What to write this morning? There was a dusting of snow last night. In the predawn darkness the spruce trees are painted white. That comforts me. The season of Fall is transitioning to Winter. If the seasons should fail to transition, that indeed, would be terror. Much worse than a deluded President, believing he…
A friend recommended Yellowstone, a Kevin Costner series playing on Amazon Prime. It is about a 5th generation rancher, John Dutton. The Montana rancher is engaged in conflict involving the land and desires of developers, and environmentalists, and native Americans and his own family. The episodes of season one involve the violence which is…
The sky is gray, overcast as if a bowl of depressive disorder had been placed over us by the gods. It seems very quiet outside with little traffic along Western Avenue. Sunday morning is not typically this silent. But these are the days of pandemic, of worsening spread of the coronavirus. I cannot say…
‘Mr Limbkins, I beg your pardon, sir! Oliver Twist has asked for more!’ – excerpt Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens Last night I participated in a Socrates Cafe discussion. The topic was social media and privacy. How much have we lost? Do humans deserve personal privacy? I felt depressed after an hour or so…
I read the email received from an old friend this morning, expressing sadness over having to cancel plans to visit family in Alaska. The pandemics spread accelerates around us, now we receive word of acquaintances who are hospitalized. The email had news of a mutual friend who was admitted to the ER last night…
The world is vast and beyond definition. Anything that can be defined can be controlled. There is much in experience that is wild, idiosyncratic, a patient contradiction to the mind. Yet, there it is, undefined, a surd. I think of my day to day responsibility to work with my grand daughter to learn her…
Strangely, all of what you do depends on who you think you are. Just who do you think you are anyway? You are everyone who ever was and everyone who ever will be. Decisions that you make in what we call this present – this here and now – will validate (or invalidate) everything…
Organisms soldier on unwittingly. The difference between how things seem and how things really are is just as fatal a gap for them as it can be for us, but they are largely oblivious to it. The recognition of the difference between appearance and reality is a human discovery. False belief=getting it wrong. Animals…
The problem with lying is that an individual, or even whole societies forget how to live. One becomes entangled in one’s own misshapen world, the mind-managed world, the one we seek to control, that is slipping out of our grasp. One seems deranged, existentially unhinged as the lies grow in number and scale, the…
“You cannot pass,” – Gandalf to the Balrog on Bridge of Khazad-dûm
