From what I understand there are some 360 different species in the Rose family, but I’m unsure if the word “beautiful” is incorporated into any of those names.
This excerpt is from the book, “The Painted Drum,” by Louise Erdrich. It really resonated for me.
Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself that you tasted as many as you could.
The great thing about our consciousness is that nobody really understands it at all. Neuroscientists have been unable to identify any specific brain structure or location that corresponds to whatever is generating consciousness. We have, however, learned to facilitate alternative states of consciousness, and we’ve learned how to shut it off with anesthesia, but we’re left wondering just what composes it. And where does it go when we sleep? Or when we die?
This has left room for scientists, philosophers and spiritualists to delve into great thought experiments of just where our little particles of awareness come from and if they are really our eternal souls. That speck of divinity in all of us.
Arguments go further about the potential ego-identities of our consciousness and if they can migrate from one corporal form to another. But before getting too abstract, I want to bounce back to one of the scientific theories that has gained a bit more traction recently.
I’m reviving this post as a prelude the next that will address an old-new theory of consciousness, which as many of you know is one of my favorite subjects. This piece is a bit long at 1500 words or an 8-10 minute read. I know, it’s a lot of time and attention in a busy world of doom scrolling, but hey, you might find it a fun brainteaser.
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A previous post of mine, which briefly touched on the symbolism of the Tower of Babylon, got me to thinking more about how humans seem to like to convey human attributes onto the Gods they believe govern their existence in the physical plane and the afterlife. (This statement, of course, presumes there is both a limited physical and eternal Spiritual existence for us.) And, this train of thought led me down the path of pondering just what are emotions, what are thoughts, and what is consciousness???
What often amazes me with other languages is that they seem to have more individual words that can describe an infinite abyss of feelings and emotions. All that heart and soul packed into just a few little letters. And at a dear heart’s direction, I came upon one such word that seems perfectly to describe what’s happening in our culture.
Wetiko
Now, this is a Cree tribal word that literally means: an evil person or spirit that terrorizes other living entities with horrible acts, including cannibalism. It can also be said to refer to a psycho-spiritual illness, which blinds us from seeing that we are infected with fear, self-centeredness, and a false apprehension of separation from our interconnection and quantum entanglement with the totality of all existence. Our ego isolation situates us as competitors in the mass consumption society we’ve created.
Trump has been in office for only a few days now and in that time he’s managed to raise the price of food and medicine and has begun a purge of federal employees whom he doesn’t believe received their jobs on the basis of merit. The part about merit-based employment may make a great sound bite, but just like everything else that comes from Trump, it’s just another falsehood.
It will take me a little time to refresh my memory on how things work here. So, as I’m getting started, I thought I’d drop a post of mine from Substack to get the feel of things. This one is political, so if you don’t like politics, you can stop now. I’ll be back with some other posts from the past and one that was published recently.
If you’ve been exploring the world of blogging for any amount of time, you’ve probably noticed that some blogs are completely devoid of original content. Instead, they fill the pages of their blogs with other people’s posts and attempt to monitize that blog by including ads.
They snatch up large volumes of other peoples’ work so they appear in the news feed (or Reader) continuously. They do this to try to drive traffic to thir sites to generate that advertising income.
But these people are hacks.
They have no intention of ever producing a creative work, they simply “borrow” others’ intellectual property. I’ve also talked with fellow bloggers and it’s not just words that are being stolen, they also steal art, whether it be photographs or some other medium.
These people suck.
If you’re wondering why I’m writing about this, it’s because another one of my posts was “lifted” to another page where that blog makes it appear that they authored my work. They do not provide proper attribution as anyone in the writing world knows is the only appropriate way of using another person’s IP.
When I originally drafted this piece, I went into great detail of the misappropriation. How I screenshot the proof, reported it to WP, and how WP simply didn’t agree, and supported the thief.
After I re-read my potential draft, I realized all of the detail merely bogged down the message. So I submit this abbreviated post in its stead.
By-the-way, WP went on to tell me that no IP could be protected on the web, and if I believed I could find a safer platform that I should go ahead and leave.
So I doubt I will be renewing my membership here. It was just this sort of theft that discouraged me from writing last year and it happened again in under ten posts this year.
I’ll keep you posted as to where I might end up, but for now, just let me say thank you for visiting my blog, reading my posts, and giving me wonderful feedback! I’ve also enjoyed your work immensely.
Earthwalking 