enlightenment

The Problem, Whatever It Is..

/ barryweber / 2 Comments

It really is true, but I needed to elaborate on it- for myself. Feel free to read over my shoulder. Tell yourself, as often as is necessary, whatever this, at the moment, is:

This, too, shall pass..

And indeed it shall:

~from the immediate corners of consciousness where- now- it jostles jaggedly, by the moment, by the half-moment, seeking a position but finding only juxtaposition.

~from the aching, angry forefront of lobotomical lamentations and synaptical sorrows.

~from the emotional heat which causes embers thought to be cold to flare again in the white and searing heat of memory, and memory of memory.

This, too, shall pass..

And indeed it shall:

~as unexpected crises are confronted, and what is imperative right now becomes an afterthought to what the newest right now is clamoring.

~as the sharp and focused particulars- each letter, each syllable, each raised eyebrow- of these moments in time become the faded pastel memories of yesterday, last month, and several years ago (no one remembers exactly when..)

~as the persons involved are ripped, or fade, from our stories, and as their circumstances, as their reactivity and proactivity waxes, and wains, and is washed away by new calendar pages, new ticking-tocking of the world’s clocks, and new birthdays, seasons, before there are..no more.

This, too, shall pass..

And indeed it shall:

~when, over a millennium, not too many millennia away, glacial sheets like geographical snow plows push down and across whole continents and Stockholm, then London, then Madrid; and Montreal, then New York, then Washington are scrapped from their rebar and concrete moorings before the great cliffs of ice.

~ when the shards of the Museum of Modern Art, Lincoln Center, the Library of Congress, Parliament, Windsor Castle, and the Louvre are piled deeply beneath the former shores and sand of the one-time Great Lakes, the no-longer-there North Sea, and the gravel that once laid at the bottom of the English Channel.

~when that ice, in epochal time, begins to melt and frozen swamps give rise to the bacterial surge of New Life, and the hundred thousand year movement toward new geological eras begins, and where new ice will again appear and new swamps, new mountain ranges, new continents, new volcanic islands, new life forms- slimes and swarms- birthing and dying, become themselves 100 million year old fossils, never to be found, catalogued, or contemplated.

~ when the Sun, explosively benign and vital through all that has been, begins its final interior burn and expands as the last stores of helium flare through ten billion years of pressure and the Sun, larger and larger, encompasses one by one the orbits of its planets, and the blue and green of Earth becomes a desert, then a smoldering coal, then a hot ember, then an ash, then smoke, then nothing but the chaotic then coalescing atoms which, in this tiny portion of the Universe, will begin again to end and begin again and again, and then- indeed-

This, too, shall have passed..

What just happened..a story of the day after..

/ barryweber / 1 Comment

What I worked on today and have ready to post here will have to wait, because I want others to read this. It is an email which my daughter Sarah just sent to her mom, her brother and sister, and me. Travis is Sarah’s husband, and they live in  a very integrated neighborhood in Dallas. They have had Obama’s picture in their front window for months.

To: Family         11/05/08,7:05                                                                                                                       Subject: What just happened

Travis just got home and we were sitting in the living room and the doorbell rang.  It was a woman who lives down the street. 

She came to our house to thank us.  To thank…us. 

Her name is Sheryl, and she is a 57 year old black woman who grew up in times of segregation.  She told us about how she used to work at AT&T as an operator, and how people would not go into the bathroom with her, and how people would call and say they didn’t want to talk to a n***.  She said that her parents would only be allowed into a neighborhood like ours to mow the lawn or clean the house.  She said that her father supported a wife and six kids on $40 a week.  She said that she never thought that she would see this day.

She cried on our front porch.  And she thanked us.  She said that Obama is not just for black people, he is for all Americans, and she can’t believe that these times are here when we can be one nation and move forward. 

She stood on our front porch and she cried and she thanked us- for something that we did for ourselves!  But for her, this is everything.  I think I knew that.  I mean, I think I knew how momentous this is, and I think I knew that this changes everything for many different reasons for many different people…but then the woman down the street came to our house and she cried and she thanked us…and I can see it more clearly than I could before.  I won’t ever understand it the way that she does, and the way that so many Americans do, but she showed us a glimpse this evening.  She showed us her heart and it was bleeding for the past and rejoicing for the future and it was everything that I want for us.

I can’t believe we did this.  I can’t believe this time is here. 

How many hundreds of thousands of times- how many million times- are versions of this story happening around the country today? This is one lady, one young couple, one neighborhood in one American city. But it is precisely and exactly why America is different today than it was yesterday.

Hallelujah

Was Blind, But Now I See: Hope

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“I have no hope; I have no fear. I am free.” (Nikos Kazantzakis)

“Frankly, I don’t have much hope. But I think that’s a good thing. Hope is what keeps us chained to the system, the conglomerate of people and ideas and ideals that is causing the destruction of the Earth.” (Derrick Johnson, Orion Magazine, May/June 2006)

I throw the word hope around quite easily and very often. Most preachers do:

“My hope is built on nothing less
Than Jesus’ blood and righteousness.” (Old hymn)

“To them God has chosen to make known among the Gentiles the glorious riches of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.” (Colossians 1:27)

I have used the word and concept of hope most often as an antidote for some set of uncomfortable, unsettling, even fearful circumstances which exist in the present moment. Implicit in hope (as I have most often used it) is the looked-forward-to future absence of those difficult feelings being experienced right now.

I am wondering, though, if I have not merely been grabbing at the whole concept of hope in the same way I used to grab at a glassful of Jim Beam? Is it simply one more way to get outside of the present moment, and to justify inaction? Does pie-in-the-sky hope cause me and others to sit around and wait for future bliss while the muck and mire of the moment is rising over our shoes, our ankles, our knees ?!

Hope is an attempt to counterbalance Fear. We can control Fear by constructing an imagined scenario of No Fear. Or so it seems. To Not Be Afraid is a primary motivator used by advertisers, preachers, and politicians. They know their audience is afraid of not being pretty enough, of not going to heaven, or of being blown to bits in another 9/11 scenario. So they offer Hope: a new shade of Max Factor lipstick, a walk down the aisle for the absolution of sins, or a “Happy Days are Here Again” ballot choice.

And we, wanting desperately to escape the dread which weighs heavily on our shoulders, believe them. Again. And again. And again, again. We have believed them for so long, that it feels natural- human, we think- to hope for a better tomorrow. We shovel out money- usually, borrowed money- in the hope that a new car, a new entertainment center,  or a shiny new piece of bling-bling on our arm will finally, despite the $125,738 unsuccessfully spent on similar doo-dads in the past, make us happy.

We pray for miracles- supernatural interventions by God, Allah, or the personal guardian angels that over 50% of Americans believe are standing nearby in anxious desire to serve them- to alleviate the anxieties of today.  It’s sooo much easier to tell God what to do, than it is to ask “What can I do?” And, where two or more are gathered, it sounds a lot holier , too.

And, politicians? 9/11 and stories about inadequate health care are mantras for them. They know we fear violence and sickness because we are afraid, above all, of Death (another soon-topic in this series),  and so they work hard at keeping those fears in the forefronts of our present thinking, so that we may hope for an end to them by properly voting.

Hope, too often, nullifies, debases, and puts off Action or Acceptance. We are blinded to our own abilities to actively affect the difficult circumstances we can do something about, and to Accept those circumstances over which we have no control. To help a 16 year accept themselves as the unique person he or she already is, it seems to me, a far greater act than helping him buy steroids, or signing the permission papers for her to get a boob job. To visit a lonely invalid or prisoner is a much more satisfying way to follow Jesus (or Allah, or one of those angels) than waiting in miserable self-absorption for glory, yes? And certainly, get out and vote, but stop hoping that Big Brother (or Sister) will make our days happy ones. Only we can do that. And if we can’t do it for ourselves, helping others do it for themselves is an even more fulfilling, satisfying, and- dare I say?- happy substitute.

I cannot make myself say that Hope is bad thing. It’s nice to believe the sun will shine tomorrow. But, more often than not, we must simply open our eyes and see that the Light is, and has been, there anyway!  If we look for it, instead of hoping for it, we can experience Light flowing in on us from all kinds of cracks in formerly dark corners. And then we might even observe that while we had been waiting for pie in the sky, there was a big slice of chocolate cake, with ice cream melting beside it, in front of us, waiting to be eaten. 

Was Blind, But Now I See..Part I

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Do you want me to tell you what I think, Yes, do, I don’t think we did go blind, I think we are blind, Blind but seeing, Blind people who can see, but do not see. (Blindness, Jose Saramago, pg. 326)

Luke 4:16– When he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, he went to the synagogue on the sabbath day, as was his custom. He stood up to read, 17and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written:
18‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free,
19to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.’

I once was lost, but now am found..was blind, but now I see.. (“Amazing Grace,” John Newton)

I’m not anticipating with any glee whatsoever, what I am about to begin writing. Most of what I write (or think, or preach, or eat, or do) is motivated by Want– I want to write about nature; I want to eat mashed potatoes with hamburger gravy; I want to go to South Padre Island next week. And I will do, because I want to, all of those things.

But, kind of like the occasional serving of greens peas that I eat at a dinner party so I do not appear to be rude, there also those things which I, or any of us, must do. These personal essays about being blind are, therefore, motivated by Must, rather than Want.

(There are few things I find more repulsive to eat than green peas. Don’t ask me why; I don’t know why. You’ve got an illogical, indefinable revulsion about some food, too- I know you do. So I know you know something of the feeling I’m talking about. I put the peas in my mouth, try to keep my tongue from touching them, dare not chew [!], then swallow quickly, and hope I don’t obviously gag.)

After reading Jose Saramago’s Blindness several weeks ago, enough of a new vocabulary permeated the boundaries of my thinking, that previously unformed groups of thoughts, ideas, and even dreads began to coalesce into what has become, for me, a new coherence. Vague feelings of confusion and concern which have a way, when they are inexpressible, of descending (personally, anyway) into anger or depression, seem to be backlit now; I have been able to begin to think about them in new ways, shadowy as they might still be.

I was emerging, with a language, from a very real blindness which had been caused in large measure, by an inadequacy of words with which to communicate, to myself or anyone else. But it was not a good feeling: it was flat-out alarming! I had gotten used to living with a mild, unfocussed alarm over “what it is I do not know specifically.” But vague shapes and washed-out colors have now begun to gel and brighten; I can see them well enough to feel the need (I apologize ahead of time) to shout them.

This entry serves as a warning then: future entries will begin with this same title but be followed by a specific word. You will see words like Life, Death, Religion, Time, Science, Technology, Politics, and Evil following “Was blind, but now I see..” My point in telling you this is that you may not want to see, or you may be highly interested in the particular word of the day, but not want to read about what I am seeing. So be it. Skip that day’s essay, or all of them. My personal therapy is to write, and plant seeds of curiosity and thought in doing so. Some of those seeds will blow away, some will be eaten by birds, some will be washed downstream, but some might take root and grow.

And I think some of them, all of them eventually, must. And soon. We have lived under a veil- luckily, some of us- for so very long that it feels comfortable in the darkness. The air might be stuffy, we may rarely be able to discern real Light, but having gotten used to such things, we don’t even notice we are breathing harder and struggling to see with less and less success.

I think we’ve been blind; I know I have been blind, much of my life, to much of what I have only begun to see, to look at critically, and then to observe contemplatively. While we’ve been blind, others have been dying and suffering en masse because of the majority’s inability to see.

I know I’m not alone in my “shouting.” I am simply one more in a long long line of known and unknown men and women throughout the ages who could not stop seeing, once they had begun. I also hope there are many millions more that will transcend my voice and vision with greater eloquence, insight, and urgency.

Tomorrow’s word: Hope

The Womb of God

/ barryweber / 5 Comments

(This was the message I gave last Sunday. I know it’s a long read, but new birth never happens all-of-a-sudden. I’ve decided to continue adding the occasional “message from Sunday.”)

(Update, October, 2014: Six years later, this still says what I mean,,)

The Womb of God

One of my favorite biblical authors is Abraham Heschel who, in 1962, wrote the definitive book on the prophets, called The Prophets. He described the time period around 400-500 B.C. when some of the great Old Testament prophets had begun to write and speak in alarming, revolutionary, and largely unlistened-to ways (I’m going to paraphrase just a little, because his words can be difficult at times):

Heschel wrote of that time- “Religion had declined not because it had been successfully argued against, but because it had become irrelevant, dull, oppressive, uninteresting. When faith is replaced by creed, worship by discipline, love by habit; when the crises of today are ignored because of the remembered splendor of the past; when faith becomes an inherited heirloom rather than a living fountain; when religion speaks only in the name of authority and rules rather than the voice of compassion, its message becomes meaningless.”

Part of my personality- my vision of the world, the universe, God, and all things and beings contained therein- is summarized in that statement. I listen to and read other preachers, so many other Christian teachers and thinkers, and I end up feeling lonely sometimes, embarrassed even because what I see and believe seems so different from what I hear being proclaimed as God’s Truth, God’s Word by almost everyone else, including many of my own denominational colleagues. And that sometimes leads to a kind of situational depression on my part. I wonder if I am wrong, and if I am even being fair in sharing some of my deepest insights and doubts and wonderings with you because they so often seem to run counter to what is considered orthodox and traditional in Christian thinking and doctrine.

That is this preacher’s burden. Robbie, primarily, and some others of you catch the brunt of that odd depression from time to time, maybe too often. But I hope all of you also hear and feel- underlying that confusion and what is a very real sadness at times- I hope you also hear a real hopefulness on my part. I don’t believe Jesus intended to lead us in circles around and around in 2000 year old cultural realities and perceptions. In fact, I think that following Jesus is God’s way of leading all people, in all times, out of the Bronze Age that religion had irrelevantly, dully, oppressively, and uninterestingly become stuck in, and into an always-being-made-new Creation.

~~

I sit by the ocean watching the waves in early morning moonlight and think about these things. I walk beside the evening’s incoming tide, watching the records of that Creation in the scampering of sandpipers and the 200 million year old ballet of pelicans. I stand on Carolinian sand dunes blown into existence by winds which blew across the continents of Africa and South America long before there was a human present to scratch boundaries of ownership across them. Around me are pairs of ragged claws, as T.S. Eliot called them, crabs scuttling in and out of their ancient habitats, in and out of holes dug among the tangle of vines, the cacti, the wildflowers, and the swaying salt marsh grasses.

One morning, as I am making what is for me a jaw-dropping discovery that the horizon is not a perfectly straight line, but a series of barely discernible ups and downs of tidal risings and forming waves, like letters, words, and sentences- a kind of oceanic story being written in circles around the globe, and on that morning that story is punctuated a mile offshore with two large spouts of water. A whale.

That same morning, a little later, dolphins- 3 of them- appear near my son and daughter and others, ten yards away, jumping from the water in perfect, almost friendly formation. Then, later that same day, two sharks- small ones- appear just beside the shore, gulping the small fish caught in a temporary lagoon caused by receding tides. Those who are swimming leave the water quickly, but are unable to stop watching this scene, an unchanging scene, a wild and eternal scene older even than the time of dinosaurs.

I watch episodes like these shoulder-deep in the water, or from my sandy seat atop a dune, or hunkered down beside the water’s edges where waves born in the meeting of Caribbean currents and sub-Saharan winds are wetting my feet as my toes curl into the million and millions of tiny worn shards of ancient shellfish, now grains of sand. Other shells lie all around me, saltwater shelters abandoned by ten thousands of mollusks and crabs, shells which one day, wave after wave after wave away, will also be pummeled into the granular debris of other beaches, other shores.

I am caught up again and again in the transcendence of moments and minutes, of time and eternities. All that is around me on this shore- on any shore, and on beyond these shores to the mountains far behind me and the plains and rivers and lakes and fields beyond; all that is around me, beside and behind me, over me and under me, from the verdant green of every flower, to the forests of trees beyond them in the Great Smoky mountains, from those creatures in the seas which are too small to be seen, to sharks and whales, to crabs and the pelicans, the gulls and sandpipers, to each and every animal that burrows, flies, swims, crawls, slithers, or hunkers down near the waves watching it all- all of it, all of them, emerged in their primary, first forms from the ocean. Life- all life- has been born in these salty wet depths. All life has surged upward and outward and forward from this womb of God, this birthplace of an always new Creation.

Above me, and I cannot look elsewhere now, the morning sun is rising between scattered gray, yellow, and white clouds moving from east to west in massive air currents I cannot feel, but only see. Clouds formed by the endless evaporation of water from the ocean’s surface in response to the 10 billion year old sun’s invitation to rise toward its light and warmth. Clouds which, when laden with the many tons of hydrogen and oxygen atoms formed into molecules of water, attracting each other, joining together and spilling in heavier-than-air raindrops on the lands over which they pass. Gentle spring rains or summertime deluges, the ocean pours through them onto lands beyond, where the grasses absorb them and grow. And then the oceans are eaten in their now green and leafy incarnations by cows. And dairy farmers gather the now milky white drops of the ocean together into pasteurization vats and stainless steel tank trucks, some of which, not far away, will be made into ice cream.

Lick the ice cream and savor the ocean’s journey onto your lips. Taste the ocean’s always new and endless Creation on your tongue. We are a part of it. It is a part of us. The boundaries of difference among living things are blurred and obscured by the commonalities of our origins. Our own saltwatery blood pulses in rhythms begun by the oceans and the moon in gravitational, tidal dances, and I am overcome, again. I put my earphones on and listen to the Leonard Cohen song “Hallelujah” as I watch and wonder in gratitude and humility and I raise my arms in the same form in which I earlier saw the whale’s spouts, and I listen, and I try to sing, because I must. I must.

It goes like this
The fourth, the fifth
The minor fall, the major lift
The baffled king composing Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah

When I come back up to the house and onto the porch my son and his girlfriend are sitting there drinking coffee and Joshua asks me, with a tinge of worry, I can tell- “Daddy, what in the heck were you doing down there?” (I didn’t think anybody would be out of bed yet!) “What in the heck were you doing down there with your arms in the air?”

And I tell him, “Becoming sane.”

~~

Psalm 24:

1 The earth is the LORD’s, and the fullness thereof, and all who live in it;

2 for he founded it upon the seas
and established it upon the waters.

I need those words. I need those words to wash over the curse of my own jabbering ego; I need those words to clean and scour the false priorities I schedule for myself constantly. I need those words, in waves crashing against my pride, I need those words to remind me that, at the bottom of everything I am nothing, but that me and you and every living thing are a part of the whole of everything. We are the intricately, intimately related parts of the earth’s fullness thereof. And we are loved very, very, very, very, very, very, very much.

Matthew 5 from ‘the Message’, verse 3: “You’re blessed when you’re at the end of your rope. With less of you there is more of God and his rule.

4″You’re blessed when you feel you’ve lost what is most dear to you. Only then can you be embraced by the One most dear to you.

5″You’re blessed when you’re content with just who you are—no more, no less. That’s the moment you find yourselves proud owners of everything that can’t be bought.

6″You’re blessed when you’ve worked up a good appetite for God. He’s food and drink in the best meal you’ll ever eat.

7″You’re blessed when you care. At the moment of being ‘care-full,’ you find yourselves cared for.

8“You’re blessed when you get your inside world—your mind and heart—put right. Then you can see God in the outside world.

Here’s the truth the ocean was drowning me in that morning, and during those days there. Here’s what I can see so much more clearly now- what Jesus is able to lead me, and all of us toward, if we are following him.

Continuing in Matthew 5, verse 13: “David, Let me tell you why you are here. (No, my name is not really there. But there’s a white space there- insert your own name in it!) David, let me tell you why you are here. (Do it, let Jesus talk to you here) David, Joey, Sarah, Nancy, Manuel, let me tell you why you are here. You’re here to be salt-seasoning that brings out the God-flavors of this earth. If you lose your saltiness, how will people taste godliness? You’ve lost your usefulness and will end up in the garbage.

Verses14-16: “Here’s another way to put it: You’re here to be light, bringing out the God-colors in the world. God is not a secret to be kept. We’re going public with this, as public as a city on a hill. If I make you light-bearers, you don’t think I’m going to hide you under a bucket, do you? I’m putting you on a light stand. Now that I’ve put you there on a hilltop, on a light stand—shine! Keep open house; be generous with your lives. By opening up to others, you’ll prompt people to open up with God, this generous Father in heaven.

So, I cannot be quiet. I dare not be quiet. If I feel the saltwater kiss of God on my lips, what else can I do but share that caress in these ways available to me, with you? I must continue to shout that I can learn almost as much about God from a wildflower field as I can from the first chapter of John. I must admit without embarrassment that I learn as much about the active presence of Jesus in a roomful of sentenced-to-life convicts as I do from the letters of Paul.

And I must stop being ashamed or otherwise discombobulated, when I tell you or others, or even admit to myself that an hour beside the ocean, lost in the eternal mysteries of blue-green waters tinged with golden sunlight, is better than any sermon, any day. Even this one.

So, on a gray Friday morning a week ago, August 15, the day after Sarah and Travis’ wedding, I got up, almost as usual before everyone else, walked down the catwalk across the dunes, sat on the last step, and wrote what follows. I didn’t know then if I would ever share it with anyone. Having read these words of Jesus just now, though, I know that I must:

August 15, 2008, Holden Beach NC

Abba, Father..

Through the smallness of my words, I cannot explain to anyone, least of all to myself, who or what you are.

Through the inadequacies of language and grammar, whatever I write leaves so much unwritten that it might be better to tear this blank page into a thousand pieces, lift them to the wind and, as they are blown across the beach say “There, there is God.”

But if I don’t write something, right now, I might cease to breathe.

I know that Genesis says humans were created in the image of God, but I think we have done a much better job of recreating God in our own image. I would rather watch the image of God I see in these pelicans, or in these scampering sandpipers, than think about the image of God which fueled the hundreds of slave ships which crossed these waters in front of me.

My heart soars as I watch the image of God in this rising sun, and know what the ancient biblical writers could not have known: that this is one of a trillion sun-stars, and a fairly minor sized one at that. I see God better in the golden explosion of these early morning, sun-reflecting clouds better- infinitely better- than I do when I read the church-blessed history of the “godly” men who came to these shores 400 years ago with ships full of guns, germs, and plans to baptize and bless the “savages” who had lived here 6000 years on land they called “Father” near the waters they called “Mother.”

My heart aches as I think about the Japanese trawlers chasing down with high powered, 21st century harpoons the whale I saw yesterday, because a Japanese god wants whale oil burning in his temples. And my heart breaks when I think of the creature-killing weapons-testing happening beneath these waters because an American god says “My country, right or wrong, my country.”

It is the man-created images of God which infect my soul, not this billions year old image in front of me! The truest maps of creation are written on the backs of these seabirds, and in the God-writ words on the horizon. I can taste God here in the spray of saltwater. I can hear God in the symphonies of the sun and moon and the harmonies of the ceaseless waves. I can see God in paths of crabs and the nests of sea turtles. And I can touch God here, simply by lifting my hands.

Hallelujah!

God’s Love 3

/ barryweber / 1 Comment

It’s one thing to talk about it in church

with others who will agree with everything

that is being said about it that day.

And who will be reminded how good it is

for those around them to learn more about it,

and be better people for having done so.

It’s inspiring, to say the least.

Where are we going for lunch today?

But it’s quite another thing to watch

God’s Love

gather in the corner of his beloved’s eye,

drop onto her cheek,

and trickle down to her top lip.

When that happens, you can see

prayers being answered with

his Kiss.

God’s Love

/ barryweber / Leave a comment

My guess is that

God’s love better resembles a stack of pancakes with

slathered butter, and soaking in Aunt Jemima’s syrup,

than it does the

the horrible slaughter of his own daughter by Jephtha*,

or God’s allowing the ten children of Job to die,

just to win a bet. **

Pass the strawberry jam, please.

*Judges 11: 30-40

**Job 1

Can We Survive this Century?

/ barryweber / 3 Comments

Well, I know I won’t. I’m 58, it’s 2008, you do the math. But this is a larger, vital, and very (very!) important question which concerns us humans, and untold other species of plants and animals that have arisen through time from the starstuff of earth:

Can we survive this century? Will the year 2100 be noted, observed, or recorded by anyone?

The question will be the subject of an ABC special this coming September- Earth 2100. Scientists from various disciplines will gather together to discuss what might happen, and when, if current population growth and resource consumption continues unabated.

Last summer, The World Without Us by Alan Weisman was published. Weisman interviewed biologists, engineers, geologists, and meteorologists about changes that would occur if, for whatever reason, humans were no longer part of the planetary equation. The result is both fascinating and disturbing- if you’re a human, of course. For most other species*, the possibility of our sudden absence would (if any of them noticed) be the greatest day in the last 1.7 million years!

The deterioration of buildings and infrastructure would begin within days. A Scientific American video- The Earth Without Us, based on Weisman’s book- is an interesting introduction to the phenomena of urbanscapes turning into landscapes. Intriguingly, one of the last recognizable humanly concocted “structures” to exist would be Mount Rushmore.** Four million years from now, barring any direct asteroid hits, George, Abe, Tom, and Teddy will still be staring out through granite eyes, into the Black Hills surrounding them. (Where there once lived a young boy named Rocky Raccoon, somewhere there.)

The immediate disappearance of all humans is almost impossible, outside of a cataclysmic planetary event, like a massive asteroid, or a physics experiment gone terribly wrong. But there are numerous possibilities for the gradual but total absence of humans. Chief among them would be a virus, or a new strain of bacteria. Other possibilities- very real ones- would be nuclear fallout after a large scale war, meteorological changes, a series of smaller asteroid hits, or a depletion of resources a la Easter Island, on a global scale. And if anyone thinks that humans are not stupid enough to let the latter happen, keep driving your SUV, or allowing agri-businesses to patent the world’s food supplies, or burning anything we can put a match to.

What will be lost, if humans are? The ability to record what is happening in the world and the universe, great art (paintings will turn to mold), and the inability to warn other species that may evolve into beings that “need” styrofoam about our short-sighted and continuous mistakes.

What would be gained? Consider the lilies of the field, and the birds of the air..

*Animals that are dependent on humans, of course, would not find such an event very fortunate.Most pets would soon die of starvation, as would all zoo animals which were unable to escape. Cattle, most breeds of which have had all speed and most wildness bred out of them, would be the victims of canines- wolves, coyotes, dingoes, and dogs- which would flourish, and some felines, which would make a gradual comeback as well. Pigs, if they could escape their confines, do fairly well, fairly quickly in the wild. Interestingly, roaches living outside of their native tropical environs, would disappear after a year or two of no heated buildings. Mice and rats in former urban areas would also disappear as food supplies dwindled and as raptors- hawks, eagles, and others- began making high rise buildings into dream aviaries.

**Also interestingly, the last artificially lighted city on earth, because of the nearness and automated systems of Hoover Dam’s electrical production, would be..ta-da!..Las Vegas!

The Earth Without Us

Consider the lilies..

/ barryweber / 3 Comments

A mind-rattling, consciousness-caressing gift was handed to me today. It is so good that I want to share it right away because it could- I think- make a difference in your world, too, beginning right now.

It is one of those insights born within our language; it is a way of thinking that moves me from two-dimensional thinking (the easy, flat kind of thinking) to three, four, even five dimensional thinking- the kind of thinking that causes green and lively shoots of new questions to suddenly and profusely appear. Here it is:

See vs. Consider..

Do I see a person? Or do I consider that person?

When I see a person, I normally make a rush to judgement. I take the visual data before me, run it quickly through the sieve of my own preconceptions, develop a cursory evaluation and move on. I’m in a hurry, after all: there are more people, more things, more places to see. Why take time to linger when I’ve got all the information necessary to momentarily sate my well-defined and hungry ego? Now I have more to see!

But, when I consider the stranger standing in the line at the grocery store, or the friend who is in front of me speaking- when I consider that person, and not merely see him or her, then their multi-dimensionality begins to be revealed.  Their faces, the tilting of their heads, and the movements of their hands became the introductory sentences of a whole narrative that is begging to be read. The strand of curly hair hanging over the young girl’s left eye, or the blurred tattoo over the old man’s right hand knuckles are not mere visual data anymore. Considered, they become colors that give depth to the feelings behind words; they make more resonant the music of a person’s being.

To consider someone is to stop and to experience them. It is to stop the timer in my mind that is always clanging, “Move on!” It is to search (albeit, most of the time, in an unobtrusive manner) for the pain and the joy, the happiness and the suffering that all humans experience in a multitude of ways. It is to seek, because now I must, the tangible and outward evidence of that which is most often hidden and quiet.

To consider a person also involves something else- and in fairness I must warn you about this.  It is also draws me toward that person’s life. It causes me to want to know more, reflect on what I learn, and to begin to make the innumerable connections between myself and that person which are possible between all of us and everyone else.  It makes love very real, and always possible. And sometimes my heart- I can’t speak for yours- but sometimes my heart just doesn’t feel like it can stretch anymore than it already has.

It’s worth the risk, anyway.

Consider, after all, the alternative.