Some Very Cool Flutes

I'm taking a light-hearted break from "The God Thing" to delight in the story in yesterday's news about the very very old flutes found in a cave in Germany, not far from where the carved female figurine (whose discovery was announced about a month ago) was also found. The flutes, made from bird bones and ivory, are almost as old as the "Venus" figurine--at least 35,000 years.

Maybe this post isn't an absolute break from "The God Thing" since the Venus figurine may well represent a very early "God image" of sorts, mostly likely used in long ago rituals of some kind. Perhaps flute music was part of the rituals, whatever they may have been.

What I love about these discoveries is the tangible evidence, reaching farther and farther back in time, of human creativity and artistic expression. They are reminders to me of just how essential and fundamental such activities are for us as a species. They inspire me to marvel and to wonder, and to count my own creative endeavors as part of this ancient human lineage.

Art and music are not luxuries reserved for times of plenty and the leisure life. They are, quite simply, deeply human endeavors. When we ignore them (or cut them from our schools and from our lives), we do so at our peril. What suffers is our humanity (and probably other species too).

One could certainly argue that these discoveries also underscore the antiquity of "ritual" and of "the religious impulse" of us human beings. I won't quibble with that.

But I would note that an inclination toward ritual and "religion" (I almost hesitate to use that word, since it connotes for us big entities, like the world religions we know best today) is not necessarily the same thing as a "theological impulse".

It is quite possible to have meaningful, even transcendent, ritual and art and music without "God" (by whatever name or designation).

Two Cool Things

I get the New York Times' daily headlines via email each morning. I am not exactly consistent in my reading habits, but I usually at least glance at the headlines and the short summary sentence beneath those that interest me and peruse the topics of the op-eds and editorials. Sometimes I don't get that far.

One of my favorite features of the Times on line is the list of the top ten favorite articles and editorials that appears when you click through to read an article. The list is neatly arranged by categories: "emailed, blogged, searched." I usually look down the list of favorite emailed stories, and sometimes one story leads to another, and . . . well, you know how the internet is. What I like most about this is that it gives me a chance to catch a great story I might have missed because I was too busy, or because it was in a section of the paper I don't usually read.

This morning, for instance, I found two cool stories! One, from yesterday's paper, about the recent discovery in Germany of a "new" Venus figure sculpture that's about 35,000 years old (that's 11,ooo years older than the famous "Venus of Willdorf" figure). So . . . such sculptures of large breasted and large buttocked, (presumably) fertile women go back even earlier than thought. This new figure is only about 2.5 inches tall--good for holding in your hand!

The other story that really intrigued me was about a new movement (also in Germany, how funny!) to create car-free suburbs. Just imagine--no driveways and garages! A few, very few co-owned or rented cars for exceptional trips. Plenty of places to walk and play outside, and no worries about balls running under passing cars and kids following after. Things within walking distance. Public transportation. Lots and lots of bikes. Basically a whole new meaning to the word "suburb"! 

My world got bigger, more intriguing, and more hopeful in a fairly short amount of time. Of perhaps I should say with a bit of Times.