Babble...

    Writing today not with anything particular to say, rather because I feel like I've neglected to blog about the Colorado vacation Beth and I took a month ago and a wonderful visit with an old friend a few weeks later and some of the other thoughts that have passed by. Maybe I'm thinking that words seem shallow and pointless compared to the emotions that really motivate us, or that it has all been said one way or another by me and others, or that none of it matters and people are going to think and do as they feel regardless of what anyone says. 

                                                         My recent journal entries have been somewhat pessimistic, or realistic,

or perhaps fatalistic in regards to the future of humanity... With  people dying of covid while at the same time denying they have the disease-as happened to the 40 something year old brother of a friend-what possible hope is there that humanity will ever believe in the less tangible threats of climate change and other slow emerging problems? Men a block away from here have new signs in their yard claiming that Mr. Trump won the election, while Q'Anon followers assembled in Dallas to await the coming of... John F Kennedy, Jr who died in 1999....?  A sane person cannot make this stuff up, but it sure is disturbing that human beings can be so gullible and uncritical in their thought processes....particularly as I witness the depths to which they sink to defend them. They do not comprehend the horrors that a breakdown in civil society would unleash. 

     Being of an independent nature, perhaps I am pessimistic regarding humanity because I understand the deep inner origins of personal growth, and I witness people neglecting the difficult effort needed to embrace empathy and compassion and the interconnection of all things. I see their unwillingness to examine their own prejudices and find a more holistic view of the world, so Tribalism, or family, or culture, or religion, or political party becomes all that is valuable to them. Humanity becomes dragged into that narrow place despite the efforts of the open-minded. At the same time I understand that each of us grows at our own pace and I have no right to judge humankind from my own small experience; sometimes I forget how little I truly know of the Universe and our place in it.

               My faith remains in Nature and the knowledge that humanity does not and will not affect the Cosmos. We are of no consequence to the stars, so the sun will burn on until its own eventual death-whether or not we kill ourselves. 

                                       

As for Colorado... our visits to Mesa Verde, Black Canyon of the Gunnison, and the Rocky Mountains were stunning. There simply is nothing to compare east of the Mississippi River...As for why the cliff dwellers built where they did, the intuitive answer Beth and I concluded was that they retreated there for self protection; such isolated difficult terrain immediately suggested that they were escaping violence. 

(...as always, click on the photos to enlarge them...)