The above photo was taken this week at dusk. It is the photo of the week.
Positive events of the week:
I’ve been enjoying live soccer games. It is great to see the families including some from my own coming together and celebrating their young girls, and watching them have a great time. Although last game of the season, last Sunday’s game had an extra special finale. Minutes after the game ended, a bald eagle few over the field from the north, circled a couple of times delighting all the people then drifted to the south.
Although the majestic bird is tiny and a little blurry below, I was grateful he/she was included in the frames at all. I couldn’t see the bird through the viewfinder.
Another positive regarding this week is my health. My body is still adjusting from my attempt up the Manitou Incline weeks ago. Bed time which used to be 9 or 10pm has been 7:30 or 8:00pm lately. Muscle groups that had been dormant have been letting me know with no ambiguity that they are alive and feeling the tingling of use, sometimes in painful ways. It feels like a good pain though, the increased activity and tougher workouts is leading to greater strength and energy over time so I don’t mind it.
Negative events of the week:
I received a traffic ticket through the mail which as fate would have it was issued on my birthday, (10/13/23.) I received it this week. On the day I went to Denver for the Parkinson’s charity walk, I was traveling before the sunrise in the early morning October 8 through the Colorado Springs streets. My intention was to turn left on a yellow light. I misjudged by about 7 feet and turned left on a red light. The photos taken from the cameras were interesting. Here are two of them. There were two others, one which caught my license plate number.
I suspected I was going to get a ticket because all of the robots on poles, started flashing and turning their lenses in my direction. I was impressed as to how many of them there were, all spinning in unison. I plan to pay the ticket before the due date since I know the little twirling robots are right.
The other negative event recently was, I was separated from my wallet somehow as I was leaving for work one morning. My best guess is I laid the bag with the wallet on the pavement when loading my car and then that bag didn’t make it in to the car. Two hours after that, someone tried to use one of the cards at a Kum and Go a few blocks from my apartment. I was at work by this time.
Long story short, two bank accounts, five cards, and a drivers license all needed to be canceled and changed, then all my creditors linked to the new accounts. It is mostly restored now. I called in a report to the police since a card was used and talked with a friendly officer. I don’t know if anything came of it, and told her I didn’t expect the bag or wallet back. I just wanted them to know for their statistics.
Back to positive events:
Above are two images taken this month in the early morning 4am-5:30am. For a short time the moon traveled in an arc toward the mountain then disappeared behind it outside my bedroom window. For the next few nights, it took the same arc only farther to the right each time. Also, I was waking up early in the morning and glancing out the window which doesn’t usually happen.
Of course, half asleep or not, the first thing I think is grab the camera. It is hard to take pictures of the moon with the iphone camera but I enjoyed the images. Yes, there is a parallel to the cover of Eva’s Journey, but I have been moon and star obsessed since long before I created the cover. Astronomy is fascinating once you are exposed to it at a depth that you REALLY GET that we are a round rock floating in a void of nothing surrounded by millions of other celestial bodies.
I think my ah-ha moment was college age with friends who traveled to a high point in the rocky mountains of the continental divide one summer. That night I had never seen so many stars. I have never seen them since. It was like a veil was lifted and I was looking deep into the cosmos. Checking out dark sky parks in Colorado (or anywhere) is well worth the trip. Books of Carl Sagan and a non-fiction Isaac Asimov book, and an astronomy class fueled the interest.
It is fascinating from a scientific perspective, but it is also consciousness broadening if you allow it to be. How serious is this little problem of this one little human in this one point of time when we are all floating on a rock in a void of nothing surrounded by millions of other celestial bodies?
In the broader sense, how important are the little struggles that humans create with each other? All we have is this one round rock. That is it, and miraculously, at least for right now, everything we need to get along and coexist with each other is on this one little rock we have. Nature regenerates, conscious people cherish it, and bombs blow it up. Maybe if every human got that… deeply got that, we’d have different collective priorities.
I think most people do get that. They arrive to the belief that life is precious. Some would call it sacred. Nation states and violent groups who’ve lost perspective play dangerous chess games, but ordinary people carry the torch of consciousness in this world. They have so many to love and so much to experience. Collectively, they form an enormous reservoir of peace. It is in the numbers of ordinary people where I place my heart and place my hope.