Joanna
Dwayne Monroe wrote:
> When I was twelve I belonged to a Boy Scouts like group that took city
> kids on extended, and quite challenging, camping trips.
>
> We learned basic survival skills - how to navigate by compass, how to
> identify safe water and edible plants, etc - and acquired, through
> immersion in a non-built environment, an appreciation of our
> fragility. There's something humbling about being, entirely without
> warning, within eye shot of a bear or almost, just almost slipping to
> your death while walking along a narrow trail.
>
> You become an oddly quiet and confident little person when you've
> experienced these things.
>
>
> During one of these trips, we camped near the top of a mountain in
> Pennsylvania, part, as I recall, of the Appalachian chain. There was
> a large lake, perhaps the water filled crater of an ancient volcano.
> We pitched our tents there. A huge boulder was near our campsite.
> Dr. Morris, our camp leader, an astrophysicist and passionate lover of
> the deep woods, explained how the retreat of glaciers more than ten
> thousand years ago had left this immense rock here, sitting as if the
> hand of Zeus had idly tossed it. He told us this, as he told us all
> things, in a tone that guided you into a reverence for the barely
> understood natural processes at work all around us. It was a science
> inspired reverence but no less spiritual than other forms.
>
> The days were exhilarating, the nights exciting, cold and dark - the
> sort of darkness we rarely experience anymore; so complete it feels
> like a liquid flowing around and through you. A beautifully
> terrifying blackness.
>
> Except of course, for the sky.
>
>
> One night, the last night as I remember, we took a hike to the rim of
> the lake. There, the trees thinned and we could see the sky without
> obstruction. Dr. Morris told us all to lie down on the ground and
> look up.
>
> And then I saw, for the first time, the Milky Way. Good god, so many
> stars. Too many to count. I imagined visiting each one and observing
> their nuclear fire at close range perhaps seeing, along the way,
> others who built things and longed to understand the universe.
>
>
> It was remarkably quiet. Dr. Morris explained how we were looking
> into the heart of our galaxy and that the Earth and its stable little
> sun were hurtling along as part of one of the spiral arms. He asked
> us to imagine some beings, youngsters like ourselves, looking up into
> their own night skies and seeing our star from far away.
>
>
> "And do you think" he asked "that with all of this before us the best
> we can do is destroy each other? We are the eyes and ears of nature -
> we are how she knows herself - through our consciousness and our
> science and our art. We have an obligation to work with each other to
> make the world the wisest, fairest and best place it can possibly be."
>
>
> I can't know for certain, but I believe that my commitment to what we
> call left or progressive principles was born at that very moment
> because to this day I refuse to believe that the best we can do is
> bomb cities to make them "safe for elections" or not provide for the
> health and safety of every person or create non destructive ways to
> deal with each other or be terminally stupid.
>
>
> Dr. Morris was asking, essentially, that we each do our part to help
> humanity reach full species maturity and be worthy, therefore, of the
> stars.
>
> Not the most direct route to socialism but it worked for me (and many
> of my childhood friends who were deeply inspired by this moment) as a
> beginning.
>
>
>
>
> .d.
>
>
>
>
>
>
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>
> .
>