Railway Tracks as Wildlife Corridors

It's well established fact amongst naturalists that disused railway tracks are nature havens in particular for reptiles.

Why is this?

• It could be that while disused, railway tracks remain out of public access so wildlife benefits from low disturbance
• It could be that the gravel laid along railway tracks provides good sunning spots for reptiles to warm up in mormning and evening - especially important for maturing eggs especially in viviparous species like Zootoca vivipara and Vipera berus.
• Railways provide joined up corridors between populations enabling spreading, inter-breeding and resilience to local fluctuations in environmental and population. This is the hypothesis of interest here.

If you want to destroy an army the best approach is to somehow break the army up into parts and then tackle each part separately. At its extreme if your army could fight each soldier one at a time then you would win the battle.

The reason for this is obvious if you take 2 soldiers. With a pair of soldiers if you trip soldier A, you cannot just go in for the kill as soldier B will defend A. While you attack B, A gets up and then you are back to fighting 2 soldiers. The group often (not always as we see at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415 where a crush destroyed the French army) sums to a force greater than the parts.

Likewise isolated animal populations become vulnerable. A weaker population might be heavily affected by a year of bad weather. With no support from stronger populations it may never recover. But once it is gone, then the stronger populations are weaker too. A simple wildlife corridor allowing mixing or populations allows "fallen" populations to be repopulated and recover, and in turn the mixing provides support for stronger populations. Genetic diversity is another important under current here.

You can see this very obviously with butterflies and birds that start to colonise Britain as the climate warms. The first few colonisers try and fail but presumably their arrival starts to change the ecology and set up the necessary interconnected niche. Perhaps they eat a food plant before a native species and so have the start of an negative impact on native species. Eventually you start to get populations doing a successful breed. But a bad winter kills them off. However as populations rise the chances of someone surviving winter increases and that has a knock on effect on future populations. Eventually when the population is large enough there is resilience to environmental fluctuations. This is not just a matter of rising temperature which is crucial. but also the benefits of having a large diverse population with wider genetic variability for evolution, and enough individuals to increase the "luck" and chance of someone surviving. If populations can be joined then these luck and genetic factors are increased. In a joined population if anyone survives a bad winter in any of the groups then they can spread to repopulate all the groups. If they remain isolated then a bad winter could knock out all the population but one which then becomes very isolated and vulnerable.

I do not know if surveys have been done on working railways but I've anecdotally noticed that land adjacent to railways has a higher than expected population of reptiles. I'm in the middle of plotting my own observations in my local patch and collecting more data but it could well be that railway lines provide essential wildlife corridors that link wildlife populations across the country providing better flow of genetics and reducing the risk incurred by local population disasters.

I notice a lot of work done on railways to provide animal shelters along the lines in the South Eastern lines so it looks like railways are already maintained in connection with environmental advisers. If this is true it is an amazing achievement and provides (at least as far as I can see) an extremely under reported and under acknowledged part of UK conservation.

Whether funding for this comes from government or is accounted for by the rail network the general population should be made aware of this as I think there would be wide support and go a long way to increase the "green" credentials of rail transport.

Obviously road networks provide a similar resource of corridors and along motorways there is equal clear wildlife management with road verges allowed to develop naturally. Everyone on UK motorways will have seen Kestrels hunting small mammals in the road verges. This is in addition to raptors and carnivores benefitting from road kills which provide a ready source of carrion meat.

However it seems that roads are far more busy and cars make contact with the road leading to the hiuge amounts of road-kill that can be seen on roads. Driving through Somerset for example there seems to be a dead badger every 100m in some places. Meanwhile a train can run over the heads of animals and perhaps runs only every 10 minutes. Obviously the existence of the 3rd rail on the ground poses a huge danger to animals as any contact is instant death. But in diesel and overhead tracks this is not a risk. Certainly foxes use our local track with 3rd-rail without apparent issue so its not a deciding factor on the value of railways.

So its a complex issue to get a clear view of. But anecdotally responding here to the observation that disused railways are wildlife havens, and there appears to be a higher than expected population of reptiles in land adjacent to railway lines.

To be developed...

Sky says "Stigma attached to going to work" well of course how else could it be?

https://news.sky.com/story/quite-often-there-is-a-stigma-attached-to-going-to-work-inside-britains-labour-market-crisis-13150687

One of the most messed up things about #Capitalism is the contradiction over work.

What do the rich aristocracy do? Well they don't work, cos that is why they need money to hire other people to do the work for them.

Indeed the whole point of money is to limit resources to the poor so they have to work, and give the rich the ability to offload work onto the poor.

No one likes work, or if they did you wouldn't need a salary. It's not like they pay you to eat ice cream.

Obviously more complex than that, but Capitalism simply has no idea what it is doing here apart from imposing a class system of non-owners who have to go to work, and owners who don't.

There was this TV interview with a girl on a new Thatcher created Under-Class council estate who was asked if she worked "piss off I'm not working class." That says everything about the nonsense of Capitalism.

Don't pretend for a minute Capitalism makes any sense or provides a blue print for the future, it's just an unfortunate hangover from the days of Empire. #EndCapitalism

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Now this line is worth some extra thought "It's not like they pay you to eat ice cream." Salary arises when you do something for someone else in a monetary system. Obviously in service sector and charity sector where "need" governs then volunteering is quite normal, and generosity and helpfulness provide a much more profound mode of behaviour than in a monetary system. As mentioned through this blog everything important (sunlight, rain, air, our conception, growth and birth**, etc is free) so why should we charge? But in a monetary system if someone gives us what we want, then we compensate monetarily. "They pay you to eat ice cream" because it is what you want. Unless it's in a movie, or perhaps you are hired as a fake customer to promote a ice-cream brand or shop. Then whether you like ice-cream or not is not the issue, its that you are delivering what someone else wants. Then you get cash. The idea of doing a job you like then is irrelevant to the cash. So the key is the find something you like doing that also give other people something they too like, then you get cash as well. So that was a basic analysis that probably wasn't needed its so basic.

** interesting SRH there in the form of Anthropic Principle. When you say your "conception was free" this presupposes your conception. If you died then was it free? There is an implicit assumption that someone is the beneficiary when we speak of "free". So this supports the monetary argument above that "free" is desire based. Getting "what you want" without compensation is "free." So the Sun rising and providing morning light is "free" if we want day light. Of course someone due to be hung at sunrise may not want it and consider it free at all. A kick in the head is "free!"

Relativity and D-Day 80

One of the greatest theories is Einstein's theories of relativity that did away with Newton's Absolute Inertial Frame which places everything relative to absolute space, and instead said that all frames of inertia are relative.

It's quite intuitive. As mentioned in a recent blog sitting on a chair we are stationary relative to the floor, but we can see the shadows move and the position of the Sun move so we know either the Sun is moving or we are moving. It turns out that having us move solves a load of problem. So relative to the centre of the Earth we are moving, at about 1000mph--on the equator--as the Earth revolves. So we have two answers for how fast we are going: 0 relative to the floor, and 1000mph relative to the axis of the Earth. But pick anything and you have a new speed. There is no actual speed! This sounds weird. But how fast we are going is purely relative and we have no baseline fundamental speed. To ask how fast am I going without a point of reference is meaningless.

What probably confuses us is there is an absolute and that is change of motion. When we speed up and slow down we can feel that and that change is absolute to all our speed. If we get in a plane and fly away from the rising Sun at 1000mph (on the equator) we can stop the Sun and stay stationary relative to the axis of the Earth. But to do this we need to feel the force in our seat as the plane accelerates and changes our speed, in this case slowing us down by 1000mph!

Now getting used to the idea that we have no absolute speed is really quite hard. But if we have no absolute speed then we have no absolute position either. This seems really hard to grasp. If I am in this room relative to the Earth surface but both room and me are travelling at 1000mph then our position is really changing all the time. And we are in a solar system moving at 100,000mph and a galaxy adding 800,000mph and who knows what else outside this. We have no absolute position! Position is relative to something else. This takes some REAL getting used to.

But it is worth it because in fact all things are relative. I'm just getting my head around the "self" being relative. You know how some people like us, and others don't like us, or sometimes people think we are really good at our job, and sometimes other don't. And sometimes even we like ourselves or don't like ourselves, and sometime we think we are good at things and sometime bad. It is like we are full of different selves, or can be one person in one location and another person in another location.

Is this not the same as the consideration above about having no absolute root location.

In here is an extremely tough thing to grasp so don't let it go and think oh that is easy, or what-ever. 

Having no "absolute" root is the essence of existence.

Once we get used to having no fixed location then we can accept that we are stationary relative to the floor, but travelling at 800,000mph relative to galactic centre.

Likewise when we get used to the fact we have no fixed self, then we can accept that at this time people think this of me, or I am this, and at another time people think something difference. It is not that we "change" it is that we only get a foxed value relative to something. Change that something and the fixed value changes. There is no rocking chair called "self" that we can retreat to and call that the "real" me, and more than we can retreat to a place of absolute stop and stationary.

Ooo hectic busy busy. I am always moving and I am never my true self... exhausting.

Well actually the opposite. When you realise that the sense of movement only comes about relative to something else, then you realise you have no true motion at all! When the train next to you pulls away and you feel like you are moving, well relative to them you are. And when you pull away exactly the same experience. The difference is just the acceleration in the second case as your rate of motion actually changes. We are not being nihilistic here and not saying that we cannot move or denying anything. We are simply pointing out that there is no situation where we find a true stationary because it does not exist. And if it does not exist then we have no absolute motion. Nothing hectic at all about that: motion and our bodies do not go together without something else in the mix.

The same goes for self. We have all these situations. Some make us feel great and we are a great self, others don't work so well and we think ouch not a great self. Perhaps we think we are good at jogging, but there will always be someone faster than us. Or we think we are a nice person but then we lose our temper and decide we are not nice any more, or we meet someone amazing and realise we have a lot of work to do. The mistake is to think we are a single changing self. But in fact--like with motion--we are having a self fixed each time. It becomes permanent just in relation to that other thing. This is vaguely analogous to the "wave collapse" in Quantum Physics where things exist as a possibility and then only become an actual value on observation. Except here it is more radical as there is no prior model that collapses when it is measured, we have no numerical position, not even a probability, without a measurement point, and likewise we have no form of self without a situation in life. And because of this there is no time when we are a "true" self. "Self" by itself is nonsense.

I hear that people go mad in isolation. I wonder whether the evaporation of self is not a welcome event when you are brought up to believe it is a solid fixed thing inside you. You think "you "is like a pilot moving around through life like Dr. Sam Beckett in "Quantum Leap" and while situations change there is still a fixed entity at root.

This is wrong. This is like saying that we have a fixed position that is suddenly sped up and slowed down as we measure our self. So this stationary position we think we are in is somehow sped up to 1000mph when we think about the Earth rotating, or 800,000mph when we think about the Milky Way rotating. This makes no sense, and the idea of a Fixed Self passing through time and taking up a position in all our situations in life is basically wrong and something 100% for the bin.

If we use film as an analogy, we see the "same" actors taking on different roles and behaving in different situations. Some actors do indeed do the same kinds of things, but others dazzle us by appearing to be different people really adapted to their role and situation. The latter type are more revealing about the truth, in reality there is no "fixed person" moving through all these roles. If there was we end up with the strange question of wondering whether an actor ever stops acting even when they return to "themselves." How do we know they are not acting even when they are introduced by the birth name. What is the difference between playing a made up character and playing themselves? And then we ask what is the character of the person who is playing all these roles? We get stuck in a kind of Platonic quandary. If we have a fixed self, what is it's character? It needs no character in order to take on other characters? But what is a self without character? This seems like the Indian question of whether God has a personality. This creates quite a division in theology. Burrowing into this we see the problem arises because of a persistent idea of a "fixed self" like a Dr. Sam Beckett sitting behind everything. When we get to questions of death of course this becomes even more perplexing. What happens to our Dr. Sam Beckett when the host body dies? Can't remember how Quantum Leap dealt with that. But if there is no Dr. Sam Beckett then no problem.

I'm sure for more realised beings who have begun the journey of relativity, they would expect the self to evaporate without there being anything to be relative to.

Very early days for me, but I suspect the experiences of those like Buddha and Eckhart Tolle are not that self disappears when they enlighten, but that they see it as something that turns up and then leaves again.

That seems crazy to us westerners who believe in Souls and Selves that are so fixed that they might survive death, but if they do not they are certainly a pebble we carry our whole lives. The idea we can put that pebble down seems nonsense. "Who puts the pebble down?" we think. "Who just thought that?" we think again.

Central to the idea of the Pebble Self is that things come from the Pebble. The Pebble thought this, and another Pebble is writing this blog.

Well someone is definitely writing this, and I hope (with some embarrassment) someone may read it and see flaws in it and realise what an idiot I am. Perhaps that person will be the same pebble that wrote it some year later. This is all true, but the problem is trying to put a "centre" into that pebble, just as we try to put a nail into space to locate a centre and true stationary place for us to rest.

We already worked out above that we have as many speeds as we have things to measure again, and there is no fundamental speed for us to have. We simply do not have a fixed "speed." It all depends upon being relative to other things.

In exactly the same way we have as many selves as we have situations and people to be relative against. But none of them is a fixed true self, somehow hidden away like a pebble that has a fixed location and fixed identity.

This sense of there being nothing fixed in there, of it being free to become whatever it becomes in relation to something else, they call that Sunyata.

This may seem like nihilism and throwing everything away. But just because we have no pure fixed stationary speed, when did that ever stop us from moving? Sitting at this chair stationary regarding the computer, does not stop the Sun moving across the sky as we also move around the Earth. Both at the same time. So which speed are we 0mph relative to the computer or 1000mpg relative to the Earth axis? They are both real. In the same way the many selves we have are all real to. Perhaps sitting at the computer is the speed we want to focus on, but note the sun still moves even while we ignore that speed. Likewise there are selves we like and want to hold on to. But this does not make them fixed, we are just holding them for a bit like a pebble.

Having no actual speed and having no actual self are actually profoundly relaxing in fact. Both these things are not really me.

So where does D-Day come into this. Well certain people (not quite sure who) are very keen that we hold onto a particular self or version of D-Day. We are told again and again about what D-Day was and how we are to think about it. Those people want it fixed.

Well no question it is all these things. But like speed, it only looks like this relative to something else. Change that something else and it all looks different.

I have always like to look at war from the perspective of another species or perhaps an alien. They look upon Humans and see them beating each other up and they must think how odd. Why did those humans killing 80 million of those humans? And WW2 was by far the greatest avoidable loss of life in human history. Plagues and natural disasters we still struggle to stop, but war is decided by nothing but humans and carried out by nothing but humans so is completely avoidable.

Obviously the other perspective in any war is the "enemy." The Allies who remember D-Day today were the amalgamation of the British and American Empires looking to defeat the German and Italian Empires. They also wanted the Russian Empire but decided to take a break. From the perspective of  people outside the Allies it was just the same old Imperial warfare of the last 400 years. Just like Allied Soldiers Axis soldiers fought for their countries and in the case of Axis a chance to define themselves free rom the British and American Empire. What I find unusual today is that the Axis offer a very attractive option, the idea of countries being free to share international power and collaborate on multiple axes seems a very advanced modern idea. But the US have decided that they do not want Axis and we must all march to the beat of a single drum in Washington. Given this I don't understand the desire if countries to join NATO or any Washington led organisation and lose their own freedom. Russia for example is only fighting for its own freedom after all and does it really represent a lesser freedom than Washington?

Anyway that paragraph expresses the "speed" and "direction" of the whole situation relative to a different train going at a different speed and direction. Miraculously D-Day looks different.

So we discover that in fact all things are relative. This does not make them less real, but it reminds us that that reality only last as long as we are in relation to some other thing. Change that thing and the reality changes. And this teaches us the fundamental truth that there is no fixed reality.

Woah wait "fixed truth that there is no fixed truth" kind of. "there is no fixed truth" is not necessarily a fixed truth, it's a remark that when you start with the idea that reality is fixed, you discover that really its relative. Once you have let go of the original idea of fixed then none of this is relevant anymore.

Sacred Landscapes. What are Song-Lines?

There is something about a journey that leads to the same line structure that you get in a sentence or a story. You start somewhere, you go somewhere else and eventually you get to the stop point. You can't be in two places at the same time and so you trace a line from start to finish.

We all know bus maps that show the various places we visit on the buses journey from its starting point to its end stop.

Sentences are exactly the same. And while there is a lot going on in our brains, when it comes to thinking it through or telling a story we are forced to start somewhere and go through various stages and then we get to the end.

Now this linear nature of a journey is rather lost since the invention of paper to draw 2D maps and recent mathematics to store graphs as 2D matrices. Now a whole landscape of destinations can be stored in X/Y space and all possible journeys can be seen as when we call up Google Maps. However when we actually select a journey we are back to a line and when we do that journey the step by step nature of it returns powerfully.

But before the existence of writing and paper to draw maps however people recorded everything in language and so in lines--both lines of words but also the line of a path. For the vast majority of human existence all things were recorded in language and that took the memorable form of verse, chants or songs.

So perhaps it's weird now but maps used to be a wealth of songs, and like a London taxi driver learning "The Knowledge" people learned all these songs to know their way around.

But Song-Lines are much, much more than this. The modern world is obsessed with building and laying roads, pavements and putting up signs and statues of famous people to remember the Past.

But in the Past the world was already here. People lived in the world and did not need to make new things or big changes. Why change what is already perfect. Rain falls from the sky, forms rivers; the deer breed and run through the woods by themselves, plants grow and put out fruit all by themselves: the world is already here and perfect. Before very recently people only needed to know and respect how the world worked to live. All this knowledge was embedded in the song-lines. And instead of man made sign-posts, natural features like mountains, rivers, rocks, even plants and animals became the notable points in the land that were captured in the songs.

But furthermore to follow a Song-Line is not even just a walk through the knowledge and the culture of a people it is also a walk through History. The names of places and features, and the stories around how those features even came to exist are all embedded in the songs. It sounds odd today in our modern world dominated by scientific factual narratives, but stories existed to envelop and embed in people's minds the important features of the landscape. I saw recently a double peaked mountain that local legend said had been cleaved by a giant throwing a boulder. That story immortalises this feature so people will always recognise it and never forget it, passing it on through the generations: known as the mountain cleaved by the giant. One day lost in the mist we see the cleaved mountain we were told about and suddenly we know where we are. This is not just pointless leisure fantasy but encoding the fundamental parts of the world for survival.

This is not an unfamiliar idea even today. We have inherited the Greek constellations which include important heroes immortalised in myths that we still tell today. And while it is usually thought today that it is romantic to put things in the stars, more importantly an already existing part of the world was being appropriated and brought into the culture and history of the people. Today we are more likely to make a statue of Perseus and the land just supplies the raw rock for this work. But this underlines the subordination of land by more modern culture. The bringing of existing parts of the land into the culture unchanged reveals a prior respect for these features. This is being exponentially rapidly lost now. And did Perseus really exist? It does not matter. He makes the night skies familiar and meaningful, ties the story to reality and upholds and preserves the important elements of the culture just like a Song-Line. It is amazing how Ancient Greek modern America is. For all its "modernity" it still recalls profoundly the story of Perseus in the 21st Century just as we still use that constellation.

None of this is actually unfamiliar to the modern mobile phone hosting Google Maps equipped person. We can go on day trips (and people do) to see things like the "Giant's Causeway" in Ireland. This is part of an odd not very attractive song-line now: but you drive to the car park and then follow the foot paths and signs to the coast where you will see a place immortalised by a story of a fight between two giants and a causeway built between Ireland and Scotland.

 

Now we part dismiss this today because we have other more respected songs to sing which tie in vast amounts of knowledge of geology. They say the hexagonal pillars are the result of the way basalt from an ancient volcano cooled. However which would you rather have if lost: a geologist singing his song of plate tectonics, volcanos and eruptions or a song-line with a story of giants which explains that the causeway links to Scotland if you cross the sea, and will have knowledge of what fish are good to eat in the sea there and where to find water, and which direction to travel home. Plus it will be a song from your community and like an immortal pop song will remind you of your home and youth, and it is a song that was sung to you by your parents and was sung to them by their grand-parents and was sung all the way back to the time the causeway was created and even before to the creation of the world. The song is as real and solid as what it talks about.

This intimate way in which the language, songs, culture, community, history and land all interlink is a Song-Line. It lets us know not only where we are in a physical landscape but also where we are culturally and in time. It tells us everything about who we are. It makes the land a living part of us.

These are fiercely guarded by Aboriginal communities in Australia and I think quite rightly. The problem with song-lines is that modern westerners will just plot them on 2D maps, digitise them and perhaps have concerts where people sing them. But this is all as worthless as planning a walk in the Lake District say up Sca Fell and then not actually walking it. Who goes to an art gallery to see this:

There is a short route. It has all the information needed for the route but it is missing one central thing: the actual land. Without the land it is of no worth at all. And a song-line is worthless without the land, and the people and the communities and the history. They all go together. It could even be said the song-lines are of no value to outsiders and so it is quite right to protect them. They are irreplaceable and unique and virtually unteachable without belonging to the community. To think they are no more than Wainwright walks in the countryside is missing the whole point.

And it is this way that modern humans dip into landscapes for holidays and day trips which underlines the poverty of our culture and the way we are divorced from the land. As argued before such vast divorce feeds ultimately into divorce from everything including our bodies and our whole planet. This is the root of the ecological crisis and the recent destruction of the planet by Western humans. We killed our songs and now everything is dying.

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Now one thing I don't understand is what do people with song-lines make of parts of the land that are not part of a song. If you are "lost" and cannot think of a song for the area then where are you? I wonder what this experience is like for people with song-lines.

I wonder whether there is any insight in the book "Walkabout" by James Vance Marshall. Was the boy on a song-line? Long time since read. TBC.

Motion is Relative (and so is Self)

This started as a foot note to a previous post but decided to give it its own post. It concerns the simple physical journey we might make to a grave stone (but obviously there is the metaphorical journey of life which is also very similar).

If we try to think about how far a grave stone moves in a year we get an interesting result.

We drive the same route as we did last year and so we think it has not moved. Perhaps a little bit of subsidence due to the soil settling.

And it is the same time of day and year which means the Earth is in the same place around the Sun. So it has not moved locally and it has not moved in the solar system.

But then we find that the solar system itself rotates around the galaxy. Relative to galactic centre the grave stone has actually moved almost a billion kilometres in a year. This is utterly bonkers and we kind of ignore it. But it is true.

But it gets even more crazy because the while Milky-Way galaxy is itself moving relative to the galactic cluster centre.

This is all completely bewildering. But there is just one thing to grasp here:

Motion is relative. Which means there is no, and can never be, just one answer.

That is to say that we can only know our state of motion by measuring it against something else and depending upon what we chose we get a different answer.

From this we can say we have no definitive state of motion. So we cannot actually answer the question of how far the grave stone has moved in a year in an absolute way. It can only be answered relative to something else.

Sitting there reading this how fast are you moving? There is no one answer. Relative to the the seat then no motion, but relative to the Earth 1000 miles per hour due to rotation, and then also 30km/s due to the orbit of the Sun. But which does it feel like? Well both are true. This is why you cannot sense state of motion because how then could you have different answers. (Technically it is acceleration which is absolute and that you can sense and measure absolutely.)

This seems really odd. We have always (probably) assumed that movement and "going places" was something that was definable and under our control. But actually there is no absolute state of rest or motion. It actually makes no sense to say--in an absolute way--what out position or state of motion is.

Now this is a window into a completely fundamental truth that in fact everything is like this and has no absolute foundation. It is all relative to something else. Homework is figuring out how we can make what seems to be an absolute statement like that which says that all things are relative and stand in relation to something else.

This was written in the context of sacred landscapes. The reason why we feel some solidity to our location and motion is because we implicitly (even today in the post Star Trek generation) assume things relative to the land, or more generally the surface of the Earth. Land, all these 100s of 1000s of years after the start of humanity, is still fundamental to our whole concept of place and motion.

Calling up Google Maps and getting directions we will be told it will take so long to cover some distance. But how far will we have moved? Google Maps is just showing us the distance and movement relative to the start point on the land, but the land itself is moving. Actually we can never know how much we move, because such a value does not even exist. Belief in absolute "motion" is exactly like belief in fixed "self" they are always only relative, there is no absolute thing there. And yet we are here even with no fixed position or speed!

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Rehash that in another way:

Someone once said to me ages ago if we could understand motion we would understand everything. Perhaps he was right.

So we have a state of motion right? What is it?

Perhaps seated it is zero relative to the floor. But relative to the Sun it is 100,000km/h with orbital speed on top of that. Relative to the Galactic Centre it is more like 828,000 km/h. So while we sit here our "state of motion" has many values and a different value depending on how we look at it. But it has no definitive fixed value.

What we are more aware of it acceleration. Sitting at rest relative to the ground we have only the acceleration of gravity and so know that our state of motion is not changing. When we accelerate we know exactly how much our state of motion changes, even while we do not know what it is absolutely.

All this is because: State of motion is relative.

Now in fact all "things" are relative especially the self.

By analogy then self is the same as our state of motion. As we sit here our self depends on how or who measures or looks at it, it has no definitive fixed state.

Furiosa and D-Day

Another thing that's interesting about Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is the normalising of war.

In the pre-ample to the 40-day Wasteland War the narrator sets it in the context of what looks like a continual history of war. But actually if you think about it the vast majority of humans have never fought and it's only a few who do this crazy thing.

Now it seems the leaders of these crazy people are the ones who write a lot (I'm hoping to turn tables on that) but it also seems that the winners of wars promote their works more than others.

Churchill is the epitome of this. He wrote a 6-volume book which he called "The Second World War" and promoted it obsessively. It remains the "definitive" version of events and even today historians shy away from challenging it.

Yet it is pure fantasy and has nothing to do with the real war. For instance 3 million Britons served in the armed forces which is 7.5% of the population. That means 92.5% did not fight. If you threw a dart during WW2 you would more than likely hit someone just getting on with life and that is the history of the world.

Now Churchill and other leaders say "never have so many owed so much to so few" but we owe nothing. Fighters chose to do whatever they do, no one tells them to do this. and they never ask if other people want them to do it. Certainly the enemy does not want them to fight, and they do not want the enemy to fight to really even soldiers do not want to fight.

To underline that no one owes soldiers anything, the leaders who set them at war have to explicitly make up that we own them (because in fact we don't).

So the vast majority of humanity have never had anything to with war, and we can happily ignore the fighters and their insane leaders. Particularly pertinent on #DDay80 where the Britons was co-opted into a war that was not even our own and was designed by a foreign power namely US for its own imperial aggrandisement.

What is a spiritual land?

Our mind is cluttered on this subject by a load of other ideas so lets just clear those.

We are taught that the Earth is just a planet orbiting a star called the Sun in just one of 100s of billions of galaxies. There is nothing special about this planet. Science fiction films which are invariably based around "space travel" give up the significance of lands in order to pack in large universes. Perhaps Arrakis in Dune or Tatooine in Star Wars are planets that have some special meaning. We are also taught that planets are rock, and rock is made of minerals and elements which are inanimate and of no use except for mining and raw materials for industry or building. These are some thoughts we are given by our society and culture.

But these ideas sit rather uneasily with other ideas we have. How about this type of land?

 

Probably in the West we don't make much of a big deal about this. Yet never-the-less we will find ourselves at some stage visiting a place where someone was buried to remember them. How does that work? After a few years there is nothing left of them physically, and the planet has moved millions of miles in space away from the actual point where they were buried (relative to galactic centre) and the grave stone marks essentially nothing. Why not take the stone home so we can remember them all the time? No: somehow this plot of land takes their place somehow. The land itself has become spiritualised. This is probably the only thing left in most people's sterile lives in the West that indicates some semblance of "spiritual land."

Here's another example: the tree at the end of the film Shawshank Redemption.

Now this tree marks a special moment in Andy's life as it is where he proposed to his wife. But this becomes a special place to everyone watching the film. Its a real place, you can visit it and the meaning of this is now a scene in a film. The tree has now been cut down so there is little marking to spot, but we can still visit that point where the fictional Andy proposed to his wife. There is meaning in the spot even if very tenuous.

Another type of sacred land we will be familiar with is the church. This is a formally consecrated land which is set aside for God and the worship of God. We privately set such land aside all the time like Andy, but the religion does this formally for the whole community too. 

Here is another more subtle example. In the UK--at least, don't know the rest of the world--a marriage traditionally is held where the bride comes from. Traditionally--and very unfashionably now--a bride was guarded by her father who ensured that she remain childless until she was handed over to her husband. This way the husband was sure that any future children were definitely his and this encouraged him to take the bride seriously and commit to her. I imagine a bride travelling long distances in the Past would have been a recipe for her to run into trouble--and there again is the issue of travel and land being inversely connected. But whatever the reasons for the way things came about, it was the land from which a bride was born and raised, that provides the literal bedrock to a traditional marriage.

These are just some basic examples of how land is more than rocks on a planet's surface in space. But it becomes very much deeper.

When they find ancient skulls they can analyse the teeth to find ratios of elements that they can use to determine quite accurately the probably land on which the person lived. Our bodies are actually made from the food we eat which is in turn made from the plants that are grown from the nutrients in the soil where we live. The land actually becomes our bodies. Now if land is just inanimate rock, this cannot be said for our bodies and brains. Suddenly the bold distinction been land and person is completely blurred. If we ever doubt this consider how much of us would be left if we stopped being able to grow plants and were unable to source the minerals that we get from soil and rocks. We are fundamentally linked at the most basic level.

Now this fundamental link between humans and the land was identified all the way back at the start of humanity. Humans know they are intricately intertwined with the land. Where people were born, where they died, where they lived their lives and did things all come from and go back into the land. We call it history now but its marked on the land. Our militarised and aggressive culture of conquest means that our maps are covered in the sites of battles. The land bears witness to our troubled and unhappy culture and minds. The bodies get buried where they are fallen and forever stain the land.

 SO to try and get into the mindset of people before the age of materialism, capitalism and mechanised transport where people lived in one place and really called that home we need to understand that history and even souls are connected to the land. It is a living and breathing thing that takes part as intimately in our community, culture and lives as any other human or living thing. The spirits of the dead and ancestors live in this land, the spirits of other non-human creatures also inhabit this land and along side all this are the living who feel they grow from the land and belong to it. This is all summarised by a relationship with the Earth Mother which is a common sense for all people, that we are birthed and owe our lives to a miraculous event which is the creation of mankind both as a species but as each one of us. No one knows how this happened and it will remain a marvel for ever that it did. But somehow the inanimate world of rocks gave birth to humans. It never asks for any payment for this greatest gift of life and humankind exist in a state of grace and bewilderment at their existence. Modern humans would rather bury this miracle in text books and science and pretend it did not happen, but it did and they are here to ignore it and not be grateful and amazed by it. This is the greatest spiritual force in the land one that sadly more and more people are closed to.

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Now there is a darker side to this. Connection to land work both ways. If I am connected then you are not. What the inhabitants of a land gain, the foreigner loses. Normally because we all realise that life was given to us by the land for free, we do not covet the land. But as the modern world has progressed and especially trade and transport people have been uprooted from the lands. It means that linos to the land have become fractured and damaged. On one hand this had led to the destruction of the planet, and on the other it has led to Nationalism as people fight to preserve their connections to land. It is important for immigrants to realise that they have made a grave choice to leave their land. In some cases immigrants try to bring the land with them in some identity but this is a mistake. When you move to new land you belong to new lands. To suggest any thing else is to break the very idea of a connection to the land. Once the connections are broken then you start to end up with people who belong no where. They are lost people. Thus unfortunately more and more is what Capitalism is creating. Lost people without connection land are cutting the very life blood and source of their existence. Physically they may be sustained by a supply of food but it is just a life support system: there is no spirituality or meaning.

This is only true to a level. There is a more advanced level of spirituality that places all phenomena together. At this level then everything above becomes just sensations and thoughts. So the above is not absolute. It is however an important part of human life.