Town Critters

It's drizzling as I write this, but the clouds were only just cruising in when I did my walk through Grandview Park earlier this morning. And a lovely morning it was, with the bonus of experiencing my second neighborhood coyote encounter since the shelter-in-place began. And the first was just a couple of days ago, so this week is looking pretty good so far.

The neighborhood cat on Monday, standing on a mossy concrete block strewn with wild cucumber, miner's lettuce, sorrel, and lilly-pilly berries.

In the wee hours of Tuesday morning, a raccoon ambled through my garden, knocking down a few miner's lettuce plants as it foraged for insects and whatnot.

Ten minutes after the raccoon visited, the neighborhood cat came through to reassert her domain.

On my Monday walk I had been slightly amazed to have crossed paths with no other walkers. That was a first for the duration of the lockdown. Also a first was seeing this coyote which had probably just ambled down from Golden Gate Heights Park. He took a detour up these stairs when he saw me, and I snapped a picture with my phone.

This morning I saw another coyote at the base of Golden Gate Heights Park, but she skedaddled back the way she came when I approached to take a picture. I wish I had more time to watch and follow them around. If it's a pair, I'd like to see if they're denned-up in the area. 

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Night & Day

Some images from a trip to Mono Lake in May 2013.

It seems like we're all living in a kind of night world these days.

Hobgoblins practice the dark arts of mendacity and treachery in the service of greed and selfishness. Elves band together to practice veracity and honesty in the service of sharing and community.

Night falls, but the sun also rises.

The face of the Earth moves into the light. Warmth and clarity return.

Life is renewed.

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Fire Season

Lupines in Burn Zone Near Yosemite, May 2013

The name of this blog can be understood in a couple of ways. It's about photography that is minimally processed and represents nature pretty much as I truly encounter it in the field. And it's also about expressing my own true nature with pictures and words. 

Nature photography is about having an encounter between myself and the world, followed by the response of letting it all in, and allowing it to have an effect on all of my senses. Immersing myself in the truth of that encounter sets fire to my soul and inspires my creative spirit.

That's the basis of artistic truth, and creative people take it from there to express, through myriad arts and crafts, what comes of that encounter and response, that marriage of subject and object. The expression of artistic truth isn't didactic. It's not trying to teach or explain or convince. It's a means by which the human soul expresses its encounter with the sublime.

So if we grant that there is such a thing as artistic truth, what do we make of other kinds of truth?

There's scientific truth which can be codified into physical laws which are the same for everyone. Then there's social truth which can be codified into civil and criminal laws whose logic must be adjudicated by a human being and which are the same for everyone only in principle, not in practice. And finally there is political truth, which can be codified into talking points whose purpose is to persuade and which are obviously not true for everyone.

It's interesting that "might makes right" even in the world of scientific truth, sometimes keeping ignorance in the forefront for generations before facts finally become incontrovertible. Until that factual apotheosis arrives, science can be a messy business full of all the slings and arrows of human frailty.

But for social and political truth, there is no final apotheosis of fact, and we're left, at their root, with "might makes right." The forms of might include the power to deploy or withhold money. There are the powers of persuasion, and not just with logic and evidence, but also with psychological manipulation, self-serving beliefs and outright lies. There are also the powers of charismatic force, of tribal bonding, and of course the most basic "might makes right" power of brute force. 

Human beings who aren't content to have their minds filled for them by unscrupulous or even well-meaning others must do their own due diligence on statements of "truth" by constantly reminding themselves to question their opinions and beliefs, to check whether the tracks that have led to those opinions and beliefs were laid on a factual foundation. 

Other human beings will just go along to get along.

There's a saying in journalism that if your mother tells you she loves you, check it out. Meaning you're always looking at the tracks and sign behind the statement that's being presented to you, no matter how trustworthy the presenter is, and figuring out for yourself if the tracks add up to a truth. If they don't, it might not even be a lie, but an opinion or a belief. And of course with an emotion like a mother's love, there really is no way to check it out.

In the end, social truth -- the law of the land -- isn't factually true. Laws are an invention used to organize society and have to be enforced with brute strength. Political truth is a battle of opinions and is enforced by social conventions such as lobbying, storytelling, and voting.

Only scientific truth and artistic truth can claim to be factually true. Scientific truth is objectively true, while artistic truth is subjectively true. And the road to each of these truths can be labyrinthine, to be sure, but in the end they are the most worthwhile to pursue. Only these two truths touch eternity, and to touch eternity while existing in time is to experience the sublime fire of true knowing.

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P.S. The idea for this post was sparked by a video my wife shared with me yesterday regarding the "Plandemic" conspiracy. In a world where the president of the United States is, in addition to anything nice or otherwise that you might say about him, also a gaslighting con-artist, can we be surprised that an unhinged conspiracy theorist could have a #1 book on Amazon and successfully run her con on otherwise intelligent people? 

Although I spent a few hours reading about this intriguing story on NPR, Retraction Watch, and Science Magazine, the most comprehensive source debunking the claims made in the video that I found in one place is here (at sciencebasedmedicine.org), and it has no paywall. 

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