March mulling

Early in the morning, walking the dog in the mountains one sees young roe deer below in the misty valley gliding gracefully back to the forests after their dawn grazing. It's still quite cold up here at 1200 metres, but it's beautiful.
The mind wanders as it often does when contemplating this scenery. Edenic gardens, the almond and wild cherry trees already in blossom, the plots of terraced land prepared with love and care for the spring planting, are they not modest epitomes of Paradise?

Then we think of the lost souls who allow themselves to be conditioned into thinking that they will be rewarded with paradise for contributing in trying to destroy it.

How can one begin to understand such hopeless mental regression? And this since two world wars from which humanity should have learnt enough to appreciate positive values more than ever, certainly that of life itself.

Is civilisation subject to cycles of barbaric tyranny, when the depressed and deluded amongst younger generations seem to close their minds to all knowledge of value? Those who have no hope for the future, no experience of the past, and are easily manipulated into believing that only by trying to destroy the freedom of others, democratic civilisation that took centuries to establish, will they find a reason of being, and even be rewarded for their evil actions with immortal pleasure?

One would have to be just as brainless as desperately hopeless, to be so persuaded. The paradox is so evident that it is horribly grotesque. Any individual who promises immortal pleasure can only be a henchman of the devil, certainly if immortal pleasure is the promised reward for perpetrating evil.
Pleasure cannot be immortal. A Garden of Eden is cultivated with love and care. Fruit trees are planted, they grow leaves, blossom and then bear fruit. Eventually they die. Life and death is essential to truth and everything that is beautiful. Immortality is a spiritual notion, but naturally it cannot exist, not even as a sterile desert, or dust of forgotten memories. Nothing is eternal, apart from love, which also determines art, and is conserved by art in all its forms for as long as it is allowed to exist. 

Therefore if Paradise depends on the joys of life itself, we live our paradise. It is a sacred loan. It is what we make it whilst we benefit from the ephemeral gift of life.
This gift that is so depreciated and disdained by the poor lost souls who have rejected every vestige of love and hope from their hearts only to substitute it with hate and intolerance. There is no almighty creator for those who preach hate and intolerance, and advocate indiscriminate murder and destruction. Only death, ruins, dust and forgotten memories.

If, from lack of experience or memory, we allow history to constantly repeat itself, or we never learn from it, or we delude ourselves into thinking that humanity got it wrong the first time and we need to rub everything out in order to start all over again to finally get it right, we negate history and all of man's greatest achievements. We negate ourselves. We dismiss the essential roots of humanity and religion. We destroy that beautiful old tree of civilisation, the many branches of which try to reach the heavens their own separate ways. This negation is atrociously emphasised by the suicide and blind mass murders that these rabid, lost souls commit. And ironically those who form and foster such monsters, are eventually bound to fall victim to them as well.

Despondent thoughts as we stroll in the mountains. The dog glances up at me with sad eyes as though he's commiserating. I pull my coat lapels up to ward off the chill breeze, then gaze up at 
the sky. The skies are always magnificent here. They make one smile, feel more confident, and small. 

Text and images © Mirino. March, 2016