OGT DAILY Day One Hundred and Seventy Five TURTLES

Statue at Glynwood House, Cold Spring, NY

Tonight I was going to write about turtles and I saved notes in my phone for later so I wouldn't forget.

40 diamondback turtles showed up on the airfield of JFK airport today delaying flights.   It's their annual migration.  A way to keep the species going.  

I was trying to add this note to my phone as I drove up to Glynwood House in Cold Spring, NY for a workshop on Coherent Breathing and QiGong with meditation teacher Ron Hershey.   He teaches a method developed by Dr. Richard Brown of Columbia University and Steven Elliot.   A spoke the note into my phone because I was driving and it so too coincidental with the story I had just heard on NPR's RadioLab about the extinct Pinta Island tortoises in the Galapagos Islands.   Just now when I went to read my notes I found it said,"Turtles and Eva Lucien."    I have no recollection of writing that name, but perhaps autocorrect was at work, or perhaps something else was at work.  When I Googled this phrase just now I found the Youtube of a compelling young woman "Queen of Nonchalance" who appears to have disappeared in the mid-eighties at a time when I would have been only 6 or 7 years older than her.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5deA9GqYJ0s

There is apparently a documentary or pseudo documentary called "The Institute" about the fake Jejuene Institute in San Francisco inspired in part by Eva and her lifestyle and art pranks.  It has a Facebook page.  The mystery deepens.  A turtle-like cipher with no apparent connection to turtles.  Yet they have lead me to her.
http://johneverettmorton.com/2014/08/good-stuff-spencer-mccalls-the-institute/

The point of this blogpost is to speak about survival and it seems that Eva Blair Lucien did not survive in this world and yet here she appears again in my writing so perhaps she has - who knows?   The theme of turtles was reinforced for me when I explored the estate where this workshop was held and found the sculpture of a young child capturing two turtles with pure delight (see above.)  Turtles according to Ronnberg and Martin in The Book of Symbols are as ancient as the world and they encompass the cosmos in their "antiquity, solidity, continuity, and wisdom," while their, "domelike upper and flattened lower shell," depict it well.   The word tortoise is derived from the Latin Tarturus for underworld speaking to their ability for going inward and downward into the unconscious.  In Hindu myth the world rests on the turtle's back - chthonic creator and preserver of life.  The hardened shell and withdrawal can evoke sinister images of entrapment and limiting of growth and creativity, but also meditative states, protection.   The female tortoise especially is a associated with fertility as she must leave the sea to lay her eggs in the sand.

On RadioLab today they described the pathos of the last remaining Pinta Island tortoise Lonesome George who died at 100 years before he could be bred to continue his line.  

Scientists then despaired of reviving this extinct species only to realize that there was a good deal of Pinta Island DNA in the tortoises of the surrounding islands and by selective breeding they could over the course of 4 generations produce an almost pure line of Pinta Island turtles again.  The question then remained: should we as humans try to recreate a past where man and time have not influenced the course of evolution by implementing a planned breeding program?   Or should we allow the natural course of 200,000 years of mating and evolution to develop and new breed of Pinta turtle?  It is as they say "above my pay grade" to have answers or even opinions about this, but it makes me err on the side of natural evolution.  If humans can return to being somewhat reasonable stewards of the earth we may see incredible adaptations we could never have imagined.  The Galapogos finches for instance have been decimated by botfly larvae which have been killing their chicks and small vs large finches would previously have never interbreed.  Now, however, they are finding that the finches are interbreeding as some species are on the brink of extinction.  The newer stronger birds are eating the offending larvae and creating chicks which are more able to withstand the attacks.   That has occurred in just a few generations - evolutionary change observed.

 Who are we to know what changes are in store and what nature is capable of for the benefit of earth's balance?   Who has more right to their existence the botfly larvae or the finch chicks?   Natural selection would say the one who is most fit to survive.   Can we humans learn to be more fit to survive; to adjust to the stress and acceleration of our mechanized computerized world?    

The training I did today with Ron Hershey makes me believe that possible.  Coherent breath takes one inward to find a place of comfort and stability within the body which can be "portable" as Ron says and used in any situation (e.g. a long and bumpy car ride that makes one nauseous; a tedious holiday with the in-laws; the inside a of a noisy prison cell; in the body of an opioid addict perhaps.    The combination of slowing down the breath, learning move and focus it toward stressed places in the body and the use of liberating natural body energy and flow promoted by QiGong is a real winner.   As an energy practitioner I could feel the movement and release these methods allowed.  And they are so simple.   It is simple science that slowing the respiratory and the pulmonary systems down produces a calmer nervous state, but there is also the element of spirit which is contained in the energetic field which surrounds which remains part mystery.   Yet it can sustain us and help us to survive if we allow it.   Perhaps that's where Eva Blair Lucien exists now is in that energy and she stuck her toe out in within my field.  Like a turtle testing the waters hoping not to get captured, she perhaps exists in some liminal underworld hoping to return to light.