Some Thoughts on Geese

 I'm glad that there is music as background to the video a friend just posted of snow geese landing in and around an icy pond, instead of the honking! They are beautiful birds, for sure, as are the Canada geese which live in profusion here at the lake. But while I'm often in tears at the Beauty and Wonder of Nature, I remain in some aspects a pragmatist. 
Geese make a gawdawful racket, and when there are flights of 60-100 of them coming in for splashdown, it's both awesome to see and a very noisy proposition, as the newcomers often get the other hundreds on the ground roiled into a honker's chorus. Our park newspaper is called "The Quacker". Let me tell you that our ducky friends are far less of an obvious acoustic factor in our lives than the Wagnarian stentorizations of the several species of geese here. Out newspaper could be more accurately named "The Lake Oaks Honker" with no chance of that being misunderstood as a reference to a nose. And then there is mating season. 
All that I have said above pales in grandiosity during that time, when the geese leave their usual grassy haunts by the water, and make most of our rooftops their podiums for the loud and constant advertisement of their allegedly superior coupling qualities. Of course, the reverberations through the structural material of our homes adds to our greatly involuntary awareness of their amorous vocal, and yes, physical combats over our heads. It's not uncommon to see disgruntled homeowners with a high-pressure nozzle on their hose washing a coating of geese off their now besoiled roof. 
Don't get me wrong: I love birds. I sit many evenings on a bench by the shore path, my 7x50 binoculars handy, and watch herons--both blue and green--coots, egrets, cormorants, black swans, Muscovy, Wood, Bufflehead, domestic, and other ducks, and a dozen other kinds of birds indigenous to our lake. This is a birder's emporium. I am grateful for the show, and for that most of these creatures will actually walk by, and even if suspicious, will trust you to be tame. That goes for the deer and skunks as well, and the odd bipeds in electric carts. But one cannot help but be then aware of the huge disproportion in the population of geese, here of at least three sorts. Wonderous as they are as creatures, in our circle they also live with us as very noisy and often dirty, arrogant, and inconvenient neighbors. And I still get a kick out of them.

A religious solution to capitalism? Really?

On one of my subscribed-to Facebook pages, someone proposed that the most necessary solution to all the problems of capitalism anywhere must be a religious one, in fact it should appear as a healing of church doctrines. Why did I take exception to this? First you have to reflect on just which church and which Jesus, as there are at least 300 streams of christianism and about 40,000 named and practicing sects in the world, without counting other gods and other religions. So integrity can't be left to the vagaries of constantly changing religious assumptions, none of which might even vaguely reflect the perspective of the original "founder" who didn't found anything.

Never mind that his astoundingly few words can be much more viably ascribed to a perennial philosophy than anything original with him personally, even as an alleged fulfillment of a dubious prophecy parlayed into a political system in the third century CE. If there is any hope of changing our story, it most probably could happen by looking at the nature of human awareness itself. And this is not incongruent with the christianist idea that we are made in the "image and likeness of God". If that is true, then most certainly each one is capable, at least potentially, of looking at their own self to see what the template or pattern of their being is about.

This approach might have verification in that all the mystics of any religion, or lack of it, throughout history have converged through their self-work on a seemingly identical view of Unity. And as I've pointed out, these very real and tangible agreements transcend the vagaries of the insurmountable number of denominations and have the great advantage of cutting through the contentious claims each disparate group might have of being the "one, true, and only".

The argumentations, and even warring, of the speculative self-differentiated mental constructs that call themselves religions all fall before the incontrovertible fact of the fundamental nature of awareness itself as the ground of *any* experience or position it might be trained into by the accidents of time, place, or necessary but parochial familial training.Such belief systems are local and meant for initial survival purposes only. On a world stage, those positions desperately need to be outgrown and supplanted by a deep and practical experiential understanding of perhaps the only thing absolutely common to all humans and permanently endemic as their very nature. If we don't start on that common ground, we are already in ideological conflict.