Mind the Gap

    Okay, there's been quite a pause between this and the last post so you may be wondering...what happened?   Here's how Amy Stewart put it on her own blog: First I want to say this: Not everybody had a chance to rest up and re-think their priorities during the pandemic.  Lots of people worked harder than ever.  Lots of people scrambled to keep their families safe, dealt with an impossible school situation for their kids, and faced all kinds of losses and hardships.  But…some people got some rest, or experienced real idleness for the first time in years, or found themselves unencumbered by the demands of their old lives – flying across the country for meetings, sitting in a car for an hour commute every day, juggling three part-time jobs–and had a little time to think about what they’d really like their lives to look like, if they were in charge of deciding that.  And now…it kind of feels like it’s time to decide.  Offices are opening back up.  People are flying on planes.  Conferences and conventions are tentatively back on the calendar.  Which puts us in a weird position.  Do we ramp our lives back up?  Or…now that so many activities were forcefully evicted from our lives, do we re-evaluate each returning thing, each resumption of an old activity, and decide on a case-by-case basis whether it’s allowed back in or not?

    It paralleled the thoughts of an older book by Sarah Ban Breathnach, a book she titled Simple Abundance.  It was a book I let slide by without a notice despite its 5 million copies topping the charts during the late 90s (it was yet another welcomed discovery from my local library's sale).  Puzzled by her own thoughts of following her muse (she was already a best-selling author but wasn't sure about continuing at the pace her editors wanted), she wrote in the book's introduction: I knew I wasn't the only woman hurtling through real life as if it were an out-of-body experience.  I knew I wasn't the only woman frazzled, depressed, worn to a raveling.  But I also knew I certainly wasn't the woman with the answers.  I didn't even know the questions.  I wanted so much --money, success, recognition, genuine creative expression-- but had absolutely no clue as to what I truly needed...before the book could be written, I had to take stock of what was working in my life and what wasn't.  Perhaps for the first time, I had to be ruthlessly honest both inwardly and outwardly...What is missing from many of our days is a true sense that we are enjoying the lives we are living.  It is difficult to experience moments of happiness if we are not aware of what it is we genuinely love.  We must learn to sense small, authentic moments that bring us contentment.

    As if to emphasize her ponderings, she opens her book with a quote from author Margaret Young (an author who compiled her mother's diary entries as a WW1 nurse into a best selling book and television series): 

A field of thistles...

Often people attempt to live their lives backwards, they try to have more things or more money in order to do more of what they want so that they will be happier.  The way it actually works is the reverse.  You must first be who you really are then do what you need to do in order to have what you want.   "The pursuit of happiness" became part of our Declaration of Independence in 1776, a viewed expressed 50 years earlier by the Glasgow-based philosopher Francis Hutcheson who wrote: That action is best, which accomplishes the greatest happiness for the greatest numbers.  But for me,  I kept seeing that image of Forrest Gump stopping in the middle of the desert and deciding, "that's probably enough."  Like many of you, the warmer temps of summer and the lure of just "getting out" to plant things and return to having dinners with neighbors and enjoying a good old laugh...all of that and more just added to my pondering of my time and how it was being spent.  I was watching tiny ducklings emerge at a local pond, watching them grow ever larger until their feathers were now close to matching those of their mother.  My "routine" was suddenly beginning to seem anything but.  

     Okay a few things happened that tended to lead to all of this: I got a dog bite that required stitches, the crown on my back molar suddenly decided to just fall off and plop onto my car seat as I was talking (my dentist told me later that my tooth was rotting out), and I had my first experience with that celebrity sedative, propofol during my decennial colonoscopy.  Wow, I was both out like a light and awakened in so many respects, forcing me to take a reflective look at certain things in my life in general.  As with the authors' thoughts above, the hot temperatures and the grills lighting, the margaritas flowing again and the hummingbirds returning, the mowers and the re-staining of decks, all made me question why I was feeling a pressure of sorts to get other things done, such as this blog?  Did I really need to finish reading that growing pile of magazines and books, not to mention watching my old collection of concerts and such (as in who has a DVD or CD player anymore, other than me).  The reality was that so much more was calling out to me and making me question whether or why I "needed" to read or write or listen to or see everything?  Or on the other hand, was I just becoming lazy?

Thistle in bloom

    I've been thoroughly enjoying Amy Stewart's 2013 book, The Drunken Botanist, filled with a whirlwind tour of how cognac came to be (primarily because of the area's rather blah wine), and how the sweet potato is not a potato at all but a member of the morning glory family (and totally different than the yam which is of African origin); and how agave is no cactus but is more closely related to asparagus; and how the cabernet sauvignon grape came from a grafting of red and white grapes (cab franc and sauvignon blanc); and how grapes may be 50+ million years old but oak trees are double that (the difference between American oaks and European oaks is startling)...and on and on (such as how many vegetables and grains produce cyanide...yikes).  Fascinating reading, and yet something which was proving to be yet another delay to me trying to get to all of my "other" stuff.  But what was wrong with that?  Some older movies (Honour comes to mind, but beware for there are many Hollywood versions of "honour" killings; this particular British version is based on actual events and may open your eyes to other cultures) are as well done as anything I've seen recently.  Life is sometimes like that, you slow down or stop to think about things and end up seeing how much has actually zipped by you...or is still going by you.  Is that because you ignore such things, or is it simply because you feel that you have "all the time in the world" and will get to it later (those bypassed emails).  A quick glance shows this may be happening not only in movies and books but in those right around you...parents, children, friends, even animals...

     I've been making a collection of songs that influenced me, writing out a short "bio" of what the song meant to me at the time, the words or melody sticking in my head often because of where I was or who I was with or something that made that particular song special to me.*  Imagine doing that for books you've read, or movies you've watched, or dinners you've attended, being asked to put together such a list and write about why you decided to put each item on that list.  It admittedly took awhile, my thoughts often vacillating about whether this was simply an egotistical exercise on my part or whether my friends would truly find such songs interesting (a female rap song from Cuba?).  But what happened as I neared the halfway point was that my inward journey of looking at what I was writing to others avtually became what I was exposing to myself.  Maybe my friends would enjoy the music, maybe not...our tastes are quite varied.  Several of my friends deny climate change and the effectiveness of vaccines, or blame China for most everything (even as they type on the Apple tablets or drive their Teslas); but while I often feel 180 degrees apart from their opinions, I enjoy hearing their viewpoints.  

     So I jump back to why we, as a species, think we're so unique; and perhaps even more so why we, individually, think we're unique.  What makes me happy may be (and likely is) something totally different than what makes you happy.  As they say, it's what makes the world go 'round.  Quite awhile back I wrote a number of posts about Merlin Sheldrake's venture into the world of fungi, which Francis Gooding recently reviewed for the London Review of Books.  On talking about psilocybin (the chemical of "magic" mushrooms) she wrote in part: In the human brain, psilocybin suppresses what is called the ‘default mode network’, the interconnected brain areas responsible for self-reflection and self-consciousness, thinking about past and future, and for regulating other cerebral processes.  The DMN, Sheldrake says, keeps a kind of order: ‘a schoolteacher in a chaotic classroom’.  In neural terms, psilocybin and LSD let the brain ‘off the leash.  Cerebral connectivity explodes, and a tumult of new neuronal pathways arise.  Networks of activity previously distant from one another link up.  The experience of this for the user involves all the stereotypical (but reliably real) sensations: mystical gnosis, the revelation of the interconnectedness of all things, and so on...The explosive growth of interconnections, the development of flexible new relationships, the filling of spaces with a tangle of new pathways, novel and powerful exchanges and flows of information coursing through an electrically excitable network: what else but this would a fungus do if it really did seize hold of your mind?  Not to worry, she writes, "...the timescales of human intervention are too short, and psilocybin-producing fungi have been around too long to care much about people."  Did I mention that oak trees have been around for 100 million years?  Fungi have been around for billions of years (we modern humans clock in at a meager 200 thousand years).

     National Geographic began one of their cover stories with this: Let’s imagine planet Earth without viruses.  We wave a wand, and they all disappear.  The rabies virus is suddenly gone.  The polio virus is gone.  The gruesomely lethal Ebola virus is gone.  The measles virus, the mumps virus, and the various influenzas are gone.  Vast reductions of human misery and death.  HIV is gone, and so the AIDS catastrophe never happened.  Nipah and Hendra and Machupo and Sin Nombre are gone—never mind their records of ugly mayhem.  Dengue, gone.  All the rotaviruses, gone, a great mercy to children in developing countries who die by the hundreds of thousands each year.  Zika virus, gone.  Yellow fever virus, gone.  Herpes B, carried by some monkeys, often fatal when passed to humans, gone.  Nobody suffers anymore from chicken pox, hepatitis, shingles, or even the common cold.  Variola, the agent of smallpox?  That virus was eradicated in the wild by 1977, but now it vanishes from the high-security freezers where the last spooky samples are stored.  The SARS virus of 2003, the alarm that we now know signaled the modern pandemic era, gone.  And of course the nefarious SARS-CoV-2 virus, cause of COVID-19 and so bewilderingly variable in its effects, so tricky, so dangerous, so very transmissible, is gone.  Do you feel better?  Don’t.  This scenario is more equivocal than you think.  The fact is, we live in a world of viruses—viruses that are unfathomably diverse, immeasurably abundant.  The oceans alone may contain more viral particles than stars in the observable universe.  Mammals may carry at least 320,000 different species of viruses.  When you add the viruses infecting nonmammalian animals, plants, terrestrial bacteria, and every other possible host, the total comes to…lots.  And beyond the big numbers are big consequences:  Many of those viruses bring adaptive benefits, not harms, to life on Earth, including human life.  We couldn’t continue without them.  We wouldn’t have arisen from the primordial muck without them.

     Kee Malesky is a fact-checker/librarian for NPR.  She wrote in her book: Facts and informaton are the nourishment, the lifeblood, the raison d'être, and also the bane and despair of librarians and researchers.  Librarians tend to be generalists, people who know a little bit about a lot of things.  Maybe that sounds superficial, but it makes a great reference librarian.  We store up facts and information (and occasionally even knowledge or wisdom), connect them, organize and describe them, and make them accessible to the world.  It's that simple and that infinitely complex...What we do matters in the world.  Every moment of the day, I must be open to learning something that will help me to be a better librarian...Facts float around my little gray cells and have a tendency to percolate to the surface at the oddest moments.  

    That was me (of a sort).  That must be why I so enjoyed reading Dr. Michael Stephen write about TB (what?)  In his book Breath Taking, he wrote: If the history of civilization is surveyed in its entirety, no other infectious disease has killed more people than TB, over one billion in the last two hundred years alone.  And it continues to kill more than one million people worldwide each year.  Much as civilization itself, tuberculosis first appeared in East Africa some twenty thousand years ago.  It has stuck with us ever since, and today it exists in the latent stage in almost two billion people, a quarter of the world's population.  Being in the latent stage means TB infected these people at some point, was controlled but not completely eradicated by the inflammatory system of their lungs, and has the potential to reactivate if their immune system weakens.  But here was what really got my attention: picture an astronaut in the final countdown before liftoff. "The heart is beating away at a fiery 160 beats per minute, the kidneys are making urine...The brain and muscles are awake."  T minus 5...4...3...2...1, ignition.  Only Stephen isn't talking about an astronaut but about the birth of a baby.  In those split seconds when the baby emerges from the mother's womb, the lungs have to "ignite" and switch from a fluid-filled function to an air-filled one, and they have only seconds to do so.  Stephen adds: In an instant, the ducts through the liver and heart close, shunting blood to the lungs to pick up oxygen.  The brain must simultaneously start firing signals to the muscles of inspiration.  The eyes must open and adjust to the harsh light of the world.  Finally, the lungs, still filled with amniotic fluid, must inflate in an instant with the first breath of life.  The alveoli pop open for the first time and, with that first deep breath, suck the fluid up and immediately begin extracting oxygen from the atmosphere.  The lungs change from being water-filled to being air-filled, from being dormant to extracting oxygen, all in the first few seconds of life.

     Facts?  It's less that for me than it is the continual discovery of the preciousness of life, of how it is indeed all around us and yet we have only touched its surface.  The ducklings grow and the trees blossom out with thousands of leaves; and yet somehow they all know when to stop, when they've reached their scheduled "size."  Even standing in a field of dried, thorny thistles (the new blooms are edible) one can find amazing beauty.  My wife doesn't really care for all these "facts," preferring that I instead dive into feelings and how we and our friends are actually "doing."  But for me, that is an even more complicated and less-understood world (although I feel that she is much farther along the "grounded" track than me).  But learning about the world around us is fascinating to me, not so much to impress or dazzle people at gatherings but to continually remind myself that there is nothing wrong with continuing to explore and discover and peek both inward and outward...if that it what makes one happy.  It does that for me, even if I sometimes take long pauses to take it all in.  But then I've only taken a few small steps on my journey...miles and miles to go.

Addendum: As noted earlier, if you're a subscriber and counting on being notified about the latest posts, that will all apparently cease at the end of this month, as mentioned in an earlier post about FeedBurner.  Sorry, I don't understand how it all works but just sending out yet another reminder that you may want to jot this down in your memory if you wonder why I haven't written something in awhile (as is commonly said in the UK, Mind the Gap means that you should "watch your step").  Also, if you've read this far (gasp) and are interested in listening to just what I put on my song "list," I'm happy to send out flash drives of the music and podcasts to the first 10 (ten) people who request one (if nothing else, you can wipe the entire thing and still have an 8-GB flash drive to use for your own compilation).  Just drop a note to: notesfromabearsjourney@gmail.com (place "flash drive" in the subject heading)  -- and thanks for reading this far!

*Songs imprint themselves into our memories deeper than we think, something I'll write about in a future post (sign language for music?...it already exists).