Ok, so therer is a space-time boundary that is approached by acceleration. As one asymptotically approaches lightspeed, space is flattened outin front and behind you. Think tunnel vision, except where the tunnel thins into a line. This is what Star wars was representing when the ships jump into hyperspeed and all the points of light stretch out into lines. Time stretches too. Basically, the faster you move, the more time you experience. People in orbit, moving faster than humans on earth, are actually experiencing slightly more time than we are! Time is speed. The universe is as big as it is old.

This is also true of life for humans. Einstein famously portrays it in negative corelation with enjoyment. Time flys when you're having fun. But I also see it disappear from homogeneity. All those routine highschool days bleed into one spatiotemporal place comprised of halls and lockers and thoughts all at once. I feel like the past and future are contained within the present, within our minds. Things make sense going forward as much as they do going backward. Tnink about it, if we lived backward, constantly fulfilling our memory, only knowing what will happen, the past being a total mystery...

It's also amazing to see what people can do with their time. Today we get people like Gilbert Bailey, who have worked and developed multiple businesses, worked internationally, and lived a variety of experiences, all within relatively few years. He seemed very time-conscious. The metaphor about buckets was like saying "go get while the gettin's good!" But I did find his description of a job interview interesting. It was revealing to see just how in-depth they can become. As somebody thoroughly interested in working with nature (plants in particular,) it just seemed way too means-end oriented for me. I hope to close the gap between work and benefit. Making sauerkraut is a good example. I just see these things in such stark contrast, the speed, the social institutions of government, money, reputation, consumer base; the necessity-to-stay-afloat paradigm; Buzzing and buzzing away, while the sauerkraut changes slowly, living and dying at the same time, transmogrifying into biotic gold for the human body. And it keeps for years... The ease of mind engendered by sauerkraut is my minds answer to the busyness I sensed from Gilbert.

What was so nice was seeing that contrast embodied in the biodynamic farmers in Efland. At least, their hearts were in it. There was still means-end stuff going on, but my perspective is skewed, after living with a maniac genius homesteader zen farmer in Black Mountain. The Biodynamic farmers were great. I love the cycle-oriented approach. The image of that little bud steadily expanding and contracting with the moon just reminded me how much we are like the plants ourselves. Another thing I love about Anthrposophy is how effective it is, while being pretty much spiritually inspired. Realizing the proper rythm in this pulsating earth being is possible. I remember a moment in Floyd, Virginia, weeding little parsely sprigs, and philosophizing with every breath, every motion of my body, looking down at each little being, keeping them safe, wondering if they have any idea that I'm here doing it for them, when suddenly out of a clear blue sky, a single fat raindrop landed from above me, right at the little rootbase of the parsely sprig in front of me. And I looked up, knowing.

I think when we really slow down and experience the complexity and necessated design in nature -- that expression of copasetic perfection in each part--we can realize that our own minds are of the same nature. Conditions make us up. I am a conglomeration of all my friends and family and culture and childhood and early fears and loves, and at the same time always freely expressing a self. I think the realization that I am a manifestation of universal copasetic energy can synthesize the duals of determinism and freedom, divinity and mechanics, morals and blind force. I mean, they all exist anyway, don't they?

Pollan is an amazing articulator of hard-to grasp realities. One of these is evolution and species-level dynamics. He explicates the coevolution of human crops and humans. We enter into a symbiosis where we provide all the perfect conditions for them to thrive, and we consume them in some fashion. But the consumption only happens on the individual level. On the species level, the plants are benefiting much more. Corn has conquered the midwest. Grass covers the outskirts of human settlements worldwide. These beings have developed ingeniously. And its not that they were designed that way, or intend themselves to become that way, but it is a manifestation of interbeing. The conditions of interaction with the world have given life its structure and function. Those words miss it though, for the structure is filling in the negative space of everything outside of it, and its function is the function of what everything else needs and gives. We are shaped by everything around us-literally. But there is this will that keeps it all moving from the inside. Subjectivities always differentiate themselves and create the level of time-experience we call life. But when you expand time-space in a conceptual space that allows for a species-level observation, what we call life dissipates in lieu of a massive explosion of organic force, tending outward....