Ponderings

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Goldilocks Planets and People

Habitable Zone Finder

Habitable Zone Finder (Photo credit: pennstatenews)

Life is a lot all about balance, the sense of which it’s always so easy to lose. Last night on the radio they were talking of the discovery of two new planets right in that “Goldilocks zone” of moderate size and distance from their middlingly massive stars where life might just be possible. I guess even planets have to keep their sense of equilibrium if they hope to reach their goals of raising a happy families.

On the micro-level, Algorithm has been pushing out all the Analgorithmia in my life lately. By day I sell fences for kids, dogs, and bad neighbors. It’s a lot of detail, so in my spare time, of late, Excel, one great glob of wonderful algorithms, has been devouring all my spare time and energy with a quest to organize my project management once and for all. Plays right into my geek personality as well. So have I strayed from the song of the spirit and writing and such.

But I take some comfort that “planet,” the name of those big guys means “wanderer.”

English: Created with Microsoft Excel.

English: Created with Microsoft Excel. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

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Red in Tooth and Claw

Tiger teeth

Tennyson, wrestling with a friend’s death, drew a contrast between concepts like having a caring God above or love being creation’s ultimate principle on the one hand versus on the other the stark apparent reality of “nature red in tooth and claw.” The dilemma seems somehow just as relevant today as in the nineteenth century, even though some might cringe at the religious couching of the thought.
Rising above tooth and claw heroically expresses quintessential humanity. Paradoxically, when we sacrifice our own personal drive to self-preservation and self-advancement to the greater good, to culture, to community, that is the time we become most adaptable. And following Darwin’s insight–for some, the greatest tooth-and-claw man of all–that adaptability would make us best fitted to survive and thrive.
The sad thing is when humans in their prodigality slip back toward tooth and claw. Whether taking the form of street violence, financial incentives for athletes to injure their opponents, or unrestrained predacious capitalism (and the communist and fascist totalitarianisms of the last century were even worse examples), we become less human and less alive when go down that road.

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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.

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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.