Day 13

I've been thinking.

On the First Day, God gave light to Heaven and Earth....On the Second Day, he watered, the Third Day is apparently debatable whether he forged Adam or made grass, fruit trees and land....

Much of the world still holds uncontestable these records of Genesis. Far be it for me to state otherwise, but today, once again in awe of "my mountain," I started thinking about how many discoveries and inventions have affected our perception of life in the last century: human genome mapping, carbon dating, computers and the notion of virtual reality, accessability to global information. Yet, I'm not sure the world will be, in the future, any better for this progress. It is as if our discoveries, while taking us farther into space and deeper into our own biology, have left us less conscious of the planet.

From many vantage points Big Sur looks just as it might have a hundred years ago. Redwood forest, streams, ungraffitied rock and roiling sea. Your eye travels upward to the heavens; lo and behold, the sky is streaked by contrails off jet planes.

On the Fourth Day, God made the sun, the moon and the stars, followed by the creation of fish, fowl and whales the next day. Day Six he made beasts, cattle, every creeping thing including men and women......

Tomorrow I will be driving back to Los Angeles for a few days to be with my family for Thanksgiving. I will be taxing the world's natural resources about one tank full (but it beats walking.) I will probably pollute myself with the chemicals of fast food, and I will regret it. But I will be thinking about a video I saw today called the Eagle and the Condor, produced by the non-profit organization called Pachamama Alliance. The music under this documentary took me immediately back to Social Studies, when we had an "audio-visual" and the classroom lights dimmed. We'd lay our heads on folded arms and fall asleep. IT'S TIME TO WAKE UP. The messages in this film are riveting. Watch it before Thanksgiving. http://www.pachamama.org/video/index.htm


On the Seventh Day, God rested.... (You've got to wonder what God would do...on the Thirteenth Day.)