Fellow blogger and friend, MuseEditions in his post titled Monday Morning Philosophy has a link to a six minute YouTube video called The Absurd Notion of One that is more than worth the time to watch and listen to. For any of you on dial up it will of course take more than six minutes, but still I believe it worth your time.
Category: Life on Earth (Page 16 of 23)
While perusing the internet for things obscure I ended up at a poetry site reading Margaret Atwood’s poem, Siren Song, which I had not read in many years. I’ve included the poem, which you can find by clicking the “continue reading” tag below, but first a little review of mythology for those of you who may not be familiar with the Sirens.
In Greek mythology the Sirens were sea deities who lived on an island called Sirenum scopuli and were the daughters of Achelous. Some versions of the myth say that the Sirens were the playmates of Persephone, Queen of the Underworld, and daughter of Zeus and Demeter. After Persephone was abducted the Sirens were given wings and it is said that their song is continually calling to Persephone. If a ship passed within hearing range of the island the sailors upon hearing the Sirens sing, would jump into the sea and to their fate at the hands of the Sirens. Leonardo da Vinci wrote, “The siren sings so sweetly that she lulls the mariners to sleep; then she climbs upon the ships and kills the sleeping mariners.” Source on Siren mythology: Wikipedia
One can claim that this is all just fantasy, flights of imagination, myth, but the sad fact is that history is full of examples of the Siren Song captivating and seducing mankind. There are almost endless verses to the Siren Song with many yet unsung, and with each successive generation new Sirens take up the lyre and begin to sing. Always the result is the same; people are seduced and jump into the sea.
When we leap into the sea at hearing a Siren Song, we give our personal power away to the Siren, and once given it is not easy to get back. It is vitally important that we each think calmly and clearly before giving our personal power to anyone. It is our responsibility to ourselves and to the entirety of existence, and we should not take this responsibility lightly.
If you realized that the nurtured spiritual part of yourself would accompany you on your eternal journey and that everything that you have labored so hard to accumulate would vanish the instant you depart this world, would it alter your daily agenda? – Walter Cooper
I help out a little in the WordPress.com technical support forums answering questions and helping with problems where I can. It’s an interesting experience and I find joy in being able to help people out. A lot of it is simply answering the same questions over and over. The search functions in the frequently asked questions (FAQ) and forums leaves a little (OK, more like a lot) to be desired, but a good portion of people don’t even attempt to search, they just type in a (many times cryptic) question and hit the submit button. Some of us (volunteers all) that help out have files we keep on our desktop with answers to questions asked frequently and with links to FAQ’s and answers that already exist. With questions we have an answer for in our file, we just copy and paste. No sense describing (inventing) the wheel over and over again.
A small portion of the posts are frantic and thick with drama, in effect saying, “my blog is my life and if this problem or that isn’t solved this moment, my life is over.” Panic, fear, stress, doom! One such case lately has to do with a bug in the Akismet spam filter used at wordpress.com. The bug, according to WordPress staff is ellusive and they have not been able to track it down. Since 92% of the comments made on blogs are spam, disabling it is not really an option (some blogs get over 4,000 spams a day), and because the software used at WordPress.com is multiuser, it would be difficult to give us each the option to turn it off on our individual blogs. There are a number of us caught up in this bug (don’t really know how many) that are not able to review all the comments caught by Akismet so we cannot tell if it is catching legitimate comments or not (apparently for some it is). A problem to be sure, but is it really the end of your world?
I took care of this by putting an explanation of the problem on my “Contact/Comments” page, so if you make a comment and your comment doesn’t show up within a day or two at the most, use my contact page and I’ll manually add your comment for you until such time as WordPress solves the problem.
I decided that I would participate in Blog Action Day. Participants have been asked to blog about the environment today, October 15, 2007. Part of the reason I decided to take part was my recent journey that I shared with you in my post titled Consequences, and since I have a strong connection to nature and the nature spirits it seemed only, well… natural.
Note: You can click on any of the images below to enlarge them.
If you type “global warming” (with the quote marks) into the Google search box, it will return about 66 million hits. This will of course bring you the full gamut from pros to cons, from rants to raves, and all sorts of experts (and morons) on both sides claiming their truth is the only real truth, and their scientific god is the only true god. This post isn’t meant to be a comprehensive debate of the pros and cons, but simply some personal thoughts and observations for your contemplation. Neither side knows the full truth (if it can ever be known by man), but until both sides come together and drop the egos, they haven’t a prayer. Right now all aspects of society – at least here in the US – are so polarized that we are virtually going nowhere. You’re either with us or against us goes the mantra of the day. Hopefully it does not become our epitaph.
I don’t think any rational person could seriously believe that human activity is not at least partly responsible for the increase in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, or that those gases trap heat on the earth and prevent it from being radiated back out into space. The chart at left was created by the Energy Information Administration (EIA) and is from Mongabay.com and shows world CO2 emissions starting in 1990 and projected out to 2030. We cannot keep this rate of increase up and survive.
Areas of the deep oceans are approaching temperatures that could produce massive releases of methane – another more potent greenhouse gas – from the seabed and from methane ice on the sea floor. Since relatively little of the seabed has been explored, we really have little idea how extensive and potentially devastating this problem could be.
This summer’s unprecedented high temperatures in the arctic uncovered and thawed vast areas of permafrost which in turn released more CO2 into the atmosphere as the previously frozen plant matter decayed. This is going to continue.Live vegetation takes in CO2 from the atmosphere and converts it to food, and in the process releases life-sustaining oxygen back into the air. Day by day deforestation is reducing the amount of vegetation on the earth and thus reducing nature’s ability to cleanse the air. Right now there is more CO2 – natural and manmade – being pumped into the air than the earth systems can convert. This is the environmental equivalent to deficit spending (a concept the US should be quite familiar with).
14 November 2005, Rome – Each year about 13 million hectares [32,123,699 acres or 50,193 sq miles, roughly equivalent to the area of Louisiana] of the world’s forests are lost due to deforestation, but the rate of net forest loss is slowing down, thanks to new planting and natural expansion of existing forests, FAO announced today.
The annual net loss of forest area between 2000 and 2005 was 7.3 million hectares/year [18,038,692 acres or 28,185 sq miles, a little less than the area of South Carolina] — an area about the size of Sierra Leone or Panama — down from an estimated 8.9 million ha/yr between 1990 and 2000. This is equivalent to a net loss of 0.18 percent of the world’s forests annually. Source: Food and Agriculture Organization of the U.N.
In his October column in The Meta Arts Magazine, Dr. Hank Wesselman, PhD talks about some of The Life Games we come into the physical to experience. (Note: If you are reading this in November 2007 or later, go here for Hank’s archives.)
One interesting thing he reveals in the article is that according to Dr. Michael Newton, 73% of those now embodied on earth are young or young-intermediate souls who are typically after money, sex, power and status – the “physical foursome” as Hank calls them.
I long ago gave up on the idea of Coincidences, and it’s not coincidence or chance that little more than a quarter of those now on earth are more advanced souls. I humbly suggest you give Hank’s article a read, I believe it will be time well spent.
Recent Comments