Visitors and palm trees
September 30, 2007 by Bill
For all of you Labor day weekend tourists and visitors, you may have noticed that you are surrounded by thousands of palm trees. Hey, that’s why we are called “Palm Springs”. And, for all of you reading this column in other cities than Palm Springs, this will give you a new appreciation of a palm tree anytime you see one.
Palm trees have been very special in the history of religions, mythology and cultures.
In the Babylonian myth of the primal garden (the biblical garden of eden) the Palm tree was the Tree of Life, a dwelling place of the Goddess Astarte. The Hebrew name for her was Tamar, meaning ‘palm tree’. Her male counterpart was Baal-Peor, or Phoenix, the god of Phoenicia whose name meant the ‘land of the palm’. As a phallic deity he was symbolized by a palm tree between two large stones. Sexual celebrations honored his union with the Goddess in Phoenicia and also in Israel. The feminine connotations of the palm tree co-existed with the male phallic symbol The Goddess was often embodied in a Mother palm giving the food of life in the form of dates and coconut milk.
Noise pollution
September 23, 2007 by Bill
“On a recent trip to lecture at the University of Colorado, Pueblo…I developed a new medical classification…in hotel lobbies and restaurants, shops and walking down historic streets I developed “noise and cell phone rage.” It is equally as devastating as “road rage.”
The distinguished anthropologist Loren Eiseley wrote that “never in the entire history of our species, Homo sapiens, has one generation been subjected to so much chaotic noise. and we will not know the damage it is doing for years.”
We are a noise drenched, dissonant, culture. The day starts, in home and car, with the incessant babbling of “talk radio” or talk television. Every Tom, Dick and Harry, Jane, Ruth and Louise give us their ‘opinions’ about every subject known to the universe. I hosted such a show for a few years. At least 98 percent of the callers did not know enough about the subject to even have an opinion.
Chaotic noise! We cannot even take a walk in the glory of the desert without ear phones on listening to more noise. We do not hear the wind in the olive trees, or the birds announcing the dawn. We do not see the buds on the tips of trees swelling, ready to erupt in color.
Pioneers! O Pioneers!
September 16, 2007 by Bill
My thoughts are still on those who labor, and have labored on our behalf. I am remembering my maternal grandmother, and all of the women, those brave, hardy, and visionary souls who came west, broke the soil, and homesteaded.
One of my favorite passages in literature is to be found in the book of Deuteronomy and is a pungent reminder for us on this weekend. “You drink here from cisterns that you did not dig…and you live in cities that you did not build…and you eat from vineyards and orchards that you did not plant.” This says to me that our indebtedness to our magnificent Western pioneers is beyond measure.
In the West Texas panhandle country of shimmering horizons, just south of the rugged canyons of the Palo Duro, my maternal grandmother and her husband homesteaded. As with thousands of others they came west for freedom and the opportunity to carve out a new home on their very own piece of land.
In the 1800’s the great plains were bare and windswept. There was the wind and the heat and cold that was combined with unbelievable hardship. But the broad valley of the Platte River, the Columbia and Arkansas, the Red and Cimarron rivers called to men and women. After the mountain men had passed through, and the trappers had migrated West, the prairie schooners came in to settle the land.
