awareness

So, I just read some of Tom Brown's field guide to Tracking and Nature Observation, and it raised some interesting points. Nowadays, we are all addicted to entertainment. We feel uncomfortable with long periods where nothing is happenning. We are addicted to having something to do regardless of it's value. I know I am. If I try to sit still for a while, I begin to go through a sort of withdrawal. I start to pay attention to all my little discomforts. I start to worry about things I need to do. I get a craving for a movie, or a game, or a book. Even though I know that if I wasn't sitting still, I would very likely be doing something far less useful, I feel like I should be doing something.
Tom Brown says that after a while, sometimes hours, sometimes days, this feeling goes away,and all that matters is the present, and life as it is happenning. I have met a couple people who have gotten to this point, and they were people I and many other had a great respect for, for reasons other than their ability to let go of day to day worries.
I can remember as a kid how I would be fascinated by a group of ants carrying a dead beetle, or by a millipede crawling over a clump of moss. It was a source of a lot of teasing for me, and eventually I began to "act more normally" I think I lost something there. I can remember how wonderful nature was to behold back then. Nature hasn't lost any of that wonder, but somehow I've grown away from it. I procrastinate, and do small, inconsequential things, daydreaming of a better life that could just come and find me. Reading stories of people who had momentous event happen to them and change their lives for the better for ever. The problem with that is that I don't do the things I need to, and as comfortable as my life is, the momentous events in it, always involved getting into an "unccomfortable" situation. Like so many other Americans, I surround myself with an artificial world where everything is just fine in my mind, and as a result, the real world goes by, and I'm so busy with myself that i totally miss it.

---- As a child, I could fly. Now I've clipped my own wings to gain the respect of those who have never flown. How could they understand what I've lost? What did I think I would gain?----

Happy Depressed Bachellor's Day

I suppose I don't have the right to call it that anymore, being romantically involved as I am, however the reason for my not being a true bachelor is, alas, far away in Austria, and I am spending the day alone save for thoughts of her. Therefore, I say happy Depressed Bachelor's Day to all. I have been told a couple times today how St. Valentine's day is another annoying Hallmark Holiday(like all other in this country), and I decided to do a little review of my saintly history.

St. Valentine was a priest who, in response to a ban on marriage by the Roman emperor Claudius the somethingth, kept marrying couples in secret. He believed that Love was something decided by God, and not to be meddled with by a mere king. For his beliefs and actions, he was imprisoned and sentenced to death, although it is uncertain whether he died before that sentence was carried out. On his dying day, he left a note to the jailer's daughter, with whom he had a deep connection, and signed it "from your Valentine".

Love is not something we chose. It is not the thing that clears all paths and makes all things good again. Love is often the source of great pain, as well as pleasure, and any number of cliches can be ascribed to love, there is some truth in all of it. We seldom choose to fall in love with someone, and if we do choose to, like an action, it seldom works. Who am I to tell someone they cannot love someone else? How can anyone dictate or judge something that has always been so holy that it is a major part of every religion? Love is a connection between that of God in everything. Emlightened people are in love with all creation. Children know it. They start life with a capacity to love and trust everyone and everything. Most horse riders know it. They develope a dee and real connection with their horse. Many pet owners know it. Most trackers know it. It is seldom possible to come to know a person, or a place, or an animal, or a tree, or a car, or a painting, or anything truly, without loving it a little. When you pour so much of yourself into something, you cannot help but love it in some way. There is a man who I feel priveleged to know, who once tracked a pair of wolves for two weeks. He saw their every action, and lived in their trail for two solid weeks, until he knew as much about them as could be discovered in an autopsy (which happened to them a short while later). A couple days after he came back from this trek, he and the others who were with him for those weeks felt that something was truly, deeply wrong. The next day, they discovered that the wolves had been shot for killing sheep. His connectoin with these animals he had come to know was so deep, that he had felt the moment they died. Other stories have been told of people knowinf for certain, without any actual evidence, that their loved one was dead. When we lose someone or something like that, the pain is a unique sort, and powerful. Still more powerful is the knowledge that we were part of something so great and good.

"To love another person is to see the face of God"

false lives

So it turns out that if you want to, you can get all the equipment to stalk someone almost anywhere. If you look up something like "spy gear" on google, you get some sites for toys, and some that have a variety of gadgets for surveillance, tracking vehicles, electrocuting thieves, and tapping phones and computers. You can also get instructional books and videos to aid you your project, whatever it may be. The question of the day, then, is this: who, aside from police and criminals would actually need that stuff? Admittedly, it would be fun to have some of it, but a briefcase that emits 50,000 volts if moved wrong? It seems that some people feel a need to have their lives play out like an action movie, of which they are the center, otherwise they can't really be "living life at it's fullest". The only problem with that is that for the most part, it's not liveing life anymore than watching a movie. Those skills can be useful, but they aren't necessary unless you need them on a proffessional basis.

On a similar note, I reccommend everyone read a book called Bimbos of the Death Sun, you'll get an idea of the kind of people I'm talking about.

"...paragon of animals..."

R.A. MacAvoy wrote a book called Tea with the Black Dragon. In this book, she makes a very interesting point. One of the characters, a man who seems to be something not quite human, observes -
"A [human] is an unsusual being. he is capable of tremendous precision of thought. What is more, he creates - languages, philosophies, poetry... In short, he is the paragon of animals. Yet he is so emminently - what is the right word? - distractable. During the most concentrated of moments he may - no he will - float off like a butterfly and scatter all he has gained.
"Yet this is not a flaw in Man, I think. This is what makes him man. And I must belive there is a value in that."

The character in question then goes on to say that his kind does not create, but hoard, and only as he has become more human, has he realized that, perhaps, this distractability is what enables man to create.

We live in a world in which creativity is valued in all venues and proffessions. The creative artist makes a wonderful work of art. The creative scientist discovers some new miracle in technology or natural history, the creative soldier is promoted, so that his creativity can aid in the campaign, the creaetive politician gains power. And while all these men and women we look up to had startling powers of concentration, they were also flighty, often considered eccentric by their peers; easily distractible by the strangest things. We value creativity as a species, and yet in our society (I speak here of the U.S.A.) we seem determined to crush creativity in spite of ourselves. Schools must cut out their art programs due to lack of funding, Students must spend all their time in school, not learning a good way to learn things, not even really learning the stuff they are taught, but frantically working to be ready for the next test, and if they fail that test, they become part of a statistic of failiure which is used to tout the need for more tests. It has long been known that the SAT is not, as originally intended, a fair test of intelligence, impossible to study for. The same goes for the tests given to younger and younger children every year. It seems to me that we no longer want to have children, but small peopletrying to be adults. We tell them that if they don't pass these tests, they will be failiures. Do you think they don't feel the pressure? and the ones who do fail - often half or more- what do they get? More failiure. How should they feel? is anyone really surprised at the high rates of teenage depression?
To add to all this, we give them drugs if they can't focus. we treat it like a disease. I knew a woman who had a problem with paying attention, and so she was allowed, when she needed to, to go to the art studios and create a little. This worked well for her. she was a happy child, and she di actually lear in school. This may not work for everyone, but I think that if there was less pressure, and more time work with their hands, children would flourish. I did not learn how to read well until fourth grade. I can now read the Lord of the Rings in three days. Does that fact that I learned late mak me a failiure? I can read faster and better than many of my friends, and yet I learned to read later than them. I went to a waldorf school, and my entire class didn't really start reading till third grade, and yet by eighth grade, we were all at least level with our peers in public schools. We also learned math later, and yet we all ended up taking algebra in freshman year in highschool, some of us took geometry instead. So what's the rush to pack this stuff into kids' heads at such an early age? what good will it do them to be able to read in first grade, or do fractions in second? All that will be gained is that they will learn the stuff sooner and not enjoy it. And, if i might add, the public schools have been basing their teaching on standarized testing for a long time, and it doesn't seem to be working to well. There are good public schools out there. I know people who have gotten excellent educations from them, but it seems to me that this is in spite of the government. More teachers, more school, more funding, more personal contact between teachers and students, less drugs, less pressure, and for God's sake, MAKE IT FUN TO LEARN!!! If the kids are enjoying it, they will learn it better. the same goes for anyone, regardless of their age.

RE - trank guns

no, I think the system is fine as it is, I could say the same stuff about a huge variety of things that have great potential for misuse, I could also mention that I think the worst things, like armies, and the weapons used therein are also in danger of being misused by irresponsible people, perhaps more so than things that are readily accessible to the general public. I actually think that there are as many irresponsible adults as there are children and teenagers, and by the time they become adults, they have all sorts of rationalizations for their behavior and are much less likely to see their actions as irresponsible, or even to acknowledge the possibility. When people get into such a rut that they won't actually listento people who dissagree with them, they might as well buy some mannekins and argue with them, because for them, everyone who disagrees isn't worth listening to.

I suppose an explanation of the title is the simplest way to start this off. The quote is a paraphrase from a slightly less famous Douglas Adams book called Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency. For those of you who have not yet read it, I strongly suggeset you do so.

I am always amazed at the number of things that can be bought and sold over the internet. The other day I did a google search for tranquilizer guns and found a couple sites where I, a random guy from Who Knows Where could buy a trank gun and accompanying disposable hypodermic darts. Although there is an age restriction - no buyers under eighteen- how many eighteen-year-olds do you know who could be trusted not to do something stupid and/or irresponsible with a weapon like that? I know a couple, but a lot of the people that age I know (and older too) shouldn't be trusted with a cap gun, let alone the capability to inject someone with any given liquid from a distance.