☀️ 0317 Song of Kokoro, song of Nightingale
🌔 0318 This Way and That - Wishing for Coalescence
🔥 0319 Tea Stories
💧 0320 Wild, uneven Weather
🌲 0321 A fanciful and satisfying swerve in routine
🏔️ 0322 Moments in Suspension, neither here nor there
🌏 0323 Amid a day of rain, quiet progress (first coalescence surfaces ✍🏻)
☀️ 0728 Brutal heat 36-7C. Hissing reptilian brain responds.
🌙 029 Summer Abundance . . . (summer surfeit?)
🔥 030 “Wheeee, wheeeeeeeeeeee!!!! Batabata!” Sounds of an introverted cicada landing on the terrace from the madly singing trees (seeking a moment of solitude to catch his breath?)
💧 031 Catching sight of the last stars @ dawn (& surprised by a setting last quarter moon, curled on the corner of the building, nodding off.)
🌲 0801 Festival of the First Fruits, or Lammas - Summer’s Midpoint
🏔️ 0802 🔥👋🏻 Unbearably unbearable, and . . . soldiering on
🌏 0803 A Lost Precious Thing Re-Materialises ✨
☀️ 0721 Full moon (The Berry Moon - oborozuki 朧月 - with cream?)
🌔 0722 Peach muffins, fresh from the oven
🔥 0723 Cut grass - the river banks' grassy glories, shorn and fragrant.
💧 0724 Waking to a thunderstorm - a visitation of freshness
🌲 0725 Sweet summer morning, scent of peaches. Lunchtime happiness: pink shiso cordial over ice. Cumulo nimbus stacking behind the castle, cool bonito slices, citron flavoured daikon, ginger, myoga, okra mix and a spoon of slaw.
🏔️ 0726 Twilight, pale grey-blue sky - 3 dark ‘cloud fish’ twist and leap over the horizon, the dark waters' rim - sunrise semi-e.
🌏 0727 Walking home after dinner out: Flap-drag-whomp - melted soles - summer sandals.
☀️ 0714 Quiet house, healing
🌔 0715 Quiet house, a washout of a long weekend
🔥 0716 No traction - a lost day?
💧 0717 The Rainy Season is over; Heat comes on in Earnest
🌲 0718 Kingfisher, arresting melancholy thoughts, a moseying, sweet presence.
🏔️ 0719 The summer sizzle - cicadas in full voice from sunup; night bugs in song, too!
🌏 0720 Old Moon: Hens' Night Out
☀️ 0707 Singing up the sun - Tanabata 🎋 x Lotus Festival 🪷
🌔 0708 The clink of ice in a glass at the close of a(nother) too hot day 🥵
🔥 0709 Just under the wire: home before the heavens opened ⛈️
💧 0710 Jazzing, Fun and Getting Soaked 🎷💃🏻☔️
🌲 0711 Cooling
🏔️ 0712 Ringing things I’m partial to: The Angelus and, in summer, around about this day: “Team Cicada: Start Your Engines!”
🌏 0713 Covid in the house 🤧😷🤒
☀️ 0630 Desk Jockeying (contentedly)
🌔 0701 Keyword: “topsoil”
🔥 0702 A spray of mauve-pink day lilies under leafy plane trees along the way
💧 0703 🌊 Hokusai’s wave, Hiroshige’s blues & Dragonfly squadrons (in the heat after the storms)
🌲 0704 First snatch of cicada song: early riser, or false start?
🏔️ 0705 Aphelion (& Heat, Waving 🔥👋🏻). Also, new moon 🌑
🌏 0706 Early morning love eyes 🥰 with a baby turtle 🐢 and a crow 🐦⬛
☀️ 0623 Cuspy Do Overs Clarify
🌗 0624 Waterfalls in full voice!
🔥 0625 Constellation: Fruiting trees
💧 0626 Forest mushrooms have landed! 🛸
🌲 0627 Having a laugh with a frog (off stage) by the reflecting pool
🏔️ 0628 “Bad ants” 🐜🦹🏻
🌏 0629 War memorials & Bearing Witness 🥺
June - Midsummer
☀️ 016 Heaviness - rising heat, humidity, falling spirit
🌔 017 First Peach of the Season! 4 distant hilltops, visible from the terrace, in layered, hazy, blue-grey watercolour.
🔥 018 Nighttime on the roof in the big white rocker: sweet solitude with the Bear looking on
💧 019 This funk, a slowdown, preparation, perhaps, for the stop before the season’s turn? First Tanabata 🎋 decorations
🌲 020 The Weight of Workiness 🏋🏻♀️
🏔️ 021 A midsummer bag of veggies freshly harvested, a true blue beauty of a day (after wet and dramatic skies to start.)
🌏 022 BD chillin'. Moonless in the heavy rain that follows the pink streaked (shepherd’s warning) morning.
☀️ 0610 Mugwort in the morning, freshened by rain; astonishing vividness of hydrangea! (About a month until cicadas arrive!)
🌏🌙 0610 Earthshine and the Big Dipper from the bedroom window 😍
🔥 0611 Three blue heron visitations! Evening rapids nearby - a swishing lullaby.
💧 0612 Midweek ratchet (memento mori 🏴☠️)
🌲 0613 Tapping the brakes
🏔️ 0614 In a dwaal 🌀
🌏 0615 Parked at the gate, ruminating over the waste(s) of the day, peeping thru from another world, that sweet boy’s shy smile and head dip of a secret not-quite-sure bow of acknowledgement (out of the gaggle of his fellows), quietly lit up my day.
☀️ 0602 A scarlet (Magdalene?) summer lily.
🌔 0603 Seen from the hide: a baby ferret, the season’s first gardenia, and ripening, green-goldening plum fuzzballs.
🔥 0604 To the limit (and a skosh beyond … remain intact).
💧 0605 Kith?
🌲 0606 First morning glory
🏔️ 0607 Watching (spontaneous, unselfconscious) solo dancing of underemployed wait staff in a nearby shop. Light shining from a phone (unheard music) - strange, transparent borders, a lonesome grace and beauty.
🌏 0608 Housekeeping & other pleasurable tinkering.
☀️ 0526. After the Rose Garden, a softening, capaciousness of mind
🌔 0527. Warm, swelling, dragging sort of a day (Before the storm)
🔥 0528. Bucketing, big, fat, wet summer-y kisses (Typhoon No.1 of the season), followed by a dramatic sunset in vivid, Kingfisher colours
💧 0529. Arrested, while clamped to the office desk, working furiously, and transported by a songbird serenade. Then, later, rolling down, adjacent to the Anjuin gate, the sweet, liquid descant of a stream, singing to the purple and white irises who were lounging on the old stone wall banks.
🌲 0530. The Eggroll of Love
🏔️ 0531. Meeting my dear ‘Otafuku’ on the way into my day
🌏 0601. The sweet abundance of the day goes some way to healing the energetic leaks I seem to have sprung
☀️ 0519 Elevating afternoon @ the symphony
🌔 0520 Bright & productive
🔥 0521 Fogs n' wobbles (Losing balance in more ways than one!)
💧 0522 Deleting a deceased friend’s birthday from my calendar
🌲 0523 Disturbed slumbers … ‘Markings’ in the wee hours
🏔️ 0524 Window open in the night, the mercury hits 30C, shorts, bare feet, & a pink-gold (just) waning moon
🌏 0525 A Triumph of a Home Repair (💻 Hello, Linux! 🤩 Why, yes! Yes, I am a 15 year old MacBook. Thank you for noticing!)
☀️ 0512 Unrelenting noise: A hard day, quite, quite wretched
🌔 0513 The gift of a difficult dream
🔥 0514 The season of the 🌼 daisies, as thick as pollen along the banks; a 🪹 in the electric cables above the door to Logos; cool of deep green shade along the canal walking home, & sparrows
💧 0515 An Enchanted Walk to Work - kind words from strangers, plant gifts (scents & oils), monks at morning prayer
🌲 05 🌪️🌪️🌪️ The Demolition continues, growing demonic 👿 😡
🏔️ 0517 🍸🥂🌇 Sundowners on the roof followed by an enjoyable dinner party
🌏 0518 🤔😣 “Accept things as they are; not as I/You want them to be” ?
☀️ 0505 Happiness is - a beautiful day, a picnic in the woods with friends
🌑 0506 Back to work 🌧️
🔥 0507 Hurtling
💧 0508 Unwrapping / Opening the jar of ferment (what’s been going on in there?) 📖
🌲 0509 A smiling, silver sliver of moon
🏔️ 0510 Sundown comes with a Moss & Momiji embrace; a soft, sweet wind chime and a glimpse of the inner garden
🌏 0511 Last of the bulldozers? Demolition complete? ⚒️
☀️ 0428 Hill Walking
🌔 0429 The Yoke is Easy? (Yet, I am Desperately Worky!)
🔥 0430 Invitation from a Dream
💧 0501 Co-arising - News of a Friend’s return home to God: Louise Glück’s ‘The Wild Iris’
🌲 0502 Begin the PC Repair Project
🏔️ 0503 High on Life!
🌏 0504 An Iris Bouquet from a dinner guest
☀️ 0422 In soft rain, voluptuous hillside wild wisteria and a tea party letting out at temple
🌕 0423 Earth Day & the Labyrinth Ritual
🔥 0424 Eastertide Evangelism, Magnetic Fields?
💧 0425 Under a Pink Moon, a Lonesome Song Echoing in the Night
🌲 0426 Snapdragons! (And other gifts sprung from Earth)
🏔️ 0427 Crowded desk, hot keyboard, slow moving
🌏 0428 Overnight delivery: A Box of Fresh Bamboo Monsters!
☀️ 0414 Sparkling, easeful, wonderfully chill day
🌔 0415 ‘Fubuki’ - Petal Blizzards, Pink Scars & the Ascent of Green
🔥 0416 Waking to a Slow Cinema of Clouds
💧 0417 Morning Viriditas smacks me in the snoot! (Quake Rumbler woke me at 11.15PM. A crow cried in the night. Creepy!)
🌲 0418 Encountering a Whirling Petal-laden Dervish (and a Kingfisher flashing along the stream!)
🏔️ 0419 Gift of a Peony
🌏 0420 Photographic Tidy Up - a Trip along Memory Lane
☀️ 0107 Calloo-Callay! Carnival’s end!
🌔 0408 First swallows among blossom clouds
🔥 0409 Rain & Wind, whips off blossoms
💧 0410 New Moon, a good day
🌲 0411 Dread realised, a stylish coffee spot & another invitation
🏔️ 0412 A dark dream
🌏 0413 Catching Flies, listlessly
🌖 0331 A happy reunion
🔥 0401 Diverging paths
💧 0402 Season of bouquets
🌲 0403 The late, slow bloom 🌸
🏔️ 0404 Finally, a there and back to Satoyama 🚶🏻♀️➡️🚶🏻♀️
🌏 0405 On a stone bridge over a clattering stream in a temple forest
☀️ 0324 Lost in the weeds
🌕 0325 First Blossoms, the other Annunciation, and a lunar eclipse
🔥 0326 After dinner saunter under a swollen, golden moon
💧 0327 Motif for the Week: Shadows
🌲 0328 Multidimensional Passiontide
🏔️ 0329 Last days
🌏 0330 Holy Saturday: Reading the Hours with Teilhard (📖🙏🏻 Deignan & Osgood)
☀️ 0310 🐍 🦎 🐊 Reptilian
🌑 0311 New Moon, Dark Castle 🥺
🔥 0312 Hakama Partay 👘
💧 0313 Lunching on the 21st floor
🌲 0314 Happy-sad-ending-thresholds 👩🏻🎓
🏔️ 0315 Via the Stag 🦌, I meet Placidus, the Hunter (St Eustace)
🌏 0316 Two shadows pass in, with invitations (that may be demands?)
☀️ 0302 Morning @ the dojo! 🏹🏹 Afternoon celebrating the Irish (saint) alongside the canal (leprachaun themed garb, funny hats, beer and a small band of drummers and fiddlers.) Fun!
> The point of the departed arrow is not merely to pierce the bullseye and carry the trophy: the point of the arrow is to sing the wind and remake the world in the brevity of flight. (~ [Bayo Akomolafe](https://www.bayoakomolafe.net/))
🌔 0304 Trying to learn how to repair an old machine and the heart does not sing. I am slow! 🐌
🔥 0305 Rain: resolute 🌨️💦
💧 0306 Scholarly dithering, meandering & feeling useless (subterranean things happening, I later come to realize . . .)
🌲 0307 The gentle, mesmerising reaching of a bright orange, dinosauric bulldozer delicately picking down a building to rubble
🏔️ 0308 Divine Banqueting with Hoods, Gowns, Stocks and (As-Yet-Unswitched) Tassels
🌏 0309 A lovely, loose, cascading day (after a good sleep)
☀️ 0225 From the Florist: the first big branches of Sakura in a big vase at home
🌔 0226 🥾 A Spontaneous Big Spring Hike
🔥 0227 The surfacing of a red-cloaked Madonna ikon into my hands from hidden depths, a long unfound gift (that waited for me)
💧 0228 The Season of the Daffodil, all that Kore energy, is good for research reading (Engaged abroad!)
🌲 0229 Ferried home in style after a fun night out amid bucketing rain
🏔️ 0301 Nostalgia strikes
🌏 0302 Attained Queen Bee (w/ collaborator). Also, 🌨️ Snowdrops?!
A Week’s Notes, Feb W08 020240218-24
Kate Rigby’s Meditations on Creation in an Era of Extinction 🔗 - ? MiroslavVolf & Ryan MacAnally-Linz The Home of God
For Lent and/or new habit-making . . .
Rumi wrote: What nine months of attention does for an embryo forty early mornings will do for your gradually growing wholeness.
The weight of illness is not to be ignored, but nor is it to be borne solely by the person whose body is ailing. St Francis of Assisi spoke of Sister Illness as a family member, a visitor to be entertained. When a sibling comes to stay, it affects the whole family. Via Theos
‘The impeded stream is the one that sings' from Wendell Berry’s “The Real Work”
Email sign off for the week . . . 油こほりともし火細き寝覚哉 abura koori tomoshibi hosoki nezame kana
Awake at night, the lamp low, the oil freezing.
~ Tr. Robert Hass
This one was very potent for me in light of things happening to people I know and love . . . and in relation to the Rigby book I’m reading for Lent subtitled ‘In An Era of Extinction’: Maria Popova’s Endling. Not knowing the last time we get to do a thing where looking forward, we might experience dread and/or panic; but looking back, it is, perhaps, a mercy.
Sitting beside the stream in the small park near home on a Wednesday afternoon, taking a short break and listening to the prayers for the day, I was struck by the phrase ‘the sign of Jonah’. Later, I found myself deeply affected by the story of the whale who had wandered off course into Osaka Bay and died. It was not a blue whale, but this poem by Molly Fuller found me and drove the story deeper.
A blue whale’s heart rate is calculated at 37 beats
per minute. Measurement is described as intense,
involving extensive coordination. Descent
into the ocean and the pressure a human body
is subjected to is an additional atmosphere, twice
as much as human lungs are used to. A man holds
his breath for eleven minutes. Depths complicate,
compress and shrink the air-containing spaces
in body and brain. Oxygen starvation feels like
euphoria, like experiencing something miraculous.
It takes two seconds to pump the 220 liters of blood
a blue whale circulates with every heartbeat. There
cannot possibly be a larger animal, the heart cannot
grow fast enough for a greater creature to survive.
A woman holds her breath for nine minutes.
The sensation of rising. Water, water, sunlight,
air. A pulse in the ears. The astonishing
violence as breath fills her lungs, her heart.
🤔
The Dopamine Cartel … on ways to consider (not) spending one’s wild and precious life.
In the wake of a recent conference about literature and the anthropocene, I wonder about this: are dystopias in fiction helpful or harmful to the imagining of better futures? Perhaps this podcast will give some pointers? How to set our imagination free to build the tech futures we want (Add to 🦤 list.)
This article in the NYT ‘What is a species?’ caught my attention. It’s a bit breathless and urgent in tone (environmental communication often is!) Nevertheless, it reminded me how language, and naming, in particular, is so interesting as a potential point of intervention. This was a nice connection to the Mark Vernon podcast mentioned in No.7 - Calyx.
Oh! This is a fine, fine Lenten read - Against Human Flourishing I am pondering it.
[The] condition of persons, which we all share—ground down, on the way to emptiness, approaching nothing—repairs as well as damages us . . . Is speaking of our flourishing the best way to elucidate what we are and how we move in the world and what it is that we move toward? I doubt it.
🆕 & lovely phrase … “stumbling bambis” which refers to new ideas, projects. We are not and do not have to pretend to be Athenas that pop out of their father’s heads fully formed, armoured and off to conquer the world!
Feb W07
📣 Deborah Levy’s Real Estate ➰ 💟
awks: ‘my best male friend’ peppered through the manuscript, an odd standout, in an otherwise absorbing narrative.
This is an excerpt from the fifth of Ten Love Letters to Mother Earth by Thich Nhat Hanh:
“Dear Mother Earth,
There are those of us who walk the Earth searching for a promised land, not realizing that you are the wondrous place we’ve been looking for our whole lives. You already are a wonderful and beautiful Kingdom of Heaven—the most beautiful planet in the solar system; the most beautiful place in the heavens. You are the Pure Land where countless buddhas and bodhisattvas of the past manifested, realized enlightenment, and taught the Dharma.
I do not need to imagine a Pure Land of the Buddha to the west or a Kingdom of God above where I will go when I die. Heaven is here on Earth. The Kingdom of God is here and now. I don’t need to die to be in the Kingdom of God. In fact, I need to be very much alive. I can touch the Kingdom of God with every step.”
——
Hortus conclusus is a Latin term, meaning literally “enclosed garden”
We have one on campus and it’s going to become an experimental space come the new semester.
——
🎧 When you teach in Environmental Humanities and have to spend time with terms like ‘Anthropocene’ it’s not hard to drift over into wondering if you, too, should be sour about Anthropos. I am and I amnt and when I am, I don’t want to hang around in that mental space - it’s claustrophobic. These two convos with thoughtful humans offered some shining gems (there was a bit of patience and mining required - a bit uneven) Worth it, though.
“Coffee Shop in the late Afternoon” by Nils Peterson …
There are fewer and fewer
native speakers of one’s born language.
You learn to live with translations.
Lent started so, while we are here and it is possible, the turning - TS Eliot, Ash Wednesday
Then, coincidentally, this: ‘scaling deep’
Fascinating, this, on how ecology influences cultures’ norms and behaviours. On the topic of EcoCultural Identity, there’s this article in Nature detailing a new resource for investigating cultural variation via datasets.
I have noticed that this is off the aspirational schedule. Have had head down preparing for a conference. Rough schedule to resume soonest!
☀️ 0211 Playing Peekaboo w the Red Rising Sun
🌒 0212 Sliding doors sliding again
🔥 0213 Lessons in Fragility
💧 0214 Seeing in Secret - the Mind’s I/Eye?
🌲 0215 Finding a Pew in the Forest
🏔️ 0216 osprey on the wing, fish for breakfast
🌏 0217 Bush warbler running scales in the reeds
☀️ 0204 Dappled Sorrow
🌔 0205 A Bright Spring Bouquet
🔥 0207 Pajama Day: Kotatsu & a Hot Keyboard
💧 0207 ‘Home,’ writes Levy, ‘is where the haunting is.’
🌲 0208 What is the story my blood will tell?
🏔️ 0209 An Afternoon Up a Curiously Plum-Blossomless Way
🌏 0210 A Shamisen player practicing on the river bank, a brisk and breezy afternoon. Welcome, Dragon 🌑🐉 …
Deborah Levy’s Real Estate is the book being enjoyed in snatches at the moment.
Other than that, I’ve dipped into the following in the past week:
😍
“symbiosis” in life sciences has been translated as gong-sheng in Chinese and kyōsei in Japanese, share the same two characters (kanji) “共生”. The first character “gong” (or “kyo”) 共 means commonality, sharing and togetherness, whereas “sheng” (or “sei”) 生 means growth, production, thriving, living and emergence. Both characters date back to more than 3000 years ago, and each has been used in ancient classics, poems and literatures (Bing Song, 7)
Serendipitous co-arising pieces on music 🎼
🎶 A Gray Area podcast, on music and mysticism. I’m drawn to the idea of “improv. as meditation” 👀
🎸 A rich Perspectiva essay on Music, Metacrisis & Metanoia by Michael Bready. Well-worth a read and think. It includes
three different conceptions of music that reveal how it can illuminate the nature of reality (enlighten), support personal transformation (ensoul), and take us into direct contact with the sacred (enchant). These three conceptions are, respectively: music as metaphor, music as spiritual practice, and music as realisation.
Small talk in the past week about the weather includes the lovely, poetic 菜種梅雨 (なたねづゆ) … What ripens in this rain?
A film review by Rupert Read in Dark Mountain notes:
Knowingness is a disease of our civilisation
Possibilities for response include cultural and existential deep adaptation as well as transformative adaptation. Essentially, it echoes the call of Donna Haraway to “Stay With the Trouble” and not to turn away from the mess, but to do the work that is before us.
I worry, as a teacher, about the memory of the young, what they call “shifting baselines”, a phrase that
describes the difficulty for humans to describe normalcy or the status quo of, for instance, fishing grounds before human exploitation: The next generation will take the new situation for granted and be unable to see changes taking place over periods of time that exceed a single life span or other human means of experiencing time. – (See Roman Bartosch’s essay on Educational Ecologies, 6.)
In light of this, we can cultivate ‘deep time negative capability’ via literary modes, say, where individual memory is supplanted by cultural memory?
“Negative capability” is, as Keats suggested, the capability of ‘being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts.’
It’s the Elders who dwell in loss, not the young (as much?) How do we deal (consciously, justly) with it while not stealing hope from the young?
On war’s ‘interregnum’, this:
“I don’t know if we will ever get out of this,” Arendt writes to Karl Jaspers in 1946, about the powerlessness and political extremes of their time. It is tempting to feel similarly in 2024. Theirs was a generation who lived through the war, moving from pre–war to post–war in a single lifetime. Last month, the UK defence secretary Grant Shapps suggested that we are moving again from “a post war to a pre–war world,” and the cycle continues.
Is this a connection worth making? 🔗 ⬇️ The Men’s Shed Movement - a beautiful practice of hospitality I’d never heard of.
Hannah Arendt noted: ‘We Are Free to Change the World’. I want to think about/learn more about what ‘free’ means, here . . .
This, by Ilia Delio, was stimulating. It find it vivifying to imagine the Christian Trinity as a kind of contact zone, an estuary! 🦅
We are at an entirely new level of life today in a much larger and expansive universe. We know so much more about matter and mind, and we now have an opportunity to change the course of history by bringing the Christian mutation into alignment with modern science and cosmology. Unless we do so, we face dire consequences up ahead. As long as the human psyche remains evicted from its natural home in divinity, we are empty human shells seeking our deepest ground of meaning. **It is time to recognize the transcendent divine ground within us and undergo the mutation that can lead to a richer reality of planetary life, fully alive in the glory of God. **
Science offers a MAP, but that is not the TERRITORY (for that we need the arts and humanities. Alan Jacobs wrote a small parable.)
🎧
Krista Tippett interviews Christiana Figueres On Being. Christiana radiates energy, a ball of enthusiasm and, like Joanna Macy, with conviction, says:
“What a marvellous time to be alive!”
Krista, like me, wobbles on this, wanting to believe. Are we really not too far gone? Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will?
🤔
Voices crying in the wilderness describe corporations as parasitical, ‘brain fungus among us’ here. This reminded me of Sohrab Amari’s Tyranny, here and an interview & transcript here on the same topic. Not all that edifying . . . 😞
What tools can you use? Lovely essay on craft and working with the hands
Wood makes demands that have to be met if you are going to produce anything worthwhile, imposing a kind of natural discipline that comes not from some authority figure but from the physical world itself. The digital world is binary, you either know the right clicks to make, the right options to pick on a drop-down menu, or you don’t. In contrast, hand-crafts are essentially qualitative.
And on my spring ‘hand-craft’ project . . . Progress on the tying of knots is slow but steady (the buds opening are quicker than I am knotting!) I’ve got 3 steps down and am carrying two tails of differently coloured cords in my pocket and practicing in my mind things I want my body to do without thinking.
Donna Harraway, she of the Cat’s Cradle for Speculative Fabulations and other SFs, writes that ‘the world is a knot in motion.’ Her antipodean sister-explorer, Deborah Bird Rose, declared: ‘Our flesh is inscribed with a multispecies history of becoming-with in “embodied knots of multispecies time.”’ 🤔 🍇
🆕
Now for a change of cord …John Cage’s 639 year long musical composition had a recent Chord change
This looks like a Cool Tool if you’re online and like a keyboard for your notes: Digital Library Cards … www.blyberg.net/card-gene…
A winter cyclamen gifted to me in 2022 which kept me company at the sink through 2023 is coming around again and has 6 hot pink blossoms opening. I am delighted by them!
“Hold a book in your hands, and you’re a pilgrim at the gates of a new city“ – Anne Michaels
Very much enjoyed and blazed through Panos Karnezis' crack(l)ing read The Convent. The next book, despite the 2BR pile, didn’t float in as quickly as the last one did. After a few days am taken away by Deborah Levy’s Real Estate.
🤔
“It’s easier to act your way into a new way of thinking than think your way into a new way of acting.”
Jonathan Rowson is thinking about practice … so is Adam Robbert. Or is askesis something different? Alan Jacobs is thinking about it, too, by way of repetition, the tolerance for monotony and the (gradual) shaping of the mind.
It is said that
practice doesn’t make perfect, rather, practice makes permanent …
but I am not sure this holds true in all things (despite the alliterative pith …)
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete,” said Buckminster Fuller. Isn’t this also kind of a homeopathic approach? (Learn more about homeopathy!)
What made me turn around (what kind of turn was it?) and see the plum blossoms that had been sneaking over my bowed head as I trudged up the hill? A fragrant nudge, perhaps?
Wow! ‘O brave, new world that has such people in it!’ 💡 Pere Santamaria strategises for the autoimmune peacekeeping mission … for the body not to be divided and @war with itself … . We are not supposed to say the C (cure) word (though at diagnosis my swashbuckling neurologist swashbuckled it! I took it with more than a grain of salt and forgave him his giddiness.) I was amused to read that ‘there’s a key’s in the liver’ … I assume reference to the organ was intended, but liked the double entendre! Is the liver going to find it? Or are the medics? 😉
It was Bean Day on February 3rd, the traditional start of spring. Pelt those little bastards in the dark corners! Fling open the windows, let in the light! 👹👹👹
🎧 🐝 From this podcast on honeybees by Green Dreamer (💚), I learn about the resonant terms ‘nectar fidelity’ and ‘dance dialects.'
♾️I am slowly listening to Christiana Figueres interview with Krista Tippet. Transcript is here A connection was sparked between something I’d read earlier that morning by @ayjay quoting Chesterton on joyful living and our ‘tolerance for monotony’ connected for me with Christiana’s remark that
anything can be mundane. Any experience, any interaction, anything can be mundane. And anything can be spiritual. The very same interaction, the very same experience can be either mundane or spiritual. The only difference between the two is how I live it. What quality of presence do I bring to it?
Roque Dalton, Like You … ‘Like you I/ love love …’
Tricia Dearborn, ‘Lead’
I was blind to my feelings for my friend.
One drunken night recognition bloomed.
Add a drop of lead nitrate to potassium iodide:
a canary bursts forth from a clear sky.
🤔 Rather a cross review on Crooked Timber here on a book called The Algorithm and its self-referencing circularity which makes mention of Vilèm Flusser (& a TED primer that might be interesting), the so-called “Sage of São Paulo,” whose work interests me, and another early media theorist,Stafford Beer- fascinating!
Definite 🔗s between Kingsnorth’s Machine & Flusser’s Apparatus … & for me, also with, Tom Berry’s call for the reinvention of the human, and possibly Teilhard’s noösphere via the field of cybernetics (subterranean sunbeams 🍭)
‘Signature’ & Knots
A plum blossom on the verge of breaking out is a knot of a kind. I am learning how to tie komboskini knots to honour these and other loosening and unfurling springy things. 🪢 🌱
“ … every single action of ours carries our signature” – Figueres. What’s my signature? 🌈
☀️ 0128 Post collapse, a work catch-up day
🌔 0129 Cold, with a hint of Spring
🔥 0130 Passing Glimpse: agéd bow wielding archers shuffling aglow in the neighbourhood dojo
💧 0131 Resolutely grey. Stars, not absent, struggle to shine
🌲 0201 Greys gather for the gradual shift into Spring
🏔️ 0202 Plums begin blossoming
🌏 0203 The Ox has Ideas of Its Own
☀️ 0121 An Etiquette Lesson from a Red Pine
🌔 0122 The Rachmaninov Reward
🔥 0123 Moon Bounce from Sentō Corner
💧 0124 The Sower and the Sown
🌲 0125 🌕 Full moon and a Spell in the Library
🏔️ 0126 ‘Rekindle the gift of God that is within you’
🌏 0127 Abed. Cloud portals open spilling golden puddles over the drab hills.
Some pics of Essex estuary-scapes surfaced here serendipitously and I loved looking at them! And thinking about lady scientists and palaeontology. And dragons - the year of the Dragon is being rung in next new moon. 🌑 To add to TBR pile (people rave about this book!) 🔗 The Peregrine, JA Baker … also set in Essex.
Browsing at the Library on a cold, dark January afternoon I came across Siddharta Mukherjee’s Song of the Cell and was instantly drawn in, reading poetry intertwined with biology and thinking about microscopes and telescopes and how all we who are alive now get to see that has never before been seen . . .
[Timothy] Steele includes poetry among the prerequisites of a good, sustainable life, here:
“What is most essential to human life and to its continuance remains a love of nature, an enthusiasm for justice, a readiness of good humor, a spontaneous susceptibility to beauty and joy, an interest in our past, a hope for our future, and above all, a desire that others should have the opportunity and encouragement to share these qualities. An art of measured speech nourishes these qualities in a way no other pursuit can.”
I was stimulated by Adam Robbert’s post reflecting on the impoverishment of excessive availability (& reproducibility) of print, nowadays. It called to mind Emma Donoghue’s Haven a book I recently read and enjoyed very much. In it, for the first time, the physicality of ancient texts and their reproduction was described in a way that really connected for me and made the venture of book-making feel amazing and revelatory. What a commitment! What an investment. The ecosystemic participation in the making, the costs and the values - I felt it in a new, animated sort of a way … And I look around my desk where at least 15 books sit piled around me . . .
Robberts notes how writing over and over again over a lifetime is a spiritual exercise:
a repetitive practice of precise attention to detail and linguistic choreography, a type of lectio divina stamped outwards onto the very material production of a text and the logos it expresses, which then folded back onto the shape of the soul who crafted it.
This is the scholarship of ritual repetition and philosophical invocation.
He links this to Byung-Chul Han’s The Disappearance of Rituals: A Topology of the Present From whom, the following:
Today, many forms of repetition, such as learning by heart, are scorned on account of the supposed stifling of creativity and innovation they involve. The expression ‘to learn something by heart,’ like the French apprendre par coeur, tells us that apparently only repetition reaches the heart. . . .
Repetition stabilizes and deepens attention.
On the Wonders of the Handwritten over the Copy-Paste reflex enabled by keyboard-screen technologies, this:
The text can grow mute with such ease of reproduction. … literary recomposition is a crucial askēsis of its own—a transformative exercise of self-overcoming and transformation—one that cannot be bypassed by digital or print reproduction, however beneficial these tools may be otherwise.
I enjoyed Dan Wang’s long letter and found the section on Chinese linguistic creativity particularly entertaining.
Also, from Dan:
The “secure transport of light” is one of my favorite phrases. It refers to both to optic cables (which make modern communications possible) and semiconductors (which make modern electronics possible). We can thank Alexander Graham Bell for allowing us to speak from one side of the Atlantic ocean to the other, through coils of sunbeams under the seas. Isn’t that a wonderful image?
It is a wonderful image … noosphere x flaring forth
I’ve known of John Cobb’s name via interests in Ecological Civilisation and perhaps I was dipping into Isabel Stengers’ work on Alfred North Whitehead one morning recently when I happened on Cobb’s wikipedia page, here. I see he was born in Japan, just up the drag from the home base. 🤩 I liked these bits particularly on ‘mutually assured transformation’ . . .
John Cobb writes: … it is the mission of Christianity to become a universal faith in the sense of taking into itself the alien truths that others have realized. This is no mere matter of addition. It is instead a matter of creative transformation. An untransformed Christianity, that is, a Christianity limited to its own parochial traditions, cannot fulfill its mission of realizing the universal meaning of Jesus Christ.
… Cobb does not conceive of dialogue as useful primarily to convert or be converted, but rather as useful in order to transform both parties mutually, allowing for a broadening of ideas and a reimagining of each faith in order that they might better face the challenges of the modern world
Timothy Steele, The Library
Anne Michaels, the wet earth
Jack Gilbert, Failing and Flying
Alan Watts, of whom it is said was seldom less than ‘fully alive’ (aspirational! 🏄🏻♀️) … a podcast called Being in the way and an essay
🆕 How it is that, despite all (looking @ you 😒 Climate Change), the East Asian 72 seasons more or less match what’s going on around us? This past week MAJOR COLD! 🥶🥶🥶
☀️ S 0114 In a Cave
🌙 M 0115 Andante, andante
🔥 T 0116 First Daffodil (a gift of light that bends over my working space)
💧 W 0117 Kept by the Word
🌲 Th 0118 Morning Walk under Stars, Darkness & the Black Madonna
🏔️ F 0119 A Sherezade-type Dream
🌏 S 0120 Etiquette lessons from a Red Pine
Added this week … 🙌🏻 Yay!
🌵🌲🌴🌳 The Language of Plants eds. Gagliano, Ryan and Vieira
Arts of LIving on a Damaged Planet eds. Tsing, Swanson, Gan and Bubandt.
Through our scientific and technological genius, we have made of this world a neighborhood and yet we have not had the ethical commitment to make of it a ~‘communion of subjects’~. But somehow, and in some way, we have got to do this.
We must all learn to live together as ~kin~ or we will all perish together as fools.
We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. And whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. For some strange reason I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. And you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be.
This is the way God’s universe is made; this is the way it is structured.
~ Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King (From: A Sermon Delivered at the National Cathedral, Washington, D.C., on 31 March 1968.)
“To struggle against a fault increases its power, keeps our attention riveted on its presence, and bring us a battle indeed […] to forget the failing and consciously to strive to develop the virtue which would make the former impossible, this is true victory.”
~ Edward Bach, Heal Thyself, 1931).
On the same day I heard this marvellous talk on ripening Black Madonnas, in a wonderful synchroncity, I encounter, unbidden, these 🔗 articles …
Terra Preta do Indio is the Portuguese name for the anthropogenic pre-Columbian Amazonian soil re-discovered by archeologists in the last century, and declared by soil-scientists to be the most sustainable, fertile soil in existence, and one that can, in turn, sequester greenhouse gases from the atmosphere in the very substantial amount of 20%…
From Frederique Apfell-Margli’s essay “Re-animating the World” in Living Earth Community (70). Eds. Mickey, Tucker & Grim. Then, later in the day, this article on the [Dark Earths of the Amazon](- https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240116-the-dark-earth-revealing-the-amazons-secrets) pops up … 🛸
A gorgeous constellation: Dark earths, Black Madonnas … grounds of being, wombs, umbilical tethers
the city bus stops– a caw of a winter crow through the opened door ~ Robert Spiess
Every generation absorbs a world view they can’t see beyond
☀️ S 0107 Kite Capture … Anpanman in the Branches
🌖 M 0108 Love of Mending (needle and thread)
🔥 T 0109 Streaming Madrigals
💧 W 0110 Lost in the mist, the fog of busyness
🌲 Th 0111 An Accelerating Day: Against the Grain
🏔️ F 0112 Thoroughly Out of Sorts
🌏 S 0113 Up the hill, round the bend, ascend to the Temple of the Buddha’s 🤍: seeking plum blossom news
Beautiful looking ebook classics
Further to my contemplating 🔖 Ruins (遺跡? Also … 廃墟, 残骸, 遺址, 旧墟. What is what? Which fits best?), Poetry. Miłosz wrote in “Witness of Poetry”
For me, a striking connection: @ayjay here writes a post about the yin & yang of purity and katharsis cultures and 🔗 I’m reading Anna Tsing’s Mushroom book picking up that messiness is the name of the game. Chapter 2, entitled “Contamination as Collaboration” shows how diversity breeds resilience, breeds life, allows for ongoingness.
🤯 Genetic ancestry and the critical importance of the Neolithic period and Bronze Age as determinants of modern immune responses.
5000 years ago ancient herders from the Pontic steppe ‘rewrote’ a genetic story.
- Gene changes linked to MS boosted Yamnaya herders’ immune defences against diseases transmitted from their horses, cattle, sheep and goats, the researchers suspect.
- Modern, sanitised environments have altered immune systems in ways that have increased MS risks
- This is the first evidence of this evolutionary process in an autoimmune disorder
🖐🏻 High five on “Contamination as collaboration”! (Sometimes ‘ongoingness’ goes a little off-piste!)
Isn’t this eye-catching?!
a publication that specialises in slow-release high-quality work
What a concept!
I’ve been reading Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble and revisiting the old practice of Cat’s Cradle which we learned as children. What a fun why to begin teaching Systems Thinking!
Here’s Federico Campagna’s generative take on World-making (or World Meeting?) via ‘thick’ description/yarning - twisting, spinning …
🌌 This delightful dizzying breaking of the cosmological rules by hyper-hyper objects. A huge ring of galaxies challenges thinking on cosmos 🔭 🤔 😆 🖖🏻
More busyness = Less walking = less listening to podcasts, but enjoyed these two on the weekend.
The concept of YOHAKU NO BI (the beauty spaciousness lends to wellbeing).
And what, little girl, will you be when you grow up? a poem by Jenny Flores
Write it on your heart by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Why the push to go cashless? I find it very unsettling, myself, preferring the fiction.
Donna Haraway in The Haraway Reader says:
I like layered meanings … I am deeply formed by Roman Catholicism … I learned it. I studied it. It is deep in my bones. … Theological tradition is a very deep inheritance for me, and I think it affects my style very deeply. (pp. 333, 334)
I was surprised by this discovery. She was quoted in Pope Francis’ 2023 exhortation, “Laudate Deum”. Why not? Nice to have a few wise women included (for a change).
A noteworthy both/and should be mentioned:
Well, you know, I am, of course, a committed atheist and anti-Catholic, anyway, at some level. I cannot live in ‘Christian’, right-wing U.S. culture and not be anti-Christian. (my emphasis)
In the last two centuries, there has been a growing awareness of loss, of disconnection. The rise of modern natural science, recognizing only efficient causality, and ratified by the control it enables over nature (what Scheler calls “Leistungswissen” – science which gets things done) has undermined the traditional vision. … so writes Charles Taylor here
Jan Richardson’s beautiful offering for Women’s Christmas is here and includes art, poetry and other riches. She writes an invitation to be ‘mindful of those who traveled to welcome the Christ child and who returned home by another way’. What questions surface when we attend to our own journeys?
Via wise LM Sacasas, intriguing work on the subversive possibilities of silence, offered by Max Picard. Silence, an all too ‘useless’ phenomemon, ‘does not fit into the world of profit and utility … it simply is. It seems to have no other purpose; it cannot be exploited.” Too, Picard asserts:
there is more help and healing in silence than in all the ‘useful things’. Purposeless, unexplainable silence suddenly appears at the side of the all-too-powerful, and frightens us by its very purposelessness. It interferes with the regular flow of the purposeful. It strengthens the untouchable, it lessens the damage inflicted by exploitation. It makes things whole again, by taking them back from the world of dissipation into the world of wholeness.
The Gray Area Sean Illing interviews Sophie Scott-Brown …. On Taking Anarchy Seriously 🔗 The Struggle for Meaningful Work, by Elizabeth Anderson
The Sacred Elizabeth Oldfield interviews Dougald Hine.
‘What can you make, can you do, to change …?' asks Jane Hirschfield in Counting, This New Year’s Morning, What Powers Yet Remain To Me A reminder, despite the unsettling start to the year here: ‘don’t despair of this falling world, not yet’.
John O’Donoghue, via The Marginalian, is gorgeous on endings and beginnings, ‘portals of possibility’. See, in this post, the poem ‘For a New Beginning’.
On Time “Nothing unfinished is completed”, by Vinod Kumar Shukla. Poems from a very amusingly named anthology, The Treasurer of Piggy Banks
🕰️
🔗 Sarah Perry’s beautifully written ‘January’’s opening 3 paragraphs on time in [The Essex Serpent](https://books.google.com/books/about/ The_Essex_Serpent.html?id=dGN3CwAAQBAJ)
… We fray into the future, rarely wrought
Save in the tapestries of afterthought.
🔗 Isabelle Stengers, Making Sense in Common (A reading of Whitehead in Times of Collapse) (2023) offers an approach in this book (TBR pile 📚)
(via Wikipedia)
Whitehead’s process philosophy argues that “there is urgency in coming to see the world as a web of interrelated processes of which we are integral parts, so that all of our choices and actions have consequences for the world around us.” For this reason, one of the most promising applications of Whitehead’s thought in recent years has been in the area of ecological civilization and environmental ethics pioneered by John B. Cobb.
Do James Bridle’s writings offer a viable response to Pope Francis’ critique of the technocratic paradigm?
What invisible lines connect our place with Ishikawa hundreds of miles away and on an opposite coast? And: how is it that people in the same house either felt the quake, or did not? What perceptual organs are activated in some and not in others?
Furry magnolia buds are proliferating along the canal even while the maples leaves in various dull shades of red, orange and brown are still hanging around.
[Syntropic](https://fore.yale.edu/blogs/entry/1704376896)
Though the term has some very specific scientific uses, it can also be seen in the broader sense of divergent pieces coming together in harmony and organization within a system, where the harmony comes from each element of the system being of service in some way to another element–a sort of systemic paying it forward that keeps all in balance. The Buckminster Fuller Institute frames it as when life “self-organize[s] in a way that supports diversity, complexity, and transformation.” Buckminster Fuller’s student and biographer, J. Baldwin, went so far as to say that “Our purpose and duty as humans is to be syntropic” (BuckyWorks, 228).
☀️ 1224. Being with the Bereaved
🌕 1225. An odd, low key Christmas day 🎄(Present to What Is)
🔥 1226. ‘Ontological Mutiny’? 🤯
💦 1227. Last Day on Campus. A Long Walk Uphill to the Shrine of the Best Bench
🌲1228. Winter Break & the First Whiff of Robai
🏔️ 1229. Circumambulating the Axis up Bongo Bump Hill, in solitude, with prayers
🌏 1230. A ‘Love, Actually’ inspired destination - immersion in dreams & Comings & Goings