edits; maybe now done

 

Ode to the Rose

Come, let us talk of the perennial flowering from a family

of thousands of cultivars; forms and shapes

so strikingly dissimilar that as we gained

familiarity with its form,

subdivisions were required for

a diversity unparalleled—

where evolutionary biologists

to this day attempt to answer how

such evolved fruit so contrastingly—

peaches, plums, cherries, berries and more—

from the Latin rosa, through the Persian to the Vedic;

native around the globe, its significance in our cultures

pervades like its scent

the vast majority of our societies.

Leaves borne alternately and pinnate—

leaflets and stipules in serrated margin;

mostly five petaled, some only four;

divided into lobes, sepals beneath petals,

appearing as green points.

All parts edible raw and flush with Vitamin C,

sometimes into jellies, jams, or syrups for tea;

a distinctive flavor used in the world’s cuisine,

candied or turned into creams for confectionery;

used as medicine and in practices of spirituality;

volatile ingredients pressed

for so intimate products as cosmetics to

used as landscape, hedging and utility—

or simply the commercial cut crop kept cool

until ready for display at point of sale;

the name artists know can be found in the rack

or on the shelf—the tint and shade of blood

from a goddess.

Dating to the Late Eocene to Mesopotamia,

its hip with its hundred and fifty or so seeds,

eaten by birds and dispersed, where today's

originate from an Old Blush from 18th-century Asia,

since patronized by an empress from Europe,

propagating collections now becoming innumerable. 

Where gods and goddesses protect the bodies of heroes

with its immortal oil, bedding them among blossoms,

or instructing those transformed to beasts

to eat its petals and return—

ancient history become symbol:

Beauty, bliss, joy, pleasure, love, life, and elegance;

praise, prayer, pride, secrecy, and silence;

wine, wisdom, woman, and worldly success;

charity, martyrdom, mercy, victory and love divine;

“I am true; love me, and you’ll discover it—

yours, heart and soul,” it says

in exchanges on St. Valentine’s Day.

Grace, desire, pure and inclined to love; hope, promise,

reward of virtue, and secret to immortality;

blissful soul, heavenly rejoice of faith;

from fingers of the dawn

to knowledge and law—

signifying truth to Buddhahood.

Window to eternity, are we worthy of you?

A new day, and your best look

inspiring us to be our best.

still figuring out colored carbon pencil

photo

Dear Diary; News From The Front

On a Zoom today with election integrity folks, perhaps important new contacts. Subsequently and on alternate recon, got email reply from Posen and Columbia Law. He likes the idea of a student convention; ruminating reply now. That's Levinson, Lessig, and Chereminsky who have the idea, now Posen. We'll see what happens. In other news my favorite actor had mention in pop culture recently. Really hope she makes a couple more films at least, or if she prefers plays, gets to sink her chompers in there. Even though she was captured in her youth, really hope she gets to be a horse for emotion again.

9x12" colored pencil/bristol

9x12" colored pencil on bristol

Revised Text

 

    The main question for human beings is whether we were created or evolved. If you believe the former, there are explanations for it, and if you believe the latter, there are explanations for it too.

    When most people speak of god it’s based on the idea of omniscience—of knowing all things. An old poem once described looking down from above, and how the greatest experience of all is to obtain the highest vantage of truth—to look upon a situation and see it as it is. The more you know, the higher in the heavens of truth you ascend—or in religious terms—the closer to god you become.

    I was brought up in a family of monotheists—people who believe the things described in the King James Bible—that there’s a god in the heavens looking down, who created Adam and Eve, who ate fruit they weren’t supposed to, and got booted from a garden. Not only do Judeo-Christians know this version of events, but Muslims too, because the exact story is part of the Koran. Meaning, roughly half the people on Earth know the Creation Story as recounted by monotheism.

    In sharp contrast is the Theory of Evolution—single cell organisms evolved into sea animals, which moved onto land, and evolved into apes. For millions of years the physical appearances of these apes remained basically the same until an inexplicable progression occurred where brain mass increased fifty-percent, and our faces became flat while slipping into a hairless, modern anatomy. According to paleontology and archaeology it happened in the blink of an eye—suddenly we looked like movie stars compared to millions of years of monkey-ness. The natural selection and random mutation required to have become what we are today—in so short a period—hasn’t ever been explained. It doesn’t mean science is invalid, just that the theory of how we went from monkey to movie star so immediately, is a mysterious unanswered, and requires faith to believe. The Creation Story and Theory of Evolution both require faith. Whether you believe one or the other, or believe something else altogether, knowing that these two fundamental world-views each require faith is important.

    Most people who know Hebrew accounts in the Old Testament know they took place in the Tigris/Euphrates river valley—Mesopotamia—the cradle of civilization—and in the 1850s waves of scientific expeditions conducted excavations there. The British, French, and Germans brought back tens of thousands of tablets with Sumerian cuneiform writing—script composed of triangles and points pressed and fired into clay. To this day, tens of thousands of these tablets rest in basements of the finest museums around the world.

    Also sitting in a museum is a popular attraction known as the Rosetta Stone; forty-five inches tall, a smooth surface containing three different scripts all saying the same thing. All three in the same place enabled us to unlock the cosmology and records of the Egyptians. Lesser known, but arguably more important, is the Behistun Inscription—fifty feet high, eighty feet across, carved 300 feet up on a limestone cliff—it first came to the attention of the western world in the 1600s when an Englishman on a diplomatic mission through Iran spotted it. Just like the Rosetta Stone it has three different scripts all saying the same thing. One of the three is the Akkadian, root of all Semitic language, including Hebrew. With the Behistun Inscription we were able to unlock the information found on all those fired clay tablets found in Mesopotamia. Up until the 1880s monotheists believed the Creation Story originated through oral tradition amongst rabbis, but in fact, Adam and Eve being banished from Eden, the Tower of Babel, Noah and the Flood—all that and more—are spelled out on the fired, clay tablets. Originally and unedited the Creation Story reads as science-fiction. They record an aristocracy of beings who ruled over a group of lesser beings, who arrived here on Earth a half million years ago, and created humans. Many today know this due to TV programs and the idea of Ancient Aliens—the idea that another race of beings create us and our civilization.

    As it happened, in this original version of the Creation Story, the leaders of the expedition were brothers—Enlil the commander and Enki the chief officer. Enlil and Enki were their names in the original version but have altered over the centuries. Through time Enlil and Enki became Zeus and Prometheus to the Greeks and Romans—Yahweh and Lucifer to Judeo-Christians—and Allah and Satan to Muslims. E1 outranks E2, just like Zeus outranks Prometheus, Yahweh outranks Lucifer, and Allah outranks Satan.

    At some point E1 and E2 decide to create a worker—“Let us create them in our image….” The first male and female spent each day in a garden with the lesser gods—“angels”—and at an appointed hour—fly up to heave—to “god”—while Adam and Eve are left alone to watch over a portion of garden. This went on for some time until one day E2 stayed behind at the appointed hour everyone else went up to visit E1, and finds the female human in her part of the garden. “Is it true E1 said you shall not taste of every tree in the garden?” he asks her.

    “We can eat of others,” she replied, “but of the one, we shall not taste, or we will die.”

    “You will not die, but that on the day you taste of it you shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.”

    Later that evening, E1 comes down to Earth to stroll the garden and Adam and Eve hide. He asks why and they say they’re ashamed because they went against his command and tasted the fruit they were told not to. E1 banishes them from the garden, telling the lesser gods, “For behold, if they eat of the Tree of Life, they will live and endure forever.”

    Sometime after we leave the garden and begin to multiply by the sweat of our brows, some of the lesser gods take an interest and start getting it on with us—“The sons of God saw the daughters of men were fair.” E1 then ruled the experiment terminated, humanity to be exterminated by catastrophe, and no god alert us to the pending event. E1 found the most righteous guy he could and told him he had to get his family together and build a boat.

    The question comes to mind—why would the E1 character create a worker, tell it not to eat something, then leave it alone with that very thing each day? Isn’t placing newly minted humans in proximity to something that would alter their consciousness tantamount to child endangerment? And isn’t it an injustice to punish Adam and Eve when they had no intention of going against the original command to begin with? They were blissed-out, enjoying the garden—it was E2 that suggested the fruit to us like candy to a child. We not only get set up the temptation, but blamed for an action out of innocence. In addition to that, E1 lied, because eating of the tree did not kill us, it only made some gods jealous we might become more righteous than our creators.

    The ancient semitic peoples all wrote that the Sumerians were the first writers and where they learned. Unless you believe those civilizations lied about where they learned, and believe the Sumerians lied about where they learned, then you realize the historic record, in the form of fired clay tablets, shows that at some point in the past, humans were taught to write. Which means we’re not alone and didn’t get where we are as a civilization without intervention by other beings. The question is: are they still here or gone? If still here, evidence shows they’re keeping a political charade in place in order to obscure their presence. If they’re gone, and another race of sapient beings happened upon us, then they’re keeping the political charade in place. Or lastly, if gone and no other specie has happened upon us, then the current state of affairs is nothing but a class of humans keeping the political charade in place, with the rest of us enslaved.

    Supposing we were freed from the charade, would we not master genetics and live lives hundreds of years long? Would we not reach a mastery of the physical universe and travel the stars? Of course we would, and of all the creatures in the cosmos with the ability to remember the past, consider the present, and imagine the future—to know, reflect and create—means all sapient species have a seat at that same table.

    So why is the E1 jealous? Why care if humans know the difference between good and evil? Why care if humans lived longer? Is there an actual threat or is it a form of cosmic pettiness? Maybe Earth really is unique in its visual appeal, special in its climes, and alongside other planets, a paradise. And there’s only so much room, and the creators need to keep a lid on things? If humans created a worker for ourselves, and there were limited resources, we’d argue it’s our right to prevent our worker from overcoming us—the same way if you had pets, you wouldn’t let them destroy the furniture and eat you out of house and home.

    The problem with why our creators have to keep a lid on us—is best framed by the history of energy, figured out fair and square by Nikola Tesla—tapping lay lines of Earth and manipulating vibrational frequencies into unlimited electrical energy. Go to archives of national newspapers and periodicals, and Tesla’s autobiography, and you realize this is the truth, the bankers put Edison in place, and when he finally died in The New Yorker Hotel, US Government agents removed all his papers and they’ve never seen the light of day since.