Thoughts & Philosophy

  No philosophical system will ever be close to the truth as long as it is anthropocentric. This means that we can have no valid philosophy until we are willing to stop putting the myth of human superiority and importance at the center of all logic, ethics, aesthetics, epistemology and metaphysics. “ When it occurs to a man that nature does not regard him as important, and that she feels she would not maim the universe by disposing of him, he at first wishes to throw bricks at the temple, and he hates deeply the fact that there are no bricks and no temples. ” (i) From Rousseau to Nietzsche, Voltaire to Santayana, from Plato to Nussbaum the myth of human superiority and importance has been at the core of philosophy. Philosophy comes from the Greek φιλοσοφία, philosophia, which means 'love of wisdom'. Most simply defined it is the study of questions about reason, existence, knowledge, values, mind and language. In modern times we also find a philosophy of j...

          My Father had a saying "war is the last argument of statesmen," and the thing that always angered him, as it does me and many others, is that old white men (still the majority in gov't), Presidents and members of Congress, are all too willing to go to war allowing young people to die for their political gain. When I first went into the Army I was not old enough to drink or vote and barely old enought to drive, but I was old enough to die. You might have seen my post about Capitol Police Officer Eugene Goodman, who used himself as bait to lead the mob away from the Senate chambers giving time for the Senators to escape to safety. I posted a set of four pictures of Officer Goodman. Every time that post passes before me, my eyes are drawn to the bottom two pictures (posted here). Look at that face. That could be my grandson who starts college next year. This young man needed to be home breaking young girls' hearts, not half way around the wor...

Here I sit, drinking my morning coffee, looking out the window at a cold, wet, dreary last day of 2020. To anthropromorphize the situation, 2020 is making no effort to make us feel sorry for its passing by giving us a beautiful day. (Even though I know full well that somewhere on this marvelous planet there is the most magnificent day.) I know that we need days like this, but that doesn't change the fact that such dreary days do nothing to help reduce the depression and anxiety manifest by an entire nation. It's hard enough to deal with the ills of this nation on a beautiful day. Thankfully we all know that nature does not have human characteristics, so we can't attribute such a day to nature punishing or getting even with us. I've never been one to pay a lot of attention to New Years Eve. In my 74 years I can probably count the number of parties, where I stayed up until after midnight, on one hand. Under any other circumstances I'd be quick to note...

           Today is the first day of winter. It really should be a day for great celebration. This is called the shortest day of the year, but in reality it will just have the least daylight of any day of the year. That means that tomorrow we will be on our way toward spring, renewed life, and longer days. As I walked through our Black Fox Hollow with Max and Milo I thought about how so many people see this time of year as ugly. I don't see it, but I'm the only one looking through my eyes. The Osage Orange doesn't grow its fruit until after most other trees have lost their leaves. Large fruit now lay on the ground awaiting the opportunity to create a new life. My parents moved to what we called "snow country" when I was still in elementary school. The area of northwestern Pennsylvania, nestled up against the Allegheny Mountains, received an average of 110 inches of snow by January 1. Towns would literally truck snow out of the towns and du...

Two Cherokee chiefs, Fly Smith and Whitepath, died in Hopkinsville, Kentucky and are buried in what a Cherokee guide told me was a family cemetery after the town refused to permit them to be buried in the town cemetery. In a 2017 story by Stacy Boston published in Cherokee Phoenix (6/24/2017) Alice Murphree, the Kentucky Chapter President of the Trail of Tears Assoc., was quoted, “ After 1834 a man by the name of Mr. Hileman took out a land patent and brought his family here. Sometime in the winter of 1837-38 he had two small preschool-aged children who passed away and he buried them, as family oral history says,” she said. “Then when the Cherokee came through…they had made arrangements for them to camp on this site. As they were stopped here due to the ice flows on the Mississippi River, naturally some of them passed away. So story says that Mr. Hileman had them buried out in the field by his little boys. So that was the basis for getting this site certified as a Nati...

  It is hard to express how much it distresses me to see the way people treat the nature around them. Within the white European dominated world, I blame religion. The Judeo-Christian "fill the world and subdue it" is not a good attitude toward the source of all life. The Jewish and Christian holy books are filled with examples of the attitude that nature is other; i.e. we are not a part of nature; and wilderness is bad. This is the reason that I blame religion at least for the unacceptable behavior in places dominated or significantly influenced by Judaism and Christianity. For most of the religions in Asia and pre-invasion North America (Native American), the wilderness is where you went for enlightenment. It would seem to me that you can not have the attitude that nature is somehow contradictory to your religion; that being in the wilderness is bad and that you have some sort of divine command to fill the world and subdue nature; and be a good citizen of planet Earth and ...

        I saw this posted on FaceBook. I often copy pictures, quotes, etc., that strike me or I may use later. Normally I have something that tells me the source. I evidently failed to note my source in this case. If I had to guess, I would guess the FB group "Human Overpopulation and the Environment." Nevertheless, it kept catching my attention whenever I was looking through my notes. Every time I would read " had the melancholy air of zoo animals, as if they yearned for the dense forests that had once existed there before the tide of concrete swept in" I found myself saying "I know that feeling" . Have you ever looked at a parking lot, shopping mall, a hotel, golf course, four-lane high way, or even someone's finely manicured yard and wondered what it had replaced. What trees, plants, wildlife was torn up, paved over or pushed out? Is this wave of concrete more important? Is it providing oxygen or food? And when you answer the que...

          This quote appeared as a post on the Jungian Facebook page of which I'm a member. As I looked at it, I soon found myself pondering its validity. One of the other members, Sam Eliasen, wrote a comment which I thought was particularly good. Sam wrote, " We have to eat so taking life is our daily fare. Knowing this our intelligent ancestors were grateful to animals and plants. Modern commerce uber alles though runs over any ancient niceties and creates a purely utilitarian relationship to life. Gratitude is basic to wisdom ." (i) While I don't disagree with Mr. Eliasen, the first line is not totally accurate. We are omnivores, like bears , raccoons, dogs and fox, so we don't need to kill to eat. I'm a vegetarian by choice. Nevertheless, he is absolutely right about our intelligent ancestors. Even some modern western hunters thank the animal for sustaining the hunter's family with its life. Some I know learned it from their fathe...

  "If we listen to the land, we will know what to do." (i) Here, I believe, listening is a metaphor for communicating with and paying attention to nature. I can support this through observation. Watch an animal; any animal; and you will notice them occasionally stop and hold very still. It is as though they are intently listening and concentrating. Actually they are. Having not declared themselves superior to Ishki Yakni; Mother Earth, nature; they have not forsaken the wonderful life-saving, life-sustaining ability to communicate with and receive guidance from Ishki Yakni. As a result they stand very still and Ishki Yakni warns them of danger, directs their course to food and shelter, tells them when and where to find a mate or prepare for winter and tells them when to take shelter from a storm. Humans just stand there looking clueless because some equally clueless person around 6,000 years ago decided that having the ability to abstract makes us better than the creator -...

  I'm certain that there are those who think I'm too hard on humans. I would disagree. As a species, we're obviously not listening to those of us who are trying desperately to get people to pay attention to nature and what it has to teach us about survival and a happy, comfortable life. Case in point. Milo, Max and I were walking in Black Fox Hollow this morning. It was a beautiful fall morning and was almost perfect until someone started up their leaf blower. Yesterday it was chain saws and leaf blowers. (The noise just never stops when you're near a town.) I couldn't help but think . . . dang, we're no ways near as smart as we think. That person is removing the leaves (nutrients and protection) from their yard so that they can work for 3.31 hours (at an average US wage rate) to buy "fall lawn food" for the same area from which they had removed nature's free fall lawn food. Is that smart? I almost forgot, they also had to work for 19.86 hour...