After-thoughts

After-thought on Toward a Commons culture

Our rainy season’s first atmospheric river dropped 7” of fresh water in about three days, according to our garden’s rain gauge. It never poured really hard but it was sustained, often accompanied by strong winds. The first clear morning afterwards, I went out under a blue sky. All around me, as far as I could see, were birds scratching up the soggy fallen leaves. They weren’t a clumped flock. They were individuals of several species spaced thinly across the land, drawing my attention with their scratching efforts.

And suddenly, there it was. All around me, feathered brown tubes doing the work of fluffing up the rain-flattened leaves. Their work was fueled by the invertebrate brown tubes they were scratchingly searching for. This work was kicking up soggy leaves, thereby expanding the leaf surface area available to all the other invertebrate brown tubes that were doing the decomposing work of making leaf-embodied nutrients available for next spring’s leaves. Spirals of energy – flowing down, rising up, around and around all around me and I have been given the gift of consciousness of this work, been given the opportunity to participate in this work in my own, unique-to-my-life-path way.

In my Commons culture essay, I contrasted these upward spirals of brown tubes and blue sky with the downward spiral of art in storage lockers. In case you missed the news, last week, a conceptual art piece (a banana duct-taped to a wall) sold at auction for 6.2 million dollars. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2024/nov/21/maurizio-cattelans-duct-taped-banana-artwork-fetches-us52m-at-new-york-auction The buyer received a banana, a piece of duct tape, and instructions on how to display the banana (when it starts to rot, replace it with a fresh banana). Oh yeah, the 6.2 million also bought a certificate of authenticity so somebody else couldn’t create a forgery by duct-taping a banana to their wall.

Birds gardening the woodlands, doing real work, all around me. A 6.2 million dollar certificate of authenticity bought with bitcoins (which are consuming increasingly more electricity in pursuit of other symbolic certificates). We have created a simplified, symbolic world that entrances us but steers us towards consuming our real world that has been created and maintained over hundreds of millions of years by “will work for food” life.

After-thought on A Good Story
In my blog entry, A Good Story: I wrote this in reference to the light from the Andromeda Galaxy.
“One girl asked what happens to the light that doesn’t hit the Earth?
‘It keeps going.’”

After I posted that blog, I found myself reflecting back on her question: “what happens to the light that doesn’t hit the Earth?” A better answer would have been “it keeps spreading out.”

Light from a star radiates out in all directions. By the time it doubles the distance it has gone, it has spread out exponentially over an area four times larger which is why light appears dimmer the further its distance. The surface area of a sphere is 4πr2. By the time the light from that galaxy reaches us, 2,500,000 light years away, all the light emanating from the Andromeda Galaxy in all directions has spread out over more than 78 trillion square light years (or, in square miles, 2.8 x 1039 or 2,800,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 square miles. Almost 3 duodecillion square miles.

Thinking about “spreading out” led me to the fact that I am seeing the galaxy through both eyes which means the light photons entering my left pupil are incredibly parallel with the light photons entering my right pupil. Technically, their two paths are not parallel but they are “infinitely close” to parallel. Along the millions of years journey, the photons have spread apart only two inches during their 15,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles streak. That is “infinitely close” to parallel. I dwelt on that example of “infinitely close” to parallel for several days, trying to hold both the idea of spreading out but the spreading being close to parallel.

Later I realized I’m not looking at a point-source star. I’m looking at a galaxy of a trillion stars stretched out across a diameter of 150,000 light years. So though the light is spreading out, in another way, at the same time a 150,000 light year’s width has concentrated down to the smallness of my pupil. I spent several days trying to connect this “concentrating down” with “spreading out.”

Along the way I realized that I was thinking of this galactic light as coming straight from that galaxy to my eyes. But I’m on a moving target. My eyes are part of the Solar System which is orbiting our galactic center at about 137 miles per second which works out to almost 4.3 billion miles per year so that when the light we are seeing left that galaxy, we were 10,800,000,000,000,000 miles (or about 1800 light years) away from this point in space where I am now seeing that light. Earth is like a football player racing to catch a very long pass that was thrown 2.5 million years ago that led the running player by 1800 light years. (Except it isn’t a single pass. It’s a continuous stream of passes that has been continuously received by whatever eyes are looking toward Andromeda.)

The more I think about light passing through space, the more I realize that space is not full of darkness. What it’s not full of is anything for light to reflect off of. Light fills all that darkness. Any place where stars can be seen is filled with the light radiating from those stars. The light just passes on, just keeps going, growing dimmer as it fills ever more space with light. Contrast that with Earth where almost everything we see is reflected light. We don’t look directly at the sun. Instead we look at all the things illuminated by light reflecting off of surfaces and into our eyes. Our world glows in reflected light. Space is black with unreflected light.

Snippet

Sam is our new farm and garden protection dog. He came from the animal shelter to take Benecia’s place. I try to give him at least two walks a day. Actually, he rarely walks; he’s usually galloping or snuffling about within the oak savanna our dirt road passes through. Sam and I have a network of possible routes with three node points where we can go one way or the other. Sam has learned these three forks and often stops, waiting for me to catch up and start along the fork I’ve chosen. Then he gallops ahead along this route.

As I approach the fork, I point with my finger and arm in the direction I’ll be going in case he wants to run ahead – but he hasn’t made the connection. He continues waiting until my walking has turned onto the chosen route. Every time I point vainly ahead, I’m reminded of a Zen saying about the challenge of spiritual transmission: The finger pointing at the Moon is not the Moon.