Thoughts on Casablanca, with palms:

This installation feels more romantic , I think because of the palm fronds silhouetted against the white circle, which could be taken for the full moon. The Judean Date Palm is extinct, but use to be very important to the existence of early civilizations in the Fertile Crescent which includes Jews, Muslims, and Christians. Recently a sealed jar was found at a Temple in Jerusalem that contained preserved Judean Date Palm seeds that have been dated as being 2,000 years old. One has been planted and is successfully growing at an agricultural center near there. Some view it as a miracle and say it is a symbol of the enduring nature of God’s Love for all mankind, but really its just science. The seed had simply been preserved in such a way that it was still viable, even twenty centuries later.

The magic and complexity of the natural world can have mystical implications, but there are also many explanations for natural events that are based on scientific investigation. The wonderful thing is that these explanations often present and describe a Universe that is incomprehensibly beautiful and grand and so far beyond the scope of human understanding that it is probable that all of it’s secrets will never be known; we will always be subservient to it’s vastness. In some ways discovering this fact can lead to a further sense of awe and wonder, and sometimes spirituality or found religion, but in this way, fully based on the reality of what is.
I’ve always thought that a good way to investigate your own spiritual beliefs is to learn about modern physics in the last 100 years with a focus on this century specifically. It can be the back door to the temple, so to speak, in that when you reach a basic understanding of the study of cosmology, which is the study of the origins and nature of our entire universe, it is very difficult to not begin thinking about the idea of a creator, because everything is so big, almost beyond measure, and fairly quickly you begin to think about infinities which naturally implies a higher power. Perhaps at this point you still choose to believe in a God, but your beliefs now involve an understanding that if there is a God, it is the God of the entire universe, not just of Humankind. Or now that you see the Universe aided by the knowledge you’ve gained through your study of New Physics and Cosmology, you will begin to see the world for what, in your terms, it really is. Either is a beautiful philosophy, because each is full of knowledge, truth, and curiousity.