Tuesday morning and it is mid-December.  Winter is settling in.  The temperature is in the teens.  That the season arrives as expected anchors my sense of well being.  We utterly depend upon Nature.  Yes, I am “of Nature” and there is nothing “higher” that I can say of myself.  I have the benefit of language.  So what!  Is that a blessing or a curse?  Making distinctions, drawing lines around experience, assigning syllabic utterance, and then a string of conventional, grammatical-arrangement of sounds (word and syntax), is nothing less than awareness of good and evil.  Drawing a distinction is where trouble begins.

My mind returns to Heraclitus of Ephesus.  Heraclitus was a 6th century BC thinker who wrote one book. The book entitled On Nature, survives as fragments quoted by others.  Heraclitus momentous observation: change is the nature of everything.  Those lines of distinction that I reflexively draw in my mind, those opinions, the thumbs up or thumbs down are context dependent, eroding, evaporating even as I construct them with a feeling of satisfaction that “I am right.”  Heraclitus said:

τὰ πάντα ῥεῖ καὶ οὐδὲν μένει (“Ta panta rhei kai ouden menei”)

I read only a few words of Greek, but these are worth turning over in my mind, silently voicing the pronunciation of the sounds.  That makes me feel closer to Heraclitus.  You cannot step into the same river twice is how this principle is usually remembered.  The river flows, with every instant of time you get a different river.  “Everything changes and nothing remains,” is the literal rendering of the Greek words.

Diogenes writes that Heraclitus deposited his book as an offering at the dedication of

the great temple of Artemis, the Artemisium, one of the largest temples of the 6th century BCE and one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.  This does not surprise me at all.  Religion is the confluence of the best and of the worst which arises from our species, Homo Sapiens.  This unity of opposites inspires awe.  Another way of putting it, “the path up and down are one and the same.”  You must give to get, die to live.

This is a New York Times photograph, one of a number which the Times published in this morning’s email newsletter.  Other Times images could also have served to speak in a wordless way about the change taking place around us, and within us.  I have a mystical sensation when I think about that for a while.  As to the photograph of the children, I doubt that all of them are alive as I write this.  The IDF bombardment of Gaza has been systematic.  The Israeli response to Hamas is measure for measure with added interest.

Oh, the children, – never mind.