Cycling – Richard’s Commentary

I find it interesting when Rosemary’s “explorations” line up nicely with mine. It was just a couple of weeks ago that I started publishing a “Friday Poem” from my collection I call “Rhythms and Cycles.” And here’s Rosemary’s post on “Cycling”!

But these aren’t really cycles, are they? In fact Rosemary’s second sentence in her post clarifies her meaning:

Life is a spiraling experience and, when we try to make it linear, going out in front of us in a straight line and looking behind us as if everything happened in a straight line, we diminish the importance of the cycles that we have experienced.

“Life is a spiraling experience.” There is a vector to all of this; it may not be linear but it is clearly going somewhere! At least I think it is despite some of the ridiculous efforts to spiral us backwards!

Rosemary and I took in the Annapolis Film Festival this past weekend. We saw several very fine films and very much enjoyed immersing ourselves in the film industry for a few days. One of the splendid films we saw was “Particle Fever”, a documentary about the building of and science behind the Large Hadron Collider, the largest machine and experiment ever built. Speaking of cycles this machine can whirl protons at one another around a 17-mile circular tunnel at speeds approaching that of light! It’s an amazing accomplishment that the Collider is revealing structures of matter as it existed just after the Big Bang. Watching the film I got a real sense of innovation, progress, discovery and jubilation as humans push through the boundaries of knowledge.

Cycling, spiraling through time to know. Isn’t this what we are here for?

And yet, there are those who want to end science, deny the truths we discover, debate facts with lies when it suits their political goals and supports their financial backers. It is with this in mind, the contrast between those who are spending their lives in the search for truth and those who deny the very benefit of science and our discoveries, that I wrote the following as it pertains to cycles:

Time flows on and everyone floats toward another milestone, whether it’s another birthday, another accomplishment on some schedule, another dream, either achieved or let go. Every moment is a milestone, every breath another passage. And we all flow together in these momentous passages, not just of time and the markers we use, but in consciousness as we develop, in spite of ourselves, the next layers of awareness, micron by micron.

This is the reality, even for the doubters and the protestors. Whether “they” (we) believe in progress or not, whether we believe in science or not, whether we choose to remain in darkness or awaken to the dawning light of ever evolving realization, the inexorable march of time, the entropy of the Universe, the unstoppable building will continue! It cannot be legislated against, it cannot be denied by the most eloquent and articulate oration, it cannot be hidden, no matter how tightly we close our eyes, and minds, to it. The conscious mind is driven. There is a compulsion about this drive for knowledge and expanded consciousness that seems to be built in to our framework, the architecture. The human mind is wired to seek, to understand, to challenge the common and create the new, that next layer of understanding. Let the naysayers bray as loudly as they will. They will continue to make asses of themselves. Their noise will be temporary just as the latest theories, scientific or otherwise, are temporary way-points along the long non-ending journey toward Truth.

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