What else should our lives be but a series of beginnings, of painful settings out into the unknown, pushing off from the edges of consciousness into the mystery of what we have not yet become.
Featured post
15-Edge
Leave a reply
Featured post
14-Sing
Fourteen
Singularity: The expected moment in history when the amplification of human intelligence begins to accelerate exponentially by the application of advanced technologies to the brain. –Raymond Kurzweil
All is lightness & bright;
While the forces of nature
Show us the height
Of the Universe’s favor.
fortnight = 14 days; stone = 14 pounds
Featured post
13-Ture
Featured post
12-Pomo
Featured post
11-Farm
Journey
Weary with toil, I haste me to my bed, The dear repose for limbs with travel tired; But then begins a journey in my head, To work my mind, when body’s work’s expired.”
Shakespeare, in the opening of Sonnet 27
Featured post
10-Trap
Boredom
My favorite cure for boredom is sleep. It’s very easy to get to sleep when bored and very hard to get bored after a long rest.
My next favorite is coffee. I usually keep a pot plugged in while working on the machine.
If these don’t work it may mean deeper Quality problems are bothering you and distracting you from what’s before you. The boredom is a signal that you should turn your attention to these problems.
Zen and the Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974) by Robert Pirsig
Featured post
31-Verg
Process
Featured post
29-Uman
Anatomy
I check my heart now, and I find that there is still a feeling there, of something hot and struggling.
I roll my eyes back under my closed lids, and there is the sense of opening in the middle of my forehead.
The chest thing is like fighting for words and the forehead thing is pure and empty, like after all the words have been said.
There now.
Belief. I have the biology of it. All I need is the stuff to put in there. All I need are the words.
The Gathering by Anne Enright (2007)
Featured post
23-Rite
Regional Preserve
One hour drive freeway north, winding road south home.
09-Mind
Synonyms
Thought: reason, concept; reflection, idea; serious consideration; supposition, speculation, imagination.
Think: ponder; muse; cogitate, deliberate, esteem, suppose.
25-Sage
Water Tower
22-Care
Emotion
Humans are amphibians – half spirit and half animal.
As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.
This means that while their spirit can be directed to an eternal object, their bodies, passions, and imaginations are in continual change, for to be in time means to change.
Their nearest approach to constancy, therefore, is undulation – the repeated return to a level from which they repeatedly fall back, a series of troughs & peaks.
If you watch carefully, you will see this undulation in every department of his life – his interest in his work, his affection for his friends, his physical appetites, all go up & down.
As long as he lives on earth periods of emotional and bodily richness and liveliness will alternate with periods of numbness & poverty.
Fun is closely related to Joy – a sort of emotional froth arising from the play instinct; it promotes charity, courage, contentment, and many other evils.
THE SCREWTAPE LETTERS by C.S.LEWIS
19-Here
Thought
Think of the flow of thoughts in your mind as a social media feed. Throughout your life, you have “subscribed” to different things without noticing. Now their posts keep showing up in your feed, and you don’t know from where. Some are true & interesting, but many are unhelpful or simply untrue.
Practical Meditation by Giovanni Dienstmann
15-Such
Influence
A thousand years from now human beings would probably continue to die of cancer and earthquake and such clownish mishaps as slipping in bathtubs.
Mankind would continue to be burdened with eyes that grow weak, feet that grow tired, noses that itch, intestines vulnerable to bacilli, and generative organs that are nervous until the age of virtue & senility.
Most people would continue, at least for a few hundred years, to sit in chairs, eat from dishes upon tables, read books — no matter how many cunning phonographic substitutes might be invented, wear shoes or sandals, sleep in beds, write with some sort of pens, and in general spend twenty or twenty-two hours a day much as they had spent them in 1930.
Tornadoes, floods, droughts, lightning, and mosquitoes would remain, along with the homicidal tendency known in the best of citizens when their sweethearts go dancing off with other men.
And, most fatally & abysmally, men of superior cunning, of slyer foxiness, whether they might be called Comrades, Brethren, Commissars, Kings, Patriots, Little Brothers of the Poor, or any other rosy name, would continue to have more influence than slower-witted men, however worthy.
It Can’t Happen Here (1935) by Sinclair Lewis
14-Ture
Eventual Fate
“You know nothing of future time,” pronounced Deep Thought, “and yet in my teeming circuitry I can navigate the infinite delta streams of future probability and see that there must one day come a computer whose merest operational parameters I am not worthy to calculate, but which it will be my fate eventually to design.”
Fook was losing patience. He pushed his notebook aside and muttered, “I think this is getting needlessly messianic.”
HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY by Douglas Adams
12-Gift
Blueprint
Brother Francis produced the blueprint. “The highwayman was kind enough to leave this in my keeping, Holy Father. He – he mistook it for a copy of the illumination which I was bringing as a gift.”
“You did not correct his mistake?”
Brother Francis blushed. “I’m ashamed to admit, Holy Father –”
“This, then, is the original relic you found in the crypt?”
“Yes –”
The Pope’s smile became wry. “So, then – the bandit thought your work was the treasure itself? Ah – even a robber can have a keen eye for art, yes? Monsignor Aguerra told us of the beauty of your commemoration. What a pity that it was stolen.”
“It was nothing, Holy Father. I only regret that I wasted fifteen years.”
“Wasted? How ‘wasted’? If the robber had not been misled by the beauty of your commemoration, he might have taken this, might he not?”
Canticle For Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr. (1959)