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Mapping "Parable of the Sower": Characters

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 Hello reader. Again I present a blog post that is primarily not writing: a map of the characters that emerge in the later half of the book and their relationships to each other. The first Earthseed community is composed of a diverse set, and while creating this map I gained an appreciation for how the group grew and evolved along their journey through California. To wrap up this blog post series, I wanted to come back to the concept of God as change. In the last two "mapping" blog posts, I've explored how location and social connections changed drastically for all the characters throughout the story. But more than that, we can see how the intentions changed - the intended path and the destination as far as geography is concerned, and with social connections, the changing nature of how people joined the traveler group. And I guess I could end with something sappy like how God was with them along their journey, but I'm really more interested in how deceptively stable t...

Mapping "Parable of the Sower": Geography

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 So for this blog post, there may not be many words, but instead images. I'm doing something I've been wanting to do ever since the route planning scene in Chapter 20 - develop a visual understanding of Lauren's journey. So Lauren starts out in "Robledo", which is about 20 miles away from Los Angeles (according to Wikipedia), and I couldn't find a real community called "Robledo", so for the purpose of mapping out Lauren's path, I'll just use Los Angeles itself as a starting point. We know that Lauren, Harry, and Zahra walked along the 118, 23, and 101 freeways on their path from LA to Santa Barbara, so here's that: Then we know that they walked a long way on the 101, and the next place I can find them mentioning is Salinas, CA. They find the radio earpiece that tells them to stay away from the Bay Area, leading them to turn east through San Juan Bautista, Hollister, by the San Luis Reservoir, then along I-5 through Sacramento. Their final...

perceiving one's self

 At the beginning of Chapter 12: "We are Earthseed The life that perceives itself Changing." This excerpt is baffling to me for a number of reasons: - Who is Earthseed, sorry? Is it the collective of all the people who follow the religion Earthseed? If so, maybe "we" should be rephrased "I". Otherwise, perhaps it's the human species. In that case, maybe the name "Earthseed" refers to humans and our potential to grow and cultivate power structures, tools, items, ideas, and societies. But... - Self-awareness isn't limited to Lauren, if the former is correct, or humans, if the latter is correct. Plenty of animals perceive themselves. But I guess I'm forgetting the last line, which with the second makes:  "The life that perceives itself changing." ...Okay, this was supposed to be a blog post about how this makes no sense, but I think I figured something out here. Know how a lot of people in Lauren's community are in denial a...

Extreme mental toughness (feat. Keith (RIP))

In traumatic situations, people develop mental shells. During genocides, wars, and other situations in which lots of human suffering and other atrocities are happening, people are known to numb themselves to the pain and suffering of others. It's one of the nastier survival mechanisms, for sure. But what is up with Keith? Lauren and Keith seem to be on extremes of the empathy spectrum. That's obviously the main reason why they don't understand each other and thus don't particularly like each other, but even with her fictional hyperempathy syndrome, Lauren's much easier to relate to in terms of how she sees and treats the suffering of others.  'Cause... well... Keith's a murderer. And probably a drug dealer and definitely a robber. And he doesn't seem to be troubled in the least by any of it. The way I would imagine numbing one's self to suffering of others is to stop trying to help other people, and just look out for yourself and members of your smal...

Not Olivar!!

Welcome to an interview with the voices inside my head. Today's topic is Olivar. Question one - Is Olivar a safe place to go? Voice 1: No, nowhere is safe in this world except for a remote place far away from society. Get as far away from humans as possible and try to survive. Voice 2: Olivar seems like it could become a place of tyranny and exploitation by the company that's taken over, but at least there's some centralized power. Lauren's community is falling apart, and even if Olivar guarantees things slowly getting worse, there's no constant fear of the destruction of everything keeping you afloat. Voice 1: Olivar seems rather scary because the company can trade you temporary safety for your power. Sure, the outside world can tear apart Lauren's community, but they can always rebuild. If their individual liberties get stripped from them slowly in Olivar, they'll be trapped and can't better their own situation. Voice 2: Fine. But then Lauren needs to ...

Is teaching mutually exclusive with scaring?

 Lauren's dad asks of Lauren on page 65: "Don't talk about this (meaning the danger the community is in) anymore." His rationale for this unfolds in the following pages. Lauren's dad believes that "it's better to teach people than to scare them," but the fact that he says this to Lauren means that he thinks all Lauren's done is scare Joanne. From Lauren's perspective we can clearly see this is false, though; Lauren's been speaking about what she believes to be true from what she has learned, and simply tried to break past Joanne's wall of denial. But clearly Lauren didn't chip all the way through, and Joanne then called on her parents to help her rebuild that wall. Nonetheless, what Lauren did was, to me, a raw form of teaching that her dad hasn't considered. Teaching people in this world without scaring them at all requires lying by omission and strengthening denial simply because of all the bad things happening.

Some philosophical stuff about God because I don't even understand words anymore (thanks, Lauren)

 I wanted to offer a point for discussion about Lauren's God, which is the following: why does Lauren call her God "God"?  Here's my reasoning for asking this. The one constant feature of Lauren's bolded writing at the start of each passage is that "God is change". Lauren also acknowledges that most people around her have Gods that are represented as father figures or even just as some sort of being. I think most people would agree that the mental image of a God is much more likely of some sort of humanoid form rather than something so hard to visualize as the concept of change, which can't even be described as an entity. So why does it make sense to Lauren to call something so different by the same name? Here are some potential answers I have to offer: 1. "God" is the starting point for Lauren's thought. What I mean is that perhaps all of this thinking about the forces affecting the human experience that Lauren has done was originally ...