Good Morning, God!
I think it was King Canute who pointed out that he could not “hold back the sea.” How true that is on Cape Cod. Rising Oceans, Warming Seas, Stronger Storms.
The erosion here is CHANGE made VISIBLE! Or maybe only visible to those who can SEE over TIME. Most of us humans have real trouble with that, God. Often it isn’t so much that facts aren’t known as that they are not CONNECTED to other facts.
As a wannabe synthesizing thinker I am delighted when I suddenly see a Connection. That happened yesterday as my wonderful husband Kit and I toured the Whaling Museum on Nantucket Island. There we learned about the SUPERIOR qualities of Sperm Whale Oil. So superior that it was a BIG contributor to the Industrial Revolution. Hmm. Right! Machines don’t run well — or at all? — without oil. And Sperm Whale oil was perfect. It didn’t gum up, go rancid or whatever it is that inferior oils do. And the supply of Sperm Oil came along — in the late 1700s — just as the mechanical age got going.
I had assumed that petroleum could do just as well — until I found an article online that said that when whale oil was made illegal (around 1972?) the rate of car transmission failures rose from one million in 1972 to eight million in 1975. Sperm Whale oil in Transmission Fluid? Really?
Well, who knows BUT it did connect dots that hadn’t been connected before.
Another CHANGE in OIL took place in the years after WWII when the munitions factories turned to making artificial fertilizers. As a result grain production SOARED!!! We had so much grain that we figured out how to make food oil out of it . . .and then figured out how to tell folks how much better that (polyunsaturated) oil was for us. And then on to how awful ANY fat was for us.
Only, of course, it wasn’t true. More later . . .
Story teller,
A Moment with God 
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