Theodore Roethke’s “The Far Field” has long been a favorite of mine. As with others of his nature poems, he combines clear detail with notes of transcendence. I may never feel at one with any of the creatures or scenes that he does, but I can’t help longing for something beyond the surface of nature and everyday life, yearning for those moments when “finite things reveal infinitude”. Traditional religion is stale and often bigoted and ignorant. Its modern manifestations have degraded into feel good self-help sessions or, even worse, fundamentalist idiocy.

Each of us is left to learn and discover on our own. That is our life and our own far field where we learn of eternity. Hence the name of this blog: it is my own attempts to write down and pass on from what I have learned in the “far field.”

Learning is a good thing, but at some point it becomes a pointless taking into oneself unless it is balanced by giving back in whatever way you can some fruits of one’s experience. This blog is one way I hope to give back.

To those rare readers who come upon my posts, do not expect new ones frequently. A few in a month will be a prodigious output. I expect most of my writing will be on science (especially climate science and evolution), and politics (there is always someone handy to skewer there), but of course I can write on whatever I want.

If my post is about the writings of another person, I will often be examining how that person constructed the argument. With politicians and other political writers, just looking at the rhetoric is enough to show how sincere or deceptive the writer is, without needing to double-check every claim the writer made.