The Nature of Things

Da rerum natura

"I believe in philosophy."

what kind of world do you want?

("I propose that a reader of Da rerum natura is going to find joy.")


The highest good?

Joy?

Beauty?

Pleasure?

Ecstasy?

Suffering?

(what's the point again?)

"The Monkey In The Machine and the Machine in the Monkey"

This is a story about the rise of machines.

And why no one believes you can change the world for the better any more.

How we decided that we were machines ourselves.

Played video games.

And helped start Africa's world war.

*please note the amount of dancing in this video. Obviously it's intentional. The clearest expression of JOY is dance.

“Death is nothing to us.”

So, when our mortal frame shall be disjoin’d,
The lifeless lump uncoupled from the mind,
From sense of grief and pain we shall be free;
We shall not feel, because we shall not be.
Though earth in seas, and seas in heaven were lost,
We should not move, we only should be toss’d.
Nay, e’en suppose when we have suffer’d fate
The soul should feel in her divided state,
What’s that to us? for we are only we,
While souls and bodies in one frame agree.
Nay, though our atoms should revolve by chance,
And matter leap into the former dance;
Though time our life and motion could restore,
And make our bodies what they were before,
What gain to us would all this bustle bring?
The new-made man would be another thing.

~Lucretius On The Nature of Things (trans John Dryden)

Lucretius, who was born about a century before Christ, was emphatically not our contemporary. He thought that worms were spontaneously generated from wet soil, that earthquakes were the result of winds caught in underground caverns, that the sun circled the earth. But, at its heart, “On the Nature of Things” persuasively laid out what seemed to be a strikingly modern understanding of the world. Every page reflected a core scientific vision—a vision of atoms randomly moving in an infinite universe—imbued with a poet’s sense of wonder. Wonder did not depend on the dream of an afterlife; in Lucretius it welled up out of a recognition that we are made of the same matter as the stars and the oceans and all things else. And this recognition was the basis for the way he thought we should live—not in fear of the gods but in pursuit of pleasure, in avoidance of pain.~Stephen Greenblatt

good news?

"That's the 'good news'?"

Together We Will Live Forever

Thanks Frank! (happy new year!!!)

So here it is, a new year. And my wife recently related how one goes about preparing for the Chinese New Year. She said that first you need to be thankful to the previous year for all that it was . . . Thank the spirit animal for all it provided.

And so I need to thank you, Frank! 2011 was a tremendous year. You were a great metal rabbit and you led me to a number of things I couldn't have found without going down your rabbit hole . . .

2011 was a year of celebrations. I spent western new years in a cabin w/ a bunch of punks last year. Thank you!

Later, you led me to The Source on my birthday. That was a lot of fun! Thanks so much! What a birthday!

The big find of the year though, was when I followed Rabbit Creek to the Solstice and The Black Rock. You led me there by following a dream, my Phaedra Dream. WOW!!!

We had a number of other fun adventures also. It was a year of exploration. Thank You! Incredibly, toward the end of the summer, you led my son and I to The Heart of The Monster. Incredible! . . . Add to that a couple of Alchemical Weddings, and a family music festival in the Sawtooths, and it was almost perfect! Thanks!

--The icing of course, was the big meet up at The Sync Cabin. What a time! Thank you sooo much!

ahh yes, there was this too . . .

Thanks!!!!

and having done that, one is to open all the windows at midnight and let the year go, which we just did. NOW,one is to only think and talk about the future for the next 24 hours.

Speaking about the future . . .

So, a dragon huh?

a fire dragon you say?

piece of cake!

an unearthed treasure that changed things.

(School is back in tomorrow, and I just wanted to share with you what I'm reading and have been reading . . .)

(This one, I can tell, is one I'm really going to enjoy!)

(the following two may be connected to 1984)

(somehow I want to connect the top to the bottom with this . . .)

Sacred Time/Sacred Space: Happy HolyDay!

Prayer is good, as is meditation–but we also need prompt action!

~the Dali Lama

In the coming few weeks ExxonMobil hopes to parade its monstrous modules past my home. If the Idaho resistance weren't battling so bravely they would already be passing. Our home is passive solar. The south-facing livingroom wall is double-paned glass from floor to ceiling. A wide eave keeps sunlinght out in the summer, when the angle of the sun is high; but lets sunlight all the way through to the interior north wall in winter. The design serves us well—but we've had to learn to close the Venetian blinds in some seasons, to keep birds from flying into the glass. In mating season, when males are setting up territories and chasing each other around in a blind passion, we still have a few collisions.

When my daughter Celia was eleven, a pine siskin flew into the window, then hung upside down in the bushes below, looking dead. She ran out and fetched it. The bird was still breathing. I sat down and showed her a sort of "procedure" I've learned from a life of bird-worship. My Warm Springs Indian friend, Liz Woody, discovered the same procedure, and had recently described it to me: when a bird hits a window and is knocked unconscious, you improve it chances if you hold it to your heart. Right up against the beating of it. (That's right, Syncrude; this is what it takes to actually serve a living bird.)

You hold it against your chest (I showed my daughter where, and she sheltered the little siskin). Then you promise the bird–silently or aloud: I prefer aloud—to be its steadfast guardian. And you have to mean it. You vow to sit still for as long as it takes, no time limit, letting the unconscious bird feel your pulse, your determination, your solid protection. You wish the little bird soul well no matter which world it decides to enter, ours or the other.

As Celia held the siskin I emphasized that it doesn't matter how busy you think you are. The bird's helplessness changes that. Unless someone is going to die while you're guarding it, don't worry. Give yourself completely to that bird. If we claim to 'love nature,' anything less is hypocrisy, because anything less is not love. I have been such a hypocrite, I told my daughter, and I have also been faithful. Faithful to me means: you sit with the bird in a gateway that leads beyond time and let the Unseen decide which way it will fly.

Last spring I held a male Downy woodpecker I felt sure would die. It smashed the window so hard I checked the glass for breakage. I went out, gathered it up, cradled it, then sat in a chair on the back deck—in bright early spring sunlight—holding it to my heart. I began breathing my favorite prayer word onto the bird. Murmured spontaneous stuff, too. I told it was okay to die, if that's what needed to happen, but that it's also beautiful to be a woodpecker. As I spoke, its tongue was lolling—and a Downy's tongue is a marvel. It is striped, black and off-white, and nearly three inches long though the entire bird is only seven inches long. What a tool, you realize as you gawk at the thing. No grub or beetle stands a chance.

The Downy's eyes stayed shut for close to an hour. Its neck looked ruined the whole time. But as it lay up close to my heart, warm in my hand, it kept breathing. So I worked with it, said my prayer word, held steady in the gate.

Then felt something. A slight quickening. The bird's being arrived from who knows where. It happened so fast. The limp body turned electric, the brid sprang back to consciousness, and its ruined neck—suddenly, impossibly—was fine.

I didn't even have time to stand. I just opened my hands. The Downy took one look at me—totem red, black and white, obsidian eye, a lightning look—then was off like a shot.

My daughter, too, held steady in the gate that day. And after a quarter hour her pine siskin filler her hands with the quikening. Opened its eyes.

Celia opened her hands. Received the lightning look. Away the siskin flew.

And my daughter's face as it winged away! When a bird falls into the unknown, lies against your heart, wakes and returns, flies from your hands, something in you quickens, awakens, and knows it too can fly.

~The Heart of the Monster David James Duncan (61-63)

wake!

it's about time . . .

(need a Key?)

feeling

sign of the times . . .

end of term

ORIGIN Middle English (denoting a limit in space or time, or (in the plural) limiting conditions): from Old French terme, from Latin terminus ‘end, boundary, limit.’

The end of term is quickly coming upon us. Will you have your Theseus ready by the deadline? Or, have you been spending all your time on the 3rd floor commons playing Hearts?

"The End is Nigh!"

does it seem that we're just going in circles?

round and round?

for there is no place that doesn't see you

change your life?

*these are the books that will help you out of the labyrinth, to get us to The New World . . .

11:12:11 -- 1339