paul-harrison.com

Last evening before sundown I hiked down to Century Lake in
Malibu Creek State Park. The flowers are varied, but sparse after
the driest winter for many years – purple nightshade, western
wallflower, light and dark purple phacelias, California poppies,
bush lupines and monkeyflower, Indian Paintbrush, verbena.

The lake sits in an enclosed valley with willow and tall pine
trees, nestled between steep hillsides cloaked in sages, laurel
sumac and white and blue flowered ceanothus, with jagged and
pitted volcanic rock cliffs as backdrop. Here you feel you are in
wilderness. The valley bottom is shielded against all noises
except those of nature: bird calls, bullfrogs, breeze in the
leaves, and the sound of water lapping or flowing over the dam.
The western end of the lake is secluded by trees and reedbeds and
is barely visited. As I push through an overgrown trail to the
bank, a blue heron startles and graciously wafts to a new perch.

Male red-winged blackbirds clutch the reeds, leaning forward
and spreading their wings, displaying their crimson epaulettes
fringed with yellow, making their sonorous and resonant calls and
clicks. Sometimes they fly up and gather in a flock, and veer in
a curve towards the crowns of trees, where they settle, testing
their mettle against each other.

While the males play competitive games, the camouflaged and
rarely seen females get on with the real work of gathering straw
to make nests and brood chicks. Their colors are designed not for
show, but for hiding: dark mottled brown with light eyebrows and
a beak that looks blue in the dusk light.

Clouds of gnats hover in the air above the water. Cliff swallows,
returned for the breeding season, are swooping across the lake in
criss-crossing flight paths, sometime skimming the surface to
take a water strider or a mosquito larva. High in the air above
the lake, they swirl in a mass aerial display at many different
levels, sometimes interlaced with the flights of blackbirds.

It was a dizzy, exhilarating spectacle of motion and music.
I stayed entranced for an hour and walked back at dusk.

Best wishes,
Paul

In the deepest probing of the Universe to date, a new composite
image from the Chandra and Spitzer telescopes has revealed a vast image
of Jesus’ face, stretching across billions of light years in the constellation
of Virgo. The likeness, striking in its accurate anatomical detail, cannot be
seen in the visible range of the spectrum. The unique combination of X-ray
and infrared imagery brought it into focus for the first time.

Made in the run-up to Easter, the image is already being hailed as the clearest proof
of God’s existence ever found. “I always wondered why God showed himself only
through images on burned tortillas or toast,” Pope Benedict commented. “Now I
know why: He was preparing us for the ultimate revelation.”

At the opposite end of the size scale, scientists at Fermilab have produced quantum
interference using Buckyballs - the largest objects at which quantum effects have
been detected. The balls were passed one by one through double slits. Astonished
scientists watched as the interference pattern on the detection screen built gradually
into a shape that experts identified as Maitreya, the next incarnation of
Buddha. Believers are claiming the discovery as definitive confirmation of
their faith. “The Cosmic Jesus is just an illusion,” said Rishi Gan
Rinpoche. “Of course we are too sophisticated to believe that this is actually
Maitreya sending us some kind of message. But it does confirm the fundamental
reality that nothing exists except the Buddha field. It’s official.”

Skeptics are already mocking these discoveries, saying they are typical
of the distortion and misuse of science to back up scripture-based and
supernatural beliefs. “It’s a Rorschach, you see what you want to see,”
commented John Pullone. “These are nothing but chance line-ups and
projected wish-fulfilments.”

Meanwhile thousands of faithful Jews, Christians and Moslems are already
gathering on the summits of the Mount of Olives and Mount Sinai, while
Hindus and Buddhists are assembling around Mount Kailash, confidently
awaiting the end of time.

We each have a basic emotional mindset, positive, negative or neutral: optimism versus pessimism, views that the majority of humans are fundamentally good versus fundamentally bad.

The rational approach at all times would be to assess every situation on the evidence, but I think we approach all life’s novel situations with prior expectations. These are based on our disposition, on our previous experiences going back to childhood, and on whether we have depression or not.

These days our picture of what the world is like is influenced a lot by what we see in the media, and what we experience via the Internet.

The media are always full of war and violent crime - yet the world is not typically like that. The incidence of civil and international wars has declined by almost three quarters since 1990: see the University of Maryland’s Peace and Conflict report 2005.

That contrasts with my direct personal experience. I have travelled a lot in some of the poorest countries on earth and the poorest communities in those countries. I have wandered through slums and villages with expensive cameras hanging round my neck, I have clambered with all my luggage into rickety pickups crammed with dirt-poor people. Yet I have only once, from a distance, personally witnessed an act of violence, never been robbed, and only twice been badly cheated (on both occasions by New York taxi drivers, once for $5 the second time was just an attempted cheat for $14!). My London flat was burgled once in 25 years. Maybe I have been incredibly lucky, or maybe that’s not untypical. In other words, unless you live in some gang area somewhere, the media create a seriously distorted view of the world and many people buy this picture despite their own personal experience.

The internet is a different story. Since my email is on the Web I get a lot of spam - maybe 250 items a day - which make up the bulk of my email. Two days ago this volume suddenly quadrupled to over 1000 per day. I have no idea why. Most of them were bounce messages, someone sending out mails using one of my emails. I had to set up 32 new filters which fortunately restored Spam to the old volume.

What is spam? Usually it has to do crime or fraud: attempts to steal your identity, get you to send thousands of dollars to Nigeria, infect your computer with a virus, turn your computer into a zombie spam machine, get you to view pornography some of it criminal, get you to buy penny stocks and make a killing for the people who already have that stock. Every day I am subject probably to over 100 attempted frauds or crimes against me and others!!! Of course I hardly ever look at this stuff, layers of filters protect me against most it. But I know it’s there and I have to protect myself against it, like walking around wearing body-armor.

I still believe that the vast majority of people are decent and honest. Even if only 1 per cent are not, the Internet gives these folk access to every other human on the Internet, so instead of being limited to burgling their neighbors, they can invade the screens of ever person in the world with an email account.

I guess I have always had a positive outlook and an empathy for others. This stance may be the reason why I like pantheism, and why I abhor the view that the earth is just a transit camp, and humans are infected with original sin like some kind of sexually transmitted disease.

The pantheist emotional stance towards the world is affirmatively positive. The world is good, even with all its faults, and when the faults affect us, pantheism helps us cope. I know that when I have personal troubles, as everyone does, pantheism is a great help. A walk in nature or a look at a Hubble image of a galaxy places all my personal problems in perspective.

The water in Malibu Creek flows all the year round and has bass, rainbow and steelhead trout and crayfish. Blue, green-backed and night heron fish here, along with great white egret and pied-billed grebe. Hooded meergansers and ospreys are rarer visitors.

The blue heron fishes the whole length of the creek, sleek and elegant and mysterious. In flight her wings look like the huge wings of angels in Christian paintings.

I learn from the quality of her attention. She stands perfectly still for minutes on end, observing. Often she tilts her head to one side. Sometimes she raises her crown feathers to shade her eyes from the sun. When she moves she does so slowly and sinously, curving her neck into a perfect S. She waits and waits. Then suddenly her focus will sharpen, and she will tense in readiness, and lunge, and emerge with a fish.

And so, standing still for minutes on end, in the shade of oaks buzzing with bee colonies, with my camera and telephoto set and ready, I wait and watch her patiently, then suddenly tense, sharpen the focus and shoot, and emerge with a photo.

I am only present in that moment, I am nowhere else.

All worries and concerns have long evaporated. All sense of self has dissolved. I fuse with the scene, I am what I see.

A camera is optional for this exercise, all that is needed is a body and eyes and brain and memory on which to record the instant.

Every instant is as precious as a fish or a photograph.

Pantheism is continually distorted in critical comments. Here’s one from someone wondering what their religious orientation is:

Perhaps I’m a Pantheist, a spiritual individual who is so blown away by the magnificence of the universe, and feels so
small in the presence of such wonders, that he cannot possibly imagine anything more insignificant than himself.

It’s true that pantheists are blown away by the power, the beauty and the mystery of Nature and the Universe. But it doesn’t follow that we are small and utterly insignificant.

I see the Universe as a community of beings, of which I am one. Everything is significant, that is, it is a presence and a thing of value. And that includes each of us as individuals.

Pantheism is affirmative and leads to a positive joyful and accepting way of life.
It’s rather theism that tells us that we are utterly insignificant in comparison with God.

Two iridescent green Anna’s hummingbirds court at the red fountain of our feeder, dancing up and down, round and about. The male flies off, the female sits on a branch of our cherry, waiting.

Two males fly by and the three dance together. The males soar off and engage in aerial displays, trying to assert dominance and ownership of the lady.

“Buzz off! You’re not wanted here.” says one in wing hums.

“She’s mine! She was and is and always will be mine!” sings the other.

“Move on buster. Can’t you tell from the speed of my climb and the roar of my wings that you’re way out of your depth here?”

“How about letting the lady decide, bigmouth? Then we’ll really see.”

The female returns to her perch and waits. When she hears the buzz of wings, she becomes agitated. Her head turns left and right, up and down and aslant. Her long tongue curls out to taste the air.

She is checking out men. The future of her gene line depends on her choosing very, very carefully. She will take all the time it takes to feel comfortable with her decision.

Later they too will fly, circling in dizzy gyres, cementing their love.

What an exhilarating privilege it is to watch these beautiful, bold, vivacious creatures.

To the wanderer trails are like home.
Trails may lead to places, but more importantly, trails are places in themselves.
Trails may lead to goals, but trails are also the goal.
At any moment what is most significant is not what lies ahead or behind,
but what is there in front of your eyes on that stretch, at that moment.
At all times, you are always there at that particular place you have reached, you can never be any place else.
If you do not focus on the place where you are, then you are nowhere.
The past does not exist any more, the future does not exist yet.
There is only the eternal present.

Life is a trail, and we are all wanderers.

Photos at: http://www.tabblo.com/studio/stories/view/98320