Of Men and the Wind

Robert Lee Wooley

Description

Naturalists notice things. Scientists attempt to explain the natural world. Religions attempt to give meaning to human life. Writing as first-person narrative history, a naturalist explores, noticing things and the inner struggle of growing up and living in a Christian culture while science continued to bring new discoveries and knowledge into human grasp. This work is about the joy of a free mind noticing things and breaking free of one of humanity’s primal afflictions: the idée fixe. It is the account of the evolution of the mind of naturalist.

Sujets

• Naturalists
• Men
• Natural history
• Wind
• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Xlibris US
• Date de parution: 31 janvier 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781669865209
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 5 Mo

Extrait

OF MEN AND THE WIND
 
 
A Story of Dharma
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Robert Lee Wooley
 
Copyright © 2023 by Robert Lee Wooley.
 
ISBN:
Softcover
978-1-6698-6521-6

eBook
978-1-6698-6520-9
 
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.
 
Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.
 
 
 
 
 
Rev. date: 01/31/2023
 
 
 
 
Xlibris
844-714-8691
www.Xlibris.com
850792
CONTENTS
Prolegomenon
 
Chapter 1       A Brief Meander in Paradise
Chapter 2       The Ancient Mountains
Chapter 3       Return to the West
Chapter 4       Monte Vesuvio and The Atlantic Ridge
Chapter 5       The Gallatin River
Chapter 6       Chaos
Chapter 7       Mt. Mazama and the Pumice Mantled Basin
Chapter 8       Mount Tacoma
Chapter 9       Pilgrimage to Yosemite
Chapter 10     The Grand Canyon
Chapter 11     The Incarnational Ecologist
Chapter 12     Rare Stuff
Chapter 13     True Stories
Chapter 14     Pine Trees
Chapter 15     Fire
Chapter 16     Fresnel Flashers
Chapter 17     An Ineluctable Discussion With the Void
Chapter 18     Presenium
Chapter 19     Of The Wind
 
Glossary
Epilogue
Literature Cited
DEDICATION
This book is dedicated to my birth mother Irene who gave me life and my parents Claire and Louise who gave me a life.

PROLEGOMENON
The primal foe of man is ignorance.
Here find tales of one who went head to toe
against this foe. And won a few skirmishes
S everal thousand years ago the buddhists postulated three marks of existence. The first is anicca or the impermanence of things. Everything changes. The Romans coined a term evolutio to describe the process of changing Roman civilians into soldiers of the roman legions. It is still used by modern militaries, including the American, to cover changing a civilian into a soldier, sailor, airman, or marine. In more recent times the term was somewhat erroneously applied to the simple observed fact that life forms change over time. Evolution became the coverall word to signify decent of organisms, sometimes with modification, from their ancestral stock.
After Charles Darwin proposed the Theory of Natural Selection to explain the observed changes in the natural world of life; Evolution became a charged word. Natural selection challenged the ancient Mesopotamian, Ugarit, and Hebrew beliefs as to a recent creation and fixation of species by a divine instigator. The Abrahamic religions espoused by some fifty percent of the global population of hominids on Earth find a dissonance between arisal from ancient organisms by strange stochastic processes and the notion of creation by an extranatural being of immense yet unfathomable powers.
Evolution can be applied to human culture and even the individual human mind. Some humans are aware they are undergoing evolution in their minds and find it a journey of discovery and elation. Others become terrified and seek to close doors with challenging new pathways behind. This book explores, among other things, the mind of the author who finds the journey an elation despite frequent trials and desire for change to slow down.
The book is based on the premise that humans now so dominate the planet that understanding the working of the human mind may determine whether we evolve into a cosmic intelligence such as the kind we search for in SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) or manage to extinguish the fragile flame that has developed in our frontal cortex over the last several hundred thousand revolutions of the earth about a middling star.
I am in most respects an ordinary American like you might see in a U.S. Post Office on any Wednesday. I was given for adoption at age 6 months to a wonderful, childless, mid-life couple, one a bootstrapped science and engineering genius, the other a stay at home mom, who loved birds, wildflowers, and romance. My family lived in northern New Jersey at the boundary of the cultural center of the world at the time, the New York Metropolis and the still rural New Jersey highlands. Here I grew up where there were still some residual wild lands and nature abounded. I learned mainstream Christianity as my religion as that was what existed albeit in competing versions in the community I was emersed in. I learned science from my father. Science was ascending in the culture and there were conflicts between ancient scriptures, religious beliefs, and new revelations from seminal thinkers about the nature of the universe. At least for those who thought about them.
Growing up in the immediate aftermath of World War II gave me a glimpse of what man could do when advanced civilizations followed megalomaniacs into abject violence against their own species. I heard from teachers and peaceful neighbors of horrors they experienced on the battlefields of Europe and pacific atolls. One said, “I was so thirsty that I filled my canteen from the pond and took a long drink. While wiping my mouth on my sleeve I saw the dark phlegm from the dead German soldier oozing into the pond a few yards away. But I was so crazed and thirsty I drank anyway.” Another told of putting oil soaked Japanese sailors “out of their misery” with M1 Garands when they turned down his U.S. destroyer’s offer of surrender. These images told by war veterans were bothersome for many years. Yet the world seemed full of hope and promise, peace, and a certainty that American life would overcome all evils, even the atheist communist threat that elementary grade students hid under historic school desks in survival drills against attacks of atomal fire from the sky.
I started off as a rather puny, physical weakling, more socially inept than not, a high level daydreamer, but always finding in myself a friend who I liked to be with, even when things got rough. That friend is named Uther in this book, a metaphor for my conscious and in different parts of this book there is a dialogue between myself and Uther as if we were separate persons. Eventually having survived grades k-12 in Eastern Society, not noted for its humility, I tried something considered by my culture as complete heresy. I migrated to the west and became, like the tumbleweed, a wanderer over those enchanting lands.
This book had its conception in late October 1999. I resided at the time in the Great Basin Desert of Oregon, North America. In that October the first strong winds of Autumn had broken several tumbleweeds from the place they made as a home, a place where they may have felt secure. The wind had other notions for them and they tumbled across an open field. Some came to cluttered piles on the barb wire fences above one of my favorite haunts on Silver Creek, a little known wash in the cold sagebrush desert. I often found myself singing Tumbling Tumbleweeds , the noted song of Bob Nolan composed in the 1930’s. I had played the version by Gene Autry over and over when I was very young. It seemed a synopsis of my life.
The tumbleweed or Russian thistle Salsola kali, is one of the ubiquitous sights of the American West. Like me it came from another place. An immigrant from central Asia it arrived in the 1800’s along with another ecological agent, the Caucasian white man who also has a very short pedigree as a native of North America.
One day I was watching the weeds and felt the wind on my face while some Geyer willow leaves blew about and alit on the shallow water behind a beaver dam. Suddenly a strange raucous noise emanated from behind the willows. Some natorial creatures were in fright. Disturbed from dabbling the creek bottom, five mergansers pausing on their Autumnal migration, had noted my presence and became alarmed, scurrying upstream in great haste. I was pleased with their interruption of my silent musings and wished they would have stayed a while. I had no intent against them and would have greatly enjoyed a visit, but mergansers are often mistaken for more desirable game ducks and must, as a matter of survival, be wary of Caucasians sitting under willows.
I turned again to the tumbleweeds, several of which had been taken by a strong updraft over the barb wire fence. They sailed into long flight over the sagebrush on the hard basalt flows above Silver Creek. I thought perhaps some of their tiny seed will try an opening in the sage to see if next year they can find a home. But even if they do I suspected the wind would find them and next autumn they shall be moved willing or not. I realized I had found a metaphor for my life.
While I was thinking about this there came into my mind the great saying attributed by the evangelist to Jesus.
“The wind bloweth where it listeth and thou heareth the sound therof but cans’t tell whence it cometh, and wither it goeth: so is everyone that is born of the Spirit.”
John 3:8
For a number of years, I held the scriptures of the Holy Bible to be in some mysterious way the word of God. I was afterall taught that firm truth not only by the church preacher but by my grandmother. These were in those days powerful authorities. I believed the stories were literally true and never in conflict with nature. I believed in the God of Genesis as th