Me & My Man

Springwolf.com Goes To The Dogs..I mean Blogs.

Springwolf.com was my first website on the internet and I started it back in 1997. It hasn’t really changed a lot over that time. I’ve added stuff, deleted stuff and replaced stuff. But it’s been quite a while since I really did anything with it. I decided this week that it needed a total overhaul. And the best way to do that, was to turn the static site into a blog.

Then came the name. What to call my special place here. Well when I first decided to turn my site into a blog, I decided to call it Springwolf’s Kosmos. And that’s what this article originally talks about.

In July 2014, my Gemini side reared up and I felt the need for change. Kosmos was retired and Springwolf’s Creations was born.

But I really liked the Kosmos; so here’s my homage to the original inspiration and creation.

March 26, 2014
I recently had a dream of a very kewl place. An island somewhere out in space. It was a 5 acre tropical island, complete with an ocean (yeah, it’s a dream; I got no idea where the ocean came from on this floating island in the depths of space). There was a lovely white and glass house, that cleaned itself. Another great plus to this dream. And off to what I’m calling the east of the island was a pinkish/purple/blue nebula and several planets that hovered on and near the horizon. I went on a search to find a sci-fi image that came close to what I saw on my special island to no avail. But I did find several images that were close. Being the artist I am, I decided to combine the components of those images and make the view of my Galactic home come to life.

My Galactic Island

That I decided was going to be the inspiration for my new blog and I needed to find a name that would go with it. Something lofty. Something that represented an overlook perhaps. A place that over looks space and time in a study of the vast and great unknown.

I thought about a variety of names. Springwolf’s Palisade was one option. But a palisade is a fence used for defenses. Too keep something in and other things out. Well I didn’t like that very much.

Springwolf’s Galaxy was an option. But that’s too much like my son’s science and technology website. His is a galaxy too. So that didn’t last long as an idea. But that got me thinking. What’s a galaxy? It’s a wide open space, it is space, it’s the universe, but science has recently made assertions that our universe isn’t so “uni” any more. It’s a multi-verse. Well that’s a pretty big thing.

That got me thinking about one of my favorite people in the world, Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson and his excellent new show Cosmos.

A Cosmos is the Universe regarded as an ordered system. It’s also a plant.

I’m big on where words and their academic meaning, but I also like to know how a word evolved. Where did it come from and how was it originally used.

Euclid’s Elements – Book I Proposition 47, the Pythagorean Theorem:

It seems that Pythagoras was the first philosopher to apply the term “cosmos” to the Universe, perhaps referring to the starry firmament. But a little more digging into its etymology and you discover that the Greek word he used was Kosmos. And of course Cosmos derives from the Latinized form of Greek kosmos which was used as “order, good order, orderly arrangement.” So when Pythagoras was writing about the starry firmament in the sky, he was saying the stars are an orderly arrangement of celestial bodies said to move about in harmony of creation.

But the word goes on to in its evolution and gets promoted by German scientist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt.
Kosmos began as a lecture series delivered by Humboldt at the University of Berlin, and was published in five volumes between 1845 and 1862 (the fifth was posthumous and incomplete). Widely read by academics and laymen alike, it applied the ancient Greek view of the orderliness of the cosmos (the universe) to the Earth, suggesting that universal laws applied as well to the apparent chaos of the terrestrial world. Controversially for the time, Humboldt in Kosmos spoke of the spirituality of the natural world only in general terms, avoiding the notion of a creator. ~ Wikipedia Kosmos (Humboldt).

So there you have it, between Pythagoras and Humboldt, and Dr. Tyson; all very smart and wise men, came the inspiration for my blog of Harmony (all things are connected and interrelated), Order (there is a flow and order to the cosmos), and Creation (out of chaos comes creation ~ also known as the Chaos Theory which I happen to believe in).

I might talk about science, nature, discoveries in astrophysics. I might share a poem, or bit of news we’ve come across. Rant about dis-harmony or un-orderly things. Or simply share a picture of two for laughs or interests. Who knows what might appear on here one day. Perhaps even faeries from the garden, sharing their creations of legend, lore and crafting.

© 1997-2014 Springwolf, D.D., Ph.D., Springwolf’s Kosmos. All Rights Reserved.