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One

"I am THIS because I am NOT that."

Someone once said that if you could wave a magic wand and instantly cause all the human beings on earth to be identical in every way — physically, culturally, intellectually, financially — the first thing they'd do is start looking for reasons to discriminate against each other. That is, they would start looking for differences.

If you travel far enough away from the earth and turn around and look back, all you see is a blue-green ball with swirling clouds covering part of it. You don't see any geopolitical boundaries. Crawling around on the earth's surface, and springing from its soil, are all manner of living creatures (there are, for instance, 900,000 species of insects; 750 species of sharks; 1,000 species of scorpions). Those living creatures are interconnected, and are intimately plugged into the one ecosystem (they are, in fact, components of the ecosystem, since they eat, and are eaten, and when they die, they often nourish other creatures with their dead bodies ... one could say that death is not the end, either physically or spiritually).

It reminds one of a living cell. It contains Golgi bodies, mitochondria, and other organelles ... but it's really a single unit. If you asked the cell what it is, it wouldn't say, "I'm a collection of pieces, all of us living inside this one cell membrane. Let me make you a list of the components." No, it would say, "I'm a cell. A single cell."

Nature has evolved us animals into competitive creatures. Watch what happens when the neighbor's cat invades your cat's yard! Watch how the birds behave at your bird feeder, fighting and pecking each other. Notice how careful we humans are about locking our doors at night; we are as territorial as any other animal.

And yet ... the things that make us the same are much more important than the things that make us different. This planet has had approximately 50 ice ages. The next time we have one (if it's any time soon), most of us will die, plants, animals, rats, and little birds as well ... because we are all of us clinging desperately to this planet and its delicately-balanced ecosystem. It is made for us. It IS us.

Some facts about planet earth:

1. It weighs 5,976,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kilograms, or 12,500,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 tons.

2. Its circumference at the equator is 24,901.5 miles. Its diameter is 7,927 miles.

3. Its orbit is elliptical. Its average distance from the sun is 92,900,000 miles. The distance that the earth travels in one year - a complete orbit around the sun - is 583,707,422 miles. The speed at which it orbits the sun is 66,633 mph. You and everything around you is traveling at that speed right now, give or take 1,037 mph (see item 4) depending on how far you are from the equator.

4. The speed of the earth's rotation is 1,037 mph. It is tilted 23 degrees on its axis, which gives us our four seasons.

5. It has only one moon, which is 234,000 miles away. The moon is moving 1.5" farther away from the earth each year, which means that since the day I was born, the moon has moved farther away from the earth by a total distance that is approximately equal to my own height. It wasn't my fault.

Pertaining to the Craft	Tarot	Death	True Stories	On a Personal Note
My Favorite Court Cases	Completely Irrelevant	Little Dissertations	Christians and Christianity	Pendragon's Top 1000

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