Maybe there would be a market for “Comfort Pillows”? Big, comfy, huggable pillows that you can snuggle up with in the couch after having one of those days.

There might be a lot of different messages on the pillows themselves, depending on the situation, and depending on what particular dumb thing you or someone else might have done today.

• “God loves me anyway”
• “Well, I think I’m pretty”
• “I hope tomorrow will be better”
• “This could have been you, dummy”
• “Who cares about passwords, the sun is shining”

…any other? :)

I noticed some birds on the lawn to work a few days ago. The grass had just been mowed, and they were walking around, searching for bugs, worms or other forms of juicy food.

When I saw that, the thought struck me: They are hunters/gatherers.

The first step in society development was groups of people hunting together. The men might have gone out to hunt food, the women might have gathered berries, roots, herbs and other edible items. The ability of a certain location to sustain a given population was severely limited by the amount of food available. This was the situation for “barbaric tribes” in northern Europe during the classical period; and nomadic peoples still exhibit this behavior today – keeping a livestock, moving from place to place.

The next step in the evolution of civilizations was farming: no longer relying on hunting and gathering, people had learned to cultivate the land to produce crops. The entire Roman Empire was founded on farming; especially North Africa being the breadbasket of entire Rome and being the motor of the entire Roman economy.

The cultivation of land also meant that the sustainable population increased dramatically, because they were no longer limited to what nature had to offer, but had learned to sustain themselves through artificial means.

Of course, from there we have ongoing levels of sophistication: improved farming techniques (e.g. using oxen for plowing – which transformed the whole medieval agrarian society) and onwards through the enlightenment to industrialization and the present information age society in which we live today; a world capable of sustaining billions.

Birds have obviously not gotten that far yet. They are still in the hunting/gathering stage – one might even say they haven’t even gotten to hunting yet – and this is why they are so obviously limited in their population. As natural resources (insects, seeds etc) decrease, so does the bird population.

If only they were to discover farming! Sowing crops, harvesting, using granaries to store food, would multiply the sustainable bird population by several times, and result in a significant development of the avian civilization. (Using oxen for plowing might prove a difficulty though.)

It’s a pity, though, that they have such small brains. I think it would be very difficult to teach them the long-term benefits of agriculture.

Oh, and wings might be a problem… no opposing thumb.

I watched “The Lake House” today again, featuring Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves. What a great movie.

But I had already gone to bed, when I started thinking about what it might be like to actually meet her (Sandra) one day. And, well, of course, it doesn’t take much figuring before you’re dreaming up scenarios and how we’d be talking to each other and laugh… which of course would never happen, because in real life, she is probably just like any other real person and would just have gone on with her life, and I with mine. The end. That was fun.

So what’s so special with her anyway? Nothing, I guess, apart from all the ordinary uniqueness in her person and her individuality, which in that respect makes her completely just like everyone else.

In fact, perhaps, sometimes, we’re so attuned to this great ideal, this Hollywood image of a person, that we forget that there are many, many others, just as unique and individual as her. What about all the Lillemors and Kerstins and retired Göstas down the street? Might they not be just as interesting? Might they not, if one looked into their particular lives, have interesting stories to tell, and be people worth knowing? Perhaps we’re so used to dealing with people as unnamed entities (“customers”, “clients”, “patients”) that we forget to see the unique individual behind.

There was a website once – I can’t find it now – called one billion people, or a million voices or something like that. It consisted of videotaped people, each talking about feelings, hopes, love, truth, pain; and all of them with their own particular stories to tell. I liked to browse through them very much, just to see what people had experienced and wanted to share.

Or am I perhaps wrong? Sometimes – especially when spending a lot of time reading blogs – I feel like the world consists of millions and millions of parrots, each echoing what the other one said. Maybe there is a point to my cynical feelings. If everyone is unique, how unique is that?

I don’t know. Perhaps I’m just rambling. But there is something to it, still: That sudden gleam of interest, that desire, in getting to know people and realizing that there is something special inside every one of us – not just our political views (Oh God how boring) but the way we feel about things, lessons we’ve learned in life. It’s a thought I am not too willing to let go of.

In any case, I certainly won’t pin any dreams on meeting a particular movie star or otherwise famous person; it might be just as worthwhile to meet the next person down the street in a slightly new way.

And now… back to bed.

It’s a quarter to 11pm on Sunday evening, and I’m reading the Wikipedia article on Latin verb conjugation.

I need a life.

PSALM 8
(For the director of music. According to gittith. A psalm of David.)

O LORD, our Lord,
how majestic is your name in all the earth!
You have set your glory
above the heavens.

An acknowledgement of the grandeur and splendor which is God’s – how great and mighty he is; and how enormous the greatness of his glory which spans over the entire earth and above the very heavens themselves.

From the lips of children and infants
you have ordained praise
because of your enemies,
to silence the foe and the avenger.

The contradictions inherent in God is a great mystery; that from which is weakest comes the greatest source of strength: Praise, praise to God for his creation, silencing even the foe and avenger. The praise unto God that flows even out of the mouths of children and infants, holds a power sufficient to overcome all opposition, proving once and for all how needless to walk in our own strength, when we have such an abundant source of strength from God so readily available.

And, ultimately, the purpose it serves is to bow us human beings down, to accept our place in creation, by giving praise to him who created it all. That he may be exalted, and we humbled before him.

When I consider your heavens,
the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars,
which you have set in place,
what is man that you are mindful of him,
the son of man that you care for him?

David must have sat, like Abraham, and watched the starry skies at night, beholding the greatness of the universe and the enormity of his creation. And yet, they probably didn’t understand just how vast it was… that beyond this little world where they sat, there were enormous expanses of void; the first of which was crossed only in 1969 as man landed on the isolated rock called “the Moon” for the first time.

And beyond that, planets strewn over this vast expanse; and beyond that, one hundred thousand years of distance as the very light itself travels, with a hundred million stars in a great, enormous disc of light in what we call our galaxy… and beyond that, billions and billions of galaxies in enormous galaxy clusters with distances too far for the human intellect to comprehend; groups of galaxies making up the landscape of the universe itself, with vast, vast expanses glittering like precious gems on the beaches of the endless sea.

What is man that God should be mindful of him? A little coal-based human being, living on a rather insignificant planet, near a rather insignificant star, towads the outer end of one of the spiral arms of a galaxy among billions of others?

You made him a little lower than the heavenly beings
and crowned him with glory and honor.

And yet these little coal-based life forms, created from dust and earth, has been put among the ranks of angels and heavenly beings, with a glory bestowed on us far, far above and beyond what we deserve.

You made him ruler over the works of your hands;
you put everything under his feet:
all flocks and herds,
and the beasts of the field,
the birds of the air,
and the fish of the sea,
all that swim the paths of the seas.

Not only so, but man has been ordained ruler of the earth, and put in a place of responsibility for the entire planet and everything that lives upon it. All the animals, the flocks and herds, the environment, the whole planet itself, is subject to the rule of us.

How difficult to rule even over a few individuals at work! Being manager over others is not an easy job, and not to be underestimated. How, then, to rule the entire earth?

And what an appalling job we have done so far. Only now, after centuries and millennias of mismanagement, is it becoming apparent what we have done to our world. Pollution, environmental disasters, mindless manipulation of the genetic code of our world in order to score a few more dollars, have burdened the planet to the point where it is becoming readily understood that from now on, most careful management is required to keep things going. And how much we little coal-based individuals need the wisdom of God to do this job!

Ultimately, this must be the lesson learned: That without the wisdom of God, we cannot manage our planet: By the time we fully understand the consequences of our actions and find measures to remedy those, it may be too late. We, too, must find our proper place in the scheme of things and subject ourselves to the rule of the one who created Everything. Only then can we become just and wise managers of our planet.

O LORD, our Lord,
how majestic is your name in all the earth!

This, then, is the springing point. Will humanity acknowledge God and his majesty, or deny it? Thereupon hangs the very future of our existence. To bow down to his majesty, assuming our rightful place in the world, or to boldly march into oblivion?

I guess it’s time for us to decide.