What’s your bottom line?

The market is once again going to hell. Monkeypox (or whatever less discriminatory name is bestowed upon it) continues to spread. Congress is holding hearings on a recent attempt to overthrow our government and install an autocrat(?), oligarch(?), dictator(?), what? The wind is strong enough to inhibit fly-fishing, or spraying the poison ivy. Although we were scheduled to have a tech work on our water softener today, it got rescheduled to late this month. This weekend and next week are forecast to be unseasonably hot. There are also lots of less important annoyances occurring. A multitude of explanations exist for why I join many others in a less than joyful mood these days.

Then again, the bright side is: we aren’t in a war zone like Ukraine or Palestine or...; we don’t own property along the Yellowstone River (a one-time fantasy). The township is very unlikely to harass us about a failure to mow. Father’s Day is coming up. I have a stack of new (to me) books to read. We have food, water and shelter for the foreseeable future. The family seems to be moderately to reasonably healthy at the moment. On a scale of zero to ten, ten being best, we’d rate our life a ... what? Compared to what or whom?

If you’ve been to a doctor in the past few years, it’s possible you were asked about how painful your “owie” was. Is it possible that more than one scale is needed? One mosquito bite is rarely painful, but the itch can be annoying. Are ten bites painful, or just ten times as annoying as one? At some point does annoyance cross over into pain?

an example of "stability, and beauty of the biotic community"

Photo by J. Harrington

Philosophers have been know to debate how many angels will fit on the head of a pin, thereby explaining the origin of the phrase “pin-headed philosopher.” The Catholic church has twisted a straightforward declarative sentence “Thou shalt not kill.” to accommodate “unless in a just war.” 

Are Liz Cheney and Mike Pence real heroes? Quite likely. Would I have predicted it? No, not in this lifetime. Today is Bloomsday. James Joyce’ masterpiece was not very popular when first published. What literature or scientific theories are unpopular today that may come to be considered classics in twenty five or fifty years?

I’m not making a case for alternate facts here. I’m pondering the multitude of belief systems against which facts can be judged. I’m taking a long-winded way to get back to part of Aldo Leopold’s Land Ethic. Leopold wrote: “Examine each question in terms of what is ethically and esthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient. A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.” Does even this wisdom help us determine if we are, or should be, satisfied or dissatisfied with where we are and the direction in which we’re traveling?

The Journey

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice–
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do–
determined to save
the only life you could save.

–Mary Oliver

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