Blue Sky Blog: Ever Seen These?

Sunday, June 12, 2011

Ever Seen These?

Probably not, unless you have a catalpa tree.

These are catalpa worms, a caterpillar of the hawk moth, that hatches out in the tree, and eats the catalpa leaves exclusively--stripping the tree bare! The people who built this house loved to fish--so they planted several catalpa trees on the property so they could collect the worms. (There are many hundreds of them on each tree.) Evidently, fish love them. We tolerate them, and the tree does grow its leaves back. Its a weird phenomenon, as you near the tree, you can hear the munching--its loud! The two caterpillars in the photo have strayed to a blueberry bush--lets hope they have not abandoned their strict diet!

1 comments:

Trashmaster46 said...: I've never heard of either the catalpa plant or the worms who feed on it. You learn all sorts of things on the intarwebs!; June 23, 2011 9:44 PM

Forwarded from Our Friend Vena

Be sure to cancel your credit cards before you die! I think we all can relate to this comical customer service conundrum!

A relative died this past January, and the lending institution billed her for January and February for their annual service charges on her credit card, and then added late fees and interest on the monthly charge. The balance had been $0.00, now it was somewhere around $60.00. I placed a call to Customer Service :

Me: "I am calling to tell you that she died in January."

C. Service: "The account was never closed and the late fees and charges still apply."

Me: "Maybe, you should turn it over to collections."

C. Service: "Since it is 2 months past due, it already has been."

Me: "So, what will they do when they find out she is dead?"

C. Service: "Either report her account to the frauds division or report her to the credit bureau, maybe both!"

Me: "Do you think God will be mad at her?"

C. Service: "Excuse me?"

Me: "Did you not get what I was telling you--The part about her being dead?"

C. Service: "Sir, you'll have to speak to my supervisor."

(Supervisor gets on the phone):

Me: "I'm calling to tell you, she died in January."

C. Service: "The account was never closed and the late fees and charges still apply."

Me: "You mean you want to collect from her estate?"

C. Service: (Stammer). "Are you her lawyer?"

Me: "No, I'm her great nephew." (Lawyer info given)

C. Service: "Could you fax us a certificate of death?"

Me: "Sure." (Fax number is given)

(After they get the fax):

C. Service: "Our system just isn't setup for death. I don't know what more I can do to help."

Me: "Well, if you figure it out, great! If not, you could just keep billing her. I don't think she will care."

C. Service: "Well, the late fees and charges do still apply."

Me: "Would you like her new billing address?"

C. Service: "That might help."

Me: Her address is: Odessa Memorial Cemetery, Hwy 129, plot number 69, Odessa, Texas

C. Service: "Sir, that's a cemetery!"

Me: "What do you do with dead people on your planet?"

A RESPONSE:
Anyway, I had a big belly laugh over the credit card issue and the card
company not understanding death. I have to tell you my story.

I had only been divorced a short time when my husband
of 20 yrs died. I ended up taking care of everything because I was the only
one that knew anything. Anyway, I got a bill for his personal taxes (luxury
tax) with a stern NEEDED TO BE PAID IMMEDIATELY. I call the Accessors
office, I told them that he had died and had been dead for almost a
year. She said "well, that would explain why he is late, but when is he
going to pay the taxes?". I again said that he was dead and the I doubted
that he was going to pay his Personal property taxes. She seemed to be getting
very agitated and again asked when he was going to pay the taxes. Again I
told her he was dead. Back and forth for a good amount of time. Finally I
asked her what was going to happen if he didn't pay his taxes. "WELL, HE
CAN'T GET HIS DRIVERS LICENSE!!" I wet myself from laughing so hard. She
hung up on me. Guess he can not legally drive dead in Arkansas.
-Anna
(My note: But he can vote in Florida!)

Black Elk

You have noticed that everything an Indian does is in a circle, and that is because the Power of the World always works in circles, and everything tries to be round..... The Sky is round, and I have heard that the earth is round like a ball, and so are all the stars. The wind, in its greatest power, whirls. Birds make their nest in circles, for theirs is the same religion as ours....
Even the seasons form a great circle in their changing, and always come back again to where they were. The life of a man is a circle from childhood to childhood, and so it is in everything where power moves.

Wendell Berry

Whether we and our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.

A person who undertakes to grow a garden at home, by practices that will preserve rather than exploit the economy of the soil, has his mind precisely against what is wrong with us. . . . What I am saying is that if we apply our minds directly and competently to the needs of the earth, then we will have begun to make fundamental and necessary changes in our minds. We will begin to understand and to mistrust and to change our wasteful economy, which markets not just the produce of the earth, but also the earth's ability to produce.

Laurens van der Post

There was only one thing which could lead to an answer and that was to let the sense of journey expressed for so long in traveling the world without become a journey within the spirit of man. Statesmen, scientists, philosophers, even priests and the whole intellectual trend of the day put up a plausible pretence that our troubles were due to imperfect political systems, badly drawn frontiers and other environmental and economic causes. The whole history of man as he, Mopani, knew it, had tried all these approaches over and over again and at last, as far as he was concerned, they were proved utterly bankrupt. The real, the only crises out of which all evil came was a crisis of meaning. It was the terrible invasion of meaninglessness and a feeling of not belonging invading the awareness of man, that was the unique sickness of our day. And this sickness, he was convinced, was the result of the so-called civilized man, parting company with the natural and instinctive man in himself. Never had the power of the civilized over the natural been so great and never had the power corrupted man within himself so dangerously. For that reason the journey within could not be resumed soon enough, the journey of what he called the exiled Jacob back to Esau, the hunter, whom he has betrayed and with whom he had to be reconciled before he could come home again to inherit his full self.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing and dance, and write poems and suffer and understand, for all that is life.

Meditation is one of the greatest arts in life - perhaps the greatest, and one cannot possibly learn it from anybody, that is the beauty of it. It has no technique and therefore no authority.

When asked in 1974 by his biographer, Mary Lutyens, to define his teachings Krishnamurti wrote the following:

The core of Krishnamurti's teaching is contained in the statement he made in 1929 when he said 'Truth is a pathless land'. Man cannot come to it through any organisation, through any creed, through any dogma, priest or ritual, not through any philosophical knowledge or psychological technique. He has to find it through the mirror of relationship, through the understanding of the contents of his own mind, through observation and not through intellectual analysis or introspective dissection. Man has built in himself images as a fence of security - religious, political, personal. These manifest as symbols, ideas, beliefs. The burden of these images dominates man's thinking, his relationships and his daily life. These images are the causes of our problems for they divide man from man. His perception of life is shaped by the concepts already established in his mind. The content of his consciousness is his entire existence. This content is common to all humanity. The individuality is the name, the form and superficial culture he acquires from tradition and environment. The uniqueness of man does not lie in the superficial but in complete freedom from the content of his consciousness, which is common to all mankind. So he is not an individual.

Freedom is not a reaction; freedom is not a choice. It is man's pretence that because he has choice he is free. Freedom is pure observation without direction, without fear of punishment and reward. Freedom is without motive; freedom is not at the end of the evolution of man but lies in the first step of his existence. In observation one begins to discover the lack of freedom. Freedom is found in the choiceless awareness of our daily existence.

Thought is time. Thought is born of experience, of knowledge, which are inseparable from time. Time is the psychological enemy of man. Our action is based on knowledge and therefore time, so man is always a slave to the past.

When man becomes aware of the movement of his own consciousness he will see the division between the thinker and the thought, the observer and the observed, the experiencer and the experience. He will discover that this division is an illusion. Then only is there pure observation which is insight without any shadow of the past . This timeless insight brings about a deep radical mutation in the mind.

Total negation is the essence of the positive. When there is negation of all those things which are not love – desire, pleasure – then love is, with its compassion and intelligence.

London, October 21, 1980

Joseph Campbell

Now the peoples of all the great civilizations everywhere have been prone to interpret their own symbolic figures literally, and so to regard themselves as favored in a special way, in direct contact with the Absolute...not only has it always been the way of the multitudes to interpret their own symbols literally, but such literally read symbolic forms have always been--and still are, in fact--the supports of their civilizations, the supports of their moral orders, their cohesion, vitality, creative powers. ...life, as both Nietzsche and Ibsen knew, requires life-supporting illusions; and where these have been dispelled, there is nothing secure to hold on to, no moral law, nothing firm. We have seen what has happened to indigenous communities unsettled by white mans civilization....Today the same thing is happening to us. With our old mythology- founded taboos unsettled by our own modern sciences, there is everywhere in the civilized world a rapidly rising incidence of violence and crime, mental disorders, suicides and drug addictions, shattered homes, impudent children, violence, murder, and despair. These are facts, I am not inventing them....is there not some point of wisdom beyond the conflicts of illusion and truth by which lives can be put back together again?

It is--and will forever be, as long as our human race exists--the old, everlasting, perennial mythology, in its "subjective sense," poetically renewed in terms neither of a remembered past nor of a projected future, but of now: addressed, that is to say, not to the flattery of "peoples," but to the waking of individuals in the knowledge of themselves, not simply as egos fighting for place on the surface of this beautiful planet, but equally as centers of Mind at Large--each in his own way at one with all, and with no horizons.

-From "Myths to Live By" 1972

Sunday, June 12, 2011

Ever Seen These?

1 comments:

Go To Our Website(s)

Wisdom of Trees

A label is

Blog Archive

To order, go to our website: www.blueskywaters.com

Forwarded from Our Friend Vena

About Us

Black Elk

Wendell Berry

Laurens van der Post

Jiddu Krishnamurti

Joseph Campbell

OUR WEBSITE plus myspace and facebook links

Sunday, June 12, 2011

Ever Seen These?

1 comments:

Go To Our Website(s)

Subscribe To

Wisdom of Trees

A label is

Blog Archive

To order, go to our website: www.blueskywaters.com

Forwarded from Our Friend Vena

About Us

Black Elk

Wendell Berry

Laurens van der Post

Jiddu Krishnamurti

Joseph Campbell

OUR WEBSITE plus myspace and facebook links