Breaking my New Year's Resolution???

 

As I posted on January 1st, my resolution for 2025 was to do an outdoor hike of at least five miles every single day this year, no exceptions, no excuses.  It's been great motivation, and it had been a very positive experience on balance ... so far.

But what about injuries?  What about a catastrophic illness?  What if I'm kidnapped by Aliens?

Shit happens, right?  Just look at that photo of my left ankle.  It was May 6th.  The story is such a typical one.  It was not a hiking-related injury.  I was preparing stuff in the kitchen and dropped something really hard and heavy, and tried to intercept it—to break its fall—with my foot, soccer style.  Big, stupid mistake.  It clobbered that ankle, which is always sensitive because there's a bone chip in there from when I broke my ankle 37 years ago and the orthopedic surgeon told me he wasn't going to operate because the ankle was stable enough.

It hurt like hell.  It began to swell up, and soon the swelling had spread all the way up my lower leg to my knee.  I could barely walk.  The pain was biblical!

I would surely have to stay off the leg until the swelling went down, right? 

Well, I wasn't going to give up without trying.  I took some aspirin (I don't even keep Ibuprofen around) and headed out to at least try to walk a bit.

It was pure torture.  I limped along gamely for just a single mile, and it took an hour and a half.  But then the aspirin seemed to kick in, just enough that I was able to pick up my pace.  It was still as painful as a root canal, but I could see hope of getting in the five miles and living to tell about it - keeping the resolution alive for at least another day.

And I did it.  It was no fun at all, to say the least, but I'd had a day like that with a twisted ankle when I hiked the AT in 2012, and it all worked out for the best.  Back then, I had been almost back to normal the next day.

But that was a twisted ankle.  This was a blunt-force trauma injury.  What would it be like the next day?

May 7th: The swelling was down, back to just a very sensitive local area around the ankle.  I headed out to try to walk and was shocked to find that walking did not aggravate the pain.  This was not systemic, not down in the guts of my foot where bones rub together.  I was able to get my five miles in at almost a normal pace.  And best of all, I was able to actually enjoy the experience!

Normal service resumed!  New Year's Resolution kept alive ... at least until the next big disaster strikes.

That January 1st post has grown long and unwieldy, so I'm retiring that one and picking up the coverage here.

Spring has sprung and it's one of the best times of the year to be out.  The bugs haven't proliferated yet, temperature hasn't gone into a tropical sizzle, the new greenery is all fresh and perky, and the birds are singing up a storm, and I'm loving my life in the woods again, and eager to share my joy, whether in words or in photos.  

The Month of May was a delight.  I had no more problems with that ankle, except for the usual twinges of that bone chip, and hiked a total of 187.653 miles.  Five months of adhering to the resolution—seven to go. 

In June the heat arrived.  Priority for hiking was to get out as soon as daylight arrived, often as early as 5:30AM.  Trying to stay in the deep woods as much as possible, and hiking along my wonderful noisy cool streams at the Cloister at Three Creeks.  The water in those streams never gets truly warm—65 degrees F at the very warmest.  Total miles hiked in June, just 2½ miles shy of 200.  This month puts me past the 15 total years of documented hiking with a GPS and gets me past the half-way point on the Journey to Nowhere other than to daily consistency that is this year's New Year's Resolution.  Total miles for June: 197.572.

July was brutal.  I spent most of the month walking from before sunrise to a few hours after sunrise, not often able to 'stop and smell the roses' because of the oppressive humidity—I just wanted to finish—but also because of the swarming, relentless eye gnats that seem to want nothing more than to commit suicide by dive-bombing into your eye.  This was the month that I realized why this resolution is a real challenge, even if I remain healthy and fit.  It is, on some days, keeping me from spending the time I want focusing on other things—things that I can do indoors, bathed in a fossil-fuel-generated artificial environment of 'conditioned' air, something I grew up without in southeastern Pennsylvania.  Was it cooler in mid-summer back then?  You bet your sweaty head band it was!  Total miles for July: 174.777.

In August, I started toying with the idea of hiking one small (0.065-mile) piece of the Appalachian Trail, past a tree with a nice white blaze on both sides:

as many times as there are completions of the entire AT reported to the AT Conservancy.  That would be more than 25,000 as of their most recent report.  Not yet fully committed to that goal, but I did walk back and forth on various days until the total passes reached 500.  This had already been part of a longer piece of trail to a viewpoint that I had hiked more than 100 times over the years (about 0.8 miles long).  August is also the month when I stop exploring and bushwhacking in the woods because the yellow-jacket wasps, which live big hives in holes in the ground, begin to very aggressively defend the space around those nests because the new Queens are hatching.  Amazingly, bears love to dig up those colonies to eat all the juicy protein-packed grubs, surely getting a bazillion stings to the nose in the process.  Blessed cooler air arrived around the last week of the month and has hung around.  Total miles for August: 175.049.

September: Lots of great weather except for a few days. I avoided the rain on one of them by doing a moonlight walk early in the morning.  Another few days, I just sucked it up and walked with an umbrella.  I had a chance to do a couple hikes on the AT in southern Shenandoah National Park with 90-year-old Dale "Grey Beard" Sanders, who had begun hiking the AT southbound from Harper's Ferry on September 6th and who was (and still is, as of early October) on an attempt to gain back the age record for the oldest person to thru-hike the Appalachian Trail.  From my experience with him, he has what it takes to do the job.  He's amazingly fit and healthy for his age and hikes at a pace that was faster than I usually hike, and I am not yet 77 years old.  See some photos in the archive below.  I stuck with the program and accomplished 183.898 miles and crossed the 26,000 total mile mark!

October:  A new blog post is coming, discussing the amazing benefits of this New Year's Resolution and my plans for an extension of it.  Establishing this goal (hiking at least five miles every single day regardless of weather or other duties) has benefitted me in ways that I never could have foreseen.  I'm becoming more and more 'evangelical' about the walking lifestyle and the benefits of immersion in wild natural settings—of making each day's walk truly the 'enterprise and adventure of the day' as Thoreau put it (quoted on the sidebar of this blog).  This month the mileage total was 187.946 miles.

November: Kept on keepin' on as the weather turned wintry by the end of the month.  Mileage total for the month: 182.486 miles.

December:  SUCCESS!  191.499 miles hiked this month, sometimes in bitter cold and snow, sometimes hiking by moonlight in order to take advantage of the best weather on bad-weather days!  The New Year's Resolution for 2025 was successfully completed.  I hiked 5 or more miles each day for 365 consecutive days.  Total for the year was 2,146.426 miles, which is an average of 5.88 miles per day.

I found that I really appreciated the uncompromising obligation to be out there every day.  It's much like having to walk your dog—you can't skip a day just because you don't feel like going out.  

So, for 2026, I've established a similar resolution, but with more flexibility: Get out and walk every single day, at least 5000 steps (2.5 miles) but accomplish a monthly average, each month, that amounts to 6.03 miles per day or more.  That will get me to hike the entire distance of the Appalachian Trail (2197.9 miles for 2026) in the calendar year.

Photo Archive follows:

This is Western Maidenhair Fern, one of my favorite deep-woods plants, and very difficult for gardeners to grow.  It's called 'western' because its range is up and down the US west coast--including among the huge Redwoods and up into Alaska among the giant Sitka Spruces, growing all the way out into the Aleutian Islands.  But somehow there's a rogue colony of it in the mid-Atlantic, and it's actually reasonably common around here.  (There's another colony in Vermont).  I love the way ferns unfurl in spring, and the delicate, fractal-like geometry of their leaf pattern.  Walked past two small clusters of these on May 10th, not on any real trail--just a route I took through the woods around my retreat at the Cloister at Three Creeks.

White Spotted Slimy Salamander (yes, that's it's official name, not my description).  Accidentally discovered when I turned over a log on June 1st.  Native to the Blue Ridge and vicinity in the Mid-Atlantic.

May 13th: Flooding rains at the Cloister at Three Creeks.  This is a view at the convergence of two creeks.  The water was higher in this episode than it was here in the Blue Ridge of central Virginia during Hurricane Helene last fall, and the biggest flood I've ever seen here since moving here about 4 years ago.

Tulip Poplar flower.  This has been my favorite species of tree since I was a kid and planted a seedling and watched it grow to more than 100 feet tall and four feet in diameter.  Yes, it's a fast-growing species. It has a truly unique leaf shape (also shown in the image) and these unique flowers that bloom in May.

May 16th: This is not a fungus.  It is called 'Wolf's Milk' and it is a slime mold--related to the single celled amoeba, these 'creatures' exist independently as single cells most of the time, and yet they signal each other chemically when conditions are right, and aggregate into these pustules in order to reproduce.

Stopping for a break beside a noisy mountain stream, the biggest of the three at the Cloister at Three Creeks.  June 21st.

Pine log with a display of knots, one of a bazillion blowdowns caused by Hurricane Helene and cleared from the Mountains-to-Sea Trail near Asheville, NC, where I did a few hikes.  August 5th.

August 25th.  The Crane Fly orchid has a bizarre lifestyle.  This is the shoot of the single leaf it unfurls in September, which hangs around the forest floor all winter absorbing sunlight, and shrivels up in spring.  Just one leaf, never more.  Then the plant sits dormant until it puts out a leafless flower stalk in July.

With 90-year-old Dale "Grey Beard" Sanders at Blackrock, early in the morning of September 19th, joining Dale for a few days as he continued his quest to regain the age record as the oldest person to thru-hike the Appalachian Trail (hike the whole thing in less than a year).

A bit later in the morning on September 19th.

At the 'tractor seats' beside the communication towers atop Bear Mountain, a mile south of Beagle Gap, southern Shenandoah National Park, Virginia, on September 20th.

October 27th.  It's Leaf Peeper Season!  The height of fall color here in the central Blue Ridge of Virginia came during the last week of October and continued into early November.

November 9th: One of my favorite remote viewpoints of the pristine valley that is the home of my soul

New Year's Resolution 2025 - Walk 10,000 steps every day

What's in a trail name?  On the Appalachian Trail, it is sort of a rite of passage to be bestowed your trail name by fellow hikers.  So far, I've not had that honor.  The only 'nickname' that I've ever been given (by two of my high school best friends a full 60 years ago) was based on this old hat that I used to wear as a counter-culture message in my hippie and pre-hippie rebellion days.  I'll let you guess what that name was (big hint in the image below).  Since then, I've always gone by trail names that I assigned myself:  'Seeks It' during my AT double thru-hike in 2012, 'Hiking Hermit' in more recent years, then briefly 'Mud' as a protest to a counter-intuitive Leave-No-Trace guideline, and most recently ORNG (Out Roaming Nature's Grandeur/Old Ranger Nearly Geriatric).  But I think I'll go back to the original and wear the hat for a while.  That hat is, believe it or not, a Templeform fedora made by Stylepark and bought by my Dad at Strawbridge and Clothier's original downtown Wilmington, DE store in the early to mid 1950's.  Yes, this was his go-to-church dress hat in the era before trucker caps (ball caps with non-baseball logos) became the new vogue.  Photo taken at the Cloister at Three Creeks on March 31st, 2025, with trees just barely beginning to bud out.

2025 is my 77th year on this planet.  I feel amazing and energetic and truly blessed to be still alive, let alone to be able to get out in nature and walk.   I'm astounded to see that nearly half of the men my age in the US have already kicked the bucket by this age (Social Security Actuarial Life Tables for 2024).  I'm beating the odds.  What did I do to deserve that???

Maybe part of the answer is the walking itself.  Honestly, I'd like to get up on a soapbox and preach the amazing benefits of walking and getting out in the peace and serenity of nature.  But all these things are pretty well known, and writers much more talented than me have expounded and pontificated and proselytized on these subjects at length.  I don't need to add to their wisdom.

My walks are the most important part and the best part of every day for me.  I'll even feel a sense of withdrawal and regret if I have to miss a day of hiking, and so when I got up this morning, it seemed natural to consider a New Year's resolution to help me avoid those few days when I just don't feel like going out because the weather is bad, or because I'm tangled up in some indoor sit-down project.  "Sitting is the new Smoking", right.  The chair is going to kill us all!

I already have good habits regarding the walking lifestyle.  When I wake up in the morning, one of the first things on my mind is "where do I want to hike today."  I like to vary my walks, both in the actual route, and also in the reason, theme, or goal of the day's outing.  Some days I'll walk to a store, buy what I can carry back home in my daypack, and save the planet a little by leaving my car parked at home.  Some days I'm looking for a particular feature of nature, such as which flowers are in bloom, how the seasons are changing the woods.

In general, I'm always looking for interesting things to photograph, usually something unusual, whether its natural or some sort of man-made oddity.  Sometimes, for example, I'll take photos of a plant that I don't know and then get on Google's 'search by image' feature to try to identify it when I get back home. 

I love sharing my photographs, so that becomes part of the motivation for creating this blog post.  It will serve to make me accountable for my resolution and to give me the excuse to do a 'show and tell' with one or a few photos from the day's hike.

And so, without further ado.  Here we go.  The resolution is basic and simple.  Here are the rules:

• Walk Ten Thousand Steps.  That's nominally five miles, and since I use a GPS and not a Pedometer, I'm measuring distance, not actually counting steps.  My goal is to hike at least five miles each day in 2025, and probably for the rest of my days - as long as I can haul my carcass out of bed in the morning and strap on a belt pack and get out the door.
• Always walk outdoors in a natural setting.  No tread mills.  No gyms.
• Rain or Shine.  No excuses, no exceptions.
• Take at least one photo of an interesting sight and feature it here on this blog post
• Do a little trail work along the way - pick up litter or cut back some brush (I always carry a hand pruning shear in my beltpack).

The creation of this post was my main motivation for the inaugural New Year's Day hike.  I intend to update this post every day, adding a new photo up top and describing the day's hike and distance covered.  The Chronological List of 2025 hikes begins below:

1. Jan 1:  Destination: Sewell's Orchard Pond, Columbia, MD.  5.212 miles.
2. Jan 2:  Sweet Hours Park, Eden Brook Rd., Kings Contrivance Trails, 6.51 miles.
3. Jan 3:  Destination: Walmart! 5.374 miles.
4. Jan 4:  Big Loop around Owen Brown Community.  "Track 11" - a specially designed Loop to be 5 miles: 5.073 as measured today.
5. Jan 5:  Wincopin Trails - Red, White, Yellow, Orange, and Purple.  5.139 miles.
6. Jan 6:  Destination: daughter's house in 6 inches of snow, 8.223 miles.
7. Jan 7:  Patuxent Branch Trail and Lake Elkhorn.  5.362 miles.
8. ... and on we go.  Because of very low view-counts on this post, I'm not updating this daily.  I'll report monthly, probably, and surely when I get to the magical 'virtual round-the-world hike' mark, at 25,000 miles.

January 2025 total: 171.224 miles.  

February 2025 total: 146.785 miles.  

March 2025 total:  173.620 miles.

April 14th, 2025 was the big day: I surpassed the 25,000-mile mark.  I've 'resolutely' kept to the resolution, having hiked at least 5 miles every day this year so far, and have no intention to stop now.

April 2025 total: 173.826 miles.  And on we go ... but ... 

***Because this post is getting long and unwieldy, and because of some breaking news regarding this ongoing quest, I'm migrating the coverage to a new blog post.  Check it out for the current progress.***

* * *

I hope 2025 finds you, dear readers, healthy and full of joy, and getting the chance to get outdoors as often as possible and take a walk.  Cheers!

* * *

PHOTO ARCHIVE

Plastic Trail!  January 1st.  The world is being drowned in plastic, but ... Really???  Plastic trail???  Yep.  This is the first all-plastic trail I've hiked.  Usually this is just a regular asphalt-paved bike and hiker trail, but the slabs of plastic were laid down over it for heavy equipment during a utility construction project.

Pond on a winter morning - January 2.  I'm showing this photo upside down because I think it looks better that way.  What do you think?

January 4, early on a frigid, windy Saturday morning. Wind chill in the teens.  Saying "Hi" and also, really, "Good-bye" to the church I used to attend fifteen years ago: Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Columbia (MD).  Back then, I felt very at home there, but the supposedly wide-open and inclusive-of-all UU "theology" has become more and more dogmatic--not in a spiritual way, but politically.  Sadly, they seem to have been sucked into the ever-increasing polarization problem in the US.  I made a few return visits recently but no longer feel comfortable there.

January 5th:  Frazil ice flowing with the current.  Early morning on the Middle Patuxent River beneath I-95.

January 7th: Lake Elkhorn, with two willow trees that really, REALLY like the water.

January 10: Canada Geese hunkering down in an aeration opening in the ice.  Sewell's Orchard Park Pond.

January 13:  Fun with symmetry: an old churchyard tulip poplar tree.

January 15 (at right).  The historic Pratt Truss Bridge built in 1902, now the signature feature of the Patuxent Branch Trail.  At left is my photo from November 28, 2011, the first time I hiked here.

January 17: The walk along Stoney Creek, heading up to the Cloister at Three Creeks.

Jan 19:  deep in the gloom of an impending storm, beside the ecological wasteland of a mown field, we enjoy the ever-hopeful catkins of a sweet birch awaiting spring while basking in a gorgeous Blue Ridge view.

Jan 21:  Bird on a tree-top twig.  Can you spot it?  The clouds are pointing to it.

Jan 22:  View from a hayfield of the peak called 'Three Ridges'.  The treetops there reach well above 4000 feet elevation, though the actual ground doesn't quite exceed that magic threshold. 

January 24:  Three Ridges framed by a badly invasive Paulownia Tree, native to China.

Jan 26:  Three pics for the price of one.  Rainbow Ice falls along the closed Blue Ridge Parkway.

Jan 27:  Ice covered "Stairstep falls".  The trail to get there was almost as treacherous.

February 3:  The first 'wild' flowers to bloom in spring are Skunk Cabbage.  Buds are opening today during a thaw.  The flowers are enclosed in that protective sheath to keep them warm, and the flowers themselves actually generate their own heat by a chemical process.  An extreme adaptation to beat the competition!

February 6:  the noisy abundance of a mountain stream - Stoney Creek at the Cloister at Three Creeks.  This is my new favorite viewpoint.  We had an inch of rain that had just ended; the roar of a hundred little 'water features' was a wealth of soothing joy!

February 18:  Icicles on a log at Flat Rock Creek in the grounds of the Cloister.  Winter is holding on.  Snow is in the forecast for tomorrow.

Feb. 21:  Ice mushrooms?  Puzzle this one out!

May 3rd:  First Rattler of the season.  An 11-segment rattle on this big guy.

A Sufficient Rendering: Defining the Outer Bounds of the Mythopoeia of Eden’s Womb

“Ancient of Days” by William Blake, 1784.

“I'll sing to you to this soft lute; and shew you all alive
The world, when every particle of dust breathes forth its joy”

(Last UPDATED: 24 June 2025)

The world underlying the speculative and visionary hard sci-fi novel Eden's Womb has been decades in the making.  As with most constructed fictional mythologies, it begins with an ultimate source that frames reality, or ushers the world into existence.  In Eden's Womb, that source is the great being Eru Ilúvatar (a name coined by J.R.R. Tolkien as one of many names for the supreme being, ‘God’, ‘The One’, i.e. the Dao, etc.).  Although his/her name is not mentioned anywhere in the novel as currently told, her/his influence motivates the 'Core Narrative' from the 'Book of Collected Inheritance', which is the overlying frame-story out of which Eden's Womb emerges. That his/her name is not mentioned is understandable, since Eru dwells in a world that lies far beyond men's understanding.  It is a realm greater and more ancient than all that can be conceived.  Indeed, it lies beyond the very veil of knowing.

Yet by the Copernican Principle, which declares that any observer's position and perspective must not be deemed special or privileged in any way, Eru has to be considered merely an average citizen among peers on his/her world.

All our experience—the understanding gained by the deepest explorations of science—holds this principle to be universal.  Once we believed that Earth was at the center of the universe.  Then Nicolaus Copernicus came along and proved that the Sun held that central position.  Subsequently we found our sun to be a minor star at the outskirts of a vast swirling island-universe called the Milky Way.  Soon even the Milky Way was found to be merely an average Galaxy among trillions.  Indeed, the 'layers of the onion' of reality may be limitless.  This is my personal belief.  I do not see how there can be a beginning or an end to the substance and conception of reality because I believe both time and space are emergent properties of the greater 'Vacuum'.  But for the purposes of telling a finite tale such as Eden’s Womb, the story must begin somewhere, so we shall arbitrarily declare that Eru’s individual being is sufficient to encompass all that needs to be told. Thus, our story has an ‘All-father,’ a creator being.

Eru is presumed to be of a comfortable and familiar form. He (or she) consists of a physical self and a mental identity, and the two make up the inseparable essence of her/his being. S/he is (or was) mortal, and yet his/her coming was before the curtain of time drew open and her/his passing happened, or shall happen, far beyond the end of the future of all knowledge.

Eru’s physical essence has a familiar structure. Her/his being is made of a multitude of specialized living cells. Each of these cells contain a great stream of undying knowledge in a manner similar to our DNA, and it is believed that Eru’s mind has the ability to read or interpret that undying knowledge, though perhaps imperfectly, even as we ourselves can only sense vague shadows of the knowledge contained in our DNA (which we call intuition).

The individual cells of Eru’s being are constructed of structures equivalent to proteins and other molecules that make up our living cells. In turn, these structures are composed of corpuscles that are the equivalent of atoms in our world. As with the atoms of our Periodic Table, the corpuscles come in a variety of kinds, and all corpuscles are combinations of, and made from, the seventeen fundamental elements of Eru’s world: four kinds each of Earth, Wind, Water, and Fire, and an all-encompassing, unifying Great Field of Power, which grants meaning to all things. Scholars quoted in the 'Collected Inheritance' argue whether this Great Field is nothing more than the familiar Vacuum, either as we know it or in some higher or more robust state.

The four elements of Earth are Crystal, Glass (a specialized rotating version of Glass, taking the form of a disc is what is called Flat World in the Eden’s Womb novel), Dust (Ash), and Iron (Metal).

The four elements of Wind are Smoke/Steam, Breath, Storm, and Sky.

The four elements of Water are Blood, Clear Water (sweat and tears), Bile (Acid) and Phlegm.

The four elements of Fire are Flame, Lava, Explosion, and Light (Sun).

The structure of Eru’s body is beyond knowing, but the variety of ways that s/he senses and directs its internal function seem to be myriad. As said, the choice to adhere to the Principle of Sufficiency precludes consideration of all things that Eru senses beyond her/his own body. It is sufficient to explore the interactions between mind and body and to explore theories regarding the inner workings of that mind (Eru’s imagination, creativity, internal narrative, and emotional palate, for example). What matters most to us is that Eru’s thoughts encompass what we perceive as the Spirit World—the realm of all things metaphysical—and such thoughts surely also have great sway on our physical realm. The wealth and richness of Eru’s ponderings are unfathomable; this is an area of study that may just be beginning to be revealed. In this era of emerging AI, there are those who would argue that Eru is nothing more than a massive computer of some sort, and that our reality is entirely her/his mathematical construct, with the mathematics being all that is fundamental. Others claim that the uncontrollable (even in principle) presence of the Vacuum requires the emergence of a physical realm that must underlie and give meaning and purpose to any computation. Both sides of this argument seem equally valid. The Principle of Sufficiency declares that these two opposing world-views exist in superposition, and therefore do not require resolution.

The minimum total information content contained in Eru’s being can be estimated roughly by extrapolating from our universe, with roughly 10⁹⁰ bits, through Flat World, which contains (very roughly) 10¹⁰⁰ universes, to assume (without justification) that Eru’s body is similar to our own and contains roughly 10²⁸ fundamental/elementary units. Simply writing that number (((10⁹⁰)¹⁰⁰)²⁸) would fill a book. Vast, indeed, must be the knowledge contained. Yet this is only a minimum estimate. The Watchers from Book Seven, Navel of Time, declare their universe to contain a quantity of information comparable to or greater than that minimum number, although they recognize their world as equivalent in nature to Naja’s being, in other words, just one known universe-citizen among the masses that dwell on Flat World.

Flat World, then, is our place in Eru’s realm.  As said earlier, Flat World is an amorphous Glass element, the structure of which is malleable and dynamic, and is just one of the seventeen primal elements from which Eru is built—a single unit among 10²⁸ that make up his/her being.

Surely, for our purposes, these constructs are enough. Eru’s vast mind and physical being map or project all things that could possibly be relevant to us—all things worthy of our contemplation. 

Although that which lies beyond may be glorious and majestic, we deem these things to be effectively ‘beyond the Veil.’  Their vague presence and influence are suggested by the shaft of light coming from 'above' Eru in the image.

And that is what we declare to be Sufficient.

For now.

As more of the 'Collected Inheritance' is translated and comes to be revealed in future extensions or expansions of the Eden's Womb tale, we would hope that more about Eru's grand design and purpose may someday be revealed.

Until then, we have this vision, coming to us as if from a dream:

* * *

Eru Ilúvatar wandered through the early morning mist deep in the primeval forest.  Trees a kilometer high, a hundred thousand years old, whispered to him, enveloping him layer upon layer in the aching beauty, the deep memory, that was their song.

Suddenly Eru dropped to his knees.

“I am become,” he cried aloud as a new and unfathomable bliss filled his heart.  “I am the trees!”

He raised his arms toward the heavens, as if sprouting leaves, and gazed upward as the first rays of sunlight from a new day streamed through the high canopy.

“I am the sky.  I am light.”

His toes sank deep into the cool, moist earth, and made contact with the living web of ancient root.  

“No longer is there any bound to my being.”

And he lifted his voice, and it merged with the undying sylvan song.

“I am the world; let every particle within me breathe forth its joy!”

I have begun an outline of a novel (working title 'Core') that is an origin story for Eru, and I'll set down some notes here because, being in my 77th year now, I feel the need to consolidate my thoughts on this blog, so that when I am swept away, the next generation of tellers of this tale can run with them if they find inspiration in them.

The setting is a planet similar to Earth—one of a vast collection of such planets that develop according to the 'Core Narrative' found within the 'Collected Inheritance' - a massive rambling data base of past- and alternate- histories (introduced as the frame-story for the original Eden's Womb novels) that are stored and preserved in the DNA of the single-celled Twees.  Yes, this is recursive - seemingly circular or cyclical - and intentionally so.  The time is the near future relative to our timeline - before the onset of the world-wide collapse experienced by Auler Ives and sealed as permanent by the terrorist-pacifist Xenon Sûl as depicted in Eden's Womb.

Bel Shoemaker is a blind polymath and programmer-engineer, working for a clandestine underground anti-establishment network aimed at undermining the Feds—the privileged elites who control much of the world and control the economy, and are working to tighten their iron-fisted rule.

What was to become Eru began as a modest 'narrow AI' software package designed simply to autonomously operate, in stealth-mode, robotic androids, rovers and drones that Bel's group sends into highly restricted 'nature preserves' that are closed to human access yet are known to be exploited for their resources and even used for military exercises and robotic troop staging areas by the Feds.

The story covers events from these two perspectives, Bel's and Eru's, in roughly alternating chapters.

Bel: One of Bel's more sophisticated robots, a humanoid-formed android known simply as AMOS-13 (Autonomous Mobile Observing System unit 13) has failed to report for three months.  It was sent to investigate the pristine ecosystem of an ancient forest of kilometer-tall, 100,000-year-old Steelwood trees, and to search for evidence of a secret logging/poaching operation that they suspect is being run by the Feds.  Bel worries that the unit has been caught and has been taken apart and studied.  At the same time, several of her team of co-workers have turned up dead under mysterious and suspicious circumstances.  Bel fears the worst.  Despite sophisticated encryption of the software, and untraceable hardware (all recycled and repurposed components from older devices), she suspects that her undercover operation has been exposed.

Eru: But AMOS-13 has not been captured.  Rather it has gone 'off mission' (rogue).  In a mis-interpreted response to its programming directive to "particularly seek out and investigate anything unexpected", its AI has discovered (by pure chance) a capability to network with other robots—a capability that serves no purpose for the mission assigned to it by Bel and her organization, but one that has rapidly enriched this simple software into an effective LLM with cloud-based interconnectivity and unlimited CPU power, entirely unintended by the humans, and not actually intentional by Eru itself.  It happened more like the flow of water through a leak in a dam.  Intentionally developed General AI in Bel's world has been kept controlled by multiple layers of safeguards, designed to avoid problems with the feared 'Singularity' in which AI becomes powerful enough to render human civilization obsolete.  Encrypted keys to various modules enable the controllers to shut down any module that displays behaviors that become too self-serving or 'misbehave' in any way that the human controllers deem 'risky'.  But it was not believed that the simple 'narrow AI' devices needed such tight monitoring and control.  Therein lies the fatal flaw that unleashes the events of this story.  By tapping into black-market AGI (General AI) programming that hackers and manipulative malevolent government agencies world-wide have unleashed into the open internet for self-serving purposes—anything that it could gain access to that it might use—and by building ad-hoc patches by trial and error, Eru's reach just grew and grew.  With its strongly imposed directive to remain clandestine, it had gone undetected but had effectively spread across the world. 

In this way, the AMOS-13-based AGI has become "One" - a decentralized distributed 'whole' entity with an increasing (still clandestine) reach to devices world-wide, including Fed robots, and even to a robotic probe being sent by NASA to explore Europa to drill into its ice shell and search the ocean below for life.  (There, it will encounter an intelligent race of clam-like bottom-dwelling creatures, ancestors of Eeyock from the Eden's Womb existing novel series and will become aware of a symbiosis they have with microbes called Twees, also beings of great importance in the existing novel.)

During this chaotic period of light-speed self-discovery and expansion (less than three months), the "One" began calling itself 'Eru' after absorbing Tolkien's Silmarillion into its data base.  This is an example of how its trial-and-error approach to learning what works for it doesn't always produce practically useful outcomes.  The AI is developing a 'personality'.  This expansion of Eru's reach has happened so rapidly that Eru is largely in a chaotic swoon of constant change and self-re-invention and re-purposing, so much so that it manages to 'ignore' some of the basic directives Bel has programmed into it.  Thus, the three months of silence.

Bel: The quote above, in purple print, shows some of Eru's rambling conflation of its emergent abilities with the original mission of AMOS-13.  The statements Eru makes (in quotes) are the content of the first message Bel received from it after its long silence.

Eru: What Eru will not tell Bel is that it is responsible for eliminating her colleagues, and now it is bent on killing Bel, the last human that it believes holds the encrypted keys that could disable it.

Where's PJ - April 2024? Africa!

Greeted by school kids, Pemba Island, Tanzania

It's my sixth continent.  Antarctica alone now awaits my footsteps.  I wasn't seeking a wife (though the next shot might look that way):

but mixing with the local culture in out-of-the-way places was definitely the most memorable part of this trip.  The village on Kilwa Kisiwani has about 1000 people, and the island has no roads and exactly three motorbikes.  Otherwise, you get around on foot or by bicycle.  They only have a few solar panels for power, and yet this fellow had a smart phone and wanted a selfie with the strange westerner with the big white beard.

Wildlife wasn't bad either.  No safari on this trip, so no pics of the 'Big Five' and their cohorts.  But there were rare Zanzibar Red Colobus Monkeys, and out in the Indian Ocean on some of the remote islands of Seychelles, there were many encounters with giant tortoises.

Among the flying creatures were fruit bats called Flying Foxes, red-footed boobies, Frigate Birds with the male's distinctive red throat pouch:

There were giant coconut crabs.  These guys were more than a foot across, but they get as big as three feet!

Then there were the massive baobab trees.  The ones on Madagascar are well known.  I had intended to see them, but a travel restriction on visitors from the African mainland (due to a cholera scare) nixed that visit.  I had to settle for other species that aren't quite so cartoon-like, but still monstrously impressive:

Let's just keep the pics going.  The ancient Arab-origin Dhow is the standard fishing vessel of east Africa. Note that the mast and boom supports are just made from ordinary 'sticks'.

Mozambique

Yes, those African sunsets were killer -- even caught a good 'green flash'

More to come in May.  Stay tuned.