A notebook bulletin board
tacked on when randomly bored
applied thoughts in a scribblebook
open for the world to look who passes by
so fast to see like a needle in a haystack we
safely stash those innermost secrets thought to be
at least you see languishing up and into pristine
blossoms for you to pick and sniff and hope
they don't make you sick.

4/25/07

On Engineers and the Stewardship of Earth


Pluck a tulip and study it carefully. Inside its bell shaped dome offered up to the sun is a hexagonal dark stained pattern with 6 insect-leg-looking spiny things around the pistil, which has its own interesting engorged shape. It is easy to ascertain how it is designed to attract the honey bee. That's what a tulip is - - this "station" for a worker honeybee to fly into and begin doing its "work".
What work is that, you say? Well the entire bottom-line business of keeping the flow of pollination going, of course -- an intricate process occurring at a very small, specific level of reality -- one might call it working nature from the "ground up", and the bees literally perform this activity, dutifully and busily. Like they say, "busy as a bee", right?

Well I imagined - and I think its important for us to imagine things - even if they are mere fantasies -- often the process of speculation is a means of lubricating our thinking process, so that when we stumble across real, correct ideas we can get through those too -- I imagined how ironic it would be (and I really appreciate irony, which I feel often reflects fundamental truths) if "God" turned out to be, quite literally, the honeybees themselves. The idea has a quaintness to it that I like. At the very least, its not difficult to imagine the bees as fundamental agents of "God" in any case (if not an aspect of God itself), and I like to imagine that the honeybees are the "Engineers", literally helping Creation along. Like seamstresses tirelessly working the bottom line of reality, helping to maintain the circuitous flow of life. I see the honeybees as "groundkeepers" or janitors, entrusted to perform this fundamental duty involving pollination via myriad species of flowers.

Now this is simply an exercise in "thinking outside the box", and here is my point in all this:

Let's just assume for the sake of argument that the honeybees literally ARE the "engineers" of creation. Notice how small they are, in comparison to us. And if you bring your focus down close to a tulip - - the "room" or "station" that the honeybee performs his crucial task in --- well, what if that level of reality -- the very small level which we must get down on our knees to examine closely -- what if that IS the real common denominator -level of reality (and not our titanic eye-level of mountainous cities) -?

It suggests the notion that what we perceive to be the "dominant species" of the planet, the Titans, the Leviathans, the Behemoths - - that is Ourselves, just like the dinosaurs were in a previous era -- are really just another link in the assembly line of workers, here. Because you see, it all becomes relative; if you contrast humans (who average about 6 feet tall, 160 pounds or so) with bees, then you can see that homo sapiens are quite literally GIGANTIC by comparison. Just like the dinosaurs. Meaning we're freakin' dinosaurs, after a fashion. (In comparison to the "gods" - the honeybees - that is.) Which are teensy tiny, able to fit in the palm of our hand.

All of this is to merely suggest the roles we (by "we" meaning, all species of life) each play in the maintenance of creation. Now if the bees are the "engineers" workin down in the boiler room keeping the thermodynamic balance of our ecosystem on an even keel so to speak, well obviously we homo sapiens have our own role, too.

And I believe that role is the stewardship of the earth. In a capacity similar to the bees, but employed w/a different task, we human beings are supposed to be the stewards of this planet. While the bees are doing their "bottom line electrical work" or whatnot, we are supposed to be the next level of a guiding hand -- the Watchmen - - the Caretakers -- also Janitors of a sort -- whose brains are supposed to have developed to the point where we can ascertain the importance of maintaining the integrity of our habitat.

We seem to be failing miserably at this simple task. Many indigenous tribes throughout earth seem to have not failed. They looked ahead 7 generations. They wasted not the flesh of each creature they killed to help sustain their tribe. They maintained a balance with nature.

But now, we live in a world of "Life without Balance", or Koyaanisqatsi. It is because we "stewards" have failed to keep our egos in check. Our ego has swelled to the point we believe ourselves as, for one, actually being "seperate" from the rest of creation! And not only that, but "superior" ! Imagine that. Just because of our "titanic" size -- and the "anthills" of our empires -- we think of ourselves as somehow being "next to God". On a fundamental level we most likely are a part of God; but our role as "guardians" of creation is a humble one. No more important nor less so than the job assigned to the honeybees.

If we could ever get it in our heads that we're "only human" -- if we pulled our heads out of the clouds for a moment, and examined the tulips for instance, and what a crucial role they exchange w/the bees and all manner of insects -- we might renew our sense of wonder at this marvelously engineered universe and acceed that the most seemingly "trivial" roles are as noble and worthy as the most apparantly "kingly" roles.

Our Life has been delineated severely Out Of Balance, and we are facing the point where our own free wills and sense of superiority over the rest of Life is resulting NOT in the establishment/maintenance of HEAVEN ON EARTH (a state that most likely has nothing to do with "the afterlife") but rather, quite unfortunately, in the degredation of the potential quality of life into a HELL ON EARTH (see: the state of the world today).

That is the way I see it, that various saviours from different cultures were speaking of a CODE to live by which would help insure our role as the humble Guardians of this world by which to maintain and establish the Kingdom of Heaven here and now while we're breathing and alive.

We have forsaken, ignored, or simply misunderstood their teachings in our egotistical quests for dominance and thus are busily paving the way straight to hell, instead.

This trend could be reversed but it looks increasingly hopeless from where I stand.

5 comments:

  1. Anonymous1:12 AM

    What an intriguing idea, full of potency, the secret history of honey bees. If honey bees are the stewards of the earth, then I wonder where the ants, whose society, according to folks like sociobiologist E.O. Wilson, is the only one in animal kingdom that approximates (surpasses?) the complexity of human societies, fit in this scheme. Ants wage war, colonize each other, even are capable of building strategic alliances against a common enemy. They practice politics without ideology, implement policies without justifications. They are like a more efficient and rationalization-free version of human beings.

    How would the bees feel about this?

    Would they consider ants just as alien as human beings are from them?

    Q

    ReplyDelete
  2. excellent question, Q ~
    Ants too must wage their wars to maintain strange alliances, then.

    Insofar as scale goes, perhaps the bees feel about the ants in a fashion analogous to what we feel about the bees - i.e, how small the ants are compared to us gigantic honeybees, "the ants must be the Engineers..."

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous11:40 AM

    The jack-o-lantern light is still telling me to do things...

    ReplyDelete
  4. may the jack'o'lantern's whispers gutter out, kyle ;|

    ReplyDelete
  5. And so a direction is revealed towards which these clues all line up to point towards, while man whispers "the bees are the Engineers", and in turn the bees hiss "the ants are the Engineers", we may yet guess correctly what the ants whisper, but soon enough we will come to the end of our chain of speculation as we approach the space in between the plancks. . . that very same space lit a guttering orange within the carved out pumpkins on a hallowed eve . . .

    ReplyDelete