The Wonder, the Wonder
“….And all of these things are wonderful and great.”
(slight misquote of a line from the WB Yeats Poem, “Fergus and the Druid”)
There has to be wonder. An open-minded innocent amazement. The Alkozirans know there is a bio-chemical in most humans that suppresses our sense of wonder and amazement. We couldn’t function without it. We’d be stoned all the time. We’d sit around saying “Wow!” and giggling. Nothing would get done.
But to be sane, to fend off gullimentalism, we have to relax and open our mind daily to simple wonder. The chemical can be suppressed…just enough. Not too much. Wonder opens your mind to the best things. Hate and fear obsess on the worst things and block out what you are meant to learn. That’s the road to gullimentalism. That’s what the pages in the Category labeled “The Wonder, the Wonder” are about.
For Example:
Everything on earth was made in a star. All of it. Everything. Both animate and inanimate. The heavier elements, like gold and platinum don’t come from normal “calm” stars, they are blown out into the universe when neutron stars spiral into one another. That’s a place the gold can come from.
Plant leaves are made from molecules of carbon-dioxide and water in the photosynthesis process powered by photons from our star. Little pheromone inspired leaf cutter ants work together by the thousands to cut some of those leaves into little pieces and carry them back to their nest. Back in the nest a fungus grows on the leaves, using the molecules and stored energy of the plant to make itself into a fungus. The ants eat the fungus, utilizing the stored solar energy and molecules of the fungus to make ant molecules and energy to power all that ceaseless work they do.
Other animals eat the ants, and other animals eat them. The energy from those solar photons that first smashed into the chlorophyll molecules is passed through the chain of life. But because of the unrelenting aspect of energy conversion humans have named the second law of thermodynamics, the energy flows steadily “downhill” and gets less concentrated, and therefore less useful, after each conversion. We have to keep getting fresh doses of solar photons from our sun everyday, or it will very quickly all come to a frozen stop.
Living things fly! Just ponder that.
Birds fly. Watch the gulls. Incredible. Dragonflies fly. They can catch other insects in mid-air. Bats fly. Using sonar they can avoid objects during high speed flight in pitch darkness. What? Beetles fly. Watch them unfold their wings. How could that have come to be?
Spend time watching.
Some birds can’t fly but swim like a porpoise. Some birds don’t fly, but can get big and run faster than almost anything else.
Tyrannosaurus Rex probably had feathers.
Cheetahs run over 60 mph.
There are 3 billion genome pairs in the human DNA. Your DNA and the DNA of the person jumping up and down next to you at the concert, differ by about 3 million. Those differences define the differences between you and her – hair color, skin color, height, nose, shape, etc., but you are both homo sapiens. The difference between you and any randomly chosen now extinct Neanderthal is also about 3 million genome pairs. The actual different genes that make them Neanderthal rather than homo sapiens may only be about 100,000 or so.
Neanderthals and humans mated and produced fertile offspring. Many of us humans still carry a significant portion of Neanderthal DNA. Wolves, coyotes, and dogs, can also interbreed with one another. Sometimes they kill each other. Sometimes they mate. Just like people.
tisrigo 