The influence of gaslight or electric light on the growth of paraheliotropic trees

Just watched a video of the news coverage when the second plane hit the World Trade Center. Evil exists, our enemies exist, they want to kill us, they want to make us afraid, but most of all, they want to defeat us.

And given that, it behooves us to ask, on this day, 14 years later, what is it about us that they want to defeat?

Who were we then, who are we now, who will we be tomorrow? And that last one — that’s the real question — what do they fear?

And they fear freedom. They fear loss of control. They fear that they’re own people will leave their systems of control and assimilate themselves to the West’s “godless secularism” which is just another name for radical existential freedom —

And our Radical Existential Freedom brings with it the good with the bad — it allows for #blacklivesmatter and it allows for the Confederate Flag-wavers, it allows for marriage equality and it allows for the murder of Matthew Shepherd —

In the Old World, men understood their essential limitations and accepted other men, older men, as authorities, as restraints, they built up institutions to either plug their ears or tie them to masts, they forged their own chains, fearing the chaos that freedom would bring —

But as the Church did not bring Heaven, and Kings did not bring Justice, Churches failed, and Kings lost their crowns, and Man became free —

What to do with this newfound freedom? Utopia or Holocaust or Both? In the adolescence of our orphanage, with God dead and nothing left but Radical Freedom, we raged and killed and invented new atrocities with every season —

And yet, in the Revolution’s Garden, some flowers took root, bound together, and growing bark and branch, rose up, to become a New Tree, with sheltering leaves and the scent of fruit on the wind that wound its way between wooded passages of ten thousand thousand limbs, and in cracks and crevices of this New Tree, creatures began to crawl and cry and flail and fly and stand and sing new songs, singing of the Tree, and the Storm that lay beyond it, and of themselves, too, trembling angels witnessing all, singing a new “Holy, Holy, Holy, All Thy Works are Holy–”

And one did this, and another that, choosing, taking on the responsibilities of maturity, their only law being that they care for everything, that they live their lives awake, mature, and act always with intention and forethought—

She wishes to be cared for, she says, and he wishes to be cared for, he shows, and he says, let us care for ourselves, and let us care for each other, and let us care for all who come to us, and let us care for all who never come to us, but live beyond the edges of our view, and let us proceed with our eyes open, looking at everything, caring, caring, caring, caring for everything