Clear Moon in a Pond

Clear Moon in a Pond is a Zen paradox which sticks in my mind because I've recently been readingAlan Watts about Zen. I' ll never convert but still the whole thing especaiily the riddles and the art is interesting. And it made me stop and think about having a blog and how I like it because you aren't forced into a mold by other people's careers, patterns, preoccupations, etc. - or even your own.
I would not have known myself, I would almost say, what I was interested in, without a blog. I would have known what I "do", meaning by "do" what I consider morally necessary and politically and socially relevant to others. That would be exposing eugenics.
But the longer I have a blog - and read other blogs - the more I see a whole set of interests which on the one hand underpin the effort against eugenics but on the other hand are entirely independent of it.
Visually, I am interested in exactly how things look and why - which is a specific kind of interest in geology and botany. What exactly does a tree look like - a cylinder? a spiral? a set of proportioned relationships? square proportions? conics? log spirals? What do I see when I look?
And where exactly do the rocks under my feet come from? In Loudoun County there is no easy answer - some from the bottom of the sea, some from Africa, some from a a mountain range rising and falling like wave on the edge of North America since continents first were. But what exactly ... is this quartz here in my hand ? - and in Maryland just a few miles away the answers are different for the same formations.
And in a similar way I am interested in how real people are living now - here and elsewhere. Newspapers only report the weird, naturally. But since we are all tied together more than we used to be the real lives of these "new neighbours" matter. Gossip about the neighbours from hell isn't good enough. Round up the usual pictures - we have a newspaper or a show to put out isn't good enough. Burning American flags, calls to kill all Americans, killing crowds of people some of whom are Americans, raising cocaine and opium, selling young girls, starving and massacring members of other tribes (none of whom are Americans), threatening to use atomic weapons in crowded places, emigrating to America by the millions - the most valid indicator of how people feel about America is we can't keep them out.
Anyhow what the MSM shows bores me because I consider it lies but even more, I think it's beside the point. Who are they really? these new neighbours.
And there are so many facets of American life that never get covered - the Katrina rescues which were an American Dunkirk, the World Trade Center, the adoption of computers by business in America which forced three whole generations to learn or die in ten years, the rise of the Internet which has novel ways of joining people, music and images, the effect of contraceptives which is exterminating whole groups, the effect ofthe Sixties which has never been shown as it was only as it saw itself, the pro-life movement which has only been shown as its enemies saw it, etc.
But what shows really cover this - or what novels. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Whiner is incredibly popular in terms of coverage. The rest is silence.
Perhaps it's a sign of intense vitality when people are so far ahead of accepted, comprehended social narratives. It's not a sign of great art or philosophy.
Being a pro-lifer it's natural that I would wonder about these others, the new neighbours who are always shown as violent religious crazies or backward rural morons or idiotic imitators of long-dead TV shows on currently dead TV shows. You get far more on blogs - written in those far away countries by someone in some way like myself or they wouldn't have a blog but immersed in the day-to-day reality of somewhere else. And compare that with the MSM narratives.
And as a kind of reflex, I'm really interested in the transition made by the Englsih who came to America. We consider George Washington "colonoal"and "early" but his family had been in America for 100 years. If you look at Mount Vernon you can see that it has a front in one style and a back in another - the front, the front of a formal kind of English house, the back, a "Southern plantation" front. The two together are quite unique - no house in England is built this way except the houses that were "hidden churches." This house shows a "hidden American" who lived long before the American Revolution declared. Stratford, the house built by the Lees of Virginia also resembles English architecture but is quite different since it wrenches the main front of the house which should be an entrance way into a breezeway where the real living was done. The changes reflect the need to stay cool in Virginia without air-conditioning while continuing to relate to English culture.
Somehow from this my mind jumps to picturing a Hispanic family living in America for 100 years. Somehow then the dreams of La Raza come true. Cuba takes over Miami and Mexico takes over California. They begin to regulate from afar as the English began to do in the time of George Washington with the main idea of making lots of money for their government from Los Angelos' prosperity. They tell people who have been in America for 100 years how things should be done the true Mexican way so as to enhance the Mexican government's revenue stream and how to have a real culture - true Cubans don't put Thai food in tortillas. Soon America is reinvented. As it has been from the beginning

A Clear Moon in a Pond.