When I went to adjust the winter coat under me, I saw a mid-sized white spider [I've since determined that she was probably a juvenile Santa Rosa Wolf Spider, still developing her colors] sitting there, cold and wet--looking pretty pathetic. Obviously, she had ridden me (on the backpack) after I plowed through her web that night on my little failed expedition to find a new sleep spot. I didn't want to hurt her, but I had nothing to capture and release her with. I tried with a plastic sandwich bag, but she ran away and into the folds of my coat. I was afraid of squishing her, but as hard as I tried, I could not relocate her. I gave up, went out to pee and came back climbing into the sleeping bag and falling asleep again until about 6:00 am.
The tarpless idea had been another failed concept. Instead of having the tarp collect and retain the dew, before it got into the tent, the tent itself did that work, unfortunately. It was a fifty-fifty chance of success and I had chosen the wrong side of the coin... But I guessed that was probably the best way to learn how to do it next time.
When I woke just before sunrise, I sat up and looked for my spider friend again, mystified by her stealth. I assumed that I must have killed her during the night, rolling over, or whatever. It had happened before. I'd found a spider in Indianapolis curled up and dead under my sleeping bag.
Now it was time to figure out how to deal with the sopping wet tent--again. I wanted to get out of the field, because I was still concerned that the Golden Flake drivers might discover me and move me on. I didn't mind the discovery itself, but other options for sleep spots were not working out, and I still had four more days to sleep in Birmingham.
However, when poking my head out to take a look around, I noticed that the rising sun would shine quite heavily on the field. So, I intuited that the best course of action might be to simply wait for the sun to rise and see if the tent might dry under it.
Within a half hour of that decision, the sun was blasting the top of the tent with warm rays. I helped things along by wiping off the entire inside of the tent with my Marriott towel. Again, as with the drying in the park the afternoon before, I was amazed by how quickly the moisture evaporated!
By 8:00 am, the tent above ground level was completely dry. And, then it was simply a matter of tipping it up so that the bottom could be exposed to the sunlight. I went out into the woods I'd just trekked through the night before to pee, and half-thought I might find a more private space for the coming night. The pee was accomplished with success, but the further search for a better sleep spot was not.
Upon returning to the tipped up tent, I noticed it was now fully dried. I disassembled it and when I went to remove the tent poles' bag to put them in, I saw a patch of white on top of the backpack.
There, in a fluff of carefully spun silk, was the spider, lying sideways. She looked dead. I was impressed with how she had tried to overcome her obstacles, by making a tent of her very own, in an attempt to keep the water off of her and the cold at bay. Sadly, I reached into my leg pocket and took out my small knife, to gently remove her - I thought - lifeless body. But when I began to loosen her little tent, she moved a bit. This was encouraging!
I breathed on her to see if she would react. She moved more and more. It had looked like half her legs were missing, but actually they were simply under her body. I delighted at seeing her stand up, complete with all eight legs, and looking quite spritely! She struggled a bit to get out of her tent. And, I took the opportunity to completely pull her off the backpack (spider-tent and all). She lowered herself to the ground from the edge of the knife, and scampered off into the grass. I LOVE a happy ending!
Along the road back onto 6th Street S, I got a shot of that red mud I mentioned yesterday...
Could be Mars!
I'm not promoting anything here, just thought it was funny to see this license plate,
next to the city's parking lines, which just happened to be shaped like crosses. Ha!
The University of Alabama Birmingham's Children's Hospital. VERY impressive building.
The Attached Women and Infants building.
Triple decker skywalk.
Not having my glasses readily available, because the strap is broken again, and I can hardly see through all the scratches anymore, anyway, I took a left onto 19th Avenue instead of 20th (where Starbucks is). But, as I've mentioned many times now, taking a "wrong" turn is actually just an opportunity to see new things.
In the same way that my appreciation for trains has grown and blossomed, my interest in tower cranes (since Nashville) is now peaking. [For mechanically-minded folks, click: here, to visit a fascinating site about these amazing machines.]
Near the lower left, see the 20 ton (16.3 metric ton) counterweight.
The operator's cabin, housing a man with the best view in Birmingham!
I located 3rd Street and walked along it to 20th Avenue...
I worked at Starbucks, publishing my daily post about the day before, and then headed back to the sleep spot that I was beginning to recognize as the best place in this town...
The night was much warmer, and the temperature had not fallen to the dew point. I was thrilled about this, and setup the tent WITH the tarp--having learned my lesson;leaving a window open...
The light of the waxing moon, from the inside of the tent.
I lay awake for about four hours, contemplating and then meditating on what a changed world might look like. After about an hour of chasing away the songs that looped in my mind after hearing Starbucks' heavy musical rotation, an unusual clarity of thought swept through me. And - based on much that I had been thinking about for months, even years - I saw, the following...
* * * * * * *
A NEW AGE OF HEROES
I sped forward to an age just to follow this current one. The air was clean and sweet. Everywhere in this country people had returned to a simpler way of life; scaling down. They saved their money - resisting the temptation of earlier times to shop without reason - and reallocated their funds for the beautification of their cities and towns, along with a percentage given, regularly and voluntarily (without the need for the collection of taxes), to social programs.
These people (mostly) worked from home, through a worldwide and cost-free communication system, born out of today's internet. There was still a stout manufacturing industry. But, its products were developed to facilitate service-based interests, and not the wasteful, resource depleting, throw-away junk that we now see pumped out through retail box stores. Everything was being re-focused into what was called "The Happiness Economy". Profit-driven motives were giving way to social service-based ones. The billionaire capitalists had been shamed into capping their fortunes, at one billion dollars each. This was a voluntary move on their parts, and freed up an enormous amount of funding for other projects--ones that held the improvement of human life for the poorest people in the world above all other concerns.
By doing this, extreme poverty was eliminated in the US within a decade, while systems were put in place to reenforce this system, protecting the investments of the rich, while allowing the very poor to also invest and find a financial return for themselves. A positive feedback loop established itself. Where the poor had once been socially demeaned, ostracized, and kept separate from decision making, their descendants were now consulted and respected for their family's wisdom--the lessons learned through struggle and hardship.
A nationwide college system (linked to all other participating nations) was established, with incentives to students who chose to learn about other cultures through immersion in them. Nevertheless, a basic college education was freely offered to all adults, who also were given work-study opportunities to support themselves. The incentives of this coming age were largely based on income tax deductions--sometimes equaling 100% (depending on the value of what the student was giving back through community service). Where once, taxes had been a negative and onerous weight, forced upon citizens, the new system was based on tax breaks for effort in social improvement. The people who paid the heaviest amount of taxes were those who only earned a living, but never participated in social progress. But, again, this was their own choice. They knew and accepted the financial consequences.
Secondary education was drastically reformed to highlight the strengths of individual children, based on what interested them. While the core language and mathematic skills were still heavily valued--even more than they are now, a longer learning curve was stretched out across a child's entire pre-college career, given her/him plenty of time to learn these things. From an early age, children were inspired to develop their natural interests and talents, so that by the time they graduated from high school, they had already begun working in the fields they enjoyed the most. This naturally feathered into their work study through college, and established a steady adult income, proportionally incentivized by the above tax system.
World population had begun to drop after governments in the first world instituted a voluntary system which encouraged women to have only one or two children--with tax incentives respectively higher for the former and slightly less-so for the latter. Families who chose to have more than two children were not eligible for these benefits. Counterintuitively, since Americans (for example) used to use some 800 times more resources than the citizens of so-called "Third World" countries (as is happening now), this limiting of first world population necessarily put significantly less strain on the resource extraction requirements and exporting of less developed nations, allowing them to use more of what they already had, for the benefit of their own poorest citizens.
Over a relatively short amount of time, the populations in the poorest parts of the world began to level off, as the standards of living increased. A highly improved communications and consumer-based 3D printing technology offered the same kinds of home-based careers that the United States and Europe were enjoying. And, instead of wanting the things that the citizens of richer nations had in former times, the people in the developing world - now able to buy home-manufacturing printers for most household items - craved the acquirement of knowledge. The world was finally realizing that true power (and thus, personal freedom) was not available through the accumulation of stuff, but by this knowledge-gathering.
Terrorism was rare and diminishing more rapidly with the passage of each year. The toleration for violence as a way to control and intimidate people--even the defensive war-waging of superpowers, was now thought be abhorrent, vulgar, criminal and treasonous. Military budgets remained strong, but the funds were channeled into international emergency and disaster relief campaigns. When a hurricane finally destroyed the rest of Gulf-side New Orleans, a massive, worldwide emergency force that had been permanently established some years earlier, rescued nearly all the people of that city, terraformed the land, and rebuilt a new city, incorporating the best of the old; one that would no longer be susceptible to such disasters. And, the New Orleans rescue force was only one of ten division; six others of which were handling, various global emergencies--wildfires in the Northwestern US, a sustained drought in Ethiopia, an earthquake in Afghanistan, floods in Bangladesh, an unusually bitter winter in Eastern Europe, and serious outbreak of disease in Mexico City. The other three divisions were kept in reserves but ready to ship out if necessary.
The US had once maintained a military force able to fight multiple wars at once, but now they adjusted this strategy into natural disaster relief, and combined forces with the militaries of all other committed nations.
The UN was restructured to be a civilian body, complete with a three-branch, representative system of government; with planetary peace as a goal. Seven Continental Federations were established, with Continental Regional Capitals. International policing was taken over by a new and centralized network of local, state, national, continental and international forces--land, air and sea. Checks and balances were instituted to ensure that no one nation dominated these forces. All nations retained their national sovereignty, but voluntarily funded and alternately commanded the "superforce". Huge savings were enjoyed by all countries, since the need to individually defend themselves was virtually eliminated.
Terrorism and regional rebellions were immediately crushed with overwhelming pan-lateral force. The highest authority over all world economic, military and civil aspects of life was given directly to the people of the planet, with a weighted system of voting on global issues and referenda, based on civil and social service accomplishments, rather than wealth or population. However, the vote for The International Chief Executives (positions always co-held by one man and one woman--co-candidates, together in partnership), was decided by a pure popular vote--without an electoral college intervening; in an international election every five years, with a two term limit.
The legislature was based on the American model, with the addition of a third house where all former chief executives served life terms, and was purely advisory, acting as a liaison between the lower houses and the executive branch.
The Judicial branch was much like it is today, except that the cases heard by the Supreme Courts of individual nations had one more level of appeal: to the International Supreme Court.
Institutional religions remained available for those individuals who craved group doctrine, but, steadily, a worldwide coalition of interfaith agencies joined together and encouraged people to follow their inner leadings, ranging from atheism to the strongly theological. People built personal belief systems that freely adopted whatever each person valued most about the belief systems of others. The proselytized teaching of social religion was giving way to the voluntary learning of the individual. In this way, belief structures were becoming extraordinarily diverse, while the commonalities found in all were becoming a planetary form of spiritual unity. Far more people considered themselves "religious" than do in our world today. But, that term had undergone a profound redefining.
In my focused but relaxed state of mind, I stood on a great tower, the tallest in the world. And, I slowly turned to face each of the four compass directions, observing how - though there were still complex economic, social, military, political and religious problems to solve - a great step had been taken by humanity. The barbarity, injustices, and greed of those who we now consider to be at the top of the power pyramid, and the former hatred and mistrust that dissimilar peoples once felt toward each other, was all fading into the mists of history.
With each succeeding generation, true human heroes were emerging to carry the torches of a new philosophical paradigm around the world--over and over again; by putting the Golden Rule - now accepted as the highest possible form of motivation - into practical action.
Healthcare was greatly enhanced, lifespans increased, peace was opening up new vistas of experience for all people. Cognitive liberty (the freedom to think what you want, uninfluenced by hardened and inflexible ideology)--from birth to death, was flowing out through all cultures. Humanity had evolved from a disjointed collection of confrontational groups, into a world of amiable neighbors, and was - as I looked around at the circular horizon - well on its way to gelling into a truly loving Family.
* * * * * * *
I felt the soft grass beneath me, the warmth of the sleeping bag, the shelter provided by the tent, the fresh air of an Alabama night. I saw the stars through my tent window, thinking that surely a few of them must have planets spinning around them who had gotten past the psychological chaos, racial wars, ideological chains, religious hatreds, economic injustices and ecological destruction. Surely, they had discovered some way not to destroy themselves. Surely, they had faced the pit of non-existence, and then turned themselves around.
I closed my eyes again and simply directed my attention, without the distraction of my normally-cluttered thoughts and personal expectations... to the Spark--waiting for some kind of affirmation that we will, on this world, find something like what I had visualized.
I waited a LONG time in this anticipatory state. There was no direct answer, which didn't surprise me. The Spark doesn't talk directly, anyway. But, as I tired of waiting, and turned onto my side to sleep, I FELT a message filter through...
Just keep wallking...
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