So I’m sitting at the poker table last night trying patiently to recoup some early losses. When I tire of the semi-drunken banter I fit earbuds in and listen to some Stan Getz and Chet Baker from Quintessence, or the Tomasz Stanko Quartet from Lontano. I sprinkle in a side of Essential Mozart and Erik Satie’s Gymnopedies, but all the while the cards are cold and I’m musing abstractedly on the uncountable, myriad, braided but ever flowing streams of Life.

Last post I wrote of us being mere ‘cells in the greater civic organism.’ I could have said ‘cells in a greater social organism’ or ‘cells in a greater cultural organism,’ but chose ‘civic’ instead.

All Life has duration, an allotted span. Individuals–whether plant or animal–are born, grow, mature, perhaps reproduce (at least enough do so the species survives), age, and pass on. The stream flows on down through the generations.

To me, ‘social’, ‘cultural’, and ‘civic’ are like the youth, maturity, and old age of another type of organism, a sort of super-organism containing the great collective stream flows of innumerable numbers of humans.

There are 7 billion of us now, and we’ve become so dominant that we have succeeded in marginalizing a large number of other stream flow species, again whether plant or animal.

Yesterday my wife, son, and I went for a morning walk. The photo of our Calgary city skyline was taken from an old bridge spanning a branch of the Bow River not far from where we live. Further along on our walk I pulled out the camera again and took photos of some of the other stream flow species we humans in our cities have impacted in our career.

A nice way to end this post, which has gone on, just like the poker last night.

Life is ALL…. ya whatever….