Living Mind, Travelling Thoughts

I've been a Couchsurfing member for exactly ONE year today. Hurrah!! But I've yet to have any CS experiences yet... but am definitely looking forward to some. Hopefully in the upcoming year.

Counting down... 15 days to 2007

Time used to fly, but now it seems to just zip past. This song sounds like something time would sing -

Once I was traveling across the sky

This lovely planet caught my eye

And being curious I flew close by

And now I'm caught here

Until I die

Until we die

It's a blessing we have time on earth but we won't be having it forever... So seize time while it's still here. Fear not, carpe diem!

"Twenty years from now, you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones that you did. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from safe harbour. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover." - Mark Twain

"When I was about twenty-one, I went broke for the first time. I slept on chair cushions in my 'studio' in Kansas City and I ate cold beans out of a can. But I took another look at my dreams and set out for Hollywood. Foolish? Not to a youngster. An older person might have too much 'common sense' to do it. Sometimes I wonder if 'common sense' isn't another way of saying 'fear'. And 'fear' often spells failure." - Walt Disney, Animator, Dreamer, Father

Yet I fear for our planet. I fear for all the species the human beings, beings of the "higher order", are tasked to protect, but are unwittingly destroying in our pursuit of dreams. Dreams of "advancement" for the human race. For convenience. But do we all realise the inconvenient truth of this convenience we are seeking - the inconvenience of convenience.

I saw Happy Feet last Monday. Posters and trailers show a bunch of bubbly, cuddly penguins. Another cutesy animation? Happy Feet begs to differ. There is a message about human interference, pollution and the destruction of natural habitats in Antartica. It does not address global warming. The picture above does. Like Happy Feet, this is "art" with a message, up for each individual's interpretation. I see penguins melting in the rising temperature, trying to shelter from the heat with little umbrellas. It gets too hot, they are burned, the parapluies fall, the penguins die. Their blood is melded with snow, hence the pink patches on a surface of white.

How much of white ice still covers the poles? As seen in Al Gore's disturbing An Inconvenient Truth, polar bears are beginning to drown because they have to swim farther afield to find a piece of solid ice on which they can rest. Imagine this - polar bears swimming with their little cubs, find a piece of ice, climb on it, it breaks because it has become so thin due to global warming that it can no longer hold the weight of its resident bears, the family has to swim again to find another slab that breaks again... until they become so tired, their feet won't peddle anymore and they sink. This has NEVER happened before. This is the bloody truth, inconvenient or not.

What do you see? The irony is, viewpoints on environmentalism are as varied as opinions on works of art. The same issue, different opinions, each motivated by selfish agendas.