40 days in the wilderness

Ash Wednesday is today in America. This is one of my favorite seasons of the Church's year.  It's only 40 days, and it truly is a welcome aberration in the flow of life.  It focuses activity as it eliminates a bit of passivity and in doing so, brings us alive just a bit more--"Life more abundantly," right?  (John 10:10)

I am always sorrowful at the end of Lent, as if the grace required for the preceding 40 days dispels a bit and my selfishness begins beaming back through the protective clouds to roast and char my back again.  The great beauty is hammering the reminder home, that we have time--however scary that may be to think, and however soon anyone may die.  We have time to participate in this great process that requires our energy, our perspective, enthusiasm, tastes, and characteristics. We have time.  We have time.

Post no Bills

Some discretion on the part of the recorder would mean something.  I amble, and with joy, sometimes pointing it out gaily in my writings...but I digress...often (get it) -- it just ends up looking stylistically sophomoric.

I have this world I live in, and as I keep living in it, I view it with a context of thought that it breeds in me--it's a wild dynamic (we'll also get to the dynamics of epicycles in a moment).  As such, I see the relics of times gone by in all the things that I have, and if we don't find a way to hold histories hand while still courting the future and making love to the present, then we are driven to desire new things to populate our visions.  This alone, could be the birth for the kind of idea which teaches us to think of an item as 'worn out.'

It will be interesting to think more on how being able to buy things with touches and getting enjoyment from that power instantly will affect our forward political and social thinking--what will we indoctrinate the next group with? This is very far past the beautiful faces of our children and grandchildren.  These three epochs of time which crowd in the same space.  With the focus on preserving the body, could we perhaps one day see some very select few, wealthy as kings (only called something else, perhaps) crowd four--even five generations into one century?

So to the dynamic nature of time.  Is destruction and construction on a personal epicycle for every human being? I think to zoom out one level from physical matter, we see the epicycle of a soul; and out even further than that? In this human epicycle, I cannot see...I can barely see beyond our own existence to the soul.  Our faculties are interesting, and marvelously varied in the degrees to which they can be applied and the characteristic of the time period.

I once wrote so obscurely two years ago, of similar things--was it destruction or construction? And on a long enough time line, instead of the survival rate dropping to zero (which was the first lesson, for the first line), can we also consider if everything is construction?

And if so, then all is laying the foundation.

More later on, I am being summoned lovingly.

KS

John Stuart Mill, and Harriet Taylor.

These weeks, it seems the updates are by week.  It is an interesting period in life and it's also interesting to actively desire a public blog--public to the chimerical few that don't even exist in my mind.  The Age of the Internet, my dear families, is a unique moment we are graced with in time.  Have you felt the excitement of creating what we're going to be passing on? Our histories.  In, I am theorizing educatedly, two hundred, to two-hundred and fifty years, what we do today, will absolutely matter.  Maybe not you and I, but we will be a part of it somehow.

This brings me to about 1750, then I have to fast forward up to 1806 to meet John Stuart Mill, Harriet Taylor, home-schooling (our schooling system in general could be a long and engaging discussion), and accomplishment after true love.

Finally, how can anyone find philosophy and history boring? It is truly a mark of someone in great need of a better educator, one who can breath fire back into any pile of ashes.

London (of course) John Stuart Mill is being reared heavily by his father James; Greek by age three, Latin by age eight, this guy read six Dialogues of Plato by the age of ten.  The trouble with this terrific regimen of intellectual progression was its delivery as coupled with a lack of affection--so much so that it affects the way Mill even reasoned for his own lacking ability for sentiments.  He did find love eventually, in a woman married to a merchant who sparked new facets, and greatly influenced his intellectuality--the only other on par with his father's influence.  When she was widowed, they married some years later and moved from London down to Avignon, France.  They were both a bit sickly at the time, and she died shortly afterwards.  In the following seven years, John Stuart Mill accomplished more than ever before, and it meant little to him--or at least that's one way my history, and ours, can tell it.

He died in 1873 after writing his Autobiography.

So, how can anyone find philosophy and history boring? Let us wait to discuss our schooling system and what we're setting up for the future--not the one we see, but the one that even they won't see--the one about two hundred, to two-hundred and fifty years out.

Have a great long weekend coming up. Looking forward to any comments I may receive.

K.S.