This past weekend JP, Ruby and I visited a goat farm forty miles from Redstone, over McClure Pass, in a town called Crawford, just past Paonia. This region is second only to California in producing organic goods, as the farm manageress informed us.

On this warm, early spring day we saw young goats, kids, one and two days old, and over forty pregnant does, all due within days of one another. In the barn closest to the main house, Ruby played with two billy kids, one white, the other white with black hair along its spine. They had both been rejected by their mother and must be bottle-fed. No one seemed to know for sure why they had been rejected; they didn’t appear sick. And although many of these domesticated animals are routinely taken from their mothers immediately, this particular farm allows the does to bond with their kids at birth, as illustrated by another doe nursing her two girls in a barn just 100 feet away. Of course, this rejection reminded me of myself as a mother, how I rejected my own child too, because she was sick. I was comforted by this common act in nature, when a mother rejects a sick or weak child as soon as it’s born or, for many species, once a human has touched her offspring. I am not alone in the animal kingdom; my maternal instincts are biological.

I know how I relate to this phenomenon may change over time, but I will most likely collect information that supports my decision to survive. As I recently heard in a later Woody Allen film when two characters are discussing their pending act of murder: once done, one can never go back. It is a crossing over a line, and the only choice we have really is to progress, or let our conscience destroy us.

A Frame of Reference is defined when you pick some point to be the origin of your measurements; all measurements are relative to that origin which each of us gets to choose at our fancy or convenience. In three-dimensional space there are three coordinates (numbers) required to tell where a point is. Pick a corner and measure in paces. In physics we also have to answer the question when, because things change as time goes on; so we have clocks and calendars. For the purposes of science we can also pick an origin for time; beginning now (the origin) something happening 20 seconds from now has a time coordinate of +20 seconds, something that happened a minute ago has a time coordinate of -60 seconds. Time is measured relative to some arbitrary origin which each of us gets to choose at our fancy or convenience.

Last Friday, George, Mirte and I met for breakfast in Carbondale at the Village Smithy. George ordered the wild mushroom enchiladas first and then Mirte and I followed with the same order. It was a most pleasant and easy-going two-hour meal together. George sported his newly acquired white/gray beard that he had habitually shaved in the past in order to remain consistent across all frontiers and friends. But now as the elder he says he no longer has any authority, as should be. He only has authorship.

We discussed People’s Press, how George is keeping it afloat and Eddie Anderson employed, distributing books to new venues, including gas stations. The abridged agenda: People’s Press guides (currently George and Mirte, as I have moved away from the administration) work with the author who pays for all design and printing costs, while People’s Press simply acts as a consultant throughout the process. Our exposure is severely limited, but so then is our profit, if any. I am focused solely on George’s website and our book: “Phlogs: Into the Heart of the Human Predicament” which is in its last design phase. It is a beautiful presentation, and could be George’s platform for a starring role in the art world.

Even if George tells us he is most pessimistic about the future, he continues to push, push, push. Like with the Aspen Science Center summit this May that he and Executive Director Kevin Ward are organizing: fifteen or twenty leaders in the field of energy innovation and environmental conservation will convene and debate privately and off-record (no cameras, audio, or media included) the critical parameters for success, or rather, for our survival. The Secretary of Energy, Nobel Prize winner Steven Chu, is invited and expected to attend. The desired outcome is for real solutions to be published and implemented by the Obama administration. If this is how a pessimist works, may we all be pessimists then. I just don’t believe George is a doom and gloom person; there are numerous silver linings in his clouds. Yes, the world will never be the same, but that is a good thing folks. We don’t have time or room for pessimism, even if you call yourself realists, reality presumes there is predictability.

Science developed slowly, depending on observation and measurement. It took the development of glass to make lenses for microscopes and telescopes. It took paper and ink to write things down, it took sailing ships to see what else there was, and so on. Now observation alone is not science in the sense of a common and communicated knowledge, something beyond a personal knowledge. I can observe a dissected frog, an occultation of one of Jupiter’s moons, or tree rings and come to conclusions for myself, but that is not science until others have made the same observations and come to the same conclusions. Science is repeatable observations with repeatable conclusions, where repeatable observations means that I can repeat the observation with the same result every time, or other people can repeat the observation with the same result that I found. A repeatable conclusion implies a measurement of some kind and some accuracy. I observed something and made a measurement of 6.1 +/- .2 somethings and you repeated the observation and made a measurement of 6.3 +/- .1 somethings; we agree on the conclusion.

I finally realized what George and I most have in common: we were both raised by a distant mother. Although his mother was an active participant in life outside of the home as my mother was not, they both kept removed from the emotional life at home. George hoped for his mother’s attention, however, by acting up; I hoped for my mother’s attention by staying low. He caused waves, while I stayed on the sand. His brothers and sisters moved in their own circles, no one assumed the mother role, while I robed myself in maternal clothes as soon as my first sister, less than three years my junior, was born. We both were largely left with making parenthood up as we went along; he admitted he “overdid it,” especially with the first five kids. With Ben he had more time, not always reaching for academic accolades, and he had Patti.

A convenient frame of reference for a particular purpose might be moving with respect to another frame of reference.

Last Wednesday, February 25, when I stopped by George and Patti’s home with Ruby in tow to pick up some materials, I had been feeling a panic attack coming on for days. I felt disoriented, the left side of my chest and arm tense, my fear of a heart attack only exacerbating the anxiety. I drank from a glass of water aware of every gulp, and rested at their dining room table while Patti led Ruby (more like Ruby led Patti) around the house, up and down both stairwells. George continued talking to me about the education book he is writing, even when Patti warned him to let me just be. She showed Ruby the cat that was hiding under her bed, and presented her with gummy bear candies, a red heart-decorated tin, and a stuffed panda bear. She let me know I could stay and sit for as long as I needed, but at the same time allowed me my space, while George talked on, my comprehending little but trying to appear engaged.

Toss something while standing and while walking: For my purposes a frame of reference with origin at my belt buckle and moving with me makes sense and I see the thing going up and down. For you all, sitting down, a frame of reference fixed to someplace in the room, your chair say, makes sense and you see the thing going up and down but also across the room, actually tracing a perfect parabola. Both of these are inertial frames of reference.

Because George now lives so much closer to me, I have casually stopped by his home about once every week or two, and so have had more interactions with Patti. She most certainly exudes the warmth and wisdom one hopes for from a mother; she is soft and sturdy, and is as vital to a home as a pillow to a bed.

An inertial frame of reference is one in which Newton’s law of inertial holds true; “Every body persists in its state of rest or of uniform motion in a straight line unless it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed on it.”

I’m not sure how long I stayed for then, less than hour I think, but the day was easier after that, and much easier the next day. I didn’t tell them about the abortion, a moment never offered itself to, but I think that having publicized my trauma on the website caused some of the panic, and then I think about all that George is publicizing about himself through this website and books, and how he commented then that he had never had a panic attack before (although Patti experienced one years ago, once when taking Ben when he was small to the movies on the East Coast), and that even though George eschews reading my essays in a way to detach himself from their revelations, he is still not as scared about it as he may believe he is. Or maybe we just haven’t gotten to the really good stuff yet, the stuff that many pray to take to the grave with them?

We are both in inertial reference frames, and there is in both frames the force of gravity. Regardless of which frame of reference we choose this thing is following the laws of physics; therefore the laws of physics must be able to describe things from different frames of reference and there must a system to translate the description from one to another. That is what relativity is all about?the laws of physics must explain the same physical phenomena no matter which frame of reference we relate our measurements to.

So, George, are you a scientist or an artist? Can you be both at the same time, like Leonardo da Vinci; can you believe in God and Science simultaneously? If yes, I suppose you can be a pessimist and an optimist simultaneously; complex, as previously noted (reference chapter entitled: “The Trail of Complexity“).

The relationship to chaos comes when, for some reason, now largely understood, some essential component of a many body system can be described by a greatly reduced number of variables, say two.

So then can I be a mother – defined as “something or someone that gives rise to or exercises protecting care over something else” – by giving life and also by taking it away?

A single mammal, such as ourselves, is a complex system, many diverse parts in integrated interaction. Our society exhibits complexity, many diverse individuals in interaction. Complexity is a characteristic of life and of evolution…There are those that suggest that our own lives are examples of a very large number of fairly large molecules functioning in that domain of parameters that allows complexity to emerge.

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