Monday, June 29, 2009

The Quiet Energy


There's a certain energy that everyone has, and now I believe for certain, there's a spark of 'life' energy that every living thing on Earth has, however that may be defined....even if it's merely defined as just being alive, the energy is there...and I felt it, in a very quiet but profound way last Monday...
My mom and I took a shuttle bus to Sequoia National Park, they encourage the use of these shuttle busses now, to minimize the smog and congestion that an endless stream of cars brings on just a two-lane road. When we got up there I was stunned...I remember coming up to the Sequoia groves as a kid, 'oh yeah, big trees, whatever'....

We went up to Moro Rock, "oooh I wanna climb it!" I felt like a kid again, since I hadn't been up there since 1968!
"okay, I'll wait for you here" my mom said, since she was in no mood to climb the 600 feet of granite staircase...but up I went, and almost as in an internal videotape, I remembered each step to the summit, but this time I was acutely aware of the dizzying drops to each side on the trail, but I told myself, "well, you haven't done anything this bold in a while, have you?"
After that we caught the shuttle to the Giant Forest, and the General Sherman Tree...
This time, whether it was from a certain wisdom that comes with age, I don't know....I was Awestruck!
Being among the Giant Sequoias is just as awesome as being in any cathedral that I had ever been in! Chartres, Notre Dame, forget about it!....Nothing ever built by Man can compare to the majesty of these trees. And they only exist in one place on the Earth, in small groves here in California.
I had forgotten how big and old these trees really were... A ranger/tour guide said, "This is the General Sherman Tree, it was a young sapling, about 30 feet tall when Jesus walked the Earth." And then while walking among them, I felt their sentient presence in their peaceful and silent groves, with all the history of wars won and lost, as humans have run to and fro over the ages.... here they still stand, with a certain powerful energy of their own, a life force only from which something that OLD can have...and I felt peaceful in their presence, as if they were smiling down in their old age and wisdom.

Saturday, June 27, 2009

The Night Sky

I've been wanting to post something like this for years, and the night sky down here compels me to do it, because it's so vivid...well on clear nights anyway. The nights here are sometimes extremely clear, and you can literally see a million stars, the Milky Way, shooting stars, and sometimes satellites move across at a steady pace. I always had a passing interest in astronomy, but some nights lately I find myself laying on the lawn and just looking up at the universe, and noticing the passing phases of the moon, and the planets, Mars is the red star in the south, Venus is the bright star at dusk, and a host of other observations that I don't recognize and best left to the serious astronomers...After reading the book 'Sarum', which is a book about the history of England, it describes the building of Stonehenge...an ancient mystery, built about five thousand years ago, by Neolithic people, neolithic meaning, new stone age!...but they must have known what they were doing, because the stones mark the sun's rise on June 21, the longest day of the year, by a distant stone whose shadow goes right through the center of stonehenge at sunrise, only on June 21...and this was five thousand years ago. How would ancient people know how to build such a thing?
And then I realized, of course they knew! how couldn't they? They had the stars at night, and the sun, and the moon...
Humans go back for thousands of years, as hunter-gatherers, the start of agriculture led to towns, towns led to cities and civilization...some say that Stonehenge was an agricultural tool, well, maybe so...but the manpower to build such a monolith way back then would require an organized effort...a society.
Way back then, I know there were smart ones...as smart as Einstien, Newton, Galileo, etc... but what they didn't have were clocks, computers, televisions...nothing to mark time. They only had the sky.... the stars, sun, and moon which rises and falls in their own eternal rhythm, that was their clock! and not just at Stonehenge, the Mayas did the same thing.
Some say that 'ancient astronauts' helped them....Aliens...the precise engineering at Maya Palenque and other sites around the world, the Plains of Nazca for example...
I am of two minds...One, there has been thousands of years of human history on this earth, and history tends to become buried if you weren't part of an empire that would record it...and Two, let's just say that what Neil Armstrong said was true, "Santa Claus Exists"....meaning he saw a UFO...it's a game changer...a myth, who knows? I don't...all I know is, the stars up there maintain a clockwork that will never change...