Sunday, September 27, 2015

telepathy?

Did it happen or did it not?
Was it spoken or was it thought?
Is it possible to convey without words
What we are thinking but do not say?

Science fiction becomes today’s published study
Telepathy experiment over the internet
Perhaps it’s possible to do mind reading
Modern times ultimate loss of privacy.

Any pet owner will likely tell you
Their animal understands what they are thinking and feeling
Though how the animals know is in dispute
Imagine communication crossing over to another kind

Standing still or sitting quietly listening
As if a babbling brook speaks distinct messages
As if all the sounds of nature sing a song to us
Endlessly repeating beginning and ending

Feel the world in motion all around us.
Science brings us fantastic awareness
Beyond our sense of this moment in this place
Even the mountains are moving.

Shared individual shards of information
Disseminate to everyone who is connected
Traveling in waves of bits and bytes
Reflecting along the shore of our cultural pond.

The expanding universe expands our consciousness
The music of the spheres now replaced as an ancient construct
The material world so full of our inventions built from ideas
Such an amazing achievement of intelligence.

Saturday, September 26, 2015

Wednesday, September 23, 2015

climbing old mountains

Being an old man climbing old mountains with my companion
I am a speck of dust walking up and down the bedrock remains
Worn down from great heights over hundreds of millions of years
Because everything is temporary.

I can count millions of minutes if not years in my life
Count tens of thousands of days
Measuring longevity, meaning nothing
Like waves speaking white noise upon the shore.

The measure of a person is not a number
Found on old gravestones listing exactly how many days, months and years
Eroded inscriptions one hundred years later blurred contours
Whispering to the wind soughing in the pines.

From the escarpment ridge looking out into the distance
The long view to the horizon presents a panorama larger than life
So beautiful to behold under a cloudless sky
So wonderful to partake.

Minnewaska Beacon Hill

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Tuesday, September 22, 2015

Wawayanda walk Fall equinox

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Monday, September 21, 2015

just yesterday

When I was a boy I would ask my mother
To tell me stories of the olden days
And listen rapt to hear about her childhood
And her adult life before I was born.

She was born at the end of the Great War
When the world was already whirling in modern times.
My grandmother was born in the previous century
Ancient history in the mists of time I thought then.

Now I think our measure of time compares to personal existence
Going back some number of times more than your own duration
And as I get older the events of the past two centuries seem closer
Like the recent past just once or twice removed from my life.

The industrial revolution accelerated the long sweep of time by any measure
Inventions of machines to transport us transforming the landscape
Inventions of weapons to destroy us bringing terror like a nightmare
Inventions of technology creating a future out of science fiction.

I see now what has happened over three of my lifetimes
Just yesterday canals were dug for barges connecting rivers
Replaced by railroad lines interlaced in a better network
Outmoded a few decades later by the interstate highway system.

Today I can telecommute on the information super highway
And as I bicycle along re-purposed canal paths and former railroad beds
I imagine a future when the multiple lane highways are overgrown
Though I do not know what will replace all that tarmac and those vehicles.

That would be the fourth lifetime for the youth of today to live out
Finding alternatives to using the atmosphere and oceans and earth as a dump
Learning how to close the cycle so that everything is a resource to re-use
Creating a healthy ecosystem where all life can thrive.

The alternative continuation of the present trajectory
Brings about the sixth mass extinction
Our amazing success creating the seeds of our destruction
Unable to adapt to the new conditions we have caused.

Saturday, September 19, 2015

Blairstown

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Friday, September 18, 2015

Wildcat Ridge WMA

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