Silhouettes of the Past

Matt and I drove by my parent's old house last night. The one with the trees, the ghosts and the memories.

We stopped the car on Wood street and looked across Mrs. Jacob's yard on the corner.  The Chicago street lights threw their weak pink light a few feet into her vast property.

Beyond her front yard, we could see the historic Civil War era Victorian in the shadows, ringed by what remained of the ancient oaks that once guarded this sentinel of our past. The old house looked empty and unhappy.

It was silhouetted against the November sky, with just a few lonely lights shining somewhere inside. The front porch illuminated by a harsh, incongruous florescent bulb that was everything about light that would make an artist cringe.

Oh well, the artists are gone. As is the harpsichord music and Handel being played too loud. The sounds of brothers and sisters arguing. The smells of baking too much bread and too many unnecessary pies. The phone ringing and ringing. All vanished.

I remember my father explain the forest of giant oaks on our property. "John, those oaks love the underground sand bars here. They're from when Lake Michigan covered this area. Most of them are very old... Mrs. Platt's Oak tree - the Council Oak, is over 800 years old. The Indians used it as a central meeting place for tribes in this area." Dad made the oaks sound potent and poetic - mysterious and magical.

And I guess they were.

Until the destructive winds of a millennium arrived a few years ago. They came from nowhere, disturbing the Indian spirits and knocking over Mrs. Platt's Council oak. They also crashed many of my father's oaks into his coach house and power lines.

The unexpected winds blew other changes into our lives. The old house emptied. The trees and leaves and happiness - scattered South and East. And up.

These years later, things seem fuller. Brighter. And I've come to understand that it's an illumination that comes from all of these beautiful minds I see around me. Souls that were seeded among those giant oaks. Generations that heard too much loud harpsichord music, did way too many chores, fought, loved, and never answered the phone.  Because they were in the living room, looking out through the stained glass - out at the oaks.

And on this Thanksgiving, I am thankful for that brightness in my life.

Looking South, East, and Up.

Fear, bravery and infamy on a French Beach - June 6, 1944

This evening, I walked along the beach here, barefoot in the warm Florida sand. Despite the scarlet sun plunging into the Gulf, I was feeling sorry for myself. For my injured hand.

It cheered me, though, to see young groups of friends and families; tan and happy, gazing into the Gulf like me - or running and splashing into the tide.

Blonde hair, bikinis, tattoos. Ah, Florida beach-goers.

I eventually sat down in the sand and glanced at my phone. June 5th. And tomorrow is the 6th.

A powerful date, June 6th. On my wall is a framed purple heart with that date, with the name August William Diedesch.  My father's "Uncle Bill." On June 6, 1944 - 71 years ago - Bill was on Omaha beach.

Bill Diedesch was barely 21 years old in this photo, taken shortly before he enlisted in the Army Reserves. You can't help but notice his sleight frame and his obvious youth.  He belonged carrying a cooler on a Florida beach - not an M1 Garand in France.

Uncle Bill was among the historic group of 1400 soldiers to arrive in the first assault wave on Omaha Beach - the most deadly and dangerous of the Normandy beaches.

I wondered, as I always do, what Bill saw through his eyes - and felt in his heart - as his Higgins boat was tossed about in the cold, high waves heading toward the empty beach. Facing the sum of all fears, perhaps he thought about God. Or his mother.

In those final moments, I hope Bill had that same determined look on his face that he did in the picture here. As his company sailed toward their doom, they could surely begin seeing the destruction wrought by the 50-caliber German guns on the other boats. Through that squint, it must have been evident that many - if not all of them - were about to sacrifice their lives - and their future.

In my mind, uncle Bill's visage does not change.

As his landing craft plowed the waves, it heralded the bravery and courage of a nation intent upon liberation and freedom. Of the sacrifices willing to be made. The determination of a generation.

And yes, it's been said  many times - but it's still true. The bravery and sacrifice of those skinny kids in the cold waters of France - and their fellow soldiers, did change the future. Perhaps, even, they made our futures possible.  The ones in which students run in the surf in swim suits and not army boots.

Sadly, many of those who fought and died should have been sitting in classrooms or riding their bicycles. Or laughing on the beach with their girlfriend.

And thinking of my father's uncle as I sat on the sand, my problems seemed kind of small.

Of the 1400 soldiers that fought in the first wave of troops on Omaha beach, less than 400 would survive. Uncle Bill didn't, but his memory does.

It's a memory of this brave, squinting, skinny kid who thought he was signing up for the Army Reserves at the library - but was really signing up to make history.

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Note: Uncle Bill was part of the 116th Division, 29th regiment.

A look through the Arch - at Dred

In 1965, the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial, also known as the Gateway Arch, was built in St. Louis, Missouri, along the western shore of the Mississippi river.

It was designed to commemorate the Louisiana Purchase, the first civil government west of the Mississippi, and the debate over slavery raised by the Dred Scott case. In practical and political ways, it was also intended to provide jobs.

But clearly, the "Jefferson National Expansion" moniker points to Jefferson's role in overseeing the purchase of the vast tract of land into which our nation would grow, starting right in St. Louis, where Lewis and Clark began their journey.

Another journey began in St. Louis - a caustic debate on slavery, which led to a rare Supreme Court ruling and - eventually - to civil war and staggering bloodshed for those on both sides of the argument. The debate was triggered by a slave - a man - named Dred Scott.

Dred had been traveling with his master, John Emerson. Scott had lived Illinois and Wisconsin - both
free states - after moving from Missouri (a slave state). When Emerson, an army surgeon, left Fort Snelling in Wisconsin, he left Dred behind and hired out his services to others. It was argued that, by selling slave services in a free state, Emerson initiated the act of slavery in that state, which violated the Missouri Compromise, the Northwest Ordinance, and the Wisconsin Enabling Act.

Emerson subsequently died, and for three years his widow continued to hire out Dred's services in Wisconsin. Dred first tried to buy his freedom from the widow but she refused. So Dred sued - in Missouri. The case went to the Supreme Court, where, in 1857, Judge Robert Taney's Majority Opinion rejected Dred's plea.

The language that Taney used in his Opinion (http://bit.ly/1GaHAA4), was, by today's standards, so inflammatory as to be hardly believable. He referred to blacks as "people of an inferior order." And that "Negroes in bondage are property and the Constitution protects property owners from deprivation.." and therefore "could be bought and sold and treated as an ordinary article of merchandise and traffic."

At that point, Abraham Lincoln, the presidential candidate, entered the fight. Lincoln characterized Taney's option as "a warped judicial interpretation of the (constitutional) framers' intent."

Taney's decision against Dred Scott fueled Lincoln's passionate oratories and helped define his political strategy during the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Historian Graham Peck wrote: “To Lincoln, the Taney and Douglas racial doctrine culminated a retreat from the idea of equality since the Revolution and provided an intellectual and legal capstone to the nation’s increasingly discriminatory racial practices..."

It can be argued that the the Lincoln-Douglas Debates decided the presidency. And the Dred Scott case helped Lincoln beat Douglas in those famous sessions. But by the time the debates - and the election - were over, war was imminent. It would be a war to define freedom. A war that would kill 620,000 Americans.

And now, back to St. Louis. Everyone knows of the social and racial unrest that have unfolded in nearby Ferguson. But not many Americans know that, just blocks away, in the Calvary Cemetery in Florissant, is Dred Scott's grave.

There, his gravestone is covered in pennies left by visitors. It's thought they link Dred's memory with Lincoln - and they attest to the heroic efforts of both men against slavery and social injustice.

Poverty, racism, and social injustice in America are widespread, complicated, and longstanding problems. They are neither socially unilateral nor can they be fixed with existing federal programs.

Dred's grave. Ferguson. The Arch. All part of St. Louis.

Looking through the gateway arch, out across the Mississippi River, are the vast tracts of land that Lewis and Clark explored. But, sadly, there are also new lands. Deserts. Deserts of jobs, of food, of affordable housing. Deserts of fairness and justice.

I've seen those deserts. Growing up on the South side of Chicago and subsequently working in places like Detroit and Flint, I've seen poor neighborhoods that stretch to the horizon. I've wondered about unemployment and despair in those places. And about whether the people living there can feel real, everyday hope for their future.

For those cities and others like Ferguson, perhaps their voices will eventually be heard. How and when change will unfold is unknown, but it's inevitable. For all of us, I hope the solution - this time - is one that can be peaceful, planned, and embraced.

Until then, when we look at the Arch, we should be reminded of the juggernaut of change that Dred Scott started in 1857.

And we should remember that in it's shadow, we'll find the troubled city of Ferguson ... and the paradox of Dred Scott's gravestone - a marble marker adorned with copper pennies and the eternal company of Abraham Lincoln.

The man I know in you

If I could only find a steam-punk time travel machine in a dusty attic somewhere, I'd spin the dials to take me back to the year 2000.

To a chilly fall day at a Chicago skate park.



I'd sneak up to the edge of the concrete track, lean on the chain- link fence and look for a familiar six-year-old among the tall, gangly teenagers.

The beautiful blonde one, his cheeks chapped and rosy-red. The one with the skinned knees and bruises. My son, timeless and innocent - fearless and confident.

Tommy.

Back then, at the skate park, 6-year-old Tommy was an epically unusual equal among those lanky, edgy, swearing teenagers. Because he didn't fear the fall or the challenge. And it was a place where he could be himself - and they loved the kid whose swagger made them feel cooler.

At night, he'd sit at our kitchen table and make his skinny friends custom tees using my old white Hanes t-shirts and indelible markers. Tommy's new clothing line, featuring skateboard company logos, was a must-have outfit for the skateboard clique.

Those shirts were genuine and pure - and thus, wondrously cool. Just like Tommy.

I think the junior-high skaters saw what I saw. And with my time travel machine, I want to see it again. I want to take pictures on my iPhone and show them to anyone who doubts the soul and the heart and destiny.

Because, like a reborn soul, it seemed that Tommy couldn't wait to get life started again. Pierre Corneille, a 17th-century dramatist, penned, "True, I am young, but for souls nobly born, valor doesn't await the passing of years." And what I saw in Tommy couldn't wait.

Tommy couldn't even wait 9 months. Couldn't wait to walk around the backyard, hunting bugs and trouble and the neighbor's dog while clutching a bottle of apple juice in his teeth like Churchill would a cigar.

He looked inexplicably cool in diapers and a baby t-shirt. He didn't have time for silly things like naps or toys. He wanted the keys to my car. He wanted my phone, my power tools, and my computer. My art supplies. My heart.

On the basketball court in our driveway, Tommy would whip off his shirt and challenge his older brother Andrew and me to a game. Him against us. He would crash into Andrew and make wild shots. He'd usually finish the game with a split lip.

But every game, Andrew and I would find ways to help him score.

Because we both knew winning meant nothing - and that Tommy's spirit meant everything.

In sixth grade, Tommy was an offensive lineman on the 7th-grade football team. He wore giant shoulder-pads and a recklessly fun attitude. More than once, I'd have to call a teammate's father and apologize for Tommy's idea of a sixth-grade football hit in practice.

In games, he would smile as the opposing 7th graders taunted and threatened him. Then he'd run to the sidelines inappropriately high-fiving his team as they helped the other kid off the field.  They just didn't know Tommy.

Vince Lombardi, a football guy, said: "Leaders are not born, they are made."

Well, Lombardi was wrong.

Leaders are born - as souls - and their lives flow toward that destiny. They are drawn to challenges and causes, purpose and justice. They are pulled, pointed and directed. Perhaps their journey takes them to an urban classroom. Perhaps to a law school in Baltimore or Washington, D.C. Or to a boardroom.

Sometimes these journeys take a sort of karmic detour. Before Marissa Meyer became the CEO at Yahoo, she was a grocery clerk. Michael Dell, of Dell Computers, was a dishwasher. Warren Buffet was a paperboy who claimed his bike as a deduction on his first tax return. Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, was a summer camp leader.



Or, maybe your detour is to spend a summer as a busboy in a tourist town. To get ready take on bigger things. To see, to remember.

My 6-year-old skateboarder is now 21, and he sometimes forgets who he was - who he is - under the weight of the world.

Of course, he's still innocent, generous, and creative. His soul is still infused with leadership and fearlessness. With charisma.

You see, that's why I need the time machine. To snap some pictures from the chain link fence.

To tell him, "You need to remember who you are."

"I need to show you that - if you look at your past, Tommy - you can see your destiny."

To tell him again and again, "I love you for the man I know in you."

A place too high

I've been up here for a few years now.

Here in Appalachia, with its mountains of sadness and antiques and coal. In the hills of the high desert, climbing red rocks in Sedona. Looking for artifacts and aliens and God's voice.

Here, on the Sunshine Bridge, driving through slanting sunlight and lemon yellow pillars of wire. Top down, flying on the salty wind across the aquamarine whitecaps.

And here, at my window, looking at coral sunsets every night. Trying to understand a language that Whitman and Keats couldn't speak. Neither could Bob Dylan or Bob Marley, even after sitting in the sand sharing enlightenment.

I can't speak it either.  You gotta do more drugs than Dylan or Marley or me.

But I know who might. Tim Leary, Harvard psychologist and the sixties hippie of all hippies. While he probably walked around with mushrooms in his pockets, he claimed they were the source of shamanic power and deep metaphysical truth.

Leary once said that he learned more "in the five hours after taking ... mushrooms than ... in the preceding 15 years of studying and doing research in psychology." 

What did he learn? About eight levels, or circuits, of consciousness. He described the first four circuits as the basic psychological skills needed by human beings - such as survival, problem-solving, and socializing. That each circuit could be clearly and astonishingly sensed, and sometimes triggered, by specific types of chemicals - such as opiates, marijuana, alcohol and sexual hormones.

Leary also described the big leap to the higher circuits.  The ones that the shamans use. Four levels, progressively associated with sociosexual knowledge, telepathy, ESP, life extension, and immortality.

The final circuit, according to Leary, is that which is sensed in near-death experiences: it is a fusion to quantum consciousness.

This highest circuit can be found described in nearly all major religions.  It is the equivalent of a heaven, a paradise, a knowing of all things. A consciousness among all souls. It's what Leary really sought.

Levels five and higher can be reached with Iboga, a root used in West Africa, which leads to an eight hour metaphysical journey.

It can be reached with Peyote, a mushroom which brought native Americans intense transcendental experiences - some lasting up to 10 hours.

And with Ayahuasca, which means “vine of the souls.” Ayahuasca is such an intense hallucinogen that it seems to hurl the user into a dimension that often requires spiritual and clinical supervision.

I'm not going up to five. I can't get that high. I need to settle for healing and understanding and old-fashioned four level learning.

But the truth isn't in the mountains or among the red rocks or on the bridge, either.

I think it's written in the sunset.  There are streaks of meaning there, if I can lose myself in the colors and the salty breeze and in my stirred faith.  And in the quantum language of the sun's rays.

I can't understand the words - yet.

But it's my journey. John's journey. For now.

The Power of Secrets

Love needs secrets. 

We need to know that the person sitting next to us, sharing that glass of wine, also shares our humanness and vulnerability. That they've shared our dreams and our failures. That they wish what we wish. We need to hear these longings and desires and vision.

But sharing these views, learning these things about each other - is so incredibly difficult.  It's like learning Chinese - hard to understand, to express, to communicate. 

Maybe this is because we continually try to brand our lives on social media - curating ourselves on Facebook and Pinterest and Instagram. 

But we need more than that. We need secrets. A man needs a woman's secrets like he needs her tenderness. 

But, that's rarely what we get. And rarely what we give in kind. We're imperfect, afraid, sensitive, cautious and suspicious. We carry histories of hurt like stacks of broken hearts, teeteringly arranged on our backs like a Dr. Seuss drawing.   

Fortresses built of these fears and suspicions make for impenetrable hearts. A man won't waste a winter trying to tear down these battlements. 

No. 

He wants to meet the princess in the forest and hear her breathlessly whisper how she can sneak him into the tower. 

He wants to hear secrets.  They are an irresistible gesture of kindness, tenderness and shared longing.

In 1997, Arthur Aron, from the SUNY Stonybrook, published “The Experimental Generation of Interpersonal Closeness,” (http://bit.ly/1F60DLK), a study on how two strangers might develop interpersonal affections (love) through a process of discovery and sharing.

In other words, he developed a verbal Petri dish that can grow love. It's the foundation for the iPhone app "36 questions on the way to love." The app of learning secrets. Of sharing.

It is evidence that this longing for learning truths and secrets and feelings - dreams and vulnerabilities - is just the right kind of environment for something really good to happen.

The secrets are a kind of metaphysical power, like the 1.21 gigawatts that Dr. Brown’s Back to the Future Delorean needed to travel in time and space.

If we take Aron's questions - and our soul's desire to learn secrets - we are connecting cables from the lightning rod on the clock tower directly to our souls. Waiting for lightning to strike.

And we’ll either get electrocuted or the car will fly.

I say plug the cables in and whisper your secrets in my ear.

John Lennon, Mozart and Creation

John Lennon would awaken from sleep with fully formed songs composed in his dreams. Mozart, while walking down a street, would spontaneously hear a completely new musical tune in his head.

In 1962, Harvard psychologist Jerome Bruner published, “On Knowing – Essays for the Left Hand.” It was a treatise on how "knowing" is shaped and how knowing in turn helps create language, science, literature, and art.

Wolfe, Hemingway, Tschaikowsky and many others have mused on the creative process. They told us what it felt like to be inspired. About the productive, creative state.

Lennon was almost embarrassed with the completeness and the ease of finishing his dream-created songs - telling friends that he didn't want to put down them down just because they came so easily. One of these is “#9 Dream.”

Mozart told us the same; that the music just entered his mind: “…thoughts crowd into my mind as easily as you could wish. Whence and how do they come? I do not know and I have nothing to do with it… Once I have my theme, another melody comes, linking itself to the first one, in accordance with the needs of the composition as a whole: the counterpoint, the part of each instrument, and all these melodic fragments at last produce the entire work.”

Importantly, these two geniuses needed more than just the intuitive raw material. They needed intellectual technique - highly developed musical, technical, mathematical, and production skills. Could it be that certain brains, certain souls, have a greater power to dissolve the barriers between the left and right brains?

In her Brain Pickings blog (http://bit.ly/1BN7XgU) Maria Popova describes Bruner’s “On Knowing” work as: “…lamenting how the artificial divide between intuition and intelligence limits us…”

There is much more to Bruner’s treatise. He identified different kinds of creativity: predictive, sudden and visionary. He also believed that the left and right worked together in two steps – a creative, inspirational step and a step where technique is applied to finish the process.

This process, where left and right come together, is exactly what Mozart described about his creative techniques. Without it, there would be no Don Giovanni - and no Imagine.

And no iPhone. It’s also what Steve Jobs reveals in his autobiography – it’s the left/right genius that made Apple into Apple.

Thus, when the inspirational, dreamy left and the pragmatic, perfectionist right work in perfect symmetry, creation happens.

We get Mozart symphonies, Beatles songs and iPhones.

A Missing Voice lost, a Lost Voice - Malcolm X

10 million Zenith televisions, their black and white screens flickering and fuzzy, circular dials spun to channel 13, showed 1959 America something real and chilling and disturbing.

Eight years before those same televisions played the carnage in Vietnam - and four years before the weekend-long broadcast of sadness in Dallas - they showed Americans Mike Wallace’s CBS special, “The Hate that Hate Produced.”

It shockingly introduced white America to the Nation of Islam (NOI) – specifically, to Malcolm X and his NOI brothers. White Americans cringed at the hatred they saw directed at them and the Brothers' deep contempt for American social values.

In it's wake, there was understandable outrage. CBS was accused of inciting racial unrest. It was unprecedented, self-directed American-made hate – playing out on an American stage.

The multi-part special included Louis Farrakhan’s angered indictments of whites: “I charge the white man …with being the greatest murderer on earth. I charge the white man with being the greatest peace-breaker on earth.... the greatest robber on earth…the greatest deceiver on earth. I charge the white man with being the greatest trouble-maker on earth.”

Amazingly, this was the same Louis Farrakhan that would later confess to his own complicit role in Malcolm’s demise.

This was 1959, and as yet the deep stirrings of the civil rights movement had not yet begun in America’s collective conscience. Thus America’s shock at these images. These words.

Mike Wallace collaborated with Louis Lomax, a black reporter.  Lomax told Wallace about Black Muslims for the first time earlier that year. “Mike, they hate white people.”

Wallace was initially skeptical when Lomax told him the specifics – that the movement had already recruited over two hundred thousand black Americans whom were vehemently opposed to integration and "had nothing but contempt for the civil rights movement." Then he witnessed it himself. And filmed it with Lomax.

In his autobiography, Wallace describes the work, “The Hate that Hate Produced,” as one of the most explosive pieces he had ever been involved in.  And considering Wallace’s body of work, that statement is astonishing.

The watershed nature of this 1959 expose is that many Americans had no idea that black people had such incendiary feelings towards whites. It was a kind of open, threatened hatred. It was organized - and it was probably really scary for 1959 Americans. Explosive.

Malcolm’s message, despite its angry rhetorical content, was one that America needed to hear. It was a bitter medicine America needed on racial justice and civil rights.  But Malcolm’s Nation of Islam was considered extreme in the extreme – his militant radicals had plunged into even more dangerous waters in that era - they were considered fringe communists. They had met with Castro in Harlem in 1960 for the United Nations Opening Session.

His group was considered so extreme, in fact, that the media was galvanized against publicizing their messages on social justice. The racial genie was out of the bottle. The voices had been heard - the messages - the hate - could not be unheard.  The media instead looked for a balancing voice - and found it in the newsreels of fire-hoses and dogs and marches in Alabama and Mississippi.

And so it was, in part, that Martin Luther King’s message became the national dialogue. His voice, equally stirring yet infinitely more palatable - is remembered as the medicine that worked.  And it Martin that is remembered by history. He is the man who stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963 and proclaimed his dream.

And after MLK stood on those steps, Malcolm X journeyed to Mecca and returned transformed, renouncing many of his radical positions and his association with the Nation of Islam.  For that, three of his radical former brothers killed him in 1964.

There is no doubt among friends and historians that Macolm X was misunderstood. Maybe by me, too.

But I believe that he cannot be morally judged by his words against social injustice. Perhaps they were words of hate – but no less so than the rhetoric of our own civil revolution.  Or of the war that ended 15 years before Malcolm began speaking for the NOI.

Malcolm’s voice was heard, even if the message was painful for our mothers and fathers, in their suburban homes, to hear. It was so painful, so extreme, that news network cameras turned to the less threatening, less violent, King – and his message. Malcolm and the NOI were marginalized. King’s voice was another to be heard. Then both were silenced.

Today, we don’t hear voices like King’s or Malcolm’s. Where are the angry African Americans to speak outrage at unemployment, underemployment, irrational imprisonment, collapsing families, and violence in their communities? Where are the ones that can speak and be heard?

We need a soul like Malcolm X to emerge again. Our moral judgments on his message are eclipsed by the effect his words - his voice - had on opening eyes, starting a conversation. We need Malcolm's charismatic and provocative outrage at injustice.

Mike Wallace, who would become a lifelong friend of Malcolm X’s family, remembers him fondly as a deeply charismatic and complex man. The same Mike Wallace that, at 93, had known world leaders, presidents, and history – up close and in detail.

He knew how important Malcolm was to us. He knew Malcolm was a part of America.

And Mike Wallace knew Malcolm was a voice that needed to be heard.

A voice that is missing.

Michelangelo's Lemnsicate

The lemnsicate can represent the zero set of two points, tucked within a complex polynomial equation. It's also what we know as the symbol of infinity.

If you were to ride on the lemnsicate like a twisted NASCAR track, you'd keep going forever and never get to the end. 

A strange symbol for infinity, really. Also known mathematically as Watt's Curve and Devil's Curve, among many descriptions. It's a number - but not a real number. It's a concept - but not a concept. Like consciousness. Like feeling. 

Like the universe. 

In his 1584 book, "On the Infinite Universe and Worlds," the Italian astronomer (and of course, philosopher) Giordano Bruno, postulated an unbound universe where, "Innumerable suns exist; innumerable earths revolve around these suns in a manner similar to the way the seven planets revolve around our sun. Living beings inhabit these worlds."

This is an amazing treatise, considering it was published some thirty years prior to Galileo's stand-off with the Catholic Church on the Aristotelian view that the earth was the center of the universe. And considering we didn't need to wait for Carl Sagan to give us his opinions. We knew it in the 16th century.

But this kind of infinity in the physical universe is metaphorically different from the mathematical lemnsicate. Astronomical radio studies seem to indicate that space - that the universe - is flat. Which means that that infinity stretches to a point of no return. Unlike the lemnsicate. An unimaginable topographical concept - perhaps not best represented by the lazy figure 8.

In mathematical circles, John Wallis first "discovered" it forty years after Galileo's disagreement with the Romans. But mystically, linguistically and religiously, it was there long before Wallis. 

And it has far more interesting origins. From India, it was passed into the Arabic numerical system. Metaphysically and artistically, it spent millennia as a representation of balanced opposites; male and female, night and day, darkness and light. 

These balanced opposites are almost a re-constituted Yin-Yang, an ancient Chinese symbol of complementary opposites. In Daoist metaphysics, the belief is that these dualistic forces are actually moral judgements and therefore they are only perceptual - that they aren't real. They're an indivisible whole. This is also tinctured in Buddhist precepts.

The lemnsicate symbol can also be found in the elaborate Arabic calligraphic renderings of the Name of God; the elegant loops providing a decorative device as well as pointing toward the idea of eternity.

On this track of infinity, there are metaphysical elements of the universe, of God and of morality. Of perfect opposites - male and female, darkness and light, life and death.

Mixing all these symbols and metaphors and real math together, what can we make of infinity? If it's a concept, then can it be rationalized by literature or science or religion?

Michelangelo, like Mozart, da Vinci, and Plato - is an old, knowing soul. And Michelangelo, in a moment of elemental wisdom, gave us his answer. With his brush, he painted God touching us as he created Adam - across the universe and across infinity.

In a perfect template of the lemnsicate.

We are all on this funny, twisted track. And few of us know - or could ever understand - if we are just human beings in born bodies or something more. Could we be creations made within infinity itself - souls that live in metaphysical worlds within the lemnsicate?

Are we on a journey that never begins - and never really ends?

Changing Egyptian Artifacts

Across the globe, people are shocked by the violence committed by ISIS forces against Christians in Egypt just a few days ago. In a graphic, violent video, soldiers beheaded approximately 50 people.

In the United States, we seem to remember and recognize that kind of violence through flickering black and white newsreels of camps in Poland and Germany and in the tides of human sadness that engulfed parts of the 20th century.

In the wake of the ISIS brutality, the world expressed a shared outrage and Egypt angrily responded by bombing suspected ISIS installations in Libya. This growing epidemic of conflict and extremism won’t be easily stopped. It continues to spread across the Middle East and Europe. Across the globe.

Yet, it has further cemented the world’s concern over this kind of terrorism - an extreme, fatal violation of human rights. It's stimulated more conversation on militant theocratic terrorists and helped push for a broader recognition that a shared global strategy is needed. That a shared commitment is needed.

That said, Egypt has another human rights problem – violence against women. Its effects ripple throughout Egyptian society - through families and marriages and communities. And while the ISIS brutality is awful and medieval, the violence against women is a far greater threat to each Egyptian family - and each woman - than the looming specter of ISIS.

In a 2013 United Nations Women survey, more than 99 percent of women and girls interviewed in Egypt reported that they experienced some form of sexual harassment. Then, in Amnesty International’s report released last month, more startling documentation emerged about how “women and girls face violence - on a disturbing scale - both at home and in public. The violence includes domestic violence, sexual mob attacks, and torture in state custody. Egyptian laws and entrenched impunity continue to foster a culture of routine sexual and gender-based violence.”

Can you imagine if, here in the United States, it was considered acceptable that our daughters, sisters, and mothers were subject to sexual violence while in public – or in state custody? Would we really accept that the raping or abusing of our girlfriends and wives was an unfortunate social norm?

Of course not.

So where are the media reports of this tragedy in Egypt?

“In a world populated with over 7 billion people, one in three women will be physically, sexually, or otherwise abused during her lifetime: that’s a staggering one billion women and girls who have experienced violence.” http://blog.amnestyusa.org/women/one-billion-women-and-girls-deserve-better/

For more, read the Amnesty International Report on Egypt violence here: http://www.amnestyusa.org/sites/default/files/mde_120042015.pdf

The 50 Breakthroughs that the world is waiting for

Looking at the technological advances that fill our lives and occupy our attention, you might think that innovation is everywhere. That our creative, constructive efforts are being focused not only on our ability to text and instagram each other but also on making the world a better place.

If the world's appetite for smartphones can feed Apple an $18B profit in a single quarter, can't humanity's needs for clean water, housing and disease prevention create an equally compelling need for innovation?

The answer, sadly, is - not yet.

The Institute for Globally Transformative Technologies at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, studied the 50 most critical scientific & technological breakthroughs required for sustainable global development (http://bit.ly/1xQijVz)

In the study, they attempted to identify "where game-changing technologies are most required," and to "Foster a thought-provoking conversation about the role of technology in solving the world's most pressing problems, and focus effort on the breakthroughs that really matter."

The world is waiting. It's waiting for desalinated water. For energy where there is cold and darkness. For better ways to treat and control malaria, one of the world's most prolific killers. And more.

We need more conversation on these problems. And we need to get to work.

A partial list is here. Click the above link to view the full report and list.

• A new method for desalination: scalable, low cost, and using renewable energy. 
• Vaccines that can effectively control and eventually help eradicate the major infectious diseases of our time—HIV/AIDS, Malaria and TB 
• A new generation of homes with advanced construction material, especially for the urban poor: durable, lightweight, and affordable, with integrated solar-powered lighting, ventilation, and toilets 
• New methods to produce fertilizers to replace current processes, which are extremely capital intensive and have significant environmental footprints 
• A ‘utility-in-a-box’ for making it simpler, cheaper and faster to set up and operate renewable energy mini-grids 
• Short course TB treatment drugs that will lead to significant improvements in treatment adherence, and curb the spread of drug resistance 
• Micro-biocides to provide a method of protection against HIV/AIDS and Human Papillomavirus (HPV) for women who are otherwise vulnerable to infection through sexual contact with their partner 
• Improved, longer-lasting antiretroviral therapy (ART) formulations to control HIV viral replication and increase patient adherence 
• PrEP (pre-exposure prophylaxis) to reduce the risk of HIV infection 
• An integrated, easy to operate, affordable, and solar-powered suite of medical devices specifically for maternal, child and primary care in low resource settings 
• A complete cure drug for Malaria that eliminates all malarial parasites, at every stage of the life cycle, from the human body 
• New long-lasting chemical mosquito repellents delivered in novel ways 
• New long-lasting non-chemical spatial mosquito repellents or attractants for vector control 
• Low cost off-grid refrigerators for preserving vaccines (and other temperature sensitive 
• Thermo-stabilizing mechanisms for preserving vaccines and other temperature sensitive, lifesaving pharmaceuticals so that they do not require refrigeration 
• Nutrient-dense and culturally appropriate foods for infants to complement breast milk during the weaning period 
• A low cost drilling system for shallow (rain-fed) groundwater wells, combined with portable sensors for measuring groundwater depth. Such systems should reduce the cost of drilling wells to under $100 per farmer in Africa 
• Affordable herbicides or other mechanisms to control weeds, ideally ones that are more environmentally friendly than herbicides currently on the market