Ever taken a nap while you were an airline passenger? Pleasant. Five hundred miles per hour with an occasional rocking. How about as a train passenger?
 
We’ve grown accustomed to traveling securely, to depending on others to get us from point A to B. Surely; the thought has crossed our minds that the pilot, engineer, ship captain, or driver is human and traveling with us. The difference of course lies in the level of responsibility. Passenger: Trust and Sleep. Person in control: Vigilant wakefulness and consummate skill.
 
The engineer on a Japanese passenger train between Yokohama and Kamata fell asleep one recent afternoon. He wasn’t a passenger. He was in control of the train traveling at 75 mph. A passenger noticed, called the front office, and the engineer awoke, taking the train to its designated safe stop at the station. He fell asleep in the middle of the trip. What if he had fallen asleep at the end?
 
He didn’t, and he was awakened before the train reached the station. Tragedy was averted. Anyway, the train was equipped with an Automatic Train Stop system. Everyone would have come to a safe stop at the station regardless of the engineer’s condition. Ah! An automated world of safety.
 
I wish we could have something like an automatic stop system when our emotions run without our personal control. So many tragedies could be avoided. Sure, we would have to give up some free will, but all the passengers we carry with us along the tracks of our lives could arrive safely at their destinations.
 
Like trains, we carry people along our tracks of life. Sometimes we stop to pick up or let someone off. Sometimes we have an express that ignores every stop in its direct course to a distant goal. Whether or not we make the stops along the way or just go to the end of the line, all of us can consider the safety of those who choose to buy a ticket to ride our train. They believe that we have vigilant wakefulness and consummate skill. They trust they can rest securely, experiencing at worst a gentle rocking that is more restful than stressful.
 
Stay awake. You are the pilot, the engineer, the ship captain, and the driver. 

It wouldn’t be easy to run through hot taffy; the thick goo would slow you down. You ask, “Who in the world would run through taffy?” You also ask, “Where in the world would one encounter a puddle of taffy—hot taffy—large enough to become an obstacle to anyone’s movement? The idea is silly, and certainly such taffy would be unexpected.”
 
Seismologists and volcanologists believe that the magma chamber beneath Mount Aso, Japan’s most active volcano, stopped the spread of seismic energy from a 7.1-magnitude earthquake on April 16, 2016.* Magma, not taffy of course, was the thick goo that both redirected and absorbed the energy, preventing probable widespread destruction, injury, and even death that most likely would have occurred.
 
At times the magma of Mount Aso is a threat. On April 16, it was an unexpected saver. There’s always a compensating irony, isn’t there?
 
Irony abounds in both fact and fiction, and maybe there might be no easier way to demonstrate the helpful nature of something either dangerous or evil than first to mention Mount Aso’s role on April 16, second to mention the use of atomic bombs to end a drawn out war that threatened maybe a million or more additional lives in 1945, and third, to draw on fiction, to mention Pulp Fiction.** One of the characters in the movie, Jules Winnfield, played by Samuel L. Jackson, quotes from Ezekiel (a passage altered by Tarentino), a book that seems to carry one particular theme: God will send brutal men to seek vengeance on evildoers. In the movie, brutal men do wreak havoc on bad people, and in doing so, they individually save—more or less—someone in the process. There’s compensation; good and evil appear to be entangled in a complementarity.
 
In the nineteenth century Ralph Waldo Emerson argued that compensation is a fundamental principle; “bad” things are countered by “good” things. No, the brutalized aren’t necessarily compensated, but somewhere the compensation occurs. In the twentieth century Neils Bohr said complementarity was at the heart of the universe, citing the strange nature of light as wave and particle. In both compensation and complementarity Emerson and Bohr suggest a dualism underpins an indifferent universe.  
 
We never know when or where hot taffy will inhibit our run through life or save us from disaster. We never know when something seemingly dangerous or even evil will ironically prevent a disaster—or even save us or someone else from something bad. And just as we have difficulty understanding how light can be both wave and particle, we also have trouble comprehending the unpredictable rise or fall of both good and evil. 
 
I’m not advocating the use of brutal men, nuclear bombs, or magma chambers—or even hot taffy—but I’ll make the point that has been made repeatedly: There’s always, to say it as Emerson did, some compensation, some potential, though not necessarily apparent potential, for good.*** The world is neither perfectly good nor perfectly evil; it appears to be an indifferent world, caring neither for good nor evil, favoring neither one nor the other. None of us escapes some kind of hardship or tragedy; all of us have the potential for a compensation.  So, a volcano that can kill is also one that can save.
 
You and I, unfortunately, can rarely know when or where there will be some intervening taffy; you and I might never know. The people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki suffered terribly; they never got to see themselves as intervening taffy, the magma that interrupted the energy of war and kept it from destroying others. The use of the atomic bomb is in retrospect, one of the most horrific acts in a war that was filled with horrors and the deaths of more than 50 million people in many countries. No one can definitively enumerate the number of lives “saved” because the war ended before an all out assault on Japan occurred.  
 
I can tell you personally, that I might have grown up without a father because of that terrible destruction. My dad was a marine who fought on Okinawa. After the battle for the island, he and his unit were scheduled to move onto the southern islands of Japan. A brutal act saved him and the other marines from going and from doing what they were trained to do: capture, injure, and kill the enemy at the risk of their own lives. They were themselves brutal men of necessity. More deaths, possibly even the death of my father, would have occurred—the military experts tell us that casualties would have been legion. The fire of the bomb, hotter than the magma beneath Mount Aso, stopped the greater carnage that would have accompanied the attack. Like the hidden magma, the bomb was itself a secret. My father didn’t know about it until after it had been dropped. The “magma” intervened, probably saving him. There was the bomb, and there was the compensation: I grew up knowing my father.
 
At the end of any catastrophe, regardless of its cause—natural or human—some will have suffered, but occasionally some will find some help from hidden sources, such as a magma chamber deep below a volcano, a stranger who veers off course to prevent you from being in a car accident, or a soldier who sacrifices so you live. This is not a religious message, and it is not one of blind hope. It’s just a report on the way a seemingly indifferent world is one of duality.
 
* http://www.livescience.com/56571-how-volcano-stops-an-earthquake.html
 
** https://mattsbibleblog.wordpress.com/2012/04/23/hollywood-bible-1-pulp-fiction-and-ezekiel-2517/  As it is in Ezekiel 21:31: “I will pour out my wrath on you …I will deliver you into the hands of brutal men, men skilled in destruction.” (http://www.biblestudytools.com/ezekiel/21.html )
 
*** http://www.emersoncentral.com/compensation.htm

I am always amazed when I read about archaeologists’, anthropologists’, and historians’ discoveries about people long gone. And a recent story keeps me amazed. Oh! Not at the discovery as much as at the discoverers. Why? Because just as teenagers seem to think that the world didn’t exist before their rise to consciousness, so, too, many who study the past seem to think that only their contemporaries or people they consider to be “modern” could live sophisticated existences. Maybe “primitive” is a term that needs to be qualified, and maybe the haughty learned of a high-tech world need some old fashioned learnin’.
 
The recent story that caught my eye in this regard centered on studies of the Pueblo peoples. Apparently, sans written language and mathematics, they structured the Chaco great house to within one percent of a “Golden rectangle.”* An online article in Sci-News for January 24, 2017, reports that Arizona State University Professor Sherry Towers “found evidence that” Mesa Verde National Park’s Pueblo archaeological site “was laid out with a Golden rectangle, equilateral and Pythagorean 3:4:5 triangles.” The Sun Temple appears to have been built on the basis of a “common unit of measurement.” Professor Towers reports the “base unit is either L = 30.5 cm, or one third of that.” She then points out that the imperial foot, the Greek common foot, the Roman foot, and the Germanic “northern foot” were all similar (30.48, 31,5, 29.59, and 33.53 cm respectively).
 
So, the surprising thing is that, let me see, a civilization had agreed on a common unit of measure? The surprising thing was they had such a measure but didn’t leave a clearly written message about it? The surprising thing was that these people weren’t without intellects?
 
I can hear the Pueblo concerned saying to the architect, “I Hopi you know what you are doing. How are you going to lay out this temple?”
 
To which the architect of the site in question responded, “I won’t even Anasazi that.”
Then, realizing she was abrupt (Why wasn’t the architect a man?), she said, “I have it covered. I’m using my uncle’s arm as a measure. Time to get back to work, Uncle Joe; stand beside this wall and stretch out your arms.”
 
Bad jokes aside, think about how we have a tendency to minimize the intellects of others simply because they do not communicate the way we do. Human communication is a complex matter. Humans are complex. They have always been complex. There’s no real primitivism in “primitives.” Put two people together and you get a society, and societies continue under complex spoken and unspoken rules, orders, and perspectives.
 
One doesn’t have to be Euclid to have discovered a ratio that enables the “Golden Rectangle.” Aren’t there examples throughout nature? Maybe an astute observer thought that a human structure should mimic a natural one on the basis of the “Golden Ratio of 1:1.618.” I don’t want to make up something about ancient intelligence and knowledge, but at the same time, I think we need not to tell ourselves Fibonaccis about the intellects of those who came before us, such as that they couldn’t have been as “smart” as we are. They obviously did pretty well. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be here to be amazed that they actually had the tools to continue the species.
 
And so the same goes for those in different cultures and subcultures. They appear to get along without us. So, there are groups of musket shooters, Bridge players, orchid aficionados, and sports fans of many kinds. All different, but maybe all bearing the mark of a Golden Similarity, members of a species that can perceive a world and imitate its many natural forms.
 
http://www.sci-news.com/archaeology/ancient-pueblo-people-advanced-geometry-04559.html
​

There’s a problem that’s been around since humans first encountered the world: Is this a continuous or a discontinuous world? If the former, then where do individuals fit in; if the latter, then where does meaning fit in among discrete “units”? For a long time, the problem lay in the hands of philosophers and theologians. Then physicists stepped in, altered the problem a bit, and either found or decided that on the most fundamental level the universe is apparently One and that our conscious efforts to understand it break it into discrete units, including the units we call You.
 
Nonsense? Not really. Think of how you waver between seeing a unified and a disunified world of people. You appear both entangled and un-entangled, wrapped up at times in a collective consciousness, set of values, and behaviors, and at other times disrobed of all encumbrances of social interaction. Crowd v. loner. Propagandized v. isolated. Them v. You. And as you look at your state of existence, you see yourself as simultaneously belonging and ostracized, a human wave or particle, a duality you can’t get a handle on because there’s a constant switching from one to the other. Each time you try to quantify (or even qualify) your status, you interfere. When you want to demonstrate that You belong, you find yourself identifying a You.
 
Esoteric nonsense? Maybe not. Look at yourself as an individual in any relationship. You can measure what you are, but then you can’t measure yourself within the relationship. You can measure the relationship, but not You as individual. Your existence seems both determined and undetermined, but it depends on how you chose to measure or qualify You or measure or qualify the relationship.
 
Is there a practical side to this? Possibly. If you recognize that you cannot be simultaneously discrete and incorporated, then you can take whatever measurement you like. That is, the human world, Your consciousness, is sometimes bound and sometimes free, sometimes determined and sometimes not. That leads to the questions You have to ask yourself: In switching from unity to disunity and back, how do I maintain both my relationship and my individuality without destroying either? Can I provide evidence that the human universe is simultaneously both continuous and discontinuous? What causes the collapse of the universe and a non-local unity of humans into a set of local discrete beings with antipathy?
 
You could, if you desire, ignore this apparent dichotomy of your being. But run this little thought experiment. You on your first day of school. You on your first day in high school. You today. Are they all You? Or, when you think of a continuous life, do you make it discontinuous when you think of discrete moments? Can you maintain a discreteness in your present state if you think of being a continuous person? Then run this thought experiment. You entangled with another in a relationship, acting as a unity. You entangled with a group, acting as a unity. Can you maintain discreteness when you act in unison as a single consciousness devoted, for example, to a single cause that overrides the causes of its component members?

​Pay attention in these troubled times to what you see on TV or on the Web to note whether or not our human universe is nonlocal or local, unified or discrete. Watch the waves collapse into particles and the particles become unified waves. Then, like the physicists, ask yourself about the nature of your assessment, that is, your measuring device. Do you change the human universe just by wanting to see it as either determined or undetermined? And if You want to quantify or qualify or You actually measure, does that in itself contradict the notion of unity? You can’t, as you know, measure infinity. You can measure only the finite. Measuring, weighing, and even judging are predicated on disunity and on discrete entities.

The escape velocity from your home planet is 25,200 mph, or 7 miles per second. Want to leave Earth and visit the moon? Get a rocket, a really big and powerful one. You need to keep fighting Earth’s gravitational pull for about 210,000 miles on a journey to the moon. Then, at a distance of 210,000 miles, just 28,000 miles from the moon, something happens. Little moon’s gravitational pull equals big Earth’s. And past that point? Little moon wins the gravitational battle even though its escape velocity is a mere 5,400 mph, or 1.5 miles per second. David beats Goliath. Your rocket breaks free from Earth’s pull and falls toward little moon on course to a crash landing.
 
In every argument, there is an ultimate stronger side, a pull toward a local truth. In contemporary thinking, truth is always relative. The influence of one “truth” over another is a matter of proximity. Even weak arguments win as people are drawn closer to the arguer. Thus, the leaders of cults win over the hearts and minds of those who leave one home “truth” for a different one, sometimes one inimical to the health and safety of the “astronaut,” the traveler who wishes to leave what appears to be the confining pull of the home planet.
 
How else can you explain the willing self-destruction of suicide bombers? How else can you explain the followers of Charles Manson or of any cult leader? If you travel to the moon, you will, regardless of your home planet’s influence, eventually fall into the gravitational pull of the smaller body. You might find the adventure of traveling to a distant world exciting until you crash land. So, before you leave "Earth," keep your options open by making sure your rocket has enough fuel to reach the escape velocity for a return journey. 

Images of the microwave background radiation, the leftover glow from the Big Bang, show a mottled universe with blobs of color that, at first glance, appear to be randomly scattered.* Apparently, enough evidence is in to suggest that there is, in fact, a pattern to the blobs. Why are the blobs or their pattern significant?
 
Don’t take offense, but you are one of those blobs. The image of the cosmic microwave background radiation from the early universe actually shows you how significant your blob is. You are a central blob.
 
As the astrophysicists tell us, the universe began essentially nowhere and small-where. Everything that now is was once, as the expression goes, packed into a dot much smaller than the period that ends this sentence. In fact, everything began in a dot smaller than a proton.
 
That description of the early universe is important when you look skyward today or see images from the Hubble Telescope. If the universe has a radius that stretches tens of billions of light years because of inflation and expansion, that scale of distance makes you seem a bit of a tiny dot today. You live on a little planet on the outskirts of a galaxy that is itself a rather ordinary collection of stars and planets. Larger galaxies exist, and although no one knows the total number of galaxies, some have estimated that there are well over two trillion of them, most with hundreds of billions of suns and many more planets. Dot. That’s you, right? Little blob lost in a universe of indefinite size stretching toward nothingness.
 
The news isn’t all that bad. You are a very significant blob. In all that scattered blobbiness only certain blobs think and emote. You are one of them. In all that vastness, there you are, a blob conscious of itself and of the other blobs. All the blobs began in the same place from the same stuff insignificantly small.
 
You were once the center of the universe as all blobs were once the center of the universe. Now you are the center because, unlike the other blobs, you can understand your blobbiness. You are a significant blob. Don’t do anything to diminish that significance, and remember that you share your central nature with everyone on the blob called Earth.

*http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/space/universe/sights/cosmic_microwave_background_radiation/ 

​http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=microwave+background+image&id=1A61B1B934B399AC5C59966CE09223F5A48402D7&FORM=IQFRBA

Hidden inside our heads, conveyors of thoughts and avenues of meaning: The axons. They operate physically, but their products are also intangible. And one principle seems to guide them: That which they transmit helps us to recognize the familiar and in doing so generates a general peacefulness. Similarity breeds content. Recognizable organization makes us feel secure.
 
That which is dissimilar breeds discontent. Okay, that’s fair. We recognize ourselves because we are different, so contrast is a part of who we are; contrast generates Self. Yet, while we cherish difference as identity, so many of us seek the comfort of similarity. Thus, groups, gangs, gaggles, and gatherings.
 
Somehow all those axons in our heads work not only in unison, but also for unison. There’s that inexplicable axiom that is an accepted norm: We are a gregarious species. We don’t have to prove the principle. It is self evident, and because so many have sacrificed so much for the good of others, it might be the principal principle, surpassing in those times of self sacrifice even the principle of self preservation.
 
Sometime in our development we pass from the baby that cries when someone takes a toy from its hand to the baby that offers a toy to another baby. Sometime in our development we learn to give for no apparent reason other than to give. Yes, caretakers tell children to share, but is that necessary for the first act of sharing, the act that precedes even the age of toddler?
 
Is there an axiom of altruism that courses as electrical impulses through the axons in our brains? Is gregariousness built into the neuronal transportation system? If it is, then antisocial behavior, selfishness, and cruelty have to be environmental. Maybe. Some, like William Golding, author of Lord of the Flies, would argue for an innate savagery held in check by environment. In his view, bloodlust courses through the axons, the electrical potential releases a deadly lightning strike that only environment, the total nature of a place held in check by custom, rules, and laws, is capable of protecting humans from the shock. Otherwise, each is a self-centered Self with little concern for others.
 
If you are a neuroscientist, psychologist, or biologist, you might say, “No, this isn’t how it works. There’s no evidence for innate gregariousness, save the built-in protection of the species as evidenced in parents protecting offspring.”
 
And, hey, who am I to debate the learned? I just wonder, the next time you have either feelings of altruism or feelings of self-centeredness, dislike, or even hate, could you stop for a moment to ask why you feel the way you do? Of course, introspection can mislead. We all know that. But you could picture yourself racing like an electrical potential through an axon, carrying some deep-seated axiom of altruism, or, in the instances of selfishness, finding your channel in the axon interrupted by some imposed environmental inculturation.
 
I prefer to think that altruism is built in, that we innately care and that all the hate is learned. But we can see that those who hate have comrades in hatred, so there is some principle of cooperating, even if to the detriment of others. For me, the axiom of altruism manifests itself at least partially even in the midst of a group of haters united by their hatred.
 
Axons convey impulses, and those impulses are subject to quantum effects. In the quantum world connections defy our intuition. Strange things occur. But, “All modern physics, including cosmology, implies interconnectedness and interpenetration of physical reality in space-time,” as Menas Kafatos and Robert Nadeau argue in The Conscious Universe.* Is it possible that the quantum effects generated down the axons of our neurons tie us together and provide the axiom of gregariousness and altruism that many recognize as the highest principle of value, ethics, and morality of our species?
 
*Springer-Verlag, 1990. p. 93.

You live a labyrinthine life. Into an out of places, problems, joys, and boredom, you daily wend your way from one maze into another. Sometimes there appears to be no exit, and the walls are too high for you to climb. If you do find an exit, you then realize you have entered yet another maze. Daily you go a-mazing.
 
You might become discouraged by the seemingly endless multiverse of mazes. There is another choice. Every maze is a challenge. Do you think you would be happy walking a straight corridor with no variation, no options, no challenges, and no mysteries? Boredom would dominate. Blank walls running off into the distant vanishing point like train tracks aren’t your destiny. You need the mystery of twists and turns. 
 
What if the inexplicable became explicable? Now what? All problems are resolved. Lie in your hammock under the gentle breeze. How long would you last in that position? Years, months, weeks, days, hours, or even minutes? No, face it; you are a maze-walker. You don’t always find your way, but you keep moving down one passageway and into another. “Surely, there’s an end,” you think. But as long as you live, there will be another unmarked passageway for you to map.
 
Some people believe the straight corridor is the best passageway. They kid themselves; they seek the straightway because it seems to be the safe way. Nothing interrupts the plain walls in the corridor of their imagination. The next step is the same as the last. The maze of life is, of course, not like that, even for people who think they can stay on such a straight path.
 
In your labyrinthine life you encounter passageways that seem to appear out of nowhere. “I didn’t see that hole in the wall until I was upon it.” That’s the nature of the maze you walk. Its passageways are dependent upon earlier turns you chose to make, not on some predetermined design by a mysterious Daedalus. You are actually in control of part of the design, and Possibility and its offspring Probability are in charge of the rest.
 
As you wend your way, realize that all your passageways are works in progress. You construct much of that maze as you go, always finding new and mysterious paths to choose, and that’s what makes going a-mazing so amazing

Charity, according to St. Paul, is the greatest of three virtues (faith and hope are the other two). Charity, caritas in Latin, is love. But as we all know, there are two kinds of charity, one driven by an internal desire to help, an altruism welling up from the depths of an individual being, and another driven by governments of any kind, from small to large, from private to public. The former appears to be a characteristic that extends beyond the self-proclaimed hierarchical importance of humans: Some videos apparently show predatory animals in the wild occasionally caring for those they would normally consume.* Mixed in with the latter is the notion that a group is responsible for its members or for “those less fortunate.” Thus, governments impose by law or rule taxes that they redistribute to help people in need. Seems that there is a collective charitable consciousness.
 
Redistribution is not new; even the Romans did it. There is a political motivation: Unhappy people don’t support a government under which they suffer. The Romans had to keep a large population happy; emperors bought peace through “charity.” The irony of such charity is that it took from those who had to give to those who had not, lessening the status of producers, leveling the society. The conquered unwillingly supported their conquerors.
 
As one interested in places, especially in places I never visited, I was drawn to Rick Steves’ Europe: The Best of Slovenia.** Once part of Tito’s Yugoslavia, Slovenia is now an independent member of the European Union. In the episode, Rick Steves visits a Slovenian family and at supper asks the head of the household what is different in Slovenia now that it is no longer a communist/socialist country. He responds by saying that under Tito young people could get housing and did have jobs, but that the system was also “good for bad workers.” The current Slovenian economy is “good for good workers.” That is, people who outwork others profit from their efforts. The society no longer “levels” to the extent it did under Tito’s control.
 
So, here we are, two thousand years after the Romans and St. Paul are long gone, still facing a problem: How do we take care of the less fortunate while still allowing individuals to succeed on their own? OR, how do we level a society while we respect merit? OR maybe, should “charitably helping” be the goal instead of “leveling”? Reality is we haven’t solved the problem. If there is a deep-seated charity in individuals, does its manifestation lie in legislation, regulation, and peer pressure? Is there a “true” charity that manifests itself only in an individual’s willingness to part with part of what he or she has garnered through hard or persistent work?
 
Are you a good worker? Are you charitable? Are you charitable on your own or through the dictates of others to whom you have given authority? And, if you are a charitable person who happens to be a good worker, is your society good for you?
 
*Of course, as I report in a previous blog, according to Peter Godfrey-Smith we have no scale on which to measure the intelligence of other beings, and by extrapolation, the emotions of other beings, though we seem to know when animals are either happy or sad, nonthreatening or angry. Anyway, see for your own interpretation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugi4x8kZJzk
 
** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8DlXa_933Y  at 15:30 in the program 

How desperate are you to preserve what you are and what you think? Not at all desperate? A bit desperate? Totally unconcerned?
 
Would you be capable, in the face of a threat to what you are spiritually, emotionally, mentally, of moving to a completely isolated spot. Imagine. Far removed from any human contact, not just for a short time but for your entire life. You, and maybe those you love, abandoning a previous life for an uncertain one filled with harshness because in abandonment, you persevere, you survive as what you were before the threat.
 
You can read about the Lykovs, a Russian family threatened first by the Tsar and then by the communists. They left the world they knew and traveled into the wilderness, where they remained so isolated that two of the children born into the family had never seen anyone outside mother, father, and siblings until a group of geologists discovered them. Isolation. All the things they took with them eventually fell into decay, even the metal cooking utensils, forcing them to adapt as they could. At one point they had a single seed that they nurtured and developed into crop seeds. They hunted, gathered seeds and berries, and grew potatoes. They survived, and the children born in the wilderness learned to write not with ink and paper, but rather with birch sticks dipped in honeysuckle juice.*
 
Geologists discovered the Lykovs in 1978. They had been living in isolation since before World War II, and, in fact, were unaware of its occurrence. They had seen satellites pass overhead, and senior Lykov guessed that people had invented something to compete with the stars. Imagine being so isolated. But then also imagine that true to their religion, when sickness befell one of them, he refused to go with the geologists to a modern hospital. Giving up their isolation after decades was not an option because it might have meant giving up their beliefs.
 
The last of the Lykov family is living alone in the only home she ever knew, a shack put together from whatever materials the family found in their environment. Imagine the isolation. Total. But then by rejecting help and offers to move into civilization, even into the villages where distant relatives would welcome her, she remained exactly the person that she always knew, unencumbered by the distractions of a modern world with values at odds with her upbringing.
 
Six thousand feet above sea level on the steep side of a river valley, she has a place that allows her to be completely who she is. You, I, and all the others around us have to struggle for such a place, a place without the pressure to change, a place without the need to conform to the wishes of others, a place without the distractions of our modern society, and a place without conflict. Imagine.
 
So, here I am, earphones sending Beethoven into my brain as I type this, wondering whether you might fare better as an individual if I had just a birch stick and some honeysuckle juice to write on some birch bark. I certainly couldn’t reach you with the distractions of my thoughts. You could thrive on your own, develop some seed of thought into a yearly crop of your own ideas, look to the heavens in wonder, and remain who you are without my interference.  
 
Having been a geologist, I am like those geologists who stumbled onto the Lykovs. I’ve interrupted your day, turned your world into one now shared by someone else, an outsider with thoughts incompatible with many of your own. And I have forced you to make a decision about where you want to be: Off on your own or coupled to another mind, another way of seeing the world. Sorry for the intrusion.
 
 
* http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/for-40-years-this-russian-family-was-cut-off-from-all-human-contact-unaware-of-world-war-ii-7354256/