Evolution and Mother Nature - Monday Thoughts in the Rain

Happy Monday to all of you. I awakened to rain, heavy rain, which continued in bands throughout my meditation hour and is still banding its' way through the area. I've always liked rains like this - the quick downpours followed by quiet, allowing everything to soak in, before being hit again with another downpour. It's a reflection of life, isn't it? One crisis - personal or broader - followed by a short period of calm, and then picked up once again by the next crisis. 

How do you react in a crisis? The world is working its' way 
towards a boiling point once again, and our wars these days 
tend to involve the entire world, not just regions here and 
there. No - when we war now, we can quite literally 
destroy the world completely. Ridiculous! 

Humanity, as a whole, was designed to operate under crises mode. We'd be wandering around in the brush, harvesting and foraging, and then a lion would be spotted and crisis mode would immediately take over. Do we stalk and kill the lion? Do we try to get around it? How is it acting - threatening, sleepy? Is it a mother with young cubs? Oh dear, better steer a wide path around her then. Those ancestors whose panic was controlled and who had the right response survived to have more level-headed kids and the species survived. 

Although it's the male lion who gets the press, if it 
were up to reality, it's the female lion that should be 
most feared. She's hunting not just for herself, but also 
for her young. 

Maybe part of our problem in this day and age, is that the mothers who would have chosen to go too close to the lion survived, and their brains just simply shut down and make poor choices under pressure. I certainly know people who have made poor choices - hell, I've made poor choices in my own life. Just not life-altering or changing events. But yeah - I don't think any of us are immune to poor choices. But, I also think that if faced with a lioness with cubs, we'd try our best to back away and keep her calm. At least, most of us would. 

I think, right now, we're surrounded by those who can 
cause us harm, and we simply are sitting on our front 
porches waiting for the apocalypse. We're out of options, 
and really don't have any solutions to the constant 
conflicts that exist in our world today. Meanwhile, we 
invent ever new ways to kill bunches and bunches of 
people. *sigh* 

We talk of peace, of a golden time when we'll all get along together and sing "Kumbaya" or some such other silly thing. It's NEVER going to happen, people. We are individuals. We are ALL different, and we think differently and act differently. Add government and religion to the mix, and you've got a guarantee that we'll never have an easy time of it. Maybe, after we finally extinguish each other (or Mother Nature gets really tired of this experiment and takes care of the extinguishing for us), there will come a new life form that will be far more successful. Maybe another reign of dinosaurs. After all, as a species, they survived for 165-177 million years. That's 'MILLION' years. Humanity? Well, we've been around about 6 million years, and I have doubts that we'll make it much farther. 

I really wanted to go a bit larger with this image, but some 
screens probably would have issues with that. See that very 
small green square to the far right? That's homo sapiens - humanity. 
Not really very much on the timeline of the earth, is it? 

As a species, we've been successful. We've managed to cover the earth - every continent, every corner, has or has had humanity in it. We've changed the face of the world in ways incalculable - buildings, water channels and tunnels, mining into the deeps, and soaring into the upper atmosphere, even escaping Earth on several occasions. But as we pet ourselves on the back for our achievements, we turn our eyes away from our failures. Our failure to blend together as a people, our failure to hold others in equal respect or to allow everyone to be the individual he/she/or other was born to be, will be our doom. 

Humanity is a plague upon the earth, and I fully expect 
that Mother Nature will eventually get tired of this 
experiment and return with a different species for this 
third rock from the sun. The only winner out of all of 
this is Mother Nature and Time. We're flunking out 
of the School of Life. 

Maybe Mother Nature made a mistake with us - we are a plague covering the Earth and she just hasn't found the correct antidote yet. But make no mistake, If there is anyone/anything who can devise something to rid Herself of that plague and start anew once again - it's "Mother" Earth. Place your best, ladies and gentlemen. My bet goes to the round orb circling the Sun. Have an excellent Monday and I'll be back tomorrow. Slava Ukraini and חיים למען ישראל. 

Happy May to One and All - Leadership on May Day

Happy May Day to all of you. In past days, Russia would be having a huge military parade down Red Square. I seem to recall that they quit doing that a while ago, but I still remember the soldiers and armaments making their way across this huge plaza with all of the 'hoity-toity" politicians looking oh so stern, watching in the cold, their coats on and sometimes their collars up to protect them from the chill winds. I remember watching and thinking that everyone looked quite chilled, and I was grateful that I wasn't there - although the architecture and the actual area looked interesting. 

I remember watching May Day parades with Russia showing 
off their military might to the world. I don't think they do 
that any more, although they certainly still celebrate May Day. 
I was always impressed and a bit frightened by their 
display of missiles and other armament. And all of those 
soldiers - marching in perfect alignment and saluting 
precisely. It was quite a show for a young kid to watch.  

Of course, that was during the "cold war" - a war of words but few actions. I know there was covert action, murders, kidnappings and imprisonments. But for a young person, that seemed so far away and so far in the background. Well, I'm an adult now. Russia is still kidnapping and imprisoning people, but now the wars aren't cold any more. They're hot, tedious, and growing in scope and area once again. It does seem that our species simply can't get along with each other. If Mother Nature or whatever deity is to your choosing decides to wipe humanity out and start again, I certainly couldn't blame Her. Nope ... not at all. 

Mankind has evolved over the centuries. Have we 
improved? In some ways, yes. But in others, we're 
now a sedentary population but we're just as 
aggressive as we were when we wandered the 
grasslands in small packs. 

As a species, we adapted and improved our genetic heritage, taking over more and more of the land masses making up this world. With our technologies, we developed improved methods of hunting dinner, learned that putting on animal skins, and/or manipulating fiber for coverings, helped keep us warm and allowed us to move into new territories (and survive the Ice Age). We grew this brain of ours - learning new hunting techniques, communication and improving our living condition. We populated and continued to populate this world, until now we are found in every continent and every corner. We've even moved past this planet and touched the Moon. We're thinking - seriously thinking - about settlements on Mars. But we still can't seem to get along with our neighbors. *sigh*

Perhaps if we paid more attention to our spiritual leaders 
and a bit less to our secular ones, we might have a 
world which would allow humanity the space to grow 
and prosper in peace with our neighbors. Maybe ... or maybe not. 

So as we move into May, I'll try to think of the positives. We've created music - glorious and heart-wrenching music. We've written masterpieces celebrated throughout the world. We've had spiritual guides who have focused on peace and working together for the common good. We've had all of the right teachers - we just need to pay attention to their voices instead of the voices of those who are petulant children claiming that their way is the only right way to live life. If we can't live with each other, I can't blame Mother Nature or any other deity (or an advanced civilization) for declaring us a failed experiment, wiping the Earth clean, and starting over again. After all, Gods are infinite and ageless. Another few millennia? A piece of cake! Have an excellent Wednesday and I'll be back tomorrow. Slava Ukraini and חיים למען ישראל. 

Stuff, Thoughts, Cleaning - Maybe Cleaning the World Again?

Looking at my computer desk, I think Wednesday will require a serious clean-off of the top of the desk. When my stacks of papers and projects and "stuff" gets higher than three inches, it's time for a serious clean. However ... Wednesday night is also our night for personal income taxes with our accountant, and I will be making sure our bills, etc are in order and ready for whatever he asks when I get to the shop today. That's another hour or two, but at least at the shop I have counter tops - lots of counter tops upon which to spread and stack invoices, grouped by kind. 

Our personal income taxes are far more complicated 
than our corporate taxes. DH actually keeps the corporate 
stuff under control, but personal stuff is a hodge podge of 
my charity gifts and donations, various other stuff, and 
investment statements. I'm not sure I have the year-end 
statements from my two brokers, so I'll have to double-check 
that today. 

It must have been easier in past times when all you had was word-of-mouth. Of course, given the "flexibility" of memory, inaccuracies were built in to that system. But, the "taxes" were demanded by the property owner, the town Mayor, the provincial Governor and the King. If you were at the bottom of the stack, you just did what you were told to do - easy, peasy, and lots of room for complaint - silent complaint, since you didn't want to be whipped, imprisoned, or conscripted into the armed forces for whatever war was then current. 

Medieval peasants had it quite a bit easier in many respects, 
than we have today. We have the conveniences, and central 
heating and high levels of cleanliness are wonderful things, 
but they didn't have the world-wide issues that we're facing 
now. They might have had megalomaniacs, but they didn't 
have nuclear armament to back those idiots up. They could 
destroy a small part of the world, but not the world as a whole. 

Isn't that the way of humanity? Times of peace followed by oppression and times of war? We're on a precipice in the USA now - so many, many things can go wrong and plunge us into the darkness that is spreading across the world right now. All I can do is think about the dinosaurs - the most successful species Mother Nature has ever come up with. Dinosaurs managed to make it a LONG time. If you include birds, they ruled the earth for 233.3 MILLION years, knock the birds out, and it's only 167.3 million years. Humans ... well, we're not doing as well. Even if you include the ancestors to humanity, we've only been around for 3 million years, and if you're just including Homo Sapiens, it's actually 200,000 to 300,000 years. We're babies, and we're destroying our planet so good on us? Not really. Mother Nature really needs to step in and start again. She needs another success story. Maybe the cockroaches? 

Dinosaurs were incredibly successful, appearing on 
EVERY continent and landmass throughout the world. 
We're also spreading, but we're nowhere as successful 
at living within our environments. We want to change 
everything to suit us, rather than learn to live easily within 
the land we're inhabiting. We're also extremely 
warlike and aggressive towards our own kind. That's 
not a recipe for species survival. 

So, I'm heading off to the pool. I think I need a swim to clear my head of all of this extraneous junk. After all, it's not very uplifting to realize that the new kids on the block are bringing in the heavy equipment and getting ready to raze every structure on the block to the ground. I think I need a swim after that mental image. Have an excellent Tuesday and I'll be back tomorrow. Slava Ukraini and חיים למען ישראל.