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.

Freshwater

If we start paying for what was previously free, we are paying into the creation of a system designed to keep us paying. The bottled water industry is a good contemporary example (oil is too obvious and takes more refinement for our modern tastes...that was set up for us by the previous generations mentality).  The individuals within the bottled water industry believe on some level either that they are doing good, or they are apathetic about their role and it is a job as simple as any other.  There are those outliers in all situations who would champion the cause of bottled water with a passion regardless of monetary relevance.  Therefore when referring to 'industry' we are discussing an undercurrent in society which like a flippant ocean can bring us all life and help sustain it--or shipwreck us.

The Group Mind must incorporate the individual mind, not just gobble it up--this may be naturally impossible; as such, it can be a building ground to more metaphysical claims.

"As the Truth Tellers die, others quarrel eternally on transient matters." - The Madman Laughs at Everything

Here's what's nuts.  Freshwater resources are, in America, first come first serve.  With the advent of the juggernaut called corporation (a Capitalistic representation of our eternal Group Mind) the amount that can be taken, and the first to be served has drastically changed.  Now, your neighbor isn't just gobbling up some of the water, he's gobbling it up and putting it in plastic and selling it back to you.  The rub, is to build his plastics, he's polluting the same water--suddenly the need for 'pure' water emerges.  This is allowed because we paid him to do this.  We can stop paying for our own demise.  Perhaps we can convince the Group to do the same.

"It's only our world for a while, we'll die in theirs and we were born in another's." - Ibid

"The coming days aren't a given" 

- Hello Echo, The Coming Days. 

The Coming Days

I went wandering

Yeah I went with nothing, nothing but the thought of you.  

The Year of the Great.

The way in which history will find us will be magnificent. History belongs to those who write it, and with the advent of the computer and the age of the Internet, everyone can write something. The danger consists in the fact that it is possible that computers will not be the main form of communication amongst the masses in the future, they may be available only to the wealthiest in societies—if the resources, or contemporary need for them exist at all. One of the most key elements in this process is the fact that so much of the written world today speaks in English—the history we will all so remarkably write is potentially written in a dead language, or certainly one evolved far enough to find these words and use of grammar painstakingly difficult to sift for its wisdom and humor should either exist in the way in which it is meant today, in our time certainly, but also more remarkably, in our particular place.

The histories of yesterday are told by politics, and by war—as those are two powerful tools to wipe the slate clean, or more accurately, to add their scribbles to the overall piece. It’s a relationship among all humankind, those able now days, and through all time, to impress our collective stamp upon the world. We must consider the possibility that the concept which is represented by the word, ‘day’ in the future, is so different in meaning that perhaps the entire tone of this piece is different to that world. They may not have as much of our world as we think they will.

If one has had children, or even loved someone as their child younger in youth, then this same concept is felt on a greater emotional level, and a less drastic social level—our children for the most part are just the other side of the coin in the same purse. Our history has this same effect far less emotionally, and incomparably more socially as we stretch our sight through future generations; whether we have children or not, we can understand the end as far as our imagination and judgment can allow us to stretch. Imagining seventeen hundred years in the future seems impossible, but for when we imagine ourselves understanding how we piece together the fall of the Roman Empire.

I did not mention famine, plague, or natural disaster in the above mechanisms for rebirth as those are catalysts with which we are able to see societies laid bare through their response; sometimes resulting in a reemergence of the society afflicted, or a wholly new society all together.  More to follow.  I hope you all have a Great year.

Karn 

Where I've Been

Here's a little practice



I'm not from around here/ and you don't know where I've been/ all that you see surround me/ is something I'm passing through as I begin//Don't you understand what I'm doing?/I'm learning how to let you in/ it's dangerous I know I could affect you/ it's something we're passing through till it ends//I'm not from around here/ and you don't know where I've been/ all that you see surround me/ is something I'm passing through as I begin//Do you understand me now?/ I want to be close or I'll go without/ as a man growing wise shows you the love in his eyes/ baby you brought my heart back to life//I'm not from around here/ and you don't know where I've been/ all that you see surround me/ is something I'm passing through as I begin//I'm not from around here/ and you don't know where I've been/ all that you see surround me/ is something I'm passing through as I begin.

Ima do this now

really, the 4:13 mark, really, seriously.

Be Jolly

Christmas is coming.