Newly Listed and the Stirring Speech of L. DiCaprio

Today we listed the house with Elders and a woman who seems keen and capable.  One thing she said made me think perhaps she'll be the one that finally moves it.  She said the other realtors should have been keeping in touch.  They haven't.  So we'll see.   Three of them are coming out on Wednesday to have a look so the round of cleaning begins anew although frankly, the place is always neat and tidy enough and it's more a sop to my need to feel as though I merit a sale more than a need to make it clean that gets me to hit the mop and sponge and rake and broom. 

The other thing of note.  Watched the last half of the Oscars.  Leonardo DiCaprio gave the best acceptance speech for Best Actor.  After graciously thanked all involved in the making of the movie and the making of him as an actor, including his parents, he concluded with this:

And lastly I just want to say this: Making ‘The Revenant’ was about man's relationship to the natural world. A world that we collectively felt in 2015 as the hottest year in recorded history. Our production needed to move to the southern tip of this planet just to be able to find snow. Climate change is real, it is happening right now. It is the most urgent threat facing our entire species, and we need to work collectively together and stop procrastinating. We need to support leaders around the world who do not speak for the big polluters, but who speak for all of humanity, for the indigenous people of the world, for the billions and billions of underprivileged people out there who would be most affected by this. For our children’s children, and for those people out there whose voices have been drowned out by the politics of greed. I thank you all for this amazing award tonight. Let us not take this planet for granted. I do not take tonight for granted. Thank you so very much.

 The audience gave him a standing ovation.  A large Indian in the audience, who obviously was in The Revenant, had the biggest widest whitest grin I've ever seen.   I cried.

Millions, perhaps billions, of people watch the Oscars.  Surely this message can no longer be ignored.  A groundswell of feeling will eventually overwhelm and render inert those who harm our planet on such a grand scale with impunity.

I should write two separate posts as what I want to write about today are unrelated, but as I don't always get here when I want to (or should!) I'll combine the two.

First of all, Edgar.  He continues to thrive.  He has supermodel legs.  They go on forever and are comically topped with this scruffy pin feathered little (in comparison) body.  There are photos of baby crows in Pinterest; all black and fluffy in duck-like down.  He's nothing like that.  He has adult feathers, most of them still encased in keratin somewhere along the shaft.  His eye is pale blue and as he grows and grows stronger, he is more responsive. 

Two days ago I was present when he had a wing flap.  It was then I noticed one wing is noticeably shorter than the other.  Not only shorter but some of the flight feathers are partially turned outward rather than lying flat against his body.  Don't know whether this will affect his ability to fly or not.  Don't know whether it was the reason he was screaming in the long grass.  For such a vocal baby there wasn't a crow in sight - and we have many local crows.  Was he kicked from the nest because he was imperfect?  Nature is not sentimental.  Staying alive is too hard.  Anything that is compromised from birth is ejected/rejected without moral reflection. 

There was a reason he was found by us.  He put everything he had into that metronomic squawking and there was very little left to live upon when he was found which is why he was so weak and ill to begin with.  But I thought Rupert (the rainbow lorikeet) and Lionel (the galah) were fostered by me for a reason too.  I thought they would live - and they did until they were released and then, in a longer or shorter time, they were killed.  No use pondering why (he was found) or if (he can fly), best just do my best for him and see what happens.  In the meantime he makes me smile. 


The other thing I want to cover isn't nearly as jolly.  Much of Tasmania has been on fire.  World Heritage areas on the west coast have burnt to a crisp.  Thousand year old pencil pines gone forever. An interviewed scientist (just tried to find the article and can't) said it was a sign of 'system collapse'.  Another article (http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-01-29/glikson-the-dilemma-of-a-climate-scientist/7123246 ) states that up to a third of climate change scientists believe the situation is far worse than what is fed to the public and that if we don't stop using fossil fuels now we are doomed.

This kept me awake most of the night.  Not because I'm doomed.  I'm 60.  I'll probably eke out another few decades before the planet becomes unlivable (or perhaps, in an effort to save the planet, everyone over 60 will be euthanized).  What kept me staring into the darkness was the plight of all those that don't have a voice.  From the unborn to all the creatures; land, sea and air, which will die through no fault of their own.  It breaks my heart.  If we want to destroy one another, so be it, but must we drag everything else down with us?

So it started me thinking.  Despite the human capacity for self-sacrific, despite our intelligence, our urge to beauty, our creativity, spirituality, generosity - we are a species seemingly doomed to failure.  In the scheme of things, meaning the Infinite Universe, it's not a big deal.  Other beings no doubt have come into existence, shone for a while and dimmed into oblivion for various reasons.  Inborn hubris leads me to think humans are rather special.  We have the ability to ponder, to reflect, to learn  and to know joy.  It would be lovely if those attributes were the ones that carried the day.  For us and every other living thing.  Unfortunately it seems greed, hubris, selfishness, fear and short-sightedness carry the day.  And the earth.

On the other hand, if it's only a dream of Maya, we'll all wake up and shake our heads at the strangeness and overriding sadness of the dream.  I wonder which reality is true.

Signs and Portents

Unless you've been living in a cave, you know the world is supposed to end tomorrow.  I'm not sure how that works with the time zones.  Does the end start as a wave and work its way around the world?  Australia is a day ahead of America.  Does the world end tomorrow for us and the 22nd (Oz time) for the US?  I'm glad I'm not in charge for it's a conundrum.

Saw the psyhic John Edwards on Dr. Phil.  He was asked whether he thought the end of the world was nigh.  He thought not.  What he did think was that a major shift in our perceptions would occur.  I would like to believe that we are waking up to what we sow, we reap.  The Newtown massacre of children has become a wake up call for Americans in a way that the other massacres did not.  It was the slaughter of innocence.   Shooting college kids or teenagers at the cinema while a tragedy, well, they've been around a bit, they've seen a little, they had some life behind them.  But these babies had it all snatched away.  And the ones spared will never be the same.  How do you explain that kind of evil to a 5 year old?  To explain is to destroy whatever wide-eyed trust is left.  I suspect some of those kids don't understand much more than a 'bad man' took away their friends and classmates. 

Now in India a 23 year old med student was gang raped on a bus by 6 men, beaten with iron rods, stripped and thrown on the side of the road.  She is on life support because of the severity of her injuries, many of them internal.  The mind cannot comprehend.  India is the worst place in the world to be a woman, worse than Pakistan (which is pretty bad) and Afghanistan.   Twenty thousand women were raped in Mombai?  New Delhi? last year.  The judicial system is so grindingly slow that it can take 10 to 15 years for the case to go to court.  Many cases of rape go unreported because of the supposed slur or because of the length of time required to go to court.  I'm not sure I could maintain the rage for 15 years.  It's been an ongoing problem  because of the way Indians view women.  Now, spontaneously, the populace has risen up and demonstrated, even protesting in such numbers outside some high official's home (the article didn't say who) that water cannon were used to disperse the crowd. 

We have the Arab spring (which has slid into winter in some places), we have America talking gun control (finally!) and India examining its opinion of women.  Germany is going all out to meet their energy needs with renewables, animal welfare is in the headlines almost on a daily basis, climate change, while stalled as far as world governments are concerned, is riding a groundswell of public opinion (because the public cops the fallout) which will result in real change.    Although sometimes I despair that we will ever rise above the heavy dross of our gross corporeality and be and behave as the Shining Beings we are, I do see, with the signs and portents of great good in reaction to great evil across the world, that we will Arrive. 

I keep thinking of the opening monologue of the movie Love Actually.   When the passengers on the planes of 9/11 knew they were doomed, they didn't ring their enemies to have the last word, they rang their loved ones to speak of  love.   In times of great crisis we strip away the superfluous and become our essence, which is love.  But we forget, we get distracted, we believe ourselves to be our ego rather than our spirit.  It is not hopeless but it is hard.  I hope the End of the World is the end of blindness, that the scales fall from our eyes and we see, really See.