Appreciating The World.

[retepsnikrep]

The World as a whole has a wonderful fascinating diversity. Each facet of it complements each other facet and it is complete, nothing missing. It's a phenomenon, no less.

You can better appreciate our marvellous balanced World of wonders if you delete something. For example, ice. If we'd never seen it, hadn't got it, it had never existed, we would not be any the wiser. But we have got ice, and I for one like seeing penguins sliding on their stomachs into the sea. I marvel at growling bergs dropping thousands of tons of ice into icy seas. And I appreciate all other things pertaining to ice, from figure skating to Scotch on the rocks. So ice is a vital part of our world. My point is that everything in the World is complementary and in my humble opinion, by the greatest miracle that has been proved to me, it is complete.

The perfection starts geographically. Imagine a load of water with one big round lump of land in it. The World could have been like that but instead we have got every combination you can think of. Big lumps of continents to tiny islands. Tiny islands all on their own, or thousands of tiny islands altogether, like a rash. There are Continents joined together by narrow strips, and some not joined to anything. The miracle continues in that all the pieces of land seem to be in the right place, aesthetically. The world map is like an exciting modern art picture. Look at it. Imagine the Americas weren't there. Not only would we not have the Blues or Zippos, the World map would be rubbish. Australia is also needed just where it is. Cover it up with your hand (on the map), everything is then off balance, and we have to sit down a minute. The World had to have a large inland sea to be complete, and it got it, the Mediterranean. If the Med was a bit lower down and was surrounded on all sides by the Sahara Desert, we would have sadly missed Italy, Greece, Egypt etc etc. This is not to disparage the Sahara Desert, the World would be a worse place without that, with it's forts and the Legionnaires with their neck flaps and forts, and Timbuctoo. So everything is in exactly the right place

I hope that my message is becoming clearer:- The miraculous, diverse wholeness and rightness of our World. I have spotted it and appreciate it. No doubt you have too, but just in case, read on..

We like a nice Fjord don't we? The Great Lakes are as good where they are, as the Dead Sea is dead right where that is, and we need the latter for the photographs of floating with only the bum in the water. The World would be a poorer place without the Grand Canyon, The Victoria Falls, The Amazon Rain Forest, and Blakeney Point. ( A tiny spit of land nearly a mile long in North Norfolk which juts into the North Sea.) Everything we have, large and small, has it's place and makes the whole World right. Geographically the canvas is perfect, but our World is only the centrepiece of a larger work of art, entitled The Cosmos.

Would you change that? Not have Mars a bit red? Have the moon larger or smaller? Of course not. Take the Moon. It's perfect in size, it waxes and wanes, it puts aluminium powder all over us sometimes, and it has craters we can look at. The stars are perfectly higgledy, and perfectly piggledy, and they are exactly vast distances away, providing unlimited awe. If anything of this grand arrangement above our heads were different, it would not be so good.

We have imagined, geographically, one big sea and one big lump of land. Imagine on that lump, six billion people who all look much the same, dress the same, eat the same food, and dance the same or don't dance at all. Dreadful. Fortunately, as diverse as the land, the peoples are also different and arranged to best advantage. Dark skinned Africans, tall as their spears. Short and white Esquimaux. All the Arabic variations and the Far Eastern peoples. Nordic and Slavs. Incas and Tartars. We need them all for the masterpiece. When we were hemmed in by the lack of progress, before the National Geographic Magazine, we didn't know about all these other peoples and they didn't know about us. It was everyone's loss.

Our oil painting masterpiece is now being filled with the detail. The magic of the World has unfolded further. Thanks to television, the most distant and unusual peoples are now no strangers to us. We know their foods, customs, clothes and religion, and we share the ones we like. We can smoke, eat, and drink what they have all over the world which has come to the supermarket in whistling 747's and refrigerated ships. These new things all seem so right, because The Grand Scheme of Things is right. There had to be bananas, and there are.

The animal World is also miraculously right. What a gap there would be without the elephant. There are thousands of beetles. I like that, there had to be. The perfect world is completed by a few necessary oddities, like the duck-billed platypus.

History has been perfect. The Pyramids and Stonehenge are vital. If they did not exist perhaps we would be wandering about, scratching our heads wondering where something was, but we don't know what it is. We don't do that it's all there.

A perfect World then? I hope I have shown that it is complete and fascinating from Ant to Apollo 13, and from Apple Tree to Alpha Centauri, but behaviour of it's inmates is not perfect. . The fact of the diverse perfection of our World is not cancelled out, or at least not yet, by the many negative acts it supports. War, crime, vandalism, nationalism, colonisation, slavery, cruelty, etc, there is no shortage of words which describe the acts which spoil it for all of us.

This post has been about the factual nature of the World, full of beauty and diversity, and it's uplifting effect. So far as the dread negatives in the previous chapter are concerned, philosophy and optimism are necessary. We should point out to those who desecrate it....'Look. It's a wonderful world. Don't spoil it.'

We know that this policy would not get very far if it were backed with law and penalties. Robbery and violence are not deterred much by law and penalties. It must be voluntary, an ethos, and that is down to education. If any educationalists read this, please make a small start. Imagine a School Period each week, from an early age, entitled, 'Appreciation of the Wonderful World.' Take the child into a world of wonder, that all can be so right and diverse. The word 'Appreciation' has two meanings which are important to the message. First:- to understand that it is a wonderful, whole World, do not take it for granted. Second:- that it gains in value to you the more it is understood.

If bad persists, never mind, everything can't necessarily be put right. The whole complex miracle will remain unbowed, and I shall still wonder at it and appreciate it with undiminished awe.

Peter :-6

[Majenta]

I like the sentiment here - it's nice to hear something optimistic amidst the calamity of global warming and nuclear war worries

(and there's always a but)

... without terror and misery and suffering, we can't appreciate the wonderfulness that the world offers. Without slavery, nor would the pyramids or stonehenge even exist...

[Bez]

The planet Earth is indeed a wondrous thing.



We are privileged to live in an age where Television can bring us images of nature that we can marvel at on a daily basis.



We should strive to 'save our planet' in whatever way we can, but in the grand scheme of things, the age of us humans, is just the 'blinking of an eye' in the life of planet earth.....we don't own it.....it is our life blood.