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Watching the Ancestral Prayers of Venerable Others
Lena Higgins, 92, breastless, blind, chewing her gums by the window, is old, but the Great Comet of 1843 is much older than that. Dry land tortoises with their elephantine feet are often very old, but giant sequoias of the western Sierras are generations older than that. The first prayer rattle, made on the savannah of seeds and bones strung together, is old, but the first winged cockroach to appear on earth is hundreds of millions of years older than that. A flowering plant fossil or a mollusk fossil in limy shale is old. Stony meteorites buried beneath polar ice are older than that, and death itself is very, very ancient, but life is certainly older than death. Shadows and silhouettes created by primordial sea storms More » -
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Deep Time: Beyond 2000
As we approach the millennium, some two thousand years after the birth of Christ, it is tempting to reflect on time in the widest scientific sense in order to attempt to break free of Judea-Christian cultural residue and its somewhat stultifying, apocalyptic tone. More » -
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Haibun
Rock is naturalist scripture. The deeper you go the older the story. Pikas & squirrels scamper over the top, then spiral descent from gone tooth & twig. Petrified bone sediment myth. Or psychic fossil? Horesetail & algae glow green again, come to life in car engines. Fantastic shapes, old as forests. And now the likelihood we have in the world as many diverse minds…"as there are organisms capable of perception." Evolution's basic job-turning rock to green growth. Andrew Schelling is an award winning poet, essayist, and translator on the faculty of the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado. More » -
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Does the Millennium Mean Anything?
“In these matters take no notice of the words of any man [meaning Aristotle], for it is the foundation of our [Jewish] faith that God created the world from nothing, that time did not exist before, because it depends upon the motion of the sphere, and that too was caused.” —Moses ben Maimon (twelfth century, Egypt) That matter, time, and space sprang from nothing at the moment of creation fits quite well with what I've come to accept as a physicist. While I cannot claim to be much of a theorist, I have spent about twenty years in observational astrophysics, much of it touching upon evidence supporting the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe. More »
