Thought for the Day

A responsible person does not take on more than She or he can handle.

Pondering Peru

There are two ways to learn: like a carnivore, tearing off great chunks of knowledge and gulping them down; or like an herbivore, chewing slowly and deliberately and ruminating at great length.

Lately I favor the latter. I like to take one concept, even a sentence or a word, and mull over it all day, while I am driving or waiting somewhere, not forced to use my brain for something else.

Today it was this:

Callejon de Huaylas.

To any knowledgeable Peruvian, it is probably quite familiar. To me, it was unknown until Marie Arana wrote of this place in the October National Geographic, as part of Her lucid and beautiful essay on the great South American continent.

Callejon de Huaylas, She writes, is a verdant canyon that cuts through two mountain ridges ... and is the cradle of one of the earliest known civilizations of Peru, the Chavin.

If I had a magic lamp, I might be a nice guy and wish for world peace but I would also wish for a thousand years of life and a wallet that never emptied, so that I could travel to every country in the world, from the tundra to the burning desert and see every city, every forest, every beach, every mountain and every canyon.

I would walk through Callejon de Huaylas, too, and meditate on the Chavin, and enjoy the South American sunshine on my face.

Above is that beautiful place, from enjoyperu.com

A Thought is Born

In the warm darkness, sheltered beneath a lid of bone, nourished by a salty soup, a collection of certain cells send electrical impulses rushing along a neural circuit.

A thought is born.

By the billion, by the trillion, human thought waves circulate, some becoming speech, others never passing the lips. If there is a God, He interprets all of them, spoken or unspoken we are told, whether in Hindi or Hungarian or the clicks of an African Bushman. How unfathomable, then, the interpretation center of His divine mind!

So many of our thoughts are dull, petty, gross or even evil. And yet, among the filth and tedium, shines now and then a grain of mental gold. What of the thoughts that gave us Moonlight Sonata, or the extant verses of Sappho? Or air conditioning? The polio vaccine? What of the inspiration that led to the deliberate fermentation of a bitter little bean and the blending of that substance with sugar and vanilla to produce what we now call chocolate?

If there is a God, did He take pleasure in the pattern of neural circuitry that resulted in the radio, ravioli and rhubarb pie? Does He sense and savor the beauty of the unique new rythm, as we sense and enjoy the tangible results of it?Do evil thoughts and deeds poison a place, do they taint it with terrifying miasma, like some kind of toxic gas, that later become interpreted as paranormal visitations?