Sometimes organisms make things easy for each other
‘[Fungi] are often completely essential to the trees they form a relationship with, and can even pass nutrients from one plant to another. This is yet another example of how the ‘red in tooth and claw’ picture of the living world is only one side of the story. Cooperation is every bit as important as competition. It is thought that fungi helped plants to transition onto land, and that in fact nearly every major transition in the evolution of living things involved a new type of cooperation. In other words, in the struggle for survival, a bit of snuggling is often needed.‘
Quoted from Ruth Bancewicz’s Science and faith blog — always worth a read.
This blog argues the virtues of slowing down, and it tries to frame the argument as part of Christian discipleship.
How to square the two? The Apostle Paul, for example, did not appear to slow down in later life, take it easy, pick up a hobby or two. A busy friend of mine grumbled that his (retired) wife wanted him to ‘go to garden centres in the afternoons’. He would rather be pressing on with work.
Yet there is a Biblical metaphor for slowing down: it’s called ‘pruning’ and makes its appearance as those familiar with the Bible will know, in John chapter 15. It makes sense as slowing down. My apple tree is in full blossom at the moment. If the bees get busy, soon it will sprout loads of fruit, baby apples. Some will fall off of their own accord. But some I ought to take off. I remove some fruit to make the best fruit. I cut down its fruitful options to make it put its strength into just making good fruit.
My tomatoes at the moment are hopeful little seedlings poking out of a flower pot. When they are bigger, I will pinch off the top so they stop growing. I will nip out some of their fruitful options. They won’t reach the sky. But they will make good tomatoes.
I wrote to a friend the other day about the joys of the third age: house paid for, kids flown, perhaps free to choose your fruiful work for now–at least until or unless other circumstances overtake you.
I think God kept pruning the Apostle Paul and slowing him down by throwing him in jail. This is best avoided. Cut down, slow down, fill your best fruit.
My other site (glennmyers.info) is mostly about my comic fiction. Here’s where I try to do what slowmission.com only talks about: writing books about big stuff using a genre I love.
Red letter day for me, then: a new title coming out on May 10th.
Here’s the announcement:
After many metal-bashing months in the factory
It’s done
The Sump of Lost Dreams
is the third book in my comic fiction series that began with Paradise and continued with The Wheels of the World
each uses comedy, fantasy and storytelling to say things about Life, the Universe and Everything
Published on May 10th, price £1.99 as a download or £8.99 for the paperback
There’s even a helpful prologue for those who may have slightly forgotten what is going on
I’d like to offer slowmission.com readers a free download of this title. Just go here:
[otw_shortcode_button href=”https://dl.bookfunnel.com/jstkowmiek” size=”medium” icon_position=”right” shape=”round” color_class=”otw-greenish” target=”_blank”]The Sump of Lost Dreams[/otw_shortcode_button]
If you can review the book on Amazon or similar — wonderful
Offer ends May 10th — when the book is published
The first book in the series is permanently free on Amazon and iBooks and all good internet bookstores.
Eternal, unchanging, omnipresent? That’s true of maths as well as of God.
Do you need a Universe for maths to exist in? I don’t think so. Do you need a moment for maths to exist in? Er, don’t think so either. Time can flicker away, stop, start, accelerate, slow down, be intermittent, go backwards and maths would continue its brute existence.
All you need for maths to exist is a single idea, ‘logic’. Once you have the idea of logic, all possible maths is both inevitable and necessary. I don’t think, for example, you need beings to think mathematical thoughts, or a Universe to write them down in. Every number, every infinity, every theorem, every possible consequence of every possible set of axioms must eternally exist in its complete perfection quite apart from this universe of time and space.
Nothing exists before Maths, and nothing can exist that is in some sense post-Maths, because Maths is a different order of a thing than Creation or Time. Maths does not create itself, slowly building itself, like Creation might. In its unchanging totality Maths cannot not exist, and it cannot not exist regardless of whether it is being observed, or whether there is or isn’t a universe.
So maths is eternal, unchanging, omnipresent and necessary.
The ontological ‘proof’ of the existence of God is a cousin to this proof in that it also talks about God being necessary. Most days, when I try, I do not understand the Ontological Argument. Occasionally I think I get an understanding glimpse of it, but then the clouds roll over again.
But that fact that I know of something that is infinite, eternal, unchanging, perfect, complete, omnipresent and necessary–Maths–makes me think that ‘proofs’ like the Ontological Argument may (as apparently even Bertrand Russell admitted) ‘have some legs’.
(If you want to wade into the Ontological Argument, try here.)
My blog’s theme, thought of by someone else and expressed better
Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything
to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way to something
unknown, something new.
And yet it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through
some stages of instability—
and that it may take a very long time.
And so I think it is with you;
your ideas mature gradually—let them grow,
let them shape themselves, without undue haste.
Don’t try to force them on,
as though you could be today what time
(that is to say, grace and circumstances
acting on your own good will)
will make of you tomorrow.
Only God could say what this new spirit
gradually forming within you will be.
Give Our Lord the benefit of believing
that his hand is leading you,
and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself
in suspense and incomplete.” Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Some years just stick out in the cultural memory. 1812. 1914. 1945.
How about 2007?
The idea that ‘the future is here, it is just unevenly distributed’? Thomas L Friedman in his book Thank you for being late seems also to suggest that 2007 was the year the future started to get distributed.
This is also so scarily not-that-long-ago, as history goes, that I remember lots of it.
Late 2006: Google bought YouTube
Late 2006: the Internet had more than 1 bn users for the first time
Sept 2006: Facebook, previously just for students, was opened to the world
Jan 9 2007 at the Moscone Centre in San Francisco, Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone to the world: I remember watching the preasentation on my mac.
2007 Twitter spun off from an earlier startup and started to scale globally. I remember joining Twitter shortly afterwards courtesy of the Guardian’s Tech Weekly podcast — and finding nothing going on, came off again.
2007 AT&T found a way to use software to expand its capacity. Its throughput of data increased 100,000% (in Friedman’s words) between Jan 2007 and December 2014
2007 Amazon released the Kindle.
2007: Google launched Android.
Spotify (though Friedman doesn’t mention it here) started in late 2008.
Of course other dates in 2007 may also make a mark on history:
Bulgaria and Romania join the EU, marking (in the light of future events) its maximum extent?
BNP Paribas blocked withdrawals by three hedge funds that were drowning in sub-prime mortgages, triggering the financial crisis.
(And there was a school shooting in the US, only a couple of dozen dead, not news at all.)
Am enjoying Thomas L Friedman’s Thank You for Being Late which, at root, only tells us the boring story that the world is changing fast and how to adapt to it. What makes Friedman’s book interesting is his observation of how fast it is changing, and the thought that many things (laws, culture, life) have not caught up. Being a three-time Pulitzer prize winner, Friedman has some great examples too. Here’s one.
Lawrence (Larry) Summers, was a treasury official in the US. In 1988 — just 30 years ago — he was campaigning for the ill-fated Michael Dukakis and was picked up at the airport in a car with a phone in it. He was so excited that he used it to phone his wife and tell her.
Just nine years later, as deputy health secretary, Summers visited Cote d’Ivoire to open a village health care project that had been funded by American aid money. The village was remote enough for him to do the last part of the journey by canoe. As he was getting into the canoe for journey home, someone handed him a phone saying ‘Washington has a question for you.’ The world had gone from a carphone being an exotic luxury to a phone in every canoe in just nine years.
Thomas L Friedman’s stimulating book ‘Thank you for being late’ reminds us that the Holocene era, an era of unusual stability, has lasted just the last 11,500 years or roughly the same time we’ve had farms and civilisation.
Can we ourselves disturb this happy Holocene stability? It seems we can. Friedman summarizes eight different ways we may be inducing planetary organ failure, based on work by Rockstrom, Steffen and others in Science on Feb 13 2015:
Climate church – already reached Holocene-rocking levels (they claim)
Loss of biodiversity -ditto
Deforestation – ditto
Then he lists four more that his source considers within safe levels, but only just:
Ocean acidification
Freshwater use
Atmospheric aerosol loading (diesel particulates and whatnot)
Introduction of novel entities (plastics, nuclear waste etc)
Finally one example of where we did breach safe levels but are now retreating back to safety: stratospheric ozone.
A useful summary, then, of the big main environmental issues. Human civilisation has only thrived in the Holocene bubble. Will we pop it, a DIY apocalypse? Or will we seek God for our ‘daily bread’ and manage to preserve our species and our planet for further adventures?
Lovely quote from Simon Sebag Montefiere in his endlessly interesting book Jerusalem – the biography.
‘Dyophysites fought their Monophysite protagonists in the imperial palaces and in the back streets of Jerusalem and Constantinople with all the violence and hatred of christological football hooligans’ (p189).
Here are some Himalayas: Rembrandt’s Return of the Prodigal Son. Handel’s Messiah. Milton’s Paradise Lost.
Here are some Alps: Marilynne Robinson’s trilogy of novels: Gilead; Home; Lila.
Here are some Lake District peaks: C S Lewis’ Narnia books.
Then there’s a long plain, and finally a crowd of dumpy little things, masses of them. What the dumpy things lack in altitude (and aptitude), they at least share in attitude with the great peaks. They want to do artistic things with Christian truth. It’s the art of the perfumer, done well or badly.
I don’t think there’s enough of this. Evangelicals–I am one–can be a menace with the gospel, painting it on the side of buses, delivering it without thought of context, speaking without listening or thinking. Nothing subtle, gentle, artistic, beautiful or even fun. (At the worst.)
Just finished the third book in what is probably a trilogy of comic fiction novels. It’s called the Sump of Lost Dreams and will be out soon, joining Paradise and The Wheels of the World, comic fiction, dumpy stuff, fun though. Out soon.
I’m also redoing the covers of the first two titles to match – coming soon:
