Ancient recycling

Somehow the winter and spring of this year moved faster than my normal cruise control, and time eluded me.  But when I found this picture again today, I had to write about it.

Recycling benefits are sometimes surprising.

There was an excellent exhibit at the Walter's Art Gallery back at the end of 2011.  Ostensibly it was about the recovery of a long lost work of Archimedes, and the amazing tools and techniques that the Walter's had used to recover an ancient work of classic mathematics.  The story of that recovery, of how the Walter's came to have the work, puts the stories of Indiana Jones to shame.  Suffice to say it involved ancient empires, isolated monasteries, world war, and discoveries found and lost and found again.

Recycling, surprisingly, was key.  The Archimedes text was copied by some unheralded scribe on parchment.  Centuries later, that valuable material was recycled...and reused for a prayer book.  It was done by scrapping the ink off the parchment and writing over the now blank pages.  Except they weren't totally blank, because imprints and materials were left from the original writing.  It was those images that were recovered.... the Archimedes Codex. 

It was recycling, the reuse of the original parchment, that saved the work.  Given the chaos of centuries of secular and religious strife in the Levant and Near East, reams of works from antiquity were destroyed and disappeared.  Yet small islands of refuge existed in the monasteries.  And in one, hidden in a book saved for prayers thought to be the only thing on it, lay Archimedes' great work.  It would have been lost if it had been only a copy of mathematics, if it had not been thought to be a book of prayer.   A prayer book worth saving from ravages and destruction and extinction when a math text would not have been.  A classic saved.......through the ancient recycling of the parchment.

Grace Gap

We seem as a society, and individually, to be laboring under a massive gap in grace.  What is it about current society that brings us to such a deficiency?


I've been thinking of this as a result of an editorial that Gene Weingarten wrote recently about a tragedy involving a child dying in a car.  The event he wrote about was clearly an unfathomably tragic accident.  Yet, the vituperatives hurled at the family were unbelievable.  In trying to understand this, he referred to psychologists who report that "Deep down, people understand that all lives are fragile, that we are all capable of momentary mistakes or misjudgments that could destroy us. We don’t want to face this terrifying fact. So we must convince ourselves that the people to whom it happens are unlike us. To sustain our delusion of safety, we must make them monsters."  So our own vulnerability drives us to demonize others.

I wonder if the trend towards zero tolerance policies for drugs, weapons, and actions isn't the flip side of the same problem.  Students expelled and suspended for even accidental events (forgetting they had aspirin in the purse, a table knife in the lunch bag to cut an apple, a key-chain knife to cut lacrosse strings, a pocket lighter defined as explosive device) that should be able to be handled in an easier, more humane manner.  Could it be the same fear of mistakes and misjudgments that says no rational approach (or oxymoronic "common sense") can be applied? 

I find it difficult to apply grace in my life, but I am learning.  Perhaps it is because I am aware of my own limits, my own failures, my own misjudgments that could/have damaged me that I am beginning to extend grace to others. 

Now if I could learn to extend it to myself.

Green and White

Lush and green
grass filled field

Full and supple,
rich and verdant

Gently waving
wind driven ripples

Undulating surface
interrupted
broken
dotted 

Stark white bodies
partially visible
fresh and clean
newly shorn
Sheep

On a blue spring day

Connection missed, communication not made

One night,
an encounter, a chance
observed not made.

Father and young son
after the game.
Time alone,
a chance to bond
man to boy, man to man
life to life.

A father's friend
"Hi" and stops
and talks,
and talks......and talks.
Intruding on their time
destroying this time.

The son turns away
gradually, slowly,
finally totally.
Back turned completely,
facing away from both.
First ignored, now ignoring.

A connection time missed,
a chance blown
to speak to his heart
to influence his life
to spend time
now gone.

lost

Pedistrian thoughts

The article that caught my attention was about walking, and how we don't do it. 

 

And it's true, even for me.  I don't walk to places.  Oh I walk, but just for the exercise (hmmm...."just" for the exercise, as though that isn't enough?  I'll have to think about that one).  I enjoy volksmarching, the German import of casual planned walks along a paths some group has set up. My 10km walks last about 90 minutes, which is a 15 minute mile if you're wondering.  So why don't I walk for function, for errands, for another purpose?  I did when I was in Boston; in fact, I lived there without a car.  So what's different?

I think it is the layout, the options, and the distance.

Even as pathway friendly a place as here is, there is a problem with the layout of the paths.  We have two types.  One are the trails rambling through the various communities, popping up beside houses and apartments, trails designed for nature walks in the woods around the developments.  While beautiful for enjoying nature, they are not as useful for getting TO someplace, like a grocery store, or a dry cleaner...because they are laid out only within the residential areas.  Interestingly, in snow, they are more likely to be clear than sidewalks!  The other type of path is the functional, stereotypical sidewalk.  Yet frequently sidewalks to the destinations are partial thoughts with gaps in them, or difficult road crossings or a lack of safe lighting.  

There is a problem with the distances that plays in as well.  I live near two grocery stores, both just over a mile away (in opposite directions).  But there is nothing between me and them other than houses...no other shops, no other things to do, no options for additional errands.  Just cars zipping along.  Do I want to carry a weeks worth of groceries in a backpack back a mile? A few blocks is one thing, a mile plus is quite another.

In Boston, I lived at least a mile and a half from the shopping in the downtown area, and yet walking was no problem.  There were things to do on the way, things to see. A meal to grab, a view to savor, people to watch.  Public transportation that I could use if I over-shopped.  As a result of all of this, I walked.  And walked and walked.  I walked everywhere.

I'm not sure that other than in cities, we can retrofit existing places to be walker friendly.  But we really need to plan on walking as well as driving for new developments. Destinations within a reasonable distance, safe lighting, access across major roads. 

It'd be nice to help encourage pedestrian people :)