Myth & Empiricism

 

Decomposing Tree Leaves, Mendocino Coast

In The Myth of the Eternal Return, Mircea Eliade describes the ways in which human culture has sought through its rituals to bring people back from a superficial, profane experience of the world, to return to a deeper, sacred experience of the world. The sense of return is a coming home to an original state of being that is uncluttered by the demands of ordinary life. We human beings can have a literal, empirical experience of the immanence of the sacred, which we then describe through metaphor. The metaphor becomes the myth. The empirical experience remains a potential to be unlocked.

Last night we experienced the last full moon before the winter solstice, the time of year when we enter the depths of darkness only to be reborn into a new dawn. There's a literal sense of crossing that threshold that is superficial and ordinary, but there is also a metaphorical sense of crossing that threshold of death and rebirth that is deep and sacred. 

Anyway, I was thinking about this in the literal sense as I woke up this morning, since I've been reading about two ways that life itself cycles through death and rebirth -- via chromosomes and viruses. The individual chromosomes in each of our bodies will die in their trillions when we ourselves die, but they will have at least tried to be reborn into a new human being before that happens. Even the lowly virus, which can't reproduce on its own and which sometimes even kills its host organism, conspires to be reborn in a new host.

Chromosomes and viruses, eternally dying and being reborn, are the seeds of life's innate drive for immortality.

I created the files to merge into an HDR image of this sunset on the Mendocino Headlands with my full-frame camera, but I hadn't thought to download my dedicated HDR software onto my laptop while I was home, so I used Photoshop for the job. I'm not crazy about the result, and I look forward to running the files through Aurora HDR for comparison when I get home. 

As we faced the sunset from the headlands, a nearly full moon was rising over the town of Mendocino behind us.

This was actually a sundog with prismatic colors, but I don't seem to have captured its delicacy here.

Sundown at the Headlands

The back yard where we're staying has a tree with countless sapsucker holes in its trunk, and its falling leaves are all over the deck. As with the HDR software, I also don't have Helicon Focus loaded on the laptop and had to use Lightroom and Photoshop to create focus stacks. I was surprised the little laptop was able to handle the files from my Nikon D800E.

The property owner where we're staying warned us about bears at the garbage cans, so I brought my trail cameras along. I was stoked that a large black bear showed up on our first night. This is a frame-capture from a video recording.

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