Give Them Air
12.04.08
Vientiane, Laos – How can we be two days ahead of ourselves? Your today is our yesterday. Our today is your tomorrow. Tomorrow, here, is two days away, for you. You may think it’s all jibberish and mind-game, until you do the math, figure out the time zones. Then it makes sense. Sure. We're spinning in space, right?
Or until you make the call, the text message, digital photo, the email. Even though it’s instantaneous in the Real 3D World, you’ll note two different dates. Yeah, Santa comes here early. Heading home, you can experience two sunrises on the same day.
For those who’ve experienced it often, like orbiting astronauts, it becomes blasé, but for the first time, even thereafter, it’s remarkable, moving quickly through time zones. If we were to travel back in time, just a little, even, a generation or two, and tell our grandfathers of the days we’d see, they would surely pronounce us mad.
Plants can’t do it. They are pretty much where they’re going to be their entire lives, unless you’ve got them in buckets. That’s why transplanting requires such care. It’s such a shock. You’ve seen the tomato or pepper plant that just sits there for weeks before deciding to go ahead and mature, a commonality, among other traits we share with the plant world.
Animals animate. We take for granted being able to eat breakfast on the east coast , and lunch in San Francisco, a distance requiring months in a Conestoga wagon traveling the Oregon Trail. We think nothing of it at all. We're pissed off if we're delayed on the tarmack.
So? So what? It’s just a time thing. There’s something to be said of roots. Do you remember when you had them? Living for three, maybe seven hundred years?
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The Tops of Their Heads
From up here, that’s what I see, the tops of their heads, each, a thread, connected to their unseen gods, interweaving, interacting in the world, affecting everything we touch and breathe. What difference between the beggar, the vendor, the monk, the philosopher?
How can we bubbles in this infinite sea of foam affect any significant change? And what would become of our lives, the double helix strand, the gene pool, for any Mozart or sublime verse you’d heard, the book you’d read, or discussion, or impression upon others? What difference? You tell me.
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