One
advantage of being an elder and mostly retired is you have time for
reading. Add a pandemic to it and there is a lot of time for reading. I
realized the other day that I was going back and forth between six
different books. That's never happened to me before! My usual habit is
to read one at a time to the conclusion. Now, I read till the mood
strikes me to move on to another. Fiction is always for just-before-
bed, to escape the non-fiction and incredibly bad news of the day. With
fiction on my mind, sleep might actually happen.

Winner
of the Pulitzer Prize, this book is an example of well researched
writing on an important subject with readable prose. Kolbert travels to
several sites around the globe to share her experiences with threatened
and extinct species, all the while making us reflect on time, and on
human origins and destiny.
A second book that made me reflect on similar issues was The Great Unknown
by Peg Kingman. A novel, with an archaeologist as a main character, one
is confronted with questions about times past but also with questions
about timing; period! Why do things happen the way they do; is it really
just coincidence, or good fortune, or destiny?
The
novel made me reflect on our culture; the busyness to the point of
exhaustion; the myopic orientation toward the future; the rampant
materialism; the orientation toward doing big and important things; and
the unexpected tragedies, like the great depression or a pandemic or
climate catastrophe. How do we understand causality, or pure luck, or
acts of God?

Elizabeth
Colbert tells us something about our ancestors. Apparently, many of us
have 1-4% Neanderthal DNA, some thirty thousand years after Neanderthals
roamed the earth. Maybe they are whispering "climb higher" in our
genetic make-up?
The
other two books making me ponder the past have more of a pronounced
religious orientation. Matthew Fox believes there is one religious river
that feeds many wells. His book of that title, One River, Many Wells,
is a study in religious ecumenism. Looking at all of the major
religious faiths, he quotes readily from their sacred texts and stories
on a series of subjects, including creation. One begins to see in this
volume the common historical themes that serve as the foundation for all
of the various traditions.
When God Was a Woman
has been on my shelf for several years. A pandemic can free some books
from their dusty cell. This 1976 title reminds us that there was an
ancient time when the feminine was not alien to divinity and gives us
some insight into what happened to that understanding.

Family
members recently sent pictures of them climbing in the White Mountains.
I was reminded that when climbing in those mountains in my younger
years, I always felt "grounded." Those mountains were likely created
some 100 million years ago. There is something about connecting to the
ancient, in person or in literature, that not only humbles, but grounds
us as well.
Try it! Touch something from 100 million years ago, if only a piece of literature, that grounds you in time.
Carl Kline
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