TREES 200

It all went very fast in the end. It had taken roughly two centuries for carbondioxide levels in the atmosphere to peak, from the late 19th century to the second half of the 21st century. After that, it took another two centuries for emissions to return to pre-1870 levels, even if it would take much longer for the amount of carbondioxide that was already in the atmosphere to diminish. That would take thousands of years.  A curious symmetry became apparent to people living in the saddle time between the old and the new world. It had taken some five thousand years for humanity to cover the earth in cities, from Uruk, the first city ever, which had city walls in the fifth millennium BCE, to the urban conglomerations that spanned the globe in vast, drawn out and interconnected cityscapes that lay like dendrites over the continents and formed a global web in the 22nd Century, stretching out to the remotest corners of the world. It would take another five thousand years for the cities to...

This morning I woke up and saw on my phone's news feed that Thich Nhat Hanh passed away, age 95. His pacifist engagement spanned the world of social relations, the inner world of our hearts and minds as well as the world in which we exist in interdependence with the rest of nature. To practice peace not as the absence of conflict but as a generative, creative state of existing in which we are in free communication with all beings, including ourselves, in this way I have understood mindfulness, the humblest of all spiritual practices. Be like water, the Daoists say. Seek the lowly place; do not move on before you have patiently filled up the depths you find on your way; stream to nurture life without claiming credit; be aware of your destructive potential, when you allow the storms to whip you up, flood and rage in devastating and ruthless anger. "In all four corners / the voice of the water / with its eternal disasters / is feared and heard", a classic Dutch poem tells us...