It’s been very, very cold for a long time. It is not the mariner’s season with its incessant snow, bitter winds and short days. He, too, has a cold that has lingered for weeks. Where are the palm trees, green grass and colorful flowers? He’s asked that before but repeats it for emphasis.

The mariner has conjured a theory that the big brain in Homo sapiens, perceived to be a benefit, is actually a time bomb to manage the population of our species. Butterflies, for Pete’s sake, are smarter than arrogant super-thinkers like Homo sapiens. They know to migrate south when the weather shifts.

The human physiology, a hairless ape adapted to the subtropics, is not very far removed from its fellow creatures on the Serengeti. Other creatures driven north for whatever reason have had an eon or two to adapt to colder zones and in reduced numbers for obvious reasons. Think how long it must have taken the whale to return to the sea. We are young punks who do not know our true limitations. Hence, the time bomb.

That we overcame cold weather that is not our natural habitat is nothing to be proud of. Nature is patient. What goes around comes around. Now Homo sapiens is called the Sixth Extinction. Indeed, there is no question about that as we squeeze more and more creatures out of existence. There are soon to be twelve billion hairless apes roaming over every inch of space on the planet, consuming every resource that can be squeezed from Planet Earth – and having little regard for the trash and global instability left behind, all the while wearing longjohns and snowsuits. However, only with the aid of artificial hides, artificial heat and unnatural methods of transportation have we accomplished this unnatural act.

Nature is patient.

In the grand scheme of things, we are beginning to suffer social breakdown similar to crowded rat experiments performed decades ago. Did we not learn? As the rat culture broke down there was needless greed, theft, rape and deliberate denial of normal rat behavior. Today, it has become more and more necessary for not-so-smart humans to carry a weapon – not only as a deterrent for family and neighborhood violence but just in case the social fabric does indeed collapse. Ask any number of people living in the northwest for fear of their lives.

Did you know our African relatives had fake wars, not real ones?

Nature is a grim reaper. We little smart-assed ants are no match. Even real ants know their place and will survive human Armageddon. Even a world overrun with dinosaurs cannot avoid Nature’s little trick called a meteorite. We should have remained in the subtropics and allow Nature to mind our reality for us. Think how nice it would be to sit under a palm tree, smell the ocean breeze and see the tropical flowers in colorful abundance, with a cocoanut in hand instead of a Mounds bar.

It is a race to the death as humans try to turn themselves into humanoids before their abuses catch up with them.

As for the mariner, he’s going back some day, come what may, to blue bayou…

Ancient Mariner

The mariner has windows in his home. Outside every window is snow. He is a distinct minority among his family, friends and acquaintances. He holds great disdain for snow, sees no use for it and considers it quite a monochrome. Indeed, one must shovel it out of the way, slide uncontrollably on it with an automobile, and he finds snow too cold to be of any comfort. Snow causes heating bills, heart attacks, broken bones and one can die from exposure. Deep enough, it brings functional life to a standstill. In this winter, the mariner has sympathy for those in the south who seldom see snow and find it alien to normal life.

Where are the greens of summer? Where are the reds of flowers and a warm breeze with a blue sky and the hopefulness of a multicolored sunrise? Where are the palm trees and lush bromeliads? Where is that moment when one cannot feel the temperature at all because it is just right as it touches the skin?

The mariner believes that if the human species were limited to a natural state of existence, that is, no clothes, no heated homes, and restricted as other creatures are to a specific habitat, Homo sapiens would exist only between parallel N25° and S25°. For landlubbers, roughly speaking that is a line between Mexico City, Daytona Beach, the Bahamas, the Canary Islands, Saudi Arabia, Bangladesh, and Hong Kong in the northern hemisphere and in the southern hemisphere Asuncion, Paraguay, Rio de Janeiro, Pretoria, South Africa, Shark Bay on the western coast of Australia and Brisbane on the Eastern Coast.

Granted, weather patterns would allow Homo sapiens to be migratory but like the Monarch butterfly, who by atmospheric standards may be smarter than Homo sapiens, returns to warmer climes. How many creatures can you name that are migratory – including life in the oceans? They need not kill other animals for protective clothing; they need not consume great resources to keep warm; they need not invade alien habitats in search of large quantities of food. Homo sapiens is not so wise in its ability to conjure unnatural means of survival that are necessary because the species has moved out of its natural habitat.

All the population issues would have been solved long ago. We may have died as a species, or, more likely, we would have adapted to less abundant procreativity. Other species would have their space on this planet.

Oh well, the mariner dreams of better days. Meanwhile, his wife is out shoveling the walk.

Ancient Mariner

As the mariner thinks about it, the mariner and his wife raised good children. In retrospect, we could not genuinely empathize with their lives. They were growing in their own existential space just as we had experienced the world into which we were born.

Physiologically, the growth patterns were the same as they are for every generation. What blocks our empathy is they are growing in a different world. Our children have a different social environment, a different national impact on their lives, a different interpretation of jobs, a different lifestyle.

When the mariner was 8 years old, he carried furnace ashes to the yard; his mother was bedridden so he washed clothes in a laundry tub with a washboard. The mariner’s public education had no electronics. He was taught cursive writing in two elementary grades. He accepted these things as the world that he had to encompass in some way.

The mariner’s children did not have to carry ashes but the burdens were different. Public schools had a more complex environment. Children were moved around, had pressure to participate in ancillary programs in music, sports, hobby clubs, etc. The mariner’s elementary and middle school had no pressures similar to those of the mariner’s children. The children’s school model was socially more difficult than for the mariner.

The mariner learned the principals of economic ethics at the age of ten. There was a summer reading program at the public Library. He received a headband made of construction paper. For each book he read, he would receive a feather stapled to the headband. If he read enough books, he would receive a strip of paper that would hang down his back like an Indian headdress. Additional feathers were stapled to the strip.

The mariner took a couple of books home to read. About a week later, when he had finished reading them, he returned to the library to find a girl in his class had feathers almost to the floor. He noticed that she was checking very thin children books ten at a time that were returned promptly for more feathers. To the mariner, the principle was to encourage reading – how altruistic. The feathers, a construction paper symbol of personal aggrandizement rather than progress in reading, were more important than actually reading good books. The mariner links this example of ignoring virtue and manipulating a process totally for personal gain to the economic manipulation by banks that caused the recession and the collapse of the housing market.

How did the mariner’s children see this collapse? He learned their worldview is extremely skeptical, even cynical about every element of society. They assume they are on their own; the government, business, banks, whatever, were vultures waiting to pick their bones. The mariner’s children do not believe that Social Security will be around when they are old. the mariner’s children feel they owe nothing to the institutions of our society. To them, it is a make it on your own environment; the social infrastructure is of no use to them.

How different is this experience from the early days of the mariner’s life. There was comfort that institutions would provide jobs and security. The government was not in turmoil as it is today. The government was where one acquired a driver’s license, a marriage license, a Social Security card or joined the armed services. The government was a stable, somewhat helpful entity during the mariner’s younger years. How different the existential experience is for our children compared to the mariner’s experience.

Washing clothes with a washboard doesn’t seem so bad in comparison to the life challenging world of the mariner’s children. Would we old codgers be able to handle the pace of life and the eclectic manner in which jobs are found, or surviving without our pensions?

Ancient Mariner

Do not become excited, these are not government resolutions. It is that time of year, amid Christmastide, when many determine that they have not served themselves well in 2013. Perhaps it is time to feign purpose and motivation that they will be a better model of themselves than in the past. The mariner, it goes without saying, was as fine a model of himself as he will ever be in 2013. At a certain age, older folks get a pass on resolutions.

In lieu of trying to make himself finer than he can be, the mariner looked about to see what resolutions others should make – if not to be finer, at least to be prepared.

Government is easy. Just say “government.” We’ll all understand. The Country is closer to revolution than resolution. The mariner supposes we should make a resolution to stand our ground not against people wearing hoodies or walking in public places but against further damage by compromised and incompetent Federal, State and Local governments.

The other day, a friend of the mariner resolved to assist the South in seceding a second time. Several years ago, another friend said the US would be better off if the northern boundary of the western United States (49^th parallel) just continued straight on to the Atlantic Ocean, implying that such a solution would lop off most of New England. As accepting as he always is, the mariner agreed it would be a good move – not only would the US not lose any territory, it would gain a great chunk of Canada including the mouth of the St. Lawrence River and half of Newfoundland. The mariner received little gratitude for helping. Another friend actually sent emails to all her Federal, State and Local representatives asking them to pass one-term limits for all elected officials.

How does one construct a resolution for government? Probing rational solutions requires walking through a dark wood as frightening as any horror film. Every kind of lurking and vicious creature lies in wait for one who dares tread this mindless darkness of elected creatures and citizen creatures. Some, like lobbyist creatures, are more like the Sirens of Greek mythology who lured sailors to their death on the rocky shore. In Government Land, however, one dies of depression and hopelessness.

The mariner’s recommended resolution: Have your passport ready and your duffel packed. The ship sails any day for better ports.

One is not supposed to talk about politics so we’ll talk about religion. One just as easily could say “religion.” We’ll all understand. There’s little difference. The dark wood is replaced by a wood invisible in dense fog. Some nasty creatures lie in wait – especially those that also lie in wait in the dark wood of politics.

It is more difficult to suggest a resolution about religion. Politics has boundaries similar to a twenty-ton boulder coming down the mountainside to visit you. For many, perhaps the boulder already has arrived. Either way, one can see the shape of the boulder. Religion, on the other hand, is like being lost in an endless swamp in Louisiana. There are so many circular paths that one will never leave the swamp.

Over the centuries, the integration of the Old and New Testament into one Bible at Nicaea has caused the most confusion. The Jews have a special place for the first five books of the Bible (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy – the Pentateuch). The mariner doesn’t intend to be too skeptical but he suspects that’s as far as most Jewish children are taught in religion class – at least that’s the case with Christian children who are taught the Jewish Pentateuch in religion class (on Sundays). Except for the Christmas and Easter stories, the New Testament is unknown to Christian children until they are forced to take a world religions class in college.

Meanwhile, debates about the origin of our species have raged endlessly for more than 150 years. The Christian part, the New Testament, never mentions the issue. Adult Christians should read all of the Pentateuch, which promotes a few severe practices reminiscent of other Middle East religions. One is to stone rebellious children to death but I will not say more in fear of giving away the plot. It is widely known that one cannot eat pig, but gecko? That’s going too far.

Perhaps the resolution for Christians is to start reading the Bible at Luke or Matthew instead of starting at Genesis. There is some important stuff in the New Testament that has nothing to do with creation or stoning children or not eating geckos.

If one cannot talk about politics or religion, then one might try talking about sexual practices or, if the reader is a US citizen, talk about one’s annual income or net worth. The mariner doubts any of these conversations will last long enough to formulate a resolution.

What’s left is gossip. The reader can always resolve to gossip better than in 2013.

Ancient Mariner

The mariner wants to believe that in the distant future knowledge about all things will be available instantly – so that the wisest decisions about life, religion, politics, health, philosophy, science, music, sociology, mathematics, and the world of all arts, will contribute to a better experience for all humanity.

However, for at least the next one hundred years, he has a decreasing belief that knowledge will be important to the person on the street. Many situations raise doubt:

Allowing governments and corporations to think “for” the reader. Personal preferences – not only credit card and banking data but presumptive knowledge about what we will wear, buy, move, die, marry, even when we will divorce – all are in databases owned by others who will leverage that knowledge to limit a reader’s personal choices. Already Google, Microsoft, Amazon.com and most online retailers shape what the reader sees, reducing the reader’s free choice to make informed decisions. Google reads your email to improve product placement.

The government no longer depends on any reader’s unique, single vote. The reader is a quantifiable entity, a mark on a standard deviation table, a phone number. The reader is grouped into a set of opinions that will be dealt with by targeted advertising and speech making all the while passing legislation that will never be vetted by the public.

The public is sated by the easy life. That is the message promoted by those who will own the reader. Who wants to read books? Who wants to dig underneath the surface to see why governments and corporations hide their intent? It takes time and intellectual energy to learn things one is not supposed to know.

Perhaps The Matrix is more revealing about future deception through intellectual repression. The reader unknowingly will lose free will. The mariner sees no urgency on the part of the government to repair the education system that has dropped the nation to twenty-seventh on the list of most educated countries. Knowledge is not as important as greed and power.

Libraries are under duress to find a new role that replaces the old one of rich collections of literature, science, and meaningful fiction. Today, many folks go to libraries to play Internet games (or as the mariner has witnessed, look for jobs). The desire to enrich one’s knowledge of reality or informative fiction is failing – easier to pick from Netflix.

True, there are many who are devoted to their calling, many which will excel in their field. The many are becoming the few. Turn on the Kindle. Highly trained fields often are controlled to keep the demand and expense high for those who leverage education (think medical doctors, sport coaches, CEO’s and tenured professors).

Something has happened to natural inquisitiveness. Do children still look for salamanders or collect tree leaves, spend a part of each day reading, experiment with how the world and its people work? Do adults maintain an informed consciousness about prices, inflation, value for the dollar spent or the dollar saved? Do adults know that salaries have not risen since Reagan while profits have climbed far beyond expectations?

Goodbye, knowledge.

Ancient Mariner

Happy holidays, Readers, even a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

The television schmaltz is actually correct for a change: Relax in any manner you can. Join the spirit of the season. Make room for family in some manner, whether near or far. Prepare a treat you would not ordinarily prepare. Take a day to go somewhere that has been on your list for some time. Visit or call that long lost cousin four states away.

Some of us are alone, ill or incapacitated.  Still, one can find a peaceful spot inside; there is a lifetime of memories if nothing else. A relative of the mariner used to visit the grave of her father and mother some time during the holidays. Christmas is sharing life, memories, joy.

Christmas is not all flash and boxes. The gifts are a metaphor for birth and the life that follows. It is not a time for depression or loneliness; it is a time for self-actualization. No matter how old or alone one is, there is an ability to celebrate one’s unique experiences, finding a satisfied wisdom that younger folks cannot fathom.

Find someone singing Christmas carols. It can be a church service, in the mall, on television or radio. The church carols are timeless and comforting.

Many have feelings of inadequacy when trying to find a gift for someone. When the mariner was in Taiwan, he learned that gifts were given on any occasion, for Chinese New year, Christmas and even a friendly visit. The gifts were not expensive. In fact, many had been passed around before; the wrapping of many was worn. The gift was rarely of significant use. Yet the Taiwanese had mastered the spirit of intent. The presence of the gift was the value – not the gift itself. The mariner once received a single small lotus blossom (invokes wealth in Hindu); another time he received an old doll for his daughter; another time he received a small wooden apple in a tattered box. The spirit is the giving, not the gift.

Many say Christmas is for the children. This is not true. Certainly, there is a parental desire to make the holiday as memorable as possible. However, the gifts will disappear from memory. The gift will be many family Christmases that mature into a blissful memory. If you have children of any age, do they have a chance to help bake cookies? Decorate the house and tree? Get a big Christmas Day hug?

All these thoughts entwine with the birth of Jesus, whose birth is the greatest joy and the core of the Christmas celebration. In celebration of the giving spirit of Jesus, many celebrate the season performing charitable work for shut-ins, for those in institutions, or for the homeless and needy.

Thanks again for being a reader of the blog.

Merry Christmas – tonight, have warm mead or hot chocolate.

Ancient Mariner

The mariner has some years on him – age separates his association with the community at large. This likely has always been true through the generations. Younger generations grant elderly citizens wisdom without proof. In ancient oriental cultures (perhaps even today), an elderly citizen was considered especially important to the community because of the elder’s wisdom. Elderly often were called upon to make judgments about divided opinion. Even a gesture of deference was given by members of the community much as would be given for the Queen of England today.

The mariner suspects this elevated role was important in days when oral tradition prevailed before language could be printed. A lifetime of experience was a valuable thing in an oral culture. Today, the best that can be said for usefulness of the very mature is to remember family ancestry. Ancestry.com can do a better job.

The specific age of supposedly wise status is about seventy-two or three, when the family suspects the old codger (or matriarch) will be around for a while. The codger recognizes quickly that elevation is not what it used to be.

Older folks have learned rules about staying engaged, keep working, keep busy, and, if the wise one has children, grandchildren and great grandchildren around, stay involved with family activities. Further, a valuable asset is old friends, or at least a bunch of otherwise old friends. Keeping the mind alive and the body fit become a daily exercise.

All this is true, of course – unearned wisdom, the tendency to be set aside as life moves on, and the extra effort to remain engaged in life no matter what – but another need for the elderly is growing.

That need is to sustain the virtues of greater good, human rights, common law justice, kindness and other unidentified but critical behaviors that hold a society together.

The mariner often uses the mathematics of chaos to describe the state of affairs today. Chaos is a time when pressure to change the status quo grows in intensity until the status quo fails and a new status quo takes its place. A good example is rising resistance when closing an open latch; at a given point of increasing pressure, the latch suddenly gives way and locks – a new status quo for the latch.

Since about 1970, cultural chaos has grown slowly in intensity and speed. Hindsight provides a trail of increasing stress. The “oil crisis” weaves in and out of our recent history. Oil leads to shortages, quantity manipulation to sustain high prices, wars, and a battleground for world economic supremacy. The financial system of the United States has been brutal in an effort by everyone who can to become richer and richer at any cost until one percent of the population owns forty percent of all stocks and bonds. Agriculture shifted from one family farms to farms equivalent to Walmarts of the countryside, leaving many heritage landowners strewn in its path.

Electronic capability changes by the hour, increasingly wiping out traditional jobs, intruding further into our private lives, and distracting culture from managing its mores.

There is a new role for the elderly. It is a role as hard and demanding as any job in the lifetime of the elderly. That role is to sustain ethics, moral priorities, and to transition high-ground values as our culture moves toward the event horizon that creates a new age. It is the role of the oriental elder – to provide wisdom in an age where printing does not have a defining role.

What is the new role: become politically active; become active in local political and cultural organizations; become an active role model in obvious situations that occur in neighborhoods and communities; detach your progeny from electronic obscurity and insist on engaging other people. Keep a steady keel and hold the rudder on course to higher moral ground even as the waves and wind grow higher.

Often mariner is overcome by metaphors of the sea. However, the course is set: the elderly have a new role to play – advocates of civility.

Ancient Mariner

The mariner finds himself at odds with friends and readers. Primarily, the issue is his effort to reconstitute the side of Christianity that has faded over the decades and centuries. That side is commonly referred to as works, which is doing God’s work as expressed through the Gospels. When one reads the Gospels, indeed the New Testament as a whole, a blatantly obvious responsibility emerges. Not only are Christians required to be nice to people generally, but there is an extra mile of service required for anyone in any kind of need. This service requires person-to-person experience.

There is no intent to deny one’s association with their perception of God or the manner in which one communicates with God. Such things are personal in nature and bound tightly to an individual’s unique life experience.

The mariner will leave the issue.

The mariner presses current social, political, scientific, technical and religious paradigms because a total cultural shift is rapidly approaching. It will affect how we relate to one another, our government, our jobs and pastimes, our ethics, our faith, the Earth and even ourselves.

No one can deny that signs of turmoil are all about us. This turmoil will continue to accelerate to the point that the fabric of everyday life will be altered. Those who are eighty years old have experienced cultural shifts. How did electricity change daily life? The automobile and airplane? Already the train and telegraph had altered one’s awareness of a greater society than once was limited to a one hundred mile radius.

With these additional inventions, and industrial transformation entering society, octogenarians can attest to the experience of a culture-wide paradigm shift – from the crystal radio to satellite communication; from horses to automobiles; from the hand held stereoscope to computer driven viewing devices; from socially isolated awareness to an awareness of differences in race, religion, politics, and the world at large. The mariner knew a farmer who, as an octogenarian, had never been farther than 54 miles from his home and never felt the need to travel that far again. Yet all about him, culture was disassembling and reassembling itself into a new culture that had little resemblance to the old one.

Perhaps the emerging culture will be known and accepted as normal by the generation being born now. They will not have experienced the culture that is passing away at this moment. Perhaps those of us past the age of fifty-five will live out our culture with little modification to who we are or how we deal with the new culture – like the octogenarian.

The mariner’s children, around thirty years old, do not live by the same rules as those over fifty-five. Their eyes see a different reality, a different value for government, work, and social relations. Personal values are visibly different. They struggle with social identity; the future is unknown even five years away. How will they live their lives? They don’t know. They do not have the security of the culture that sustained the lives of older folks. They are adrift as they look for their cultural identity in the midst of the change that whirls about them.

Consequently, for those readers over fifty-five, the mariner’s ranting about apocalypse has little meaning. Blog statistics show most readers are 25-35 years of age. To them he promises that he will continue to tug at the vagaries of culture, the change in religiosity, the danger of not reining in the issues that disrupt fairness, privacy and equality.

The last comment on the insistence of the Gospel call to works is that it is that part of Christian practice that will survive and will be needed badly as we move into the whirling shift.

Ancient Mariner

The mariner is awake at 5:00am. He knows that many readers are up at five but the old mariner usually sleeps until much later. It is still dark and the house is quiet. The mariner’s wife inevitably is dressed for the day before he rises but today she still sleeps. It is an odd experience.

Today, the temperature will rise from freezing to the low fifties. It will be a good day to work in the mariner’s heated shed. Today he will install a chain lift in the ceiling so his 17-foot sailboat can be lifted from its trailer.

The sailboat, named Pogo, has been in dry dock for three years. Pogo needs a lot of work. Most work relates to cleaning and refitting. New sails are at hand, and new lines (ropes to manage the sails). The centerboard needs repair and the stays must be replaced (stays are usually made of plastic covered steel and are used to hold the mast in place).

Pogo is a fine boat to trailer. When the mariner’s family travels hither and yon, pogo can travel to spots where sailing is available. Dams built by the Corps of Engineers on the Des Moines River created recreational lakes in Iowa. These lakes are not round or large so sailing is a limited sport in Iowa.

Pogo will tag along when the mariner’s family visits old friends and family in Maryland and Pennsylvania. The Chesapeake Bay is available for good sailing (and good seafood). Good sailing is available on the Florida Gulf coast and at several spots along the coast to Texas – warm weather sites to wait out the Iowa winter.

A trip to the California coast also provides good sailing. Remember the song “26 miles across the sea, Santa Catalina is waiting for me…” Santa Catalina is one of eight islands in the group. A nice pastime while visiting family in California. Trips to Costa Rica or to the Caribbean Islands require a larger sailboat – actually an RV with sails. Forty-footers provide a nice trip.

It is daylight now. The day is beginning. It is 32°.

Ancient Mariner

The mariner attended a wedding the other day. The entire wedding party (10) was in their late twenties and early thirties. It was not a splashy ceremony; there were no flowers, no tuxedos, and no flamboyance of the kind we are accustomed to seeing. Music was from a CD although a guitarist and soloist performed two numbers.

It was two large families plus a number of guests who made a long trip to the church. The tone of the families and the wedding party was subdued but committed to the couple. They showed contentment that this event was happening but the parents were not exuberant; the grandparents were pleased but quiet. The mariner saw in the eyes of the families a weariness. Weariness not related to the wedding but to strife, to the burden of working class people across a lifetime. There had been divorces in both families.

The mariner is pleased to believe the match is a good one. The marriage will last. He wonders whether our society will let them lead a life of personal growth, financial opportunity, and the chance to feel successful.

Once the wedding was over, everyone relaxed a bit and socialized for a half hour while many took pictures of the wedding participants. The wedding was an event, not a ceremony. The mariner believes, though, that things are better now. Like most weddings, there is a new chapter in the life of the bride and groom – especially for this bride.

Ancient Mariner