Oh my! In response to yesterday’s post, dear friend Laura Bruno just reminded me of one line in an email to her a few days ago as also related to neck pain I concentrated on for yesterday’s post: “More and more, I feel myself becoming mute.”

I thought I was referring to the unseemly mess the world appears to be descending into, and yet I was also talking about myself in that statement, and wondered:

Is my embodied self a  caterpillar melting into chrysallis state?

Taurus, by governing the throat, also governs the voice!

So am I transforming into a butterfly?

Well, certainly, it wouldn’t be the first time I’ve undergone a prolonged dying/ death/rebirth process. Indeed, over and over again, at every level and in many dimensions, such has been my fate (my destiny?) as a puny human on planet Earth during this extraordinary time.

Today and yesterday evening, three encounters, with increasing levels of intensity . . .

On this morning’s walk, I came across an oldish woman coming out of my bank to whom I found myself pointing out the crisscrossing chem trails loading the eastern and southeastern sky this morning. I had just taken photos of them. I went on to mention how they poison everything, trees, plants, us . . . She looked startled. I then wondered, out loud: “Who is doing this?”

Perhaps she had never before heard anyone refer in this manner, to the sky? Had she known about chem trails herself? If so, I doubt she has differentiated them from con trails.

But then she said, “And I was just taking photos of trees against a clear blue sky. . . ”

She didn’t say this to dispute me. She said it because she could: much of the sky is still clear blue; the chem trail haze has not yet drifted down.

I’ll be our very real encounter set her mind aflame.

 

A bit earlier, on my usual four mile walk with puppy Scampi, I had come across an old geezer, who was planting two trees with another, much younger man. I asked: “Is the city planting these? Or the owner of this house.”

“The city,” he answered. The city is currently sponsoring? encouraging? an organization called

https://www.canopybloomington.org/

While I applaud the effort (but wonder who really, is funding it; and does it include federal money to the city about to be removed?), I also think we need more land without trees inside the city. Like the totally green grass lawn with no trees across from where we were standing. I said: “Wouldn’t it be great if that turned into a vegetable garden?” He loved the idea, and says his wife wants fewer trees, rather than more: so that she can grow a vegetable garden at home.

I then pointed out how the owner of that house would most likely not allow such a wonderful vision to be realized on his lawn. That all he cares about is renters who pay top dollar. That the values of this country are totally screwed up, that really, “money” is a mere scrim over nature. That we don’t value nature, we don’t even value our own bodies! That Descartes was right! “I think, therefore I am.” Well, this really got him going. He loved it; I could see lightbulbs popping internally.

Then, he said, in a wondering, vulnerable manner: “It’s so wonderful when people like you and I can meet.” And then pointed to his young partner, currently shoveling, silent, smiling: “He too; he thinks the same way.”

As I started to go I pointed him in the direction, one block away, of greenacresvillage.org, our gigantic garden on the one of our three lots that had started out as an enormous green grassy space. “Drive back that way,” I said.

 

Now here’s what’s really weird: I had nearly the identical conversation, though it went deeper and much longer into the philosophical angle, last night at our regular monthly dinner with Brownstone Supper Club (search “Supper Club” on this site, two entries).

The man across the table from me — who has degrees in both engineering and law, and has worked as a lawyer for many years, but, he says, embarrassed, even abashed, “I don’t like many of them,” mentioning their money and status-based value system — kept asking me question after question. This, after hearing that I have a doctorate in philosophy (and no, not from IU, I said, but from Boston University), but had turned rogue back in 1973, having been “fired from an experimental college for being too experimental.”

Well, this got him going. He kept encouraging me, more more! So I spilled all the beans. And midway through marveled out loud at how he was the very first person in my very long life to show such great interest in an extended manner . . .

How the entire history of western philosophy that segued into the history of science, starting with Descartes (unless you want to go back even further: as Wittgenstein said: “It’s hard to go back to the beginning and not go further back”) ignited the still ongoing “mind/body split.” How the entire so-called and much lauded scientific enterprise is merely left brained, not at all connected to right brain intuition; encouraging that separation of body and (merely logical) mind, and yet with body considered both much more “real” (i.e., material) than mind, but! — seen as dumb, mute, a mere object in space, like any other.

On and on; how the rise of AI was utterly inevitable, given how it mimics the functions of the left brain.

We probably talked, intensely, for 30 minutes, with him asking me question after question, leading himself down rabbit hole after rabbit hole. I kept feeling that we were resonating with the same (formerly unconscious) questions within him as have beset me on a conscious level for so many decades.

I didn’t refer to myself, and my own processing right now; just kept it to a philosophical discussion. But he was both floored and thrilled. I wonder how long it’s been since he’s had an authentic connection with a stranger that he just met, who descended, with him, into an much larger comprehension of what we are all going through as this all-too-human world appears to descend into madness.

BTW: I will be the speaker at our Supper Club’s next, December, meeting. More on that tomorrow.