Trust... it must guide our every thought and action and breath, our very life. It must not be us working for ourselves, but God working through us. We are his instruments. Can a cello or piano play itself? How glorious a melody our lives could be if only we would put it in the hands of the Musician and Composer of the universe.
"For I know the plans I have for you, says, the Lord... to give you a future and a hope." (Jeremiah 29:11)
Friday, December 18, 2009
Friday, December 11, 2009
Affections of the Soul...
This is a short one for today, but it is something that I need to be constantly asking in order to renew my determination to groggily force my tired self out of bed at 6:15 every morning, bury myself in a million layers and stumble out into 10 degree frostiness... to participate in one of the most incredible and yet profoundly overlooked things that man could ever do... to go to Mass.
“God gave you a gift of 86,400 seconds today. Have you used one to say “thank you?” (William A. Ward)
“God gave you a gift of 86,400 seconds today. Have you used one to say “thank you?” (William A. Ward)
Friday, December 4, 2009
Affections of the Soul...
"The word is a sign or symbol of the impressions or affections of the soul." ~Aristotle
As each day and week goes by, I read things that touch, thought provoke, inspire or encourage me, and I realized that since "The words that enlighten the soul are more precious than jewels. ~Hazrat Inayat Khan", I ought to share them with others. After all, what good is something valuable with no one else to share it with? So at the end of every week, on Fridays, I will post my "affections of the soul," and share a quote, poem, part of a book... any words that I have read that have inspired me.
So I will start it off with a favorite poem. I have had a lot of time to contemplate it, as I have been playing and singing it over and over each day in a song that I composed on the piano. And I found that it beautifully relates to my last post, "For these seemingly common things are reflections of what is eternal, they are the mirrors in which we can see God in this earthly life."
As each day and week goes by, I read things that touch, thought provoke, inspire or encourage me, and I realized that since "The words that enlighten the soul are more precious than jewels. ~Hazrat Inayat Khan", I ought to share them with others. After all, what good is something valuable with no one else to share it with? So at the end of every week, on Fridays, I will post my "affections of the soul," and share a quote, poem, part of a book... any words that I have read that have inspired me.
So I will start it off with a favorite poem. I have had a lot of time to contemplate it, as I have been playing and singing it over and over each day in a song that I composed on the piano. And I found that it beautifully relates to my last post, "For these seemingly common things are reflections of what is eternal, they are the mirrors in which we can see God in this earthly life."
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
Gratitude for the Ordinary
As I have been thinking about life over the past few days, the words that keep coming to me are: there is so much to be thankful for. But I realized that it is not so much the fancy turkeys and pies or the extraordinary celebrations that engenders my gratitude, but the ordinary, the "stuff of life." For true happiness comes from finding the significance in the common experiences of life: cooking, washing dishes, getting from place to place, waking, sleeping. And from witnessing the miracle of life: the rising and setting of the sun, the changing of the seasons, the growing and dying of living things. For these seemingly common things are reflections of what is eternal, they are the mirrors in which we can see God in this earthly life. That is why they are a gift from God to man, (just as I said in my previous post on work,) and ought to be received as such, with profound gratitude.
And now I must go to one who will say things infinitely better than I ever could: Thomas Howard, in Chance or the Dance. This is truly one of the best books ever written, and I could quote the entire book. But as difficult as it is, I will try and give just a few excerpts that capture this concept.
And now I must go to one who will say things infinitely better than I ever could: Thomas Howard, in Chance or the Dance. This is truly one of the best books ever written, and I could quote the entire book. But as difficult as it is, I will try and give just a few excerpts that capture this concept.
"There were some ages in Western History that have occasionally been called Dark. They were dark, it is said, because learning in them declined, and progress paused, and men labored under the pall of belief...Then the light came, It was the light that has lighted us men into a new age. Charms and devils, plagues and parthenogenesis have fled from the glare into the crannies of memory. In their place have come coal mining and E = mc2 and plastic and group dynamics and napalm and urban renewal and rapid transit. Men were freed from the fear of the Last Judgment; it was felt to be more bracing to face Nothing than to face the Tribunal. They were freed from the worry about getting their souls into God's heaven by the discovery that they had no souls and that God had no heaven... Altogether, life became much more livable since it was clear that nothing in fact lay behind things. The age was called enlightened. The myth sovereign in the old age was that everything means everything. The myth sovereign in the new is that nothing means anything. That is to the darkened mind it did not mean nothing that the sun went down and night came and the moon and the stars appeared and the dawn and the sun and morning again and another day, which would itself wax and then wane into twilight and dusk and night. It did not mean nothing to them that the time of work was under the aegis of the bright sun and that it was the sun that poured life into the seeds that they were planting, and that brought out the sweat on their foreheads, and that the time of rest was under the scepter of the silver moon. This was the diurnal exhibition of what was True-- that there was a panoply and a rhythm and a cycle, a waxing and a waning, a rising and a setting and a rising again.
The old myth would have seen the given (the humdrum, in most cases) as, on the other hand precisely the agent and mediator of something substantial- of the way things are in a word. This is not to say that everyone up to the Enlightenment went whistling about the kitchen and farmyard, merry and content in the knowledge that his broomstick or shovel was the summum bonum. It is simply to say that the old myth sanctioned the humdrum by seeing it, along with everything else in the world, as image. That is the commonplaces of life, the given rhythms of experience in which every human being is involved whether he is king or serf, jet set or typist (things like birth, growth, learning, work, marriage, and friendship), are themselves the occasions in which we may enact what is real, what lies at the root of things. In this view, there is no hiatus between what we are given to do by life, and what life is really about. There is on the contrary a synonymity. All this commonplace stuff is what life is really about. Three cheers for travel and theater and parties and fashions, but they aren't at the center. What is at the center is the given, the obvious things- like birth and growth and learning and marriage.
Whatever else a man may be doing, there are various things, which mark his experience, and the viewpoint being put here is that it is those universals, which lie at the center of significance... And it is the supposition here that these commonplaces- these given rhythms of experience- constitute the imagery under which we may all participate in the way things are. And, the corollary to this, that the failure to seize the humdrum commonplaces as vitally significant, or the effort to fly from them and seek fulfillment in various forms of substitution or diversion, represents a misapprehension of what it means to be authentically human.
This view, carried to the nth place, would go like this, then: things are not random; they are, finally, glorious, and the the diagram of this glory appears everywhere and on all levels- in astronomy, zoology and botany and anatomy and oceanography- and is enacted by man in his politics and institutions, and acknowledged and celebrated in his rituals and his art. And it is configured not immediately and obviously for him in the commonplaces of his life. So that, working from the bottom up he might see those commonplaces as the images of ultimate glory, and find in them clues as to the nature of that glory. But he might note, because he has looked around him at a thousand images, that it is not unobserved that life issues from death- that spring rises from winter, and the oak from the dead acorn, and dawn from night, and Phoenix from the ashes. And the rest of us may see it all either as a pointless jumble of phenomena, or as the diagram of glory- as grinding tediously toward entropy, or as dancing toward the Dance."
Whatever else a man may be doing, there are various things, which mark his experience, and the viewpoint being put here is that it is those universals, which lie at the center of significance... And it is the supposition here that these commonplaces- these given rhythms of experience- constitute the imagery under which we may all participate in the way things are. And, the corollary to this, that the failure to seize the humdrum commonplaces as vitally significant, or the effort to fly from them and seek fulfillment in various forms of substitution or diversion, represents a misapprehension of what it means to be authentically human.
This view, carried to the nth place, would go like this, then: things are not random; they are, finally, glorious, and the the diagram of this glory appears everywhere and on all levels- in astronomy, zoology and botany and anatomy and oceanography- and is enacted by man in his politics and institutions, and acknowledged and celebrated in his rituals and his art. And it is configured not immediately and obviously for him in the commonplaces of his life. So that, working from the bottom up he might see those commonplaces as the images of ultimate glory, and find in them clues as to the nature of that glory. But he might note, because he has looked around him at a thousand images, that it is not unobserved that life issues from death- that spring rises from winter, and the oak from the dead acorn, and dawn from night, and Phoenix from the ashes. And the rest of us may see it all either as a pointless jumble of phenomena, or as the diagram of glory- as grinding tediously toward entropy, or as dancing toward the Dance."
Or in the words of Albert Einstein, "There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”
Thursday, November 19, 2009
The Value of Work: Sinfulness to Sanctification
"For the LORD your God will bless you... in all the work of your hands, and your joy will be complete." ~ Deuteronomy 16:15
It all started in the Garden of Eden. Adam and Eve had just eaten the forbidden fruit. In His just wisdom, God said to Adam, "Cursed is the ground because of you... through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life. By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food... until you return to the ground." (Genesis 3:17) It may seem like this is just an evil curse from God, but what man did was the true wrong, and this was the means of redeeming it. In one bite, the perfection meant for man was shattered; his entire future, his very nature changed, broken. We went from walking with God in a beautiful garden, picking the fruits of God's love, to being destined to toil for all the rest of time. And yet God, as always, is infinitely forgiving, and through that toil-filled curse gave us the means of regaining one fragment of that unblemished relationship man once had with God.
A closer look into the nature of work will reveal to us how very merciful God is to even give us that. Work redeems us through the virtues that it requires. Strictly speaking, these would be the seven cardinal virtues of prudence, justice, temperance, courage, faith, hope, and charity. Work is the epitome of these disciplines, both for the body and mind. Work disciplines us to have the prudence to know what the right thing is, and through justice to act upon it. Temperance is achieved through self-control and going against the current of sinful desires, not losing yourself in what you want, but rather doing hard things and pushing through to the end. That is the very essence of true, hard, work. But all of this requires, while at the same time affirming courage. Work is hard, becoming a better person is hard, that is why God calls us to have, through this hardness, complete faith and hope in Him. And it is through all of these things that we can truly love God. Work is about love. God created us and gave us a paradise to live in out of love. But when we shattered that gift, he still loved us so much that he allowed us, through our well-deserved fate of work and toil, to piece together the fragments which we had broken, to love him.
"We see in work, in men’s noble creative toil, not only one of the highest human values, but also a sign of God’s Love for His creatures, and of men’s love for each other and for God: we see in work a means of perfection, a way to sanctity." ~ Saint Josemaria Escriva
~This topic is definitely something that I want to keep thinking and posting about, this is hopefully just the beginning. But I would love to know what your thoughts and/or questions might be on this. :)
It all started in the Garden of Eden. Adam and Eve had just eaten the forbidden fruit. In His just wisdom, God said to Adam, "Cursed is the ground because of you... through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life. By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food... until you return to the ground." (Genesis 3:17) It may seem like this is just an evil curse from God, but what man did was the true wrong, and this was the means of redeeming it. In one bite, the perfection meant for man was shattered; his entire future, his very nature changed, broken. We went from walking with God in a beautiful garden, picking the fruits of God's love, to being destined to toil for all the rest of time. And yet God, as always, is infinitely forgiving, and through that toil-filled curse gave us the means of regaining one fragment of that unblemished relationship man once had with God.
A closer look into the nature of work will reveal to us how very merciful God is to even give us that. Work redeems us through the virtues that it requires. Strictly speaking, these would be the seven cardinal virtues of prudence, justice, temperance, courage, faith, hope, and charity. Work is the epitome of these disciplines, both for the body and mind. Work disciplines us to have the prudence to know what the right thing is, and through justice to act upon it. Temperance is achieved through self-control and going against the current of sinful desires, not losing yourself in what you want, but rather doing hard things and pushing through to the end. That is the very essence of true, hard, work. But all of this requires, while at the same time affirming courage. Work is hard, becoming a better person is hard, that is why God calls us to have, through this hardness, complete faith and hope in Him. And it is through all of these things that we can truly love God. Work is about love. God created us and gave us a paradise to live in out of love. But when we shattered that gift, he still loved us so much that he allowed us, through our well-deserved fate of work and toil, to piece together the fragments which we had broken, to love him.
"We see in work, in men’s noble creative toil, not only one of the highest human values, but also a sign of God’s Love for His creatures, and of men’s love for each other and for God: we see in work a means of perfection, a way to sanctity." ~ Saint Josemaria Escriva
~This topic is definitely something that I want to keep thinking and posting about, this is hopefully just the beginning. But I would love to know what your thoughts and/or questions might be on this. :)
Monday, November 9, 2009
Excuses? Updates? Or just a post...finally.
Well...I am back...and all I can say is that it has been a very, very, long time.
A lot has happened in my life during this indefinite blogging absence. I could give excuses as to why I have not blogged, I could also give you all the updates of the past year, but instead I will just say...hello again my dear blog readers and thank you for being patient.
There are so many thoughts and inspirations and ideas racing through my head of what I could possibly say and post, but you are again going to have to have patience with me as I get back into the swing of blogging and try to present them in a (somewhat) coherent way.
It is a bit like coming home after a long trip, there is so much to do and say, but one doesn't know exactly where to start. So as I am figuring this all out, I thought I would post some of the things that I have done (a.k.a written, thought, or read about) over the last year.
I do have one request of you though: could you (whoever you are) please leave a comment so that I know if and who is still reading my blog? Not only would it motivate me to post more often but also it would help me get to know my readers a little bit more. ;) Thank You!
World of blogging here I come...
A lot has happened in my life during this indefinite blogging absence. I could give excuses as to why I have not blogged, I could also give you all the updates of the past year, but instead I will just say...hello again my dear blog readers and thank you for being patient.
There are so many thoughts and inspirations and ideas racing through my head of what I could possibly say and post, but you are again going to have to have patience with me as I get back into the swing of blogging and try to present them in a (somewhat) coherent way.
It is a bit like coming home after a long trip, there is so much to do and say, but one doesn't know exactly where to start. So as I am figuring this all out, I thought I would post some of the things that I have done (a.k.a written, thought, or read about) over the last year.
I do have one request of you though: could you (whoever you are) please leave a comment so that I know if and who is still reading my blog? Not only would it motivate me to post more often but also it would help me get to know my readers a little bit more. ;) Thank You!
World of blogging here I come...
Monday, October 13, 2008
I, Pencil
Whew... sorry I haven't posted in a while!
I heard this poem or story a little while ago, and found it simply profound. It has been on my mind quite a bit lately, and I thought it was kind of a good run up to my "Story of Stuff" post.
It is pretty long but here it is:
I, Pencil
My Family Tree as told to Leonard E. Read
I am a lead pencil—the ordinary wooden pencil familiar to all boys and girls and adults who can read and write.*
Writing is both my vocation and my avocation; that's all I do.
You may wonder why I should write a genealogy. Well, to begin with, my story is interesting. And, next, I am a mystery—more so than a tree or a sunset or even a flash of lightning. But, sadly, I am taken for granted by those who use me, as if I were a mere incident and without background. This supercilious attitude relegates me to the level of the commonplace. This is a species of the grievous error in which mankind cannot too long persist without peril. For, the wise G. K. Chesterton observed, "We are perishing for want of wonder, not for want of wonders."
I, Pencil, simple though I appear to be, merit your wonder and awe, a claim I shall attempt to prove. In fact, if you can understand me—no, that's too much to ask of anyone—if you can become aware of the miraculousness which I symbolize, you can help save the freedom mankind is so unhappily losing. I have a profound lesson to teach. And I can teach this lesson better than can an automobile or an airplane or a mechanical dishwasher because—well, because I am seemingly so simple.
Simple? Yet, not a single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me. This sounds fantastic, doesn't it? Especially when it is realized that there are about one and one-half billion of my kind produced in the U.S.A. each year.
Pick me up and look me over. What do you see? Not much meets the eye—there's some wood, lacquer, the printed labeling, graphite lead, a bit of metal, and an eraser.
Innumerable Antecedents
Just as you cannot trace your family tree back very far, so is it impossible for me to name and explain all my antecedents. But I would like to suggest enough of them to impress upon you the richness and complexity of my background.
My family tree begins with what in fact is a tree, a cedar of straight grain that grows in Northern California and Oregon. Now contemplate all the saws and trucks and rope and the countless other gear used in harvesting and carting the cedar logs to the railroad siding. Think of all the persons and the numberless skills that went into their fabrication: the mining of ore, the making of steel and its refinement into saws, axes, motors; the growing of hemp and bringing it through all the stages to heavy and strong rope; the logging camps with their beds and mess halls, the cookery and the raising of all the foods. Why, untold thousands of persons had a hand in every cup of coffee the loggers drink!
The logs are shipped to a mill in San Leandro, California. Can you imagine the individuals who make flat cars and rails and railroad engines and who construct and install the communication systems incidental thereto? These legions are among my antecedents.
Consider the millwork in San Leandro. The cedar logs are cut into small, pencil-length slats less than one-fourth of an inch in thickness. These are kiln dried and then tinted for the same reason women put rouge on their faces. People prefer that I look pretty, not a pallid white. The slats are waxed and kiln dried again. How many skills went into the making of the tint and the kilns, into supplying the heat, the light and power, the belts, motors, and all the other things a mill requires? Sweepers in the mill among my ancestors? Yes, and included are the men who poured the concrete for the dam of a Pacific Gas & Electric Company hydroplant which supplies the mill's power!
Don't overlook the ancestors present and distant who have a hand in transporting sixty carloads of slats across the nation.
Once in the pencil factory—$4,000,000 in machinery and building, all capital accumulated by thrifty and saving parents of mine—each slat is given eight grooves by a complex machine, after which another machine lays leads in every other slat, applies glue, and places another slat atop—a lead sandwich, so to speak. Seven brothers and I are mechanically carved from this "wood-clinched" sandwich.
My "lead" itself—it contains no lead at all—is complex. The graphite is mined in Ceylon. Consider these miners and those who make their many tools and the makers of the paper sacks in which the graphite is shipped and those who make the string that ties the sacks and those who put them aboard ships and those who make the ships. Even the lighthouse keepers along the way assisted in my birth—and the harbor pilots.
The graphite is mixed with clay from Mississippi in which ammonium hydroxide is used in the refining process. Then wetting agents are added such as sulfonated tallow—animal fats chemically reacted with sulfuric acid. After passing through numerous machines, the mixture finally appears as endless extrusions—as from a sausage grinder-cut to size, dried, and baked for several hours at 1,850 degrees Fahrenheit. To increase their strength and smoothness the leads are then treated with a hot mixture which includes candelilla wax from Mexico, paraffin wax, and hydrogenated natural fats.
My cedar receives six coats of lacquer. Do you know all the ingredients of lacquer? Who would think that the growers of castor beans and the refiners of castor oil are a part of it? They are. Why, even the processes by which the lacquer is made a beautiful yellow involve the skills of more persons than one can enumerate!
Observe the labeling. That's a film formed by applying heat to carbon black mixed with resins. How do you make resins and what, pray, is carbon black?
My bit of metal—the ferrule—is brass. Think of all the persons who mine zinc and copper and those who have the skills to make shiny sheet brass from these products of nature. Those black rings on my ferrule are black nickel. What is black nickel and how is it applied? The complete story of why the center of my ferrule has no black nickel on it would take pages to explain.
Then there's my crowning glory, inelegantly referred to in the trade as "the plug," the part man uses to erase the errors he makes with me. An ingredient called "factice" is what does the erasing. It is a rubber-like product made by reacting rape-seed oil from the Dutch East Indies with sulfur chloride. Rubber, contrary to the common notion, is only for binding purposes. Then, too, there are numerous vulcanizing and accelerating agents. The pumice comes from Italy; and the pigment which gives "the plug" its color is cadmium sulfide.
No One Knows
Does anyone wish to challenge my earlier assertion that no single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me?
Actually, millions of human beings have had a hand in my creation, no one of whom even knows more than a very few of the others. Now, you may say that I go too far in relating the picker of a coffee berry in far off Brazil and food growers elsewhere to my creation; that this is an extreme position. I shall stand by my claim. There isn't a single person in all these millions, including the president of the pencil company, who contributes more than a tiny, infinitesimal bit of know-how. From the standpoint of know-how the only difference between the miner of graphite in Ceylon and the logger in Oregon is in the type of know-how. Neither the miner nor the logger can be dispensed with, any more than can the chemist at the factory or the worker in the oil field—paraffin being a by-product of petroleum.
Here is an astounding fact: Neither the worker in the oil field nor the chemist nor the digger of graphite or clay nor any who mans or makes the ships or trains or trucks nor the one who runs the machine that does the knurling on my bit of metal nor the president of the company performs his singular task because he wants me. Each one wants me less, perhaps, than does a child in the first grade. Indeed, there are some among this vast multitude who never saw a pencil nor would they know how to use one. Their motivation is other than me. Perhaps it is something like this: Each of these millions sees that he can thus exchange his tiny know-how for the goods and services he needs or wants. I may or may not be among these items.
No Master Mind
There is a fact still more astounding: the absence of a master mind, of anyone dictating or forcibly directing these countless actions which bring me into being. No trace of such a person can be found. Instead, we find the Invisible Hand at work. This is the mystery to which I earlier referred.
It has been said that "only God can make a tree." Why do we agree with this? Isn't it because we realize that we ourselves could not make one? Indeed, can we even describe a tree? We cannot, except in superficial terms. We can say, for instance, that a certain molecular configuration manifests itself as a tree. But what mind is there among men that could even record, let alone direct, the constant changes in molecules that transpire in the life span of a tree? Such a feat is utterly unthinkable!
I, Pencil, am a complex combination of miracles: a tree, zinc, copper, graphite, and so on. But to these miracles which manifest themselves in Nature an even more extraordinary miracle has been added: the configuration of creative human energies—millions of tiny know-hows configurating naturally and spontaneously in response to human necessity and desire and in the absence of any human master-minding! Since only God can make a tree, I insist that only God could make me. Man can no more direct these millions of know-hows to bring me into being than he can put molecules together to create a tree.
The above is what I meant when writing, "If you can become aware of the miraculousness which I symbolize, you can help save the freedom mankind is so unhappily losing." For, if one is aware that these know-hows will naturally, yes, automatically, arrange themselves into creative and productive patterns in response to human necessity and demand—that is, in the absence of governmental or any other coercive masterminding—then one will possess an absolutely essential ingredient for freedom: a faith in free people. Freedom is impossible without this faith.
Once government has had a monopoly of a creative activity such, for instance, as the delivery of the mails, most individuals will believe that the mails could not be efficiently delivered by men acting freely. And here is the reason: Each one acknowledges that he himself doesn't know how to do all the things incident to mail delivery. He also recognizes that no other individual could do it. These assumptions are correct. No individual possesses enough know-how to perform a nation's mail delivery any more than any individual possesses enough know-how to make a pencil. Now, in the absence of faith in free people—in the unawareness that millions of tiny know-hows would naturally and miraculously form and cooperate to satisfy this necessity—the individual cannot help but reach the erroneous conclusion that mail can be delivered only by governmental "master-minding."
Testimony Galore
If I, Pencil, were the only item that could offer testimony on what men and women can accomplish when free to try, then those with little faith would have a fair case. However, there is testimony galore; it's all about us and on every hand. Mail delivery is exceedingly simple when compared, for instance, to the making of an automobile or a calculating machine or a grain combine or a milling machine or to tens of thousands of other things. Delivery? Why, in this area where men have been left free to try, they deliver the human voice around the world in less than one second; they deliver an event visually and in motion to any person's home when it is happening; they deliver 150 passengers from Seattle to Baltimore in less than four hours; they deliver gas from Texas to one's range or furnace in New York at unbelievably low rates and without subsidy; they deliver each four pounds of oil from the Persian Gulf to our Eastern Seaboard—halfway around the world—for less money than the government charges for delivering a one-ounce letter across the street!
The lesson I have to teach is this: Leave all creative energies uninhibited. Merely organize society to act in harmony with this lesson. Let society's legal apparatus remove all obstacles the best it can. Permit these creative know-hows freely to flow. Have faith that free men and women will respond to the Invisible Hand. This faith will be confirmed. I, Pencil, seemingly simple though I am, offer the miracle of my creation as testimony that this is a practical faith, as practical as the sun, the rain, a cedar tree, the good earth.
It really just makes me realize how utterly disconnected we are from everything we have and from each other. That seems to be one of our huge modern tragedies: disconnection.
Disconnection from:
~People: This is the age of... ipods and cell phones, where you walk on any street and almost everybody is holding up some device to their ears, cutting of any opportunity for real human interaction; of vehicles whizzing past you and your house, and not a clue or care as to who is in them; of computers and televisions and many other machines that replace real human interactions and experiences, real culture and life with some cyber and psuedo reality.
~Nature: I know how often for myself I can drive quickly by the same thing on our street hundreds of times and never notice anything for I am not going slowly enough to notice the beauty, then walk or ride my bike past the exact same things and notice so many beautiful or interesting little things I had never noticed before. How often this happens, and how much beauty and how many little kisses from the Creator am I missing out on just because I am so distracted and so disconnected from nature and ultimately God.
~Necessities/Belongings/Food: If you read the above poem and think, "wow all that just went into that pencil that I used a second ago," then think how much more goes into everything else we own. The clothes on your back, how many people were involved in creating your shirt and getting it to you so that you can wear it today? The chair you are sitting in, how many little pieces are in that thing and how much energy, how many resources, how much labor was used in the production of it? The computer that I am typing this on. This object that I take so much for granted, is marked by how many peoples sweat and labors? Or food! If you open your refrigerator and pull something off the shelf, how many other peoples hands touched it? If you had a bowl of cereal for breakfast, how many lives were involved to get that to your table, so that you could then eat it. First there is the milk, where are the cow/s that produced that milk and who do they belong to? Who milked them? And who ran the machines to process the milk? Then there is the cereal if you have wheat in your cereal, who owned the land? Who planted, and harvested and processed the wheat? Who transported the wheat? Nuts, where and who grew the nuts, who processed them, who transported them from place to place? Oil, who grew the nut, bean, etc. to make the oil from, who was involved in the making and transporting of it. The list goes on with EVERY other ingredient in the cereal. Then finally the combining of all of those ingredients and all of those peoples' labors in to a box ( which people are also involved with,) and then the transportation (which of course uses gas which people had to work for to get out of the ground and processed, and the metal and all the other parts of the vehicle,) to get it to the store at which point you could buy it. Imagine that, all the hundreds, thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of people involved in just one bite of cereal.
And yet how often do we actually care or think about it and them, all those people who exist somewhere in the world right now.
It is very difficult for me to put my mind around all this, and not feel a pang of guilt. Is it really right for me to eat the cereal when all those people, the running of all those factories and therefore pollution, and all those resources, etc. were all used just so I could eat it for breakfast without even acknowledging their existence and labors??? Sure they are paid, but are those nut growers in Brazil, or wheat farmers, or cow milkers really getting paid enough for what they worked hard for, when I only pay a buck and a half for that box of cereal? I honestly don't know! And it just goes to show how truly disconnected we have become from the very things that feed and keep us alive.
~God: Really I think ultimately the worst thing is that it makes us more disconnected from God. The farther away we step from the natural order, and the way He created things to be, the more disconnected we are from Him.
I don't really understand this (which is precisely why I posted, helps me to sort my thoughts I guess, :) and I don't expect anyone, myself included to never eat cereal again, or use a pencil, but I do find that poem very interesting, and I do think this is worth thinking about because it does make us realize our dependence on the sweat of other people and it makes me more grateful for what I do have.
I must say though there is quite an appeal to try and buy things more local. Imagine if your entire bowl of cereal could be traced within a 30-60 mile radius of your house. And because you make your own cereal, you get the wheat from a farmer friend down the road, the nuts from your local almond and pecan orchard, your honey from the beehive a friend has, the oil from melted butter that you got from your local dairy, where you also got your milk. Right, I know this is imaginary thinking, but it does seem so much nobler a breakfast, than that of the one with ingredients from all over the world, produced by people who we had no clue existed.
In the past it was always this way. If the family or person didn't milk the cow, and grow the wheat themselves, they would get it from friends or from the local store that got it from the local people. Before machines there was no way to transport things such far distances as we do now. And people either made it themselves (and therefore had a completely direct connection with it) or got it locally, with the exception of maybe sugar, which was probably extremely expensive anyways.
Why is our culture so completely different now and should it be this way? It all connects back up with disconnection. :)
I heard this poem or story a little while ago, and found it simply profound. It has been on my mind quite a bit lately, and I thought it was kind of a good run up to my "Story of Stuff" post.
It is pretty long but here it is:
I, Pencil
My Family Tree as told to Leonard E. Read
I am a lead pencil—the ordinary wooden pencil familiar to all boys and girls and adults who can read and write.*
Writing is both my vocation and my avocation; that's all I do.
You may wonder why I should write a genealogy. Well, to begin with, my story is interesting. And, next, I am a mystery—more so than a tree or a sunset or even a flash of lightning. But, sadly, I am taken for granted by those who use me, as if I were a mere incident and without background. This supercilious attitude relegates me to the level of the commonplace. This is a species of the grievous error in which mankind cannot too long persist without peril. For, the wise G. K. Chesterton observed, "We are perishing for want of wonder, not for want of wonders."
I, Pencil, simple though I appear to be, merit your wonder and awe, a claim I shall attempt to prove. In fact, if you can understand me—no, that's too much to ask of anyone—if you can become aware of the miraculousness which I symbolize, you can help save the freedom mankind is so unhappily losing. I have a profound lesson to teach. And I can teach this lesson better than can an automobile or an airplane or a mechanical dishwasher because—well, because I am seemingly so simple.
Simple? Yet, not a single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me. This sounds fantastic, doesn't it? Especially when it is realized that there are about one and one-half billion of my kind produced in the U.S.A. each year.
Pick me up and look me over. What do you see? Not much meets the eye—there's some wood, lacquer, the printed labeling, graphite lead, a bit of metal, and an eraser.
Innumerable Antecedents
Just as you cannot trace your family tree back very far, so is it impossible for me to name and explain all my antecedents. But I would like to suggest enough of them to impress upon you the richness and complexity of my background.
My family tree begins with what in fact is a tree, a cedar of straight grain that grows in Northern California and Oregon. Now contemplate all the saws and trucks and rope and the countless other gear used in harvesting and carting the cedar logs to the railroad siding. Think of all the persons and the numberless skills that went into their fabrication: the mining of ore, the making of steel and its refinement into saws, axes, motors; the growing of hemp and bringing it through all the stages to heavy and strong rope; the logging camps with their beds and mess halls, the cookery and the raising of all the foods. Why, untold thousands of persons had a hand in every cup of coffee the loggers drink!
The logs are shipped to a mill in San Leandro, California. Can you imagine the individuals who make flat cars and rails and railroad engines and who construct and install the communication systems incidental thereto? These legions are among my antecedents.
Consider the millwork in San Leandro. The cedar logs are cut into small, pencil-length slats less than one-fourth of an inch in thickness. These are kiln dried and then tinted for the same reason women put rouge on their faces. People prefer that I look pretty, not a pallid white. The slats are waxed and kiln dried again. How many skills went into the making of the tint and the kilns, into supplying the heat, the light and power, the belts, motors, and all the other things a mill requires? Sweepers in the mill among my ancestors? Yes, and included are the men who poured the concrete for the dam of a Pacific Gas & Electric Company hydroplant which supplies the mill's power!
Don't overlook the ancestors present and distant who have a hand in transporting sixty carloads of slats across the nation.
Once in the pencil factory—$4,000,000 in machinery and building, all capital accumulated by thrifty and saving parents of mine—each slat is given eight grooves by a complex machine, after which another machine lays leads in every other slat, applies glue, and places another slat atop—a lead sandwich, so to speak. Seven brothers and I are mechanically carved from this "wood-clinched" sandwich.
My "lead" itself—it contains no lead at all—is complex. The graphite is mined in Ceylon. Consider these miners and those who make their many tools and the makers of the paper sacks in which the graphite is shipped and those who make the string that ties the sacks and those who put them aboard ships and those who make the ships. Even the lighthouse keepers along the way assisted in my birth—and the harbor pilots.
The graphite is mixed with clay from Mississippi in which ammonium hydroxide is used in the refining process. Then wetting agents are added such as sulfonated tallow—animal fats chemically reacted with sulfuric acid. After passing through numerous machines, the mixture finally appears as endless extrusions—as from a sausage grinder-cut to size, dried, and baked for several hours at 1,850 degrees Fahrenheit. To increase their strength and smoothness the leads are then treated with a hot mixture which includes candelilla wax from Mexico, paraffin wax, and hydrogenated natural fats.
My cedar receives six coats of lacquer. Do you know all the ingredients of lacquer? Who would think that the growers of castor beans and the refiners of castor oil are a part of it? They are. Why, even the processes by which the lacquer is made a beautiful yellow involve the skills of more persons than one can enumerate!
Observe the labeling. That's a film formed by applying heat to carbon black mixed with resins. How do you make resins and what, pray, is carbon black?
My bit of metal—the ferrule—is brass. Think of all the persons who mine zinc and copper and those who have the skills to make shiny sheet brass from these products of nature. Those black rings on my ferrule are black nickel. What is black nickel and how is it applied? The complete story of why the center of my ferrule has no black nickel on it would take pages to explain.
Then there's my crowning glory, inelegantly referred to in the trade as "the plug," the part man uses to erase the errors he makes with me. An ingredient called "factice" is what does the erasing. It is a rubber-like product made by reacting rape-seed oil from the Dutch East Indies with sulfur chloride. Rubber, contrary to the common notion, is only for binding purposes. Then, too, there are numerous vulcanizing and accelerating agents. The pumice comes from Italy; and the pigment which gives "the plug" its color is cadmium sulfide.
No One Knows
Does anyone wish to challenge my earlier assertion that no single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me?
Actually, millions of human beings have had a hand in my creation, no one of whom even knows more than a very few of the others. Now, you may say that I go too far in relating the picker of a coffee berry in far off Brazil and food growers elsewhere to my creation; that this is an extreme position. I shall stand by my claim. There isn't a single person in all these millions, including the president of the pencil company, who contributes more than a tiny, infinitesimal bit of know-how. From the standpoint of know-how the only difference between the miner of graphite in Ceylon and the logger in Oregon is in the type of know-how. Neither the miner nor the logger can be dispensed with, any more than can the chemist at the factory or the worker in the oil field—paraffin being a by-product of petroleum.
Here is an astounding fact: Neither the worker in the oil field nor the chemist nor the digger of graphite or clay nor any who mans or makes the ships or trains or trucks nor the one who runs the machine that does the knurling on my bit of metal nor the president of the company performs his singular task because he wants me. Each one wants me less, perhaps, than does a child in the first grade. Indeed, there are some among this vast multitude who never saw a pencil nor would they know how to use one. Their motivation is other than me. Perhaps it is something like this: Each of these millions sees that he can thus exchange his tiny know-how for the goods and services he needs or wants. I may or may not be among these items.
No Master Mind
There is a fact still more astounding: the absence of a master mind, of anyone dictating or forcibly directing these countless actions which bring me into being. No trace of such a person can be found. Instead, we find the Invisible Hand at work. This is the mystery to which I earlier referred.
It has been said that "only God can make a tree." Why do we agree with this? Isn't it because we realize that we ourselves could not make one? Indeed, can we even describe a tree? We cannot, except in superficial terms. We can say, for instance, that a certain molecular configuration manifests itself as a tree. But what mind is there among men that could even record, let alone direct, the constant changes in molecules that transpire in the life span of a tree? Such a feat is utterly unthinkable!
I, Pencil, am a complex combination of miracles: a tree, zinc, copper, graphite, and so on. But to these miracles which manifest themselves in Nature an even more extraordinary miracle has been added: the configuration of creative human energies—millions of tiny know-hows configurating naturally and spontaneously in response to human necessity and desire and in the absence of any human master-minding! Since only God can make a tree, I insist that only God could make me. Man can no more direct these millions of know-hows to bring me into being than he can put molecules together to create a tree.
The above is what I meant when writing, "If you can become aware of the miraculousness which I symbolize, you can help save the freedom mankind is so unhappily losing." For, if one is aware that these know-hows will naturally, yes, automatically, arrange themselves into creative and productive patterns in response to human necessity and demand—that is, in the absence of governmental or any other coercive masterminding—then one will possess an absolutely essential ingredient for freedom: a faith in free people. Freedom is impossible without this faith.
Once government has had a monopoly of a creative activity such, for instance, as the delivery of the mails, most individuals will believe that the mails could not be efficiently delivered by men acting freely. And here is the reason: Each one acknowledges that he himself doesn't know how to do all the things incident to mail delivery. He also recognizes that no other individual could do it. These assumptions are correct. No individual possesses enough know-how to perform a nation's mail delivery any more than any individual possesses enough know-how to make a pencil. Now, in the absence of faith in free people—in the unawareness that millions of tiny know-hows would naturally and miraculously form and cooperate to satisfy this necessity—the individual cannot help but reach the erroneous conclusion that mail can be delivered only by governmental "master-minding."
Testimony Galore
If I, Pencil, were the only item that could offer testimony on what men and women can accomplish when free to try, then those with little faith would have a fair case. However, there is testimony galore; it's all about us and on every hand. Mail delivery is exceedingly simple when compared, for instance, to the making of an automobile or a calculating machine or a grain combine or a milling machine or to tens of thousands of other things. Delivery? Why, in this area where men have been left free to try, they deliver the human voice around the world in less than one second; they deliver an event visually and in motion to any person's home when it is happening; they deliver 150 passengers from Seattle to Baltimore in less than four hours; they deliver gas from Texas to one's range or furnace in New York at unbelievably low rates and without subsidy; they deliver each four pounds of oil from the Persian Gulf to our Eastern Seaboard—halfway around the world—for less money than the government charges for delivering a one-ounce letter across the street!
The lesson I have to teach is this: Leave all creative energies uninhibited. Merely organize society to act in harmony with this lesson. Let society's legal apparatus remove all obstacles the best it can. Permit these creative know-hows freely to flow. Have faith that free men and women will respond to the Invisible Hand. This faith will be confirmed. I, Pencil, seemingly simple though I am, offer the miracle of my creation as testimony that this is a practical faith, as practical as the sun, the rain, a cedar tree, the good earth.
It really just makes me realize how utterly disconnected we are from everything we have and from each other. That seems to be one of our huge modern tragedies: disconnection.
Disconnection from:
~People: This is the age of... ipods and cell phones, where you walk on any street and almost everybody is holding up some device to their ears, cutting of any opportunity for real human interaction; of vehicles whizzing past you and your house, and not a clue or care as to who is in them; of computers and televisions and many other machines that replace real human interactions and experiences, real culture and life with some cyber and psuedo reality.
~Nature: I know how often for myself I can drive quickly by the same thing on our street hundreds of times and never notice anything for I am not going slowly enough to notice the beauty, then walk or ride my bike past the exact same things and notice so many beautiful or interesting little things I had never noticed before. How often this happens, and how much beauty and how many little kisses from the Creator am I missing out on just because I am so distracted and so disconnected from nature and ultimately God.
~Necessities/Belongings/Food: If you read the above poem and think, "wow all that just went into that pencil that I used a second ago," then think how much more goes into everything else we own. The clothes on your back, how many people were involved in creating your shirt and getting it to you so that you can wear it today? The chair you are sitting in, how many little pieces are in that thing and how much energy, how many resources, how much labor was used in the production of it? The computer that I am typing this on. This object that I take so much for granted, is marked by how many peoples sweat and labors? Or food! If you open your refrigerator and pull something off the shelf, how many other peoples hands touched it? If you had a bowl of cereal for breakfast, how many lives were involved to get that to your table, so that you could then eat it. First there is the milk, where are the cow/s that produced that milk and who do they belong to? Who milked them? And who ran the machines to process the milk? Then there is the cereal if you have wheat in your cereal, who owned the land? Who planted, and harvested and processed the wheat? Who transported the wheat? Nuts, where and who grew the nuts, who processed them, who transported them from place to place? Oil, who grew the nut, bean, etc. to make the oil from, who was involved in the making and transporting of it. The list goes on with EVERY other ingredient in the cereal. Then finally the combining of all of those ingredients and all of those peoples' labors in to a box ( which people are also involved with,) and then the transportation (which of course uses gas which people had to work for to get out of the ground and processed, and the metal and all the other parts of the vehicle,) to get it to the store at which point you could buy it. Imagine that, all the hundreds, thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of people involved in just one bite of cereal.
And yet how often do we actually care or think about it and them, all those people who exist somewhere in the world right now.
It is very difficult for me to put my mind around all this, and not feel a pang of guilt. Is it really right for me to eat the cereal when all those people, the running of all those factories and therefore pollution, and all those resources, etc. were all used just so I could eat it for breakfast without even acknowledging their existence and labors??? Sure they are paid, but are those nut growers in Brazil, or wheat farmers, or cow milkers really getting paid enough for what they worked hard for, when I only pay a buck and a half for that box of cereal? I honestly don't know! And it just goes to show how truly disconnected we have become from the very things that feed and keep us alive.
~God: Really I think ultimately the worst thing is that it makes us more disconnected from God. The farther away we step from the natural order, and the way He created things to be, the more disconnected we are from Him.
I don't really understand this (which is precisely why I posted, helps me to sort my thoughts I guess, :) and I don't expect anyone, myself included to never eat cereal again, or use a pencil, but I do find that poem very interesting, and I do think this is worth thinking about because it does make us realize our dependence on the sweat of other people and it makes me more grateful for what I do have.
I must say though there is quite an appeal to try and buy things more local. Imagine if your entire bowl of cereal could be traced within a 30-60 mile radius of your house. And because you make your own cereal, you get the wheat from a farmer friend down the road, the nuts from your local almond and pecan orchard, your honey from the beehive a friend has, the oil from melted butter that you got from your local dairy, where you also got your milk. Right, I know this is imaginary thinking, but it does seem so much nobler a breakfast, than that of the one with ingredients from all over the world, produced by people who we had no clue existed.
In the past it was always this way. If the family or person didn't milk the cow, and grow the wheat themselves, they would get it from friends or from the local store that got it from the local people. Before machines there was no way to transport things such far distances as we do now. And people either made it themselves (and therefore had a completely direct connection with it) or got it locally, with the exception of maybe sugar, which was probably extremely expensive anyways.
Why is our culture so completely different now and should it be this way? It all connects back up with disconnection. :)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)