You Only Keep on Striving, and That's the Beauty
You are trying to sound
The middle of the ocean
With a six-foot pole.
― Chuang Tzu
 |
| A Leaf Fairy |
Everywhere in the world, magic works and doesn't work and no one's ever figured out how to make it more consistent, not with technology or potions or prayers.
― Kathy Parks, Notes from My Captivity
 |
| What Is Conscious? |
It is possible that we are rare, fleeting specks of awareness in an unfeeling cosmic desert, the only witnesses to its wonder. It is also possible that we are living in a universal sea of sentience, surrounded by ecstasy and strife that is open to our influence. Sensible beings that we are, both possibilities should worry us.
Judging by folklore and myth, this is a perennial human desire, to converse with our neighbors in their separate dialects—to speak bear with bear, oak with oak, flint with flint—and once in a great while to leap into the universal language and hear and be heard by the Creator.
In the beginning, storytellers say, humans and animals could speak to one another, as familiarly as God spoke with Adam and Eve in the garden. The lore of many lands is filled with helpful coyotes or cats, talkative serpents or swans, wise lions, crafty crows. Even the villains—the dragons and wolves—are garrulous. Now and again a wild poet such as Blake may still converse with tigers, or a rare shaman such as Black Elk may still converse with buffaloes. But the rest of us have forgotten the universal language. Our ears have been stopped up. Our lips are sealed.
According to Hindus, God speaks Sanskrit; according to Jews, God speaks Hebrew; according to one people after another, God speaks the language of the tribe. What God speaks, I humbly submit, is the universe. Since nobody has supplied us with a cosmic dictionary, we have been laboring, word by word, over a thousand generations, to compile one for ourselves.
― Scott Russell Sanders, "Telling the Holy" in Wonder and Other Survival Skills
 |
| https://twitter.com/KaitlinCurtice/status/1035478101311057920?s=04 |
Let's start the day with this:
We don't know much.
We have more to learn than to teach.
We are small things in a vast world.
Resistance to hate works best when led by intentional and constant humility.
 | ||
| The Motherless Oven |
Unreasoning . . . is fundamental to understanding circular history -
God creates Man and Man creates God.
The secret life of fungi: Ten fascinating facts
They're all around us, in the soil, our bodies and the air, but are often too small to be seen with the naked eye. . . .
"They're really weird organisms with the most bizarre life cycle. And yet when you understand their role in the Earth's ecosystem, you realise that they underpin life on Earth." . . .
1. Fungi are in a kingdom of their own but are closer to animals than plants
2. They have chemicals in their cell walls shared with lobsters and crabs
3. A fungus has been discovered capable of breaking down plastics in weeks rather than years
4. There is evidence to suggest that yeasts - a type of fungus - were being used to produce the alcoholic drink mead as long ago as 9,000 years ago
5. At least 350 species are consumed as foods including truffles, which can sell for thousands of dollars apiece, quorn, and those in marmite and cheese
6. Plastic car parts, synthetic rubber and lego are made using itaconic acid derived from a fungus
7. 216 species of fungi are thought to be hallucinogenic
8. Fungi are being used to turn crop waste into bioethanol
9. Products made from fungi can be used as replacements for polystyrene foam, leather and building materials
10. DNA studies show that there are thousands of different fungi in a single sample of soil, many of which are unknown and hidden - so-called "dark taxa"
 |
| https://www.facebook.com/ContemplativeMonk/photos/a.521707157878538/1773310342718207/?type=3&theater |
Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement, [to] get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted. Everything is phenomenal; everything is incredible; never treat life casually. To be spiritual is to be amazed.
Paradise is not a place but a condition, a simple being-alive, a drinking straight from the spring.
― Scott Russell Sanders, "Telling the Holy" in Wonder and Other Survival Skills
 |
| The Motherless Oven |
We appear to have found a place where safe and dangerous are the same thing.
Use the commonplace to escape the commonplace.
― Buson
A question: Would you rather find somewhere with no human-created light for viewing the night sky or somewhere with no human-created noise for listening to nature?
My answer: If I could only have the experience a single time, I would see the stars with no light pollution. If it was someplace I could go repeatedly, I would savor the sounds of nature.
 |
| The Motherless Oven |
The way to free yourself from any system of control is to do something useless. But do it as well as you can!
Human beings excel, beyond all else, at becoming absorbed in their own self stories.
― David Gessner, "When You See a Skimmer" in Wonder and Other Survival Skills
That’s why I like stories. They usually wind up revealing more about a person than what they’d tell you about themselves. It’s not that they lie intentionally, but when people describe themselves they’re really describing what they see in a mirror, and most mirrors are too distorted to show us the truth. If you listen hard enough, there’s more truth in fiction than in all the other shit combined.
― Shaun David Hutchinson, Feral Youth
 |
| The Motherless Oven |
Stories don't have points. They're lies for keeping the truth in. They're sort of rounded, not pointy at all.
I have come to probably the halfway point in my life, a life blessed mainly with privilege and good fortune, yet more and more often I worry about how I’ll get through the rest of it without giving in to cynicism or self-indulgence or despair. And until I learn to find some balance between action and acceptance, I suspect that I’ll keep throttling myself with questions about suffering and heartbreak and the darker exhalations of the human soul.
― John Calderazzo, "Sailing Through the Night" in Wonder and Other Survival Skills
It's always so awkward when adults comment on your age. They look at you and say You're still so young or You're getting so old, and you want to shake your head and say I'm not young or old. I'm just me.
― Tae Keller, The Science of Breakable Things
 |
| The Can Opener's Daughter |
Suicide is empirical, there is only one answer! If you get it wrong, you could die too soon and miss stuff or die too late and suffer.
 |
| https://www.facebook.com/TheOther98/photos/a.115969958413991/2686064241404537/?type=3&theater |
Poverty exists not because we cannot feed the poor, but because we cannot satisfy the rich.
Blaming the fish for getting sick does no good when the water is poisoned; healing sick fish who remain in poisoned water won't keep them cured.
Americans Want to Believe Jobs Are the Solution to Poverty. They’re Not.
These days, we’re told that the American economy is strong. Unemployment is down, the Dow Jones industrial average is north of 25,000 and millions of jobs are going unfilled. But for people like Vanessa, the question is not, Can I land a job? (The answer is almost certainly, Yes, you can.) Instead the question is, What kinds of jobs are available to people without much education? By and large, the answer is: jobs that do not pay enough to live on. . . .
Millions of Americans work with little hope of finding security and comfort. In recent decades, America has witnessed the rise of bad jobs offering low pay, no benefits and little certainty. When it comes to poverty, a willingness to work is not the problem, and work itself is no longer the solution.
Until the late 18th century, poverty in the West was considered not only durable but desirable for economic growth. . . .
The nonworking poor person getting something for nothing is a lot like the cheat committing voter fraud: pariahs who loom far larger in the American imagination than in real life. . . .
We might think that the existence of millions of working poor Americans like Vanessa would cause us to question the notion that indolence and poverty go hand in hand. But no. While other inequality-justifying myths have withered under the force of collective rebuke, we cling to this devastatingly effective formula. Most of us lack a confident account for increasing political polarization, rising prescription drug costs, urban sprawl or any number of social ills. But ask us why the poor are poor, and we have a response quick at the ready, grasping for this palliative of explanation. We have to, or else the national shame would be too much to bear. How can a country with such a high poverty rate — higher than those in Latvia, Greece, Poland, Ireland and all other member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development — lay claim to being the greatest on earth? Vanessa’s presence is a judgment. But rather than hold itself accountable, America reverses roles by blaming the poor for their own miseries. . . .
When small solutions are applied to a huge problem, they don’t work; and when weak antipoverty initiatives don’t work, many throw up their hands and argue that we should stop tossing money at the problem altogether. Cheap solutions only cheapen the problem. . . .
We need a new language for talking about poverty. “Nobody who works should be poor,” we say. That’s not good enough. Nobody in America should be poor, period. No single mother struggling to raise children on her own; no formerly incarcerated man who has served his time; no young heroin user struggling with addiction and pain; no retired bus driver whose pension was squandered; nobody. And if we respect hard work, then we should reward it, instead of deploying this value to shame the poor and justify our unconscionable and growing inequality. “I’ve worked hard to get where I am,” you might say. Well, sure. But Vanessa has worked hard to get where she is, too.
I got handed an Ayn Rand sandwich
straight from a can it tasted so bland
I asked a lass to pass me a glass
of Engel’s Conditions of the Working Class
right away they dragged me to the committee
to explain my un-American activity
they’re gonna see they made a mistake
if they’d only let me play my mixtape
I’m not partial to the martial
or the plutocrats in their beaver hats
and the fascists have the outfits
but I don’t care for the outfits
what I care about is music
and the communists have the music
I hear a melody
and just as suddenly
I know who I’m
supposed to be
I don’t need a rationale
to sing the Internationale
I only need to plug in the headphone jack
so I can listen to my backing track
I’m not jealous of the zealous
or anarchics with guitar picks
and the fascists have their outfits
but I don’t care for the outfits
what I care about is music
and the communists have the music
yes the communists have the music
oh the communists have the music
I hear a melody
and just as suddenly
I know who I’m
supposed to be
I’m not partial to the martial
or the plutocrats in their beaver hats
and the fascists have the outfits
but I don’t care for the outfits
what I care about is music
and the communists have the music
Dial-A-Song Video Week 32.
 |
| The Can Opener's Daughter |
A mother should sacrifice herself. The world is a happy place when it can sacrifice mothers on the altar of unconditional love. . . .
I can take the blame. All the blame! I'm designed for it.
I'm like the village witch who gets burned when the child gets sick or the crops fail . . . If you can't blame the weather, blame the mother. Welcome to womanhood.
I’m not a liar. You’re a liar. I’m just telling stories; that’s all. And sometimes when you’re telling a story, you can’t let stupid shit like the truth get in the way.
Besides, what good is the truth for anyway? Folks get put in prison for shit they didn’t do every single day, and telling the truth doesn’t help them one bit. Ask any woman who’s ever reported a sexual assault, and she’ll tell you how much the truth is worth. Nothing. The truth isn’t worth a damned thing. Only what people believe. And the funny thing is that most of the time, the story being told and how the person’s telling it isn’t as important as who’s doing the telling. Ask any black person who’s ever gone up against the police and they’ll tell you.
Nah. There’s no such thing as an objective truth anymore. It’s all about what you believe. Believe something hard enough and—to you at least—that’s the truth forever and ever, and fuck anyone who tries to tell you otherwise.
Take these stories. I don’t know if they’re true or not, but I bet the ones doing the telling believe them. And that’s kind of all that matters. Whether a story is true isn’t important if you’re hurting all the same because of it.
― Shaun David Hutchinson, Feral Youth
 |
| The Can Opener's Daughter |
Making sense is overrated. It's just confirming what people already think. Making new sense is more important.
I’m finding solace in the liquid nature of rock, in the impermanent nature of everything.
― John Calderazzo, "Sailing Through the Night" in Wonder and Other Survival Skills
 |
| The Can Opener's Daughter |
Nothing always means something.
The Chekhov Sentence That Contains Almost All of Life
And it seemed as though in a little while the solution would be found, and then a new and glorious life would begin; and it was clear to both of them that they still had a long, long road before them, and that the most complicated and difficult part of it was only just beginning.
Personal growth is not some sudden breakthrough that solves everything. Instead, it’s incredibly protracted, hard-won, and painful. If anything, you’re less happy as a result, not more. But you get the sense the characters wouldn’t trade it. The final insight of this ending is that there is no final insight, there is no ending. You only keep on striving, and that’s the beauty.
posted by Degolar @ 10:44 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home