In Travels with Charley, John Steinbeck introduced me to the musings of a regular man, with a regular dog, driving a regular house-on-wheels to wherever he wanted to go in America.  He wrote that he had always lived violently, drunk hugely, eaten too much or not at all, slept around the clock or missed two nights of sleeping, worked too hard and too long in glory, or slobbed for a time in utter laziness. He had lifted, pulled, chopped, climbed, made love with joy and taken his hangovers as a consequence, not as a punishment. At a tender age I had stumbled upon a regular person who was still living his long life wandering toward consciousness. Unlike friends who wanted to grow up to be rich or others who wanted to be envied; I wanted to grow up to be aware.

The historian Will Durant wrote that some of us should try to lift ourselves by our bootstraps "out of superstition, occultism, and credulity to an informed and friendly intelligence conscious of its infinite ignorance." That process requires tracing the mix of simplicity and complexity, regularity and randomness, order and disorder in our lifetime of experience; up the ladder from elementary particle physics and cosmology, through chemistry and biology, to the physiology and psychology of our complex adaptive selves. Inherent in that quest is an understanding of how the simplicity, regularity, and order of the early universe gave rise over time to the intermediate balance of order and disorder that have prevailed in many areas during later epochs, making possible among other things, the existence of a complex adaptive system like me.

I was separated from my children and therefore didn't have the experience of observing a developing child as nature's way of reducing the entropy of its corner of the universe. I missed watching a one dimensional strand of DNA flowering into a three dimensional person. Information on a one-way street to becoming protein using the energy of the sun. The history of life written like a biblical commandment for negative entropy. Make thy information larger. This genetic material could never become senile. It is no more likely to die when it is a million years old than when it is only a hundred. It leaps from body to body down the generations, manipulating a series of carriers in its own way and for its own ends, abandoning a series of mortal bodies before they sink into senility and death.

Ideas cause ideas and help evolve new ideas. They interact with each other and with other mental forces in the same brain, in neighboring brains and thanks to global communication, in far distant, foreign brains. And they also interact with the external surroundings to produce an explosive advance in evolution that is far beyond any of the quantum leaps on our earlier evolutionary stage. We are almost ready to create Marshall McLuhan's "global consciousness" where the creative process of knowing will be collectively extended to the whole of human society. Perhaps we are witnessing the birth of the "star child" with its limbs, its nervous system, its centers of perception, its memory--the very body of that great something to come which is to fulfill the aspirations of evolution.

The News button leads you to a page listing recent and evolving travel plans, the Journals button gives access to an archive of travel journals, the Old Pix button reveals the yellowing pages of photographs from the previous century, and the Gallery button accesses galleries of images which can each be mouse clicked to expand the thumbnail to a full size image.

Farewell Diesel, thou art too dear for my possession