Last week, we had the chance to visit one of my favorite spots in Ireland; the stone circle at Grange and the nearby Lough Gur settlement.
For those of you unfamiliar with the area, Lough Gur was archaeologically surveyed and found to have evidence of settlement for 6,000 years. And the stone circle itself is now 4,100 years old and the entrance to it along with two other partial circles in neighboring fields forms a perfect isosceles triangle.
The circle is 50 yards in diameter and as such is the largest circle known in Europe.
So, the feeling is not just that you are standing in a pretty place but that you have entered a place in time … a place of reverence, with connection to the deities and the stars.
I have added a few images from this visit at the end of the blog. Hope you enjoy.
Whenever I visit Ireland, I like to go visit. It is a very simple and uncommercialized spot and there in the natural surrounds it is very easy to let your mind drift back in time as you think of those that have been there before you and the life and times that played out there over the years.
It can be a very humbling exercise and one that makes you come to grips with your own insignificance and brevity of life.
And that is how the thought for today’s blog evolved in my head. How we can become so consumed with our own importance and self-worth, that we fail to see the bigger picture.
My lifetime, whenever it comes to an end, will be merely the smallest speck in the timeline of the world I live in. Unless I do something catastrophic that causes the earth to collide with the moon, my own existence will be completely lost as the world continues to turn.
To people that think the world revolves around them, that is a very difficult notion to accept and I pity them for their lack of understanding. No individual is important beyond a momentary spark of interest in the timeline of human existence.
And the entire human existence itself is only a speck in the timeline of this planet; barely noticeable as you examine the length of time this planet has existed. You see, humans have been on this planet for approximately 300,000 years and the planet itself has been here 4,500,000,000 years.
Yet there are some that think humanity is god’s gift to the planet and that they are god’s gift to humanity.
There is no coffee for these people to wake up and smell; there is only the stench of their pathetic selves to greet them and so they stay asleep in their miserable dream.
Humans created their gods to explain certain things their little brains could not understand and then used their own creation to inflate their own importance. They believe humans were created in gods image, so they see their deity as this elderly Caucasian with a long flowing beard living somewhere up in the clouds and smiling down on his wondrous creation.
If you want to believe in a god, then go for it. Whatever crutch you need to feel some degree of self-worth is fine with me. But when your creation allows you to justify certain behaviors based on your own highest ranking in creation … that’s where I have the problem.
You see, the notion that we humans are more important than all other creatures allows certain among us to mistreat, abuse, slaughter, and eradicate many of the other creatures that evolved on this same planet.
I have seen the callousness and those that perform it are small people; small minded, low intelligence, self-serving, scum.
Our race has a lot of wonderful people in it. People that are intelligent, humble, appreciative, aware. But there are others who think so highly of themselves that they willingly place themselves and their wants ahead of the very planet that gives them life.
Yet there was a moment, back in the day, before these books were written that humans coexisted with other creatures without grandiose ideologies that led to abuse.
Sometimes these creatures ate us and sometimes we ate them. Birds eat worms and one day worms eats birds. Such is the way of life.
The moment when we started building caskets and tombs to protect our decaying bodies after death, is the first real moment when humans decided that they were not part of the circle of life … but above it.
But like most of the things we pat ourselves on the back for; it is a false position.
We exist until we don’t. It’s a simple concept and one that scares only the feeble minded.
… just a thought.
