The New York Times published online on July 28 a piece about the few remaining Japanese survivors of World War II. Tetsuo Sato is quoted in the article, giving this advice to young Japanese: “They wasted our lives like pieces of scrap paper,” he said. “Never die for Emperor or country.” That war is said to have killed 60 million people worldwide. Yet the so-called “leaders” of many nations today are so lacking in morality and/or intellect to understand how fundamentally crucial that advice is, if humankind is to survive.
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Clear night skies, when neither clouds nor atmospheric haze and dust impede the view, are stunning in their simple beauty. Despite astronomy’s enormous contributions to our understanding of the mysteries of black night skies—riddled with twinkling microscopic lights—viewing the bewitching grandeur of space is a magical experience. Our relative paucity of understanding the universe reenforces its beauty, I think. I wonder how our experience of mystery might be changed if the skies were utterly clear—no clouds, no stars, no planets, no meteorites, no satellites; nothing but empty space? Assuming Earth-bound organisms had no need for rain nor wind nor wireless communications, would the emptiness surrounding our planet hold so much allure? To what extent do we depend on the unknown to fuel our creativity and our sense of wonder? Early mornings fill me with wonder as I await daylight to reveal whether the sky is still there…whether the trees I saw yesterday remain…whether the world as I knew it when I went to sleep will appear the same if I awake. Does the acknowledgement that our assumptions are not guarantees fuel our capacity to imagine how lifelong understanding of existence could change in the blink of an eye? So many questions…valid answers to which probably can never be found.
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My creativity sometimes can explode as if a fuse had been lit to unleash my imagination, causing it to explode from an enclosed, pressurized space. What causes that potential power is beyond me. I know of circumstances that cause that fuse to burn slowly or die, though. Discomfort, either physical or emotional/mental can douse that fuse and rob me of my creativity. Pain tends to smother the spark of my imagination. I think fear can have the same effect—which makes sense, in that fear can drive mental or emotional pain. There is no shortage of examples of creative people—painters, sculptors, novelists, actors, etc.—whose creativity seems to have died after they experienced some kind of powerful trauma. None of those numerous examples, of course, come to mind at the moment. But they exist. And they serve as evidence of the power of pain to quell the imagination. I wonder whether, though, the memory of pain can have the same impact on one’s life? The pain may have softened enough to be tolerable, but not enough to stop its memory from extinguishing creativity.
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My November 25, 2014: Thoughts for the Day
When trees shed their leaves, they reveal beauty inaccessible in full leaf. People do the same when they shed their clothes. It doesn’t matter whether the tree is gnarled and imperfect, any more than whether the person is wrinkled and worn.
The heartwood of the trunk is as perfect and pristine as it was a hundred years earlier, just as the person’s heart is clean and pure and unmolested by the ravages of time.
And, when a person sheds the protective layers of emotional armor developed over a lifetime of responses to pain and uncertainty, the beauty that remains is stunning.
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I will deal with today in the same way I have dealt with so many days before: I will take it as it comes and ponder how I might overcome the shame of allowing the decay of humanity without a fight.
