Friday Thinking - 7-7-2023

Friday Thinking, is a playful reflection of the week's pondering moments. 

It is dedicated to illuminating that the next tomorrow won't be like today's yesterday. 

I've been reading a couple of science-fiction novels lately. 'The Doors of Eden' (2020) by Adrian Tchaikovsky and 'Star Maker' (1937) by Olaf Stapleton - almost a century separates their publication and it's hard to say which is a better account of the 'living possibilities' of vast time-spaces. 

This quote from Olaf Stapleton:

Star-Maker - p.224

We should not for a moment consider even our best-established knowledge of existence as true. It is awareness only of the colours that our own vision paints on the film of one bubble in one strand of foam on the ocean of being. 

The sense of the fated incompleteness of all creatures and of all their achievements gave to the Galactic society of Worlds a charm, a sanctity, as of some short-lived and delicate flower. 

And it was with an increasing sense of precarious beauty that we ourselves were now learning to regard the far-flung utopia.

And if we could apprehend our uncertainties. In a way that comprehends our actual context of infinite possibilities, even if we limit our imagination to a concept of a linear-plane of an unfolding. We may come to perceive how indeterminant any existence is. 

and finally -

the comprehension -

of the sanctity -

of life -

that arises -

with the apprehension -

of its precarity -

[#micropoem](https://twitter.com/hashtag/micropoem?src=hashtag_click) 

And it is this indeterminacy, this precarity to change - transformation - that is 'the sacred' of life. No matter the scale with which we measure. Any moment of glimpsing - life's fractals of fragility and our wistful ifs of memory - reveal the form of the sacred. 

This re-calls to my mind Octavia Butler's 'Parable of the Sower' - and her visioning of 'God is Change and we can Shape Change'. Change is irrevocable, implacable, inevitable, unpredictable - and we have agency enough to nudge affordances - to shape experiences. And it is this 'choice-making will' that affords us - the nudging.  Of a god - that is not a god - and without a god - the force of a sanctity that is a secular illumination for re-linking a-part to what is beyond parting. 

To end this moment of pondering, I want to contextualize it with another recent science fiction - 'The Ministry For The Future' by Kim Stanley Robinson. This is a magnificent work. Everyone should read it.

Everyone should read all the books I've mentioned.

Ministry For The Future illuminates the essence of the challenge of climate change for humans. For us it is a crisis of consciousness - to grasp and embody the reality that we humans - are one species, on one planet (or ultimately in one solar system, one galaxy - turtles all the way). 

A paradox of a secular raising of consciousness of the sanctity of our fragile life. 

mhm