A woman who was a sister to me died on Monday.  Her death was not unexpected but despite this it was still a shock. This is not unusual. Having experienced the death of loved ones before, now matter how well prepared one is, death is never a comfortable experience.

Like all family, my sister and I had our disagreements but as luck would have it we were able to have a comfortable coze and admit missing each other when I came over for her daughter’s wedding. It was a good, if brief, visit and it stands as the last time I got to see her alive.

I had hoped to make it before she died, and last week made plans to come over yesterday, but Monday she was told there was nothing more that the doctors could do except make her comfortable and by mid afternoon she was dead. And so here I am back in Washington State, having left at the planned time, but, unfortunately, not before her death.

I am running up to the Reservation today to attend the first of several good-bye services. The services will last three days because there are many, many people who are, like me, travelling to say good bye to someone who will be deeply missed.

My children and I arrived in town last night, paid for the hotel room, unpacked and then (once email etc had been checked) we went out to pick up some groceries and a little fast food for my daughter. Remember now, this is the US.  We went to a Jack in the Box drive through and I ordered poutine. It was a bit of a comedy. The woman said “what?”  I said “poutine.” She said “what?” In the end I ordered chicken strips and drove up to the window to pay.  She came over to the window and asked “what did you ask for?” And so I had to explain what poutine is and the expression on her face said “what?”  ”Never heard of it,” she said. “Wrong country,” I said.

We laughed; it was a bit of a face-palm moment I fear.  A long drive, never enough sleep, grief, and the shock of it all –  I am hazy, not quite here. Yet I am alive, and so laughter remains. It is a wonderous thing being human.

why life is worth living. This is the thing I miss the most by living in a city as big as Vancouver.

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I had a wonderful experience at the US-Canadian border! I am astounded. The American dude was friendly, helpful and polite. It took quite a long time, but he was nice throughout. By far, the best US border experience in my history, and I have quite a few of them.

I’m glad to have this done because I have to boot to the US to see a dying friend this week. May the next crossing be as pleasant.

and as it happens, just minutes before I left this was sent to me. I don’t look forward to border crossings much and in this case I actually have some long overdue business to attend to at the border itself so I have to get out and go have a conflab with a bevy of guards. So in this state of mind I watched this ad.

Thanks for the (much needed) giggle, Naren.

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You may (or may not) be aware of the discovery of many new planets outside our solar system but it has become something of a hot topic.  Universe (that cool blog that recently moved over to ScienceBlogs) had an interesting take on the idea of scale which included the discovery, and  Samuel Arbesman posted an interesting article on what he calls mesofacts that also included the discovery.  He’s right that some things change at a rate that means we just don’t notice them, even things that are important to our continued survival. I blame evolution. We are primed to notice sudden changes —  like the panther that seems suddenly really, really interested in our presence in her and her kits’ personal space. Those kinds of changes make or break our chances for immediate survival and so have taken the lead in our bodies ranking system for what is going to cause a sudden behavioural modifcation (you know like the fight or flight thingy). Often the slow changes (like in climate) do not trigger the hormonal stimulants which jump start behavioural change. After all, a bad harvest or two? We are omnivores, the barley is low? Go eat millet, or the goat, or last year’s walnuts, they last for a long time, even if bitter, and then there’s dandelion greens, it would take a pretty major cataclysm to wipe those suckers out. It is hunger, another kind of hormonal trigger, that causes us to seek out alternate food sources. What it doesn’t do is make us stop acting like giant earth-predators and unbalancing the larger biosphere. That is reason’s role, but it is a newby and apparently not up to the job yet.

As Claire Evans (the writer behind Universe) said, it really is about scale.  She thinks that we are about to experience that wrench that comes with the realization that we are not, in fact, the scale against which the universe developed. And of course what the universe’s non-human scale means is that the things that are most critical to us, the things we think matter the most, almost certainly have no corollary in the vast reaches of all-that-is.

Things like language, mind, awareness, these are human things in that they are the consequence of the evolution of our bodies and the ensuing social change the evolution of our bodies and brains has stimulated (and of course of any other group of creatures that might evolve toward the same evolutionary “goal” of a proactive intelligence capable of rapid learning as a member of a deeply social species). There are so many philosophers that have talked of our capacity for awareness as if it is an attribute worthy of universal acclaim, as if, at bottom, awareness must be a fundamental principle of the universe like mass or the speed of light. This is the power of the meso-world on us. Call it middle earth or midgaard, it is a fantasy universe where things are in fact human-sized and human oriented. Unfortunately for us, but fortunately for the universe, we do not actually live in middle earth.

Now’s a good time to go watch a short video called The Evolution of Life in 60 Seconds.

And that’s just starting with the formation of the earth.  We barely register. In fact the only reason we do is because the creator of the video is human and probably thinks our existence matters. But to be fair I suppose we have made an impact as far as the earth is concerned. Well at least for this particular set of life forms that may well suffer extinction earlier than would have happened without our presence. But extinctions are a regular part of earth history so even this is nothing particularly out of the ordinary. Can you imagine a video “The Evolution of the Solar System in 60 Seconds“? Or “The Evolution of the Universe…”? We wouldn’t be a blip. I mean even the formation of the earth would barely register in the second imagined film.

I sometimes wonder what philosophy would be if we could get outside our middle-earth mindset. And teleology without a human orientation?  That would be fun.  Maybe the universe has been evolving all along toward the mechanisms that make a three toed sloth capable of enormous body temperature variation. Or maybe it is all about bioluminescence. Or the cephlapod ink sac. Or maybe life was just an accident on the way to limestone and the karst lands and their elemental denizens.

Wouldn’t that be fun? — to find out we do inhabit middle earth but that it was created in the image of a set of caves carved by the relationship between water, CaCO₃ and CaMg(CO₃)_2.

Personally I’d rather find out there is no meaning than find out I was an extra in someone else’s drama. That way I can make my own meaning, decide for myself what it all means, and then change my mind depending on how I feel that day. Much more fun, and in keeping with my middle-earth mind.

I mean, really, meaning?  Another of those human qualities that say nothing about the universe, whether big or small. But what else can guide us if not our quest for meaning?

Facts you say? Posh. Tish.

man, it is cool to watch. Makes me want to run out and but a camera capable of such a thing. Not to mention treats for my dog. (Get a load of those tongues…)

Thanks Mango for the link.

Photographer, Aja Dawn

Photographer, Aja Dawn

Actors and actresses be damned. The creator of this is someone worth meeting.

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