As you must have gathered, I like to play with words and in general to reflect on life.  I started writing this autobiography initially to write down interesting episodes for my son David.  But I want to end with reflections on life's lessons that I have learned.

     Now 70 years old, I live in my cabin, named the "Howling Wolf" cabin, after my rescue dogs.  The Howling Wolf sits halfway up the southeastern flank of Ft. Butler Mountain.  This is the North Carolina mountain that marked the beginning of that "sad" trail, the 1838 Cherokee Trail of Tears.  My cabin is small, comfortable, and isolated, surrounded by acres of tall woods on the "Little Easy", named by those homesick for New Orleans.  Tonight is March 11, 2017, a cold winter night with a nearly full moon and light snow falling outside.  The cabin looks south towards the moonlight silhouette of the North Georgia mountains.  The fire burns in the woodstove and my dogs are scattered around, sleeping on the floor.  These are rescue dogs in Lost Dogs Run, born to run and like me, living on borrowed time.  I am glad that they too have survived for they are family and the reason I am here.  I think of my dogs that have passed, buried below among granite boulders placed on the grassy knoll we call "Standing Rock."  Some day my ashes will be spread over those graves.  The grey boulders stand guard while the wind plays with chimes and the Bonnie Blue Flag flies over the graves, a continuous reminder of life's lost causes and the irrationality of human nature.  This flag was the first battle flag of the Confederacy in the bloody Civil War in which 750,000 soldiers died.  Of my great grandfathers: one wore Gray and was captured at Lookout Mountain, one wore Blue and was discharged from a Navy Hospital in Norfolk, another was a Spanish immigrant, 11 years old in 1861 in Louisiana, and one was Bürgermeister of Stolp in West Prussia.  Tonight, the Blue and the Gray with the Cherokee walk the trails on Ft. Butler Mountain, ghosts that never sleep, on paths that someday I too will walk.  As Christy Moore sang "There is no feeling so alone, as when the one you’re hurting is your own".  These are the same trails that my "lost" dogs run each day.  Below Standing Rock is the "Rocking Bowl", a green hollow nestled in the woods, cut by a shallow stream draining a small pond.  Here, as it must have been in the past, smoke sometimes rises from fire pits in the hollow while the "lost" dogs wade the pond and walk the stream.  The Cherokees of Old would recognize this hollow.  The name Rocking Bowl came from a "rocking" Big Easy bowling hall where Londi and I used to dance.  The Little Easy is not a bad place to end the winter of your life.



The "lost" dogs' graves at Standing Rock, summer 2017 - The fenced yard extends more than 100 yards up slope to the Howling Wolf Cabin.

     Age forces each of us to confront the coming reality of the end of our existence.  I find myself falling into that rabbit hole of wondering as to the purpose of my existence.  And on evenings like this, I sometimes sip tequila or whiskey and think of the mysteries of the universe that I will never understand.  Knowledge always leads to more questions.  Like the passage of youth, the golden liquor burns briefly and then like memories, the taste lingers before fading away.  Memories give meaning to my past but are not enough to face my future.  Living has shown me that I need goals, outside of satisfying needs.  My goals arise from the curosity that used to drive my research, to understand what I see and come across.  Without goals, life becomes living for existence and with increasing age, eventually existence becomes meaningless.  Retirement should not just be a path to death but a time of reflection and doing what is important to you.  Success is less important in achieving a goal than trying to make that achievement.  For without goals there is little purpose in living.

     There are those basic quality needs in life other than food, drink, and shelter that are not goals but give contentment to life.  I was always a "thinker" and enjoy (even more now than when young) contemplating hard-to-understand concepts.  I was never a "good old boy" but can appreciate the joy of good camaraderie.  Enjoying the friendship of others is the most important part of living each day.  Most important in our needs is the unconditional and non-possessive love between beings.  Now Cindy White Mulkey, my little Georgia peach, provides that love with me.  But humans tend to be careless with those we love.  Effort is needed to maintain a relationships making them often the most fleeting aspects of our lives.

     Empathy for other living creatures is our recognization of their feelings, their hurts and their joys.  Empathy and compassion to help those in need are within my DNA.  When I was younger, those feelings were buried in my love of doing science but now I cannot escape the sadness that comes from having limited resources to help.  Empathy is necessary for people to live together, acting for the good of all and being tolerant of others having different beliefs and lifestyles.  Empathy and compassion for all should guide our civilization and are expressed but are not truly felt by a majority of humans.  For that reason, many humans, often with the support of their followers, continuously exploit other living creatures, in a relentless drive for more wealth, power, sex, and domination of their world.  In the end, this lack of care for others will probably destroy our civilization.  Evolution has given us the brains to control our destiny but apparently not the will to control our greed.

     What can explain the inability of humans to live in peace for the common good?  Is it ignorance and distrust of others or is it that we have killing for sport and dominance is in our DNA.  I want to use hunting for sport as an example.  Such hunting is justified as a means of being alone or with family and friends in the outdoors and using the prey as food.  As a child, I started hunting doves at about age 12.  My father liked to hunt and these were probably the closest times I had with him.  I always enjoyed being in the outdoors but I never liked killing wounded animals and would do so as quickly as possible.  Killing a dove by banging its head against the stock of my shotgun didn't arouse much feeling in me, but wringing the neck of a goose as it gurgled in its throat, exposed the pain that the animal was going through.  I went on my last hunt at age 23, the day before my father died and never went hunting again.  My point is that killing for sport means enjoying killing another living creature.  If a person doesn't feel empathy for an animal he or she is killing, then they are unlikely to feel empathy for killing a human who is not part of their family or friends.  Hunting for sport really illustrates the lack of empathy in humans.  Almost universally, wild animals kill only to survive, not for sport, with animals such as sharks and African wild dogs as possible exceptions.

     I was raised Episcopalian and have gradually become an agnostic.  Religion is difficult to discuss because so many humans require the unconditional belief in a God to justify their existence.  Usually a religion provides moral framework and reward in an afterlife for living life in a particular way.  Those who believe in a God often say there are no atheists in fox holes, that belief is needed to face death.  Someday soon I will find out.  But belief is a personal choice and as long as one's beliefs do not infringe on others' beliefs, different religions can live together.  In today's world (now 2024) this is not always the case, given the examples of fringe Muslim, fundamentalist Christian, and extreme Jewish groups.  The most prominent today are Muslim: Al-Qaeda, ISIS, and the Taliban whose goal is to convert non-believers and kill those they cannot convert.  But today far-right Christians call for Civil War to replace the American Democracy with a Christian Theocracy led by Trump while far-right Jews in Israel justify the oppression of Palestonians by the belief their God has given them Palestine.  These groups have become cults where religion is used to justify their lack of compassion.

     As a geologist who spent his life examining the rock record, the evolution of life on Earth over the past 4 billion years is self-evident.  There is no need to call upon a creator to explain the life present today.  That is not to say that science has been able to satisfactorily explain the absolute origin of life in the first chemical compounds coming together to form the most primitive living cells that can reproduce.  But once those first single-celled organisms formed, evolution occurred and there is a record of it in the rocks.  Creationists point to "intelligent design" saying complex organs (such as eyes) could not evolve by chance.  But evolution is guided by survival, and random gene mutations that are not beneficial are lost such that over 4 billion years on Earth, more complex organisms continue to evolve from favorable gene mutations in earlier organisms.  On a primitive scale, evolution occurs rapidly with modern drugs causing bacteria, fungi, and protozoa to become drug resistant.  The same process over immense time frames has given rise to complex organisms such as ourselves.  And today we are developing the ability to modify the genes in DNA and alter future beings, a process whose outcome is unknown.  I mention evolution not to convince others to doubt their faith but to explain why I am agnostic.  Although I do not understand the origin of my existence, my heart feels the call of my soul and the souls of those that I have loved.  And having a soul gives me hope there is more to our existence than evolution, that some part of us does not end with death.  Regardless, I accept my existence and its coming end.

     One never-ending mystery for me is the passage of time and how it affects each of us.  Time measures the rate of change and the concept can not exist without change.  Einstein's theories of special and general relativity tell us that time slows with an increase in gravity and speed, going to zero as the speed of light is approached when mass becomes infinite, making it impossible to travel faster than the speed of light.  If time goes to zero at the speed of light than no time has passed for light emitted in the Big Bang while billions of years have passed in "Earth" time.  So time is relative to gravity and velocity and can be slowed or increased, but apparently only moves in one direction - forward.  We could move ahead in time on Earth, by leaving the planet and increasing our speed before returning to Earth.  We could also possibly move to the past on Earth using the concept of a worm hole, but our own time would still be moving forward, i.e., not becoming younger.  Our "Earth" time is measured versus rates of "nearly" constant irreversible processes on Earth such as radioactive decay.  I think of our universe moving within a river of time with the different parts moving at different speeds, and those light beams emitted during the Big Bang, are not affected by time.

     If a beam of light or electromagnetic radiation travels without experiencing passage of time than can the radiation be destroyed, i.e., exists forever in our universe, if not absorbed by interactions with matter.  Is that true?  Our thoughts are equivalent to electromagnetic radiation so could they possibly still exist after our death?  Is this our immortality?  Can this explain the ghosts that we often feel.

     I like to call the passage of time here on our planet, the passage of Earth time which we use to measure time.  But I think each living creature modifies Earth time to produce a personal time that slows with age.  When we are young, the 24 hours of a day seems to be longer than when we are old, but the length of a day has not significantly changed.  What has changed is our perception of its length.  The chemical processes (metabolism) of our bodies are fastest when we are children and slow down as we grow older, slowing personal time for each of us.  As a result, our conscious awareness of what is happening around us has also slowed such that the days appear to be becoming shorter.  To me, the passage of Earth time appears to be moving faster with increasing age because my personal time is slowing down and will stop with my death.  This slowing of personal time is an evolutionary adjustment to extend our existance.  I believe the time linkage to metabolism is through the entropy production from our metabolism (see next paragraph).  Time passage for each individual decreases with decreasing entropy production from slowing metabolism.  This can be temporarily reversed in times of stress when metabolism increases, resulting in time moving faster such that events around us appear to happen in slow motion, e.g., the passage of our personal time during an auto accident.

     The concept of entropy was derived in chemistry to explain the inability to convert all the energy input into any process into work.  The explanation is in the second law of thermodynamics, that entropy must increase in any irreversible process so that some energy is utilized to increase entropy.  In a gasoline engine, this is done through heat flow to the surroundings, providing a way to compute the maximum efficiency of the engine.  Our life processes are also irreversible reactions reflected through our metabolism with the heat produced passed on to our environment.  The concept of entropy production explains the direction of irreversible processes and predicts (to me) that time cannot be reversed.  For time is the ultimate irreversible process.  As previously mentioned above, we can come up with scenarios where we move forward in time relative to earth time and through worm holes, move backward in time; however, in each case our personal time always moves forward, i.e., we haven't gotten younger.  For this reason entropy is sometimes called the "arrow of time."  I have spent many a night drifting off to sleep, thinking of this relationship.  Establishing a relationship between time and entropy production might be done by looking at radioactive decay.  The existence of a radioactive molecule is defined by its half life.  The decay process produces entropy.  By comparing the entropy production between different radioactive isotopes with different half lives, a relationship between entropy and time passage might be found.

     And finally, just to completely fall into the rabbit hole, I might as well speculate on the future of the universe.  The currently expanding universe is also disappearing into black holes at the center of each galaxy.  If the gravitational attraction of these expanding black holes results in combining adjacent black holes, perhaps eventually the gravitational attraction will start the universe to contract.  The resulting gravitational contraction of the universe into one giant black hole, could produce an unstable situation in which a new big bang would give rise to a new or regenerated universe.  One never knows what thoughts can come from drinking whiskey by a wood stove on a cold night with dogs asleep by your feet.

     My life has had its wonderful monents when it seems that everything went my way.  This could sometimes occur when I first understood the answer to a scientific problem I was working on, or when I was overcome by the beauty and intimacy of a relationship, and during the feelings of awe and wonder of nature in a far-away land.  But these moments of exhilaration have always been brief.  My understanding of science has dulled with age and past relationships are mostly gone.  We cannot go back to old haunts and expect things not to have changed.  Some of the best times in my life were spent in the Yucatan, working along the Carribean coast and in the jungle inland around the cenotes.  On my 70th birthday I went back to some of these areas.  Hordes of tourists were everywhere.  Gone was the beauty of the solitude of a beach with the green waters of the Caribbean lapping at your feet.  Even the colorful corals on the reefs were now bleached.  Often memories of such events are much better than present-day reality.  Enjoy the memories but live in the present, not the past.  If we make the effort to look around, there is beauty and joy everywhere.  Sadness is a state of mind as is happiness.  Each of us can make that choice.

     As a professor, my goal was always to get students to think for themselves, not to accept information and ideas blindly but to check them out from other sources and to think about an idea rationally and test it if possible.  I was rarely successful.  Unfortunately, most students, like people in general, find it mentally easier to memorize information and ideas rather than spend time analyzing them.  And this is also true of those teachers who do not want to be challenged in their classrooms.  Kings, emperors, dictators, tribal leaders and politicians can successfully lie to their followers, knowing they will rarely use their own reasoning to determine if they are being told the truth.  We generally dislike the mental effort it takes to check out information and to analyze ideas, particularly if we already want to believe the information and ideas, making us easily led by the unscrupulous.  The problem is componded when religious differences are added to the mix with the premise that ideas cannot be challenged because they are believed to come from God.  Unfortunately, human nature cannot be easily changed through education, leading to continuing human misery, ongoing destruction of the earth's surface and endless conflicts over the ages.  Perhaps evolution can provide an answer for the human race, because the alternative can only be extinction!

     So why am I here?  And, in a few years, my "unanswered" question will be - Did I make a difference?  Perhaps in the short term - but in the long term?

     For me, when my time stops, death is better left unmarked.  Spread my ashes over the graves of the lost dogs on the Little Easy.  My soul will not linger here but be gone, where I do not know.


When I was young, there was wonder in my soul,
with a feeling of power to face the coming storms.
My faith was in my kind and there was nothing we could not do,
working together for the common good to fight the darkness within.

But I grew up and the darkness was still there,
for empathy and compassion are empty words for most.
So I sought knowledge that was universal and true,
thinking this would drive the darkness away.

I was a scientist, working outdoors and in the lab,
with time spent to ponder what I found.
I had a family and those were good years,
but that time too, passed me by.

By then fifty years had passed since I left my childhood home.
And around me, the gnomes were rising so I could not see what lay ahead.
While besides me my hounds were howling,
but I just kept moving on.

And so I wandered with a soul that was not free,
looking but not knowing I was looking for you,
still searching my world with cold, hard facts,
for truths that no one else cared to know.

And now that I found you, I care not for looking anymore,
just to stay with you, wrapped in your arms,
in green fields under blue skies with the warmth of the sun,
until time no longer moves.

And later.

Emotions and thoughts now run through my mind.
A crying wind is in my soul, telling me my time is short.
I reach out my hands, touching those I love,
feeling the love that kept me by their side.


February, 2020

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