I Am Thinking of Sunrises and Sunsets, Time, Technology, Work, and Human Routines. It Was a Telling Monday. And so Sunrises and Sunsets are On My Mind

I had a 14-hour day on Monday that was extra-challenging because schools were on a two-hour delay, and so in -school service was delayed, because the communities we serve had different criteria for their day. They were given the first two hours off, so of course they couldn't meet. 

This, however, gave me opportunity to attend on-campus meetings, which I wouldn't be able to attend if I was able to fulfill my community obligations.

The sunrises, and the sunsets. This is the way of the world, and this has proven time and again, it is the way of nature. Predictability. Reliability. A larger rhythm of time than humans can manage. The rouble is, however, that for this period of time we have very human responsibilities to the work we're hired to do. It is what we were trained to do, worked to do, and fought hard to do.

The Walsh Gallery has an exhibit called "To See This Place: Awakening to Our Common Home." The exhibit includes this photo of a sunrise (sunset) and what appears to be a boat on fire. The same hues from the sun, accompany the burning of an apparatus in the water. It's ecological criticism and all the photographs stimulate such thinking. For me, though, it has me wondering about labor, hard work, our responsibilities to climate change, and the human condition. The routines. The hive work. The life of ants. Our innate mechanisms. The canines in our mouth that make us carnivores.

We're in a paradigm shift of what education means, the importance of knowledge, our historical accuracy, and the scientific reasoning traditions of what we know. The times tipped to opinion, personal gripes, and a further exploitation of the many populations that helped us to get to this point. I honestly don't know what comes next, other than the fact that the sun will rise and the sun will set (for my friends and I, it is also the cycles and predictability of the moon). 

Perhaps, nature's use of human beings is simply to see the best ways we can destroy social order.  I'm a home owner, so I know that nature surpasses my humanity all the time (a storm, a flood, an environmental catastrophe). If humans are part of nature, maybe it's natural then for us to simply destroy what generations and generations have built.

 I'll keep wondering and writing. 

I respect art, democracy, intellectual curiosity, and the passing of knowledge to the next generation. With such natural phenomena, I hope sunrises and sunsets bring them progress and a better tomorrow. 

We are, after all, part of the earth's fabric. This too shall pass.