The Awe of Wonder

How things have changed.

When I was a teenager to make a telephone call, you would pick up the phone and in a second or two an operator would say, “number please.” You’d give the number usually three or four digits, and sometimes say, “ring two” if it were a party line.

Now, sixty years after my early teens, I’m sitting in a comfortable chair in my home in the Hudson Valley of New York State. My smart cell phone rings. It indicates a face-time call from my son who is traveling on business to Japan.

He’s walking on a street in Tokyo, heading for a train station to go to Kyoto. I see him walking and talk to him with no delay in transmission. What marvels humankind has accomplished? What wonderful science the mind has created in a short sixty years. What wonderment will there be in another sixty years? I could only imagine what it will be like if I had the creative minds of writers like Heinlein and Asimov.

When I read them as a teenager is was science fiction. Little did I realize, that in my lifetime, I would see most of what they envisioned and then some.

Some things in daily life still bring me to the cusp of wonder. Fireflies and their flashing beacons on a summer night. As a pilot, I understand the Bernoulli principle, but I’m still amazed at how a jumbo airliner gets into the air. The Hubble telescope, peering into seeming nothingness and images come back that become astounding photos of a universe so vast we cannot fathom it without awe and an atavistic gasp.

If we lose our sense of wonder, we lose our creativity and without creativity we are pliable automatons willing to be ruled by fear, prejudice and a dispassionate view of the future. It seems to me we are closer to that than most of us would like.

Trump is not the first!

Donald Trump is selectively prohibiting reportedly unfriendly press from covering his campaign. It’s not new.

Mistrust between the press and authority has been around for a long time.

General William Tecumseh Sherman once said:

“I hate newspapermen. They come into camp and pick up their camp rumors and print them as facts. I regard them as spies, which in truth, they are. If I killed them all there would be news from Hell before breakfast”.

The Federalists, led by Alexander Hamilton controlled their own newspaper. It was called the Gazette of the United States.

Thomas Jefferson, who was an anti-federalist, wanted a newspaper to express his views. Not only that, Jefferson knew whom he wanted for an editor. It was a guy named Philip Freneau, a writer known as the “poet of the revolution.”

There was one problem. Freneau did not want the job.

Jefferson persisted and when he offered Freneau a no-show government job, plus access to all foreign intelligence reports and a lucrative contract to print government documents, Freneau agreed to run Jefferson’s newspaper.

George Washington was president at the time and Jefferson was Secretary of State and through his newspaper he criticized and editorially jabbed at Washington.

Old George would bitterly complain to his cabinet about that “rascal Freneau.” But Jefferson insisted he had no recollection of being told that his clerk for foreign languages ran a newspaper in his spare time.

When Jefferson became President, he took control. He spoke only to his own editors. Opponents and other reporters knew only what they read in the Jefferson controlled newspaper.

It did not matter that Jefferson was the author of our Bill of Rights. Freedom of the Press seemed to be a child forgotten by a busy President.

Something Profound

I read something the other day that struck me as profound. If you’d like to know its source, send me an email and I’ll respond. Otherwise just enjoy its truth.

Here it is.

“Minds were designed for carrying out the orders of the heart. The mind answers the ‘how,’ not the ‘what.’ The ‘what’ is a deeper matter.

The greatest war in life within each individual is between the intellect and the heart –where the heart is saying, “this is so” and the intellect is saying, “I don’t understand, therefore I don’t believe.”

When you are with another human being are you really communicating with the mind? Or are you speaking to a soul and the minds are scurrying around trying to put it all into order and vocabulary?

When your mind asks “why?” you realize how easily it is satisfied with a superficial answer. When your heart asks “why?” it wants nothing but the truth of God.”

Wanderings of Eclectic Thought

Great souls come into lifetimes and lives with visions and inspirations for humanities greatness. People like Jefferson, Gandhi, and Einstein saw possibilities that most of would not in the course of their beliefs and actions. Great souls attract others of like mind and like spirit, but the followers don’t often see the possibilities until the noble one's become the evidence of their power through extraordinary creativity, selfless service to others, or the ultimate sacrifice.

Emerson wrote about it eloquently in his essay, The Uses of Great Men. I think if Emerson were alive today he'd retitle his essay the uses of great men and women. Great souls take on either gender. In my life experience, I've known personally two avatars of noble service who inhabited a female body. Mother Teresa, and Wangari Maathai of the Kenyan Greenbelt Movement. I would, however, add to the list many other women whose spirit is just beginning to blossom with the feminine energy of the Aquarian Age.

So where does leave the masculine energy that’s predominated for the last few eons? Right where it is, but with a reluctant appreciation of the feminine component and its transcendence into the realms of business, politics, and the arts.

Male assertiveness and female nurturing is a natural cosmic balance. Humankind needs balance. It is the yin-yang of consciousness, without it, one-sided power would have destroyed the world long before now.

It is no wonder that the women of the Iroquois Confederacy were the only tribal members to appoint a chief, the only ones who could depose a chief and the only ones who could declare war.

Today, we are on the cusp of a paradigm shift to the feminine, and it’s fascinating.