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From Mensagenda - August 2005
Blue River
by Ray Voet
Survival: The Anvil
In weather, observing a cumulo-nimbus capillatus cloud, with
the characteristic anvil-shaped upper portion or thunderhead, at a height of 0
to 2,000 meters, one awaits the sound of Thor forging with his hammer at his
anvil, as thunder soon rolls across the earth.
In the century XXI (21), year MMV (2005), we hear the
collapse of air after a 30,000 K (Kelvin temperature) electric lightning
discharge of up to 30,000 amperes, which has given the wonderment of a catalyst
that fixes the nitrogen in the air into oxides of nitrogen, needed as fertilizer
for plants and to make amino acids for protein.
The stories and speculations in folklore are many, with storm
gods Zeus and Jupiter, Wakan of the Dakota, Iko of the Maori, and Jehovah of the
Old Testament providing then-logical explanations to describe what may be
fearsome or miraculous. The stories are true in the traditions of the various
peoples of the Earth. We call them myths. Today we measure, photograph, study,
and use instruments to provide a rational, empirical, scientific understanding
of what we believe we perceive.
Henry Corbin, who studied religion, wrote, "What is
wrong with the ... world is that it has destroyed its images, and without these
images that are so rich and so full in its tradition, they are going crazy
because they have no containers for their extraordinary imaginative power."
In A Blue Fire by James Hillman: "We need the mythology and the
legends to enable us to adapt to the external world, using aesthetics, the soul,
imagination to adapt to the external world, which is alive, but considered dead
by those who deny the traditions of the world, — no color, no taste, no
texture, no temperature — and for some, the denial of existence of reality if
mankind is not there to perceive it."
Many people are afraid of the legends, the stories, the
fables. They may be considered dangerous or satanic. There is no place for them
in our modern enlightened(?) world. Yet they may be real in a different
perspective. The Mother Goose stories of Jack and Jill, Jack Sprat, Jack Horner,
and others relate to the politics and edicts of King Hank the 8th. They need to
be told as originally related to the English populace to describe the misdeeds
of the royalty and others. Other folk tales were used to teach, to explain, and
to keep wayward children, youth, and adults in proper line.
For others the myths are metaphors giving imagination the
means to understand. Yet the beauty of the myth must be understood as a myth. We
need mentors, grandparents, storytellers to relate the tales told and to explain
their relevance and meaning as/to the legends of humanity.
President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, speaking to the graduating
class of Yale University on June 11, 1962: "For the great enemy of truth is
very often not the lie — deliberate, contrived, and dishonest, but the myth
— persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the
clichés of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of
interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of
thought." (Minneapolis Star/Tribune, June 13, 2005, Commentary by
Jack Uldrich, author, former chair of Independence Party.)
"The question is not what you look at, but what you see." —Henry
David Thoreau.
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