spring forward camping trip

Two of my business associates live near Boston, MA. Boston is going through what might end up being the coldest winter and the highest snow year in history. They are still dealing with sub-zero temperatures and continuing snow.

Many bloggers who live in the Northeast seem to be writing quite often about the anticipation of spring. They can’t wait for spring.

This past weekend, here in our deserts, temperatures were forecasted to be in the 80’s in the low deserts and the 70’s in the high deserts. So we hooked up the trailer and headed for the later. We are enjoying spring weather, although spring doesn’t officially start until March 20th. Mother Nature could care less when we say spring starts. The reason we say spring starts on the 20th, is because for an instant the day will be exactly 12 hours long and the night 12 hours long. We often consider spring to be the months of March, April, and May. Tell my acquaintances in Massachusetts that!

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Although we are in the midst of spring, there were few wildflowers on the weekend excursion to the desert. Mother Nature provides bountiful flowers when and if she wants. There needs to be a certain amount of rain over a certain interval, followed by a certain amount of temperature and sunlight. Those ingredients were not in perfect balance this weekend. That was okay, the view out our door was wonderful, expansive and devoid of people. But somehow we ran into a problem with time.

DOES TIME EXIST?

Apparently, during the middle of the night, something miraculous occured.

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When I got up Sunday morning, Joyce told me we had to spring forward, meaning we had to move our clock forward one hour because the time changed at 2:00 am; she said we lost an hour, and today we would have more sun because we are now on Daylight Savings Time.

Really?

So where did that lost hour go? Is it really gone? Are we actually saving daylight? Do we, in fact, need time? And most importantly, does time actually exist?

To the farmer or even the long distance backpacker, time isn’t a necessity. You start working or walking at daylight and you stop at sundown. You really don’t need a watch. The amount of daylight is dependent on the tilt of the earth and the earth’s relative position to the sun, as our globe spins and circles our glorious sun.

If the farmer or hiker really wanted to “know what time it is” a shadow will do the trick.

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Industrialized societies need time so that everyone gets to work at the same instant, or you know what time to get to the airport so you don’t miss your flight. Seems to me that we invented time. So I got thinking about time. The past no longer exists. It is gone, we cannot go back and we cannot change it. The future isn’t here yet; we cannot accurately predict it or change it. The only thing that exists is the present. The question is, does the present exist? Scientists tell us that the smallest unit of time is an attosecond, which is one quintillionth of a second  — meaning the present is so small that we are standing, legs spread apart, straddling the present with one foot in the past and one foot in the future; living in a few attoseconds of the present that are so incredibly small we cannot observe the real present. So if time doesn’t exist, what does?

Heck, do we exist?

Yes, because we perceive existence, and because our consciousness perceives that existence, we exist. Existence exists. This is so simple and the implications are so huge.

The existence we live in is a 3-dimensional world: length, height, and depth. Using mathematics we can prove the nature of our 3-dimensional world with laws that are always true. We cannot, however, prove that time exists. Some say that time is a 4th dimension, which implies that we could travel to the past and to the future. I don’t think Mother Nature cares about the concept of time.

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Corky doesn’t care about time either. As a matter of fact, he can’t even use a watch. When we are camping he does likes to be outside and observe the world around him. When he is inside the camper, he lays at the door looking out. Time means nothing to him.

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These boulders were created by molten liquid from the earth’s core. They cooled and became huge rocks below the surface of the earth. We are told that time eroded the earth exposing these marvelous rock formations. Time had nothing to do with it, neither a cause nor effect. Wind and rain did all of the work; it was the intensity and intervals of wind and rain that exposed the boulders.

Nature creates life and ends it. Time isn’t needed; events are needed. Nature couldn’t care less what time we say it is.

Some of this past weekend’s pictures while searching for the existence or possibly the meaning of time.

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BOTTOM LINE

We didn’t find the proliferation of wildflowers we were hoping for.

We’ll let the philosophers and physicists work out the question of whether or not time exists.

We will concentrate on finding wildflowers on our next trip.

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