It wasnt Bubbles. It was the wind. Okay, so not too long ago I was standing waiting for someone and decided to actually read the great big sign I was looking at which was all about some politicians success in getting millions of dollars to rehab the once beautiful public building the sign was standing in front of in the great big city I was in. My first thoughts were, Wow, gee, good. Because it had been a beautiful building. And how nice that it was going to be salvaged from its own ruination... But behind these thoughts another set of thoughts arose and kind of gurgled around in the background, just a little out of reach, but they were there.. Then the other day I was taken on a spontaneous tour of another public building in another city, the tour guide proudly describing the restoration of the foundation, structure, facade, murals, and so on... But as I gazed in admiration at the murals, the exquisite details of this important public building in the center of this fairly important town, those thoughts started gurgling in the background, and they make me want to ask a question: How did all these public buildings GET ruined in the first place? Did we leave the planet and go someplace else for awhile and are we now just returning and did these things happen in our absence? Is that the story? And were we struck with amnesia during our journey so that now that we are back again were not quite certain of anything except that -- bright spot (because we put the spotlight of our consciousness on it) -- we are the ones who are saving (some of) the things which fell into ruin (in our unexplained absence)? And its not just the magnificent libraries, public parks, esplanades, and so on. Its our highway bridges. We love our highways. Our highways are where our cars go, and we love our cars. The bridges collapse - and we shake our fingers and scratch our heads. How did it happen? Who knows? And how about all those churches? I will not let you forget them, you Christian crusaders, you. How about them? Did the aliens snatch you away from them and then spray them with invisible paint so that even when you returned to earth, you did not see them falling into ruin? Is that how that happened? Yes, I know there are explanations for it. I used to listen to them with some fascination. I used to think the people who were giving them were saying something. But then I can find meaning in ink blots, too. And thats all very nice, its very beautiful. Its part of the musicality of life -- that we see castles in the clouds and attribute sense to any old string of words that we hear. But I am looking for something thats not so much a learned treatise on why the ship sank as it is a wake-up call for it not to sink again. Two different classes of talk entirely. You know what I think? I dont think were conscious, really, much. I think weve adopted a view of ourselves that asks for no correspondence whatsoever in reality. That requires no reality checks in actual reality -- only more and more hot air to keep it afloat. We seem not to think that our own created environment -- outside of our bathrooms and our kitchens and our granite lawns -- has as much to say about who we are as the techno-hype we read about ourselves, and our capabilities, on our devices. Its like we are completely stoned on hype. We drift in and out of the real world -- that is, the built environment beyond our private property -- like people who have no stake in anything real -- while we gaze into our devices like Narcissus into his pond. So lets just put our devices down a day or two a week. We invented these things to grace our experience of the world, not replace it. We can have those things and get real. Sober up. Look around. And remember that the real world is not a clickable situation. There is no one button to click that will fix things, as there is in cyberspace. The real world will always require constant, loving, diligent attention. And thats not so bad. Weve been doing that for tens of thousands of years, and we could do it again. Weve created a whole new generation of tools now -- tools, created by us -- which could help us in paying the constant, loving, diligent attention we need to pay the actual physical world around us -- if we remember whats what. We could have just as much fun cleaning up the messes of ruination as we had letting them happen in the first place. Probably much more. Consciousness is an effort -- maybe like balancing when you are riding on a bicycle, not necessarily like rolling a boulder up hill all the time. And it is also a leap of faith. Its something you do, not because someone proves to you, by pointing to some location in some mechanism that you can, but because you do... Speaking of wind -- its rushing in under my beautiful door where there is a gap of a half an inch. When I was having my house restored, I asked my workmen to rasp down the part of the door that stuck. They had a better idea and, unfortunately, they sold me on it. They had a new machine. I dont know what it was called, but, they assured me, it would allow them to take a perfect slice out of the bottom of the door. I thought just a little rasping with a hand tool would do the trick, but the light of certain and eager knowledge was in their eyes and I succumbed to it. So they sliced my door as only men with a new power tool could do. And of course they did not pay attention to the doors real needs -- put chalk on the lintel and see where it was rubbing and work away at it in passes. No, they imposed their new power tool on the situation -- took a slice off the whole bottom -- and we all made excuses for it afterwards. Me to keep them from being embarrassed, and them to keep their machine from being embarrassed. We are funny creatures. We invent things, and then we let them control us. But were at a point now, I believe, where we might want to get our inventions in hand. We are not here for them. They are here for us. And our impact on our physical world has just as much to say about who we really are as all the things we are so entranced with reading about ourselves on all those little screens we have forever in our hands. Really. Thank you.
Posted on: Sat, 13 Sep 2014 17:22:40 +0000
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