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.

Echo Lake Pequannock Watershed

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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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Wawayanda walk Fall equinox

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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.

Blairstown

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Wildcat Ridge WMA

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