Friday, January 12, 2024

Superior Hiking Trail Caribou Trail

 Previous Section        a few miles        Next Section

3 Campsites
Stunning views and a beautiful lake

https://superiorhiking.org/trail-section/caribou-river-wayside-to-lutsen/#section_4

This is a skip way up the shore since last time. I can't believe we missed two years of hiking. Ruth did a camping trip with some friends, but 2023 had some nasty weather to deal with. I don't know what happened to 2022. 

2024 started out with very little snow, we found ourselves hiking in January. It's been a winter of either mud or ice, but we got lucky. The elevation changes were not dramatic, so that helped. We followed the directions to Caribou Trail, the road, which is also Co Rd 4 and a short drive to the trailhead. It's a small parking lot. We passed it once. 

No problem finding the trail from there. The white markers let us know it's a spur trail. Normally I don't mention them, but this one was 

Monday, January 1, 2024

One more trip around the sun

 Nick Cave says, 


"We’re often led to believe that getting older is in itself somehow a betrayal of our idealistic younger self, but sometimes I think it might be the other way around. Maybe the younger self finds it difficult to inhabit its true potential because it has no idea what that potential is. It is a kind of unformed thing running scared most of the time, frantically trying to build its sense of self — This is me! Here I am! — in any way that it can. But then time and life come along, and smash that sense of self into a million pieces.

Then comes the reassembled self, the self you have to put back together. You no longer have to devote time to finding out what you are, you are just free to be whatever you want to be, unimpeded by the incessant needs of others. You somehow grow into the fullness of your humanity, form your own character, become a proper person — I don’t know, someone who has become a part of things, not someone separated from or at odds with the world."  -- from Faith, Hope, and Courage


I can get that. The trouble with a lot of these types of musings is they come from people who have found comfort in their later years. Maybe that came from some hard work, and maybe from some luck. When you're young, you can't predict how those forces will play out. So the old repeat the old truisms, that are true, except, not always. 

If they were always true, then people who are working three jobs would have enough to feed their families. 

We are stuck between centuries of traditions and an uncertain future. The one got our ancestors through adversity and the other we can only imagine. When I read the stories of those ancestors, I can feel their sense of being in this same place. I see myself as the result of their dreams. 



Monday, December 25, 2023

Travelling MO and AR

 Doniphan MO historical marker 

https://youtu.be/Tr1d0ivyTTk?si=W7Nd_K0PT5JhwSgF

Holt to Hoxie

https://goo.gl/maps/bup9CB4u6aukc3gz6


https://g.co/kgs/MvJJx1o

Clover Bend Historical Preservation

(870) 869-2708

https://herroncenter.org/

https://lchsar.org/publications/walnut-ridge-hoxie/



Moore Cemetery, 2 miles west of Hoxie, near Black Rock
Moore Cemetery - Google Maps - probably not it, because it's east of Walnut Ridge


Then on to bird watching





Saturday, November 18, 2023

Barnabas Pope

 

This little section of my ancestry is a companion to The Unfinished Podcast. It's the first chapter after the end of reading of the book, "The Unfinished Symphony". The main characters in that story are Barnabas and Aletha, who lived during the 19th century. Their great-grandson is my grandfather, on the far left of this picture. It gets to be tough to keep track of all the "greats" so provided this visual aid.

The Unfinished Podcast | a podcast by jwolforth (podbean.com)


Sunday, August 13, 2023

Computers Are Easy

 Computers are easy, there are icons, you don’t need to know all the technical terms.

They are not easy. I’m a writer. I know how to type. I tried to move some text, like everyone said I could, and now it’s gone.

It’s on the clipboard, look for the clipboard icon.

Why can’t I just look for the clipboard itself.

Well, you can’t see the clipboard, but, that doesn't matter.

Of course it matters. We are literally talking about something existing. That’s what matter is.

Well, this is more like energy.

Okay, great, whatever, show me the icon.

(shows icon)

That’s two rectangles and a little scribble I can barely see on top of one of them.

Well, it’s the clipboard icon, now you know.

So, now it’s easy? Because I know what some nerd in California drew on his lunch break one day, and now I know the name of it. Where is my missing text?

At one point it was on the clipboard. You probably used “cut”, right? I hope you didn’t do “delete”.

I learned the delete lesson early, so no. Yes, someone said, “cut and paste” is cool. So I tried that.

And what happened?

I cut and it was gone and I haven’t seen it since.

(opens mouth)

Do not tell me it was on the clipboard. You know that’s exactly where you started, right? If you say it was on the clipboard, then you are proving to me that you have so far told me nothing.

Okay, what else have you done.

This was two days ago. I turned off the computer.

Um, exactly how did you turn off the computer?

Really?

Well, there’s sleep mode, there’s restart, there’s Ctrl-Alt-Delete then sign-out or switch user, there’s…

Stop. At what point are you going to say computers might not be easy?

Fine. Let’s say someone helps you maintain the computer, turns it on and off for you, selects the software, installs it, and makes sure you are protected from viruses. They get you to your thing that you are writing when you want. Where are your files saved by the way? Never mind.

So, I need a computer expert in my house?

Or use help.

You’ve never tried that have you?

No, I learned from others mostly, as computers changed, I read the occasional article on what’s new.

Yeah, so I hit “help” yesterday, watched a video, and it showed me how to cut and paste in Microsoft Word. There were a bunch of words like “app” that I wasn’t sure about.

Uh-huh. And that didn’t help?

I don’t have Microsoft Word.

Oh.

But, cut, copy, and paste are universal. It comes from literally cutting paper with scissors and pasting back together. The icon for paste used to be a bottle of paste.

How does that help me?

(nothing)

Have you heard the joke about the kid who asked why the save icon is a vending machine?

Yeah. I don’t like jokes about nerds.

It’s not a joke. It’s bad graphic design. It’s like using terms from the American South before 1863 in regular speech or naming your sports team with a racial slur.

Okay, no need to get political.

Not the analogy I was going for. Language isn’t easy. Which is why computers aren’t easy.

Well, if you just understand that there is temporary memory and permanent memory, then you can imagine your text being in that temporary place for a minute, while you move to the next window where you want it, then you paste it, and then save it to the hard drive, to make it permanent, then, oh. Okay.

Friday, August 11, 2023

Garbage and Worship

 


This was posted on an atheist facebook that I'm a member of. It's private, so you might not have seen it. They didn't if it was in a church, or where they found it. That doesn't really matter. It's the kind of thing that people who say "God is energy" or "God is love" say. It's better than saying that God hates all the same people you hate, so I don't want to critique it too harshly. But, this is my blog. I say things here that I might not say in polite company. 

Someone else commented that "at that point you see the Divine in yourself and others. Not really worship. Just acknowledgment." Good point. Let's set aside what "worship" means, or give it your most generous interpretation of something kind and generous. I agreed with the comment, adding that when you learn to love the stranger, even the enemy, you see that religion doesn't support that. If you want to hang on to your religion, you need to distance yourself by creating an other, some other version of religion that isn't the one you are trying to articulate.

Some go even further, saying they are spiritual, but not religious. That even has an acronym, SPNR. In all cases, these are stepping stones. They are a recognition that there are aspects of religion, or religions, or the origins of your religion, that need to be jettisoned. There is no right way to leave religion, or as it's sometimes called, "deconstruct", but for me, the above is preferrable to being angry at the lies, manipulation, history of abuse, and anything else someone might experience or find out. 

I'm still working this out. If someone has something that caused anger, I can't say to not have that feeling. The meme here though, is an opening. It's a chance to dig into what it's talking about. It's an admission that somewhere, some church person has treated people like garbage. Other comments noted that God killed almost everyone in a flood and recommended stoning as a cure for problems. So, there's that. Maybe, take a highlighter to a Bible and start crossing the parts that encourages treating people terribly. 

Friday, June 30, 2023

Why Philosophy Matters - History

 

I hope I don’t lose too many with that heading. I promise not to list a bunch of dates and Greek names.

Philosophy is part of science. I’ll get to more on that soon. Long before the word “science” was coined, there were the “Natural Philosophers” in ancient Greece. That’s a good place to start for this blog series which is about the line between and the gray areas around philosophy and science.

Natural Philosophers

Those ancient Greeks were philosophizing about what things are. They didn’t know about quantum physics or laws of motion and likewise, much of what they concluded was wrong. We can give them a pass because they were doing something new. They are set apart from earlier attempts to answer the question “why” because they didn’t resort to wild claims about supernatural forces or beings that lived up on inaccessible mountains.

Shamans

For thousands of years before them, there were the Shamans. Sorry, I said Greece was the place to start, but I need to discuss what that “starting place” grew out of. “Shaman” is just one title of this group that I’ll refer to later. They, like the Natural Philosophers, also used methods of experimentation and gathering of data but I’m distinguishing them because they would also claim cosmic origins of their knowledge or include supernatural explanations of their methods. I’m not trying to lessen their importance. Without them most of us might not be here. As tribes of humans migrated around the globe, to new climates and new ecosystems, they needed to learn. And they did, quickly. If they hadn’t, they would have had a lot of trouble surviving. So, we are the descendants of those who were successful. That’s just basic Darwinian logic, but amazing, nonetheless.

They would find the healing herbs and learn to read the movement of the winds and the waters. The reasons the Shamans spoke of sprites and mystical explanations varied. It might have been for job security, to make it look mysterious so others would think it required special powers to learn. In other cases, it might have been a way to help others remember their lessons, or a way to pass them on. A story or a dance is easier to remember than a formula. The older the archaeology, the less we know about their thinking. Brú na Bóinne - Archaeological Ensemble of the Bend of the Boyne - UNESCO World Heritage Centre

If you go back in history further, something motivated us to come together in groups of a few hundred, and to split off into smaller groups when they grew larger than that. The size was conducive to some of them leaving for days at a time to hunt, or to having some who could protect the young and protect the mothers while they were vulnerable, and to help those who were sick or hurt. Maybe as a lucky accident, or maybe by design, it allowed for exploration and for figuring out how to make an arrowhead, how to corral a mastodon, or just to stare up at the stars because they might tell them something. Keeping the groups smaller allowed for social control of liars, thieves, and freeloaders.

There are still Shamans on the Earth today Home - Flowering Mountain. Some literally call themselves that. I don’t have a list of skills or abilities that qualify one for the job. A modern version of a Shaman could be someone who passes on oral traditions, or someone who forages for food or material to create tools or works of art. It could include musicians or healers of any type.

The Grateful Dead

A friend of mine followed a band called The Grateful Dead one summer while I was in college The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test book by Tom Wolfe (thriftbooks.com). When she told her story, she said, “Gerry Garcia is God.” Through experiences like hers we recreate ancient discoveries. With enough people, and the right music, and your own ability to let ourselves go with that flow, we can feel like it’s not us that is doing the dancing, but something else, something larger than just ourselves.

Some of my friends thought that was a little weird, calling a guitarist a god. We have methods now to figure out if such claims are true. I’m sure my friend wasn’t the first to propose Gerry’s divinity, nor were my other friends the first to be skeptical. In similar ways, young people discover the wonders of nature through curiosity and experimenting. It can be a fine line between encouraging that creativity and suppressing it in the name of safety.

A good teacher today not only shows children how to pass a science test but encourages them to discover science on their own. Kids also recreate some of the not-so-scientific phases of our past, like “might makes right”.  It would be good for children to develop the skills of sorting out reality before they start making decisions about how to spend their summers. But I’m getting ahead of the discussion here.

The Axial Age

Moving on, a big leap in the transition from those ancient days in Greece, and everywhere else, into the modern era, took place in the last millennium BCE. Major philosophies and theisms coalesced, blossomed, and were codified into the scriptures and words and common sense that still survives in the modern world. We, the whole planet, are still discussing exactly how “common” common sense is and what we should keep or throw away, but I’ll get to that later. I bring it up because this period is significant enough to be named. It was The Axial Age, and we can trace worldviews and current colloquial sayings back to it.

Civilizations had grown and fallen before that, and we should be careful, and not discount them. A simple distinction, my opinion, between the ones before this time and now, would be that the earlier civilizations emphasized “might makes right” over reflection on what “is” right. The familiar names from the Axial Age include Confucius, Zoroaster, and Siddhartha Gautama aka the Buddha (293) Documentary - The Buddha - PBS Documentary (Narrated by Richard Gere) - YouTube. Judaism has much deeper roots, but the Torah that has been handed down to us came together after they were released from captivity by the Babylonians.

The Golden Rules

Common ideas, like how to put boundaries on the right of self-defense, variations on the Golden Rule, how to maintain larger populations and divide work, came from all these traditions. The phrasing varies, but the ideas are the same.

Many words have been spilled over the Axial Age. There is no need for me to regurgitate them here.

It is important to note that questions about the nature of faith and arguments about what gods are did not develop until hundreds of years later. This was still a time of cultures being enmeshed with their spiritual histories and governments making war because of beliefs. The philosophy behind these questions became necessary when faith, politics, work, family, and other parts of life were separated into the silos that most of us are familiar with now.

Order

To complete our journey from the past to recent events, I’ll quickly cover three types of societal order, Nomological, Normative, and Narrative. See an excerpt from: John Vervaeke Episode 19: Augustine and Aquinas.

Nomological order can be traced back to the Shamans, up to the foundational assumptions of science. It says there are laws that just are. The methods of science allow for those laws to be questioned.

Normative order has codes to designate what is good, or what is permissible, or not. They may or may not be logical. Moral codes are based on some natural laws, something demonstrable. Purity codes might claim some logic, but they are based on tradition. See an excerpt from: Vervaeke Episode 14 Cynics.

A Narrative order is a story that presents a point of view. It’s a path to be followed with a promise of some future end. The Catholic story is a good example. Luther came along and said their narrative is wrong, that salvation is arbitrary.

Now

That brings up to the 16th century. Soon after Martin Luther made his mark on history, Galileo made his bold claims about the planets. Then came Newton. His formulas got us to the moon. The place where science is trying to figure out what is going on with gravity and quantum mechanics, and non-scientists are trying to figure out what that means to them is where this blog series heads next. If you’re still with me, thank you.