Do you remember the PANDEMIC?
For some reason in 2020 I felt I had something to share about viruses, history, vaccination and science which others might find at the very least entertaining, but also possibly informative and maybe challenging. And sitting by the window one day I heard a bird sing and realised that without lockdowns and the stalling of life as we knew it, the traffic noise would have drowned out the song of a solitary bird.
And without the pandemic, I would probably never have started my blog. So the name, ABirdSong.blog was born.
It’s roughly five years on from that moment now, and for two of those years I didn’t post anything on ABirdSong.blog. I started again in the Autumn (Fall) of last year with The Doorway to Wonderland? and have begun to write regularly again. There are now three other new posts available to read, digest, comment on or ignore!
People Pods, Corn and Mud, Mud, Glorious Mud
With a background including studying biological sciences at university and postgraduate level and also (much more recently) history and religion at degree level, the perfect meeting place of these interests seems to me to be the science and philosophy of Evolution. I would go so far as to say that it is where science, history and mysticism meet.
About 15 years ago, a dear friend of mine called Yoga introduced me to a book called “The Evolutionaries” which turned out to be literally life changing inasmuch as it offered a bridge between the scientific concept of evolution and a far deeper understanding which embraced consciousness and the nature of the universe. Carter Phipps, the author, quotes many scientists, philosophers and mystics including:
- Julian Huxley (1957) – “As a result of a thousand million years of evolution, the universe is becoming conscious of itself.”
- George Gurdjieff in a Letter to Ouspensky (1916) – “The evolution of man is the evolution of consciousness and ‘consciousness’ cannot evolve unconsciously.
- Teilhard de Chardin (1955) in ‘The Phenomenon of Man’ – “Evolution is an ascent toward consciousness”
- To which I would add the mystic Osho (1975) in ‘The Great Secret’ – “Nature is unconscious evolution, godliness is conscious evolution, and man is the link in between.”
One reason it took me two years to get going was that my natural writing instinct is to come from a place of ‘knowing’, of having investigated a phenomenon thoroughly and be prepared for my writing and conclusions to be challenged (which is, on reflection, a pretty egoistic place to want to start from).
I found that with evolution, that was impossible because the deeper I dug the clearer it became that, appropriately, my understanding of evolution was itself evolving, and so I would never get to that place of ‘knowing’ evolution. Over tea one day last year I was sharing my dilemma or koan with a group of several wise women friends of mine and the outcome was that perhaps I should make the story about my journey of discovering evolution rather than a definitive work on evolution.
After all, by its nature, there can never be a ‘final’ work on an evolving understanding (and as it turns out, biological evolution may, itself be evolving!).
So that’s where I am now going – starting from Covid-19 where I left off in 2022 and setting off to share my journey through the science and mystery of evolution. The transition from Covid to Evolution was like a Doorway to Wonderland as a core feature of Covid is its ability to evolve as we live with it.
From the Doorway, the obvious place to start is In The Beginning…
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