Notes early in a New Year

Photo: Neal gives Flaubert a bath. He is pretty good about baths, and does his best to stay positive about them, even though he hates the part where his face gets washed.

Notes from Jan 5, 2024

After a conversation with Peter

It's a new year, and I need to gather what few wits I still have left about me at this advancing age, collect myself — this is something I try to remember to do every morning – and, after gathering the magnetic forces of my being around the gravitational field of my body, concentrate more carefully on what will take place next; how I will breathe next, sense next; intuit through the fibers of my Being what will be written next.

The world seems like it is slowly sliding into disaster; but I'm sure that in many ways, it has seemed that way to every human throughout countless trillions of lives and tens of thousands of years. We’re putting the planet through great woes, yes; and yet it will survive them. After all, it survived a huge meteorite striking it 65 million years ago, which rendered most lifeforms extinct, and everything came back most beautifully. The impact we’re having now can never actually be any worse than that; when we speak of how great the catastrophes we are visiting on the planet are, it's another form of narcissism – we tiny creatures actually think we’re bigger and worse than gigantic meteorites from outer space.

This says something about the nature of our minds and egos that is even bigger than the objective outer problems we face in the biosphere, all self-created.