Spider Time

This is the image of a dead spider, covered in white mould, hanging in mid-air in front of a cellar grating in front of a bycicle wheel, in front of a backyard, in front of the world.
Tomorrow I will bring a better camera to capture more details.
If you could see the real thing, you would be able to tell how beautiful it is.

In the outside world friends die in motorcycle accidents, refugees die like flies on the open sea and in trucks in the middle of the continent.
Inside I sit and meditate, read Meister Eckhart and drink stinging nettle infusion.
Is this the same world?

When you look at the picture long enough you will realize: It is!

Back from the Beach

Back from the beach, drinking my stinging nettle infusion I want to keep the openness of the sea and the beaches in my head.
How can I achieve that?
When I occasionally step out of my comfort zone, I return with more openness.
It seems to be a time for new paths, new highways, new decisions.
However, I will carry the beach with me, in my mind.
It is always there, and it is always here, too.
It is not a memory but an attitude.

So bury me not in the lone prairie but carry my ashes to the mighty sea.

How can I share my beach-experience with others? That remains to be seen in a time of media transported permanent crisis.

The rocks on that beach have seen many a crisis. They are a billion years old and now they have to face erosion. Limpets lurk upon some of them. Moss and algae grow on others. Soon their billion year old existence will turn into a billion grains of sand.

The show must go on, they say. So lets go back from the beach into the facespooky, business wishy-washy-laden world of racist gobbledegook. But let the rocks and the beach be my companions there.

On the Beach

This is what my beach looks like. I do not own it, but it is my favourite beach. It is near Melvaig in Scotland, quite remote. Just a few people make their way there, because it is hard to reach from the inland road. Sheep and cattle graze above the nearby cliffs. It is sandy but also full of larger rocks.
For me it is also a metaphor for the good things in life or for life in general.
For the moment I have nothing more to say about it.

Time-out Two

Another way to pause, to stop for a moment is to write into the diary. Yes, not the blog, the public, show-off, soul-strip version. No.
I mean the paper and pencil style, secret, modest version, that I occasionally read for myself and very rarely to a friend or my wife.
It has become something special for me, a ritual, a time-out.
At the moment, a plastic bag with all my older diaries stands next to my office chair. It is my treasure, rather vulnerable to fire and vandalism, compared with the cloud-saved 21st century blog, the bioblog, the seemingly unpublished one.
It is my treasure chest, there for a journey into my past.
My joyful, painful, unstructured, well-planned and chaotic past.
There are countless stories in these little books, stories of love and loss, of success and paradise gained, regained and lost again.
As I have time to think about time, I can as well think about my old times, too.
Time for another time-out.

Time-out

Between Alfred Komarek's "Anstiftung zum Innehalten" and Barbara Adam's "Time" the desire for a time-out gains momentum.
A time-out from what?
A time-out from the treadmill, the hamster wheel, as we say in German (Hamsterrad)
And a time-out from the anesthetic that we call our comfort zone. (Thank you Placebo)
But is this not a contradiction?
No, just a slight change of perspective.
A step up the ladder on to a higher plane, or down the ladder to a lower plane, whatever direction you may consider.
Just to gain a broader horizon, that is worth it.
However, do not blame the blind for not being able to see colours.
Never forget how it was in the wheel.
Otherwise you become worse than those caught within.
So between these words of wisdom and the slogans of despair (Thank you New Model Army) do not forget fun.
Another reason to leave your comfort zone once in a while and have a time-out from feeling smug, lazy or powerless.
And consider this candle for reasons you can imagine:

Newtonian Time Management

Time is money. But if time does not exist, will money still be there?
On the safe side of life, in the check-list laden literature of executive training and management skill development, these questions do not exist.
Time is money. Everyone knows that.
But what was this relation like before Benjamin Franklin?
Would Newton and Leibniz still have their dispute in modern turbo-captitalism?
Well, money is not the thing that it used to be - especially not a thing - well not an object. It is mere stardust of binary codes in virtual worlds. Your nice pieces of paper are just the remains of another age.
And time?
Believe me time is money.
Time is also cocoa butter, Brussels sprouts and chocolate fudge.
According to Isaac Newton there is such a thing as time out there. There is also money out there.
So when you have finally succeeded to overcome this equation, time being money, in your ol' grave, you can look back and see if it is/was/will be true.
However, it is incredible what you can win if you spend your time not in the pursuit of money. In some cases you will end up even earning money, too.
Time is money.
I don't think so.
Time is money.
If time is money, we can build a money clock. Without doing any research on that idea, I assume that it already exists.
There is only the need for a periodic oscillation or happening.
You can base your timing on your individual money clock, dependent on how much you earn every year, every month, every day, every hour, every minute, every second, every quantum tick of the universe. Interesting phenomena can be observed with this sort of time: Acceleration with wage raises, complete halts of your personal universe, yes indeed.
I love that.
Time is money.
Time is on my side.
Money is not on my side.
Therefore: Time is not money.
Time to go to some logic classes.
If you open a book on time management called Zeitmanagement, on page 7 you will read: Everybody knows: Time is money.
Although I hate the burning of books, some of them do really deserve that.
And if I am wrong, the words will finally rise like a Phoenix from the ashes and scream:
Time is ice-cream.

NIST F-1 and other clocks

The NIST F-1 is the atomic clock of the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colorado.
Although it is very accurate (it loses about a second in 20 million years) it cannot compete with the Linnean flower clock.
The flower clock captures the beauty of change, whereas the F-1 only counts the oscillations of cesium atoms, which are not meant for the perception of the human eye.
However, for me the perfect description of time is the image below (Could be the marks of the Hershebian lawyer beetle).

Perdurantism and Endurantism

Perdurantism and Endurantism or 4Dism and 3Dism respectively are two ways to describe persistence of objects in time.
My belief that the universe is created anew every instant (how short that instant may be) faces the question of how it does that with keeping rather complex forms almost the same (at least on a macro level)
Otherwise, instead of my body, there would be a chaotic blur of matter in the next moment of time?
Is it really the sheer force of electromagnetic patterns and other forces, or are there essences involved?
And furthermore, what are the pragmatic aspects of these questions?
At least we know, although we keep the same form, on an atomic level we wobble and swing all the time.
Hang on, I have to read more about that.
Then there will be more thoughts about perdurantism, endurantism and eternity.

Tarqeq

the Inuit moon spirit

Reflections on the Yodelling Stick Insect

In the Garden of Five Surprises you will also find the yodelling stick insect.
When I read this for the first time, some four or five years ago, I thought it is some sort of mosquito that yodels before it bites you.
Well, it is an insect at least.
In "reality" it is an insect that is famous for its camouflage and which is simply able to yodel a little.
I imagine that it is really a surprise, when you find out where the yodeling comes from.
From all the surprises in the Garden it is my favorite one.
However, when you are occupied a lot with time theory, the yodelling of the stick insect can be very comforting, much more than its mere human Swiss or Tyrolian counterparts.
Humor is very important, especially in a world like this.
From now on, whenever I will read a newspaper, I will consider the fascinating ways of the yodelling stick insect, as a counterpart to death, torture, famine, terror and whatever you read about every day.
So be it.