My writings - and those of others.
Learnings
It’s been a busy week. A week ago, the Emergencies Act came into force in Canada to much censure for overreach by some, and a sense of relief by others. I tended to be in the latter group, and felt justified in its results and withdrawal as soon as an emergency in the City of Ottawa was resolved. Yes, - the Provincial Government might have stepped in and solved it. But it reminded me of a board meeting some years ago when a member commented, “I could have done it, just as well or better'‘. and an astute chair replied, “That may be - but you didn’t”.
What the whole thing did do was bring to light how many of our Canadian citizens are ignorant of our country’s history and governance. We don’t have a First Amendment to guarantee their rights. Our constitution does not guarantee life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Freedom - FREE-DOM chanted loudly and repeatedly - does not mean that others don’t have rights too - for clean air, theability to move in their neighbourhood without harrassment and feedom to adhere to follow the law onwearing masks. Fox News is not a Canadian network that the majority of our citizens use to get their information. I’d also love to know - looking at the protestors and guessing their age - whether they are aware that they were inoculated or vaccinated as babies and toddlers - Did they ever think to ask about Diphtheria, Tetanus. Pertussis. Poliomyelitis, Mumps, Measles. Rubella, Chicken Pox or Hepatitis B. I think I know the answer, but it would be interesting to know if they do.
It was easy to ignore the growing tensions in the Ukraine and be preoccupied with events at home - but no more. Last week the seminar on Non-Violent Communication came back to mind. What both these events have in common are Faux Feelings - interpretations of reality masquerading as feelings. Among the shared interpretations of some truckers and a Russian president are words like = betrayed, ignored, invisible, neglected, put upon and unappreciated. How they will play out in the larger world conflict we are about to see.
Deep Time and Deep Work
“Deep” is in and these two terms will yield results when you Google them or check them out in Wikipedia as I just did.
Google says this:
Deep time" refers to the time scale of geologic events, which is vastly, almost unimaginably greater than the time scale of human lives and human plans. It is one of geology's great gifts to the world's set of important ideas.
Here is what Wikipedia has to say:
“Deep time is a term introduced and applied by John McPhee to the concept of geologic time in his Basin and Range (1981), parts of which originally appeared in the New Yorker magazine.The philosophical concept of geological time was developed in the 18th century by Scottish geologist James Hutton (1726–1797); his "system of the habitable Earth" was a deistic mechanism keeping the world eternally suitable for humans. The modern concept shows huge changes over the age of the Earth which has been determined to be, after a long and complex history of developments, around 4.55 billion years.
The DeepTime Network tries to come from a broad perspective, though it doesn’t have an emphasis on geology and might benefit from more references to it. I created a map of the main components of the perspective just to provide a big picture view.
When you Google Cal Newport, you go straight to the book order site loved and despised by all. Deep Work is the title of a book by Cal Newport. Wikipedia tells us this about him.
“Newport coined the term "deep work," in his book Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World (2016) which refers to studying for focused chunks of time without distractions such as email and social media. He challenges the belief that participation in social media is important for career capital. In 2017, he began advocating for "digital minimalism. In 2021, he began referring to the role email and chat play in what he calls "the hyperactive hive mind".
I’ve read the book and it has some useful advice for a curious and distractable person like me. I’m also currently participating in a DTN course that attempts to prepare leaders in to use the new cosmology.
Much of its framework depends on the writing and teaching of Thomas Berry, a Passionist priest and a cultural historian who pondered the impact of culture and religion on our attitude toward the environment. He called as early as 1978 for a New Story that incorporated the learnings of science and religion. The purpose was to create a new spiritual framework for all institutional forms that included the entire universe story into religious and cultural history – especially those of the West. Later he framed this as a journey, a sequence of non-reversible events. To follow through would have a profound impact on education, government, law and world religions themselves. The assigment went far beyond simply learning about other faiths through social gatherings, study groups or visits to places of worship, but getting down to the business of saving our common planet together.
Berry’s impact on his graduate students was immense and his teachings have found an impressive home at Yale in the Yale Forum for Religion and Ecology. There are solid resources there which come for free to all who are interested. One of the aspects I admire is their thoroughness. There is a continuing relationship with world religions. In contrast the DTN is going more in the direction of creating a new one – for the spiritual but not religious. Some of the participants are RC nuns, who have every reason to distrust their hierarchy. Much of the energy of some has a stamp of Berry’s teaching. He was willing to spend lots of time teaching them and they were good students. But other participants may be enthusiasts of their own individual spiritualities that used to be called New Age – and which Berry warned against.
I find it really interesting to spend time in worlds unlike those of my former not-for profit one or my institutional church one. At times I have to draw back a bit from endless new processes and their acronyms so much loved in America. Any workshop attender has been there. The temptation is to go down rabbit-holes of suggestions to explore that sometimes are a waste of time – though at least I would not say, dangerous. I’m starting to become impatient as to how many websites suggested by participants are focusing mainly on sales and donations even with a url of .org. My own .url is a leftover from the days I actually did have a business.
There is sometimes a tendency to think in such courses that a quotation substitutes for a entire body of learning. Understanding and absorbing any worthwhile body of work must be gained through serious study. Such a body of work is not like a short poem – a very good one does have the capability of creating a universe of its own. Some sessions on life long learning are coming up. I have some good track record in that area - long life a t least - of longer duration than the presenting academics. We’ll see how they relate to deep time and deep work.
Metaphor and Meaning
The CBC had a recent Ideas podcast had a recent rerun of a one entitled The Greenest Metaphor. I’ve taken to listening to programs like these at 10:00 pm to wind down from too much looking at screens. All the programs are thought provoking and could actually work against getting to sleep, but I was able to come back to this one in the daytime.
Unless our religious or cultural background is fundamentalist, the place where we probably first encounter and start to understand how metaphors work is in scripture. The Psalms particularly are full of other names for the divine - fortress, rock, shepherd. The story of the Prodigal Son is rich in metaphor and as theologian Sallie McFague notes, metaphors and parables carry much more than a one-to-one connection between two words and their meanings and creates within us an experience that is much broader and rich. Since climate change - now climate emergency - is such a large subject, we are reduced to try and deal with it in a more comprehensive way that single words or concepts can convey.
The Ideas program suggested several metaphors - a race, a sickness, a puzzle, a war - and one more. I don’t recall all the comments on these, but I’ll reflect on my own response..
When I think of a race, I think of a challenge and a contest. The Tortoise and the Hare is a familiar fable. There is a sense of fun and games in a race - and of course, winning. In the case of this fable fable we run into the difficulty that we are already facing. Devastation is coming quickly, so patience is hardly the right response this time. It’s not a matter of fun and games either, but disasters that are destroying us and if we want to stay as the winners - as we have been up to now - it is at the cost of the earth losing. So this one isn’t working so well.
A puzzle is a possibility until we think that some puzzles are so challenging that we tend to give up - or never start. I never try Sudoku like a clever sister-in-law, who does them daily. if it is not the kind of puzzle I like - such as Wordle - now the new family craze - or those regular word puzzles in the New York Times. It doesn’t matter if I can’t solve those on a daily basis - but dealing with climate change does matter. Giving up or not starting - or even saying that I don’t like that kind of puzzle isn’t going to help. There is a lot of not liking the climate change puzzle going around.
We have learned through Covid that sickness is not as straight-forward as we had hoped. Some deny that a sickness even exists and persecute those who believe it. Caring is a good response - but its problem is that we can care passionately without ever doing anything. Taking an aspirin and calling in the morning if it doesn’t work, might not be bad advice for a minor infection, but we now know this is neither minor or simple. This one isn’t going away in a day or two. Pandemic arguments are mirrored in climate change ones. If we do one thing, we risk another. If we stop using fossil fuels, we harm the economy. So there are shortfalls in this one too.
War is a metaphor that is especially popular in North America - the War on Drugs, the War on Terror, the War to end all Wars. It suggests aggressive action and it also suggests that we are protecting ourselves against an enemy that is evil and must be conquered. But doesn’t that reverse the roles? Nature isn’t our enemy. Over the past two hundred years of industrial activity, we are.
And that’s the conundrum - and the urgency of the last of the words in the Green Metaphor that the Ideas program suggested. It was love. For thousands of years people had positive metaphors for the natural world. Matthew Fox has a lovely series right now talking about Father Sun and Mother Earth - ways of understanding that countless indigenous communities had, until western culture decided that the Earth was something to be exploited. We haven’t loved it enough. Love involves some of the metaphors I have looked at already. Earth isthe great teacher. Its own journey has encouraged us to the challenge of the race, as we look at our own challenges. Its complexity has inspired us to puzzle over its enormous diversity. Its caring for us by providing light, food and air and so much else invites reciprocity.
Recent floods and fire suggests to some that earth is now wreaking revenge on us. But that points out the fallacy we fell into many times in human history and we are having to learn anew. We are not the centre of the universe - we are a species of it - one of its more recent creations. We were the last one to turn up - after stars, galaxies, planets, insects, fish, plants and animals. Watch a newborn calf or foal and we realize that we are also the most fragile of creations and are dependent on others to survive. We need to return that understanding to the earth itself - by loving it enough to start to take care of it.
4,000 Weeks
I’ve just finished a book with that title by Oliver Burkeman - the sub-title is Time Management for Mortals. Four Thousand weeks describes the amount of time someone has if he/she lives to be 80. My own life is now 4,260 weeks. That seems like quite a lot until it is compared to a universe of 13.8 billion x 52. As a cosmic comparison, it puts me in my place.
At the beginning of 2021 I promised myself that I would post something twice a week during the year. I fell off just before Christmas with some other activities taking precedence - and then felt guilty. Why? It’s not as though this site has many readers. It’s a perfect example of how we set goals for ourselves and then beat ourselves up for what we don’t do in comparison with what we do accomplish.
I received a Christmas gift that is an excellent choice for someone in in the 4,000 week plus category. It invites one to reflect on one’s own life by writing an answer to a question that is sent once a week. At the end of the year, it is compiled in a book. My father wrote a good family history exploring the ancestors so that let me off the hook. but this is a good assignment.
Burkeman has many ideas and the book is worth a read for anyone like me who has read too many books on time management. Perhaps the most important one is that we are time - time is spent not managed - especially in terms of working too hard toward some future that is unknowable. Another idea I liked - perhaps a better one for a retiree than someone actively working to earn a living - is to abandon a “to-do” list - which I have kept religiously using the Bullet Journal format - for a “done” list. It’s more honest and allows one to see whether time is being spent on things that really matter.
I’ll end 2021 - pandemic ridden as it is with cancelled travel plans - with an intention to write the blog once a week - and the memoir above for the other weekly assignment. In both cases the real gift is being here on earth to do them.
Happy New Year
