Moving Days

I recently heard an environmentalist say that the best thing we can do for the earth is to "stay at home." We travel a lot, move around a lot, burn up energy in both cases. Humans are restless, curious creatures and desire to see new landscapes, harbour an urge to nest in a new tree, long to engage with new people.

Friends just moved to town. At 70+, this is their second home location in a lifetime. Agnes and I have received mail in about 30 places in ours! I wonder if we qualify in the psycho-medical world for some kind of condition that may sometime have a name: "compulsive-obsessive dislocation syndrome" or something.

Thursday's our relocation day to a house that at this moment has no front porch . . . but will by then. Moving is anxiety-producing, of course, as is all relocation/disclocation. I imagine the decision to stay or move is always a balance between two impulses (rest in the old, venture into the new) that tips one way or the other from time to time.

Creation is now

encordat

There’s evidence that humankind as we now see it—on the streets, in the stands at football games, in the pews on a Sunday morning—is an evolving life form. Imagine trying to explain the workings of an Ipod to a Neanderthal or early Homo Sapien, watching him scratch his head with a hairy finger. Our average size and our brain capacity have been increasing gradually over the nearly 200,000 years of our [Homo Sapien] presence on earth.

Normally—when you can see where a phenomenon began and how it has progressed—you can make a tentative prediction on where it is headed. If we begin with a man in a cave with a club and spear, cowering against the cold under animal hides, and track the progression in sophistication to the moon landing of Neil Armstrong, what is the potential in humankind given another 100,000 years of evolution? (This assumes, of course, that there won’t be an extinction event meanwhile.) Will the moon rocket and the Ipod appear as primitive to future humans as club and spear do to us?

Whatever the nature and physical structure of humans in the future, it’s not a big leap to the assertion that he/she is currently being created. Obviously, then, we represent a stage in that creation, and not an end-point. We are, we would hope, co-creators of a better human, one who can finally grasp the futility of material accumulation and warfare, who lives the codependence of all of the Creator’s creatures, and with the skills necessary to manage the earth’s resources so that all are beneficiaries of her largesse. One who possesses a Creator consciousness, is imbued with the “Holy Spirit.”

We are either co-creators with The Creator, consumers simply feeding on what’s been provided, or vandals wrecking and wasting what has been achieved so far. And if we can’t grasp the big picture yet, we ought at least to recognize the creative role we play vis-à-vis our children . . . and their futures.