To Everything, a Season

Many years ago, I had a very good friend who was a Jehovah's Witness. The friendship would not have persisted over more than a decade, starting in our late teens, had M. pushed his beliefs on me. He was very respectful. But I remember one visit when we were in our mid-twenties, when he finally showed me one of his pamphlets. I had a look-through out of curiosity and was appalled. I had never heard of the Rapture - that fundamentalist Christian belief in some sort of global purge and selection of the holy - so the pamphlet was my first taste of the idea that destroying the planet and starting over was a good way to deal with sin (broadly defined). At that very moment, I learned that many people, religious or not, seek to solve a difficult problem by clearing the slate - instead of doggedly working to fix whatever's wrong.The concept of a cleared field or blank sheet of paper or uncluttered desk focusses the mind incredibly. (In the case of the Rapture, we are not supposed to think of all the people who must die horribly in order to leave the planet "clean.")
Since then, I have seen much evidence of this. Of course, stories abound of stubborn/crazy/devoted writers or researchers or explorers. James Joyce took 18 years to write Finnegans Wake. The Australian who discovered Heliobactor pylori, the bacterium that causes stomach ulcers, fought years to convince a whole cadre of medical skeptics that he was right, until his proof became irrefutable, and controversy became accepted dogma. They were ultimately thanked for their informed monomania.
But giving up might be more common - either because of laziness or wisdom. (We can never know how many projects have been ditched prematurely.) To be sure, hard work is, well, hard work - and the easy way out is enticing. However, it can be folly to ignore any number of signals saying, this ain't gonna work, honey, try something else while you still have the strength. Sometimes it's better to clear the slate and start over. It's not weak, it's wise.
The really, really tricky part is to know when you're onto the right thing - and keep fighting for it - and when it's better to quit.
I've been thinking of this all year - for one thing then another. (Why now? Is it correlated with my age?) At stake are time and energy, two very precious commodities. Hope is a basic human feeling, both adaptive and maladaptive. My dilemma: is keeping my hopes alive a help or a hindrance? Am I a dreamer and a fool? Should I face reality (with the facts I have at hand) and get on with the rest of my life, pouring energy into more certain outcomes?
On a related note, this blog is nearing its first anniversary. I have been wondering if I really have more to say on the subject of connection. Also, the almost complete lack of feedback makes me think I'm writing into a void - the reason I was reluctant to start a blog in the first place!
Perhaps the time has come to bring it to an end, and start another, entirely about neuroscience.
If I don't hear any howls of protest by October 28, I'll sign off then.

Seasonal Transitions

My readings of Zen & the Brain have slowed down a bit in the past week. Part of this has been due to the nature of the material - not the easiest to pick up and breeze through! But I am continuing, and sharing what I find with others. I find if I can explain it to someone in simple, everyday terms, I must have a fundamental grasp of it.
One relatively minor thing I discovered was the fact that in Japan there are more than four official seasons. The Japanese regard seasonal transitions as kinds of seasons unto themselves. Well, if not in the Southern Hemisphere, we in the Northern one are definitely in the middle of one of those unofficial seasons. Everywhere, things are mid-way between winter and spring - with spring predominating so far. Small, soil-hugging spring ephemerals of the horticultural variety have been appearing in gardens for the past two weeks, more like alpine or Arctic plants than Temperate Forest zone ones (my bioregion). If the warm weather persists in the next fortnight, the tulips, daffodils, irises, and so on will stretch to normal heights. Then we really will know we are in Spring proper. Until then, we'll be in this as-yet-unnamed season, unsure what coats to put away or leave out, nervous about storing winter boots, and superstitious about hiding the snow shovel.
Transitions are interesting because they embody ambiguity, a concept the human mind finds fascinating and troubling. We enjoy our categories, don't we? I don't need to remind anyone of either the benefits of classification or the terrible costs.
Zen teachings encourage the mind to embrace the Oneness of all. The challenge - one of many, I suppose, in a highly disciplined practice - is to break down (artificial) fences and see the underlying connections. We cling to those cozy categories and refuse to acknowledge their evanescence and arbitrary narture. With concerted study, the mind can learn to recognize the innate tendency to group things as like or not-like, and transcend those areas of disconnection. An "easy" place to start would be the human species, which we now break down into classes, religions, cultures, skin colors, and on and on. Those differences are indeed there - diversity exists in the world of humanity and most everything else - yet they also do not exist.
Try holding that thought in your mind for a few minutes. It's not exactly a Zen koan, but it will do until a real Zen master comes along to suggest one!

Autumn drear has crept up on us in this part of the world, bringing chilly foreshadows of winter and its associative symbols of dormancy, inactivity, and death. Poets have a long tradition of drawing their strongest tropes from natural phenomena, of course, and even the non-reading public is aware of pathetic fallacy - rain denoting sorrow, for example - whether or not it was taught in school. It just seems part of our nature to, well, turn to nature to explain how we feel.
Ecology, however (no matter what my blog title may suggest), differs from poetry in many respects. For one thing, it does not make value judgments on seasons, weather, or any other phenomena. Everything must die - otherwise there would not be life in the first place. Rain (and snow and sleet) must fall. In temperate zones, seasons are fairly sharply - sometimes very sharply - delineated. We cannot help but find our lives rise and fall in rhythm with them.
While snow and shorter days restrict growth, winter does not mean death. And even though is is hard to associate anything but "rebirth" with spring, in reality, life has been ongoing, neither dying nor coming back to life. (I sense religious imagery creeping in here - but leave that topic to another day perhaps.)
I find myself wandering into these realms this week, because health and mortality are very much on my mind. The timing of certain worrisome events is mere coincidence. Yet I cannot ignore it. The growing season is winding down. I am reminded of other lives winding down - loved ones. The connection is there if I choose to find it. And once I make that decision ("poetry or ecology," I suppose, is a little too facile) then I have to use it effectively.