Summer Solstice + 1

Happy Summer Solstice.....plus one. I forgot to record
it yesterday. Longest day of the year and cause for cele-
bration among a number of cultures, past and present.
The Solstices and the Equinoxes are 'natural' holidays,
created as they are by planet cycles that can be recog-
nized and observed. All other mythologies are scenar-
ios, i.e. narratives with characters, god and human. But
the procession of the heavens needs no story or actors.
It's enough that celestial bodies pirouette in the void.

PROJECTIONS

People sometimes project onto me attributes that i either
don't have or don't have in the abundance they think.
Then later when they find out that i'm just like everyone
else they're angry with me, as if i'd let them down. But
i'm not trying to manifest myself as anything other than
myself & if someone is disappointed in me it's because
i didn't live up to his/her expectations.

But it would be mentally unhealthy to try to live up to
the expectations of others. I'm not perfect and i don't
intend to be. I tried being perfect when i was a young
man and it was far too difficult. It took all my energy
and made me weak, unable to respond to anybody in
an engaging, personal, and spontaneous way. I have
no desire to go thru that again.

So i ask people not to project their own ideals onto me,
in other words, not to overvalue me, because later they
are likely to undervalue me. Ideals have their place but
there is always the reality principle to deal with. And
the reality here is that i'm just plain me, with all the vir-
tues and faults that any human being is capable of. And
i wouldn't have it any other way.

NATURE OBSERVATIONS

The black locusts are flowering now, one of the most
fragrant blossoms around. I don't think they're native
to our area but they were widely planted by plantation
owners in the 18th and 19th centuries. That fact leaves
us flower sniffers with a problem, namely that these
trees are all mature & so the blossoms are largely above
the height of human reach. Frustrating. Perhaps a lad-
der should become part of the toolkit of the dedicated
blossom inhaler.


Yesterday it was raining cotton around here. Not the
kind that is planted but the seeds of the cottonwood
tree. I have a special affinity with the cottonwood be-
cause i grew up with two of them in our yard and be-
cause they are widely distributed thruout the semi-
desert West. Their roots grow deeply in the ground
in search of water and sometimes they'll be the only
tree around. It's also the state tree of Kansas, the
place i'm from.

But perhaps the most notable aspect of the cottonwood
(along with aspens) is the sound they make in the wind.
Their leaves are positioned in a different way from most
trees, configured so they beat gently against each other.
Listen to that sound the next time you encounter a cot-
ton wood on a breezy day.

FAITH AND SCIENCE

A recent poll finds that 44% of US Americans believe that God
created human beings within the last 10,000 years. (? Usually
fundamentalists say our 'birth date' is 4004 BC, which would
make our race 6,013 years old.)

This is kind of scarey except that similar polls have been finding
the same thing for the last 30 years or so. What are we to make
of this?

There is no rational reason to believe that science and faith are
incompatible. The Puritans, noted for being, well, puritanical,
were nevertheless not rejecting of science. They thought that the
physical world mirrored God's majesty and that the more they
discovered of the world, the more they could understand God's
will.

How simple fundamentalist faith could be if the believer would
just accept that the world is a manifestation of God. But we can
bet that that's not about to happen.

It reminds me of the beginnings of the 'feminist era', during which
a best-selling book (don't remember the title) was about the 'nat-
ural' submission of women to men. That was scarey too but it
didn't prevent a new era of feminism from manifesting itself, which
leads us to interpret the book's popularity as a last hurrah of the
old guard rather than a portent of the future.

Similarly, polls rejecting the truth of science may be a last, desper-
ate stand to somehow prevent change from taking place in the
world. I think this is the key to the issue: not that people are
resisting science per se (although i'm sure they think so), but that
they are afraid of change itself. This is a prominent feature of con-
servatism: such people, sometimes called authoritarian personal-
ities, want to be told what to do and also highly prize the stability
of the status quo which allows them to refrain from having to
challenge their own beliefs.

But this is not how our world is. To the contrary, we are going thru
a period of change unparalleled in human history, in fact the
greatest change to the planet biome since 65 million years ago,
when the dinosaurs became extinct. Nothing is going to stop this
change--altho we hope that we can direct it into desirable channels.
Fortunately our children and grandchildren seem to be wiser than
we, even as we are wiser than our parents and grandparents. Per-
haps the hope of a better world is what real faith is in our times.