First, a public service announcement for the many who ask. Yes, Whitaker, the old orange cat we adopted from a friend who left town, is doing great and enjoying later life. He integrated well with our other two rescues, proving once again that cats can work out their differences.
It helped that Whitaker landed in a cat paradise like our house.
Perhaps the feds could take lessons from our cats and learn how to stop spitting, hissing, and biting each other. Throughout my life, I’ve studied the process of human beings becoming illuminated, and there’s still much enlightenment that needs to happen in Washington, D.C., the U.S., and around the world.
A couple of weeks ago, we had a stunning display of the Northern Lights in Estes. It was a great way to launch the season of light, the American holiday season when streets and buildings come alive like an amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.
We like lights. From the earliest human attempts to create light through fire when the night becomes dark, to the many modern forms of radiant illumination, light cheers us, guides us, and allows us to extend our waking day into the long night.
I’ve already used “light” and “illumination” to represent two things. We shine light in our rooms and on our streets, and we strive to move to greater levels of illuminated awareness. Mindfulness needs voltage! And when we share our thoughts, or have others share theirs with us, we create something greater than a single mind. We create a network of consciousness, a network of conscience, as we connect our thoughts.
I’m not the first to say this. The first President Bush used the phrase “a thousand points of light” to represent the “brilliant diversity” of America’s clubs and volunteer organizations. The term was actually used earlier, in 1946, by science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, to describe a futuristic control room.
I support the Dark Sky initiative, although the presence of Front Range towns hinders Estes Park’s local efforts to achieve a truly dark sky. Still, we in Estes have the good fortune of never being far away from great night views in Rocky Mountain National Park.
We still have a few weeks to go until the winter solstice. I celebrate the solstice because that is the day that we can have optimism that we’re already headed back toward spring and summer. Even though the angle of the planet Earth causes things to get colder for several months after the solstice, there is hope for summer, with long bright days, mountain flowers, and high hikes without spikes.
The 30-foot Visit Estes Park digital tree is delightfully rocking in Bond Park. I can see it from my perch at the Town Hall dais during board meetings.
We light up our houses and town and bring brightness and color to the darkest time of the year. We work to gain knowledge and skills during our lifetime, to become brighter and wiser. We seek a guiding light when life challenges, political fog, debates, and disagreements cast shadows.
The world becomes brighter for me when I listen to others, read books, and hear alternative viewpoints and philosophies. Hopefully, we form our views with the broadest range of information available, the widest worldview, ensuring that we’ve considered the whole spectrum of thought in our deliberations.
The human brain is still our best tool for navigating difficult pathways. The sparking of synapses lights up the dark alleys of problems.
With the great encyclopedia in the sky (i.e., the internet), and now with burgeoning AI skills, we have an extension of that network. As with receiving insights or input from other humans, we need to have our “accuracy detectors” up when listening to information from the well of computed wisdom. If used wisely, it’s a tremendous tool for us humans. We don’t want HAL 9000 computers to mislead us. (See Arthur C. Clarke again and Stanley Kubrick for that reference.)
So, in summary, I’m writing to tell you to enjoy the “season of light” and have a cheerful holiday time. Whatever your situation, illumination (real or mental) is the best path to follow. Gather those lumens, take in a few extra photons or wavicles of light in the presolstice days ahead, and always be willing to share those with others.