We are co-creators of culture. Culture is the web of meaning received from preceding generations. The way of things, our shared sense of life together is handed off generation to generation. A deeper, wider, more satisfying understanding of our place and time on the earth is received from the artists of successive generations. These…
The sun rises predictably, warm, glorious. The gift of light is the life source for our entire planet. Light precedes us. What are we going to do with life? Will we honor and cherish the wonder of being here, being a center of consciousness? Or are we choosing to plunder? The decision is presented…
I rose ahead of the sun this morning. The old creature of habit that I am, I do not enjoy breaking the 6AM start to my day. I’ve never lived on a farm, and have not acquired the mental toughness achieved by the obligation to care for animals at first light. My grandfather would…
A good discussion, spirited and wide ranging on the subject of time last night…… No final solution was offered to what is not a problem. Comment was made that time is a feature of language, and a feature of conscious awareness of ourselves within a world. Time is closely related to change, and we…
Tonight we will have a second discussion session on the topic of time. The Raymond Tallis essay was brief, a well expressed overview of the uses and the limitations of the language of time. Tallis made reference to the maxim that “time is what prevents everything from happening all at once.” Time and change…
The Saudi visit began with a traditional sword dance. The photo reminds me of a “ladies choice” dance at a high school prom. Yesterday the President gave a speech in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. I listened to some of his speech broadcast on NPR. After a few minutes I could take no more of the…
Spring in the mid-west is unsettled. Every day one gets to draw blind, a card from the deck. One turns over the card to find one has drawn an Ace or the Joker. I remember a Memorial Day many years ago at Great Lakes Drag Strip. The afternoon was raw. I shivered, wrapped in…
Leave it to a philosopher of science to nudge us to think seriously about something that we never expected to think about. As one of our group succinctly stated: “Time, what’s the big deal.” Granted most of us, philosophers excepted, have no reason to worry over the status of time, the reality or the…
As a younger man I thought that Mother’s Day was a perfunctory holiday. It seemed a formal obligation with minimalist, relatively unstructured requirement to express appreciation to one’s mom, and to motherhood in general. As the years have passed, Mother’s day as grown in my estimation. Now I view it as a sacred time,…
Life continues apace, society adjusts, acclimates to the idiosyncratic dismissal of the FBI chief. This was a out-of-nowhere Surd for us Americans. We’ve not had anyone in the White House who assumed tyrannical powers, since the Civil War. Lincoln was accused of arrogation of power when he suspended the writ of habeas corpus. But…
