Tag Archives: DNA

The Road to Diamond, Day 234: Identity

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Posted by on in Assistance, collaborating, Community, Entertainment, Inspiration, Matters of Faith, Personal Values, Service Activities, Social, Spiritual, Striving

July 20,2025- This evening, I spent a few hours watching all I cared to, of the 2010s series Blindspot. It begins with a woman who has been injected with drugs that lead to her total amnesia. Of course, nothing of the sort lasts forever, and through snippets of triggered memory, helped in part by her having been tattooed in specific manners, over her body, she is soon faced with two DNA paths, as to her real identity.

I may get back to the series at some point, but this week will be focused on three aspects of my own identity: Red Cross documentation, study of Baha’i guidance, and a friend’s need for transportation. Today was just focused on the leisure aspect of who I am. Breakfast with friends, exercise at Planet Fitness and light reading, followed by crossword puzzles and the aforementioned program.

I have a much firmer grasp of my identity and purpose now, than I did in certain parts of years past. There has never been any doubt as to my family, or the love of my late wife. Any gaps in understanding have more or less began and ended with my own being at peace with self. There are things that seem to have been kept from me, by extended family who have gone on-but none of that has any bearing on who I am now, so bygones are bygones. I’ve elaborated in other posts about the various parts of my life, and the people who are important in those elements. What matters most now is what I am going to do with those parts, as I approach the next quarter century, or whatever part of it I may be given.

There is no amnesia, or conflicting paths, as to who I am or what I represent. That’s what matters most.

The Summer of the Rising Tides, Day 59: The Ties that Bind

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Posted by on in collaborating, Community, impediments, Inner Struggles, Inspiration, Personal Values, Social, Spiritual, Striving

July 29, 2020-

It is easier to mend connections with people through acts of integrity, than by insisting on that which injures their feelings and ignores their perceptions. So it has come to my banishing memes and shared posts, which have only served to confuse some of my online friends, while not exactly elucidating my own views.

A personal blog, or social media page, can’t really serve as a marketplace for ideas. That role is for the comments section, which is hopefully governed by rules of civil discourse. I have set such rules for my other social media site, and, only on two instances have I had to delete toxic comments which got past the Akismet filters on this site.

My focus is, more than ever, on fostering the ties that bind us. One commenter on my other site recommended that we all view differences as diversity, rather than as divisions. Seeing nuggets of commonality takes a great deal of self-discipline and patience, not often evident in times of widespread confusion, such as these. Yet, it remains that this sort of vision is the only way we can, as a species, get out of this confusion.

Our strands of Dioxyribonucleic Acid are the most basic tools we have, for keeping us tied. Let us look to those DNA features that are common, that lead to our shared esperiences and visions.

The Road to 65, Mile 59: Heaven Sent

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Posted by on in Hiking and Nature

January 26, 2015, Prescott- An asteroid, replete with its own tiny moon, zipped past us today.  As our area was overcast, no one here would have been the wiser, had it not been for the media making several references.  Apparently, Russia, Australia and the midmost Pacific Ocean were all spared, as was the rest of the planet.  God knows, we need no more extinctions or disasters, given that there are plenty of both happening, almost on a daily basis.

The last five Northern White Rhinoceros are being prepped for DNA extractions, in hopes that a female Southern White Rhino might be a surrogate mother of an IVF Northern White Rhino baby, or two.  In order for the population to be restored, however, one would imagine the process would have to be repeated at least four more times. I mention this, because we tend to think of life as being subject to human whim.

This is a peculiar narcissism.  Life happened so long before any creature resembling us was more than a part of the Creative Force’s long-range plan.  We have the power to undo so much, though, that I shudder at the tendency of some to look at profit as the sole determinant of who, or what, lives and dies.  Mass extinction, though, would seem to require far more.

It could be that someday the  planet will be visited by an orb large enough to bring about a “night” of three to six months.  There will, no doubt, be human and animal survivors of such a dreadful occasion, just as there were animals which thrived, even after the asteroid which most likely precipitated the demise of the dinosaurs, as the fossil record revealed them to be.

Through it all, I hope that people will look upwards, at the noonday Sun and at the bright moon and stars of night, and remember that, as life was generated, seemingly from nothing, so many eons ago, any acts of ours which extinguish one living flame will be answered by a new torch of life.