taken on 7/17/10
and somewhere in the 80’s
between the oat bran and the ozone
she started to figure out things like “why?”
one eye pointed upwards
looking for the holes in the sky
one eye on the little flashing red light
a picasso face twisted
listing down the canvas
of the end of an endless night
— Ani Difranco
‘I have done my best’; that is about all the philosophy of living one needs.
— Lin Yutang
taken on 7/11/10
taken on 7/2/10
We suffer from a hallucination, from a false and distorted sensation of our own existence as living organisms. Most of us have the sensation that “I myself” is a separate center of feeling and action, living inside and bounded by the physical body-a center which “confronts” an “external” world of people and things, making contact through the senses with a universe both alien and strange.
…we are so wrong! …We have lacked the real humility of recognizing that we are members of the biosphere, the harmony of contained conflicts in which we cannot exist at all without the cooperation of plants, insects, fish, cattle, and bacteria. In the same measure, we have lacked the proper self-respect of recognizing that I, the individual organism, am a structure of such fabulous ingenuity that it calls the whole universe into being.
— Alan Watts
There were days when she was very happy without knowing why. She was happy to be alive and breathing, when her whole being seemed to be one with the sunlight, the color, the odors, the luxuriant warmth of some perfect Southern day. She liked then to wander alone into strange and unfamiliar places. She discovered many a sunny, sleepy corner, fashioned to dream in. And she found it good to dream and to be alone and unmolested.
There were days when she was unhappy, she did not know why,—when it did not seem worth while to be glad or sorry, to be alive or dead; when life appeared to her like a grotesque pandemonium and humanity like worms struggling blindly toward inevitable annihilation. She could not work on such a day, nor weave fancies to stir her pulses and warm her blood.
from “The Awakening” by Kate Chopin
“Torcello, Near Venice” taken by Henri Cartier-Bresson, 1953
Economics is, like all else, fluid, and CAN change
Unfortunately, economists know much less about how to adapt regulation over time to complex systems with constantly evolving risks, much less how to design regulatory resilient institutions. Until these problems are better understood, we may be doomed to a world of regulation that perpetually overshoots or undershoots its goals.
-Kenneth Rogoff, from The BP Oil Spill’s Lessons for Regulation
Remembering how it is to feel free also clearly brings into focus how ridiculously fettered I have been. Like the thorns inside my robe have been there so long, I’d forgotten they were even there. Like the soreness of a muscle as it finally relaxes.
I love my family
We shall not cease from exploration
…We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.
T.S. Eliot
露の世は露の世ながらさりながら
taken on 4/24/10
From “Nature, Man and Woman”
[ In many circles, “pantheism” has long been a definitively damning label, and those who like their religious and philosophical opinions to be robust and definite are also inclined to use the word “mysticism” with the same kind of opprobrium. They associate it with “mist”, with vagueness, with clouding of issues and blurring of distinctions.
…The mystic is thus a feeble-minded fellow who finds in this boring “undifferentiated aesthetic continuum” a source of enthusiasm, because, somehow or other, it unifies the conflicts and evils of the world into a transcendental Goodness.
While this is obviously an ignorant caricature, there is something to be said in defense of philosophical vagueness. Strangely assorted people join forces in making fun of it—Logical Positivists and Catholic Neo-Thomists, Dialectical Materialists and Protestant Neo-Orthodoxists, Behaviorists and Fundamentalists. Despite intense differences of opinion among themselves, they belong to a psychological type which takes special glee in having one’s philosophy of life clear-cut, hard, and rigid. They range from the kind of scientist who likes to lick his tongue around the notion of “brute” facts to the kind of religionist who fondles a system of “unequivocal dogma.” There is doubtless a deep sense of security in being able to say, “The clear and authoritative teaching of the Church is…,” or to feel that one has mastered a logical method which can tear other opinions—especially metaphysical opinions—to shreds.
Attitudes of this kind usually go together with a somewhat aggressive and hostile type of personality which employs sharp definition like the edge of a sword. There is more in this than a metaphor, for, as we have seen, the laws and hypotheses of science are not so much discoveries as instruments, like knives and hammers, for bending nature to one’s will. So there is a type of personality which approaches the world with an entire armory of sharp and hard instruments, by means of which it slices and sorts the universe into precise and sterile categories which will not interfere with one’s peace of mind.
There is a place in life for a sharp knife, but there is a still more important place for other kinds of contact with the world. Man is not to be an intellectual porcupine, meeting his environment with a surface of spikes. …But there is a kind of brash mental healthiness ever ready to rush in and clean up the mystery, to find out just precisely where the wild geese have gone, what herbs the master is picking and where, and that sees the true face of a landscape only in the harsh light of the noonday sun. It is just this attitude which every traditional culture finds utterly insufferable in Western man, not just because it is tactless and unrefined, but because it is blind. It seeks the depth by cutting into the surface. But the depth is known only when it reveals itself, and ever withdraws from the probing mind.
We fail so easily to see the difference between fear of the known and respect for the unknown, thinking that those who do not hasten in with bright lights and knives are deterred by a holy and superstitious fear. Respect for the unknown is the attitude of those who, instead of rapping nature, woo her until she gives herself. But what she gives, even then, is not the cold clarity of the surface, but the warm inwardness of the body—a mysteriousness which is not merely a negation, a blank absence of knowledge, but that positive substance which we call Wonderfull. ]
Alan Watts
Spring has sprung
