Month: March 2013

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Is competition the only way?

Composite image to illustrate the diversity of...

The Diversity of Plants (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

On the radio the other night I heard  about exciting studies that point to ways that plants in nature actually help each other out. Contrary to the way we have come to think of evolutionary biology as relentless pursuit of ruthless competition, some scientists see a different theme also at work: community and cooperation, another level of adaptation. What does this mean for balancing our human life? Is competition the only way to obtain and maintain strength and prosperity in our society?

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Something Beyond

Vincent van Gogh: Kirschbaum. Frühjahr 1888, Ö...

Vincent van Gogh: Kirschbaum. Frühjahr 1888, Öl auf Leinwand, 72,4 x 53,3 cm, The Metropolitan Museum of Art (Mr. and Mrs. Henry, Ittleson Jr. Fund, 1956), New York (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

All nature seems to speak….As for me, I cannot understand why everybody does not see it or feel it; nature or God does it for every one who has eyes and ears and a heart to understand.
Vincent Van Gogh, The complete letters, 248, I, 495. in D. Postema, Space for God.

There is something out there calling to us, to which we belong, greater than ourselves. We cannot escape the need to reach out beyond ourselves, to dreams, to other places, to other times. To sort of lose ourselves in something that transcends, and in the losing, to find ourselves.

What in the world is “analgorithmia”?

Photo credit: jkbrooks85

…A LITTLE  BIT OUT OF A STORY…

“Oh, so,” she replied, ” that’s a term I learned in one of my psych classes;  ‘analgorithmia’ refers, in the DSM9, to a disorder in which a person’s mental processing follows dysfunctional or broken channels and often leads to irrational or antisocial communication efforts or behavior.”

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The Glories of my First Shower

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I just took my first shower in exactly one month. Don’t get me wrong. My hygiene has been pretty good. I mean a real get under good-and-hot water, get all the way wet, and stay there a while kind of shower. A ruptured appendix, hospital stay, and a drain tube I was supposed to keep dry kept that kind of shower off the docket from February 15 till today. And tonight’s shower sure felt good. And I am so thankful for that simple joy. Which reminds me of all other sorts of joys I can be thankful for, lots of which I often take for granted. And I firmly believe, of all the choices about how to live, gratitude is one of the best picks for filling up that empty spot that lurks somewhere in every human heart. Yeah shower! Yeah this special feeling of thankfulness–sadly too often absent–that feels even better than the shower!

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Progress?

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In going up trails, a hiker must sometimes switchback from the intended overall course to gain the necessary altitude. Or a poor soul must drop altitude, later to be laboriously recovered, in order to gain the needed direction across some intervening declivity. Both types of regression can feel painfully like going backwards or wandering lost–to one’s self, but also to one’s fellow travelers. So is it as well with all of us hapless souls on life’s pathway.

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Concerning nature’s beauty, paradoxes, and crazy joy

snowLooking out my glass door this morning, with the sun beating down on the snow, my eyes caught the glimmer of individual ice crystals in the brightening light. Their random distribution over that part of the yard immediately sent the synapses of my brain into images of stars on a dark night– about as opposite, in a way, to what my eyes are seeing as you can get. I am good at such far-fetched associations, and then often go on to see some deeper truth in the connection to boot (not this morning, though). Drives people in my life nuts. Yet somehow those moments of insight–or is it craziness?–are often the moments that soothingly massage the soul’s chronic wound, at least for me, and I suspect for others as well.