Last Friday I started re-publishing the wonderful comments that had appeared on Climate Sight in response to a question that I had raised, namely,
“While in every way that I can think of, I support the premise of mankind affecting global climate, I would love to hear from someone who could reconcile the Post above with these recent items:” and then included the links to the WSJ and Daily Mail items.
If you are not familiar with those WSJ and Daily Mail items, then you will need to go back to Friday’s Post.
So moving on.
The third response was from chrisd3, here’s what he wrote,
Paul, here is the Met Office’s response, which begins, “[The Daily Mail] article includes numerous errors in the reporting of published peer reviewed science undertaken by the Met Office Hadley Centre and for Mr. Rose to suggest that the latest global temperatures available show no warming in the last 15 years is entirely misleading.”
Here is Deltoid taking David Rose apart on some earlier pieces:
And NASA never said anything about the Thames freezing over. Rose just made that bit up.
From this, it is pretty clear why Rose chooses 15 years as his starting point: 1997-1998 was the time of the largest El Nino ever recorded, resulting in a huge temperature spike. Using that as the starting point for a temperature comparison is absolutely classic cherry-picking.
And in any event, you can’t say anything about trends in noisy data by simply comparing two arbitrary points. That is not a valid way to analyze the data (especially if you pick an obvious outlier as your starting point!). It is like trying to say whether the tide is coming in or going out by looking at the height of two waves. It just doesn’t work that way. You have to look at the long-term trend to remove the noise.
Let me take you to that Met Office response (and I’m republishing it in full).
Met Office in the Media: 29 January 2012
Today the Mail on Sunday published a story written by David Rose entitled “Forget global warming – it’s Cycle 25 we need to worry about”.
This article includes numerous errors in the reporting of published peer reviewed science undertaken by the Met Office Hadley Centre and for Mr. Rose to suggest that the latest global temperatures available show no warming in the last 15 years is entirely misleading.
Despite the Met Office having spoken to David Rose ahead of the publication of the story, he has chosen to not fully include the answers we gave him to questions around decadal projections produced by the Met Office or his belief that we have seen no warming since 1997.
For clarity I have included our full response to David Rose below:A spokesman for the Met Office said: “The ten year projection remains groundbreaking science. The complete period for the original projection is not over yet and these projections are regularly updated to take account of the most recent data.
“The projections are probabilistic in nature, and no individual forecast should be taken in isolation. Instead, several decades of data will be needed to assess the robustness of the projections.
“However, what is absolutely clear is that we have continued to see a trend of warming, with the decade of 2000-2009 being clearly the warmest in the instrumental record going back to 1850. Depending on which temperature records you use, 2010 was the warmest year on record for NOAA NCDC and NASA GISS, and the second warmest on record in HadCRUT3.”
Global average temperatures from 1850 to 2011 from the three individual global temperature datasets (Met Office/UEA HadCRUT3, NASA GISS and NOAA NCDC)
Furthermore despite criticism of a paper published by the Met Office he chose not to ask us to respond to his misconceptions. The study in question, supported by many others, provides an insight into the sensitivity of our climate to changes in the output of the sun.
It confirmed that although solar output is likely to reduce over the next 90 years this will not substantially delay expected increases in global temperatures caused by greenhouse gases. The study found that the expected decrease in solar activity would only most likely cause a reduction in global temperatures of 0.08 °C. This compares to an expected warming of about 2.5 °C over the same period due to greenhouse gases (according to the IPCC’s B2 scenario for greenhouse gas emissions that does not involve efforts to mitigate emissions). In addition the study also showed that if solar output reduced below that seen in the Maunder Minimum – a period between 1645 and 1715 when solar activity was at its lowest observed level – the global temperature reduction would be 0.13C.
Back to that response from chrisd3. He offered this, “Finally, here is a chart of global temps from HadCRU.” Here is that chart, remember we are looking at Global temperatures.
Global temperature trend
OK, between this Post and my Post last Friday, you probably get the message! There were many other contributions and I could go on and on quoting the great responses I got, all of them uniformly saying there IS global warming unprecedented in recent years. The message is crystal clear and those who wish to deny the evidence … well, I can’t come up with a polite term, so will just leave it at that!
My final contribution is from Martin Lack, author of the Blog Lack of Environment, and a good friend of Learning from Dogs. Here is what he wrote in a recent email,
When I eventually saw your earlier comment, I was surprised and disappointed in equal measure because I almost feel that I have failed in some way. Let me explain: Unlike ClimateSight and SkepticalScience, which both do an excellent job of focusing on the science of climate change, my blog is deliberately focused on the politics underlying the denial of all environmental our problems; including 2 key aspects to my MA dissertation, namely the political misuse of scepticism; and the psychology of denial. See my How to be a Climate Change ‘Sceptic’ for more detail.
Therefore, although not specifically categorised as such, just about everything I have posted is traceable back to Paul and Anne Ehrlich’sBetrayal of Science and Reason (1996) and/or Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway’s Merchants of Doubt (2010). For someone who does not currently go to any Church, I am remarkably fond of quoting Scripture so, if necessary, please forgive me but, as the Good Book says: “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun” (Ecclesiastes 1:9).
Therefore, I do not think you should be surprised by the amount of misinformation and misrepresentation contained in the original WSJ Sixteen’s article; and/or the fact that denialist arguments are repeated no matter how many times they have been shown to be false. Furthermore, I would warn against trying to summarise it all on Learning from Dogs. This is definitely Book territory and, in addition to the two mentioned above, the market is already saturated by the likes of Climate Change Cover-up by James Hoggan and Climate Change Denial by Haydn Washington and John Cook.
With very best wishes for a fog-free future,
What to say to close these two Posts off? Frankly, it’s difficult to know how to pitch it. The science seems clear beyond reasonable doubt. But if you are reading this and disagree, then PLEASE offer the science to refute the conclusions presented here. I promise you that I will present it on Learning from Dogs.
So let me end with a simple photograph.
Earthrise
This is the photograph that wilderness photographer Galen Rowell called, “the most influential environmental photograph ever taken.”
The now world-famous photograph was taken by Astronaut William Anders from Apollo 8, the first manned mission to the Moon, a little over 43 years ago on December 24th, 1968.
As the Earth rose above the horizon of the moon, NASA astronaut Frank Borman uttered the words, “Oh my God! Look at that picture over there! Here’s the Earth coming up. Wow, is that pretty.” Bill Anders then took the ‘unscheduled’ photograph.
Now project forward 43 years to the year 2055 and play with the idea of what ‘pretty‘ planet Earth will be like for mankind and so many other species, including our longest companion, the dog, if we don’t get our act together pretty soon!
On the 26th January, I wrote a piece about some computer challenges that I was having called Oh, to be a dog! I included a number of gorgeous photographs of dogs that had been previously sent to me by Katie S. There was such a lovely response to those pictures that it seemed timely to offer some more.
Here they are.
"A life without a dog is a mistake"” (Carl Zuckmayer)When you leave a dog behind because he “grew old", your children will learn the lesson. Maybe they will do the same to you when you are an old man. Think about it….“Women and cats will do what please’s them, dogs and men should relax and get used to the idea” (Robert A. Heinlein)
"Love is when your dog licks your face, even if you leave it alone the whole day" Anita, 4 years old
"The dog knows, but does not know that he knows“ (Pierre Teilhard de Chardin)
First, an apology for presenting something that isn’t from my own pen, so to speak. But for much of yesterday I was immersed in other writings and when I turned to ‘today’s’ Post for Learning from Dogs, around 5pm my time, my creative juices had well and truly dried up! So a very big ‘thank you’ to Diane M., from here in Payson, for recently sending me this wonderful dog story! It’s been widely circulated, not that I had seen it before, but I’m told that not necessarily with the full story, as this version includes.
ALittle Something Just For You!
Meet George the Great Dane
The first time we saw George, our beloved Great Dane, he was no more than a tiny, cowering ball of fuzzy fur. As my wife Christie opened the door of the crate he’d travelled in, he teetered to a standing position and looked out at us, moving his head slowly from side to side, taking in the wonder of it all. Finally, as if weighing us up and deciding we were acceptable, he tentatively pushed his little nose forward and gave Christie her first lick.
Puppy love: A young George with Dave's wife Christie. Even as a pup he had comically large paws.
He came into our lives in January 2006, just a few months after we had married and set up home in Arizona . We both had busy jobs, Christie selling medical equipment while I was a property developer, but she had always planned that, once she had a house of her own, she would also have a dog.
She wanted a Great Dane as they make great family pets, so we tracked down a litter of 13, born 1,000 miles away in Oregon. Their owner emailed us a photo showing a chaotic jumble of paws, snouts and tails.Twelve were entangled with one another, but our eyes were drawn to one pup standing apart from the rest. He was clearly the runt, endearing him to Christie immediately.
Though it didn’t really register, George’s paws were comically large even then. But all we saw was this cute puppy. We certainly never dreamed he would one day become the biggest dog in the world, standing nearly 4ft high at the shoulder, 7ft long and weighing nearly 250 pounds. Right now, he just looked bewildered.
George made the long journey from Oregon to Phoenix by plane and we picked him up from the freight area, tired but unshaken. As soon as George settled into our home, we discovered our plans to be fair but firm parents were wishful thinking. All the things that make Great Danes wonderful pets — their lack of aggression and their attachment to humans — make them more emotionally sensitive than other dogs.They need to be with their ‘pack’ at all times and at night the cute pup with intensely blue eyes turned into a caterwauling banshee whenever we tried to leave him alone in the kitchen.
No matter how much we reminded ourselves that he had every home comfort (warm dog bed, warm blanket, warm kitchen, squeaky bone), each whimper created a picture in our heads of a tragic, abandoned pup, desperate for his mother. Eventually, we gave in and shunted George’s dog bed into our bedroom.
George measures more than 7 ft from nose to tail and weighs 250 pounds and is the world's biggest dog, but he's terrified of Chihuahuas...
In the coming months, Christie really threw herself into being a mum to George. As well as a photo album, he had a growth chart — we were soon reading it in awe.At five months he still acted like a puppy, chasing his tail and playing games of fetch and tug-of-war with his favorite bit of rope. But he was already the size of a fully-grown Labrador .He was putting on more than a pound a day and he bounded around like Bambi, skittering on our wooden floors and hurling himself at everything he fancied, including us humans. His displays of affection could leave you pinned temporarily against a wall or a piece of furniture.
His size did not go unnoticed in the outside world. Our local park had a section for puppies but we were bullied out of it by other owners, who were scared George would hurt their pups — but the opposite was true.
The smaller dogs ran around and under him, and he’d be constantly sidestepping them, obviously anxious and jittery. Slowly we realized that our enormous puppy was a big softie. Besides his terror of being left alone, he had a fear of water. He’d growl anxiously at the side of our swimming pool, alarmed that his ‘pack’ members would so willingly place themselves in danger of drowning.
If the pool was his most-hated place, his favorite was our bedroom. Eventually he outgrew the single mattress we placed there for him and preferred instead the comfort of our king-sized bed — sprawling between us like some over-indulged prince while we spent half the night clinging onto the edges.
Paws for thought: George's giant feet dwarf Dave's hand.
In the summer of 2006, we solved this problem by buying him his own queen-sized mattress, which he still sleeps on today at the bottom of our bed. But soon we encountered another challenge as George reached doggie puberty. Once he had grabbed life by the lapels, now he was grabbing onto legs — table legs, chair legs, human legs, he wasn’t picky — and doing what all male dogs do with the vigor of a canine giant.
He calmed down in the furniture department after we had him neutered, but then he took up a new hobby, eating as if it were an Olympic sport.A sausage on the barbecue was like a siren to a passing sailor. You couldn’t turn your back for a minute. And he was so tall that he actually had to bend down to pinch food off kitchen counters.
He could reach the high shelves as well, so we had to hide everything away in cupboards. Soon, he was getting through around 100lb of dry dog food every month.
As he approached his first birthday in November 2006, weighing about 196 pounds, it was getting physically impossible to make him go anywhere he didn’t want to — including the vet’s surgery. He had not forgotten the time he went there in possession of his manhood — and came out less than whole. As soon as he recognized the entrance, he refused to move. So I had to take him around to the less familiar back door instead.
For all these troubles, George gave us plenty in return, not least the following year when Christie lost the baby she was carrying. Evidently tuned in to her grief, George was a constant presence at her side. When she sat, he sat too. When she stood, he stood and padded alongside her to wherever she was going.
His personality grew more delightful the bigger he got. A male Great Dane typically weighs from nine to 11 stone, but by Christmas 2007 George weighed 210 pounds — bigger than most men. At this point, he loved being chauffeured around in my golf cart and would sit in it, his haunches on the seat and front legs on the floor. By Christmas 2008, our canine colossus weighed 252 pounds. A friend suggested he might be a contender for the Guinness Book of Records, but we had other things to think about: Christie had discovered that she was pregnant again.
With size comes problems: George the giant barely fits in the back of his owner's SUV
The trouble was, when our daughter Annabel arrived that September George made it clear he wanted nothing to do with this interloper. He was used to spending nights in delightful oblivion at the foot of our bed. Annabel’s high-decibel presence simply wasn’t on. When she cried, he’d wake, harrumph and then turn over in annoyance. Once it was clear the racket was going to continue, he’d exhale heavily again, till one of us finished that mysterious feeding thing we did with the noisy intruder.
But while he might not have cared much for Annabel, George loved her dolls, especially a stuffed green one that played a nursery rhyme when squeezed. Whenever he could, he placed it between his paws and pressed it so he could hear the tune. It was like a security blanket. It was a period of such big adjustment for him that if it made him happy, then it was fine by us and our patience was rewarded.
Slowly, George understood that Annabel was our pack’s youngest member and in need of his affection and protection. And on Christmas morning, he ended his three-month sulk, acknowledging her presence with a lick of her hand. It was the best present we could have had — although the beginning of 2010 brought more good news.
A doggone miracle: George the Great Dane with the Nasser's daughter Annabel at home in Arizona.
Over the previous weeks, while Annabel slept, Christie had applied to the Guinness World Records people on George’s behalf. That February, one of their adjudicators came to watch George being measured in the presence of a vet. He was officially declared not just the world’s tallest living dog (43 inches from paw to shoulder) but the tallest dog ever.
The following week we flew to Chicago to appear on the Oprah Winfrey Show and were put up in one of the city’s most luxurious hotels. We had a huge sitting room, dining area and even a bar — but there was just one problem. There was nowhere for George to sleep.
As we enjoyed a gourmet meal and a bottle of red wine that night, he struggled to settle on two roll-out divans provided for him. Infuriatingly, they wouldn’t stay together. So he had his head on one and back end on the other, but his stomach was sagging onto the carpet.
‘You know what we need to do,’ I joked. ‘Give George our bed to sleep on and have the divans in this room ourselves.’
Christie looked at me with a telltale gleam in her eye and I knew immediately my joke had been a fatal error. An hour later, our boy was sprawled in splendor in our huge, fluffy king-size bed.
‘Well,’ whispered Christie, ‘George is the star here, after all.’ She was right, of course, and since his appearance on TV, Giant George has built a following around the world, with his own fan club, website and 70,000 fans on Facebook.
None of this, of course, means anything to George. He still spends his days doing what he has always liked best: eating, playing and sleeping. Our cherished pet may have become a global celebrity — but really, he’s just one of the family.
Man's biggest friend: Devoted owner Dave Nasser with George.
Two days ago, I wrote a piece about how the evolution of the domestic dog has been reliably re-calibrated back to around 33,000 years ago. I quoted from an article in the Arizona Republic, here are the opening paragraphs of that article.
Tamed dogs may go back 33,000 years
by Anne Ryman – Jan. 24, 2012 11:33 PM
The Republic | azcentral.com
Dogs have been “man’s best friend” longer than any other animal. And, as it turns out, longer than previously thought.
A pair of research papers published in the past few years, one most recently by a team that includes the University of Arizona, significantly pushes back the timeline for domestication of dogs from about 14,000 years ago to more than 30,000 years ago.
Researchers at UA and universities in England and the Netherlands used radiocarbon dating to determine that the skull of a Siberian dog was about 33,000 years old. Slightly older dog remains were identified in Belgium a few years ago by a separate research team.
So moving on, and apologies for a bit of a personal muse.
Last night (the night of the 30th/31st Jan.) a single, gentle yelp from Pharaoh had me instantly awake. Initially hadn’t a clue about the time but instinctively knew it was an un-Godly hour! Jean and I had been late to bed and I was pretty tired when the lights went out – off to sleep in an instant. Ergo, waking up at 2am as it turned out to be, the classic deep-sleep time of the night, was challenging! It is also relevant to mention that Pharaoh is reliably a very good sleeper at night.
Yet, in literally an instant of time, I had transitioned from being totally asleep to being mentally alert wondering what had caused him to cry out. Pharaoh came to the side of the bed and let me rub his head, then went back to near the door and uttered another soft yelp. I knew without any doubt at all that he was in pain and lay on my back anticipating what would be coming – putting a dressing-gown on and leading his nibs out into a very cold and dark night!
Then a clawed paw on the door told me to get moving, and within moments of Pharaoh being outside, it was clear that he had a badly upset tummy.
The whole episode was repeated around 4.45 am.
It was later in the morning that I was reflecting with Jean about the evolution of the dog-human relationship that a) gave the dog the instinctive confidence to call out to his ‘master’ in a different ‘I need help‘ tone, and b) that the call was so rapidly interpreted by a human as a call for help from another species.
But dogs sleeping near or around their human companions for more than 30,000 years allows plenty of time for species bonding to develop in ways that are both beautiful and mysterious. Long may that bonding remain beautiful and mysterious.
Fabulous animals!
Pharaoh. June 2008, 3 months before we both left for Mexico!
An opportunity to watch a new video of Rupert Sheldrake talking about his new book The Science Delusion
I have written or referred to Rupert Sheldrake many times previously on Learning from Dogs. I have also read the book by Mr. Sheldrake, Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home. (The linked title takes you to something I published about the book and the author on the 9th May, 2011 and also links to other articles about Rupert Sheldrake.)
Rupert Sheldrake
Previously, I had written about what Rupert Sheldrake calls morphic resonance and morphic fields, see my article here.
Yesterday, I received an email promoting Sheldrake’s new book. This is what it said,
From Rupert Sheldrake
London January 30th, 2012
In my last newsletter I said that the UK launch of my new book The Science Delusion would be streamed live from Kings College, London University, on January 17, but unfortunately the internet connection at King College broke down, so this did not happen.
Clearly they were able to film that launch and that video link is available, but only until February 7th, 2012! So if you want to watch the video then please go here. I am not able to embed that into this Post. You will be going to the video of this:
THE SCIENCE DELUSION: FREEING THE SPIRIT OF INQUIRY
January 17, 2012, 7pm – 8:30pm (GMT), 2pm – 3:30pm (EST)
Venue: Great Hall King’s College London, Strand, London WC2R 2LS
In addition, that email newsletter carried the link to a review of the new book in the British Guardian newspaper, by Mary Midgley. It starts thus,
The unlucky fact that our current form of mechanistic materialism rests on muddled, outdated notions of matter isn’t often mentioned today. It’s a mess that can be ignored for everyday scientific purposes, but for our wider thinking it is getting very destructive. We can’t approach important mind-body topics such as consciousness or the origins of life while we still treat matter in 17th-century style as if it were dead, inert stuff, incapable of producing life. And we certainly can’t go on pretending to believe that our own experience – the source of all our thought – is just an illusion, which it would have to be if that dead, alien stuff were indeed the only reality.
If you want to read the review in full then it is here. (If you are a follower of Rupert Sheldrake, best not to take the comments to Mary’s article too seriously!)
Also, the Guardian blog carried a piece by Mark Vernon, that opened thus,
Werner Heisenberg, one of the founding fathers of quantum physics, once observed that history could be divided into periods according to what people of the time made of matter. In his book Physics and Philosophy, published in the early 60s, he argued that at the beginning of the 20th century we entered a new period. It was then that quantum physics threw off the materialism that dominated the natural sciences of the 19th century.
“[This] frame was so narrow and rigid that it was difficult to find a place in it for many concepts of our language that had always belonged to its very substance, for instance, the concept of mind, of the human soul or of life. Mind could be introduced into the general picture only as a kind of mirror of the material world.”
Today we live in the 21st century, and it seems that we are still stuck with this narrow and rigid view of the things. As Rupert Sheldrake puts it in his new book, published this week, The Science Delusion: “The belief system that governs conventional scientific thinking is an act of faith, grounded in a 19th-century ideology.”
Mark Vernon closes the fascinating piece with these tantalising words.
The analogy has the benefit of naturalising extrasensory perception, Watts notes. But it also raises problems. For example, how would it be possible mentally “to touch” objects that don’t exist, as would happen when contemplating a centaur? Watts concludes: “An adequate account of the mind must encompass both first- and third-person description whereas the idea of a ‘field’, along with the other spatial descriptions that Sheldrake uses, seem to be exclusively third-person type descriptions.” Oddly, this is a strikingly 19th century attitude to have.
Nonetheless, Sheldrake must welcome such serious engagement with his work. He may not be right in the details. But he is surely right, with Heisenberg, in insisting that the materialist world view must go.
Don’t rely on my short excerpts, read the article in full here.
For my money, this will be a book that I won’t miss reading!
I saw this on Freyja’s Facebook account and thought it would be appropriate for a Saturday reflection along with Random Notes 2. I’m sure many have seen it already but it was new to me!
There was a blind girl who hated herself because she was blind. She hated everyone except her loving boyfriend. He was always there for her. She told her boyfriend, ” If I could see the world, I’d marry you”.
One day someone donated eyes to her. When the bandages came off, she was able to see everything, including her boyfriend. He asked her, “Now that you can see the world, will you marry me?”
The girl looked at her boyfriend and saw that he was blind. The sight of his closed eyelids shocked her. She hadn’t expected that. The thought of looking at him for the rest of her life led her to refuse his offer of marriage. Her boyfriend left her in tears and days later wrote a note to her saying; “Take good care of your eyes, my dear, for before they were yours, they were mine.”
Having just cut and pasted that from the Facebook page, I thought that I would do a web search on ‘There was a blind girl who hated herself‘ and the first link on the results page was Stories from the Heart from the A View on Buddhism website. So that was a lovely find and a web site that deserves more browsing.
At the top of the ‘Home Page’ was the following quote:
“Don’t try to use what you learn from Buddhism to be a Buddhist;
use it to be a better whatever-you-already-are.” His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama
Some of you may remember that this ‘series’ started on the 24th with the first of John H.’s delightful collection of humour and reflective thoughts. Here’s number two! Have a great week-end.
“Tsunami” wasn’t a common word in the 1950’s.
Imagination energizes creativity
We live within natural rhythms.
Collective insanity is destructive in proportion to species growth.
On Wednesday, I wrote how something, as I thought then, had corrupted my PC causing it to run very slowly. In fact, it was running so unreliably that I really struggled to wonder what had happened. As I wrote, buggins at this end hadn’t got around to making a back-up of the hard disk in 18 months, so for a while I sweated big time! But miracle of miracles, the PC in ‘Safe’ mode allowed me to take a complete copy of the My Documents folder.
Then yesterday (Thursday) on the dot of 9am I marched into the local Payson branch of The Computer Guys with my PC. Quickly I was appraised of the fact that my hard drive was operating intermittently and plumped for a new system, just grateful that they could transfer all the data from my old drive across to the new one.
Two hours later, they advised me that my existing hard drive had totally failed So yet another miracle in my life; I had a backup of my documents including my priceless Scrivener projects.
It was a long day spent re-installing software programs and uploading all the relevant files but by 8pm it was done! Phew!
So if was serendipity itself to see a Post come in from Sue Dreamwalker’s fabulous blog with the title, ‘Fitting the Pieces Together‘. I had spent my whole day fitting pieces back together! Knowing I would have so little time, I asked Sue for permission to re-publish her Post and, bless her, she readily agreed. It now follows.
Making the pieces of life fit smoothly!
Fitting the Pieces Together.
None of us need to be a genius to know that something is shifting within the Human Consciousness. Each of us is sensing these changes.
Many more now are awakening to the possibilities that there is more to our physical ‘Being’ than mere flesh and blood as more and more of us get in touch once again with our intuition.
In this modern age we have pushed aside and stopped the flow of our natural abilities in favour of a world that relies upon its Gadgets. Take all those Gadgets away from us and we wouldn’t survive very long if only we had was the skin we are living in to rely upon. Unlike our Indigenous tribes around the world today, whom modern man may term ‘Primitive’ in comparison, And I also wonder if such a machine were ever invented to measure our Awareness and Happiness factors, just how Primitive we would compare to our Indigenous brothers to their own Conscious Awareness. For they have long known the things which we have long since forgotten.
Throughout time we have lost touch with our inner selves as we gathered together our gadgets, bigger homes, faster cars trinkets and ornaments, accumulating more debt in order to gather yet more ‘Things’. And still when we think we have everything money can buy, there is still something Missing… We keep on searching, driven to that higher paid job, the next relationship as we each search for that which makes us feel complete and whole, as we search for the meaning of Life.
Each of us are searching for their own piece of the Puzzle, and yet if only we could realise that we are all of us part of that Huge jigsaw puzzle.. ‘The Puzzle of Life’
But unlike the Jigsaws we buy we don’t get to see the ‘Big Picture’ on the box lid.
We travel along in life as that little separate jigsaw piece searching to fit in, looking for that connection to more pieces as we slot our lives together.
When we start our puzzle making, we start by looking for all those straight edges pieces, we need structure, a place to start from. It may take us some time to put the boarders together, especially when there are so many pieces to choose from. But we sift through them, gathering together the one’s we need.
We may have to scrabble around the ‘box of life’ trying many pieces to fit with ours. We start by following similar pieces, those with straight lines, whose colours match our own, and gradually we create the perimeters, a structure, rules, a base from which we can then start to fill in more missing pieces.
So too in life we start by congregating with similar people as we join various groups, whether that be education, social, or spiritual. That part is easy, we can see which piece is sky-blue, or Green-Grass and so we huddle together knowing we are going to fit in somewhere. But what about all those mingled colours, the pieces in the box that could be anything.. If we had the picture box lid, we could make more sense of it, but as we don’t, we scratch our heads and wonder as we hold that random jigsaw which represents our self, just where DO we fit in? Often we can drop it/our direction and pick up another/following a different route hoping this one we’ll have better luck with. So to with our careers, our relationships we swop and change forever searching for that perfect fit.
And you know it when it slots into place.. How? because it ‘Feels’ right, and when that happens, just how much more quicker do the rest of the pieces then start to slot into place.. For once again we are following our intuition, as we ‘know’ we are then on its correct coarse again.
Life is like that Puzzle, all the pieces are there right before our eyes, and yet we miss what’s right under our very noses. We are constantly being given signs from the Universal Mind , the source of creation, but we have been wrapped up for so long within our Material world, we no longer see the signs that naturally occur and point us in the right direction.
The first part of putting the Puzzle together is to see yourself not as separate from anything else, we are all part of this huge picture called ‘Life on Earth’, We cannot function as a lone piece. We need others to connect with. Each adding their own colour creating the whole. It would not be Earth if we didn’t have the Flora and Fauna and each of us are inevitably connected via that same Life Source of Energy which permeates through each of us.
The indigenous tribes survive because they function as a whole, they connect to Nature and the Universal Mind serving each for the good of the whole working within the natural laws of oneness.
To find the answers of “ Where do I fit in?” and “What is my purpose?”we need to understand we are connected to a “Whole” lot more, and that the time is now, whereby we need to start and dig around in that Box of Life and turn over some of our own jigsaw pieces as we discover the make up of our reality.
We need to see that by adding our Conscious awareness to that of others piece by piece our memory of just who we are will return.
I am reminded of that saying.
“ Together we stand, Divided we Fall ”
This is why our Lights need now more than ever to join together to bring Illumination into the world..
Keep searching, for the pieces are coming together, ~ One by one of us are seeking to understand and Wake-Up..But first we need to re-discover ourselves
Now is the time to reach out with your Hearts and send each other Love, Pray for Peace around this word… For this world needs YOU.. for You are a vital Piece of the Puzzle..
We need to Uniteeach other to complete the task we came to achieve.
Yesterday, around 10am something got into my main desktop computer and practically brought it to a halt. Of course, it had been months since I had done a backup and there were dozens and dozens of documents at risk, including a fair chunk of a novel that I have under-way! An hour later, I had managed to backup my documents yet the PC was still pretty crippled. Felt like an utter waste of a day!
Luckily the old laptop that we use to watch movies was fine, and that is what I am using to prepare this Post.
So, by way of making me and hopefully many of you as well, feel so grateful for the way that dogs just let it all flow by, here are a few wonderful dog pictures, sent to me courtesy of Rich and Katie S.
Holding a rose for all humanity!
and what about this this fine dog!
The epitome of loyalty and unconditional love!
Try avoiding this pair of eyes!
Not many would disagree with W.W.
Don’t know about you, but I’m already feeling better!
Some of man's best listeners!
The unavoidable truth!
Oh, how so true!
OK, plenty more where these came from, to be held in reserve for other challenging days! Thank you Rich and Katie.
But aren’t we so lucky to have these animals in our lives! God bless them!
A lovely collection of humour and reflective thoughts.
Good friend, John H. here in Payson, recently sent me an email with a delightful collection of, as the sub-heading put it, humour and reflective thoughts.
I decided to offer one every so often as an additional post for the day. So here’s the first, accompanying my Post about Satish Kumar. Enjoy!
Whoops!
Truth, love and laughter are a good way of life.
Life is a journey we share as if we knew the answers.
We can’t do anything right and we can’t do anything wrong.
Learning from Dogs 