The show ended with Luke thinking that maybe his life wasn't so bad after all,
as he chomped into that apple with full abandon.
Today I'm being glad that at this age I've managed to come down on the Luke
side.
*****
MARS'S NEXT VISIT
My cousin Jeff in Kentucky is as enthusiastic about space
exploration as you can get. After reading my last Newsletter, in which I
referred to this week's close encounter between Earth and Mars, Jeff wrote
saying that he hoped that by the next time Mars comes this close -- over two
centuries from now -- humans will be busily colonizing new worlds.
I just wonder if such will be the
case. In fact, sometimes I think that there may be a universal natural law as
inescapable as E=MC2 that states
this:
When any
evolving lifeform reaches a certain stage of dominance over its fellow creatures,
because that lifeform's dominance will be a consequence of the aggression and
self-centeredness encoded in its genetic heritage, that lifeform enevitably
will destroy its own environment and therefore itself.
Maybe such a universal law doesn't
exist, however. My hopefulness is based on how I feel when my body is in a
steady state, my mind clear, and my thoughts turn to the grandness and beauty
of the things around me -- the bugs, weeds, clouds, compost heap, people...
At those times, which are frequent,
I feel that I enter a state of spirituality, or communion with the Creator,
that empowers me to be more than the sum total of my body's hungers and mental
predispositions. In that state, I drift in the opposite direction to being a
collection of hungers needing to be satisfied.
In fact, maybe there's another law
of nature that states this:
Aggression and
self-centeredness dissipate in direct proportion to the extent to which one
nurtures his or her spirituality.
By the next time Mars rolls around,
whether we're colonizing other worlds or not, maybe we humans will be saying to
one another:
The last time
this happened, back in 2003, we had wars and mindless, ecosystem-shattering
consumerism instead of reverence for the beauty