# EVERY ANGEL IS TERRIFYING > Duino Elegies--Ranier Maria Rilke ## Posts - [So, how free do I think that I am?](https://everyangel.org/so-how-free-do-i-think-that-i-am/): There are few issues more compelling than individual freedom.  Around fifteen or so of us, responding to an essay on Einstein’s morality, debated the whether and to what extent we are individually free.  Einstein thought that there was no exception to the uniformity of cause and effect within a closed system.  Yet, he also... Read More Read More - [Home Again Part 2](https://everyangel.org/home-again-part-2/): GLOBALIZATION describes the opening decades of the 21st century.  Countries and cultures are bound together by light speed communication disrupting old boundaries and ways of life.  I think about this a lot.  Can we conceive a way forward, a productive support for a humanly productive humanity,—avoiding the cul de sac of exploitation? Are we... Read More Read More - [More thoughts from Paul Virilio](https://everyangel.org/more-thoughts-from-paul-virilio/): “global village” now becomes disturbing. Instantaneous military presence, pure speed, exhaustion of the world, geocide. The twilight of places… What about the rhythms of daily life, the cosmic rhythms? Speed paralyzes us. Go faster, but where? Everything is moving, but nothing is changing. It still takes a child 20 years to develop, and 3... Read More Read More - [Home Again](https://everyangel.org/home-again/): I love coffee shops.  It was love at first sight.  In 1970 I began my two year tenure in Tokyo.  I was twenty one.  That the social environment was alien to a kid from Durham North Carolina is an understatement.  Then I discovered Fugetsudo coffee shop in Shinjuku.  It no longer exists, as one... Read More Read More - [Rock and Roll Lullaby](https://everyangel.org/rock-and-roll-lullaby/): Life can be considered a journey.  From the first flicker of self awareness to the palpable confidence at the height of physical and intellectual powers; then to the inexorable decline of passing years, –the precarity of ones life is the enduring subtext.  It’s the consistent back-beat of a bass drum anchoring the melody and... Read More Read More - [Zinnias](https://everyangel.org/zinnias/): The tomato vines are fading, the last of the fruit will soon be picked.  The squirrels have taken a share over the past several weeks.  Who knew they could be vegetarians?  Life is nothing but adaptable.  There was a time when we humans would pass on a tomato.  But we learned.  Now the tomato... Read More Read More - [The Whole Earth Our Hospital](https://everyangel.org/the-whole-earth-our-hospital/): What do you do when you can’t sleep?  Too much caffeine maybe?  Or is it the picture of the kid that haunts me?  I’ve been thinking of him since this past Wednesday when I glimpsed his picture in the NY Times.  The boy lives in Aleppo. He was pulled bleeding but alive from the... Read More Read More - [Finding One's Kin](https://everyangel.org/finding-ones-kin/): Kevin said it best.  The theme of the event was gratitude.  Time, effort were expended by everyone present, each according to his or her capacity.  How do you find your kin?  For our family, the annual “Pig Pickin” hosted by Kevin and Caryn in their backyard gets the job done. Kevin said that the... Read More Read More - [Fortuna Smiles](https://everyangel.org/fortuna-smiles/): My tomato harvest of the summer is unprecedented.  I’ve cultivated squash, cucumbers, eggplant and tomato plants at the back of the yard for years.  That patch gets the most sun.   I learn a bit with each season of experience.  Working with living things is trial and error.  There are a few things which I... Read More Read More - [Summer Sizzle](https://everyangel.org/summer-sizzle/): A visit to the Wisconsin State Fair in West Allis, just outside of Milwaukee is immersion in a great festival.  Seduction is the word.  The sights and sounds are counterpoint to the mundane of one’s life. Milwaukee Wisconsin has a reputation for good beer.  I ordered two cups of Leinenkugel’s Summer Shandy.  The waitress... Read More Read More - [Paradise Enough](https://everyangel.org/paradise-enough/): While the idea of paradise is on my mind, I’ll reference Lake Geneva Wisconsin.  If you live in the Chicago or Milwaukee area you are familiar with the town, at the end of a gorgeous lake.  The Persian word for paradise meant a walled garden.  Lake Geneva is remarkable for it’s beautiful lake, and... Read More Read More - [Almost Paradise](https://everyangel.org/almost-paradise/): Old Heraclitus was right.  “πάντα χωρεῖ καὶ οὐδὲν μένει”  Every thing changes and nothing remains. I found a cicada exoskeleton attached under a leaf while examining my garden.  Cicadas have been featured in literature since Homers Illiad.  They are short lived.  They sing loudly in chorus from the trees, a undulating cacophony, the song of... Read More Read More - [Paul Virilio](https://everyangel.org/paul-virilio/): Some quotes from The Administration of Fear, –a  meditation on technology, globalization, mass communication, and fear. The earth is shrinking and space is dwindling, compressed by instantaneous time.  Carried along by the headlong rush of an increasingly accelerated world, all we can do is manage and administer this fear instead of deal with it... Read More Read More - [APOGEE](https://everyangel.org/apogee/): Apogee is a term that I heard often when I was much younger, when space exploration was new.  Rockets and satellites were often in the news.  The apogee was the maximum point of flight at which gravity would overcome the energy of momentum and the launch vehicle begins its reentry arc into the earths... Read More Read More - [VERTIGO](https://everyangel.org/vertigo/): I am a Christian.  For me it would be impossible to be otherwise.  I cannot separate myself from my upbringing.  I do not think that I would if I could.  My world view is conditioned by Christian thought forms and evaluations.  However it has been many years since regular attendance at Sunday worship services. ... Read More Read More - [And about the speech](https://everyangel.org/one-more-thing-about-the-convention/): Here are a few lines which I lifted from Donald Trump’s acceptance speech of his nomination for the presidency of our country, delivered on Thursday evening July 21st. I have visited the laid-off factory workers, and the communities crushed by our horrible and unfair trade deals. These are the forgotten men and women of... Read More Read More - [Come see, there goes Robert E. Lee](https://everyangel.org/quick-come-see-there-goes-robert-e-lee/): And the subtext to “MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN” is…………….  If you grew up in the South, you will get the point.  Someone said, History is like old National Geographic magazines, it just keeps piling up.  While one may intellectually “move on” from horrific events, a subterranean emotional residue remains.  Seems to me that having... Read More Read More - [The Next Emperior](https://everyangel.org/the-next-emperior/): The Republican Party is convening in Cincinnati to promote Donald Trump as it’s adoptive son.  The stage craft, the hype is palpable.  The rest of us are expected to endorse Trump with a collective huzzah on November 11th. I was reminded of a striking statue at the Detroit Institute of Arts.  The statue was... Read More Read More - [15,001 of my friends](https://everyangel.org/15001-of-my-friends/): A highlight of the trip to Detroit was a concert at the DTE Energy Music theater, one of the foremost venues in the country.  We had lawn seating for three storied Rock N Roll bands, Cheap Trick, Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, and Heart.  All have been inducted into the Rock N Roll hall... Read More Read More - [Rhythm in their Dancing](https://everyangel.org/rhythm-in-their-dancing/): After arriving in Holly Michigan we saw an advertisement for the Oakland County Fair.  The kid in me hates to pass up a visit to a county fair.  What is more iconic than a Ferris wheel, even a double Ferris wheel? Our first stop upon entering the fairground was the pig races.  Actually the... Read More Read More - [Doc, fix me a Bloody Mary](https://everyangel.org/doc-fix-me-a-bloody-mary/): We were tired and hungry after spending the better part of the morning at the Detroit Institute of Arts.  Our spirits were full, satisfied.  Our bodies craved nourishment.  A quick cell phone search revealed that a restaurant with a suitable bill of fare was close at hand.  We crossed the street, walked about a... Read More Read More - [Things that run through us](https://everyangel.org/things-that-run-through-us/): Spent a day in Detroit.  So much to see in this Motor City.  Promised myself that I’d return in the future; maybe the Grand Prix of Detroit on Belle Isle in the spring; or the Heidelberg Project, a neighborhood rising from the ruins of American  politics as usual. The day was spent at the... Read More Read More - [A look in the mirror](https://everyangel.org/a-look-in-the-mirror/): This post is by Michael, a guest contributor.  It is offered as an appeal to reason, and to good will in order to address the collapsing dialog between conservatives and liberals in our country.  These good words are a call to self reflection.   BLUE STATE, red state. Big government, big business. Gay rights,... Read More Read More - [The Eye of god II](https://everyangel.org/the-eye-of-god-ii/): A mid summer visit to Kraklauer Creek.  Wildflowers and everything else is at the apogee of life. At that point does a plant pass from the everyday mundane into the realm of sculpture? Sculpture is made to touch.     And this is but a sliver of life that simultaneously “happens.”  A friend recently... Read More Read More - [A Weed By The Wall](https://everyangel.org/a-weed-by-the-wall/):   So, which plant would you designate as cultivated, and which a randomly growing, “volunteer” weed?  Would either plant “know,” have any sensibility of the distinction?  Is it a matter of beauty?  Though distinct in vegetative form, and shape of blossom,  each is beautiful in it’s own way.  Where is the dividing line of... Read More Read More - [Make Earth Great Again](https://everyangel.org/make-earth-great-again/): Browsing porn sites every day? Smoking pot because life is boring?  Does a day pass without fondling your TV remote? We are a binge drinking generation, the children of alcoholics.  Obsessing over our own reflection, soaking the mirror in attention–self devoted. The emotional healing that each needs exists within each one of us.  We... Read More Read More - [Dionysus Redux](https://everyangel.org/dionysus-redux/): Ahh, Summerfest, the annual music festival on the Milwaukee lakefront.  Anticipation of Summerfest keeps me going in the dark and often bitter Midwestern winters. It’s all about the music, –nine performance venues! Music and beer.  Ok, non-alcoholic libation is for sale too. I thought of the ancient god of wine, of ritual madness, fertility,... Read More Read More - [Love Will Keep us Alive,--The Last Festival](https://everyangel.org/love-will-keep-us-alive-the-last-festival/): Friday July 1st, the holiday weekend begins.  We made our way to Kraklauer Park.  Annually our town holds a four day community festival on the spacious lawn adjacent to Santa Maria church.  A big circus-sized tent is pitched and filled with picnic tables.  Outside is a lineup of local food vendors.  I walked over... Read More Read More - [BREXIT, Not a Breakup Song](https://everyangel.org/brexit-not-a-breakup-song/): I awakened on Sunday morning.  My first thought of the day, on Thursday a majority of Brits decided to leave the EU.  The European Union is a block of nations that have agreed to use a common currency, to establish a common regulation of trade, and to have open borders easing the movement of... Read More Read More - [Transcendence](https://everyangel.org/transcendence/): Everything is context.  The severe weather missed us.   A gentle rain had fallen over night.  I walked over to the garden.  The dark wet earth framed the lush, soft green of the young tomato plants.  I noticed some weeds that survived the hoe, making their come back.  I pulled a few, throwing them to... Read More Read More - [Father's Day 2016, Beans and Leaves](https://everyangel.org/fathers-day-2016-beans-and-leaves/): Music disseminates truth, A weapon of mass instruction. Our music is family unrelated by blood. It contains multitudes. We must be vigilant We must be citizen soldiers Stripped of fear. Our optimism is magnified In our music. We sing of ourselves. The songs we create Address our own condition, Will ultimately sing of another,... Read More Read More - [I Bought a Hoe](https://everyangel.org/i-bought-a-hoe/): For the past 5 or 6 years I have put in a small vegetable garden.  It’s a month to month process of work, and I have the help of multitudes.  What I mean is the presence of the botanists who developed the “Better Boy” hybrid tomato plant, the chemists who worked out the method... Read More Read More - [The Eye of god](https://everyangel.org/the-eye-of-god/): There is a park in Mundelein.  A creek runs through the park, providing sanctuary for finches, red wing black birds, and more that I do not recognize.  Wild flowers in abundance crowd the opposing banks.  Children find adventure descending the stone faced banks to peer into the shallow, slow flowing stream.  The more daring... Read More Read More - [Ninja Attack](https://everyangel.org/ninja-attack/): “attacked me like some fucking ninja” May 19, 2016 5. i had to buy a wristwatch – well, wanted to – since i was sick of digging my fob watch out, and feel a reluctance to rely on mobile phones for the time. i bought a Seiko 5 after watching a great video on the... Read More Read More - [Both of us might be wrong.](https://everyangel.org/both-of-us-might-be-wrong/):   From Nancy:  I was a high school senior — 17 or probably 18 — when I wrote this, apparently feeling less infallible than usual.  I do notice that at 61, I still apologize after committing an inadvertent injury.  But my opinions have marinated for decades so I’m less willing to reconsider them without... Read More Read More - [Times Are A-Changin](https://everyangel.org/times-are-a-changin/): Wow!  What a Tuesday evening at Beans & Leaves.  The house was full and we commenced to “do philosophy” sparked by the lyrics of Bob Dylan.  Dylan is iconic of a time, and of a generation.  We all pass, but our work lives on if we are lucky.   Peter, a serious fan of... Read More Read More - [The Value of Silence](https://everyangel.org/the-value-of-silence/): Some things are unsayable. and Some things sayable,–are best left unsaid. “Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent.”         Ludwig Wittgenstein  Tractatus 7.1 - [Under Construction](https://everyangel.org/under-construction/): Under Construction Uncertainty Incomplete knowledge Must be accepted. Courage! Update your beliefs As new evidence Comes in. Describe the universe As a series of Interconnected models Appropriate at different levels. Each model In it’s applicable domain– Ideas appearing– Essential parts of each story, Having the right To be thought of As real. Our task... Read More Read More - [Hephaestus](https://everyangel.org/hephaestus/): I envy the ancient Greeks of Attica, particularly the freemen and citizens of Athens.  They lived in a god-infused world.  Not us.  We inhabit a sterile, positivistic world.  According to logical positivism only that which can be empirically measured, mathematically accounted for has ontological status.  The mystery of being is fed into a reductionistic... Read More Read More - [Homo Faber, WTF](https://everyangel.org/homo-faber/): The Atlantic published an article on The 50 Greatest Breakthroughs Since the Wheel. This compilation of technological achievements reached back 6000 years thereabouts. Wendell Berry has said that it was a tool or a weapon that has been the prime mover of change in human history. That is a reasonable assessment as far as... Read More Read More - [Time](https://everyangel.org/time/):                   TIME Time alters form. What was Gives rise To what is. Gases condense Into planets. A spermatozoa Finds a ovum, Here I am. Impermanent, temporary A confluence of Past concatenations. For the time being Formed, I am. Me here, You there. Next? Credit given to Robert Langan, for his wonderful book... Read More Read More - [I Would Do Anything For Love](https://everyangel.org/i-would-do-anything-for-love/): Love is one of the lesser topics of philosophical treatment.  Like the word “belief” the term has a fulsome cloud of meaning.  The more one thinks about a statement about love, the less clear one becomes about what is meant.  Would I do anything for love?  It all depends on exactly what you have... Read More Read More - [A Poem For the Animal That Isn't There](https://everyangel.org/a-poem-for-the-animal-that-isnt-there/): Another fine poem composed by Nancy who has been a long term participant in our weekly philosophy discussion gathering.  The poem reflects experience of game spotting in East Africa.  Nancy mentioned that the animals are becoming scarce as their habitat is taken by encroaching human population. SONG OF THE SAFARI Though many creatures here... Read More Read More - [The Universe Spins In His Heart](https://everyangel.org/the-universe-spins-in-his-heart/): Here is a fine poetic work in words and visual presentation.  Gary is a long term participant in our philosophy discussion group.  It is a privilege to present his work here.  The poem: Humanities Man.     - [Another Poem For What Lies Ahead](https://everyangel.org/another-poem-for-what-lies-ahead/): WHAT REMAINS My world A conscious projection Of an unconscious construction. I’ve forgotten How to forget Now my palace Is my prison. Waking, “thrown” Into a world I did not create, Unless with luck, I find a puzzling key To the locked palace door. It is my palace after all. All palaces crumble. I... Read More Read More - [Nietzsche On Prince](https://everyangel.org/nietzsche-on-prince/): As we are now the products of earlier generations, we are also the products of their aberrations, passions, mistakes, and even crimes.  It is impossible to loose oneself from this chain entirely.  When we condemn that confusion and consider ourselves released from it, then we have not overcome the fact that we are derived... Read More Read More - [Nihilism and Purple Rain](https://everyangel.org/nihilism-and-purple-rain/): This past Tuesday evening I participated in a discussion with friends. The topic was Nihilism. The topic held a particular resonance for me. Just days ago word came that Prince was found dead. Shakespeare speaks to the brevity of life and the challenge of Nihilism. Out, out brief candle. Life is nothing more than... Read More Read More - [A Poem For What Lies Ahead](https://everyangel.org/a-poem-for-the-great-challenge/): SURRENDER Not as defeat As release Letting one’s self go To unknown possibilities. The problem with doing— It’s headlong, voracious,– More and more, over and over. We just do what We have always done. One must die to rise anew: We cannot hold to this reality Which we are offered. It suffocates us. We... Read More Read More - [How Bad Can It Get?](https://everyangel.org/how-bad-can-it-get/): Yesterday by default I listened to the inauguration speeches, ritual, etc.  My office mate had the coverage running on his computer.  I worked at my desk, reasonably productive while listening to the broadcast.  Unfortunately no surprises.  Trump in his first presidential speech reiterated the laundry list of nativist programs and planet killing ideas that... Read More Read More - [The Sea of Life](https://everyangel.org/the-sea-of-life/): Our destiny: to cross the sea of life on a raft of words.   —David P. Gantar Today I awakened and felt numb.  The 45th president of the United States, Donald J. Trump will take the oath of office.  I woke to a real life Jerry Springer “show” where the guests have chosen one of... Read More Read More - [Already Falling](https://everyangel.org/already-falling/): Today’s NY Times front page article reads: For The third Year, The Earth in 2016 Hits Record Heat.  Today is Thursday, the last day before Friday, when Donald J. Trump will be inaugurated as the 45th president of the united States.  The old president, Barack Obama, fulfilled the responsibility of office along the lines... Read More Read More - [Crow In Snow, Metaphysics](https://everyangel.org/crow-in-snow/): We spent the evening discussing slavery.  Admittedly a depressing topic.  The topic was explored to the extent of our ability and satisfaction. How do we explain slavery?  Slavery as a legalized practice of owning and utilizing the life force of another, ended in the late 19th century.  There are reports of remaining outlaw human... Read More Read More - [The Anvil Rings](https://everyangel.org/the-anvil-rings/): Sex, the attraction between male and female, courtship, seduction are all words describing a perennial driving force that marks history, art, politics and every other endeavor.  Helen’s face launched a thousand ships to the ruin of Troy and Greece.  Helen was surely one of many beautiful women.  Yet she alone was the pivot point... Read More Read More - [Crashing Down Like An Anvil](https://everyangel.org/crashing-down-like-an-anvil/): I grew up in the South, as a Christian Fundamentalist.  Everyone has to start somewhere.  It’s not as if you or I have a choice.  The text of the Old and New Testament was a major factor in my upbringing and consequently of my view of myself.  As an adult, revising, reincorporating those formative... Read More Read More - [Thinking at a Bar](https://everyangel.org/thinking-at-a-bar/): At a bar sipping a wheat beer, I had time to consider something I wrote down twenty years ago.  Words in the old note book seemed more truthful, more penetrating than when discovered long ago.  I was younger, a different man then.  Now, I hope I’m wiser, and more focused upon my one life.... Read More Read More - [In The Beat](https://everyangel.org/in-the-beat/): This morning I felt out-of-sorts when I began my day.  My sense of life was dissonant with my perception of “reality,” the goings-on around me.  I know that the daily news reporting has a lot to do with my funk.  The president elect has yet to be inaugurated and the ether is filled with... Read More Read More - [Nothing To Say](https://everyangel.org/nothing-to-say/): Now I understand better the utility of silence.  Nowadays the availability of social media has created a troposphere of unrelieved cacophony, a din of trivia, opining, and pontificating.  There is even a class of paid hacks, contracted to generate opinions favorable to their paymaster.  My life 1s enriched when I endeavor to just shut... Read More Read More - [The Omega Point](https://everyangel.org/the-omega-point/): Last night Peter posed a question to us around the table.  “Given that no one chooses to exist, to be born into this world, –What obligates us to choose to be helpful, to act kindly toward others?”  That question always touches something deep within me.  Something more basic and indescribable than my words awakens... Read More Read More - [The Indefatigable Truth](https://everyangel.org/the-indefatigable-truth/): Published in the LA Times, January 8, 2017 The following is a transcript of Meryl Streep’s speech at the 74th Golden Globes  as she accepted the Cecil B. DeMille Award for lifetime achievement. I love you all. You have to forgive me, I have lost my voice in screaming and lamentation this weekend and... Read More Read More - [Questions](https://everyangel.org/questions/): Just finished Chuck Klosterman’s book, But What If We’re Wrong?  I recommend it.  Here are some questions that are put forward in the concluding chapter. Is the downside of our species unparalleled cerebral evolution the ingrained propensity for self destruction? If a problem is irreversible, is there still an ethical obligation to try to... Read More Read More - [Another Parable For A Winter's Afternoon](https://everyangel.org/another-parable-for-a-winters-afternoon/): The old book seemed to be a history text book.  Appearing to be a 21st Century artifact, it had been overlooked in the bottom of a box in the dimly lit storage closet.  It had to be a leftover from the old days before AI managed learning, and wireless implants linked almost everyone to... Read More Read More - [How To Die In A Ditch By The Road](https://everyangel.org/how-to-die-in-a-ditch-by-the-road/): The following story is contributed by a good friend and writer. Once upon a time in a land not so far away, two hale gentlemen went for a walk in the country. One hardy fellow went by the name of Gareth whilst the other bore the odd moniker of Tobias. Both were jaunty and... Read More Read More - [Time](https://everyangel.org/time-2/): Outside it’s raw, below zero. In this warm coffee shop protected from the elements, I desire simply to be and to think. Here time is fecund with possibility. Around me others are here for the same reason, a place to be where the differences in lifestyle, economic status, the weight of fortune, become a... Read More Read More - [The Day of Alchemy](https://everyangel.org/the-day-of-alchemy/): “What the hell do you have to lose? Give me a chance. I’ll straighten it out. I’ll straighten it out. What do you have to lose?” The mostly white crowd cheered. Donald J Trump — appeal to Blacks and Hispanics, Ohio, Aug 22, 2016 I In the world forever one With the informing Love That... Read More Read More - [Traveling Blind](https://everyangel.org/traveling-blind/): Its a bitter morning, dark and  7 degrees when I last checked.  But now the sun illuminates the parking lot, suggesting what lies ahead today will be agreeable.  Whatever my mind ruminates upon, there is always a lot more going on. VI We travelers, walking to the sun, can’t see Ahead, but looking back... Read More Read More - [The Comfort of Perspective](https://everyangel.org/the-comfort-of-perspective/): In a few days a casino magnate and Reality TV Show celebrity will be inaugurated as President of the United States.  The Republican Party with its new majority in both houses of congress cannot wait to destroy the health care insurance of millions by repealing Obamacare.  Never mind that they have nothing to put... Read More Read More - [A Walk To Visit A Creek](https://everyangel.org/a-walk-to-visit-a-creek/): New Years day, the weather is pleasant.  What better way to begin the year than by taking a walk.  I decided to visit a creek that runs between two subdivisions, then flows under Midlothian Road, cutting it’s way behind the Park District water park. The creek just over Midlothian Road is damed by a... Read More Read More - [The Sun Comes Up Like A God, Silently](https://everyangel.org/the-sun-comes-up/): January first of 2017.  The sun, a half ball of warmth rising toward the tree tops; my windshield is covered with frost and I run back inside to obtain a container of warm water.  Can’t drive unless I can see. Two Baristas behind the counter at Starbucks and just me.  The seating area is... Read More Read More - [Something Old, Something New](https://everyangel.org/something-old-something-new/): December 31, 2016, years end.  One more year fades into the rear view mirror. I pause longer to reflect, than was the case when I was younger. Yesterday I stopped by The Roadster Shop which is across the street from the Starbucks where I often come to write.  The guys and gals at the... Read More Read More - [For God's Sake Shut Up. Do Something!](https://everyangel.org/for-gods-sake-shut-up-do-something/): The Future For God’s sake, be done with this jabber of “a better world.” What blasphemy! No “futuristic” twit or child thereof ever in embodied light will see a better world than this. Do something! Go cut the weeds beside the oblivious road. Pick up the cans and bottles, old tires, and dead predictions.... Read More Read More - [And Then](https://everyangel.org/and-then/): WORDS 1. What is one to make of a life given to putting things into words, saying them, writing them down? Is there a world beyond words? There is. But don’t start, don’t go on about the tree unqualified, standing in the light that shines to time’s end beyond its summoning name. Don’t praise... Read More Read More - [Nothing More Need Be Said](https://everyangel.org/nothing-more-need-be-said/): I know your eyes in the morning sun I feel you touch me in the pouring rain And the moment that you wander far from me I want to feel you in my arms again And you come to me on a summer breeze Keep me warm in your love, then you softly leave... Read More Read More - [Old Saki Cups](https://everyangel.org/old-saki-cups/): We are a few days past winter solstice.  The solstice is the shortest day, the least amount of sunlight.  Every year as the solstice nears I am disconcerted at the rapid onset of nightfall.  “Is it dark already”, I ask myself at 5PM.  I feel cheated of sunlight by winter.  Christmas is our resistance... Read More Read More - [A Christmas Story](https://everyangel.org/a-christmas-story/): Year to year, I am drawn to the Christmas story.  It is a simple well known tale.  I re-imagine the story in terms of one more year of life experience.  At this juncture I am interested in Matthews rendition of the story.  (Matthew 1:18-2:23) The points of dissonance in the story speak to me,... Read More Read More - [Ironic Points of Light](https://everyangel.org/ironic-points-of-light/): Verse nine Defenseless under the night Our world in stupor lies; Yet, dotted everywhere, Ironic points of light Flash out wherever the Just Exchange their messages: May I, composed like them Of Eros and of dust, Beleaguered by the same Negation and despair, Show an affirming flame. September 1, 1939 by W. H. Auden... Read More Read More - [White Rabbit Interlude](https://everyangel.org/white-rabbit-interlude/): How many years since you’ve remembered the lyrics of White Rabbit, or listened to the tune?  Grace Slick belted out her anthem of resistance at a time when American young men were asked to kill Vietnamese young men, in the jungles and villages of Vietnam.  At the time one line of resistance to official... Read More Read More - [All I Have Is A Voice](https://everyangel.org/all-i-have-is-a-voice/): Verse eight All I have is a voice To undo the folded lie, The romantic lie in the brain Of the sensual man-in-the-street And the lie of Authority Whose buildings grope the sky: There is no such thing as the State And no one exists alone; Hunger allows no choice To the citizen or... Read More Read More - [No Way Outta Here](https://everyangel.org/some-way-outta-here/): Verse Seven From the conservative dark Into the ethical life The dense commuters come, Repeating their morning vow; ‘I will be true to the wife, I’ll concentrate more on my work,’ And helpless governors wake To resume their compulsory game: Who can release them now, Who can reach the dead, Who can speak for... Read More Read More - [The Normal Heart](https://everyangel.org/the-normal-heart/): Verse Six The windiest militant trash Important Persons shout Is not so crude as our wish: What mad Nijinsky wrote About Diaghilev Is true of the normal heart; For the error bred in the bone Of each woman and each man Craves what it cannot have, Not universal love But to be loved alone.... Read More Read More - [Where We Are](https://everyangel.org/where-we-are/): Verse five Faces along the bar Cling to their average day: The lights must never go out, The music must always play, All the conventions conspire To make this fort assume The furniture of home; Lest we should see where we are, Lost in a haunted wood, Children afraid of the night Who have... Read More Read More - [Imperialism's Mirror](https://everyangel.org/imperialisms-mirror/): Verse four Into this neutral air Where blind skyscrapers use Their full height to proclaim The strength of Collective Man, Each language pours its vain Competitive excuse: But who can live for long In an euphoric dream; Out of the mirror they stare, Imperialism’s face And the international wrong. September 1, 1939  by W.... Read More Read More - [Ah Thucydides.....](https://everyangel.org/oh-thucydides/): Verse three Exiled Thucydides knew All that a speech can say About Democracy, And what dictators do, The elderly rubbish they talk To an apathetic grave; Analysed all in his book, The enlightenment driven away, The habit-forming pain, Mismanagement and grief: We must suffer them all again. September 1, 1939 by W. H. Auden... Read More Read More - [We Schoolchildren](https://everyangel.org/all-we-schoolchildren/): Verse two Accurate scholarship can Unearth the whole offence From Luther until now That has driven a culture mad, Find what occurred at Linz, What huge imago made A psychopathic god: I and the public know What all schoolchildren learn, Those to whom evil is done Do evil in return. September 1, 1949  by... Read More Read More - [So Now It Is Christmas](https://everyangel.org/so-now-it-is-christmas/): The house is decorated.  Certainly to a dispassionate observer the splendor, the glory of light and color is equal to any years past.  Yet it is not Christmas time existentially for me.  My spirit is more akin to the sharp edge of the air temperature that sinks toward the single digits, and the cold,... Read More Read More - [Luck](https://everyangel.org/luck/): My last post was on the 7th.  I reflected upon the nature of a common sore throat/head cold.  Five days later I am able to write again.  The illness was uncommon, something that at times I wondered if my now older body would overcome.  With illness, there is one winner.  The immune system is... Read More Read More - [A Knife to my Throat](https://everyangel.org/a-knife-to-my-throat/): I suspected this was coming.  Yesterday I felt abnormal tightness in my throat.  Aspirin, two at a time were taken throughout the day. In a semi conscious mental fog around 5 AM I felt a persistent stab of pain.  Well, it’s not the first time that I’ve had a sore throat.  I was well... Read More Read More - [Mysterium Tremendum no 2](https://everyangel.org/mysterium-tremendum-no-2/): There is more to say about the concert. The Pretenders fronted by vocalist, and guitar slinger Chrissie Hynde opened the evening at the United Center.  Both Hynde and Nicks are strong women.  Any artist with a catalog of acclaimed work is a strong individual.  I have always been attracted by the personalities of strong... Read More Read More - [High Mass at the United Center](https://everyangel.org/high-mass-at-the-united-center/): Last night I attended a concert at the United Center.  The Pretenders with Chrissie Hynde opened for Stevie Nicks.  Nicks has been writing lyrics and performing her songs, album after album, since the early 1970s.  Nicks is on tour with her band to reprise her songs written over a forty year career as a... Read More Read More - [How Neighborly](https://everyangel.org/how-neighborly/): The first sip of coffee, like a knife-cut of astringence, faintly sweet and bitter to the tongue: a metaphor for life.  With practice some develop a taste for it,…. for life that is. I am a Christian monk and priest, and I am, therefore, accountable before God for the actions and deeds of every... Read More Read More - [Meditation on Civilization](https://everyangel.org/meditation-on-civilization/): We are embedded in the day to day.  We tend not to notice the exquisite design all around us, the product of our progenitors sweat, intelligence and passion.  Reflecting upon this past Thanksgiving holiday, feeling some awe at the memory of a well appointed dining table.  In the pleasant company of family, children and... Read More Read More - [Could have been written yesterday.....](https://everyangel.org/could-have-been-written-yesterday/): And yet he felt forebodings.   Some nameless threat lurked just around the corner of the world for the sun to rise again.  The feeling had been gnawing at him, as annoying as a swarm of hungry insects that buzzed about one’s face in the desert sun.  There was a sense of the imminent, the... Read More Read More - [On The Other Hand...](https://everyangel.org/on-the-other-hand/): How can a great and wise civilization have destroyed itself so completely? “Perhaps,” said Apollo, “by being materially great and materially wise, and nothing else.” “Perhaps,” said Thon Taddeo, “but I doubt it.” “You reject all history, then, as a myth?” “Not ‘reject.’ But it must be questioned.  Who wrote your histories?” “….a doubt... Read More Read More - [On Radical Skepticism](https://everyangel.org/on-radical-skepticism/): A radical skepticism reduces reason to its own caricature: to a mere rationalization of positions that were actually predetermined by desire and were held– or secured– by force alone. Michael Polanyi and Harry Prosch Meaning, Published 1975 Who was Michael Polanyi? Michael Polanyi, (11 March 1891 – 22 February 1976) was a Hungarian-British polymath,... Read More Read More - [Everything Will Be Ok aka Exceptionalism](https://everyangel.org/everything-will-be-ok/): It will not do to say that every age has been like this, that man has always felt threatened and yet managed to survive.  The point is precisely that every age is different:  each time has been unique, both in what it promised and what it threatened; sometimes the catastrophe has occurred. Irrational Man... Read More Read More - [Redemption: Getting The Band Back Together](https://everyangel.org/redemption-getting-the-band-back-together/): Ah, Jake and Elwood, so nice to see you again!  I happened upon The Blues Brothers Movie last night.  A few years have passed since my last viewing of the iconic film.  Jake and Elwood are ex-cons.  Jake is picked up by his brother Elwood outside of Joliete prison.  They visit the Catholic orphanage... Read More Read More - [Thanksgiving Saved by a Great Iron Screw](https://everyangel.org/thanksgiving-topography/): Retrieved my copy of William Bradford’s History of Plymouth Colony.  I periodically review it with fresh interest, as the years pass.  Accrued life experience allows a richer and deeper interpretation of Bradford’s words.  Yes, these were Englishmen, my ancestors by blood and by religious heritage.  Their tale is similar to immigrant tales of our... Read More Read More - [Three Dead Canaries](https://everyangel.org/three-dead-canaries-in-a-coal-mine/): Canary no. 1 Members of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers — themselves desperately afraid of being downsized —... Read More Read More - [That Man Who Lit a Lantern](https://everyangel.org/that-man-who-lit-a-lantern/): Is there any up and down left? Has it not become colder? Have we not killed him and now,——- Shall we console ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games, ought we to have invented? Have we not ourselves become gods? I threw my lantern to the ground. It broke and went out. The... Read More Read More - [Doing It To Ourselves](https://everyangel.org/doing-it-to-ourselves/): No, wait!  For this story a title with more zip, more punch is needed.  Here are some choices.  I’ll let you the reader look these over and make a selection, after you have read the New York Times article. Y’all come on down! Winter comes early to Republican red-state-Texas Making promises you can’t keep... Read More Read More - [If We Fail This Time](https://everyangel.org/if-we-fail-this-time/): IMAGINING WORLD In my dream, the angel shrugged and said if we fail this time it will be a failure of imagination and then she placed the world gently in the palm of my hand. –by Brian Andreas 1994 - [Winter Is Coming](https://everyangel.org/winter-is-coming/): “Daylight would have shown a wilderness weathered and blowzy, a wanton that had lived her summer too fast and too greedily. It would have shown the white birches pale and shivering in a sudden ague, and here and there an ash or a sumac burning red, like a hectic spot, where the first frosts... Read More Read More - [Custer's Last Words](https://everyangel.org/custers-last-words/): How would I know Custer’s words?  The battle between the US 7th Cavalry and the Lakota, Northern Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes  took place 140 years ago.  I was born 140 years late to hear what if anything he might have said, had I been there.  Additionally only Indians walked away from that fight alive. ... Read More Read More - [Life, Traveling Blind](https://everyangel.org/life-traveling-blind/): Spent a troubled night, awakening at intervals.  Dreams are unaccountable.  The recurring dream included several lyric lines from Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne”.  Not an unpleasant dream for me, I like the song.  The alarm sounded at 6AM.  A few minutes later,  hardly awake, I heard from NPR  that Trump’s son-in-law is angling for a role... Read More Read More - [The World Is Changing Right Before Our Eyes](https://everyangel.org/the-world-is-changing-right-before-our-eyes/): Nicolaus Copernicus surmised that the earth rotated around in sun in about 1514, and no one killed him for thinking that.  He lived another twenty-nine years and died at the age of seventy.  Throughout those final twenty-nine years, his revolutionary description of outer space mostly seemed an unprovable thought experiment that had the ancillary... Read More Read More - [Why Must There Be A Morning After?](https://everyangel.org/why-must-there-be-a-morning-after/): Twenty four hours ago I was horribly ill.  Four or five sessions of throwing up, and then came the fever.  At some point the thought occurred to me, –so this is how we die.  I did not dwell on the thought.  The coming of dawn always makes everything better.  I had several emails and... Read More Read More - [A Gap In The Line](https://everyangel.org/a-gap-in-the-line/): A few years ago I fed my interest in the American Civil War by a lot of reading, and by visiting a number battlefields.  I have more than a shelf of books.  I’ve spent time at Gettysburg, Petersburg, and Fort Fisher.  In that day the preparation for battle meant forming a “line of battle,”... Read More Read More - [Baba O'Riley, Further Comment](https://everyangel.org/baba-oreily-further-comment/): Yes, it’s a long tune, at 5 minutes.  Did you notice the organ track, the musical pattern that opens and runs the entire length of the piece?  Townsend was influenced by the philosophy of Meher Baba, Inayat Kahn, and composer Terry Riley.  Townsend sought to replicate a theory of reality as harmonious, with the... Read More Read More - [Analysis, No Exodus Here](https://everyangel.org/analysis-no-exodus-here/): Four days after the election, protest of the results continued last night in a number of cities.  Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Denver, Minneapolis, Dallas, Oakland, were included in the CNN report.  The photos supported my assumption that the demonstrations were likely to include many in their twenties, young adults seeking adult entree into society.  I... Read More Read More - [Beyond Politics](https://everyangel.org/beyond-politics/): Some years ago I spent a few days by the Columbia River Gorge in Washington state.  In the course of the hiking expeditions, two things came to mind over and over.  The immense beauty of the surroundings was indescribable.  The physical sensation of hazard, of the lethal consequences of a lapse in judgment, was... Read More Read More - [The Day After -- Prayer](https://everyangel.org/the-day-after-livin-on-a-prayer/): PRAYER Why do we work? Answer: For one another. Right here, right now, We have one another. So take my hand We’ll make it I swear. Hold on Ready or not. We live For the fight Because that’s all we’ve got. - [Day Zero, Wonder and Why](https://everyangel.org/day-zero-wonder-and-why/): I drove past my local polling place this morning.  The parking lot was full.  Campaign signs crowded the lawn on both sides of the drive way.  Now, at Starbucks customers come in with the conventional hint of a smile on their faces.  If they are like me they carry a suppressed sense of foreboding... Read More Read More - [The Eve of Election Day](https://everyangel.org/the-eve-of-election-day/): Today is the day before the ballots are cast, the vote tallied and the results announced.  My cynical self says, “so what.”  The one candidate is a life long uber predator, property developer, and pitch man for all manner of dodgy, shell game offers:  Trump University, Trump Steaks, apparel, etc.   The other candidate offers... Read More Read More - [Two Days, Rebel With No Causes Left](https://everyangel.org/two-days-rebel-with-no-causes-left/): It is perfectly clear that political parties across the spectrum today are unquestioningly committed to maintain the capitalist growth economy, seemingly oblivious to the catastrophe that this out-dated development agenda holds in store for people and the planet – a catastrophe that, in some respects, has already arrived.  In short, a universal ‘growth fetish’... Read More Read More - [Three More Days To Go](https://everyangel.org/three-more-days-to-go/): Last night I attended a production of The Addams Family musical play at the Vernon Hills High School auditorium.  The play was a clever, contemporary rendition of the old Addams family ABC sitcom which I barely remember seeing in the 1960s.  The concept of a dysfunctional typical American family was created by cartoonist Charles... Read More Read More - [Day Four, Who Are We Going To Kill?](https://everyangel.org/day-four-who-are-we-going-to-kill/): Today is Friday, do I dare call it “Good Friday?”  The election is scheduled for Tuesday.  From the vitriol, the accusations that have filled electronic media, and particularly the breathless panic with which the network anchorman “reports” the latest outrageous incrimination,—this feels a lot like a gathering mob to me.  I just don’t know... Read More Read More - [Five Days: Praising Ignorance, Laughing, Losing My Mind](https://everyangel.org/five-days-praising-ignorance-laughing-losing-my-mind/): Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front by Wendell Berry Love the quick profit, the annual raise, vacation with pay. Want more of everything ready-made. Be afraid to know your neighbors and to die. And you will have a window in your head. Not even your future will be a mystery any more. Your mind... Read More Read More - [Six Days Out](https://everyangel.org/six-days-out/): Those who know me well, have no need to ask me which of the candidates for president that I favor.  I’ve voted already,–the deed is done.  Nothing more is left for me to do but wait. The reason for my choice is singular, simple.  Here is a paragraph from Letter no. 7 from Rainer... Read More Read More - [Seven Days to go and "There Won't Be Any Trumpets Blow'in...."](https://everyangel.org/six-days-to-go-and-there-wont-be-any-trumpets-blowin/): One Tin Soldier is a 1960’s era protest song written by Dennis Lambert and Brian Potter. It was first recorded by the Canadian group The Original Castle in 1969. It was recorded in 1971 by The American group Coven and it reached number 26 on the Billboard Hot 100. It was featured in the... Read More Read More - [Eight Days and Counting](https://everyangel.org/seven-days-and-counting/): Only fools imagine that freedom means getting what one happens to desire.  Real freedom begins with obedience to a higher influence—a higher, finer energy within oneself.  What is higher in yourself?  That way of thinking about the question is the beginning of the answer—because it involves a real idea which has been handed down... Read More Read More - [Nine Days and then cosmic calamity....?](https://everyangel.org/eight-days-and-then-cosmic-calamity/): …..if it worries and torments you to think of your childhood, and of that simplicity and quiet, because you cannot believe any more in God.…then what justifies you in missing him, who never was? Why do you not think of him as the coming one, imminent from all eternity, the future one, the final... Read More Read More - [Ten Days Before The Election](https://everyangel.org/ten-days-before-the-election/): WHAT HAS TO BE DONE WHEN NOTHING CAN BE DONE. Dystopia has to be faced and dissolved by irony. If paranoia “knows well”— we need a method of ignorance. The spectrum of the possible is much larger than the range of probability. Irony is the excess of language that opens the door to the... Read More Read More - [Always Wanting More](https://everyangel.org/always-wanting-more/): A visit to Cave Hill cemetery forces a dislocation in time.  My sense of being “in the flow” stutters,  stops.  The watch on my wrist “keeps time” and my cell time display functions.  But in the presence of the dead, and with statues of angels standing watch —life itself strikes me as palpably temporary. ... Read More Read More - [Louisville, River Town](https://everyangel.org/louisville-river-town/): I am a North Carolinian, who immigrated to Chicago and adapted to life in one of the world’s great cities.  Yet, the South has a place in my heart.  Every visit to Louisville, Kentucky feels like home coming.  Louisville is located on the Ohio River, a trade route since the West was settled in... Read More Read More - [Pullets, Laughing Our Way to Louisville](https://everyangel.org/pullets-laughing-our-way-to-louisville/): The road from Chicago to Louisville can seem longer than the five and a half hour drive the journey is supposed to take.  Especially if you happen to run into a time-killing-slow-crawl traffic jam in the Chicago metro area.   We’d been on the road for a while and were just past Indianapolis.  Our joints... Read More Read More - [If I Could, I Would.....](https://everyangel.org/if-i-could-i-would/): If I could send a message to everyone who does not blindly follow Donald Trump and the Republican Party…………………this would be it. Take courage my friends.  Keep working it.  That is, — the one special life that you have been given. - [Baraboo Philosophy Discussion Group](https://everyangel.org/baraboo-philosophy-discussion-group/): Thursday evening is the regular meeting of the Baraboo Philosophy Discussion Group held at the Log Cabin Cafe.  Here one of the participants expresses an opinion on Plato’s Parmenides. Okay, okay –the Discussion Group exists only in my imagination.  The Log Cabin Restaurant in Baraboo Wisconsin is “real” though.  The establishment is exceptional on... Read More Read More - [A Walk in the North Woods](https://everyangel.org/autumn-in-the-north-woods/): Went for a walk on Sunday Oct 9th about 3PM in the afternoon.  The wind was rustling the tall pines. I stood on the narrow spit of sand at the edge of the lake. The air was cool, giving hint of frost after sunset. A breeze lapped the lake surface; creating a big plate... Read More Read More - [Where to from here?](https://everyangel.org/where-to-from-here/): We Americans entertain the notion that we are unlike other peoples.  It’s a seductive thought.  The American system of governance is emulated, our society is knit together by fascination with sporting events, our economy is a Capitalistic paradise, etc.    One could go on and on about American Exceptionalism. The myth has worn very... Read More Read More - [Galileo's Telescope](https://everyangel.org/galileos-telescope/): What we see comes from that which is not apparent. This statement is axiomatic for us, becoming embedded in the DNA of our culture since the rise of science as a basis for knowledge.  Did it all began when Galileo pointed his 10x homemade refracting telescope at the moon, and discovered, saw with his... Read More Read More - [Absolute Transitivity](https://everyangel.org/absolute-transitivity/): We live in technological temporality. Duration and material support replaced— by individual retinal and auditory instants. —- Sensible appearances changed into so many instances, mere specters of a perspective. Perspective reality is about to disappear —- Post-reality Paul Virilio Lost Dimension, published 1984 - [With Each Minute Subtracted....](https://everyangel.org/chanting-with-each-minute-subtracted/): Emanating from a cathedral  the center of Rome, a line of ten thousand people stretches radially outward, like the hand of a giant clock, out to the edge of the city, and beyond.  Yet these patient pilgrims are directed inward, not out.  They are waiting their turn to enter the Temple of Time.  They... Read More Read More - [Sublimity of the Ordinary](https://everyangel.org/sublimity-of-the-ordinary/): There are times when I’m exhausted by life.  Conflict and stress are consequences of being a sentient being.  With few useful instincts we depend upon learning and emotional intelligence to “earn our living.”–by a paradox of cooperation and competition with others.  This is what we mean by society.  It’s more complicated than we know. ... Read More Read More - [Autumn, Three Days In](https://everyangel.org/autumn-three-days-in/): Distracted by the atypical warm weather, I did not notice the advent of Fall on September 22nd.  Here in the Midwest we’ve had days in the high 80’s late into the month.  Quite unusual for the Chicago area.  A few maples show a hint of color in my neighborhood. On Sunday September 25th I... Read More Read More - [The Final Shootout](https://everyangel.org/the-final-shootout/): Saturday Sept 24th was the final Nitrous Shootout of the season at Great Lakes Dragway.  The dragstrip is a gathering place for those addicted to creating compression of time over a quarter mile.  A final big race day of the season drew a sizable crowd of crew members, drivers, families, and fans–all deserving of... Read More Read More - [Time and a Trump Presidency](https://everyangel.org/time-and-a-trump-presidency/): Recently I was pointed to a New Yorker article by a friend.  Evan Osnos composed a fulsome speculative forecast of what type of presidency is likely should Donald Trump be elected.  Osnos writing was well researched with many interviews over several months time with individuals connected to the candidate.  Donald Trump has placed great... Read More Read More - [Natural Philosopher Continues Newtons Work](https://everyangel.org/natural-philosopher-continues-newtons-work/): Lincoln, prepares for an experiment in Natural Philosophy.  Natural Philosophy up until the 19th century was “the science of beings which undergo change and are independent of human beings.”  Lincoln protests the fragmentation of philosophy into departmentalized sciences due to new contexts and ways of learning.   The trend beginning with Galileo, to Sir... Read More Read More - [A Philosopher is Born](https://everyangel.org/a-philosopher-is-born/): Yes, Lincoln does not look the part, not yet anyway.  But here he is on the playground of Longfellow School, surveying the lawn with confidence, exploring, running this way and that.  Do you remember your earliest visits to a playground?  Remember the vast expanse of grassy carpet, maybe there was some playground equipment……  Can... Read More Read More - [CODA](https://everyangel.org/coda/): Coda [ˈkoːda] (Italian for “tail”, plural code) is a term used in music primarily to designate a passage that brings a piece to an end. When you begin to understand the previous post, the quotation from Paul Virilio, you will shudder.  The consequences for life and well being are dark.  A counter point, an... Read More Read More - [Only The Point Remains](https://everyangel.org/only-the-point-remains/): Why do we stand amazed before the assumed properties of the black holes of outer space? Aren’t all of our puncta of observation and all of our quanta of actions simply black holes of scientific thought?  These are the black dots of the line wherein begin and end our rational representations.  As Bachelard slyly... Read More Read More - [Not What We Thought](https://everyangel.org/not-what-we-thought/): THE SECOND COMING We see, But not with the light of day. It’s the light of no solar star. It’s the light of our own theory, The theory of energy that appeared in 1905. Along with cinematography and aviation, Grand vectors of audiovisual and automotive Transformation of sensory experiences. Transport and transmission revolutions. With... Read More Read More - [Show Queens](https://everyangel.org/show-queens/): It’s Thursday 5 0’clock PM.  A mini crisis shortened my day at the office.  Fortunately the crisis evaporated.  I celebrated by pouring myself a Blue Moon. I soak up the suns warmth and cooler air temps, a harbinger of Fall.  I felt the nudge of Fall yesterday, hanging out for a while at Park... Read More Read More - [Like A Bullet](https://everyangel.org/when-the-bullet-snaps-past-ones-ear/): Today is our 46th wedding anniversary; married to my best friend for 46 years.  She knows me in ways that I do not know myself.  At 21 I could not have imagined that the journey would have lasted for 46 years.  Each must play the hand that one is dealt.  You either ruminate, marinate... Read More Read More - [Requiem For a Passing Age](https://everyangel.org/requiem-for-a-passing-age/): There is a above average steak house, if you exit I40 at Alamance Road traveling west to Greensboro.  When I am in North Carolina I usually meet with good friends at The Cutting Board.  The steaks are excellent, w. baked potato-sour cream-bacon bits and a fine salad bar.  In the foyer is displayed a... Read More Read More - [RECIPE: A Touch of Genius and a Lot of Courage](https://everyangel.org/recipe-a-touch-of-genius-and-a-lot-of-courage/): Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage — to move in the opposite direction.   –Albert Einstein  The photo of a anonymous woman sitting on a curb in the aftermath of one of many random killings in a... Read More Read More - [CORN KING 2016](https://everyangel.org/corn-king-2016/): Do you remember what your life was like at 20 months old?  At 20 months one can say several words.  Self reflective awareness begins to form with language.  Best of all, every waking day is literally “the first day of the rest of one’s life.”  We repeat the phrase as adults as a reminder... Read More Read More - [Elegy for My Generation](https://everyangel.org/elegy-for-my-generation/): I’ll not forget my first visit to a drag strip.  Drag strips are often in out of the way places.  By definition it was and is an “outlaw” activity.  I was a high school sophomore. I lied to my father about my intentions, in order to gain permission to go with Eddie to the... Read More Read More - [SIC SIMPER ERAT, ET SEMPER ERIT](https://everyangel.org/sic-simper-erat-et-semper-erit/): I am seated before a screen, letters, words, sentences appearing by magic, as fingers press buttons.  The words, arranged in grammatical structure convey the meaning within my mind, and serendipitiously to your mind, if you should discover and read the post.  The symbols on the screen are evanescent, held in being by retinal persistence. ... Read More Read More - [And More From Paul Virilio](https://everyangel.org/and-more-from-paul-virilio/): This morning I read more from Virilio’s book, Lost Dimension, published in 1984.  I read a few pages and came upon this section.  These words left me existentially numb.  For now I can read no further.  Basically, if the early sciences were sciences of the earth, of matter and of physical sciences, sciences of... Read More Read More - [The Old Gods Part II](https://everyangel.org/the-old-gods-part-ii/): Sun’s-day Moon-day Tiw’s-day Woden’s-day Thor’s-day Frig’s-day Saturn’s-day Thunor, god of thunder and Frig, goddess of growing things and fertility….  Perhaps it is both human and wise, like King Redwald, to keep in favor with both sides. Two altars were constructed side by side. At one altar the king partook of bread and wine, “the... Read More Read More - [Cattulus](https://everyangel.org/cattulus/): Love should not be written in stone but written in water. –Cattulus Very little is objectively known of the life of Gaius Valerius Catullus. It is believed that he was born in Verona in 84 B.C. to a wealthy and well-connected family. Catullus’ father was a friend of Julius Caesar. He died in Rome... Read More Read More - [Of Old Gods](https://everyangel.org/of-old-gods/): Am reading about England of 1000 AD.  The book by Robert Lacey and Danny Danziger is an enjoyable read of the conditions of life in the Middle Ages, dealing with Viking raids, settlements by the Norsemen, and the development of Christianity.  I imagine the story as a time capsule sent to me from my... Read More Read More - [Recipe For Good Luck](https://everyangel.org/recipe-for-good-luck/): Yeah, I know the word “luck” is totally plebeian, tarnished with the soil of ignorance and superstition.  We may resist using the term preferring instead gussied up circumlocutions such as “in sync with the universe.”  Is there any difference?  Does not luck in all of it’s variations touch the finite nature of our knowledge,... Read More Read More - [Remember To Remember](https://everyangel.org/remember-to-remember/): The primal law that governs all living: not love not hate not hope but fear Its universality is the cause of every abomination in the shitty chaos called human history. The trick is not to become unbalanced, punished, ruled by it. Any fool can be a pessimist; it takes no imagination, no guts. Remember... Read More Read More - [Mission Accomplished](https://everyangel.org/mission-accomplished/): Is this how a member of a bomber crew felt upon return from a WWII mission upon sighting the cliffs of Dover and England below?  Maybe.  At the end of a visit to my home town, I hope to board the American Airlines jet shortly, for transport back to Chicago.  A visit to my... Read More Read More - [Stewing](https://everyangel.org/stewing/): When you cut off arterial blood to an organ, the organ dies. When you cut the flow of nature into people’s lives, their spirit dies. As we plunge into cyberspace and strive to replicate the “real” world in the “virtual,” we lose sight of one fundamental fact: nature is totally missing in the digital... Read More Read More - [Science Day Postscript](https://everyangel.org/science-day-postscript/): The following quotations are from Sarah Sekula’s outstanding article TURTLE POWER Endangered species spawn on Florida beaches, USA TODAY. Sarasota county has the highest density of turtle nests on the Gulf Coast, with as many as 6,000 nests a year, while the east coast of Florida hosts as many as 40,000. Seeing hatchlings emerge... Read More Read More - [March For Science Day](https://everyangel.org/march-for-science-day/): We have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time— when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest... Read More Read More - [Dinner & Bank Robbery](https://everyangel.org/dinner-bank-robbery/): Our first day in town featured dinner at Dame’s Chicken and Waffles on Main Street.  The rather small restaurant-bar delivers on it’s promise.  “Southern fried perfection meets sweet European decadence.”  The menu reflects an era when jazz musicians would finish their gigs in New York City.  They’d find a Chicken and Waffles joint open till... Read More Read More - [Time Travel](https://everyangel.org/time-travel/): By noon I will be boarding an American Airlines plane at O’hare.  After enclosure, sardine like, in the silver-aluminum tube, with good fortune, I will emerge two hours later in North Carolina.  I expect the air to be warmer and scented with pine needles.  The people will be vaguely familiar with respect to voice... Read More Read More - [Magic Between You And I](https://everyangel.org/magic-between-you-and-i/): Just felt like considering the message, or better, the zeitgeist of this song.  I don’t usually mourn the passing of an actor, more than just making a mental note of their absence. With the passing of Patrick Swayze in 2009 it was different.  I felt that an artist of rare ability, a dancer, had... Read More Read More - [Reno's Story](https://everyangel.org/renos-story/): Reno is a friend who stops by to say hello nearly every morning, as I contemplate my computer screen at Starbucks.  A bit of small talk is exchanged and sometimes a good story. Reno with a wry smile and irony in his voice told me of an experience on the job yesterday.  He works... Read More Read More - [Existentialism Raw](https://everyangel.org/existentialism-raw/): Did you ever read about a frog Who dreamed of bein’ a king And then became one Well except for the names And a few other changes If you talk about me The story’s the same one… Heard this song played today and I knew that I had to write about it.  It is... Read More Read More - [Easter Morning](https://everyangel.org/easter-morning/): Walked around the block early this morning.  The early spring thunderstorm left the ground wet and the grass emerald green.  I believe in the concept of resurrection, that newness seemingly comes out of nothing: ex nihilio.  After winters deep sleep, the emergence of green, a constellation of tiny leaves covering the apple tree, robins... Read More Read More - [Easter And Making One's Self Happy](https://everyangel.org/easter-and-making-ones-self-happy/): What are you trying to say?  I am not sure “what” the point is but I like this song.  My instinct tells me that the point will become clear with more thought, more care.  Enjoy. - [Easter Weekend](https://everyangel.org/easter-weekend/): How do I not ruminate on the meaning of Easter?  Raised a fundamentalist Christian, I was and am shaped by the stories of the Bible, especially those of Christ’s passion.  The facts of the story are grim, and the happy ending has been added by interpretation, a after-the-fact postscript.  Life is like that though. ... Read More Read More - ["Happy" Easter](https://everyangel.org/happy-easter/): Good Friday, two days before Easter Sunday is the day of commemoration of Jesus’s death.  There are various of interpretations of Jesus’s death by Christians.  The essential idea is that Jesus was a substitute, he died as a stand-in for everyone else.  The word sacrifice is typically used.  The ancient religious understanding of sacrifice... Read More Read More - [Becoming A Philosopher](https://everyangel.org/becoming-a-philosopher/): What a philosopher is, that is hard to learn because it cannot be taught: one must “know” it from experience. —Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil #213 - [The Absurd Part II](https://everyangel.org/the-absurd-part-ii/): A interesting quote. The absurd is productive as a stimulus toward the creation of beauty and significance. But…………… What happens when a majority of us embrace the absurd as a intellectual and moral habitat? - [Absurdity](https://everyangel.org/absurdity/): The discussion touched upon interpreting the world as absurd.  Surely this cannot mean a world that is chaotic, profoundly in contradiction, schizophrenic.   The world to my observation exists as a manifold of Being in flux, a perpetual dance, adjusting to cyclical seasonal increase and diminution of temperature and light.  The world just is.  There... Read More Read More - [Existentialism](https://everyangel.org/existentialism/): I am reading material on Existentialism, a movement that emerged in post WW II Europe.  Given the intense suffering, and the brutality of Nazi occupation it seems reasonable to me that an existentialist approach to life would have been persuasive.  Life stripped of anchor points for humane value, — with the vantage point of... Read More Read More - [Crescendo](https://everyangel.org/crescendo/): Beyond Good and Evil, Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, final section, What is Noble, concludes with a number of aphorisms which seem quite personal.  It is as if the author says—“and now the heart of the matter.”  I was drawn to Nietzsche from a upbringing of religious fundamentalism.  Fundamentalism is both right... Read More Read More - [Sheep Thrills](https://everyangel.org/sheep-thrills/): We are well into spring.  I worked with a rake clearing up the debris fallen from the two old blue spruce trees, winters leavings.  Two garbage containers were filled with twigs, and pine cones.  Butter cups are on the cusp of blooming.  The tulips will be close behind. I was reminded of the nature... Read More Read More - [Stacked Odds, A Man, And His Will To Survive](https://everyangel.org/stacked-odds-a-man-and-his-will-to-survive/): Another day in paradise.  I say paradise ironically.  We live East of Eden, outside the gates of paradise.  Or to put it another way with a lyric line from Hotel California, “This could be heaven or this could be hell…” I heard about the cruise missile strike on the Syrian airbase.  Shortly afterward I... Read More Read More - [Coda](https://everyangel.org/coda-2/): Coda: the finale of a ballet in which the dancers parade before the audience. The values of a human being betray something of the structure of his soul and where it finds its conditions of life, its true need. It would follow on the whole that easy communicability of need —-which in the last... Read More Read More - [What, In The End....](https://everyangel.org/what-in-the-end/): What, in the end, is common? Words are acoustical signs for concepts; concepts, however, are more or less definite image signs for often recurring and associated sensations, or groups of sensations.  To understand on another, it is not enough that one use the same words; one also has to use the same words for... Read More Read More - [Outside Of Time](https://everyangel.org/outside-of-time/): Once in a while I experience time dislocation.  By that I mean a disruption in my accustomed sequence of things.  Time for us is a concatenation of events, causally related, more or less–that we have adapted to.  Sometimes something happens to upend those expectations.  If you stop to think you can imagine events that... Read More Read More - [Transience](https://everyangel.org/transience/): This weekend I heard this tune on the radio.  “Have You Seen Her” by the Chi-Lites moved me.  Though I’ve not personally experienced the cause of loneliness depicted in the lyric story line, — I can relate.  The point is an old one, succinctly stated by Heraclitus,  “Everything changes, and nothing remains.”  What time... Read More Read More - [A Birthday In Retrospect](https://everyangel.org/a-birthday-in-retrospect/): April 2nd, the day after my birthday.  I awakened this morning thinking of my ancestors, the ones going back to the England of the first millennium.  Like the common Anglo-Saxon they surely had a hoe in their hands and planted the fields at this time of year. They came to this country from somewhere... Read More Read More - [A Birthday](https://everyangel.org/a-birthday/): April 1, 1949 was the day that I was born.  I seldom think  about it.  In past years often I needed a reminder, “Isn’t today your birthday?’  World War II concluded on September 2nd 1945 with the surrender of Japan.  Germany surrendered earlier in May.  I was born soon after the second great war... Read More Read More - [Our Virtues](https://everyangel.org/our-virtues/): Every people has its own Tartuffery and calls it its virtues— What is best in us we do not know— we cannot know. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Peoples and Fatherlands  #249 - [Supra-national, Nomadic Man](https://everyangel.org/supra-national-nomadic-man/): A friend forwarded to me the address of a conservative web site.  The site featured an article that explores the negative reaction expressed by the conservative minded to philosophers who specialize in postmodern thought.  In our discussion group there is always push back when an essay is offered, authored by Slavoj Zizek or Michele... Read More Read More - [Art](https://everyangel.org/art/): Art lies in concealing art. –Horace Quintus Horatius Flaccus (December 8, 65 BC – November 27, 8 BC), known in the English-speaking world as Horace, was the leading Roman lyric poet during the time of Augustus (also known as Octavian). His career coincided with Rome’s momentous change from a republic to an empire. An... Read More Read More - [Hope](https://everyangel.org/hope/): Open societies, in their pluralism, create an anxiety that brings about a reaction toward a fixed organic state, which, then as now, serves both the interests of an oligarchy and those of a frightened, insecure population looking to arrest change. We live, certainly, in societies that are in many ways inequitable, unfair, capriciously oppressive,... Read More Read More - [Diogenes, We Need You](https://everyangel.org/diogenes-we-need-you/): Diogenes used his simple lifestyle and behavior to criticize the social values and institutions of what he saw as a corrupt or at least confused society. In a highly non-traditional fashion, he had a reputation of sleeping and eating wherever he chose and took to toughening himself against nature. He declared himself a cosmopolitan... Read More Read More - [And On The Other Hand](https://everyangel.org/and-on-the-other-hand/): This same will has at its service an apparently opposite drive of the spirit, a suddenly adopted preference of ignorance, of deliberate shutting out, a shutting of one’s windows, an inner No to this or that, a prohibition to approach, a sort of defensive attitude against much that is knowable, a contentment with the... Read More Read More - [The Undying Beast](https://everyangel.org/the-undying-beast/): 229. In these later ages, which may be proud of their humanity, there still remains so much fear, so much SUPERSTITION of the fear, of the “cruel wild beast,” the mastering of which constitutes the very pride of these humaner ages–that even obvious truths, as if by the agreement of centuries, have long remained... Read More Read More - [This One Got To Me](https://everyangel.org/this-one-got-to-me/): This poem was delivered yesterday via email.  I recommend Poem-A-Day for exposure to a variety of poets, and as a form of therapy to counter the negativity that surrounds us. Deception Story by  Solmaz Sharif Friends describe my DISPOSITION as stoic. Like a dead fish, an ex said. DISTANCE is a funny drug and... Read More Read More - [Kiss It Goodby](https://everyangel.org/kiss-it-goodby/): I’m in a funk this morning.  The ACA, also known as Obamacare is certain to be repealed and replaced today.  The replacement will be something unaccountably cruel.  The accounting will come soon enough, when the fixed sum of money allocated to the states runs out.   At the same time, there is no cap on... Read More Read More - [Pure As New York Snow](https://everyangel.org/pure-as-new-york-snow/): A friend issued a challenge to the members of our discussion group.  We were asked to conceive an idea or an aspect of experience that is universal, upon which everyone would tend to agree.  The idea was to imagine a basis upon which we could begin to dialog with those with whom we usuallyvociferously... Read More Read More - [Socrates Meets Donald Trump](https://everyangel.org/socrates-meets-donald-trump/): In the age of Socrates, among men of fatigued instincts, among the conservatives of ancient Athens who let themselves go—- “toward happiness,” as they said, toward pleasure, as they acted—- and who all the while still mouthed the ancient pompous words to which their lives no longer gave them any right, irony may have... Read More Read More - [Tightrope](https://everyangel.org/tightrope/): The stupidity of the average man will permit the oligarch, whether economic or political, to hide his real purposes from the scrutiny of his fellows and to withdraw his activities from effective control. Since it is impossible to count on enough moral goodwill among those who possess irresponsible power to sacrifice it for the... Read More Read More - [Peeps](https://everyangel.org/peeps/): A reader response to yesterdays post “Bible Study” stimulated my thinking.  Those with whom we disagree are in a position to help us the most.  That is counter intuitive, and true. Why are many scared, so angry?  And what about my state of mind and heart?  What emotions are evoked by a cursory reading... Read More Read More - [Bible Study](https://everyangel.org/bible-study/): The following was received from a friend, who thinks as do I, that resistance to the agenda of the administration is required if we are to maintain self respect and not be stripped of our humanity.  This is from the NY Times and the URL is appended below.  I’ll add a comment or two... Read More Read More - [Wishing We Were In His Place](https://everyangel.org/wishing-we-were-in-his-place/): I have a tattered paperback copy of Beyond Good and Evil in my briefcase.  Its longevity is extended by a strip of silver duck tape long the spine.  The frayed edges of the cover are protected by clear vinyl tape.  The book was purchased when I was in college, and I am now rereading... Read More Read More - [The Sun Comes Up Like a God](https://everyangel.org/the-sun-comes-up-like-a-god/): Its comforting when the morning sun breaks over the tree tops and streams into the windows here at Starbucks.  On a winter morning, one’s spirit shouts,  “light, light!”  I understand in part how our ancestors worshiped the sun as a god.  The Mayans structured their cities around their great pyramids, temples for worship of... Read More Read More - [To Sin By Silence](https://everyangel.org/to-sin-by-silence/): PROTEST To sin by silence, when we should protest, Makes cowards out of men. The human race Has climbed on protest. Had no voice been raised Against injustice, ignorance and lust, The Inquisition yet would serve the law, And guillotines decide our least disputes. The few who dare, must speak and speak again To... Read More Read More - [Words At The Very Best](https://everyangel.org/words-at-the-very-best/): This quotation from Simone Weil is worth passing on: At the very best, a mind enclosed in language is in prison.  It is limited to the number of relations which words can make simultaneously present to it; and it remains in ignorance of thoughts which involve a combination of a greater number. The intelligent... Read More Read More - [Here I Go, There I Go](https://everyangel.org/here-i-go-there-i-go/): I’ve always loved this Bob Seger song.  Written in 1973 it is a mournful elegy to the transitivity of life.  Seger reflects upon the day to day experience of being an entertainer.  Beneath the glamor, the klieg lights of the big arenas, is the grind, the loneliness inscribed into “the life”.  I am reminded... Read More Read More - [What About The Lying..](https://everyangel.org/what-about-the-lying/): The comment heightened my awareness. “What about the lying…?”—-a query with a tone of uncertainty, a Freudian slip, — concluding after thought by a Trump supporter. The interview was coming to an end, and the resident of Charlotte had just spoken his full-throated support for the president. And then came the hint of doubt.... Read More Read More - [Physics, Second Thoughts](https://everyangel.org/physics-second-thoughts/): In the intellectual tradition of the West, through the Middle Ages, until the modern era, Theology was considered the “queen of the sciences.”  With the demise of Roman law and order the Catholic Church was the guarantor of European social order in the Middle Ages.  God’s law, the cathedrals and monasteries were the conservators... Read More Read More - [Light In A Mad World](https://everyangel.org/light-in-a-mad-world/): Can’t focus on anything in particular this morning.  Thus, I offer for consideration a selection of aphorisms from Nietzsche in section 4, Epigrams and Interludes, found in Beyond Good and Evil.  This is a playlist, some of Nietzsche’s Greatest Hits. 69. One has watched life badly, if one has failed to see the hand... Read More Read More - [A Great Ladder With Many Rungs](https://everyangel.org/a-great-ladder-with-many-rungs/): There is a great ladder of religious cruelty, with many rungs; but three of these are the most important. Once men sacrificed human beings to their God, and perhaps just those they loved the best–to this category belong the first-born sacrifices of all primitive religions, and also the sacrifice of the Emperor Tiberius in... Read More Read More - [Epicurus, Liberator](https://everyangel.org/epicurus-liberator/): How pleasant to know that Epicurus is part of our Grecco-Roman heritage.  The culture of the West owes a great deal to the intellectual ideals of Greece and Rome.  The Epicurean spirit is one of hospitality, of generous invitation. The host and keeper of this place, where you will find the pleasure of the... Read More Read More - [Like Prometheus](https://everyangel.org/like-prometheus/): I struggle to write this morning.  I awakened to the details of the Republican replacement for the ACA.  The Affordable Care Act was a work in process, an attempt to blunt the double digit annual increase in health care cost.  The measure was a heroic attempt.  The real issue always has been and is... Read More Read More - [A Will To Ignorance](https://everyangel.org/a-will-to-ignorance/): O sancta simplicitas!………….. Giving our senses a passport to everything superficial, our thoughts a godlike desire for wanton leaps and wrong inferences!–how from the beginning, we have contrived to retain our ignorance…… And only on this solidified, granitelike foundation of ignorance could knowledge rear itself hitherto, the will to knowledge on the foundation of... Read More Read More - [So You Want To Live According To Nature?](https://everyangel.org/so-you-want-to-live-according-to-nature/): WANTING TO LIVE ACCORDING TO NATURE So, you want to live according to nature? Imagine a being like nature: Wasteful beyond measure, Indifferent beyond measure Without purposes and consideration, Without mercy and justice, Fertile and desolate and uncertain at the same time; Imagine indifference itself as a power—– How could you live according to... Read More Read More - [I Would Not Give You False Hope](https://everyangel.org/i-would-not-give-you-false-hope/): Saturday and I am up early.  The days are longer and I am thankful for extended day light plus a morning that offers me hot coffee and music.  As I arrived here at Starbucks Paul Simon’s Mother and Child Reunion played on my car radio.  I’ve witnessed Paul Simon in concert and I felt... Read More Read More - [The Shape of Unmet Needs](https://everyangel.org/the-shape-of-unmet-needs/): Sloth – Laziness is really fear. We can’t bear to get down to our work, because if we were to apply ourselves, we risk terrifying humiliation. We might not succeed as well as we’d like, we might find a task too hard, we may realise we’re not yet equipped to undertake it or be mocked... Read More Read More - [Free Will Of A Penny](https://everyangel.org/free-will-of-a-penny/): Over the years Don has contended for a thorough going cause/effect description of reality.  We’ve enjoyed exchanges exploring the possibility or impossibility of free will.  This story is for you, Don. “Explain free will,” I said. “Imagine a copper penny that is exactly like an ordinary penny except that for this discussion it has... Read More Read More - [Nietzsche](https://everyangel.org/nietzsche/): Tuesday evening is philosophy discussion night.  Eight to ten of us gather together to discuss an essay.   We “go” together in conversation where ever our stories seem to lead us.  We have discussed Nietzsche’s work before.  He is difficult for many reasons, none the least is shear brilliance of his intellect. The springboard for... Read More Read More - [Vanishing In Plain Sight](https://everyangel.org/vanishing-in-plain-sight/): Read this in the NY Times this morning.  What would possess us to kill/eliminate/obliterate a species forever?…….  Are we mad? SAN FELIPE, Mexico — In the shallow sea waters of the Gulf of California swims a porpoise that few have seen, its numbers dwindling so fast that its very existence is now in peril.... Read More Read More - [Back From Galena](https://everyangel.org/back-from-galena/): Monday, the work week begins.  As usual seated at Starbucks, keyboard at my fingers, I realize that those around me, baristas behind the counter, and the regulars purposely striding in to place their beverage orders, are all connected in a vast network of communication and purpose which we call work.  It is a living... Read More Read More - [Galena](https://everyangel.org/galena/): Decided to visit Galena Illinois for the weekend.  Galena is close by the Mississippi River and and is known for it’s most famous resident, General Ulysses S Grant.  Grant lived in Galena at the conclusion of the War Between The States.  Galena has a Main Street, looking to be at least a half mile,... Read More Read More - [Our Hungry Ghost Zeitgeist](https://everyangel.org/our-hungry-ghost-zeitgeist/): Natural disasters are not as bad As not knowing what is enough. Loss is not as bad As wanting more. –Lao Tsu, Tao Te Ching 46   - [Trouble On The Way](https://everyangel.org/trouble-on-the-way/): I can hardly write this morning.  Like a massive rotating hurricane, —gale force words on immigration surround the eye of this storm.  Our newly elected president is the eye.  The storm has yet to make landfall.  It promises to be a big one, like the one that ripped up New Orleans a few years... Read More Read More - [Doses of Fury](https://everyangel.org/doses-of-fury/): Tuesday evening our Philosophy Discussion Group meets at Beans & Leaves Cafe in Long Grove.   Our “launch pad” essay for last night was POLITENESS by Quinn Norton.  Quinn Norton is a blogger, journalist, photographer.  She comments upon the movements that roil our post-modern, globalized, social world.  You may have a look at one of... Read More Read More - [The Strong Brown God](https://everyangel.org/the-strong-brown-god/): Tuesday morning, gray sky, warm and a light rain is falling.  Feels like May in late February.  Wish that I knew what this radical momentary departure from winter means.  Perhaps it means nothing, portends nothing that is to come.  After all, it’s weather and weather is change on a daily basis, forgettable.  Or maybe... Read More Read More - [United In The Strife Which Divides Us](https://everyangel.org/united-in-the-strife-which-divides-us/): My writing since the election of our president has disclosed my state of mind, that we are on the cusp of destruction.  Time will tell.  Nevertheless one must live one day at a time.  Living in premonition of the apocalypse is no life at all.  It’s a stuttering distraction from the path that one... Read More Read More - [Missing President Obama](https://everyangel.org/missing-president-obama/): Earlier in my life,  I lived day-to-day with little awareness of, scarce concern about the occupant of the White House.  Lately, I really miss President Obama.  He exhibited probity and propriety for eight years, in the teeth of stiff opposition.  He observed that the cost of health care for a majority of Americans was... Read More Read More - [We Are Not Dreaming](https://everyangel.org/we-are-not-dreaming/): Last night after dusk I saw the planet Venus suspended, a glowing large star, behind the silhouette of the tall maple in the distance.  I felt the comfort of knowing that Venus remains for me, as it did for my father, my grandfather, and for so many past generations.  The enjoyment of that glimpse... Read More Read More - [Living Among The Breakage](https://everyangel.org/living-among-the-breakage/): Yesterday I was reminded of the fragility of language.  Words are spontaneously used, transparent, selected for a purpose almost by reflex.  As a man working on a motor instinctively reaches into his tool tray for the 3/8 inch socket because he “just knows” that’s the one that fits–so we chose our words, you and... Read More Read More - [Terminus](https://everyangel.org/terminus/): Yesterday a friend sent a link to The Atlantic article featuring the winners of the 2017 World Press Photo Contest.  This photo rocked my world, –that is the world of connections, coherency, the lucidity that my mind has fashioned from my 67 years of life experience.  The photo is of a female, holding a... Read More Read More - [Chanting Loudly Consoling Ourselves](https://everyangel.org/chanting-loudly-consoling-ourselves/): VII This, then, is to be the way? Freedom’s candle will be snuffed out by freedom’s sworn defenders, chanting hourly the praise of freedom. Their praise will console the free waking in their prisons when the Bill of Rights has at last dissolved in the indifference of the great Self of force. When the... Read More Read More - [Troubling Our Own House](https://everyangel.org/troubling-our-own-house/): Another restless night battling this sinus infection.  Slept fitfully in the TV room.  My condition was not the only thing troubling me.   I thought of my co workers, especially the news of a yet to be diagnosed heart condition of one of the men.  He is much younger than I.  I also could not... Read More Read More - [We Resist](https://everyangel.org/we-resist/): “If we live through this precarious moment, if his catastrophic instinct to retaliate doesn’t lead us to nuclear winter, we will have much to thank our current leader for. …He will have woken us up to how fragile freedom is. The whip of the executive, through a Twitter feed, can lash and intimidate, punish... Read More Read More - [Being Human](https://everyangel.org/being-human/): Our culture idolizes youth. The images selected for commercial promotion are adults and children, in the bloom of health, active, energized by joie de vivre, apparently eternally young.  The message directly voiced, or indirectly implied is the product under offer, is the secret to this well being.  I wish that were true. Last night... Read More Read More - [Spannungsbogen](https://everyangel.org/spannungsbogen/): It is possible to act well in spite of one’s difficulties and apprehensions, a reserve of spiritual power becomes manifest, and may be accessed and drawn upon. The Fremen were supreme in that quality the ancients called “spannungsbogen” – which is the self-imposed delay between desire for a thing and the act of reaching... Read More Read More - [Coda On Morality Part II](https://everyangel.org/coda-on-morality-part-ii/): The more you love, the more you can love— and the more intensely you love. Nor is there any limit on how many you can love. If a person had Time Enough, he could love all of the majority who are decent and just. –Robert A. Heinlein The Notebooks of Lazarus Long - [Coda on Morality](https://everyangel.org/coda-on-morality/): So, do you mean to say, “love thy neighbor as thyself” is the best that we can do for an objective moral principle? Yes. Then it seems that I need to get right to work on better loving myself. Yes. - [Corrupted Morality](https://everyangel.org/corrupted-morality/): A spirited discussion developed on the topic of morality.  Where does one begin to think about such an expansive idea?  A promising launch point was suggested.  Morality, what is good, and it’s opposite, is rooted in our visceral response to the external world.  In short pleasure is an indication of what is good, and... Read More Read More - [Into The Darkness](https://everyangel.org/into-the-darkness/): Another day, a weirdly warm fifty degrees, but the usual gray for February.  Was reflecting upon a meeting with friends last night.  I flashed back to the 60s where coffee shops were places for songs of resistance to a war, and for building alternative community.  Our colonial forebears likewise met in the public houses... Read More Read More - [Monday Morning Hero](https://everyangel.org/monday-morning-hero/): Its Monday morning.  The day after the Super Bowl, and feeling blue.  There is good-natured banter between staff here at Starbucks.  Awareness of the chatter, and the David Bowie lyric in the background, “We can be Hero’s for just one day…” is pulling my spirit toward the bright side.  Certainly my funk is the... Read More Read More - [Needed: One Rickety Raft](https://everyangel.org/needed-one-rickety-raft/): I am delighted to offer a guest post from a friend, and a fine writer.  The choice is perennial and ancient, and as contemporary as that offered to Neo in the Matrix movie, “You take the blue pill, the story ends. You wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe.... Read More Read More - [A Chain of Two Yards](https://everyangel.org/a-chain-of-two-yards/): People claim to want freedom. In good faith attempts are made to set up political freedom. People also proclaim metaphysical freedom. They struggle to free slaves. They make liberty a supreme value. The loss of freedom by imprisonment is a punishment that is hard to bear. Liberty is cherished……. It is not true that... Read More Read More - [Rodent Prognosticator](https://everyangel.org/rodent-prognosticator/): And freedom, oh freedom, well that’s just some people talkin’ A lyric line from the song Desperado by Glenn Frey and Don Henley is how I feel right now.  We worship at the Shrine of Freedom in this country.  Lately I wonder if there is much behind the curtain.  I happily accepted a invitation... Read More Read More - [Time To Play Jazz](https://everyangel.org/time-to-play-jazz/): Street violence was reported in Berkeley last night.  Riot police, students and tear gas is never a good  combination.  The cancelled speaker is an editor for the Breitbart News Network, which was headed until recently by a senior Trump advisor.  “So now it begins,” I thought upon waking to this news report.  A  drumbeat... Read More Read More - [Is That God, Dancing?](https://everyangel.org/is-that-god-dancing/): After two sessions discussing the work and sayings of Albert Einstein, he remains one of my heroes.  Einstein is remembered for his worldview altering theories of Special Relativity and General Relativity.  The math and the experiments show that space and time and matter and gravity exist in dynamic relationship.  Space and time are no... Read More Read More - [Looking For That Sign](https://everyangel.org/looking-for-that-sign/): Tuesday morning and a cold rain is falling.  Another day is before me.  I have a short to-do list.  Every item seems of life & death importance.  And that,– is the problem.  The daily news reports stories of the anti-Muslim travel ban affecting thousands of travelers world-wide, innocent, but denied entry to our country. ... Read More Read More - [Making America Great Reconsidered](https://everyangel.org/making-america-great-reconsidered/): There is a story that Czeslaw Milosz, on a return visit to his birthplace in Lithuania some 50 years after he had left, walked up to an oak tree and embraced it. An image of the return of the native, of course, but also an image of someone drawing strength – the psychic, moral... Read More Read More - [A Taste Of Thyme Sweetened Honey](https://everyangel.org/a-taste-of-thyme-sweetened-honey/): Last night I attended a concert by a cover band of Eagles music.  A few years ago, I was lucky enough to hear The Eagles perform live.  That concert and those songs continue to change my life, to be sources of hope.  My wife was with me for that event.  At the time she... Read More Read More - [Coming Apart At The Seams](https://everyangel.org/coming-apart-at-the-seams/): Sparks fly!  I think that I’ve learned as much of life from Rock n Roll as I have from philosophy.  The distinction is a false one.  The discipline of reflection on the contents of the mind, and attending to the lyrics and tune composed by another, are complementary.  Its as if wisdom rises up, ... Read More Read More - [What Do You See?](https://everyangel.org/what-do-you-see/): It is Friday, midwinter.  Out of the window here at Starbucks the sky is unrelieved gray, much salty damp asphalt, and concrete curbing.  The architecture of our way of life is designed to accommodate the automobile.  Automobiles, now cybernetic platforms,  often cost as much as our parents paid for a house.  Trees, shrubs, grass... Read More Read More - [A Beach Story](https://everyangel.org/a-beach-story/): [In an ongoing attempt to clarify communication, Tobin decides to write another story as an analogy with regard to recent comments posted to the Philo Group. In his usual delusional manner, he actually believes things such as this story can open doors and produce results. Poor Tobin. He may never learn, at which point... Read More Read More - [The View From Afar](https://everyangel.org/the-view-from-afar/): On Tuesday, President Donald Trump ordered the re-authorization and rapid completion of the Dakota Access and the Keystone XL pipelines, two controversial infrastructure projects that will make it easier to transport fossil fuels across North America .—The Atlantic Daily Jan 25, 2017 Earth “A planet doesn’t explode of itself,” said dryly The Martian astronomer,... Read More Read More - [A Roar Heard Around The World](https://everyangel.org/a-roar-heard-around-the-world/): Women around the world marched. It is clear to me why women would march in the United States.  Trumps statements, his campaign promises and behavior would reasonably alarm any American who is not a Trump follower, who cares about the survival of the planet, human rights, and prosperity based upon trade with other nations. ... Read More Read More - [Has The Worm Turned?](https://everyangel.org/has-the-worm-turned/): In fairy tales the worm is a common term for dragon.  What a relief when the worm turns and your village and fields are not scorched by the beast. The day after the inauguration, women took to the streets to protest the stated intentions of the newly elected president of the United States to... Read More Read More - [More Fake News](https://everyangel.org/more-fake-news/): The following is a guest post from Nancy. I can’t stop reading about this stuff!  The Women’s March took place not just in a few cities, but all over the WORLD, estimated 2.5 million participants!  This is not just a few sour-grapes American ladies . . .    For every marcher, how many of her/his... Read More Read More - [Fake News](https://everyangel.org/fake-news/): WARNING: The following perhaps was a figment of my imagination.  Or maybe it was really a Trump fan club rally, and etc…?  The possibilities of illusion, delusion, are infinite.  In any case, I’ll tell you what the Chicago Tribune wrote about the event, and show you the pictures that “somehow” materialized in my camera. ... Read More Read More - [So, how free do I think that I am?](https://everyangel.org/so-how-free-do-i-think-that-i-am/): There are few issues more compelling than individual freedom.  Around fifteen or so of us, responding to an essay on Einstein’s morality, debated the whether and to what extent we are individually free.  Einstein thought that there was no exception to the uniformity of cause and effect within a closed system.  Yet, he also... Read More Read More - [Home Again Part 2](https://everyangel.org/home-again-part-2/): GLOBALIZATION describes the opening decades of the 21st century.  Countries and cultures are bound together by light speed communication disrupting old boundaries and ways of life.  I think about this a lot.  Can we conceive a way forward, a productive support for a humanly productive humanity,—avoiding the cul de sac of exploitation? Are we... Read More Read More - [More thoughts from Paul Virilio](https://everyangel.org/more-thoughts-from-paul-virilio/): “global village” now becomes disturbing. Instantaneous military presence, pure speed, exhaustion of the world, geocide. The twilight of places… What about the rhythms of daily life, the cosmic rhythms? Speed paralyzes us. Go faster, but where? Everything is moving, but nothing is changing. It still takes a child 20 years to develop, and 3... Read More Read More - [Home Again](https://everyangel.org/home-again/): I love coffee shops.  It was love at first sight.  In 1970 I began my two year tenure in Tokyo.  I was twenty one.  That the social environment was alien to a kid from Durham North Carolina is an understatement.  Then I discovered Fugetsudo coffee shop in Shinjuku.  It no longer exists, as one... Read More Read More - [Rock and Roll Lullaby](https://everyangel.org/rock-and-roll-lullaby/): Life can be considered a journey.  From the first flicker of self awareness to the palpable confidence at the height of physical and intellectual powers; then to the inexorable decline of passing years, –the precarity of ones life is the enduring subtext.  It’s the consistent back-beat of a bass drum anchoring the melody and... Read More Read More - [Zinnias](https://everyangel.org/zinnias/): The tomato vines are fading, the last of the fruit will soon be picked.  The squirrels have taken a share over the past several weeks.  Who knew they could be vegetarians?  Life is nothing but adaptable.  There was a time when we humans would pass on a tomato.  But we learned.  Now the tomato... Read More Read More - [The Whole Earth Our Hospital](https://everyangel.org/the-whole-earth-our-hospital/): What do you do when you can’t sleep?  Too much caffeine maybe?  Or is it the picture of the kid that haunts me?  I’ve been thinking of him since this past Wednesday when I glimpsed his picture in the NY Times.  The boy lives in Aleppo. He was pulled bleeding but alive from the... Read More Read More - [Finding One's Kin](https://everyangel.org/finding-ones-kin/): Kevin said it best.  The theme of the event was gratitude.  Time, effort were expended by everyone present, each according to his or her capacity.  How do you find your kin?  For our family, the annual “Pig Pickin” hosted by Kevin and Caryn in their backyard gets the job done. Kevin said that the... Read More Read More - [Fortuna Smiles](https://everyangel.org/fortuna-smiles/): My tomato harvest of the summer is unprecedented.  I’ve cultivated squash, cucumbers, eggplant and tomato plants at the back of the yard for years.  That patch gets the most sun.   I learn a bit with each season of experience.  Working with living things is trial and error.  There are a few things which I... Read More Read More - [Summer Sizzle](https://everyangel.org/summer-sizzle/): A visit to the Wisconsin State Fair in West Allis, just outside of Milwaukee is immersion in a great festival.  Seduction is the word.  The sights and sounds are counterpoint to the mundane of one’s life. Milwaukee Wisconsin has a reputation for good beer.  I ordered two cups of Leinenkugel’s Summer Shandy.  The waitress... Read More Read More - [Paradise Enough](https://everyangel.org/paradise-enough/): While the idea of paradise is on my mind, I’ll reference Lake Geneva Wisconsin.  If you live in the Chicago or Milwaukee area you are familiar with the town, at the end of a gorgeous lake.  The Persian word for paradise meant a walled garden.  Lake Geneva is remarkable for it’s beautiful lake, and... Read More Read More - [Almost Paradise](https://everyangel.org/almost-paradise/): Old Heraclitus was right.  “πάντα χωρεῖ καὶ οὐδὲν μένει”  Every thing changes and nothing remains. I found a cicada exoskeleton attached under a leaf while examining my garden.  Cicadas have been featured in literature since Homers Illiad.  They are short lived.  They sing loudly in chorus from the trees, a undulating cacophony, the song of... Read More Read More - [Paul Virilio](https://everyangel.org/paul-virilio/): Some quotes from The Administration of Fear, –a  meditation on technology, globalization, mass communication, and fear. The earth is shrinking and space is dwindling, compressed by instantaneous time.  Carried along by the headlong rush of an increasingly accelerated world, all we can do is manage and administer this fear instead of deal with it... Read More Read More - [APOGEE](https://everyangel.org/apogee/): Apogee is a term that I heard often when I was much younger, when space exploration was new.  Rockets and satellites were often in the news.  The apogee was the maximum point of flight at which gravity would overcome the energy of momentum and the launch vehicle begins its reentry arc into the earths... Read More Read More - [VERTIGO](https://everyangel.org/vertigo/): I am a Christian.  For me it would be impossible to be otherwise.  I cannot separate myself from my upbringing.  I do not think that I would if I could.  My world view is conditioned by Christian thought forms and evaluations.  However it has been many years since regular attendance at Sunday worship services. ... Read More Read More - [And about the speech](https://everyangel.org/one-more-thing-about-the-convention/): Here are a few lines which I lifted from Donald Trump’s acceptance speech of his nomination for the presidency of our country, delivered on Thursday evening July 21st. I have visited the laid-off factory workers, and the communities crushed by our horrible and unfair trade deals. These are the forgotten men and women of... Read More Read More - [Come see, there goes Robert E. Lee](https://everyangel.org/quick-come-see-there-goes-robert-e-lee/): And the subtext to “MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN” is…………….  If you grew up in the South, you will get the point.  Someone said, History is like old National Geographic magazines, it just keeps piling up.  While one may intellectually “move on” from horrific events, a subterranean emotional residue remains.  Seems to me that having... Read More Read More - [The Next Emperior](https://everyangel.org/the-next-emperior/): The Republican Party is convening in Cincinnati to promote Donald Trump as it’s adoptive son.  The stage craft, the hype is palpable.  The rest of us are expected to endorse Trump with a collective huzzah on November 11th. I was reminded of a striking statue at the Detroit Institute of Arts.  The statue was... Read More Read More - [15,001 of my friends](https://everyangel.org/15001-of-my-friends/): A highlight of the trip to Detroit was a concert at the DTE Energy Music theater, one of the foremost venues in the country.  We had lawn seating for three storied Rock N Roll bands, Cheap Trick, Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, and Heart.  All have been inducted into the Rock N Roll hall... Read More Read More - [Rhythm in their Dancing](https://everyangel.org/rhythm-in-their-dancing/): After arriving in Holly Michigan we saw an advertisement for the Oakland County Fair.  The kid in me hates to pass up a visit to a county fair.  What is more iconic than a Ferris wheel, even a double Ferris wheel? Our first stop upon entering the fairground was the pig races.  Actually the... Read More Read More - [Doc, fix me a Bloody Mary](https://everyangel.org/doc-fix-me-a-bloody-mary/): We were tired and hungry after spending the better part of the morning at the Detroit Institute of Arts.  Our spirits were full, satisfied.  Our bodies craved nourishment.  A quick cell phone search revealed that a restaurant with a suitable bill of fare was close at hand.  We crossed the street, walked about a... Read More Read More - [Things that run through us](https://everyangel.org/things-that-run-through-us/): Spent a day in Detroit.  So much to see in this Motor City.  Promised myself that I’d return in the future; maybe the Grand Prix of Detroit on Belle Isle in the spring; or the Heidelberg Project, a neighborhood rising from the ruins of American  politics as usual. The day was spent at the... Read More Read More - [A look in the mirror](https://everyangel.org/a-look-in-the-mirror/): This post is by Michael, a guest contributor.  It is offered as an appeal to reason, and to good will in order to address the collapsing dialog between conservatives and liberals in our country.  These good words are a call to self reflection.   BLUE STATE, red state. Big government, big business. Gay rights,... Read More Read More - [The Eye of god II](https://everyangel.org/the-eye-of-god-ii/): A mid summer visit to Kraklauer Creek.  Wildflowers and everything else is at the apogee of life. At that point does a plant pass from the everyday mundane into the realm of sculpture? Sculpture is made to touch.     And this is but a sliver of life that simultaneously “happens.”  A friend recently... Read More Read More - [A Weed By The Wall](https://everyangel.org/a-weed-by-the-wall/):   So, which plant would you designate as cultivated, and which a randomly growing, “volunteer” weed?  Would either plant “know,” have any sensibility of the distinction?  Is it a matter of beauty?  Though distinct in vegetative form, and shape of blossom,  each is beautiful in it’s own way.  Where is the dividing line of... Read More Read More - [Make Earth Great Again](https://everyangel.org/make-earth-great-again/): Browsing porn sites every day? Smoking pot because life is boring?  Does a day pass without fondling your TV remote? We are a binge drinking generation, the children of alcoholics.  Obsessing over our own reflection, soaking the mirror in attention–self devoted. The emotional healing that each needs exists within each one of us.  We... Read More Read More - [Dionysus Redux](https://everyangel.org/dionysus-redux/): Ahh, Summerfest, the annual music festival on the Milwaukee lakefront.  Anticipation of Summerfest keeps me going in the dark and often bitter Midwestern winters. It’s all about the music, –nine performance venues! Music and beer.  Ok, non-alcoholic libation is for sale too. I thought of the ancient god of wine, of ritual madness, fertility,... Read More Read More - [Love Will Keep us Alive,--The Last Festival](https://everyangel.org/love-will-keep-us-alive-the-last-festival/): Friday July 1st, the holiday weekend begins.  We made our way to Kraklauer Park.  Annually our town holds a four day community festival on the spacious lawn adjacent to Santa Maria church.  A big circus-sized tent is pitched and filled with picnic tables.  Outside is a lineup of local food vendors.  I walked over... Read More Read More - [BREXIT, Not a Breakup Song](https://everyangel.org/brexit-not-a-breakup-song/): I awakened on Sunday morning.  My first thought of the day, on Thursday a majority of Brits decided to leave the EU.  The European Union is a block of nations that have agreed to use a common currency, to establish a common regulation of trade, and to have open borders easing the movement of... Read More Read More - [Transcendence](https://everyangel.org/transcendence/): Everything is context.  The severe weather missed us.   A gentle rain had fallen over night.  I walked over to the garden.  The dark wet earth framed the lush, soft green of the young tomato plants.  I noticed some weeds that survived the hoe, making their come back.  I pulled a few, throwing them to... Read More Read More - [Father's Day 2016, Beans and Leaves](https://everyangel.org/fathers-day-2016-beans-and-leaves/): Music disseminates truth, A weapon of mass instruction. Our music is family unrelated by blood. It contains multitudes. We must be vigilant We must be citizen soldiers Stripped of fear. Our optimism is magnified In our music. We sing of ourselves. The songs we create Address our own condition, Will ultimately sing of another,... Read More Read More - [I Bought a Hoe](https://everyangel.org/i-bought-a-hoe/): For the past 5 or 6 years I have put in a small vegetable garden.  It’s a month to month process of work, and I have the help of multitudes.  What I mean is the presence of the botanists who developed the “Better Boy” hybrid tomato plant, the chemists who worked out the method... Read More Read More - [The Eye of god](https://everyangel.org/the-eye-of-god/): There is a park in Mundelein.  A creek runs through the park, providing sanctuary for finches, red wing black birds, and more that I do not recognize.  Wild flowers in abundance crowd the opposing banks.  Children find adventure descending the stone faced banks to peer into the shallow, slow flowing stream.  The more daring... Read More Read More - [Ninja Attack](https://everyangel.org/ninja-attack/): “attacked me like some fucking ninja” May 19, 2016 5. i had to buy a wristwatch – well, wanted to – since i was sick of digging my fob watch out, and feel a reluctance to rely on mobile phones for the time. i bought a Seiko 5 after watching a great video on the... Read More Read More - [Both of us might be wrong.](https://everyangel.org/both-of-us-might-be-wrong/):   From Nancy:  I was a high school senior — 17 or probably 18 — when I wrote this, apparently feeling less infallible than usual.  I do notice that at 61, I still apologize after committing an inadvertent injury.  But my opinions have marinated for decades so I’m less willing to reconsider them without... Read More Read More - [Times Are A-Changin](https://everyangel.org/times-are-a-changin/): Wow!  What a Tuesday evening at Beans & Leaves.  The house was full and we commenced to “do philosophy” sparked by the lyrics of Bob Dylan.  Dylan is iconic of a time, and of a generation.  We all pass, but our work lives on if we are lucky.   Peter, a serious fan of... Read More Read More - [The Value of Silence](https://everyangel.org/the-value-of-silence/): Some things are unsayable. and Some things sayable,–are best left unsaid. “Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent.”         Ludwig Wittgenstein  Tractatus 7.1 - [Under Construction](https://everyangel.org/under-construction/): Under Construction Uncertainty Incomplete knowledge Must be accepted. Courage! Update your beliefs As new evidence Comes in. Describe the universe As a series of Interconnected models Appropriate at different levels. Each model In it’s applicable domain– Ideas appearing– Essential parts of each story, Having the right To be thought of As real. Our task... Read More Read More - [Hephaestus](https://everyangel.org/hephaestus/): I envy the ancient Greeks of Attica, particularly the freemen and citizens of Athens.  They lived in a god-infused world.  Not us.  We inhabit a sterile, positivistic world.  According to logical positivism only that which can be empirically measured, mathematically accounted for has ontological status.  The mystery of being is fed into a reductionistic... Read More Read More - [Homo Faber, WTF](https://everyangel.org/homo-faber/): The Atlantic published an article on The 50 Greatest Breakthroughs Since the Wheel. This compilation of technological achievements reached back 6000 years thereabouts. Wendell Berry has said that it was a tool or a weapon that has been the prime mover of change in human history. That is a reasonable assessment as far as... Read More Read More - [Time](https://everyangel.org/time/):                   TIME Time alters form. What was Gives rise To what is. Gases condense Into planets. A spermatozoa Finds a ovum, Here I am. Impermanent, temporary A confluence of Past concatenations. For the time being Formed, I am. Me here, You there. Next? Credit given to Robert Langan, for his wonderful book... Read More Read More - [I Would Do Anything For Love](https://everyangel.org/i-would-do-anything-for-love/): Love is one of the lesser topics of philosophical treatment.  Like the word “belief” the term has a fulsome cloud of meaning.  The more one thinks about a statement about love, the less clear one becomes about what is meant.  Would I do anything for love?  It all depends on exactly what you have... Read More Read More - [A Poem For the Animal That Isn't There](https://everyangel.org/a-poem-for-the-animal-that-isnt-there/): Another fine poem composed by Nancy who has been a long term participant in our weekly philosophy discussion gathering.  The poem reflects experience of game spotting in East Africa.  Nancy mentioned that the animals are becoming scarce as their habitat is taken by encroaching human population. SONG OF THE SAFARI Though many creatures here... Read More Read More - [The Universe Spins In His Heart](https://everyangel.org/the-universe-spins-in-his-heart/): Here is a fine poetic work in words and visual presentation.  Gary is a long term participant in our philosophy discussion group.  It is a privilege to present his work here.  The poem: Humanities Man.     - [Another Poem For What Lies Ahead](https://everyangel.org/another-poem-for-what-lies-ahead/): WHAT REMAINS My world A conscious projection Of an unconscious construction. I’ve forgotten How to forget Now my palace Is my prison. Waking, “thrown” Into a world I did not create, Unless with luck, I find a puzzling key To the locked palace door. It is my palace after all. All palaces crumble. I... Read More Read More - [Nietzsche On Prince](https://everyangel.org/nietzsche-on-prince/): As we are now the products of earlier generations, we are also the products of their aberrations, passions, mistakes, and even crimes.  It is impossible to loose oneself from this chain entirely.  When we condemn that confusion and consider ourselves released from it, then we have not overcome the fact that we are derived... Read More Read More - [Nihilism and Purple Rain](https://everyangel.org/nihilism-and-purple-rain/): This past Tuesday evening I participated in a discussion with friends. The topic was Nihilism. The topic held a particular resonance for me. Just days ago word came that Prince was found dead. Shakespeare speaks to the brevity of life and the challenge of Nihilism. Out, out brief candle. Life is nothing more than... Read More Read More - [A Poem For What Lies Ahead](https://everyangel.org/a-poem-for-the-great-challenge/): SURRENDER Not as defeat As release Letting one’s self go To unknown possibilities. The problem with doing— It’s headlong, voracious,– More and more, over and over. We just do what We have always done. One must die to rise anew: We cannot hold to this reality Which we are offered. It suffocates us. We... Read More Read More - [Autopoiesis](https://everyangel.org/autopoiesis/): Can agency and determinism be combined?  Helen Steward in her book A Metaphysics of Freedom asserts agency.  Agency is the ability of a Subject to effect a physical change in the world apart from the limit of antecedent brain states.  The position is that of incompatibilism.  Agency and determinism are incompatible descriptions of human... Read More Read More - [Today's Lesson In Chicago](https://everyangel.org/todays-lesson-in-chicago/): The 10 AM meeting was scheduled in Chicago.  I am not comfortable in a congested urban space, but will do what is necessary for the good of the company.  The traffic gods were favorable and our departure time of 9AM allowed just enough time to exit off of I94 at  Fullerton.  We found a... Read More Read More - [Never Mind](https://everyangel.org/never-mind/): Yesterday late afternoon as we returned from a family birthday celebration, a dark towering bank of clouds filled the horizon to the north.  From past experience I knew that rain was in those clouds, maybe lightening and a lot of wind.  Everyday it is the same.  In some direction a threatening cloud fills the... Read More Read More - [Dunkirk, The Experience](https://everyangel.org/dunkirk-the-experience/): Sunday morning at Starbucks.  I have the seating area to myself, reggae music over the PA.  I am in recovery.  I sat through the movie Dunkirk yesterday.  Seated before the enormous IMAX screen I knew viewing the film would be a most unpleasant experience.  I enjoy movies usually, and find even the poorly made... Read More Read More - [A Terrarium That You Live In](https://everyangel.org/a-terrarium-that-you-live-in/): PERMACULTURE is the science and practice of creating living systems of nature (permanent agriculture). In contrast to traditional agriculture, permaculture is characterized by: FLOW MAINTENANCE: working with nature rather than against it, ALL NATURAL: no artificial pesticides or fertilizer, and ZERO WASTE: complete cycles of use/re-use. The end result is abundance and health. Done... Read More Read More - [Trouble In Paradise](https://everyangel.org/trouble-in-paradise/): I have not written directly about the President elected some months ago.  Others have written often, at length.  I did not see the benefit of more ink spent upon that topic.  Now I’ll hazard to put my thoughts into words. Perhaps we have a President that we deserve, an person who is an example... Read More Read More - [To Be In One's Right Mind](https://everyangel.org/to-be-in-ones-right-mind/): We live by the economy of gifts, the only economy that will last. To be in one’s right mind is to know the right use of gifts. To ask for more than is given, to take more than is given back, is to have less, and finally nothing. It follows the law of Nature,... Read More Read More - [Kraklauer Creek August 2017](https://everyangel.org/kraklauer-creek-august-2017/): Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea, But sad mortality o’er-sways their power, How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea, Whose action is no stronger than a flower? O, how shall summer’s honey breath hold out Against the wreckful siege of battering days, When rocks impregnable are not so stout,... Read More Read More - [Nowness: The Garden](https://everyangel.org/nowness-the-garden/): What do we have but right now?  Nothing really. I have a “new” camera.  It is a newer model of my old Sony camera.  Dismayed that my Cybershot camera was run over in the driveway, I was thankful to find a affordable replacement.  I discussed some issues relative to the replacement camera with the... Read More Read More - [The Fair II](https://everyangel.org/the-fair-ii/): Monday morning, mid summer, the day promises to be hot.  The front page of the NY Times offers nothing that is encouraging.  On the cusp of Brexit a mega public works subway construction project in London is unlikely to be completed.  Brexit means disruption socially and financially for Brits and the continental member countries. ... Read More Read More - [The Fair](https://everyangel.org/the-fair/): Friday evening was spent at the Lake County Fair.  County Fairs activate memories of the Durham County Fair which I attended as a boy in North Carolina.  The odor of sawdust, animals, the visual experience of a mobile pop-up village dedicated to entertainment — has not changed.  The midway of amusement rides remain but... Read More Read More - [To Remain In The Middle](https://everyangel.org/to-remain-in-the-middle/): Life goes on as it must.  Patterns are established, habits ingrained, the inexorable impetus of cause and effect.  Can I imagine our ancestors sense of dread at a time when they felt the gods were working against them?  Has not science removed that burden?  Hardly. I had a brief conversation with a friend and... Read More Read More - [Am I Not An Animal Too?](https://everyangel.org/am-i-not-an-animal-too/): This poem came my way this morning.  To be human is not fixed, a given.  Its a process of learning.  The curve of a individual life lived can result in wreckage, or complex beauty.  I wonder if it is possible to achieve the latter without a relationship to animals? A PRAYER TO TALK TO... Read More Read More - [Katharsis, Pleasurable Relief](https://everyangel.org/katharsis-pleasurable-relief/): I am looking forward to attending a concert tomorrow evening, Friday, at the Lake County Fair.  Infinity, a cover band I’ve enjoyed in the past, is scheduled to take the main stage at 9PM.  Since I am a senior citizen now, Fair admission comes at a discount.  To hear tunes made popular nationally in... Read More Read More - [The Chain](https://everyangel.org/the-chain/): Americans, myself included, believe that slavery ended with the conclusion of the Civil War.  There is a shop in St. Joseph, Bound For Freedom.  The phrase refers to the underground railroad, the route north taken by escaped slaves.  The Bound For Freedom shop offers “fair trade” items produced by individuals in third world countries. ... Read More Read More - [How To Make a Grain of Sand](https://everyangel.org/how-to-make-a-grain-of-sand/): Lake Michigan, the five great lakes are inland seas.  The imagination fails at the immensity of the amount of fresh water, 21 percent by volume of the world’s surface fresh water.  While wading on a sand bar at the edge of Lake Michigan my attention was drawn by the sand that enveloped each step. ... Read More Read More - [A Michigan Sunday Morning](https://everyangel.org/a-michigan-sunday-morning/): It is a delight to travel.  I’m in Michigan wine country, just outside of St. Joseph.  With a brief two hour drive, the big city of Chicago is west of us.   Benton Harbor and St. Joseph are situated on the other side of great Lake Michigan.  The environment of soil and weather and proximity... Read More Read More - [Broken Vessels](https://everyangel.org/broken-vessels/): Falling in order to rise…… the destruction of received models and forms is necessary in order to clear a space for spontaneous thought to arise. From the cathedral of our own feelings, from the void of the blank canvas, then, comes the space for revelation. We are fragments of an unutterable whole. Meaning is... Read More Read More - [Elegy for Charlie](https://everyangel.org/elegy-for-charlie/): Superficially this is a love song.  By chance it was offered by the playlist here at Starbucks at the time I was contemplating what to say about Charlie Gard.  The tune is far from pop entertainment.  To my ear it enters at an existential level, speaking to the essential need for human connection.  Our... Read More Read More - [Charlie Gard](https://everyangel.org/charlie-gard/): Aristotle wrote in his Ethics that the end purpose of philosophy is purposeful action.  Disciplined thinking is essential to living well, deciding what action to take.  And since to be human is to be a social creature, we make innumerable decisions  that materially affect the lives of others. A group of us met last... Read More Read More - [In the Beginning Was the Word](https://everyangel.org/in-the-beginning-was-the-word/): Tuesday morning, and I have nothing in particular to say.  A few interesting stories are on the front page of the New York Times.  None of that affects me, at least not yet.  Up until quite recently, say the last one hundred years, nothing that occurred outside of your village had an impact on... Read More Read More - [Event Horizon](https://everyangel.org/event-horizon/): The boundaries of causation always exceed the boundaries of consideration. –Wes Jackson Mystery, the unknown, our ignorance always will be with us, to be dealt with. The farther we extend the radius of knowledge, the larger becomes the circumference of mystery. There is, a boundary that may move somewhat, but can never be removed,... Read More Read More - [Primal](https://everyangel.org/primal/): Verse—whether spoken or sung— appears to be deeply encoded in the human brain. Cursing, singing lyrics, and reciting poetry are understood as instances of automatic speech, as distinguished from propositional speech…. that constitutes most everyday conversation. –Oliver Sacks Today I attended the April Verch concert in Long Grove.  The Long Grove Arts and Music... Read More Read More - [Tainted Love](https://everyangel.org/tainted-love/): Time for a musical interlude.  “True” stories of life are veined with tragedy.  Music is our “gift of the gods,” a respite from care. Whenever I hear this song I am haunted by the tune and lyric.  The attraction between male and female gender is exciting and terrifying.  Certainly hormones, the primal reproductive drive... Read More Read More - [What We Choose To Forget](https://everyangel.org/what-we-choose-to-forget/): I’ve mentioned that on Wednesday in the early morning hours the suburbs north of Chicago were struck by a series of thunder storms and torrential rain.  The towns of Mundelein, Gurnee and Libertyville received in excess of 6 inches of water within the span of 4 to 5 hours.  Before light my sleep was... Read More Read More - [Carpe Diem?](https://everyangel.org/carpe-diem/): How much is enough?  The question arises often and in many forms.  The time came for transition from employer based medical insurance coverage to Medicare.  Transition has proven to be challenging, complex, with a fair amount of anxiety.  After all who cannot be protective of physical health once the youthful stage of life has... Read More Read More - [Weaponized Part II](https://everyangel.org/weaponized-part-ii/): To think the thought of weaponized Nature is to entertain dissonance of heretofore contradictory ideas.  Nature is conceived as the totality of a life supporting, living context that common sense tells us that we are a part.  A weapon is a human artifact created for the purpose of taking life.  For humans life is... Read More Read More - [Weaponized](https://everyangel.org/weaponized/): It is raining hard, a deluge for the past 20 minutes.  At 6AM this morning upon waking there were signs that the downpour, with thunder and lightening of the early morning hours had passed.  The sky was much lighter, and nothing was falling, the birds were singing.  Standing in my driveway I encountered a... Read More Read More - [Feynman](https://everyangel.org/feynman/): I don’t have to know an answer.  I don’t feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose, which is the way it really is as far as I can tell.  It doesn’t frighten me. –Richard Feynman quoted from The Life and Science of Richard Feynman by... Read More Read More - [Reading Without Seeing](https://everyangel.org/reading-without-seeing/): One final musing from my Summerfest experience.  We typically take one of the festival shuttles into Milwaukee’s Maer Festival Park.  Leaving our vehicle at the Ryan Park and Ride lot saves the trouble of dealing with city traffic, as well as finding and paying for parking.  One pays the bus driver $7 for the... Read More Read More - [Sailing Away](https://everyangel.org/sailing-away/): Maybe you’ve never been to Summerfest in Milwaukee?  Today is the final day of the eleven day festival on the Lake Front.  I’ve attended Summerfest for many years.  The event is comprised of thousands of fellow Americans. Americans from a kaleidoscope of ethnic backgrounds, ways of life, and taste in music.  For the price... Read More Read More - [Not Again](https://everyangel.org/not-again/): Yes, we are going again.  Summerfest Milwaukee will be the destination for the afternoon and evening.  We hope to experience the music  of Dennis DeYoung and Styx at 10PM tonight.  The atmospherics will crackle with the electricity of sensuality, of reality, of life and death as DeYoung performs his lyrics of Lady, and Come... Read More Read More - [Go To The Quiet Wood](https://everyangel.org/go-to-the-quiet-wood/): The Media by C.H. Sisson  (What and Who, 1994): 1 The world is fabricated by A gang of entertainers who Have replaced God Almighty. The universe, made in six days, Is re-made every day by those Who hear all that the newsman says, For whom fact is replaced by gloze. 2 The air is... Read More Read More - [Where's Waldo](https://everyangel.org/wheres-waldo/): We attended the Independence Day parade in Wheaton for the second year.  Its an old fashioned “people’s parade” with many volunteer organizations, businesses, civic groups, churches, and of course government officials making up the procession.  The event lasts for at least an hour.  Main street Wheaton is a long, broad, straight road stretching for... Read More Read More - [Remembering What Was](https://everyangel.org/remembering-what-was/):                  I Hear America Singing. I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear, Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it should be blithe and strong, The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank or beam, The mason singing his as he makes ready... Read More Read More - [A Poem For Monday](https://everyangel.org/a-poem-for-monday/): Clear running stream clear running stream Your water is light to my mouth And a light to my dry body your flowing Music, in my ears.  free, Flowing free! With you in me. —-Gary Snyder,  Water Music II In the words of Dogen:  How is it with us who are walking on the mountains... Read More Read More - [Hope At Summerfest](https://everyangel.org/hope-at-summerfest/): This is the 50th year anniversary of Summerfest.  Held in Milwaukee it is a convocation of music lovers from around the world.  The lake front is gorgeous.  Participants are generally well behaved, no matter that thousands are present in the Maer Festival Park. I existentially needed to be present at Summerfest this year as... Read More Read More - [Bikini Atoll](https://everyangel.org/bikini-atoll/): I received an email from a friend this morning.  The email was a request for a emergency response of sorts.  I was urged to email my legislative Representative in Springfield to register my desire that he vote “no” today on a Bill that entails a 5 billion in tax hike.  A take hike of... Read More Read More - [I Can Dream](https://everyangel.org/i-can-dream/): I know I’m crazy.  No diagnosis needed. A few days ago I was present for a concert at a local park district.  The first song offered by the community chorus was our national anthem, The Star Spangled Banner.  I’ve joined in singing the song hundreds of times since I was taught the tune in... Read More Read More - [Spring Passage](https://everyangel.org/spring_passage/): Torrential rains last night.  The weather forecast maps displayed a line of thunder storms portending heavy rain, two to five inches, to fall within the span of a few hours.  Persons living near creeks and rivers were warned of flooding.  My parents generation did not have this precision of weather forecasting, nor did they... Read More Read More - [In Our Right Mind](https://everyangel.org/in-our-right-mind/): Our final Philosophy Group discussion was held at Beans & Leaves.  It was a full house.  Food and drink were consumed to celebrate the work and friendships cultivated around the tables for the past several years.  Our final meeting, was a beginning, the fold point for a renewed, vibrant, youthful iteration.  For many reasons... Read More Read More - [Medicare](https://everyangel.org/medicare/): I finished signing up for Medicare yesterday.  I am fortunate to have a friend, a insurance professional who is competent to coach me through the process.  Insurance coverage for health care is a reminder of our mortality, that mind does not overrule matter.  Despite the fantasies of youth this body which I inhabit is... Read More Read More - [Second Thoughts](https://everyangel.org/second-thoughts/): Jeff raised a concern.  Jeff expressed a cautionary concern about losing oneself in sensual experience.  Jeff thought that full-out pursuit of sensuality without abatement is counterproductive.  In short, too much of anything is detrimental. I’ve taken a few days to consider Jeff’s words.  The point is well taken.  We live in a society that... Read More Read More - [One More Thing](https://everyangel.org/one-more-thing/): I do not feel sadness for Kurt.  Kurt lived, and passed on as do all living things.  Even the non-living suffer the effects of time.  It takes much longer for a mountain to reach the sea, but eventually it does.  Why are we here?  I do not know.  I am sure that as long... Read More Read More - [So Long My Friend](https://everyangel.org/so-long-my-friend/): Sunday morning. Back to my routine life.   Just yesterday I was in Eagle River Wisconsin, the north woods.  It is a country inhabited by wild life as much as by people.  Over the 6 hour drive north past Milwaukee and Madison the flat expanses of cultivated fields gave way to aspen and spruce forests. ... Read More Read More - [Stay](https://everyangel.org/stay/): The sensualist cries out, “Stay a bit, my tongue has not concluded its encounter; wait a moment for my smile to widen.”  If the sensualist could, he would stretch time like a length of elastic….. But experience is not simply a river you can’t step into twice (Heraclitus): it is composed of unrebreathable sighs;... Read More Read More - [Lightning](https://everyangel.org/lightning/): To think philosophically is to ponder the range of human experience, as well as the tremendous width and breadth of words that have been written to explore, and make sense of that experience.  A moment of discovery for the adult fortunate enough to have any curiosity left—-happens when a connection appears between two experiences... Read More Read More - [Kitchen Table Talk](https://everyangel.org/kitchen-table-talk/): We arrived with just a few minutes to spare.  Could this be the place?  The winding roads, up and down through the grassy hillsides, the hollows, not that far from the Ohio River were exhilarating and disorienting for two guys from Chicago.  Additionally we had overlooked the loss of an hour of travel time... Read More Read More - [Madison](https://everyangel.org/madison/): I never expected to visit Madison, Indiana.   More to the point I never heard of the place until we passed through yesterday on our way to the Ohio River.  The road trip to Kentucky was for the purpose of having a talk with Wendell Berry.  Berry is a prolific author, essayist, poet–  one who... Read More Read More - [There Can Be Only One](https://everyangel.org/there-can-be-only-one/): This morning I heard the news that Amazon is purchasing Whole Foods.  Jeff Bezos acquires another weapon in his quest to slay the Wal-Mart behemoth.  At least that is what the analysts are saying.  The prime principle of 21st century greed-is-good Capitalism is “There Can Be Only One.”  This mantra comes from the Highlander... Read More Read More - [Indivisible](https://everyangel.org/indivisible/): Don commented,–“One of the main problems in discussing reality is that humans have the tendency to separate themselves from the rest of the universe, we feel we are an ‘I’ and everything else is ‘out there”. That word I thought is worth a great deal.  Don points to the impossibility of achieving the distance... Read More Read More - [Work](https://everyangel.org/work/): Work is a given for most of us.  Each day is dedicated to shaping the world, typically in concert with others to derive our sustenance, the necessary energy to feed, clothe, and shelter our organism.  That is my basic definition of work.  Yet, this essential dimension of life is not nearly so simple.  Within... Read More Read More - [Tell Me A Story](https://everyangel.org/tell-me-a-story/): Two stories are better than just one, right?  We all love stories.  Stories require imagination, the mind supplies the “sense” of living within the Reality of the story. Story no. 1 is a story of us, we who live in the early years of the 21st century.  The words are taken from Paul Virilio’s... Read More Read More - [Haunted By Metaphysics](https://everyangel.org/haunted-by-metaphysics/): I finished the collection of paragraphs contributed by Philosophy Now magazine readers on the subject of Metaphysics.  Metaphysics entails thinking about the nature of the Real.  I capitalize Real, because with just a little thought, one recognizes the similarity between “the Real” and the term God.  Language is our failing attempt to point at... Read More Read More - [Not Standing Around](https://everyangel.org/not-standing-around/): I do not enjoy thinking about, or writing about politics.  I recognize that politics is a dimension of life.  Yet we live in terrible times, by comparison to the time of my childhood and early adult years.  In that time, with the exception of the Vietnam War years, politics was not a daily intrusion,... Read More Read More - [Screaming Together](https://everyangel.org/screaming-together/): I finished putting in the garden. What remains is watering, hoeing weeds as necessary, and waiting for harvest. Like raising a child once the basics are taken care of by labor, sometimes hard labor, it is best to observe with care the development of those for which one is responsible. Too much intervention, ill... Read More Read More - [What Me Worry?](https://everyangel.org/what-me-worry/): “Things continue as they were since the beginning of the world,” is a saying from my early 20s heard while sitting in a college class room.   The language has to do with the natural tendency to extend the present pattern of experience backwards and forwards.  The denial of change is our default, our longing... Read More Read More - [What A Relief](https://everyangel.org/what-a-relief/): I have worried about something for a few months.  My impression of the president has been of someone who is lying.  Mind you I am not one who subscribes to a dogmatic definition of truth.   There is no one to one correlation between reality and words.  Reality itself varies somewhat person to person.  It... Read More Read More - [Up With The Chickens](https://everyangel.org/up-with-the-chickens/): Waking before 5AM in the gathering morning light, my mission took me to Park Ridge.  One benefit of a early start is once the client obligations are taken care of–enough of the day remains for reflection, and perhaps for a non routine project. During my return drive on 294 I listened to a few... Read More Read More - [Bleeding Out](https://everyangel.org/bleeding-out/): I took a walk in town around midday.  Mother nature was in her fecund glory. I saw the Poppy blossoms from a distance.  Red is an arresting color.  These three or four Poppy blossoms were blazing with radiance on the side of a dreary street.  Most of the rental spaces for small businesses are... Read More Read More - [Earth Mother](https://everyangel.org/earth-mother/): The Soil….is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all.  It is the healer and restorer and resurrector, by which disease passes into health, age into youth, death into life. Without proper care of it we can have no community, because without proper care for it we can have no life.... Read More Read More - [Mixed Feelings & A Requiem](https://everyangel.org/mixed-feelings-a-requiem/): I grew up in North Carolina.  As time passes I look back at my formative years as a kid in the 50s.  My parents had life long careers working in the tobacco factories.  Evangelical fundamentalist religion was the structuring element of our personal lives.  In the pre civil rights days most of my friends... Read More Read More - [Counterpoint](https://everyangel.org/counterpoint/): With the news feed always available via iphone it is easy to be tethered to stories of tragedy, large scale vistas of wrack-and-ruin, and the ridiculous.  Is not man both the tragic and the absurd animal?  For the sake of one’s mental health it is best to forego a glimpse at the news-feed freak... Read More Read More - [More Words](https://everyangel.org/more-words/): Early June and the Saturday morning holds promise of warming sun, growth for the vegetables lately placed in the ground.  I sit here in the corner at Starbucks listening to the beat of easy jazz playing too loud over the PA.  This rhythm is a human replication of the heart beat of nature that... Read More Read More - [Earth Killer](https://everyangel.org/earth-killer/): June 1, 2017 the President of the United States withdraws from the Paris Accord on Climate Change. The rise in sea level accelerates. The ice pack at both poles melts at an increasing rate. Weather events increase in severity. Species extinction continues. Hotter more acidic oceans. Famine. Forests succumb to drought and disease. I... Read More Read More - [Sitting With The Auditor](https://everyangel.org/sitting-with-the-auditor/): Our business insurance audit was scheduled and the day arrived yesterday.  I sat with an auditor for an hour.  I did little but wait until he asked a question.  There were few questions.  I have “been through” many of these audits.  I exercise every effort to organize the requested material for the auditor.  The... Read More Read More - [A Prayer For The Pretender](https://everyangel.org/a-prayer-for-the-pretender/): It has already been a rough week, at least psychologically.  We live in our minds, and the state of my mind is like the weather.  I spoke with a friend who owns a local cell phone store, a new business.  He confided in me that he was relieved that his business was meeting his... Read More Read More - [Memorial Day](https://everyangel.org/memorial-day/): Memorial Day weekend is generally considered to be the beginning of summer here in Illinois.  A rule of thumb, anything planted before Memorial Day can be lost to frost.  With the arrival of this weekend, it is as if one hears a starting gun.  The race begins to capture to the full the benefits... Read More Read More - [Don't Think, Look](https://everyangel.org/dont-think-look/): Once again I am reminded that paying attention, waking up is critical to living well.  Perhaps that is why we are here –if there is a why.  That seems as good an answer as any to me.  Especially since all of the answers to the “why” of human purpose are speculative.  Place your bet... Read More Read More - [Another Star Falls](https://everyangel.org/another-star-falls/): 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... Read More Read More - [Augury](https://everyangel.org/augury/): A good friend recently said to me, “at least there is a chance that the president will put a stop to the ‘politics as usual’ that is no longer working for us.”  That is not the first time I’ve heard a similar statement of hope/faith/superstition.  This non sequitur is offered dead pan, or with... Read More Read More - [Light, Light In A Maelstrom of Hate](https://everyangel.org/light-light-in-a-maelstrom-of-hate/): 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... Read More Read More - [Days End](https://everyangel.org/days-end/): 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... Read More Read More - [Time Is Running Out Or Is It?](https://everyangel.org/time-is-running-out-or-is-it/): 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... Read More Read More - [Time Enough For Prayer](https://everyangel.org/time-enough-for-prayer/): 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... Read More Read More - [If The Dam Breaks Open...](https://everyangel.org/if-the-dam-breaks-open/): 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... Read More Read More - [Sunday And The Sun Comes Like A God](https://everyangel.org/sunday-and-the-sun-comes-like-a-god/): 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... Read More Read More - [I Read Three Poems](https://everyangel.org/i-read-three-poems/): I was neither at the hot gates Nor fought in the warm rain Nor knee deep in the salt marsh, heaving a cutlass, Bitten by flies, fought. —-Gerontion by T. S. Eliot No, I did not fight alongside Leonidas. But I read three poems. I was invited to attend an evening of music and... Read More Read More - [Thank You to Raymond Tallis](https://everyangel.org/thank-you-to-raymond-tallis/): It is not time, but fibroblasts or the spirit of forgiveness, that heal wounds. And perhaps we need to row back from the idea of “time” as generally “permissive” of change. Many things are not permitted…….. What’s more, a global permissiveness would permit nothing in particular: If everything were permitted, nothing could happen. –Raymond... Read More Read More - [Dawn & Poetry](https://everyangel.org/dawn-poetry/): I woke to an intensely bright day, strong gusts bend the trees.  I understand that the central States further west are in the path of dangerous storms today.  Life is such a combination of light, life, and hazard. I read several poems this morning, poems that I have chosen to read tomorrow evening at... Read More Read More - [Turning Back Time](https://everyangel.org/turning-back-time/): 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... Read More Read More - [The Fox, Meditation](https://everyangel.org/the-fox-meditation/): I can think of nothing more beneficent, the image of a possible world than that of two foxes that I recently observed.  The two animals represent for me a ideal state of being.  A full-on tactile awareness of life, one’s own and that of the surrounding environment.  Foxes do not use words.  Their manner... Read More Read More - [Mothers, Guardians of the Galaxy](https://everyangel.org/mothers-guardians-of-the-galaxy/): 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,... Read More Read More - [Our Last Dance](https://everyangel.org/our-last-dance/): 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... Read More Read More - [Friday, Weeks End](https://everyangel.org/friday-weeks-end/): Every end is a beginning.  Who does not look forward to the end of the work week?  The last day of the usual, necessary tedium; and the beginning of a weekend–opportunity for relaxation and reflection.  Sunday coming up will be Mother’s day, and I am lucky to remember my mother, and to select a... Read More Read More - [The King](https://everyangel.org/the-king/) - [Murder In The Dept of Justice](https://everyangel.org/murder-in-the-dept-of-justice/): Two days have passed, I continue to be shaken by the dismissal of James Comey, Director of the FBI.  FBI directors are appointed for a 10 year term in order to be resistant to political influence.  Comey’s agency has been investigating the scope of Russian interference in our November election, and the Trump campaign... Read More Read More - [Good-by To Cynicism](https://everyangel.org/good-by-to-cynicism/): RECIPE FOR REMAKING A WORLD Ingredients: ugliness, unfairness, suffering, poverty, terror, rage, sadness, etc. Most of which is no one’s fault, the cause being diffuse, shared, distributed, so that blame cannot be focally assigned. A majority of us are touched by these circumstances, and feel that there is nothing we can do, no one... Read More Read More - [Propofol](https://everyangel.org/propofol/): Tuesday morning, when I customarily compose the day’s post, I will be under the influence of anesthesia, Propofol most likely.  I can attest that the drug produces a dreamless sleep.  When the drug is administered, consciousness winks out.  There is no sliver of fading, just light and then nothing.  Waking is not unpleasant, as... Read More Read More - [To Repeat Myself](https://everyangel.org/to-repeat-myself/): The election results are in!  The French people with the good sense of self preservation have stepped away from the brink, choosing to move ahead rather than back.  The work of nurturing a great family, or a great society is a multi-generational project.  There is much to overcome, debris of past mistakes which must... Read More Read More - [Sun and Fabulation](https://everyangel.org/sun-and-fabulation/): First agenda item of the day: breakfast at Taste of Paris.   Its a favorite Cafe and we look forward to the weekly visit.  The waitstaff are always welcoming, familiar faces due to our patronage of many months.  France has been much on my mind.  Today they are holding a national election.  At stake is... Read More Read More - [Growl of 400 Horses](https://everyangel.org/growl-of-400-horses/): I walked across the parking lot at 7AM, a sunlit morning in May.  A  silver corvette was parked in the center of two parking spaces.  As I walked by a young female approached the passengers side of the vehicle with coffee for two.  A young male waited in the drivers side, his baseball cap... Read More Read More - [The Shield Wall Booms](https://everyangel.org/the-shield-wall-booms/): Yesterday Thorsday, when the news feed came across that the House had passed the Obamacare replacement act, I was palpably nauseated.  Predictably the Tribune front page of this morning featured a picture of the President flanked by his fawning palace guard, applauding the event in the White House Rose Garden. Emotionally this seems like... Read More Read More - [Thursday, No Rain Yet](https://everyangel.org/thursday-no-rain-yet/): Thursday is without rain, at least not yet.  This morning my sister came to mind.  I spoke with her by phone yesterday, understanding with difficulty her speech.  She has battled schizophrenia and diabetes for her entire adult life.  Today she expects to meet with a surgeon.  She is in pain due to an infection... Read More Read More - [Anthem Of Resistance](https://everyangel.org/anthem-of-resistance/): …this sluggish paradise. A human being protected from all normal and natural hardship simply is not alive. We inhabit insecurely a world which must of its intransitory nature be insecure. The tyranny of mindless technology. It is well to use the wheel. But it is fatal to be bound to it. We are trapped... Read More Read More - [Making Morality Out Of Nothing At All](https://everyangel.org/making-morality-out-of-nothing-at-all/): THE DIAGNOSIS This generation of Americans has become so steeped in greed and social Darwinism that it can no longer distinguish between cheating and achieving, between enterprise and crime and can’t bring itself to criticize winners any more than it knows how to be nice to losers. An increasing number of Americans agree that... Read More Read More - [Rain,--The Best of Times And The Worst](https://everyangel.org/rain-the-best-of-times-and-the-worst/): More rain and some pics from today’s NY Times.   And then there is a need that each should understand where he came from and what he is—- and what will become of him. –Wulfstan, Archbishop of York from 1002 to 1023     - [Monday With More Rain](https://everyangel.org/monday-with-more-rain/): Climate change is manifest by extreme weather events.  Over the past two days the backyard has soaked up so much water that a footfall instantly produces water welling up around my shoe.  It’s 6PM and rain continues to fall.  Recently I read that Anglo-Saxon England of the 10th century was also going through a... Read More Read More - [What To Do On A Rainy Sunday](https://everyangel.org/what-to-do-on-a-rainy-sunday/): One can wonder what our ancestors did for recreation absent video screens.  After a steady rain in the evening, the morning dawned with light rain and a gusting wind.  Out of doors plans made little sense under these conditions.  To remain dry and warm the day would be spent indoors.  Like many middle class... Read More Read More - [VAPNATAK](https://everyangel.org/vapnatak/): A comment left by a friend last night reminisced on the Legend of King Arthur.  The legend suggests that merry ole England was ruled by a chivalrous king and nobles.  This could not have been further from the truth.  We love our myths: American exceptionalism, manifest destiny and everyone’s favorite “the American dream.”  The... Read More Read More - [How Bad Can It Get?](https://everyangel.org/how-bad-can-it-get/): Yesterday by default I listened to the inauguration speeches, ritual, etc.  My office mate had the coverage running on his computer.  I worked at my desk, reasonably productive while listening to the broadcast.  Unfortunately no surprises.  Trump in his first presidential speech reiterated the laundry list of nativist programs and planet killing ideas that... Read More Read More - [The Sea of Life](https://everyangel.org/the-sea-of-life/): Our destiny: to cross the sea of life on a raft of words.   —David P. Gantar Today I awakened and felt numb.  The 45th president of the United States, Donald J. Trump will take the oath of office.  I woke to a real life Jerry Springer “show” where the guests have chosen one of... Read More Read More - [Already Falling](https://everyangel.org/already-falling/): Today’s NY Times front page article reads: For The third Year, The Earth in 2016 Hits Record Heat.  Today is Thursday, the last day before Friday, when Donald J. Trump will be inaugurated as the 45th president of the united States.  The old president, Barack Obama, fulfilled the responsibility of office along the lines... Read More Read More - [Crow In Snow, Metaphysics](https://everyangel.org/crow-in-snow/): We spent the evening discussing slavery.  Admittedly a depressing topic.  The topic was explored to the extent of our ability and satisfaction. How do we explain slavery?  Slavery as a legalized practice of owning and utilizing the life force of another, ended in the late 19th century.  There are reports of remaining outlaw human... Read More Read More - [The Anvil Rings](https://everyangel.org/the-anvil-rings/): Sex, the attraction between male and female, courtship, seduction are all words describing a perennial driving force that marks history, art, politics and every other endeavor.  Helen’s face launched a thousand ships to the ruin of Troy and Greece.  Helen was surely one of many beautiful women.  Yet she alone was the pivot point... Read More Read More - [Crashing Down Like An Anvil](https://everyangel.org/crashing-down-like-an-anvil/): I grew up in the South, as a Christian Fundamentalist.  Everyone has to start somewhere.  It’s not as if you or I have a choice.  The text of the Old and New Testament was a major factor in my upbringing and consequently of my view of myself.  As an adult, revising, reincorporating those formative... Read More Read More - [Thinking at a Bar](https://everyangel.org/thinking-at-a-bar/): At a bar sipping a wheat beer, I had time to consider something I wrote down twenty years ago.  Words in the old note book seemed more truthful, more penetrating than when discovered long ago.  I was younger, a different man then.  Now, I hope I’m wiser, and more focused upon my one life.... Read More Read More - [In The Beat](https://everyangel.org/in-the-beat/): This morning I felt out-of-sorts when I began my day.  My sense of life was dissonant with my perception of “reality,” the goings-on around me.  I know that the daily news reporting has a lot to do with my funk.  The president elect has yet to be inaugurated and the ether is filled with... Read More Read More - [Nothing To Say](https://everyangel.org/nothing-to-say/): Now I understand better the utility of silence.  Nowadays the availability of social media has created a troposphere of unrelieved cacophony, a din of trivia, opining, and pontificating.  There is even a class of paid hacks, contracted to generate opinions favorable to their paymaster.  My life 1s enriched when I endeavor to just shut... Read More Read More - [The Omega Point](https://everyangel.org/the-omega-point/): Last night Peter posed a question to us around the table.  “Given that no one chooses to exist, to be born into this world, –What obligates us to choose to be helpful, to act kindly toward others?”  That question always touches something deep within me.  Something more basic and indescribable than my words awakens... Read More Read More - [The Indefatigable Truth](https://everyangel.org/the-indefatigable-truth/): Published in the LA Times, January 8, 2017 The following is a transcript of Meryl Streep’s speech at the 74th Golden Globes  as she accepted the Cecil B. DeMille Award for lifetime achievement. I love you all. You have to forgive me, I have lost my voice in screaming and lamentation this weekend and... Read More Read More - [Questions](https://everyangel.org/questions/): Just finished Chuck Klosterman’s book, But What If We’re Wrong?  I recommend it.  Here are some questions that are put forward in the concluding chapter. Is the downside of our species unparalleled cerebral evolution the ingrained propensity for self destruction? If a problem is irreversible, is there still an ethical obligation to try to... Read More Read More - [Another Parable For A Winter's Afternoon](https://everyangel.org/another-parable-for-a-winters-afternoon/): The old book seemed to be a history text book.  Appearing to be a 21st Century artifact, it had been overlooked in the bottom of a box in the dimly lit storage closet.  It had to be a leftover from the old days before AI managed learning, and wireless implants linked almost everyone to... Read More Read More - [How To Die In A Ditch By The Road](https://everyangel.org/how-to-die-in-a-ditch-by-the-road/): The following story is contributed by a good friend and writer. Once upon a time in a land not so far away, two hale gentlemen went for a walk in the country. One hardy fellow went by the name of Gareth whilst the other bore the odd moniker of Tobias. Both were jaunty and... Read More Read More - [Time](https://everyangel.org/time-2/): Outside it’s raw, below zero. In this warm coffee shop protected from the elements, I desire simply to be and to think. Here time is fecund with possibility. Around me others are here for the same reason, a place to be where the differences in lifestyle, economic status, the weight of fortune, become a... Read More Read More - [The Day of Alchemy](https://everyangel.org/the-day-of-alchemy/): “What the hell do you have to lose? Give me a chance. I’ll straighten it out. I’ll straighten it out. What do you have to lose?” The mostly white crowd cheered. Donald J Trump — appeal to Blacks and Hispanics, Ohio, Aug 22, 2016 I In the world forever one With the informing Love That... Read More Read More - [Traveling Blind](https://everyangel.org/traveling-blind/): Its a bitter morning, dark and  7 degrees when I last checked.  But now the sun illuminates the parking lot, suggesting what lies ahead today will be agreeable.  Whatever my mind ruminates upon, there is always a lot more going on. VI We travelers, walking to the sun, can’t see Ahead, but looking back... Read More Read More - [The Comfort of Perspective](https://everyangel.org/the-comfort-of-perspective/): In a few days a casino magnate and Reality TV Show celebrity will be inaugurated as President of the United States.  The Republican Party with its new majority in both houses of congress cannot wait to destroy the health care insurance of millions by repealing Obamacare.  Never mind that they have nothing to put... Read More Read More - [A Walk To Visit A Creek](https://everyangel.org/a-walk-to-visit-a-creek/): New Years day, the weather is pleasant.  What better way to begin the year than by taking a walk.  I decided to visit a creek that runs between two subdivisions, then flows under Midlothian Road, cutting it’s way behind the Park District water park. The creek just over Midlothian Road is damed by a... Read More Read More - [The Sun Comes Up Like A God, Silently](https://everyangel.org/the-sun-comes-up/): January first of 2017.  The sun, a half ball of warmth rising toward the tree tops; my windshield is covered with frost and I run back inside to obtain a container of warm water.  Can’t drive unless I can see. Two Baristas behind the counter at Starbucks and just me.  The seating area is... Read More Read More - [Something Old, Something New](https://everyangel.org/something-old-something-new/): December 31, 2016, years end.  One more year fades into the rear view mirror. I pause longer to reflect, than was the case when I was younger. Yesterday I stopped by The Roadster Shop which is across the street from the Starbucks where I often come to write.  The guys and gals at the... Read More Read More - [For God's Sake Shut Up. Do Something!](https://everyangel.org/for-gods-sake-shut-up-do-something/): The Future For God’s sake, be done with this jabber of “a better world.” What blasphemy! No “futuristic” twit or child thereof ever in embodied light will see a better world than this. Do something! Go cut the weeds beside the oblivious road. Pick up the cans and bottles, old tires, and dead predictions.... Read More Read More - [And Then](https://everyangel.org/and-then/): WORDS 1. What is one to make of a life given to putting things into words, saying them, writing them down? Is there a world beyond words? There is. But don’t start, don’t go on about the tree unqualified, standing in the light that shines to time’s end beyond its summoning name. Don’t praise... Read More Read More - [Nothing More Need Be Said](https://everyangel.org/nothing-more-need-be-said/): I know your eyes in the morning sun I feel you touch me in the pouring rain And the moment that you wander far from me I want to feel you in my arms again And you come to me on a summer breeze Keep me warm in your love, then you softly leave... Read More Read More - [Old Saki Cups](https://everyangel.org/old-saki-cups/): We are a few days past winter solstice.  The solstice is the shortest day, the least amount of sunlight.  Every year as the solstice nears I am disconcerted at the rapid onset of nightfall.  “Is it dark already”, I ask myself at 5PM.  I feel cheated of sunlight by winter.  Christmas is our resistance... Read More Read More - [A Christmas Story](https://everyangel.org/a-christmas-story/): Year to year, I am drawn to the Christmas story.  It is a simple well known tale.  I re-imagine the story in terms of one more year of life experience.  At this juncture I am interested in Matthews rendition of the story.  (Matthew 1:18-2:23) The points of dissonance in the story speak to me,... Read More Read More - [Ironic Points of Light](https://everyangel.org/ironic-points-of-light/): Verse nine Defenseless under the night Our world in stupor lies; Yet, dotted everywhere, Ironic points of light Flash out wherever the Just Exchange their messages: May I, composed like them Of Eros and of dust, Beleaguered by the same Negation and despair, Show an affirming flame. September 1, 1939 by W. H. Auden... Read More Read More - [White Rabbit Interlude](https://everyangel.org/white-rabbit-interlude/): How many years since you’ve remembered the lyrics of White Rabbit, or listened to the tune?  Grace Slick belted out her anthem of resistance at a time when American young men were asked to kill Vietnamese young men, in the jungles and villages of Vietnam.  At the time one line of resistance to official... Read More Read More - [All I Have Is A Voice](https://everyangel.org/all-i-have-is-a-voice/): Verse eight All I have is a voice To undo the folded lie, The romantic lie in the brain Of the sensual man-in-the-street And the lie of Authority Whose buildings grope the sky: There is no such thing as the State And no one exists alone; Hunger allows no choice To the citizen or... Read More Read More - [No Way Outta Here](https://everyangel.org/some-way-outta-here/): Verse Seven From the conservative dark Into the ethical life The dense commuters come, Repeating their morning vow; ‘I will be true to the wife, I’ll concentrate more on my work,’ And helpless governors wake To resume their compulsory game: Who can release them now, Who can reach the dead, Who can speak for... Read More Read More - [The Normal Heart](https://everyangel.org/the-normal-heart/): Verse Six The windiest militant trash Important Persons shout Is not so crude as our wish: What mad Nijinsky wrote About Diaghilev Is true of the normal heart; For the error bred in the bone Of each woman and each man Craves what it cannot have, Not universal love But to be loved alone.... Read More Read More - [Where We Are](https://everyangel.org/where-we-are/): Verse five Faces along the bar Cling to their average day: The lights must never go out, The music must always play, All the conventions conspire To make this fort assume The furniture of home; Lest we should see where we are, Lost in a haunted wood, Children afraid of the night Who have... Read More Read More - [Imperialism's Mirror](https://everyangel.org/imperialisms-mirror/): Verse four Into this neutral air Where blind skyscrapers use Their full height to proclaim The strength of Collective Man, Each language pours its vain Competitive excuse: But who can live for long In an euphoric dream; Out of the mirror they stare, Imperialism’s face And the international wrong. September 1, 1939  by W.... Read More Read More - [Ah Thucydides.....](https://everyangel.org/oh-thucydides/): Verse three Exiled Thucydides knew All that a speech can say About Democracy, And what dictators do, The elderly rubbish they talk To an apathetic grave; Analysed all in his book, The enlightenment driven away, The habit-forming pain, Mismanagement and grief: We must suffer them all again. September 1, 1939 by W. H. Auden... Read More Read More - [We Schoolchildren](https://everyangel.org/all-we-schoolchildren/): Verse two Accurate scholarship can Unearth the whole offence From Luther until now That has driven a culture mad, Find what occurred at Linz, What huge imago made A psychopathic god: I and the public know What all schoolchildren learn, Those to whom evil is done Do evil in return. September 1, 1949  by... Read More Read More - [So Now It Is Christmas](https://everyangel.org/so-now-it-is-christmas/): The house is decorated.  Certainly to a dispassionate observer the splendor, the glory of light and color is equal to any years past.  Yet it is not Christmas time existentially for me.  My spirit is more akin to the sharp edge of the air temperature that sinks toward the single digits, and the cold,... Read More Read More - [Luck](https://everyangel.org/luck/): My last post was on the 7th.  I reflected upon the nature of a common sore throat/head cold.  Five days later I am able to write again.  The illness was uncommon, something that at times I wondered if my now older body would overcome.  With illness, there is one winner.  The immune system is... Read More Read More - [A Knife to my Throat](https://everyangel.org/a-knife-to-my-throat/): I suspected this was coming.  Yesterday I felt abnormal tightness in my throat.  Aspirin, two at a time were taken throughout the day. In a semi conscious mental fog around 5 AM I felt a persistent stab of pain.  Well, it’s not the first time that I’ve had a sore throat.  I was well... Read More Read More - [Mysterium Tremendum no 2](https://everyangel.org/mysterium-tremendum-no-2/): There is more to say about the concert. The Pretenders fronted by vocalist, and guitar slinger Chrissie Hynde opened the evening at the United Center.  Both Hynde and Nicks are strong women.  Any artist with a catalog of acclaimed work is a strong individual.  I have always been attracted by the personalities of strong... Read More Read More - [High Mass at the United Center](https://everyangel.org/high-mass-at-the-united-center/): Last night I attended a concert at the United Center.  The Pretenders with Chrissie Hynde opened for Stevie Nicks.  Nicks has been writing lyrics and performing her songs, album after album, since the early 1970s.  Nicks is on tour with her band to reprise her songs written over a forty year career as a... Read More Read More - [How Neighborly](https://everyangel.org/how-neighborly/): The first sip of coffee, like a knife-cut of astringence, faintly sweet and bitter to the tongue: a metaphor for life.  With practice some develop a taste for it,…. for life that is. I am a Christian monk and priest, and I am, therefore, accountable before God for the actions and deeds of every... Read More Read More - [Meditation on Civilization](https://everyangel.org/meditation-on-civilization/): We are embedded in the day to day.  We tend not to notice the exquisite design all around us, the product of our progenitors sweat, intelligence and passion.  Reflecting upon this past Thanksgiving holiday, feeling some awe at the memory of a well appointed dining table.  In the pleasant company of family, children and... Read More Read More - [Could have been written yesterday.....](https://everyangel.org/could-have-been-written-yesterday/): And yet he felt forebodings.   Some nameless threat lurked just around the corner of the world for the sun to rise again.  The feeling had been gnawing at him, as annoying as a swarm of hungry insects that buzzed about one’s face in the desert sun.  There was a sense of the imminent, the... Read More Read More - [On The Other Hand...](https://everyangel.org/on-the-other-hand/): How can a great and wise civilization have destroyed itself so completely? “Perhaps,” said Apollo, “by being materially great and materially wise, and nothing else.” “Perhaps,” said Thon Taddeo, “but I doubt it.” “You reject all history, then, as a myth?” “Not ‘reject.’ But it must be questioned.  Who wrote your histories?” “….a doubt... Read More Read More - [On Radical Skepticism](https://everyangel.org/on-radical-skepticism/): A radical skepticism reduces reason to its own caricature: to a mere rationalization of positions that were actually predetermined by desire and were held– or secured– by force alone. Michael Polanyi and Harry Prosch Meaning, Published 1975 Who was Michael Polanyi? Michael Polanyi, (11 March 1891 – 22 February 1976) was a Hungarian-British polymath,... Read More Read More - [Everything Will Be Ok aka Exceptionalism](https://everyangel.org/everything-will-be-ok/): It will not do to say that every age has been like this, that man has always felt threatened and yet managed to survive.  The point is precisely that every age is different:  each time has been unique, both in what it promised and what it threatened; sometimes the catastrophe has occurred. Irrational Man... Read More Read More - [Redemption: Getting The Band Back Together](https://everyangel.org/redemption-getting-the-band-back-together/): Ah, Jake and Elwood, so nice to see you again!  I happened upon The Blues Brothers Movie last night.  A few years have passed since my last viewing of the iconic film.  Jake and Elwood are ex-cons.  Jake is picked up by his brother Elwood outside of Joliete prison.  They visit the Catholic orphanage... Read More Read More - [Thanksgiving Saved by a Great Iron Screw](https://everyangel.org/thanksgiving-topography/): Retrieved my copy of William Bradford’s History of Plymouth Colony.  I periodically review it with fresh interest, as the years pass.  Accrued life experience allows a richer and deeper interpretation of Bradford’s words.  Yes, these were Englishmen, my ancestors by blood and by religious heritage.  Their tale is similar to immigrant tales of our... Read More Read More - [Three Dead Canaries](https://everyangel.org/three-dead-canaries-in-a-coal-mine/): Canary no. 1 Members of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers — themselves desperately afraid of being downsized —... Read More Read More - [That Man Who Lit a Lantern](https://everyangel.org/that-man-who-lit-a-lantern/): Is there any up and down left? Has it not become colder? Have we not killed him and now,——- Shall we console ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games, ought we to have invented? Have we not ourselves become gods? I threw my lantern to the ground. It broke and went out. The... Read More Read More - [Doing It To Ourselves](https://everyangel.org/doing-it-to-ourselves/): No, wait!  For this story a title with more zip, more punch is needed.  Here are some choices.  I’ll let you the reader look these over and make a selection, after you have read the New York Times article. Y’all come on down! Winter comes early to Republican red-state-Texas Making promises you can’t keep... Read More Read More - [If We Fail This Time](https://everyangel.org/if-we-fail-this-time/): IMAGINING WORLD In my dream, the angel shrugged and said if we fail this time it will be a failure of imagination and then she placed the world gently in the palm of my hand. –by Brian Andreas 1994 - [Winter Is Coming](https://everyangel.org/winter-is-coming/): “Daylight would have shown a wilderness weathered and blowzy, a wanton that had lived her summer too fast and too greedily. It would have shown the white birches pale and shivering in a sudden ague, and here and there an ash or a sumac burning red, like a hectic spot, where the first frosts... Read More Read More - [Custer's Last Words](https://everyangel.org/custers-last-words/): How would I know Custer’s words?  The battle between the US 7th Cavalry and the Lakota, Northern Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes  took place 140 years ago.  I was born 140 years late to hear what if anything he might have said, had I been there.  Additionally only Indians walked away from that fight alive. ... Read More Read More - [Life, Traveling Blind](https://everyangel.org/life-traveling-blind/): Spent a troubled night, awakening at intervals.  Dreams are unaccountable.  The recurring dream included several lyric lines from Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne”.  Not an unpleasant dream for me, I like the song.  The alarm sounded at 6AM.  A few minutes later,  hardly awake, I heard from NPR  that Trump’s son-in-law is angling for a role... Read More Read More - [The World Is Changing Right Before Our Eyes](https://everyangel.org/the-world-is-changing-right-before-our-eyes/): Nicolaus Copernicus surmised that the earth rotated around in sun in about 1514, and no one killed him for thinking that.  He lived another twenty-nine years and died at the age of seventy.  Throughout those final twenty-nine years, his revolutionary description of outer space mostly seemed an unprovable thought experiment that had the ancillary... Read More Read More - [Why Must There Be A Morning After?](https://everyangel.org/why-must-there-be-a-morning-after/): Twenty four hours ago I was horribly ill.  Four or five sessions of throwing up, and then came the fever.  At some point the thought occurred to me, –so this is how we die.  I did not dwell on the thought.  The coming of dawn always makes everything better.  I had several emails and... Read More Read More - [A Gap In The Line](https://everyangel.org/a-gap-in-the-line/): A few years ago I fed my interest in the American Civil War by a lot of reading, and by visiting a number battlefields.  I have more than a shelf of books.  I’ve spent time at Gettysburg, Petersburg, and Fort Fisher.  In that day the preparation for battle meant forming a “line of battle,”... Read More Read More - [Baba O'Riley, Further Comment](https://everyangel.org/baba-oreily-further-comment/): Yes, it’s a long tune, at 5 minutes.  Did you notice the organ track, the musical pattern that opens and runs the entire length of the piece?  Townsend was influenced by the philosophy of Meher Baba, Inayat Kahn, and composer Terry Riley.  Townsend sought to replicate a theory of reality as harmonious, with the... Read More Read More - [Analysis, No Exodus Here](https://everyangel.org/analysis-no-exodus-here/): Four days after the election, protest of the results continued last night in a number of cities.  Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Denver, Minneapolis, Dallas, Oakland, were included in the CNN report.  The photos supported my assumption that the demonstrations were likely to include many in their twenties, young adults seeking adult entree into society.  I... Read More Read More - [Beyond Politics](https://everyangel.org/beyond-politics/): Some years ago I spent a few days by the Columbia River Gorge in Washington state.  In the course of the hiking expeditions, two things came to mind over and over.  The immense beauty of the surroundings was indescribable.  The physical sensation of hazard, of the lethal consequences of a lapse in judgment, was... Read More Read More - [The Day After -- Prayer](https://everyangel.org/the-day-after-livin-on-a-prayer/): PRAYER Why do we work? Answer: For one another. Right here, right now, We have one another. So take my hand We’ll make it I swear. Hold on Ready or not. We live For the fight Because that’s all we’ve got. - [Day Zero, Wonder and Why](https://everyangel.org/day-zero-wonder-and-why/): I drove past my local polling place this morning.  The parking lot was full.  Campaign signs crowded the lawn on both sides of the drive way.  Now, at Starbucks customers come in with the conventional hint of a smile on their faces.  If they are like me they carry a suppressed sense of foreboding... Read More Read More - [The Eve of Election Day](https://everyangel.org/the-eve-of-election-day/): Today is the day before the ballots are cast, the vote tallied and the results announced.  My cynical self says, “so what.”  The one candidate is a life long uber predator, property developer, and pitch man for all manner of dodgy, shell game offers:  Trump University, Trump Steaks, apparel, etc.   The other candidate offers... Read More Read More - [Two Days, Rebel With No Causes Left](https://everyangel.org/two-days-rebel-with-no-causes-left/): It is perfectly clear that political parties across the spectrum today are unquestioningly committed to maintain the capitalist growth economy, seemingly oblivious to the catastrophe that this out-dated development agenda holds in store for people and the planet – a catastrophe that, in some respects, has already arrived.  In short, a universal ‘growth fetish’... Read More Read More - [Three More Days To Go](https://everyangel.org/three-more-days-to-go/): Last night I attended a production of The Addams Family musical play at the Vernon Hills High School auditorium.  The play was a clever, contemporary rendition of the old Addams family ABC sitcom which I barely remember seeing in the 1960s.  The concept of a dysfunctional typical American family was created by cartoonist Charles... Read More Read More - [Day Four, Who Are We Going To Kill?](https://everyangel.org/day-four-who-are-we-going-to-kill/): Today is Friday, do I dare call it “Good Friday?”  The election is scheduled for Tuesday.  From the vitriol, the accusations that have filled electronic media, and particularly the breathless panic with which the network anchorman “reports” the latest outrageous incrimination,—this feels a lot like a gathering mob to me.  I just don’t know... Read More Read More - [Five Days: Praising Ignorance, Laughing, Losing My Mind](https://everyangel.org/five-days-praising-ignorance-laughing-losing-my-mind/): Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front by Wendell Berry Love the quick profit, the annual raise, vacation with pay. Want more of everything ready-made. Be afraid to know your neighbors and to die. And you will have a window in your head. Not even your future will be a mystery any more. Your mind... Read More Read More - [Six Days Out](https://everyangel.org/six-days-out/): Those who know me well, have no need to ask me which of the candidates for president that I favor.  I’ve voted already,–the deed is done.  Nothing more is left for me to do but wait. The reason for my choice is singular, simple.  Here is a paragraph from Letter no. 7 from Rainer... Read More Read More - [Seven Days to go and "There Won't Be Any Trumpets Blow'in...."](https://everyangel.org/six-days-to-go-and-there-wont-be-any-trumpets-blowin/): One Tin Soldier is a 1960’s era protest song written by Dennis Lambert and Brian Potter. It was first recorded by the Canadian group The Original Castle in 1969. It was recorded in 1971 by The American group Coven and it reached number 26 on the Billboard Hot 100. It was featured in the... Read More Read More - [Eight Days and Counting](https://everyangel.org/seven-days-and-counting/): Only fools imagine that freedom means getting what one happens to desire.  Real freedom begins with obedience to a higher influence—a higher, finer energy within oneself.  What is higher in yourself?  That way of thinking about the question is the beginning of the answer—because it involves a real idea which has been handed down... Read More Read More - [Nine Days and then cosmic calamity....?](https://everyangel.org/eight-days-and-then-cosmic-calamity/): …..if it worries and torments you to think of your childhood, and of that simplicity and quiet, because you cannot believe any more in God.…then what justifies you in missing him, who never was? Why do you not think of him as the coming one, imminent from all eternity, the future one, the final... Read More Read More - [Ten Days Before The Election](https://everyangel.org/ten-days-before-the-election/): WHAT HAS TO BE DONE WHEN NOTHING CAN BE DONE. Dystopia has to be faced and dissolved by irony. If paranoia “knows well”— we need a method of ignorance. The spectrum of the possible is much larger than the range of probability. Irony is the excess of language that opens the door to the... Read More Read More - [Always Wanting More](https://everyangel.org/always-wanting-more/): A visit to Cave Hill cemetery forces a dislocation in time.  My sense of being “in the flow” stutters,  stops.  The watch on my wrist “keeps time” and my cell time display functions.  But in the presence of the dead, and with statues of angels standing watch —life itself strikes me as palpably temporary. ... Read More Read More - [Louisville, River Town](https://everyangel.org/louisville-river-town/): I am a North Carolinian, who immigrated to Chicago and adapted to life in one of the world’s great cities.  Yet, the South has a place in my heart.  Every visit to Louisville, Kentucky feels like home coming.  Louisville is located on the Ohio River, a trade route since the West was settled in... Read More Read More - [Pullets, Laughing Our Way to Louisville](https://everyangel.org/pullets-laughing-our-way-to-louisville/): The road from Chicago to Louisville can seem longer than the five and a half hour drive the journey is supposed to take.  Especially if you happen to run into a time-killing-slow-crawl traffic jam in the Chicago metro area.   We’d been on the road for a while and were just past Indianapolis.  Our joints... Read More Read More - [If I Could, I Would.....](https://everyangel.org/if-i-could-i-would/): If I could send a message to everyone who does not blindly follow Donald Trump and the Republican Party…………………this would be it. Take courage my friends.  Keep working it.  That is, — the one special life that you have been given. - [Baraboo Philosophy Discussion Group](https://everyangel.org/baraboo-philosophy-discussion-group/): Thursday evening is the regular meeting of the Baraboo Philosophy Discussion Group held at the Log Cabin Cafe.  Here one of the participants expresses an opinion on Plato’s Parmenides. Okay, okay –the Discussion Group exists only in my imagination.  The Log Cabin Restaurant in Baraboo Wisconsin is “real” though.  The establishment is exceptional on... Read More Read More - [A Walk in the North Woods](https://everyangel.org/autumn-in-the-north-woods/): Went for a walk on Sunday Oct 9th about 3PM in the afternoon.  The wind was rustling the tall pines. I stood on the narrow spit of sand at the edge of the lake. The air was cool, giving hint of frost after sunset. A breeze lapped the lake surface; creating a big plate... Read More Read More - [Where to from here?](https://everyangel.org/where-to-from-here/): We Americans entertain the notion that we are unlike other peoples.  It’s a seductive thought.  The American system of governance is emulated, our society is knit together by fascination with sporting events, our economy is a Capitalistic paradise, etc.    One could go on and on about American Exceptionalism. The myth has worn very... Read More Read More - [Galileo's Telescope](https://everyangel.org/galileos-telescope/): What we see comes from that which is not apparent. This statement is axiomatic for us, becoming embedded in the DNA of our culture since the rise of science as a basis for knowledge.  Did it all began when Galileo pointed his 10x homemade refracting telescope at the moon, and discovered, saw with his... Read More Read More - [Absolute Transitivity](https://everyangel.org/absolute-transitivity/): We live in technological temporality. Duration and material support replaced— by individual retinal and auditory instants. —- Sensible appearances changed into so many instances, mere specters of a perspective. Perspective reality is about to disappear —- Post-reality Paul Virilio Lost Dimension, published 1984 - [With Each Minute Subtracted....](https://everyangel.org/chanting-with-each-minute-subtracted/): Emanating from a cathedral  the center of Rome, a line of ten thousand people stretches radially outward, like the hand of a giant clock, out to the edge of the city, and beyond.  Yet these patient pilgrims are directed inward, not out.  They are waiting their turn to enter the Temple of Time.  They... Read More Read More - [Sublimity of the Ordinary](https://everyangel.org/sublimity-of-the-ordinary/): There are times when I’m exhausted by life.  Conflict and stress are consequences of being a sentient being.  With few useful instincts we depend upon learning and emotional intelligence to “earn our living.”–by a paradox of cooperation and competition with others.  This is what we mean by society.  It’s more complicated than we know. ... Read More Read More - [Autumn, Three Days In](https://everyangel.org/autumn-three-days-in/): Distracted by the atypical warm weather, I did not notice the advent of Fall on September 22nd.  Here in the Midwest we’ve had days in the high 80’s late into the month.  Quite unusual for the Chicago area.  A few maples show a hint of color in my neighborhood. On Sunday September 25th I... Read More Read More - [The Final Shootout](https://everyangel.org/the-final-shootout/): Saturday Sept 24th was the final Nitrous Shootout of the season at Great Lakes Dragway.  The dragstrip is a gathering place for those addicted to creating compression of time over a quarter mile.  A final big race day of the season drew a sizable crowd of crew members, drivers, families, and fans–all deserving of... Read More Read More - [Time and a Trump Presidency](https://everyangel.org/time-and-a-trump-presidency/): Recently I was pointed to a New Yorker article by a friend.  Evan Osnos composed a fulsome speculative forecast of what type of presidency is likely should Donald Trump be elected.  Osnos writing was well researched with many interviews over several months time with individuals connected to the candidate.  Donald Trump has placed great... Read More Read More - [Natural Philosopher Continues Newtons Work](https://everyangel.org/natural-philosopher-continues-newtons-work/): Lincoln, prepares for an experiment in Natural Philosophy.  Natural Philosophy up until the 19th century was “the science of beings which undergo change and are independent of human beings.”  Lincoln protests the fragmentation of philosophy into departmentalized sciences due to new contexts and ways of learning.   The trend beginning with Galileo, to Sir... Read More Read More - [A Philosopher is Born](https://everyangel.org/a-philosopher-is-born/): Yes, Lincoln does not look the part, not yet anyway.  But here he is on the playground of Longfellow School, surveying the lawn with confidence, exploring, running this way and that.  Do you remember your earliest visits to a playground?  Remember the vast expanse of grassy carpet, maybe there was some playground equipment……  Can... Read More Read More - [CODA](https://everyangel.org/coda/): Coda [ˈkoːda] (Italian for “tail”, plural code) is a term used in music primarily to designate a passage that brings a piece to an end. When you begin to understand the previous post, the quotation from Paul Virilio, you will shudder.  The consequences for life and well being are dark.  A counter point, an... Read More Read More - [Only The Point Remains](https://everyangel.org/only-the-point-remains/): Why do we stand amazed before the assumed properties of the black holes of outer space? Aren’t all of our puncta of observation and all of our quanta of actions simply black holes of scientific thought?  These are the black dots of the line wherein begin and end our rational representations.  As Bachelard slyly... Read More Read More - [Not What We Thought](https://everyangel.org/not-what-we-thought/): THE SECOND COMING We see, But not with the light of day. It’s the light of no solar star. It’s the light of our own theory, The theory of energy that appeared in 1905. Along with cinematography and aviation, Grand vectors of audiovisual and automotive Transformation of sensory experiences. Transport and transmission revolutions. With... Read More Read More - [Show Queens](https://everyangel.org/show-queens/): It’s Thursday 5 0’clock PM.  A mini crisis shortened my day at the office.  Fortunately the crisis evaporated.  I celebrated by pouring myself a Blue Moon. I soak up the suns warmth and cooler air temps, a harbinger of Fall.  I felt the nudge of Fall yesterday, hanging out for a while at Park... Read More Read More - [Like A Bullet](https://everyangel.org/when-the-bullet-snaps-past-ones-ear/): Today is our 46th wedding anniversary; married to my best friend for 46 years.  She knows me in ways that I do not know myself.  At 21 I could not have imagined that the journey would have lasted for 46 years.  Each must play the hand that one is dealt.  You either ruminate, marinate... Read More Read More - [Requiem For a Passing Age](https://everyangel.org/requiem-for-a-passing-age/): There is a above average steak house, if you exit I40 at Alamance Road traveling west to Greensboro.  When I am in North Carolina I usually meet with good friends at The Cutting Board.  The steaks are excellent, w. baked potato-sour cream-bacon bits and a fine salad bar.  In the foyer is displayed a... Read More Read More - [RECIPE: A Touch of Genius and a Lot of Courage](https://everyangel.org/recipe-a-touch-of-genius-and-a-lot-of-courage/): Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage — to move in the opposite direction.   –Albert Einstein  The photo of a anonymous woman sitting on a curb in the aftermath of one of many random killings in a... Read More Read More - [CORN KING 2016](https://everyangel.org/corn-king-2016/): Do you remember what your life was like at 20 months old?  At 20 months one can say several words.  Self reflective awareness begins to form with language.  Best of all, every waking day is literally “the first day of the rest of one’s life.”  We repeat the phrase as adults as a reminder... Read More Read More - [Elegy for My Generation](https://everyangel.org/elegy-for-my-generation/): I’ll not forget my first visit to a drag strip.  Drag strips are often in out of the way places.  By definition it was and is an “outlaw” activity.  I was a high school sophomore. I lied to my father about my intentions, in order to gain permission to go with Eddie to the... Read More Read More - [SIC SIMPER ERAT, ET SEMPER ERIT](https://everyangel.org/sic-simper-erat-et-semper-erit/): I am seated before a screen, letters, words, sentences appearing by magic, as fingers press buttons.  The words, arranged in grammatical structure convey the meaning within my mind, and serendipitiously to your mind, if you should discover and read the post.  The symbols on the screen are evanescent, held in being by retinal persistence. ... Read More Read More - [And More From Paul Virilio](https://everyangel.org/and-more-from-paul-virilio/): This morning I read more from Virilio’s book, Lost Dimension, published in 1984.  I read a few pages and came upon this section.  These words left me existentially numb.  For now I can read no further.  Basically, if the early sciences were sciences of the earth, of matter and of physical sciences, sciences of... Read More Read More - [Language The First Divider](https://everyangel.org/language-the-first-divider/): What if, however, humans exceed animals in their capacity for violence precisely because they speak? Language dismembers a thing, destroying its organic unity, treating its parts and properties as autonomous. -*- The fact that reason and race have the same root (ratio) in Latin tells us something: language, not primitive egotistic interest, is the... Read More Read More - [The Problem](https://everyangel.org/the-problem/): “Si vous êtes pris dans le rêve de l’autre, vous êtes foutu”  (If you’re trapped in the dream of the other, you’re fucked) —Gilles Deleuze Have you ever been in love?  Horrible isn’t it? It makes you so vulnerable.  It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone... Read More Read More - [Day After Veterans Day](https://everyangel.org/day-after-veterans-day/): I agreed to accompany my wife to the American Legion Post in Gurnee for the Veterans Day ceremony.  She is a member of a local choral group that was to participate in the community event.  As she is recovering from a knee injury I did the driving. It’s never been easy for me to... Read More Read More - [Helpless, Helpless, Helpless ?](https://everyangel.org/helpless-helpless-helpless/): I recently exchanged emails with a friend on the topic of gerrymandering.  Gerrymandering is the practice of shaping the voting districts to align with the population density that has supported the party in power, according to past election data.  The majority party, the one in power gets to manipulate the boundaries of electoral districts,... Read More Read More - [Seeking Experimenters](https://everyangel.org/seeking-experimenters/): I am only an experimenter. Do not set the least value upon what I do, or the least discredit upon what I do not, as if I pretended to settle any thing as true or false. I unsettle all things. No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless... Read More Read More - [A Night At The Opera](https://everyangel.org/a-night-at-the-opera/): Guess which of these guys is the leader of the “free” world?  Given this impression–which man would you chose to follow?  Assuming that you were in a position to have a choice………………… Ruling a great country is like cooking a small fish. –Lao Tsu, Tao Te Ching chapter 60   - [Rain In My Shoes](https://everyangel.org/rain-in-my-shoes/): I’ve always loved this song.  It is one of Elvis signature tunes, but the credit for the superlative lyric go to Ronnie Milsap and Eddie Rabbitt.  The lyric knits together time and place by means of a consuming quest for a person who is loved.  Each of us is a mystery to ourselves, our... Read More Read More - [Traveling In Style](https://everyangel.org/traveling-in-style/): A friend sent this poem to me.  I’ve read it before.  Since the first reading several years have passed. Now the words evoke a more personal reality, something that could be autobiographical.  I guess that is the whole point. A discussion of politics last night was passionate, mindful, with good insights being exchanged.  This... Read More Read More - [There Is No Why](https://everyangel.org/there-is-no-why/): Sutherland Springs, Texas, First Baptist Church, Devin Patrick Kelley, 15 magazines of AR-15 ammo, 15 rounds per mag, emptied into the congregation.  Twenty six people are killed.  Kelley is dead. I read these “facts” and more on the CNN website.  The bottomless analysis of the event continues.  Everyone who has an opinion weighs in,... Read More Read More - [If](https://everyangel.org/if/): If we are going to be personally free and productive human beings we need to recover some kind of interest in the possibility of attaining a relatively human and civilized condition, in which we ourselves can find ourselves and help others do the same. And that we might even be able to communicate something... Read More Read More - [Today is Nov 4](https://everyangel.org/today-is-oct-4/): “We acknowledge the receipt of your order for five triple furnaces including two electric elevators for raising the corpses and one emergency elevator..” –excerpt of letter from I A Topf and Sons, manufacturers of heating equipment to the commandant of Auschwitz concerning the new “heating system.” “…for putting the bodies into the furnace we... Read More Read More - [The Labyrinth](https://everyangel.org/the-labyrinth/): Propaganda is an ostensible appeal to reason and to action which is in fact essentially irrational. We are all the more susceptible to its irrational appeal since we are subject to the same systematic irrationality in advertising. There is such a thing as a labyrinth of information; the information is truly abundant and complex,... Read More Read More - [Everybody Needs A Helping Hand](https://everyangel.org/everybody-needs-a-helping-hand/):                                                                        Thanks Dad ! - [Kaleidoscope](https://everyangel.org/kaleidoscope/): Another morning.  Its Wednesday and at least I am not in traffic on I-294 in the stampede to Chicago.  Around 6AM yesterday before dawn I accelerated up the ramp into the stream of traffic with a massive chrome truck bumper in my rear view mirror.  In the darkness the surreal stream of headlights, with... Read More Read More - [The Bull's Eye](https://everyangel.org/the-bulls-eye/): A man of massive meditation Is like a man looking at death, Looking at death as at a bull’s –eye. He watches before he crosses the tracks. –Richard Eberhart Life comes at us without warning.  I cannot imagine what this day will bring.  Yet I must “cross the tracks,” get on with the business... Read More Read More - [Why Bring It Back?](https://everyangel.org/why-bring-it-back/): Strange the memories that present themselves in surprising detail.  I remember falling in love with a Ford Mustang.  It was 1965, my sophomore year in high school.  An acquaintance who lived in the neighborhood was given a new Ford Mustang 2+2 fastback by his mother.  It had a 289 ci motor and a four... Read More Read More - [Nothing To Lose](https://everyangel.org/nothing-to-lose/): Though we have the power to destroy the whole world, life is stronger than the death instinct and love is stronger than hate. It does not make logical sense to be too hopeful, but once again this is not a matter of logic. One does not look for signs of hope in the newspapers... Read More Read More - [Snapshot](https://everyangel.org/snapshot/): A mixture of satiety, boredom, violence, and despair which characterizes our mass society— the impotence of well-fed bodies with empty and lost minds. The obsession with lust and with violent erratic forms of sex. Abstraction, confusion, pseudo passion— fabricated in the imagination and centered on fantasies Collect us together, give us a leader that... Read More Read More - [One More Story](https://everyangel.org/one-more-story/): Our last evening in Sister Bay we picked a restaurant called Chop.  The place appeared to be newer by comparison to the other places we had dined during our stay.  So close to Lake Michigan, but I had enough fish, so anticipated consuming something different for our last evening meal in Door County. The... Read More Read More - [Zen Story And A Party](https://everyangel.org/zen-story-and-a-party/): A monk said to Joshu” What is the way?” Joshu replied: “Outside the fence.” The monk insisted: “I mean the Great Way? What is the Great Way?” Joshu replied: “The Great Way is that which leads to the Capital.” The philosophy group gathered for a social evening last night.  They came over to our... Read More Read More - [Off Script, Again](https://everyangel.org/off-script-again/): No one gets through their allotted span without a major off-script event. Something, somewhere, will go catastrophically wrong. Not potentially, or incidentally, but necessarily, because of the structure of human existence and of our appalling exposure to error, accident, madness and illness. Someone very important to us will die long before they should, in... Read More Read More - [You And I Must Make A Pact](https://everyangel.org/you-and-i-must-make-a-pact/): Heard this song on the radio yesterday.  The lyrics keep coming back to me.  I believe that it is much more than a simple love song.  How difficult it is to make a pact with oneself to respect, to honor the integrity of one’s own one life.  How difficult it is to accept ourselves,... Read More Read More - [Feynman](https://everyangel.org/feynman-2/): D’Arline, I adore you, sweetheart. I know how much you like to hear that — but I don’t only write it because you like it — I write it because it makes me warm all over inside to write it to you. It is such a terribly long time since I last wrote to... Read More Read More - [Door County Farewell](https://everyangel.org/door-county-farewell/): A few days in Door County Wisconsin was just what we needed.  We stayed four nights at the Sister Bay Inn.  The sojourn in our comfortable room was existentially satisfying when we read the story of the inn keepers, Vilius and Alma Vaicekauskas.  We had occasion to converse with them several times while we... Read More Read More - [Pinkadon](https://everyangel.org/pinkadon/): Another pleasant day exploring Door County Wisconsin.  We visited Egg Harbor for breakfast.  Then off to Carlsville for the Door County Coffee Company coffee shop.  Not far away was the Door County Distillery and Winery.  We purchased more wine than we could possibly drink.  With the holidays coming up, I am sure that will... Read More Read More - [Fish Creek](https://everyangel.org/fish-creek/): This is my first visit to Door County Wisconsin.  Door County is a peninsula with Green Bay to the west side of one shoreline, and Lake Michigan to the east of the other shore.  It is the proximity of the great fresh water lake that shapes the environment and the way of life of... Read More Read More - [A Parable of Two Idiots](https://everyangel.org/a-parable-of-two-idiots/): The old idiot wanted the truth, but the new idiot wants to turn the absurd into the highest power of thought– in other words, to create.  The old idiot wanted to be accountable only to reason.  The new idiot, closer to Job than to Socrates wants account to be taken of “every victim of... Read More Read More - [Hibakusha](https://everyangel.org/hibakusha/): I have been thinking about the recent talk of atomic weapons that has become prominent in the ebb and flow of the news.  The leader of North Korea has initiated a series of atomic tests culminating in a claim to now have a fusion weapon, a hydrogen bomb.  To sharpen the point, long range... Read More Read More - [On Dissent](https://everyangel.org/on-dissent/): The more massive a movement is, the more doctored and manipulated. The more it tends to be a mass lie, a front…… Genuine dissent must always keep a human measure. It must be free and spontaneous. The slighter gestures are often the more significant, because they are unpremeditated and they cannot be doctored beforehand... Read More Read More - [Someone To Lean On](https://everyangel.org/someone-to-lean-on/): With all the disruptions swirling around us, even if one is not directly impacted, — these are troubled times.  I am dismayed for my countrymen in Northern California, and in Puerto Rico.  Those who live in Houston and in the Florida Keys will suffer the hard labor of recovery for many months, perhaps years... Read More Read More - [Everything Will Be Ok](https://everyangel.org/everything-will-be-ok-2/): I was awakened by the rain drumming on the roof at 4 AM.  My consciousness returned to the same sound years ago in Karuizawa Japan.  We were there for our honeymoon.  It was spring, the onset of rainy season and it rained off and on the entire week of our visit to the mountain... Read More Read More - [Representing The Mind Of The Subject](https://everyangel.org/representing-the-mind-of-the-subject/): I was reminded of how iconic the pumpkin has become of the fall season.  Pumpkins are carved by children for Halloween jack o lanterns.  The carvings are displayed by proud parents as decorations on the front porch.  At the thanksgiving feast pumpkin is the main ingredient of a delicately spiced pie. I passed an... Read More Read More - [We Grizzle Everyday](https://everyangel.org/we-grizzle-everyday/): Cannot help but think about aging.  One must experience before one begins to know.  I do not think that the failing of powers that come with the fading of youth would be intelligible if one were told ahead of time what is in store.  How could one imagine the slow failure of eyesight, or... Read More Read More - [The Wind Cries](https://everyangel.org/the-wind-cries/): Too much caffeine yesterday, I slept little last night.  Today is another day.  Like everyone else, a creature of habit, I begin my day with a cup of coffee.  I know better, but here I am at Starbucks. Happened to hear this song playing on the radio:  The Wind Cries Mary by Jimi Hendrix. ... Read More Read More - [A Prayer](https://everyangel.org/a-prayer/): “Help me to forget today’s pain…….” Tuesday mid-afternoon and the empire staggers on.  Too melodramatic?  I hope so.  I heard snippets of a report from the fires in Northern California.  Santa Rosa is incinerated in the wind lashed wild fire.  Wine country burns.  At the very same time our head of the EPA is... Read More Read More - [Strange But True](https://everyangel.org/strange-but-true/): “This is some weird shit…..” is a statement coming out of the recesses of memory so far back that I doubt if I will ever remember who said it or what was being spoken of.  It has a “hippie” texture, something coming from the era of “free” love, –“tune in, turn on, and drop... Read More Read More - [Ragnarok](https://everyangel.org/ragnarok/): The authorities yet search for pathology, something to isolate as a cause of the murder of 58 people in Las Vegas.  Surely something caused this individual to step out of the matrix of time and place to impersonally wreak chaos upon the attendees of a country music festival.  He orchestrated his own Ragnarök*.  His... Read More Read More - [Love Will Keep Us Alive](https://everyangel.org/love-will-keep-us-alive/): Somehow it seems right to entitle this mornings words with the declaration that “love wins.” At the end of the shit-storm, a shining star remains in the dark night  to guide us home.   That star is the option of responding with love to circumstances such as they may be.  Every man and woman’s... Read More Read More - [Our Awful Innocence](https://everyangel.org/our-awful-innocence/): Saturday and the morning sun is glorious on a day when rain is predicted.  So much for prediction, our obsession with certainty. The FBI continues to dig deep, and search far and wide for a reason.  There has to be a anchor point for ourselves, something, anything to separate us from one who murdered... Read More Read More - [He Was Just Like Anybody Else](https://everyangel.org/he-was-just-like-anybody-else/): Found this superb video of The Who performing their magnificent anthem of resistance.  The Who are performing live at Kilburn in 1977.  They are in their prime.  The issue comes down to what we will do with the “life force.”  Will we individually and collectively utilize the energy, our heritage of elan from Nature,... Read More Read More - [Dying From Excess](https://everyangel.org/dying-from-excess/): My mind is still occupied with thoughts of the 58 people killed in Las Vegas, and many more who will not recover fully from wounds.  An apparently “normal” American collected the means, and took the time to meticulously plan a mass murder.  Upon these terms the shooter decided to write the final chapter of... Read More Read More - [Speak, Speak My Friend....](https://everyangel.org/speak-speak-my-friend/): Another morning.  A few days ago, a sixty-four year old guy mowed down over fifty and wounded many more after careful preparation.  This took place in Las Vegas, our city of excess.  Several undeclared wars, Iraq and Afghanistan continue to simmer, producing a daily quotient of dead and maimed.  Additional conflagrations are verbally threatened,... Read More Read More - [Tom Petty 1950-2017](https://everyangel.org/tom-petty-1950-2017/): Tom Petty passed away over the weekend.  He was one year younger than I. There was vitality and nourishment for the spirit in those songs coming over the radio.  I am sorry that I did not choose to see him live in concert when I had the opportunity. I’ve always liked this song, “Runnin’... Read More Read More - [Tinsel Town](https://everyangel.org/tinsel-town/): I was in North Carolina when the news broke on the music festival shooting in Las Vegas.  I happened to check my phone news-feed late in the evening, and there it was.  The text displayed a estimated number of casualties at the time.  I clicked on the video/audio clip associated with the story.  Immediately... Read More Read More - [Deo Vindice](https://everyangel.org/deo-vindice/): Durham of my youth was a sleepy town, seldom in the news.  This changed with the advent of the Civil Rights movement of the mid 1960s.  Durham was in the news recently.  A crowd demonstrating against the implicit racism of the Trump administration pulled down the statue of the confederate solder that has stood... Read More Read More - [Sunday Morning](https://everyangel.org/sunday-morning/): Its Sunday morning.  A few fellow guests join me for my morning coffee here at the Holiday Inn.  I cannot help but overhear the collegial conversation of three older males, and several young adult males planning for a baseball game later in the day.  I’d lay odds that the older guys are coaches, and... Read More Read More - [21 c Hotel Gallery](https://everyangel.org/21-c-hotel-gallery/): A warm Fall evening is the perfect time for a walking exploration of Main Street Durham.  The old street is substantially arrayed in 21st Century commerce and entertainment.  Upscale Salons, Bars, Silicon Valley type incubators for fledgling business startups, and of course the restaurants, make up the mix of tenants for the old 20th... Read More Read More - [Elegy](https://everyangel.org/elegy/): Here I am in my hometown, Durham, North Carolina.  It is hardly worth mention that much has changed since I left for the big city.  The truism that “one cannot go home again,” is true with the sadness that is endemic to time.  This place has changed and so have I.  What was a... Read More Read More - [Our Neo-Pagan Age](https://everyangel.org/our-neo-pagan-age/):     Auschwitz (Laggiù, ad Auschwitz, lontano dalla Vistola) There, at Auschwitz, far from the Vistula, love, on the northern plain in a field of death: funereal, cold, rain on the rusted poles, and a tangle of steel fences: and no trees or birds in the grey air, or above our thought, but inertia and... Read More Read More - [Wednesday](https://everyangel.org/wednesday/): Today, the middle of the work week, the heat outside cools, it’s feeling a bit like Fall.  Starbucks is a hubbub.  Those present are regulars to my eye, parents, grandparents seated with children before the kids are off to school and the adults off to the days planned activities. The world is a collection... Read More Read More - [Tuesday](https://everyangel.org/tuesday/): Another day of news.  What is to be done for wrecked Puerto Rico?  It is surreal.  The residents of Puerto Rico are US citizens.  For all practical purposes the island has been treated as a colony, stripped of wealth.  The hurricane, a random, impartial  Act-Of-Nature has pushed the island deeper into the debt-hole that... Read More Read More - [Monday](https://everyangel.org/monday/): Another hot late September day.  It promises to be 90 degrees. Between our president and the leader of North Korea, another session of bitch-slapping, saber rattling.  A formation of B-1 bombers and F-15 fighters made a pass along the coast of North Korea.  What is the next move going to be and who will... Read More Read More - [Why ?](https://everyangel.org/why/): Its September 24, mid afternoon, and 90 degrees.  According to the calendar it is Fall but you’d never know.  It has been a while since an adequate rain, and the grass is fading from green to tan.  I do not expect to become accustomed to these predicted unseasonal extreme-weather events.  There will be no... Read More Read More - [Cruel Awakening](https://everyangel.org/cruel-awakening/): The South, too, was an earthly paradise. Not of course at all times, for all its inhabitants. There were the slaves. Yet the South, before the War between the States, had this of paradise left to it: it had the wholeness that embraced white and black in an apparent unity, even though the relationship... Read More Read More - [Daydreaming](https://everyangel.org/daydreaming/): When a myth becomes a daydream it is judged, found wanting, and must be discarded.  To cling to it when it has lost its creative function is to condemn oneself to mental illness.  I do not say we must learn to live without myths (such an idea is dangerous self-deception: it is itself a... Read More Read More - [Memoro Ergo Sum](https://everyangel.org/memoro-ergo-sum/): But this memory is the glue that keeps the universe as one: although immaterial it makes being possible, it is being. If an idea did not remember to think it wouldn’t be. If a chair wasn’t there, it wouldn’t be tomorrow. If I didn’t remember that I am, I won’t be. We can also... Read More Read More - [If Nothing Is Left](https://everyangel.org/if-nothing-is-left/): Where many machines are used in monastic work (and it is right that they should be used), there can be a deadening of the spirit and of sensibility, a blunting of perception, a loss of awareness, a lowering of tone, a general fatigue and lassitude, a proneness to unrest and guilt which we might... Read More Read More - [The River Abides](https://everyangel.org/the-river-abides/): The Ohio River is big.  From the deck of a boat, one can appreciate the scale of the bridges required to convey vehicles from Kentucky to Indiana, across the Ohio river.  It is not hard to imagine the immense challenge of constructing the first bridge across this muscular flowing expanse of water.  Then came... Read More Read More - [Channeling History](https://everyangel.org/channeling-history/): I can’t prove this. And I have no idea how data could be collected and interpreted. I think that we are a composite of our ancestors, parents, grandparents, extending backward…..  the times in which they lived, their failures, successes, triumphs, and defeats –all add up to form the backdrop, the emotional ground tone of... Read More Read More - [Safai Coffee Shop](https://everyangel.org/safai-coffee-shop/): A coffee shop can be a “home” away from home.  For the price of a cup of coffee one can just be, hangout, find solitude with others, for reading, for ones thoughts, or for observing human nature expressed in behavior and the dress of patrons.  Coffee Shops are essential public spaces. My customary spot... Read More Read More - [Light, Light!](https://everyangel.org/light-light/): It was dark when I walked in the door here at Safai Coffee shop on Bardstown Road in Louisville.  At 7AM just myself and two baristas compose the crowd.  There is comfort to darkness.  The relative quiet of morning with slight traffic noise leaves the mind undisturbed.  We need darkness.  Darkness is context for... Read More Read More - [A Ghost You Can't See](https://everyangel.org/a-ghost-you-cant-see/): It’s Sunday morning in Louisville Ky.  A short walk from the BNB I found Safai Coffee open at 7AM.  Southern towns are sleepy on Sunday morning and Louisville is no exception, though Louisville qualifies as a small city.  In the South on a Sunday morning, I feel that I ought to be in church. ... Read More Read More - [Reminiscence](https://everyangel.org/reminiscence/): “Who dares despise the day of small things,……” –Zechariah 4:10 niv I cannot recall beginning a post with a quotation from the prophets of the Old Testament.  These words strike me as fitting. Today I responded to a request from a long term customer.  While working on site in a remodeled space that will... Read More Read More - [History](https://everyangel.org/history/): We leave for wherever history takes us.  Preceded. Followed. –Etel Adnan, Night I watched a program on the discovery of the wreck of the USS Indianapolis last night.  A team of scientists funded by Paul Allen found the Indianapolis on the bottom of the Philippine Sea lying at a dept of 18,000 feet.  The... Read More Read More - [Hey Gary](https://everyangel.org/hey-gary/): Our philosophy discussion group has convened for many years.  Gary and I have had a long standing difference of view regarding a particular staple thought-experiment.  The philosophical conundrum goes thusly: If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it fall, does the falling tree make a sound? Gary’s... Read More Read More - [Tuesday Morning Meditation](https://everyangel.org/tuesday-morning-meditation/): The wedding of history with the coffee we drink in our ever shrinking days awakes our need to reinvent love. Another morning, of the many that I have been lucky to enjoy in my sixty eight years.  Fall comes, the sun shines brightly, and the slight chill promises a comfortable day.  I confess that... Read More Read More - [Kyrie Eleison](https://everyangel.org/kyrie-eleison/): The weekend offered a gift of beautiful weather to those living in the Midwest.  Yard work on Saturday morning, clearing the garden patch of the remaining tomato vines, and dying squash plants.  The afternoon was spent in conversation with friends in Long Grove.  We chatted with Michael at Buffalo Creek Brewery, sampled two of... Read More Read More - [Poseidon's Trident](https://everyangel.org/poseidons-trident/): Starbucks on a Sunday morning.  The sun shines in the windows like a strong god.  To the South two days drive by car, Poseidon strikes the ground with his trident.  Storm surge, extreme winds lash the keys, and the Florida mainland.  Those who have not fled hunker down and pray.  And so it goes... Read More Read More - [Poseidon Redux](https://everyangel.org/poseidon-redux/): Poseidon brought back.  Hurricane Irma, a gargantuan storm is about to engulf Florida. The news prompted memory of eleven days spent on a freighter traveling from San Francisco to Yokohama, Japan.  Several days outside of Japan our ship, loaded with supplies for the Vietnam war passed through the tail end of a hurricane.  The... Read More Read More - [Haunted](https://everyangel.org/haunted/): At our last philosophy discussion session I was asked a question that I did not immediately answer.  The question posed was did I not think that tribalism would always be with us?  We’ve discussed tribalism within our group often, and for many months, years even.  The term stands for the defensive posture, the ethnocentrism,... Read More Read More - [Quilting & Disenchantment](https://everyangel.org/quilting-disenchantment/): We attended the Walworth County Fair.  I look forward to the drive to Elkhorn Wisconsin. The fair is one of the few remaining old fashioned agriculturally-based county fairs. While inside the homemaking arts exhibit building I noticed a individual standing at a computerized sewing machine. She was guiding the sewing head lazer dot, tracing... Read More Read More - [Godlike ?](https://everyangel.org/godlike/): A good discussion last night on the topic of “violence.”  I continue to mull over the concluding idea of the evening,–a reversal of the common place notion of “the good.”  Here is a quote from Zizek, “According to the traditional ideological commonplace, immortality is linked to the good and mortality to evil: what makes... Read More Read More - [History and Freedom](https://everyangel.org/history-and-freedom/): Exile.  That is what I feel this morning.  Tuesday after the Labor Day weekend, and already there is a autumn chill in the air.  Too soon, too early to anticipate the frost.  I feel wrecked by life, by the chain of events that have led me, led us to this point.  We have a... Read More Read More - [Entanglement](https://everyangel.org/entanglement/): I often encounter Reno, a friend, while attending to reading and writing at Starbucks.  We’ve shared satisfying exchange of stories on a number of occasions.  Certainly we do not know a lot about each other.  But the insight gained through the story telling has effected a change within my personality, my mode of being.... Read More Read More - [Buffalo Creek Brewing](https://everyangel.org/buffalo-creek-brewing/): Yesterday was a sunny Saturday.  After some yard work I headed to the office in Long Grove to tie up a few loose ends.  Loose ends prey on the mind, until they are properly connected.  After about 20 minutes, satisfied that all was taken care of, I decided to visit the new Buffalo Creek... Read More Read More - [Etel Adnan, Philosopher Poet](https://everyangel.org/etel-adnan-philosopher-poet/): I read a review in the New Yorker about a book of poems entitled Night by Etel Adnan.  The next day I submitted my order to Amazon. For many years I have carried a copy of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets in my briefcase where ever i go.  Adnan’s work will join the Eliot... Read More Read More - [Against Public Relations](https://everyangel.org/against-public-relations/): In the Philosophy Discussion Group we are considering the work of Slavoj Zizek.  Zizek is a prolific writer and a popular lecturer.  He is a culture critic, a commentator upon contemporary life in these times.  His method is dialectical as he comes from a Marxist background. Zizek often mentions communism, that failed recipe for... Read More Read More - [Here On This Darkling Plain](https://everyangel.org/here-on-this-darkling-plain/): There are seasons of life.  In the late 1970’s I was a student learning to swim in the vast ocean of philosophy.  With a bit more focus next I studied at Garrett Evangelical Divinity School in Evanston.  I assumed the professional end of all of the study was to become a Christian minister.  For... Read More Read More - [A Last Concert for 2017](https://everyangel.org/a-last-concert-for-2017/): The Long Grove Arts and Music Council held it’s last free concert for 2017.  I joined the townspeople on Towner Green Sunday afternoon to hear Scott Ainslie and Reggie Harris.  These artists carry the song and story telling heritage of our country, especially of the ante bellum South.  Indeed the story of humanity is... Read More Read More - [No More Answers](https://everyangel.org/no-more-answers/): Decided to take Monday for a visit to the Chicago Botanical Garden.  This garden is world class, an expanse of sculpted land and water displaying a sublime array of plants.  Calling a rare time out from work, I gathered my camera, and a book.  Laura and I left for a few hours of paradise.... Read More Read More - [Nothin' Can Last Forever](https://everyangel.org/nothin-can-last-forever/): I have a invitation to the 50th anniversary class reunion at Northern High School where I graduated in 1967.  The reunion is to be held the third weekend in October.  The fall calendar is quite full for me and I will not be able to attend.  I’ve carried the invitation around in my briefcase... Read More Read More - [Pig Pickin](https://everyangel.org/pig-pickin/): I was blessed to be present at the annual Family Pig Pickin hosted by Kevin and Caryn in their backyard.  It is an annual event.  Family members came from as far as Washington State to attend.  Everyone present was related by blood, by marriage or by the bond of friendship.  The “guest of honor”... Read More Read More - [There The Dance Is](https://everyangel.org/there-the-dance-is/): The end of summer, the inception of fall is always a sad time for me.  I will miss the radiance of long days, the heat which enables the tomato vines to produce, and the festivals of music.  As the days shorten, become cooler, bees become more active gathering supplies for the severe months, and... Read More Read More - [Walking](https://everyangel.org/walking/): We drove into the city last night.  We planned to enjoy dinner with Ben and Jeff.  Ben is nephew to my wife.  I had not seen Ben in at least eight years.  We walked the neighborhood to Crosby’s Kitchen on 3455 N. Southport for a leisurely meal. Stories were swapped while eating.  We then... Read More Read More - [Nomination For Man Of The Year](https://everyangel.org/nomination-for-man-of-the-year/): I know this is early or late, depending on your perspective.  The occupant of the White House was chosen person of the year 2016.  I am getting a jump on the 2017 pick. With every new year, it’s a new contest.  Nothing rules out anyone getting the nod.  A past recipient may become a... Read More Read More - [Andrew Young](https://everyangel.org/andrew-young/): On August 20, 2017 Andrew Young was interviewed on NBC News Meet The Press .  Here are excerpts verbatim of what he had to say.  This is a longish post but worth reading, maybe more than once. On the Klan types Well, it’s a week of misunderstandings. We originally sought to redeem the soul... Read More Read More - [Unending Deployment](https://everyangel.org/unending-deployment/): The poem haunts me.  I receive one poem a day via email from the poetry foundation.  Most I read once and discard due to my inability to resonate with the words.  This one gets to me. It describes the speakers encounter with a “crazy” street preacher, Brother Rickey, while waiting for the pedestrian crosswalk... Read More Read More - [Summer Car Show](https://everyangel.org/summer-car-show/): A gear-head since my high school days, I go out of my way to admire an old muscle car, or a race car.  An early memory remains of standing outside the fence at the State Fair at Raleigh as the open wheeled dirt track midget cars screamed around the track.  After the race I... Read More Read More - [Lake Geneva](https://everyangel.org/lake-geneva/): It’s early Monday morning. The sun glows a fiery ball behind overcast clouds.  Around 1 PM a eclipse of the sun by the moon is to occur, but we are unlikely to see it.  The solar system continues to move in orbital regularity as it has for a very long time, by human time... Read More Read More - [Better Left Alone?](https://everyangel.org/better-left-alone/): Not every false belief is a mistake.      What is the difference between a mistake and a mental disturbance? A mistake does not only have a cause, it also has a ground. The truth of my statements is the test of my understanding of these statements. The truth of certain empirical propositions belongs to... Read More Read More - [Charlottesville, A Final Thought](https://everyangel.org/charlottesville-a-final-thought/): My slave holding people of the mid 1800s who lived in the South deserve more consideration for their brutal attitudes toward blacks, —than do we for our racism toward people of color.  The slave trade, referred to by Southeners as “our peculiar institution” was the fading, dying residue of an ancient institution.  The Slavery... Read More Read More - [Charlottesville](https://everyangel.org/charlottesville/): Sometimes you have to say it out loud in order for the truth to penetrate, to register, to enter the heart.  If you are able, for whatever reason or rationalization, to support the president after Charlottesville and the pronouncement following several days later about the “good people” among the alt-right demonstrators,–you are a racist. ... Read More Read More - [New Realism, A First Look](https://everyangel.org/new-realism-a-first-look/): Just read an essay culled from Philosophy Now magazine.  The piece is an interview with Professor Maurizio Ferraris, University of Turin, a proponent of New Realism.  Here are some phrases that captured my imagination, vectors for exploration. The transformation of reality: revolution is possible and necessary. But it requires real action and not mere... Read More Read More - [Reality, Slice by Slice](https://everyangel.org/reality-slice-by-slice/): Wow! What a discussion.  There is nothing more ordinary than “reality” and nothing more controversial.  When we seriously think about what we mean by “reality”  we encounter levels, horizontal slices of a cake.  Which slice is desired, pointed to—involves the vocabulary and the syntax that you must use to describe that segment of reality. ... Read More Read More - [Falling](https://everyangel.org/falling/): Falling in order to rise…. The destruction of received models and forms is necessary in order to clear a space for spontaneous thought to arise. From the cathedral of our own feelings, from the void of the blank canvas, then, comes the space for revelation. We are fragments of an unutterable whole.  Meaning is... Read More Read More - [Fire Show Post Script](https://everyangel.org/fire-show-post-script/): Earth is a clump of iron and magnesium, and nickel, smeared with organic material and sleeved in vapor.  It whirls along in a nearly circular orbit around a minor star we call the sun.  There are enough stars in the universe that if everybody on earth were charged with naming his or her share,... Read More Read More - [Fire Show](https://everyangel.org/fire-show/): Again the family celebrated Clara’s 89th birthday with a prime rib dinner.  A dining room was filled with light and conversation.  At one end a display of mounted musky, pike and walleye reminded us of our link to the north woods.  Looking down upon our long table at the other end, a mounted trophy... Read More Read More - [A Quietly Growing Circle](https://everyangel.org/a-quietly-growing-circle/): The lake and the woods make a scarcely perceptible sound. Maybe it’s the sound of the wind in the tall pines, spruce and aspen. No wind can been seen moving the surface of the still, mirror-like surface. There is life all around, and almost no sound. Most of the movement is behind the scene,... Read More Read More - [Second Great Migration](https://everyangel.org/second-great-migration/): Friday morning in Eagle River Wisconsin. The woods by the lake are serene. In the north woods life is expressed by shear being. I recall life in a busy Starbucks at this time of morning; the chatter of patrons describing morning drink orders to a barista who recognizes the payment collected by the swipe... Read More Read More - [He Made It To Phoenix](https://everyangel.org/he-made-it-to-phoenix/): Glen Campbell passed on August 8th.  I was never a fan but I heard his music played over the radio for many of my young adult years.  When we lived in Durham Campbell was a patient at the Ear Nose and Throat hospital where my wife worked as a medical assistant.  She rode in... Read More Read More - [The Old Gods Part II](https://everyangel.org/the-old-gods-part-ii/): Sun’s-day Moon-day Tiw’s-day Woden’s-day Thor’s-day Frig’s-day Saturn’s-day Thunor, god of thunder and Frig, goddess of growing things and fertility….  Perhaps it is both human and wise, like King Redwald, to keep in favor with both sides. Two altars were constructed side by side. At one altar the king partook of bread and wine, “the... Read More Read More - [Cattulus](https://everyangel.org/cattulus/): Love should not be written in stone but written in water. –Cattulus Very little is objectively known of the life of Gaius Valerius Catullus. It is believed that he was born in Verona in 84 B.C. to a wealthy and well-connected family. Catullus’ father was a friend of Julius Caesar. He died in Rome... Read More Read More - [Of Old Gods](https://everyangel.org/of-old-gods/): Am reading about England of 1000 AD.  The book by Robert Lacey and Danny Danziger is an enjoyable read of the conditions of life in the Middle Ages, dealing with Viking raids, settlements by the Norsemen, and the development of Christianity.  I imagine the story as a time capsule sent to me from my... Read More Read More - [Recipe For Good Luck](https://everyangel.org/recipe-for-good-luck/): Yeah, I know the word “luck” is totally plebeian, tarnished with the soil of ignorance and superstition.  We may resist using the term preferring instead gussied up circumlocutions such as “in sync with the universe.”  Is there any difference?  Does not luck in all of it’s variations touch the finite nature of our knowledge,... Read More Read More - [Remember To Remember](https://everyangel.org/remember-to-remember/): The primal law that governs all living: not love not hate not hope but fear Its universality is the cause of every abomination in the shitty chaos called human history. The trick is not to become unbalanced, punished, ruled by it. Any fool can be a pessimist; it takes no imagination, no guts. Remember... Read More Read More - [Mission Accomplished](https://everyangel.org/mission-accomplished/): Is this how a member of a bomber crew felt upon return from a WWII mission upon sighting the cliffs of Dover and England below?  Maybe.  At the end of a visit to my home town, I hope to board the American Airlines jet shortly, for transport back to Chicago.  A visit to my... Read More Read More - [Stewing](https://everyangel.org/stewing/): When you cut off arterial blood to an organ, the organ dies. When you cut the flow of nature into people’s lives, their spirit dies. As we plunge into cyberspace and strive to replicate the “real” world in the “virtual,” we lose sight of one fundamental fact: nature is totally missing in the digital... Read More Read More - [Science Day Postscript](https://everyangel.org/science-day-postscript/): The following quotations are from Sarah Sekula’s outstanding article TURTLE POWER Endangered species spawn on Florida beaches, USA TODAY. Sarasota county has the highest density of turtle nests on the Gulf Coast, with as many as 6,000 nests a year, while the east coast of Florida hosts as many as 40,000. Seeing hatchlings emerge... Read More Read More - [March For Science Day](https://everyangel.org/march-for-science-day/): We have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time— when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest... Read More Read More - [Dinner & Bank Robbery](https://everyangel.org/dinner-bank-robbery/): Our first day in town featured dinner at Dame’s Chicken and Waffles on Main Street.  The rather small restaurant-bar delivers on it’s promise.  “Southern fried perfection meets sweet European decadence.”  The menu reflects an era when jazz musicians would finish their gigs in New York City.  They’d find a Chicken and Waffles joint open till... Read More Read More - [Time Travel](https://everyangel.org/time-travel/): By noon I will be boarding an American Airlines plane at O’hare.  After enclosure, sardine like, in the silver-aluminum tube, with good fortune, I will emerge two hours later in North Carolina.  I expect the air to be warmer and scented with pine needles.  The people will be vaguely familiar with respect to voice... Read More Read More - [Magic Between You And I](https://everyangel.org/magic-between-you-and-i/): Just felt like considering the message, or better, the zeitgeist of this song.  I don’t usually mourn the passing of an actor, more than just making a mental note of their absence. With the passing of Patrick Swayze in 2009 it was different.  I felt that an artist of rare ability, a dancer, had... Read More Read More - [Reno's Story](https://everyangel.org/renos-story/): Reno is a friend who stops by to say hello nearly every morning, as I contemplate my computer screen at Starbucks.  A bit of small talk is exchanged and sometimes a good story. Reno with a wry smile and irony in his voice told me of an experience on the job yesterday.  He works... Read More Read More - [Existentialism Raw](https://everyangel.org/existentialism-raw/): Did you ever read about a frog Who dreamed of bein’ a king And then became one Well except for the names And a few other changes If you talk about me The story’s the same one… Heard this song played today and I knew that I had to write about it.  It is... Read More Read More - [Easter Morning](https://everyangel.org/easter-morning/): Walked around the block early this morning.  The early spring thunderstorm left the ground wet and the grass emerald green.  I believe in the concept of resurrection, that newness seemingly comes out of nothing: ex nihilio.  After winters deep sleep, the emergence of green, a constellation of tiny leaves covering the apple tree, robins... Read More Read More - [Easter And Making One's Self Happy](https://everyangel.org/easter-and-making-ones-self-happy/): What are you trying to say?  I am not sure “what” the point is but I like this song.  My instinct tells me that the point will become clear with more thought, more care.  Enjoy. - [Easter Weekend](https://everyangel.org/easter-weekend/): How do I not ruminate on the meaning of Easter?  Raised a fundamentalist Christian, I was and am shaped by the stories of the Bible, especially those of Christ’s passion.  The facts of the story are grim, and the happy ending has been added by interpretation, a after-the-fact postscript.  Life is like that though. ... Read More Read More - ["Happy" Easter](https://everyangel.org/happy-easter/): Good Friday, two days before Easter Sunday is the day of commemoration of Jesus’s death.  There are various of interpretations of Jesus’s death by Christians.  The essential idea is that Jesus was a substitute, he died as a stand-in for everyone else.  The word sacrifice is typically used.  The ancient religious understanding of sacrifice... Read More Read More - [Becoming A Philosopher](https://everyangel.org/becoming-a-philosopher/): What a philosopher is, that is hard to learn because it cannot be taught: one must “know” it from experience. —Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil #213 - [The Absurd Part II](https://everyangel.org/the-absurd-part-ii/): A interesting quote. The absurd is productive as a stimulus toward the creation of beauty and significance. But…………… What happens when a majority of us embrace the absurd as a intellectual and moral habitat? - [Absurdity](https://everyangel.org/absurdity/): The discussion touched upon interpreting the world as absurd.  Surely this cannot mean a world that is chaotic, profoundly in contradiction, schizophrenic.   The world to my observation exists as a manifold of Being in flux, a perpetual dance, adjusting to cyclical seasonal increase and diminution of temperature and light.  The world just is.  There... Read More Read More - [Existentialism](https://everyangel.org/existentialism/): I am reading material on Existentialism, a movement that emerged in post WW II Europe.  Given the intense suffering, and the brutality of Nazi occupation it seems reasonable to me that an existentialist approach to life would have been persuasive.  Life stripped of anchor points for humane value, — with the vantage point of... Read More Read More - [Crescendo](https://everyangel.org/crescendo/): Beyond Good and Evil, Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, final section, What is Noble, concludes with a number of aphorisms which seem quite personal.  It is as if the author says—“and now the heart of the matter.”  I was drawn to Nietzsche from a upbringing of religious fundamentalism.  Fundamentalism is both right... Read More Read More - [Sheep Thrills](https://everyangel.org/sheep-thrills/): We are well into spring.  I worked with a rake clearing up the debris fallen from the two old blue spruce trees, winters leavings.  Two garbage containers were filled with twigs, and pine cones.  Butter cups are on the cusp of blooming.  The tulips will be close behind. I was reminded of the nature... Read More Read More - [Stacked Odds, A Man, And His Will To Survive](https://everyangel.org/stacked-odds-a-man-and-his-will-to-survive/): Another day in paradise.  I say paradise ironically.  We live East of Eden, outside the gates of paradise.  Or to put it another way with a lyric line from Hotel California, “This could be heaven or this could be hell…” I heard about the cruise missile strike on the Syrian airbase.  Shortly afterward I... Read More Read More - [Coda](https://everyangel.org/coda-2/): Coda: the finale of a ballet in which the dancers parade before the audience. The values of a human being betray something of the structure of his soul and where it finds its conditions of life, its true need. It would follow on the whole that easy communicability of need —-which in the last... Read More Read More - [What, In The End....](https://everyangel.org/what-in-the-end/): What, in the end, is common? Words are acoustical signs for concepts; concepts, however, are more or less definite image signs for often recurring and associated sensations, or groups of sensations.  To understand on another, it is not enough that one use the same words; one also has to use the same words for... Read More Read More - [Outside Of Time](https://everyangel.org/outside-of-time/): Once in a while I experience time dislocation.  By that I mean a disruption in my accustomed sequence of things.  Time for us is a concatenation of events, causally related, more or less–that we have adapted to.  Sometimes something happens to upend those expectations.  If you stop to think you can imagine events that... Read More Read More - [Transience](https://everyangel.org/transience/): This weekend I heard this tune on the radio.  “Have You Seen Her” by the Chi-Lites moved me.  Though I’ve not personally experienced the cause of loneliness depicted in the lyric story line, — I can relate.  The point is an old one, succinctly stated by Heraclitus,  “Everything changes, and nothing remains.”  What time... Read More Read More - [A Birthday In Retrospect](https://everyangel.org/a-birthday-in-retrospect/): April 2nd, the day after my birthday.  I awakened this morning thinking of my ancestors, the ones going back to the England of the first millennium.  Like the common Anglo-Saxon they surely had a hoe in their hands and planted the fields at this time of year. They came to this country from somewhere... Read More Read More - [A Birthday](https://everyangel.org/a-birthday/): April 1, 1949 was the day that I was born.  I seldom think  about it.  In past years often I needed a reminder, “Isn’t today your birthday?’  World War II concluded on September 2nd 1945 with the surrender of Japan.  Germany surrendered earlier in May.  I was born soon after the second great war... Read More Read More - [Our Virtues](https://everyangel.org/our-virtues/): Every people has its own Tartuffery and calls it its virtues— What is best in us we do not know— we cannot know. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Peoples and Fatherlands  #249 - [Supra-national, Nomadic Man](https://everyangel.org/supra-national-nomadic-man/): A friend forwarded to me the address of a conservative web site.  The site featured an article that explores the negative reaction expressed by the conservative minded to philosophers who specialize in postmodern thought.  In our discussion group there is always push back when an essay is offered, authored by Slavoj Zizek or Michele... Read More Read More - [Art](https://everyangel.org/art/): Art lies in concealing art. –Horace Quintus Horatius Flaccus (December 8, 65 BC – November 27, 8 BC), known in the English-speaking world as Horace, was the leading Roman lyric poet during the time of Augustus (also known as Octavian). His career coincided with Rome’s momentous change from a republic to an empire. An... Read More Read More - [Hope](https://everyangel.org/hope/): Open societies, in their pluralism, create an anxiety that brings about a reaction toward a fixed organic state, which, then as now, serves both the interests of an oligarchy and those of a frightened, insecure population looking to arrest change. We live, certainly, in societies that are in many ways inequitable, unfair, capriciously oppressive,... Read More Read More - [Diogenes, We Need You](https://everyangel.org/diogenes-we-need-you/): Diogenes used his simple lifestyle and behavior to criticize the social values and institutions of what he saw as a corrupt or at least confused society. In a highly non-traditional fashion, he had a reputation of sleeping and eating wherever he chose and took to toughening himself against nature. He declared himself a cosmopolitan... Read More Read More - [And On The Other Hand](https://everyangel.org/and-on-the-other-hand/): This same will has at its service an apparently opposite drive of the spirit, a suddenly adopted preference of ignorance, of deliberate shutting out, a shutting of one’s windows, an inner No to this or that, a prohibition to approach, a sort of defensive attitude against much that is knowable, a contentment with the... Read More Read More - [The Undying Beast](https://everyangel.org/the-undying-beast/): 229. In these later ages, which may be proud of their humanity, there still remains so much fear, so much SUPERSTITION of the fear, of the “cruel wild beast,” the mastering of which constitutes the very pride of these humaner ages–that even obvious truths, as if by the agreement of centuries, have long remained... Read More Read More - [This One Got To Me](https://everyangel.org/this-one-got-to-me/): This poem was delivered yesterday via email.  I recommend Poem-A-Day for exposure to a variety of poets, and as a form of therapy to counter the negativity that surrounds us. Deception Story by  Solmaz Sharif Friends describe my DISPOSITION as stoic. Like a dead fish, an ex said. DISTANCE is a funny drug and... Read More Read More - [Kiss It Goodby](https://everyangel.org/kiss-it-goodby/): I’m in a funk this morning.  The ACA, also known as Obamacare is certain to be repealed and replaced today.  The replacement will be something unaccountably cruel.  The accounting will come soon enough, when the fixed sum of money allocated to the states runs out.   At the same time, there is no cap on... Read More Read More - [Pure As New York Snow](https://everyangel.org/pure-as-new-york-snow/): A friend issued a challenge to the members of our discussion group.  We were asked to conceive an idea or an aspect of experience that is universal, upon which everyone would tend to agree.  The idea was to imagine a basis upon which we could begin to dialog with those with whom we usuallyvociferously... Read More Read More - [Socrates Meets Donald Trump](https://everyangel.org/socrates-meets-donald-trump/): In the age of Socrates, among men of fatigued instincts, among the conservatives of ancient Athens who let themselves go—- “toward happiness,” as they said, toward pleasure, as they acted—- and who all the while still mouthed the ancient pompous words to which their lives no longer gave them any right, irony may have... Read More Read More - [Tightrope](https://everyangel.org/tightrope/): The stupidity of the average man will permit the oligarch, whether economic or political, to hide his real purposes from the scrutiny of his fellows and to withdraw his activities from effective control. Since it is impossible to count on enough moral goodwill among those who possess irresponsible power to sacrifice it for the... Read More Read More - [Peeps](https://everyangel.org/peeps/): A reader response to yesterdays post “Bible Study” stimulated my thinking.  Those with whom we disagree are in a position to help us the most.  That is counter intuitive, and true. Why are many scared, so angry?  And what about my state of mind and heart?  What emotions are evoked by a cursory reading... Read More Read More - [Bible Study](https://everyangel.org/bible-study/): The following was received from a friend, who thinks as do I, that resistance to the agenda of the administration is required if we are to maintain self respect and not be stripped of our humanity.  This is from the NY Times and the URL is appended below.  I’ll add a comment or two... Read More Read More - [Wishing We Were In His Place](https://everyangel.org/wishing-we-were-in-his-place/): I have a tattered paperback copy of Beyond Good and Evil in my briefcase.  Its longevity is extended by a strip of silver duck tape long the spine.  The frayed edges of the cover are protected by clear vinyl tape.  The book was purchased when I was in college, and I am now rereading... Read More Read More - [The Sun Comes Up Like a God](https://everyangel.org/the-sun-comes-up-like-a-god/): Its comforting when the morning sun breaks over the tree tops and streams into the windows here at Starbucks.  On a winter morning, one’s spirit shouts,  “light, light!”  I understand in part how our ancestors worshiped the sun as a god.  The Mayans structured their cities around their great pyramids, temples for worship of... Read More Read More - [To Sin By Silence](https://everyangel.org/to-sin-by-silence/): PROTEST To sin by silence, when we should protest, Makes cowards out of men. The human race Has climbed on protest. Had no voice been raised Against injustice, ignorance and lust, The Inquisition yet would serve the law, And guillotines decide our least disputes. The few who dare, must speak and speak again To... Read More Read More - [Words At The Very Best](https://everyangel.org/words-at-the-very-best/): This quotation from Simone Weil is worth passing on: At the very best, a mind enclosed in language is in prison.  It is limited to the number of relations which words can make simultaneously present to it; and it remains in ignorance of thoughts which involve a combination of a greater number. The intelligent... Read More Read More - [Here I Go, There I Go](https://everyangel.org/here-i-go-there-i-go/): I’ve always loved this Bob Seger song.  Written in 1973 it is a mournful elegy to the transitivity of life.  Seger reflects upon the day to day experience of being an entertainer.  Beneath the glamor, the klieg lights of the big arenas, is the grind, the loneliness inscribed into “the life”.  I am reminded... Read More Read More - [What About The Lying..](https://everyangel.org/what-about-the-lying/): The comment heightened my awareness. “What about the lying…?”—-a query with a tone of uncertainty, a Freudian slip, — concluding after thought by a Trump supporter. The interview was coming to an end, and the resident of Charlotte had just spoken his full-throated support for the president. And then came the hint of doubt.... Read More Read More - [Physics, Second Thoughts](https://everyangel.org/physics-second-thoughts/): In the intellectual tradition of the West, through the Middle Ages, until the modern era, Theology was considered the “queen of the sciences.”  With the demise of Roman law and order the Catholic Church was the guarantor of European social order in the Middle Ages.  God’s law, the cathedrals and monasteries were the conservators... Read More Read More - [Light In A Mad World](https://everyangel.org/light-in-a-mad-world/): Can’t focus on anything in particular this morning.  Thus, I offer for consideration a selection of aphorisms from Nietzsche in section 4, Epigrams and Interludes, found in Beyond Good and Evil.  This is a playlist, some of Nietzsche’s Greatest Hits. 69. One has watched life badly, if one has failed to see the hand... Read More Read More - [A Great Ladder With Many Rungs](https://everyangel.org/a-great-ladder-with-many-rungs/): There is a great ladder of religious cruelty, with many rungs; but three of these are the most important. Once men sacrificed human beings to their God, and perhaps just those they loved the best–to this category belong the first-born sacrifices of all primitive religions, and also the sacrifice of the Emperor Tiberius in... Read More Read More - [Epicurus, Liberator](https://everyangel.org/epicurus-liberator/): How pleasant to know that Epicurus is part of our Grecco-Roman heritage.  The culture of the West owes a great deal to the intellectual ideals of Greece and Rome.  The Epicurean spirit is one of hospitality, of generous invitation. The host and keeper of this place, where you will find the pleasure of the... Read More Read More - [Like Prometheus](https://everyangel.org/like-prometheus/): I struggle to write this morning.  I awakened to the details of the Republican replacement for the ACA.  The Affordable Care Act was a work in process, an attempt to blunt the double digit annual increase in health care cost.  The measure was a heroic attempt.  The real issue always has been and is... Read More Read More - [A Will To Ignorance](https://everyangel.org/a-will-to-ignorance/): O sancta simplicitas!………….. Giving our senses a passport to everything superficial, our thoughts a godlike desire for wanton leaps and wrong inferences!–how from the beginning, we have contrived to retain our ignorance…… And only on this solidified, granitelike foundation of ignorance could knowledge rear itself hitherto, the will to knowledge on the foundation of... Read More Read More - [So You Want To Live According To Nature?](https://everyangel.org/so-you-want-to-live-according-to-nature/): WANTING TO LIVE ACCORDING TO NATURE So, you want to live according to nature? Imagine a being like nature: Wasteful beyond measure, Indifferent beyond measure Without purposes and consideration, Without mercy and justice, Fertile and desolate and uncertain at the same time; Imagine indifference itself as a power—– How could you live according to... Read More Read More - [I Would Not Give You False Hope](https://everyangel.org/i-would-not-give-you-false-hope/): Saturday and I am up early.  The days are longer and I am thankful for extended day light plus a morning that offers me hot coffee and music.  As I arrived here at Starbucks Paul Simon’s Mother and Child Reunion played on my car radio.  I’ve witnessed Paul Simon in concert and I felt... Read More Read More - [The Shape of Unmet Needs](https://everyangel.org/the-shape-of-unmet-needs/): Sloth – Laziness is really fear. We can’t bear to get down to our work, because if we were to apply ourselves, we risk terrifying humiliation. We might not succeed as well as we’d like, we might find a task too hard, we may realise we’re not yet equipped to undertake it or be mocked... Read More Read More - [Free Will Of A Penny](https://everyangel.org/free-will-of-a-penny/): Over the years Don has contended for a thorough going cause/effect description of reality.  We’ve enjoyed exchanges exploring the possibility or impossibility of free will.  This story is for you, Don. “Explain free will,” I said. “Imagine a copper penny that is exactly like an ordinary penny except that for this discussion it has... Read More Read More - [Nietzsche](https://everyangel.org/nietzsche/): Tuesday evening is philosophy discussion night.  Eight to ten of us gather together to discuss an essay.   We “go” together in conversation where ever our stories seem to lead us.  We have discussed Nietzsche’s work before.  He is difficult for many reasons, none the least is shear brilliance of his intellect. The springboard for... Read More Read More - [Vanishing In Plain Sight](https://everyangel.org/vanishing-in-plain-sight/): Read this in the NY Times this morning.  What would possess us to kill/eliminate/obliterate a species forever?…….  Are we mad? SAN FELIPE, Mexico — In the shallow sea waters of the Gulf of California swims a porpoise that few have seen, its numbers dwindling so fast that its very existence is now in peril.... Read More Read More - [Back From Galena](https://everyangel.org/back-from-galena/): Monday, the work week begins.  As usual seated at Starbucks, keyboard at my fingers, I realize that those around me, baristas behind the counter, and the regulars purposely striding in to place their beverage orders, are all connected in a vast network of communication and purpose which we call work.  It is a living... Read More Read More - [Galena](https://everyangel.org/galena/): Decided to visit Galena Illinois for the weekend.  Galena is close by the Mississippi River and and is known for it’s most famous resident, General Ulysses S Grant.  Grant lived in Galena at the conclusion of the War Between The States.  Galena has a Main Street, looking to be at least a half mile,... Read More Read More - [Our Hungry Ghost Zeitgeist](https://everyangel.org/our-hungry-ghost-zeitgeist/): Natural disasters are not as bad As not knowing what is enough. Loss is not as bad As wanting more. –Lao Tsu, Tao Te Ching 46   - [Trouble On The Way](https://everyangel.org/trouble-on-the-way/): I can hardly write this morning.  Like a massive rotating hurricane, —gale force words on immigration surround the eye of this storm.  Our newly elected president is the eye.  The storm has yet to make landfall.  It promises to be a big one, like the one that ripped up New Orleans a few years... Read More Read More - [Doses of Fury](https://everyangel.org/doses-of-fury/): Tuesday evening our Philosophy Discussion Group meets at Beans & Leaves Cafe in Long Grove.   Our “launch pad” essay for last night was POLITENESS by Quinn Norton.  Quinn Norton is a blogger, journalist, photographer.  She comments upon the movements that roil our post-modern, globalized, social world.  You may have a look at one of... Read More Read More - [The Strong Brown God](https://everyangel.org/the-strong-brown-god/): Tuesday morning, gray sky, warm and a light rain is falling.  Feels like May in late February.  Wish that I knew what this radical momentary departure from winter means.  Perhaps it means nothing, portends nothing that is to come.  After all, it’s weather and weather is change on a daily basis, forgettable.  Or maybe... Read More Read More - [United In The Strife Which Divides Us](https://everyangel.org/united-in-the-strife-which-divides-us/): My writing since the election of our president has disclosed my state of mind, that we are on the cusp of destruction.  Time will tell.  Nevertheless one must live one day at a time.  Living in premonition of the apocalypse is no life at all.  It’s a stuttering distraction from the path that one... Read More Read More - [Missing President Obama](https://everyangel.org/missing-president-obama/): Earlier in my life,  I lived day-to-day with little awareness of, scarce concern about the occupant of the White House.  Lately, I really miss President Obama.  He exhibited probity and propriety for eight years, in the teeth of stiff opposition.  He observed that the cost of health care for a majority of Americans was... Read More Read More - [We Are Not Dreaming](https://everyangel.org/we-are-not-dreaming/): Last night after dusk I saw the planet Venus suspended, a glowing large star, behind the silhouette of the tall maple in the distance.  I felt the comfort of knowing that Venus remains for me, as it did for my father, my grandfather, and for so many past generations.  The enjoyment of that glimpse... Read More Read More - [Living Among The Breakage](https://everyangel.org/living-among-the-breakage/): Yesterday I was reminded of the fragility of language.  Words are spontaneously used, transparent, selected for a purpose almost by reflex.  As a man working on a motor instinctively reaches into his tool tray for the 3/8 inch socket because he “just knows” that’s the one that fits–so we chose our words, you and... Read More Read More - [Terminus](https://everyangel.org/terminus/): Yesterday a friend sent a link to The Atlantic article featuring the winners of the 2017 World Press Photo Contest.  This photo rocked my world, –that is the world of connections, coherency, the lucidity that my mind has fashioned from my 67 years of life experience.  The photo is of a female, holding a... Read More Read More - [Chanting Loudly Consoling Ourselves](https://everyangel.org/chanting-loudly-consoling-ourselves/): VII This, then, is to be the way? Freedom’s candle will be snuffed out by freedom’s sworn defenders, chanting hourly the praise of freedom. Their praise will console the free waking in their prisons when the Bill of Rights has at last dissolved in the indifference of the great Self of force. When the... Read More Read More - [Troubling Our Own House](https://everyangel.org/troubling-our-own-house/): Another restless night battling this sinus infection.  Slept fitfully in the TV room.  My condition was not the only thing troubling me.   I thought of my co workers, especially the news of a yet to be diagnosed heart condition of one of the men.  He is much younger than I.  I also could not... Read More Read More - [We Resist](https://everyangel.org/we-resist/): “If we live through this precarious moment, if his catastrophic instinct to retaliate doesn’t lead us to nuclear winter, we will have much to thank our current leader for. …He will have woken us up to how fragile freedom is. The whip of the executive, through a Twitter feed, can lash and intimidate, punish... Read More Read More - [Being Human](https://everyangel.org/being-human/): Our culture idolizes youth. The images selected for commercial promotion are adults and children, in the bloom of health, active, energized by joie de vivre, apparently eternally young.  The message directly voiced, or indirectly implied is the product under offer, is the secret to this well being.  I wish that were true. Last night... Read More Read More - [Spannungsbogen](https://everyangel.org/spannungsbogen/): It is possible to act well in spite of one’s difficulties and apprehensions, a reserve of spiritual power becomes manifest, and may be accessed and drawn upon. The Fremen were supreme in that quality the ancients called “spannungsbogen” – which is the self-imposed delay between desire for a thing and the act of reaching... Read More Read More - [Coda On Morality Part II](https://everyangel.org/coda-on-morality-part-ii/): The more you love, the more you can love— and the more intensely you love. Nor is there any limit on how many you can love. If a person had Time Enough, he could love all of the majority who are decent and just. –Robert A. Heinlein The Notebooks of Lazarus Long - [Coda on Morality](https://everyangel.org/coda-on-morality/): So, do you mean to say, “love thy neighbor as thyself” is the best that we can do for an objective moral principle? Yes. Then it seems that I need to get right to work on better loving myself. Yes. - [Corrupted Morality](https://everyangel.org/corrupted-morality/): A spirited discussion developed on the topic of morality.  Where does one begin to think about such an expansive idea?  A promising launch point was suggested.  Morality, what is good, and it’s opposite, is rooted in our visceral response to the external world.  In short pleasure is an indication of what is good, and... Read More Read More - [Into The Darkness](https://everyangel.org/into-the-darkness/): Another day, a weirdly warm fifty degrees, but the usual gray for February.  Was reflecting upon a meeting with friends last night.  I flashed back to the 60s where coffee shops were places for songs of resistance to a war, and for building alternative community.  Our colonial forebears likewise met in the public houses... Read More Read More - [Monday Morning Hero](https://everyangel.org/monday-morning-hero/): Its Monday morning.  The day after the Super Bowl, and feeling blue.  There is good-natured banter between staff here at Starbucks.  Awareness of the chatter, and the David Bowie lyric in the background, “We can be Hero’s for just one day…” is pulling my spirit toward the bright side.  Certainly my funk is the... Read More Read More - [Needed: One Rickety Raft](https://everyangel.org/needed-one-rickety-raft/): I am delighted to offer a guest post from a friend, and a fine writer.  The choice is perennial and ancient, and as contemporary as that offered to Neo in the Matrix movie, “You take the blue pill, the story ends. You wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe.... Read More Read More - [A Chain of Two Yards](https://everyangel.org/a-chain-of-two-yards/): People claim to want freedom. In good faith attempts are made to set up political freedom. People also proclaim metaphysical freedom. They struggle to free slaves. They make liberty a supreme value. The loss of freedom by imprisonment is a punishment that is hard to bear. Liberty is cherished……. It is not true that... Read More Read More - [Rodent Prognosticator](https://everyangel.org/rodent-prognosticator/): And freedom, oh freedom, well that’s just some people talkin’ A lyric line from the song Desperado by Glenn Frey and Don Henley is how I feel right now.  We worship at the Shrine of Freedom in this country.  Lately I wonder if there is much behind the curtain.  I happily accepted a invitation... Read More Read More - [Time To Play Jazz](https://everyangel.org/time-to-play-jazz/): Street violence was reported in Berkeley last night.  Riot police, students and tear gas is never a good  combination.  The cancelled speaker is an editor for the Breitbart News Network, which was headed until recently by a senior Trump advisor.  “So now it begins,” I thought upon waking to this news report.  A  drumbeat... Read More Read More - [Is That God, Dancing?](https://everyangel.org/is-that-god-dancing/): After two sessions discussing the work and sayings of Albert Einstein, he remains one of my heroes.  Einstein is remembered for his worldview altering theories of Special Relativity and General Relativity.  The math and the experiments show that space and time and matter and gravity exist in dynamic relationship.  Space and time are no... Read More Read More - [Looking For That Sign](https://everyangel.org/looking-for-that-sign/): Tuesday morning and a cold rain is falling.  Another day is before me.  I have a short to-do list.  Every item seems of life & death importance.  And that,– is the problem.  The daily news reports stories of the anti-Muslim travel ban affecting thousands of travelers world-wide, innocent, but denied entry to our country. ... Read More Read More - [Making America Great Reconsidered](https://everyangel.org/making-america-great-reconsidered/): There is a story that Czeslaw Milosz, on a return visit to his birthplace in Lithuania some 50 years after he had left, walked up to an oak tree and embraced it. An image of the return of the native, of course, but also an image of someone drawing strength – the psychic, moral... Read More Read More - [A Taste Of Thyme Sweetened Honey](https://everyangel.org/a-taste-of-thyme-sweetened-honey/): Last night I attended a concert by a cover band of Eagles music.  A few years ago, I was lucky enough to hear The Eagles perform live.  That concert and those songs continue to change my life, to be sources of hope.  My wife was with me for that event.  At the time she... Read More Read More - [Coming Apart At The Seams](https://everyangel.org/coming-apart-at-the-seams/): Sparks fly!  I think that I’ve learned as much of life from Rock n Roll as I have from philosophy.  The distinction is a false one.  The discipline of reflection on the contents of the mind, and attending to the lyrics and tune composed by another, are complementary.  Its as if wisdom rises up, ... Read More Read More - [What Do You See?](https://everyangel.org/what-do-you-see/): It is Friday, midwinter.  Out of the window here at Starbucks the sky is unrelieved gray, much salty damp asphalt, and concrete curbing.  The architecture of our way of life is designed to accommodate the automobile.  Automobiles, now cybernetic platforms,  often cost as much as our parents paid for a house.  Trees, shrubs, grass... Read More Read More - [A Beach Story](https://everyangel.org/a-beach-story/): [In an ongoing attempt to clarify communication, Tobin decides to write another story as an analogy with regard to recent comments posted to the Philo Group. In his usual delusional manner, he actually believes things such as this story can open doors and produce results. Poor Tobin. He may never learn, at which point... Read More Read More - [The View From Afar](https://everyangel.org/the-view-from-afar/): On Tuesday, President Donald Trump ordered the re-authorization and rapid completion of the Dakota Access and the Keystone XL pipelines, two controversial infrastructure projects that will make it easier to transport fossil fuels across North America .—The Atlantic Daily Jan 25, 2017 Earth “A planet doesn’t explode of itself,” said dryly The Martian astronomer,... Read More Read More - [A Roar Heard Around The World](https://everyangel.org/a-roar-heard-around-the-world/): Women around the world marched. It is clear to me why women would march in the United States.  Trumps statements, his campaign promises and behavior would reasonably alarm any American who is not a Trump follower, who cares about the survival of the planet, human rights, and prosperity based upon trade with other nations. ... Read More Read More - [Has The Worm Turned?](https://everyangel.org/has-the-worm-turned/): In fairy tales the worm is a common term for dragon.  What a relief when the worm turns and your village and fields are not scorched by the beast. The day after the inauguration, women took to the streets to protest the stated intentions of the newly elected president of the United States to... Read More Read More - [More Fake News](https://everyangel.org/more-fake-news/): The following is a guest post from Nancy. I can’t stop reading about this stuff!  The Women’s March took place not just in a few cities, but all over the WORLD, estimated 2.5 million participants!  This is not just a few sour-grapes American ladies . . .    For every marcher, how many of her/his... Read More Read More - [Fake News](https://everyangel.org/fake-news/): WARNING: The following perhaps was a figment of my imagination.  Or maybe it was really a Trump fan club rally, and etc…?  The possibilities of illusion, delusion, are infinite.  In any case, I’ll tell you what the Chicago Tribune wrote about the event, and show you the pictures that “somehow” materialized in my camera. ... Read More Read More - [No Sale](https://everyangel.org/no-sale/): Yesterday, we went to Ninth Street to visit the Regulator Book Shop.  It is a small independent place, offering a collection of books appealing to the literary community anchored by Duke University.  Many of the older homes in the area have been re-purposed for small business use.  The big old tobacco warehouse in the... Read More Read More - [Always Selling](https://everyangel.org/always-selling/): Another day in North Carolina.  I cannot escape the memories that attend a visit to the Durham area.  I grew up in Bragtown just off of Roxboro Road a few minutes from this Holiday Inn. We walked down main street last night and marveled at the massive transformation underway in the old downtown area.... Read More Read More - [Winter In The Southland](https://everyangel.org/winter-in-the-southland/): Arriving yesterday in Raleigh-Durham we deplaned into seventy-five degree sunny weather.  Today will be the same.  It is February the 23, and this is winter?  I know that weather is not climate.  Climate is what we call those more or less stable patterns governed by the jet stream, ocean currents, and probably much else... Read More Read More - [Nothing Held In Place](https://everyangel.org/nothing-held-in-place/): For human life to continue on the hillside (or anywhere else) through successive generations requires good use, good work, all along.  For in any agricultural place that will waste and erode–and all will–bad work will not permit “muddling through”; sooner or later it ends human life. For good work to last, to outlast the... Read More Read More - [Where There's A Whip](https://everyangel.org/where-theres-a-whip/): In the Lord of the Rings story by JRR Tolkien, the cartoon version has a scene of orc infantry being marched to war.  While supervised by an officer wielding a whip they sing, “Don’t want to go to war today,–but where there’s a whip there is a way.” The scene came to mind as... Read More Read More - [Raining In My Heart](https://everyangel.org/raining-in-my-heart/): It is raining today.  It is also “raining” in Parkland Florida where the funerals continue for the 17 killed in the latest school shooting.  No one can grieve for anyone else.  Grief is solitary work.  No one can imagine the sorrow of a parent who feels the loneliness of having a child murdered.  So... Read More Read More - [Persons](https://everyangel.org/persons/): Persons are joined to families families to communities, etc., by disciplines that must be deliberately made, remembered, taught, learned, and practiced. –excerpt Standing by Words by Wendell Berry - [Respite](https://everyangel.org/respite/): Sunday, in the Judeo-Christian tradition is the “day of rest.”  That still means generally that the seventh day of the week is purposed for rest and refreshment.  I tend to seek a change in my normal daily routine, enjoy spending time out of doors, and in conversation with my wife.  Both of us are... Read More Read More - [What the F__k Are We Going To Do?](https://everyangel.org/what-the-f__k-are-we-going-to-do/): Yeah, I know the title is out of character.  Those who know me recognize that I do not routinely use such language.  I would bet you a large sum of money that the family members of the 17 murdered at Florida’s Douglas High School are thinking and speaking in these terms.  Their grief is... Read More Read More - [Lost, Shy Dog](https://everyangel.org/lost-shy-dog/): Ran out of time this morning to post any thoughts.  Only had an hour, part of which was spent reading Standing by Words, by Wendell Berry, and part was spent chatting with Reno. Then off to my first work appointment of the day.  I was in a funk on a sunny Friday.  Felt like... Read More Read More - [Lent: Seventeen Shots](https://everyangel.org/lent-seventeen-shots/): I had an awful dream in the early morning hours.  I was with others swimming, enjoying a calm pond; the water was warm, I felt family and friends were close by.  In the distance a rickety old building stood on the shore of the pond.  The kid in me has always been curious, so... Read More Read More - [How To Do Philosophy In Two Sentences](https://everyangel.org/how-to-do-philosophy-in-two-sentences/): Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough, to choose what to pay attention to, and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. –excerpt, This is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion about Living... Read More Read More - [I Threw My Lantern](https://everyangel.org/i-threw-my-lantern/): Today is Fat Tuesday, tomorrow is Lent, a season of abstinence. I was not raised Catholic, but I understand the logic of deprivation as preparation for newness, the emergence of new life.  The truth is ancient, predating the Christian era.  That’s the dynamic of life, of reality, of Nature, and the arc of human... Read More Read More - [Not To Imagine Anything](https://everyangel.org/not-to-imagine-anything/): The narrower a man’s intellectual grasp, the more power he is able to grab in his country.  I tell you, Lieutenant, there is only one way to survive here.  And that is not to imagine anything.  A Russian who uses his imagination is done for.  I certainly never use mine.  My job is to... Read More Read More - [Immigrant](https://everyangel.org/immigrant/): Yesterday, I arrived at Starbucks at my customary time of 7AM.  The evening snowfall was ending and the roads were treacherous.  The parking lot was not plowed.  I was the only customer in sight.  Several staff had arrived and were preparing for the morning rush.  I offered to grab a snow shovel to clear... Read More Read More - [Flower Power](https://everyangel.org/flower-power/): For who has despised the day of small things? For they shall rejoice, and shall see the plumbline in the hand of Zerubbabel; these seven are the eyes of the LORD, which run to and fro through the whole earth. —Zechariah 4:10 I’ve not lost my mind.  I seldom quote verses of scripture.  In... Read More Read More - [And When I Die](https://everyangel.org/and-when-i-die/): I thought that I was through with the subject of “time.”  But no, the choice is not , was not mine.  “Time” is not through with me.  There is more that I must say. It is impossible to assess the meaning of time, because we are like fish; we humans swim in the sea... Read More Read More - [Words Like A Hammer](https://everyangel.org/words-like-a-hammer/): Return by Gala Mukomolova   There are poets with history and poets without history, Tsvetsaeva claimed living through the ruin of Russia. Karina says disavow every time I see her. We, the daughters between countries, wear our mean mothers like scarves around our necks. Every visit, mine recounts all the wrongs done against her... Read More Read More - [Lights Out!](https://everyangel.org/lights-out/): The snow lies deep, parking lots remain unplowed.  The world has not ended in ice. Not yet. Not today. I am comforted by my customary warm cup of coffee with the green goddess Starbucks logo. Many worship at the altar of the green goddess. There are far worse religious obsessions.  With this one, what... Read More Read More - [Awake In The Night](https://everyangel.org/awake-in-the-night/): Can I be honest with you, Mr. Wind-Up Bird? I mean really, really, honest? Sometimes I get sooo scared! I’ll wake up in the middle of the night all alone, hundreds of miles away from anybody, and it’s pitch dark, and I have absolutely no idea what’s going to happen to me in the... Read More Read More - [Playing With Time](https://everyangel.org/playing-with-time/): All that really belongs to us is time; even he who has nothing else has that. —Balthasar Gracian So began our essay, Flavors of Time by Dean Buonomano.  We awaken to consciousness upon birth, a consciousness that increases with the mastery of motor skills and then of language.  Observe a child over the year... Read More Read More - [Cheating Time](https://everyangel.org/cheating-time/): I finished the essay on the subject of time. That’s my second read.  And I’ll likely read it again.  I’ve been intrigued with “time” for many years.  I cannot help but notice that a great deal of poetry happens to be verses that meditate upon the difference that times passage makes in human consciousness... Read More Read More - [On The Other Hand](https://everyangel.org/on-the-other-hand-2/): Twitter salvos continue unabated.  Talking points of both sides remain unchanged.  Trenches are dug deeper, bunker support timbers are laid in.  Phalanxes of lawyers prepare further assaults. All will die for honor and country, as the flag waves and the band plays on. The Superbowl is over and the Nation is late in its... Read More Read More - [Sunlight Without Shadow](https://everyangel.org/sunlight-without-shadow/): How do I say this?  On this Sunday afternoon the Superbowl spectacle is to be staged in Minneapolis.  I find it hard to care.  I am stuck back on groundhog day, February the 2nd. It was a sunny day, Punxsutawny Phil returned to his burrow and thus six more weeks of winter are in... Read More Read More - [Parenting Digression](https://everyangel.org/parenting-digression/): The link between excellence in parenting and a happy childhood is obvious.  There are not many excellent parents.  From my observation of families, and of my own experience a majority of us greet our newly born child as if we were Adam and Eve. I am sobered to acknowledge that most of us enter... Read More Read More - [There Is No Why](https://everyangel.org/there-is-no-why-2/): This morning I decided to sleep in, to get more rest.  Typically I arise at 6AM and am out the door 45 minutes later.  It is Saturday so why not “sleep in?”  The last hour or so of this morning’s rest were interrupted by troubled dreams. So much for getting more rest. I will... Read More Read More - [A World The Exact Opposite of Yours](https://everyangel.org/a-world-the-exact-opposite-of-yours/): “He said once I am the single greatest president in his lifetime, now he’s a young man, so it’s not that much,” Trump told Congressional Republicans at their annual retreat in West Virginia. And apparently it wasn’t enough that the 83-year-old from Utah said that he was the best president in his lifetime. “He... Read More Read More - [Excursus on Rock N Roll](https://everyangel.org/excursus-on-rock-n-roll/): First there was everything else that absolutely existed, and then there was rock and roll, circa 1950; named after a 1934 song by the Boswell sisters, popularized by Cleveland DJ Alan Freed, devolved into Rock N Roll of the mid 60s, music for teenagers, by 1968 expanding into ROCK—- all popular music with roots... Read More Read More - [State of the Union Sampling](https://everyangel.org/state-of-the-union-sampling/): As planned I met with friends Tuesday evening for philosophy discussion.  We considered the words of Seneca on the subject of friendship.  The subject was apropos in our own time of political gridlock, when words seem to make little difference.  Feeling is confused with thinking.  Feelings are shifting sand, nothing upon which to forge... Read More Read More - [A Lifeboat](https://everyangel.org/a-lifeboat/): It is Tuesday morning.  The sun rises gloriously.  The air is still and cold, about 13 degrees F.  The President will deliver his first State of the Union address tonight.  I will not be watching.  I plan to be with friends sampling Scotch and philosophizing about an essay by Seneca on friendship.  Friendship takes... Read More Read More - [Still Good Advice](https://everyangel.org/still-good-advice/): Dream not of Utopias but be content if the least thing go forward, and count the outcome of the thing at hand as a small thing. For who can alter another’s conviction? Failing to get a change of conviction, we merely get men pretending to be persuaded and chafing like slaves under coercion. —-Marcus... Read More Read More - [The Fragile Film of Order](https://everyangel.org/the-fragile-film-of-order/): What lessons can be taken away from the stories of the three Julio-Claudian emperors, the city-bred descendants of Augustus and Livia?  The language is that of Will Durant.  Durant writes “They began like Gabriel, and ended like Lucifer.” 1. When power devolves from being distributed between the legislative and the executive branch an unconstitutional... Read More Read More - [Caligula, Claudius, Nero](https://everyangel.org/caligula-claudius-nero/): Spent the last hour reading Will Durant’s account of three Roman emperors, The Story of Civilization vol. III.  The writing style is as lucid as the content of the story is disturbing, displaying aspects of able rule and extremes of cruelty.  Here are some excerpts. Gaius Caesar Germanicus (Caligula or Little Boot)  emperor AD... Read More Read More - [The Old Roman](https://everyangel.org/the-old-roman/): The old Roman distrusted individuality and genius. He had none of the charm, vivacity, the unstable fluency, of the Attic Greek. He admired character and will as the Greek admired freedom and intellect. Organization was his forte. He lacked imagination even to make a mythology of his own. He could with some effort love... Read More Read More - [Seneca](https://everyangel.org/seneca/): The first lesson of philosophy is that we cannot be wise about everything. We are fragments in infinity and moments in eternity; for such forked atoms to describe the universe, or the Supreme Being, must make the planets tremble with mirth. …One may prove out of his writings that he was a monotheist, a... Read More Read More - [Midweek Intermezzo](https://everyangel.org/midweek-intermezzo/): The Women’s March of protest and hope in Chicago provided much material for reflection.  Participation is a catalysis for personal change.  I know I am not the same person I was one week ago.  I am changed in ways that will be recognizable as my future unfolds. Everything is connected.  We separate aspects of... Read More Read More - [The Well](https://everyangel.org/the-well/): There was no way this well could be so deep. —excerpt The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami I will offer my thoughts on the Women’s March of 2018.  We are into the 2nd year of the Trump Administration.  This is the second Women’s March. The march of 2017 came the day after his... Read More Read More - [Freedom: A Raised Voice](https://everyangel.org/freedom-a-raised-voice/): A prominent feature of a mass demonstration are the signs.  Most are conceived, constructed, and hand-lettered/drawn by individuals.  The signs are an enduring appeal to anyone who is within viewing distance.  Signs are a persistent assertion of the objectives of the individuals who are compelled to raise their voices in the public square and... Read More Read More - [We The People](https://everyangel.org/we-the-people/): We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America….. Yesterday I... Read More Read More - [Aristotle Answers Gary and Peter](https://everyangel.org/aristotle-answers-gary-and-peter/): A group of us discussed Aristotle’s writing on excellence; the meaning and the process of creating an excellent/virtuous human being.  Aristotle asserts a mode of human existence that involves excellence of character, and excellence of action.  It is possible to make something of one’s self, to use the current manner of speaking. The short... Read More Read More - [Life On The Island](https://everyangel.org/life-on-the-island/): They are trying again, trying to avoid a partial government shutdown by Friday and  trying to prevent 700,000 non-citizen Americans, resident here since infancy, from being exiled to some strange country where they neither speak the language nor have means for survival.  They are trying to refund the Children’s Health Insurance Program. The well... Read More Read More - [The Pervert](https://everyangel.org/the-pervert/): The pervert claims direct access to some figure of the big Other (from God or history to the desire of his partner), so that, dispelling all the ambiguity of language, he is able to act directly as the instrument of the Other’s will. In this sense, both Osama bin Laden and President Bush, although... Read More Read More - [What Is Wrong With Us?](https://everyangel.org/what-is-wrong-with-us/): The controversy rolls on in reference to the President’s profane characterization of the inhabitants of Haiti and of the African nations.  Today when questioned the Secretary of DHS Kristen Nielsen said that she did not hear the vulgar language that others heard the President say.  She was in the room.  All she heard was... Read More Read More - [Happiness](https://everyangel.org/happiness/): It is snowing outside.  The streets are hazardous for travel.  Hawaii is recovering from a false alarm of a ballistic missile attack.  Our President is tweeting madly to deflect the response to his comments characterizing Africa and Haiti as “shit-hole” countries.  Individuals who happened to be in proximity to him when he made the... Read More Read More - [Why I Read](https://everyangel.org/why-i-read/): I’ve been looking at the box of books on my “to read” list.  I buy books, one or even two or three at a time. One book leads to another and another.  This has been the story of my life for many years.  I have subjects of interest that I’ve revisited over and over,... Read More Read More - [A Thread Running Through It](https://everyangel.org/a-thread-running-through-it/): The sun shines with morning brilliance.  Deep winter reigns over the landscape with close to zero temps at 9AM.  The end table of Starbucks seating area is ideal for surveying the hubbub of coming and going, conversations between pairs of individuals at single tables, to the long table at the far end of the... Read More Read More - [Rain in Our Hearts](https://everyangel.org/rain-in-our-hearts/): Our grand daughter was laid to rest day before yesterday.  She passed three weeks before she was due to be born.  There is a cause which we most certainly will never know.  There is no reason that she died.  She was loved intensely and nothing was left undone to prepare for her coming into... Read More Read More - [Melancholy](https://everyangel.org/melancholy/): Here I am twelve hours later at Starbucks, 4PM.  I awakened at 4AM giving up on the endeavor of normal sleep, acceding to my restlessness.  I got up, and read for a while; then prepared for a day of work. Was it the late evening cup of caffeinated coffee?  Maybe the excitement of our... Read More Read More - [A Well Without Water](https://everyangel.org/a-well-without-water/): A well without water.  A bird that can’t fly.  An alley with no exit.  And— —excerpt from The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami   - [Terrifying Excess](https://everyangel.org/terrifying-excess/): I considered watching the playoff game between the Georgia Bulldogs and Alabama’s Crimson Tide, but changed my mind after viewing for a few seconds the President striding across the field flanked by young men in military uniform.  I had forgotten.  A nationally televised playoff game is not so much a sporting event but a... Read More Read More - [Weightlessness](https://everyangel.org/weightlessness/): We’ve got gluts of information but are dizzy for lack of a norm. The norms of capitalism, friendship, and religion: everything is so provisional, situational, optional, such a matter of lifestyle choice that the very word “norm” is likely to victimize somebody. Our magnetic field is dislocated; gravity itself seems weakened. But weightlessness is... Read More Read More - [Che Vuoi? Part II](https://everyangel.org/che-vuoi-part-ii/): I have friends who believe that strict adherence to a strict interpretation of the US Constitution is all that is needed to fix what is wrong with our society.  I resist that position on many accounts.  A visceral scream rises within my psyche at this proposal.  That notion is the analogue of the Biblical... Read More Read More - [King of Snow](https://everyangel.org/king-of-snow/): Recently I had a brief exchange of views with a friend who is a Trump supporter.  Our conversation exchange of a few text lines concerned the tale of an old dog that habitually chases vehicles.  The conundrum arises when the dog happens to catch, and somehow latches onto a vehicle.  It immediately realizes that... Read More Read More - [Greeks Bearing Gifts](https://everyangel.org/greeks-bearing-gifts/): Language is a gift as dangerous to humanity as the horse was to the Trojans: it offers itself to our use free of charge, but once we accept it, it colonizes us. The symbolic order emerges from a gift, an offering, that marks its content as neutral in order to pose as a gift:... Read More Read More - [Sadness](https://everyangel.org/sadness/): Wednesday is another gray day.  It is somewhat warmer, 18 degrees. It is snowing outside.  A giant nor’easter is hammering the east coast today with wind, freezing rain and ice from Florida to the Carolinas.  The meteorologists are warning of up to six inches of snow into New England.  Climate change, what climate change…..?... Read More Read More - [Reflections](https://everyangel.org/reflections/): Reflection for a new year We mistake what is manageable for a catastrophe; we despair of ourselves too soon; we alienate others by overreacting; we don’t notice and appreciate what there is still to be grateful for; we forget we’re going to die and that a lot of today’s headache will soon be forgotten.... Read More Read More - [To Laura on New Years Day](https://everyangel.org/to-laura-on-new-years-day/): It is unusual for me to leave you behind for any reason.  When I crossed the Ohio River on the new toll bridge leaving Louisville, I felt deeply why I needed to leave you behind.  For the first time I felt our family; how substantial, how strong it has become.  We grieved for our... Read More Read More - [New Years Day](https://everyangel.org/new-years-day/): A friend observed with chagrin that I was too pessimistic in outlook.  I was tempted to compose a detailed justification.  The inclination for a pointless dialog passed.  This quotation sums it up for me: There are no pessimists; there are only realists and liars. —Paul Virilio - [Meditation](https://everyangel.org/meditation/): …………….in a time of empire collapse. “What need is there to weep over parts of life?  The whole of it calls for tears.” —-Seneca We get weepy and furious because our plans have failed and we strongly expected them not to. The task of philosophy is to disappoint us gently before life has a... Read More Read More - [Emptiness](https://everyangel.org/emptiness/): There is nothing more terrible, and more truthful than a mother weeping for her stillborn child.  Words absolutely fail to convey anything of the meaning of the experience.  One observes and understands nothing of what is happening. To weep is a natural, appropriate response to death, the passage of something or someone who is... Read More Read More - [Loss](https://everyangel.org/loss/): Friday morning at Baptist Health here in Louisville.  I didn’t expect to be here at this time.  Yesterday I received word that our daughter lost the baby that was due in another month.  The news came as a shock, a lightning strike on a clear day. The pregnancy had proceeded normally with regular checkups. ... Read More Read More - [Guest Post: The Human Predicament](https://everyangel.org/guest-post-the-human-predicament/): Anticipating the final days of 2017, and the beginning of the New Year of 2018 do we not all probe the future with our awareness?  We hope, and some pray for conditions of health, well-being, and comity between family members, friends, and indeed the nations of the world.  In 1970 I performatively enacted this... Read More Read More - [Thinking About War](https://everyangel.org/thinking-about-war/): I am interested in war.  My interest is a profound irony because by temperament I am “bookish” as some would say.   I like a good story, wherever I can find one.  I have plans to read Homer, and have purchased several translations.  I know it’s a good story. I viewed the film The Last... Read More Read More - [Che vuoi?](https://everyangel.org/che-vuoi/): What do you want? The thought came this morning while reading.  I am looking forward to the start of a new year of philosophical work with friends.  That seems to be the only way to understand what it is that I want from life…..  I have concluded that I need help, that working on... Read More Read More - [Christmas Snowfall](https://everyangel.org/christmas-snowfall/): A seasonal light blanket of snow fell yesterday.  The cold has arrived.  The seasons continue as they have before humans were around to mark the passage of time, or even to conceive of time. If a tree falls in the forest, and no one is around……  (A Christmas joke for Gary.) These photo’s were... Read More Read More - [Christmas Eve](https://everyangel.org/christmas-eve/): Not much to say this morning.  Arrived at the usual time at Starbucks.  Heather and Keith were behind the counter.  Christmas greetings were exchanged and my cup of coffee was served.  Tony had arrived before me and was seated with his laptop in place, already working.  There was no one else around.  Tony and... Read More Read More - [Christmas Story IV](https://everyangel.org/christmas-story-iv/): This is the hard part.  The final installment of my evaluation of Christmas is where I must make clear my measure of the Christ event.  Christmas entails more than the new-born infant, the manger scene so beloved by the religious oriented pitchman.  There’s profit in Christmas for the retailer as well as the religious... Read More Read More - [Christmas Story III](https://everyangel.org/christmas-story-iii/): I finished reading the Gospel of John, all twenty-one chapters.  Unlike the other three gospels this is not a copy and paste, vignettes of Jesus’s sayings and deeds.  This is an esoteric interpretation of Jesus.  He is human, but in a manner that defies the term ordinary.  He has insight, access to the deep... Read More Read More - [Middle Class Miracle](https://everyangel.org/middle-class-miracle/): The President and Republicans do a happy dance !! Deficit of (at least) 1.5 trillion is born in Washington. Do you hear what I hear? .   - [Interlude](https://everyangel.org/interlude/): We are enjoying a break in the late Fall chill in the Mid-West.  Today I worked outside for a few hours, enjoying the freedom of working without cumbersome gloves, wearing a light jacket.  The session of work was made all the more agreeable thanks to good company.  Scott and I ranged from discussing our... Read More Read More - [Christmas Story II](https://everyangel.org/christmas-story-ii/): The years have passed. I can no longer deceive myself.  The fantasy fades. I am not ageless.   Strangely I’m as awestruck by the hymn that opens the Gospel of John as when in my early 20s.  That has not changed. In the beginning was the Word.  And the Word was with God,  And... Read More Read More - [Christmas Story I](https://everyangel.org/christmas-story-i/): Today is December the 17th, and we approach Christmas.  I think about the Christmas story a lot this time of year.  I was raised an evangelical Christian believer in the South, so the text of the Bible is in my DNA.  I was marinated in the words of the Bible for the first 30... Read More Read More - [Ignorance Comes Into Its Own](https://everyangel.org/ignorance-comes-into-its-own/): There are things that cannot be taught in ten easy lessons; they take years of skull sweat. This is treason in an age when ignorance has come into its own and one man’s opinion is as good as another’s. The world is what it is— and doesn’t forgive ignorance. excerpt from Glory Road by... Read More Read More - [And Furthermore](https://everyangel.org/and-furthermore/): A man who is of “sound mind” keeps his inner madman under lock and key. —Paul Valery A man of sound mind would not be the individual who occupies the White House.  He takes delight in unleashing his inner madman at will on twitter.  And I would include a majority in congress and many... Read More Read More - [One More Thing Since It's Friday](https://everyangel.org/one-more-thing-since-its-friday/): We seekers after knowledge today, we godless ones and anti-metaphysicians, we too continue to take our flame from the fire ignited by a belief which is millennia old, that Christian belief, that God is the truth, that the truth is divine.  But what if this self same idea is becoming increasingly incredible, what if... Read More Read More - [Dumbstruck](https://everyangel.org/dumbstruck/): The front page of the NY Times had a graphic yesterday that rendered me speechless.  The President of the United States was pictured standing behind a lectern on the front porch of the White House.  The building was decorated in magnificent array of holiday green and illuminated splendor.  The president was speaking: “We want... Read More Read More - [Christmas and Loyal Opposition](https://everyangel.org/christmas-and-loyal-opposition/): The Brits have a term for members of Parliament who are on opposite sides of an issue.  Each calls the other his/her “loyal opponent.”  There is something profoundly civilized about the phrase.  Individuals may disagree, even passionately—but remain within the bounds of a shared humanity. Our philosophy discussion group has met weekly for many... Read More Read More - [Dawn](https://everyangel.org/dawn/): The sky to the East is glowing, cloudless.  There is a frigid gusting wind.  The temperature is around 15 degrees.  In an hour or so, I’ll be working outside, the first experience of this season of winter work.  Do I look forward to the experience?  No. But the work has to get done, and... Read More Read More - [Lake Geneva](https://everyangel.org/lake-geneva-2/): Lake Geneva has been a refuge for many years.  When life just gets “too much” a forty five minute drive on route 12 brings me to a lake that is consistently beautiful, season by season.  The town of Lake Geneva, is associated with the mansions built in the early 20th century by the wealthy/prestigious... Read More Read More - [Town Hall Meeting In Reflection](https://everyangel.org/town-hall-meeting-in-reflection/): For most of my adult life, I have endeavored to avoid politics.  The minutiae of administering institutions, the order of society has held no attraction for me.  However beginning with the first Iraq war, and then Afghanistan, I’ve felt compelled to pay attention. I’ve attempted to hire several veterans who were emotionally effected by... Read More Read More - [Political Meeting](https://everyangel.org/political-meeting/): Saturday morning and the first snow of winter lies as a diaphanus sheet upon the ground.  Technically winter begins with the solstice of December 21st.  No matter– cold, ice, hibernation, rest, reflection is the natural way, the rhythm dictated by Nature.  I welcome the coming season.  There is no clear-cut beginning and end to... Read More Read More - [The Tree](https://everyangel.org/the-tree/): A Christmas tree is the central feature of house decorations.  Many years ago we’d go to a local tree lot, carefully select the “perfect” tree, tie it to the roof of the car— home we’d go.  I did enjoy the scent of pine in the house, but decided that the labor-intensive ritual, that always... Read More Read More - [Tuesday in December](https://everyangel.org/tuesday-in-december/): The first Tuesday in the first month of winter is demonstrably cold. Patrons arrive at Starbucks with heavy coats, collars turned up.  The wind races from the north, some gusts at 30 mph under a gray lowering sky.  The temperature is in the low thirties.  This feels much colder since — until now, I’ve... Read More Read More - [I Look Inside Myself](https://everyangel.org/i-look-inside-myself/): Happened to hear this song on the radio.  Like a moth to a flame, the lyric and tune are mesmerizing.  I am not the only one so affected.  Written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards in 1966, the song became iconic of deeply rooted resistance to the Vietnam War.  Fifty one years later we... Read More Read More - [Wake up, Wake up](https://everyangel.org/wake-up-wake-up/): At Starbucks this morning just after six AM the horizon to the East was glowing.  To the West just above the tree line in the distance, was a big orange pumpkin moon.  It is rare that I have a cosmic sense that everything is in motion.  Yes, everything. We fear stasis.  Stasis is a... Read More Read More - [Tipping Point](https://everyangel.org/tipping-point/): The Senate passed a tax reform bill last night.  The vote was taken at a late hour, after a flurry of last minute amendments, which members certainly did not have the time to read or consider.  But no matter.  The bill became law along party lines.  Republicans all thumbs up, and Democratic Senators, thumbs... Read More Read More - [Resurrection](https://everyangel.org/resurrection/): What?  Surely the title is an anachronism, an absurd term in today’s world.  Why, yes it is quite absurd and that is the point.  Time’s arrow moves in one direction only.  According to the 2nd law of thermodynamics, energy seeks equilibrium.  It dissipates, no exceptions.  Unless there is a twist of fate. What I... Read More Read More - [A Hand Is Raised](https://everyangel.org/a-hand-is-raised/): The quotes from Guevara are mind bending.  As a source of insight, Che Guevara is considered by many to be a stone-cold-killer, an enemy of all social order.  The quote indicates that he was anything but stone-cold, and that he was an advocate of a particular kind of order. Wait, is that a hand... Read More Read More - [Love and Cruelty](https://everyangel.org/love-and-cruelty/): “Hay que endurecerse sin perder jamás la ternura.” (one must endure-become hard, toughen oneself—without losing tenderness.) –Che Guevara At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality. Hatred is an... Read More Read More - [Tuesday](https://everyangel.org/tuesday-2/): Full sunlight this morning. A dramatic contrast to the top story on the front page of the Wall Street Journal.  Major retailers such as Walmart and Kroger are to start charging suppliers penalty fees on account of late deliveries.  With supply chains being extended so far, not just nationwide but as far as assembly... Read More Read More - [Matters of Habit](https://everyangel.org/matters-of-habit/): Habits are the very stuff our identities are made of. In them we enact and thus define what we effectively are as social beings, often in contrast with our perception of what we are. In their very transparency they are the medium of social violence. My notions—of good and evil, of pleasant and unpleasant,... Read More Read More - [Thanksgiving III](https://everyangel.org/thanksgiving-iii/): Sunday was the occasion of a mild 40 degree day.  I especially enjoyed the shades of brown and tan illumined by the afternoon sun as we passed a wetland, undeveloped, tall grasses waving in the breeze. White oaks were showing  spiky leaves hanging on to face the coming frost. Everything is as it should... Read More Read More - [On Nietzsche](https://everyangel.org/on-nietzsche/): There is more truth in the “decontextualized” French Nietzsche of Deleuze and Foucault than in the historically accurate Nietzsche………… The universal frame of Nietzsche’s thought and its particular historical contextualization is inscribed into the very edifice of Nietzsche’s thought. Ergo…. In the same way the tension between the universal form of human rights and... Read More Read More - [Thanksgiving Part II](https://everyangel.org/thanksgiving-part-ii/): The feast day began with paying homage to Nature.  This is it should be, since each of us is a child of Nature, flesh and blood, born of the Earth, sustained by the sun, rain, the recurring force of Gaia’s productive effort.  Is it not proper on this day to personify Nature’s dispassionate, life-giving... Read More Read More - [Thanksgiving](https://everyangel.org/thanksgiving/): I anticipated this day for a while.  Fall days come one by one, daylight lessening, leaves falling, my spirit waiting for the coming interlude–a day dedicated to taking stock of the goodness that life serendipitously has offered.  Thanksgiving!  The benefits that come our way are unaccountable.  I did not expect them.  Indeed no one... Read More Read More - [Aesthetics](https://everyangel.org/aesthetics/): Instrumental rationality— namely the calculation of the most efficient means for achieving a given desire— has overwhelmed Western thinking for the last 300 years……….. We must change the aesthetic tone of the world. –Adbusters Nov/Dec 2017 - [Louisville Family](https://everyangel.org/louisville-family/): Our daughter and her partner are expecting a baby girl.  Kai is to be born in January.  I am awed that the child is to bear my mothers name as her middle name.  My mother was a extraordinarily courageous and kind woman.  She would have been greatly honored to have her name given to... Read More Read More - [Raining](https://everyangel.org/raining/): Did not post yesterday since most of the day was spent on I-65 traveling from Chicago to Louisville.  We departed in a gentle rain which surely will bring down the few remaining leaves from the trees in the neighborhood.  The plus side of the 6 hour drive was the brisk movement of traffic around... Read More Read More - [Hello](https://everyangel.org/hello/): “Hello, do you hear me?” Is the channel working? Are we both using the same code? Thus we understand the outbreak of public violence in Charlottesville, home to the University of Virginia, with Monticello nearby. And the mass slaughter at the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs Texas…..  There was and is no underlying... Read More Read More - [Language Part II](https://everyangel.org/language-part-ii/): Axiom: there is no simple “reality.” I remember the promise of the internet.  Ease of connectivity would produce greater understanding.  Instead what we got was not the spread of democracy but “mobocracy.”  We are being fractured by a firehose of falsehood.  Facebook estimates that 126 million Americans, about 40% of the population were reached... Read More Read More - [Autopoiesis](https://everyangel.org/autopoiesis/): Can agency and determinism be combined?  Helen Steward in her book A Metaphysics of Freedom asserts agency.  Agency is the ability of a Subject to effect a physical change in the world apart from the limit of antecedent brain states.  The position is that of incompatibilism.  Agency and determinism are incompatible descriptions of human... Read More Read More - [Today's Lesson In Chicago](https://everyangel.org/todays-lesson-in-chicago/): The 10 AM meeting was scheduled in Chicago.  I am not comfortable in a congested urban space, but will do what is necessary for the good of the company.  The traffic gods were favorable and our departure time of 9AM allowed just enough time to exit off of I94 at  Fullerton.  We found a... Read More Read More - [Never Mind](https://everyangel.org/never-mind/): Yesterday late afternoon as we returned from a family birthday celebration, a dark towering bank of clouds filled the horizon to the north.  From past experience I knew that rain was in those clouds, maybe lightening and a lot of wind.  Everyday it is the same.  In some direction a threatening cloud fills the... Read More Read More - [Dunkirk, The Experience](https://everyangel.org/dunkirk-the-experience/): Sunday morning at Starbucks.  I have the seating area to myself, reggae music over the PA.  I am in recovery.  I sat through the movie Dunkirk yesterday.  Seated before the enormous IMAX screen I knew viewing the film would be a most unpleasant experience.  I enjoy movies usually, and find even the poorly made... Read More Read More - [A Terrarium That You Live In](https://everyangel.org/a-terrarium-that-you-live-in/): PERMACULTURE is the science and practice of creating living systems of nature (permanent agriculture). In contrast to traditional agriculture, permaculture is characterized by: FLOW MAINTENANCE: working with nature rather than against it, ALL NATURAL: no artificial pesticides or fertilizer, and ZERO WASTE: complete cycles of use/re-use. The end result is abundance and health. Done... Read More Read More - [Trouble In Paradise](https://everyangel.org/trouble-in-paradise/): I have not written directly about the President elected some months ago.  Others have written often, at length.  I did not see the benefit of more ink spent upon that topic.  Now I’ll hazard to put my thoughts into words. Perhaps we have a President that we deserve, an person who is an example... Read More Read More - [To Be In One's Right Mind](https://everyangel.org/to-be-in-ones-right-mind/): We live by the economy of gifts, the only economy that will last. To be in one’s right mind is to know the right use of gifts. To ask for more than is given, to take more than is given back, is to have less, and finally nothing. It follows the law of Nature,... Read More Read More - [Kraklauer Creek August 2017](https://everyangel.org/kraklauer-creek-august-2017/): Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea, But sad mortality o’er-sways their power, How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea, Whose action is no stronger than a flower? O, how shall summer’s honey breath hold out Against the wreckful siege of battering days, When rocks impregnable are not so stout,... Read More Read More - [Nowness: The Garden](https://everyangel.org/nowness-the-garden/): What do we have but right now?  Nothing really. I have a “new” camera.  It is a newer model of my old Sony camera.  Dismayed that my Cybershot camera was run over in the driveway, I was thankful to find a affordable replacement.  I discussed some issues relative to the replacement camera with the... Read More Read More - [The Fair II](https://everyangel.org/the-fair-ii/): Monday morning, mid summer, the day promises to be hot.  The front page of the NY Times offers nothing that is encouraging.  On the cusp of Brexit a mega public works subway construction project in London is unlikely to be completed.  Brexit means disruption socially and financially for Brits and the continental member countries. ... Read More Read More - [The Fair](https://everyangel.org/the-fair/): Friday evening was spent at the Lake County Fair.  County Fairs activate memories of the Durham County Fair which I attended as a boy in North Carolina.  The odor of sawdust, animals, the visual experience of a mobile pop-up village dedicated to entertainment — has not changed.  The midway of amusement rides remain but... Read More Read More - [To Remain In The Middle](https://everyangel.org/to-remain-in-the-middle/): Life goes on as it must.  Patterns are established, habits ingrained, the inexorable impetus of cause and effect.  Can I imagine our ancestors sense of dread at a time when they felt the gods were working against them?  Has not science removed that burden?  Hardly. I had a brief conversation with a friend and... Read More Read More - [Am I Not An Animal Too?](https://everyangel.org/am-i-not-an-animal-too/): This poem came my way this morning.  To be human is not fixed, a given.  Its a process of learning.  The curve of a individual life lived can result in wreckage, or complex beauty.  I wonder if it is possible to achieve the latter without a relationship to animals? A PRAYER TO TALK TO... Read More Read More - [Katharsis, Pleasurable Relief](https://everyangel.org/katharsis-pleasurable-relief/): I am looking forward to attending a concert tomorrow evening, Friday, at the Lake County Fair.  Infinity, a cover band I’ve enjoyed in the past, is scheduled to take the main stage at 9PM.  Since I am a senior citizen now, Fair admission comes at a discount.  To hear tunes made popular nationally in... Read More Read More - [The Chain](https://everyangel.org/the-chain/): Americans, myself included, believe that slavery ended with the conclusion of the Civil War.  There is a shop in St. Joseph, Bound For Freedom.  The phrase refers to the underground railroad, the route north taken by escaped slaves.  The Bound For Freedom shop offers “fair trade” items produced by individuals in third world countries. ... Read More Read More - [How To Make a Grain of Sand](https://everyangel.org/how-to-make-a-grain-of-sand/): Lake Michigan, the five great lakes are inland seas.  The imagination fails at the immensity of the amount of fresh water, 21 percent by volume of the world’s surface fresh water.  While wading on a sand bar at the edge of Lake Michigan my attention was drawn by the sand that enveloped each step. ... Read More Read More - [A Michigan Sunday Morning](https://everyangel.org/a-michigan-sunday-morning/): It is a delight to travel.  I’m in Michigan wine country, just outside of St. Joseph.  With a brief two hour drive, the big city of Chicago is west of us.   Benton Harbor and St. Joseph are situated on the other side of great Lake Michigan.  The environment of soil and weather and proximity... Read More Read More - [Broken Vessels](https://everyangel.org/broken-vessels/): Falling in order to rise…… the destruction of received models and forms is necessary in order to clear a space for spontaneous thought to arise. From the cathedral of our own feelings, from the void of the blank canvas, then, comes the space for revelation. We are fragments of an unutterable whole. Meaning is... Read More Read More - [Elegy for Charlie](https://everyangel.org/elegy-for-charlie/): Superficially this is a love song.  By chance it was offered by the playlist here at Starbucks at the time I was contemplating what to say about Charlie Gard.  The tune is far from pop entertainment.  To my ear it enters at an existential level, speaking to the essential need for human connection.  Our... Read More Read More - [Charlie Gard](https://everyangel.org/charlie-gard/): Aristotle wrote in his Ethics that the end purpose of philosophy is purposeful action.  Disciplined thinking is essential to living well, deciding what action to take.  And since to be human is to be a social creature, we make innumerable decisions  that materially affect the lives of others. A group of us met last... Read More Read More - [In the Beginning Was the Word](https://everyangel.org/in-the-beginning-was-the-word/): Tuesday morning, and I have nothing in particular to say.  A few interesting stories are on the front page of the New York Times.  None of that affects me, at least not yet.  Up until quite recently, say the last one hundred years, nothing that occurred outside of your village had an impact on... Read More Read More - [Event Horizon](https://everyangel.org/event-horizon/): The boundaries of causation always exceed the boundaries of consideration. –Wes Jackson Mystery, the unknown, our ignorance always will be with us, to be dealt with. The farther we extend the radius of knowledge, the larger becomes the circumference of mystery. There is, a boundary that may move somewhat, but can never be removed,... Read More Read More - [Primal](https://everyangel.org/primal/): Verse—whether spoken or sung— appears to be deeply encoded in the human brain. Cursing, singing lyrics, and reciting poetry are understood as instances of automatic speech, as distinguished from propositional speech…. that constitutes most everyday conversation. –Oliver Sacks Today I attended the April Verch concert in Long Grove.  The Long Grove Arts and Music... Read More Read More - [Tainted Love](https://everyangel.org/tainted-love/): Time for a musical interlude.  “True” stories of life are veined with tragedy.  Music is our “gift of the gods,” a respite from care. Whenever I hear this song I am haunted by the tune and lyric.  The attraction between male and female gender is exciting and terrifying.  Certainly hormones, the primal reproductive drive... Read More Read More - [What We Choose To Forget](https://everyangel.org/what-we-choose-to-forget/): I’ve mentioned that on Wednesday in the early morning hours the suburbs north of Chicago were struck by a series of thunder storms and torrential rain.  The towns of Mundelein, Gurnee and Libertyville received in excess of 6 inches of water within the span of 4 to 5 hours.  Before light my sleep was... Read More Read More - [Carpe Diem?](https://everyangel.org/carpe-diem/): How much is enough?  The question arises often and in many forms.  The time came for transition from employer based medical insurance coverage to Medicare.  Transition has proven to be challenging, complex, with a fair amount of anxiety.  After all who cannot be protective of physical health once the youthful stage of life has... Read More Read More - [Weaponized Part II](https://everyangel.org/weaponized-part-ii/): To think the thought of weaponized Nature is to entertain dissonance of heretofore contradictory ideas.  Nature is conceived as the totality of a life supporting, living context that common sense tells us that we are a part.  A weapon is a human artifact created for the purpose of taking life.  For humans life is... Read More Read More - [Weaponized](https://everyangel.org/weaponized/): It is raining hard, a deluge for the past 20 minutes.  At 6AM this morning upon waking there were signs that the downpour, with thunder and lightening of the early morning hours had passed.  The sky was much lighter, and nothing was falling, the birds were singing.  Standing in my driveway I encountered a... Read More Read More - [Feynman](https://everyangel.org/feynman/): I don’t have to know an answer.  I don’t feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose, which is the way it really is as far as I can tell.  It doesn’t frighten me. –Richard Feynman quoted from The Life and Science of Richard Feynman by... Read More Read More - [Reading Without Seeing](https://everyangel.org/reading-without-seeing/): One final musing from my Summerfest experience.  We typically take one of the festival shuttles into Milwaukee’s Maer Festival Park.  Leaving our vehicle at the Ryan Park and Ride lot saves the trouble of dealing with city traffic, as well as finding and paying for parking.  One pays the bus driver $7 for the... Read More Read More - [Sailing Away](https://everyangel.org/sailing-away/): Maybe you’ve never been to Summerfest in Milwaukee?  Today is the final day of the eleven day festival on the Lake Front.  I’ve attended Summerfest for many years.  The event is comprised of thousands of fellow Americans. Americans from a kaleidoscope of ethnic backgrounds, ways of life, and taste in music.  For the price... Read More Read More - [Not Again](https://everyangel.org/not-again/): Yes, we are going again.  Summerfest Milwaukee will be the destination for the afternoon and evening.  We hope to experience the music  of Dennis DeYoung and Styx at 10PM tonight.  The atmospherics will crackle with the electricity of sensuality, of reality, of life and death as DeYoung performs his lyrics of Lady, and Come... Read More Read More - [Go To The Quiet Wood](https://everyangel.org/go-to-the-quiet-wood/): The Media by C.H. Sisson  (What and Who, 1994): 1 The world is fabricated by A gang of entertainers who Have replaced God Almighty. The universe, made in six days, Is re-made every day by those Who hear all that the newsman says, For whom fact is replaced by gloze. 2 The air is... Read More Read More - [Where's Waldo](https://everyangel.org/wheres-waldo/): We attended the Independence Day parade in Wheaton for the second year.  Its an old fashioned “people’s parade” with many volunteer organizations, businesses, civic groups, churches, and of course government officials making up the procession.  The event lasts for at least an hour.  Main street Wheaton is a long, broad, straight road stretching for... Read More Read More - [Remembering What Was](https://everyangel.org/remembering-what-was/):                  I Hear America Singing. I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear, Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it should be blithe and strong, The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank or beam, The mason singing his as he makes ready... Read More Read More - [A Poem For Monday](https://everyangel.org/a-poem-for-monday/): Clear running stream clear running stream Your water is light to my mouth And a light to my dry body your flowing Music, in my ears.  free, Flowing free! With you in me. —-Gary Snyder,  Water Music II In the words of Dogen:  How is it with us who are walking on the mountains... Read More Read More - [Hope At Summerfest](https://everyangel.org/hope-at-summerfest/): This is the 50th year anniversary of Summerfest.  Held in Milwaukee it is a convocation of music lovers from around the world.  The lake front is gorgeous.  Participants are generally well behaved, no matter that thousands are present in the Maer Festival Park. I existentially needed to be present at Summerfest this year as... Read More Read More - [Bikini Atoll](https://everyangel.org/bikini-atoll/): I received an email from a friend this morning.  The email was a request for a emergency response of sorts.  I was urged to email my legislative Representative in Springfield to register my desire that he vote “no” today on a Bill that entails a 5 billion in tax hike.  A take hike of... Read More Read More - [I Can Dream](https://everyangel.org/i-can-dream/): I know I’m crazy.  No diagnosis needed. A few days ago I was present for a concert at a local park district.  The first song offered by the community chorus was our national anthem, The Star Spangled Banner.  I’ve joined in singing the song hundreds of times since I was taught the tune in... Read More Read More - [Spring Passage](https://everyangel.org/spring_passage/): Torrential rains last night.  The weather forecast maps displayed a line of thunder storms portending heavy rain, two to five inches, to fall within the span of a few hours.  Persons living near creeks and rivers were warned of flooding.  My parents generation did not have this precision of weather forecasting, nor did they... Read More Read More - [In Our Right Mind](https://everyangel.org/in-our-right-mind/): Our final Philosophy Group discussion was held at Beans & Leaves.  It was a full house.  Food and drink were consumed to celebrate the work and friendships cultivated around the tables for the past several years.  Our final meeting, was a beginning, the fold point for a renewed, vibrant, youthful iteration.  For many reasons... Read More Read More - [Medicare](https://everyangel.org/medicare/): I finished signing up for Medicare yesterday.  I am fortunate to have a friend, a insurance professional who is competent to coach me through the process.  Insurance coverage for health care is a reminder of our mortality, that mind does not overrule matter.  Despite the fantasies of youth this body which I inhabit is... Read More Read More - [Second Thoughts](https://everyangel.org/second-thoughts/): Jeff raised a concern.  Jeff expressed a cautionary concern about losing oneself in sensual experience.  Jeff thought that full-out pursuit of sensuality without abatement is counterproductive.  In short, too much of anything is detrimental. I’ve taken a few days to consider Jeff’s words.  The point is well taken.  We live in a society that... Read More Read More - [One More Thing](https://everyangel.org/one-more-thing/): I do not feel sadness for Kurt.  Kurt lived, and passed on as do all living things.  Even the non-living suffer the effects of time.  It takes much longer for a mountain to reach the sea, but eventually it does.  Why are we here?  I do not know.  I am sure that as long... Read More Read More - [So Long My Friend](https://everyangel.org/so-long-my-friend/): Sunday morning. Back to my routine life.   Just yesterday I was in Eagle River Wisconsin, the north woods.  It is a country inhabited by wild life as much as by people.  Over the 6 hour drive north past Milwaukee and Madison the flat expanses of cultivated fields gave way to aspen and spruce forests. ... Read More Read More - [Stay](https://everyangel.org/stay/): The sensualist cries out, “Stay a bit, my tongue has not concluded its encounter; wait a moment for my smile to widen.”  If the sensualist could, he would stretch time like a length of elastic….. But experience is not simply a river you can’t step into twice (Heraclitus): it is composed of unrebreathable sighs;... Read More Read More - [Lightning](https://everyangel.org/lightning/): To think philosophically is to ponder the range of human experience, as well as the tremendous width and breadth of words that have been written to explore, and make sense of that experience.  A moment of discovery for the adult fortunate enough to have any curiosity left—-happens when a connection appears between two experiences... Read More Read More - [Kitchen Table Talk](https://everyangel.org/kitchen-table-talk/): We arrived with just a few minutes to spare.  Could this be the place?  The winding roads, up and down through the grassy hillsides, the hollows, not that far from the Ohio River were exhilarating and disorienting for two guys from Chicago.  Additionally we had overlooked the loss of an hour of travel time... Read More Read More - [Madison](https://everyangel.org/madison/): I never expected to visit Madison, Indiana.   More to the point I never heard of the place until we passed through yesterday on our way to the Ohio River.  The road trip to Kentucky was for the purpose of having a talk with Wendell Berry.  Berry is a prolific author, essayist, poet–  one who... Read More Read More - [There Can Be Only One](https://everyangel.org/there-can-be-only-one/): This morning I heard the news that Amazon is purchasing Whole Foods.  Jeff Bezos acquires another weapon in his quest to slay the Wal-Mart behemoth.  At least that is what the analysts are saying.  The prime principle of 21st century greed-is-good Capitalism is “There Can Be Only One.”  This mantra comes from the Highlander... Read More Read More - [Indivisible](https://everyangel.org/indivisible/): Don commented,–“One of the main problems in discussing reality is that humans have the tendency to separate themselves from the rest of the universe, we feel we are an ‘I’ and everything else is ‘out there”. That word I thought is worth a great deal.  Don points to the impossibility of achieving the distance... Read More Read More - [Work](https://everyangel.org/work/): Work is a given for most of us.  Each day is dedicated to shaping the world, typically in concert with others to derive our sustenance, the necessary energy to feed, clothe, and shelter our organism.  That is my basic definition of work.  Yet, this essential dimension of life is not nearly so simple.  Within... Read More Read More - [Tell Me A Story](https://everyangel.org/tell-me-a-story/): Two stories are better than just one, right?  We all love stories.  Stories require imagination, the mind supplies the “sense” of living within the Reality of the story. Story no. 1 is a story of us, we who live in the early years of the 21st century.  The words are taken from Paul Virilio’s... Read More Read More - [Haunted By Metaphysics](https://everyangel.org/haunted-by-metaphysics/): I finished the collection of paragraphs contributed by Philosophy Now magazine readers on the subject of Metaphysics.  Metaphysics entails thinking about the nature of the Real.  I capitalize Real, because with just a little thought, one recognizes the similarity between “the Real” and the term God.  Language is our failing attempt to point at... Read More Read More - [Not Standing Around](https://everyangel.org/not-standing-around/): I do not enjoy thinking about, or writing about politics.  I recognize that politics is a dimension of life.  Yet we live in terrible times, by comparison to the time of my childhood and early adult years.  In that time, with the exception of the Vietnam War years, politics was not a daily intrusion,... Read More Read More - [Screaming Together](https://everyangel.org/screaming-together/): I finished putting in the garden. What remains is watering, hoeing weeds as necessary, and waiting for harvest. Like raising a child once the basics are taken care of by labor, sometimes hard labor, it is best to observe with care the development of those for which one is responsible. Too much intervention, ill... Read More Read More - [What Me Worry?](https://everyangel.org/what-me-worry/): “Things continue as they were since the beginning of the world,” is a saying from my early 20s heard while sitting in a college class room.   The language has to do with the natural tendency to extend the present pattern of experience backwards and forwards.  The denial of change is our default, our longing... Read More Read More - [What A Relief](https://everyangel.org/what-a-relief/): I have worried about something for a few months.  My impression of the president has been of someone who is lying.  Mind you I am not one who subscribes to a dogmatic definition of truth.   There is no one to one correlation between reality and words.  Reality itself varies somewhat person to person.  It... Read More Read More - [Up With The Chickens](https://everyangel.org/up-with-the-chickens/): Waking before 5AM in the gathering morning light, my mission took me to Park Ridge.  One benefit of a early start is once the client obligations are taken care of–enough of the day remains for reflection, and perhaps for a non routine project. During my return drive on 294 I listened to a few... Read More Read More - [Bleeding Out](https://everyangel.org/bleeding-out/): I took a walk in town around midday.  Mother nature was in her fecund glory. I saw the Poppy blossoms from a distance.  Red is an arresting color.  These three or four Poppy blossoms were blazing with radiance on the side of a dreary street.  Most of the rental spaces for small businesses are... Read More Read More - [Earth Mother](https://everyangel.org/earth-mother/): The Soil….is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all.  It is the healer and restorer and resurrector, by which disease passes into health, age into youth, death into life. Without proper care of it we can have no community, because without proper care for it we can have no life.... Read More Read More - [Mixed Feelings & A Requiem](https://everyangel.org/mixed-feelings-a-requiem/): I grew up in North Carolina.  As time passes I look back at my formative years as a kid in the 50s.  My parents had life long careers working in the tobacco factories.  Evangelical fundamentalist religion was the structuring element of our personal lives.  In the pre civil rights days most of my friends... Read More Read More - [Counterpoint](https://everyangel.org/counterpoint/): With the news feed always available via iphone it is easy to be tethered to stories of tragedy, large scale vistas of wrack-and-ruin, and the ridiculous.  Is not man both the tragic and the absurd animal?  For the sake of one’s mental health it is best to forego a glimpse at the news-feed freak... Read More Read More - [More Words](https://everyangel.org/more-words/): Early June and the Saturday morning holds promise of warming sun, growth for the vegetables lately placed in the ground.  I sit here in the corner at Starbucks listening to the beat of easy jazz playing too loud over the PA.  This rhythm is a human replication of the heart beat of nature that... Read More Read More - [Earth Killer](https://everyangel.org/earth-killer/): June 1, 2017 the President of the United States withdraws from the Paris Accord on Climate Change. The rise in sea level accelerates. The ice pack at both poles melts at an increasing rate. Weather events increase in severity. Species extinction continues. Hotter more acidic oceans. Famine. Forests succumb to drought and disease. I... Read More Read More - [Sitting With The Auditor](https://everyangel.org/sitting-with-the-auditor/): Our business insurance audit was scheduled and the day arrived yesterday.  I sat with an auditor for an hour.  I did little but wait until he asked a question.  There were few questions.  I have “been through” many of these audits.  I exercise every effort to organize the requested material for the auditor.  The... Read More Read More - [A Prayer For The Pretender](https://everyangel.org/a-prayer-for-the-pretender/): It has already been a rough week, at least psychologically.  We live in our minds, and the state of my mind is like the weather.  I spoke with a friend who owns a local cell phone store, a new business.  He confided in me that he was relieved that his business was meeting his... Read More Read More - [Memorial Day](https://everyangel.org/memorial-day/): Memorial Day weekend is generally considered to be the beginning of summer here in Illinois.  A rule of thumb, anything planted before Memorial Day can be lost to frost.  With the arrival of this weekend, it is as if one hears a starting gun.  The race begins to capture to the full the benefits... Read More Read More - [Don't Think, Look](https://everyangel.org/dont-think-look/): Once again I am reminded that paying attention, waking up is critical to living well.  Perhaps that is why we are here –if there is a why.  That seems as good an answer as any to me.  Especially since all of the answers to the “why” of human purpose are speculative.  Place your bet... Read More Read More - [Another Star Falls](https://everyangel.org/another-star-falls/): 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... Read More Read More - [Augury](https://everyangel.org/augury/): A good friend recently said to me, “at least there is a chance that the president will put a stop to the ‘politics as usual’ that is no longer working for us.”  That is not the first time I’ve heard a similar statement of hope/faith/superstition.  This non sequitur is offered dead pan, or with... Read More Read More - [Light, Light In A Maelstrom of Hate](https://everyangel.org/light-light-in-a-maelstrom-of-hate/): 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... Read More Read More - [Days End](https://everyangel.org/days-end/): 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... Read More Read More - [Time Is Running Out Or Is It?](https://everyangel.org/time-is-running-out-or-is-it/): 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... Read More Read More - [Time Enough For Prayer](https://everyangel.org/time-enough-for-prayer/): 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... Read More Read More - [If The Dam Breaks Open...](https://everyangel.org/if-the-dam-breaks-open/): 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... Read More Read More - [Sunday And The Sun Comes Like A God](https://everyangel.org/sunday-and-the-sun-comes-like-a-god/): 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... Read More Read More - [I Read Three Poems](https://everyangel.org/i-read-three-poems/): I was neither at the hot gates Nor fought in the warm rain Nor knee deep in the salt marsh, heaving a cutlass, Bitten by flies, fought. —-Gerontion by T. S. Eliot No, I did not fight alongside Leonidas. But I read three poems. I was invited to attend an evening of music and... Read More Read More - [Thank You to Raymond Tallis](https://everyangel.org/thank-you-to-raymond-tallis/): It is not time, but fibroblasts or the spirit of forgiveness, that heal wounds. And perhaps we need to row back from the idea of “time” as generally “permissive” of change. Many things are not permitted…….. What’s more, a global permissiveness would permit nothing in particular: If everything were permitted, nothing could happen. –Raymond... Read More Read More - [Dawn & Poetry](https://everyangel.org/dawn-poetry/): I woke to an intensely bright day, strong gusts bend the trees.  I understand that the central States further west are in the path of dangerous storms today.  Life is such a combination of light, life, and hazard. I read several poems this morning, poems that I have chosen to read tomorrow evening at... Read More Read More - [Turning Back Time](https://everyangel.org/turning-back-time/): 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... Read More Read More - [The Fox, Meditation](https://everyangel.org/the-fox-meditation/): I can think of nothing more beneficent, the image of a possible world than that of two foxes that I recently observed.  The two animals represent for me a ideal state of being.  A full-on tactile awareness of life, one’s own and that of the surrounding environment.  Foxes do not use words.  Their manner... Read More Read More - [Mothers, Guardians of the Galaxy](https://everyangel.org/mothers-guardians-of-the-galaxy/): 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,... Read More Read More - [Our Last Dance](https://everyangel.org/our-last-dance/): 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... Read More Read More - [Friday, Weeks End](https://everyangel.org/friday-weeks-end/): Every end is a beginning.  Who does not look forward to the end of the work week?  The last day of the usual, necessary tedium; and the beginning of a weekend–opportunity for relaxation and reflection.  Sunday coming up will be Mother’s day, and I am lucky to remember my mother, and to select a... Read More Read More - [The King](https://everyangel.org/the-king/) - [Murder In The Dept of Justice](https://everyangel.org/murder-in-the-dept-of-justice/): Two days have passed, I continue to be shaken by the dismissal of James Comey, Director of the FBI.  FBI directors are appointed for a 10 year term in order to be resistant to political influence.  Comey’s agency has been investigating the scope of Russian interference in our November election, and the Trump campaign... Read More Read More - [Good-by To Cynicism](https://everyangel.org/good-by-to-cynicism/): RECIPE FOR REMAKING A WORLD Ingredients: ugliness, unfairness, suffering, poverty, terror, rage, sadness, etc. Most of which is no one’s fault, the cause being diffuse, shared, distributed, so that blame cannot be focally assigned. A majority of us are touched by these circumstances, and feel that there is nothing we can do, no one... Read More Read More - [Propofol](https://everyangel.org/propofol/): Tuesday morning, when I customarily compose the day’s post, I will be under the influence of anesthesia, Propofol most likely.  I can attest that the drug produces a dreamless sleep.  When the drug is administered, consciousness winks out.  There is no sliver of fading, just light and then nothing.  Waking is not unpleasant, as... Read More Read More - [To Repeat Myself](https://everyangel.org/to-repeat-myself/): The election results are in!  The French people with the good sense of self preservation have stepped away from the brink, choosing to move ahead rather than back.  The work of nurturing a great family, or a great society is a multi-generational project.  There is much to overcome, debris of past mistakes which must... Read More Read More - [Sun and Fabulation](https://everyangel.org/sun-and-fabulation/): First agenda item of the day: breakfast at Taste of Paris.   Its a favorite Cafe and we look forward to the weekly visit.  The waitstaff are always welcoming, familiar faces due to our patronage of many months.  France has been much on my mind.  Today they are holding a national election.  At stake is... Read More Read More - [Growl of 400 Horses](https://everyangel.org/growl-of-400-horses/): I walked across the parking lot at 7AM, a sunlit morning in May.  A  silver corvette was parked in the center of two parking spaces.  As I walked by a young female approached the passengers side of the vehicle with coffee for two.  A young male waited in the drivers side, his baseball cap... Read More Read More - [The Shield Wall Booms](https://everyangel.org/the-shield-wall-booms/): Yesterday Thorsday, when the news feed came across that the House had passed the Obamacare replacement act, I was palpably nauseated.  Predictably the Tribune front page of this morning featured a picture of the President flanked by his fawning palace guard, applauding the event in the White House Rose Garden. Emotionally this seems like... Read More Read More - [Thursday, No Rain Yet](https://everyangel.org/thursday-no-rain-yet/): Thursday is without rain, at least not yet.  This morning my sister came to mind.  I spoke with her by phone yesterday, understanding with difficulty her speech.  She has battled schizophrenia and diabetes for her entire adult life.  Today she expects to meet with a surgeon.  She is in pain due to an infection... Read More Read More - [Anthem Of Resistance](https://everyangel.org/anthem-of-resistance/): …this sluggish paradise. A human being protected from all normal and natural hardship simply is not alive. We inhabit insecurely a world which must of its intransitory nature be insecure. The tyranny of mindless technology. It is well to use the wheel. But it is fatal to be bound to it. We are trapped... Read More Read More - [Making Morality Out Of Nothing At All](https://everyangel.org/making-morality-out-of-nothing-at-all/): THE DIAGNOSIS This generation of Americans has become so steeped in greed and social Darwinism that it can no longer distinguish between cheating and achieving, between enterprise and crime and can’t bring itself to criticize winners any more than it knows how to be nice to losers. An increasing number of Americans agree that... Read More Read More - [Rain,--The Best of Times And The Worst](https://everyangel.org/rain-the-best-of-times-and-the-worst/): More rain and some pics from today’s NY Times.   And then there is a need that each should understand where he came from and what he is—- and what will become of him. –Wulfstan, Archbishop of York from 1002 to 1023     - [Monday With More Rain](https://everyangel.org/monday-with-more-rain/): Climate change is manifest by extreme weather events.  Over the past two days the backyard has soaked up so much water that a footfall instantly produces water welling up around my shoe.  It’s 6PM and rain continues to fall.  Recently I read that Anglo-Saxon England of the 10th century was also going through a... Read More Read More - [What To Do On A Rainy Sunday](https://everyangel.org/what-to-do-on-a-rainy-sunday/): One can wonder what our ancestors did for recreation absent video screens.  After a steady rain in the evening, the morning dawned with light rain and a gusting wind.  Out of doors plans made little sense under these conditions.  To remain dry and warm the day would be spent indoors.  Like many middle class... Read More Read More - [VAPNATAK](https://everyangel.org/vapnatak/): A comment left by a friend last night reminisced on the Legend of King Arthur.  The legend suggests that merry ole England was ruled by a chivalrous king and nobles.  This could not have been further from the truth.  We love our myths: American exceptionalism, manifest destiny and everyone’s favorite “the American dream.”  The... Read More Read More - [My Hometown](https://everyangel.org/my-hometown/): I confess to being a fan of Bruce Springsteen.  Springsteen is the Homer of my generation.  I make the assertion without apology.  At the Tony Awards televised live on CBS  from Radio City Music Hall Springsteen delivered an abbreviated rendition of his song My Hometown which was prefaced by a moving soliloquy remembering Freehold... Read More Read More - [Kraklauer Creek, June 2018](https://everyangel.org/kraklauer-creek-june-2018/): Reality is not mathematical, and mathematics is not the law of reality, but a language whose consistency has nothing to do with the multilayered consistency of life. Franco Berardi, excerpt from The Uprising, On Poetry and Finance - [Light, Light, Light](https://everyangel.org/light-light-light/): A friend just sent me additional photos of the Teton mountains.  Everything in each of the three photos is magnificent.  It is light that enables me to make this statement.  Light streaming from the sun sculpted the magisterial peaks due to heat and cold, and wind-driven erosion.  Light energized photosynthesis for the spruce, the... Read More Read More - [G-7 Photo](https://everyangel.org/g-7-photo/): This instagram photo posted by Prime Minister of Germany Angela Merkel is striking for the story that it tells. Note Prime Minister Abe of Japan’s stoic expression showing dismay. Stay tuned………………….. - [The Road](https://everyangel.org/the-road/): I was asked by Melanie as she handed my coffee to me what I was working on this morning. I said, “I do not know.  Something will come to me.”  She smiled. I glanced at the front page of the New York Times.  The Newspaper stand is adjacent to the counter for coffee additives,... Read More Read More - [Overcast, Rain Coming](https://everyangel.org/overcast-rain-coming/): Waking I took the measure of my blood sugar.  50 mg/dcl was quite low, a partial explanation for my mental fog.  NPR reported the death of Anthony Bourdain at 61 years of age this morning.  My sense of malaise deepened.  Bourdain was a superb story teller, a man who appreciated the rapture of fine... Read More Read More - [Clearing Space](https://everyangel.org/clearing-space/): Doing philosophy is a revolutionary activity.  In these times of discord, suspicion, verbal assault, and sometimes overt expression of hatred–anyone who disciplines him or herself to mindfully exercise reason, speaking and writing with clarity is a subversive.  Nothing is more antithetical to the mayhem, the pandemonium of “warfare,” than thoughtful communication. A family member... Read More Read More - [Making A Deeper Appeal](https://everyangel.org/making-a-deeper-appeal/): The following lines are taken from a Situationist website, a brief comment written in the aftermath of the Trump election.  I offer these words for the truth they convey, not as an endorsement of the Situationist Revolutionary philosophy.  The Situationist International  was an international organization of social revolutionaries made up of avant-garde artists, intellectuals,... Read More Read More - [Family](https://everyangel.org/family/): Family is not limited to those related by blood.  I understand that more deeply as the years pass.  The circle may be wide to include friends whose stories intersect our own.  Each child that is  born and welcomed into the family circle is a reminder of the generosity of heart and congeniality of spirit... Read More Read More - [Voices](https://everyangel.org/voices/): Lately I’ve the privilege to witness the email exchange between two friends on the topic of The Second Amendment and gun ownership.  The exchange has been passionate, and to my sense, contentious at times.  Yet, the topic represents a nexus of the present state of our society since firearms are a prominent aspect of... Read More Read More - [An End, A Beginning](https://everyangel.org/an-end-a-beginning/): Friday is typically conceived as the end of the work week.  The truth is, one’s work never ends.  To be alive is to work.  We make these conventional assumptions, arbitrary lines.  They are illusory and evaporate under the pressure of reality.  What we think is reality gets in the way of reality.  So here... Read More Read More - [Chicago](https://everyangel.org/chicago/): While living in the suburbs I seldom go into Chicago.  Every place in northern Illinois is within the orbit of the city, one of the most populous in the country with 9.5 million people.  The scale of the city causes discomfort.  I have a sensation of 360 degrees of thinly veiled chaos when I... Read More Read More - [Values Are Aims](https://everyangel.org/values-are-aims/): Life is a matter of values.  The thrust of one’s life is a matter of one’s aims. Purposes which one has chosen together, constitute the meaning of an individual’s life.  Each has the opportunity to choose, to endorse the path that he or she takes.  A few of the options offered by our post-industrial,... Read More Read More - [Memorial Day](https://everyangel.org/memorial-day-2/): We attended a Memorial Day ceremony in Beach Park.  I did my best to enjoy it.  It always seems tragically sad to remember those who died prematurely in unnecessary wars.  I consider the Vietnam War and all of those since, including those underway,–unnecessary.  To disregard the evidence of your own senses, and to believe... Read More Read More - [Weekend Part II](https://everyangel.org/weekend-part-ii/): Saturday was dedicated to putting in the garden.  The patch of ground was broken a few times with the assist of a power tiller.  I was grateful for the powered help.  A neighbor who owns a horse farm was kind to allow me to obtain a sufficient quantity of barn manure for fertilizer.  The... Read More Read More - [Memorial Day Weekend](https://everyangel.org/memorial-day-weekend/): Saturday is the beginning of the long weekend, culminating in Memorial Day on Monday.  Memorial Day is set aside to remember our war dead.  The last war to defend the country from attack was World War II.  The others since have been “botique wars” conducted by politicians to assert our interests; Korea, Vietnam, Iraq,... Read More Read More - [Holding On or Held](https://everyangel.org/holding-on-or-held/): Awakened this morning from a nightmare.  The dream had to do with life as we know it today, of encounter with the myriad bureaucratic obstructions imposed upon the individual by “the system.”  There is no escape.  Costs pile up. Red light cameras, late penalties of all kinds, and if you live in Cook County,... Read More Read More - [More From The Tao](https://everyangel.org/more-from-the-tao/): This morning I was delighted to locate on my shelf a text book from my college days.  I was introduced to the words of the Tao te Ching from A Source Book In Chinese Philosophy by  Wing-Tsit Chan.  I’ve not opened the book in many years.  Finding it was like receiving a phone call... Read More Read More - [Disappearing Into The Tao](https://everyangel.org/disappearing-into-the-tao/): What a session last night at Starbucks.  At least fifteen of us were seated around a table of a size to accommodate ten people.  The room was echoing with voices, with the cacophony of the cappuccino machine used by the baristas.  Nevertheless the group intently listened to chosen readings from the Tao te Ching. ... Read More Read More - [Royal Wedding](https://everyangel.org/royal-wedding/): I watched again on video the wedding between Britain’s Prince Harry and Meghan Markle.  I wish the couple well.  There are few things more fraught with risk than marriage.  There are many inevitable unknowns, like the under water volume of the iceberg that looks so beautiful and benign on the surface.  Good luck to... Read More Read More - [The Way That Can Only Be Shown](https://everyangel.org/the-way-that-can-only-be-shown/): The Tao doesn’t take sides; it gives birth to both good and evil. The Master doesn’t take sides; she welcomes both saints and sinners. The Tao is like a bellows; it is empty yet infinitely capable. The more you use it, the more it produces; the more you talk of it, the less you... Read More Read More - [Wild Horses](https://everyangel.org/wild-horses/): I considered writing about the Texas High School shooting.  A lot has been written already in the NY Times, the Washington Post and other sources.  Another breakout of violence will roil the Texas community for years. Surely the families who lost kids will be shattered for as long as they live.  My expression of... Read More Read More - [Reading Poetry](https://everyangel.org/reading-poetry/): I was asked to read some poems last night.  A gathering was sponsored by the Mundelein Arts Council at Taste of Paris.  Musicians from the area and several writers were given opportunity to perform in public.  I found my imagination going back to the late bronze age.  Certainly members of the aristocracy and their... Read More Read More - [Feathers & Fenders: Seamless](https://everyangel.org/feathers__fenders_seamless/): A few days ago my daughter asked me to write about the connection between the white headed robin and the muscle cars which were featured in the post on BEAUTY  I am satisfied that there are many ties of relationship between the rare bird and the hand built single purpose hot rods. It is... Read More Read More - [Miscellany](https://everyangel.org/miscellany/): One of many useful gifts that I received from grad school is the habit of taking notes in a pocket-sized moleskin notebook. I record memorable statements, questions, and especially outrageous exclamations that I happen upon in my reading.  As a result of much reading I have filled seven or eight of these notebooks with... Read More Read More - [On The Pursuit Of Happiness](https://everyangel.org/on-the-pursuit-of-happiness/): So how is it going?  You know, that pursuit of happiness?  Was it genius or was it a touch of madness for Jefferson to have inserted “that” (happiness) into the Declaration of Independence?  Is there anything more unstable than happiness?  Happiness is not up to me for a starter.  Today I plan some actions... Read More Read More - [Ken And Barbie Open A New Embassy](https://everyangel.org/ken-and-barbie-open-a-new-embassy/): Often cause and effect is not obvious.  The direction of the process, and the meaning of the ultimate result may be concealed by a tortuous chain of ambiguous links.  Where, how did the cancer begin?  Such news comes “out of the blue.” the last thing one expects to hear.  The lethal condition was not... Read More Read More - [Mother's Day](https://everyangel.org/mothers-day/): Mother’s Day becomes more important to me as the years pass.  Thanksgiving and Mother’s Day are my top contenders for excellent holidays.  Those are solitary days dedicated to showing gratitude.  Both holidays stand as reminders of how much of my life depends upon the good graces of others, acts of kindness, of solicitude that... Read More Read More - [The Iliad by Homer](https://everyangel.org/the-iliad-by-homer/): I finished reading the essay The Iliad or the Poem of Force written in 1943 by Simone Weil.  The essay and other similar works are preparation for my commitment to read the Iliad by Homer.  The more I’ve learned of the ancient Greeks, the greater my desire to read Homers great poem.  This text was... Read More Read More - [To Again Hear The Bird Sing](https://everyangel.org/to-again-hear-the-bird-sing/): A copy of Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse was given to me by a good friend.  I finished the story a few days ago.  I read it once before over 30 years ago.  Hesse’s story is life changing, similar to T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets.  A copy of the Four Quartets is in my brief... Read More Read More - [Beauty](https://everyangel.org/beauty/): Is beauty in the eye of the beholder?  One is tempted to answer “yes” or answer “no.”  Then to follow up with a discussion on the latest findings on brain research. Alternatively there is the description of objectively measurable parameters of proportion, of design technique.  To take either side is an interesting game.  I’ve... Read More Read More - [The Clown](https://everyangel.org/the-clown/): In life, a man commits himself, draws his own portrait and there is nothing but that portrait. *** If I have excluded God the Father, there must be somebody to invent values. We have to take things as they are. Life is nothing until it is lived. *** Man is all the time outside... Read More Read More - [No Sugar Added](https://everyangel.org/no-sugar-added/): I am diabetic.  Finding no sugar added ice cream makes me happy.  The taste is perfect, with no sugar added. I think these words by Herman Hesse make the point. In every truth the opposite is equally true. For example, a truth can only be expressed and enveloped in words if it is one-sided.... Read More Read More - [Rain](https://everyangel.org/rain/): This morning the rains came.  My jacket was moistened by big drops as I hurried across the parking lot.  A slash of white lightening fell in the distance, so far away that I did not hear the thunder.  The arrival of the spring rain is a reminder, that time is passage, and that we... Read More Read More - [This Well-upholstered Hell](https://everyangel.org/this-well-upholstered-hell/): I awakened this morning, barely.  I am diabetic and as it happened I awakened with low blood sugar.  At the level of physical function, I did well enough.  I prepared my bowl of cheerios.  Then I attempted to check my blood sugar.  I found that my faculties of reason were impaired.  I could not... Read More Read More - [Spring At Last](https://everyangel.org/spring-at-last/): We who live in the Mid-West suffer a longer winter than do those who live in the South.  And unlike our countrymen in Minnesota or the Canadians winter is not a universal hockey season or celebrated for snowmobiling adventures etc.  We endure winter.  When spring arrives in early May its a big deal. That’s... Read More Read More - [Justify](https://everyangel.org/justify/): I attended a town-hall meeting at the Kildeer Elementary School yesterday.  The meeting was convened by our 10th District Representative to Congress, Brad Schneider.  I’ve attended other public gatherings hosted by Brad.  I am struck with how similar these meetings are.  Given that yesterday was one of those early spring days, with blue sky... Read More Read More - [Runaway American Dream](https://everyangel.org/runaway-american-dream/): I could never be a happy idiot, to borrow a phrase from a Jackson Browne lyric.  It does not take genius to see the abject sorrow all around.  Much is just bad luck.  Parents usually do the best they can raising their kids.  Often though they make crucial mistakes and the child matures to... Read More Read More - [Manifesto of Resistance](https://everyangel.org/manifesto-of-resistance/): Love is never abstract. it does not adhere to the universe or the planet or the nation or the institution or the profession, but to the singular sparrows of the street, the lilies of the field, “the least of these my bretheren.” Love is not, by its own desire, heroic. It is heroic only... Read More Read More - [Sacred Ground](https://everyangel.org/sacred-ground/): We visited Huber’s Orchard and Winery in Starlight, Indiana.  This is a 7th generation farm that started with 80 acres in 1843.  Huber’s now is 600 acres growing fruits and vegetables, the largest producer of grapes in Indiana. We left the dogwoods behind in Kentucky and crossed the Ohio River into the hilly Indiana farm... Read More Read More - [A Day In River City](https://everyangel.org/a-day-in-river-city/): Louisville Kentucky, on the Ohio River is a Southern town.  Strictly speaking during the Civil War it was a border state.  The citizens of Kentucky had sympathies on both sides.  Still it was a slave holding state.  Present day aspects of Southern culture remain. Almost every where you look there is remembrance of the... Read More Read More - [Ignorance](https://everyangel.org/ignorance/): We are in Louisville Kentucky.  It’s a week before the running of the Derby.  The town is in festival mode, special events are in progress, Mother Nature is doing her best with pleasant weather. The sidewalks are crowded on Bardstown Road.  Our AirBnB is just a around the corner.  I found a spot at... Read More Read More - [Souls](https://everyangel.org/souls/): Thursday evening six of us sat around a small table at Taste of Paris.  Wine, coffee, steamed clams, pastries, were a satisfying accompaniment to conversation that ranged from Mach Picchu, Peru, to the nature of daily life in antiquity, infuseded by awareness of divinity.  And, I believe that Barry managed to keep tabs with... Read More Read More - [Lynching Victims Memorial](https://everyangel.org/lynching-victims-memorial/): Lynching Victims Memorial in Montgomery Alabama. For the full story CLICK HERE. How could we have waited so long to do this? Why are we STILL OPPRESSING people of color? How can we exercise power and authority, but no responsibility? Is this the way things have to be, the will of the god, are... Read More Read More - [If Life Is Just A Highway...](https://everyangel.org/if-life-is-just-a-highway/): ….and the soul is just a car. What an interesting wide-ranging discussion last night!  Around fifteen or so of us sat together in the Coffee Shop and discussed ideas expressed by Plato in his treatment of Socrates, awaiting the carrying out of the death sentence imposed by the Athenian Assembly.  Perhaps there are worse... Read More Read More - [Ridiculous The Waste Sad Time](https://everyangel.org/ridiculous-the-waste-sad-time/): IV Time and the bell have buried the day, The black cloud carries the sun away. Will the sunflower turn to us, will the clematis Stray down, bend to us; tendril and spray Clutch and cling?     Chill Fingers of yew be curled Down on us? After the kingfisher’s wing Has answered light... Read More Read More - [Sunday, Sunday Afternoon](https://everyangel.org/sunday-sunday-afternoon/): At last the days are warming in the Mid-West.  Its beginning to feel like spring.  The buttercups are sprouting and a few are in bloom by the road. After breakfast at Taste of Paris Cafe on Sunday morning we traveled to Wheaton to see our children and grand children.  To visit together on a... Read More Read More - [A Great Day](https://everyangel.org/a-great-day/): I was not there.  A prior commitment oblidged me to be in Chicago on Friday evening.  At that time the grand opening of The Long Grove Confectionary store and the adjoining sister company, the Long Grove Coffee Company was held in splendid fashion by Towner Green.  The weather gods smiled upon the event and... Read More Read More - [On Throwing Away The Song](https://everyangel.org/on-throwing-away-the-song/): Religion in its broadest sense, then, must be another term for that obscurity that surrounds men’s efforts to defend himself by curative or preventive means against his own violence. Religion shelters us from violence just as violence seeks shelter in religion. —excerpt from Violence and the Sacred by Rene Girard Bad Company A company... Read More Read More - [Nowhere To Run](https://everyangel.org/nowhere-to-run/): Played a vintage Springsteen CD while driving yesterday.  It was the “Live in New York City” CD.  I did not attend the Madison Square Garden concert of July 1, 2000.  By chance some time later I happened to catch rebroadcast of the concert while in a hotel room in Columbia Kentucky.  The power of... Read More Read More - [On The Cult of Competition](https://everyangel.org/on-the-cult-of-competition/): There is no denying that competitiveness is a part of the life both of an individual and of a community, or that, within limits, it is a useful and necessary part. But it is equally obvious that no individual can lead a good or a satisfying life under the rule of competition, and no... Read More Read More - [Like A Toad](https://everyangel.org/like-a-toad/): There’s a killer on the road His brain is squirmin’ like a toad Into this world we’re thrown Like a dog without a bone An actor out on loan. Riders on the storm –The Doors Riders on the Storm is a haunting Rock paean.  Jim Morrison does justice to the dark lyric, singing about... Read More Read More - [Ice](https://everyangel.org/ice/): Mid April.  I anticipate with longer days warm weather will call forth the green of grass and the tender shoots of daffodils.  This weekend was a setback.  A mega storm of snow and ice swept across the plains state.  Minnesota received fifteen inches in some parts.  The Star Tribune called it a historic blizzard. ... Read More Read More - [Remembering](https://everyangel.org/remembering/): In Japan many homes have a feature that is called in direct translation, a god-shelf, or kami-dana in Japanese.  This feature, a wooden shelf placed in a wall niche, is used for placement of pictures of the deceased, and on occasion a burning candle, and food offering.  I thought this odd when I lived... Read More Read More - [Resumption](https://everyangel.org/resumption/): I’ve not posted in several days.  The writing routine has been interrupted by a remodeling project at my preferred spot for contemplation, my examination of soul for proper words.  I think that good work requires being at home in a context.  The renovation of the Starbucks is nearly complete and I should return to... Read More Read More - [Homer's Women](https://everyangel.org/homers-women/): Comment was made in the course of our discussion of the Iliad, of the great cultural differences in the late-bronze age status of women, and that of our own time, three millennia in the future. Consider the character of Briseis, taken and given as a spoil of war to Achilles consequent to the razing... Read More Read More - [μῆνῐς](https://everyangel.org/%ce%bc%e1%bf%86%ce%bd%e1%bf%90%cf%82/): Rage!  Menis! How much history, as though a blind fate, –is a story of rage and the aftermath. April 2, 1865 the Confederacy was essentially finished.  After four years of war, the Union army entered Richmond while the city burned.  A way of life based upon slavery, the blind determination to unjustly use human... Read More Read More - [Rage](https://everyangel.org/rage/): The rage of Achilles—sing it now, goddess, sing it through me the deadly rage that caused the Achaeans such grief and hurled down to Hades the souls of so many fighters, leaving their naked flesh to be eaten by dogs and carrion birds, as the will of Zeus was accomplished. Begin at the time... Read More Read More - [Sack Of Troy](https://everyangel.org/sack-of-troy/): I cannot imagine the headlines, if they should have had such a thing as a newspaper.  More to the point the “news” was conveyed by word of mouth over the commercial sea lanes of the Mediterranean basin:  Troy has fallen.  After ten years of war, Priam’s great city is sacked by the Achaeans.  That... Read More Read More - [Achilles](https://everyangel.org/achilles/): Achilles, like most people, has many values, which do not all fit together tidily in all circumstances. This would be a flaw, I suppose, if there were a better alternative, or if it were not so obviously the human lot. –excerpt The Anger of Achilles essay by C D C Reeve - [Thursday Evening](https://everyangel.org/thursday-evening/): A more intimate opportunity for philosophical “play” is offered at Taste-of-Paris on Thursday evenings.  The setting could not be more perfect.  A few of us meet in the dining room, find a place at the round table, which is under the scaled down model of the Eiffel Tower.  Two to five individuals, friends, a... Read More Read More - [Into The Swamp](https://everyangel.org/into-the-swamp/): Stopped in at the local CVS yesterday to purchase a birthday card.  Walking with purpose to the greeting card display against the back wall, I passed a solitary individual who was busy stocking shelves who said “hello.”  In the big, quiet store I chose a card with a superhero graphic on the front.  Making... Read More Read More - [Teachers](https://everyangel.org/teachers/): There have been many.  Yesterday, I challenged myself to remember the names of as many of my elementary teachers as I could.  I remembered most of them, in order, from the first to the eighth grade.  A majority are remembered with affection and gratitude.  They gave an emotionally lost kid the gift of their... Read More Read More - [Everyone Is Invited](https://everyangel.org/everyone-is-invited/): I propose a festival to celebrate the fecundity of ignorance.  It is to ignorance that a teacher will come.  Ignorance is our natural condition.  A three year old child will dash headlong, careening through the hallways, delighted with the sensation of his/her play.  The child is responding to curiosity of mind and body– learning... Read More Read More - [蘇りRedux](https://everyangel.org/%e8%98%87%e3%82%8aredux/): Monday after Easter.  Back into the trenches of life.  To call it problem solving is an understatement.  Circumstances develop, life itself demands particular “solutions” –or things fall apart, or so it seems.  Easter is a story, a compact microcosm of ideas and emotions, a miniature of life itself.  Betrayal, trial, abandonment, suffering and the... Read More Read More - [Easter](https://everyangel.org/easter/): Easter, April 1st, and my birthday.  The sun rises brilliant, warm, and smooth jazz is playing inside at Starbucks.  Easter is the day by which we all celebrate our good fortune to be alive.  And it’s sheer good fortune, our number came up in the lottery of Nature.  Sometimes things happen which remind us... Read More Read More - [Good Friday Walk About](https://everyangel.org/good-friday-walk-about/): Yesterday was Good Friday.  I took a rare weekday off from the office.  Since Jesus died inconveniently, ignominiously on a Friday, it seemed right to take the day to consider the way of his journey, and of mine.  Do we not all die?  Birth and death are momentous events that we all have in... Read More Read More - [Good Friday](https://everyangel.org/good-friday/): The day is overcast, air temperature at 34 degrees, no wind–as if Nature is at the fold point.  Spring is soon to be felt, experienced, seen in the tender green shoots emerging from the black earth, seeking light, warmth, life.  Life is a mystery, impervious to our intelligence.  We describe it variously, but do... Read More Read More - [Lifeline](https://everyangel.org/lifeline/): Thinking of the challenges that I face in life, these quotes from What Are People For by Wendell Berry seemed timely, much appreciated. The clarification of pain, healing cultivates the scar that is the course of time and nature over damage: the landmark and mindmark that is the notation of a limit. You never... Read More Read More - [I Dreamed, I Saw](https://everyangel.org/i-dreamed-i-saw/): What an evening at Starbucks!  The long table at the end of the room was full.  Over an hour and a half of impassioned exchange of ideas followed.  The conversation was in the main about the “great chain of being” with a segue into Mandelbrot fractals, a demonstration of which we enjoyed from Gary’s... Read More Read More - [Morning Rain and The Dark Woods](https://everyangel.org/morning-rain-and-the-dark-woods/): There is a gentle rain falling outside.  It is supposed to rain all day.  The spring rain will encourage the green shoots to emerge, enlivening the melodious birds. Soon they will raise their families. There is a co-joined harmony between seasonal vegetation, and conscious life forms, humans included, that find a habitat, resources of... Read More Read More - [Sometimes I'm Sane](https://everyangel.org/sometimes-im-sane/): There are many Wendell Berry poems that speak to me.  A poem has been in mind for several days awaiting posting and comment.  This one though takes precedence.  There are times with life presents an inflection point, a point of decision forced by circumstances.  To do nothing is also an action, but often one... Read More Read More - [Palm Sunday Assumptions And Fate](https://everyangel.org/palm-sunday-assumptions-and-fate/): A destiny, oh it’s the rising sun I was born, a shotgun in my hands Behind the gun I’ll make my final stand, yeah That’s why they call me Bad company I can’t deny -lyrics, Bad Company by Bad Company The sun shines with brilliance this morning.  It rises as a strong athlete arching... Read More Read More - [Freedom: Comin' To Our Senses](https://everyangel.org/freedom-comin-to-our-senses/): And freedom, oh freedom well, that’s just some people talkin’ –Desperado lyrics by Glenn Frey, Don Henley There’s a lot of talk about freedom going around.  Seems like more talk than ever.  Perhaps the talk is in inverse proportion to the degree/quality of freedom that we are currently experiencing?  When one has enough of... Read More Read More - [Freedom's Paradox](https://everyangel.org/freedoms-paradox/): Yesterday a friend posted the word “freedom” along with a dictionary definition or two, and several paragraphs of personal commentary.  The challenge to the reader was to help with a definition of freedom, something that is useful as a guide for behavior.  Clearly freedom is something that all of us value, and it would... Read More Read More - [The War Begins](https://everyangel.org/the-war-begins/): The primary is over here in Illinois.  The gubernatorial primary ended with the incumbent Governor Rauner victorious over Jeanne Ives.  Ives, a West Point Graduate, a female-warrior, brought a warm, steely, fundamentalist authenticity to the camera.  I liked her at a emotional level while being terrified of her intentions.  Rauner on the other hand... Read More Read More - [Midweek](https://everyangel.org/midweek/): Wednesday, closing in on the end of March.  I understand that the east coast is being ripped by the forth Nor’easter this year, more wet snow and high winds.  I am sad for those who live along the coast and in New York. I know that climate change is the consequence of the life... Read More Read More - [Half Mad](https://everyangel.org/half-mad/): A Wendell Berry poem, 1988, II It is the destruction of the world in our own lives that drives us half insane, and more than half. To destroy that which we were given in trust: how will we bear it? It is our own bodies that we give to be broken, our bodies existing... Read More Read More - [Mental Noise](https://everyangel.org/mental-noise/): I found it impossible to write this morning.  My mind ruminated on the possible outcomes of the challenges represented by my to-do list for Monday. A rolling-tangle of dark anxiety was all that I could come up with.  I staggered inwardly with nothing to say.  Silence is preferable to adding to any readers quotient... Read More Read More - [What To Write](https://everyangel.org/what-to-write/): A Sunday morning warmed by our life-giving sun greeted me on March 18.  Yesterday was occupied with a leisurely breakfast with an old friend.  By definition old friends are rare.  Time and space separate us.  An old friend knows the young adult that we were, and the battles that we fought and survived in... Read More Read More - [To Get Out Of My Mind](https://everyangel.org/to-get-out-of-my-mind/): The week ends with news of further firings from the inner circle of palace courtiers. The Secretary of State was fired several days ago. The Deputy FBI Director Anthony McCabe was fired last night, by a twitter post. By way of contrast I offer these words of Wendell Berry, taken from the last essay,... Read More Read More - [To Reconcile The Contradictions](https://everyangel.org/to-reconcile-the-contradictions/): Received an email from a friend yesterday informing me of his enthusiasm for Antonio Damasio’s book, The Strange Order of Things.  The work is about the importance of story telling.  To say that story telling is important is to greatly underestimate the matter.  I do not think it is possible to understand how our... Read More Read More - [American War](https://everyangel.org/american-war/): I am reading a book by Omar El Akkad.  He is a journalist.  He was born in Cairo Egypt and grew up in Doha, Qatar.  He has filed dispatches from the NATO led war in Afghanistan, the military trials at Guantanamo Bay, the Arab Spring revolution in Egypt and the Black Lives Matter movement... Read More Read More - [Day's End](https://everyangel.org/days-end-2/): Soon the light will begin to fade.  I’d rather have my say in the morning before the usual responsibilities, the newscasts on NPR, etc. clutter my mind.  I prefer a clean sheet to draw my word-pictures for the day.  Today was different.  It was necessary to be in traffic on I94 at rush hour,... Read More Read More - [Welcome To Paradise](https://everyangel.org/welcome-to-paradise/): This is the ruinous contradiction underlying present-day American “conservatism.”  For the present economy to thrive or even survive, it is necessary for the great majority of the people to have exorbitant or inordinate wants, to expect to get what they want, and to feel that they have a “right” to get it.  But to... Read More Read More - [Standing In The Shadows](https://everyangel.org/standing-in-the-shadows/): Some songs seem immortal.  This one happened on the radio over the weekend.  I am still thinking about it.  Standing In The Shadows of Love by the Four Tops was one of Motown’s greatest hits.  There is a driving, surging passion in the tune that mimics the tide of life that is reminiscent of... Read More Read More - [What Were We Saying About Truth](https://everyangel.org/what-were-we-saying-about-truth/): In all of this back and forth about Truth this and Truth that we are missing a crucial point and that is: Truth is not a single thing 1. Personal Truth – Humans desperately want to believe that the world is a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get). The keyboard I’m typing... Read More Read More - [Happy Birthday Myles](https://everyangel.org/happy-birthday-myles/): Yesterday I was a guest for a tenth birthday celebration.  The party was a glorious event.  The family affair was held in honor of Myles’s tenth birthday.  Josh and Cassie were host to a house full of family and close friends.  The feasting, story telling, the presents, the cake, everything was perfect to say... Read More Read More - [Goodness and Power](https://everyangel.org/goodness-and-power/): In his essay on “How to Raise a Boy” Michael Kimmel offers these answers to the question: “What does it mean to be a good man?”  This list of attributes were offered by several thousand young men around the world to Kimmel’s question. Integrity Honor Being Responsible Being a good provider, protector Doing the... Read More Read More - [Panpsychism](https://everyangel.org/panpsychism/): What?  Sounds like a obscure cult? Do Panpsychists have a holy text?  Could the condition be a recently diagnosed disease, for which a new wonder drug is being pitched on TV?  I doubt you’d think any of those things.  You’d be sensitive to the components of the word, pan and psyche.  Likely you’d know... Read More Read More - [Misinformation, Fake News, Propaganda](https://everyangel.org/misinformation-fake-news-propaganda/): If you are like me, you despair of finding a reliable source for “news.”  In the old days, there was one source for everyone, the newspaper.  The newspaper published daily, was delivered by a neighborhood kid, and you’d find your copy lying at the end of the driveway.  Television news was a informative summary,... Read More Read More - [Less Is More](https://everyangel.org/less-is-more/): I have few words to say.  Today was an early morning, attending to customers needs.  So this post waited until the end of the day.  The words are important though.  They are koan-like, found in a book by Wendell Berry, Standing By Words. Love one another or die, individually and as a species. I... Read More Read More - [The Australian Viewpoint](https://everyangel.org/the-australian-viewpoint/): I have spent a fair amount of time in Louisville, Ky.  My daughter and her partner live there.  While visiting I always grab a copy of the Leo.  The Leo is an alternative weekly newspaper.  The paper has an editorial policy that fearlessly takes the measure of the political and social scene in Kentucky. ... Read More Read More - [The Academy Awards](https://everyangel.org/the-academy-awards/): Like many Americans I watched the Academy Awards last night.  I appreciate Jimmy Kimmel’s wit, and his fearless opposition to the racist and neo-fascist intentions of the Republican party.  On balance the crowd in the auditorium are pro-humanity, and to that extent they are “my people.”  The ABC  Oscars event presented two high points... Read More Read More - [Learning To Like Scotch](https://everyangel.org/learning-to-like-scotch/): Visited a neighborhood bar last night in Chicago.  The Duke of Perth is on Clark Street in the Lakeview neighborhood.  I had never tasted Scotch until several weeks ago.  A friend knowledgeable about the libation brought a bottle of his favorite malt to open an evening of philosophy discussion with a Scotch tasting.  I... Read More Read More - [I Was Sixteen](https://everyangel.org/i-was-sixteen/): “Everything flows” said old Heraclitus.  Heraclitus of Ephesus, otherwise known as Heraclitus the Obscure lived about 500 BC. Heraclitus famous saying is pronounced, “panta rhea, ouden manei.”  The literal meaning is: everything changes and nothing remains. Given this brief snippet of information, the most essential knowledge about this world and our life has been... Read More Read More - [Priestcraft](https://everyangel.org/priestcraft/): Just finished reading Ed O’Keefe’s Washington Post story on the ceremony in the Capitol Rotunda honoring Billy Graham.  The only statement in the report to be understood with simplicity, as a young child would think —that Graham died on February 21 at his home in Montreat North Carolina.  The rest is surface for layers... Read More Read More - [In Praise of Punxsutawney Phil](https://everyangel.org/in-praise-of-punxsutawney-phil/): It is gray and raining today, with perhaps a visitation of wet snow later in the morning.  Weather extremes herald the approach of spring.  The tilt of the earth provides incremental warming to us in the northern hemisphere–the slide begins to the awaited growing season.  Natures rhythm is beneficent, a solace that we depend... Read More Read More - [Requiem For The Sand Flea](https://everyangel.org/requiem-for-the-sand-flea/): Wednesday morning.  It is the morning after another interesting, passionately discussed topic: panpsychism.  Sounds esoteric, and implausible on its face: that mind might be a component of all of reality, from the sand flea, no, lets start even more basic, with the electron.  How about reciprocity of rudimentary awareness between a single electron and... Read More Read More - [Some Things Change, Some Remain](https://everyangel.org/some-things-change-some-remain/): The visit to my home town has concluded.  Three days were allocated to spend time with my disabled sister, and to visit with my brother.  Those three days are also filled with memories of the person that I was when I was a child in Durham.  There are also the years in my mid-twenties... Read More Read More - [Language The First Divider](https://everyangel.org/language-the-first-divider/): What if, however, humans exceed animals in their capacity for violence precisely because they speak? Language dismembers a thing, destroying its organic unity, treating its parts and properties as autonomous. -*- The fact that reason and race have the same root (ratio) in Latin tells us something: language, not primitive egotistic interest, is the... Read More Read More - [The Problem](https://everyangel.org/the-problem/): “Si vous êtes pris dans le rêve de l’autre, vous êtes foutu”  (If you’re trapped in the dream of the other, you’re fucked) —Gilles Deleuze Have you ever been in love?  Horrible isn’t it? It makes you so vulnerable.  It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone... Read More Read More - [Day After Veterans Day](https://everyangel.org/day-after-veterans-day/): I agreed to accompany my wife to the American Legion Post in Gurnee for the Veterans Day ceremony.  She is a member of a local choral group that was to participate in the community event.  As she is recovering from a knee injury I did the driving. It’s never been easy for me to... Read More Read More - [Helpless, Helpless, Helpless ?](https://everyangel.org/helpless-helpless-helpless/): I recently exchanged emails with a friend on the topic of gerrymandering.  Gerrymandering is the practice of shaping the voting districts to align with the population density that has supported the party in power, according to past election data.  The majority party, the one in power gets to manipulate the boundaries of electoral districts,... Read More Read More - [Seeking Experimenters](https://everyangel.org/seeking-experimenters/): I am only an experimenter. Do not set the least value upon what I do, or the least discredit upon what I do not, as if I pretended to settle any thing as true or false. I unsettle all things. No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless... Read More Read More - [A Night At The Opera](https://everyangel.org/a-night-at-the-opera/): Guess which of these guys is the leader of the “free” world?  Given this impression–which man would you chose to follow?  Assuming that you were in a position to have a choice………………… Ruling a great country is like cooking a small fish. –Lao Tsu, Tao Te Ching chapter 60   - [Rain In My Shoes](https://everyangel.org/rain-in-my-shoes/): I’ve always loved this song.  It is one of Elvis signature tunes, but the credit for the superlative lyric go to Ronnie Milsap and Eddie Rabbitt.  The lyric knits together time and place by means of a consuming quest for a person who is loved.  Each of us is a mystery to ourselves, our... Read More Read More - [Traveling In Style](https://everyangel.org/traveling-in-style/): A friend sent this poem to me.  I’ve read it before.  Since the first reading several years have passed. Now the words evoke a more personal reality, something that could be autobiographical.  I guess that is the whole point. A discussion of politics last night was passionate, mindful, with good insights being exchanged.  This... Read More Read More - [There Is No Why](https://everyangel.org/there-is-no-why/): Sutherland Springs, Texas, First Baptist Church, Devin Patrick Kelley, 15 magazines of AR-15 ammo, 15 rounds per mag, emptied into the congregation.  Twenty six people are killed.  Kelley is dead. I read these “facts” and more on the CNN website.  The bottomless analysis of the event continues.  Everyone who has an opinion weighs in,... Read More Read More - [If](https://everyangel.org/if/): If we are going to be personally free and productive human beings we need to recover some kind of interest in the possibility of attaining a relatively human and civilized condition, in which we ourselves can find ourselves and help others do the same. And that we might even be able to communicate something... Read More Read More - [Today is Nov 4](https://everyangel.org/today-is-oct-4/): “We acknowledge the receipt of your order for five triple furnaces including two electric elevators for raising the corpses and one emergency elevator..” –excerpt of letter from I A Topf and Sons, manufacturers of heating equipment to the commandant of Auschwitz concerning the new “heating system.” “…for putting the bodies into the furnace we... Read More Read More - [The Labyrinth](https://everyangel.org/the-labyrinth/): Propaganda is an ostensible appeal to reason and to action which is in fact essentially irrational. We are all the more susceptible to its irrational appeal since we are subject to the same systematic irrationality in advertising. There is such a thing as a labyrinth of information; the information is truly abundant and complex,... Read More Read More - [Everybody Needs A Helping Hand](https://everyangel.org/everybody-needs-a-helping-hand/):                                                                        Thanks Dad ! - [Kaleidoscope](https://everyangel.org/kaleidoscope/): Another morning.  Its Wednesday and at least I am not in traffic on I-294 in the stampede to Chicago.  Around 6AM yesterday before dawn I accelerated up the ramp into the stream of traffic with a massive chrome truck bumper in my rear view mirror.  In the darkness the surreal stream of headlights, with... Read More Read More - [The Bull's Eye](https://everyangel.org/the-bulls-eye/): A man of massive meditation Is like a man looking at death, Looking at death as at a bull’s –eye. He watches before he crosses the tracks. –Richard Eberhart Life comes at us without warning.  I cannot imagine what this day will bring.  Yet I must “cross the tracks,” get on with the business... Read More Read More - [Why Bring It Back?](https://everyangel.org/why-bring-it-back/): Strange the memories that present themselves in surprising detail.  I remember falling in love with a Ford Mustang.  It was 1965, my sophomore year in high school.  An acquaintance who lived in the neighborhood was given a new Ford Mustang 2+2 fastback by his mother.  It had a 289 ci motor and a four... Read More Read More - [Nothing To Lose](https://everyangel.org/nothing-to-lose/): Though we have the power to destroy the whole world, life is stronger than the death instinct and love is stronger than hate. It does not make logical sense to be too hopeful, but once again this is not a matter of logic. One does not look for signs of hope in the newspapers... Read More Read More - [Snapshot](https://everyangel.org/snapshot/): A mixture of satiety, boredom, violence, and despair which characterizes our mass society— the impotence of well-fed bodies with empty and lost minds. The obsession with lust and with violent erratic forms of sex. Abstraction, confusion, pseudo passion— fabricated in the imagination and centered on fantasies Collect us together, give us a leader that... Read More Read More - [One More Story](https://everyangel.org/one-more-story/): Our last evening in Sister Bay we picked a restaurant called Chop.  The place appeared to be newer by comparison to the other places we had dined during our stay.  So close to Lake Michigan, but I had enough fish, so anticipated consuming something different for our last evening meal in Door County. The... Read More Read More - [Zen Story And A Party](https://everyangel.org/zen-story-and-a-party/): A monk said to Joshu” What is the way?” Joshu replied: “Outside the fence.” The monk insisted: “I mean the Great Way? What is the Great Way?” Joshu replied: “The Great Way is that which leads to the Capital.” The philosophy group gathered for a social evening last night.  They came over to our... Read More Read More - [Off Script, Again](https://everyangel.org/off-script-again/): No one gets through their allotted span without a major off-script event. Something, somewhere, will go catastrophically wrong. Not potentially, or incidentally, but necessarily, because of the structure of human existence and of our appalling exposure to error, accident, madness and illness. Someone very important to us will die long before they should, in... Read More Read More - [You And I Must Make A Pact](https://everyangel.org/you-and-i-must-make-a-pact/): Heard this song on the radio yesterday.  The lyrics keep coming back to me.  I believe that it is much more than a simple love song.  How difficult it is to make a pact with oneself to respect, to honor the integrity of one’s own one life.  How difficult it is to accept ourselves,... Read More Read More - [Feynman](https://everyangel.org/feynman-2/): D’Arline, I adore you, sweetheart. I know how much you like to hear that — but I don’t only write it because you like it — I write it because it makes me warm all over inside to write it to you. It is such a terribly long time since I last wrote to... Read More Read More - [Door County Farewell](https://everyangel.org/door-county-farewell/): A few days in Door County Wisconsin was just what we needed.  We stayed four nights at the Sister Bay Inn.  The sojourn in our comfortable room was existentially satisfying when we read the story of the inn keepers, Vilius and Alma Vaicekauskas.  We had occasion to converse with them several times while we... Read More Read More - [Pinkadon](https://everyangel.org/pinkadon/): Another pleasant day exploring Door County Wisconsin.  We visited Egg Harbor for breakfast.  Then off to Carlsville for the Door County Coffee Company coffee shop.  Not far away was the Door County Distillery and Winery.  We purchased more wine than we could possibly drink.  With the holidays coming up, I am sure that will... Read More Read More - [Fish Creek](https://everyangel.org/fish-creek/): This is my first visit to Door County Wisconsin.  Door County is a peninsula with Green Bay to the west side of one shoreline, and Lake Michigan to the east of the other shore.  It is the proximity of the great fresh water lake that shapes the environment and the way of life of... Read More Read More - [A Parable of Two Idiots](https://everyangel.org/a-parable-of-two-idiots/): The old idiot wanted the truth, but the new idiot wants to turn the absurd into the highest power of thought– in other words, to create.  The old idiot wanted to be accountable only to reason.  The new idiot, closer to Job than to Socrates wants account to be taken of “every victim of... Read More Read More - [Hibakusha](https://everyangel.org/hibakusha/): I have been thinking about the recent talk of atomic weapons that has become prominent in the ebb and flow of the news.  The leader of North Korea has initiated a series of atomic tests culminating in a claim to now have a fusion weapon, a hydrogen bomb.  To sharpen the point, long range... Read More Read More - [On Dissent](https://everyangel.org/on-dissent/): The more massive a movement is, the more doctored and manipulated. The more it tends to be a mass lie, a front…… Genuine dissent must always keep a human measure. It must be free and spontaneous. The slighter gestures are often the more significant, because they are unpremeditated and they cannot be doctored beforehand... Read More Read More - [Someone To Lean On](https://everyangel.org/someone-to-lean-on/): With all the disruptions swirling around us, even if one is not directly impacted, — these are troubled times.  I am dismayed for my countrymen in Northern California, and in Puerto Rico.  Those who live in Houston and in the Florida Keys will suffer the hard labor of recovery for many months, perhaps years... Read More Read More - [Everything Will Be Ok](https://everyangel.org/everything-will-be-ok-2/): I was awakened by the rain drumming on the roof at 4 AM.  My consciousness returned to the same sound years ago in Karuizawa Japan.  We were there for our honeymoon.  It was spring, the onset of rainy season and it rained off and on the entire week of our visit to the mountain... Read More Read More - [Representing The Mind Of The Subject](https://everyangel.org/representing-the-mind-of-the-subject/): I was reminded of how iconic the pumpkin has become of the fall season.  Pumpkins are carved by children for Halloween jack o lanterns.  The carvings are displayed by proud parents as decorations on the front porch.  At the thanksgiving feast pumpkin is the main ingredient of a delicately spiced pie. I passed an... Read More Read More - [We Grizzle Everyday](https://everyangel.org/we-grizzle-everyday/): Cannot help but think about aging.  One must experience before one begins to know.  I do not think that the failing of powers that come with the fading of youth would be intelligible if one were told ahead of time what is in store.  How could one imagine the slow failure of eyesight, or... Read More Read More - [The Wind Cries](https://everyangel.org/the-wind-cries/): Too much caffeine yesterday, I slept little last night.  Today is another day.  Like everyone else, a creature of habit, I begin my day with a cup of coffee.  I know better, but here I am at Starbucks. Happened to hear this song playing on the radio:  The Wind Cries Mary by Jimi Hendrix. ... Read More Read More - [A Prayer](https://everyangel.org/a-prayer/): “Help me to forget today’s pain…….” Tuesday mid-afternoon and the empire staggers on.  Too melodramatic?  I hope so.  I heard snippets of a report from the fires in Northern California.  Santa Rosa is incinerated in the wind lashed wild fire.  Wine country burns.  At the very same time our head of the EPA is... Read More Read More - [Strange But True](https://everyangel.org/strange-but-true/): “This is some weird shit…..” is a statement coming out of the recesses of memory so far back that I doubt if I will ever remember who said it or what was being spoken of.  It has a “hippie” texture, something coming from the era of “free” love, –“tune in, turn on, and drop... Read More Read More - [Ragnarok](https://everyangel.org/ragnarok/): The authorities yet search for pathology, something to isolate as a cause of the murder of 58 people in Las Vegas.  Surely something caused this individual to step out of the matrix of time and place to impersonally wreak chaos upon the attendees of a country music festival.  He orchestrated his own Ragnarök*.  His... Read More Read More - [Love Will Keep Us Alive](https://everyangel.org/love-will-keep-us-alive/): Somehow it seems right to entitle this mornings words with the declaration that “love wins.” At the end of the shit-storm, a shining star remains in the dark night  to guide us home.   That star is the option of responding with love to circumstances such as they may be.  Every man and woman’s... Read More Read More - [Our Awful Innocence](https://everyangel.org/our-awful-innocence/): Saturday and the morning sun is glorious on a day when rain is predicted.  So much for prediction, our obsession with certainty. The FBI continues to dig deep, and search far and wide for a reason.  There has to be a anchor point for ourselves, something, anything to separate us from one who murdered... Read More Read More - [He Was Just Like Anybody Else](https://everyangel.org/he-was-just-like-anybody-else/): Found this superb video of The Who performing their magnificent anthem of resistance.  The Who are performing live at Kilburn in 1977.  They are in their prime.  The issue comes down to what we will do with the “life force.”  Will we individually and collectively utilize the energy, our heritage of elan from Nature,... Read More Read More - [Dying From Excess](https://everyangel.org/dying-from-excess/): My mind is still occupied with thoughts of the 58 people killed in Las Vegas, and many more who will not recover fully from wounds.  An apparently “normal” American collected the means, and took the time to meticulously plan a mass murder.  Upon these terms the shooter decided to write the final chapter of... Read More Read More - [Speak, Speak My Friend....](https://everyangel.org/speak-speak-my-friend/): Another morning.  A few days ago, a sixty-four year old guy mowed down over fifty and wounded many more after careful preparation.  This took place in Las Vegas, our city of excess.  Several undeclared wars, Iraq and Afghanistan continue to simmer, producing a daily quotient of dead and maimed.  Additional conflagrations are verbally threatened,... Read More Read More - [Tom Petty 1950-2017](https://everyangel.org/tom-petty-1950-2017/): Tom Petty passed away over the weekend.  He was one year younger than I. There was vitality and nourishment for the spirit in those songs coming over the radio.  I am sorry that I did not choose to see him live in concert when I had the opportunity. I’ve always liked this song, “Runnin’... Read More Read More - [Tinsel Town](https://everyangel.org/tinsel-town/): I was in North Carolina when the news broke on the music festival shooting in Las Vegas.  I happened to check my phone news-feed late in the evening, and there it was.  The text displayed a estimated number of casualties at the time.  I clicked on the video/audio clip associated with the story.  Immediately... Read More Read More - [Deo Vindice](https://everyangel.org/deo-vindice/): Durham of my youth was a sleepy town, seldom in the news.  This changed with the advent of the Civil Rights movement of the mid 1960s.  Durham was in the news recently.  A crowd demonstrating against the implicit racism of the Trump administration pulled down the statue of the confederate solder that has stood... Read More Read More - [Sunday Morning](https://everyangel.org/sunday-morning/): Its Sunday morning.  A few fellow guests join me for my morning coffee here at the Holiday Inn.  I cannot help but overhear the collegial conversation of three older males, and several young adult males planning for a baseball game later in the day.  I’d lay odds that the older guys are coaches, and... Read More Read More - [21 c Hotel Gallery](https://everyangel.org/21-c-hotel-gallery/): A warm Fall evening is the perfect time for a walking exploration of Main Street Durham.  The old street is substantially arrayed in 21st Century commerce and entertainment.  Upscale Salons, Bars, Silicon Valley type incubators for fledgling business startups, and of course the restaurants, make up the mix of tenants for the old 20th... Read More Read More - [Elegy](https://everyangel.org/elegy/): Here I am in my hometown, Durham, North Carolina.  It is hardly worth mention that much has changed since I left for the big city.  The truism that “one cannot go home again,” is true with the sadness that is endemic to time.  This place has changed and so have I.  What was a... Read More Read More - [Our Neo-Pagan Age](https://everyangel.org/our-neo-pagan-age/):     Auschwitz (Laggiù, ad Auschwitz, lontano dalla Vistola) There, at Auschwitz, far from the Vistula, love, on the northern plain in a field of death: funereal, cold, rain on the rusted poles, and a tangle of steel fences: and no trees or birds in the grey air, or above our thought, but inertia and... Read More Read More - [Wednesday](https://everyangel.org/wednesday/): Today, the middle of the work week, the heat outside cools, it’s feeling a bit like Fall.  Starbucks is a hubbub.  Those present are regulars to my eye, parents, grandparents seated with children before the kids are off to school and the adults off to the days planned activities. The world is a collection... Read More Read More - [Tuesday](https://everyangel.org/tuesday/): Another day of news.  What is to be done for wrecked Puerto Rico?  It is surreal.  The residents of Puerto Rico are US citizens.  For all practical purposes the island has been treated as a colony, stripped of wealth.  The hurricane, a random, impartial  Act-Of-Nature has pushed the island deeper into the debt-hole that... Read More Read More - [Monday](https://everyangel.org/monday/): Another hot late September day.  It promises to be 90 degrees. Between our president and the leader of North Korea, another session of bitch-slapping, saber rattling.  A formation of B-1 bombers and F-15 fighters made a pass along the coast of North Korea.  What is the next move going to be and who will... Read More Read More - [Why ?](https://everyangel.org/why/): Its September 24, mid afternoon, and 90 degrees.  According to the calendar it is Fall but you’d never know.  It has been a while since an adequate rain, and the grass is fading from green to tan.  I do not expect to become accustomed to these predicted unseasonal extreme-weather events.  There will be no... Read More Read More - [Cruel Awakening](https://everyangel.org/cruel-awakening/): The South, too, was an earthly paradise. Not of course at all times, for all its inhabitants. There were the slaves. Yet the South, before the War between the States, had this of paradise left to it: it had the wholeness that embraced white and black in an apparent unity, even though the relationship... Read More Read More - [Daydreaming](https://everyangel.org/daydreaming/): When a myth becomes a daydream it is judged, found wanting, and must be discarded.  To cling to it when it has lost its creative function is to condemn oneself to mental illness.  I do not say we must learn to live without myths (such an idea is dangerous self-deception: it is itself a... Read More Read More - [Memoro Ergo Sum](https://everyangel.org/memoro-ergo-sum/): But this memory is the glue that keeps the universe as one: although immaterial it makes being possible, it is being. If an idea did not remember to think it wouldn’t be. If a chair wasn’t there, it wouldn’t be tomorrow. If I didn’t remember that I am, I won’t be. We can also... Read More Read More - [If Nothing Is Left](https://everyangel.org/if-nothing-is-left/): Where many machines are used in monastic work (and it is right that they should be used), there can be a deadening of the spirit and of sensibility, a blunting of perception, a loss of awareness, a lowering of tone, a general fatigue and lassitude, a proneness to unrest and guilt which we might... Read More Read More - [The River Abides](https://everyangel.org/the-river-abides/): The Ohio River is big.  From the deck of a boat, one can appreciate the scale of the bridges required to convey vehicles from Kentucky to Indiana, across the Ohio river.  It is not hard to imagine the immense challenge of constructing the first bridge across this muscular flowing expanse of water.  Then came... Read More Read More - [Channeling History](https://everyangel.org/channeling-history/): I can’t prove this. And I have no idea how data could be collected and interpreted. I think that we are a composite of our ancestors, parents, grandparents, extending backward…..  the times in which they lived, their failures, successes, triumphs, and defeats –all add up to form the backdrop, the emotional ground tone of... Read More Read More - [Safai Coffee Shop](https://everyangel.org/safai-coffee-shop/): A coffee shop can be a “home” away from home.  For the price of a cup of coffee one can just be, hangout, find solitude with others, for reading, for ones thoughts, or for observing human nature expressed in behavior and the dress of patrons.  Coffee Shops are essential public spaces. My customary spot... Read More Read More - [Light, Light!](https://everyangel.org/light-light/): It was dark when I walked in the door here at Safai Coffee shop on Bardstown Road in Louisville.  At 7AM just myself and two baristas compose the crowd.  There is comfort to darkness.  The relative quiet of morning with slight traffic noise leaves the mind undisturbed.  We need darkness.  Darkness is context for... Read More Read More - [A Ghost You Can't See](https://everyangel.org/a-ghost-you-cant-see/): It’s Sunday morning in Louisville Ky.  A short walk from the BNB I found Safai Coffee open at 7AM.  Southern towns are sleepy on Sunday morning and Louisville is no exception, though Louisville qualifies as a small city.  In the South on a Sunday morning, I feel that I ought to be in church. ... Read More Read More - [Reminiscence](https://everyangel.org/reminiscence/): “Who dares despise the day of small things,……” –Zechariah 4:10 niv I cannot recall beginning a post with a quotation from the prophets of the Old Testament.  These words strike me as fitting. Today I responded to a request from a long term customer.  While working on site in a remodeled space that will... Read More Read More - [History](https://everyangel.org/history/): We leave for wherever history takes us.  Preceded. Followed. –Etel Adnan, Night I watched a program on the discovery of the wreck of the USS Indianapolis last night.  A team of scientists funded by Paul Allen found the Indianapolis on the bottom of the Philippine Sea lying at a dept of 18,000 feet.  The... Read More Read More - [Hey Gary](https://everyangel.org/hey-gary/): Our philosophy discussion group has convened for many years.  Gary and I have had a long standing difference of view regarding a particular staple thought-experiment.  The philosophical conundrum goes thusly: If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it fall, does the falling tree make a sound? Gary’s... Read More Read More - [Tuesday Morning Meditation](https://everyangel.org/tuesday-morning-meditation/): The wedding of history with the coffee we drink in our ever shrinking days awakes our need to reinvent love. Another morning, of the many that I have been lucky to enjoy in my sixty eight years.  Fall comes, the sun shines brightly, and the slight chill promises a comfortable day.  I confess that... Read More Read More - [Kyrie Eleison](https://everyangel.org/kyrie-eleison/): The weekend offered a gift of beautiful weather to those living in the Midwest.  Yard work on Saturday morning, clearing the garden patch of the remaining tomato vines, and dying squash plants.  The afternoon was spent in conversation with friends in Long Grove.  We chatted with Michael at Buffalo Creek Brewery, sampled two of... Read More Read More - [Poseidon's Trident](https://everyangel.org/poseidons-trident/): Starbucks on a Sunday morning.  The sun shines in the windows like a strong god.  To the South two days drive by car, Poseidon strikes the ground with his trident.  Storm surge, extreme winds lash the keys, and the Florida mainland.  Those who have not fled hunker down and pray.  And so it goes... Read More Read More - [Poseidon Redux](https://everyangel.org/poseidon-redux/): Poseidon brought back.  Hurricane Irma, a gargantuan storm is about to engulf Florida. The news prompted memory of eleven days spent on a freighter traveling from San Francisco to Yokohama, Japan.  Several days outside of Japan our ship, loaded with supplies for the Vietnam war passed through the tail end of a hurricane.  The... Read More Read More - [Haunted](https://everyangel.org/haunted/): At our last philosophy discussion session I was asked a question that I did not immediately answer.  The question posed was did I not think that tribalism would always be with us?  We’ve discussed tribalism within our group often, and for many months, years even.  The term stands for the defensive posture, the ethnocentrism,... Read More Read More - [Quilting & Disenchantment](https://everyangel.org/quilting-disenchantment/): We attended the Walworth County Fair.  I look forward to the drive to Elkhorn Wisconsin. The fair is one of the few remaining old fashioned agriculturally-based county fairs. While inside the homemaking arts exhibit building I noticed a individual standing at a computerized sewing machine. She was guiding the sewing head lazer dot, tracing... Read More Read More - [Godlike ?](https://everyangel.org/godlike/): A good discussion last night on the topic of “violence.”  I continue to mull over the concluding idea of the evening,–a reversal of the common place notion of “the good.”  Here is a quote from Zizek, “According to the traditional ideological commonplace, immortality is linked to the good and mortality to evil: what makes... Read More Read More - [History and Freedom](https://everyangel.org/history-and-freedom/): Exile.  That is what I feel this morning.  Tuesday after the Labor Day weekend, and already there is a autumn chill in the air.  Too soon, too early to anticipate the frost.  I feel wrecked by life, by the chain of events that have led me, led us to this point.  We have a... Read More Read More - [Entanglement](https://everyangel.org/entanglement/): I often encounter Reno, a friend, while attending to reading and writing at Starbucks.  We’ve shared satisfying exchange of stories on a number of occasions.  Certainly we do not know a lot about each other.  But the insight gained through the story telling has effected a change within my personality, my mode of being.... Read More Read More - [Buffalo Creek Brewing](https://everyangel.org/buffalo-creek-brewing/): Yesterday was a sunny Saturday.  After some yard work I headed to the office in Long Grove to tie up a few loose ends.  Loose ends prey on the mind, until they are properly connected.  After about 20 minutes, satisfied that all was taken care of, I decided to visit the new Buffalo Creek... Read More Read More - [Etel Adnan, Philosopher Poet](https://everyangel.org/etel-adnan-philosopher-poet/): I read a review in the New Yorker about a book of poems entitled Night by Etel Adnan.  The next day I submitted my order to Amazon. For many years I have carried a copy of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets in my briefcase where ever i go.  Adnan’s work will join the Eliot... Read More Read More - [Against Public Relations](https://everyangel.org/against-public-relations/): In the Philosophy Discussion Group we are considering the work of Slavoj Zizek.  Zizek is a prolific writer and a popular lecturer.  He is a culture critic, a commentator upon contemporary life in these times.  His method is dialectical as he comes from a Marxist background. Zizek often mentions communism, that failed recipe for... Read More Read More - [Here On This Darkling Plain](https://everyangel.org/here-on-this-darkling-plain/): There are seasons of life.  In the late 1970’s I was a student learning to swim in the vast ocean of philosophy.  With a bit more focus next I studied at Garrett Evangelical Divinity School in Evanston.  I assumed the professional end of all of the study was to become a Christian minister.  For... Read More Read More - [A Last Concert for 2017](https://everyangel.org/a-last-concert-for-2017/): The Long Grove Arts and Music Council held it’s last free concert for 2017.  I joined the townspeople on Towner Green Sunday afternoon to hear Scott Ainslie and Reggie Harris.  These artists carry the song and story telling heritage of our country, especially of the ante bellum South.  Indeed the story of humanity is... Read More Read More - [No More Answers](https://everyangel.org/no-more-answers/): Decided to take Monday for a visit to the Chicago Botanical Garden.  This garden is world class, an expanse of sculpted land and water displaying a sublime array of plants.  Calling a rare time out from work, I gathered my camera, and a book.  Laura and I left for a few hours of paradise.... Read More Read More - [Nothin' Can Last Forever](https://everyangel.org/nothin-can-last-forever/): I have a invitation to the 50th anniversary class reunion at Northern High School where I graduated in 1967.  The reunion is to be held the third weekend in October.  The fall calendar is quite full for me and I will not be able to attend.  I’ve carried the invitation around in my briefcase... Read More Read More - [Pig Pickin](https://everyangel.org/pig-pickin/): I was blessed to be present at the annual Family Pig Pickin hosted by Kevin and Caryn in their backyard.  It is an annual event.  Family members came from as far as Washington State to attend.  Everyone present was related by blood, by marriage or by the bond of friendship.  The “guest of honor”... Read More Read More - [There The Dance Is](https://everyangel.org/there-the-dance-is/): The end of summer, the inception of fall is always a sad time for me.  I will miss the radiance of long days, the heat which enables the tomato vines to produce, and the festivals of music.  As the days shorten, become cooler, bees become more active gathering supplies for the severe months, and... Read More Read More - [Walking](https://everyangel.org/walking/): We drove into the city last night.  We planned to enjoy dinner with Ben and Jeff.  Ben is nephew to my wife.  I had not seen Ben in at least eight years.  We walked the neighborhood to Crosby’s Kitchen on 3455 N. Southport for a leisurely meal. Stories were swapped while eating.  We then... Read More Read More - [Nomination For Man Of The Year](https://everyangel.org/nomination-for-man-of-the-year/): I know this is early or late, depending on your perspective.  The occupant of the White House was chosen person of the year 2016.  I am getting a jump on the 2017 pick. With every new year, it’s a new contest.  Nothing rules out anyone getting the nod.  A past recipient may become a... Read More Read More - [Andrew Young](https://everyangel.org/andrew-young/): On August 20, 2017 Andrew Young was interviewed on NBC News Meet The Press .  Here are excerpts verbatim of what he had to say.  This is a longish post but worth reading, maybe more than once. On the Klan types Well, it’s a week of misunderstandings. We originally sought to redeem the soul... Read More Read More - [Unending Deployment](https://everyangel.org/unending-deployment/): The poem haunts me.  I receive one poem a day via email from the poetry foundation.  Most I read once and discard due to my inability to resonate with the words.  This one gets to me. It describes the speakers encounter with a “crazy” street preacher, Brother Rickey, while waiting for the pedestrian crosswalk... Read More Read More - [Summer Car Show](https://everyangel.org/summer-car-show/): A gear-head since my high school days, I go out of my way to admire an old muscle car, or a race car.  An early memory remains of standing outside the fence at the State Fair at Raleigh as the open wheeled dirt track midget cars screamed around the track.  After the race I... Read More Read More - [Lake Geneva](https://everyangel.org/lake-geneva/): It’s early Monday morning. The sun glows a fiery ball behind overcast clouds.  Around 1 PM a eclipse of the sun by the moon is to occur, but we are unlikely to see it.  The solar system continues to move in orbital regularity as it has for a very long time, by human time... Read More Read More - [Better Left Alone?](https://everyangel.org/better-left-alone/): Not every false belief is a mistake.      What is the difference between a mistake and a mental disturbance? A mistake does not only have a cause, it also has a ground. The truth of my statements is the test of my understanding of these statements. The truth of certain empirical propositions belongs to... Read More Read More - [Charlottesville, A Final Thought](https://everyangel.org/charlottesville-a-final-thought/): My slave holding people of the mid 1800s who lived in the South deserve more consideration for their brutal attitudes toward blacks, —than do we for our racism toward people of color.  The slave trade, referred to by Southeners as “our peculiar institution” was the fading, dying residue of an ancient institution.  The Slavery... Read More Read More - [Charlottesville](https://everyangel.org/charlottesville/): Sometimes you have to say it out loud in order for the truth to penetrate, to register, to enter the heart.  If you are able, for whatever reason or rationalization, to support the president after Charlottesville and the pronouncement following several days later about the “good people” among the alt-right demonstrators,–you are a racist. ... Read More Read More - [New Realism, A First Look](https://everyangel.org/new-realism-a-first-look/): Just read an essay culled from Philosophy Now magazine.  The piece is an interview with Professor Maurizio Ferraris, University of Turin, a proponent of New Realism.  Here are some phrases that captured my imagination, vectors for exploration. The transformation of reality: revolution is possible and necessary. But it requires real action and not mere... Read More Read More - [Reality, Slice by Slice](https://everyangel.org/reality-slice-by-slice/): Wow! What a discussion.  There is nothing more ordinary than “reality” and nothing more controversial.  When we seriously think about what we mean by “reality”  we encounter levels, horizontal slices of a cake.  Which slice is desired, pointed to—involves the vocabulary and the syntax that you must use to describe that segment of reality. ... Read More Read More - [Falling](https://everyangel.org/falling/): Falling in order to rise…. The destruction of received models and forms is necessary in order to clear a space for spontaneous thought to arise. From the cathedral of our own feelings, from the void of the blank canvas, then, comes the space for revelation. We are fragments of an unutterable whole.  Meaning is... Read More Read More - [Fire Show Post Script](https://everyangel.org/fire-show-post-script/): Earth is a clump of iron and magnesium, and nickel, smeared with organic material and sleeved in vapor.  It whirls along in a nearly circular orbit around a minor star we call the sun.  There are enough stars in the universe that if everybody on earth were charged with naming his or her share,... Read More Read More - [Fire Show](https://everyangel.org/fire-show/): Again the family celebrated Clara’s 89th birthday with a prime rib dinner.  A dining room was filled with light and conversation.  At one end a display of mounted musky, pike and walleye reminded us of our link to the north woods.  Looking down upon our long table at the other end, a mounted trophy... Read More Read More - [A Quietly Growing Circle](https://everyangel.org/a-quietly-growing-circle/): The lake and the woods make a scarcely perceptible sound. Maybe it’s the sound of the wind in the tall pines, spruce and aspen. No wind can been seen moving the surface of the still, mirror-like surface. There is life all around, and almost no sound. Most of the movement is behind the scene,... Read More Read More - [Second Great Migration](https://everyangel.org/second-great-migration/): Friday morning in Eagle River Wisconsin. The woods by the lake are serene. In the north woods life is expressed by shear being. I recall life in a busy Starbucks at this time of morning; the chatter of patrons describing morning drink orders to a barista who recognizes the payment collected by the swipe... Read More Read More - [He Made It To Phoenix](https://everyangel.org/he-made-it-to-phoenix/): Glen Campbell passed on August 8th.  I was never a fan but I heard his music played over the radio for many of my young adult years.  When we lived in Durham Campbell was a patient at the Ear Nose and Throat hospital where my wife worked as a medical assistant.  She rode in... Read More Read More - [Batavia One More Day](https://everyangel.org/batavia-one-more-day/): We returned to Batavia.  Is there any better way to gain a sense of a place than to move around observing what there is to see?  We identified eight homes that seemed suitable to our needs.  We critically looked at each of them as well as the surrounding neighborhoods.  I am satisfied that we... Read More Read More - [Batavia](https://everyangel.org/batavia/): We spent a day in Batavia.  I do not recall visiting Batavia in the past.  We decided that we want to live in Batavia, –so what better reason for a visit?  Seriously!  Not unlike a pioneer family who left what they knew behind for distant California, (a territory they had no experience of) on... Read More Read More - [Because Part II](https://everyangel.org/because-ii/): I remembered an old photograph that depicts us in an earlier time.  In 1977 we held our first born girl.  We had no idea what life had in store for us.  That is a metaphor to be taken seriously but not literally.  It Is not as if there was any predetermined path, which is... Read More Read More - [Because](https://everyangel.org/because/): Yesterday we celebrated our 48th year of marriage.  Seems like a long journey, when I think of it that way.  We purchased greeting cards for each other, with verses that expressed our affection for the other. She purchased a Wendell Berry book of essays for me.  We celebrated by enjoying the Friday evening fish... Read More Read More - [Point Break & Counter Point](https://everyangel.org/point-break-counter-point/): During my high school years, I owned a surfboard.  I remember paddling out beyond the breakers at Carolina Beach, during  the onset of a squall.  The waves were as big as a house.  The challenge was timing, to drive the board between the mountains of water, to avoid the break. If I mistimed the... Read More Read More - [Celebrating The Animal Mass](https://everyangel.org/celebrating-the-animal-mass/): Art begins with the animal, at least with the animal that carves out a territory and constructs a house (both are correlative, or even one and the same, in what is called a habitat). The territory-house system transforms a number of organic functions— sexuality, procreation, aggression, feeding. But this transformation does not explain the... Read More Read More - [Jump](https://everyangel.org/jump/): In a vain attempt to avoid being serious, all too serious, I offer this respite.  Van Halen’s 1983  hit Jump will get your blood pumping, period.  When and if I am in a coma, I hope that someone remembers to play this song. Curious about the origin and meaning of the song I consulted... Read More Read More - [Confiding To The Ear Of the Future](https://everyangel.org/confiding-to-the-ear-of-the-future/): Hurricane Florence.  Like a massive heat-driven-machine the storm churns the Atlantic sucking up moisture.  It’s path along a vector of the Bermudas and the Bahamas is aimed at North and South Carolina.  Possibly as a cat 5 storm, water and wind will batter the coastal areas.  What we know as civilization, homes, schools, roads,... Read More Read More - [We Become With](https://everyangel.org/we-become-with/): Not a “minute of the world passes,” says Cezanne, that we will preserve if we do not “become the minute.” We are not in the world, we become with the world; we become by contemplating it. Everything is vision, becoming. We become universes. Becoming animal, plant, molecular, becoming zero. What terror haunts Van Gogh’s... Read More Read More - [Never Stop Swinging](https://everyangel.org/never-stop-swinging/): A few more photos of the Piñata “contest” at the family pig roast.  Its everyone against the pig.  No matter how difficult, how tough the pig, perseverance is called for to “bring it down.”  Keep swinging! Keep stepping up, and taking your turn with the bat. I captured these additional photos.  Enjoy! Life:  Never... Read More Read More - [Family Pig Pickin](https://everyangel.org/family-pig-pickin/): There are times when I can hardly believe my good fortune. Yesterday Laura and I traveled a few miles to Kevin and Caryn’s house in Arlington Heights were the annual family pig roast is convened in Kevin’s back-yard.  A young pig is slow roasted over a charcoal fire, in the rotisserie cooker.  The steel... Read More Read More - [Trouble](https://everyangel.org/trouble/): I awakened this morning to a lawyer-dream.  Dreams come to consciousness as the mind ascends from deep sleep to the boundary of a waking state.  Awareness traces the dreams/nightmares that represent our hopes and fears.  This is the first lawyer-dream that I remember having.  In the dream I visualized the face of my attorney,... Read More Read More - [You Can Check-Out Anytime](https://everyangel.org/you-can-check-out-anytime/): Didn’t get to write this morning.  The server behind the Starbucks Wifi was not happy.  Since I was unable to reach my blog, I finished off the last chapter in the philosophy book that I’ve been reading.  What Is Philosophy? by Deleuze and Guattari is among the most difficult material that I’ve attempted reading,... Read More Read More - [Winged Horses & Fiery Dragons](https://everyangel.org/winged-horses-fiery-dragons/): We require just a little order to protect us from chaos. Nothing is more distressing than a thought that escapes itself, than ideas that fly off, that disappear hardly formed, already eroded by forgetfulness or precipitated into others that we no longer master. These are infinite variabilities, the appearing of which coincide. They are... Read More Read More - [Why Beauty?](https://everyangel.org/why-beauty/): I left the house this morning in gray light.  In the course of the short drive to Starbucks my attention was attracted to a fragment of fire in my rear view mirror.  The sun.  The star at the center of our solar system is a marker of day and night, and of the seasons,... Read More Read More - [Opaque Complexity](https://everyangel.org/opaque-complexity/): rising economic inequality breakdown of the nation-state militarization of borders totalizing global surveillance curtailment of individual freedoms triumph of transnational corporations the rise of neurocognitive capitalism the rise of nativist ideologies the degradation of the natural environment ….all of these are the product of a general inability to perceive the wider, networked effects of... Read More Read More - [The Park](https://everyangel.org/the-park/): Sunday morning.  Sunday’s a day of reflection, when one dials back one’s engagement, to let the world “just be” to consider where one has come and what it means.  Do we not need one day of respite?  I think so. Life in ordinary time, the work week, never slows down.  The press of events,... Read More Read More - [Habitat](https://everyangel.org/habitat/): Perhaps art begins with the animal, at least with the animal that carves out a territory and constructs a house (both are correlative, or even one and the same, in what is called a habitat). The territory-house system transforms a number of organic functions— sexuality, procreation, aggression, feeding. But this transformation does not explain... Read More Read More - [Advertising](https://everyangel.org/advertising/): I enjoy Adbusters Magazine.  It is a Canadian publication, edgy, transgressive, full of social criticism.  I find the writing stimulating, even when I do not happen to agree with the writers point of view.  I also enjoy the graphic elements within the publication.  I willingly pay $14.95 for a copy. Here is an excerpt... Read More Read More - [No Interest In Politics...Till Lately](https://everyangel.org/no-interest-in-politics-till-lately/): I’ve never had a natural interest in politics.  Politics has always seemed like back-office stuff.  You know the run-of-the-mill chores that have to be done to keep society functioning.  A means must be found for making judgements, the adjustments necessary to keep commerce flowing, roads paved, teachers teaching, etc. I never found politics appealing... Read More Read More - [Venus In The Mirror/Lens](https://everyangel.org/venus-in-the-mirror-lens/): This past Sunday we decided to spend the afternoon reading by the lake that is the center of our subdivision.  The lakefront park is a well maintained shady expanse of lawn.  The view of the lake in the afternoon sun was splendid.  Water sparkled with light, a few children played in the shallow water,... Read More Read More - [Walworth County Fair](https://everyangel.org/walworth-county-fair/): We attended the Walworth County Fair in Elkhorn Wisconsin yesterday.  The first fair to be held on the grounds was in 1851.  This is an old fashion farming community fair that continues to be supported by the entire community.  I particularly enjoy the sense of history whenever we visit this place.  The fair grounds... Read More Read More - [Light In A Dark Time](https://everyangel.org/light-in-a-dark-time/): We live in a dark time.  Anything that can be said is relative to context.  I write in a first world country, in relative safety.  My circumstances are enviable.  So far no drought, no floods, and abundance of food.  Today I am gainfully employed.  Many others who live elsewhere would happily trade places with... Read More Read More - [Black Mirror](https://everyangel.org/black-mirror/): “When you tell me that, you know, he should testify because he’s going to tell the truth and he shouldn’t worry, well that’s so silly because it’s somebody’s version of the truth. Not the truth,” Giuliani told Chuck Todd on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday morning. “Truth is truth,” Todd responded. “No, no,... Read More Read More - [To Turn Back A Straight Line](https://everyangel.org/to-turn-back-a-straight-line/): THE STRAIGHT LINE IS GODLESS AND IMMORAL  –Friedensreich Hundertwasser Architect and artist December 15, 1928 – February 19, 2000 The logic freaks have had it their way for over 2000 years and all they have to offer now is more of the same: more technology,   more rationality,     more surveillance,       more consumption,... Read More Read More - [Requiem For John McCain](https://everyangel.org/requiem-for-john-mccain/): As we all know by now, John McCain died earlier today (Saturday). This was not a surprise. In recent days we knew that the end of his life was nearing. When Senator McCain ran for president I did not vote for him. I was cheering on the young Senator from Illinois whose father was... Read More Read More - [Never Thought The Day Would Come](https://everyangel.org/never-thought-the-day-would-come/): “Time goes slowly, but time can do so much….,” according to the lyric of the Righteous Brothers anthem Unchained Melody.  We are bound to time.  When there’s plenty of time ahead of us–we  seldom reflect upon times passage.  At least that is how I’ve lived my life. Several weeks ago, I decided not to... Read More Read More - [My Opinion On Opinions](https://everyangel.org/my-opinion-on-opinions/): Doxa (ancient Greek; from verb dokein, “to appear”, “to seem”, “to think” and “to accept”) is a Greek word meaning common belief or popular opinion. We have opinions on everything that we see or that affects us, to the extent the human sciences can be seen as a vast doxology. —but things themselves are... Read More Read More - [Air Show](https://everyangel.org/air-show/): Last weekend the Chicago Airshow was held at the lake front.  I did not attend.  Not that I do not enjoy airshows.  I’ve attended my share in the past.  One of my enduring memories was the privilege of viewing a mock dogfight between a Japanese Zero and the American P-38.  A low altitude twisting... Read More Read More - [Even Gravity...](https://everyangel.org/even-gravity/): What is called “perception” is no longer a state of affairs but a state of the body as induced by another body, and “affection” is the passage of this state to another state as increase or decrease of potential-power through the action of other bodies. Nothing is passive, but everything is interaction, even gravity……... Read More Read More - [Play](https://everyangel.org/play/): SPIRALLING OUT I look for the way things will turn spiralling out from a center… Life is about invention, not survival. We are here to create, not to defend. In a creative playful world, all of us are, all the time, poets. Even the most analytic science, the most careful construction of models, is... Read More Read More - [Best Years Come And Gone](https://everyangel.org/best-years-come-and-gone/): Rain today.  I am grateful for the rain.  It has been six weeks with very little rain. Last night I exchanged emails with a friend who expressed hatred for a group of people.  i failed to persuade him that expressing hatred is unjustified as no individual has responsibility for who their parents happen to... Read More Read More - [Laughter And Nietzsche](https://everyangel.org/laughter-and-nietzsche/): I’ve never thought of Nietzsche as having a good joke.  Granted he was a good writer.  If he were alive I do not think he’d be hired to write comedy skits for Saturday Night Live.  His biting sardonic wit is an acquired taste. Yesterday I read for a few minutes from one of my... Read More Read More - [My God! What Have I Done?](https://everyangel.org/my-god-what-have-i-done/): Exhausted and don’t know why.  Well not exactly why, though I have some ideas about the why of it all.  Not the first time I’ve felt this way.  The feeling will pass as do all emotional states, which are the minds weather.  No need to worry about the weather. So, I am content to... Read More Read More - [Thoughts About Thinking](https://everyangel.org/thoughts-about-thinking/): What is involved when I think, when you think? What does one do when one thinks? Is it possible to remember when you were a child, just learning speak words, asking and learning the names of things, …tricycle, dog, ball? (1) There is a triple root of acts of transcendence (thought) through which the... Read More Read More - [Aretha Franklin 1942-2018](https://everyangel.org/aretha-franklin-1942-2018/): When an artist dies, I think a piece of the world breaks off and falls away.  Aretha Franklin was a “world maker.” Franklin recorded 112 charted singles on Billboard, including 77 Hot 100 entries, 17 top-ten pop singles, 100 R&B entries and 20 number-one R&B singles, becoming the most charted female artist in the... Read More Read More - [Friends At Table](https://everyangel.org/friends-at-table/): Concepts are Vagabond A concept is fuzzy or vague not because it lacks an outline but because it is a vagabond, non-discursive, moving about on a plane of immanence. ….it is the event as pure sense that immediately runs through the components. It has no number…for counting things that display its properties, but a... Read More Read More - [Metastasis](https://everyangel.org/metastasis/): Metastasis Metastasis is a pathogenic agent’s spread from an initial or primary site to a different or secondary site within the host’s body; it is typically spoken of as such spread by a cancerous tumor. The newly pathological sites, then, are metastases. Wikipedia *** This morning I felt numb, unable to write in the... Read More Read More - [Deep Water](https://everyangel.org/deep-water/): Today is to be a “normal” day at the office.  Pay no attention that my mind seems to be in molasses, barely able to rise above idle.  Perhaps that will improve as the day progresses. I struggled to read and understand the text in this mornings reading of the comparison between philosophy and science. ... Read More Read More - [The Passage Of Time](https://everyangel.org/the-passage-of-time/): Got up at 5:30AM and by 6AM I was climbing into the cab of the big blue Volvo semi.  I spent the weekend with Aunt Clara and her family, honored to be included by marriage.  The occasion was a celebration of her 90th birthday.  A family member, David operates a trucking business and kindly... Read More Read More - [The Road That I Must Travel](https://everyangel.org/the-road-that-i-must-travel/): Rough day yesterday.  I witnessed an email exchange between friends which came to a painful conclusion.  I was a participant, and played a part in the conclusion which at this juncture could entail the end of a relationship with an individual.  I do not know anyone who would abide the disparagement of being judged... Read More Read More - [On The Road](https://everyangel.org/on-the-road/): Nothing much to say this morning.  I am on the road to Eagle River Wisconsin.  Stayed in Baraboo last night.  Baraboo is one of our favorite little Wisconsin towns.  Outside of the big cities such as Madison and Milwaukee the economy is closely related to Nature.  The quality of travel experience is much enhanced... Read More Read More - [Miscellaneous Quotations For Friday](https://everyangel.org/miscellaneous-quotations-for-friday/): These lines, the first four from What Is Philosophy by Deleuze and Guattari, and the last from this mornings front page of the New York Times have weighed on my mind.  These are snapshots, evidence of a state of things that will continue to move, to change inexorably according to contingent factors which by... Read More Read More - [Why But To Remember](https://everyangel.org/why-but-to-remember/): Why do I keep attending car shows?  Another one was held in Mundelein late in the day yesterday, Park on Park.  This time my wife agreed to go with me.  I always enjoy her company.  Usually I go alone with camera in hand. I am drawn to a car show for the same reason... Read More Read More - [Ways To Die Young](https://everyangel.org/ways-to-die-young/): Another day of fiery destruction in California.  When Nature is shoved off balance by the heat sink of increased atmospheric carbon loading, the surface of the land warms without recovery from regular and gentle rains,–then the dry vegetation burns.  How many days have the weary fire fighters manned their fire lines while airborne tankers... Read More Read More - [After A Little Rain](https://everyangel.org/after-a-little-rain/): Another early morning at Starbucks, Mundelein.  By habit I begin my day here to read and to write.  The atmosphere is congenial for focus upon the state of my mind and of the world.  Contemporary music in the background, plaintive, a male voice celebrating/mourning the state of our lives as mortal. A friendly barista... Read More Read More - [That's The Law](https://everyangel.org/thats-the-law/): I am a native born North Carolinian.  I’ve lived in Illinois for over forty years.  When asked by anyone if I miss my home state, my answer usually is, “Its a good place to be from.”  I grew up in North Carolina, and have fond memories of my teachers, of the pine tree forests... Read More Read More - [Summer](https://everyangel.org/summer/): Visited Kraklauer Creek Park again a few days ago.  In fact my first visit on July 28th was followed by another on August 5th.  There was much to take in along this waterway that is the centerpiece for Kraklauer Park.  Wildflowers are featured in a colorful spectacle on the banks of this little creek.... Read More Read More - [After The Bubble](https://everyangel.org/after-the-bubble/): Ideas associated with Christianity……. The idea that reciprocal pity is a sufficient basis for political association, that there is something wrong with imprisonment without trial, Or the use of war prisoners as slaves, Or public executions, Or torture to extract confessions, Or the use of hostages, Or the deportation of whole populations…. Were once... Read More Read More - [A Stratigraphic Order](https://everyangel.org/a-stratagraphic-order/): A recurring topic among those of us interested in (seized by) philosophy is what is philosophy.  What does this “thinking about thinking” mean?  In this passage from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s book, What Is Philosophy? a description of philosophy includes the concept of time dilation.  Time is compressed (accelerated) or expanded, (slowed down). ... Read More Read More - [Relativity Redux](https://everyangel.org/relativity-redux/): I want to say more about the principle/law of special relativity.  Special Relativity is analogous to gravity.  For every living being on the earth, the pull toward the center always must be figured into one’s day to day living. When hiking in the Cascades in an Oregon forest, do not venture too close to... Read More Read More - [Relativity](https://everyangel.org/relativity/): Last night’s discussion on Relativity Theory was rousing and wide ranging.  It is remarkable that a group of fourteen adults, each with an individual history, different levels and types of education, and widely varied interests– would have the ability to discuss Einstein’s great work, with substantial understanding.  It is also remarkable that differences in... Read More Read More - [Scone Love](https://everyangel.org/scone-love/): What !  I don’t believe it.  The lyric is not scone love?  Who doesn’t love a scone?  A scone is just the right portion for a bite sized treat, lightly frosted crust, flaky texture, with just enough of a carb bump to fix low blood sugar. For months and months I have privately enjoyed... Read More Read More - [Cormorant](https://everyangel.org/cormorant/): Sunday was a day of adventure.  An adventure happens when one’s plans, actions and experiences which you counted on are thwarted by circumstances.  We planned to visit the Morton Arboretum to take in the troll display.  The Arboretum has a number of giant trolls constructed of wood placed throughout the grounds. The entrance to... Read More Read More - [Goats And Politicians](https://everyangel.org/goats-and-politicians/): I remember a visit to a county fair.  It happened when I was fourteen or fifteen.  The occasion was memorable because I was not accompanied by my parents.  I recall the glitter of the midway lights in the dark night, the aroma of cotton candy, and candied apples.  Also the smell of sawdust, and... Read More Read More - [Sweet Red Angel](https://everyangel.org/sweet-red-angel/): I stopped in at the Roadster Shop several days ago with my camera.  As usual I asked and was given permission to shoot a few photos of their work which is displayed on the showroom lobby of the business.  There were a number of interesting, truly amazing works of automotive art on display, but only... Read More Read More - [To Roll The Dice Just One More Time](https://everyangel.org/to-roll-the-dice-just-one-more-time/): A tale about the human condition is conveyed by the rock anthem: Don’t Stop Belevin’ by Journey.  The tune was included in the play list that we enjoyed while having dinner yesterday.  I’ve listened to this song innumerable times.  Sometimes I feel tears, as something deep within is touched by the slow building melody,... Read More Read More - [Bullying, Cruelty, And Tyranny](https://everyangel.org/bullying-cruelty-and-tyranny/): Exchanged emails with a friend on the related terms: bullying, cruelty, and tyranny.  Is not the recognition of this type of behavior a matter of skill?  One learns by experience, and by exposure to literature, poetry, and story telling,–empathy.  Empathy is learned.  It is the profound appreciation of our capacity for suffering.  The capacity... Read More Read More - [Thoughts Of A Dry Brain In A Dry Season](https://everyangel.org/thoughts-of-a-dry-brain-in-a-dry-season/): Days end yesterday I read the poem Gerontion by T. S. Eliot. That was my second reading of the poem this week.  I was taken by Eliot’s words.  Scholarly analysts say Gerontion is one of his most enigmatic works.  There is much enigma in all of Eliot’s poems. Yesterday afternoon I heard that Sergio... Read More Read More - [Imagination](https://everyangel.org/imagination/): Imagination is the chief instrument of the good… art is more moral than moralities. For the latter either are, or tend to become, consecrations of the status quo… The moral prophets of humanity have always been poets even though they always spoke in free verse or by parable. —John Dewey Art as Experience (New... Read More Read More - [Poetry and Revolution](https://everyangel.org/poetry-and-revolution/): A liberal society is one whose ideals can be fulfilled by persuasion rather than by force, by reform than by revolution. by the free and open encounters of present linguistic and other practices with suggestions for new practices. ….an ideal liberal society is one which has no other purpose except freedom, no goal except... Read More Read More - [If I Can't Get Clean](https://everyangel.org/if-i-cant-get-clean/): The culture of liberalism should be one which was enlightened, secular, through and through. It would be one in which no trace of divinity remained, either in the form of a divinized world or of a divinized self. Such a culture would have no room for the notion that there are nonhuman forces to... Read More Read More - [Becoming Human](https://everyangel.org/becoming-human/): By seeing every human being as consciously or unconsciously acting out an idiosyncratic fantasy, we can see the distinctively human, as opposed to the animal portion of each human life as the use for symbolic purposes of every particular person, object, situation, event, and word encountered in later life. This process amounts to redescribing... Read More Read More - [Solilquy Of Hate](https://everyangel.org/solilquy-of-hate/): SEDUCED BY HATE, INDIAN POLITICIAN EMBRACES A LYNCH MOB By Jeffrey Gettleman and Hari Kumar July 20, 2018 HAZARIBAGH, India — Jayant Sinha is a Celtics fan. He graduated from Harvard. He worked for McKinsey. Born and raised in India but minted in the United States, he found wealth and success in the Boston... Read More Read More - [Vacations Greatest Benefit](https://everyangel.org/vacations-greatest-benefit/): Perhaps you will agree that a vacation time away permits one some different choices about the foci of one’s attention.  In our ordinary lives, the “blind impress” of accrued circumstances can be oppressive.  We feel the need to “get away” to a destination affording different scenery, perhaps time for more reading, fewer phone calls,... Read More Read More - [Looking Back](https://everyangel.org/looking-back/): What a great week of vacation!  A friend expressed surprise that so many of us stayed happily together in a big house for seven days.  Actually we had plenty of room, there were many things to do, and we like being together.  We had some wonderful meals together, lots of good conversation, and three... Read More Read More - [Another Day By The Lake](https://everyangel.org/another-day-by-the-lake/): A few photographs capture the memory of a day of being out and about in the wine country of Michigan.  Everyone gets to be a child again while on vacation.  We will not forget the time spent at Bumbelberry Acres picking blueberrys, and the visit to the petting zoo.  We heard the story of... Read More Read More - [Indians ?](https://everyangel.org/indians/): It is Sunday morning.  The state of Michigan is considered to be traditionally religious with many houses of worship.  Grand Rapids is the location of Calvin College, a Christian Reformed liberal arts school founded in 1876.  Zondervan publishing, one of the largest and well-respected Christian publishing houses is also in Grand Rapids.  Grand Rapids... Read More Read More - [Like The Old Maple](https://everyangel.org/like-the-old-maple/): Thinking only begins at the point where we have come to know that Reason, glorified for centuries, is the most obstinate adversary of thinking. —Martin Heidegger Gary kindly shared a quote that prompted him to consider afresh his conception of Reason.  The quotation had the same effect upon me.  And as a bonus, Gary... Read More Read More - [A Day At The Lake](https://everyangel.org/a-day-at-the-lake/):   A great body of water is compelling.  When I was a kid family vacation involved spending a few days at Carolina Beach.  The car trip to the seaside always involved mounting excitement the closer our destination.  I gazed intently from the side window straining for a first glimpse of the ocean.  That first... Read More Read More - [Wildflowers And A Ruined Stairway](https://everyangel.org/wildflowers-and-a-ruined-stairway/): I checked the map to learn that I am in Hagar Michigan, just a bit south of Benton Harbor.  Shortly after arriving at our rental house we walked down the road, then through the woods, taking the wooden stairway down through the ravine to the beach of sand at the waters edge.  Lake Michigan... Read More Read More - [Philosophy And Opinion](https://everyangel.org/philosophy-and-opinion/): Chaos is not the enemy.  It is a tempting jump to this conclusion.  Is it not the case that the disorganized, and even threatening elements of experience provide material for making a habitat of mind?  I think so.  Organization arises from the mind, and especially from the give and take of shared minds with... Read More Read More - [Ironical Soliloquy Bird](https://everyangel.org/ironical-soliloquy-bird/): These photos were taken at the Rivera Boat House at Lake Geneva this past Sunday afternoon.  Lake Geneva on a Sunday afternoon is close enough to Paradise as far as I am concerned.  The lake stretches to the horizon, the surface sparkling in the sun, a platter of diamonds.  We walked out on the... Read More Read More - [On Happiness](https://everyangel.org/on-happiness/): Each of us desired to be happy, once.  As the years pass many give up the quest and the hope of happiness.  Happiness, the contentment of well-being diminishes as time takes its toll.  It’s not a matter of money.  Financial resources while necessary to happiness are not sufficient.  The most important aspects of happiness... Read More Read More - [Art And Philosophy](https://everyangel.org/art-and-philosophy/): This image was received from a friend.  The quality of this photograph is obvious.  I have never been to Yellowstone.  This photo transports me emotionally to that landscape, its loneliness, to the emergence of life amidst the rocky crag.  To my mind the image is titled, “One Tree Hill.” An image of a universe….... Read More Read More - [Philosophy Is](https://everyangel.org/philosophy-is/): Philosophy is becoming, not history; it is the coexistence of planes, not the succession of systems. We will say that the plane of immanence is, at the same time, that which must be thought and that which cannot be thought. It is the nonthought within thought. …It is the most intimate within thought and... Read More Read More - [Worlds Under Construction](https://everyangel.org/worlds-under-construction/): The year was 1965. I was a member of an Eagle Scout Troop sponsored by Monsanto. Our meetings typically were in the lab where our scoutmaster worked at the Monsanto Research Triangle facility. I’ve never forgotten the evening. I remember the whine of the power supply and capacitors powering up. Then we heard the... Read More Read More - [Independence Day Parade Images](https://everyangel.org/independence-day-parade-images/): Another Independence Day Parade on Main Street of Wheaton Illinois is a memory.  These are a few of the photos that remind me of how diverse and unique is the American experience.  The course of historical events has brought us to this point in time and place.  So, join me curbside to view the... Read More Read More - [Silence And Intractability](https://everyangel.org/silence-and-intractability/): ….it gets worse with Christian philosophy. the positing of immanence remains pure philosophical instituting, but at the same time it is tolerated only in very small doses; it is strictly controlled and enframed by the demands of an emanative and, above all, creative transcendence. Putting their work and sometimes their lives at risk, all... Read More Read More - [Summerfest Once Again](https://everyangel.org/summerfest-once-again/): Summerfest in Milwaukee is the best music festival that I’ve attended.  Music and Nature are our reliable sources for life and renewal.  Summerfest on the Milwaukee lakefront is the apotheosis of devotion for those of us who love music, who find in music the rhythm of life itself. I am informed that this is the... Read More Read More - [Danger Ahead](https://everyangel.org/danger-ahead/): The non-philosophical is perhaps closer to the heart of philosophy than philosophy itself, and this means that philosophy cannot be content to be understood only philosophically or conceptually, but is addressed essentially to non-philosophers as well. Both the creation of concepts and the instituting of a plane of immanence are required, like two wings... Read More Read More - [A Day In Chicago](https://everyangel.org/a-day-in-chicago/): I seldom travel into Chicago.  As years have passed, I have less reason to visit the city.  In the past we’d go frequently to experience the sights, the galleries along Superior, the sensation of the Mag Mile, and the festivals at Grant Park.  For some of those years Laura worked in the city.  Chicago... Read More Read More - [Throwing Dice](https://everyangel.org/throwing-dice/): Like many who I have spoken with since the presidential election of November of 2016, I remain puzzled and dismayed that this ignorant bombastic individual received enough votes to win The White House for four years.  The media rationale as well as “reasons” given by acquaintances for supporting Trump seem surreal, like ideas transmitted... Read More Read More - [Gonna Leave You Here](https://everyangel.org/gonna-leave-you-here/): Heard this tune played on the radio yesterday,  I’ve heard it many times before.  This time it rocked me, “knocked me out”.  That’s an expression of the impact of a tune and lyric on my sense of space and time.  Music can do that.  It’s a matter of serendipity of timing: the right time... Read More Read More - [The Day Before Yesterday](https://everyangel.org/the-day-before-yesterday/): The day before yesterday it rained hard, really hard.  In our neighborhood over two inches fell within an hour,  In the backyard, the green grass appeared faint and then disappeared under the surface of brown water.  At the side of our house, a creek flowed, threatening to become a river.  Water covering our and... Read More Read More - [The Border Between Good And Evil](https://everyangel.org/the-border-between-good-and-evil/): Recently I was troubled by an email exchange with a friend.  He supported the removal of children from parents seeking asylum at our southern border.  I called it kidnapping, and insisted such acts were atrocities.  He disagreed. His argument was that these parents were neer-do-wells intent on defrauding our government.  Therefore they deserve to... Read More Read More - [Fear Of Drowning](https://everyangel.org/fear-of-drowning/): Tuesday morning 8AM at Starbucks. Outside the rain Is falling in a dense curtain of water. Thunder rolls. If this keeps up there is going to be flooding. Usually a downpour abates in a few minutes. Sometimes it does not. I find myself thinking in a parallel fashion about the state of our society,... Read More Read More - [A Poet Has Died](https://everyangel.org/a-poet-has-died/): One of the first news items of the day was that Donald Hall has passed.  The poet died on Saturday at his home in New Hampshire.  He will be missed by many.  If you are interested here is the NY Times ARTICLE on his life and work. A poem by Donald Hall: Affirmation To... Read More Read More - [Tied With A Silver Chain](https://everyangel.org/tied-with-a-silver-chain/): Yesterday I spent the afternoon sorting through boxes of archived files, –class notes from college and grad school, articles on business that I had saved for a second reading that never happened, and family related materials. It was an archeological dig into the past of selves that became the person that I now am.... Read More Read More - [If There Were A Place...](https://everyangel.org/if-there-were-a-place/): This morning I received a short, two lines of email from a friend. He commented that he was “somewhat troubled by the Presidents apparent lack of humility.” I composed a brief reply which I sent to him privately without including the rest of the group of recipients. Each of us is an individual caught... Read More Read More - [For A Song In A Time Of Dissonance](https://everyangel.org/for-a-song-in-a-time-of-dissonance/): Aesthetics is the science dedicated to the study of the contact between the derma (the skin, the sensitive surface of our body-mind) and different chemical, physical, electromagnetic, electronic, and informational flows. ….the universe is a continuum of diverse and interrelated entities in bodily contact with each other. It is both an organic and inorganic... Read More Read More - [On Solidarity](https://everyangel.org/on-solidarity/): Social solidarity is not an ethical or ideological value: It depends on the continuousness of the relation between individuals in time and in space. The material foundation of solidarity is the perception of the continuation of the body in the body, and the immediate understanding of my interest and your interest. —Franco “Bifo” Berardi... Read More Read More - [Hangover](https://everyangel.org/hangover/): I am sure that you’ve had one.  Awaking with the agenda of a new day on your mind, and just feeling out of sorts, like there is a “disturbance in the force” of your world.  That is how it was for me this morning as I found a gap in traffic on Midlothian road. ... Read More Read More - [If I Had Only Known](https://everyangel.org/if-i-had-only-known/): Now I get it.  With everyone else I was agitated, on edge at the thought that our President would confront the dictator of North Korea with an ill-considered demand that he immediately give up his nukes.  No doubt that would have ended badly for everyone, especially for those in the area, South Korea and... Read More Read More - [Then And Now](https://everyangel.org/then-and-now/): Enterprises are no longer linked to a territory and the work process is no longer based on a community of workers, living together in a factory day after day, but instead takes the form of an ever-changing recombination of time fragments connected in the global network. Cognitive workers do not meet in the same... Read More Read More - [Liquidating the Planet](https://everyangel.org/liquidating-the-planet/): The financial class that dominates the contemporary scene has neither attachments to territory nor to material production, because its power and wealth are founded on the total abstraction of a digitally multiplied finance. This digital-financial hyper-abstraction is liquidating both the living body of the planet and the social body. —-Franco “Bifo” Berardi excerpt The... Read More Read More - [Thinking About 1977](https://everyangel.org/thinking-about-1977/): 1977 is the year when Charlie Chaplin dies. The death of that man, in my perception, represents the end of the possibility of a gentle modernity, the end of the perception of time as a contradictory, controversial place where different viewpoints can meet, conflict, and then find progressive agreement. Charlie Chaplin is the last... Read More Read More - [Summer Car Show](https://everyangel.org/summer-car-show-2/): Park on Park is the name of the Mundelein car show that is held on the 2nd Wednesday evening of the summer months.  Street rods, collectible cars of all descriptions are parked on and around Park Avenue for the admiration of gear heads like myself.  As I grow older with every visit to a... Read More Read More - [Yummy Cherries](https://everyangel.org/yummy-cherries/): Can you think of anything more yummy than a bowl of cherries?  Maybe it has been a very long time since you’ve tasted fresh cherries in springtime.  When we become adult we tend not to indulge ourselves in such ordinary, and natural experiences of joy.  Our minds are seduced by things more abstract, and... Read More Read More - [To Tune Into A Shared Vibration](https://everyangel.org/to-tune-into-a-shared-vibration/): The center cannot hold, and things have fallen apart, detached from their meaning. The revelation of the century is the devastating spiral of abstraction and nihilism; abstraction of work from activity, abstraction of goods from usefulness, abstraction of time from sensuousness. Abstraction has detached the epidermis of language from the flesh of the linguistic... Read More Read More - [No Sale](https://everyangel.org/no-sale/): Yesterday, we went to Ninth Street to visit the Regulator Book Shop.  It is a small independent place, offering a collection of books appealing to the literary community anchored by Duke University.  Many of the older homes in the area have been re-purposed for small business use.  The big old tobacco warehouse in the... Read More Read More - [Always Selling](https://everyangel.org/always-selling/): Another day in North Carolina.  I cannot escape the memories that attend a visit to the Durham area.  I grew up in Bragtown just off of Roxboro Road a few minutes from this Holiday Inn. We walked down main street last night and marveled at the massive transformation underway in the old downtown area.... Read More Read More - [Winter In The Southland](https://everyangel.org/winter-in-the-southland/): Arriving yesterday in Raleigh-Durham we deplaned into seventy-five degree sunny weather.  Today will be the same.  It is February the 23, and this is winter?  I know that weather is not climate.  Climate is what we call those more or less stable patterns governed by the jet stream, ocean currents, and probably much else... Read More Read More - [Nothing Held In Place](https://everyangel.org/nothing-held-in-place/): For human life to continue on the hillside (or anywhere else) through successive generations requires good use, good work, all along.  For in any agricultural place that will waste and erode–and all will–bad work will not permit “muddling through”; sooner or later it ends human life. For good work to last, to outlast the... Read More Read More - [Where There's A Whip](https://everyangel.org/where-theres-a-whip/): In the Lord of the Rings story by JRR Tolkien, the cartoon version has a scene of orc infantry being marched to war.  While supervised by an officer wielding a whip they sing, “Don’t want to go to war today,–but where there’s a whip there is a way.” The scene came to mind as... Read More Read More - [Raining In My Heart](https://everyangel.org/raining-in-my-heart/): It is raining today.  It is also “raining” in Parkland Florida where the funerals continue for the 17 killed in the latest school shooting.  No one can grieve for anyone else.  Grief is solitary work.  No one can imagine the sorrow of a parent who feels the loneliness of having a child murdered.  So... Read More Read More - [Persons](https://everyangel.org/persons/): Persons are joined to families families to communities, etc., by disciplines that must be deliberately made, remembered, taught, learned, and practiced. –excerpt Standing by Words by Wendell Berry - [Respite](https://everyangel.org/respite/): Sunday, in the Judeo-Christian tradition is the “day of rest.”  That still means generally that the seventh day of the week is purposed for rest and refreshment.  I tend to seek a change in my normal daily routine, enjoy spending time out of doors, and in conversation with my wife.  Both of us are... Read More Read More - [What the F__k Are We Going To Do?](https://everyangel.org/what-the-f__k-are-we-going-to-do/): Yeah, I know the title is out of character.  Those who know me recognize that I do not routinely use such language.  I would bet you a large sum of money that the family members of the 17 murdered at Florida’s Douglas High School are thinking and speaking in these terms.  Their grief is... Read More Read More - [Lost, Shy Dog](https://everyangel.org/lost-shy-dog/): Ran out of time this morning to post any thoughts.  Only had an hour, part of which was spent reading Standing by Words, by Wendell Berry, and part was spent chatting with Reno. Then off to my first work appointment of the day.  I was in a funk on a sunny Friday.  Felt like... Read More Read More - [Lent: Seventeen Shots](https://everyangel.org/lent-seventeen-shots/): I had an awful dream in the early morning hours.  I was with others swimming, enjoying a calm pond; the water was warm, I felt family and friends were close by.  In the distance a rickety old building stood on the shore of the pond.  The kid in me has always been curious, so... Read More Read More - [How To Do Philosophy In Two Sentences](https://everyangel.org/how-to-do-philosophy-in-two-sentences/): Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough, to choose what to pay attention to, and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. –excerpt, This is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion about Living... Read More Read More - [I Threw My Lantern](https://everyangel.org/i-threw-my-lantern/): Today is Fat Tuesday, tomorrow is Lent, a season of abstinence. I was not raised Catholic, but I understand the logic of deprivation as preparation for newness, the emergence of new life.  The truth is ancient, predating the Christian era.  That’s the dynamic of life, of reality, of Nature, and the arc of human... Read More Read More - [Not To Imagine Anything](https://everyangel.org/not-to-imagine-anything/): The narrower a man’s intellectual grasp, the more power he is able to grab in his country.  I tell you, Lieutenant, there is only one way to survive here.  And that is not to imagine anything.  A Russian who uses his imagination is done for.  I certainly never use mine.  My job is to... Read More Read More - [Immigrant](https://everyangel.org/immigrant/): Yesterday, I arrived at Starbucks at my customary time of 7AM.  The evening snowfall was ending and the roads were treacherous.  The parking lot was not plowed.  I was the only customer in sight.  Several staff had arrived and were preparing for the morning rush.  I offered to grab a snow shovel to clear... Read More Read More - [Flower Power](https://everyangel.org/flower-power/): For who has despised the day of small things? For they shall rejoice, and shall see the plumbline in the hand of Zerubbabel; these seven are the eyes of the LORD, which run to and fro through the whole earth. —Zechariah 4:10 I’ve not lost my mind.  I seldom quote verses of scripture.  In... Read More Read More - [And When I Die](https://everyangel.org/and-when-i-die/): I thought that I was through with the subject of “time.”  But no, the choice is not , was not mine.  “Time” is not through with me.  There is more that I must say. It is impossible to assess the meaning of time, because we are like fish; we humans swim in the sea... Read More Read More - [Words Like A Hammer](https://everyangel.org/words-like-a-hammer/): Return by Gala Mukomolova   There are poets with history and poets without history, Tsvetsaeva claimed living through the ruin of Russia. Karina says disavow every time I see her. We, the daughters between countries, wear our mean mothers like scarves around our necks. Every visit, mine recounts all the wrongs done against her... Read More Read More - [Lights Out!](https://everyangel.org/lights-out/): The snow lies deep, parking lots remain unplowed.  The world has not ended in ice. Not yet. Not today. I am comforted by my customary warm cup of coffee with the green goddess Starbucks logo. Many worship at the altar of the green goddess. There are far worse religious obsessions.  With this one, what... Read More Read More - [Awake In The Night](https://everyangel.org/awake-in-the-night/): Can I be honest with you, Mr. Wind-Up Bird? I mean really, really, honest? Sometimes I get sooo scared! I’ll wake up in the middle of the night all alone, hundreds of miles away from anybody, and it’s pitch dark, and I have absolutely no idea what’s going to happen to me in the... Read More Read More - [Playing With Time](https://everyangel.org/playing-with-time/): All that really belongs to us is time; even he who has nothing else has that. —Balthasar Gracian So began our essay, Flavors of Time by Dean Buonomano.  We awaken to consciousness upon birth, a consciousness that increases with the mastery of motor skills and then of language.  Observe a child over the year... Read More Read More - [Cheating Time](https://everyangel.org/cheating-time/): I finished the essay on the subject of time. That’s my second read.  And I’ll likely read it again.  I’ve been intrigued with “time” for many years.  I cannot help but notice that a great deal of poetry happens to be verses that meditate upon the difference that times passage makes in human consciousness... Read More Read More - [On The Other Hand](https://everyangel.org/on-the-other-hand-2/): Twitter salvos continue unabated.  Talking points of both sides remain unchanged.  Trenches are dug deeper, bunker support timbers are laid in.  Phalanxes of lawyers prepare further assaults. All will die for honor and country, as the flag waves and the band plays on. The Superbowl is over and the Nation is late in its... Read More Read More - [Sunlight Without Shadow](https://everyangel.org/sunlight-without-shadow/): How do I say this?  On this Sunday afternoon the Superbowl spectacle is to be staged in Minneapolis.  I find it hard to care.  I am stuck back on groundhog day, February the 2nd. It was a sunny day, Punxsutawny Phil returned to his burrow and thus six more weeks of winter are in... Read More Read More - [Parenting Digression](https://everyangel.org/parenting-digression/): The link between excellence in parenting and a happy childhood is obvious.  There are not many excellent parents.  From my observation of families, and of my own experience a majority of us greet our newly born child as if we were Adam and Eve. I am sobered to acknowledge that most of us enter... Read More Read More - [There Is No Why](https://everyangel.org/there-is-no-why-2/): This morning I decided to sleep in, to get more rest.  Typically I arise at 6AM and am out the door 45 minutes later.  It is Saturday so why not “sleep in?”  The last hour or so of this morning’s rest were interrupted by troubled dreams. So much for getting more rest. I will... Read More Read More - [A World The Exact Opposite of Yours](https://everyangel.org/a-world-the-exact-opposite-of-yours/): “He said once I am the single greatest president in his lifetime, now he’s a young man, so it’s not that much,” Trump told Congressional Republicans at their annual retreat in West Virginia. And apparently it wasn’t enough that the 83-year-old from Utah said that he was the best president in his lifetime. “He... Read More Read More - [Excursus on Rock N Roll](https://everyangel.org/excursus-on-rock-n-roll/): First there was everything else that absolutely existed, and then there was rock and roll, circa 1950; named after a 1934 song by the Boswell sisters, popularized by Cleveland DJ Alan Freed, devolved into Rock N Roll of the mid 60s, music for teenagers, by 1968 expanding into ROCK—- all popular music with roots... Read More Read More - [State of the Union Sampling](https://everyangel.org/state-of-the-union-sampling/): As planned I met with friends Tuesday evening for philosophy discussion.  We considered the words of Seneca on the subject of friendship.  The subject was apropos in our own time of political gridlock, when words seem to make little difference.  Feeling is confused with thinking.  Feelings are shifting sand, nothing upon which to forge... Read More Read More - [A Lifeboat](https://everyangel.org/a-lifeboat/): It is Tuesday morning.  The sun rises gloriously.  The air is still and cold, about 13 degrees F.  The President will deliver his first State of the Union address tonight.  I will not be watching.  I plan to be with friends sampling Scotch and philosophizing about an essay by Seneca on friendship.  Friendship takes... Read More Read More - [Still Good Advice](https://everyangel.org/still-good-advice/): Dream not of Utopias but be content if the least thing go forward, and count the outcome of the thing at hand as a small thing. For who can alter another’s conviction? Failing to get a change of conviction, we merely get men pretending to be persuaded and chafing like slaves under coercion. —-Marcus... Read More Read More - [The Fragile Film of Order](https://everyangel.org/the-fragile-film-of-order/): What lessons can be taken away from the stories of the three Julio-Claudian emperors, the city-bred descendants of Augustus and Livia?  The language is that of Will Durant.  Durant writes “They began like Gabriel, and ended like Lucifer.” 1. When power devolves from being distributed between the legislative and the executive branch an unconstitutional... Read More Read More - [Caligula, Claudius, Nero](https://everyangel.org/caligula-claudius-nero/): Spent the last hour reading Will Durant’s account of three Roman emperors, The Story of Civilization vol. III.  The writing style is as lucid as the content of the story is disturbing, displaying aspects of able rule and extremes of cruelty.  Here are some excerpts. Gaius Caesar Germanicus (Caligula or Little Boot)  emperor AD... Read More Read More - [The Old Roman](https://everyangel.org/the-old-roman/): The old Roman distrusted individuality and genius. He had none of the charm, vivacity, the unstable fluency, of the Attic Greek. He admired character and will as the Greek admired freedom and intellect. Organization was his forte. He lacked imagination even to make a mythology of his own. He could with some effort love... Read More Read More - [Seneca](https://everyangel.org/seneca/): The first lesson of philosophy is that we cannot be wise about everything. We are fragments in infinity and moments in eternity; for such forked atoms to describe the universe, or the Supreme Being, must make the planets tremble with mirth. …One may prove out of his writings that he was a monotheist, a... Read More Read More - [Midweek Intermezzo](https://everyangel.org/midweek-intermezzo/): The Women’s March of protest and hope in Chicago provided much material for reflection.  Participation is a catalysis for personal change.  I know I am not the same person I was one week ago.  I am changed in ways that will be recognizable as my future unfolds. Everything is connected.  We separate aspects of... Read More Read More - [The Well](https://everyangel.org/the-well/): There was no way this well could be so deep. —excerpt The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami I will offer my thoughts on the Women’s March of 2018.  We are into the 2nd year of the Trump Administration.  This is the second Women’s March. The march of 2017 came the day after his... Read More Read More - [Freedom: A Raised Voice](https://everyangel.org/freedom-a-raised-voice/): A prominent feature of a mass demonstration are the signs.  Most are conceived, constructed, and hand-lettered/drawn by individuals.  The signs are an enduring appeal to anyone who is within viewing distance.  Signs are a persistent assertion of the objectives of the individuals who are compelled to raise their voices in the public square and... Read More Read More - [We The People](https://everyangel.org/we-the-people/): We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America….. Yesterday I... Read More Read More - [Aristotle Answers Gary and Peter](https://everyangel.org/aristotle-answers-gary-and-peter/): A group of us discussed Aristotle’s writing on excellence; the meaning and the process of creating an excellent/virtuous human being.  Aristotle asserts a mode of human existence that involves excellence of character, and excellence of action.  It is possible to make something of one’s self, to use the current manner of speaking. The short... Read More Read More - [Life On The Island](https://everyangel.org/life-on-the-island/): They are trying again, trying to avoid a partial government shutdown by Friday and  trying to prevent 700,000 non-citizen Americans, resident here since infancy, from being exiled to some strange country where they neither speak the language nor have means for survival.  They are trying to refund the Children’s Health Insurance Program. The well... Read More Read More - [The Pervert](https://everyangel.org/the-pervert/): The pervert claims direct access to some figure of the big Other (from God or history to the desire of his partner), so that, dispelling all the ambiguity of language, he is able to act directly as the instrument of the Other’s will. In this sense, both Osama bin Laden and President Bush, although... Read More Read More - [What Is Wrong With Us?](https://everyangel.org/what-is-wrong-with-us/): The controversy rolls on in reference to the President’s profane characterization of the inhabitants of Haiti and of the African nations.  Today when questioned the Secretary of DHS Kristen Nielsen said that she did not hear the vulgar language that others heard the President say.  She was in the room.  All she heard was... Read More Read More - [Happiness](https://everyangel.org/happiness/): It is snowing outside.  The streets are hazardous for travel.  Hawaii is recovering from a false alarm of a ballistic missile attack.  Our President is tweeting madly to deflect the response to his comments characterizing Africa and Haiti as “shit-hole” countries.  Individuals who happened to be in proximity to him when he made the... Read More Read More - [Why I Read](https://everyangel.org/why-i-read/): I’ve been looking at the box of books on my “to read” list.  I buy books, one or even two or three at a time. One book leads to another and another.  This has been the story of my life for many years.  I have subjects of interest that I’ve revisited over and over,... Read More Read More - [A Thread Running Through It](https://everyangel.org/a-thread-running-through-it/): The sun shines with morning brilliance.  Deep winter reigns over the landscape with close to zero temps at 9AM.  The end table of Starbucks seating area is ideal for surveying the hubbub of coming and going, conversations between pairs of individuals at single tables, to the long table at the far end of the... Read More Read More - [Rain in Our Hearts](https://everyangel.org/rain-in-our-hearts/): Our grand daughter was laid to rest day before yesterday.  She passed three weeks before she was due to be born.  There is a cause which we most certainly will never know.  There is no reason that she died.  She was loved intensely and nothing was left undone to prepare for her coming into... Read More Read More - [Melancholy](https://everyangel.org/melancholy/): Here I am twelve hours later at Starbucks, 4PM.  I awakened at 4AM giving up on the endeavor of normal sleep, acceding to my restlessness.  I got up, and read for a while; then prepared for a day of work. Was it the late evening cup of caffeinated coffee?  Maybe the excitement of our... Read More Read More - [A Well Without Water](https://everyangel.org/a-well-without-water/): A well without water.  A bird that can’t fly.  An alley with no exit.  And— —excerpt from The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami   - [Terrifying Excess](https://everyangel.org/terrifying-excess/): I considered watching the playoff game between the Georgia Bulldogs and Alabama’s Crimson Tide, but changed my mind after viewing for a few seconds the President striding across the field flanked by young men in military uniform.  I had forgotten.  A nationally televised playoff game is not so much a sporting event but a... Read More Read More - [Weightlessness](https://everyangel.org/weightlessness/): We’ve got gluts of information but are dizzy for lack of a norm. The norms of capitalism, friendship, and religion: everything is so provisional, situational, optional, such a matter of lifestyle choice that the very word “norm” is likely to victimize somebody. Our magnetic field is dislocated; gravity itself seems weakened. But weightlessness is... Read More Read More - [Che Vuoi? Part II](https://everyangel.org/che-vuoi-part-ii/): I have friends who believe that strict adherence to a strict interpretation of the US Constitution is all that is needed to fix what is wrong with our society.  I resist that position on many accounts.  A visceral scream rises within my psyche at this proposal.  That notion is the analogue of the Biblical... Read More Read More - [King of Snow](https://everyangel.org/king-of-snow/): Recently I had a brief exchange of views with a friend who is a Trump supporter.  Our conversation exchange of a few text lines concerned the tale of an old dog that habitually chases vehicles.  The conundrum arises when the dog happens to catch, and somehow latches onto a vehicle.  It immediately realizes that... Read More Read More - [Greeks Bearing Gifts](https://everyangel.org/greeks-bearing-gifts/): Language is a gift as dangerous to humanity as the horse was to the Trojans: it offers itself to our use free of charge, but once we accept it, it colonizes us. The symbolic order emerges from a gift, an offering, that marks its content as neutral in order to pose as a gift:... Read More Read More - [Sadness](https://everyangel.org/sadness/): Wednesday is another gray day.  It is somewhat warmer, 18 degrees. It is snowing outside.  A giant nor’easter is hammering the east coast today with wind, freezing rain and ice from Florida to the Carolinas.  The meteorologists are warning of up to six inches of snow into New England.  Climate change, what climate change…..?... Read More Read More - [Reflections](https://everyangel.org/reflections/): Reflection for a new year We mistake what is manageable for a catastrophe; we despair of ourselves too soon; we alienate others by overreacting; we don’t notice and appreciate what there is still to be grateful for; we forget we’re going to die and that a lot of today’s headache will soon be forgotten.... Read More Read More - [To Laura on New Years Day](https://everyangel.org/to-laura-on-new-years-day/): It is unusual for me to leave you behind for any reason.  When I crossed the Ohio River on the new toll bridge leaving Louisville, I felt deeply why I needed to leave you behind.  For the first time I felt our family; how substantial, how strong it has become.  We grieved for our... Read More Read More - [New Years Day](https://everyangel.org/new-years-day/): A friend observed with chagrin that I was too pessimistic in outlook.  I was tempted to compose a detailed justification.  The inclination for a pointless dialog passed.  This quotation sums it up for me: There are no pessimists; there are only realists and liars. —Paul Virilio - [Meditation](https://everyangel.org/meditation/): …………….in a time of empire collapse. “What need is there to weep over parts of life?  The whole of it calls for tears.” —-Seneca We get weepy and furious because our plans have failed and we strongly expected them not to. The task of philosophy is to disappoint us gently before life has a... Read More Read More - [Emptiness](https://everyangel.org/emptiness/): There is nothing more terrible, and more truthful than a mother weeping for her stillborn child.  Words absolutely fail to convey anything of the meaning of the experience.  One observes and understands nothing of what is happening. To weep is a natural, appropriate response to death, the passage of something or someone who is... Read More Read More - [Loss](https://everyangel.org/loss/): Friday morning at Baptist Health here in Louisville.  I didn’t expect to be here at this time.  Yesterday I received word that our daughter lost the baby that was due in another month.  The news came as a shock, a lightning strike on a clear day. The pregnancy had proceeded normally with regular checkups. ... Read More Read More - [Guest Post: The Human Predicament](https://everyangel.org/guest-post-the-human-predicament/): Anticipating the final days of 2017, and the beginning of the New Year of 2018 do we not all probe the future with our awareness?  We hope, and some pray for conditions of health, well-being, and comity between family members, friends, and indeed the nations of the world.  In 1970 I performatively enacted this... Read More Read More - [Thinking About War](https://everyangel.org/thinking-about-war/): I am interested in war.  My interest is a profound irony because by temperament I am “bookish” as some would say.   I like a good story, wherever I can find one.  I have plans to read Homer, and have purchased several translations.  I know it’s a good story. I viewed the film The Last... Read More Read More - [Che vuoi?](https://everyangel.org/che-vuoi/): What do you want? The thought came this morning while reading.  I am looking forward to the start of a new year of philosophical work with friends.  That seems to be the only way to understand what it is that I want from life…..  I have concluded that I need help, that working on... Read More Read More - [Christmas Snowfall](https://everyangel.org/christmas-snowfall/): A seasonal light blanket of snow fell yesterday.  The cold has arrived.  The seasons continue as they have before humans were around to mark the passage of time, or even to conceive of time. If a tree falls in the forest, and no one is around……  (A Christmas joke for Gary.) These photo’s were... Read More Read More - [Christmas Eve](https://everyangel.org/christmas-eve/): Not much to say this morning.  Arrived at the usual time at Starbucks.  Heather and Keith were behind the counter.  Christmas greetings were exchanged and my cup of coffee was served.  Tony had arrived before me and was seated with his laptop in place, already working.  There was no one else around.  Tony and... Read More Read More - [Christmas Story IV](https://everyangel.org/christmas-story-iv/): This is the hard part.  The final installment of my evaluation of Christmas is where I must make clear my measure of the Christ event.  Christmas entails more than the new-born infant, the manger scene so beloved by the religious oriented pitchman.  There’s profit in Christmas for the retailer as well as the religious... Read More Read More - [Christmas Story III](https://everyangel.org/christmas-story-iii/): I finished reading the Gospel of John, all twenty-one chapters.  Unlike the other three gospels this is not a copy and paste, vignettes of Jesus’s sayings and deeds.  This is an esoteric interpretation of Jesus.  He is human, but in a manner that defies the term ordinary.  He has insight, access to the deep... Read More Read More - [Middle Class Miracle](https://everyangel.org/middle-class-miracle/): The President and Republicans do a happy dance !! Deficit of (at least) 1.5 trillion is born in Washington. Do you hear what I hear? .   - [Interlude](https://everyangel.org/interlude/): We are enjoying a break in the late Fall chill in the Mid-West.  Today I worked outside for a few hours, enjoying the freedom of working without cumbersome gloves, wearing a light jacket.  The session of work was made all the more agreeable thanks to good company.  Scott and I ranged from discussing our... Read More Read More - [Christmas Story II](https://everyangel.org/christmas-story-ii/): The years have passed. I can no longer deceive myself.  The fantasy fades. I am not ageless.   Strangely I’m as awestruck by the hymn that opens the Gospel of John as when in my early 20s.  That has not changed. In the beginning was the Word.  And the Word was with God,  And... Read More Read More - [Christmas Story I](https://everyangel.org/christmas-story-i/): Today is December the 17th, and we approach Christmas.  I think about the Christmas story a lot this time of year.  I was raised an evangelical Christian believer in the South, so the text of the Bible is in my DNA.  I was marinated in the words of the Bible for the first 30... Read More Read More - [Ignorance Comes Into Its Own](https://everyangel.org/ignorance-comes-into-its-own/): There are things that cannot be taught in ten easy lessons; they take years of skull sweat. This is treason in an age when ignorance has come into its own and one man’s opinion is as good as another’s. The world is what it is— and doesn’t forgive ignorance. excerpt from Glory Road by... Read More Read More - [And Furthermore](https://everyangel.org/and-furthermore/): A man who is of “sound mind” keeps his inner madman under lock and key. —Paul Valery A man of sound mind would not be the individual who occupies the White House.  He takes delight in unleashing his inner madman at will on twitter.  And I would include a majority in congress and many... Read More Read More - [One More Thing Since It's Friday](https://everyangel.org/one-more-thing-since-its-friday/): We seekers after knowledge today, we godless ones and anti-metaphysicians, we too continue to take our flame from the fire ignited by a belief which is millennia old, that Christian belief, that God is the truth, that the truth is divine.  But what if this self same idea is becoming increasingly incredible, what if... Read More Read More - [Dumbstruck](https://everyangel.org/dumbstruck/): The front page of the NY Times had a graphic yesterday that rendered me speechless.  The President of the United States was pictured standing behind a lectern on the front porch of the White House.  The building was decorated in magnificent array of holiday green and illuminated splendor.  The president was speaking: “We want... Read More Read More - [Christmas and Loyal Opposition](https://everyangel.org/christmas-and-loyal-opposition/): The Brits have a term for members of Parliament who are on opposite sides of an issue.  Each calls the other his/her “loyal opponent.”  There is something profoundly civilized about the phrase.  Individuals may disagree, even passionately—but remain within the bounds of a shared humanity. Our philosophy discussion group has met weekly for many... Read More Read More - [Dawn](https://everyangel.org/dawn/): The sky to the East is glowing, cloudless.  There is a frigid gusting wind.  The temperature is around 15 degrees.  In an hour or so, I’ll be working outside, the first experience of this season of winter work.  Do I look forward to the experience?  No. But the work has to get done, and... Read More Read More - [Lake Geneva](https://everyangel.org/lake-geneva-2/): Lake Geneva has been a refuge for many years.  When life just gets “too much” a forty five minute drive on route 12 brings me to a lake that is consistently beautiful, season by season.  The town of Lake Geneva, is associated with the mansions built in the early 20th century by the wealthy/prestigious... Read More Read More - [Town Hall Meeting In Reflection](https://everyangel.org/town-hall-meeting-in-reflection/): For most of my adult life, I have endeavored to avoid politics.  The minutiae of administering institutions, the order of society has held no attraction for me.  However beginning with the first Iraq war, and then Afghanistan, I’ve felt compelled to pay attention. I’ve attempted to hire several veterans who were emotionally effected by... Read More Read More - [Political Meeting](https://everyangel.org/political-meeting/): Saturday morning and the first snow of winter lies as a diaphanus sheet upon the ground.  Technically winter begins with the solstice of December 21st.  No matter– cold, ice, hibernation, rest, reflection is the natural way, the rhythm dictated by Nature.  I welcome the coming season.  There is no clear-cut beginning and end to... Read More Read More - [The Tree](https://everyangel.org/the-tree/): A Christmas tree is the central feature of house decorations.  Many years ago we’d go to a local tree lot, carefully select the “perfect” tree, tie it to the roof of the car— home we’d go.  I did enjoy the scent of pine in the house, but decided that the labor-intensive ritual, that always... Read More Read More - [Tuesday in December](https://everyangel.org/tuesday-in-december/): The first Tuesday in the first month of winter is demonstrably cold. Patrons arrive at Starbucks with heavy coats, collars turned up.  The wind races from the north, some gusts at 30 mph under a gray lowering sky.  The temperature is in the low thirties.  This feels much colder since — until now, I’ve... Read More Read More - [I Look Inside Myself](https://everyangel.org/i-look-inside-myself/): Happened to hear this song on the radio.  Like a moth to a flame, the lyric and tune are mesmerizing.  I am not the only one so affected.  Written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards in 1966, the song became iconic of deeply rooted resistance to the Vietnam War.  Fifty one years later we... Read More Read More - [Wake up, Wake up](https://everyangel.org/wake-up-wake-up/): At Starbucks this morning just after six AM the horizon to the East was glowing.  To the West just above the tree line in the distance, was a big orange pumpkin moon.  It is rare that I have a cosmic sense that everything is in motion.  Yes, everything. We fear stasis.  Stasis is a... Read More Read More - [Tipping Point](https://everyangel.org/tipping-point/): The Senate passed a tax reform bill last night.  The vote was taken at a late hour, after a flurry of last minute amendments, which members certainly did not have the time to read or consider.  But no matter.  The bill became law along party lines.  Republicans all thumbs up, and Democratic Senators, thumbs... Read More Read More - [Resurrection](https://everyangel.org/resurrection/): What?  Surely the title is an anachronism, an absurd term in today’s world.  Why, yes it is quite absurd and that is the point.  Time’s arrow moves in one direction only.  According to the 2nd law of thermodynamics, energy seeks equilibrium.  It dissipates, no exceptions.  Unless there is a twist of fate. What I... Read More Read More - [A Hand Is Raised](https://everyangel.org/a-hand-is-raised/): The quotes from Guevara are mind bending.  As a source of insight, Che Guevara is considered by many to be a stone-cold-killer, an enemy of all social order.  The quote indicates that he was anything but stone-cold, and that he was an advocate of a particular kind of order. Wait, is that a hand... Read More Read More - [Love and Cruelty](https://everyangel.org/love-and-cruelty/): “Hay que endurecerse sin perder jamás la ternura.” (one must endure-become hard, toughen oneself—without losing tenderness.) –Che Guevara At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality. Hatred is an... Read More Read More - [Tuesday](https://everyangel.org/tuesday-2/): Full sunlight this morning. A dramatic contrast to the top story on the front page of the Wall Street Journal.  Major retailers such as Walmart and Kroger are to start charging suppliers penalty fees on account of late deliveries.  With supply chains being extended so far, not just nationwide but as far as assembly... Read More Read More - [Matters of Habit](https://everyangel.org/matters-of-habit/): Habits are the very stuff our identities are made of. In them we enact and thus define what we effectively are as social beings, often in contrast with our perception of what we are. In their very transparency they are the medium of social violence. My notions—of good and evil, of pleasant and unpleasant,... Read More Read More - [Thanksgiving III](https://everyangel.org/thanksgiving-iii/): Sunday was the occasion of a mild 40 degree day.  I especially enjoyed the shades of brown and tan illumined by the afternoon sun as we passed a wetland, undeveloped, tall grasses waving in the breeze. White oaks were showing  spiky leaves hanging on to face the coming frost. Everything is as it should... Read More Read More - [On Nietzsche](https://everyangel.org/on-nietzsche/): There is more truth in the “decontextualized” French Nietzsche of Deleuze and Foucault than in the historically accurate Nietzsche………… The universal frame of Nietzsche’s thought and its particular historical contextualization is inscribed into the very edifice of Nietzsche’s thought. Ergo…. In the same way the tension between the universal form of human rights and... Read More Read More - [Thanksgiving Part II](https://everyangel.org/thanksgiving-part-ii/): The feast day began with paying homage to Nature.  This is it should be, since each of us is a child of Nature, flesh and blood, born of the Earth, sustained by the sun, rain, the recurring force of Gaia’s productive effort.  Is it not proper on this day to personify Nature’s dispassionate, life-giving... Read More Read More - [Thanksgiving](https://everyangel.org/thanksgiving/): I anticipated this day for a while.  Fall days come one by one, daylight lessening, leaves falling, my spirit waiting for the coming interlude–a day dedicated to taking stock of the goodness that life serendipitously has offered.  Thanksgiving!  The benefits that come our way are unaccountable.  I did not expect them.  Indeed no one... Read More Read More - [Aesthetics](https://everyangel.org/aesthetics/): Instrumental rationality— namely the calculation of the most efficient means for achieving a given desire— has overwhelmed Western thinking for the last 300 years……….. We must change the aesthetic tone of the world. –Adbusters Nov/Dec 2017 - [Louisville Family](https://everyangel.org/louisville-family/): Our daughter and her partner are expecting a baby girl.  Kai is to be born in January.  I am awed that the child is to bear my mothers name as her middle name.  My mother was a extraordinarily courageous and kind woman.  She would have been greatly honored to have her name given to... Read More Read More - [Raining](https://everyangel.org/raining/): Did not post yesterday since most of the day was spent on I-65 traveling from Chicago to Louisville.  We departed in a gentle rain which surely will bring down the few remaining leaves from the trees in the neighborhood.  The plus side of the 6 hour drive was the brisk movement of traffic around... Read More Read More - [Hello](https://everyangel.org/hello/): “Hello, do you hear me?” Is the channel working? Are we both using the same code? Thus we understand the outbreak of public violence in Charlottesville, home to the University of Virginia, with Monticello nearby. And the mass slaughter at the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs Texas…..  There was and is no underlying... Read More Read More - [Language Part II](https://everyangel.org/language-part-ii/): Axiom: there is no simple “reality.” I remember the promise of the internet.  Ease of connectivity would produce greater understanding.  Instead what we got was not the spread of democracy but “mobocracy.”  We are being fractured by a firehose of falsehood.  Facebook estimates that 126 million Americans, about 40% of the population were reached... Read More Read More - [Christmas The Day After](https://everyangel.org/christmas-the-day-after/): I didn’t post anything on Christmas day.  My schedule was tight and I chose to sleep-in anyway, –a Christmas present to myself.  Today I have the luxury of looking back at Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.  Do they not belong together?  I went for a run in the neighborhood on Christmas eve.  I must... Read More Read More - [Christmas Eve](https://everyangel.org/christmas-eve-2/): We sang Christmas carols last night.  It is a rare treat to sing carols.  We have lots of music; it is everywhere, digital.  I have several Spotify play lists that I sometimes enjoy.  But I miss singing, especially at Christmas time.  I could attend church.  But I have not attended for years.  I have... Read More Read More - [Journey](https://everyangel.org/journey/): Waking before light, shaking off a nightmare–I wanted to write and post this poem by T. S. Eliot, The Journey of The Magi. Life, your life and my life, can be thought of as a journey.  If I dare to pay attention the journey is troubled, fraught with hazard. The friction of living can... Read More Read More - [Christmas Butchers Bill](https://everyangel.org/christmas-butchers-bill/): 13 Now when they had departed, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, “Rise, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there until I tell you, for Herod is about to search for the child, to destroy him.” 14And he rose and... Read More Read More - [A Reluctant Ticket](https://everyangel.org/a-reluctant-ticket/): I diffidently attended a concert a few days ago.  That would be a first for me.  I have laid down the purchase price for many concert tickets over the years.  Most were expensive, but an experience which I eagerly anticipated.  Often the opportunity to see and hear an artist perform live, to feel the... Read More Read More - [Divine Beer Cheese Soup](https://everyangel.org/divine-beer-cheese-soup/): Brenden asked if  I had written yet about “the soup.”  I had not.  But only because I was working on a larger, time consuming project.  At the Long Grove Coffee Shop, Brenden, the in-house chef for the Long Grove Confectionary, brings in a pot of his specialty soup to the Coffee Shop.  Arriving later... Read More Read More - [Just A Poem](https://everyangel.org/just-a-poem/): Yesterday I began to write a response to Martin Heidegger’s, What Is Metaphysics? lecture delivered in 1929.  I am quite taken by Heidegger’s words.  They strike me as revolutionary, as transgressive in this 21st century as they were when they were uttered.  Who thinks and writes about metaphysics anymore?  The metaphysical flame reduced to... Read More Read More - [In Memoriam](https://everyangel.org/in-memoriam-2/): At the end of the year Time Magazine selects a Person Of The Year.  This time around Time chose a category of individual: the “guardians” for truth, that is four journalists who persisted in writing, in reporting truth at great cost to themselves, imprisonment and loss of their lives. One of the guardians for... Read More Read More - [A Party](https://everyangel.org/party/): As the year comes to a close we can look back upon lessons learned, or lessons we searched for –but really weren’t there.  Best of all, time is time we spent with friends.  Philosophy is not a solitary activity.  Philosophy is a journey that is made in the company of others, much like the... Read More Read More - [Why Read The New York Times?](https://everyangel.org/why-read-the-new-york-times/): A few months ago I subscribed to the New York Times.  I have no regrets.  I receive the Sunday edition only.  It suffices for a weeks worth of reading.  A variety of subjects are treated in depth, with a purity and precision of language that rivals the best prose that I have read anywhere. ... Read More Read More - [...In Need Of Rescue](https://everyangel.org/in-need-of-rescue/): I am not a fan of White Snake.  If it takes only one song to make one a fan, then Here I go Again, seals the deal.  I envy musicians.  Surely it must feel “god-like” to stand before thousands of people with a guitar, or a keyboard and sing that one song which you... Read More Read More - [Only Once](https://everyangel.org/only-once/): Yesterday I attended a birthday party for our grandson.  It was his forth birthday.  He has a good grasp of language now and is able to express his opinions, his desires quite well.  The excitement on his face was unmistakable.  He had reason to anticipate this special occasion long before the guest arrived at... Read More Read More - [Ordinary People, Ordinary Life](https://everyangel.org/ordinary-people-ordinary-life/): Ordinary people have to live their lives on an ordinary personal level; there are decencies and betrayals, judgments and perceptions which persist above or below whatever political circumstances exist or whatever social changes come into force. and these are the stuff of the ordinary moral life. ….because the everyday moral worldis a matter of... Read More Read More - [Starbucks Subtext](https://everyangel.org/starbucks-subtext/): A subtext is a unifying thematic melody that extends underneath, present, intermittently sensible in a larger work.  Seated at Starbucks reading silently Anthony O’Hear’s Science Art and the Human World, a challenging work of philosophy of science, a familiar tune playing on the PA came to my awareness.  Along with the seasonal Christmas carols... Read More Read More - [Heidegger](https://everyangel.org/heidegger/): Scientific existence possesses its simplicity and aptness in that it relates to beings themselves in a distinctive way and only to them. Science would like to dismiss the nothing with a lordly wave of the hand.                             –*– Only when the strangeness of beings oppresses us does it arouse and evoke wonder. Only on... Read More Read More - [Mysterium Tremendum](https://everyangel.org/mysterium-tremendum/): Late in the afternoon a almost-winter sun glowed pink through hazy clouds, I walked across the parking lot at the Roadster Shop in Mundelein.  Earlier in the day while at Starbucks Dan asked me if I had seen the Road Rage street rod which had been taken to the SEMA show? Dan is a... Read More Read More - [Stitching Past, Present & Future](https://everyangel.org/stitching-past-present-future/): Maturity beckons also, asking us to be larger, more fluid, more elemental, less cornered, less unilateral, a living conversational intuition between the inherited story, the one we are privileged to inhabit and the one, if we are large enough and broad enough, moveable enough and even, here enough, just, astonishingly, about to occur. –excerpt... Read More Read More - [To Harmonize](https://everyangel.org/to-harmonize/): The source of this list has been lost.  I cannot give attribution.  I know that I am not the one who compiled these words.  I think it is an act of resistance to share them in this era of disharmony, of unrestrained ego, of the illusion that conflict has a worthwhile outcome.  Leadership demands... Read More Read More - [Weeping Still](https://everyangel.org/weeping-still/): Why is the Buddha depicted with a countenance of calm, exuding an inner peace with circumstances as they may be?  Nirvana.  Nirvana is described variously as a mind and heart that accepts things as they happen to be.  I’ve never met anyone who has achieved that.  A few individuals seemed closer than I to... Read More Read More - [About Nature](https://everyangel.org/about-nature/): We are engulfed in an immense ancient indifference that does not sleep or dream. Call it Nature if you will, though everything that is is natural— the lignite-bearing earth, the factory, a darkness taller than the sky. This out-of-doors that wins our release and temporary peace— not because it is pristine or pretty, but... Read More Read More - [Wait No Longer, Return To Innocence](https://everyangel.org/wait-no-longer-return-to-innocence/): The years click by, one becomes older, and things get worse.  Many would agree with this generalization of their experience.  If one is unlucky it would be difficult to see life otherwise , beset with chronic medical issues, and subject to the indignities of medicare for treatment.  Luck counts for a great deal in... Read More Read More - [Squirrel Conjuring](https://everyangel.org/squirrel-conjuring/): What follows is a guest post……………………….. Friday morning our Newfoundland/Golden Retriever mix, Astrid, roused me from sleep nearly an hour earlier than I’d hoped to get up the day after Thanksgiving. She wanted to be let out, of course. So I growled to myself, stumbled downstairs into the dawn, opened the sliding door to... Read More Read More - [Speechless, Almost](https://everyangel.org/speechless-almost/): There are two more days left in November.  Then comes December the darkest month, which is also the coming of Christmas.  Christmas is a festival of lights.  Darkness and light. This morning I wish that I were a bear having found a warm place to hibernate until spring.  But I am not a bear... Read More Read More - [Codependent Origination](https://everyangel.org/codependent-origination/): That is a term that has not come to mind for many years.  The concept means causation. Nothing comes to be apart from depending on many other things.  It is an important, often used word in Buddhist texts. The Buddhist tradition takes cause and effect with total seriousness, –as serious as a heart attack... Read More Read More - [Light](https://everyangel.org/light/): We visited the ELMHURST ART MUSEUM on Saturday.  May not one purpose of a holiday, be the opportunity to step outside of ordinary time, to be with friends and family, and to seek experiences that widen one’s world, increase one’s capacity to wonder?  That is exactly what I wish for myself and for those... Read More Read More - [We're On Our Own](https://everyangel.org/were-on-our-own/): Michael: Every time he comes up, he’s got no knife, he’s got no jacket, he’s got no pants, he’s got no boots. All he’s got is that stupid gun he carries around like John Wayne. That ain’t gonna help ya’. Axel: Oh, what the hell, Mike. Give him the boots. Michael: No way. I... Read More Read More - [Contemplating Glowing Embers](https://everyangel.org/contemplating-glowing-embers/): Honduran migrants, October 2018 Perhaps confusion is a natural state of mind for us. The condition never completely goes away.  We try to minimize confusion. Civilization is the construction of a “world” to reduce our confusion. The Natural world is given, not made by us.  Nature is a congerie of living organisms and inanimate... Read More Read More - [The Day After](https://everyangel.org/the-day-after/): The Day After Thanksgiving, is a day off for most people.  Starbucks is quiet.  Baristas behind the counter are working leisurely, exchanging stories of their thanksgiving experience.  Each family Thanksgiving is one-of-a-kind.  It is rare to enjoy a leisurely meal together, not to speak of having extended family and perhaps friends join the circle... Read More Read More - [Blue Angel](https://everyangel.org/blue-angel/): Yesterday, I saw an automobile that prompted me to reflect upon my heritage.  I remembered my deceased half-brother, and a time and place of growing up as a kid.. On the display floor at the Roadster Shop in Mundelein a 1957 Ford Fairlane 500 caught my eye.  You could say that the mid 1950’s were... Read More Read More - [Thanksgiving Eve](https://everyangel.org/thanksgiving-eve/): Trump Stands with Saudis over Murder of Khashoggi By Mark Mazzetti and Ben Hubbard Nov. 20, 2018 WASHINGTON — President Trump has long viewed foreign policy as a series of business deals, stripped of values and idealism. But his 633-word statement on Tuesday about the brutal killing of the Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi showed... Read More Read More - [Concertina Wire And A Poem](https://everyangel.org/concertina-wire-and-a-poem/): In the parking lot of Mercy Hospital, and inside of the building four people were killed yesterday.  Yesterday twelve people were killed in a California country music bar.  The slaughter continues in our armed-up society.  Wouldn’t think of giving up our guns. In fact we have the right to carry them around with us... Read More Read More - [Photo Stories](https://everyangel.org/photo-stories/): Thinking of Frank Styburski’s photos, some of his images remain in my memory.  There is a surplus of images around us. We are inundated. Over-stimulated our attention is fleeting and little of any of it is remembered. The Styburski photos  by contrast show the underlying forms of Nature, and of the interface between civilization... Read More Read More - [Another Day, Over The Edge](https://everyangel.org/another-day-over-the-edge/): Awakened an hour later than usual this morning.  I barely remember the alarm which I somehow squelched.  Consciousness returned at 7AM at which time I rose from sleep. Attended a gallery opening in Waukegan for the work of photographer Frank Styburski.   A consequence of an evening rich with wonder at the stories told... Read More Read More - [Recognized When Once Lost](https://everyangel.org/recognized-when-once-lost/): It is snowing outside, a gentle snow, the advance scout of approaching winter.  It’s no longer possible to assume that winter will fall within the range of past norms.  Will it be a siege of ice, an assault by serial snow storms?  Or will the next few months bring warmth, and little precipitation?  Either... Read More Read More - [On Wine And Certainty](https://everyangel.org/on-wine-and-certainty/): Last night was delightfully strange.  On Thursday evenings a few of us, using philosophy as an excuse, meet at Taste of Paris Cafe in Mundelein.  The purpose is to reflect upon a topical discussion of earlier in the week, while we drink wine or coffee.  I never know who will show up or if anyone... Read More Read More - [On Pain](https://everyangel.org/on-pain/): I am reading a book by Ernst Jünger, the WWI era German writer and survivor of trench warfare.  Jünger’s claim to fame is his book based upon his daily journals written while fighting in the trenches entitled Storm of Steel.  His book On Pain was written and published in 1934.  Jünger is an excellent... Read More Read More - [Many Layers](https://everyangel.org/many-layers/): It is a Wednesday morning.  Sunlight floods into the window at Starbucks.  Warmth, light, life– gifts of nature, no charge.  The coffee on the other hand costs, but the deal is quite fair for a large cup of pure comfort. Do I write about a jetliner that went down?  It plunged into the sea... Read More Read More - [Drink Wine, Dance Here and Pray](https://everyangel.org/drink-wine-dance-here-and-pray/): I am old.  Old is when you find yourself thinking “they’ve not made music like that since Elvis, or the Beatles, or the Bodeans or whomever.”  Stuck in time not noticing that time has moved on.  Well, snap out of it!  There is fabulous music out there, and we must not forget that a... Read More Read More - [Coming Home](https://everyangel.org/coming-home/): Wrestling with what to call this story, I settled on what’s written above.  On Saturday evening six of us met at Docks Bar and Grill on the edge of Bangs Lake in Wauconda.  Gary invited us to hear his son Jeff play in a band.  I’d never visited Docks Bar and Grill before.  On... Read More Read More - [Armistice Day 2018](https://everyangel.org/armistice-day-2018/): On Receiving the First News of the War by Issac Rosenberg Snow is a strange white word; No ice or frost Has asked of bud or bird For Winter’s cost. Yet ice and frost and snow From earth to sky This Summer land doth know; No man knows why. In all men’s hearts it... Read More Read More - [Jeff Takes Us To Church](https://everyangel.org/jeff-takes-us-to-church/): This guest post is a story by my good friend Jeff.  Jeff is a retired banker and a life-long devotee of making music.  I’ve benefited from hearing Jeff cover songs that are deeply embedded within the memory of our generation, as well as some fine compositions of his own.  He gave permission to share... Read More Read More - [If The Weather Permits](https://everyangel.org/if-the-weather-permits/): I like you, tend to be distracted by the posturing, the theatrics, the spectacle of politicians and admen jockeying for more power in our media infused way of life.  As I observe those around me, it seems that most of us are about to fall into those small screens we hold in our hands,... Read More Read More - [Pay No Attention](https://everyangel.org/pay-no-attention/):         to what he says.         He is a man –not a wolf. Elisapie Isaac is a Canadian performer from Quebec.  This tune was featured on NPR.  The melody is haunting. I am not a fan of the President. This lyric is dead center on target.  You will understand. Enjoy.   - [Rebel Alliance Gains Ground](https://everyangel.org/rebel-alliance-gains-ground/): The day after voting day, November 7, I have a sense of hope, some satisfaction that the Republican Governors of my state of Illinois, and that of the state to our north, Wisconsin have been replaced by Democratic governors.  I do not enjoy partisan politics, as the process has devolved to that of verbal,... Read More Read More - [Farewell to Door County](https://everyangel.org/farewell-to-door-county/): My farewell memory upon departing Door County was our breakfast at the Carroll House Family Restaurant in Sister Bay.  The restaurant is unassuming; the dining room has a typical blue-collar, every mans atmosphere.  The menu is ample with a number of breakfast choices.  The coffee was hot and strong enough. Eggs, toast, sausage are... Read More Read More - [Wandering Door County II](https://everyangel.org/wandering-door-county-ii/): Monday was a rainy today.  We didn’t care.  The gentle rain gave the woods the patina of an oil painting. The ground was intense yellow with leaves, soon to be covered with the first snow of the season.  The gentle rain, and gusty wind that did not impede our enjoyment of movement throughout the... Read More Read More - [Gospel Reading For Sunday November 4](https://everyangel.org/gospel-reading-for-sunday-november-4/): Jesus really was a no-body, and a pain in the neck to a lot of people with better connections. So the people amused themselves one day by nailing him to a cross and planting the cross in the ground.  There couldn’t possibly any repercussions the lynchers thought.  Then, just before the nobody died, the... Read More Read More - [Why Us?](https://everyangel.org/why-us/): Why you? Why us for that matter? Why anything? Because this moment simply is. Have you ever seen bugs trapped in amber? Well here we are trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why. –Excerpt Slaughterhouse 5 p 97 by Kurt Vonnegut - [Wandering Door County](https://everyangel.org/wandering-door-county/): Friday, yesterday was our first day in the area.  We just wandered around.  The peninsula of Door County is composed of a chain of small towns linked by Route 42 and Route 57 which makes the area easy to drive in about an hour.  A few of the towns are Sister Bay, Ephriam, Fish... Read More Read More - [Will The Circle Be Unbroken ?](https://everyangel.org/will-the-circle-be-unbroken/): Arrived in Door County Wisconsin late yesterday.  Since the tourist season is over, we were fortunate to find a restaurant open for our evening meal.  The placed turned out to be “fine dining” and the upshot was a wonderful meal, with superb service in a beautiful dining room which we almost had to ourselves. ... Read More Read More - [Halloween](https://everyangel.org/halloween/): There is not much more to be said.  The evening is one of enchantment in a neighborhood with lots of kids.  The imagination of children is apt for an evening of costume dress up, and going door-to-door receiving treats from the householder at each residence.  Some front yards are suitably decorated with skeletons, and... Read More Read More - [That They Should Wear Our Colors There](https://everyangel.org/that-they-should-wear-our-colors-there/): I was a sophomore in high school.  That winter a neighborhood acquaintance, James House, who was perhaps a year older than I, turned up driving a new 1965 2+2 mustang.  The car was a fastback, dark blue with a broad double white racing strip from bumper to bumper.  The motor was a 289 cubic... Read More Read More - [In Reply To Gary And Barry](https://everyangel.org/in-reply-to-gary-and-barry/): I received email messages from two friends this morning.  They registered a complaint to a statement which I made yesterday.  I criticized Capitalism as practiced by Big Pharma as being predatory, pitiless.  I am an insulin dependent diabetic.  Not only is the cost of insulin very expensive, the pricing of many prescription medications has... Read More Read More - [Astounding Revelation](https://everyangel.org/astounding-revelation/): I received a sardonic email from a friend this morning.  The writer observed that “the sun is hot, ice cubes are actually made of water, and blueberries tend to be blue.” Such observations of the nature of reality, until recently uncontroversial, agreed upon without further ado as “common” by everybody except maybe those under... Read More Read More - [In Memoriam](https://everyangel.org/in-memoriam/): To stop thinking about the Second World War and Auschwitz is to forget the reality of the horror of war and the violence of extermination. –John Armitage 2002 Introduction to Art and Fear by Paul Virilio To bow in silence seems appropriate in response to the eleven who were killed in the Tree of... Read More Read More - [Slouching Toward Bethlehem](https://everyangel.org/slouching-toward-bethleheim/): Rampage Kills Eleven PITTSBURGH — Armed with an AR-15-style assault rifle and at least three handguns, a man shouting anti-Semitic slurs opened fire inside a Pittsburgh synagogue Saturday morning, killing at least 11 congregants and wounding four police officers and two others, the authorities said. In a rampage described as among the deadliest against... Read More Read More - [Smokey Robinson](https://everyangel.org/smokey-robinson/): I never expected to see Smokey Robinson perform live.  The Motown artists were in their heyday when I was a kid.  All are up in years.  Performing is demanding work.  It is physically arduous, and  one has to give one hundred percent emotionally if one is to meet one’s obligation to the audience. Last... Read More Read More - [Trump-Party Bomber In Custody](https://everyangel.org/trump-party-bomber-in-custody/): And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,     Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? Excerpt from The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) I have no words. There is nothing more to say. - [What's Missing](https://everyangel.org/whats-missing/): Ethical boundary, aesthetic boundary of sport as of art. Without limits there is no value; without value, there is no esteem, no respect and especially no pity: death to the referee! —the fatal habituation to the banalization of excess. –excerpt Silence on Trial p 33 by Paul Virilio What is missing? It is Friday... Read More Read More - [Checkmate ?](https://everyangel.org/checkmate/): A machine for seeing, a machine for hearing, and a machine for thinking…. very shortly to come with the boom in all things digital and the programmed abandonment of the analogue. How will the silence of the infinite spaces of art subsist? We are all seated in Plato’s cave, which has become the Sybil’s... Read More Read More - [A Bridge Over](https://everyangel.org/a-bridge-over/): This afternoon I feel blue.  There is a lot of funky-shit going down.  I am aware of too much given the ever present cell phone news feed, offering adrenaline prompting content, just a swipe away.  Most of the time I resist the temptation.  A sure recipe for misery is to allow one’s mind-space to... Read More Read More - [Organizers Hunger & Death](https://everyangel.org/organizers-hunger-death/): “It’s a mass exodus.” Rodrigo Abeja, who is also with Pueblo Sin Fronteras, said extreme poverty and unchecked gang violence have driven migrants to leave their homeland.  “The organizer of this caravan is number one hunger, two death,” he said. —report USA Today We must put out the excess rather than the fire.—Heraclitus Today... Read More Read More - [No Room](https://everyangel.org/no-room/): In my scheme of the German state, there will be no room for the alien, no use for the wastrel, for the usurer or speculator, or anyone incapable of productive work. — Adolf Hitler, Interview with George Sylvester Viereck, 1923 I came upon this quote yesterday.  The words froze my mind.  These are the... Read More Read More - [Pumpkins](https://everyangel.org/pumpkins/): Fall harvest season is here.  Apple picking, visits to a local farm for selecting pumpkins are parts of the ritual that marks this season of the year.  The air is chilly.  One does the remaining out of doors chores with awareness that soon the frost and then the snow will signal a season of... Read More Read More - [In Spite Of Which](https://everyangel.org/in-spite-of-which/): The last few hours were eventful with travel, rental car return, receipt of boarding pass, TSA check in, and then boarding for the two hour flight to Chicago.  Nothing outside of normal expectations.  That is how life sometimes is, except when it isn’t. I am sad for my sister two years younger than I. ... Read More Read More - [Celebrate?](https://everyangel.org/celebrate/): A last evening in my hometown, with a note of celebration.  We finished two days dedicated to visiting with my sister.  She and I are separated by distance which equates to the passage of time with too little contact.  Not nearly enough can be forced into two days to remedy the loss.  But we... Read More Read More - [Blood and Bone](https://everyangel.org/blood-and-bone/): Just finished an essay in a book, Basic Writings by Martin Heidegger.  Reading Heidegger is like jumping into the deep end of the pool, before one is confident that one knows how to swim.  I read, “What is Metaphysics?” at the behest of a friend who said that his life was changed by the... Read More Read More - [Jamal Khashoggi](https://everyangel.org/jamal-khashoggi/): While they were in the field, Cain attacked his brother Abel and killed him. 9 Then the LORD said to Cain, “Where is your brother Abel?” “I don’t know,” he replied. “Am I my brother’s keeper?” 10 The LORD said, “What have you done? Listen! Your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground. —Genesis... Read More Read More - [Kindness Of Strangers](https://everyangel.org/kindness-of-strangers/): Boarded a morning flight today at O’Hare.  A major city airport is always managed chaos.  My rule of thumb is to be kind to everyone that i encounter, the American Airlines ticket agent, the female behind the register at McDonalds, or the airline gate agent who needed to assign me a seat.  Kindness is... Read More Read More - [But It's Late](https://everyangel.org/but-its-late/): Based on fossils and archeological artifacts from around the world, modern humans have existed for about 200,000 years; but the roots of civilization only go back 20,000 years, to when we first began planting grain and building walls. These dates slide back and forth on history’s timeline depending on the viewpoint, but practically all... Read More Read More - [Dirty Hands](https://everyangel.org/dirty-hands/): The dawn breaks the darkness of night and the sky glows.  I know that in time dawn will  break within me today.  I am in a dark mood.  I’ve been thinking of the killing of the Washington Post journalist, Jamal Khashoggi.  Thinking that he was safe in Istanbul he walked into the Saudi consulate... Read More Read More - [For A Little While](https://everyangel.org/for-a-little-while/): THE POEM OF ONE WORLD This morning the beautiful white heron was floating along above the water and then into the sky of this the one world we all belong to where everything sooner or later is a part of everything else which thought made me feel for a little while quite beautiful myself.... Read More Read More - [Women's March Chicago Oct. 2018](https://everyangel.org/womens-march-chicago-oct-2018/): A few photos to give a sense of being at the Women’s March, Grant Park on the Chicago lakefront.  We joined thousands.  One person at a time, adds up.  Just as one vote at a time adds up and can be the difference between a free society and the rule of tyranny.    ... Read More Read More - [Waltz Of Ignorance](https://everyangel.org/waltz-of-ignorance/): Huzzah for ignorance!  The election of the individual which we now have in the White House has given me pause to think about the nature of ignorance.  The President and his supporters represent ignorance piled high and deep.  I note that ignorance and power entails an escalation of violence, a resort to violence in... Read More Read More - [A Change Is Gonna Come ?](https://everyangel.org/a-change-is-gonna-come/): Tomorrow, Saturday morning I will leave early for Chicago.  This is the third Women’s March in which I will participate.  I will be with friends, and will be surrounded by thousands with whom I am in solidarity.  People of color, immigrants, and women are diminished to inferior, “second class” status by the actions of the... Read More Read More - [A Last Laugh](https://everyangel.org/a-last-laugh/): I read that flowers are the earth’s laughter.  Flowers cause me to smile, such as when I attend to a joke or a good pun. I visited the zinnia garden to view the blossoms for the last time.  Today the temperature is to be in the 70s and then the drop-off comes into the... Read More Read More - [Our Family](https://everyangel.org/our-family/): This photo prompts me to express gratitude for each member of our immediate family.  Taken at a birthday golf outing in Naperville in October of 2018, we celebrate the accomplishments of each member.  We are blessed to be in good health, to be here, now, together. I include this youtube video of the great... Read More Read More - [Chicago Marathon Part II](https://everyangel.org/chicago-marathon-part-ii/): The story has no end.  More remains to be said. Our daughter in law crossed the finish line in Grant Park in just a little over four hours.  At three points on the race course we saw her pass by and shouted her name to recognize her and to cheer her on to the... Read More Read More - [Chicago Marathon](https://everyangel.org/chicago-marathon/): I do not expect to run a marathon. Pheidippides ran 26.2 miles to announce that Athens would not be annihilated by the Persians in 490 BC. That makes perfect sense to me.  That scale of good news is worth the effort.  But I am not an Attic Greek.  Running twenty-six miles for personal satisfaction... Read More Read More - [The Last Nail](https://everyangel.org/the-last-nail/): Someone To Watch Over Me fills the background here, a languid voice.  Perhaps it is Ella Fitzgerald. I hear the piano notes with the singular melody caressing the patrons, myself included, here at Starbucks.  This is a morning when I wish that I could talk with my mother.  I can only imagine her presence,... Read More Read More - [Who Ya Gonna Believe....](https://everyangel.org/who-ya-gonna-believe/): I spent the day in Lincoln Square, Chicago yesterday.  A Friend offered to discuss a business startup concept.  I jumped at the opportunity.  One never knows.  Something important and beneficial might be born from a give and take of ideas, conceiving of experimental steps, to discover whether a vision does in fact address the... Read More Read More - [Playing Against The Odds](https://everyangel.org/playing-against-the-odds/): The morning came with gusty winds, cloud swept sky, all signs of advance of the cold air mass, roiling against the warmth of the retreating southern formation.  Advance, retreat, friction, thunder and lightning, and a gentle rain if we are lucky.  A flood if we are unlucky.  Welcome to another day of life on... Read More Read More - [Right Down The Line....](https://everyangel.org/right-down-the-line/): This topic comes easy.  Laura and I have been married for forty-eight years.  She is my best friend and friendship is a hint of eternity, a bond that seems to defeat the erosion of time, growing better and stronger year by year. This song by Journey is heard often on the radio.  I think... Read More Read More - [More Caffeine!](https://everyangel.org/more-caffeine/): With an interlude of forty-five minutes I stopped at Starbucks to do some reading yesterday afternoon.  Starbucks is a bar for non-alcohol drinkers, for the introverted types who have a proclivity for caffeine, and for studying.  I glanced up from my reading to see the individual at the adjoining table.  This afternoon, how long... Read More Read More - [Unhinged & Supreme Court Bound](https://everyangel.org/unhinged-supreme-court-bound/): Bro, she said that you are the guy. She remembers the attempted rape when you were classmates in High School. Just before your rant, your home-boys said that she was persuasive. You said, “It ain’t me babe.” You did not say, “I just don’t remember.” And you resisted the FBI investigation until forced by... Read More Read More - [Walk In The Rain](https://everyangel.org/walk-in-the-rain/): Yesterday afternoon with some time on my hands I decided to walk around Viking Park at the Gurnee Park District.  A light rain was falling.  The plantings in the park are well cared for.  A variety of tree species are planted to memorialize individuals; paving stones honor community organizations.  What better way to establish... Read More Read More - [Dad's Hammer](https://everyangel.org/dads-hammer/): Sunday?  I awakened as if in a time warp.  My conscious mind was oriented toward the coming day at the office.  Waking at 6AM, I left the house for Starbucks with the dawn barely showing to the east.  In my dissociation, a day was missing.  I glanced at the newspaper rack at Starbucks and... Read More Read More - [Bring It On Home](https://everyangel.org/bring-it-on-home/): Saturday morning at Starbucks, a song by the great Sam Cooke can be heard over the cacophony.  Reading and writing here reminds me of my visit to a Zoo aviary; voices and objects in constant motion, rising and falling, chattering, calling, etc.  This is life: constant motion.  The words of Sam Cooke came to... Read More Read More - [Stephen King Weighs In](https://everyangel.org/stephen-king-weighs-in/): Stephen King makes his feelings about Kavanaugh very clear on Twitter Stephen King is no fan of Brett Kavanaugh. People across the world tuned in to watch Dr. Christine Blasey Ford and Brett Kavanaugh give their testimonies in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday. And all across the world, people were tweeting... Read More Read More - [Week Ends and Beginning](https://everyangel.org/weeks-ends-and-beginning/): Friday is the end of the work week.  The weeks ends but in truth work does not end.  Life is work.  Sometimes work is nothing more or less than acceptance of the circumstances of life.  All that I imagined, and wrote in yesterday’s post took place before the Senate Judiciary committee just as I... Read More Read More - [Easy To Say No](https://everyangel.org/easy-to-say-no/): Thursday and I awakened at 5:30AM.  I couldn’t sleep because this is the Thursday of the awaited hearing. The complaint asserted by Dr.Christine Blaise Ford that the candidate for the Supreme Court attempted to rape her when they were students in high school will be heard by the Senate Judiciary Committee. I do not... Read More Read More - [House Party](https://everyangel.org/house-party/): We attended a house party last night.  A house party is a response to gather in a home for a convivial evening of conversation, food and drink, and in this case, a reflective interaction with the songs and stories of Scott Ainslie.  There were many around me that I had not previously met.  In... Read More Read More - [Soul Talk](https://everyangel.org/soul-talk/): On occasion while reading, a statement or a paragraph effects me like the booming, sympathetic vibration of a rung bell.  These statements outlining a concept of “the soul” had precisely this impact.  Almost no intellectual now-a-days, attempts to use the term “soul” let alone risks a cogent account.  The soul,—an internal incubus, an ephemeral... Read More Read More - [Extravagant Beauty](https://everyangel.org/extravagant-beauty/): The weekend was intense.  Like a remembered Christmas morning when I was 5 years old, with so much under the tree, — my child’s mind was suffused with delight. A friend, Peter passed on a tip that a extraordinary four person female band would be entertaining at the Buffalo Creek Brewing on Saturday night. ... Read More Read More - [Tiny Flying Cows](https://everyangel.org/tiny-flying-cows/): Camera in hand I visited Kraklauer Creek yesterday.  It is late September and the weather has barely cooled from the heat of summer.  Yet, it is not the frost that brings the end of the season for the wild flowers growing in profusion on the creek bed.  They appear to have a set life... Read More Read More - [Greatness](https://everyangel.org/greatness/): A few minutes ago I composed a brief email reply to a friend who expressed disillusion with the human race.  Or in his words, “disgusted with people.”  I know how that feels.  I fall into that dark place on occasion.  It is easy to do.  Examples of mediocrity, stupidity, weakness and gratuitous violence abound. ... Read More Read More - [No Blue Pill](https://everyangel.org/no-blue-pill/): You take the blue pill—the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill—you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. Remember: all I’m offering is the truth. Nothing more. –Morpheus, The Matrix film Chaos is a... Read More Read More - [Wittgenstein And Rape](https://everyangel.org/wittgenstein-and-rape/): This is a topic that I am least qualified to write about.  I am not female, and thus am unlikely to be subject to rape.  My imagination is quite unable to construct a facsimile of the experience of rape.  If I were female it would be otherwise. A spirited email exchange was conducted yesterday... Read More Read More - [Ghost Of Wittgenstein](https://everyangel.org/ghost-of-wittgenstein/): We revisited Philosophical Investigations by Ludwig Wittgenstein last night.  The Investigations are just that.  Wittgenstein used his classroom lectures as an opportunity to do original research with his students.  His method was to have a free ranging dialog with the class, doing philosophy of language.  Notes of these lectures were published posthumously.  The Philosophical... Read More Read More - [On Throwing A Plane Over Chaos](https://everyangel.org/on-throwing-a-plane-over-chaos/): Perhaps the peculiarity of art is to pass through the finite in order to rediscover, to restore the infinite. What defines thought in its three great forms— art, science, and philosophy— is always confronting chaos, laying out a plane, throwing a plane over chaos. But philosophy wants to save the infinite by giving it... Read More Read More - [My Hometown](https://everyangel.org/my-hometown/): I confess to being a fan of Bruce Springsteen.  Springsteen is the Homer of my generation.  I make the assertion without apology.  At the Tony Awards televised live on CBS  from Radio City Music Hall Springsteen delivered an abbreviated rendition of his song My Hometown which was prefaced by a moving soliloquy remembering Freehold... Read More Read More - [Kraklauer Creek, June 2018](https://everyangel.org/kraklauer-creek-june-2018/): Reality is not mathematical, and mathematics is not the law of reality, but a language whose consistency has nothing to do with the multilayered consistency of life. Franco Berardi, excerpt from The Uprising, On Poetry and Finance - [Light, Light, Light](https://everyangel.org/light-light-light/): A friend just sent me additional photos of the Teton mountains.  Everything in each of the three photos is magnificent.  It is light that enables me to make this statement.  Light streaming from the sun sculpted the magisterial peaks due to heat and cold, and wind-driven erosion.  Light energized photosynthesis for the spruce, the... Read More Read More - [G-7 Photo](https://everyangel.org/g-7-photo/): This instagram photo posted by Prime Minister of Germany Angela Merkel is striking for the story that it tells. Note Prime Minister Abe of Japan’s stoic expression showing dismay. Stay tuned………………….. - [The Road](https://everyangel.org/the-road/): I was asked by Melanie as she handed my coffee to me what I was working on this morning. I said, “I do not know.  Something will come to me.”  She smiled. I glanced at the front page of the New York Times.  The Newspaper stand is adjacent to the counter for coffee additives,... Read More Read More - [Overcast, Rain Coming](https://everyangel.org/overcast-rain-coming/): Waking I took the measure of my blood sugar.  50 mg/dcl was quite low, a partial explanation for my mental fog.  NPR reported the death of Anthony Bourdain at 61 years of age this morning.  My sense of malaise deepened.  Bourdain was a superb story teller, a man who appreciated the rapture of fine... Read More Read More - [Clearing Space](https://everyangel.org/clearing-space/): Doing philosophy is a revolutionary activity.  In these times of discord, suspicion, verbal assault, and sometimes overt expression of hatred–anyone who disciplines him or herself to mindfully exercise reason, speaking and writing with clarity is a subversive.  Nothing is more antithetical to the mayhem, the pandemonium of “warfare,” than thoughtful communication. A family member... Read More Read More - [Making A Deeper Appeal](https://everyangel.org/making-a-deeper-appeal/): The following lines are taken from a Situationist website, a brief comment written in the aftermath of the Trump election.  I offer these words for the truth they convey, not as an endorsement of the Situationist Revolutionary philosophy.  The Situationist International  was an international organization of social revolutionaries made up of avant-garde artists, intellectuals,... Read More Read More - [Family](https://everyangel.org/family/): Family is not limited to those related by blood.  I understand that more deeply as the years pass.  The circle may be wide to include friends whose stories intersect our own.  Each child that is  born and welcomed into the family circle is a reminder of the generosity of heart and congeniality of spirit... Read More Read More - [Voices](https://everyangel.org/voices/): Lately I’ve the privilege to witness the email exchange between two friends on the topic of The Second Amendment and gun ownership.  The exchange has been passionate, and to my sense, contentious at times.  Yet, the topic represents a nexus of the present state of our society since firearms are a prominent aspect of... Read More Read More - [An End, A Beginning](https://everyangel.org/an-end-a-beginning/): Friday is typically conceived as the end of the work week.  The truth is, one’s work never ends.  To be alive is to work.  We make these conventional assumptions, arbitrary lines.  They are illusory and evaporate under the pressure of reality.  What we think is reality gets in the way of reality.  So here... Read More Read More - [Chicago](https://everyangel.org/chicago/): While living in the suburbs I seldom go into Chicago.  Every place in northern Illinois is within the orbit of the city, one of the most populous in the country with 9.5 million people.  The scale of the city causes discomfort.  I have a sensation of 360 degrees of thinly veiled chaos when I... Read More Read More - [Values Are Aims](https://everyangel.org/values-are-aims/): Life is a matter of values.  The thrust of one’s life is a matter of one’s aims. Purposes which one has chosen together, constitute the meaning of an individual’s life.  Each has the opportunity to choose, to endorse the path that he or she takes.  A few of the options offered by our post-industrial,... Read More Read More - [Memorial Day](https://everyangel.org/memorial-day-2/): We attended a Memorial Day ceremony in Beach Park.  I did my best to enjoy it.  It always seems tragically sad to remember those who died prematurely in unnecessary wars.  I consider the Vietnam War and all of those since, including those underway,–unnecessary.  To disregard the evidence of your own senses, and to believe... Read More Read More - [Weekend Part II](https://everyangel.org/weekend-part-ii/): Saturday was dedicated to putting in the garden.  The patch of ground was broken a few times with the assist of a power tiller.  I was grateful for the powered help.  A neighbor who owns a horse farm was kind to allow me to obtain a sufficient quantity of barn manure for fertilizer.  The... Read More Read More - [Memorial Day Weekend](https://everyangel.org/memorial-day-weekend/): Saturday is the beginning of the long weekend, culminating in Memorial Day on Monday.  Memorial Day is set aside to remember our war dead.  The last war to defend the country from attack was World War II.  The others since have been “botique wars” conducted by politicians to assert our interests; Korea, Vietnam, Iraq,... Read More Read More - [Holding On or Held](https://everyangel.org/holding-on-or-held/): Awakened this morning from a nightmare.  The dream had to do with life as we know it today, of encounter with the myriad bureaucratic obstructions imposed upon the individual by “the system.”  There is no escape.  Costs pile up. Red light cameras, late penalties of all kinds, and if you live in Cook County,... Read More Read More - [More From The Tao](https://everyangel.org/more-from-the-tao/): This morning I was delighted to locate on my shelf a text book from my college days.  I was introduced to the words of the Tao te Ching from A Source Book In Chinese Philosophy by  Wing-Tsit Chan.  I’ve not opened the book in many years.  Finding it was like receiving a phone call... Read More Read More - [Disappearing Into The Tao](https://everyangel.org/disappearing-into-the-tao/): What a session last night at Starbucks.  At least fifteen of us were seated around a table of a size to accommodate ten people.  The room was echoing with voices, with the cacophony of the cappuccino machine used by the baristas.  Nevertheless the group intently listened to chosen readings from the Tao te Ching. ... Read More Read More - [Royal Wedding](https://everyangel.org/royal-wedding/): I watched again on video the wedding between Britain’s Prince Harry and Meghan Markle.  I wish the couple well.  There are few things more fraught with risk than marriage.  There are many inevitable unknowns, like the under water volume of the iceberg that looks so beautiful and benign on the surface.  Good luck to... Read More Read More - [The Way That Can Only Be Shown](https://everyangel.org/the-way-that-can-only-be-shown/): The Tao doesn’t take sides; it gives birth to both good and evil. The Master doesn’t take sides; she welcomes both saints and sinners. The Tao is like a bellows; it is empty yet infinitely capable. The more you use it, the more it produces; the more you talk of it, the less you... Read More Read More - [Wild Horses](https://everyangel.org/wild-horses/): I considered writing about the Texas High School shooting.  A lot has been written already in the NY Times, the Washington Post and other sources.  Another breakout of violence will roil the Texas community for years. Surely the families who lost kids will be shattered for as long as they live.  My expression of... Read More Read More - [Reading Poetry](https://everyangel.org/reading-poetry/): I was asked to read some poems last night.  A gathering was sponsored by the Mundelein Arts Council at Taste of Paris.  Musicians from the area and several writers were given opportunity to perform in public.  I found my imagination going back to the late bronze age.  Certainly members of the aristocracy and their... Read More Read More - [Feathers & Fenders: Seamless](https://everyangel.org/feathers__fenders_seamless/): A few days ago my daughter asked me to write about the connection between the white headed robin and the muscle cars which were featured in the post on BEAUTY  I am satisfied that there are many ties of relationship between the rare bird and the hand built single purpose hot rods. It is... Read More Read More - [Miscellany](https://everyangel.org/miscellany/): One of many useful gifts that I received from grad school is the habit of taking notes in a pocket-sized moleskin notebook. I record memorable statements, questions, and especially outrageous exclamations that I happen upon in my reading.  As a result of much reading I have filled seven or eight of these notebooks with... Read More Read More - [On The Pursuit Of Happiness](https://everyangel.org/on-the-pursuit-of-happiness/): So how is it going?  You know, that pursuit of happiness?  Was it genius or was it a touch of madness for Jefferson to have inserted “that” (happiness) into the Declaration of Independence?  Is there anything more unstable than happiness?  Happiness is not up to me for a starter.  Today I plan some actions... Read More Read More - [Ken And Barbie Open A New Embassy](https://everyangel.org/ken-and-barbie-open-a-new-embassy/): Often cause and effect is not obvious.  The direction of the process, and the meaning of the ultimate result may be concealed by a tortuous chain of ambiguous links.  Where, how did the cancer begin?  Such news comes “out of the blue.” the last thing one expects to hear.  The lethal condition was not... Read More Read More - [Mother's Day](https://everyangel.org/mothers-day/): Mother’s Day becomes more important to me as the years pass.  Thanksgiving and Mother’s Day are my top contenders for excellent holidays.  Those are solitary days dedicated to showing gratitude.  Both holidays stand as reminders of how much of my life depends upon the good graces of others, acts of kindness, of solicitude that... Read More Read More - [The Iliad by Homer](https://everyangel.org/the-iliad-by-homer/): I finished reading the essay The Iliad or the Poem of Force written in 1943 by Simone Weil.  The essay and other similar works are preparation for my commitment to read the Iliad by Homer.  The more I’ve learned of the ancient Greeks, the greater my desire to read Homers great poem.  This text was... Read More Read More - [To Again Hear The Bird Sing](https://everyangel.org/to-again-hear-the-bird-sing/): A copy of Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse was given to me by a good friend.  I finished the story a few days ago.  I read it once before over 30 years ago.  Hesse’s story is life changing, similar to T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets.  A copy of the Four Quartets is in my brief... Read More Read More - [Beauty](https://everyangel.org/beauty/): Is beauty in the eye of the beholder?  One is tempted to answer “yes” or answer “no.”  Then to follow up with a discussion on the latest findings on brain research. Alternatively there is the description of objectively measurable parameters of proportion, of design technique.  To take either side is an interesting game.  I’ve... Read More Read More - [The Clown](https://everyangel.org/the-clown/): In life, a man commits himself, draws his own portrait and there is nothing but that portrait. *** If I have excluded God the Father, there must be somebody to invent values. We have to take things as they are. Life is nothing until it is lived. *** Man is all the time outside... Read More Read More - [No Sugar Added](https://everyangel.org/no-sugar-added/): I am diabetic.  Finding no sugar added ice cream makes me happy.  The taste is perfect, with no sugar added. I think these words by Herman Hesse make the point. In every truth the opposite is equally true. For example, a truth can only be expressed and enveloped in words if it is one-sided.... Read More Read More - [Rain](https://everyangel.org/rain/): This morning the rains came.  My jacket was moistened by big drops as I hurried across the parking lot.  A slash of white lightening fell in the distance, so far away that I did not hear the thunder.  The arrival of the spring rain is a reminder, that time is passage, and that we... Read More Read More - [This Well-upholstered Hell](https://everyangel.org/this-well-upholstered-hell/): I awakened this morning, barely.  I am diabetic and as it happened I awakened with low blood sugar.  At the level of physical function, I did well enough.  I prepared my bowl of cheerios.  Then I attempted to check my blood sugar.  I found that my faculties of reason were impaired.  I could not... Read More Read More - [Spring At Last](https://everyangel.org/spring-at-last/): We who live in the Mid-West suffer a longer winter than do those who live in the South.  And unlike our countrymen in Minnesota or the Canadians winter is not a universal hockey season or celebrated for snowmobiling adventures etc.  We endure winter.  When spring arrives in early May its a big deal. That’s... Read More Read More - [Justify](https://everyangel.org/justify/): I attended a town-hall meeting at the Kildeer Elementary School yesterday.  The meeting was convened by our 10th District Representative to Congress, Brad Schneider.  I’ve attended other public gatherings hosted by Brad.  I am struck with how similar these meetings are.  Given that yesterday was one of those early spring days, with blue sky... Read More Read More - [Runaway American Dream](https://everyangel.org/runaway-american-dream/): I could never be a happy idiot, to borrow a phrase from a Jackson Browne lyric.  It does not take genius to see the abject sorrow all around.  Much is just bad luck.  Parents usually do the best they can raising their kids.  Often though they make crucial mistakes and the child matures to... Read More Read More - [Manifesto of Resistance](https://everyangel.org/manifesto-of-resistance/): Love is never abstract. it does not adhere to the universe or the planet or the nation or the institution or the profession, but to the singular sparrows of the street, the lilies of the field, “the least of these my bretheren.” Love is not, by its own desire, heroic. It is heroic only... Read More Read More - [Sacred Ground](https://everyangel.org/sacred-ground/): We visited Huber’s Orchard and Winery in Starlight, Indiana.  This is a 7th generation farm that started with 80 acres in 1843.  Huber’s now is 600 acres growing fruits and vegetables, the largest producer of grapes in Indiana. We left the dogwoods behind in Kentucky and crossed the Ohio River into the hilly Indiana farm... Read More Read More - [A Day In River City](https://everyangel.org/a-day-in-river-city/): Louisville Kentucky, on the Ohio River is a Southern town.  Strictly speaking during the Civil War it was a border state.  The citizens of Kentucky had sympathies on both sides.  Still it was a slave holding state.  Present day aspects of Southern culture remain. Almost every where you look there is remembrance of the... Read More Read More - [Ignorance](https://everyangel.org/ignorance/): We are in Louisville Kentucky.  It’s a week before the running of the Derby.  The town is in festival mode, special events are in progress, Mother Nature is doing her best with pleasant weather. The sidewalks are crowded on Bardstown Road.  Our AirBnB is just a around the corner.  I found a spot at... Read More Read More - [Souls](https://everyangel.org/souls/): Thursday evening six of us sat around a small table at Taste of Paris.  Wine, coffee, steamed clams, pastries, were a satisfying accompaniment to conversation that ranged from Mach Picchu, Peru, to the nature of daily life in antiquity, infuseded by awareness of divinity.  And, I believe that Barry managed to keep tabs with... Read More Read More - [Lynching Victims Memorial](https://everyangel.org/lynching-victims-memorial/): Lynching Victims Memorial in Montgomery Alabama. For the full story CLICK HERE. How could we have waited so long to do this? Why are we STILL OPPRESSING people of color? How can we exercise power and authority, but no responsibility? Is this the way things have to be, the will of the god, are... Read More Read More - [If Life Is Just A Highway...](https://everyangel.org/if-life-is-just-a-highway/): ….and the soul is just a car. What an interesting wide-ranging discussion last night!  Around fifteen or so of us sat together in the Coffee Shop and discussed ideas expressed by Plato in his treatment of Socrates, awaiting the carrying out of the death sentence imposed by the Athenian Assembly.  Perhaps there are worse... Read More Read More - [Ridiculous The Waste Sad Time](https://everyangel.org/ridiculous-the-waste-sad-time/): IV Time and the bell have buried the day, The black cloud carries the sun away. Will the sunflower turn to us, will the clematis Stray down, bend to us; tendril and spray Clutch and cling?     Chill Fingers of yew be curled Down on us? After the kingfisher’s wing Has answered light... Read More Read More - [Sunday, Sunday Afternoon](https://everyangel.org/sunday-sunday-afternoon/): At last the days are warming in the Mid-West.  Its beginning to feel like spring.  The buttercups are sprouting and a few are in bloom by the road. After breakfast at Taste of Paris Cafe on Sunday morning we traveled to Wheaton to see our children and grand children.  To visit together on a... Read More Read More - [A Great Day](https://everyangel.org/a-great-day/): I was not there.  A prior commitment oblidged me to be in Chicago on Friday evening.  At that time the grand opening of The Long Grove Confectionary store and the adjoining sister company, the Long Grove Coffee Company was held in splendid fashion by Towner Green.  The weather gods smiled upon the event and... Read More Read More - [On Throwing Away The Song](https://everyangel.org/on-throwing-away-the-song/): Religion in its broadest sense, then, must be another term for that obscurity that surrounds men’s efforts to defend himself by curative or preventive means against his own violence. Religion shelters us from violence just as violence seeks shelter in religion. —excerpt from Violence and the Sacred by Rene Girard Bad Company A company... Read More Read More - [Nowhere To Run](https://everyangel.org/nowhere-to-run/): Played a vintage Springsteen CD while driving yesterday.  It was the “Live in New York City” CD.  I did not attend the Madison Square Garden concert of July 1, 2000.  By chance some time later I happened to catch rebroadcast of the concert while in a hotel room in Columbia Kentucky.  The power of... Read More Read More - [On The Cult of Competition](https://everyangel.org/on-the-cult-of-competition/): There is no denying that competitiveness is a part of the life both of an individual and of a community, or that, within limits, it is a useful and necessary part. But it is equally obvious that no individual can lead a good or a satisfying life under the rule of competition, and no... Read More Read More - [Like A Toad](https://everyangel.org/like-a-toad/): There’s a killer on the road His brain is squirmin’ like a toad Into this world we’re thrown Like a dog without a bone An actor out on loan. Riders on the storm –The Doors Riders on the Storm is a haunting Rock paean.  Jim Morrison does justice to the dark lyric, singing about... Read More Read More - [Ice](https://everyangel.org/ice/): Mid April.  I anticipate with longer days warm weather will call forth the green of grass and the tender shoots of daffodils.  This weekend was a setback.  A mega storm of snow and ice swept across the plains state.  Minnesota received fifteen inches in some parts.  The Star Tribune called it a historic blizzard. ... Read More Read More - [Remembering](https://everyangel.org/remembering/): In Japan many homes have a feature that is called in direct translation, a god-shelf, or kami-dana in Japanese.  This feature, a wooden shelf placed in a wall niche, is used for placement of pictures of the deceased, and on occasion a burning candle, and food offering.  I thought this odd when I lived... Read More Read More - [Resumption](https://everyangel.org/resumption/): I’ve not posted in several days.  The writing routine has been interrupted by a remodeling project at my preferred spot for contemplation, my examination of soul for proper words.  I think that good work requires being at home in a context.  The renovation of the Starbucks is nearly complete and I should return to... Read More Read More - [Homer's Women](https://everyangel.org/homers-women/): Comment was made in the course of our discussion of the Iliad, of the great cultural differences in the late-bronze age status of women, and that of our own time, three millennia in the future. Consider the character of Briseis, taken and given as a spoil of war to Achilles consequent to the razing... Read More Read More - [μῆνῐς](https://everyangel.org/%ce%bc%e1%bf%86%ce%bd%e1%bf%90%cf%82/): Rage!  Menis! How much history, as though a blind fate, –is a story of rage and the aftermath. April 2, 1865 the Confederacy was essentially finished.  After four years of war, the Union army entered Richmond while the city burned.  A way of life based upon slavery, the blind determination to unjustly use human... Read More Read More - [Rage](https://everyangel.org/rage/): The rage of Achilles—sing it now, goddess, sing it through me the deadly rage that caused the Achaeans such grief and hurled down to Hades the souls of so many fighters, leaving their naked flesh to be eaten by dogs and carrion birds, as the will of Zeus was accomplished. Begin at the time... Read More Read More - [Sack Of Troy](https://everyangel.org/sack-of-troy/): I cannot imagine the headlines, if they should have had such a thing as a newspaper.  More to the point the “news” was conveyed by word of mouth over the commercial sea lanes of the Mediterranean basin:  Troy has fallen.  After ten years of war, Priam’s great city is sacked by the Achaeans.  That... Read More Read More - [Achilles](https://everyangel.org/achilles/): Achilles, like most people, has many values, which do not all fit together tidily in all circumstances. This would be a flaw, I suppose, if there were a better alternative, or if it were not so obviously the human lot. –excerpt The Anger of Achilles essay by C D C Reeve - [Thursday Evening](https://everyangel.org/thursday-evening/): A more intimate opportunity for philosophical “play” is offered at Taste-of-Paris on Thursday evenings.  The setting could not be more perfect.  A few of us meet in the dining room, find a place at the round table, which is under the scaled down model of the Eiffel Tower.  Two to five individuals, friends, a... Read More Read More - [Into The Swamp](https://everyangel.org/into-the-swamp/): Stopped in at the local CVS yesterday to purchase a birthday card.  Walking with purpose to the greeting card display against the back wall, I passed a solitary individual who was busy stocking shelves who said “hello.”  In the big, quiet store I chose a card with a superhero graphic on the front.  Making... Read More Read More - [Teachers](https://everyangel.org/teachers/): There have been many.  Yesterday, I challenged myself to remember the names of as many of my elementary teachers as I could.  I remembered most of them, in order, from the first to the eighth grade.  A majority are remembered with affection and gratitude.  They gave an emotionally lost kid the gift of their... Read More Read More - [Everyone Is Invited](https://everyangel.org/everyone-is-invited/): I propose a festival to celebrate the fecundity of ignorance.  It is to ignorance that a teacher will come.  Ignorance is our natural condition.  A three year old child will dash headlong, careening through the hallways, delighted with the sensation of his/her play.  The child is responding to curiosity of mind and body– learning... Read More Read More - [蘇りRedux](https://everyangel.org/%e8%98%87%e3%82%8aredux/): Monday after Easter.  Back into the trenches of life.  To call it problem solving is an understatement.  Circumstances develop, life itself demands particular “solutions” –or things fall apart, or so it seems.  Easter is a story, a compact microcosm of ideas and emotions, a miniature of life itself.  Betrayal, trial, abandonment, suffering and the... Read More Read More - [Easter](https://everyangel.org/easter/): Easter, April 1st, and my birthday.  The sun rises brilliant, warm, and smooth jazz is playing inside at Starbucks.  Easter is the day by which we all celebrate our good fortune to be alive.  And it’s sheer good fortune, our number came up in the lottery of Nature.  Sometimes things happen which remind us... Read More Read More - [Good Friday Walk About](https://everyangel.org/good-friday-walk-about/): Yesterday was Good Friday.  I took a rare weekday off from the office.  Since Jesus died inconveniently, ignominiously on a Friday, it seemed right to take the day to consider the way of his journey, and of mine.  Do we not all die?  Birth and death are momentous events that we all have in... Read More Read More - [Good Friday](https://everyangel.org/good-friday/): The day is overcast, air temperature at 34 degrees, no wind–as if Nature is at the fold point.  Spring is soon to be felt, experienced, seen in the tender green shoots emerging from the black earth, seeking light, warmth, life.  Life is a mystery, impervious to our intelligence.  We describe it variously, but do... Read More Read More - [Lifeline](https://everyangel.org/lifeline/): Thinking of the challenges that I face in life, these quotes from What Are People For by Wendell Berry seemed timely, much appreciated. The clarification of pain, healing cultivates the scar that is the course of time and nature over damage: the landmark and mindmark that is the notation of a limit. You never... Read More Read More - [I Dreamed, I Saw](https://everyangel.org/i-dreamed-i-saw/): What an evening at Starbucks!  The long table at the end of the room was full.  Over an hour and a half of impassioned exchange of ideas followed.  The conversation was in the main about the “great chain of being” with a segue into Mandelbrot fractals, a demonstration of which we enjoyed from Gary’s... Read More Read More - [Morning Rain and The Dark Woods](https://everyangel.org/morning-rain-and-the-dark-woods/): There is a gentle rain falling outside.  It is supposed to rain all day.  The spring rain will encourage the green shoots to emerge, enlivening the melodious birds. Soon they will raise their families. There is a co-joined harmony between seasonal vegetation, and conscious life forms, humans included, that find a habitat, resources of... Read More Read More - [Sometimes I'm Sane](https://everyangel.org/sometimes-im-sane/): There are many Wendell Berry poems that speak to me.  A poem has been in mind for several days awaiting posting and comment.  This one though takes precedence.  There are times with life presents an inflection point, a point of decision forced by circumstances.  To do nothing is also an action, but often one... Read More Read More - [Palm Sunday Assumptions And Fate](https://everyangel.org/palm-sunday-assumptions-and-fate/): A destiny, oh it’s the rising sun I was born, a shotgun in my hands Behind the gun I’ll make my final stand, yeah That’s why they call me Bad company I can’t deny -lyrics, Bad Company by Bad Company The sun shines with brilliance this morning.  It rises as a strong athlete arching... Read More Read More - [Freedom: Comin' To Our Senses](https://everyangel.org/freedom-comin-to-our-senses/): And freedom, oh freedom well, that’s just some people talkin’ –Desperado lyrics by Glenn Frey, Don Henley There’s a lot of talk about freedom going around.  Seems like more talk than ever.  Perhaps the talk is in inverse proportion to the degree/quality of freedom that we are currently experiencing?  When one has enough of... Read More Read More - [Freedom's Paradox](https://everyangel.org/freedoms-paradox/): Yesterday a friend posted the word “freedom” along with a dictionary definition or two, and several paragraphs of personal commentary.  The challenge to the reader was to help with a definition of freedom, something that is useful as a guide for behavior.  Clearly freedom is something that all of us value, and it would... Read More Read More - [The War Begins](https://everyangel.org/the-war-begins/): The primary is over here in Illinois.  The gubernatorial primary ended with the incumbent Governor Rauner victorious over Jeanne Ives.  Ives, a West Point Graduate, a female-warrior, brought a warm, steely, fundamentalist authenticity to the camera.  I liked her at a emotional level while being terrified of her intentions.  Rauner on the other hand... Read More Read More - [Midweek](https://everyangel.org/midweek/): Wednesday, closing in on the end of March.  I understand that the east coast is being ripped by the forth Nor’easter this year, more wet snow and high winds.  I am sad for those who live along the coast and in New York. I know that climate change is the consequence of the life... Read More Read More - [Half Mad](https://everyangel.org/half-mad/): A Wendell Berry poem, 1988, II It is the destruction of the world in our own lives that drives us half insane, and more than half. To destroy that which we were given in trust: how will we bear it? It is our own bodies that we give to be broken, our bodies existing... Read More Read More - [Mental Noise](https://everyangel.org/mental-noise/): I found it impossible to write this morning.  My mind ruminated on the possible outcomes of the challenges represented by my to-do list for Monday. A rolling-tangle of dark anxiety was all that I could come up with.  I staggered inwardly with nothing to say.  Silence is preferable to adding to any readers quotient... Read More Read More - [What To Write](https://everyangel.org/what-to-write/): A Sunday morning warmed by our life-giving sun greeted me on March 18.  Yesterday was occupied with a leisurely breakfast with an old friend.  By definition old friends are rare.  Time and space separate us.  An old friend knows the young adult that we were, and the battles that we fought and survived in... Read More Read More - [To Get Out Of My Mind](https://everyangel.org/to-get-out-of-my-mind/): The week ends with news of further firings from the inner circle of palace courtiers. The Secretary of State was fired several days ago. The Deputy FBI Director Anthony McCabe was fired last night, by a twitter post. By way of contrast I offer these words of Wendell Berry, taken from the last essay,... Read More Read More - [To Reconcile The Contradictions](https://everyangel.org/to-reconcile-the-contradictions/): Received an email from a friend yesterday informing me of his enthusiasm for Antonio Damasio’s book, The Strange Order of Things.  The work is about the importance of story telling.  To say that story telling is important is to greatly underestimate the matter.  I do not think it is possible to understand how our... Read More Read More - [American War](https://everyangel.org/american-war/): I am reading a book by Omar El Akkad.  He is a journalist.  He was born in Cairo Egypt and grew up in Doha, Qatar.  He has filed dispatches from the NATO led war in Afghanistan, the military trials at Guantanamo Bay, the Arab Spring revolution in Egypt and the Black Lives Matter movement... Read More Read More - [Day's End](https://everyangel.org/days-end-2/): Soon the light will begin to fade.  I’d rather have my say in the morning before the usual responsibilities, the newscasts on NPR, etc. clutter my mind.  I prefer a clean sheet to draw my word-pictures for the day.  Today was different.  It was necessary to be in traffic on I94 at rush hour,... Read More Read More - [Welcome To Paradise](https://everyangel.org/welcome-to-paradise/): This is the ruinous contradiction underlying present-day American “conservatism.”  For the present economy to thrive or even survive, it is necessary for the great majority of the people to have exorbitant or inordinate wants, to expect to get what they want, and to feel that they have a “right” to get it.  But to... Read More Read More - [Standing In The Shadows](https://everyangel.org/standing-in-the-shadows/): Some songs seem immortal.  This one happened on the radio over the weekend.  I am still thinking about it.  Standing In The Shadows of Love by the Four Tops was one of Motown’s greatest hits.  There is a driving, surging passion in the tune that mimics the tide of life that is reminiscent of... Read More Read More - [What Were We Saying About Truth](https://everyangel.org/what-were-we-saying-about-truth/): In all of this back and forth about Truth this and Truth that we are missing a crucial point and that is: Truth is not a single thing 1. Personal Truth – Humans desperately want to believe that the world is a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get). The keyboard I’m typing... Read More Read More - [Happy Birthday Myles](https://everyangel.org/happy-birthday-myles/): Yesterday I was a guest for a tenth birthday celebration.  The party was a glorious event.  The family affair was held in honor of Myles’s tenth birthday.  Josh and Cassie were host to a house full of family and close friends.  The feasting, story telling, the presents, the cake, everything was perfect to say... Read More Read More - [Goodness and Power](https://everyangel.org/goodness-and-power/): In his essay on “How to Raise a Boy” Michael Kimmel offers these answers to the question: “What does it mean to be a good man?”  This list of attributes were offered by several thousand young men around the world to Kimmel’s question. Integrity Honor Being Responsible Being a good provider, protector Doing the... Read More Read More - [Panpsychism](https://everyangel.org/panpsychism/): What?  Sounds like a obscure cult? Do Panpsychists have a holy text?  Could the condition be a recently diagnosed disease, for which a new wonder drug is being pitched on TV?  I doubt you’d think any of those things.  You’d be sensitive to the components of the word, pan and psyche.  Likely you’d know... Read More Read More - [Misinformation, Fake News, Propaganda](https://everyangel.org/misinformation-fake-news-propaganda/): If you are like me, you despair of finding a reliable source for “news.”  In the old days, there was one source for everyone, the newspaper.  The newspaper published daily, was delivered by a neighborhood kid, and you’d find your copy lying at the end of the driveway.  Television news was a informative summary,... Read More Read More - [Less Is More](https://everyangel.org/less-is-more/): I have few words to say.  Today was an early morning, attending to customers needs.  So this post waited until the end of the day.  The words are important though.  They are koan-like, found in a book by Wendell Berry, Standing By Words. Love one another or die, individually and as a species. I... Read More Read More - [The Australian Viewpoint](https://everyangel.org/the-australian-viewpoint/): I have spent a fair amount of time in Louisville, Ky.  My daughter and her partner live there.  While visiting I always grab a copy of the Leo.  The Leo is an alternative weekly newspaper.  The paper has an editorial policy that fearlessly takes the measure of the political and social scene in Kentucky. ... Read More Read More - [The Academy Awards](https://everyangel.org/the-academy-awards/): Like many Americans I watched the Academy Awards last night.  I appreciate Jimmy Kimmel’s wit, and his fearless opposition to the racist and neo-fascist intentions of the Republican party.  On balance the crowd in the auditorium are pro-humanity, and to that extent they are “my people.”  The ABC  Oscars event presented two high points... Read More Read More - [Learning To Like Scotch](https://everyangel.org/learning-to-like-scotch/): Visited a neighborhood bar last night in Chicago.  The Duke of Perth is on Clark Street in the Lakeview neighborhood.  I had never tasted Scotch until several weeks ago.  A friend knowledgeable about the libation brought a bottle of his favorite malt to open an evening of philosophy discussion with a Scotch tasting.  I... Read More Read More - [I Was Sixteen](https://everyangel.org/i-was-sixteen/): “Everything flows” said old Heraclitus.  Heraclitus of Ephesus, otherwise known as Heraclitus the Obscure lived about 500 BC. Heraclitus famous saying is pronounced, “panta rhea, ouden manei.”  The literal meaning is: everything changes and nothing remains. Given this brief snippet of information, the most essential knowledge about this world and our life has been... Read More Read More - [Priestcraft](https://everyangel.org/priestcraft/): Just finished reading Ed O’Keefe’s Washington Post story on the ceremony in the Capitol Rotunda honoring Billy Graham.  The only statement in the report to be understood with simplicity, as a young child would think —that Graham died on February 21 at his home in Montreat North Carolina.  The rest is surface for layers... Read More Read More - [In Praise of Punxsutawney Phil](https://everyangel.org/in-praise-of-punxsutawney-phil/): It is gray and raining today, with perhaps a visitation of wet snow later in the morning.  Weather extremes herald the approach of spring.  The tilt of the earth provides incremental warming to us in the northern hemisphere–the slide begins to the awaited growing season.  Natures rhythm is beneficent, a solace that we depend... Read More Read More - [Requiem For The Sand Flea](https://everyangel.org/requiem-for-the-sand-flea/): Wednesday morning.  It is the morning after another interesting, passionately discussed topic: panpsychism.  Sounds esoteric, and implausible on its face: that mind might be a component of all of reality, from the sand flea, no, lets start even more basic, with the electron.  How about reciprocity of rudimentary awareness between a single electron and... Read More Read More - [Some Things Change, Some Remain](https://everyangel.org/some-things-change-some-remain/): The visit to my home town has concluded.  Three days were allocated to spend time with my disabled sister, and to visit with my brother.  Those three days are also filled with memories of the person that I was when I was a child in Durham.  There are also the years in my mid-twenties... Read More Read More - [Unliterary](https://everyangel.org/un-literary/): This morning is sun bright.  My disposition was not so sunny.  I felt unliterary.  Enthusiasm for life is a reflection of bodily well-being.  The older one gets, one’s moods are predictably more somber.  Some of that is simple biology.  Aches and pains….  The other dimension is the perspective that a higher vantage point, a... Read More Read More - [Out On A Limb](https://everyangel.org/no-more-easy-god/): I am entranced by James Kavanaugh poems.  I received a beautiful book of his poems, There Are Men Too Gentle To Live Among Wolves,  for my birthday.  Every poem is a collection of sensibility that resonates with me.  The poems are interleaved with pen and ink drawing of trees with bare branches.  One of... Read More Read More - [The Dancer and the Self-Enjoying Soul](https://everyangel.org/the-dancer-and-the-self-enjoying-soul/): Dreams, we all have them.  They come as the mind moves from deep sleep to REM sleep in the nether world before waking.  Most dreams evaporate  from memory within moments of rising from sleep.  A few linger in memory, a haunting message that demands attention. Nietzsche recounts such a dream.  His character Zarathustra stands... Read More Read More - [Elegy For A Relationship](https://everyangel.org/elegy-for-a-relationship/): Last night a few of us conversed about music.  I do not know anyone who does not depend upon music as a lifeline to emotional stability.  Of course many do not, but I do not move in those circles. Music is the analog to life, life which is a river, a movement of always... Read More Read More - [Guilty](https://everyangel.org/guilty/): Guilty, guilty as charged. Along with others of my Baby Boomer generation I too have concluded that the members of the Millennial generation are unsuitable for hire. Sometimes exigencies of circumstance do result in a business relationship, then one must be prepared for inordinate commitment to parent-like support, to the kind of patience which... Read More Read More - [Not Much](https://everyangel.org/not-much/): I have little to say this morning. Chicago has a new Mayor.  Much is made in the press about the first female black person to be elected Mayor, Lori Lightfoot.  What is left unsaid, the thundering silence from the press reports is that it matters little who is elected, their racial heritage or their... Read More Read More - [Stumbling In The Debris](https://everyangel.org/stumbling-in-the-debris/): Yesterday was April Fool’s.  Here I am among fools, myself one of many.  That is the straight-up assessment of life that makes the most sense.  And why not?  I celebrated my 70th birthday yesterday, with the help of my family.  My wife offered the most assistance with a really good meal at a favorite... Read More Read More - [Before Sunrise](https://everyangel.org/before-sunrise/): For all things are baptized at the font of eternity, and beyond good and evil; good and evil themselves, however, are but fugitive shadows and damp afflictions and passing clouds. Truly, it is a blessing and not a blasphemy When I teach that ‘above all things there stands the heaven of chance, the heaven... Read More Read More - [Awake or Dreaming?](https://everyangel.org/awake-or-dreaming/): Nietzsche’s dream-vision tale concludes.  His spokesman Zarathustra comes upon a young shepherd lying across the mountain path in agony.  A dog howls mournfully as a Greek chorus would add commentary to a tragedian performance.  The narrator does not know if he is awake or if this is a dream.  And is there a difference?... Read More Read More - [Every Thrown Stone](https://everyangel.org/every-thrown-stone/): Yesterday while at lunch I spoke with a friend.  He told a story of an exchange with a Facebook acquaintance. His interlocutor sent a list of common ethical principles held between varieties of religious traditions. Conspicuously missing was that of the atheist position. Naturally my friend composed his version of the common ground that... Read More Read More - [Seeing Into The Abyss](https://everyangel.org/seeing-into-the-abyss/): Man, however is the most courageous animal: thereby he has overcome every animal. With sound of triumph he has overcome every pain; human pain, however, is the sorest pain. Courage slays also vertigo at abysses; and where does not man stand at abysses! Is not seeing itself seeing abysses? Courage is the best slayer;... Read More Read More - [The Racoon Part II](https://everyangel.org/the-racoon-part-ii/): I expect her to show for another round.  I repaired the hole in the wood trim, thankfully no larger than a golf ball—  the likely result of the animal’s first session of work.  I expected it to return.  The night after our first encounter,  it was a no show.  Maybe I got the best... Read More Read More - [Racoon Story](https://everyangel.org/racoon-story/): The sound was subtle, not loud, irregular.  I walked into the guest bed room and listened,–there it was. And then into the front room, again, but not so loud.  The thought came to me.  There is an animal on the roof.  Outside I went with my little flashlight, the batteries at their low ebb. ... Read More Read More - [In Celebration of Vanity](https://everyangel.org/in-celebration-of-vanity/): Tonight our intention is to discussion “fashion.”  After years of reading and exchanging ideas, at last we arrive at this topic.  My wife and kids might say, “It’s about time.”  I am fashion challenged as I’ve mentioned before.  By habit I have my mind on other things.  I dress to be comfortable and to... Read More Read More - [Mental Ill-Health](https://everyangel.org/mental-ill-health/): What we’re taking in when we check our phones is perhaps the single greatest contributor to our mental ill-health……. Every minute of every day presents us with untold options for filling our minds with the mania, exploits, disasters, furies, reversals, ambitions, triumphs, insanity and cataclysms of strangers around our benighted planet. Always, news organizations... Read More Read More - [Fashion](https://everyangel.org/fashion/): Writing about this subject, a fool rushing in — I am not a “fashion forward” guy.  I attribute that to my upbringing.  I didn’t grow into adulthood in New York, Paris, or London.  While living in Durham North Carolina in the 1950s dressing up for church on Sundays, was a close as I came... Read More Read More - [My Life](https://everyangel.org/my-life/): Yesterday it occurred that I could attempt to write directly about myself.  My posts have been indirect discourse about my life experience, about the makeup of my mind.  I doubt that anything remains concealed. Philosophical ideas interest me, are worth writing about.  Philosophy is not a frivolous word-game played by academics.  Philosophy arises from... Read More Read More - [Selling Redemption](https://everyangel.org/selling-redemption/): Things do not change.  They do not change as long as there is a market for a good pitchman.  I was invited to listen to Dr. David Jeremiah, a current television preacher of some note.  I agreed, not wanting to be rude.  I was hopeful that I might learn something.  Perhaps I’d discover a... Read More Read More - [Hollow Men](https://everyangel.org/hollow-men/): A friend posed the dilemma yesterday: what is the distinction between the real, and the unreal in a photograph?  The three of us engaged in conversation love the challenge and the enhanced awareness which comes from viewing the ever-changing world through a viewfinder, or a LCD screen.  A split second judgement “captures,” freezes the... Read More Read More - [Eagle River Until Later](https://everyangel.org/eagle-river-until-later/): A few minutes after ten o’clock yesterday we left Eagle River.  The familiar driveway through the woods, ice and snow covered, leads us to Zeeman Road.  A late heavy snow makes this four wheel drive country, in mid March, the day before spring. I left with a sadness, and the satisfaction of memories of... Read More Read More - [By Made Things](https://everyangel.org/by-made-things/): We join ourselves to the living world by artifacts of art and science— by made things. We are always going to be somewhat at fault, because we are ignorant, fallible, and small. The living world is larger and more complex than our works. The extremes of reality and of imagination, within the limits of... Read More Read More - [The Devil and a Dog Story](https://everyangel.org/the-devil-and-a-dog-story/): I don’t think about the Devil much anymore.  In years past, being raised a fundamentalist Christian, I believed that evil personified was bent on creating chaos in my life.  I was given much advice from those who claimed “to know” about defensive measures.  Some of these were: memorizing passages from the Bible, more prayer,... Read More Read More - [Eagle River II](https://everyangel.org/eagle-river-ii/): Sunday morning a divine light reflects off a cover of deep snow.  Several gown deer crossed the road well in front of my vehicle.  I had to turn my head and look after them as they disappeared into the woods.   One appeared to be a young buck.  This is their time.  They know spring... Read More Read More - [Eagle River](https://everyangel.org/eagle-river/): We arrived yesterday afternoon.  As always I am awed by the tall spruce, birch, and pine trees standing in deep snow for miles and miles.  The bridge over the Wisconsin River revealed a frozen, snow covered surface except for a small channel of flowing water close to one bank.  Three deer had ventured out... Read More Read More - [Why So Late?](https://everyangel.org/speaking-to-cowards/): Thursday.  I am to drive north to Eagle River, Wisconsin today.  My cell news feed this morning featured a article by Reuters.  Congress is reported to be puzzled at why the FAA waited so long to ground the Boeing 737 Max jets,  after other countries and airlines acted more quickly.  A 737 Max jetliner... Read More Read More - [You Wouldn't Want It If ...](https://everyangel.org/you-wouldnt-want-it-if/): A gray Wednesday, midweek morning with rain, the remainder of melting winter’s ice, —- and traffic hurtling, leaving a billowing wake of dirty mist. The Brits, some of them want to leave the EU, but cannot agree among themselves how to do it.  It is likely the time will run out while they bicker.... Read More Read More - [Reading Nietzsche](https://everyangel.org/reading-nietzsche/): I continue to read Thus Spoke Zarathustra.  To supplement the primary source, I am working my way through Hiking With Nietzsche- On Becoming Who You Are by John Kaag. Professor Kaag teaches philosophy at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell.  He approaches Nietzsche’s words as vectors for a life-long workout of sorts,  a discipline placing... Read More Read More - [The Poets Lie Too Much](https://everyangel.org/the-poets-lie-too-much/): God is a thought —a thought that makes all that is straight crooked, and all that is standing reel. What !? Time negated, and all time bound beings, dying, would be but a lie? To think such is giddiness and vertigo to human limbs, and even vomiting to the stomach; truly a reeling sickness... Read More Read More - [A Sad Song](https://everyangel.org/a-sad-song/): If you love music, you already know that when you feel down, a sad song is just the medicine, the relief that you need.  This one by the Eagles, brings back memories.  The more miles that one has under one’s belt, the more clear the truth conveyed by the lyric. Old Heraclitus came to... Read More Read More - [The Rising](https://everyangel.org/the-rising/): Where to from here?  What are we to do?  To sharpen the point, what am I to do?  We are to suffer the impact of problems so large and so complex that they defy expert understanding, problems so great in scale that no reasonable solution is apparent.  These “problems” are the outcome of ratiocination,... Read More Read More - [Not Just Any Danger Part II](https://everyangel.org/the-danger-part-ii/): My wife who is likely my most consistent reader, suggested that I draw a shorter line between the Iditarod-Alaska article and the quotation from Martin Heidegger.  I knew she was right.  She said out loud, what my inner voice of instinct already was saying. The weather conditions in Alaska, the effect of a shift... Read More Read More - [Not Just Any Danger](https://everyangel.org/the-danger/): ANCHORAGE — A few miles and a few days from this weekend’s start of the Iditarod sled dog race, a glaciologist named Shad O’Neel stood in his sun-drenched office at the United States Geological Survey, talking about climate change. The walls displayed striking before-and-after photographs of the Columbia Glacier and others in Alaska. Even... Read More Read More - [Techne, τέχνη](https://everyangel.org/techne-%cf%84%ce%ad%cf%87%ce%bd%ce%b7/): I continue to read about technology.  I finished the essay which is to serve as basis for our coming Tuesday evening discussion.  I am nearing the finish of another essay by Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology.  This essay was first delivered to The Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts, on November 18, 1953.  I... Read More Read More - [Poiesis](https://everyangel.org/poiesis/): Every occasion for whatever passes beyond the nonpresent and goes forward into presencing is poiesis, bringing forth. —excerpt Symposium (205b) by Plato Last night we met friends for dinner at The Green Door, a restaurant in Libertyville. A first visit to any smallish, bar-bistro on a Saturday evening is an adventure. There is the... Read More Read More - [Enframed](https://everyangel.org/enframed/): An early memory of my childhood was my beloved hatchet.  I remember the heft of the sharpened blade in my hands— which lead to many adventures, and problem solving lessons.  In the woods, which were in close proximity to my house, I chopped down small pine trees, and used the limbs to build shady... Read More Read More - [About Women](https://everyangel.org/about-women/): The idea came that I could risk to write about women.  Writing about women as a man, especially when read by women is certain to provoke push-back.  Men never get away with opining about women unless they are speaking to men.   Within Nietzsche’s work Thus Spake Zarathustra, is a meditation entitled, Old and Young... Read More Read More - [Content To Live It All Again](https://everyangel.org/content-to-live-it-all-again/): Thursday morning, another single-digit day of winter cold.  The first day of spring is just a few days away,–March 20th.  Surreal!  No more surreal than the early broadcast of today’s news on NPR.  The much ballyhooed summit with the North Koreans reached a swift end with absolutely nothing achieved.  Imagine asking the North Koreans... Read More Read More - [Omega Point](https://everyangel.org/omega-point/): As it often is, the discussion last night among our group was engaging, for an hour and a half.  Over a dozen adults enjoyed a wide-ranging exchange of ideas prompted by a thought experiment proposed many years ago by Edwin Schrodinger.  The concept is known by the moniker, Schrodinger’s Cat.  The set up is... Read More Read More - [Oh, We Can Beat Them...](https://everyangel.org/oh-we-can-beat-them/): Awakened this morning in a foul mood.  Can’t blame the low blood sugar because breakfast didn’t help my attitude.  I attempted listening to NPR, feeling more troubled, enraged by an interview with an elected member of Congress from Oklahoma.  The man smug and self-righteous, asserted that he would cast his vote to support the... Read More Read More - [Looking For A Rhythm Like You](https://everyangel.org/making/): I received a note from a friend yesterday. He expressed a cautionary word about my interest in reading Nietzsche, about sliding from a productive skepticism into a grim cynicism. Nietzsche is not everyone’s cup of tea. His writings skirt the edge of madness. In the final months of his life he did suffer from... Read More Read More - [Hoping About A Small Earth](https://everyangel.org/hoping-about-a-small-earth/): Yesterday I listened to an interview with Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend Indiana.  He is 37 years old, served a tour in Afghanistan, is a Rhodes scholar and is running for President.  He won his 2nd term of Mayor with 80% of the vote. Mayor Pete comes across as likeable.  His self confidence... Read More Read More - [To Go Out Like A Hero](https://everyangel.org/to-go-out-like-a-hero/): What child would not have cause to weep over its parents? Worthy I deemed this man and ripe for the sense of the earth; but when I saw his wife, the earth seemed to me a house for the senseless….. This one went out like a hero in quests for truths, and eventually he... Read More Read More - [Our Need Of Lies...](https://everyangel.org/our-need-of-lies/): There is only one world, and this is false, cruel, and contradictory, seductive, without meaning— A world thus constituted is the real world. We have need of lies in order to conquer this reality, this “truth,” that is in order to live. –excerpt The Birth of Tragedy Friedrich Nietzsche Can’t shake this brief quotation. ... Read More Read More - [Avocado Story](https://everyangel.org/avocado-story/): It is impossible to ignore, to reduce to a disposable abstraction one’s relationship to the Earth.  We are of Nature, and with all that lives, will return to the living earth, from which we came.  There was a time before we were, even if I seldom feel that fact.  There will be a time... Read More Read More - [Land of Audi and Lexus](https://everyangel.org/land-of-audi-and-lexus/): Yesterday I didn’t post.  Regret that I was defeated by circumstances.  Defeat always occurs in the mind.  External circumstances, in my case a disabled snow blower, projects awaiting my attention at work, etc. in concert constituted a mental squall, and I lost my heading.  Writing is a discipline that serves to clarify a direction... Read More Read More - [Tyranny Redux](https://everyangel.org/tyranny-redux/): The snow falls this morning in a steady curtain.  Vehicles, one by one speed by in a swirling wake of icy turbulence.  Another morning in wintry Illinois.  There is inevitable friction, turbulence, a rift between the world of human artifice called “civilization” and Nature.  From the beginning of humankind, the awakening of consciousness by... Read More Read More - [What Demon Leads Me..](https://everyangel.org/what-demon-leads-me/): Starbucks on a Saturday morning, a background buzz of conversation, hubub from behind the serving counter, as baristas furiously compose drinks, microwaving breakfast treats, –and I reading my new book, Hiking With Nietzsche, by John Kaag.  What am I thinking, as I close in on my 70th birthday, day to day working through the... Read More Read More - [Bitter](https://everyangel.org/bitter/): The weather is bitter, matching my frame of mind. Yesterday was close to 50 degrees Fahrenheit, and over night, a whipsaw to 8 degrees and a stiff wind. Even colder existentially was the snippet of a NPR news report this morning. There is planned for today a White House Rose Garden ceremony where the... Read More Read More - [Elegy No. 2](https://everyangel.org/elegy-no-2/): A day of appreciation for those who mean the most to us reminded me of a granddaughter that we all miss.  Baby Kai was still-born with little advance warning on December of 2017.  She was loved, her birth celebrated with anticipation.  She will always have a place in our hearts.  Thus I remember her ... Read More Read More - [Valentine's Day Elegy](https://everyangel.org/valentines-day-remembering/): Yesterday I was working out of doors, it was 16 degrees with a stiff 20 mph gusting wind.  I persevered to completion of a necessary job.  That’s what it means to live as an adult.  There are many things that must be done, never mind the discomfort. On the return drive to the office... Read More Read More - [A New And Essential World](https://everyangel.org/a-new-and-essential-world/): And so it begins.  What begins, remains to be seen. A bipartisan committee has finished a compromise bill that addresses border security concerns, as well as funds the government.  The Democrats appear to have turned the Presidents demand to have ability to create unlimited detention centers along the border.  A cap is established in... Read More Read More - [Belonging Together To Take A Stand](https://everyangel.org/belonging-together-to-take-a-stand/): A few days ago an extended email exchange of points of view happened.  The mutual expression of views were in response to an initial statement regarding the hyped and stratospheric values of the art market, a field of competition for the uber-wealthy.  I was prompted to reflect upon my long standing fascination with art,... Read More Read More - [Death Spiral](https://everyangel.org/death-spiral/): WASHINGTON — Congressional efforts to reach a border security deal ahead of another government shutdown broke down on Sunday over Democratic demands to limit the detention of undocumented immigrants, as President Trump moved more troops to the border and prepared to rally supporters in Texas on Monday…… The impasse appears to center on Democratic... Read More Read More - [To Start A Fire...](https://everyangel.org/art-is-a-burning-fuse-unifying-world-and-earth/): Truth establishes itself in the work.* Truth essentially occurs only as the strife between the clearing and concealing in the opposition of world and earth. Truth wills to be established in the work as this strife of world and earth. The strife is not to be resolved in being brought forth for that purpose,... Read More Read More - [Objects: Sign of the Times](https://everyangel.org/how-cold/): My post of yesterday was a singularly grim, unnerving topic, the German V-1 rocket bomb.  It was labeled by its creators,  vengeance weapon.  For 80 days they rained down on London in 1944. One could evaluate by a study of the development, use, and purpose of the V-1, the meaning of German society in... Read More Read More - [Kirschkern (cherry stone)](https://everyangel.org/kirschkern-cherry-stone/): A poetic codename for the V-1 flying bomb, or “Vengeance Weapon”  launched against London on June 13, 1944.  The flying bomb, was developed at Peenemunde Army Research Center in 1939 by the German Luftwaffe.  It was a weapon of desperation, launched after the successful D-day landing on the beaches in France. Nearly 10,000 V-1s... Read More Read More - [A Veiled Fatality](https://everyangel.org/a-veiled-fatality/): Things are, and human beings, gifts and sacrifices are, animals and plants are, equipment and works are. The particular being stands in Being. Through Being there passes a veiled fatality that is ordained between the godly and the countergodly. There is much in being that man cannot master. There is but little that comes... Read More Read More - [World Making](https://everyangel.org/world-making/): The world is not the mere collection of the countable or the uncountable, familiar and unfamiliar things that are at hand. But neither is it a merely imagined framework added by our representation to the sum of such given things. The world worlds, and is more fully in being than the tangible and perceptible... Read More Read More - [Dream](https://everyangel.org/dream/): Dreams come when they will.  Most of mine are indistinct, and the memory evaporates within minutes of waking.  Years ago when I worked with a therapist, dreams came often, nightly if I remember.  The unconscious was stirring, the therapist working as a friendly guide helped me to knock at the door of long unacknowledged... Read More Read More - [The Super Bowl](https://everyangel.org/the-super-bowl/): I watched.  The Patriots over the Rams 13 to 3, a defensive game, like watching a tableau of trench warfare, grinding on….  At last the Rams broke and the Patriots scored a touch down.  This was the Patriots sixth Super Bowl win.  Six rings,–what to do with them all?  The game was the second... Read More Read More - [Cirque du Soleil](https://everyangel.org/cirque-du-soleil/): We drove to Milwaukee, the traffic enveloped in a miasma of  salt and soot laced snow-melt spray.  The bone chilling sub-zero cold has passed.  Our objective was the Fiserve Forum where we had tickets for a performance of Cirque du Soleil Crystal. Words cannot be easily found to describe the unfolding of figure skating,... Read More Read More - [Spirituality](https://everyangel.org/spirituality/): To be reverentially unexplored and pure or nonsensical bunkum of appeal, worshiped or derided, an oblique perspective on existence freed from customary egoistic vigilance taking leave of the “I.” Becoming a vagabond promiscuous thing to find ourselves loving, an intensity of enthusiasm, now distributed, erratically and generously to experience generosity, nobility of feeling, selflessness... Read More Read More - [More Heidegger](https://everyangel.org/more-heidegger/): Defeated by the slow moving traffic on a inordinately chilled morning, I returned to home base.  Reconsidering the day ahead, I had time for some emails and reading.  I am eager to begin an essay by Heidegger, THE ORIGIN OF THE WORK OF ART.  Here are some sentences from the first paragraph. On the... Read More Read More - [To Start Again](https://everyangel.org/to-start-again/): Another bitter day.  The cold stabs inadequately protected flesh like a stiletto.  It’s a white death that is felt, something you know intuitively. I woke this morning with a shocking high blood glucose reading.  Everything has a cause.  I identified several possibilities, and changed my insulin pump setting.  High blood sugar is another form... Read More Read More - [Negative 22 Fahrenheit](https://everyangel.org/negative-22-fahrenheit/):                        Warming Arctic fuels polar vortex,—the end of our world.  That is a headline which we will never see on the front page of the New York Times.  Tell me that you have not thought of that possibility, the consequence of disruption of normal, seasonal weather patterns, such that commerce, agriculture, and social life... Read More Read More - [Following An Antique Drum](https://everyangel.org/following-an-antique-drum/): Tuesday, the first of three days of bitter cold. With -3 degrees and a stiff breeze I changed my plans for the morning. On the road in the early morning sun, obliquely illuminating the snow covered fields, the drifts appeared as wind driven wavelets on a frozen lake. Perhaps an image of our lives,... Read More Read More - [White Blanket](https://everyangel.org/white-blanket/): A blanket of snow, at least six inches covers everything.  I imagine that this day could be recognized as a opportunity for the minimum, the most basic of chores, a day for rest and reflection.  Not so for us who live in towns and suburbs.  A snow fall presents an obstacle to be overcome,... Read More Read More - [Sunday, The First Day](https://everyangel.org/sunday-first-day-of-creation/): Certainly one does not put one’s beginnings over the horizon, in the rear view mirror of life.  This Sunday morning I awakened early and made my way to Starbucks.  Starbucks is the quintessential secular environment.  Individuals or clusters of friends, and a few families sip coffee, enjoy a breakfast sandwich while concentrating their attention... Read More Read More - [Earth-Mother](https://everyangel.org/earth-mother-2/): The bitter cold continues.  Unaccountably I was not awakened by the alarm this morning.  At least I have no memory of shutting the alarm off and returning to sleep.  I customarily rise before sunup to begin my day.  I enjoy a session of reading and writing to begin a day of activity.  It seemed... Read More Read More - [-7 Degrees Farenheit](https://everyangel.org/7-degrees-farenheit/): The sun is just above the eastern horizon and it’s bitter cold.  After a siege of a severe head cold I am beginning to recover.  Perhaps.  I’ll conserve my strength and allow Nature to advance the recovery.  There is only so much that I can do. I offer several quotations that are related.  It... Read More Read More - [Delirium](https://everyangel.org/delirium/): I am fortunate.  Throughout my adult life I’ve had little experience with sickness.  There have been several occasions of minor surgical repair, with attendant recovery periods.  I’ve had my share of colds, flu and virus infections, those onslaughts that run their course as the body marshals its defense.  Unpleasant enough, but soon forgotten as... Read More Read More - [Less Is More](https://everyangel.org/less-is-more-2/): I am feeling feverish this morning with a lingering cold.  Snow continues to fall and the roads are a skating rink.  I take satisfaction in knowing that Nature overwhelms the best of our engineering, the artificial habitat that we call civilization.  Is that “schadenfreude” the pleasure felt at the misfortune of others?  Yes, but... Read More Read More - [Growing Up Believing](https://everyangel.org/still-flying/): Another cold morning with snow, freezing rain, and more rain anticipated for today.  A somber day.  I awakened looking forward to writing this post.  The first snippet of news this morning gave content to my somber mood, the mood encapsulated by Paul Simon’s song, My Little Town.  The NPR news snippet mentioned that the... Read More Read More - [A Knife To The Throat](https://everyangel.org/a-knife-to-the-throat/): I am reading Bananas, by Peter Chapman, How the United Fruit Company shaped the world.  It is a chilling tale of colonization.  The colonial power was the United States in the late 1800s, the William McKinley administration, followed by Teddy Roosevelt.  How we tend to view our history through rose-colored glasses, giving others and... Read More Read More - [Mary Oliver Rests In Peace](https://everyangel.org/mary-oliver-rests-in-peace/): Mary Oliver has died.  She was eighty three.  I have a number of her books of poetry. Wild Geese   You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your... Read More Read More - [Five Degrees](https://everyangel.org/five-degrees/): I awakened at 5AM.  I dressed and arrived here at Starbucks.  I watched a large bright white moon to the west while I drove.  It’s five degrees farenheit outside.  Two stars, one large and the other more faint hang in the east against the inky black sky.  It is 6:30AM now and the big... Read More Read More - [The Absurd](https://everyangel.org/the-absurd/): I am compelled to write about the picture which was on the front page of the Thursday edition of the New York Times.  My thoughts will have to be held in abeyance, until I can change my password for my Godaddy account.  This morning I received a email note from my friends at Godaddy. ... Read More Read More - [Friday](https://everyangel.org/friday/): The end of the work week has arrived; a grey overcast winter day with a forecast of snow.  Would we be better off if we did not know what is coming?  Would we live more contentedly in the present moment, since less about the future would be displayed for speculation on our cell phone... Read More Read More - [The Sublime](https://everyangel.org/the-sublime/): Life is not easy.  The luster of childhood can barely be remembered.  The idealism of youth has been replaced by disillusionment of Realpolitik.   Therefore to avoid the dark well of nihilism I seek beauty and meaning on a day-to-day basis.  The meaning of life depends in part upon me.   In part, a worthwhile life... Read More Read More - [Wisdom, Take It Or Leave It](https://everyangel.org/wisdom-take-it-or-leave-it/): The discussion last night dragged on for me.  That is unusual.  The topic was the relationship between science and wisdom.  Science is an institution, and a method that yields knowledge, which defines the 20th and our own 21st century.  Certainly from the comments shared among our group there is much controversy, disagreement about what... Read More Read More - [Live And Let Die](https://everyangel.org/live-and-let-die/): I had a dream this morning, likely a few minutes before the alarm was to activate at 6AM.  I dreamed of walking in an open field with acquaintances, possibly family.  At some distance, a mile or so in the sky a big military tanker plane was making a slow turn.  I’ve see such aircraft... Read More Read More - [Possessed](https://everyangel.org/possessed/): Email from a friend expressing feelings of revulsion at political “leadership.”  I felt his pain.  Feelings are like the weather.  The “weather” of feelings are the swirling impact of feeling upon feeling.  Feelings come and go.  Feelings pass for “news” in some sectors of the media.  Feelings are not news.  Feelings pass for “truth”... Read More Read More - [View From The Outside](https://everyangel.org/view-from-the-outside/): Music is a blessed respite from the grime, the contamination of day to day politics, commerce, the trade offs that must be made in order for life to go on.  I get it, this is not Paradise, this is East of Eden.  I do not live in a rose garden.  My opportunity, along with... Read More Read More - [Ghost](https://everyangel.org/ghost/): Exchanged emails with a friend last night.  He is a Trump supporter.  I am not.  I asked him how it is that he is such a Trump-man when his people were immigrants.  Perhaps I will hear from him later this morning.  We are friends so he will likely have some answer for my consideration. ... Read More Read More - [Recrudescence](https://everyangel.org/recrudescence/): This morning I turned on NPR.  Still dark, it was early.  Barely awake, I tuned to the beginning of an interview with one of Alabama’s Congressional Representatives.  This is the followup of the Presidents visit to McAllen Texas yesterday.  I could not listen to the interview with the man from Alabama.  The sound of... Read More Read More - [Letting Things Be](https://everyangel.org/letting-things-be/): This morning according to the NPR newscast the President is to visit the border region between our country and Mexico.  I visited that part of our country once, many years ago.  Traveling from Chicago to San Francisco on the California Zephyr the train stopped for about twenty minutes somewhere in New Mexico.  I marveled... Read More Read More - [No](https://everyangel.org/no/): It is Wednesday, the day after the Presidents televised speech to the nation.  Such televised speeches usually signal circumstances of extraordinary, even dire import.  This was simply the next stratagem to get a wall built along the border between our country and Mexico.  The cost would be in excess of five billion dollars.  Why... Read More Read More - [The Constructive Fever](https://everyangel.org/the-constructive-fever/): Philosophy becomes a kind of necessary virus, which causes a constructive fever in others, compelling them to be and to do more than just survive.  It is not there to appease or to make people feel better; it is there to provoke a constant restlessness of being. –excerpt from What Makes A Philosopher? by... Read More Read More - [Construction and Destruction...](https://everyangel.org/a-new-species-you-probably-wouldnt-like/): Not that I have lost any hope. All the goodness and the heroisms will rise up again, then be cut down again and rise up. It isn’t that the evil thing wins — it never will — but that it doesn’t die. I don’t know why we should expect it to. It seems fairly... Read More Read More - [What If?](https://everyangel.org/what-if/): The automobile is emblematic of America.  The Model T Ford created by Henry Ford, a “modern” means of transportation affordable by the working man/woman, and the interstate highway system built by the Eisenhower Administration have defined America.  As a baby-boomer I learned to love cars while in high school.  The most vivid memories retained... Read More Read More - [This Could Be Heaven or...](https://everyangel.org/this-could-be-heaven-or/): Friday, yesterday began with frost on the windshield.  After all it is still early January.  The weather forecast for the day held promise of temperature in the 40s, with 50s expected today.  This was delivered on the late evening news with much fanfare of graphical display and expression of animated glee by the attractive... Read More Read More - [Going Wrong With Innovation](https://everyangel.org/going-wrong-with-innovation/): I was intrigued by these words from Heidegger.  You will need to read carefully, and at least twice for his meaning to clarify for your mind.  Written in the early years of the 20th century, the words are prescient to our condition a century into the future, the 21st century. By disavowing itself in... Read More Read More - [Not One Dollar](https://everyangel.org/not-one-dollar/): for a wall along the southern border. I watched the local five o’clock news on ABC.  Becoming drowsy and I fell asleep while watching.  I awakened with the realization that the National News broadcast was in progress.  I saw images of an iced over highway with a tractor-trailer sliding in slow motion to slam... Read More Read More - [The Good News About Freedom](https://everyangel.org/the-good-news-about-freedom/): The disclosedness of beings, which lets beings be, sets man free for his “freedom” by first offering to his choice something possible (a being) and by imposing on him something necessary (a being), human caprice does not then have freedom at its disposal. Man does not “possess” freedom as a property. At best, the... Read More Read More - [A New Year](https://everyangel.org/a-new-year/): A year come and another gone.  We celebrate for what?  The easy answer is life is short, and one must seize any opportunity to make merry with friends that comes along.  That’s an answer that we can depend upon.  I think that we also celebrate in hope. The opportunities entailed in the next twelve... Read More Read More - [Time....](https://everyangel.org/time-3/): Time goes slowly….  Today is the last day of 2018.  Tomorrow technically will begin at 12:00 AM which will herald the begining of 2019.  A few friends will come over for some genial conversation, a celebration of friendship, and of the passage of time.  Will I remain awake until midnight?  I doubt it.  Those... Read More Read More - [Remembering](https://everyangel.org/remembering-2/): After a mild month, the last days of December are descending towards winter.  Yesterday was the 29th, a cold, breezy day with light icy rain. Our family gathered at our oldest daughters home to remember our grand-daughter, baby Kai Ruby Lewis-King who was born one year ago on the 29th.  She was still-born after... Read More Read More - [Milwaukee](https://everyangel.org/milwaukee/): Amazing Architecture versus A Perfect Beef and Mushroom Strudel I traveled to Milwaukee yesterday.  The drive north to Wisconsin is enjoyable.  Milwaukee is not as sprawling as Chicago, a more user-friendly city by the lake.  The cost of parking is reasonable there too.  We wanted to visit the Christkindl Market that was situated near... Read More Read More - [In The Clear Night](https://everyangel.org/in-the-clear-night/): This tune has always caused me to shiver inwardly. It is Purple Rain by Prince and The Revolution. The lyrics are simple on the surface, but I think it is the image of purple rain and the sweeping, fat and luscious, and sometimes slashing guitar chords that get the job done. For me the... Read More Read More - [Relief, Just A Song Away](https://everyangel.org/relief-just-a-song-away/): I always write first thing in the morning.  My mind works best then.  If I can lay some good words down, doing my best,  I face the rest of the day with a “can do” attitude. I did not show up this morning, because Mother Nature kicked my ass.  I suffered through the night... Read More Read More - [Batavia One More Day](https://everyangel.org/batavia-one-more-day/): We returned to Batavia.  Is there any better way to gain a sense of a place than to move around observing what there is to see?  We identified eight homes that seemed suitable to our needs.  We critically looked at each of them as well as the surrounding neighborhoods.  I am satisfied that we... Read More Read More - [Batavia](https://everyangel.org/batavia/): We spent a day in Batavia.  I do not recall visiting Batavia in the past.  We decided that we want to live in Batavia, –so what better reason for a visit?  Seriously!  Not unlike a pioneer family who left what they knew behind for distant California, (a territory they had no experience of) on... Read More Read More - [Because Part II](https://everyangel.org/because-ii/): I remembered an old photograph that depicts us in an earlier time.  In 1977 we held our first born girl.  We had no idea what life had in store for us.  That is a metaphor to be taken seriously but not literally.  It Is not as if there was any predetermined path, which is... Read More Read More - [Because](https://everyangel.org/because/): Yesterday we celebrated our 48th year of marriage.  Seems like a long journey, when I think of it that way.  We purchased greeting cards for each other, with verses that expressed our affection for the other. She purchased a Wendell Berry book of essays for me.  We celebrated by enjoying the Friday evening fish... Read More Read More - [Point Break & Counter Point](https://everyangel.org/point-break-counter-point/): During my high school years, I owned a surfboard.  I remember paddling out beyond the breakers at Carolina Beach, during  the onset of a squall.  The waves were as big as a house.  The challenge was timing, to drive the board between the mountains of water, to avoid the break. If I mistimed the... Read More Read More - [Celebrating The Animal Mass](https://everyangel.org/celebrating-the-animal-mass/): Art begins with the animal, at least with the animal that carves out a territory and constructs a house (both are correlative, or even one and the same, in what is called a habitat). The territory-house system transforms a number of organic functions— sexuality, procreation, aggression, feeding. But this transformation does not explain the... Read More Read More - [Jump](https://everyangel.org/jump/): In a vain attempt to avoid being serious, all too serious, I offer this respite.  Van Halen’s 1983  hit Jump will get your blood pumping, period.  When and if I am in a coma, I hope that someone remembers to play this song. Curious about the origin and meaning of the song I consulted... Read More Read More - [Confiding To The Ear Of the Future](https://everyangel.org/confiding-to-the-ear-of-the-future/): Hurricane Florence.  Like a massive heat-driven-machine the storm churns the Atlantic sucking up moisture.  It’s path along a vector of the Bermudas and the Bahamas is aimed at North and South Carolina.  Possibly as a cat 5 storm, water and wind will batter the coastal areas.  What we know as civilization, homes, schools, roads,... Read More Read More - [We Become With](https://everyangel.org/we-become-with/): Not a “minute of the world passes,” says Cezanne, that we will preserve if we do not “become the minute.” We are not in the world, we become with the world; we become by contemplating it. Everything is vision, becoming. We become universes. Becoming animal, plant, molecular, becoming zero. What terror haunts Van Gogh’s... Read More Read More - [Never Stop Swinging](https://everyangel.org/never-stop-swinging/): A few more photos of the Piñata “contest” at the family pig roast.  Its everyone against the pig.  No matter how difficult, how tough the pig, perseverance is called for to “bring it down.”  Keep swinging! Keep stepping up, and taking your turn with the bat. I captured these additional photos.  Enjoy! Life:  Never... Read More Read More - [Family Pig Pickin](https://everyangel.org/family-pig-pickin/): There are times when I can hardly believe my good fortune. Yesterday Laura and I traveled a few miles to Kevin and Caryn’s house in Arlington Heights were the annual family pig roast is convened in Kevin’s back-yard.  A young pig is slow roasted over a charcoal fire, in the rotisserie cooker.  The steel... Read More Read More - [Trouble](https://everyangel.org/trouble/): I awakened this morning to a lawyer-dream.  Dreams come to consciousness as the mind ascends from deep sleep to the boundary of a waking state.  Awareness traces the dreams/nightmares that represent our hopes and fears.  This is the first lawyer-dream that I remember having.  In the dream I visualized the face of my attorney,... Read More Read More - [You Can Check-Out Anytime](https://everyangel.org/you-can-check-out-anytime/): Didn’t get to write this morning.  The server behind the Starbucks Wifi was not happy.  Since I was unable to reach my blog, I finished off the last chapter in the philosophy book that I’ve been reading.  What Is Philosophy? by Deleuze and Guattari is among the most difficult material that I’ve attempted reading,... Read More Read More - [Winged Horses & Fiery Dragons](https://everyangel.org/winged-horses-fiery-dragons/): We require just a little order to protect us from chaos. Nothing is more distressing than a thought that escapes itself, than ideas that fly off, that disappear hardly formed, already eroded by forgetfulness or precipitated into others that we no longer master. These are infinite variabilities, the appearing of which coincide. They are... Read More Read More - [Why Beauty?](https://everyangel.org/why-beauty/): I left the house this morning in gray light.  In the course of the short drive to Starbucks my attention was attracted to a fragment of fire in my rear view mirror.  The sun.  The star at the center of our solar system is a marker of day and night, and of the seasons,... Read More Read More - [Opaque Complexity](https://everyangel.org/opaque-complexity/): rising economic inequality breakdown of the nation-state militarization of borders totalizing global surveillance curtailment of individual freedoms triumph of transnational corporations the rise of neurocognitive capitalism the rise of nativist ideologies the degradation of the natural environment ….all of these are the product of a general inability to perceive the wider, networked effects of... Read More Read More - [The Park](https://everyangel.org/the-park/): Sunday morning.  Sunday’s a day of reflection, when one dials back one’s engagement, to let the world “just be” to consider where one has come and what it means.  Do we not need one day of respite?  I think so. Life in ordinary time, the work week, never slows down.  The press of events,... Read More Read More - [Habitat](https://everyangel.org/habitat/): Perhaps art begins with the animal, at least with the animal that carves out a territory and constructs a house (both are correlative, or even one and the same, in what is called a habitat). The territory-house system transforms a number of organic functions— sexuality, procreation, aggression, feeding. But this transformation does not explain... Read More Read More - [Advertising](https://everyangel.org/advertising/): I enjoy Adbusters Magazine.  It is a Canadian publication, edgy, transgressive, full of social criticism.  I find the writing stimulating, even when I do not happen to agree with the writers point of view.  I also enjoy the graphic elements within the publication.  I willingly pay $14.95 for a copy. Here is an excerpt... Read More Read More - [No Interest In Politics...Till Lately](https://everyangel.org/no-interest-in-politics-till-lately/): I’ve never had a natural interest in politics.  Politics has always seemed like back-office stuff.  You know the run-of-the-mill chores that have to be done to keep society functioning.  A means must be found for making judgements, the adjustments necessary to keep commerce flowing, roads paved, teachers teaching, etc. I never found politics appealing... Read More Read More - [Venus In The Mirror/Lens](https://everyangel.org/venus-in-the-mirror-lens/): This past Sunday we decided to spend the afternoon reading by the lake that is the center of our subdivision.  The lakefront park is a well maintained shady expanse of lawn.  The view of the lake in the afternoon sun was splendid.  Water sparkled with light, a few children played in the shallow water,... Read More Read More - [Walworth County Fair](https://everyangel.org/walworth-county-fair/): We attended the Walworth County Fair in Elkhorn Wisconsin yesterday.  The first fair to be held on the grounds was in 1851.  This is an old fashion farming community fair that continues to be supported by the entire community.  I particularly enjoy the sense of history whenever we visit this place.  The fair grounds... Read More Read More - [Light In A Dark Time](https://everyangel.org/light-in-a-dark-time/): We live in a dark time.  Anything that can be said is relative to context.  I write in a first world country, in relative safety.  My circumstances are enviable.  So far no drought, no floods, and abundance of food.  Today I am gainfully employed.  Many others who live elsewhere would happily trade places with... Read More Read More - [Black Mirror](https://everyangel.org/black-mirror/): “When you tell me that, you know, he should testify because he’s going to tell the truth and he shouldn’t worry, well that’s so silly because it’s somebody’s version of the truth. Not the truth,” Giuliani told Chuck Todd on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday morning. “Truth is truth,” Todd responded. “No, no,... Read More Read More - [To Turn Back A Straight Line](https://everyangel.org/to-turn-back-a-straight-line/): THE STRAIGHT LINE IS GODLESS AND IMMORAL  –Friedensreich Hundertwasser Architect and artist December 15, 1928 – February 19, 2000 The logic freaks have had it their way for over 2000 years and all they have to offer now is more of the same: more technology,   more rationality,     more surveillance,       more consumption,... Read More Read More - [Requiem For John McCain](https://everyangel.org/requiem-for-john-mccain/): As we all know by now, John McCain died earlier today (Saturday). This was not a surprise. In recent days we knew that the end of his life was nearing. When Senator McCain ran for president I did not vote for him. I was cheering on the young Senator from Illinois whose father was... Read More Read More - [Never Thought The Day Would Come](https://everyangel.org/never-thought-the-day-would-come/): “Time goes slowly, but time can do so much….,” according to the lyric of the Righteous Brothers anthem Unchained Melody.  We are bound to time.  When there’s plenty of time ahead of us–we  seldom reflect upon times passage.  At least that is how I’ve lived my life. Several weeks ago, I decided not to... Read More Read More - [My Opinion On Opinions](https://everyangel.org/my-opinion-on-opinions/): Doxa (ancient Greek; from verb dokein, “to appear”, “to seem”, “to think” and “to accept”) is a Greek word meaning common belief or popular opinion. We have opinions on everything that we see or that affects us, to the extent the human sciences can be seen as a vast doxology. —but things themselves are... Read More Read More - [Air Show](https://everyangel.org/air-show/): Last weekend the Chicago Airshow was held at the lake front.  I did not attend.  Not that I do not enjoy airshows.  I’ve attended my share in the past.  One of my enduring memories was the privilege of viewing a mock dogfight between a Japanese Zero and the American P-38.  A low altitude twisting... Read More Read More - [Even Gravity...](https://everyangel.org/even-gravity/): What is called “perception” is no longer a state of affairs but a state of the body as induced by another body, and “affection” is the passage of this state to another state as increase or decrease of potential-power through the action of other bodies. Nothing is passive, but everything is interaction, even gravity……... Read More Read More - [Play](https://everyangel.org/play/): SPIRALLING OUT I look for the way things will turn spiralling out from a center… Life is about invention, not survival. We are here to create, not to defend. In a creative playful world, all of us are, all the time, poets. Even the most analytic science, the most careful construction of models, is... Read More Read More - [Best Years Come And Gone](https://everyangel.org/best-years-come-and-gone/): Rain today.  I am grateful for the rain.  It has been six weeks with very little rain. Last night I exchanged emails with a friend who expressed hatred for a group of people.  i failed to persuade him that expressing hatred is unjustified as no individual has responsibility for who their parents happen to... Read More Read More - [Laughter And Nietzsche](https://everyangel.org/laughter-and-nietzsche/): I’ve never thought of Nietzsche as having a good joke.  Granted he was a good writer.  If he were alive I do not think he’d be hired to write comedy skits for Saturday Night Live.  His biting sardonic wit is an acquired taste. Yesterday I read for a few minutes from one of my... Read More Read More - [My God! What Have I Done?](https://everyangel.org/my-god-what-have-i-done/): Exhausted and don’t know why.  Well not exactly why, though I have some ideas about the why of it all.  Not the first time I’ve felt this way.  The feeling will pass as do all emotional states, which are the minds weather.  No need to worry about the weather. So, I am content to... Read More Read More - [Thoughts About Thinking](https://everyangel.org/thoughts-about-thinking/): What is involved when I think, when you think? What does one do when one thinks? Is it possible to remember when you were a child, just learning speak words, asking and learning the names of things, …tricycle, dog, ball? (1) There is a triple root of acts of transcendence (thought) through which the... Read More Read More - [Aretha Franklin 1942-2018](https://everyangel.org/aretha-franklin-1942-2018/): When an artist dies, I think a piece of the world breaks off and falls away.  Aretha Franklin was a “world maker.” Franklin recorded 112 charted singles on Billboard, including 77 Hot 100 entries, 17 top-ten pop singles, 100 R&B entries and 20 number-one R&B singles, becoming the most charted female artist in the... Read More Read More - [Friends At Table](https://everyangel.org/friends-at-table/): Concepts are Vagabond A concept is fuzzy or vague not because it lacks an outline but because it is a vagabond, non-discursive, moving about on a plane of immanence. ….it is the event as pure sense that immediately runs through the components. It has no number…for counting things that display its properties, but a... Read More Read More - [Metastasis](https://everyangel.org/metastasis/): Metastasis Metastasis is a pathogenic agent’s spread from an initial or primary site to a different or secondary site within the host’s body; it is typically spoken of as such spread by a cancerous tumor. The newly pathological sites, then, are metastases. Wikipedia *** This morning I felt numb, unable to write in the... Read More Read More - [Deep Water](https://everyangel.org/deep-water/): Today is to be a “normal” day at the office.  Pay no attention that my mind seems to be in molasses, barely able to rise above idle.  Perhaps that will improve as the day progresses. I struggled to read and understand the text in this mornings reading of the comparison between philosophy and science. ... Read More Read More - [The Passage Of Time](https://everyangel.org/the-passage-of-time/): Got up at 5:30AM and by 6AM I was climbing into the cab of the big blue Volvo semi.  I spent the weekend with Aunt Clara and her family, honored to be included by marriage.  The occasion was a celebration of her 90th birthday.  A family member, David operates a trucking business and kindly... Read More Read More - [The Road That I Must Travel](https://everyangel.org/the-road-that-i-must-travel/): Rough day yesterday.  I witnessed an email exchange between friends which came to a painful conclusion.  I was a participant, and played a part in the conclusion which at this juncture could entail the end of a relationship with an individual.  I do not know anyone who would abide the disparagement of being judged... Read More Read More - [On The Road](https://everyangel.org/on-the-road/): Nothing much to say this morning.  I am on the road to Eagle River Wisconsin.  Stayed in Baraboo last night.  Baraboo is one of our favorite little Wisconsin towns.  Outside of the big cities such as Madison and Milwaukee the economy is closely related to Nature.  The quality of travel experience is much enhanced... Read More Read More - [Miscellaneous Quotations For Friday](https://everyangel.org/miscellaneous-quotations-for-friday/): These lines, the first four from What Is Philosophy by Deleuze and Guattari, and the last from this mornings front page of the New York Times have weighed on my mind.  These are snapshots, evidence of a state of things that will continue to move, to change inexorably according to contingent factors which by... Read More Read More - [Why But To Remember](https://everyangel.org/why-but-to-remember/): Why do I keep attending car shows?  Another one was held in Mundelein late in the day yesterday, Park on Park.  This time my wife agreed to go with me.  I always enjoy her company.  Usually I go alone with camera in hand. I am drawn to a car show for the same reason... Read More Read More - [Ways To Die Young](https://everyangel.org/ways-to-die-young/): Another day of fiery destruction in California.  When Nature is shoved off balance by the heat sink of increased atmospheric carbon loading, the surface of the land warms without recovery from regular and gentle rains,–then the dry vegetation burns.  How many days have the weary fire fighters manned their fire lines while airborne tankers... Read More Read More - [After A Little Rain](https://everyangel.org/after-a-little-rain/): Another early morning at Starbucks, Mundelein.  By habit I begin my day here to read and to write.  The atmosphere is congenial for focus upon the state of my mind and of the world.  Contemporary music in the background, plaintive, a male voice celebrating/mourning the state of our lives as mortal. A friendly barista... Read More Read More - [That's The Law](https://everyangel.org/thats-the-law/): I am a native born North Carolinian.  I’ve lived in Illinois for over forty years.  When asked by anyone if I miss my home state, my answer usually is, “Its a good place to be from.”  I grew up in North Carolina, and have fond memories of my teachers, of the pine tree forests... Read More Read More - [Summer](https://everyangel.org/summer/): Visited Kraklauer Creek Park again a few days ago.  In fact my first visit on July 28th was followed by another on August 5th.  There was much to take in along this waterway that is the centerpiece for Kraklauer Park.  Wildflowers are featured in a colorful spectacle on the banks of this little creek.... Read More Read More - [After The Bubble](https://everyangel.org/after-the-bubble/): Ideas associated with Christianity……. The idea that reciprocal pity is a sufficient basis for political association, that there is something wrong with imprisonment without trial, Or the use of war prisoners as slaves, Or public executions, Or torture to extract confessions, Or the use of hostages, Or the deportation of whole populations…. Were once... Read More Read More - [A Stratigraphic Order](https://everyangel.org/a-stratagraphic-order/): A recurring topic among those of us interested in (seized by) philosophy is what is philosophy.  What does this “thinking about thinking” mean?  In this passage from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s book, What Is Philosophy? a description of philosophy includes the concept of time dilation.  Time is compressed (accelerated) or expanded, (slowed down). ... Read More Read More - [Relativity Redux](https://everyangel.org/relativity-redux/): I want to say more about the principle/law of special relativity.  Special Relativity is analogous to gravity.  For every living being on the earth, the pull toward the center always must be figured into one’s day to day living. When hiking in the Cascades in an Oregon forest, do not venture too close to... Read More Read More - [Relativity](https://everyangel.org/relativity/): Last night’s discussion on Relativity Theory was rousing and wide ranging.  It is remarkable that a group of fourteen adults, each with an individual history, different levels and types of education, and widely varied interests– would have the ability to discuss Einstein’s great work, with substantial understanding.  It is also remarkable that differences in... Read More Read More - [Scone Love](https://everyangel.org/scone-love/): What !  I don’t believe it.  The lyric is not scone love?  Who doesn’t love a scone?  A scone is just the right portion for a bite sized treat, lightly frosted crust, flaky texture, with just enough of a carb bump to fix low blood sugar. For months and months I have privately enjoyed... Read More Read More - [Cormorant](https://everyangel.org/cormorant/): Sunday was a day of adventure.  An adventure happens when one’s plans, actions and experiences which you counted on are thwarted by circumstances.  We planned to visit the Morton Arboretum to take in the troll display.  The Arboretum has a number of giant trolls constructed of wood placed throughout the grounds. The entrance to... Read More Read More - [Goats And Politicians](https://everyangel.org/goats-and-politicians/): I remember a visit to a county fair.  It happened when I was fourteen or fifteen.  The occasion was memorable because I was not accompanied by my parents.  I recall the glitter of the midway lights in the dark night, the aroma of cotton candy, and candied apples.  Also the smell of sawdust, and... Read More Read More - [Sweet Red Angel](https://everyangel.org/sweet-red-angel/): I stopped in at the Roadster Shop several days ago with my camera.  As usual I asked and was given permission to shoot a few photos of their work which is displayed on the showroom lobby of the business.  There were a number of interesting, truly amazing works of automotive art on display, but only... Read More Read More - [To Roll The Dice Just One More Time](https://everyangel.org/to-roll-the-dice-just-one-more-time/): A tale about the human condition is conveyed by the rock anthem: Don’t Stop Belevin’ by Journey.  The tune was included in the play list that we enjoyed while having dinner yesterday.  I’ve listened to this song innumerable times.  Sometimes I feel tears, as something deep within is touched by the slow building melody,... Read More Read More - [Bullying, Cruelty, And Tyranny](https://everyangel.org/bullying-cruelty-and-tyranny/): Exchanged emails with a friend on the related terms: bullying, cruelty, and tyranny.  Is not the recognition of this type of behavior a matter of skill?  One learns by experience, and by exposure to literature, poetry, and story telling,–empathy.  Empathy is learned.  It is the profound appreciation of our capacity for suffering.  The capacity... Read More Read More - [Thoughts Of A Dry Brain In A Dry Season](https://everyangel.org/thoughts-of-a-dry-brain-in-a-dry-season/): Days end yesterday I read the poem Gerontion by T. S. Eliot. That was my second reading of the poem this week.  I was taken by Eliot’s words.  Scholarly analysts say Gerontion is one of his most enigmatic works.  There is much enigma in all of Eliot’s poems. Yesterday afternoon I heard that Sergio... Read More Read More - [Imagination](https://everyangel.org/imagination/): Imagination is the chief instrument of the good… art is more moral than moralities. For the latter either are, or tend to become, consecrations of the status quo… The moral prophets of humanity have always been poets even though they always spoke in free verse or by parable. —John Dewey Art as Experience (New... Read More Read More - [Poetry and Revolution](https://everyangel.org/poetry-and-revolution/): A liberal society is one whose ideals can be fulfilled by persuasion rather than by force, by reform than by revolution. by the free and open encounters of present linguistic and other practices with suggestions for new practices. ….an ideal liberal society is one which has no other purpose except freedom, no goal except... Read More Read More - [If I Can't Get Clean](https://everyangel.org/if-i-cant-get-clean/): The culture of liberalism should be one which was enlightened, secular, through and through. It would be one in which no trace of divinity remained, either in the form of a divinized world or of a divinized self. Such a culture would have no room for the notion that there are nonhuman forces to... Read More Read More - [Becoming Human](https://everyangel.org/becoming-human/): By seeing every human being as consciously or unconsciously acting out an idiosyncratic fantasy, we can see the distinctively human, as opposed to the animal portion of each human life as the use for symbolic purposes of every particular person, object, situation, event, and word encountered in later life. This process amounts to redescribing... Read More Read More - [Solilquy Of Hate](https://everyangel.org/solilquy-of-hate/): SEDUCED BY HATE, INDIAN POLITICIAN EMBRACES A LYNCH MOB By Jeffrey Gettleman and Hari Kumar July 20, 2018 HAZARIBAGH, India — Jayant Sinha is a Celtics fan. He graduated from Harvard. He worked for McKinsey. Born and raised in India but minted in the United States, he found wealth and success in the Boston... Read More Read More - [Vacations Greatest Benefit](https://everyangel.org/vacations-greatest-benefit/): Perhaps you will agree that a vacation time away permits one some different choices about the foci of one’s attention.  In our ordinary lives, the “blind impress” of accrued circumstances can be oppressive.  We feel the need to “get away” to a destination affording different scenery, perhaps time for more reading, fewer phone calls,... Read More Read More - [Looking Back](https://everyangel.org/looking-back/): What a great week of vacation!  A friend expressed surprise that so many of us stayed happily together in a big house for seven days.  Actually we had plenty of room, there were many things to do, and we like being together.  We had some wonderful meals together, lots of good conversation, and three... Read More Read More - [Another Day By The Lake](https://everyangel.org/another-day-by-the-lake/): A few photographs capture the memory of a day of being out and about in the wine country of Michigan.  Everyone gets to be a child again while on vacation.  We will not forget the time spent at Bumbelberry Acres picking blueberrys, and the visit to the petting zoo.  We heard the story of... Read More Read More - [Indians ?](https://everyangel.org/indians/): It is Sunday morning.  The state of Michigan is considered to be traditionally religious with many houses of worship.  Grand Rapids is the location of Calvin College, a Christian Reformed liberal arts school founded in 1876.  Zondervan publishing, one of the largest and well-respected Christian publishing houses is also in Grand Rapids.  Grand Rapids... Read More Read More - [Like The Old Maple](https://everyangel.org/like-the-old-maple/): Thinking only begins at the point where we have come to know that Reason, glorified for centuries, is the most obstinate adversary of thinking. —Martin Heidegger Gary kindly shared a quote that prompted him to consider afresh his conception of Reason.  The quotation had the same effect upon me.  And as a bonus, Gary... Read More Read More - [A Day At The Lake](https://everyangel.org/a-day-at-the-lake/):   A great body of water is compelling.  When I was a kid family vacation involved spending a few days at Carolina Beach.  The car trip to the seaside always involved mounting excitement the closer our destination.  I gazed intently from the side window straining for a first glimpse of the ocean.  That first... Read More Read More - [Wildflowers And A Ruined Stairway](https://everyangel.org/wildflowers-and-a-ruined-stairway/): I checked the map to learn that I am in Hagar Michigan, just a bit south of Benton Harbor.  Shortly after arriving at our rental house we walked down the road, then through the woods, taking the wooden stairway down through the ravine to the beach of sand at the waters edge.  Lake Michigan... Read More Read More - [Philosophy And Opinion](https://everyangel.org/philosophy-and-opinion/): Chaos is not the enemy.  It is a tempting jump to this conclusion.  Is it not the case that the disorganized, and even threatening elements of experience provide material for making a habitat of mind?  I think so.  Organization arises from the mind, and especially from the give and take of shared minds with... Read More Read More - [Ironical Soliloquy Bird](https://everyangel.org/ironical-soliloquy-bird/): These photos were taken at the Rivera Boat House at Lake Geneva this past Sunday afternoon.  Lake Geneva on a Sunday afternoon is close enough to Paradise as far as I am concerned.  The lake stretches to the horizon, the surface sparkling in the sun, a platter of diamonds.  We walked out on the... Read More Read More - [On Happiness](https://everyangel.org/on-happiness/): Each of us desired to be happy, once.  As the years pass many give up the quest and the hope of happiness.  Happiness, the contentment of well-being diminishes as time takes its toll.  It’s not a matter of money.  Financial resources while necessary to happiness are not sufficient.  The most important aspects of happiness... Read More Read More - [Art And Philosophy](https://everyangel.org/art-and-philosophy/): This image was received from a friend.  The quality of this photograph is obvious.  I have never been to Yellowstone.  This photo transports me emotionally to that landscape, its loneliness, to the emergence of life amidst the rocky crag.  To my mind the image is titled, “One Tree Hill.” An image of a universe….... Read More Read More - [Philosophy Is](https://everyangel.org/philosophy-is/): Philosophy is becoming, not history; it is the coexistence of planes, not the succession of systems. We will say that the plane of immanence is, at the same time, that which must be thought and that which cannot be thought. It is the nonthought within thought. …It is the most intimate within thought and... Read More Read More - [Worlds Under Construction](https://everyangel.org/worlds-under-construction/): The year was 1965. I was a member of an Eagle Scout Troop sponsored by Monsanto. Our meetings typically were in the lab where our scoutmaster worked at the Monsanto Research Triangle facility. I’ve never forgotten the evening. I remember the whine of the power supply and capacitors powering up. Then we heard the... Read More Read More - [Independence Day Parade Images](https://everyangel.org/independence-day-parade-images/): Another Independence Day Parade on Main Street of Wheaton Illinois is a memory.  These are a few of the photos that remind me of how diverse and unique is the American experience.  The course of historical events has brought us to this point in time and place.  So, join me curbside to view the... Read More Read More - [Silence And Intractability](https://everyangel.org/silence-and-intractability/): ….it gets worse with Christian philosophy. the positing of immanence remains pure philosophical instituting, but at the same time it is tolerated only in very small doses; it is strictly controlled and enframed by the demands of an emanative and, above all, creative transcendence. Putting their work and sometimes their lives at risk, all... Read More Read More - [Summerfest Once Again](https://everyangel.org/summerfest-once-again/): Summerfest in Milwaukee is the best music festival that I’ve attended.  Music and Nature are our reliable sources for life and renewal.  Summerfest on the Milwaukee lakefront is the apotheosis of devotion for those of us who love music, who find in music the rhythm of life itself. I am informed that this is the... Read More Read More - [Danger Ahead](https://everyangel.org/danger-ahead/): The non-philosophical is perhaps closer to the heart of philosophy than philosophy itself, and this means that philosophy cannot be content to be understood only philosophically or conceptually, but is addressed essentially to non-philosophers as well. Both the creation of concepts and the instituting of a plane of immanence are required, like two wings... Read More Read More - [A Day In Chicago](https://everyangel.org/a-day-in-chicago/): I seldom travel into Chicago.  As years have passed, I have less reason to visit the city.  In the past we’d go frequently to experience the sights, the galleries along Superior, the sensation of the Mag Mile, and the festivals at Grant Park.  For some of those years Laura worked in the city.  Chicago... Read More Read More - [Throwing Dice](https://everyangel.org/throwing-dice/): Like many who I have spoken with since the presidential election of November of 2016, I remain puzzled and dismayed that this ignorant bombastic individual received enough votes to win The White House for four years.  The media rationale as well as “reasons” given by acquaintances for supporting Trump seem surreal, like ideas transmitted... Read More Read More - [Gonna Leave You Here](https://everyangel.org/gonna-leave-you-here/): Heard this tune played on the radio yesterday,  I’ve heard it many times before.  This time it rocked me, “knocked me out”.  That’s an expression of the impact of a tune and lyric on my sense of space and time.  Music can do that.  It’s a matter of serendipity of timing: the right time... Read More Read More - [The Day Before Yesterday](https://everyangel.org/the-day-before-yesterday/): The day before yesterday it rained hard, really hard.  In our neighborhood over two inches fell within an hour,  In the backyard, the green grass appeared faint and then disappeared under the surface of brown water.  At the side of our house, a creek flowed, threatening to become a river.  Water covering our and... Read More Read More - [The Border Between Good And Evil](https://everyangel.org/the-border-between-good-and-evil/): Recently I was troubled by an email exchange with a friend.  He supported the removal of children from parents seeking asylum at our southern border.  I called it kidnapping, and insisted such acts were atrocities.  He disagreed. His argument was that these parents were neer-do-wells intent on defrauding our government.  Therefore they deserve to... Read More Read More - [Fear Of Drowning](https://everyangel.org/fear-of-drowning/): Tuesday morning 8AM at Starbucks. Outside the rain Is falling in a dense curtain of water. Thunder rolls. If this keeps up there is going to be flooding. Usually a downpour abates in a few minutes. Sometimes it does not. I find myself thinking in a parallel fashion about the state of our society,... Read More Read More - [A Poet Has Died](https://everyangel.org/a-poet-has-died/): One of the first news items of the day was that Donald Hall has passed.  The poet died on Saturday at his home in New Hampshire.  He will be missed by many.  If you are interested here is the NY Times ARTICLE on his life and work. A poem by Donald Hall: Affirmation To... Read More Read More - [Tied With A Silver Chain](https://everyangel.org/tied-with-a-silver-chain/): Yesterday I spent the afternoon sorting through boxes of archived files, –class notes from college and grad school, articles on business that I had saved for a second reading that never happened, and family related materials. It was an archeological dig into the past of selves that became the person that I now am.... Read More Read More - [If There Were A Place...](https://everyangel.org/if-there-were-a-place/): This morning I received a short, two lines of email from a friend. He commented that he was “somewhat troubled by the Presidents apparent lack of humility.” I composed a brief reply which I sent to him privately without including the rest of the group of recipients. Each of us is an individual caught... Read More Read More - [For A Song In A Time Of Dissonance](https://everyangel.org/for-a-song-in-a-time-of-dissonance/): Aesthetics is the science dedicated to the study of the contact between the derma (the skin, the sensitive surface of our body-mind) and different chemical, physical, electromagnetic, electronic, and informational flows. ….the universe is a continuum of diverse and interrelated entities in bodily contact with each other. It is both an organic and inorganic... Read More Read More - [On Solidarity](https://everyangel.org/on-solidarity/): Social solidarity is not an ethical or ideological value: It depends on the continuousness of the relation between individuals in time and in space. The material foundation of solidarity is the perception of the continuation of the body in the body, and the immediate understanding of my interest and your interest. —Franco “Bifo” Berardi... Read More Read More - [Hangover](https://everyangel.org/hangover/): I am sure that you’ve had one.  Awaking with the agenda of a new day on your mind, and just feeling out of sorts, like there is a “disturbance in the force” of your world.  That is how it was for me this morning as I found a gap in traffic on Midlothian road. ... Read More Read More - [If I Had Only Known](https://everyangel.org/if-i-had-only-known/): Now I get it.  With everyone else I was agitated, on edge at the thought that our President would confront the dictator of North Korea with an ill-considered demand that he immediately give up his nukes.  No doubt that would have ended badly for everyone, especially for those in the area, South Korea and... Read More Read More - [Then And Now](https://everyangel.org/then-and-now/): Enterprises are no longer linked to a territory and the work process is no longer based on a community of workers, living together in a factory day after day, but instead takes the form of an ever-changing recombination of time fragments connected in the global network. Cognitive workers do not meet in the same... Read More Read More - [Liquidating the Planet](https://everyangel.org/liquidating-the-planet/): The financial class that dominates the contemporary scene has neither attachments to territory nor to material production, because its power and wealth are founded on the total abstraction of a digitally multiplied finance. This digital-financial hyper-abstraction is liquidating both the living body of the planet and the social body. —-Franco “Bifo” Berardi excerpt The... Read More Read More - [Thinking About 1977](https://everyangel.org/thinking-about-1977/): 1977 is the year when Charlie Chaplin dies. The death of that man, in my perception, represents the end of the possibility of a gentle modernity, the end of the perception of time as a contradictory, controversial place where different viewpoints can meet, conflict, and then find progressive agreement. Charlie Chaplin is the last... Read More Read More - [Summer Car Show](https://everyangel.org/summer-car-show-2/): Park on Park is the name of the Mundelein car show that is held on the 2nd Wednesday evening of the summer months.  Street rods, collectible cars of all descriptions are parked on and around Park Avenue for the admiration of gear heads like myself.  As I grow older with every visit to a... Read More Read More - [Yummy Cherries](https://everyangel.org/yummy-cherries/): Can you think of anything more yummy than a bowl of cherries?  Maybe it has been a very long time since you’ve tasted fresh cherries in springtime.  When we become adult we tend not to indulge ourselves in such ordinary, and natural experiences of joy.  Our minds are seduced by things more abstract, and... Read More Read More - [To Tune Into A Shared Vibration](https://everyangel.org/to-tune-into-a-shared-vibration/): The center cannot hold, and things have fallen apart, detached from their meaning. The revelation of the century is the devastating spiral of abstraction and nihilism; abstraction of work from activity, abstraction of goods from usefulness, abstraction of time from sensuousness. Abstraction has detached the epidermis of language from the flesh of the linguistic... Read More Read More - [The Sun Goes Down In Our Eyes](https://everyangel.org/the-sun-goes-down-in-our-eyes/): After rush hour, late yesterday, I returned from our new place in Batavia. We have yet to move in, — my visit was to assess the dimensions of the rooms, to get a sense of what is possible.  The space of habitation determines, almost absolutely, the form and texture of the life that is... Read More Read More - [I Couldn't](https://everyangel.org/i-couldnt/): This morning as always I switched on the car radio.  It was tuned to NPR.  The host was in the midst of an interview with someone opining on the antics of the President.  I reached for the dashboard and turned it off.  I felt my psyche bend under the additional weight of hearing more... Read More Read More - [Two Tickets To Paradise](https://everyangel.org/two-tickets-to-paradise/): This post is a stream of consciousness discourse, the contents of my mind today.  I have memories of my day at the race track, wonderful memories, with some left-over photos to share.  This is prefaced and framed by the unhinged comments made by the President.  Life is nothing but a mixture of good and... Read More Read More - [I Hear Your Voice](https://everyangel.org/i-hear-your-voice/): We live our lives as the unique, “one-off” human being that we are.  There has never been, and there will never be another you.  You and I are the summation of a long intersection of confluences, lost in the recesses of historical time of your ancestors.  We are also the result of coincidences, that... Read More Read More - [...Apart From Politics II](https://everyangel.org/apart-from-politics-ii/): It is the world of the imagination in which the imaginative man/woman delights and not the gaunt world of reason.  The pleasure is the pleasure of powers that create a truth that cannot be arrived at by the reason alone, a truth that the poet recognizes by sensation.  The morality of the poet’s radiant... Read More Read More - [Life Apart From Politics](https://everyangel.org/life-apart-from-politics/): There is life apart from politics. It is this life that the youth as virile poet lives, in a kind of radiant and productive atmosphere. It is the life of that atmosphere. There the philosopher is an alien. The pleasure that the poet has there is a pleasure of agreement with the radiant and... Read More Read More - [Who Knows How?](https://everyangel.org/who-knows-how/): Pied Beauty Gerard Manley Hopkins – 1844-1889 Glory be to God for dappled things—    For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;        For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;    Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;        And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim. All things counter,... Read More Read More - [Poetry And Philosophy](https://everyangel.org/poetry-and-philosophy/): I am reading a collection of essays by Wallace Stevens, a poet of the 20th century.  His insights into what words do for us “knocks me out.”  I think these few lines written about poetry suggest the relationship between poetry and philosophy.  The promise of reason is that we may clarify what must be... Read More Read More - [A Fresh Approach To Despair](https://everyangel.org/a-fresh-approach-to-despair/): Slept fitfully last night, but that is not unusual.  Perhaps that was due to elevated blood sugar that I measured just before my breakfast of cheerios.  I’ve been diabetic for a while, and controlling blood sugar is like staying on a pitching rodeo bull.  I am thrown often, and I know that I will... Read More Read More - [What One Has Created](https://everyangel.org/to-need-what-one-has-created/): If we say the idea of God is merely a poetic idea, even the supreme poetic idea, and that our notions of heaven and hell are merely poetry not so called, even if poetry involves us vitally, the feeling of deliverance, of a release, of a perfection touched, of a vocation so that all... Read More Read More - [Something Real](https://everyangel.org/violence-within-that-protects-from-violence-without/): Continuing to think about my time at the drag strip Saturday afternoon….  Anticipation was in the air,  — that adrenaline sizzle as I waited for 20 minutes in a long line of cars and pickup trucks to pay entry admission to the track.  Excitement is contagious.   They came out —  dare I say, for... Read More Read More - [The Last Race Car](https://everyangel.org/the-last-race-car/): Yesterday I visited Great Lakes Drag-a-Way at Union Grove Wisconsin.   This past summer was the first year that I failed to visit the track at least once, in many summers. My first visit to a drag strip took place in my sophomore year of high school.  I was hooked.  I loved everything about it.  The... Read More Read More - [What About Poetry?](https://everyangel.org/what-about-poetry/): There is, in fact, a world of poetry indistinguishable from the world in which we live, or, as I ought to say, no doubt, from the world in which we shall come to live, since what makes the poet the potent figure that he is, or was, or ought to be, is that he... Read More Read More - [Celebrating](https://everyangel.org/celebrating/): Since becoming an adult celebrating the 4th of July has always felt strange to me.  As a kid, all you had to do was offer me cake and ice cream and I could celebrate anything.  No questions asked.  Adulthood has meant that I cannot celebrate some things.  It is a matter of knowing too... Read More Read More - [Standford's Wager](https://everyangel.org/standfords-wager/): The following is a guest post.  It is a refrain on the reasoning of Paschal’s Wager.  Enjoy! Standford’s Wager You should go into Suspended Animation upon your approaching death: If you believe in Suspended Animation and that someday you can be resurrected, you will be rewarded with extended life on Earth; If you do... Read More Read More - [Because I Am Involved](https://everyangel.org/because-i-am-involved/): At mid morning we left Eagle River Wisconsin.  The drive took some hours, the last segment approaching Milwaukee in a driving downpour.  Reason dictated that we pull over and wait until the dark clouds overhead had passed.  How many times in my life, have I dared circumstances risking serious injury or death by keeping... Read More Read More - [Farewell And Fare Forward](https://everyangel.org/farewell-and-fare-forward/): Today my wife’s Aunt Clara will be laid to rest.  All of us follow, in our own time.  There is so much beauty within this life, in our world to be enjoyed, to give life meaning.  Yet, everything passes.  It is a sad prospect, but only because we are aware, able to measure time,... Read More Read More - [Sunday Eagle River](https://everyangel.org/sunday-eagle-river/): We traveled from metropolitan Chicago to the north woods of Wisconsin. The change in environment is dramatic, shocking.  Chicago sprawl, the commercial hub of the country, with suburbs extending horizon to horizon contrasts with tall pine and birch forests, and lakes, and small town communities.  Eagle River is a community larger than some.  It’s... Read More Read More - [More Photos](https://everyangel.org/more-photos/): More photos taken on a visit to Kraklauer Creek.  The aster flowers grow like little suns, a golden pistil surrounded by white petals. The creek runs full.  The sound of rushing water is soothing — an invitation to relax, to stay longer.  The quarried stone from Wisconsin reminds that Nature is enhanced when mindfully... Read More Read More - [Kraklauer Creek](https://everyangel.org/kraklauer-creek/): Several days ago I had the urge to visit Kraklauer Creek.  A visit anytime of year is worthwhile.  Spring is unusually gratifying because the heat of the direct sun and the longer days, along with a lot of rain transform the creek banks into a thick curtain of vegetation.  Wild flowers of various types... Read More Read More - [Thrown, Stranded...](https://everyangel.org/thrown-stranded/): Thursday, the day after the first debate in Miami for the Democratic candidates for the Presidency. I did not watch. At this stage it’s a beauty contest. The real game will be between the last man or woman standing and the current occupant of the White House. Whenever I pause to think about the... Read More Read More - [More Wagering](https://everyangel.org/more-wagering/): The following is a guest post.  Several posts have been in response to a consideration of Paschal’s Wager.  Here is another: Wager   Summer’s end, autumn waits, patient, since the world turns inevitably, even though we claim exemption from nature’s wheel, inventing eternities and peopling them with souls. Sunflowers bloom wild and silent by... Read More Read More - [Blind Faith](https://everyangel.org/blind-faith/): I think that I was at the Norwalk, Ohio dragstrip when I saw the Blind Faith funny car.  A funny car dragster is a hand built race car, with a fiber glass body loosely mimicking one of Detroit’s products, a Camaro or a Mustang.  The entire body tilts up and away from the motor... Read More Read More - [On Blindly Believing](https://everyangel.org/no-ability-to-blindly-believe/): Whether or not you believe in God, you should live your life with love, kindness, compassion, mercy and tolerance while trying to make the world a better place. If there is no God, you have lost nothing and will have made a positive impact on those around you. If there is a benevolent God... Read More Read More - [Already Carving The Epitaphs..](https://everyangel.org/already-carving-the-epitaphs/): Just past 9AM, at this moment the tables are empty within Starbucks, except for myself.  Kevin, a contractor,  stands behind me adding sugar and creme to his tall cup of coffee.  Momentarily he will depart.  He always does.  I am  surprised that he appears to be working on a Sunday. I read these lines... Read More Read More - [Banker And Friend](https://everyangel.org/a-banker-and-friend/): The contention with the big bank came to conclusion.  We received the “clear to close” word on our mortgage approval, and soon afterward a pdf of the loan agreement was received via email.  The mortgage document was signed electronically and returned.  An hour or so later a closing disclosure document was received and reviewed.... Read More Read More - [Into The Dark](https://everyangel.org/into-the-dark/): Friday and the majority of patrons walking up to the counter at Starbucks have a small screen in their hands. They momentarily look up to engage the barista to place their order.  It’s a sunny day, and I wonder if anyone pays attention.  The warm sun, the last day of spring, the effulgence of... Read More Read More - [Big Banks](https://everyangel.org/big-banks/): My day was upended by a conference call last night.  My local bank branch manager, patched me in with a supervisor from his bank’s mortgage processing department. Three of us discussed, briefly and quite intensely the status of a certain mortgage application.  You probably know from experience that one of the critical dimensions of... Read More Read More - [Selling A Home](https://everyangel.org/midweek-2/): Buying or selling a home is a high stakes proposition.  A family needs a dwelling suitable to their lifestyle as well as a neighborhood amenable to all family members. Realtors, bankers, and several lawyers  — are involved in the conversation.  A home sale cuts wide into the successive rings of society: familial, legal, financial,... Read More Read More - [Blinking Cursor](https://everyangel.org/blinking-cursor/): For a few minutes Starbucks is unaccountably quiet.  The space is usually a mad-house.   The capuccino machine roars, a cacophony of voices rise in the high ceiling room, and sometimes a canine barks from a vehicle into the drive up window.  I am acquainted with the staff.   They work very hard, professionally competent,... Read More Read More - [Why Say More...](https://everyangel.org/why-say-more/): I wonder why say anything more.  Much has been said already, a storehouse of hard earned wisdom, the deposit of ancestors from their trials and errors.  Little attention is paid, especially if at first what has been written is arcane, somewhat opaque, less than transparent.  Complaints are voiced, and we move on to an... Read More Read More - [Out Of Control](https://everyangel.org/out-of-control/): Another Sunday.  This Sunday morning is gray, foggy, cool, and Father’s Day.  I asked myself what it takes to become a father.  From a biological point of view–it takes very little.  Nature takes it’s course,— one sperm finds the egg and resulting from a cascade of cause and effect some months later, a child... Read More Read More - [Learning To Laugh](https://everyangel.org/learning-to-laugh/): A head-cold continues to aggravate, deep cough and much tissue paper is needed.  We are not spiritual beings, the body obtrudes into our preferred idealism. Walked into the kitchen this morning, and turned on NPR.  The Saturday morning special programming was an exploration of the ethos, and the lore of Alabama, yes, the State... Read More Read More - [Eric Hoffer](https://everyangel.org/eric-hoffer/): I am at a loss for a story this morning.  I think this is a second sunny, paradisiacal day in a row absent rain,  but I am discomfited with laryngitis which has almost taken my voice. After a review of notes taken many years ago, I will offer some excerpts from Before The Sabbath... Read More Read More - [Making Mozart Laugh](https://everyangel.org/making-mozart-laugh/): He laughed so hard that he turned a somersault in the air and played trills with his heels. At the same time he shouted at me: “Hey, my young fellow, does your tongue smart, man, do your lungs really pinch, man? You think of your readers, those carrion feeders, and all your typesetters, those... Read More Read More - [1965 Was A Good Year](https://everyangel.org/1965-was-a-good-year/): I remember well, my sophomore year in high school.  It was a good year.  Somehow I managed to earn As and Bs as a student, enjoyed life with friends on weekends, hanging out at Honey’s drive-in and occasional street racing on I-85 at night.  I think it was the summer of 65 that I... Read More Read More - [Tribute](https://everyangel.org/tribute/): Last night we attended a dinner to celebrate the 50th year wedding anniversary of two friends.  Lauretta’s Italian Bakery Restaurant in Mundelein provided the venue for the event.  I cannot remember an evening of conversation, good food, wine and much good will, that was more enjoyable.  Certainly I will remember the extended conversations with... Read More Read More - [Sweet Intoxication](https://everyangel.org/sweet-intoxication/): Another cloudy morning with a stiff cool breeze.  It is June and we’ve had rain with more to come.  Wet and cool does not augur well for the corn just planted in the fields. There’s no comfort on the front page of the New York Times this morning.  Depicted on the front page, —... Read More Read More - [Have We All Got To Die Then?](https://everyangel.org/have-we-all-got-to-die-then/): “Have we all got to die then?” she asked. There was no reply. Meanwhile a man on foot went past below. He saw the smashed-up cars and began nosing round them. Leaning over into one of them he pulled out a gay parasol, a lady’s handbag and a bottle of wine. Then he sat... Read More Read More - [No Vacancy](https://everyangel.org/no-vacancy/): Saturday.  I arrived at Starbucks earlier than usual.  The Saturday papers are not yet delivered, and feeling abnormally anxious I wanted to know if a five percent tariff would be imposed on imports from Mexico, beginning Monday.  So I resorted to MSN news site on my computer and I felt relief.  An agreement has... Read More Read More - [For Tomorrow](https://everyangel.org/for-tomorrow/): Friday is the final work day of the week. This has been a full week of physical labor, one project after another.  It’s simply hard labor to prepare a house to go on the market.  I have been on the roof and in the attic.  Hours have been dedicated to finding and filling boxes... Read More Read More - [Stumbling With No One To Guide Us](https://everyangel.org/stumbling-with-no-one-to-guide-us/): Another day, Thursday, one day closer to the imposition of a tariff on all goods imported from Mexico.  Thus a supply chain between the United States and Mexico established over the last twenty five years will be disrupted.  The President expects Mexico to slam the door upon thousands fleeing the impact of climate change... Read More Read More - [Lucifer Is Fallen](https://everyangel.org/lucifer-is-fallen/): We are radically different and radically alike. We are extensively differentiated yet bound together. …that of the strong protecting and standing for the weak. ..because most people cease to believe [this] its conceit. —excerpt The Ignoble Lie By Patrick Deneen “They use this phrase to refer to the mushroom cloud over the whole earth.... Read More Read More - [Music Of Spring](https://everyangel.org/music-of-spring/): Springtime is Natures spectacle of color and music.  Birds sing loudly, flowers reach for the warm sun, the creeks flow with their own music and rhapsody. Included are some photos taken over the weekend.  Kraklauer Creek in the little park by our favorite Taste-of-Paris Cafe was running with wild abandon, full to the banks... Read More Read More - [No Eye Of The Tiger](https://everyangel.org/no-eye-of-the-tiger/): Yesterday I received several text messages and pictures from Cincinnati.  My daughter and her partner traveled from Louisville to visit the Cincinnati Zoo.  The objective of their journey was to spend time with Fiona, the recently born baby hippo.  She was born 6 weeks premature, and is the smallest hippo ever to survive. Perhaps... Read More Read More - [Act II - Madmen Like Us](https://everyangel.org/act-ii-madmen-like-us/): “……what we are doing is probably mad, and probably it is good and necessary all the same. It is not a good thing when man over strains his reason and tries to reduce to rational order matters that are not susceptible of rational treatment. Then there arise ideals such as those of the Americans... Read More Read More - [On The Stage I Saw](https://everyangel.org/on-the-stage-i-saw/): This morning I was copied on an email sent by a friend to another friend.  The note was a bitter farewell, a dismissal of relationship on account of one’s unconditioned, sycophantic support of the President.  The email was laden with fear, revulsion, and sorrow.  I understood as I read.  I could not have written... Read More Read More - [Resurrection](https://everyangel.org/resurrection-2/): Yesterday a friend sent me a link to a collection of photos taken on Lake Baikal in Siberia.  Baikal is the world’s deepest fresh water lake.  The ice formations, sculpted by the effect of wind and temperature fluctuation were starkly beautiful.  I would happily travel there any time of year to experience this faraway... Read More Read More - [Expiation of Endless Guilt](https://everyangel.org/expiation-of-endless-guilt/): An exchange of emails between three of us, friends, each with a different history and a different viewpoint.  That is even more complicated than a simple face-value understanding of those words suggest.  Are not friends of the same mind?  They are not of the same mind, if they dare to speak truthfully with one... Read More Read More - [Memorial Day .... War Revisited](https://everyangel.org/memorial-day-war-revisited/): For many years I’ve been present at a ceremony to remember and honor the war dead.  Given a story told yesterday I found it hard to sleep last night.  The stories do not fill me with admiration for the dead.  After some reflection I tremble inside, shiver with revulsion at the thought of five... Read More Read More - [Wandering From The Wreckage](https://everyangel.org/wandering-from-the-wreckage/): A Voice From the Wreck By Chad Abushanab I’m an accident on the south side of the town, on the outskirts, where the desert holds its ground against the streetlights’ last defenses. I’m the fire leaping from the Chevy’s frame to smite the sky and drain the cool out of the night. I’m the... Read More Read More - [Immortality](https://everyangel.org/immortality/): …[to] recognize chance as destiny once more and see the ruins of my being as fragments of the divine. My soul breathed once more. My eyes were opened. There were moments when I felt with a glow that I had only to snatch up my scattered images and raise my life as Harry Haller... Read More Read More - [Dreaming The American Dream](https://everyangel.org/the-german-spirit/): In the German spirit the matriarchal link with nature rules in the form of the hegemony of music to an extent unknown in any other people. We intellectuals, instead of fighting against this tendency like men, and rendering obedience to the spirit, the Logos, the Word, and gaining a hearing for it, are all... Read More Read More - [The Saddest Song](https://everyangel.org/the-saddest-song/): I’ve listened to this song over and over.  It’s included on a greatest hits CD by The Band.  There are several tunes that I like on the disc.  This one is like a gift from the god’s in its sad beauty.  I’ve never personally experienced anything like unrequited love, but I can imagine how... Read More Read More - [Children Of The Devil](https://everyangel.org/children-of-the-devil/): “Do you know that we are both children of the devil?”  Yes, that is what we are. The devil is the spirit, and we are his unhappy children. We have fallen out of nature and hang suspended in space. —Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse p. 126 Suspended in space.  That’s how I usually feel these... Read More Read More - [Stoicism Roman Edition](https://everyangel.org/stoicism-roman-edition/): Our evening of discussion on the legacy of Stoicism was engaging.  How satisfying to spend time with friends, discussing according to our ability an ancient tradition that is deemed yet valuable.  A consensus of the group was that living according to the nature of things, acceding to what is beyond our control, in order... Read More Read More - [Who Are You ?](https://everyangel.org/who-are-you/): Who am I?  I am unsure, because I find myself accepting points of view that upon reflection are short sighted, mean-spirited, and often closed-minded.  This has been my plight since I was overtaken by interest in philosophy in my mid twenties.  I am still unsure of myself, unsure that there is a single, unitary-self... Read More Read More - [Sandals For Weary Feet](https://everyangel.org/sandals-for-weary-feet/): WHAT WILL YOU DO? By Ranier Maria Rilke What will you do, God, when I die? I am your jar (if cracked, I lie?) Your well-spring (if the well go dry?) I am your craft, your vesture I— You lose your purport, losing me. When I go, your cold house will be Empty of... Read More Read More - [Like Stones Or Flowers](https://everyangel.org/like-stones-or-flowers/):  “They are as they are, like stones or flowers or stars in the sky.” “They [animals] may be terrible sometimes, but they’re much more right than men.” “How do you mean—right?” “Well, look at an animal, a cat, a dog, or a bird, or one of those beautiful great beasts in the zoo, a... Read More Read More - [Summer Nights Are Callin'](https://everyangel.org/summer-nights-are-callin/): What a song!  The story told by the lyric did not happen to me.  Who knows if it happened to anyone?  I can imagine though. I grew up close to a wide expanse of woods, and a half mile or so distant was a railroad track.  You could follow the creek and eventually you’d... Read More Read More - [Just Long Enough For A Joke](https://everyangel.org/just-long-enough-for-a-joke/): More from Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse. Harry Haller mired in the seeming pointlessness of continuing to live, finds his loneliness relieved by a chance conversation with a female that he has met at the bar, The Black Eagle.  She desires to dance but Harry resists, so she bids him take a nap while she... Read More Read More - [Enough Of Play](https://everyangel.org/enough-of-play/): Who would not remain a child as long as possible, to play forever…..  My hand is raised. That is not possible.  The passage of time, the toll of aging –exacts a price.  The bill for living is that sooner or later you must die.  That is the way it is.  The concert must end,... Read More Read More - [Maypole Dance Anyone?](https://everyangel.org/maypole-dance-anyone/): I propose a national holiday, a floating holiday decreed by Congress, timed to coincide with the blooming of the cherry trees along the Potomac River.  This will be a rite of spring, a mandated closure of all but essential business, including the exchanges on Wall Street.  All citizens will be encouraged by a proclamation... Read More Read More - [And So Ends Everything](https://everyangel.org/and-so-ends-everything/): I went to bed on the edge of panic last night.  I misplaced the digital control unit for my insulin pump.  I am insulin dependent.  I thought that I knew where I placed the small electronic device.  My first mission of the next day would be to return to the coffee shop where I... Read More Read More - [A Fine Farewell](https://everyangel.org/a-fine-farewell/): Yesterday I took the afternoon to attend a funeral of a man that I never personally met.  I felt obligated to attend.  He was the founder and CEO of a company that does work which I have the deepest respect, even reverence for.  I knew Neal through his work. I attended the funeral of... Read More Read More - [What Is That?](https://everyangel.org/what-is-that/): I know that you are resisting the impulse to ask.  That is a mass air flow sensor for a 2.0 liter Suzuki motor.  The part is important for the fuel/air mixture that is the basis for engine performance.  Where was the part manufactured?  China.  I shopped for the part online, and it was delivered... Read More Read More - [On Mother's Day](https://everyangel.org/on-mothers-day/): Tomorrow is Mother’s Day.  It is salutary that a day is designated for appreciation of one’s mother, the one that we know best.  Also to reflect upon the meaning of bringing life into the world, and the role of nurturing an innocent, vulnerable human to adulthood.  No need to insist that motherhood is sainthood... Read More Read More - [Here Comes The Rain Again](https://everyangel.org/here-comes-the-rain-again/): You know, the rain.  The rain is coming.  Sunny days always give way to rain, sometimes lots of rain.   We delight in a sunny day, and who cannot celebrate!  Moreover who does not feel disappointment with report of a rainy weekend?  We had so many plans for the weekend.  Rain, and more rain interrupts... Read More Read More - [Narrow And Perilous Bridge](https://everyangel.org/narrow-and-perilous-bridge/): Nothing of note comes to mind this morning.  I will not waste your time or mine. A further thought; we were lost on a Wisconsin north woods road recently.  The road ended with a sign that read, “bridge out.”  We turned around. Here are some fine lines from Hermann Hesse: Man is not by... Read More Read More - [Come Monday](https://everyangel.org/exhaustion-and-come-monday/): Midweek, Wednesday, more rain, and I grab onto the lifeline of this Jimmy Buffett song.  Don’t we all need something to hang on to on occasion? I have done what I could to keep my balance on a high wire.  Negotiations with a lending bank, and with a homeowner/realtor whose property I thought about... Read More Read More - [A Bad Joke, Or..](https://everyangel.org/a-bad-joke-or/): After the signal to attack is given, one can only wait, wait and observe the course of battle, of this weeks events, of my life, —to see how things will play out.  To observe and wait is a rarefied ability, to restrain oneself, to resist temptation to “make something happen,” to prematurely intervene…. I... Read More Read More - [Another Day Of Rage](https://everyangel.org/another-day-of-rage/): Waking this morning I half listened to a fragment of a business news report.  Last night, Sunday, the President unleashed a twitter blast at China voicing his displeasure at the slow pace of trade agreement negotiations.  The Dow Jones dropped 500 points.  Is there no other way to nudge different  points of view toward... Read More Read More - [Treading Water](https://everyangel.org/treading-water/): Yesterday I finished Thus Spake Zarathustra by Nietzsche.  Zarathustra is not finished with me.  I plan to revisit the text.  I will obtain another translation.  Why not?  A somewhat different  linguistic angle cannot help but improve understanding of the story. I began reading Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse.  That is another book that I postponed... Read More Read More - [Divine Donkeyism](https://everyangel.org/divine-donkeyism/): Saturday dawns bright.  The spring sun intensely warms vegetation, evaporation continues from the rain-soaked ground.  We bear with climate change, the downpours and the droughts as best as we can.  The effects are always local, as the suffering is always personal.  Thus the great lords in the manor houses are enabled to believe and... Read More Read More - [Making Up My Mind, At Last](https://everyangel.org/makin-up-my-mind-finally/): I like this song.  But why?  How is it that I am moved? What speaks to me as a bedrock-truth from these lyrics, from this melody?  Perhaps its the possibility of coming to an unshakable decision, an enduring course-of-action that will not be qualified, modified, or conditions added. Deep River Woman written by Lionel... Read More Read More - [Half Shattered Ones](https://everyangel.org/half-shattered-ones/): Man’s most far, profoundest, star-highest issues, his prodigious powers—do not all these foam through one another in your vessel? What wonder that many a vessel shatters! Learn to laugh at yourselves, as you well should to laugh! You of great aspiration, –Oh, how much is still possible! And truly, how much has already succeeded!... Read More Read More - [What Of Art?](https://everyangel.org/what-of-art/): A group of us came together last night to find language to express our feelings, and our musings in response to a work of art.   The piece was unveiled at the inception of our conversation.  To supply a sparkle of delight, to ensure that we’d not slip into an all-too-serious mode, a bottle... Read More Read More - [If Everybody's Wrong...](https://everyangel.org/if-everybodys-wrong/): The song by Buffalo Springfield has always hooked me.  From the shimmering melody intro, to the subject matter of war by a colonial power, whenever this one is played on the radio, time stops for me. I came to adulthood during the Vietnam War.  I had no strong feelings pro or con with respect... Read More Read More - [Raining In My Heart](https://everyangel.org/raining-in-my-heart-2/): Monday morning and it is pouring rain outside.  The sky weeps.  Is it not apt to weep profusely, to wail with grief?  Maybe you’ve not noticed.  We exert much effort to remain oblivious, to sustain the bliss which we have purchased by our overdraft of Natures resources.  Nature weeps by a precipitous decline in... Read More Read More - [My Shadow](https://everyangel.org/my-shadow/): A lifetime ago, in my late 20’s my life seemed to be growing darker, bit by bit emotionally constricted.  I tried whatever might help.  I doubled down on my devotional life, looking for “answers,” a turning point through Bible reading and prayer.  No improvement.  What to do about this absence of feeling, the colorless... Read More Read More - [Playing God](https://everyangel.org/playing-god/): Yard work can be considered a chore. So much in life depends upon the angle of view. Yard cleanup in the aftermath of winter is labor. That is a given. In contrast to mind-work, which ultimately ends with my fingers on this keyboard, staring at a glowing LCD screen, yard-work-done-right culminates with soil under... Read More Read More - [Great Shame, Great Love](https://everyangel.org/shame-and-love/): Several days ago a good friend and I exchanged texts.  He commented that he was his own worst enemy.  That is no trite expression.  How many ways subtle and not so subtle do we not undermine our own best interests?  We may arrive at a place of utter helplessness, realizing that there is no... Read More Read More - [Pity](https://everyangel.org/pity/): This morning came and I woke feeling a body ache, and a malaise of spirit.  I was fortunate to have passed the night without throwing up.  My wife just now recovered from a brief but hard-hitting viral illness.  One definition of misery is to be retching into a toilet.  So far, I’ve dodged that... Read More Read More - [On Good Taste](https://everyangel.org/on-good-taste/): Wednesday morning is filled with light.  Sunlight is a great, magnificent gift.  This morning I read another strange, and delightful story by Nietzsche.  His spokesman, Zarathustra walks a path, and sees a black man, haggard, barely concealing his grief, sitting by the path.  Zarathustra, weary of encountering characters who impose their issues upon him... Read More Read More - [Half-knowing](https://everyangel.org/half-knowing/): There is a strange and delightful little story about Zarathustra hiking along a trail passing through a lowland swamp.  He stumbles upon a man concealed laying across the path.  The one underfoot quickly rises cursing. Zarathustra in the confusion of the moment gives him a blow with his walking stick.  Shortly the two calm... Read More Read More - [Two Kings And An Ass](https://everyangel.org/conversation-with-two-kings-and-a-ass/): The Monday after Easter, I feel disoriented, as if with a hang over.  The day is splendid with full sunlight and singing birds.  That is not the only thing on my mind.  I am thinking of Aunt Clara, very sick with the final stages of cancer.  The Sri Lanka bombings over the weekend are... Read More Read More - [Ready for Lightning](https://everyangel.org/easter-and-nietzsche/): It is Easter morning 2019.  Little has changed. I mean in the big picture of the world’s normality.  Normal that is, with respect to the flooded and wind damaged regions of the South, wracked with the latest eruption of climate change.  Normal if I keep in mind that Aunt Clara still slowly succumbs to... Read More Read More - [Afraid Of Laughter](https://everyangel.org/afraid-of-laughter/): Back to home base.  It feels good to be back at Starbucks.  Here I compose my thoughts trying to decide which of my conflicted selves I will give voice to. The cappuccino machine roars in the background.  Maybe this is as it has to be.  We live by the rhythm of the machines which... Read More Read More - [Not Just Another Friday](https://everyangel.org/not-just-another-friday/): Today is Good Friday. I have a few minutes to write before returning to Aunt Clara’s bedside.  Yesterday we viewed old photographs together.  She remembered the good times, traveling to new places, the trip to Florida with co-workers, the worn 8×10 photo displaying a smiling group, she in the middle, beautiful and appearing eternally... Read More Read More - [Maunday Thursday](https://everyangel.org/maunday-thursday/): I have a surreal feeling just typing the title, “Maunday Thursday.”  Thursday of Holy Week is supposed to coincide with the last supper when Jesus kept company with his disciples.  It is never a pleasant thing to leave this life.  Many have no opportunity to sit with friends or family, eating together, and  exchanging... Read More Read More - [Wednesday](https://everyangel.org/wednesday-2/): Wednesday morning, bright with sunlight.  Enough of the snow is melted to show swaths of leaf-covered ground under the forest pines.  Birds and squirrels search the leaf cover with practiced eye.  I imagine that food is not easily found at the tail end of winter. In the aftermath of the great fire that destroyed... Read More Read More - [Loss](https://everyangel.org/loss-2/): I was taken by surprise to hear that Notre Dame Cathedral was burning.  Something of such magnificence deserves to exist forever, does it not?  My spirit believes that some things ought to be exempt from the erosion of time, and the common accidents that occur during renovations.  Was the cause an errant spark, a... Read More Read More - [Keeping The Rhythm](https://everyangel.org/keeping-the-rhythm/): There are times in life, when you just step up to play your part, fulfill your role to the best of your ability, knowing that there has been no rehearsal.  Moreover the role is not one that you would’ve happily chosen. We are in Eagle River, Wisconsin for a few days.  Laura’s aunt is... Read More Read More - [Holy Week Playbill](https://everyangel.org/holy-week-playbill/): Things all dance themselves: they come and hold out the hand and laugh and flee — and return. Everything goes, everything returns; the wheel of existence rolls eternally. Everything dies, everything blossoms forth again; the year-of-existence eternally runs on. Everything breaks, everything is integrated anew; the same house of existence eternally builds itself. All... Read More Read More - [In Praise of Walking](https://everyangel.org/in-praise-of-walking/): Walking is among the most life-affirming of human activities. It is a way we organize space and organize ourselves to the world at large. It is living proof that repetition – placing one foot in front of another— can in fact allow a person to make meaningful progress. Walking is practically and physically beneficial…... Read More Read More - [Live And Let Die](https://everyangel.org/live-and-let-die-2/): There are times when music is similar to a divine visitation, having a god drop by to have coffee with you.  A tune and lyric is moving in a way that you cannot describe.  You are told things that you did not know that you knew. This song does it for me.  I’ve heard... Read More Read More - [Fear Of Flying](https://everyangel.org/fear-of-flying/): Brothers, am I then so cruel? I say that what falls, you should also give a push! Everything of today—falls, de-constructs; who would preserve it!  But I,  I wish to give it a shove!  Recall the joy of rolling a stone over a precipitous edge?  The men of today, look how they roll over... Read More Read More - [Flying Lessons](https://everyangel.org/flying-lessons/):                                        This however is my teaching: Anyone who wishes to fly one day, must first learn standing             and walking                                          and running                                     and climbing                                                 and dancing… .…one does not fly into flying! With rope ladders I learned to reach many a window, with nimble legs I climbed high masts; to... Read More Read More - [Fact And Opinion](https://everyangel.org/fact-and-opinion/): What is the difference between fact and opinion?  I knew until I thought, and thought some more about the subject.  I have a better idea of how we use those terms, their role in day to day discussion.  I am still unsatisfied with the “distinction” and I know there is a difference.  My instinct... Read More Read More - [Cain Continued](https://everyangel.org/cain-continued/): The Cain and Abel story is strange.  Certainly the two young men were brothers by blood.  As suggested by the poet, perhaps the kinship involved little more.  Realistically, a store house of rage is likely to have fueled a act of murder, — an act which in all civilized society signals an end to... Read More Read More - [Christmas The Day After](https://everyangel.org/christmas-the-day-after/): I didn’t post anything on Christmas day.  My schedule was tight and I chose to sleep-in anyway, –a Christmas present to myself.  Today I have the luxury of looking back at Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.  Do they not belong together?  I went for a run in the neighborhood on Christmas eve.  I must... Read More Read More - [Christmas Eve](https://everyangel.org/christmas-eve-2/): We sang Christmas carols last night.  It is a rare treat to sing carols.  We have lots of music; it is everywhere, digital.  I have several Spotify play lists that I sometimes enjoy.  But I miss singing, especially at Christmas time.  I could attend church.  But I have not attended for years.  I have... Read More Read More - [Journey](https://everyangel.org/journey/): Waking before light, shaking off a nightmare–I wanted to write and post this poem by T. S. Eliot, The Journey of The Magi. Life, your life and my life, can be thought of as a journey.  If I dare to pay attention the journey is troubled, fraught with hazard. The friction of living can... Read More Read More - [Christmas Butchers Bill](https://everyangel.org/christmas-butchers-bill/): 13 Now when they had departed, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, “Rise, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there until I tell you, for Herod is about to search for the child, to destroy him.” 14And he rose and... Read More Read More - [A Reluctant Ticket](https://everyangel.org/a-reluctant-ticket/): I diffidently attended a concert a few days ago.  That would be a first for me.  I have laid down the purchase price for many concert tickets over the years.  Most were expensive, but an experience which I eagerly anticipated.  Often the opportunity to see and hear an artist perform live, to feel the... Read More Read More - [Divine Beer Cheese Soup](https://everyangel.org/divine-beer-cheese-soup/): Brenden asked if  I had written yet about “the soup.”  I had not.  But only because I was working on a larger, time consuming project.  At the Long Grove Coffee Shop, Brenden, the in-house chef for the Long Grove Confectionary, brings in a pot of his specialty soup to the Coffee Shop.  Arriving later... Read More Read More - [Just A Poem](https://everyangel.org/just-a-poem/): Yesterday I began to write a response to Martin Heidegger’s, What Is Metaphysics? lecture delivered in 1929.  I am quite taken by Heidegger’s words.  They strike me as revolutionary, as transgressive in this 21st century as they were when they were uttered.  Who thinks and writes about metaphysics anymore?  The metaphysical flame reduced to... Read More Read More - [In Memoriam](https://everyangel.org/in-memoriam-2/): At the end of the year Time Magazine selects a Person Of The Year.  This time around Time chose a category of individual: the “guardians” for truth, that is four journalists who persisted in writing, in reporting truth at great cost to themselves, imprisonment and loss of their lives. One of the guardians for... Read More Read More - [A Party](https://everyangel.org/party/): As the year comes to a close we can look back upon lessons learned, or lessons we searched for –but really weren’t there.  Best of all, time is time we spent with friends.  Philosophy is not a solitary activity.  Philosophy is a journey that is made in the company of others, much like the... Read More Read More - [Why Read The New York Times?](https://everyangel.org/why-read-the-new-york-times/): A few months ago I subscribed to the New York Times.  I have no regrets.  I receive the Sunday edition only.  It suffices for a weeks worth of reading.  A variety of subjects are treated in depth, with a purity and precision of language that rivals the best prose that I have read anywhere. ... Read More Read More - [...In Need Of Rescue](https://everyangel.org/in-need-of-rescue/): I am not a fan of White Snake.  If it takes only one song to make one a fan, then Here I go Again, seals the deal.  I envy musicians.  Surely it must feel “god-like” to stand before thousands of people with a guitar, or a keyboard and sing that one song which you... Read More Read More - [Only Once](https://everyangel.org/only-once/): Yesterday I attended a birthday party for our grandson.  It was his forth birthday.  He has a good grasp of language now and is able to express his opinions, his desires quite well.  The excitement on his face was unmistakable.  He had reason to anticipate this special occasion long before the guest arrived at... Read More Read More - [Ordinary People, Ordinary Life](https://everyangel.org/ordinary-people-ordinary-life/): Ordinary people have to live their lives on an ordinary personal level; there are decencies and betrayals, judgments and perceptions which persist above or below whatever political circumstances exist or whatever social changes come into force. and these are the stuff of the ordinary moral life. ….because the everyday moral worldis a matter of... Read More Read More - [Starbucks Subtext](https://everyangel.org/starbucks-subtext/): A subtext is a unifying thematic melody that extends underneath, present, intermittently sensible in a larger work.  Seated at Starbucks reading silently Anthony O’Hear’s Science Art and the Human World, a challenging work of philosophy of science, a familiar tune playing on the PA came to my awareness.  Along with the seasonal Christmas carols... Read More Read More - [Heidegger](https://everyangel.org/heidegger/): Scientific existence possesses its simplicity and aptness in that it relates to beings themselves in a distinctive way and only to them. Science would like to dismiss the nothing with a lordly wave of the hand.                             –*– Only when the strangeness of beings oppresses us does it arouse and evoke wonder. Only on... Read More Read More - [Mysterium Tremendum](https://everyangel.org/mysterium-tremendum/): Late in the afternoon a almost-winter sun glowed pink through hazy clouds, I walked across the parking lot at the Roadster Shop in Mundelein.  Earlier in the day while at Starbucks Dan asked me if I had seen the Road Rage street rod which had been taken to the SEMA show? Dan is a... Read More Read More - [Stitching Past, Present & Future](https://everyangel.org/stitching-past-present-future/): Maturity beckons also, asking us to be larger, more fluid, more elemental, less cornered, less unilateral, a living conversational intuition between the inherited story, the one we are privileged to inhabit and the one, if we are large enough and broad enough, moveable enough and even, here enough, just, astonishingly, about to occur. –excerpt... Read More Read More - [To Harmonize](https://everyangel.org/to-harmonize/): The source of this list has been lost.  I cannot give attribution.  I know that I am not the one who compiled these words.  I think it is an act of resistance to share them in this era of disharmony, of unrestrained ego, of the illusion that conflict has a worthwhile outcome.  Leadership demands... Read More Read More - [Weeping Still](https://everyangel.org/weeping-still/): Why is the Buddha depicted with a countenance of calm, exuding an inner peace with circumstances as they may be?  Nirvana.  Nirvana is described variously as a mind and heart that accepts things as they happen to be.  I’ve never met anyone who has achieved that.  A few individuals seemed closer than I to... Read More Read More - [About Nature](https://everyangel.org/about-nature/): We are engulfed in an immense ancient indifference that does not sleep or dream. Call it Nature if you will, though everything that is is natural— the lignite-bearing earth, the factory, a darkness taller than the sky. This out-of-doors that wins our release and temporary peace— not because it is pristine or pretty, but... Read More Read More - [Wait No Longer, Return To Innocence](https://everyangel.org/wait-no-longer-return-to-innocence/): The years click by, one becomes older, and things get worse.  Many would agree with this generalization of their experience.  If one is unlucky it would be difficult to see life otherwise , beset with chronic medical issues, and subject to the indignities of medicare for treatment.  Luck counts for a great deal in... Read More Read More - [Squirrel Conjuring](https://everyangel.org/squirrel-conjuring/): What follows is a guest post……………………….. Friday morning our Newfoundland/Golden Retriever mix, Astrid, roused me from sleep nearly an hour earlier than I’d hoped to get up the day after Thanksgiving. She wanted to be let out, of course. So I growled to myself, stumbled downstairs into the dawn, opened the sliding door to... Read More Read More - [Speechless, Almost](https://everyangel.org/speechless-almost/): There are two more days left in November.  Then comes December the darkest month, which is also the coming of Christmas.  Christmas is a festival of lights.  Darkness and light. This morning I wish that I were a bear having found a warm place to hibernate until spring.  But I am not a bear... Read More Read More - [Codependent Origination](https://everyangel.org/codependent-origination/): That is a term that has not come to mind for many years.  The concept means causation. Nothing comes to be apart from depending on many other things.  It is an important, often used word in Buddhist texts. The Buddhist tradition takes cause and effect with total seriousness, –as serious as a heart attack... Read More Read More - [Light](https://everyangel.org/light/): We visited the ELMHURST ART MUSEUM on Saturday.  May not one purpose of a holiday, be the opportunity to step outside of ordinary time, to be with friends and family, and to seek experiences that widen one’s world, increase one’s capacity to wonder?  That is exactly what I wish for myself and for those... Read More Read More - [We're On Our Own](https://everyangel.org/were-on-our-own/): Michael: Every time he comes up, he’s got no knife, he’s got no jacket, he’s got no pants, he’s got no boots. All he’s got is that stupid gun he carries around like John Wayne. That ain’t gonna help ya’. Axel: Oh, what the hell, Mike. Give him the boots. Michael: No way. I... Read More Read More - [Contemplating Glowing Embers](https://everyangel.org/contemplating-glowing-embers/): Honduran migrants, October 2018 Perhaps confusion is a natural state of mind for us. The condition never completely goes away.  We try to minimize confusion. Civilization is the construction of a “world” to reduce our confusion. The Natural world is given, not made by us.  Nature is a congerie of living organisms and inanimate... Read More Read More - [The Day After](https://everyangel.org/the-day-after/): The Day After Thanksgiving, is a day off for most people.  Starbucks is quiet.  Baristas behind the counter are working leisurely, exchanging stories of their thanksgiving experience.  Each family Thanksgiving is one-of-a-kind.  It is rare to enjoy a leisurely meal together, not to speak of having extended family and perhaps friends join the circle... Read More Read More - [Blue Angel](https://everyangel.org/blue-angel/): Yesterday, I saw an automobile that prompted me to reflect upon my heritage.  I remembered my deceased half-brother, and a time and place of growing up as a kid.. On the display floor at the Roadster Shop in Mundelein a 1957 Ford Fairlane 500 caught my eye.  You could say that the mid 1950’s were... Read More Read More - [Thanksgiving Eve](https://everyangel.org/thanksgiving-eve/): Trump Stands with Saudis over Murder of Khashoggi By Mark Mazzetti and Ben Hubbard Nov. 20, 2018 WASHINGTON — President Trump has long viewed foreign policy as a series of business deals, stripped of values and idealism. But his 633-word statement on Tuesday about the brutal killing of the Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi showed... Read More Read More - [Concertina Wire And A Poem](https://everyangel.org/concertina-wire-and-a-poem/): In the parking lot of Mercy Hospital, and inside of the building four people were killed yesterday.  Yesterday twelve people were killed in a California country music bar.  The slaughter continues in our armed-up society.  Wouldn’t think of giving up our guns. In fact we have the right to carry them around with us... Read More Read More - [Photo Stories](https://everyangel.org/photo-stories/): Thinking of Frank Styburski’s photos, some of his images remain in my memory.  There is a surplus of images around us. We are inundated. Over-stimulated our attention is fleeting and little of any of it is remembered. The Styburski photos  by contrast show the underlying forms of Nature, and of the interface between civilization... Read More Read More - [Another Day, Over The Edge](https://everyangel.org/another-day-over-the-edge/): Awakened an hour later than usual this morning.  I barely remember the alarm which I somehow squelched.  Consciousness returned at 7AM at which time I rose from sleep. Attended a gallery opening in Waukegan for the work of photographer Frank Styburski.   A consequence of an evening rich with wonder at the stories told... Read More Read More - [Recognized When Once Lost](https://everyangel.org/recognized-when-once-lost/): It is snowing outside, a gentle snow, the advance scout of approaching winter.  It’s no longer possible to assume that winter will fall within the range of past norms.  Will it be a siege of ice, an assault by serial snow storms?  Or will the next few months bring warmth, and little precipitation?  Either... Read More Read More - [On Wine And Certainty](https://everyangel.org/on-wine-and-certainty/): Last night was delightfully strange.  On Thursday evenings a few of us, using philosophy as an excuse, meet at Taste of Paris Cafe in Mundelein.  The purpose is to reflect upon a topical discussion of earlier in the week, while we drink wine or coffee.  I never know who will show up or if anyone... Read More Read More - [On Pain](https://everyangel.org/on-pain/): I am reading a book by Ernst Jünger, the WWI era German writer and survivor of trench warfare.  Jünger’s claim to fame is his book based upon his daily journals written while fighting in the trenches entitled Storm of Steel.  His book On Pain was written and published in 1934.  Jünger is an excellent... Read More Read More - [Many Layers](https://everyangel.org/many-layers/): It is a Wednesday morning.  Sunlight floods into the window at Starbucks.  Warmth, light, life– gifts of nature, no charge.  The coffee on the other hand costs, but the deal is quite fair for a large cup of pure comfort. Do I write about a jetliner that went down?  It plunged into the sea... Read More Read More - [Drink Wine, Dance Here and Pray](https://everyangel.org/drink-wine-dance-here-and-pray/): I am old.  Old is when you find yourself thinking “they’ve not made music like that since Elvis, or the Beatles, or the Bodeans or whomever.”  Stuck in time not noticing that time has moved on.  Well, snap out of it!  There is fabulous music out there, and we must not forget that a... Read More Read More - [Coming Home](https://everyangel.org/coming-home/): Wrestling with what to call this story, I settled on what’s written above.  On Saturday evening six of us met at Docks Bar and Grill on the edge of Bangs Lake in Wauconda.  Gary invited us to hear his son Jeff play in a band.  I’d never visited Docks Bar and Grill before.  On... Read More Read More - [Armistice Day 2018](https://everyangel.org/armistice-day-2018/): On Receiving the First News of the War by Issac Rosenberg Snow is a strange white word; No ice or frost Has asked of bud or bird For Winter’s cost. Yet ice and frost and snow From earth to sky This Summer land doth know; No man knows why. In all men’s hearts it... Read More Read More - [Jeff Takes Us To Church](https://everyangel.org/jeff-takes-us-to-church/): This guest post is a story by my good friend Jeff.  Jeff is a retired banker and a life-long devotee of making music.  I’ve benefited from hearing Jeff cover songs that are deeply embedded within the memory of our generation, as well as some fine compositions of his own.  He gave permission to share... Read More Read More - [If The Weather Permits](https://everyangel.org/if-the-weather-permits/): I like you, tend to be distracted by the posturing, the theatrics, the spectacle of politicians and admen jockeying for more power in our media infused way of life.  As I observe those around me, it seems that most of us are about to fall into those small screens we hold in our hands,... Read More Read More - [Pay No Attention](https://everyangel.org/pay-no-attention/):         to what he says.         He is a man –not a wolf. Elisapie Isaac is a Canadian performer from Quebec.  This tune was featured on NPR.  The melody is haunting. I am not a fan of the President. This lyric is dead center on target.  You will understand. Enjoy.   - [Rebel Alliance Gains Ground](https://everyangel.org/rebel-alliance-gains-ground/): The day after voting day, November 7, I have a sense of hope, some satisfaction that the Republican Governors of my state of Illinois, and that of the state to our north, Wisconsin have been replaced by Democratic governors.  I do not enjoy partisan politics, as the process has devolved to that of verbal,... Read More Read More - [Farewell to Door County](https://everyangel.org/farewell-to-door-county/): My farewell memory upon departing Door County was our breakfast at the Carroll House Family Restaurant in Sister Bay.  The restaurant is unassuming; the dining room has a typical blue-collar, every mans atmosphere.  The menu is ample with a number of breakfast choices.  The coffee was hot and strong enough. Eggs, toast, sausage are... Read More Read More - [Wandering Door County II](https://everyangel.org/wandering-door-county-ii/): Monday was a rainy today.  We didn’t care.  The gentle rain gave the woods the patina of an oil painting. The ground was intense yellow with leaves, soon to be covered with the first snow of the season.  The gentle rain, and gusty wind that did not impede our enjoyment of movement throughout the... Read More Read More - [Gospel Reading For Sunday November 4](https://everyangel.org/gospel-reading-for-sunday-november-4/): Jesus really was a no-body, and a pain in the neck to a lot of people with better connections. So the people amused themselves one day by nailing him to a cross and planting the cross in the ground.  There couldn’t possibly any repercussions the lynchers thought.  Then, just before the nobody died, the... Read More Read More - [Why Us?](https://everyangel.org/why-us/): Why you? Why us for that matter? Why anything? Because this moment simply is. Have you ever seen bugs trapped in amber? Well here we are trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why. –Excerpt Slaughterhouse 5 p 97 by Kurt Vonnegut - [Wandering Door County](https://everyangel.org/wandering-door-county/): Friday, yesterday was our first day in the area.  We just wandered around.  The peninsula of Door County is composed of a chain of small towns linked by Route 42 and Route 57 which makes the area easy to drive in about an hour.  A few of the towns are Sister Bay, Ephriam, Fish... Read More Read More - [Will The Circle Be Unbroken ?](https://everyangel.org/will-the-circle-be-unbroken/): Arrived in Door County Wisconsin late yesterday.  Since the tourist season is over, we were fortunate to find a restaurant open for our evening meal.  The placed turned out to be “fine dining” and the upshot was a wonderful meal, with superb service in a beautiful dining room which we almost had to ourselves. ... Read More Read More - [Halloween](https://everyangel.org/halloween/): There is not much more to be said.  The evening is one of enchantment in a neighborhood with lots of kids.  The imagination of children is apt for an evening of costume dress up, and going door-to-door receiving treats from the householder at each residence.  Some front yards are suitably decorated with skeletons, and... Read More Read More - [That They Should Wear Our Colors There](https://everyangel.org/that-they-should-wear-our-colors-there/): I was a sophomore in high school.  That winter a neighborhood acquaintance, James House, who was perhaps a year older than I, turned up driving a new 1965 2+2 mustang.  The car was a fastback, dark blue with a broad double white racing strip from bumper to bumper.  The motor was a 289 cubic... Read More Read More - [In Reply To Gary And Barry](https://everyangel.org/in-reply-to-gary-and-barry/): I received email messages from two friends this morning.  They registered a complaint to a statement which I made yesterday.  I criticized Capitalism as practiced by Big Pharma as being predatory, pitiless.  I am an insulin dependent diabetic.  Not only is the cost of insulin very expensive, the pricing of many prescription medications has... Read More Read More - [Astounding Revelation](https://everyangel.org/astounding-revelation/): I received a sardonic email from a friend this morning.  The writer observed that “the sun is hot, ice cubes are actually made of water, and blueberries tend to be blue.” Such observations of the nature of reality, until recently uncontroversial, agreed upon without further ado as “common” by everybody except maybe those under... Read More Read More - [In Memoriam](https://everyangel.org/in-memoriam/): To stop thinking about the Second World War and Auschwitz is to forget the reality of the horror of war and the violence of extermination. –John Armitage 2002 Introduction to Art and Fear by Paul Virilio To bow in silence seems appropriate in response to the eleven who were killed in the Tree of... Read More Read More - [Slouching Toward Bethlehem](https://everyangel.org/slouching-toward-bethleheim/): Rampage Kills Eleven PITTSBURGH — Armed with an AR-15-style assault rifle and at least three handguns, a man shouting anti-Semitic slurs opened fire inside a Pittsburgh synagogue Saturday morning, killing at least 11 congregants and wounding four police officers and two others, the authorities said. In a rampage described as among the deadliest against... Read More Read More - [Smokey Robinson](https://everyangel.org/smokey-robinson/): I never expected to see Smokey Robinson perform live.  The Motown artists were in their heyday when I was a kid.  All are up in years.  Performing is demanding work.  It is physically arduous, and  one has to give one hundred percent emotionally if one is to meet one’s obligation to the audience. Last... Read More Read More - [Trump-Party Bomber In Custody](https://everyangel.org/trump-party-bomber-in-custody/): And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,     Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? Excerpt from The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) I have no words. There is nothing more to say. - [What's Missing](https://everyangel.org/whats-missing/): Ethical boundary, aesthetic boundary of sport as of art. Without limits there is no value; without value, there is no esteem, no respect and especially no pity: death to the referee! —the fatal habituation to the banalization of excess. –excerpt Silence on Trial p 33 by Paul Virilio What is missing? It is Friday... Read More Read More - [Checkmate ?](https://everyangel.org/checkmate/): A machine for seeing, a machine for hearing, and a machine for thinking…. very shortly to come with the boom in all things digital and the programmed abandonment of the analogue. How will the silence of the infinite spaces of art subsist? We are all seated in Plato’s cave, which has become the Sybil’s... Read More Read More - [A Bridge Over](https://everyangel.org/a-bridge-over/): This afternoon I feel blue.  There is a lot of funky-shit going down.  I am aware of too much given the ever present cell phone news feed, offering adrenaline prompting content, just a swipe away.  Most of the time I resist the temptation.  A sure recipe for misery is to allow one’s mind-space to... Read More Read More - [Organizers Hunger & Death](https://everyangel.org/organizers-hunger-death/): “It’s a mass exodus.” Rodrigo Abeja, who is also with Pueblo Sin Fronteras, said extreme poverty and unchecked gang violence have driven migrants to leave their homeland.  “The organizer of this caravan is number one hunger, two death,” he said. —report USA Today We must put out the excess rather than the fire.—Heraclitus Today... Read More Read More - [No Room](https://everyangel.org/no-room/): In my scheme of the German state, there will be no room for the alien, no use for the wastrel, for the usurer or speculator, or anyone incapable of productive work. — Adolf Hitler, Interview with George Sylvester Viereck, 1923 I came upon this quote yesterday.  The words froze my mind.  These are the... Read More Read More - [Pumpkins](https://everyangel.org/pumpkins/): Fall harvest season is here.  Apple picking, visits to a local farm for selecting pumpkins are parts of the ritual that marks this season of the year.  The air is chilly.  One does the remaining out of doors chores with awareness that soon the frost and then the snow will signal a season of... Read More Read More - [In Spite Of Which](https://everyangel.org/in-spite-of-which/): The last few hours were eventful with travel, rental car return, receipt of boarding pass, TSA check in, and then boarding for the two hour flight to Chicago.  Nothing outside of normal expectations.  That is how life sometimes is, except when it isn’t. I am sad for my sister two years younger than I. ... Read More Read More - [Celebrate?](https://everyangel.org/celebrate/): A last evening in my hometown, with a note of celebration.  We finished two days dedicated to visiting with my sister.  She and I are separated by distance which equates to the passage of time with too little contact.  Not nearly enough can be forced into two days to remedy the loss.  But we... Read More Read More - [Blood and Bone](https://everyangel.org/blood-and-bone/): Just finished an essay in a book, Basic Writings by Martin Heidegger.  Reading Heidegger is like jumping into the deep end of the pool, before one is confident that one knows how to swim.  I read, “What is Metaphysics?” at the behest of a friend who said that his life was changed by the... Read More Read More - [Jamal Khashoggi](https://everyangel.org/jamal-khashoggi/): While they were in the field, Cain attacked his brother Abel and killed him. 9 Then the LORD said to Cain, “Where is your brother Abel?” “I don’t know,” he replied. “Am I my brother’s keeper?” 10 The LORD said, “What have you done? Listen! Your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground. —Genesis... Read More Read More - [Kindness Of Strangers](https://everyangel.org/kindness-of-strangers/): Boarded a morning flight today at O’Hare.  A major city airport is always managed chaos.  My rule of thumb is to be kind to everyone that i encounter, the American Airlines ticket agent, the female behind the register at McDonalds, or the airline gate agent who needed to assign me a seat.  Kindness is... Read More Read More - [But It's Late](https://everyangel.org/but-its-late/): Based on fossils and archeological artifacts from around the world, modern humans have existed for about 200,000 years; but the roots of civilization only go back 20,000 years, to when we first began planting grain and building walls. These dates slide back and forth on history’s timeline depending on the viewpoint, but practically all... Read More Read More - [Dirty Hands](https://everyangel.org/dirty-hands/): The dawn breaks the darkness of night and the sky glows.  I know that in time dawn will  break within me today.  I am in a dark mood.  I’ve been thinking of the killing of the Washington Post journalist, Jamal Khashoggi.  Thinking that he was safe in Istanbul he walked into the Saudi consulate... Read More Read More - [For A Little While](https://everyangel.org/for-a-little-while/): THE POEM OF ONE WORLD This morning the beautiful white heron was floating along above the water and then into the sky of this the one world we all belong to where everything sooner or later is a part of everything else which thought made me feel for a little while quite beautiful myself.... Read More Read More - [Women's March Chicago Oct. 2018](https://everyangel.org/womens-march-chicago-oct-2018/): A few photos to give a sense of being at the Women’s March, Grant Park on the Chicago lakefront.  We joined thousands.  One person at a time, adds up.  Just as one vote at a time adds up and can be the difference between a free society and the rule of tyranny.    ... Read More Read More - [Waltz Of Ignorance](https://everyangel.org/waltz-of-ignorance/): Huzzah for ignorance!  The election of the individual which we now have in the White House has given me pause to think about the nature of ignorance.  The President and his supporters represent ignorance piled high and deep.  I note that ignorance and power entails an escalation of violence, a resort to violence in... Read More Read More - [A Change Is Gonna Come ?](https://everyangel.org/a-change-is-gonna-come/): Tomorrow, Saturday morning I will leave early for Chicago.  This is the third Women’s March in which I will participate.  I will be with friends, and will be surrounded by thousands with whom I am in solidarity.  People of color, immigrants, and women are diminished to inferior, “second class” status by the actions of the... Read More Read More - [A Last Laugh](https://everyangel.org/a-last-laugh/): I read that flowers are the earth’s laughter.  Flowers cause me to smile, such as when I attend to a joke or a good pun. I visited the zinnia garden to view the blossoms for the last time.  Today the temperature is to be in the 70s and then the drop-off comes into the... Read More Read More - [Our Family](https://everyangel.org/our-family/): This photo prompts me to express gratitude for each member of our immediate family.  Taken at a birthday golf outing in Naperville in October of 2018, we celebrate the accomplishments of each member.  We are blessed to be in good health, to be here, now, together. I include this youtube video of the great... Read More Read More - [Chicago Marathon Part II](https://everyangel.org/chicago-marathon-part-ii/): The story has no end.  More remains to be said. Our daughter in law crossed the finish line in Grant Park in just a little over four hours.  At three points on the race course we saw her pass by and shouted her name to recognize her and to cheer her on to the... Read More Read More - [Chicago Marathon](https://everyangel.org/chicago-marathon/): I do not expect to run a marathon. Pheidippides ran 26.2 miles to announce that Athens would not be annihilated by the Persians in 490 BC. That makes perfect sense to me.  That scale of good news is worth the effort.  But I am not an Attic Greek.  Running twenty-six miles for personal satisfaction... Read More Read More - [The Last Nail](https://everyangel.org/the-last-nail/): Someone To Watch Over Me fills the background here, a languid voice.  Perhaps it is Ella Fitzgerald. I hear the piano notes with the singular melody caressing the patrons, myself included, here at Starbucks.  This is a morning when I wish that I could talk with my mother.  I can only imagine her presence,... Read More Read More - [Who Ya Gonna Believe....](https://everyangel.org/who-ya-gonna-believe/): I spent the day in Lincoln Square, Chicago yesterday.  A Friend offered to discuss a business startup concept.  I jumped at the opportunity.  One never knows.  Something important and beneficial might be born from a give and take of ideas, conceiving of experimental steps, to discover whether a vision does in fact address the... Read More Read More - [Playing Against The Odds](https://everyangel.org/playing-against-the-odds/): The morning came with gusty winds, cloud swept sky, all signs of advance of the cold air mass, roiling against the warmth of the retreating southern formation.  Advance, retreat, friction, thunder and lightning, and a gentle rain if we are lucky.  A flood if we are unlucky.  Welcome to another day of life on... Read More Read More - [Right Down The Line....](https://everyangel.org/right-down-the-line/): This topic comes easy.  Laura and I have been married for forty-eight years.  She is my best friend and friendship is a hint of eternity, a bond that seems to defeat the erosion of time, growing better and stronger year by year. This song by Journey is heard often on the radio.  I think... Read More Read More - [More Caffeine!](https://everyangel.org/more-caffeine/): With an interlude of forty-five minutes I stopped at Starbucks to do some reading yesterday afternoon.  Starbucks is a bar for non-alcohol drinkers, for the introverted types who have a proclivity for caffeine, and for studying.  I glanced up from my reading to see the individual at the adjoining table.  This afternoon, how long... Read More Read More - [Unhinged & Supreme Court Bound](https://everyangel.org/unhinged-supreme-court-bound/): Bro, she said that you are the guy. She remembers the attempted rape when you were classmates in High School. Just before your rant, your home-boys said that she was persuasive. You said, “It ain’t me babe.” You did not say, “I just don’t remember.” And you resisted the FBI investigation until forced by... Read More Read More - [Walk In The Rain](https://everyangel.org/walk-in-the-rain/): Yesterday afternoon with some time on my hands I decided to walk around Viking Park at the Gurnee Park District.  A light rain was falling.  The plantings in the park are well cared for.  A variety of tree species are planted to memorialize individuals; paving stones honor community organizations.  What better way to establish... Read More Read More - [Dad's Hammer](https://everyangel.org/dads-hammer/): Sunday?  I awakened as if in a time warp.  My conscious mind was oriented toward the coming day at the office.  Waking at 6AM, I left the house for Starbucks with the dawn barely showing to the east.  In my dissociation, a day was missing.  I glanced at the newspaper rack at Starbucks and... Read More Read More - [Bring It On Home](https://everyangel.org/bring-it-on-home/): Saturday morning at Starbucks, a song by the great Sam Cooke can be heard over the cacophony.  Reading and writing here reminds me of my visit to a Zoo aviary; voices and objects in constant motion, rising and falling, chattering, calling, etc.  This is life: constant motion.  The words of Sam Cooke came to... Read More Read More - [Stephen King Weighs In](https://everyangel.org/stephen-king-weighs-in/): Stephen King makes his feelings about Kavanaugh very clear on Twitter Stephen King is no fan of Brett Kavanaugh. People across the world tuned in to watch Dr. Christine Blasey Ford and Brett Kavanaugh give their testimonies in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday. And all across the world, people were tweeting... Read More Read More - [Week Ends and Beginning](https://everyangel.org/weeks-ends-and-beginning/): Friday is the end of the work week.  The weeks ends but in truth work does not end.  Life is work.  Sometimes work is nothing more or less than acceptance of the circumstances of life.  All that I imagined, and wrote in yesterday’s post took place before the Senate Judiciary committee just as I... Read More Read More - [Easy To Say No](https://everyangel.org/easy-to-say-no/): Thursday and I awakened at 5:30AM.  I couldn’t sleep because this is the Thursday of the awaited hearing. The complaint asserted by Dr.Christine Blaise Ford that the candidate for the Supreme Court attempted to rape her when they were students in high school will be heard by the Senate Judiciary Committee. I do not... Read More Read More - [House Party](https://everyangel.org/house-party/): We attended a house party last night.  A house party is a response to gather in a home for a convivial evening of conversation, food and drink, and in this case, a reflective interaction with the songs and stories of Scott Ainslie.  There were many around me that I had not previously met.  In... Read More Read More - [Soul Talk](https://everyangel.org/soul-talk/): On occasion while reading, a statement or a paragraph effects me like the booming, sympathetic vibration of a rung bell.  These statements outlining a concept of “the soul” had precisely this impact.  Almost no intellectual now-a-days, attempts to use the term “soul” let alone risks a cogent account.  The soul,—an internal incubus, an ephemeral... Read More Read More - [Extravagant Beauty](https://everyangel.org/extravagant-beauty/): The weekend was intense.  Like a remembered Christmas morning when I was 5 years old, with so much under the tree, — my child’s mind was suffused with delight. A friend, Peter passed on a tip that a extraordinary four person female band would be entertaining at the Buffalo Creek Brewing on Saturday night. ... Read More Read More - [Tiny Flying Cows](https://everyangel.org/tiny-flying-cows/): Camera in hand I visited Kraklauer Creek yesterday.  It is late September and the weather has barely cooled from the heat of summer.  Yet, it is not the frost that brings the end of the season for the wild flowers growing in profusion on the creek bed.  They appear to have a set life... Read More Read More - [Greatness](https://everyangel.org/greatness/): A few minutes ago I composed a brief email reply to a friend who expressed disillusion with the human race.  Or in his words, “disgusted with people.”  I know how that feels.  I fall into that dark place on occasion.  It is easy to do.  Examples of mediocrity, stupidity, weakness and gratuitous violence abound. ... Read More Read More - [No Blue Pill](https://everyangel.org/no-blue-pill/): You take the blue pill—the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill—you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. Remember: all I’m offering is the truth. Nothing more. –Morpheus, The Matrix film Chaos is a... Read More Read More - [Wittgenstein And Rape](https://everyangel.org/wittgenstein-and-rape/): This is a topic that I am least qualified to write about.  I am not female, and thus am unlikely to be subject to rape.  My imagination is quite unable to construct a facsimile of the experience of rape.  If I were female it would be otherwise. A spirited email exchange was conducted yesterday... Read More Read More - [Ghost Of Wittgenstein](https://everyangel.org/ghost-of-wittgenstein/): We revisited Philosophical Investigations by Ludwig Wittgenstein last night.  The Investigations are just that.  Wittgenstein used his classroom lectures as an opportunity to do original research with his students.  His method was to have a free ranging dialog with the class, doing philosophy of language.  Notes of these lectures were published posthumously.  The Philosophical... Read More Read More - [On Throwing A Plane Over Chaos](https://everyangel.org/on-throwing-a-plane-over-chaos/): Perhaps the peculiarity of art is to pass through the finite in order to rediscover, to restore the infinite. What defines thought in its three great forms— art, science, and philosophy— is always confronting chaos, laying out a plane, throwing a plane over chaos. But philosophy wants to save the infinite by giving it... Read More Read More - [Hammer Of The Gods](https://everyangel.org/hammer-of-the-gods/): There is gray mist in the air this morning.  Traffic is heavy, as usual.  A Metra train pulls into the station and gaggles of commuters will come into view hustling across the road toward the the gleaming open doors.  Another day in the outskirts of a big city, Chicago of course.  I hear the... Read More Read More - [Where Do Ya Wanna Go](https://everyangel.org/where-do-you-want-to-go/): Weary of the shit-storm of our politics: our President raging against the human scum, his opponents, and then shortly thereafter gloating, basking in the glow of the suicide demise of the leader of ISIS.  He described in detail the immolation which included the man’s children.  In addition, I have engaged in an extended email... Read More Read More - [Choosing Who I Have Become](https://everyangel.org/how-much-reality/): It is Sunday morning.  Sunday is a “time-out” day when traditionally we dial back the fever of commerce, that survival game which we all play.  Time outs, half times are important as a player, by definition, is the subject of the game, a mind/body point of awareness who agrees to engage in play with... Read More Read More - [A Day Ending In Fire](https://everyangel.org/a-day-ending-in-fire/): I want to think of Fall as the season of red and yellow maple trees, orange pumpkins, and children under the supervision of nearby parents, holding an open pillow case at a front door.  On Halloween the sack grows heavier by the minute with treats collected from the neighbors.  Fall is truly a season... Read More Read More - [Nothing But Survival](https://everyangel.org/nothing-but-survival/): This post was written by a good friend.  It is offered here as a succinct description of the divide that exists between Americans. The lesson that we are at taught over and over and over again (and yet we never seem to retain) is that the supporters of Donald Trump will find a way... Read More Read More - [Why Not Atheism?](https://everyangel.org/why-not-atheism/): One cannot be religious in general, one can only believe in some god(s) to the detriment of others, and the failure of all the efforts to unite religions proves that the only way to be religious in general is under the banner of the ‘anonymous religion of atheism’. And effectively only an atheist regime... Read More Read More - [Fire Discovered Again](https://everyangel.org/fire-discovered-again/): Google claims a computing breakthrough The company said today that it had achieved “quantum supremacy,” a milestone that would make current supercomputers look like toys. At a research lab in California, a mathematical calculation that the largest supercomputers could not complete in under 10,000 years was done in 3 minutes 20 seconds, Google said... Read More Read More - [Gunfight ?](https://everyangel.org/gunfight/): Why? Any action taken, any at all, — is subject to the bar of reason.  One can ask “the why” of anything.  Why am I here?  Yesterday afternoon why did I find myself at the Honda of Lisle dealership, being introduced by a stranger at the front desk to another stranger who would sell... Read More Read More - [Enter The Dark Lord](https://everyangel.org/enter-the-dark-lord/): Well here you have it.  Disaffection with “business as usual,” corrupt, inefficient, representative democracy had reached such a pitch that in the 2016 presidential election we installed an unabashed authoritarian into the White House.  This man doubles down on ignorance.  He knows nothing about many things that he fancies himself to be supremely knowledgeable... Read More Read More - [A Darkening Morning](https://everyangel.org/a-gray-day/): The sky is overcast, a chill asserts that Fall and Winter inexorably follows the tilt of the earth’s axis. Over a bowl of cheerios I perused the New York Times Weekend Briefing email received in the early hours.  Somewhere someone is awake, living, in full awareness of their lot in their one solitary life, ... Read More Read More - [Living Right Now](https://everyangel.org/living-right-now/): We do not experience the contents of our self-consciousness as the contents of a representational process, and we do not experience them as some sort of causally active internal placeholder of the system in the system’s all-inclusive model of reality, but simply as ourselves, living in the world right now. — Excerpt Being No... Read More Read More - [So You Want To Change Your Life...](https://everyangel.org/so-you-want-to-change-your-life/): In the ‘normal’ run of things life just goes on, following its inertia, and we are immersed in our daily cares and rituals. Then something happens, an eventual Awakening, a secular version of a miracle (social emancipatory tumult, a traumatic love encounter…). If we opt for fidelity to this Event, our entire life changes;... Read More Read More - [Drowning](https://everyangel.org/drowning/): I am invited to read some poetry at a community gathering tomorrow evening.  It is an honor to be asked to join others for sharing poetry and prose in a public place.  Words crafted and offered up to celebrate the joy and tragedy of our experience create a sacred space. I plan to read... Read More Read More - [More Miracle And Magic](https://everyangel.org/more-miracle-and-magic/): Walked into Starbucks this morning and over the subdued buzz of the room came the sultry voice of Stevie Nix.  It was a love song: Dreams. I retrieved my computer from the case and placed it on the table, my mind (and heart) captured by the lyric of loss.  This is a song of... Read More Read More - [The Canary Doesn't Sing](https://everyangel.org/the-canary-no-longer-sings/): The topic was a challenging one.  We seldom talk directly, think out-loud about the meaning and practice of the sex act in the lives of our peers.  In past times, such discussion was taboo, unacceptable.  Presently, mores have relaxed.  A frank public discussion is possible.  We yet lack sufficient vocabulary, and I am aware... Read More Read More - [On Greatness](https://everyangel.org/on-greatness/): A very old fashioned argument: increasing value, not profit.Value is how much cash flow you generate over time – 10 years, 20 years. Sustainability is the main value creator. If you are not sustainable in business,then you have reputation damage that will make you sell lessbecause consumers buy less from business with low reputation.You... Read More Read More - [No Hero](https://everyangel.org/no-hero/): We have to accept that we live on a ‘spaceship earth’, responsible and accountable for its conditions. Earth is no longer the impenetrable background/horizon of our productive activity: It emerges as a finite object that we can inadvertently destroy or transform to make it unlivable. This means that, at the very moment when we... Read More Read More - [So You Are Not A Slave Owner](https://everyangel.org/so-you-are-not-a-slave-owner/): Capitalism thrives all around the world (more or less), from China to Africa. It is definitely not in crisis – it is just the people caught in this explosive development that are in crisis. This tension between overall rapid growth and local crisis and misery is part of capitalism’s normal functioning: capitalism renews itself... Read More Read More - [Consuming Our Own Lives](https://everyangel.org/consuming-our-own-lives/): The society of experience – the direct commodification of our experience itself. What we are buying on the market are less and less products, (material objects) that we want to own, and more and more ‘life experiences’ experiences of sex, eating, communicating, cultural consumption, participating in a lifestyle… ‘we become consumers of our own... Read More Read More - [The Road To Unfreedom](https://everyangel.org/the-road-to-unfreedom/): Since in our society, free choice is elevated into a supreme value, social control and domination can no longer appear as infringing on a subject’s freedom – it has to appear as (and be sustained by) the very self-experience of individuals as free. There are a multitude of examples of un-freedom appearing in the... Read More Read More - [Why?](https://everyangel.org/why-2/): In capitalism,you cannot throw outthe dirty water of financial speculationand keep the healthy baby of the real economy:The dirty water effectively is the blood of the healthy baby.One should not be afraid to go to the end here:the global capitalist legal system itself is,in its most fundamental dimension,corruption legalized.The question of where crime begins(which... Read More Read More - [The Primary Fact Of our Age](https://everyangel.org/the-primary-fact-of-our-age/): While on the road, when I am not driving, and we are not talking – I plan to read more from Slavoj Zizek’s book The Courage of Hopelessness A Year of Acting Dangerously. Here are ideas from a paragraph in the first chapter. Today’s globalization, as a capitalist system, came to determine all conditions... Read More Read More - [Hard Edge](https://everyangel.org/10456/): Stand and fight ! or accede to the hard edges of this world:  post industrial, connected, regimented — that we have made. Those are the thoughts that rise to contemplation. I found a port in the storm, somewhere that is familiar, where mind and body do not lapse into a pity party. It has... Read More Read More - [How To Run A World](https://everyangel.org/how-to-run-a-world/): Long Guns By Carl Sandburg Then came Oscar, the time of the guns,  And there was no land for a man, no land for a country,       Unless guns sprang up       And spoke their language. The how of running the world was all in guns.  The law of a God keeping sea and land apart,... Read More Read More - [What's Going On](https://everyangel.org/whats-going-on/): Friday, the last day of my work week. Beginning to mentally prepare for a road trip to the west coast, driving back with stops along the way.  I believe the final stop is to be New York City and then return to Chicago.  Hopeful of visiting Gettysburg along the way home. Some pictures of... Read More Read More - [To Continue](https://everyangel.org/to-continue/): Without dispute mechanization (science/technology) has developed the means of satisfying real needs, but we reproach it with having too strongly encouraged, artificial ones, with having fostered luxury, with having favored the towns to the detriment of the countryside, lastly with having widened the gap and revolutionized the relationship between employer and employed, between capital... Read More Read More - [Dogma](https://everyangel.org/dogma/): Without being exactly in danger of starving to death, people consider that life is not worth living if they cannot have comforts, pleasures, luxuries; the national industry is considered insufficient if it provides for a bare existence, if it does not provide affluence; a country considers itself incomplete if it has not good ports,... Read More Read More - [What The Squirrel Didn't Say](https://everyangel.org/what-the-squirrel-didnt-say/): Upon recollection of my childhood the most cherished memories were the many times I explored the environment surrounding my house and the yard where I grew up.  The desire to see, to hear, to touch one’s surroundings first hand, to know one’s own country is natural.  Whenever I visit my hometown, the neighborhood where... Read More Read More - [Oh No!](https://everyangel.org/oh-no/): Like Linus, who has the football snatched from his well aimed, and enthusiastic kick, by Lucy — could it be that all we have heard, have had represented to us is a grand hoax?  The motivation to make the world a better place by reducing my carbon footprint, by the installation of the roof... Read More Read More - [Spellbound](https://everyangel.org/spellbound/): The photo was captured by a friend.  On my first look at the image I felt that something unspeakable and primeval had been captured on the cameras sensor, and by the collection of forms in the print.  The photo taken on September 11 at twilight, shows a passing cloud wall, just after a downpour. ... Read More Read More - [Animals All](https://everyangel.org/animals-all/): The great obstacle to mysticism transforming humanity is the same which prevented the creation of a divine humanity. Man has to earn his bread by the sweat of his brow; in other words, humanity is an animal species, and, as such, subject to the law which governs the animal world and condemns the living... Read More Read More - [Mysticism Everyday](https://everyangel.org/mysticism-everyday/): On Sunday I was invited to a event at the Tau Center in Wheaton, a presentation on “everyday mysticism.”  Being new to the area, I am curious to make new acquaintances, and the topic does interest me.  Mystical experience is not esoteric, rare, something reserved for the psychologically unbalanced.  Seems to me that mystical... Read More Read More - [Someone To Cling To](https://everyangel.org/someone-to-cling-to/): I am not a fan of television due my upbringing, and on account of other reasons flowing from that.  I become impatient with thinly written dialog, and one dimensional cartoon-like characters.  That’s how prime-time TV seems to me.  Anyway after a day of effort earning a living, or in pursuit of something that I... Read More Read More - [Our Shattered Society](https://everyangel.org/our-shattered-society/): …… as long as experimental science is not firmly established, there will be no surer guarantee of the truth than universal assent. Nay, truth will as a rule, be this very assent. We may note, by the way, that this is one of the causes of intolerance. The man who does not accept the... Read More Read More - [Faster Than You Thought](https://everyangel.org/faster-than-you-thought/): Things take longer to happen than you think they will, but then they happen much faster than you thought they could…….. The accumulation of carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases – some of which will envelop the planet for hundreds and possibly thousands of years – is now trapping as much extra energy... Read More Read More - [Toad Hunter](https://everyangel.org/toad-hunter/): A rainy Sunday morning in Geneva.  The remnants of tropical storm Imelda, which inundated Houston is passing through: rain, potentially lots of rain adding to already swollen Fox and Des Planes rivers. Does a future scientist begin as a toad hunter?  Perhaps!  Summertime is opportunitie for a child to observe Nature in a mode... Read More Read More - [May We Call Ourselves Civilized?](https://everyangel.org/may-we-call-ourselves-civilized/): Man’s structure seemed indeed to destine him for a more humble existence. His instinctive resistance to innovations is a proof. The inertia of humanity has never yielded, save under the impulsion of genius. In a word, science demands a twofold effort, that of a few men to find some new thing and that of... Read More Read More - [Just For Fun](https://everyangel.org/just-for-fun/): ….. but once you come to the intelligence, Farewell nature! Farewell life! Intelligence is assumed to be what it is       “for no particular reason,             for the fun of the thing.” As if it did not also correspond to vital needs! Its original business is to resolve problems similar to those resolved by... Read More Read More - [More Room On The Bus](https://everyangel.org/more-room-on-the-bus/): Christians as well as Buddhists can practice Zen just as big fish and small fish are both contentedly living in the same ocean. Zen is the ocean, Zen is the air, Zen is the mountain, Zen is thunder and lightning, the spring flower, summer heat, and winter snow; nay more than that, Zen is... Read More Read More - [For Chris & For Tobin](https://everyangel.org/for-chris-for-tobin/): When I heard this tune by The Call, both of you came to mind.  I offer these lyrics and this tune in tribute to you both.  As friends, you are on opposite ends of the spectrum of sensibility concerning the existence of God, but I think that you are moving in the same direction. ... Read More Read More - [Πάντα ῥεῖ καὶ οὐδὲν μένει.](https://everyangel.org/%cf%80%ce%ac%ce%bd%cf%84%ce%b1-%e1%bf%a5%ce%b5%e1%bf%96-%ce%ba%ce%b1%e1%bd%b6-%ce%bf%e1%bd%90%ce%b4%e1%bd%b2%ce%bd-%ce%bc%ce%ad%ce%bd%ce%b5%ce%b9/): I do not read classical Greek.  I studied enough koine Greek or common Greek to be able to pronounce these words.  Whenever I read them, unaccountsbly I feel close to Heraclitus of Ephesus, the Pre-Socratic philosopher.  Heraclitus was a contrarian. While it is natural to look for permanence, to seek permanence in the systems... Read More Read More - [Effort ?](https://everyangel.org/effort/): It is criticism that demands an effort. The assertion stopped me cold while reading the chapter entitled Static Religion in Henri Bergson’s book, Two Sources of Morality and Religion. Is it not painfully clear than things are badly off kilter in our world? Never before have we had the capability of news awareness 24×7,... Read More Read More - [Radio Ga Ga](https://everyangel.org/radio-ga-ga/): A measured discussion between a half dozen friends was conducted via email.  We exchanged ideas pondering the causes which make the conservative minded and the liberal minded so different.  The difference in attitude, in perception is not minor.  There is a preference for a strong man father-figure, even for an abusive tyrant as long... Read More Read More - [Good News](https://everyangel.org/good-news/): Percival, the wild rabbet living in our backyard was sighted again yesterday.  I suspect that he/she is finding shelter under our deck.  Does the young animal “know” there are fewer predators in our yard than just 50 yards away in Almond Marsh?  Maybe.  Was reminded of a line from Bergson in yesterday’s post that... Read More Read More - [What Hangs Around The Edge](https://everyangel.org/what-hangs-around-the-edge/): Life is a certain effort to obtain certain things from raw matter, and that instinct and intelligence, taken in their finished state, are two distinct means of utilizing a tool for this object; in the first case, the tool is a part of the living creature; in the other, it is an inorganic instrument... Read More Read More - [Survival On The Fringe](https://everyangel.org/survival-on-the-fringe/): LIFEis a co-ordinationof disciplined elementsamong whichthe work is divided.therefore, the socialunderlies the vital. This is so in those societies where the individualmust be ready to sacrifice itselffor the whole:the hive and the anthill.This result is obtained by instinctwhich is an extensionof nature’s work of organization.This means that natureis more concerned with societythan with the... Read More Read More - [Pumpkin Transcendence](https://everyangel.org/pumpkin-transcendence/): Everyone finds the pumpkin attractive.  The kid-in-me loves pumpkins.  The pumpkin is a signature of the Fall season, a symbol of cooler days, falling leaves, the turn of Nature toward a season of rest, of quiescence.  Who does not need a season of reduced activity, to contemplate, take stock with gratitude,  — the good... Read More Read More - [Religion And Fiction](https://everyangel.org/religion-and-fiction/): Having moved to Batavia, I have discovered Randall Road.  Randall Road, running north and south is a dense strip of retail shopping.  Some of the national chains have more than one store along this well traveled artery.  Randall road is iconic of America if you think that the achievement of “the American Dream” is... Read More Read More - [A Spike In the Heart](https://everyangel.org/a-spike-in-the-heart/): No question that instrumental rationality is the heartbeat of our time. Science gave us the industrial age, — the telegraph, railroads, automobiles, radios, television, industrialized warfare, the hydrogen bomb….  There is no need to go on. The industrial age has been eclipsed by the age of communication made possible by hyper miniaturized solid state... Read More Read More - [Interlude](https://everyangel.org/interlude-2/): Sunday can be a day of reflection, a generally recognized, if little practiced “time out” day.  Monday through Saturday, the other six days of the week are pure hustle.  The organism of society and economy is in “fast forward” mode, and a majority of us have a defined role which we play, mainly out... Read More Read More - [Casting Call For Heroes](https://everyangel.org/what-way-forward/): “Where to from here?” is the question that I always ask.  Not every one asks, as many are content to remain where they presently are.  Why the difference? Upbringing is often mentioned as the decisive factor in the orientation of the individual.  What about upbringing?  Why not include the physical and emotional upbringing of... Read More Read More - [Biting The Apple](https://everyangel.org/biting-the-apple/): Another Friday morning at Starbucks, and as on any day, a majority of patrons walk in, scarcely looking up from the small iPhone screen held in their hand.  A beverage order has been placed by means of the device, and paid for prior to their arrival at the serving counter.  All that remains is... Read More Read More - [Enigma](https://everyangel.org/enigma/): The love of humanity is not a self sufficient force or one that has a direct efficacy. …as every teacher knows you cannot prevail over egoism by recommending “altruism.” — excerpt The Two Sources of Morality and Religion By Henri Bergson p. 36 - [To Spin Hope](https://everyangel.org/to-spin-hope/): Truly great artists—- the ones that shape the zeitgeist— have the bravery to take themselves seriously. Never irony —- honesty is the coin of their realm. The willingness to look a fool. The audacity to be earnest. The confidence to be vulnerable. Cynicism comes cheap in the postmodern era, but you get what you... Read More Read More - [Holding On](https://everyangel.org/holding-on/): Another thought provoking discussion.  This one considered the work of Martin Heidegger and William Faulkner.  Both men, one a metaphysician, and the other a writer of fiction offered a lifetime’s worth of caution, of alarm about what we are doing to Nature.  Faulker writes of the last of the large game, an old bear... Read More Read More - [Braeburn Marsh](https://everyangel.org/braeburn-marsh/): Yesterday was my son’s 42nd birthday.  The family gathered at the house for a celebration.  Another year together is a cause for celebration.  There was a fine meal with some of my son’s favorite foods, and of course an ice-cream birthday cake. As aspect of the afternoon was a frog hunting expedition along the... Read More Read More - [Why Do I Keep This Up?](https://everyangel.org/why-do-i-keep-this-up/): First some good news!  I indicated in yesterday’s post that the young rabbit that is living in our backyard may have joined the circle of life.  By that I mean the predator-prey relationship.  The vegetarian rabbit is prey for larger carnivores.  The rabbit that I have named Percival is still around!  One day at... Read More Read More - [A Poor Player's Tale](https://everyangel.org/a-poor-players-tale/): Original Poem (Dowson, 1890) They are not long, the weeping and the laughter, Love and desire and hate; I think they have no portion in us after We pass the gate. They are not long, the days of wine and roses, Out of a misty dream Our path emerges for a while, then closes... Read More Read More - [So That You Can See](https://everyangel.org/so-that-you-can-see/): I am certain that, of speaking and of listening, — to listen well is the more difficult skill. I was reminded of this yesterday when I heard the old Marvin Gaye song, What’s Going On.  The tune is an appeal for careful, generous listening so that we can see “What’s going on.”  Marvin’s appeal... Read More Read More - [On Killing Part II](https://everyangel.org/on-killing-part-ii/): Virulent, half true, untrue rhetoric is a step towards war, real war, not war as a metaphor. A thing begins by the language that we absorb and begin to speak.  By our manner of speaking one “chooses a lane,” aligns him or herself with a side and thereby voluntarily ceases to think.  Consequently one... Read More Read More - [Preparing To Kill](https://everyangel.org/preparing-to-kill/): Yesterday a friend and I had a troubling email exchange.  At least the words were troubling to me.  The friend insisted that I “choose a lane.”  What was meant was that I ought to definitively side with the conservative/near fascist collective, of which the President is the figure-head or side with the liberal/socialist minded... Read More Read More - [Rage Against The Machine](https://everyangel.org/rage-against-the-machine/): Ray Bradbury, the acclaimed author from Waukegan, Illinois said that the secret to life was knowing how to fall in love and stay in love.  (I’ve not read Fahrenheit 451, but plan to do so.) My instincts tell me that Bradbury hit the bullseye with his sage comment.  Nevertheless knowing and doing cannot be... Read More Read More - [All Is One](https://everyangel.org/all-is-one/): Any one thing is what it is because of it’s relationships with all the other things that define it. The building is the building, because of each of the parts that make it up, but the rafter is the rafter because it is part of the building. — excerpt Taking Back Philosophy A Multicultural... Read More Read More - [Monday Morning Rain](https://everyangel.org/monday-morning-rain/): I did not make the car show yesterday morning.  I have a pang of regret. From this angle of view there is no sign of yesterday’s show from my table by the big Starbucks window.  The white archway marking the grand entry to 3rd Street, to the promenade by the double line of parked,... Read More Read More - [A Dream Within A Dream](https://everyangel.org/a-dream-within-a-dream/): A magnificent morning graces Geneva.  The air temperature is a touch cool, a reminder that we are on the cusp of Fall.  Seated, by the big window at Starbucks I read this quotation from the ancient Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi.  Zhuangzi has been characterized as the Wittgenstein of Chinese philosophy. Once Zhuang Zhou dreamt he... Read More Read More - [How Much](https://everyangel.org/how-much/):        Questionnaire                         by Wendell Berry 1. How much poison are you willing to eat for the success of the free market and global trade? Please name your preferred poisons. 2. For the sake of goodness, how much evil are you willing to... Read More Read More - [If You Are Offended](https://everyangel.org/if-you-are-offended/): If you are offended when someone says you are wrong, you have no business claiming to be any kind of intellectual. There is a great difference between a sincerely reasoned argument and an unargued dismissal. As English clergyman William Paley (1743-1805) lamented, “Who can refute a sneer? Such attacks do their execution without inquiry.”... Read More Read More - [Day Begs The Night For Mercy](https://everyangel.org/we-run-like-a-river/): Unsure of what to write this morning.  I thought of posting some recently taken photos of a Porsche GT2RS.  The photos of the exotic car which I greatly admired on the day the photos were taken, seem a bit obscene this morning.  Showing a $350,000 sports car would be a radical disjunction with my... Read More Read More - [A Citizen Of The Universe Or Of One Walled City At War](https://everyangel.org/a-citizen-of-the-universe-or-of-one-walled-city-at-war/): The impartiality which,in contemplation, is the unalloyed desire for truth,is the very same quality of mind which,in action, is justice,and in emotion is that universal lovewhich can be given to all,and not only to thosewho are judged useful or admirable.Thus contemplation enlarges not only the objects of our thoughts,but also the objects of our... Read More Read More - [A Certain Hunger For Blood](https://everyangel.org/a-certain-hunger-for-blood/): Once one has worked through and been suitably impressed by Derrida’s perceptive and witty analysis of Nietzsche’s style, one feels, at the end of all the urbanity, an empty longing amounting to a hunger, a longing for the sense of difficulty and risk and practical urgency that are inseparable from Zarathustra’s dance….. Nietzsche’s work... Read More Read More - [HONG KONG](https://everyangel.org/hong-kong/): While the confrontation has turned entirely on political issues, it’s important to remember the frustrations of Hong Kong’s young people are broader. They live in one of the most unequal places on earth, with an astonishing proportion of the economy controlled by a few billionaires who dominate real estate, retail, utilities, telecommunications, and critical... Read More Read More - [A Kind Of Moral Order](https://everyangel.org/a-kind-of-moral-order/): The warm cup of coffee comforts.  The sky is solid with gray rain clouds.  Driving through a stout downpour I was thankful.  At last the smaller plants and the trees are getting a drink.  More is needed, considerably more.  Life and maybe even reality is a matter of maintenance.  Rainfall maintains life.  Life is... Read More Read More - [In The End](https://everyangel.org/in-the-end/): In the end, I must trust in myself.  I have seen men who have beaten from themselves the ability to recognize truth and goodness, and I do not think I am one of them.  I can still see the tears in a young child’s eyes and feel pain at his suffering. If I ever... Read More Read More - [Go Ahead, Jump](https://everyangel.org/go-ahead-jump/): A few thoughts on Stoicism…. I found James Stockdale’s story a motherlode of lessons — if one is ready to consider and reflect.  Stockdale’s foray into politics as Ross Perot’s running mate was fated to fail it seems to me.  Success in politics demands that one be a shape-shifter, or worse.  One thing that... Read More Read More - [A Fiery Translucence](https://everyangel.org/a-fiery-translucence/): Yesterday I planted a Japanese Maple.  Highly motivated to find the right tree I traveled for an hour in afternoon traffic, north to Countryside Nursery in Crystal Lake.  They had a variety called Crimson Queen, for which I happily paid the purchase price.  I transported the small tree home, another hour of stop and... Read More Read More - [The Possibilities Of Things](https://everyangel.org/the-possibilities-of-things/): Yesterday, late afternoon at the Long Grove Coffee Shop I was discussing photography with Bonnie who works as barista at the shop.  We both have interest in shooting photos and agreed that it was pleasant to converse with others about the topic.  Bonnie drew my attention to the conditions of late afternoon light outside,... Read More Read More - [Compensation For What Has Been Lost](https://everyangel.org/compensation-for-what-has-been-lost/): Do you remember your first taste of toasted marshmallow? Was not that a divine sensation? The taste of honeyed sweetness, when toasted over a fire, presented a range of taste-counterpoint from the light toast to a dark char.  A poetic tension of sweet and a hint of bitter, was indescribable, delicious.  The work/art of... Read More Read More - [On Comparison To The Nazis](https://everyangel.org/on-comparison-to-the-nazis/): …hatred of the idea of the Jews was tied to hatred of the power of intellect, as opposed to military power, hatred of law courts, of negotiations, of cleverness in argument, of learning and of the domination of learning; and in this way anti-Semitism is tied to hatred of justice itself, which must set... Read More Read More - [Abomination](https://everyangel.org/abomination/): Find it hard to write anything this morning. Jeffrey Epstein committed suicide, a twice-charged seller-of-women-for-sex.  The first charge was accommodated by a brief stint under house arrest with daily “release for work at the office” privileges.  The second time around, his wealth and favors-owed by his powerful friends showed little promise of another slap... Read More Read More - [Of A Cardinal](https://everyangel.org/of-a-cardinal/): The days spent in Durham were bitter-sweet.  Any persons death is sad, and that of a sister is particularly dark.  People count and family members count most of all. I delighted to see the resurgence of my hometown.  The medium sized, blue-collar town,  integrated into the tobacco farming rural counties when I grew up... Read More Read More - [The River](https://everyangel.org/the-river/): A few days spent in my hometown of Durham  involves a visit to the city park alongside the Eno River.  The park is on the site of one of the first settlements in the area before Durham could have been called a town.  Before railroads, grist mills along the river were places of gathering... Read More Read More - [Everybody Does Not See Alike](https://everyangel.org/everybody-does-not-see-alike/): Fun I love, but too much fun is of all things the most loathsome. Mirth is better than fun, and happiness is better than mirth. I feel that a man may be happy in this world. and I know that this world is a world of imagination and vision. I see everything that I... Read More Read More - [Ruins](https://everyangel.org/ruins/): My sister, after suffering beyond words, from schizophrenia, and conditions of day to day life bereft of family,  — passed on Saturday July 27.   The meaning of a life cannot be positively expressed, but the absence is felt, much as the ruin of a edifice can be felt.  I miss her and will always... Read More Read More - [What Is Important](https://everyangel.org/what-is-important/): In life what is important is the truth as it is, while in arts and letters what is important is the truth as we see it. There is a real difference here though people turn to the imagination without knowing it in life and to reality without knowing it in arts and letters. —... Read More Read More - [Breaking?](https://everyangel.org/breaking/): Here I am, another day in the town where I grew up.  I am here for the funeral of my sister, the last of our family to live in Durham, North Carolina.  I will miss my sister.  I feel grief over what we both missed while growing up.  Things were as they were.  The... Read More Read More - [A Life Livable](https://everyangel.org/a-life-livable/): Words make, and have made a world, that transcends the world and a life livable in that transcendence. It is a transcendence achieved by the minor effects of figurations and the major effects of the poet’s sense of the world and of the motive music of his/her poems and it is the imaginative dynamism... Read More Read More - [Accommodation](https://everyangel.org/accommodation/): What to say and how to say it? Unable to write anything yesterday, waking in the predawn gray I handed the luggage over to the limo driver.  The day began with the familiar ground-tone of anxiety,  — I didn’t want to miss our flight.  My mind flashed back to when I was a boy. ... Read More Read More - [Two Poems](https://everyangel.org/two-poems/): THE SOLUTIONS OF DREADFUL NIGHT (excerpt) by James Thomson We do not ask a longer term of strife,      Weakness and weariness and nameless woes: We do not claim renewed and endless life      When this which is our torment here shall close, An everlasting conscious inanation! We yearn for speedy death in full... Read More Read More - [Geneva, Days End](https://everyangel.org/geneva-days-end/): Another day’s grind.  That sounds like a unwarranted complaint.  As a matter of fact I’m an old white guy,  benefiting from ruling class privilege. There are many blue-collar tradesmen not as secure as I happen to be, to say nothing of persons of color working their way up, competing with Caucasian peers……  I have... Read More Read More - [In My Beginning, In My End](https://everyangel.org/in-my-beginning-in-my-end/): Three days have passed since my sister died.  A time was before any of us existed, and a time will come when we no longer will be present.  That everything passes is occasion for sadness, and maybe gladness.  Everything has it’s “prime time.”  It is unseemingly to stay too long, to be ungraciously present,... Read More Read More - [Foreigner](https://everyangel.org/a-foreign-country/): We moved from Mundelein. Our reason, to consolidate the family in one area, so that the grand kids, cousins, can play together as they grow up.  We adults can compare notes about “life.”  Life is nothing but a deck of jokers, as least that is how I’ve felt lately.  Your quest: find meaning in... Read More Read More - [Death](https://everyangel.org/death/): My sister passed yesterday around 9PM.  She lingered but for a short while, perhaps two hours after the nurse called to say that she was passing. I cannot say what death is as I cannot say what life is.  It is concrete, a singular experience for each of us.  No one can define what... Read More Read More - [Life](https://everyangel.org/life/): I knew it was coming.  The last several phone conversations that I had with my sister were labored, troubling.  With our last conversation she was unable to finish a sentence.  I could not help her,  as her mind no longer responded to verbal encouragement. An excerpt from Robert A. Heinlein was sent to me... Read More Read More - [The Lazy Ballerina](https://everyangel.org/the-lazy-ballerina/): One of the features of the south west of the State of Michigan are the fruit farms and the vineyards.  Conditions are agreeable for this type of farming.  We have visited the Bumbleberry farm several times to pick blue berries and I always come away with the conviction that I have received much more... Read More Read More - [I Do Not Know Much](https://everyangel.org/i-do-not-know-much/): Yesterday was our last full day here in Michigan.  We concluded the day by a walk down the path to the big lake.  We could hear the lake, one block away booming, like a distant sound of canon.  The sound grew louder the nearer we approached walking through the woods For the third year... Read More Read More - [If It Were Up To Me](https://everyangel.org/if-it-were-up-to-me/): In downtown St. Joseph Michigan we stopped in at Cabana’s ice cream parlor.  The ice cream was worth the wait.  I had a giant single scoop of dark chocolate with chocolate chips in a waffle cone.  Summer deliciousness…! I noted several paintings, rather surreal images of cows displayed on the walls.  I thought to... Read More Read More - [Resemblance](https://everyangel.org/resemblance/): Reading continues in the essays by Wallace Stevens.  I just finished an essay on resemblance, how things resemble one another thus establishing a relationship, and how this is so in poetry. Stevens asserts that the job of poetry is to tell the truth about reality.  That is a lofty estimation of poetry, much higher... Read More Read More - [Narcissus](https://everyangel.org/narcissus/): Narcissus did not expect, when he looked into the stream, to find in his hair a serpent coiled to strike, nor, when he looked in his own eyes there, to be met with a look of hate, nor, in general, to discover in himself the center of inexplicable ugliness from which he would be... Read More Read More - [Raccoon Story](https://everyangel.org/raccoon-story/): The baby was somewhat larger than a kitten.  But there was nothing “kitten-like” about it’s dark eyes, and the rows sharp teeth lining it’s mouth.  I’ve seen raccoons at some distance, sometimes as close as the garbage containers which attracted their  attention.  A few months ago, with difficulty I dislodged one that had peeled... Read More Read More - [On Losing My Audience](https://everyangel.org/thoughts-on-losing-my-audience/): A friend said to me, “when you get into politics, you lose half your audience.”  He is right of course and that is expected.  My aim in writing is to find the words to speak with integrity, to discover my voice, to be my own reader first and foremost.  What control do I have... Read More Read More - [Unliterary](https://everyangel.org/un-literary/): This morning is sun bright.  My disposition was not so sunny.  I felt unliterary.  Enthusiasm for life is a reflection of bodily well-being.  The older one gets, one’s moods are predictably more somber.  Some of that is simple biology.  Aches and pains….  The other dimension is the perspective that a higher vantage point, a... Read More Read More - [Out On A Limb](https://everyangel.org/no-more-easy-god/): I am entranced by James Kavanaugh poems.  I received a beautiful book of his poems, There Are Men Too Gentle To Live Among Wolves,  for my birthday.  Every poem is a collection of sensibility that resonates with me.  The poems are interleaved with pen and ink drawing of trees with bare branches.  One of... Read More Read More - [The Dancer and the Self-Enjoying Soul](https://everyangel.org/the-dancer-and-the-self-enjoying-soul/): Dreams, we all have them.  They come as the mind moves from deep sleep to REM sleep in the nether world before waking.  Most dreams evaporate  from memory within moments of rising from sleep.  A few linger in memory, a haunting message that demands attention. Nietzsche recounts such a dream.  His character Zarathustra stands... Read More Read More - [Elegy For A Relationship](https://everyangel.org/elegy-for-a-relationship/): Last night a few of us conversed about music.  I do not know anyone who does not depend upon music as a lifeline to emotional stability.  Of course many do not, but I do not move in those circles. Music is the analog to life, life which is a river, a movement of always... Read More Read More - [Guilty](https://everyangel.org/guilty/): Guilty, guilty as charged. Along with others of my Baby Boomer generation I too have concluded that the members of the Millennial generation are unsuitable for hire. Sometimes exigencies of circumstance do result in a business relationship, then one must be prepared for inordinate commitment to parent-like support, to the kind of patience which... Read More Read More - [Not Much](https://everyangel.org/not-much/): I have little to say this morning. Chicago has a new Mayor.  Much is made in the press about the first female black person to be elected Mayor, Lori Lightfoot.  What is left unsaid, the thundering silence from the press reports is that it matters little who is elected, their racial heritage or their... Read More Read More - [Stumbling In The Debris](https://everyangel.org/stumbling-in-the-debris/): Yesterday was April Fool’s.  Here I am among fools, myself one of many.  That is the straight-up assessment of life that makes the most sense.  And why not?  I celebrated my 70th birthday yesterday, with the help of my family.  My wife offered the most assistance with a really good meal at a favorite... Read More Read More - [Before Sunrise](https://everyangel.org/before-sunrise/): For all things are baptized at the font of eternity, and beyond good and evil; good and evil themselves, however, are but fugitive shadows and damp afflictions and passing clouds. Truly, it is a blessing and not a blasphemy When I teach that ‘above all things there stands the heaven of chance, the heaven... Read More Read More - [Awake or Dreaming?](https://everyangel.org/awake-or-dreaming/): Nietzsche’s dream-vision tale concludes.  His spokesman Zarathustra comes upon a young shepherd lying across the mountain path in agony.  A dog howls mournfully as a Greek chorus would add commentary to a tragedian performance.  The narrator does not know if he is awake or if this is a dream.  And is there a difference?... Read More Read More - [Every Thrown Stone](https://everyangel.org/every-thrown-stone/): Yesterday while at lunch I spoke with a friend.  He told a story of an exchange with a Facebook acquaintance. His interlocutor sent a list of common ethical principles held between varieties of religious traditions. Conspicuously missing was that of the atheist position. Naturally my friend composed his version of the common ground that... Read More Read More - [Seeing Into The Abyss](https://everyangel.org/seeing-into-the-abyss/): Man, however is the most courageous animal: thereby he has overcome every animal. With sound of triumph he has overcome every pain; human pain, however, is the sorest pain. Courage slays also vertigo at abysses; and where does not man stand at abysses! Is not seeing itself seeing abysses? Courage is the best slayer;... Read More Read More - [The Racoon Part II](https://everyangel.org/the-racoon-part-ii/): I expect her to show for another round.  I repaired the hole in the wood trim, thankfully no larger than a golf ball—  the likely result of the animal’s first session of work.  I expected it to return.  The night after our first encounter,  it was a no show.  Maybe I got the best... Read More Read More - [Racoon Story](https://everyangel.org/racoon-story/): The sound was subtle, not loud, irregular.  I walked into the guest bed room and listened,–there it was. And then into the front room, again, but not so loud.  The thought came to me.  There is an animal on the roof.  Outside I went with my little flashlight, the batteries at their low ebb. ... Read More Read More - [In Celebration of Vanity](https://everyangel.org/in-celebration-of-vanity/): Tonight our intention is to discussion “fashion.”  After years of reading and exchanging ideas, at last we arrive at this topic.  My wife and kids might say, “It’s about time.”  I am fashion challenged as I’ve mentioned before.  By habit I have my mind on other things.  I dress to be comfortable and to... Read More Read More - [Mental Ill-Health](https://everyangel.org/mental-ill-health/): What we’re taking in when we check our phones is perhaps the single greatest contributor to our mental ill-health……. Every minute of every day presents us with untold options for filling our minds with the mania, exploits, disasters, furies, reversals, ambitions, triumphs, insanity and cataclysms of strangers around our benighted planet. Always, news organizations... Read More Read More - [Fashion](https://everyangel.org/fashion/): Writing about this subject, a fool rushing in — I am not a “fashion forward” guy.  I attribute that to my upbringing.  I didn’t grow into adulthood in New York, Paris, or London.  While living in Durham North Carolina in the 1950s dressing up for church on Sundays, was a close as I came... Read More Read More - [My Life](https://everyangel.org/my-life/): Yesterday it occurred that I could attempt to write directly about myself.  My posts have been indirect discourse about my life experience, about the makeup of my mind.  I doubt that anything remains concealed. Philosophical ideas interest me, are worth writing about.  Philosophy is not a frivolous word-game played by academics.  Philosophy arises from... Read More Read More - [Selling Redemption](https://everyangel.org/selling-redemption/): Things do not change.  They do not change as long as there is a market for a good pitchman.  I was invited to listen to Dr. David Jeremiah, a current television preacher of some note.  I agreed, not wanting to be rude.  I was hopeful that I might learn something.  Perhaps I’d discover a... Read More Read More - [Hollow Men](https://everyangel.org/hollow-men/): A friend posed the dilemma yesterday: what is the distinction between the real, and the unreal in a photograph?  The three of us engaged in conversation love the challenge and the enhanced awareness which comes from viewing the ever-changing world through a viewfinder, or a LCD screen.  A split second judgement “captures,” freezes the... Read More Read More - [Eagle River Until Later](https://everyangel.org/eagle-river-until-later/): A few minutes after ten o’clock yesterday we left Eagle River.  The familiar driveway through the woods, ice and snow covered, leads us to Zeeman Road.  A late heavy snow makes this four wheel drive country, in mid March, the day before spring. I left with a sadness, and the satisfaction of memories of... Read More Read More - [By Made Things](https://everyangel.org/by-made-things/): We join ourselves to the living world by artifacts of art and science— by made things. We are always going to be somewhat at fault, because we are ignorant, fallible, and small. The living world is larger and more complex than our works. The extremes of reality and of imagination, within the limits of... Read More Read More - [The Devil and a Dog Story](https://everyangel.org/the-devil-and-a-dog-story/): I don’t think about the Devil much anymore.  In years past, being raised a fundamentalist Christian, I believed that evil personified was bent on creating chaos in my life.  I was given much advice from those who claimed “to know” about defensive measures.  Some of these were: memorizing passages from the Bible, more prayer,... Read More Read More - [Eagle River II](https://everyangel.org/eagle-river-ii/): Sunday morning a divine light reflects off a cover of deep snow.  Several gown deer crossed the road well in front of my vehicle.  I had to turn my head and look after them as they disappeared into the woods.   One appeared to be a young buck.  This is their time.  They know spring... Read More Read More - [Eagle River](https://everyangel.org/eagle-river/): We arrived yesterday afternoon.  As always I am awed by the tall spruce, birch, and pine trees standing in deep snow for miles and miles.  The bridge over the Wisconsin River revealed a frozen, snow covered surface except for a small channel of flowing water close to one bank.  Three deer had ventured out... Read More Read More - [Why So Late?](https://everyangel.org/speaking-to-cowards/): Thursday.  I am to drive north to Eagle River, Wisconsin today.  My cell news feed this morning featured a article by Reuters.  Congress is reported to be puzzled at why the FAA waited so long to ground the Boeing 737 Max jets,  after other countries and airlines acted more quickly.  A 737 Max jetliner... Read More Read More - [You Wouldn't Want It If ...](https://everyangel.org/you-wouldnt-want-it-if/): A gray Wednesday, midweek morning with rain, the remainder of melting winter’s ice, —- and traffic hurtling, leaving a billowing wake of dirty mist. The Brits, some of them want to leave the EU, but cannot agree among themselves how to do it.  It is likely the time will run out while they bicker.... Read More Read More - [Reading Nietzsche](https://everyangel.org/reading-nietzsche/): I continue to read Thus Spoke Zarathustra.  To supplement the primary source, I am working my way through Hiking With Nietzsche- On Becoming Who You Are by John Kaag. Professor Kaag teaches philosophy at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell.  He approaches Nietzsche’s words as vectors for a life-long workout of sorts,  a discipline placing... Read More Read More - [The Poets Lie Too Much](https://everyangel.org/the-poets-lie-too-much/): God is a thought —a thought that makes all that is straight crooked, and all that is standing reel. What !? Time negated, and all time bound beings, dying, would be but a lie? To think such is giddiness and vertigo to human limbs, and even vomiting to the stomach; truly a reeling sickness... Read More Read More - [A Sad Song](https://everyangel.org/a-sad-song/): If you love music, you already know that when you feel down, a sad song is just the medicine, the relief that you need.  This one by the Eagles, brings back memories.  The more miles that one has under one’s belt, the more clear the truth conveyed by the lyric. Old Heraclitus came to... Read More Read More - [The Rising](https://everyangel.org/the-rising/): Where to from here?  What are we to do?  To sharpen the point, what am I to do?  We are to suffer the impact of problems so large and so complex that they defy expert understanding, problems so great in scale that no reasonable solution is apparent.  These “problems” are the outcome of ratiocination,... Read More Read More - [Not Just Any Danger Part II](https://everyangel.org/the-danger-part-ii/): My wife who is likely my most consistent reader, suggested that I draw a shorter line between the Iditarod-Alaska article and the quotation from Martin Heidegger.  I knew she was right.  She said out loud, what my inner voice of instinct already was saying. The weather conditions in Alaska, the effect of a shift... Read More Read More - [Not Just Any Danger](https://everyangel.org/the-danger/): ANCHORAGE — A few miles and a few days from this weekend’s start of the Iditarod sled dog race, a glaciologist named Shad O’Neel stood in his sun-drenched office at the United States Geological Survey, talking about climate change. The walls displayed striking before-and-after photographs of the Columbia Glacier and others in Alaska. Even... Read More Read More - [Techne, τέχνη](https://everyangel.org/techne-%cf%84%ce%ad%cf%87%ce%bd%ce%b7/): I continue to read about technology.  I finished the essay which is to serve as basis for our coming Tuesday evening discussion.  I am nearing the finish of another essay by Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology.  This essay was first delivered to The Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts, on November 18, 1953.  I... Read More Read More - [Poiesis](https://everyangel.org/poiesis/): Every occasion for whatever passes beyond the nonpresent and goes forward into presencing is poiesis, bringing forth. —excerpt Symposium (205b) by Plato Last night we met friends for dinner at The Green Door, a restaurant in Libertyville. A first visit to any smallish, bar-bistro on a Saturday evening is an adventure. There is the... Read More Read More - [Enframed](https://everyangel.org/enframed/): An early memory of my childhood was my beloved hatchet.  I remember the heft of the sharpened blade in my hands— which lead to many adventures, and problem solving lessons.  In the woods, which were in close proximity to my house, I chopped down small pine trees, and used the limbs to build shady... Read More Read More - [About Women](https://everyangel.org/about-women/): The idea came that I could risk to write about women.  Writing about women as a man, especially when read by women is certain to provoke push-back.  Men never get away with opining about women unless they are speaking to men.   Within Nietzsche’s work Thus Spake Zarathustra, is a meditation entitled, Old and Young... Read More Read More - [Content To Live It All Again](https://everyangel.org/content-to-live-it-all-again/): Thursday morning, another single-digit day of winter cold.  The first day of spring is just a few days away,–March 20th.  Surreal!  No more surreal than the early broadcast of today’s news on NPR.  The much ballyhooed summit with the North Koreans reached a swift end with absolutely nothing achieved.  Imagine asking the North Koreans... Read More Read More - [Omega Point](https://everyangel.org/omega-point/): As it often is, the discussion last night among our group was engaging, for an hour and a half.  Over a dozen adults enjoyed a wide-ranging exchange of ideas prompted by a thought experiment proposed many years ago by Edwin Schrodinger.  The concept is known by the moniker, Schrodinger’s Cat.  The set up is... Read More Read More - [Oh, We Can Beat Them...](https://everyangel.org/oh-we-can-beat-them/): Awakened this morning in a foul mood.  Can’t blame the low blood sugar because breakfast didn’t help my attitude.  I attempted listening to NPR, feeling more troubled, enraged by an interview with an elected member of Congress from Oklahoma.  The man smug and self-righteous, asserted that he would cast his vote to support the... Read More Read More - [Looking For A Rhythm Like You](https://everyangel.org/making/): I received a note from a friend yesterday. He expressed a cautionary word about my interest in reading Nietzsche, about sliding from a productive skepticism into a grim cynicism. Nietzsche is not everyone’s cup of tea. His writings skirt the edge of madness. In the final months of his life he did suffer from... Read More Read More - [Hoping About A Small Earth](https://everyangel.org/hoping-about-a-small-earth/): Yesterday I listened to an interview with Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend Indiana.  He is 37 years old, served a tour in Afghanistan, is a Rhodes scholar and is running for President.  He won his 2nd term of Mayor with 80% of the vote. Mayor Pete comes across as likeable.  His self confidence... Read More Read More - [To Go Out Like A Hero](https://everyangel.org/to-go-out-like-a-hero/): What child would not have cause to weep over its parents? Worthy I deemed this man and ripe for the sense of the earth; but when I saw his wife, the earth seemed to me a house for the senseless….. This one went out like a hero in quests for truths, and eventually he... Read More Read More - [Our Need Of Lies...](https://everyangel.org/our-need-of-lies/): There is only one world, and this is false, cruel, and contradictory, seductive, without meaning— A world thus constituted is the real world. We have need of lies in order to conquer this reality, this “truth,” that is in order to live. –excerpt The Birth of Tragedy Friedrich Nietzsche Can’t shake this brief quotation. ... Read More Read More - [Avocado Story](https://everyangel.org/avocado-story/): It is impossible to ignore, to reduce to a disposable abstraction one’s relationship to the Earth.  We are of Nature, and with all that lives, will return to the living earth, from which we came.  There was a time before we were, even if I seldom feel that fact.  There will be a time... Read More Read More - [Land of Audi and Lexus](https://everyangel.org/land-of-audi-and-lexus/): Yesterday I didn’t post.  Regret that I was defeated by circumstances.  Defeat always occurs in the mind.  External circumstances, in my case a disabled snow blower, projects awaiting my attention at work, etc. in concert constituted a mental squall, and I lost my heading.  Writing is a discipline that serves to clarify a direction... Read More Read More - [Tyranny Redux](https://everyangel.org/tyranny-redux/): The snow falls this morning in a steady curtain.  Vehicles, one by one speed by in a swirling wake of icy turbulence.  Another morning in wintry Illinois.  There is inevitable friction, turbulence, a rift between the world of human artifice called “civilization” and Nature.  From the beginning of humankind, the awakening of consciousness by... Read More Read More - [What Demon Leads Me..](https://everyangel.org/what-demon-leads-me/): Starbucks on a Saturday morning, a background buzz of conversation, hubub from behind the serving counter, as baristas furiously compose drinks, microwaving breakfast treats, –and I reading my new book, Hiking With Nietzsche, by John Kaag.  What am I thinking, as I close in on my 70th birthday, day to day working through the... Read More Read More - [Bitter](https://everyangel.org/bitter/): The weather is bitter, matching my frame of mind. Yesterday was close to 50 degrees Fahrenheit, and over night, a whipsaw to 8 degrees and a stiff wind. Even colder existentially was the snippet of a NPR news report this morning. There is planned for today a White House Rose Garden ceremony where the... Read More Read More - [Elegy No. 2](https://everyangel.org/elegy-no-2/): A day of appreciation for those who mean the most to us reminded me of a granddaughter that we all miss.  Baby Kai was still-born with little advance warning on December of 2017.  She was loved, her birth celebrated with anticipation.  She will always have a place in our hearts.  Thus I remember her ... Read More Read More - [Valentine's Day Elegy](https://everyangel.org/valentines-day-remembering/): Yesterday I was working out of doors, it was 16 degrees with a stiff 20 mph gusting wind.  I persevered to completion of a necessary job.  That’s what it means to live as an adult.  There are many things that must be done, never mind the discomfort. On the return drive to the office... Read More Read More - [A New And Essential World](https://everyangel.org/a-new-and-essential-world/): And so it begins.  What begins, remains to be seen. A bipartisan committee has finished a compromise bill that addresses border security concerns, as well as funds the government.  The Democrats appear to have turned the Presidents demand to have ability to create unlimited detention centers along the border.  A cap is established in... Read More Read More - [Belonging Together To Take A Stand](https://everyangel.org/belonging-together-to-take-a-stand/): A few days ago an extended email exchange of points of view happened.  The mutual expression of views were in response to an initial statement regarding the hyped and stratospheric values of the art market, a field of competition for the uber-wealthy.  I was prompted to reflect upon my long standing fascination with art,... Read More Read More - [Death Spiral](https://everyangel.org/death-spiral/): WASHINGTON — Congressional efforts to reach a border security deal ahead of another government shutdown broke down on Sunday over Democratic demands to limit the detention of undocumented immigrants, as President Trump moved more troops to the border and prepared to rally supporters in Texas on Monday…… The impasse appears to center on Democratic... Read More Read More - [To Start A Fire...](https://everyangel.org/art-is-a-burning-fuse-unifying-world-and-earth/): Truth establishes itself in the work.* Truth essentially occurs only as the strife between the clearing and concealing in the opposition of world and earth. Truth wills to be established in the work as this strife of world and earth. The strife is not to be resolved in being brought forth for that purpose,... Read More Read More - [Objects: Sign of the Times](https://everyangel.org/how-cold/): My post of yesterday was a singularly grim, unnerving topic, the German V-1 rocket bomb.  It was labeled by its creators,  vengeance weapon.  For 80 days they rained down on London in 1944. One could evaluate by a study of the development, use, and purpose of the V-1, the meaning of German society in... Read More Read More - [Kirschkern (cherry stone)](https://everyangel.org/kirschkern-cherry-stone/): A poetic codename for the V-1 flying bomb, or “Vengeance Weapon”  launched against London on June 13, 1944.  The flying bomb, was developed at Peenemunde Army Research Center in 1939 by the German Luftwaffe.  It was a weapon of desperation, launched after the successful D-day landing on the beaches in France. Nearly 10,000 V-1s... Read More Read More - [A Veiled Fatality](https://everyangel.org/a-veiled-fatality/): Things are, and human beings, gifts and sacrifices are, animals and plants are, equipment and works are. The particular being stands in Being. Through Being there passes a veiled fatality that is ordained between the godly and the countergodly. There is much in being that man cannot master. There is but little that comes... Read More Read More - [World Making](https://everyangel.org/world-making/): The world is not the mere collection of the countable or the uncountable, familiar and unfamiliar things that are at hand. But neither is it a merely imagined framework added by our representation to the sum of such given things. The world worlds, and is more fully in being than the tangible and perceptible... Read More Read More - [Dream](https://everyangel.org/dream/): Dreams come when they will.  Most of mine are indistinct, and the memory evaporates within minutes of waking.  Years ago when I worked with a therapist, dreams came often, nightly if I remember.  The unconscious was stirring, the therapist working as a friendly guide helped me to knock at the door of long unacknowledged... Read More Read More - [The Super Bowl](https://everyangel.org/the-super-bowl/): I watched.  The Patriots over the Rams 13 to 3, a defensive game, like watching a tableau of trench warfare, grinding on….  At last the Rams broke and the Patriots scored a touch down.  This was the Patriots sixth Super Bowl win.  Six rings,–what to do with them all?  The game was the second... Read More Read More - [Cirque du Soleil](https://everyangel.org/cirque-du-soleil/): We drove to Milwaukee, the traffic enveloped in a miasma of  salt and soot laced snow-melt spray.  The bone chilling sub-zero cold has passed.  Our objective was the Fiserve Forum where we had tickets for a performance of Cirque du Soleil Crystal. Words cannot be easily found to describe the unfolding of figure skating,... Read More Read More - [Spirituality](https://everyangel.org/spirituality/): To be reverentially unexplored and pure or nonsensical bunkum of appeal, worshiped or derided, an oblique perspective on existence freed from customary egoistic vigilance taking leave of the “I.” Becoming a vagabond promiscuous thing to find ourselves loving, an intensity of enthusiasm, now distributed, erratically and generously to experience generosity, nobility of feeling, selflessness... Read More Read More - [More Heidegger](https://everyangel.org/more-heidegger/): Defeated by the slow moving traffic on a inordinately chilled morning, I returned to home base.  Reconsidering the day ahead, I had time for some emails and reading.  I am eager to begin an essay by Heidegger, THE ORIGIN OF THE WORK OF ART.  Here are some sentences from the first paragraph. On the... Read More Read More - [To Start Again](https://everyangel.org/to-start-again/): Another bitter day.  The cold stabs inadequately protected flesh like a stiletto.  It’s a white death that is felt, something you know intuitively. I woke this morning with a shocking high blood glucose reading.  Everything has a cause.  I identified several possibilities, and changed my insulin pump setting.  High blood sugar is another form... Read More Read More - [Negative 22 Fahrenheit](https://everyangel.org/negative-22-fahrenheit/):                        Warming Arctic fuels polar vortex,—the end of our world.  That is a headline which we will never see on the front page of the New York Times.  Tell me that you have not thought of that possibility, the consequence of disruption of normal, seasonal weather patterns, such that commerce, agriculture, and social life... Read More Read More - [Following An Antique Drum](https://everyangel.org/following-an-antique-drum/): Tuesday, the first of three days of bitter cold. With -3 degrees and a stiff breeze I changed my plans for the morning. On the road in the early morning sun, obliquely illuminating the snow covered fields, the drifts appeared as wind driven wavelets on a frozen lake. Perhaps an image of our lives,... Read More Read More - [White Blanket](https://everyangel.org/white-blanket/): A blanket of snow, at least six inches covers everything.  I imagine that this day could be recognized as a opportunity for the minimum, the most basic of chores, a day for rest and reflection.  Not so for us who live in towns and suburbs.  A snow fall presents an obstacle to be overcome,... Read More Read More - [Sunday, The First Day](https://everyangel.org/sunday-first-day-of-creation/): Certainly one does not put one’s beginnings over the horizon, in the rear view mirror of life.  This Sunday morning I awakened early and made my way to Starbucks.  Starbucks is the quintessential secular environment.  Individuals or clusters of friends, and a few families sip coffee, enjoy a breakfast sandwich while concentrating their attention... Read More Read More - [Earth-Mother](https://everyangel.org/earth-mother-2/): The bitter cold continues.  Unaccountably I was not awakened by the alarm this morning.  At least I have no memory of shutting the alarm off and returning to sleep.  I customarily rise before sunup to begin my day.  I enjoy a session of reading and writing to begin a day of activity.  It seemed... Read More Read More - [-7 Degrees Farenheit](https://everyangel.org/7-degrees-farenheit/): The sun is just above the eastern horizon and it’s bitter cold.  After a siege of a severe head cold I am beginning to recover.  Perhaps.  I’ll conserve my strength and allow Nature to advance the recovery.  There is only so much that I can do. I offer several quotations that are related.  It... Read More Read More - [Delirium](https://everyangel.org/delirium/): I am fortunate.  Throughout my adult life I’ve had little experience with sickness.  There have been several occasions of minor surgical repair, with attendant recovery periods.  I’ve had my share of colds, flu and virus infections, those onslaughts that run their course as the body marshals its defense.  Unpleasant enough, but soon forgotten as... Read More Read More - [Less Is More](https://everyangel.org/less-is-more-2/): I am feeling feverish this morning with a lingering cold.  Snow continues to fall and the roads are a skating rink.  I take satisfaction in knowing that Nature overwhelms the best of our engineering, the artificial habitat that we call civilization.  Is that “schadenfreude” the pleasure felt at the misfortune of others?  Yes, but... Read More Read More - [Growing Up Believing](https://everyangel.org/still-flying/): Another cold morning with snow, freezing rain, and more rain anticipated for today.  A somber day.  I awakened looking forward to writing this post.  The first snippet of news this morning gave content to my somber mood, the mood encapsulated by Paul Simon’s song, My Little Town.  The NPR news snippet mentioned that the... Read More Read More - [A Knife To The Throat](https://everyangel.org/a-knife-to-the-throat/): I am reading Bananas, by Peter Chapman, How the United Fruit Company shaped the world.  It is a chilling tale of colonization.  The colonial power was the United States in the late 1800s, the William McKinley administration, followed by Teddy Roosevelt.  How we tend to view our history through rose-colored glasses, giving others and... Read More Read More - [Mary Oliver Rests In Peace](https://everyangel.org/mary-oliver-rests-in-peace/): Mary Oliver has died.  She was eighty three.  I have a number of her books of poetry. Wild Geese   You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your... Read More Read More - [Five Degrees](https://everyangel.org/five-degrees/): I awakened at 5AM.  I dressed and arrived here at Starbucks.  I watched a large bright white moon to the west while I drove.  It’s five degrees farenheit outside.  Two stars, one large and the other more faint hang in the east against the inky black sky.  It is 6:30AM now and the big... Read More Read More - [The Absurd](https://everyangel.org/the-absurd/): I am compelled to write about the picture which was on the front page of the Thursday edition of the New York Times.  My thoughts will have to be held in abeyance, until I can change my password for my Godaddy account.  This morning I received a email note from my friends at Godaddy. ... Read More Read More - [Friday](https://everyangel.org/friday/): The end of the work week has arrived; a grey overcast winter day with a forecast of snow.  Would we be better off if we did not know what is coming?  Would we live more contentedly in the present moment, since less about the future would be displayed for speculation on our cell phone... Read More Read More - [The Sublime](https://everyangel.org/the-sublime/): Life is not easy.  The luster of childhood can barely be remembered.  The idealism of youth has been replaced by disillusionment of Realpolitik.   Therefore to avoid the dark well of nihilism I seek beauty and meaning on a day-to-day basis.  The meaning of life depends in part upon me.   In part, a worthwhile life... Read More Read More - [Wisdom, Take It Or Leave It](https://everyangel.org/wisdom-take-it-or-leave-it/): The discussion last night dragged on for me.  That is unusual.  The topic was the relationship between science and wisdom.  Science is an institution, and a method that yields knowledge, which defines the 20th and our own 21st century.  Certainly from the comments shared among our group there is much controversy, disagreement about what... Read More Read More - [Live And Let Die](https://everyangel.org/live-and-let-die/): I had a dream this morning, likely a few minutes before the alarm was to activate at 6AM.  I dreamed of walking in an open field with acquaintances, possibly family.  At some distance, a mile or so in the sky a big military tanker plane was making a slow turn.  I’ve see such aircraft... Read More Read More - [Possessed](https://everyangel.org/possessed/): Email from a friend expressing feelings of revulsion at political “leadership.”  I felt his pain.  Feelings are like the weather.  The “weather” of feelings are the swirling impact of feeling upon feeling.  Feelings come and go.  Feelings pass for “news” in some sectors of the media.  Feelings are not news.  Feelings pass for “truth”... Read More Read More - [View From The Outside](https://everyangel.org/view-from-the-outside/): Music is a blessed respite from the grime, the contamination of day to day politics, commerce, the trade offs that must be made in order for life to go on.  I get it, this is not Paradise, this is East of Eden.  I do not live in a rose garden.  My opportunity, along with... Read More Read More - [Ghost](https://everyangel.org/ghost/): Exchanged emails with a friend last night.  He is a Trump supporter.  I am not.  I asked him how it is that he is such a Trump-man when his people were immigrants.  Perhaps I will hear from him later this morning.  We are friends so he will likely have some answer for my consideration. ... Read More Read More - [Recrudescence](https://everyangel.org/recrudescence/): This morning I turned on NPR.  Still dark, it was early.  Barely awake, I tuned to the beginning of an interview with one of Alabama’s Congressional Representatives.  This is the followup of the Presidents visit to McAllen Texas yesterday.  I could not listen to the interview with the man from Alabama.  The sound of... Read More Read More - [Letting Things Be](https://everyangel.org/letting-things-be/): This morning according to the NPR newscast the President is to visit the border region between our country and Mexico.  I visited that part of our country once, many years ago.  Traveling from Chicago to San Francisco on the California Zephyr the train stopped for about twenty minutes somewhere in New Mexico.  I marveled... Read More Read More - [No](https://everyangel.org/no/): It is Wednesday, the day after the Presidents televised speech to the nation.  Such televised speeches usually signal circumstances of extraordinary, even dire import.  This was simply the next stratagem to get a wall built along the border between our country and Mexico.  The cost would be in excess of five billion dollars.  Why... Read More Read More - [The Constructive Fever](https://everyangel.org/the-constructive-fever/): Philosophy becomes a kind of necessary virus, which causes a constructive fever in others, compelling them to be and to do more than just survive.  It is not there to appease or to make people feel better; it is there to provoke a constant restlessness of being. –excerpt from What Makes A Philosopher? by... Read More Read More - [Construction and Destruction...](https://everyangel.org/a-new-species-you-probably-wouldnt-like/): Not that I have lost any hope. All the goodness and the heroisms will rise up again, then be cut down again and rise up. It isn’t that the evil thing wins — it never will — but that it doesn’t die. I don’t know why we should expect it to. It seems fairly... Read More Read More - [What If?](https://everyangel.org/what-if/): The automobile is emblematic of America.  The Model T Ford created by Henry Ford, a “modern” means of transportation affordable by the working man/woman, and the interstate highway system built by the Eisenhower Administration have defined America.  As a baby-boomer I learned to love cars while in high school.  The most vivid memories retained... Read More Read More - [This Could Be Heaven or...](https://everyangel.org/this-could-be-heaven-or/): Friday, yesterday began with frost on the windshield.  After all it is still early January.  The weather forecast for the day held promise of temperature in the 40s, with 50s expected today.  This was delivered on the late evening news with much fanfare of graphical display and expression of animated glee by the attractive... Read More Read More - [Going Wrong With Innovation](https://everyangel.org/going-wrong-with-innovation/): I was intrigued by these words from Heidegger.  You will need to read carefully, and at least twice for his meaning to clarify for your mind.  Written in the early years of the 20th century, the words are prescient to our condition a century into the future, the 21st century. By disavowing itself in... Read More Read More - [Not One Dollar](https://everyangel.org/not-one-dollar/): for a wall along the southern border. I watched the local five o’clock news on ABC.  Becoming drowsy and I fell asleep while watching.  I awakened with the realization that the National News broadcast was in progress.  I saw images of an iced over highway with a tractor-trailer sliding in slow motion to slam... Read More Read More - [The Good News About Freedom](https://everyangel.org/the-good-news-about-freedom/): The disclosedness of beings, which lets beings be, sets man free for his “freedom” by first offering to his choice something possible (a being) and by imposing on him something necessary (a being), human caprice does not then have freedom at its disposal. Man does not “possess” freedom as a property. At best, the... Read More Read More - [A New Year](https://everyangel.org/a-new-year/): A year come and another gone.  We celebrate for what?  The easy answer is life is short, and one must seize any opportunity to make merry with friends that comes along.  That’s an answer that we can depend upon.  I think that we also celebrate in hope. The opportunities entailed in the next twelve... Read More Read More - [Time....](https://everyangel.org/time-3/): Time goes slowly….  Today is the last day of 2018.  Tomorrow technically will begin at 12:00 AM which will herald the begining of 2019.  A few friends will come over for some genial conversation, a celebration of friendship, and of the passage of time.  Will I remain awake until midnight?  I doubt it.  Those... Read More Read More - [Remembering](https://everyangel.org/remembering-2/): After a mild month, the last days of December are descending towards winter.  Yesterday was the 29th, a cold, breezy day with light icy rain. Our family gathered at our oldest daughters home to remember our grand-daughter, baby Kai Ruby Lewis-King who was born one year ago on the 29th.  She was still-born after... Read More Read More - [Milwaukee](https://everyangel.org/milwaukee/): Amazing Architecture versus A Perfect Beef and Mushroom Strudel I traveled to Milwaukee yesterday.  The drive north to Wisconsin is enjoyable.  Milwaukee is not as sprawling as Chicago, a more user-friendly city by the lake.  The cost of parking is reasonable there too.  We wanted to visit the Christkindl Market that was situated near... Read More Read More - [In The Clear Night](https://everyangel.org/in-the-clear-night/): This tune has always caused me to shiver inwardly. It is Purple Rain by Prince and The Revolution. The lyrics are simple on the surface, but I think it is the image of purple rain and the sweeping, fat and luscious, and sometimes slashing guitar chords that get the job done. For me the... Read More Read More - [Relief, Just A Song Away](https://everyangel.org/relief-just-a-song-away/): I always write first thing in the morning.  My mind works best then.  If I can lay some good words down, doing my best,  I face the rest of the day with a “can do” attitude. I did not show up this morning, because Mother Nature kicked my ass.  I suffered through the night... Read More Read More - [Morning Postscript](https://everyangel.org/morning-postscript/): If we spend our life looking for the eye of the hurricane, we live a life that is fruitless. We die without having really lived. No one can know what life is. But we can experience life directly. Only that is given to human beings. Life is not a safe space. It never was,... Read More Read More - [Still Believing III](https://everyangel.org/still-believing-iii/): I believe there is no ultimate meaning outside of humankind, no final answer to be discovered which provides a certain anchor, a firm grounding, a robust assurance that “all will be well” and that all human suffering is justified. Life itself is change; life is recognized by our self-awareness and reason in the form... Read More Read More - [Still Believing II](https://everyangel.org/still-believing-ii/): I believe human freedom is narrowly circumscribed, channeled, confined by genetic inheritance, by the resources available for clothing, shelter, nourishment, safety, and above all shaped —  by the values absorbed from the birth family, and mores of the zeitgeist into which I was born. None of these factors were and are, within my discretion.... Read More Read More - [Still Believing I](https://everyangel.org/still-believing-i/): I mentioned that in graduate school that one requirement for graduation was that I compose a essay addressing the foundational belief commitments that I held at the time.  A friend suggested that I post that statement.  so I retrieved an age-tinged copy composed on a typewriter in 1983.  I confess that I still hold... Read More Read More - [Appetite For Destruction](https://everyangel.org/appetite-for-destruction/): I was unable to post this morning.  I am in the midst of a rewrite, my update of a “This I Believe” statement that I wrote in 1983 when in grad school.  A friend asked that I post the statement, which I will do.  The world of society which includes language terms, and issues... Read More Read More - [Making Things Secure](https://everyangel.org/making-things-secure/): Today Western imperialism is the imperialism of relativism, of the “it all depends on your point of view”; it’s the eye-rolling or the wounded indignation at anyone who’s stupid, primitive, or presumptuous enough to still believe in something, to affirm anything at all. No social order can securely found itself on the principle that... Read More Read More - [Thucydides](https://everyangel.org/thucydides/): Yesterday I resolved to sort through a bankers box of archived materials, a good bit philosophy related, some personal photos from 5k runs that I enjoyed with family members, business related articles on sales saved on the merits of future usefulness….etc.  The material represents the mosiac of my life.  A 8×10 photo of “Animal... Read More Read More - [Fate, When Dreams Come True](https://everyangel.org/fate-when-dreams-come-true/): Parents are generally anxious about really big things like melting ice caps and collapsing economy and unending stories about violence and predators and college admissions…. They displace all of these fears of things they cannot control onto the one thing they believe they can control, which is children. —-excerpt Wendy Mogel, The Blessing Of... Read More Read More - [Outta Nothing At All](https://everyangel.org/outta-nothing-at-all/): It is the eighth day of gray overcast here in the Midwest.  I anticipate my appointment with the medical technician for a blood draw in about an hour.  No breakfast yet, as fasting is required.  Will the caffeine in this tall black coffee help?  I can’t tell. Where do you turn for a recharge... Read More Read More - [This I Believe](https://everyangel.org/this-i-believe/): Many years ago, when in graduate school, I was asked to write a Credo, a concise statement of the core principles of my life.  This was a good exercise for anyone intent upon earning a degree.  After all what has one really learned from the exercise of education, — hours spent listening to passionate... Read More Read More - [Time Travel](https://everyangel.org/time-travel-2/): Memory is a strange thing.  Yesterday I dedicated enough time to sort through the folders of legal, financial and administrative paperwork archived on occasion of the passing of my mom and more recently my sister.  There seemed to be a lot of evidence for events that were sudden and still feel less than real,... Read More Read More - [A Persistent Fiction](https://everyangel.org/the-rupture/): In our home, upon a wall of the room with all of the books, and there are more than a few books, there are a pair of photographs hanging.  The photos are of my wife taken when she was seven years old, and of myself when I look to be about five.  We decided... Read More Read More - [This Creature](https://everyangel.org/this-creature-2/): I know that others have been invited.  I’ve seen the invitation.  I never expected to receive one myself. I have been invited by the President of the United States, Donald J. Trump to be a member of the Presidential Advisory Board, to help lead his 2020 grassroots support team.  Perhaps upon my soon-to-be-filed 2019... Read More Read More - [My God! What have I done?](https://everyangel.org/my-god-what-have-i-done-2/): I didn’t realize how much I looked forward to Tuesday evenings.  As usual I walked into the Chatterbox Cafe in Long Grove and looked for a seat.  The place always gets crowed on taco Tuesdays, cheap taco night.  When the small tables are taken along two sides of the room, I find a place... Read More Read More - [A Grifter People?](https://everyangel.org/a-grifter-people/): LET’S REMAKE AMERICA GREAT  by Richard Blanco Yes: Let’s reshoot America as a fantasy, a 90’s TV show in clearblack and white, sponsored by Kent cigarettes, Wonder Bread,and good old-fashioned war, again. Let’s re-create the backlotsuburb with rows of five bedroom homes for every Wilsonand Johnson, walled by perfectly trimmed hedges, weedlesslawns, and at... Read More Read More - [Purity?](https://everyangel.org/purity/): Philosophy is simultaneously maddening and satisfying, a linguistic deep dive into the foundations of our ways of life, an attempt to explore why we process “reality” the way we do.  There are great and important differences between us.  Where do those distinctive features, those dimensions of the self that I have come to be,... Read More Read More - [Where's The Uprising?](https://everyangel.org/wheres-the-uprising/): Again picked up the essay on political theory by Wendy Brown entitled, American Nightmare: Neoliberalism, Neoconservatism, and De-Democratization.  Brown composed the essay in 2006. It is a dense read.  I work to understand the collaboration, the alliance between Neoconservative minded people, who represent the family of my birth, and those Americans of a Neoliberal... Read More Read More - [Is Anyone Home?](https://everyangel.org/is-anyone-home/): Yesterday was really cold, bone chilling cold.  Desiring to move about,  we decided to visit the Japanese Tea Garden on the Fabyan estate, a short drive by car from our home.  After all the sun was out,  the trees, stone lantern, and moon bridge would be spectacular with a cover of snow. Yes, the... Read More Read More - [L'etat c'est moi](https://everyangel.org/letat-cest-moi/): Sunday morning, a bitter cold morning with 7 degrees registering outside.  I greeted another patron with “a good morning” who happened to be seated at an adjacent table.  She mentioned that she was departing to walk to St Charles, which is some distance from this Starbucks here in Geneva.  I was reminded that human... Read More Read More - [Requiem For A Country](https://everyangel.org/requiem-for-our-country/): Angel Of Harlem by U2 It was a cold and wet December day When we touched the ground at JFK Snow was melting on the ground On BLS I heard the sound Of an angel New York, like a Christmas tree Tonight this city belongs to me Angel Soul love…this love won’t let me... Read More Read More - [Drunkenness & Longing](https://everyangel.org/drunkenness-longing/): I am always surprised at how quickly things can snap out of control.  I remember that summer afternoon.  The image remains; seated in the warm sun, basking in the hospitality of the backyard of two friends.  Jim was a traveling salesperson.  He traveled from North Carolina to the Midwest, peddling sets of wooden-handled screw... Read More Read More - [The Mouth Of Sauron](https://everyangel.org/the-mouth-of-sauron/): I received a link to a New Yorker article from a friend.  The link lead to a seventeen page detailed exploration of the career and the present work of Attorney General William Barr.  The piece was entitled, Trump’s Sword and Shield by David Rohde.   Simultaneously drawn and repelled by the prospect of reading the... Read More Read More - [Either Way You Gotta Pay](https://everyangel.org/what-will-it-cost-me/): The radio awakened me at 6AM, my usual rising time.  Aware that if I lay there just a few more seconds I’d get additional rest before waking to the music again.  Or I could go ahead and get up, and gain the 20 minutes of reading and writing time here at Starbucks.  Either way,... Read More Read More - [How Could You Not Take Me..](https://everyangel.org/how-could-you-not-take-me/): Thinking this morning of how consciousness sculpts time.  Exchanged words condition the passage of time, lend color, fulsome shape to life’s time or shock time to a standstill. Do we not resist, dread a condition of impasse, to be so traumatized by happenstance that time is frozen, nothing is allowed to change, I am... Read More Read More - [Monday Monday](https://everyangel.org/monday-monday/): Monday is not a celebrated day of the week.  For a many of us Monday signals a return to the responsibility, evaluation, tension of a competitive work place.  Who looks forward to Monday? This Monday morning, I have promise of an answer to a conundrum which I have pondered for many years.  Raised in... Read More Read More - [Our Deepest Secrets](https://everyangel.org/our-deepest-secrets/): With the final integration of the instinctive and the spiritual by means of human techniques, the edifice of the technical society will be completed. It will not be a universal concentration camp, for it will be guilty of no atrocity. It will not seem insane for everything will be ordered, and the stains of... Read More Read More - [Hours Only Lonely](https://everyangel.org/hours-only-lonely/): Loneliness comes over me this morning.  Is loneliness the default condition of homo sapiens?  We are social beings because our physical survival is dependent upon others.  Others have written since Homer that we have “being,” solidity as selves in and through the regard of others.  What do others say of us, say about us? ... Read More Read More - [Interlude](https://everyangel.org/interlude-3/): Where to this morning?  I intended to compose additional thoughts on the Two Americas theme.  The subject is depressing, like touring a social wasteland.  I will delay another dive into that pool until tomorrow. In the meanwhile this fine tune comes as an antidote to the innervation of the post-industrial capitalism that besets us... Read More Read More - [Two Americas](https://everyangel.org/two-americas/): Yes, I know there is a book by that title.  I read a NY Times article (Who Killed the Knapp Family?) forwarded by a friend, that reminded me afresh, that I live in a country of multitudes of a suffering, beleaguered, permanent underclass.  The phrase captures the story that I have to write this... Read More Read More - [This Creature](https://everyangel.org/this-creature/): There exists a creature that is perfectly harmless; when it passes before your eyes, you hardly notice it and immediately forget it again. But as soon as it somehow, invisibly, gets into your ears, it begins to develop, it hatches, and cases have been known where it has penetrated into the brain and flourished... Read More Read More - [Ruins Of Our Time](https://everyangel.org/ruins-of-our-time/): The beautiful monster vomits a stream of watches clocks jewels knives silver coins & copper blood The well of time & trouble whiskey bottles perfume razor blades beads liquid insects hammers & thin nails the feet of birds eagle feathers & claws machine parts chrome teeth hair shards of pottery & skulls the ruins... Read More Read More - [About Capitalism](https://everyangel.org/about-capitalism/): Just started a new book, a slim volume by a Brit philosopher/intellectual entitled Capitalist Realism-Is There No Alternative?   One thesis of the author, Mark Fisher, is that the premises of Capitalism are so embedded in our consciousness that it is almost impossible to imagine alternative ways of organizing a society.  This constitutes an... Read More Read More - [I Watched](https://everyangel.org/i-watched/): The Golden Globes.  Of course, the Sunday night live broadcast on NBC is hard to walk away from.  At the end of the day with the best of my attention, effort, and quotient of energy already spent — why not be mildly entertained by the first of the entertainment industry award season shows? I... Read More Read More - [Staring Into The Dark](https://everyangel.org/staring-into-the-dark/): There are no longer “dancers,” the possessed. The cleavage of men into actor and spectators is the central fact of our time. We are obsessed with heroes who live for us and whom we punish. If all radios and televisions were deprived of their sources of power, all books and paintings burned tomorrow, all... Read More Read More - [Belonging](https://everyangel.org/belonging/): Day before yesterday I awakened at the usual early hour.  I finished getting dressed before going upstairs. A knock came at the bathroom door.  My wife stood in the dim pre-dawn hallway to ask if she could come in.  Opening the door, as we passed she said to me, — “We have always loved... Read More Read More - [Gunpowder In My Coffee](https://everyangel.org/gunpowder-in-my-coffee/): Friday morning at Starbucks, the room is a-twitter with rising and  falling conversations from tables — not unlike a tree full of blackbirds.  The sound of life, the exchange of advice, consolation, the ritual of community.  I am fortunate to be here. My sleep of last night was interrupted by a strange early morning... Read More Read More - [Day 2](https://everyangel.org/day-2/): Change can be counted upon.  Today is sunny, yesterday was gray — tomorrow will be felt and seen as a unique opportunity.   With the sunrise the day is born anew and so should I be.  Yet I know that yesterdays challenges, the endemic obstacles and the inherited frictions within human nature endure from... Read More Read More - [First Day New Year](https://everyangel.org/first-day-new-year/): The day dawns January the first, the year 2020.  I wish that it were possible to start afresh, like every new born, with a new, un-worn body, and a voracious mind eager to absorb experience, to make sense of a world, forthwith.  That is not the way of things with the new year.  The... Read More Read More - [Things Left Behind II](https://everyangel.org/things-left-behind-ii/): News Year’s eve.  Everyone reflects.  Some do it a little, I do it a lot. Cold enough to snow, just enough to whiten the ground: Nature’s proof that winter is present.  How could I doubt?  A few days of temperate weather in mid December is enough rhetoric in my mind, raising suspicion that climate... Read More Read More - [Things Left Behind](https://everyangel.org/things-left-behind/): The year draws down.  Yesterday was warm.  I decided to take a walk alongside the Fox River, to visit the  FABYAN ESTATE which is close to my neighborhood.  The day was gray, damp, unpropitious for photography.  Determined anyway, I took my camera. The Fabyans, George and Nellie lived here from 1908 until 1939.  George... Read More Read More - [Forging Peace](https://everyangel.org/forging-peace/): Years ago I was privileged to spend some time at the Pilchuck School of Glass, an internationally renowned community of artists in hot glass outside of Seattle Washington.  Glass blowing is not an artform for the fainthearted.  One must stand for hours, drawing molten glass out of a furnace as hot as a volcano. ... Read More Read More - [Bertolt Brecht](https://everyangel.org/bertolt-brecht/): Saturday morning after Christmas day.  State Street in Geneva is eerily quiet. Traffic is scarce.  I’ve never before witnessed this scene of absence.   No roaring eighteen-wheelers,  vanity pickups and car traffic on this main artery to the bridge over the Fox River.  Old buildings stand as a double row of street side tombstones... Read More Read More - [On Walking](https://everyangel.org/more-thoughts-on-walking/): You run ahead — Are you doing it as a shepherd? A third case would be the fugitive. Do you want to walk along? Or walk ahead? Or walk by yourself? One must know what one wants and that one wants. — excerpt Twilight Of The Idols or How to Philosophize With A Hammer... Read More Read More - [Another Year & A Lonely Street Of Dreams](https://everyangel.org/another-year-a-lonely-street-of-dreams/): The tune came over the car radio.  As it happens to be a favorite of mine I commented to my wife that the lyric line about walking alone is always true.  She replied that one need not always be lonely. I think the human condition is inherently lonely.  No matter the condition of material... Read More Read More - [Christmas Day](https://everyangel.org/christmas-day/): The day arrives, on the face of it, like every other day. Everything up to this day has been preparation, doing the work requisite to celebration.  Not that the “to do” list of decorating, seeking out and purchasing the “right gift” for those whom you have a natural obligation etc. is without satisfaction.  Work... Read More Read More - [The Day Before](https://everyangel.org/the-day-before/): It is Christmas Eve. Yesterday the project of the day was gift wrapping.  The upstairs filled with the aroma of pumpkin bread, banana bread loaves, baking in the oven.  I could hardly leave the gift-prep job to others on the team, since they were doing such a fine job in the kitchen.  I wrapped... Read More Read More - [Winter Solstice](https://everyangel.org/winter-solstice/): December 21st, I was inclined to make a fire in our fire pit.  Then I learned that we were to attend a holiday party with old friends in another town.  The enjoyment of open fire, heat emanating from burning wood, the glow of embers, pungent rising smoke into the inky sky, was delayed.  Maybe... Read More Read More - [Running Maskless](https://everyangel.org/running-maskless/): How I Became a Madman (Prologue) by Kahlil Gibrand You ask me how I became a madman. It happened thus: One day, long before many gods were born, I woke from a deep sleep and found all my masks were stolen,—the seven masks I have fashioned and worn in seven lives,—I ran maskless through... Read More Read More - [Christmas Carol For This Century](https://everyangel.org/christmas-carol-for-this-century/): As a general rule, I can take “only so much” of Christmas carols.  Many I have heard since childhood.  I am no longer mystified by the Baby In The Manager story in the same way.  I can’t help but think critically about the elements of the story.  The problem is not with the story... Read More Read More - [Do You Hear What I Hear?](https://everyangel.org/do-you-hear-what-i-hear/): Friday morning and I am not the only one who will not be reporting to the office.  My usual Starbucks venue for coffee and writing was crowded.  I left for another Starbucks, my plan B. So here I am, aware that my life is to change with retirement, the familiar routines of customer relations,... Read More Read More - [Shattered](https://everyangel.org/shattered-nation/): Yesterday after hours of speechifying, the House of Representatives voted affirmative to impeach the President.  There was little if any genuine discussion in the hours leading up to the vote.  Nearly all of the majority Democratic members voted to impeach him.  The Republican minority voted in lockstep, unanimously, — not to impeach.  Impeachment is... Read More Read More - [A Long View](https://everyangel.org/a-long-view/): What to say on a bitter cold Wednesday morning?  There is a bitter chill in my soul too.  The House of Representatives is on the cusp of voting to impeach the President today.  They will almost certainly vote.  His supporters — in a blatant, undisguised advocacy of institution-destroying, society fracturing violence will defend him. ... Read More Read More - [Skepticism And Strong Faith](https://everyangel.org/skepticism-and-strong-faith/): A strong faith.  I cannot think of a definition, and for the life of me cannot come up with anyone who serves as an example.  The occasion for my puzzle was a snippet of television where Robin Roberts announced her intention to visit Lakewood Church in Houston, Texas to interview Joel Osteen this weekend. ... Read More Read More - [Feliz Navidad](https://everyangel.org/feliz-navidad/): How do I know the holidays are fully arrived, that Christmas is a settled “fact” of social life?  (We must agree that a fact is not limited to objects.)  I attended my first choral event, a concert performed by a community chorus, supported by a chorus Brass ensemble.  The theme of the event was... Read More Read More - [Let's Play Pretend](https://everyangel.org/lets-play-pretend/): Did you play ‘pretend’, when you were about five or six years old?  I did. What if a large majority of voters succumb to anti-immigrant, populist propaganda and decide to close the borders make life more difficult for those already inside the country….. and what if in such a country the voters, despite such... Read More Read More - [Last Chance?](https://everyangel.org/last-chance/): After out patient surgery earlier in the day our daughter was resting. She chose The Matrix film as entertainment.  We waited for the medication to arrive from Walgreens and refreshed our memories of this great film from 1999.  There are many lines of dialog from the characters Morpheus, Neo, and Trinity that are as... Read More Read More - [Hearing One's Name Called](https://everyangel.org/hearing-ones-name-called/): Waiting, patient waiting to hear one’s name called.  One waits until one “hears….”  When one hears his/her name called by the great leader, one bows in submission, in servile obedience to whatever the great man directs one to do, to become.  One feels defined, given solidity, substantive being in response to the sound of... Read More Read More - [So You'd Like To Be A Writer?](https://everyangel.org/so-youd-like-to-be-a-writer/): So, you’d like to be a writer? Start keeping a journal. Everyday write something. Even if, and especially if it’s raw, words that can’t be polished, that take heroic effort to release and get down on the page. No matter how disjointed, incoherent, unappealing your emotional storms may be, –do your best to find... Read More Read More - [Those Old Crazy Dreams](https://everyangel.org/those-old-crazy-dreams/): Cold and snowy this morning, traffic “moved” like molasses…pondering what to write.  With only forty five minutes to work with there will be no philosophical foray into the nature of knowledge, or to say it plainly “why it is that we are such fools.”  A song played on the car radio, I’ve heard many... Read More Read More - [Losing Touch](https://everyangel.org/losing-touch/): This morning there’s little in mind.  A lingering memory from yesterday; the image of a Republican lawyer at the impeachment hearings in Washington.  The man speaking to a struck-dumb, packed hearing room said the president had nothing in mind, no intention, when he had the phone conversation with the President of Ukraine, Zelinsky.  The... Read More Read More - [My Daughter](https://everyangel.org/my-daughter/): Yesterday afternoon I received a phone call from our oldest daughter.   She was driving to the Central Dupage Hospital ER to request a CAT scan in order to better diagnose a possible hernia.  I have had three hernia surgeries.  I’ve experienced how painful a tear in the abdominal muscle wall can be.  The... Read More Read More - [We Are All In Prehistory](https://everyangel.org/we-are-all-in-prehistory/): On Borders by Yevgeny Yevtushenko In every border postthere is something insecure.Each one of themis longing for leaves and for flowers.They saythe greatest punishment for a treeis to become a border post.The birds that pause to reston border postscan’t figure outwhat kind of trees they’ve landed on.I supposethat at first, it was people who... Read More Read More - [Each A Weird Lunatic](https://everyangel.org/each-a-weird-lunatic/): …in his or her own way of course. As you’d expect, I continue to read Slavoj Zizek — with more care the second time around.  The European intellectual wrestles with the problem that confounds me: how to address a virulent ethnic hatred that matastasizes as a ravenous cancer in our society.  Our President and... Read More Read More - [So, Is This How It Ends?](https://everyangel.org/so-is-this-how-it-ends/): This morning as I opened my browser, this graphic caught my eye.  I felt compelled to read the story.  The image is of Mount Everest.  I have never been a rock climber and I am well past the age to consider climbing a mountain.  I thought it common knowledge the Everest was the severest... Read More Read More - [Freedom, Oh Freedom](https://everyangel.org/freedom-oh-freedom/): The Socrates Café discussion of this past evening was stimulating, open-ended, a probing exploration for a definition of freedom.  Our quest to find or to fashion a definition of freedom came from a quotation from a book, “To Fight Against This Age” by Rob Rieman: “He who remains a slave to his desires, emotions,... Read More Read More - [Life: Tactile, Raw](https://everyangel.org/life-tactile-raw/): The final gathering for 2019 for our philosophy group took place last night at Taste of Paris in Mundelein.  The surprise, unforeseen was that half again as many showed up than had sent me their RSVP of their intentions.  A sign that the life of the mind, the tactile experience of exchanging ideas, is... Read More Read More - [Self Care](https://everyangel.org/self-care/): The emotionally intelligent person   –  knows that love is a skill, not a feeling, and will require trust, vulnerability, generosity, humor, sexual understanding, and selective resignation. The emotionally intelligent person   –  awards themselves the time to determine what gives their working life meaning and has the confidence and tenacity to try to find an... Read More Read More - [Stories & Wheels Coming Off](https://everyangel.org/stories-the-wheels-coming-off/): How good is any story?  Logic dictates that it would be impossible to assess while the story is being created.  Only after the finish will someone else, in the telling of the story, know the quality of the tale.  Whether something qualifies as a story or not depends upon the teller and the audience... Read More Read More - [Requiem](https://everyangel.org/requiem/): I did something that I cannot remember doing before.  I saw the same movie twice, Ford vs Ferrari which features Matt Damon playing the role of Carroll Shelby and Christian Bale in the role of Ken Miles.  The story is a exploration of human nature, the cost of achieving excellence, —  an adventure involving... Read More Read More - [Getting Lost](https://everyangel.org/getting-lost/): There is nothing arrogant about mentioning ordinary people’s material concerns: the poor have the right to do it, and to talk about a readiness for great sacrifices, or suffering ‘whatever the price‘, is as a rule the ideology of the privileged, who are quite content to let the people suffer for them. So do... Read More Read More - [What We Have To Accept](https://everyangel.org/what-we-have-to-accept/): We have to accept that we live on a ‘Spaceship Earth’ responsible and accountable for its conditions. Earth is no longer the impenetrable background/horizon of our productive activities. It emerges as another finite object that we can inadvertently destroy or transform to make it livable. This means that the very moment we become powerful... Read More Read More - [A Runaway American Dream](https://everyangel.org/a-runaway-american-dream/): I woke this morning to the chords of Bruce Springsteen’s anthem Born To Run.  As you may know the song is a bitter-sweet salute to life-in-America.  Also, I am basking in the afterglow of viewing the film Ford vs Ferrari for the second time.  The cinematic story telling was superb, featuring Matt Damon as... Read More Read More - [What Is Life?](https://everyangel.org/what-is-life/): It is my turn. Having read and discussed a number of paragraphs submitted by readers of Philosophy Now Magazine my appreciation grows for the effort put forth by these readers to formulate their ideas on a philosophically interesting question.  The variety of approaches is stimulating, a reminder of the suppleness of our minds.  No... Read More Read More - [Not The Champions](https://everyangel.org/not-the-champions/): Watched the last scene of Bohemian Rhapsody a movie about Freddie Mercury and the band Queen.  Originally I saw the 2018 movie at a theater.  The last few minutes were just as inspiring in the living room on a smaller screen. I was thrilled by Rami Malek’s depiction of Mercury belting out his now... Read More Read More - [A Prayer](https://everyangel.org/a-prayer-2/): Incantation By Czeslaw Milosz Translated by Czeslaw Milosz and Robert Pinsky Human reason is beautiful and invincible. No bars, no barbed wire, no pulping of books, No sentence of banishment can prevail against it. It establishes the universal ideas in language, And guides our hand so we write Truth and Justice With capital letters, lie... Read More Read More - [What If ?](https://everyangel.org/what-if-2/): Seated in Starbucks this morning, marveling at the blue sky outside my window.  Sunlight streams into the room whenever someone opens the front door entering or departing.  I have more leaves to rake from the grass, and I am thankful to have yet another opportunity before the frost comes.  The frost will come hard... Read More Read More - [Pro Grand Kids](https://everyangel.org/pro-grand-kids/): Yesterday was an improvisational exercise in child care. We have committed to responsibility to care for two of the grandchildren for one day of the week.  This means taking them to preschool, and picking them up several hours later, having lunch with them, and then being on hand for a mid-afternoon nap.  Their parents... Read More Read More - [Apple & Peanut Butter](https://everyangel.org/apple-peanut-butter/): Just finished my lunch, which was a large Macintosh apple sliced and a generous dollop of peanut butter on a paper plate.  I have reason to believe this is a well loved menu option for older guys.  My friend Mike, at Starbucks this morning conveyed to me his satisfaction with making peanut butter the... Read More Read More - [Alternative To Glittering Pandemonium?](https://everyangel.org/alternative-to-glittering-pandemonium/): Modern, first-world life is nothing if not a glittering pandemonium.  Walk down Michigan Avenue in Chicago, or on the Ginza in Tokyo, or Times Square in New York City and one is swept away by stimulus overload.  The scale of everything, from the building facades, the store displays, the large screen displays changing dynamically... Read More Read More - [Won't Be Fooled again...](https://everyangel.org/wont-be-fooled-again/): Couldn’t settle on an idea earlier in the day.  I decided to just read.  Sometime another’s words give birth to my own. To be human is not a given.  It’s an achievement, a task of a life time, worthwhile but imperfectly accomplished.  Old Heraclitus once observed that the majority never awaken to their opportunity/responsibility... Read More Read More - [Theological Deep Dive](https://everyangel.org/theological-deep-dive/): We are on the cusp of the holidays.  Thanksgiving comes first, then Christmas, and as an after thought, New Years.  Thanksgiving is a harvest festival with a focus upon bonds between family and friends.  Christmas is complicated.  There’s the commercial dimension, which already has emerged a week before Thanksgiving, and there is the religious... Read More Read More - [A Strong Brown God](https://everyangel.org/a-strong-brown-god/): I do not know much about gods; but I think that the riverIs a strong brown god—sullen, untamed and intractable,Patient to some degree, at first recognized as a frontier;Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce;Then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges.The problem once solved, the brown god is almost forgottenBy the dwellers... Read More Read More - [Guilty Pleasure Postscript](https://everyangel.org/guilty-pleasure-postscript/): Starbucks is a hubbub of background voices, like the breaking of waves on a sandy lake shore.  Interlaced with indistinct conversations is the voice of a smooth jazz singer in the background.  All this serves as sonic context for some reading and writing.  Do we not read and write for ourselves with others? What... Read More Read More - [Guilty Pleasure](https://everyangel.org/guilty-pleasure/): Theodor Adorno was no fan of pop culture.  He thought it was a guilty pleasure. Hardly.  Pleasure contaminated by guilt, a cold glass of milk on a hot summer day, with a gnat floating on the surface….  That’s the picture I get. Regret, a price is to be paid as life unfolds.  Guilt is... Read More Read More - [On Bank Robbery](https://everyangel.org/on-bank-robbery/): What is the robbing of a bank compared to the founding of a new bank? — Bertholdt Brecht What is the brutality of Trump’s racist and sexist outbursts compared to the brutality and violence of today’s global capitalism? — Slavoj Zizek - [By Made Things](https://everyangel.org/by-made-things-2/): We join ourselves to the living world by the artifacts of art and science – by made things. We are always going to be at least somewhat at fault, because we are ignorant, fallible and small. The living world is larger and more complex than our works.  — Wendell Berry I am an advocate... Read More Read More - [In Support of Popular Culture](https://everyangel.org/in-support-of-popular-culture/): I anticipate our discussion tonight on the role of popular culture, according to the work of Theodor Adorno.  Adorno lived in the mid 20th century and was of the opinion that pop culture was exploitative, depriving it’s consumers of genuine aesthetic enjoyment.  Even worse the externalized consequences, — a less than healthy, robust and... Read More Read More - [No Agreement On The Basics](https://everyangel.org/no-agreement-on-the-basics/): This morning I was at an impasse.  I had no definite inclination to write.  That is rare.  There is always something of import, either a local personal item of interest, something I care about or perhaps one of the political and social inanities of the Trump administration that begs for comment. I had no... Read More Read More - [The Mission](https://everyangel.org/the-mission/): The sky is bright with morning.  Soon I will leave Louisville.  The reason for our presence here has been accomplished.  We welcomed a new family member into the World.  The World is much bigger than our family and we are part of it.  There are many generations before us.  We are their representatives, their... Read More Read More - [And Freedom, Oh Freedom...](https://everyangel.org/and-freedom-oh-freedom/): It’s unseasonably cold this morning.  The sky is gray, underbellies of clouds glow pink at the point where the sun is soon to rise.  I am at a Holiday Inn in Louisville, Kentucky.  I have more to say about the topic of freedom, as instinct says that I left the matter unfinished.  The topic... Read More Read More - [Life](https://everyangel.org/life-2/): I selected a lot of dark material as subject for my blog posts.  I am compelled to write about what interests me at the time set aside for writing.  I write primarily for myself, to discover more clearly what lies at the root of the kid, the adult, that lives within.  We have one... Read More Read More - [Atrocity Smiles](https://everyangel.org/wake-the-hell-up/): To designate a hellis not, of course, to tell us anythingabout how to extract people from that hell,how to moderate hell’s flames. Still, it seems a good in itself to acknowledge,to have enlarged, one’s senseof how much sufferingcaused by human wickednessthere is in the world we share with others.Someone who is perennially surprisedthat depravity... Read More Read More - [Queen of Hearts, -Your Best Bet](https://everyangel.org/queen-of-hearts-is-your-best-bet/): We attempted to discuss the topic: How Are We Free?  The topic is perennially compelling.  A sense of agency is what it means to be a self.  To the extent that one is a self, one feels his or her own agency, — one believes that one is free. I recognize that I’ve prejudiced... Read More Read More - [When I Was Young](https://everyangel.org/when-i-was-young/): Received good news this morning around 5:30AM.  Our granddaughter was born.  We plan to travel to Louisville on Wednesday.  She surprised all of us by coming just a bit earlier than expected.  Life is nothing but surprise after surprise.  Another argument for living simply, in a uncomplicated fashion.  One must always be able to... Read More Read More - [Recapitulation](https://everyangel.org/recapitulation/): Sunday afternoon was dedicated to mowing the grass for the last time in the growing season of 2019.  The cold of winter is at hand and I cannot count on Indian Summer, a warm day or two remaining in the month of November.  I pushed the mower and mulched the fallen leaves. What remains... Read More Read More - [More On Racism](https://everyangel.org/more-on-racism/): A comment to a post of several days ago asserted that racism in some form is endemic to the human experience, without exception.  The response was a bullseye, so I’ll attempt to repay the “two cents” worth of commentary with a bit of interest. In my experience this appears to be the case.  To... Read More Read More - [Spectacle Remix](https://everyangel.org/spectacle-remix/): Spent a delightful late Thursday walking a neighborhood with grandchildren and parents.  Sure it was a brisk, snowy day, unusual for late fall, — but no matter.  On both sides of the street costumed kids happily approached the front door of house after house to say the customary incantation: Trick or Treat.  The reward,... Read More Read More - [Racism As You Like It](https://everyangel.org/racism-as-you-like-it/): Racism á la carte 1. Old fashioned racism Rejection of the Islamic or Mexican or Black or _____ (despotic, barbarian, orthodox, corrupt, oriental) other on behalf of authentic (Western, civilized, democratic, Christian) values. 2. Politically correct racism The mult-culturalist perception that the “other” is the terrain of ethnic horrors, intolerance, of primitive irrational war-passions... Read More Read More - [Halloween & A Guest Post](https://everyangel.org/halloween-a-guest-post/): Ever so often I see articles suggesting that eventually it may be possible to eliminate human death from “natural causes.” That sounds terrific from an individual point of view — who wants to die involuntarily?  But reading reports LIKE further convinces me that such a development would thoroughly ruin the human race. Currently, just... Read More Read More - [Our Lifeline](https://everyangel.org/our-lifeline/): The discussion last night was spirited.   A thought experiment involving observation of one’s hand was proposed.  A hand has objective status, a object existing in space along with other objects.  Concurrently there is no denying that my hand, with age blemished skin, and a partially healed nick from a sharp edge of a paring... Read More Read More - [The Sun Goes Down In Our Eyes](https://everyangel.org/the-sun-goes-down-in-our-eyes/): After rush hour, late yesterday, I returned from our new place in Batavia. We have yet to move in, — my visit was to assess the dimensions of the rooms, to get a sense of what is possible.  The space of habitation determines, almost absolutely, the form and texture of the life that is... Read More Read More - [I Couldn't](https://everyangel.org/i-couldnt/): This morning as always I switched on the car radio.  It was tuned to NPR.  The host was in the midst of an interview with someone opining on the antics of the President.  I reached for the dashboard and turned it off.  I felt my psyche bend under the additional weight of hearing more... Read More Read More - [Two Tickets To Paradise](https://everyangel.org/two-tickets-to-paradise/): This post is a stream of consciousness discourse, the contents of my mind today.  I have memories of my day at the race track, wonderful memories, with some left-over photos to share.  This is prefaced and framed by the unhinged comments made by the President.  Life is nothing but a mixture of good and... Read More Read More - [I Hear Your Voice](https://everyangel.org/i-hear-your-voice/): We live our lives as the unique, “one-off” human being that we are.  There has never been, and there will never be another you.  You and I are the summation of a long intersection of confluences, lost in the recesses of historical time of your ancestors.  We are also the result of coincidences, that... Read More Read More - [...Apart From Politics II](https://everyangel.org/apart-from-politics-ii/): It is the world of the imagination in which the imaginative man/woman delights and not the gaunt world of reason.  The pleasure is the pleasure of powers that create a truth that cannot be arrived at by the reason alone, a truth that the poet recognizes by sensation.  The morality of the poet’s radiant... Read More Read More - [Life Apart From Politics](https://everyangel.org/life-apart-from-politics/): There is life apart from politics. It is this life that the youth as virile poet lives, in a kind of radiant and productive atmosphere. It is the life of that atmosphere. There the philosopher is an alien. The pleasure that the poet has there is a pleasure of agreement with the radiant and... Read More Read More - [Who Knows How?](https://everyangel.org/who-knows-how/): Pied Beauty Gerard Manley Hopkins – 1844-1889 Glory be to God for dappled things—    For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;        For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;    Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;        And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim. All things counter,... Read More Read More - [Poetry And Philosophy](https://everyangel.org/poetry-and-philosophy/): I am reading a collection of essays by Wallace Stevens, a poet of the 20th century.  His insights into what words do for us “knocks me out.”  I think these few lines written about poetry suggest the relationship between poetry and philosophy.  The promise of reason is that we may clarify what must be... Read More Read More - [A Fresh Approach To Despair](https://everyangel.org/a-fresh-approach-to-despair/): Slept fitfully last night, but that is not unusual.  Perhaps that was due to elevated blood sugar that I measured just before my breakfast of cheerios.  I’ve been diabetic for a while, and controlling blood sugar is like staying on a pitching rodeo bull.  I am thrown often, and I know that I will... Read More Read More - [What One Has Created](https://everyangel.org/to-need-what-one-has-created/): If we say the idea of God is merely a poetic idea, even the supreme poetic idea, and that our notions of heaven and hell are merely poetry not so called, even if poetry involves us vitally, the feeling of deliverance, of a release, of a perfection touched, of a vocation so that all... Read More Read More - [Something Real](https://everyangel.org/violence-within-that-protects-from-violence-without/): Continuing to think about my time at the drag strip Saturday afternoon….  Anticipation was in the air,  — that adrenaline sizzle as I waited for 20 minutes in a long line of cars and pickup trucks to pay entry admission to the track.  Excitement is contagious.   They came out —  dare I say, for... Read More Read More - [The Last Race Car](https://everyangel.org/the-last-race-car/): Yesterday I visited Great Lakes Drag-a-Way at Union Grove Wisconsin.   This past summer was the first year that I failed to visit the track at least once, in many summers. My first visit to a drag strip took place in my sophomore year of high school.  I was hooked.  I loved everything about it.  The... Read More Read More - [What About Poetry?](https://everyangel.org/what-about-poetry/): There is, in fact, a world of poetry indistinguishable from the world in which we live, or, as I ought to say, no doubt, from the world in which we shall come to live, since what makes the poet the potent figure that he is, or was, or ought to be, is that he... Read More Read More - [Celebrating](https://everyangel.org/celebrating/): Since becoming an adult celebrating the 4th of July has always felt strange to me.  As a kid, all you had to do was offer me cake and ice cream and I could celebrate anything.  No questions asked.  Adulthood has meant that I cannot celebrate some things.  It is a matter of knowing too... Read More Read More - [Standford's Wager](https://everyangel.org/standfords-wager/): The following is a guest post.  It is a refrain on the reasoning of Paschal’s Wager.  Enjoy! Standford’s Wager You should go into Suspended Animation upon your approaching death: If you believe in Suspended Animation and that someday you can be resurrected, you will be rewarded with extended life on Earth; If you do... Read More Read More - [Because I Am Involved](https://everyangel.org/because-i-am-involved/): At mid morning we left Eagle River Wisconsin.  The drive took some hours, the last segment approaching Milwaukee in a driving downpour.  Reason dictated that we pull over and wait until the dark clouds overhead had passed.  How many times in my life, have I dared circumstances risking serious injury or death by keeping... Read More Read More - [Farewell And Fare Forward](https://everyangel.org/farewell-and-fare-forward/): Today my wife’s Aunt Clara will be laid to rest.  All of us follow, in our own time.  There is so much beauty within this life, in our world to be enjoyed, to give life meaning.  Yet, everything passes.  It is a sad prospect, but only because we are aware, able to measure time,... Read More Read More - [Sunday Eagle River](https://everyangel.org/sunday-eagle-river/): We traveled from metropolitan Chicago to the north woods of Wisconsin. The change in environment is dramatic, shocking.  Chicago sprawl, the commercial hub of the country, with suburbs extending horizon to horizon contrasts with tall pine and birch forests, and lakes, and small town communities.  Eagle River is a community larger than some.  It’s... Read More Read More - [More Photos](https://everyangel.org/more-photos/): More photos taken on a visit to Kraklauer Creek.  The aster flowers grow like little suns, a golden pistil surrounded by white petals. The creek runs full.  The sound of rushing water is soothing — an invitation to relax, to stay longer.  The quarried stone from Wisconsin reminds that Nature is enhanced when mindfully... Read More Read More - [Kraklauer Creek](https://everyangel.org/kraklauer-creek/): Several days ago I had the urge to visit Kraklauer Creek.  A visit anytime of year is worthwhile.  Spring is unusually gratifying because the heat of the direct sun and the longer days, along with a lot of rain transform the creek banks into a thick curtain of vegetation.  Wild flowers of various types... Read More Read More - [Thrown, Stranded...](https://everyangel.org/thrown-stranded/): Thursday, the day after the first debate in Miami for the Democratic candidates for the Presidency. I did not watch. At this stage it’s a beauty contest. The real game will be between the last man or woman standing and the current occupant of the White House. Whenever I pause to think about the... Read More Read More - [More Wagering](https://everyangel.org/more-wagering/): The following is a guest post.  Several posts have been in response to a consideration of Paschal’s Wager.  Here is another: Wager   Summer’s end, autumn waits, patient, since the world turns inevitably, even though we claim exemption from nature’s wheel, inventing eternities and peopling them with souls. Sunflowers bloom wild and silent by... Read More Read More - [Blind Faith](https://everyangel.org/blind-faith/): I think that I was at the Norwalk, Ohio dragstrip when I saw the Blind Faith funny car.  A funny car dragster is a hand built race car, with a fiber glass body loosely mimicking one of Detroit’s products, a Camaro or a Mustang.  The entire body tilts up and away from the motor... Read More Read More - [On Blindly Believing](https://everyangel.org/no-ability-to-blindly-believe/): Whether or not you believe in God, you should live your life with love, kindness, compassion, mercy and tolerance while trying to make the world a better place. If there is no God, you have lost nothing and will have made a positive impact on those around you. If there is a benevolent God... Read More Read More - [Already Carving The Epitaphs..](https://everyangel.org/already-carving-the-epitaphs/): Just past 9AM, at this moment the tables are empty within Starbucks, except for myself.  Kevin, a contractor,  stands behind me adding sugar and creme to his tall cup of coffee.  Momentarily he will depart.  He always does.  I am  surprised that he appears to be working on a Sunday. I read these lines... Read More Read More - [Banker And Friend](https://everyangel.org/a-banker-and-friend/): The contention with the big bank came to conclusion.  We received the “clear to close” word on our mortgage approval, and soon afterward a pdf of the loan agreement was received via email.  The mortgage document was signed electronically and returned.  An hour or so later a closing disclosure document was received and reviewed.... Read More Read More - [Into The Dark](https://everyangel.org/into-the-dark/): Friday and the majority of patrons walking up to the counter at Starbucks have a small screen in their hands. They momentarily look up to engage the barista to place their order.  It’s a sunny day, and I wonder if anyone pays attention.  The warm sun, the last day of spring, the effulgence of... Read More Read More - [Big Banks](https://everyangel.org/big-banks/): My day was upended by a conference call last night.  My local bank branch manager, patched me in with a supervisor from his bank’s mortgage processing department. Three of us discussed, briefly and quite intensely the status of a certain mortgage application.  You probably know from experience that one of the critical dimensions of... Read More Read More - [Selling A Home](https://everyangel.org/midweek-2/): Buying or selling a home is a high stakes proposition.  A family needs a dwelling suitable to their lifestyle as well as a neighborhood amenable to all family members. Realtors, bankers, and several lawyers  — are involved in the conversation.  A home sale cuts wide into the successive rings of society: familial, legal, financial,... Read More Read More - [Blinking Cursor](https://everyangel.org/blinking-cursor/): For a few minutes Starbucks is unaccountably quiet.  The space is usually a mad-house.   The capuccino machine roars, a cacophony of voices rise in the high ceiling room, and sometimes a canine barks from a vehicle into the drive up window.  I am acquainted with the staff.   They work very hard, professionally competent,... Read More Read More - [Why Say More...](https://everyangel.org/why-say-more/): I wonder why say anything more.  Much has been said already, a storehouse of hard earned wisdom, the deposit of ancestors from their trials and errors.  Little attention is paid, especially if at first what has been written is arcane, somewhat opaque, less than transparent.  Complaints are voiced, and we move on to an... Read More Read More - [Out Of Control](https://everyangel.org/out-of-control/): Another Sunday.  This Sunday morning is gray, foggy, cool, and Father’s Day.  I asked myself what it takes to become a father.  From a biological point of view–it takes very little.  Nature takes it’s course,— one sperm finds the egg and resulting from a cascade of cause and effect some months later, a child... Read More Read More - [Learning To Laugh](https://everyangel.org/learning-to-laugh/): A head-cold continues to aggravate, deep cough and much tissue paper is needed.  We are not spiritual beings, the body obtrudes into our preferred idealism. Walked into the kitchen this morning, and turned on NPR.  The Saturday morning special programming was an exploration of the ethos, and the lore of Alabama, yes, the State... Read More Read More - [Eric Hoffer](https://everyangel.org/eric-hoffer/): I am at a loss for a story this morning.  I think this is a second sunny, paradisiacal day in a row absent rain,  but I am discomfited with laryngitis which has almost taken my voice. After a review of notes taken many years ago, I will offer some excerpts from Before The Sabbath... Read More Read More - [Making Mozart Laugh](https://everyangel.org/making-mozart-laugh/): He laughed so hard that he turned a somersault in the air and played trills with his heels. At the same time he shouted at me: “Hey, my young fellow, does your tongue smart, man, do your lungs really pinch, man? You think of your readers, those carrion feeders, and all your typesetters, those... Read More Read More - [1965 Was A Good Year](https://everyangel.org/1965-was-a-good-year/): I remember well, my sophomore year in high school.  It was a good year.  Somehow I managed to earn As and Bs as a student, enjoyed life with friends on weekends, hanging out at Honey’s drive-in and occasional street racing on I-85 at night.  I think it was the summer of 65 that I... Read More Read More - [Tribute](https://everyangel.org/tribute/): Last night we attended a dinner to celebrate the 50th year wedding anniversary of two friends.  Lauretta’s Italian Bakery Restaurant in Mundelein provided the venue for the event.  I cannot remember an evening of conversation, good food, wine and much good will, that was more enjoyable.  Certainly I will remember the extended conversations with... Read More Read More - [Sweet Intoxication](https://everyangel.org/sweet-intoxication/): Another cloudy morning with a stiff cool breeze.  It is June and we’ve had rain with more to come.  Wet and cool does not augur well for the corn just planted in the fields. There’s no comfort on the front page of the New York Times this morning.  Depicted on the front page, —... Read More Read More - [Have We All Got To Die Then?](https://everyangel.org/have-we-all-got-to-die-then/): “Have we all got to die then?” she asked. There was no reply. Meanwhile a man on foot went past below. He saw the smashed-up cars and began nosing round them. Leaning over into one of them he pulled out a gay parasol, a lady’s handbag and a bottle of wine. Then he sat... Read More Read More - [No Vacancy](https://everyangel.org/no-vacancy/): Saturday.  I arrived at Starbucks earlier than usual.  The Saturday papers are not yet delivered, and feeling abnormally anxious I wanted to know if a five percent tariff would be imposed on imports from Mexico, beginning Monday.  So I resorted to MSN news site on my computer and I felt relief.  An agreement has... Read More Read More - [For Tomorrow](https://everyangel.org/for-tomorrow/): Friday is the final work day of the week. This has been a full week of physical labor, one project after another.  It’s simply hard labor to prepare a house to go on the market.  I have been on the roof and in the attic.  Hours have been dedicated to finding and filling boxes... Read More Read More - [Stumbling With No One To Guide Us](https://everyangel.org/stumbling-with-no-one-to-guide-us/): Another day, Thursday, one day closer to the imposition of a tariff on all goods imported from Mexico.  Thus a supply chain between the United States and Mexico established over the last twenty five years will be disrupted.  The President expects Mexico to slam the door upon thousands fleeing the impact of climate change... Read More Read More - [Lucifer Is Fallen](https://everyangel.org/lucifer-is-fallen/): We are radically different and radically alike. We are extensively differentiated yet bound together. …that of the strong protecting and standing for the weak. ..because most people cease to believe [this] its conceit. —excerpt The Ignoble Lie By Patrick Deneen “They use this phrase to refer to the mushroom cloud over the whole earth.... Read More Read More - [Music Of Spring](https://everyangel.org/music-of-spring/): Springtime is Natures spectacle of color and music.  Birds sing loudly, flowers reach for the warm sun, the creeks flow with their own music and rhapsody. Included are some photos taken over the weekend.  Kraklauer Creek in the little park by our favorite Taste-of-Paris Cafe was running with wild abandon, full to the banks... Read More Read More - [No Eye Of The Tiger](https://everyangel.org/no-eye-of-the-tiger/): Yesterday I received several text messages and pictures from Cincinnati.  My daughter and her partner traveled from Louisville to visit the Cincinnati Zoo.  The objective of their journey was to spend time with Fiona, the recently born baby hippo.  She was born 6 weeks premature, and is the smallest hippo ever to survive. Perhaps... Read More Read More - [Act II - Madmen Like Us](https://everyangel.org/act-ii-madmen-like-us/): “……what we are doing is probably mad, and probably it is good and necessary all the same. It is not a good thing when man over strains his reason and tries to reduce to rational order matters that are not susceptible of rational treatment. Then there arise ideals such as those of the Americans... Read More Read More - [On The Stage I Saw](https://everyangel.org/on-the-stage-i-saw/): This morning I was copied on an email sent by a friend to another friend.  The note was a bitter farewell, a dismissal of relationship on account of one’s unconditioned, sycophantic support of the President.  The email was laden with fear, revulsion, and sorrow.  I understood as I read.  I could not have written... Read More Read More - [Resurrection](https://everyangel.org/resurrection-2/): Yesterday a friend sent me a link to a collection of photos taken on Lake Baikal in Siberia.  Baikal is the world’s deepest fresh water lake.  The ice formations, sculpted by the effect of wind and temperature fluctuation were starkly beautiful.  I would happily travel there any time of year to experience this faraway... Read More Read More - [Expiation of Endless Guilt](https://everyangel.org/expiation-of-endless-guilt/): An exchange of emails between three of us, friends, each with a different history and a different viewpoint.  That is even more complicated than a simple face-value understanding of those words suggest.  Are not friends of the same mind?  They are not of the same mind, if they dare to speak truthfully with one... Read More Read More - [Memorial Day .... War Revisited](https://everyangel.org/memorial-day-war-revisited/): For many years I’ve been present at a ceremony to remember and honor the war dead.  Given a story told yesterday I found it hard to sleep last night.  The stories do not fill me with admiration for the dead.  After some reflection I tremble inside, shiver with revulsion at the thought of five... Read More Read More - [Wandering From The Wreckage](https://everyangel.org/wandering-from-the-wreckage/): A Voice From the Wreck By Chad Abushanab I’m an accident on the south side of the town, on the outskirts, where the desert holds its ground against the streetlights’ last defenses. I’m the fire leaping from the Chevy’s frame to smite the sky and drain the cool out of the night. I’m the... Read More Read More - [Immortality](https://everyangel.org/immortality/): …[to] recognize chance as destiny once more and see the ruins of my being as fragments of the divine. My soul breathed once more. My eyes were opened. There were moments when I felt with a glow that I had only to snatch up my scattered images and raise my life as Harry Haller... Read More Read More - [Dreaming The American Dream](https://everyangel.org/the-german-spirit/): In the German spirit the matriarchal link with nature rules in the form of the hegemony of music to an extent unknown in any other people. We intellectuals, instead of fighting against this tendency like men, and rendering obedience to the spirit, the Logos, the Word, and gaining a hearing for it, are all... Read More Read More - [The Saddest Song](https://everyangel.org/the-saddest-song/): I’ve listened to this song over and over.  It’s included on a greatest hits CD by The Band.  There are several tunes that I like on the disc.  This one is like a gift from the god’s in its sad beauty.  I’ve never personally experienced anything like unrequited love, but I can imagine how... Read More Read More - [Children Of The Devil](https://everyangel.org/children-of-the-devil/): “Do you know that we are both children of the devil?”  Yes, that is what we are. The devil is the spirit, and we are his unhappy children. We have fallen out of nature and hang suspended in space. —Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse p. 126 Suspended in space.  That’s how I usually feel these... Read More Read More - [Stoicism Roman Edition](https://everyangel.org/stoicism-roman-edition/): Our evening of discussion on the legacy of Stoicism was engaging.  How satisfying to spend time with friends, discussing according to our ability an ancient tradition that is deemed yet valuable.  A consensus of the group was that living according to the nature of things, acceding to what is beyond our control, in order... Read More Read More - [Who Are You ?](https://everyangel.org/who-are-you/): Who am I?  I am unsure, because I find myself accepting points of view that upon reflection are short sighted, mean-spirited, and often closed-minded.  This has been my plight since I was overtaken by interest in philosophy in my mid twenties.  I am still unsure of myself, unsure that there is a single, unitary-self... Read More Read More - [Sandals For Weary Feet](https://everyangel.org/sandals-for-weary-feet/): WHAT WILL YOU DO? By Ranier Maria Rilke What will you do, God, when I die? I am your jar (if cracked, I lie?) Your well-spring (if the well go dry?) I am your craft, your vesture I— You lose your purport, losing me. When I go, your cold house will be Empty of... Read More Read More - [Like Stones Or Flowers](https://everyangel.org/like-stones-or-flowers/):  “They are as they are, like stones or flowers or stars in the sky.” “They [animals] may be terrible sometimes, but they’re much more right than men.” “How do you mean—right?” “Well, look at an animal, a cat, a dog, or a bird, or one of those beautiful great beasts in the zoo, a... Read More Read More - [Summer Nights Are Callin'](https://everyangel.org/summer-nights-are-callin/): What a song!  The story told by the lyric did not happen to me.  Who knows if it happened to anyone?  I can imagine though. I grew up close to a wide expanse of woods, and a half mile or so distant was a railroad track.  You could follow the creek and eventually you’d... Read More Read More - [Just Long Enough For A Joke](https://everyangel.org/just-long-enough-for-a-joke/): More from Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse. Harry Haller mired in the seeming pointlessness of continuing to live, finds his loneliness relieved by a chance conversation with a female that he has met at the bar, The Black Eagle.  She desires to dance but Harry resists, so she bids him take a nap while she... Read More Read More - [Enough Of Play](https://everyangel.org/enough-of-play/): Who would not remain a child as long as possible, to play forever…..  My hand is raised. That is not possible.  The passage of time, the toll of aging –exacts a price.  The bill for living is that sooner or later you must die.  That is the way it is.  The concert must end,... Read More Read More - [Maypole Dance Anyone?](https://everyangel.org/maypole-dance-anyone/): I propose a national holiday, a floating holiday decreed by Congress, timed to coincide with the blooming of the cherry trees along the Potomac River.  This will be a rite of spring, a mandated closure of all but essential business, including the exchanges on Wall Street.  All citizens will be encouraged by a proclamation... Read More Read More - [And So Ends Everything](https://everyangel.org/and-so-ends-everything/): I went to bed on the edge of panic last night.  I misplaced the digital control unit for my insulin pump.  I am insulin dependent.  I thought that I knew where I placed the small electronic device.  My first mission of the next day would be to return to the coffee shop where I... Read More Read More - [A Fine Farewell](https://everyangel.org/a-fine-farewell/): Yesterday I took the afternoon to attend a funeral of a man that I never personally met.  I felt obligated to attend.  He was the founder and CEO of a company that does work which I have the deepest respect, even reverence for.  I knew Neal through his work. I attended the funeral of... Read More Read More - [What Is That?](https://everyangel.org/what-is-that/): I know that you are resisting the impulse to ask.  That is a mass air flow sensor for a 2.0 liter Suzuki motor.  The part is important for the fuel/air mixture that is the basis for engine performance.  Where was the part manufactured?  China.  I shopped for the part online, and it was delivered... Read More Read More - [On Mother's Day](https://everyangel.org/on-mothers-day/): Tomorrow is Mother’s Day.  It is salutary that a day is designated for appreciation of one’s mother, the one that we know best.  Also to reflect upon the meaning of bringing life into the world, and the role of nurturing an innocent, vulnerable human to adulthood.  No need to insist that motherhood is sainthood... Read More Read More - [Here Comes The Rain Again](https://everyangel.org/here-comes-the-rain-again/): You know, the rain.  The rain is coming.  Sunny days always give way to rain, sometimes lots of rain.   We delight in a sunny day, and who cannot celebrate!  Moreover who does not feel disappointment with report of a rainy weekend?  We had so many plans for the weekend.  Rain, and more rain interrupts... Read More Read More - [Narrow And Perilous Bridge](https://everyangel.org/narrow-and-perilous-bridge/): Nothing of note comes to mind this morning.  I will not waste your time or mine. A further thought; we were lost on a Wisconsin north woods road recently.  The road ended with a sign that read, “bridge out.”  We turned around. Here are some fine lines from Hermann Hesse: Man is not by... Read More Read More - [Come Monday](https://everyangel.org/exhaustion-and-come-monday/): Midweek, Wednesday, more rain, and I grab onto the lifeline of this Jimmy Buffett song.  Don’t we all need something to hang on to on occasion? I have done what I could to keep my balance on a high wire.  Negotiations with a lending bank, and with a homeowner/realtor whose property I thought about... Read More Read More - [A Bad Joke, Or..](https://everyangel.org/a-bad-joke-or/): After the signal to attack is given, one can only wait, wait and observe the course of battle, of this weeks events, of my life, —to see how things will play out.  To observe and wait is a rarefied ability, to restrain oneself, to resist temptation to “make something happen,” to prematurely intervene…. I... Read More Read More - [Another Day Of Rage](https://everyangel.org/another-day-of-rage/): Waking this morning I half listened to a fragment of a business news report.  Last night, Sunday, the President unleashed a twitter blast at China voicing his displeasure at the slow pace of trade agreement negotiations.  The Dow Jones dropped 500 points.  Is there no other way to nudge different  points of view toward... Read More Read More - [Treading Water](https://everyangel.org/treading-water/): Yesterday I finished Thus Spake Zarathustra by Nietzsche.  Zarathustra is not finished with me.  I plan to revisit the text.  I will obtain another translation.  Why not?  A somewhat different  linguistic angle cannot help but improve understanding of the story. I began reading Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse.  That is another book that I postponed... Read More Read More - [Divine Donkeyism](https://everyangel.org/divine-donkeyism/): Saturday dawns bright.  The spring sun intensely warms vegetation, evaporation continues from the rain-soaked ground.  We bear with climate change, the downpours and the droughts as best as we can.  The effects are always local, as the suffering is always personal.  Thus the great lords in the manor houses are enabled to believe and... Read More Read More - [Making Up My Mind, At Last](https://everyangel.org/makin-up-my-mind-finally/): I like this song.  But why?  How is it that I am moved? What speaks to me as a bedrock-truth from these lyrics, from this melody?  Perhaps its the possibility of coming to an unshakable decision, an enduring course-of-action that will not be qualified, modified, or conditions added. Deep River Woman written by Lionel... Read More Read More - [Half Shattered Ones](https://everyangel.org/half-shattered-ones/): Man’s most far, profoundest, star-highest issues, his prodigious powers—do not all these foam through one another in your vessel? What wonder that many a vessel shatters! Learn to laugh at yourselves, as you well should to laugh! You of great aspiration, –Oh, how much is still possible! And truly, how much has already succeeded!... Read More Read More - [What Of Art?](https://everyangel.org/what-of-art/): A group of us came together last night to find language to express our feelings, and our musings in response to a work of art.   The piece was unveiled at the inception of our conversation.  To supply a sparkle of delight, to ensure that we’d not slip into an all-too-serious mode, a bottle... Read More Read More - [If Everybody's Wrong...](https://everyangel.org/if-everybodys-wrong/): The song by Buffalo Springfield has always hooked me.  From the shimmering melody intro, to the subject matter of war by a colonial power, whenever this one is played on the radio, time stops for me. I came to adulthood during the Vietnam War.  I had no strong feelings pro or con with respect... Read More Read More - [Raining In My Heart](https://everyangel.org/raining-in-my-heart-2/): Monday morning and it is pouring rain outside.  The sky weeps.  Is it not apt to weep profusely, to wail with grief?  Maybe you’ve not noticed.  We exert much effort to remain oblivious, to sustain the bliss which we have purchased by our overdraft of Natures resources.  Nature weeps by a precipitous decline in... Read More Read More - [My Shadow](https://everyangel.org/my-shadow/): A lifetime ago, in my late 20’s my life seemed to be growing darker, bit by bit emotionally constricted.  I tried whatever might help.  I doubled down on my devotional life, looking for “answers,” a turning point through Bible reading and prayer.  No improvement.  What to do about this absence of feeling, the colorless... Read More Read More - [Playing God](https://everyangel.org/playing-god/): Yard work can be considered a chore. So much in life depends upon the angle of view. Yard cleanup in the aftermath of winter is labor. That is a given. In contrast to mind-work, which ultimately ends with my fingers on this keyboard, staring at a glowing LCD screen, yard-work-done-right culminates with soil under... Read More Read More - [Great Shame, Great Love](https://everyangel.org/shame-and-love/): Several days ago a good friend and I exchanged texts.  He commented that he was his own worst enemy.  That is no trite expression.  How many ways subtle and not so subtle do we not undermine our own best interests?  We may arrive at a place of utter helplessness, realizing that there is no... Read More Read More - [Pity](https://everyangel.org/pity/): This morning came and I woke feeling a body ache, and a malaise of spirit.  I was fortunate to have passed the night without throwing up.  My wife just now recovered from a brief but hard-hitting viral illness.  One definition of misery is to be retching into a toilet.  So far, I’ve dodged that... Read More Read More - [On Good Taste](https://everyangel.org/on-good-taste/): Wednesday morning is filled with light.  Sunlight is a great, magnificent gift.  This morning I read another strange, and delightful story by Nietzsche.  His spokesman, Zarathustra walks a path, and sees a black man, haggard, barely concealing his grief, sitting by the path.  Zarathustra, weary of encountering characters who impose their issues upon him... Read More Read More - [Half-knowing](https://everyangel.org/half-knowing/): There is a strange and delightful little story about Zarathustra hiking along a trail passing through a lowland swamp.  He stumbles upon a man concealed laying across the path.  The one underfoot quickly rises cursing. Zarathustra in the confusion of the moment gives him a blow with his walking stick.  Shortly the two calm... Read More Read More - [Two Kings And An Ass](https://everyangel.org/conversation-with-two-kings-and-a-ass/): The Monday after Easter, I feel disoriented, as if with a hang over.  The day is splendid with full sunlight and singing birds.  That is not the only thing on my mind.  I am thinking of Aunt Clara, very sick with the final stages of cancer.  The Sri Lanka bombings over the weekend are... Read More Read More - [Ready for Lightning](https://everyangel.org/easter-and-nietzsche/): It is Easter morning 2019.  Little has changed. I mean in the big picture of the world’s normality.  Normal that is, with respect to the flooded and wind damaged regions of the South, wracked with the latest eruption of climate change.  Normal if I keep in mind that Aunt Clara still slowly succumbs to... Read More Read More - [Afraid Of Laughter](https://everyangel.org/afraid-of-laughter/): Back to home base.  It feels good to be back at Starbucks.  Here I compose my thoughts trying to decide which of my conflicted selves I will give voice to. The cappuccino machine roars in the background.  Maybe this is as it has to be.  We live by the rhythm of the machines which... Read More Read More - [Not Just Another Friday](https://everyangel.org/not-just-another-friday/): Today is Good Friday. I have a few minutes to write before returning to Aunt Clara’s bedside.  Yesterday we viewed old photographs together.  She remembered the good times, traveling to new places, the trip to Florida with co-workers, the worn 8×10 photo displaying a smiling group, she in the middle, beautiful and appearing eternally... Read More Read More - [Maunday Thursday](https://everyangel.org/maunday-thursday/): I have a surreal feeling just typing the title, “Maunday Thursday.”  Thursday of Holy Week is supposed to coincide with the last supper when Jesus kept company with his disciples.  It is never a pleasant thing to leave this life.  Many have no opportunity to sit with friends or family, eating together, and  exchanging... Read More Read More - [Wednesday](https://everyangel.org/wednesday-2/): Wednesday morning, bright with sunlight.  Enough of the snow is melted to show swaths of leaf-covered ground under the forest pines.  Birds and squirrels search the leaf cover with practiced eye.  I imagine that food is not easily found at the tail end of winter. In the aftermath of the great fire that destroyed... Read More Read More - [Loss](https://everyangel.org/loss-2/): I was taken by surprise to hear that Notre Dame Cathedral was burning.  Something of such magnificence deserves to exist forever, does it not?  My spirit believes that some things ought to be exempt from the erosion of time, and the common accidents that occur during renovations.  Was the cause an errant spark, a... Read More Read More - [Keeping The Rhythm](https://everyangel.org/keeping-the-rhythm/): There are times in life, when you just step up to play your part, fulfill your role to the best of your ability, knowing that there has been no rehearsal.  Moreover the role is not one that you would’ve happily chosen. We are in Eagle River, Wisconsin for a few days.  Laura’s aunt is... Read More Read More - [Holy Week Playbill](https://everyangel.org/holy-week-playbill/): Things all dance themselves: they come and hold out the hand and laugh and flee — and return. Everything goes, everything returns; the wheel of existence rolls eternally. Everything dies, everything blossoms forth again; the year-of-existence eternally runs on. Everything breaks, everything is integrated anew; the same house of existence eternally builds itself. All... Read More Read More - [In Praise of Walking](https://everyangel.org/in-praise-of-walking/): Walking is among the most life-affirming of human activities. It is a way we organize space and organize ourselves to the world at large. It is living proof that repetition – placing one foot in front of another— can in fact allow a person to make meaningful progress. Walking is practically and physically beneficial…... Read More Read More - [Live And Let Die](https://everyangel.org/live-and-let-die-2/): There are times when music is similar to a divine visitation, having a god drop by to have coffee with you.  A tune and lyric is moving in a way that you cannot describe.  You are told things that you did not know that you knew. This song does it for me.  I’ve heard... Read More Read More - [Fear Of Flying](https://everyangel.org/fear-of-flying/): Brothers, am I then so cruel? I say that what falls, you should also give a push! Everything of today—falls, de-constructs; who would preserve it!  But I,  I wish to give it a shove!  Recall the joy of rolling a stone over a precipitous edge?  The men of today, look how they roll over... Read More Read More - [Flying Lessons](https://everyangel.org/flying-lessons/):                                        This however is my teaching: Anyone who wishes to fly one day, must first learn standing             and walking                                          and running                                     and climbing                                                 and dancing… .…one does not fly into flying! With rope ladders I learned to reach many a window, with nimble legs I climbed high masts; to... Read More Read More - [Fact And Opinion](https://everyangel.org/fact-and-opinion/): What is the difference between fact and opinion?  I knew until I thought, and thought some more about the subject.  I have a better idea of how we use those terms, their role in day to day discussion.  I am still unsatisfied with the “distinction” and I know there is a difference.  My instinct... Read More Read More - [Cain Continued](https://everyangel.org/cain-continued/): The Cain and Abel story is strange.  Certainly the two young men were brothers by blood.  As suggested by the poet, perhaps the kinship involved little more.  Realistically, a store house of rage is likely to have fueled a act of murder, — an act which in all civilized society signals an end to... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Where's Toto?](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-wheres-toto/): “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.” There is always a curtain.  There’s a lot going on that’s concealed, the necessary underpinning of what we experience as “normal” life.  The supply chain for example operates unobtrusively, silently, efficiently.  In times of social displacement, in the grip of anxiety which comes and goes,... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Stress](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-stress/): I participated in a video conferencing philosophy discussion group last night.  Given the images, screen facsimiles of acquaintances, along with audio, it was an enjoyable session.  I greatly miss the face to face, embodied dialog of the pre covid-19 era.  It is unclear if or when we will return to the traditional mode of... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Out-And-About](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-out-and-about/): Yesterday, I departed the house for my doctors office to keep my quarterly checkup appointment.  Motivated by the insistence of the insurance company that I be seen by my Doctor quarterly, I decided to keep the appointment.  I have risk on both sides, indeterminate health risk by moving around in public areas, and financial... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, True Belief](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-true-belief/): Yesterday I finished a chapter in The Rebel by Albert Camus entitled The Regicides.  Camus writes to detail the theoretical underpinning of the Jacobin Reign of Terror.  All opponents of the uprising against Louis XVI, indeed those in favor of the idea of divine right of kings  — were lead to the scaffold, put... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Religion II](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-religion-ii/): Since the beginning of civilization religion has been a mainstay for humanity to get through life.  That is, until recently.  More is to be said about the decline of traditional religion in our day to day lives. In our world reason is ascendant.  We look to our own resources of knowledge, the methodology of... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Religion](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-religion/): A magnificent morning.  The social distancing, self quarantine precaution against coronavirus does not mean that sunlight, green grass, the budding trees cannot be appreciated.  Indeed, for me this is the foundation of religion.  I am alive.  We are alive.  We, the human community live, in relation to the cosmos, sky, land, the red tulip,... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Freedom?](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-freedom/): Saturday.  Today if I am fortunate I will find a Bonsai, a miniature tree trained to grow, beautiful, in a dish.  You’ve seen them.  The cultivation of Bonsai is an artform perfected in Japan, originating in China.  A Bonsai is a fragment of nature, confined and cared for, in order to disclose the beauty... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Passion](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-passion/): The morning is magnificent.  A strong sun bathes everything with life-giving light.  Delicate vine plants, promising to blossom throughout the summer months ascend to the trellis, with perceptible growth by the day. In company with my daughter I visited Home Depot yesterday.  Our mission was to purchase some plants, and to buy the foundation... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Grape Hyacinth](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-grape-hyacinth/): The truth of a grape hyacinth exceeds that of a man who *fabulates daily, foisting sociopathic reality upon all who need a cause, or have something to gain, or who are just lost in the kaleidoscopic zeitgeist of endless marketing.  I arrived at this conclusion, peering through the lens of my camera on a... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Rain](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-rain/): It is raining outside.  A gray day, but timely for the spring vegetation.  Nature is more reliable than human nature.  I say “more” because there are interruptions in natural processes, sometimes severe ones such as the little ice age (1303-1860) which brought cold and wet summers, failed crops and famine to Europe.  Human nature... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Sunshine](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-sunshine/): The day dawned with spring sunlight streaming through the trees.  I left for a short 5 minute drive to the outpatient lab for a fulfillment of a blood work order.  For a diabetic the quarterly blood panel work up discloses the balance of health, or a possible downward spiral…  I was met in the... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, The Backward Look](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-the-backward-look/): The essay was entitled Against Cheerfulness, written by a female philosopher, Mariana Alessandri.  Only a female would have the fortitude to mount an assault upon the Boy Scout code.  Often it is from the outside that one is able to see more clearly.  Especially an attack that illuminates the fault line between the admonition... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, In Retrospect](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-in-retrospect/): Quarantine imposes a discipline.  One has time to attend to important, the most important tasks, which otherwise we have put off because we were so busy, our schedule so full.  Now, there is no schedule.  I have in mind the salutary duty of taking stock, of a backward look to see where one has... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, The Social Vaccuum](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-the-social-vaccuum/): Today, Saturday begins almost as if the abstraction, the day of the week label is useless, without significance.  The routine of work, the necessary expenditure of effort with others, to meet basic needs, — having been interrupted by a quarantine, any day seems like any other.  The distinction is lost, of work schedules texturing... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, The Logic We Live By](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-the-logic-we-live-by/): After finishing Albert Camus’s work, The Plague, I returned to the text to mark several sections of singular philosophical statement.  The segment chosen this morning is relevant to consideration of our post-covid-19 return to “normality”, the start-up of the economy.  It is unclear what economy will be possible.  Capitalist economies are marketplaces designed for... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Trying To Stay Alive Like People Do](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-trying-to-stay-alive-like-people-do/): Thursday, another day in a week of quarantine.  The days run together.  I am bereft of the normal routine of work that structures our sense of time.  There is more mulch to be moved, to spread around the yard.  The mind’s focus necessarily is restricted to the boundaries of one’s own house.  There’s nowhere... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Earth Day](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-earth-day/): I have never paid attention to Earth Day.  April 22, set aside to pay homage to the home which we share with all living beings as been on the periphery of my awareness.  No longer.  The global condition that we now find ourselves, searching for a treatment, a vaccine for the covid-19 virus —... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Vertigo](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-vertigo/): Waking at my usual time, I confess being disoriented.  I admit that my blood sugar was very low.  On that account alone it is not surprising that my body, felt like it was Sunday.  The calendar reads Tuesday.  Well informed individuals know that the mind’s function depends upon the brain.  The brain is an... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Dying For Love](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-dying-for-love/): I am revisiting passages in The Plague by Albert Camus.  I am interested in lynch pin ideas which Camus presents through his characters.  In this passage is conversation is held between Rambert, a Paris journalist trapped in plague infested Oran, Dr. Bernard Rieux, the surgeon who is the narrator, and Jean Tarrou, the best... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Runnin' w. the Devil](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-runnin-w-the-devil/): So this is what is meant by freedom.*   What happens if they do not get what they want, when they want it, in full measure? Then what? Not that I care if they were to get exactly what they bargain for, — as long as it does not involve anyone else.  Unfortunately, what... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Descent](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-descent/): I subscribe to the New York Times Sunday edition.  The diverse content, the quality of journalism and fine writing provide a weeks-worth of pleasurable reading.  The Arts and Leisure section for Sunday the 12th (Easter) featured a piece entitled Searching for a Jesus Who Looks Like Me.  The topic was the range of personal... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Spring Unfolding](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-spring-unfolding/): Saturday, is a first day of the weekend.   For most of us, a day for chores, those more involved projects that cannot be included in the routine housekeeping.  By routine, I refer to cleanup after the delivered pizza is consumed, or making the bed after you’ve risen into the mornings sunlight.  That sounds like... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Snowfall](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-snow/): Today it is snowing.  This will be the biggest snowfall of winter….  That’s right, it’s spring already.  Yet another reminder that Heraclitus was right.  Change is the one thing we an depend upon.  You cannot step into the same river twice.  Something worth thinking about. I shoveled mulch yesterday.  Shoveling, spreading mulch is not... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Skittering](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-skittering/): Social distancing, a general quarantine for good reason; the coronavirus, extremely infectious, has no treatment.  If infected, one has minor or no symptoms.  Alternatively after days of fever the virus progresses for replication in the lungs, requiring a ventilator to keep one alive, until one recovers or dies.  What more motivation would one need... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, The Road Ahead](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-the-road-ahead/): A friend wrote about the creativity, comity, the shear effort to offer assistance in this time of necessary quarantine.  Yes, there are innumerable acts of sacrifice, a dedication of time, perhaps of groceries to a person who was in need of the help.  Such expressions of our shared humanity, the vulnerability and community orientation... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Easter Redux](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-easter-redux/): It occurred to me that my Easter related commentary, no matter how heart felt, was certainly obtuse, and irrelevant to almost everyone who might happen upon those paragraphs.  Religious categories,  theological language does not figure in to the lives of my contemporaries.  Easter as a religious event, to remember a resurrection, something that continues... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, A Fan Of The Man](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-a-fan/): Granted it is unusual for someone who insists that Jesus is not God, or ‘a god’ on Easter morning to nevertheless be a fan.  Yes, I am a big fan of Jesus, one of his proponents, one who is convinced by his message and by his style of encounter with his contemporaries ….  Just... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Dark Joke](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-dark-joke/): Easter.  The morning itself is straight forward enough.  A soft light suffuses through the thin grey cloud cover.  The green of spring under velvet light, light without shadow, no sharp edges, strikes me as as it should be.  Things are not as they should be.  Shadows abound, there’s blood, and one must take unceasing... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Effulgence](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-effulgence/): That word describes the response of the germ of life to the sun’s warmth.  We see it all around this time of year.  I noticed it yesterday.  My camera helps me to be more careful as I take note of how fortunate it is to be alive to see all of this happening.  The... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Good Friday?](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-good-friday/): The day passed with no more than the usual fretfulness over the prospects of staying healthy.  Also, hoping, praying that the economy and society will  be intact, when the quarantine is lifted.  I did the usual seasonal chores around the house and yard.  It never occurred to me once that today was Good Friday. ... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Waking](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-waking/): Waking this morning, I remember what it was like to awaken as a child.  Children are permitted to live in an idyllic world.  They are cared for, they are at the beginning of a long learning curve, of all that responsibility entails.  With responsibility comes stress.  Stress is what it is like to be... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Plato](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-plato/): My wife mentioned that social distancing is expected to hold until the end of May.  Not sure what that means.  I doubt that I will be able to resume my past routine, trusting luck to hold out…..  Even if one recovers from such a serious illness, surely the experience must be life altering. I... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Old Guy W. Big Plans](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-old-guy-w-big-plans/): I know it’s not the Bonneville Dam on the Columbia River, but still, at the North Aurora Dam on the Fox River — the river has a voice.  At the end of my bicycle ride yesterday I found the fishermen absent from the elevated spot at the end of the dam.  I walked up,... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, A Fog](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-a-fog/): It is Tuesday, April 7.  Waking this morning, the mind clouded, a fog of mental disorientation, like glaucous light filtering through an aquarium,  I reached over and snapped off the alarm on the clock radio.  I believe I heard the opening notes of Dancing Queen by Abba coming from the speaker.  At the conclusion... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Making More Stupid](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-making-more-stupid/): It is Holy Week.  Yesterday was Palm Sunday.  In five days Good Friday, and then Easter Sunday.  Given the siege of the covid-19 virus all houses of worship should be on hiatus, observing the social-distancing regime in order to save lives.  That is not the case though as several mega church pastors have indicated... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Photos and Hope](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-photos-of-hope/): So much has changed over the past two, three weeks.  Social distancing is mandatory, the coronavirus is more contagious than anything that we’ve known is pushing New York City hospital doctors to exhaustion.  We still do not have the testing resources that we need, are blind to the extent of the sickness. This morning... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Believing Into A Void](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-believing-into-a-void/): Today is Saturday.  I awakened and checked the news feed on my iphone.  According to the  New York Times, by executive order the President has stopped all shipments to foreign customers, of masks which could be used at home to fight the Covid-19 virus.  Never mind that the Germans, the Canadians have already paid... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Getting Away With It](https://everyangel.org/getting-away-with-it/): America and Americans have been able to do whatever we wanted — and gotten away with it.  We spread our footprint over this continent, then our influence over the rest of the world — and have got away with it. Others have admired us for the range of our freedoms, how we’ve celebrated liberty,... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Time Out](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-time-out/): Yesterday was my birthday.  Yes I know, April 1st is the day set aside so that everyone can play the jokester if they desire.  That fits my temperament.  Life is highly improbable, unlikely, fragile and thus is suitable material for ironic humor.  What are the odds that I am here, that I continue to... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Closed](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-closed/): We are at the beginning of a hard time.  My father’s generation knew the beginning of hard times when Pearl Harbor was attacked.  They responded to the demands of those circumstances.  They passed the test. We will know if we have passed our test in the months that are to come.  One never knows... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Stupefaction](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-stupefaction/): This morning I drove to Geneva.  Before the onset of the coronavirus, I used to travel the 10 minute drive to the Starbucks at the corner of 3rd and State Street.  As a matter of habit I looked forward to beginning my day with an hour of writing.  I learned the names of several... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Shizuka](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-shizuka/): In my early 20’s I lived for several years in Tokyo.  One of my first memories of that very big city was a visit to a coffee shop.  The place was small, just a few tables, as are most such places in big cities.  Located below grade in a basement, it was dark, haze... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Early Report](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-early-report/): The news is not good.  I read the Weekend Briefing from the New York Times this morning.  While reading, a chill came over me.  The realization came, that I am an observer of these events — and a participant. We Americans do not like being told what to do.  Authority, even legitimate authority provokes... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Zhangke](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-zhangke/): China has been much in the news.  Over the past several weeks we have heard of the measures the Chinese government has taken to combat the spread of the covid-19 virus which emerged in Wuhan.  The direct and severe restrictions on travel, and imposed confinement seems to have blunted the spread of the potentially... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Whole Lotta Water](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-whole-lotta-water/): These are unprecedented days.  Nothing like this has come before in my memory.  The science fiction writers have imagined stories of circumstances that massively threatened the survival of humanity, stories of microbes.  Remember War of the Worlds by Orson Wells?   As a kid I remember sneaking an illicit reading of the story from a... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, 2+2≠5](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-22%e2%89%a05/): I shared my thoughts about the inspiring scale, the dispassionate ineluctable “thusness” of Nature as observed/felt in the mighty advance of a river over a dam as it flows to the sea, and the life-form of a virus.  Upon reading the post a friend inquired if I could put my point in a more... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, 2+2=4](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-224/): The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding. On the whole, men are more good than bad; that, however, isn’t the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Life's More Fun](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-lifes-more-fun/): Tuesday.  The weather grows a few degrees warmer by the day.  What if I ride the bicycle north, on the path alongside the river toward Geneva?  The drive to Geneva takes about 10 minutes, so that will be an easy bike ride.  I’ve used the Schwinn bike more since the imposed seclusion to the... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Sunday, Sunday](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-sunday-sunday/): Sunday, Sunday, so good to me… Ok, I know those are not the lyrics of the song by the Mamas and the Papas.  It is supposed to be Monday, Monday, etc.  I exercised license to substitute Sunday for the purposes of my reflection, my need to look back in order to compose a narrative... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Finding Solace](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-finding-solace/): Life goes on, life is, must be lived, on the cusp of catastrophe, in the midst of chaos, and also, in the aftermath of the storm.  There is always work to be done,  and moments of joy to be savored. I spent the better part of my day yesterday out of doors.  A substantial... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, The Dying Begins](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-the-dying-begins/): Saturday breaks sunny, cool and not unusual for March.  The number of deaths due to covid-19 begin to increase dramatically.  The Mayor of New York made a public appeal for medical supplies, stating that the hospitals would run out of needed supplies in early April.  As usual the promises of test-kits, just ordered, to... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, To Put Up a Fight](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-to-put-up-a-fight/): How long is this going to last?   Here in Illinois we continue to practice the advisory social distancing.  There is no order to remain at home as is the case in San Francisco, or the deployment of the National Guard as in New Rochelle, New York.  We Americans are quite slow to recognize that... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, The Bounds of Possibility](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-the-bounds-of-possibility/): Perhaps I ought to select a unique title for what will be or has been written today.  Though, the order of the day, and for many days ahead will be “social distancing.”  The days ahead will entail a large helping of boredom. That means avoiding contact, as close of 6 feet with others.  Remaining... Read More Read More - [Wrapped Up In Ourselves](https://everyangel.org/wrapped-up-in-ourselves/): When a war breaks out, people say: “It’s too stupid; it can’t last long.” But though a war may well be “too stupid,” that doesn’t prevent its lasting. Stupidity has a knack of getting its way; as we should see if we were not always so much wrapped up in ourselves. In this respect... Read More Read More - [Say Goodby To Main Street](https://everyangel.org/say-goodby-to-main-street/): The return drive to Illinois was uneventful, as has been the case in normal times.  These are not normal times.  The covid-19 virus is spreading.  The symptoms have not yet become apparent as the virus spreads exponentially, and quietly begins to live within our bodies, before we become really, really sick.  Many of us... Read More Read More - [On Stupidity](https://everyangel.org/on-stupidity/): Stupidity cannot be cured with money, or through education, or by legislation. Stupidity is not a sin, the victim cannot help being stupid. Stupidity is the only universal capital crime; the sentence is death, There is no appeal, execution is carried out automatically, without pity. (natural laws have no pity) *** The truth of... Read More Read More - [Sunday Morning At The Derby Inn](https://everyangel.org/sunday-morning-at-the-derby-inn/): Rising early to read and write I sat in the early dawn light here in the lobby at the Best Western Derby Inn in Eagle River.  The slant of the sun illuminates the line of white birch trees in the distance.  I exchanged morning greetings with one of the managers just after she had... Read More Read More - [Where Is Your Brother?](https://everyangel.org/where-is-your-brother/): And the LORD said to Cain, “Where is your brother Abel?” “I do not know!” he answered. “Am I my brother’s keeper?” “What have you done?” replied the LORD. “The voice of your brother’s blood cries out to Me from the ground….   Genesis 4:9-10 Yesterday government response to the covid-19 virus was reaching a... Read More Read More - [Born Again Trump-Style](https://everyangel.org/born-again-trump-style/): The mass movementabsorbs the individual,by stripping the individualof his opinions, tastes, and values.He is thereby reducedto an infantile state.This is what the new birth really means:to become like a child,and children are primitive beings,credulous, followers,members of a pack. — Eric Hoffer What curious, weird creatures, we humans are !  I feel quite old, Yoda-like... Read More Read More - [The Glittering Dance](https://everyangel.org/the-glittering-dance/): The glittering dance of brilliants must be strung on that dark thread of sadness which is time. Vernon Scannell (1922-2007) These lines of verse by a British poet came to me as a precise summation of my feelings while absorbing the tune and lyric of Townshend’s anthem/prayer for solidarity, Join Together.  Viewing the video,... Read More Read More - [A Million Ways To Laugh](https://everyangel.org/a-million-ways-to-laugh/): Rain had fallen all day.  At dusk I had just turned on the ignition; the motor came to life along with the radio.  In reverse, I slowly backed the few feet toward the road, half listening.  The announcer said that the president was about to hold a press conference on the covid-19 crisis.  By... Read More Read More - [Falling To Rise](https://everyangel.org/falling-to-rise/): Falling in order to rise…… The destruction of received models and forms is necessary in order to clear a space for spontaneous thought to arise. From the cathedral of our own feelings, from the void of the blank canvas, then, comes the space for revelation. We are fragments of an unattainable whole. Meaning is... Read More Read More - [Interlude: Che vuoi?](https://everyangel.org/interlude-che-vuoi/): The 1968 song was written by Dan Penn and Spooner Oldham for Alex Chilton of the Boxtops.  The “Cry like a baby” tagline came to Oldham in the early morning hours at Porky’s Diner across the street from the studio.  Penn and Oldham returned to the studio and finished the song in a few... Read More Read More - [Ice & Fire](https://everyangel.org/ice-fire/): Attempting to walk from Batavia north to Geneva along side the river I soon came to a tall cyclone fence.  Private property.  I turned around along with another couple who likely had the same intention as I.  I’ll simply have to find another way to walk northward along the river to Geneva.  There’s the... Read More Read More - [House Fire](https://everyangel.org/house-fire/): Yesterday was the day after the going-out-of-business announcement of Art Van Furniture.  The Metro Detroit based company folded just three years after being purchased by a private equity firm, Thomas H. Lee Partners. The firm purchased the Midwest largest retail furniture and mattress retailer, founded in 1957 by Archie Van Elslander.   Thriving for... Read More Read More - [Mediation Toward the Future](https://everyangel.org/mediation-toward-the-future/): Uncertain about what to write this morning.  The coffee shop was jammed at 7AM.  Fortunately I claimed the last open table. Yesterday I took a hour long walk along the Fox river into town.  Soon, the singing of the wind through the tall oaks, the voices of the Canada Geese on the water replaced... Read More Read More - [The Agora](https://everyangel.org/the-agora/): Once again we met last night at the Agora in Geneva.  I use the term as a metaphor for a public meeting space, the Barnes & Noble at Geneva Commons.  As in Socrates day a circle of us gathered to ask questions which have no final answer, the enigmas that have and will follow... Read More Read More - [Making It To the Other Side..](https://everyangel.org/making-it-to-the-other-side/): Life can be imagined in many metaphors.  Word-images “say” more that any formulaic, extended description, a one-to-one correlation between word/syntax and external reality.  Life cannot be reduced to any logical, rule like convention.  The metaphor rising in my imagination labeled “life” is the memory of a river rafting experience on the Hood River in... Read More Read More - [Safe Harbor](https://everyangel.org/12030/): Unchained Melody Oh, my love My darling I’ve hungered for your touch A long, lonely time And time goes by so slowly And time can do so much Are you still mine? I need your love I need your love God speed your love to me Lonely rivers flow to the sea, to the... Read More Read More - [What Happens To Women?](https://everyangel.org/what-happens-to-women/): What happens? Yesterday the news came that Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar dropped out of primary contention. The day before it was Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana who called a halt to his bid to be the candidate for the Democratic party.  I assume both are throwing their support to former... Read More Read More - [Happiness In One Easy Step](https://everyangel.org/happiness-in-one-easy-step/): To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost. — Gustave Flaubert I have been a fan of “good quotes” for many years.  At the prompting of a professor in grad school I began writing in a pocket-sized notebook memorable lines discovered... Read More Read More - [Life Itself, You Might Say](https://everyangel.org/life-itself-you-might-say/): Teachingis a kind of learning,much like loving,mutual goings-on,mutual forbearance,life itself, you might say. But how shall I improvethe swiftly-dimming hour?I shall deteriorate amid bucolic dreamsand gather in my fate.There’s lots worse ways than that. Alas,some goodbyes are like death;they bring the heart to earthand teach it how to die. Excerpt, Farewell to Teaching By... Read More Read More - [Nothing But The Dead and Dying](https://everyangel.org/nothing-but-the-dead-and-dying/): Consequent to a phone conversation with a friend yesterday, I was asked to write about the covid-19 epidemic that is much in the media.  His suggestion seemed like a good idea to me.  Who is not aware of the recently discovered virus, belonging to the corona family that has made many sick in Hubei... Read More Read More - [Again](https://everyangel.org/again/): Creatures of habit.  I am, — no question about it.  Yesterday I walked away.  I left a place where I have worked daily, departing from my role as owner of a company, the chief problem solver.  The wind-down has been gradual, beginning six months ago.  After a day of labor to tear down the... Read More Read More - [Leaving The Capsule](https://everyangel.org/leaving-the-capsule/): It is easy for the mind to indulge. The opposite is also easy, to renounce. To move to the extreme is easy for the mind. To remain in the middle, exactly in the middle, is the most difficult thing for the mind because it is suicide for the mind. The mind dies in the... Read More Read More - [Shaking](https://everyangel.org/shaking/): I read an essay written by a friend, a recollection of the 60s when our country was riven by division.  The up and coming generation took to the streets to protest the sending of their generation to kill Vietnamese, on the pretext of halting communism.  The rift in our society was political and ethical. ... Read More Read More - [Undoing](https://everyangel.org/undoing/): The systemic drive of capitalism produces cheapening labor (reduce input costs) expanding markets (new venues for profit) economic growth constant innovation in production ushering in a new order of economic reason, of governing rationality. Thus capital itself, gives shape to human worlds, the power of world making. Capital dominates the human beings, and human... Read More Read More - [Nothing Left Behind](https://everyangel.org/nothing-left-behind/): Shortly we will depart Galena.  A few hours of driving and we will be home again in Batavia.  We take leave of Galena but our few days here have given us memories enough for many days and hours of satisfied reflection upon the people that we met, and all that we learned. The last... Read More Read More - [Last Day](https://everyangel.org/last-day/): Today is our last day in Galena.  Our accommodations are about a quarter mile from the home where U.S. Grant and his family lived.  We could walk to the Grant place.  It is on a bluff. The elevation affords a grand view of Galena.  I consider that the high elevations around the town are... Read More Read More - [Galena Shooting Star](https://everyangel.org/galena-2/): It has been a while since visiting the Mississippi river town.  It is close enough for a short road trip, a get-away from the day to day routine of home base.  Everyone benefits from adventure.   Travel brings different scenery, others whose way of life differs from our own.  Who doesn’t desire to tell their... Read More Read More - [Waking Nightmare](https://everyangel.org/waking-nightmare/): DREAMING A WALL by Richard Blanco He hates his neighbors’ flowers, claims hisare redder, bluer, whiter than theirs, believeshis bees work harder, his soil richer, blacker.He hears birds sing sweeter in his trees, tallerand fuller, too, but not enough to screen outthe nameless faces next door that he callsliars, thieves who’d steal his juicier... Read More Read More - [Of Turtles and Worlds](https://everyangel.org/of-turtles-and-worlds/):        The Beginning 1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 2 Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. 3 And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was…. There is always a beginning, at... Read More Read More - [God N' Country N' Trump](https://everyangel.org/god-n-country-n-trump/): I grew up in the South.  I am a drag racing fan, and in general, I get the appeal of motor sports, any motorsport.  NASCAR has evolved into something, that in principle, has troubled me for a few years now.  Over the years racing American manufactured cars, has evolved from a regional motor sport... Read More Read More - [Politics and War](https://everyangel.org/politics-and-war/): If I had to provide a definition, I would say that politics has to do with the relationship between a collectivity and the available and necessary resources, with the aim of employing such resources to increase the happiness of the collectivity -if we understand collectivity as the sum of its individual members, and happiness... Read More Read More - [No Country For Old Men](https://everyangel.org/no-country-for-old-men/): Millions of Americans are wrestling with the impossibility of a traditional middle-class existence. In homes across the country, kitchen tables are strewn with unpaid bills. Lights burn late into the night. The same calculations get performed again and again, over and over, through exhaustion and sometimes tears. Wages minus grocery receipts. Minus medical bills.... Read More Read More - [The River & A Burnt Country](https://everyangel.org/the-river-a-burnt-country/): Yesterday was a mild, “feels like spring” day.  Enjoying the sunlight, we took the Batavia River Walk for a stroll southward towards the dam by the old Challenge  windmill factory.  A visit to the dam is a reminder of the immense power of flowing water, moved by gravitational pull toward the Mississippi River ultimately... Read More Read More - [Raising Rocks](https://everyangel.org/raising-rocks/): Convinced of the wholly human origin of all that is human, a blind man eager to see who knows that the night has no end, he is still on the go. The rock is still rolling. I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds ones burden again. But Sisyphus teaches... Read More Read More - [Living Within The Dream, Lucidly If I Can](https://everyangel.org/living-within-the-dream-lucidly-if-i-can/): Adventurers only exist within the time of their own mortality. No heaven or hell, no memory or glory lie beyond the moment in which their bodies start rotting. The time of adventure only exists as a ‘time of now’…..   Whatever we desire, we can only achieve within the narrow time of our biology. Before... Read More Read More - [China Girl](https://everyangel.org/china-girl/): Good work of any kind presents many potential insights.  One has to chose one’s focus, what to consider and write about.  Artists say more than they are consciously aware in their work.  The lyric of China Girl was composed by David Bowie and Iggy Pop in 1976.  The lyric and tune sizzle.  There are... Read More Read More - [A Poem By Philip Larkin](https://everyangel.org/a-poem-by-philip-larkin/): The Buddhist in me, really likes these verses.  Larkin’s words capture with unemotional observational precision the transience of life.  Given the amount of violence, not the TV theatrical variety, but bloody life-wrecking violence in our big cities, and in many places around our world, it is timely to take a step back.  You and... Read More Read More - [If (Can) Stones Talk?](https://everyangel.org/is-matter-conscious/): Good discussion last night.  The topic was, is revolutionary.  Revolutions are violent paradigm shifts, alternative ways of perception, and of self understanding.  Political revolutions are almost never a “good” thing, as the river of blood that results, provokes a corresponding violent, bloody response.  Revolutions of the intellect, on the other hand are desirable, a... Read More Read More - [Covering The Distance](https://everyangel.org/covering-the-distance/): A long process of religious self-delusion has been necessary to pass from the myth of the birth of work as God’s punishment for the original sin, to the infamous slogan covering the entrance to Nazi concentration camps, ‘Work will set you free.’ A process which covers the distance between the origin of the French... Read More Read More - [The Rest, All Construction](https://everyangel.org/the-rest-all-construction/): Wakening this morning, Tuesday, in a mental fog. I managed to stand erect, moving toward the kitchen, wondering how long until the thick malaise of mind would clear. Is this normal for a person my age, a diabetic of too many years…? What is normal? Is it the average, the median? There is no... Read More Read More - [Participating, willy nilly](https://everyangel.org/participating-willy-nilly/): No community can survivethat cannot survive the worst.We lack tragic imaginationthat through communal form or ceremony,permits great loss to be recognized,suffered, and borne,and makes possiblesome sort of consolation and renewal. If we are members of a society,we participate, willy nilly,in its evils.How do we reduce our dependencyupon what is wrong?Wrong will be corrected by... Read More Read More - [Lost: The Essential Spiritual Thread](https://everyangel.org/lost-the-essential-spiritual-thread/): Our culture emphasizes “building wealth” not “building places,” self-service over community life. Pragmatics, efficiency, metrics, metropolis. We have been sold a new vision of architecture, centered on convenience, comfort, the car. This vision erodes our connection to the land, and it is from the land from which we ultimately draw our vitality and viability.... Read More Read More - ['Tis Not Too Late](https://everyangel.org/tis-not-too-late/): What is to be done?  I cannot forget, by some means distract myself, from the darkness that invests Washington, and seems to be gathering strength.  This poem by Tennyson, giving voice to aged Ulysses, captures my sense of our situation.  The aspiration, given the constraints of age as well as the advantage of experience... Read More Read More - [Not A Small Discipline](https://everyangel.org/not-a-small-discipline/): Is there enough pride, daring boldness, self-assurance, enough spiritual will, will to responsibility, freedom of will available today for “the philosopher” to be from now on really —- possible on earth? The desire to see differently for once in this way is not a small discipline of the intellect, and a preparation for its... Read More Read More - [What Counts](https://everyangel.org/what-counts/): Friday morning is bright, a rare sunlit day for midwinter.  Mentally I wrestle with a better understanding of artificial intelligence, the future which accelerates toward me with self-driving vehicles and all manner of intelligent things busily analyzing my habits and tastes. I just finished reading a four page essay by Gilles Deleuze published in... Read More Read More - [Welcome To The Jungle](https://everyangel.org/welcome-to-the-jungle/): Welcome to the jungle, we’ve got fun and games We got everything you want honey, we know the names We are the people that can find whatever you may need If you got the money, honey we got your disease Have we been seduced into imagining that the day to day operation of government... Read More Read More - [What Thucydides Knew](https://everyangel.org/what-thucydides-knew/): I couldn’t listen.  Last night after our philosophy discussion ended I departed for home.  Tuning to NPR on the radio a few minutes after 9PM, the voice of President Trump filled the space around me.  His labored reading of lines, halting enunciation of words, caused me to cringe inwardly.  Feeling my disgust I changed... Read More Read More - [Hammer Of The Gods](https://everyangel.org/hammer-of-the-gods/): There is gray mist in the air this morning.  Traffic is heavy, as usual.  A Metra train pulls into the station and gaggles of commuters will come into view hustling across the road toward the the gleaming open doors.  Another day in the outskirts of a big city, Chicago of course.  I hear the... Read More Read More - [Where Do Ya Wanna Go](https://everyangel.org/where-do-you-want-to-go/): Weary of the shit-storm of our politics: our President raging against the human scum, his opponents, and then shortly thereafter gloating, basking in the glow of the suicide demise of the leader of ISIS.  He described in detail the immolation which included the man’s children.  In addition, I have engaged in an extended email... Read More Read More - [Choosing Who I Have Become](https://everyangel.org/how-much-reality/): It is Sunday morning.  Sunday is a “time-out” day when traditionally we dial back the fever of commerce, that survival game which we all play.  Time outs, half times are important as a player, by definition, is the subject of the game, a mind/body point of awareness who agrees to engage in play with... Read More Read More - [A Day Ending In Fire](https://everyangel.org/a-day-ending-in-fire/): I want to think of Fall as the season of red and yellow maple trees, orange pumpkins, and children under the supervision of nearby parents, holding an open pillow case at a front door.  On Halloween the sack grows heavier by the minute with treats collected from the neighbors.  Fall is truly a season... Read More Read More - [Nothing But Survival](https://everyangel.org/nothing-but-survival/): This post was written by a good friend.  It is offered here as a succinct description of the divide that exists between Americans. The lesson that we are at taught over and over and over again (and yet we never seem to retain) is that the supporters of Donald Trump will find a way... Read More Read More - [Why Not Atheism?](https://everyangel.org/why-not-atheism/): One cannot be religious in general, one can only believe in some god(s) to the detriment of others, and the failure of all the efforts to unite religions proves that the only way to be religious in general is under the banner of the ‘anonymous religion of atheism’. And effectively only an atheist regime... Read More Read More - [Fire Discovered Again](https://everyangel.org/fire-discovered-again/): Google claims a computing breakthrough The company said today that it had achieved “quantum supremacy,” a milestone that would make current supercomputers look like toys. At a research lab in California, a mathematical calculation that the largest supercomputers could not complete in under 10,000 years was done in 3 minutes 20 seconds, Google said... Read More Read More - [Gunfight ?](https://everyangel.org/gunfight/): Why? Any action taken, any at all, — is subject to the bar of reason.  One can ask “the why” of anything.  Why am I here?  Yesterday afternoon why did I find myself at the Honda of Lisle dealership, being introduced by a stranger at the front desk to another stranger who would sell... Read More Read More - [Enter The Dark Lord](https://everyangel.org/enter-the-dark-lord/): Well here you have it.  Disaffection with “business as usual,” corrupt, inefficient, representative democracy had reached such a pitch that in the 2016 presidential election we installed an unabashed authoritarian into the White House.  This man doubles down on ignorance.  He knows nothing about many things that he fancies himself to be supremely knowledgeable... Read More Read More - [A Darkening Morning](https://everyangel.org/a-gray-day/): The sky is overcast, a chill asserts that Fall and Winter inexorably follows the tilt of the earth’s axis. Over a bowl of cheerios I perused the New York Times Weekend Briefing email received in the early hours.  Somewhere someone is awake, living, in full awareness of their lot in their one solitary life, ... Read More Read More - [Living Right Now](https://everyangel.org/living-right-now/): We do not experience the contents of our self-consciousness as the contents of a representational process, and we do not experience them as some sort of causally active internal placeholder of the system in the system’s all-inclusive model of reality, but simply as ourselves, living in the world right now. — Excerpt Being No... Read More Read More - [So You Want To Change Your Life...](https://everyangel.org/so-you-want-to-change-your-life/): In the ‘normal’ run of things life just goes on, following its inertia, and we are immersed in our daily cares and rituals. Then something happens, an eventual Awakening, a secular version of a miracle (social emancipatory tumult, a traumatic love encounter…). If we opt for fidelity to this Event, our entire life changes;... Read More Read More - [Drowning](https://everyangel.org/drowning/): I am invited to read some poetry at a community gathering tomorrow evening.  It is an honor to be asked to join others for sharing poetry and prose in a public place.  Words crafted and offered up to celebrate the joy and tragedy of our experience create a sacred space. I plan to read... Read More Read More - [More Miracle And Magic](https://everyangel.org/more-miracle-and-magic/): Walked into Starbucks this morning and over the subdued buzz of the room came the sultry voice of Stevie Nix.  It was a love song: Dreams. I retrieved my computer from the case and placed it on the table, my mind (and heart) captured by the lyric of loss.  This is a song of... Read More Read More - [The Canary Doesn't Sing](https://everyangel.org/the-canary-no-longer-sings/): The topic was a challenging one.  We seldom talk directly, think out-loud about the meaning and practice of the sex act in the lives of our peers.  In past times, such discussion was taboo, unacceptable.  Presently, mores have relaxed.  A frank public discussion is possible.  We yet lack sufficient vocabulary, and I am aware... Read More Read More - [On Greatness](https://everyangel.org/on-greatness/): A very old fashioned argument: increasing value, not profit.Value is how much cash flow you generate over time – 10 years, 20 years. Sustainability is the main value creator. If you are not sustainable in business,then you have reputation damage that will make you sell lessbecause consumers buy less from business with low reputation.You... Read More Read More - [No Hero](https://everyangel.org/no-hero/): We have to accept that we live on a ‘spaceship earth’, responsible and accountable for its conditions. Earth is no longer the impenetrable background/horizon of our productive activity: It emerges as a finite object that we can inadvertently destroy or transform to make it unlivable. This means that, at the very moment when we... Read More Read More - [So You Are Not A Slave Owner](https://everyangel.org/so-you-are-not-a-slave-owner/): Capitalism thrives all around the world (more or less), from China to Africa. It is definitely not in crisis – it is just the people caught in this explosive development that are in crisis. This tension between overall rapid growth and local crisis and misery is part of capitalism’s normal functioning: capitalism renews itself... Read More Read More - [Consuming Our Own Lives](https://everyangel.org/consuming-our-own-lives/): The society of experience – the direct commodification of our experience itself. What we are buying on the market are less and less products, (material objects) that we want to own, and more and more ‘life experiences’ experiences of sex, eating, communicating, cultural consumption, participating in a lifestyle… ‘we become consumers of our own... Read More Read More - [The Road To Unfreedom](https://everyangel.org/the-road-to-unfreedom/): Since in our society, free choice is elevated into a supreme value, social control and domination can no longer appear as infringing on a subject’s freedom – it has to appear as (and be sustained by) the very self-experience of individuals as free. There are a multitude of examples of un-freedom appearing in the... Read More Read More - [Why?](https://everyangel.org/why-2/): In capitalism,you cannot throw outthe dirty water of financial speculationand keep the healthy baby of the real economy:The dirty water effectively is the blood of the healthy baby.One should not be afraid to go to the end here:the global capitalist legal system itself is,in its most fundamental dimension,corruption legalized.The question of where crime begins(which... Read More Read More - [The Primary Fact Of our Age](https://everyangel.org/the-primary-fact-of-our-age/): While on the road, when I am not driving, and we are not talking – I plan to read more from Slavoj Zizek’s book The Courage of Hopelessness A Year of Acting Dangerously. Here are ideas from a paragraph in the first chapter. Today’s globalization, as a capitalist system, came to determine all conditions... Read More Read More - [Hard Edge](https://everyangel.org/10456/): Stand and fight ! or accede to the hard edges of this world:  post industrial, connected, regimented — that we have made. Those are the thoughts that rise to contemplation. I found a port in the storm, somewhere that is familiar, where mind and body do not lapse into a pity party. It has... Read More Read More - [How To Run A World](https://everyangel.org/how-to-run-a-world/): Long Guns By Carl Sandburg Then came Oscar, the time of the guns,  And there was no land for a man, no land for a country,       Unless guns sprang up       And spoke their language. The how of running the world was all in guns.  The law of a God keeping sea and land apart,... Read More Read More - [What's Going On](https://everyangel.org/whats-going-on/): Friday, the last day of my work week. Beginning to mentally prepare for a road trip to the west coast, driving back with stops along the way.  I believe the final stop is to be New York City and then return to Chicago.  Hopeful of visiting Gettysburg along the way home. Some pictures of... Read More Read More - [To Continue](https://everyangel.org/to-continue/): Without dispute mechanization (science/technology) has developed the means of satisfying real needs, but we reproach it with having too strongly encouraged, artificial ones, with having fostered luxury, with having favored the towns to the detriment of the countryside, lastly with having widened the gap and revolutionized the relationship between employer and employed, between capital... Read More Read More - [Dogma](https://everyangel.org/dogma/): Without being exactly in danger of starving to death, people consider that life is not worth living if they cannot have comforts, pleasures, luxuries; the national industry is considered insufficient if it provides for a bare existence, if it does not provide affluence; a country considers itself incomplete if it has not good ports,... Read More Read More - [What The Squirrel Didn't Say](https://everyangel.org/what-the-squirrel-didnt-say/): Upon recollection of my childhood the most cherished memories were the many times I explored the environment surrounding my house and the yard where I grew up.  The desire to see, to hear, to touch one’s surroundings first hand, to know one’s own country is natural.  Whenever I visit my hometown, the neighborhood where... Read More Read More - [Oh No!](https://everyangel.org/oh-no/): Like Linus, who has the football snatched from his well aimed, and enthusiastic kick, by Lucy — could it be that all we have heard, have had represented to us is a grand hoax?  The motivation to make the world a better place by reducing my carbon footprint, by the installation of the roof... Read More Read More - [Spellbound](https://everyangel.org/spellbound/): The photo was captured by a friend.  On my first look at the image I felt that something unspeakable and primeval had been captured on the cameras sensor, and by the collection of forms in the print.  The photo taken on September 11 at twilight, shows a passing cloud wall, just after a downpour. ... Read More Read More - [Animals All](https://everyangel.org/animals-all/): The great obstacle to mysticism transforming humanity is the same which prevented the creation of a divine humanity. Man has to earn his bread by the sweat of his brow; in other words, humanity is an animal species, and, as such, subject to the law which governs the animal world and condemns the living... Read More Read More - [Mysticism Everyday](https://everyangel.org/mysticism-everyday/): On Sunday I was invited to a event at the Tau Center in Wheaton, a presentation on “everyday mysticism.”  Being new to the area, I am curious to make new acquaintances, and the topic does interest me.  Mystical experience is not esoteric, rare, something reserved for the psychologically unbalanced.  Seems to me that mystical... Read More Read More - [Someone To Cling To](https://everyangel.org/someone-to-cling-to/): I am not a fan of television due my upbringing, and on account of other reasons flowing from that.  I become impatient with thinly written dialog, and one dimensional cartoon-like characters.  That’s how prime-time TV seems to me.  Anyway after a day of effort earning a living, or in pursuit of something that I... Read More Read More - [Our Shattered Society](https://everyangel.org/our-shattered-society/): …… as long as experimental science is not firmly established, there will be no surer guarantee of the truth than universal assent. Nay, truth will as a rule, be this very assent. We may note, by the way, that this is one of the causes of intolerance. The man who does not accept the... Read More Read More - [Faster Than You Thought](https://everyangel.org/faster-than-you-thought/): Things take longer to happen than you think they will, but then they happen much faster than you thought they could…….. The accumulation of carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases – some of which will envelop the planet for hundreds and possibly thousands of years – is now trapping as much extra energy... Read More Read More - [Toad Hunter](https://everyangel.org/toad-hunter/): A rainy Sunday morning in Geneva.  The remnants of tropical storm Imelda, which inundated Houston is passing through: rain, potentially lots of rain adding to already swollen Fox and Des Planes rivers. Does a future scientist begin as a toad hunter?  Perhaps!  Summertime is opportunitie for a child to observe Nature in a mode... Read More Read More - [May We Call Ourselves Civilized?](https://everyangel.org/may-we-call-ourselves-civilized/): Man’s structure seemed indeed to destine him for a more humble existence. His instinctive resistance to innovations is a proof. The inertia of humanity has never yielded, save under the impulsion of genius. In a word, science demands a twofold effort, that of a few men to find some new thing and that of... Read More Read More - [Just For Fun](https://everyangel.org/just-for-fun/): ….. but once you come to the intelligence, Farewell nature! Farewell life! Intelligence is assumed to be what it is       “for no particular reason,             for the fun of the thing.” As if it did not also correspond to vital needs! Its original business is to resolve problems similar to those resolved by... Read More Read More - [More Room On The Bus](https://everyangel.org/more-room-on-the-bus/): Christians as well as Buddhists can practice Zen just as big fish and small fish are both contentedly living in the same ocean. Zen is the ocean, Zen is the air, Zen is the mountain, Zen is thunder and lightning, the spring flower, summer heat, and winter snow; nay more than that, Zen is... Read More Read More - [For Chris & For Tobin](https://everyangel.org/for-chris-for-tobin/): When I heard this tune by The Call, both of you came to mind.  I offer these lyrics and this tune in tribute to you both.  As friends, you are on opposite ends of the spectrum of sensibility concerning the existence of God, but I think that you are moving in the same direction. ... Read More Read More - [Πάντα ῥεῖ καὶ οὐδὲν μένει.](https://everyangel.org/%cf%80%ce%ac%ce%bd%cf%84%ce%b1-%e1%bf%a5%ce%b5%e1%bf%96-%ce%ba%ce%b1%e1%bd%b6-%ce%bf%e1%bd%90%ce%b4%e1%bd%b2%ce%bd-%ce%bc%ce%ad%ce%bd%ce%b5%ce%b9/): I do not read classical Greek.  I studied enough koine Greek or common Greek to be able to pronounce these words.  Whenever I read them, unaccountsbly I feel close to Heraclitus of Ephesus, the Pre-Socratic philosopher.  Heraclitus was a contrarian. While it is natural to look for permanence, to seek permanence in the systems... Read More Read More - [Effort ?](https://everyangel.org/effort/): It is criticism that demands an effort. The assertion stopped me cold while reading the chapter entitled Static Religion in Henri Bergson’s book, Two Sources of Morality and Religion. Is it not painfully clear than things are badly off kilter in our world? Never before have we had the capability of news awareness 24×7,... Read More Read More - [Radio Ga Ga](https://everyangel.org/radio-ga-ga/): A measured discussion between a half dozen friends was conducted via email.  We exchanged ideas pondering the causes which make the conservative minded and the liberal minded so different.  The difference in attitude, in perception is not minor.  There is a preference for a strong man father-figure, even for an abusive tyrant as long... Read More Read More - [Good News](https://everyangel.org/good-news/): Percival, the wild rabbet living in our backyard was sighted again yesterday.  I suspect that he/she is finding shelter under our deck.  Does the young animal “know” there are fewer predators in our yard than just 50 yards away in Almond Marsh?  Maybe.  Was reminded of a line from Bergson in yesterday’s post that... Read More Read More - [What Hangs Around The Edge](https://everyangel.org/what-hangs-around-the-edge/): Life is a certain effort to obtain certain things from raw matter, and that instinct and intelligence, taken in their finished state, are two distinct means of utilizing a tool for this object; in the first case, the tool is a part of the living creature; in the other, it is an inorganic instrument... Read More Read More - [Survival On The Fringe](https://everyangel.org/survival-on-the-fringe/): LIFEis a co-ordinationof disciplined elementsamong whichthe work is divided.therefore, the socialunderlies the vital. This is so in those societies where the individualmust be ready to sacrifice itselffor the whole:the hive and the anthill.This result is obtained by instinctwhich is an extensionof nature’s work of organization.This means that natureis more concerned with societythan with the... Read More Read More - [Pumpkin Transcendence](https://everyangel.org/pumpkin-transcendence/): Everyone finds the pumpkin attractive.  The kid-in-me loves pumpkins.  The pumpkin is a signature of the Fall season, a symbol of cooler days, falling leaves, the turn of Nature toward a season of rest, of quiescence.  Who does not need a season of reduced activity, to contemplate, take stock with gratitude,  — the good... Read More Read More - [Religion And Fiction](https://everyangel.org/religion-and-fiction/): Having moved to Batavia, I have discovered Randall Road.  Randall Road, running north and south is a dense strip of retail shopping.  Some of the national chains have more than one store along this well traveled artery.  Randall road is iconic of America if you think that the achievement of “the American Dream” is... Read More Read More - [A Spike In the Heart](https://everyangel.org/a-spike-in-the-heart/): No question that instrumental rationality is the heartbeat of our time. Science gave us the industrial age, — the telegraph, railroads, automobiles, radios, television, industrialized warfare, the hydrogen bomb….  There is no need to go on. The industrial age has been eclipsed by the age of communication made possible by hyper miniaturized solid state... Read More Read More - [Interlude](https://everyangel.org/interlude-2/): Sunday can be a day of reflection, a generally recognized, if little practiced “time out” day.  Monday through Saturday, the other six days of the week are pure hustle.  The organism of society and economy is in “fast forward” mode, and a majority of us have a defined role which we play, mainly out... Read More Read More - [Casting Call For Heroes](https://everyangel.org/what-way-forward/): “Where to from here?” is the question that I always ask.  Not every one asks, as many are content to remain where they presently are.  Why the difference? Upbringing is often mentioned as the decisive factor in the orientation of the individual.  What about upbringing?  Why not include the physical and emotional upbringing of... Read More Read More - [Biting The Apple](https://everyangel.org/biting-the-apple/): Another Friday morning at Starbucks, and as on any day, a majority of patrons walk in, scarcely looking up from the small iPhone screen held in their hand.  A beverage order has been placed by means of the device, and paid for prior to their arrival at the serving counter.  All that remains is... Read More Read More - [Enigma](https://everyangel.org/enigma/): The love of humanity is not a self sufficient force or one that has a direct efficacy. …as every teacher knows you cannot prevail over egoism by recommending “altruism.” — excerpt The Two Sources of Morality and Religion By Henri Bergson p. 36 - [To Spin Hope](https://everyangel.org/to-spin-hope/): Truly great artists—- the ones that shape the zeitgeist— have the bravery to take themselves seriously. Never irony —- honesty is the coin of their realm. The willingness to look a fool. The audacity to be earnest. The confidence to be vulnerable. Cynicism comes cheap in the postmodern era, but you get what you... Read More Read More - [Holding On](https://everyangel.org/holding-on/): Another thought provoking discussion.  This one considered the work of Martin Heidegger and William Faulkner.  Both men, one a metaphysician, and the other a writer of fiction offered a lifetime’s worth of caution, of alarm about what we are doing to Nature.  Faulker writes of the last of the large game, an old bear... Read More Read More - [Braeburn Marsh](https://everyangel.org/braeburn-marsh/): Yesterday was my son’s 42nd birthday.  The family gathered at the house for a celebration.  Another year together is a cause for celebration.  There was a fine meal with some of my son’s favorite foods, and of course an ice-cream birthday cake. As aspect of the afternoon was a frog hunting expedition along the... Read More Read More - [Why Do I Keep This Up?](https://everyangel.org/why-do-i-keep-this-up/): First some good news!  I indicated in yesterday’s post that the young rabbit that is living in our backyard may have joined the circle of life.  By that I mean the predator-prey relationship.  The vegetarian rabbit is prey for larger carnivores.  The rabbit that I have named Percival is still around!  One day at... Read More Read More - [A Poor Player's Tale](https://everyangel.org/a-poor-players-tale/): Original Poem (Dowson, 1890) They are not long, the weeping and the laughter, Love and desire and hate; I think they have no portion in us after We pass the gate. They are not long, the days of wine and roses, Out of a misty dream Our path emerges for a while, then closes... Read More Read More - [So That You Can See](https://everyangel.org/so-that-you-can-see/): I am certain that, of speaking and of listening, — to listen well is the more difficult skill. I was reminded of this yesterday when I heard the old Marvin Gaye song, What’s Going On.  The tune is an appeal for careful, generous listening so that we can see “What’s going on.”  Marvin’s appeal... Read More Read More - [On Killing Part II](https://everyangel.org/on-killing-part-ii/): Virulent, half true, untrue rhetoric is a step towards war, real war, not war as a metaphor. A thing begins by the language that we absorb and begin to speak.  By our manner of speaking one “chooses a lane,” aligns him or herself with a side and thereby voluntarily ceases to think.  Consequently one... Read More Read More - [Preparing To Kill](https://everyangel.org/preparing-to-kill/): Yesterday a friend and I had a troubling email exchange.  At least the words were troubling to me.  The friend insisted that I “choose a lane.”  What was meant was that I ought to definitively side with the conservative/near fascist collective, of which the President is the figure-head or side with the liberal/socialist minded... Read More Read More - [Rage Against The Machine](https://everyangel.org/rage-against-the-machine/): Ray Bradbury, the acclaimed author from Waukegan, Illinois said that the secret to life was knowing how to fall in love and stay in love.  (I’ve not read Fahrenheit 451, but plan to do so.) My instincts tell me that Bradbury hit the bullseye with his sage comment.  Nevertheless knowing and doing cannot be... Read More Read More - [All Is One](https://everyangel.org/all-is-one/): Any one thing is what it is because of it’s relationships with all the other things that define it. The building is the building, because of each of the parts that make it up, but the rafter is the rafter because it is part of the building. — excerpt Taking Back Philosophy A Multicultural... Read More Read More - [Monday Morning Rain](https://everyangel.org/monday-morning-rain/): I did not make the car show yesterday morning.  I have a pang of regret. From this angle of view there is no sign of yesterday’s show from my table by the big Starbucks window.  The white archway marking the grand entry to 3rd Street, to the promenade by the double line of parked,... Read More Read More - [A Dream Within A Dream](https://everyangel.org/a-dream-within-a-dream/): A magnificent morning graces Geneva.  The air temperature is a touch cool, a reminder that we are on the cusp of Fall.  Seated, by the big window at Starbucks I read this quotation from the ancient Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi.  Zhuangzi has been characterized as the Wittgenstein of Chinese philosophy. Once Zhuang Zhou dreamt he... Read More Read More - [How Much](https://everyangel.org/how-much/):        Questionnaire                         by Wendell Berry 1. How much poison are you willing to eat for the success of the free market and global trade? Please name your preferred poisons. 2. For the sake of goodness, how much evil are you willing to... Read More Read More - [If You Are Offended](https://everyangel.org/if-you-are-offended/): If you are offended when someone says you are wrong, you have no business claiming to be any kind of intellectual. There is a great difference between a sincerely reasoned argument and an unargued dismissal. As English clergyman William Paley (1743-1805) lamented, “Who can refute a sneer? Such attacks do their execution without inquiry.”... Read More Read More - [Day Begs The Night For Mercy](https://everyangel.org/we-run-like-a-river/): Unsure of what to write this morning.  I thought of posting some recently taken photos of a Porsche GT2RS.  The photos of the exotic car which I greatly admired on the day the photos were taken, seem a bit obscene this morning.  Showing a $350,000 sports car would be a radical disjunction with my... Read More Read More - [A Citizen Of The Universe Or Of One Walled City At War](https://everyangel.org/a-citizen-of-the-universe-or-of-one-walled-city-at-war/): The impartiality which,in contemplation, is the unalloyed desire for truth,is the very same quality of mind which,in action, is justice,and in emotion is that universal lovewhich can be given to all,and not only to thosewho are judged useful or admirable.Thus contemplation enlarges not only the objects of our thoughts,but also the objects of our... Read More Read More - [A Certain Hunger For Blood](https://everyangel.org/a-certain-hunger-for-blood/): Once one has worked through and been suitably impressed by Derrida’s perceptive and witty analysis of Nietzsche’s style, one feels, at the end of all the urbanity, an empty longing amounting to a hunger, a longing for the sense of difficulty and risk and practical urgency that are inseparable from Zarathustra’s dance….. Nietzsche’s work... Read More Read More - [HONG KONG](https://everyangel.org/hong-kong/): While the confrontation has turned entirely on political issues, it’s important to remember the frustrations of Hong Kong’s young people are broader. They live in one of the most unequal places on earth, with an astonishing proportion of the economy controlled by a few billionaires who dominate real estate, retail, utilities, telecommunications, and critical... Read More Read More - [A Kind Of Moral Order](https://everyangel.org/a-kind-of-moral-order/): The warm cup of coffee comforts.  The sky is solid with gray rain clouds.  Driving through a stout downpour I was thankful.  At last the smaller plants and the trees are getting a drink.  More is needed, considerably more.  Life and maybe even reality is a matter of maintenance.  Rainfall maintains life.  Life is... Read More Read More - [In The End](https://everyangel.org/in-the-end/): In the end, I must trust in myself.  I have seen men who have beaten from themselves the ability to recognize truth and goodness, and I do not think I am one of them.  I can still see the tears in a young child’s eyes and feel pain at his suffering. If I ever... Read More Read More - [Go Ahead, Jump](https://everyangel.org/go-ahead-jump/): A few thoughts on Stoicism…. I found James Stockdale’s story a motherlode of lessons — if one is ready to consider and reflect.  Stockdale’s foray into politics as Ross Perot’s running mate was fated to fail it seems to me.  Success in politics demands that one be a shape-shifter, or worse.  One thing that... Read More Read More - [A Fiery Translucence](https://everyangel.org/a-fiery-translucence/): Yesterday I planted a Japanese Maple.  Highly motivated to find the right tree I traveled for an hour in afternoon traffic, north to Countryside Nursery in Crystal Lake.  They had a variety called Crimson Queen, for which I happily paid the purchase price.  I transported the small tree home, another hour of stop and... Read More Read More - [The Possibilities Of Things](https://everyangel.org/the-possibilities-of-things/): Yesterday, late afternoon at the Long Grove Coffee Shop I was discussing photography with Bonnie who works as barista at the shop.  We both have interest in shooting photos and agreed that it was pleasant to converse with others about the topic.  Bonnie drew my attention to the conditions of late afternoon light outside,... Read More Read More - [Compensation For What Has Been Lost](https://everyangel.org/compensation-for-what-has-been-lost/): Do you remember your first taste of toasted marshmallow? Was not that a divine sensation? The taste of honeyed sweetness, when toasted over a fire, presented a range of taste-counterpoint from the light toast to a dark char.  A poetic tension of sweet and a hint of bitter, was indescribable, delicious.  The work/art of... Read More Read More - [On Comparison To The Nazis](https://everyangel.org/on-comparison-to-the-nazis/): …hatred of the idea of the Jews was tied to hatred of the power of intellect, as opposed to military power, hatred of law courts, of negotiations, of cleverness in argument, of learning and of the domination of learning; and in this way anti-Semitism is tied to hatred of justice itself, which must set... Read More Read More - [Abomination](https://everyangel.org/abomination/): Find it hard to write anything this morning. Jeffrey Epstein committed suicide, a twice-charged seller-of-women-for-sex.  The first charge was accommodated by a brief stint under house arrest with daily “release for work at the office” privileges.  The second time around, his wealth and favors-owed by his powerful friends showed little promise of another slap... Read More Read More - [Of A Cardinal](https://everyangel.org/of-a-cardinal/): The days spent in Durham were bitter-sweet.  Any persons death is sad, and that of a sister is particularly dark.  People count and family members count most of all. I delighted to see the resurgence of my hometown.  The medium sized, blue-collar town,  integrated into the tobacco farming rural counties when I grew up... Read More Read More - [The River](https://everyangel.org/the-river/): A few days spent in my hometown of Durham  involves a visit to the city park alongside the Eno River.  The park is on the site of one of the first settlements in the area before Durham could have been called a town.  Before railroads, grist mills along the river were places of gathering... Read More Read More - [Everybody Does Not See Alike](https://everyangel.org/everybody-does-not-see-alike/): Fun I love, but too much fun is of all things the most loathsome. Mirth is better than fun, and happiness is better than mirth. I feel that a man may be happy in this world. and I know that this world is a world of imagination and vision. I see everything that I... Read More Read More - [Ruins](https://everyangel.org/ruins/): My sister, after suffering beyond words, from schizophrenia, and conditions of day to day life bereft of family,  — passed on Saturday July 27.   The meaning of a life cannot be positively expressed, but the absence is felt, much as the ruin of a edifice can be felt.  I miss her and will always... Read More Read More - [What Is Important](https://everyangel.org/what-is-important/): In life what is important is the truth as it is, while in arts and letters what is important is the truth as we see it. There is a real difference here though people turn to the imagination without knowing it in life and to reality without knowing it in arts and letters. —... Read More Read More - [Breaking?](https://everyangel.org/breaking/): Here I am, another day in the town where I grew up.  I am here for the funeral of my sister, the last of our family to live in Durham, North Carolina.  I will miss my sister.  I feel grief over what we both missed while growing up.  Things were as they were.  The... Read More Read More - [A Life Livable](https://everyangel.org/a-life-livable/): Words make, and have made a world, that transcends the world and a life livable in that transcendence. It is a transcendence achieved by the minor effects of figurations and the major effects of the poet’s sense of the world and of the motive music of his/her poems and it is the imaginative dynamism... Read More Read More - [Accommodation](https://everyangel.org/accommodation/): What to say and how to say it? Unable to write anything yesterday, waking in the predawn gray I handed the luggage over to the limo driver.  The day began with the familiar ground-tone of anxiety,  — I didn’t want to miss our flight.  My mind flashed back to when I was a boy. ... Read More Read More - [Two Poems](https://everyangel.org/two-poems/): THE SOLUTIONS OF DREADFUL NIGHT (excerpt) by James Thomson We do not ask a longer term of strife,      Weakness and weariness and nameless woes: We do not claim renewed and endless life      When this which is our torment here shall close, An everlasting conscious inanation! We yearn for speedy death in full... Read More Read More - [Geneva, Days End](https://everyangel.org/geneva-days-end/): Another day’s grind.  That sounds like a unwarranted complaint.  As a matter of fact I’m an old white guy,  benefiting from ruling class privilege. There are many blue-collar tradesmen not as secure as I happen to be, to say nothing of persons of color working their way up, competing with Caucasian peers……  I have... Read More Read More - [In My Beginning, In My End](https://everyangel.org/in-my-beginning-in-my-end/): Three days have passed since my sister died.  A time was before any of us existed, and a time will come when we no longer will be present.  That everything passes is occasion for sadness, and maybe gladness.  Everything has it’s “prime time.”  It is unseemingly to stay too long, to be ungraciously present,... Read More Read More - [Foreigner](https://everyangel.org/a-foreign-country/): We moved from Mundelein. Our reason, to consolidate the family in one area, so that the grand kids, cousins, can play together as they grow up.  We adults can compare notes about “life.”  Life is nothing but a deck of jokers, as least that is how I’ve felt lately.  Your quest: find meaning in... Read More Read More - [Death](https://everyangel.org/death/): My sister passed yesterday around 9PM.  She lingered but for a short while, perhaps two hours after the nurse called to say that she was passing. I cannot say what death is as I cannot say what life is.  It is concrete, a singular experience for each of us.  No one can define what... Read More Read More - [Life](https://everyangel.org/life/): I knew it was coming.  The last several phone conversations that I had with my sister were labored, troubling.  With our last conversation she was unable to finish a sentence.  I could not help her,  as her mind no longer responded to verbal encouragement. An excerpt from Robert A. Heinlein was sent to me... Read More Read More - [The Lazy Ballerina](https://everyangel.org/the-lazy-ballerina/): One of the features of the south west of the State of Michigan are the fruit farms and the vineyards.  Conditions are agreeable for this type of farming.  We have visited the Bumbleberry farm several times to pick blue berries and I always come away with the conviction that I have received much more... Read More Read More - [I Do Not Know Much](https://everyangel.org/i-do-not-know-much/): Yesterday was our last full day here in Michigan.  We concluded the day by a walk down the path to the big lake.  We could hear the lake, one block away booming, like a distant sound of canon.  The sound grew louder the nearer we approached walking through the woods For the third year... Read More Read More - [If It Were Up To Me](https://everyangel.org/if-it-were-up-to-me/): In downtown St. Joseph Michigan we stopped in at Cabana’s ice cream parlor.  The ice cream was worth the wait.  I had a giant single scoop of dark chocolate with chocolate chips in a waffle cone.  Summer deliciousness…! I noted several paintings, rather surreal images of cows displayed on the walls.  I thought to... Read More Read More - [Resemblance](https://everyangel.org/resemblance/): Reading continues in the essays by Wallace Stevens.  I just finished an essay on resemblance, how things resemble one another thus establishing a relationship, and how this is so in poetry. Stevens asserts that the job of poetry is to tell the truth about reality.  That is a lofty estimation of poetry, much higher... Read More Read More - [Narcissus](https://everyangel.org/narcissus/): Narcissus did not expect, when he looked into the stream, to find in his hair a serpent coiled to strike, nor, when he looked in his own eyes there, to be met with a look of hate, nor, in general, to discover in himself the center of inexplicable ugliness from which he would be... Read More Read More - [Raccoon Story](https://everyangel.org/raccoon-story/): The baby was somewhat larger than a kitten.  But there was nothing “kitten-like” about it’s dark eyes, and the rows sharp teeth lining it’s mouth.  I’ve seen raccoons at some distance, sometimes as close as the garbage containers which attracted their  attention.  A few months ago, with difficulty I dislodged one that had peeled... Read More Read More - [On Losing My Audience](https://everyangel.org/thoughts-on-losing-my-audience/): A friend said to me, “when you get into politics, you lose half your audience.”  He is right of course and that is expected.  My aim in writing is to find the words to speak with integrity, to discover my voice, to be my own reader first and foremost.  What control do I have... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Passin' My Own Shadow](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-passin-my-own-shadow/): Summer passes.  Yesterday Kamala Harris was introduced as Joe Biden’s VP running mate.  Already she is a lightning rod for name calling, character assassination.  A QAnon candidate from Georgia prevailed in the primary and is certain to be elected to represent that district in the House of Representatives.  I feel dismay on the one... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, My Stereo Turned Up High](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-my-stereo-turned-up-high/): We discussed philosophy last night, or made an attempt.  I made an effort, but just could not seem to “get there.”  We are all “ground down” by the pandemic, by the lies, betrayal, and conflict disseminated from the White House. Senator Kamala Harris has been selected as VP partner by Joe Biden.  The announcement... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Reading](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-reading/): What are you reading?  If you are looking at this blog, I am certain that you are a person who reads often, varied materials from a number of sources. –*– I subscribe to the New York Times Sunday edition.  There is enough interesting, well written, relevant material to keep me dipping into the sections... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Music, Manners, Nature](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-music-manners-nature/): Not too long ago, I was introduced to a candidate who is running for the Illinois Senate.  I took a piece of campaign literature which I kept.  I’ve examined the message and the layout of the piece at some length.  The banner tagline is three words that sum up this candidates programme.  Stimulated to... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Running & Calamity's Child](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-running-calamitys-child/): I thought about it off and on.  Part of my life recedes in the rear view mirror: running.  In my early years, those when I was a kid at play, or in the school yard, I loved to run.  Running was fun.  I always chose to run instead of walk no matter the occasional... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Melting In The Dark](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-melting-in-the-dark/): This is one of those most sad songs, MacArthur Park.  And everyone loved to hear it, to sing it in 1967. How can one not take Buddhism seriously?  The impermanence of all things, life as suffering, etc.  Everything passes, becomes unhinged, fails it’s intended function, etc.  Acceptance of such an assessment of our condition... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Slavery And Class](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-slavery-and-class/): Several posts ago I invited comment from readers who viewed the Netflix film, The 13th. The film title is a reference to the 13th amendment to the constitution that freed the slaves during the Civil War.  The point of the film is the loophole, an exception to universal freedom which we hear indefatigably advertised... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Help Wanted](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-help-wanted/): Naturally you will ask, “What position are you hoping to fill? What are the qualifications?”  My answer: I hope to interview candidates for the position of a “god.”  That’s right we have an opening for a qualified deity.  Similar to the CEO of a corporation, we need a symbol, a totem upon which we... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Walking](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-walking/): I’ve always enjoyed running.  As a kid if I could run somewhere rather than walk, I would run.  Around my 40th year, I began running every day, which served my general health, and “the kid in me” felt the old enjoyment.  It has been a few years since the daily habit of running, and... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Cucumbers & Slavery](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-cucumbers-slavery/): What is this?  Why it’s a potato cucumber that originates in India!  The vines love sun and moist earth.  The cucumbers are about the size of a golf ball.  They can be eaten without peeling, and have a slight lemony flavor. This is one of the garden “experiments” of this year that proved to... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Miscellany](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-miscellany/): Many things on my mind this morning.  We viewed the film Harriet last night.  It is the story of Harriet Tubman, escaped slave from a Maryland slaveholder, becoming a female “Moses” returning to the area of her former captivity to lead family members and others to freedom.  As a former Southerner I was rocked... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, To Take Some Time](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-to-take-some-time/): Today is Sunday.  My memory of yesterday is almost featureless.  I recognize that is the aftermath of low blood sugar.  Diabetics are aware of the condition.  The remedy is easy under normal circumstances.  Just consume something, fruit, a cookie, anything with sugar.  I mention this to highlight how organic our sense of time is,... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Not Joking](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-not-joking/): Last night we viewed The Joker, a movie starring Joaquin Phoenix.  Perhaps you’ve seen it already.  The movie is a grinding exposé of an individual’s destruction, along with the society upon which he depends (New York city), as consequence of institutional cruelty, exploitation for profit and amusement, as well as a litany of petty... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Finding Jesus in Arkansas](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-finding-jesus-in-arkansas/): Sometimes you know what is going to happen, — and yet seeing for one’s self is a shocking revelation.  This video shot in Harrison, Ark. by Rob Bliss was mentioned in the NYT Thursday edition of The Morning update.  I am not a consumer of Youtube videos as a general rule.  Viewing takes time... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Consecrated In-difference](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-consecrated-in-difference/): I finished reading America, by Jean Baudrillard published in 1986.  It is Baudrillard’s reflection upon his stay in this country, a rough parallel to the commentary by Alexis de Tocqueville in 1835.  A recurring theme for Baudrillard is a comparison between the desert and the cities, especially Los Angeles. The concluding chapter is entitled... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Addiction To Lies & Death](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-addiction-to-lies-death/): Sinclair Broadcast Group recently published an online interview with a conspiracy theorist who claimed that Dr. Anthony Fauci created the coronavirus using monkey cells. Sinclair — which operates almost 200 television stations — has also run segments downplaying the severity of the virus. Fox News has repeatedly run segments promoting ideas that scientists consider... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Criticizing Religion](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-criticizing-religion/): Yesterday featured an email exchange with a friend which ended in agreement “to disagree.”  The recipient of my email resisted my criticism of Evangelical’s support of President Donald J. Trump.  Another mutual friend, copied on our exchange, commented that the crux of the dissension appeared to be my opponents will to defend the concept... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Signs](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-signs/): Yesterday was blazing hot.  The sun felt like you were too close to that charcoal grill.  Yet my wife, the disciplined person that she is, prepared to embark on a lengthy walk in the neighborhood.  I offered to go along, and she said Ok.  She is serious about walking as a fitness regimen, while... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Sunday](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-sunday/): The world, meaning the wider, invisible context of my life, present in mind’s awareness is increasingly given over to chaos.  It has not always been this way.  There have been interludes of peace, of normality, when the rivers tranquil flow transported commerce, and ordinary ‘gossipy news’ that was a standard mix of fact and... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Impotence](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-impotence/): The fifties were a real high spot in the US…and you can feel the nostalgia for those years,for the ecstasy of power, when power held power.In the seventies power was still there,but the spell was broken.That was orgy time(war, sex, Manson, Woodstock).Today the orgy is over.The US, like everyone else,now has to face up... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Banality](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-banality/): Banality, lack of culture, and vulgarity do not have the same meaning here as they have in Europe. Or perhaps this is merely the crazy notion of a European, a fascination with an unreal America. Perhaps Americans are quite simply vulgar, and this meta-vulgarity is merely something I have dreamed up. Who knows? But... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Tear Gas](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-tear-gas/): The protest demonstrations following the May murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis have waned.  Demonstrations have waned in other cites, except for Portland, Oregon.  There demonstrations have continued for 55 consecutive nights against police brutality and other grievances.  Last night, Mayor Ted Wheeler who joined the lawful demonstration was tear gassed. Portland has given... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Color](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-color/): Another morning dawns in splendor.  Summer days are a gift, Natures welcome to all living things.  I anthropomorphize of course.  With our ancestors it just seems right and proper to give the world as presented to our senseS the label, “Nature.” It’s our term for the surrounding life-sustaining-matrix of sky, water, earth, vegetation and... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Potpourri](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-potpourri/): No ‘new’ big issue on my mind today,– just the usual ones. On Monday, Trump tweeted a photo of himself wearing a mask with a presidential seal, writing, “Many people say that it is Patriotic to wear a face mask when you can’t socially distance.”* CNN reported that the president’s falling poll numbers likely... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Percival](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-percival-2/): Monday morning breaks with brilliant sunlight.  I can hear the voice of our granddaughter, about 9 months old, loudly expressing pre-language delight in another day of life, of shapes, colors, sounds, of endless adventure and opportunity for exploration.  May she never lose her voice, misplace her passion. While preparing breakfast I noticed a wild... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Freedom American Style](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-freedom-american-style/): SPECTACULAR ORGY (FREEDOM AMERICAN STYLE) But this is precisely the point:the high point of liberation, it’s logical outcome,is to be found in the spectacular orgy, speed, the instantaneity of change, generalized eccentricity. Politics frees itself in the spectacle,in the all-out advertising effect;sexuality frees itself in all its anomalies,and perversions; mores, customs, the body, and... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, If](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-if-2/): How to say it.  There is so much at stake , much more than we can know.  We are on the cusp, the beginning days of a second surge in deaths from the coronavirus.  California, a populous state that opened prematurely, along with states in the west and south whose governors owe fealty to... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Contemplation](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-contemplation/): This morning I read part of a story in the NYT of a grandmother on the way to the hospital, dying in the arms of her grand daughter after receiving her diagnosis of covid-19.  This was a Florida story illustrating the difficulties of testing, and the consequences of back up of lab results, in... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, If You Leave](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-if-you-leave/): A friend left a comment on a recent post observing that one becomes emotionally exhausted by a deluge of bad news.  The reflex is to “cocoon,” to contract inwardly in order to reduce exposure to continued erosion of the self, to further loss of sanity.  I knew what he meant by his insight. I... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Ending My Problems](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-ending-my-problems/): 20 Stop thinking, and end your problems.What difference between yes and no?What difference between success and failure?Must you value what others value,avoid what others avoid?How ridiculous! Other people are excited,as though they were at a parade.I alone don’t care,I alone am expressionless,like an infant before it can smile. Other people have what they need;I... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, To Wait Till Your Mud Settles](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-to-wait-till-your-mud-settles/): 15 The ancient Masters were profound and subtle. Their wisdom was unfathomable. There is no way to describe it; all we can describe is their appearance. They were careful as someone crossing an iced-over stream. Alert as a warrior in enemy territory. Courteous as a guest. Fluid as melting ice. Shapable as a block... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, The Tao Continued](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-the-tao-continued/): We are seeing at the moment that the pandemic can’t be fought with lies and disinformation, and neither can it be with hatred and agitation,  Angelica Merkel told the European Parliament on Thursday, according to French news agency France24. “Fact-denying populism is being shown its limits,” she added.  — Business Insider July 9, 2020 - [Plague Journal, To Step Back](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-to-step-back/): Tao te Ching By Lao Tsu Translation by Stephen Mitchell 8 The supreme good is like water, which nourishes all things without trying to. It is content with the low places that people disdain. Thus it is like the Tao. In dwelling, live close to the ground. In thinking, keep to the simple. In... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Indulgence](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-indulgence/): Admittedly, the irony of community is missing here, as is the playfulness of social life. The charm to be found in social graces and in the theatre of social relations is all transferred outwards into the advertising of life and lifestyles. This is a society that is endlessly concerned to vindicate itself, perpetually seeking... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Water](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-water-2/): The first day of a long weekend by Lake Michigan.  The sun slowly illuminates the forest that is quite close to the patio, the tall dark trees flame with green light.  The curtain goes up on another day.  Do you suppose that for the living vegetation, birds, mammals that live invisibly to us —... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Roadtrip](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-roadtrip/): In several hours we will leave Illinois for St. Joseph, Michigan.  The drive will take us around the big lake, (Lake Michigan) to the resort town in the adjoining state.  I love a road trip, the change of scene which travel affords.  The geographical change enables a reboot of the psyche, to shift the... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Hell World](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-hell-world/): Just listened to a NYT podcast, The Argument for the first time.  The presentation ran for about 20 minutes.  The subjects were the prospects for DJ Trump in the election in November, “Is Donald Trump Toast?” and the problems, issues having to do with opening schools in the midst of an uncontrolled pandemic.  Three... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, You Have To Be Utopian](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-you-have-to-be-utopian/): Americans believe in facts,but not in facticity.They do not know that factsare factitious*, as their name suggests.It is this belief in facts,in the total credibility of what is done or seen,in this pragmatic evidence of things and an accompanying contempt for what may be called appearancesor the play of appearances –— a face does... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Taste](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-taste/): Another abnormally hot summer day?  How is one to know?  What is the good in knowing?  What would I do if I knew?  The thermometer gauge in the morning sun on the patio is already showing 120 degrees at 7AM.  According to my cell phone news feed report the tundra in Siberia is burning,... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Exploring](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-exploring/): What  better way to spend a Sunday morning than exploring.  We set out for the North Aurora Dam on the Fox River.  Fishing poles in hand we hoped to find fish close to the bank just above the dam.  We did our best. A feature of the morning was a session with a throw... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Exiles](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-exiles/): It is by an act of force,or coup de théâtre*geographical exile of the Founding Fathers of the seventeenth centuryadding itself to the voluntary exile of man within his own consciousness –that what in Europe had remained a critical and religious esotericismbecame transformed on the New Continent into a pragmatic exotercism.The whole foundation of America... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Nothing Dreams Here](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-nothing-dreams-here/): Yesterday I found time to take a short bike ride along the river path to the North Aurora dam.  The river is less swollen within its banks than my last visit some weeks ago to this spot.  Just below the dam on the bank under a bit of shade I read more from America... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Matters Of Blood](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-matters-of-blood/): Born In The U.S.A. By Bruce Springsteen Born down in a dead man’s town The first kick I took was when I hit the ground You end up like a dog that’s been beat too much Till you spend half your life just covering up Born in the U.S.A. I was born in the... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, What if?](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-what-if/): What if a butterfly thinks it is ugly? I participated in a Socrates’ Cafe discussion last night that entertained this question.  The discussion was wide ranging, stimulating, satisfying.  There were seven of us in attendance using Go-To-Meeting for the video mediated discussion. The question asks the reader to imagine oneself a butterfly.  That alone... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Believing In Money](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-believing-in-money/): Money is fluid. Like grace, it is never yours. Coming to claim it is an offense against the divinity. Have you deserved this favor? Who are you and what are you going to do with it? You are suspected of wanting to put it to some use, an evil one no doubt, whereas money... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, The Sun King](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-the-sun-king/): Another day in the reign of Trump.  That seems the language suited to our condition.  I wonder how similar our situation to that of the French man/woman-on-the-street under the reign of Louis the XIV?   Louis XIV was concerned above all with the enhancement of his glory.  He was called the Sun King (le... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Hope](https://everyangel.org/journal-hope/): Yesterday morning I joined my son and the grand kids for a walk to the park and some fishing.  Fishing is a grand adventure for a kid.  Fishing can be one of life’s most important lessons.  One never knows what one will catch, if anything.  There are many factors involved in catching a fish. ... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, A Cold Ferocious Beast](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-a-cold-ferocious-beast/): This morning I do not want to write more about the coronavirus.  I prefer a session with a philosophy book, America by Jean Baudrillard.  The pandemic leaves one emotionally drained, by the disruption in daily life, — more so after hearing recent developments in the South and West.  What to write is not entirely... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, The Axe](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-the-axe/): Waking this morning, my first thought was the fragment of a dream.  I was the subject of the dream.  I saw myself, standing in a room, with an axe in my hand, chopping through a wooden floor.  Then I was awake and the dream evaporated. A wise person once said to me that that... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Backgammon Anyone?](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-backgammon-anyone/): After a session of wrestling with ideas, words, with the recalcitrant “world”, — my spirit seems to seize, overcome with the weary business of it all.  Perhaps this is the hazard of a love of philosophy? David Hume once said. Since reason is incapable of dispelling these clouds, Nature herself suffices to that purpose,... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Joined Together](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-joined-together/): Who doesn’t own an iphone?  I have an older 6s model with a cracked screen.  It’s a marvelous device, magical, concealing state-of-the-art circuits, layer upon layer, thousands of semi conductor elements, applied quantum mechanics delivering convenience and entertainment.  You know what I am attempting to say.  Few of us have consciously opted out of... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Always Smiling](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-always-smiling/): And that smile everyone gives you as they pass, that friendly contraction of the jaws triggered by human warmth. It is the eternal smile of communication, the smile through which the child becomes aware of the presence of the others. It is the equivalent of the primal scream of man alone in the world.... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Sublime And Animal](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-sublime-and-animal/): NEW YORK The beauty of the Black and Puerto Rican women of New York. Apart from the sexual stimulation produced by the crowding together of so many races, it must be said that black, the pigmentation of the dark races, is like a natural make-up that is set off by the artificial kind to... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, World's Center](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-worlds-center/): These lines, quoted from America, by Jean Baudrillard, published 1986, translated by Chris Turner: NEW YORK More sirens here, day and night. The cars are faster, the advertisements more aggressive. This is wall-to-wall prostitution. And total electric light too. And the game – all games – gets more intense. It’s always like this when... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Fatherless Child](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-fatherless-child/): It is Sunday morning,  the 21st day of June. Father’s Day.  I know little about the role and responsibility of being a Father.  Plainly fatherhood is more than a biological or a social role.  I’ve known many males, with children, who qualify for the label, since language is a social construct.  When the topic... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, A Vanishing Stake](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-a-vanishing-stake/): And we are all melancholic. Melancholia is the brutal disaffection that characterizes our saturated systems. Once the hope of balancing good and evil, true and false, indeed of confronting some values of the same order, once the more general hope of a relation of forces and a stake has vanished. Everywhere, always, the system... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, To Fight In Defiance](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-to-fight-in-defiance/): All around us are nothingbut dummies of power,but the mechanical illusion of powerstill rules the social order,behind which grows the absent, illegible, terror of control, of which we are the minuscule terminals. The whole logical universe of the politicalis dissolved at the same time,ceding its place to a transfinite universe of simulationwhere from the... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, The Officers Looked On](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-the-officers-looked-on/): We had our philosophy discussion last night, six of us using one of the online video chat tools.  The question of the evening: Is goodness natural?  Certainly we could have wrestled with the definition of each of those terms. I have thought about this question in its many variants for years.  The three words... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Hegel](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-hegel-2/): Did not post anything yesterday.  An important appointment early in the day foreclosed the opportunity to give adequate consideration to what I had on my mind.  I would have written about the current President of the United States as our *fire-starter; like a troubled child, or disturbed adult who finds an adrenaline rush in... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Nothing More](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-nothing-more/): Nothing more need be said. - [Plague Journal, Time](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-time/): As usual I received the weekend update on my iphone news feed from the New York Times.  I attempted to read over my bowl of cheerios.  Interesting and concise as always, but I felt repulsed.  My mind resisted following the cascade of deepening “troubles.”  Another Black man is shot while fleeing police; demonstrations against... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Money & Truth](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-money-truth/): The love of money as a possession—- as distinguished from the love of money as a means to enjoyments and realities of life — will be recognized for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease.... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, You Can Try](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-take-it-to-the-limit/): Friday!  A sense of accomplishment to reach the final day of the workweek with my sense of self intact, given all the events swirling around.  It goes without saying it is my choice to be aware of events, political, economic, and social that happen.  Dumb and happy is a live option.  There is the... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Typhoid Trump](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-typhoid-trump/): I am tired of writing about the bully that we’ve installed in the White House.  It’s only by means of words that his dissimulation can be revealed to be  darkness, a grim future which his lies hold for all of us.  I’ll continue to have my say until he and his supporters are out... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Laughing And Crying](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-laughing-and-crying/): My daughter walked in a nearby park several days ago.  At a distance on the manicured green ball park outfield she noticed a round dark shape.  Upon closer examination, it appeared to be a creature belonging in the Braeburn Marsh not very far away.  She hurried back to the house to summon me with... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Turning Around](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-turning-around/): What time is it?  Why, its time for another song!  The video is worth the eight minutes of viewing.  It’ll change your life! Sweet Jane By Cowboy Junkies Anyone who’s ever had a heartWouldn’t turn around and break itAnd anyone who’s ever played a partWouldn’t turn around and hate itSweet Jane, sweet JaneSweet, sweet... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, May I Help You?](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-may-i-help-you/): How about a fist in the face! A friend recently relayed the story of a family member who works in retail.  The point of his tale was the cascade of anti-social, loutish behavior suffered by a seasoned retail employee dedicated to helping customers, that was told to him.  The disconcerting behavior took place during... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, A Warm, Safe Place](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-a-warm-safe-place/): I wanted to take a break, if possible, from writing about the virus, and about the current edition of social disenfranchisement/murder of Black citizens, which is mirrored in the response by the President and Attorney General to the demonstrations rising from the murder of George Floyd.  This song by Guns N’ Roses seduced me... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, This We Believe](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-this-we-believe/):    Socialization is measured by the exposure to media messages. Whoever is underexposed to media is de-socialized or virtually asocial. Everywhere information is thought to produce an accelerated circulation of meaning, a plus value of meaning corresponding to the economic one that results from the accelerated rotation of capital. Information is thought to create... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, The Problem With Ignorance](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-the-problem-with-ignorance/): Thursday afternoon was hot, summer-like.  For a change of scene I took a short drive to Geneva to find a quiet spot outside to continue my reading in Simulacra and Simulation.  Walking along State Street I felt depression, saddened by the view of boarded up store fronts.  The property owners, no doubt called in... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Taking On Water](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-taking-on-water/): I wrestle with words to characterize the condition of our society, as I perceive it.  The “Ship-Of-State” is the metaphor that comes to mind.  The image comes from Plato’s Republic book VI.  Plato likens the governance of the city-state to the commanding of a naval vessel.  I like the image, of a large ship. ... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Reading, Dialog](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-reading-dialog/): Today June 4th is the anniversary of the uprising of students in Tiananmen Square, China.  The resistance to authoritarian incompetency, suppression of freedom took place April 15 – June 4th, 1989.  Everyone remembers the image of the solitary individual standing, one man obstructing a column of tanks. Did the uprising matter?  Did it make... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Truth, Love & Beauty](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-truth-love-beauty/): The weeks have been long.  There is a exhaustion felt due to quarantine, mandated isolation from communal activities, and then the spate of murders of innocent black men, in Georgia and then in Minnesota.  The riots over the past few nights in our cities are a natural release of rage, of exasperation over the... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Why Violence?](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-why-violence/): There are appeals for peaceful demonstration, the peaceful exercise of free speech. These appeals predictably come from elected officials, those placed in charge.  They are in charge of a formal system, — as well as approaches, attitudes, and comments informally expressed by thousands, perhaps millions of members. Hypothetically consider an HR administrator, or maybe... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Another Night of Tear Gas, Rubber Bullets](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-another-night-of-tear-gas-rubber-bullets/): The rioting continues, despite the efforts of governors to use police and national guard to protect property, and to minimize the use of force against those who are protesting systemic racism, and particularly the disproportionate killing of black people by police. At the national level, the President rages like a mad emperor.  Subsequent to... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Remaking Our Souls](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-remaking-our-souls/): Choosing to refrain from news media consumption over the weekend, I dedicated time and emotional energy to personal projects and to others in my family.  Can I afford this type of choice because I am white, male, a member of the dominant class in this society?  Are some Sunday afternoon hours reading Nietzsche by... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Morning In Geneva](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-morning-in-geneva/): It is Sunday morning.  Two and a half months ago, late winter when the quarantine was announced, I drove to Geneva on a Sunday morning.  That was not unusual since Geneva is 10 minutes away from Batavia.  Until the covid-19 quarantine the Starbucks on 3rd Street was my preferred venue for beginning each day... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Justice In A Silent World](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-justice-in-a-silent-world/): I have two, maybe three pages left in the book written by Albert Camus, The Rebel.  Camus’ generation in France and Europe survived the horror of WWII and the murderous Nazi occupation.  The Rebel is a manifesto, of what was learned from that experience.  Today I offer a longish excerpt of Camus words, and... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Halftime Friday](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-life-death/): Friday, the last day of the work week is greeted with the gratitude of a homecoming, the “ending” of a period of work, of aspiration.  It is not as if the work can be finished, brought to a ultimate terminus.  To be alive is to be immersed in change; there’s always work to be... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Cruise Ship Or Dinghy](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-cruise-ship-or-dinghy/): This morning the news feed conveyed word of rioting in Minneapolis.  Police officers in the course of arresting a black man while he was pinned to the ground, forced a knee into his neck long enough to kill him   I’ve seen rioting, burning and looting before in the aftermath of the killing of M.... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, If](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-if/): After waking, then consuming a bowl of cheerios for breakfast, I listened to The Daily.  The Daily is a New York Times podcast.  It is an in depth audio exploration of a something that affects all of us, and I often chose to listen with the earbuds in place.  I recommend it.  The Daily... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Connection](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-connection/): Yesterday was Memorial Day.  I read of several remembrance ceremonies for our veterans, and for those who died in wars.  I is hard to conceive of dying in war as hallowed, an event with transcendent meaning.  War is a nightmare, a feast of death, the failure of government to deliver the welfare of communities,... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Where Talk Is Cheap](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-cheap-talk/): Today, Memorial Day, I woke at 3AM.  Couldn’t sleep.  For a diabetic, high blood sugar sometimes has that effect.  I decided to make use of the circumstance by getting dressed in order to read more in Simulacra and Simulation bv Jean Baudrillard.  Baudrillard’s thought is revolutionary, reminding me of the effort required to learn... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Rotating Endlessly](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-rotating-endlessly/): Culture: a system of shared beliefs, values, customs, behaviors, and artifacts that members of society use to cope with their world and with one another, — transmitted from generation to generation through learning. culture as widely defined A fact is that which from being an object of the intellect becomes a matter of conscience;... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Weaving Dreams](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-weaving-dreams/): Saturday, Memorial Day weekend.  This is a strange beginning to summer, a season feeling “out of time,” something unlike any beginning of summer that I’ve experienced.  This is the aftermath of the self quarantine-social-distancing for the past two months or so that has been necessary to slow the advance of the covid-19 virus.  The... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Percival](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-percival/): These photos were taken in the backyard over the last 48 hours.  Spring is at the epitome of glory, flowering trees, wild flowers at the edge of the woods,  and the rabbit that makes a home by our creek.  We have named the rabbit Percival.  At this juncture in the season Percival finds plenty... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Isn't This Great?](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-isnt-this-great/): I joined a wide ranging philosophy discussion last night.  The topic for the evening was the ethical implications of the covid-19 plague.  One of our participants remarked that in his experience a majority of his fellow acquaintances rarely paused to consider ethical matters.  Most of us live unmindfully, engaging circumstances to maximize our pleasure,... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Void of Taste](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-void-of-taste/): Another day of self quarantine. The constraints are practical as well as psychological.  I share with every American the growing sensation of rebellion. Overarching all — certainty that our leaders are confused, disingenuous, indolent, and most demoralizing, — bereft of good taste. Good taste.  I refer to the sensibility of judgment wherein one “knows”... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Performative Gesture](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-performative-gesture/): The New York Times reported this morning that major corporations have announced that they are phasing out the “Hero Pay,” the $2.00 to $3.00 per hour raise offered to employees volunteering to work during the covid-19 stay-at-home orders.  The NYT referenced a Los Angeles Times article which you may read in full CLICK HERE I... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Justice Postponed](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-justice-postponed/): I visited the Fox River this morning.  After several days of prolonged heavy rain, the river overflowing its banks, roared over the dam, a maelstrom of froth and brown waves.  The sound was indescribable.  Like you I prefer to think of Nature as benevolent, hospitable, leaning in my direction with good will.  Another image... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Culture II](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-culture-ii/): A friend sent me this graphic picturing the various modes that culture takes.  We use the term ‘culture’ in many ways.  The diverse uses indicates how important this aspect of our lives in fact happens to be.  Here are a few examples of culture that come to mind from my own experience.  Certainly you... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Culture](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-culture/): A few days ago, while preparing to sit down for the evening meal, I had thoughts about culture.  What is culture, and how is culture created? Culture is not an aspect of Nature.  We never expect to come upon culture in the wild.  We find instinct prolific.  Animals instinctively fight or flee when feeling... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Backyard Radiance](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-backyard-radiance/): Nature silently calls to us, always.  Refreshment of mind is offered, a reorientation of spirit without charge, ours if we attend to the world of growing things, and animals that live around us, birds flying and singing, or the mouse living in a decaying stump.  These living things are our contemporaries, yet their generations... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Water](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-water/): Yesterday, there was a good deal of rain. I took a walk into Braeburn Marsh. The marshland floor was wet; the decomposition of wood fragments of the fallen giant cottonwoods was a visible example of the carbon cycle. Sunlight, to sugar by photosynthesis, to the cellulose wood fiber over time, becoming a 50 foot... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Arbery](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-arbery/): Arbery, remember that name. I am late to be aware of the killing of Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia. I overheard others in the household conversing about his death. The 25 year old was jogging through a neighborhood, when two armed men, a father and son, pursued him in a pickup. Arbery’s path was obstructed,... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Commencement](https://everyangel.org/commencement/): Yesterday we went for a walk in the woods, that is I and my son, with two grandchildren a boy of 6 and a girl of 5.  The close proximity to life was thrilling, a reminder of how exceptional it is to observe, to be present when new life is emerging, expressing its efflorescence. ... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Limited Edition](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-limited-edition/): This morning I feel compelled to write about this poem.  The poem is entitled “Fool’s Gold.”  Since a kid, I’ve been fascinated with fool’s gold.   Iron pyrite is the less romantic term for the substance.  It mimics the sheen of true gold but is worthless except in the imagination.  The title of the... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Gangster Morality Revived](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-gangster-morality-revived/): The Growing Omnipotence Of The State All modern revolutions have ended in a reinforcement of the power of the State. 1789 brings Napoleon;1848, Napoleon III; 1917, Stalin; the Italian disturbances of the twenties, Mussolini; the Weimar Republic, Hitler. These revolutions, particularly after the First World War had liquidated the vestiges of divine right, still... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Mother's Day](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-mothers-day/): Another Sunday, the country is haunted by the coronavirus.  States have been encouraged to “open up” in hopes that the virus, mirage-like will disappear with the advent of normal activity.  I read in the New York Times Morning Briefing that some climate deniers and conservatives are saying the death toll numbers by the coronavirus... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Hegel](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-hegel/): “God without man is no more than man without God.” — GWF Hegel Individuality replaces faithreason replaces the biblepolitics replaces religion and the churchearth replaces heavenwork replaces prayerpoverty replaces hellman replaces Christ. …to conquer God,to make Him a slave,amounts to abolishing the transcendencethat kept the former master in powerand to preparing,with the ascendancy of... Read More Read More - [Morning Postscript](https://everyangel.org/morning-postscript/): If we spend our life looking for the eye of the hurricane, we live a life that is fruitless. We die without having really lived. No one can know what life is. But we can experience life directly. Only that is given to human beings. Life is not a safe space. It never was,... Read More Read More - [Still Believing III](https://everyangel.org/still-believing-iii/): I believe there is no ultimate meaning outside of humankind, no final answer to be discovered which provides a certain anchor, a firm grounding, a robust assurance that “all will be well” and that all human suffering is justified. Life itself is change; life is recognized by our self-awareness and reason in the form... Read More Read More - [Still Believing II](https://everyangel.org/still-believing-ii/): I believe human freedom is narrowly circumscribed, channeled, confined by genetic inheritance, by the resources available for clothing, shelter, nourishment, safety, and above all shaped —  by the values absorbed from the birth family, and mores of the zeitgeist into which I was born. None of these factors were and are, within my discretion.... Read More Read More - [Still Believing I](https://everyangel.org/still-believing-i/): I mentioned that in graduate school that one requirement for graduation was that I compose a essay addressing the foundational belief commitments that I held at the time.  A friend suggested that I post that statement.  so I retrieved an age-tinged copy composed on a typewriter in 1983.  I confess that I still hold... Read More Read More - [Appetite For Destruction](https://everyangel.org/appetite-for-destruction/): I was unable to post this morning.  I am in the midst of a rewrite, my update of a “This I Believe” statement that I wrote in 1983 when in grad school.  A friend asked that I post the statement, which I will do.  The world of society which includes language terms, and issues... Read More Read More - [Making Things Secure](https://everyangel.org/making-things-secure/): Today Western imperialism is the imperialism of relativism, of the “it all depends on your point of view”; it’s the eye-rolling or the wounded indignation at anyone who’s stupid, primitive, or presumptuous enough to still believe in something, to affirm anything at all. No social order can securely found itself on the principle that... Read More Read More - [Thucydides](https://everyangel.org/thucydides/): Yesterday I resolved to sort through a bankers box of archived materials, a good bit philosophy related, some personal photos from 5k runs that I enjoyed with family members, business related articles on sales saved on the merits of future usefulness….etc.  The material represents the mosiac of my life.  A 8×10 photo of “Animal... Read More Read More - [Fate, When Dreams Come True](https://everyangel.org/fate-when-dreams-come-true/): Parents are generally anxious about really big things like melting ice caps and collapsing economy and unending stories about violence and predators and college admissions…. They displace all of these fears of things they cannot control onto the one thing they believe they can control, which is children. —-excerpt Wendy Mogel, The Blessing Of... Read More Read More - [Outta Nothing At All](https://everyangel.org/outta-nothing-at-all/): It is the eighth day of gray overcast here in the Midwest.  I anticipate my appointment with the medical technician for a blood draw in about an hour.  No breakfast yet, as fasting is required.  Will the caffeine in this tall black coffee help?  I can’t tell. Where do you turn for a recharge... Read More Read More - [This I Believe](https://everyangel.org/this-i-believe/): Many years ago, when in graduate school, I was asked to write a Credo, a concise statement of the core principles of my life.  This was a good exercise for anyone intent upon earning a degree.  After all what has one really learned from the exercise of education, — hours spent listening to passionate... Read More Read More - [Time Travel](https://everyangel.org/time-travel-2/): Memory is a strange thing.  Yesterday I dedicated enough time to sort through the folders of legal, financial and administrative paperwork archived on occasion of the passing of my mom and more recently my sister.  There seemed to be a lot of evidence for events that were sudden and still feel less than real,... Read More Read More - [A Persistent Fiction](https://everyangel.org/the-rupture/): In our home, upon a wall of the room with all of the books, and there are more than a few books, there are a pair of photographs hanging.  The photos are of my wife taken when she was seven years old, and of myself when I look to be about five.  We decided... Read More Read More - [This Creature](https://everyangel.org/this-creature-2/): I know that others have been invited.  I’ve seen the invitation.  I never expected to receive one myself. I have been invited by the President of the United States, Donald J. Trump to be a member of the Presidential Advisory Board, to help lead his 2020 grassroots support team.  Perhaps upon my soon-to-be-filed 2019... Read More Read More - [My God! What have I done?](https://everyangel.org/my-god-what-have-i-done-2/): I didn’t realize how much I looked forward to Tuesday evenings.  As usual I walked into the Chatterbox Cafe in Long Grove and looked for a seat.  The place always gets crowed on taco Tuesdays, cheap taco night.  When the small tables are taken along two sides of the room, I find a place... Read More Read More - [A Grifter People?](https://everyangel.org/a-grifter-people/): LET’S REMAKE AMERICA GREAT  by Richard Blanco Yes: Let’s reshoot America as a fantasy, a 90’s TV show in clearblack and white, sponsored by Kent cigarettes, Wonder Bread,and good old-fashioned war, again. Let’s re-create the backlotsuburb with rows of five bedroom homes for every Wilsonand Johnson, walled by perfectly trimmed hedges, weedlesslawns, and at... Read More Read More - [Purity?](https://everyangel.org/purity/): Philosophy is simultaneously maddening and satisfying, a linguistic deep dive into the foundations of our ways of life, an attempt to explore why we process “reality” the way we do.  There are great and important differences between us.  Where do those distinctive features, those dimensions of the self that I have come to be,... Read More Read More - [Where's The Uprising?](https://everyangel.org/wheres-the-uprising/): Again picked up the essay on political theory by Wendy Brown entitled, American Nightmare: Neoliberalism, Neoconservatism, and De-Democratization.  Brown composed the essay in 2006. It is a dense read.  I work to understand the collaboration, the alliance between Neoconservative minded people, who represent the family of my birth, and those Americans of a Neoliberal... Read More Read More - [Is Anyone Home?](https://everyangel.org/is-anyone-home/): Yesterday was really cold, bone chilling cold.  Desiring to move about,  we decided to visit the Japanese Tea Garden on the Fabyan estate, a short drive by car from our home.  After all the sun was out,  the trees, stone lantern, and moon bridge would be spectacular with a cover of snow. Yes, the... Read More Read More - [L'etat c'est moi](https://everyangel.org/letat-cest-moi/): Sunday morning, a bitter cold morning with 7 degrees registering outside.  I greeted another patron with “a good morning” who happened to be seated at an adjacent table.  She mentioned that she was departing to walk to St Charles, which is some distance from this Starbucks here in Geneva.  I was reminded that human... Read More Read More - [Requiem For A Country](https://everyangel.org/requiem-for-our-country/): Angel Of Harlem by U2 It was a cold and wet December day When we touched the ground at JFK Snow was melting on the ground On BLS I heard the sound Of an angel New York, like a Christmas tree Tonight this city belongs to me Angel Soul love…this love won’t let me... Read More Read More - [Drunkenness & Longing](https://everyangel.org/drunkenness-longing/): I am always surprised at how quickly things can snap out of control.  I remember that summer afternoon.  The image remains; seated in the warm sun, basking in the hospitality of the backyard of two friends.  Jim was a traveling salesperson.  He traveled from North Carolina to the Midwest, peddling sets of wooden-handled screw... Read More Read More - [The Mouth Of Sauron](https://everyangel.org/the-mouth-of-sauron/): I received a link to a New Yorker article from a friend.  The link lead to a seventeen page detailed exploration of the career and the present work of Attorney General William Barr.  The piece was entitled, Trump’s Sword and Shield by David Rohde.   Simultaneously drawn and repelled by the prospect of reading the... Read More Read More - [Either Way You Gotta Pay](https://everyangel.org/what-will-it-cost-me/): The radio awakened me at 6AM, my usual rising time.  Aware that if I lay there just a few more seconds I’d get additional rest before waking to the music again.  Or I could go ahead and get up, and gain the 20 minutes of reading and writing time here at Starbucks.  Either way,... Read More Read More - [How Could You Not Take Me..](https://everyangel.org/how-could-you-not-take-me/): Thinking this morning of how consciousness sculpts time.  Exchanged words condition the passage of time, lend color, fulsome shape to life’s time or shock time to a standstill. Do we not resist, dread a condition of impasse, to be so traumatized by happenstance that time is frozen, nothing is allowed to change, I am... Read More Read More - [Monday Monday](https://everyangel.org/monday-monday/): Monday is not a celebrated day of the week.  For a many of us Monday signals a return to the responsibility, evaluation, tension of a competitive work place.  Who looks forward to Monday? This Monday morning, I have promise of an answer to a conundrum which I have pondered for many years.  Raised in... Read More Read More - [Our Deepest Secrets](https://everyangel.org/our-deepest-secrets/): With the final integration of the instinctive and the spiritual by means of human techniques, the edifice of the technical society will be completed. It will not be a universal concentration camp, for it will be guilty of no atrocity. It will not seem insane for everything will be ordered, and the stains of... Read More Read More - [Hours Only Lonely](https://everyangel.org/hours-only-lonely/): Loneliness comes over me this morning.  Is loneliness the default condition of homo sapiens?  We are social beings because our physical survival is dependent upon others.  Others have written since Homer that we have “being,” solidity as selves in and through the regard of others.  What do others say of us, say about us? ... Read More Read More - [Interlude](https://everyangel.org/interlude-3/): Where to this morning?  I intended to compose additional thoughts on the Two Americas theme.  The subject is depressing, like touring a social wasteland.  I will delay another dive into that pool until tomorrow. In the meanwhile this fine tune comes as an antidote to the innervation of the post-industrial capitalism that besets us... Read More Read More - [Two Americas](https://everyangel.org/two-americas/): Yes, I know there is a book by that title.  I read a NY Times article (Who Killed the Knapp Family?) forwarded by a friend, that reminded me afresh, that I live in a country of multitudes of a suffering, beleaguered, permanent underclass.  The phrase captures the story that I have to write this... Read More Read More - [This Creature](https://everyangel.org/this-creature/): There exists a creature that is perfectly harmless; when it passes before your eyes, you hardly notice it and immediately forget it again. But as soon as it somehow, invisibly, gets into your ears, it begins to develop, it hatches, and cases have been known where it has penetrated into the brain and flourished... Read More Read More - [Ruins Of Our Time](https://everyangel.org/ruins-of-our-time/): The beautiful monster vomits a stream of watches clocks jewels knives silver coins & copper blood The well of time & trouble whiskey bottles perfume razor blades beads liquid insects hammers & thin nails the feet of birds eagle feathers & claws machine parts chrome teeth hair shards of pottery & skulls the ruins... Read More Read More - [About Capitalism](https://everyangel.org/about-capitalism/): Just started a new book, a slim volume by a Brit philosopher/intellectual entitled Capitalist Realism-Is There No Alternative?   One thesis of the author, Mark Fisher, is that the premises of Capitalism are so embedded in our consciousness that it is almost impossible to imagine alternative ways of organizing a society.  This constitutes an... Read More Read More - [I Watched](https://everyangel.org/i-watched/): The Golden Globes.  Of course, the Sunday night live broadcast on NBC is hard to walk away from.  At the end of the day with the best of my attention, effort, and quotient of energy already spent — why not be mildly entertained by the first of the entertainment industry award season shows? I... Read More Read More - [Staring Into The Dark](https://everyangel.org/staring-into-the-dark/): There are no longer “dancers,” the possessed. The cleavage of men into actor and spectators is the central fact of our time. We are obsessed with heroes who live for us and whom we punish. If all radios and televisions were deprived of their sources of power, all books and paintings burned tomorrow, all... Read More Read More - [Belonging](https://everyangel.org/belonging/): Day before yesterday I awakened at the usual early hour.  I finished getting dressed before going upstairs. A knock came at the bathroom door.  My wife stood in the dim pre-dawn hallway to ask if she could come in.  Opening the door, as we passed she said to me, — “We have always loved... Read More Read More - [Gunpowder In My Coffee](https://everyangel.org/gunpowder-in-my-coffee/): Friday morning at Starbucks, the room is a-twitter with rising and  falling conversations from tables — not unlike a tree full of blackbirds.  The sound of life, the exchange of advice, consolation, the ritual of community.  I am fortunate to be here. My sleep of last night was interrupted by a strange early morning... Read More Read More - [Day 2](https://everyangel.org/day-2/): Change can be counted upon.  Today is sunny, yesterday was gray — tomorrow will be felt and seen as a unique opportunity.   With the sunrise the day is born anew and so should I be.  Yet I know that yesterdays challenges, the endemic obstacles and the inherited frictions within human nature endure from... Read More Read More - [First Day New Year](https://everyangel.org/first-day-new-year/): The day dawns January the first, the year 2020.  I wish that it were possible to start afresh, like every new born, with a new, un-worn body, and a voracious mind eager to absorb experience, to make sense of a world, forthwith.  That is not the way of things with the new year.  The... Read More Read More - [Things Left Behind II](https://everyangel.org/things-left-behind-ii/): News Year’s eve.  Everyone reflects.  Some do it a little, I do it a lot. Cold enough to snow, just enough to whiten the ground: Nature’s proof that winter is present.  How could I doubt?  A few days of temperate weather in mid December is enough rhetoric in my mind, raising suspicion that climate... Read More Read More - [Things Left Behind](https://everyangel.org/things-left-behind/): The year draws down.  Yesterday was warm.  I decided to take a walk alongside the Fox River, to visit the  FABYAN ESTATE which is close to my neighborhood.  The day was gray, damp, unpropitious for photography.  Determined anyway, I took my camera. The Fabyans, George and Nellie lived here from 1908 until 1939.  George... Read More Read More - [Forging Peace](https://everyangel.org/forging-peace/): Years ago I was privileged to spend some time at the Pilchuck School of Glass, an internationally renowned community of artists in hot glass outside of Seattle Washington.  Glass blowing is not an artform for the fainthearted.  One must stand for hours, drawing molten glass out of a furnace as hot as a volcano. ... Read More Read More - [Bertolt Brecht](https://everyangel.org/bertolt-brecht/): Saturday morning after Christmas day.  State Street in Geneva is eerily quiet. Traffic is scarce.  I’ve never before witnessed this scene of absence.   No roaring eighteen-wheelers,  vanity pickups and car traffic on this main artery to the bridge over the Fox River.  Old buildings stand as a double row of street side tombstones... Read More Read More - [On Walking](https://everyangel.org/more-thoughts-on-walking/): You run ahead — Are you doing it as a shepherd? A third case would be the fugitive. Do you want to walk along? Or walk ahead? Or walk by yourself? One must know what one wants and that one wants. — excerpt Twilight Of The Idols or How to Philosophize With A Hammer... Read More Read More - [Another Year & A Lonely Street Of Dreams](https://everyangel.org/another-year-a-lonely-street-of-dreams/): The tune came over the car radio.  As it happens to be a favorite of mine I commented to my wife that the lyric line about walking alone is always true.  She replied that one need not always be lonely. I think the human condition is inherently lonely.  No matter the condition of material... Read More Read More - [Christmas Day](https://everyangel.org/christmas-day/): The day arrives, on the face of it, like every other day. Everything up to this day has been preparation, doing the work requisite to celebration.  Not that the “to do” list of decorating, seeking out and purchasing the “right gift” for those whom you have a natural obligation etc. is without satisfaction.  Work... Read More Read More - [The Day Before](https://everyangel.org/the-day-before/): It is Christmas Eve. Yesterday the project of the day was gift wrapping.  The upstairs filled with the aroma of pumpkin bread, banana bread loaves, baking in the oven.  I could hardly leave the gift-prep job to others on the team, since they were doing such a fine job in the kitchen.  I wrapped... Read More Read More - [Winter Solstice](https://everyangel.org/winter-solstice/): December 21st, I was inclined to make a fire in our fire pit.  Then I learned that we were to attend a holiday party with old friends in another town.  The enjoyment of open fire, heat emanating from burning wood, the glow of embers, pungent rising smoke into the inky sky, was delayed.  Maybe... Read More Read More - [Running Maskless](https://everyangel.org/running-maskless/): How I Became a Madman (Prologue) by Kahlil Gibrand You ask me how I became a madman. It happened thus: One day, long before many gods were born, I woke from a deep sleep and found all my masks were stolen,—the seven masks I have fashioned and worn in seven lives,—I ran maskless through... Read More Read More - [Christmas Carol For This Century](https://everyangel.org/christmas-carol-for-this-century/): As a general rule, I can take “only so much” of Christmas carols.  Many I have heard since childhood.  I am no longer mystified by the Baby In The Manager story in the same way.  I can’t help but think critically about the elements of the story.  The problem is not with the story... Read More Read More - [Do You Hear What I Hear?](https://everyangel.org/do-you-hear-what-i-hear/): Friday morning and I am not the only one who will not be reporting to the office.  My usual Starbucks venue for coffee and writing was crowded.  I left for another Starbucks, my plan B. So here I am, aware that my life is to change with retirement, the familiar routines of customer relations,... Read More Read More - [Shattered](https://everyangel.org/shattered-nation/): Yesterday after hours of speechifying, the House of Representatives voted affirmative to impeach the President.  There was little if any genuine discussion in the hours leading up to the vote.  Nearly all of the majority Democratic members voted to impeach him.  The Republican minority voted in lockstep, unanimously, — not to impeach.  Impeachment is... Read More Read More - [A Long View](https://everyangel.org/a-long-view/): What to say on a bitter cold Wednesday morning?  There is a bitter chill in my soul too.  The House of Representatives is on the cusp of voting to impeach the President today.  They will almost certainly vote.  His supporters — in a blatant, undisguised advocacy of institution-destroying, society fracturing violence will defend him. ... Read More Read More - [Skepticism And Strong Faith](https://everyangel.org/skepticism-and-strong-faith/): A strong faith.  I cannot think of a definition, and for the life of me cannot come up with anyone who serves as an example.  The occasion for my puzzle was a snippet of television where Robin Roberts announced her intention to visit Lakewood Church in Houston, Texas to interview Joel Osteen this weekend. ... Read More Read More - [Feliz Navidad](https://everyangel.org/feliz-navidad/): How do I know the holidays are fully arrived, that Christmas is a settled “fact” of social life?  (We must agree that a fact is not limited to objects.)  I attended my first choral event, a concert performed by a community chorus, supported by a chorus Brass ensemble.  The theme of the event was... Read More Read More - [Let's Play Pretend](https://everyangel.org/lets-play-pretend/): Did you play ‘pretend’, when you were about five or six years old?  I did. What if a large majority of voters succumb to anti-immigrant, populist propaganda and decide to close the borders make life more difficult for those already inside the country….. and what if in such a country the voters, despite such... Read More Read More - [Last Chance?](https://everyangel.org/last-chance/): After out patient surgery earlier in the day our daughter was resting. She chose The Matrix film as entertainment.  We waited for the medication to arrive from Walgreens and refreshed our memories of this great film from 1999.  There are many lines of dialog from the characters Morpheus, Neo, and Trinity that are as... Read More Read More - [Hearing One's Name Called](https://everyangel.org/hearing-ones-name-called/): Waiting, patient waiting to hear one’s name called.  One waits until one “hears….”  When one hears his/her name called by the great leader, one bows in submission, in servile obedience to whatever the great man directs one to do, to become.  One feels defined, given solidity, substantive being in response to the sound of... Read More Read More - [So You'd Like To Be A Writer?](https://everyangel.org/so-youd-like-to-be-a-writer/): So, you’d like to be a writer? Start keeping a journal. Everyday write something. Even if, and especially if it’s raw, words that can’t be polished, that take heroic effort to release and get down on the page. No matter how disjointed, incoherent, unappealing your emotional storms may be, –do your best to find... Read More Read More - [Those Old Crazy Dreams](https://everyangel.org/those-old-crazy-dreams/): Cold and snowy this morning, traffic “moved” like molasses…pondering what to write.  With only forty five minutes to work with there will be no philosophical foray into the nature of knowledge, or to say it plainly “why it is that we are such fools.”  A song played on the car radio, I’ve heard many... Read More Read More - [Losing Touch](https://everyangel.org/losing-touch/): This morning there’s little in mind.  A lingering memory from yesterday; the image of a Republican lawyer at the impeachment hearings in Washington.  The man speaking to a struck-dumb, packed hearing room said the president had nothing in mind, no intention, when he had the phone conversation with the President of Ukraine, Zelinsky.  The... Read More Read More - [My Daughter](https://everyangel.org/my-daughter/): Yesterday afternoon I received a phone call from our oldest daughter.   She was driving to the Central Dupage Hospital ER to request a CAT scan in order to better diagnose a possible hernia.  I have had three hernia surgeries.  I’ve experienced how painful a tear in the abdominal muscle wall can be.  The... Read More Read More - [We Are All In Prehistory](https://everyangel.org/we-are-all-in-prehistory/): On Borders by Yevgeny Yevtushenko In every border postthere is something insecure.Each one of themis longing for leaves and for flowers.They saythe greatest punishment for a treeis to become a border post.The birds that pause to reston border postscan’t figure outwhat kind of trees they’ve landed on.I supposethat at first, it was people who... Read More Read More - [Each A Weird Lunatic](https://everyangel.org/each-a-weird-lunatic/): …in his or her own way of course. As you’d expect, I continue to read Slavoj Zizek — with more care the second time around.  The European intellectual wrestles with the problem that confounds me: how to address a virulent ethnic hatred that matastasizes as a ravenous cancer in our society.  Our President and... Read More Read More - [So, Is This How It Ends?](https://everyangel.org/so-is-this-how-it-ends/): This morning as I opened my browser, this graphic caught my eye.  I felt compelled to read the story.  The image is of Mount Everest.  I have never been a rock climber and I am well past the age to consider climbing a mountain.  I thought it common knowledge the Everest was the severest... Read More Read More - [Freedom, Oh Freedom](https://everyangel.org/freedom-oh-freedom/): The Socrates Café discussion of this past evening was stimulating, open-ended, a probing exploration for a definition of freedom.  Our quest to find or to fashion a definition of freedom came from a quotation from a book, “To Fight Against This Age” by Rob Rieman: “He who remains a slave to his desires, emotions,... Read More Read More - [Life: Tactile, Raw](https://everyangel.org/life-tactile-raw/): The final gathering for 2019 for our philosophy group took place last night at Taste of Paris in Mundelein.  The surprise, unforeseen was that half again as many showed up than had sent me their RSVP of their intentions.  A sign that the life of the mind, the tactile experience of exchanging ideas, is... Read More Read More - [Self Care](https://everyangel.org/self-care/): The emotionally intelligent person   –  knows that love is a skill, not a feeling, and will require trust, vulnerability, generosity, humor, sexual understanding, and selective resignation. The emotionally intelligent person   –  awards themselves the time to determine what gives their working life meaning and has the confidence and tenacity to try to find an... Read More Read More - [Stories & Wheels Coming Off](https://everyangel.org/stories-the-wheels-coming-off/): How good is any story?  Logic dictates that it would be impossible to assess while the story is being created.  Only after the finish will someone else, in the telling of the story, know the quality of the tale.  Whether something qualifies as a story or not depends upon the teller and the audience... Read More Read More - [Requiem](https://everyangel.org/requiem/): I did something that I cannot remember doing before.  I saw the same movie twice, Ford vs Ferrari which features Matt Damon playing the role of Carroll Shelby and Christian Bale in the role of Ken Miles.  The story is a exploration of human nature, the cost of achieving excellence, —  an adventure involving... Read More Read More - [Getting Lost](https://everyangel.org/getting-lost/): There is nothing arrogant about mentioning ordinary people’s material concerns: the poor have the right to do it, and to talk about a readiness for great sacrifices, or suffering ‘whatever the price‘, is as a rule the ideology of the privileged, who are quite content to let the people suffer for them. So do... Read More Read More - [What We Have To Accept](https://everyangel.org/what-we-have-to-accept/): We have to accept that we live on a ‘Spaceship Earth’ responsible and accountable for its conditions. Earth is no longer the impenetrable background/horizon of our productive activities. It emerges as another finite object that we can inadvertently destroy or transform to make it livable. This means that the very moment we become powerful... Read More Read More - [A Runaway American Dream](https://everyangel.org/a-runaway-american-dream/): I woke this morning to the chords of Bruce Springsteen’s anthem Born To Run.  As you may know the song is a bitter-sweet salute to life-in-America.  Also, I am basking in the afterglow of viewing the film Ford vs Ferrari for the second time.  The cinematic story telling was superb, featuring Matt Damon as... Read More Read More - [What Is Life?](https://everyangel.org/what-is-life/): It is my turn. Having read and discussed a number of paragraphs submitted by readers of Philosophy Now Magazine my appreciation grows for the effort put forth by these readers to formulate their ideas on a philosophically interesting question.  The variety of approaches is stimulating, a reminder of the suppleness of our minds.  No... Read More Read More - [Not The Champions](https://everyangel.org/not-the-champions/): Watched the last scene of Bohemian Rhapsody a movie about Freddie Mercury and the band Queen.  Originally I saw the 2018 movie at a theater.  The last few minutes were just as inspiring in the living room on a smaller screen. I was thrilled by Rami Malek’s depiction of Mercury belting out his now... Read More Read More - [A Prayer](https://everyangel.org/a-prayer-2/): Incantation By Czeslaw Milosz Translated by Czeslaw Milosz and Robert Pinsky Human reason is beautiful and invincible. No bars, no barbed wire, no pulping of books, No sentence of banishment can prevail against it. It establishes the universal ideas in language, And guides our hand so we write Truth and Justice With capital letters, lie... Read More Read More - [What If ?](https://everyangel.org/what-if-2/): Seated in Starbucks this morning, marveling at the blue sky outside my window.  Sunlight streams into the room whenever someone opens the front door entering or departing.  I have more leaves to rake from the grass, and I am thankful to have yet another opportunity before the frost comes.  The frost will come hard... Read More Read More - [Pro Grand Kids](https://everyangel.org/pro-grand-kids/): Yesterday was an improvisational exercise in child care. We have committed to responsibility to care for two of the grandchildren for one day of the week.  This means taking them to preschool, and picking them up several hours later, having lunch with them, and then being on hand for a mid-afternoon nap.  Their parents... Read More Read More - [Apple & Peanut Butter](https://everyangel.org/apple-peanut-butter/): Just finished my lunch, which was a large Macintosh apple sliced and a generous dollop of peanut butter on a paper plate.  I have reason to believe this is a well loved menu option for older guys.  My friend Mike, at Starbucks this morning conveyed to me his satisfaction with making peanut butter the... Read More Read More - [Alternative To Glittering Pandemonium?](https://everyangel.org/alternative-to-glittering-pandemonium/): Modern, first-world life is nothing if not a glittering pandemonium.  Walk down Michigan Avenue in Chicago, or on the Ginza in Tokyo, or Times Square in New York City and one is swept away by stimulus overload.  The scale of everything, from the building facades, the store displays, the large screen displays changing dynamically... Read More Read More - [Won't Be Fooled again...](https://everyangel.org/wont-be-fooled-again/): Couldn’t settle on an idea earlier in the day.  I decided to just read.  Sometime another’s words give birth to my own. To be human is not a given.  It’s an achievement, a task of a life time, worthwhile but imperfectly accomplished.  Old Heraclitus once observed that the majority never awaken to their opportunity/responsibility... Read More Read More - [Theological Deep Dive](https://everyangel.org/theological-deep-dive/): We are on the cusp of the holidays.  Thanksgiving comes first, then Christmas, and as an after thought, New Years.  Thanksgiving is a harvest festival with a focus upon bonds between family and friends.  Christmas is complicated.  There’s the commercial dimension, which already has emerged a week before Thanksgiving, and there is the religious... Read More Read More - [A Strong Brown God](https://everyangel.org/a-strong-brown-god/): I do not know much about gods; but I think that the riverIs a strong brown god—sullen, untamed and intractable,Patient to some degree, at first recognized as a frontier;Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce;Then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges.The problem once solved, the brown god is almost forgottenBy the dwellers... Read More Read More - [Guilty Pleasure Postscript](https://everyangel.org/guilty-pleasure-postscript/): Starbucks is a hubbub of background voices, like the breaking of waves on a sandy lake shore.  Interlaced with indistinct conversations is the voice of a smooth jazz singer in the background.  All this serves as sonic context for some reading and writing.  Do we not read and write for ourselves with others? What... Read More Read More - [Guilty Pleasure](https://everyangel.org/guilty-pleasure/): Theodor Adorno was no fan of pop culture.  He thought it was a guilty pleasure. Hardly.  Pleasure contaminated by guilt, a cold glass of milk on a hot summer day, with a gnat floating on the surface….  That’s the picture I get. Regret, a price is to be paid as life unfolds.  Guilt is... Read More Read More - [On Bank Robbery](https://everyangel.org/on-bank-robbery/): What is the robbing of a bank compared to the founding of a new bank? — Bertholdt Brecht What is the brutality of Trump’s racist and sexist outbursts compared to the brutality and violence of today’s global capitalism? — Slavoj Zizek - [By Made Things](https://everyangel.org/by-made-things-2/): We join ourselves to the living world by the artifacts of art and science – by made things. We are always going to be at least somewhat at fault, because we are ignorant, fallible and small. The living world is larger and more complex than our works.  — Wendell Berry I am an advocate... Read More Read More - [In Support of Popular Culture](https://everyangel.org/in-support-of-popular-culture/): I anticipate our discussion tonight on the role of popular culture, according to the work of Theodor Adorno.  Adorno lived in the mid 20th century and was of the opinion that pop culture was exploitative, depriving it’s consumers of genuine aesthetic enjoyment.  Even worse the externalized consequences, — a less than healthy, robust and... Read More Read More - [No Agreement On The Basics](https://everyangel.org/no-agreement-on-the-basics/): This morning I was at an impasse.  I had no definite inclination to write.  That is rare.  There is always something of import, either a local personal item of interest, something I care about or perhaps one of the political and social inanities of the Trump administration that begs for comment. I had no... Read More Read More - [The Mission](https://everyangel.org/the-mission/): The sky is bright with morning.  Soon I will leave Louisville.  The reason for our presence here has been accomplished.  We welcomed a new family member into the World.  The World is much bigger than our family and we are part of it.  There are many generations before us.  We are their representatives, their... Read More Read More - [And Freedom, Oh Freedom...](https://everyangel.org/and-freedom-oh-freedom/): It’s unseasonably cold this morning.  The sky is gray, underbellies of clouds glow pink at the point where the sun is soon to rise.  I am at a Holiday Inn in Louisville, Kentucky.  I have more to say about the topic of freedom, as instinct says that I left the matter unfinished.  The topic... Read More Read More - [Life](https://everyangel.org/life-2/): I selected a lot of dark material as subject for my blog posts.  I am compelled to write about what interests me at the time set aside for writing.  I write primarily for myself, to discover more clearly what lies at the root of the kid, the adult, that lives within.  We have one... Read More Read More - [Atrocity Smiles](https://everyangel.org/wake-the-hell-up/): To designate a hellis not, of course, to tell us anythingabout how to extract people from that hell,how to moderate hell’s flames. Still, it seems a good in itself to acknowledge,to have enlarged, one’s senseof how much sufferingcaused by human wickednessthere is in the world we share with others.Someone who is perennially surprisedthat depravity... Read More Read More - [Queen of Hearts, -Your Best Bet](https://everyangel.org/queen-of-hearts-is-your-best-bet/): We attempted to discuss the topic: How Are We Free?  The topic is perennially compelling.  A sense of agency is what it means to be a self.  To the extent that one is a self, one feels his or her own agency, — one believes that one is free. I recognize that I’ve prejudiced... Read More Read More - [When I Was Young](https://everyangel.org/when-i-was-young/): Received good news this morning around 5:30AM.  Our granddaughter was born.  We plan to travel to Louisville on Wednesday.  She surprised all of us by coming just a bit earlier than expected.  Life is nothing but surprise after surprise.  Another argument for living simply, in a uncomplicated fashion.  One must always be able to... Read More Read More - [Recapitulation](https://everyangel.org/recapitulation/): Sunday afternoon was dedicated to mowing the grass for the last time in the growing season of 2019.  The cold of winter is at hand and I cannot count on Indian Summer, a warm day or two remaining in the month of November.  I pushed the mower and mulched the fallen leaves. What remains... Read More Read More - [More On Racism](https://everyangel.org/more-on-racism/): A comment to a post of several days ago asserted that racism in some form is endemic to the human experience, without exception.  The response was a bullseye, so I’ll attempt to repay the “two cents” worth of commentary with a bit of interest. In my experience this appears to be the case.  To... Read More Read More - [Spectacle Remix](https://everyangel.org/spectacle-remix/): Spent a delightful late Thursday walking a neighborhood with grandchildren and parents.  Sure it was a brisk, snowy day, unusual for late fall, — but no matter.  On both sides of the street costumed kids happily approached the front door of house after house to say the customary incantation: Trick or Treat.  The reward,... Read More Read More - [Racism As You Like It](https://everyangel.org/racism-as-you-like-it/): Racism á la carte 1. Old fashioned racism Rejection of the Islamic or Mexican or Black or _____ (despotic, barbarian, orthodox, corrupt, oriental) other on behalf of authentic (Western, civilized, democratic, Christian) values. 2. Politically correct racism The mult-culturalist perception that the “other” is the terrain of ethnic horrors, intolerance, of primitive irrational war-passions... Read More Read More - [Halloween & A Guest Post](https://everyangel.org/halloween-a-guest-post/): Ever so often I see articles suggesting that eventually it may be possible to eliminate human death from “natural causes.” That sounds terrific from an individual point of view — who wants to die involuntarily?  But reading reports LIKE further convinces me that such a development would thoroughly ruin the human race. Currently, just... Read More Read More - [Our Lifeline](https://everyangel.org/our-lifeline/): The discussion last night was spirited.   A thought experiment involving observation of one’s hand was proposed.  A hand has objective status, a object existing in space along with other objects.  Concurrently there is no denying that my hand, with age blemished skin, and a partially healed nick from a sharp edge of a paring... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Friendship](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-friendship/): I met with a friend yesterday afternoon.  To meet with someone across a table is an extraordinary privilege in these days of the spread of covid-19.  Typically exchanges of any kind that are conducted indoors take place on video screens.  Extreme caution is justified as the virus often is debilitating and there is always... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Turning Away From The Mad King](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-turning-away-from-the-mad-king/): There are times when “reality” is just too much.  Yesterday I felt as if I had reached such a time.  I must turn away from thinking about “the mad king” who tightens his grasp upon power.  He wants nothing more than to negate the outcome of the election of several weeks ago.  All the... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, May I Have More Order Please..](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-just-a-little-more-order/): ‘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... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, The Quest](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-the-quest/): What we need. Those words capture in retrospect my sense of the exchange of ideas experienced a few hours ago when the philosophy discussion group held a virtual meeting to consider (M)existentialism.  The launch pad for this discussion was Carlos Alberto Sanchez’ essay about Emilio Uranga’s philosophical work.  The texture of the discussion was... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Ashes To Earth](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-ashes-to-earth/): I In my beginning is my end. In succession Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended, Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass. Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires, Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth Which... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Enter The Dark Lord](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-enter-the-dark-lord/): 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... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, KaBoom](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-kaboom/): Yesterday I read fragments of a report on the massive Pro-Trump demonstration in Washington DC.  Thousands gathered to wave flags and to march noisily through the streets to protest of the outcome of one of the cleanest U.S. elections in modern times.  So much for the notion that President elect Biden will unite the... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Slouching Together..](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-slouching-together/): The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Breathing In A Baroque Empire](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-breathing-in-a-baroque-empire/): Yesterday was a sublime fall day.  In the morning I worked to gather the leaves that remained on our lawn.  The mulched leaves were used to form a berm across a boundary section between our yard and the public park.  In the months intervening till spring perhaps these leaves will turn to humus.  I... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, On Paradox](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-on-absurdity/): 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... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, To Breathe Again](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-poety-and-politics/): Continuing To Live By Philip Larkin Continuing to live — that is, repeat A habit formed to get necessaries — Is nearly always losing, or going without. It varies. This loss of interest, hair, and enterprise — Ah, if the game were poker, yes, You might discard them, draw a full house! But it’s... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Refusing To Look Away](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-refusing-to-look-away/): 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... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Monday Again](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-monday-once-again/): Sounds mundane doesn’t it?  Monday is the first day of the “work week.” Taken literally the “work week” is a hallmark of middle class.  If one is not fortunate to have sufficient shelter, food, and good health — there is no respite from work.  That has always been the case.  Also, if one is... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, The Day After](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-the-day-after/): Today is another warm fall day, a good time to be out of doors.  As with most of the country I watched the speech last night of Vice President Joe Biden, with Senator Kamala Harris acknowledge having won the election.  It was a good speech, one that Biden after a lifetime of public service... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, We The Confused](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-the-fatal-gap/): 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... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, The Problem With Lying](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-the-problem-with-lying/): 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... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Dropping Over The Rim](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-over-the-edge/): "You cannot pass," - Gandalf to the Balrog on Bridge of Khazad-dûm - [Plague Journal, Livin' It Up](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-innocence-ended/): A day dawns.  Is it a new day, or is it groundhog day, a hellish repetition of the last four years?  This is reference to the election of course.  Could this be a version of Nietzsche’s doctrine of eternal return?  That understanding of history posits that we are fated to repeat every detail of... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, When The Bullet Hits The Bone](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-when-the-bullet-hits-the-bone/): When I was in my 40’s I learned that my great Uncle Thomas McLamb was a soldier in the Army of Northern Virginia lead by Robert E. Lee.  The War of Northern Aggression did not go well for Thomas.  He was greviously wounded by a spent minié ball at Kelly’s Ford, Virginia.   Uncle... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Bond Is Dead](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-bond-is-dead/): The words that I just typed into the header caused a chill as I read them trailing the cursor.  I knew on Saturday morning that Sean Connery had passed by means of my cell news feed which is almost an instant conduit of information about events.  The next day, scanning the New York Times... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Something Lurks](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-something-lurks/): Yesterday we celebrated Halloween by accompanying costumed children on a parade through a suburban neighborhood.  The homeowners appeared as happy to dispense treats to passing children, as were the children receiving the sweets.  Halloween is a day of celebration, a mirthful exercise of imagination, a costumed reminder of our belonging to a wider community,... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, The Fable Collapses](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-the-fable-collapses/): The tragic artist is no pessimist: he is precisely the one who says Yes to everything questionable, even to the terrible — he is Dionysian. — excerpt Twilight of the Idols by Friedrich Nietzsche, chapt. “Reason” in Philosophy  published 1888 Yesterday a friend and I chatted for twenty minutes about the writings of Nietzsche... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, That Great Fatality](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-that-great-fatality/): In that great fatality called Christianity, Plato represents that ambiguity and fascination, called an ‘ideal,’ which made it possible for the nobler natures of antiquity to misunderstand themselves and to step on the bridge leading to the ‘Cross’… And how much Plato there still is in the concept ‘church,’ in the structure, system, and... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, What America's President Does Not Say](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-what-americas-president-does-not-say/): “The virus is circulating at a speed that not even the most pessimistic forecasts had anticipated,” Macron said in a televised address. “Like all our neighbours, we are submerged by the sudden acceleration of the virus.” “We are all in the same position: overrun by a second wave which we know will be harder,... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Darkness My Old Friend](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-darkness-my-old-friend/): That which is earlier with regard to its rise into dominance becomes manifest to us men only later. That which is primally early shows itself only ultimately to men. Therefore, in the realm of thinking, a painstaking effort to think through still more primally what was primally thought is not the absurd wish to... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Poetry With A Knife](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-poetry-with-a-knife/): Thus we shall never experience our relationship to the essence of technology so long as we merely represent and pursue the technological, put up with it, or evade it. Everywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology, whether we passionately affirm or deny it. But we are delivered over to it in the worst... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Dying With Fall](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-dying-with-fall/): Fall has come gently, with a hint of frost in late October.  The trees are well into shedding their leaves.  I walked around the backyard holding my camera.  I wanted photographs to help me remember this day.  Today is ten days out from the election.   Would I remember this day as one of... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Hunger Games](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-hunger-games/): The language game of legitimationis not state-politicalbut philosophical. There is a universal “history” of spirit,spirit is “life,” and “life” is its own self-presentationand formulation in the ordered knowledgeof all of its formscontained in the empirical sciences.German idealism is the narration of the his(story) of this life-subject. In this perspective,knowledge first finds legitimacywithin itself,and it... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, The Way Out](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-the-way-out/): I made it to Saturday.  Frost can be seen on the ground.  I have a to-do list which includes pruning rose bushes to cleaning a shower.  To live is to work; there is always work to be done.  Any work can be transformed into agreeable activity with a certain angle of approach.  Cleaning a... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Wanted Dead Or Alive](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-wanted-dead-or-alive/): How do I write this morning? I did not listen to the debate last night.  I cannot expose myself to a litany of lies, which is nothing other than emotional abuse.  Mentally and emotionally I have suffered enough from the verbal battering that accompanies the President of the United States. Nevertheless I found sleep... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Nothing More To Say](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-nothing-more-to-say/): A Thursday morning, still dark outside and I feel exhausted.  This morning I’ve nothing in mind to say.  I am tired, very tired. The pandemic is gaining momentum, yet a second wave of infections, certain to grow worse with the coming cold months.  This was foreseen as the certain result of official rejection of... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, The Meaning of Life & A World Without Work](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-the-meaning-of-life-a-world-without-work/): Last night we discussed an excerpt from Yuval Harari’s book.  The segment was titled The Meaning of Life In A world Without Work. Perhaps you detect the minor, yet major difference between the title of my thoughts about living in a world where work is relentlessly reduced by the application of artificial intelligence, and... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Our Last Dance](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-our-last-dance/): THE WHITE HOUSE WASHINGTON                                                                                                                                                                                         NOTICE DATE: October 2, 2020 JERRY W & LAURA L KING                          NOTICE NUMBER: 1444 1426 HAINES CT BATAVIA, IL 60510-9206 Your Economic Impact Payment Has Arrived My Fellow American: Our great country is experiencing an unprecedented public health and economic challenge as a result of the global coronavirus pandemic.... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, A Meter Beating Time](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-a-meter-beating-time/): “A meter beating time…a strange form of knowledge..” These words from The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge came to mind while reflecting upon our nine month old grand daughter’s response to the rock tune by Journey, “Any Way You Want It.”  When the evening meal was finished yesterday, I selected a rock station... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, How Bad, Before Blood?](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-how-bad-before-blood/): A friend sent me this youtube video.  The visual is an excerpt of the confirmation hearing for Judge Amy Cony Barrett.  Watching and listening to the speech of Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, my despair deepened.  How more craven, oblivious to the requirements of office, and of representative democracy can this possibly become?  The legislative/administrative violence... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Pirate Ship](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-pirate-ship/): Walking a few blocks from the house after nightfall, we came upon the ‘pirate ship’ that we’d heard of.  This one was in celebration of Halloween.  Nevertheless the creators had a point of irony.  The ship was christened USS Covid.  Every ship has a captain, and a crew.   I captured some photos of the... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Halloween Decoration Fantasy](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-viewing-halloween-decorations/): It was a sunny afternoon.  We declared a field trip for ourselves and the two grand kids.  Off we went to visit several homes that featured impressive Halloween displays.   On the visit to a West Chicago neighborhood, the monster featured was a giant dragon.  Skeletons and rats were placed at the foot of... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, What Is Truth?*](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-what-is-truth/): …the right to decide what is trueis not independent of the right to decide what is just,even if statement consigned to these two authorities differ in nature.The point is there is a strict interlinkagebetween the kind of language called science and the kind called ethics and politics:they both stem from the same perspective, the... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Emasculated Society](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-an-emasculated-society/): It is society, our tame, mediocre, gelded society, in which a natural human being, who comes from the mountains or from the adventures of the sea, necessarily degenerates into a criminal. — excerpt Twilight of the Idols, Skirmishes of an Untimely Man, by Friedrich Nietzsche p. 110 Another day, a predictable concatenation of events,... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Senate Kabuki Festival](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-senate-kabuki-festival/): Kabuki (歌舞伎) is a classical Japanese dance-drama. Kabuki theatre is known for the stylization of its drama, the often-glamorous costumes worn by performers, and for the elaborate kumadori make-up worn by some of its performers.                     — Wikipedia Judge Barrett is from the South and Midwest.... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Make-Believe Fright](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-make-believe-fright/): Fall is magical time.  Two holidays of the Fall season are Halloween on October 31st and Thanksgiving, the last Thursday of November.  As the leaves begin to turn, float to the earth to dapple the ground, the magic begins. This year I’ve taken note of the particular attraction that Fall has for children.  Halloween... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, What It Costs](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-what-it-costs/): 38. My conception of freedom.— The value of a thing sometimes does not lie in that which one attains by it, but in what one pays for it — what it costs us. I shall give an example. Liberal institutions cease to be liberal as soon as they are attained: later on, there are... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, In My Hometown?](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-in-my-hometown/): West Chicago is not my hometown.  It does remind me however of the place where I was born, where I grew to adulthood, Durham, North Carolina.  Do I bear the traces of where I grew up, in my DNA?  Sometimes I think so.  I would visit there more often, if we lived closer.  I... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Religion](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-religion-2/): Religion and politics are hot buttons.  That has always been true.  A long list of deadly conflicts could be composed without difficulty.  Both of these topics are a “third rail.”  Advice is widely known that these topics ought to be avoided in polite company.  Would you solicit opinion about politics with relatives whom you... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Survivor Guilt](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-survivor-guilt/): Yesterday I enjoyed the rare privilege of lunch with a good friend at a restaurant which we both find delightful.  We met at Taste of Paris in Mundelein.  In the middle of the week, we had the dining room to ourselves.  Under these conditions of increasing covid-19 contagion it felt safer to dine alone. ... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Worth It?](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-worth-it/): Our philosophy discussion last night was conducted via zoom.  Admittedly not as satisfying, but a conference call among six to eight people, their presence indicated by a postage-stamp scale image is better than nothing.  Evening comes earlier now, with the chill, precluding our custom of sitting in a big circle of chairs on the... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Art And Protest](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-art-and-protest/): Another mild fall day.  The pleasant weather betrays the darkness that roils our society.  Conditions present a surface quiescence, especially in towns such as mine, majority white, affluent, well ordered by the system.  My neighbors appear to be comfortable enough in their homes, most of us are able to work from home, and our... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, 'Beautiful' Or 'Ugly'](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-beautiful-or-ugly/): We are constantly making judgments, what we like and what we dislike.  These moments are hardly thought about.  Years have passed, we’ve journeyed far down our road of evaluative exploration.  As a reflex we simply respond to a visual impression, a scent, a taste, or to an idea either in sophisticated, nuanced, oblique approval... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Respite](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-respite/): Sunday morning, and a chill breeze  removes some leaves from our maple tree.  Red and orange colors begin to illuminate the tree.  Little seems changed in the last twenty four hours according to the NYT Weekend Briefing received this morning.  The president continues to be hospitalized with covid-19.  Reports of his condition are uncertain. ... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Paradise](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-paradise/): My Ancestors –  immigrated from Britain to escape religious persecution, intending to found a city set-on-a-hill, or paradise, which is another way of putting it.  In the haste to flee persecution, we overlooked our streak of self-righteousness which we inadvertently transported to the “new” world.  Early in our settlement in Massachusetts we had a... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Divine Retribution](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-divine-retribution/): I woke and read that the President and his wife have tested positive for coronavirus.  She says that she feels fine.  Of course the NY Times Morning report mentioned well wishes received from many world leaders.  I am not so sympathetic.  Given the presidents attitude of disdain for social distancing, for wearing a mask,... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, The Unprayable Prayer](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-the-unprayable-prayer/): THE DRY SALVAGES* (No. 3 of ‘Four Quartets’) by T.S. Eliot I I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river Is a strong brown god—sullen, untamed and intractable, Patient to some degree, at first recognised as a frontier; Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce; Then only a problem... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Debate Analysis](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-debate-analysis/): I did not watch the debate for egotistical reasons.  What could the President possibly have said, that he does not say on a daily basis on twitter?  What could he possibly show, that he has not demonstrated already?  Besides, I’ve already voted.  Of importance to me is my rest.  Why jeopardize a good night’s... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, A Refuge In Cynicism](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-taking-refuge-in-cynicism/): In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would,at the same time,believe everything and nothing,think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. ….Mass propaganda discovered that its audiencewas ready at all times to believe the worst,no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceivedbecause... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Squinting](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-squinting/): 7. Moral code for psychologists —- Never observe for the sake of observing!That gives a false perspective, a squint and something forced and exaggerated. A born psychologist guards instinctively against seeing in order to see;the same is true of the born painter. He never works “from nature”;he leaves it to his instinct, to his... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Monsters Ball](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-monsters/): Soon it will be October.  Taking a bike ride into town yesterday, I looked for the seasonal Halloween decorations that households and businesses create to celebrate the October 31st children’s holiday.  Halloween is second only to Christmas as an event to be anticipated.  Who doesn’t love to “dress up?” Monster costumes are popular. Children... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Fall Dreams](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-fall-dreams/): The days continue to be warm.  Frost seems far away.  Weather conditions can change suddenly though, within a few hours.  The tilt of the earth is the primary determinant, as days are shorter, and there’s less energy with the oblique angle of the sun’s rays.  Energy exchange is the story of life, and of... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, To Be Conscious](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-to-be-conscious/): II Garlic and sapphires in the mudClot the bedded axle-tree.The trilling wire in the bloodSings below inveterate scarsAppeasing long forgotten wars.The dance along the arteryThe circulation of the lymphAre figured in the drift of starsAscend to summer in the treeWe move above the moving treeIn light upon the figured leafAnd hear upon the sodden... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Ripping Out The Guts](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-ripping-out-the-guts/): The Balrog reached the bridge. Gandalf stood in the middle of the span, leaning on the staff in his left hand, but in his other hand Glamdring gleamed, cold and white. His enemy halted again, facing him, and the shadow about it reached out like two vast wings. It raised the whip, and the... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Watching A Conflagration](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-watching-a-conflagration/): We discussed Buddhist principles last night.  That is, we worked at re-training our minds to process a way of thinking.  We’re habituated to think that life is basically problem solving, according to widely accepted principles of cause and effect logic.  Major principle, minor principle then the conclusion follows: problem solved.  If “the problem” presented... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, A Piece Of Fate](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-wheel-in-the-sky/): A friend reached out to me, inquiring of my thoughts on treatment options he had been presented for a recurrence of cancer.  I briefly awakened at 3AM thinking about what I would say.  Cancer is a serious illness, terminal if not treated.  The overture for a philosophical response could not have been more pragmatic... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Oh No...](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-oh-no/): Not another obscure, obtuse post….  Everyone knows that it’s not a good idea to keep causing pain to your readers.  I’ve been warned by others who care about my happiness.  But I knew already the difficulty of the self imposed task to comment upon philosophical concepts regarded as radical, beyond the pale of common... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Math Isn't Real, (What's Real?)](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-math-isnt-real-whats-real/): Sunday morning, I retrieved the New York Times from the end of the driveway.  Sorting the sections of the paper, after discarding the advertising inserts I brought the Magazine section to my desk.  The first article, entitled After Math is about the musing of a teenager (while applying makeup) about whether math is real... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Detonation And Firestorm](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-detonation-and-firestorm/): I slept soundly enough last night.  The news late Friday was of the passing of Supreme Court Judge, Ruth Bader Ginsburg.  Justice Ginsburg’s death is a momentous event, a breaking away of the keystone if you will, of a liberal (humane) democratic society as we have known it, as imperfect as it has been. ... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, A Strident Cacophony](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-cacophony/): The Socrates Café met earlier this week.  Seven or eight of us began by discussing the challenges of listening mindfully, carefully to what someone of a different culture has to say.  Listening well is quite difficult.  A member of our group asserted that we Caucasian Americans are accustomed to speaking, to the expectation that... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, A Dog Named Boo](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-a-dog-named-boo/): Silly me.  Why should I write about this song?  Perhaps an ironic silliness is my hold upon sanity?  Never mind. In our discussion session on Buddhist philosophy, we mused together about the few possessions owned by those most intent upon practicing the prescripts of the Buddha’s message. A monk owns a saffron robe or... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Buddhism Lifeline or Straw?](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-buddhism-lifeline-or-straw/): Why Buddhism? We began several sessions to consider concepts entailed in Buddhism; not easy or comfortable for Americans who are natural pragmatists.  Habits of thinking by categorizing, labeling experience is our default.  Buddhist thought is a bid to move in another direction:  reality as seamless, metaphysical monism.  There is no purity or pollution, birth... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Freedom - Another Word For Nothing Left To Lose*](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal/): I have the website for The Leo bookmarked. The Leo is an independent, “alternative” newspaper published in Louisville, Kentucky.  The editorial slant is unapologetic and progressive.  The coverage of culture and local happenings is extensive and well written.  I’ve visited Louisville a number of times and find the town on the Ohio river stimulating. ... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Photography & Violence](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-photography-violence/): Photography has been an interest for many years.  In high school I began taking my fathers Kodak box camera to the drag strip.  Imagine using a camera with a 1/30th second shutter speed and 100 ASA  film to record the accelerating launch of a dragster.  My first lesson: a photograph depends essentially upon the... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Tailspin](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-tailspin/): A friend sent me a link to an article by Ed Yong, staff writer at The Atlantic.  The article by a science writer was an overview of America’s response to the pandemic; America Is Trapped in a Pandemic Spiral.  The article was nine pages of emotionally difficult reading.  I felt a sense of terror,... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Life Without A Castle](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-life-without-a-castle/): Waking this morning there is drizzle outside.  Weather extremes are devastating, and I am thankful, the proportion of sunlit days and to those with rain seems normal here so far.  Too much heat and vegetation becomes fuel.  Too much water, and flooding is the consequence.  Technology, or to say it more plainly, the application... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Philosophizing With A Hammer](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-philosophizing-with-a-hammer/): To stay cheerful in the midst of a gloomy task, fraught with immeasurable responsibility, is no small feat; and yet what is needed more than cheerfulness? Nothing succeeds if high spirits has no part in it. Excess strength alone is the proof of strength.  A revaluation of all values: this question mark, so black,... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, The View From The Wall](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-the-view-from-the-wall/): Thursday morning, One of my ancestors might have been a common foot-soldier in service of some Medieval nobleman.  In my imagination I am back in time, re-living his life, standing in place on a castle wall.  The crossbow is heavy.  I look over the countryside from the high vantage point to see the tents... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, For The Few](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-for-the-few/): 57 In every healthy society, three mutually conditioning physiological types separate out and gravitate in different directions, each one having its own hygiene, its own area of work, its own feelings of perfection and field of mastery. Nature, …, separates out predominantly spiritual people from people characterized by muscular and temperamental strength from a... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Destiny?](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-destiny/): Sitting under the maple tree, in front of the old Kane County courthouse built in 1892,  it has the architectural look and feel of another time.  Many that constructed the edifice remembered the War Between the States, and likely served in the Grand Army of the Republic.  That explains the impressive sculpture, imposing, on... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Hunger's Edge](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-hungers-edge/): The New York Times Magazine dedicated an entire issue to a photo exploration of hunger in America.  As you would assume the victims are predominately Black, Hispanic, women and children.  The photographs taken by Brenda Ann Kenneally in the course of a three month journey from Oneida, New York to San Diego, California moved... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, All The World Will Love You](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-all-the-world-will-love-you/): Who doesn’t want to be loved?  The desire/need to be loved and to love is universal for all humans.  Maybe the principle holds for all living things.  For a blade of grass, or a rose, — I cannot say.  I have observed that mammals seek out love, affectionate response.  A dog understands a kind... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, What Time Is It?](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-what-time-is-it/): Is it not interesting how we label time?  A week ago I made the mistake of assuming it was the Labor Day weekend — a week early.  I arrived at that conclusion despite evidence to the contrary.  The joke was on me.  Emotionally, my internal reality began to anticipate the three day weekend,– and... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Ignorance](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-ignorance/): I have completed the preface of a book, AGNOTOLOGY [The Making & Unmaking of Ignorance], edited by Robert N. Proctor and Londa Schiebinger.  The subject is “ignorance,” the history and the function of ignorance.  I was intrigued to select this book because there is current an outbreak of studied, deliberate ignorance, ignorance which is... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Dissonance](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-dissonance/): The Socrates Café group met last night.  As with the protocol for the last few sessions, a Go-To-Meeting video link was used.  There were six images of participants, in a double line across the screen.  For many reasons a digital representation of a human being lacks the vibrancy of physical presence.  We are at... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Time After Time](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-time-after-time/): What to write this morning?  There’s Trump-In-Kenosha, the topic of the President’s visit to a place where I have spent some time.  I know very well that I’d write more, what I have said many times before about this man.  I’d recount a litany of lies spoken, words which have nothing to do with... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, When The Shotgun Sings The Song...](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-civil-war/): We are on the edge of a storm according to a writer in The Atlantic and another in The Federalist. At the end of today’s edition of the NYT The Daily update of articles, I read a paragraph that stated that we are locked in a cold “civil war” as a nation. The journalist... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Without A Spark?](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-without-a-spark/): Monday, a week before Labor Day.  It’s early, and all is quiet outside.  Traffic is minimal.  The atmosphere is like a relative silence before an anticipated storm breaks with fury and unforeseeable destruction. There has been civil unrest in Portland, Oregon and Kenosha, Wisconsin.  In those places members of Trump-world, armed, and intent on... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Buddhist Thought And Violence](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-buddhist-thought-and-violence/): Today is Sunday.  I remember when growing up in North Carolina, Sunday was referred to as “the day of rest.”  That meant that it was customary to spend a portion of the morning in attendance at a church “worship” service.  Worship meant minimally that respect was shown for a shared tradition of stories and... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Posing As Conventions](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-posing-as-conventions/): There is a lot more offered on the internet than one can consume, even when one attempts to be judicious.  Recently I’ve listened to a podcast by Scott Galloway, a marketing professor at NYU.  I like his direct, no-nonsense manner of speaking.  If you’d like to sample the podcast, The Professor G Show,  CLICK... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Burlesque The Grand Illusion](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-burlesque/): As mentioned previously, I did not watch the Republican convention.  It was widely known that the Party was intent upon rebranding the brash, petulant, infantile Trump, as a stolid law n’ order leader, — “just the man that we need.”  I can’t stomach the lies.   A lesson of life, learned by dint of experience,... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Already A Shrapnel Casualty](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-already-a-shrapnel-casualty/): 54One should not let oneself be misled:great intellects are skeptics…..The vigor of mind,its freedom through strengthand superior strength, is proved by skepticism.Men of conviction simply do not come into considerationwhere the fundamentals of value and dis-valueare concerned. Convictions are prisons.They do not see far enough,they do not see things beneath them:but to be permitted... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Our Unmaking](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-our-unmaking/): We met again, a circle of lawn chairs in the setting sun, and then in the cool of early evening to discuss Reciprocal Altruism as a behavior germane to evolutionary development among living creatures.  The author of the essay which formed the basis of our discussion, cited the symbiotic relationship between cleaner fish removing... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Decadence](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-decadence/): The term is used often by Nietzsche in his writings.  I have quoted often, a few longish passages from The Anti-Christ.  There is no need for additional quotation here.  Nietzsche, living in the late 19th century saw clearly the precursors of Wiemar Republic, the Nazi cultic ideology and war that shortly followed.  In his... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Interlude](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-interlude/): For a Monday, why not take a break from the political chatter, from the reports of extensive wild fire damage in California, from reports of twin hurricanes that threaten Texas and Louisiana, and from the propaganda storm about to envelop us?  The last is a reference to the Republican Party MAGA convention. Yesterday in... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Decadence & Beatings](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-decadence-beatings/): I watched a 1972 Bob Fosse movie Cabaret last night with my wife.  I don’t usually prefer musicals.  I confess to a negligible background in music which constrains my appreciation of many varieties of musical expression. This movie impressed me as a layered, complex piece of story telling.  The musical pieces, served to show... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Watching Everything Burn](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-watching-everything-burn/): Saturday!  Here I am at my desk with conflicting emotions of gratitude (I made it to the weekend) and trepidation.  Challenges remain ahead.  I am sad, feel empathy for those in northern California who are in the vise of climate warming.  They watch as the land around them is scorched by wildfires.  How awful... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Improvisation](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-improvisation/): Yesterday, we watched as an old willow tree was removed from the back of our property.  The tree was just over our property line, and belonged to the Park District.  A neighbor said she remembered when the tree was planted.  The top of the giant willow was broken by a wind storm.  A crane... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Insanity Laughs](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-insanity-laughs-under-pressure/): The pressure of circumstances forces choices.  Those “choices” are less free than I formerly believed.  Free will!?  I doubt it.  I am aware of the juxtaposition of the impress of past events and encounters within my psyche. Does not the mind reflexively select to act upon the factors offering the best chances of survival? ... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Anti Science](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-anti-science/): 48The old God, all ‘spirit’,…all perfection,promenades in his garden:but he is bored.Against boredom the gods themselvesfight in vain.What is he to do?He invents man – man is entertaining…..But behold, man too is bored.God’s sympathy with the only kind of distressfound in paradise knows no bounds:He forthwith creates other animals.God’s first blunder:man did not find... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Change - It Had To Come](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-change-it-had-to-come/): Summer is waning.  In our child-like fantasy, we’d like endless summer.  Deceiving ourselves, we forget that in time we’d be satiated with the beauty, the days of amusement and play.  Boredom would overtake us soon enough. I entertained these thoughts yesterday while enjoying a “just right” lunch on the patio of the Makray Memorial... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Lost In Space](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-lost-in-space/): 43 If one shifts the center of gravity of life out of life into the ‘Beyond’ – into nothingness one has deprived life as such of its center of gravity. The great lie of personal immortality destroys all rationality, all naturalness of instinct, all that is salutary, all that is life-furthering, all that holds... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Down On Our Luck?](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-down-on-our-luck/): Yesterday I went for a short drive to Geneva as is my habit to do some reading, sitting on the ground under a maple tree in front of the old court house.  Gazing at the great old Civil War memorial statue that dominates the view from the courthouse, — the mood came over me... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, There Has Been Only One](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-there-has-been-only-one/): 39 The word ‘Christianity’ is already a misunderstanding – In reality there has been only one Christian, and he died on a Cross. The ‘Evangel’ died on the Cross. What was called ‘Evangel’ from this moment onwards was already the opposite of what he had lived: the ‘bad tidings’ a dysangel. It is false... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Appetite For Destruction](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-appetite-for-destruction/): Friday Reading this morning’s The Daily update of stories in the New York Times, I learned more detail about the Presidents attempts to de-fund and degrade the Post Office.  The Post Office is one of the venerable institutions of the government that has served many generations of Americans well.  The Presidents appointed Postmaster General,... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Where's Toto?](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-wheres-toto/): “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.” There is always a curtain.  There’s a lot going on that’s concealed, the necessary underpinning of what we experience as “normal” life.  The supply chain for example operates unobtrusively, silently, efficiently.  In times of social displacement, in the grip of anxiety which comes and goes,... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Stress](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-stress/): I participated in a video conferencing philosophy discussion group last night.  Given the images, screen facsimiles of acquaintances, along with audio, it was an enjoyable session.  I greatly miss the face to face, embodied dialog of the pre covid-19 era.  It is unclear if or when we will return to the traditional mode of... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Out-And-About](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-out-and-about/): Yesterday, I departed the house for my doctors office to keep my quarterly checkup appointment.  Motivated by the insistence of the insurance company that I be seen by my Doctor quarterly, I decided to keep the appointment.  I have risk on both sides, indeterminate health risk by moving around in public areas, and financial... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, True Belief](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-true-belief/): Yesterday I finished a chapter in The Rebel by Albert Camus entitled The Regicides.  Camus writes to detail the theoretical underpinning of the Jacobin Reign of Terror.  All opponents of the uprising against Louis XVI, indeed those in favor of the idea of divine right of kings  — were lead to the scaffold, put... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Religion II](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-religion-ii/): Since the beginning of civilization religion has been a mainstay for humanity to get through life.  That is, until recently.  More is to be said about the decline of traditional religion in our day to day lives. In our world reason is ascendant.  We look to our own resources of knowledge, the methodology of... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Religion](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-religion/): A magnificent morning.  The social distancing, self quarantine precaution against coronavirus does not mean that sunlight, green grass, the budding trees cannot be appreciated.  Indeed, for me this is the foundation of religion.  I am alive.  We are alive.  We, the human community live, in relation to the cosmos, sky, land, the red tulip,... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Freedom?](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-freedom/): Saturday.  Today if I am fortunate I will find a Bonsai, a miniature tree trained to grow, beautiful, in a dish.  You’ve seen them.  The cultivation of Bonsai is an artform perfected in Japan, originating in China.  A Bonsai is a fragment of nature, confined and cared for, in order to disclose the beauty... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Passion](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-passion/): The morning is magnificent.  A strong sun bathes everything with life-giving light.  Delicate vine plants, promising to blossom throughout the summer months ascend to the trellis, with perceptible growth by the day. In company with my daughter I visited Home Depot yesterday.  Our mission was to purchase some plants, and to buy the foundation... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Grape Hyacinth](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-grape-hyacinth/): The truth of a grape hyacinth exceeds that of a man who *fabulates daily, foisting sociopathic reality upon all who need a cause, or have something to gain, or who are just lost in the kaleidoscopic zeitgeist of endless marketing.  I arrived at this conclusion, peering through the lens of my camera on a... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Rain](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-rain/): It is raining outside.  A gray day, but timely for the spring vegetation.  Nature is more reliable than human nature.  I say “more” because there are interruptions in natural processes, sometimes severe ones such as the little ice age (1303-1860) which brought cold and wet summers, failed crops and famine to Europe.  Human nature... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Sunshine](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-sunshine/): The day dawned with spring sunlight streaming through the trees.  I left for a short 5 minute drive to the outpatient lab for a fulfillment of a blood work order.  For a diabetic the quarterly blood panel work up discloses the balance of health, or a possible downward spiral…  I was met in the... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, The Backward Look](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-the-backward-look/): The essay was entitled Against Cheerfulness, written by a female philosopher, Mariana Alessandri.  Only a female would have the fortitude to mount an assault upon the Boy Scout code.  Often it is from the outside that one is able to see more clearly.  Especially an attack that illuminates the fault line between the admonition... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, In Retrospect](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-in-retrospect/): Quarantine imposes a discipline.  One has time to attend to important, the most important tasks, which otherwise we have put off because we were so busy, our schedule so full.  Now, there is no schedule.  I have in mind the salutary duty of taking stock, of a backward look to see where one has... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, The Social Vaccuum](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-the-social-vaccuum/): Today, Saturday begins almost as if the abstraction, the day of the week label is useless, without significance.  The routine of work, the necessary expenditure of effort with others, to meet basic needs, — having been interrupted by a quarantine, any day seems like any other.  The distinction is lost, of work schedules texturing... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, The Logic We Live By](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-the-logic-we-live-by/): After finishing Albert Camus’s work, The Plague, I returned to the text to mark several sections of singular philosophical statement.  The segment chosen this morning is relevant to consideration of our post-covid-19 return to “normality”, the start-up of the economy.  It is unclear what economy will be possible.  Capitalist economies are marketplaces designed for... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Trying To Stay Alive Like People Do](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-trying-to-stay-alive-like-people-do/): Thursday, another day in a week of quarantine.  The days run together.  I am bereft of the normal routine of work that structures our sense of time.  There is more mulch to be moved, to spread around the yard.  The mind’s focus necessarily is restricted to the boundaries of one’s own house.  There’s nowhere... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Earth Day](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-earth-day/): I have never paid attention to Earth Day.  April 22, set aside to pay homage to the home which we share with all living beings as been on the periphery of my awareness.  No longer.  The global condition that we now find ourselves, searching for a treatment, a vaccine for the covid-19 virus —... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Vertigo](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-vertigo/): Waking at my usual time, I confess being disoriented.  I admit that my blood sugar was very low.  On that account alone it is not surprising that my body, felt like it was Sunday.  The calendar reads Tuesday.  Well informed individuals know that the mind’s function depends upon the brain.  The brain is an... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Dying For Love](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-dying-for-love/): I am revisiting passages in The Plague by Albert Camus.  I am interested in lynch pin ideas which Camus presents through his characters.  In this passage is conversation is held between Rambert, a Paris journalist trapped in plague infested Oran, Dr. Bernard Rieux, the surgeon who is the narrator, and Jean Tarrou, the best... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Runnin' w. the Devil](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-runnin-w-the-devil/): So this is what is meant by freedom.*   What happens if they do not get what they want, when they want it, in full measure? Then what? Not that I care if they were to get exactly what they bargain for, — as long as it does not involve anyone else.  Unfortunately, what... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Descent](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-descent/): I subscribe to the New York Times Sunday edition.  The diverse content, the quality of journalism and fine writing provide a weeks-worth of pleasurable reading.  The Arts and Leisure section for Sunday the 12th (Easter) featured a piece entitled Searching for a Jesus Who Looks Like Me.  The topic was the range of personal... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Spring Unfolding](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-spring-unfolding/): Saturday, is a first day of the weekend.   For most of us, a day for chores, those more involved projects that cannot be included in the routine housekeeping.  By routine, I refer to cleanup after the delivered pizza is consumed, or making the bed after you’ve risen into the mornings sunlight.  That sounds like... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Snowfall](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-snow/): Today it is snowing.  This will be the biggest snowfall of winter….  That’s right, it’s spring already.  Yet another reminder that Heraclitus was right.  Change is the one thing we an depend upon.  You cannot step into the same river twice.  Something worth thinking about. I shoveled mulch yesterday.  Shoveling, spreading mulch is not... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Skittering](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-skittering/): Social distancing, a general quarantine for good reason; the coronavirus, extremely infectious, has no treatment.  If infected, one has minor or no symptoms.  Alternatively after days of fever the virus progresses for replication in the lungs, requiring a ventilator to keep one alive, until one recovers or dies.  What more motivation would one need... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, The Road Ahead](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-the-road-ahead/): A friend wrote about the creativity, comity, the shear effort to offer assistance in this time of necessary quarantine.  Yes, there are innumerable acts of sacrifice, a dedication of time, perhaps of groceries to a person who was in need of the help.  Such expressions of our shared humanity, the vulnerability and community orientation... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Easter Redux](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-easter-redux/): It occurred to me that my Easter related commentary, no matter how heart felt, was certainly obtuse, and irrelevant to almost everyone who might happen upon those paragraphs.  Religious categories,  theological language does not figure in to the lives of my contemporaries.  Easter as a religious event, to remember a resurrection, something that continues... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, A Fan Of The Man](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-a-fan/): Granted it is unusual for someone who insists that Jesus is not God, or ‘a god’ on Easter morning to nevertheless be a fan.  Yes, I am a big fan of Jesus, one of his proponents, one who is convinced by his message and by his style of encounter with his contemporaries ….  Just... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Dark Joke](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-dark-joke/): Easter.  The morning itself is straight forward enough.  A soft light suffuses through the thin grey cloud cover.  The green of spring under velvet light, light without shadow, no sharp edges, strikes me as as it should be.  Things are not as they should be.  Shadows abound, there’s blood, and one must take unceasing... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Effulgence](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-effulgence/): That word describes the response of the germ of life to the sun’s warmth.  We see it all around this time of year.  I noticed it yesterday.  My camera helps me to be more careful as I take note of how fortunate it is to be alive to see all of this happening.  The... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Good Friday?](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-good-friday/): The day passed with no more than the usual fretfulness over the prospects of staying healthy.  Also, hoping, praying that the economy and society will  be intact, when the quarantine is lifted.  I did the usual seasonal chores around the house and yard.  It never occurred to me once that today was Good Friday. ... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Waking](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-waking/): Waking this morning, I remember what it was like to awaken as a child.  Children are permitted to live in an idyllic world.  They are cared for, they are at the beginning of a long learning curve, of all that responsibility entails.  With responsibility comes stress.  Stress is what it is like to be... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Plato](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-plato/): My wife mentioned that social distancing is expected to hold until the end of May.  Not sure what that means.  I doubt that I will be able to resume my past routine, trusting luck to hold out…..  Even if one recovers from such a serious illness, surely the experience must be life altering. I... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Old Guy W. Big Plans](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-old-guy-w-big-plans/): I know it’s not the Bonneville Dam on the Columbia River, but still, at the North Aurora Dam on the Fox River — the river has a voice.  At the end of my bicycle ride yesterday I found the fishermen absent from the elevated spot at the end of the dam.  I walked up,... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, A Fog](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-a-fog/): It is Tuesday, April 7.  Waking this morning, the mind clouded, a fog of mental disorientation, like glaucous light filtering through an aquarium,  I reached over and snapped off the alarm on the clock radio.  I believe I heard the opening notes of Dancing Queen by Abba coming from the speaker.  At the conclusion... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Making More Stupid](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-making-more-stupid/): It is Holy Week.  Yesterday was Palm Sunday.  In five days Good Friday, and then Easter Sunday.  Given the siege of the covid-19 virus all houses of worship should be on hiatus, observing the social-distancing regime in order to save lives.  That is not the case though as several mega church pastors have indicated... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Photos and Hope](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-photos-of-hope/): So much has changed over the past two, three weeks.  Social distancing is mandatory, the coronavirus is more contagious than anything that we’ve known is pushing New York City hospital doctors to exhaustion.  We still do not have the testing resources that we need, are blind to the extent of the sickness. This morning... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Believing Into A Void](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-believing-into-a-void/): Today is Saturday.  I awakened and checked the news feed on my iphone.  According to the  New York Times, by executive order the President has stopped all shipments to foreign customers, of masks which could be used at home to fight the Covid-19 virus.  Never mind that the Germans, the Canadians have already paid... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Getting Away With It](https://everyangel.org/getting-away-with-it/): America and Americans have been able to do whatever we wanted — and gotten away with it.  We spread our footprint over this continent, then our influence over the rest of the world — and have got away with it. Others have admired us for the range of our freedoms, how we’ve celebrated liberty,... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Time Out](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-time-out/): Yesterday was my birthday.  Yes I know, April 1st is the day set aside so that everyone can play the jokester if they desire.  That fits my temperament.  Life is highly improbable, unlikely, fragile and thus is suitable material for ironic humor.  What are the odds that I am here, that I continue to... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Closed](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-closed/): We are at the beginning of a hard time.  My father’s generation knew the beginning of hard times when Pearl Harbor was attacked.  They responded to the demands of those circumstances.  They passed the test. We will know if we have passed our test in the months that are to come.  One never knows... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Stupefaction](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-stupefaction/): This morning I drove to Geneva.  Before the onset of the coronavirus, I used to travel the 10 minute drive to the Starbucks at the corner of 3rd and State Street.  As a matter of habit I looked forward to beginning my day with an hour of writing.  I learned the names of several... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Shizuka](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-shizuka/): In my early 20’s I lived for several years in Tokyo.  One of my first memories of that very big city was a visit to a coffee shop.  The place was small, just a few tables, as are most such places in big cities.  Located below grade in a basement, it was dark, haze... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Early Report](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-early-report/): The news is not good.  I read the Weekend Briefing from the New York Times this morning.  While reading, a chill came over me.  The realization came, that I am an observer of these events — and a participant. We Americans do not like being told what to do.  Authority, even legitimate authority provokes... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Zhangke](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-zhangke/): China has been much in the news.  Over the past several weeks we have heard of the measures the Chinese government has taken to combat the spread of the covid-19 virus which emerged in Wuhan.  The direct and severe restrictions on travel, and imposed confinement seems to have blunted the spread of the potentially... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Whole Lotta Water](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-whole-lotta-water/): These are unprecedented days.  Nothing like this has come before in my memory.  The science fiction writers have imagined stories of circumstances that massively threatened the survival of humanity, stories of microbes.  Remember War of the Worlds by Orson Wells?   As a kid I remember sneaking an illicit reading of the story from a... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, 2+2≠5](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-22%e2%89%a05/): I shared my thoughts about the inspiring scale, the dispassionate ineluctable “thusness” of Nature as observed/felt in the mighty advance of a river over a dam as it flows to the sea, and the life-form of a virus.  Upon reading the post a friend inquired if I could put my point in a more... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, 2+2=4](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-224/): The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding. On the whole, men are more good than bad; that, however, isn’t the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Life's More Fun](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-lifes-more-fun/): Tuesday.  The weather grows a few degrees warmer by the day.  What if I ride the bicycle north, on the path alongside the river toward Geneva?  The drive to Geneva takes about 10 minutes, so that will be an easy bike ride.  I’ve used the Schwinn bike more since the imposed seclusion to the... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Sunday, Sunday](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-sunday-sunday/): Sunday, Sunday, so good to me… Ok, I know those are not the lyrics of the song by the Mamas and the Papas.  It is supposed to be Monday, Monday, etc.  I exercised license to substitute Sunday for the purposes of my reflection, my need to look back in order to compose a narrative... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Finding Solace](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-finding-solace/): Life goes on, life is, must be lived, on the cusp of catastrophe, in the midst of chaos, and also, in the aftermath of the storm.  There is always work to be done,  and moments of joy to be savored. I spent the better part of my day yesterday out of doors.  A substantial... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, The Dying Begins](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-the-dying-begins/): Saturday breaks sunny, cool and not unusual for March.  The number of deaths due to covid-19 begin to increase dramatically.  The Mayor of New York made a public appeal for medical supplies, stating that the hospitals would run out of needed supplies in early April.  As usual the promises of test-kits, just ordered, to... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, To Put Up a Fight](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-to-put-up-a-fight/): How long is this going to last?   Here in Illinois we continue to practice the advisory social distancing.  There is no order to remain at home as is the case in San Francisco, or the deployment of the National Guard as in New Rochelle, New York.  We Americans are quite slow to recognize that... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, The Bounds of Possibility](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-the-bounds-of-possibility/): Perhaps I ought to select a unique title for what will be or has been written today.  Though, the order of the day, and for many days ahead will be “social distancing.”  The days ahead will entail a large helping of boredom. That means avoiding contact, as close of 6 feet with others.  Remaining... Read More Read More - [Wrapped Up In Ourselves](https://everyangel.org/wrapped-up-in-ourselves/): When a war breaks out, people say: “It’s too stupid; it can’t last long.” But though a war may well be “too stupid,” that doesn’t prevent its lasting. Stupidity has a knack of getting its way; as we should see if we were not always so much wrapped up in ourselves. In this respect... Read More Read More - [Say Goodby To Main Street](https://everyangel.org/say-goodby-to-main-street/): The return drive to Illinois was uneventful, as has been the case in normal times.  These are not normal times.  The covid-19 virus is spreading.  The symptoms have not yet become apparent as the virus spreads exponentially, and quietly begins to live within our bodies, before we become really, really sick.  Many of us... Read More Read More - [On Stupidity](https://everyangel.org/on-stupidity/): Stupidity cannot be cured with money, or through education, or by legislation. Stupidity is not a sin, the victim cannot help being stupid. Stupidity is the only universal capital crime; the sentence is death, There is no appeal, execution is carried out automatically, without pity. (natural laws have no pity) *** The truth of... Read More Read More - [Sunday Morning At The Derby Inn](https://everyangel.org/sunday-morning-at-the-derby-inn/): Rising early to read and write I sat in the early dawn light here in the lobby at the Best Western Derby Inn in Eagle River.  The slant of the sun illuminates the line of white birch trees in the distance.  I exchanged morning greetings with one of the managers just after she had... Read More Read More - [Where Is Your Brother?](https://everyangel.org/where-is-your-brother/): And the LORD said to Cain, “Where is your brother Abel?” “I do not know!” he answered. “Am I my brother’s keeper?” “What have you done?” replied the LORD. “The voice of your brother’s blood cries out to Me from the ground….   Genesis 4:9-10 Yesterday government response to the covid-19 virus was reaching a... Read More Read More - [Born Again Trump-Style](https://everyangel.org/born-again-trump-style/): The mass movementabsorbs the individual,by stripping the individualof his opinions, tastes, and values.He is thereby reducedto an infantile state.This is what the new birth really means:to become like a child,and children are primitive beings,credulous, followers,members of a pack. — Eric Hoffer What curious, weird creatures, we humans are !  I feel quite old, Yoda-like... Read More Read More - [The Glittering Dance](https://everyangel.org/the-glittering-dance/): The glittering dance of brilliants must be strung on that dark thread of sadness which is time. Vernon Scannell (1922-2007) These lines of verse by a British poet came to me as a precise summation of my feelings while absorbing the tune and lyric of Townshend’s anthem/prayer for solidarity, Join Together.  Viewing the video,... Read More Read More - [A Million Ways To Laugh](https://everyangel.org/a-million-ways-to-laugh/): Rain had fallen all day.  At dusk I had just turned on the ignition; the motor came to life along with the radio.  In reverse, I slowly backed the few feet toward the road, half listening.  The announcer said that the president was about to hold a press conference on the covid-19 crisis.  By... Read More Read More - [Falling To Rise](https://everyangel.org/falling-to-rise/): Falling in order to rise…… The destruction of received models and forms is necessary in order to clear a space for spontaneous thought to arise. From the cathedral of our own feelings, from the void of the blank canvas, then, comes the space for revelation. We are fragments of an unattainable whole. Meaning is... Read More Read More - [Interlude: Che vuoi?](https://everyangel.org/interlude-che-vuoi/): The 1968 song was written by Dan Penn and Spooner Oldham for Alex Chilton of the Boxtops.  The “Cry like a baby” tagline came to Oldham in the early morning hours at Porky’s Diner across the street from the studio.  Penn and Oldham returned to the studio and finished the song in a few... Read More Read More - [Ice & Fire](https://everyangel.org/ice-fire/): Attempting to walk from Batavia north to Geneva along side the river I soon came to a tall cyclone fence.  Private property.  I turned around along with another couple who likely had the same intention as I.  I’ll simply have to find another way to walk northward along the river to Geneva.  There’s the... Read More Read More - [House Fire](https://everyangel.org/house-fire/): Yesterday was the day after the going-out-of-business announcement of Art Van Furniture.  The Metro Detroit based company folded just three years after being purchased by a private equity firm, Thomas H. Lee Partners. The firm purchased the Midwest largest retail furniture and mattress retailer, founded in 1957 by Archie Van Elslander.   Thriving for... Read More Read More - [Mediation Toward the Future](https://everyangel.org/mediation-toward-the-future/): Uncertain about what to write this morning.  The coffee shop was jammed at 7AM.  Fortunately I claimed the last open table. Yesterday I took a hour long walk along the Fox river into town.  Soon, the singing of the wind through the tall oaks, the voices of the Canada Geese on the water replaced... Read More Read More - [The Agora](https://everyangel.org/the-agora/): Once again we met last night at the Agora in Geneva.  I use the term as a metaphor for a public meeting space, the Barnes & Noble at Geneva Commons.  As in Socrates day a circle of us gathered to ask questions which have no final answer, the enigmas that have and will follow... Read More Read More - [Making It To the Other Side..](https://everyangel.org/making-it-to-the-other-side/): Life can be imagined in many metaphors.  Word-images “say” more that any formulaic, extended description, a one-to-one correlation between word/syntax and external reality.  Life cannot be reduced to any logical, rule like convention.  The metaphor rising in my imagination labeled “life” is the memory of a river rafting experience on the Hood River in... Read More Read More - [Safe Harbor](https://everyangel.org/12030/): Unchained Melody Oh, my love My darling I’ve hungered for your touch A long, lonely time And time goes by so slowly And time can do so much Are you still mine? I need your love I need your love God speed your love to me Lonely rivers flow to the sea, to the... Read More Read More - [What Happens To Women?](https://everyangel.org/what-happens-to-women/): What happens? Yesterday the news came that Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar dropped out of primary contention. The day before it was Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana who called a halt to his bid to be the candidate for the Democratic party.  I assume both are throwing their support to former... Read More Read More - [Happiness In One Easy Step](https://everyangel.org/happiness-in-one-easy-step/): To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost. — Gustave Flaubert I have been a fan of “good quotes” for many years.  At the prompting of a professor in grad school I began writing in a pocket-sized notebook memorable lines discovered... Read More Read More - [Life Itself, You Might Say](https://everyangel.org/life-itself-you-might-say/): Teachingis a kind of learning,much like loving,mutual goings-on,mutual forbearance,life itself, you might say. But how shall I improvethe swiftly-dimming hour?I shall deteriorate amid bucolic dreamsand gather in my fate.There’s lots worse ways than that. Alas,some goodbyes are like death;they bring the heart to earthand teach it how to die. Excerpt, Farewell to Teaching By... Read More Read More - [Nothing But The Dead and Dying](https://everyangel.org/nothing-but-the-dead-and-dying/): Consequent to a phone conversation with a friend yesterday, I was asked to write about the covid-19 epidemic that is much in the media.  His suggestion seemed like a good idea to me.  Who is not aware of the recently discovered virus, belonging to the corona family that has made many sick in Hubei... Read More Read More - [Again](https://everyangel.org/again/): Creatures of habit.  I am, — no question about it.  Yesterday I walked away.  I left a place where I have worked daily, departing from my role as owner of a company, the chief problem solver.  The wind-down has been gradual, beginning six months ago.  After a day of labor to tear down the... Read More Read More - [Leaving The Capsule](https://everyangel.org/leaving-the-capsule/): It is easy for the mind to indulge. The opposite is also easy, to renounce. To move to the extreme is easy for the mind. To remain in the middle, exactly in the middle, is the most difficult thing for the mind because it is suicide for the mind. The mind dies in the... Read More Read More - [Shaking](https://everyangel.org/shaking/): I read an essay written by a friend, a recollection of the 60s when our country was riven by division.  The up and coming generation took to the streets to protest the sending of their generation to kill Vietnamese, on the pretext of halting communism.  The rift in our society was political and ethical. ... Read More Read More - [Undoing](https://everyangel.org/undoing/): The systemic drive of capitalism produces cheapening labor (reduce input costs) expanding markets (new venues for profit) economic growth constant innovation in production ushering in a new order of economic reason, of governing rationality. Thus capital itself, gives shape to human worlds, the power of world making. Capital dominates the human beings, and human... Read More Read More - [Nothing Left Behind](https://everyangel.org/nothing-left-behind/): Shortly we will depart Galena.  A few hours of driving and we will be home again in Batavia.  We take leave of Galena but our few days here have given us memories enough for many days and hours of satisfied reflection upon the people that we met, and all that we learned. The last... Read More Read More - [Last Day](https://everyangel.org/last-day/): Today is our last day in Galena.  Our accommodations are about a quarter mile from the home where U.S. Grant and his family lived.  We could walk to the Grant place.  It is on a bluff. The elevation affords a grand view of Galena.  I consider that the high elevations around the town are... Read More Read More - [Galena Shooting Star](https://everyangel.org/galena-2/): It has been a while since visiting the Mississippi river town.  It is close enough for a short road trip, a get-away from the day to day routine of home base.  Everyone benefits from adventure.   Travel brings different scenery, others whose way of life differs from our own.  Who doesn’t desire to tell their... Read More Read More - [Waking Nightmare](https://everyangel.org/waking-nightmare/): DREAMING A WALL by Richard Blanco He hates his neighbors’ flowers, claims hisare redder, bluer, whiter than theirs, believeshis bees work harder, his soil richer, blacker.He hears birds sing sweeter in his trees, tallerand fuller, too, but not enough to screen outthe nameless faces next door that he callsliars, thieves who’d steal his juicier... Read More Read More - [Of Turtles and Worlds](https://everyangel.org/of-turtles-and-worlds/):        The Beginning 1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 2 Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. 3 And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was…. There is always a beginning, at... Read More Read More - [God N' Country N' Trump](https://everyangel.org/god-n-country-n-trump/): I grew up in the South.  I am a drag racing fan, and in general, I get the appeal of motor sports, any motorsport.  NASCAR has evolved into something, that in principle, has troubled me for a few years now.  Over the years racing American manufactured cars, has evolved from a regional motor sport... Read More Read More - [Politics and War](https://everyangel.org/politics-and-war/): If I had to provide a definition, I would say that politics has to do with the relationship between a collectivity and the available and necessary resources, with the aim of employing such resources to increase the happiness of the collectivity -if we understand collectivity as the sum of its individual members, and happiness... Read More Read More - [No Country For Old Men](https://everyangel.org/no-country-for-old-men/): Millions of Americans are wrestling with the impossibility of a traditional middle-class existence. In homes across the country, kitchen tables are strewn with unpaid bills. Lights burn late into the night. The same calculations get performed again and again, over and over, through exhaustion and sometimes tears. Wages minus grocery receipts. Minus medical bills.... Read More Read More - [The River & A Burnt Country](https://everyangel.org/the-river-a-burnt-country/): Yesterday was a mild, “feels like spring” day.  Enjoying the sunlight, we took the Batavia River Walk for a stroll southward towards the dam by the old Challenge  windmill factory.  A visit to the dam is a reminder of the immense power of flowing water, moved by gravitational pull toward the Mississippi River ultimately... Read More Read More - [Raising Rocks](https://everyangel.org/raising-rocks/): Convinced of the wholly human origin of all that is human, a blind man eager to see who knows that the night has no end, he is still on the go. The rock is still rolling. I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds ones burden again. But Sisyphus teaches... Read More Read More - [Living Within The Dream, Lucidly If I Can](https://everyangel.org/living-within-the-dream-lucidly-if-i-can/): Adventurers only exist within the time of their own mortality. No heaven or hell, no memory or glory lie beyond the moment in which their bodies start rotting. The time of adventure only exists as a ‘time of now’…..   Whatever we desire, we can only achieve within the narrow time of our biology. Before... Read More Read More - [China Girl](https://everyangel.org/china-girl/): Good work of any kind presents many potential insights.  One has to chose one’s focus, what to consider and write about.  Artists say more than they are consciously aware in their work.  The lyric of China Girl was composed by David Bowie and Iggy Pop in 1976.  The lyric and tune sizzle.  There are... Read More Read More - [A Poem By Philip Larkin](https://everyangel.org/a-poem-by-philip-larkin/): The Buddhist in me, really likes these verses.  Larkin’s words capture with unemotional observational precision the transience of life.  Given the amount of violence, not the TV theatrical variety, but bloody life-wrecking violence in our big cities, and in many places around our world, it is timely to take a step back.  You and... Read More Read More - [If (Can) Stones Talk?](https://everyangel.org/is-matter-conscious/): Good discussion last night.  The topic was, is revolutionary.  Revolutions are violent paradigm shifts, alternative ways of perception, and of self understanding.  Political revolutions are almost never a “good” thing, as the river of blood that results, provokes a corresponding violent, bloody response.  Revolutions of the intellect, on the other hand are desirable, a... Read More Read More - [Covering The Distance](https://everyangel.org/covering-the-distance/): A long process of religious self-delusion has been necessary to pass from the myth of the birth of work as God’s punishment for the original sin, to the infamous slogan covering the entrance to Nazi concentration camps, ‘Work will set you free.’ A process which covers the distance between the origin of the French... Read More Read More - [The Rest, All Construction](https://everyangel.org/the-rest-all-construction/): Wakening this morning, Tuesday, in a mental fog. I managed to stand erect, moving toward the kitchen, wondering how long until the thick malaise of mind would clear. Is this normal for a person my age, a diabetic of too many years…? What is normal? Is it the average, the median? There is no... Read More Read More - [Participating, willy nilly](https://everyangel.org/participating-willy-nilly/): No community can survivethat cannot survive the worst.We lack tragic imaginationthat through communal form or ceremony,permits great loss to be recognized,suffered, and borne,and makes possiblesome sort of consolation and renewal. If we are members of a society,we participate, willy nilly,in its evils.How do we reduce our dependencyupon what is wrong?Wrong will be corrected by... Read More Read More - [Lost: The Essential Spiritual Thread](https://everyangel.org/lost-the-essential-spiritual-thread/): Our culture emphasizes “building wealth” not “building places,” self-service over community life. Pragmatics, efficiency, metrics, metropolis. We have been sold a new vision of architecture, centered on convenience, comfort, the car. This vision erodes our connection to the land, and it is from the land from which we ultimately draw our vitality and viability.... Read More Read More - ['Tis Not Too Late](https://everyangel.org/tis-not-too-late/): What is to be done?  I cannot forget, by some means distract myself, from the darkness that invests Washington, and seems to be gathering strength.  This poem by Tennyson, giving voice to aged Ulysses, captures my sense of our situation.  The aspiration, given the constraints of age as well as the advantage of experience... Read More Read More - [Not A Small Discipline](https://everyangel.org/not-a-small-discipline/): Is there enough pride, daring boldness, self-assurance, enough spiritual will, will to responsibility, freedom of will available today for “the philosopher” to be from now on really —- possible on earth? The desire to see differently for once in this way is not a small discipline of the intellect, and a preparation for its... Read More Read More - [What Counts](https://everyangel.org/what-counts/): Friday morning is bright, a rare sunlit day for midwinter.  Mentally I wrestle with a better understanding of artificial intelligence, the future which accelerates toward me with self-driving vehicles and all manner of intelligent things busily analyzing my habits and tastes. I just finished reading a four page essay by Gilles Deleuze published in... Read More Read More - [Welcome To The Jungle](https://everyangel.org/welcome-to-the-jungle/): Welcome to the jungle, we’ve got fun and games We got everything you want honey, we know the names We are the people that can find whatever you may need If you got the money, honey we got your disease Have we been seduced into imagining that the day to day operation of government... Read More Read More - [What Thucydides Knew](https://everyangel.org/what-thucydides-knew/): I couldn’t listen.  Last night after our philosophy discussion ended I departed for home.  Tuning to NPR on the radio a few minutes after 9PM, the voice of President Trump filled the space around me.  His labored reading of lines, halting enunciation of words, caused me to cringe inwardly.  Feeling my disgust I changed... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Rebirth](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-revivification/): Monday, the weather has turned, the ice melts, the brown earth appears.  There is hope.  Life returns.  Living in the Midwest, one learns to take winter seriously.  Severe, single digit cold is an effective teacher.  Therefore, in the Midwest we celebrate the first hint of spring.  Over the weekend I completed planting preparation for... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Over The Edge](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-over-the-edge-2/): Sunday morning, the New York Times Weekend Briefing has again arrived in my iphone mailbox.  Among the usual topics is an overview of the Johnson and Johnson vaccine, an anticipated reinforcement in the push to immunize the population against accelerating transmission of the corona virus.  The pandemic aid bill which has gained House approval... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Vaccination](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-vaccination/): Yesterday we received the first of two vaccinations to immunize us from the coronavirus.  We received email notice from the Kane County Health Department that an appointment was offered.  I felt a reaction of relief, of thanksgiving.  Upon receiving the Moderna vaccine, if I should become ill, I am unlikely to be hospitalized or... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Opps](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-opps/): Wednesday I picked up the latest issue of  Adbusters Magazine at Barnes & Noble.  It is a Canadian publication with a global range of contributors.  The March/April issue is entitled, The New Left.  The title succinctly describes the editorial point of view of the publication.  The magazine uses graphic design to advantage, to clarify... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Dreaming](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-dreaming/): I dreamed last night.  It was unusual in brevity, in technicolor and in dynamism.  I was supervising the moving of a rather large, antique, turquoise finished wooden cabinet.  The beautiful cabinet was suspended by a sling, and a stout steel cable.  In my dream, something happened to the cable, the antique piece of furniture... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, House Hunting](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-house-hunting/): The most distant object that most folks can see with the unaided eye is also the closest major galaxy to our own Milky Way. Although the Andromeda Galaxy lies a mind-bending 2.5 million light-years from Earth, its trillion stars are enough to emit a strong glow across the vast reaches of space. Despite the wide gap, the... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Closer](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-closer/): Let’s start out with a song.  This one by the Canadian band Rush, Closer To The Heart.  The tune scarcely needs any comment. Closer To The Heart By Rush And the men who hold high places Must be the ones who start To mold a new reality Closer to the heart Closer to the... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, A Wildcat's Growl](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-a-wildcats-growl/): Recently I considered the books piled upon my desk.  I am fortunate to be able to purchase whatever I am inclined to read.  I am happy in a strange way, — happy like a soldier departing on a mission, grasping a rifle with clip of full metal-jacket rounds, and plenty of spare ammo.  I... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Ideals And History](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-ideals-and-history/): Yesterday I after months of delay I addressed the task of connecting our Toshiba combo VCR – DVD player to our new Samsung television.  The older Toshiba is an analog device.  Mating the old, by today’s standards, analog electronic instrument to a state of the art digital screen required some thought, and a bit... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Smokey Still Sings](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-smokey-still-sings/): In October of 2018 my wife and I were present at a Smokey Robinson concert at the Genesee theater in Waukegan.  I have received inspiration from Smokey Robinson songs for the entirety of my adult life.  Smokey Robinson is a living legend, the songs he has written, and the performances he has given have... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, To What Purpose](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-to-what-purpose/): BURNT NORTON By T. S. Eliot Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future, And time future contained in time past. If all time is eternally present All time is unredeemable. What might have been is an abstraction Remaining a perpetual possibility Only in a world of speculation. What might... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, What Is Coming](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-what-is-coming/): Difficult to write this morning. The weather is forecast to warm in a day or so in Illinois. We have had a week of single digit temps, which is not unusual for winter in the Midwest. In Texas, they have been besieged with severely below normal temps, and ice storms with snow. Power failure... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Che Vuoi?](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-che-vuoi/): I have no idea what to write.  What do I/you want?  (Che Vuoí?) That is the question.  Do I know?  Does anyone know?  Usually I do not think about it.  When I do, I realize how unsure I actually am, how torn, how tossed about by a confusion of inner voices. I offer a... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, The Old Photo](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-an-old-photo/): Yesterday with a strong grip upon duty, tedious but necessary, I began moving the 2020 photo files from the flash memory chip in my camera to appropriately labeled folders in my laptop.   The work entails several hours of peering at this laptop screen.  Photo organization is important if there is to be a... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Warming & Freezing To Death](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-warming-freezing-to-death/): What is there to say this morning…  It is zero degree Fahrenheit at 7AM.  According to the forecast the rest of the week is to feature temps around zero.  This is the Midwest, not a polar zone, so very little moves outside in these conditions.  Exposure is dangerous.  We misunderstand global warming.  Weather extremes... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Music And Deliverance](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-music-and-deliverance/): Yesterday was marked by two events.  I initiated and finished cleaning the shower.  The necessary and unpleasant biweekly chore was alleviated by my Spotify playlist of music.  I use several small fans to ameliorate the noxious fumes of the cleaning agent which removes hard water residue.  There’s no need to describe in further detail... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Not Enough Time](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-not-enough-time/): Yesterday I received report of my granddaughter’s visit to the physician.  She is a toddler, walking about, exploring, and babbling.  I sense that she is on the cusp of language.  She understands simple commands and responds with appropriate behavior.   She runs about her play area, with obvious excitement, laughing, to point out the... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, No Sympathy](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-no-sympathy/): The world, “reality” can be cruel and dangerous.  One ought always to keep  that in mind.  The United States is a civilized society, relatively “safe” depending on where you happen to be, upon the cash and credit cards you have in your pocket.  Nonetheless, this country is a legally and administratively violent society. Today,... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Stoned Love](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-stoned-love/): Words cannot assay the loss of a great soul, an artist who has manifestly changed the world, doing his/her part to leave behind a quotient of light.  All the more so in these dark days, days when so many are unsure what matters, or if anything at all matters.  Mary Wilson, founding member of... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, To Die Laughing](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-to-die-laughing/): Last night six or seven of us had a virtual discussion, that is, via screen image we considered the function of humor, the role of laughter in the grand scheme of life.  The launchpad was the short story, The Jokester by Isaac Asimov.  The conclusion of our hour and a half rumination, — a... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, A Step To The Block](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-a-step-to-the-block/): Why not start with a song?  An incisive, no-nonsense attempt to grasp what matters… Patience by Guns N, Roses 1, 2, 1, 2, 3, 4 Shed a tear ’cause I’m missin’ youI’m still alright to smileGirl, I think about you every day nowWas a time when I wasn’t sureBut you set my mind at... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Winter Rumination](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-winter-rumination/): Winter is a season for contemplation.  Time spent before a fireplace, is time well spent.  Single digit cold bewitches the mind, compelling a still spirit.  Focus is demanded by the elements of a near zero day.  A footfall is announced by a sharp note of compacted ice, exposed skin serrated by a chill wind.... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Remembering A Time](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-remembering-a-time/): The following is a guest post by Tobin Fraley. I would like to thank this blog’s host, Jerry, for allowing me to usurp his daily offering by giving me an opportunity to discuss a song I feel is of particular consequence in today’s atmosphere of hatred, blame, and violence, violence both real and threatened.... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Blindness In Early Afternoon](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-blindness-in-early-afternoon/): Saturday morning, I was beginning to dream a rather unpleasant series of visions of the up-and-coming 2nd impeachment trial of former President Trump.  Sufficiently conscious to recognize that sleeping-in would probably mean additional images from the cellar of my consciousness, I got up. Today is sunny, still, and quite cold, 5 degrees in fact. ... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Bright With Frost And Fire](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-bright-with-frost-and-fire/): LITTLE GIDDING (No. 4 of ‘Four Quartets’) I Midwinter spring is its own season Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown, Suspended in time, between pole and tropic. When the short day is brightest, with frost and fire, The brief sun flames the ice, on pond and ditches, In windless cold that is the heart’s heat,... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Getting To What's Real](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-getting-to-whats-real/): Tuesday evening a few of us “gathered” via virtual video and discussed the role of “awe” or put another way, “wonder” in the scientific enterprise.  Science is understood is a method of testing the reliability of a theory, our notions of the way things are/work.  This is difficult at best.  Scientists, all those who... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, As Is](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-as-is/): A friend asked me via email, “… just wondering why you are terrified of every angel? Even good angels?”  The source of the question was the poetic assertion from Rilke, “Every angel’s terrifying” that I chose as a tagline for this blog.  Her question came straight, not tongue in cheek, rhetorical. I do not... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Missing Child](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-missing-child/): A friend introduced me to The Wind In The Willows by Kenneth Grahame, published in 1908.  It is a children’s story of the adventures of Mole, Rat, Toad and Badger.  After reading the short book I learned the story had been a favorite of my youngest daughter.  Kenneth Grahame, a banker, served as the... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Contra Facebook](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-contra-facebook/): In a speech on January 28th at Brussels’ International Privacy Day, Tim Cook CEO of Apple had this to say.  Here is an excerpt from his speech: “Technology does not need vast troves of personal data stitched together across dozens of websites and apps in order to succeed. Advertising existed and thrived for decades... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Snow](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-snow-3/): Snow last night.  It is well that snow imposes a stillness upon all activity.  A still mind, like an unblemished surface of fresh snow is a gift.  There is much in the course of human affairs, tortured and neurotic, — we are a troubled mammal unlike our cousins (rabbits, raccoons, etc.) without language or... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Paradise](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-paradise-2/): I remember as child, to have a day off from school, away from the obligation, from the mental work/stress of learning, (the profession of childhood) was a release that filled me with anticipation.  The times have changed, as change is the given, — that up-welling of joy remains the same. Our two grand children,... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Failure](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-failure/): In a noisy bar in Avalon I tried to call youBut on a midnight watch I realized why twice you ran away Think aboutThink about how many times I have fallenSpirits are using me larger voices callin’What Heaven brought you and me cannot be forgotten.. So we cheated and we lied and we testedAnd... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, The Woods At Dawn](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-the-woods-at-dawn/): Today I awakened before dawn intent on walking into nearby Almond Marsh before sunrise.  I enjoy taking a walk with camera in hand.  Predictably the camera is an aid to careful observation.  A camera is a mechanical device that records only what the lens captures, without the distractions of a human mind.  Are we... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, For A Friend](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-for-a-friend/): A friend revealed last night that her cousin was dying.  She had little to say in terms of the detail, but it was clear that she was emotionally spent.  Love means grief over the torturous journey that a beloved must take, aware that debilitating bodily pain, as well as the beloved’s mental suffering cannot... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Saluting The Flag In The Snow](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-saluting-the-flag-in-the-snow/): It is snowing hard.  The stone buddha on the hill  is shrouded with white.  Nature is “what it is.”  There is no mask, no screen of projection, a proffered interpretation which Nature offers to the human mind.  There is no wrap of culture with regard to Nature, as is the case with human affairs. ... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Snow](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-snow-2/): Today is Monday.  Preparations for the impeachment trial of former president Trump are underway.  I heard on NPR someone interviewed about what the president knew about the plans of the mob who overran the Capitol on January 6th.  Does a mob have plans as such?  There is abundant evidence that the former president feels... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, No Time To Cry](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-no-time-to-cry/): Sunday, a day traditionally reserved for mindful reflection.  I awakened early this morning aware of a dream that I was leaving behind.  It was an interesting dream, unlike the violent, terror laced dreams that came on occasion during the Trump administration.  When you have a bully to contend with, the dreams are of panic. ... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Closer To Free](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-closer-to-free/): I would be remiss if I did not post something about the inauguration of President Joe Biden, and VP Kamala Harris.  That was an event that I wish that I would have been lucky to attend, not that attendance was possible under the current pandemic restrictions. It was a “normal” inauguration with  no prevarication, ... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, More Covid Please...](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-more-covid-please/): This written by David Leonhardt in today’s issue of The New York Times: Nationwide, about half of Americans are not wearing masks when in close contact with people outside their households, according to a survey released yesterday by the University of Southern California. Wearing a mask isn’t much fun. It’s hard to speak clearly,... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Interlude](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-interlude-2/): An interlude is a time for reflection, a brief “time out” to recall what has been written in the playbook, and to conceive a plan of attack.  Momentarily it will be “game on.”  The wonderful words said at the inauguration ritual will be past —  difficult, improvisational work will begin. One difficulty will be... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Under Siege](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-under-siege/): This from the New York Times: A capital under siege A presidential inauguration in the United States is usually a celebration of democracy. Hundreds of thousands of people descend on Washington to watch a newly elected president take the oath of office. A departing president signals his respect for the country by celebrating the... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Sort Of Glued Together](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-sort-of-glued-together/): More than I want to know, more than I ought to know about the riot, the attempted overthrow of an election…  There is a surplus of video taken of the January 6th assault on the Capitol.  According to the New York Times: It’s hard to think of another crime that the perpetrators documented so... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, MLK Day](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-mlk-day/): It is Martin Luther King Jr. day.  I regret that when King was active in the Civil Rights movement in the 1960’s I was indifferent to the events, to the suffering of Blacks across this land.  I did not go out of my way to hurt Black individuals, even felt “positive” about several who... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Friendship & Revolution](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-friendship-revolution/): I met with two friends yesterday at St. James Farm Forest Preserve in Winfield for a walk in the woods.  St. James Farm was originally a retreat of many decades for the McCormick family.  Chauncey and Marion McCormick purchased the farm in 1920.  He was the great nephew of Cyrus McCormick who invented the first... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Blood Is Heavy](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-blood-is-heavy/): I dreamed last night.  Surely the mental vision happened early morning just before waking.  Dreams are in the “coming to consciousness” phase of sleep. I found myself in a ruined city, at least it was partially wrecked, decrepit. Some few neighborhoods and thoroughfares were maintained and in use, — the rest, skyscrapers included were... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Work](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-work/): Late in the day, dusk was giving way to darkness and traffic was becoming heavier.  I felt relieved to hear the voice of Kai Ryssdal, the host of Marketplace on NPR radio.  There hasn’t been much good news lately.  I believe it is better to know, — to be “Socrates dissatisfied, than a pig... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, This Is This](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-this-is-this/): Praying the Covid away !  It isn’t working.  Sure, we have the freedom to wear or not wear a mask, to infect or not infect your family members or neighbors,…. The virus roars on, not unlike an out of control forest fire, driven by the Santa Ana wind of American “freedom.” How are we... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Good Coffee](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-good-coffee/): A good discussion last night on the writings of Martin Buber.  Here are some samples from Buber’s book, Ich und Du.  The German renders the title better than the English title of I and Thou.  Thou in English is sonorous, off putting, with religious connotations from the King James Bible.  In German, Du connotes... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Mackay In The Morning](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-mackay-in-the-morning/): As consciousness dawned this morning, from the clock radio came these sounds of exhortation:  “It’s the Mackay-in-the-morning show at 95.9, The River… — followed by the harmonious voices, a choir singing acappella the Rolling Stones anthem You can’t always get what you want.” I rose and thought to myself, “How perfect.”  What better battle... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Kristallnacht](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-kristallnacht/): The Night of Broken Glass.  Anyone who reads or hears that word ought to shudder, tremble with dread. I offer this statement of yesterday by former Governor of California, Republican, Arnold Schwarzenegger. Nothing need be added by way of comment to these words. If you page down to the commentary affixed to the Youtube... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Culture: Blocks Of Language Subjected To Pitiless Erosion](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-culture-blocks-of-language-subjected-to-pitiless-erosion/): The body politic twists, wracked from the clarity of what must be done, distended in a contrary direction by a customary shape-shifting accommodation.  Thus the odds are long that a decisive, kill-stroke will be delivered to the personification of anti-truth that looms over us…  Trump and his acolytes, either costumed and embellished with facial... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Attempted Murder](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-attempted-murder/): Still reeling from the events of Wednesday.  An armed mob, incited by the President of the United States, stormed the Capitol, roamed the halls of Congress, looting and posing for selfies with police officers.  This was the attempted murder of our democracy.  Not simply a lunatic fringe, a few extremists getting out of hand,... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, A Nice Day To Start Again](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-a-nice-day-to-start-again/): I awoke at 5:50AM a few minutes before the alarm would have aroused me from slumber.  In the darkness my first thoughts were that Friday is a nice day,  I have a fine vantage point to observe the demise of our democracy, our civil society.  Two days in the aftermath of a failed coup,... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Wilding](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-wilding/): I am numb after viewing the rampage of thousands of Trumpers around and inside of the Capitol building yesterday.  A mob of thousands gathered from throughout the country, listened to their revered leader Trump instruct them to storm the Capitol.  They proceeded accordingly.  It is beyond belief this was a spur of the moment... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Bells, Ring The Bells!](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-bells-ring-the-bells/): I awakened to the news that the Democrats appear to have won the Georgia runoffs.  That means that control of the Senate passes from the Trump Party to the Democrats.  The new Biden Administration stymied at every turn by a Republican controlled Senate would have been a nightmare four years in duration.  For me... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, A Walk Through The Woods](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-a-walk-through-the-woods/): I want to do things that I did when I was sixteen.  I would spend hours walking in the woods, in any season.  I carried a Mars Chocolate Bar in one pocket, my hunting knife on my belt, my 22 rifle in my hand, and a box of 50 shells in the other pocket. ... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, The End Of The World](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-the-end-of-the-world/): The day begins in darkness.  That is not new.  What is new is the effort of the President of the United States to overthrow the result of the election.  The days ahead will be critical.  And what of the  seventy two million who offered him their votes, who believe the Presidents version of “reality?” ... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Requiem For Loss And A Dream](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-requiem-for-loss-and-a-dream/): Sunday, January 3, 2021.  A new year begins tomorrow, Monday is the first work-day of the week, — the beginning of ordinary time.  We are exhausted psychologically by the severing of social exchange imposed by the pandemic.  The worst is yet to come.  Many have been ambivalent to the required measures necessary to slowing... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Monsters Everywhere](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-monsters-everywhere/): A light snowfall last night.  Everything is coated with white, beautiful and temporary.  Life for human beings is a mix of good and evil, light and darkness if you will.  We cannot speak directly about “good” or it’s opposite, evil.  We use metaphor to describe what we mean.  Plato’s allegory of the cave is... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, New Year's Day](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-new-years-day/): I did not remain awake til midnight for the departure of the old year  to celebrate the new.  Just before turning in I glimpsed television images of the Times Square “celebration” in New York.  The scene was outlandish, devoid of crowds, just the TV personalities outfitted as if  attending a monster’s ball.  The rhetoric... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Eros](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-2/): This the final day of the year 2020. What does the future hold for us?  And there is only us.  The worst delusion is to imagine that my fate is not entwined with that of others.  Each of us is individual, a paradox of sentiment and thought, one-of-a-kind in all of the world, indeed,... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Maybe Just The Touch...](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-maybe-just-the-touch/): What is the purpose of the cosmos? How could I possibly know?  I am “on the inside” as are you.  To know the purpose I’d need to be on the outside, – like a god.  An overview of the vastness of space, innumerable suns and planets need be encompassed in order to “know” the... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Drifting Away](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-drifting-away/): Three more days remain in 2020.  The year has been one of pandemic, and of the nation roiled by the incompetence of the Trump administration.  I am offended by incompetence.  A state of incompetence, the inability to carefully execute a task to completion is something expected of children.  When adults are incompetent, especially when... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Liftoff, Maximum Burn](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-liftoff-maximum-burn/): 1. Across the United States, thousands of businesses have closed during the pandemic, but the demise of so many beloved hangouts cuts especially deep. They were local landmarks — watering holes, shops and haunts that weathered recessions and world wars, only to succumb to the economic ravages of the coronavirus. 2.The myth of a... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Laughing](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-laughing/): I lived in Japan when this song was released in 1969.  A Canadian band, The Guess Who performed the tune, Laughing, which became the second of their three gold records.  The lyrics are simple and brutal.  Rare is the love song that is not a sad song.  The patience, courage, and luck demanded by... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Work In Retrospect](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-work-in-retrospect/): I am not sure when I learned to work.  Learning how to work, is open ended, a quest that one pursues over the arc of years until one no longer has any curiosity, or the will to expend further energy.  Work is the expenditure of energy in a focused fashion to achieve a more... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Nothing To Kill or Die For...](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-nothing-to-live-or-die-for/): I have mixed thoughts about Christmas.  Given that the story of Christmas happens to be about a working class couple, without adequate shelter, with responsibility to care for a new born child, — as long as my home is a “Christian” country that girdles the world with military bases, and has a military budget... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Like Cold Steel](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-like-cold-steel/): It is Christmas eve.  Conditions have turned bone chilling cold outside.  It is 12 degrees Fahrenheit according to the iphone weather app.  Those are unforgiving conditions, like the honed edge of a tempered steel blade. I read this report in today’s New York Times, written by David Leonhardt: Yet it is also clear that... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Memorial](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-memorial/): In the course of the philosophy discussion of this week, the alternative viewpoints, of freedom or of determinism came up.  This durable topic surfaces often with us.  How free are we?   Are we as free as we feel, as free as we were taught as Americans, a culture with a heritage of Enlightenment... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Losing My Mind](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-losing-my-mind/): Waking at 7AM this morning I felt particularly disoriented.  By dint of habit I made my way to the stairs, then to the kitchen.  At the counter I poured a bowl of Cheerios.  I mechanically assembled the elements of breakfast ticking off the components in turn: two packets of splenda, gallon of milk, banana,... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Look!](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-look/): Monday morning.  I had to ask a family member last night if this was the week of Christmas.  The pandemic has shorn social encounters, parties, appointments with friends, all cleaved from Christmas.  A chimera, a ghost of Christmas without heart is all that remains…  The sensation of giving and receiving, the tokens of a... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Solstice](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-solstice/): Sunday morning before sunrise.  Still dark outside.  I have the privilege of taking a nap later in the day if I choose.  Why not get up, do some reading, explore the contents of my mind?  Aspiring to find words to more clearly understand this time, the events occurring globally, in America, and in Batavia... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Pottersville?](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-pottersville/): I watched the Frank Capra directed film, “It’s A Wonderful Life.”  My wife and I viewed it together.  It is one of her favorite films.  With each viewing of this 1946 film, a Christmas fantasy tale from our parents generation, I understand better why the story has become one of her favorites. The philosophical... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Another Day In...](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-another-day-in/): It’s just another day in paradiseAs you stumble to your bed…. I know, that’s a fragment of song lyric ripped from the Eagles tune, Learn To Be Still.  Waking this morning, I felt existentially disoriented.  As expected there was little “good news” in The New York Times, The Morning update received via email.  Of... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Thoughts On Dying](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-thoughts-on-dying/): For over an hour those who knew Glenn O’Dell spoke of the impact of his life upon them, and of what they had lost on account of his death.  I barely knew Glenn.  I was a late comer to the Socrates Café discussion group.  I remember that he made me welcome to the circle,... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, God Talk](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-god-talk/): We discussed ideas from an essay by Stephen Law.  Law took pains to show that the concept of language games developed by Ludwig Wittgenstein late in his career do not provide immunity for theists from the intellectual assault of those who simply cannot believe.  I do not use the term “unbeliever” because it is... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, The End Of The Innocence](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-the-end-of-the-innocence/): I listened to the new reports last night of the delivery of the vaccine.  The Pfizer vaccine was quickly approved by the FDA and is now being distributed throughout the country.  An additional vaccine from Moderna is reported to soon be approved and follow.  I worked in a laboratory for several years.  I can... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Dying To Live](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-dying-to-live/): A few days remain before Christmas.  At this juncture in life, I am able to call to memory past Christmas seasons.  Christmas is the high point of a year, is it not?  A season of ending, as well as a season of anticipation. Something is about to begin.  The ending and the beginning are... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Building Castles](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-building-castles/): Society is an imaginary sphere in which different processes of signification interweave and interfere. The symbolic organization of this imaginary sphere is an effect of signification. I define “signification” as the building of a bridge of shared illusion over the abyss of the absence of meaning. Reality, by contrast, can be described as the... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, God Be With Us](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-god-be-with-us/): I was drawn to this Dec. 9, Washington Post article by Annie Gowin.  Here are several paragraphs: MITCHELL, S.D. — A cold wind whipped through the prairie as they laid Buck Timmins to rest. Timmins, a longtime coach and referee, was not the first person in Mitchell, S.D., pop. 15,600, to die of the coronavirus.... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Hand In Hand Over The bridge](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-hand-in-hand-over-the-bridge/): Friday brings the expectation of rain at midday.  Always I welcome the arrival of rain.  Drought is the condition that concerns me most here in the mid-West.  Weather patterns are crucial to the well being of all living things, the trees growing here before my arrival as well as the arbor vitae shrubs that... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Half Knowledge](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-half-knowledge/): What is outdated is not asking what is true and what is just, but viewing science…relegating it to the status of unlegitimated learning, half knowledge… The question, “What is your argument worth, what is your proof worth?” is so much a part of the pragmatics of scientific knowledge that is what assures the transformation... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, To Rise Up Again](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-to-rise-up-again/): Posting more holiday themed photographs will have to wait. I feel compelled to say something about our philosophy discussion of a few hours ago.  There were eight of us joining a Zoom video chat based upon a New Yorker article entitled Why Facts Do Not Change Our Minds.  That title speaks for itself.  The... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, On Context Control](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-on-context-control/): The difficulty with rape, is getting past the emotional wave of horror and revulsion, to ask “how are such acts possible in this or any civilized society?”  The #Me Too movement is not new.  Women have lived under the threat, and some have suffered from this manner of violence for 2000 years and longer.... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Dispersion](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-dispersion/): Another grey winter-like day.  More similar days are to come.  Much in life must be accepted. In the state of Georgia the scrum intensifies leading up to the January runoff between a pair of Republican and a pair of Democratic candidates.  The outcome will determine which party controls the Senate.  What if any difference... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Holiday Whimsy](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-holiday-whimsy/): We see the world, not as it is, but as we are. The saying is not original to me.  It’s something I read and never forgot.  Another argument for reading widely.  Reading can save one’s life.  Too often I find myself in a ditch, having painted all that I perceive with the color of... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Sneak Attack](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-sneak-attack/): A self does not amount to much, but no self is an island; each exists in a fabric of relations that is now more complex and mobile than ever before. Young or old, man or woman, rich or poor, a person is always located at “nodal points” of specific communication circuits, however tiny these... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Rilke](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-rilke/): And we, who have always thought of happiness as rising, would feel the emotion that almost overwhelms us whenever a happy thing falls. — Rainer Maria Rilke, The Tenth Elegy I suppose that my first few months of life were happy.  That is speculation.  I am not certain that I have at any time... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, The Anthropocene](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-the-anthropocene/): One might argue that the refinement and miniaturization of the intelligent machine, linked to the introduction of fuzzy dynamics in the quantic activity of AI, will lead androids to behave consciously… It is philosophically false, because consciousness is not behavior, but self-perception and self-judgment, self-enjoyment and self-loathing. this is the distinctive feature – ethical... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, On A Positive Note](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-on-a-positive-note/): Yes, most of the posts have been rather dark.  There’s the second law of thermodynamics, the fall toward entropy, which is unpleasant and irresistible to contemplate.  Things come apart, the center does not hold.  That is only part of the story as many of us know. A year represents a sliver of time, a... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, To Resist](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-resistance/): Why do you pick those old songs a reader will ask?  Honestly those are the songs that I know.  Those are the songs of my generation, that served to inspire, that firmed our resolve as some of us marched to protest a foreign war, a place where many young Americans took their last breath... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Endgame](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-no-one-left/): Monday morning, early, before sunrise.  Waking on account of “who knows what” I got up knowing that I would sort through the contents of my mind with words.  What is bothering me?  Perhaps it is the craziness of these times, the absolutely “wigged out,” insane behavior of too many of my contemporaries!?  Today I... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Where To From Here?](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-where-to-from-here/): Trumpism is an expression of the despair of impotent old white people in the age of globalization. Trumpism – a desire for supremacy that ignoramuses reclaim in the name of their own ignorance, supremacy of those who are aggressively competitive but lack the intellectual means to achieve. p. 106 The idiocy of protecting racial... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, If We Cannot...](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-if-we-cannot/): The 20th century was a century of the straight line, of yang rationality, of modernism and abstraction, The 21st century will be the century of the curve, of yin, of harmony and building with Nature. …if we cannot recover our innate empathy, find balance, and come up with a new tone, a new mood,... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Trevor Noah](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-trevor-noah/): People talk about melting pots,America’s a melting pot, South Africa’s a melting pot,melting pot, melting pot…What you forget is that what’s making the things in the pot meltis the fire….. There are no diverse places in the worldwhere people just came there for good times. — excerpt, interview with Trevor NoahTrevor Noah Is Still... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Hi-De-Ho Thanksgiving](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-hi-de-ho-thanksgiving/): Thanksgiving at last!  Thanksgiving day is the least commercialized of all our national celebrations.  The day of “feasting” goes back to the mythic founding of the nation.  The Pilgrims arrived and founded Plymouth colony in Massachusetts.  A deal was made with the Wampanoag tribe of indigenous people.  Indians indigenous to America had lived here... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Mysterium Tremendum](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-mysterium-tremendum/): We discussed ideas from an essay which treated the sensation that comes when one is aware of an object in Nature, experienced as overwhelming, awe inspiring.  German theologian and philosopher Rudolf Otto in his influential 1917 German book The Idea of the Holy, coined the term Mysterium Tremendum.  We are fascinated, attracted and paradoxically... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Perfection](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-irrational-impurity/): 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... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Lost Faith And Frenzy](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-lost-faith-and-frenzy/): 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... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Saying Goodbye To Mr. Hegel](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-saying-goodbye-to-mr-hegel/): 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... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Passin' My Own Shadow](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-passin-my-own-shadow/): Summer passes.  Yesterday Kamala Harris was introduced as Joe Biden’s VP running mate.  Already she is a lightning rod for name calling, character assassination.  A QAnon candidate from Georgia prevailed in the primary and is certain to be elected to represent that district in the House of Representatives.  I feel dismay on the one... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, My Stereo Turned Up High](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-my-stereo-turned-up-high/): We discussed philosophy last night, or made an attempt.  I made an effort, but just could not seem to “get there.”  We are all “ground down” by the pandemic, by the lies, betrayal, and conflict disseminated from the White House. Senator Kamala Harris has been selected as VP partner by Joe Biden.  The announcement... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Reading](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-reading/): What are you reading?  If you are looking at this blog, I am certain that you are a person who reads often, varied materials from a number of sources. –*– I subscribe to the New York Times Sunday edition.  There is enough interesting, well written, relevant material to keep me dipping into the sections... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Music, Manners, Nature](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-music-manners-nature/): Not too long ago, I was introduced to a candidate who is running for the Illinois Senate.  I took a piece of campaign literature which I kept.  I’ve examined the message and the layout of the piece at some length.  The banner tagline is three words that sum up this candidates programme.  Stimulated to... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Running & Calamity's Child](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-running-calamitys-child/): I thought about it off and on.  Part of my life recedes in the rear view mirror: running.  In my early years, those when I was a kid at play, or in the school yard, I loved to run.  Running was fun.  I always chose to run instead of walk no matter the occasional... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Melting In The Dark](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-melting-in-the-dark/): This is one of those most sad songs, MacArthur Park.  And everyone loved to hear it, to sing it in 1967. How can one not take Buddhism seriously?  The impermanence of all things, life as suffering, etc.  Everything passes, becomes unhinged, fails it’s intended function, etc.  Acceptance of such an assessment of our condition... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Slavery And Class](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-slavery-and-class/): Several posts ago I invited comment from readers who viewed the Netflix film, The 13th. The film title is a reference to the 13th amendment to the constitution that freed the slaves during the Civil War.  The point of the film is the loophole, an exception to universal freedom which we hear indefatigably advertised... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Help Wanted](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-help-wanted/): Naturally you will ask, “What position are you hoping to fill? What are the qualifications?”  My answer: I hope to interview candidates for the position of a “god.”  That’s right we have an opening for a qualified deity.  Similar to the CEO of a corporation, we need a symbol, a totem upon which we... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Walking](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-walking/): I’ve always enjoyed running.  As a kid if I could run somewhere rather than walk, I would run.  Around my 40th year, I began running every day, which served my general health, and “the kid in me” felt the old enjoyment.  It has been a few years since the daily habit of running, and... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Cucumbers & Slavery](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-cucumbers-slavery/): What is this?  Why it’s a potato cucumber that originates in India!  The vines love sun and moist earth.  The cucumbers are about the size of a golf ball.  They can be eaten without peeling, and have a slight lemony flavor. This is one of the garden “experiments” of this year that proved to... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Miscellany](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-miscellany/): Many things on my mind this morning.  We viewed the film Harriet last night.  It is the story of Harriet Tubman, escaped slave from a Maryland slaveholder, becoming a female “Moses” returning to the area of her former captivity to lead family members and others to freedom.  As a former Southerner I was rocked... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, To Take Some Time](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-to-take-some-time/): Today is Sunday.  My memory of yesterday is almost featureless.  I recognize that is the aftermath of low blood sugar.  Diabetics are aware of the condition.  The remedy is easy under normal circumstances.  Just consume something, fruit, a cookie, anything with sugar.  I mention this to highlight how organic our sense of time is,... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Not Joking](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-not-joking/): Last night we viewed The Joker, a movie starring Joaquin Phoenix.  Perhaps you’ve seen it already.  The movie is a grinding exposé of an individual’s destruction, along with the society upon which he depends (New York city), as consequence of institutional cruelty, exploitation for profit and amusement, as well as a litany of petty... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Finding Jesus in Arkansas](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-finding-jesus-in-arkansas/): Sometimes you know what is going to happen, — and yet seeing for one’s self is a shocking revelation.  This video shot in Harrison, Ark. by Rob Bliss was mentioned in the NYT Thursday edition of The Morning update.  I am not a consumer of Youtube videos as a general rule.  Viewing takes time... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Consecrated In-difference](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-consecrated-in-difference/): I finished reading America, by Jean Baudrillard published in 1986.  It is Baudrillard’s reflection upon his stay in this country, a rough parallel to the commentary by Alexis de Tocqueville in 1835.  A recurring theme for Baudrillard is a comparison between the desert and the cities, especially Los Angeles. The concluding chapter is entitled... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Addiction To Lies & Death](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-addiction-to-lies-death/): Sinclair Broadcast Group recently published an online interview with a conspiracy theorist who claimed that Dr. Anthony Fauci created the coronavirus using monkey cells. Sinclair — which operates almost 200 television stations — has also run segments downplaying the severity of the virus. Fox News has repeatedly run segments promoting ideas that scientists consider... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Criticizing Religion](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-criticizing-religion/): Yesterday featured an email exchange with a friend which ended in agreement “to disagree.”  The recipient of my email resisted my criticism of Evangelical’s support of President Donald J. Trump.  Another mutual friend, copied on our exchange, commented that the crux of the dissension appeared to be my opponents will to defend the concept... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Signs](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-signs/): Yesterday was blazing hot.  The sun felt like you were too close to that charcoal grill.  Yet my wife, the disciplined person that she is, prepared to embark on a lengthy walk in the neighborhood.  I offered to go along, and she said Ok.  She is serious about walking as a fitness regimen, while... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Sunday](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-sunday/): The world, meaning the wider, invisible context of my life, present in mind’s awareness is increasingly given over to chaos.  It has not always been this way.  There have been interludes of peace, of normality, when the rivers tranquil flow transported commerce, and ordinary ‘gossipy news’ that was a standard mix of fact and... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Impotence](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-impotence/): The fifties were a real high spot in the US…and you can feel the nostalgia for those years,for the ecstasy of power, when power held power.In the seventies power was still there,but the spell was broken.That was orgy time(war, sex, Manson, Woodstock).Today the orgy is over.The US, like everyone else,now has to face up... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Banality](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-banality/): Banality, lack of culture, and vulgarity do not have the same meaning here as they have in Europe. Or perhaps this is merely the crazy notion of a European, a fascination with an unreal America. Perhaps Americans are quite simply vulgar, and this meta-vulgarity is merely something I have dreamed up. Who knows? But... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Tear Gas](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-tear-gas/): The protest demonstrations following the May murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis have waned.  Demonstrations have waned in other cites, except for Portland, Oregon.  There demonstrations have continued for 55 consecutive nights against police brutality and other grievances.  Last night, Mayor Ted Wheeler who joined the lawful demonstration was tear gassed. Portland has given... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Color](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-color/): Another morning dawns in splendor.  Summer days are a gift, Natures welcome to all living things.  I anthropomorphize of course.  With our ancestors it just seems right and proper to give the world as presented to our senseS the label, “Nature.” It’s our term for the surrounding life-sustaining-matrix of sky, water, earth, vegetation and... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Potpourri](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-potpourri/): No ‘new’ big issue on my mind today,– just the usual ones. On Monday, Trump tweeted a photo of himself wearing a mask with a presidential seal, writing, “Many people say that it is Patriotic to wear a face mask when you can’t socially distance.”* CNN reported that the president’s falling poll numbers likely... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Percival](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-percival-2/): Monday morning breaks with brilliant sunlight.  I can hear the voice of our granddaughter, about 9 months old, loudly expressing pre-language delight in another day of life, of shapes, colors, sounds, of endless adventure and opportunity for exploration.  May she never lose her voice, misplace her passion. While preparing breakfast I noticed a wild... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Freedom American Style](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-freedom-american-style/): SPECTACULAR ORGY (FREEDOM AMERICAN STYLE) But this is precisely the point:the high point of liberation, it’s logical outcome,is to be found in the spectacular orgy, speed, the instantaneity of change, generalized eccentricity. Politics frees itself in the spectacle,in the all-out advertising effect;sexuality frees itself in all its anomalies,and perversions; mores, customs, the body, and... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, If](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-if-2/): How to say it.  There is so much at stake , much more than we can know.  We are on the cusp, the beginning days of a second surge in deaths from the coronavirus.  California, a populous state that opened prematurely, along with states in the west and south whose governors owe fealty to... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Contemplation](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-contemplation/): This morning I read part of a story in the NYT of a grandmother on the way to the hospital, dying in the arms of her grand daughter after receiving her diagnosis of covid-19.  This was a Florida story illustrating the difficulties of testing, and the consequences of back up of lab results, in... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, If You Leave](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-if-you-leave/): A friend left a comment on a recent post observing that one becomes emotionally exhausted by a deluge of bad news.  The reflex is to “cocoon,” to contract inwardly in order to reduce exposure to continued erosion of the self, to further loss of sanity.  I knew what he meant by his insight. I... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Ending My Problems](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-ending-my-problems/): 20 Stop thinking, and end your problems.What difference between yes and no?What difference between success and failure?Must you value what others value,avoid what others avoid?How ridiculous! Other people are excited,as though they were at a parade.I alone don’t care,I alone am expressionless,like an infant before it can smile. Other people have what they need;I... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, To Wait Till Your Mud Settles](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-to-wait-till-your-mud-settles/): 15 The ancient Masters were profound and subtle. Their wisdom was unfathomable. There is no way to describe it; all we can describe is their appearance. They were careful as someone crossing an iced-over stream. Alert as a warrior in enemy territory. Courteous as a guest. Fluid as melting ice. Shapable as a block... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, The Tao Continued](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-the-tao-continued/): We are seeing at the moment that the pandemic can’t be fought with lies and disinformation, and neither can it be with hatred and agitation,  Angelica Merkel told the European Parliament on Thursday, according to French news agency France24. “Fact-denying populism is being shown its limits,” she added.  — Business Insider July 9, 2020 - [Plague Journal, To Step Back](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-to-step-back/): Tao te Ching By Lao Tsu Translation by Stephen Mitchell 8 The supreme good is like water, which nourishes all things without trying to. It is content with the low places that people disdain. Thus it is like the Tao. In dwelling, live close to the ground. In thinking, keep to the simple. In... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Indulgence](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-indulgence/): Admittedly, the irony of community is missing here, as is the playfulness of social life. The charm to be found in social graces and in the theatre of social relations is all transferred outwards into the advertising of life and lifestyles. This is a society that is endlessly concerned to vindicate itself, perpetually seeking... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Water](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-water-2/): The first day of a long weekend by Lake Michigan.  The sun slowly illuminates the forest that is quite close to the patio, the tall dark trees flame with green light.  The curtain goes up on another day.  Do you suppose that for the living vegetation, birds, mammals that live invisibly to us —... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Roadtrip](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-roadtrip/): In several hours we will leave Illinois for St. Joseph, Michigan.  The drive will take us around the big lake, (Lake Michigan) to the resort town in the adjoining state.  I love a road trip, the change of scene which travel affords.  The geographical change enables a reboot of the psyche, to shift the... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Hell World](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-hell-world/): Just listened to a NYT podcast, The Argument for the first time.  The presentation ran for about 20 minutes.  The subjects were the prospects for DJ Trump in the election in November, “Is Donald Trump Toast?” and the problems, issues having to do with opening schools in the midst of an uncontrolled pandemic.  Three... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, You Have To Be Utopian](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-you-have-to-be-utopian/): Americans believe in facts,but not in facticity.They do not know that factsare factitious*, as their name suggests.It is this belief in facts,in the total credibility of what is done or seen,in this pragmatic evidence of things and an accompanying contempt for what may be called appearancesor the play of appearances –— a face does... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Taste](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-taste/): Another abnormally hot summer day?  How is one to know?  What is the good in knowing?  What would I do if I knew?  The thermometer gauge in the morning sun on the patio is already showing 120 degrees at 7AM.  According to my cell phone news feed report the tundra in Siberia is burning,... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Exploring](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-exploring/): What  better way to spend a Sunday morning than exploring.  We set out for the North Aurora Dam on the Fox River.  Fishing poles in hand we hoped to find fish close to the bank just above the dam.  We did our best. A feature of the morning was a session with a throw... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Exiles](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-exiles/): It is by an act of force,or coup de théâtre*geographical exile of the Founding Fathers of the seventeenth centuryadding itself to the voluntary exile of man within his own consciousness –that what in Europe had remained a critical and religious esotericismbecame transformed on the New Continent into a pragmatic exotercism.The whole foundation of America... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Nothing Dreams Here](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-nothing-dreams-here/): Yesterday I found time to take a short bike ride along the river path to the North Aurora dam.  The river is less swollen within its banks than my last visit some weeks ago to this spot.  Just below the dam on the bank under a bit of shade I read more from America... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Matters Of Blood](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-matters-of-blood/): Born In The U.S.A. By Bruce Springsteen Born down in a dead man’s town The first kick I took was when I hit the ground You end up like a dog that’s been beat too much Till you spend half your life just covering up Born in the U.S.A. I was born in the... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, What if?](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-what-if/): What if a butterfly thinks it is ugly? I participated in a Socrates’ Cafe discussion last night that entertained this question.  The discussion was wide ranging, stimulating, satisfying.  There were seven of us in attendance using Go-To-Meeting for the video mediated discussion. The question asks the reader to imagine oneself a butterfly.  That alone... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Believing In Money](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-believing-in-money/): Money is fluid. Like grace, it is never yours. Coming to claim it is an offense against the divinity. Have you deserved this favor? Who are you and what are you going to do with it? You are suspected of wanting to put it to some use, an evil one no doubt, whereas money... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, The Sun King](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-the-sun-king/): Another day in the reign of Trump.  That seems the language suited to our condition.  I wonder how similar our situation to that of the French man/woman-on-the-street under the reign of Louis the XIV?   Louis XIV was concerned above all with the enhancement of his glory.  He was called the Sun King (le... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Hope](https://everyangel.org/journal-hope/): Yesterday morning I joined my son and the grand kids for a walk to the park and some fishing.  Fishing is a grand adventure for a kid.  Fishing can be one of life’s most important lessons.  One never knows what one will catch, if anything.  There are many factors involved in catching a fish. ... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, A Cold Ferocious Beast](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-a-cold-ferocious-beast/): This morning I do not want to write more about the coronavirus.  I prefer a session with a philosophy book, America by Jean Baudrillard.  The pandemic leaves one emotionally drained, by the disruption in daily life, — more so after hearing recent developments in the South and West.  What to write is not entirely... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, The Axe](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-the-axe/): Waking this morning, my first thought was the fragment of a dream.  I was the subject of the dream.  I saw myself, standing in a room, with an axe in my hand, chopping through a wooden floor.  Then I was awake and the dream evaporated. A wise person once said to me that that... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Backgammon Anyone?](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-backgammon-anyone/): After a session of wrestling with ideas, words, with the recalcitrant “world”, — my spirit seems to seize, overcome with the weary business of it all.  Perhaps this is the hazard of a love of philosophy? David Hume once said. Since reason is incapable of dispelling these clouds, Nature herself suffices to that purpose,... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Joined Together](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-joined-together/): Who doesn’t own an iphone?  I have an older 6s model with a cracked screen.  It’s a marvelous device, magical, concealing state-of-the-art circuits, layer upon layer, thousands of semi conductor elements, applied quantum mechanics delivering convenience and entertainment.  You know what I am attempting to say.  Few of us have consciously opted out of... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Always Smiling](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-always-smiling/): And that smile everyone gives you as they pass, that friendly contraction of the jaws triggered by human warmth. It is the eternal smile of communication, the smile through which the child becomes aware of the presence of the others. It is the equivalent of the primal scream of man alone in the world.... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Sublime And Animal](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-sublime-and-animal/): NEW YORK The beauty of the Black and Puerto Rican women of New York. Apart from the sexual stimulation produced by the crowding together of so many races, it must be said that black, the pigmentation of the dark races, is like a natural make-up that is set off by the artificial kind to... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, World's Center](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-worlds-center/): These lines, quoted from America, by Jean Baudrillard, published 1986, translated by Chris Turner: NEW YORK More sirens here, day and night. The cars are faster, the advertisements more aggressive. This is wall-to-wall prostitution. And total electric light too. And the game – all games – gets more intense. It’s always like this when... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Fatherless Child](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-fatherless-child/): It is Sunday morning,  the 21st day of June. Father’s Day.  I know little about the role and responsibility of being a Father.  Plainly fatherhood is more than a biological or a social role.  I’ve known many males, with children, who qualify for the label, since language is a social construct.  When the topic... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, A Vanishing Stake](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-a-vanishing-stake/): And we are all melancholic. Melancholia is the brutal disaffection that characterizes our saturated systems. Once the hope of balancing good and evil, true and false, indeed of confronting some values of the same order, once the more general hope of a relation of forces and a stake has vanished. Everywhere, always, the system... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, To Fight In Defiance](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-to-fight-in-defiance/): All around us are nothingbut dummies of power,but the mechanical illusion of powerstill rules the social order,behind which grows the absent, illegible, terror of control, of which we are the minuscule terminals. The whole logical universe of the politicalis dissolved at the same time,ceding its place to a transfinite universe of simulationwhere from the... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, The Officers Looked On](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-the-officers-looked-on/): We had our philosophy discussion last night, six of us using one of the online video chat tools.  The question of the evening: Is goodness natural?  Certainly we could have wrestled with the definition of each of those terms. I have thought about this question in its many variants for years.  The three words... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Hegel](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-hegel-2/): Did not post anything yesterday.  An important appointment early in the day foreclosed the opportunity to give adequate consideration to what I had on my mind.  I would have written about the current President of the United States as our *fire-starter; like a troubled child, or disturbed adult who finds an adrenaline rush in... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Nothing More](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-nothing-more/): Nothing more need be said. - [Plague Journal, Time](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-time/): As usual I received the weekend update on my iphone news feed from the New York Times.  I attempted to read over my bowl of cheerios.  Interesting and concise as always, but I felt repulsed.  My mind resisted following the cascade of deepening “troubles.”  Another Black man is shot while fleeing police; demonstrations against... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Money & Truth](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-money-truth/): The love of money as a possession—- as distinguished from the love of money as a means to enjoyments and realities of life — will be recognized for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease.... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, You Can Try](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-take-it-to-the-limit/): Friday!  A sense of accomplishment to reach the final day of the workweek with my sense of self intact, given all the events swirling around.  It goes without saying it is my choice to be aware of events, political, economic, and social that happen.  Dumb and happy is a live option.  There is the... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Typhoid Trump](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-typhoid-trump/): I am tired of writing about the bully that we’ve installed in the White House.  It’s only by means of words that his dissimulation can be revealed to be  darkness, a grim future which his lies hold for all of us.  I’ll continue to have my say until he and his supporters are out... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Laughing And Crying](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-laughing-and-crying/): My daughter walked in a nearby park several days ago.  At a distance on the manicured green ball park outfield she noticed a round dark shape.  Upon closer examination, it appeared to be a creature belonging in the Braeburn Marsh not very far away.  She hurried back to the house to summon me with... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Turning Around](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-turning-around/): What time is it?  Why, its time for another song!  The video is worth the eight minutes of viewing.  It’ll change your life! Sweet Jane By Cowboy Junkies Anyone who’s ever had a heartWouldn’t turn around and break itAnd anyone who’s ever played a partWouldn’t turn around and hate itSweet Jane, sweet JaneSweet, sweet... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, May I Help You?](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-may-i-help-you/): How about a fist in the face! A friend recently relayed the story of a family member who works in retail.  The point of his tale was the cascade of anti-social, loutish behavior suffered by a seasoned retail employee dedicated to helping customers, that was told to him.  The disconcerting behavior took place during... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, A Warm, Safe Place](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-a-warm-safe-place/): I wanted to take a break, if possible, from writing about the virus, and about the current edition of social disenfranchisement/murder of Black citizens, which is mirrored in the response by the President and Attorney General to the demonstrations rising from the murder of George Floyd.  This song by Guns N’ Roses seduced me... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, This We Believe](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-this-we-believe/):    Socialization is measured by the exposure to media messages. Whoever is underexposed to media is de-socialized or virtually asocial. Everywhere information is thought to produce an accelerated circulation of meaning, a plus value of meaning corresponding to the economic one that results from the accelerated rotation of capital. Information is thought to create... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, The Problem With Ignorance](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-the-problem-with-ignorance/): Thursday afternoon was hot, summer-like.  For a change of scene I took a short drive to Geneva to find a quiet spot outside to continue my reading in Simulacra and Simulation.  Walking along State Street I felt depression, saddened by the view of boarded up store fronts.  The property owners, no doubt called in... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Taking On Water](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-taking-on-water/): I wrestle with words to characterize the condition of our society, as I perceive it.  The “Ship-Of-State” is the metaphor that comes to mind.  The image comes from Plato’s Republic book VI.  Plato likens the governance of the city-state to the commanding of a naval vessel.  I like the image, of a large ship. ... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Reading, Dialog](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-reading-dialog/): Today June 4th is the anniversary of the uprising of students in Tiananmen Square, China.  The resistance to authoritarian incompetency, suppression of freedom took place April 15 – June 4th, 1989.  Everyone remembers the image of the solitary individual standing, one man obstructing a column of tanks. Did the uprising matter?  Did it make... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Truth, Love & Beauty](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-truth-love-beauty/): The weeks have been long.  There is a exhaustion felt due to quarantine, mandated isolation from communal activities, and then the spate of murders of innocent black men, in Georgia and then in Minnesota.  The riots over the past few nights in our cities are a natural release of rage, of exasperation over the... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Why Violence?](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-why-violence/): There are appeals for peaceful demonstration, the peaceful exercise of free speech. These appeals predictably come from elected officials, those placed in charge.  They are in charge of a formal system, — as well as approaches, attitudes, and comments informally expressed by thousands, perhaps millions of members. Hypothetically consider an HR administrator, or maybe... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Another Night of Tear Gas, Rubber Bullets](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-another-night-of-tear-gas-rubber-bullets/): The rioting continues, despite the efforts of governors to use police and national guard to protect property, and to minimize the use of force against those who are protesting systemic racism, and particularly the disproportionate killing of black people by police. At the national level, the President rages like a mad emperor.  Subsequent to... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Remaking Our Souls](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-remaking-our-souls/): Choosing to refrain from news media consumption over the weekend, I dedicated time and emotional energy to personal projects and to others in my family.  Can I afford this type of choice because I am white, male, a member of the dominant class in this society?  Are some Sunday afternoon hours reading Nietzsche by... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Morning In Geneva](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-morning-in-geneva/): It is Sunday morning.  Two and a half months ago, late winter when the quarantine was announced, I drove to Geneva on a Sunday morning.  That was not unusual since Geneva is 10 minutes away from Batavia.  Until the covid-19 quarantine the Starbucks on 3rd Street was my preferred venue for beginning each day... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Justice In A Silent World](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-justice-in-a-silent-world/): I have two, maybe three pages left in the book written by Albert Camus, The Rebel.  Camus’ generation in France and Europe survived the horror of WWII and the murderous Nazi occupation.  The Rebel is a manifesto, of what was learned from that experience.  Today I offer a longish excerpt of Camus words, and... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Halftime Friday](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-life-death/): Friday, the last day of the work week is greeted with the gratitude of a homecoming, the “ending” of a period of work, of aspiration.  It is not as if the work can be finished, brought to a ultimate terminus.  To be alive is to be immersed in change; there’s always work to be... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Cruise Ship Or Dinghy](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-cruise-ship-or-dinghy/): This morning the news feed conveyed word of rioting in Minneapolis.  Police officers in the course of arresting a black man while he was pinned to the ground, forced a knee into his neck long enough to kill him   I’ve seen rioting, burning and looting before in the aftermath of the killing of M.... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, If](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-if/): After waking, then consuming a bowl of cheerios for breakfast, I listened to The Daily.  The Daily is a New York Times podcast.  It is an in depth audio exploration of a something that affects all of us, and I often chose to listen with the earbuds in place.  I recommend it.  The Daily... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Connection](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-connection/): Yesterday was Memorial Day.  I read of several remembrance ceremonies for our veterans, and for those who died in wars.  I is hard to conceive of dying in war as hallowed, an event with transcendent meaning.  War is a nightmare, a feast of death, the failure of government to deliver the welfare of communities,... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Where Talk Is Cheap](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-cheap-talk/): Today, Memorial Day, I woke at 3AM.  Couldn’t sleep.  For a diabetic, high blood sugar sometimes has that effect.  I decided to make use of the circumstance by getting dressed in order to read more in Simulacra and Simulation bv Jean Baudrillard.  Baudrillard’s thought is revolutionary, reminding me of the effort required to learn... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Rotating Endlessly](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-rotating-endlessly/): Culture: a system of shared beliefs, values, customs, behaviors, and artifacts that members of society use to cope with their world and with one another, — transmitted from generation to generation through learning. culture as widely defined A fact is that which from being an object of the intellect becomes a matter of conscience;... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Weaving Dreams](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-weaving-dreams/): Saturday, Memorial Day weekend.  This is a strange beginning to summer, a season feeling “out of time,” something unlike any beginning of summer that I’ve experienced.  This is the aftermath of the self quarantine-social-distancing for the past two months or so that has been necessary to slow the advance of the covid-19 virus.  The... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Percival](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-percival/): These photos were taken in the backyard over the last 48 hours.  Spring is at the epitome of glory, flowering trees, wild flowers at the edge of the woods,  and the rabbit that makes a home by our creek.  We have named the rabbit Percival.  At this juncture in the season Percival finds plenty... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Isn't This Great?](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-isnt-this-great/): I joined a wide ranging philosophy discussion last night.  The topic for the evening was the ethical implications of the covid-19 plague.  One of our participants remarked that in his experience a majority of his fellow acquaintances rarely paused to consider ethical matters.  Most of us live unmindfully, engaging circumstances to maximize our pleasure,... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Void of Taste](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-void-of-taste/): Another day of self quarantine. The constraints are practical as well as psychological.  I share with every American the growing sensation of rebellion. Overarching all — certainty that our leaders are confused, disingenuous, indolent, and most demoralizing, — bereft of good taste. Good taste.  I refer to the sensibility of judgment wherein one “knows”... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Performative Gesture](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-performative-gesture/): The New York Times reported this morning that major corporations have announced that they are phasing out the “Hero Pay,” the $2.00 to $3.00 per hour raise offered to employees volunteering to work during the covid-19 stay-at-home orders.  The NYT referenced a Los Angeles Times article which you may read in full CLICK HERE I... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Justice Postponed](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-justice-postponed/): I visited the Fox River this morning.  After several days of prolonged heavy rain, the river overflowing its banks, roared over the dam, a maelstrom of froth and brown waves.  The sound was indescribable.  Like you I prefer to think of Nature as benevolent, hospitable, leaning in my direction with good will.  Another image... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Culture II](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-culture-ii/): A friend sent me this graphic picturing the various modes that culture takes.  We use the term ‘culture’ in many ways.  The diverse uses indicates how important this aspect of our lives in fact happens to be.  Here are a few examples of culture that come to mind from my own experience.  Certainly you... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Culture](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-culture/): A few days ago, while preparing to sit down for the evening meal, I had thoughts about culture.  What is culture, and how is culture created? Culture is not an aspect of Nature.  We never expect to come upon culture in the wild.  We find instinct prolific.  Animals instinctively fight or flee when feeling... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Backyard Radiance](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-backyard-radiance/): Nature silently calls to us, always.  Refreshment of mind is offered, a reorientation of spirit without charge, ours if we attend to the world of growing things, and animals that live around us, birds flying and singing, or the mouse living in a decaying stump.  These living things are our contemporaries, yet their generations... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Water](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-water/): Yesterday, there was a good deal of rain. I took a walk into Braeburn Marsh. The marshland floor was wet; the decomposition of wood fragments of the fallen giant cottonwoods was a visible example of the carbon cycle. Sunlight, to sugar by photosynthesis, to the cellulose wood fiber over time, becoming a 50 foot... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Arbery](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-arbery/): Arbery, remember that name. I am late to be aware of the killing of Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia. I overheard others in the household conversing about his death. The 25 year old was jogging through a neighborhood, when two armed men, a father and son, pursued him in a pickup. Arbery’s path was obstructed,... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Commencement](https://everyangel.org/commencement/): Yesterday we went for a walk in the woods, that is I and my son, with two grandchildren a boy of 6 and a girl of 5.  The close proximity to life was thrilling, a reminder of how exceptional it is to observe, to be present when new life is emerging, expressing its efflorescence. ... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Limited Edition](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-limited-edition/): This morning I feel compelled to write about this poem.  The poem is entitled “Fool’s Gold.”  Since a kid, I’ve been fascinated with fool’s gold.   Iron pyrite is the less romantic term for the substance.  It mimics the sheen of true gold but is worthless except in the imagination.  The title of the... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Gangster Morality Revived](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-gangster-morality-revived/): The Growing Omnipotence Of The State All modern revolutions have ended in a reinforcement of the power of the State. 1789 brings Napoleon;1848, Napoleon III; 1917, Stalin; the Italian disturbances of the twenties, Mussolini; the Weimar Republic, Hitler. These revolutions, particularly after the First World War had liquidated the vestiges of divine right, still... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Mother's Day](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-mothers-day/): Another Sunday, the country is haunted by the coronavirus.  States have been encouraged to “open up” in hopes that the virus, mirage-like will disappear with the advent of normal activity.  I read in the New York Times Morning Briefing that some climate deniers and conservatives are saying the death toll numbers by the coronavirus... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Hegel](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-hegel/): “God without man is no more than man without God.” — GWF Hegel Individuality replaces faithreason replaces the biblepolitics replaces religion and the churchearth replaces heavenwork replaces prayerpoverty replaces hellman replaces Christ. …to conquer God,to make Him a slave,amounts to abolishing the transcendencethat kept the former master in powerand to preparing,with the ascendancy of... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Flea Market](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-flea-market/): We visited the Flea Market at the Kane County Fairgrounds.  Pandemic restrictions have recently been lifted here in Illinois.  We are eager to freely move about in public.  The fairgrounds had more exhibits of bric-a-brac, colorful 1950s vintage serving bowls, a collection of solid brass doorknobs embossed with a cross, — than we could... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Say A Prayer](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-say-a-prayer/): Well it is Sunday, blazing hot, and we need rain.  Looking for rain in early June…  What is happening to us? I wanted to change my routine.  I began the day with an early walk around the backyard.  Nature is uplifting, visually inspiring as vegetation is in seasonal bloom, and wild life is at... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, What We See Is Real](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-what-we-see-is-real/): Saturday morning, and there is much to do.  There’s just not the spark to launch myself into a “to do” list.  My quotient of energy is at low ebb.  On account of many concerns, there does not seems to be a lot “left in the tank.”  Is not every genuine concern a personal concern?... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Walking Without Hope](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-walking-without-hope/): We walked tree lined streets.  Springtime is the best time for a walk through Batavia neighborhoods.  Homes are embellished by the growth of spring flowers, trees, the ornamental plants selected with care by townspeople with a love for working the soil.  Walking with a friend, we discussed topics of interest, of concern to both... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Aftershocks](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-aftershocks/): Relieved due to a wider dissemination of the covid vaccines more of us are able to move about without wearing a mask.  The danger is not over though, as some countries are struggling with a rising outbreak, and many deaths.  Poor countries remain essentially unvaccinated.  Virologists warn that the virus is mutating as long... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Chatter](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-chatter/): Stepping away from the chatter is not easy.  I ask, “are we addicted to information?”  It comes cascading at a rapid rate, at best understood partially, without enough context, — via iphone, TV, laptop screen…  One byte after another edited for our approval, or said clearly, for “consumption.” After sitting down to breakfast I... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Texture of Summer](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-texture-of-summer/): Today is June 1st.  June is the month of summer.  Summer arrives in few days.  Summer is prime time for plants, animals and all living things.  Growth is at maximum velocity over the arc of June and the following two months.  In the northern hemisphere, the tilt of the earth’s axis places us closer... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Traveling Blind](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-traveling-blind/):   And you know that she’s half-crazy but that’s why you want to be thereAnd she feeds you tea and oranges that come all the way from China…   And she shows you where to look among the garbage and the flowersThere are heroes in the seaweed, there are children in the morningThey are... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Couldn't Write It](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-i-couldnt-write-it/): Yesterday, a sunny Saturday on Memorial Day weekend.  It’s uncertain that warm weather reaches the Midwest by late May.  The weather is often “ify,” that is rainy, borderline cold, unpleasant.  In the past a number of planned outings to Great Lakes Drag-a-Way on Memorial Day weekend were disappointed due to weather.  Misery for me... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, After The Rain](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-after-the-rain/): Saturday morning.  The air is clear and clean, the green of spring is iridescent.  Birds are calling, hidden in the foliage.  I heard report that we received a half inch of needed rain.  For now that goes a long way to relieve the mild drought we’ve experienced.  Perhaps my neighbors have not noticed.  I... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Running On Empty](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-not-much-2/): I have little to say this morning.  At the end of the week I am “running on empty” as the phrase goes.  The duties of the week demand attention, a quotient of energy/effort and little is left over when every day is full.  Today is rainy, overcast, in the 50s, cool for springtime.  Spring... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Stevie Nicks](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-7/): Yesterday was the birthday of STEVIE NICKS.  If you are a member of the “Boomer” generation, those born right after WWII, odds are that you know that Nicks is a member of Fleetwood Mac a premier rock band of the Age of Aquarius.  To a millennial person born in the 80s or a gen... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Half Crazy](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-6/): Here’s to the song writers, the lyricists, the word-smiths of rhythm, rhyme and harmony!  If it were not so early in the day I’d raise a glass of sweet red wine to toast all that I have been given by their songs.  (Out of an abundance of caution, it is best to stay away... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Another Dangerous Poet](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-another-dangerous-poet/): Plato was not a fan of the tragedians, or of the work of any poet.  The view of Plato, that reason will lead us to an epiphany of “the good”, if we discipline ourselves enough, — is precisely the idealism which is central to our Enlightenment heritage, here in this United States of America. ... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Infant Mortality](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-infant-mortality/): “Humanity’s pasthas been relatively brief:some 300,000 years as a species,a few thousand years of civilization.Its potential future, by contrast,could extend for billions of years,encompassing many trillions of sentient, rational beingsyet to be born.” The future – the adulthood of humanityis now in jeopardy. “If our species does destroy itself,”wrote Orville Schell, “it will bea... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Sinking In Our Fight](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-sinking-in-our-fight/): Sunday morning.  Arrived at a local coffee shop, along with a few early-bird bike riders.  The coffee, excellent, and what better venue with a hum of voices in the background for wrestling with words to express inchoate thoughts.  The mind is like that: associations rapidly intersecting in unpredictable fashion.  You search for words to... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Learning Living Learning](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-learning-living-learning/): Yesterday afternoon was spent at the Don Early Park in West Chicago.  The park is tucked in beside and behind the cemetery right on East Washington Street.  The feature of the park is a small pond.  I would estimate the pond is about 50 yards or so in diameter.  The pond is home to... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Report Card Day](https://everyangel.org/plague-journalreport-card-day/): I was once a kid.  I remember feeling trepidation the day report cards were issued.  A report card is an evaluation, derived from the aggregation of grades of your progress in the subjects which you have attempted to learn.  Kids do not volunteer for the role of student, as learning is difficult work.  They’d... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Mid Spring Beauty](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-mid-spring-bueaty/): Yesterday was a day of wind and showers.  These days of mid spring are fleeting and I did not want to delay taking pictures of flowers that I noticed in the neighborhood.  I did my best given the wind to capture pictures of blooms along a white picket fence around the yard next door. ... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Science & Theology](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-science-theology/): It is Wednesday morning.  I am certain that the spirited discussion the night before about the realms of science and theology is working to transform my psyche, the hidden submerged dialog within, — when I wake up remembering and thinking about words that were written, comments made, and positions taken with strong emotion.  Eight... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, No Rain](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-no-rain/): The morning comes, and I am awake.  I ought to be thankful since I am alive.  I understand that.  Life goes on until it does not.  We are in a condition of drought here in our area.  Spring is the usual “rainy season.”  That is another way of saying that we get plenty of... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Children](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-children/): Children are among the most expensive purchasesthat average consumers are likely to make in the course of their entire lives.In purely monetary terms, children cost morethan the most luxurious state-of-the-art car,   a round-the-world cruise,      even a mansion to be proud of. Worse still, the total cost is likely to grow over the years,and its... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Hell](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-hell/): There are many versions of hell. I awakened this morning from a dream/nightmare.  Waking was a release from the images rising up from my subconscious.  I dreamed of reestablishing my company.  I was accompanied by two old friends.  My associates knew the business, were trusted, competent.  The direction of the dreamed images abruptly changed... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Thoughts On Wildness](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-thoughts-on-wildness/): I do not know if that is a word.  The thought is to be in and of “the wild.”  Nature is alive, undomesticated, responsive to the presence of humans:  physical expressions of our institutions such as roads and buildings, our consumptive way of life, garbage dumps, the oceans loaded with plastic run-off of industry. ... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Living The Dream](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-living-the-dream/): Yesterday we returned to the Don Earley Park in West Chicago.  A prominent feature of the park is the pond.  The pond is open to catch and release fishing.  Turtles can be seen sunning themselves close to the waters edge.  Also there are a number of bullfrogs sitting in shallow water on the blanket... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Desire II](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-desire-ii/): Desire By U2 (Yeah) Lover, I’m on the street Gonna go where the bright lights And the big city meet With a red guitar…on fire Desire She’s a candle burning in my room Yeah I’m like the needle, needle and spoon Over the counter with a shotgun Pretty soon everybody got one And the... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Desire](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-desire/): Advertising is one of the cultural mediums that has the most sanctioned lying. Keeping people in a constant state of lack, in perpetual desire, strengthens the marketplace economy. Lovelessness is a boon to consumerism. And lies strengthen the world of predatory advertising. — Excerpt, All about Love, New Visions by bell hooks p. 47... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Our Epoch](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-our-epoch/): Our epoch does not love itself. And a world that does not love itself is a world that does not believe in the world: we can believe only in what we love. That is what makes the atmosphere of this world So heavy, stifling, and anguished. The world of the hyper-market, which is the... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, It's Alive!](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-its-alive/): Yesterday in the morning I took a walk in Braeburn Marsh.  I returned at the end of the day, as the sun was setting.  Luck is being at the right place at the right time.  I feel lucky when I experience beauty, or a moment of extraordinary accomplishment. Venturing off the path, the ground... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Mother's Day II](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-mothers-day-ii/): Another Mother’s Day recedes in the rear view mirror.  I appreciate this day of remembrance more with each year that passes.  It is almost 11PM.  Before turning in for the evening I felt the need to state that my life is enriched each time that I have opportunity to honor the females in my... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Mother's Day](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-mothers-day-2/): It is raining outside.  Rain is a long awaited gift.  My mother would have rejoiced at a gentle rain falling to a dry ground.  Springtime is a rainy season in normal times.  These are not normal times.  Global warming is another way of saying that weather patterns are disrupted, intensified, too much rain, wind,... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Living In A Powder Keg II](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-living-in-a-powder-keg-ii/): I have more to say about Bonnie Tyler’s great hit tune, Total Eclipse Of The Heart composed by Jim Steinman (November 1, 1947 – April 19, 2021) .  Even if one could interview Steinman, to ask explicitly what he meant by his lyric lines — I am satisfied that would not help.  Steinman passed... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Living In A Powder Keg](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-living-in-a-powerkeg/): I thought to write about this song for several days.  The lyrics are ethereal, with a mystical meaning, admitting multiple interpretations.  Listening to several Youtube presentations of Bonnie Tyler singing her great hit, I felt the tears.  This is not a “feel good” love song, triggering pointless emotion.  The story line has a texture... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Commodificaton](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-commodificaton/): I have signed up for a seminar course on May 22nd, so I am pressing forward to finish a book that will be central to the topic of discussion.  Eric Fromm was referred to in the chapter entitled, Love as Praxis: Critical Theory and Pscyhoanalysis, which I am reading.  I have not read Eric... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, More Haute Couture](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-more-haute-couture/): The French term means “high sewing” or high fashion as the term is typically used.  It is no disservice to the language, or to our intention of meaning to note there’s nothing more elegant than than bloom, shade of color, elegance of form as offered by Nature in the springtime.  My thought was to... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Field Trip](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-field-trip/): Yesterday we took our two grand kids with us to Don Earley Park in West Chicago.  The Geneva Road which we often travel passes by the Park.  The small park is striking with a pond, walking path, a children’s playground with jungle gym, —  something in between a forest preserve displaying nature’s serene beauty,... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Static](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-nothing-but-static/): This is one of those mornings when I have nothing to say.  A new day, when nothing seems especially new about it.  I know, I simply need to shift the axis of my point of view.  I have made that move before, and felt something in the depths which I dare not say or... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Running For The Roses](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-running-for-the-roses/): May 1st yesterday was the 147th running of the Kentucky Derby at Churchill Downs in Louisville, Kentucky.  Our daughter and her partner lived in Louisville for many years.  The celebration of Derby week is part of their heritage as former residents of Louisville.  Therefore our household gathered in the living room to enjoy the... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Life Goes On](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-life-goes-on/): Jesus is not coming back! Is that statement ironic, troubling, laugh-out-loud funny, or simply nonsensical?  It depends entirely upon the reader.  What do you bring to those words arranged in syntax?  What mental image forms, involuntarily?  Do you experience a strong emotional response: relief, dread…  The meaning is involuntary after all, the effect of... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Yard Sale Days](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-yard-sale-days/): My day began at 6AM.  These are community yard sale days here in Batavia.  I did what I could to assist with staging items in our driveway, preparing for the early-comers.  The early birds are intent upon surveying as many places possible, looking for the odd item to be treasured, or something they need. ... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Disappeared](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-where-did-i-go/): Where did One go? Am I still One when I analyze, or am analyzed? Yes, but with an unidentifiable identity, without a fixed center, or mortiferous* repetition; serial music rather, a dance improvised and yet supported by an underlying, open order. …a long history that never stops coming back, catching up with us. p.... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Capitalism Checkmated](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-capitalism-checkmated/): We discussed capitalism last night.  The essay was a three page thought experiment with an optimistic conclusion.  The author speculated that capitalism would be “humanized” as a result of covid.  I am not convinced that will be the case.  Moreover the covid virus is not done with us Americans. Approximately a third of us... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Future Contained In The Past](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-future-contained-in-the-past/): Getting started is the crux of the matter.  The ending depends upon the beginning, or as T. S. Eliot wrote in Burnt Norton: Time present and time pastAre both perhaps present in time future,And time future contained in time past. What immediately follows, the very next line dumbfounds me.. If all time is eternally... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, A Backward Look](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-look-back/): A few days ago I stopped in at the Roadster Shop in Mundelein.  This business builds custom street roads for customers all over the United States.  They have been kind over the years to allow me to shoot photos of their work parked on the showroom floor.  I can hardly remember a time when... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Forbidden Planet](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-5/): Last night we viewed “Stowaway,” a Netflix film about a three man mission to Mars.  Or rather, a two woman, and one man mission that becomes a four person mission with the discovery of a stowaway, after the launch of the spacecraft Kingfisher.  The acting is excellent. Toni Collette is mission commander Marina Barrett. ... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Into This World, Thrown](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-troubled-sleep/): It is Saturday morning. I awakened early, around 5AM I suppose. The nightmare caused me to grasp for consciousness. I no longer remember any details. A feeling of dread lingers though. The vision in some form is likely to return. It is there in the nether regions of the unconscious. What fear is the... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Mulch Festival](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-mulch-festival/): Timing is everything, according to the saying.  Timing, the right time, a propitious time, the “alignment of stars and planets,” is a key aspect of life.  Perhaps it is everything.  I cannot say.  In the off chance there is a god, and he/she could see with exquisite clarity past, present, and future, — and... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Earth Day](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-earth-day-2/): It is not often that I offer more than one post per day.  Since this is EARTH DAY I am obligated to draw attention to the matter that is before all of us.  Are we not at a “live or let die” juncture?  We are “of the earth” and will surely share whatever is... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Stain Removal](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-stain-removal/): From this Thursday morning’s New York Times: Biden plans to declare that the Ottoman killings of Armenian civilians during World War I were genocide. It could fray relations with Turkey, which rejects the designation. This up-welling of truthful, coherent speech has been long in coming.  No other president has was able to overcome the... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, A New Day, More Of The Same](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-a-new-day-more-of-the-same/): Yesterday in Minneapolis a jury convicted officer Derek Chauvin of second degree murder (and of two other charges as well) in the killing of George Floyd this past May.  The scene of gratuitous, lethal cruelty was filmed by a bystander.  The conviction of a police officer is very, very rare.  The New York Times... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Enveloped With Beauty](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-enveloped-with-beauty/): Today promises to be gray and chilly.  Rain and snow is predicted, — spring in the Midwest.  I plan to be out and about, walking with my camera.  This is the time of birth in the cycle of the seasons.  Who would not wish to be on hand when new life is emerging to... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Breakout](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-breakout/): The word, “breakout,” conveys the connotation of an extreme, threatening circumstance.  The stakes are high.  An attempt is made by force to breach the encirclement, to achieve freedom of movement.   I simply want to write about our very first experience of eating-out, dining at a restaurant after receiving our second Moderna covid shot.  This... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Life With Music](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-4/): Πολιτεία (Politeia) The Greek word translates into English as Republic.  It is the title of Plato’s well known work, The Republic.  The Greek word comes from the term polis, a description of a commercial, administrative community such as Athens in her heyday, a city-state.  A polis is more sharply defined is the administrative and... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Art & Religion](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-art-religion/): My reading in Julia Kristeva’s This Incredible Need To Believe continues.  Here are some quotations from the book that are particularly arresting this morning. What is art? …adventures of immanence.  Infinite intellectual love (literature, art, etc.) when they are carried out and received not as “objects of consummation” but as the very being of... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Wanting To Open](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-3/): Friday dawns cool and sunny, typical of spring here in the Midwest.  Of the projects in mind for today: a morning Zoom session to hear our grandson, a new author present his story of a visit to the zoo.  I will be privileged to witness his reading of the story.  He is six years... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, An Orphan Speaks](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-an-orphan-speaks/): In fact, we are the orphans of a reality that came too late and which is only, like truth, an “official report” in “delayed time.” Excerpt, Radical Thought by Jean Baudrillard Yesterday, while driving, listening to an interview on NPR, I heard this story.  In Kane County where I presently live, the county government has... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, For Don](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-for-don/): For reality is an illusion, and any thought must first try to unmask it. For this purpose, reality itself must remain masked and must shape itself as a decoy, without even thinking or caring about its own truth. Reality must place its pride in never being an instrument of analysis, or a critical instrument,... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Madness & The Ellipse of Meaning](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-madness-the-ellipse-of-meaning/): …it is the world that must proceed to its own analysis. It is the world, not reality, that must be revealed not as a truth, but as an illusion. We must trap reality, we must go faster than reality. The idea too must go faster than its own shadow. But if the idea goes... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, More Perversion](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-more-perversion/): The requirement of this thought is double and contradictory. It does not consist in analyzing the world to extract from it an improbable truth. It does not adapt itself dialectically to the facts and abstract from them some logical construction. It is much more subtle than that, and more perverse as well. This thought... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Anti-gravity](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-anti-gravity/): The two modes of thought present radically opposed projects: one hopes to reveal the objective reality of this world but wants to be a distinct thought; the other seeks to restore an illusion, of which it is an integral part. One seeks a total gravitation, a concentric effect of meaning. The other seeks to... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, There May Be Nothing](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-there-may-be-nothing/): In contrast to the discourse of reality and rationality, which bets on the fact that there is something (some meaning) rather than nothing, and which, in the last analysis, wants to be built on the preservative notion of an objective and decipherable world, radical thought bets on the illusion of the world. This thought... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Two Orders Of Thought](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-black-lives/): Today I was at the crossing point of an email conversation between two friends.  It was as if I were standing on a curb before a cross walk at a busy intersection.  Two vehicles approach at speed limit velocity, each at right angles to the other.  Each driver is oblivious to the other, and... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Why We Should Give It Another Try](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-why-we-should-give-it-another-try/): Why wouldn’t there be as many real worlds as there are imaginary ones?Why would there be only one real world?Why such a mode of exception? In reality, the notion of a real world existing among all other possible worlds is unimaginable.It is unthinkable, except perhaps as a dangerous superstition. We must stay away from... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Life !](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-yikes/): Our discussion topic last night was a question with three words:  “What is life?“  Thoughts have  come to mind about this intriguing question that I wish to express.  In the course of wrestling with the topic last night one of our members referenced the famous lines of Shakespeare from Macbeth, Act V, Scene V,... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, What?](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-what/): Tuesday, and I plan to have lunch with a friend.  Later in the day, I hope to meet another friend for coffee at Starbucks.  Can I imagine a more agreeable day?  It gets better.  In the evening, I will join a group of old friends via Zoom to discuss the topic, “What Is Life?” ... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Time Dilaton](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-time-dilaton/): Easter recedes in the rear view mirror, or does it?  It depends on your point of view. I viewed a youtube video of a worship service, a Good Friday service.  You know, Good Friday is what we call the day when Jesus is forcibly removed from the street and made to stand trial for... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Everything That Touches You And Me](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-everything-that-touches-you-and-me/): Easter morning.  I awakened early so that I could write this.  Family members are to arrive around eleven, and preparations will be made beforehand.  I will not be rushing off to Easter worship services this morning.  That’s not to say that I do not believe in resurrection.  I do.  Just not the crude, atavistic... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Good Friday](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-good-friday-2/): Yesterday we took a rare day-trip to Ottowa, Illinois.  Ottowa is about an hour and a half south of Batavia, where the Fox River and the Illinois River meet.  It is a once prosperous town in the middle of farming country.  We enjoyed the drive, leaving behind the last of the tony suburbs with... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Sweet Jane](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-sweet-jane/): Five minutes of bliss. A friend suggested including Lou Reed’s Sweet Jane for one of my posts.  Here it is. So what is the message?  I think there are many messages.  What does the melody, the back-beat signifying the pulse of the universe, and the lyrics, showing the ebb and flow of life “as... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, A Poem For My Birthday](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-a-poem-for-my-birthday/): Like everyone who views Endgame by Samuel Beckett, I am haunted by the production.  Coincidentally today happens to be my birthday.  Haunted, troubled by a theatrical production on my birthday.  I suppose that is no coincidence when you consider that life is nothing but a production; just a succession of roles that must be... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, No Exit](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-no-exit/): Wait, hasn’t that title already been taken?  Who could forget that Jean Paul Sartre wrote the existentialist play Huis clos in 1944?  I understand the technical meaning of the term is that of a conversation behind closed doors, a private conversation.  Are there not things that one does not say out loud in public,... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Heaven Or Hell](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-heaven-or-hell/): Today is Tuesday.  Retired, reminding myself that today is Tuesday.  Without the rhythm of a workplace one can become disoriented as to one’s placement in time.  Let’s face it, life is often disorienting.  Circumstances can change in a “New York minute.”  I like that phrase.  It captures the visible and palpable flux of street... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, To See As Beautiful What Is Necessary](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-to-see-as-beautiful-what-is-necessary/): I’ve almost finished watching Endgame by Samuel Beckett.  The play is my sole exposure to Beckett.  I knew of his reputation as a playwright.  I was asked why I chose this play.  I wanted to take a “deep dive” into waters which required that I swim or else fail.  “Drown” is the term, isn’t... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Goodby Bob](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-goodby-bob/): One week ago was the first day of Spring.  That’s an arbitrary date of course.  The term “spring” is an arbitrary label, a sign that we have agreed means that days are longer, there is more light, vegetation shows signs of new life, birds and mammals move about, a sign that mating season is... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, 静](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-%e9%9d%99/): I know that it is unlikely that you speak/read Japanese.  I once spoke a little, and what remains are pieces of a once useful skill, breaking the surface of my consciousness, evoked by context.  “Shizuka” pronounced the way it appears, means quiet-silence.  I once saw a solitary male folk singer in a below street... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Another Thorn](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-another-thorn/): Say: I am real, this is real, the world is real, and nobody laughs. But say: this is a simulacrum*, you are only a simulacrum, this war is a simulacrum, and everybody bursts out laughing. With a condescending and yellow laughter, or perhaps a convulsive one, as if it was a childish joke or... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Roses & Thorns](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-roses-thorns/): It is early.  There is no sunrise yet.  Wondering what to write.  Yesterday I began reading an essay by Jean Baurdrillard.  The essay is entitled Radical Thought.  Here is a short paragraph: The belief in truth is part of the elementary forms of religious life. It is a weakness of understanding, of common-sense. At... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Seems Like Religion](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-seems-like-religion/): I am mesmerized by this song.  I have listened many time to the Eurythmics Ultimate Collection CD.  Love is a Stranger “knocks me out” every time that I hear Annie Lennox deliver the lyric with such a cold clear voice, like a rifle shot of a sniper, – “one shot, one kill.” I am... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, A Queen In A Sailors Dream](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-a-queen-in-a-sailors-dream/): Sundown by Gordon Lightfoot.  A few years ago I was lucky to be present at a live performance by Gordon Lightfoot at the Genesee Theater in Waukegan.  The Genesee is a magnificent old theater, restored, perfect sight lines from any place in the house.  The atmosphere is apt for music performance, particularly folk, or... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Walking In A Cold Rain](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-walking-in-a-cold-rain/): I have always liked this song, the simple piano intro, and the powerful voice of Elvis telling a universal human story.  Durable relationships are hard.  Both parties are challenged to go “all in,” to show the hand each is holding.  This must be done if the relationship has a chance of enduring.  We typically... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, A Saturday](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-a-saturday/): Morning The first Saturday morning of spring was spent with a rake in hand, a wheelbarrow nearby.  Our yard has a considerable lawn, and is surrounded by trees.  Winter has left behind it’s quotient of small branches, twigs, and leaves under shrubbery.  Raking these left overs, feeling the pulsations of the rake tines upon... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Madness And Genius](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-madness-and-genius/): The Tragedy and the Paradox of Greek Civilization by Vincent Kavaloski They are old Dead White Males,Embarrassing in their political incorrectness.They built their greatness on slavery,They were patriarchal and sexist to the core,They idealized the warrior, and warredIncessantly. They could be cruel and oftenDespised mercy as weakness.And yet – and yetWe are still fascinated... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, A Backward Look](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-a-backward-look/): Late Lament Breathe deep the gathering gloom,Watch lights fade from every room.Bedsitter people look back and lament,Another day’s useless energy spent. Impassioned lovers wrestle as one,Lonely man cries for love and has none.New mother picks up and suckles her son,Senior citizens wish they were young. Cold hearted orb that rules the night,Removes the colours... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Social Analysis By Love Song](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-a-love-song-and-social-analysis/): The time has come, push the pile of chips forward, to the middle of the table.  Time to go “all in,” risking everything to gain a point. I like this song by Huey Lewis for several reasons. I have been fortunate to see Huey Lewis perform  live.  He is a prolific song writer.  His... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, And When I Die.](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-and-when-i-die/): On St. Patrick’s Day I am a one-eyed leprechaun!  I write this entry late in the day with a patch over one eye.  This morning quite early I received surgery on my left eye.  The treatment to my retina promises to improve my vision.  For now though, until the followup visit with the physician... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Greatness](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-greatness/): What is required for greatness?  Infrequently I ask the question silently, to myself in solitude.  I’ve never answered out loud.  But I know.  Greatness is the achievement of a few lines of prose, a poem or two, a lyric or a tune of such quality that one recognizes “for this I was born.”  I... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Wide Open?](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-wide-open/): You will like this Tom Petty video.  Into the Great Wide Open was the title song on the album by the same name released in 1991.  It is a story song, the lyric “tells itself.”   The music video for the single, directed by Julien Temple, starred Johnny Depp as the protagonist, Eddie Rebel, as... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, I'm American Made](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-im-american-made/): ‘ I receive a weekly email newsletter from Professor Scott Galloway.  Galloway is a professor in the New York University Stern School of Business.  He is a podcast host, and entrepreneur.  The professor is philosophically astute, able to see the “big picture.”  For today I will excerpt some of Galloway’s words from his No... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Chinmoku](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-chinmoku/): The word surfaces to consciousness, something that seldom comes.  It means “silence” in Japanese.  I’ve not thought of that word for many years.   Saturday morning early, — viewing the frost covered ground in the backyard.  Nothing is moving.  The frost is the remains of winter’s grasp upon the ground.  There is little traffic... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, A Prayer For Spring](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-a-prayer-for-spring/): THE SOIL…is the great connector of lives,the source and destination of all. It is the healer and restorer and resurrector, by whichdisease passes into health, age into youth,death into life. Without proper care for it we can have nocommunity, because without proper carefor it we can have no life. — Wendell Berry - [Plague Journal, Somethin' Better](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-somethin-better/): When I was younger I was fascinated by the city.  I grew up in a what was then a small town in North Carolina.  I remember riding my bike into town as a kid.  The scale of a small town is dwarfed by that of a city.   I have lived outside of Chicago for... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Arete](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-arete/): It is midweek, Wednesday.  Today I have a early appointment with my primary care physician. I will be cleared for surgery on Wednesday of the coming week.  My eyesight is in need of surgical attention, the consequences of age and diabetes.  I did not understand the meaning of having a body that is subject... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Not Much](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-not-much/): I have little to say this morning. That is as it should be.  Life is replete with conflict, language games, reportage contending for the apex of one’s attention.  Often, better that less or nothing be said, — silence is the condition for reflection, a quieting of awareness so that the dispersed energies of life... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Divine Donkeyism](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-divine-donkeyism/): Anything written by  Nietzsche is approached with apprehension.  By reputation Friedrich Nietzsche is a “bomb thrower,” a nihilist who is responsible for the death of God.  On a ‘reputation scale’ from high to low, that would be on the low side.  Unaccountably in my late 20s I read Nietzsche’s writing with an open mind, overcoming... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Springtime Reverence](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-springtime-reverence/): Sunday is the aftermath of  Senate approval of the 1.9 trillion aid package for a battered national.  No republican senator voted for the bill. It stands to reason that many are destitute with no remaining options, — food and shelter balanced on the knife-edge of being called back to the workplace after long months... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Pied Cow Part III](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-spoken-at-the-pied-cow-iii/): But tell me, my brethren, what the child can do, which even the lion could not do? Why hath the preying lion still to become a child? Innocence is the child, and forgetfulness, a new beginning, a game, a self-rolling wheel, a first movement, a holy Yea. Aye, for the game of creating, my... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Pied Cow Part II](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-pied-cow-part-ii/): But in the loneliest wilderness happeneth the second metamorphosis: here the spirit becometh a lion; freedom will it capture, and lordship in its own wilderness. Its last Lord it here seeketh: hostile will it be to him, and to its last God; for victory will it struggle with the great dragon. What is the... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Spoken At The Pied Cow](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-spoken-at-the-pied-cow/): Last night the Socrates Café convened once again.  The topic of the evening was “self-actualization” a term introduced into public discourse by the psychologist Abraham Maslow (1908-1970).  Maslow presented a 5 step process, a journey starting from the basic need of food, water, shelter, etc, followed by a safe environment, progressing to the final... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Liberation & Security](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-liberation-security/): Our philosophy discussion group convened virtually last night , via zoom video.  We discussed an essay by Olufemi O Taiwo, a philosopher who teaches at Georgetown University.  The Who Gets To Feel Secure essay treated the down-to-earth security that all human beings need in order to survive, to preserve their humanity.  I mean the... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, The Space Between](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-the-space-between/): Yesterdays rumination touched on the thought that love or the absence of love has to do with what takes place in the space between us.  Love is not a substance but our description of a negotiation — of my sense of being, of my identity in juxtaposition with yours, in the relational space that... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Friendship](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-friendship/): I met with a friend yesterday afternoon.  To meet with someone across a table is an extraordinary privilege in these days of the spread of covid-19.  Typically exchanges of any kind that are conducted indoors take place on video screens.  Extreme caution is justified as the virus often is debilitating and there is always... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Turning Away From The Mad King](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-turning-away-from-the-mad-king/): There are times when “reality” is just too much.  Yesterday I felt as if I had reached such a time.  I must turn away from thinking about “the mad king” who tightens his grasp upon power.  He wants nothing more than to negate the outcome of the election of several weeks ago.  All the... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, May I Have More Order Please..](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-just-a-little-more-order/): ‘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... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, The Quest](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-the-quest/): What we need. Those words capture in retrospect my sense of the exchange of ideas experienced a few hours ago when the philosophy discussion group held a virtual meeting to consider (M)existentialism.  The launch pad for this discussion was Carlos Alberto Sanchez’ essay about Emilio Uranga’s philosophical work.  The texture of the discussion was... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Ashes To Earth](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-ashes-to-earth/): I In my beginning is my end. In succession Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended, Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass. Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires, Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth Which... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Enter The Dark Lord](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-enter-the-dark-lord/): 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... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, KaBoom](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-kaboom/): Yesterday I read fragments of a report on the massive Pro-Trump demonstration in Washington DC.  Thousands gathered to wave flags and to march noisily through the streets to protest of the outcome of one of the cleanest U.S. elections in modern times.  So much for the notion that President elect Biden will unite the... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Slouching Together..](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-slouching-together/): The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Breathing In A Baroque Empire](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-breathing-in-a-baroque-empire/): Yesterday was a sublime fall day.  In the morning I worked to gather the leaves that remained on our lawn.  The mulched leaves were used to form a berm across a boundary section between our yard and the public park.  In the months intervening till spring perhaps these leaves will turn to humus.  I... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, On Paradox](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-on-absurdity/): 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... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, To Breathe Again](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-poety-and-politics/): Continuing To Live By Philip Larkin Continuing to live — that is, repeat A habit formed to get necessaries — Is nearly always losing, or going without. It varies. This loss of interest, hair, and enterprise — Ah, if the game were poker, yes, You might discard them, draw a full house! But it’s... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Refusing To Look Away](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-refusing-to-look-away/): 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... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Monday Again](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-monday-once-again/): Sounds mundane doesn’t it?  Monday is the first day of the “work week.” Taken literally the “work week” is a hallmark of middle class.  If one is not fortunate to have sufficient shelter, food, and good health — there is no respite from work.  That has always been the case.  Also, if one is... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, The Day After](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-the-day-after/): Today is another warm fall day, a good time to be out of doors.  As with most of the country I watched the speech last night of Vice President Joe Biden, with Senator Kamala Harris acknowledge having won the election.  It was a good speech, one that Biden after a lifetime of public service... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, We The Confused](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-the-fatal-gap/): 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... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, The Problem With Lying](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-the-problem-with-lying/): 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... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Dropping Over The Rim](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-over-the-edge/): "You cannot pass," - Gandalf to the Balrog on Bridge of Khazad-dûm - [Plague Journal, Livin' It Up](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-innocence-ended/): A day dawns.  Is it a new day, or is it groundhog day, a hellish repetition of the last four years?  This is reference to the election of course.  Could this be a version of Nietzsche’s doctrine of eternal return?  That understanding of history posits that we are fated to repeat every detail of... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, When The Bullet Hits The Bone](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-when-the-bullet-hits-the-bone/): When I was in my 40’s I learned that my great Uncle Thomas McLamb was a soldier in the Army of Northern Virginia lead by Robert E. Lee.  The War of Northern Aggression did not go well for Thomas.  He was greviously wounded by a spent minié ball at Kelly’s Ford, Virginia.   Uncle... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Bond Is Dead](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-bond-is-dead/): The words that I just typed into the header caused a chill as I read them trailing the cursor.  I knew on Saturday morning that Sean Connery had passed by means of my cell news feed which is almost an instant conduit of information about events.  The next day, scanning the New York Times... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Something Lurks](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-something-lurks/): Yesterday we celebrated Halloween by accompanying costumed children on a parade through a suburban neighborhood.  The homeowners appeared as happy to dispense treats to passing children, as were the children receiving the sweets.  Halloween is a day of celebration, a mirthful exercise of imagination, a costumed reminder of our belonging to a wider community,... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, The Fable Collapses](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-the-fable-collapses/): The tragic artist is no pessimist: he is precisely the one who says Yes to everything questionable, even to the terrible — he is Dionysian. — excerpt Twilight of the Idols by Friedrich Nietzsche, chapt. “Reason” in Philosophy  published 1888 Yesterday a friend and I chatted for twenty minutes about the writings of Nietzsche... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, That Great Fatality](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-that-great-fatality/): In that great fatality called Christianity, Plato represents that ambiguity and fascination, called an ‘ideal,’ which made it possible for the nobler natures of antiquity to misunderstand themselves and to step on the bridge leading to the ‘Cross’… And how much Plato there still is in the concept ‘church,’ in the structure, system, and... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, What America's President Does Not Say](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-what-americas-president-does-not-say/): “The virus is circulating at a speed that not even the most pessimistic forecasts had anticipated,” Macron said in a televised address. “Like all our neighbours, we are submerged by the sudden acceleration of the virus.” “We are all in the same position: overrun by a second wave which we know will be harder,... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Darkness My Old Friend](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-darkness-my-old-friend/): That which is earlier with regard to its rise into dominance becomes manifest to us men only later. That which is primally early shows itself only ultimately to men. Therefore, in the realm of thinking, a painstaking effort to think through still more primally what was primally thought is not the absurd wish to... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Poetry With A Knife](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-poetry-with-a-knife/): Thus we shall never experience our relationship to the essence of technology so long as we merely represent and pursue the technological, put up with it, or evade it. Everywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology, whether we passionately affirm or deny it. But we are delivered over to it in the worst... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Dying With Fall](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-dying-with-fall/): Fall has come gently, with a hint of frost in late October.  The trees are well into shedding their leaves.  I walked around the backyard holding my camera.  I wanted photographs to help me remember this day.  Today is ten days out from the election.   Would I remember this day as one of... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Hunger Games](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-hunger-games/): The language game of legitimationis not state-politicalbut philosophical. There is a universal “history” of spirit,spirit is “life,” and “life” is its own self-presentationand formulation in the ordered knowledgeof all of its formscontained in the empirical sciences.German idealism is the narration of the his(story) of this life-subject. In this perspective,knowledge first finds legitimacywithin itself,and it... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, The Way Out](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-the-way-out/): I made it to Saturday.  Frost can be seen on the ground.  I have a to-do list which includes pruning rose bushes to cleaning a shower.  To live is to work; there is always work to be done.  Any work can be transformed into agreeable activity with a certain angle of approach.  Cleaning a... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Wanted Dead Or Alive](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-wanted-dead-or-alive/): How do I write this morning? I did not listen to the debate last night.  I cannot expose myself to a litany of lies, which is nothing other than emotional abuse.  Mentally and emotionally I have suffered enough from the verbal battering that accompanies the President of the United States. Nevertheless I found sleep... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Nothing More To Say](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-nothing-more-to-say/): A Thursday morning, still dark outside and I feel exhausted.  This morning I’ve nothing in mind to say.  I am tired, very tired. The pandemic is gaining momentum, yet a second wave of infections, certain to grow worse with the coming cold months.  This was foreseen as the certain result of official rejection of... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, The Meaning of Life & A World Without Work](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-the-meaning-of-life-a-world-without-work/): Last night we discussed an excerpt from Yuval Harari’s book.  The segment was titled The Meaning of Life In A world Without Work. Perhaps you detect the minor, yet major difference between the title of my thoughts about living in a world where work is relentlessly reduced by the application of artificial intelligence, and... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Our Last Dance](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-our-last-dance/): THE WHITE HOUSE WASHINGTON                                                                                                                                                                                         NOTICE DATE: October 2, 2020 JERRY W & LAURA L KING                          NOTICE NUMBER: 1444 1426 HAINES CT BATAVIA, IL 60510-9206 Your Economic Impact Payment Has Arrived My Fellow American: Our great country is experiencing an unprecedented public health and economic challenge as a result of the global coronavirus pandemic.... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, A Meter Beating Time](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-a-meter-beating-time/): “A meter beating time…a strange form of knowledge..” These words from The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge came to mind while reflecting upon our nine month old grand daughter’s response to the rock tune by Journey, “Any Way You Want It.”  When the evening meal was finished yesterday, I selected a rock station... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, How Bad, Before Blood?](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-how-bad-before-blood/): A friend sent me this youtube video.  The visual is an excerpt of the confirmation hearing for Judge Amy Cony Barrett.  Watching and listening to the speech of Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, my despair deepened.  How more craven, oblivious to the requirements of office, and of representative democracy can this possibly become?  The legislative/administrative violence... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Pirate Ship](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-pirate-ship/): Walking a few blocks from the house after nightfall, we came upon the ‘pirate ship’ that we’d heard of.  This one was in celebration of Halloween.  Nevertheless the creators had a point of irony.  The ship was christened USS Covid.  Every ship has a captain, and a crew.   I captured some photos of the... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Halloween Decoration Fantasy](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-viewing-halloween-decorations/): It was a sunny afternoon.  We declared a field trip for ourselves and the two grand kids.  Off we went to visit several homes that featured impressive Halloween displays.   On the visit to a West Chicago neighborhood, the monster featured was a giant dragon.  Skeletons and rats were placed at the foot of... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, What Is Truth?*](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-what-is-truth/): …the right to decide what is trueis not independent of the right to decide what is just,even if statement consigned to these two authorities differ in nature.The point is there is a strict interlinkagebetween the kind of language called science and the kind called ethics and politics:they both stem from the same perspective, the... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Emasculated Society](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-an-emasculated-society/): It is society, our tame, mediocre, gelded society, in which a natural human being, who comes from the mountains or from the adventures of the sea, necessarily degenerates into a criminal. — excerpt Twilight of the Idols, Skirmishes of an Untimely Man, by Friedrich Nietzsche p. 110 Another day, a predictable concatenation of events,... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Senate Kabuki Festival](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-senate-kabuki-festival/): Kabuki (歌舞伎) is a classical Japanese dance-drama. Kabuki theatre is known for the stylization of its drama, the often-glamorous costumes worn by performers, and for the elaborate kumadori make-up worn by some of its performers.                     — Wikipedia Judge Barrett is from the South and Midwest.... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Make-Believe Fright](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-make-believe-fright/): Fall is magical time.  Two holidays of the Fall season are Halloween on October 31st and Thanksgiving, the last Thursday of November.  As the leaves begin to turn, float to the earth to dapple the ground, the magic begins. This year I’ve taken note of the particular attraction that Fall has for children.  Halloween... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, What It Costs](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-what-it-costs/): 38. My conception of freedom.— The value of a thing sometimes does not lie in that which one attains by it, but in what one pays for it — what it costs us. I shall give an example. Liberal institutions cease to be liberal as soon as they are attained: later on, there are... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, In My Hometown?](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-in-my-hometown/): West Chicago is not my hometown.  It does remind me however of the place where I was born, where I grew to adulthood, Durham, North Carolina.  Do I bear the traces of where I grew up, in my DNA?  Sometimes I think so.  I would visit there more often, if we lived closer.  I... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Religion](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-religion-2/): Religion and politics are hot buttons.  That has always been true.  A long list of deadly conflicts could be composed without difficulty.  Both of these topics are a “third rail.”  Advice is widely known that these topics ought to be avoided in polite company.  Would you solicit opinion about politics with relatives whom you... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Survivor Guilt](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-survivor-guilt/): Yesterday I enjoyed the rare privilege of lunch with a good friend at a restaurant which we both find delightful.  We met at Taste of Paris in Mundelein.  In the middle of the week, we had the dining room to ourselves.  Under these conditions of increasing covid-19 contagion it felt safer to dine alone. ... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Worth It?](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-worth-it/): Our philosophy discussion last night was conducted via zoom.  Admittedly not as satisfying, but a conference call among six to eight people, their presence indicated by a postage-stamp scale image is better than nothing.  Evening comes earlier now, with the chill, precluding our custom of sitting in a big circle of chairs on the... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Art And Protest](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-art-and-protest/): Another mild fall day.  The pleasant weather betrays the darkness that roils our society.  Conditions present a surface quiescence, especially in towns such as mine, majority white, affluent, well ordered by the system.  My neighbors appear to be comfortable enough in their homes, most of us are able to work from home, and our... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, 'Beautiful' Or 'Ugly'](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-beautiful-or-ugly/): We are constantly making judgments, what we like and what we dislike.  These moments are hardly thought about.  Years have passed, we’ve journeyed far down our road of evaluative exploration.  As a reflex we simply respond to a visual impression, a scent, a taste, or to an idea either in sophisticated, nuanced, oblique approval... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Respite](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-respite/): Sunday morning, and a chill breeze  removes some leaves from our maple tree.  Red and orange colors begin to illuminate the tree.  Little seems changed in the last twenty four hours according to the NYT Weekend Briefing received this morning.  The president continues to be hospitalized with covid-19.  Reports of his condition are uncertain. ... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Paradise](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-paradise/): My Ancestors –  immigrated from Britain to escape religious persecution, intending to found a city set-on-a-hill, or paradise, which is another way of putting it.  In the haste to flee persecution, we overlooked our streak of self-righteousness which we inadvertently transported to the “new” world.  Early in our settlement in Massachusetts we had a... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Divine Retribution](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-divine-retribution/): I woke and read that the President and his wife have tested positive for coronavirus.  She says that she feels fine.  Of course the NY Times Morning report mentioned well wishes received from many world leaders.  I am not so sympathetic.  Given the presidents attitude of disdain for social distancing, for wearing a mask,... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, The Unprayable Prayer](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-the-unprayable-prayer/): THE DRY SALVAGES* (No. 3 of ‘Four Quartets’) by T.S. Eliot I I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river Is a strong brown god—sullen, untamed and intractable, Patient to some degree, at first recognised as a frontier; Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce; Then only a problem... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Debate Analysis](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-debate-analysis/): I did not watch the debate for egotistical reasons.  What could the President possibly have said, that he does not say on a daily basis on twitter?  What could he possibly show, that he has not demonstrated already?  Besides, I’ve already voted.  Of importance to me is my rest.  Why jeopardize a good night’s... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, A Refuge In Cynicism](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-taking-refuge-in-cynicism/): In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would,at the same time,believe everything and nothing,think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. ….Mass propaganda discovered that its audiencewas ready at all times to believe the worst,no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceivedbecause... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Squinting](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-squinting/): 7. Moral code for psychologists —- Never observe for the sake of observing!That gives a false perspective, a squint and something forced and exaggerated. A born psychologist guards instinctively against seeing in order to see;the same is true of the born painter. He never works “from nature”;he leaves it to his instinct, to his... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Monsters Ball](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-monsters/): Soon it will be October.  Taking a bike ride into town yesterday, I looked for the seasonal Halloween decorations that households and businesses create to celebrate the October 31st children’s holiday.  Halloween is second only to Christmas as an event to be anticipated.  Who doesn’t love to “dress up?” Monster costumes are popular. Children... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Fall Dreams](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-fall-dreams/): The days continue to be warm.  Frost seems far away.  Weather conditions can change suddenly though, within a few hours.  The tilt of the earth is the primary determinant, as days are shorter, and there’s less energy with the oblique angle of the sun’s rays.  Energy exchange is the story of life, and of... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, To Be Conscious](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-to-be-conscious/): II Garlic and sapphires in the mudClot the bedded axle-tree.The trilling wire in the bloodSings below inveterate scarsAppeasing long forgotten wars.The dance along the arteryThe circulation of the lymphAre figured in the drift of starsAscend to summer in the treeWe move above the moving treeIn light upon the figured leafAnd hear upon the sodden... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Ripping Out The Guts](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-ripping-out-the-guts/): The Balrog reached the bridge. Gandalf stood in the middle of the span, leaning on the staff in his left hand, but in his other hand Glamdring gleamed, cold and white. His enemy halted again, facing him, and the shadow about it reached out like two vast wings. It raised the whip, and the... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Watching A Conflagration](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-watching-a-conflagration/): We discussed Buddhist principles last night.  That is, we worked at re-training our minds to process a way of thinking.  We’re habituated to think that life is basically problem solving, according to widely accepted principles of cause and effect logic.  Major principle, minor principle then the conclusion follows: problem solved.  If “the problem” presented... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, A Piece Of Fate](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-wheel-in-the-sky/): A friend reached out to me, inquiring of my thoughts on treatment options he had been presented for a recurrence of cancer.  I briefly awakened at 3AM thinking about what I would say.  Cancer is a serious illness, terminal if not treated.  The overture for a philosophical response could not have been more pragmatic... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Oh No...](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-oh-no/): Not another obscure, obtuse post….  Everyone knows that it’s not a good idea to keep causing pain to your readers.  I’ve been warned by others who care about my happiness.  But I knew already the difficulty of the self imposed task to comment upon philosophical concepts regarded as radical, beyond the pale of common... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Math Isn't Real, (What's Real?)](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-math-isnt-real-whats-real/): Sunday morning, I retrieved the New York Times from the end of the driveway.  Sorting the sections of the paper, after discarding the advertising inserts I brought the Magazine section to my desk.  The first article, entitled After Math is about the musing of a teenager (while applying makeup) about whether math is real... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Detonation And Firestorm](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-detonation-and-firestorm/): I slept soundly enough last night.  The news late Friday was of the passing of Supreme Court Judge, Ruth Bader Ginsburg.  Justice Ginsburg’s death is a momentous event, a breaking away of the keystone if you will, of a liberal (humane) democratic society as we have known it, as imperfect as it has been. ... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, A Strident Cacophony](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-cacophony/): The Socrates Café met earlier this week.  Seven or eight of us began by discussing the challenges of listening mindfully, carefully to what someone of a different culture has to say.  Listening well is quite difficult.  A member of our group asserted that we Caucasian Americans are accustomed to speaking, to the expectation that... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, A Dog Named Boo](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-a-dog-named-boo/): Silly me.  Why should I write about this song?  Perhaps an ironic silliness is my hold upon sanity?  Never mind. In our discussion session on Buddhist philosophy, we mused together about the few possessions owned by those most intent upon practicing the prescripts of the Buddha’s message. A monk owns a saffron robe or... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Buddhism Lifeline or Straw?](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-buddhism-lifeline-or-straw/): Why Buddhism? We began several sessions to consider concepts entailed in Buddhism; not easy or comfortable for Americans who are natural pragmatists.  Habits of thinking by categorizing, labeling experience is our default.  Buddhist thought is a bid to move in another direction:  reality as seamless, metaphysical monism.  There is no purity or pollution, birth... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Freedom - Another Word For Nothing Left To Lose*](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal/): I have the website for The Leo bookmarked. The Leo is an independent, “alternative” newspaper published in Louisville, Kentucky.  The editorial slant is unapologetic and progressive.  The coverage of culture and local happenings is extensive and well written.  I’ve visited Louisville a number of times and find the town on the Ohio river stimulating. ... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Photography & Violence](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-photography-violence/): Photography has been an interest for many years.  In high school I began taking my fathers Kodak box camera to the drag strip.  Imagine using a camera with a 1/30th second shutter speed and 100 ASA  film to record the accelerating launch of a dragster.  My first lesson: a photograph depends essentially upon the... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Tailspin](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-tailspin/): A friend sent me a link to an article by Ed Yong, staff writer at The Atlantic.  The article by a science writer was an overview of America’s response to the pandemic; America Is Trapped in a Pandemic Spiral.  The article was nine pages of emotionally difficult reading.  I felt a sense of terror,... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Life Without A Castle](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-life-without-a-castle/): Waking this morning there is drizzle outside.  Weather extremes are devastating, and I am thankful, the proportion of sunlit days and to those with rain seems normal here so far.  Too much heat and vegetation becomes fuel.  Too much water, and flooding is the consequence.  Technology, or to say it more plainly, the application... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Philosophizing With A Hammer](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-philosophizing-with-a-hammer/): To stay cheerful in the midst of a gloomy task, fraught with immeasurable responsibility, is no small feat; and yet what is needed more than cheerfulness? Nothing succeeds if high spirits has no part in it. Excess strength alone is the proof of strength.  A revaluation of all values: this question mark, so black,... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, The View From The Wall](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-the-view-from-the-wall/): Thursday morning, One of my ancestors might have been a common foot-soldier in service of some Medieval nobleman.  In my imagination I am back in time, re-living his life, standing in place on a castle wall.  The crossbow is heavy.  I look over the countryside from the high vantage point to see the tents... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, For The Few](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-for-the-few/): 57 In every healthy society, three mutually conditioning physiological types separate out and gravitate in different directions, each one having its own hygiene, its own area of work, its own feelings of perfection and field of mastery. Nature, …, separates out predominantly spiritual people from people characterized by muscular and temperamental strength from a... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Destiny?](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-destiny/): Sitting under the maple tree, in front of the old Kane County courthouse built in 1892,  it has the architectural look and feel of another time.  Many that constructed the edifice remembered the War Between the States, and likely served in the Grand Army of the Republic.  That explains the impressive sculpture, imposing, on... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Hunger's Edge](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-hungers-edge/): The New York Times Magazine dedicated an entire issue to a photo exploration of hunger in America.  As you would assume the victims are predominately Black, Hispanic, women and children.  The photographs taken by Brenda Ann Kenneally in the course of a three month journey from Oneida, New York to San Diego, California moved... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, All The World Will Love You](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-all-the-world-will-love-you/): Who doesn’t want to be loved?  The desire/need to be loved and to love is universal for all humans.  Maybe the principle holds for all living things.  For a blade of grass, or a rose, — I cannot say.  I have observed that mammals seek out love, affectionate response.  A dog understands a kind... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, What Time Is It?](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-what-time-is-it/): Is it not interesting how we label time?  A week ago I made the mistake of assuming it was the Labor Day weekend — a week early.  I arrived at that conclusion despite evidence to the contrary.  The joke was on me.  Emotionally, my internal reality began to anticipate the three day weekend,– and... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Ignorance](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-ignorance/): I have completed the preface of a book, AGNOTOLOGY [The Making & Unmaking of Ignorance], edited by Robert N. Proctor and Londa Schiebinger.  The subject is “ignorance,” the history and the function of ignorance.  I was intrigued to select this book because there is current an outbreak of studied, deliberate ignorance, ignorance which is... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Dissonance](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-dissonance/): The Socrates Café group met last night.  As with the protocol for the last few sessions, a Go-To-Meeting video link was used.  There were six images of participants, in a double line across the screen.  For many reasons a digital representation of a human being lacks the vibrancy of physical presence.  We are at... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Time After Time](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-time-after-time/): What to write this morning?  There’s Trump-In-Kenosha, the topic of the President’s visit to a place where I have spent some time.  I know very well that I’d write more, what I have said many times before about this man.  I’d recount a litany of lies spoken, words which have nothing to do with... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, When The Shotgun Sings The Song...](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-civil-war/): We are on the edge of a storm according to a writer in The Atlantic and another in The Federalist. At the end of today’s edition of the NYT The Daily update of articles, I read a paragraph that stated that we are locked in a cold “civil war” as a nation. The journalist... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Without A Spark?](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-without-a-spark/): Monday, a week before Labor Day.  It’s early, and all is quiet outside.  Traffic is minimal.  The atmosphere is like a relative silence before an anticipated storm breaks with fury and unforeseeable destruction. There has been civil unrest in Portland, Oregon and Kenosha, Wisconsin.  In those places members of Trump-world, armed, and intent on... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Buddhist Thought And Violence](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-buddhist-thought-and-violence/): Today is Sunday.  I remember when growing up in North Carolina, Sunday was referred to as “the day of rest.”  That meant that it was customary to spend a portion of the morning in attendance at a church “worship” service.  Worship meant minimally that respect was shown for a shared tradition of stories and... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Posing As Conventions](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-posing-as-conventions/): There is a lot more offered on the internet than one can consume, even when one attempts to be judicious.  Recently I’ve listened to a podcast by Scott Galloway, a marketing professor at NYU.  I like his direct, no-nonsense manner of speaking.  If you’d like to sample the podcast, The Professor G Show,  CLICK... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Burlesque The Grand Illusion](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-burlesque/): As mentioned previously, I did not watch the Republican convention.  It was widely known that the Party was intent upon rebranding the brash, petulant, infantile Trump, as a stolid law n’ order leader, — “just the man that we need.”  I can’t stomach the lies.   A lesson of life, learned by dint of experience,... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Already A Shrapnel Casualty](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-already-a-shrapnel-casualty/): 54One should not let oneself be misled:great intellects are skeptics…..The vigor of mind,its freedom through strengthand superior strength, is proved by skepticism.Men of conviction simply do not come into considerationwhere the fundamentals of value and dis-valueare concerned. Convictions are prisons.They do not see far enough,they do not see things beneath them:but to be permitted... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Our Unmaking](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-our-unmaking/): We met again, a circle of lawn chairs in the setting sun, and then in the cool of early evening to discuss Reciprocal Altruism as a behavior germane to evolutionary development among living creatures.  The author of the essay which formed the basis of our discussion, cited the symbiotic relationship between cleaner fish removing... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Decadence](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-decadence/): The term is used often by Nietzsche in his writings.  I have quoted often, a few longish passages from The Anti-Christ.  There is no need for additional quotation here.  Nietzsche, living in the late 19th century saw clearly the precursors of Wiemar Republic, the Nazi cultic ideology and war that shortly followed.  In his... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Interlude](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-interlude/): For a Monday, why not take a break from the political chatter, from the reports of extensive wild fire damage in California, from reports of twin hurricanes that threaten Texas and Louisiana, and from the propaganda storm about to envelop us?  The last is a reference to the Republican Party MAGA convention. Yesterday in... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Decadence & Beatings](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-decadence-beatings/): I watched a 1972 Bob Fosse movie Cabaret last night with my wife.  I don’t usually prefer musicals.  I confess to a negligible background in music which constrains my appreciation of many varieties of musical expression. This movie impressed me as a layered, complex piece of story telling.  The musical pieces, served to show... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Watching Everything Burn](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-watching-everything-burn/): Saturday!  Here I am at my desk with conflicting emotions of gratitude (I made it to the weekend) and trepidation.  Challenges remain ahead.  I am sad, feel empathy for those in northern California who are in the vise of climate warming.  They watch as the land around them is scorched by wildfires.  How awful... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Improvisation](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-improvisation/): Yesterday, we watched as an old willow tree was removed from the back of our property.  The tree was just over our property line, and belonged to the Park District.  A neighbor said she remembered when the tree was planted.  The top of the giant willow was broken by a wind storm.  A crane... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Insanity Laughs](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-insanity-laughs-under-pressure/): The pressure of circumstances forces choices.  Those “choices” are less free than I formerly believed.  Free will!?  I doubt it.  I am aware of the juxtaposition of the impress of past events and encounters within my psyche. Does not the mind reflexively select to act upon the factors offering the best chances of survival? ... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Anti Science](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-anti-science/): 48The old God, all ‘spirit’,…all perfection,promenades in his garden:but he is bored.Against boredom the gods themselvesfight in vain.What is he to do?He invents man – man is entertaining…..But behold, man too is bored.God’s sympathy with the only kind of distressfound in paradise knows no bounds:He forthwith creates other animals.God’s first blunder:man did not find... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Change - It Had To Come](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-change-it-had-to-come/): Summer is waning.  In our child-like fantasy, we’d like endless summer.  Deceiving ourselves, we forget that in time we’d be satiated with the beauty, the days of amusement and play.  Boredom would overtake us soon enough. I entertained these thoughts yesterday while enjoying a “just right” lunch on the patio of the Makray Memorial... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Lost In Space](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-lost-in-space/): 43 If one shifts the center of gravity of life out of life into the ‘Beyond’ – into nothingness one has deprived life as such of its center of gravity. The great lie of personal immortality destroys all rationality, all naturalness of instinct, all that is salutary, all that is life-furthering, all that holds... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Down On Our Luck?](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-down-on-our-luck/): Yesterday I went for a short drive to Geneva as is my habit to do some reading, sitting on the ground under a maple tree in front of the old court house.  Gazing at the great old Civil War memorial statue that dominates the view from the courthouse, — the mood came over me... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, There Has Been Only One](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-there-has-been-only-one/): 39 The word ‘Christianity’ is already a misunderstanding – In reality there has been only one Christian, and he died on a Cross. The ‘Evangel’ died on the Cross. What was called ‘Evangel’ from this moment onwards was already the opposite of what he had lived: the ‘bad tidings’ a dysangel. It is false... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Appetite For Destruction](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-appetite-for-destruction/): Friday Reading this morning’s The Daily update of stories in the New York Times, I learned more detail about the Presidents attempts to de-fund and degrade the Post Office.  The Post Office is one of the venerable institutions of the government that has served many generations of Americans well.  The Presidents appointed Postmaster General,... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Out Of Nothing At All](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-out-of-nothing-at-all/): Could the second law of thermodynamics be the least abstract of all scientific principles?  I am thinking of entropy, the arrow of time.  Left to itself, a system, or a human being, or a city, a whole society, a solar system will reach a state of equilibrium.  The principle was first formulated in 1824.  Heat... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Woolly Mammoth Is Back](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-welcome-the-woolly-mammoth/): Many months ago it felt right to use “Plague Journal” in the title line for these posts.  I assumed that fighting the virus would be a process, that the work of research with the public’s self-interested cooperation would reduce the corona virus to a minor inconvenience.  A two year anniversary is approaching since our... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Father Knows](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-father-knows/): Uncultured mansees in conscience, in reason,so far as he recognizes it as his ownno universal objective power; therefore he must separate from himselfthat which gives him moral laws,and place it in opposition to himself,as a distinct personal being. Belief in revelationis a childlike belief,and is only respectable as long asit is childlike. — excerpt,... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, 9-11 Twenty Years After](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-20th-year-anniversary-of-9-11/): How to begin.  Yesterday was the 20th anniversary, of the September 11th, 2001 suicide attack on the twin towers in Manhattan, on the Pentagon, and the fourth passenger jet plowing into the earth at Shanksville Pennsylvania.  Four occasions of mass death were memorialized yesterday by ceremonies at the sites where they occurred.  I paid... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Sunup](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-sunup/): “‘Now if love is always for this,’ she proceeded, ‘what is the method of those who pursue it, and what is the behavior whose eagerness and straining are to be termed love? What actually is this effort? Can you tell me?’ “‘Ah, Diotima,’ I said; ‘in that case I should hardly be admiring you... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Another Thought On Heaven](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-another-thought-on-heaven/): Is anything comparable to music to say what can only be said indirectly, approached by metaphor? Absent any belief in heaven, — do THEY not all live, in us!? Rock And Roll Heaven by The Righteous Brothers If you believe in forever Then life is just a one-night stand If there’s a rock n’... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, If There's No Heaven...](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-what-if-theres-no-heaven/): I am not the first, and this is not the first time the thought comes to mind.  Yesterday, early evening, the moon was a sliver of fingernail behind a cloud low in the darkening sky.  I hurried inside to get my camera.  I knew the moment would not last.  This morning on Fabyan Parkway... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, One Hundred & Fifty Six](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-one-hundred-fifty-six/): How many years since the War of Southern Rebellion ended? For many of those years a statue of Robert E. Lee mounted on his horse Traveler has occupied a prominent place on Monument Avenue in Richmond Virginia.  Lee was commander in chief of the pro-slavery forces (human trafficking) that fought for four long years... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Higher Ed Redux](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-higher-ed-redux/): If I could — I would. The discussion was intense for an hour and a half.  If I could re-invent higher education, where would I start, what would I change?  The question is more than an idle thought experiment, a mind game.  Human beings without the benefit of instincts, rely upon the internal map... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Ottawa](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-ottawa/): Today is the day after Labor Day. We visited the town of Ottawa yesterday.  The town is about an hour drive south, near the terminus of the Fox River.  Ottawa is the seat of Lasalle County and was the site of the first debate between Stephen A. Douglass and Abraham Lincoln in 1858.  The... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Labor Day](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-labor-day/): Monday, the end of summer.  The street is eerily quiet at State and 3rd in Geneva.  At the hour of 7AM, there’s not the usual bustle. While driving to Starbucks I listened to a NPR piece covering the aftermath of hurricane Ida’s destruction on the coast of Louisiana.  Several individuals were interviewed that formerly... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, That Great Fatality](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-that-great-fatality-2/): In that great fatality called Christianity, Plato represents that ambiguity and fascination, called an “ideal,” which made it possible for the nobler spirits of antiquity to misunderstand themselves and to set foot on the bridge leading to the ‘Cross’… And how much Plato there still is in the concept “church,” in the construction, system,... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Pointing To One End](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-pointing-to-one-end/): BURNT NORTON by T. S. Eliot (No. 1 of ‘Four Quartets’)   Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future, And time future contained in time past. If all time is eternally present All time is unredeemable. What might have been is an abstraction Remaining a perpetual possibility Only in... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Paradise City](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-paradise-city/): Little to say this morning.  The Starbucks room vibe parallels my subdued mood.  With difficulty I listened to the morning news report on NPR.  A business reporter described the decline in business activity among small businesses, restaurants, particularly in the states impacted with Delta virus.  Large numbers of un-vaccinated fellow citizens have wide spread... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Entanglement](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-entanglement/): Yesterday we were privileged to have a guided tour of the Fabyan Estate home in Geneva, on the bank of the Fox River.  George Fabyan, descendant of a wealthy Boston dry goods manufacturing family and his wife Nelle, purchased 300 acres in the early 1900s.  The old farmhouse on the property was remodeled by... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Off The Deep End](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-off-the-deep-end/): The exchange of ideas began with the presentation of research notes.  Five of us submitted summaries of our findings, our considerations on the prospect of building-from-scratch higher education.  Perhaps it is obvious that college and post graduate studies are out of reach financially for a large majority of high school students desiring to continue. ... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Hungry](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-hungry/): Yesterday I took a late August bike ride.  I followed the bike path along the Fox River from Batavia to Aurora.  The asphalt path eased my fifteen mile journey, following the river under the trees, shaded from late summer sunlight.  The journey concluded with a rest, reading for a while under a massive old... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Burn, Burn, Burn](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-burn-burn-burn/): I witnessed, an extended email exchange between two friends which treated the topic of vengeance, rage-filled violence.  The pivot point of the discussion had to do with a comparison/contrast between the palpable expression, the gorge-filled uprising of murderous wrath, and the more benign fictional, hypothetical contemplation of this emotional storm, such as we find... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Tequila Sunrise Sunday](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-tequila-sunrise-sunday/): Sunday at six thirty AM looking east the sky was pale yellow, and the sun a blinding, fiery ball.  The yellow is the smoke from distant fires.  I read late yesterday that the Caldor fire near Lake Tahoe is being contained.  In the Midwest we do not have to remain indoors day after day... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Charlie Watts](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-charlie-watts/): Charlie Watts died on August 24.  He was eighty.  Watts played drums for the Rolling Stones since 1963. Is it trite to say that Watts passing marks the end of an era?  There, I have said it and will say it again.  A great deal of what we’ve taken for granted and relied upon... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Truth-freaks And Liars Invited...](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-truth-freaks-and-liars-are-invited/): Today is Friday.  Sometimes I am disoriented, unsure if today is Saturday or…  Retirement sometimes has a confusing texture as the structure of the workweek is removed. I am considering, speculating upon what I would desire if it were possible to be young again, to begin higher education under ideal circumstances.  In hindsight, what... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, If You Let Yourself Stop](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-if-you-let-yourself-stop/): Today promises to be hot, with the possibility of thunderstorms.  The rain will be welcome, as the usual pattern of sunny days interspersed with rain are a memory.  The summers are hotter and more dry. Illinois is under a mask mandate announced by the governor today.  This measure is to prevent the depletion of... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, At Bulldogs](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-at-bulldogs/): Hungry, but not hungry enough to order a hotdog and fries.  I ordered the hotdog.  The man behind the counter about to swipe my card, inquired, “No fries?”  That’s right I replied.  I hate to throw out the fries, and that’s what will happen.  “Ok” he said. I watched him compose the hotdog.  A... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, There!](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-there/): Imagine, by way of experiment, two young men [Wittgenstein and Heidegger] strolling together through the city – and suddenly one says to the other: “How strange that everything exists [“das es überhaupt etwas gibt”]!  How miraculous:  There! And there! Do you see it, too?” And the other man nods and says “Yes I see... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Napping On Sunday Afternoon](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-sunday-afternoon/): I took a nap on a summers afternoon, warm, bright with sunlight.  I awakened noting that my blood sugar was high.  A diabetic pays attention to such things.  I decided to take a bike ride into town.  The afternoon was quiet. A short ride would serve to address the high blood sugar.  Riding for... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Sunday, Sunday](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-sunday-sunday-2/): It is Sunday.  While at Starbucks I enjoyed a conversation with an acquaintance. The conversation ranged from the Le Mans race taking place in Europe while we conversed, to Formula1 racing and Drag racing.  Both of us are gear-heads with a long standing interest in performance automobiles, engineering, and racing.  Any Sunday spent at... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Thoreau](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-thoreau/): ON PHILOSOPHERS Of a life of luxury the fruit is luxury, whether in agriculture, or commerce, or literature, or art. There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers. Yet it is admirable to profess because it was once admirable to live. To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Taking More Than We Give](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-taking-more-than-we-give/): Humankind has exploited it’s own species for as long as recorded history.  We’ve enslaved, colonized, worked for low wages-without-benefits the hapless, the unlucky, the victims of circumstance.  This is an old story from the construction of the pyramids along the Nile, to the cotton fields of the antebellum South, to Amazon warehouses across America... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, What Is Owed-A Meditation](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-what-is-owed-a-meditation/): What do I owe future generations?  That was the question of the evening for the Socrates Cafe group.  We met again at Barnes & Noble.  Everyone around the table wore a mask.  It is yet unclear how truly effective the vaccine will be to protect us from the more contagious Delta virus.  Surely this... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Only The Dance](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-there-is-only-the-dance/): Yesterday I walked in the woods.  My last attempt to enter Braeburn Marsh I was met with a phalanx of mosquitoes.  Outnumbered my determination crumbled, I hastily returned to the house.  This summer day I walked along the edge of the marsh paying attention, quietly absorbing the late summer wild flowers.  Many things that... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Booberry Party](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-booberry-party/): Close enough …!  I am thinking of the Blueberry Festival which we attended at the Windy Acres Farm in Geneva Sunday afternoon.  The Festival was an immersive experience, as festivals must be.  Present at a festival, once more I am reminded that I am not alone.  Others are raising families, introducing children to the... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Haul'n Ass Again](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-haulin-ass-again/): Perhaps you remember April 30, 1975, when NVA tanks rolled through the gates of the Presidential palace in Saigon?  I was twenty six years old then.  I still carry my draft card from that era in my wallet. That offensive put an end to our attempt to make Vietnam a client state, a colony... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, The Hand Of Fate](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-the-hand-of-fate/): A return home after days of absence is a special feeling.  The conviction arises, “this is where I belong.”  Is that familiar touch of place and of presence in time, — what is meant by “the hand of fate?”  All of my experiences, the places, faces, and events have brought me to this place. ... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, More Change More Of The Same](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-more-change-more-of-the-same/): We return home from Minnesota today.  Our visit with family was a satisfying relief from the restriction on travel which has prevented contact and face to face conversation for the past year and a half.  It is a delight to witness children playing and growing, maturing in interests, and capabilities.  I was intellectually stimulated... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Gibbering On](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-gibbering-on/): I moved.  Today at breakfast I moved as far as possible from the droning of Good Morning America television, a mindless going on about how the quiz show Jeopardy.  The show now will have two hosts…  Who in his/her right mind should care?  Clearly inhabitants of our media culture do care.  The world is burning! ... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Shilling To Oblivion](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-nation-of-shills/): 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... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, French Toast](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-8/): Willmar, Minnesota.  Years have passed since visiting with relatives here.  Willmar, a great plains town is a center for the Burlington Northern Santa Fe railroad.  Driving into Willmar, you are unlikely to miss the switching yard for the  freight bearing trains bound for Chicago, or for the Pacific coast.  Willmar is home to the... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Lucy's](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-lucys-diner/): Yesterday was our last full day in Eagle River.  We visited Lucy’s Diner for breakfast.  Yes, Lucy’s is a bona fide diner, a diminutive dining room of perhaps eight tables, and a counter with a row of stools.  We sat at the counter affording a view of the kitchen.  My interest was captured by... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Orphans](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-orphans/): How beautiful indifference was in a world that was not indifferent,      in a world that was different, convulsive           and contradictory, with stakes and passions. Back then, the indifference of the mind could turn into a stake or a passion, in total opposition to the world. It could anticipate the indifferent future of... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Resistance](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-more-from-my-notebook/): Saturday morning is overcast in Eagle River.  I anticipated writing from a coffee shop in town.  I arrived and read a sign that said open 7 till 2PM Monday through Friday.  Disappointed, I returned to the Best Western lobby. I settled into a chair at a corner table.  Yesterday the manager of Inn described... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Baraboo](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-baraboo/): We are spending several days in Baraboo, Wisconsin.  We plan to visit with relatives living in Eagle River Wisconsin, and then on to Willmar Minnesota, to see family that we’ve not seen for many months.  For the most part our stay in Baraboo has been delightful.  There have been bare glimpses of the ideological... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Breakfast In America](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-breakfast-in-america/): I am in Baraboo Wisconsin today.  I am alone, with a cup of coffee on an outside patio.  The crows in the woods behind me are noisily conferring.  I heard this song on the radio yesterday. Goodby Stranger was featured in Breakfast in America an album by the British group Supertramp, released in 1979. ... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Science](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-science/): This morning I am processing the discussion of last night, an exchange of ideas within our amateur philosophers group about the work of Paul Feyerabend.  Feyerabend was Austrian.  He taught philosophy at the University of California at Berkley for three decades.  He passed in 1994. Attracted by Feyerabend’s anarchistic view of the methods of... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Good Work Begins](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-good-work/): Braeburn Forest Preserve and Marsh is a two minute walk from our house. I received report than our grand daughter who is twenty months old, created two works by the entryway to the park yesterday. When Finlea is permitted to walk supervised in the backyard she often heads for the park, the entryway of... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Here I Am, Again](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-here-i-am-again/): Monday, the morning illuminated with unfiltered sun.  Reaching for my dark sunglasses I accelerated into traffic, peering directly into the rising sun.  Turning left from Fabyan Parkway onto Rt 31 I noted the poor reception on the FM radio no matter the station selected.  Atmospheric conditions are such, — static mixes with music,… That... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Meditation East Of Eden](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-meditation-east-of-eden/): Another day East of Eden.  There are times, when for a moment I think this is paradise, or better that it could be.  Those are the times when my body and mind registers beauty or meaning.  Almost always I am taken by surprise.  If I am lucky, I have a pad and pen at... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Eternally Young](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-another-walkabout/): In summer, when school term responsibilities are lifted from children, they utilize “vacation” time for play.  One universal form which play usually takes is to walk about, or better to run, while observing all manner of things which one encounters as one passes by.  Running through the neighborhood to a friends house, walking briskly... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Almost Paradise](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-almost-paradise/): The morning is bright and cool, reminding me of the Wisconsin North Woods which are subject to spells of midsummer cool days.  The human mind strives to recognize patterns. Our default is the assumption that our mind-made pattern is the form of reality, which we presume will persist .   Thus I am “tipped... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Self-Made](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-self-made/): This statue entitled Self-Made Man by sculptor Bobbie Carlyle is installed in front of Bar Evolution here in Batavia.  I have occasion to walk by the statue often.  The work prompts the sardonic thought that there is nothing that is self-made in this world.  Homo Sapiens, humans are among the most complex and fragile... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, That Strange Elongated Crisis](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-that-strange-elongated-crisis/): I finished the essay by Maxwell Hyett of Western University.  The essay is entitled Amateur Mortality.  It was forwarded to me by a friend.  Hyett treats Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi’s three short meditations on the meanings, the possible outcomes of the covid pandemic, the quarantine, the masking up in public places, the social isolation which... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Place](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-place/): Tuesday, and friends are coming over late in the morning.  Friends of many years become scarce with the passage of time.  Life becomes more complex, or worse, we are uprooted and forced to begin all over again.  The latter is often the case as demands of employment mandate a move to a new town... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Not Enough Poetry](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-not-enough-poetry/): Another week begins.  The Olympics in Tokyo are in full swing.  I watched some of it on TV.  The main event of my weekend was attendance at the Geneva Art Fair.  I had several memorable conversations with artists.  Life at best, is an art-form, a practice that reveals beauty and meaning.  I aspire to... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Life](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-life/): “Life” — is an expansive topic.  I’ll write about it until I die.  I am an expression of life on this planet.  It is not as if I am an outsider, a disinterested observer.  There are times when I think that our human form of life, we are social creatures after all, — is... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Prayer](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-prayer/): I am the last person to have anything to say about prayer.  It is rare for me to “pray.”  I have become a Christian-agnostic.  That sounds like an oxymoron, an impossible contradiction.  It is not that I decided impiety is a reasonable response to life.  Reason has nothing to do with it, nor does... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Sunny Days End](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-sunny-days-end/): Friday brings a sultry summer morning.  Perhaps this will be the beginning of an idyllic day, such as I remember, or believe that I remember from my childhood.  Those were endless summers.  My only responsibility was to return to the house by dark.  Otherwise the day was entirely mine for play and for exploration. ... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, As The World Just Falls Apart](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-as-the-world-just-falls-apart/): The question comes in due time to everyone who is aware, caring about the condition of society, about the well being of one’s fellows.  No doubt that the question of concern is self-interested.  What if anything ought I to do about climate warming, or the pandemic, or the political issues which divide us as... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, A Carnival Midway](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-carnival-midway/): It is a great feeling to return home.  A “get-a-way” is a luxury, and I have memories that I will cherish for quite some time.  When visiting the shore of Lake Michigan I am aware that my presence is limited.  I fantasize about making time stand still.  A fantasy.  Time, a feature of the... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Saying Goodby](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-saying-goodby/): Every ending is a beginning.  Time to depart, to say goodby to the house where we stayed, and to Lake Michigan.  We have good memories of the past five days.  There has been lots of laughter and some funny stories were told.  I am satisfied to know the children will remember this time for... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Playing](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-playing/): It is paradoxical that I spend yet another day of enjoyment by the lake, knowing that Germany is slammed by flooding, with great loss of life, and devastation.  The corona virus, the latest, hyper contagious variant is exponentially increasing infections by the day, with more deaths to follow.  The obvious question comes to mind... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Saturday](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-saturday/): We decided to go blueberry picking.  For the past five years that we’ve spent time in the St. Joseph area we’ve visited the Bumbleberry Acres Farm.  Blueberry picking by comparison to strawberry picking is much to my liking.  The ripened blueberrys grow on bushes which allow a standing upright position while picking the clusters... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Gray](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-gray/): A gray day with a fine mist falling.  I do not mind the mist.  In fact I attempted opening this computer screen outside on the patio table.  I did not mind the infrequent mosquito.  I peered at this glowing screen, feeling the keyboard surface at my finger tips moistened by the palpable mist.  The... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, The Lake House](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-the-lake-house/): Friday, in a few hours I will depart for St. Joseph, Michigan.  The plan is to spend 5 days at a lake house, for an all-family vacation.  It is a special occasion for parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and children to spend extended time together in conversation, play, swimming in the lake, enjoyment of the... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Handing Tickets Out](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-handing-tickets-out/): Another day dawns.  A light rain is falling for which I am thankful.  I do not live in L.A.  There it is a dry time.  The city is certain to face water rationing, when Lake Mead falls  lower.  The man-made lake is now at 36% of full capacity.  Four million people in one place,... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Your Move](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-shaking-again/): Last night I participated in a wide ranging discussion about language.  How language, words and a manner of speaking, those informal “rules” that channel our conversations in predictable ways — make up our minds.  When I look at the assertion which I just wrote I feel an inner disquiet, dismay.  It appears that language,... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Time Bandit](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-time-bandit/): Walking about with my camera is satisfying.  In my high school days I discovered the challenge of angle-of-view, light, and the framing of a camera lens, are elements of an art form that continues to fascinate.  My first lesson in capturing a photo took place at a drag strip, with my father’s box camera... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Gett'n Past The Pain](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-gettn-past-the-pain/): It is Monday morning, a gray overcast sky.  I do not want to write about politics, about the resurgence of the covid virus, or about the heatwave scorching the West.  Can I write a few lines about a song, about music that communicates more than the composers, the performers intended, or could know?  Rock... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Monsters](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-monsters-2/): The dreamworld, the visions of the subconscious in the early morning hours are said to come from the id, the primal dimension of the psyche which is concealed from the ego, the conscious self.  No matter how blessed, how felicitous circumstances may be, there are always monsters just outside the gates. I had such... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Money](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-money/): It is difficult to impossible to avoid thinking about money directly, or indirectly.  Money, the economy, the future cost of housing, of health care, — the enormity of the sum certainly to be required for the basics of retirement will be “front of mind” for anyone in their middle years.  Naturally underemployment, or unemployment... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, The One Who Finally Burns It Down](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-the-one-who-finally-burns-it-down/): How could I not offer this song?  “By chance,” perhaps the phrase is nonsense.  From another angle of view “chance” is a place holder for ignorance, the cause and effect chain that I did not take into account.  There’s much that I do not take into account.  Anyway, by chance I heard this one... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, To See-To Love-To Care](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-to-see-to-love-to-care/): Success is as dangerous as failure. Hope is as hollow as fear. What does it mean that success is as dangerous as failure? Whether you go up the ladder or down it, your position is shaky. When you stand with your two feet on the ground you will always keep your balance. What does... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Searching For The Emptiness - Inside](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-searching-for-the-emptiness-inside/): It is the center hole, the emptiness inside, the inner space…that holds me. These phrases from verse eleven of the Tao Te Ching in my mind serve as an anchor chain this morning.  I awakened with a high blood sugar reading, which perhaps is not unusual for anyone diabetic.  The condition nevertheless is unacceptable,... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Desire](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-desire-2/): I am revisiting the Tao Te Ching, written by Lao Tsu, a contemporary of Confucius.  It is old by the standard of my short lifetime.  And it is not so old in terms of our Earth, estimated at 4.5 billion years. Thus the text of the Tao Te Ching is both old and not... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Nothing But Image](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-all-is-image/): Today is the day after July the 4th, Independence Day. I joined family members to view a parade spectacle.  Many community groups in town published their presence by a float, a marching band, or by some unusual vehicle, (cement mixer, etc.)  The parade was pure entertainment.  Free candy for the children at the curb.... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Independence Day](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-independence-day/): The 4th of July, Independence Day has arrived.  Shortly I will join family members to view a parade, to participate in a traditional celebration of ourselves.  “Celebrating ourselves”, as ridiculous as that sounds can be a productive, reflective, a good-will-engendering act of reverence that we are blessed with good fortune to enjoy the sunlight,... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Bending Time & Folding Space](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-bending-time-folding-space/): “Well, how was it?” — you may be asking.  The visit to the race track, the drag racing, what was that like? Drag racing, a competition of acceleration, the apotheosis of the individual, to determine which man and machine can cross the finish line first, over a span of asphalt a quarter mile long... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Patriot?](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-patriot/): Friday and the counter at Starbucks is busy.  But it is worth the wait in line to say hello to the welcoming barista behind the register who takes your order with a smile.  The smile is priceless and the coffee is always hot, a perfect balance of astringent bean flavor, and just a  touch... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Heat Dome](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-heat-dome/): I remember Jiffy Pop a product of my childhood.  Popcorn kernels are contained in a lightweight, disposable aluminum pan, a wire handle, with a slightly twisted piece of aluminum foil serving as a cover.  The pan-container is placed upon a stove burner.  As the kernels begin to pop, — the attached aluminum foil cover... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, A Day To Start Again](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-a-day-to-start-again/): A lively discussion last night, about “rules,” the many uses of rules, the origin of all rules, and considerations upon breaking rules.  The discussion was wide ranging and sometimes passionate.  Passion is natural, rising from a variety of motivations.  Let’s be honest that fear often motivates many an impassioned soliloquy.  When I suspect that... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Embraced By The Cosmos](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-embraced-by-the-cosmos/): The rumination about freedom vs determinism, the conundrum presented by cause and effect runs its course.  It is time to move on to another stop on our journey.  After all, change in scenery, variety is what we are looking for.  Life is more than one topic, a single discussion. I took a short walk... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Time The Healer?](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-time-the-healer/): Lately I’ve been thinking about determinism…  WTF you might think!  Perhaps one of the most enduring conundrums of philosophy is the ongoing debate, the wrangle over whether freedom is possible, whether the word refers to anything at all, — in a rigorous cause and effect universe.  Speculation about the topic can be traced as... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, The Anthropocene](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-the-anthropocene-2/): Neither divine punishment nor the nemesis of history. It is difficult not the see the pandemic as the consequence of our devastating, short-sighted choices regarding the environment. We have treated planet Earth as a dumping ground, a warehouse for dross and garbage, a heap of ruins. Yet it is impossible to save the planet... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Heaven & Hell](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-heaven-hell/): Language is a marvelous thing.  Words, symbols referencing things, events, and concepts give birth to efficient mental states, causing substantive change, influencing human actions.  I noticed this in my iphone news feed this morning. A highly unusual weather pattern is setting up over the Pacific Northwest, with a record-strong high-pressure area aloft — known... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Unbreathable](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-natures-devotion/): The rain falls steadily non-stop, then in sheets.  Weeks of mounting drought, then today flood warnings.  Nature is a condition of extremes.  After all, is not “the mean” a quantity that humans judge to be “just right” for the purposes of life?  Nature, being “blind,” the feedback of cause and effect, “knows” nothing of... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, This Huge Reality Show](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-this-huge-reality-show/): We are no longer alienated and passive spectators but interactive extras; we are the meek lyophilized members of this huge “reality show.” It is no longer a spectacular logic of alienation but a spectral logic of dis-incarnation, no longer a fantastic logic of diversion, but a corpuscular logic of transfusion and transubstantiation of all... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Walking](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-walking-2/): A friend who practices walking about town for fitness, for interest, suggested that I consider the activity for my own benefit.  The advice came as we walked together to the Starbucks on Randall Road and back.  On a hot, sunny summer’s day the conversation, passing scenery, and natural exercise made the experience pleasing.  “The... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Latent Catastrophe](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-latent-catastrophe/): Biopoliticsbecoming immunopolitics…The latent catastrophecoursing through and troubling the early decades of the century. The catastrophe is ungovernableand brings to light all the limitsof neoliberal governance. It has the tone of the irreversibleand the timbre of the irreparable.Nothing will be like it was before. Yesterday’s world appearsas a remote, collapsed worldthat has now slipped away.In... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Shaking](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-shaking/): I am shaking this morning, mentally, existentially, spiritually.  I am loath to use the term “spiritual.”  I know the term is spoken and written in a bastardized manner referring to the holy spirit, possession of the ego by the supernatural.  The idea is pure, unalloyed BS, which deserves ridicule.  We are standard issue human... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Juneteenth Hangover](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-juneteenth-hangover/): June 20, today is Father’s Day.  I am suspicious.  Could Father’s Day be a “Hallmark holiday,” created by clever marketers to sell cards, to condition “consumers” to spend more?  Learning to be a good father is important.  I just do not think fatherhood compares to the months of pregnancy, to the hazard of giving... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, The Zoo](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-the-zoo/): Yesterday was spent at the Brookfield Zoo.  I recall visiting some thirty years ago…  Eager to visit again, I was taken by surprise at the feelings that came when viewing the animals in captivity.  I am no longer a child, able to experience the zoo environment with magical delight.  I remember what that was... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, The Hammer](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-the-hammer/): NASA: Earth is trapping ‘unprecedented’ amount of heat, warming ‘faster than expected’Catherine Garcia, Night editor Wed, June 16, 2021, 6:41 PM Since 2005, the amount of heat trapped by the Earth has roughly doubled, according to a new study by NASA and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration researchers. This is contributing to warming oceans,... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, The Way](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-the-way/): Day’s end was spent in a leisurely walk by the Fox River in the vicinity of the Fabyan Japanese Tea Garden.  The walk was a welcome conclusion to a summer day of work.  Camera in hand I paid attention to the wild flowers which grow there in abundance.  Walking around the Tea Garden I... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Speechless](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-speechless/): A postscript to the observations about Amazon.  I am a Amazon customer.  I buy books on a regular basis and Amazon is convenient, affordable, etc.  Often a book is available that perhaps I’d find otherwise with a great deal of effort.  I have a good friend who works for Amazon.  His account of the... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Shouting And No One Seems To Hear](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-shouting-and-no-one-seems-to-hear/): How much should I care?  Is care involuntary?  Can I choose to care or not to care?  Or what to care about?  It appears that all of life, that is all that I am aware of, is involuntary…  The organism, you and I are no exception, is a concatenated layered system of bio-chemical cause... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Fox River](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-fox-river/): It is tempting to believe that Nature is eternal, subsisting impervious to the erosion of time.  A temptation, an illusion, one immature mistake made when we extract “resources” and increase the heat load to the atmosphere and to the oceans.  Thus we give a collective shove-of-the-wheel toward global warming and climate change catastrophe.  Whenever... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, It Takes A Wound](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-it-takes-a-wound/): [there must be one thing you can’t have in order to be alive] Jon-Michael Frank there must be one thing you can’t have in order to be alive  watching flowers open on youtube  I mean, my life is wasted on my life requirement is simple  it takes a wound to return to yourself  the... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Weave of Fate](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-weave-of-fate/): Several days ago a friend sent me this graphic.  The three fates are pictured attending to their respective duties, measuring and allocating the course of good and the not-so-good fallout of “chance” in the life of the individual and also of nations.  Our ancestors understanding of “determinism” had to do with the meta observation... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Roosevelt Redux?](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-roosevelt-redux/): Yesterday evening, Thursday prior to the G-7 meeting a media event was held showcasing a meeting between President Joe Biden and Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain.  The meeting was competently choreographed, and both spoke in generalities: a typical show and tell projecting images of the leaders of the “free world.” I have doubts. ... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Determinism & a Rabbit's Behind](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-determinism-a-rabbits-behind/): I was a participant in a rollicking discussion on the topic of determinism and free will earlier in the week.  The topic is an ancient philosophical conundrum how the appearance of choice, true freedom can be real, given that cause and effect are seamless.  That cause and effect are inviolate is the underlying premise... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Things That Haven't Changed](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-the-things-that-havent-changed/): ProPublica yesterday published a scoop on the tax returns of some of the wealthiest Americans.  Included were the returns of Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg.  Aside from the issue of how ProPublica obtained the returns, is confirmation of what well informed Americans already knew.  One would... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Not Laughing](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-not-laughing/): Why do I return to the old songs, the ballads that search the landscape of love and loss, of faithfulness and betrayal?  Homer’s great tale, The Iliad, is such a story put into verse. I awakened at 4:30 AM this morning, with the chorus to this song, echoing in my waking consciousness.  Laughing, is... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Rebirth](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-revivification/): Monday, the weather has turned, the ice melts, the brown earth appears.  There is hope.  Life returns.  Living in the Midwest, one learns to take winter seriously.  Severe, single digit cold is an effective teacher.  Therefore, in the Midwest we celebrate the first hint of spring.  Over the weekend I completed planting preparation for... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Over The Edge](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-over-the-edge-2/): Sunday morning, the New York Times Weekend Briefing has again arrived in my iphone mailbox.  Among the usual topics is an overview of the Johnson and Johnson vaccine, an anticipated reinforcement in the push to immunize the population against accelerating transmission of the corona virus.  The pandemic aid bill which has gained House approval... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Vaccination](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-vaccination/): Yesterday we received the first of two vaccinations to immunize us from the coronavirus.  We received email notice from the Kane County Health Department that an appointment was offered.  I felt a reaction of relief, of thanksgiving.  Upon receiving the Moderna vaccine, if I should become ill, I am unlikely to be hospitalized or... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Opps](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-opps/): Wednesday I picked up the latest issue of  Adbusters Magazine at Barnes & Noble.  It is a Canadian publication with a global range of contributors.  The March/April issue is entitled, The New Left.  The title succinctly describes the editorial point of view of the publication.  The magazine uses graphic design to advantage, to clarify... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Dreaming](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-dreaming/): I dreamed last night.  It was unusual in brevity, in technicolor and in dynamism.  I was supervising the moving of a rather large, antique, turquoise finished wooden cabinet.  The beautiful cabinet was suspended by a sling, and a stout steel cable.  In my dream, something happened to the cable, the antique piece of furniture... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, House Hunting](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-house-hunting/): The most distant object that most folks can see with the unaided eye is also the closest major galaxy to our own Milky Way. Although the Andromeda Galaxy lies a mind-bending 2.5 million light-years from Earth, its trillion stars are enough to emit a strong glow across the vast reaches of space. Despite the wide gap, the... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Closer](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-closer/): Let’s start out with a song.  This one by the Canadian band Rush, Closer To The Heart.  The tune scarcely needs any comment. Closer To The Heart By Rush And the men who hold high places Must be the ones who start To mold a new reality Closer to the heart Closer to the... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, A Wildcat's Growl](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-a-wildcats-growl/): Recently I considered the books piled upon my desk.  I am fortunate to be able to purchase whatever I am inclined to read.  I am happy in a strange way, — happy like a soldier departing on a mission, grasping a rifle with clip of full metal-jacket rounds, and plenty of spare ammo.  I... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Ideals And History](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-ideals-and-history/): Yesterday I after months of delay I addressed the task of connecting our Toshiba combo VCR – DVD player to our new Samsung television.  The older Toshiba is an analog device.  Mating the old, by today’s standards, analog electronic instrument to a state of the art digital screen required some thought, and a bit... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Smokey Still Sings](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-smokey-still-sings/): In October of 2018 my wife and I were present at a Smokey Robinson concert at the Genesee theater in Waukegan.  I have received inspiration from Smokey Robinson songs for the entirety of my adult life.  Smokey Robinson is a living legend, the songs he has written, and the performances he has given have... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, To What Purpose](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-to-what-purpose/): BURNT NORTON By T. S. Eliot Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future, And time future contained in time past. If all time is eternally present All time is unredeemable. What might have been is an abstraction Remaining a perpetual possibility Only in a world of speculation. What might... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, What Is Coming](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-what-is-coming/): Difficult to write this morning. The weather is forecast to warm in a day or so in Illinois. We have had a week of single digit temps, which is not unusual for winter in the Midwest. In Texas, they have been besieged with severely below normal temps, and ice storms with snow. Power failure... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Che Vuoi?](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-che-vuoi/): I have no idea what to write.  What do I/you want?  (Che Vuoí?) That is the question.  Do I know?  Does anyone know?  Usually I do not think about it.  When I do, I realize how unsure I actually am, how torn, how tossed about by a confusion of inner voices. I offer a... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, The Old Photo](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-an-old-photo/): Yesterday with a strong grip upon duty, tedious but necessary, I began moving the 2020 photo files from the flash memory chip in my camera to appropriately labeled folders in my laptop.   The work entails several hours of peering at this laptop screen.  Photo organization is important if there is to be a... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Warming & Freezing To Death](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-warming-freezing-to-death/): What is there to say this morning…  It is zero degree Fahrenheit at 7AM.  According to the forecast the rest of the week is to feature temps around zero.  This is the Midwest, not a polar zone, so very little moves outside in these conditions.  Exposure is dangerous.  We misunderstand global warming.  Weather extremes... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Music And Deliverance](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-music-and-deliverance/): Yesterday was marked by two events.  I initiated and finished cleaning the shower.  The necessary and unpleasant biweekly chore was alleviated by my Spotify playlist of music.  I use several small fans to ameliorate the noxious fumes of the cleaning agent which removes hard water residue.  There’s no need to describe in further detail... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Not Enough Time](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-not-enough-time/): Yesterday I received report of my granddaughter’s visit to the physician.  She is a toddler, walking about, exploring, and babbling.  I sense that she is on the cusp of language.  She understands simple commands and responds with appropriate behavior.   She runs about her play area, with obvious excitement, laughing, to point out the... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, No Sympathy](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-no-sympathy/): The world, “reality” can be cruel and dangerous.  One ought always to keep  that in mind.  The United States is a civilized society, relatively “safe” depending on where you happen to be, upon the cash and credit cards you have in your pocket.  Nonetheless, this country is a legally and administratively violent society. Today,... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Stoned Love](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-stoned-love/): Words cannot assay the loss of a great soul, an artist who has manifestly changed the world, doing his/her part to leave behind a quotient of light.  All the more so in these dark days, days when so many are unsure what matters, or if anything at all matters.  Mary Wilson, founding member of... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, To Die Laughing](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-to-die-laughing/): Last night six or seven of us had a virtual discussion, that is, via screen image we considered the function of humor, the role of laughter in the grand scheme of life.  The launchpad was the short story, The Jokester by Isaac Asimov.  The conclusion of our hour and a half rumination, — a... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, A Step To The Block](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-a-step-to-the-block/): Why not start with a song?  An incisive, no-nonsense attempt to grasp what matters… Patience by Guns N, Roses 1, 2, 1, 2, 3, 4 Shed a tear ’cause I’m missin’ youI’m still alright to smileGirl, I think about you every day nowWas a time when I wasn’t sureBut you set my mind at... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Winter Rumination](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-winter-rumination/): Winter is a season for contemplation.  Time spent before a fireplace, is time well spent.  Single digit cold bewitches the mind, compelling a still spirit.  Focus is demanded by the elements of a near zero day.  A footfall is announced by a sharp note of compacted ice, exposed skin serrated by a chill wind.... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Remembering A Time](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-remembering-a-time/): The following is a guest post by Tobin Fraley. I would like to thank this blog’s host, Jerry, for allowing me to usurp his daily offering by giving me an opportunity to discuss a song I feel is of particular consequence in today’s atmosphere of hatred, blame, and violence, violence both real and threatened.... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Blindness In Early Afternoon](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-blindness-in-early-afternoon/): Saturday morning, I was beginning to dream a rather unpleasant series of visions of the up-and-coming 2nd impeachment trial of former President Trump.  Sufficiently conscious to recognize that sleeping-in would probably mean additional images from the cellar of my consciousness, I got up. Today is sunny, still, and quite cold, 5 degrees in fact. ... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Bright With Frost And Fire](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-bright-with-frost-and-fire/): LITTLE GIDDING (No. 4 of ‘Four Quartets’) I Midwinter spring is its own season Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown, Suspended in time, between pole and tropic. When the short day is brightest, with frost and fire, The brief sun flames the ice, on pond and ditches, In windless cold that is the heart’s heat,... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Getting To What's Real](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-getting-to-whats-real/): Tuesday evening a few of us “gathered” via virtual video and discussed the role of “awe” or put another way, “wonder” in the scientific enterprise.  Science is understood is a method of testing the reliability of a theory, our notions of the way things are/work.  This is difficult at best.  Scientists, all those who... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, As Is](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-as-is/): A friend asked me via email, “… just wondering why you are terrified of every angel? Even good angels?”  The source of the question was the poetic assertion from Rilke, “Every angel’s terrifying” that I chose as a tagline for this blog.  Her question came straight, not tongue in cheek, rhetorical. I do not... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Missing Child](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-missing-child/): A friend introduced me to The Wind In The Willows by Kenneth Grahame, published in 1908.  It is a children’s story of the adventures of Mole, Rat, Toad and Badger.  After reading the short book I learned the story had been a favorite of my youngest daughter.  Kenneth Grahame, a banker, served as the... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Contra Facebook](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-contra-facebook/): In a speech on January 28th at Brussels’ International Privacy Day, Tim Cook CEO of Apple had this to say.  Here is an excerpt from his speech: “Technology does not need vast troves of personal data stitched together across dozens of websites and apps in order to succeed. Advertising existed and thrived for decades... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Snow](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-snow-3/): Snow last night.  It is well that snow imposes a stillness upon all activity.  A still mind, like an unblemished surface of fresh snow is a gift.  There is much in the course of human affairs, tortured and neurotic, — we are a troubled mammal unlike our cousins (rabbits, raccoons, etc.) without language or... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Paradise](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-paradise-2/): I remember as child, to have a day off from school, away from the obligation, from the mental work/stress of learning, (the profession of childhood) was a release that filled me with anticipation.  The times have changed, as change is the given, — that up-welling of joy remains the same. Our two grand children,... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Failure](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-failure/): In a noisy bar in Avalon I tried to call youBut on a midnight watch I realized why twice you ran away Think aboutThink about how many times I have fallenSpirits are using me larger voices callin’What Heaven brought you and me cannot be forgotten.. So we cheated and we lied and we testedAnd... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, The Woods At Dawn](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-the-woods-at-dawn/): Today I awakened before dawn intent on walking into nearby Almond Marsh before sunrise.  I enjoy taking a walk with camera in hand.  Predictably the camera is an aid to careful observation.  A camera is a mechanical device that records only what the lens captures, without the distractions of a human mind.  Are we... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, For A Friend](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-for-a-friend/): A friend revealed last night that her cousin was dying.  She had little to say in terms of the detail, but it was clear that she was emotionally spent.  Love means grief over the torturous journey that a beloved must take, aware that debilitating bodily pain, as well as the beloved’s mental suffering cannot... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Saluting The Flag In The Snow](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-saluting-the-flag-in-the-snow/): It is snowing hard.  The stone buddha on the hill  is shrouded with white.  Nature is “what it is.”  There is no mask, no screen of projection, a proffered interpretation which Nature offers to the human mind.  There is no wrap of culture with regard to Nature, as is the case with human affairs. ... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Snow](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-snow-2/): Today is Monday.  Preparations for the impeachment trial of former president Trump are underway.  I heard on NPR someone interviewed about what the president knew about the plans of the mob who overran the Capitol on January 6th.  Does a mob have plans as such?  There is abundant evidence that the former president feels... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, No Time To Cry](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-no-time-to-cry/): Sunday, a day traditionally reserved for mindful reflection.  I awakened early this morning aware of a dream that I was leaving behind.  It was an interesting dream, unlike the violent, terror laced dreams that came on occasion during the Trump administration.  When you have a bully to contend with, the dreams are of panic. ... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Closer To Free](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-closer-to-free/): I would be remiss if I did not post something about the inauguration of President Joe Biden, and VP Kamala Harris.  That was an event that I wish that I would have been lucky to attend, not that attendance was possible under the current pandemic restrictions. It was a “normal” inauguration with  no prevarication, ... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, More Covid Please...](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-more-covid-please/): This written by David Leonhardt in today’s issue of The New York Times: Nationwide, about half of Americans are not wearing masks when in close contact with people outside their households, according to a survey released yesterday by the University of Southern California. Wearing a mask isn’t much fun. It’s hard to speak clearly,... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Interlude](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-interlude-2/): An interlude is a time for reflection, a brief “time out” to recall what has been written in the playbook, and to conceive a plan of attack.  Momentarily it will be “game on.”  The wonderful words said at the inauguration ritual will be past —  difficult, improvisational work will begin. One difficulty will be... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Under Siege](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-under-siege/): This from the New York Times: A capital under siege A presidential inauguration in the United States is usually a celebration of democracy. Hundreds of thousands of people descend on Washington to watch a newly elected president take the oath of office. A departing president signals his respect for the country by celebrating the... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Sort Of Glued Together](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-sort-of-glued-together/): More than I want to know, more than I ought to know about the riot, the attempted overthrow of an election…  There is a surplus of video taken of the January 6th assault on the Capitol.  According to the New York Times: It’s hard to think of another crime that the perpetrators documented so... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, MLK Day](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-mlk-day/): It is Martin Luther King Jr. day.  I regret that when King was active in the Civil Rights movement in the 1960’s I was indifferent to the events, to the suffering of Blacks across this land.  I did not go out of my way to hurt Black individuals, even felt “positive” about several who... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Friendship & Revolution](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-friendship-revolution/): I met with two friends yesterday at St. James Farm Forest Preserve in Winfield for a walk in the woods.  St. James Farm was originally a retreat of many decades for the McCormick family.  Chauncey and Marion McCormick purchased the farm in 1920.  He was the great nephew of Cyrus McCormick who invented the first... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Blood Is Heavy](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-blood-is-heavy/): I dreamed last night.  Surely the mental vision happened early morning just before waking.  Dreams are in the “coming to consciousness” phase of sleep. I found myself in a ruined city, at least it was partially wrecked, decrepit. Some few neighborhoods and thoroughfares were maintained and in use, — the rest, skyscrapers included were... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Work](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-work/): Late in the day, dusk was giving way to darkness and traffic was becoming heavier.  I felt relieved to hear the voice of Kai Ryssdal, the host of Marketplace on NPR radio.  There hasn’t been much good news lately.  I believe it is better to know, — to be “Socrates dissatisfied, than a pig... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, This Is This](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-this-is-this/): Praying the Covid away !  It isn’t working.  Sure, we have the freedom to wear or not wear a mask, to infect or not infect your family members or neighbors,…. The virus roars on, not unlike an out of control forest fire, driven by the Santa Ana wind of American “freedom.” How are we... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Good Coffee](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-good-coffee/): A good discussion last night on the writings of Martin Buber.  Here are some samples from Buber’s book, Ich und Du.  The German renders the title better than the English title of I and Thou.  Thou in English is sonorous, off putting, with religious connotations from the King James Bible.  In German, Du connotes... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Mackay In The Morning](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-mackay-in-the-morning/): As consciousness dawned this morning, from the clock radio came these sounds of exhortation:  “It’s the Mackay-in-the-morning show at 95.9, The River… — followed by the harmonious voices, a choir singing acappella the Rolling Stones anthem You can’t always get what you want.” I rose and thought to myself, “How perfect.”  What better battle... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Kristallnacht](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-kristallnacht/): The Night of Broken Glass.  Anyone who reads or hears that word ought to shudder, tremble with dread. I offer this statement of yesterday by former Governor of California, Republican, Arnold Schwarzenegger. Nothing need be added by way of comment to these words. If you page down to the commentary affixed to the Youtube... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Culture: Blocks Of Language Subjected To Pitiless Erosion](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-culture-blocks-of-language-subjected-to-pitiless-erosion/): The body politic twists, wracked from the clarity of what must be done, distended in a contrary direction by a customary shape-shifting accommodation.  Thus the odds are long that a decisive, kill-stroke will be delivered to the personification of anti-truth that looms over us…  Trump and his acolytes, either costumed and embellished with facial... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Attempted Murder](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-attempted-murder/): Still reeling from the events of Wednesday.  An armed mob, incited by the President of the United States, stormed the Capitol, roamed the halls of Congress, looting and posing for selfies with police officers.  This was the attempted murder of our democracy.  Not simply a lunatic fringe, a few extremists getting out of hand,... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, A Nice Day To Start Again](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-a-nice-day-to-start-again/): I awoke at 5:50AM a few minutes before the alarm would have aroused me from slumber.  In the darkness my first thoughts were that Friday is a nice day,  I have a fine vantage point to observe the demise of our democracy, our civil society.  Two days in the aftermath of a failed coup,... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Wilding](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-wilding/): I am numb after viewing the rampage of thousands of Trumpers around and inside of the Capitol building yesterday.  A mob of thousands gathered from throughout the country, listened to their revered leader Trump instruct them to storm the Capitol.  They proceeded accordingly.  It is beyond belief this was a spur of the moment... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Bells, Ring The Bells!](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-bells-ring-the-bells/): I awakened to the news that the Democrats appear to have won the Georgia runoffs.  That means that control of the Senate passes from the Trump Party to the Democrats.  The new Biden Administration stymied at every turn by a Republican controlled Senate would have been a nightmare four years in duration.  For me... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, A Walk Through The Woods](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-a-walk-through-the-woods/): I want to do things that I did when I was sixteen.  I would spend hours walking in the woods, in any season.  I carried a Mars Chocolate Bar in one pocket, my hunting knife on my belt, my 22 rifle in my hand, and a box of 50 shells in the other pocket. ... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, The End Of The World](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-the-end-of-the-world/): The day begins in darkness.  That is not new.  What is new is the effort of the President of the United States to overthrow the result of the election.  The days ahead will be critical.  And what of the  seventy two million who offered him their votes, who believe the Presidents version of “reality?” ... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Requiem For Loss And A Dream](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-requiem-for-loss-and-a-dream/): Sunday, January 3, 2021.  A new year begins tomorrow, Monday is the first work-day of the week, — the beginning of ordinary time.  We are exhausted psychologically by the severing of social exchange imposed by the pandemic.  The worst is yet to come.  Many have been ambivalent to the required measures necessary to slowing... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Monsters Everywhere](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-monsters-everywhere/): A light snowfall last night.  Everything is coated with white, beautiful and temporary.  Life for human beings is a mix of good and evil, light and darkness if you will.  We cannot speak directly about “good” or it’s opposite, evil.  We use metaphor to describe what we mean.  Plato’s allegory of the cave is... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, New Year's Day](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-new-years-day/): I did not remain awake til midnight for the departure of the old year  to celebrate the new.  Just before turning in I glimpsed television images of the Times Square “celebration” in New York.  The scene was outlandish, devoid of crowds, just the TV personalities outfitted as if  attending a monster’s ball.  The rhetoric... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Eros](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-2/): This the final day of the year 2020. What does the future hold for us?  And there is only us.  The worst delusion is to imagine that my fate is not entwined with that of others.  Each of us is individual, a paradox of sentiment and thought, one-of-a-kind in all of the world, indeed,... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Maybe Just The Touch...](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-maybe-just-the-touch/): What is the purpose of the cosmos? How could I possibly know?  I am “on the inside” as are you.  To know the purpose I’d need to be on the outside, – like a god.  An overview of the vastness of space, innumerable suns and planets need be encompassed in order to “know” the... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Drifting Away](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-drifting-away/): Three more days remain in 2020.  The year has been one of pandemic, and of the nation roiled by the incompetence of the Trump administration.  I am offended by incompetence.  A state of incompetence, the inability to carefully execute a task to completion is something expected of children.  When adults are incompetent, especially when... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Liftoff, Maximum Burn](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-liftoff-maximum-burn/): 1. Across the United States, thousands of businesses have closed during the pandemic, but the demise of so many beloved hangouts cuts especially deep. They were local landmarks — watering holes, shops and haunts that weathered recessions and world wars, only to succumb to the economic ravages of the coronavirus. 2.The myth of a... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Laughing](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-laughing/): I lived in Japan when this song was released in 1969.  A Canadian band, The Guess Who performed the tune, Laughing, which became the second of their three gold records.  The lyrics are simple and brutal.  Rare is the love song that is not a sad song.  The patience, courage, and luck demanded by... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Work In Retrospect](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-work-in-retrospect/): I am not sure when I learned to work.  Learning how to work, is open ended, a quest that one pursues over the arc of years until one no longer has any curiosity, or the will to expend further energy.  Work is the expenditure of energy in a focused fashion to achieve a more... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Nothing To Kill or Die For...](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-nothing-to-live-or-die-for/): I have mixed thoughts about Christmas.  Given that the story of Christmas happens to be about a working class couple, without adequate shelter, with responsibility to care for a new born child, — as long as my home is a “Christian” country that girdles the world with military bases, and has a military budget... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Like Cold Steel](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-like-cold-steel/): It is Christmas eve.  Conditions have turned bone chilling cold outside.  It is 12 degrees Fahrenheit according to the iphone weather app.  Those are unforgiving conditions, like the honed edge of a tempered steel blade. I read this report in today’s New York Times, written by David Leonhardt: Yet it is also clear that... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Memorial](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-memorial/): In the course of the philosophy discussion of this week, the alternative viewpoints, of freedom or of determinism came up.  This durable topic surfaces often with us.  How free are we?   Are we as free as we feel, as free as we were taught as Americans, a culture with a heritage of Enlightenment... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Losing My Mind](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-losing-my-mind/): Waking at 7AM this morning I felt particularly disoriented.  By dint of habit I made my way to the stairs, then to the kitchen.  At the counter I poured a bowl of Cheerios.  I mechanically assembled the elements of breakfast ticking off the components in turn: two packets of splenda, gallon of milk, banana,... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Look!](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-look/): Monday morning.  I had to ask a family member last night if this was the week of Christmas.  The pandemic has shorn social encounters, parties, appointments with friends, all cleaved from Christmas.  A chimera, a ghost of Christmas without heart is all that remains…  The sensation of giving and receiving, the tokens of a... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Solstice](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-solstice/): Sunday morning before sunrise.  Still dark outside.  I have the privilege of taking a nap later in the day if I choose.  Why not get up, do some reading, explore the contents of my mind?  Aspiring to find words to more clearly understand this time, the events occurring globally, in America, and in Batavia... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Pottersville?](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-pottersville/): I watched the Frank Capra directed film, “It’s A Wonderful Life.”  My wife and I viewed it together.  It is one of her favorite films.  With each viewing of this 1946 film, a Christmas fantasy tale from our parents generation, I understand better why the story has become one of her favorites. The philosophical... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Another Day In...](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-another-day-in/): It’s just another day in paradiseAs you stumble to your bed…. I know, that’s a fragment of song lyric ripped from the Eagles tune, Learn To Be Still.  Waking this morning, I felt existentially disoriented.  As expected there was little “good news” in The New York Times, The Morning update received via email.  Of... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Thoughts On Dying](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-thoughts-on-dying/): For over an hour those who knew Glenn O’Dell spoke of the impact of his life upon them, and of what they had lost on account of his death.  I barely knew Glenn.  I was a late comer to the Socrates Café discussion group.  I remember that he made me welcome to the circle,... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, God Talk](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-god-talk/): We discussed ideas from an essay by Stephen Law.  Law took pains to show that the concept of language games developed by Ludwig Wittgenstein late in his career do not provide immunity for theists from the intellectual assault of those who simply cannot believe.  I do not use the term “unbeliever” because it is... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, The End Of The Innocence](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-the-end-of-the-innocence/): I listened to the new reports last night of the delivery of the vaccine.  The Pfizer vaccine was quickly approved by the FDA and is now being distributed throughout the country.  An additional vaccine from Moderna is reported to soon be approved and follow.  I worked in a laboratory for several years.  I can... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Dying To Live](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-dying-to-live/): A few days remain before Christmas.  At this juncture in life, I am able to call to memory past Christmas seasons.  Christmas is the high point of a year, is it not?  A season of ending, as well as a season of anticipation. Something is about to begin.  The ending and the beginning are... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Building Castles](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-building-castles/): Society is an imaginary sphere in which different processes of signification interweave and interfere. The symbolic organization of this imaginary sphere is an effect of signification. I define “signification” as the building of a bridge of shared illusion over the abyss of the absence of meaning. Reality, by contrast, can be described as the... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, God Be With Us](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-god-be-with-us/): I was drawn to this Dec. 9, Washington Post article by Annie Gowin.  Here are several paragraphs: MITCHELL, S.D. — A cold wind whipped through the prairie as they laid Buck Timmins to rest. Timmins, a longtime coach and referee, was not the first person in Mitchell, S.D., pop. 15,600, to die of the coronavirus.... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Hand In Hand Over The bridge](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-hand-in-hand-over-the-bridge/): Friday brings the expectation of rain at midday.  Always I welcome the arrival of rain.  Drought is the condition that concerns me most here in the mid-West.  Weather patterns are crucial to the well being of all living things, the trees growing here before my arrival as well as the arbor vitae shrubs that... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Half Knowledge](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-half-knowledge/): What is outdated is not asking what is true and what is just, but viewing science…relegating it to the status of unlegitimated learning, half knowledge… The question, “What is your argument worth, what is your proof worth?” is so much a part of the pragmatics of scientific knowledge that is what assures the transformation... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, To Rise Up Again](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-to-rise-up-again/): Posting more holiday themed photographs will have to wait. I feel compelled to say something about our philosophy discussion of a few hours ago.  There were eight of us joining a Zoom video chat based upon a New Yorker article entitled Why Facts Do Not Change Our Minds.  That title speaks for itself.  The... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, On Context Control](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-on-context-control/): The difficulty with rape, is getting past the emotional wave of horror and revulsion, to ask “how are such acts possible in this or any civilized society?”  The #Me Too movement is not new.  Women have lived under the threat, and some have suffered from this manner of violence for 2000 years and longer.... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Dispersion](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-dispersion/): Another grey winter-like day.  More similar days are to come.  Much in life must be accepted. In the state of Georgia the scrum intensifies leading up to the January runoff between a pair of Republican and a pair of Democratic candidates.  The outcome will determine which party controls the Senate.  What if any difference... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Holiday Whimsy](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-holiday-whimsy/): We see the world, not as it is, but as we are. The saying is not original to me.  It’s something I read and never forgot.  Another argument for reading widely.  Reading can save one’s life.  Too often I find myself in a ditch, having painted all that I perceive with the color of... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Sneak Attack](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-sneak-attack/): A self does not amount to much, but no self is an island; each exists in a fabric of relations that is now more complex and mobile than ever before. Young or old, man or woman, rich or poor, a person is always located at “nodal points” of specific communication circuits, however tiny these... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Rilke](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-rilke/): And we, who have always thought of happiness as rising, would feel the emotion that almost overwhelms us whenever a happy thing falls. — Rainer Maria Rilke, The Tenth Elegy I suppose that my first few months of life were happy.  That is speculation.  I am not certain that I have at any time... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, The Anthropocene](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-the-anthropocene/): One might argue that the refinement and miniaturization of the intelligent machine, linked to the introduction of fuzzy dynamics in the quantic activity of AI, will lead androids to behave consciously… It is philosophically false, because consciousness is not behavior, but self-perception and self-judgment, self-enjoyment and self-loathing. this is the distinctive feature – ethical... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, On A Positive Note](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-on-a-positive-note/): Yes, most of the posts have been rather dark.  There’s the second law of thermodynamics, the fall toward entropy, which is unpleasant and irresistible to contemplate.  Things come apart, the center does not hold.  That is only part of the story as many of us know. A year represents a sliver of time, a... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, To Resist](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-resistance/): Why do you pick those old songs a reader will ask?  Honestly those are the songs that I know.  Those are the songs of my generation, that served to inspire, that firmed our resolve as some of us marched to protest a foreign war, a place where many young Americans took their last breath... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Endgame](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-no-one-left/): Monday morning, early, before sunrise.  Waking on account of “who knows what” I got up knowing that I would sort through the contents of my mind with words.  What is bothering me?  Perhaps it is the craziness of these times, the absolutely “wigged out,” insane behavior of too many of my contemporaries!?  Today I... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Where To From Here?](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-where-to-from-here/): Trumpism is an expression of the despair of impotent old white people in the age of globalization. Trumpism – a desire for supremacy that ignoramuses reclaim in the name of their own ignorance, supremacy of those who are aggressively competitive but lack the intellectual means to achieve. p. 106 The idiocy of protecting racial... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, If We Cannot...](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-if-we-cannot/): The 20th century was a century of the straight line, of yang rationality, of modernism and abstraction, The 21st century will be the century of the curve, of yin, of harmony and building with Nature. …if we cannot recover our innate empathy, find balance, and come up with a new tone, a new mood,... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Trevor Noah](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-trevor-noah/): People talk about melting pots,America’s a melting pot, South Africa’s a melting pot,melting pot, melting pot…What you forget is that what’s making the things in the pot meltis the fire….. There are no diverse places in the worldwhere people just came there for good times. — excerpt, interview with Trevor NoahTrevor Noah Is Still... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Hi-De-Ho Thanksgiving](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-hi-de-ho-thanksgiving/): Thanksgiving at last!  Thanksgiving day is the least commercialized of all our national celebrations.  The day of “feasting” goes back to the mythic founding of the nation.  The Pilgrims arrived and founded Plymouth colony in Massachusetts.  A deal was made with the Wampanoag tribe of indigenous people.  Indians indigenous to America had lived here... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Mysterium Tremendum](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-mysterium-tremendum/): We discussed ideas from an essay which treated the sensation that comes when one is aware of an object in Nature, experienced as overwhelming, awe inspiring.  German theologian and philosopher Rudolf Otto in his influential 1917 German book The Idea of the Holy, coined the term Mysterium Tremendum.  We are fascinated, attracted and paradoxically... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Perfection](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-irrational-impurity/): 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... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Lost Faith And Frenzy](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-lost-faith-and-frenzy/): 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... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Saying Goodbye To Mr. Hegel](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-saying-goodbye-to-mr-hegel/): 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... Read More Read More - [Living With Fire](https://everyangel.org/living-with-fire/): On fire, the world was always on fire.  It just depends on where you live.  Can you smell smoke?  See flames?  Some of us run for our lives.  And there’s a time when running is impossible, there is nowhere to run to. I tire of thinking about politics, which has become a reflex, —... Read More Read More - [The Purple Rain](https://everyangel.org/when-rain-is-purple/): Just music today.  Purple Rain by Prince ranks as one of the great guitar solos.  The lyrics laid over the melody are an eloquent expression of what it means to be human.  What does it mean to be human?  This. The story teller reflects upon the fact of his father’s madness, the effect of... Read More Read More - [Another Year To Wake Up](https://everyangel.org/another-year-to-wake-up/): A twelve month segment of time.  Time. a human made measure.  Homo sapiens, aware of the 2nd law of thermodynamics, that everything processes toward dispersion of energy, dissipation of life-force if you will — so we measure.  I wonder if we are the only mammal that consciously measures?  What is twelve months by comparison... Read More Read More - [Wrap Up](https://everyangel.org/wrap-up/): December 31st of 2021. No regrets or sadness to see 2021 recede into the past.  Do not all events end up in “the past?”  Surely we do not mean a closet, located somewhere we do not know, a frozen storage locker for everything with a locked door.  I read once that the past, or... Read More Read More - [To Become Who I Really Am](https://everyangel.org/to-become-who-i-really-am/): This morning I felt a unusual sense of peace upon awaking. Yesterday with help from WordPress support I solved a issue with the back-end of this blog, an issue which had haunted me for some weeks.  The solution did not come easy.  It was necessary to grasp the vocabulary, as well as to visually... Read More Read More - [A Boy That Never Lost His Passion](https://everyangel.org/a-boy-that-never-lost-his-passion/): Edward O. Wilson, Harvard professor for 46 years, pioneer of Evolutionary Biology died at age 92 this past Thursday.   Wilson was born and raised in Alabama.  As a boy he became interested in ants.  At the age of 13 he was first to discover the presence of fire ants in the United States,... Read More Read More - [In Between Time](https://everyangel.org/in-between-time/): Is here a designation for the week between Christmas day and New Year’s day?  This interregnum I choose to call “the in between time.”  I know that is awkward.  Perhaps a more apt phrase will come to mind?  After all that is how the mind works.  The world is arranged/created according to what one... Read More Read More - [To Be Human](https://everyangel.org/to-be-human/): Not much to say this morning.  It is gray, raining.  We need the rain.  I am speaking for the vegetation, trees, grass, shrubs and everything really.  Do we not all live by virtue of water?  Blood is water. At the same time, too much water and a flood soon follows.  Too much of anything... Read More Read More - [Hopes And Fears Of All The Years](https://everyangel.org/the-hopes-and-dreams-of-all-the-years/): Christmas day is different for each of us.  One day of the year is laden with so many expectations.  Some of those expectations are impossible, even if we understand them with better clarity. When I pause to consider, the hopes, the trepidation which a parent invests in a child, — as the years spool... Read More Read More - [Christmas Morning](https://everyangel.org/christmas-morning/): Soon, very soon the two year old in the house will awaken.  Will she remember it is Christmas morning?  This is the time!  It is a point in time when she will begin to learn what the myth, what the tradition, what the practice of Christmas means.  The meaning of Christmas cannot be reduced... Read More Read More - [A Night So Dark](https://everyangel.org/a-night-is-so-dark/): Yesterday the news came that Joan Didion died on Thursday.  She was 87 years old.  I did not know her personally, only through her collection of essays Slouching Toward Bethlehem.  She wrote about the chaos of the 60s.  Her writing electrified me, and made sense, in a primal way of the extremes that had... Read More Read More - [Christmas, Personally Speaking](https://everyangel.org/christmas-personally-speaking/): Are there not many ways to think about, well everything?  Certainly!  Who would disagree.  Several days ago, I posted a reflection about Christmas that was about change, about illusion, and about “reality.”  At the time I wanted to tell a post-modern story of an event that has occurred for over two millennia. Early today when... Read More Read More - [Running For Our Lives](https://everyangel.org/running-for-our-lives/): A high point of the holidays has been the Tuesday evening Zoom meetings of a group of friends for a discussion of ideas.  I understand how unusual to recognize time spent on a Zoom virtual meeting to be agreeable, pleasurable.  The past two sessions have been unusual as we’ve had nothing on the agenda,... Read More Read More - [Now It Is Christmas, A God Is Born](https://everyangel.org/now-it-is-christmas-a-god-is-born/): LUKE 2  And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed. 2 (And this taxing was first made when Cyrenius was governor of Syria.) 3 And all went to be taxed, every one into his own city. 4 And Joseph also went... Read More Read More - [On Wealth](https://everyangel.org/on-wealth/): [this] semblance of redemption.If I possess this kind of wealth, I have the illusionof omnipotence and immortality.Wealth [Vermogen] What a beautiful word.Infinite wealth means infinite capacity;finitude fades away. What is salvation?This illusion is surely enough.There is a very theological dimension to it,and that dimension has nothing to do withmaterial greed. There are many shades... Read More Read More - [Sunday Before, Christmas?](https://everyangel.org/sunday-before-christmas/): I did not post anything yesterday.  That’s the first day missed in three years.  I am blessed, lucky, and there’s no explanation, nothing I have done to merit good health, the ability to consistently write.  How much does civilization, not to mention bare existence owe to dumb luck?  What are the odds that you... Read More Read More - [Omicron, Mental Fracturing, Tanks](https://everyangel.org/omicron-mental-fracturing-tanks/): Couldn’t access the blog this morning.  I yelled, “help” to Hostgator support.  They fixed the obstruction.  I’m no code monkey.  We often need help from others who have expertise that we will never have. Felt like yelling “help” on account of the top-of-mind subjects that I am compelled to write about.  Like a child,... Read More Read More - [Shaking](https://everyangel.org/shaking-2/): Thursday is overcast, gray.  The wind is gusting, a gentle breeze by comparison to the 60 mph winds of last night.  December, tornado season?  Mayfield, Kentucky.  It appears that a giant blender descended from the sky, churning to rubble neighborhoods and buildings…  The candle factory, ranked as Graves County’s third-largest private employer, is gone. ... Read More Read More - [On Beauty](https://everyangel.org/on-beauty/): What is beautifulis the object in its drapery,under its veil, in its hideout. …The task of art criticism is notto lift the veil but rather,through the most precise knowledge of itas a veil, to raise itself for the first timeto the true view of the beautiful. …The only way to view beautyas a secretis... Read More Read More - [Ode To Becoming Grumpy?](https://everyangel.org/ode-to-becoming-grumpy/): I think grumpy comes with the territory. [I for one was rather grumpy following Cindy challenging all of us to actually DO something. But that’s a rant for another day.] Here’s a subject I’m certain Tobin will have a ready, useful opinion about: I went on a photography outing last Thursday; not an easy... Read More Read More - [No Reset Button](https://everyangel.org/no-reset-button/): There’s no“reset button” for civilization,and no viable planfor transforming global infrastructure,agriculture, and energy networksin the next ten to twenty years.And while smart, dedicated, and thoughtful peoplefumble with political machinery that doesn’t work,such as carbon-pricing markets,protests and the United Nations,all of us in the Global Northgo about our business,driving, flying, leaving lights on,running heaters and... Read More Read More - [If You Do Not Come Too Close](https://everyangel.org/if-you-do-not-come-too-close/): More from East Coker by T. S. Eliot winner of the Nobel prize for literature… In that open field If you do not come too close, if you do not come too close, On a summer midnight, you can hear the music Of the weak pipe and the little drum And see them dancing... Read More Read More - [A Time To Break](https://everyangel.org/a-time-to-break-to-shake/): I In my beginning is my end. In successionHouses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their placeIs an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass. Old stone to new building,     old timber to new fires,Old fires to ashes,     and ashes to the earthWhich is already flesh, fur and... Read More Read More - [Sunlight and Petal Vs. Ignorance](https://everyangel.org/sunlight-and-petal-vs-ignorance/): Canticle By Wendell Berry What death means is not this – the spirit, triumphant in the body’s fall, praising its absence, feeding on music. If life can’t justify and explain itself, death can’t justify and explain it. A creed and a grave never did equal life of anything. Yellow flowers sprout in the clefts... Read More Read More - [Abundance And Brain Fog](https://everyangel.org/abundance-and-brain-fog/): Brain fog this morning. My mind felt on the edge of malfunction, like a slowing old computer hard-drive memory disc. I entered Starbucks without wearing a mask. Fortunately a spare mask was in my computer bag. I remind myself to “settle down,” as if a parent were instructing a small child. Aided by the... Read More Read More - [Peace On Earth, Goodwill To Humankind](https://everyangel.org/peace-on-earth-goodwill-to-humankind/): Those lyric lines filled the atmosphere of the Starbucks patron seating area.  Under present conditions such language seems to be the apex of irony.  On a two hour zoom call yesterday President Biden is reported to have ‘warned’ Putin of Russia that if he attacks Ukraine, he will be sorry…  And so goes the... Read More Read More - [Plato Wouldn't Have Been A Fan](https://everyangel.org/plato-wouldnt-have-been-a-fan/): January 8th will be the birthday of Elvis Presley. Plato was no fan of poetry.  Plato, a professor of philosophy, Athenian who lived 4th Century BCE, expressed aversion to the arts.  Plato was pointed in his criticism of poetry.  He believed that poetry especially when combined with the emotional stimulus of music was dangerous. ... Read More Read More - [How The World Turns](https://everyangel.org/the-axis-of-the-world/): Late Lament Breathe deep the gathering gloom,Watch lights fade from every room.Bedsitter people look back and lament,Another day’s useless energy spent.Impassioned lovers wrestle as one.Lonely man cries for love and has none.New mother picks up and suckles her son.Senior citizens wish they were young.Cold-hearted orb that rules the nightRemoves the colours from our sight.Red... Read More Read More - [After The Party](https://everyangel.org/after-the-party/): Yesterday evening I was guest at a birthday celebration for our grandson.  Family members gathered to express our joy on the occasion of his turning 7 years old.  The event was glorious.  Of course gifts were given, enough toys to afford hours of pleasure and learning.  Thoughtful aunts gave him clothes too.  Our family... Read More Read More - [Melting With You](https://everyangel.org/melting-with-you/): Saturday, and it is quiet in the Starbucks seating area.  This serene atmosphere will change soon.  Families are sure to arrive, busy with Christmas shopping here in Geneva.  The space will be crowded, as customers wait for a warm beverage. Last night I joined my best friend of over 50 years for a dinner... Read More Read More - [Improv From Birth To Grave](https://everyangel.org/failure-and-a-thought-experiment/): I did not post yesterday. Yesterday, after arriving at Starbucks I discovered my laptop computer was hardly running, no life left in the battery.  Over night, a power discharge depleted the machine.  I was left without my usual writing aid.  I could have improvised with pen and paper.  I chose to read instead, and... Read More Read More - [Seinsgefühl](https://everyangel.org/seinsgefuhl/): Seinsgefühl, German for “feeling of being.” Our discussion last night on the topic of Existentialism, the post WWII movement revolved around this indispensable aspect of our lives, “feeling of being.”  For our fathers, or grandfathers who survived the industrial scale slaughter and destruction of Europe, of the Pacific islands including Japan the issue was... Read More Read More - [Tuesday](https://everyangel.org/tuesday-3/): Tuesday dawned brisk, in the low 30s the sky a shade of baby blue.  One more day is given, a gift to be lived, and who knows what opportunities will come for appreciation, puzzlement, a tap on the shoulder so to speak, there is more to be learned, much more.  As is my habit... Read More Read More - [Durchsichtigkeit](https://everyangel.org/durchsichtigkeit/): Transparency. Sounds innocuous enough, even desirable.  Who does not wish to have daily life smoothed out, obstacles and bottle necks which make realizing our objectives, especially those involved in getting what we need from relationships, — removed?  Transparency is a good idea is it not?  Transparency is a watchword, a conceptual key to the... Read More Read More - [Art Institute Of Chicago](https://everyangel.org/art-institute-of-chicago/): Several days have passed without posting.  That is a first I believe.  I aspire to write something everyday as a necessary discipline to improving ability to express with words thoughts that swirl, partly formed in my mind.  Temporarily locked out of my blog due to insufficient care with a password, at last I found... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, All In A Dream](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-all-in-a-dream/): It is Monday morning, just three days before Thanksgiving.  Thanksgiving will be a needed respite. The Kyle Rittenhouse verdict has been on the minds of many.  I am no exception.  I have thought about the trial and the verdict well enough.  I wish this were a dream or better put, a nightmare from which... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Over The Edge](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-over-the-edge-3/): Is there no help for it?  What I mean to say, I cannot conceive how to avoid the abyss of the irrational, that which eludes language. Language is the ease by which the mind constructs reality out of binary symbols, black is not white, sweet the opposite of sour, etc.  These words are successively... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Alpha Predator](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-alpha-predator/): Yesterday morning family members peering into the backyard called to me, “quick come and look, a hawk is feeding on top of our wood pile.”  Suspecting that I’d be too late, I pulled the flash card out of this laptop and inserted it into my camera.  In the distance a solitary hawk was feeding... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Family Unrelated By Blood](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-family-unrelated-by-blood/): MUSIC DISSEMINATES TRUTH BECOMING A WEAPON OF MASS INSTRUCTION. OUR MUSIC IS FAMILY UNRELATED BY BLOOD. WE MUST BE VIGILANT. WE MUST BE CITIZEN SOLDIERS, STRIPPED OF FEAR. OUR OPTIMISM IS MAGNIFIED IN OUR MUSIC. –Patti Smith I have thought about these words for many years.  These days, there does not seem to be... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Adviser to Swordmasters](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-adviser-to-swordmasters/): It is the very mind itself that leads the mind astray, –of the mind do not be mindless. –Takuan Sōhō Voltaire once said, “Le mieux est l’ennemi du bien,” — the perfect is enemy of the good.   A few of us, together around a table at Barnes & Noble last night, and several more... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Pop Culture?](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-pop-culture/): We engaged in a discussion about pop culture last night.  As enjoyable as that was, after a good night’s sleep I feel unease, that there’s little left to talk about.  The examples which we cited were no longer current, freshly minted.  We discussed Dune, the film recently released, October 22 of 2021. The book... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, The Look-back](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-the-look-back/): The holiday season approaches.  First up, Thanksgiving is on the last Thursday of this month.  The day of feasting is about nothing less than what the day is called.  Thanksgiving is the holiday I appreciate the most.  I do not mind helping with the preparations in the kitchen, peeling potatoes is my area of... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, The Miraculous Thing](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-the-miraculous-thing/): Like practitioners of the Baroque,we too are irrepressible creators of images,but secretly we are iconoclasts -not in the sense that we destroy images,but in the sense that we manufacture a profusion of imagesin which there is nothing to see.Present-day images – be they video images, paintings,products of the plastic arts, or audiovisual or synthesized... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Party With Peppa](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-lets-party/): Sunday morning is windy, with a light rain.  I cannot complain as the trees need moisture.  Soon the ground will freeze…  Vegetation will begin the winter season of sleep.  Life can be hard.  And life can be serendipitous, — the feel of a strange looking rock you happened to find, in your pocket.  Is... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Functioning Even Better](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-functioning-even-better/): When things, signs or actions are forced from their respective ideas, concepts, essences, values, points of reference, origins, and aims, they embark upon an endless process of self-reproduction. Yet things continue to function long after their ideas have disappeared, and they do so in total indifference to their own content. The paradoxical fact is... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Shining For A Moment](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-shining-for-a-moment/): Since the world is on a delusional course,we must adopt a delusional standpointtowards the world. Better to die from extremesthan starting from the extremes. Excerpt, The Transparency of Evil – After The Orgy  by Jean Baudrillard Properly speakingthere is now no law of value,merely a sort of epidemic of value,a sort of general metastasis... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Living In The Meantime](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-living-in-the-meantime/): In the Meantime By Max Garland The river rose wildly every seventh spring or so, and down the hatch went the town, just a floating hat box or two, a cradle, a cellar door like an ark to float us back into the story of how we drown but never for good, or long.... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Starting Over Again](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-starting-over-again/): You are kidding of course?  Start over again?  Pardon my laughter as I am laughing so hard that it hurts…  Are you meaning to say that we Americans have reached a fold point in our history, that our society as it now stands is unsustainable?  Do you really think that conditions are in such... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, To Start Over Again](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-to-start-over-again/): I have been thinking about René Descartes.  Descartes made a world changing discovery on November 10, 1619.  Descartes was a 17th century mathematician, upper class, university educated and was well-traveled in Europe. Descartes, uneasy with his learning based upon Medieval scholasticism, couldn’t discount nagging doubt triggered by the discoveries of Galileo, by the rise... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Vaccination For Cynicism](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-remedy-for-cynicism/): Monday promises to be a warm Fall day.  I’d like lose myself in Fall.  I will carry forward the outside Fall cleanup in the yard.  Fall presents much to be done, to prepare the house and surrounding area for the cold months.  Work is beneficial to interdict the mind’s inclination to endlessly speculate about... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, What The Buddha Said](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-what-the-buddha-said/): Should I be a Buddhist?  I ask the question from time to time.  I have two statues of Buddha within the landscaping of our backyard.  I am drawn to the physical statuary: a representation of a life Buddha lived, the Indian Prince who rejected the luxurious life which being well born would have afforded. ... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, These Fictions, These Shadows](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-these-fictions-these-shadows/): The truths of humanism,the confidence in mankind and all the rest,still possess only the vigor of fictions,only a prosperity of shadows.The West was these truths;it is no more than these fictions, these shadows.as helpless as they,it has not been given to the West to verify them. It drags them along, exposes them,but no longer... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Always Under Pressure](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-always-under-pressure/): Friday, a beautiful Fall day, with frost and full sunlight.  Today is my grand daughter’s 2nd birthday.  Watching her grow day to day has been a rare delight.  She is the advancing edge of the new world that is born with each generation.  And what of that “new world?”  Upon her adulthood some twenty... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Language Making The Earth Stand Still](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-language-making-the-earth-stand-still/): I saw it!  In the blink of an eye I witnessed a “miracle” of language.  Seated at the table for the evening meal, my grand daughter was in a fickle mood in relation to the food on her plate.  Children are often uncertain about whether to consume the food selections made for them by... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Clairvoyant Puppets](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-clairvoyant-puppets/): III – We have all had a taste for the West’s disease: Art, Love, Religion, War – We know too much about them all to believe in them now; then too, so many centuries have worn them down… The epoch of the finite in plenitude is past; the substance of poems? Exhausted. — To... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, We Are Not The World](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-we-are-not-the-world/): Viewing this photo journalism project reminded me of a tune from 1985, We Are The World.  The lyrics are composed by Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie.  I recall the 45 person choir of celebrities singing and swaying in unison as they performed the song.  I thought the lyric, while well meaning was saccharine sweet,... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Metamorphosis](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-metamorphosis/): The sun rose this morning like a god.  The air was tinged with frost.  The first frost is late in the season.  I felt relief at this awaited sign of seasonal change.  Is not frost, the cold an ascetic exercise in paring of life, a reduction to the essence of things? And what does... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Halloween](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-halloween/): To return home, subsequent to an interlude of extensive travel (three weeks) prompts me to reflect upon my life.  I would like to think I do not take on the role of a tourist, a dabbler, one who passes through anonymously, with diffident attention to anything or anyone.  Boredom can be chosen without leaving... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, What We Leave Behind](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-what-we-leave-behind/): Here I am again, in the corner by the wall on a rainy morning at Starbucks.  The return home feels right, the feeling of completion.  What did I accomplish in the last three weeks on the road, a composite of time and places in my memory?  Did I accomplish much, or nothing?  “Nothing” sounds... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Always and Never Home](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-always-and-never-home/): Our last evening at a Holiday Inn.  The straight lines, white surfaces and turquoise of Holiday Inn decor palate have become familiar.  We laughed yesterday after checking into our room here at Lexington Kentucky.  The bathroom was adequately spacious, the white sink countertop and the backlit big mirror similar to the other four or... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, To Buy More Time](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-to-buy-more-time/): Shortly we leave Asheville.  The drive through the Blue Ridge mountains to Lexington promises to be spectacular.  Passing through the mountains at any time is breath taking.  At the peak of fall color change, the views will be extraordinary.  Perhaps I will attempt to capture the splendor with some photos.  A photograph never does... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Another Day](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-another-day/): I couldn’t concentrate on the email summary of the stories in the New York Times.  Maybe the brain fog will dissipate as the morning flows into midday.  The Times featured story was about a recently taken Gallup opinion poll on the matter of abortion in Texas.  The poll shows that Texans think remarkably the same... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Metaphysics](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-metaphysics/): We reached Asheville.  The drive from Greenville, S.C. to Asheville was barely more than an hour.  The dogwoods in the foothills flamed blood red.  The color change is beginning, though I do not think there has been a frost yet.  Seated in the breakfast room of the Holiday Inn I overhear a conversation between... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Not Over](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-not-over/): Monday dawns as another mid-Fall, blue-sky day in Greenville, South Carolina.  Our plan is to leave for Asheville, North Carolina shortly.  The drive will be short.  I can see the blue mountains on the distant horizon from here. Yesterday I spent some time walking among the graves in Springwood Cemetary.  The place, a quiet plot... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Another Angle Of View](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-another-angle-of-view/): John Fogerty sings in the background, Down on the Bayou, and I drink a mediocre cup of coffee in the breakfast room of the Holiday Inn.  It is Sunday morning in Greenville, South Carolina.  To bed late and a short evening of restless sleep.  I know that “things change” and that I will feel... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Suffocating In Jesus](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-traveling-south/): …more miles south yesterday, into South Carolina.  We are staying in Greenville, which I had forgotten is the home of Bob Jones University.  The term “University” is understood as only Christian fundamentalists would understand the word.  Young adults born into a cultic form of faith seek admission to BJU.  “Faith” by the literalist interpretation... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, One More Poem](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-one-more-poem/): My Brain Is Mad for Baudrillard By Elizabeth Knapp Today, I read of scientists’ warnings about the potential dangers of sex robots and thought of you. Some blame the rise of right-wing populism on postmodern windbags like you, holed up in your university office, giving head to your shadow. But Jean, you were right—... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Gnawing On Fictions](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-gnawing-on-fictions/): Waiting for Your Call by Aria Aber The light retreats and is generous again.No you to speak of, anywhere—neither in vicinity nor distance,  so I look at the blue water, the snowy egret, the lace of its feathers  shaking in the wind, the lake—no, I am lying.  There are no egrets here, no water.... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Nothing Binds Time](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-nothing-binds-time/): A society of consumption and leisure is characterized by a particular temporality. Surplus time, which is the result of a massive increase in productivity, is filled with events and experiences that are fleeting and short-lived. As nothing binds time in a lasting fashion, the impression is created that time is passing very quickly, or... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Farewell Thoughts](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-a-farewell-thought/): We departed the Outer Banks crossing the five mile long Melvin R. Daniels Bridge on I64 in bright sunlight.  The bridge arched over the water ahead of us.  We approached Alligator Island, I could see the marina below with a row of big (and expensive) ocean fishing craft at rest.  These looked to be... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, The Page Turns](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-one-page-at-a-time/): We enjoyed a last walk along the beach at Nags Head.  The gently rolling surf enveloped us in its timeless cadence.  I would like to think this island will last forever, the waves will beat on this beach eternally.  I know that eternity is an abstraction, a fiction of the mind, and that, change... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Boredom](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-boredom/): Boredom dominates the widening gapbetween subject and world,between freedom and facticity,between action and being. The Dasein that is determined to act,is no longer familiar with the feeling of being-surroundedor of being-taken-in.The ‘point’ of the ‘moment’, as the temporal form of the self,lacks the width and length of ‘home’,the space for dwelling and lingering. …’home’... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Like A God](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-like-a-god/): Yesterday the sun rose like a god, above the rim of the watery horizon.  The language is an inadequate description I know; words pointing to the rotation of this earth relative to our star, the source of life here, upon our home planet.  Furthermore the sun as well as our earth and every planet... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Life In Words](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-life-in-words/): Today a guest post is offered from a friend living in the neighboring town of Geneva.  To write is to wait for the apt words to express the journey that one is taking.  Chaucer, whose collection of 24 stories were published in 1483 would have agreed. Sunday looking out my backyard windows signs of... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Wright Bros. Memorial](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-wright-bros-memorial/): We visited the Wright Bros. Memorial at Kill Devils Hill, Kitty Hawk. I was particularly moved by the exhibits.  The Wrights, Orville and Wilbur, residents of Dayton Ohio, transported their flyer to Kitty Hawk North Carolina, due to reports of wind conditions favorable to powered flight.  On the remote sandy beach in 1903 Orville... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Tortugas' Lie](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-tortugas-lie/): Before noon we walked across the street to a restaurant called Tortugas’ Lie.  Tortugas is Spanish for turtle.  The Cayman Islands were originally called The Tortugas.  A paragraph in the menu explains that Lie is the lair of an animal or of an anchorage at sea, such as would have been used by BLACKBEARD in... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Friendship & Truth](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-friendship-truth/): Truth…consists of relationships between events. Truth occurs when things communicate with each other on the basis of a similarity or some other form of closeness between them, when they turn towards each other and enter into a relationships with each other, even befriend each other. Only relationships based upon similarity, friendship or affinity make... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, What Matters](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-what-matters/): Everyone has ideas, even more than they need. What matters is the poetic singularity of analysis. Only the spirituality of language can justify writing. Not a miserable objectivity of ideas. There will never be a solution to the contradiction of ideas, except inside language itself, in the energy and fortune (happiness) of language. —... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Charlottesville](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-charlottesville/): Yesterday we reached Charlottesville, Virginia. We enjoyed the mountains of West Virginia.  On I64 while crossing the bridge spanning a river I glimpsed piles of coal to be loaded into waiting barges.  How much more coal are we going to burn in order to generate electricity, while the planet gathers heat from the co2... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, A Pilgrimage To My Past](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-a-pilgrimage-to-my-past/): Yesterday our long planned three week road trip to the Outer Banks of North Carolina, to my hometown, and then to South Carolina began. On I65 running north and south, in Indiana farmland we passed this sign prominently installed by the side of the road.  The message communicated with unmistakable clarity.  I was reminded... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, To Light A Lantern](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-to-light-a-lantern/): “Where has God gone?” he cried.“I shall tell you.We have killed him – you and I.We are his murderers. But how have we done this? How were we able to drink up the sea?Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon?What did we do when we unchained the earth from its... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, From Recurring Present To Shattered Mirror](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-from-recurring-present-to-the-shattered-mirror/): Gods are nothingbut eternal bearers of meaning.They make the world meaningful and significant, make sense.They will tell us about the way things and events are related to each other,And these narrated connections create sense.Out of nothing, narration makes world.Full of gods means full of meaning, full of narration.The world becomes readable, like a picture.…everything... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, More Tears](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-a-prayer-for-fall/): Sunday morning is gray.  There is a damp heaviness in the air.  It is supposed to rain.  Today if we do not receive a good rain, will some of the trees in my neighborhood, trees in my yard die?  The drought has been prolonged, for most of the summer.  Fall, a season of falling... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Supply Chain, etc. etc.](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-supply-chain-etc-etc/): Today I purchased a vehicle.  The Suzuki SX4 that has faithfully served me and afforded enjoyable driving has reach its end of service.  After fourteen years and 170,000 miles, I offer my respect to the designers, engineers, and manufacturing workers at Suzuki Kabushiki-Kaisha, Hamamatsu, Japan.  The product speaks eloquently for the company. Yesterday upon... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Singing The Blues](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-singing-the-blues/): If I can struggle against a fit of depression,in the name of what vitality can I oppose an obsessionwhich belongs to me, which precedes me? In good health, I take the path I prefer;“sick,” it is no longer I who decide: it is my disease.For the obsessed, no choice:their obsession has already opted for... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Minutes Till Midnight](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-minutes-till-midnight/): Theoryis a primary,primordial decision,which determines what counts and what does not –what is or should be,and what does not matter. As a highly selective narration,it cuts a clearing of differentiationthrough untrodden terrain. — The Agony of Eros by Byung-Chul Han Ahh, theory is the crux of the matter is it not !?  The prime... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Religare III](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-religare-iii/): You’ve got to be kidding.  Not more on religion…  But I have to — because I am not finished.  There is much at stake.  To risk overstating the matter, — “the survival of humanity!”  At least that is how it seems from my vantage point.  I know that I am the least likely in... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Religare II](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-religare-ii/): Religion, Part II.  I should say more should I not?  There’s always evidence around of our sense of a “greater” reality.  Walking through a graveyard is the easiest way to get an idea of what is thought, or better, the nature of what some of us believe about the greater or deeper or hidden... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Religare](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-religare/): I suppose this is a good place to start.  The Latin word means “to tie, to bind” and is related to the word religio which means “respect,” “awe,” or “sanctity” suggesting that the soul is bound to god.  Well – ok.  The notion that one is inherently, inevitably, innately “religious” works as long as... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, More Ruins](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-more-ruins/): As a kid I delighted to discover an abandoned house in the woods.  In my imagination I pondered about the lives of those who had lived there.  Sometimes signs left behind, were clues to what they cared about.  Moreover the condition of what remained served as a rough indication of how long the place... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, This Golden Tether](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-this-golden-tether/): There are songs, — one song alone for which I’d pay the full price of a concert ticket, to hear performed live.  Never mind the rest of the set list, a single melody and lyric would make the ticket outlay, as well as the effort to reach the venue, the expense of time, —... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, The Last Walk/Waltz](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-the-last-walk-waltz/): There is a last time for everything.  The first day of Fall was yesterday, September 22nd.  I picked up my camera, earlier in the week with the intention of capturing a final collection of Summer flower photos from Almond Marsh.  Summer ends and Fall begins.  That’s a logical deduction, a necessity of thought is... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Believing Six Impossible Things](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-believing-six-impossible-things/): “Alice laughed. ‘There’s no use trying,’ she said. ‘One can’t believe impossible things.’ I daresay you haven’t had much practice,’ said the Queen. ‘When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. There goes the shawl again!”   —... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Beginning With Cathedrals](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-is-this-how-it-ends/): When modes of expression are worn out art tends toward non-sense, toward a private and incommunicable universe. An intelligible shudder, whether in painting, in music, or in poetry, strikes us, and rightly, as vulgar or out-of-date. The public will soon disappear; art will follow shortly. A civilization which began with the cathedrals has to... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Turning Point & Precipice](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-tipping-point/): Tomorrow officially Fall begins.  It has been a hot dry summer, with a big deficit in moisture.  When the maples shed leaves on account of heat stress I take note.  I am ready for Fall.  Should we not celebrate seasonal change by gathering a few friends together for quiet conversation, for sharing a found... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Another Dispatch](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-another-dispatch/): A friend sent me an article by David Brooks, published in the September issue of The Atlantic, How the Bobos Broke America  Brooks uses his incisive analytical skills, a deft facility with language to outline the rise of the Creative Class to the apex of the pecking order of American influence, and a rising simmer... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Lurching Onward](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-lurching-onward/): I discovered another writer.  Or did the work of Emil Cioran discovered me?  There is the old saying, “when the student is ready, the teacher will come.”  E. M. Cioran was born Romanian.  He left for Paris in the late 1930s.  I purchased his second book published in French, entitled, All Gall Is Divided. ... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, I Do Not Know Much But I Think](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-i-not-know-much-but-i-think/): THE DRY SALVAGES (No. 3 of ‘Four Quartets’) I I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river Is a strong brown god—sullen, untamed and intractable, Patient to some degree, at first recognised as a frontier; Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce; Then only a problem confronting the builder... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Summer Heat](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-summer-heat/): I walked north along the Fox River trail from Batavia to Geneva yesterday.  In my estimation this is not a long walk, about two miles round trip.  I could not fail to notice how low the river is presently.  Due to a lack of rain you could walk across the shallows bank to bank,... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, The Vulgar & The Sublime](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-the-obscene-the-sublime/): I wonder if life would be better as a “lower” mammal, rather than as a human being?  A non human mammal, without the facility of language would be equipped with efficient senses, better sight, hearing, smell along with instinct honed as a serrated blade.  The mammal would not be burdened with the paradoxes of... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Flea Market](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-flea-market/): We visited the Flea Market at the Kane County Fairgrounds.  Pandemic restrictions have recently been lifted here in Illinois.  We are eager to freely move about in public.  The fairgrounds had more exhibits of bric-a-brac, colorful 1950s vintage serving bowls, a collection of solid brass doorknobs embossed with a cross, — than we could... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Say A Prayer](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-say-a-prayer/): Well it is Sunday, blazing hot, and we need rain.  Looking for rain in early June…  What is happening to us? I wanted to change my routine.  I began the day with an early walk around the backyard.  Nature is uplifting, visually inspiring as vegetation is in seasonal bloom, and wild life is at... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, What We See Is Real](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-what-we-see-is-real/): Saturday morning, and there is much to do.  There’s just not the spark to launch myself into a “to do” list.  My quotient of energy is at low ebb.  On account of many concerns, there does not seems to be a lot “left in the tank.”  Is not every genuine concern a personal concern?... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Walking Without Hope](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-walking-without-hope/): We walked tree lined streets.  Springtime is the best time for a walk through Batavia neighborhoods.  Homes are embellished by the growth of spring flowers, trees, the ornamental plants selected with care by townspeople with a love for working the soil.  Walking with a friend, we discussed topics of interest, of concern to both... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Aftershocks](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-aftershocks/): Relieved due to a wider dissemination of the covid vaccines more of us are able to move about without wearing a mask.  The danger is not over though, as some countries are struggling with a rising outbreak, and many deaths.  Poor countries remain essentially unvaccinated.  Virologists warn that the virus is mutating as long... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Chatter](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-chatter/): Stepping away from the chatter is not easy.  I ask, “are we addicted to information?”  It comes cascading at a rapid rate, at best understood partially, without enough context, — via iphone, TV, laptop screen…  One byte after another edited for our approval, or said clearly, for “consumption.” After sitting down to breakfast I... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Texture of Summer](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-texture-of-summer/): Today is June 1st.  June is the month of summer.  Summer arrives in few days.  Summer is prime time for plants, animals and all living things.  Growth is at maximum velocity over the arc of June and the following two months.  In the northern hemisphere, the tilt of the earth’s axis places us closer... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Traveling Blind](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-traveling-blind/):   And you know that she’s half-crazy but that’s why you want to be thereAnd she feeds you tea and oranges that come all the way from China…   And she shows you where to look among the garbage and the flowersThere are heroes in the seaweed, there are children in the morningThey are... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Couldn't Write It](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-i-couldnt-write-it/): Yesterday, a sunny Saturday on Memorial Day weekend.  It’s uncertain that warm weather reaches the Midwest by late May.  The weather is often “ify,” that is rainy, borderline cold, unpleasant.  In the past a number of planned outings to Great Lakes Drag-a-Way on Memorial Day weekend were disappointed due to weather.  Misery for me... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, After The Rain](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-after-the-rain/): Saturday morning.  The air is clear and clean, the green of spring is iridescent.  Birds are calling, hidden in the foliage.  I heard report that we received a half inch of needed rain.  For now that goes a long way to relieve the mild drought we’ve experienced.  Perhaps my neighbors have not noticed.  I... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Running On Empty](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-not-much-2/): I have little to say this morning.  At the end of the week I am “running on empty” as the phrase goes.  The duties of the week demand attention, a quotient of energy/effort and little is left over when every day is full.  Today is rainy, overcast, in the 50s, cool for springtime.  Spring... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Stevie Nicks](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-7/): Yesterday was the birthday of STEVIE NICKS.  If you are a member of the “Boomer” generation, those born right after WWII, odds are that you know that Nicks is a member of Fleetwood Mac a premier rock band of the Age of Aquarius.  To a millennial person born in the 80s or a gen... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Half Crazy](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-6/): Here’s to the song writers, the lyricists, the word-smiths of rhythm, rhyme and harmony!  If it were not so early in the day I’d raise a glass of sweet red wine to toast all that I have been given by their songs.  (Out of an abundance of caution, it is best to stay away... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Another Dangerous Poet](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-another-dangerous-poet/): Plato was not a fan of the tragedians, or of the work of any poet.  The view of Plato, that reason will lead us to an epiphany of “the good”, if we discipline ourselves enough, — is precisely the idealism which is central to our Enlightenment heritage, here in this United States of America. ... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Infant Mortality](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-infant-mortality/): “Humanity’s pasthas been relatively brief:some 300,000 years as a species,a few thousand years of civilization.Its potential future, by contrast,could extend for billions of years,encompassing many trillions of sentient, rational beingsyet to be born.” The future – the adulthood of humanityis now in jeopardy. “If our species does destroy itself,”wrote Orville Schell, “it will bea... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Sinking In Our Fight](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-sinking-in-our-fight/): Sunday morning.  Arrived at a local coffee shop, along with a few early-bird bike riders.  The coffee, excellent, and what better venue with a hum of voices in the background for wrestling with words to express inchoate thoughts.  The mind is like that: associations rapidly intersecting in unpredictable fashion.  You search for words to... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Learning Living Learning](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-learning-living-learning/): Yesterday afternoon was spent at the Don Early Park in West Chicago.  The park is tucked in beside and behind the cemetery right on East Washington Street.  The feature of the park is a small pond.  I would estimate the pond is about 50 yards or so in diameter.  The pond is home to... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Report Card Day](https://everyangel.org/plague-journalreport-card-day/): I was once a kid.  I remember feeling trepidation the day report cards were issued.  A report card is an evaluation, derived from the aggregation of grades of your progress in the subjects which you have attempted to learn.  Kids do not volunteer for the role of student, as learning is difficult work.  They’d... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Mid Spring Beauty](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-mid-spring-bueaty/): Yesterday was a day of wind and showers.  These days of mid spring are fleeting and I did not want to delay taking pictures of flowers that I noticed in the neighborhood.  I did my best given the wind to capture pictures of blooms along a white picket fence around the yard next door. ... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Science & Theology](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-science-theology/): It is Wednesday morning.  I am certain that the spirited discussion the night before about the realms of science and theology is working to transform my psyche, the hidden submerged dialog within, — when I wake up remembering and thinking about words that were written, comments made, and positions taken with strong emotion.  Eight... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, No Rain](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-no-rain/): The morning comes, and I am awake.  I ought to be thankful since I am alive.  I understand that.  Life goes on until it does not.  We are in a condition of drought here in our area.  Spring is the usual “rainy season.”  That is another way of saying that we get plenty of... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Children](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-children/): Children are among the most expensive purchasesthat average consumers are likely to make in the course of their entire lives.In purely monetary terms, children cost morethan the most luxurious state-of-the-art car,   a round-the-world cruise,      even a mansion to be proud of. Worse still, the total cost is likely to grow over the years,and its... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Hell](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-hell/): There are many versions of hell. I awakened this morning from a dream/nightmare.  Waking was a release from the images rising up from my subconscious.  I dreamed of reestablishing my company.  I was accompanied by two old friends.  My associates knew the business, were trusted, competent.  The direction of the dreamed images abruptly changed... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Thoughts On Wildness](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-thoughts-on-wildness/): I do not know if that is a word.  The thought is to be in and of “the wild.”  Nature is alive, undomesticated, responsive to the presence of humans:  physical expressions of our institutions such as roads and buildings, our consumptive way of life, garbage dumps, the oceans loaded with plastic run-off of industry. ... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Living The Dream](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-living-the-dream/): Yesterday we returned to the Don Earley Park in West Chicago.  A prominent feature of the park is the pond.  The pond is open to catch and release fishing.  Turtles can be seen sunning themselves close to the waters edge.  Also there are a number of bullfrogs sitting in shallow water on the blanket... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Desire II](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-desire-ii/): Desire By U2 (Yeah) Lover, I’m on the street Gonna go where the bright lights And the big city meet With a red guitar…on fire Desire She’s a candle burning in my room Yeah I’m like the needle, needle and spoon Over the counter with a shotgun Pretty soon everybody got one And the... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Desire](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-desire/): Advertising is one of the cultural mediums that has the most sanctioned lying. Keeping people in a constant state of lack, in perpetual desire, strengthens the marketplace economy. Lovelessness is a boon to consumerism. And lies strengthen the world of predatory advertising. — Excerpt, All about Love, New Visions by bell hooks p. 47... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Our Epoch](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-our-epoch/): Our epoch does not love itself. And a world that does not love itself is a world that does not believe in the world: we can believe only in what we love. That is what makes the atmosphere of this world So heavy, stifling, and anguished. The world of the hyper-market, which is the... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, It's Alive!](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-its-alive/): Yesterday in the morning I took a walk in Braeburn Marsh.  I returned at the end of the day, as the sun was setting.  Luck is being at the right place at the right time.  I feel lucky when I experience beauty, or a moment of extraordinary accomplishment. Venturing off the path, the ground... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Mother's Day II](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-mothers-day-ii/): Another Mother’s Day recedes in the rear view mirror.  I appreciate this day of remembrance more with each year that passes.  It is almost 11PM.  Before turning in for the evening I felt the need to state that my life is enriched each time that I have opportunity to honor the females in my... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Mother's Day](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-mothers-day-2/): It is raining outside.  Rain is a long awaited gift.  My mother would have rejoiced at a gentle rain falling to a dry ground.  Springtime is a rainy season in normal times.  These are not normal times.  Global warming is another way of saying that weather patterns are disrupted, intensified, too much rain, wind,... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Living In A Powder Keg II](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-living-in-a-powder-keg-ii/): I have more to say about Bonnie Tyler’s great hit tune, Total Eclipse Of The Heart composed by Jim Steinman (November 1, 1947 – April 19, 2021) .  Even if one could interview Steinman, to ask explicitly what he meant by his lyric lines — I am satisfied that would not help.  Steinman passed... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Living In A Powder Keg](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-living-in-a-powerkeg/): I thought to write about this song for several days.  The lyrics are ethereal, with a mystical meaning, admitting multiple interpretations.  Listening to several Youtube presentations of Bonnie Tyler singing her great hit, I felt the tears.  This is not a “feel good” love song, triggering pointless emotion.  The story line has a texture... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Commodificaton](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-commodificaton/): I have signed up for a seminar course on May 22nd, so I am pressing forward to finish a book that will be central to the topic of discussion.  Eric Fromm was referred to in the chapter entitled, Love as Praxis: Critical Theory and Pscyhoanalysis, which I am reading.  I have not read Eric... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, More Haute Couture](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-more-haute-couture/): The French term means “high sewing” or high fashion as the term is typically used.  It is no disservice to the language, or to our intention of meaning to note there’s nothing more elegant than than bloom, shade of color, elegance of form as offered by Nature in the springtime.  My thought was to... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Field Trip](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-field-trip/): Yesterday we took our two grand kids with us to Don Earley Park in West Chicago.  The Geneva Road which we often travel passes by the Park.  The small park is striking with a pond, walking path, a children’s playground with jungle gym, —  something in between a forest preserve displaying nature’s serene beauty,... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Static](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-nothing-but-static/): This is one of those mornings when I have nothing to say.  A new day, when nothing seems especially new about it.  I know, I simply need to shift the axis of my point of view.  I have made that move before, and felt something in the depths which I dare not say or... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Running For The Roses](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-running-for-the-roses/): May 1st yesterday was the 147th running of the Kentucky Derby at Churchill Downs in Louisville, Kentucky.  Our daughter and her partner lived in Louisville for many years.  The celebration of Derby week is part of their heritage as former residents of Louisville.  Therefore our household gathered in the living room to enjoy the... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Life Goes On](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-life-goes-on/): Jesus is not coming back! Is that statement ironic, troubling, laugh-out-loud funny, or simply nonsensical?  It depends entirely upon the reader.  What do you bring to those words arranged in syntax?  What mental image forms, involuntarily?  Do you experience a strong emotional response: relief, dread…  The meaning is involuntary after all, the effect of... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Yard Sale Days](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-yard-sale-days/): My day began at 6AM.  These are community yard sale days here in Batavia.  I did what I could to assist with staging items in our driveway, preparing for the early-comers.  The early birds are intent upon surveying as many places possible, looking for the odd item to be treasured, or something they need. ... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Disappeared](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-where-did-i-go/): Where did One go? Am I still One when I analyze, or am analyzed? Yes, but with an unidentifiable identity, without a fixed center, or mortiferous* repetition; serial music rather, a dance improvised and yet supported by an underlying, open order. …a long history that never stops coming back, catching up with us. p.... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Capitalism Checkmated](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-capitalism-checkmated/): We discussed capitalism last night.  The essay was a three page thought experiment with an optimistic conclusion.  The author speculated that capitalism would be “humanized” as a result of covid.  I am not convinced that will be the case.  Moreover the covid virus is not done with us Americans. Approximately a third of us... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Future Contained In The Past](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-future-contained-in-the-past/): Getting started is the crux of the matter.  The ending depends upon the beginning, or as T. S. Eliot wrote in Burnt Norton: Time present and time pastAre both perhaps present in time future,And time future contained in time past. What immediately follows, the very next line dumbfounds me.. If all time is eternally... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, A Backward Look](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-look-back/): A few days ago I stopped in at the Roadster Shop in Mundelein.  This business builds custom street roads for customers all over the United States.  They have been kind over the years to allow me to shoot photos of their work parked on the showroom floor.  I can hardly remember a time when... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Forbidden Planet](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-5/): Last night we viewed “Stowaway,” a Netflix film about a three man mission to Mars.  Or rather, a two woman, and one man mission that becomes a four person mission with the discovery of a stowaway, after the launch of the spacecraft Kingfisher.  The acting is excellent. Toni Collette is mission commander Marina Barrett. ... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Into This World, Thrown](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-troubled-sleep/): It is Saturday morning. I awakened early, around 5AM I suppose. The nightmare caused me to grasp for consciousness. I no longer remember any details. A feeling of dread lingers though. The vision in some form is likely to return. It is there in the nether regions of the unconscious. What fear is the... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Mulch Festival](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-mulch-festival/): Timing is everything, according to the saying.  Timing, the right time, a propitious time, the “alignment of stars and planets,” is a key aspect of life.  Perhaps it is everything.  I cannot say.  In the off chance there is a god, and he/she could see with exquisite clarity past, present, and future, — and... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Earth Day](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-earth-day-2/): It is not often that I offer more than one post per day.  Since this is EARTH DAY I am obligated to draw attention to the matter that is before all of us.  Are we not at a “live or let die” juncture?  We are “of the earth” and will surely share whatever is... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Stain Removal](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-stain-removal/): From this Thursday morning’s New York Times: Biden plans to declare that the Ottoman killings of Armenian civilians during World War I were genocide. It could fray relations with Turkey, which rejects the designation. This up-welling of truthful, coherent speech has been long in coming.  No other president has was able to overcome the... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, A New Day, More Of The Same](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-a-new-day-more-of-the-same/): Yesterday in Minneapolis a jury convicted officer Derek Chauvin of second degree murder (and of two other charges as well) in the killing of George Floyd this past May.  The scene of gratuitous, lethal cruelty was filmed by a bystander.  The conviction of a police officer is very, very rare.  The New York Times... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Enveloped With Beauty](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-enveloped-with-beauty/): Today promises to be gray and chilly.  Rain and snow is predicted, — spring in the Midwest.  I plan to be out and about, walking with my camera.  This is the time of birth in the cycle of the seasons.  Who would not wish to be on hand when new life is emerging to... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Breakout](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-breakout/): The word, “breakout,” conveys the connotation of an extreme, threatening circumstance.  The stakes are high.  An attempt is made by force to breach the encirclement, to achieve freedom of movement.   I simply want to write about our very first experience of eating-out, dining at a restaurant after receiving our second Moderna covid shot.  This... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Life With Music](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-4/): Πολιτεία (Politeia) The Greek word translates into English as Republic.  It is the title of Plato’s well known work, The Republic.  The Greek word comes from the term polis, a description of a commercial, administrative community such as Athens in her heyday, a city-state.  A polis is more sharply defined is the administrative and... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Art & Religion](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-art-religion/): My reading in Julia Kristeva’s This Incredible Need To Believe continues.  Here are some quotations from the book that are particularly arresting this morning. What is art? …adventures of immanence.  Infinite intellectual love (literature, art, etc.) when they are carried out and received not as “objects of consummation” but as the very being of... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Wanting To Open](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-3/): Friday dawns cool and sunny, typical of spring here in the Midwest.  Of the projects in mind for today: a morning Zoom session to hear our grandson, a new author present his story of a visit to the zoo.  I will be privileged to witness his reading of the story.  He is six years... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, An Orphan Speaks](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-an-orphan-speaks/): In fact, we are the orphans of a reality that came too late and which is only, like truth, an “official report” in “delayed time.” Excerpt, Radical Thought by Jean Baudrillard Yesterday, while driving, listening to an interview on NPR, I heard this story.  In Kane County where I presently live, the county government has... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, For Don](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-for-don/): For reality is an illusion, and any thought must first try to unmask it. For this purpose, reality itself must remain masked and must shape itself as a decoy, without even thinking or caring about its own truth. Reality must place its pride in never being an instrument of analysis, or a critical instrument,... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Madness & The Ellipse of Meaning](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-madness-the-ellipse-of-meaning/): …it is the world that must proceed to its own analysis. It is the world, not reality, that must be revealed not as a truth, but as an illusion. We must trap reality, we must go faster than reality. The idea too must go faster than its own shadow. But if the idea goes... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, More Perversion](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-more-perversion/): The requirement of this thought is double and contradictory. It does not consist in analyzing the world to extract from it an improbable truth. It does not adapt itself dialectically to the facts and abstract from them some logical construction. It is much more subtle than that, and more perverse as well. This thought... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Anti-gravity](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-anti-gravity/): The two modes of thought present radically opposed projects: one hopes to reveal the objective reality of this world but wants to be a distinct thought; the other seeks to restore an illusion, of which it is an integral part. One seeks a total gravitation, a concentric effect of meaning. The other seeks to... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, There May Be Nothing](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-there-may-be-nothing/): In contrast to the discourse of reality and rationality, which bets on the fact that there is something (some meaning) rather than nothing, and which, in the last analysis, wants to be built on the preservative notion of an objective and decipherable world, radical thought bets on the illusion of the world. This thought... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Two Orders Of Thought](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-black-lives/): Today I was at the crossing point of an email conversation between two friends.  It was as if I were standing on a curb before a cross walk at a busy intersection.  Two vehicles approach at speed limit velocity, each at right angles to the other.  Each driver is oblivious to the other, and... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Why We Should Give It Another Try](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-why-we-should-give-it-another-try/): Why wouldn’t there be as many real worlds as there are imaginary ones?Why would there be only one real world?Why such a mode of exception? In reality, the notion of a real world existing among all other possible worlds is unimaginable.It is unthinkable, except perhaps as a dangerous superstition. We must stay away from... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Life !](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-yikes/): Our discussion topic last night was a question with three words:  “What is life?“  Thoughts have  come to mind about this intriguing question that I wish to express.  In the course of wrestling with the topic last night one of our members referenced the famous lines of Shakespeare from Macbeth, Act V, Scene V,... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, What?](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-what/): Tuesday, and I plan to have lunch with a friend.  Later in the day, I hope to meet another friend for coffee at Starbucks.  Can I imagine a more agreeable day?  It gets better.  In the evening, I will join a group of old friends via Zoom to discuss the topic, “What Is Life?” ... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Time Dilaton](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-time-dilaton/): Easter recedes in the rear view mirror, or does it?  It depends on your point of view. I viewed a youtube video of a worship service, a Good Friday service.  You know, Good Friday is what we call the day when Jesus is forcibly removed from the street and made to stand trial for... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Everything That Touches You And Me](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-everything-that-touches-you-and-me/): Easter morning.  I awakened early so that I could write this.  Family members are to arrive around eleven, and preparations will be made beforehand.  I will not be rushing off to Easter worship services this morning.  That’s not to say that I do not believe in resurrection.  I do.  Just not the crude, atavistic... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Good Friday](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-good-friday-2/): Yesterday we took a rare day-trip to Ottowa, Illinois.  Ottowa is about an hour and a half south of Batavia, where the Fox River and the Illinois River meet.  It is a once prosperous town in the middle of farming country.  We enjoyed the drive, leaving behind the last of the tony suburbs with... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Sweet Jane](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-sweet-jane/): Five minutes of bliss. A friend suggested including Lou Reed’s Sweet Jane for one of my posts.  Here it is. So what is the message?  I think there are many messages.  What does the melody, the back-beat signifying the pulse of the universe, and the lyrics, showing the ebb and flow of life “as... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, A Poem For My Birthday](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-a-poem-for-my-birthday/): Like everyone who views Endgame by Samuel Beckett, I am haunted by the production.  Coincidentally today happens to be my birthday.  Haunted, troubled by a theatrical production on my birthday.  I suppose that is no coincidence when you consider that life is nothing but a production; just a succession of roles that must be... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, No Exit](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-no-exit/): Wait, hasn’t that title already been taken?  Who could forget that Jean Paul Sartre wrote the existentialist play Huis clos in 1944?  I understand the technical meaning of the term is that of a conversation behind closed doors, a private conversation.  Are there not things that one does not say out loud in public,... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Heaven Or Hell](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-heaven-or-hell/): Today is Tuesday.  Retired, reminding myself that today is Tuesday.  Without the rhythm of a workplace one can become disoriented as to one’s placement in time.  Let’s face it, life is often disorienting.  Circumstances can change in a “New York minute.”  I like that phrase.  It captures the visible and palpable flux of street... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, To See As Beautiful What Is Necessary](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-to-see-as-beautiful-what-is-necessary/): I’ve almost finished watching Endgame by Samuel Beckett.  The play is my sole exposure to Beckett.  I knew of his reputation as a playwright.  I was asked why I chose this play.  I wanted to take a “deep dive” into waters which required that I swim or else fail.  “Drown” is the term, isn’t... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Goodby Bob](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-goodby-bob/): One week ago was the first day of Spring.  That’s an arbitrary date of course.  The term “spring” is an arbitrary label, a sign that we have agreed means that days are longer, there is more light, vegetation shows signs of new life, birds and mammals move about, a sign that mating season is... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, 静](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-%e9%9d%99/): I know that it is unlikely that you speak/read Japanese.  I once spoke a little, and what remains are pieces of a once useful skill, breaking the surface of my consciousness, evoked by context.  “Shizuka” pronounced the way it appears, means quiet-silence.  I once saw a solitary male folk singer in a below street... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Another Thorn](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-another-thorn/): Say: I am real, this is real, the world is real, and nobody laughs. But say: this is a simulacrum*, you are only a simulacrum, this war is a simulacrum, and everybody bursts out laughing. With a condescending and yellow laughter, or perhaps a convulsive one, as if it was a childish joke or... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Roses & Thorns](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-roses-thorns/): It is early.  There is no sunrise yet.  Wondering what to write.  Yesterday I began reading an essay by Jean Baurdrillard.  The essay is entitled Radical Thought.  Here is a short paragraph: The belief in truth is part of the elementary forms of religious life. It is a weakness of understanding, of common-sense. At... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Seems Like Religion](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-seems-like-religion/): I am mesmerized by this song.  I have listened many time to the Eurythmics Ultimate Collection CD.  Love is a Stranger “knocks me out” every time that I hear Annie Lennox deliver the lyric with such a cold clear voice, like a rifle shot of a sniper, – “one shot, one kill.” I am... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, A Queen In A Sailors Dream](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-a-queen-in-a-sailors-dream/): Sundown by Gordon Lightfoot.  A few years ago I was lucky to be present at a live performance by Gordon Lightfoot at the Genesee Theater in Waukegan.  The Genesee is a magnificent old theater, restored, perfect sight lines from any place in the house.  The atmosphere is apt for music performance, particularly folk, or... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Walking In A Cold Rain](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-walking-in-a-cold-rain/): I have always liked this song, the simple piano intro, and the powerful voice of Elvis telling a universal human story.  Durable relationships are hard.  Both parties are challenged to go “all in,” to show the hand each is holding.  This must be done if the relationship has a chance of enduring.  We typically... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, A Saturday](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-a-saturday/): Morning The first Saturday morning of spring was spent with a rake in hand, a wheelbarrow nearby.  Our yard has a considerable lawn, and is surrounded by trees.  Winter has left behind it’s quotient of small branches, twigs, and leaves under shrubbery.  Raking these left overs, feeling the pulsations of the rake tines upon... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Madness And Genius](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-madness-and-genius/): The Tragedy and the Paradox of Greek Civilization by Vincent Kavaloski They are old Dead White Males,Embarrassing in their political incorrectness.They built their greatness on slavery,They were patriarchal and sexist to the core,They idealized the warrior, and warredIncessantly. They could be cruel and oftenDespised mercy as weakness.And yet – and yetWe are still fascinated... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, A Backward Look](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-a-backward-look/): Late Lament Breathe deep the gathering gloom,Watch lights fade from every room.Bedsitter people look back and lament,Another day’s useless energy spent. Impassioned lovers wrestle as one,Lonely man cries for love and has none.New mother picks up and suckles her son,Senior citizens wish they were young. Cold hearted orb that rules the night,Removes the colours... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Social Analysis By Love Song](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-a-love-song-and-social-analysis/): The time has come, push the pile of chips forward, to the middle of the table.  Time to go “all in,” risking everything to gain a point. I like this song by Huey Lewis for several reasons. I have been fortunate to see Huey Lewis perform  live.  He is a prolific song writer.  His... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, And When I Die.](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-and-when-i-die/): On St. Patrick’s Day I am a one-eyed leprechaun!  I write this entry late in the day with a patch over one eye.  This morning quite early I received surgery on my left eye.  The treatment to my retina promises to improve my vision.  For now though, until the followup visit with the physician... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Greatness](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-greatness/): What is required for greatness?  Infrequently I ask the question silently, to myself in solitude.  I’ve never answered out loud.  But I know.  Greatness is the achievement of a few lines of prose, a poem or two, a lyric or a tune of such quality that one recognizes “for this I was born.”  I... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Wide Open?](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-wide-open/): You will like this Tom Petty video.  Into the Great Wide Open was the title song on the album by the same name released in 1991.  It is a story song, the lyric “tells itself.”   The music video for the single, directed by Julien Temple, starred Johnny Depp as the protagonist, Eddie Rebel, as... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, I'm American Made](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-im-american-made/): ‘ I receive a weekly email newsletter from Professor Scott Galloway.  Galloway is a professor in the New York University Stern School of Business.  He is a podcast host, and entrepreneur.  The professor is philosophically astute, able to see the “big picture.”  For today I will excerpt some of Galloway’s words from his No... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Chinmoku](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-chinmoku/): The word surfaces to consciousness, something that seldom comes.  It means “silence” in Japanese.  I’ve not thought of that word for many years.   Saturday morning early, — viewing the frost covered ground in the backyard.  Nothing is moving.  The frost is the remains of winter’s grasp upon the ground.  There is little traffic... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, A Prayer For Spring](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-a-prayer-for-spring/): THE SOIL…is the great connector of lives,the source and destination of all. It is the healer and restorer and resurrector, by whichdisease passes into health, age into youth,death into life. Without proper care for it we can have nocommunity, because without proper carefor it we can have no life. — Wendell Berry - [Plague Journal, Somethin' Better](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-somethin-better/): When I was younger I was fascinated by the city.  I grew up in a what was then a small town in North Carolina.  I remember riding my bike into town as a kid.  The scale of a small town is dwarfed by that of a city.   I have lived outside of Chicago for... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Arete](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-arete/): It is midweek, Wednesday.  Today I have a early appointment with my primary care physician. I will be cleared for surgery on Wednesday of the coming week.  My eyesight is in need of surgical attention, the consequences of age and diabetes.  I did not understand the meaning of having a body that is subject... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Not Much](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-not-much/): I have little to say this morning. That is as it should be.  Life is replete with conflict, language games, reportage contending for the apex of one’s attention.  Often, better that less or nothing be said, — silence is the condition for reflection, a quieting of awareness so that the dispersed energies of life... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Divine Donkeyism](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-divine-donkeyism/): Anything written by  Nietzsche is approached with apprehension.  By reputation Friedrich Nietzsche is a “bomb thrower,” a nihilist who is responsible for the death of God.  On a ‘reputation scale’ from high to low, that would be on the low side.  Unaccountably in my late 20s I read Nietzsche’s writing with an open mind, overcoming... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Springtime Reverence](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-springtime-reverence/): Sunday is the aftermath of  Senate approval of the 1.9 trillion aid package for a battered national.  No republican senator voted for the bill. It stands to reason that many are destitute with no remaining options, — food and shelter balanced on the knife-edge of being called back to the workplace after long months... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Pied Cow Part III](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-spoken-at-the-pied-cow-iii/): But tell me, my brethren, what the child can do, which even the lion could not do? Why hath the preying lion still to become a child? Innocence is the child, and forgetfulness, a new beginning, a game, a self-rolling wheel, a first movement, a holy Yea. Aye, for the game of creating, my... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Pied Cow Part II](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-pied-cow-part-ii/): But in the loneliest wilderness happeneth the second metamorphosis: here the spirit becometh a lion; freedom will it capture, and lordship in its own wilderness. Its last Lord it here seeketh: hostile will it be to him, and to its last God; for victory will it struggle with the great dragon. What is the... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Spoken At The Pied Cow](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-spoken-at-the-pied-cow/): Last night the Socrates Café convened once again.  The topic of the evening was “self-actualization” a term introduced into public discourse by the psychologist Abraham Maslow (1908-1970).  Maslow presented a 5 step process, a journey starting from the basic need of food, water, shelter, etc, followed by a safe environment, progressing to the final... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Liberation & Security](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-liberation-security/): Our philosophy discussion group convened virtually last night , via zoom video.  We discussed an essay by Olufemi O Taiwo, a philosopher who teaches at Georgetown University.  The Who Gets To Feel Secure essay treated the down-to-earth security that all human beings need in order to survive, to preserve their humanity.  I mean the... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, The Space Between](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-the-space-between/): Yesterdays rumination touched on the thought that love or the absence of love has to do with what takes place in the space between us.  Love is not a substance but our description of a negotiation — of my sense of being, of my identity in juxtaposition with yours, in the relational space that... Read More Read More - [Finale Worth Remembering](https://everyangel.org/finale-worth-remembering/): It is Thursday.  A morning sun shines in brilliance.  Nature is awakens !  I can feel it. If you are a church-going person, today would be Maundy Thursday, a commemoration of the “last supper.”  Perhaps you remember the painting by Leonardo da Vinci?  How ironic that an aspect of that final week, was a... Read More Read More - [You And I Looking On](https://everyangel.org/you-and-i-looking-on/): There’s a gentle rain outside.  Trees show signs of emerging leaf.  Everything that I can see seems to be waiting.  Waiting for what?  Life is a procession, one thing after another.  Cause and effect… ad infinitum.  The mind imposes the notion of delay, waiting as a holiday parade, the marching band has to march... Read More Read More - [Another Song](https://everyangel.org/another-song/): Read ‘Em And Weep By Barry Manilow I’ve been tryin for hours just to think of what exactly to say I thought I leave you with a letter or a fiery speech like when an actor makes an exit at the end of a play and I’ve been dying for hours trying to fill... Read More Read More - [Gray](https://everyangel.org/gray/): Monday morning, 7 AM the sun already some distance above the horizon toward the river, illuminates a pearl gray sky.  It is overcast.  Gray, gray, gray is pronounced over and over by my grand daughter.  She is two and a half and delights to learn the name of colors. Gray is the color of... Read More Read More - [Holy Week](https://everyangel.org/holy-week/): I am the last person to mention Holy Week.  Holy Week is the commemoration of the apogee of the Christian mythos: Jesus’ triumphant arrival in Jerusalem, and events that follow.  Think of the hoopla surrounding the winner of ‘American Idol.’  As consequence of the word of mouth rumor of his outlandish teaching (love your... Read More Read More - [Looking, Remembering](https://everyangel.org/looking-remembering/): Standing by a Shelf by Brandon D. Johnson for Reuben When he looks at the edges, The covers of books and records, He remembers when and where He got them, how it felt. Everything’s a testament To life lived on the fringe Of some sense of sanity. All the vehicles for imbibing These treasures... Read More Read More - [Growing Flowers In A Desert](https://everyangel.org/growing-flowers-in-a-desert/): Again I demonstrate to myself Homo Sapiens are fragile mammals.  Expectation is obstructed, this is my second try, — the illusion of a stable self is dispelled.  My annoyance surfaces and I express anger, expletives, desire has been frustrated…  The social self, a seductive illusion, is jangled by circumstance.  And so it goes.  I... Read More Read More - [Entranced](https://everyangel.org/entranced/): Thursday morning.  I am existentially feel disoriented.  Just read an account of the war in Ukraine, a story about proximity fused mines left by the retreating Russians.  These mines explode when a sensor detects a person passing by, scattering shrapnel in a 50 foot radius.  My imagination conjures up a Terminator movie…  This is... Read More Read More - [As We Imagined It](https://everyangel.org/as-we-imagined-it/): High, Higher, Highest by Samuel Hazo                                           Viewed from space, the world’s                                            impersonal.                                                                 France appears,                                            but no Frenchmen.                                                                                      Then Germany,                                            without... Read More Read More - [The Unforgivable](https://everyangel.org/the-unforgivable/): I have never been a Led Zeppelin fan.  Taste in music, taste in art has nothing to do with reason.  It comes down to serendipity, the genre’s of music that one is exposed to by accident of your time and place in this world.  That’s all.  There’s no independent baseline of measure, when it... Read More Read More - [Music Vs. Silence Of The Dead](https://everyangel.org/music-vs-silence-of-the-dead/): I watched the Grammy’s Award Show.  I am an “old guy” so I knew in advance most of the show content would be barely understood.  Music is the voice of a generation.  Several generations and more have come into being since mine was up and coming.  The Boomer generation was the one born right... Read More Read More - [Your One Life To Take Care](https://everyangel.org/your-one-life-to-take-care/): We traveled by train into the city yesterday, to take in a theatrical performance of Six.  My first experience of the city post-pandemic, the streets and buildings seemed frozen in time, by comparison to my memory of the bustle of crowds and of the traffic congestion.  The dampened vibe was surreal.  Much has changed... Read More Read More - [Gett'in Through Stormy Weather](https://everyangel.org/gettin-through-stormy-weather/): …you know it’s now or never           Take a chance on rock ‘n’ roll Life is never easy and never will be.  By definition ‘to live’ is to feel the friction of cause and effect, the interior movement of changing mood and the exterior uncontrollable forces or personalities, competing for resources, for ascendancy… Sartre... Read More Read More - [Memory](https://everyangel.org/remembering-3/): Every single day is paradoxically heaven and hell.  My grand daughter cannot experience life in such terms because she is somewhere in the middle of her effort to acquire language.  I have no doubt that as years pass, with experience, reading, pursuit of scholarship, she will understand that unalloyed moments of joy flicker and... Read More Read More - [Still Here](https://everyangel.org/still-here/): Tomorrow will be my birthday.  I am still here.  In the course of asking myself, “how the hell did I reach this time and place,” I cannot answer in fine detail.  I have to think that shear accident, more than my share of luck has figured into the fact that I am within reach... Read More Read More - [Proposal: Great Oak Festival](https://everyangel.org/proposal-great-oak-festival/): Yesterday was a good day.  Choosing to revisit the Dick Young Forest Preserve in Batavia, when I arrived my vehicle was the the only one in the parking lot.  Following the path to Nelson Lake Marsh I grew comfortable with the solitude.  My company was the wind, the brown vegetation, and tender new growth invisibly... Read More Read More - [To Hold Back The Night](https://everyangel.org/to-hold-back-the-night/): This morning’s New York Times report on the war in Ukraine is a meditation upon the logic of war. “Stand with you, period” President Biden, in a passionate speech from Warsaw on Saturday, proclaimed the West’s complete support for Ukraine. “We stand with you, period,” Biden said. “Not doing enough” The next day, Ukraine’s... Read More Read More - [The Long March](https://everyangel.org/the-long-march/): I watched the 94th Academy Awards last night,  a bit reluctantly.  The Academy Awards show, as such shows go, become absurd in the bid to out-do themselves.  Each year the aspiration is for more of a spectacle than anything done in the past.  The need to produce “a show” to attract advertisers competes with... Read More Read More - [Vakarchuk](https://everyangel.org/vakarchuk/): “Even if you’re alone, you’re destined to do it…” Svyatoslav Vakarchuk, 46, the lead singer of Okean Elzy and perhaps Ukraine’s biggest star, was supposed to be preparing to play the band’s latest album to packed venues across the world from April… Since, he has sung in Odessa near the Duc de Richelieu monument... Read More Read More - [The Show That Never Ends](https://everyangel.org/the-show-that-never-ends/): Brain fog…  At least that was my condition upon waking this morning.  It is gray, windy, a day chilled with winter’s retreat.  The disorientation, as if my senses were obstructed by a old exhausted filter, continued until I arrived at Starbucks.  Now I am into my second cup of coffee.  I watched the 1970... Read More Read More - [The Hour Of Darkness](https://everyangel.org/grief/): My mood, my internal weather is as somber as the morning sky.  The news from Ukraine is of widespread shelling of neighborhoods, of a mother wounded by shrapnel in the face, as she covers her child to protect it from death in the air.  There is news of thousands of civilians removed from Mariupol,... Read More Read More - [Looking To China Grove](https://everyangel.org/looking-to-china-grove/): We live in through and by our stories do we not? Who could I possibly be apart from the stories that I tell myself? What could I become unless my imagination is sparked by the stories which you have told me? The ultimate form of human association is marked by vulnerability, – such that... Read More Read More - [Love Is Like A Shadow](https://everyangel.org/love-is-like-a-shadow/): We began our discussion on the expansive subject of “love.”  What can be said philosophically about love, or about “falling in love?”  Love is a subject commanding enormous attention, as witnessed by innumerable novels, pop ballads, movies, and the Hallmark channel.  “Falling in love” is a euphemism that is often overheard.  The expression can... Read More Read More - [Mariupol](https://everyangel.org/mariupol/): The officer, who had once begged us to show the world his dying city, now pleaded with us to go. He nudged us toward the thousands of battered cars preparing to leave Mariupol. The deaths came fast. On Feb. 27, we watched as a doctor tried to save a little girl hit by shrapnel.... Read More Read More - [Water](https://everyangel.org/water/): The first spring rain produced about an inch of rainfall.   An inch is a good beginning.  With another day of gentle rain, we will be off the starting-line of growing season.  It sounds strange to say “we.”  By habit we think of homo sapiens as distinct, abstract, essentially different from nature.  That is a... Read More Read More - [Passage](https://everyangel.org/passage/): What does it take to become human, to bridge the gap between… zoe and bios, physiology and biography, nature and spirit, the somatic and symbolic? For us life is meaning and meaning is life. —Inner Experience and Worldly Revolt; Arendt’s Bearing on Kristeva’s Project by Noëlle McAfee, Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy The... Read More Read More - [Rain](https://everyangel.org/rain-2/): There is a light rain falling.  Rain began yesterday.  I never complain about the rain.  What I fear is drought depriving vegetation of nourishment in the growing season.  Severe drought stresses mature trees, making older trees susceptible to disease.  I feel kinship to trees.  Trees provide shelter to a variety of mammals, birds, even... Read More Read More - [Gypsies All](https://everyangel.org/gypsies-all/): It is Friday morning.  After rising, switching on the iphone, a text message was waiting.  A friend asked if I could meet him at Limestone Coffee Shop at 7.  I had ten minutes.  I pressed ahead with the bowl of cheerios, grabbed my coat and was out the door.  Arriving at the coffee shop... Read More Read More - [Where The Streets Have Names](https://everyangel.org/where-the-streets-have-names/): Mariupol They are stacked together with dozens of others in this mass grave on the outskirts of the city. A man covered in a bright blue tarp, weighed down by stones at the crumbling curb. A woman wrapped in a red and gold bedsheet, her legs neatly bound at the ankles with a scrap... Read More Read More - [Friendship](https://everyangel.org/friendship/): Met up with two friends this morning.  Walking along the riverfront, in the presence of waterbirds congregating on the far bank, commenting on the old buildings, built by several generations before the present, the buildings rehabilitated, upgraded not only for our end use purposes, but a reminder that we are not the first to... Read More Read More - [Memory](https://everyangel.org/memory/): Shaking inwardly again this morning.  I planned to write only about Rock N Roll.  After I write what I have to say about that, — more is to be said about the war in Ukraine. Hold On, I’m Comin’ By Sam and Dave Now don’t you ever be sad Lean on me when times... Read More Read More - [A Sight Like This](https://everyangel.org/a-sight-like-this/): Reinforcements Marianne Moore The vestibule to experience is not to    Be exalted into epic grandeur. These men are goingTo their work with this idea, advancing like a school of fish through Still water—waiting to change the course or dismiss    The idea of movement, till forced to. The words of the GreeksRing in our ears, but they... Read More Read More - [No Minnesotan Ever Wanted To Take Over The World](https://everyangel.org/no-minnesotan-ever-wanted-to-take-over-the-world/): This tune comes from my past.  It is a “message in a bottle” a whisper in my ear from the god.   Something like Socrates’ daimonion, which from a child had spoke cautionary messages to him…  The whispered message of this old song, that we are borne along by time.  The passage of time is... Read More Read More - [Weekend Reflection](https://everyangel.org/a-weekend-reflection/):    Thought written, represented is a passage through evil, …the most profound way of avoiding radical evil… the stoppage of representation and questioning. -excerpt, New Forms of Revolt by Julia Kristeva, pp 9 The Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy Saturday morning comes with brilliant sunlight and cold.  The cold is reminder that winter... Read More Read More - [Heaven Or Hell](https://everyangel.org/heaven-or-hell/): Do we not all “live” at the Hotel California? “You can check out anytime but you can never leave…” Bombs and rockets rained down last night.  Russian missiles struck at least three cities in western and central Ukraine, and there were reports of fierce fighting on the outskirts of Kyiv. — according to the... Read More Read More - [War And Calming Our Fears](https://everyangel.org/war-and-calming-our-fears/): War is the ultimate atrocity, the heart of evil.  War is the failure of civilized life, when the bonds of “common sense” between us break, the rage of the petulant child erupting in irrational destruction.  This morning I awakened to read the story of the Perebyinis family in the New York Times.  War in... Read More Read More - [Ukraine Is Iconic](https://everyangel.org/ukraine-is-iconic/): Shaking inwardly again this morning.  The day is beautiful.  For many days my life has been beautiful.  There have been some dark days, dark existentially, a time when I could not foresee a way forward.  Nevertheless by act of faith, absurd as it felt, I carried on.  Near by were others who believed that... Read More Read More - [Again](https://everyangel.org/the-road-2/): The Tuesday morning sun shines brilliantly framed by blue sky.  There are no clouds.  I understand why the Maya and many other peoples worshiped the sun.  The sun, our sun, gives life.  Sol Invictus, the unconquered sun, was a god of the later Roman empire.  Sol was of supreme importance, until Constantine abandoned Sol... Read More Read More - [Time Goes So Slowly](https://everyangel.org/time-goes-so-slowly/): It is snowing.  There is purity in a cover of snow.  That’s how I’d prefer life.  In my imagined world, in paradise all would be love, peace and harmony. In this world there is friction and response.   That is all that you can expect.  And sometimes there’s violence, immediate, extreme, murderous.  Survival and... Read More Read More - [Moving Day](https://everyangel.org/moving-day/): Yesterday was moving day.  I pitched in, doing what I could to assist my daughter and her partner in their move from Wheaton to Deerfield.  Moving is a many day’s long process, culminating with moving day.  Boxes packed with household items moved to the center of each room.  On moving day, the movers arrive... Read More Read More - [Am I My Brother's Keeper?*](https://everyangel.org/a-facetious-people/): Time for writing is limited today.  I did not post yesterday.  Posting nothing again would be morally indefensible under the circumstances. This was the lead paragraph in The Morning news update from the New York Times: First, a news update: Russia continued its broad offensive in Ukraine today, pummeling cities and towns. Ukrainian officials... Read More Read More - [Laughing](https://everyangel.org/laughing/): This morning in a fog, dazed in disbelief.  The siege of Ukraine continues.  The port of Kherson has fallen.  It is a city of 300,000.  The bombardment of other cities continues. My mind reels at the news, that Xi Jinping General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party asked Putin of Russia to delay the... Read More Read More - [Are You Not Entertained?](https://everyangel.org/are-you-not-entertained/): The well of desire!  Am I falling into a well?  Or like Moses, am I to ascend? Do I rise to a divine calling?  What metaphor best describes the palpable sensation of absence, some “thing” that is missing, a loss that must be sought after?  How many ways to describe the quest, that ends... Read More Read More - [Things Holding Together](https://everyangel.org/things-holding-together/): Can I, should I take a break in writing about the defense of Ukraine?  Yes and no…  Life is many things.  Even in war there are interludes in assault, in the effort to destroy and kill.  Especially in abject misery, in ravening terror — a pause is useful to recognize, to feel gratitude that... Read More Read More - [The Fighting Continues](https://everyangel.org/the-fighting-continues/): Monday morning, the Russian assault on Kyiv continues.  Ukrainian resistance has been fierce, the intended lightning quick investment of the capital city bogged down.  The Russians have sufficient armor, artillery and infantry to squeeze the outnumbered defenders.  Infrastructure is destroyed in the course of the shelling, rocket attacks, the street fighting.  For information on... Read More Read More - [Zelensky - Need Ammo, Not A Ride](https://everyangel.org/zelensky-need-ammo-not-a-ride/): Zelensky turned down a US offer of evacuation, the Ukraine Embassy in Britain said Saturday on Twitter. “The fight is here; I need ammunition, not a ride,” Zelensky told the US, according to the embassy.   — CNN Until his surprise election in 2019, Volodymyr Zelenskyy played a president on TV. Today, the 44-year-old is... Read More Read More - [Come On In See The Show](https://everyangel.org/come-on-in-see-the-show/): Saturday morning, gleaming sunlight upon pure fallen show, and at Starbucks I wrestle with words again.  Each day presents a new contestation to say what is sayable. Before turning in last night I noted that on television an interview conducted with a female Ukrainian diplomat.  By all appearances it was a measured, sober, responsible... Read More Read More - [The One Ring](https://everyangel.org/the-one-ring/): “Western leaders and diplomats,” she wrote, “think they live in a world where rules matter, where diplomatic protocol is useful, where polite speech is valued. All of them think that when they go to Russia, they are talking to people whose minds can be changed by argument or debate. They think the Russian elite... Read More Read More - [How Easy To Make A Ghost](https://everyangel.org/how-easy-to-make-a-ghost/): How to Kill by Keith Douglas Under the parabola of a ball, a child turning into a man, I looked into the air too long. The ball fell in my hand, it sang in the closed fist: Open Open Behold a gift designed to kill. Now in my dial of glass appears the soldier... Read More Read More - [The Walls Of Our Cage](https://everyangel.org/the-walls-of-our-cage/): The tendency of all … who have ever wanted to write or talk Ethics or Religion was to run against the boundaries of language. This running against the walls of our cage is perfectly, absolutely hopeless. Ethics so far as it springs from the desire to say something about the ultimate meaning of life,... Read More Read More - [Remembering Dave Hickey](https://everyangel.org/remembering-dave-hickey/): All revolutions are aesthetic… Taste is power, and power is politics… So taste has enormous power to shape history. If it makes your scalp tingle, it’s art. “Bad taste is real taste, and good taste is just the residue of someone else’s privilege.” Jazz exemplifies the possibly doomed experiment of being totally free, with... Read More Read More - [The Outrage One Does Not Want](https://everyangel.org/the-outrage-one-does-not-want/): A Russian invasion of Ukraine would look like the kind of war that has been largely absent in the past 80 years and that was once common. It would involve a powerful nation setting out to expand its regional dominance by taking over a neighbor. A war like this — a voluntary war of... Read More Read More - [Freeze, Thaw, Freeze](https://everyangel.org/freezing-and-thawing/): Let This Darkness Be a Bell Tower By Rainer Maria Rilke Quiet friend who has come so far, feel how your breathing makes more space around you. Let this darkness be a bell tower and you the bell. As you ring, what batters you becomes your strength. Move back and forth into the change.... Read More Read More - [A Child's Uneven Scrawl](https://everyangel.org/a-childs-uneven-scrawl/): Saturday, late February, and out-of-doors is bitter cold.  This is the cold season, a time suited for reflection.  Waking early, making my way to Starbucks, two thoughts were looping in my mind.  I checked my iphone news feed soon after rising.  I felt relief that Ukraine is not yet fighting, dying to fend off... Read More Read More - [No Matter How Difficult Or Costly](https://everyangel.org/no-matter-the-difficulty-or-cost/): Capitalism is an extractive circuit which quite literally crisscrosses the world. 1.  Its global value chains stretch through physical infrastructure and “frictionless” financial flows at the speed allowed by telecommunications; fossil fuels; and geophysical, technological, psychosocial, and bodily limits and “optimizations.” 2.  It connects economically and ecologically dispossessed agricultural communities in the Global South... Read More Read More - [Always Wanting More](https://everyangel.org/always-wanting-more-2/): Took a walk yesterday; a mid-winter warmup, the sidewalk was melted clear of ice.  Walking past Almond Marsh I felt sad, resonating with the gray sky, the muted brown of the decaying cattails. The melt water was a sheen of reflected light upon an ice covered marsh.  The world before me appeared ethereal drained... Read More Read More - [Valentine's Day Postscript](https://everyangel.org/valentines-day-postscript/): Yesterday I wondered if they celebrate February 14 as Valentine’s Day in Ukraine.  I consulted the Oracle, no longer at Delphi.  The answer: yes they do.  That it is possible to celebrate love when surrounded by serried ranks of armor, self-propelled artillery, motorized infantry seemed a truly human image of resistance.  We ought to... Read More Read More - [Valentine's Day](https://everyangel.org/valentines-day/): Yesterday was Valentine’s Day.  Laura and I had breakfast together at Buttermilk which is an uncommonly good place for biscuits.  We reflected upon the many years that we have been together.  Our journey has been worthwhile, a mutual learning.  In a manner of speaking, from our first meeting, the initial conversation I found her interesting. ... Read More Read More - [Short Story-No Last Words](https://everyangel.org/short-story-no-last-words/): Wake Up, Mario by Martín Espada For Mario Gonzalez Arenales (1994-2021) He’s not doing anything wrong. He’s just scaring my wife.—call to the Alameda Police Department, April 19, 2021 They watched him from the window of the house, a man at the fencein a crooked wool cap, chipping at their tree with a comb,... Read More Read More - [Go For A Ride](https://everyangel.org/going-for-a-ride/): “Moments are torn from us,” Seneca wrote. “The whole future lies in uncertainty.” Fortune behaves as she pleases, he wrote. As we’ve talked about before, life comes at you fast. It doesn’t rhyme, it doesn’t reason, it doesn’t care about your wants or needs—it just is. All we can do is accept the uncertainty... Read More Read More - [Roxy](https://everyangel.org/roxy/): Revisionary by Robert Pinsky The globe on a tilted axis means The News. As the icon spins the angle seems to shift. Science has found ancestral Neanderthals. We have a bit of their blood. They painted caves Better than sapiens, as we named ourselves. History has found the Jews who fought for Hitler. Thousands... Read More Read More - [Saddle Up Partner](https://everyangel.org/saddle-up-partner/): Where would I be without a few good friends, without my family? To imagine how different my life could be, I would have never known about books which have changed my life.  There’s music which has transformed by sense of self, my being in the world, that I would never discover without a recommendation.... Read More Read More - [Deciding Without Help](https://everyangel.org/deciding-without-help/): A long quotation on the role of violence, — some difficult issues consequent to deciding upon a violent act, necessary for survival. This world is a violent place.  Homo Sapiens often have recourse to violence.  Ask any who live in Ukraine, or who lived in Afghanistan, or Iraq, or Syria…  Places wet with blood,... Read More Read More - [He Got Mauled.](https://everyangel.org/he-got-mauled/): After more than five hours of talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow, there was little doubt Emmanuel Macron walked into the grizzly bear’s den — and he got mauled. With more than 100,000 Russian troops and heavy weapons massed on the Ukrainian border, the French president and his advisers had insisted that,... Read More Read More - [Contra Fascism](https://everyangel.org/contra-fascism/): We object to the inquisitors who want to create faith and virtue from without; We object to all forms of fascism which seek to fashion the happiness of man from without; And also the paternalism which thinks that it has done something for [humankind] by prohibiting him from certain possibilities of temptation, whereas what... Read More Read More - [Napping & Doing Away With Limits](https://everyangel.org/napping-doing-away-with-limits/): [Humankind] extends his control by instruments which enable him to devour distances and to multiply the output of his effort in time; but he is always and only one. However, instead of accepting his limits, he tries to do away with them. He aspires to act upon everything and by knowing everything. -excerpt the... Read More Read More - [To Break Through The Wall](https://everyangel.org/to-break-through-the-wall/): This morning the sun was a fingernail of fire above the treeline across the river.  This poem was on my mind.  Life is a siege, sometimes a pitched battle against the darkness that surely will envelop our dreams — unless you, unless I resist.  As we grow older, it happens.  The ancient contest between... Read More Read More - [From That Formless Night](https://everyangel.org/from-that-formless-night/): But the truth is that if division and violence define war, the world has always been at war and always will be; if man is waiting for universal peace in order to establish his existence validly; he will wait indefinitely: there will never be any other future. …Our hold on the future is limited;... Read More Read More - [The Rigged Game](https://everyangel.org/playing-the-rigged-game/): Someone who knows me well took me to task this week on account of my contempt for capitalism.  His complaint paraphrased, – “Do you mean to say the guy operating the corner grocery down the street is an avaricious, exploiting….etc.”  He and I were not in a situation to discuss the matter at length,... Read More Read More - [Winter's Bone](https://everyangel.org/winters-bone/): Writing about the death of someone I did not know, I took a short walk in the snowfall to think.  There’s a purity about snow.  I remembered white symbolizes death in Japan.  Purity is erasure, a blank slate.  Death is erasure of the filigreed world, that Baroque montage of shape, color and sound, the... Read More Read More - [Life And Death](https://everyangel.org/this-world-no-jukebox/): She was thirty years old. Several days ago report of a suicide on my iphone feed caught my attention. The age of the individual prompted me to read further. She was a North Carolinian, my home state. Chosen Miss America 2019, she was a civil attorney who did free legal work for people unjustly... Read More Read More - [Capitalism Part II](https://everyangel.org/capitalism-part-ii/): Some additional thoughts on capitalism… I remember a time when capitalism did not seem so rapacious, as destructive in its general effect upon the social circle within my awareness.  Perhaps as a young adult in my twenties, I was simply ignorant, blind to suffering of others, particularly citizens of color.  Yes, I was ignorant... Read More Read More - [Our Economy of Violence](https://everyangel.org/our-economy-of-violence/): The specifically human form of aggression, violence, is closely connected to the awareness of death, which is exclusively human. The economy of violence is ruled by the logic of accumulation. The more violence you exert, the more powerful you feel. Accumulated killing power [Tötungsgewalt] produces a feeling of growth, force, power, [Macht] — of... Read More Read More - [To Juggle Away The Bitter Truth...](https://everyangel.org/to-juggle-away-the-bitter-truth/): Nihilistic pessimismand rationalistic optimismfail in their effort to juggle awaythe bitter truth of sacrifice:they also eliminate all reasons for wanting it. Someone told a young invalid who wept because she had to leave her home, her occupations, and her whole past life, “Get cured. The rest has no importance.” “But if nothing has any... Read More Read More - [A Being Of The Distances](https://everyangel.org/a-being-of-the-distances/): A child’s face is so moving, it is not that the child is more movingor that [she] has more of a right to happiness than the others:it is that [she] is the living affirmation of human transcendence;[she] is on the watch, she is an eager hand held out to the world,[she] is a hope,... Read More Read More - [About Guns](https://everyangel.org/about-guns/): American history has been about guns.  Ask any indigenous American.  Ask any Republican for that matter… Yesterday I watched an old Western movie entitled, Last Train From Gun Hill, staring Kirk Douglas and Anthony Quinn. The plot as you can guess is about outlaws and gun-play. The “good guy,” the one wearing the star... Read More Read More - [Not A Fan...](https://everyangel.org/not-a-fan/): I am not a fan of Heavy Metal music.  That would be an understatement.  If offered free tickets I would not attend a concert.  However I have friends who are fans of Heavy Metal.  There’s something about a song, or a band, or a composer that resonates with a chord in one’s own soul. ... Read More Read More - [We Don't Make The Rules](https://everyangel.org/we-dont-make-the-rules/): Yesterday I noticed this sign while stopping at a Starbucks.  I felt excited at the “sign” of sanity, a public display of reason in a time of covid.  Why in the name of humanity should we sacrifice lives, and “sacrifice” is the only word to use.  What of this childish desire to assert “freedom”... Read More Read More - [Blazing Death](https://everyangel.org/blazing-death/): Early morning, I left the house, the sun was a fiery ball at the tree line across a frozen river.  The vehicle temperature gauge read +2 degrees.  A song was playing on the local radio station. I am certain the poets, lyricists, playwrights, are the ones who show us the metaphors, perform the scenes... Read More Read More - [Winter And War](https://everyangel.org/winter-and-war/): Snow continues to fall.  I, the creature of habit, fetched my usual cup of coffee from Starbucks, despite the slippery roads.  I returned safely.  Perhaps I was a little lucky.  No accident and here I am. One has to be somewhere, as long as one is alive.  I’d rather be in Batavia, Illinois than... Read More Read More - [Shaking...](https://everyangel.org/shaking-3/): Last night before turning in I watched a piece on the Magellan channel about volcanoes.  Scenes of Mount St. Helens in Washington state, before and after the eruption on May 18, 1980 were featured.  An eerie aspect in the piece was a radio report, from an observer on the mountain side describing in some... Read More Read More - [Haunted By A Heart Upon A Wall](https://everyangel.org/haunted-by-a-heart-upon-a-wall/): For Homo Sapiens to live is to be aware of loss.  I doubt that is the case for any other mammal.  Language, the ability to think and to communicate with symbols allows us to contemplate time in the abstract, with memory of a past, and an imagined future.  We are unable to live solely... Read More Read More - [When Darkness Comes](https://everyangel.org/when-darkness-comes/): A poignant conversation happened between friends this week.  The occasion and opportunity for the exchange of words was the death of a renowned self-taught improvisational pianist Michael Jones.  Jones lived in Toronto and was an international recording artist. This morning I thought about other losses.  Upon waking I learned of the death of Meatloaf,... Read More Read More - [Epicurus II: Welcome To The Dance](https://everyangel.org/epicurus-ii-welcome-to-the-dance/): Choice/Responsibility  and  Fate/Doing What Your Daddy Done The trick it seems when it comes to philosophy is to make sense of a coincidence of opposites.  On the one hand, is our intuitive sense of choice, that decisions are pivot points with consequences for which we blame ourselves (and others) or believe to be praiseworthy. ... Read More Read More - [And When I Die](https://everyangel.org/and-when-i-die-2/): Two things, there are two momentous “passages” the unavoidable transitions attendant to this life.  Without any question there are two inescapable events that all living must abide, that of birth and that of death.  The first passage recedes in the past, is not even in memory.  The second great transition is ahead. I refer... Read More Read More - [View From The North](https://everyangel.org/view-from-the-north/): Yesterday was Martin Luther King Jr. day, the national Federal holiday for marking the birthday of Dr. King.  I was in high school, in the South when Dr. King was in the news.  King was organizing, raising to consciousness the formal and informal practices by which we whites were relegating black citizens to second... Read More Read More - [Zeitgeist](https://everyangel.org/zeitgeist/):   We spent part of the afternoon at one of the national booksellers, perusing the shelves.  Not that I “need” another book.  A bookstore is always an agreeable place, and especially on a chill winter’s day.  I spent some time examining the display of new fiction hardcover books.  A thought came to mind.  A... Read More Read More - [Ah, Freedom](https://everyangel.org/ah-freedom/): Every manneeds the freedom of other men,in a sense, always wants it, even though he may be a tyrant; the only thing he fails to do is to assume honestlythe consequences of such a wish. Only the freedom of others keeps each one of us from hardeningin the absurdity of facticity. -excerpt, The Ethics... Read More Read More - [Dead Or Alive](https://everyangel.org/dead-or-alive/): I took a walk yesterday.  A gray day, mid-January with a brisk breeze and thirty degrees.  I walked 3rd Street in Geneva, the mind stimulated by visual and tactile sensation, — as I passed by restaurants “coming to life” in early afternoon.  Reaching State Street, intending to purchase another cup of coffee from the... Read More Read More - [Laughing Till It Hurts](https://everyangel.org/laughing-till-it-hurts/): Publius Rutilius Rufus was incorruptible. And what was his reward for this? He was indicted on trumped up charges and driven into exile. Marcus Aurelius was good and decent and fair. And for this? Fate handed him a plague and floods…and then his best friend attempted a coup. And how do modern historians recognize... Read More Read More - [Too Little, Too Late...](https://everyangel.org/too-little-too-late/): Today I upgraded the theme software for this blog.  I paid a nominal amount for some added features.  Upon activating the new theme, I discovered the image for my header vanished.  The gods or demons within what-we-have-created, the world wide web, again manifested their presence.  Magic or superstition is that feeling of “mystery” in... Read More Read More - [Lucifer Rising](https://everyangel.org/lucifer-rising/): The discussion touching on Platonic idealism was fascinating.  Who is not captivated by an ideal, gleaming in transparent purity?  I certainly am.  Would I kill for an ideal?  Or to put it more plainly would I commit murder to advance an ideal?  I probably would, as many have.  I am admittedly a standard issue... Read More Read More - [The Greatest Story Teller](https://everyangel.org/the-greatest-story-teller-of-them-all/): I just finished reading The Phaedo written by Plato.  The Phaedo, is a story that receives its title from the name of a friend of Socrates who is observer and auditor of the last hours of Socrates’ life.  The last hours are spent in philosophical exchange with a circle of friends.  Plato, a playwright... Read More Read More - [Immigrant Song (our story)](https://everyangel.org/immigrant-song-our-story/): A confession: Writing about music, rock and roll in particular comes easily.  That is, by comparison finding the words to describe other topics; the more abstract the topic, the more difficult.  To find the exact word, that’s the key.  This tune by Led Zeppelin pierced “to the heart” as I drove to Starbucks this... Read More Read More - [Then I Pray To God...](https://everyangel.org/then-i-pray-to-god/): Sunday, and freezing mist has covered pavement with a quarter inch of ice.  I will be satisfied with the cup of coffee from the kitchen.  The short drive to the Starbucks on 3rd and State in Geneva would be a risk.  I appreciate the hot rich astringent cup of Starbucks coffee, and anticipate the... Read More Read More - [Holy Paths To Hell](https://everyangel.org/holy-paths-to-hell/): Never did I think that I’d feature music by a heavy metal band.  The genre does not inspire me, and perhaps that is a generational thing.  My father’s generation thought the performances of Elvis were disturbing, beyond the bounds of the conventions of popular music.  Perhaps a form of music emanates from the zeitgeist,... Read More Read More - [No Threats, No Promises](https://everyangel.org/no-threats-no-promises/): The universe is just there; that’s the only way one can view it and remain master of one’s senses. The universe neither threatens nor promises. It holds things beyond our sway: the fall of a meteor, growing old and dying. These are the realities of the universe and they must be faced regardless of... Read More Read More - [Becoming A Student](https://everyangel.org/becoming-a-student/): There is in all things a patternthat is part of our universe.It has symmetry, elegance, and grace–these qualities you find always in that which the true artist captures. You can find itin the turning of the seasons,in the way the sand trails along a ridge…We try to capture these patternsin our lives and in... Read More Read More - [On Interpretation](https://everyangel.org/on-interpretation/): So you’ve run out of things to say!  I imagine that a reader could react to this “throw-away” pop tune for the post of today.  I am often inspired by the challenge of writing about an art form.  Rock and roll is within that wide circle of made objects that we refer to as... Read More Read More - [Fear Of Existence](https://everyangel.org/fear-of-existence/): To exist is to make oneself a lack of being; it is to cast oneself into the world. Those who occupy themselves in restraining this original movement can be considered as sub-men. They have eyes and ears, but from their childhood on they make themselves blind and deaf, without love and without desire. This... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Out Of Nothing At All](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-out-of-nothing-at-all/): Could the second law of thermodynamics be the least abstract of all scientific principles?  I am thinking of entropy, the arrow of time.  Left to itself, a system, or a human being, or a city, a whole society, a solar system will reach a state of equilibrium.  The principle was first formulated in 1824.  Heat... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Woolly Mammoth Is Back](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-welcome-the-woolly-mammoth/): Many months ago it felt right to use “Plague Journal” in the title line for these posts.  I assumed that fighting the virus would be a process, that the work of research with the public’s self-interested cooperation would reduce the corona virus to a minor inconvenience.  A two year anniversary is approaching since our... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Father Knows](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-father-knows/): Uncultured mansees in conscience, in reason,so far as he recognizes it as his ownno universal objective power; therefore he must separate from himselfthat which gives him moral laws,and place it in opposition to himself,as a distinct personal being. Belief in revelationis a childlike belief,and is only respectable as long asit is childlike. — excerpt,... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, 9-11 Twenty Years After](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-20th-year-anniversary-of-9-11/): How to begin.  Yesterday was the 20th anniversary, of the September 11th, 2001 suicide attack on the twin towers in Manhattan, on the Pentagon, and the fourth passenger jet plowing into the earth at Shanksville Pennsylvania.  Four occasions of mass death were memorialized yesterday by ceremonies at the sites where they occurred.  I paid... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Sunup](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-sunup/): “‘Now if love is always for this,’ she proceeded, ‘what is the method of those who pursue it, and what is the behavior whose eagerness and straining are to be termed love? What actually is this effort? Can you tell me?’ “‘Ah, Diotima,’ I said; ‘in that case I should hardly be admiring you... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Another Thought On Heaven](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-another-thought-on-heaven/): Is anything comparable to music to say what can only be said indirectly, approached by metaphor? Absent any belief in heaven, — do THEY not all live, in us!? Rock And Roll Heaven by The Righteous Brothers If you believe in forever Then life is just a one-night stand If there’s a rock n’... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, If There's No Heaven...](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-what-if-theres-no-heaven/): I am not the first, and this is not the first time the thought comes to mind.  Yesterday, early evening, the moon was a sliver of fingernail behind a cloud low in the darkening sky.  I hurried inside to get my camera.  I knew the moment would not last.  This morning on Fabyan Parkway... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, One Hundred & Fifty Six](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-one-hundred-fifty-six/): How many years since the War of Southern Rebellion ended? For many of those years a statue of Robert E. Lee mounted on his horse Traveler has occupied a prominent place on Monument Avenue in Richmond Virginia.  Lee was commander in chief of the pro-slavery forces (human trafficking) that fought for four long years... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Higher Ed Redux](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-higher-ed-redux/): If I could — I would. The discussion was intense for an hour and a half.  If I could re-invent higher education, where would I start, what would I change?  The question is more than an idle thought experiment, a mind game.  Human beings without the benefit of instincts, rely upon the internal map... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Ottawa](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-ottawa/): Today is the day after Labor Day. We visited the town of Ottawa yesterday.  The town is about an hour drive south, near the terminus of the Fox River.  Ottawa is the seat of Lasalle County and was the site of the first debate between Stephen A. Douglass and Abraham Lincoln in 1858.  The... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Labor Day](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-labor-day/): Monday, the end of summer.  The street is eerily quiet at State and 3rd in Geneva.  At the hour of 7AM, there’s not the usual bustle. While driving to Starbucks I listened to a NPR piece covering the aftermath of hurricane Ida’s destruction on the coast of Louisiana.  Several individuals were interviewed that formerly... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, That Great Fatality](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-that-great-fatality-2/): In that great fatality called Christianity, Plato represents that ambiguity and fascination, called an “ideal,” which made it possible for the nobler spirits of antiquity to misunderstand themselves and to set foot on the bridge leading to the ‘Cross’… And how much Plato there still is in the concept “church,” in the construction, system,... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Pointing To One End](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-pointing-to-one-end/): BURNT NORTON by T. S. Eliot (No. 1 of ‘Four Quartets’)   Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future, And time future contained in time past. If all time is eternally present All time is unredeemable. What might have been is an abstraction Remaining a perpetual possibility Only in... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Paradise City](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-paradise-city/): Little to say this morning.  The Starbucks room vibe parallels my subdued mood.  With difficulty I listened to the morning news report on NPR.  A business reporter described the decline in business activity among small businesses, restaurants, particularly in the states impacted with Delta virus.  Large numbers of un-vaccinated fellow citizens have wide spread... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Entanglement](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-entanglement/): Yesterday we were privileged to have a guided tour of the Fabyan Estate home in Geneva, on the bank of the Fox River.  George Fabyan, descendant of a wealthy Boston dry goods manufacturing family and his wife Nelle, purchased 300 acres in the early 1900s.  The old farmhouse on the property was remodeled by... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Off The Deep End](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-off-the-deep-end/): The exchange of ideas began with the presentation of research notes.  Five of us submitted summaries of our findings, our considerations on the prospect of building-from-scratch higher education.  Perhaps it is obvious that college and post graduate studies are out of reach financially for a large majority of high school students desiring to continue. ... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Hungry](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-hungry/): Yesterday I took a late August bike ride.  I followed the bike path along the Fox River from Batavia to Aurora.  The asphalt path eased my fifteen mile journey, following the river under the trees, shaded from late summer sunlight.  The journey concluded with a rest, reading for a while under a massive old... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Burn, Burn, Burn](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-burn-burn-burn/): I witnessed, an extended email exchange between two friends which treated the topic of vengeance, rage-filled violence.  The pivot point of the discussion had to do with a comparison/contrast between the palpable expression, the gorge-filled uprising of murderous wrath, and the more benign fictional, hypothetical contemplation of this emotional storm, such as we find... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Tequila Sunrise Sunday](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-tequila-sunrise-sunday/): Sunday at six thirty AM looking east the sky was pale yellow, and the sun a blinding, fiery ball.  The yellow is the smoke from distant fires.  I read late yesterday that the Caldor fire near Lake Tahoe is being contained.  In the Midwest we do not have to remain indoors day after day... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Charlie Watts](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-charlie-watts/): Charlie Watts died on August 24.  He was eighty.  Watts played drums for the Rolling Stones since 1963. Is it trite to say that Watts passing marks the end of an era?  There, I have said it and will say it again.  A great deal of what we’ve taken for granted and relied upon... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Truth-freaks And Liars Invited...](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-truth-freaks-and-liars-are-invited/): Today is Friday.  Sometimes I am disoriented, unsure if today is Saturday or…  Retirement sometimes has a confusing texture as the structure of the workweek is removed. I am considering, speculating upon what I would desire if it were possible to be young again, to begin higher education under ideal circumstances.  In hindsight, what... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, If You Let Yourself Stop](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-if-you-let-yourself-stop/): Today promises to be hot, with the possibility of thunderstorms.  The rain will be welcome, as the usual pattern of sunny days interspersed with rain are a memory.  The summers are hotter and more dry. Illinois is under a mask mandate announced by the governor today.  This measure is to prevent the depletion of... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, At Bulldogs](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-at-bulldogs/): Hungry, but not hungry enough to order a hotdog and fries.  I ordered the hotdog.  The man behind the counter about to swipe my card, inquired, “No fries?”  That’s right I replied.  I hate to throw out the fries, and that’s what will happen.  “Ok” he said. I watched him compose the hotdog.  A... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, There!](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-there/): Imagine, by way of experiment, two young men [Wittgenstein and Heidegger] strolling together through the city – and suddenly one says to the other: “How strange that everything exists [“das es überhaupt etwas gibt”]!  How miraculous:  There! And there! Do you see it, too?” And the other man nods and says “Yes I see... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Napping On Sunday Afternoon](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-sunday-afternoon/): I took a nap on a summers afternoon, warm, bright with sunlight.  I awakened noting that my blood sugar was high.  A diabetic pays attention to such things.  I decided to take a bike ride into town.  The afternoon was quiet. A short ride would serve to address the high blood sugar.  Riding for... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Sunday, Sunday](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-sunday-sunday-2/): It is Sunday.  While at Starbucks I enjoyed a conversation with an acquaintance. The conversation ranged from the Le Mans race taking place in Europe while we conversed, to Formula1 racing and Drag racing.  Both of us are gear-heads with a long standing interest in performance automobiles, engineering, and racing.  Any Sunday spent at... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Thoreau](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-thoreau/): ON PHILOSOPHERS Of a life of luxury the fruit is luxury, whether in agriculture, or commerce, or literature, or art. There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers. Yet it is admirable to profess because it was once admirable to live. To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Taking More Than We Give](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-taking-more-than-we-give/): Humankind has exploited it’s own species for as long as recorded history.  We’ve enslaved, colonized, worked for low wages-without-benefits the hapless, the unlucky, the victims of circumstance.  This is an old story from the construction of the pyramids along the Nile, to the cotton fields of the antebellum South, to Amazon warehouses across America... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, What Is Owed-A Meditation](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-what-is-owed-a-meditation/): What do I owe future generations?  That was the question of the evening for the Socrates Cafe group.  We met again at Barnes & Noble.  Everyone around the table wore a mask.  It is yet unclear how truly effective the vaccine will be to protect us from the more contagious Delta virus.  Surely this... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Only The Dance](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-there-is-only-the-dance/): Yesterday I walked in the woods.  My last attempt to enter Braeburn Marsh I was met with a phalanx of mosquitoes.  Outnumbered my determination crumbled, I hastily returned to the house.  This summer day I walked along the edge of the marsh paying attention, quietly absorbing the late summer wild flowers.  Many things that... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Booberry Party](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-booberry-party/): Close enough …!  I am thinking of the Blueberry Festival which we attended at the Windy Acres Farm in Geneva Sunday afternoon.  The Festival was an immersive experience, as festivals must be.  Present at a festival, once more I am reminded that I am not alone.  Others are raising families, introducing children to the... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Haul'n Ass Again](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-haulin-ass-again/): Perhaps you remember April 30, 1975, when NVA tanks rolled through the gates of the Presidential palace in Saigon?  I was twenty six years old then.  I still carry my draft card from that era in my wallet. That offensive put an end to our attempt to make Vietnam a client state, a colony... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, The Hand Of Fate](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-the-hand-of-fate/): A return home after days of absence is a special feeling.  The conviction arises, “this is where I belong.”  Is that familiar touch of place and of presence in time, — what is meant by “the hand of fate?”  All of my experiences, the places, faces, and events have brought me to this place. ... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, More Change More Of The Same](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-more-change-more-of-the-same/): We return home from Minnesota today.  Our visit with family was a satisfying relief from the restriction on travel which has prevented contact and face to face conversation for the past year and a half.  It is a delight to witness children playing and growing, maturing in interests, and capabilities.  I was intellectually stimulated... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Gibbering On](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-gibbering-on/): I moved.  Today at breakfast I moved as far as possible from the droning of Good Morning America television, a mindless going on about how the quiz show Jeopardy.  The show now will have two hosts…  Who in his/her right mind should care?  Clearly inhabitants of our media culture do care.  The world is burning! ... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Shilling To Oblivion](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-nation-of-shills/): 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... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, French Toast](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-8/): Willmar, Minnesota.  Years have passed since visiting with relatives here.  Willmar, a great plains town is a center for the Burlington Northern Santa Fe railroad.  Driving into Willmar, you are unlikely to miss the switching yard for the  freight bearing trains bound for Chicago, or for the Pacific coast.  Willmar is home to the... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Lucy's](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-lucys-diner/): Yesterday was our last full day in Eagle River.  We visited Lucy’s Diner for breakfast.  Yes, Lucy’s is a bona fide diner, a diminutive dining room of perhaps eight tables, and a counter with a row of stools.  We sat at the counter affording a view of the kitchen.  My interest was captured by... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Orphans](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-orphans/): How beautiful indifference was in a world that was not indifferent,      in a world that was different, convulsive           and contradictory, with stakes and passions. Back then, the indifference of the mind could turn into a stake or a passion, in total opposition to the world. It could anticipate the indifferent future of... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Resistance](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-more-from-my-notebook/): Saturday morning is overcast in Eagle River.  I anticipated writing from a coffee shop in town.  I arrived and read a sign that said open 7 till 2PM Monday through Friday.  Disappointed, I returned to the Best Western lobby. I settled into a chair at a corner table.  Yesterday the manager of Inn described... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Baraboo](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-baraboo/): We are spending several days in Baraboo, Wisconsin.  We plan to visit with relatives living in Eagle River Wisconsin, and then on to Willmar Minnesota, to see family that we’ve not seen for many months.  For the most part our stay in Baraboo has been delightful.  There have been bare glimpses of the ideological... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Breakfast In America](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-breakfast-in-america/): I am in Baraboo Wisconsin today.  I am alone, with a cup of coffee on an outside patio.  The crows in the woods behind me are noisily conferring.  I heard this song on the radio yesterday. Goodby Stranger was featured in Breakfast in America an album by the British group Supertramp, released in 1979. ... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Science](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-science/): This morning I am processing the discussion of last night, an exchange of ideas within our amateur philosophers group about the work of Paul Feyerabend.  Feyerabend was Austrian.  He taught philosophy at the University of California at Berkley for three decades.  He passed in 1994. Attracted by Feyerabend’s anarchistic view of the methods of... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Good Work Begins](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-good-work/): Braeburn Forest Preserve and Marsh is a two minute walk from our house. I received report than our grand daughter who is twenty months old, created two works by the entryway to the park yesterday. When Finlea is permitted to walk supervised in the backyard she often heads for the park, the entryway of... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Here I Am, Again](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-here-i-am-again/): Monday, the morning illuminated with unfiltered sun.  Reaching for my dark sunglasses I accelerated into traffic, peering directly into the rising sun.  Turning left from Fabyan Parkway onto Rt 31 I noted the poor reception on the FM radio no matter the station selected.  Atmospheric conditions are such, — static mixes with music,… That... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Meditation East Of Eden](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-meditation-east-of-eden/): Another day East of Eden.  There are times, when for a moment I think this is paradise, or better that it could be.  Those are the times when my body and mind registers beauty or meaning.  Almost always I am taken by surprise.  If I am lucky, I have a pad and pen at... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Eternally Young](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-another-walkabout/): In summer, when school term responsibilities are lifted from children, they utilize “vacation” time for play.  One universal form which play usually takes is to walk about, or better to run, while observing all manner of things which one encounters as one passes by.  Running through the neighborhood to a friends house, walking briskly... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Almost Paradise](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-almost-paradise/): The morning is bright and cool, reminding me of the Wisconsin North Woods which are subject to spells of midsummer cool days.  The human mind strives to recognize patterns. Our default is the assumption that our mind-made pattern is the form of reality, which we presume will persist .   Thus I am “tipped... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Self-Made](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-self-made/): This statue entitled Self-Made Man by sculptor Bobbie Carlyle is installed in front of Bar Evolution here in Batavia.  I have occasion to walk by the statue often.  The work prompts the sardonic thought that there is nothing that is self-made in this world.  Homo Sapiens, humans are among the most complex and fragile... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, That Strange Elongated Crisis](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-that-strange-elongated-crisis/): I finished the essay by Maxwell Hyett of Western University.  The essay is entitled Amateur Mortality.  It was forwarded to me by a friend.  Hyett treats Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi’s three short meditations on the meanings, the possible outcomes of the covid pandemic, the quarantine, the masking up in public places, the social isolation which... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Place](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-place/): Tuesday, and friends are coming over late in the morning.  Friends of many years become scarce with the passage of time.  Life becomes more complex, or worse, we are uprooted and forced to begin all over again.  The latter is often the case as demands of employment mandate a move to a new town... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Not Enough Poetry](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-not-enough-poetry/): Another week begins.  The Olympics in Tokyo are in full swing.  I watched some of it on TV.  The main event of my weekend was attendance at the Geneva Art Fair.  I had several memorable conversations with artists.  Life at best, is an art-form, a practice that reveals beauty and meaning.  I aspire to... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Life](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-life/): “Life” — is an expansive topic.  I’ll write about it until I die.  I am an expression of life on this planet.  It is not as if I am an outsider, a disinterested observer.  There are times when I think that our human form of life, we are social creatures after all, — is... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Prayer](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-prayer/): I am the last person to have anything to say about prayer.  It is rare for me to “pray.”  I have become a Christian-agnostic.  That sounds like an oxymoron, an impossible contradiction.  It is not that I decided impiety is a reasonable response to life.  Reason has nothing to do with it, nor does... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Sunny Days End](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-sunny-days-end/): Friday brings a sultry summer morning.  Perhaps this will be the beginning of an idyllic day, such as I remember, or believe that I remember from my childhood.  Those were endless summers.  My only responsibility was to return to the house by dark.  Otherwise the day was entirely mine for play and for exploration. ... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, As The World Just Falls Apart](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-as-the-world-just-falls-apart/): The question comes in due time to everyone who is aware, caring about the condition of society, about the well being of one’s fellows.  No doubt that the question of concern is self-interested.  What if anything ought I to do about climate warming, or the pandemic, or the political issues which divide us as... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, A Carnival Midway](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-carnival-midway/): It is a great feeling to return home.  A “get-a-way” is a luxury, and I have memories that I will cherish for quite some time.  When visiting the shore of Lake Michigan I am aware that my presence is limited.  I fantasize about making time stand still.  A fantasy.  Time, a feature of the... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Saying Goodby](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-saying-goodby/): Every ending is a beginning.  Time to depart, to say goodby to the house where we stayed, and to Lake Michigan.  We have good memories of the past five days.  There has been lots of laughter and some funny stories were told.  I am satisfied to know the children will remember this time for... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Playing](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-playing/): It is paradoxical that I spend yet another day of enjoyment by the lake, knowing that Germany is slammed by flooding, with great loss of life, and devastation.  The corona virus, the latest, hyper contagious variant is exponentially increasing infections by the day, with more deaths to follow.  The obvious question comes to mind... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Saturday](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-saturday/): We decided to go blueberry picking.  For the past five years that we’ve spent time in the St. Joseph area we’ve visited the Bumbleberry Acres Farm.  Blueberry picking by comparison to strawberry picking is much to my liking.  The ripened blueberrys grow on bushes which allow a standing upright position while picking the clusters... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Gray](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-gray/): A gray day with a fine mist falling.  I do not mind the mist.  In fact I attempted opening this computer screen outside on the patio table.  I did not mind the infrequent mosquito.  I peered at this glowing screen, feeling the keyboard surface at my finger tips moistened by the palpable mist.  The... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, The Lake House](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-the-lake-house/): Friday, in a few hours I will depart for St. Joseph, Michigan.  The plan is to spend 5 days at a lake house, for an all-family vacation.  It is a special occasion for parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and children to spend extended time together in conversation, play, swimming in the lake, enjoyment of the... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Handing Tickets Out](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-handing-tickets-out/): Another day dawns.  A light rain is falling for which I am thankful.  I do not live in L.A.  There it is a dry time.  The city is certain to face water rationing, when Lake Mead falls  lower.  The man-made lake is now at 36% of full capacity.  Four million people in one place,... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Your Move](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-shaking-again/): Last night I participated in a wide ranging discussion about language.  How language, words and a manner of speaking, those informal “rules” that channel our conversations in predictable ways — make up our minds.  When I look at the assertion which I just wrote I feel an inner disquiet, dismay.  It appears that language,... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Time Bandit](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-time-bandit/): Walking about with my camera is satisfying.  In my high school days I discovered the challenge of angle-of-view, light, and the framing of a camera lens, are elements of an art form that continues to fascinate.  My first lesson in capturing a photo took place at a drag strip, with my father’s box camera... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Gett'n Past The Pain](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-gettn-past-the-pain/): It is Monday morning, a gray overcast sky.  I do not want to write about politics, about the resurgence of the covid virus, or about the heatwave scorching the West.  Can I write a few lines about a song, about music that communicates more than the composers, the performers intended, or could know?  Rock... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Monsters](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-monsters-2/): The dreamworld, the visions of the subconscious in the early morning hours are said to come from the id, the primal dimension of the psyche which is concealed from the ego, the conscious self.  No matter how blessed, how felicitous circumstances may be, there are always monsters just outside the gates. I had such... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Money](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-money/): It is difficult to impossible to avoid thinking about money directly, or indirectly.  Money, the economy, the future cost of housing, of health care, — the enormity of the sum certainly to be required for the basics of retirement will be “front of mind” for anyone in their middle years.  Naturally underemployment, or unemployment... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, The One Who Finally Burns It Down](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-the-one-who-finally-burns-it-down/): How could I not offer this song?  “By chance,” perhaps the phrase is nonsense.  From another angle of view “chance” is a place holder for ignorance, the cause and effect chain that I did not take into account.  There’s much that I do not take into account.  Anyway, by chance I heard this one... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, To See-To Love-To Care](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-to-see-to-love-to-care/): Success is as dangerous as failure. Hope is as hollow as fear. What does it mean that success is as dangerous as failure? Whether you go up the ladder or down it, your position is shaky. When you stand with your two feet on the ground you will always keep your balance. What does... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Searching For The Emptiness - Inside](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-searching-for-the-emptiness-inside/): It is the center hole, the emptiness inside, the inner space…that holds me. These phrases from verse eleven of the Tao Te Ching in my mind serve as an anchor chain this morning.  I awakened with a high blood sugar reading, which perhaps is not unusual for anyone diabetic.  The condition nevertheless is unacceptable,... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Desire](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-desire-2/): I am revisiting the Tao Te Ching, written by Lao Tsu, a contemporary of Confucius.  It is old by the standard of my short lifetime.  And it is not so old in terms of our Earth, estimated at 4.5 billion years. Thus the text of the Tao Te Ching is both old and not... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Nothing But Image](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-all-is-image/): Today is the day after July the 4th, Independence Day. I joined family members to view a parade spectacle.  Many community groups in town published their presence by a float, a marching band, or by some unusual vehicle, (cement mixer, etc.)  The parade was pure entertainment.  Free candy for the children at the curb.... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Independence Day](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-independence-day/): The 4th of July, Independence Day has arrived.  Shortly I will join family members to view a parade, to participate in a traditional celebration of ourselves.  “Celebrating ourselves”, as ridiculous as that sounds can be a productive, reflective, a good-will-engendering act of reverence that we are blessed with good fortune to enjoy the sunlight,... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Bending Time & Folding Space](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-bending-time-folding-space/): “Well, how was it?” — you may be asking.  The visit to the race track, the drag racing, what was that like? Drag racing, a competition of acceleration, the apotheosis of the individual, to determine which man and machine can cross the finish line first, over a span of asphalt a quarter mile long... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Patriot?](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-patriot/): Friday and the counter at Starbucks is busy.  But it is worth the wait in line to say hello to the welcoming barista behind the register who takes your order with a smile.  The smile is priceless and the coffee is always hot, a perfect balance of astringent bean flavor, and just a  touch... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Heat Dome](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-heat-dome/): I remember Jiffy Pop a product of my childhood.  Popcorn kernels are contained in a lightweight, disposable aluminum pan, a wire handle, with a slightly twisted piece of aluminum foil serving as a cover.  The pan-container is placed upon a stove burner.  As the kernels begin to pop, — the attached aluminum foil cover... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, A Day To Start Again](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-a-day-to-start-again/): A lively discussion last night, about “rules,” the many uses of rules, the origin of all rules, and considerations upon breaking rules.  The discussion was wide ranging and sometimes passionate.  Passion is natural, rising from a variety of motivations.  Let’s be honest that fear often motivates many an impassioned soliloquy.  When I suspect that... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Embraced By The Cosmos](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-embraced-by-the-cosmos/): The rumination about freedom vs determinism, the conundrum presented by cause and effect runs its course.  It is time to move on to another stop on our journey.  After all, change in scenery, variety is what we are looking for.  Life is more than one topic, a single discussion. I took a short walk... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Time The Healer?](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-time-the-healer/): Lately I’ve been thinking about determinism…  WTF you might think!  Perhaps one of the most enduring conundrums of philosophy is the ongoing debate, the wrangle over whether freedom is possible, whether the word refers to anything at all, — in a rigorous cause and effect universe.  Speculation about the topic can be traced as... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, The Anthropocene](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-the-anthropocene-2/): Neither divine punishment nor the nemesis of history. It is difficult not the see the pandemic as the consequence of our devastating, short-sighted choices regarding the environment. We have treated planet Earth as a dumping ground, a warehouse for dross and garbage, a heap of ruins. Yet it is impossible to save the planet... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Heaven & Hell](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-heaven-hell/): Language is a marvelous thing.  Words, symbols referencing things, events, and concepts give birth to efficient mental states, causing substantive change, influencing human actions.  I noticed this in my iphone news feed this morning. A highly unusual weather pattern is setting up over the Pacific Northwest, with a record-strong high-pressure area aloft — known... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Unbreathable](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-natures-devotion/): The rain falls steadily non-stop, then in sheets.  Weeks of mounting drought, then today flood warnings.  Nature is a condition of extremes.  After all, is not “the mean” a quantity that humans judge to be “just right” for the purposes of life?  Nature, being “blind,” the feedback of cause and effect, “knows” nothing of... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, This Huge Reality Show](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-this-huge-reality-show/): We are no longer alienated and passive spectators but interactive extras; we are the meek lyophilized members of this huge “reality show.” It is no longer a spectacular logic of alienation but a spectral logic of dis-incarnation, no longer a fantastic logic of diversion, but a corpuscular logic of transfusion and transubstantiation of all... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Walking](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-walking-2/): A friend who practices walking about town for fitness, for interest, suggested that I consider the activity for my own benefit.  The advice came as we walked together to the Starbucks on Randall Road and back.  On a hot, sunny summer’s day the conversation, passing scenery, and natural exercise made the experience pleasing.  “The... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Latent Catastrophe](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-latent-catastrophe/): Biopoliticsbecoming immunopolitics…The latent catastrophecoursing through and troubling the early decades of the century. The catastrophe is ungovernableand brings to light all the limitsof neoliberal governance. It has the tone of the irreversibleand the timbre of the irreparable.Nothing will be like it was before. Yesterday’s world appearsas a remote, collapsed worldthat has now slipped away.In... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Shaking](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-shaking/): I am shaking this morning, mentally, existentially, spiritually.  I am loath to use the term “spiritual.”  I know the term is spoken and written in a bastardized manner referring to the holy spirit, possession of the ego by the supernatural.  The idea is pure, unalloyed BS, which deserves ridicule.  We are standard issue human... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Juneteenth Hangover](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-juneteenth-hangover/): June 20, today is Father’s Day.  I am suspicious.  Could Father’s Day be a “Hallmark holiday,” created by clever marketers to sell cards, to condition “consumers” to spend more?  Learning to be a good father is important.  I just do not think fatherhood compares to the months of pregnancy, to the hazard of giving... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, The Zoo](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-the-zoo/): Yesterday was spent at the Brookfield Zoo.  I recall visiting some thirty years ago…  Eager to visit again, I was taken by surprise at the feelings that came when viewing the animals in captivity.  I am no longer a child, able to experience the zoo environment with magical delight.  I remember what that was... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, The Hammer](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-the-hammer/): NASA: Earth is trapping ‘unprecedented’ amount of heat, warming ‘faster than expected’Catherine Garcia, Night editor Wed, June 16, 2021, 6:41 PM Since 2005, the amount of heat trapped by the Earth has roughly doubled, according to a new study by NASA and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration researchers. This is contributing to warming oceans,... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, The Way](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-the-way/): Day’s end was spent in a leisurely walk by the Fox River in the vicinity of the Fabyan Japanese Tea Garden.  The walk was a welcome conclusion to a summer day of work.  Camera in hand I paid attention to the wild flowers which grow there in abundance.  Walking around the Tea Garden I... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Speechless](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-speechless/): A postscript to the observations about Amazon.  I am a Amazon customer.  I buy books on a regular basis and Amazon is convenient, affordable, etc.  Often a book is available that perhaps I’d find otherwise with a great deal of effort.  I have a good friend who works for Amazon.  His account of the... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Shouting And No One Seems To Hear](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-shouting-and-no-one-seems-to-hear/): How much should I care?  Is care involuntary?  Can I choose to care or not to care?  Or what to care about?  It appears that all of life, that is all that I am aware of, is involuntary…  The organism, you and I are no exception, is a concatenated layered system of bio-chemical cause... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Fox River](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-fox-river/): It is tempting to believe that Nature is eternal, subsisting impervious to the erosion of time.  A temptation, an illusion, one immature mistake made when we extract “resources” and increase the heat load to the atmosphere and to the oceans.  Thus we give a collective shove-of-the-wheel toward global warming and climate change catastrophe.  Whenever... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, It Takes A Wound](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-it-takes-a-wound/): [there must be one thing you can’t have in order to be alive] Jon-Michael Frank there must be one thing you can’t have in order to be alive  watching flowers open on youtube  I mean, my life is wasted on my life requirement is simple  it takes a wound to return to yourself  the... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Weave of Fate](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-weave-of-fate/): Several days ago a friend sent me this graphic.  The three fates are pictured attending to their respective duties, measuring and allocating the course of good and the not-so-good fallout of “chance” in the life of the individual and also of nations.  Our ancestors understanding of “determinism” had to do with the meta observation... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Roosevelt Redux?](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-roosevelt-redux/): Yesterday evening, Thursday prior to the G-7 meeting a media event was held showcasing a meeting between President Joe Biden and Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain.  The meeting was competently choreographed, and both spoke in generalities: a typical show and tell projecting images of the leaders of the “free world.” I have doubts. ... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Determinism & a Rabbit's Behind](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-determinism-a-rabbits-behind/): I was a participant in a rollicking discussion on the topic of determinism and free will earlier in the week.  The topic is an ancient philosophical conundrum how the appearance of choice, true freedom can be real, given that cause and effect are seamless.  That cause and effect are inviolate is the underlying premise... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Things That Haven't Changed](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-the-things-that-havent-changed/): ProPublica yesterday published a scoop on the tax returns of some of the wealthiest Americans.  Included were the returns of Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg.  Aside from the issue of how ProPublica obtained the returns, is confirmation of what well informed Americans already knew.  One would... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Not Laughing](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-not-laughing/): Why do I return to the old songs, the ballads that search the landscape of love and loss, of faithfulness and betrayal?  Homer’s great tale, The Iliad, is such a story put into verse. I awakened at 4:30 AM this morning, with the chorus to this song, echoing in my waking consciousness.  Laughing, is... Read More Read More - [Almost Paradise, Heaven's Door](https://everyangel.org/almost-paradise-heavens-door/): The morning is paradisical.  Even if that is a made-up word…  There are no words for adequate description of a fine mid-summer’s morning.  My good fortune is to be aware, to engage with my senses the warmth of light streaming from the sun, illuminating the streets, sidewalk, the backdrop bed of black eyed susans... Read More Read More - [Pressure Rising](https://everyangel.org/pressure-rising/): Yesterday the Amateur Philosophers Discussion Group convened in the corner at the round table at Starbucks.  We discussed a topic “the right of belief” using a essay by professor Daniel DeNicola to launch us into dialog.  The exchange between the nine of us was down-to-earth, directly tied to individual past histories, and to recent... Read More Read More - [Tiffany-Twisted?](https://everyangel.org/tiffany-twisted/): Another day in paradise…  The thought often comes to me here at Starbucks, standing at the counter speaking to the barista.  I know him by name and he already knows the type of coffee that I am in habit of ordering.  Sometimes I say the phrase out loud and Noah smiles.  We agree, a... Read More Read More - [Whatever Works...](https://everyangel.org/whatever-works/): A received a loan of three books from a friend yesterday.  The books were from her library, offered because she wished me to look them over.  I am a book lover.  One important axis of my life are books which I choose to read, usually purchased from Amazon.  I read to live and live... Read More Read More - [You Can't Have Any Pudding](https://everyangel.org/you-cant-have-any-pudding/): How can I say this?  A conversation with a friend yesterday remained in my psyche.  Upon waking I recalled what he said about his experience with Medicare and the Veterans Administration.  His story was not a happy one.  I reflected upon the rules that constrain receiving medical care benefits that one is qualified for,... Read More Read More - [Keeping Beat And Rhythm](https://everyangel.org/silent-wonder/): Here are some photos that were taken over the past day or so.  Flowers fascinate me.  A blossom is an extravagance of form, and splendor of light, — in the service of reproduction, more life.  The first grouping of photos were taken in the backyard.  Some of the flowers were inherited when we moved... Read More Read More - [The One Exception](https://everyangel.org/the-one-exception/): Some days ago in conversation with a friend here at Starbucks, Alex insisted that knowledge was possible without the symbolic representation of reason.  I thought to myself, “What a radical thought.”  I think of “knowledge” as what can be diagrammed, presented in the form 2+2=4, or encoded with words and grammar. On the other... Read More Read More - [The Edge And Back](https://everyangel.org/life-on-the-edge-and-back/): It was an orange 2022 Corvette.  That’s me waving from the drivers side, ready for three laps around the race track.  The C8 Z51 model Corvette makes 475 horsepower.  The jaunty wave of the hand from the car toward my daughter taking the picture, was but a small part of the story.  I have... Read More Read More - [The Look Back](https://everyangel.org/the-look-back-2/): In a state of vertigo this morning, feeling my way along hoping the words come. Yesterday while concentrating to write an entry for another day, I discovered that a few weeks ago my aunt passed away.  I was not aware she was ill.  I visited with her a year ago in North Carolina.  She... Read More Read More - [Death](https://everyangel.org/death-2/): Six of us, a wide ranging discussion last night.  The topic was death; more precisely, pondering whether death gives meaning to life.  The discussion was satisfying.   We did not resolve the matter after an hour and a half of back and forth.  Briefly in the midst of the session we touched on guns, mass... Read More Read More - [Mortality Wake Up Call](https://everyangel.org/mortality-wake-up-call/): Always something comes to mind, for which I discover a few words to compose a paragraph or two.  Poets are the true seers of a generation giving definition to the world such as it is, suggesting what is likely in store.  Upon reading this poem I knew, “this is it.”  This is what I’d... Read More Read More - [No End Of It](https://everyangel.org/no-end-of-it/): This passage from T. S. Eliot’s poem The Dry Salvages is one of my favorite.  There are many phrases in these lines that are analogous to an arrow striking dead center to the bulls eye.  The poem overall is a meditation upon a seafaring way of life.  The point of view offered proposes to be... Read More Read More - [Belonging](https://everyangel.org/belonging-2/): This we know: Earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth.  All things are connected like the blood that unites us all.  Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it.  Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself. -Chief Seattle Four satisfying... Read More Read More - [Rome, Is It Burning?](https://everyangel.org/rome-is-it-burning/): Vacation for me, for our tribe is a place and time apart from the usual day to day responsibilities, from news of national, even far flung happenings, — a bubble of blessed separation.  Not that our lives are terrible, we do not live in a war zone, or conditions of extremity.  Nevertheless it is... Read More Read More - [How Long?](https://everyangel.org/how-long/): We arrived at the lake house a short walk from the east side of Lake Michigan.  Annually we have a four to five day, all-family get together.  The “big event” is the interest derived from being by the big lake.  Weather, that is, the wind swept sky, the waves, and the shore itself which... Read More Read More - [What We'd Like To Believe](https://everyangel.org/what-wed-like-to-believe/): I am feeling déjà vu.   The scene keeps repeating itself.  Except in Highland Park, it appears that white people are grieving innocents struck down by gunfire.  The story has headlined the evening news for days now.  Not the “one and done” of such stories that keep happening on the west and south side... Read More Read More - [A Look Into The Nursery](https://everyangel.org/a-look-into-the-nursery/): NGC 3324 in the Carina Nebula. Captured in infrared light by NASA’s new James Webb Space Telescope, this image reveals for the first time previously invisible areas of star birth… The tallest “peaks” in this image are about 7 light-years high. The cavernous area has been carved from the nebula by the intense ultraviolet... Read More Read More - [SMACS 0723](https://everyangel.org/smacs-0723/): I remember first using Kodachrome film.  To hold a color print was a delight, an image that represented with remarkable fidelity the mental image achieved by the eye and the mind.  Up until I owned the Agfa 35mm camera which took the Kodak color film, I was accustomed to a box camera, which I... Read More Read More - [Monday, Overcast, Religion...](https://everyangel.org/monday-overcast-religion/): The Tears of Eros will remain as a barb in my consciousness, or better, a striation layer of my unconscious. The truth, always there, undisclosed by daylight – is like the black-backing of a mirror.  I continue on to a second book by Georges Bataille, The Theory of Religion.  What do I expect to... Read More Read More - [The Sacred](https://everyangel.org/the-sacred/): This morning I finished reading, The Tears of Eros by Georges Bataille.  I am sure the book is not finished with me.  Bataille offers not an argument, but an assertion demonstrated by photography of artworks from the Paleolithic to the modern era, to paintings by various artists in the late 20th century.  The book,... Read More Read More - [Exploring A Renewed World](https://everyangel.org/exploring-the-new-world/): No matter the light showers we accompanied two of our grandchildren to the Fox River for some fishing and exploration.  (The fish in the river proved to be totally safe, from our efforts.)  The exploration was an adventure of great interest.  There’s always a lot to see whenever we leave our accustomed habitat and... Read More Read More - [Pleasure At The End Of...](https://everyangel.org/pleasure-at-the-end-of/): A few minutes ago I presented my Starbucks card.  The barista commented, “one day this is not going to work.”  The piece of gold plastic is old, by charge card standards.  The plastic is split in several places.  One fissure is patched with scotch tape.  I am attached to the card.  I’ve used it... Read More Read More - [Ruins, More Or Less](https://everyangel.org/ruins-more-or-less/): Every life is, more or less, a ruin among whose debris we have to discover what the person ought to have been. -José Ortega y Gasset The typical greeting for encounter of any sort is “How is your day?” The expected reply is a chipper “Just great!”  To answer simply “good” is sometimes received... Read More Read More - [Becoming The Reasonable Animal](https://everyangel.org/becoming-the-reasonable-animal/): René Descartes is often quoted to emphasize reason as the hallmark of Enlightenment based culture of the West.  Cogito, Ergo Sum.  A pithy saying indeed, “I think therefore I am,” with Latin lending the words a patina of sophistication.  Descartes by profession a mathematician naturally would be inclined to believe the clarity of reason... Read More Read More - [The Morning After](https://everyangel.org/the-morning-after/): Tuesday morning after Independence Day 2022, is overcast with intermittent sunshine.  Is today the beginning of a new week, or a continuation of the week that was, a week that seemed compressed into one day?  I refer to the mass murder that occurred yesterday at the Highland Park Independence Day parade.  A young man,... Read More Read More - [July 3rd](https://everyangel.org/july-3rd/): A sultry Sunday afternoon, and here I am at Starbucks, moving words on this screen, like pieces on a chessboard.  Yesterday evening was spent at Henry Maier Festival Park, Milwaukee for Summerfest.  Summerfest bills itself as the worlds largest music festival.  As a marketing ploy, I suppose the outsized claim works.  The site is... Read More Read More - [Shock](https://everyangel.org/shock/): Another Independence Day weekend.  Monday will be the 4th of July.  We are planning a family gathering for breakfast in the morning, and then a viewing of the Independence Day parade.  On the surface around here life appears to be good, never better for some.  Are such generalizations warranted?  Of course not but we... Read More Read More - [Mysterium Tremendium*](https://everyangel.org/mysterium-tremendium/): Life itself is not the reality. We are the ones who put life into stones and pebbles. -Fredrick Sommer Since my adolescence I have found photography fascinating.  With a machine held in one’s hand, it is possible to make an image of the world of which we participate, a freeze-frame depiction.  I felt the... Read More Read More - [Singin' And Dyin'](https://everyangel.org/singin-and-dyin/): Dunbar By Anne Spencer Ah, how poets sing and die! Make one song and Heaven takes it; Have one heart and Beauty breaks it; Chatterton, Shelley, Keats, and I—Ah, how poets sing and die!  Anne Spencer, born on February 6, 1882, on a plantation in Henry County, Virginia, was a poet from the Harlem Renaissance movement. She published... Read More Read More - [...And There It Is](https://everyangel.org/and-there-it-is/): Polaroid’s SX-70. It won’t let you stop. Suddenly you see a picture everywhere you look… now you press the red electric button. Whirr…whoosh …and there it is. You watch and your picture comes to life, growing more vivid, more detailed, until minutes later you have a print as real as life. Soon you’re taking... Read More Read More - [Parades And Spectacle](https://everyangel.org/about-parades-one-more-thing/): It has been argued in detail, by Guy Debord that the 20th century West is a Society of the Spectacle.  There is little doubt that the information received by the eye, vision, has always been a pivot point for finding food and shelter necessary to life, and for self preservation.  The rabbits that come... Read More Read More - [To The Inhuman World](https://everyangel.org/to-the-inhuman-world/): Yesterday we viewed from curbside the Geneva Swedish Days parade.  I have enjoyed a good parade as long as I can remember, the magic, the exuberance of seeing and being seen.  A parade is a meaningful social ritual, in a secular time is it not? I took photographs using my iphone 13 camera. However,... Read More Read More - [One Day, Two Towns, One Life](https://everyangel.org/one-day-two-towns-one-life/): I visited Mundelein where I once lived.  We lived for many good years there.  Now we live in Batavia to the west along the Fox River Valley.  We moved due to a change in circumstance, namely both of us retired.  The time was right to move closer to our children and our grandchildren.  Now... Read More Read More - [To Sacrifice Half The Population](https://everyangel.org/to-sacrifice-one-half-the-population/): Memory, is what we call the minds re-membering of past experience, of what we did, saw or heard.  Memory is not an exact replication of a past event.  Memory like everything else the mind/body does, serves the survival of the organism.  I will always remember the announcement of yesterday, the Supreme Court ruling eliminating... Read More Read More - [It Fades, Fades !](https://everyangel.org/it-fades-fades/): My Love by Bruce Nugent My love has hair Like midnight, But midnight fades to dawn. My love has eyes Like starlight, But starlight fades in morn. My love has a voice Like dew-fall, But dew-fall dies at a breath. My love has love Like life’s all, But life’s all fades in death. Richard... Read More Read More - ["They Don't Give A F***..."](https://everyangel.org/they-dont-give-a-f/): Today I read more about the war in Ukraine in the New York Times.   The war grinds on.  The article was about the role of therapists to offer treatment for the psychological damage exacted by the extreme violence of artillery strikes and missiles destroying towns. I thought about commenting about a poem today, as... Read More Read More - [Why This Way?](https://everyangel.org/why-did-i-come-this-way/): Do you ever wonder at the path you’ve taken?  What has lead you to take this way?  I do. Several days ago tending the lilies planted at the edge of the yard, I admired again the small statue of the female Buddha placed as background to the colorful lilies.  The statue is the image... Read More Read More - [More Dream Making](https://everyangel.org/more-about-dream-making/): A friend offered comment highlighting the tribal aspect of the sport of drag racing.  There’s no debate about the machismo inscribed in the passion for automobiles designed and constructed as a competition weapon.  Also race cars are a symbol of a concrete alliance of a owner and crew members — a long term commitment... Read More Read More - [To Make Dreams Come True](https://everyangel.org/mysterium-tremendum-2/): It is uncanny, the memories that a sound will evoke. Saturday at Great Lakes Dragaway, often the sound of an idling supercharged race engine could be heard. Sometimes in the staging lanes waiting to move forward to the starting line, or at a distance being tuned somewhere in the pits, — the undulating, rising,... Read More Read More - [Here And Now](https://everyangel.org/here-and-now/): “Remember that life is short and death is long,” is attributed to artist Fritz Scholder.  Perhaps he was channeling Epictetus?  The insight could have come from the writings of a Roman Stoic. Time spent with family, with both Nature and community at hand – is time well spent.  These thoughts come to mind on... Read More Read More - [Sometimes, Time Stands Still](https://everyangel.org/sometimes-time-stands-still/): It is Saturday morning.  The day promises to be comfortable, more so than the high 90s of the past several days.  This morning the Farmers Market with Laura and our daughter and grand daughter is anticipated.  In the afternoon I look forward to keeping accompany with my son to the race track in Wisconsin. ... Read More Read More - [Nest Making](https://everyangel.org/nest-making/): We live a short distance from Braeburn Marsh.  At this time of year female snapping turtles move from their habitat into open view searching for a suitable spot to lay their eggs.  While partially concealed behind a tree I took these photos a few days ago.  The common snapping turtle (Chelydra serpentina), its natural... Read More Read More - [Bataille Again](https://everyangel.org/bataille-again/): Eroticism differs from animal sexuality in that human sexuality is limited by taboos and the domain of eroticism is that of the transgression of these taboos. Desire in eroticism is the desire that triumphs over the taboo. It presupposes man in conflict with himself. Georges Bataille (1977). “Death and Sensuality: A Study of Eroticism... Read More Read More - [Eroticism](https://everyangel.org/eroticism/): Eroticism, it may be said, is assenting to life up to the point of death… Sexual reproductive activity is common to sexual animals and humankind, but only humankind appear to have turned their sexual activity into erotic activity. Eroticism is assenting to life even in death. [A] gulf exists, for instance, between you, listening... Read More Read More - [Till Now](https://everyangel.org/till-now/): One Girl by Sappho                                          I. Like the sweet apple which reddens upon the topmost bough, A-top on the topmost twig, which the pluckers forgot, somehow,— Forgot it not, nay, but got it not, for... Read More Read More - [Incomprehensible Adventure](https://everyangel.org/incomprehensible-adventure/): We are discontinuous beings, individuals who perish in the midst of an incomprehensible adventure, but we yearn, for our lost continuity. Continuity is what we are after… -excerpt introduction to Eroticism by Georges Bataille, trans. by Mary Dalwood This tune will be our lifeline, enough to hold onto for this part of the journey.... Read More Read More - [Pride Month](https://everyangel.org/pride-month/): June is Pride Month.  Pride Month is celebrated by the LGBTQ community, by parades, poetry readings, and peaceful protests to raise political awareness of the issues facing the gay community.  There was a time in my life when I wondered why?  Is there a point when it appears simply living one’s life is sufficient? ... Read More Read More - [Advancing On Chaos And The Dark](https://everyangel.org/advancing-on-chaos-and-the-dark/): A man [woman] should learn to detect and watchthat gleam of lightwhich flashes across his mind from within,more than the lusterof the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he [she] dismisses without notice his thought,because it is his [hers]….     ¶1 and, Trust thyself:every heart vibrates to that iron string.Accept the place that divine... Read More Read More - [Life Or Liberty, Conform Or Die](https://everyangel.org/life-or-liberty-conform-or-die/): Society  everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood (womanhood) of every one of its members. Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its... Read More Read More - [One Side Or The Other](https://everyangel.org/one-side-or-the-other/): PHOTOGRAPHY is the paradigm of the inherently equivocal connection between self and world –its version of the ideology of realism sometimes dictating an effacement of the self in relation to the world, sometimes authorizing an aggressive relation to the world which celebrates the self. One side or the other of the connection is always... Read More Read More - [Living Fractals](https://everyangel.org/reminder-of-fractals/): The peonies are blooming.  A short walk around the neighborhood is rewarded by a viewing of the color and variety of these blooms.  A peony reminds me of fractals, when I examine one closely, an organic repeating series…  Perhaps you are fascinated with fractals as am I.  A fractal is Nature’s reminder that chaos... Read More Read More - [Kaneville Cemetery](https://everyangel.org/kaneville-cemetery/): Saturday came, and the opportunity to get caught up with a friend.  We decided to visit Johnson’s Mound State Park in Elburn, Illinois which was only a few minutes away.  A short drive would afford opportunity for conversation.  Despite the use of a GPS we found ourselves without bearings in the rural countryside.  We... Read More Read More - [In One Merciless White Blade](https://everyangel.org/in-one-merciless-white-blade/): Voyages V by Hart Crane Meticulous, past midnight in clear rime,Infrangible and lonely, smooth as though castTogether in one merciless white blade—The bay estuaries fleck the hard sky limits. —As if too brittle or too clear to touch!The cables of our sleep so swiftly filed,Already hang, shred ends from remembered stars.One frozen trackless smile…... Read More Read More - [Saturday Ruminations](https://everyangel.org/saturday-meditation/): The Starbucks big room is quieter than usual.  There’s not the usual hubbub of workers stopping in picking up iphone orders, moms and dads stopping by with kids amid early morning walks.  I shouldn’t neglect mention of the runners, and the women who attend nearby yoga classes.  All of these groups form a loose... Read More Read More - [The New Cross Part 2](https://everyangel.org/the-new-cross-part-2/): My thesis I think is obvious.  Our society, the American people are deeply divided about the meaning of “guns,” between the necessity of arming one’s self and those who hold a view of a society becoming more egalitarian, a community where instruments conceived to take human life are unimportant for the average citizen. I... Read More Read More - [Guns: The New Cross](https://everyangel.org/guns-the-new-cross/): It is common knowledge that there’s a great divide in our society, and the meaning of guns is at the crux of the different realities that American’s inhabit.  Each of us lives in the world that we and others have jointly fashioned, or put differently the mind organizes reality in terms of the relationships... Read More Read More - [Good Things](https://everyangel.org/good-things/): A full measure of the tragic, the catastrophic, the dystopian dimensions of our life together on this planet is served to us, a concatenation of streaming media, Fox, CNN, ABC, NPR, to name a few.  It’s easy to understand why this is so.  Life’s extremities, danger, stimulates our fight/flight reaction.  Nothing is a more... Read More Read More - [Memorial Day Redux](https://everyangel.org/memorial-day-redux/): It’s difficult to “move on” from the drama of Memorial Day.  Though a day of remembrance, certainly the fact of war is impossible to dismiss as the fighting, the random death of the battle for Dombas furiously unfolds in Ukraine.  I shudder, my imagination cannot trace the paralyzing terror which the Ukrainian soldiers and... Read More Read More - [Angelica](https://everyangel.org/angelica/): Didn’t have anything in mind that I wished to write this morning.  Memorial Day brings mixed feelings.  I do not enjoy the parading of grinning politicians, old soldiers, and vintage military equipment.  We’ve not fought a war in defense of our country since WWII, the many since have been colonial wars to protect markets. ... Read More Read More - [Photographs](https://everyangel.org/photographs/): These photos with the exception of the last one were taken, once again, in my backyard.  The final and forth photo belongs in the series to offer a more complete “picture.”  Why mislead and why be self deceived, that all is well?  Perhaps, And all shall be well andAll manner of thing shall be... Read More Read More - [Not To Stand, Not To Kneel](https://everyangel.org/will-not-stand-or-kneel/): I write in the morning, seated at Starbucks, enveloped in the buzz of townspeople conversing around me.  Most linger here for as long as it takes the barista to fill their drink order.  Some like myself stay for a while.  I recognize many and know some, the regulars.   At the corner of State... Read More Read More - [Losing The Keys](https://everyangel.org/losing-the-keys/): We Americans are “stuck in a ditch”, “out of gas”, “can’t find the keys.” Use any metaphor that comes to mind to describe an impasse.  The automobile, “the invention” of the 20th century, is the indispensable means of transportation.  How many idioms do we have to express the helpless feeling of being unable to... Read More Read More - [Radiance](https://everyangel.org/radiance/): Thursday.  More mulch to spread, the last of ten yards.  After more rain, the plants are “happy.”  Happiness is about well-being is it not?  I am compulsive about using the camera at this time of year.  Each springtime is new, as if there has never been one just like this one.  I do what... Read More Read More - [Reeling](https://everyangel.org/reeling/): Wednesday midweek, I reel at the news of another mass shooting.  This time the slaughter was visited upon children (19 children and 2 adults) at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.  And the reason?  Why there was no reason, in the classical definition of reason.  A few of the causes: a society awash in... Read More Read More - [Just You And Me](https://everyangel.org/just-you-and-me/): How to get started this morning. Last night’s sleep was troubled.  Dreams, all unpleasant, but those have come infrequently lately.  I realize that each of us has a young vulnerable child within.  What child does not have a nightmare from time to time?  It’s a big world and there are monsters about! But morning... Read More Read More - [Cannes](https://everyangel.org/cannes/): The Cannes Film Festival is in progress, Tue, May 17 – Sat, May 28.  The New York Times reported on the festival in the email dispatch that I received this morning. I was captivated by the quote used in a speech by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.  Perhaps the Russian war to obliterate Ukraine is the... Read More Read More - [The Unspeakably Great](https://everyangel.org/the-unspeakably-great/): It is a Sunday morning.  A glorious day, sunlight, all vegetation shimmers after the inch or so of rain that fell yesterday.  A squirrel aspires to “carve” a habitation from an old log in the middle of our woodpile, — to give birth to it’s babies.  Yesterday the squirrel peered at me from the... Read More Read More - [My Life, My Love, My Lady](https://everyangel.org/my-life-my-love-my-lady/): Saturday morning and Starbucks is abuzz. Yesterday afternoon we attended an open house to celebrate the graduation of my wife’s brother’s son’s daughter from high school.  The graduate was radiant as she greeted well wishers just inside the foyer of the great room.  We were not sure who would be present at the event. ... Read More Read More - [Pathos](https://everyangel.org/pathos/): Photographs are, of course, artifacts… Thus they trade simultaneously on the prestige of art and the magic of the real. They are clouds of fantasy and pellets of information. Photography has become the quintessential art of affluent, wasteful, restless societies – an indispensable tool of the new mass culture that took shape here after... Read More Read More - [On Poets And Poetry](https://everyangel.org/on-poets-and-poetry/): Of all the nationsthe United States with veins full of poetical stuffmost need poets —and will doubtless have the greatestand use them the greatest. Of all mankind the great poet is the equitable man.Not in him but off from him things aregrotesque or eccentric or fail of their sanity.Nothing out of its place is... Read More Read More - [Taking Pictures and Looting](https://everyangel.org/taking-pictures-and-looting/): The photographer both loots and preserves, denounces and consecrates. Photography expresses the American impatience with reality, the taste for activities whose instrumentality is the machine. “Speed is at the bottom of it all,” as Hart Crane said (writing about Stieglitz in 1923), “the hundredth of a second caught so precisely that the motion is... Read More Read More - [What Is Surreal](https://everyangel.org/what-is-surreal/): Surrealism lies at the heart of the photographic enterprise: in the very creation of a duplicate world, or a reality in the second degree, narrower but more dramatic than one perceived by natural vision. The less doctored, the less patiently crafted, the more naïve – the more authoritative the photograph is likely to be.... Read More Read More - [Is It Too Much To Ask?](https://everyangel.org/is-it-too-much-to-ask/): Monday, the workday is pleasant, seventy degrees or so.  I am thankful for the common grace of an exquisite balance of sunlight, rainfall, and Nature’s denouement of new life.  A few days ago I installed a statue of a rabbit in our backyard, a memorial to the fecundity of Nature. This tune approaches perfection. ... Read More Read More - [The Art Of Art](https://everyangel.org/the-art-of-art/): The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters is simplicity. Nothing is better than simplicity… nothing can make up for excess or for the lack of definiteness. To carry on the heave of impulse and to pierce intellectual depths and give all subjects their articulations are... Read More Read More - [The Fight Underway](https://everyangel.org/the-fight-ahead/): All beauty comes from beautiful blood and a beautiful brain. If greatness are in conjunction in a man or a woman It is enough… The fact will prevail through the universe… But the gaggery of gilt of a million years Will not prevail. Who troubles himself about his ornaments or fluency is lost. This... Read More Read More - [Busy Bumblebee](https://everyangel.org/busy-bumblebee/): Busy bee you slow downJust for me?So busy are we, we fail to see.Several shots I did takeBut I felt as if you did not see…This brief and rare exchange I got to see.Slowing down like you,Nature’s beautiful bumblebee. -Rick Schaefer-Space   - [Riddling The Inevitable](https://everyangel.org/riddling-the-inevitable/): ὁδὸς ἄνω κάτω μία καὶ ὡυτή The way upward and the way downwardis one and the same  — Heraclitus V To communicate with Mars, converse with spirits,To report the behaviour of the sea monster,Describe the horoscope, haruspicate or scry,Observe disease in signatures, evokeBiography from the wrinkles of the palmAnd tragedy from fingers; release omensBy... Read More Read More - [America (After The Gold Rush)](https://everyangel.org/america/): As Walt Whitmangazed down the democratic vistas of culture,he tried to see beyond the difference between beauty and ugliness,importance and triviality. It seemed to him servile or snobbishto make any discrimination of value, except the most generous one. All facts, even the mean ones are incandescent in Whitman’s America.p. 27 Much of modern artis... Read More Read More - [This I Believe](https://everyangel.org/this-i-believe-2/): I continue to read On Photography by Susan Sontag.  Today I finished the essay entitled, America, Seen Through Photographs, Darkly.  There Sontag surveys the intent of a number of well known chroniclers of our grand experiment, beginning with Walt Whitman, concluding with commentary on the life work of photographer Diane Arbus.  Sontag is a... Read More Read More - [Mother's Day](https://everyangel.org/mothers-day-2/): This has been written about Mother’s Day: [A mother’s work is] a job that is ever-changing and frequently exasperating. Moms don’t get days off, nor do they receive handsome salaries or generous pensions. Instead, their rewards come in the form of sticky kisses, necklaces made of elbow macaroni, and the satisfaction of seeing their... Read More Read More - [Only That Which Narrates](https://everyangel.org/only-that-which-narrates/): Photographs …a way of giving information to people who do not take easily to reading. In a world ruled by photographic images, all borders (“framing”) seem arbitrary. Anything can be separated, can be made discontinuous, from everything else: all that is necessary is to frame the subject differently. Photography reinforces a nominalist view of... Read More Read More - [Our Cave, Our World](https://everyangel.org/our-cave-our-world/): Humankind lingers unregenerately in Plato’s cave, still recycling, it’s age-old habit, in mere images of truth. But being educated by photographs is not like being educated by older, more artisanal images. For one thing, there are a great more images around, claiming our attention. The inventory started in 1839 and since then about everything... Read More Read More - [Photography](https://everyangel.org/why-i-love-photography/): I remember the one of my first occasions to hold a camera in my hands.  I was a teenager.  I borrowed my fathers Kodak box camera, a black and white film camera with a fixed shutter speed of 1/30th of a second.  The camera was little more than a black box, postage stamp-sized viewfinder,... Read More Read More - [Stockton Hills Mine](https://everyangel.org/stockton-hills-mine/): Nearly a week has passed since my return from the West.  I revisited in my mind our hike to the site of the old silver mine, the abandoned Stockton Hills Mine. “Stockton the liveliest mining camp in Mohave county” is written in the old records of the area.  The mines played out, as did... Read More Read More - [A Hard Cold Rain](https://everyangel.org/a-hard-cold-rain/): A hard, cold rain is falling.  I know that it’s spring.  The days will grow longer and warmer, as sure as the axis of the earth inclines the northern hemisphere incrementally toward the sun.  Nature is reliable, a human concept.  “Reliable” is a euphemism for inexorable cause and effect.  Sometimes I take comfort in... Read More Read More - [The Barely Prayable](https://everyangel.org/the-barely-prayable/): II There is no end of it, the voiceless wailing, No end to the withering of withered flowers, To the movement of pain that is painless and motionless, To the drift of the sea and the drifting wreckage, The bone’s prayer to Death its God. Only the hardly, barely prayable Prayer of the one... Read More Read More - [The Look Back](https://everyangel.org/the-look-back/): The second day has passed after concluding two weeks of adventure out west.  I was introduced to a few of the individuals who have a enduring love for carved carousel animals, some collectors, others conservators and painters, and a master class carver.  The hospitality will be long remembered.  I was invited to studios, where... Read More Read More - [Home](https://everyangel.org/home/): Two weeks traveling with a friend to the west, – from Illinois, to Missouri, to Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California.  The occasion for the trip was a book which my friend plans to write, a definitive book about the history and importance of carousel animals for American culture.  I felt lucky to... Read More Read More - [Beverly Hills](https://everyangel.org/beverly-hills/): At last I have seen Beverly Hills.  Visiting was not on my bucket list of places, but I have been aware for much of my life that movie stars and other entertainers live in Beverly Hills.  Beverly Hills is storied for it’s luxurious shopping, for the glitz and glamor cultivated by those who are... Read More Read More - [When You Know Certain Things...](https://everyangel.org/when-you-know-certain-things/): “But, friend, when you know certain things: these things lead to dispassion not to passion; to detachment not to bondage; to diminution not to accumulation; to having few wishes, not to having many wishes; to contentment not to discontent; to seclusion not to gregariousness; to the arousing of energy, not to indolence; to frugality... Read More Read More - [Joshua Tree National Park](https://everyangel.org/joshua-tree-national-park/): I hope that you have opportunity to visit the Joshua Tree National Park, where the Mojave and the Colorado deserts meet. We walked the trails there for three hours taking many pictures, viewing only a sliver of the park. I cannot describe for you the effect of the experience of this desert environment upon... Read More Read More - [Can Some Of Us Agree?](https://everyangel.org/can-some-of-us-agree/): I had time to think.  Our adventure in the west continued today with the drive from Kingman Arizona to the town of 29 Palms on the edge of the Mojave Desert.  The Mojave Desert is a desolate place.  The two lane road was busy in both directions.  There were commercial tractor trailers, and many... Read More Read More - [The Desert](https://everyangel.org/the-desert/): Only experience suffices to allow understanding.  And if you are fortunate, have someone to guide you, point out the manner in which “things work,” — there is a chance to learn without injury. The desert is austere, an unforgiving place.  The scarcity of water means that life is precarious, the margin of survival is... Read More Read More - [Shooting](https://everyangel.org/shooting/): The journey continues.  We’ve passed though much desert, and some high country with tall lodge pole pine trees.  We are now in Kingman, Arizona.  This is our third stop, visiting with individuals who have a long term interest, fascination with carousels, with the artistry and history of carousel animals.  My host and guide, for... Read More Read More - [The Wind Breaks The Loosened Pane](https://everyangel.org/the-wind-breaks-the-loosened-pane/): I was told that it is windy in New Mexico this time of year.  For someone that lives in the Midwest, eighty degrees with a stiff, dry wind, is a hot day in April… On the way to Albuquerque New Mexico we glimpsed an abandoned structure, a wrecked shell, with a small parking lot... Read More Read More - [Amarillo Tx](https://everyangel.org/amarillo-tx/): Passing through Texas.  Anticipate reaching New Mexico within a few more hours of driving. The panhandle of Texas seems as flat as a plate, dry in appearance by comparison to the Midwest.   Many cows are viewed from the road, standing, heads down, finding such nourishment as they can.  Do they know they will soon... Read More Read More - [Ghostly, Whiter Shade Of Pale](https://everyangel.org/ghostly-whiter-shade-of-pale/): It is Monday morning.  I am in a hotel room in Springfield Missouri.  Unaccountably I slept well last night.  There is much to subvert a good night’s sleep, the bits and pieces of “the news” that one would rather not think about.  Often the knowledge of things I would rather not say out loud,... Read More Read More - [The Thunder Of This Deed](https://everyangel.org/the-thunder-of-this-deed/): That Madman Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market-place, and cried incessantly: “I am looking for God! I am looking for God!” As many of those who did not believe in God were standing together there, he excited considerable laughter. Have... Read More Read More - [The Night...](https://everyangel.org/the-night/): Saturday is bright and brisk.  Tomorrow is Easter Sunday.  I, a refugee from Christianity find the unreality of Easter, that is a certain opinion about the Easter story excruciating.  How so you naturally will ask…  The pageantry, the spectacle made of the resurrection story by Christian churches directs me to believe because a mutilated... Read More Read More - [Streaming Consciousness](https://everyangel.org/streaming-consciousness/): Stoic Philosopher-Slave We met late in the day to discuss Stoicism, that is, the sayings of Epictetus, an excerpt from his “Manual.”  Nine of us were around the table, a sell-out crowd.  The discussion was spirited, wide ranging.  There is no respite from the issues of our time, pressing upon us.  Epictetus, a slave,... Read More Read More - [Living With Fire](https://everyangel.org/living-with-fire/): On fire, the world was always on fire.  It just depends on where you live.  Can you smell smoke?  See flames?  Some of us run for our lives.  And there’s a time when running is impossible, there is nowhere to run to. I tire of thinking about politics, which has become a reflex, —... Read More Read More - [The Purple Rain](https://everyangel.org/when-rain-is-purple/): Just music today.  Purple Rain by Prince ranks as one of the great guitar solos.  The lyrics laid over the melody are an eloquent expression of what it means to be human.  What does it mean to be human?  This. The story teller reflects upon the fact of his father’s madness, the effect of... Read More Read More - [Another Year To Wake Up](https://everyangel.org/another-year-to-wake-up/): A twelve month segment of time.  Time. a human made measure.  Homo sapiens, aware of the 2nd law of thermodynamics, that everything processes toward dispersion of energy, dissipation of life-force if you will — so we measure.  I wonder if we are the only mammal that consciously measures?  What is twelve months by comparison... Read More Read More - [Wrap Up](https://everyangel.org/wrap-up/): December 31st of 2021. No regrets or sadness to see 2021 recede into the past.  Do not all events end up in “the past?”  Surely we do not mean a closet, located somewhere we do not know, a frozen storage locker for everything with a locked door.  I read once that the past, or... Read More Read More - [To Become Who I Really Am](https://everyangel.org/to-become-who-i-really-am/): This morning I felt a unusual sense of peace upon awaking. Yesterday with help from WordPress support I solved a issue with the back-end of this blog, an issue which had haunted me for some weeks.  The solution did not come easy.  It was necessary to grasp the vocabulary, as well as to visually... Read More Read More - [A Boy That Never Lost His Passion](https://everyangel.org/a-boy-that-never-lost-his-passion/): Edward O. Wilson, Harvard professor for 46 years, pioneer of Evolutionary Biology died at age 92 this past Thursday.   Wilson was born and raised in Alabama.  As a boy he became interested in ants.  At the age of 13 he was first to discover the presence of fire ants in the United States,... Read More Read More - [In Between Time](https://everyangel.org/in-between-time/): Is here a designation for the week between Christmas day and New Year’s day?  This interregnum I choose to call “the in between time.”  I know that is awkward.  Perhaps a more apt phrase will come to mind?  After all that is how the mind works.  The world is arranged/created according to what one... Read More Read More - [To Be Human](https://everyangel.org/to-be-human/): Not much to say this morning.  It is gray, raining.  We need the rain.  I am speaking for the vegetation, trees, grass, shrubs and everything really.  Do we not all live by virtue of water?  Blood is water. At the same time, too much water and a flood soon follows.  Too much of anything... Read More Read More - [Hopes And Fears Of All The Years](https://everyangel.org/the-hopes-and-dreams-of-all-the-years/): Christmas day is different for each of us.  One day of the year is laden with so many expectations.  Some of those expectations are impossible, even if we understand them with better clarity. When I pause to consider, the hopes, the trepidation which a parent invests in a child, — as the years spool... Read More Read More - [Christmas Morning](https://everyangel.org/christmas-morning/): Soon, very soon the two year old in the house will awaken.  Will she remember it is Christmas morning?  This is the time!  It is a point in time when she will begin to learn what the myth, what the tradition, what the practice of Christmas means.  The meaning of Christmas cannot be reduced... Read More Read More - [A Night So Dark](https://everyangel.org/a-night-is-so-dark/): Yesterday the news came that Joan Didion died on Thursday.  She was 87 years old.  I did not know her personally, only through her collection of essays Slouching Toward Bethlehem.  She wrote about the chaos of the 60s.  Her writing electrified me, and made sense, in a primal way of the extremes that had... Read More Read More - [Christmas, Personally Speaking](https://everyangel.org/christmas-personally-speaking/): Are there not many ways to think about, well everything?  Certainly!  Who would disagree.  Several days ago, I posted a reflection about Christmas that was about change, about illusion, and about “reality.”  At the time I wanted to tell a post-modern story of an event that has occurred for over two millennia. Early today when... Read More Read More - [Running For Our Lives](https://everyangel.org/running-for-our-lives/): A high point of the holidays has been the Tuesday evening Zoom meetings of a group of friends for a discussion of ideas.  I understand how unusual to recognize time spent on a Zoom virtual meeting to be agreeable, pleasurable.  The past two sessions have been unusual as we’ve had nothing on the agenda,... Read More Read More - [Now It Is Christmas, A God Is Born](https://everyangel.org/now-it-is-christmas-a-god-is-born/): LUKE 2  And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed. 2 (And this taxing was first made when Cyrenius was governor of Syria.) 3 And all went to be taxed, every one into his own city. 4 And Joseph also went... Read More Read More - [On Wealth](https://everyangel.org/on-wealth/): [this] semblance of redemption.If I possess this kind of wealth, I have the illusionof omnipotence and immortality.Wealth [Vermogen] What a beautiful word.Infinite wealth means infinite capacity;finitude fades away. What is salvation?This illusion is surely enough.There is a very theological dimension to it,and that dimension has nothing to do withmaterial greed. There are many shades... Read More Read More - [Sunday Before, Christmas?](https://everyangel.org/sunday-before-christmas/): I did not post anything yesterday.  That’s the first day missed in three years.  I am blessed, lucky, and there’s no explanation, nothing I have done to merit good health, the ability to consistently write.  How much does civilization, not to mention bare existence owe to dumb luck?  What are the odds that you... Read More Read More - [Omicron, Mental Fracturing, Tanks](https://everyangel.org/omicron-mental-fracturing-tanks/): Couldn’t access the blog this morning.  I yelled, “help” to Hostgator support.  They fixed the obstruction.  I’m no code monkey.  We often need help from others who have expertise that we will never have. Felt like yelling “help” on account of the top-of-mind subjects that I am compelled to write about.  Like a child,... Read More Read More - [Shaking](https://everyangel.org/shaking-2/): Thursday is overcast, gray.  The wind is gusting, a gentle breeze by comparison to the 60 mph winds of last night.  December, tornado season?  Mayfield, Kentucky.  It appears that a giant blender descended from the sky, churning to rubble neighborhoods and buildings…  The candle factory, ranked as Graves County’s third-largest private employer, is gone. ... Read More Read More - [On Beauty](https://everyangel.org/on-beauty/): What is beautifulis the object in its drapery,under its veil, in its hideout. …The task of art criticism is notto lift the veil but rather,through the most precise knowledge of itas a veil, to raise itself for the first timeto the true view of the beautiful. …The only way to view beautyas a secretis... Read More Read More - [Ode To Becoming Grumpy?](https://everyangel.org/ode-to-becoming-grumpy/): I think grumpy comes with the territory. [I for one was rather grumpy following Cindy challenging all of us to actually DO something. But that’s a rant for another day.] Here’s a subject I’m certain Tobin will have a ready, useful opinion about: I went on a photography outing last Thursday; not an easy... Read More Read More - [No Reset Button](https://everyangel.org/no-reset-button/): There’s no“reset button” for civilization,and no viable planfor transforming global infrastructure,agriculture, and energy networksin the next ten to twenty years.And while smart, dedicated, and thoughtful peoplefumble with political machinery that doesn’t work,such as carbon-pricing markets,protests and the United Nations,all of us in the Global Northgo about our business,driving, flying, leaving lights on,running heaters and... Read More Read More - [If You Do Not Come Too Close](https://everyangel.org/if-you-do-not-come-too-close/): More from East Coker by T. S. Eliot winner of the Nobel prize for literature… In that open field If you do not come too close, if you do not come too close, On a summer midnight, you can hear the music Of the weak pipe and the little drum And see them dancing... Read More Read More - [A Time To Break](https://everyangel.org/a-time-to-break-to-shake/): I In my beginning is my end. In successionHouses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their placeIs an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass. Old stone to new building,     old timber to new fires,Old fires to ashes,     and ashes to the earthWhich is already flesh, fur and... Read More Read More - [Sunlight and Petal Vs. Ignorance](https://everyangel.org/sunlight-and-petal-vs-ignorance/): Canticle By Wendell Berry What death means is not this – the spirit, triumphant in the body’s fall, praising its absence, feeding on music. If life can’t justify and explain itself, death can’t justify and explain it. A creed and a grave never did equal life of anything. Yellow flowers sprout in the clefts... Read More Read More - [Abundance And Brain Fog](https://everyangel.org/abundance-and-brain-fog/): Brain fog this morning. My mind felt on the edge of malfunction, like a slowing old computer hard-drive memory disc. I entered Starbucks without wearing a mask. Fortunately a spare mask was in my computer bag. I remind myself to “settle down,” as if a parent were instructing a small child. Aided by the... Read More Read More - [Peace On Earth, Goodwill To Humankind](https://everyangel.org/peace-on-earth-goodwill-to-humankind/): Those lyric lines filled the atmosphere of the Starbucks patron seating area.  Under present conditions such language seems to be the apex of irony.  On a two hour zoom call yesterday President Biden is reported to have ‘warned’ Putin of Russia that if he attacks Ukraine, he will be sorry…  And so goes the... Read More Read More - [Plato Wouldn't Have Been A Fan](https://everyangel.org/plato-wouldnt-have-been-a-fan/): January 8th will be the birthday of Elvis Presley. Plato was no fan of poetry.  Plato, a professor of philosophy, Athenian who lived 4th Century BCE, expressed aversion to the arts.  Plato was pointed in his criticism of poetry.  He believed that poetry especially when combined with the emotional stimulus of music was dangerous. ... Read More Read More - [How The World Turns](https://everyangel.org/the-axis-of-the-world/): Late Lament Breathe deep the gathering gloom,Watch lights fade from every room.Bedsitter people look back and lament,Another day’s useless energy spent.Impassioned lovers wrestle as one.Lonely man cries for love and has none.New mother picks up and suckles her son.Senior citizens wish they were young.Cold-hearted orb that rules the nightRemoves the colours from our sight.Red... Read More Read More - [After The Party](https://everyangel.org/after-the-party/): Yesterday evening I was guest at a birthday celebration for our grandson.  Family members gathered to express our joy on the occasion of his turning 7 years old.  The event was glorious.  Of course gifts were given, enough toys to afford hours of pleasure and learning.  Thoughtful aunts gave him clothes too.  Our family... Read More Read More - [Melting With You](https://everyangel.org/melting-with-you/): Saturday, and it is quiet in the Starbucks seating area.  This serene atmosphere will change soon.  Families are sure to arrive, busy with Christmas shopping here in Geneva.  The space will be crowded, as customers wait for a warm beverage. Last night I joined my best friend of over 50 years for a dinner... Read More Read More - [Improv From Birth To Grave](https://everyangel.org/failure-and-a-thought-experiment/): I did not post yesterday. Yesterday, after arriving at Starbucks I discovered my laptop computer was hardly running, no life left in the battery.  Over night, a power discharge depleted the machine.  I was left without my usual writing aid.  I could have improvised with pen and paper.  I chose to read instead, and... Read More Read More - [Seinsgefühl](https://everyangel.org/seinsgefuhl/): Seinsgefühl, German for “feeling of being.” Our discussion last night on the topic of Existentialism, the post WWII movement revolved around this indispensable aspect of our lives, “feeling of being.”  For our fathers, or grandfathers who survived the industrial scale slaughter and destruction of Europe, of the Pacific islands including Japan the issue was... Read More Read More - [Tuesday](https://everyangel.org/tuesday-3/): Tuesday dawned brisk, in the low 30s the sky a shade of baby blue.  One more day is given, a gift to be lived, and who knows what opportunities will come for appreciation, puzzlement, a tap on the shoulder so to speak, there is more to be learned, much more.  As is my habit... Read More Read More - [Durchsichtigkeit](https://everyangel.org/durchsichtigkeit/): Transparency. Sounds innocuous enough, even desirable.  Who does not wish to have daily life smoothed out, obstacles and bottle necks which make realizing our objectives, especially those involved in getting what we need from relationships, — removed?  Transparency is a good idea is it not?  Transparency is a watchword, a conceptual key to the... Read More Read More - [Art Institute Of Chicago](https://everyangel.org/art-institute-of-chicago/): Several days have passed without posting.  That is a first I believe.  I aspire to write something everyday as a necessary discipline to improving ability to express with words thoughts that swirl, partly formed in my mind.  Temporarily locked out of my blog due to insufficient care with a password, at last I found... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, All In A Dream](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-all-in-a-dream/): It is Monday morning, just three days before Thanksgiving.  Thanksgiving will be a needed respite. The Kyle Rittenhouse verdict has been on the minds of many.  I am no exception.  I have thought about the trial and the verdict well enough.  I wish this were a dream or better put, a nightmare from which... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Over The Edge](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-over-the-edge-3/): Is there no help for it?  What I mean to say, I cannot conceive how to avoid the abyss of the irrational, that which eludes language. Language is the ease by which the mind constructs reality out of binary symbols, black is not white, sweet the opposite of sour, etc.  These words are successively... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Alpha Predator](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-alpha-predator/): Yesterday morning family members peering into the backyard called to me, “quick come and look, a hawk is feeding on top of our wood pile.”  Suspecting that I’d be too late, I pulled the flash card out of this laptop and inserted it into my camera.  In the distance a solitary hawk was feeding... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Family Unrelated By Blood](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-family-unrelated-by-blood/): MUSIC DISSEMINATES TRUTH BECOMING A WEAPON OF MASS INSTRUCTION. OUR MUSIC IS FAMILY UNRELATED BY BLOOD. WE MUST BE VIGILANT. WE MUST BE CITIZEN SOLDIERS, STRIPPED OF FEAR. OUR OPTIMISM IS MAGNIFIED IN OUR MUSIC. –Patti Smith I have thought about these words for many years.  These days, there does not seem to be... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Adviser to Swordmasters](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-adviser-to-swordmasters/): It is the very mind itself that leads the mind astray, –of the mind do not be mindless. –Takuan Sōhō Voltaire once said, “Le mieux est l’ennemi du bien,” — the perfect is enemy of the good.   A few of us, together around a table at Barnes & Noble last night, and several more... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Pop Culture?](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-pop-culture/): We engaged in a discussion about pop culture last night.  As enjoyable as that was, after a good night’s sleep I feel unease, that there’s little left to talk about.  The examples which we cited were no longer current, freshly minted.  We discussed Dune, the film recently released, October 22 of 2021. The book... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, The Look-back](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-the-look-back/): The holiday season approaches.  First up, Thanksgiving is on the last Thursday of this month.  The day of feasting is about nothing less than what the day is called.  Thanksgiving is the holiday I appreciate the most.  I do not mind helping with the preparations in the kitchen, peeling potatoes is my area of... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, The Miraculous Thing](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-the-miraculous-thing/): Like practitioners of the Baroque,we too are irrepressible creators of images,but secretly we are iconoclasts -not in the sense that we destroy images,but in the sense that we manufacture a profusion of imagesin which there is nothing to see.Present-day images – be they video images, paintings,products of the plastic arts, or audiovisual or synthesized... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Party With Peppa](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-lets-party/): Sunday morning is windy, with a light rain.  I cannot complain as the trees need moisture.  Soon the ground will freeze…  Vegetation will begin the winter season of sleep.  Life can be hard.  And life can be serendipitous, — the feel of a strange looking rock you happened to find, in your pocket.  Is... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Functioning Even Better](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-functioning-even-better/): When things, signs or actions are forced from their respective ideas, concepts, essences, values, points of reference, origins, and aims, they embark upon an endless process of self-reproduction. Yet things continue to function long after their ideas have disappeared, and they do so in total indifference to their own content. The paradoxical fact is... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Shining For A Moment](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-shining-for-a-moment/): Since the world is on a delusional course,we must adopt a delusional standpointtowards the world. Better to die from extremesthan starting from the extremes. Excerpt, The Transparency of Evil – After The Orgy  by Jean Baudrillard Properly speakingthere is now no law of value,merely a sort of epidemic of value,a sort of general metastasis... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Living In The Meantime](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-living-in-the-meantime/): In the Meantime By Max Garland The river rose wildly every seventh spring or so, and down the hatch went the town, just a floating hat box or two, a cradle, a cellar door like an ark to float us back into the story of how we drown but never for good, or long.... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Starting Over Again](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-starting-over-again/): You are kidding of course?  Start over again?  Pardon my laughter as I am laughing so hard that it hurts…  Are you meaning to say that we Americans have reached a fold point in our history, that our society as it now stands is unsustainable?  Do you really think that conditions are in such... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, To Start Over Again](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-to-start-over-again/): I have been thinking about René Descartes.  Descartes made a world changing discovery on November 10, 1619.  Descartes was a 17th century mathematician, upper class, university educated and was well-traveled in Europe. Descartes, uneasy with his learning based upon Medieval scholasticism, couldn’t discount nagging doubt triggered by the discoveries of Galileo, by the rise... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Vaccination For Cynicism](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-remedy-for-cynicism/): Monday promises to be a warm Fall day.  I’d like lose myself in Fall.  I will carry forward the outside Fall cleanup in the yard.  Fall presents much to be done, to prepare the house and surrounding area for the cold months.  Work is beneficial to interdict the mind’s inclination to endlessly speculate about... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, What The Buddha Said](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-what-the-buddha-said/): Should I be a Buddhist?  I ask the question from time to time.  I have two statues of Buddha within the landscaping of our backyard.  I am drawn to the physical statuary: a representation of a life Buddha lived, the Indian Prince who rejected the luxurious life which being well born would have afforded. ... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, These Fictions, These Shadows](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-these-fictions-these-shadows/): The truths of humanism,the confidence in mankind and all the rest,still possess only the vigor of fictions,only a prosperity of shadows.The West was these truths;it is no more than these fictions, these shadows.as helpless as they,it has not been given to the West to verify them. It drags them along, exposes them,but no longer... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Always Under Pressure](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-always-under-pressure/): Friday, a beautiful Fall day, with frost and full sunlight.  Today is my grand daughter’s 2nd birthday.  Watching her grow day to day has been a rare delight.  She is the advancing edge of the new world that is born with each generation.  And what of that “new world?”  Upon her adulthood some twenty... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Language Making The Earth Stand Still](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-language-making-the-earth-stand-still/): I saw it!  In the blink of an eye I witnessed a “miracle” of language.  Seated at the table for the evening meal, my grand daughter was in a fickle mood in relation to the food on her plate.  Children are often uncertain about whether to consume the food selections made for them by... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Clairvoyant Puppets](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-clairvoyant-puppets/): III – We have all had a taste for the West’s disease: Art, Love, Religion, War – We know too much about them all to believe in them now; then too, so many centuries have worn them down… The epoch of the finite in plenitude is past; the substance of poems? Exhausted. — To... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, We Are Not The World](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-we-are-not-the-world/): Viewing this photo journalism project reminded me of a tune from 1985, We Are The World.  The lyrics are composed by Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie.  I recall the 45 person choir of celebrities singing and swaying in unison as they performed the song.  I thought the lyric, while well meaning was saccharine sweet,... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Metamorphosis](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-metamorphosis/): The sun rose this morning like a god.  The air was tinged with frost.  The first frost is late in the season.  I felt relief at this awaited sign of seasonal change.  Is not frost, the cold an ascetic exercise in paring of life, a reduction to the essence of things? And what does... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Halloween](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-halloween/): To return home, subsequent to an interlude of extensive travel (three weeks) prompts me to reflect upon my life.  I would like to think I do not take on the role of a tourist, a dabbler, one who passes through anonymously, with diffident attention to anything or anyone.  Boredom can be chosen without leaving... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, What We Leave Behind](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-what-we-leave-behind/): Here I am again, in the corner by the wall on a rainy morning at Starbucks.  The return home feels right, the feeling of completion.  What did I accomplish in the last three weeks on the road, a composite of time and places in my memory?  Did I accomplish much, or nothing?  “Nothing” sounds... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Always and Never Home](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-always-and-never-home/): Our last evening at a Holiday Inn.  The straight lines, white surfaces and turquoise of Holiday Inn decor palate have become familiar.  We laughed yesterday after checking into our room here at Lexington Kentucky.  The bathroom was adequately spacious, the white sink countertop and the backlit big mirror similar to the other four or... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, To Buy More Time](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-to-buy-more-time/): Shortly we leave Asheville.  The drive through the Blue Ridge mountains to Lexington promises to be spectacular.  Passing through the mountains at any time is breath taking.  At the peak of fall color change, the views will be extraordinary.  Perhaps I will attempt to capture the splendor with some photos.  A photograph never does... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Another Day](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-another-day/): I couldn’t concentrate on the email summary of the stories in the New York Times.  Maybe the brain fog will dissipate as the morning flows into midday.  The Times featured story was about a recently taken Gallup opinion poll on the matter of abortion in Texas.  The poll shows that Texans think remarkably the same... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Metaphysics](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-metaphysics/): We reached Asheville.  The drive from Greenville, S.C. to Asheville was barely more than an hour.  The dogwoods in the foothills flamed blood red.  The color change is beginning, though I do not think there has been a frost yet.  Seated in the breakfast room of the Holiday Inn I overhear a conversation between... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Not Over](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-not-over/): Monday dawns as another mid-Fall, blue-sky day in Greenville, South Carolina.  Our plan is to leave for Asheville, North Carolina shortly.  The drive will be short.  I can see the blue mountains on the distant horizon from here. Yesterday I spent some time walking among the graves in Springwood Cemetary.  The place, a quiet plot... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Another Angle Of View](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-another-angle-of-view/): John Fogerty sings in the background, Down on the Bayou, and I drink a mediocre cup of coffee in the breakfast room of the Holiday Inn.  It is Sunday morning in Greenville, South Carolina.  To bed late and a short evening of restless sleep.  I know that “things change” and that I will feel... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Suffocating In Jesus](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-traveling-south/): …more miles south yesterday, into South Carolina.  We are staying in Greenville, which I had forgotten is the home of Bob Jones University.  The term “University” is understood as only Christian fundamentalists would understand the word.  Young adults born into a cultic form of faith seek admission to BJU.  “Faith” by the literalist interpretation... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, One More Poem](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-one-more-poem/): My Brain Is Mad for Baudrillard By Elizabeth Knapp Today, I read of scientists’ warnings about the potential dangers of sex robots and thought of you. Some blame the rise of right-wing populism on postmodern windbags like you, holed up in your university office, giving head to your shadow. But Jean, you were right—... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Gnawing On Fictions](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-gnawing-on-fictions/): Waiting for Your Call by Aria Aber The light retreats and is generous again.No you to speak of, anywhere—neither in vicinity nor distance,  so I look at the blue water, the snowy egret, the lace of its feathers  shaking in the wind, the lake—no, I am lying.  There are no egrets here, no water.... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Nothing Binds Time](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-nothing-binds-time/): A society of consumption and leisure is characterized by a particular temporality. Surplus time, which is the result of a massive increase in productivity, is filled with events and experiences that are fleeting and short-lived. As nothing binds time in a lasting fashion, the impression is created that time is passing very quickly, or... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Farewell Thoughts](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-a-farewell-thought/): We departed the Outer Banks crossing the five mile long Melvin R. Daniels Bridge on I64 in bright sunlight.  The bridge arched over the water ahead of us.  We approached Alligator Island, I could see the marina below with a row of big (and expensive) ocean fishing craft at rest.  These looked to be... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, The Page Turns](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-one-page-at-a-time/): We enjoyed a last walk along the beach at Nags Head.  The gently rolling surf enveloped us in its timeless cadence.  I would like to think this island will last forever, the waves will beat on this beach eternally.  I know that eternity is an abstraction, a fiction of the mind, and that, change... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Boredom](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-boredom/): Boredom dominates the widening gapbetween subject and world,between freedom and facticity,between action and being. The Dasein that is determined to act,is no longer familiar with the feeling of being-surroundedor of being-taken-in.The ‘point’ of the ‘moment’, as the temporal form of the self,lacks the width and length of ‘home’,the space for dwelling and lingering. …’home’... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Like A God](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-like-a-god/): Yesterday the sun rose like a god, above the rim of the watery horizon.  The language is an inadequate description I know; words pointing to the rotation of this earth relative to our star, the source of life here, upon our home planet.  Furthermore the sun as well as our earth and every planet... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Life In Words](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-life-in-words/): Today a guest post is offered from a friend living in the neighboring town of Geneva.  To write is to wait for the apt words to express the journey that one is taking.  Chaucer, whose collection of 24 stories were published in 1483 would have agreed. Sunday looking out my backyard windows signs of... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Wright Bros. Memorial](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-wright-bros-memorial/): We visited the Wright Bros. Memorial at Kill Devils Hill, Kitty Hawk. I was particularly moved by the exhibits.  The Wrights, Orville and Wilbur, residents of Dayton Ohio, transported their flyer to Kitty Hawk North Carolina, due to reports of wind conditions favorable to powered flight.  On the remote sandy beach in 1903 Orville... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Tortugas' Lie](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-tortugas-lie/): Before noon we walked across the street to a restaurant called Tortugas’ Lie.  Tortugas is Spanish for turtle.  The Cayman Islands were originally called The Tortugas.  A paragraph in the menu explains that Lie is the lair of an animal or of an anchorage at sea, such as would have been used by BLACKBEARD in... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Friendship & Truth](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-friendship-truth/): Truth…consists of relationships between events. Truth occurs when things communicate with each other on the basis of a similarity or some other form of closeness between them, when they turn towards each other and enter into a relationships with each other, even befriend each other. Only relationships based upon similarity, friendship or affinity make... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, What Matters](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-what-matters/): Everyone has ideas, even more than they need. What matters is the poetic singularity of analysis. Only the spirituality of language can justify writing. Not a miserable objectivity of ideas. There will never be a solution to the contradiction of ideas, except inside language itself, in the energy and fortune (happiness) of language. —... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Charlottesville](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-charlottesville/): Yesterday we reached Charlottesville, Virginia. We enjoyed the mountains of West Virginia.  On I64 while crossing the bridge spanning a river I glimpsed piles of coal to be loaded into waiting barges.  How much more coal are we going to burn in order to generate electricity, while the planet gathers heat from the co2... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, A Pilgrimage To My Past](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-a-pilgrimage-to-my-past/): Yesterday our long planned three week road trip to the Outer Banks of North Carolina, to my hometown, and then to South Carolina began. On I65 running north and south, in Indiana farmland we passed this sign prominently installed by the side of the road.  The message communicated with unmistakable clarity.  I was reminded... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, To Light A Lantern](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-to-light-a-lantern/): “Where has God gone?” he cried.“I shall tell you.We have killed him – you and I.We are his murderers. But how have we done this? How were we able to drink up the sea?Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon?What did we do when we unchained the earth from its... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, From Recurring Present To Shattered Mirror](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-from-recurring-present-to-the-shattered-mirror/): Gods are nothingbut eternal bearers of meaning.They make the world meaningful and significant, make sense.They will tell us about the way things and events are related to each other,And these narrated connections create sense.Out of nothing, narration makes world.Full of gods means full of meaning, full of narration.The world becomes readable, like a picture.…everything... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, More Tears](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-a-prayer-for-fall/): Sunday morning is gray.  There is a damp heaviness in the air.  It is supposed to rain.  Today if we do not receive a good rain, will some of the trees in my neighborhood, trees in my yard die?  The drought has been prolonged, for most of the summer.  Fall, a season of falling... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Supply Chain, etc. etc.](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-supply-chain-etc-etc/): Today I purchased a vehicle.  The Suzuki SX4 that has faithfully served me and afforded enjoyable driving has reach its end of service.  After fourteen years and 170,000 miles, I offer my respect to the designers, engineers, and manufacturing workers at Suzuki Kabushiki-Kaisha, Hamamatsu, Japan.  The product speaks eloquently for the company. Yesterday upon... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Singing The Blues](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-singing-the-blues/): If I can struggle against a fit of depression,in the name of what vitality can I oppose an obsessionwhich belongs to me, which precedes me? In good health, I take the path I prefer;“sick,” it is no longer I who decide: it is my disease.For the obsessed, no choice:their obsession has already opted for... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Minutes Till Midnight](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-minutes-till-midnight/): Theoryis a primary,primordial decision,which determines what counts and what does not –what is or should be,and what does not matter. As a highly selective narration,it cuts a clearing of differentiationthrough untrodden terrain. — The Agony of Eros by Byung-Chul Han Ahh, theory is the crux of the matter is it not !?  The prime... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Religare III](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-religare-iii/): You’ve got to be kidding.  Not more on religion…  But I have to — because I am not finished.  There is much at stake.  To risk overstating the matter, — “the survival of humanity!”  At least that is how it seems from my vantage point.  I know that I am the least likely in... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Religare II](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-religare-ii/): Religion, Part II.  I should say more should I not?  There’s always evidence around of our sense of a “greater” reality.  Walking through a graveyard is the easiest way to get an idea of what is thought, or better, the nature of what some of us believe about the greater or deeper or hidden... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Religare](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-religare/): I suppose this is a good place to start.  The Latin word means “to tie, to bind” and is related to the word religio which means “respect,” “awe,” or “sanctity” suggesting that the soul is bound to god.  Well – ok.  The notion that one is inherently, inevitably, innately “religious” works as long as... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, More Ruins](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-more-ruins/): As a kid I delighted to discover an abandoned house in the woods.  In my imagination I pondered about the lives of those who had lived there.  Sometimes signs left behind, were clues to what they cared about.  Moreover the condition of what remained served as a rough indication of how long the place... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, This Golden Tether](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-this-golden-tether/): There are songs, — one song alone for which I’d pay the full price of a concert ticket, to hear performed live.  Never mind the rest of the set list, a single melody and lyric would make the ticket outlay, as well as the effort to reach the venue, the expense of time, —... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, The Last Walk/Waltz](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-the-last-walk-waltz/): There is a last time for everything.  The first day of Fall was yesterday, September 22nd.  I picked up my camera, earlier in the week with the intention of capturing a final collection of Summer flower photos from Almond Marsh.  Summer ends and Fall begins.  That’s a logical deduction, a necessity of thought is... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Believing Six Impossible Things](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-believing-six-impossible-things/): “Alice laughed. ‘There’s no use trying,’ she said. ‘One can’t believe impossible things.’ I daresay you haven’t had much practice,’ said the Queen. ‘When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. There goes the shawl again!”   —... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Beginning With Cathedrals](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-is-this-how-it-ends/): When modes of expression are worn out art tends toward non-sense, toward a private and incommunicable universe. An intelligible shudder, whether in painting, in music, or in poetry, strikes us, and rightly, as vulgar or out-of-date. The public will soon disappear; art will follow shortly. A civilization which began with the cathedrals has to... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Turning Point & Precipice](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-tipping-point/): Tomorrow officially Fall begins.  It has been a hot dry summer, with a big deficit in moisture.  When the maples shed leaves on account of heat stress I take note.  I am ready for Fall.  Should we not celebrate seasonal change by gathering a few friends together for quiet conversation, for sharing a found... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Another Dispatch](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-another-dispatch/): A friend sent me an article by David Brooks, published in the September issue of The Atlantic, How the Bobos Broke America  Brooks uses his incisive analytical skills, a deft facility with language to outline the rise of the Creative Class to the apex of the pecking order of American influence, and a rising simmer... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Lurching Onward](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-lurching-onward/): I discovered another writer.  Or did the work of Emil Cioran discovered me?  There is the old saying, “when the student is ready, the teacher will come.”  E. M. Cioran was born Romanian.  He left for Paris in the late 1930s.  I purchased his second book published in French, entitled, All Gall Is Divided. ... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, I Do Not Know Much But I Think](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-i-not-know-much-but-i-think/): THE DRY SALVAGES (No. 3 of ‘Four Quartets’) I I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river Is a strong brown god—sullen, untamed and intractable, Patient to some degree, at first recognised as a frontier; Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce; Then only a problem confronting the builder... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, Summer Heat](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-summer-heat/): I walked north along the Fox River trail from Batavia to Geneva yesterday.  In my estimation this is not a long walk, about two miles round trip.  I could not fail to notice how low the river is presently.  Due to a lack of rain you could walk across the shallows bank to bank,... Read More Read More - [Plague Journal, The Vulgar & The Sublime](https://everyangel.org/plague-journal-the-obscene-the-sublime/): I wonder if life would be better as a “lower” mammal, rather than as a human being?  A non human mammal, without the facility of language would be equipped with efficient senses, better sight, hearing, smell along with instinct honed as a serrated blade.  The mammal would not be burdened with the paradoxes of... Read More Read More - [Land Of Hopes And Dreams](https://everyangel.org/land-of-hopes-and-dreams/): November 2nd, election day.  But I voted early.  Not that my voice will be heard.  Is my voice hypothetically,  durable enough to be heard, given the radical oppositional viewpoints, indeed the incipient violence roiling this land of “hopes and dreams?” Given what we Americans desire, the future we actively support, and the disparate languages... Read More Read More - [Tasting And Wasting](https://everyangel.org/tasting-and-wasting/): Keeping Time by Mike Orlock I’ve lost time. Lost track of where I left it, (on a table at home, in a desk at work): I placed it somewhere for safekeeping, thinking, That five minutes will come in handy later today or early tomorrow— Just give me a minute, maybe two, I’ll get back... Read More Read More - [A Giggling Fit](https://everyangel.org/the-giggling-fit/): In ourselves human existence is nothing but shouts,      a cruel spasm,           a giggling fit where agreement is born from a consciousness which is at last shared between the impenetrability of ourselves and that of others. — excerpt Literature and Evil, Genet, by Georges Bataille, p. 170 …all our yesterdays have lighted fools... Read More Read More - [In A Cry Heard](https://everyangel.org/in-a-cry-heard/): I am sure about one thing: humanity is not composed of isolated beings but of a communication between them. Never are we revealed, even to ourselves, other than in a network of communication with others. We bathe in communication, we are reduced to this incessant communication whose absence we feel, even in the depths... Read More Read More - [Leonidas Lives](https://everyangel.org/leonidas-lives/): We cannot assess the impact that our life will have upon others, others yet to be born. King Leonidas of the Spartans did not know, as he and his 300 men refused domination of the Persian God-king Xerxes, dying on the beach at Thermopylae, — the effect his life and story would have upon... Read More Read More - [Darkness Within Darkness](https://everyangel.org/darkness-within-darkness/): A strange phrase of only three words that leaves the mind grasping for nothing in particular.  Of course it feels uncomfortable,  I prefer the defined, something to take in hand.  When there’s nothing — I am constrained to become quiet, to cease movement, that quest to outrun time, to make something of myself. What... Read More Read More - [Light And Darkness](https://everyangel.org/light-and-darkness/):        Evil, depends upon the possibility of breaking the rule. Infraction is frightening -like death: and yet it is attractive, as though the being only wanted to survive out of weakness, as though exuberance inspired that contempt for death which is necessary once the rule has been broken. The attraction of irregularity sustains the... Read More Read More - [Nothing And Scripture Quotation](https://everyangel.org/nothing-and-quoting-scripture/): Nothing this morning.  There is nothing in mind to say. Still the planet turns upon it’s axis. But wait, – I do have something to say… The results of the Brazilian election election are in, the Bolsonaro losers “take to the streets” since compromise, agreeing to settle for some point in the middle is alien... Read More Read More - [Halloween Story](https://everyangel.org/halloween-story/): Yesterday I raked leaves, a task to be done over and over.  Tedium.  Leaves do not fall all at once, raking is not a task “one and done.”  The work is recurrent.  When one session is finished it is replaced by another. Raking, I heard many voices, the sound of approaching running feet.  Upon... Read More Read More - [The Spirit Of Halloween](https://everyangel.org/the-spirit-of-halloween/): Tomorrow!  The eve of merriment approaches!  There have been various “dress rehearsals,” opportunities to don costumes, usually with friends for parties.  Here are several images which I captured of my grand daughter and her classmates, enjoying a out-of-doors parade of costumes, accompanied by parents and grand parents. Additionally here is a delightful poem, a... Read More Read More - [Bat-Fest](https://everyangel.org/bat-fest/): Saturday, Oct 29th.  I am relieved to be in the sunlight, walking in the fall air, with family, enjoying the sights and sounds of Bat-Fest, the public celebration of Halloween held in downtown Batavia.  On Thursday I was admitted at the ER for observation at Delnor Northwestern Medical center.  The diagnosis: atrial flutter, or... Read More Read More - [I Can See Forever](https://everyangel.org/i-can-see-forever/): I’ve not concealed my love for Rock N Roll, that music of the people, admittedly a cultural feature of my generation.  Nietzsche said that life would hardly be worth living without music. “Without music, life would be a mistake.. I would only believe in a God who knew how to dance.” This song fills... Read More Read More - [Life Like A Sea Saw](https://everyangel.org/life-like-a-sea-saw/): It is time for some wild dancing, some ecstasy is it not? We approach election day for the mid-terms, a great deal is at stake and it will be impossible to know the stakes until the results are in.   Our prime directive is “survival” is it not? Therefore I offer this tune by... Read More Read More - [Halloween Part 3](https://everyangel.org/halloween-part-3/): Just a few days more until Halloween.  It is raining now.  We’ve yet a hard frost here in the Fox River Valley.  The trick or treat experience for children depends upon the weather.  Adults hope that the evening will be without inclement weather and not too cold.  It is late October after all. More... Read More Read More - [Halloween Part 2](https://everyangel.org/halloween-part-2/): Continuing the theme of outdoor, full scale dioramas, another household in Batavia offers the theme of a Madame Butterfly gathering of spirits on Halloween.  The vivid colors juxtaposed with the somber skeletal reminders of death is effective to teach that life and death are never separated.  Additional background on Halloween: The festival of Samhain... Read More Read More - [Halloween](https://everyangel.org/halloween-2/): Halloween.  On the eve of October 31st, the sun sets and sidewalks are transformed by children dressed in costumes of all descriptions, even adults embellished with face paint, – to celebrate a festival of ghosts, goblins, a few hours of zany merriment.  Adults are allowed to give expression to the inner child, to participate... Read More Read More - [Too Dark To See](https://everyangel.org/too-dark-to-see/): Saturday 11:35 AM is quite late for me to be writing here at Starbucks.  But who cares?  I will not care as long as I come up with some good words. I awakened at 6AM in order to be present on the sidelines to observe and cheer a grandson play his final soccer game... Read More Read More - [Paradox](https://everyangel.org/paradox/): I awakened a few minutes ahead of the alarm.  Sometimes that happens.  That part of me which eludes words, wanted to be conscious, awake/alive…  Thus began my day. On my way to Starbucks, I could sense that Friday will be warm, a return of comfortable weather, prior to the certain advent of frost, and... Read More Read More - [Energy Is Eternal Delight](https://everyangel.org/energy-is-eternal-delight/): Fall is a divine time of year.  Fall is the season of harvest.  As well, the days grow shorter, a chill descends, sunlight falls oblique upon the earth and the maple leaves catch fire, and begin to fall.  They fall one by one, finished, the alchemy of chlorophyll having utilized sunlight to make sugar. ... Read More Read More - [Three Parts Or Four](https://everyangel.org/three-parts-or-four/): All Gaul is divided into three parts, one of which the Belgae inhabit, the Aquitani another, those who in their own language are called “Celts,” in our language “Gauls,” the third. All these differ from each other in language, customs and laws. – excerpt The Gallic War by Julius Caesar (written in 53 BCE),... Read More Read More - [Running To Stand Still](https://everyangel.org/running-to-stand-still/): It [laughter] burns as it comes into contact with death; from the symbols of the emptiness of death it draws a heightened consciousness of being. …It brings us out, for a time, from the impasse in which life is enclosed by those whose only concern is to preserve it. …those arts which sustain anguish... Read More Read More - [I, Sink Like A Stone](https://everyangel.org/i-sink-like-a-stone/): Egoism is like trying to swim without relying on the water, endeavoring to keep afloat by tugging at your own legs; your whole body becomes tense, and you sink like a stone. -Alan Watts Egoism… There are many untethered egos about these days.  I think that capitalism as a way-of-life, breeds this illusion of... Read More Read More - [Style Dammit, Style!](https://everyangel.org/style-god-damnit-style/): It is not so much a matter of what you do as of how you do it, not so much the content as the style of action adopted. -Alan Watts I heard more than once from a conservative-minded friend that former President Trump accomplished some good things.  Perhaps.  Even to concede my friend’s point,... Read More Read More - [Rhythm And Flow](https://everyangel.org/rhythm-and-flow/): The greater part of human activity is designed to make permanent those experiences and joys which are only lovable because they are changing. Music is a delight because of its rhythm and flow. Yet the moment you arrest the flow and prolong a note or a chord beyond its time, the rhythm is destroyed.... Read More Read More - [You Must Choose](https://everyangel.org/you-must-choose/): At every moment we are crushed by the idea and the sensation of time. There are only two ways of escaping from this nightmare, of forgetting it: pleasure and work. Pleasure exhausts us. Work strengthens us. Let us choose. In every man, at every time, there are two simultaneous tendencies -one towards God, the... Read More Read More - [The Obscene, The Sublime](https://everyangel.org/the-obscene-the-sublime/): A gentle rain falls under a gray sky.  We need the rain. Last night a group of us discussed the relationship between critical thinking and war.  The first issue to be considered has to be what one has in mind by the term “war.”  The soldier in a combat zone understands that the word... Read More Read More - [A Mere Six Seeds](https://everyangel.org/a-mere-six-seeds/): Thoreau’s Pumpkins by Ginny Lowe Connors It is thought that Henry David Thoreau was the first American to plant Potiron Jaune Grosse, a variety of large yellow pumpkin. Six seeds from France began it all.             No abracadabra required, no alacazam—             just a bit of manure, some hoeing,             a little rain, and... Read More Read More - [A Story About Paradox](https://everyangel.org/paradoxical-story/): Columbus Day 2022.  Today is a federal holiday and traffic is noticeably lighter.  “A day off” is appreciated especially by students, who get to sleep-in this morning. The fall days are superlative as the mornings edge toward the appearing of frost.  Leaves are beginning to fall.  Vegetation has an arc of lifespan as do... Read More Read More - [Breaking Point](https://everyangel.org/breaking-point/) - [Turn The Page](https://everyangel.org/turn-the-page/): Often I have something in mind to write about.  I read.  Thoughts conveyed by others often imperfectly understood, capture my imagination.  I feel a compulsion to write something, because instinct says an insight important for the future is worthy of exploration.  We are “in this thing called life,” together are we not?  It is... Read More Read More - [Contemplating Catastrophe](https://everyangel.org/contemplating-catastrophe/): Friday, another “end” of the work-week.  But this Friday is incomparable to any other that has ever been…  The Starbucks room here at 3rd and State contains a configuration of individuals, various, by socio-economic status, or by the arc of a standard lifetime, a group of high school students, and I, a retiree…  Never... Read More Read More - [Two Things For Thursday](https://everyangel.org/two-things-for-thursday/): Broken Brix is a winery & cidery in St. Charles.  The two of us stopped in for a few minutes of conversation, to relax in the comfortable atmosphere, the bar displaying hints of the infinite possibilities of taste inherent in the art of brewing.  Almost always Steve, the owner warmly greets us from behind... Read More Read More - [Mythinformation](https://everyangel.org/mythinformation/): …the world is immense, truly, and the way we’re doing things in this world is only one of the many ways we might be doing them. Once you know this, then you know that we’re not just alive, we’re the bearers of life. Anything can change. -excerpt Shadow Dancing in the USA, by Michael... Read More Read More - [Not Quite The Walking Dead](https://everyangel.org/not-quite-the-walking-dead/): I had a few minutes at the end of my evening, I decided out of curiosity to watch a few minutes of an episode of The Walking Dead.  I have not followed the show.  I didn’t care which segment was available on the TV.  A friend recommended the series as an exploration of human... Read More Read More - [Do You Need More?](https://everyangel.org/do-you-need-more/): I remember writing about this tune in the past.  The musical score and lyric of certain songs strike me as iconic, as emblematic of a time, a quest for what it means to be human in a certain “world.”  The lyric lines, the blend of the voices convey the friction and effort of discovering... Read More Read More - [Moment Joined To Moment To...](https://everyangel.org/moment-joined-to-moment-to/): It is the moment that first imposes a chronological sequence and order upon the stimulations operating on an organism, and, in turn, through the sub-noticable joining together of successive units of this smallest time-span, time originates. In the moment, the world stands still. A series of moments in which, respectively, time stands still, leads... Read More Read More - [Enemy Mine](https://everyangel.org/enemy-mine/): Fall sunrise over the Fox River is glorious.  I think it worth rising for the brief spectacle just before 7AM.  This is the view through my windshield traveling on Fabyan Parkway east toward Starbucks in Geneva.  The sunlight is a gift to every living thing, trees, shrubs, grasses and the squirrels that inhabit the... Read More Read More - [That Is How We Do It](https://everyangel.org/that-is-how-we-do-it/): The crisis of ’29, which was a real catastrophe, cannot happen again today. It has been supplanted by a perpetual simulation of crisis. Unlike a society’s heroic or intrinsic values, the simulated, synthetic values (see Reagan) that have taken their place no longer threaten to collapse. Their own weight no long threatens to result... Read More Read More - [Wrecked On Main Street](https://everyangel.org/wrecked-on-main-street/): Orwell had it easy when fixing 1984 as the crucial point. What we are condemned to may be, after time itself has unfolded, the disappearance of time in the instantaneousness of action. That is the price of change. In the exaltation of uninterrupted circulation and incessant up-to-dateness, societies lose the thread of their development.... Read More Read More - [What More Do You Want?](https://everyangel.org/what-more-do-you-want/): Look at the two great events: [the advent of] nuclear power and revolution. It is utterly pointless to hope for the one or to fear the other since both have already occurred. Everything has been liberated, changed, undermined; what more do you want? It is useless to hope: things are there; born or stillborn,... Read More Read More - [Catastrophe In Slow Motion](https://everyangel.org/catastrophe-in-slow-motion/): We are no longer in a state of growth;we are in a state of excess.We are living in a society of excrescence,meaning that which incessantly develops without being measurableagainst its own objectives.…growing out of control at cross purposes with itself…This process can be compared best with cancerous metastases –                                *** As long as... Read More Read More - [Memory And Play](https://everyangel.org/memory-2/): Here are additional images of the final Nitrous Shootout event at “the Grove.”  We tilt into fall, the days become short.  We know that a season of cold and ice soon will be in store.  Nevertheless we have memories, held as if in a keepsake box, moments of delight, — satisfaction upon making a... Read More Read More - [All That Remains](https://everyangel.org/all-that-remains/): Well what was your visit to “the Grove” like?  I mean your plans to spend Saturday afternoon at the Great Lakes Dragaway? I was not disappointed.  In retrospect I received more than the fee paid for admission.  The hours spent walking around the pits, lingering for a few minutes to chat with the Lumbert... Read More Read More - [Homo Faber](https://everyangel.org/homo-faber-2/): A fall Saturday is overcast.  I plan to make my way to the drag strip perhaps for a last hurrah.  There’s a chill in the air.  Soon time will be past for “test and tune” of race cars, hand-built expressions of the personality of an owner, and that of crew members, who are likely... Read More Read More - [Losing The Magic](https://everyangel.org/desecration-a-loss-of-magic/): The truly beautiful cannot be touched. It demands distance. Faced with the sublime, we stand back in awe. When praying we fold our hands. The sense of touch destroys distance. It knows no astonishment. It demystifies, de-auratizes and renders profane what is touched. The touchscreen sublates the negativity of the other, of the unavailable.... Read More Read More - [Making Others Disappear](https://everyangel.org/making-others-disappear/): Communicationwith a smartphone is disembodiedand without a gaze.Community has a bodily dimension.Because of its lack of corporeality,digital communication weakens community.The gaze stabilizes community.Digitization makes the other as gaze disappear. The absence of the gaze is partly responsiblefor the loss of empathy in the digital age.When a parent stares at a smartphone, the infant is... Read More Read More - [The Age Of Non-things](https://everyangel.org/the-age-of-non-things/): In the age of non-things,there is something almost utopianabout the notion of possession.Possession is characterized byan intimacy and inwardness.For a thing to be a possession, I must havean intense relationship with it.You do not possess an electronic gadget.Because we no longer possess them, consumer goodsquickly end up on the rubbish heap.Possession is something internalized... Read More Read More - [A Partner In Negotiation](https://everyangel.org/a-partner-in-negotiation/): Mid September and Fall is approaching. I anticipate a last visit to the drag strip for the Saturday coming up. Drag racing is a quintessential male, warm weather sport. Race cars constructed to achieve maximum acceleration are an icon of a passing era. I confess my love of the adrenaline stimulating sight and sound... Read More Read More - [Gobsmacked](https://everyangel.org/gobsmacked/): I have never used that word before.  It means utterly astonished.  Yesterday four of us experienced an architectural tour of Chicago, narrated by Joe, our tour guide, progressing on both the south and the north branches of the Chicago river on the Wendella tour boat toward Lake Michigan.  The word describes the wonderment that... Read More Read More - [You Can Be Both](https://everyangel.org/you-can-be-both/): More from Friedrich Nietzsche… To live alone one must be an animal or a god, says Aristotle. But you can be both –a philosopher. Twilight of the Idols, “Epigrams and Maxims,” Section 3 Philosophy offers an asylum to a man into which no tyranny can force its way, the inward cave, the labyrinth of... Read More Read More - [Always In Recovery](https://everyangel.org/always-in-recovery/): The laws of numbers assume there are identical things, but in fact, nothing is identical with anything else. -Human, All Too Human, “Of First and Last Things,” Section 19 Mathematics would certainly not have come into existence if one had known from the beginning that there was in nature no such thing as a... Read More Read More - [Circles Of Conflict](https://everyangel.org/circles-of-conflict/): Is it not the case that similar problems, analogous issues present themselves over and over, such as is suggested by Ralph Waldo Emerson’s famous essay, Circles?   Emerson wrote in his unforgettable way that life is composed of concentric circles, intersecting matters of concern, of compelling interest.  Fresh to my consciousness is an email... Read More Read More - [A Good Day, A Bad Day](https://everyangel.org/a-good-day-a-bad-day/): Got off to a late start this morning…  I arrived at Starbucks and found a place seated against the wall, the small table holding the computer and a book,  The space in between where I am seated and the counter behind which the baristas work, has been a whirl of activity for the past... Read More Read More - [The Look In Your Eyes](https://everyangel.org/the-look-in-your-eyes/): Well here I am, again.  I guess it comes down to luck, the grace of good fortune.  Some would say “dumb luck,” a crude way of putting it.  How much credit do I deserve?  Little if any. Our anniversary was yesterday.  How many years?  52  That is a long time by the standard of... Read More Read More - [Whimsy](https://everyangel.org/whimsy/): In the aftermath of some hours of soaking rain I took a walk in the yard.  The rain was welcome in that trees and shrubs benefit from a thorough soaking of the soil.  Water is life.  I suppose that I am similar to any other mammal that moves around following a ample rainfall, everything... Read More Read More - [Let's Do Something](https://everyangel.org/lets-do-something/): I Am Waiting By Lawrence Ferlinghetti I am waiting for my case to come up    and I am waiting for a rebirth of wonder and I am waiting for someone to really discover America and wail and I am waiting    for the discovery of a new symbolic western frontier    and I am waiting    for... Read More Read More - [Enjoy The Revolution](https://everyangel.org/enjoy-the-revolution/): Yesterday we visited Cantigny Park to experience a Revolutionary War Reenactment.  At a distance we observed the ballet like performance of a artillery crew firing the canon, then followed the choreographed advance of a line of infantry marching across the green meadow.  Reenact a war?  The thought of reenacting a war, causes the mind... Read More Read More - [To Resist](https://everyangel.org/to-resist/): When a man [woman] chooses himself [or herself], he chooses for all men. Of all the actions a man may take in order to create himself as he wills to be, there is not one which is not creative, of an image of man such as he believes he ought to be. Existence precedes... Read More Read More - [Moral Choice](https://everyangel.org/moral-choice/): Moral choiceis comparable to the construction of a work of art. As there are no aesthetic values apriori,there are values which will appearin due course in the coherence of the picture— in the relation between the will to create and the finished work. One cannot judge a painting until it is done.likewise with morality.In... Read More Read More - [Why?](https://everyangel.org/why-3/): What if there is no why? That is, no purpose and no reason for the way things are…..  What if everything could have been different, and thus markedly different in the present.  There’s the endless pass time of counterfactual history.  You know that game of speculation, a diversion of the imagination:  What if the... Read More Read More - [License To Language, To Love](https://everyangel.org/license-to-language-to-love/): Rebel Yell By Billy Idol Last night a little dancer came dancin’ to my door Last night a little angel came pumping on the floor She said “Come on baby I got a license for love And if it expires pray help from above” Because In the midnight hour she cried – “more, more,... Read More Read More - [Labor](https://everyangel.org/labor/): Yesterday was Labor Day, a national holiday.  Many businesses were closed, as the intention is to celebrate the “working man.”  This is ironic.  Those who labor behind the scenes, stocking the shelves, sorting records, expediting those customer orders flowing into Amazon warehouses across the country, — orders promised for next day delivery…  Those who... Read More Read More - [Godlike Moments](https://everyangel.org/godlike-for-a-moment/): The supreme being, the sovereign deity, the god of heaven, is generally only a more powerful god of the same nature as the others. The gods are simply mythical spirits, without any substratum of reality. The spirit that is not subordinated to the reality of a mortal body is a god, is purely divine... Read More Read More - [Going To War](https://everyangel.org/warfare/): You did what?  You went where?  Once again you spent a Saturday afternoon at a drag strip?  Why?  What’s the attraction? I’d have to say that the quarter mile drag strip, 1,320 feet of two lane asphalt is one of the last sane places, where men go to war.  Surely you are kidding, making... Read More Read More - [Against Idealism](https://everyangel.org/contra-idealism/): The straight line is Godless and immoral –Hundertwasser You won’t find a river that decided a straight line was the best path to the open sea. You won’t find a vine that grew straight up to reach the sun. You won’t find a single organic object on this earth that traces a perfect line. “Nothing... Read More Read More - [To Artfully Dance](https://everyangel.org/to-artfully-dance/): The story of the individual is embedded in a larger set of stories. We play our part in an ensemble cast. How do we imagine a successful strategy for addressing the tension between the needs of the individual and the problems of satisfying those needs within the social, economic and natural environment? We must... Read More Read More - [Caught In A Landslide](https://everyangel.org/time-for-confession/): Real animals and plants separated from their spiritual truth slowly rejoin the empty objectivity of tools, the mortal body is gradually assimilated to the mass of things. Insofar as it is spirit, the human reality is holy, but it is profane insofar as it is real. Animals, plants, tools, and other controllable things form... Read More Read More - [Joy Is The Moment](https://everyangel.org/joy-is-the-moment/): Speaker no. 1 – Won’t you just cut it out!? Speaker no. 2 – I can’t.  I cannot help myself. At every moment, at every opportunity the truth comes to light, the truth of life and death, of my solitude and my bond with the world, of my freedom and my servitude, of the... Read More Read More - [Salvation](https://everyangel.org/salvation/): Yesterday I thought about our proclivity to desire something for nothing.  The simple minded way of putting it:  free is good.  If not entirely free, so minimal in cost, that no thought need be given to “what it is going to cost me.”  I am no exception to this rule… Except, the adult version... Read More Read More - [All The Rest...](https://everyangel.org/all-the-rest/): …the contradictionof a style of living whichcultivates sincerityand is at the same timea fraud.There is truth only in an existencewhich feels its acts asirrevocably necessary. There exists today no politician who feelsthe inevitableness of his policy,the more extreme his attitudes, the more frivolous,the less inspired by destiny they are. The only life with its... Read More Read More - [In The Unmaking...](https://everyangel.org/in-the-unmaking/): In truth a nation is never formed. …the nation is always either in the making, or in the unmaking. It is either winning adherents, or losing them, according as the State does or does not represent at a given time. a vital enterprise. Excerpt The Revolt of the Masses by José Ortega y Gasset... Read More Read More - [To Invent A Collective Program](https://everyangel.org/a-plan-of-action/): The State begins when groups naturally divided find themselves obliged to live in common. This obligation is not of brute force, but implies an impelling purpose, a common task which is set before the dispersed groups. Before all the State is a plan of action and a program of collaboration. The men [and women]... Read More Read More - [The Labyrinth](https://everyangel.org/the-labyrinth-2/): Human life, by its very nature, has to be dedicated to something, an enterprise glorious or humble, a destiny illustrious or trivial. …in these years we are witnessing the gigantic spectacle of innumerable human lives wandering about lost in their own labyrinths… All imperatives, all commands, are in a state of suspension. Given over... Read More Read More - [Dying While Laughing](https://everyangel.org/dying-while-laughing/): …we are unable to have directly complete knowledge of reality, there is nothing for us but arbitrarily to construct a reality, to suppose that things are happening after a certain fashion. This provides us with an outline, a concept or framework of concepts. With this, as through a “sight,” we then look at the... Read More Read More - [Our Home For The Aged](https://everyangel.org/welcome-to-our-home-for-the-aged/): Today violence is the rhetoric of the period, the empty rhetorician has made it his own. When a reality of human existence has completed its historic course, has been shipwrecked and lies dead, the waves throw it up on the shores of rhetoric, where the corpse remains for a long time. Rhetoric is the... Read More Read More - [On Lynching](https://everyangel.org/on-lynching/): In a right ordering of public affairs, the mass is that part which does not act of itself. Such is its mission. It has come into the world to be directed, influenced, represented, organized … It needs to submit its life to a higher court, formed of the superior minorities. …but without them, humanity... Read More Read More - [The Backward Look](https://everyangel.org/the-backward-look/): Sunday, the backward look… Yesterday was delightful.  On a Sunday, we give ourselves permission to reflect, to consider in the course of a walk in late summer, the perfection of Nature’s effulgence in plant life.  After breakfast in Geneva we walked down 3rd Street.   We admired the elephant’s ear leaves, purple, green and... Read More Read More - [Hurricane Of Farcicality](https://everyangel.org/hurricane-of-farcicality/): This morning I was moved by the description in the New York Times of the hundreds of criminal prosecutions in the aftermath of the January 6 uprising at the Capitol in Washington.  This from the Times:  If someone is being criminally prosecuted, there’s often some dysfunction in their past. But I’ve been struck by... Read More Read More - [What Is That?](https://everyangel.org/what-is-that-2/): What is that?  How often have you asked yourself?  Can you remember the last time you wandered around your backyard with no chore in mind, noticing the strange, seeing something beautiful as if for the first time?  True confession, — I seldom do just that. On the other hand my grand daughter of two... Read More Read More - [Running Back and Forth Screaming](https://everyangel.org/running-back-and-forth-screaming/): Fracture Ellen Bass When the grizzly cubs were caught, collared, and taken away— relocated they call it— their mother ran back and forth on the road screaming. Brutal sound. Torn from her lungs. Her heart, twisted knot, hot blood rivering to the twenty-six pounding bones of her feet. Just weeks before I watched a... Read More Read More - [Machines Fire & Steel](https://everyangel.org/machines-fire-steel/): What is it about machinery, the proximity of forged, of cast metal, that combination of fire and steel of a machine that has shaped the male psyche of my generation?  Will I always fail to do justice to the attraction of the symmetry, the “magic” of artifice, — which strikes home to the male... Read More Read More - [Playing With Fire](https://everyangel.org/playing-with-fire/): Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time. Write your self. Your body must be heard. Only then will the immense resources of the unconscious spring forth. p. 880 To write and thus to forge for herself the anti-logos weapon. To become at will the taker and initiator, for... Read More Read More - [Metaphor](https://everyangel.org/metaphor/): The mother, too, is a metaphor. It is necessary and sufficient that the best of herself be given to woman by another woman for her to be able to love herself and return in love the body that was “born” to her. Touch me, caress me, you the living no-name, give me my self... Read More Read More - [The Texture Of Time](https://everyangel.org/the-texture-of-time/): Monday, glorious Monday morning… Awaking late, I discovered a day of sunlight softly filtered by a milky-blue sky.  For mid-August, today the 15th, air temperature is delightfully pleasant.  Why don’t I return to the backyard, lay down in the grass, to gaze at the sky in utter bliss?  I feel that I should, or... Read More Read More - [Blown Out](https://everyangel.org/blown-out/): A few minutes until 7AM, and the streets of Geneva were silent, traffic on State Street was scarce.   A rare sensation of quiescence on a Sunday morning in this river town.  It will not last.  I begin to write, the raucous sound of the bean grinding machine, the animated conversation of baristas behind the... Read More Read More - [Of Retrogression](https://everyangel.org/of-retrogression/): Saturday morning dawns, sunny and temperate — a perfect mid-summer day for the Midwest.  There’s no possible summation of the state of things, — no matter the iphone news feed.  The extremes attract our attention as the fight or flight trigger is deep, encoded, that instinct for survival yet necessary, even if I cannot... Read More Read More - [Time To Hesitate...](https://everyangel.org/time-to-hesitate/): All life, and consequently the life of history, is made up of simple moments, each of them relatively undetermined in respect to the previous one, so that in it reality hesitates, walks up and down, and is uncertain whether to decide for one or other of various possibilities. …this metaphysical hesitancy which gives to... Read More Read More - [Vulgarity As A Right](https://everyangel.org/vulgarity-as-a-right/): …the individual finds himself already with a stock of ideas. He decides to content himself with them and to consider himself intellectually complete. As he feels the lack of nothing outside himself, he settles down definitely amid his mental furniture. Such is the mechanism of self-obliteration. The mass-man regards himself as perfect. …it never... Read More Read More - [Politics And Gratitude](https://everyangel.org/politics-and-gratitude/): I walked in the woods a day after the rain.  Several weeks have passed since I last visited.  I was delighted at the change, the head-high foliage, the exuberance of mid summer’s transformation of growth.  I took some photos of wild flowers.  Consider — everything that grows in the marsh belongs where it  grows… ... Read More Read More - [Again, Red Or Blue Pill*](https://everyangel.org/again-red-or-blue-pill/): Sunshine!  Much needed rain is followed by a morning of sunlight.  Often I take Nature for granted.  Somehow it doesn’t come to mind that the most basic needs and pleasures of my life directly depends on the soil, upon moisture and light in proper measure.  No application of technology can possibly counter the inexorable... Read More Read More - [Imagination](https://everyangel.org/imagination-2/): A persistent rain is falling.   I am happy to see it.  Trees will benefit from taking a deep drink of fresh water.  These mornings are rare.  They are a precious cue to reflection about the kid who still lives within.  You know, — that kid who “hated” rain days, always longed to be out-of-doors,... Read More Read More - [There Is No Plan B](https://everyangel.org/there-is-no-plan-b/): Sunday morning almost 9 AM and a steady rain falls.  Days of gentle rain are few it seems to me.  Weather seems more hot.  Rain comes after extended dry spells, in a torrent.  Climatologists expect the trend to continue.  What is to be done?  That is the question. Life requires incremental exchange.  A rapid,... Read More Read More - [Some Way Outta Here](https://everyangel.org/some-way-outta-here-2/): The world does not seek to have more existence, nor does it seek to persist in its existence. On the contrary, it is looking for the most spiritual way to escape reality. Through thought, the world is looking for what could lead to its own loss. The absolute rule of symbolic exchange: is to... Read More Read More - [All That Matters...](https://everyangel.org/all-that-matters/): Is there more to say?  The only way to know – sit, and prepare to say it. I took several good photos yesterday while strolling around the Fabyan estate Japanese Tea Garden.  Few people were about so the wild life were stirring.  And there were the summer blossoms at the height of their magnificence. ... Read More Read More - [Dancing At Daytona](https://everyangel.org/daytona-and-dance/): Daytona 500 by Kayleb Rae Candrilli Where we’re from, we know ballet as Dale Earnhardt gliding through the traffic of Daytona; we know dance as our hands moving across a table of drunk Miller Lites. This is universal because I say it is. When my mother called me Kayleb for the first time, I remembered... Read More Read More - [Laughing Matters](https://everyangel.org/laughing-matters/): Everyone has ideas, even more than they need. What matters is the poetic singularity of analysis. Only this spirituality of language can justify writing. Not a critical objectivity of ideas. There will never be a solution to the contradiction of ideas, except inside language itself, in the energy and fortune (happiness) of language. Radical... Read More Read More - [Our Enigmatic World](https://everyangel.org/our-enigmatic-world/): Several days ago I offered a short quote from Baudrillard in an email to several friends.  The objection was made that I had not given a context to ease understanding of the admittedly obscure lines.  Once again here is an excerpt from Baudrillard’s essay Radical Thought.  Added context would not make his words more... Read More Read More - [We Are No Longer...](https://everyangel.org/we-are-no-longer/): I read an email this morning from a friend expressing anguish at the juxtaposition between the stunning accomplishments of mankind culturally and scientifically with the despoliation of Nature and the consequent global warming and climate catastrophe.  It is hard to conceive of anyone now living who is not aware of the event of climate... Read More Read More - [Because I Am Involved](https://everyangel.org/because-i-am-involved-2/): Death is coming and leaving the tavern, death leaving and coming in. by Frederico Garcia Lorca Many years ago I wrote this poem into one of my little notebooks.  There are nine of these small notebooks, small enough to fit inside of a rear pocket of my blue jeans.  I liked the poem by... Read More Read More - [How To Bastardize A Word](https://everyangel.org/how-to-bastardize-a-word/): Reading this poem a few days ago, I knew the poem deserved feature in a blog post.  This poem shows the bastardization of language, a symptom of the decay of comity and of peacable order in our towns and cities.  The controversy over the status of the door, consciously or unconsciously an attempt to... Read More Read More - [Finale Worth Remembering](https://everyangel.org/finale-worth-remembering/): It is Thursday.  A morning sun shines in brilliance.  Nature is awakens !  I can feel it. If you are a church-going person, today would be Maundy Thursday, a commemoration of the “last supper.”  Perhaps you remember the painting by Leonardo da Vinci?  How ironic that an aspect of that final week, was a... Read More Read More - [You And I Looking On](https://everyangel.org/you-and-i-looking-on/): There’s a gentle rain outside.  Trees show signs of emerging leaf.  Everything that I can see seems to be waiting.  Waiting for what?  Life is a procession, one thing after another.  Cause and effect… ad infinitum.  The mind imposes the notion of delay, waiting as a holiday parade, the marching band has to march... Read More Read More - [Another Song](https://everyangel.org/another-song/): Read ‘Em And Weep By Barry Manilow I’ve been tryin for hours just to think of what exactly to say I thought I leave you with a letter or a fiery speech like when an actor makes an exit at the end of a play and I’ve been dying for hours trying to fill... Read More Read More - [Gray](https://everyangel.org/gray/): Monday morning, 7 AM the sun already some distance above the horizon toward the river, illuminates a pearl gray sky.  It is overcast.  Gray, gray, gray is pronounced over and over by my grand daughter.  She is two and a half and delights to learn the name of colors. Gray is the color of... Read More Read More - [Holy Week](https://everyangel.org/holy-week/): I am the last person to mention Holy Week.  Holy Week is the commemoration of the apogee of the Christian mythos: Jesus’ triumphant arrival in Jerusalem, and events that follow.  Think of the hoopla surrounding the winner of ‘American Idol.’  As consequence of the word of mouth rumor of his outlandish teaching (love your... Read More Read More - [Looking, Remembering](https://everyangel.org/looking-remembering/): Standing by a Shelf by Brandon D. Johnson for Reuben When he looks at the edges, The covers of books and records, He remembers when and where He got them, how it felt. Everything’s a testament To life lived on the fringe Of some sense of sanity. All the vehicles for imbibing These treasures... Read More Read More - [Growing Flowers In A Desert](https://everyangel.org/growing-flowers-in-a-desert/): Again I demonstrate to myself Homo Sapiens are fragile mammals.  Expectation is obstructed, this is my second try, — the illusion of a stable self is dispelled.  My annoyance surfaces and I express anger, expletives, desire has been frustrated…  The social self, a seductive illusion, is jangled by circumstance.  And so it goes.  I... Read More Read More - [Entranced](https://everyangel.org/entranced/): Thursday morning.  I am existentially feel disoriented.  Just read an account of the war in Ukraine, a story about proximity fused mines left by the retreating Russians.  These mines explode when a sensor detects a person passing by, scattering shrapnel in a 50 foot radius.  My imagination conjures up a Terminator movie…  This is... Read More Read More - [As We Imagined It](https://everyangel.org/as-we-imagined-it/): High, Higher, Highest by Samuel Hazo                                           Viewed from space, the world’s                                            impersonal.                                                                 France appears,                                            but no Frenchmen.                                                                                      Then Germany,                                            without... Read More Read More - [The Unforgivable](https://everyangel.org/the-unforgivable/): I have never been a Led Zeppelin fan.  Taste in music, taste in art has nothing to do with reason.  It comes down to serendipity, the genre’s of music that one is exposed to by accident of your time and place in this world.  That’s all.  There’s no independent baseline of measure, when it... Read More Read More - [Music Vs. Silence Of The Dead](https://everyangel.org/music-vs-silence-of-the-dead/): I watched the Grammy’s Award Show.  I am an “old guy” so I knew in advance most of the show content would be barely understood.  Music is the voice of a generation.  Several generations and more have come into being since mine was up and coming.  The Boomer generation was the one born right... Read More Read More - [Your One Life To Take Care](https://everyangel.org/your-one-life-to-take-care/): We traveled by train into the city yesterday, to take in a theatrical performance of Six.  My first experience of the city post-pandemic, the streets and buildings seemed frozen in time, by comparison to my memory of the bustle of crowds and of the traffic congestion.  The dampened vibe was surreal.  Much has changed... Read More Read More - [Gett'in Through Stormy Weather](https://everyangel.org/gettin-through-stormy-weather/): …you know it’s now or never           Take a chance on rock ‘n’ roll Life is never easy and never will be.  By definition ‘to live’ is to feel the friction of cause and effect, the interior movement of changing mood and the exterior uncontrollable forces or personalities, competing for resources, for ascendancy… Sartre... Read More Read More - [Memory](https://everyangel.org/remembering-3/): Every single day is paradoxically heaven and hell.  My grand daughter cannot experience life in such terms because she is somewhere in the middle of her effort to acquire language.  I have no doubt that as years pass, with experience, reading, pursuit of scholarship, she will understand that unalloyed moments of joy flicker and... Read More Read More - [Still Here](https://everyangel.org/still-here/): Tomorrow will be my birthday.  I am still here.  In the course of asking myself, “how the hell did I reach this time and place,” I cannot answer in fine detail.  I have to think that shear accident, more than my share of luck has figured into the fact that I am within reach... Read More Read More - [Proposal: Great Oak Festival](https://everyangel.org/proposal-great-oak-festival/): Yesterday was a good day.  Choosing to revisit the Dick Young Forest Preserve in Batavia, when I arrived my vehicle was the the only one in the parking lot.  Following the path to Nelson Lake Marsh I grew comfortable with the solitude.  My company was the wind, the brown vegetation, and tender new growth invisibly... Read More Read More - [To Hold Back The Night](https://everyangel.org/to-hold-back-the-night/): This morning’s New York Times report on the war in Ukraine is a meditation upon the logic of war. “Stand with you, period” President Biden, in a passionate speech from Warsaw on Saturday, proclaimed the West’s complete support for Ukraine. “We stand with you, period,” Biden said. “Not doing enough” The next day, Ukraine’s... Read More Read More - [The Long March](https://everyangel.org/the-long-march/): I watched the 94th Academy Awards last night,  a bit reluctantly.  The Academy Awards show, as such shows go, become absurd in the bid to out-do themselves.  Each year the aspiration is for more of a spectacle than anything done in the past.  The need to produce “a show” to attract advertisers competes with... Read More Read More - [Vakarchuk](https://everyangel.org/vakarchuk/): “Even if you’re alone, you’re destined to do it…” Svyatoslav Vakarchuk, 46, the lead singer of Okean Elzy and perhaps Ukraine’s biggest star, was supposed to be preparing to play the band’s latest album to packed venues across the world from April… Since, he has sung in Odessa near the Duc de Richelieu monument... Read More Read More - [The Show That Never Ends](https://everyangel.org/the-show-that-never-ends/): Brain fog…  At least that was my condition upon waking this morning.  It is gray, windy, a day chilled with winter’s retreat.  The disorientation, as if my senses were obstructed by a old exhausted filter, continued until I arrived at Starbucks.  Now I am into my second cup of coffee.  I watched the 1970... Read More Read More - [The Hour Of Darkness](https://everyangel.org/grief/): My mood, my internal weather is as somber as the morning sky.  The news from Ukraine is of widespread shelling of neighborhoods, of a mother wounded by shrapnel in the face, as she covers her child to protect it from death in the air.  There is news of thousands of civilians removed from Mariupol,... Read More Read More - [Looking To China Grove](https://everyangel.org/looking-to-china-grove/): We live in through and by our stories do we not? Who could I possibly be apart from the stories that I tell myself? What could I become unless my imagination is sparked by the stories which you have told me? The ultimate form of human association is marked by vulnerability, – such that... Read More Read More - [Love Is Like A Shadow](https://everyangel.org/love-is-like-a-shadow/): We began our discussion on the expansive subject of “love.”  What can be said philosophically about love, or about “falling in love?”  Love is a subject commanding enormous attention, as witnessed by innumerable novels, pop ballads, movies, and the Hallmark channel.  “Falling in love” is a euphemism that is often overheard.  The expression can... Read More Read More - [Mariupol](https://everyangel.org/mariupol/): The officer, who had once begged us to show the world his dying city, now pleaded with us to go. He nudged us toward the thousands of battered cars preparing to leave Mariupol. The deaths came fast. On Feb. 27, we watched as a doctor tried to save a little girl hit by shrapnel.... Read More Read More - [Water](https://everyangel.org/water/): The first spring rain produced about an inch of rainfall.   An inch is a good beginning.  With another day of gentle rain, we will be off the starting-line of growing season.  It sounds strange to say “we.”  By habit we think of homo sapiens as distinct, abstract, essentially different from nature.  That is a... Read More Read More - [Passage](https://everyangel.org/passage/): What does it take to become human, to bridge the gap between… zoe and bios, physiology and biography, nature and spirit, the somatic and symbolic? For us life is meaning and meaning is life. —Inner Experience and Worldly Revolt; Arendt’s Bearing on Kristeva’s Project by Noëlle McAfee, Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy The... Read More Read More - [Rain](https://everyangel.org/rain-2/): There is a light rain falling.  Rain began yesterday.  I never complain about the rain.  What I fear is drought depriving vegetation of nourishment in the growing season.  Severe drought stresses mature trees, making older trees susceptible to disease.  I feel kinship to trees.  Trees provide shelter to a variety of mammals, birds, even... Read More Read More - [Gypsies All](https://everyangel.org/gypsies-all/): It is Friday morning.  After rising, switching on the iphone, a text message was waiting.  A friend asked if I could meet him at Limestone Coffee Shop at 7.  I had ten minutes.  I pressed ahead with the bowl of cheerios, grabbed my coat and was out the door.  Arriving at the coffee shop... Read More Read More - [Where The Streets Have Names](https://everyangel.org/where-the-streets-have-names/): Mariupol They are stacked together with dozens of others in this mass grave on the outskirts of the city. A man covered in a bright blue tarp, weighed down by stones at the crumbling curb. A woman wrapped in a red and gold bedsheet, her legs neatly bound at the ankles with a scrap... Read More Read More - [Friendship](https://everyangel.org/friendship/): Met up with two friends this morning.  Walking along the riverfront, in the presence of waterbirds congregating on the far bank, commenting on the old buildings, built by several generations before the present, the buildings rehabilitated, upgraded not only for our end use purposes, but a reminder that we are not the first to... Read More Read More - [Memory](https://everyangel.org/memory/): Shaking inwardly again this morning.  I planned to write only about Rock N Roll.  After I write what I have to say about that, — more is to be said about the war in Ukraine. Hold On, I’m Comin’ By Sam and Dave Now don’t you ever be sad Lean on me when times... Read More Read More - [A Sight Like This](https://everyangel.org/a-sight-like-this/): Reinforcements Marianne Moore The vestibule to experience is not to    Be exalted into epic grandeur. These men are goingTo their work with this idea, advancing like a school of fish through Still water—waiting to change the course or dismiss    The idea of movement, till forced to. The words of the GreeksRing in our ears, but they... Read More Read More - [No Minnesotan Ever Wanted To Take Over The World](https://everyangel.org/no-minnesotan-ever-wanted-to-take-over-the-world/): This tune comes from my past.  It is a “message in a bottle” a whisper in my ear from the god.   Something like Socrates’ daimonion, which from a child had spoke cautionary messages to him…  The whispered message of this old song, that we are borne along by time.  The passage of time is... Read More Read More - [Weekend Reflection](https://everyangel.org/a-weekend-reflection/):    Thought written, represented is a passage through evil, …the most profound way of avoiding radical evil… the stoppage of representation and questioning. -excerpt, New Forms of Revolt by Julia Kristeva, pp 9 The Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy Saturday morning comes with brilliant sunlight and cold.  The cold is reminder that winter... Read More Read More - [Heaven Or Hell](https://everyangel.org/heaven-or-hell/): Do we not all “live” at the Hotel California? “You can check out anytime but you can never leave…” Bombs and rockets rained down last night.  Russian missiles struck at least three cities in western and central Ukraine, and there were reports of fierce fighting on the outskirts of Kyiv. — according to the... Read More Read More - [War And Calming Our Fears](https://everyangel.org/war-and-calming-our-fears/): War is the ultimate atrocity, the heart of evil.  War is the failure of civilized life, when the bonds of “common sense” between us break, the rage of the petulant child erupting in irrational destruction.  This morning I awakened to read the story of the Perebyinis family in the New York Times.  War in... Read More Read More - [Ukraine Is Iconic](https://everyangel.org/ukraine-is-iconic/): Shaking inwardly again this morning.  The day is beautiful.  For many days my life has been beautiful.  There have been some dark days, dark existentially, a time when I could not foresee a way forward.  Nevertheless by act of faith, absurd as it felt, I carried on.  Near by were others who believed that... Read More Read More - [Again](https://everyangel.org/the-road-2/): The Tuesday morning sun shines brilliantly framed by blue sky.  There are no clouds.  I understand why the Maya and many other peoples worshiped the sun.  The sun, our sun, gives life.  Sol Invictus, the unconquered sun, was a god of the later Roman empire.  Sol was of supreme importance, until Constantine abandoned Sol... Read More Read More - [Time Goes So Slowly](https://everyangel.org/time-goes-so-slowly/): It is snowing.  There is purity in a cover of snow.  That’s how I’d prefer life.  In my imagined world, in paradise all would be love, peace and harmony. In this world there is friction and response.   That is all that you can expect.  And sometimes there’s violence, immediate, extreme, murderous.  Survival and... Read More Read More - [Moving Day](https://everyangel.org/moving-day/): Yesterday was moving day.  I pitched in, doing what I could to assist my daughter and her partner in their move from Wheaton to Deerfield.  Moving is a many day’s long process, culminating with moving day.  Boxes packed with household items moved to the center of each room.  On moving day, the movers arrive... Read More Read More - [Am I My Brother's Keeper?*](https://everyangel.org/a-facetious-people/): Time for writing is limited today.  I did not post yesterday.  Posting nothing again would be morally indefensible under the circumstances. This was the lead paragraph in The Morning news update from the New York Times: First, a news update: Russia continued its broad offensive in Ukraine today, pummeling cities and towns. Ukrainian officials... Read More Read More - [Laughing](https://everyangel.org/laughing/): This morning in a fog, dazed in disbelief.  The siege of Ukraine continues.  The port of Kherson has fallen.  It is a city of 300,000.  The bombardment of other cities continues. My mind reels at the news, that Xi Jinping General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party asked Putin of Russia to delay the... Read More Read More - [Are You Not Entertained?](https://everyangel.org/are-you-not-entertained/): The well of desire!  Am I falling into a well?  Or like Moses, am I to ascend? Do I rise to a divine calling?  What metaphor best describes the palpable sensation of absence, some “thing” that is missing, a loss that must be sought after?  How many ways to describe the quest, that ends... Read More Read More - [Things Holding Together](https://everyangel.org/things-holding-together/): Can I, should I take a break in writing about the defense of Ukraine?  Yes and no…  Life is many things.  Even in war there are interludes in assault, in the effort to destroy and kill.  Especially in abject misery, in ravening terror — a pause is useful to recognize, to feel gratitude that... Read More Read More - [The Fighting Continues](https://everyangel.org/the-fighting-continues/): Monday morning, the Russian assault on Kyiv continues.  Ukrainian resistance has been fierce, the intended lightning quick investment of the capital city bogged down.  The Russians have sufficient armor, artillery and infantry to squeeze the outnumbered defenders.  Infrastructure is destroyed in the course of the shelling, rocket attacks, the street fighting.  For information on... Read More Read More - [Zelensky - Need Ammo, Not A Ride](https://everyangel.org/zelensky-need-ammo-not-a-ride/): Zelensky turned down a US offer of evacuation, the Ukraine Embassy in Britain said Saturday on Twitter. “The fight is here; I need ammunition, not a ride,” Zelensky told the US, according to the embassy.   — CNN Until his surprise election in 2019, Volodymyr Zelenskyy played a president on TV. Today, the 44-year-old is... Read More Read More - [Come On In See The Show](https://everyangel.org/come-on-in-see-the-show/): Saturday morning, gleaming sunlight upon pure fallen show, and at Starbucks I wrestle with words again.  Each day presents a new contestation to say what is sayable. Before turning in last night I noted that on television an interview conducted with a female Ukrainian diplomat.  By all appearances it was a measured, sober, responsible... Read More Read More - [The One Ring](https://everyangel.org/the-one-ring/): “Western leaders and diplomats,” she wrote, “think they live in a world where rules matter, where diplomatic protocol is useful, where polite speech is valued. All of them think that when they go to Russia, they are talking to people whose minds can be changed by argument or debate. They think the Russian elite... Read More Read More - [How Easy To Make A Ghost](https://everyangel.org/how-easy-to-make-a-ghost/): How to Kill by Keith Douglas Under the parabola of a ball, a child turning into a man, I looked into the air too long. The ball fell in my hand, it sang in the closed fist: Open Open Behold a gift designed to kill. Now in my dial of glass appears the soldier... Read More Read More - [The Walls Of Our Cage](https://everyangel.org/the-walls-of-our-cage/): The tendency of all … who have ever wanted to write or talk Ethics or Religion was to run against the boundaries of language. This running against the walls of our cage is perfectly, absolutely hopeless. Ethics so far as it springs from the desire to say something about the ultimate meaning of life,... Read More Read More - [Remembering Dave Hickey](https://everyangel.org/remembering-dave-hickey/): All revolutions are aesthetic… Taste is power, and power is politics… So taste has enormous power to shape history. If it makes your scalp tingle, it’s art. “Bad taste is real taste, and good taste is just the residue of someone else’s privilege.” Jazz exemplifies the possibly doomed experiment of being totally free, with... Read More Read More - [The Outrage One Does Not Want](https://everyangel.org/the-outrage-one-does-not-want/): A Russian invasion of Ukraine would look like the kind of war that has been largely absent in the past 80 years and that was once common. It would involve a powerful nation setting out to expand its regional dominance by taking over a neighbor. A war like this — a voluntary war of... Read More Read More - [Freeze, Thaw, Freeze](https://everyangel.org/freezing-and-thawing/): Let This Darkness Be a Bell Tower By Rainer Maria Rilke Quiet friend who has come so far, feel how your breathing makes more space around you. Let this darkness be a bell tower and you the bell. As you ring, what batters you becomes your strength. Move back and forth into the change.... Read More Read More - [A Child's Uneven Scrawl](https://everyangel.org/a-childs-uneven-scrawl/): Saturday, late February, and out-of-doors is bitter cold.  This is the cold season, a time suited for reflection.  Waking early, making my way to Starbucks, two thoughts were looping in my mind.  I checked my iphone news feed soon after rising.  I felt relief that Ukraine is not yet fighting, dying to fend off... Read More Read More - [No Matter How Difficult Or Costly](https://everyangel.org/no-matter-the-difficulty-or-cost/): Capitalism is an extractive circuit which quite literally crisscrosses the world. 1.  Its global value chains stretch through physical infrastructure and “frictionless” financial flows at the speed allowed by telecommunications; fossil fuels; and geophysical, technological, psychosocial, and bodily limits and “optimizations.” 2.  It connects economically and ecologically dispossessed agricultural communities in the Global South... Read More Read More - [Always Wanting More](https://everyangel.org/always-wanting-more-2/): Took a walk yesterday; a mid-winter warmup, the sidewalk was melted clear of ice.  Walking past Almond Marsh I felt sad, resonating with the gray sky, the muted brown of the decaying cattails. The melt water was a sheen of reflected light upon an ice covered marsh.  The world before me appeared ethereal drained... Read More Read More - [Valentine's Day Postscript](https://everyangel.org/valentines-day-postscript/): Yesterday I wondered if they celebrate February 14 as Valentine’s Day in Ukraine.  I consulted the Oracle, no longer at Delphi.  The answer: yes they do.  That it is possible to celebrate love when surrounded by serried ranks of armor, self-propelled artillery, motorized infantry seemed a truly human image of resistance.  We ought to... Read More Read More - [Valentine's Day](https://everyangel.org/valentines-day/): Yesterday was Valentine’s Day.  Laura and I had breakfast together at Buttermilk which is an uncommonly good place for biscuits.  We reflected upon the many years that we have been together.  Our journey has been worthwhile, a mutual learning.  In a manner of speaking, from our first meeting, the initial conversation I found her interesting. ... Read More Read More - [Short Story-No Last Words](https://everyangel.org/short-story-no-last-words/): Wake Up, Mario by Martín Espada For Mario Gonzalez Arenales (1994-2021) He’s not doing anything wrong. He’s just scaring my wife.—call to the Alameda Police Department, April 19, 2021 They watched him from the window of the house, a man at the fencein a crooked wool cap, chipping at their tree with a comb,... Read More Read More - [Go For A Ride](https://everyangel.org/going-for-a-ride/): “Moments are torn from us,” Seneca wrote. “The whole future lies in uncertainty.” Fortune behaves as she pleases, he wrote. As we’ve talked about before, life comes at you fast. It doesn’t rhyme, it doesn’t reason, it doesn’t care about your wants or needs—it just is. All we can do is accept the uncertainty... Read More Read More - [Roxy](https://everyangel.org/roxy/): Revisionary by Robert Pinsky The globe on a tilted axis means The News. As the icon spins the angle seems to shift. Science has found ancestral Neanderthals. We have a bit of their blood. They painted caves Better than sapiens, as we named ourselves. History has found the Jews who fought for Hitler. Thousands... Read More Read More - [Saddle Up Partner](https://everyangel.org/saddle-up-partner/): Where would I be without a few good friends, without my family? To imagine how different my life could be, I would have never known about books which have changed my life.  There’s music which has transformed by sense of self, my being in the world, that I would never discover without a recommendation.... Read More Read More - [Deciding Without Help](https://everyangel.org/deciding-without-help/): A long quotation on the role of violence, — some difficult issues consequent to deciding upon a violent act, necessary for survival. This world is a violent place.  Homo Sapiens often have recourse to violence.  Ask any who live in Ukraine, or who lived in Afghanistan, or Iraq, or Syria…  Places wet with blood,... Read More Read More - [He Got Mauled.](https://everyangel.org/he-got-mauled/): After more than five hours of talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow, there was little doubt Emmanuel Macron walked into the grizzly bear’s den — and he got mauled. With more than 100,000 Russian troops and heavy weapons massed on the Ukrainian border, the French president and his advisers had insisted that,... Read More Read More - [Contra Fascism](https://everyangel.org/contra-fascism/): We object to the inquisitors who want to create faith and virtue from without; We object to all forms of fascism which seek to fashion the happiness of man from without; And also the paternalism which thinks that it has done something for [humankind] by prohibiting him from certain possibilities of temptation, whereas what... Read More Read More - [Napping & Doing Away With Limits](https://everyangel.org/napping-doing-away-with-limits/): [Humankind] extends his control by instruments which enable him to devour distances and to multiply the output of his effort in time; but he is always and only one. However, instead of accepting his limits, he tries to do away with them. He aspires to act upon everything and by knowing everything. -excerpt the... Read More Read More - [To Break Through The Wall](https://everyangel.org/to-break-through-the-wall/): This morning the sun was a fingernail of fire above the treeline across the river.  This poem was on my mind.  Life is a siege, sometimes a pitched battle against the darkness that surely will envelop our dreams — unless you, unless I resist.  As we grow older, it happens.  The ancient contest between... Read More Read More - [From That Formless Night](https://everyangel.org/from-that-formless-night/): But the truth is that if division and violence define war, the world has always been at war and always will be; if man is waiting for universal peace in order to establish his existence validly; he will wait indefinitely: there will never be any other future. …Our hold on the future is limited;... Read More Read More - [The Rigged Game](https://everyangel.org/playing-the-rigged-game/): Someone who knows me well took me to task this week on account of my contempt for capitalism.  His complaint paraphrased, – “Do you mean to say the guy operating the corner grocery down the street is an avaricious, exploiting….etc.”  He and I were not in a situation to discuss the matter at length,... Read More Read More - [Winter's Bone](https://everyangel.org/winters-bone/): Writing about the death of someone I did not know, I took a short walk in the snowfall to think.  There’s a purity about snow.  I remembered white symbolizes death in Japan.  Purity is erasure, a blank slate.  Death is erasure of the filigreed world, that Baroque montage of shape, color and sound, the... Read More Read More - [Life And Death](https://everyangel.org/this-world-no-jukebox/): She was thirty years old. Several days ago report of a suicide on my iphone feed caught my attention. The age of the individual prompted me to read further. She was a North Carolinian, my home state. Chosen Miss America 2019, she was a civil attorney who did free legal work for people unjustly... Read More Read More - [Capitalism Part II](https://everyangel.org/capitalism-part-ii/): Some additional thoughts on capitalism… I remember a time when capitalism did not seem so rapacious, as destructive in its general effect upon the social circle within my awareness.  Perhaps as a young adult in my twenties, I was simply ignorant, blind to suffering of others, particularly citizens of color.  Yes, I was ignorant... Read More Read More - [Our Economy of Violence](https://everyangel.org/our-economy-of-violence/): The specifically human form of aggression, violence, is closely connected to the awareness of death, which is exclusively human. The economy of violence is ruled by the logic of accumulation. The more violence you exert, the more powerful you feel. Accumulated killing power [Tötungsgewalt] produces a feeling of growth, force, power, [Macht] — of... Read More Read More - [To Juggle Away The Bitter Truth...](https://everyangel.org/to-juggle-away-the-bitter-truth/): Nihilistic pessimismand rationalistic optimismfail in their effort to juggle awaythe bitter truth of sacrifice:they also eliminate all reasons for wanting it. Someone told a young invalid who wept because she had to leave her home, her occupations, and her whole past life, “Get cured. The rest has no importance.” “But if nothing has any... Read More Read More - [A Being Of The Distances](https://everyangel.org/a-being-of-the-distances/): A child’s face is so moving, it is not that the child is more movingor that [she] has more of a right to happiness than the others:it is that [she] is the living affirmation of human transcendence;[she] is on the watch, she is an eager hand held out to the world,[she] is a hope,... Read More Read More - [About Guns](https://everyangel.org/about-guns/): American history has been about guns.  Ask any indigenous American.  Ask any Republican for that matter… Yesterday I watched an old Western movie entitled, Last Train From Gun Hill, staring Kirk Douglas and Anthony Quinn. The plot as you can guess is about outlaws and gun-play. The “good guy,” the one wearing the star... Read More Read More - [Not A Fan...](https://everyangel.org/not-a-fan/): I am not a fan of Heavy Metal music.  That would be an understatement.  If offered free tickets I would not attend a concert.  However I have friends who are fans of Heavy Metal.  There’s something about a song, or a band, or a composer that resonates with a chord in one’s own soul. ... Read More Read More - [We Don't Make The Rules](https://everyangel.org/we-dont-make-the-rules/): Yesterday I noticed this sign while stopping at a Starbucks.  I felt excited at the “sign” of sanity, a public display of reason in a time of covid.  Why in the name of humanity should we sacrifice lives, and “sacrifice” is the only word to use.  What of this childish desire to assert “freedom”... Read More Read More - [Blazing Death](https://everyangel.org/blazing-death/): Early morning, I left the house, the sun was a fiery ball at the tree line across a frozen river.  The vehicle temperature gauge read +2 degrees.  A song was playing on the local radio station. I am certain the poets, lyricists, playwrights, are the ones who show us the metaphors, perform the scenes... Read More Read More - [Winter And War](https://everyangel.org/winter-and-war/): Snow continues to fall.  I, the creature of habit, fetched my usual cup of coffee from Starbucks, despite the slippery roads.  I returned safely.  Perhaps I was a little lucky.  No accident and here I am. One has to be somewhere, as long as one is alive.  I’d rather be in Batavia, Illinois than... Read More Read More - [Shaking...](https://everyangel.org/shaking-3/): Last night before turning in I watched a piece on the Magellan channel about volcanoes.  Scenes of Mount St. Helens in Washington state, before and after the eruption on May 18, 1980 were featured.  An eerie aspect in the piece was a radio report, from an observer on the mountain side describing in some... Read More Read More - [Haunted By A Heart Upon A Wall](https://everyangel.org/haunted-by-a-heart-upon-a-wall/): For Homo Sapiens to live is to be aware of loss.  I doubt that is the case for any other mammal.  Language, the ability to think and to communicate with symbols allows us to contemplate time in the abstract, with memory of a past, and an imagined future.  We are unable to live solely... Read More Read More - [When Darkness Comes](https://everyangel.org/when-darkness-comes/): A poignant conversation happened between friends this week.  The occasion and opportunity for the exchange of words was the death of a renowned self-taught improvisational pianist Michael Jones.  Jones lived in Toronto and was an international recording artist. This morning I thought about other losses.  Upon waking I learned of the death of Meatloaf,... Read More Read More - [Epicurus II: Welcome To The Dance](https://everyangel.org/epicurus-ii-welcome-to-the-dance/): Choice/Responsibility  and  Fate/Doing What Your Daddy Done The trick it seems when it comes to philosophy is to make sense of a coincidence of opposites.  On the one hand, is our intuitive sense of choice, that decisions are pivot points with consequences for which we blame ourselves (and others) or believe to be praiseworthy. ... Read More Read More - [And When I Die](https://everyangel.org/and-when-i-die-2/): Two things, there are two momentous “passages” the unavoidable transitions attendant to this life.  Without any question there are two inescapable events that all living must abide, that of birth and that of death.  The first passage recedes in the past, is not even in memory.  The second great transition is ahead. I refer... Read More Read More - [View From The North](https://everyangel.org/view-from-the-north/): Yesterday was Martin Luther King Jr. day, the national Federal holiday for marking the birthday of Dr. King.  I was in high school, in the South when Dr. King was in the news.  King was organizing, raising to consciousness the formal and informal practices by which we whites were relegating black citizens to second... Read More Read More - [Zeitgeist](https://everyangel.org/zeitgeist/):   We spent part of the afternoon at one of the national booksellers, perusing the shelves.  Not that I “need” another book.  A bookstore is always an agreeable place, and especially on a chill winter’s day.  I spent some time examining the display of new fiction hardcover books.  A thought came to mind.  A... Read More Read More - [Ah, Freedom](https://everyangel.org/ah-freedom/): Every manneeds the freedom of other men,in a sense, always wants it, even though he may be a tyrant; the only thing he fails to do is to assume honestlythe consequences of such a wish. Only the freedom of others keeps each one of us from hardeningin the absurdity of facticity. -excerpt, The Ethics... Read More Read More - [Dead Or Alive](https://everyangel.org/dead-or-alive/): I took a walk yesterday.  A gray day, mid-January with a brisk breeze and thirty degrees.  I walked 3rd Street in Geneva, the mind stimulated by visual and tactile sensation, — as I passed by restaurants “coming to life” in early afternoon.  Reaching State Street, intending to purchase another cup of coffee from the... Read More Read More - [Laughing Till It Hurts](https://everyangel.org/laughing-till-it-hurts/): Publius Rutilius Rufus was incorruptible. And what was his reward for this? He was indicted on trumped up charges and driven into exile. Marcus Aurelius was good and decent and fair. And for this? Fate handed him a plague and floods…and then his best friend attempted a coup. And how do modern historians recognize... Read More Read More - [Too Little, Too Late...](https://everyangel.org/too-little-too-late/): Today I upgraded the theme software for this blog.  I paid a nominal amount for some added features.  Upon activating the new theme, I discovered the image for my header vanished.  The gods or demons within what-we-have-created, the world wide web, again manifested their presence.  Magic or superstition is that feeling of “mystery” in... Read More Read More - [Lucifer Rising](https://everyangel.org/lucifer-rising/): The discussion touching on Platonic idealism was fascinating.  Who is not captivated by an ideal, gleaming in transparent purity?  I certainly am.  Would I kill for an ideal?  Or to put it more plainly would I commit murder to advance an ideal?  I probably would, as many have.  I am admittedly a standard issue... Read More Read More - [The Greatest Story Teller](https://everyangel.org/the-greatest-story-teller-of-them-all/): I just finished reading The Phaedo written by Plato.  The Phaedo, is a story that receives its title from the name of a friend of Socrates who is observer and auditor of the last hours of Socrates’ life.  The last hours are spent in philosophical exchange with a circle of friends.  Plato, a playwright... Read More Read More - [Immigrant Song (our story)](https://everyangel.org/immigrant-song-our-story/): A confession: Writing about music, rock and roll in particular comes easily.  That is, by comparison finding the words to describe other topics; the more abstract the topic, the more difficult.  To find the exact word, that’s the key.  This tune by Led Zeppelin pierced “to the heart” as I drove to Starbucks this... Read More Read More - [Then I Pray To God...](https://everyangel.org/then-i-pray-to-god/): Sunday, and freezing mist has covered pavement with a quarter inch of ice.  I will be satisfied with the cup of coffee from the kitchen.  The short drive to the Starbucks on 3rd and State in Geneva would be a risk.  I appreciate the hot rich astringent cup of Starbucks coffee, and anticipate the... Read More Read More - [Holy Paths To Hell](https://everyangel.org/holy-paths-to-hell/): Never did I think that I’d feature music by a heavy metal band.  The genre does not inspire me, and perhaps that is a generational thing.  My father’s generation thought the performances of Elvis were disturbing, beyond the bounds of the conventions of popular music.  Perhaps a form of music emanates from the zeitgeist,... Read More Read More - [No Threats, No Promises](https://everyangel.org/no-threats-no-promises/): The universe is just there; that’s the only way one can view it and remain master of one’s senses. The universe neither threatens nor promises. It holds things beyond our sway: the fall of a meteor, growing old and dying. These are the realities of the universe and they must be faced regardless of... Read More Read More - [Becoming A Student](https://everyangel.org/becoming-a-student/): There is in all things a patternthat is part of our universe.It has symmetry, elegance, and grace–these qualities you find always in that which the true artist captures. You can find itin the turning of the seasons,in the way the sand trails along a ridge…We try to capture these patternsin our lives and in... Read More Read More - [On Interpretation](https://everyangel.org/on-interpretation/): So you’ve run out of things to say!  I imagine that a reader could react to this “throw-away” pop tune for the post of today.  I am often inspired by the challenge of writing about an art form.  Rock and roll is within that wide circle of made objects that we refer to as... Read More Read More - [Fear Of Existence](https://everyangel.org/fear-of-existence/): To exist is to make oneself a lack of being; it is to cast oneself into the world. Those who occupy themselves in restraining this original movement can be considered as sub-men. They have eyes and ears, but from their childhood on they make themselves blind and deaf, without love and without desire. This... Read More Read More - [Malefic Share](https://everyangel.org/malefic-share/): To go to the summit, to put oneself at risk without reason at least a reason that can be stated, to propose a summit as a summit, to risk only for the love of anguish. …a conclusion: we can only speak of a summit by altering it, making it equal to decline. But we... Read More Read More - [Wanting To Touch](https://everyangel.org/wanting-to-touch/): …burning desire in search of “communication.” Desire in “communication” bears essentially on the beyond of the being. But this beyond is not only the nothingness that limits us, toward which we throw ourselves, wanting to touch another being; it is at the same time the interrogation of the being that we are. …We can... Read More Read More - [Mushrooms Part II](https://everyangel.org/mushrooms-part-ii/): Roll The Bones By Rush Well, you can stake that claimGood work is the key to good fortuneWinners take that praiseLosers seldom take that blameIf they don’t take that gameAnd sometimes the winner takes nothingWe draw our own designsBut fortune has to make that frame We go out in the world and take our... Read More Read More - [More Mushrooms?](https://everyangel.org/more-mushrooms/): Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland by Lewis Carroll published in 1865 has been overlooked.  I hope to “catch up” with this widely recognized tale soon.  Amazon offered a paperback copy for $2.95 and I expect the book to arrive sometime Friday.  Time and space distortion is a feature of the story as I am given... Read More Read More - [Disarmed And Free](https://everyangel.org/disarmed-and-free/): A certain non-knowledge must leave me disarmed before what I have to do… so that I have to do it in order for me to feel freely obligated and bound to it… It is necessary to know the most and the best possible, but between the widest, the most refined, the most necessary knowledge,... Read More Read More - [Valentine's Day](https://everyangel.org/valentines-day-2/): Exceptional beauty, richness are evoked by disorders of the flesh. If the attracting light of those disorders is the sign of a summit, this summit is only open to chance; the virtue to which a moral goal is normally proposed is on the contrary set aside, made ridiculous. –excerpt On Nietzsche, Notes, by Georges... Read More Read More - [Lookout To Breakout](https://everyangel.org/on-the-lookout-to-breakout/): Temptation is the work of the flesh represented as at once desirable and dangerous possibility. What the body desires, that the mind re-presents in the grammar of language…  Are not words a form of touching, certainly a most oft used manner of touch? Desire and danger at the same time!  Temptation is excitement simultaneously... Read More Read More - [Where I Would Not Like To Go](https://everyangel.org/where-i-would-not-like-to-go/): We can hardly find the nothingness other than precisely where we would not like to go. Temptation is in a sense the extreme moment of sensuality. It is to the extent that we reject it that it makes us afraid, that sensuality has the power to make us attain nothingness. Insofar as temptation is... Read More Read More - [Streaming N' Screaming](https://everyangel.org/streaming-screaming/): The media is the politicians’ mirror, developed in the political and corporate financiers interest. It exists to sell a product. politicians and products alike thrive on being seen on a screen, they crave its validation. As a mirror it is but an image, a self-contained world, flat, insubstantial and brittle as glass. The media... Read More Read More - [Goin' Off The Deep End](https://everyangel.org/goin-off-the-deep-end/): Friday morning, the air clean, brisk, — is illumined by our sun.  Humanity is warmed by the same sun, as our home world rotates. Every word in the two sentences just written is relative, a marker for a set of relationships.  Nevertheless all of it feels absolutely true.  Do you not feel that humanity... Read More Read More - [Beating Against The Window](https://everyangel.org/beating-against-the-window/): Man is a fly behind a window and the time that he passes in beating against the window is the most human, being the most rebellious. –excerpt On Nietzsche, Notes, page 287 by Georges Bataille Sadness, tinged with some grief this morning.  Loss is more or less, greater and lesser, equivalent to life.  I... Read More Read More - [A Mind, Not For Rent](https://everyangel.org/a-mind-not-for-rent/): Midweek, the sun shines, the usual frigid winter cold has moderated.  A good day for a long walk, and lunch with a friend. What to write about as several things present themselves to mind today.  First is the wonder of learning, no matter our circumstances, there are elements at hand to admire, recognize as... Read More Read More - [A Gray Tuesday](https://everyangel.org/a-gray-tuesday/): A gray Tuesday, winter…  Surely this must be the mid-west.  Indeed, the Fox River Valley is west of Chicago.  A typical winter’s pall has ascended, and homo sapiens are inclined toward hibernation.  Never mind Chinese spy balloons, or an earthquake in Turkey, or a war grinding on between Russia and Ukraine, or commerce that... Read More Read More - [Music And Memory](https://everyangel.org/music-and-memory/): Life— that means for us constantly transforming all that we are into light and flame —also everything that wounds us; we simply cannot do otherwise. –excerpt The Gay Science, Preface, §3 by Friedrich Nietzsche Last night I watched the Grammy Awards on CBS.  I was indifferent to most of the two hour show.  It... Read More Read More - [Creating Gods](https://everyangel.org/creating-gods/): When one no longer finds God great, one no longer finds God anywhere; God must be denied or created. –excerpt The Will To Power, II. bk. 3 §422 by Friedrich Nietzsche Sunday morning, winter weather has moderated.  The sun is shining, a bonus for a mid-western winter’s day.  Very soon those with a lingering... Read More Read More - [Coloring](https://everyangel.org/coloring/): Theory of chance. The soul, a selective and self-nourishing entity, extremely shrewd and perpetually creative (this creative force is usually overlooked!) is conceived only as passive. To recognize the active force, the creative force among the contingencies: chance itself is only the clash of creative impulses. –excerpt The Will To Power, II, bk. 4,... Read More Read More - [What Would You Do For Love?](https://everyangel.org/what-would-you-do-for-love/): February 3rd, and bitter cold outside.  The number of patrons increase, in the warmth here at Starbucks.  I have no gut-feel of direction as to what to write; just awareness of being lost in a vast sea, for now, on the surface of an incomprehensible uncertainty.  All that I know is important for my... Read More Read More - [The Spicy Potion](https://everyangel.org/the-spicy-potion/): We should reconsider cruelty and open our eyes… Almost everything we call “higher culture” is based upon the spiritualization and deepening of cruelty: This is my proposition. That wild beast has not really been killed; it lives and flourishes, it has merely become — divine. What constitutes the painful voluptuousness of tragedy is cruelty;... Read More Read More - [Words Are The Only Victors*](https://everyangel.org/words-are-the-only-victors/): Wednesday morning, early and the sun has yet to rise.  It’s winter after all. Doubting that sleep would return at 5AM, after dressing and the routine bowl of cheerios, here I am at Starbucks.  This morning I anticipate traveling for a last time to my friend Al Lykin’s home.  Al died subsequent to a... Read More Read More - [A Serious Joke](https://everyangel.org/a-serious-joke/): Sunny and zero degrees F outside.  You’d think that on such a chill winter’s day the warm-blooded would be conserving energy, hibernating, or ensconced in a safe habitat. And we should call every truth false that is not accompanied by at least one laugh. –excerpt Thus Spoke Zarathustra, pt. 1, Reading and Writing, By... Read More Read More - [Danger And Play](https://everyangel.org/throw-me-a-line/): A real man wants two things:danger and play. Therefore he wants womanas the most dangerous plaything. –excerpt Thus Spoke Zarathustra, pt. 1, On Little Old and Young Woman, by Friedrich Nietzsche Nietzsche, a prolific writer throughout his professional life, said many outrageous things, a challenge to life-as-we-know-it.  Reading Nietzsche, I have learned to be... Read More Read More - [Re-membering](https://everyangel.org/re-membering/): Memory.  How crucial, even sublime is the faculty of memory.  In the pre-dawn I dreamed.  I was back at my childhood home.  Perhaps it was only a fragment, a sliver of sensation.   I saw, or better expressed, felt that I was in the hallway of the old house where I grew up, living... Read More Read More - [What Have We Done](https://everyangel.org/what-have-we-done/): January 28 at 9AM is showing 19 degrees F outside and snow is coming.  Starbucks is filled with the “Saturday crowd,” the atmosphere infused with the babble of voices.  Life goes on — until it doesn’t.  I read this in the New York Times summary of the news which is received by email daily:... Read More Read More - [Thinking About Artificial Intelligence](https://everyangel.org/thinking-about-artificial-intelligence/): We are not thinking frogs, nor objectifying and registering mechanisms with their innards removed: ceaselessly we have to give birth to our thoughts out of our pain, and maternally, endow them with all that we have of blood, heart, fire, joy, passion, torment, conscience, and fate. –Excerpt, The Gay Science, Preface §3, by Friedrich... Read More Read More - [Virtue, Or Life Lived Dangerously](https://everyangel.org/virtue-or-life-lived-dangerously/): One kind of man will risk nothing, another wants risks. Are we others contemptuous of life? On the contrary, we instinctively seek life raised to a higher power, life lived in danger— but that, to repeat it, does not mean we want to be more virtuous than others. Pascal, for example, wanted to risk... Read More Read More - [Underestimating Ourselves](https://everyangel.org/underestimating-ourselves/): We who think and feel at the same time are those who really continually fashion something that had not been there before: the whole eternally growing world of valuations,    colors,       accents,          perspectives,             scales,                affirmations,                   and negations. This poem that we... Read More Read More - [Sun Down Honey, Moon Up In Wine](https://everyangel.org/sun-down-honey-moon-up-in-wine/): You want if possible — and there is no more insane “if possible” — to abolish suffering. And we? It really seems that we would rather have it higher and worse than ever. Well-being as you understand it — that seems to us an end, a state that makes humanity ridiculous and contemptible —... Read More Read More - [Wheels On Her Feet](https://everyangel.org/wheels-on-her-feet/): Monday morning, waking early before light, — couldn’t sleep.  What can one do but adjust…  I suppose the loss of anyone is a stand-alone experience, an uprooting, a sensation of gratitude and regret.  Fuck…  Al’s passing was timely in that his living years were full.  I mean his stories “ran over,” as a glass... Read More Read More - [In Our End Dark Is Right](https://everyangel.org/in-our-end-dark-is-right/): Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Though wise men at their end know dark is right, Because their words had forked no lightning they Do not go gentle into that good night. –excerpt Do... Read More Read More - [Faith, Love And Hope](https://everyangel.org/faith-love-and-hope/): East Coker by T. S. Eliot III I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hopeFor hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faithBut the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.Wait... Read More Read More - [David Crosby](https://everyangel.org/david-crosby/): EAST COKER By T. S. Eliot I In that open field If you do not come too close, if you do not come too close, On a summer midnight, you can hear the music Of the weak pipe and the little drum And see them dancing around the bonfire The association of man and... Read More Read More - [Hero And Fool](https://everyangel.org/a-hero-and-a-fool/): From time to time we need to be separated from ourselves to gaze upon ourselves from above, and, from an artistic distance, to laugh and cry over ourselves. We must discover the hero no less than the fool in our passion for knowledge; we must occasionally find pleasure in our folly or we cannot... Read More Read More - [Animal](https://everyangel.org/animal/): …there can be no doubtthat mankind is more changeable, uncertain, inconsistent than any other animal —he is the sick animal:how has this come about? Certainly he has also dared more,done more things, braved more and challenged fatemore than all the other animals put together;he, the great experimenter with himself,discontented and insatiable, wrestling with animals,nature... Read More Read More - [Being Unhappy](https://everyangel.org/being-unhappy/): A philosophy that does not make us happier, more virtuous; that on the contrary, lets it be understood that one will likely perish in its service; that one will be isolated from one’s times, burned and scaled; that one will have to pass through every contempt and hate; that one will need a great... Read More Read More - [To Humankind...](https://everyangel.org/cheers-to-humankind/): What is great in humankind is that he is a bridge and not an end: What can be loved in man is that he/she is a passage and a fall. –Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Prologue §4 I love he/she whose soul is deep, even in being wounded, and who can perish of a small experience:... Read More Read More - [To Walk Away](https://everyangel.org/to-walk-away/): How often is a sign encountered that “points one way.”  No matter how strong the affection, the essence, the soul-deep person that we love, even with a desperate love — must take journey that differs from the one which fate has determined I must take.  It is simply not true that love conquers all. ... Read More Read More - [Gifts](https://everyangel.org/gifts/): LITTLE GIDDING  By T. S. Eliot (No. 4 of ‘Four Quartets’) II Let me disclose the gifts reserved for age To set a crown upon your lifetime’s effort. First, the cold friction of expiring sense Without enchantment, offering no promise But bitter tastelessness of shadow fruit As body and soul begin to fall asunder.... Read More Read More - [Winter's Fire](https://everyangel.org/winters-fire/): LITTLE GIDDING  by T. S. Eliot (No. 4 of ‘Four Quartets’) I Midwinter spring is its own season Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown, Suspended in time, between pole and tropic. When the short day is brightest, with frost and fire, The brief sun flames the ice, on pond and ditches, In windless cold that... Read More Read More - [Become Gods](https://everyangel.org/become-gods/): “How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall... Read More Read More - [That Madman](https://everyangel.org/that-madman/): Have you not heard of that madmanwho lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly: “I seek God! I seek God!”—As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Has he got lost? asked one. Did... Read More Read More - [This Twittering World](https://everyangel.org/this-twittering-world/): What is there to say?  Sleeping till late this morning (9AM) I hope for recovery from Covid.  Some congestion lingers.  Does one know if congestion in the throat is advancing or receding?  There’s only trust in nature, and no knowing. A return to the Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot is gratifying.  I am... Read More Read More - [Seijin No Hi](https://everyangel.org/seijin-no-hi/): Monday brings sunshine.  “The world” continues.  The myriad outworking of cause and effect: today was inscribed in yesterday, and while we do not know what tomorrow will bring, all of it is etched faintly or deeply into this present.  It is “Coming of Age Day” (Seijin no Hi) in Japan for all females of... Read More Read More - [Your Moment Of Revolt](https://everyangel.org/your-moment-of-revolt/): In other words, a moment of revolt inherent in the will-to-understand beyond practical ends cannot be prolonged indefinitely: to be the whole of the universe man/woman must let go of his/her principles: accepting nothing that he/she is other than the tendency to go beyond what he/she is. This being that I am is the... Read More Read More - [Letting Go Of My Principles](https://everyangel.org/letting-go-of-my-principles/): I can only be this whole man, by letting go. I cannot be that being through my will: my will is necessarily a will to succeed! If misfortune (or chance) wants me to let go, then I would know that I am the whole man, subordinated to nothing. In other words, a moment of... Read More Read More - [Immense Foolishness](https://everyangel.org/friabile/): It is because an acute intelligence sometimes appears to hide, the immense foolishness to which it is linked –of which it is only a negligible part –does not delay in returning to it. The certainty of the readers inconsistency, the friability of the most astute constructions constitutes the profound truth of books. Since appearances... Read More Read More - [Live And Let Die](https://everyangel.org/live-and-let-die-3/): Recovery continues from Covid.  Paxlovid, the anti-viral med seems to be working.  Thus far I am able to read and to write.  I could be much worse off.  I feel gratitude. This is a segment from this morning’s New York Times concerning the collapse and cardiac arrest of Buffalo Bill’s Damar Hamlin on Monday... Read More Read More - [Covid](https://everyangel.org/covid/): “Good luck” lasts only so long.  The smile of fortune is just that, — a smile.  Nothing in this world lasts indefinitely. I am contending with Covid.  No need to describe the unpleasant fever and a cough.  Many have been afflicted with the virus, and many have died. Illness is an opportunity to consider... Read More Read More - [Mad Burn of Chance](https://everyangel.org/mad-burn-of-chance/): How can one avoid knowing once —then again, and endlessly— the lie of the objects for which we burn? Nevertheless, in this senseless darkness, more distant than every nonsense, than every collapse, passion still lacerates me to “communicate” to those I love the news of this nightfall, as if this “communication,” and none other,... Read More Read More - [Turn The Page](https://everyangel.org/turn-the-page-2/): Sunday is the first day of 2023.  As we mark time, the New Year has begun.  We chose to spend New Year’s Eve dining at Foxfire in Geneva.  We were seated at our table promptly in accord with our reservation and expectation.  The table service was as efficient, our server communicated a warmth that was... Read More Read More - [The Universe Does Not Care](https://everyangel.org/the-universe-does-not-care/): New Year’s eve! Here is a fragment of a poem, Nothing New by Richard Greene: The world doesn’t stop at midnight like a train changing engineers. There’s no bump in the road of time. The scene hasn’t changed. The characters remain the same. The play goes on as before. Dramatic climax is no more... Read More Read More - [At Dusk, The Calmness Remains Unshaken](https://everyangel.org/at-dusk-the-calmness-remains-unshaken/): The Germans are undoubtedly giving up. The artillery in the night shakes the doors. At dusk, twenty some inexpressibly violent explosions (an important ammunition depot went up): I felt the shock of the air between my legs and shoulders. Seven kilometers away, the flames lit up the sky. I saw one of the explosions... Read More Read More - [Toothbrushes](https://everyangel.org/toothbrushes/): The newsis as manufactured a productas an electric toothbrush and issubject to the same market forces and prevailing power system.You do not make toothbrushes under capitalismto stop people buying more of them.in the same way, media product is presentedas desirable and necessary, more of it is nicer still. Television, is controlled, not by its... Read More Read More - [Star Dancer](https://everyangel.org/star-dancer/): If everone breath came to me of that heavenly needthat constrains even accidentsto dance star-dances; If I everlaughed the laughter of creative lightningwhich is followed obediently but grumblinglyby the long thunder of the deed; If I everplayed dice with gods at their table,the earth, till the earth quaked and burst and snortedup floods of... Read More Read More - [The Worst Mistake](https://everyangel.org/the-worst-mistake/): Among the worst mistakes a prisoner could make was to watch (to notice) another prisoner’s mistreatment. There the SS seemed totally irrational, but only seemed so. For example, if a SS man was killing off a prisoner and other prisoners dared to look at what was going on in front of their eyes he... Read More Read More - [Never Enough World](https://everyangel.org/never-enough-world/): …if there is no great machine in the name of which to speak, how is action set,      how can action be required,           and what is to be done? –excerpt On Nietzsche, by Georges Bataille, trans. by Stuart Kendall, p. 143 Monday is the “day after”. Christmas day was yesterday.  I’m never able... Read More Read More - [Toasting The Immense Gentleness](https://everyangel.org/toastin-the-derangement-of-things/): How at that moment— at the limit of the laceration of reason— happiness grows in me from my obvious inability to possess it. We are like the meadow about to be inundated with rain, disarmed under a wan sky. having only one recourse: to carry our glasses to our lips, and to drink gently... Read More Read More - [I Saw Them Radiating...](https://everyangel.org/i-saw-them-radiating/): Chance, happinesswhich don’t exalt me,arriving unexpectedly, in calm,I saw them radiating, gently, from their simple exuberance.and I said of laughter, “I am laughter—to the extremity of outburst— so much that it is superfluous to laugh and out of place.” In the wood, the sun rising, I was free, my life rising effortlessly andlike a... Read More Read More - [Losing Oneself](https://everyangel.org/losing-oneself/): Time lets “what is” fall on individuals. The individual himself (herself) – in time – loses himself, falls in a movement in which he dissolves –is “communication,” not inevitably from one to another. With this exception, that chance is the duration of the individual in his (her) loss, time, which needs the individual, is... Read More Read More - [Nativity Unwrapped](https://everyangel.org/the-nativity-unwrapped/): When we use the word “happiness” as defined by our philosophy, we’re not in the first place thinking like tired, anxious, and suffering philosophers, inwardly and outwardly at peace in the absence of pain, impossibility, tranquility, the “holy of holies,” at equilibrium, something that more or less has the value of a deep dreamless... Read More Read More - [There Is No Wall](https://everyangel.org/there-is-no-wall/): Chance for the individual is “communication,” the loss of one individual in another. “Communication” is the “duration of loss.” Will I in the end find a joyful, rather mad way of speaking –and the analytic subtlety — to recount the dance around time?* With the spite and obstinacy of a fly, I say insistently:... Read More Read More - [If Chance Fails Me, I Sink](https://everyangel.org/if-chance-fails-me-i-sink/): “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. And the Lord God will give to him the... Read More Read More - [Facing The Wall](https://everyangel.org/facing-the-wall/): And so it begins!  Year by year as the denouement of Christmas Eve nears, I dedicate myself to make sense of the nativity story.  God-in-a-manger, stated baldly.  I have not attended a worship service on Sunday morning in years so I can hardly be considered “a believer.” Nevertheless I am compelled to revisit the... Read More Read More - [A Christmas Miracle?](https://everyangel.org/a-christmas-miracle/): Saturday, I have permission to drive subsequent to the heart procedure.  I returned to Starbucks.  When I reflect, words to describe my feelings come with difficulty, the irregular heartbeat has been eliminated with a minimum of disruption to my life.  A “Christmas miracle,” a credit to a host of individuals, especially to those no... Read More Read More - [Beloved Chance](https://everyangel.org/beloved-chance/): Desperately, I work, seeking the unity of man and the world! On coordinated levels of knowledge, political action, and limitless contemplation! I have to go back to this truth: that life implicates a beyond of light, of beloved chance. My madness—or rather my extreme wisdom— nevertheless reveals this to me: this beloved chance had... Read More Read More - [No Mere Players](https://everyangel.org/recovery-day/): No post was attempted yesterday. At the time I would be writing I was being prepared for anesthesia, several hours of sleep, while a Cardiac Electrophysiology specialist treated a circuit malfunction of my heart that was causing an irregular heartbeat. The method used was indicative of a benefit of knowledge. For human beings knowledge... Read More Read More - [The Feeling Of The Impossible](https://everyangel.org/the-feeling-of-the-impossible/): An infinite possibility flowsfrom the multitude of life’s difficulties:We attribute the feeling of the impossible that dominates usto those difficulties that get in the way! If existence is intolerable, we think,it is because some specific wrong has lead us astray. And we struggle against this wrong.The impossible is lifted if the struggle is possible.... Read More Read More - [Glum Evocation Of Happiness](https://everyangel.org/glum-evocation-of-happiness/): A gray Monday.  There are apt to be many of these as the winter solstice is ahead, December 21st.  Spring, why that’s just an idea…  The idea is one of hope nevertheless.  Just this morning I received an emailed advertisement announcing Summerfest 2023.  James Taylor is to be one of the headliner performers.  Count... Read More Read More - [Amazing Grace](https://everyangel.org/amazing-grace/): Saturday evening, upon a friend’s recommendation we dined at Villa Verone in Geneva. The occasion for us was to celebrate fifty two years of partnership, a marriage which began in Japan.  The year was 1970 and we both were 21 years old.  We traveled to the city hall in our section of Tokyo to... Read More Read More - [If It So Happens](https://everyangel.org/24285-2/): And if it so happens that someone sees chance beside me, that chance should be taken! It is not my chance, it belongs to whoever takes it. No one can grasp it any more than I can. Nothing about it can be known, but it can be taken. But who can see it without... Read More Read More - [Age Of Anxiety And Excess](https://everyangel.org/age-of-anxiety-and-excess/): Deathscape Lullaby Cynthia Cruz Broken crimson Mercedes sedan. Cotton-wood, milk-weed. The taste of cold metal and the repetition of three AM sirening ambulance rides. Yellow cream, three-tiered birthday cake. Cherry lip balm. Pale blue satin shorts and matching jacket with my name embroidered in hot pink, Cindy. Poochie, my childhood beagle, whimpering inside the... Read More Read More - [Touching The Limit](https://everyangel.org/touching-the-limit/): Anticipating the gathering of a circle of friends tonight, for a holiday social.  A portion of the day will be dedicated to completing projects of final preparation.  The guests are fellow travelers.  I need company, others with whom to share the risk of thinking-out-loud.  To think out loud is one description of philosophy.  To... Read More Read More - [Misery Preserves The Happy Man](https://everyangel.org/misery-preserves-the-happy-man/): And how many new ideals are, at bottom, still possible! —Here is a new ideal I stumble upon once every five weeks in a wild and lonely walk, in an azure moment of sinful happiness. to spend one’s life amid delicate and absurd things; a stranger to reality; half an artist, half a bird... Read More Read More - [Uncertainty](https://everyangel.org/uncertainty/): Uncertain, what to write this morning.  Tom, stopped by for several minutes and we exchanged our impressions about “philosophy.”  Tom mentioned the slog of reading John Stewart Mill.  I agreed with him.  Mill was as inaccessible to me as well.  I said, that one must pick and choose among the philosophers, selecting material that... Read More Read More - [An Old Story](https://everyangel.org/an-old-story/): Should I say anything at all about this song?  It is a classic Marty Robbins cowboy ballad.  Released in 1959 the lyric and the melody convey a heightened tension between the inevitable confrontation between one representing “law and order” the constraints of civilized life, and another, representing the imposition of idiosyncratic preference with a... Read More Read More - [Music](https://everyangel.org/music/): Music often elevates my spirit. A catchy tune, and smooth lyrics launch me into a memory, or sometimes rotates the axis of my view point.  I tend to interpret reality in shades of gray.  I’d like to be optimistic.  I work at it.  But, my body, the experience that has accrued over the years... Read More Read More - [Dancing Like A Peasant](https://everyangel.org/dancing-like-a-peasant/): Saturday morning and the day is cold.  Early December’s days oscillate between mild  50s and frigid lows of mornings in the low teens.  Like life.  A shuttle between opposites… This morning, a short drive from Batavia to the Geneva Starbucks a tune by AC/DC, Highway to Hell played on the radio.  The song, another... Read More Read More - [Head In My Hands](https://everyangel.org/head-in-my-hands/): Friday is gray overcast, the temperature mild, and the day is windy.  Change is always on the playbill.  Why not welcome another harbinger of winter? Reading On Nietzsche by Georges Bataille, I am captivated by the author’s analysis of the trajectory of a life, in the light of a relationship, or relationships of maximum... Read More Read More - [Impalement, Laughing](https://everyangel.org/impalement-laughing/): On a state designated by a shorthand name, (impalement), I am writing these few lines in the form of a theme for meditation: I imagine: an object of attraction. The flame Shining and light Consuming itself in itself Annihilating itself And in this way revealing emptiness, The identity of the attraction, Of that which... Read More Read More - [A Being In Pain](https://everyangel.org/a-being-in-pain/): The Philosophy Bunch discussed the topic of euthanasia.  Death is not an event which merely happens to each of us as individuals.  Dying is a process measured by time, and there are infinite ways to die.  It is exceeding rare for anyone to die without the involvement of others.  (Death must be the definitive... Read More Read More - [The Explosive Charge](https://everyangel.org/the-explosive-charge/): For much of my adult life I’ve felt drawn to the writings of Nietzsche.  I have speculated inwardly the reasons why this is so.  I think my attraction to this troubled writer from the 19th century was inevitable.  Do we have any say in the time and place of our birth, the circumstances and... Read More Read More - [Laughing Uncontrollably](https://everyangel.org/laughing-uncontrollably/): I have nothing in mind for writing today.  Perhaps it was the troubling dream that came in the early morning hours that unaccountably erased/rebooted my psyche?  I am left with a mind that is grasping helplessly.  Nothing “makes sense.”  Is “making” sense nothing more than a safety-blanket of illusion?  Is that enough?  Can I... Read More Read More - [Devotion](https://everyangel.org/devotion/): We cannot equal the empty sky that infinitely murders and annihilates us to the last man. I can only sadly say, of the necessity to which I submit, that it humanizes me, that it give me an undeniable dominion over things. I can however refuse to not see this as a sign of impotence.... Read More Read More - [Delight](https://everyangel.org/elation/): Saturday.  Another mild, sunny day at the end of November.  Time for reflection upon the sumptuousness of Thanksgiving feast day, the glamor of a formal table, guests in their places, words spoken, and convivial conversation exchanged…  Perhaps this seems idealistic, not exactly what you in fact experienced, this past Thursday, day before yesterday.  Were... Read More Read More - [Coloring Outside The Lines](https://everyangel.org/color-outside-the-lines-always/): All “communication” participates in suicide and crime. Funeral horror accompanies it, disgust is its sign. And in this light evil appears – as a source of life! By destroying in myself, in others, the integrity of being, I open myself to communion, I attain a moral summit. And the summit is not submission to,... Read More Read More - [Eternal Fabulousness Of Being Human](https://everyangel.org/the-fabulousness-of-being-human/): Thanksgiving day.  A day of sacrifice and feasting.  The customary “victim” is the turkey.  The day is dedicated to a nationwide communal meal, families including invited guests, extended family members are together around a table for a meal of prepared turkey, side dishes which have passed the test of tradition.  The elements are common,... Read More Read More - [Sinking... A Line If I Reach It In Time](https://everyangel.org/sinking-a-line-if-i-reach-it-in-time/): Two hours of discussion on the proposition that “psychology” has replaced ancient myth as the anchor of personal identity, a solid ground of membership in a people.  I am unconvinced.  Psychology is a soft science, similar to sociology, that investigation of social structures, institutions.  Dissimilar to chemistry or physics, which are studies of external... Read More Read More - [Hair On Fire](https://everyangel.org/setting-my-hair-on-fire/): “We will make philosophy dangerous, change the notion of it, we teach a philosophy that is dangerous to life; how can we serve it better? An idea is much more valuable to humanity when it is more costly. If no one hesitates to sacrifice themselves for the idea of ‘God,’ ‘Country,’ ‘Freedom,’ if all... Read More Read More - [World Making](https://everyangel.org/world-making-2/): Morning, — is not the word poetic? A one word poem that you can say over and over quietly, and feel your mood elevate in response.  Dawn with rising sun, is portent of life, a call and response promise of “give and take” between the interior “self” and the exterior “world.” What is meant... Read More Read More - [Smokescreen All Around](https://everyangel.org/smokescreen-all-around/): It is Sunday afternoon.  I chose not to write in the morning.  I started the day late.  I read an essay that waited in my computer bag, while the fog of my mind slowly dissipated.  Nowadays there is abundant news of tragedy and mayhem somewhere. Should the newspapers be criticized for reporting on the... Read More Read More - [So Think](https://everyangel.org/so-think/): Think!  The admonition, “think, god-damn it, think!” is the hardest, sharpest, heaviest, advisement that can be uttered and received.  Many of us born to privilege, in the West, white and almost certainly male are relatively unconstrained by circumstances.  A felt compulsion to think, that is, to consider that one’s lifestyle, the purchases, the use... Read More Read More - [Plunging Into The Story](https://everyangel.org/plunging-into-the-story/): Iconic denotation    is only syntagm,       associates elements without          any system: The discontinuous connotators are connected, actualized, ‘spoken’ through the syntagm of the denotation, the discontinuous world of symbols plunges into the story of the denoted scene, as though into a lustral bath of innocence. -excerpt, Rhetoric of the Image, by Roland... Read More Read More - [Erotica](https://everyangel.org/erotica/): The jukebox makes listening to music a highly enjoyable visual, acoustic and tactile experience. The listening is, however, very complicated and time-intensive. As my jukebox is not in constant use, it first has to be plugged in. It takes some time for the valves to warm up. After inserting the coins, I carefully press... Read More Read More - [A Time Without Consecration](https://everyangel.org/a-time-without-consecration/): We live in a time without consecration… Hypercommunication, the noise of communication, desecrates the world, profanes it. Stillness produces nothing. Capitalism therefore dislikes stillness. Information capitalism produces the compulsion of communication. Stillness sharpens our sense for the higher order, which, however, need not be an order of rule or power. Stillness can be extremely... Read More Read More - [Now](https://everyangel.org/now/): Right Now By Van Halen Don’t wanna wait til tomorrow, Why put it off another day? One more walk through problems, Built up, and stand in our way ,ah One step ahead, one step behind me Now you gotta run to get even Make future plans, don’t dream about yesterday, hey C’mon turn, turn... Read More Read More - [Same Old Song](https://everyangel.org/same-old-song/): Dust in the Wind By Kansas I close my eyesOnly for a moment, and the moment’s goneAll my dreamsPass before my eyes, a curiosity Dust in the windAll they are is dust in the wind Same old songJust a drop of water in an endless seaAll we doCrumbles to the ground, though we refuse... Read More Read More - [Born, Worked, Died](https://everyangel.org/born-worked-died/): One of his [Heidegger’s] lectures on Aristotle begins thus: ‘Aristotle was born, worked, and died.’ Thinking is work. Later, Heidegger called thinking handwork: ‘Perhaps thinking, too, is just something like building a cabinet [Schrein].  At any rate, it is handwork. The hand makes thinking a decidedly analogue process. –excerpt, Non-things by Byung-chul Han, p.... Read More Read More - [Gaplessness](https://everyangel.org/gaplessness/): Humans are intimate beings [Nahwesen]. Intimacy, however, is not the same as a lack of distance. Distance is a part of it. Nearness and distance belong together. The human being is thus simultaneously a being of nearness and a being of distance. That is why Kafka says that we can hold someone who is... Read More Read More - [Poseidon Says Hello](https://everyangel.org/poseidon-says-hello/): It’s called schadenfreude, a descriptive term for the satisfaction that wells up when someone else suffers misfortune.   Confession:  I felt schadenfreude while viewing the evening news’ depiction of the massive shoreline destruction, the result of the moon’s near orbit, of a high tide and the storm surge of hurricane Nicole’s wind lashed waves.... Read More Read More - [More](https://everyangel.org/more/): Not another song…  Yes!  I suspect that what I write is not a matter of choice at all.  Is it chance, that implacable, impenetrable twisting of fate?  I mean that branching of inchoate inclination to switch radio stations while on Fayban Parkway on the way to Starbucks. Whether chance or choice, I’ll never get... Read More Read More - [Holding On Tight](https://everyangel.org/holding-on-tight/): The morning after the mid-terms.  One has to expect something on the day after…  What did I expect?  Perhaps I thought that the deluge of propaganda, image-based demonizing of the opposition, “othering” of a member of the opposing party, caricaturing as anti-human one’s opponent would rule the day — the sun would fail to... Read More Read More - [Almost Paradise, Heaven's Door](https://everyangel.org/almost-paradise-heavens-door/): The morning is paradisical.  Even if that is a made-up word…  There are no words for adequate description of a fine mid-summer’s morning.  My good fortune is to be aware, to engage with my senses the warmth of light streaming from the sun, illuminating the streets, sidewalk, the backdrop bed of black eyed susans... Read More Read More - [Pressure Rising](https://everyangel.org/pressure-rising/): Yesterday the Amateur Philosophers Discussion Group convened in the corner at the round table at Starbucks.  We discussed a topic “the right of belief” using a essay by professor Daniel DeNicola to launch us into dialog.  The exchange between the nine of us was down-to-earth, directly tied to individual past histories, and to recent... Read More Read More - [Tiffany-Twisted?](https://everyangel.org/tiffany-twisted/): Another day in paradise…  The thought often comes to me here at Starbucks, standing at the counter speaking to the barista.  I know him by name and he already knows the type of coffee that I am in habit of ordering.  Sometimes I say the phrase out loud and Noah smiles.  We agree, a... Read More Read More - [Whatever Works...](https://everyangel.org/whatever-works/): A received a loan of three books from a friend yesterday.  The books were from her library, offered because she wished me to look them over.  I am a book lover.  One important axis of my life are books which I choose to read, usually purchased from Amazon.  I read to live and live... Read More Read More - [You Can't Have Any Pudding](https://everyangel.org/you-cant-have-any-pudding/): How can I say this?  A conversation with a friend yesterday remained in my psyche.  Upon waking I recalled what he said about his experience with Medicare and the Veterans Administration.  His story was not a happy one.  I reflected upon the rules that constrain receiving medical care benefits that one is qualified for,... Read More Read More - [Keeping Beat And Rhythm](https://everyangel.org/silent-wonder/): Here are some photos that were taken over the past day or so.  Flowers fascinate me.  A blossom is an extravagance of form, and splendor of light, — in the service of reproduction, more life.  The first grouping of photos were taken in the backyard.  Some of the flowers were inherited when we moved... Read More Read More - [The One Exception](https://everyangel.org/the-one-exception/): Some days ago in conversation with a friend here at Starbucks, Alex insisted that knowledge was possible without the symbolic representation of reason.  I thought to myself, “What a radical thought.”  I think of “knowledge” as what can be diagrammed, presented in the form 2+2=4, or encoded with words and grammar. On the other... Read More Read More - [The Edge And Back](https://everyangel.org/life-on-the-edge-and-back/): It was an orange 2022 Corvette.  That’s me waving from the drivers side, ready for three laps around the race track.  The C8 Z51 model Corvette makes 475 horsepower.  The jaunty wave of the hand from the car toward my daughter taking the picture, was but a small part of the story.  I have... Read More Read More - [The Look Back](https://everyangel.org/the-look-back-2/): In a state of vertigo this morning, feeling my way along hoping the words come. Yesterday while concentrating to write an entry for another day, I discovered that a few weeks ago my aunt passed away.  I was not aware she was ill.  I visited with her a year ago in North Carolina.  She... Read More Read More - [Death](https://everyangel.org/death-2/): Six of us, a wide ranging discussion last night.  The topic was death; more precisely, pondering whether death gives meaning to life.  The discussion was satisfying.   We did not resolve the matter after an hour and a half of back and forth.  Briefly in the midst of the session we touched on guns, mass... Read More Read More - [Mortality Wake Up Call](https://everyangel.org/mortality-wake-up-call/): Always something comes to mind, for which I discover a few words to compose a paragraph or two.  Poets are the true seers of a generation giving definition to the world such as it is, suggesting what is likely in store.  Upon reading this poem I knew, “this is it.”  This is what I’d... Read More Read More - [No End Of It](https://everyangel.org/no-end-of-it/): This passage from T. S. Eliot’s poem The Dry Salvages is one of my favorite.  There are many phrases in these lines that are analogous to an arrow striking dead center to the bulls eye.  The poem overall is a meditation upon a seafaring way of life.  The point of view offered proposes to be... Read More Read More - [Belonging](https://everyangel.org/belonging-2/): This we know: Earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth.  All things are connected like the blood that unites us all.  Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it.  Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself. -Chief Seattle Four satisfying... Read More Read More - [Rome, Is It Burning?](https://everyangel.org/rome-is-it-burning/): Vacation for me, for our tribe is a place and time apart from the usual day to day responsibilities, from news of national, even far flung happenings, — a bubble of blessed separation.  Not that our lives are terrible, we do not live in a war zone, or conditions of extremity.  Nevertheless it is... Read More Read More - [How Long?](https://everyangel.org/how-long/): We arrived at the lake house a short walk from the east side of Lake Michigan.  Annually we have a four to five day, all-family get together.  The “big event” is the interest derived from being by the big lake.  Weather, that is, the wind swept sky, the waves, and the shore itself which... Read More Read More - [What We'd Like To Believe](https://everyangel.org/what-wed-like-to-believe/): I am feeling déjà vu.   The scene keeps repeating itself.  Except in Highland Park, it appears that white people are grieving innocents struck down by gunfire.  The story has headlined the evening news for days now.  Not the “one and done” of such stories that keep happening on the west and south side... Read More Read More - [A Look Into The Nursery](https://everyangel.org/a-look-into-the-nursery/): NGC 3324 in the Carina Nebula. Captured in infrared light by NASA’s new James Webb Space Telescope, this image reveals for the first time previously invisible areas of star birth… The tallest “peaks” in this image are about 7 light-years high. The cavernous area has been carved from the nebula by the intense ultraviolet... Read More Read More - [SMACS 0723](https://everyangel.org/smacs-0723/): I remember first using Kodachrome film.  To hold a color print was a delight, an image that represented with remarkable fidelity the mental image achieved by the eye and the mind.  Up until I owned the Agfa 35mm camera which took the Kodak color film, I was accustomed to a box camera, which I... Read More Read More - [Monday, Overcast, Religion...](https://everyangel.org/monday-overcast-religion/): The Tears of Eros will remain as a barb in my consciousness, or better, a striation layer of my unconscious. The truth, always there, undisclosed by daylight – is like the black-backing of a mirror.  I continue on to a second book by Georges Bataille, The Theory of Religion.  What do I expect to... Read More Read More - [The Sacred](https://everyangel.org/the-sacred/): This morning I finished reading, The Tears of Eros by Georges Bataille.  I am sure the book is not finished with me.  Bataille offers not an argument, but an assertion demonstrated by photography of artworks from the Paleolithic to the modern era, to paintings by various artists in the late 20th century.  The book,... Read More Read More - [Exploring A Renewed World](https://everyangel.org/exploring-the-new-world/): No matter the light showers we accompanied two of our grandchildren to the Fox River for some fishing and exploration.  (The fish in the river proved to be totally safe, from our efforts.)  The exploration was an adventure of great interest.  There’s always a lot to see whenever we leave our accustomed habitat and... Read More Read More - [Pleasure At The End Of...](https://everyangel.org/pleasure-at-the-end-of/): A few minutes ago I presented my Starbucks card.  The barista commented, “one day this is not going to work.”  The piece of gold plastic is old, by charge card standards.  The plastic is split in several places.  One fissure is patched with scotch tape.  I am attached to the card.  I’ve used it... Read More Read More - [Ruins, More Or Less](https://everyangel.org/ruins-more-or-less/): Every life is, more or less, a ruin among whose debris we have to discover what the person ought to have been. -José Ortega y Gasset The typical greeting for encounter of any sort is “How is your day?” The expected reply is a chipper “Just great!”  To answer simply “good” is sometimes received... Read More Read More - [Becoming The Reasonable Animal](https://everyangel.org/becoming-the-reasonable-animal/): René Descartes is often quoted to emphasize reason as the hallmark of Enlightenment based culture of the West.  Cogito, Ergo Sum.  A pithy saying indeed, “I think therefore I am,” with Latin lending the words a patina of sophistication.  Descartes by profession a mathematician naturally would be inclined to believe the clarity of reason... Read More Read More - [The Morning After](https://everyangel.org/the-morning-after/): Tuesday morning after Independence Day 2022, is overcast with intermittent sunshine.  Is today the beginning of a new week, or a continuation of the week that was, a week that seemed compressed into one day?  I refer to the mass murder that occurred yesterday at the Highland Park Independence Day parade.  A young man,... Read More Read More - [July 3rd](https://everyangel.org/july-3rd/): A sultry Sunday afternoon, and here I am at Starbucks, moving words on this screen, like pieces on a chessboard.  Yesterday evening was spent at Henry Maier Festival Park, Milwaukee for Summerfest.  Summerfest bills itself as the worlds largest music festival.  As a marketing ploy, I suppose the outsized claim works.  The site is... Read More Read More - [Shock](https://everyangel.org/shock/): Another Independence Day weekend.  Monday will be the 4th of July.  We are planning a family gathering for breakfast in the morning, and then a viewing of the Independence Day parade.  On the surface around here life appears to be good, never better for some.  Are such generalizations warranted?  Of course not but we... Read More Read More - [Mysterium Tremendium*](https://everyangel.org/mysterium-tremendium/): Life itself is not the reality. We are the ones who put life into stones and pebbles. -Fredrick Sommer Since my adolescence I have found photography fascinating.  With a machine held in one’s hand, it is possible to make an image of the world of which we participate, a freeze-frame depiction.  I felt the... Read More Read More - [Singin' And Dyin'](https://everyangel.org/singin-and-dyin/): Dunbar By Anne Spencer Ah, how poets sing and die! Make one song and Heaven takes it; Have one heart and Beauty breaks it; Chatterton, Shelley, Keats, and I—Ah, how poets sing and die!  Anne Spencer, born on February 6, 1882, on a plantation in Henry County, Virginia, was a poet from the Harlem Renaissance movement. She published... Read More Read More - [...And There It Is](https://everyangel.org/and-there-it-is/): Polaroid’s SX-70. It won’t let you stop. Suddenly you see a picture everywhere you look… now you press the red electric button. Whirr…whoosh …and there it is. You watch and your picture comes to life, growing more vivid, more detailed, until minutes later you have a print as real as life. Soon you’re taking... Read More Read More - [Parades And Spectacle](https://everyangel.org/about-parades-one-more-thing/): It has been argued in detail, by Guy Debord that the 20th century West is a Society of the Spectacle.  There is little doubt that the information received by the eye, vision, has always been a pivot point for finding food and shelter necessary to life, and for self preservation.  The rabbits that come... Read More Read More - [To The Inhuman World](https://everyangel.org/to-the-inhuman-world/): Yesterday we viewed from curbside the Geneva Swedish Days parade.  I have enjoyed a good parade as long as I can remember, the magic, the exuberance of seeing and being seen.  A parade is a meaningful social ritual, in a secular time is it not? I took photographs using my iphone 13 camera. However,... Read More Read More - [One Day, Two Towns, One Life](https://everyangel.org/one-day-two-towns-one-life/): I visited Mundelein where I once lived.  We lived for many good years there.  Now we live in Batavia to the west along the Fox River Valley.  We moved due to a change in circumstance, namely both of us retired.  The time was right to move closer to our children and our grandchildren.  Now... Read More Read More - [To Sacrifice Half The Population](https://everyangel.org/to-sacrifice-one-half-the-population/): Memory, is what we call the minds re-membering of past experience, of what we did, saw or heard.  Memory is not an exact replication of a past event.  Memory like everything else the mind/body does, serves the survival of the organism.  I will always remember the announcement of yesterday, the Supreme Court ruling eliminating... Read More Read More - [It Fades, Fades !](https://everyangel.org/it-fades-fades/): My Love by Bruce Nugent My love has hair Like midnight, But midnight fades to dawn. My love has eyes Like starlight, But starlight fades in morn. My love has a voice Like dew-fall, But dew-fall dies at a breath. My love has love Like life’s all, But life’s all fades in death. Richard... Read More Read More - ["They Don't Give A F***..."](https://everyangel.org/they-dont-give-a-f/): Today I read more about the war in Ukraine in the New York Times.   The war grinds on.  The article was about the role of therapists to offer treatment for the psychological damage exacted by the extreme violence of artillery strikes and missiles destroying towns. I thought about commenting about a poem today, as... Read More Read More - [Why This Way?](https://everyangel.org/why-did-i-come-this-way/): Do you ever wonder at the path you’ve taken?  What has lead you to take this way?  I do. Several days ago tending the lilies planted at the edge of the yard, I admired again the small statue of the female Buddha placed as background to the colorful lilies.  The statue is the image... Read More Read More - [More Dream Making](https://everyangel.org/more-about-dream-making/): A friend offered comment highlighting the tribal aspect of the sport of drag racing.  There’s no debate about the machismo inscribed in the passion for automobiles designed and constructed as a competition weapon.  Also race cars are a symbol of a concrete alliance of a owner and crew members — a long term commitment... Read More Read More - [To Make Dreams Come True](https://everyangel.org/mysterium-tremendum-2/): It is uncanny, the memories that a sound will evoke. Saturday at Great Lakes Dragaway, often the sound of an idling supercharged race engine could be heard. Sometimes in the staging lanes waiting to move forward to the starting line, or at a distance being tuned somewhere in the pits, — the undulating, rising,... Read More Read More - [Here And Now](https://everyangel.org/here-and-now/): “Remember that life is short and death is long,” is attributed to artist Fritz Scholder.  Perhaps he was channeling Epictetus?  The insight could have come from the writings of a Roman Stoic. Time spent with family, with both Nature and community at hand – is time well spent.  These thoughts come to mind on... Read More Read More - [Sometimes, Time Stands Still](https://everyangel.org/sometimes-time-stands-still/): It is Saturday morning.  The day promises to be comfortable, more so than the high 90s of the past several days.  This morning the Farmers Market with Laura and our daughter and grand daughter is anticipated.  In the afternoon I look forward to keeping accompany with my son to the race track in Wisconsin. ... Read More Read More - [Nest Making](https://everyangel.org/nest-making/): We live a short distance from Braeburn Marsh.  At this time of year female snapping turtles move from their habitat into open view searching for a suitable spot to lay their eggs.  While partially concealed behind a tree I took these photos a few days ago.  The common snapping turtle (Chelydra serpentina), its natural... Read More Read More - [Bataille Again](https://everyangel.org/bataille-again/): Eroticism differs from animal sexuality in that human sexuality is limited by taboos and the domain of eroticism is that of the transgression of these taboos. Desire in eroticism is the desire that triumphs over the taboo. It presupposes man in conflict with himself. Georges Bataille (1977). “Death and Sensuality: A Study of Eroticism... Read More Read More - [Eroticism](https://everyangel.org/eroticism/): Eroticism, it may be said, is assenting to life up to the point of death… Sexual reproductive activity is common to sexual animals and humankind, but only humankind appear to have turned their sexual activity into erotic activity. Eroticism is assenting to life even in death. [A] gulf exists, for instance, between you, listening... Read More Read More - [Till Now](https://everyangel.org/till-now/): One Girl by Sappho                                          I. Like the sweet apple which reddens upon the topmost bough, A-top on the topmost twig, which the pluckers forgot, somehow,— Forgot it not, nay, but got it not, for... Read More Read More - [Incomprehensible Adventure](https://everyangel.org/incomprehensible-adventure/): We are discontinuous beings, individuals who perish in the midst of an incomprehensible adventure, but we yearn, for our lost continuity. Continuity is what we are after… -excerpt introduction to Eroticism by Georges Bataille, trans. by Mary Dalwood This tune will be our lifeline, enough to hold onto for this part of the journey.... Read More Read More - [Pride Month](https://everyangel.org/pride-month/): June is Pride Month.  Pride Month is celebrated by the LGBTQ community, by parades, poetry readings, and peaceful protests to raise political awareness of the issues facing the gay community.  There was a time in my life when I wondered why?  Is there a point when it appears simply living one’s life is sufficient? ... Read More Read More - [Advancing On Chaos And The Dark](https://everyangel.org/advancing-on-chaos-and-the-dark/): A man [woman] should learn to detect and watchthat gleam of lightwhich flashes across his mind from within,more than the lusterof the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he [she] dismisses without notice his thought,because it is his [hers]….     ¶1 and, Trust thyself:every heart vibrates to that iron string.Accept the place that divine... Read More Read More - [Life Or Liberty, Conform Or Die](https://everyangel.org/life-or-liberty-conform-or-die/): Society  everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood (womanhood) of every one of its members. Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its... Read More Read More - [One Side Or The Other](https://everyangel.org/one-side-or-the-other/): PHOTOGRAPHY is the paradigm of the inherently equivocal connection between self and world –its version of the ideology of realism sometimes dictating an effacement of the self in relation to the world, sometimes authorizing an aggressive relation to the world which celebrates the self. One side or the other of the connection is always... Read More Read More - [Living Fractals](https://everyangel.org/reminder-of-fractals/): The peonies are blooming.  A short walk around the neighborhood is rewarded by a viewing of the color and variety of these blooms.  A peony reminds me of fractals, when I examine one closely, an organic repeating series…  Perhaps you are fascinated with fractals as am I.  A fractal is Nature’s reminder that chaos... Read More Read More - [Kaneville Cemetery](https://everyangel.org/kaneville-cemetery/): Saturday came, and the opportunity to get caught up with a friend.  We decided to visit Johnson’s Mound State Park in Elburn, Illinois which was only a few minutes away.  A short drive would afford opportunity for conversation.  Despite the use of a GPS we found ourselves without bearings in the rural countryside.  We... Read More Read More - [In One Merciless White Blade](https://everyangel.org/in-one-merciless-white-blade/): Voyages V by Hart Crane Meticulous, past midnight in clear rime,Infrangible and lonely, smooth as though castTogether in one merciless white blade—The bay estuaries fleck the hard sky limits. —As if too brittle or too clear to touch!The cables of our sleep so swiftly filed,Already hang, shred ends from remembered stars.One frozen trackless smile…... Read More Read More - [Saturday Ruminations](https://everyangel.org/saturday-meditation/): The Starbucks big room is quieter than usual.  There’s not the usual hubbub of workers stopping in picking up iphone orders, moms and dads stopping by with kids amid early morning walks.  I shouldn’t neglect mention of the runners, and the women who attend nearby yoga classes.  All of these groups form a loose... Read More Read More - [The New Cross Part 2](https://everyangel.org/the-new-cross-part-2/): My thesis I think is obvious.  Our society, the American people are deeply divided about the meaning of “guns,” between the necessity of arming one’s self and those who hold a view of a society becoming more egalitarian, a community where instruments conceived to take human life are unimportant for the average citizen. I... Read More Read More - [Guns: The New Cross](https://everyangel.org/guns-the-new-cross/): It is common knowledge that there’s a great divide in our society, and the meaning of guns is at the crux of the different realities that American’s inhabit.  Each of us lives in the world that we and others have jointly fashioned, or put differently the mind organizes reality in terms of the relationships... Read More Read More - [Good Things](https://everyangel.org/good-things/): A full measure of the tragic, the catastrophic, the dystopian dimensions of our life together on this planet is served to us, a concatenation of streaming media, Fox, CNN, ABC, NPR, to name a few.  It’s easy to understand why this is so.  Life’s extremities, danger, stimulates our fight/flight reaction.  Nothing is a more... Read More Read More - [Memorial Day Redux](https://everyangel.org/memorial-day-redux/): It’s difficult to “move on” from the drama of Memorial Day.  Though a day of remembrance, certainly the fact of war is impossible to dismiss as the fighting, the random death of the battle for Dombas furiously unfolds in Ukraine.  I shudder, my imagination cannot trace the paralyzing terror which the Ukrainian soldiers and... Read More Read More - [Angelica](https://everyangel.org/angelica/): Didn’t have anything in mind that I wished to write this morning.  Memorial Day brings mixed feelings.  I do not enjoy the parading of grinning politicians, old soldiers, and vintage military equipment.  We’ve not fought a war in defense of our country since WWII, the many since have been colonial wars to protect markets. ... Read More Read More - [Photographs](https://everyangel.org/photographs/): These photos with the exception of the last one were taken, once again, in my backyard.  The final and forth photo belongs in the series to offer a more complete “picture.”  Why mislead and why be self deceived, that all is well?  Perhaps, And all shall be well andAll manner of thing shall be... Read More Read More - [Not To Stand, Not To Kneel](https://everyangel.org/will-not-stand-or-kneel/): I write in the morning, seated at Starbucks, enveloped in the buzz of townspeople conversing around me.  Most linger here for as long as it takes the barista to fill their drink order.  Some like myself stay for a while.  I recognize many and know some, the regulars.   At the corner of State... Read More Read More - [Losing The Keys](https://everyangel.org/losing-the-keys/): We Americans are “stuck in a ditch”, “out of gas”, “can’t find the keys.” Use any metaphor that comes to mind to describe an impasse.  The automobile, “the invention” of the 20th century, is the indispensable means of transportation.  How many idioms do we have to express the helpless feeling of being unable to... Read More Read More - [Radiance](https://everyangel.org/radiance/): Thursday.  More mulch to spread, the last of ten yards.  After more rain, the plants are “happy.”  Happiness is about well-being is it not?  I am compulsive about using the camera at this time of year.  Each springtime is new, as if there has never been one just like this one.  I do what... Read More Read More - [Reeling](https://everyangel.org/reeling/): Wednesday midweek, I reel at the news of another mass shooting.  This time the slaughter was visited upon children (19 children and 2 adults) at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.  And the reason?  Why there was no reason, in the classical definition of reason.  A few of the causes: a society awash in... Read More Read More - [Just You And Me](https://everyangel.org/just-you-and-me/): How to get started this morning. Last night’s sleep was troubled.  Dreams, all unpleasant, but those have come infrequently lately.  I realize that each of us has a young vulnerable child within.  What child does not have a nightmare from time to time?  It’s a big world and there are monsters about! But morning... Read More Read More - [Cannes](https://everyangel.org/cannes/): The Cannes Film Festival is in progress, Tue, May 17 – Sat, May 28.  The New York Times reported on the festival in the email dispatch that I received this morning. I was captivated by the quote used in a speech by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.  Perhaps the Russian war to obliterate Ukraine is the... Read More Read More - [The Unspeakably Great](https://everyangel.org/the-unspeakably-great/): It is a Sunday morning.  A glorious day, sunlight, all vegetation shimmers after the inch or so of rain that fell yesterday.  A squirrel aspires to “carve” a habitation from an old log in the middle of our woodpile, — to give birth to it’s babies.  Yesterday the squirrel peered at me from the... Read More Read More - [My Life, My Love, My Lady](https://everyangel.org/my-life-my-love-my-lady/): Saturday morning and Starbucks is abuzz. Yesterday afternoon we attended an open house to celebrate the graduation of my wife’s brother’s son’s daughter from high school.  The graduate was radiant as she greeted well wishers just inside the foyer of the great room.  We were not sure who would be present at the event. ... Read More Read More - [Pathos](https://everyangel.org/pathos/): Photographs are, of course, artifacts… Thus they trade simultaneously on the prestige of art and the magic of the real. They are clouds of fantasy and pellets of information. Photography has become the quintessential art of affluent, wasteful, restless societies – an indispensable tool of the new mass culture that took shape here after... Read More Read More - [On Poets And Poetry](https://everyangel.org/on-poets-and-poetry/): Of all the nationsthe United States with veins full of poetical stuffmost need poets —and will doubtless have the greatestand use them the greatest. Of all mankind the great poet is the equitable man.Not in him but off from him things aregrotesque or eccentric or fail of their sanity.Nothing out of its place is... Read More Read More - [Taking Pictures and Looting](https://everyangel.org/taking-pictures-and-looting/): The photographer both loots and preserves, denounces and consecrates. Photography expresses the American impatience with reality, the taste for activities whose instrumentality is the machine. “Speed is at the bottom of it all,” as Hart Crane said (writing about Stieglitz in 1923), “the hundredth of a second caught so precisely that the motion is... Read More Read More - [What Is Surreal](https://everyangel.org/what-is-surreal/): Surrealism lies at the heart of the photographic enterprise: in the very creation of a duplicate world, or a reality in the second degree, narrower but more dramatic than one perceived by natural vision. The less doctored, the less patiently crafted, the more naïve – the more authoritative the photograph is likely to be.... Read More Read More - [Is It Too Much To Ask?](https://everyangel.org/is-it-too-much-to-ask/): Monday, the workday is pleasant, seventy degrees or so.  I am thankful for the common grace of an exquisite balance of sunlight, rainfall, and Nature’s denouement of new life.  A few days ago I installed a statue of a rabbit in our backyard, a memorial to the fecundity of Nature. This tune approaches perfection. ... Read More Read More - [The Art Of Art](https://everyangel.org/the-art-of-art/): The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters is simplicity. Nothing is better than simplicity… nothing can make up for excess or for the lack of definiteness. To carry on the heave of impulse and to pierce intellectual depths and give all subjects their articulations are... Read More Read More - [The Fight Underway](https://everyangel.org/the-fight-ahead/): All beauty comes from beautiful blood and a beautiful brain. If greatness are in conjunction in a man or a woman It is enough… The fact will prevail through the universe… But the gaggery of gilt of a million years Will not prevail. Who troubles himself about his ornaments or fluency is lost. This... Read More Read More - [Busy Bumblebee](https://everyangel.org/busy-bumblebee/): Busy bee you slow downJust for me?So busy are we, we fail to see.Several shots I did takeBut I felt as if you did not see…This brief and rare exchange I got to see.Slowing down like you,Nature’s beautiful bumblebee. -Rick Schaefer-Space   - [Riddling The Inevitable](https://everyangel.org/riddling-the-inevitable/): ὁδὸς ἄνω κάτω μία καὶ ὡυτή The way upward and the way downwardis one and the same  — Heraclitus V To communicate with Mars, converse with spirits,To report the behaviour of the sea monster,Describe the horoscope, haruspicate or scry,Observe disease in signatures, evokeBiography from the wrinkles of the palmAnd tragedy from fingers; release omensBy... Read More Read More - [America (After The Gold Rush)](https://everyangel.org/america/): As Walt Whitmangazed down the democratic vistas of culture,he tried to see beyond the difference between beauty and ugliness,importance and triviality. It seemed to him servile or snobbishto make any discrimination of value, except the most generous one. All facts, even the mean ones are incandescent in Whitman’s America.p. 27 Much of modern artis... Read More Read More - [This I Believe](https://everyangel.org/this-i-believe-2/): I continue to read On Photography by Susan Sontag.  Today I finished the essay entitled, America, Seen Through Photographs, Darkly.  There Sontag surveys the intent of a number of well known chroniclers of our grand experiment, beginning with Walt Whitman, concluding with commentary on the life work of photographer Diane Arbus.  Sontag is a... Read More Read More - [Mother's Day](https://everyangel.org/mothers-day-2/): This has been written about Mother’s Day: [A mother’s work is] a job that is ever-changing and frequently exasperating. Moms don’t get days off, nor do they receive handsome salaries or generous pensions. Instead, their rewards come in the form of sticky kisses, necklaces made of elbow macaroni, and the satisfaction of seeing their... Read More Read More - [Only That Which Narrates](https://everyangel.org/only-that-which-narrates/): Photographs …a way of giving information to people who do not take easily to reading. In a world ruled by photographic images, all borders (“framing”) seem arbitrary. Anything can be separated, can be made discontinuous, from everything else: all that is necessary is to frame the subject differently. Photography reinforces a nominalist view of... Read More Read More - [Our Cave, Our World](https://everyangel.org/our-cave-our-world/): Humankind lingers unregenerately in Plato’s cave, still recycling, it’s age-old habit, in mere images of truth. But being educated by photographs is not like being educated by older, more artisanal images. For one thing, there are a great more images around, claiming our attention. The inventory started in 1839 and since then about everything... Read More Read More - [Photography](https://everyangel.org/why-i-love-photography/): I remember the one of my first occasions to hold a camera in my hands.  I was a teenager.  I borrowed my fathers Kodak box camera, a black and white film camera with a fixed shutter speed of 1/30th of a second.  The camera was little more than a black box, postage stamp-sized viewfinder,... Read More Read More - [Stockton Hills Mine](https://everyangel.org/stockton-hills-mine/): Nearly a week has passed since my return from the West.  I revisited in my mind our hike to the site of the old silver mine, the abandoned Stockton Hills Mine. “Stockton the liveliest mining camp in Mohave county” is written in the old records of the area.  The mines played out, as did... Read More Read More - [A Hard Cold Rain](https://everyangel.org/a-hard-cold-rain/): A hard, cold rain is falling.  I know that it’s spring.  The days will grow longer and warmer, as sure as the axis of the earth inclines the northern hemisphere incrementally toward the sun.  Nature is reliable, a human concept.  “Reliable” is a euphemism for inexorable cause and effect.  Sometimes I take comfort in... Read More Read More - [The Barely Prayable](https://everyangel.org/the-barely-prayable/): II There is no end of it, the voiceless wailing, No end to the withering of withered flowers, To the movement of pain that is painless and motionless, To the drift of the sea and the drifting wreckage, The bone’s prayer to Death its God. Only the hardly, barely prayable Prayer of the one... Read More Read More - [The Look Back](https://everyangel.org/the-look-back/): The second day has passed after concluding two weeks of adventure out west.  I was introduced to a few of the individuals who have a enduring love for carved carousel animals, some collectors, others conservators and painters, and a master class carver.  The hospitality will be long remembered.  I was invited to studios, where... Read More Read More - [Home](https://everyangel.org/home/): Two weeks traveling with a friend to the west, – from Illinois, to Missouri, to Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California.  The occasion for the trip was a book which my friend plans to write, a definitive book about the history and importance of carousel animals for American culture.  I felt lucky to... Read More Read More - [Beverly Hills](https://everyangel.org/beverly-hills/): At last I have seen Beverly Hills.  Visiting was not on my bucket list of places, but I have been aware for much of my life that movie stars and other entertainers live in Beverly Hills.  Beverly Hills is storied for it’s luxurious shopping, for the glitz and glamor cultivated by those who are... Read More Read More - [When You Know Certain Things...](https://everyangel.org/when-you-know-certain-things/): “But, friend, when you know certain things: these things lead to dispassion not to passion; to detachment not to bondage; to diminution not to accumulation; to having few wishes, not to having many wishes; to contentment not to discontent; to seclusion not to gregariousness; to the arousing of energy, not to indolence; to frugality... Read More Read More - [Joshua Tree National Park](https://everyangel.org/joshua-tree-national-park/): I hope that you have opportunity to visit the Joshua Tree National Park, where the Mojave and the Colorado deserts meet. We walked the trails there for three hours taking many pictures, viewing only a sliver of the park. I cannot describe for you the effect of the experience of this desert environment upon... Read More Read More - [Can Some Of Us Agree?](https://everyangel.org/can-some-of-us-agree/): I had time to think.  Our adventure in the west continued today with the drive from Kingman Arizona to the town of 29 Palms on the edge of the Mojave Desert.  The Mojave Desert is a desolate place.  The two lane road was busy in both directions.  There were commercial tractor trailers, and many... Read More Read More - [The Desert](https://everyangel.org/the-desert/): Only experience suffices to allow understanding.  And if you are fortunate, have someone to guide you, point out the manner in which “things work,” — there is a chance to learn without injury. The desert is austere, an unforgiving place.  The scarcity of water means that life is precarious, the margin of survival is... Read More Read More - [Shooting](https://everyangel.org/shooting/): The journey continues.  We’ve passed though much desert, and some high country with tall lodge pole pine trees.  We are now in Kingman, Arizona.  This is our third stop, visiting with individuals who have a long term interest, fascination with carousels, with the artistry and history of carousel animals.  My host and guide, for... Read More Read More - [The Wind Breaks The Loosened Pane](https://everyangel.org/the-wind-breaks-the-loosened-pane/): I was told that it is windy in New Mexico this time of year.  For someone that lives in the Midwest, eighty degrees with a stiff, dry wind, is a hot day in April… On the way to Albuquerque New Mexico we glimpsed an abandoned structure, a wrecked shell, with a small parking lot... Read More Read More - [Amarillo Tx](https://everyangel.org/amarillo-tx/): Passing through Texas.  Anticipate reaching New Mexico within a few more hours of driving. The panhandle of Texas seems as flat as a plate, dry in appearance by comparison to the Midwest.   Many cows are viewed from the road, standing, heads down, finding such nourishment as they can.  Do they know they will soon... Read More Read More - [Ghostly, Whiter Shade Of Pale](https://everyangel.org/ghostly-whiter-shade-of-pale/): It is Monday morning.  I am in a hotel room in Springfield Missouri.  Unaccountably I slept well last night.  There is much to subvert a good night’s sleep, the bits and pieces of “the news” that one would rather not think about.  Often the knowledge of things I would rather not say out loud,... Read More Read More - [The Thunder Of This Deed](https://everyangel.org/the-thunder-of-this-deed/): That Madman Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market-place, and cried incessantly: “I am looking for God! I am looking for God!” As many of those who did not believe in God were standing together there, he excited considerable laughter. Have... Read More Read More - [The Night...](https://everyangel.org/the-night/): Saturday is bright and brisk.  Tomorrow is Easter Sunday.  I, a refugee from Christianity find the unreality of Easter, that is a certain opinion about the Easter story excruciating.  How so you naturally will ask…  The pageantry, the spectacle made of the resurrection story by Christian churches directs me to believe because a mutilated... Read More Read More - [Streaming Consciousness](https://everyangel.org/streaming-consciousness/): Stoic Philosopher-Slave We met late in the day to discuss Stoicism, that is, the sayings of Epictetus, an excerpt from his “Manual.”  Nine of us were around the table, a sell-out crowd.  The discussion was spirited, wide ranging.  There is no respite from the issues of our time, pressing upon us.  Epictetus, a slave,... Read More Read More - [A God Shines Through](https://everyangel.org/a-god-shines-through/): …Since the ancients believed in dreams,waking appeared in a different light. The same goes for the whole of life, which was illumined by death and its significance;for us “death” means something quite different. All experiences shone differently becausea god shone through them. –excerpt The Gay Science, Book 3, Section 152 by Friedrich Nietzsche As the... Read More Read More - [Marionettes](https://everyangel.org/puppets-on-strings/): The debt ceiling crisis is over.  The idea that our nation could refuse to make good on debts already incurred is surreal, the creation of an insane world.  In effect this would destroy the credit of the nation by a single political impasse.  Embedded in my mind is image of President Biden and Speaker... Read More Read More - [Prayer](https://everyangel.org/prayer/): Do we pray anymore? Piety is obsolete in a secular society.  Not entirely of course.  Always there are remote places that have yet to hear the news.  News takes time. “God is dead,” Nietzsche proclaimed as in the “Gay Science” published 1882.  A way of life predicated upon reliance upon the technology of the... Read More Read More - [Hell Yeah Resistance](https://everyangel.org/hell-yeah-resistance/): Yeah, I know it’s a spectacle.  But it is a spectacle that I care about.  For most of my adult life drag racing has captured my imagination.  A distinctly American, male oriented form of competition, involving  imagination to visualize the possibilities of maximizing the output of an engine, to understand the physics of a... Read More Read More - [Fashioning Paradise](https://everyangel.org/to-fashion-paradise/): At the racetrack on a Saturday afternoon, I feel gratitude for yet another experience of earthly paradise.  I am able to be with others, fellow citizens that I know only slightly.  That fragment of common ground is enough: the passion for quarter mile competition unites us.  Paradise, an ideal condition of experience is always... Read More Read More - [Time Travel](https://everyangel.org/time-travel-3/): Starbucks on Saturday morning, the first day of Memorial Day weekend.  Sunshine is rapturous… I sometimes catch myself in a fit of imagination wondering what it must have been like to live in the Athens of Greece during the reign of Pericles, the golden age of Athenian democracy.  Radical idealists of all stripes are... Read More Read More - [Shall We Invent A God!](https://everyangel.org/shall-we-invent-a-god/): There was only one norm, man; and every people thought that it possessed this one ultimate norm. But above and outside, in some distant over-world, one was permitted to behold a plurality of norms; one god was not considered a denial of another god, nor blasphemy against him. It was here that the luxury... Read More Read More - [Like A Disease](https://everyangel.org/the-great-separation/): “Sin” is a word seldom mentioned, rarely heard now-a-days.  The emotion of shame though is all too prevalent.  Is it universal to have hidden anxiety that one fails to be “good enough?”  No matter the surface appearance due to education, social status, etc., it’s not unusual to wonder if one is a failure.  Why... Read More Read More - [No White Flag](https://everyangel.org/no-white-flag/): Wednesday, midweek and I am running on fumes.  What is my body, the universe saying to me?  That I should care less about my disagreements with others, those niggling, aggravating differences, when heard, I am loathe to offer any reply. A podcast is a way to gain information in a format that is part... Read More Read More - [Danger](https://everyangel.org/danger/): A dangerous resolve— The Christian resolve to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad. –excerpt The Gay Science, Book 3, Section 130 by Friedrich Nietzsche Against Christianity— What is now decisive against Christianity is our taste, no longer our reasons. –excerpt The Gay Science, Book 3, Section 133 by Friedrich... Read More Read More - [Prayer, What's It Good For](https://everyangel.org/prayer-whats-it-good-for/): The value of prayer— Prayer has been invented for those people who really never have thoughts of their own and who do not know any elevation of the soul or at least do not notice it when it occurs… To keep them at least from disturbing others, the wisdom of all founders of religions,... Read More Read More - [Look!](https://everyangel.org/look/): Sunday promises to be a fine day.  There is sunshine, and spring flowers are in full bloom.  Nature is a matter of cause and effect, that is — to the extent that our faculties of perception and our abilities to describe find traction.  I am reminded of just how much our naked perception misses,... Read More Read More - [Laughing Ourselves To Death](https://everyangel.org/laughing-ourselves-to-death/): The madman— Have you not heard of that madman Who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly: “I seek God! I seek God!” –As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Has he got... Read More Read More - [Our Little Ship](https://everyangel.org/our-little-ship/): In the horizon of the infinite – We      have left the land           and have embarked. We have burned our bridges behind us      –indeed, we have gone farther           and destroyed the land behind us. Now, little ship, look out! Beside you is the ocean: to be sure, it does not always... Read More Read More - [Dancing](https://everyangel.org/welcome-to-the-dance/): Is it virtuous when a cell transforms itself into a function of a stronger cell? It has no alternative. And is it evil when the stronger cell assimilates the weaker? It also has no alternative; it follows necessity, for it strives for super- abundant substitutes and wants to regenerate itself. Hence we should make... Read More Read More - [Life Preserving Errors](https://everyangel.org/life-preserving-errors/): I think of my grandfather of late.  He raised a family of five daughters, one son, tending a few acres of land in Johnson Country, North Carolina.  My mother once mentioned how happy he felt upon purchasing his first tractor.  He no longer had to walk behind a mule, in order to plow a... Read More Read More - [When](https://everyangel.org/when/): Let us beware of thinkingthat the world eternally creates new things. There are no eternally enduring substances;Matter is as much of an error as the God of the Eleatics. But when shall we ever be done with our caution and care? When will all these shadows of God cease to darken our minds?When will... Read More Read More - [Exception Of Exceptions](https://everyangel.org/exception-of-exceptions/): Monday after Mother’s day. Reflection, musing, thoughtful consideration is a human trait.  I doubt that dogs are able to perform such mental acrobatics as they are not blessed, and troubled with language and syntax.  It is natural for us homo sapiens to wonder to ourselves about the origin, about the essence of everything, to... Read More Read More - [Requiem For Mother](https://everyangel.org/requiem-for-a-mother/): Sunday.  Today is mother’s day.  I wish that my mother could be here.  Once again I would show her my gratitude for the kindness which she demonstrated to me.  She is not here however as each of us pay dues to time.  We are time bound. This tune has to do with time.  There... Read More Read More - [Shadow Show](https://everyangel.org/shadow-show/): New struggles — After Buddha was dead, his shadow was still shown for centuries in a cave      –a tremendous,           gruesome shadow. God is dead; but given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown. –And we      –we still have... Read More Read More - [Virtuous Monsters](https://everyangel.org/floating-playing-or-virtuous-monsters/): Another discussion among friends on the matter of abortion, politics, women’s rights.  I need to hear the words of others to get a wide angle view of our condition presently.  I took away from the discussion wonderment, how evangelicals once disposed to treat others kindly, practicing their personal piety privately, have become indifferent to... Read More Read More - [Through The Pouring Rain](https://everyangel.org/through-the-pouring-rain/): Drift Away Day after day I’m more confused Yet I look for the light through the pouring rain You know that’s a game that I hate to lose And I’m feelin’ the strain Ain’t it a shame Oh, give me the beat boys and free my soul I wanna get lost in your rock... Read More Read More - [A Seedling Must Become A Tree](https://everyangel.org/a-seedling-must-become-a-tree/): Music as an advocate — “I am thirsting for a composer,”said an innovator to his disciple, “who would learn my ideas from me and transpose them into his language;that way. I should reach men’s ears and hearts for better. With musicone can seduce mento every error and every truth:who could refute a tone?” –“‘Then... Read More Read More - [Being Honest In Evil...](https://everyangel.org/this-life-which-shouts/): I learned by chance of the 2019 death of a eminent evangelical theologian.  I am often surprised by what google comes up with. I met Geisler twice.  I recall spending a few minutes in his office when considering whether to enroll at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.  Some years later, Norman Geisler was a guest... Read More Read More - [Yes](https://everyangel.org/yes/): Am I Am I the pebble lying in the stream or the water freed from melting snow Am I a dreamers sleeping dream that has no home, nowhere to go Am I a thought to build the bridge between two points of view I am at least one thing I know, a solitary monument... Read More Read More - [Are You Not Entertained!](https://everyangel.org/are-you-not-entertained-2/): AMX+, Netflix, HBOmax, Youtube TV, Hulu, Disney+, Peacock, Amazon Prime, Paramount+, ESPN Plus, Apple TV… Now and formerly— What good is all the art of our works of art if we lose that higher art, the art of festivals? Formerly, all works of art adorned the great festival road of humanity, to commemorate high... Read More Read More - [Writing While Facing Poetry](https://everyangel.org/war-with-the-lovely-goddess/): Prose and poetry— It is noteworthythat the great masters of prosehave almost always been poets, too–if not publicly than at least secretly, in the ”closet.” Good prose is written only face to face with poetry. For it is an uninterrupted,well mannered war with poetry:all of its attractions depend on the way in which poetryis... Read More Read More - [My Little Town](https://everyangel.org/my-little-town/): Spring is manifest in Batavia, Rising earlier than usual, I assisted to prepare for the yard sale.  The town sponsors a weekend yard sale to fund the 4th of July fireworks display. I do not know what “middle class” means nowadays since so many are under-employed, underpaid relative to the time and effort a... Read More Read More - [To Become A God, Well Almost](https://everyangel.org/to-become-a-god-well-almost/): Joined with a group  of friends last night to exchange ideas about morality.  Is morality relative or absolute?  The notion of an absolute, something not disposed to many interpretations, a universal standard, — inevitably is linked to the idea of a deity.  Absolutes of any kind, morality included, are affairs of divinity, since we... Read More Read More - [The Other Unnatural Convention](https://everyangel.org/the-other-unnatural-convention/): Art and nature — The Greeks (or at least the Athenians) liked to hear people speak well. Nothing distinguishes them so thoroughly from non-Greeks as does this truly greedy craving. Even of passion on the stage they demanded that it should speak well, and they endured the unnaturalness of dramatic verse with rapture. In... Read More Read More - [Hero From A Distance](https://everyangel.org/hero-from-a-distance/): Only artists, and especially those of the theater, have given men eyes and ears to see and hear with some pleasure… only they have taught us to esteem the hero that is concealed in everyday characters; only they have taught us the art of viewing ourselves as heroes from a distance and, as it... Read More Read More - [Vulgarity](https://everyangel.org/vulgarity/): The animal with a good conscience.– The vulgar element in everything that gives pleasure… does not escape me, but it does not offend me anymore… How come? Is it because there is no sense of shame and everything vulgar appears as poised and self-assured as anything noble, lovely, and passionate in the same sort... Read More Read More - [The Gift](https://everyangel.org/the-gift/): Life by Edgar Guest Life is a gift to be used every day, Not to be smothered and hidden away; It isn’t a thing to be stored in the chest Where you gather your keepsakes and treasure your best; It isn’t a joy to be sipped now and then And promptly put back in... Read More Read More - [A Cheerful Tempo](https://everyangel.org/eruption/): The greatest dangerthat always hovered over humanityand still hovers over it is the eruption of madness–which means the eruption of arbitrariness in feeling, seeing, and hearing,the enjoyment of the mind’s lack of discipline,the joy in human un-reason. Not truth and certaintyare the opposite of the world of the madman,but the universality andthe universal binding... Read More Read More - [Image Creation](https://everyangel.org/image-creation/): Men and Women…  The simultaneous attraction and risk inherent in the roles of men and women has been mined by poets, lyricists, and by philosophers.  Nietzsche opined on women.  As one reads one recognizes that Nietzsche’s experience with women was limited, and by any account, unfortunate.  Nietzsche wrote some obtuse, even boneheaded things about... Read More Read More - [Because People Believe](https://everyangel.org/because-people-believe/): Only As Creators! …what things are called is incomparably more important than what they are. The reputation, name, and appearance, the usual measure and weight of a thing, what it counts for — originally almost always wrong and arbitrary, thrown over things like a dress and altogether foreign to their nature and even to... Read More Read More - [A Secret, Inextinguishable Drunkenness](https://everyangel.org/a-secret-inextinguishable-drunkenness/): A group, five of us discussed the principles of Buddhist philosophy, the world view that rises from noticing the fluidity of “things.”  We are surrounded by a kaleidoscope should we pause, slow down sufficiently to notice.  What is real?  I am not sure.  Moreover I too am kaleidoscopic…  I cannot assume a god-like vantage... Read More Read More - [Almost A Madness](https://everyangel.org/almost-a-madness/): The ultimate noblemindedness.- What makes a person “noble”? …the passion that attacks those who are noble is peculiar, and they fail to realize this. It involves the use of a rare and singular standard and almost a madness: the feeling of heat in things that feel cold to everybody else; the discovery of values... Read More Read More - [Let's Try That Shit](https://everyangel.org/lets-try-that-shit/): Truthfulness— I favor any skepsis to which I may reply: “Let us try it!” But I no longer wish to hear anything of all those things and questions that do not permit any experiment. This is the limit of my “truthfulness”; for there courage has lost its right. –excerpt The Gay Science, Book 1,... Read More Read More - [Mosquito Bites Too Bloody](https://everyangel.org/mosquito-bites-too-bloody/): Knowledge of misery — The emergence of pessimistic philosophies is by no means a sign of great and terrible misery. No. these question marks about the value of all life are put up in ages in which the refinement and alleviation of existence make even the inevitable mosquito bites of the soul and the... Read More Read More - [Remorseless](https://everyangel.org/remorseless/): The end, it’s moving  toward us. His future’s set in an unreadable script.  — excerpt Lullaby by John James Saturday, early spring is overcast.  I am excited.  The photo shoot is “on” at the old Joliet prison.  A collection of photo’s depicting the dissonance between our actions, our practices, ways-of-life all contributing to climate... Read More Read More - [I Won't Be Afraid](https://everyangel.org/i-wont-be-afraid/): I have a fortunate life.  You do as well, if you are reading this.  To be homo sapiens is particularly difficult.  Literature expresses our dilemma sometimes subtly and sometimes with a raw edge.  The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus comes to mind. The rendition of this tune, and the video is an expression... Read More Read More - [Playing Craps](https://everyangel.org/playing-craps/): I have an old friend, an individual who expresses his disdain for “socialism.”  He speaks of “force collectivism” with condescension.  His point, policies to help the majority, those under-employed, individuals and families unable to “help themselves” are contemptible.  I and others, react to his aversion to public funding of services targeted to persons, who... Read More Read More - [A Servant Of This Paradise](https://everyangel.org/a-servant-of-this-paradise/): A satisfying exchange of ideas last night, based upon an interview with Stephen Batchelor.  Batchelor is a prolific author who treats the intellectual foundations and practice coming from the Buddhist tradition.  I have been interested in Buddhist thought for a long while.  I think the philosophy of life derived from Buddhism offers an alternative... Read More Read More - [Can We Step Away](https://everyangel.org/can-we-step-away/): Another satisfying morning at Starbucks.  Often do I fail to notice how good life can be, just how lucky (another way of putting it) to be seated here with a cup of coffee in hand, conversing with a friend?  Friendship is inestimable, a practice of presence, the exchange of words which reciprocally enlighten…  The... Read More Read More - [Believing Doesn't Make It So](https://everyangel.org/believing-doesnt-make-it-so/): Owing to three errors. — During the last centuries science has been promoted, partly because it was by means of science that one hoped to understand God’s goodness and wisdom best- this was the main motive of the great Englishmen (like Newton); partly because one believed in the absolute utility of knowledge, and especially... Read More Read More - [Intermission](https://everyangel.org/intermission/): Sunday.  I awakened, my mind seeming to have skipped a day.  It felt like Monday.  The New York Times in the blue plastic wrapper lying at the end of the driveway was a clue.  Today is Sunday.  There’s a fine rain falling. At Starbucks I chose a table.  Coffee in hand I considered the... Read More Read More - [A Side We Do Not See](https://everyangel.org/recommendation-to-murder/): Saturday morning, following a few days of warm weather trees in Geneva are flowering.  After the austere gray and brown season of winter cold the effect is enchanting.  Life is.  I do not understand life.  The binary operations of my mind suited to simple problem solving makes visible only one side of life’s equation. ... Read More Read More - [Caesar Always Appears](https://everyangel.org/caesar-always-appears/): Once decay has reached its climax along with the infighting of all sorts of tyrants, the Caesar always appears, the final tyrant who puts an end to the weary struggle for sole rule-by putting weariness to work for himself… In these ages bribery and treason reach their peak, for the love of the newly... Read More Read More - [Cruelty More Refined](https://everyangel.org/cruelty-more-refined/): Once again I visited the old Joliet penitentiary.  The abandoned, decrepit site draws me.  I wanted to have another opportunity to feel the place, a scarce relic of the past.  The prison was constructed in 1860 out of limestone, built by convicts brought from the prison at Alton.  Alton was shuttered in part due... Read More Read More - [Ask Yourself !](https://everyangel.org/ask-yourself/): Evil- Examine the lives of the best and most fruitful people and peoples and ask yourselves: whether a tree that is supposed to grow to a proud height can dispense with bad weather and storms; whether misfortune and external resistance, some kinds of hatred, jealousy, stubbornness, mistrust, hardness, avarice, and violence do not belong... Read More Read More - [Craving Part II](https://everyangel.org/craving-part-ii/): Acquaintances make lighthearted comment concerning my fascination with Nietzsche.  Do they feel pity that I appear “stuck” on the writings of a 19th century writer, — a prototype of we psychologically troubled children of Enlightenment reason, of Christianity with all of it’s anti-reason?  I’ll never know clearly what they think about my lifelong deep-dive... Read More Read More - [This Possessive Craving](https://everyangel.org/this-possessive-craving/): …if one considers, finally that to the lover himself the whole rest of the world appears indifferent, pale. and worthless, and he is prepared to make any sacrifice, to disturb any order, to subordinate all other interests-then one comes to feel genuine amazement that this wild avarice and injustice of sexual love has been... Read More Read More - [Confession Of An Easter Bunny](https://everyangel.org/easter-2/): Easter morning and the first duty of the day is finished.  Fifty four plastic eggs were hidden under a fallen oak leaf, or nested in the fork of a sapling.  Frost chilled my fingers as I worked.  I, the Easter bunny fulfilled my role in the ritual of resurrection.  Three children will come later... Read More Read More - [What's Up?](https://everyangel.org/whats-up/): Saturday before Easter Sunday:  The buttercups are up! A glorious resurrection all around.  No one is excluded, nothing incredulous, no tall tale that beggars common sense…  This splendid denouement, shades of yellow in every yard, along the roadside…  We’re all born again! Centerfield by the great John Fogerty is perfect for today.  Put me... Read More Read More - [Good Friday](https://everyangel.org/good-friday-2/): Easter.  Images of Pope Francis performing the “foot washing” ritual, – a reminder of Easter as a religious commemoration… That was yesterday, Maundy Thursday.  The image reminds me that Christianity promotes servility.  Is there any evolutionary advantage to servility?  Are the survival odds of one’s fellowman improved? I think, offering to others the self-that-I-am... Read More Read More - [Bullying Insurance](https://everyangel.org/bullying-insurance/): In this morning’s Japan Times: Japan insurer to offer policy against bullying by Karin Kaneko * Staff writer * Apr 5, 2023 What if your child is bullied at school or online? It’s something every parent fears and while financial losses are likely not their first concern, a new insurance policy to be made... Read More Read More - [Still](https://everyangel.org/still/): Even the most harmful man may really be the most useful when it comes to the preservation of the species; for he nurtures either in himself or in others, through his effects, instincts without which humanity would long have become feeble or rotten. Hatred, the mischievous delight in the misfortunes of others, the lust... Read More Read More - [My God! What have I done?](https://everyangel.org/my-god-what-have-i-done-3/): Waking this Monday morning, my mind slowly clearing the cobwebs of sleep and I thought to myself:  I am 74 years old!  The actual birthday on April 1st was celebrated with much pleasure.  Now, two days later, reflection upon the fact stuns me. How much of those years in the rear view mirror can... Read More Read More - [It Might Be Great](https://everyangel.org/it-might-be-great/): 57 Choosy Taste If it depended on my choice,I think it might be greatTo have a place in Paradise;Better yet-outside the gate. — excerpt The Gay Science. Prelude in Jokes, Cunning and Revenge by Friedrich Nietzsche, pub. 1887, trans. by Walter Kaufmann April 2nd.  Yesterday was my birthday.  I contemplated wax candles on the... Read More Read More - [Fighting Alone Yields Happiness](https://everyangel.org/fighting-alone-yields-happiness/): 41 Heraclitean Only fighting yields Happiness on earth, And on battlefields Friendship has its birth. One in three are friends: Brothers in distress, Equals, facing foes, Free-when facing death! — excerpt The Gay Science. Prelude in Jokes, Cunning and Revenge by Friedrich Nietzsche, pub. 1887, trans. by Walter Kaufmann What?  How counter intuitive!   “Only... Read More Read More - [A Cloven Mind](https://everyangel.org/a-cloven-mind/): Today at lunch with a friend, our conversation segued into religion. Religion is a topic many of us find uncomfortable. Some of us have a robust faith, and some take pains to be unaligned, (my term for the agnostic.)  Putting labels to use to discuss religion is certain to over-simplify, to distort a more... Read More Read More - [Joliet](https://everyangel.org/joliet/): Joliet is a town, a small river town west of Chicago.  In 1673, Louis Jolliet, along with Father Jacques Marquette, paddled up the Des Plaines River.  The name reminds one of the history, what I mean is the indigenous people who once lived here, the Illinois native Americans, and the European French explorer for... Read More Read More - [Dungeon View...](https://everyangel.org/dungeon-view/): A wide ranging discussion ensued last night.  On the agenda was the current politico-social conflict over unwanted pregnancy.  You know, the dogma that the state is morally obliged to force a woman to carry a fetus to full term,..  It doesn’t end there.  Is there ever an ending?  Life is inexpressibly complex.  One thing... Read More Read More - [Handing Round The Refreshments](https://everyangel.org/handing-round-the-refreshments/): Out of sorts this morning, a disoriented feeling, and I hardly know how to begin writing.  A dream played in my mind just before waking this morning.  I was on the verge of being questioned, asked to give evidence about a stolen snowmobile.  Did I have a role in the hijacking of the machine,... Read More Read More - [To Walk Off In Disgust](https://everyangel.org/to-walk-off-in-disgust/): The Dormouse had closed its eyes by this time, and was going off into a doze; but, on being pinched by the Hatter, it woke up again with a little shriek, and went on: ‘—that begins with an M, such as mouse–traps, and the moon, and memory, and muchness—you know you say things are... Read More Read More - [Vases, Tragedies, Statues](https://everyangel.org/vases-tragedies-statues/): The Greeks are not reflective, but perfect in their senses and in their health, with the finest physical organization in the world. Adults acted with the simplicity and grace of children. They made vases, tragedies, and statues, such as healthy senses should,—— that is, in good taste. Such things have continued to be made... Read More Read More - [Cry Me A River](https://everyangel.org/cry-me-a-river/): After a time she heard a little pattering of feet in the distance, and she hastily dried her eyes to see what was coming. It was the White Rabbit returning, splendidly dressed, with a pair of white kid gloves in one hand and a large fan in the other: he came trotting along in... Read More Read More - [Immortality](https://everyangel.org/immortality-2/): I anticipate reading The Gay Science by Friedrich Nietzsche.  The introduction is written by Walter Kaufmann, the translator.  Kaufmann mentions that Nietzsche was greatly influenced by the writings of New England transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson.  Curious to understand the substrate of Nietzsche’s sense of himself and of his world I downloaded a segment of... Read More Read More - [Yum, Finishing Off The Cake](https://everyangel.org/yum-finishing-off-the-cake/): A gray rainy spring day…  I do not remember turning off the alarm on the bedside radio, but who else could have managed?  Thus, I rose one hour later than is my custom.  How much of my life amounts to actions of which I have no memory?  I am surprised by effects which seem... Read More Read More - [A Table Is Not A Table](https://everyangel.org/a-table-is-not-just-a-table/): There was a table set out under a tree in front of the house, and the March Hare and the Hatter were having tea at it: a Dormouse was sitting between them, fast asleep, and the other two were using it as a cushion, resting their elbows on it, and talking over its head.... Read More Read More - [Contra Membership](https://everyangel.org/contra-membership/): Through morality the individual is instructed to be a function of the herd and only to attribute value to himself as a function. Freedom assumes, if not the individual, at least life is not necessary as a value. It assumes therefore that one place one’s life at stake (it is not necessary) at the... Read More Read More - [The Last Generation](https://everyangel.org/the-last-generation/): Today, is the first day of spring.  I am ready for change to a season of transformation.  Soon with gradually warming days grass will become green and tiny buds will appear on the trees.  Green buttercup stalks are already emerging, piercing the brown and gray of the leaf strewn flower beds. The Tina Turner... Read More Read More - [Love Keeps Us Alive](https://everyangel.org/love-keeps-us-alive/): Sunday, is warmer, more agreeable than was Saturday.  The plans for today include adventuring into Chicago for a performance of The Tina Turner Musical at the Nederlander Theater.  Tina Turner was a “force of Nature,” survivor of an physically destructive relationship with Ike, her husband- manager.  She survived fame as well, with 11 Grammy... Read More Read More - [Pathways](https://everyangel.org/pathways/): A being is a closed pathway. This engages in that direction. Each being is suspended over the infinite possibility that it had of not being. It perceives an ensemble of possibilities not occurring as possibilities for existence other than it. –excerpt On Nietzsche, Notes by Georges Bataille p. 319 This particular combination that I... Read More Read More - [Both Worlds](https://everyangel.org/both-worlds/): Conversed with two friends this morning long enough to finish my first cup of Starbucks dark roast, with two splendas and creme… I asked about sites in the area — of ruins, abandoned factories, or such structures which have fallen into disuse, decrepitude from their heyday.  I received several good leads.  Apparently there is... Read More Read More - [Just Bangin' On The Bongos](https://everyangel.org/just-banging-on-the-bongos/): Today I am at loss about writing.  War in Ukraine never leaves my mind.  News reports seem rife with speculation.  The “news” is a business which means that words are offered profusely, photos recycled in order to collect the paycheck.  Stimulating pics and speculation about the future.  Perhaps all of that is a distraction. ... Read More Read More - [After All Is Said](https://everyangel.org/after-all-is-said/): Sunlight washes the intersection of State and 3rd today in Geneva.  There’s a good vibe inside Starbucks.  The coffee is hot, the flavor bracing, an acquired taste… Last night I participated in a discussion on “art”, the state-of-art at the end of the 20th century.  At least that is when the essay by Jean... Read More Read More - [Laceration](https://everyangel.org/laceration/): What kind of immanence or transcendencedo lovers attainthat lacerates themwhile uniting them? MORAL VALUE IS THE OBJECT OF DESIRE. On this topic I am speaking of “undefined existence”Desire is sometimes for a defined object, sometimes…Opposition God, beloved (transcendent, defined)to nothingness, feminine nakedness… –excerpt On Nietzsche, Notes by Georges Bataille, p. 307 Decided to “sleep... Read More Read More - [Is Art Gone?](https://everyangel.org/is-art-gone/): Intrigued with the exhibit of AI art on display at Waterstreet Studios I returned on Saturday morning to have a measured look at the pieces offered for appreciation.  I took my time, pausing before each work to absorb movement offered by the artist.  A few photographs were taken. Artificial Intelligence is in it’s infancy. ... Read More Read More - [In Play](https://everyangel.org/putting-oneself-in-play/): Whoever needs something other than a puppet is not part of this community. to play: to put oneself in play, to surpass the given in play, the content: only what is favorable to the game. Perhaps also on     the mad philosopher:         community?             or mystic? -excerpt On Nietzsche Notes by Georges Bataille... Read More Read More - [If You Don't/Won't](https://everyangel.org/if-you-dont-wont/): A provocative discussion last night…  A group of us considered the role of emotion in decision making.  A decision is assumed to be the outcome of reason, the action of the mind to assess facts, the “truth value” of experience, including information received from 2nd hand sources. Is not one’s life a composite of... Read More Read More - [Tanks, Half Destroyed In A Field](https://everyangel.org/tanks-half-destroyed-in-a-field/):    And now?    I account for myself clearly.    The project that I put in writing, this book was a frightful challenge.    Could I have succeeded? Really?    It is apparently a failure; this book resembles tanks abandoned in their essence and through combat, half destroyed in a field.    It is... Read More Read More - [My Hands Are Shakin'](https://everyangel.org/my-hands-are-shakin/): Whenever this song is played on the radio, the bright guitar licks, as well as the sparkling harmonies of the voices are enchanting.  Without question the lyrics are dark.  Does the contrast give the tune its power? Language conceals the complicated, many layered nuance of homo sapiens, the language-enabled-mammal.  The story line has to... Read More Read More - [Communion With God](https://everyangel.org/communion-with-god/): Sometimes I have no idea what to write.  In time an idea develops…  “This” piece of writing “sets my hair on fire.”  There’s no need for anything of my own but to share this with you. An infantryman’s least favorite weather is a temperature of 35 degrees Fahrenheit and pouring rain, when the trench... Read More Read More - [On Writing](https://everyangel.org/on-writing/): I hesitate to mention an inclination to write-a-book.  Why, in god’s name would I want to do that?  The bookstore is filled with titles, and on the internet a tidal wave of material, much self published.  What portion of those publications, paper or virtual are likely to be read?  The question is unanswerable.  In... Read More Read More - [Zoo Of Humankind](https://everyangel.org/the-zoo-of-humankind/): We visited the Cosley Zoo yesterday.  Cosley Zoo is a small zoo in Wheaton, Illinois, scaled for toddlers and older children.  At the zoo you get a close-up look at animals, wild and domestic.  The visit was greatly enjoyed.  Our grand daughter certainly will remember for many years the animals which are cared for,... Read More Read More - [What Is Given](https://everyangel.org/what-is-given/): The question: what to do? Is to give chance                to play It is first of all to accept what is given as a game The condition of a difficult fight, to fight on the side on which chance seems to appear           The same thing as freedom. –excerpt On Nietzsche Notes by Georges... Read More Read More - [The Hardest Part](https://everyangel.org/the-hardest-part/): This afternoon seems more chill than 35 degrees F.  The sky is an oppressive grey, a bowl of achromatic glass, horizon to horizon.  I cannot delay writing some words until I happen to be inspired.  Why delay?  Tomorrow is not foreseen, and is as likely to be gray as of sunlight. A tune performed... Read More Read More - [The Distance Between](https://everyangel.org/from-farmyard-to-alpine-peaks/): The questions that [Nietzsche] posed touch on tragedy, laughter, suffering, and the enjoyment of suffering, wealth, and the freedom of the mind: in general, the extreme states the human mind can reach. …His doctrine of dangerous life, of lucid, unbound, contemptuous humanity, is foreign to public struggles. It concerns solitaries hostile to the universe.... Read More Read More - [Pivot Point](https://everyangel.org/pivot-point/): Wednesday mid-morning, the intersection of State and 3rd is washed in sunlight.  It is 45 degrees F.  Will grass be green in a day or so? Today, a late start on my daily writing effort.  Why is that?  Yesterday, bedtime I noticed that the insulin pump which I wear — no longer communicates with... Read More Read More - [Voluntarily Going Into A Madhouse](https://everyangel.org/voluntarily-going-into-a-madhouse/): “I say unto you: one must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star. I say unto you: you still have chaos in yourselves.      Alas, the time is coming when man will no longer give birth to a star. Alas, the time of the most despicable man... Read More Read More - [Peeling Potatoes](https://everyangel.org/peeling-potatoes/): A friend is gone. Al Lykins passed away a few weeks ago. I miss having coffee with Al, swapping stories about life. Al was a teller of stories, an enchanter. I know that Al’s time to go arrived. It is impossible not to wish there had been more time. Al was a Buddhist. I... Read More Read More - [Love And The Truth](https://everyangel.org/love-and-the-truth/): Sunday morning, on the road proceeding west, I made my way to Starbucks.  The sun blazes in the east across the Fox River.  I felt atypically more alive, as if I were years younger…  Pat Benatar’s Love Is A Battlefield was playing on the radio.  Pat Benatar and Neil Gerardo remain one of the... Read More Read More - [Goddess](https://everyangel.org/goddess/): A winter view of marshland, dormant tall grass, is the norm for this time of year.  A friend invited me to join him at the Orchid Show at the Chicago Botanic Society.  Both of us are photo buffs.  How could I not take the opportunity?  Perhaps I should not confess my indifference to the... Read More Read More - [The Pivot](https://everyangel.org/the-pivot/): You have already grasped that Sisyphus is the absurd hero. He is, as much through his passions as through his torture. His scorn of the gods, his hatred of death, and his passion for life won him that unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is exerted toward accomplishing nothing. This is the price... Read More Read More - [Bakhmut, Ukraine](https://everyangel.org/bakhmut-ukraine/): Bakhmut 2023 Guernica 1937 New video footage of Bakhmut shot from the air with a drone for The Associated Press shows how the longest battle of the year-long Russian invasion has turned the city of salt and gypsum mines in eastern Ukraine into a ghost town, its jagged destruction testament to the folly of... Read More Read More - [No Time For Mourning...](https://everyangel.org/no-time-for-mourning/):  “The choice we face is simple,  We continue fighting and lose the best of the best or we let them turn this country into Bucha,  Now is not the time for mourning,” he said. “It’s a time for hate.” —Yevhen Mahda, a Ukrainian political scientist Bucha is the suburb of Kyiv where last spring,... Read More Read More - [Eternal Return](https://everyangel.org/eternal-return/): Didn’t post yesterday.  Rare circumstances on occasion are more important than having something to say.  Failing to add more words here causes no tremor in the fabric of the cosmos…  The challenge of finding some good words to describe an emotional response, or to express an idea received from a writer more worthy than... Read More Read More - [Every Question Unanswered](https://everyangel.org/every-question-unanswered/): But without the night, without despair, and without the irremediable terror that strikes me would I have known the inaccessible happiness of the summit? …Responding, out of breath, to the moral interrogation that I proposed to myself in anguish, I would be forever separated. By letting the interrogation open within me like a wound,... Read More Read More - [Land Of Hopes And Dreams](https://everyangel.org/land-of-hopes-and-dreams/): November 2nd, election day.  But I voted early.  Not that my voice will be heard.  Is my voice hypothetically,  durable enough to be heard, given the radical oppositional viewpoints, indeed the incipient violence roiling this land of “hopes and dreams?” Given what we Americans desire, the future we actively support, and the disparate languages... Read More Read More - [Tasting And Wasting](https://everyangel.org/tasting-and-wasting/): Keeping Time by Mike Orlock I’ve lost time. Lost track of where I left it, (on a table at home, in a desk at work): I placed it somewhere for safekeeping, thinking, That five minutes will come in handy later today or early tomorrow— Just give me a minute, maybe two, I’ll get back... Read More Read More - [A Giggling Fit](https://everyangel.org/the-giggling-fit/): In ourselves human existence is nothing but shouts,      a cruel spasm,           a giggling fit where agreement is born from a consciousness which is at last shared between the impenetrability of ourselves and that of others. — excerpt Literature and Evil, Genet, by Georges Bataille, p. 170 …all our yesterdays have lighted fools... Read More Read More - [In A Cry Heard](https://everyangel.org/in-a-cry-heard/): I am sure about one thing: humanity is not composed of isolated beings but of a communication between them. Never are we revealed, even to ourselves, other than in a network of communication with others. We bathe in communication, we are reduced to this incessant communication whose absence we feel, even in the depths... Read More Read More - [Leonidas Lives](https://everyangel.org/leonidas-lives/): We cannot assess the impact that our life will have upon others, others yet to be born. King Leonidas of the Spartans did not know, as he and his 300 men refused domination of the Persian God-king Xerxes, dying on the beach at Thermopylae, — the effect his life and story would have upon... Read More Read More - [Darkness Within Darkness](https://everyangel.org/darkness-within-darkness/): A strange phrase of only three words that leaves the mind grasping for nothing in particular.  Of course it feels uncomfortable,  I prefer the defined, something to take in hand.  When there’s nothing — I am constrained to become quiet, to cease movement, that quest to outrun time, to make something of myself. What... Read More Read More - [Light And Darkness](https://everyangel.org/light-and-darkness/):        Evil, depends upon the possibility of breaking the rule. Infraction is frightening -like death: and yet it is attractive, as though the being only wanted to survive out of weakness, as though exuberance inspired that contempt for death which is necessary once the rule has been broken. The attraction of irregularity sustains the... Read More Read More - [Nothing And Scripture Quotation](https://everyangel.org/nothing-and-quoting-scripture/): Nothing this morning.  There is nothing in mind to say. Still the planet turns upon it’s axis. But wait, – I do have something to say… The results of the Brazilian election election are in, the Bolsonaro losers “take to the streets” since compromise, agreeing to settle for some point in the middle is alien... Read More Read More - [Halloween Story](https://everyangel.org/halloween-story/): Yesterday I raked leaves, a task to be done over and over.  Tedium.  Leaves do not fall all at once, raking is not a task “one and done.”  The work is recurrent.  When one session is finished it is replaced by another. Raking, I heard many voices, the sound of approaching running feet.  Upon... Read More Read More - [The Spirit Of Halloween](https://everyangel.org/the-spirit-of-halloween/): Tomorrow!  The eve of merriment approaches!  There have been various “dress rehearsals,” opportunities to don costumes, usually with friends for parties.  Here are several images which I captured of my grand daughter and her classmates, enjoying a out-of-doors parade of costumes, accompanied by parents and grand parents. Additionally here is a delightful poem, a... Read More Read More - [Bat-Fest](https://everyangel.org/bat-fest/): Saturday, Oct 29th.  I am relieved to be in the sunlight, walking in the fall air, with family, enjoying the sights and sounds of Bat-Fest, the public celebration of Halloween held in downtown Batavia.  On Thursday I was admitted at the ER for observation at Delnor Northwestern Medical center.  The diagnosis: atrial flutter, or... Read More Read More - [I Can See Forever](https://everyangel.org/i-can-see-forever/): I’ve not concealed my love for Rock N Roll, that music of the people, admittedly a cultural feature of my generation.  Nietzsche said that life would hardly be worth living without music. “Without music, life would be a mistake.. I would only believe in a God who knew how to dance.” This song fills... Read More Read More - [Life Like A Sea Saw](https://everyangel.org/life-like-a-sea-saw/): It is time for some wild dancing, some ecstasy is it not? We approach election day for the mid-terms, a great deal is at stake and it will be impossible to know the stakes until the results are in.   Our prime directive is “survival” is it not? Therefore I offer this tune by... Read More Read More - [Halloween Part 3](https://everyangel.org/halloween-part-3/): Just a few days more until Halloween.  It is raining now.  We’ve yet a hard frost here in the Fox River Valley.  The trick or treat experience for children depends upon the weather.  Adults hope that the evening will be without inclement weather and not too cold.  It is late October after all. More... Read More Read More - [Halloween Part 2](https://everyangel.org/halloween-part-2/): Continuing the theme of outdoor, full scale dioramas, another household in Batavia offers the theme of a Madame Butterfly gathering of spirits on Halloween.  The vivid colors juxtaposed with the somber skeletal reminders of death is effective to teach that life and death are never separated.  Additional background on Halloween: The festival of Samhain... Read More Read More - [Halloween](https://everyangel.org/halloween-2/): Halloween.  On the eve of October 31st, the sun sets and sidewalks are transformed by children dressed in costumes of all descriptions, even adults embellished with face paint, – to celebrate a festival of ghosts, goblins, a few hours of zany merriment.  Adults are allowed to give expression to the inner child, to participate... Read More Read More - [Too Dark To See](https://everyangel.org/too-dark-to-see/): Saturday 11:35 AM is quite late for me to be writing here at Starbucks.  But who cares?  I will not care as long as I come up with some good words. I awakened at 6AM in order to be present on the sidelines to observe and cheer a grandson play his final soccer game... Read More Read More - [Paradox](https://everyangel.org/paradox/): I awakened a few minutes ahead of the alarm.  Sometimes that happens.  That part of me which eludes words, wanted to be conscious, awake/alive…  Thus began my day. On my way to Starbucks, I could sense that Friday will be warm, a return of comfortable weather, prior to the certain advent of frost, and... Read More Read More - [Energy Is Eternal Delight](https://everyangel.org/energy-is-eternal-delight/): Fall is a divine time of year.  Fall is the season of harvest.  As well, the days grow shorter, a chill descends, sunlight falls oblique upon the earth and the maple leaves catch fire, and begin to fall.  They fall one by one, finished, the alchemy of chlorophyll having utilized sunlight to make sugar. ... Read More Read More - [Three Parts Or Four](https://everyangel.org/three-parts-or-four/): All Gaul is divided into three parts, one of which the Belgae inhabit, the Aquitani another, those who in their own language are called “Celts,” in our language “Gauls,” the third. All these differ from each other in language, customs and laws. – excerpt The Gallic War by Julius Caesar (written in 53 BCE),... Read More Read More - [Running To Stand Still](https://everyangel.org/running-to-stand-still/): It [laughter] burns as it comes into contact with death; from the symbols of the emptiness of death it draws a heightened consciousness of being. …It brings us out, for a time, from the impasse in which life is enclosed by those whose only concern is to preserve it. …those arts which sustain anguish... Read More Read More - [I, Sink Like A Stone](https://everyangel.org/i-sink-like-a-stone/): Egoism is like trying to swim without relying on the water, endeavoring to keep afloat by tugging at your own legs; your whole body becomes tense, and you sink like a stone. -Alan Watts Egoism… There are many untethered egos about these days.  I think that capitalism as a way-of-life, breeds this illusion of... Read More Read More - [Style Dammit, Style!](https://everyangel.org/style-god-damnit-style/): It is not so much a matter of what you do as of how you do it, not so much the content as the style of action adopted. -Alan Watts I heard more than once from a conservative-minded friend that former President Trump accomplished some good things.  Perhaps.  Even to concede my friend’s point,... Read More Read More - [Rhythm And Flow](https://everyangel.org/rhythm-and-flow/): The greater part of human activity is designed to make permanent those experiences and joys which are only lovable because they are changing. Music is a delight because of its rhythm and flow. Yet the moment you arrest the flow and prolong a note or a chord beyond its time, the rhythm is destroyed.... Read More Read More - [You Must Choose](https://everyangel.org/you-must-choose/): At every moment we are crushed by the idea and the sensation of time. There are only two ways of escaping from this nightmare, of forgetting it: pleasure and work. Pleasure exhausts us. Work strengthens us. Let us choose. In every man, at every time, there are two simultaneous tendencies -one towards God, the... Read More Read More - [The Obscene, The Sublime](https://everyangel.org/the-obscene-the-sublime/): A gentle rain falls under a gray sky.  We need the rain. Last night a group of us discussed the relationship between critical thinking and war.  The first issue to be considered has to be what one has in mind by the term “war.”  The soldier in a combat zone understands that the word... Read More Read More - [A Mere Six Seeds](https://everyangel.org/a-mere-six-seeds/): Thoreau’s Pumpkins by Ginny Lowe Connors It is thought that Henry David Thoreau was the first American to plant Potiron Jaune Grosse, a variety of large yellow pumpkin. Six seeds from France began it all.             No abracadabra required, no alacazam—             just a bit of manure, some hoeing,             a little rain, and... Read More Read More - [A Story About Paradox](https://everyangel.org/paradoxical-story/): Columbus Day 2022.  Today is a federal holiday and traffic is noticeably lighter.  “A day off” is appreciated especially by students, who get to sleep-in this morning. The fall days are superlative as the mornings edge toward the appearing of frost.  Leaves are beginning to fall.  Vegetation has an arc of lifespan as do... Read More Read More - [Breaking Point](https://everyangel.org/breaking-point/) - [Turn The Page](https://everyangel.org/turn-the-page/): Often I have something in mind to write about.  I read.  Thoughts conveyed by others often imperfectly understood, capture my imagination.  I feel a compulsion to write something, because instinct says an insight important for the future is worthy of exploration.  We are “in this thing called life,” together are we not?  It is... Read More Read More - [Contemplating Catastrophe](https://everyangel.org/contemplating-catastrophe/): Friday, another “end” of the work-week.  But this Friday is incomparable to any other that has ever been…  The Starbucks room here at 3rd and State contains a configuration of individuals, various, by socio-economic status, or by the arc of a standard lifetime, a group of high school students, and I, a retiree…  Never... Read More Read More - [Two Things For Thursday](https://everyangel.org/two-things-for-thursday/): Broken Brix is a winery & cidery in St. Charles.  The two of us stopped in for a few minutes of conversation, to relax in the comfortable atmosphere, the bar displaying hints of the infinite possibilities of taste inherent in the art of brewing.  Almost always Steve, the owner warmly greets us from behind... Read More Read More - [Mythinformation](https://everyangel.org/mythinformation/): …the world is immense, truly, and the way we’re doing things in this world is only one of the many ways we might be doing them. Once you know this, then you know that we’re not just alive, we’re the bearers of life. Anything can change. -excerpt Shadow Dancing in the USA, by Michael... Read More Read More - [Not Quite The Walking Dead](https://everyangel.org/not-quite-the-walking-dead/): I had a few minutes at the end of my evening, I decided out of curiosity to watch a few minutes of an episode of The Walking Dead.  I have not followed the show.  I didn’t care which segment was available on the TV.  A friend recommended the series as an exploration of human... Read More Read More - [Do You Need More?](https://everyangel.org/do-you-need-more/): I remember writing about this tune in the past.  The musical score and lyric of certain songs strike me as iconic, as emblematic of a time, a quest for what it means to be human in a certain “world.”  The lyric lines, the blend of the voices convey the friction and effort of discovering... Read More Read More - [Moment Joined To Moment To...](https://everyangel.org/moment-joined-to-moment-to/): It is the moment that first imposes a chronological sequence and order upon the stimulations operating on an organism, and, in turn, through the sub-noticable joining together of successive units of this smallest time-span, time originates. In the moment, the world stands still. A series of moments in which, respectively, time stands still, leads... Read More Read More - [Enemy Mine](https://everyangel.org/enemy-mine/): Fall sunrise over the Fox River is glorious.  I think it worth rising for the brief spectacle just before 7AM.  This is the view through my windshield traveling on Fabyan Parkway east toward Starbucks in Geneva.  The sunlight is a gift to every living thing, trees, shrubs, grasses and the squirrels that inhabit the... Read More Read More - [That Is How We Do It](https://everyangel.org/that-is-how-we-do-it/): The crisis of ’29, which was a real catastrophe, cannot happen again today. It has been supplanted by a perpetual simulation of crisis. Unlike a society’s heroic or intrinsic values, the simulated, synthetic values (see Reagan) that have taken their place no longer threaten to collapse. Their own weight no long threatens to result... Read More Read More - [Wrecked On Main Street](https://everyangel.org/wrecked-on-main-street/): Orwell had it easy when fixing 1984 as the crucial point. What we are condemned to may be, after time itself has unfolded, the disappearance of time in the instantaneousness of action. That is the price of change. In the exaltation of uninterrupted circulation and incessant up-to-dateness, societies lose the thread of their development.... Read More Read More - [What More Do You Want?](https://everyangel.org/what-more-do-you-want/): Look at the two great events: [the advent of] nuclear power and revolution. It is utterly pointless to hope for the one or to fear the other since both have already occurred. Everything has been liberated, changed, undermined; what more do you want? It is useless to hope: things are there; born or stillborn,... Read More Read More - [Catastrophe In Slow Motion](https://everyangel.org/catastrophe-in-slow-motion/): We are no longer in a state of growth;we are in a state of excess.We are living in a society of excrescence,meaning that which incessantly develops without being measurableagainst its own objectives.…growing out of control at cross purposes with itself…This process can be compared best with cancerous metastases –                                *** As long as... Read More Read More - [Memory And Play](https://everyangel.org/memory-2/): Here are additional images of the final Nitrous Shootout event at “the Grove.”  We tilt into fall, the days become short.  We know that a season of cold and ice soon will be in store.  Nevertheless we have memories, held as if in a keepsake box, moments of delight, — satisfaction upon making a... Read More Read More - [All That Remains](https://everyangel.org/all-that-remains/): Well what was your visit to “the Grove” like?  I mean your plans to spend Saturday afternoon at the Great Lakes Dragaway? I was not disappointed.  In retrospect I received more than the fee paid for admission.  The hours spent walking around the pits, lingering for a few minutes to chat with the Lumbert... Read More Read More - [Homo Faber](https://everyangel.org/homo-faber-2/): A fall Saturday is overcast.  I plan to make my way to the drag strip perhaps for a last hurrah.  There’s a chill in the air.  Soon time will be past for “test and tune” of race cars, hand-built expressions of the personality of an owner, and that of crew members, who are likely... Read More Read More - [Losing The Magic](https://everyangel.org/desecration-a-loss-of-magic/): The truly beautiful cannot be touched. It demands distance. Faced with the sublime, we stand back in awe. When praying we fold our hands. The sense of touch destroys distance. It knows no astonishment. It demystifies, de-auratizes and renders profane what is touched. The touchscreen sublates the negativity of the other, of the unavailable.... Read More Read More - [Making Others Disappear](https://everyangel.org/making-others-disappear/): Communicationwith a smartphone is disembodiedand without a gaze.Community has a bodily dimension.Because of its lack of corporeality,digital communication weakens community.The gaze stabilizes community.Digitization makes the other as gaze disappear. The absence of the gaze is partly responsiblefor the loss of empathy in the digital age.When a parent stares at a smartphone, the infant is... Read More Read More - [The Age Of Non-things](https://everyangel.org/the-age-of-non-things/): In the age of non-things,there is something almost utopianabout the notion of possession.Possession is characterized byan intimacy and inwardness.For a thing to be a possession, I must havean intense relationship with it.You do not possess an electronic gadget.Because we no longer possess them, consumer goodsquickly end up on the rubbish heap.Possession is something internalized... Read More Read More - [A Partner In Negotiation](https://everyangel.org/a-partner-in-negotiation/): Mid September and Fall is approaching. I anticipate a last visit to the drag strip for the Saturday coming up. Drag racing is a quintessential male, warm weather sport. Race cars constructed to achieve maximum acceleration are an icon of a passing era. I confess my love of the adrenaline stimulating sight and sound... Read More Read More - [Gobsmacked](https://everyangel.org/gobsmacked/): I have never used that word before.  It means utterly astonished.  Yesterday four of us experienced an architectural tour of Chicago, narrated by Joe, our tour guide, progressing on both the south and the north branches of the Chicago river on the Wendella tour boat toward Lake Michigan.  The word describes the wonderment that... Read More Read More - [You Can Be Both](https://everyangel.org/you-can-be-both/): More from Friedrich Nietzsche… To live alone one must be an animal or a god, says Aristotle. But you can be both –a philosopher. Twilight of the Idols, “Epigrams and Maxims,” Section 3 Philosophy offers an asylum to a man into which no tyranny can force its way, the inward cave, the labyrinth of... Read More Read More - [Always In Recovery](https://everyangel.org/always-in-recovery/): The laws of numbers assume there are identical things, but in fact, nothing is identical with anything else. -Human, All Too Human, “Of First and Last Things,” Section 19 Mathematics would certainly not have come into existence if one had known from the beginning that there was in nature no such thing as a... Read More Read More - [Circles Of Conflict](https://everyangel.org/circles-of-conflict/): Is it not the case that similar problems, analogous issues present themselves over and over, such as is suggested by Ralph Waldo Emerson’s famous essay, Circles?   Emerson wrote in his unforgettable way that life is composed of concentric circles, intersecting matters of concern, of compelling interest.  Fresh to my consciousness is an email... Read More Read More - [A Good Day, A Bad Day](https://everyangel.org/a-good-day-a-bad-day/): Got off to a late start this morning…  I arrived at Starbucks and found a place seated against the wall, the small table holding the computer and a book,  The space in between where I am seated and the counter behind which the baristas work, has been a whirl of activity for the past... Read More Read More - [The Look In Your Eyes](https://everyangel.org/the-look-in-your-eyes/): Well here I am, again.  I guess it comes down to luck, the grace of good fortune.  Some would say “dumb luck,” a crude way of putting it.  How much credit do I deserve?  Little if any. Our anniversary was yesterday.  How many years?  52  That is a long time by the standard of... Read More Read More - [Whimsy](https://everyangel.org/whimsy/): In the aftermath of some hours of soaking rain I took a walk in the yard.  The rain was welcome in that trees and shrubs benefit from a thorough soaking of the soil.  Water is life.  I suppose that I am similar to any other mammal that moves around following a ample rainfall, everything... Read More Read More - [Let's Do Something](https://everyangel.org/lets-do-something/): I Am Waiting By Lawrence Ferlinghetti I am waiting for my case to come up    and I am waiting for a rebirth of wonder and I am waiting for someone to really discover America and wail and I am waiting    for the discovery of a new symbolic western frontier    and I am waiting    for... Read More Read More - [Enjoy The Revolution](https://everyangel.org/enjoy-the-revolution/): Yesterday we visited Cantigny Park to experience a Revolutionary War Reenactment.  At a distance we observed the ballet like performance of a artillery crew firing the canon, then followed the choreographed advance of a line of infantry marching across the green meadow.  Reenact a war?  The thought of reenacting a war, causes the mind... Read More Read More - [To Resist](https://everyangel.org/to-resist/): When a man [woman] chooses himself [or herself], he chooses for all men. Of all the actions a man may take in order to create himself as he wills to be, there is not one which is not creative, of an image of man such as he believes he ought to be. Existence precedes... Read More Read More - [Moral Choice](https://everyangel.org/moral-choice/): Moral choiceis comparable to the construction of a work of art. As there are no aesthetic values apriori,there are values which will appearin due course in the coherence of the picture— in the relation between the will to create and the finished work. One cannot judge a painting until it is done.likewise with morality.In... Read More Read More - [Why?](https://everyangel.org/why-3/): What if there is no why? That is, no purpose and no reason for the way things are…..  What if everything could have been different, and thus markedly different in the present.  There’s the endless pass time of counterfactual history.  You know that game of speculation, a diversion of the imagination:  What if the... Read More Read More - [License To Language, To Love](https://everyangel.org/license-to-language-to-love/): Rebel Yell By Billy Idol Last night a little dancer came dancin’ to my door Last night a little angel came pumping on the floor She said “Come on baby I got a license for love And if it expires pray help from above” Because In the midnight hour she cried – “more, more,... Read More Read More - [Labor](https://everyangel.org/labor/): Yesterday was Labor Day, a national holiday.  Many businesses were closed, as the intention is to celebrate the “working man.”  This is ironic.  Those who labor behind the scenes, stocking the shelves, sorting records, expediting those customer orders flowing into Amazon warehouses across the country, — orders promised for next day delivery…  Those who... Read More Read More - [Godlike Moments](https://everyangel.org/godlike-for-a-moment/): The supreme being, the sovereign deity, the god of heaven, is generally only a more powerful god of the same nature as the others. The gods are simply mythical spirits, without any substratum of reality. The spirit that is not subordinated to the reality of a mortal body is a god, is purely divine... Read More Read More - [Going To War](https://everyangel.org/warfare/): You did what?  You went where?  Once again you spent a Saturday afternoon at a drag strip?  Why?  What’s the attraction? I’d have to say that the quarter mile drag strip, 1,320 feet of two lane asphalt is one of the last sane places, where men go to war.  Surely you are kidding, making... Read More Read More - [Against Idealism](https://everyangel.org/contra-idealism/): The straight line is Godless and immoral –Hundertwasser You won’t find a river that decided a straight line was the best path to the open sea. You won’t find a vine that grew straight up to reach the sun. You won’t find a single organic object on this earth that traces a perfect line. “Nothing... Read More Read More - [To Artfully Dance](https://everyangel.org/to-artfully-dance/): The story of the individual is embedded in a larger set of stories. We play our part in an ensemble cast. How do we imagine a successful strategy for addressing the tension between the needs of the individual and the problems of satisfying those needs within the social, economic and natural environment? We must... Read More Read More - [Caught In A Landslide](https://everyangel.org/time-for-confession/): Real animals and plants separated from their spiritual truth slowly rejoin the empty objectivity of tools, the mortal body is gradually assimilated to the mass of things. Insofar as it is spirit, the human reality is holy, but it is profane insofar as it is real. Animals, plants, tools, and other controllable things form... Read More Read More - [Joy Is The Moment](https://everyangel.org/joy-is-the-moment/): Speaker no. 1 – Won’t you just cut it out!? Speaker no. 2 – I can’t.  I cannot help myself. At every moment, at every opportunity the truth comes to light, the truth of life and death, of my solitude and my bond with the world, of my freedom and my servitude, of the... Read More Read More - [Salvation](https://everyangel.org/salvation/): Yesterday I thought about our proclivity to desire something for nothing.  The simple minded way of putting it:  free is good.  If not entirely free, so minimal in cost, that no thought need be given to “what it is going to cost me.”  I am no exception to this rule… Except, the adult version... Read More Read More - [All The Rest...](https://everyangel.org/all-the-rest/): …the contradictionof a style of living whichcultivates sincerityand is at the same timea fraud.There is truth only in an existencewhich feels its acts asirrevocably necessary. There exists today no politician who feelsthe inevitableness of his policy,the more extreme his attitudes, the more frivolous,the less inspired by destiny they are. The only life with its... Read More Read More - [In The Unmaking...](https://everyangel.org/in-the-unmaking/): In truth a nation is never formed. …the nation is always either in the making, or in the unmaking. It is either winning adherents, or losing them, according as the State does or does not represent at a given time. a vital enterprise. Excerpt The Revolt of the Masses by José Ortega y Gasset... Read More Read More - [To Invent A Collective Program](https://everyangel.org/a-plan-of-action/): The State begins when groups naturally divided find themselves obliged to live in common. This obligation is not of brute force, but implies an impelling purpose, a common task which is set before the dispersed groups. Before all the State is a plan of action and a program of collaboration. The men [and women]... Read More Read More - [The Labyrinth](https://everyangel.org/the-labyrinth-2/): Human life, by its very nature, has to be dedicated to something, an enterprise glorious or humble, a destiny illustrious or trivial. …in these years we are witnessing the gigantic spectacle of innumerable human lives wandering about lost in their own labyrinths… All imperatives, all commands, are in a state of suspension. Given over... Read More Read More - [Dying While Laughing](https://everyangel.org/dying-while-laughing/): …we are unable to have directly complete knowledge of reality, there is nothing for us but arbitrarily to construct a reality, to suppose that things are happening after a certain fashion. This provides us with an outline, a concept or framework of concepts. With this, as through a “sight,” we then look at the... Read More Read More - [Our Home For The Aged](https://everyangel.org/welcome-to-our-home-for-the-aged/): Today violence is the rhetoric of the period, the empty rhetorician has made it his own. When a reality of human existence has completed its historic course, has been shipwrecked and lies dead, the waves throw it up on the shores of rhetoric, where the corpse remains for a long time. Rhetoric is the... Read More Read More - [On Lynching](https://everyangel.org/on-lynching/): In a right ordering of public affairs, the mass is that part which does not act of itself. Such is its mission. It has come into the world to be directed, influenced, represented, organized … It needs to submit its life to a higher court, formed of the superior minorities. …but without them, humanity... Read More Read More - [The Backward Look](https://everyangel.org/the-backward-look/): Sunday, the backward look… Yesterday was delightful.  On a Sunday, we give ourselves permission to reflect, to consider in the course of a walk in late summer, the perfection of Nature’s effulgence in plant life.  After breakfast in Geneva we walked down 3rd Street.   We admired the elephant’s ear leaves, purple, green and... Read More Read More - [Hurricane Of Farcicality](https://everyangel.org/hurricane-of-farcicality/): This morning I was moved by the description in the New York Times of the hundreds of criminal prosecutions in the aftermath of the January 6 uprising at the Capitol in Washington.  This from the Times:  If someone is being criminally prosecuted, there’s often some dysfunction in their past. But I’ve been struck by... Read More Read More - [What Is That?](https://everyangel.org/what-is-that-2/): What is that?  How often have you asked yourself?  Can you remember the last time you wandered around your backyard with no chore in mind, noticing the strange, seeing something beautiful as if for the first time?  True confession, — I seldom do just that. On the other hand my grand daughter of two... Read More Read More - [Running Back and Forth Screaming](https://everyangel.org/running-back-and-forth-screaming/): Fracture Ellen Bass When the grizzly cubs were caught, collared, and taken away— relocated they call it— their mother ran back and forth on the road screaming. Brutal sound. Torn from her lungs. Her heart, twisted knot, hot blood rivering to the twenty-six pounding bones of her feet. Just weeks before I watched a... Read More Read More - [Machines Fire & Steel](https://everyangel.org/machines-fire-steel/): What is it about machinery, the proximity of forged, of cast metal, that combination of fire and steel of a machine that has shaped the male psyche of my generation?  Will I always fail to do justice to the attraction of the symmetry, the “magic” of artifice, — which strikes home to the male... Read More Read More - [Playing With Fire](https://everyangel.org/playing-with-fire/): Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time. Write your self. Your body must be heard. Only then will the immense resources of the unconscious spring forth. p. 880 To write and thus to forge for herself the anti-logos weapon. To become at will the taker and initiator, for... Read More Read More - [Metaphor](https://everyangel.org/metaphor/): The mother, too, is a metaphor. It is necessary and sufficient that the best of herself be given to woman by another woman for her to be able to love herself and return in love the body that was “born” to her. Touch me, caress me, you the living no-name, give me my self... Read More Read More - [The Texture Of Time](https://everyangel.org/the-texture-of-time/): Monday, glorious Monday morning… Awaking late, I discovered a day of sunlight softly filtered by a milky-blue sky.  For mid-August, today the 15th, air temperature is delightfully pleasant.  Why don’t I return to the backyard, lay down in the grass, to gaze at the sky in utter bliss?  I feel that I should, or... Read More Read More - [Blown Out](https://everyangel.org/blown-out/): A few minutes until 7AM, and the streets of Geneva were silent, traffic on State Street was scarce.   A rare sensation of quiescence on a Sunday morning in this river town.  It will not last.  I begin to write, the raucous sound of the bean grinding machine, the animated conversation of baristas behind the... Read More Read More - [Of Retrogression](https://everyangel.org/of-retrogression/): Saturday morning dawns, sunny and temperate — a perfect mid-summer day for the Midwest.  There’s no possible summation of the state of things, — no matter the iphone news feed.  The extremes attract our attention as the fight or flight trigger is deep, encoded, that instinct for survival yet necessary, even if I cannot... Read More Read More - [Time To Hesitate...](https://everyangel.org/time-to-hesitate/): All life, and consequently the life of history, is made up of simple moments, each of them relatively undetermined in respect to the previous one, so that in it reality hesitates, walks up and down, and is uncertain whether to decide for one or other of various possibilities. …this metaphysical hesitancy which gives to... Read More Read More - [Vulgarity As A Right](https://everyangel.org/vulgarity-as-a-right/): …the individual finds himself already with a stock of ideas. He decides to content himself with them and to consider himself intellectually complete. As he feels the lack of nothing outside himself, he settles down definitely amid his mental furniture. Such is the mechanism of self-obliteration. The mass-man regards himself as perfect. …it never... Read More Read More - [Politics And Gratitude](https://everyangel.org/politics-and-gratitude/): I walked in the woods a day after the rain.  Several weeks have passed since I last visited.  I was delighted at the change, the head-high foliage, the exuberance of mid summer’s transformation of growth.  I took some photos of wild flowers.  Consider — everything that grows in the marsh belongs where it  grows… ... Read More Read More - [Again, Red Or Blue Pill*](https://everyangel.org/again-red-or-blue-pill/): Sunshine!  Much needed rain is followed by a morning of sunlight.  Often I take Nature for granted.  Somehow it doesn’t come to mind that the most basic needs and pleasures of my life directly depends on the soil, upon moisture and light in proper measure.  No application of technology can possibly counter the inexorable... Read More Read More - [Imagination](https://everyangel.org/imagination-2/): A persistent rain is falling.   I am happy to see it.  Trees will benefit from taking a deep drink of fresh water.  These mornings are rare.  They are a precious cue to reflection about the kid who still lives within.  You know, — that kid who “hated” rain days, always longed to be out-of-doors,... Read More Read More - [There Is No Plan B](https://everyangel.org/there-is-no-plan-b/): Sunday morning almost 9 AM and a steady rain falls.  Days of gentle rain are few it seems to me.  Weather seems more hot.  Rain comes after extended dry spells, in a torrent.  Climatologists expect the trend to continue.  What is to be done?  That is the question. Life requires incremental exchange.  A rapid,... Read More Read More - [Some Way Outta Here](https://everyangel.org/some-way-outta-here-2/): The world does not seek to have more existence, nor does it seek to persist in its existence. On the contrary, it is looking for the most spiritual way to escape reality. Through thought, the world is looking for what could lead to its own loss. The absolute rule of symbolic exchange: is to... Read More Read More - [All That Matters...](https://everyangel.org/all-that-matters/): Is there more to say?  The only way to know – sit, and prepare to say it. I took several good photos yesterday while strolling around the Fabyan estate Japanese Tea Garden.  Few people were about so the wild life were stirring.  And there were the summer blossoms at the height of their magnificence. ... Read More Read More - [Dancing At Daytona](https://everyangel.org/daytona-and-dance/): Daytona 500 by Kayleb Rae Candrilli Where we’re from, we know ballet as Dale Earnhardt gliding through the traffic of Daytona; we know dance as our hands moving across a table of drunk Miller Lites. This is universal because I say it is. When my mother called me Kayleb for the first time, I remembered... Read More Read More - [Laughing Matters](https://everyangel.org/laughing-matters/): Everyone has ideas, even more than they need. What matters is the poetic singularity of analysis. Only this spirituality of language can justify writing. Not a critical objectivity of ideas. There will never be a solution to the contradiction of ideas, except inside language itself, in the energy and fortune (happiness) of language. Radical... Read More Read More - [Our Enigmatic World](https://everyangel.org/our-enigmatic-world/): Several days ago I offered a short quote from Baudrillard in an email to several friends.  The objection was made that I had not given a context to ease understanding of the admittedly obscure lines.  Once again here is an excerpt from Baudrillard’s essay Radical Thought.  Added context would not make his words more... Read More Read More - [We Are No Longer...](https://everyangel.org/we-are-no-longer/): I read an email this morning from a friend expressing anguish at the juxtaposition between the stunning accomplishments of mankind culturally and scientifically with the despoliation of Nature and the consequent global warming and climate catastrophe.  It is hard to conceive of anyone now living who is not aware of the event of climate... Read More Read More - [Because I Am Involved](https://everyangel.org/because-i-am-involved-2/): Death is coming and leaving the tavern, death leaving and coming in. by Frederico Garcia Lorca Many years ago I wrote this poem into one of my little notebooks.  There are nine of these small notebooks, small enough to fit inside of a rear pocket of my blue jeans.  I liked the poem by... Read More Read More - [How To Bastardize A Word](https://everyangel.org/how-to-bastardize-a-word/): Reading this poem a few days ago, I knew the poem deserved feature in a blog post.  This poem shows the bastardization of language, a symptom of the decay of comity and of peacable order in our towns and cities.  The controversy over the status of the door, consciously or unconsciously an attempt to... Read More Read More - [Furious At Three In The Morning](https://everyangel.org/furious-at-three-in-the-morning/): If the United Auto Workers strike declared against “the big three” auto companies is not on your mind, it should be.  Initially the strike is shutting down three plants.  It is doubtful the gap between what the Union is asking and what the companies are offering will be narrowed soon.  The picketing is likely... Read More Read More - [No Grown-ups](https://everyangel.org/no-grown-ups/): I am taking a course in Lord of the Flies by William Golding.  The book was first published in Great Britain in 1954.  I’ve read it once before and cannot be sure whether I was in high school, or college.  Golding writes a parable, a deft assay of our human condition, of the trajectory... Read More Read More - [The Means By Which We Live](https://everyangel.org/the-means-by-which-we-live/): Today stands to be full.  A literature class is scheduled for the afternoon.  Consideration of Lord of the Flies by William Golding.  later in the afternoon, I am fortunate to participate in a exploration of Artistotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. The day begins at Starbucks, by reading the Taoist text composed by Zhuang Zhou, reported to have... Read More Read More - [Not To Drown...](https://everyangel.org/not-to-drown/): I obtained a copy of one of the great works of Asian literature to enlarge my appreciation of the Taoist sensibility of life and world.  Nowadays, fragmentation, seemingly intractable polarization demands that common ground be found.  Is any synthesis upon which enough of us can stand together possible? Drown if you must. Do not... Read More Read More - [Without Words](https://everyangel.org/without-words/): The air is cool, cleansed by a day of rain. I do not remember the last time of a full day of rain.  Rain comes infrequently, as if nature is diffident, inattentive to the thirst of plants and creatures living on a thin crust of the earth.  Another consequence of climate warming, perhaps?  Heat... Read More Read More - [Raindance](https://everyangel.org/praying-for-rain/): Monday brings the prospect of rain.  Weeks without precipitation and the grass is dormant, the shrubs appear thirsty and dull at the end of a growing season.  Some trees are shedding leaves, without any retrograde movement of temperature thus far.  Does anyone pray for rain?  I know that my grandfather did. Granddad owned a... Read More Read More - [Falling A Long Way](https://everyangel.org/falling-a-long-way/): In the after-dawn hour of 6AM I fell back to sleep.  As sometime happens I dreamed a nightmare.  The dream “experience” was real enough then.  Upon waking what I dreamed seemed as if an extension of my life.  I dreamed that a post, my comments on social media had provoked outrage from one person... Read More Read More - [Today's Pain](https://everyangel.org/todays-pain/): Gary Wright has died.  On Monday September 4th Wright passed after some years struggle with illness.  From 1976 do you remember The Dream Weaver? Here is what Billboard wrote about Wright: The Dream Weaver, released in the summer of 1975, peaked at No. 7 on the Billboard 200 album charts in April 1976, with... Read More Read More - [Untergehen](https://everyangel.org/untergehen/): Unteregehen – going down, drowning, to perish It’s Friday, early September with a hint the Fall soon to come.  Things in time reocurr, over and over.  Time is infinite, an open ended flow.  But “things” in time are bounded by circumstance, arise and come to be and then dissipate. You could become depressed if... Read More Read More - [Paradise Enough](https://everyangel.org/paradise-enough-2/): Paradise is a state of mind and heart.  It’s engagement with no separation between the texture, aroma, touch, and echo of one’s passion — and you, the agent.  Paradise is a time and place of sublime union with what you’ve learned to love.  Paradise is temporary, a rare interlude, a magical concatenation…  Paradise has... Read More Read More - [Hello Stranger](https://everyangel.org/hello-stranger/): Feeling empty this morning.  What is to be said/written?  The coffee is hot and astringent.  The traffic outside the front window at Starbucks rushes by upon it’s metaled ways.  There’s the look of rain in the gray clouds.  Time will tell how much we will receive.  Hot, dry weather has persisted.  Vegetation is thirsty... Read More Read More - [A Life Lived](https://everyangel.org/a-life-lived/): It is Tuesday, the day after Labor Day.  My mind is in a fog, and I have no desire to catch up on the morning’s news.  The sun streams from the east over the Fox River and it stands to be another warm day.  It is not yet astronomical Fall, the season of summer... Read More Read More - [Labor Day](https://everyangel.org/labor-day/): Today is Labor Day.  Monday a day of respite from work.  Work is the joint enterprise to sustain ourselves, to build shelter, cultivate, to transport, to prepare food.  Also, work is essential to fashion a place of safety, a refuge that is “home.” I am reading Lord of the Flies by William Golding.  I... Read More Read More - [Jimmy Buffett Died At 76](https://everyangel.org/jimmy-buffett-died-at-76/): “It was a scene,” he told Playboy magazine. “Everyone went out and applauded the sunset every night. Bales of marijuana washed up on the shore. There were great cheap Cuban restaurants … Key West seemed like the End: East Coast Division — a common reason people wind up there, especially writers, artists, musicians and... Read More Read More - [Happiness: Time Without Aim](https://everyangel.org/happiness-time-without-aim/): What is happiness?  By what means do we know if we are happy?  It seems that only in retrospect I judge myself to have been happy. My grand daughter is almost four years old.  She appears to be as happy as is humanly possible when I push her high in a swing.  While swinging... Read More Read More - [Living Is Hard](https://everyangel.org/living-is-hard/): This strange poem resonates with me.  Nietzsche was in a class by himself as a professional intellectual.  The youngest person to hold the Chair of Classical Philology at the University of Basel at the age of 24, he later turned to philosophy.  Nietzsche was an incessant writer.  He was plagued with health problems.  Also,... Read More Read More - [Ship Of Unsure Souls](https://everyangel.org/ship-of-unsure-souls/): “Souls that are unsure” Souls that are unsure and cloying I loathe like their acclaim. All their honors are annoying, All their praise is self-hatred and shame. Since I do not join their dances, Tied to their old rope, I am followed by their glances’ Sweetly poisoned envy without hope. Let them curse me... Read More Read More - [Dark Warm And Timeless](https://everyangel.org/dark-warm-and-timeless/): The concluding appendix of The Gay Science is a collection of poems.  The section is entitled Songs of Prince Bird-free, or “free as a bird.”  The German term signifies an outlaw whom anyone can shoot on sight.  The reader of The Gay Science likely would not be surprised at the ambiguity of the title. ... Read More Read More - [Of What We Did](https://everyangel.org/of-what-we-did/): I felt ambivalence.  Not being a connoisseur of antique automobiles why would I desire the press of congestion at the Geneva Concours d’Elegance?  Contemplating vintage vehicles on the flat screen in the course of a  television historical drama is enough for me.  On the other hand, the event was free…  As you would guess... Read More Read More - [Praise Be To God](https://everyangel.org/praise-be-to-god/): Another poem from the concluding appendix to The Gay Science.  I like the sardonic note of this one, a surreal description of a professional religionist, of a man-of-the-cloth.  Beppa is the pious priest, the first to benefit from forgiveness-at-a-discount offered by the church.  “With another sin, one wipes old sins away.”  Another phrasing that... Read More Read More - [Blending Us In Too](https://everyangel.org/blending-us-in-too/): Saturday is a quasi holiday for many adults, and for children.  A timeout from the usual routine of work, perhaps some chores around the yard or house, followed by a visit to the Farmer’s Market.  Certainly that describes a Saturday in late summer for those like myself living in a Fox River Valley community. ... Read More Read More - [Never A Better Hour](https://everyangel.org/never-a-better-hour/): “Who will sing a song for us?” — and that is the question is it not?  Who, perhaps you or I will step forward to do our best with the future’s melody!  What of concern which you and I are certain to have of being misunderstood?  That is none of our business!  It is... Read More Read More - [The Hand Moves Forward](https://everyangel.org/the-hand-moves-forward/): So the hand moves forward, the tragedy begins… That describes my sense of reality after reading the account of the Republican debate last night.  I did not watch.  I was tempted by shear voyeurism, but managed to resist my inclination. The eight Republican candidates running for second place, far behind the polling numbers of... Read More Read More - [Stronger, Seasoned, Tougher, Audacious, Gayer](https://everyangel.org/standing-divinely-apart/): I approached the Fox River this morning on Fayban Parkway, the sky was smoky, a low hanging mix of Canada Wildfire haze and high humidity.  I remembered reading the New York Times report that as the climate warms wild fires, storms, floods and extreme heat are going to increase across our country.  Some areas... Read More Read More - [When Less Is More](https://everyangel.org/when-less-is-more/): That said, it’s difficult not to think of the present day as a tipping point (a word used a great deal in discussions of climate change). And since none of us are PhD scientists who have written dozens of papers on the impact of humanity on the environment (at least I don’t believe any... Read More Read More - [Dirty Birds, Boys, Exhausted Wanderers](https://everyangel.org/dirty-birds-boys-exhausted-wanderers/): Another passage that should bear no further comment.  Is it enough to raise one’s voice in resistance to the denial of history , to thinly veiled misogyny in red-state anti-abortion laws, to indifference to lying by candidates for public office, to climate warming denial,…  That is to write or to speak as opportunity affords... Read More Read More - [Hatred, On The Other Hand](https://everyangel.org/hatredon-the-other-hand/): Hatred, on the other hand, places people on a par, vis-a-vis; in hatred there is honor; finally, in hatred there is fear, …. a good and ample element of fear. We fearless ones, however, we more spiritual human beings of this age, we know our own advantage well enough to live without fear of... Read More Read More - [Nietzsche To Springsteen](https://everyangel.org/nietzsche-and-springsteen/): You can’t start a fire Worrying about your little world falling apart This gun’s for hire Even if we’re just dancing in the dark –Dancing In The Dark by Bruce Springsteen Discussed with a friend, what to do about the yawning gap in perception between republicans, some supporting Trump unconditionally, maybe more who support... Read More Read More - [Still Riding Mad And Fiery Horses](https://everyangel.org/still-riding-mad-and-fiery-horses/): What the hell has happened to me? How does one explain to oneself, to justify even, — on occasion being called a “moral relativist” ?  The term is not meant as a complement.  It’s a near epithet, a label of derision…  Of course the speaker means that I come across, am perceived as one... Read More Read More - [The Most Stupid Of All](https://everyangel.org/the-most-stupid-of-all/): We are surrounded by technology.  The skill of mankind has grown exponentially since the early industrial age, and then since the time of Bohr and Heisenberg and a host of others, names not so well known.  I’ve known a few researchers, — scientists, physicists, chemists, engineers whose curiosity and meticulous work has produced products... Read More Read More - [Our Square Little Reason](https://everyangel.org/our-square-little-reason/): So, is this the final act, a horizon which we did not see because our eyes did not reach that far? I am referring to the experiment of America, that we thought was “noble,” a special nation, as Madeleine Albright said in 1998, — the Indispensable Nation.  A city shining, set on a hill,... Read More Read More - [Listen To The Music](https://everyangel.org/listen-to-the-music/): I stayed up late last night to watch the breaking news on ABC:  Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis read a RICO indictment against former president Donald Trump, accusing him and a circle of associates of attempting to steal a presidential election.  Upon reflection it seems poetic-justice, (if there is any justice in this... Read More Read More - [Like Trees We Grow](https://everyangel.org/like-trees-we-grow/): At the Paramount Theater in Aurora we were present for the Happy Together Tour concert.  Songs written in our youth, over fifty years ago were performed by The Turtles, Little Anthony, Gary Puckett, The Vogues, The Classics IV and The Cowsills.  Arriving early we waited for the doors to open just outside the auditorium. ... Read More Read More - [Another Day In Paradise](https://everyangel.org/another-day-in-paradise/): Sunday, late summertime is fine here.  Sunshine, the beds of flowers display a riot of life and colors.  But not so everywhere.  In the aftermath of the Maui wildfires the death toll stands at 93 so far.  Did anyone think a tropical paradise could be vulnerable to wildfires?  Neighborhoods wiped out, now become skeletal... Read More Read More - [Hibiscus](https://everyangel.org/hibiscus/): I received this poem yesterday.  Later in the day I observed hibiscus growing wild in a wetland by the Braeburn marsh.  I was excited to return later, parking my vehicle in a nearby neighborhood then hiking over the wetland, dry now because of the summer drought.  The hibiscus were magnificent, glowing, saucer-sized gems in... Read More Read More - [Converse Pivot Point](https://everyangel.org/converse-pivot-point/): I have puzzled over the difference in temperament between a die-hard republican, one who would cast a vote, albeit reluctantly for Trump, rather than vote for any democratic candidate.  Or consider the liberal minded who judges the republican to be in thrall to a ghost emanating from the pre-industrial 18th century.  There exists a... Read More Read More - [About Music](https://everyangel.org/about-music/): In the course of a brief phone conversation yesterday with a friend, music was mentioned.  What does music affect for us, when we listen, when we are enthralled with rhythm, rhyme, harmony, and the lyric of a human voice?  Could it be we are addressed by a god that we cannot name, one without... Read More Read More - [Remedy For Indigestion](https://everyangel.org/remedy-for-indigestion/): Jean Paul Sartre in his famous play No Exit writes, “Others Are Hell.”  Who would disagree?  I do care what others think of me.  Still I have no way of knowing what they think.  Therefore I “dance around” trying my best so speak and behave in sync with minds that are opaque to me… ... Read More Read More - [The Helmsman?](https://everyangel.org/the-helmsman/): Once there was a time when I believed in “free will.”  I truly thought that the course of my life was the sum total of decisions, freely made.  Furthermore, self recrimination, or self-congratulation was due because I was the actor, the subject who had decided those courses of action.  I was the helmsman-of-my-life, accountable... Read More Read More - [About Love](https://everyangel.org/about-love/): These lines compel reflection.  Songs about love beyond counting have been written.  Just within my short span of life, poets and lyricists find a bottomless well of material, as they peer into the surreal experience of love between two human beings.  And, this is not limited to male-female love, never has been… Nietzsche comments... Read More Read More - [Weekend](https://everyangel.org/weekend/): The weekend has been full.  It’s only Sunday morning and I wonder what this day will bring?  What adventure(s) will be in store? We are all Sisyphus are we not?  A friend reminded me of the enduring truth of this myth.  Each of us is subject to fate, the inexorable consequence of cause and... Read More Read More - [Turning Out Badly](https://everyangel.org/turning-out-badly/): Perhaps you’ve had the misfortune of acquaintance with someone who conducted himself as if he was discomforted by “a stick up his ass,” a moral prig?  I wonder whether churches serve as a magnet for such who desire to judge others?  Like attracts like.  A unctuous, self-abasing demeanor can be a screen hiding self-loathing… ... Read More Read More - [Peasant Rebellion Continues](https://everyangel.org/peasant-rebellion-continues/): It is Friday.  I’ve got almost nothing to write. What does it mean “to be” here, to exist, to be located in Starbucks at 7:15 AM on a Friday morning?  What links my being, to my physical position in space and time, here-now? The room is quite full, humming with voices and movement.  I... Read More Read More - [The Maddest, Most Interesting Age](https://everyangel.org/the-maddest-most-interesting-age/): Many, myself included ask ourselves WTF has happened to us Americans.  What happened?  What happened to the Republican Party, when they had opportunity to convict this shape-shifting con man, impeaching him and banning him from holding future office?  They feared him, feared their actions would anger their own voters. That is what the prosecutor,... Read More Read More - [Most Wanted: Security](https://everyangel.org/most-wanted-security/): I heard one of the common people say, “he knew me right away.” Then I asked myself: What is it that the common people take for knowledge? What do they want when they want “knowledge”? Nothing more than this: Something strange is to be reduced to something familiar. And we philosophers –have we really... Read More Read More - [Utility, Of Which We May Perish](https://everyangel.org/ultility-of-which-we-may-perish/): I believe it was a Reuters or maybe a Guardian report of the battle for a Ukrainian town outside of Bakhmut.  A soldier who survived the assault described the kill zones that awaited the advance of his unit.  The Ukrainians prevailed but at a terrible cost.  I simply felt numb upon finishing the piece. ... Read More Read More - [What Do We Cover Up?](https://everyangel.org/what-do-we-cover-up/): Certainly this war photograph provokes a feeling of revulsion.  Only the clothes are left.  The photo reminds of many things. War brutalizes every participant.  Almost every actor involuntarily participates.  War dissolves morality.  What is morality? What does morality cover up? Now consider the way ”moral man”is dressed up,how he is veiledbehind moral formulasand concepts... Read More Read More - [Religious Without Religion](https://everyangel.org/religious-without-religion/): Sunday morning dawns, time enough for reflection.  We were guests at a concert last night at the Royal Fox Country Club.  Arcada Productions presented the music of Styx and Boston: Boston and Styx at the Fox.  Musicians included members of Dennis DeYoung Band and Tommy Decarlo lead singer for Boston. I struggle to find... Read More Read More - [Nut House Ripe](https://everyangel.org/nut-house-ripe/): The writings of Nietzsche are resisted by many, aware of his assertion of “the death of God” in his parable of the madman.  Nietzsche has a reputation for raging against the church, a sworn enemy of priestcraft, opposing veneration for those believing themselves as adepts of divine wisdom, spokespersons for/of life after life… To... Read More Read More - [Come Out !](https://everyangel.org/come-out/): In a nutshell!  Nietzsche’s POV of life.  Come out, come out of your nook he urges the reader!  Live your life, expansively, assertively…  Thinking/living to defend is a minor note to the torrent of life…  Come out of your human nook, be the lion! But… a scientist should come out of his human nook;... Read More Read More - [Play Offense Always](https://everyangel.org/to-play-offense/): Today will be another sweltering day.  Heat and stifling humidity.  One adapts to conditions as one is able, constraints presented by the thermal energy-surge of atmosphere, of ocean currents, a result of millennia of sequestered carbon release since the advent of the industrial age.  The “waste” must go somewhere…  Wouldn’t you agree? You cannot... Read More Read More - [Ancestor In The Blood](https://everyangel.org/my-ancestor-in-the-blood/): What manner of scholar am I?  What is my standard of workmanship?  Nietzsche suggests a certain tenor is transmitted from our ancestors way of life.  Is there a “prehistory” that haunts the sweep of these blog entries? My father grew up poor, raised by a single mother, helping to support my grandmother and his... Read More Read More - [Fanaticism And Exhaustion](https://everyangel.org/fanaticism-and-exhaustion/): I am amazed that anyone could subscribe to a religion or a quasi-religious movement, such as the Republican (Trump) Party as it now stands.  Shiny surfaces notwithstanding, the truth of our time, this first half of the 21st century, is that of existential exhaustion.  There is a market for fanaticism, many “takers,” those willing... Read More Read More - [Still Catching A Ride](https://everyangel.org/still-catching-a-ride/): I was sixteen.  I remember the sensation: to lay on the surf board supported by movement on moving water, paddling toward the horizon, past the break point, that point where the energy radiating under the surface, shoreward reaches a crest.  At that point the wave begins to break, energy manifests as a collapsing liquid... Read More Read More - [Reverence Dissipating...](https://everyangel.org/we-laugh/): …modem pessimism, and a more ancient and stronger expression in the teaching of Buddha; but it is part of Christianity also, if more doubtfully and ambiguously so but not for that reason any less seductive. The whole pose of “man against the world,” of man as a “world-negating” principle, of man as the measure... Read More Read More - [We Are All Three](https://everyangel.org/we-are-all-three/): If we simply called ourselves,using an old expression,godless, or unbelievers, or perhaps immoralists,we do not, believe that this would even come close to designating us: We are all three in such an advanced stage that one    — that you, my curious friends      — could never comprehend how we feel at this point. Ours... Read More Read More - [Yes! Yes! Yes!](https://everyangel.org/yes-yes-yes/): The lack of personality always takes its revenge: A weakened, thin, extinguished personality that denies itself is no longer fit for anything good –least of all for philosophy. “Selflessness” has no value either in heaven or on earth. All great problems demand great love, and of that only strong, round, secure spirits who have... Read More Read More - [Fractured, Baked, Assaulted, Overrun](https://everyangel.org/while-we-slept/): Good morning! Some snapshots of things related to us, — while we were sleeping…  For a more complete rendering visit the NEW YORK TIMES. FRACTURED Screenwriters — who are unionized — have gone on strike in an attempt to use their collective leverage to avoid becoming Hollywood’s equivalent of adjunct professors. Today, only one... Read More Read More - [More Like Evening](https://everyangel.org/more-like-evening/): Late to Starbucks today.  Began my day by coming “out of retirement” to assist my son with a new client.  I was reminded of the way of life, the day to day routine that was my normal for many years.  Is anything ever truly behind us?  I do not think so.  We are marked... Read More Read More - [Incipit tragoedia](https://everyangel.org/incipit-tragoedia/): The tragedy begins…. Thus Nietzsche ends this section of The Gay Science, book four. Every ending brings a beginning, an interregnum, an interlude when “what comes next” cracks the old constraints, a climax of a chain of events, only described as WTF, when you crest the apex, the highest point in a roller coaster,... Read More Read More - [Prayer To The Sun](https://everyangel.org/prayer-to-the-sun/): When Zarathustra was thirty years old, he left his home and Lake Urmi and went into the mountains. There he enjoyed his spirit and his solitude, and for ten years did not tire of that. But at last his heart changed –and on morning he rose with the dawn, stepped before the sun, and... Read More Read More - [Eternal Hourglass Of Existence](https://everyangel.org/eternal-hourglass-of-existence/): What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: “This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain... Read More Read More - [Everything Not Said](https://everyangel.org/everything-not-said/): I admire the courage and wisdom of Socrates in everything he did, said, — and did not say. This mocking and enamored monster and pied piper of Athens, who made the most overweening youths tremble and sob, was not only the wisest chatterer of all time: he was equally great in silence. I wish... Read More Read More - [Once Only](https://everyangel.org/once-only/): For seeing the ultimate beautiesof a work,no knowledge or good will is sufficient;this requires the rarest of lucky accidents: The clouds that veil these peakshave to lift for onceso that we see them glowing in the sun. Not only do we have to standin precisely the right spot in order to see this,but the... Read More Read More - [Taking Five Steps](https://everyangel.org/taking-five-steps/): Met with some friends via Zoom to discuss the function of “intention” in relation to moral judgments.  We agreed that intent is slippery, an ambiguous aspect of deciding right action…  The intent of another’s action is notoriously difficult to ascertain.  Moreover introspection of one’s own intention reveals a complex, anything but pure motivation for... Read More Read More - [Laughing, Weeping, Cursing](https://everyangel.org/laughing-weeping-cursing/): Non ridere, non lugere, neque detestari, sed intelligere! “Not to laugh, not to lament, nor to detest, but to understand” —Tractatus Politicus by Spinoza …what else is this intelligere than the form in which we come to feel the other three at once? One result of the different and mutually opposed desires to laugh,... Read More Read More - [What Do I Matter?](https://everyangel.org/what-do-i-matter/): Every philosopher has probablyhad an evil hour when he/she thought: What do I matter if one does not accept my bad arguments, too? –And then some mischievous little bird flew past him and twittered: “What do you matter?What do you matter?” –excerpt The Gay Science, Book 4, Section 332 by Friedrich Nietzsche Perhaps we ought... Read More Read More - [Screaming](https://everyangel.org/screaming/): Formerly, one wished to acquire fame and be spoken of. Now that is no longer enough because the market has grown too large; nothing less than screaming will do. As a consequence, even good voices scream till they are hoarse, and the best goods are offered by cracked voices. Without the screaming of those... Read More Read More - [Virtue Is Efficiency](https://everyangel.org/virtue-as-efficiency/): We live in the age of cybernetics, of next-day Amazon delivery, of iphone instant communication anywhere in the world.  The American way of life is idealized as the apex of 21st century freedom and affluence by many.  Nietzsche, living in the late 19th century, as the industrial age broke like a wave transforming Europe,... Read More Read More - [Places To Dance](https://everyangel.org/places-to-dance/): Mid-life No. Life has not disappointed me.On the contrary, I find it truer,more desirable and mysterious every year–ever since the day when the great liberator came to me: the idea that life could be an experimentof the seeker for know1edge–and not a duty, not a calamity, not trickery. –And knowledge itself: let it be... Read More Read More - [Inflating Ourselves](https://everyangel.org/inflating-ourselves/): There is as much wisdom in pain as there is in pleasure… In pain I hear the captain’s command: “Take in the sails!… The bold seafarer “man” must have mastered the art of doing a thousand things with his sails; otherwise he would be done for in no time, — the ocean would swallow... Read More Read More - [The Weight Of Brilliance](https://everyangel.org/the-weight-of-brilliance/): Let us stop thinking so much about punishing, reproaching, and improving others! We rarely change an individual, and if we should succeed for once, something may also have been accomplished, unnoticed: we may have been changed by him. Let us rather see to it that our own influence on all that is yet to... Read More Read More - [Not Joining The March](https://everyangel.org/not-joining-the-march/): July 4th, Memorial Day 2023.  And feelings that well up?  Emotions are involuntary…  Patriotism?  Love-of-country?  Perhaps I should just fix a standard American flag to the front of the garage door, a flag purchased from Amazon, or from the local Menards, –let that action suffice…  Should I join the apathy, that bland, happy indifference... Read More Read More - [Something Wants To Live](https://everyangel.org/something-wants-to-live/): Perhaps you’ve reflected upon the course of your life marveling at the path you have taken?  I cannot describe the person that I’ve become by comparison to who I was as a young adult in my early 20s.  In that day I did my best to be an “enthusiast for Christ.”  Jesus-is-the-answer might have... Read More Read More - [Becoming Insufferable](https://everyangel.org/becoming-insufferable/): Without a laptop computer for several days, it was difficult to write.  The replacement, a new Lenovo Thinkpad was ready yesterday.  Now, I must, one task at a time, wrangle the new machine into the arrangement which is suited to my style of use. Much has taken place in the interim since my mind/body... Read More Read More - [The Wall](https://everyangel.org/the-wall/): The wall is a there.  That terminus for every man, in every woman’s future. You likely guess my meaning. Just as there was a time before my entry, there will be a time for exiting. Time. Birth and death are measured in time. Our manner of conversation marks birth dates, and in the obituary,... Read More Read More - [Magicians, Alchemists, Astrologers, Witches](https://everyangel.org/magicians-alchemists-astrologers-witches/): Preludes of science— Do you really believe that the sciences would ever have originated and grown if the way had not been prepared by magicians, alchemists, astrologers, and witches whose promises and pretensions first had to create a thirst, a hunger, a taste for hidden and forbidden powers? Indeed, infinitely more had to be... Read More Read More - [Inspiring Nausea](https://everyangel.org/inspiring-nausea/): To the sanctimonious, filing into your house of worship pews anticipating the show, eager to note down the happy-talk words of your pastor, shill for a discounted Jesus, conjuring up feelings of self-satisfaction about moral living that you can afford —  are you not entertained! To those who preach morals— I do not wish... Read More Read More - [Always Freedom And Sunlight](https://everyangel.org/always-freedom-and-sunlight/): I composed an email in reply to a friend.  The exchange between us had to do with the contentious pro-choice vs the pro-life viewpoints.  Pragmatically the subject has to do with a woman’s rights of privacy and health care choice.  To engage with another male friend about the subject causes an unsettled feeling.  ... Read More Read More - [Farmer's Market](https://everyangel.org/frarmers-market/): Yesterday was Saturday.  An enjoyable summertime activity is our Batavia Farmer’s Market.  We have a casual acquaintance with several of the vendors that we have patronized often.  The breakfast taco prepared by the owners of El Taco Grande is just right, and I feel fortunate to be their customer. While eating our breakfast taco... Read More Read More - [Where Art Ends And Life Begins](https://everyangel.org/where-art-ends-and-life-begins/): Learning from artists — How can we make thingsbeautiful, attractive, and desirable for us when they are not?And I rather think that in themselves they never are. … from artists whoare really continually tryingto bring off such inventions and feats. Moving awayfrom things untilthere is a good deal that one no longer seesand there... Read More Read More - [Walking In The Dark](https://everyangel.org/walking-in-the-dark/): The poem came my way yesterday.  Life is long and arduous, all the more so for humans.  Risk and suffering cannot be “structured out” as we Americans are accustomed to think.  There is no manifest destiny.  We are not on-a-mission-for-god.  Just because you and I have a voice, because our system of transfer of... Read More Read More - [I Keep Seeing](https://everyangel.org/i-keep-seeing/): America, the land of hopes and dreams… or so it is said in the Springsteen lyric. Time enough for you and I to look around, to consider what your eyes see… I remember the road trip out west with a friend, when we visited Los Angles, Beverly Hills.  I still remember what I saw.... Read More Read More - [Pride Parade II](https://everyangel.org/pride-parade-afterthoughts/): I was asked to say more about the Louisville Pride parade of this past weekend.  I thought about what the event meant to me, as a straight male.  Lived experience means something different for each of us.  We depend upon words to communicate our internal experience which is personal, intimate, private and concealed.  No... Read More Read More - [When The Work Is Finished](https://everyangel.org/when-the-work-is-finished/): One thing is needful— To “give style” to one’s character– a great and rare art. It is practiced by those who survey all the strengths and weaknesses of their nature and then fit them into an artistic plan until every one of them appears as art and reason and even weaknesses delight the eye.... Read More Read More - [We See You](https://everyangel.org/we-see-you/): On this day in 1865, a contingent of Federal troops lead by Gen. Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston Texas to proclaim, to enforce the end of enslavement of black Americans.  Today is Juneteenth, a national day of remembrance. I offer for your pondering along with me, these magnificent words from Nietzsche.  The photos were... Read More Read More - [Everyone Wants To Be First](https://everyangel.org/everyone-wants-to-be-first/): We are staying at the Louisville Ky downtown Marriott Courtyard.  On the seventh floor, across from our window is the Yum KFC center, the home of the Louisville Cardinals.  The Ohio River can be seen behind the Yum Center. The sky is obscured by dome of gray haze.  Sunlight waxes and wanes through the... Read More Read More - [Actually Burning](https://everyangel.org/actually-burning/): Thursday at 7AM the morning sun burned a pallid orange.  Wildfire smoke in the high atmosphere filters the sunlight.  For us here in the Fox Valley it is an early sign of much more that is coming.  In terms of climate the midwest is not far from Quebec where the fires burn.  Imagine the... Read More Read More - [What Is Necessary](https://everyangel.org/what-is-necessary/): I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do... Read More Read More - [As Important As The Greatest Event...](https://everyangel.org/as-important-as-the-greatest-event/): What I do or do not do now is as important for everything that is yet to come as is the greatest event of the past: in this tremendous perspective of effectiveness all actions appear equally great and small. –excerpt The Gay Science, Book 3, Section 233 by Friedrich Nietzsche I shared these lines with... Read More Read More - [About Those Clowns](https://everyangel.org/about-those-clowns/): Slept in today in the aftermath of a full weekend.  Sunday afternoon I had a rare opportunity to attend a live performance of show tunes, by the Fox Valley Festival Chorus.  As you’d imagine the work of Stephen Sondheim was a feature of the concert.  These lines from perhaps the best known of Sondheim’s... Read More Read More - [No More](https://everyangel.org/no-more/): What does your conscience say? — “You shall become the person you are.” –excerpt The Gay Science, Book 3, Section 270 by Friedrich Nietzsche My mind is numb, as if tantalized by just a taste of what is badly needed.  Like the promise of rain, in the midst of a drought.  Dry ground, dormant grass... Read More Read More - [Resist To Be Free](https://everyangel.org/resist-to-be-free/): Sacrifice– The sacrificial animal does not share the spectators ideas about sacrifice, but one has never let it have its say. –excerpt The Gay Science, Book 3, Section 220 by Friedrich Nietzsche I am haunted by this line of text, by this thought.  Compared with other mammals life for humans has great added difficulty.  Our... Read More Read More - [Nothing Or Interesting](https://everyangel.org/nothing-or-interesting/): Dreams— Either we have no dreams or our dreams are interesting. We should learn to arrange our waking life the same way: nothing or interesting. –excerpt The Gay Science, Book 3, Section 232 by Friedrich Nietzsche Lately I hardly dream.  Where does a dream belong?  Are dreams the visitation of a god?  A message from... Read More Read More - [Blood](https://everyangel.org/blood/): Thursday dawns with a hazy sky, hundreds of wildfires burn in the Canadian north.  Since we all share a single planet New York City, the eastern seaboard of the United States is choked with unhealthy levels of smoke.  For New York’s citizens it is unhealthy to be outside.  Are we about to change our... Read More Read More - [Finding Traction](https://everyangel.org/finding-traction/): Faith makes blessed— Virtue bestows happiness and a kind of bliss only on those who have not lost their faith in their virtue— not on those subtler souls whose virtue consists in a profound mistrust of themselves and of all virtue. Ultimately, then, “faith makes blessed” here, too, and not–mark it well– virtue. –excerpt The... Read More Read More - [Dangerously Lost](https://everyangel.org/how-lost/): Animals as critics— I fear that the animals consider man as a being like themselves that has lost in a most dangerous way its sound animal common sense; they consider him the insane animal,    the laughing animal,       the weeping animal,          the miserable animal. –excerpt The Gay Science, Book 3, Section 224 by... Read More Read More - [Paradox Unending](https://everyangel.org/paradox-unending/): Monday in Geneva is overcast, most likely with haze from wildfires in Canada.  The anticipated Ukrainian counter offensive has likely begun.  Reuters alone reported a press release from the Russian side.  The relative absence of information leads me to believe that engagement has begun.  No question that many are going to die. There’s a... Read More Read More - [What Is He...](https://everyangel.org/what-is-he/): Once I was tempted to think that candidates for office are bloviating buffoons, vacuous minded, baby kissers, etc. etc.  I no longer think such a candidate for office is harmless.  Who is not dismayed by the condition of the country; we are all bit performers in a comedy of societal dysfunction.  It is unclear... Read More Read More - [Just Dance](https://everyangel.org/just-dance/): Returned from a wedding in Michigan.  We received the invitation from a couple on my wife’s side of our family. No two weddings are alike.  Two family groups are brought together in celebration of a beginning of life-together for two adults who have been recipients of parent’s devotion.  The endeavor of parents to enable... Read More Read More - [Malefic Share](https://everyangel.org/malefic-share/): To go to the summit, to put oneself at risk without reason at least a reason that can be stated, to propose a summit as a summit, to risk only for the love of anguish. …a conclusion: we can only speak of a summit by altering it, making it equal to decline. But we... Read More Read More - [Wanting To Touch](https://everyangel.org/wanting-to-touch/): …burning desire in search of “communication.” Desire in “communication” bears essentially on the beyond of the being. But this beyond is not only the nothingness that limits us, toward which we throw ourselves, wanting to touch another being; it is at the same time the interrogation of the being that we are. …We can... Read More Read More - [Mushrooms Part II](https://everyangel.org/mushrooms-part-ii/): Roll The Bones By Rush Well, you can stake that claimGood work is the key to good fortuneWinners take that praiseLosers seldom take that blameIf they don’t take that gameAnd sometimes the winner takes nothingWe draw our own designsBut fortune has to make that frame We go out in the world and take our... Read More Read More - [More Mushrooms?](https://everyangel.org/more-mushrooms/): Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland by Lewis Carroll published in 1865 has been overlooked.  I hope to “catch up” with this widely recognized tale soon.  Amazon offered a paperback copy for $2.95 and I expect the book to arrive sometime Friday.  Time and space distortion is a feature of the story as I am given... Read More Read More - [Disarmed And Free](https://everyangel.org/disarmed-and-free/): A certain non-knowledge must leave me disarmed before what I have to do… so that I have to do it in order for me to feel freely obligated and bound to it… It is necessary to know the most and the best possible, but between the widest, the most refined, the most necessary knowledge,... Read More Read More - [Valentine's Day](https://everyangel.org/valentines-day-2/): Exceptional beauty, richness are evoked by disorders of the flesh. If the attracting light of those disorders is the sign of a summit, this summit is only open to chance; the virtue to which a moral goal is normally proposed is on the contrary set aside, made ridiculous. –excerpt On Nietzsche, Notes, by Georges... Read More Read More - [Lookout To Breakout](https://everyangel.org/on-the-lookout-to-breakout/): Temptation is the work of the flesh represented as at once desirable and dangerous possibility. What the body desires, that the mind re-presents in the grammar of language…  Are not words a form of touching, certainly a most oft used manner of touch? Desire and danger at the same time!  Temptation is excitement simultaneously... Read More Read More - [Where I Would Not Like To Go](https://everyangel.org/where-i-would-not-like-to-go/): We can hardly find the nothingness other than precisely where we would not like to go. Temptation is in a sense the extreme moment of sensuality. It is to the extent that we reject it that it makes us afraid, that sensuality has the power to make us attain nothingness. Insofar as temptation is... Read More Read More - [Streaming N' Screaming](https://everyangel.org/streaming-screaming/): The media is the politicians’ mirror, developed in the political and corporate financiers interest. It exists to sell a product. politicians and products alike thrive on being seen on a screen, they crave its validation. As a mirror it is but an image, a self-contained world, flat, insubstantial and brittle as glass. The media... Read More Read More - [Goin' Off The Deep End](https://everyangel.org/goin-off-the-deep-end/): Friday morning, the air clean, brisk, — is illumined by our sun.  Humanity is warmed by the same sun, as our home world rotates. Every word in the two sentences just written is relative, a marker for a set of relationships.  Nevertheless all of it feels absolutely true.  Do you not feel that humanity... Read More Read More - [Beating Against The Window](https://everyangel.org/beating-against-the-window/): Man is a fly behind a window and the time that he passes in beating against the window is the most human, being the most rebellious. –excerpt On Nietzsche, Notes, page 287 by Georges Bataille Sadness, tinged with some grief this morning.  Loss is more or less, greater and lesser, equivalent to life.  I... Read More Read More - [A Mind, Not For Rent](https://everyangel.org/a-mind-not-for-rent/): Midweek, the sun shines, the usual frigid winter cold has moderated.  A good day for a long walk, and lunch with a friend. What to write about as several things present themselves to mind today.  First is the wonder of learning, no matter our circumstances, there are elements at hand to admire, recognize as... Read More Read More - [A Gray Tuesday](https://everyangel.org/a-gray-tuesday/): A gray Tuesday, winter…  Surely this must be the mid-west.  Indeed, the Fox River Valley is west of Chicago.  A typical winter’s pall has ascended, and homo sapiens are inclined toward hibernation.  Never mind Chinese spy balloons, or an earthquake in Turkey, or a war grinding on between Russia and Ukraine, or commerce that... Read More Read More - [Music And Memory](https://everyangel.org/music-and-memory/): Life— that means for us constantly transforming all that we are into light and flame —also everything that wounds us; we simply cannot do otherwise. –excerpt The Gay Science, Preface, §3 by Friedrich Nietzsche Last night I watched the Grammy Awards on CBS.  I was indifferent to most of the two hour show.  It... Read More Read More - [Creating Gods](https://everyangel.org/creating-gods/): When one no longer finds God great, one no longer finds God anywhere; God must be denied or created. –excerpt The Will To Power, II. bk. 3 §422 by Friedrich Nietzsche Sunday morning, winter weather has moderated.  The sun is shining, a bonus for a mid-western winter’s day.  Very soon those with a lingering... Read More Read More - [Coloring](https://everyangel.org/coloring/): Theory of chance. The soul, a selective and self-nourishing entity, extremely shrewd and perpetually creative (this creative force is usually overlooked!) is conceived only as passive. To recognize the active force, the creative force among the contingencies: chance itself is only the clash of creative impulses. –excerpt The Will To Power, II, bk. 4,... Read More Read More - [What Would You Do For Love?](https://everyangel.org/what-would-you-do-for-love/): February 3rd, and bitter cold outside.  The number of patrons increase, in the warmth here at Starbucks.  I have no gut-feel of direction as to what to write; just awareness of being lost in a vast sea, for now, on the surface of an incomprehensible uncertainty.  All that I know is important for my... Read More Read More - [The Spicy Potion](https://everyangel.org/the-spicy-potion/): We should reconsider cruelty and open our eyes… Almost everything we call “higher culture” is based upon the spiritualization and deepening of cruelty: This is my proposition. That wild beast has not really been killed; it lives and flourishes, it has merely become — divine. What constitutes the painful voluptuousness of tragedy is cruelty;... Read More Read More - [Words Are The Only Victors*](https://everyangel.org/words-are-the-only-victors/): Wednesday morning, early and the sun has yet to rise.  It’s winter after all. Doubting that sleep would return at 5AM, after dressing and the routine bowl of cheerios, here I am at Starbucks.  This morning I anticipate traveling for a last time to my friend Al Lykin’s home.  Al died subsequent to a... Read More Read More - [A Serious Joke](https://everyangel.org/a-serious-joke/): Sunny and zero degrees F outside.  You’d think that on such a chill winter’s day the warm-blooded would be conserving energy, hibernating, or ensconced in a safe habitat. And we should call every truth false that is not accompanied by at least one laugh. –excerpt Thus Spoke Zarathustra, pt. 1, Reading and Writing, By... Read More Read More - [Danger And Play](https://everyangel.org/throw-me-a-line/): A real man wants two things:danger and play. Therefore he wants womanas the most dangerous plaything. –excerpt Thus Spoke Zarathustra, pt. 1, On Little Old and Young Woman, by Friedrich Nietzsche Nietzsche, a prolific writer throughout his professional life, said many outrageous things, a challenge to life-as-we-know-it.  Reading Nietzsche, I have learned to be... Read More Read More - [Re-membering](https://everyangel.org/re-membering/): Memory.  How crucial, even sublime is the faculty of memory.  In the pre-dawn I dreamed.  I was back at my childhood home.  Perhaps it was only a fragment, a sliver of sensation.   I saw, or better expressed, felt that I was in the hallway of the old house where I grew up, living... Read More Read More - [What Have We Done](https://everyangel.org/what-have-we-done/): January 28 at 9AM is showing 19 degrees F outside and snow is coming.  Starbucks is filled with the “Saturday crowd,” the atmosphere infused with the babble of voices.  Life goes on — until it doesn’t.  I read this in the New York Times summary of the news which is received by email daily:... Read More Read More - [Thinking About Artificial Intelligence](https://everyangel.org/thinking-about-artificial-intelligence/): We are not thinking frogs, nor objectifying and registering mechanisms with their innards removed: ceaselessly we have to give birth to our thoughts out of our pain, and maternally, endow them with all that we have of blood, heart, fire, joy, passion, torment, conscience, and fate. –Excerpt, The Gay Science, Preface §3, by Friedrich... Read More Read More - [Virtue, Or Life Lived Dangerously](https://everyangel.org/virtue-or-life-lived-dangerously/): One kind of man will risk nothing, another wants risks. Are we others contemptuous of life? On the contrary, we instinctively seek life raised to a higher power, life lived in danger— but that, to repeat it, does not mean we want to be more virtuous than others. Pascal, for example, wanted to risk... Read More Read More - [Underestimating Ourselves](https://everyangel.org/underestimating-ourselves/): We who think and feel at the same time are those who really continually fashion something that had not been there before: the whole eternally growing world of valuations,    colors,       accents,          perspectives,             scales,                affirmations,                   and negations. This poem that we... Read More Read More - [Sun Down Honey, Moon Up In Wine](https://everyangel.org/sun-down-honey-moon-up-in-wine/): You want if possible — and there is no more insane “if possible” — to abolish suffering. And we? It really seems that we would rather have it higher and worse than ever. Well-being as you understand it — that seems to us an end, a state that makes humanity ridiculous and contemptible —... Read More Read More - [Wheels On Her Feet](https://everyangel.org/wheels-on-her-feet/): Monday morning, waking early before light, — couldn’t sleep.  What can one do but adjust…  I suppose the loss of anyone is a stand-alone experience, an uprooting, a sensation of gratitude and regret.  Fuck…  Al’s passing was timely in that his living years were full.  I mean his stories “ran over,” as a glass... Read More Read More - [In Our End Dark Is Right](https://everyangel.org/in-our-end-dark-is-right/): Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Though wise men at their end know dark is right, Because their words had forked no lightning they Do not go gentle into that good night. –excerpt Do... Read More Read More - [Faith, Love And Hope](https://everyangel.org/faith-love-and-hope/): East Coker by T. S. Eliot III I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hopeFor hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faithBut the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.Wait... Read More Read More - [David Crosby](https://everyangel.org/david-crosby/): EAST COKER By T. S. Eliot I In that open field If you do not come too close, if you do not come too close, On a summer midnight, you can hear the music Of the weak pipe and the little drum And see them dancing around the bonfire The association of man and... Read More Read More - [Hero And Fool](https://everyangel.org/a-hero-and-a-fool/): From time to time we need to be separated from ourselves to gaze upon ourselves from above, and, from an artistic distance, to laugh and cry over ourselves. We must discover the hero no less than the fool in our passion for knowledge; we must occasionally find pleasure in our folly or we cannot... Read More Read More - [Animal](https://everyangel.org/animal/): …there can be no doubtthat mankind is more changeable, uncertain, inconsistent than any other animal —he is the sick animal:how has this come about? Certainly he has also dared more,done more things, braved more and challenged fatemore than all the other animals put together;he, the great experimenter with himself,discontented and insatiable, wrestling with animals,nature... Read More Read More - [Being Unhappy](https://everyangel.org/being-unhappy/): A philosophy that does not make us happier, more virtuous; that on the contrary, lets it be understood that one will likely perish in its service; that one will be isolated from one’s times, burned and scaled; that one will have to pass through every contempt and hate; that one will need a great... Read More Read More - [To Humankind...](https://everyangel.org/cheers-to-humankind/): What is great in humankind is that he is a bridge and not an end: What can be loved in man is that he/she is a passage and a fall. –Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Prologue §4 I love he/she whose soul is deep, even in being wounded, and who can perish of a small experience:... Read More Read More - [To Walk Away](https://everyangel.org/to-walk-away/): How often is a sign encountered that “points one way.”  No matter how strong the affection, the essence, the soul-deep person that we love, even with a desperate love — must take journey that differs from the one which fate has determined I must take.  It is simply not true that love conquers all. ... Read More Read More - [Gifts](https://everyangel.org/gifts/): LITTLE GIDDING  By T. S. Eliot (No. 4 of ‘Four Quartets’) II Let me disclose the gifts reserved for age To set a crown upon your lifetime’s effort. First, the cold friction of expiring sense Without enchantment, offering no promise But bitter tastelessness of shadow fruit As body and soul begin to fall asunder.... Read More Read More - [Winter's Fire](https://everyangel.org/winters-fire/): LITTLE GIDDING  by T. S. Eliot (No. 4 of ‘Four Quartets’) I Midwinter spring is its own season Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown, Suspended in time, between pole and tropic. When the short day is brightest, with frost and fire, The brief sun flames the ice, on pond and ditches, In windless cold that... Read More Read More - [Become Gods](https://everyangel.org/become-gods/): “How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall... Read More Read More - [That Madman](https://everyangel.org/that-madman/): Have you not heard of that madmanwho lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly: “I seek God! I seek God!”—As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Has he got lost? asked one. Did... Read More Read More - [This Twittering World](https://everyangel.org/this-twittering-world/): What is there to say?  Sleeping till late this morning (9AM) I hope for recovery from Covid.  Some congestion lingers.  Does one know if congestion in the throat is advancing or receding?  There’s only trust in nature, and no knowing. A return to the Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot is gratifying.  I am... Read More Read More - [Seijin No Hi](https://everyangel.org/seijin-no-hi/): Monday brings sunshine.  “The world” continues.  The myriad outworking of cause and effect: today was inscribed in yesterday, and while we do not know what tomorrow will bring, all of it is etched faintly or deeply into this present.  It is “Coming of Age Day” (Seijin no Hi) in Japan for all females of... Read More Read More - [Your Moment Of Revolt](https://everyangel.org/your-moment-of-revolt/): In other words, a moment of revolt inherent in the will-to-understand beyond practical ends cannot be prolonged indefinitely: to be the whole of the universe man/woman must let go of his/her principles: accepting nothing that he/she is other than the tendency to go beyond what he/she is. This being that I am is the... Read More Read More - [Letting Go Of My Principles](https://everyangel.org/letting-go-of-my-principles/): I can only be this whole man, by letting go. I cannot be that being through my will: my will is necessarily a will to succeed! If misfortune (or chance) wants me to let go, then I would know that I am the whole man, subordinated to nothing. In other words, a moment of... Read More Read More - [Immense Foolishness](https://everyangel.org/friabile/): It is because an acute intelligence sometimes appears to hide, the immense foolishness to which it is linked –of which it is only a negligible part –does not delay in returning to it. The certainty of the readers inconsistency, the friability of the most astute constructions constitutes the profound truth of books. Since appearances... Read More Read More - [Live And Let Die](https://everyangel.org/live-and-let-die-3/): Recovery continues from Covid.  Paxlovid, the anti-viral med seems to be working.  Thus far I am able to read and to write.  I could be much worse off.  I feel gratitude. This is a segment from this morning’s New York Times concerning the collapse and cardiac arrest of Buffalo Bill’s Damar Hamlin on Monday... Read More Read More - [Covid](https://everyangel.org/covid/): “Good luck” lasts only so long.  The smile of fortune is just that, — a smile.  Nothing in this world lasts indefinitely. I am contending with Covid.  No need to describe the unpleasant fever and a cough.  Many have been afflicted with the virus, and many have died. Illness is an opportunity to consider... Read More Read More - [Mad Burn of Chance](https://everyangel.org/mad-burn-of-chance/): How can one avoid knowing once —then again, and endlessly— the lie of the objects for which we burn? Nevertheless, in this senseless darkness, more distant than every nonsense, than every collapse, passion still lacerates me to “communicate” to those I love the news of this nightfall, as if this “communication,” and none other,... Read More Read More - [Turn The Page](https://everyangel.org/turn-the-page-2/): Sunday is the first day of 2023.  As we mark time, the New Year has begun.  We chose to spend New Year’s Eve dining at Foxfire in Geneva.  We were seated at our table promptly in accord with our reservation and expectation.  The table service was as efficient, our server communicated a warmth that was... Read More Read More - [The Universe Does Not Care](https://everyangel.org/the-universe-does-not-care/): New Year’s eve! Here is a fragment of a poem, Nothing New by Richard Greene: The world doesn’t stop at midnight like a train changing engineers. There’s no bump in the road of time. The scene hasn’t changed. The characters remain the same. The play goes on as before. Dramatic climax is no more... Read More Read More - [At Dusk, The Calmness Remains Unshaken](https://everyangel.org/at-dusk-the-calmness-remains-unshaken/): The Germans are undoubtedly giving up. The artillery in the night shakes the doors. At dusk, twenty some inexpressibly violent explosions (an important ammunition depot went up): I felt the shock of the air between my legs and shoulders. Seven kilometers away, the flames lit up the sky. I saw one of the explosions... Read More Read More - [Toothbrushes](https://everyangel.org/toothbrushes/): The newsis as manufactured a productas an electric toothbrush and issubject to the same market forces and prevailing power system.You do not make toothbrushes under capitalismto stop people buying more of them.in the same way, media product is presentedas desirable and necessary, more of it is nicer still. Television, is controlled, not by its... Read More Read More - [Star Dancer](https://everyangel.org/star-dancer/): If everone breath came to me of that heavenly needthat constrains even accidentsto dance star-dances; If I everlaughed the laughter of creative lightningwhich is followed obediently but grumblinglyby the long thunder of the deed; If I everplayed dice with gods at their table,the earth, till the earth quaked and burst and snortedup floods of... Read More Read More - [The Worst Mistake](https://everyangel.org/the-worst-mistake/): Among the worst mistakes a prisoner could make was to watch (to notice) another prisoner’s mistreatment. There the SS seemed totally irrational, but only seemed so. For example, if a SS man was killing off a prisoner and other prisoners dared to look at what was going on in front of their eyes he... Read More Read More - [Never Enough World](https://everyangel.org/never-enough-world/): …if there is no great machine in the name of which to speak, how is action set,      how can action be required,           and what is to be done? –excerpt On Nietzsche, by Georges Bataille, trans. by Stuart Kendall, p. 143 Monday is the “day after”. Christmas day was yesterday.  I’m never able... Read More Read More - [Toasting The Immense Gentleness](https://everyangel.org/toastin-the-derangement-of-things/): How at that moment— at the limit of the laceration of reason— happiness grows in me from my obvious inability to possess it. We are like the meadow about to be inundated with rain, disarmed under a wan sky. having only one recourse: to carry our glasses to our lips, and to drink gently... Read More Read More - [I Saw Them Radiating...](https://everyangel.org/i-saw-them-radiating/): Chance, happinesswhich don’t exalt me,arriving unexpectedly, in calm,I saw them radiating, gently, from their simple exuberance.and I said of laughter, “I am laughter—to the extremity of outburst— so much that it is superfluous to laugh and out of place.” In the wood, the sun rising, I was free, my life rising effortlessly andlike a... Read More Read More - [Losing Oneself](https://everyangel.org/losing-oneself/): Time lets “what is” fall on individuals. The individual himself (herself) – in time – loses himself, falls in a movement in which he dissolves –is “communication,” not inevitably from one to another. With this exception, that chance is the duration of the individual in his (her) loss, time, which needs the individual, is... Read More Read More - [Nativity Unwrapped](https://everyangel.org/the-nativity-unwrapped/): When we use the word “happiness” as defined by our philosophy, we’re not in the first place thinking like tired, anxious, and suffering philosophers, inwardly and outwardly at peace in the absence of pain, impossibility, tranquility, the “holy of holies,” at equilibrium, something that more or less has the value of a deep dreamless... Read More Read More - [There Is No Wall](https://everyangel.org/there-is-no-wall/): Chance for the individual is “communication,” the loss of one individual in another. “Communication” is the “duration of loss.” Will I in the end find a joyful, rather mad way of speaking –and the analytic subtlety — to recount the dance around time?* With the spite and obstinacy of a fly, I say insistently:... Read More Read More - [If Chance Fails Me, I Sink](https://everyangel.org/if-chance-fails-me-i-sink/): “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. And the Lord God will give to him the... Read More Read More - [Facing The Wall](https://everyangel.org/facing-the-wall/): And so it begins!  Year by year as the denouement of Christmas Eve nears, I dedicate myself to make sense of the nativity story.  God-in-a-manger, stated baldly.  I have not attended a worship service on Sunday morning in years so I can hardly be considered “a believer.” Nevertheless I am compelled to revisit the... Read More Read More - [A Christmas Miracle?](https://everyangel.org/a-christmas-miracle/): Saturday, I have permission to drive subsequent to the heart procedure.  I returned to Starbucks.  When I reflect, words to describe my feelings come with difficulty, the irregular heartbeat has been eliminated with a minimum of disruption to my life.  A “Christmas miracle,” a credit to a host of individuals, especially to those no... Read More Read More - [Beloved Chance](https://everyangel.org/beloved-chance/): Desperately, I work, seeking the unity of man and the world! On coordinated levels of knowledge, political action, and limitless contemplation! I have to go back to this truth: that life implicates a beyond of light, of beloved chance. My madness—or rather my extreme wisdom— nevertheless reveals this to me: this beloved chance had... Read More Read More - [No Mere Players](https://everyangel.org/recovery-day/): No post was attempted yesterday. At the time I would be writing I was being prepared for anesthesia, several hours of sleep, while a Cardiac Electrophysiology specialist treated a circuit malfunction of my heart that was causing an irregular heartbeat. The method used was indicative of a benefit of knowledge. For human beings knowledge... Read More Read More - [The Feeling Of The Impossible](https://everyangel.org/the-feeling-of-the-impossible/): An infinite possibility flowsfrom the multitude of life’s difficulties:We attribute the feeling of the impossible that dominates usto those difficulties that get in the way! If existence is intolerable, we think,it is because some specific wrong has lead us astray. And we struggle against this wrong.The impossible is lifted if the struggle is possible.... Read More Read More - [Glum Evocation Of Happiness](https://everyangel.org/glum-evocation-of-happiness/): A gray Monday.  There are apt to be many of these as the winter solstice is ahead, December 21st.  Spring, why that’s just an idea…  The idea is one of hope nevertheless.  Just this morning I received an emailed advertisement announcing Summerfest 2023.  James Taylor is to be one of the headliner performers.  Count... Read More Read More - [Amazing Grace](https://everyangel.org/amazing-grace/): Saturday evening, upon a friend’s recommendation we dined at Villa Verone in Geneva. The occasion for us was to celebrate fifty two years of partnership, a marriage which began in Japan.  The year was 1970 and we both were 21 years old.  We traveled to the city hall in our section of Tokyo to... Read More Read More - [If It So Happens](https://everyangel.org/24285-2/): And if it so happens that someone sees chance beside me, that chance should be taken! It is not my chance, it belongs to whoever takes it. No one can grasp it any more than I can. Nothing about it can be known, but it can be taken. But who can see it without... Read More Read More - [Age Of Anxiety And Excess](https://everyangel.org/age-of-anxiety-and-excess/): Deathscape Lullaby Cynthia Cruz Broken crimson Mercedes sedan. Cotton-wood, milk-weed. The taste of cold metal and the repetition of three AM sirening ambulance rides. Yellow cream, three-tiered birthday cake. Cherry lip balm. Pale blue satin shorts and matching jacket with my name embroidered in hot pink, Cindy. Poochie, my childhood beagle, whimpering inside the... Read More Read More - [Touching The Limit](https://everyangel.org/touching-the-limit/): Anticipating the gathering of a circle of friends tonight, for a holiday social.  A portion of the day will be dedicated to completing projects of final preparation.  The guests are fellow travelers.  I need company, others with whom to share the risk of thinking-out-loud.  To think out loud is one description of philosophy.  To... Read More Read More - [Misery Preserves The Happy Man](https://everyangel.org/misery-preserves-the-happy-man/): And how many new ideals are, at bottom, still possible! —Here is a new ideal I stumble upon once every five weeks in a wild and lonely walk, in an azure moment of sinful happiness. to spend one’s life amid delicate and absurd things; a stranger to reality; half an artist, half a bird... Read More Read More - [Uncertainty](https://everyangel.org/uncertainty/): Uncertain, what to write this morning.  Tom, stopped by for several minutes and we exchanged our impressions about “philosophy.”  Tom mentioned the slog of reading John Stewart Mill.  I agreed with him.  Mill was as inaccessible to me as well.  I said, that one must pick and choose among the philosophers, selecting material that... Read More Read More - [An Old Story](https://everyangel.org/an-old-story/): Should I say anything at all about this song?  It is a classic Marty Robbins cowboy ballad.  Released in 1959 the lyric and the melody convey a heightened tension between the inevitable confrontation between one representing “law and order” the constraints of civilized life, and another, representing the imposition of idiosyncratic preference with a... Read More Read More - [Music](https://everyangel.org/music/): Music often elevates my spirit. A catchy tune, and smooth lyrics launch me into a memory, or sometimes rotates the axis of my view point.  I tend to interpret reality in shades of gray.  I’d like to be optimistic.  I work at it.  But, my body, the experience that has accrued over the years... Read More Read More - [Dancing Like A Peasant](https://everyangel.org/dancing-like-a-peasant/): Saturday morning and the day is cold.  Early December’s days oscillate between mild  50s and frigid lows of mornings in the low teens.  Like life.  A shuttle between opposites… This morning, a short drive from Batavia to the Geneva Starbucks a tune by AC/DC, Highway to Hell played on the radio.  The song, another... Read More Read More - [Head In My Hands](https://everyangel.org/head-in-my-hands/): Friday is gray overcast, the temperature mild, and the day is windy.  Change is always on the playbill.  Why not welcome another harbinger of winter? Reading On Nietzsche by Georges Bataille, I am captivated by the author’s analysis of the trajectory of a life, in the light of a relationship, or relationships of maximum... Read More Read More - [Impalement, Laughing](https://everyangel.org/impalement-laughing/): On a state designated by a shorthand name, (impalement), I am writing these few lines in the form of a theme for meditation: I imagine: an object of attraction. The flame Shining and light Consuming itself in itself Annihilating itself And in this way revealing emptiness, The identity of the attraction, Of that which... Read More Read More - [A Being In Pain](https://everyangel.org/a-being-in-pain/): The Philosophy Bunch discussed the topic of euthanasia.  Death is not an event which merely happens to each of us as individuals.  Dying is a process measured by time, and there are infinite ways to die.  It is exceeding rare for anyone to die without the involvement of others.  (Death must be the definitive... Read More Read More - [The Explosive Charge](https://everyangel.org/the-explosive-charge/): For much of my adult life I’ve felt drawn to the writings of Nietzsche.  I have speculated inwardly the reasons why this is so.  I think my attraction to this troubled writer from the 19th century was inevitable.  Do we have any say in the time and place of our birth, the circumstances and... Read More Read More - [Laughing Uncontrollably](https://everyangel.org/laughing-uncontrollably/): I have nothing in mind for writing today.  Perhaps it was the troubling dream that came in the early morning hours that unaccountably erased/rebooted my psyche?  I am left with a mind that is grasping helplessly.  Nothing “makes sense.”  Is “making” sense nothing more than a safety-blanket of illusion?  Is that enough?  Can I... Read More Read More - [Devotion](https://everyangel.org/devotion/): We cannot equal the empty sky that infinitely murders and annihilates us to the last man. I can only sadly say, of the necessity to which I submit, that it humanizes me, that it give me an undeniable dominion over things. I can however refuse to not see this as a sign of impotence.... Read More Read More - [Delight](https://everyangel.org/elation/): Saturday.  Another mild, sunny day at the end of November.  Time for reflection upon the sumptuousness of Thanksgiving feast day, the glamor of a formal table, guests in their places, words spoken, and convivial conversation exchanged…  Perhaps this seems idealistic, not exactly what you in fact experienced, this past Thursday, day before yesterday.  Were... Read More Read More - [Coloring Outside The Lines](https://everyangel.org/color-outside-the-lines-always/): All “communication” participates in suicide and crime. Funeral horror accompanies it, disgust is its sign. And in this light evil appears – as a source of life! By destroying in myself, in others, the integrity of being, I open myself to communion, I attain a moral summit. And the summit is not submission to,... Read More Read More - [Eternal Fabulousness Of Being Human](https://everyangel.org/the-fabulousness-of-being-human/): Thanksgiving day.  A day of sacrifice and feasting.  The customary “victim” is the turkey.  The day is dedicated to a nationwide communal meal, families including invited guests, extended family members are together around a table for a meal of prepared turkey, side dishes which have passed the test of tradition.  The elements are common,... Read More Read More - [Sinking... A Line If I Reach It In Time](https://everyangel.org/sinking-a-line-if-i-reach-it-in-time/): Two hours of discussion on the proposition that “psychology” has replaced ancient myth as the anchor of personal identity, a solid ground of membership in a people.  I am unconvinced.  Psychology is a soft science, similar to sociology, that investigation of social structures, institutions.  Dissimilar to chemistry or physics, which are studies of external... Read More Read More - [Hair On Fire](https://everyangel.org/setting-my-hair-on-fire/): “We will make philosophy dangerous, change the notion of it, we teach a philosophy that is dangerous to life; how can we serve it better? An idea is much more valuable to humanity when it is more costly. If no one hesitates to sacrifice themselves for the idea of ‘God,’ ‘Country,’ ‘Freedom,’ if all... Read More Read More - [World Making](https://everyangel.org/world-making-2/): Morning, — is not the word poetic? A one word poem that you can say over and over quietly, and feel your mood elevate in response.  Dawn with rising sun, is portent of life, a call and response promise of “give and take” between the interior “self” and the exterior “world.” What is meant... Read More Read More - [Smokescreen All Around](https://everyangel.org/smokescreen-all-around/): It is Sunday afternoon.  I chose not to write in the morning.  I started the day late.  I read an essay that waited in my computer bag, while the fog of my mind slowly dissipated.  Nowadays there is abundant news of tragedy and mayhem somewhere. Should the newspapers be criticized for reporting on the... Read More Read More - [So Think](https://everyangel.org/so-think/): Think!  The admonition, “think, god-damn it, think!” is the hardest, sharpest, heaviest, advisement that can be uttered and received.  Many of us born to privilege, in the West, white and almost certainly male are relatively unconstrained by circumstances.  A felt compulsion to think, that is, to consider that one’s lifestyle, the purchases, the use... Read More Read More - [Plunging Into The Story](https://everyangel.org/plunging-into-the-story/): Iconic denotation    is only syntagm,       associates elements without          any system: The discontinuous connotators are connected, actualized, ‘spoken’ through the syntagm of the denotation, the discontinuous world of symbols plunges into the story of the denoted scene, as though into a lustral bath of innocence. -excerpt, Rhetoric of the Image, by Roland... Read More Read More - [Erotica](https://everyangel.org/erotica/): The jukebox makes listening to music a highly enjoyable visual, acoustic and tactile experience. The listening is, however, very complicated and time-intensive. As my jukebox is not in constant use, it first has to be plugged in. It takes some time for the valves to warm up. After inserting the coins, I carefully press... Read More Read More - [A Time Without Consecration](https://everyangel.org/a-time-without-consecration/): We live in a time without consecration… Hypercommunication, the noise of communication, desecrates the world, profanes it. Stillness produces nothing. Capitalism therefore dislikes stillness. Information capitalism produces the compulsion of communication. Stillness sharpens our sense for the higher order, which, however, need not be an order of rule or power. Stillness can be extremely... Read More Read More - [Now](https://everyangel.org/now/): Right Now By Van Halen Don’t wanna wait til tomorrow, Why put it off another day? One more walk through problems, Built up, and stand in our way ,ah One step ahead, one step behind me Now you gotta run to get even Make future plans, don’t dream about yesterday, hey C’mon turn, turn... Read More Read More - [Same Old Song](https://everyangel.org/same-old-song/): Dust in the Wind By Kansas I close my eyesOnly for a moment, and the moment’s goneAll my dreamsPass before my eyes, a curiosity Dust in the windAll they are is dust in the wind Same old songJust a drop of water in an endless seaAll we doCrumbles to the ground, though we refuse... Read More Read More - [Born, Worked, Died](https://everyangel.org/born-worked-died/): One of his [Heidegger’s] lectures on Aristotle begins thus: ‘Aristotle was born, worked, and died.’ Thinking is work. Later, Heidegger called thinking handwork: ‘Perhaps thinking, too, is just something like building a cabinet [Schrein].  At any rate, it is handwork. The hand makes thinking a decidedly analogue process. –excerpt, Non-things by Byung-chul Han, p.... Read More Read More - [Gaplessness](https://everyangel.org/gaplessness/): Humans are intimate beings [Nahwesen]. Intimacy, however, is not the same as a lack of distance. Distance is a part of it. Nearness and distance belong together. The human being is thus simultaneously a being of nearness and a being of distance. That is why Kafka says that we can hold someone who is... Read More Read More - [Poseidon Says Hello](https://everyangel.org/poseidon-says-hello/): It’s called schadenfreude, a descriptive term for the satisfaction that wells up when someone else suffers misfortune.   Confession:  I felt schadenfreude while viewing the evening news’ depiction of the massive shoreline destruction, the result of the moon’s near orbit, of a high tide and the storm surge of hurricane Nicole’s wind lashed waves.... Read More Read More - [More](https://everyangel.org/more/): Not another song…  Yes!  I suspect that what I write is not a matter of choice at all.  Is it chance, that implacable, impenetrable twisting of fate?  I mean that branching of inchoate inclination to switch radio stations while on Fayban Parkway on the way to Starbucks. Whether chance or choice, I’ll never get... Read More Read More - [Holding On Tight](https://everyangel.org/holding-on-tight/): The morning after the mid-terms.  One has to expect something on the day after…  What did I expect?  Perhaps I thought that the deluge of propaganda, image-based demonizing of the opposition, “othering” of a member of the opposing party, caricaturing as anti-human one’s opponent would rule the day — the sun would fail to... Read More Read More - [Tougher Than The Rest](https://everyangel.org/tougher-than-the-rest/): Ferrari.  I saw the movie for the second time yesterday.  A friend, (who has spent a good amount of time at race tracks) and I met at the theater.  The arc of the story, the birth of the Enzo Ferrari company is entwined with its founders history in post-WWII Italy, his conflict fraught marriage... Read More Read More - [I Should've Walked Away](https://everyangel.org/i-shouldve-walked-away/): I must write about this tune, said the insistent small voice as if a small version of my younger self sat on my shoulder. The Cutting Crew tune came over the radio as I made my way before sunrise to the Geneva Starbucks neighborhood. There is something about this tune, the keyboard runs which... Read More Read More - [Music](https://everyangel.org/music-2/): Thursday, the sun threatens to illuminate which is a hint of a brighter afternoon.  Wintertime in the Midwest.  How can one resist absorbing the somber, gray, cold of the season?  I must resist.  Music is a proven tactic for sustaining creativity, the motivation for good work. I finished an essay written by Nietzsche which... Read More Read More - [Whatever You Call The In Between](https://everyangel.org/see-saw/): Midweek and I am unsure what to write.  Uncertainty is the rule, the rule that overrides all else most of the time. Read a passage translated from Aristotle’s Ethics I 1094b which is famously and often quoted.  The philosopher writes that we should measure our judgment to the particular topic at hand.  Our expectations... Read More Read More - [About Dreaming](https://everyangel.org/about-dreaming/): A quotation captured my imagination this morning.  Consider that there are varieties of knowledge.  The knowledge that is acquired by learning the proper names of the elements, by learning how they combine to form complex molecules, by learning the mathematics by which molecular chemistry is expressed – are all types of knowledge.  Then there... Read More Read More - [A Little Help Please](https://everyangel.org/a-little-help-please/): A new year, turn the page.  We prefer predictability do we not?  We cannot help ourselves.  Each of us is a standard issue mammal, albeit a language enabled one.  Like every living thing our bodies seek homeostasis, that delicate balance which makes living easier, an economy of energy exchange.  Those undisturbed circumstances, you know... Read More Read More - [正月 Oshōgatsu](https://everyangel.org/%e6%ad%a3%e6%9c%88-oshogatsu/): Japanese: Oshōgatsu is the festival of year’s end and of a new beginning.  The holiday is celebrated by gathering with family and friends to eat traditional foods. The feasting is typically preceded by the visit to a local temple where at the stroke of midnight one offers a coin to the deity.  The temple... Read More Read More - [The Sponge](https://everyangel.org/the-sponge/): Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the horizon? –The Gay Science by Friedrich Nietzsche To The Unknown God Once more, before I move on I am directing my gaze forward In loneliness, I am lifting my hands Up to Thee, to whom I flee, To whom I, from the deepest bottom of... Read More Read More - [Year's End](https://everyangel.org/years-end/): On occasion words come to “set my hair on fire.”  It is one of my favorite metaphors to describe a life-changing experience.  Poetry is a matter of words used to proper effect, to orient us as a compass needle to our position within the larger scheme of space and time.  This poem by Cal... Read More Read More - [Wear](https://everyangel.org/wear/): I accompanied my granddaughter to a story telling event at the public library.  The topic was the screech owl and raptors in general.  The three story tellers were enthusiastic about their work rehabilitating injured raptors, returning the birds to the wild.  I felt humbled in the presence of the birds which were gently removed... Read More Read More - [Poem About The Sun](https://everyangel.org/27868-2/): [Sun-messenger] Lynn Xu Sun-messenger call Life to me slowly and all at once criss- crossing in that golden light                                     Snail                        with your moving shroud                        Silver tree             with your thousand roadways             O dream hurry go past me This poem speaks to me and I cannot describe why.  These are the shortest days, less... Read More Read More - [You Must Decide](https://everyangel.org/you-must-decide/): This is a controversial image.  Street Art by definition is subversive, a point blank interrogation of the received, official interpretation of events. The war between the IDF and Hamas grinds on.  “Grind,” is the word. The densely populated landscape of Gaza continues to be pulverized by artillery, by IDF airstrikes in order to eliminate... Read More Read More - [Arriving Not A Moment Too Soon](https://everyangel.org/arriving-not-a-moment-too-soon/): Journey of the Magi T. S. Eliot ‘A cold coming we had of it, Just the worst time of the year For a journey, and such a long journey: The ways deep and the weather sharp, The very dead of winter.’ And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory, Lying down in the melting snow. There... Read More Read More - [Live!](https://everyangel.org/live/): I participated with a group of friends in a discussion about the future.  What possible paths appear to be before us as a society, given the political, economic, an social trends that we are aware of?  I am satisfied the future is opaque, not subject to prediction.  Still, who can resist such an exchange... Read More Read More - [For This Code-Red Moment](https://everyangel.org/for-this-code-red-moment/): The rules that programmed an entire century: form follows function. We planned cities, tone-deaf buildings, urban social engineering, so soul-crushing it finally had to be leveled. Monster homes plopped on the seashore, boxes upon boxes, right to the property line, curve of the shore against the straight-lime imagination of the developers. Post-modern architecture was... Read More Read More - [Day And Night And Evil](https://everyangel.org/day-and-night-and-evil/): December 21st.  The dark outside is palpable reminder.  Today is the shortest day of the year.  The tilt of the earth’s axis away from the sun is at an oblique angle in the northern hemisphere.  Is the dark evil, the diminished light an omen?  On the other hand might we celebrate this interlude, pause... Read More Read More - [Before I Move On](https://everyangel.org/before-i-move-on/): Midweek.  A few days remain until Christmas. The to-do list is short.  To live is to act, to do.  It is good to have a list, the illusion of control.  I believe there is no control, that all is at “the mercy” of the state of things that immediately preceded this moment.  Still there... Read More Read More - [Cold Rumination On A Cold Day](https://everyangel.org/cold-meditation-on-a-cold-day/): Tuesday morning and it is mid-December.  Winter is settling in.  The temperature is in the teens.  That the season arrives as expected anchors my sense of well being.  We utterly depend upon Nature.  Yes, I am “of Nature” and there is nothing “higher” that I can say of myself.  I have the benefit of... Read More Read More - [Solstice Cool Change](https://everyangel.org/solstice-cool-change/): Solstice in Truro Joshua Weiner Teaching term done, I keep my laptop shut A chill in the air runs under weak June sun Chickadee warbler catbird waxwing— Morning migrant songs drowned by bulldozer next door The backing up beeping a constant one note feed From far off, boundless tides crest onto restless sand How... Read More Read More - [Sugar, Wine, and Cheap Perfume](https://everyangel.org/sugar-wine-and-cheap-perfume/): Sunday morning is dark by cloud cover. The asphalt intersection at State and 3rd is a gray sheen with last night’s rain.  On my way this morning I captured a photograph of the Christmas display in front of the old courthouse.  An old maple, regal in summer, the bare branches now framing strings of... Read More Read More - [Before, How Were Things](https://everyangel.org/how-were-things-before/): Rän Qiu asked Zhongni, saying,‘Can it be knownhow it was before heaven and earth?’ The reply was,‘It can. It was the same of old as now… [Zhongni] Was that which was produced before Heaven and Earth a thing?That which made things and gave to each its character was not itself a thing.Things came forth... Read More Read More - [Life Shining](https://everyangel.org/life-shining/): Musing about possible topics for this post.  When I read this poem by Lori Levy, it seemed this was more than enough to pass on.  The lines are a reminder that ordinary life is a smorgasbord of delightful details.  Often what I lack, is sufficient inner calm to notice the play of everything going... Read More Read More - [Forger Of Song](https://everyangel.org/forger-of-song/): The forger of swords for the Minister of War had reached the age of eighty, and had not lost a hair’s-breadth of his ability. The Minister said to him, ‘You are indeed skillful, Sir. Have you any method that makes you so?’ The man said, ‘Your servant has (always) kept to his work. When... Read More Read More - [Returning Home](https://everyangel.org/27765-2/): ‘Men’s life between heaven and earth is like a white colt’s passing a crevice, and suddenly disappearing. As with a plunge and an effort they all come forth; easily and quietly they all enter again. By a transformation they live, and by another transformation they die. Living things are made sad (by death), and... Read More Read More - [Ho, Ho, Ho.](https://everyangel.org/ho-ho-ho/): St. Nicholas, Santa Claus, St. Nick is a Saint that continues to have a defined function. Not being raised Catholic, praying to any saint strikes me as strange, an out of sync movement in the symphony of survival. On the other hand perhaps my secular point of view is out of tune. I cannot... Read More Read More - [Santa Clause: Rebel Without A Cause](https://everyangel.org/santa-clause-rebel-without-a-cause/): Ten days into December.  A friend asked if I was finished my Christmas shopping?  The gift giving custom can be approached in many ways. Christmas is best experienced for me by reducing the intensity of stress.  Quite by accident I am learning to cultivate curiosity for each of the duties, the chores, and the... Read More Read More - [Rundown By A Dream](https://everyangel.org/rundown-by-a-dream/): Soon it will be mid-December.  Its raining outside, Saturday.  Tom Petty’s Runnin’ Down A Dream played on the radio, I drove on the rain slicked road before light this morning. An extended email exchange with an old friend occupied my thoughts.  He is a die-hard conservative.  I, on the other hand, am on the... Read More Read More - [Looking At One Thing](https://everyangel.org/looking-at-one-thing/): Nie Qüe asked about the Tao from Bei-yi who replied, ‘If you keep your body as it should be, and look only at the one thing, the Harmony of Heaven will come to you. Call in your knowledge, and make your measures uniform, and the spiritual (belonging to you) will come and lodge with... Read More Read More - [Tao In The Manger Part II](https://everyangel.org/tao-in-the-manger-part-ii/): The life is due to the collecting of the breath. When that is collected, there is life; when it is dispersed, there is death. Since death and life thus attend on each other, why should I account (either of) them an evil? ‘Therefore all things go through one and the same experience. (Life) is... Read More Read More - [Tao In The Manger](https://everyangel.org/tao-in-the-manger/): Knowledge had rambled northwards to the region of the Dark Water, where he ascended the height of Imperceptible Slope, when it happened that he met with Dumb Inaction. Knowledge addressed him, saying, ‘I wish to ask you some questions: By what process of thought and anxious consideration do we get to know the Tao?... Read More Read More - [Drifters All](https://everyangel.org/drifters-all/): Tuesday is a gray day. A bit of snow this morning becomes an annunciation of winter. I look forward to winter because days are shorter. There’s the respite from growth. Absent the need to transform energy into concrete form, I make room for contemplation, reading, marinating my sense of self with the mind of... Read More Read More - [Eyes No Longer Blind](https://everyangel.org/eyes-no-longer-blind/): look at the world I look at the world From awakening eyes in a black face— And this is what I see: This fenced-off narrow space    Assigned to me. I look then at the silly walls Through dark eyes in a dark face— And this is what I know: That all these walls oppression... Read More Read More - [Preservation and Destruction](https://everyangel.org/preservation-and-destruction/): The king of Ku and the ruler of Fan were sitting together. After a little while, the attendants of the king said, ‘Fan has been destroyed three times.’ The ruler of Fan rejoined, ‘The destruction of Fan has not been sufficient to destroy what we had that was most deserving to be preserved.’ Now,... Read More Read More - [Incomprehension](https://everyangel.org/incomprehension/): [There is no Life or Death,] by Mina Loy There is no Life or Death, Only activity And in the absolute Is no declivity. There is no Love or Lust Only propensity Who would possess Is a nonentity. There is no First or Last Only equality And who would rule Joins the majority. There... Read More Read More - [Finding That One](https://everyangel.org/finding-that-one/): “Beasts that feed on grass do not fret over a change of pasture; creatures that live in water do not fret over a change of stream. They accept the minor shift as long as the all-important constant is not lost. [Be like them,] And joy, anger, grief, and happiness can never enter your breast.... Read More Read More - [Enjoying Myself](https://everyangel.org/enjoying-myself/): ‘I was enjoying myself in thinking about the commencement of things.’ ‘What do you mean?’ ‘My mind is so cramped that I hardly know it; my tongue is so tied that I cannot tell it; but I will try to describe it to you as nearly as I can. When the state of Yin... Read More Read More - [Christmas Part II](https://everyangel.org/christmas-part-ii/): Christmas is canceled in Bethlehem. Palestinian Christian leaders plan to forgo celebrations in solidarity with Gaza, The Washington Post reports. While reading my email bulletin from the New York Times a few minutes ago, this story prompted a pause.  Much by the light of decency ought come to a halt while there is egregious... Read More Read More - [Now It Is Christmas](https://everyangel.org/now-it-is-christmas/): December is upon us.  Very soon, all will be involved in a schedule of holiday festivities.  The merriment begins the day after Thanksgiving.  On Sunday Batavia hosted our tree-lighting ceremony, with a band playing holiday tunes, our Mayor recognizing the high school coaching staff and achievement of the football team, then Santa arrived, transported... Read More Read More - [Standing Tall, Seeing Further](https://everyangel.org/standing-tall-seeing-further/): I am reading an article from Foreign Affairs sent to me by a friend: If Mao Had Come to Washington by Barbara W. Tuchman. In 1945 Mao Tse-tung and Chou En-lai requested a meeting with President Roosevelt, in hopes of convincing him that the Communists were a worthy ally, and that the Communist Party... Read More Read More - [First Snow](https://everyangel.org/first-snow/): It is Sunday and there’s snow outside.  The first snow of the season is falling, just enough to make driving hazardous.  Pay no attention to that slush slicked intersection and you are courting an expensive, inconvenient surprise that possibly will involve another of your townspeople. There is no other place that I’d rather be... Read More Read More - [Climate Change and The Magpie](https://everyangel.org/climate-change-and-the-magpie/): Zhuang Zhou was wandering in the park at Diaoling when he saw a peculiar kind of magpie that came flying along from the south. It had a wingspread of seven feet, and its eyes were a good inch in diameter. It brushed against Zhuang Zhou’s forehead and then settled down in a grove of... Read More Read More - [You Cannot Be A Hero](https://everyangel.org/you-cannot-be-a-hero/): Every single one of ushas to be a hero at some time in our lives. Every babyforced through the narrow passage of the birth canal,which is not unlikethe labyrinthine tunnels at Lascaux,has to leave the safety of the womb,and face the trauma of entryinto a terrifyingly unfamiliar world. Every motherwho gives birth, who risks... Read More Read More - [This Fire](https://everyangel.org/this-fire/): This fierce disco number, written by Kenneth Gamble, Leon Huff and Cary Gilbert captured my imagination.  I have listened to radio play of the song too many times to count. Thelma Houston’s opening voice run washed over me like the movement of a great tide.  Is not our fundamental longing that of loving and... Read More Read More - [On Thanksgiving](https://everyangel.org/on-thanksgiving/): Monday is gray outside with cloud cover.  The light is muted, the leaves of Fall are almost all descended from branches.  This is the week of Thanksgiving.  Proclaimed as a national holiday by President Lincoln on October 3, 1863 in a context of the Civil War, the day was a bid for unity, and... Read More Read More - [Album Covers](https://everyangel.org/album-covers/): In the beginning Man created God; and in the image of Man created he him. 2 And Man gave unto God a multitude of names, that he might be Lord of all the earth when it was suited to Man 3 And on the seven millionth day Man rested and did lean heavily on... Read More Read More - [Addiction](https://everyangel.org/on-addiction/): …one who takes his seat on the Tao and its Attributes, and there finds his ease and enjoyment, is not exposed to such a contingency. He is above the reach both of praise and of detraction; now he (mounts aloft) like a dragon, now he (keeps beneath) like a snake; he is transformed with... Read More Read More - [Fitness That Forgets](https://everyangel.org/fitness-that-forgets/): The artisan Chui made things round (and square) more exactly than if he had used the circle and square. The operation of his fingers on (the forms of) things was like the transformations of them (in nature), and required no application of his mind; and so his Intelligence was entire and encountered no resistance.... Read More Read More - [Why Think So Differently](https://everyangel.org/why-think-so-differently/): The officer of Prayer in his dark and square-cut robes goes to the pig-pen, and thus counsels the pigs, ‘Why should you shrink from dying? I will for three months feed you on grain. Then for ten days I will fast, and keep vigil for three days, after which I will put down the... Read More Read More - [Sheltered](https://everyangel.org/sheltered/): ‘Take the case of a drunken man falling from his carriage; – though he may suffer injury, he will not die. His bones and joints are the same as those of other men, but the injury which he receives is different: his spirit is entire. He knew nothing about his getting into the carriage,... Read More Read More - [Skull For A Pillow](https://everyangel.org/skull-for-a-pillow/): When Zhuangzi went to Ku, he saw an empty skull, bleached indeed, but still retaining its shape. Tapping it with his horse-switch, he asked it, saying, ‘Did you, Sir, in your greed of life, fail in the lessons of reason, and come to this? Or did you do so, in the service of a... Read More Read More - [Walking The Dam Over The Hâo](https://everyangel.org/walking-the-dam-over-the-hao/): Master Zhuangzi and Master Hui were walking on the dam over the Hâo, when the former said, ‘These thryssas come out and play about at their ease; – that is the enjoyment of fishes.’ The other said, ‘You are not a fish; how do you know what constitutes the enjoyment of fishes?’ Master Zhuangzi... Read More Read More - [To Hold All Things In My Love](https://everyangel.org/to-hold-all-things-in-my-love/): The earl of the Ho said, ‘Very well. But what am I to do? and what am I not to do? How am I to be guided after all in regard to what I accept or reject, and what I pursue or put away from me?’ Zo of the Northern Sea replied, ‘From the... Read More Read More - [The Limits Of My Hole](https://everyangel.org/the-limits-of-my-hole/):    ‘A frog in a well cannot be talked with about the sea; – he is confined to the limits of his hole.    An insect of the summer cannot be talked with about ice; – it knows nothing beyond its own season.    A scholar of limited views cannot be talked with about... Read More Read More - [Tell Me A Story, Your Life](https://everyangel.org/tell-me-the-story-of-your-life/): Myth, a fabulous story of a single individual of destiny, that inscrutable intersection of circumstance has placed on the pivot point of choice!  Is it to be “life”, or will it be “death”, capitulation to maintain things as they are, to remain asleep?  What will you do with your life?  The great wager, a... Read More Read More - [Darkness Roars Unstifled Yet](https://everyangel.org/darkness-roars-unstifled-yet/): Children of Darkness By Robert Graves “In their generation wiser than the children of Light.” We spurred our parents to the kiss, Though doubtfully they shrank from this— Day had no courage to review  What lusty dark alone might do— Then were we joined from their caress  In heat of midnight, one from two.... Read More Read More - [Culture And Society](https://everyangel.org/culture-and-society/): A group of us attempted to better understand what is meant by culture.  Isn’t culture tacitly agreed upon habits of behavior, norms of a common life, a form-of-life shared?  Expectations are built up gradually by observation and practice.  So much becomes “as if” instinct, imprinted habit.  I simply know how to act, and how... Read More Read More - [Promising What I Do Not have](https://everyangel.org/promising-what-i-do-not-have/): To love is to give what you do not have to someone who does not exist. -Jacques Lacan, Seminar VIII Today I “decided” to dedicate time to revisit the ideas of Jacques Lacan (1901-1981).  Lacan was a psychoanalyst practicing according to the insight offered by Freudian philosophy which treated the unconscious.  Lacan was interested... Read More Read More - [No End Or Beginning](https://everyangel.org/there-is-no-end-or-beginning/): ‘There is no end or beginning to the Tao. Things indeed die and are born, not reaching a perfect state which can be relied on. Now there is emptiness, and now fulness; – they do not continue in one form. The years cannot be reproduced; time cannot be arrested. Decay and growth, fulness and... Read More Read More - [On Republicans](https://everyangel.org/on-republicans/): Zo of the Northern Sea replied, ‘From the standpoint of the Tao, what is noble? and what is mean? These expressions are but the different extremes of the average level. Do not keep pertinaciously to your own ideas, which put you in such opposition to the Tao. What are few? and what are many?... Read More Read More - [The Plain And Quiet Path](https://everyangel.org/the-plain-and-quiet-path/): The earl of the Ho said, ‘Well then, may I consider heaven and earth as (the ideal of) what is great, and the point of a hair as that of what is small?’ Zo of the Northern Sea replied, ‘No.’ The (different) capacities of things are illimitable; time never stops, (but is always moving... Read More Read More - [Upside Down](https://everyangel.org/27426-2/): They who lose themselves in their pursuit of things, and lose their nature in their study of what is vulgar, must be pronounced people who turn things upside down.  -Zhuangzi, Correcting the Nature, by Zhuang Zhou, trans. James Legge With the GMC Sierra truck commercials, I feel a twinge of discomfort.  Is that repulsion... Read More Read More - [Mulch Therefore We Are](https://everyangel.org/i-mulch-therefore-we-are/): Saturday afternoon was spent in the yard mulching fallen leaves. Mulching is good work. The leaves are prepared for decay, a return to humus, bedding for future generations of trees. Does life have an absolute beginning, and a final end? Where is a line of separation between what is living, and the process of... Read More Read More - [Juxtaposition](https://everyangel.org/juxtaposition/): The life of the sage is like the action of Heaven; and his/her death is the transformation common to all things. In his/her stillness his/her virtue is the same as that of the Yin, and in movement his/her diffusiveness is like that of the Yang. He does not take the initiative in producing either... Read More Read More - [Contra Tranquilizing The World](https://everyangel.org/contra-to-tranquilize-the-world/): Ingrained ideas and a high estimate of their own conduct; leaving the world, and pursuing uncommon ways; talking loftily and in resentful disparagement of others; – all this is simply symptomatic of arrogance… Discoursing of benevolence, righteousness, loyalty, and good faith; being humble and frugal, self-forgetful and courteous; – all this is simply symptomatic... Read More Read More - [The Sword](https://everyangel.org/the-sword/): The night was restless.  It was as if I awakened every hour or so, unable to be sufficiently comfortable to drift off into sleep until morning.  Awake at five AM ceasing attempts to shake the foreboding which had invested my mind since the early evening, I gave up the quest for sleep.  I got... Read More Read More - [Dust In Our Eyes](https://everyangel.org/dust-in-our-eyes/): If you winnow chaff, and the dust gets into your eyes, then the places of heaven and earth and of the four cardinal points are all changed to you. If mosquitoes or gadflies puncture your skin, it will keep you all the night from sleeping. But this painful iteration of benevolence and righteousness excites... Read More Read More - [Heaven's Doom](https://everyangel.org/heavens-doom/): Those who think that wealth is the proper thing for them cannot give up their revenues; those who seek distinction cannot give up the thought of fame; those who cleave to power cannot give the handle of it to others. While they hold their grasp of those things, they are afraid (of losing them).... Read More Read More - [A Calculation Built In?](https://everyangel.org/is-the-calculation-built-in/): ‘I performed first the music calculated to awe;      and you were frightened as if by a ghostly visitation, I followed it with that calculated to weary;      and in your weariness you would have withdrawn. I concluded with that calculated to perplex;      and in your perplexity you felt your stupidity. But that... Read More Read More - [What That Something Else Is](https://everyangel.org/what-that-something-else-is/): What the world thinks the most valuable exhibition of the Tao is to be found in books. But books are only a collection of words. Words have what is valuable in them; – what is valuable in words is the ideas they convey. But those ideas are a sequence of something else; – and... Read More Read More - [There Will Be Blood](https://everyangel.org/there-will-be-blood/): Of course everyone is aware of events in Israel.  No need to recount details of the attack by Hamas upon Israeli neighborhoods.  Over a thousand were murdered, and hostages were taken to Gaza. The tit-for-tat bloodletting continues apace, as no leader has come to the fore lately, advocating a statehood resolution for displaced Palestinians. ... Read More Read More - [As If You Were Beating A Drum](https://everyangel.org/as-if-you-were-beating-a-drum/): There is an interesting dialog in Zhuangzi between Confucius and a librarian, Lao Tan, who represents the Taoist philosophy of Lao Tsu.  This exchange is reminiscent of the manner of conversation between Socrates and a younger student in the 4th century BCE Agora of Athens, Greece. Confucius who represents conventional thinking desires to place... Read More Read More - [A Single Virtue, A Single Flow](https://everyangel.org/a-single-virtue-a-single-flow/): Zhuangzi has said, “This Teacher of mine, this Teacher of mine —he passes judgment on the ten thousand things, but he/she doesn’t think himself severe; his bounty extends to ten thousand generations, but he/she doesn’t think himself benevolent. He is older than the highest antiquity, but he/she doesn’t think himself long-lived; he covers heaven,... Read More Read More - [If Two Of Three](https://everyangel.org/a-sad-case/): He who knows his stupidity is not very stupid; he who knows that he is under a delusion is not greatly deluded. He who is greatly deluded will never shake the delusion off; he who is very stupid will all his life not become intelligent. If three men be walking together, and (only) one... Read More Read More - [Outlander](https://everyangel.org/outlander/): It’s a Saturday, inside of Starbucks it is unusually quiet. There is a steady rain falling.  Movement in the out-of-doors is avoided by most.  The temp is comfortable yet, for mid October.  It would be fine to go for a walk in the rain. Gazing at the empty tables, the view is peaceful, unobstructed... Read More Read More - [Benefits Of Tedium](https://everyangel.org/benefits-of-tedium/): Geneva, the Fox river Valley is overcast, rain is expected for this afternoon.  That is well, as growing things are eager for a drink before the sleep of frost comes.  All things in due time is the rule-of-thumb. Reading the Zhuangzi, the admonition is to forget oneself, to be oblivious to the human, that... Read More Read More - [On Restraint](https://everyangel.org/on-restraint/): “The brutality of Hamas, this bloodthirstiness, brings to mind the worst rampages of ISIS … Stomach-turning reports of babies being killed; entire families slain; young people massacred while attending a musical festival to celebrate peace; women raped, assaulted, paraded as trophies. In this moment it must be crystal clear: We stand with Israel. We... Read More Read More - [Stepping Away From the Abyss](https://everyangel.org/stepping-away-from-the-abyss/): Ancient texts often describe a long ago period of idyllic society, a time when humans lived in harmony with one another and with Nature.  This is a literary device, a means of contrast with present conditions in order to advance the writer’s point of view.  Whether Eden could have existed, if furthermore any of... Read More Read More - [Bleeding Out](https://everyangel.org/bleeding-out-2/): I followed the war in Israel last night on ABC streaming channel.  Perhaps I should say nothing about this bloodletting.  Still, how is this not my business since I am human, and this is yet another outbreak, a paroxysm of rage?  Gaza has been called an open air prison, one of the most densely... Read More Read More - [Columbus Day](https://everyangel.org/columbus-day/): Columbus Day or Indigenous Peoples Day, which is it? This day, the morning of October 9th is dedicated equally to each of these dimensions of our American past, which is also our present.  A day to remember our ancestors attempts to enslave the communities that lived on this continent prior to our arrival from... Read More Read More - [To Blend My Light](https://everyangel.org/to-blend-my-light/): I chose to “sleep in” this morning.  Something which I seldom do.  I like the early morning, a habit learned from my mother who grew up on a farm.  Plants and animals elicit care, not scheduling at one’s convenience.  Farmers do not sleep in. We visited a farmers market in Geneva where we purchased... Read More Read More - [Fall, Quiet And Unexciting](https://everyangel.org/fall-quiet-and-unexciting/): Great indeed is the disorder produced in the world by the love of knowledge. From the time of the three dynasties downwards it has been so. The plain and honest-minded people are neglected, and the plausible representations of restless spirits received with pleasure; the quiet and unexciting method of non-action is put away, and... Read More Read More - [So Sad We Almost Made It](https://everyangel.org/so-sad-we-almost-made-it/): (So), the versatility shown in artful deceptions becoming more and more pernicious, in ingenious discussions as to    what is hard       and what is white, and in attempts to disperse the dust and reconcile different views, is great, but the common people are perplexed by all the sophistry. Hence there is great disorder... Read More Read More - [Almost Dialed-In](https://everyangel.org/almost-dialed-in/): There’s something menacing, darkly beautiful about the sound and sight of a drag car slowly rolling toward the staging beam.  A big-inch motor idles, breathing heavily for air, the undulating bass note of a machine conceived, purpose-built for gobs of power, parts assembled for total acceleration.  After staging, when the tree flashes green, pedal... Read More Read More - [Knowing When To Stop](https://everyangel.org/knowing-when-to-stop/): An extraordinary faculty in debating leads to the piling up of arguments      like a builder with his bricks,           or a net-maker with his string. (Its possessor) cunningly contrives his sentences and enjoys himself in discussing what hardness is and what whiteness is, where views agree and where they differ, and pressing on,... Read More Read More - [Thinking In Vain](https://everyangel.org/thinking-in-vain/): An email exchange developed between the three of us.  What is the relationship between the origin, the durability of religion — and our fear of the unknown?  There’s a great deal of the unknown, an ocean of it.  Does the unknown have a far shore? The thought experiment was posed:  Consider the difference —... Read More Read More - [Seeming To Soar, To Dive](https://everyangel.org/seeming-to-soar-to-dive/): It is morning and the sun “rises” in the east over the Fox River.  Do I correctly understand and render these matters?  Consider the possibility that “getting it correct” is to completely miss the point.  Is there a correct?  How could/would one know?  And if you were convinced that your assessment was incorrect what... Read More Read More - [Horror And Solicitude](https://everyangel.org/horror-and-solicitude/): I participated in a study group of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies.  Did I read the book when in high school or is my memory from college?  I am not sure.  The book is widely known, a parable of sorts.  A group of English boarding school boys is marooned on a nameless South... Read More Read More - [So Many Dead Lie Around](https://everyangel.org/so-many-dead-lie-around/): Yesterday with a group of friends in a large circle, we discussed “God,” considered our relationship to church, our past experience that inevitably effects our sense of what-the-sacred-means to each of us now.  One of our group shared this Philip Larkin poem.  I remembered reading it many years ago, when I was much younger,... Read More Read More - [The Tao Is A Thing](https://everyangel.org/the-tao-is-a-thing/): Continuing to read from the Zhuangzi.  A few verses come as a calming presence when facing circumstances which present a likelihood of a weakened society, more violence, less solicitude for the unfortunate majority without power.  I need not say that “power” is shorthand for financial reserves.  A government shutdown over the coming weekend…  Likely.... Read More Read More - [Time's Lens](https://everyangel.org/times-lens/): More of Zhuangzi.  Clearly it is natural to project upon the past our ideals, our concept of an idyllic condition of society, of a way-of-life realized by human beings in contrast to the flawed, and often wrecked behavior that we observe day to day in the present.  We “see” outlines of a figure, embellished... Read More Read More - [Blood-stained Hands](https://everyangel.org/blood-stained-hands/): Spent the morning reading about the thought of Chuang Tsu.  Also I read a few minutes from the Zhuangzi, a English translation of his story telling.  Amazing!  Words simply fail to do justice, there’s no straight forward description of his point of view. Moreover, I doubt if our 21st century external circumstances are really... Read More Read More - [Valediction of the Madman](https://everyangel.org/valediction-of-the-madman/): This passage in Zhuangzi reminds me of the famous “Madman” passage in The Gay Science by Nietzsche.  An individual, deranged by conventional standards, presents himself in a town square.  He insistently, pointedly passes judgment upon the optimism of his countrymen; that the future will, as a matter of course, be the present extended, — ... Read More Read More - [In The End](https://everyangel.org/in-the-end-2/): “When men get together to pit their strength in games of skill, they start off in a light and friendly mood but usually end up in a dark and angry one, and if they go on too long, they start resorting to various underhanded tricks. When men meet at some ceremony to drink, they... Read More Read More - [Exhibition](https://everyangel.org/exhibition/): The world today is no theater where actions and feelings are represented and interpreted, but a market on which intimacies are exhibited, sold, consumed. The theater is a site of representation, whereas the market is a site of exhibition. Today theatrical representation is yielding to pornographic exhibition. —The Transparency Society, The Society of Intimacy... Read More Read More - [What Comes True In The End?](https://everyangel.org/coming-true-in-the-end/): Showers today.  Should I mind.  Of course not.  It is enough to remain in my circle of responsibility, of duty and concern.  Weather, and the machinations of governments whether in Chicago, or in Washington are affairs upon which I have no effect.  Is anyone in charge?  Likely nobody.  Office holders moving about as marionettes,... Read More Read More - [A Great Dream](https://everyangel.org/a-great-dream/): Yesterday I received an email from a friend expressing an opinion that repudiated Quantum Mechanics.  For the majority of us this opinion is unremarkable, seeming irrelevant.  Quantum Mechanics is a field of esoteric mathematics describing the behavior of invisible forces that constitute material objects.  Field effects dance with improvisation, to support the visible superstructure... Read More Read More - [A Kind Of Race](https://everyangel.org/a-kind-of-race/): My exploration of Zhuangzi continues. I am drawn toward his story telling, his manner of doing philosophy.  This 4th century BCE Taoist intellectual responds to several defined schools of thought by writing philosophical fantasy.  Philosophical fantasy! Imagine someone rising to his/her feet in a lecture hall at a philosophy conference Q&A session, to describe... Read More Read More - [To Take A Tumble](https://everyangel.org/to-take-a-tumble/): Raining now.  Prospect of rain for the rest of the day.  Well and good for the trees and shrubs.  A good drink is needed before the frost of Fall arrives. Today these words from Ludwig Wittgenstein captured my imagination. But I did not get my picture of the world by satisfying myself of its... Read More Read More - [Ticking Of The Clock](https://everyangel.org/ticking-of-the-clock/): Read more of the Zhuangzi this morning.  Stories concatenated in succession, the writer considers that his thinking, his point of view could be, might be, or was, radically different — even reversed.  “This” is easily “that” in another context.  In a time past I thought differently… I am entranced by this love song, every... Read More Read More - [Forgive Me I Misspoke](https://everyangel.org/forgive-me-i-misspoke/): There was a beginning. There was a beginning before that beginning. There was a beginning previous to that beginning before there was the beginning. There was existence; there had been no existence. There was no existence before the beginning of that no existence. There was no existence previous to the no existence before there... Read More Read More - [A God Shines Through](https://everyangel.org/a-god-shines-through/): …Since the ancients believed in dreams,waking appeared in a different light. The same goes for the whole of life, which was illumined by death and its significance;for us “death” means something quite different. All experiences shone differently becausea god shone through them. –excerpt The Gay Science, Book 3, Section 152 by Friedrich Nietzsche As the... Read More Read More - [Marionettes](https://everyangel.org/puppets-on-strings/): The debt ceiling crisis is over.  The idea that our nation could refuse to make good on debts already incurred is surreal, the creation of an insane world.  In effect this would destroy the credit of the nation by a single political impasse.  Embedded in my mind is image of President Biden and Speaker... Read More Read More - [Prayer](https://everyangel.org/prayer/): Do we pray anymore? Piety is obsolete in a secular society.  Not entirely of course.  Always there are remote places that have yet to hear the news.  News takes time. “God is dead,” Nietzsche proclaimed as in the “Gay Science” published 1882.  A way of life predicated upon reliance upon the technology of the... Read More Read More - [Hell Yeah Resistance](https://everyangel.org/hell-yeah-resistance/): Yeah, I know it’s a spectacle.  But it is a spectacle that I care about.  For most of my adult life drag racing has captured my imagination.  A distinctly American, male oriented form of competition, involving  imagination to visualize the possibilities of maximizing the output of an engine, to understand the physics of a... Read More Read More - [Fashioning Paradise](https://everyangel.org/to-fashion-paradise/): At the racetrack on a Saturday afternoon, I feel gratitude for yet another experience of earthly paradise.  I am able to be with others, fellow citizens that I know only slightly.  That fragment of common ground is enough: the passion for quarter mile competition unites us.  Paradise, an ideal condition of experience is always... Read More Read More - [Time Travel](https://everyangel.org/time-travel-3/): Starbucks on Saturday morning, the first day of Memorial Day weekend.  Sunshine is rapturous… I sometimes catch myself in a fit of imagination wondering what it must have been like to live in the Athens of Greece during the reign of Pericles, the golden age of Athenian democracy.  Radical idealists of all stripes are... Read More Read More - [Shall We Invent A God!](https://everyangel.org/shall-we-invent-a-god/): There was only one norm, man; and every people thought that it possessed this one ultimate norm. But above and outside, in some distant over-world, one was permitted to behold a plurality of norms; one god was not considered a denial of another god, nor blasphemy against him. It was here that the luxury... Read More Read More - [Like A Disease](https://everyangel.org/the-great-separation/): “Sin” is a word seldom mentioned, rarely heard now-a-days.  The emotion of shame though is all too prevalent.  Is it universal to have hidden anxiety that one fails to be “good enough?”  No matter the surface appearance due to education, social status, etc., it’s not unusual to wonder if one is a failure.  Why... Read More Read More - [No White Flag](https://everyangel.org/no-white-flag/): Wednesday, midweek and I am running on fumes.  What is my body, the universe saying to me?  That I should care less about my disagreements with others, those niggling, aggravating differences, when heard, I am loathe to offer any reply. A podcast is a way to gain information in a format that is part... Read More Read More - [Danger](https://everyangel.org/danger/): A dangerous resolve— The Christian resolve to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad. –excerpt The Gay Science, Book 3, Section 130 by Friedrich Nietzsche Against Christianity— What is now decisive against Christianity is our taste, no longer our reasons. –excerpt The Gay Science, Book 3, Section 133 by Friedrich... Read More Read More - [Prayer, What's It Good For](https://everyangel.org/prayer-whats-it-good-for/): The value of prayer— Prayer has been invented for those people who really never have thoughts of their own and who do not know any elevation of the soul or at least do not notice it when it occurs… To keep them at least from disturbing others, the wisdom of all founders of religions,... Read More Read More - [Look!](https://everyangel.org/look/): Sunday promises to be a fine day.  There is sunshine, and spring flowers are in full bloom.  Nature is a matter of cause and effect, that is — to the extent that our faculties of perception and our abilities to describe find traction.  I am reminded of just how much our naked perception misses,... Read More Read More - [Laughing Ourselves To Death](https://everyangel.org/laughing-ourselves-to-death/): The madman— Have you not heard of that madman Who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly: “I seek God! I seek God!” –As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Has he got... Read More Read More - [Our Little Ship](https://everyangel.org/our-little-ship/): In the horizon of the infinite – We      have left the land           and have embarked. We have burned our bridges behind us      –indeed, we have gone farther           and destroyed the land behind us. Now, little ship, look out! Beside you is the ocean: to be sure, it does not always... Read More Read More - [Dancing](https://everyangel.org/welcome-to-the-dance/): Is it virtuous when a cell transforms itself into a function of a stronger cell? It has no alternative. And is it evil when the stronger cell assimilates the weaker? It also has no alternative; it follows necessity, for it strives for super- abundant substitutes and wants to regenerate itself. Hence we should make... Read More Read More - [Life Preserving Errors](https://everyangel.org/life-preserving-errors/): I think of my grandfather of late.  He raised a family of five daughters, one son, tending a few acres of land in Johnson Country, North Carolina.  My mother once mentioned how happy he felt upon purchasing his first tractor.  He no longer had to walk behind a mule, in order to plow a... Read More Read More - [When](https://everyangel.org/when/): Let us beware of thinkingthat the world eternally creates new things. There are no eternally enduring substances;Matter is as much of an error as the God of the Eleatics. But when shall we ever be done with our caution and care? When will all these shadows of God cease to darken our minds?When will... Read More Read More - [Exception Of Exceptions](https://everyangel.org/exception-of-exceptions/): Monday after Mother’s day. Reflection, musing, thoughtful consideration is a human trait.  I doubt that dogs are able to perform such mental acrobatics as they are not blessed, and troubled with language and syntax.  It is natural for us homo sapiens to wonder to ourselves about the origin, about the essence of everything, to... Read More Read More - [Requiem For Mother](https://everyangel.org/requiem-for-a-mother/): Sunday.  Today is mother’s day.  I wish that my mother could be here.  Once again I would show her my gratitude for the kindness which she demonstrated to me.  She is not here however as each of us pay dues to time.  We are time bound. This tune has to do with time.  There... Read More Read More - [Shadow Show](https://everyangel.org/shadow-show/): New struggles — After Buddha was dead, his shadow was still shown for centuries in a cave      –a tremendous,           gruesome shadow. God is dead; but given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown. –And we      –we still have... Read More Read More - [Virtuous Monsters](https://everyangel.org/floating-playing-or-virtuous-monsters/): Another discussion among friends on the matter of abortion, politics, women’s rights.  I need to hear the words of others to get a wide angle view of our condition presently.  I took away from the discussion wonderment, how evangelicals once disposed to treat others kindly, practicing their personal piety privately, have become indifferent to... Read More Read More - [Through The Pouring Rain](https://everyangel.org/through-the-pouring-rain/): Drift Away Day after day I’m more confused Yet I look for the light through the pouring rain You know that’s a game that I hate to lose And I’m feelin’ the strain Ain’t it a shame Oh, give me the beat boys and free my soul I wanna get lost in your rock... Read More Read More - [A Seedling Must Become A Tree](https://everyangel.org/a-seedling-must-become-a-tree/): Music as an advocate — “I am thirsting for a composer,”said an innovator to his disciple, “who would learn my ideas from me and transpose them into his language;that way. I should reach men’s ears and hearts for better. With musicone can seduce mento every error and every truth:who could refute a tone?” –“‘Then... Read More Read More - [Being Honest In Evil...](https://everyangel.org/this-life-which-shouts/): I learned by chance of the 2019 death of a eminent evangelical theologian.  I am often surprised by what google comes up with. I met Geisler twice.  I recall spending a few minutes in his office when considering whether to enroll at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.  Some years later, Norman Geisler was a guest... Read More Read More - [Yes](https://everyangel.org/yes/): Am I Am I the pebble lying in the stream or the water freed from melting snow Am I a dreamers sleeping dream that has no home, nowhere to go Am I a thought to build the bridge between two points of view I am at least one thing I know, a solitary monument... Read More Read More - [Are You Not Entertained!](https://everyangel.org/are-you-not-entertained-2/): AMX+, Netflix, HBOmax, Youtube TV, Hulu, Disney+, Peacock, Amazon Prime, Paramount+, ESPN Plus, Apple TV… Now and formerly— What good is all the art of our works of art if we lose that higher art, the art of festivals? Formerly, all works of art adorned the great festival road of humanity, to commemorate high... Read More Read More - [Writing While Facing Poetry](https://everyangel.org/war-with-the-lovely-goddess/): Prose and poetry— It is noteworthythat the great masters of prosehave almost always been poets, too–if not publicly than at least secretly, in the ”closet.” Good prose is written only face to face with poetry. For it is an uninterrupted,well mannered war with poetry:all of its attractions depend on the way in which poetryis... Read More Read More - [My Little Town](https://everyangel.org/my-little-town/): Spring is manifest in Batavia, Rising earlier than usual, I assisted to prepare for the yard sale.  The town sponsors a weekend yard sale to fund the 4th of July fireworks display. I do not know what “middle class” means nowadays since so many are under-employed, underpaid relative to the time and effort a... Read More Read More - [To Become A God, Well Almost](https://everyangel.org/to-become-a-god-well-almost/): Joined with a group  of friends last night to exchange ideas about morality.  Is morality relative or absolute?  The notion of an absolute, something not disposed to many interpretations, a universal standard, — inevitably is linked to the idea of a deity.  Absolutes of any kind, morality included, are affairs of divinity, since we... Read More Read More - [The Other Unnatural Convention](https://everyangel.org/the-other-unnatural-convention/): Art and nature — The Greeks (or at least the Athenians) liked to hear people speak well. Nothing distinguishes them so thoroughly from non-Greeks as does this truly greedy craving. Even of passion on the stage they demanded that it should speak well, and they endured the unnaturalness of dramatic verse with rapture. In... Read More Read More - [Hero From A Distance](https://everyangel.org/hero-from-a-distance/): Only artists, and especially those of the theater, have given men eyes and ears to see and hear with some pleasure… only they have taught us to esteem the hero that is concealed in everyday characters; only they have taught us the art of viewing ourselves as heroes from a distance and, as it... Read More Read More - [Vulgarity](https://everyangel.org/vulgarity/): The animal with a good conscience.– The vulgar element in everything that gives pleasure… does not escape me, but it does not offend me anymore… How come? Is it because there is no sense of shame and everything vulgar appears as poised and self-assured as anything noble, lovely, and passionate in the same sort... Read More Read More - [The Gift](https://everyangel.org/the-gift/): Life by Edgar Guest Life is a gift to be used every day, Not to be smothered and hidden away; It isn’t a thing to be stored in the chest Where you gather your keepsakes and treasure your best; It isn’t a joy to be sipped now and then And promptly put back in... Read More Read More - [A Cheerful Tempo](https://everyangel.org/eruption/): The greatest dangerthat always hovered over humanityand still hovers over it is the eruption of madness–which means the eruption of arbitrariness in feeling, seeing, and hearing,the enjoyment of the mind’s lack of discipline,the joy in human un-reason. Not truth and certaintyare the opposite of the world of the madman,but the universality andthe universal binding... Read More Read More - [Image Creation](https://everyangel.org/image-creation/): Men and Women…  The simultaneous attraction and risk inherent in the roles of men and women has been mined by poets, lyricists, and by philosophers.  Nietzsche opined on women.  As one reads one recognizes that Nietzsche’s experience with women was limited, and by any account, unfortunate.  Nietzsche wrote some obtuse, even boneheaded things about... Read More Read More - [Because People Believe](https://everyangel.org/because-people-believe/): Only As Creators! …what things are called is incomparably more important than what they are. The reputation, name, and appearance, the usual measure and weight of a thing, what it counts for — originally almost always wrong and arbitrary, thrown over things like a dress and altogether foreign to their nature and even to... Read More Read More - [A Secret, Inextinguishable Drunkenness](https://everyangel.org/a-secret-inextinguishable-drunkenness/): A group, five of us discussed the principles of Buddhist philosophy, the world view that rises from noticing the fluidity of “things.”  We are surrounded by a kaleidoscope should we pause, slow down sufficiently to notice.  What is real?  I am not sure.  Moreover I too am kaleidoscopic…  I cannot assume a god-like vantage... Read More Read More - [Almost A Madness](https://everyangel.org/almost-a-madness/): The ultimate noblemindedness.- What makes a person “noble”? …the passion that attacks those who are noble is peculiar, and they fail to realize this. It involves the use of a rare and singular standard and almost a madness: the feeling of heat in things that feel cold to everybody else; the discovery of values... Read More Read More - [Let's Try That Shit](https://everyangel.org/lets-try-that-shit/): Truthfulness— I favor any skepsis to which I may reply: “Let us try it!” But I no longer wish to hear anything of all those things and questions that do not permit any experiment. This is the limit of my “truthfulness”; for there courage has lost its right. –excerpt The Gay Science, Book 1,... Read More Read More - [Mosquito Bites Too Bloody](https://everyangel.org/mosquito-bites-too-bloody/): Knowledge of misery — The emergence of pessimistic philosophies is by no means a sign of great and terrible misery. No. these question marks about the value of all life are put up in ages in which the refinement and alleviation of existence make even the inevitable mosquito bites of the soul and the... Read More Read More - [Remorseless](https://everyangel.org/remorseless/): The end, it’s moving  toward us. His future’s set in an unreadable script.  — excerpt Lullaby by John James Saturday, early spring is overcast.  I am excited.  The photo shoot is “on” at the old Joliet prison.  A collection of photo’s depicting the dissonance between our actions, our practices, ways-of-life all contributing to climate... Read More Read More - [I Won't Be Afraid](https://everyangel.org/i-wont-be-afraid/): I have a fortunate life.  You do as well, if you are reading this.  To be homo sapiens is particularly difficult.  Literature expresses our dilemma sometimes subtly and sometimes with a raw edge.  The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus comes to mind. The rendition of this tune, and the video is an expression... Read More Read More - [Playing Craps](https://everyangel.org/playing-craps/): I have an old friend, an individual who expresses his disdain for “socialism.”  He speaks of “force collectivism” with condescension.  His point, policies to help the majority, those under-employed, individuals and families unable to “help themselves” are contemptible.  I and others, react to his aversion to public funding of services targeted to persons, who... Read More Read More - [A Servant Of This Paradise](https://everyangel.org/a-servant-of-this-paradise/): A satisfying exchange of ideas last night, based upon an interview with Stephen Batchelor.  Batchelor is a prolific author who treats the intellectual foundations and practice coming from the Buddhist tradition.  I have been interested in Buddhist thought for a long while.  I think the philosophy of life derived from Buddhism offers an alternative... Read More Read More - [Can We Step Away](https://everyangel.org/can-we-step-away/): Another satisfying morning at Starbucks.  Often do I fail to notice how good life can be, just how lucky (another way of putting it) to be seated here with a cup of coffee in hand, conversing with a friend?  Friendship is inestimable, a practice of presence, the exchange of words which reciprocally enlighten…  The... Read More Read More - [Believing Doesn't Make It So](https://everyangel.org/believing-doesnt-make-it-so/): Owing to three errors. — During the last centuries science has been promoted, partly because it was by means of science that one hoped to understand God’s goodness and wisdom best- this was the main motive of the great Englishmen (like Newton); partly because one believed in the absolute utility of knowledge, and especially... Read More Read More - [Intermission](https://everyangel.org/intermission/): Sunday.  I awakened, my mind seeming to have skipped a day.  It felt like Monday.  The New York Times in the blue plastic wrapper lying at the end of the driveway was a clue.  Today is Sunday.  There’s a fine rain falling. At Starbucks I chose a table.  Coffee in hand I considered the... Read More Read More - [A Side We Do Not See](https://everyangel.org/recommendation-to-murder/): Saturday morning, following a few days of warm weather trees in Geneva are flowering.  After the austere gray and brown season of winter cold the effect is enchanting.  Life is.  I do not understand life.  The binary operations of my mind suited to simple problem solving makes visible only one side of life’s equation. ... Read More Read More - [Caesar Always Appears](https://everyangel.org/caesar-always-appears/): Once decay has reached its climax along with the infighting of all sorts of tyrants, the Caesar always appears, the final tyrant who puts an end to the weary struggle for sole rule-by putting weariness to work for himself… In these ages bribery and treason reach their peak, for the love of the newly... Read More Read More - [Cruelty More Refined](https://everyangel.org/cruelty-more-refined/): Once again I visited the old Joliet penitentiary.  The abandoned, decrepit site draws me.  I wanted to have another opportunity to feel the place, a scarce relic of the past.  The prison was constructed in 1860 out of limestone, built by convicts brought from the prison at Alton.  Alton was shuttered in part due... Read More Read More - [Ask Yourself !](https://everyangel.org/ask-yourself/): Evil- Examine the lives of the best and most fruitful people and peoples and ask yourselves: whether a tree that is supposed to grow to a proud height can dispense with bad weather and storms; whether misfortune and external resistance, some kinds of hatred, jealousy, stubbornness, mistrust, hardness, avarice, and violence do not belong... Read More Read More - [Craving Part II](https://everyangel.org/craving-part-ii/): Acquaintances make lighthearted comment concerning my fascination with Nietzsche.  Do they feel pity that I appear “stuck” on the writings of a 19th century writer, — a prototype of we psychologically troubled children of Enlightenment reason, of Christianity with all of it’s anti-reason?  I’ll never know clearly what they think about my lifelong deep-dive... Read More Read More - [This Possessive Craving](https://everyangel.org/this-possessive-craving/): …if one considers, finally that to the lover himself the whole rest of the world appears indifferent, pale. and worthless, and he is prepared to make any sacrifice, to disturb any order, to subordinate all other interests-then one comes to feel genuine amazement that this wild avarice and injustice of sexual love has been... Read More Read More - [Confession Of An Easter Bunny](https://everyangel.org/easter-2/): Easter morning and the first duty of the day is finished.  Fifty four plastic eggs were hidden under a fallen oak leaf, or nested in the fork of a sapling.  Frost chilled my fingers as I worked.  I, the Easter bunny fulfilled my role in the ritual of resurrection.  Three children will come later... Read More Read More - [What's Up?](https://everyangel.org/whats-up/): Saturday before Easter Sunday:  The buttercups are up! A glorious resurrection all around.  No one is excluded, nothing incredulous, no tall tale that beggars common sense…  This splendid denouement, shades of yellow in every yard, along the roadside…  We’re all born again! Centerfield by the great John Fogerty is perfect for today.  Put me... Read More Read More - [Good Friday](https://everyangel.org/good-friday-2/): Easter.  Images of Pope Francis performing the “foot washing” ritual, – a reminder of Easter as a religious commemoration… That was yesterday, Maundy Thursday.  The image reminds me that Christianity promotes servility.  Is there any evolutionary advantage to servility?  Are the survival odds of one’s fellowman improved? I think, offering to others the self-that-I-am... Read More Read More - [Bullying Insurance](https://everyangel.org/bullying-insurance/): In this morning’s Japan Times: Japan insurer to offer policy against bullying by Karin Kaneko * Staff writer * Apr 5, 2023 What if your child is bullied at school or online? It’s something every parent fears and while financial losses are likely not their first concern, a new insurance policy to be made... Read More Read More - [Still](https://everyangel.org/still/): Even the most harmful man may really be the most useful when it comes to the preservation of the species; for he nurtures either in himself or in others, through his effects, instincts without which humanity would long have become feeble or rotten. Hatred, the mischievous delight in the misfortunes of others, the lust... Read More Read More - [My God! What have I done?](https://everyangel.org/my-god-what-have-i-done-3/): Waking this Monday morning, my mind slowly clearing the cobwebs of sleep and I thought to myself:  I am 74 years old!  The actual birthday on April 1st was celebrated with much pleasure.  Now, two days later, reflection upon the fact stuns me. How much of those years in the rear view mirror can... Read More Read More - [It Might Be Great](https://everyangel.org/it-might-be-great/): 57 Choosy Taste If it depended on my choice,I think it might be greatTo have a place in Paradise;Better yet-outside the gate. — excerpt The Gay Science. Prelude in Jokes, Cunning and Revenge by Friedrich Nietzsche, pub. 1887, trans. by Walter Kaufmann April 2nd.  Yesterday was my birthday.  I contemplated wax candles on the... Read More Read More - [Fighting Alone Yields Happiness](https://everyangel.org/fighting-alone-yields-happiness/): 41 Heraclitean Only fighting yields Happiness on earth, And on battlefields Friendship has its birth. One in three are friends: Brothers in distress, Equals, facing foes, Free-when facing death! — excerpt The Gay Science. Prelude in Jokes, Cunning and Revenge by Friedrich Nietzsche, pub. 1887, trans. by Walter Kaufmann What?  How counter intuitive!   “Only... Read More Read More - [A Cloven Mind](https://everyangel.org/a-cloven-mind/): Today at lunch with a friend, our conversation segued into religion. Religion is a topic many of us find uncomfortable. Some of us have a robust faith, and some take pains to be unaligned, (my term for the agnostic.)  Putting labels to use to discuss religion is certain to over-simplify, to distort a more... Read More Read More - [Joliet](https://everyangel.org/joliet/): Joliet is a town, a small river town west of Chicago.  In 1673, Louis Jolliet, along with Father Jacques Marquette, paddled up the Des Plaines River.  The name reminds one of the history, what I mean is the indigenous people who once lived here, the Illinois native Americans, and the European French explorer for... Read More Read More - [Dungeon View...](https://everyangel.org/dungeon-view/): A wide ranging discussion ensued last night.  On the agenda was the current politico-social conflict over unwanted pregnancy.  You know, the dogma that the state is morally obliged to force a woman to carry a fetus to full term,..  It doesn’t end there.  Is there ever an ending?  Life is inexpressibly complex.  One thing... Read More Read More - [Handing Round The Refreshments](https://everyangel.org/handing-round-the-refreshments/): Out of sorts this morning, a disoriented feeling, and I hardly know how to begin writing.  A dream played in my mind just before waking this morning.  I was on the verge of being questioned, asked to give evidence about a stolen snowmobile.  Did I have a role in the hijacking of the machine,... Read More Read More - [To Walk Off In Disgust](https://everyangel.org/to-walk-off-in-disgust/): The Dormouse had closed its eyes by this time, and was going off into a doze; but, on being pinched by the Hatter, it woke up again with a little shriek, and went on: ‘—that begins with an M, such as mouse–traps, and the moon, and memory, and muchness—you know you say things are... Read More Read More - [Vases, Tragedies, Statues](https://everyangel.org/vases-tragedies-statues/): The Greeks are not reflective, but perfect in their senses and in their health, with the finest physical organization in the world. Adults acted with the simplicity and grace of children. They made vases, tragedies, and statues, such as healthy senses should,—— that is, in good taste. Such things have continued to be made... Read More Read More - [Cry Me A River](https://everyangel.org/cry-me-a-river/): After a time she heard a little pattering of feet in the distance, and she hastily dried her eyes to see what was coming. It was the White Rabbit returning, splendidly dressed, with a pair of white kid gloves in one hand and a large fan in the other: he came trotting along in... Read More Read More - [Immortality](https://everyangel.org/immortality-2/): I anticipate reading The Gay Science by Friedrich Nietzsche.  The introduction is written by Walter Kaufmann, the translator.  Kaufmann mentions that Nietzsche was greatly influenced by the writings of New England transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson.  Curious to understand the substrate of Nietzsche’s sense of himself and of his world I downloaded a segment of... Read More Read More - [Yum, Finishing Off The Cake](https://everyangel.org/yum-finishing-off-the-cake/): A gray rainy spring day…  I do not remember turning off the alarm on the bedside radio, but who else could have managed?  Thus, I rose one hour later than is my custom.  How much of my life amounts to actions of which I have no memory?  I am surprised by effects which seem... Read More Read More - [A Table Is Not A Table](https://everyangel.org/a-table-is-not-just-a-table/): There was a table set out under a tree in front of the house, and the March Hare and the Hatter were having tea at it: a Dormouse was sitting between them, fast asleep, and the other two were using it as a cushion, resting their elbows on it, and talking over its head.... Read More Read More - [Contra Membership](https://everyangel.org/contra-membership/): Through morality the individual is instructed to be a function of the herd and only to attribute value to himself as a function. Freedom assumes, if not the individual, at least life is not necessary as a value. It assumes therefore that one place one’s life at stake (it is not necessary) at the... Read More Read More - [The Last Generation](https://everyangel.org/the-last-generation/): Today, is the first day of spring.  I am ready for change to a season of transformation.  Soon with gradually warming days grass will become green and tiny buds will appear on the trees.  Green buttercup stalks are already emerging, piercing the brown and gray of the leaf strewn flower beds. The Tina Turner... Read More Read More - [Love Keeps Us Alive](https://everyangel.org/love-keeps-us-alive/): Sunday, is warmer, more agreeable than was Saturday.  The plans for today include adventuring into Chicago for a performance of The Tina Turner Musical at the Nederlander Theater.  Tina Turner was a “force of Nature,” survivor of an physically destructive relationship with Ike, her husband- manager.  She survived fame as well, with 11 Grammy... Read More Read More - [Pathways](https://everyangel.org/pathways/): A being is a closed pathway. This engages in that direction. Each being is suspended over the infinite possibility that it had of not being. It perceives an ensemble of possibilities not occurring as possibilities for existence other than it. –excerpt On Nietzsche, Notes by Georges Bataille p. 319 This particular combination that I... Read More Read More - [Both Worlds](https://everyangel.org/both-worlds/): Conversed with two friends this morning long enough to finish my first cup of Starbucks dark roast, with two splendas and creme… I asked about sites in the area — of ruins, abandoned factories, or such structures which have fallen into disuse, decrepitude from their heyday.  I received several good leads.  Apparently there is... Read More Read More - [Just Bangin' On The Bongos](https://everyangel.org/just-banging-on-the-bongos/): Today I am at loss about writing.  War in Ukraine never leaves my mind.  News reports seem rife with speculation.  The “news” is a business which means that words are offered profusely, photos recycled in order to collect the paycheck.  Stimulating pics and speculation about the future.  Perhaps all of that is a distraction. ... Read More Read More - [After All Is Said](https://everyangel.org/after-all-is-said/): Sunlight washes the intersection of State and 3rd today in Geneva.  There’s a good vibe inside Starbucks.  The coffee is hot, the flavor bracing, an acquired taste… Last night I participated in a discussion on “art”, the state-of-art at the end of the 20th century.  At least that is when the essay by Jean... Read More Read More - [Laceration](https://everyangel.org/laceration/): What kind of immanence or transcendencedo lovers attainthat lacerates themwhile uniting them? MORAL VALUE IS THE OBJECT OF DESIRE. On this topic I am speaking of “undefined existence”Desire is sometimes for a defined object, sometimes…Opposition God, beloved (transcendent, defined)to nothingness, feminine nakedness… –excerpt On Nietzsche, Notes by Georges Bataille, p. 307 Decided to “sleep... Read More Read More - [Is Art Gone?](https://everyangel.org/is-art-gone/): Intrigued with the exhibit of AI art on display at Waterstreet Studios I returned on Saturday morning to have a measured look at the pieces offered for appreciation.  I took my time, pausing before each work to absorb movement offered by the artist.  A few photographs were taken. Artificial Intelligence is in it’s infancy. ... Read More Read More - [In Play](https://everyangel.org/putting-oneself-in-play/): Whoever needs something other than a puppet is not part of this community. to play: to put oneself in play, to surpass the given in play, the content: only what is favorable to the game. Perhaps also on     the mad philosopher:         community?             or mystic? -excerpt On Nietzsche Notes by Georges Bataille... Read More Read More - [If You Don't/Won't](https://everyangel.org/if-you-dont-wont/): A provocative discussion last night…  A group of us considered the role of emotion in decision making.  A decision is assumed to be the outcome of reason, the action of the mind to assess facts, the “truth value” of experience, including information received from 2nd hand sources. Is not one’s life a composite of... Read More Read More - [Tanks, Half Destroyed In A Field](https://everyangel.org/tanks-half-destroyed-in-a-field/):    And now?    I account for myself clearly.    The project that I put in writing, this book was a frightful challenge.    Could I have succeeded? Really?    It is apparently a failure; this book resembles tanks abandoned in their essence and through combat, half destroyed in a field.    It is... Read More Read More - [My Hands Are Shakin'](https://everyangel.org/my-hands-are-shakin/): Whenever this song is played on the radio, the bright guitar licks, as well as the sparkling harmonies of the voices are enchanting.  Without question the lyrics are dark.  Does the contrast give the tune its power? Language conceals the complicated, many layered nuance of homo sapiens, the language-enabled-mammal.  The story line has to... Read More Read More - [Communion With God](https://everyangel.org/communion-with-god/): Sometimes I have no idea what to write.  In time an idea develops…  “This” piece of writing “sets my hair on fire.”  There’s no need for anything of my own but to share this with you. An infantryman’s least favorite weather is a temperature of 35 degrees Fahrenheit and pouring rain, when the trench... Read More Read More - [On Writing](https://everyangel.org/on-writing/): I hesitate to mention an inclination to write-a-book.  Why, in god’s name would I want to do that?  The bookstore is filled with titles, and on the internet a tidal wave of material, much self published.  What portion of those publications, paper or virtual are likely to be read?  The question is unanswerable.  In... Read More Read More - [Zoo Of Humankind](https://everyangel.org/the-zoo-of-humankind/): We visited the Cosley Zoo yesterday.  Cosley Zoo is a small zoo in Wheaton, Illinois, scaled for toddlers and older children.  At the zoo you get a close-up look at animals, wild and domestic.  The visit was greatly enjoyed.  Our grand daughter certainly will remember for many years the animals which are cared for,... Read More Read More - [What Is Given](https://everyangel.org/what-is-given/): The question: what to do? Is to give chance                to play It is first of all to accept what is given as a game The condition of a difficult fight, to fight on the side on which chance seems to appear           The same thing as freedom. –excerpt On Nietzsche Notes by Georges... Read More Read More - [The Hardest Part](https://everyangel.org/the-hardest-part/): This afternoon seems more chill than 35 degrees F.  The sky is an oppressive grey, a bowl of achromatic glass, horizon to horizon.  I cannot delay writing some words until I happen to be inspired.  Why delay?  Tomorrow is not foreseen, and is as likely to be gray as of sunlight. A tune performed... Read More Read More - [The Distance Between](https://everyangel.org/from-farmyard-to-alpine-peaks/): The questions that [Nietzsche] posed touch on tragedy, laughter, suffering, and the enjoyment of suffering, wealth, and the freedom of the mind: in general, the extreme states the human mind can reach. …His doctrine of dangerous life, of lucid, unbound, contemptuous humanity, is foreign to public struggles. It concerns solitaries hostile to the universe.... Read More Read More - [Pivot Point](https://everyangel.org/pivot-point/): Wednesday mid-morning, the intersection of State and 3rd is washed in sunlight.  It is 45 degrees F.  Will grass be green in a day or so? Today, a late start on my daily writing effort.  Why is that?  Yesterday, bedtime I noticed that the insulin pump which I wear — no longer communicates with... Read More Read More - [Voluntarily Going Into A Madhouse](https://everyangel.org/voluntarily-going-into-a-madhouse/): “I say unto you: one must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star. I say unto you: you still have chaos in yourselves.      Alas, the time is coming when man will no longer give birth to a star. Alas, the time of the most despicable man... Read More Read More - [Peeling Potatoes](https://everyangel.org/peeling-potatoes/): A friend is gone. Al Lykins passed away a few weeks ago. I miss having coffee with Al, swapping stories about life. Al was a teller of stories, an enchanter. I know that Al’s time to go arrived. It is impossible not to wish there had been more time. Al was a Buddhist. I... Read More Read More - [Love And The Truth](https://everyangel.org/love-and-the-truth/): Sunday morning, on the road proceeding west, I made my way to Starbucks.  The sun blazes in the east across the Fox River.  I felt atypically more alive, as if I were years younger…  Pat Benatar’s Love Is A Battlefield was playing on the radio.  Pat Benatar and Neil Gerardo remain one of the... Read More Read More - [Goddess](https://everyangel.org/goddess/): A winter view of marshland, dormant tall grass, is the norm for this time of year.  A friend invited me to join him at the Orchid Show at the Chicago Botanic Society.  Both of us are photo buffs.  How could I not take the opportunity?  Perhaps I should not confess my indifference to the... Read More Read More - [The Pivot](https://everyangel.org/the-pivot/): You have already grasped that Sisyphus is the absurd hero. He is, as much through his passions as through his torture. His scorn of the gods, his hatred of death, and his passion for life won him that unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is exerted toward accomplishing nothing. This is the price... Read More Read More - [Bakhmut, Ukraine](https://everyangel.org/bakhmut-ukraine/): Bakhmut 2023 Guernica 1937 New video footage of Bakhmut shot from the air with a drone for The Associated Press shows how the longest battle of the year-long Russian invasion has turned the city of salt and gypsum mines in eastern Ukraine into a ghost town, its jagged destruction testament to the folly of... Read More Read More - [No Time For Mourning...](https://everyangel.org/no-time-for-mourning/):  “The choice we face is simple,  We continue fighting and lose the best of the best or we let them turn this country into Bucha,  Now is not the time for mourning,” he said. “It’s a time for hate.” —Yevhen Mahda, a Ukrainian political scientist Bucha is the suburb of Kyiv where last spring,... Read More Read More - [Eternal Return](https://everyangel.org/eternal-return/): Didn’t post yesterday.  Rare circumstances on occasion are more important than having something to say.  Failing to add more words here causes no tremor in the fabric of the cosmos…  The challenge of finding some good words to describe an emotional response, or to express an idea received from a writer more worthy than... Read More Read More - [Every Question Unanswered](https://everyangel.org/every-question-unanswered/): But without the night, without despair, and without the irremediable terror that strikes me would I have known the inaccessible happiness of the summit? …Responding, out of breath, to the moral interrogation that I proposed to myself in anguish, I would be forever separated. By letting the interrogation open within me like a wound,... Read More Read More - [Farewell](https://everyangel.org/farewell/): In my beginning is my end. In succession Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended, Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass. Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires, Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth Which is... Read More Read More - [Nothing But Imaginary](https://everyangel.org/nothing-but-imaginary/): In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point. Nothing but imaginary causes (‘God’, ’soul’, ‘ego’, ‘spirit’, ‘free will’, – or ‘unfree-will.): Nothing but imaginary effects (‘sin’, ‘redemption’, ‘grace’, ‘punishment’, ‘forgiveness of sins’). Once the concept of ‘nature’ has been devised as the concept antithetical to ‘God’, ‘natural’ had... Read More Read More - [A Coin With Two Sides](https://everyangel.org/paradise-is-here/): Spring by Alan L. Strang Spring time is here with its sunshine and showers, All nature is waking from its long winter sleep. The gardens are blooming with beautiful flowers, The song-birds are carolling melodies sweet. Alan L. Strang (1908 – 1919) was born in Spokane, Washington. His family moved to Redwood City, California... Read More Read More - [Break A Leg](https://everyangel.org/you-are-the-show/): The internet service is intermittent today. I am unsure whether I will be able to finish a post. The connection is unimportant. Today, the sun shines a majestic power, warming seeds, bulbs to sprout upward to  light. I’ll be at the show. Maybe to capture some photos. It is a one of a kind... Read More Read More - [Sunday](https://everyangel.org/sunday/): Sunday dawns as one more day. This day is incomparable, a day only superficially similar to any other. We Americans have designated the seventh day Sunday, as a day of rest, reflection. To say it in a degraded form, “the Lord’s day,” a day for collective worship. Degraded you say!? Yes. Do not feel... Read More Read More - [Bleeding Out](https://everyangel.org/piercing/): My home is Batavia, a river town established at a time when Americans were settling the West. The importance of Christianity for past generations is borne witness by several substantial churches at the center of town, steeples with a Crosses piercing the sky. Even if forms of Christian thinking are not as close to... Read More Read More - [These Terrible Unknown Powers](https://everyangel.org/these-terrible-unknown-powers/): If we transport ourselves back to the ages in which the religious life flourished most vigorously we discover a fundamental conviction which we no longer share… In those ages one as of yet knows nothing of natural laws; neither the earth nor the sky are constrained by any compulsion; any season, sunshine, rain can... Read More Read More - [Overrun With Heroes](https://everyangel.org/overrun-with-heroes/): Every mistake (in every sense of the word) is the result of a degeneration of instinct, a disintegration of the will: one could almost equate what is bad with whatever is a mistake. All that is good is instinctive — and hence easy, necessary, uninhibited. Effort is a failing: the god is typically different... Read More Read More - [Original Sin Revisited](https://everyangel.org/original-sin-revisited/): The most general formula on which every religion and morality is founded is: “Do this and that, refrain from this and that — and then you will be happy! And if you don’t…” I call it the original sin of reason, the immortal unreason. — the first example of my “revaluation of all values.”... Read More Read More - [The Slightest Dose](https://everyangel.org/the-slightest-dose/): Today especially, the real is no more than a stockpile of dead matter, dead bodies, and dead language. It still makes us feel secure today to evaluate this stock of what is real (let’s not talk about energy; the ecological complaint that hides the fact that it is not material energy which is disappearing... Read More Read More - [Meditation Continued](https://everyangel.org/meditation-continued/): behind every great human destiny there resounded as a refrain an even greater ‘in vain!’ The Genealogy of Morals by Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. by R. J. Hollingdale, What Is the Meaning of Ascetic Ideals, aphorism 28 I think that there is no conclusive counterargument to this assertion.  When I consider my experience of life,... Read More Read More - [Meditation For Sunday](https://everyangel.org/meditation-for-sunday/): A question without an answer; the will for man and the earth is lacking; behind every great human destiny there resounded as a refrain an even greater ‘in vain!’ The meaninglessness of suffering, not suffering itself, was the curse which hitherto lay over mankind… Any meaning is better than no meaning at all. From... Read More Read More - [Cruelty Sweet Cruelty](https://everyangel.org/cruelty-sweet-cruelty/): People should rethink their ideas about cruelty and open up their eyes;… This is my claim: almost everything we call “higher culture” is based on the spiritualization and deepening of cruelty. The “wild animal” has not been killed off at all; it is alive and well, it has just – become divine. Cruelty is... Read More Read More - [Night Art](https://everyangel.org/night-art/): The ear, the organ of fear, could not have evolved so greatly as it has only in the night and twilight of obscure caves and woods, in accordance with the mode of life of the age of timidity, that is to say the longest human age there has ever been: in bright daylight the... Read More Read More - [Like Slaves At Christmas](https://everyangel.org/like-slaves-at-christmas/): How can a man take pleasurein nonsense?For wherever in the worldthere is laughterthis is the case;one can say, indeed,that almost everywhere there is happinessthere is pleasure in nonsense. The overturning of experienceinto its opposite,of the purposive into the purposelessness,of the necessary into the arbitrary,but in such a way that this eventcauses no harmand is... Read More Read More - [The Birth Of Comedy](https://everyangel.org/the-birth-of-comedy/): If one considers that man for many hundreds of thousands of years an animal in the highest degree accessible to fear and that everything sudden and unexpected bade him prepare to fight and perhaps to die that even later on, indeed, in social relationships all security depended on the expected and the traditional in... Read More Read More - [All Great Deceivers](https://everyangel.org/all-great-deceivers/): With all great deceivers there is a noteworthy occurrence to which they owe their power. in the actual act of deception… They are overcome by belief in themselves: It is this which then speaks so miraculously and compellingly to those who surround them. The founders of religions are distinguished from these great deceivers by... Read More Read More - [Holy Week?](https://everyangel.org/holy-week-2/): Today is my birthday. It is early but already several have greeted me with, “happy birthday.” As an adult it has been difficult to dwell on my birthday.  “Happy Birthday…” Really!? A pure happiness is not of this world. I am here after 75 years, an astonishing, lucky win. After all the odds of... Read More Read More - [That Beautiful Feeling](https://everyangel.org/that-beautiful-feeling/): Nothing is so conditional that is so circumscribed, as our feeling for the beautiful. Anyone who has tried to divorce it from man’s pleasure would be to find the ground give way beneath him. the ‘beautiful in itself’ is not even a concept, merely a phrase. In the beautiful man sets himself up as... Read More Read More - [Décadence](https://everyangel.org/thinking-about-decadence/): Decadence (Oxford Dictionary): moral or cultural decline as characterized by excessive indulgence in pleasure or luxury. The whole is no longer a whole,.. a metaphor for every style of décadence; every time anarchy of atoms, scattering of will, ‘freedom of the individual’, morally speaking expanded into political theory, ‘equal rights for all’. life, equal... Read More Read More - [On Sensuality](https://everyangel.org/on-sensuality/): The sight of the beautiful… a releasing stimulant to the chief force of his nature… so that this force then exploded and all at once became master of his consciousness. But that does not in any way exclude the possibility for that particular sweetness and plentitude which is characteristic of the aesthetic condition might... Read More Read More - [Two Heartbeats](https://everyangel.org/poverty-or-superabundance/): Every art, every philosophy may be viewed as a remedy and an aid in the service of growing and struggling life; they always presuppose suffering and sufferers. But there are two kinds of sufferers: first those who suffer from the over-fullness of life -they want a Dionysian art and likewise a tragic view of... Read More Read More - [Welcome To The Show](https://everyangel.org/welcome-to-the-show/): Perhaps, we can discover a realm where originality is again possible as parodists of history and buffoons of God. Beyond Good and Evil,  by Friedrich Nietzsche, aphorism 223 I am curious about this quote which is found in the essay by Michel Foucault, Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.  History, the stories that we tell are compared... Read More Read More - [More Blood](https://everyangel.org/more-blood/): A friend gave me an essay written by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, On Stupidity. Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran pastor, a leader of the “confessing church” opposing the policies of the Nazis. The Nazis aimed at eliminating Jews, promoting the ideology of Aryan purity. Bonhoeffer’s essay seems germane to our situation now, the rise of Trumpism, and... Read More Read More - [Bleeding Out](https://everyangel.org/bleeding-out-3/): “Effective history” deprives the self of the reassuring stability of life and nature, and it will not permit itself to be transported by a voiceless obstinacy toward a millennial ending… This is because knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting. “Effective history” deals with events in terms of their most... Read More Read More - [About The Rule Of Law](https://everyangel.org/about-the-rule-of-law/): Humanity does not gradually progress from combat to combat until it arrives at universal reciprocity, where the rule of law gradually replaces warfare; humanity installs each of its violences in a system of rules and thus proceeds from domination to domination. The nature of these rules allows violence to be inflicted upon violence and... Read More Read More - [Foucault X3](https://everyangel.org/foucault-x3/): Descent attaches itself to the body.1 It inscribes itself in the nervous system, in temperament, in the digestive apparatus; it appears in faulty respiration, in improper diets, in the debilitated and prostrate body of those whose ancestors committed errors. Fathers have only to mistake the effects for causes, believe in the “afterlife,” or maintain... Read More Read More - [More Foucault](https://everyangel.org/more-foucault/): Truth is undoubtedly the sort of error that cannot be refuted because it was hardened into an unalterable form in the long baking process of history.1 Moreover, the very question of truth, the right it appropriates to refute error and oppose itself to appearance, the manner in which it was developed (initially made available... Read More Read More - [Foucault](https://everyangel.org/foucault/): I anticipate beginning a final revision of my comments upon selected passages from The Gay Science by Friedrich Nietzsche.  Nietzsche’s writing compelled my attention upon my introduction to the late 19th century philosopher when I was much younger. I was in my late 20’s, a student.  Many years have passed  and somehow there remains... Read More Read More - [Position Filled](https://everyangel.org/position-filled/): …those who suffer most and are poorest in life would need above all mildness, peacefulness, and goodness in thought as well as deed –if possible, also a god who would be truly a god for the sick, a healer and savior; The Gay Science by Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann, aphorism 370 The thought... Read More Read More - [Hilarity & The Dance](https://everyangel.org/hilarity-the-dance/): If we had not welcomed the arts and invented this kind of cult of the untrue, then the realization of general untruth and mendaciousness that now comes to us through science –the realization that delusion and error are conditions of human knowledge and sensation –would be utterly unbearable. Honesty would lead to nausea and... Read More Read More - [Like A Mystic Veil](https://everyangel.org/like-a-mystic-veil/): Everything in a Greek or Christian building originally had a meaning, and referred to a higher order of things; this feeling of inexhaustible meaning enveloped the edifice like a mystic veil. Beauty was only a secondary consideration in the system, without in any way materially injuring the fundamental sentiment of the mysteriously-exalted, the divinely... Read More Read More - [Xplaning Explained...](https://everyangel.org/xplaning-explained/): “Cause” and “effect” is what one says; but we have merely perfected the image of becoming without reaching beyond the image or behind it. In every case the series of “causes” confronts us much more completely, and we infer: first, this and that has to precede in order that this or that may then... Read More Read More - [Good Work](https://everyangel.org/good-work/): Another magnificent day, a morning all sunshine. I spoke with a friend about preparing for the growing season.  He grows dahlias, and I grow vegetables.  Nature is one of the bonds between us.  Another bond, we see one another almost daily at the Geneva Starbucks.  Perhaps both of us prefers dark roast coffee? Last... Read More Read More - [A Pickup With A Flag](https://everyangel.org/a-pickup-with-a-flag/): These semi-animals which were well adapted to the wilderness, to war, to prowling about, to adventure –suddenly all their instincts were deprived of value and ‘suspended’… They felt incapable of the simplest undertakings, in this new unfamiliar world their former guides, the regulating and unconsciously certain guides, deserted them – These unhappy creatures were... Read More Read More - [Let's Go Outside And Play](https://everyangel.org/can-you-come-outside-and-play/): This is Monday. There has never been a Monday like this Monday. Today received by my senses is infused with early spring sunlight. To compare with the past seasonal average, a day like this is unusual for Mid-March. Light warms the soil, rousing those dormant subterranean living things, a world invisible to us for... Read More Read More - [Burning The Amazon](https://everyangel.org/burning-the-amazon/): The Sunday of the time change, the switch to daylight ‘savings’ time.  Is anything at all ‘saved’?  Describe for me how shifting the imposed grid of punctuated time, industrial time, upon the flow of natural-seasonal time is useful?  Disruptive yes.  Worth it?  Why keep doing, in lock step what we’ve always done? I glimpsed... Read More Read More - [No!](https://everyangel.org/no-2/): The slave revolt in morality begins when resentment itself becomes creative and gives birth to values; the resentment of creatures to whom the real reaction, that of the deed, is denied and who can indemnify themselves only through an imaginary revenge. While every noble morality develops from a triumphant affirmation of itself, slave morality... Read More Read More - [What If](https://everyangel.org/what-if-3/): “Believing” in God is like “believing” in the taste of fresh-baked bread without ever having tasted actual fresh-baked bread. But what if you could commune with the Divine-Wow through up-close, personal encounters that are as vivid as eating fresh-baked bread? Some people have. You could, too. Formulate the intention to do so. Freewill Astrology... Read More Read More - [Goldilocks](https://everyangel.org/on-the-goldilocks-principle/): Wednesday is midpoint of a seven day week.  The middle is regarded to be the point of balance.  It is common to believe that maintaining a balance, middle of the road, porridge not too hot and not too cold, the Goldilocks principle, (and the bed not too soft and not too hard, but just... Read More Read More - [Thus I Laughed](https://everyangel.org/thus-i-laughed/): When I visited humankind, I found them sitting upon an old self-conceit. Each one thought he had long since known what was good and evil for humankind. All talk of virtue seemed to them an ancient wearied affair; and he who wished to sleep well spoke of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ before retiring. I disturbed... Read More Read More - [Exhausted](https://everyangel.org/remedy-for-exhausted-land/): The strongest and most evil spirits… rekindled the dozing passions. –every ordered society puts the passions to sleep… Time and again they reawakened the sense of comparison, of contradiction, of delight in what is new, daring, un-attempted; they forced humankind to pit opinion against opinion, ideal model against ideal model. Mostly by force of... Read More Read More - [Language & Rebirth](https://everyangel.org/language-rebirth/): Rob Brezsny’s Freewill Astrology newsletter stimulates me to think.  He is a happy warrior, samurai-like with unflagging dedication to his craft as a writer, faith in the mana/power of words to humanize us.  The last newsletter from Rob offered a list of neologisms. The list is relevant, important to the work that remains in... Read More Read More - [Successful Crime](https://everyangel.org/successful-crime/): There is a constant moiling and toiling going on in morality –the effect of successful crimes (among which, for example, are included all innovations in moral thinking.) Daybreak by Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. by R. G. Collingwood aphorism 98 Nietzsche the wordsmith, was adept in three languages.  A philologist by education, a specialist in classical... Read More Read More - [Sympathy For Ourselves...](https://everyangel.org/sympathy-for-ourselves/): The oldest moral judgments. What really are our reactions to the behavior of someone in our presence? First of all, we see what there is in it for us we regard it only from this point of view. We take this effect as the intention behind the behavior and finally we ascribe the harboring... Read More Read More - [On Madness](https://everyangel.org/on-madness/): All earlier people found it much more likely that wherever there is madness there is also a grain of genius and wisdom — something ‘divine’, as one whispered to oneself. Or rather: as one said aloud forcefully enough. ‘It is through madness that the greatest good things have come to Greece’, Plato said, in... Read More Read More - [Why Don't You?](https://everyangel.org/why-dont-you/): A patient in a large hospital room with many beds complains to the doctor about the constant noise other patients are making, which is driving him crazy. The doctor replies that nothing can be done, one cannot forbid the patients from expressing their despair, since they all know they are dying. The first patient... Read More Read More - [Excavating Morality](https://everyangel.org/excavating-morality/): Morality is nothing other than obedience to customs, of whatever kind there may be; customs, however, are the traditional way of behaving and evaluating. In things in which no tradition commands there is no morality; and the less life is determined by tradition, the smaller the circle of morality… The free human being is... Read More Read More - [Scaffold Builders Inc.](https://everyangel.org/scaffold-build-inc/): …the despairing and salvation-thirsty heart to which the madness whispers: ‘Behold thou art the lamb that beareth the sins of God.’ –the error lies not only in the feeling ‘I am accountable’, but equally in that antithesis ‘I am not, but somebody has to be.’ —This is, in fact, not true: The philosopher has... Read More Read More - [Breaking A Chrysalis](https://everyangel.org/breaking-a-chrysalis/): It is absurd to praise and blame nature and necessity. In the same way as he loves a fine work of art, but does not praise it, because it can do nothing for itself; in the same way as he regards plants, so must he regard his own actions and those of mankind. He... Read More Read More - [Simply Survival, Nothing More](https://everyangel.org/just-survival-nothing-more/): We do not complain of nature as immoral because it sends a thunderstorm and makes us wet, — why do we call those who injure us immoral? Because in the latter case we take for granted a free will functioning voluntarily; in the former we see necessity. But this distinction is an error. Thus... Read More Read More - [Justice Reconsidered](https://everyangel.org/justice-reconsidered/): I read a passage from Nietzsche’s Human, All Too Human about justice. The words stayed with me as if barbed.  Nietzsche refers to a passage written by Thucydides (431 BC), his account of the war between Athens and Sparta.  Thucydides recounts a negotiation between Athenian ambassadors and representatives of Melos, a island community in... Read More Read More - [Yes, Another Joke](https://everyangel.org/yes-another-joke/): There is thus and element of truth in a joke about a young Christian girl’s ideal prayer to the Virgin Mary: “O thou who conceived without having sinned, let me sin without having to conceive!” –in the perverse functioning of Christianity, religion is, in effect, evoked as a safeguard allowing us to enjoy life... Read More Read More - [More Viewing From My Corner](https://everyangel.org/more-viewing-from-my-corner/): How far the perspectival character of existence extends or indeed whether existence has any other character than this; whether existence without interpretation, without sense, does not become “meaninglessness”. Whether on the other hand, all existence is not essentially actively engaged in interpretation –that cannot be decided even by the most industrious and most scrupulously... Read More Read More - [The View From My Corner](https://everyangel.org/the-view-from-my-corner/): How far the perspectival character of existence extends or indeed whether existence has any other character than this; whether existence without interpretation, without sense, does not become “meaninglessness”. Whether on the other hand, all existence is not essentially actively engaged in interpretation –that cannot be decided even by the most industrious and most scrupulously... Read More Read More - [On Being Stuck](https://everyangel.org/thoughts-on-being-stuck/): I take this explanation from the street. I heard one of the common people say, “he knew me right away.” Then I asked myself: What is it that the common people take for knowledge? What do they want when they want “knowledge”? Nothing more than this: Something strange is to be reduced to something... Read More Read More - [Herd Signals In My Head](https://everyangel.org/herd-signals-in-my-head/): …we could think, feel, will, and remember, and we could also “act” in every sense of that word, and yet none of all this would have to “enter our consciousness”. The whole of life would be possible without, as it were, seeing itself in a mirror. Man… as the most endangered animal, he needed... Read More Read More - [The Final Match](https://everyangel.org/the-last-match/): The intellectual fight became an occupation, an attraction, a profession, a duty, something dignified-and eventually knowledge and the striving for the true found their place as a need among other needs. Henceforth not only faith and conviction but also scrutiny, denial, mistrust, and contradiction became a power; all “evil” instincts were subordinated to knowledge,... Read More Read More - [Necessity Uber Alles](https://everyangel.org/necessity-uber-alles/): Over one man/woman necessity stands In the shape of his passions,    over another the habit of hearing an obeying,       over a third as a logical conscience,          over a fourth as caprice and a mischievous pleasure          in escapades. These four will, however, seek freedom of their will precisely where each of... Read More Read More - [Hybrid Real](https://everyangel.org/hybrid-real/): To live alone one must be an animal or a god –says Aristotle. There is yet a third case; one must be both –a philosopher. Twilight of the Idols, By Friedrich Nietzsche, Trans. by R. G. Collingdale Maxims and Arrows 3 …philosophy once again pose(s) the same question(s) as they did 2,000 years ago:... Read More Read More - [The Forbidden](https://everyangel.org/the-forbidden/): My writings… An air of heights, a robust air. The ice is near, the solitude is terrible But…how freely one breathes! How much one feels beneath one! Philosophy.. is a voluntary living in ice and high mountains -a seeking after everything strange and questionable in existence, all that has hitherto been excommunicated by morality.... Read More Read More - [Anti-Valentine](https://everyangel.org/anti-valentine/): Can all values not be turned around? And is goodness perhaps evil? And God only an invention and finesse of the Devil? Is everything perhaps in the last resort false? And if we are deceived, are we not for that very reason also deceivers? must we not be deceivers? …learn to grasp the necessary... Read More Read More - [To Enjoy Us](https://everyangel.org/to-enjoy-us/): Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day. It is good to embrace the day dedicated to love, the opportunity to celebrate relationships which make one more human, more in tune with the person that is becoming in the journey of one’s solitary life. I offer words that came my way, gratefully received and sourced from someone else. ... Read More Read More - [The Morning After](https://everyangel.org/the-morning-after-2/): This task itself demands something different –it demands that he/she create values. Actual philosophers are commanders and law-givers: they say ‘thus it shall be!’ it is they who determine the Wherefore and Whether of mankind, and they possess for this task the preliminary work of all philosophical laborers, of all those who have subdued... Read More Read More - [Americans Come Together](https://everyangel.org/americans-come-together/): Nothing brings together more Americans — not awards shows, not television series finales, not even presidential debates — than the Super Bowl. …Las Vegas is hosting its first Super Bowl today. The city has a fraught history with professional sports because of its association with gambling, and leagues have kept teams away to maintain... Read More Read More - [War Gods](https://everyangel.org/war-gods/): Another Saturday morning at Starbucks. No two Saturdays are alike. With a backward look each of those Saturdays has its own character. After all change is another way of saying that time matters. Time is the ocean that buoys, supports, in which everything swims. I have been swimming for a few days toward the... Read More Read More - [Art](https://everyangel.org/art-2/): Art is the highest value. In relation to the value truth, it is the higher value. The one, ever in a fresh way, calls forth the other. Both values determine in their value-relation the unitive essence of the intrinsic value-positing will to power. The will to power is the reality of the will or,... Read More Read More - [Exuberance](https://everyangel.org/exuberant-self-possession/): Commanding, which is to be sharply distinguished from the mere ordering about of others, is self-conquest and is more difficult than obeying. Will is gathering oneself together for the given task. Only he who cannot obey himself must be expressly commanded. What the will wills it does not merely strive after as something it... Read More Read More - [Naked Philosophy](https://everyangel.org/naked-philosophy/): Acquaintances express surprise when they learn about my interest in philosophy, and my taste for Friedrich Nietzsche’s books.  I’ve heard, “that sounds deep,” more than once.  How many experiences, areas of life, strike us as “deep” from a distance?  I say to myself, “why not come closer and have a better look?” Many aspects... Read More Read More - [Bad Taste](https://everyangel.org/bad-taste/): One has to get rid of the bad taste of wanting to be in agreement with many. ‘Good’ is no longer good when your neighbor takes it into his mouth. and how could there exist a ‘common good!’ The expression is a self-contradiction: what can be common has ever little value. in the end... Read More Read More - [Shameless](https://everyangel.org/shameless/): For in the realm of thought, power and fame are hard to maintain if erected on the basis of error or lies; the feeling that such a building could at some time or other fall down is humiliating to the self-conceit of its architect; he is ashamed of the fragility of his material and,... Read More Read More - [To Hope Again](https://everyangel.org/to-hope-again/): But my truth is dreadful: for hitherto the lie has been called truth. –revaluation of all values; that is my formula for an act of supreme coming-to-oneself on the part of mankind which in me has become flesh and genius. It is my fate to have to be the first decent human being, to... Read More Read More - [The End](https://everyangel.org/the-end/): …The Stoic, taught by experience and ruling himself by ideas! He who otherwise only looks for uprightness, truth, freedom from deceptions and shelter from ensnaring and sudden attack, in his misfortune performs the masterpiece of dissimilation; he shows no twitching mobile face but as it were a mask with dignified, harmonious features; he does... Read More Read More - [Olympian Cloudlessness](https://everyangel.org/olympian-cloudlessness/): There are ages, when the rational and the intuitive man stand side by side, the one full of fear of the intuition and the other full of fear of the abstraction; the latter just as irrational as the former is inartistic. Both desire to rule over life; the one knowing how to meet the... Read More Read More - [Smashed To Pieces](https://everyangel.org/smashed-to-pieces/): That enormous framework and hoarding of ideas, by clinging to which the needy man saves himself through life, is to the freed intellect only a scaffolding and a toy for Its most daring feats, and when it smashes It to pieces, throws it into confusion, and then puts it together ironically, paring the strangest,... Read More Read More - [Sobered By Science](https://everyangel.org/we-sobered-by-science/): The wide-awake day of a people mystically excitable, let us say the earlier Greeks, is in fact through the continually-working wonder which mythos presupposes, more akin to a dream than to the day of the thinker sobered by science. If every tree may at some time talk as a nymph, or a god under... Read More Read More - [Torn By Art](https://everyangel.org/torn-by-art/): …waking man per se is only clear about his being awake through the rigid and orderly woof of ideas, and it is for this very reason that he sometimes comes to believe that he was dreaming when the woof of his ideas has for a moment been torn by Art. Pascal is quite right,... Read More Read More - [Awful Powers](https://everyangel.org/awful-powers/): It is language which has worked originally in the construction of ideas; in later times it is science. Just as the bee works at the same time at the cells and fills them with honey, thus science works irresistibly at that great columbarium of ideas, the cemetery of perceptions, builds ever newer and higher... Read More Read More - [Sweet Oblivion](https://everyangel.org/sweet-oblivion/): Only by forgetting the primitive world of metaphors, only by congelation and coagulation of an original mass of similes pouring forth as a fiery liquid out of the primal faculty of human fancy, only by the invincible faith, that this sun, this window, this table is a truth in itself: in short only by... Read More Read More - [Carving Up The Sky](https://everyangel.org/carving-up-the-sky/): …the Romans and Etrusceans for their benefit cut up the sky by means of strong mathematical lines and banned a god as it were into a templum, into a space limited in this fashion, so every nation has above its head such a sky of ideas divided up mathematically, and it understands the demand... Read More Read More - [Worthless](https://everyangel.org/worthless/): What then is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms — in short, a sum of human relations, which become poetically and rhetorically intensified, transposed, and embellished, and which after long use seem firm, canonic, and binding to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that they are illusions;... Read More Read More - [No Further Mission](https://everyangel.org/no-further-mission/): In some remote corner of the universe, effused into innumerable solar-systems, there was once a star upon which clever animals invented cognition. It was the haughtiest, most mendacious moment in the history of this world, but yet only a moment. After Nature had taken breath awhile the star congealed and the clever animals had... Read More Read More - [Renegade: One Learning To Love](https://everyangel.org/renegade-one-learning-to-love/): A grey, damp day! Yea!  I hope to go for a walk this afternoon, an eyes-wide-open walkabout.  Daytime temps are around the freezing point for the first time in many days.  A mammalian body does not do well in a single digit environment.  So, I plan to stroll a while, and enjoy what I... Read More Read More - [It Rains It Freezes](https://everyangel.org/it-rains-it-freezes/): Blues suffuses from the speakers, and the room is alive with male and female melodic voices. This blends with a spirited tide of conversation coming from the tables, especially the big round table in the corner by the window. Starbucks, Tuesday morning. Today, the side streets are icy and hazardous. Someone mentioned that the... Read More Read More - [The Spell Of A Dream](https://everyangel.org/the-spell-of-a-dream/): These days I seldom dream. There have been periods of my life when dreams came often, sometimes with such intensity that when waking, the dream was so vivid, to be as persuasive as my mentally aware life. I remember when my mother died many years ago, sadness descended to ebb and flow for months.... Read More Read More - [Playing Dice To Rise Up](https://everyangel.org/playing-dice-to-rise-up/): An hour plus was spent reading Nietzsche’s account – the pre-Socratic philosophers struggle, one after another to “explain”, to express to their own satisfaction, the nature of Being. Is Being singular and indivisible? If so does that mean that all that we experience, the multiplicity and the change in every direction is illusion and... Read More Read More - [Before Dawn](https://everyangel.org/before-dawn/): Shearing ice crystals, sound with each step in the predawn gray.  The friction of each footfall on this “bitter” morning announces winter’s presence.  Friction and heat.  Heat in January. Heat as concept, a marker of life remains in my memory.  Can you imagine the feel of warmth, to move about in a verdant landscape? ... Read More Read More - [So Sorry, No More Room On This Board](https://everyangel.org/so-sorry-no-more-room-on-this-board/): …[the] awful energy of striving after Certainty, in a mythically thinking and highly emotional –fantastic age is quite remarkable. “Grant me but a certainty, ye gods!” is the prayer of Parmenides, “and be it, in an ocean of Uncertainty, only a board, broad enough to lie on! Everything becoming, everything luxuriant, varied, blossoming, deceiving,... Read More Read More - [Ennui !](https://everyangel.org/ennui/): Late again to Starbucks today.  Restless night, waking at 2AM and lying still, waiting for sleep to return. Another session, looking at this screen wondering what to write.  Sometimes there is a theme that bears more words, thought and development. But is anything possibly a start over? According to Parmenides everything is apriori inscribed,... Read More Read More - [Empty Husks Of Words](https://everyangel.org/empty-husks-of-words/): I continue to read Nietzsche’s description of the philosophers who came before Socrates/Plato.  Plato is the watershed of the intellectual heritage of the West.  Plato, a composer of theatrical drama introduces us to Socrates by his collection of Socratic Dialogues.  Socrates is an example, teacher/role model.  He instructs by provoking reflection, the exercise of... Read More Read More - [The Great World-Child](https://everyangel.org/the-great-world-child/): Another bitter day. The number at the bottom left of this screen informs that the outside air temperature is -12 degrees F. I am satisfied to have books, more to think about and to write about and a warm place to be safe. Everyone is not so fortunate. I continue reading Nietzsche on the... Read More Read More - [Fire Playing With Itself](https://everyangel.org/fire-playing-with-itself/): Monday morning a few minutes before 9AM. The outside temperature is minus 10 degrees Fahrenheit.  I am tempted to regard cold as if “that” were a fixed state of matter. Especially when opening the glass storm door before dark, it’s frosted over, opaque with translucent white. The vehicle warmed up for 20 minutes. I... Read More Read More - [Perfection?](https://everyangel.org/perfection/): The Habit of Perfection by Gerard Manley Hopkins Elected Silence, sing to me And beat upon my whorlèd ear, Pipe me to pastures still and be The music that I care to hear. Shape nothing, lips; be lovely-dumb: It is the shut, the curfew sent From there where all surrenders come Which only make... Read More Read More - [On Going South In Winter](https://everyangel.org/on-going-south-in-winter/): I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter. What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man, You cannot say, or guess, for you know only A heap of broken images, where the sun beats, And the dead tree gives no shelter,... Read More Read More - [The Waste Land Continued](https://everyangel.org/considering-the-waste-land/): Friday afternoon. Dawn brought a snowfall to the area. We have not seen this much snow in a number of winters. My daughter-in-law and I dedicated an early morning session to shoveling. More is to come. Reason led us to clear the vehicles, then prepare to do the same again a few hours later.... Read More Read More - [More Thunder](https://everyangel.org/more-thunder/): V. What the Thunder Said There is not even silence in the mountains But dry sterile thunder without rain There is not even solitude in the mountains But red sullen faces sneer and snarl From doors of mudcracked houses                              ... Read More Read More - [What The Thunder Said](https://everyangel.org/what-the-thunder-said/): The Waste Land By T. S. Eliot V.  What The Thunder Said Then spoke the thunderD A                                                                           400Datta: what have we given?My friend, blood shaking my heartThe awful daring of a moment’s surrenderWhich an age of prudence can never retractBy this, and this only, we have existed                     405Which is not to be found in... Read More Read More - [Holding On](https://everyangel.org/holding-on-2/): [By] thus selecting and precipitating the unusual, astounding, difficult, and divine, Philosophy marks the boundary lines dividing her from Science in the same way as she does from Prudence by the emphasizing of the useless.   – Early Greek Philosophy and other Essays, by Friedrich Nietzsche, p. 73 Nietzsche paraphrases Aristotle to say that philosophy... Read More Read More - [Never Mind The Stench](https://everyangel.org/to-hear-and-smell-nothing/): The sky is a uniform gray, the traffic moves silently, on the far side of the Starbucks window on State Street here in Geneva.  Snow is predicted for the late afternoon or early evening.  Forecasters are almost apologetic for uncertainty.  They’re unable to predict how much snow will fall.  Computer models for weather much... Read More Read More - [The Living Legacy](https://everyangel.org/the-living-legacy/): Sunday, grey, road slick with a sheen of plowed snow, — that’s winter in the mid-west.  I do not mind the snow.  It is a blanket for nature.  Snow slows the pace of town-life, obstructing the efficiency, a machine-logic that accelerates, a reminder that winter’s cold is a sign.  Now is the season for... Read More Read More - [Furious At Three In The Morning](https://everyangel.org/furious-at-three-in-the-morning/): If the United Auto Workers strike declared against “the big three” auto companies is not on your mind, it should be.  Initially the strike is shutting down three plants.  It is doubtful the gap between what the Union is asking and what the companies are offering will be narrowed soon.  The picketing is likely... Read More Read More - [No Grown-ups](https://everyangel.org/no-grown-ups/): I am taking a course in Lord of the Flies by William Golding.  The book was first published in Great Britain in 1954.  I’ve read it once before and cannot be sure whether I was in high school, or college.  Golding writes a parable, a deft assay of our human condition, of the trajectory... Read More Read More - [The Means By Which We Live](https://everyangel.org/the-means-by-which-we-live/): Today stands to be full.  A literature class is scheduled for the afternoon.  Consideration of Lord of the Flies by William Golding.  later in the afternoon, I am fortunate to participate in a exploration of Artistotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. The day begins at Starbucks, by reading the Taoist text composed by Zhuang Zhou, reported to have... Read More Read More - [Not To Drown...](https://everyangel.org/not-to-drown/): I obtained a copy of one of the great works of Asian literature to enlarge my appreciation of the Taoist sensibility of life and world.  Nowadays, fragmentation, seemingly intractable polarization demands that common ground be found.  Is any synthesis upon which enough of us can stand together possible? Drown if you must. Do not... Read More Read More - [Without Words](https://everyangel.org/without-words/): The air is cool, cleansed by a day of rain. I do not remember the last time of a full day of rain.  Rain comes infrequently, as if nature is diffident, inattentive to the thirst of plants and creatures living on a thin crust of the earth.  Another consequence of climate warming, perhaps?  Heat... Read More Read More - [Raindance](https://everyangel.org/praying-for-rain/): Monday brings the prospect of rain.  Weeks without precipitation and the grass is dormant, the shrubs appear thirsty and dull at the end of a growing season.  Some trees are shedding leaves, without any retrograde movement of temperature thus far.  Does anyone pray for rain?  I know that my grandfather did. Granddad owned a... Read More Read More - [Falling A Long Way](https://everyangel.org/falling-a-long-way/): In the after-dawn hour of 6AM I fell back to sleep.  As sometime happens I dreamed a nightmare.  The dream “experience” was real enough then.  Upon waking what I dreamed seemed as if an extension of my life.  I dreamed that a post, my comments on social media had provoked outrage from one person... Read More Read More - [Today's Pain](https://everyangel.org/todays-pain/): Gary Wright has died.  On Monday September 4th Wright passed after some years struggle with illness.  From 1976 do you remember The Dream Weaver? Here is what Billboard wrote about Wright: The Dream Weaver, released in the summer of 1975, peaked at No. 7 on the Billboard 200 album charts in April 1976, with... Read More Read More - [Untergehen](https://everyangel.org/untergehen/): Unteregehen – going down, drowning, to perish It’s Friday, early September with a hint the Fall soon to come.  Things in time reocurr, over and over.  Time is infinite, an open ended flow.  But “things” in time are bounded by circumstance, arise and come to be and then dissipate. You could become depressed if... Read More Read More - [Paradise Enough](https://everyangel.org/paradise-enough-2/): Paradise is a state of mind and heart.  It’s engagement with no separation between the texture, aroma, touch, and echo of one’s passion — and you, the agent.  Paradise is a time and place of sublime union with what you’ve learned to love.  Paradise is temporary, a rare interlude, a magical concatenation…  Paradise has... Read More Read More - [Hello Stranger](https://everyangel.org/hello-stranger/): Feeling empty this morning.  What is to be said/written?  The coffee is hot and astringent.  The traffic outside the front window at Starbucks rushes by upon it’s metaled ways.  There’s the look of rain in the gray clouds.  Time will tell how much we will receive.  Hot, dry weather has persisted.  Vegetation is thirsty... Read More Read More - [A Life Lived](https://everyangel.org/a-life-lived/): It is Tuesday, the day after Labor Day.  My mind is in a fog, and I have no desire to catch up on the morning’s news.  The sun streams from the east over the Fox River and it stands to be another warm day.  It is not yet astronomical Fall, the season of summer... Read More Read More - [Labor Day](https://everyangel.org/labor-day/): Today is Labor Day.  Monday a day of respite from work.  Work is the joint enterprise to sustain ourselves, to build shelter, cultivate, to transport, to prepare food.  Also, work is essential to fashion a place of safety, a refuge that is “home.” I am reading Lord of the Flies by William Golding.  I... Read More Read More - [Jimmy Buffett Died At 76](https://everyangel.org/jimmy-buffett-died-at-76/): “It was a scene,” he told Playboy magazine. “Everyone went out and applauded the sunset every night. Bales of marijuana washed up on the shore. There were great cheap Cuban restaurants … Key West seemed like the End: East Coast Division — a common reason people wind up there, especially writers, artists, musicians and... Read More Read More - [Happiness: Time Without Aim](https://everyangel.org/happiness-time-without-aim/): What is happiness?  By what means do we know if we are happy?  It seems that only in retrospect I judge myself to have been happy. My grand daughter is almost four years old.  She appears to be as happy as is humanly possible when I push her high in a swing.  While swinging... Read More Read More - [Living Is Hard](https://everyangel.org/living-is-hard/): This strange poem resonates with me.  Nietzsche was in a class by himself as a professional intellectual.  The youngest person to hold the Chair of Classical Philology at the University of Basel at the age of 24, he later turned to philosophy.  Nietzsche was an incessant writer.  He was plagued with health problems.  Also,... Read More Read More - [Ship Of Unsure Souls](https://everyangel.org/ship-of-unsure-souls/): “Souls that are unsure” Souls that are unsure and cloying I loathe like their acclaim. All their honors are annoying, All their praise is self-hatred and shame. Since I do not join their dances, Tied to their old rope, I am followed by their glances’ Sweetly poisoned envy without hope. Let them curse me... Read More Read More - [Dark Warm And Timeless](https://everyangel.org/dark-warm-and-timeless/): The concluding appendix of The Gay Science is a collection of poems.  The section is entitled Songs of Prince Bird-free, or “free as a bird.”  The German term signifies an outlaw whom anyone can shoot on sight.  The reader of The Gay Science likely would not be surprised at the ambiguity of the title. ... Read More Read More - [Of What We Did](https://everyangel.org/of-what-we-did/): I felt ambivalence.  Not being a connoisseur of antique automobiles why would I desire the press of congestion at the Geneva Concours d’Elegance?  Contemplating vintage vehicles on the flat screen in the course of a  television historical drama is enough for me.  On the other hand, the event was free…  As you would guess... Read More Read More - [Praise Be To God](https://everyangel.org/praise-be-to-god/): Another poem from the concluding appendix to The Gay Science.  I like the sardonic note of this one, a surreal description of a professional religionist, of a man-of-the-cloth.  Beppa is the pious priest, the first to benefit from forgiveness-at-a-discount offered by the church.  “With another sin, one wipes old sins away.”  Another phrasing that... Read More Read More - [Blending Us In Too](https://everyangel.org/blending-us-in-too/): Saturday is a quasi holiday for many adults, and for children.  A timeout from the usual routine of work, perhaps some chores around the yard or house, followed by a visit to the Farmer’s Market.  Certainly that describes a Saturday in late summer for those like myself living in a Fox River Valley community. ... Read More Read More - [Never A Better Hour](https://everyangel.org/never-a-better-hour/): “Who will sing a song for us?” — and that is the question is it not?  Who, perhaps you or I will step forward to do our best with the future’s melody!  What of concern which you and I are certain to have of being misunderstood?  That is none of our business!  It is... Read More Read More - [The Hand Moves Forward](https://everyangel.org/the-hand-moves-forward/): So the hand moves forward, the tragedy begins… That describes my sense of reality after reading the account of the Republican debate last night.  I did not watch.  I was tempted by shear voyeurism, but managed to resist my inclination. The eight Republican candidates running for second place, far behind the polling numbers of... Read More Read More - [Stronger, Seasoned, Tougher, Audacious, Gayer](https://everyangel.org/standing-divinely-apart/): I approached the Fox River this morning on Fayban Parkway, the sky was smoky, a low hanging mix of Canada Wildfire haze and high humidity.  I remembered reading the New York Times report that as the climate warms wild fires, storms, floods and extreme heat are going to increase across our country.  Some areas... Read More Read More - [When Less Is More](https://everyangel.org/when-less-is-more/): That said, it’s difficult not to think of the present day as a tipping point (a word used a great deal in discussions of climate change). And since none of us are PhD scientists who have written dozens of papers on the impact of humanity on the environment (at least I don’t believe any... Read More Read More - [Dirty Birds, Boys, Exhausted Wanderers](https://everyangel.org/dirty-birds-boys-exhausted-wanderers/): Another passage that should bear no further comment.  Is it enough to raise one’s voice in resistance to the denial of history , to thinly veiled misogyny in red-state anti-abortion laws, to indifference to lying by candidates for public office, to climate warming denial,…  That is to write or to speak as opportunity affords... Read More Read More - [Hatred, On The Other Hand](https://everyangel.org/hatredon-the-other-hand/): Hatred, on the other hand, places people on a par, vis-a-vis; in hatred there is honor; finally, in hatred there is fear, …. a good and ample element of fear. We fearless ones, however, we more spiritual human beings of this age, we know our own advantage well enough to live without fear of... Read More Read More - [Nietzsche To Springsteen](https://everyangel.org/nietzsche-and-springsteen/): You can’t start a fire Worrying about your little world falling apart This gun’s for hire Even if we’re just dancing in the dark –Dancing In The Dark by Bruce Springsteen Discussed with a friend, what to do about the yawning gap in perception between republicans, some supporting Trump unconditionally, maybe more who support... Read More Read More - [Still Riding Mad And Fiery Horses](https://everyangel.org/still-riding-mad-and-fiery-horses/): What the hell has happened to me? How does one explain to oneself, to justify even, — on occasion being called a “moral relativist” ?  The term is not meant as a complement.  It’s a near epithet, a label of derision…  Of course the speaker means that I come across, am perceived as one... Read More Read More - [The Most Stupid Of All](https://everyangel.org/the-most-stupid-of-all/): We are surrounded by technology.  The skill of mankind has grown exponentially since the early industrial age, and then since the time of Bohr and Heisenberg and a host of others, names not so well known.  I’ve known a few researchers, — scientists, physicists, chemists, engineers whose curiosity and meticulous work has produced products... Read More Read More - [Our Square Little Reason](https://everyangel.org/our-square-little-reason/): So, is this the final act, a horizon which we did not see because our eyes did not reach that far? I am referring to the experiment of America, that we thought was “noble,” a special nation, as Madeleine Albright said in 1998, — the Indispensable Nation.  A city shining, set on a hill,... Read More Read More - [Listen To The Music](https://everyangel.org/listen-to-the-music/): I stayed up late last night to watch the breaking news on ABC:  Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis read a RICO indictment against former president Donald Trump, accusing him and a circle of associates of attempting to steal a presidential election.  Upon reflection it seems poetic-justice, (if there is any justice in this... Read More Read More - [Like Trees We Grow](https://everyangel.org/like-trees-we-grow/): At the Paramount Theater in Aurora we were present for the Happy Together Tour concert.  Songs written in our youth, over fifty years ago were performed by The Turtles, Little Anthony, Gary Puckett, The Vogues, The Classics IV and The Cowsills.  Arriving early we waited for the doors to open just outside the auditorium. ... Read More Read More - [Another Day In Paradise](https://everyangel.org/another-day-in-paradise/): Sunday, late summertime is fine here.  Sunshine, the beds of flowers display a riot of life and colors.  But not so everywhere.  In the aftermath of the Maui wildfires the death toll stands at 93 so far.  Did anyone think a tropical paradise could be vulnerable to wildfires?  Neighborhoods wiped out, now become skeletal... Read More Read More - [Hibiscus](https://everyangel.org/hibiscus/): I received this poem yesterday.  Later in the day I observed hibiscus growing wild in a wetland by the Braeburn marsh.  I was excited to return later, parking my vehicle in a nearby neighborhood then hiking over the wetland, dry now because of the summer drought.  The hibiscus were magnificent, glowing, saucer-sized gems in... Read More Read More - [Converse Pivot Point](https://everyangel.org/converse-pivot-point/): I have puzzled over the difference in temperament between a die-hard republican, one who would cast a vote, albeit reluctantly for Trump, rather than vote for any democratic candidate.  Or consider the liberal minded who judges the republican to be in thrall to a ghost emanating from the pre-industrial 18th century.  There exists a... Read More Read More - [About Music](https://everyangel.org/about-music/): In the course of a brief phone conversation yesterday with a friend, music was mentioned.  What does music affect for us, when we listen, when we are enthralled with rhythm, rhyme, harmony, and the lyric of a human voice?  Could it be we are addressed by a god that we cannot name, one without... Read More Read More - [Remedy For Indigestion](https://everyangel.org/remedy-for-indigestion/): Jean Paul Sartre in his famous play No Exit writes, “Others Are Hell.”  Who would disagree?  I do care what others think of me.  Still I have no way of knowing what they think.  Therefore I “dance around” trying my best so speak and behave in sync with minds that are opaque to me… ... Read More Read More - [The Helmsman?](https://everyangel.org/the-helmsman/): Once there was a time when I believed in “free will.”  I truly thought that the course of my life was the sum total of decisions, freely made.  Furthermore, self recrimination, or self-congratulation was due because I was the actor, the subject who had decided those courses of action.  I was the helmsman-of-my-life, accountable... Read More Read More - [About Love](https://everyangel.org/about-love/): These lines compel reflection.  Songs about love beyond counting have been written.  Just within my short span of life, poets and lyricists find a bottomless well of material, as they peer into the surreal experience of love between two human beings.  And, this is not limited to male-female love, never has been… Nietzsche comments... Read More Read More - [Weekend](https://everyangel.org/weekend/): The weekend has been full.  It’s only Sunday morning and I wonder what this day will bring?  What adventure(s) will be in store? We are all Sisyphus are we not?  A friend reminded me of the enduring truth of this myth.  Each of us is subject to fate, the inexorable consequence of cause and... Read More Read More - [Turning Out Badly](https://everyangel.org/turning-out-badly/): Perhaps you’ve had the misfortune of acquaintance with someone who conducted himself as if he was discomforted by “a stick up his ass,” a moral prig?  I wonder whether churches serve as a magnet for such who desire to judge others?  Like attracts like.  A unctuous, self-abasing demeanor can be a screen hiding self-loathing… ... Read More Read More - [Peasant Rebellion Continues](https://everyangel.org/peasant-rebellion-continues/): It is Friday.  I’ve got almost nothing to write. What does it mean “to be” here, to exist, to be located in Starbucks at 7:15 AM on a Friday morning?  What links my being, to my physical position in space and time, here-now? The room is quite full, humming with voices and movement.  I... Read More Read More - [The Maddest, Most Interesting Age](https://everyangel.org/the-maddest-most-interesting-age/): Many, myself included ask ourselves WTF has happened to us Americans.  What happened?  What happened to the Republican Party, when they had opportunity to convict this shape-shifting con man, impeaching him and banning him from holding future office?  They feared him, feared their actions would anger their own voters. That is what the prosecutor,... Read More Read More - [Most Wanted: Security](https://everyangel.org/most-wanted-security/): I heard one of the common people say, “he knew me right away.” Then I asked myself: What is it that the common people take for knowledge? What do they want when they want “knowledge”? Nothing more than this: Something strange is to be reduced to something familiar. And we philosophers –have we really... Read More Read More - [Utility, Of Which We May Perish](https://everyangel.org/ultility-of-which-we-may-perish/): I believe it was a Reuters or maybe a Guardian report of the battle for a Ukrainian town outside of Bakhmut.  A soldier who survived the assault described the kill zones that awaited the advance of his unit.  The Ukrainians prevailed but at a terrible cost.  I simply felt numb upon finishing the piece. ... Read More Read More - [What Do We Cover Up?](https://everyangel.org/what-do-we-cover-up/): Certainly this war photograph provokes a feeling of revulsion.  Only the clothes are left.  The photo reminds of many things. War brutalizes every participant.  Almost every actor involuntarily participates.  War dissolves morality.  What is morality? What does morality cover up? Now consider the way ”moral man”is dressed up,how he is veiledbehind moral formulasand concepts... Read More Read More - [Religious Without Religion](https://everyangel.org/religious-without-religion/): Sunday morning dawns, time enough for reflection.  We were guests at a concert last night at the Royal Fox Country Club.  Arcada Productions presented the music of Styx and Boston: Boston and Styx at the Fox.  Musicians included members of Dennis DeYoung Band and Tommy Decarlo lead singer for Boston. I struggle to find... Read More Read More - [Nut House Ripe](https://everyangel.org/nut-house-ripe/): The writings of Nietzsche are resisted by many, aware of his assertion of “the death of God” in his parable of the madman.  Nietzsche has a reputation for raging against the church, a sworn enemy of priestcraft, opposing veneration for those believing themselves as adepts of divine wisdom, spokespersons for/of life after life… To... Read More Read More - [Come Out !](https://everyangel.org/come-out/): In a nutshell!  Nietzsche’s POV of life.  Come out, come out of your nook he urges the reader!  Live your life, expansively, assertively…  Thinking/living to defend is a minor note to the torrent of life…  Come out of your human nook, be the lion! But… a scientist should come out of his human nook;... Read More Read More - [Play Offense Always](https://everyangel.org/to-play-offense/): Today will be another sweltering day.  Heat and stifling humidity.  One adapts to conditions as one is able, constraints presented by the thermal energy-surge of atmosphere, of ocean currents, a result of millennia of sequestered carbon release since the advent of the industrial age.  The “waste” must go somewhere…  Wouldn’t you agree? You cannot... Read More Read More - [Ancestor In The Blood](https://everyangel.org/my-ancestor-in-the-blood/): What manner of scholar am I?  What is my standard of workmanship?  Nietzsche suggests a certain tenor is transmitted from our ancestors way of life.  Is there a “prehistory” that haunts the sweep of these blog entries? My father grew up poor, raised by a single mother, helping to support my grandmother and his... Read More Read More - [Fanaticism And Exhaustion](https://everyangel.org/fanaticism-and-exhaustion/): I am amazed that anyone could subscribe to a religion or a quasi-religious movement, such as the Republican (Trump) Party as it now stands.  Shiny surfaces notwithstanding, the truth of our time, this first half of the 21st century, is that of existential exhaustion.  There is a market for fanaticism, many “takers,” those willing... Read More Read More - [Still Catching A Ride](https://everyangel.org/still-catching-a-ride/): I was sixteen.  I remember the sensation: to lay on the surf board supported by movement on moving water, paddling toward the horizon, past the break point, that point where the energy radiating under the surface, shoreward reaches a crest.  At that point the wave begins to break, energy manifests as a collapsing liquid... Read More Read More - [Reverence Dissipating...](https://everyangel.org/we-laugh/): …modem pessimism, and a more ancient and stronger expression in the teaching of Buddha; but it is part of Christianity also, if more doubtfully and ambiguously so but not for that reason any less seductive. The whole pose of “man against the world,” of man as a “world-negating” principle, of man as the measure... Read More Read More - [We Are All Three](https://everyangel.org/we-are-all-three/): If we simply called ourselves,using an old expression,godless, or unbelievers, or perhaps immoralists,we do not, believe that this would even come close to designating us: We are all three in such an advanced stage that one    — that you, my curious friends      — could never comprehend how we feel at this point. Ours... Read More Read More - [Yes! Yes! Yes!](https://everyangel.org/yes-yes-yes/): The lack of personality always takes its revenge: A weakened, thin, extinguished personality that denies itself is no longer fit for anything good –least of all for philosophy. “Selflessness” has no value either in heaven or on earth. All great problems demand great love, and of that only strong, round, secure spirits who have... Read More Read More - [Fractured, Baked, Assaulted, Overrun](https://everyangel.org/while-we-slept/): Good morning! Some snapshots of things related to us, — while we were sleeping…  For a more complete rendering visit the NEW YORK TIMES. FRACTURED Screenwriters — who are unionized — have gone on strike in an attempt to use their collective leverage to avoid becoming Hollywood’s equivalent of adjunct professors. Today, only one... Read More Read More - [More Like Evening](https://everyangel.org/more-like-evening/): Late to Starbucks today.  Began my day by coming “out of retirement” to assist my son with a new client.  I was reminded of the way of life, the day to day routine that was my normal for many years.  Is anything ever truly behind us?  I do not think so.  We are marked... Read More Read More - [Incipit tragoedia](https://everyangel.org/incipit-tragoedia/): The tragedy begins…. Thus Nietzsche ends this section of The Gay Science, book four. Every ending brings a beginning, an interregnum, an interlude when “what comes next” cracks the old constraints, a climax of a chain of events, only described as WTF, when you crest the apex, the highest point in a roller coaster,... Read More Read More - [Prayer To The Sun](https://everyangel.org/prayer-to-the-sun/): When Zarathustra was thirty years old, he left his home and Lake Urmi and went into the mountains. There he enjoyed his spirit and his solitude, and for ten years did not tire of that. But at last his heart changed –and on morning he rose with the dawn, stepped before the sun, and... Read More Read More - [Eternal Hourglass Of Existence](https://everyangel.org/eternal-hourglass-of-existence/): What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: “This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain... Read More Read More - [Everything Not Said](https://everyangel.org/everything-not-said/): I admire the courage and wisdom of Socrates in everything he did, said, — and did not say. This mocking and enamored monster and pied piper of Athens, who made the most overweening youths tremble and sob, was not only the wisest chatterer of all time: he was equally great in silence. I wish... Read More Read More - [Once Only](https://everyangel.org/once-only/): For seeing the ultimate beautiesof a work,no knowledge or good will is sufficient;this requires the rarest of lucky accidents: The clouds that veil these peakshave to lift for onceso that we see them glowing in the sun. Not only do we have to standin precisely the right spot in order to see this,but the... Read More Read More - [Taking Five Steps](https://everyangel.org/taking-five-steps/): Met with some friends via Zoom to discuss the function of “intention” in relation to moral judgments.  We agreed that intent is slippery, an ambiguous aspect of deciding right action…  The intent of another’s action is notoriously difficult to ascertain.  Moreover introspection of one’s own intention reveals a complex, anything but pure motivation for... Read More Read More - [Laughing, Weeping, Cursing](https://everyangel.org/laughing-weeping-cursing/): Non ridere, non lugere, neque detestari, sed intelligere! “Not to laugh, not to lament, nor to detest, but to understand” —Tractatus Politicus by Spinoza …what else is this intelligere than the form in which we come to feel the other three at once? One result of the different and mutually opposed desires to laugh,... Read More Read More - [What Do I Matter?](https://everyangel.org/what-do-i-matter/): Every philosopher has probablyhad an evil hour when he/she thought: What do I matter if one does not accept my bad arguments, too? –And then some mischievous little bird flew past him and twittered: “What do you matter?What do you matter?” –excerpt The Gay Science, Book 4, Section 332 by Friedrich Nietzsche Perhaps we ought... Read More Read More - [Screaming](https://everyangel.org/screaming/): Formerly, one wished to acquire fame and be spoken of. Now that is no longer enough because the market has grown too large; nothing less than screaming will do. As a consequence, even good voices scream till they are hoarse, and the best goods are offered by cracked voices. Without the screaming of those... Read More Read More - [Virtue Is Efficiency](https://everyangel.org/virtue-as-efficiency/): We live in the age of cybernetics, of next-day Amazon delivery, of iphone instant communication anywhere in the world.  The American way of life is idealized as the apex of 21st century freedom and affluence by many.  Nietzsche, living in the late 19th century, as the industrial age broke like a wave transforming Europe,... Read More Read More - [Places To Dance](https://everyangel.org/places-to-dance/): Mid-life No. Life has not disappointed me.On the contrary, I find it truer,more desirable and mysterious every year–ever since the day when the great liberator came to me: the idea that life could be an experimentof the seeker for know1edge–and not a duty, not a calamity, not trickery. –And knowledge itself: let it be... Read More Read More - [Inflating Ourselves](https://everyangel.org/inflating-ourselves/): There is as much wisdom in pain as there is in pleasure… In pain I hear the captain’s command: “Take in the sails!… The bold seafarer “man” must have mastered the art of doing a thousand things with his sails; otherwise he would be done for in no time, — the ocean would swallow... Read More Read More - [The Weight Of Brilliance](https://everyangel.org/the-weight-of-brilliance/): Let us stop thinking so much about punishing, reproaching, and improving others! We rarely change an individual, and if we should succeed for once, something may also have been accomplished, unnoticed: we may have been changed by him. Let us rather see to it that our own influence on all that is yet to... Read More Read More - [Not Joining The March](https://everyangel.org/not-joining-the-march/): July 4th, Memorial Day 2023.  And feelings that well up?  Emotions are involuntary…  Patriotism?  Love-of-country?  Perhaps I should just fix a standard American flag to the front of the garage door, a flag purchased from Amazon, or from the local Menards, –let that action suffice…  Should I join the apathy, that bland, happy indifference... Read More Read More - [Something Wants To Live](https://everyangel.org/something-wants-to-live/): Perhaps you’ve reflected upon the course of your life marveling at the path you have taken?  I cannot describe the person that I’ve become by comparison to who I was as a young adult in my early 20s.  In that day I did my best to be an “enthusiast for Christ.”  Jesus-is-the-answer might have... Read More Read More - [Becoming Insufferable](https://everyangel.org/becoming-insufferable/): Without a laptop computer for several days, it was difficult to write.  The replacement, a new Lenovo Thinkpad was ready yesterday.  Now, I must, one task at a time, wrangle the new machine into the arrangement which is suited to my style of use. Much has taken place in the interim since my mind/body... Read More Read More - [The Wall](https://everyangel.org/the-wall/): The wall is a there.  That terminus for every man, in every woman’s future. You likely guess my meaning. Just as there was a time before my entry, there will be a time for exiting. Time. Birth and death are measured in time. Our manner of conversation marks birth dates, and in the obituary,... Read More Read More - [Magicians, Alchemists, Astrologers, Witches](https://everyangel.org/magicians-alchemists-astrologers-witches/): Preludes of science— Do you really believe that the sciences would ever have originated and grown if the way had not been prepared by magicians, alchemists, astrologers, and witches whose promises and pretensions first had to create a thirst, a hunger, a taste for hidden and forbidden powers? Indeed, infinitely more had to be... Read More Read More - [Inspiring Nausea](https://everyangel.org/inspiring-nausea/): To the sanctimonious, filing into your house of worship pews anticipating the show, eager to note down the happy-talk words of your pastor, shill for a discounted Jesus, conjuring up feelings of self-satisfaction about moral living that you can afford —  are you not entertained! To those who preach morals— I do not wish... Read More Read More - [Always Freedom And Sunlight](https://everyangel.org/always-freedom-and-sunlight/): I composed an email in reply to a friend.  The exchange between us had to do with the contentious pro-choice vs the pro-life viewpoints.  Pragmatically the subject has to do with a woman’s rights of privacy and health care choice.  To engage with another male friend about the subject causes an unsettled feeling.  ... Read More Read More - [Farmer's Market](https://everyangel.org/frarmers-market/): Yesterday was Saturday.  An enjoyable summertime activity is our Batavia Farmer’s Market.  We have a casual acquaintance with several of the vendors that we have patronized often.  The breakfast taco prepared by the owners of El Taco Grande is just right, and I feel fortunate to be their customer. While eating our breakfast taco... Read More Read More - [Where Art Ends And Life Begins](https://everyangel.org/where-art-ends-and-life-begins/): Learning from artists — How can we make thingsbeautiful, attractive, and desirable for us when they are not?And I rather think that in themselves they never are. … from artists whoare really continually tryingto bring off such inventions and feats. Moving awayfrom things untilthere is a good deal that one no longer seesand there... Read More Read More - [Walking In The Dark](https://everyangel.org/walking-in-the-dark/): The poem came my way yesterday.  Life is long and arduous, all the more so for humans.  Risk and suffering cannot be “structured out” as we Americans are accustomed to think.  There is no manifest destiny.  We are not on-a-mission-for-god.  Just because you and I have a voice, because our system of transfer of... Read More Read More - [I Keep Seeing](https://everyangel.org/i-keep-seeing/): America, the land of hopes and dreams… or so it is said in the Springsteen lyric. Time enough for you and I to look around, to consider what your eyes see… I remember the road trip out west with a friend, when we visited Los Angles, Beverly Hills.  I still remember what I saw.... Read More Read More - [Pride Parade II](https://everyangel.org/pride-parade-afterthoughts/): I was asked to say more about the Louisville Pride parade of this past weekend.  I thought about what the event meant to me, as a straight male.  Lived experience means something different for each of us.  We depend upon words to communicate our internal experience which is personal, intimate, private and concealed.  No... Read More Read More - [When The Work Is Finished](https://everyangel.org/when-the-work-is-finished/): One thing is needful— To “give style” to one’s character– a great and rare art. It is practiced by those who survey all the strengths and weaknesses of their nature and then fit them into an artistic plan until every one of them appears as art and reason and even weaknesses delight the eye.... Read More Read More - [We See You](https://everyangel.org/we-see-you/): On this day in 1865, a contingent of Federal troops lead by Gen. Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston Texas to proclaim, to enforce the end of enslavement of black Americans.  Today is Juneteenth, a national day of remembrance. I offer for your pondering along with me, these magnificent words from Nietzsche.  The photos were... Read More Read More - [Everyone Wants To Be First](https://everyangel.org/everyone-wants-to-be-first/): We are staying at the Louisville Ky downtown Marriott Courtyard.  On the seventh floor, across from our window is the Yum KFC center, the home of the Louisville Cardinals.  The Ohio River can be seen behind the Yum Center. The sky is obscured by dome of gray haze.  Sunlight waxes and wanes through the... Read More Read More - [Actually Burning](https://everyangel.org/actually-burning/): Thursday at 7AM the morning sun burned a pallid orange.  Wildfire smoke in the high atmosphere filters the sunlight.  For us here in the Fox Valley it is an early sign of much more that is coming.  In terms of climate the midwest is not far from Quebec where the fires burn.  Imagine the... Read More Read More - [What Is Necessary](https://everyangel.org/what-is-necessary/): I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do... Read More Read More - [As Important As The Greatest Event...](https://everyangel.org/as-important-as-the-greatest-event/): What I do or do not do now is as important for everything that is yet to come as is the greatest event of the past: in this tremendous perspective of effectiveness all actions appear equally great and small. –excerpt The Gay Science, Book 3, Section 233 by Friedrich Nietzsche I shared these lines with... Read More Read More - [About Those Clowns](https://everyangel.org/about-those-clowns/): Slept in today in the aftermath of a full weekend.  Sunday afternoon I had a rare opportunity to attend a live performance of show tunes, by the Fox Valley Festival Chorus.  As you’d imagine the work of Stephen Sondheim was a feature of the concert.  These lines from perhaps the best known of Sondheim’s... Read More Read More - [No More](https://everyangel.org/no-more/): What does your conscience say? — “You shall become the person you are.” –excerpt The Gay Science, Book 3, Section 270 by Friedrich Nietzsche My mind is numb, as if tantalized by just a taste of what is badly needed.  Like the promise of rain, in the midst of a drought.  Dry ground, dormant grass... Read More Read More - [Resist To Be Free](https://everyangel.org/resist-to-be-free/): Sacrifice– The sacrificial animal does not share the spectators ideas about sacrifice, but one has never let it have its say. –excerpt The Gay Science, Book 3, Section 220 by Friedrich Nietzsche I am haunted by this line of text, by this thought.  Compared with other mammals life for humans has great added difficulty.  Our... Read More Read More - [Nothing Or Interesting](https://everyangel.org/nothing-or-interesting/): Dreams— Either we have no dreams or our dreams are interesting. We should learn to arrange our waking life the same way: nothing or interesting. –excerpt The Gay Science, Book 3, Section 232 by Friedrich Nietzsche Lately I hardly dream.  Where does a dream belong?  Are dreams the visitation of a god?  A message from... Read More Read More - [Blood](https://everyangel.org/blood/): Thursday dawns with a hazy sky, hundreds of wildfires burn in the Canadian north.  Since we all share a single planet New York City, the eastern seaboard of the United States is choked with unhealthy levels of smoke.  For New York’s citizens it is unhealthy to be outside.  Are we about to change our... Read More Read More - [Finding Traction](https://everyangel.org/finding-traction/): Faith makes blessed— Virtue bestows happiness and a kind of bliss only on those who have not lost their faith in their virtue— not on those subtler souls whose virtue consists in a profound mistrust of themselves and of all virtue. Ultimately, then, “faith makes blessed” here, too, and not–mark it well– virtue. –excerpt The... Read More Read More - [Dangerously Lost](https://everyangel.org/how-lost/): Animals as critics— I fear that the animals consider man as a being like themselves that has lost in a most dangerous way its sound animal common sense; they consider him the insane animal,    the laughing animal,       the weeping animal,          the miserable animal. –excerpt The Gay Science, Book 3, Section 224 by... Read More Read More - [Paradox Unending](https://everyangel.org/paradox-unending/): Monday in Geneva is overcast, most likely with haze from wildfires in Canada.  The anticipated Ukrainian counter offensive has likely begun.  Reuters alone reported a press release from the Russian side.  The relative absence of information leads me to believe that engagement has begun.  No question that many are going to die. There’s a... Read More Read More - [What Is He...](https://everyangel.org/what-is-he/): Once I was tempted to think that candidates for office are bloviating buffoons, vacuous minded, baby kissers, etc. etc.  I no longer think such a candidate for office is harmless.  Who is not dismayed by the condition of the country; we are all bit performers in a comedy of societal dysfunction.  It is unclear... Read More Read More - [Just Dance](https://everyangel.org/just-dance/): Returned from a wedding in Michigan.  We received the invitation from a couple on my wife’s side of our family. No two weddings are alike.  Two family groups are brought together in celebration of a beginning of life-together for two adults who have been recipients of parent’s devotion.  The endeavor of parents to enable... Read More Read More - [Beware, She's Beautiful She's Dangerous](https://everyangel.org/beware-shes-beautiful-and-dangerous/): This J. D. Vance clip has been at the forefront of media coverage of the election campaign. In a 2021 interview with Fox News host Tucker Carlson, then-Senate-candidate Vance complained that the U.S. was being run by Democrats, corporate oligarchs and “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives... Read More Read More - [The Unteachable](https://everyangel.org/the-unteachable/): “something unteachable, a granite of spiritual fate”  Those written words make me shudder.  Do I detect an odor of a timeworn notion of destiny? I mean to say that even with the privilege of education, or perhaps of financial resources, of means – there’s a certain core that is untouchable by any circumstance, a... Read More Read More - [Graffiti](https://everyangel.org/graffiti/): Who doesn’t prefer approval, being well received, thought of with affection by one’s fellows. Nietzsche was no different than you or I. That variety of genteel, decorous social embrace, idealized in storytelling of the Victorian era is what we’d all wish, because then each of us has his/her place in the tribe without fissure... Read More Read More - [A Drop Of Cruelty](https://everyangel.org/a-drop-of-cruelty/): People should rethink their ideas about cruelty and open up their eyes; they should finally learn impatience, so that big, fat, presumptuous mistakes like this will stop wandering virtuously and audaciously about. We’d like to believe we Americans are of all people the most humane. We want what is best, which we fervently believe... Read More Read More - [Same As They Have Always Been](https://everyangel.org/same-as-they-have-always-been/): Yes, a taste for Nietzsche’s style of thought surely includes admiration for his sardonic manner of expression.  To attempt a paraphrase: Let’s move the conversation as far as possible from the subject of morality.  Shall we cling to the golden rule, satisfied that this mantra, as often as is brought to mind, is the... Read More Read More - [Spirits We Are Hiding](https://everyangel.org/spirits-all-are-hiding/): Liberals are misjudged and there is no remedy for that. That cannot be helped. You may wonder how the world appears to the liberal minded. The world is viewed as a changing matrix, an organism-like phenomenon which is perpetually searching a more efficient way, (by trial and error) an improved way of processing of... Read More Read More - [All The Love And Malice](https://everyangel.org/all-the-love-and-malice/): A friend’s comment to the post of yesterday inspired the choice of these lines. Here a train of thought describes a point of view of life in a society marked by affluence as well as by the violence of extreme poverty. Systemic exploitation amounts to healthcare you cannot afford, and doing without the benefits... Read More Read More - [A World Of The Almost](https://everyangel.org/a-world-of-the-almost/): WE IMMORALISTS! – This world as it concerns US, in which we need to love and be afraid, this almost invisible, inaudible world of subtle command, subtle obedience, a world of the “almost” in every respect, twisted, tricky, barbed, and loving: yes, it is well defended against clumsy spectators and friendly curiosity! We have... Read More Read More - [A Grain Of Salt](https://everyangel.org/a-grain-of-salt/): We discussed humor. There was speculation about the role of wry humor, the benefits of the proximity of laughter to our well being. I enjoy the presence of humorous individuals. I think that most do. My formative years were spent among people who in retrospect were humorless. They were moralists, that overweening focus upon... Read More Read More - [A Drifter Needing Rescue](https://everyangel.org/a-drifter-needing-rescue/): The uncomfortable, suffocating heat and humidity have moved on. Today is bright with sunlight, and agreeably mild. “So it goes” with the weather and with life.  It pays to pay attention to what is on the menu, to the “soup of the day” or to the Duck à l’Orange if it happens as the... Read More Read More - [Enough Luck](https://everyangel.org/luck-2/): This graphic was featured in a Sunday edition of the New York Times.  “Luck” – If you are lucky… Of course the entire point is the unknown of the future, your future and mine.  Would you delight to have a long life, winning against the odds, what we mean by luck?  I would. My... Read More Read More - [Dangerous And Crazy](https://everyangel.org/dangerous-and-crazy/): Hedonism, pessimism, utilitarianism, eudamonianism: these are all ways of thinking that measure the value of things according to pleasure and pain, which is to say according to incidental states and trivialities. They are all foreground ways of thinking and naivetes, and nobody who is conscious of both formative powers and an artist’s conscience will... Read More Read More - [To Taste And Love Again](https://everyangel.org/to-taste-and-love-again/): We men of “historical sense,” we do have our virtues – this cannot be denied. We are unassuming, selfless, modest, brave, full of self-overcoming, full of dedication, very grateful, very patient, very accommodating: – but for all that we are, perhaps, not very “tasteful.” Finally, let us admit to ourselves: what we men of... Read More Read More - [Desire](https://everyangel.org/desire/): This parable was received in a weekly email from Rob Brezsny, Freewill Astrology Newsletter. The newsletter edition from Brezsny, a fine writer, is an analysis of desire, the morality of craving. I will say no more. Just enjoy the story! THE MYSTERY OF THIRST Imagine this scene. I’m really thirsty—so dehydrated that I’m feeling... Read More Read More - [Anything For Love !?](https://everyangel.org/anything-for-love/): “And love?”–What! Even an action for love’s sake shall be “unegoistic”? But you fools–! “And the praise of the self- sacrificer?” –But whoever has really offered sacrifice knows that he wanted and obtained something for it –perhaps something from himself for something from himself; that he relinquished here in order to have more there,... Read More Read More - [Badly Endowed By Nature](https://everyangel.org/badly-endowed-by-nature/): The practice of judging and condemning morally, is the favorite revenge of the intellectually shallow on those who are less so, it is also a kind of indemnity for their being badly endowed by nature, and finally, it is an opportunity for acquiring spirit and BECOMING subtle –malice spiritualizes. They are glad in their... Read More Read More - [Contra Religious Posturing](https://everyangel.org/contra-religious-posturing/): Morality as attitude -is opposed to our taste nowadays. This is ALSO an advance, as it was an advance in our fathers that religion as an attitude finally became opposed to their taste, including the enmity and Voltairean bitterness against religion (and all that formerly belonged to freethinker- pantomime). It is the music in... Read More Read More - [Natural Born](https://everyangel.org/natural-born/): You need to have been born for any higher world; to say it more clearly, you need to have been bred for it: only your descent, your ancestry can give you a right to philosophy – taking that word in its highest sense. Even here, “bloodline” is decisive. The preparatory labor of many generations... Read More Read More - [Backyard Meditation](https://everyangel.org/backyard-meditation/): A backyard can be sublime. I confess to having no background in landscape design.  Anyone potentially may pay attention, admire the form and colors of a well cared for lawn, accent shrubs, etc..  The preponderance of the work is what I call “hand-work” -weeding, pruning with a hand cutter, picking up debris, arranging fallen stems... Read More Read More - [Standing Alone](https://everyangel.org/standing-alone/): These days, by contrast, when only the herd animal gets and gives honor in Europe [America], when “equal rights” could all too easily end up as equal wrongs (I mean, in waging a joint war on everything rare, strange, privileged, on the higher man, higher soul, higher duty, higher responsibility, on creative power and... Read More Read More - [Reaching For The Future](https://everyangel.org/reaching-for-the-future/): But true philosophers are commanders and legislators: they say “That is how it should be!” They are the ones who first determine the “where to?” and “what for?” of people… True philosophers reach for the future with a creative hand and everything that is and was becomes a means, a tool, a hammer for... Read More Read More - [Dahlias And Saying No](https://everyangel.org/pleasure-in-saying-no/): Thursday sunrise dawns with a clear sky. These are paradisiacal days. A friend’s dahlias are in full bloom, several are on display here at Starbucks.  We shouldn’t be deceived though, everything is not well here in paradise. The New York Times published a report showing that upward mobility, the income of working class whites... Read More Read More - [Level-headed Cruelty](https://everyangel.org/level-headed-cruelty/): In fact, these philosophers [of the future] admit to taking pleasure in saying no, in dissecting, and in a certain level-headed cruelty that knows how to guide a knife with assurance and subtlety, even when the heart is bleeding. They will be more severe (and perhaps not always with themselves alone) than humane people... Read More Read More - [No To Oppression](https://everyangel.org/now-a-fierce-no/): This passage is haunting. Europe of the late 19th century was on the cusp of shattering events.  July 28, 1914 was the inception of WWI, and September 1st, 1939 the Wehrmacht invaded Poland, arguably a continuation of the earlier conflict. Nietzsche wrote in 1886 describing the social and moral dislocations of the modern era.... Read More Read More - [About Beauty](https://everyangel.org/about-beauty/): Just finished reading an essay, Attuned to the Aesthetic by Tom Cochrane. The author proposed, suggested that beauty is a ground for morality. I did enjoy the essay, not simply because I also endorse his thesis, but because the seven pages were beautifully written, a smooth read. Could we say that to be involved... Read More Read More - [Farmer's Market](https://everyangel.org/farmers-market/): The Farmer’s Market does not disappoint. A weekly event, which replicates the open air commerce of many generations, universal, on every continent, – that is the Farmer’s Market.  The buying and selling is integrated with the producer, with the production of many types of goods, not limited to the produce which comes from sun,... Read More Read More - [The Way The World Ends](https://everyangel.org/the-way-the-world-ends/): I understand this poem was found in T. S. Eliot’s papers. It appears to have been written in the last years of his writing career.  The poem is a composition of poems which were previously written and published.  Near to the end of a journey one sometimes is able to understand how once seeming... Read More Read More - [Not Keeping Out Of The Way](https://everyangel.org/not-keeping-out-of-the-way/): If you hear anyone praised these days for living “wisely” or “like a philosopher” it basically just means he is “clever and keeps out of the way.” To the rabble, wisdom seems like a kind of escape, a device or trick for pulling yourself out of the game when things get rough. But the... Read More Read More - [Made Up Reality](https://everyangel.org/made-up-reality/): Again, the circle of friends settled in at Barnes & Noble, provoked to consider, to attempt a response to several challenges to conventional thought. Since antiquity, here in Europe and lately in America we have relied upon the assumption that each of us has a defined, stable identity, a “self” which we aim to... Read More Read More - [Someone Like Us](https://everyangel.org/someone-like-us/): …but someone with an uncommon eye for the overall danger that “humanity” itself will degenerate, someone like us, who has recognized the outrageous contingency that has been playing games with the future of humanity so far – games in which no hand and not even a “finger of God” has taken part! – someone... Read More Read More - [Steel Conscience, Bronze Heart](https://everyangel.org/steel-conscience-bronze-heart/): …a new type of philosopher and commander will be needed for this someday, and whatever hidden, dreadful, or benevolent spirits have existed on earth will pale into insignificance beside the image of this type. The image of such leaders hovers before our eyes: – may I say this out loud, you free spirits? The... Read More Read More - [Are You Strong Enough, Original Enough?](https://everyangel.org/are-you-strong-enough-original-enough/): We who have a different faith –, we who consider the democratic movement to be not merely an abased form of political organization, but rather an abased (a diminished) form of humanity, a mediocritization and depreciation of humanity in value: where do we need to reach with our hopes? – Towards new philosophers, there... Read More Read More - [Serendipity](https://everyangel.org/serendipity/): Our first full day in Coloma Michigan. The afternoon was spent by the lake, – walking and observing the life happening at the interface of water and land, by the ancient dunes, and in the lake enjoying the inflatable kayak. Spending these days by the lake, three generations of our family is serendipitous, a... Read More Read More - [Constraints](https://everyangel.org/constraints/): Taking a few days for a planned family visit to St. Joseph Michigan. We rent a large house a short walk from Lake Michigan. The adults of our extended family have the luxury of conversation about current events, challenges in the work-life, and about the opportunities presented by raising young children. One of the... Read More Read More - [Communal Pity](https://everyangel.org/communal-pity/): People in Europe [America] clearly know what Socrates claimed not to know, and what that famous old snake once promised to teach, – people these days “know” what is good and evil. Now it must sound harsh and strike the ear quite badly when we keep insisting on the following point: what it is... Read More Read More - [Sheeple Morality](https://everyangel.org/sheeple-morality/): How much or how little danger there is to the community or to equality in an opinion, in a condition or affect, in a will, in a talent, this is now the moral perspective: and      fear is once again the mother of morality. When the highest and strongest drives erupt in passion, driving... Read More Read More - [Grabbing Hold](https://everyangel.org/grabbing-hold/): For as long as there have been people, there have been herds of people as well (racial groups, communities, tribes, folk, states, churches), and a very large number of people who obey compared to relatively few who command. So, considering the fact that humanity has been the best and most long-standing breeding ground for... Read More Read More - [And It Follows From This...](https://everyangel.org/and-it-follows-from-this/): No mother doubts at the bottom of her heart that, in the child, she has given birth to a piece of property; no father questions his right to subject the child to his own ideas and valuations. In fact, there was a time (among the ancient Germans, for instance) when it seemed fair that... Read More Read More - [Dumb Goodwill To Believe](https://everyangel.org/dumb-goodwill-to-believe/): …the oldest and most secret processes ofall “knowledge and cognition”:there as here,rash hypotheses, fictions,the dumb good will to “believe,”and a lack of mistrust and patience develop first– our senses learn late and never fully learnto be refined, trusty, careful organs of knowledge. Given some stimulus,our eyesfind it more convenientto reproduce an imagethat they have... Read More Read More - [Giving Fair Due](https://everyangel.org/giving-fair-due/): The question of whether, with respect to the value of things, the instincts deserve more authority than reason (reason wants some ground or “what for?”, some purpose or utility behind our values and actions) – this is the same old moral problem that first emerged in the person of Socrates and divided opinions long... Read More Read More - [More On Reason](https://everyangel.org/more-on-reason/): The old theological problem of “faith” and “knowledge” – or, to be more precise, of instinct and reason – and so, the question of whether, with respect to the value of things, the instincts deserve more authority than reason (reason wants some ground or “what for?”, some purpose or utility behind our values and... Read More Read More - [Rules, Reasons And Reason](https://everyangel.org/my-thoughts-on-rules/): July 4th, Independence Day 2024 arrives.  It is overcast.  The roads were eerily quiet, no traffic.  I nodded to instinct and pressed the accelerator, the car surged to 70 mph in three seconds or so. That was enough. The published speed limit was 40 mph. What is life but to exceed a limit? Karl... Read More Read More - [To Save The World Today](https://everyangel.org/to-save-the-world-today/): We Are In Charge Dance on this verge, do not let the ruling fools of this dying world consummate their curses. Rise up, defy, resist! Uncork the sacred rage! Be and become the new culture   of euphoric duty,     and insurrectionary beauty. Join the new alliance! Needed: radical curiosity, reverent pranks, voracious listening.... Read More Read More - [Everything There Is, Or Was,](https://everyangel.org/everything-there-is-or-was/): But the strange fact is that everything there is, or was, of freedom, subtlety, boldness, dance, or masterly assurance on earth, whether in thinking itself, or in ruling, or in speaking and persuading, in artistic just as in ethical practices, has only developed by virtue of the “tyranny of such arbitrary laws.” And, in... Read More Read More - [Resuscitation?](https://everyangel.org/resuscitation/): Monday. This is a week of celebration. The key event will be Thursday, the 4th of July birthday celebration for the country. It is impossible to ignore signs of America in dotage. The two candidates for the Presidency are 81 and 78. Face to face for 90 minutes of debate they traded insults, the... Read More Read More - [Sentiment Redeeming A Falsehood](https://everyangel.org/sentiment-to-redeem-a-falsehood/): The difficulty involved in grounding the claim just citedmight be great indeed – Schopenhauer himself came up famously shortin this regard. And anyone who has ever truly felt how inanely false andsentimental this claim is in a world whose essence is will to power –,they might recall that Schopenhauer, pessimism notwithstanding, actually – played... Read More Read More - [Becoming Monster](https://everyangel.org/becoming-monster/): Whoever fights with monstersshould see to itthat he does notbecome onehimself. And when you starefor a long time into an abyss,the abyssstares backinto you.                       Beyond Good and Evil, by Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. Judith Butler, aphorism 146 For many certainly this is the “morning after”. Like the hangover after the all night binge. I... Read More Read More - [Don't Pet A Tiger](https://everyangel.org/shes-a-tiger/): Today is such summer’s that only a poet could describe by shading language into light.  Today promises to be full. I have chores which I find agreeable. This day is my wife’s birthday. She and I have made common cause since we met in our early 20s. Many years are to be celebrated as... Read More Read More - [On The Wire](https://everyangel.org/on-the-wire/): To write something, anything at all is only one reason for starting the day at Starbucks. Perhaps a good conversation will be possible? Wednesday is a day of good fortune since I have benefited from a good chat with Doug, as well as prospect of reflecting upon some aphorisms from Beyond Good and Evil. ... Read More Read More - [Knowing Yourself](https://everyangel.org/knowing-yourself/): This day, a Tuesday is unsettled with respect to the weather. Also, in truth the unsettled condition is the normal state of things for homo sapiens, for everyone of us, no matter our class, our poverty or our affluence. Education and health or youth or professional success does not eliminate the fact that not... Read More Read More - [Commandment(s)](https://everyangel.org/commandments/): Monday. Feeling as if this is the first day, the first page of six more to be filled, hour by hour with my life. I am not alone though. Around me are others, working, playing, worrying, exploring, celebrating, and fucking up.  All of us, with rare exception know that we are on the cusp... Read More Read More - [Geneva Grotto](https://everyangel.org/geneva-grotto/): I found it, I mean the Geneva Grotto. Not long ago, I was asked by a high school student while walking toward Starbucks if I knew where to find the Geneva Grotto. I’d not heard of it before, so I couldn’t help him. Curious I checked the internet. I read about a shrine built... Read More Read More - [Sunshine And Eternal Torment](https://everyangel.org/sunshine-and-eternal-torment/): Finally, as for the common people, the great majority, who exist and are only allowed to exist to serve and to be of general utility, religion gives them an invaluable sense of contentment with their situation and type; it puts their hearts greatly at ease, it glorifies their obedience, it gives them (and those... Read More Read More - [Beautifully Lost!](https://everyangel.org/beautifully-lost/): To love humanity for the sake of God – that has been the noblest and most bizarre feeling people have attained so far. That the love of humanity, in the absence of any sanctifying ulterior motive, is one more stupidity and abomination; that the tendency to love humanity like this can only get its... Read More Read More - [The Final Cruelty](https://everyangel.org/the-final-cruelty/): There is a great ladder of religious cruelty, and, of its many rungs, three are the most important. People used to make human sacrifices to their god, perhaps even sacrificing those they loved the best – this sort of phenomenon can be found in the sacrifice of the firstborn (a practice shared by all... Read More Read More - [He Doesn't Know How To Help](https://everyangel.org/he-doesnt-know-how-to-help/): Why atheism today? God “the Father” has been thoroughly refuted; and so has “the Judge” and “the Reward-giver.” The same for God’s “free will”: he doesn’t listen, – and even if he did, he wouldn’t know how to help anyway. The worst part of it is: he seems unable to communicate in an intelligible... Read More Read More - [A Final Act To Come?](https://everyangel.org/a-final-curtain-call/): And what infuriated the slavesabout and against their masters was never faith itself,but rather the freedom from faith,that half-stoic and smiling nonchalancewhen it came to the seriousness of faith. Enlightenment is infuriating. Slaves want the unconditional;they understand only tyranny, even in morality.They love as they hate,without nuance, into the depths, to the point of... Read More Read More - [The Hideous Superlative](https://everyangel.org/the-hideous-superlative/): From the beginning,Christian faith has been sacrifice:sacrifice of all freedom, of all pride, of all self-confidence of the spirit;it is simultaneously enslavement and self-derision, self-mutilation. There is cruelty and religious Phoenicianism in this faith,which is expected of a worn-down,many-sided, badly spoiled conscience. Its presuppositionis that the subjugation of spirit causes indescribable pain,and that the... Read More Read More - [The Type Of People We Are](https://everyangel.org/the-type-of-people-we-are/): This weekend I am in Louisville, Kentucky. I like Louisville. On the Ohio River the city draws from the past and reaches for a future. I am reminded of the story of Daniel Boone, that he was a Kentuckian. There is a regional pride here, a linkage to what is owed to the past. ... Read More Read More - [Everything Snakelike In Humanity](https://everyangel.org/against-green-pasture-happiness/): Yesterday was spent at the Holocaust Museum in Skokie, illinois.  The New York Times in a 2021 article lists 21 such museums in the United States. In my better judgment there will never be enough of such places. I am still reeling, trying to grasp the meaning of the images and the artifacts that I... Read More Read More - [Temptation & Attempting](https://everyangel.org/temptation-attempting/): A new breed of philosophers is approaching. I will risk christening them with a name not lacking in dangers. From what I can guess about them, from what they allow to be guessed (since it is typical of them to want to remain riddles in some respect), these philosophers of the future might have... Read More Read More - [Away With Bad Taste](https://everyangel.org/away-with-bad-taste/): “My judgment is my judgment: other people don’t have an obvious right to it too” – perhaps this is what such a philosopher of the future will say. We must do away with the bad taste of wanting to be in agreement with the majority. “Good” is no longer good when it comes from... Read More Read More - [Persistent Test](https://everyangel.org/persistent-test/): We have to test ourselves to see whether we are destined for independence and command, and we have to do it at the right time. We should not sidestep our tests, even though they may well be the most dangerous game we can play, and, in the last analysis, can be witnessed by no... Read More Read More - [Desire Is Enough](https://everyangel.org/desire-is-enough/): Assuming that our world of desires and passions is the only thing “given” as real, that we cannot get down or up to any “reality” except the reality of our drives (since thinking is only a relation between these drives) – aren’t we allowed to make the attempt and pose the question as to... Read More Read More - [The Biggest Joke Ever](https://everyangel.org/laughing-to-oblivion/): It does not matter what philosophical standpoint you might take these days: any way you look at it, the erroneousness of the world we think we live in is the most certain and solid fact that our eyes can still grab hold of. We find reason after reason for it, reasons that might lure... Read More Read More - [Sacred Uncertainty](https://everyangel.org/sacred-uncertainty/): I am quite taken by Rob Brezsny’s use of language. I enjoy and learn from reading his frequent posts which are thoughtful and quasi philosophical. Not that I “get” everything that he presents. I miss the point of astrology. As a vehicle, a conductor for fruitful living, astrology is not for me.  I remind... Read More Read More - [Writer's Block](https://everyangel.org/writers-block/): …a thought comes when “it” wants, and not when “I” want. It is, therefore, a falsification of the facts to say that the subject “I” is the condition of the predicate “think.” It thinks: but to say the “it” is just that famous old “I” – well that is just an assumption or opinion,... Read More Read More - [The Stench](https://everyangel.org/the-stench/): Our highest insights must – and should! – sound like stupidities, or possibly crimes, when they come without permission to people whose ears have no affinity for them and were not predestined for them. …There are heights of the soul from whose vantage point even tragedy stops having tragic effects; and who would dare... Read More Read More - [Foundations Of Ignorance](https://everyangel.org/a-granite-foundation/): O sancta simplicitas! What a strange simplification and falsification people live in! the wonders never cease, for those who devote their eyes to such wondering. How we have made everything around us so bright and easy and free and simple! How we have given our senses a carte blanche for everything superficial, given our... Read More Read More - [A Religion Of Human Suffering](https://everyangel.org/making-a-religion-of-human-suffering/): …if I have observed correctly, “un-freedom of the will” is regarded as a problem by two completely opposed parties, but always in a profoundly personal manner. The one party would never dream of relinquishing their “responsibility,” a belief in themselves, a personal right to their own merit (the vain races belong to this group).... Read More Read More - [Is This What You Want?](https://everyangel.org/is-this-what-you-want/): It is Saturday late afternoon. Failed to write anything this morning. The stars did not align. A friend joined me at Starbucks and we enjoyed an extended conversation. I think a good principle is to give priority to friends over projects that we intend to advance. I have followed the principle with difficulty in... Read More Read More - [Natality](https://everyangel.org/natality/): A spring morning is yet one more delectable indication of the natality of the world.  Nothing is fixed, unmoved, but all is in motion, the exuberance of growth, a driving trajectory of maximum expression. Perhaps that sentence is nonsense. What is my basis for knowing anything? When I know, I make the claim with... Read More Read More - [This Tyrannical Drive](https://everyangel.org/this-tyrannical-drive/): But this is an old, eternal story: what happened back then with the Stoics still happens today, just as soon as a philosophy begins believing in itself. It always creates the world in its own image, it cannot do otherwise; philosophy is this tyrannical drive itself, the most spiritual will to power, to the... Read More Read More - [Playing A Little Game](https://everyangel.org/playing-my-little-game/): I have gradually come to realize what every great philosophy so far has been: a confession of faith on the part of its author, and a type of involuntary and unself-conscious memoir; in short, that the moral (or immoral) intentions in every philosophy constitute the true living seed from which the whole plant has... Read More Read More - [More](https://everyangel.org/more-2/): There is more to say. I mean the drag strip experience always affords something new, cars and conversations that are unexpected. At the larger holiday events at The Grove, Arnie Beswick is sometimes present with his Tameless Tiger nostalgia GTO.  In past years Arnie shown up with a driver and a late model Pontiac... Read More Read More - [Summer Thunder](https://everyangel.org/summer-thunder/): Memorial Day weekend is commonly recognized as unofficial beginning of summer.  The kids are out of school, all grinning ear to ear, imagining the adventures that await. Perhaps there remains a kid in me!? Year to year I too anticipate the warm months of summer by planning to be present for the first big... Read More Read More - [Making A Virtuous Racket](https://everyangel.org/what-silliness/): What goads us into regarding all philosophers with an equal measure of mistrust and mockery is not that we are struck repeatedly by how innocent they are – how often and easily they err and stray, in short, their childish childlikeness – but rather that there is not enough genuine honesty about them: even... Read More Read More - [Home](https://everyangel.org/home-base/): We returned from New England.  A return home feels good, since that environment is where I belong. There I continue to become myself with the support of family, friends, and of nature.  I cannot forget nature. The Transcendentalists of New England were onto something enormous, almost too important to be captured by words. Every... Read More Read More - [Freedom, Oh Freedom II](https://everyangel.org/freedom-oh-freedom-ii/): Saturday morning in Cleveland. It is unclear how much I will be able to write.  A few minutes is available before our Tour Coach boarding time.  Our night at the Hampton Inn was pleasant. One feature of our stay, from our second floor room we had a fine view of the front entrance of... Read More Read More - [Freedom, Oh Freedom](https://everyangel.org/freedom-oh-freedom-2/): How inevitable every detail of my life has been, how channeled by prior events, some partially understood, most just opaque happenings that appear dumb, still no less impactful upon my life. Fortune and misfortune are how I would label the entire saga. I know that with some effort I could construct a list of... Read More Read More - [We Fools At Best](https://everyangel.org/we-fools-at-best/): “How could anything originate out of its opposite?Truth from error, for instance?Or the will to truth from the will to deception?Or selfless action from self-interest?Or the pure, sun-bright gaze of wisdom from a covetous leer? Such origins are impossible,and people who dream about such thingsare fools – at best. Things of the highest valuemust... Read More Read More - [If Truth Were A Woman](https://everyangel.org/if-truth-were-a-woman/): Supposing truth is a woman-what then? Is there not reason to suspect that all philosophers, in so far as they were dogmatists, have known very little about women? That if their aim was to charm a female, they have been especially inept and inapt in making advances to truth with such awful seriousness and... Read More Read More - [The Last Disciple](https://everyangel.org/the-last-disciple/): I, the last disciple and initiate of the god Dionysus: and can I, at last, start to give you, my friends, a small taste of this philosophy, as far as I am permitted? In undertones, which would be best, since it concerns many things that are secret, new, foreign, strange, uncanny. Even the fact... Read More Read More - [Broken Open](https://everyangel.org/broken-open/): The genius of the heart, as it is possessed by that great hidden one, the tempter god and born pied piper of consciences, whose voice knows how to descend into the underworld of every soul, whose every word and every glance conveys both consideration and a wrinkle of temptation, whose mastery includes an understanding... Read More Read More - [Running Aground](https://everyangel.org/running-aground/): There is a way of asking for our reasons which makes us forget our best reasons but awakens in us a defiance of and a repugnance for reasons in general -a way of asking which makes us very stupid and a typical trick of tyrannical people! The Gay Science by Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. by... Read More Read More - [I Resist](https://everyangel.org/i-resist/): The strongest knowledge (that of the unfreedom of the human will) is nonetheless the poorest in successes: For it always has the strongest opponent, human vanity. Human, All Too Human by Nietzsche, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, Assorted Opinions and Maxims, aphorism 50 I entertain many opinions.  The most durable opinion that possesses me lately... Read More Read More - [Becoming A Highwayman](https://everyangel.org/becoming-a-highwayman/): In an exchange, the only just and honest course would be for either party to demand only so much as he considers his commodity to be worth, allowance being made for trouble in acquisition, scarcity, time spent and so forth, besides the subjective value. As soon as you make your price bear a relation... Read More Read More - [Beginning To Learn Anew](https://everyangel.org/beginning-to-learn-anew/): I shall be asked why really I have narrated all these little and, according to traditional judgment, insignificant things… Answer: these little things -food, place, climate, recreation, the whole casuistry of egoism -are beyond all comparison more serious things than anything that has been taken seriously hitherto. It is precisely here that one must... Read More Read More - [Behind All Of This Noise](https://everyangel.org/behind-all-of-this-noise/): Living in the midst of this jumble of little lanes, needs, and voices gives me a melancholy happiness: how much enjoyment, impatience, and desire, how much thirsty life and drunkenness of life comes to light every moment! And yet silence will soon ascend on all these noisy, living, life-thirsty people. How his shadow stands... Read More Read More - [Saying Yes](https://everyangel.org/saying-yes/): Did you ever say Yes to one joy? Oh my friends, then you said Yes to all woe as well. All things are chained and entwined together, all things are in love; If ever you wanted one moment twice, if ever you said: ‘You please me happiness, instant, moment!’ Then you wanted everything to... Read More Read More - [Made Of Nonsense And Chaos](https://everyangel.org/made-of-nonsense-and-chaos/): You want, if possible (and no “if possible” is crazier) to abolish suffering. And us? – it looks as though we would prefer it to be heightened and made even worse than it has ever been!… The discipline of suffering, of great suffering – don’t you know that this discipline has been the sole... Read More Read More - [Great Table For Play And Mockery](https://everyangel.org/great-table-for-play-and-mockery/): A throw that you made had failed. But what of that, you dice-throwers! You have not learnedto play and mock as a man ought to play and mock.Are we not always seated at a great tablefor play and mockery? And if great things you attemptedhave turned out failures,does that mean that you yourselves are... Read More Read More - [A Bridge, Not An End](https://everyangel.org/a-bridge-not-an-end/): Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman —a rope over an abyss.    A dangerous across,       a dangerous on-the-way,          a dangerous looking-back,             a dangerous shuddering and stopping. What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end: what can be loved in man is... Read More Read More - [Autopoiesis](https://everyangel.org/29084-2/): ‘Will a self’ – Active, successful natures act, not according to the dictum ‘know thyself’, but as if there hovered before them the commandment: will a self and thou shalt become a self… Assorted Opinions and Maxims, by Nietzsche, trans. by R. J. Hollingdale, aphorism 366 Gnothi Seauton (γνῶθι σεαυτόν), “know thyself!” is reported... Read More Read More - [Sacrifice](https://everyangel.org/sacrifice/): What is good?     -All that heightens the feeling of power,      the will to power, power itself in man. What is bad?     -Everything that is born of weakness. What is happiness?     -The feeling that power is growing     -That resistance is overcome. The Anti-Christ, by Friedrich Nietzsche, Trans. R. J. Hollingdale. aphorism 2 The good and... Read More Read More - [The Point Of Absurdity](https://everyangel.org/the-point-of-absurdity/): In naturethe rule is not the state of distressit is superfluity, prodigality,even to the point of absurdity. The struggle for existence is only an exception,a temporary restriction of the will of life.The struggle, great and small,everywhere turns on ascendancy, on growth and extension,–in accordance with the will to powerwhich is the will of life.... Read More Read More - [The Given: Passion](https://everyangel.org/the-given-passion/): Day three of recovery from covid.  I am feeling somewhat better. I decided to attempt to mow the lawn.  There is no doubt that being 75 years of age in combination with covid made the task a challenge.  The passage of time. Nothing is absolved from the eroding effects of time. Clearly this varies... Read More Read More - [Hanging Over Our Heads](https://everyangel.org/hanging-over-our-heads/): I prefer not to take a break from daily writing. Still, Covid imposed a day off. Monday night I ran a high fever. I had delirious thoughts, attempting to connect ideas that promptly fell apart in my semi conscious misery. Now with Tylenol and Paxlovid I am feeling much better.  I cannot get the... Read More Read More - [What's Worth More?](https://everyangel.org/whats-worth-more/): ‘Power against which much ill is done and mediated is worth more than impotence when it encounters only good’ -thus the Greeks felt. That is to say: they valued the feeling of power more highly than any sort of utility or good reputation. Daybreak by Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, aphorism 360 Nietzsche... Read More Read More - [My Hometown](https://everyangel.org/my-hometown-2/): My hometown. I spent several days in Durham to visit with some old friends. Now life has resumed for me in Batavia. I have lived nearly all of my adult life in the Midwest. The values and viewpoint of the middle of the Midwest are the composite self that most easily presents to my... Read More Read More - [Tougher Than The Rest](https://everyangel.org/tougher-than-the-rest/): Ferrari.  I saw the movie for the second time yesterday.  A friend, (who has spent a good amount of time at race tracks) and I met at the theater.  The arc of the story, the birth of the Enzo Ferrari company is entwined with its founders history in post-WWII Italy, his conflict fraught marriage... Read More Read More - [I Should've Walked Away](https://everyangel.org/i-shouldve-walked-away/): I must write about this tune, said the insistent small voice as if a small version of my younger self sat on my shoulder. The Cutting Crew tune came over the radio as I made my way before sunrise to the Geneva Starbucks neighborhood. There is something about this tune, the keyboard runs which... Read More Read More - [Music](https://everyangel.org/music-2/): Thursday, the sun threatens to illuminate which is a hint of a brighter afternoon.  Wintertime in the Midwest.  How can one resist absorbing the somber, gray, cold of the season?  I must resist.  Music is a proven tactic for sustaining creativity, the motivation for good work. I finished an essay written by Nietzsche which... Read More Read More - [Whatever You Call The In Between](https://everyangel.org/see-saw/): Midweek and I am unsure what to write.  Uncertainty is the rule, the rule that overrides all else most of the time. Read a passage translated from Aristotle’s Ethics I 1094b which is famously and often quoted.  The philosopher writes that we should measure our judgment to the particular topic at hand.  Our expectations... Read More Read More - [About Dreaming](https://everyangel.org/about-dreaming/): A quotation captured my imagination this morning.  Consider that there are varieties of knowledge.  The knowledge that is acquired by learning the proper names of the elements, by learning how they combine to form complex molecules, by learning the mathematics by which molecular chemistry is expressed – are all types of knowledge.  Then there... Read More Read More - [A Little Help Please](https://everyangel.org/a-little-help-please/): A new year, turn the page.  We prefer predictability do we not?  We cannot help ourselves.  Each of us is a standard issue mammal, albeit a language enabled one.  Like every living thing our bodies seek homeostasis, that delicate balance which makes living easier, an economy of energy exchange.  Those undisturbed circumstances, you know... Read More Read More - [正月 Oshōgatsu](https://everyangel.org/%e6%ad%a3%e6%9c%88-oshogatsu/): Japanese: Oshōgatsu is the festival of year’s end and of a new beginning.  The holiday is celebrated by gathering with family and friends to eat traditional foods. The feasting is typically preceded by the visit to a local temple where at the stroke of midnight one offers a coin to the deity.  The temple... Read More Read More - [The Sponge](https://everyangel.org/the-sponge/): Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the horizon? –The Gay Science by Friedrich Nietzsche To The Unknown God Once more, before I move on I am directing my gaze forward In loneliness, I am lifting my hands Up to Thee, to whom I flee, To whom I, from the deepest bottom of... Read More Read More - [Year's End](https://everyangel.org/years-end/): On occasion words come to “set my hair on fire.”  It is one of my favorite metaphors to describe a life-changing experience.  Poetry is a matter of words used to proper effect, to orient us as a compass needle to our position within the larger scheme of space and time.  This poem by Cal... Read More Read More - [Wear](https://everyangel.org/wear/): I accompanied my granddaughter to a story telling event at the public library.  The topic was the screech owl and raptors in general.  The three story tellers were enthusiastic about their work rehabilitating injured raptors, returning the birds to the wild.  I felt humbled in the presence of the birds which were gently removed... Read More Read More - [Poem About The Sun](https://everyangel.org/27868-2/): [Sun-messenger] Lynn Xu Sun-messenger call Life to me slowly and all at once criss- crossing in that golden light                                     Snail                        with your moving shroud                        Silver tree             with your thousand roadways             O dream hurry go past me This poem speaks to me and I cannot describe why.  These are the shortest days, less... Read More Read More - [You Must Decide](https://everyangel.org/you-must-decide/): This is a controversial image.  Street Art by definition is subversive, a point blank interrogation of the received, official interpretation of events. The war between the IDF and Hamas grinds on.  “Grind,” is the word. The densely populated landscape of Gaza continues to be pulverized by artillery, by IDF airstrikes in order to eliminate... Read More Read More - [Arriving Not A Moment Too Soon](https://everyangel.org/arriving-not-a-moment-too-soon/): Journey of the Magi T. S. Eliot ‘A cold coming we had of it, Just the worst time of the year For a journey, and such a long journey: The ways deep and the weather sharp, The very dead of winter.’ And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory, Lying down in the melting snow. There... Read More Read More - [Live!](https://everyangel.org/live/): I participated with a group of friends in a discussion about the future.  What possible paths appear to be before us as a society, given the political, economic, an social trends that we are aware of?  I am satisfied the future is opaque, not subject to prediction.  Still, who can resist such an exchange... Read More Read More - [For This Code-Red Moment](https://everyangel.org/for-this-code-red-moment/): The rules that programmed an entire century: form follows function. We planned cities, tone-deaf buildings, urban social engineering, so soul-crushing it finally had to be leveled. Monster homes plopped on the seashore, boxes upon boxes, right to the property line, curve of the shore against the straight-lime imagination of the developers. Post-modern architecture was... Read More Read More - [Day And Night And Evil](https://everyangel.org/day-and-night-and-evil/): December 21st.  The dark outside is palpable reminder.  Today is the shortest day of the year.  The tilt of the earth’s axis away from the sun is at an oblique angle in the northern hemisphere.  Is the dark evil, the diminished light an omen?  On the other hand might we celebrate this interlude, pause... Read More Read More - [Before I Move On](https://everyangel.org/before-i-move-on/): Midweek.  A few days remain until Christmas. The to-do list is short.  To live is to act, to do.  It is good to have a list, the illusion of control.  I believe there is no control, that all is at “the mercy” of the state of things that immediately preceded this moment.  Still there... Read More Read More - [Cold Rumination On A Cold Day](https://everyangel.org/cold-meditation-on-a-cold-day/): Tuesday morning and it is mid-December.  Winter is settling in.  The temperature is in the teens.  That the season arrives as expected anchors my sense of well being.  We utterly depend upon Nature.  Yes, I am “of Nature” and there is nothing “higher” that I can say of myself.  I have the benefit of... Read More Read More - [Solstice Cool Change](https://everyangel.org/solstice-cool-change/): Solstice in Truro Joshua Weiner Teaching term done, I keep my laptop shut A chill in the air runs under weak June sun Chickadee warbler catbird waxwing— Morning migrant songs drowned by bulldozer next door The backing up beeping a constant one note feed From far off, boundless tides crest onto restless sand How... Read More Read More - [Sugar, Wine, and Cheap Perfume](https://everyangel.org/sugar-wine-and-cheap-perfume/): Sunday morning is dark by cloud cover. The asphalt intersection at State and 3rd is a gray sheen with last night’s rain.  On my way this morning I captured a photograph of the Christmas display in front of the old courthouse.  An old maple, regal in summer, the bare branches now framing strings of... Read More Read More - [Before, How Were Things](https://everyangel.org/how-were-things-before/): Rän Qiu asked Zhongni, saying,‘Can it be knownhow it was before heaven and earth?’ The reply was,‘It can. It was the same of old as now… [Zhongni] Was that which was produced before Heaven and Earth a thing?That which made things and gave to each its character was not itself a thing.Things came forth... Read More Read More - [Life Shining](https://everyangel.org/life-shining/): Musing about possible topics for this post.  When I read this poem by Lori Levy, it seemed this was more than enough to pass on.  The lines are a reminder that ordinary life is a smorgasbord of delightful details.  Often what I lack, is sufficient inner calm to notice the play of everything going... Read More Read More - [Forger Of Song](https://everyangel.org/forger-of-song/): The forger of swords for the Minister of War had reached the age of eighty, and had not lost a hair’s-breadth of his ability. The Minister said to him, ‘You are indeed skillful, Sir. Have you any method that makes you so?’ The man said, ‘Your servant has (always) kept to his work. When... Read More Read More - [Returning Home](https://everyangel.org/27765-2/): ‘Men’s life between heaven and earth is like a white colt’s passing a crevice, and suddenly disappearing. As with a plunge and an effort they all come forth; easily and quietly they all enter again. By a transformation they live, and by another transformation they die. Living things are made sad (by death), and... Read More Read More - [Ho, Ho, Ho.](https://everyangel.org/ho-ho-ho/): St. Nicholas, Santa Claus, St. Nick is a Saint that continues to have a defined function. Not being raised Catholic, praying to any saint strikes me as strange, an out of sync movement in the symphony of survival. On the other hand perhaps my secular point of view is out of tune. I cannot... Read More Read More - [Santa Clause: Rebel Without A Cause](https://everyangel.org/santa-clause-rebel-without-a-cause/): Ten days into December.  A friend asked if I was finished my Christmas shopping?  The gift giving custom can be approached in many ways. Christmas is best experienced for me by reducing the intensity of stress.  Quite by accident I am learning to cultivate curiosity for each of the duties, the chores, and the... Read More Read More - [Rundown By A Dream](https://everyangel.org/rundown-by-a-dream/): Soon it will be mid-December.  Its raining outside, Saturday.  Tom Petty’s Runnin’ Down A Dream played on the radio, I drove on the rain slicked road before light this morning. An extended email exchange with an old friend occupied my thoughts.  He is a die-hard conservative.  I, on the other hand, am on the... Read More Read More - [Looking At One Thing](https://everyangel.org/looking-at-one-thing/): Nie Qüe asked about the Tao from Bei-yi who replied, ‘If you keep your body as it should be, and look only at the one thing, the Harmony of Heaven will come to you. Call in your knowledge, and make your measures uniform, and the spiritual (belonging to you) will come and lodge with... Read More Read More - [Tao In The Manger Part II](https://everyangel.org/tao-in-the-manger-part-ii/): The life is due to the collecting of the breath. When that is collected, there is life; when it is dispersed, there is death. Since death and life thus attend on each other, why should I account (either of) them an evil? ‘Therefore all things go through one and the same experience. (Life) is... Read More Read More - [Tao In The Manger](https://everyangel.org/tao-in-the-manger/): Knowledge had rambled northwards to the region of the Dark Water, where he ascended the height of Imperceptible Slope, when it happened that he met with Dumb Inaction. Knowledge addressed him, saying, ‘I wish to ask you some questions: By what process of thought and anxious consideration do we get to know the Tao?... Read More Read More - [Drifters All](https://everyangel.org/drifters-all/): Tuesday is a gray day. A bit of snow this morning becomes an annunciation of winter. I look forward to winter because days are shorter. There’s the respite from growth. Absent the need to transform energy into concrete form, I make room for contemplation, reading, marinating my sense of self with the mind of... Read More Read More - [Eyes No Longer Blind](https://everyangel.org/eyes-no-longer-blind/): look at the world I look at the world From awakening eyes in a black face— And this is what I see: This fenced-off narrow space    Assigned to me. I look then at the silly walls Through dark eyes in a dark face— And this is what I know: That all these walls oppression... Read More Read More - [Preservation and Destruction](https://everyangel.org/preservation-and-destruction/): The king of Ku and the ruler of Fan were sitting together. After a little while, the attendants of the king said, ‘Fan has been destroyed three times.’ The ruler of Fan rejoined, ‘The destruction of Fan has not been sufficient to destroy what we had that was most deserving to be preserved.’ Now,... Read More Read More - [Incomprehension](https://everyangel.org/incomprehension/): [There is no Life or Death,] by Mina Loy There is no Life or Death, Only activity And in the absolute Is no declivity. There is no Love or Lust Only propensity Who would possess Is a nonentity. There is no First or Last Only equality And who would rule Joins the majority. There... Read More Read More - [Finding That One](https://everyangel.org/finding-that-one/): “Beasts that feed on grass do not fret over a change of pasture; creatures that live in water do not fret over a change of stream. They accept the minor shift as long as the all-important constant is not lost. [Be like them,] And joy, anger, grief, and happiness can never enter your breast.... Read More Read More - [Enjoying Myself](https://everyangel.org/enjoying-myself/): ‘I was enjoying myself in thinking about the commencement of things.’ ‘What do you mean?’ ‘My mind is so cramped that I hardly know it; my tongue is so tied that I cannot tell it; but I will try to describe it to you as nearly as I can. When the state of Yin... Read More Read More - [Christmas Part II](https://everyangel.org/christmas-part-ii/): Christmas is canceled in Bethlehem. Palestinian Christian leaders plan to forgo celebrations in solidarity with Gaza, The Washington Post reports. While reading my email bulletin from the New York Times a few minutes ago, this story prompted a pause.  Much by the light of decency ought come to a halt while there is egregious... Read More Read More - [Now It Is Christmas](https://everyangel.org/now-it-is-christmas/): December is upon us.  Very soon, all will be involved in a schedule of holiday festivities.  The merriment begins the day after Thanksgiving.  On Sunday Batavia hosted our tree-lighting ceremony, with a band playing holiday tunes, our Mayor recognizing the high school coaching staff and achievement of the football team, then Santa arrived, transported... Read More Read More - [Standing Tall, Seeing Further](https://everyangel.org/standing-tall-seeing-further/): I am reading an article from Foreign Affairs sent to me by a friend: If Mao Had Come to Washington by Barbara W. Tuchman. In 1945 Mao Tse-tung and Chou En-lai requested a meeting with President Roosevelt, in hopes of convincing him that the Communists were a worthy ally, and that the Communist Party... Read More Read More - [First Snow](https://everyangel.org/first-snow/): It is Sunday and there’s snow outside.  The first snow of the season is falling, just enough to make driving hazardous.  Pay no attention to that slush slicked intersection and you are courting an expensive, inconvenient surprise that possibly will involve another of your townspeople. There is no other place that I’d rather be... Read More Read More - [Climate Change and The Magpie](https://everyangel.org/climate-change-and-the-magpie/): Zhuang Zhou was wandering in the park at Diaoling when he saw a peculiar kind of magpie that came flying along from the south. It had a wingspread of seven feet, and its eyes were a good inch in diameter. It brushed against Zhuang Zhou’s forehead and then settled down in a grove of... Read More Read More - [You Cannot Be A Hero](https://everyangel.org/you-cannot-be-a-hero/): Every single one of ushas to be a hero at some time in our lives. Every babyforced through the narrow passage of the birth canal,which is not unlikethe labyrinthine tunnels at Lascaux,has to leave the safety of the womb,and face the trauma of entryinto a terrifyingly unfamiliar world. Every motherwho gives birth, who risks... Read More Read More - [This Fire](https://everyangel.org/this-fire/): This fierce disco number, written by Kenneth Gamble, Leon Huff and Cary Gilbert captured my imagination.  I have listened to radio play of the song too many times to count. Thelma Houston’s opening voice run washed over me like the movement of a great tide.  Is not our fundamental longing that of loving and... Read More Read More - [On Thanksgiving](https://everyangel.org/on-thanksgiving/): Monday is gray outside with cloud cover.  The light is muted, the leaves of Fall are almost all descended from branches.  This is the week of Thanksgiving.  Proclaimed as a national holiday by President Lincoln on October 3, 1863 in a context of the Civil War, the day was a bid for unity, and... Read More Read More - [Album Covers](https://everyangel.org/album-covers/): In the beginning Man created God; and in the image of Man created he him. 2 And Man gave unto God a multitude of names, that he might be Lord of all the earth when it was suited to Man 3 And on the seven millionth day Man rested and did lean heavily on... Read More Read More - [Addiction](https://everyangel.org/on-addiction/): …one who takes his seat on the Tao and its Attributes, and there finds his ease and enjoyment, is not exposed to such a contingency. He is above the reach both of praise and of detraction; now he (mounts aloft) like a dragon, now he (keeps beneath) like a snake; he is transformed with... Read More Read More - [Fitness That Forgets](https://everyangel.org/fitness-that-forgets/): The artisan Chui made things round (and square) more exactly than if he had used the circle and square. The operation of his fingers on (the forms of) things was like the transformations of them (in nature), and required no application of his mind; and so his Intelligence was entire and encountered no resistance.... Read More Read More - [Why Think So Differently](https://everyangel.org/why-think-so-differently/): The officer of Prayer in his dark and square-cut robes goes to the pig-pen, and thus counsels the pigs, ‘Why should you shrink from dying? I will for three months feed you on grain. Then for ten days I will fast, and keep vigil for three days, after which I will put down the... Read More Read More - [Sheltered](https://everyangel.org/sheltered/): ‘Take the case of a drunken man falling from his carriage; – though he may suffer injury, he will not die. His bones and joints are the same as those of other men, but the injury which he receives is different: his spirit is entire. He knew nothing about his getting into the carriage,... Read More Read More - [Skull For A Pillow](https://everyangel.org/skull-for-a-pillow/): When Zhuangzi went to Ku, he saw an empty skull, bleached indeed, but still retaining its shape. Tapping it with his horse-switch, he asked it, saying, ‘Did you, Sir, in your greed of life, fail in the lessons of reason, and come to this? Or did you do so, in the service of a... Read More Read More - [Walking The Dam Over The Hâo](https://everyangel.org/walking-the-dam-over-the-hao/): Master Zhuangzi and Master Hui were walking on the dam over the Hâo, when the former said, ‘These thryssas come out and play about at their ease; – that is the enjoyment of fishes.’ The other said, ‘You are not a fish; how do you know what constitutes the enjoyment of fishes?’ Master Zhuangzi... Read More Read More - [To Hold All Things In My Love](https://everyangel.org/to-hold-all-things-in-my-love/): The earl of the Ho said, ‘Very well. But what am I to do? and what am I not to do? How am I to be guided after all in regard to what I accept or reject, and what I pursue or put away from me?’ Zo of the Northern Sea replied, ‘From the... Read More Read More - [The Limits Of My Hole](https://everyangel.org/the-limits-of-my-hole/):    ‘A frog in a well cannot be talked with about the sea; – he is confined to the limits of his hole.    An insect of the summer cannot be talked with about ice; – it knows nothing beyond its own season.    A scholar of limited views cannot be talked with about... Read More Read More - [Tell Me A Story, Your Life](https://everyangel.org/tell-me-the-story-of-your-life/): Myth, a fabulous story of a single individual of destiny, that inscrutable intersection of circumstance has placed on the pivot point of choice!  Is it to be “life”, or will it be “death”, capitulation to maintain things as they are, to remain asleep?  What will you do with your life?  The great wager, a... Read More Read More - [Darkness Roars Unstifled Yet](https://everyangel.org/darkness-roars-unstifled-yet/): Children of Darkness By Robert Graves “In their generation wiser than the children of Light.” We spurred our parents to the kiss, Though doubtfully they shrank from this— Day had no courage to review  What lusty dark alone might do— Then were we joined from their caress  In heat of midnight, one from two.... Read More Read More - [Culture And Society](https://everyangel.org/culture-and-society/): A group of us attempted to better understand what is meant by culture.  Isn’t culture tacitly agreed upon habits of behavior, norms of a common life, a form-of-life shared?  Expectations are built up gradually by observation and practice.  So much becomes “as if” instinct, imprinted habit.  I simply know how to act, and how... Read More Read More - [Promising What I Do Not have](https://everyangel.org/promising-what-i-do-not-have/): To love is to give what you do not have to someone who does not exist. -Jacques Lacan, Seminar VIII Today I “decided” to dedicate time to revisit the ideas of Jacques Lacan (1901-1981).  Lacan was a psychoanalyst practicing according to the insight offered by Freudian philosophy which treated the unconscious.  Lacan was interested... Read More Read More - [No End Or Beginning](https://everyangel.org/there-is-no-end-or-beginning/): ‘There is no end or beginning to the Tao. Things indeed die and are born, not reaching a perfect state which can be relied on. Now there is emptiness, and now fulness; – they do not continue in one form. The years cannot be reproduced; time cannot be arrested. Decay and growth, fulness and... Read More Read More - [On Republicans](https://everyangel.org/on-republicans/): Zo of the Northern Sea replied, ‘From the standpoint of the Tao, what is noble? and what is mean? These expressions are but the different extremes of the average level. Do not keep pertinaciously to your own ideas, which put you in such opposition to the Tao. What are few? and what are many?... Read More Read More - [The Plain And Quiet Path](https://everyangel.org/the-plain-and-quiet-path/): The earl of the Ho said, ‘Well then, may I consider heaven and earth as (the ideal of) what is great, and the point of a hair as that of what is small?’ Zo of the Northern Sea replied, ‘No.’ The (different) capacities of things are illimitable; time never stops, (but is always moving... Read More Read More - [Upside Down](https://everyangel.org/27426-2/): They who lose themselves in their pursuit of things, and lose their nature in their study of what is vulgar, must be pronounced people who turn things upside down.  -Zhuangzi, Correcting the Nature, by Zhuang Zhou, trans. James Legge With the GMC Sierra truck commercials, I feel a twinge of discomfort.  Is that repulsion... Read More Read More - [Mulch Therefore We Are](https://everyangel.org/i-mulch-therefore-we-are/): Saturday afternoon was spent in the yard mulching fallen leaves. Mulching is good work. The leaves are prepared for decay, a return to humus, bedding for future generations of trees. Does life have an absolute beginning, and a final end? Where is a line of separation between what is living, and the process of... Read More Read More - [Juxtaposition](https://everyangel.org/juxtaposition/): The life of the sage is like the action of Heaven; and his/her death is the transformation common to all things. In his/her stillness his/her virtue is the same as that of the Yin, and in movement his/her diffusiveness is like that of the Yang. He does not take the initiative in producing either... Read More Read More - [Contra Tranquilizing The World](https://everyangel.org/contra-to-tranquilize-the-world/): Ingrained ideas and a high estimate of their own conduct; leaving the world, and pursuing uncommon ways; talking loftily and in resentful disparagement of others; – all this is simply symptomatic of arrogance… Discoursing of benevolence, righteousness, loyalty, and good faith; being humble and frugal, self-forgetful and courteous; – all this is simply symptomatic... Read More Read More - [The Sword](https://everyangel.org/the-sword/): The night was restless.  It was as if I awakened every hour or so, unable to be sufficiently comfortable to drift off into sleep until morning.  Awake at five AM ceasing attempts to shake the foreboding which had invested my mind since the early evening, I gave up the quest for sleep.  I got... Read More Read More - [Dust In Our Eyes](https://everyangel.org/dust-in-our-eyes/): If you winnow chaff, and the dust gets into your eyes, then the places of heaven and earth and of the four cardinal points are all changed to you. If mosquitoes or gadflies puncture your skin, it will keep you all the night from sleeping. But this painful iteration of benevolence and righteousness excites... Read More Read More - [Heaven's Doom](https://everyangel.org/heavens-doom/): Those who think that wealth is the proper thing for them cannot give up their revenues; those who seek distinction cannot give up the thought of fame; those who cleave to power cannot give the handle of it to others. While they hold their grasp of those things, they are afraid (of losing them).... Read More Read More - [A Calculation Built In?](https://everyangel.org/is-the-calculation-built-in/): ‘I performed first the music calculated to awe;      and you were frightened as if by a ghostly visitation, I followed it with that calculated to weary;      and in your weariness you would have withdrawn. I concluded with that calculated to perplex;      and in your perplexity you felt your stupidity. But that... Read More Read More - [What That Something Else Is](https://everyangel.org/what-that-something-else-is/): What the world thinks the most valuable exhibition of the Tao is to be found in books. But books are only a collection of words. Words have what is valuable in them; – what is valuable in words is the ideas they convey. But those ideas are a sequence of something else; – and... Read More Read More - [There Will Be Blood](https://everyangel.org/there-will-be-blood/): Of course everyone is aware of events in Israel.  No need to recount details of the attack by Hamas upon Israeli neighborhoods.  Over a thousand were murdered, and hostages were taken to Gaza. The tit-for-tat bloodletting continues apace, as no leader has come to the fore lately, advocating a statehood resolution for displaced Palestinians. ... Read More Read More - [As If You Were Beating A Drum](https://everyangel.org/as-if-you-were-beating-a-drum/): There is an interesting dialog in Zhuangzi between Confucius and a librarian, Lao Tan, who represents the Taoist philosophy of Lao Tsu.  This exchange is reminiscent of the manner of conversation between Socrates and a younger student in the 4th century BCE Agora of Athens, Greece. Confucius who represents conventional thinking desires to place... Read More Read More - [A Single Virtue, A Single Flow](https://everyangel.org/a-single-virtue-a-single-flow/): Zhuangzi has said, “This Teacher of mine, this Teacher of mine —he passes judgment on the ten thousand things, but he/she doesn’t think himself severe; his bounty extends to ten thousand generations, but he/she doesn’t think himself benevolent. He is older than the highest antiquity, but he/she doesn’t think himself long-lived; he covers heaven,... Read More Read More - [If Two Of Three](https://everyangel.org/a-sad-case/): He who knows his stupidity is not very stupid; he who knows that he is under a delusion is not greatly deluded. He who is greatly deluded will never shake the delusion off; he who is very stupid will all his life not become intelligent. If three men be walking together, and (only) one... Read More Read More - [Outlander](https://everyangel.org/outlander/): It’s a Saturday, inside of Starbucks it is unusually quiet. There is a steady rain falling.  Movement in the out-of-doors is avoided by most.  The temp is comfortable yet, for mid October.  It would be fine to go for a walk in the rain. Gazing at the empty tables, the view is peaceful, unobstructed... Read More Read More - [Benefits Of Tedium](https://everyangel.org/benefits-of-tedium/): Geneva, the Fox river Valley is overcast, rain is expected for this afternoon.  That is well, as growing things are eager for a drink before the sleep of frost comes.  All things in due time is the rule-of-thumb. Reading the Zhuangzi, the admonition is to forget oneself, to be oblivious to the human, that... Read More Read More - [On Restraint](https://everyangel.org/on-restraint/): “The brutality of Hamas, this bloodthirstiness, brings to mind the worst rampages of ISIS … Stomach-turning reports of babies being killed; entire families slain; young people massacred while attending a musical festival to celebrate peace; women raped, assaulted, paraded as trophies. In this moment it must be crystal clear: We stand with Israel. We... Read More Read More - [Stepping Away From the Abyss](https://everyangel.org/stepping-away-from-the-abyss/): Ancient texts often describe a long ago period of idyllic society, a time when humans lived in harmony with one another and with Nature.  This is a literary device, a means of contrast with present conditions in order to advance the writer’s point of view.  Whether Eden could have existed, if furthermore any of... Read More Read More - [Bleeding Out](https://everyangel.org/bleeding-out-2/): I followed the war in Israel last night on ABC streaming channel.  Perhaps I should say nothing about this bloodletting.  Still, how is this not my business since I am human, and this is yet another outbreak, a paroxysm of rage?  Gaza has been called an open air prison, one of the most densely... Read More Read More - [Columbus Day](https://everyangel.org/columbus-day/): Columbus Day or Indigenous Peoples Day, which is it? This day, the morning of October 9th is dedicated equally to each of these dimensions of our American past, which is also our present.  A day to remember our ancestors attempts to enslave the communities that lived on this continent prior to our arrival from... Read More Read More - [To Blend My Light](https://everyangel.org/to-blend-my-light/): I chose to “sleep in” this morning.  Something which I seldom do.  I like the early morning, a habit learned from my mother who grew up on a farm.  Plants and animals elicit care, not scheduling at one’s convenience.  Farmers do not sleep in. We visited a farmers market in Geneva where we purchased... Read More Read More - [Fall, Quiet And Unexciting](https://everyangel.org/fall-quiet-and-unexciting/): Great indeed is the disorder produced in the world by the love of knowledge. From the time of the three dynasties downwards it has been so. The plain and honest-minded people are neglected, and the plausible representations of restless spirits received with pleasure; the quiet and unexciting method of non-action is put away, and... Read More Read More - [So Sad We Almost Made It](https://everyangel.org/so-sad-we-almost-made-it/): (So), the versatility shown in artful deceptions becoming more and more pernicious, in ingenious discussions as to    what is hard       and what is white, and in attempts to disperse the dust and reconcile different views, is great, but the common people are perplexed by all the sophistry. Hence there is great disorder... Read More Read More - [Almost Dialed-In](https://everyangel.org/almost-dialed-in/): There’s something menacing, darkly beautiful about the sound and sight of a drag car slowly rolling toward the staging beam.  A big-inch motor idles, breathing heavily for air, the undulating bass note of a machine conceived, purpose-built for gobs of power, parts assembled for total acceleration.  After staging, when the tree flashes green, pedal... Read More Read More - [Knowing When To Stop](https://everyangel.org/knowing-when-to-stop/): An extraordinary faculty in debating leads to the piling up of arguments      like a builder with his bricks,           or a net-maker with his string. (Its possessor) cunningly contrives his sentences and enjoys himself in discussing what hardness is and what whiteness is, where views agree and where they differ, and pressing on,... Read More Read More - [Thinking In Vain](https://everyangel.org/thinking-in-vain/): An email exchange developed between the three of us.  What is the relationship between the origin, the durability of religion — and our fear of the unknown?  There’s a great deal of the unknown, an ocean of it.  Does the unknown have a far shore? The thought experiment was posed:  Consider the difference —... Read More Read More - [Seeming To Soar, To Dive](https://everyangel.org/seeming-to-soar-to-dive/): It is morning and the sun “rises” in the east over the Fox River.  Do I correctly understand and render these matters?  Consider the possibility that “getting it correct” is to completely miss the point.  Is there a correct?  How could/would one know?  And if you were convinced that your assessment was incorrect what... Read More Read More - [Horror And Solicitude](https://everyangel.org/horror-and-solicitude/): I participated in a study group of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies.  Did I read the book when in high school or is my memory from college?  I am not sure.  The book is widely known, a parable of sorts.  A group of English boarding school boys is marooned on a nameless South... Read More Read More - [So Many Dead Lie Around](https://everyangel.org/so-many-dead-lie-around/): Yesterday with a group of friends in a large circle, we discussed “God,” considered our relationship to church, our past experience that inevitably effects our sense of what-the-sacred-means to each of us now.  One of our group shared this Philip Larkin poem.  I remembered reading it many years ago, when I was much younger,... Read More Read More - [The Tao Is A Thing](https://everyangel.org/the-tao-is-a-thing/): Continuing to read from the Zhuangzi.  A few verses come as a calming presence when facing circumstances which present a likelihood of a weakened society, more violence, less solicitude for the unfortunate majority without power.  I need not say that “power” is shorthand for financial reserves.  A government shutdown over the coming weekend…  Likely.... Read More Read More - [Time's Lens](https://everyangel.org/times-lens/): More of Zhuangzi.  Clearly it is natural to project upon the past our ideals, our concept of an idyllic condition of society, of a way-of-life realized by human beings in contrast to the flawed, and often wrecked behavior that we observe day to day in the present.  We “see” outlines of a figure, embellished... Read More Read More - [Blood-stained Hands](https://everyangel.org/blood-stained-hands/): Spent the morning reading about the thought of Chuang Tsu.  Also I read a few minutes from the Zhuangzi, a English translation of his story telling.  Amazing!  Words simply fail to do justice, there’s no straight forward description of his point of view. Moreover, I doubt if our 21st century external circumstances are really... Read More Read More - [Valediction of the Madman](https://everyangel.org/valediction-of-the-madman/): This passage in Zhuangzi reminds me of the famous “Madman” passage in The Gay Science by Nietzsche.  An individual, deranged by conventional standards, presents himself in a town square.  He insistently, pointedly passes judgment upon the optimism of his countrymen; that the future will, as a matter of course, be the present extended, — ... Read More Read More - [In The End](https://everyangel.org/in-the-end-2/): “When men get together to pit their strength in games of skill, they start off in a light and friendly mood but usually end up in a dark and angry one, and if they go on too long, they start resorting to various underhanded tricks. When men meet at some ceremony to drink, they... Read More Read More - [Exhibition](https://everyangel.org/exhibition/): The world today is no theater where actions and feelings are represented and interpreted, but a market on which intimacies are exhibited, sold, consumed. The theater is a site of representation, whereas the market is a site of exhibition. Today theatrical representation is yielding to pornographic exhibition. —The Transparency Society, The Society of Intimacy... Read More Read More - [What Comes True In The End?](https://everyangel.org/coming-true-in-the-end/): Showers today.  Should I mind.  Of course not.  It is enough to remain in my circle of responsibility, of duty and concern.  Weather, and the machinations of governments whether in Chicago, or in Washington are affairs upon which I have no effect.  Is anyone in charge?  Likely nobody.  Office holders moving about as marionettes,... Read More Read More - [A Great Dream](https://everyangel.org/a-great-dream/): Yesterday I received an email from a friend expressing an opinion that repudiated Quantum Mechanics.  For the majority of us this opinion is unremarkable, seeming irrelevant.  Quantum Mechanics is a field of esoteric mathematics describing the behavior of invisible forces that constitute material objects.  Field effects dance with improvisation, to support the visible superstructure... Read More Read More - [A Kind Of Race](https://everyangel.org/a-kind-of-race/): My exploration of Zhuangzi continues. I am drawn toward his story telling, his manner of doing philosophy.  This 4th century BCE Taoist intellectual responds to several defined schools of thought by writing philosophical fantasy.  Philosophical fantasy! Imagine someone rising to his/her feet in a lecture hall at a philosophy conference Q&A session, to describe... Read More Read More - [To Take A Tumble](https://everyangel.org/to-take-a-tumble/): Raining now.  Prospect of rain for the rest of the day.  Well and good for the trees and shrubs.  A good drink is needed before the frost of Fall arrives. Today these words from Ludwig Wittgenstein captured my imagination. But I did not get my picture of the world by satisfying myself of its... Read More Read More - [Ticking Of The Clock](https://everyangel.org/ticking-of-the-clock/): Read more of the Zhuangzi this morning.  Stories concatenated in succession, the writer considers that his thinking, his point of view could be, might be, or was, radically different — even reversed.  “This” is easily “that” in another context.  In a time past I thought differently… I am entranced by this love song, every... Read More Read More - [Forgive Me I Misspoke](https://everyangel.org/forgive-me-i-misspoke/): There was a beginning. There was a beginning before that beginning. There was a beginning previous to that beginning before there was the beginning. There was existence; there had been no existence. There was no existence before the beginning of that no existence. There was no existence previous to the no existence before there... Read More Read More - [Campaigning Against Myself](https://everyangel.org/campaigning-against-myself/): Years pass, many books read, lectures, conversations held. I feel unease about my points of view. It’s just that I am the beneficiary of others, the writers, Professors, the friends who have contributed their minds, their passions. All became components, a composition of the sense of reality that I “call” my own. I suspect... Read More Read More - [What If We're Not Screwed?](https://everyangel.org/what-if-were-not-screwed/): Yesterday I read about an essay by Joan Westenberg. I clicked the link, read the essay and resonated with her words. I have excerpted some of it here. It just seems timely to pass on these good words. To read the eight minute essay, CLICK HERE. We are choking on cynicism.      Hope is... Read More Read More - [When Inspired We Find](https://everyangel.org/when-inspired-we-find/): Like you I struggle to regain emotional equilibrium in the aftermath of the expressed will of the majority of my countrymen to cede the next four years of the Presidency to a con-man entertainer, to a life-long molester of females, to an insurrectionist. The White House, both houses of Congress, and the Supreme Court... Read More Read More - [Birds Of Passage](https://everyangel.org/birds-of-passage/): In the midst ofthe ocean of becomingwe adventurers and birds of passagewake up on an island no larger than a small boat,and herewe look round us for a momentwith as much haste and curiosity as possible; for how quicklymay some gale blow us awayor some wave sweep over the little islandand leave nothing of... Read More Read More - [Admired By The Gods](https://everyangel.org/admired-by-the-gods/): One of my objectives upon retiring is to read the great works of Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey. I have purchased several translations with this in mind. These tales remain a cornerstone of culture. Even in Plato’s day the bronze age saga of the great war between the Greeks and Troy was ancient.... Read More Read More - [On Marriage](https://everyangel.org/on-marriage/): HOW OFTEN! HOW UNEXPECTED! How may married men have some morning awakened to the fact that their young wife is dull, although she thinks quite the contrary! not to speak of those wives whose flesh is willing but whose intellect is weak! — aphorism 276 DANGER IN BEAUTY. This woman is beautiful and intelligent:... Read More Read More - [Black Friday](https://everyangel.org/black-friday/): Thanksgiving, the day after. Around 8AM and this Starbucks is getting busy. It seems absurd to me that you’d attempt to go out today, especially to do shopping. If you’ve viewed television lately, commercials that focus upon “the holidays,” a period of 3.5 weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas, are presented one after the other.... Read More Read More - [Reason And Temperament](https://everyangel.org/reason-and-temperament/): Thanksgiving day. This day has become a tradition, since President Lincoln’s speech in 1863. Lincoln invoked God, suggesting that the “day of feasting” along with a collective attitude of thanksgiving might nudge the divinity to hasten a conclusion to the slaughter, destruction, and deprivation of the War Between the States.  Check it out for... Read More Read More - [Oh, This Eye](https://everyangel.org/oh-this-eye/): The quoted segment explores the labyrinthine, puzzle-like nature of art, – whether poetry or theater, or music, or perhaps of painting or of sculpture. Imagine yourself in a gallery, or in an artist’s studio and you are surrounded by an array of paintings, or perhaps by sculpture. Each work is a portal into the... Read More Read More - [Belief Or Unbelief](https://everyangel.org/belief-or-unbelief/): Tuesday morning is clear and chilled. At last fall envelops us. Hot coffee tastes especially delicious. Having discovered a collection of quotations relative to Religion and Unbelief, again I ponder my own journey. I do not think I’ve exercised choice at any point in the matter of religion. Prior to my birth infinite circumstances... Read More Read More - [Holiday Prep](https://everyangel.org/holiday-preparation/): Monday begins the procession to Thanksgiving day, Thursday of this week. Three and a half weeks hence we will celebrate Christmas day. it is impossible to avoid the insistence of (paid) purveyors of merriment, that this is the happiest time of the year. Thanksgiving and Christmas are both religious holidays, with a veneer of... Read More Read More - [This Feeling](https://everyangel.org/this-feeling/): Saturday morning at a crowded Starbucks. What is to be done? Concentrate, focus upon the task at hand? I mean, the search for words, to wait until sensations, the reciprocal response of the body to a world sparks thought, a response… This space, the remodeled corner of 3rd and State in Geneva expresses the... Read More Read More - [Borderlands](https://everyangel.org/borderlands/): It is Friday. In my working years, every week had a frontier. The near border was Monday, the starting line where one accelerates to “get ahead.” What in the name of sanity did the intention of “getting ahead” mean? The relativity of everything was unnoticed, I was enthralled with what I had written, my... Read More Read More - [Three Chords And The Truth](https://everyangel.org/three-chords-and-the-truth/): It is late November, a winter chill has arrived. The “wintery mix,” a covering of fine ice crystals and rain is a reminder that the tilt of the earth’s axis away from the sun means winter is sure. That is the truth. What is meant by winter can be counted upon, preparation ought to... Read More Read More - [Someone To Lie To Me](https://everyangel.org/someone-to-lie-to-me/): A voice whispers, the sound of my conscience, that I am no exception to this mad scenario. All will choose seduction over prosaic substance, if we have opportunity. We cannot help ourselves — but believe that “someone to lie to me” must also be “someone to watch over me”… Nations are deceived so often... Read More Read More - [Musing About Our Soul](https://everyangel.org/musing-about-our-soul/): This passage personally resonates with me. In my working years as owner of a company, I knew day to day the discipline of assigning a value, in terms of what someone else would be willing to pay. Exchange value: dollars for service, the quid pro quo. Is this a fair assessment of what we’ve... Read More Read More - [No Chariot Of History](https://everyangel.org/noise-and-dust/): A feature of our time is media punditry.  From MSNBC, to Fox, to Newsmax and unnumbered internet channels of influencers and opinion makers, to name just a few: Joe Rogan, Bill Maher, and Selena Gomez… The overarching horizon of communication companies is profit/loss capitalism. Competition is the rule and thus the appetite for content... Read More Read More - [Contra Meathead Morals](https://everyangel.org/against-meathead-morals/): There is… a counterforce which continually reminds us that there is no exclusively moral-making morality, and that a morality which asserts itself to the exclusion of all other morality destroys too much sound strength and is too dearly bought by mankind. The non-conventional and deviating people, who are so often productive and inventive, must... Read More Read More - [Poetry Respite](https://everyangel.org/poetry-respite/): The mind begins to sweat soon enough when reading Nietzsche. He offers a style of thinking, and angle of view of world and of self which is uncomfortable, at first. Reading such philosophy is comparable to training in order to run a marathon. One does not just run 26.1 miles on a whim. One... Read More Read More - [Joining The Mob](https://everyangel.org/joining-the-mob/): Nietzsche is interested in the ideal of the ancient Greeks, “all things in moderation.” The Greeks were as human as any 21st century homo sapien. Ideals serve as coordinates that we attempt to follow, albeit the inadequacy of our character, or skill, or resources. In contradistinction to the Greeks we Americans make no attempt... Read More Read More - [Art Theory](https://everyangel.org/art-theory/): BEAUTY CORRESPONDING TO THE AGE. —Ifour sculptors, painters, and musicianswish to catch the significance of the age,they should represent beauty as bloated, gigantic, and nervous: just as the Greeks,under the influence of their morality of moderation,saw and represented beauty in the Apollo di Belvedere. We should, indeed, call him ugly!But the pedantic “classicists” have... Read More Read More - [A Yardstick From Somewhere Else](https://everyangel.org/a-yardstick-from-somewhere-else/): Day by day November 5th recedes. Today is the 12th. Psychologically it seems as if an entire age has transpired. I mean that we ‘liberal minded’ are worn out by news of sycophants appointed to head cabinet departments, for which they need only demonstrate unconditioned, servile loyalty to the President. The next four years... Read More Read More - [For My Own Ego](https://everyangel.org/for-my-own-ego/): A restless night is followed by a grey, cloud-covered sky. The air is somewhat cooler, to remind us that typically this is fall. The weather has been markedly warmer than usual, another indicator of global warming. The signs are coming more often, such as the wild fires in New England.  My nightmare that disrupted... Read More Read More - [Night Divinity](https://everyangel.org/night-is-a-divinity/): Thought reels upon recall of yesterdays extended quotation. Nietzsche describes Moira, a concept of the ancient Greeks. Moira is an inchoate dimension of a-rationality, impenetrable, formless dark, which  disrupts our “world”, the one which we’ve purposefully constructed, a life-world of reason. We call such events accidents. Such as when a vehicle slams into another... Read More Read More - [Clever Dwarfs And Ultra-stupid Giants](https://everyangel.org/clever-dwarfs-and-ultra-stupid-giants/): It is a Sunday morning. The first day of our week in some traditions is designated for mindful attention to divine reality, to put it plainly – for worship. The timing could not be better for a story, an ancient tale of exchange between humans (we clever dwarfs) and the “gods” who by comparison... Read More Read More - [Being Done At Every Moment](https://everyangel.org/being-done-at-every-moment/): Reading Nietzsche ranks with the most difficult of duties within memory. I categorize my inclination, my taste for his fevered commentary, the excavation of language in the only way possible, with language, – as a duty. I am reminded of being taken as a sick child to the family doctor by my parents. Then... Read More Read More - [Uneasy Thought Experiment](https://everyangel.org/a-wtf-thought-experiment/): Just suppose for a moment…  If you could imagine the ultimate game, one which you and I are outside observers,… As nonparticipants, god-like spectators removed, we notice something: the unending suffering, nuanced, background discomfort all the way to extreme agony of the players. Additionally notice how the self-aware creatures assume their suffering is a... Read More Read More - [A Tiger A Coyote](https://everyangel.org/a-tiger-a-coyote/): I felt comfort to see the horizon alight with the dawn. Upon entering the seating area at Starbucks, I felt the red of the Christmas-holiday promotion posters behind the beverage prep. counter. Paper cups with the colorful holiday graphic were stacked ready for use. Thus, I am reminded that life has a relentless heartbeat... Read More Read More - [Alia Iacta Est*](https://everyangel.org/alia-iacta-est/): Wednesday morning, I heard from my wife, daughter, and a friend, that the mad king shortly will be ensconced in the White House by the “will of the people.” Did we imagine that democracy was an American birthright, inviolate, a gift of the gods. What a sad illusion that was. We are awake now,... Read More Read More - [The Real World](https://everyangel.org/the-real-world/): Election day. I am glad to see, to feel the falling rain. The New York Times reports this morning that all but two states are in a condition of drought. According to the poet, Dionysus Olympian god of reverie and wine, while intoxicated with a single candle, illuminates the horizon. I think that we... Read More Read More - [Doomed, Anyway](https://everyangel.org/we-are-doomed-anyway/): Disastrous are disasters. Paradise is such a lonely place that we are doomed, anyway. But at the meeting point of its rivers the horizon is always enlarged, the imagination unleashed. *** Love creates sand-storms and loosens reality’s building blocks. Its feverish energy takes us into the heart of mountains. Sometimes, a frozen moon illuminates... Read More Read More - [Music Not Matter](https://everyangel.org/music-not-matter/): The poet Murel Rukeyser said the universe is composed of stories, not atoms. The physicistWerner Heisenberg declared that the universe ismade of music, not matter. And we believe that if you habitually expose yourselfto toxic stories and music, you could wind up livingin the wrong universe, where it’s impossible tobecome the gorgeous genius you were born... Read More Read More - [Falling And Thinking](https://everyangel.org/falling-and-thinking/): November 5 is election day. No matter the election outcome, I anticipate celebrating our granddaughter’s 5th birthday upon that day. Last evening afforded little rest. I woke with troubling dreams at odd times before daybreak Then I felt disoriented. Sometimes in waking life, I feel at a decision point, and my sense of things... Read More Read More - [Happiness And Morality](https://everyangel.org/happiness-and-morality/): So you desire the happiness of others, perhaps that of your own child… What are you going to do? We should notgive the individual,in so far as he desires his own happiness,any preceptsor recommendationsas to the road leading to happiness; for individual happinessarises from particular lawsthat are unknownto anybody, and such a man/womanwill only... Read More Read More - [Miasma Of Opinions](https://everyangel.org/phantom-queer-world/): Today is Halloween. Who doesn’t enjoy a ghost story, especially those classic movies which portray a tale of haunting? We recently viewed George Romero’s 1968 Night of the Living Dead. Viewing the movie for the first time, I appreciated that in 1968 the tale absolutely induced fear. We love a haunting… Is a haunting... Read More Read More - [And Then](https://everyangel.org/and-then-2/): I joined a group of adults for an evening of theological discussion. The topic assigned to us had to do with the relationship between our sense of Christian faith and the struggle for power which will crescendo on November 5th. Christianity is inherited from late antiquity. I suppose you are acquainted with the stories.... Read More Read More - [Evangelical Salvation](https://everyangel.org/being-saved-for-evangelicals/): The Trump rally of Sunday at Madison Square Garden has been in the news. The rally was billed as an occasion for the closing arguments of the Trump campaign. The “argument” developed as a hate fest, a racist orgy castigating Puerto Rico and immigrant citizens from Puerto Rico who certainly vote in elections. Trump himself,... Read More Read More - [More Suffering?](https://everyangel.org/how-to-suffer-more/): We watched a 2023 film entitled Poor Things. This is a fantasy, steampunk Frankenstein takeoff, that picks apart default moral assumptions of cultured society. Bella Baxter is brought back to life. Bella, waking with the brain of a newborn, learns to physically function as an adult female. The twist of this tale is Bella’s... Read More Read More - ["Christian" House Of Horrors](https://everyangel.org/house-of-horrors/): A widespread feature of Christianity is hardly ever spoken of. Entire cultural groups are yet to recover from this malignant, distorted, misshapen evaluation of human sexuality. Perhaps you’ve the wrestled with a haunting of shame, the guilt-goblin that obstructs, persists, impeding a natural expression of your mammalian self? Hauntings are concealed, never spoken of... Read More Read More - [Hatred Of Mankind](https://everyangel.org/hatred-of-mankind/): How many conversations have I overheard on the “golden rule”? You know the maxim which recommends that I demonstrate toward my fellowman/woman the same deference which I am wont to demonstrate toward myself. The consensus: everyone approves the rule of harmony, this prescription for universal peace-love-and-understanding. Simply keep the Golden Rule in mind, and... Read More Read More - [Scary Story](https://everyangel.org/scary-story/): Could Halloween as a matter of fact be a religious festival? I mean that taking stock of the otherworldly, that sense of life when touched by ghostly, supernatural presence, – a frank admission of fright, of something inscrutable about what life and death means… Nietzsche writes a speculative account of someone who experiences a... Read More Read More - [Naked Un-Reason](https://everyangel.org/naked-un-reason/): I perused the New York Times email of today’s headlines. We are two weeks out from election day. Have you ever found yourself watching a prize fight that lasted too many rounds?  At the final bell, judges render their decision and in the case of Trump v. Harris the judges will be the American... Read More Read More - [Cruelty To Spare](https://everyangel.org/cruelty-to-spare/): I have nothing specific in mind, this morning. This text merits bringing to the fore for consideration. Scratch the surface of the widespread dissatisfaction with American society, and you will find those who wish to turn the country over to a sociopath are convinced that doom is in store. Divine judgment is near. There’s... Read More Read More - [Candles Burn Blood](https://everyangel.org/when-candles-burn-blood/): References to the macabre are hyperbole it seems to me, in relation to our Halloween. American kids look forward to scoring a bagful of free candy treats while thinly disguised in the costume of choice. Halloween is by no means as comparably serious as the Dia de Muertos in Mexico that features offerings to... Read More Read More - [No Further](https://everyangel.org/no-further/): We viewed a film noir, The Killing by Stanley Kubrick. One’s sense of viewing, the take-away from the film hinges as much upon what one brings to the screen, as upon Kubrick’s cinematic composition of the tale of a horse racetrack heist. The mastermind of the theft from the track counting room, Johnny Clay is... Read More Read More - [Without Suffering](https://everyangel.org/without-suffering/): A world without suffering is easy to imagine. Every human that has lived, members of our species, we language enabled mammals, finding ourselves thrown into this world, experience pain on many accounts. To avoid pain, to seek pleasure is and has been universal. A world without suffering has been a theme of countless legends,... Read More Read More - [The Only War](https://everyangel.org/the-only-war/): The statement is enough. It will be sufficient to linger for a while to consider what this means, how extensive the repression of imagination. Our imagination expands our world. The world is held conjointly, you and I in relation, even more, in company with all living and nonliving things. Who is to say that... Read More Read More - [King's Ransom](https://everyangel.org/kings-ransom/): On Sunday, two days ago I took the opportunity to visit the track for a final time for this year. It is mid fall. Soon the temps will fall, warm days will become a memory. Drag racing is a fair weather activity, ideal for summertime. Direct sunlight, heat, make asphalt lanes treated with traction... Read More Read More - [Making Yourself Powerful and Fascinating](https://everyangel.org/making-yourself-powerful-and-fascinating/): I am a fan of civilization. The comfort of this Starbucks, the soothing background music, the efficient and professional-polite barista, and this “just right” hot cup of delicious coffee, all appeal to me. Is this what is meant by civilized, polite society? I mean a society calibrated to ensure security and comfort for those... Read More Read More - [All That Hasn't Changed](https://everyangel.org/all-this-hasnt-changed/): Words published in 1881 persuades us that we ought to stop lying to ourselves. Nietzsche, the philologist compares the epoch of modern humanity, an era marked by reason, and the search for knowledge, by awareness of class differences, of institutional injustice, (a few of the hallmarks of a liberal-democratic society) – a juxtaposition with... Read More Read More - [Vertigo](https://everyangel.org/vertigo-2/): Attempting to wrap my mind around this insight – I inwardly shiver. To become well educated in the contemporary sense means a grasp of cause and effect, of a mechanical notion of reality, that events, even occasions of unspeakable enormity, of power so destructive that ordinary words cannot serve, – are no longer divine... Read More Read More - [Our Amerika](https://everyangel.org/silhouette-of-evil/): My quest for insight from Nietzsche continues. Today I began reading The Dawn of Day written in 1881. Beginning with The Dawn of Day Nietzsche’s ideas began to coalesce into a unified vision. As usual reading Nietzsche is like running full-out into the cold ocean surf. There is the shock of difference, the comfort... Read More Read More - [Taken By Surprise](https://everyangel.org/taken-by-surprise/): A visit to the Saturday morning Farmer’s Market is something we look forward to. On the street between vendor stalls, I remember the excitement of childhood: the sky is blue, I hear the conversation and laughter of our Batavia neighbors. A majority of us work indoors. Is is not natural to be out of... Read More Read More - [Just This](https://everyangel.org/just-this/): Didn’t post yesterday.  Fall chores at home, then to the Batavia Farmer’s Market. A Farmer’s Market is a party, as well as an opportunity to participate in the life-sustaining exchange. Our human species prefers civilization. Civilization is wedded to infinite processes of soil, water, seed & plant, sun, atmosphere, every scintilla of which is... Read More Read More - [The Joke's On Me](https://everyangel.org/the-jokes-on-me/): Each day passes, election day is closer to us. Perhaps today I will fill out my mail-in ballot, and be satisfied that I have expressed my will for the texture of the future for all that live here, not just here, for the world. There is much that I wish were different about the... Read More Read More - [The Mystery Of Flavor](https://everyangel.org/the-mystery-of-flavor/): Tuesday begins. The day promises to be full. The launchpad for my life is Starbucks as usual. I have adjusted long ago to the full-bodied flavor of the Starbucks brand of coffee, and confess that I look forward to my first cup, and to my second cup, etc. etc.  How do they achieve the... Read More Read More - [Animal Narrans](https://everyangel.org/animal-narrans/): Living is narrating. The human being is an animal narrans, and differs from animals to the extent that, through narrative, new forms of life are brought about. A narrative contains the power of a new beginning. Every action that changes the world presupposes a narrative. The crisis of narration, by Byung-chul Han, page 68... Read More Read More - [Soulless, Without Myth](https://everyangel.org/soulless-without-myth/): Rising from the evening’s rest I was in a surly frame of mind. I felt haunted by the spectre of college football. You know that fall season of televised spectacle where many millions of dollars are marshaled to fill magnificent stadiums with students, alumni arrayed in team apparel, some with painted faces, immersed in... Read More Read More - [Walk With Me](https://everyangel.org/walk-with-me/): Born To Run In the day, we sweat it out on the streetsOf a runaway American dreamAt night, we ride through mansions of gloryIn suicide machinesSprung from cages out on Highway 9Chrome wheeled, fuel injected and steppin’ out over the lineOh, baby this town rips the bones from your backIt’s a death trap, it’s... Read More Read More - [Praise The Cat](https://everyangel.org/praise-the-cat/): Friday, the sky is overcast. Perhaps we shall see showers, remnants of Helene, the cat 4 hurricane that bisected the Florida panhandle. I must confess schadenfreunde, perverse pleasure at the dread of the climate-warming-denying Florida administration. Nature is dispassionate, reciprocating according to the effect of a consumption based, hydrocarbon ravenous culture which increases the... Read More Read More - [Popeye Takes It Straight](https://everyangel.org/popeye-returns/): A Thursday morning, and I have an appointment with my lawnmower. Fallen leaves wait to be harvested. The mulch will not be wasted. The dying and the life-to-come are intimately linked, – mulch to new life. Just thinking about the infinite supply of shock material, so many videos from the political right and left... Read More Read More - [Pivoting](https://everyangel.org/pivoting/): Wednesday is the pivot point of this week. Waking this morning I felt disoriented. Before waking, the body just ‘knows’ time in a way that a clock cannot. I surfaced to wakefulness through a sticky, surreal, dreamy vision. Did I see it or did I feel it? Both… Almost 9AM now and I continue... Read More Read More - [This Is Enough](https://everyangel.org/this-is-enough/): This is what I thought: for the most banal event to become an adventure, you must (and this is enough) begin to recount it. This is what fools people: a man is always a teller of tales, he[she] lives surrounded by his[her] stories, and stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him... Read More Read More - [Redemption, The Long Tail](https://everyangel.org/redemption-the-long-tail/): Happiness for us is thinkableonly in the air that we have breathed,among the people who have lived with us.In other words, there vibratesin the idea of happiness…the idea of salvation. …Our life it can be said,is a muscle strong enough to contract the whole of historical time. Or, to put it differently, the genuine... Read More Read More - [Not To Be Continued](https://everyangel.org/not-to-be-continued/): I am reading an extended essay by Byung-chul Han entitled The crisis of narration. Han quotes often from Walter Benjamin. Here are a few lines from Han: Communicable experience based upon word of mouthis becoming increasingly rare.Nothing is passed down;nothing is narrated. Benjamin holds that the storyteller‘is a man who has counsel for his... Read More Read More - [Until It Rains, Soccer, Art](https://everyangel.org/am-i-strong-enough/): Saturday morning, a little time is left here at Starbucks. Less now, but enough.  Drought assaulted shrubs in my yard need a drink. I feel the obligation. I’ll provide water until it rains tonight (or perhaps not). Weather reports are speculation even with the improved accuracy of late. That is all it is, which... Read More Read More - [If I Were An Idiot](https://everyangel.org/wish-i-could-be-an-idiot/): The Song of the Idiot By Ranier Maria Rilke They do not hinder me. They let me go.They say, nothing could happen even so.   How good.Nothing can happen. Everything revolves engrossedalways around the Holy Ghost,around a certain ghost (you know)—   how good.No, one should really not supposethat there is any danger in those.There’s of... Read More Read More - [Alas, Always Only](https://everyangel.org/alas-always-only/): These are the concluding words, the wrap-up of Beyond Good and Evil. Nietzsche takes his measure of a comprehensive philosophy which he has offered, not unlike a master-work painting of detail and subtlety. The author declares what he has said/written is already showing decrepitude, the dissolution inevitable to everything that is time bound. I... Read More Read More - [Mandarins With Brushes](https://everyangel.org/mandarins-with-brushes/): So this is where we are! Nothing to do, nothing but to recognize and embrace what is before us. What we had established, our words steadfast-in-print on paper, at one time attractive, compelling, emulated around the world… (I remember a story by a professor teaching a course in American business practices, recounting that we... Read More Read More - [Finding A Way](https://everyangel.org/finding-a-way/): A friend read the ‘hidden god’ quotation of yesterday.  He responded by text that he wanted to think more about the quotation. We plan to talk by phone this afternoon. Nietzsche reveals in subsequent lines that he is referring to Dionysus, the god of reverie, of wine, of inadvertent discovery.  The thought of such... Read More Read More - [That Great Hidden One](https://everyangel.org/that-great-hidden-one/): Monday, the day after a 2nd attempt to assassinate the former president… The Secret Service detected someone with a weapon in proximity to where Trump was finishing up a round of golf at his club. The assailant was arrested a short while later. Trump, ever the bloviating self-promoter immediately tweeted to his sycophants that... Read More Read More - [Strength](https://everyangel.org/strength/): Would you say these are persuasive words, describing inner strength of self, the ability to see clearly what one lives for and if necessary, absolutely willing to die to defend? I would. I have been acquainted with many strong females, thus the interpolation suggests that women are able to show this manner of strength... Read More Read More - [A Fatal Human Being](https://everyangel.org/a-fatal-human-being/): Perhaps any comment upon this passage would ruin it. I am relieved to read that a philosopher is a mere human. Not everyone is captivated by how extraordinary are “ordinary” experiences, ie. seeing, hearing, hoping and dreaming. When you stop reflect do further, secondary storms blow up? Surely Nietzsche is being autobiographical here. Still,... Read More Read More - [Morality As Jersey Art](https://everyangel.org/art-3/): Homo Sapiens, the mammal that psychologically clothes itself with team colors, like every other fan at a soccer game. A coordinated style, moral attire that palate of team colors is instantly recognized by everyone in the room. What I mean – approved comportment, a manner of getting things done, of movement, of being, is... Read More Read More - [Not Putting Away My Spade](https://everyangel.org/not-putting-away-my-spade/): This segment stopped me cold. For as long as I can remember I welcomed solitude. As a kid I adventured alone in the woods, and I had an appetite for books. Perhaps I understood then what philosophy affirmed later to my adult self: “the world” is a product of what we can manage, or... Read More Read More - [Poker Tells](https://everyangel.org/poker-tells/): After dinner we played a card game that included our almost-five year old grand daughter. A simple game, called “Go Fish” was played with intense delight by the child. The game is a matter of alphabet matching. She is learning the letters of the alphabet. Her pleasure visibly grows as she masters the rules... Read More Read More - [This Heavy, Overcast Sky](https://everyangel.org/under-this-heavy-overcast-sky/): Tonight the debate between the Republican and the Democratic candidate is to be televised on ABC. It is difficult to imagine two personalities of starker contrast. Most Americans have already made a choice. Perhaps you are sympatico with a life-long bully, a male who has made his way by grift. He is an icon... Read More Read More - [How Much Longer Daddy?](https://everyangel.org/how-long-does-it-take-daddy/): How could it be otherwise? Our sense of time, of the texture of change, – is of-our-species of mammal. When I was a child with my sister in the back seat of our car, I remember those trips to visit with my grand parents. The hour and a half drive felt interminable. More than... Read More Read More - [Happiness By The Throat](https://everyangel.org/choking-happiness-to-death/): A festival, a fair has always been the occasion for my happiness. I remember as a child being taken to a circus, or that feeling of excitement on a chill December evening, waiting curbside for the first sound and sight of the Christmas parade,… Such events caused me to feel happy for a while.... Read More Read More - [What I Want To See](https://everyangel.org/what-i-want-to-see/): Fall approaches, as does the general election. Given the division within the country, the stoking of alarm, no doubt many feel that we are on a slippery slope. No one can know what the future will be. Our insecurity prompts us to seek what is base, dishonorable, – to be defensive minded. I think... Read More Read More - [What Holiness Is](https://everyangel.org/what-holiness-is/): Nothing is wasted! Even a heritage that one has taken measure of, reflected upon, then with effort to transition, to construct a more humane self, – that old wreckage in the rear-view-mirror is a resource for insight. Nietzsche states that holiness is nothing but a quest for purity. Saintliness is to insist upon unifying... Read More Read More - [Soul With A Crack](https://everyangel.org/soul-with-a-crack/): How do I begin? We are several days on the far side of Labor Day. In this election year, November 4th is coming up fast (like a sweeping curve at the end of a racetrack straightaway). We, that is fellow citizens, will soon cast a ballot to select the 47th president of the United... Read More Read More - [Inventing A God](https://everyangel.org/inventing-a-god/): This is one of the most un-nerving texts I’ve ever read. A single idea that I have held sacred for a long time as an adult is the thought that I and others, say everyone in this room could, might thrive in a loving relationship. A tagline from the great song by the Eagles... Read More Read More - [Possum Chaser II](https://everyangel.org/possum-chaser-ii/): Human individuals are often surprising. Each of us is the consequence of genetic inheritance, and of conditioning. What I mean to say by conditioning – that complex of geography, of the point in time of a civilization’s/people’s stage of development, of the style and degree of nurture received from one’s parents, of the texture... Read More Read More - [Every Star An Egoist](https://everyangel.org/every-star-an-egoist/): These lines are counter intuitive to the contemporary American scale of values. Democracy valorizes what is common, the equality of citizenship. I think this is a critical dimension, to be defended – at the level of political participation in our society. By universal agreement every citizen has a voice, in the form of a... Read More Read More - [Furthermore On Education](https://everyangel.org/furthermore-on-education/): The college football season begins. Following an afternoon of immersion in drag racing at Great Lakes Drag-a-way in Wisconsin, I resigned myself to indifferently watching the game between Texas A&M and Notre Dame on channel 7. The commentators ballyhoo’d the start of the season, which features televised games in state-of-the-art stadiums viewed by millions,... Read More Read More - [What Else Is Education For?](https://everyangel.org/what-else-is-education-for/): These are severe, almost serrated words. The writer observes how profoundly we are marked, shaped by attitudes, habitual behaviors of our immediate, even of ancestors not proximate to our memory. I hardly knew my grandfather. Nevertheless what he loved lives and and is expressed in me. This endowment, a tendency for benefit or for... Read More Read More - [Like Dirty Water](https://everyangel.org/like-dirty-water/): An important feature of Nietzsche’s thought is a cultivated intuition of a gradation, of a hierarchy from the base, common, mundane to the transcendent. A scale of values is a capacity for recognition of the sacred.  Nietzsche seldom wrote any approving estimation of European Christendom. Here, he acknowledges that “the book” of Christianity has... Read More Read More - [Becoming A Yes Sayer](https://everyangel.org/becoming-a-yes-sayer/): A friend pointed me to this poem by Wm. Blake. How important is friendship, a few associations that are mutually cultivated for years, over an arc of time. I owe my growth as an adult to the recommendations received from friends, the books, poems, film, – all of that, the deposits in the bank... Read More Read More - [Left Standing There](https://everyangel.org/left-standing-there/): Wednesday, is midweek. The suffocating, dangerous heat dome prevailing upon outdoor activity for the last day or so has receded. It is possible to move about again, to enjoy the most basic of our animal-like freedoms, that of movement. How about a story? This story of New York’s MTA, of a city public transit... Read More Read More - [Do Not Touch](https://everyangel.org/do-not-touch/): Still pondering the car show. I recall the blue Lamborghini parked near the entrance to the show, at the intersection of State and 3rd. Ferrari is widely recognized as an uncommon instance of excellence, the high art of the automobile.  Lamborghini is even more so, and one might argue the apex of a tradition... Read More Read More - [Keepin' The Faith](https://everyangel.org/keepin-the-faith/): Car show yesterday. An adventure in memory. Big shows seem to trigger introspection. I think about the individuals in the prime of life, that solved mechanical conundrums, understanding more deeply the principles of physics, to design, to construct a more functional, and a more beautiful vehicle. I do not believe that beauty can be... Read More Read More - [The Primal Fact](https://everyangel.org/the-primal-fact/): Car show weekend in Geneva.  Today, Sunday is the big show, the Geneva concurs d’elegance.  Both sides of 3rd as well as side streets are parked with exotic collector cars and race cars of all vintages. This is an annual event.  Sure it’s testosterone laced, a fashion show of shaped metal, painted, polished to... Read More Read More - [Egalité](https://everyangel.org/egalite/): At times one feels compelled to venture out on thin ice. The term is used as metaphor to capture the hazard that attends to speaking the absurd, or on the other hand, speaking truth from which one’s fellows are conditioned to turn away. Equality is bedrock to the American experiment, to these United States.... Read More Read More - [Tanaami](https://everyangel.org/tanaami/): A final evening of the DNC event at the United Center featured Kamala Harris’ acceptance speech of her parties nomination as candidate for the presidency. I was transfixed by the superb choice of words, the artistry of the rhetoric, while feeling a bit of discomfort. Upon reflection this morning I understand that the speech... Read More Read More - [Confession Of A Late Refugee](https://everyangel.org/confession-of-a-late-refugee/): Again I viewed night three of the televised speeches from the Democratic National Convention.  As anticipated the parade of celebrities was preliminary to the headliner, Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota. Walz’ nomination acceptance speech was a praise anthem to middle-class America. Does anyone know what “this” is anymore? Middle class is no longer cleanly... Read More Read More - [Drunken And Dissipated Cows](https://everyangel.org/drunken-and-dissipated-cows/): I do not keep secret that I am a recovering evangelical. My evangelical roots will always be residual in my personality, my style and manner of life. The past, however it might have been, continues to reverberate through us. (Just a note of gratitude, – without a past you and I would not be... Read More Read More - [A Conscience In My Ear](https://everyangel.org/a-conscience-in-my-ear/): I was inclined not to watch. I assumed the first evening of televised speeches from the Democratic National Convention were likely to be similar to the first half of most NFL football games.  Each team gets a feel for the game plan, taking the measure of the opponent, a tepid warmup of sorts. Some... Read More Read More - [Drip, Drip or Bite, Sizzle, Cut](https://everyangel.org/drip-drip-or-bite-sizzle-and-cut/): The National Convention of the Democratic Party begins today in downtown Chicago. As one would expect the event is conceived to produce maximally persuasive visuals for television, for electronic distribution. The convention as a whole, including various groups coming to Chicago to exercise the opportunity for free expression in the “public square” – will... Read More Read More - [Blood & Light & Water & Sky](https://everyangel.org/blood-light-water-sky/): Saturday morning is overcast. A storm moved through last night.  We needed the rain. I feel gratitude for timely rain, because circumstances could be otherwise. I’ll not dwell upon that! Here is a poem that speaks to many things. The female poetess describes a birth, which is a primal and spiritual matter, a dying... Read More Read More - [Farewell](https://everyangel.org/farewell/): In my beginning is my end. In succession Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended, Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass. Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires, Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth Which is... Read More Read More - [Nothing But Imaginary](https://everyangel.org/nothing-but-imaginary/): In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point. Nothing but imaginary causes (‘God’, ’soul’, ‘ego’, ‘spirit’, ‘free will’, – or ‘unfree-will.): Nothing but imaginary effects (‘sin’, ‘redemption’, ‘grace’, ‘punishment’, ‘forgiveness of sins’). Once the concept of ‘nature’ has been devised as the concept antithetical to ‘God’, ‘natural’ had... Read More Read More - [A Coin With Two Sides](https://everyangel.org/paradise-is-here/): Spring by Alan L. Strang Spring time is here with its sunshine and showers, All nature is waking from its long winter sleep. The gardens are blooming with beautiful flowers, The song-birds are carolling melodies sweet. Alan L. Strang (1908 – 1919) was born in Spokane, Washington. His family moved to Redwood City, California... Read More Read More - [Break A Leg](https://everyangel.org/you-are-the-show/): The internet service is intermittent today. I am unsure whether I will be able to finish a post. The connection is unimportant. Today, the sun shines a majestic power, warming seeds, bulbs to sprout upward to  light. I’ll be at the show. Maybe to capture some photos. It is a one of a kind... Read More Read More - [Sunday](https://everyangel.org/sunday/): Sunday dawns as one more day. This day is incomparable, a day only superficially similar to any other. We Americans have designated the seventh day Sunday, as a day of rest, reflection. To say it in a degraded form, “the Lord’s day,” a day for collective worship. Degraded you say!? Yes. Do not feel... Read More Read More - [Bleeding Out](https://everyangel.org/piercing/): My home is Batavia, a river town established at a time when Americans were settling the West. The importance of Christianity for past generations is borne witness by several substantial churches at the center of town, steeples with a Crosses piercing the sky. Even if forms of Christian thinking are not as close to... Read More Read More - [These Terrible Unknown Powers](https://everyangel.org/these-terrible-unknown-powers/): If we transport ourselves back to the ages in which the religious life flourished most vigorously we discover a fundamental conviction which we no longer share… In those ages one as of yet knows nothing of natural laws; neither the earth nor the sky are constrained by any compulsion; any season, sunshine, rain can... Read More Read More - [Overrun With Heroes](https://everyangel.org/overrun-with-heroes/): Every mistake (in every sense of the word) is the result of a degeneration of instinct, a disintegration of the will: one could almost equate what is bad with whatever is a mistake. All that is good is instinctive — and hence easy, necessary, uninhibited. Effort is a failing: the god is typically different... Read More Read More - [Original Sin Revisited](https://everyangel.org/original-sin-revisited/): The most general formula on which every religion and morality is founded is: “Do this and that, refrain from this and that — and then you will be happy! And if you don’t…” I call it the original sin of reason, the immortal unreason. — the first example of my “revaluation of all values.”... Read More Read More - [The Slightest Dose](https://everyangel.org/the-slightest-dose/): Today especially, the real is no more than a stockpile of dead matter, dead bodies, and dead language. It still makes us feel secure today to evaluate this stock of what is real (let’s not talk about energy; the ecological complaint that hides the fact that it is not material energy which is disappearing... Read More Read More - [Meditation Continued](https://everyangel.org/meditation-continued/): behind every great human destiny there resounded as a refrain an even greater ‘in vain!’ The Genealogy of Morals by Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. by R. J. Hollingdale, What Is the Meaning of Ascetic Ideals, aphorism 28 I think that there is no conclusive counterargument to this assertion.  When I consider my experience of life,... Read More Read More - [Meditation For Sunday](https://everyangel.org/meditation-for-sunday/): A question without an answer; the will for man and the earth is lacking; behind every great human destiny there resounded as a refrain an even greater ‘in vain!’ The meaninglessness of suffering, not suffering itself, was the curse which hitherto lay over mankind… Any meaning is better than no meaning at all. From... Read More Read More - [Cruelty Sweet Cruelty](https://everyangel.org/cruelty-sweet-cruelty/): People should rethink their ideas about cruelty and open up their eyes;… This is my claim: almost everything we call “higher culture” is based on the spiritualization and deepening of cruelty. The “wild animal” has not been killed off at all; it is alive and well, it has just – become divine. Cruelty is... Read More Read More - [Night Art](https://everyangel.org/night-art/): The ear, the organ of fear, could not have evolved so greatly as it has only in the night and twilight of obscure caves and woods, in accordance with the mode of life of the age of timidity, that is to say the longest human age there has ever been: in bright daylight the... Read More Read More - [Like Slaves At Christmas](https://everyangel.org/like-slaves-at-christmas/): How can a man take pleasurein nonsense?For wherever in the worldthere is laughterthis is the case;one can say, indeed,that almost everywhere there is happinessthere is pleasure in nonsense. The overturning of experienceinto its opposite,of the purposive into the purposelessness,of the necessary into the arbitrary,but in such a way that this eventcauses no harmand is... Read More Read More - [The Birth Of Comedy](https://everyangel.org/the-birth-of-comedy/): If one considers that man for many hundreds of thousands of years an animal in the highest degree accessible to fear and that everything sudden and unexpected bade him prepare to fight and perhaps to die that even later on, indeed, in social relationships all security depended on the expected and the traditional in... Read More Read More - [All Great Deceivers](https://everyangel.org/all-great-deceivers/): With all great deceivers there is a noteworthy occurrence to which they owe their power. in the actual act of deception… They are overcome by belief in themselves: It is this which then speaks so miraculously and compellingly to those who surround them. The founders of religions are distinguished from these great deceivers by... Read More Read More - [Holy Week?](https://everyangel.org/holy-week-2/): Today is my birthday. It is early but already several have greeted me with, “happy birthday.” As an adult it has been difficult to dwell on my birthday.  “Happy Birthday…” Really!? A pure happiness is not of this world. I am here after 75 years, an astonishing, lucky win. After all the odds of... Read More Read More - [That Beautiful Feeling](https://everyangel.org/that-beautiful-feeling/): Nothing is so conditional that is so circumscribed, as our feeling for the beautiful. Anyone who has tried to divorce it from man’s pleasure would be to find the ground give way beneath him. the ‘beautiful in itself’ is not even a concept, merely a phrase. In the beautiful man sets himself up as... Read More Read More - [Décadence](https://everyangel.org/thinking-about-decadence/): Decadence (Oxford Dictionary): moral or cultural decline as characterized by excessive indulgence in pleasure or luxury. The whole is no longer a whole,.. a metaphor for every style of décadence; every time anarchy of atoms, scattering of will, ‘freedom of the individual’, morally speaking expanded into political theory, ‘equal rights for all’. life, equal... Read More Read More - [On Sensuality](https://everyangel.org/on-sensuality/): The sight of the beautiful… a releasing stimulant to the chief force of his nature… so that this force then exploded and all at once became master of his consciousness. But that does not in any way exclude the possibility for that particular sweetness and plentitude which is characteristic of the aesthetic condition might... Read More Read More - [Two Heartbeats](https://everyangel.org/poverty-or-superabundance/): Every art, every philosophy may be viewed as a remedy and an aid in the service of growing and struggling life; they always presuppose suffering and sufferers. But there are two kinds of sufferers: first those who suffer from the over-fullness of life -they want a Dionysian art and likewise a tragic view of... Read More Read More - [Welcome To The Show](https://everyangel.org/welcome-to-the-show/): Perhaps, we can discover a realm where originality is again possible as parodists of history and buffoons of God. Beyond Good and Evil,  by Friedrich Nietzsche, aphorism 223 I am curious about this quote which is found in the essay by Michel Foucault, Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.  History, the stories that we tell are compared... Read More Read More - [More Blood](https://everyangel.org/more-blood/): A friend gave me an essay written by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, On Stupidity. Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran pastor, a leader of the “confessing church” opposing the policies of the Nazis. The Nazis aimed at eliminating Jews, promoting the ideology of Aryan purity. Bonhoeffer’s essay seems germane to our situation now, the rise of Trumpism, and... Read More Read More - [Bleeding Out](https://everyangel.org/bleeding-out-3/): “Effective history” deprives the self of the reassuring stability of life and nature, and it will not permit itself to be transported by a voiceless obstinacy toward a millennial ending… This is because knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting. “Effective history” deals with events in terms of their most... Read More Read More - [About The Rule Of Law](https://everyangel.org/about-the-rule-of-law/): Humanity does not gradually progress from combat to combat until it arrives at universal reciprocity, where the rule of law gradually replaces warfare; humanity installs each of its violences in a system of rules and thus proceeds from domination to domination. The nature of these rules allows violence to be inflicted upon violence and... Read More Read More - [Foucault X3](https://everyangel.org/foucault-x3/): Descent attaches itself to the body.1 It inscribes itself in the nervous system, in temperament, in the digestive apparatus; it appears in faulty respiration, in improper diets, in the debilitated and prostrate body of those whose ancestors committed errors. Fathers have only to mistake the effects for causes, believe in the “afterlife,” or maintain... Read More Read More - [More Foucault](https://everyangel.org/more-foucault/): Truth is undoubtedly the sort of error that cannot be refuted because it was hardened into an unalterable form in the long baking process of history.1 Moreover, the very question of truth, the right it appropriates to refute error and oppose itself to appearance, the manner in which it was developed (initially made available... Read More Read More - [Foucault](https://everyangel.org/foucault/): I anticipate beginning a final revision of my comments upon selected passages from The Gay Science by Friedrich Nietzsche.  Nietzsche’s writing compelled my attention upon my introduction to the late 19th century philosopher when I was much younger. I was in my late 20’s, a student.  Many years have passed  and somehow there remains... Read More Read More - [Position Filled](https://everyangel.org/position-filled/): …those who suffer most and are poorest in life would need above all mildness, peacefulness, and goodness in thought as well as deed –if possible, also a god who would be truly a god for the sick, a healer and savior; The Gay Science by Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann, aphorism 370 The thought... Read More Read More - [Hilarity & The Dance](https://everyangel.org/hilarity-the-dance/): If we had not welcomed the arts and invented this kind of cult of the untrue, then the realization of general untruth and mendaciousness that now comes to us through science –the realization that delusion and error are conditions of human knowledge and sensation –would be utterly unbearable. Honesty would lead to nausea and... Read More Read More - [Like A Mystic Veil](https://everyangel.org/like-a-mystic-veil/): Everything in a Greek or Christian building originally had a meaning, and referred to a higher order of things; this feeling of inexhaustible meaning enveloped the edifice like a mystic veil. Beauty was only a secondary consideration in the system, without in any way materially injuring the fundamental sentiment of the mysteriously-exalted, the divinely... Read More Read More - [Xplaning Explained...](https://everyangel.org/xplaning-explained/): “Cause” and “effect” is what one says; but we have merely perfected the image of becoming without reaching beyond the image or behind it. In every case the series of “causes” confronts us much more completely, and we infer: first, this and that has to precede in order that this or that may then... Read More Read More - [Good Work](https://everyangel.org/good-work/): Another magnificent day, a morning all sunshine. I spoke with a friend about preparing for the growing season.  He grows dahlias, and I grow vegetables.  Nature is one of the bonds between us.  Another bond, we see one another almost daily at the Geneva Starbucks.  Perhaps both of us prefers dark roast coffee? Last... Read More Read More - [A Pickup With A Flag](https://everyangel.org/a-pickup-with-a-flag/): These semi-animals which were well adapted to the wilderness, to war, to prowling about, to adventure –suddenly all their instincts were deprived of value and ‘suspended’… They felt incapable of the simplest undertakings, in this new unfamiliar world their former guides, the regulating and unconsciously certain guides, deserted them – These unhappy creatures were... Read More Read More - [Let's Go Outside And Play](https://everyangel.org/can-you-come-outside-and-play/): This is Monday. There has never been a Monday like this Monday. Today received by my senses is infused with early spring sunlight. To compare with the past seasonal average, a day like this is unusual for Mid-March. Light warms the soil, rousing those dormant subterranean living things, a world invisible to us for... Read More Read More - [Burning The Amazon](https://everyangel.org/burning-the-amazon/): The Sunday of the time change, the switch to daylight ‘savings’ time.  Is anything at all ‘saved’?  Describe for me how shifting the imposed grid of punctuated time, industrial time, upon the flow of natural-seasonal time is useful?  Disruptive yes.  Worth it?  Why keep doing, in lock step what we’ve always done? I glimpsed... Read More Read More - [No!](https://everyangel.org/no-2/): The slave revolt in morality begins when resentment itself becomes creative and gives birth to values; the resentment of creatures to whom the real reaction, that of the deed, is denied and who can indemnify themselves only through an imaginary revenge. While every noble morality develops from a triumphant affirmation of itself, slave morality... Read More Read More - [What If](https://everyangel.org/what-if-3/): “Believing” in God is like “believing” in the taste of fresh-baked bread without ever having tasted actual fresh-baked bread. But what if you could commune with the Divine-Wow through up-close, personal encounters that are as vivid as eating fresh-baked bread? Some people have. You could, too. Formulate the intention to do so. Freewill Astrology... Read More Read More - [Goldilocks](https://everyangel.org/on-the-goldilocks-principle/): Wednesday is midpoint of a seven day week.  The middle is regarded to be the point of balance.  It is common to believe that maintaining a balance, middle of the road, porridge not too hot and not too cold, the Goldilocks principle, (and the bed not too soft and not too hard, but just... Read More Read More - [Thus I Laughed](https://everyangel.org/thus-i-laughed/): When I visited humankind, I found them sitting upon an old self-conceit. Each one thought he had long since known what was good and evil for humankind. All talk of virtue seemed to them an ancient wearied affair; and he who wished to sleep well spoke of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ before retiring. I disturbed... Read More Read More - [Exhausted](https://everyangel.org/remedy-for-exhausted-land/): The strongest and most evil spirits… rekindled the dozing passions. –every ordered society puts the passions to sleep… Time and again they reawakened the sense of comparison, of contradiction, of delight in what is new, daring, un-attempted; they forced humankind to pit opinion against opinion, ideal model against ideal model. Mostly by force of... Read More Read More - [Language & Rebirth](https://everyangel.org/language-rebirth/): Rob Brezsny’s Freewill Astrology newsletter stimulates me to think.  He is a happy warrior, samurai-like with unflagging dedication to his craft as a writer, faith in the mana/power of words to humanize us.  The last newsletter from Rob offered a list of neologisms. The list is relevant, important to the work that remains in... Read More Read More - [Successful Crime](https://everyangel.org/successful-crime/): There is a constant moiling and toiling going on in morality –the effect of successful crimes (among which, for example, are included all innovations in moral thinking.) Daybreak by Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. by R. G. Collingwood aphorism 98 Nietzsche the wordsmith, was adept in three languages.  A philologist by education, a specialist in classical... Read More Read More - [Sympathy For Ourselves...](https://everyangel.org/sympathy-for-ourselves/): The oldest moral judgments. What really are our reactions to the behavior of someone in our presence? First of all, we see what there is in it for us we regard it only from this point of view. We take this effect as the intention behind the behavior and finally we ascribe the harboring... Read More Read More - [On Madness](https://everyangel.org/on-madness/): All earlier people found it much more likely that wherever there is madness there is also a grain of genius and wisdom — something ‘divine’, as one whispered to oneself. Or rather: as one said aloud forcefully enough. ‘It is through madness that the greatest good things have come to Greece’, Plato said, in... Read More Read More - [Why Don't You?](https://everyangel.org/why-dont-you/): A patient in a large hospital room with many beds complains to the doctor about the constant noise other patients are making, which is driving him crazy. The doctor replies that nothing can be done, one cannot forbid the patients from expressing their despair, since they all know they are dying. The first patient... Read More Read More - [Excavating Morality](https://everyangel.org/excavating-morality/): Morality is nothing other than obedience to customs, of whatever kind there may be; customs, however, are the traditional way of behaving and evaluating. In things in which no tradition commands there is no morality; and the less life is determined by tradition, the smaller the circle of morality… The free human being is... Read More Read More - [Scaffold Builders Inc.](https://everyangel.org/scaffold-build-inc/): …the despairing and salvation-thirsty heart to which the madness whispers: ‘Behold thou art the lamb that beareth the sins of God.’ –the error lies not only in the feeling ‘I am accountable’, but equally in that antithesis ‘I am not, but somebody has to be.’ —This is, in fact, not true: The philosopher has... Read More Read More - [Breaking A Chrysalis](https://everyangel.org/breaking-a-chrysalis/): It is absurd to praise and blame nature and necessity. In the same way as he loves a fine work of art, but does not praise it, because it can do nothing for itself; in the same way as he regards plants, so must he regard his own actions and those of mankind. He... Read More Read More - [Simply Survival, Nothing More](https://everyangel.org/just-survival-nothing-more/): We do not complain of nature as immoral because it sends a thunderstorm and makes us wet, — why do we call those who injure us immoral? Because in the latter case we take for granted a free will functioning voluntarily; in the former we see necessity. But this distinction is an error. Thus... Read More Read More - [Justice Reconsidered](https://everyangel.org/justice-reconsidered/): I read a passage from Nietzsche’s Human, All Too Human about justice. The words stayed with me as if barbed.  Nietzsche refers to a passage written by Thucydides (431 BC), his account of the war between Athens and Sparta.  Thucydides recounts a negotiation between Athenian ambassadors and representatives of Melos, a island community in... Read More Read More - [Yes, Another Joke](https://everyangel.org/yes-another-joke/): There is thus and element of truth in a joke about a young Christian girl’s ideal prayer to the Virgin Mary: “O thou who conceived without having sinned, let me sin without having to conceive!” –in the perverse functioning of Christianity, religion is, in effect, evoked as a safeguard allowing us to enjoy life... Read More Read More - [More Viewing From My Corner](https://everyangel.org/more-viewing-from-my-corner/): How far the perspectival character of existence extends or indeed whether existence has any other character than this; whether existence without interpretation, without sense, does not become “meaninglessness”. Whether on the other hand, all existence is not essentially actively engaged in interpretation –that cannot be decided even by the most industrious and most scrupulously... Read More Read More - [The View From My Corner](https://everyangel.org/the-view-from-my-corner/): How far the perspectival character of existence extends or indeed whether existence has any other character than this; whether existence without interpretation, without sense, does not become “meaninglessness”. Whether on the other hand, all existence is not essentially actively engaged in interpretation –that cannot be decided even by the most industrious and most scrupulously... Read More Read More - [On Being Stuck](https://everyangel.org/thoughts-on-being-stuck/): I take this explanation from the street. I heard one of the common people say, “he knew me right away.” Then I asked myself: What is it that the common people take for knowledge? What do they want when they want “knowledge”? Nothing more than this: Something strange is to be reduced to something... Read More Read More - [Herd Signals In My Head](https://everyangel.org/herd-signals-in-my-head/): …we could think, feel, will, and remember, and we could also “act” in every sense of that word, and yet none of all this would have to “enter our consciousness”. The whole of life would be possible without, as it were, seeing itself in a mirror. Man… as the most endangered animal, he needed... Read More Read More - [The Final Match](https://everyangel.org/the-last-match/): The intellectual fight became an occupation, an attraction, a profession, a duty, something dignified-and eventually knowledge and the striving for the true found their place as a need among other needs. Henceforth not only faith and conviction but also scrutiny, denial, mistrust, and contradiction became a power; all “evil” instincts were subordinated to knowledge,... Read More Read More - [Necessity Uber Alles](https://everyangel.org/necessity-uber-alles/): Over one man/woman necessity stands In the shape of his passions,    over another the habit of hearing an obeying,       over a third as a logical conscience,          over a fourth as caprice and a mischievous pleasure          in escapades. These four will, however, seek freedom of their will precisely where each of... Read More Read More - [Hybrid Real](https://everyangel.org/hybrid-real/): To live alone one must be an animal or a god –says Aristotle. There is yet a third case; one must be both –a philosopher. Twilight of the Idols, By Friedrich Nietzsche, Trans. by R. G. Collingdale Maxims and Arrows 3 …philosophy once again pose(s) the same question(s) as they did 2,000 years ago:... Read More Read More - [The Forbidden](https://everyangel.org/the-forbidden/): My writings… An air of heights, a robust air. The ice is near, the solitude is terrible But…how freely one breathes! How much one feels beneath one! Philosophy.. is a voluntary living in ice and high mountains -a seeking after everything strange and questionable in existence, all that has hitherto been excommunicated by morality.... Read More Read More - [Anti-Valentine](https://everyangel.org/anti-valentine/): Can all values not be turned around? And is goodness perhaps evil? And God only an invention and finesse of the Devil? Is everything perhaps in the last resort false? And if we are deceived, are we not for that very reason also deceivers? must we not be deceivers? …learn to grasp the necessary... Read More Read More - [To Enjoy Us](https://everyangel.org/to-enjoy-us/): Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day. It is good to embrace the day dedicated to love, the opportunity to celebrate relationships which make one more human, more in tune with the person that is becoming in the journey of one’s solitary life. I offer words that came my way, gratefully received and sourced from someone else. ... Read More Read More - [The Morning After](https://everyangel.org/the-morning-after-2/): This task itself demands something different –it demands that he/she create values. Actual philosophers are commanders and law-givers: they say ‘thus it shall be!’ it is they who determine the Wherefore and Whether of mankind, and they possess for this task the preliminary work of all philosophical laborers, of all those who have subdued... Read More Read More - [Americans Come Together](https://everyangel.org/americans-come-together/): Nothing brings together more Americans — not awards shows, not television series finales, not even presidential debates — than the Super Bowl. …Las Vegas is hosting its first Super Bowl today. The city has a fraught history with professional sports because of its association with gambling, and leagues have kept teams away to maintain... Read More Read More - [War Gods](https://everyangel.org/war-gods/): Another Saturday morning at Starbucks. No two Saturdays are alike. With a backward look each of those Saturdays has its own character. After all change is another way of saying that time matters. Time is the ocean that buoys, supports, in which everything swims. I have been swimming for a few days toward the... Read More Read More - [Art](https://everyangel.org/art-2/): Art is the highest value. In relation to the value truth, it is the higher value. The one, ever in a fresh way, calls forth the other. Both values determine in their value-relation the unitive essence of the intrinsic value-positing will to power. The will to power is the reality of the will or,... Read More Read More - [Exuberance](https://everyangel.org/exuberant-self-possession/): Commanding, which is to be sharply distinguished from the mere ordering about of others, is self-conquest and is more difficult than obeying. Will is gathering oneself together for the given task. Only he who cannot obey himself must be expressly commanded. What the will wills it does not merely strive after as something it... Read More Read More - [Naked Philosophy](https://everyangel.org/naked-philosophy/): Acquaintances express surprise when they learn about my interest in philosophy, and my taste for Friedrich Nietzsche’s books.  I’ve heard, “that sounds deep,” more than once.  How many experiences, areas of life, strike us as “deep” from a distance?  I say to myself, “why not come closer and have a better look?” Many aspects... Read More Read More - [Bad Taste](https://everyangel.org/bad-taste/): One has to get rid of the bad taste of wanting to be in agreement with many. ‘Good’ is no longer good when your neighbor takes it into his mouth. and how could there exist a ‘common good!’ The expression is a self-contradiction: what can be common has ever little value. in the end... Read More Read More - [Shameless](https://everyangel.org/shameless/): For in the realm of thought, power and fame are hard to maintain if erected on the basis of error or lies; the feeling that such a building could at some time or other fall down is humiliating to the self-conceit of its architect; he is ashamed of the fragility of his material and,... Read More Read More - [To Hope Again](https://everyangel.org/to-hope-again/): But my truth is dreadful: for hitherto the lie has been called truth. –revaluation of all values; that is my formula for an act of supreme coming-to-oneself on the part of mankind which in me has become flesh and genius. It is my fate to have to be the first decent human being, to... Read More Read More - [The End](https://everyangel.org/the-end/): …The Stoic, taught by experience and ruling himself by ideas! He who otherwise only looks for uprightness, truth, freedom from deceptions and shelter from ensnaring and sudden attack, in his misfortune performs the masterpiece of dissimilation; he shows no twitching mobile face but as it were a mask with dignified, harmonious features; he does... Read More Read More - [Olympian Cloudlessness](https://everyangel.org/olympian-cloudlessness/): There are ages, when the rational and the intuitive man stand side by side, the one full of fear of the intuition and the other full of fear of the abstraction; the latter just as irrational as the former is inartistic. Both desire to rule over life; the one knowing how to meet the... Read More Read More - [Smashed To Pieces](https://everyangel.org/smashed-to-pieces/): That enormous framework and hoarding of ideas, by clinging to which the needy man saves himself through life, is to the freed intellect only a scaffolding and a toy for Its most daring feats, and when it smashes It to pieces, throws it into confusion, and then puts it together ironically, paring the strangest,... Read More Read More - [Sobered By Science](https://everyangel.org/we-sobered-by-science/): The wide-awake day of a people mystically excitable, let us say the earlier Greeks, is in fact through the continually-working wonder which mythos presupposes, more akin to a dream than to the day of the thinker sobered by science. If every tree may at some time talk as a nymph, or a god under... Read More Read More - [Torn By Art](https://everyangel.org/torn-by-art/): …waking man per se is only clear about his being awake through the rigid and orderly woof of ideas, and it is for this very reason that he sometimes comes to believe that he was dreaming when the woof of his ideas has for a moment been torn by Art. Pascal is quite right,... Read More Read More - [Awful Powers](https://everyangel.org/awful-powers/): It is language which has worked originally in the construction of ideas; in later times it is science. Just as the bee works at the same time at the cells and fills them with honey, thus science works irresistibly at that great columbarium of ideas, the cemetery of perceptions, builds ever newer and higher... Read More Read More - [Sweet Oblivion](https://everyangel.org/sweet-oblivion/): Only by forgetting the primitive world of metaphors, only by congelation and coagulation of an original mass of similes pouring forth as a fiery liquid out of the primal faculty of human fancy, only by the invincible faith, that this sun, this window, this table is a truth in itself: in short only by... Read More Read More - [Carving Up The Sky](https://everyangel.org/carving-up-the-sky/): …the Romans and Etrusceans for their benefit cut up the sky by means of strong mathematical lines and banned a god as it were into a templum, into a space limited in this fashion, so every nation has above its head such a sky of ideas divided up mathematically, and it understands the demand... Read More Read More - [Worthless](https://everyangel.org/worthless/): What then is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms — in short, a sum of human relations, which become poetically and rhetorically intensified, transposed, and embellished, and which after long use seem firm, canonic, and binding to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that they are illusions;... Read More Read More - [No Further Mission](https://everyangel.org/no-further-mission/): In some remote corner of the universe, effused into innumerable solar-systems, there was once a star upon which clever animals invented cognition. It was the haughtiest, most mendacious moment in the history of this world, but yet only a moment. After Nature had taken breath awhile the star congealed and the clever animals had... Read More Read More - [Renegade: One Learning To Love](https://everyangel.org/renegade-one-learning-to-love/): A grey, damp day! Yea!  I hope to go for a walk this afternoon, an eyes-wide-open walkabout.  Daytime temps are around the freezing point for the first time in many days.  A mammalian body does not do well in a single digit environment.  So, I plan to stroll a while, and enjoy what I... Read More Read More - [It Rains It Freezes](https://everyangel.org/it-rains-it-freezes/): Blues suffuses from the speakers, and the room is alive with male and female melodic voices. This blends with a spirited tide of conversation coming from the tables, especially the big round table in the corner by the window. Starbucks, Tuesday morning. Today, the side streets are icy and hazardous. Someone mentioned that the... Read More Read More - [The Spell Of A Dream](https://everyangel.org/the-spell-of-a-dream/): These days I seldom dream. There have been periods of my life when dreams came often, sometimes with such intensity that when waking, the dream was so vivid, to be as persuasive as my mentally aware life. I remember when my mother died many years ago, sadness descended to ebb and flow for months.... Read More Read More - [Playing Dice To Rise Up](https://everyangel.org/playing-dice-to-rise-up/): An hour plus was spent reading Nietzsche’s account – the pre-Socratic philosophers struggle, one after another to “explain”, to express to their own satisfaction, the nature of Being. Is Being singular and indivisible? If so does that mean that all that we experience, the multiplicity and the change in every direction is illusion and... Read More Read More - [Before Dawn](https://everyangel.org/before-dawn/): Shearing ice crystals, sound with each step in the predawn gray.  The friction of each footfall on this “bitter” morning announces winter’s presence.  Friction and heat.  Heat in January. Heat as concept, a marker of life remains in my memory.  Can you imagine the feel of warmth, to move about in a verdant landscape? ... Read More Read More - [So Sorry, No More Room On This Board](https://everyangel.org/so-sorry-no-more-room-on-this-board/): …[the] awful energy of striving after Certainty, in a mythically thinking and highly emotional –fantastic age is quite remarkable. “Grant me but a certainty, ye gods!” is the prayer of Parmenides, “and be it, in an ocean of Uncertainty, only a board, broad enough to lie on! Everything becoming, everything luxuriant, varied, blossoming, deceiving,... Read More Read More - [Ennui !](https://everyangel.org/ennui/): Late again to Starbucks today.  Restless night, waking at 2AM and lying still, waiting for sleep to return. Another session, looking at this screen wondering what to write.  Sometimes there is a theme that bears more words, thought and development. But is anything possibly a start over? According to Parmenides everything is apriori inscribed,... Read More Read More - [Empty Husks Of Words](https://everyangel.org/empty-husks-of-words/): I continue to read Nietzsche’s description of the philosophers who came before Socrates/Plato.  Plato is the watershed of the intellectual heritage of the West.  Plato, a composer of theatrical drama introduces us to Socrates by his collection of Socratic Dialogues.  Socrates is an example, teacher/role model.  He instructs by provoking reflection, the exercise of... Read More Read More - [The Great World-Child](https://everyangel.org/the-great-world-child/): Another bitter day. The number at the bottom left of this screen informs that the outside air temperature is -12 degrees F. I am satisfied to have books, more to think about and to write about and a warm place to be safe. Everyone is not so fortunate. I continue reading Nietzsche on the... Read More Read More - [Fire Playing With Itself](https://everyangel.org/fire-playing-with-itself/): Monday morning a few minutes before 9AM. The outside temperature is minus 10 degrees Fahrenheit.  I am tempted to regard cold as if “that” were a fixed state of matter. Especially when opening the glass storm door before dark, it’s frosted over, opaque with translucent white. The vehicle warmed up for 20 minutes. I... Read More Read More - [Perfection?](https://everyangel.org/perfection/): The Habit of Perfection by Gerard Manley Hopkins Elected Silence, sing to me And beat upon my whorlèd ear, Pipe me to pastures still and be The music that I care to hear. Shape nothing, lips; be lovely-dumb: It is the shut, the curfew sent From there where all surrenders come Which only make... Read More Read More - [On Going South In Winter](https://everyangel.org/on-going-south-in-winter/): I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter. What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man, You cannot say, or guess, for you know only A heap of broken images, where the sun beats, And the dead tree gives no shelter,... Read More Read More - [The Waste Land Continued](https://everyangel.org/considering-the-waste-land/): Friday afternoon. Dawn brought a snowfall to the area. We have not seen this much snow in a number of winters. My daughter-in-law and I dedicated an early morning session to shoveling. More is to come. Reason led us to clear the vehicles, then prepare to do the same again a few hours later.... Read More Read More - [More Thunder](https://everyangel.org/more-thunder/): V. What the Thunder Said There is not even silence in the mountains But dry sterile thunder without rain There is not even solitude in the mountains But red sullen faces sneer and snarl From doors of mudcracked houses                              ... Read More Read More - [What The Thunder Said](https://everyangel.org/what-the-thunder-said/): The Waste Land By T. S. Eliot V.  What The Thunder Said Then spoke the thunderD A                                                                           400Datta: what have we given?My friend, blood shaking my heartThe awful daring of a moment’s surrenderWhich an age of prudence can never retractBy this, and this only, we have existed                     405Which is not to be found in... Read More Read More - [Holding On](https://everyangel.org/holding-on-2/): [By] thus selecting and precipitating the unusual, astounding, difficult, and divine, Philosophy marks the boundary lines dividing her from Science in the same way as she does from Prudence by the emphasizing of the useless.   – Early Greek Philosophy and other Essays, by Friedrich Nietzsche, p. 73 Nietzsche paraphrases Aristotle to say that philosophy... Read More Read More - [Never Mind The Stench](https://everyangel.org/to-hear-and-smell-nothing/): The sky is a uniform gray, the traffic moves silently, on the far side of the Starbucks window on State Street here in Geneva.  Snow is predicted for the late afternoon or early evening.  Forecasters are almost apologetic for uncertainty.  They’re unable to predict how much snow will fall.  Computer models for weather much... Read More Read More - [The Living Legacy](https://everyangel.org/the-living-legacy/): Sunday, grey, road slick with a sheen of plowed snow, — that’s winter in the mid-west.  I do not mind the snow.  It is a blanket for nature.  Snow slows the pace of town-life, obstructing the efficiency, a machine-logic that accelerates, a reminder that winter’s cold is a sign.  Now is the season for... Read More Read More - [Preserving The Fourfold](https://everyangel.org/preserving-the-fourfold/): The edifices guard the fourfold. They are things that in their own way preserve the fourfold.To preserve the fourfold, to save the earth, to receive the sky, to await the divinities, to escort mortals-this fourfold preserving is the simple nature, the presencing, of dwelling. In this way, then, do genuine buildings give form to... Read More Read More - [Arch, Preen, Attack](https://everyangel.org/arch-preen-attack/): My intention has  been to learn more about Stoicism. Stoicism was (and is) a point of view as well as a practice located in history 4th century BC. Zeno of Citium facilitated a gathering on Stoa Poikile, the painted porch on the north side of the Athenian market place. This view that you are... Read More Read More - [Unheimlich! Unheimlich! Unheimlich!](https://everyangel.org/unheimlich-unheimlich-unheimlich/): Today is St. Patrick’s Day. We celebrated Ireland, and the Irish people as a family yesterday. Ireland and its inhabitants have always been hard scrabble. Rural, village life is not easy-city-living. And then there’s England. The British have been Ireland’s overlords until recently, Dec. 6, 1921. Even then the British held onto Northern Island.... Read More Read More - [Getting Clear](https://everyangel.org/getting-clear/): “To dare is to lose one’s footing momentarily. Not to dare is to lose oneself.” — Kierkegaard Well, which is it, what fate am I going to choose? To dare is to lose for the moment. Choose not, – and you lose yourself. Frankly I do not know if a “choice” at all is... Read More Read More - [Handed Over](https://everyangel.org/handed-over/): Human existence discovers itself as something unclear, even to itself, as to where it came from and where it is going. It is as if Dasein (existence) has been handed over to human beings, whose being is thereby revealed to be a burden with which they have been laden. Just why one has been... Read More Read More - [But We Differ](https://everyangel.org/but-we-differ/): I mentioned a book which I finished reading. The author caught me with a too abrupt ending. I wanted more. No doubt, the writer gave what he had to say, without attempting to gin-up a speculative conclusion. That was ideal, and how much courage does that require? That is – strength to be silent... Read More Read More - [God, Love, Rock & Roll](https://everyangel.org/god-love-rock-roll/): I wonder if this is how Charlie Brown felt, that rush of adrenaline, to imagine a perfect kick of the ball and then, – well nothing. Or almost nothing. Charlie is seen to fall on his head. Finishing up a difficult and satisfying book, The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism by Nishitani Keiji, I anticipated a... Read More Read More - [To Check Out But Never Leave](https://everyangel.org/to-check-out-but-never-leave/): A friend asked, “What are you going to write about today?” I had a vague idea which I vaguely described to him. The look back at forty years or so of establishing and operating a company, the challenges, some failures, and those successes -now come into focus. My life appears as the individualized version,... Read More Read More - [Cool Is A Cage](https://everyangel.org/cool-is-a-cage/): These words come from Joan Westenberg’s newsletter. Contrary my natural inclination, I cannot but resonate with her point. It is this involuntary feeling – to preserve decorum is indirectly to “kiss the ring.”  At the very least, to begin, – a push away from the starting block. You and I must find our voices. While... Read More Read More - [The Inverted World](https://everyangel.org/the-inverted-world/): Philosophy by its very nature is esoteric; for itself is neither made for the masses nor is susceptible of being cooked up for them. It is philosophy only because it goes exactly contrary to the understanding and thus even more so to “sound common sense,” the so-called healthy human understanding. Which actually means the... Read More Read More - [Gutfeld Naked](https://everyangel.org/gutfeld-naked/): Yesterday Laura and I discussed a Fox celebrity who as interviewed on NPR by Scott Simon. I listen to very little radio with the exception of several rock n’ roll music stations. I had not heard the interview. Nor was I familiar with Greg Gutfeld, one of the Fox entertainers. His show is late-night,... Read More Read More - [Being Normal](https://everyangel.org/being-normal/): I am more than midway the Nishitani book. It is a challenging read introducing me to literature that I have only heard others speak of. In this quoted passage the author comments upon Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. At this moment 9:09AM Starbucks is busy, almost crowded. I can hear the buzz... Read More Read More - [The Mouth of Sauron](https://everyangel.org/the-mouth-of-sauron-2/): In years past I read The Lord of the Rings trilogy by J. R. R. Tolkien. His work is literature that changed my life, with painterly scenes that I’ll never forget. Tolkien’s ideas and ideals are still warm within my psyche. Worth noting too, Peter Jackson captured the power of the Middle Earth saga in cinema... Read More Read More - [Toad Of Chaos](https://everyangel.org/toad-of-destruction/): Thursday. Thursday is halfway to Friday. A compass heading is an orientation of sorts. That’s something I suppose, to believe you are located here or there in space and time. The two guys seated at the table to the right of me are bowed in prayer. I used to do that, so I “get... Read More Read More - [No Ashes](https://everyangel.org/no-ashes/): Wednesday, Ash Wednesday. Once again at Starbucks, sans the smear of ash in the sign of the cross on my forehead. I do not belong to the Catholic community. I was not raised to believe in the Catholic church or its tenets, a shear accident of birth. The season of lent is something I... Read More Read More - [Did We Build This Ship To Wreck?](https://everyangel.org/fat-tuesday/): Raining outside, a gentle spring rain and the sky is overcast. There are days like this, to remind that every cloud has a silver lining. The wildflower seeds that I scattered yesterday are responding, as I write, to the H²0 that moistens, softens the outer covering. The inner living kernel will activate soon… Stay... Read More Read More - [Child And Mighty Ruler](https://everyangel.org/child-and-mighty-ruler/): It’s Monday morning. I watched the Oscar Awards event on television with Laura before bedtime. Memories linger. I am fascinated by the exuberance and delight on a face when the envelope is opened.  Filmmakers, perhaps a director, a special effects professional, or an actor/actress hears their name called, a singular affirmation of excellence bestowed... Read More Read More - [Becoming A Child](https://everyangel.org/becoming-a-child/): Sunday morning. Why be “all in”, attempting a “full throttle” life all of the time? I have such conversations with myself. Sure that’s the my temptation. But, I know better. Calling a “time out,” taking some time for rest on the bench, to use a sports metaphor, is in the interest of playing the... Read More Read More - [The Unteachable](https://everyangel.org/the-unteachable-2/): Intermission is timely. At midpoint of a soul stirring performative event one is glad when the lights go up and everyone is invited to stand, and perhaps visit the restroom. Perhaps you’d wait with others at the Bar for a glass of white or red to take as you return to your seat. This... Read More Read More - [More Becoming The Lion](https://everyangel.org/more-becoming-the-lion/): Nietzsche advocates that I become “the lion.” I offer these lines as a snap-shot of the condition of mind and heart of Lion-like existence. This point converges to our condition in Trump-land, a weak autocrat, elected by a majority of Americans to make their lives better. The question is unavoidable – Who the fuck... Read More Read More - [Becoming The Lion](https://everyangel.org/becoming-the-lion/): These thoughts have taken me longer than usual to formulate, to write. The second movement of Nietzsche’s vision-story of a camel that changes into a lion is well worth reading/absorbing as one would taste an exquisitely prepared appetizer. Why should one desire, or better, – need to become a lion? So far I am... Read More Read More - [Heavy Lift Life](https://everyangel.org/heavy-lift-life/): Lately I’ve reflected upon the idea of “conversion.” That moment, as if illuminated by a closeby flash of lightning, the lay of the land transformed in appearance, you recognize an alternative, a different course than the one so familiar. Perhaps the conversion, the transformation of view comes upon one gradually, a kind of dawning... Read More Read More - [Offer You Can’t Refuse](https://everyangel.org/greatest-bait-and-switch/): It [religion] consummates one’s dissatisfaction with oneself, and at that extreme point gives one satisfaction in “God.” It pushes weariness with humanity to the limit, and offers instead the image of a divine savior; It takes away one’s taste for life on earth entirely, and promotes the quest for a “higher world.” The Self-Overcoming... Read More Read More - [Cowboy](https://everyangel.org/cowboy/): Friend Zarathustra has come, the guest of guests. Now the world laughs, the great curtain is rent. The wedding day has come for light and darkness Beyond Good and Evil, by Friedrich Nietzsche, “From High Mountains: Aftersong.” I attended a second showing of The Million Dollar Quartet , at the Stolop Island Theatre in Aurora.... Read More Read More - [Abyss Nausea](https://everyangel.org/abyss-nausea/): Sunday. What to write? I have read and am mulling over the prospect of “eternal recurrence.” This is the concluding idea from Nietzsche’s writings. I mean that everything that has happened, every human who has ever lived, every word spoken (including a roar of support for a MMA favorite, or a delicate and tentative... Read More Read More - [The Miracle](https://everyangel.org/the-miracle/): More thoughts from Nietzsche? Rumination on types of nihilism? Topics, all relevant to day-to-day life, which I intend to examine. On the other hand this remarkable collection of insights came my way. The current condition of America is described by the envelopment of the old Republican Party by the Trump movement, and his accession... Read More Read More - [Devoted Children Play](https://everyangel.org/devoted-children-play/): Sometimes I have something in mind to write. At other times nothing in particular has come to me. Life is a moving current, languid, – then that sound ahead becomes a roaring white water. Just attend to the friction of movement, (there’s always friction) some topic will rise to the surface of consciousness about... Read More Read More - [A Poetic Filling In](https://everyangel.org/a-poetic-filling-in/): February 20th feels midwinter. The exterior temperature registered two degrees this morning, though day by day there is more daylight. Waking at 6AM now is rising in the dawn, rather than dark of night. What do I mean by “middle of winter”? Certainly I intend this human’s embodied experience of winter 2025. I did... Read More Read More - [Two Gendered World](https://everyangel.org/two-gendered-world/): Wednesday is mid-week. Sometimes it happens in the middle, one is able to with a backward look, take measure of where one has come. Are we in the middle? In the middle of what? I was urged yesterday to abstain from glancing at my iphone news feed. None of those snippets was positive, “good... Read More Read More - [NASCAR & Pissing Excellence](https://everyangel.org/nascar-pissing-excellence/): Yesterday, Sunday afternoon I attempted to watch the NASCAR race at Daytona. I cannot remember the last time I listened/watched a “stock car” race on television. At the time watching NASCAR became similar to watching golf. The televised races seemed to be perfect for napping. I lasted about 20 minutes, then I had to... Read More Read More - [Kendrick Lamar Kicks Me In The Shin](https://everyangel.org/kendrick-lamar-kicks-me-in-the-shin/): What the fuck are you doing? My better judgment kicks me in the shin, about what I am about to write. I reply that I just think I am obligated to recognize a person’s work no matter if I barely understand the genre. Humans owe the truth to one another. Wouldn’t you agree? To... Read More Read More - [Playing For Time](https://everyangel.org/playing-for-time/): Saturday morning dawns a pleasant 32 degrees F. There’s a fresh snowfall. Today is a gift for our enjoyment. Weather forecast’s feature single digit days ahead. Every day is a gift, a bonus. One of the lessons which Thoreau has to teach in his writings about Walden Pond. Like a child greeting the morning... Read More Read More - [NO ONE GIVES A FUCK ABOUT YOUR POEMS](https://everyangel.org/no-one-gives-a-fuck-about-your-poems/): To a Young Poet Zaina Alsous I don’t usually write because I’m too busy being afraid of it. Not of writing but the it. It’s more like breaking open a fruit. Not to taste but to see what bleeds out. Here is a country. Here is a person in that country who has no papers but... Read More Read More - [Thumbs Up](https://everyangel.org/thumbs-up/): I am reading a new book, the Self-Overcoming of NIHILISM by Nishiani Keiji, translated by Graham Parkes with Setsuko Aihara. [Nihilism], an existential problemin which the being of the self is revealedto the self itselfas somethinggroundless… The phenomenon of nihilism showsthat our historical life has lost its groundas objective spirit,that the value system which... Read More Read More - [Screaming Into Snow](https://everyangel.org/screaming-into-snow/): Today is Wednesday, midweek. Snow is expected. I am happy that the snow will cover everything in a blanket of ice-white-crystal. I hunger to see all, everywhere, the possibility of purity. I know, I know this is a psychological need, a fabricated abstraction, akin to what Plato meant by “the good.” . Such abstractions... Read More Read More - [Stardust And Tired](https://everyangel.org/stardust-and-tired/): I offer some lines and phrases from the story-poem Stardust by Hisham Bustani. Tired of turning the dials of history. I LOOK AT THEM: they are motionless and shackled, sap sucked dry, faces covered with imbecilic smiles. Who are these people… (First answer) Physical systems change…from highly ordered to more disordered. Entropy The entropy... Read More Read More - [Technology As Transformative Power](https://everyangel.org/technology-as-transformative-power/): Yesterday was an unofficial American national holiday. The final game of the NFL season was held in New Orleans, The Super Bowl. Ostensibly the athletic championship is a thin pretext for one of the most expensive marketing spectacles of the year, fueled by many of our largest companies. The component of sport is a... Read More Read More - [Come!](https://everyangel.org/come/): The silhouette sharpens the electric saw with the sheaf of papers,hitting the pages with the saw, and the red splotcheson the walls move around, coalescing and separating; A hammer and sickle appear,no, it’s a five-pointed star, or maybe a stylized arrow-like jeemnext to an elongated map… Is it a victory sign?A sun? A peasant?A... Read More Read More - [Questions Don't Amount To Much](https://everyangel.org/questions-dont-amount-to-much/): A gray but mild February day, almost like a Southern winter day. Climate warming amounts to season after season of decreased snowfall, of fewer days of single-digit bitter cold… More heat means exponential acceleration, intensity, a supercharged process,… Opinions become irrelevant. A slow breaking of what we thought to be normal… I read two... Read More Read More - [Freefall of May or Maybe or Might Not or What If or Perhaps](https://everyangel.org/freefall/): In the United States,Congress, the president and the courtsare supposed to keep an eye on one another — to stop any one branch of government frombecoming too powerful. President Trump is showing uswhat happens when those checks and balances break down. The courts may still intervene,as a judge did yesterday to halt Trump’s offer... Read More Read More - [Tucked Away](https://everyangel.org/tucked-away/): Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people. -Carl Sagan I’ve got my hands on a copy of Palestinian poet Hisham Bustani’s book of... Read More Read More - [Down Deep, Even Deeper](https://everyangel.org/down-deep-no-deeper/): What this brings us to, more or less, is a poetic, ironic analysis of events. Against the simulation of a linear history “in progress”, we have to accord a privileged status to these backfires, these malign deviations, these lightweight catastrophes which cripple an empire much more effectively than any great upheavals. We have to... Read More Read More - [Causes No Longer](https://everyangel.org/causes-no-longer/): If,in Chaos Theory, for sensitivity to initial conditions, we substitutesensitivity to final conditions,we are in the form of predestination,which is the form of fate. Poetic language also lives with predestination,with the imminence of its own endingand of reversibility between the ending and the beginning.it is predestined in this sense -it is an unconditional event,without... Read More Read More - [None Of This Is True](https://everyangel.org/none-of-this-is-true/): …we have to get used to the idea there will no longer be any end, that history itself has become interminable. Thus, when we speak of the ‘end of history’, the ‘end of the political’, the ‘end of the social’, the ‘end of ideologies’, none of this is true The worst of it all... Read More Read More - [The Big Crumb Ticket](https://everyangel.org/the-big-crumb-ticket/): We shall never experience the original chaos, the Big Bang; the file is closed on that; we weren’t there. But, where the final moment is concerned –the Big Crumb -we might have some hope of seeing that. Some hope of enjoying the end, to make up for not being able to enjoy the origin.... Read More Read More - [Groundhog Day](https://everyangel.org/groundhog-day/): We are, self evidently,entering upon a retroactive form of history,and all our ideas, philosophies and mental techniquesare progressively adapting to that model. We may even see this as an adventure,since the disappearance of the end is in itselfan original situation. It seems to be characteristic of our culture and our history,which cannot even manage... Read More Read More - [To Tweak The Flow](https://everyangel.org/to-tweak-the-flow/): Words are a lifeline: The connecting link between my inner awareness, the layered consciousness, and memories which we loosely call “self” to other selves, and to “the world. ” The connectors are a matter of words, grammar and syntax.  Therefore a deft touch with words is key to becoming more real, the process of... Read More Read More - [A Hurricane Ending In A Beat Of Butterfly Wings](https://everyangel.org/a-hurricane-ending-in-a-beat-of-butterfly-wings/): Cause and effect reversibility… I get into reading Jean Baudrillard because this philosopher bends language reminiscent of poets. Change and times passage are interchangeable, the given of our experience on this planet. We tip our hats to Heraclitus, the pre-Socratic thinker who famously said that ‘you cannot step into the same river twice’. Another... Read More Read More - [Having A Bad Day](https://everyangel.org/everyone-having-a-bad-day/): An inauspicious day from the get-go by Hisham Bustani     translated from the Arabic by Alice Guthrie Some damn thing made her mom start talking to her about her fiancé yet again. “He’s just not cast from the same clay we are,” she said, “and I don’t think he’s really got it in... Read More Read More - [Coda](https://everyangel.org/coda-3/): No really! This is the final of my comments about The Dawn of Day. The writer, Nietzsche, bids that we never forget this one principle of flight. A majority of our fellows cannot fly. That I must accept. A limited few will be able to join the adventures on the horizon of thought. Best... Read More Read More - [Just A Bit More](https://everyangel.org/just-a-bit-more/): My intention was the preceding post as my final comment on The Dawn of Day. After all the featured quotation by Nietzsche appears on the last page of his book. And yet three more “pearls of wisdom” remain, which beg for comment. The first of the three aphorisms is equivalent to a Molotov cocktail... Read More Read More - [And Finally](https://everyangel.org/and-finally/): 555. We ought to avoid events when we know that even the least important of them frequently enough leave a strong impression upon us —and these we cannot avoid. —The thinker must possess an approximate canon of all the things he still wishes to experience. These three aphorisms, or put differently, pearls of wisdom... Read More Read More - [Not Even Light Escapes](https://everyangel.org/not-even-light-escapes/): What will preserve us from this unlimited frenzy, this desire to abolish the horizon as perpetual line of flight, as virtual line of flight which must remain virtual, But which we are crossing today -towards that ‘event horizon’ beyond which nothing happens, nothing has meaning any longer and whence not even light escapes. The... Read More Read More - [A Sharp White Blade](https://everyangel.org/a-sharp-white-blade/): Six AM and it was pitch black. In the sky a blinding white moon, a crescent sharper than any blade. I felt cold bite into my face. I drove the winding neighborhood street. Three black forms moved across a yard to pass just out of headlight range. Deer. Absolutely those wild animals were hungry.... Read More Read More - [To Come Full Circle](https://everyangel.org/to-come-full-circle/): A day or so ago, I was seated as is my habit, here at Starbucks. Midwestern winters have returned, with single digit cold and some snow. Also who is not weary with the media onslaught, the hash of Trumpism? The spirit of the age is that of toxic patriarchy. My instincts are on-alert. The... Read More Read More - [Unforgiven](https://everyangel.org/unforgiven/): The new administration is moving at warp speed. Tech moguls skurrey, gathering as baby chicks around a brood hen, to Trump.  The New York Times reports that new leaders are quickly being appointed to the U. S. Prosecutors offices. The President believes with justification that he has carte blanche to act at will. More... Read More Read More - [Immortality](https://everyangel.org/immortality-3/): We can only arriveat a clear conception of immortalityin a stable, unchanging universe.In a universe where a divine sanctionensures the continuity of the cosmic order (Kepler’s universe),immortality is akin to a natural propertyof the human microcosm.It is merely the logical extensionof the continuity of an order.The universe could not change since allis ordained by... Read More Read More - [January 20, 2025](https://everyangel.org/january-20-2025/):  THE SECOND COMING Turning, turning in the widening gyre   The falcon cannot hear the falconerThings fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Turning and turning in the widening gyreMere anarchy is loosed upon the world,The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned;  The best lack all convictions, while the worst Are full... Read More Read More - [Charnel-house Of Images](https://everyangel.org/charnel-house-of-images/): I have no plans to join millions around the world viewing the inauguration. I’d rather dedicate my awareness to other things. I imagine Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, Chew – appointed members of the royal court. They will occupy prime seating close to the man forwarded to the oval office by a system that long since... Read More Read More - [Of Profound Irresponsibility](https://everyangel.org/of-profound-irresponsibility/): This short story is one of the most remarkable I’ve ever read! How is it possible for a male to express with such insight, aspects of pregnancy which only a female is directly acquainted? Surely the description of such an expectation of ‘the unknown’ must be attributed to extraordinary observation. And then the hidden... Read More Read More - [Rapture Of Reality](https://everyangel.org/rapture-of-reality/): I purchased a painting by the late artist, Ed Dlugopolski, who lived in Batavia. I did not know Ed. I am sure that I would have enjoyed his company. Ed was an art educator. He taught high school. The acrylic painting is called, The Innocent Victims of War. Ed’s painting cannot be labeled as... Read More Read More - [Running On (out of) Empty](https://everyangel.org/running-on-out-of-empty/): At Barnes & Noble a group of us talked and listened for almost two hours. The topic igniting the discussion: fervent desires when acted upon, change the course of the future in expected and unexpected ways. One member at the table observed that every living thing is involved with adapting to an environment, therefore... Read More Read More - [Written Over The Door](https://everyangel.org/written-over-the-door/): “What do I matter?”is written over the doorof the thinker of the future. The Dawn of Day by Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. by J. M. Kennedy, aphorism 547 Of course each of us that lives believes – that “I” am here as an undercover Messiah. One way or another I (and you) desire to be... Read More Read More - [Charity Cannibalism](https://everyangel.org/charity-cannibalism/): The very idea of a market, or better, of markets places/techniques of exchange, for the purpose of trading on human misery – is obscene. The video appeals for donations to alleviate the suffering of children in foreign lands reach crescendo during the weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas. In January over the dinner evening news... Read More Read More - [At A Stroke](https://everyangel.org/at-a-stroke/): A few minutes ago a friend mentioned in passing that he intends to be absent from Starbucks for a few days. He plans to be on a cruise in the Caribbean, out of the country, anticipating the inauguration of the Trump administration on January 20th. Coincidentally I happened to be reading this text at... Read More Read More - [Contra Greed](https://everyangel.org/contra-greed/): Over the past several day’s I have read and contributed to an email discussion on the topic of greed. There’s no secret that greed, becomes manifest as an approved American virtue. The 1 percent, the uber wealthy are celebrated, feted in print media, regarded as exemplars of an ideal to be emulated. Indeed perhaps... Read More Read More - [Moralists And Intuitives](https://everyangel.org/moralists-and-intuitives/): What we have at present in our country is a ‘dialog of the deaf’. A group of eight to ten friends recently considered the failure of communication between Americans. I mean between those who believe a bygone way-of-life, paternalist, authority based, moral principles as reasonable, the only option for creating a future – and... Read More Read More - [Jimmy Carter, 1924-2024](https://everyangel.org/jimmy-carter-1924-2024/): It is snowing outside. It is the first snow of the season to significantly cover everything, and the snowplows are out. Snow covered asphalt reacquaints us with the laws of physics. With a warming climate, winter snow, as it happens, comes later, and less of it. I can remember the blinding snowstorms of many... Read More Read More - [A Truck And A Hole](https://everyangel.org/a-truck-and-a-hole/): The wildfires now surround Los Angles are uncontained. This from the update received several hours ago from the New York Times: Los Angeles is surrounded by fire. The city’s major wildfires have spread, and a new one started overnight in Hollywood Hills. It threatened a wealthy neighborhood and landmarks synonymous with America’s self-image —... Read More Read More - [Oozing, Leaking, Bleeding](https://everyangel.org/oozing-leaking-bleeding/): Evil was visible, opaque, localized… We have exorcised it, liberated it, liquidated it. But has it, for all that, ceased to be Evil? Not at all: it has become fluid, liquid, interstitial, viral. That is the transparence of Evil. It is not a transparency in the sense that you might see through it. It... Read More Read More - [After The Orgy](https://everyangel.org/after-the-orgy/): January 20th, inauguration day represents for me a frontier, a line of demarcation in time. Following that day I expect palpable change to swiftly be imposed upon the country. Efforts ongoing to erase the crimes committed by the president-elect are sure to proceed with enhanced efficiency to their revisionistic end. America is to be... Read More Read More - [Beautiful Madness](https://everyangel.org/beautiful-madness/): Perhaps I ought to let this go, pass on with nothing to say. And yet, the scene sketched here is cut diamond-like, an illustration of the paradox of our being. Homo sapiens is a troubled and a magnificent animal. I invite you to mindfully read, to consider… Love wishes to spare the other to... Read More Read More - [Drifting](https://everyangel.org/drifting/): Two weeks. Fourteen days remain and then Trump is inaugurated, his administration installed to pilot the ship-of-state, as per “the will of the people.” Elections and inauguration rituals are considered sacrosanct, a ‘gift of the gods’. The illusion is intentional. The desire of men long since dead was expressed in our Constitution. The institutions... Read More Read More - [In The Long Run](https://everyangel.org/in-the-long-run/): How many really individual actions are left undone merely because before performing them we perceive or suspect that they will be misunderstood! —those actions, for example, which have some intrinsic value, both in good and evil. The more highly an age or a nation values its individuals, therefore, and the more right and ascendancy... Read More Read More - [All That We Have Loved Best](https://everyangel.org/all-that-we-have-loved-best/): Both within and beyondthe confines of historywe might imagine that we were listeningto a continual funeral oration: we have buried, and are still burying,all that we have loved best, our thoughts, and our hopes,receiving in exchange pride, gloria mundi—that is, the pomp of the graveside speech. It is thusthat everything is made good! Even... Read More Read More - [What! More Worlds To Create!](https://everyangel.org/what/): Yesterday was dedicated to sorting more than several thousand photos captured in 2024. The files are archived from the iphone to this laptop. Moments in time were photographed in response to an undefined sense in my body. “Right here and right now ‘this’ penetrates more deeply than I can know,…” Or even, “has meaning,... Read More Read More - [How Mad Am I?](https://everyangel.org/how-mad-am-i/): Even if we were mad enough to consider all our opinions as truth, we should nevertheless not wish them alone to exist. I cannot see why we should ask for an autocracy and omnipotence of truth: it is sufficient for me to know that it is a great power. Truth, however, must meet with... Read More Read More - [Tis The Eve'n Of The Abyss](https://everyangel.org/new-years-eve-the-abyss/): Gray and raining outside. Starbucks is momentarily, unnaturally quiet, only the two of us minding our screens and our thoughts. Why so silent? Is this the edge? I mean the edge (never with a safety rail) of the abyss? Perhaps it’s extraordinary to know when one is proximate to the edge, a “hazard zone”... Read More Read More - [Male Fantasy](https://everyangel.org/male-fantasy/): The fundamental male fantasyof the womanis not her seductive appearance,but the idea,that the dazzling appearanceconcealssome imponderablemystery. -Jacques Lacan There is something tragic, simultaneously sad and delicious with respect to Lacan’s quote. How could this possibly be denied? The male – female dynamic-attraction is as old as Helen of Troy. Perhaps you remember Helen, according... Read More Read More - [Harassment](https://everyangel.org/harrassment/): The goal is to avoid harassment. But no harassment means no joy either. [Harassment] can mean nothing more than the excessive proximity of the other with his/her desires and fears and pleasures. The other is Ok as long as he does not intrude as long as he/she is not really other. The central human... Read More Read More - [2025](https://everyangel.org/2025-2/): The journey to better understand Jacques Lacan’s system of thought continues. In a few days we will turn the page on 2024. 2025 brings the inauguration of Donald Trump on January 20th. The first quotation featured in today’s post reminded me of the President elect. Our institutions proved hollow, without power to incarcerate him... Read More Read More - [Paid For In Advance](https://everyangel.org/paid-for-in-advance/): Another gray day in the Fox River Valley. My day began around 6:30 AM at Starbucks in downtown Geneva. Baristas there are old acquaintances, and it was good to see everyone again. Then several friends came in. The better part of the morning was dedicated to pleasant conversation. Is there a more congenial, satisfying... Read More Read More - [Morning After](https://everyangel.org/morning-after/): A  hangover is what this feels like. Perhaps you recall your last hangover? It is Thursday morning after Christmas day. You know, that day anticipated by everyone with the highest of expectation. For my adult self, reason/experience insists “that longing is fantasy, a shape shifting, media driven, ginned up illusion” so snap out of... Read More Read More - [Christmas Eve](https://everyangel.org/christmas-eve-3/): Christmas Eve and I begin the day at Starbucks… Why wouldn’t I? Beginning a day, any day with some reading, some contemplation, and pleasant conversation is agreeable to me. That is what I want. For the most part, on many occasions I have no idea about what I want. If you were to ask,... Read More Read More - [Dance At Winter Solstice](https://everyangel.org/dance-at-winter-solstice/): As intended, I made a fire at nightfall on the winter solstice. The family left the warmth of the house to see the fire that by itself cut the frost of the night. I made the fire as a memorial of sorts for those who might have been with us, my parents, the grandmother... Read More Read More - [Death And Rebirth](https://everyangel.org/death-and-rebirth/): Today, the 21st of December is Winter Solstice. Darkness will be at maximum duration. In the Northern Hemisphere the earth’s pole is tilted at greatest distance from the sun. But that is not all… Spring is coming! I wish that I knew a metaphor of greater exuberance, of unalloyed childlike anticipation to celebrate the... Read More Read More - [Caroling To Resist](https://everyangel.org/christmas-song-of-resistance/): Nothing much this morning. I have nothing to say. This tune though, seems apt for the season. The days grow short, slowly, too slow for immediate notice. And then December 21st is the winter solstice, the shortest day. I think that I will make a fire in the fire pit at dusk, my act... Read More Read More - [Looking Where I'd Prefer Not To See](https://everyangel.org/looking-where-id-prefer-not-to-see/): There are, indeed, events, forms and oscillations which are only open to a long contemplative gaze, but remain hidden to the working gaze; things that are subtle, fleeting; inconspicuous things, minor things [das Geringe]; that hover or retreat, which evade any violent efforts at their capture. The Scent of Time by Byung-chul Han, trans.... Read More Read More - [Not Just Another Day](https://everyangel.org/not-just-another-day/): Another day, and yet not just ‘another’ day. There has never been, or can there ever be a segment of space and time that mirrors, replicates this one. The “eternal return” as a rule-of-thumb is a safe bet.  Patterns become familiar. We’ve seen them before. Would we expect anything else? Matter and the personalities... Read More Read More - [Savage Landscapes](https://everyangel.org/savage-landscapes/): The lines quoted below were read several days ago. I was confused. I thought about revisiting Nietzsche’s point of view, as more time was needed to absorb what he seemed to say. A collection of blown glass pumpkins that I encountered while Christmas shopping yesterday reminded me of the written lines about beauty. The... Read More Read More - [Not Again, Yes Again!](https://everyangel.org/not-again-yes-again/): “What have I done? What possessed me, again I am here, trembling. One way or another I am going to live to tell about this!” – This is exactly what I’ll feel when I am seated and the harness is tightened, into the C8 Corvette Z06. I signed up with Xtreme Xperience for four... Read More Read More - [Fooling Ourselves Again](https://everyangel.org/fooling-ourselves-again/): Another NFL match-up between the Detroit Lions and the Greenbay Packers is ‘on tap’ for today. I chose to find a table at Barnes & Noble for some writing, rather than view the game. A NFL contest between two top ranked teams is exciting, something I enjoy. Nevertheless I felt compelled to think and... Read More Read More - [Just Two Things](https://everyangel.org/just-two-things/): Why does the man not see the things? He himself is in the way: he conceals the things. The Dawn of Day by Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. by J. M. Kennedy, aphorism 438 –*– Because we have reached the point of being able to see through a thing we believe that henceforth it can offer... Read More Read More - [A Higher And Worse Situation](https://everyangel.org/a-higher-and-worse-situation/): With every day that passes, January 20, 2025 approaches. Inauguration day for the Trump administration draws near. Words written in 1881 describe the situation for many of us.  Not for all Americans of course. Many stand with the captain, who by their ballot, is to command the helm of the ship of state. He... Read More Read More - [To Toast Another Beginning](https://everyangel.org/to-toast-another-beginning/): I wrote before about a round table discussion of a few days ago. Six of us were asked to explore dimensions of our experience that troubled us, which cause a feeling of dread. A few days have passed. I continue to remember a passionate statement made there by a good friend that humankind is... Read More Read More - [The Main Question](https://everyangel.org/the-main-question/): I am attracted to Nietzsche’s thought because he pursues as a cheetah on the savanna, question after question, wrestling each in turn into submission. Without assumptions about answers, he is interested to seize the main, root question, in order to clarify the alternatives inscribed within such a question. Several evenings earlier I attended a... Read More Read More - [Do You Hear What I Hear?](https://everyangel.org/31209-2/): Tuesday, the weather begins to slide toward the sub-freezing that we’d expect of a midwest winter.  Luigi Mangione was arrested for the assassination of the United Health Care C.E.O., Brian Thompson. Mangione was eating lunch at a McDonald’s when he was questioned by police. Weather, murder and arrest, all are apparent of the day-to-day... Read More Read More - [Merry Christmas II](https://everyangel.org/merry-christmas-ii/): Many men/women may certainly have attained that humility which says credo quia absurdum est, and sacrifices its reason; but, so far as I know, not one has attained to that humility which after all is only one step further, and which says creda quia absurdus sum. The Dawn of Day, by Friedrich Nietzsche, trans.... Read More Read More - [How To Ruin Your Soul](https://everyangel.org/how-to-ruin-your-soul/): “Sin” is a tawdry, toxic concept. We’d all be better off, had we not been handed this sticky, absurd contradiction. It is the accusation, the indictment that one is irremediably, morally flawed. One is biased in favor of preservation of the life-force with which one awakens in this world. I know, my description highlights... Read More Read More - [Merry Christmas](https://everyangel.org/merry-christmas/): We are like shop-windows, where we ourselves are constantly arranging, concealing, or setting in the foreground those supposed qualities which others attribute to us —in order to deceive ourselves. The Dawn of Day* by Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. by J. M. Kennedy, aphorism 385 *There are many dawns which have yet to shed their light.—RIG-VEDA... Read More Read More - [Beware, She's Beautiful She's Dangerous](https://everyangel.org/beware-shes-beautiful-and-dangerous/): This J. D. Vance clip has been at the forefront of media coverage of the election campaign. In a 2021 interview with Fox News host Tucker Carlson, then-Senate-candidate Vance complained that the U.S. was being run by Democrats, corporate oligarchs and “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives... Read More Read More - [The Unteachable](https://everyangel.org/the-unteachable/): “something unteachable, a granite of spiritual fate”  Those written words make me shudder.  Do I detect an odor of a timeworn notion of destiny? I mean to say that even with the privilege of education, or perhaps of financial resources, of means – there’s a certain core that is untouchable by any circumstance, a... Read More Read More - [Graffiti](https://everyangel.org/graffiti/): Who doesn’t prefer approval, being well received, thought of with affection by one’s fellows. Nietzsche was no different than you or I. That variety of genteel, decorous social embrace, idealized in storytelling of the Victorian era is what we’d all wish, because then each of us has his/her place in the tribe without fissure... Read More Read More - [A Drop Of Cruelty](https://everyangel.org/a-drop-of-cruelty/): People should rethink their ideas about cruelty and open up their eyes; they should finally learn impatience, so that big, fat, presumptuous mistakes like this will stop wandering virtuously and audaciously about. We’d like to believe we Americans are of all people the most humane. We want what is best, which we fervently believe... Read More Read More - [Same As They Have Always Been](https://everyangel.org/same-as-they-have-always-been/): Yes, a taste for Nietzsche’s style of thought surely includes admiration for his sardonic manner of expression.  To attempt a paraphrase: Let’s move the conversation as far as possible from the subject of morality.  Shall we cling to the golden rule, satisfied that this mantra, as often as is brought to mind, is the... Read More Read More - [Spirits We Are Hiding](https://everyangel.org/spirits-all-are-hiding/): Liberals are misjudged and there is no remedy for that. That cannot be helped. You may wonder how the world appears to the liberal minded. The world is viewed as a changing matrix, an organism-like phenomenon which is perpetually searching a more efficient way, (by trial and error) an improved way of processing of... Read More Read More - [All The Love And Malice](https://everyangel.org/all-the-love-and-malice/): A friend’s comment to the post of yesterday inspired the choice of these lines. Here a train of thought describes a point of view of life in a society marked by affluence as well as by the violence of extreme poverty. Systemic exploitation amounts to healthcare you cannot afford, and doing without the benefits... Read More Read More - [A World Of The Almost](https://everyangel.org/a-world-of-the-almost/): WE IMMORALISTS! – This world as it concerns US, in which we need to love and be afraid, this almost invisible, inaudible world of subtle command, subtle obedience, a world of the “almost” in every respect, twisted, tricky, barbed, and loving: yes, it is well defended against clumsy spectators and friendly curiosity! We have... Read More Read More - [A Grain Of Salt](https://everyangel.org/a-grain-of-salt/): We discussed humor. There was speculation about the role of wry humor, the benefits of the proximity of laughter to our well being. I enjoy the presence of humorous individuals. I think that most do. My formative years were spent among people who in retrospect were humorless. They were moralists, that overweening focus upon... Read More Read More - [A Drifter Needing Rescue](https://everyangel.org/a-drifter-needing-rescue/): The uncomfortable, suffocating heat and humidity have moved on. Today is bright with sunlight, and agreeably mild. “So it goes” with the weather and with life.  It pays to pay attention to what is on the menu, to the “soup of the day” or to the Duck à l’Orange if it happens as the... Read More Read More - [Enough Luck](https://everyangel.org/luck-2/): This graphic was featured in a Sunday edition of the New York Times.  “Luck” – If you are lucky… Of course the entire point is the unknown of the future, your future and mine.  Would you delight to have a long life, winning against the odds, what we mean by luck?  I would. My... Read More Read More - [Dangerous And Crazy](https://everyangel.org/dangerous-and-crazy/): Hedonism, pessimism, utilitarianism, eudamonianism: these are all ways of thinking that measure the value of things according to pleasure and pain, which is to say according to incidental states and trivialities. They are all foreground ways of thinking and naivetes, and nobody who is conscious of both formative powers and an artist’s conscience will... Read More Read More - [To Taste And Love Again](https://everyangel.org/to-taste-and-love-again/): We men of “historical sense,” we do have our virtues – this cannot be denied. We are unassuming, selfless, modest, brave, full of self-overcoming, full of dedication, very grateful, very patient, very accommodating: – but for all that we are, perhaps, not very “tasteful.” Finally, let us admit to ourselves: what we men of... Read More Read More - [Desire](https://everyangel.org/desire/): This parable was received in a weekly email from Rob Brezsny, Freewill Astrology Newsletter. The newsletter edition from Brezsny, a fine writer, is an analysis of desire, the morality of craving. I will say no more. Just enjoy the story! THE MYSTERY OF THIRST Imagine this scene. I’m really thirsty—so dehydrated that I’m feeling... Read More Read More - [Anything For Love !?](https://everyangel.org/anything-for-love/): “And love?”–What! Even an action for love’s sake shall be “unegoistic”? But you fools–! “And the praise of the self- sacrificer?” –But whoever has really offered sacrifice knows that he wanted and obtained something for it –perhaps something from himself for something from himself; that he relinquished here in order to have more there,... Read More Read More - [Badly Endowed By Nature](https://everyangel.org/badly-endowed-by-nature/): The practice of judging and condemning morally, is the favorite revenge of the intellectually shallow on those who are less so, it is also a kind of indemnity for their being badly endowed by nature, and finally, it is an opportunity for acquiring spirit and BECOMING subtle –malice spiritualizes. They are glad in their... Read More Read More - [Contra Religious Posturing](https://everyangel.org/contra-religious-posturing/): Morality as attitude -is opposed to our taste nowadays. This is ALSO an advance, as it was an advance in our fathers that religion as an attitude finally became opposed to their taste, including the enmity and Voltairean bitterness against religion (and all that formerly belonged to freethinker- pantomime). It is the music in... Read More Read More - [Natural Born](https://everyangel.org/natural-born/): You need to have been born for any higher world; to say it more clearly, you need to have been bred for it: only your descent, your ancestry can give you a right to philosophy – taking that word in its highest sense. Even here, “bloodline” is decisive. The preparatory labor of many generations... Read More Read More - [Backyard Meditation](https://everyangel.org/backyard-meditation/): A backyard can be sublime. I confess to having no background in landscape design.  Anyone potentially may pay attention, admire the form and colors of a well cared for lawn, accent shrubs, etc..  The preponderance of the work is what I call “hand-work” -weeding, pruning with a hand cutter, picking up debris, arranging fallen stems... Read More Read More - [Standing Alone](https://everyangel.org/standing-alone/): These days, by contrast, when only the herd animal gets and gives honor in Europe [America], when “equal rights” could all too easily end up as equal wrongs (I mean, in waging a joint war on everything rare, strange, privileged, on the higher man, higher soul, higher duty, higher responsibility, on creative power and... Read More Read More - [Reaching For The Future](https://everyangel.org/reaching-for-the-future/): But true philosophers are commanders and legislators: they say “That is how it should be!” They are the ones who first determine the “where to?” and “what for?” of people… True philosophers reach for the future with a creative hand and everything that is and was becomes a means, a tool, a hammer for... Read More Read More - [Dahlias And Saying No](https://everyangel.org/pleasure-in-saying-no/): Thursday sunrise dawns with a clear sky. These are paradisiacal days. A friend’s dahlias are in full bloom, several are on display here at Starbucks.  We shouldn’t be deceived though, everything is not well here in paradise. The New York Times published a report showing that upward mobility, the income of working class whites... Read More Read More - [Level-headed Cruelty](https://everyangel.org/level-headed-cruelty/): In fact, these philosophers [of the future] admit to taking pleasure in saying no, in dissecting, and in a certain level-headed cruelty that knows how to guide a knife with assurance and subtlety, even when the heart is bleeding. They will be more severe (and perhaps not always with themselves alone) than humane people... Read More Read More - [No To Oppression](https://everyangel.org/now-a-fierce-no/): This passage is haunting. Europe of the late 19th century was on the cusp of shattering events.  July 28, 1914 was the inception of WWI, and September 1st, 1939 the Wehrmacht invaded Poland, arguably a continuation of the earlier conflict. Nietzsche wrote in 1886 describing the social and moral dislocations of the modern era.... Read More Read More - [About Beauty](https://everyangel.org/about-beauty/): Just finished reading an essay, Attuned to the Aesthetic by Tom Cochrane. The author proposed, suggested that beauty is a ground for morality. I did enjoy the essay, not simply because I also endorse his thesis, but because the seven pages were beautifully written, a smooth read. Could we say that to be involved... Read More Read More - [Farmer's Market](https://everyangel.org/farmers-market/): The Farmer’s Market does not disappoint. A weekly event, which replicates the open air commerce of many generations, universal, on every continent, – that is the Farmer’s Market.  The buying and selling is integrated with the producer, with the production of many types of goods, not limited to the produce which comes from sun,... Read More Read More - [The Way The World Ends](https://everyangel.org/the-way-the-world-ends/): I understand this poem was found in T. S. Eliot’s papers. It appears to have been written in the last years of his writing career.  The poem is a composition of poems which were previously written and published.  Near to the end of a journey one sometimes is able to understand how once seeming... Read More Read More - [Not Keeping Out Of The Way](https://everyangel.org/not-keeping-out-of-the-way/): If you hear anyone praised these days for living “wisely” or “like a philosopher” it basically just means he is “clever and keeps out of the way.” To the rabble, wisdom seems like a kind of escape, a device or trick for pulling yourself out of the game when things get rough. But the... Read More Read More - [Made Up Reality](https://everyangel.org/made-up-reality/): Again, the circle of friends settled in at Barnes & Noble, provoked to consider, to attempt a response to several challenges to conventional thought. Since antiquity, here in Europe and lately in America we have relied upon the assumption that each of us has a defined, stable identity, a “self” which we aim to... Read More Read More - [Someone Like Us](https://everyangel.org/someone-like-us/): …but someone with an uncommon eye for the overall danger that “humanity” itself will degenerate, someone like us, who has recognized the outrageous contingency that has been playing games with the future of humanity so far – games in which no hand and not even a “finger of God” has taken part! – someone... Read More Read More - [Steel Conscience, Bronze Heart](https://everyangel.org/steel-conscience-bronze-heart/): …a new type of philosopher and commander will be needed for this someday, and whatever hidden, dreadful, or benevolent spirits have existed on earth will pale into insignificance beside the image of this type. The image of such leaders hovers before our eyes: – may I say this out loud, you free spirits? The... Read More Read More - [Are You Strong Enough, Original Enough?](https://everyangel.org/are-you-strong-enough-original-enough/): We who have a different faith –, we who consider the democratic movement to be not merely an abased form of political organization, but rather an abased (a diminished) form of humanity, a mediocritization and depreciation of humanity in value: where do we need to reach with our hopes? – Towards new philosophers, there... Read More Read More - [Serendipity](https://everyangel.org/serendipity/): Our first full day in Coloma Michigan. The afternoon was spent by the lake, – walking and observing the life happening at the interface of water and land, by the ancient dunes, and in the lake enjoying the inflatable kayak. Spending these days by the lake, three generations of our family is serendipitous, a... Read More Read More - [Constraints](https://everyangel.org/constraints/): Taking a few days for a planned family visit to St. Joseph Michigan. We rent a large house a short walk from Lake Michigan. The adults of our extended family have the luxury of conversation about current events, challenges in the work-life, and about the opportunities presented by raising young children. One of the... Read More Read More - [Communal Pity](https://everyangel.org/communal-pity/): People in Europe [America] clearly know what Socrates claimed not to know, and what that famous old snake once promised to teach, – people these days “know” what is good and evil. Now it must sound harsh and strike the ear quite badly when we keep insisting on the following point: what it is... Read More Read More - [Sheeple Morality](https://everyangel.org/sheeple-morality/): How much or how little danger there is to the community or to equality in an opinion, in a condition or affect, in a will, in a talent, this is now the moral perspective: and      fear is once again the mother of morality. When the highest and strongest drives erupt in passion, driving... Read More Read More - [Grabbing Hold](https://everyangel.org/grabbing-hold/): For as long as there have been people, there have been herds of people as well (racial groups, communities, tribes, folk, states, churches), and a very large number of people who obey compared to relatively few who command. So, considering the fact that humanity has been the best and most long-standing breeding ground for... Read More Read More - [And It Follows From This...](https://everyangel.org/and-it-follows-from-this/): No mother doubts at the bottom of her heart that, in the child, she has given birth to a piece of property; no father questions his right to subject the child to his own ideas and valuations. In fact, there was a time (among the ancient Germans, for instance) when it seemed fair that... Read More Read More - [Dumb Goodwill To Believe](https://everyangel.org/dumb-goodwill-to-believe/): …the oldest and most secret processes ofall “knowledge and cognition”:there as here,rash hypotheses, fictions,the dumb good will to “believe,”and a lack of mistrust and patience develop first– our senses learn late and never fully learnto be refined, trusty, careful organs of knowledge. Given some stimulus,our eyesfind it more convenientto reproduce an imagethat they have... Read More Read More - [Giving Fair Due](https://everyangel.org/giving-fair-due/): The question of whether, with respect to the value of things, the instincts deserve more authority than reason (reason wants some ground or “what for?”, some purpose or utility behind our values and actions) – this is the same old moral problem that first emerged in the person of Socrates and divided opinions long... Read More Read More - [More On Reason](https://everyangel.org/more-on-reason/): The old theological problem of “faith” and “knowledge” – or, to be more precise, of instinct and reason – and so, the question of whether, with respect to the value of things, the instincts deserve more authority than reason (reason wants some ground or “what for?”, some purpose or utility behind our values and... Read More Read More - [Rules, Reasons And Reason](https://everyangel.org/my-thoughts-on-rules/): July 4th, Independence Day 2024 arrives.  It is overcast.  The roads were eerily quiet, no traffic.  I nodded to instinct and pressed the accelerator, the car surged to 70 mph in three seconds or so. That was enough. The published speed limit was 40 mph. What is life but to exceed a limit? Karl... Read More Read More - [To Save The World Today](https://everyangel.org/to-save-the-world-today/): We Are In Charge Dance on this verge, do not let the ruling fools of this dying world consummate their curses. Rise up, defy, resist! Uncork the sacred rage! Be and become the new culture   of euphoric duty,     and insurrectionary beauty. Join the new alliance! Needed: radical curiosity, reverent pranks, voracious listening.... Read More Read More - [Everything There Is, Or Was,](https://everyangel.org/everything-there-is-or-was/): But the strange fact is that everything there is, or was, of freedom, subtlety, boldness, dance, or masterly assurance on earth, whether in thinking itself, or in ruling, or in speaking and persuading, in artistic just as in ethical practices, has only developed by virtue of the “tyranny of such arbitrary laws.” And, in... Read More Read More - [Resuscitation?](https://everyangel.org/resuscitation/): Monday. This is a week of celebration. The key event will be Thursday, the 4th of July birthday celebration for the country. It is impossible to ignore signs of America in dotage. The two candidates for the Presidency are 81 and 78. Face to face for 90 minutes of debate they traded insults, the... Read More Read More - [Sentiment Redeeming A Falsehood](https://everyangel.org/sentiment-to-redeem-a-falsehood/): The difficulty involved in grounding the claim just citedmight be great indeed – Schopenhauer himself came up famously shortin this regard. And anyone who has ever truly felt how inanely false andsentimental this claim is in a world whose essence is will to power –,they might recall that Schopenhauer, pessimism notwithstanding, actually – played... Read More Read More - [Becoming Monster](https://everyangel.org/becoming-monster/): Whoever fights with monstersshould see to itthat he does notbecome onehimself. And when you starefor a long time into an abyss,the abyssstares backinto you.                       Beyond Good and Evil, by Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. Judith Butler, aphorism 146 For many certainly this is the “morning after”. Like the hangover after the all night binge. I... Read More Read More - [Don't Pet A Tiger](https://everyangel.org/shes-a-tiger/): Today is such summer’s that only a poet could describe by shading language into light.  Today promises to be full. I have chores which I find agreeable. This day is my wife’s birthday. She and I have made common cause since we met in our early 20s. Many years are to be celebrated as... Read More Read More - [On The Wire](https://everyangel.org/on-the-wire/): To write something, anything at all is only one reason for starting the day at Starbucks. Perhaps a good conversation will be possible? Wednesday is a day of good fortune since I have benefited from a good chat with Doug, as well as prospect of reflecting upon some aphorisms from Beyond Good and Evil. ... Read More Read More - [Knowing Yourself](https://everyangel.org/knowing-yourself/): This day, a Tuesday is unsettled with respect to the weather. Also, in truth the unsettled condition is the normal state of things for homo sapiens, for everyone of us, no matter our class, our poverty or our affluence. Education and health or youth or professional success does not eliminate the fact that not... Read More Read More - [Commandment(s)](https://everyangel.org/commandments/): Monday. Feeling as if this is the first day, the first page of six more to be filled, hour by hour with my life. I am not alone though. Around me are others, working, playing, worrying, exploring, celebrating, and fucking up.  All of us, with rare exception know that we are on the cusp... Read More Read More - [Geneva Grotto](https://everyangel.org/geneva-grotto/): I found it, I mean the Geneva Grotto. Not long ago, I was asked by a high school student while walking toward Starbucks if I knew where to find the Geneva Grotto. I’d not heard of it before, so I couldn’t help him. Curious I checked the internet. I read about a shrine built... Read More Read More - [Sunshine And Eternal Torment](https://everyangel.org/sunshine-and-eternal-torment/): Finally, as for the common people, the great majority, who exist and are only allowed to exist to serve and to be of general utility, religion gives them an invaluable sense of contentment with their situation and type; it puts their hearts greatly at ease, it glorifies their obedience, it gives them (and those... Read More Read More - [Beautifully Lost!](https://everyangel.org/beautifully-lost/): To love humanity for the sake of God – that has been the noblest and most bizarre feeling people have attained so far. That the love of humanity, in the absence of any sanctifying ulterior motive, is one more stupidity and abomination; that the tendency to love humanity like this can only get its... Read More Read More - [The Final Cruelty](https://everyangel.org/the-final-cruelty/): There is a great ladder of religious cruelty, and, of its many rungs, three are the most important. People used to make human sacrifices to their god, perhaps even sacrificing those they loved the best – this sort of phenomenon can be found in the sacrifice of the firstborn (a practice shared by all... Read More Read More - [He Doesn't Know How To Help](https://everyangel.org/he-doesnt-know-how-to-help/): Why atheism today? God “the Father” has been thoroughly refuted; and so has “the Judge” and “the Reward-giver.” The same for God’s “free will”: he doesn’t listen, – and even if he did, he wouldn’t know how to help anyway. The worst part of it is: he seems unable to communicate in an intelligible... Read More Read More - [A Final Act To Come?](https://everyangel.org/a-final-curtain-call/): And what infuriated the slavesabout and against their masters was never faith itself,but rather the freedom from faith,that half-stoic and smiling nonchalancewhen it came to the seriousness of faith. Enlightenment is infuriating. Slaves want the unconditional;they understand only tyranny, even in morality.They love as they hate,without nuance, into the depths, to the point of... Read More Read More - [The Hideous Superlative](https://everyangel.org/the-hideous-superlative/): From the beginning,Christian faith has been sacrifice:sacrifice of all freedom, of all pride, of all self-confidence of the spirit;it is simultaneously enslavement and self-derision, self-mutilation. There is cruelty and religious Phoenicianism in this faith,which is expected of a worn-down,many-sided, badly spoiled conscience. Its presuppositionis that the subjugation of spirit causes indescribable pain,and that the... Read More Read More - [The Type Of People We Are](https://everyangel.org/the-type-of-people-we-are/): This weekend I am in Louisville, Kentucky. I like Louisville. On the Ohio River the city draws from the past and reaches for a future. I am reminded of the story of Daniel Boone, that he was a Kentuckian. There is a regional pride here, a linkage to what is owed to the past. ... Read More Read More - [Everything Snakelike In Humanity](https://everyangel.org/against-green-pasture-happiness/): Yesterday was spent at the Holocaust Museum in Skokie, illinois.  The New York Times in a 2021 article lists 21 such museums in the United States. In my better judgment there will never be enough of such places. I am still reeling, trying to grasp the meaning of the images and the artifacts that I... Read More Read More - [Temptation & Attempting](https://everyangel.org/temptation-attempting/): A new breed of philosophers is approaching. I will risk christening them with a name not lacking in dangers. From what I can guess about them, from what they allow to be guessed (since it is typical of them to want to remain riddles in some respect), these philosophers of the future might have... Read More Read More - [Away With Bad Taste](https://everyangel.org/away-with-bad-taste/): “My judgment is my judgment: other people don’t have an obvious right to it too” – perhaps this is what such a philosopher of the future will say. We must do away with the bad taste of wanting to be in agreement with the majority. “Good” is no longer good when it comes from... Read More Read More - [Persistent Test](https://everyangel.org/persistent-test/): We have to test ourselves to see whether we are destined for independence and command, and we have to do it at the right time. We should not sidestep our tests, even though they may well be the most dangerous game we can play, and, in the last analysis, can be witnessed by no... Read More Read More - [Desire Is Enough](https://everyangel.org/desire-is-enough/): Assuming that our world of desires and passions is the only thing “given” as real, that we cannot get down or up to any “reality” except the reality of our drives (since thinking is only a relation between these drives) – aren’t we allowed to make the attempt and pose the question as to... Read More Read More - [The Biggest Joke Ever](https://everyangel.org/laughing-to-oblivion/): It does not matter what philosophical standpoint you might take these days: any way you look at it, the erroneousness of the world we think we live in is the most certain and solid fact that our eyes can still grab hold of. We find reason after reason for it, reasons that might lure... Read More Read More - [Sacred Uncertainty](https://everyangel.org/sacred-uncertainty/): I am quite taken by Rob Brezsny’s use of language. I enjoy and learn from reading his frequent posts which are thoughtful and quasi philosophical. Not that I “get” everything that he presents. I miss the point of astrology. As a vehicle, a conductor for fruitful living, astrology is not for me.  I remind... Read More Read More - [Writer's Block](https://everyangel.org/writers-block/): …a thought comes when “it” wants, and not when “I” want. It is, therefore, a falsification of the facts to say that the subject “I” is the condition of the predicate “think.” It thinks: but to say the “it” is just that famous old “I” – well that is just an assumption or opinion,... Read More Read More - [The Stench](https://everyangel.org/the-stench/): Our highest insights must – and should! – sound like stupidities, or possibly crimes, when they come without permission to people whose ears have no affinity for them and were not predestined for them. …There are heights of the soul from whose vantage point even tragedy stops having tragic effects; and who would dare... Read More Read More - [Foundations Of Ignorance](https://everyangel.org/a-granite-foundation/): O sancta simplicitas! What a strange simplification and falsification people live in! the wonders never cease, for those who devote their eyes to such wondering. How we have made everything around us so bright and easy and free and simple! How we have given our senses a carte blanche for everything superficial, given our... Read More Read More - [A Religion Of Human Suffering](https://everyangel.org/making-a-religion-of-human-suffering/): …if I have observed correctly, “un-freedom of the will” is regarded as a problem by two completely opposed parties, but always in a profoundly personal manner. The one party would never dream of relinquishing their “responsibility,” a belief in themselves, a personal right to their own merit (the vain races belong to this group).... Read More Read More - [Is This What You Want?](https://everyangel.org/is-this-what-you-want/): It is Saturday late afternoon. Failed to write anything this morning. The stars did not align. A friend joined me at Starbucks and we enjoyed an extended conversation. I think a good principle is to give priority to friends over projects that we intend to advance. I have followed the principle with difficulty in... Read More Read More - [Natality](https://everyangel.org/natality/): A spring morning is yet one more delectable indication of the natality of the world.  Nothing is fixed, unmoved, but all is in motion, the exuberance of growth, a driving trajectory of maximum expression. Perhaps that sentence is nonsense. What is my basis for knowing anything? When I know, I make the claim with... Read More Read More - [This Tyrannical Drive](https://everyangel.org/this-tyrannical-drive/): But this is an old, eternal story: what happened back then with the Stoics still happens today, just as soon as a philosophy begins believing in itself. It always creates the world in its own image, it cannot do otherwise; philosophy is this tyrannical drive itself, the most spiritual will to power, to the... Read More Read More - [Playing A Little Game](https://everyangel.org/playing-my-little-game/): I have gradually come to realize what every great philosophy so far has been: a confession of faith on the part of its author, and a type of involuntary and unself-conscious memoir; in short, that the moral (or immoral) intentions in every philosophy constitute the true living seed from which the whole plant has... Read More Read More - [More](https://everyangel.org/more-2/): There is more to say. I mean the drag strip experience always affords something new, cars and conversations that are unexpected. At the larger holiday events at The Grove, Arnie Beswick is sometimes present with his Tameless Tiger nostalgia GTO.  In past years Arnie shown up with a driver and a late model Pontiac... Read More Read More - [Summer Thunder](https://everyangel.org/summer-thunder/): Memorial Day weekend is commonly recognized as unofficial beginning of summer.  The kids are out of school, all grinning ear to ear, imagining the adventures that await. Perhaps there remains a kid in me!? Year to year I too anticipate the warm months of summer by planning to be present for the first big... Read More Read More - [Making A Virtuous Racket](https://everyangel.org/what-silliness/): What goads us into regarding all philosophers with an equal measure of mistrust and mockery is not that we are struck repeatedly by how innocent they are – how often and easily they err and stray, in short, their childish childlikeness – but rather that there is not enough genuine honesty about them: even... Read More Read More - [Home](https://everyangel.org/home-base/): We returned from New England.  A return home feels good, since that environment is where I belong. There I continue to become myself with the support of family, friends, and of nature.  I cannot forget nature. The Transcendentalists of New England were onto something enormous, almost too important to be captured by words. Every... Read More Read More - [Freedom, Oh Freedom II](https://everyangel.org/freedom-oh-freedom-ii/): Saturday morning in Cleveland. It is unclear how much I will be able to write.  A few minutes is available before our Tour Coach boarding time.  Our night at the Hampton Inn was pleasant. One feature of our stay, from our second floor room we had a fine view of the front entrance of... Read More Read More - [Freedom, Oh Freedom](https://everyangel.org/freedom-oh-freedom-2/): How inevitable every detail of my life has been, how channeled by prior events, some partially understood, most just opaque happenings that appear dumb, still no less impactful upon my life. Fortune and misfortune are how I would label the entire saga. I know that with some effort I could construct a list of... Read More Read More - [We Fools At Best](https://everyangel.org/we-fools-at-best/): “How could anything originate out of its opposite?Truth from error, for instance?Or the will to truth from the will to deception?Or selfless action from self-interest?Or the pure, sun-bright gaze of wisdom from a covetous leer? Such origins are impossible,and people who dream about such thingsare fools – at best. Things of the highest valuemust... Read More Read More - [If Truth Were A Woman](https://everyangel.org/if-truth-were-a-woman/): Supposing truth is a woman-what then? Is there not reason to suspect that all philosophers, in so far as they were dogmatists, have known very little about women? That if their aim was to charm a female, they have been especially inept and inapt in making advances to truth with such awful seriousness and... Read More Read More - [The Last Disciple](https://everyangel.org/the-last-disciple/): I, the last disciple and initiate of the god Dionysus: and can I, at last, start to give you, my friends, a small taste of this philosophy, as far as I am permitted? In undertones, which would be best, since it concerns many things that are secret, new, foreign, strange, uncanny. Even the fact... Read More Read More - [Broken Open](https://everyangel.org/broken-open/): The genius of the heart, as it is possessed by that great hidden one, the tempter god and born pied piper of consciences, whose voice knows how to descend into the underworld of every soul, whose every word and every glance conveys both consideration and a wrinkle of temptation, whose mastery includes an understanding... Read More Read More - [Running Aground](https://everyangel.org/running-aground/): There is a way of asking for our reasons which makes us forget our best reasons but awakens in us a defiance of and a repugnance for reasons in general -a way of asking which makes us very stupid and a typical trick of tyrannical people! The Gay Science by Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. by... Read More Read More - [I Resist](https://everyangel.org/i-resist/): The strongest knowledge (that of the unfreedom of the human will) is nonetheless the poorest in successes: For it always has the strongest opponent, human vanity. Human, All Too Human by Nietzsche, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, Assorted Opinions and Maxims, aphorism 50 I entertain many opinions.  The most durable opinion that possesses me lately... Read More Read More - [Becoming A Highwayman](https://everyangel.org/becoming-a-highwayman/): In an exchange, the only just and honest course would be for either party to demand only so much as he considers his commodity to be worth, allowance being made for trouble in acquisition, scarcity, time spent and so forth, besides the subjective value. As soon as you make your price bear a relation... Read More Read More - [Beginning To Learn Anew](https://everyangel.org/beginning-to-learn-anew/): I shall be asked why really I have narrated all these little and, according to traditional judgment, insignificant things… Answer: these little things -food, place, climate, recreation, the whole casuistry of egoism -are beyond all comparison more serious things than anything that has been taken seriously hitherto. It is precisely here that one must... Read More Read More - [Behind All Of This Noise](https://everyangel.org/behind-all-of-this-noise/): Living in the midst of this jumble of little lanes, needs, and voices gives me a melancholy happiness: how much enjoyment, impatience, and desire, how much thirsty life and drunkenness of life comes to light every moment! And yet silence will soon ascend on all these noisy, living, life-thirsty people. How his shadow stands... Read More Read More - [Saying Yes](https://everyangel.org/saying-yes/): Did you ever say Yes to one joy? Oh my friends, then you said Yes to all woe as well. All things are chained and entwined together, all things are in love; If ever you wanted one moment twice, if ever you said: ‘You please me happiness, instant, moment!’ Then you wanted everything to... Read More Read More - [Made Of Nonsense And Chaos](https://everyangel.org/made-of-nonsense-and-chaos/): You want, if possible (and no “if possible” is crazier) to abolish suffering. And us? – it looks as though we would prefer it to be heightened and made even worse than it has ever been!… The discipline of suffering, of great suffering – don’t you know that this discipline has been the sole... Read More Read More - [Great Table For Play And Mockery](https://everyangel.org/great-table-for-play-and-mockery/): A throw that you made had failed. But what of that, you dice-throwers! You have not learnedto play and mock as a man ought to play and mock.Are we not always seated at a great tablefor play and mockery? And if great things you attemptedhave turned out failures,does that mean that you yourselves are... Read More Read More - [A Bridge, Not An End](https://everyangel.org/a-bridge-not-an-end/): Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman —a rope over an abyss.    A dangerous across,       a dangerous on-the-way,          a dangerous looking-back,             a dangerous shuddering and stopping. What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end: what can be loved in man is... Read More Read More - [Autopoiesis](https://everyangel.org/29084-2/): ‘Will a self’ – Active, successful natures act, not according to the dictum ‘know thyself’, but as if there hovered before them the commandment: will a self and thou shalt become a self… Assorted Opinions and Maxims, by Nietzsche, trans. by R. J. Hollingdale, aphorism 366 Gnothi Seauton (γνῶθι σεαυτόν), “know thyself!” is reported... Read More Read More - [Sacrifice](https://everyangel.org/sacrifice/): What is good?     -All that heightens the feeling of power,      the will to power, power itself in man. What is bad?     -Everything that is born of weakness. What is happiness?     -The feeling that power is growing     -That resistance is overcome. The Anti-Christ, by Friedrich Nietzsche, Trans. R. J. Hollingdale. aphorism 2 The good and... Read More Read More - [The Point Of Absurdity](https://everyangel.org/the-point-of-absurdity/): In naturethe rule is not the state of distressit is superfluity, prodigality,even to the point of absurdity. The struggle for existence is only an exception,a temporary restriction of the will of life.The struggle, great and small,everywhere turns on ascendancy, on growth and extension,–in accordance with the will to powerwhich is the will of life.... Read More Read More - [The Given: Passion](https://everyangel.org/the-given-passion/): Day three of recovery from covid.  I am feeling somewhat better. I decided to attempt to mow the lawn.  There is no doubt that being 75 years of age in combination with covid made the task a challenge.  The passage of time. Nothing is absolved from the eroding effects of time. Clearly this varies... Read More Read More - [Hanging Over Our Heads](https://everyangel.org/hanging-over-our-heads/): I prefer not to take a break from daily writing. Still, Covid imposed a day off. Monday night I ran a high fever. I had delirious thoughts, attempting to connect ideas that promptly fell apart in my semi conscious misery. Now with Tylenol and Paxlovid I am feeling much better.  I cannot get the... Read More Read More - [What's Worth More?](https://everyangel.org/whats-worth-more/): ‘Power against which much ill is done and mediated is worth more than impotence when it encounters only good’ -thus the Greeks felt. That is to say: they valued the feeling of power more highly than any sort of utility or good reputation. Daybreak by Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, aphorism 360 Nietzsche... Read More Read More - [My Hometown](https://everyangel.org/my-hometown-2/): My hometown. I spent several days in Durham to visit with some old friends. Now life has resumed for me in Batavia. I have lived nearly all of my adult life in the Midwest. The values and viewpoint of the middle of the Midwest are the composite self that most easily presents to my... Read More Read More - [No Teardrops In My Eye](https://everyangel.org/no-teardrops-in-my-eye/): July 5th. Yet another Independence Day experienced and consigned to memory. We American’s are urged to experience feelings of dedication, of fond attachment for our country especially at this time of year. As in past years, from curbside I witnessed the Wheaton 4th of July parade. I’d wager this parade is exceptional for the... Read More Read More - [To Praise Play](https://everyangel.org/to-praise-play/): PLAY Is not the opposite of work but the improvisational genius the inner child sage PLAY Is rehearsal for reality remaking of reality myth-making in motion shapeshifting on purpose how we make love to uncertainty composing music out of paradox HOLY PLAY Sabotages fanaticism and dogmatic ferocity MUST sabotage fanaticism can you dignify plain... Read More Read More - [Missing Paris](https://everyangel.org/missing-paris/): Today is Wednesday our second day at home. Slowly the body adjusts to the mid-western time zone. France is seven time zones earlier than Chicago. (Tomorrow perhaps I will not be wake at 5AM) A memory that lingers is our Bateaux Mouches cruise up the Seine at dusk in Paris. This is an ancient... Read More Read More - [Well, How Did I Get Here?](https://everyangel.org/well-how-did-i-get-here/): Back at last. Ten days in France became twelve. The airline cancelled our return flight. The lesson was learned which I suppose all seasoned travelers know. When reservations are upended by circumstance one thing alone matters, – to hash out the details of an alternate flight yourself. The airline is unlikely to independently reschedule... Read More Read More - [A Single Great Truth](https://everyangel.org/a-single-great-truth/): Travel in a foreign country asks the traveler to adapt. Humans can be very adaptive. Or frozen, by patterns of past experience, those impossible expectations paralyzing the mind, and then spinning like a top, after energy is spent, wobbling to fall over. It is Sunday morning, I compose these lines at the end of... Read More Read More - [Tours To Caen - day no. 5](https://everyangel.org/tours-to-caen-day-no-5/): We stayed a night in Tours. Tours was once the capital of France. I will always remember the Starbucks that looked convenient across the street. There I’d be able to simply order medium-sized, dark roast coffee as I am accustomed back in the states. It happened not to be found on the menu board.... Read More Read More - [Chartres - day no. 4](https://everyangel.org/chartres-day-no-4/): Our fourth day in France featured a pilgrimage to Chartres. Could one conclude that the cathedral at Chartres is one of the wonders of the world? Yesterday in conversation with three Parisians we mentioned our plans to visit Chartres. Their eyes became wide, they assured us Chartres was amazing. The story of this great... Read More Read More - [Paris - day no. 3](https://everyangel.org/paris-day-3-sunday/): The day three, another outstanding breakfast at our hotel. The French feature of flakey, buttery pastry and fresh fruit, plus a charcuterie board is impossible to beat by my breakfast standards. My standard of what makes a good breakfast has been elevated. Today is Sunday. We arrived at the church of Saint Augustin, where... Read More Read More - [Paris - day no. 2](https://everyangel.org/paris-day-no-2/): The first day in Paris featured several outdoor mini-concerts, the first at the Eiffel Tower, the second occurring among the swirl of an outdoor music festival organized by the French government. The rationale of our visit to France is the opportunity for performances by the Fox Valley Festival Chorus. The often mention in the... Read More Read More - [Paris](https://everyangel.org/paris/): This is to be our second day in Paris. I have a strange sensation of being in a country, and a city that in my fathers time suffered four long years of German occupation. I cannot exactly describe the feeling of walking along the Seine yesterday afternoon, the air filled with the sounds of... Read More Read More - [The Marvelousness...](https://everyangel.org/the-marvelousness/): Contrary to the expectationsof 19th century radicals, religion hasnot gone away–perhaps we’d be better off if it had–but instead has increased in power,seemingly in proportion to the global increasein the realm of technology& rational control. Both fundamentalism& the New Agederive some forcefrom deep & widespread dissatisfactionwith the System that works againstall perception of the... Read More Read More - [Crashing To Zero](https://everyangel.org/crashing-to-zero/): It was shocking in the Sixties when the painter Anselm Kiefer photographed himself in various European locales performing the Nazi salute. “Too soon,” people said – even if it’s satire. Those wounds were still raw. (Even Mel Brooks was a couple years away from “springtime for Hitler.”) Kiefer was born in Germany at the... Read More Read More - [Sending It Home To Me](https://everyangel.org/sending-it-home-to-me/): A View from the Quarter, March 12th, 1965 we are in a terrible hurry to die as large Negroes break the pavement our fingers tremble on dark coffee cups as this city all the cities lie spread-legged dipped into with beak, I awaken to pull a shade open I awaken to black men and white... Read More Read More - [A Possible Society](https://everyangel.org/a-possible-society/): The Other mirrors the Self –the Other is our witness. The Other completes the Self –the Other gives us the key to the perception of the oneness-of-being. When we speak of being & consciousness, we point to the Self; when we speak of bliss we implicate the Other. The acquisition of language falls under... Read More Read More - [Father's Day](https://everyangel.org/fathers-day/): Sunday morning, and it is Father’s Day. I feel puzzlement each year when Father’s Day arrives. What a mother does is something that is easy to feel. Is that Illusion? I am no female. And if I were, would I be up to giving birth? Is everything simply one more delusion, another fantastic and... Read More Read More - [Eros and Thanatos](https://everyangel.org/eros-and-thanatos/): According to legend, Helen of Troy was ‘the face that launched a thousand ships’…  I have no idea whether Homer’s Iliad reflects actual events, or whether it is a tribute to the mind of a brilliant story-teller. The tale of a prolonged conflict between the Greeks and a city state is profoundly human, psychologically... Read More Read More - [Weed](https://everyangel.org/weed/): Today, Friday is overcast. Clouds and wildfire smoke from Canada’s forests. Nature seems real enough to me. There are wildflowers as well as “weeds” growing, living, drawing nourishment in a section of my backyard. Weeds and wildflowers are a distinction of language, my trace of a line between vegetation that I desire, and that... Read More Read More - [Christianity](https://everyangel.org/christianity/): Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.” Gospel of Matthew 22:37-39 There exists a creature which is perfectly harmless; when it passes... Read More Read More - [To Dream](https://everyangel.org/to-dream/): IN SLEEP WE DREAM of only two forms of government – anarchy & monarchy. Primordial root consciousness understands no politics & never plays fair. A democratic dream? A socialists dream? Impossible. Only kings & wild people populate my night. Monads & nomads. But in a dream we are never ruled except by love or... Read More Read More - [Damned Poets!](https://everyangel.org/damned-poets/): But granting that someone did sayin all seriousness thatthe poets lie too much: he was right – we do lie too much. We also know too little,and are bad learners: so we are obliged to lie. And which of us poets has not adulterated his wine?Many a poisonous messhas evolved in our cellars:many an... Read More Read More - [Where The Sun Burns](https://everyangel.org/where-the-sun-burns/): I like to lie here where the children play, beside the ruined wall, among thistles and red poppies. I am still a scholar to the children, and also to the thistles and red poppies. They are innocent, even in their wickedness. But to the sheep I am no longer a scholar: so it is... Read More Read More - [To Dream, To Dare](https://everyangel.org/to-dream-and-to-dare/): WHAT ARE MY TRUE DESIRES?–& what can I DO before it is too late?… Do you possess both imagination & Will,can you both dream & dare–or are you the dupe of an impotent fantasy? Any day now, vast numbers of Americans are going to realizethey’re being force-fed a load of reactionary boring hystericalartificially-flavored crap.... Read More Read More - [Humor That Bleeds](https://everyangel.org/humor-that-bleeds/): CHAOS THEORY MUST OFcourse flow impurely. “Lazy yokel plowsa crooked furrow.” Any attempt to precipitatea crystal of ideology would result in flawed rigidness,fossilizations, armorings & drynesses, whichwe would like to renounce,along with all “purity.” Yes, Chaos revels in a certain abandoned formlessnessnot unlike the erotic messiness of those we lovefor their shattering of habit&... Read More Read More - [Wine We Could Be Drinking Now](https://everyangel.org/wine-we-could-be-drinking-now/): Food, cooked or raw, cannot escape from symbolism. It is, & also simultaneously represents that which it is. All food is soul food. But in the airless vault of our civilization, …nearly every experience is mediated, reality strained through the deadening mesh of consensus-perception, we lose touch with food as nourishment; we begin to... Read More Read More - [Like The Sun Do I Love](https://everyangel.org/like-the-sun-do-i-love/): See there! Surprised and pale does it stand – before the rosy dawn! For already she comes, the glowing one, — her love to the earth comes! Innocence, and creative desire,          is all solar love! See there, how she comes impatiently over the sea! Do you not feel the thirst... Read More Read More - [Loving And Perishing](https://everyangel.org/where/): Oh, you nostalgic liars,you avaricious ones! You, without innocence in your desire:and how you discredit desiring on that account! Truly, not as creators, as birth-parents,or as revelers do you love the earth! WHERE IS INNOCENCE?Where there is will to childbearing. And he whoseeks to create beyond himself, has for me the purest will. WHERE... Read More Read More - [Just Enough Left](https://everyangel.org/just-enough-left/): TOO far did I fly into the future: a horror seized upon me. And when I looked around me. Behold, there time was my sole contemporary! Then did I fly backwards, homewards – and always faster. Thus did I come to you: you present-day men, and into the land of culture. For the first... Read More Read More - [When An Ox Learns To Smile](https://everyangel.org/when-an-ox-learns-to-smile/): Like a white ox I’d like to see him, which, snorting and lowing, walks before the plough-share: and his lowing should also laud all that is earthly! Dark is still his countenance; the shadow of his hand dances upon it. Overshadowed is still the sense of his eye.      ~*~ His deed itself... Read More Read More - [The Thing About Taste](https://everyangel.org/the-thing-about-taste/): And you tell me, friends, that there ought be no controversy about taste and tasting?      But all life is a matter of dispute about taste and tasting! Taste: that is to weigh at the same time, and scales and a one-who-weighs; and all the worse for every living thing that would attempt... Read More Read More - [Destroyer, Breaker of Values Into Pieces](https://everyangel.org/playing-dice-for-death/): Listen carefully now, you enlightened ones! Weigh seriously, whether I have discerned the heart of life itself, the very roots of its heart! Wherever I found a living thing, there found I Will-to-Power; and even in the will of the servant I found the will to be master. The weaker is to serve the... Read More Read More - [What To Fear (the entire enchilada)](https://everyangel.org/what-to-fear-the-entire-enchilada/): “WILL to Truth” you call it, you learned ones, which compels you to become so focused? ~*~ Will for the thinkableness of all being: thus would I characterize your will! All being you want to make thinkable: because you secretly doubt with good reason whether being is already thinkable… But it shall accommodate and... Read More Read More - [Something Invulnerable](https://everyangel.org/something-invulnerable/): How did I ever bear it?How did I survive and overcome such wounds?How did my soul rise again out of those killing fields? Yes, something invulnerable, unburiable is within me,something that would shatter rocks into pieces:it is called my Will. Silently does it proceed,unchanged throughout the years.Its course proceeds upon my feet,my old Will;... Read More Read More - [Unappeased Gap](https://everyangel.org/unappeased-gap/): Night. In darkness things gain definition, a better focus. I dreamed in the early morning hours. The detail has already escaped my recall. The gist, the weight of the presences, a female voice spoke to me saying that I must attend to female perspectives in my life. Why that point? I am a guy,... Read More Read More - [Eye To Eye](https://everyangel.org/eye-to-eye/): Yesterday, Memorial Day I went for an unplanned walk by the Fox River. Noting that the Creamery ice cream shop was crowded to capacity, a short walk along the river would allow families with children to be served. After my walk I would return for a scoop of chocolate ice cream. The Fox River... Read More Read More - [Something Wicked Comes](https://everyangel.org/something-wicked-comes/): TIS night: now all the gushing fountains speak louder. And my soul also is a gushing fountain. ‘Tis night: now only all songs of the loving ones do awake. And my soul also is the song of a loving one. Something unappeased, unappeasable, is within me; it longs to find expression…. Light am I:... Read More Read More - [From This Wreckage](https://everyangel.org/from-this-wreckage/): It is Sunday. I considered launching an anti-Christianity rant this morning. On second thought, these lines are more important, and widely universal than any critique of Christian fundamentalism. I am a recovering Jesus Fundamentalist. (Everyone starts somewhere. No child has a choice about that or anything else) I am not unlike an alcoholic, who... Read More Read More - [Wild Wisdom](https://everyangel.org/wild-wisdom/): And the blindness of the blind one,and his seeking and groping,still testifies to the power of the suninto which he has gazed,– did you know that before? And with mountains shall the discerning one learn to build!It is a small thing for the spiritto remove mountains,– did you know that before? You know only... Read More Read More - [No Going Back](https://everyangel.org/no-going-back/): We have no interest in going “back to the land” if the deal includes the boring life of a shit-kicking peasant –nor do we want “tribalism” if it comes with taboos, fetishes & malnutrition. We have no quarrel with the concept of culture –including technology; for us the problem begins with civilization. What we... Read More Read More - [Paradise Even Now](https://everyangel.org/paradise-even-now/): A friend of mine posted an essay this week entitled Machismo…and Why? The paragraphs of the essay described toxic masculinity as a range of behaviors, a state of male arrested development. Males in socially elevated positions present themselves as powerful, yet behave as a child of 3 or 4 years of age going into a... Read More Read More - [Same Note Played](https://everyangel.org/same-note-played/): The Manichees…believed that the body can be spiritualized–or rather, that the body merely contaminates pure spiritand must be rejected. The Gnostic* perfecti (radical dualists)starved themselves to deathto escape the body & returnto the pleroma of pure light. So to evade the evils of the flesh–murder, war, famine, greed–paradoxically only one path remains:murder of one’s... Read More Read More - [Aimed](https://everyangel.org/aimed/): We might now contemplateaesthetic actions which possesssome of the resonance of terrorism(or “cruelty” as Artaud* put it)aimed at the destruction of abstractions   rather than people,      at liberation rather than power,         pleasure rather than profit,            joy rather than fear, “Poetic Terrorism.” Our chosen images have the potency of darkness –but all images are masks, &... Read More Read More - [Be Sorcerer](https://everyangel.org/be-sorcerer/): It seems to me there’s a hazard we secular minded folk risk. Our satisfaction, indeed our conviction of the truth of cause and effect becomes a filter, a colored lens of sorts, a type of bias… It goes without saying too, bias allows us perceive anything at all. Without some bias (a lens) we’d... Read More Read More - [Wake up! Breathe! Seize the day!](https://everyangel.org/wake-up-breathe-seize-the-day/): Sunday arrived early in my case. Was it that two hour nap which I enjoyed yesterday afternoon? Or was it a melange of current events in my subconscious which aroused me at 5:30AM today? Impossible to tell. Anyway it’s a typical chilly mid-western spring day, brilliant sunlight, and everything fades by comparison to the... Read More Read More - [Saturday](https://everyangel.org/saturday/): Waking to an overcast day. A stiff wind continues to blow. There’s some relief from the high gusts of yesterday which transported a dust storm, yes giant horizon-wide clouds of yellow-grey field soil from farms to the distant west. A dust storm in Chicago. This is the American mid-west, not a middle eastern country... Read More Read More - [The Ruined Temple](https://everyangel.org/the-ruined-temple/): These preachers of equality I’ll not be mixed up, confounded with them. This is how justice speaks to me: “Human beings are not equal.” And nor will they ever become so! And what of my dedication to the Overman, if I spoke anything different?                            ~*~ On a thousand bridges and piers shall they... Read More Read More - [Tarantula World ?](https://everyangel.org/tarantula-world/): THIS isthe tarantula’s den! Would you see the tarantula itself?Here hangs its web: touch this,so that it trembles.There comes the tarantula willingly: Enter, the tarantula! Black on your backis your triangle and symbol;and I know also what is in your soul.                     ~*~Revenge is in your soul:wherever you bite, there arises black scab;with revenge,... Read More Read More - [Eagles, Snow, Sun](https://everyangel.org/eagles-snow-sun/): And as strong winds we will live above them, neighbor to the eagles,    neighbor to the snow,       neighbor to the sun: thus live the strong winds. And like a wind I will one day blow among them, and with my spirit, take the breath from their spirit: thus wills my future. Truly,... Read More Read More - [Becoming Mid-Summer's Day](https://everyangel.org/becoming-mid-summers-day/): But I asked once,and my question almost suffocated me:What? Is the rabble alsonecessary for life? Are poisoned fountains necessary,and stinking fires,and filthy dreams,and maggots in the bread of life? Not my hatred, — my loathing, gnawed hungrily at my life!Ah, often my spirit was drained,when I found even the rabble spiritual! And holding my... Read More Read More - [The Rabble Also Drink](https://everyangel.org/the-rabble-also-drink/): LIFE is a well of delight;but where the rabble also drink,thereall fountains are poisoned. To everything clean I am well disposed;but I hate to seethe grinning mouthsand the thirst of the unclean. They cast their eye down into the fountain:and now glance up to metheir odious smile out of the fountain. They poisoned the... Read More Read More - [Playing By The Sea](https://everyangel.org/playing-by-the-sea/): But Zarathustra didn’t come to say to all those liars and fools: “What do you know of virtue! What could you know of virtue!” –But that you, my friends, might become weary of the old words which you have learned from the fools and liars: That you might become weary of the words   ... Read More Read More - [Beauty Speaks](https://everyangel.org/beauty-speaks/): WITH thunderand heavenly fireworksmust one speakto lethargic and drowsy senses. But beauty’s voicespeaks gently:it appeals onlyto the most awakened souls. My buckler gently vibratedand laughed to me to-day;it was beauty’s holy laughing and thrilling. At you, you virtuous ones,laughed my beauty to-day.And thus came its voice to me: “They want – to be paid... Read More Read More - [Blood Sign](https://everyangel.org/blood-sign/): Characters of blood they wrote on the way they went, and their folly taught that truth is proved by blood. But blood is the very worst witness to truth; blood taints the purest teaching, and turns it into delusion and hatred of heart.                               ~*~ And when a person goes through fire for his... Read More Read More - [Shame, Shame, Shame](https://everyangel.org/shame-shame-shame/): FRIENDS, You’ve heard this joke making the rounds: “Look at Zarathustra! Walking around, among us as if among animals?” But said better: “The discerning one walks among men as among animals.” Man himself is to the discerning one: the animal with red cheeks. How has that happened to him? Isn’t it because he has... Read More Read More - [Flying Fragments](https://everyangel.org/flying-fragments/): Away from God and gods did this will allure me; what would there be to create if there were – gods! I read that one’s life amounts to a collection of stories. You and I existentially are a composition of everything that we believe about the world, believe about ourselves as a feature of... Read More Read More - [Vertigo](https://everyangel.org/vertigo-3/): But that I may reveal my heartentirely to you, my friends:if there were gods,how could I endure it to be no God! Therefore there are no gods.Yes, I have drawn the conclusion;now, however,does it draw me.–God is a conjecture: ~*~but who could drinkall the bitterness of this conjecturewithout dying?Shall his faith be takenfrom the... Read More Read More - [Look Into The Mirror](https://everyangel.org/looking-into-the-mirror/): Why did I startle in my dream, so that I awoke? That is the question isn’t it? Dreams and night visions are the stuff of literature. The story of Macbeth comes to mind. No one knows for sure from whence comes a dream. I remember talking about dreams with a therapist. She recognized dreams... Read More Read More - [Keeping Modest](https://everyangel.org/keeping-modest/): AFTER this Zarathustra returned again into the mountains to the solitude of his cave, and withdrew himself from men, waiting like a sower who has scattered his seed. His soul, however, became impatient and full of longing for those whom he loved: because he had still much to give them. For this is hardest... Read More Read More - [Noontide](https://everyangel.org/noontide/): When Zarathustra had spoken these words, he paused, like one who had not said his last word; and long did he balance the staff doubtfully in his hand. At last he said this – and his voice had changed: I now go alone, my disciples! You also must now go away alone! So will... Read More Read More - [A Millennia's Worth Of Madness, Part II](https://everyangel.org/a-millennias-worth-of-madness-part-ii/): Remain true to the earth, my brothers, with the power of your virtue! Let your bestowing love and your knowledge be devoted to be the meaning of the earth! Thus do I pray and appeal to you. Let it not fly away from the earthly and beat against eternal walls with its wings! Ah,... Read More Read More - [Becomer and Fighter, Part I](https://everyangel.org/becomer-and-fighter/): Thus goes the bodythrough history,a becomer and fighter. And the spirit — what is it to the body?Its fights’and victories’herald, its companionand echo. Nietzsche/Zarathustra refers time and time again to the wisdom of the body. The body is the conduit, our interface with external reality. An ongoing theme is emphasis on what the body... Read More Read More - [Virtue As Selfish](https://everyangel.org/virtue-as-selfish/): Tell me… how is it that gold is attributed the highest value? Because it is uncommon, and nonfunctional, and beaming, and soft in lustre; it always bestows itself. Only as image of the highest virtue came gold to the highest value. Goldlike, beams the glance of the bestower. Gold-lustre makes peace between moon and... Read More Read More - [To Catch The Golden Ball Part III](https://everyangel.org/to-catch-the-golden-ball-part-iii/): Truly, he died too early that Hebrew whom the preachers of slow death honor: and to many has it proved a calamity that he died too early. This begins a breath taking assessment of the death of Jesus. Yes Jesus, the Palestinian carpenter condemned as an agitator by the occupying Romans when in his... Read More Read More - [When One Tastes Best Part II](https://everyangel.org/when-one-tastes-best-part-ii/): How many are the ways by which one might die? Infinitely many. Dying like living, is limitless as to time and context. Think for a while on that. Yet, one requirement for a “good” death is sure. You must put away notions of fame, the accolades of the masses. Forget about that! Dying well... Read More Read More - [Memento Mori Part I](https://everyangel.org/memento-mori/): Die at the right time! This is either the most absurd statement than can be uttered or the most inescapable. The coincidence of a timed death, a departure from this life that harmonizes with one’s goals, purposes… I assume that you are aware of the goals which animate you? I mean those for which... Read More Read More - [Marriage](https://everyangel.org/marriage/): Marriage. Men ought to think more on this topic, and say much less. We (males) are without a clue on the matter. Nietzsche, a scholar with a razor wit, writes in his ironic style to treat marriage. Notwithstanding his notable failure at love. Nietzsche met Lou Andreas-Salomé in Rome in 1882. He was instantly... Read More Read More - [Bitten In The Neck Part II](https://everyangel.org/bitten-in-the-neck-part-ii/): Often the irony of my situation slaps me in the face, a wake up call! Good news is bad news is good news, etc., etc.. Who would choose to be bitten by snake, in the neck while napping?! The scream, the shock subsides, and you recognize that it was time to wake up anyway.... Read More Read More - [The Talking Adder Part I](https://everyangel.org/the-talking-adder-part-i/): Tuesday and wondering how to get started with this post. This weirdly delightful story parallels the Creation Story in Genesis. You know, the temptation of Eve segment with the talking serpent. Zarathustra, Nietzsche’s alter ego, is portrayed as encountering a talking adder, while napping. The shock of the encounter was extreme, as he wakes... Read More Read More - [Auto-Da-Fé](https://everyangel.org/auto-da-fe/): Monday. Easter weekend recedes. Pope Francis died. Everyone dies. What one does to create oneself concludes at the moment of death. Game over… This New York Times headline struck me as more portentous however: Republicans in half a dozen states, including Idaho and Michigan, have introduced resolutions urging the Supreme Court to reconsider same-sex... Read More Read More - [Driving Ourselves To Death](https://everyangel.org/riding-this-strange-torpedo/): It is early Easter morning. Here at Starbucks I’ll write a bit before returning to home base. Among my responsibilities, to hide a bucket full of Easter eggs around the yard. Four grandchildren are to be dispatched to find the eggs, according to some rules, naturally. I pondered for a moment what to write... Read More Read More - [Don't Know Much About Gods](https://everyangel.org/dont-know-much-about-gods/): Today I am in Niles, Michigan. The Niles area is rural. Niles is a small town by comparison to towns in the Chicago suburbs. I am situated in Starbucks within a Martin Food store, that is large, offering a wide variety of foodstuffs and services. The mom standing in front of me waiting to... Read More Read More - [Easter & The Nut Of Existence](https://everyangel.org/easter-the-nut-of-existence/): Well today is Good Friday. Do we not each celebrate this day in his/her own way? Even, to not commemorate at all! I am well acquainted with the meaning of the Passion story as held by Christians. To be a human being, a Homo Sapien, is to belong to a species that assigns a... Read More Read More - [About Good Friday](https://everyangel.org/about-good-friday/): We watched a film, The Long Good Friday, an Aurora Film Society showing, in company with a room full of other film buffs. Yes, this was a chilling gangster film. The leading man in the tale is Harold Shand played by Bob Hoskins. Harold’s girlfriend, Victoria, is played by Helen Mirren. The film reminded me... Read More Read More - [Your Voice !](https://everyangel.org/not-a-voice-from-heaven/): Today is Wednesday. It is called “hump day” the mid-point of the work week. Though retired, by force of habit Wednesday yet feels like a halfway to Friday to me. I look around the room at Starbucks, I see the mix of patrons, genders, generations from infants perhaps only weeks old, to seniors like... Read More Read More - [Decked With Purple](https://everyangel.org/decked-with-purple/): The wandering sage observes that humans create tribal units by a process of valuing, by labeling as good or as evil – behaviors, practices, forms of life, etc., etc.. Much that passed for good with one peoplewas regarded with scorn and contempt by another:thus I found it. Much found I here called bad,which was... Read More Read More - [Stung All Over](https://everyangel.org/stung-all-over/): Today is Monday. It is tempting to characterize this passage: The Poison Fly Soliloquy. Thousands of business owners in Europe, Asia, and in America are weary, and wary as one becomes when forced to swat away swarms of stinging gnats. The “on again”, “paused again” (for 90 days) tariffs become positively maddening for anyone... Read More Read More - [L'état, c'est moi](https://everyangel.org/letat-cest-moi-2/): This is by no means the first occasion when a head of state claimed that in his person, resided the state, beyond question and certainly any criticism. “L’état, c’est moi” (“I am the state”) said Louis XIV, the king of France. He supposedly declared this before the Parlament of Paris in 1655, signifying his... Read More Read More - [The Lightning- Part II](https://everyangel.org/the-lightning-part-ii/): It is Saturday. Nature, sunrise with the warming of spring, – proceeds impassively. The bedrock of reality is cause and effect as far as I can tell. I find comfort in that. There, in Nature is my refuge from being whipsawed by revulsion, or by terror, or by avarice, by hope, or by _____.... Read More Read More - [Waiting For Lightning- Part I](https://everyangel.org/waiting-for-lightning-part-i/): This Friday begins with magnificent sunlight. Nature is our mother, the beginning and the ending of my/our individual stories. This story penned by Nietzsche requires two movements. Tomorrow I will offer part 2. As you’ve noticed it’s a conversation between a young adult (male or female) and Zarathustra. “Zarathustra,” Nietzsche’s mouthpiece, is a mysterious... Read More Read More - [Write With Blood](https://everyangel.org/write-with-blood/): Days become weeks, weeks months and perhaps years too, rare if ever does the conversation arise. I mean a direct, heads-up discussion about what we mean when we use the term God. What qualifies as experience of a divine presence for me? I could never hazard to answer on your behalf. Sometimes after pondering... Read More Read More - [Happiness Of The Knife](https://everyangel.org/happiness-of-the-knife/): Ought I to be surprised that Nietzsche’s understanding of crime parallels that of the ancient Stoics? This disciplined way of life aimed at moderating the passions, harmonizing emotion according to reason was developed from 400 to 500 year span of time from Athens to Rome. Stoics recognized that feeling, impulse, bodily sensation is emotion... Read More Read More - [Devil To Angel](https://everyangel.org/devil-to-angel/): I press forward to learn as much as possible about the ancient practice of Stoicism. The Greek and Roman adherents to the Stoic practice of self-reflection, the mindful analysis of emotion, – desired to become virtuous individuals. The ability to respond to whatever fate served up, preserving one’s sense of identity, reciprocating with clarity... Read More Read More - [At Daddio's](https://everyangel.org/at-daddios/): Monday morning brings a look-back, memories of the weekend. Several events remain vivid in mind. We enjoyed breakfast once again at Daddio’s Diner. The dining room is compact, bustling with patrons, griddle-man, and several waitstaff. We found two seats at the counter opposite the griddle. Hash brown potatoes are cooking at the back of... Read More Read More - [Drunken Joy To Look Away](https://everyangel.org/drunken-joy-looking-away/): One more nationwide demonstration is under my belt. I joined the Hands Off event in Geneva, standing on State Street, with a few thousand of my neighbors, frightened and concerned Americans. Trump, naturally, after announcing the imposition of massive tariffs, flew away to his Trump National Doral Golf Club to host the LIV tournament.... Read More Read More - [To Play A New Game](https://everyangel.org/to-play-a-new-game/): Saturday morning is quiet at this time. Patrons haven’t arrived yet to fill the room with conversation. The sky is overcast, an early spring chill in the air. I will participate in a demonstration of resistance to the administration that is scheduled for 11:30 AM later today. The non-violent protest will take place on... Read More Read More - [At The Motley Cow](https://everyangel.org/staying-at-the-motley-cow/): I resolved to turn away from writing about Trump. There is no question his machinations are fascinating and dangerous. Others do a better job of dissecting politics than I. They are professional story tellers and politics is their forte. I’d prefer to reflect upon the journey that I have taken, playing the hand that... Read More Read More - [Clown Or Buffoon](https://everyangel.org/much-poison-in-the-end/): A little poison now and then:that makes pleasant dreams.And much poison in the end,for a pleasant death. I cannot purge my mind of yesterday’s main news event. Trump hosted a spectacle in the outdoor Rose Garden, announcing a list of new tariffs that are to be applied to every trading partner. The tariffs were... Read More Read More - [For The Good Of All](https://everyangel.org/for-the-good-of-all/): This is an old Buddhist prayer. May I traverse all my lives in the world free of afflictions and interfering forces, but poised to endure with equanimity if afflictions and interfering forces come — for the good of All May I ease suffering in the earth realms. May I help guide wanderers in ignorance... Read More Read More - [And They Blink](https://everyangel.org/and-they-blink/): Perhaps you’ve hazarded an attempt to express, to a dyed-in-the-wool, hard-right Republican partisan, why you think a humane society, a system that is set up to include everyone, — is best for everyone. I have. The outcome is similar to pivoting, only to smash your forehead into a concrete abutment. Nietzsche, in his prologue,... Read More Read More - [A Rope Over An Abyss](https://everyangel.org/a-rope-over-the-abyss/): A friend commented regarding the post of yesterday, that my anger was showing, a turbulence roiling the waters of mind and expression. Nevertheless I continue because what follows in the Nietzschean tale is important that we consider. Our leading character in this tale is Zarathustra, who by chance happens upon a gathering of townspeople... Read More Read More - [Happiness, Reason, Virtue](https://everyangel.org/happiness-reason-virtue/): Sunday morning is a springish cloudy day. I am at Starbucks again. The room is buzzing, overlapping conversations. Briefly speaking with two friends, – we are to join the demonstration planned for Saturday at the end of this week. We will meet in Geneva on the bridge over the Fox River to chant and... Read More Read More - [Piling On](https://everyangel.org/piling-on/): I want to write another book. Laura insists that I get the first one published. She is right. Nevertheless I’d like to engage the fabulous fable penned by Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra. The story is surreal, a prescient foretelling, a projection of the course of the West. Zarathustra is a hermit-like individual whose season... Read More Read More - [Addiction & Self-complacency](https://everyangel.org/addiction/): Unaccountably I woke an hour before the alarm. Better to get an early start on a Friday than to insist upon sleep, when already awake. So with ample time at Starbucks, I read a three page commentary that I found on the internet which treats Truth and Lies Beyond Morality. I regret that I... Read More Read More - [A Fiery Sky](https://everyangel.org/the-sky-rains-fire/): According to the myth of Christianity, the eschaton signals the ending of an old order.  ἔσχατος means the end, last, and is often associated with doomsaying that the earth is to ‘end in fire.’ In a manner of speaking, the sky rains fire these days. Circumstances force a choice. Each in his/her heart is... Read More Read More - [While Passing I Noticed](https://everyangel.org/while-passing-i-noticed/): Here we go again! It seems that yesterday’s train of thought is not finished. Hang on! There’s a sharp, banked curve just ahead! No apology for the roller coaster metaphor… The creative act is a moment of Becoming itself and thus entails the most intimate unity of an individual and actuality. In such a... Read More Read More - [Good News After All](https://everyangel.org/good-news-after-all/): …the Artisten-Metaphysik suggeststhat individuals are alienatedfrom actuality, the synchronicity of the terms   suffering,   willing,   and becomingimplies that the experience of alienationspeaks not so much to humanity’sisolation from actualitybut of the point ofits most intimate unionwith it: ‘This world is will to power   — and nothing besides!And you yourselves are also        this will to power... Read More Read More - [Becoming A Dancer](https://everyangel.org/learn-to-dance/): It is Monday. Am I “in the groove” of a first work-day of the week? “Work” in my case no longer involves customers, employees, contractors, scheduling and profit. Where has destiny, the complicated twists and turns of circumstance, and of people led me, – what is “on my plate,” what I must do? That... Read More Read More - [Hero Of My Own Life](https://everyangel.org/be-hero-of-my-own-life/): Thinking about Ennui. It becomes clear that a response to ignorance, to the ill-will of sexism, to racism, to homophobia, and to tribalism, is to withdraw from excruciating pain. Ennui is the response of shock, an inward cringing, a “just too much” at the horror. This is a normal, healthy sign that one remains... Read More Read More - [Rx For Ennui](https://everyangel.org/rx-for-ennui/): An old friend wrote about the topic of Ennui on his blog The Cage. I and others have known first hand this persistent sense of malaise. Ennui is personal, a condition of soul that is beyond any abstract focus of interest. Speaking personally, a confluence of climate disruption resulting from runaway capitalism, and the... Read More Read More - [Defending Becoming Human](https://everyangel.org/to-defend-becoming-human/): Friday, the end of the week! An ending involves a beginning. Opposite meanings, each defines the other. You cannot have one without the other. Both terms are symbols, linguistic markers used to make sense of time. Making sense is something we humans cannot do without. Primitive and mammalian, the reflex to cry out, soon... Read More Read More - [To Court Oblivion](https://everyangel.org/to-court-oblivion/): In our everyday, public way of being,we have fallen awayfrom the innermost ground of our being,and the most finite thingin our finitude has been concealed from us. The radical nullity of Dasein (existence),of being held out into Nothingis forgottenin the courseof relating to beings; with great peace of mindwe hurry to the superficial domains... Read More Read More - [Campaigning Against Myself](https://everyangel.org/campaigning-against-myself/): Years pass, many books read, lectures, conversations held. I feel unease about my points of view. It’s just that I am the beneficiary of others, the writers, Professors, the friends who have contributed their minds, their passions. All became components, a composition of the sense of reality that I “call” my own. I suspect... Read More Read More - [What If We're Not Screwed?](https://everyangel.org/what-if-were-not-screwed/): Yesterday I read about an essay by Joan Westenberg. I clicked the link, read the essay and resonated with her words. I have excerpted some of it here. It just seems timely to pass on these good words. To read the eight minute essay, CLICK HERE. We are choking on cynicism.      Hope is... Read More Read More - [When Inspired We Find](https://everyangel.org/when-inspired-we-find/): Like you I struggle to regain emotional equilibrium in the aftermath of the expressed will of the majority of my countrymen to cede the next four years of the Presidency to a con-man entertainer, to a life-long molester of females, to an insurrectionist. The White House, both houses of Congress, and the Supreme Court... Read More Read More - [Birds Of Passage](https://everyangel.org/birds-of-passage/): In the midst ofthe ocean of becomingwe adventurers and birds of passagewake up on an island no larger than a small boat,and herewe look round us for a momentwith as much haste and curiosity as possible; for how quicklymay some gale blow us awayor some wave sweep over the little islandand leave nothing of... Read More Read More - [Admired By The Gods](https://everyangel.org/admired-by-the-gods/): One of my objectives upon retiring is to read the great works of Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey. I have purchased several translations with this in mind. These tales remain a cornerstone of culture. Even in Plato’s day the bronze age saga of the great war between the Greeks and Troy was ancient.... Read More Read More - [On Marriage](https://everyangel.org/on-marriage/): HOW OFTEN! HOW UNEXPECTED! How may married men have some morning awakened to the fact that their young wife is dull, although she thinks quite the contrary! not to speak of those wives whose flesh is willing but whose intellect is weak! — aphorism 276 DANGER IN BEAUTY. This woman is beautiful and intelligent:... Read More Read More - [Black Friday](https://everyangel.org/black-friday/): Thanksgiving, the day after. Around 8AM and this Starbucks is getting busy. It seems absurd to me that you’d attempt to go out today, especially to do shopping. If you’ve viewed television lately, commercials that focus upon “the holidays,” a period of 3.5 weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas, are presented one after the other.... Read More Read More - [Reason And Temperament](https://everyangel.org/reason-and-temperament/): Thanksgiving day. This day has become a tradition, since President Lincoln’s speech in 1863. Lincoln invoked God, suggesting that the “day of feasting” along with a collective attitude of thanksgiving might nudge the divinity to hasten a conclusion to the slaughter, destruction, and deprivation of the War Between the States.  Check it out for... Read More Read More - [Oh, This Eye](https://everyangel.org/oh-this-eye/): The quoted segment explores the labyrinthine, puzzle-like nature of art, – whether poetry or theater, or music, or perhaps of painting or of sculpture. Imagine yourself in a gallery, or in an artist’s studio and you are surrounded by an array of paintings, or perhaps by sculpture. Each work is a portal into the... Read More Read More - [Belief Or Unbelief](https://everyangel.org/belief-or-unbelief/): Tuesday morning is clear and chilled. At last fall envelops us. Hot coffee tastes especially delicious. Having discovered a collection of quotations relative to Religion and Unbelief, again I ponder my own journey. I do not think I’ve exercised choice at any point in the matter of religion. Prior to my birth infinite circumstances... Read More Read More - [Holiday Prep](https://everyangel.org/holiday-preparation/): Monday begins the procession to Thanksgiving day, Thursday of this week. Three and a half weeks hence we will celebrate Christmas day. it is impossible to avoid the insistence of (paid) purveyors of merriment, that this is the happiest time of the year. Thanksgiving and Christmas are both religious holidays, with a veneer of... Read More Read More - [This Feeling](https://everyangel.org/this-feeling/): Saturday morning at a crowded Starbucks. What is to be done? Concentrate, focus upon the task at hand? I mean, the search for words, to wait until sensations, the reciprocal response of the body to a world sparks thought, a response… This space, the remodeled corner of 3rd and State in Geneva expresses the... Read More Read More - [Borderlands](https://everyangel.org/borderlands/): It is Friday. In my working years, every week had a frontier. The near border was Monday, the starting line where one accelerates to “get ahead.” What in the name of sanity did the intention of “getting ahead” mean? The relativity of everything was unnoticed, I was enthralled with what I had written, my... Read More Read More - [Three Chords And The Truth](https://everyangel.org/three-chords-and-the-truth/): It is late November, a winter chill has arrived. The “wintery mix,” a covering of fine ice crystals and rain is a reminder that the tilt of the earth’s axis away from the sun means winter is sure. That is the truth. What is meant by winter can be counted upon, preparation ought to... Read More Read More - [Someone To Lie To Me](https://everyangel.org/someone-to-lie-to-me/): A voice whispers, the sound of my conscience, that I am no exception to this mad scenario. All will choose seduction over prosaic substance, if we have opportunity. We cannot help ourselves — but believe that “someone to lie to me” must also be “someone to watch over me”… Nations are deceived so often... Read More Read More - [Musing About Our Soul](https://everyangel.org/musing-about-our-soul/): This passage personally resonates with me. In my working years as owner of a company, I knew day to day the discipline of assigning a value, in terms of what someone else would be willing to pay. Exchange value: dollars for service, the quid pro quo. Is this a fair assessment of what we’ve... Read More Read More - [No Chariot Of History](https://everyangel.org/noise-and-dust/): A feature of our time is media punditry.  From MSNBC, to Fox, to Newsmax and unnumbered internet channels of influencers and opinion makers, to name just a few: Joe Rogan, Bill Maher, and Selena Gomez… The overarching horizon of communication companies is profit/loss capitalism. Competition is the rule and thus the appetite for content... Read More Read More - [Contra Meathead Morals](https://everyangel.org/against-meathead-morals/): There is… a counterforce which continually reminds us that there is no exclusively moral-making morality, and that a morality which asserts itself to the exclusion of all other morality destroys too much sound strength and is too dearly bought by mankind. The non-conventional and deviating people, who are so often productive and inventive, must... Read More Read More - [Poetry Respite](https://everyangel.org/poetry-respite/): The mind begins to sweat soon enough when reading Nietzsche. He offers a style of thinking, and angle of view of world and of self which is uncomfortable, at first. Reading such philosophy is comparable to training in order to run a marathon. One does not just run 26.1 miles on a whim. One... Read More Read More - [Joining The Mob](https://everyangel.org/joining-the-mob/): Nietzsche is interested in the ideal of the ancient Greeks, “all things in moderation.” The Greeks were as human as any 21st century homo sapien. Ideals serve as coordinates that we attempt to follow, albeit the inadequacy of our character, or skill, or resources. In contradistinction to the Greeks we Americans make no attempt... Read More Read More - [Art Theory](https://everyangel.org/art-theory/): BEAUTY CORRESPONDING TO THE AGE. —Ifour sculptors, painters, and musicianswish to catch the significance of the age,they should represent beauty as bloated, gigantic, and nervous: just as the Greeks,under the influence of their morality of moderation,saw and represented beauty in the Apollo di Belvedere. We should, indeed, call him ugly!But the pedantic “classicists” have... Read More Read More - [A Yardstick From Somewhere Else](https://everyangel.org/a-yardstick-from-somewhere-else/): Day by day November 5th recedes. Today is the 12th. Psychologically it seems as if an entire age has transpired. I mean that we ‘liberal minded’ are worn out by news of sycophants appointed to head cabinet departments, for which they need only demonstrate unconditioned, servile loyalty to the President. The next four years... Read More Read More - [For My Own Ego](https://everyangel.org/for-my-own-ego/): A restless night is followed by a grey, cloud-covered sky. The air is somewhat cooler, to remind us that typically this is fall. The weather has been markedly warmer than usual, another indicator of global warming. The signs are coming more often, such as the wild fires in New England.  My nightmare that disrupted... Read More Read More - [Night Divinity](https://everyangel.org/night-is-a-divinity/): Thought reels upon recall of yesterdays extended quotation. Nietzsche describes Moira, a concept of the ancient Greeks. Moira is an inchoate dimension of a-rationality, impenetrable, formless dark, which  disrupts our “world”, the one which we’ve purposefully constructed, a life-world of reason. We call such events accidents. Such as when a vehicle slams into another... Read More Read More - [Clever Dwarfs And Ultra-stupid Giants](https://everyangel.org/clever-dwarfs-and-ultra-stupid-giants/): It is a Sunday morning. The first day of our week in some traditions is designated for mindful attention to divine reality, to put it plainly – for worship. The timing could not be better for a story, an ancient tale of exchange between humans (we clever dwarfs) and the “gods” who by comparison... Read More Read More - [Being Done At Every Moment](https://everyangel.org/being-done-at-every-moment/): Reading Nietzsche ranks with the most difficult of duties within memory. I categorize my inclination, my taste for his fevered commentary, the excavation of language in the only way possible, with language, – as a duty. I am reminded of being taken as a sick child to the family doctor by my parents. Then... Read More Read More - [Uneasy Thought Experiment](https://everyangel.org/a-wtf-thought-experiment/): Just suppose for a moment…  If you could imagine the ultimate game, one which you and I are outside observers,… As nonparticipants, god-like spectators removed, we notice something: the unending suffering, nuanced, background discomfort all the way to extreme agony of the players. Additionally notice how the self-aware creatures assume their suffering is a... Read More Read More - [A Tiger A Coyote](https://everyangel.org/a-tiger-a-coyote/): I felt comfort to see the horizon alight with the dawn. Upon entering the seating area at Starbucks, I felt the red of the Christmas-holiday promotion posters behind the beverage prep. counter. Paper cups with the colorful holiday graphic were stacked ready for use. Thus, I am reminded that life has a relentless heartbeat... Read More Read More - [Alia Iacta Est*](https://everyangel.org/alia-iacta-est/): Wednesday morning, I heard from my wife, daughter, and a friend, that the mad king shortly will be ensconced in the White House by the “will of the people.” Did we imagine that democracy was an American birthright, inviolate, a gift of the gods. What a sad illusion that was. We are awake now,... Read More Read More - [The Real World](https://everyangel.org/the-real-world/): Election day. I am glad to see, to feel the falling rain. The New York Times reports this morning that all but two states are in a condition of drought. According to the poet, Dionysus Olympian god of reverie and wine, while intoxicated with a single candle, illuminates the horizon. I think that we... Read More Read More - [Doomed, Anyway](https://everyangel.org/we-are-doomed-anyway/): Disastrous are disasters. Paradise is such a lonely place that we are doomed, anyway. But at the meeting point of its rivers the horizon is always enlarged, the imagination unleashed. *** Love creates sand-storms and loosens reality’s building blocks. Its feverish energy takes us into the heart of mountains. Sometimes, a frozen moon illuminates... Read More Read More - [Music Not Matter](https://everyangel.org/music-not-matter/): The poet Murel Rukeyser said the universe is composed of stories, not atoms. The physicistWerner Heisenberg declared that the universe ismade of music, not matter. And we believe that if you habitually expose yourselfto toxic stories and music, you could wind up livingin the wrong universe, where it’s impossible tobecome the gorgeous genius you were born... Read More Read More - [Falling And Thinking](https://everyangel.org/falling-and-thinking/): November 5 is election day. No matter the election outcome, I anticipate celebrating our granddaughter’s 5th birthday upon that day. Last evening afforded little rest. I woke with troubling dreams at odd times before daybreak Then I felt disoriented. Sometimes in waking life, I feel at a decision point, and my sense of things... Read More Read More - [Happiness And Morality](https://everyangel.org/happiness-and-morality/): So you desire the happiness of others, perhaps that of your own child… What are you going to do? We should notgive the individual,in so far as he desires his own happiness,any preceptsor recommendationsas to the road leading to happiness; for individual happinessarises from particular lawsthat are unknownto anybody, and such a man/womanwill only... Read More Read More - [Miasma Of Opinions](https://everyangel.org/phantom-queer-world/): Today is Halloween. Who doesn’t enjoy a ghost story, especially those classic movies which portray a tale of haunting? We recently viewed George Romero’s 1968 Night of the Living Dead. Viewing the movie for the first time, I appreciated that in 1968 the tale absolutely induced fear. We love a haunting… Is a haunting... Read More Read More - [And Then](https://everyangel.org/and-then-2/): I joined a group of adults for an evening of theological discussion. The topic assigned to us had to do with the relationship between our sense of Christian faith and the struggle for power which will crescendo on November 5th. Christianity is inherited from late antiquity. I suppose you are acquainted with the stories.... Read More Read More - [Evangelical Salvation](https://everyangel.org/being-saved-for-evangelicals/): The Trump rally of Sunday at Madison Square Garden has been in the news. The rally was billed as an occasion for the closing arguments of the Trump campaign. The “argument” developed as a hate fest, a racist orgy castigating Puerto Rico and immigrant citizens from Puerto Rico who certainly vote in elections. Trump himself,... Read More Read More - [More Suffering?](https://everyangel.org/how-to-suffer-more/): We watched a 2023 film entitled Poor Things. This is a fantasy, steampunk Frankenstein takeoff, that picks apart default moral assumptions of cultured society. Bella Baxter is brought back to life. Bella, waking with the brain of a newborn, learns to physically function as an adult female. The twist of this tale is Bella’s... Read More Read More - ["Christian" House Of Horrors](https://everyangel.org/house-of-horrors/): A widespread feature of Christianity is hardly ever spoken of. Entire cultural groups are yet to recover from this malignant, distorted, misshapen evaluation of human sexuality. Perhaps you’ve the wrestled with a haunting of shame, the guilt-goblin that obstructs, persists, impeding a natural expression of your mammalian self? Hauntings are concealed, never spoken of... Read More Read More - [Hatred Of Mankind](https://everyangel.org/hatred-of-mankind/): How many conversations have I overheard on the “golden rule”? You know the maxim which recommends that I demonstrate toward my fellowman/woman the same deference which I am wont to demonstrate toward myself. The consensus: everyone approves the rule of harmony, this prescription for universal peace-love-and-understanding. Simply keep the Golden Rule in mind, and... Read More Read More - [Scary Story](https://everyangel.org/scary-story/): Could Halloween as a matter of fact be a religious festival? I mean that taking stock of the otherworldly, that sense of life when touched by ghostly, supernatural presence, – a frank admission of fright, of something inscrutable about what life and death means… Nietzsche writes a speculative account of someone who experiences a... Read More Read More - [Naked Un-Reason](https://everyangel.org/naked-un-reason/): I perused the New York Times email of today’s headlines. We are two weeks out from election day. Have you ever found yourself watching a prize fight that lasted too many rounds?  At the final bell, judges render their decision and in the case of Trump v. Harris the judges will be the American... Read More Read More - [Cruelty To Spare](https://everyangel.org/cruelty-to-spare/): I have nothing specific in mind, this morning. This text merits bringing to the fore for consideration. Scratch the surface of the widespread dissatisfaction with American society, and you will find those who wish to turn the country over to a sociopath are convinced that doom is in store. Divine judgment is near. There’s... Read More Read More - [Candles Burn Blood](https://everyangel.org/when-candles-burn-blood/): References to the macabre are hyperbole it seems to me, in relation to our Halloween. American kids look forward to scoring a bagful of free candy treats while thinly disguised in the costume of choice. Halloween is by no means as comparably serious as the Dia de Muertos in Mexico that features offerings to... Read More Read More - [No Further](https://everyangel.org/no-further/): We viewed a film noir, The Killing by Stanley Kubrick. One’s sense of viewing, the take-away from the film hinges as much upon what one brings to the screen, as upon Kubrick’s cinematic composition of the tale of a horse racetrack heist. The mastermind of the theft from the track counting room, Johnny Clay is... Read More Read More - [Without Suffering](https://everyangel.org/without-suffering/): A world without suffering is easy to imagine. Every human that has lived, members of our species, we language enabled mammals, finding ourselves thrown into this world, experience pain on many accounts. To avoid pain, to seek pleasure is and has been universal. A world without suffering has been a theme of countless legends,... Read More Read More - [The Only War](https://everyangel.org/the-only-war/): The statement is enough. It will be sufficient to linger for a while to consider what this means, how extensive the repression of imagination. Our imagination expands our world. The world is held conjointly, you and I in relation, even more, in company with all living and nonliving things. Who is to say that... Read More Read More - [King's Ransom](https://everyangel.org/kings-ransom/): On Sunday, two days ago I took the opportunity to visit the track for a final time for this year. It is mid fall. Soon the temps will fall, warm days will become a memory. Drag racing is a fair weather activity, ideal for summertime. Direct sunlight, heat, make asphalt lanes treated with traction... Read More Read More - [Making Yourself Powerful and Fascinating](https://everyangel.org/making-yourself-powerful-and-fascinating/): I am a fan of civilization. The comfort of this Starbucks, the soothing background music, the efficient and professional-polite barista, and this “just right” hot cup of delicious coffee, all appeal to me. Is this what is meant by civilized, polite society? I mean a society calibrated to ensure security and comfort for those... Read More Read More - [All That Hasn't Changed](https://everyangel.org/all-this-hasnt-changed/): Words published in 1881 persuades us that we ought to stop lying to ourselves. Nietzsche, the philologist compares the epoch of modern humanity, an era marked by reason, and the search for knowledge, by awareness of class differences, of institutional injustice, (a few of the hallmarks of a liberal-democratic society) – a juxtaposition with... Read More Read More - [Vertigo](https://everyangel.org/vertigo-2/): Attempting to wrap my mind around this insight – I inwardly shiver. To become well educated in the contemporary sense means a grasp of cause and effect, of a mechanical notion of reality, that events, even occasions of unspeakable enormity, of power so destructive that ordinary words cannot serve, – are no longer divine... Read More Read More - [Our Amerika](https://everyangel.org/silhouette-of-evil/): My quest for insight from Nietzsche continues. Today I began reading The Dawn of Day written in 1881. Beginning with The Dawn of Day Nietzsche’s ideas began to coalesce into a unified vision. As usual reading Nietzsche is like running full-out into the cold ocean surf. There is the shock of difference, the comfort... Read More Read More - [Taken By Surprise](https://everyangel.org/taken-by-surprise/): A visit to the Saturday morning Farmer’s Market is something we look forward to. On the street between vendor stalls, I remember the excitement of childhood: the sky is blue, I hear the conversation and laughter of our Batavia neighbors. A majority of us work indoors. Is is not natural to be out of... Read More Read More - [Just This](https://everyangel.org/just-this/): Didn’t post yesterday.  Fall chores at home, then to the Batavia Farmer’s Market. A Farmer’s Market is a party, as well as an opportunity to participate in the life-sustaining exchange. Our human species prefers civilization. Civilization is wedded to infinite processes of soil, water, seed & plant, sun, atmosphere, every scintilla of which is... Read More Read More - [The Joke's On Me](https://everyangel.org/the-jokes-on-me/): Each day passes, election day is closer to us. Perhaps today I will fill out my mail-in ballot, and be satisfied that I have expressed my will for the texture of the future for all that live here, not just here, for the world. There is much that I wish were different about the... Read More Read More - [The Mystery Of Flavor](https://everyangel.org/the-mystery-of-flavor/): Tuesday begins. The day promises to be full. The launchpad for my life is Starbucks as usual. I have adjusted long ago to the full-bodied flavor of the Starbucks brand of coffee, and confess that I look forward to my first cup, and to my second cup, etc. etc.  How do they achieve the... Read More Read More - [Animal Narrans](https://everyangel.org/animal-narrans/): Living is narrating. The human being is an animal narrans, and differs from animals to the extent that, through narrative, new forms of life are brought about. A narrative contains the power of a new beginning. Every action that changes the world presupposes a narrative. The crisis of narration, by Byung-chul Han, page 68... Read More Read More - [Soulless, Without Myth](https://everyangel.org/soulless-without-myth/): Rising from the evening’s rest I was in a surly frame of mind. I felt haunted by the spectre of college football. You know that fall season of televised spectacle where many millions of dollars are marshaled to fill magnificent stadiums with students, alumni arrayed in team apparel, some with painted faces, immersed in... Read More Read More - [Walk With Me](https://everyangel.org/walk-with-me/): Born To Run In the day, we sweat it out on the streetsOf a runaway American dreamAt night, we ride through mansions of gloryIn suicide machinesSprung from cages out on Highway 9Chrome wheeled, fuel injected and steppin’ out over the lineOh, baby this town rips the bones from your backIt’s a death trap, it’s... Read More Read More - [Praise The Cat](https://everyangel.org/praise-the-cat/): Friday, the sky is overcast. Perhaps we shall see showers, remnants of Helene, the cat 4 hurricane that bisected the Florida panhandle. I must confess schadenfreunde, perverse pleasure at the dread of the climate-warming-denying Florida administration. Nature is dispassionate, reciprocating according to the effect of a consumption based, hydrocarbon ravenous culture which increases the... Read More Read More - [Popeye Takes It Straight](https://everyangel.org/popeye-returns/): A Thursday morning, and I have an appointment with my lawnmower. Fallen leaves wait to be harvested. The mulch will not be wasted. The dying and the life-to-come are intimately linked, – mulch to new life. Just thinking about the infinite supply of shock material, so many videos from the political right and left... Read More Read More - [Pivoting](https://everyangel.org/pivoting/): Wednesday is the pivot point of this week. Waking this morning I felt disoriented. Before waking, the body just ‘knows’ time in a way that a clock cannot. I surfaced to wakefulness through a sticky, surreal, dreamy vision. Did I see it or did I feel it? Both… Almost 9AM now and I continue... Read More Read More - [This Is Enough](https://everyangel.org/this-is-enough/): This is what I thought: for the most banal event to become an adventure, you must (and this is enough) begin to recount it. This is what fools people: a man is always a teller of tales, he[she] lives surrounded by his[her] stories, and stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him... Read More Read More - [Redemption, The Long Tail](https://everyangel.org/redemption-the-long-tail/): Happiness for us is thinkableonly in the air that we have breathed,among the people who have lived with us.In other words, there vibratesin the idea of happiness…the idea of salvation. …Our life it can be said,is a muscle strong enough to contract the whole of historical time. Or, to put it differently, the genuine... Read More Read More - [Not To Be Continued](https://everyangel.org/not-to-be-continued/): I am reading an extended essay by Byung-chul Han entitled The crisis of narration. Han quotes often from Walter Benjamin. Here are a few lines from Han: Communicable experience based upon word of mouthis becoming increasingly rare.Nothing is passed down;nothing is narrated. Benjamin holds that the storyteller‘is a man who has counsel for his... Read More Read More - [Until It Rains, Soccer, Art](https://everyangel.org/am-i-strong-enough/): Saturday morning, a little time is left here at Starbucks. Less now, but enough.  Drought assaulted shrubs in my yard need a drink. I feel the obligation. I’ll provide water until it rains tonight (or perhaps not). Weather reports are speculation even with the improved accuracy of late. That is all it is, which... Read More Read More - [If I Were An Idiot](https://everyangel.org/wish-i-could-be-an-idiot/): The Song of the Idiot By Ranier Maria Rilke They do not hinder me. They let me go.They say, nothing could happen even so.   How good.Nothing can happen. Everything revolves engrossedalways around the Holy Ghost,around a certain ghost (you know)—   how good.No, one should really not supposethat there is any danger in those.There’s of... Read More Read More - [Alas, Always Only](https://everyangel.org/alas-always-only/): These are the concluding words, the wrap-up of Beyond Good and Evil. Nietzsche takes his measure of a comprehensive philosophy which he has offered, not unlike a master-work painting of detail and subtlety. The author declares what he has said/written is already showing decrepitude, the dissolution inevitable to everything that is time bound. I... Read More Read More - [Mandarins With Brushes](https://everyangel.org/mandarins-with-brushes/): So this is where we are! Nothing to do, nothing but to recognize and embrace what is before us. What we had established, our words steadfast-in-print on paper, at one time attractive, compelling, emulated around the world… (I remember a story by a professor teaching a course in American business practices, recounting that we... Read More Read More - [Finding A Way](https://everyangel.org/finding-a-way/): A friend read the ‘hidden god’ quotation of yesterday.  He responded by text that he wanted to think more about the quotation. We plan to talk by phone this afternoon. Nietzsche reveals in subsequent lines that he is referring to Dionysus, the god of reverie, of wine, of inadvertent discovery.  The thought of such... Read More Read More - [That Great Hidden One](https://everyangel.org/that-great-hidden-one/): Monday, the day after a 2nd attempt to assassinate the former president… The Secret Service detected someone with a weapon in proximity to where Trump was finishing up a round of golf at his club. The assailant was arrested a short while later. Trump, ever the bloviating self-promoter immediately tweeted to his sycophants that... Read More Read More - [Strength](https://everyangel.org/strength/): Would you say these are persuasive words, describing inner strength of self, the ability to see clearly what one lives for and if necessary, absolutely willing to die to defend? I would. I have been acquainted with many strong females, thus the interpolation suggests that women are able to show this manner of strength... Read More Read More - [A Fatal Human Being](https://everyangel.org/a-fatal-human-being/): Perhaps any comment upon this passage would ruin it. I am relieved to read that a philosopher is a mere human. Not everyone is captivated by how extraordinary are “ordinary” experiences, ie. seeing, hearing, hoping and dreaming. When you stop reflect do further, secondary storms blow up? Surely Nietzsche is being autobiographical here. Still,... Read More Read More - [Morality As Jersey Art](https://everyangel.org/art-3/): Homo Sapiens, the mammal that psychologically clothes itself with team colors, like every other fan at a soccer game. A coordinated style, moral attire that palate of team colors is instantly recognized by everyone in the room. What I mean – approved comportment, a manner of getting things done, of movement, of being, is... Read More Read More - [Not Putting Away My Spade](https://everyangel.org/not-putting-away-my-spade/): This segment stopped me cold. For as long as I can remember I welcomed solitude. As a kid I adventured alone in the woods, and I had an appetite for books. Perhaps I understood then what philosophy affirmed later to my adult self: “the world” is a product of what we can manage, or... Read More Read More - [Poker Tells](https://everyangel.org/poker-tells/): After dinner we played a card game that included our almost-five year old grand daughter. A simple game, called “Go Fish” was played with intense delight by the child. The game is a matter of alphabet matching. She is learning the letters of the alphabet. Her pleasure visibly grows as she masters the rules... Read More Read More - [This Heavy, Overcast Sky](https://everyangel.org/under-this-heavy-overcast-sky/): Tonight the debate between the Republican and the Democratic candidate is to be televised on ABC. It is difficult to imagine two personalities of starker contrast. Most Americans have already made a choice. Perhaps you are sympatico with a life-long bully, a male who has made his way by grift. He is an icon... Read More Read More - [How Much Longer Daddy?](https://everyangel.org/how-long-does-it-take-daddy/): How could it be otherwise? Our sense of time, of the texture of change, – is of-our-species of mammal. When I was a child with my sister in the back seat of our car, I remember those trips to visit with my grand parents. The hour and a half drive felt interminable. More than... Read More Read More - [Happiness By The Throat](https://everyangel.org/choking-happiness-to-death/): A festival, a fair has always been the occasion for my happiness. I remember as a child being taken to a circus, or that feeling of excitement on a chill December evening, waiting curbside for the first sound and sight of the Christmas parade,… Such events caused me to feel happy for a while.... Read More Read More - [What I Want To See](https://everyangel.org/what-i-want-to-see/): Fall approaches, as does the general election. Given the division within the country, the stoking of alarm, no doubt many feel that we are on a slippery slope. No one can know what the future will be. Our insecurity prompts us to seek what is base, dishonorable, – to be defensive minded. I think... Read More Read More - [What Holiness Is](https://everyangel.org/what-holiness-is/): Nothing is wasted! Even a heritage that one has taken measure of, reflected upon, then with effort to transition, to construct a more humane self, – that old wreckage in the rear-view-mirror is a resource for insight. Nietzsche states that holiness is nothing but a quest for purity. Saintliness is to insist upon unifying... Read More Read More - [Soul With A Crack](https://everyangel.org/soul-with-a-crack/): How do I begin? We are several days on the far side of Labor Day. In this election year, November 4th is coming up fast (like a sweeping curve at the end of a racetrack straightaway). We, that is fellow citizens, will soon cast a ballot to select the 47th president of the United... Read More Read More - [Inventing A God](https://everyangel.org/inventing-a-god/): This is one of the most un-nerving texts I’ve ever read. A single idea that I have held sacred for a long time as an adult is the thought that I and others, say everyone in this room could, might thrive in a loving relationship. A tagline from the great song by the Eagles... Read More Read More - [Possum Chaser II](https://everyangel.org/possum-chaser-ii/): Human individuals are often surprising. Each of us is the consequence of genetic inheritance, and of conditioning. What I mean to say by conditioning – that complex of geography, of the point in time of a civilization’s/people’s stage of development, of the style and degree of nurture received from one’s parents, of the texture... Read More Read More - [Every Star An Egoist](https://everyangel.org/every-star-an-egoist/): These lines are counter intuitive to the contemporary American scale of values. Democracy valorizes what is common, the equality of citizenship. I think this is a critical dimension, to be defended – at the level of political participation in our society. By universal agreement every citizen has a voice, in the form of a... Read More Read More - [Furthermore On Education](https://everyangel.org/furthermore-on-education/): The college football season begins. Following an afternoon of immersion in drag racing at Great Lakes Drag-a-way in Wisconsin, I resigned myself to indifferently watching the game between Texas A&M and Notre Dame on channel 7. The commentators ballyhoo’d the start of the season, which features televised games in state-of-the-art stadiums viewed by millions,... Read More Read More - [What Else Is Education For?](https://everyangel.org/what-else-is-education-for/): These are severe, almost serrated words. The writer observes how profoundly we are marked, shaped by attitudes, habitual behaviors of our immediate, even of ancestors not proximate to our memory. I hardly knew my grandfather. Nevertheless what he loved lives and and is expressed in me. This endowment, a tendency for benefit or for... Read More Read More - [Like Dirty Water](https://everyangel.org/like-dirty-water/): An important feature of Nietzsche’s thought is a cultivated intuition of a gradation, of a hierarchy from the base, common, mundane to the transcendent. A scale of values is a capacity for recognition of the sacred.  Nietzsche seldom wrote any approving estimation of European Christendom. Here, he acknowledges that “the book” of Christianity has... Read More Read More - [Becoming A Yes Sayer](https://everyangel.org/becoming-a-yes-sayer/): A friend pointed me to this poem by Wm. Blake. How important is friendship, a few associations that are mutually cultivated for years, over an arc of time. I owe my growth as an adult to the recommendations received from friends, the books, poems, film, – all of that, the deposits in the bank... Read More Read More - [Left Standing There](https://everyangel.org/left-standing-there/): Wednesday, is midweek. The suffocating, dangerous heat dome prevailing upon outdoor activity for the last day or so has receded. It is possible to move about again, to enjoy the most basic of our animal-like freedoms, that of movement. How about a story? This story of New York’s MTA, of a city public transit... Read More Read More - [Do Not Touch](https://everyangel.org/do-not-touch/): Still pondering the car show. I recall the blue Lamborghini parked near the entrance to the show, at the intersection of State and 3rd. Ferrari is widely recognized as an uncommon instance of excellence, the high art of the automobile.  Lamborghini is even more so, and one might argue the apex of a tradition... Read More Read More - [Keepin' The Faith](https://everyangel.org/keepin-the-faith/): Car show yesterday. An adventure in memory. Big shows seem to trigger introspection. I think about the individuals in the prime of life, that solved mechanical conundrums, understanding more deeply the principles of physics, to design, to construct a more functional, and a more beautiful vehicle. I do not believe that beauty can be... Read More Read More - [The Primal Fact](https://everyangel.org/the-primal-fact/): Car show weekend in Geneva.  Today, Sunday is the big show, the Geneva concurs d’elegance.  Both sides of 3rd as well as side streets are parked with exotic collector cars and race cars of all vintages. This is an annual event.  Sure it’s testosterone laced, a fashion show of shaped metal, painted, polished to... Read More Read More - [Egalité](https://everyangel.org/egalite/): At times one feels compelled to venture out on thin ice. The term is used as metaphor to capture the hazard that attends to speaking the absurd, or on the other hand, speaking truth from which one’s fellows are conditioned to turn away. Equality is bedrock to the American experiment, to these United States.... Read More Read More - [Tanaami](https://everyangel.org/tanaami/): A final evening of the DNC event at the United Center featured Kamala Harris’ acceptance speech of her parties nomination as candidate for the presidency. I was transfixed by the superb choice of words, the artistry of the rhetoric, while feeling a bit of discomfort. Upon reflection this morning I understand that the speech... Read More Read More - [Confession Of A Late Refugee](https://everyangel.org/confession-of-a-late-refugee/): Again I viewed night three of the televised speeches from the Democratic National Convention.  As anticipated the parade of celebrities was preliminary to the headliner, Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota. Walz’ nomination acceptance speech was a praise anthem to middle-class America. Does anyone know what “this” is anymore? Middle class is no longer cleanly... Read More Read More - [Drunken And Dissipated Cows](https://everyangel.org/drunken-and-dissipated-cows/): I do not keep secret that I am a recovering evangelical. My evangelical roots will always be residual in my personality, my style and manner of life. The past, however it might have been, continues to reverberate through us. (Just a note of gratitude, – without a past you and I would not be... Read More Read More - [A Conscience In My Ear](https://everyangel.org/a-conscience-in-my-ear/): I was inclined not to watch. I assumed the first evening of televised speeches from the Democratic National Convention were likely to be similar to the first half of most NFL football games.  Each team gets a feel for the game plan, taking the measure of the opponent, a tepid warmup of sorts. Some... Read More Read More - [Drip, Drip or Bite, Sizzle, Cut](https://everyangel.org/drip-drip-or-bite-sizzle-and-cut/): The National Convention of the Democratic Party begins today in downtown Chicago. As one would expect the event is conceived to produce maximally persuasive visuals for television, for electronic distribution. The convention as a whole, including various groups coming to Chicago to exercise the opportunity for free expression in the “public square” – will... Read More Read More - [Blood & Light & Water & Sky](https://everyangel.org/blood-light-water-sky/): Saturday morning is overcast. A storm moved through last night.  We needed the rain. I feel gratitude for timely rain, because circumstances could be otherwise. I’ll not dwell upon that! Here is a poem that speaks to many things. The female poetess describes a birth, which is a primal and spiritual matter, a dying... Read More Read More - [Explaining Myself](https://everyangel.org/explaining-myself/): But here now are some other sayings: I do not know whether they are of the same character as those which I have already given, or of a different character. Whether they be of the same character or not when looked at along with them, they have a character of their own, which cannot... Read More Read More - [Debacle](https://everyangel.org/comedy-of-errors/): Among the men of old their knowledge reached the extreme point. What was that extreme point? Some held that at first there was not anything. This is the extreme point, the utmost point to which nothing can be added. A second class held that there was something, but without any responsive recognition of it... Read More Read More - [In The Morning Three](https://everyangel.org/in-the-morning-three/): When we toil our spirits and intelligence,obstinately determined (to establish our own view),and do not know the agreement(which underlies it and the views of others),we have what is called‘In the morning three.’ What is meant by that ‘In the morning three?’ A keeper of monkeys,in giving them out their acorns, (once) said,‘In the morning... Read More Read More - [Starting The Fire](https://everyangel.org/starting-the-fire/): Saturday morning brings a needed rain. Rain, even as my mind turns to the national No Kings rally scheduled for later in the morning. I plan to participate rain or no rain. What will this multi-city demonstration involving millions of citizens amount to? Nothing at all in the immediate manifestations of human injustice. I... Read More Read More - [When To Stop](https://everyangel.org/knowing-when-to-stop-2/): It was separation that led to completion;from completion ensued dissolution. But all things,without regardto their completion and dissolution,may again be comprehended in their unity; It is only the far reaching in thoughtwho know how to comprehend them in this unity.This being so, let us give up our devotion to our own views,and occupy ourselves... Read More Read More - [Beaten Path](https://everyangel.org/a-beaten-path/): 4. By means of a finger (of my own) to illustrate that the finger (of another) is not a finger is not so good a plan as to illustrate that it is not so by means of what is (acknowledged to be) not a finger; and by means of (what I call) a horse... Read More Read More - [Chirpings](https://everyangel.org/chirpings/): If we were to follow the judgments of the predetermined mind, who would be left alone and without a teacher? Not only would it be so with those who know the sequences (of knowledge and feeling) and make their own selection among them, but it would be so as well with the stupid and... Read More Read More - [Sound And Fury*](https://everyangel.org/sound-and-fury/): Life is lived in the shadow of language. Language conceals and reveals. Your opinion serves to define my opinion. Would there be any point to my opinion without you, without your opinion? Still there’s the nagging sense that something is missing. What if anything makes your view or my view true? Shall we seek... Read More Read More - [Stop, Just Stop It!](https://everyangel.org/stop-just-stop-it/): Great knowledge is wide and comprehensive;    small knowledge is partial and restricted. Great speech is exact and complete;    small speech is (merely) so much talk. When we sleep, the soul communicates with (what is external to us); when we awake, the body is set free. Our intercourse with others then leads to... Read More Read More - [Autumn Colors - Camo](https://everyangel.org/fall/): Sunday, the sun is brilliant and the air cool. Fall. The seasons are reliable, delivering the rhythmic weather essential to the community life here in the Midwest. You might guess that my subtext, about which I struggle to write, — the political upheaval, the social unrest that troubles Chicago and our suburbs. The advent... Read More Read More - [Giving Is Getting](https://everyangel.org/giving-is-getting/): 81 True words aren’t eloquent;eloquent words aren’t true.Wise men don’t need to prove their point;men who need to prove their point aren’t wise. The Master has no possessions.The more he does for others,the happier he is.The more he gives to others,the wealthier he is. The Tao nourishes by not forcing.By not dominating, the Master... Read More Read More - [Growing From Here To There](https://everyangel.org/growing-from-here-to-there/): 80 Ifa country is governed wisely,its inhabitants will be content.They enjoy the labor of their handsand don’t waste time inventinglabor-saving machines. Since they dearly love their homes,they aren’t interested in travel.There may be a few wagons and boats,but these don’t go anywhere.There may be an arsenal of weapons,but nobody ever uses them. People enjoy... Read More Read More - [Blame](https://everyangel.org/blame/): 79 Failure is an opportunity. If you blame someone else, there is no end to the blame. Therefore the Master fulfills her own obligations and corrects her own mistakes. She does what she needs to do and demands nothing of others. Tao Te Ching by Lao-tsu, trans. by Stephen Mitchell These lines, verse 79... Read More Read More - [Reality And Contradiction](https://everyangel.org/reality-and-contradiction/): 78 Nothing in the worldis as soft and yielding as water.Yet for dissolving the hard and inflexible,nothing can surpass it. The soft overcomes the hard;the gentle overcomes the rigid.Everyone knows this is true,but few can put it into practice. Therefore the Master remainsserene in the midst of sorrow.Evil cannot enter his heart.Because he has... Read More Read More - [Vicious Circle](https://everyangel.org/vicious-circle/): 77 As it acts in the world, the Tao is like the bending of a bow. The top is bent downward; the bottom is bent up. It adjusts excess and deficiency so that there is perfect balance. It takes from what is too much and gives to what isn’t enough. Those who try to... Read More Read More - [Born Soft - Die Hard](https://everyangel.org/born-soft-to-die-hard/): 76 Men are born soft and supple;dead, they are stiff and hard.Plants are born tender and pliant;dead, they are brittle and dry. Thus whoever is stiff and inflexibleis a disciple of death.Whoever is soft and yieldingis a disciple of life. The hard and stiff will be broken.The soft and supple will prevail. Tao Te... Read More Read More - [Taxes & Propaganda](https://everyangel.org/taxes-propaganda/): 75 When taxes are too high, people go hungry. When the government is too intrusive, people lose their spirit. Act for the people’s benefit. Trust them; leave them alone. Tao Te Ching, by Lao-tsu, trans. by Stephen Mitchell Scholars Roger T. Ames and David L. Hall observed that much of the Tao Te Ching... Read More Read More - [Not Scared Of Dying](https://everyangel.org/not-scared-of-dying/): 74 If you realize that all things change, there is nothing you will try to hold on to. If you aren’t afraid of dying, there is nothing you can’t achieve. Trying to control the future is like trying to take the master carpenter’s place. When you handle the master carpenter’s tools, chances are that... Read More Read More - [The Net](https://everyangel.org/the-net/): 73 The Tao is always at ease.It overcomes without competing,answers without speaking a word,arrives without being summoned,accomplishes without a plan. Its netcovers the whole universe.And though its meshes are wide,it doesn’t let a thing slip through. Tao Te Ching by Lao Tsu, trans. by Stephen Mitchell This verse, a few lines provides a description... Read More Read More - [Nothing To Learn](https://everyangel.org/nothing-to-learn/): 72 When they lose their sense of awe,people turn to religion.When they no longer trust themselves,they begin to depend upon authority. Therefore the Master steps back     so that people won’t be confused.     He teaches without a teaching,     so that people will have nothing to learn. Tao Te Ching by Lao-tsu, trans.... Read More Read More - [Rx For Well-Being](https://everyangel.org/rx-for-well-being/): 71 Not-knowing is true knowledge. Presuming to know is a disease. First realize that you are sick; then you can move toward health. The Master is her own physician. She has healed herself of all knowing. Thus she is truly whole. Tao Te Ching by Lao-tsu, trans. by Stephen Mitchell How much is taking... Read More Read More - [Look Inside Girl](https://everyangel.org/look-inside-girl/): 70 My teachings are easy to understand and easy to put into practice. Yet your intellect will never grasp them, and if you try to practice them, you’ll fail. My teachings are older than the world. How can you grasp their meaning? If you want to know me, look inside your heart. Tao Te... Read More Read More - [Philosophy Of War](https://everyangel.org/art-of-war/): 69 The generals have a saying:“Rather than make the first moveit is better to wait and see.Rather than advance an inchit is better to retreat a yard.” This is calledgoing forward without advancing,pushing back without using weapons. There is no greater misfortunethan underestimating your enemy.Underestimating your enemymeans thinking that he is evil.Thus you destroy... Read More Read More - [Let's Play](https://everyangel.org/lets-play/): 68 The best athlete wants his opponent at his best. The best general enters the mind of his enemy. The best businessman serves the communal good. The best leader follows the will of the people. All of them embody the virtue of non-competition. Not that they don’t love to compete, but they do it... Read More Read More - [Return To The Source](https://everyangel.org/return-to-the-source/): 67 Some saythat my teaching is nonsense.Others call it lofty but impractical.But to those who have looked inside themselves,this nonsense makes perfect sense.And to those who put it into practice,this loftiness has roots that go deep. I have just three things to teach:                   simplicity,  ... Read More Read More - [Non Competition](https://everyangel.org/non-competition/): 66 All streams flow to the seabecause it is lower than they are.Humility gives it its power. If you want to govern the people,you must place yourself below them.If you want to lead the people,you must learn how to follow them. The Master is above the people,and no one feels oppressed.She goes ahead of... Read More Read More - [The Way Back](https://everyangel.org/the-way-back/): 65 The ancient Mastersdidn’t try to educate the people,but kindly taught them to not-know. When they think that they know the answers,people are difficult to guide.When they know that they don’t know,people can find their own way. If you want to learn how to govern,avoid being clever or rich.The simplest pattern is the clearest.Content... Read More Read More - [A Giant Pine](https://everyangel.org/a-giant-pine/): 64 What is rooted is easy to nourish.What is recent is easy to correct.What is brittle is easy to break.What is small is easy to scatter. Prevent trouble before it arises.Put things in order before they exist.     The giant pine tree     grows from a tiny sprout.The journey of a thousand milesstarts from... Read More Read More - [The Detail Is Easy](https://everyangel.org/the-detail-is-easy/): 63 Act without doing; work without effort. Think of the small as large and the few as many. Confront the difficult while it is still easy; accomplish the great task by a series of small acts. The Master never reaches for the great; thus she achieves greatness. When she runs into a difficulty, she... Read More Read More - [Treasure And Refuge](https://everyangel.org/treasure-and-refuge/): 62 The Tao is the center of the universe,the good man’s treasure,the bad man’s refuge. Honors can be bought with fine words,respect can be won with good deeds;but the Tao is beyond all value,and no one can achieve it. Thus, when a new leader is chosen,don’t offer to help himwith your wealth or your... Read More Read More - [IF](https://everyangel.org/if-2/): 61 When a country obtains great power,it becomes like the sea:all streams run downward into it.The more powerful it grows,the greater the need for humility.Humility means trusting the Tao,thus never needing to be defensive. A great nation is like a great man:When he makes a mistake, he realizes it.Having realized it, he admits it.Having... Read More Read More - [Unable To Step Out Of The Way](https://everyangel.org/unable-to-step-out-of-the-way/): 60 Governing a large country is like frying a small fish. You spoil it with too much poking. Center your country in the Tao and evil will have no power. Not that it isn’t there, but you’ll be able to step out of its way. Give evil nothing to oppose and it will disappear... Read More Read More - [For Governing Your Life Well](https://everyangel.org/for-governing-your-life-well/): 59 For governing a country well there is nothing better than moderation. The mark of a moderate man/woman is freedom from his own ideas.       Tolerant like the sky,       all-pervading like sunlight,       firm like a mountain,       supple like a tree in the wind,... Read More Read More - [This Same Delicious Temporality](https://everyangel.org/this-same-delicious-temporality/): 58 If a country is governed with tolerance,the people are comfortable and honest.If a country is governed with repression,the people are depressed and crafty. When the will to power is in charge,the higher the ideals, the lower the results.Try to make people happy,and you lay the groundwork for misery.Try to make people moral,and you... Read More Read More - [As Common As Grass](https://everyangel.org/as-common-as-grass/): 57 If you want to be a great leader, you must learn to follow the Tao. Stop trying to control. Let go of fixed plans and concepts, and the world will govern itself. The more prohibitions you have, the less virtuous people will be. The more weapons you have, the less secure people will... Read More Read More - [What Cannot Be Said](https://everyangel.org/what-cannot-be-said/): 56 Those who know don’t talk.Those who talk don’t know.    Close your mouth,   block off your senses,   blunt your sharpness,   untie your knots,   soften your glare,   settle your dust.   This is the primal identity. Be like the Tao. It can’t be approached or withdrawn from,benefited or harmed,honored or brought into disgrace.It gives itself... Read More Read More - [Like A Newborn](https://everyangel.org/like-a-newborn/): 55 He who is in harmony with the Tao is like a newborn child. Its bones are soft, its muscles are weak, but its grip is powerful. It doesn’t know about the union of male and female, yet its penis can stand erect, so intense is its vital power. It can scream its head... Read More Read More - [The Thing About Violence](https://everyangel.org/the-thing-about-violence/): 53 The great Way is easy, yet people prefer the side paths. Be aware when things are out of balance. Stay centered within the Tao. When rich speculators prosper while farmers lose their land; when government officials spend money on weapons instead of cures; when the upper class is extravagant and irresponsible while the... Read More Read More - [Origin Story](https://everyangel.org/34135-2/): 52 In the beginning was the Tao.All things issue from it;all things return to it. To find the origin,trace back the manifestations.When you recognize the childrenand find the mother,you will be free of sorrow. If you close your mind in judgmentsand traffic with desires,your heart will be troubled.If you keep your mind from judgingand... Read More Read More - [Toad Pond](https://everyangel.org/toad-pond/): 51 Every being in the universeis an expression of the Tao.It springs into existence,unconscious, perfect, free,takes on a physical body,lets circumstances complete it.That is why every beingspontaneously honors the Tao. The Tao gives birth to all beings,nourishes them, maintains them,cares for them, comforts them, protects them,takes them back to itself,creating without possessing,acting without expecting,guiding... Read More Read More - [Holding Nothing Back](https://everyangel.org/holding-nothing-back/): 50 The Master gives himself up to whatever the moment brings. He knows that he is going to die, and he has nothing left to hold on to: no illusions in his mind, no resistances in his body. He doesn’t think about his actions; they flow from the core of his being. He holds... Read More Read More - [Wobbling](https://everyangel.org/spun-around/): 49 The Master has no mind of her own. She works with the mind of the people. She is good to people who are good. She is also good to people who aren’t good. This is true goodness. She trusts people who are trustworthy. She also trusts people who aren’t trustworthy. This is true... Read More Read More - [Abiding](https://everyangel.org/abiding/): 48 In the pursuit of knowledge,every day something is added. In the practice of the Tao,every day something is dropped.Less and less do you need to force things,until finally you arrive at non-action.When nothing is done,nothing is left undone. True mastery can be gainedby letting things go their own way.It can’t be gained by... Read More Read More - [No Time For The Game](https://everyangel.org/no-time-for-the-game/): One of the great rock bands. A Zen-like anthem to solitude, to satisfaction with the “thusness” of things. Love means nothing less than allowing “the world,” especially another human being the space and the time to discover their location, whatever that comes to be. Today is Saturday. Laura and I are off to the... Read More Read More - [Going Far To Know Less](https://everyangel.org/going-far-to-know-less/): 47 Without opening your door, you can open your heart to the world. Without looking out your window, you can see the essence of the Tao. The more you know, the less you understand. The Master arrives without leaving, sees the light without looking, achieves without doing a thing. Tao Te Ching by Lao... Read More Read More - [.4 Second Release](https://everyangel.org/4-second-release/): To take a break from writing about the Tao Te Ching, a song shared with me by a friend merits a good look. The truth telling of the lyricist (Jesse Welles) is extraordinary. As Americans the countries which we care least about, are the countries and peoples that we involve in our machismo parodies.... Read More Read More - [Death-Spiral](https://everyangel.org/death-spiral-2/): 46 When a country is in harmony with the Tao, the factories make trucks and tractors. When a country goes counter to the Tao, warheads are stockpiled outside the cities. There is no greater illusion than fear, no greater wrong than preparing to defend yourself, no greater misfortune than having an enemy. Whoever can... Read More Read More - [Perfection, Not A Fan](https://everyangel.org/perfection-not-a-fan/): 45 True perfection seems imperfect,yet it is perfectly itself.True fullness seems empty,yet it is fully present. True straightness seems crooked.True wisdom seems foolish.True art seems artless. The Master allows things to happen.She shapes events as they come.She steps out of the wayand lets the Tao speak for itself. Tao Te Ching by Lao Tsu,... Read More Read More - [The World Is Yours](https://everyangel.org/the-whole-world-belongs/): 44 Fame or integrity: which is more important?Money or happiness: which is more valuable?Success or failure: which is more destructive? If you look to others for fulfillment,you will never truly be fulfilled.If your happiness depends on money,you will never be happy with yourself Be content with what you have;rejoice in the way things are.When... Read More Read More - [Care, Air, Fire & Fuel](https://everyangel.org/drag-racing-the-tao/): I enjoyed the afternoon at the racetrack. I mean the environs of Great Lakes Dragaway located off of State Rt KR outside of Union Grove Wisconsin. Opened in 1955 the venue was the nation’s first purpose-built and is the oldest continuously operating dragstrip. The track was inspired by California racing. I was six years old... Read More Read More - [Labor](https://everyangel.org/labor-2/): 43 The gentlest thing in the worldovercomes the hardest thing in the world.That which has no substanceenters where there is no space.This shows the value of non-action. Teaching without words,performing without actions:that is the Master’s way. Tao Te Ching by Lao Tsu, trans. by Stephen Mitchell Labor Day weekend. “Labor” is what life requires... Read More Read More - [What Makes Me](https://everyangel.org/33976-2/): 42 The Tao gives birth to One. One gives birth to Two. Two gives birth to Three. Three gives birth to all things. All things have their backs to the female and stand facing the male. When male and female combine, all things achieve harmony. Ordinary men hate solitude. But the Master makes use... Read More Read More - [Laughing Ourselves To Death](https://everyangel.org/elitist/): 41 When a superior man hears of the Tao,he immediately begins to embody it.    When an average man hears of the Tao,    he half believes it, half doubts it.        When a foolish man hears of the Tao,        he laughs out loud.        If he... Read More Read More - [Pivot Point](https://everyangel.org/pivot-point-2/): 39 In harmony with the Tao, the sky is clear and spacious, the earth is solid and full, all creatures flourish together, content with the way they are, endlessly repeating themselves, endlessly renewed. When man interferes with the Tao, the sky becomes filthy, the earth becomes depleted, the equilibrium crumbles, creatures become extinct. The... Read More Read More - [Thinner And Thinner](https://everyangel.org/thinner-and-thinner/): 38 The Master doesn’t try to be powerful; thus he is truly powerful. The ordinary man keeps reaching for power; thus he never has enough. The Master does nothing, yet he leaves nothing undone. The ordinary man is always doing things, yet many more are left to be done. The kind man does something,... Read More Read More - [Natural Rhythm](https://everyangel.org/natural-rhythm/): 37 The Tao never does anything, yet through it all things are done. If powerful men and women could center themselves in it, the whole world would be transformed by itself, in its natural rhythms. People would be content with their simple, everyday lives, in harmony, and free of desire. When there is no... Read More Read More - [The Way Things Are](https://everyangel.org/the-way-things-are/): 36 If you want to shrink something, you must first allow it to expand. If you want to get rid of something, you must first allow it to flourish. If you want to take something, you must first allow it to be given. This is called the subtle perception of the way things are.... Read More Read More - [Inexhaustable](https://everyangel.org/inexhaustable/): 35 She who is centered in the Taocan go where she wishes, without danger.She perceives the universal harmony,even amid great pain,because she has found peace in her heart. Music or the smell of good cookingmay make people stop and enjoy.But words that point to the Taoseem monotonous and without flavor.When you look for it,... Read More Read More - [About Humility](https://everyangel.org/about-humility/): 34 The great Tao flows everywhere.All things are born from it,yet it doesn’t create them.It pours itself into its work,yet it makes no claim.It nourishes infinite worlds,yet it doesn’t hold on to them.Since it is merged with all thingsand hidden in their hearts,it can be called humble.Since all things vanish into itand it alone... Read More Read More - [Unmaking My Mind](https://everyangel.org/soul-talk-2/): Today is Thursday August 21st. My life is quite good. Others are not as fortunate. At Starbucks, the space is safe, I can search for, investigate anything of my choosing on the internet without fear of being fined. This is not Russia, not here, and not now, not yet. I enjoy reasonable good health... Read More Read More - [True Power](https://everyangel.org/strength-and-wealth/): 33 Knowing others is intelligence; knowing yourself is true wisdom. Mastering others is strength; mastering yourself is true power. If you realize that you have enough, you are truly rich. If you stay in the center and embrace death with your whole heart, you will endure forever. Tao Te Ching by Lao Tsu, trans.... Read More Read More - [Knowing When](https://everyangel.org/knowing-when/): 32 The Tao can’t be perceived,Smaller than an electron,it contains uncountable galaxies. If powerful men and womencould remain centered in the Tao,all things would be in harmony.The world would become a paradise.All people would be at peace,and the law would be written in their hearts. When you have names and forms,know that they are... Read More Read More - [Vulgarity](https://everyangel.org/vulgarity-2/): 31 Weapons are the tools of violence;all decent men detest them. Weapons are the tools of fear;a decent man will avoid themexcept in the direst necessityand, if compelled, will use themonly with the utmost restraint.Peace is his highest value.If the peace has been shattered,how can he be content?His enemies are not demons,but human beings... Read More Read More - [Against The Current](https://everyangel.org/going-against-the-current/): 30Whoever relies on the Tao in governing mendoesn’t try to force issuesor defeat enemies by force of arms.For every force there is a counterforce.Violence, even well intentioned,always rebounds upon oneself. The Master does his joband then stops.He understands that the universeis forever out of control,and that trying to dominate eventsgoes against the current of... Read More Read More - [Sacred](https://everyangel.org/sacred/): 29 Do you want to improve the world? I don’t think it can be done. The world is sacred. It can’t be improved. If you tamper with it, you’ll ruin it. If you treat it like an object, you’ll lose it. There is a time for being ahead, a time for being behind; a... Read More Read More - [So, Now What?](https://everyangel.org/so-now-what/): We read Philip Larkin’s famous 1954 poem Church Going last night. I was five years old when the poem was written. The poem was troubling to everyone in our circle. No doubt that was Larkin’s purpose. I am seventy six now and the dereliction of churches continues unabated. Faith and superstition still die. In... Read More Read More - [Being The Future](https://everyangel.org/being-the-future/): 28 Know the male,yet keep to the female:receive the world in your arms.     If you receive the world,     the Tao will never leave you     and you will be like a little child. Know the white,yet keep to the black:be a pattern for the world.     If you are a pattern for... Read More Read More - [Acuity](https://everyangel.org/acuity/): 27 A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent upon arriving. A good artist lets his intuition, lead him wherever it wants. A good scientist has freed himself of concepts and keeps his mind open to what is. Thus the Master is available to all people and doesn’t reject anyone. He... Read More Read More - [Self-composed](https://everyangel.org/self-composed/): 26 The heavy is the root of the light. The unmoved is the source of all movement. Thus the Master travels all day without leaving home. However splendid the views, she stays serenely in herself. Why should the lord of the country flit about like a fool? If you let yourself be blown to... Read More Read More - [Before](https://everyangel.org/before/): 25 There was something formless and perfect before the universe was born. It is serene. Empty. Solitary. Unchanging. Infinite. Eternally present. It is the mother of the universe. For lack of a better name, I call it the Tao. It flows through all things, inside and outside, and returns to the origin of all... Read More Read More - [Waiting In The Wings No Longer](https://everyangel.org/waiting-in-the-wings-no-longer/): 23 Express yourself completely,then keep quiet.Be like the forces of nature:when it blows, there is only wind;when it rains, there is only rain;when the clouds pass, the sun shines through. If you open yourself to the Tao,you are at one with the Taoand you can embody it completely.If you open yourself to insight,you are... Read More Read More - [Always There's Smoke](https://everyangel.org/always-smoke/): 22 If you want to become whole, let yourself be partial. If you want to become straight, let yourself be crooked. If you want to become full, let yourself be empty. If you want to be reborn, let yourself die. If you want to be given everything, give everything up. The Master, by residing... Read More Read More - [Looking Inside](https://everyangel.org/looking-inside/): 21 The Master keeps her mindalways at one with the Tao;that is what gives her her radiance.The Tao is ungraspable.How can her mind be at one with it?Because she doesn’t cling to ideas.The Tao is dark and unfathomable.How can it make her radiant?Because she lets it.Since before time and space were,the Tao is.It is... Read More Read More - [Best To Worst](https://everyangel.org/best-to-worst/): 17 When the Master governs, the peopleare hardly aware that he exists.                                                       Next best is a leader who is loved.               ... Read More Read More - [Pivot Point](https://everyangel.org/heart/): 16 Empty your mind of all thoughts. Let your heart be at peace. Watch the turmoil of beings, but contemplate their return. Each separate being in the universe returns to the common source. Returning to the source is serenity. If you don’t realize the source, you stumble in confusion and sorrow. When you realize... Read More Read More - [Always Under Construction](https://everyangel.org/under-construction-always/): 15 The ancient Masters were profound and subtle. Their wisdom was unfathomable. There is no way to describe it; all we can describe is their appearance.                                                        ... Read More Read More - [Being It](https://everyangel.org/being-it/): 14 Look, and it can’t be seen.Listen, and it can’t be heard.Reach, and it can’t be grasped.Above, it isn’t bright.Below, it isn’t dark. Seamless, unnamable,it returns to the realm of nothing. Form that includes all forms,image without an image,subtle, beyond all conception.Approach it and there is no beginning;follow it and there is no end.... Read More Read More - [What We Use](https://everyangel.org/what-we-use/): 11 We join spokes together in a wheel, but it is the center hole that makes the wagon move. We shape clay into a pot, but it is the emptiness inside that holds whatever we want. We hammer wood for a house, but it is the inner space that makes it livable. We work... Read More Read More - [Can I](https://everyangel.org/can-i/): 10 Can you coax your mind from its wandering and keep to the original oneness? Can you let your body become supple as a newborn child’s? Can you cleanse your inner vision until you see nothing but the light? Can you love people and lead them without imposing your will? Can you deal with... Read More Read More - [Stepping Back](https://everyangel.org/stepping-back/): 9 Fill your bowl to the brim and it will spill. Keep sharpening your knife and it will blunt. Chase after money and security and your heart will never unclench. Care about people’s approval and you will be their prisoner. Do your work, then step back. …is the way (tao) that tian works. Tao... Read More Read More - [Water](https://everyangel.org/water-2/):  8 The supreme good is like water,which nourishes all things without trying to.It is content with the low places that people disdain.Thus it is like the Tao. In dwelling, live close to the ground.In thinking, keep to the simple.In conflict, be fair and generous.In governing, don’t try to control.In work, do what you enjoy.In... Read More Read More - [Show Me The Way](https://everyangel.org/show-me-the-way/): 5 The Tao doesn’t take sides; it gives birth to both good and evil. The Master doesn’t take sides; she welcomes both saints and sinners. The Tao is like a bellows: it is empty yet infinitely capable. The more you use it, the more it produces; the more you talk of it, the less... Read More Read More - [Used, Never Used Up](https://everyangel.org/used-never-used-up/): 4 The Tao is like a well: used but never used up. It is like the eternal void: filled with infinite possibilities. It is hidden but always present. I don’t know who gave birth to it. It is older than God. Tao Te Ching by Lao Tsu, trans. by Stephen Mitchell Plans for the... Read More Read More - [How It All Works](https://everyangel.org/how-it-all-works/): 2 When people see some things as beautiful,other things become ugly.When people see some things as good,other things become bad.Being and non-being create each other.Difficult and easy support each other.Long and short define each other.High and low depend on each other.Before and after follow each other. Therefore the Masteracts without doing anythingand teaches without... Read More Read More - [Not Enough Of A Poet](https://everyangel.org/not-enough-of-a-poet/) - [The Backward Look](https://everyangel.org/the-backward-look-2/): Several nights ago we attended a performance of Bob Seger’s music at the Paramount Theater in Aurora. The band was first rate, the lead singer in a fitting manner honored Bob Seger who is eighty years old. Seger the balladeer wrote and performed world-creating music. That is what music does, rhythm, rhyme, harmony and... Read More Read More - [On Good Taste](https://everyangel.org/on-good-taste-2/): Three years ago I planted some oriental lily bulbs at the edge of our yard. The lily bed interfaces with the creek bed. Also a large boulder with a natural notch impressed me as the ideal resting place for a carved stone heart. The stone heart is about the size of a bowling ball.... Read More Read More - [Manufactured Innocence](https://everyangel.org/not-a-happy-idiot/): The Song of the Idiot They do not hinder me. They let me go.They say, nothing could happen even so.How good.Nothing can happen. Everything revolves engrossedalways around the Holy Ghost,around a certain ghost (you know)—how good.No, one should really not supposethat there is any danger in those.There’s of course the blood.The blood is the... Read More Read More - [A Mind, Like Space](https://everyangel.org/a-mind-like-space/): 49 The Master has no mind of her own. She works with the mind of the people. She is good to people who are good. She is also good to people who aren’t good. This is true goodness. She trusts people who are trustworthy. She also trusts people who aren’t trustworthy. This is true... Read More Read More - [About Chaos](https://everyangel.org/about-not-trying/): 38 The Master doesn’t try to be powerful; thus he is truly powerful. The ordinary man keeps reaching for power; thus he never has enough. The Master does nothing, yet he leaves nothing undone. The ordinary man is always doing things, yet many more are left to be done. The kind man does something,... Read More Read More - [Ball Room Carousel](https://everyangel.org/silver-beach-carousel/): We visited the St Joe’s Silver Beach Carousel while on vacation. St Joseph is situated on a bluff overlooking Silver Beach. The beach is aptly named. Gazing west toward Lake Michigan which shimmers, a mystical presence, I am reminded of the “goodness,” to risk saying it plainly, of “the love” which is inscribed into life.... Read More Read More - [The Face Of One Little Child](https://everyangel.org/the-face-of-one-little-child/): This single flowerhas leaves and rootsthat take nourishment fromthe environing soil and air. And the soil contains the distilled nutrientsof past growth and decay that constitute the living ecological systemin which all of its participants are organically interdependent. The sun enables the flower to process these nutrients,while the atmosphere that caresses the floweralso nourishes... Read More Read More - [A Chrysalis Breaks](https://everyangel.org/breaking-chrysalis/): Monday morning, resuming my ordinary life, two cups of dark roast, reading and now a bit of writing here at Starbucks. Agreeable conversation with two friends is welcome. I am grounded by others… I know that to be so from experience. Friends remind me I am not “that” guy I assumed that I was.... Read More Read More - [Calling All Angels](https://everyangel.org/farewell-2/): Leaving Michigan. Another family vacation, swimming in the lake, sitting under a beach sun, watching four grandchildren play – becomes memory. And the country, the world staggers on, to what end as always, is unknowable. Woke up this morning to read of the President of the United State’s threats to Rosie O’Donnell to remove... Read More Read More - [To Let Go & Let Be](https://everyangel.org/to-let-go-let-be/): No. 24 He who stands on tiptoedoesn’t stand firm.He who rushes aheaddoesn’t go far.He who tries to shinedims his own light.He who defines himselfcan’t know who he really is.He who has power over otherscan’t empower himself.He who clings to his workwill create nothing that endures.If you want to accord with the Tao,just do your... Read More Read More - [Walking To Stop Thinking](https://everyangel.org/walking-to-stop-thinking/): No. 20 Stop thinking, and end your problems.What difference between yes and no?What difference between success and failure?Must you value what others value,avoid what others avoid?How ridiculous! Other people are excited,as though they were at a parade.I alone don’t care,I alone am expressionless,like an infant before it can smile. Other people have what they... Read More Read More - [The Big Lake](https://everyangel.org/the-big-lake/): A second day, family vacation close to Coloma Michigan. St. Joseph is just a fifteen minute drive south, a famed small town enjoyed by generations. The view from the bluff of Silver Beach is spectacular. There is a very large circular concrete splash pad with timed water jets for toddlers, and older children to... Read More Read More - [Like Water](https://everyangel.org/like-water/): No. 8 The supreme good is like water, which nourishes all things without trying to. It is content with the low places that people disdain. Thus it is like the Tao. In dwelling, live close to the ground. In thinking, keep to the simple. In conflict, be fair and generous. In governing, don’t try... Read More Read More - [The Easiest Thing To Do](https://everyangel.org/the-easiest-thing-to-do/): Tuesday morning and what to write? Words come and go in the mind, and I continue to find inspiration, hope, and sober realism in these lyrics. Am I as happy as my organism can reasonably be, as “happy” as allowed by the universe, which heals and challenges? Probably… What is to be done? What... Read More Read More - [Asphalt Poetics](https://everyangel.org/asphalt-poetics/): My love affair with drag racing reaches back in time to my sixteen year old self. A visit to Great Lakes Drag-a-way in Union Grove Wisconsin comes with sensation of connection. Just inside the gate in the distance is the shutdown area for the quarter mile race track. Before my vehicle is parked I... Read More Read More - [Preserving The Fourfold](https://everyangel.org/preserving-the-fourfold/): The edifices guard the fourfold. They are things that in their own way preserve the fourfold.To preserve the fourfold, to save the earth, to receive the sky, to await the divinities, to escort mortals-this fourfold preserving is the simple nature, the presencing, of dwelling. In this way, then, do genuine buildings give form to... Read More Read More - [Arch, Preen, Attack](https://everyangel.org/arch-preen-attack/): My intention has  been to learn more about Stoicism. Stoicism was (and is) a point of view as well as a practice located in history 4th century BC. Zeno of Citium facilitated a gathering on Stoa Poikile, the painted porch on the north side of the Athenian market place. This view that you are... Read More Read More - [Unheimlich! Unheimlich! Unheimlich!](https://everyangel.org/unheimlich-unheimlich-unheimlich/): Today is St. Patrick’s Day. We celebrated Ireland, and the Irish people as a family yesterday. Ireland and its inhabitants have always been hard scrabble. Rural, village life is not easy-city-living. And then there’s England. The British have been Ireland’s overlords until recently, Dec. 6, 1921. Even then the British held onto Northern Island.... Read More Read More - [Getting Clear](https://everyangel.org/getting-clear/): “To dare is to lose one’s footing momentarily. Not to dare is to lose oneself.” — Kierkegaard Well, which is it, what fate am I going to choose? To dare is to lose for the moment. Choose not, – and you lose yourself. Frankly I do not know if a “choice” at all is... Read More Read More - [Handed Over](https://everyangel.org/handed-over/): Human existence discovers itself as something unclear, even to itself, as to where it came from and where it is going. It is as if Dasein (existence) has been handed over to human beings, whose being is thereby revealed to be a burden with which they have been laden. Just why one has been... Read More Read More - [But We Differ](https://everyangel.org/but-we-differ/): I mentioned a book which I finished reading. The author caught me with a too abrupt ending. I wanted more. No doubt, the writer gave what he had to say, without attempting to gin-up a speculative conclusion. That was ideal, and how much courage does that require? That is – strength to be silent... Read More Read More - [God, Love, Rock & Roll](https://everyangel.org/god-love-rock-roll/): I wonder if this is how Charlie Brown felt, that rush of adrenaline, to imagine a perfect kick of the ball and then, – well nothing. Or almost nothing. Charlie is seen to fall on his head. Finishing up a difficult and satisfying book, The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism by Nishitani Keiji, I anticipated a... Read More Read More - [To Check Out But Never Leave](https://everyangel.org/to-check-out-but-never-leave/): A friend asked, “What are you going to write about today?” I had a vague idea which I vaguely described to him. The look back at forty years or so of establishing and operating a company, the challenges, some failures, and those successes -now come into focus. My life appears as the individualized version,... Read More Read More - [Cool Is A Cage](https://everyangel.org/cool-is-a-cage/): These words come from Joan Westenberg’s newsletter. Contrary my natural inclination, I cannot but resonate with her point. It is this involuntary feeling – to preserve decorum is indirectly to “kiss the ring.”  At the very least, to begin, – a push away from the starting block. You and I must find our voices. While... Read More Read More - [The Inverted World](https://everyangel.org/the-inverted-world/): Philosophy by its very nature is esoteric; for itself is neither made for the masses nor is susceptible of being cooked up for them. It is philosophy only because it goes exactly contrary to the understanding and thus even more so to “sound common sense,” the so-called healthy human understanding. Which actually means the... Read More Read More - [Gutfeld Naked](https://everyangel.org/gutfeld-naked/): Yesterday Laura and I discussed a Fox celebrity who as interviewed on NPR by Scott Simon. I listen to very little radio with the exception of several rock n’ roll music stations. I had not heard the interview. Nor was I familiar with Greg Gutfeld, one of the Fox entertainers. His show is late-night,... Read More Read More - [Being Normal](https://everyangel.org/being-normal/): I am more than midway the Nishitani book. It is a challenging read introducing me to literature that I have only heard others speak of. In this quoted passage the author comments upon Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. At this moment 9:09AM Starbucks is busy, almost crowded. I can hear the buzz... Read More Read More - [The Mouth of Sauron](https://everyangel.org/the-mouth-of-sauron-2/): In years past I read The Lord of the Rings trilogy by J. R. R. Tolkien. His work is literature that changed my life, with painterly scenes that I’ll never forget. Tolkien’s ideas and ideals are still warm within my psyche. Worth noting too, Peter Jackson captured the power of the Middle Earth saga in cinema... Read More Read More - [Toad Of Chaos](https://everyangel.org/toad-of-destruction/): Thursday. Thursday is halfway to Friday. A compass heading is an orientation of sorts. That’s something I suppose, to believe you are located here or there in space and time. The two guys seated at the table to the right of me are bowed in prayer. I used to do that, so I “get... Read More Read More - [No Ashes](https://everyangel.org/no-ashes/): Wednesday, Ash Wednesday. Once again at Starbucks, sans the smear of ash in the sign of the cross on my forehead. I do not belong to the Catholic community. I was not raised to believe in the Catholic church or its tenets, a shear accident of birth. The season of lent is something I... Read More Read More - [Did We Build This Ship To Wreck?](https://everyangel.org/fat-tuesday/): Raining outside, a gentle spring rain and the sky is overcast. There are days like this, to remind that every cloud has a silver lining. The wildflower seeds that I scattered yesterday are responding, as I write, to the H²0 that moistens, softens the outer covering. The inner living kernel will activate soon… Stay... Read More Read More - [Child And Mighty Ruler](https://everyangel.org/child-and-mighty-ruler/): It’s Monday morning. I watched the Oscar Awards event on television with Laura before bedtime. Memories linger. I am fascinated by the exuberance and delight on a face when the envelope is opened.  Filmmakers, perhaps a director, a special effects professional, or an actor/actress hears their name called, a singular affirmation of excellence bestowed... Read More Read More - [Becoming A Child](https://everyangel.org/becoming-a-child/): Sunday morning. Why be “all in”, attempting a “full throttle” life all of the time? I have such conversations with myself. Sure that’s the my temptation. But, I know better. Calling a “time out,” taking some time for rest on the bench, to use a sports metaphor, is in the interest of playing the... Read More Read More - [The Unteachable](https://everyangel.org/the-unteachable-2/): Intermission is timely. At midpoint of a soul stirring performative event one is glad when the lights go up and everyone is invited to stand, and perhaps visit the restroom. Perhaps you’d wait with others at the Bar for a glass of white or red to take as you return to your seat. This... Read More Read More - [More Becoming The Lion](https://everyangel.org/more-becoming-the-lion/): Nietzsche advocates that I become “the lion.” I offer these lines as a snap-shot of the condition of mind and heart of Lion-like existence. This point converges to our condition in Trump-land, a weak autocrat, elected by a majority of Americans to make their lives better. The question is unavoidable – Who the fuck... Read More Read More - [Becoming The Lion](https://everyangel.org/becoming-the-lion/): These thoughts have taken me longer than usual to formulate, to write. The second movement of Nietzsche’s vision-story of a camel that changes into a lion is well worth reading/absorbing as one would taste an exquisitely prepared appetizer. Why should one desire, or better, – need to become a lion? So far I am... Read More Read More - [Heavy Lift Life](https://everyangel.org/heavy-lift-life/): Lately I’ve reflected upon the idea of “conversion.” That moment, as if illuminated by a closeby flash of lightning, the lay of the land transformed in appearance, you recognize an alternative, a different course than the one so familiar. Perhaps the conversion, the transformation of view comes upon one gradually, a kind of dawning... Read More Read More - [Offer You Can’t Refuse](https://everyangel.org/greatest-bait-and-switch/): It [religion] consummates one’s dissatisfaction with oneself, and at that extreme point gives one satisfaction in “God.” It pushes weariness with humanity to the limit, and offers instead the image of a divine savior; It takes away one’s taste for life on earth entirely, and promotes the quest for a “higher world.” The Self-Overcoming... Read More Read More - [Cowboy](https://everyangel.org/cowboy/): Friend Zarathustra has come, the guest of guests. Now the world laughs, the great curtain is rent. The wedding day has come for light and darkness Beyond Good and Evil, by Friedrich Nietzsche, “From High Mountains: Aftersong.” I attended a second showing of The Million Dollar Quartet , at the Stolop Island Theatre in Aurora.... Read More Read More - [Abyss Nausea](https://everyangel.org/abyss-nausea/): Sunday. What to write? I have read and am mulling over the prospect of “eternal recurrence.” This is the concluding idea from Nietzsche’s writings. I mean that everything that has happened, every human who has ever lived, every word spoken (including a roar of support for a MMA favorite, or a delicate and tentative... Read More Read More - [The Miracle](https://everyangel.org/the-miracle/): More thoughts from Nietzsche? Rumination on types of nihilism? Topics, all relevant to day-to-day life, which I intend to examine. On the other hand this remarkable collection of insights came my way. The current condition of America is described by the envelopment of the old Republican Party by the Trump movement, and his accession... Read More Read More - [Devoted Children Play](https://everyangel.org/devoted-children-play/): Sometimes I have something in mind to write. At other times nothing in particular has come to me. Life is a moving current, languid, – then that sound ahead becomes a roaring white water. Just attend to the friction of movement, (there’s always friction) some topic will rise to the surface of consciousness about... Read More Read More - [A Poetic Filling In](https://everyangel.org/a-poetic-filling-in/): February 20th feels midwinter. The exterior temperature registered two degrees this morning, though day by day there is more daylight. Waking at 6AM now is rising in the dawn, rather than dark of night. What do I mean by “middle of winter”? Certainly I intend this human’s embodied experience of winter 2025. I did... Read More Read More - [Two Gendered World](https://everyangel.org/two-gendered-world/): Wednesday is mid-week. Sometimes it happens in the middle, one is able to with a backward look, take measure of where one has come. Are we in the middle? In the middle of what? I was urged yesterday to abstain from glancing at my iphone news feed. None of those snippets was positive, “good... Read More Read More - [NASCAR & Pissing Excellence](https://everyangel.org/nascar-pissing-excellence/): Yesterday, Sunday afternoon I attempted to watch the NASCAR race at Daytona. I cannot remember the last time I listened/watched a “stock car” race on television. At the time watching NASCAR became similar to watching golf. The televised races seemed to be perfect for napping. I lasted about 20 minutes, then I had to... Read More Read More - [Kendrick Lamar Kicks Me In The Shin](https://everyangel.org/kendrick-lamar-kicks-me-in-the-shin/): What the fuck are you doing? My better judgment kicks me in the shin, about what I am about to write. I reply that I just think I am obligated to recognize a person’s work no matter if I barely understand the genre. Humans owe the truth to one another. Wouldn’t you agree? To... Read More Read More - [Playing For Time](https://everyangel.org/playing-for-time/): Saturday morning dawns a pleasant 32 degrees F. There’s a fresh snowfall. Today is a gift for our enjoyment. Weather forecast’s feature single digit days ahead. Every day is a gift, a bonus. One of the lessons which Thoreau has to teach in his writings about Walden Pond. Like a child greeting the morning... Read More Read More - [NO ONE GIVES A FUCK ABOUT YOUR POEMS](https://everyangel.org/no-one-gives-a-fuck-about-your-poems/): To a Young Poet Zaina Alsous I don’t usually write because I’m too busy being afraid of it. Not of writing but the it. It’s more like breaking open a fruit. Not to taste but to see what bleeds out. Here is a country. Here is a person in that country who has no papers but... Read More Read More - [Thumbs Up](https://everyangel.org/thumbs-up/): I am reading a new book, the Self-Overcoming of NIHILISM by Nishiani Keiji, translated by Graham Parkes with Setsuko Aihara. [Nihilism], an existential problemin which the being of the self is revealedto the self itselfas somethinggroundless… The phenomenon of nihilism showsthat our historical life has lost its groundas objective spirit,that the value system which... Read More Read More - [Screaming Into Snow](https://everyangel.org/screaming-into-snow/): Today is Wednesday, midweek. Snow is expected. I am happy that the snow will cover everything in a blanket of ice-white-crystal. I hunger to see all, everywhere, the possibility of purity. I know, I know this is a psychological need, a fabricated abstraction, akin to what Plato meant by “the good.” . Such abstractions... Read More Read More - [Stardust And Tired](https://everyangel.org/stardust-and-tired/): I offer some lines and phrases from the story-poem Stardust by Hisham Bustani. Tired of turning the dials of history. I LOOK AT THEM: they are motionless and shackled, sap sucked dry, faces covered with imbecilic smiles. Who are these people… (First answer) Physical systems change…from highly ordered to more disordered. Entropy The entropy... Read More Read More - [Technology As Transformative Power](https://everyangel.org/technology-as-transformative-power/): Yesterday was an unofficial American national holiday. The final game of the NFL season was held in New Orleans, The Super Bowl. Ostensibly the athletic championship is a thin pretext for one of the most expensive marketing spectacles of the year, fueled by many of our largest companies. The component of sport is a... Read More Read More - [Come!](https://everyangel.org/come/): The silhouette sharpens the electric saw with the sheaf of papers,hitting the pages with the saw, and the red splotcheson the walls move around, coalescing and separating; A hammer and sickle appear,no, it’s a five-pointed star, or maybe a stylized arrow-like jeemnext to an elongated map… Is it a victory sign?A sun? A peasant?A... Read More Read More - [Questions Don't Amount To Much](https://everyangel.org/questions-dont-amount-to-much/): A gray but mild February day, almost like a Southern winter day. Climate warming amounts to season after season of decreased snowfall, of fewer days of single-digit bitter cold… More heat means exponential acceleration, intensity, a supercharged process,… Opinions become irrelevant. A slow breaking of what we thought to be normal… I read two... Read More Read More - [Freefall of May or Maybe or Might Not or What If or Perhaps](https://everyangel.org/freefall/): In the United States,Congress, the president and the courtsare supposed to keep an eye on one another — to stop any one branch of government frombecoming too powerful. President Trump is showing uswhat happens when those checks and balances break down. The courts may still intervene,as a judge did yesterday to halt Trump’s offer... Read More Read More - [Tucked Away](https://everyangel.org/tucked-away/): Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people. -Carl Sagan I’ve got my hands on a copy of Palestinian poet Hisham Bustani’s book of... Read More Read More - [Down Deep, Even Deeper](https://everyangel.org/down-deep-no-deeper/): What this brings us to, more or less, is a poetic, ironic analysis of events. Against the simulation of a linear history “in progress”, we have to accord a privileged status to these backfires, these malign deviations, these lightweight catastrophes which cripple an empire much more effectively than any great upheavals. We have to... Read More Read More - [Causes No Longer](https://everyangel.org/causes-no-longer/): If,in Chaos Theory, for sensitivity to initial conditions, we substitutesensitivity to final conditions,we are in the form of predestination,which is the form of fate. Poetic language also lives with predestination,with the imminence of its own endingand of reversibility between the ending and the beginning.it is predestined in this sense -it is an unconditional event,without... Read More Read More - [None Of This Is True](https://everyangel.org/none-of-this-is-true/): …we have to get used to the idea there will no longer be any end, that history itself has become interminable. Thus, when we speak of the ‘end of history’, the ‘end of the political’, the ‘end of the social’, the ‘end of ideologies’, none of this is true The worst of it all... Read More Read More - [The Big Crumb Ticket](https://everyangel.org/the-big-crumb-ticket/): We shall never experience the original chaos, the Big Bang; the file is closed on that; we weren’t there. But, where the final moment is concerned –the Big Crumb -we might have some hope of seeing that. Some hope of enjoying the end, to make up for not being able to enjoy the origin.... Read More Read More - [Groundhog Day](https://everyangel.org/groundhog-day/): We are, self evidently,entering upon a retroactive form of history,and all our ideas, philosophies and mental techniquesare progressively adapting to that model. We may even see this as an adventure,since the disappearance of the end is in itselfan original situation. It seems to be characteristic of our culture and our history,which cannot even manage... Read More Read More - [To Tweak The Flow](https://everyangel.org/to-tweak-the-flow/): Words are a lifeline: The connecting link between my inner awareness, the layered consciousness, and memories which we loosely call “self” to other selves, and to “the world. ” The connectors are a matter of words, grammar and syntax.  Therefore a deft touch with words is key to becoming more real, the process of... Read More Read More - [A Hurricane Ending In A Beat Of Butterfly Wings](https://everyangel.org/a-hurricane-ending-in-a-beat-of-butterfly-wings/): Cause and effect reversibility… I get into reading Jean Baudrillard because this philosopher bends language reminiscent of poets. Change and times passage are interchangeable, the given of our experience on this planet. We tip our hats to Heraclitus, the pre-Socratic thinker who famously said that ‘you cannot step into the same river twice’. Another... Read More Read More - [Having A Bad Day](https://everyangel.org/everyone-having-a-bad-day/): An inauspicious day from the get-go by Hisham Bustani     translated from the Arabic by Alice Guthrie Some damn thing made her mom start talking to her about her fiancé yet again. “He’s just not cast from the same clay we are,” she said, “and I don’t think he’s really got it in... Read More Read More - [Coda](https://everyangel.org/coda-3/): No really! This is the final of my comments about The Dawn of Day. The writer, Nietzsche, bids that we never forget this one principle of flight. A majority of our fellows cannot fly. That I must accept. A limited few will be able to join the adventures on the horizon of thought. Best... Read More Read More - [Just A Bit More](https://everyangel.org/just-a-bit-more/): My intention was the preceding post as my final comment on The Dawn of Day. After all the featured quotation by Nietzsche appears on the last page of his book. And yet three more “pearls of wisdom” remain, which beg for comment. The first of the three aphorisms is equivalent to a Molotov cocktail... Read More Read More - [And Finally](https://everyangel.org/and-finally/): 555. We ought to avoid events when we know that even the least important of them frequently enough leave a strong impression upon us —and these we cannot avoid. —The thinker must possess an approximate canon of all the things he still wishes to experience. These three aphorisms, or put differently, pearls of wisdom... Read More Read More - [Not Even Light Escapes](https://everyangel.org/not-even-light-escapes/): What will preserve us from this unlimited frenzy, this desire to abolish the horizon as perpetual line of flight, as virtual line of flight which must remain virtual, But which we are crossing today -towards that ‘event horizon’ beyond which nothing happens, nothing has meaning any longer and whence not even light escapes. The... Read More Read More - [A Sharp White Blade](https://everyangel.org/a-sharp-white-blade/): Six AM and it was pitch black. In the sky a blinding white moon, a crescent sharper than any blade. I felt cold bite into my face. I drove the winding neighborhood street. Three black forms moved across a yard to pass just out of headlight range. Deer. Absolutely those wild animals were hungry.... Read More Read More - [To Come Full Circle](https://everyangel.org/to-come-full-circle/): A day or so ago, I was seated as is my habit, here at Starbucks. Midwestern winters have returned, with single digit cold and some snow. Also who is not weary with the media onslaught, the hash of Trumpism? The spirit of the age is that of toxic patriarchy. My instincts are on-alert. The... Read More Read More - [Unforgiven](https://everyangel.org/unforgiven/): The new administration is moving at warp speed. Tech moguls skurrey, gathering as baby chicks around a brood hen, to Trump.  The New York Times reports that new leaders are quickly being appointed to the U. S. Prosecutors offices. The President believes with justification that he has carte blanche to act at will. More... Read More Read More - [Immortality](https://everyangel.org/immortality-3/): We can only arriveat a clear conception of immortalityin a stable, unchanging universe.In a universe where a divine sanctionensures the continuity of the cosmic order (Kepler’s universe),immortality is akin to a natural propertyof the human microcosm.It is merely the logical extensionof the continuity of an order.The universe could not change since allis ordained by... Read More Read More - [January 20, 2025](https://everyangel.org/january-20-2025/):  THE SECOND COMING Turning, turning in the widening gyre   The falcon cannot hear the falconerThings fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Turning and turning in the widening gyreMere anarchy is loosed upon the world,The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned;  The best lack all convictions, while the worst Are full... Read More Read More - [Charnel-house Of Images](https://everyangel.org/charnel-house-of-images/): I have no plans to join millions around the world viewing the inauguration. I’d rather dedicate my awareness to other things. I imagine Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, Chew – appointed members of the royal court. They will occupy prime seating close to the man forwarded to the oval office by a system that long since... Read More Read More - [Of Profound Irresponsibility](https://everyangel.org/of-profound-irresponsibility/): This short story is one of the most remarkable I’ve ever read! How is it possible for a male to express with such insight, aspects of pregnancy which only a female is directly acquainted? Surely the description of such an expectation of ‘the unknown’ must be attributed to extraordinary observation. And then the hidden... Read More Read More - [Rapture Of Reality](https://everyangel.org/rapture-of-reality/): I purchased a painting by the late artist, Ed Dlugopolski, who lived in Batavia. I did not know Ed. I am sure that I would have enjoyed his company. Ed was an art educator. He taught high school. The acrylic painting is called, The Innocent Victims of War. Ed’s painting cannot be labeled as... Read More Read More - [Running On (out of) Empty](https://everyangel.org/running-on-out-of-empty/): At Barnes & Noble a group of us talked and listened for almost two hours. The topic igniting the discussion: fervent desires when acted upon, change the course of the future in expected and unexpected ways. One member at the table observed that every living thing is involved with adapting to an environment, therefore... Read More Read More - [Written Over The Door](https://everyangel.org/written-over-the-door/): “What do I matter?”is written over the doorof the thinker of the future. The Dawn of Day by Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. by J. M. Kennedy, aphorism 547 Of course each of us that lives believes – that “I” am here as an undercover Messiah. One way or another I (and you) desire to be... Read More Read More - [Charity Cannibalism](https://everyangel.org/charity-cannibalism/): The very idea of a market, or better, of markets places/techniques of exchange, for the purpose of trading on human misery – is obscene. The video appeals for donations to alleviate the suffering of children in foreign lands reach crescendo during the weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas. In January over the dinner evening news... Read More Read More - [At A Stroke](https://everyangel.org/at-a-stroke/): A few minutes ago a friend mentioned in passing that he intends to be absent from Starbucks for a few days. He plans to be on a cruise in the Caribbean, out of the country, anticipating the inauguration of the Trump administration on January 20th. Coincidentally I happened to be reading this text at... Read More Read More - [Contra Greed](https://everyangel.org/contra-greed/): Over the past several day’s I have read and contributed to an email discussion on the topic of greed. There’s no secret that greed, becomes manifest as an approved American virtue. The 1 percent, the uber wealthy are celebrated, feted in print media, regarded as exemplars of an ideal to be emulated. Indeed perhaps... Read More Read More - [Moralists And Intuitives](https://everyangel.org/moralists-and-intuitives/): What we have at present in our country is a ‘dialog of the deaf’. A group of eight to ten friends recently considered the failure of communication between Americans. I mean between those who believe a bygone way-of-life, paternalist, authority based, moral principles as reasonable, the only option for creating a future – and... Read More Read More - [Jimmy Carter, 1924-2024](https://everyangel.org/jimmy-carter-1924-2024/): It is snowing outside. It is the first snow of the season to significantly cover everything, and the snowplows are out. Snow covered asphalt reacquaints us with the laws of physics. With a warming climate, winter snow, as it happens, comes later, and less of it. I can remember the blinding snowstorms of many... Read More Read More - [A Truck And A Hole](https://everyangel.org/a-truck-and-a-hole/): The wildfires now surround Los Angles are uncontained. This from the update received several hours ago from the New York Times: Los Angeles is surrounded by fire. The city’s major wildfires have spread, and a new one started overnight in Hollywood Hills. It threatened a wealthy neighborhood and landmarks synonymous with America’s self-image —... Read More Read More - [Oozing, Leaking, Bleeding](https://everyangel.org/oozing-leaking-bleeding/): Evil was visible, opaque, localized… We have exorcised it, liberated it, liquidated it. But has it, for all that, ceased to be Evil? Not at all: it has become fluid, liquid, interstitial, viral. That is the transparence of Evil. It is not a transparency in the sense that you might see through it. It... Read More Read More - [After The Orgy](https://everyangel.org/after-the-orgy/): January 20th, inauguration day represents for me a frontier, a line of demarcation in time. Following that day I expect palpable change to swiftly be imposed upon the country. Efforts ongoing to erase the crimes committed by the president-elect are sure to proceed with enhanced efficiency to their revisionistic end. America is to be... Read More Read More - [Beautiful Madness](https://everyangel.org/beautiful-madness/): Perhaps I ought to let this go, pass on with nothing to say. And yet, the scene sketched here is cut diamond-like, an illustration of the paradox of our being. Homo sapiens is a troubled and a magnificent animal. I invite you to mindfully read, to consider… Love wishes to spare the other to... Read More Read More - [Drifting](https://everyangel.org/drifting/): Two weeks. Fourteen days remain and then Trump is inaugurated, his administration installed to pilot the ship-of-state, as per “the will of the people.” Elections and inauguration rituals are considered sacrosanct, a ‘gift of the gods’. The illusion is intentional. The desire of men long since dead was expressed in our Constitution. The institutions... Read More Read More - [In The Long Run](https://everyangel.org/in-the-long-run/): How many really individual actions are left undone merely because before performing them we perceive or suspect that they will be misunderstood! —those actions, for example, which have some intrinsic value, both in good and evil. The more highly an age or a nation values its individuals, therefore, and the more right and ascendancy... Read More Read More - [All That We Have Loved Best](https://everyangel.org/all-that-we-have-loved-best/): Both within and beyondthe confines of historywe might imagine that we were listeningto a continual funeral oration: we have buried, and are still burying,all that we have loved best, our thoughts, and our hopes,receiving in exchange pride, gloria mundi—that is, the pomp of the graveside speech. It is thusthat everything is made good! Even... Read More Read More - [What! More Worlds To Create!](https://everyangel.org/what/): Yesterday was dedicated to sorting more than several thousand photos captured in 2024. The files are archived from the iphone to this laptop. Moments in time were photographed in response to an undefined sense in my body. “Right here and right now ‘this’ penetrates more deeply than I can know,…” Or even, “has meaning,... Read More Read More - [How Mad Am I?](https://everyangel.org/how-mad-am-i/): Even if we were mad enough to consider all our opinions as truth, we should nevertheless not wish them alone to exist. I cannot see why we should ask for an autocracy and omnipotence of truth: it is sufficient for me to know that it is a great power. Truth, however, must meet with... Read More Read More - [Tis The Eve'n Of The Abyss](https://everyangel.org/new-years-eve-the-abyss/): Gray and raining outside. Starbucks is momentarily, unnaturally quiet, only the two of us minding our screens and our thoughts. Why so silent? Is this the edge? I mean the edge (never with a safety rail) of the abyss? Perhaps it’s extraordinary to know when one is proximate to the edge, a “hazard zone”... Read More Read More - [Male Fantasy](https://everyangel.org/male-fantasy/): The fundamental male fantasyof the womanis not her seductive appearance,but the idea,that the dazzling appearanceconcealssome imponderablemystery. -Jacques Lacan There is something tragic, simultaneously sad and delicious with respect to Lacan’s quote. How could this possibly be denied? The male – female dynamic-attraction is as old as Helen of Troy. Perhaps you remember Helen, according... Read More Read More - [Harassment](https://everyangel.org/harrassment/): The goal is to avoid harassment. But no harassment means no joy either. [Harassment] can mean nothing more than the excessive proximity of the other with his/her desires and fears and pleasures. The other is Ok as long as he does not intrude as long as he/she is not really other. The central human... Read More Read More - [2025](https://everyangel.org/2025-2/): The journey to better understand Jacques Lacan’s system of thought continues. In a few days we will turn the page on 2024. 2025 brings the inauguration of Donald Trump on January 20th. The first quotation featured in today’s post reminded me of the President elect. Our institutions proved hollow, without power to incarcerate him... Read More Read More - [Paid For In Advance](https://everyangel.org/paid-for-in-advance/): Another gray day in the Fox River Valley. My day began around 6:30 AM at Starbucks in downtown Geneva. Baristas there are old acquaintances, and it was good to see everyone again. Then several friends came in. The better part of the morning was dedicated to pleasant conversation. Is there a more congenial, satisfying... Read More Read More - [Morning After](https://everyangel.org/morning-after/): A  hangover is what this feels like. Perhaps you recall your last hangover? It is Thursday morning after Christmas day. You know, that day anticipated by everyone with the highest of expectation. For my adult self, reason/experience insists “that longing is fantasy, a shape shifting, media driven, ginned up illusion” so snap out of... Read More Read More - [Christmas Eve](https://everyangel.org/christmas-eve-3/): Christmas Eve and I begin the day at Starbucks… Why wouldn’t I? Beginning a day, any day with some reading, some contemplation, and pleasant conversation is agreeable to me. That is what I want. For the most part, on many occasions I have no idea about what I want. If you were to ask,... Read More Read More - [Dance At Winter Solstice](https://everyangel.org/dance-at-winter-solstice/): As intended, I made a fire at nightfall on the winter solstice. The family left the warmth of the house to see the fire that by itself cut the frost of the night. I made the fire as a memorial of sorts for those who might have been with us, my parents, the grandmother... Read More Read More - [Death And Rebirth](https://everyangel.org/death-and-rebirth/): Today, the 21st of December is Winter Solstice. Darkness will be at maximum duration. In the Northern Hemisphere the earth’s pole is tilted at greatest distance from the sun. But that is not all… Spring is coming! I wish that I knew a metaphor of greater exuberance, of unalloyed childlike anticipation to celebrate the... Read More Read More - [Caroling To Resist](https://everyangel.org/christmas-song-of-resistance/): Nothing much this morning. I have nothing to say. This tune though, seems apt for the season. The days grow short, slowly, too slow for immediate notice. And then December 21st is the winter solstice, the shortest day. I think that I will make a fire in the fire pit at dusk, my act... Read More Read More - [Looking Where I'd Prefer Not To See](https://everyangel.org/looking-where-id-prefer-not-to-see/): There are, indeed, events, forms and oscillations which are only open to a long contemplative gaze, but remain hidden to the working gaze; things that are subtle, fleeting; inconspicuous things, minor things [das Geringe]; that hover or retreat, which evade any violent efforts at their capture. The Scent of Time by Byung-chul Han, trans.... Read More Read More - [Not Just Another Day](https://everyangel.org/not-just-another-day/): Another day, and yet not just ‘another’ day. There has never been, or can there ever be a segment of space and time that mirrors, replicates this one. The “eternal return” as a rule-of-thumb is a safe bet.  Patterns become familiar. We’ve seen them before. Would we expect anything else? Matter and the personalities... Read More Read More - [Savage Landscapes](https://everyangel.org/savage-landscapes/): The lines quoted below were read several days ago. I was confused. I thought about revisiting Nietzsche’s point of view, as more time was needed to absorb what he seemed to say. A collection of blown glass pumpkins that I encountered while Christmas shopping yesterday reminded me of the written lines about beauty. The... Read More Read More - [Not Again, Yes Again!](https://everyangel.org/not-again-yes-again/): “What have I done? What possessed me, again I am here, trembling. One way or another I am going to live to tell about this!” – This is exactly what I’ll feel when I am seated and the harness is tightened, into the C8 Corvette Z06. I signed up with Xtreme Xperience for four... Read More Read More - [Fooling Ourselves Again](https://everyangel.org/fooling-ourselves-again/): Another NFL match-up between the Detroit Lions and the Greenbay Packers is ‘on tap’ for today. I chose to find a table at Barnes & Noble for some writing, rather than view the game. A NFL contest between two top ranked teams is exciting, something I enjoy. Nevertheless I felt compelled to think and... Read More Read More - [Just Two Things](https://everyangel.org/just-two-things/): Why does the man not see the things? He himself is in the way: he conceals the things. The Dawn of Day by Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. by J. M. Kennedy, aphorism 438 –*– Because we have reached the point of being able to see through a thing we believe that henceforth it can offer... Read More Read More - [A Higher And Worse Situation](https://everyangel.org/a-higher-and-worse-situation/): With every day that passes, January 20, 2025 approaches. Inauguration day for the Trump administration draws near. Words written in 1881 describe the situation for many of us.  Not for all Americans of course. Many stand with the captain, who by their ballot, is to command the helm of the ship of state. He... Read More Read More - [To Toast Another Beginning](https://everyangel.org/to-toast-another-beginning/): I wrote before about a round table discussion of a few days ago. Six of us were asked to explore dimensions of our experience that troubled us, which cause a feeling of dread. A few days have passed. I continue to remember a passionate statement made there by a good friend that humankind is... Read More Read More - [The Main Question](https://everyangel.org/the-main-question/): I am attracted to Nietzsche’s thought because he pursues as a cheetah on the savanna, question after question, wrestling each in turn into submission. Without assumptions about answers, he is interested to seize the main, root question, in order to clarify the alternatives inscribed within such a question. Several evenings earlier I attended a... Read More Read More - [Do You Hear What I Hear?](https://everyangel.org/31209-2/): Tuesday, the weather begins to slide toward the sub-freezing that we’d expect of a midwest winter.  Luigi Mangione was arrested for the assassination of the United Health Care C.E.O., Brian Thompson. Mangione was eating lunch at a McDonald’s when he was questioned by police. Weather, murder and arrest, all are apparent of the day-to-day... Read More Read More - [Merry Christmas II](https://everyangel.org/merry-christmas-ii/): Many men/women may certainly have attained that humility which says credo quia absurdum est, and sacrifices its reason; but, so far as I know, not one has attained to that humility which after all is only one step further, and which says creda quia absurdus sum. The Dawn of Day, by Friedrich Nietzsche, trans.... Read More Read More - [How To Ruin Your Soul](https://everyangel.org/how-to-ruin-your-soul/): “Sin” is a tawdry, toxic concept. We’d all be better off, had we not been handed this sticky, absurd contradiction. It is the accusation, the indictment that one is irremediably, morally flawed. One is biased in favor of preservation of the life-force with which one awakens in this world. I know, my description highlights... Read More Read More - [Merry Christmas](https://everyangel.org/merry-christmas/): We are like shop-windows, where we ourselves are constantly arranging, concealing, or setting in the foreground those supposed qualities which others attribute to us —in order to deceive ourselves. The Dawn of Day* by Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. by J. M. Kennedy, aphorism 385 *There are many dawns which have yet to shed their light.—RIG-VEDA... Read More Read More - [To Nourish A Bird](https://everyangel.org/not-to-nourish-a-bird/): “Do to others, as you’d desire others doing to you”, my down and dirty paraphrase of the ‘golden rule’. Jesus said it… ergo for many there’s no greater authority. “All we need is love, love, love…” is another variation of the idea. So wrote Paul Mccartney and John Lennon. Come on people now Smile... Read More Read More - [Punxsutawney Phil Obituary](https://everyangel.org/punxsutawney-phil-obituary/): Today is the 2nd day of February, Groundhog day. The sky is gray as if a canvas were stretched horizon to horizon. Groundhog day is a wistful anticipation of an early end of winter’s cold. According to the German legend, the groundhog emerges from its borrow and has a look around. If the animal... Read More Read More - [Slouches, Being Born](https://everyangel.org/slouches-being-born/): My wife asked me what I would write about today. I replied I was unsure whether I would write anything at all on this February 1st. Midway through winter, my energy is at low ebb. I am not one to peruse Facebook, or other social media sites. Still, I am aware of the activities... Read More Read More - [Forgetfulness To Work Things Out](https://everyangel.org/forgetfulness-to-work-things-out/): Chui the artisan could draw as precisely as if he had used a circle and square. His fingers moved with the changes without requiring the attention of the mind. His Tower of Intelligence was intact and not impeded. The feet are forgotten when the shoes fit. The waist is forgotten when the girdle fits.... Read More Read More - [Renounce, Be Free](https://everyangel.org/renounce-be-free/): The segment describing our common condition, and a treatment that allows day-to-day life on a much better basis — greatly impressed me today. I think such enormous waste of our potential is a direct consequence of our ignorance. We are confused about the difference between what is superfluous, optional, redundant to our essential flourishing.... Read More Read More - [Why Not?](https://everyangel.org/why-not/): The memory remains when I was twelve or thirteen years old. That memory shimmers, a glow of experience from a time which by and large I cannot recall. The Engineering School at Duke University sponsored an annual open house for an evening. The community was invited to observe and to admire the work which... Read More Read More - [Two Stars Passing](https://everyangel.org/two-stars-passing/): I joined an online book club at the beginning of the year. I was motivated by the accountability entailed by membership. At the end of every month a zoom session, moderated by Jared Henderson, a philosopher-convener is offered to members. I figured this was sure to motivate me to read each of the monthly... Read More Read More - [Drumming And Singing](https://everyangel.org/drumming-and-singing/): The death of a child of any age is an unspeakable grief for a parent. Death is a change that upends our wishes. What I desire one way or another does not effect the circumstance or the timing of the death of those dearest to me. Alex Pretti was murdered a few days ago... Read More Read More - [Coda](https://everyangel.org/coda-4/): What the world valuesare riches, honor, long life, and recognition.What it finds pleasurable is repose for the body,rich flavors, fine clothes, beautiful colors and good music. What it dislikes are poverty, low status, short life,and dishonor. The rich are burdened with accumulating possessions,piling up more than they can use.Those who pursue honordeliberate about their... Read More Read More - [Fishing In The Po](https://everyangel.org/fishing-in-the-po/): Zhuangzi was once fishingin the Po river when the ruler of Chusent two ministers with a message,“I wish to trouble youwith the charge of all territories.’ Zhuangzi continued to hold to hold the rodand without looking around said,“I have heard that in Chuthere is a sacred tortoisewhich died three thousand years ago.The ruler keeps... Read More Read More - [Defiance](https://everyangel.org/in-defiance/): …what is noble and what is base is determined by what the time requires –there is no absolute rule. A battering ram can be used to storm a city wall but it cannot be used to fill a small hole. –the uses of the implements are different. “therefore the saying, ‘Shall we not follow... Read More Read More - [Frigid Fire](https://everyangel.org/frigid-fire/): I participated in a discussion of Fascism yesterday. We reflected upon an 1932 essay written by Benito Mussolini, The Doctrine of Fascism. Fascism is a political religion. Elements are: an underclass of citizens with a grievance about unjust social arrangements they believe causes them unsatisfactory lives, an autocratic politician with a savior delusion, and... Read More Read More - [Know That Time Never Stops](https://everyangel.org/know-that-time-never-stops/): Well then,may I consider heaven and earth as greatand the tip of a hair as small?                   “No,”replied the Ruo of the North Sea. “The capacities of things cannot be defined,time never stops,all is in constant flux,and the ends and the beginnings of thingsare never the... Read More Read More - [Going In Reverse](https://everyangel.org/going-in-reverse/): I’ll say it again, to write again something that cannot be said enough… We ought not to pride ourselves in possessing carriages and coronets or because of difficulties and poverty resort to crude means. Who among us doesn’t feel a flush of pride to own a new vehicle, especially one which is widely admired... Read More Read More - [Out-Of-Joint Time](https://everyangel.org/out-of-joint-time/): Those who are called“recluse scholars” by the ancientsdid not conceal themselvesto shun the world.They did not declineto speak their wordsor conceal their knowledge. It was the times that were out of joint… Highest happiness is the fulfillment of aspiration.Fulfillment of aspiration for the ancientsdid not mean carriages and coronets,but that nothing more was needed... Read More Read More - [Always On The Wire](https://everyangel.org/once-upon-a-time/): The ancients who tended to the taoabided in calmto nourish their wisdom,butthey did not dependon their wisdom in their actions.It can be said that they preserved their calmwith wisdom.When wisdom and calmfoster one another from innate nature,harmony and order emerge. Virtue is harmonyand tao is order. Zhuangzi trans by Hyun Höchsmann and Yang Guorong,... Read More Read More - [I'll Take My Stand](https://everyangel.org/ill-take-my-stand/): To be simple, pure, clear, still, level, and constant; to be impartial without action and in action to be aligned with heaven— this is the way to sustain the spirit. The swords made at Wu and Yue are kept in a box and rarely used since they are valuable. But the subtle spirit moves... Read More Read More - [As Light Without Glitter](https://everyangel.org/as-light-without-glitter/): Saturday and it is bitter-cold today. It is colder in Minneapolis, 11 degrees F. A quiet question comes over and over. Would I be willing to stand alongside friends and others who live around me to oppose the roundup and extradition of immigrants from their homes and places of work? Would I oppose the... Read More Read More - [Fondness For Deep Pools](https://everyangel.org/fondness-for-deep-pools/): Ingrained ideas, a high regard for oneself, abandoning the world to pursue an uncommon course, talking imposingly and disparaging others – these are the traits of conceit. This is what scholars who retreat to the hills and valleys, who find fault with the world and who are like withered trees or throw themselves into... Read More Read More - [Proclamation](https://everyangel.org/proclamation/):      No Leaders Please invent yourself and then reinvent yourself, don’t swim in the same slough. invent yourself and then reinvent yourself and stay out of the clutches of mediocrity. invent yourself and then reinvent yourself, change your tone and shape so often that they can never categorize you. reinvigorate yourself and accept... Read More Read More - [The Occupation Of Minnesota](https://everyangel.org/the-occupation-of-minnesota/): think of it by Charles Bukowski think of it, there were fellows like Kierkegaard and Sartre who found existence absurd, who battled against anxiety and anguish, nothingness, nausea, and death hanging over them like a Damocles sword while there are other men now -so empty of concern that their first thought of the day... Read More Read More - [Darkened Self & Time](https://everyangel.org/monday-2/): I dare not sleep-in today, even though it is Monday and I am retired… Retired!? Ha! So what? I am still a human being among my own kind,… I live in a small town, Batavia. Batavia belongs to the State of Illinois, which is in the midsection of the U.S. of A. I cannot... Read More Read More - [Ain’t No Going Back](https://everyangel.org/theres-no-going-back/): This is a poem written by Renee Nicole Good. She is dead. She was a mother. She was many things…  Renee left these words behind. They are for you and I to consider: what manner of person would choose these words, express this description of life. Also for you and I to consider: what... Read More Read More - [Vigil](https://everyangel.org/vigil/): It is Saturday, raining and the sky hints of snow to come. I do not mind rain in wintertime, or any time. Trees need water, a subsurface soaking. Lately rain seems to come less frequently, sometimes weeks pass with little to no moisture. Like it or not we (humans) belong to Nature, we are... Read More Read More - [The Pimp](https://everyangel.org/the-pimp/): Today The New York Times featured an account of an interview with the President in the Oval Office. He was interviewed by four journalists. It is difficult to take the measure of another human being. The Homosapien is a layered mammal, quite like and unlike other quadrupeds, say your dog or cat. A member... Read More Read More - [Always There's Somethin'](https://everyangel.org/always-theres-somethin/): Those who hold wealth as their life    cannot give up their revenues. Those who seek recognition    cannot give up fame. Those who crave power    cannot yield to others. While they possess, they are afraid of losing them. When they must let them go, they are desperate and will not reflect upon... Read More Read More - [And You And Me](https://everyangel.org/and-you-and-me/): Cannot decide what to write this morning. Enough Nietzsche for now. Of course I will circle back to him soon enough. Cannot be helped. Like drag racing, the exercise is open-ended, like fate. You’ll lineup at the starting line one more time. Fate is not the cul de sac that everyone thinks. There’s no... Read More Read More - [Tattered, Decrepit, Spent](https://everyangel.org/tattered-decrepit-spent/): Every concept arises from the equation of unequal things. Just as it is certain that one leaf is never totally the same as another, so it is certain that the concept “leaf ” is formed by arbitrarily discarding these individual differences and by forgetting the distinguishing aspects. This awakens the idea that, in addition... Read More Read More - [A Groping Game](https://everyangel.org/a-groping-game/):  This art of dissimulationreaches its peakin man. Deception, flattering, lying, deluding, talking behind the back, putting up a false front, living in borrowed splendor, wearing a mask, hiding behind convention, playing a role for others and for oneself – in short, a continuous flutteringaround the solitary flame of vanity – is so much the... Read More Read More - [Nothing Will Have Happened](https://everyangel.org/nothing-will-have-happened/): Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe which is dispersed into numberless twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing. That was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of “world history,” but nevertheless, it was only a minute. After nature had drawn... Read More Read More - [My God, It’s Quiet](https://everyangel.org/my-god-its-quiet/): The first Saturday in a new year. The year is 2026. America as a republic, administered by a distribution of power, democratically – is finished. What comes next, has yet to be formed. A safe wager to be made that for now, the dismantling of the old status quo will proceed with dispatch. A... Read More Read More - [Strolling To Gather The True](https://everyangel.org/strolling-to-gather-the-true/): The highest men of the ancient days traversed the virtue of benevolence as a path; They borrowed and dwelled in righteousness as a lodging for the night. They ambled in the empty space of Unruffled Repose, found nourishment in the Field Free of Longing and stood in the Garden Free of Possession.    Unruffled... Read More Read More - [Monkey Bitten](https://everyangel.org/monkey-bites/): Have you never seen a well pump? When it is pulled up it goes down, and when it is let go it comes up. It is pulled by men but does NOT pull the men. Whether it rises or falls, the well-pump does not go against men. It is the same with rules of... Read More Read More - [Dissonance And The Music Of Heaven](https://everyangel.org/dissonance-and-the-music-of-heaven/): In the last part of the performance, I played notes which did not have an enervating effect. I blended them with spontaneity. Hence the sounds came forth in dissonance, like a cluster of plants growing from one root, or like the music of the forest coming from no perceptible form. The sounds spread in... Read More Read More - [In A Daze, You Stood](https://everyangel.org/in-a-daze-you-stood/): These verses describe a concert sponsored by the Yellow Emperor. Beimin Cheng, a member of the court is speaking with the Yellow Emperor. Cheng relates that the music effected him. The concert was in two parts. Here the Yellow Emperor describes the second part – the sensations felt by the listener who is enveloped... Read More Read More - [Tao Exam](https://everyangel.org/tao-exam/): 1. Does heaven revolve continuously? 2. Does earth continuously abide in rest? 3. And do the sun and moon pursue one another? 4. Who guides and directs these movements? 5. Who holds them together and connects them? 6. Who is it that, without straining and effort,     brings them about and maintains them?... Read More Read More - [Not To Be Refused](https://everyangel.org/not-to-be-refused/): Duke Huan sat in his hall reading a book. The wheelwright Bian was making a wheel in the courtyard below the hall. Putting down his hammer and chisel, Bian went up the steps and said, “I venture to ask your Grace what words are you reading.” “The words of the sages,” replied the duke.... Read More Read More - [Become Square And Rigid](https://everyangel.org/becoming-square-and-rigid/): The great tao is not named. The great argument needs no words. Great benevolence is not benevolent. Great modesty is not humble. Great courage is not destructive. The tao that is displayed is not the tao. Argumentative words do not achieve their purpose. Benevolence that is predominant is not comprehensive. Modesty that is demonstrative... Read More Read More - [Stepping Back](https://everyangel.org/stepping-back-2/): Shicheng Qi came to see Lao-tsu and asked him, “I heard master, that you are a sage, so I came to see you, not minding the long journey. During the hundred days of the journey the soles of my feet became callous, but I did not stop to rest. Now I see that you... Read More Read More - [Christmas With Bukowski](https://everyangel.org/christmas-with-bukowski/): Received an invitation yesterday to a Christmas service/event at Christ Community Church. An acquaintance here at Starbucks invited me. The printed invitation said there will be festive music, “our traditional giant Christmas tree, and a model train display.” That’s not all – “‘Silent night’ by candle light.” I accepted the invitation without comment. I’ve... Read More Read More - [Unfolding Under The Sky](https://everyangel.org/unfolding-under-the-sky/): Therefore it is said, ‘Those who know the happiness of heaven are like heaven in their actions during their life and at death undergo transformation like other things. In their stillness they embody yin and in their movement they flow outward as the yang. One who knows the happiness of heaven does not quarrel... Read More Read More - [The Mirror](https://everyangel.org/the-mirror/): The sages are stillnot because they possessthe aptitude of being still.Nothing can disturb their mind—that is why they are still. When water is still,it reflects the eyebrows and the beard.It is a perfect level and the craftsman takes his rule from it.If still water has this clarity, how much greater is that of the... Read More Read More - [With Whom Will I Despair?](https://everyangel.org/with-whom-will-i-despair/): Great music does not move the villagers, but if they hear “The Breaking of the Willow” or “Bright Flowers” they will be rollicking with laughter. Noble words do not stay in the minds of the multitude, and consummate words are not comprehended because common words proliferate. Two clay instruments will overpower the sound of... Read More Read More - [The Rest, Into A Ditch](https://everyangel.org/the-rest-into-a-ditch/): A tree of a hundred years is cut and carved into a sacrificial wood vessel decorated with green and yellow. The rest is thrown into a ditch. If we compare the sacrificial vessel with what was thrown away, there is a difference between them in relation to beauty and ugliness. But they have a... Read More Read More - [Not Arriving](https://everyangel.org/not-arriving/): One who knows    that he is ignorant       is not entirely ignorant. One who knows    that he is deluded       is not entirely deluded. One who is severely deluded will not become free of delusion. One who is steeped in ignorance will not become discerning. If three men... Read More Read More - [Integrity](https://everyangel.org/integrity/): “I should like to hear of the rule of kind and virtuous men,” continued Yuan Feng. “The virtuous men are unmoved. They have no thought. They act without fear. Judgments of right and wrong or good and bad do not occupy them. All within the four seas delight in what they possess and are... Read More Read More - [Dogs And Monkeys](https://everyangel.org/dogs-and-monkeys/): Confucius asked Lao-tsu,“Some men approach the taoas a regimentation to submit to.they say a thing is either admissible or inadmissible;it is so or not so.They are like disputers who claimthat they can distinguish clearlywhat is hard and what is white.Can such men be considered sages?” Lao-tsu replied,they are like the subordinates in a courtwho... Read More Read More - [Silencing The Bird](https://everyangel.org/silencing-the-bird/): At the ultimate origin of all things, there was nothing; there was nothing that could be named. From this emerged the One, the first existence without form. Then different things were produced receiving what we regard as their attributes. What was formless was divided and then continued to be interconnected. The two processes led... Read More Read More - [Ecce Homo](https://everyangel.org/ecce-homo/): The tao,how deep and still it is.How clear is its purity. Metal and stone would not reverberate without it.They have the sound within thembut unless they are struck,they produce no sound.Who could determine the characteristics of all things?        ~*~ The man of sovereign virtueproceeds unencumberedand is distressed to be preoccupiedwith the... Read More Read More - [Can You Hear The Music?](https://everyangel.org/can-you-hear-the-music/): What is the Tao? There is the tao of heaven and there is the tao of man. Doing nothing and retaining all is the tao of heaven. Straining with action is the tao of man. The tao of heaven is the sovereign and the tao of man is the attendant. The tao of heaven... Read More Read More - [Origin Story](https://everyangel.org/origin-story/): Permeating heaven and earth, there is virtue.Operating in all things, there is the Tao. It is the duty of rulers to govern the people.Ability was developed into skill,which led to righteousness;righteousness rose from virtue, and virtue emerged from the Tao.The Tao was aligned with heaven. The ancients who sustained the worlddesired nothing and the... Read More Read More - [Yet](https://everyangel.org/yet/): Undistinguished and yet needed for use—Such are things.Low and yet to be relied upon—Such are people.Hidden and yet necessary to be set forth—Such are the laws.Remote and yet necessary to hold within-–Such is righteousness.Near and yet necessary to extend widely—Such is benevolence.Restrictive and yet necessary to be applied broadly—Such are ceremonies. Placed in the... Read More Read More - [Like An Echo](https://everyangel.org/like-an-echo/): The teaching of a great manis like a shadow,following the body,an echo following the sound.All questions find answers in his innermost thought. He abides in silenceand his field of activity is not confined.He guides people to their goalsthrough their movements.His actions leave no traceas he goes forth and returns. His movements arelike the sun–... Read More Read More - [Caring Still Indifferent](https://everyangel.org/caring-to-be-indifferent/): Yungjiang implored, “It has been difficult to meet with you. O Heaven! I ask for one more word.” “Ah, your mind needs to be fortified. Do nothing and things will be transformed by themselves. Be indifferent to your body, dismiss your hearing and sight, And forget the external world. Be one with the ultimate... Read More Read More - [To Save A Ho*](https://everyangel.org/to-save-a-ho/): Cui Qu asked Laozi, “If you do not govern the world, how can you make men’s minds good?” “Take care lest you intervene and disturb men’s minds,” replied Laozi. “The mind, if pushed down becomes despondent; if pulled up, elated. Now elated, now despondent, here it is a captive, and there it is a... Read More Read More - [Simply Abide](https://everyangel.org/when-doing-nothing/): The superior man/woman, when obliged to govern the world, will find that it is best to do nothing. In doing nothing, he can abide in his/her true given nature. Hence one who honors the world as he honors his own person can be entrusted with government. One who loves the world as he loves... Read More Read More - [Pleasure Über Alles](https://everyangel.org/pleasure-uber-alles/): Pleasure in seeing leads to an excessive preoccupation with colors. Pleasure in hearing leads to an excessive preoccupation with sounds. Pleasure in benevolence leads to disorder in virtue. Pleasure in righteousness leads to opposition to reason. Pleasure in ritual leads to artifice. Pleasure in music leads to sensuous indulgence. Pleasure in wisdom of the... Read More Read More - [World Not Enough](https://everyangel.org/the-world-not-enough/): I have heard of letting the world beand letting it stand; I have not heardof governing the world. We let it belest men will push their nature to extreme.We let it standlest men will alter their nature.When men do not carry their nature to extremesor alter their virtuewhat need would there be to govern... Read More Read More - [My Anti-holiday Post](https://everyangel.org/my-anti-holiday-post/): There is a saying, “The greatest art resembles ignorance.” The versatility shown in ingenuous arguments and the efforts to blow off the dust and reconcile different views is great, but the common people are perplexed by the sophistry. Hence there is a prevailing disorder in the world due to a fondness for knowledge. All... Read More Read More - [Principles Of Larceny](https://everyangel.org/principles-of-larceny/): The followers of the Robber Zhi asked him, “Do robbers have any principles?” He replied, “What profession is there which does not have its principles? That the robber decides that there are things of value in the house shows his knowledge; that he is the first to break into the house shows his courage;... Read More Read More - [Becoming A Prince](https://everyangel.org/becoming-a-prince/): Make bushels and buckets to measure and by bushels and buckets people will steal. Make agreements and seals and by agreements and seals people will steal. Make benevolence and righteousness to inculcate what is right and by benevolence and righteousness people will be taught to steal. How do I know this? One steals a... Read More Read More - [Duck & Crane](https://everyangel.org/duck-crane/): What is long should not be regarded as too long, nor what is short too short. A ducks legs, for instance, are short, but if we try to lengthen them it would pine; A crane’s legs are long, but if we try to lop them off it would grieve. Where is a part is... Read More Read More - [The One](https://everyangel.org/the-one/): Will men with intensified visual perceptionnot be confused by the five colors and excessive ornamentation,and be dazzled buy the brightness ofgreen and yellow, white and black?Li Zhu was such a man. Will men with extraordinary power of hearingnot be confused by the five notesand the excessive use of the six tones,which are produced by... Read More Read More - [No Carte Blanche](https://everyangel.org/no-carte-blanche/): A ligament connecting the big toe with the other toes and an extra finger may be natural growths but they are extraneous. Swelling and tumors are growths from the body but they are unnatural additions. There are many instances of benevolence and righteousness and they are connected to the five organs. But this is... Read More Read More - [The Day Chaos Died](https://everyangel.org/the-day-chaos-died/): The ruler of the South Seawas called Heedless,the ruler of the North Seawas called Sudden,and the ruler of the central regionwas called Chaos. Heedless and Sudden frequently metin the land of Chaos, who treated them well.Heedless and Sudden conferredhow they could reciprocate his kindness. “All men have seven openingsfor the purposes of seeing, hearing,... Read More Read More - [To Hold What Is From Heaven](https://everyangel.org/to-hold-what-is-from-heaven/): Do not yearn for fame. Do not make plans. Do not set up projects. Do not be a possessor of knowledge. Embody to the fullest what has no end and wander where there is no path. Hold what is from heaven but do not take it to be anything. Be empty. The highest man’s... Read More Read More - [Gunned Down](https://everyangel.org/gunned-down/): Time moves on with its usual nihilism, mows us all down, jaw-droppingly insensate to our preference for living. Guns us down… We’re caught in a universe of collision and drift, the long slow ripples of the first Big Bang as the universe breaks apart; the closest galaxies smash together, then those that are left... Read More Read More - [Singing Or Wailing](https://everyangel.org/singing-or-wailing/): Master Yu and Master Sang were friends. Once when it rained continuously for ten days, Master Yu said, “Perhaps Master Sang is unwell.” He wrapped some rice and took it to his friend. When he arrived at Sang’s gate, he heard sounds of singing or wailing accompanied by a lute. “Father? mother? Heaven? Man?”... Read More Read More - [Abide And Be](https://everyangel.org/abide-and-be/): “When we say to one another,‘I am this’, how do we knowthat the ‘I’ isthe real ‘I’? You dream that you are a birdsoaring into the sky; you dream that you are a fishdiving into the deep.We do not know whether wewho are now speakingare awake or dreaming. It is not seeing what is... Read More Read More - [A Great Furnace](https://everyangel.org/as-a-great-furnace/): “Here is a master smith casting his metal.If the metal were to leap up and say,‘I want to be made into Moye!”*he would think it is wrong. If I, after having already received the human form,were to say, ‘I must become a man, I must become a man!’the creator would certainly think it is... Read More Read More - [Tranquility In Disturbance](https://everyangel.org/tranquility-in-disturbance/): Having transcended all life,     he was clear as the morning.Having become as clear as the morning,     he was able to see the One.Having seen the One,     he was able to set aside past and present.Having set aside past and present,     he was able to enter where there is neither life... Read More Read More - [No Doing & No Form](https://everyangel.org/no-doing-no-form/): Tao has reality and manifestation but does nothing and has no form. It may be imparted by cannot be grasped. It may be attained but cannot be seen. It has its root and ground of existence in itself. Before there was heaven and earth It existed from eternity. From it came the powers of... Read More Read More - [What Makes Life Good](https://everyangel.org/what-makes-life-good/): There is the great mass of nature –it supports my body. I struggle with my life; old age brings relief and death rest.     What makes my life good also      makes my death good. A boat may be hidden in a ravine, or a fishing net in a lake, and you... Read More Read More - [Waking Without Anguish](https://everyangel.org/waking-without-anguish/): A few more lines from Zhuang Zhou constructing a three dimensional model of what is possible within the Taoist course of practice. A “true” man or woman approaches what is possible for the individual in their place and time.  Sometimes I have a restful night of sleep without haunting of dreams. But not often,... Read More Read More - [Into Water, Into Fire](https://everyangel.org/into-water-into-fire/): What is meant by “the true man”? The true man of ancient times did not protest against poverty, did not boast of plenty and did not calculate the effects. If he made mistakes he did not regret, and if he was successful he did not become complacent Being like this he could ascend the... Read More Read More - [Like Still Water](https://everyangel.org/like-still-water/): “What do you mean by virtue not being manifested?” “Nothing is so level than still waters –this can be a paradigm. There is inner preservation and no outer movement. Virtue is the perfect cultivation of harmony. Even though this is not manifested in the person, things cannot be without it.“ Zhuangzi by Zhuang Zhou,... Read More Read More - [Always Springtime](https://everyangel.org/always-springtime/): Duke Âi said,‘What is meant by saying that his powers were complete?’ Confucius replied,‘Death and life,preservation and ruin,failure and success,poverty and wealth,superiority and inferiority,blame and praise,hunger and thirst,cold and heat; these are the changes of circumstances, the operation of our appointed lot.Day and night they succeed to one another before us,but there is no... Read More Read More - [Seasonal Work](https://everyangel.org/seasonal-work/): One week before Thanksgiving. The weather has been distinctly unfall-like. The days have been comfortable, nearly too warm for a jacket along the Fox River valley just west of Chicago. There has been no frost to speak of. Yesterday with almost seventy degree weather I busied myself raking and mulching leaves. The ideal is... Read More Read More - [A Madman's Advice](https://everyangel.org/a-madmans-advice/): When Confucius went to Chû, Jieyû, the madman of Chû, as he was wandering about, passed by his gate, called out, ‘Oh Phoenix, Oh Phoenix, how is your virtue degenerated! The future is not to be waited for; the past is not to be sought again! When good order (Tao) prevails in the world,... Read More Read More - [Benefit Of Uselessness](https://everyangel.org/benefit-of-uselessness/): A (master) mechanic, called Shih,on his way to Khî, came to Khü yüan,where he saw an oak tree,which was used as the altar for the spirits of the land. It was so largethat an ox standing behind itcould not be seen.It measured a hundred spans round,and rose up eighty cubits on the hillbefore it... Read More Read More - [Afterword](https://everyangel.org/afterword/): When has one written or said enough? That is, said enough, leaving space for the reader, room enough for freedom of reflection, allowing a companion to the conversation to “make up” their own mind. It is always a judgment call. One additional thought rattles around my mind. The crux of my reaction, my aversion... Read More Read More - [Christianity Considered Part III](https://everyangel.org/christianity-considered-part-iii/): Holy Sonnets: Batter My heart, Three-person’d God By John Donne (1572–1631) Batter my heart, three-person’d God, for you As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend; That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new. I, like an usurp’d town to... Read More Read More - [Tu Stultus Es, Part II](https://everyangel.org/tu-stultus-es-part-ii/):                 Moira was the name given by the Greeks to this realm of the incalculable and of sublime and eternal limitedness; and they set it round their gods like a horizon beyond which they could neither see nor act, —with that secret defiance of the gods which... Read More Read More - [We Clever Dwarfs](https://everyangel.org/we-clever-dwarfs/): We haveaccustomed ourselvesto believein two kingdoms,the domain of purposes and volition,and the domain of chance. In this latter domaineverything is done senselessly, there is a continual going to and frowithout any one being able to saywhy or wherefore. We stand in aweof this powerful realmof the great cosmic stupidity,for in most instanceswe learn to... Read More Read More - [Fucktard](https://everyangel.org/fucktard/): The neologism that I used was borrowed as is all language. We inherit a manner-of-speaking, labels which by mutual agreement we decide point to a thing, or an experience, or… As you can imagine any language affords an infinite number of pieces by which to “play” on the game board. Grammar, the rules of... Read More Read More - [Losing The Real Point](https://everyangel.org/losing-the-real-point/): Moreover, skillful wrestlers begin with open trials of strength, but always end with masked aggression (to gain the victory); as their excitement grows excessive, they display fraudulent tactics. Parties drinking according to the rules at first observe good order, but always end with disorder; as their excitement grows excessive, they become raucous. In all... Read More Read More - [That I Was, Has Passed](https://everyangel.org/that-i-was-has-passed/): This conversation takes place between Confucius and Yan Hui, a court official. Can you imagine a more precarious professional role, than a job in the administration of an autocrat? The topic revolves around how a “fasting-of-the-mind” is advantageous to someone such as Hui. Confucius describes a concentration, a quieting of the will, as one... Read More Read More - [Realpolitik](https://everyangel.org/realpolitik/): In ancient times Kieh killed Kwan Lung fang, and Kâu killed the prince Pî kan. Both of these cultivated their persons, bending down in sympathy with the lower people to comfort, to relieve suffering (as they did) from their oppressors, and on their account opposing their superiors. On this account, because of their moral... Read More Read More - [Thinking Lightly Of The Dying](https://everyangel.org/thinking-lightly-of-people-dying/): Along with others, I have struggled to understand the nature of my relationship to the Federal Government. This ancient dialog between Confucius and one of his students illuminates the topic. What frame-of-mind is feasible toward a autocrat, and the high-handed murderous administration for which he is the “front man”? The autocrat’s party regards compromise... Read More Read More - [Quiet Acquiescence](https://everyangel.org/quiet-acquiescence/): Serendipity is coincidence of circumstance that is unexpected. Perhaps occasionally that happens to everybody. Earlier in the day preparing for a session later in the week I composed several questions related to the relationship between life and death. Then, when turning to consider this post was this ancient account of a funeral. The funeral... Read More Read More - [Ten And Thirty](https://everyangel.org/ten-and-thirty/): The pheasant of the marshes has to take ten steps to pick up a mouthful of food, and thirty steps to get a drink, but it does not seek to be nourished in a coup. Though its spirit would (there) enjoy a royal abundance, it does not think (such confinement) good. Zhuangzi by Zhuang... Read More Read More - [To Butcher An Ox](https://everyangel.org/to-butcher-an-ox/): Perhaps there is nothing more satisfying than to observe a skilled artisan work. Here is a widely known Taoist story. A humble cook instructs the ruler of the realm on the art of ruling by his manner of dismembering an Ox in the course of meal preparation. No further comment needed. Cook Ding was... Read More Read More - [Peril](https://everyangel.org/peril/): The Mastery of Life There is a limit to our life,but to knowledge there is no limit.With what is limitedto pursue after what is unlimited is a perilous thing; and when, knowing this,we still seek the increase of our knowledge,the peril cannot be averted. There should not be the practice of what is goodwith... Read More Read More - [There Is No Why](https://everyangel.org/there-is-no-why-3/): The Penumbra asked the Shadow, saying, ‘Formerly you were walking on, and now you have stopped; formerly you were sitting, and now you have risen up: how is it that you are so without stability?’ The Shadow replied, ‘I wait for the movements of something else to do what I do, and that something... Read More Read More - [Gone](https://everyangel.org/gone/): The lyric penned by Chrissie Hynde is more true now than ever. Resist temptation, irrational faith in “the system,” that’s going to take care of us. The system is an abstraction, a collection of imagined, dream-like benefits, (democracy protects everyone’s rights, captalism-gets-us-all-ahead, etc.) quite divorced from the way things actually work, the sharp-edged reality.... Read More Read More - [It's A Human Sign](https://everyangel.org/its-a-human-sign/): Monday, a mild day with 45 degrees F at 6:30AM. The poet James Dickey suggests in his poem To Rise To Walk Again that non-human mammals live in a perpetual paradise. That is, they live in a state of perpetual renewal. A consciousness that is filled with each successive moment would be one that... Read More Read More - [To Rise To Walk Again](https://everyangel.org/to-rise-to-walk-again/):      The Heaven of Animals By James L. Dickey Here they are. The soft eyes open.    If they have lived in a wood It is a wood. If they have lived on plains It is grass rolling Under their feet forever. Having no souls, they have come,    Anyway, beyond their knowing.    Their instincts... Read More Read More - [Hair's Tip In Autumn](https://everyangel.org/hairs-tip-in-autumn/): Under heaven there is nothing greaterthan the tip of an autumn down,and the Thâi mountain is small. There is no one more long livedthan a child which dies prematurely,and Phang Tsû did not live out his time.                ~*~ Heaven, Earth, and Iwere produced together,and all things and... Read More Read More - [When They Awoke They Knew](https://everyangel.org/when-they-awoke-they-knew/): ‘How do I know that the love of life is not a delusion?and that the dislike of death is not like a young person’s losing his way,and not knowing that he is (really) going home? Lî Kî was a daughter of the border Warden of Âi.When (the ruler of) the state of Tsin first... Read More Read More - [Becoming Square](https://everyangel.org/becoming-square/): The Tâo that is displayed is not the Tâo. Words that are argumentative do not reach the point.    Benevolence that is constantly exercised does not accomplish its object.       Disinterestedness that vaunts its purity is not genuine.          Courage that is most stubborn is ineffectual. These five seem... Read More Read More - [No Teardrops In My Eye](https://everyangel.org/no-teardrops-in-my-eye/): July 5th. Yet another Independence Day experienced and consigned to memory. We American’s are urged to experience feelings of dedication, of fond attachment for our country especially at this time of year. As in past years, from curbside I witnessed the Wheaton 4th of July parade. I’d wager this parade is exceptional for the... Read More Read More - [To Praise Play](https://everyangel.org/to-praise-play/): PLAY Is not the opposite of work but the improvisational genius the inner child sage PLAY Is rehearsal for reality remaking of reality myth-making in motion shapeshifting on purpose how we make love to uncertainty composing music out of paradox HOLY PLAY Sabotages fanaticism and dogmatic ferocity MUST sabotage fanaticism can you dignify plain... Read More Read More - [Missing Paris](https://everyangel.org/missing-paris/): Today is Wednesday our second day at home. Slowly the body adjusts to the mid-western time zone. France is seven time zones earlier than Chicago. (Tomorrow perhaps I will not be wake at 5AM) A memory that lingers is our Bateaux Mouches cruise up the Seine at dusk in Paris. This is an ancient... Read More Read More - [Well, How Did I Get Here?](https://everyangel.org/well-how-did-i-get-here/): Back at last. Ten days in France became twelve. The airline cancelled our return flight. The lesson was learned which I suppose all seasoned travelers know. When reservations are upended by circumstance one thing alone matters, – to hash out the details of an alternate flight yourself. The airline is unlikely to independently reschedule... Read More Read More - [A Single Great Truth](https://everyangel.org/a-single-great-truth/): Travel in a foreign country asks the traveler to adapt. Humans can be very adaptive. Or frozen, by patterns of past experience, those impossible expectations paralyzing the mind, and then spinning like a top, after energy is spent, wobbling to fall over. It is Sunday morning, I compose these lines at the end of... Read More Read More - [Tours To Caen - day no. 5](https://everyangel.org/tours-to-caen-day-no-5/): We stayed a night in Tours. Tours was once the capital of France. I will always remember the Starbucks that looked convenient across the street. There I’d be able to simply order medium-sized, dark roast coffee as I am accustomed back in the states. It happened not to be found on the menu board.... Read More Read More - [Chartres - day no. 4](https://everyangel.org/chartres-day-no-4/): Our fourth day in France featured a pilgrimage to Chartres. Could one conclude that the cathedral at Chartres is one of the wonders of the world? Yesterday in conversation with three Parisians we mentioned our plans to visit Chartres. Their eyes became wide, they assured us Chartres was amazing. The story of this great... Read More Read More - [Paris - day no. 3](https://everyangel.org/paris-day-3-sunday/): The day three, another outstanding breakfast at our hotel. The French feature of flakey, buttery pastry and fresh fruit, plus a charcuterie board is impossible to beat by my breakfast standards. My standard of what makes a good breakfast has been elevated. Today is Sunday. We arrived at the church of Saint Augustin, where... Read More Read More - [Paris - day no. 2](https://everyangel.org/paris-day-no-2/): The first day in Paris featured several outdoor mini-concerts, the first at the Eiffel Tower, the second occurring among the swirl of an outdoor music festival organized by the French government. The rationale of our visit to France is the opportunity for performances by the Fox Valley Festival Chorus. The often mention in the... Read More Read More - [Paris](https://everyangel.org/paris/): This is to be our second day in Paris. I have a strange sensation of being in a country, and a city that in my fathers time suffered four long years of German occupation. I cannot exactly describe the feeling of walking along the Seine yesterday afternoon, the air filled with the sounds of... Read More Read More - [The Marvelousness...](https://everyangel.org/the-marvelousness/): Contrary to the expectationsof 19th century radicals, religion hasnot gone away–perhaps we’d be better off if it had–but instead has increased in power,seemingly in proportion to the global increasein the realm of technology& rational control. Both fundamentalism& the New Agederive some forcefrom deep & widespread dissatisfactionwith the System that works againstall perception of the... Read More Read More - [Crashing To Zero](https://everyangel.org/crashing-to-zero/): It was shocking in the Sixties when the painter Anselm Kiefer photographed himself in various European locales performing the Nazi salute. “Too soon,” people said – even if it’s satire. Those wounds were still raw. (Even Mel Brooks was a couple years away from “springtime for Hitler.”) Kiefer was born in Germany at the... Read More Read More - [Sending It Home To Me](https://everyangel.org/sending-it-home-to-me/): A View from the Quarter, March 12th, 1965 we are in a terrible hurry to die as large Negroes break the pavement our fingers tremble on dark coffee cups as this city all the cities lie spread-legged dipped into with beak, I awaken to pull a shade open I awaken to black men and white... Read More Read More - [A Possible Society](https://everyangel.org/a-possible-society/): The Other mirrors the Self –the Other is our witness. The Other completes the Self –the Other gives us the key to the perception of the oneness-of-being. When we speak of being & consciousness, we point to the Self; when we speak of bliss we implicate the Other. The acquisition of language falls under... Read More Read More - [Father's Day](https://everyangel.org/fathers-day/): Sunday morning, and it is Father’s Day. I feel puzzlement each year when Father’s Day arrives. What a mother does is something that is easy to feel. Is that Illusion? I am no female. And if I were, would I be up to giving birth? Is everything simply one more delusion, another fantastic and... Read More Read More - [Eros and Thanatos](https://everyangel.org/eros-and-thanatos/): According to legend, Helen of Troy was ‘the face that launched a thousand ships’…  I have no idea whether Homer’s Iliad reflects actual events, or whether it is a tribute to the mind of a brilliant story-teller. The tale of a prolonged conflict between the Greeks and a city state is profoundly human, psychologically... Read More Read More - [Weed](https://everyangel.org/weed/): Today, Friday is overcast. Clouds and wildfire smoke from Canada’s forests. Nature seems real enough to me. There are wildflowers as well as “weeds” growing, living, drawing nourishment in a section of my backyard. Weeds and wildflowers are a distinction of language, my trace of a line between vegetation that I desire, and that... Read More Read More - [Christianity](https://everyangel.org/christianity/): Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.” Gospel of Matthew 22:37-39 There exists a creature which is perfectly harmless; when it passes... Read More Read More - [To Dream](https://everyangel.org/to-dream/): IN SLEEP WE DREAM of only two forms of government – anarchy & monarchy. Primordial root consciousness understands no politics & never plays fair. A democratic dream? A socialists dream? Impossible. Only kings & wild people populate my night. Monads & nomads. But in a dream we are never ruled except by love or... Read More Read More - [Damned Poets!](https://everyangel.org/damned-poets/): But granting that someone did sayin all seriousness thatthe poets lie too much: he was right – we do lie too much. We also know too little,and are bad learners: so we are obliged to lie. And which of us poets has not adulterated his wine?Many a poisonous messhas evolved in our cellars:many an... Read More Read More - [Where The Sun Burns](https://everyangel.org/where-the-sun-burns/): I like to lie here where the children play, beside the ruined wall, among thistles and red poppies. I am still a scholar to the children, and also to the thistles and red poppies. They are innocent, even in their wickedness. But to the sheep I am no longer a scholar: so it is... Read More Read More - [To Dream, To Dare](https://everyangel.org/to-dream-and-to-dare/): WHAT ARE MY TRUE DESIRES?–& what can I DO before it is too late?… Do you possess both imagination & Will,can you both dream & dare–or are you the dupe of an impotent fantasy? Any day now, vast numbers of Americans are going to realizethey’re being force-fed a load of reactionary boring hystericalartificially-flavored crap.... Read More Read More - [Humor That Bleeds](https://everyangel.org/humor-that-bleeds/): CHAOS THEORY MUST OFcourse flow impurely. “Lazy yokel plowsa crooked furrow.” Any attempt to precipitatea crystal of ideology would result in flawed rigidness,fossilizations, armorings & drynesses, whichwe would like to renounce,along with all “purity.” Yes, Chaos revels in a certain abandoned formlessnessnot unlike the erotic messiness of those we lovefor their shattering of habit&... Read More Read More - [Wine We Could Be Drinking Now](https://everyangel.org/wine-we-could-be-drinking-now/): Food, cooked or raw, cannot escape from symbolism. It is, & also simultaneously represents that which it is. All food is soul food. But in the airless vault of our civilization, …nearly every experience is mediated, reality strained through the deadening mesh of consensus-perception, we lose touch with food as nourishment; we begin to... Read More Read More - [Like The Sun Do I Love](https://everyangel.org/like-the-sun-do-i-love/): See there! Surprised and pale does it stand – before the rosy dawn! For already she comes, the glowing one, — her love to the earth comes! Innocence, and creative desire,          is all solar love! See there, how she comes impatiently over the sea! Do you not feel the thirst... Read More Read More - [Loving And Perishing](https://everyangel.org/where/): Oh, you nostalgic liars,you avaricious ones! You, without innocence in your desire:and how you discredit desiring on that account! Truly, not as creators, as birth-parents,or as revelers do you love the earth! WHERE IS INNOCENCE?Where there is will to childbearing. And he whoseeks to create beyond himself, has for me the purest will. WHERE... Read More Read More - [Just Enough Left](https://everyangel.org/just-enough-left/): TOO far did I fly into the future: a horror seized upon me. And when I looked around me. Behold, there time was my sole contemporary! Then did I fly backwards, homewards – and always faster. Thus did I come to you: you present-day men, and into the land of culture. For the first... Read More Read More - [When An Ox Learns To Smile](https://everyangel.org/when-an-ox-learns-to-smile/): Like a white ox I’d like to see him, which, snorting and lowing, walks before the plough-share: and his lowing should also laud all that is earthly! Dark is still his countenance; the shadow of his hand dances upon it. Overshadowed is still the sense of his eye.      ~*~ His deed itself... Read More Read More - [The Thing About Taste](https://everyangel.org/the-thing-about-taste/): And you tell me, friends, that there ought be no controversy about taste and tasting?      But all life is a matter of dispute about taste and tasting! Taste: that is to weigh at the same time, and scales and a one-who-weighs; and all the worse for every living thing that would attempt... Read More Read More - [Destroyer, Breaker of Values Into Pieces](https://everyangel.org/playing-dice-for-death/): Listen carefully now, you enlightened ones! Weigh seriously, whether I have discerned the heart of life itself, the very roots of its heart! Wherever I found a living thing, there found I Will-to-Power; and even in the will of the servant I found the will to be master. The weaker is to serve the... Read More Read More - [What To Fear (the entire enchilada)](https://everyangel.org/what-to-fear-the-entire-enchilada/): “WILL to Truth” you call it, you learned ones, which compels you to become so focused? ~*~ Will for the thinkableness of all being: thus would I characterize your will! All being you want to make thinkable: because you secretly doubt with good reason whether being is already thinkable… But it shall accommodate and... Read More Read More - [Something Invulnerable](https://everyangel.org/something-invulnerable/): How did I ever bear it?How did I survive and overcome such wounds?How did my soul rise again out of those killing fields? Yes, something invulnerable, unburiable is within me,something that would shatter rocks into pieces:it is called my Will. Silently does it proceed,unchanged throughout the years.Its course proceeds upon my feet,my old Will;... Read More Read More - [Unappeased Gap](https://everyangel.org/unappeased-gap/): Night. In darkness things gain definition, a better focus. I dreamed in the early morning hours. The detail has already escaped my recall. The gist, the weight of the presences, a female voice spoke to me saying that I must attend to female perspectives in my life. Why that point? I am a guy,... Read More Read More - [Eye To Eye](https://everyangel.org/eye-to-eye/): Yesterday, Memorial Day I went for an unplanned walk by the Fox River. Noting that the Creamery ice cream shop was crowded to capacity, a short walk along the river would allow families with children to be served. After my walk I would return for a scoop of chocolate ice cream. The Fox River... Read More Read More - [Something Wicked Comes](https://everyangel.org/something-wicked-comes/): TIS night: now all the gushing fountains speak louder. And my soul also is a gushing fountain. ‘Tis night: now only all songs of the loving ones do awake. And my soul also is the song of a loving one. Something unappeased, unappeasable, is within me; it longs to find expression…. Light am I:... Read More Read More - [From This Wreckage](https://everyangel.org/from-this-wreckage/): It is Sunday. I considered launching an anti-Christianity rant this morning. On second thought, these lines are more important, and widely universal than any critique of Christian fundamentalism. I am a recovering Jesus Fundamentalist. (Everyone starts somewhere. No child has a choice about that or anything else) I am not unlike an alcoholic, who... Read More Read More - [Wild Wisdom](https://everyangel.org/wild-wisdom/): And the blindness of the blind one,and his seeking and groping,still testifies to the power of the suninto which he has gazed,– did you know that before? And with mountains shall the discerning one learn to build!It is a small thing for the spiritto remove mountains,– did you know that before? You know only... Read More Read More - [No Going Back](https://everyangel.org/no-going-back/): We have no interest in going “back to the land” if the deal includes the boring life of a shit-kicking peasant –nor do we want “tribalism” if it comes with taboos, fetishes & malnutrition. We have no quarrel with the concept of culture –including technology; for us the problem begins with civilization. What we... Read More Read More - [Paradise Even Now](https://everyangel.org/paradise-even-now/): A friend of mine posted an essay this week entitled Machismo…and Why? The paragraphs of the essay described toxic masculinity as a range of behaviors, a state of male arrested development. Males in socially elevated positions present themselves as powerful, yet behave as a child of 3 or 4 years of age going into a... Read More Read More - [Same Note Played](https://everyangel.org/same-note-played/): The Manichees…believed that the body can be spiritualized–or rather, that the body merely contaminates pure spiritand must be rejected. The Gnostic* perfecti (radical dualists)starved themselves to deathto escape the body & returnto the pleroma of pure light. So to evade the evils of the flesh–murder, war, famine, greed–paradoxically only one path remains:murder of one’s... Read More Read More - [Aimed](https://everyangel.org/aimed/): We might now contemplateaesthetic actions which possesssome of the resonance of terrorism(or “cruelty” as Artaud* put it)aimed at the destruction of abstractions   rather than people,      at liberation rather than power,         pleasure rather than profit,            joy rather than fear, “Poetic Terrorism.” Our chosen images have the potency of darkness –but all images are masks, &... Read More Read More - [Be Sorcerer](https://everyangel.org/be-sorcerer/): It seems to me there’s a hazard we secular minded folk risk. Our satisfaction, indeed our conviction of the truth of cause and effect becomes a filter, a colored lens of sorts, a type of bias… It goes without saying too, bias allows us perceive anything at all. Without some bias (a lens) we’d... Read More Read More - [Wake up! Breathe! Seize the day!](https://everyangel.org/wake-up-breathe-seize-the-day/): Sunday arrived early in my case. Was it that two hour nap which I enjoyed yesterday afternoon? Or was it a melange of current events in my subconscious which aroused me at 5:30AM today? Impossible to tell. Anyway it’s a typical chilly mid-western spring day, brilliant sunlight, and everything fades by comparison to the... Read More Read More - [Saturday](https://everyangel.org/saturday/): Waking to an overcast day. A stiff wind continues to blow. There’s some relief from the high gusts of yesterday which transported a dust storm, yes giant horizon-wide clouds of yellow-grey field soil from farms to the distant west. A dust storm in Chicago. This is the American mid-west, not a middle eastern country... Read More Read More - [The Ruined Temple](https://everyangel.org/the-ruined-temple/): These preachers of equality I’ll not be mixed up, confounded with them. This is how justice speaks to me: “Human beings are not equal.” And nor will they ever become so! And what of my dedication to the Overman, if I spoke anything different?                            ~*~ On a thousand bridges and piers shall they... Read More Read More - [Tarantula World ?](https://everyangel.org/tarantula-world/): THIS isthe tarantula’s den! Would you see the tarantula itself?Here hangs its web: touch this,so that it trembles.There comes the tarantula willingly: Enter, the tarantula! Black on your backis your triangle and symbol;and I know also what is in your soul.                     ~*~Revenge is in your soul:wherever you bite, there arises black scab;with revenge,... Read More Read More - [Eagles, Snow, Sun](https://everyangel.org/eagles-snow-sun/): And as strong winds we will live above them, neighbor to the eagles,    neighbor to the snow,       neighbor to the sun: thus live the strong winds. And like a wind I will one day blow among them, and with my spirit, take the breath from their spirit: thus wills my future. Truly,... Read More Read More - [Becoming Mid-Summer's Day](https://everyangel.org/becoming-mid-summers-day/): But I asked once,and my question almost suffocated me:What? Is the rabble alsonecessary for life? Are poisoned fountains necessary,and stinking fires,and filthy dreams,and maggots in the bread of life? Not my hatred, — my loathing, gnawed hungrily at my life!Ah, often my spirit was drained,when I found even the rabble spiritual! And holding my... Read More Read More - [The Rabble Also Drink](https://everyangel.org/the-rabble-also-drink/): LIFE is a well of delight;but where the rabble also drink,thereall fountains are poisoned. To everything clean I am well disposed;but I hate to seethe grinning mouthsand the thirst of the unclean. They cast their eye down into the fountain:and now glance up to metheir odious smile out of the fountain. They poisoned the... Read More Read More - [Playing By The Sea](https://everyangel.org/playing-by-the-sea/): But Zarathustra didn’t come to say to all those liars and fools: “What do you know of virtue! What could you know of virtue!” –But that you, my friends, might become weary of the old words which you have learned from the fools and liars: That you might become weary of the words   ... Read More Read More - [Beauty Speaks](https://everyangel.org/beauty-speaks/): WITH thunderand heavenly fireworksmust one speakto lethargic and drowsy senses. But beauty’s voicespeaks gently:it appeals onlyto the most awakened souls. My buckler gently vibratedand laughed to me to-day;it was beauty’s holy laughing and thrilling. At you, you virtuous ones,laughed my beauty to-day.And thus came its voice to me: “They want – to be paid... Read More Read More - [Blood Sign](https://everyangel.org/blood-sign/): Characters of blood they wrote on the way they went, and their folly taught that truth is proved by blood. But blood is the very worst witness to truth; blood taints the purest teaching, and turns it into delusion and hatred of heart.                               ~*~ And when a person goes through fire for his... Read More Read More - [Shame, Shame, Shame](https://everyangel.org/shame-shame-shame/): FRIENDS, You’ve heard this joke making the rounds: “Look at Zarathustra! Walking around, among us as if among animals?” But said better: “The discerning one walks among men as among animals.” Man himself is to the discerning one: the animal with red cheeks. How has that happened to him? Isn’t it because he has... Read More Read More - [Flying Fragments](https://everyangel.org/flying-fragments/): Away from God and gods did this will allure me; what would there be to create if there were – gods! I read that one’s life amounts to a collection of stories. You and I existentially are a composition of everything that we believe about the world, believe about ourselves as a feature of... Read More Read More - [Vertigo](https://everyangel.org/vertigo-3/): But that I may reveal my heartentirely to you, my friends:if there were gods,how could I endure it to be no God! Therefore there are no gods.Yes, I have drawn the conclusion;now, however,does it draw me.–God is a conjecture: ~*~but who could drinkall the bitterness of this conjecturewithout dying?Shall his faith be takenfrom the... Read More Read More - [Look Into The Mirror](https://everyangel.org/looking-into-the-mirror/): Why did I startle in my dream, so that I awoke? That is the question isn’t it? Dreams and night visions are the stuff of literature. The story of Macbeth comes to mind. No one knows for sure from whence comes a dream. I remember talking about dreams with a therapist. She recognized dreams... Read More Read More - [Keeping Modest](https://everyangel.org/keeping-modest/): AFTER this Zarathustra returned again into the mountains to the solitude of his cave, and withdrew himself from men, waiting like a sower who has scattered his seed. His soul, however, became impatient and full of longing for those whom he loved: because he had still much to give them. For this is hardest... Read More Read More - [Noontide](https://everyangel.org/noontide/): When Zarathustra had spoken these words, he paused, like one who had not said his last word; and long did he balance the staff doubtfully in his hand. At last he said this – and his voice had changed: I now go alone, my disciples! You also must now go away alone! So will... Read More Read More - [A Millennia's Worth Of Madness, Part II](https://everyangel.org/a-millennias-worth-of-madness-part-ii/): Remain true to the earth, my brothers, with the power of your virtue! Let your bestowing love and your knowledge be devoted to be the meaning of the earth! Thus do I pray and appeal to you. Let it not fly away from the earthly and beat against eternal walls with its wings! Ah,... Read More Read More - [Becomer and Fighter, Part I](https://everyangel.org/becomer-and-fighter/): Thus goes the bodythrough history,a becomer and fighter. And the spirit — what is it to the body?Its fights’and victories’herald, its companionand echo. Nietzsche/Zarathustra refers time and time again to the wisdom of the body. The body is the conduit, our interface with external reality. An ongoing theme is emphasis on what the body... Read More Read More - [Virtue As Selfish](https://everyangel.org/virtue-as-selfish/): Tell me… how is it that gold is attributed the highest value? Because it is uncommon, and nonfunctional, and beaming, and soft in lustre; it always bestows itself. Only as image of the highest virtue came gold to the highest value. Goldlike, beams the glance of the bestower. Gold-lustre makes peace between moon and... Read More Read More - [To Catch The Golden Ball Part III](https://everyangel.org/to-catch-the-golden-ball-part-iii/): Truly, he died too early that Hebrew whom the preachers of slow death honor: and to many has it proved a calamity that he died too early. This begins a breath taking assessment of the death of Jesus. Yes Jesus, the Palestinian carpenter condemned as an agitator by the occupying Romans when in his... Read More Read More - [When One Tastes Best Part II](https://everyangel.org/when-one-tastes-best-part-ii/): How many are the ways by which one might die? Infinitely many. Dying like living, is limitless as to time and context. Think for a while on that. Yet, one requirement for a “good” death is sure. You must put away notions of fame, the accolades of the masses. Forget about that! Dying well... Read More Read More - [Memento Mori Part I](https://everyangel.org/memento-mori/): Die at the right time! This is either the most absurd statement than can be uttered or the most inescapable. The coincidence of a timed death, a departure from this life that harmonizes with one’s goals, purposes… I assume that you are aware of the goals which animate you? I mean those for which... Read More Read More - [Marriage](https://everyangel.org/marriage/): Marriage. Men ought to think more on this topic, and say much less. We (males) are without a clue on the matter. Nietzsche, a scholar with a razor wit, writes in his ironic style to treat marriage. Notwithstanding his notable failure at love. Nietzsche met Lou Andreas-Salomé in Rome in 1882. He was instantly... Read More Read More - [Bitten In The Neck Part II](https://everyangel.org/bitten-in-the-neck-part-ii/): Often the irony of my situation slaps me in the face, a wake up call! Good news is bad news is good news, etc., etc.. Who would choose to be bitten by snake, in the neck while napping?! The scream, the shock subsides, and you recognize that it was time to wake up anyway.... Read More Read More - [The Talking Adder Part I](https://everyangel.org/the-talking-adder-part-i/): Tuesday and wondering how to get started with this post. This weirdly delightful story parallels the Creation Story in Genesis. You know, the temptation of Eve segment with the talking serpent. Zarathustra, Nietzsche’s alter ego, is portrayed as encountering a talking adder, while napping. The shock of the encounter was extreme, as he wakes... Read More Read More - [Auto-Da-Fé](https://everyangel.org/auto-da-fe/): Monday. Easter weekend recedes. Pope Francis died. Everyone dies. What one does to create oneself concludes at the moment of death. Game over… This New York Times headline struck me as more portentous however: Republicans in half a dozen states, including Idaho and Michigan, have introduced resolutions urging the Supreme Court to reconsider same-sex... Read More Read More - [Driving Ourselves To Death](https://everyangel.org/riding-this-strange-torpedo/): It is early Easter morning. Here at Starbucks I’ll write a bit before returning to home base. Among my responsibilities, to hide a bucket full of Easter eggs around the yard. Four grandchildren are to be dispatched to find the eggs, according to some rules, naturally. I pondered for a moment what to write... Read More Read More - [Don't Know Much About Gods](https://everyangel.org/dont-know-much-about-gods/): Today I am in Niles, Michigan. The Niles area is rural. Niles is a small town by comparison to towns in the Chicago suburbs. I am situated in Starbucks within a Martin Food store, that is large, offering a wide variety of foodstuffs and services. The mom standing in front of me waiting to... Read More Read More - [Easter & The Nut Of Existence](https://everyangel.org/easter-the-nut-of-existence/): Well today is Good Friday. Do we not each celebrate this day in his/her own way? Even, to not commemorate at all! I am well acquainted with the meaning of the Passion story as held by Christians. To be a human being, a Homo Sapien, is to belong to a species that assigns a... Read More Read More - [About Good Friday](https://everyangel.org/about-good-friday/): We watched a film, The Long Good Friday, an Aurora Film Society showing, in company with a room full of other film buffs. Yes, this was a chilling gangster film. The leading man in the tale is Harold Shand played by Bob Hoskins. Harold’s girlfriend, Victoria, is played by Helen Mirren. The film reminded me... Read More Read More - [Your Voice !](https://everyangel.org/not-a-voice-from-heaven/): Today is Wednesday. It is called “hump day” the mid-point of the work week. Though retired, by force of habit Wednesday yet feels like a halfway to Friday to me. I look around the room at Starbucks, I see the mix of patrons, genders, generations from infants perhaps only weeks old, to seniors like... Read More Read More - [Decked With Purple](https://everyangel.org/decked-with-purple/): The wandering sage observes that humans create tribal units by a process of valuing, by labeling as good or as evil – behaviors, practices, forms of life, etc., etc.. Much that passed for good with one peoplewas regarded with scorn and contempt by another:thus I found it. Much found I here called bad,which was... Read More Read More - [Stung All Over](https://everyangel.org/stung-all-over/): Today is Monday. It is tempting to characterize this passage: The Poison Fly Soliloquy. Thousands of business owners in Europe, Asia, and in America are weary, and wary as one becomes when forced to swat away swarms of stinging gnats. The “on again”, “paused again” (for 90 days) tariffs become positively maddening for anyone... Read More Read More - [L'état, c'est moi](https://everyangel.org/letat-cest-moi-2/): This is by no means the first occasion when a head of state claimed that in his person, resided the state, beyond question and certainly any criticism. “L’état, c’est moi” (“I am the state”) said Louis XIV, the king of France. He supposedly declared this before the Parlament of Paris in 1655, signifying his... Read More Read More - [The Lightning- Part II](https://everyangel.org/the-lightning-part-ii/): It is Saturday. Nature, sunrise with the warming of spring, – proceeds impassively. The bedrock of reality is cause and effect as far as I can tell. I find comfort in that. There, in Nature is my refuge from being whipsawed by revulsion, or by terror, or by avarice, by hope, or by _____.... Read More Read More - [Waiting For Lightning- Part I](https://everyangel.org/waiting-for-lightning-part-i/): This Friday begins with magnificent sunlight. Nature is our mother, the beginning and the ending of my/our individual stories. This story penned by Nietzsche requires two movements. Tomorrow I will offer part 2. As you’ve noticed it’s a conversation between a young adult (male or female) and Zarathustra. “Zarathustra,” Nietzsche’s mouthpiece, is a mysterious... Read More Read More - [Write With Blood](https://everyangel.org/write-with-blood/): Days become weeks, weeks months and perhaps years too, rare if ever does the conversation arise. I mean a direct, heads-up discussion about what we mean when we use the term God. What qualifies as experience of a divine presence for me? I could never hazard to answer on your behalf. Sometimes after pondering... Read More Read More - [Happiness Of The Knife](https://everyangel.org/happiness-of-the-knife/): Ought I to be surprised that Nietzsche’s understanding of crime parallels that of the ancient Stoics? This disciplined way of life aimed at moderating the passions, harmonizing emotion according to reason was developed from 400 to 500 year span of time from Athens to Rome. Stoics recognized that feeling, impulse, bodily sensation is emotion... Read More Read More - [Devil To Angel](https://everyangel.org/devil-to-angel/): I press forward to learn as much as possible about the ancient practice of Stoicism. The Greek and Roman adherents to the Stoic practice of self-reflection, the mindful analysis of emotion, – desired to become virtuous individuals. The ability to respond to whatever fate served up, preserving one’s sense of identity, reciprocating with clarity... Read More Read More - [At Daddio's](https://everyangel.org/at-daddios/): Monday morning brings a look-back, memories of the weekend. Several events remain vivid in mind. We enjoyed breakfast once again at Daddio’s Diner. The dining room is compact, bustling with patrons, griddle-man, and several waitstaff. We found two seats at the counter opposite the griddle. Hash brown potatoes are cooking at the back of... Read More Read More - [Drunken Joy To Look Away](https://everyangel.org/drunken-joy-looking-away/): One more nationwide demonstration is under my belt. I joined the Hands Off event in Geneva, standing on State Street, with a few thousand of my neighbors, frightened and concerned Americans. Trump, naturally, after announcing the imposition of massive tariffs, flew away to his Trump National Doral Golf Club to host the LIV tournament.... Read More Read More - [To Play A New Game](https://everyangel.org/to-play-a-new-game/): Saturday morning is quiet at this time. Patrons haven’t arrived yet to fill the room with conversation. The sky is overcast, an early spring chill in the air. I will participate in a demonstration of resistance to the administration that is scheduled for 11:30 AM later today. The non-violent protest will take place on... Read More Read More - [At The Motley Cow](https://everyangel.org/staying-at-the-motley-cow/): I resolved to turn away from writing about Trump. There is no question his machinations are fascinating and dangerous. Others do a better job of dissecting politics than I. They are professional story tellers and politics is their forte. I’d prefer to reflect upon the journey that I have taken, playing the hand that... Read More Read More - [Clown Or Buffoon](https://everyangel.org/much-poison-in-the-end/): A little poison now and then:that makes pleasant dreams.And much poison in the end,for a pleasant death. I cannot purge my mind of yesterday’s main news event. Trump hosted a spectacle in the outdoor Rose Garden, announcing a list of new tariffs that are to be applied to every trading partner. The tariffs were... Read More Read More - [For The Good Of All](https://everyangel.org/for-the-good-of-all/): This is an old Buddhist prayer. May I traverse all my lives in the world free of afflictions and interfering forces, but poised to endure with equanimity if afflictions and interfering forces come — for the good of All May I ease suffering in the earth realms. May I help guide wanderers in ignorance... Read More Read More - [And They Blink](https://everyangel.org/and-they-blink/): Perhaps you’ve hazarded an attempt to express, to a dyed-in-the-wool, hard-right Republican partisan, why you think a humane society, a system that is set up to include everyone, — is best for everyone. I have. The outcome is similar to pivoting, only to smash your forehead into a concrete abutment. Nietzsche, in his prologue,... Read More Read More - [A Rope Over An Abyss](https://everyangel.org/a-rope-over-the-abyss/): A friend commented regarding the post of yesterday, that my anger was showing, a turbulence roiling the waters of mind and expression. Nevertheless I continue because what follows in the Nietzschean tale is important that we consider. Our leading character in this tale is Zarathustra, who by chance happens upon a gathering of townspeople... Read More Read More - [Happiness, Reason, Virtue](https://everyangel.org/happiness-reason-virtue/): Sunday morning is a springish cloudy day. I am at Starbucks again. The room is buzzing, overlapping conversations. Briefly speaking with two friends, – we are to join the demonstration planned for Saturday at the end of this week. We will meet in Geneva on the bridge over the Fox River to chant and... Read More Read More - [Piling On](https://everyangel.org/piling-on/): I want to write another book. Laura insists that I get the first one published. She is right. Nevertheless I’d like to engage the fabulous fable penned by Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra. The story is surreal, a prescient foretelling, a projection of the course of the West. Zarathustra is a hermit-like individual whose season... Read More Read More - [Addiction & Self-complacency](https://everyangel.org/addiction/): Unaccountably I woke an hour before the alarm. Better to get an early start on a Friday than to insist upon sleep, when already awake. So with ample time at Starbucks, I read a three page commentary that I found on the internet which treats Truth and Lies Beyond Morality. I regret that I... Read More Read More - [A Fiery Sky](https://everyangel.org/the-sky-rains-fire/): According to the myth of Christianity, the eschaton signals the ending of an old order.  ἔσχατος means the end, last, and is often associated with doomsaying that the earth is to ‘end in fire.’ In a manner of speaking, the sky rains fire these days. Circumstances force a choice. Each in his/her heart is... Read More Read More - [While Passing I Noticed](https://everyangel.org/while-passing-i-noticed/): Here we go again! It seems that yesterday’s train of thought is not finished. Hang on! There’s a sharp, banked curve just ahead! No apology for the roller coaster metaphor… The creative act is a moment of Becoming itself and thus entails the most intimate unity of an individual and actuality. In such a... Read More Read More - [Good News After All](https://everyangel.org/good-news-after-all/): …the Artisten-Metaphysik suggeststhat individuals are alienatedfrom actuality, the synchronicity of the terms   suffering,   willing,   and becomingimplies that the experience of alienationspeaks not so much to humanity’sisolation from actualitybut of the point ofits most intimate unionwith it: ‘This world is will to power   — and nothing besides!And you yourselves are also        this will to power... Read More Read More - [Becoming A Dancer](https://everyangel.org/learn-to-dance/): It is Monday. Am I “in the groove” of a first work-day of the week? “Work” in my case no longer involves customers, employees, contractors, scheduling and profit. Where has destiny, the complicated twists and turns of circumstance, and of people led me, – what is “on my plate,” what I must do? That... Read More Read More - [Hero Of My Own Life](https://everyangel.org/be-hero-of-my-own-life/): Thinking about Ennui. It becomes clear that a response to ignorance, to the ill-will of sexism, to racism, to homophobia, and to tribalism, is to withdraw from excruciating pain. Ennui is the response of shock, an inward cringing, a “just too much” at the horror. This is a normal, healthy sign that one remains... Read More Read More - [Rx For Ennui](https://everyangel.org/rx-for-ennui/): An old friend wrote about the topic of Ennui on his blog The Cage. I and others have known first hand this persistent sense of malaise. Ennui is personal, a condition of soul that is beyond any abstract focus of interest. Speaking personally, a confluence of climate disruption resulting from runaway capitalism, and the... Read More Read More - [Defending Becoming Human](https://everyangel.org/to-defend-becoming-human/): Friday, the end of the week! An ending involves a beginning. Opposite meanings, each defines the other. You cannot have one without the other. Both terms are symbols, linguistic markers used to make sense of time. Making sense is something we humans cannot do without. Primitive and mammalian, the reflex to cry out, soon... Read More Read More - [To Court Oblivion](https://everyangel.org/to-court-oblivion/): In our everyday, public way of being,we have fallen awayfrom the innermost ground of our being,and the most finite thingin our finitude has been concealed from us. The radical nullity of Dasein (existence),of being held out into Nothingis forgottenin the courseof relating to beings; with great peace of mindwe hurry to the superficial domains... Read More Read More - [Chicks For Free](https://everyangel.org/chicks-for-free/): Saturday begins on a mellow note.  The coffee here at Starbucks is hot, astringent, a bracing effect – just as I like it. I know, I know that it’s an acquired taste. Only three of us now occupy the customer area. Each reads quietly. A coffee shop is a public space dedicated in part... Read More Read More - [Simultaneous Realities](https://everyangel.org/simultaneous-realities/): Wednesday, late afternoon, I am thinking about multiple realities. I mean the singular fact, – “the real” is co-dependent upon the mind! What reality do you prefer? There is no single univocal, granite-like “real” no matter how comforting this ancient intuition has been for us. What’s real – is a feature of the synthetic... Read More Read More - [Dying Naturally](https://everyangel.org/dying-naturally/): Today I attended a Memorial Day event at a unincorporated farming community. I understand the town (a cross-roads) has less than 500 residents. However a very important occasion for the community is a service of remembrance for veterans that went to war and did not return to the place of their birth. Many are... Read More Read More - [A Dream - Racin' In The Street](https://everyangel.org/a-dream/): I dreamed. I saw this on the cusp of waking today. An old friend and I raced together on the street. We had the greatest of fun, pure joy on account of the competition, the sensation, the rush of being “in the game.” To disclose the truth of who won, who lost, – I... Read More Read More - [We Remember God'n Country](https://everyangel.org/remember-godn-country/): Saturday, May 23 of Memorial Day weekend. This weekend is prime time. It is a fold point when spring starts to feel like summer. Or not. The Midwest at this juncture in May, a day can be chilly enough to beg a winter’s coat, or edge close to 80 degrees Fahrenheit. I tell myself... Read More Read More - [In The Dark](https://everyangel.org/have-another-helping/): Friday feels like the lift-off to another Memorial Day weekend, – an interlude of graduation celebrations, of weddings, of cook-out gatherings, of ceremonies of patriotic posturing. We agree to pause, to call a time-out to the day to day routine for all of this… I plan to “lean in” to absorb the ebb and... Read More Read More - [He Made His Own Kind of Music](https://everyangel.org/he-made-his-own-kind-of-music/): What is time? Is time simply awareness, awake to the incidence of transformation, that everything is on the move, a process of becoming other than “what”, …it was? That is one way to put it. There’s more than one way. No one finds a best way, a single, unequivocal definition of time. Time is... Read More Read More - [The Goal](https://everyangel.org/the-goal/): Monday morning has been grey, cloud covered. Consistent with the forecast, a short and ferocious downpour a few minutes ago. Curtains of rain. I heard the force of water beating upon the exterior roof here at Starbucks. I remembered the final diminutive vegetable seedlings that I planted over the weekend. The tiny plants hold... Read More Read More - [No Place Left To Hide](https://everyangel.org/no-place-left-to-hide/): Another warmer day! Mid May and the promise of springtime is finding fulfillment. There is no certainty of a gradual transition to balmy days. The swings of heat and cold have been extreme in the past. You cannot count on mild weather, and the body does not “turn on a dime” to adapt to... Read More Read More - [Tomato Juice & Celery Salt](https://everyangel.org/batavia-farmers-market/): Saturday morning is gray with on and off light rain falling. Starbucks has been quiet. It is Saturday after all. At present a few people stand patiently by the counter until their internet app orders are completed. It is a few minutes until 8 o’clock and families will shortly come by. Today the Batavia... Read More Read More - [Complete Devotion](https://everyangel.org/complete-devotion/): I can aesthetically attend to the very experience of having my experience narrowed. This is, in fact, one of the best parts of climbing—that lovely feeling of having the world disappear, all my worries about my obligations and my finances vanishing. My whole consciousness is lost in complete devotion to this one problem, this... Read More Read More - [Taking Aim](https://everyangel.org/taking-aim/): A day presents itself, Thursday. In the afternoon I expect to join a circle of friends at the Barnes & Noble to discuss the topic of friendship in the light of what Aristotle had to say in the Nicomachean Ethics. Aristotle composed a summation of his understanding of life lived well, a legacy statement... Read More Read More - [SMOKE](https://everyangel.org/while-the-house-burns/): Rob Brezsny is a fine writer. I subscribe to his blog as a vote in favor of excellence, also to endorse his message of self-cultivation. We journey together. I touched on the May 4 Met Gala in a past post. Rob expanded upon my thoughts with eloquence. I will pass on his words to... Read More Read More - [Playing To Lose](https://everyangel.org/playing-to-lose/): Monday at 9AM. In a few minutes I’ll depart Starbucks for home. Waking later today (continuing to battle this congestion) nonetheless a cup of coffee energizes body and spirit for another day. I am not into game playing. I’ve cared little about board games, card games, etc.. Certainly there are reasons for my diffidence... Read More Read More - [Your Own Kind of Music](https://everyangel.org/your-own-kind-of-music/): Another spring day, splendid with sunlight. Maybe I’ll go for a short walk by the river. Today is Mother’s Day and I never could repay what I owe to my mother. She’d want me to pay it forward in any case. Men are tasked to become mother and father, not limited to the socially... Read More Read More - [Hear Yourself Sweat](https://everyangel.org/hearing-yourself-sweat/): Saturday stands to be one more glorious dawning of spring. I, however am beset with a head cold. I give credit to Fortune for smiling upon me as the medication enabled me to sleep through the night. Discomfort notwithstanding I am eager to experience what the day holds. We viewed an outstanding film last... Read More Read More - [Opening The Show](https://everyangel.org/opening-crescendo/): The 2nd Friday in May is the warmest day so far in the week. The four “seasons” are linguistic conveniences: spring, summer, fall and winter. Nature is mute, except for us humans. It is our job to label, and we continue upon our crafting of symbols, which fit within the already existing universe of... Read More Read More - [Blind Faith/Win-Loss](https://everyangel.org/blind-faith-win-loss/): Early May is a transition to spring. Spring equates to longer and warmer days. Trees release pollen, male robins sing, seeking a female of the species, for mating and nest building. What is Robin consciousness? Is there a smidgen of self-awareness in the matrix of instinct? Does a robin “feel”, register loss in any... Read More Read More - [Lure & Fascination](https://everyangel.org/lure-fascination/): It is camera lucidathat we should say(such was the name of that apparatus,anterior to Photography,which permitted drawing an object through a prism,one eye on the model, the other on the paper);for, from the eye’s viewpoint, “the essence of the imageis to be altogether outside,without intimacy,and yetmore inaccessible and mysteriousthan the thought of the innermost... Read More Read More - [Aria 2026](https://everyangel.org/aria-2026/): It is Monday, the first Monday in May. The time comes for considering the types and number of vegetable plants which I intend to place into the ground for the growing season. Tomatoes certainly and cucumbers. What vegetables will Finlea, our grand daughter happily enjoy? The thrust of my present,  — is dedicated on... Read More Read More - [The Pose Not Swept Away](https://everyangel.org/the-pose-not-swept-away/): The morning, Saturday features frost. After all May 2nd is early enough; that rotation of the earth’s axis inclining the northern hemispheres toward light and heat is not enough to dispel the condensation to freezing of water, frost. Frost will come and go for a week or so. After which time vegetables will be... Read More Read More - [Light Box](https://everyangel.org/light-box/): History is hysterical: it is constituted only if we consider it, only if we look at it— and in order to look at it, we must be excluded from it. As a living soul, I am the very contrary of History, I am what belies it, destroys it for the sake of my own... Read More Read More - [Clematis](https://everyangel.org/clematis/): April’s final day promises to be glorious with a Natality that always surprises and inspires. Having witnessed the emergence of vegetation in springtime year by year, I feel delight once again at the onrush of life. New life rises up from a brown and gray debris strewn ground. Never ending life is concealed from... Read More Read More - [Torrent of Spring](https://everyangel.org/torrent-of-spring/): Wednesday is midweek. Another day of magnificent light… Perhaps I will be able to transport what remains of my mulch pile to a proper location somewhere in the yard. Life is a matter of making small adjustments, is it not? Small adjustments accumulate. The big picture is effected, transformed, made otherwise than if we’d... Read More Read More - [Racing & Mulch & Being](https://everyangel.org/racing-mulch-being/): A Springtime Tuesday rushes onward, a wave-force concealed under the surface. The wave builds and if you choose to ride you are uncertain as to what the veiled pulse of energy will become at the moment of crest. Do we need to know though, in order to enjoy the ride? Saturday of the past... Read More Read More - [Pain & Dreams](https://everyangel.org/pain-dreams/): “Animula”  ‘Issues from the hand of God, the simple soul’ To a flat world of changing lights and noise, To light, dark, dry or damp, chilly or warm; Moving between the legs of tables and of chairs, Rising or falling, grasping at kisses and toys, Advancing boldly, sudden to take alarm, Retreating to the... Read More Read More - [Velvet Fire](https://everyangel.org/36013-2/): Saturday morning. My gaze is drawn to the window, to sunlight that streams into the room. The blue sky beckons me, thin gray clouds scuttling southward, drawing away from the dim glow of this screen (a necessary tool). Desire. What is desire? Desire is inclination for movement, for pleasure of bodily movement, the wind... Read More Read More - [Not Looking Back](https://everyangel.org/never-look-back/): Another splendid spring morning, and today is Thursday. The day stands to be full. A lift-off here at Starbucks has been gratifying. I witnessed the entrance of a mom with three pre-school children, two female and one male. The mother appeared to thoroughly enjoy the company of her offspring, and the children definitely discovered... Read More Read More - [Beauty & Meaning All Around](https://everyangel.org/beauty-meaning-all-around/): Wednesday morning is filled with light. Struggling with my laptop, seeming to have a mind of its own, (it doesn’t) multiple apps attempted to run, and the machine locked up. Shutting it down, sure enough, upon reboot the chaos of the prior session disappeared. Thus keyboard and screen behave in concert, and I view... Read More Read More - [Touch and Desire](https://everyangel.org/touch-and-desire/): Desire. In a day or so I have an appointment to discuss “touch” with a group of friends. This is designated our “amateur philosopher group” because our objective is enjoyment of good company. What is more agreeable, — than to listen carefully to ourselves, and to others wrestle with words to communicate thoughts rising... Read More Read More - [Virginia Bluebells](https://everyangel.org/virginia-bluebells/): Perhaps writing nothing at all is best today. A chill invests the air, after a few days of nearly summer-like warmth. This is April’s reversal, the point of the line in Eliot’s poem The Wasteland. “April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / Memory and desire, stirring... Read More Read More - [Becoming The Channel](https://everyangel.org/becoming-the-channel/): Lao-tsu said, “He knows his masculine force but prevails in his feminine receptivity, becoming the channel into which all streams flow. He knows his purity but stays at the low level, becoming the valley of the world. Men all prefer to be first; he alone prefers to be last, saying that he will accept... Read More Read More - [Evening Out The Corners](https://everyangel.org/evening-out-the-corners/): Therefore Shen Dao cast aside his learningand all concern for himself,Acting only when it was necessary,and strove to be disinterested and purein his relationship with others. He said that the best knowledge is to have no knowledgeand that a little knowledge could be dangerous. Regarding himself as unqualified,he took on no projects, and laughed... Read More Read More - [Life In A Corner](https://everyangel.org/life-in-a-corner/): What better overview, critique of the fragmentation, of the lassitude of America than Zhuangzi’s commentary upon ancient iron-age China, and a near identical insight from Friedrich Nietzsche? Disorder prevails in the world –the sages and worthy men no longer bring forth light. The tao and its virtue are no longer regarded as universal. People... Read More Read More - [Mulch And Random Thoughts](https://everyangel.org/mulch-and-random-thoughts/): Mid April. At present it is seventy degrees out-of-doors. Much is green as rain has been ample. The morning held for me a session of shoveling mulch into the wheel barrow, to dispose each load in beds containing shrubs and emerging green plants. The task is not as simple as you’d believe. The mulch... Read More Read More - [Rogue](https://everyangel.org/rogue/): GOVERNMENT is founded on the formulations of laws which define various functions in society, specify social responsibility and ensure the fair investigations of all evidence before a decision is reached. The hundred offices are organized; commerce follows its regular course; the essential needs of clothing and food are prepared for; the cattle are fed... Read More Read More - [Tickets To Paradise](https://everyangel.org/tickets-to-paradise/): Regarding BENEVOLENCE as the source of kindness, RIGHTEOUSNESS as the source of the distinction between right and wrong, PROPRIETY as the rule of conduct, MUSIC as the pattern of harmony, and merging SYMPATHY with FAIRNESS —these are the characteristics of the superior man/woman. Zhuangzi trans. by Hyun Höchsmann and Yang Guorong, Book 33 Under... Read More Read More - [Tao Gate](https://everyangel.org/the-gate/): Not to be severedfrom his/her primal sourceis the characteristic of the heavenly man/woman;not to be severed from his/her true nature,that of the spirit-like man/woman;not to be severed from the truth,that of the perfect man/woman. To regard heaven as the primal source,virtue as the root and the taoas the gate,and recognizing the implications of changeand... Read More Read More - [The One](https://everyangel.org/the-one-2/): Under the heaven the schools of particular knowledge are numerous. The advocates of each school believe in the effectiveness of their approaches and that nothing can be added to them. Where can we find now what was known as the wisdom of the tao in the past? We must reply, “it is everywhere.” Where... Read More Read More - [Credo Ut Intelligam](https://everyangel.org/credo-ut-intelligam/): Reflection upon the lines quoted from Book 32 of the Zhuangzi proved to be a dive into the deep end of a pool of rumination on epistemology. But those who are ignorantrely only on what they seeand take it to be what is common to all men. What do I mean when I write... Read More Read More - [What You See Is Not What You Get](https://everyangel.org/what-you-see-is-not-what-you-get/): The attempt to produce equality with what is not equal will only result in inequality. The attempt to make certain with what is not certain will not go beyond uncertainty. One who relies only on seeing with his eyes will be led only by what he sees. It is spirit that leads to certainty.... Read More Read More - [And When I Die](https://everyangel.org/and-when-i-die-3/): When Zhuangzi was about to die, his disciples indicated their wish to prepare a grand burial. Zhuangzi remarked, “I shall have heaven and earth for my coffin and its cover, the sun and moon for my two round symbols of jade, the stars and the constellations for my pearls and jewels and all things... Read More Read More - [No Final Exam](https://everyangel.org/no-final-exam/): Hence the superior manobserves the people that he employsat a distanceto ascertain their trustworthinessand when employed nearobserves them to test their respect. By assigning them difficult tasks,he tests their ability; by questioningthem unexpectedly, he tests their knowledge;by designating an urgent task, he tests their commitment; by entrusting them with wealth, he tests their benevolence;... Read More Read More - [Easter Morning](https://everyangel.org/easter-morning-2/): Confucius said, “The minds of men/women are more difficult to comprehend than heaven itself. Heaven has its seasons of spring, summer, autumn and winter and the times of morning and evening. But man’s exterior is impenetrable concealed and his feelings lie deep within. Some can have an honest appearance    but can be excessively... Read More Read More - [All Being Rolled Away](https://everyangel.org/all-being-rolled-away/): III O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark, The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant, The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters, The generous patrons of art, the statesmen and the rulers, Distinguished civil servants, chairmen of many committees, Industrial lords and petty contractors, all go into the... Read More Read More - [Good Friday](https://everyangel.org/good-friday-3/): The understanding of the small man does not go beyond the details of giving presents and writing memoranda. He wears out his spirit in what is inconsequential and meaningless but wishes to participate in guiding others to the tao and bring about the unity of all things. But he falls into error regarding space... Read More Read More - [What's Necessary](https://everyangel.org/whats-necessary/): The sage [insightful] regards what is thought to be necessary as unnecessary, and therefore he is not at war with himself. The multitude of men think what is unnecessary is necessary, therefore they are at war with themselves. Those who rely upon the strategy of war resort to it in all their actions. But... Read More Read More - [Cain And Abel Redux](https://everyangel.org/cain-and-abel-redux/): A man of Zheng, called Huan, studied his books in a place called Quishi. In three years he became a Confucian scholar, bringing benefits to the three classes of his family relations as the yellow river extends its beneficial influence for nine li. He encouraged his younger brother to study the doctrines of Mo,... Read More Read More - [To Eat, Ramble, Float](https://everyangel.org/to-eat-ramble-float/): Bohun Maoren replied, “It is useless. I have said to you that they would come to you and they have. It is not you that have caused them to come to you, but you cannot prevent them from coming to you. Of what use then was my warning? It was the outward manifestation of... Read More Read More - [Come On Babe](https://everyangel.org/as-i-was-saying/): “The goodness of service does not imply that it is the same on all occasions. Serving parents to provide contentment does not prescribe how it is to be done; in festivities enjoyment does not depend on the dishes that are used; in mourning as an expression of grief the rituals are insignificant. Rites determine... Read More Read More - [Truth](https://everyangel.org/truth/): Confucius was despondent and said, “May I ask what is meant by complete truth?” The stranger replied, “Complete truth is pure sincerity at its most perfect. Without pure sincerity one cannot move others. If one forces oneself to weep, however convincingly he does so, it is not true sorrow. If one forces oneself to... Read More Read More - [Terminal Ignorance](https://everyangel.org/terminal-ignorance/): Confucius looked disconsolate and sighed. …”I was twice driven from Lu; I had to flee from Wei; the tree under which I taught was cut down in Song; I was held in a state of siege between Chen and Cai. I do not know what transgressions I had committed that brought about the hardship... Read More Read More - [Old Fisherman Speaks](https://everyangel.org/old-fisherman-speaks/): Book 31 is a brief 5 page vignette of an encounter between Confucius and an anonymous Fisherman. While on a roadway adjacent to a lake Confucius and his traveling companions are taking a break from the road. They are approached by this stranger who steps down from his boat. The man is described in... Read More Read More - [Luck, Six Days In](https://everyangel.org/luck-six-days-in/): Today is unseasonably warm, six days into spring. By 11AM the temperature gauge reads in the high 70s. According to meteorologist’s report late in the day the temp will fall quickly with the onset of high winds and rain. Granted weather reports are much improved of late, but our examination of climate and weather... Read More Read More - [Slave In The Blood](https://everyangel.org/slave-in-the-blood/): The vain take pleasure in every good opinion they hear about themselves (abstracted entirely from the point of view of utility, and just as much removed from truth or falsity), just as they suffer from every bad opinion. This is because they submit – they feel submissive – to both good and bad opinions... Read More Read More - [Alike](https://everyangel.org/alike/): Wu Yue said, “The small man seeks wealth. The superior man seeks renown. They differ in the way they frame their mind and transform their nature. However, as they both cast away what they possess in pursuit of what they lack, they are alike. Hence it is said, ‘Do not be a small man;... Read More Read More - [ROI Part II](https://everyangel.org/roi-part-ii/): Zizhang said,“In the past Jie and Zhou reveled in being sovereignand possessed all the wealth in the world.If you now say to a grasping man, ‘Your conductis like that of Jie and Zhou,’ he will look contriteand will object to the charge,for even the smallest men despise them. Confucius and Mo Di, on the... Read More Read More - [ROI Part I](https://everyangel.org/roi-part-i/): Zizhang asked Man Goude, “Why do you not follow the virtuous path? Unless you follow such a path you will not be believed in you will not be appointed to office, you will not acquire gain. Therefore, whether you consider it from the standpoint of reputation or gain, righteousness is the right action. If... Read More Read More - [The Yacht-life](https://everyangel.org/the-yacht-life/): Prince Mu of Zhongshan said to Zhanzi, “My body is here by the streams and the sea, but my mind is in the court of Wei. What counsel could you offer?” Zhanzi replied, “Value your life in the right way. When one values one’s life in the right way, gain will seem insignificant.” Prince... Read More Read More - [A Bell Or A Sounding Stone](https://everyangel.org/a-bell-or-a-sounding-stone/): Zengzi was living in the state of Wei. He wore a robe of quilted hemp and no outer garment. He appeared rough and emaciated, his hands and feet had hard callouses. He would go three days without lighting a fire and ten years without a new coat. If he put his hat on straight,... Read More Read More - [Asking & Realizing](https://everyangel.org/asking-realizing/): The Penumbrae asked the Shadow, “A moment ago you were looking down    and now you are looking up; a moment ago you were sitting down but now,    you are standing up; a moment ago you were walking,    but now you have stopped. Why is this?” The Shadow replied, “Honored Sirs, why... Read More Read More - [Failing, Only to Fail Better](https://everyangel.org/failing-only-to-fail-better/): Zhuangzi said to Huizi,“When Confucius was in his sixtieth yearhe changed his views.What he previously held to be truehe now regards as false.We do not know whether what he now holds to be trueis not what he regarded to be falsefor fifty-nine years.” Huizi replied, “Confucius is earnestin his pursuit of learning and acts... Read More Read More - [Unbroken Circle II](https://everyangel.org/unbroken-circle-ii/): But without the words which flow daily as from a cup and without our nature being aligned with heaven, what could be made of these characteristics? Things are divided into various genera and develop successively into distinct physical forms. They begin and end In an unbroken circle; But how this occurs we cannot fathom.... Read More Read More - [Unbroken Circle I](https://everyangel.org/saturday-delight/): How is a thing right? It is right because it is right. How is a thing wrong? It is wrong because it is wrong. How is a thing possible? It is possible because it is so. How is a thing not possible? It is not possible because it is not possible. Things have within... Read More Read More - [Word Inflation](https://everyangel.org/word-inflation/): Of my assertions,9 out of 10 are metaphorical;7 in 10 are from existing writings. Words flow on every day clarified bythe heavenly elementin our nature. The 9 assertions in 10 which are metaphoricalare borrowed from external sources to expound my arguments. It is said,“A father does not act as the matchmakerfor his own son.”This... Read More Read More - [Say What?](https://everyangel.org/say-what/): A comparison of two quotations is a riddle. Language is a pivot, a fulcrum to rouse understanding in the mind. Zhuangzi, the taoist sage and Ludwig Wittgenstein, a very influential intellectual of the 20th century, “play” in the same sandbox. Jump in the box with them! There’s enough toys for everyone. (A riddle naturally... Read More Read More - [Great Dissolution](https://everyangel.org/great-dissolution/): Virtue dissolves into fame; fame dissolves into excess; schemes arise from a crisis; cleverness from disputes; strife is fueled by obstinate adherence to one’s views. The work of government should be distributed in accordance with the approval of all. In spring, when the rains fall and the sun shines, the grass and trees burst... Read More Read More - [I Can't Breathe !](https://everyangel.org/breathe/): All things which have a consciousness depend on their breath. If the breath is not ample, it is not the fault of heaven. Heaven provides breath day and night without ceasing but [humankind] closes up their passages. The womb encloses an empty space; but the mind finds delight in its natural movements. If the... Read More Read More - [The Unstoppable](https://everyangel.org/the-unstoppable/): Huizi said to Zhuangzi, “You speak of what is useless!” Zhuangzi replied, “You have to know what is useless beforeyou can speak about what is useful… Zhuangzi said, “if a man has the capacity to wander freely,can he be stopped? If a man lacks the capacity, then whatcan induce him? There are those who... Read More Read More - [This Crippled Island](https://everyangel.org/this-crippled-island/): The 2nd Sunday of March, you lose an hour of rest due to the ‘click forward’ of daylight savings time. I’d wager most despise the imposition, and there’s no mechanism to stop the obsolete ritual. Saving energy and encouraging commerce… A globalized economy heavily encumbered by tariffs is roiled by the President of the... Read More Read More - [Rubbing To Burn](https://everyangel.org/rubbing-to-burn/): When wood is rubbed against woodit begins to burn;when metal is heatedit melts. When yin and yang are out of balance, heaven and earthare perturbed. Then comes the crash of thunder, and from the rain,lightning sets the locust trees on fire. With men, it is still worse. They stand distraughtbetween two pitfalls of gain... Read More Read More - [Dragged About By Words](https://everyangel.org/dragged-about-by-words/): A few of us met last night to talk about consciousness. We ambled about. Taking a turn to speak, the speaker struggled to clarify what it was that he/she intended to say. That’s the upshot when there’s no agreed upon definition of consciousness. There’s a tinge of magic to the term. Consciousness has traditionally... Read More Read More - [Dogs Bark](https://everyangel.org/dogs-bark/): …”Cocks crow and dogs bark— this is what all men know. But even the men of greatest wisdom do not know how to explain in words how they are formed, nor can they speculate in their minds how they might develop in the future. “When we examine the nature of things, we can arrive... Read More Read More - [Playin' For Keeps](https://everyangel.org/playin-for-keeps/): Yin and yang reflected light on one another, enfolded one another; created order for one another. The four seasons followed one another, gave rise to one another and brought one another to an end. Likes and dislikes, which draw or repel, led to specific distinctness. from this came the separation and union of the... Read More Read More - [The Price Of Avocados](https://everyangel.org/the-price-of-avocados/): “Every season has its beginning and end;every age has its changes and transformations.Happiness and despair follow one another continuously.Sometimes our views are underminedbut the result may win our consent. Other times we persist in our erroneous viewsand seek to correct the views of others. This is comparable to a great marsh where all variety... Read More Read More - [No Means No, Always](https://everyangel.org/no-means-no-always/): The four seasons have distinct weather, but as heaven has no partiality the year completes the cycle. The five offices of the government have distinct duties, but as rulers have no partiality the state is governed. Peace and war have distinct characteristics, but as a great man does not oppose one against the other... Read More Read More - [The Thing About Poverty](https://everyangel.org/the-thing-about-poverty/): Bai Ju was studying under Lao Dan.One day he said, “I would like to receiveyour permission to wander alone in the world.” Lao Dan replied,“Leave off.Everywhere it isjust as it is here.” But Bai Ju asked again and Lao Dan said,“Where would you go first?” “I will begin with Qi.” When he reached the... Read More Read More - [Don't Know Shit About Farming](https://everyangel.org/dont-know-shit-about-farming/): The border guard at Changwu said to Zilao,“The ruler must not leave clods unbroken in governingand not pull up new growth in regulating the people. Previously in ploughing my fields, I left the clods unbrokenand the result was a poor crop. In weeding I pulled up good plants andthe result was a scanty harvest.... Read More Read More - [Redux](https://everyangel.org/redux/): Lord Hui of Wei agreed on a treaty with Marquis Wei of Qi. When Marquis of Wei violated it, Lord Hui was enraged and was planning to send a man to assassinate him. When Gongsun Yan, the Minister of War, heard of this he regarded it as a shame and said, “you are the... Read More Read More - [The Mirror](https://everyangel.org/the-mirror-2/): The sage understands the connections between himself and others and how all things constitute one body. He does not know how this is brought about: it is due to his nature. whether he is acted upon or is acting, he follows the direction of heaven; Therefore people refer to him as a sage. If... Read More Read More - [Suckling Pig Roast](https://everyangel.org/another-suckling-pig-roast/): There are peoplewho are complacent and conceited,indolent and impatient,and ambitious and distorted. The complacent and conceited acquire the words of one master and in their privateself-satisfaction think that they know all that is necessary to know, when in realitythey have not yet begun to understand a single thing.That is what makes them complacent and... Read More Read More - [What Is Called Great](https://everyangel.org/what-is-called-great/): “〈Tom〉 and 〈Jerry〉 follow the way that cannot be traversed” … Therefore when virtue is encompassed in the unity of the tao and words end where knowledge can go no further, there is completion. The unity of the tao transcends virtue, and what is beyond knowledge cannot be explained by reasoning. To proliferate names... Read More Read More - [Marionettes](https://everyangel.org/marionettes/): When those who pursue knowledge do not see the influences of their ideas they are not content. When debaters cannot present their views in an orderly manner they are not content. When a critic finds nothing which can be faulted he is not content. They are all confined by external restrictions. — And further... Read More Read More - [Ain't Got Nowhere To Go](https://everyangel.org/aint-got-nowhere-to-go/): The marquis said, “I have wished to see you for a long time. I want to love my people and with the practice of righteousness put an end to war. Will that be adequate?” “Certainly not replied,” Replied Xu Wugui, “Loving the people is the start of hurting the people. Practicing righteousness to put... Read More Read More - [Prescription Pt. II](https://everyangel.org/prescription-part-ii/): Laozi said, “The way to guard life consists in the following: Can you encompass the unity of body and spirit? Can you sustain it? Can you know the fortunate and the unfortunate without relying on the divination of the tortoise shell or the yarrow sticks? Can you rest where you ought to rest? Can... Read More Read More - [Distress Fraught Remedy Pt. I](https://everyangel.org/distress-fraught-remedy-pt-1/): Nanrong Chu said, “If I lack knowledge, people will say that I am obtuse.     If I have knowledge, it brings me distress.If I am not benevolent, then I might harm others;     If I am benevolent, I distress myself.If I am not righteous, I might injure others;     If I am righteous, I... Read More Read More - [Join The Dance](https://everyangel.org/to-join-the-dance/): Light of the Stars asked Non-being, “Master, do you exist or do you not exist?” Light of the Stars received no reply and, gazing intensely into the appearance of Non-being, saw that it was a deep void. All day he looked at it but could see nothing; he listened for it but could hear... Read More Read More - [If We Could See](https://everyangel.org/if-we-could-see/): I have enjoyed taking photographs since I was a sophomore in high school. I borrowed my fathers box camera, (shutter speed of 1/30 th second) which I used to capture black-and-white photos of the racing action at a North Carolina drag strip. I have owed many cameras since. Photography and images endure as important... Read More Read More - [Protozoa To Cosmos](https://everyangel.org/protozoa-to-cosmos/): Perfectionism which would transform the whole of thought and the entire society, is a program of destruction, ending up at best in a world of pretense. The Tacit Dimension by Michael Polanyi, 1891-1976 Today is unseasonably warm nearly sixty degrees, mid-February. Are the gods are playing with us? Or is it just another step... Read More Read More - [Valentine's Day](https://everyangel.org/valentines-day-3/): Today is a special time to recognize those we care about most. Here are two thoughts that strike a note with me today. A metaphor can unlock a door that logic cannot budge.  – Rob Brezsny Great societies decline when old men chop down forests meant to provide shade and oxygen for future generations... Read More Read More - [Like A White Colt](https://everyangel.org/like-a-white-colt/): “Man’s life between heaven and earth is like a white colt passing through a narrow opening in a wall: in a moment it is suddenly over. With striving, all things hurtle into life. Calmly and silently all things pass away. Undergoing change they are born, and by another change they die. Living things are... Read More Read More - [You Are Marvelous](https://everyangel.org/you-are-marvelous/): The Laughing Heart by Charles Bukowski your life is your life don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission. be on the watch. there are ways out. there is a light somewhere. it may not be much light but it beats the darkness. be on the watch. the gods will offer you chances. know... Read More Read More - [Without This](https://everyangel.org/without-this/): Confucius and Lao-tsu are reported to have been contemporaries. Both are legendary figures in the cultural/moral ethos for many generations living in China. Both figures are larger than life. In this passage one overhears a conversation between the two. Confucius, author of the legal-ethico composite for China asks Lao-tsu to say more, speak more... Read More Read More - [Conjunction](https://everyangel.org/conjunction/): I am confounded, at impasse to understand how the tao can be maintained in view in a 21st century context of technology. Our species has been designated “homo faber” man-the-maker on account of the application of reason for tool making. Untold generations lived upon the earth between “discovery” of methods for making fire, and... Read More Read More - [Already Home](https://everyangel.org/already-home/): To understand what originates and sustains all is the highest beauty and the highest happiness. One who knows this highest beauty and happiness is the complete man/woman. Confucius said, “I would like to hear how this is achieved.” Lao-tsu replied, “Grass-eating animals do not object to changing their pastures; creatures born in the water... Read More Read More - [Darkness Falls](https://everyangel.org/darkness-falls/): the luck of the draw after decades and decades of poverty as I now approach the lip of the grave, suddenly I have a home, a new car, a spa, a swimming pool, a computer. will this destroy me? well, something is bound to destroy me soon enough. the boys in jails, the slaughterhouses,... Read More Read More - [Knowing Without A How](https://everyangel.org/knowing-without-a-how/): Yan Hui asked, “What do you mean when you saythat there is no beginning without ending?” Confucius said, “All thingsare undergoing a continuous changebut we do not know who sustains the processof transformation. How do we know the ending?How do we know the beginning? What we can do is simply to follow the natural... Read More Read More - [A Bird, Low And Slow](https://everyangel.org/like-a-bird-low-and-slow/): The following is an exchange between Confucius and Grand Duke Ren, a friend and a follower of the tao. Ren said, “Allow me to relate to you the way of avoiding death. In the Eastern Sea there are birds called Yidai. They fly low and slowly as if they lacked strength. They fly near... Read More Read More - [What A Show !](https://everyangel.org/is-this-show-amazing-or-what/): Zhuangzi laughed and said,“If I were to say that I would prefer to be in the intermediate position between being useful and being useless,That might seem to be in the right position.But it is not,for we will not be able to avoid difficulties. One who follows the tao is free of difficulties.He is above... Read More Read More - [The One That Cannot Cackle](https://everyangel.org/the-one-that-cannot-cackle/): Zhuangzi was walking on a mountain when he saw a great tree with enormous branches and abundant foliage. A woodcutter was standing beside the tree without touching it. When asked why he did not, he replied, “It is useless.” Zhuangzi then said, “This tree will live out its natural term of life because it... Read More Read More - [Explaining Myself](https://everyangel.org/explaining-myself/): But here now are some other sayings: I do not know whether they are of the same character as those which I have already given, or of a different character. Whether they be of the same character or not when looked at along with them, they have a character of their own, which cannot... Read More Read More - [Debacle](https://everyangel.org/comedy-of-errors/): Among the men of old their knowledge reached the extreme point. What was that extreme point? Some held that at first there was not anything. This is the extreme point, the utmost point to which nothing can be added. A second class held that there was something, but without any responsive recognition of it... Read More Read More - [In The Morning Three](https://everyangel.org/in-the-morning-three/): When we toil our spirits and intelligence,obstinately determined (to establish our own view),and do not know the agreement(which underlies it and the views of others),we have what is called‘In the morning three.’ What is meant by that ‘In the morning three?’ A keeper of monkeys,in giving them out their acorns, (once) said,‘In the morning... Read More Read More - [Starting The Fire](https://everyangel.org/starting-the-fire/): Saturday morning brings a needed rain. Rain, even as my mind turns to the national No Kings rally scheduled for later in the morning. I plan to participate rain or no rain. What will this multi-city demonstration involving millions of citizens amount to? Nothing at all in the immediate manifestations of human injustice. I... Read More Read More - [When To Stop](https://everyangel.org/knowing-when-to-stop-2/): It was separation that led to completion;from completion ensued dissolution. But all things,without regardto their completion and dissolution,may again be comprehended in their unity; It is only the far reaching in thoughtwho know how to comprehend them in this unity.This being so, let us give up our devotion to our own views,and occupy ourselves... Read More Read More - [Beaten Path](https://everyangel.org/a-beaten-path/): 4. By means of a finger (of my own) to illustrate that the finger (of another) is not a finger is not so good a plan as to illustrate that it is not so by means of what is (acknowledged to be) not a finger; and by means of (what I call) a horse... Read More Read More - [Chirpings](https://everyangel.org/chirpings/): If we were to follow the judgments of the predetermined mind, who would be left alone and without a teacher? Not only would it be so with those who know the sequences (of knowledge and feeling) and make their own selection among them, but it would be so as well with the stupid and... Read More Read More - [Sound And Fury*](https://everyangel.org/sound-and-fury/): Life is lived in the shadow of language. Language conceals and reveals. Your opinion serves to define my opinion. Would there be any point to my opinion without you, without your opinion? Still there’s the nagging sense that something is missing. What if anything makes your view or my view true? Shall we seek... Read More Read More - [Stop, Just Stop It!](https://everyangel.org/stop-just-stop-it/): Great knowledge is wide and comprehensive;    small knowledge is partial and restricted. Great speech is exact and complete;    small speech is (merely) so much talk. When we sleep, the soul communicates with (what is external to us); when we awake, the body is set free. Our intercourse with others then leads to... Read More Read More - [Autumn Colors - Camo](https://everyangel.org/fall/): Sunday, the sun is brilliant and the air cool. Fall. The seasons are reliable, delivering the rhythmic weather essential to the community life here in the Midwest. You might guess that my subtext, about which I struggle to write, — the political upheaval, the social unrest that troubles Chicago and our suburbs. The advent... Read More Read More - [Giving Is Getting](https://everyangel.org/giving-is-getting/): 81 True words aren’t eloquent;eloquent words aren’t true.Wise men don’t need to prove their point;men who need to prove their point aren’t wise. The Master has no possessions.The more he does for others,the happier he is.The more he gives to others,the wealthier he is. The Tao nourishes by not forcing.By not dominating, the Master... Read More Read More - [Growing From Here To There](https://everyangel.org/growing-from-here-to-there/): 80 Ifa country is governed wisely,its inhabitants will be content.They enjoy the labor of their handsand don’t waste time inventinglabor-saving machines. Since they dearly love their homes,they aren’t interested in travel.There may be a few wagons and boats,but these don’t go anywhere.There may be an arsenal of weapons,but nobody ever uses them. People enjoy... Read More Read More - [Blame](https://everyangel.org/blame/): 79 Failure is an opportunity. If you blame someone else, there is no end to the blame. Therefore the Master fulfills her own obligations and corrects her own mistakes. She does what she needs to do and demands nothing of others. Tao Te Ching by Lao-tsu, trans. by Stephen Mitchell These lines, verse 79... Read More Read More - [Reality And Contradiction](https://everyangel.org/reality-and-contradiction/): 78 Nothing in the worldis as soft and yielding as water.Yet for dissolving the hard and inflexible,nothing can surpass it. The soft overcomes the hard;the gentle overcomes the rigid.Everyone knows this is true,but few can put it into practice. Therefore the Master remainsserene in the midst of sorrow.Evil cannot enter his heart.Because he has... Read More Read More - [Vicious Circle](https://everyangel.org/vicious-circle/): 77 As it acts in the world, the Tao is like the bending of a bow. The top is bent downward; the bottom is bent up. It adjusts excess and deficiency so that there is perfect balance. It takes from what is too much and gives to what isn’t enough. Those who try to... Read More Read More - [Born Soft - Die Hard](https://everyangel.org/born-soft-to-die-hard/): 76 Men are born soft and supple;dead, they are stiff and hard.Plants are born tender and pliant;dead, they are brittle and dry. Thus whoever is stiff and inflexibleis a disciple of death.Whoever is soft and yieldingis a disciple of life. The hard and stiff will be broken.The soft and supple will prevail. Tao Te... Read More Read More - [Taxes & Propaganda](https://everyangel.org/taxes-propaganda/): 75 When taxes are too high, people go hungry. When the government is too intrusive, people lose their spirit. Act for the people’s benefit. Trust them; leave them alone. Tao Te Ching, by Lao-tsu, trans. by Stephen Mitchell Scholars Roger T. Ames and David L. Hall observed that much of the Tao Te Ching... Read More Read More - [Not Scared Of Dying](https://everyangel.org/not-scared-of-dying/): 74 If you realize that all things change, there is nothing you will try to hold on to. If you aren’t afraid of dying, there is nothing you can’t achieve. Trying to control the future is like trying to take the master carpenter’s place. When you handle the master carpenter’s tools, chances are that... Read More Read More - [The Net](https://everyangel.org/the-net/): 73 The Tao is always at ease.It overcomes without competing,answers without speaking a word,arrives without being summoned,accomplishes without a plan. Its netcovers the whole universe.And though its meshes are wide,it doesn’t let a thing slip through. Tao Te Ching by Lao Tsu, trans. by Stephen Mitchell This verse, a few lines provides a description... Read More Read More - [Nothing To Learn](https://everyangel.org/nothing-to-learn/): 72 When they lose their sense of awe,people turn to religion.When they no longer trust themselves,they begin to depend upon authority. Therefore the Master steps back     so that people won’t be confused.     He teaches without a teaching,     so that people will have nothing to learn. Tao Te Ching by Lao-tsu, trans.... Read More Read More - [Rx For Well-Being](https://everyangel.org/rx-for-well-being/): 71 Not-knowing is true knowledge. Presuming to know is a disease. First realize that you are sick; then you can move toward health. The Master is her own physician. She has healed herself of all knowing. Thus she is truly whole. Tao Te Ching by Lao-tsu, trans. by Stephen Mitchell How much is taking... Read More Read More - [Look Inside Girl](https://everyangel.org/look-inside-girl/): 70 My teachings are easy to understand and easy to put into practice. Yet your intellect will never grasp them, and if you try to practice them, you’ll fail. My teachings are older than the world. How can you grasp their meaning? If you want to know me, look inside your heart. Tao Te... Read More Read More - [Philosophy Of War](https://everyangel.org/art-of-war/): 69 The generals have a saying:“Rather than make the first moveit is better to wait and see.Rather than advance an inchit is better to retreat a yard.” This is calledgoing forward without advancing,pushing back without using weapons. There is no greater misfortunethan underestimating your enemy.Underestimating your enemymeans thinking that he is evil.Thus you destroy... Read More Read More - [Let's Play](https://everyangel.org/lets-play/): 68 The best athlete wants his opponent at his best. The best general enters the mind of his enemy. The best businessman serves the communal good. The best leader follows the will of the people. All of them embody the virtue of non-competition. Not that they don’t love to compete, but they do it... Read More Read More - [Return To The Source](https://everyangel.org/return-to-the-source/): 67 Some saythat my teaching is nonsense.Others call it lofty but impractical.But to those who have looked inside themselves,this nonsense makes perfect sense.And to those who put it into practice,this loftiness has roots that go deep. I have just three things to teach:                   simplicity,  ... Read More Read More - [Non Competition](https://everyangel.org/non-competition/): 66 All streams flow to the seabecause it is lower than they are.Humility gives it its power. If you want to govern the people,you must place yourself below them.If you want to lead the people,you must learn how to follow them. The Master is above the people,and no one feels oppressed.She goes ahead of... Read More Read More - [The Way Back](https://everyangel.org/the-way-back/): 65 The ancient Mastersdidn’t try to educate the people,but kindly taught them to not-know. When they think that they know the answers,people are difficult to guide.When they know that they don’t know,people can find their own way. If you want to learn how to govern,avoid being clever or rich.The simplest pattern is the clearest.Content... Read More Read More - [A Giant Pine](https://everyangel.org/a-giant-pine/): 64 What is rooted is easy to nourish.What is recent is easy to correct.What is brittle is easy to break.What is small is easy to scatter. Prevent trouble before it arises.Put things in order before they exist.     The giant pine tree     grows from a tiny sprout.The journey of a thousand milesstarts from... Read More Read More - [The Detail Is Easy](https://everyangel.org/the-detail-is-easy/): 63 Act without doing; work without effort. Think of the small as large and the few as many. Confront the difficult while it is still easy; accomplish the great task by a series of small acts. The Master never reaches for the great; thus she achieves greatness. When she runs into a difficulty, she... Read More Read More - [Treasure And Refuge](https://everyangel.org/treasure-and-refuge/): 62 The Tao is the center of the universe,the good man’s treasure,the bad man’s refuge. Honors can be bought with fine words,respect can be won with good deeds;but the Tao is beyond all value,and no one can achieve it. Thus, when a new leader is chosen,don’t offer to help himwith your wealth or your... Read More Read More - [IF](https://everyangel.org/if-2/): 61 When a country obtains great power,it becomes like the sea:all streams run downward into it.The more powerful it grows,the greater the need for humility.Humility means trusting the Tao,thus never needing to be defensive. A great nation is like a great man:When he makes a mistake, he realizes it.Having realized it, he admits it.Having... Read More Read More - [Unable To Step Out Of The Way](https://everyangel.org/unable-to-step-out-of-the-way/): 60 Governing a large country is like frying a small fish. You spoil it with too much poking. Center your country in the Tao and evil will have no power. Not that it isn’t there, but you’ll be able to step out of its way. Give evil nothing to oppose and it will disappear... Read More Read More - [For Governing Your Life Well](https://everyangel.org/for-governing-your-life-well/): 59 For governing a country well there is nothing better than moderation. The mark of a moderate man/woman is freedom from his own ideas.       Tolerant like the sky,       all-pervading like sunlight,       firm like a mountain,       supple like a tree in the wind,... Read More Read More - [This Same Delicious Temporality](https://everyangel.org/this-same-delicious-temporality/): 58 If a country is governed with tolerance,the people are comfortable and honest.If a country is governed with repression,the people are depressed and crafty. When the will to power is in charge,the higher the ideals, the lower the results.Try to make people happy,and you lay the groundwork for misery.Try to make people moral,and you... Read More Read More - [As Common As Grass](https://everyangel.org/as-common-as-grass/): 57 If you want to be a great leader, you must learn to follow the Tao. Stop trying to control. Let go of fixed plans and concepts, and the world will govern itself. The more prohibitions you have, the less virtuous people will be. The more weapons you have, the less secure people will... Read More Read More - [What Cannot Be Said](https://everyangel.org/what-cannot-be-said/): 56 Those who know don’t talk.Those who talk don’t know.    Close your mouth,   block off your senses,   blunt your sharpness,   untie your knots,   soften your glare,   settle your dust.   This is the primal identity. Be like the Tao. It can’t be approached or withdrawn from,benefited or harmed,honored or brought into disgrace.It gives itself... Read More Read More - [Like A Newborn](https://everyangel.org/like-a-newborn/): 55 He who is in harmony with the Tao is like a newborn child. Its bones are soft, its muscles are weak, but its grip is powerful. It doesn’t know about the union of male and female, yet its penis can stand erect, so intense is its vital power. It can scream its head... Read More Read More - [The Thing About Violence](https://everyangel.org/the-thing-about-violence/): 53 The great Way is easy, yet people prefer the side paths. Be aware when things are out of balance. Stay centered within the Tao. When rich speculators prosper while farmers lose their land; when government officials spend money on weapons instead of cures; when the upper class is extravagant and irresponsible while the... Read More Read More - [Origin Story](https://everyangel.org/34135-2/): 52 In the beginning was the Tao.All things issue from it;all things return to it. To find the origin,trace back the manifestations.When you recognize the childrenand find the mother,you will be free of sorrow. If you close your mind in judgmentsand traffic with desires,your heart will be troubled.If you keep your mind from judgingand... Read More Read More - [Toad Pond](https://everyangel.org/toad-pond/): 51 Every being in the universeis an expression of the Tao.It springs into existence,unconscious, perfect, free,takes on a physical body,lets circumstances complete it.That is why every beingspontaneously honors the Tao. The Tao gives birth to all beings,nourishes them, maintains them,cares for them, comforts them, protects them,takes them back to itself,creating without possessing,acting without expecting,guiding... Read More Read More - [Holding Nothing Back](https://everyangel.org/holding-nothing-back/): 50 The Master gives himself up to whatever the moment brings. He knows that he is going to die, and he has nothing left to hold on to: no illusions in his mind, no resistances in his body. He doesn’t think about his actions; they flow from the core of his being. He holds... Read More Read More - [Wobbling](https://everyangel.org/spun-around/): 49 The Master has no mind of her own. She works with the mind of the people. She is good to people who are good. She is also good to people who aren’t good. This is true goodness. She trusts people who are trustworthy. She also trusts people who aren’t trustworthy. This is true... Read More Read More - [Abiding](https://everyangel.org/abiding/): 48 In the pursuit of knowledge,every day something is added. In the practice of the Tao,every day something is dropped.Less and less do you need to force things,until finally you arrive at non-action.When nothing is done,nothing is left undone. True mastery can be gainedby letting things go their own way.It can’t be gained by... Read More Read More - [No Time For The Game](https://everyangel.org/no-time-for-the-game/): One of the great rock bands. A Zen-like anthem to solitude, to satisfaction with the “thusness” of things. Love means nothing less than allowing “the world,” especially another human being the space and the time to discover their location, whatever that comes to be. Today is Saturday. Laura and I are off to the... Read More Read More - [Going Far To Know Less](https://everyangel.org/going-far-to-know-less/): 47 Without opening your door, you can open your heart to the world. Without looking out your window, you can see the essence of the Tao. The more you know, the less you understand. The Master arrives without leaving, sees the light without looking, achieves without doing a thing. Tao Te Ching by Lao... Read More Read More - [.4 Second Release](https://everyangel.org/4-second-release/): To take a break from writing about the Tao Te Ching, a song shared with me by a friend merits a good look. The truth telling of the lyricist (Jesse Welles) is extraordinary. As Americans the countries which we care least about, are the countries and peoples that we involve in our machismo parodies.... Read More Read More - [Death-Spiral](https://everyangel.org/death-spiral-2/): 46 When a country is in harmony with the Tao, the factories make trucks and tractors. When a country goes counter to the Tao, warheads are stockpiled outside the cities. There is no greater illusion than fear, no greater wrong than preparing to defend yourself, no greater misfortune than having an enemy. Whoever can... Read More Read More - [Perfection, Not A Fan](https://everyangel.org/perfection-not-a-fan/): 45 True perfection seems imperfect,yet it is perfectly itself.True fullness seems empty,yet it is fully present. True straightness seems crooked.True wisdom seems foolish.True art seems artless. The Master allows things to happen.She shapes events as they come.She steps out of the wayand lets the Tao speak for itself. Tao Te Ching by Lao Tsu,... Read More Read More - [The World Is Yours](https://everyangel.org/the-whole-world-belongs/): 44 Fame or integrity: which is more important?Money or happiness: which is more valuable?Success or failure: which is more destructive? If you look to others for fulfillment,you will never truly be fulfilled.If your happiness depends on money,you will never be happy with yourself Be content with what you have;rejoice in the way things are.When... Read More Read More - [Care, Air, Fire & Fuel](https://everyangel.org/drag-racing-the-tao/): I enjoyed the afternoon at the racetrack. I mean the environs of Great Lakes Dragaway located off of State Rt KR outside of Union Grove Wisconsin. Opened in 1955 the venue was the nation’s first purpose-built and is the oldest continuously operating dragstrip. The track was inspired by California racing. I was six years old... Read More Read More - [Labor](https://everyangel.org/labor-2/): 43 The gentlest thing in the worldovercomes the hardest thing in the world.That which has no substanceenters where there is no space.This shows the value of non-action. Teaching without words,performing without actions:that is the Master’s way. Tao Te Ching by Lao Tsu, trans. by Stephen Mitchell Labor Day weekend. “Labor” is what life requires... Read More Read More - [What Makes Me](https://everyangel.org/33976-2/): 42 The Tao gives birth to One. One gives birth to Two. Two gives birth to Three. Three gives birth to all things. All things have their backs to the female and stand facing the male. When male and female combine, all things achieve harmony. Ordinary men hate solitude. But the Master makes use... Read More Read More - [Laughing Ourselves To Death](https://everyangel.org/elitist/): 41 When a superior man hears of the Tao,he immediately begins to embody it.    When an average man hears of the Tao,    he half believes it, half doubts it.        When a foolish man hears of the Tao,        he laughs out loud.        If he... Read More Read More - [Pivot Point](https://everyangel.org/pivot-point-2/): 39 In harmony with the Tao, the sky is clear and spacious, the earth is solid and full, all creatures flourish together, content with the way they are, endlessly repeating themselves, endlessly renewed. When man interferes with the Tao, the sky becomes filthy, the earth becomes depleted, the equilibrium crumbles, creatures become extinct. The... Read More Read More - [Thinner And Thinner](https://everyangel.org/thinner-and-thinner/): 38 The Master doesn’t try to be powerful; thus he is truly powerful. The ordinary man keeps reaching for power; thus he never has enough. The Master does nothing, yet he leaves nothing undone. The ordinary man is always doing things, yet many more are left to be done. The kind man does something,... Read More Read More - [Natural Rhythm](https://everyangel.org/natural-rhythm/): 37 The Tao never does anything, yet through it all things are done. If powerful men and women could center themselves in it, the whole world would be transformed by itself, in its natural rhythms. People would be content with their simple, everyday lives, in harmony, and free of desire. When there is no... Read More Read More - [The Way Things Are](https://everyangel.org/the-way-things-are/): 36 If you want to shrink something, you must first allow it to expand. If you want to get rid of something, you must first allow it to flourish. If you want to take something, you must first allow it to be given. This is called the subtle perception of the way things are.... Read More Read More - [Inexhaustable](https://everyangel.org/inexhaustable/): 35 She who is centered in the Taocan go where she wishes, without danger.She perceives the universal harmony,even amid great pain,because she has found peace in her heart. Music or the smell of good cookingmay make people stop and enjoy.But words that point to the Taoseem monotonous and without flavor.When you look for it,... Read More Read More - [About Humility](https://everyangel.org/about-humility/): 34 The great Tao flows everywhere.All things are born from it,yet it doesn’t create them.It pours itself into its work,yet it makes no claim.It nourishes infinite worlds,yet it doesn’t hold on to them.Since it is merged with all thingsand hidden in their hearts,it can be called humble.Since all things vanish into itand it alone... Read More Read More - [Unmaking My Mind](https://everyangel.org/soul-talk-2/): Today is Thursday August 21st. My life is quite good. Others are not as fortunate. At Starbucks, the space is safe, I can search for, investigate anything of my choosing on the internet without fear of being fined. This is not Russia, not here, and not now, not yet. I enjoy reasonable good health... Read More Read More - [True Power](https://everyangel.org/strength-and-wealth/): 33 Knowing others is intelligence; knowing yourself is true wisdom. Mastering others is strength; mastering yourself is true power. If you realize that you have enough, you are truly rich. If you stay in the center and embrace death with your whole heart, you will endure forever. Tao Te Ching by Lao Tsu, trans.... Read More Read More - [Knowing When](https://everyangel.org/knowing-when/): 32 The Tao can’t be perceived,Smaller than an electron,it contains uncountable galaxies. If powerful men and womencould remain centered in the Tao,all things would be in harmony.The world would become a paradise.All people would be at peace,and the law would be written in their hearts. When you have names and forms,know that they are... Read More Read More - [Vulgarity](https://everyangel.org/vulgarity-2/): 31 Weapons are the tools of violence;all decent men detest them. Weapons are the tools of fear;a decent man will avoid themexcept in the direst necessityand, if compelled, will use themonly with the utmost restraint.Peace is his highest value.If the peace has been shattered,how can he be content?His enemies are not demons,but human beings... Read More Read More - [Against The Current](https://everyangel.org/going-against-the-current/): 30Whoever relies on the Tao in governing mendoesn’t try to force issuesor defeat enemies by force of arms.For every force there is a counterforce.Violence, even well intentioned,always rebounds upon oneself. The Master does his joband then stops.He understands that the universeis forever out of control,and that trying to dominate eventsgoes against the current of... Read More Read More - [Sacred](https://everyangel.org/sacred/): 29 Do you want to improve the world? I don’t think it can be done. The world is sacred. It can’t be improved. If you tamper with it, you’ll ruin it. If you treat it like an object, you’ll lose it. There is a time for being ahead, a time for being behind; a... Read More Read More - [So, Now What?](https://everyangel.org/so-now-what/): We read Philip Larkin’s famous 1954 poem Church Going last night. I was five years old when the poem was written. The poem was troubling to everyone in our circle. No doubt that was Larkin’s purpose. I am seventy six now and the dereliction of churches continues unabated. Faith and superstition still die. In... Read More Read More - [Being The Future](https://everyangel.org/being-the-future/): 28 Know the male,yet keep to the female:receive the world in your arms.     If you receive the world,     the Tao will never leave you     and you will be like a little child. Know the white,yet keep to the black:be a pattern for the world.     If you are a pattern for... Read More Read More - [Acuity](https://everyangel.org/acuity/): 27 A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent upon arriving. A good artist lets his intuition, lead him wherever it wants. A good scientist has freed himself of concepts and keeps his mind open to what is. Thus the Master is available to all people and doesn’t reject anyone. He... Read More Read More - [Self-composed](https://everyangel.org/self-composed/): 26 The heavy is the root of the light. The unmoved is the source of all movement. Thus the Master travels all day without leaving home. However splendid the views, she stays serenely in herself. Why should the lord of the country flit about like a fool? If you let yourself be blown to... Read More Read More - [Before](https://everyangel.org/before/): 25 There was something formless and perfect before the universe was born. It is serene. Empty. Solitary. Unchanging. Infinite. Eternally present. It is the mother of the universe. For lack of a better name, I call it the Tao. It flows through all things, inside and outside, and returns to the origin of all... Read More Read More - [Waiting In The Wings No Longer](https://everyangel.org/waiting-in-the-wings-no-longer/): 23 Express yourself completely,then keep quiet.Be like the forces of nature:when it blows, there is only wind;when it rains, there is only rain;when the clouds pass, the sun shines through. If you open yourself to the Tao,you are at one with the Taoand you can embody it completely.If you open yourself to insight,you are... Read More Read More - [Always There's Smoke](https://everyangel.org/always-smoke/): 22 If you want to become whole, let yourself be partial. If you want to become straight, let yourself be crooked. If you want to become full, let yourself be empty. If you want to be reborn, let yourself die. If you want to be given everything, give everything up. The Master, by residing... Read More Read More - [Looking Inside](https://everyangel.org/looking-inside/): 21 The Master keeps her mindalways at one with the Tao;that is what gives her her radiance.The Tao is ungraspable.How can her mind be at one with it?Because she doesn’t cling to ideas.The Tao is dark and unfathomable.How can it make her radiant?Because she lets it.Since before time and space were,the Tao is.It is... Read More Read More - [Best To Worst](https://everyangel.org/best-to-worst/): 17 When the Master governs, the peopleare hardly aware that he exists.                                                       Next best is a leader who is loved.               ... Read More Read More - [Pivot Point](https://everyangel.org/heart/): 16 Empty your mind of all thoughts. Let your heart be at peace. Watch the turmoil of beings, but contemplate their return. Each separate being in the universe returns to the common source. Returning to the source is serenity. If you don’t realize the source, you stumble in confusion and sorrow. When you realize... Read More Read More - [Always Under Construction](https://everyangel.org/under-construction-always/): 15 The ancient Masters were profound and subtle. Their wisdom was unfathomable. There is no way to describe it; all we can describe is their appearance.                                                        ... Read More Read More - [Being It](https://everyangel.org/being-it/): 14 Look, and it can’t be seen.Listen, and it can’t be heard.Reach, and it can’t be grasped.Above, it isn’t bright.Below, it isn’t dark. Seamless, unnamable,it returns to the realm of nothing. Form that includes all forms,image without an image,subtle, beyond all conception.Approach it and there is no beginning;follow it and there is no end.... Read More Read More - [What We Use](https://everyangel.org/what-we-use/): 11 We join spokes together in a wheel, but it is the center hole that makes the wagon move. We shape clay into a pot, but it is the emptiness inside that holds whatever we want. We hammer wood for a house, but it is the inner space that makes it livable. We work... Read More Read More - [Can I](https://everyangel.org/can-i/): 10 Can you coax your mind from its wandering and keep to the original oneness? Can you let your body become supple as a newborn child’s? Can you cleanse your inner vision until you see nothing but the light? Can you love people and lead them without imposing your will? Can you deal with... Read More Read More - [Stepping Back](https://everyangel.org/stepping-back/): 9 Fill your bowl to the brim and it will spill. Keep sharpening your knife and it will blunt. Chase after money and security and your heart will never unclench. Care about people’s approval and you will be their prisoner. Do your work, then step back. …is the way (tao) that tian works. Tao... Read More Read More - [Water](https://everyangel.org/water-2/):  8 The supreme good is like water,which nourishes all things without trying to.It is content with the low places that people disdain.Thus it is like the Tao. In dwelling, live close to the ground.In thinking, keep to the simple.In conflict, be fair and generous.In governing, don’t try to control.In work, do what you enjoy.In... Read More Read More - [Show Me The Way](https://everyangel.org/show-me-the-way/): 5 The Tao doesn’t take sides; it gives birth to both good and evil. The Master doesn’t take sides; she welcomes both saints and sinners. The Tao is like a bellows: it is empty yet infinitely capable. The more you use it, the more it produces; the more you talk of it, the less... Read More Read More - [Used, Never Used Up](https://everyangel.org/used-never-used-up/): 4 The Tao is like a well: used but never used up. It is like the eternal void: filled with infinite possibilities. It is hidden but always present. I don’t know who gave birth to it. It is older than God. Tao Te Ching by Lao Tsu, trans. by Stephen Mitchell Plans for the... Read More Read More - [How It All Works](https://everyangel.org/how-it-all-works/): 2 When people see some things as beautiful,other things become ugly.When people see some things as good,other things become bad.Being and non-being create each other.Difficult and easy support each other.Long and short define each other.High and low depend on each other.Before and after follow each other. Therefore the Masteracts without doing anythingand teaches without... Read More Read More - [Not Enough Of A Poet](https://everyangel.org/not-enough-of-a-poet/) - [The Backward Look](https://everyangel.org/the-backward-look-2/): Several nights ago we attended a performance of Bob Seger’s music at the Paramount Theater in Aurora. The band was first rate, the lead singer in a fitting manner honored Bob Seger who is eighty years old. Seger the balladeer wrote and performed world-creating music. That is what music does, rhythm, rhyme, harmony and... Read More Read More - [On Good Taste](https://everyangel.org/on-good-taste-2/): Three years ago I planted some oriental lily bulbs at the edge of our yard. The lily bed interfaces with the creek bed. Also a large boulder with a natural notch impressed me as the ideal resting place for a carved stone heart. The stone heart is about the size of a bowling ball.... Read More Read More - [Manufactured Innocence](https://everyangel.org/not-a-happy-idiot/): The Song of the Idiot They do not hinder me. They let me go.They say, nothing could happen even so.How good.Nothing can happen. Everything revolves engrossedalways around the Holy Ghost,around a certain ghost (you know)—how good.No, one should really not supposethat there is any danger in those.There’s of course the blood.The blood is the... Read More Read More - [A Mind, Like Space](https://everyangel.org/a-mind-like-space/): 49 The Master has no mind of her own. She works with the mind of the people. She is good to people who are good. She is also good to people who aren’t good. This is true goodness. She trusts people who are trustworthy. She also trusts people who aren’t trustworthy. This is true... Read More Read More - [About Chaos](https://everyangel.org/about-not-trying/): 38 The Master doesn’t try to be powerful; thus he is truly powerful. The ordinary man keeps reaching for power; thus he never has enough. The Master does nothing, yet he leaves nothing undone. The ordinary man is always doing things, yet many more are left to be done. The kind man does something,... Read More Read More - [Ball Room Carousel](https://everyangel.org/silver-beach-carousel/): We visited the St Joe’s Silver Beach Carousel while on vacation. St Joseph is situated on a bluff overlooking Silver Beach. The beach is aptly named. Gazing west toward Lake Michigan which shimmers, a mystical presence, I am reminded of the “goodness,” to risk saying it plainly, of “the love” which is inscribed into life.... Read More Read More - [The Face Of One Little Child](https://everyangel.org/the-face-of-one-little-child/): This single flowerhas leaves and rootsthat take nourishment fromthe environing soil and air. And the soil contains the distilled nutrientsof past growth and decay that constitute the living ecological systemin which all of its participants are organically interdependent. The sun enables the flower to process these nutrients,while the atmosphere that caresses the floweralso nourishes... Read More Read More - [A Chrysalis Breaks](https://everyangel.org/breaking-chrysalis/): Monday morning, resuming my ordinary life, two cups of dark roast, reading and now a bit of writing here at Starbucks. Agreeable conversation with two friends is welcome. I am grounded by others… I know that to be so from experience. Friends remind me I am not “that” guy I assumed that I was.... Read More Read More - [Calling All Angels](https://everyangel.org/farewell-2/): Leaving Michigan. Another family vacation, swimming in the lake, sitting under a beach sun, watching four grandchildren play – becomes memory. And the country, the world staggers on, to what end as always, is unknowable. Woke up this morning to read of the President of the United State’s threats to Rosie O’Donnell to remove... Read More Read More - [To Let Go & Let Be](https://everyangel.org/to-let-go-let-be/): No. 24 He who stands on tiptoedoesn’t stand firm.He who rushes aheaddoesn’t go far.He who tries to shinedims his own light.He who defines himselfcan’t know who he really is.He who has power over otherscan’t empower himself.He who clings to his workwill create nothing that endures.If you want to accord with the Tao,just do your... Read More Read More - [Walking To Stop Thinking](https://everyangel.org/walking-to-stop-thinking/): No. 20 Stop thinking, and end your problems.What difference between yes and no?What difference between success and failure?Must you value what others value,avoid what others avoid?How ridiculous! Other people are excited,as though they were at a parade.I alone don’t care,I alone am expressionless,like an infant before it can smile. Other people have what they... Read More Read More - [The Big Lake](https://everyangel.org/the-big-lake/): A second day, family vacation close to Coloma Michigan. St. Joseph is just a fifteen minute drive south, a famed small town enjoyed by generations. The view from the bluff of Silver Beach is spectacular. There is a very large circular concrete splash pad with timed water jets for toddlers, and older children to... Read More Read More - [Like Water](https://everyangel.org/like-water/): No. 8 The supreme good is like water, which nourishes all things without trying to. It is content with the low places that people disdain. Thus it is like the Tao. In dwelling, live close to the ground. In thinking, keep to the simple. In conflict, be fair and generous. In governing, don’t try... Read More Read More - [The Easiest Thing To Do](https://everyangel.org/the-easiest-thing-to-do/): Tuesday morning and what to write? Words come and go in the mind, and I continue to find inspiration, hope, and sober realism in these lyrics. Am I as happy as my organism can reasonably be, as “happy” as allowed by the universe, which heals and challenges? Probably… What is to be done? What... Read More Read More - [Asphalt Poetics](https://everyangel.org/asphalt-poetics/): My love affair with drag racing reaches back in time to my sixteen year old self. A visit to Great Lakes Drag-a-way in Union Grove Wisconsin comes with sensation of connection. Just inside the gate in the distance is the shutdown area for the quarter mile race track. Before my vehicle is parked I... Read More Read More - [To Nourish A Bird](https://everyangel.org/not-to-nourish-a-bird/): “Do to others, as you’d desire others doing to you”, my down and dirty paraphrase of the ‘golden rule’. Jesus said it… ergo for many there’s no greater authority. “All we need is love, love, love…” is another variation of the idea. So wrote Paul Mccartney and John Lennon. Come on people now Smile... Read More Read More - [Punxsutawney Phil Obituary](https://everyangel.org/punxsutawney-phil-obituary/): Today is the 2nd day of February, Groundhog day. The sky is gray as if a canvas were stretched horizon to horizon. Groundhog day is a wistful anticipation of an early end of winter’s cold. According to the German legend, the groundhog emerges from its borrow and has a look around. If the animal... Read More Read More - [Slouches, Being Born](https://everyangel.org/slouches-being-born/): My wife asked me what I would write about today. I replied I was unsure whether I would write anything at all on this February 1st. Midway through winter, my energy is at low ebb. I am not one to peruse Facebook, or other social media sites. Still, I am aware of the activities... Read More Read More - [Forgetfulness To Work Things Out](https://everyangel.org/forgetfulness-to-work-things-out/): Chui the artisan could draw as precisely as if he had used a circle and square. His fingers moved with the changes without requiring the attention of the mind. His Tower of Intelligence was intact and not impeded. The feet are forgotten when the shoes fit. The waist is forgotten when the girdle fits.... Read More Read More - [Renounce, Be Free](https://everyangel.org/renounce-be-free/): The segment describing our common condition, and a treatment that allows day-to-day life on a much better basis — greatly impressed me today. I think such enormous waste of our potential is a direct consequence of our ignorance. We are confused about the difference between what is superfluous, optional, redundant to our essential flourishing.... Read More Read More - [Why Not?](https://everyangel.org/why-not/): The memory remains when I was twelve or thirteen years old. That memory shimmers, a glow of experience from a time which by and large I cannot recall. The Engineering School at Duke University sponsored an annual open house for an evening. The community was invited to observe and to admire the work which... Read More Read More - [Two Stars Passing](https://everyangel.org/two-stars-passing/): I joined an online book club at the beginning of the year. I was motivated by the accountability entailed by membership. At the end of every month a zoom session, moderated by Jared Henderson, a philosopher-convener is offered to members. I figured this was sure to motivate me to read each of the monthly... Read More Read More - [Drumming And Singing](https://everyangel.org/drumming-and-singing/): The death of a child of any age is an unspeakable grief for a parent. Death is a change that upends our wishes. What I desire one way or another does not effect the circumstance or the timing of the death of those dearest to me. Alex Pretti was murdered a few days ago... Read More Read More - [Coda](https://everyangel.org/coda-4/): What the world valuesare riches, honor, long life, and recognition.What it finds pleasurable is repose for the body,rich flavors, fine clothes, beautiful colors and good music. What it dislikes are poverty, low status, short life,and dishonor. The rich are burdened with accumulating possessions,piling up more than they can use.Those who pursue honordeliberate about their... Read More Read More - [Fishing In The Po](https://everyangel.org/fishing-in-the-po/): Zhuangzi was once fishingin the Po river when the ruler of Chusent two ministers with a message,“I wish to trouble youwith the charge of all territories.’ Zhuangzi continued to hold to hold the rodand without looking around said,“I have heard that in Chuthere is a sacred tortoisewhich died three thousand years ago.The ruler keeps... Read More Read More - [Defiance](https://everyangel.org/in-defiance/): …what is noble and what is base is determined by what the time requires –there is no absolute rule. A battering ram can be used to storm a city wall but it cannot be used to fill a small hole. –the uses of the implements are different. “therefore the saying, ‘Shall we not follow... Read More Read More - [Frigid Fire](https://everyangel.org/frigid-fire/): I participated in a discussion of Fascism yesterday. We reflected upon an 1932 essay written by Benito Mussolini, The Doctrine of Fascism. Fascism is a political religion. Elements are: an underclass of citizens with a grievance about unjust social arrangements they believe causes them unsatisfactory lives, an autocratic politician with a savior delusion, and... Read More Read More - [Know That Time Never Stops](https://everyangel.org/know-that-time-never-stops/): Well then,may I consider heaven and earth as greatand the tip of a hair as small?                   “No,”replied the Ruo of the North Sea. “The capacities of things cannot be defined,time never stops,all is in constant flux,and the ends and the beginnings of thingsare never the... Read More Read More - [Going In Reverse](https://everyangel.org/going-in-reverse/): I’ll say it again, to write again something that cannot be said enough… We ought not to pride ourselves in possessing carriages and coronets or because of difficulties and poverty resort to crude means. Who among us doesn’t feel a flush of pride to own a new vehicle, especially one which is widely admired... Read More Read More - [Out-Of-Joint Time](https://everyangel.org/out-of-joint-time/): Those who are called“recluse scholars” by the ancientsdid not conceal themselvesto shun the world.They did not declineto speak their wordsor conceal their knowledge. It was the times that were out of joint… Highest happiness is the fulfillment of aspiration.Fulfillment of aspiration for the ancientsdid not mean carriages and coronets,but that nothing more was needed... Read More Read More - [Always On The Wire](https://everyangel.org/once-upon-a-time/): The ancients who tended to the taoabided in calmto nourish their wisdom,butthey did not dependon their wisdom in their actions.It can be said that they preserved their calmwith wisdom.When wisdom and calmfoster one another from innate nature,harmony and order emerge. Virtue is harmonyand tao is order. Zhuangzi trans by Hyun Höchsmann and Yang Guorong,... Read More Read More - [I'll Take My Stand](https://everyangel.org/ill-take-my-stand/): To be simple, pure, clear, still, level, and constant; to be impartial without action and in action to be aligned with heaven— this is the way to sustain the spirit. The swords made at Wu and Yue are kept in a box and rarely used since they are valuable. But the subtle spirit moves... Read More Read More - [As Light Without Glitter](https://everyangel.org/as-light-without-glitter/): Saturday and it is bitter-cold today. It is colder in Minneapolis, 11 degrees F. A quiet question comes over and over. Would I be willing to stand alongside friends and others who live around me to oppose the roundup and extradition of immigrants from their homes and places of work? Would I oppose the... Read More Read More - [Fondness For Deep Pools](https://everyangel.org/fondness-for-deep-pools/): Ingrained ideas, a high regard for oneself, abandoning the world to pursue an uncommon course, talking imposingly and disparaging others – these are the traits of conceit. This is what scholars who retreat to the hills and valleys, who find fault with the world and who are like withered trees or throw themselves into... Read More Read More - [Proclamation](https://everyangel.org/proclamation/):      No Leaders Please invent yourself and then reinvent yourself, don’t swim in the same slough. invent yourself and then reinvent yourself and stay out of the clutches of mediocrity. invent yourself and then reinvent yourself, change your tone and shape so often that they can never categorize you. reinvigorate yourself and accept... Read More Read More - [The Occupation Of Minnesota](https://everyangel.org/the-occupation-of-minnesota/): think of it by Charles Bukowski think of it, there were fellows like Kierkegaard and Sartre who found existence absurd, who battled against anxiety and anguish, nothingness, nausea, and death hanging over them like a Damocles sword while there are other men now -so empty of concern that their first thought of the day... Read More Read More - [Darkened Self & Time](https://everyangel.org/monday-2/): I dare not sleep-in today, even though it is Monday and I am retired… Retired!? Ha! So what? I am still a human being among my own kind,… I live in a small town, Batavia. Batavia belongs to the State of Illinois, which is in the midsection of the U.S. of A. I cannot... Read More Read More - [Ain’t No Going Back](https://everyangel.org/theres-no-going-back/): This is a poem written by Renee Nicole Good. She is dead. She was a mother. She was many things…  Renee left these words behind. They are for you and I to consider: what manner of person would choose these words, express this description of life. Also for you and I to consider: what... Read More Read More - [Vigil](https://everyangel.org/vigil/): It is Saturday, raining and the sky hints of snow to come. I do not mind rain in wintertime, or any time. Trees need water, a subsurface soaking. Lately rain seems to come less frequently, sometimes weeks pass with little to no moisture. Like it or not we (humans) belong to Nature, we are... Read More Read More - [The Pimp](https://everyangel.org/the-pimp/): Today The New York Times featured an account of an interview with the President in the Oval Office. He was interviewed by four journalists. It is difficult to take the measure of another human being. The Homosapien is a layered mammal, quite like and unlike other quadrupeds, say your dog or cat. A member... Read More Read More - [Always There's Somethin'](https://everyangel.org/always-theres-somethin/): Those who hold wealth as their life    cannot give up their revenues. Those who seek recognition    cannot give up fame. Those who crave power    cannot yield to others. While they possess, they are afraid of losing them. When they must let them go, they are desperate and will not reflect upon... Read More Read More - [And You And Me](https://everyangel.org/and-you-and-me/): Cannot decide what to write this morning. Enough Nietzsche for now. Of course I will circle back to him soon enough. Cannot be helped. Like drag racing, the exercise is open-ended, like fate. You’ll lineup at the starting line one more time. Fate is not the cul de sac that everyone thinks. There’s no... Read More Read More - [Tattered, Decrepit, Spent](https://everyangel.org/tattered-decrepit-spent/): Every concept arises from the equation of unequal things. Just as it is certain that one leaf is never totally the same as another, so it is certain that the concept “leaf ” is formed by arbitrarily discarding these individual differences and by forgetting the distinguishing aspects. This awakens the idea that, in addition... Read More Read More - [A Groping Game](https://everyangel.org/a-groping-game/):  This art of dissimulationreaches its peakin man. Deception, flattering, lying, deluding, talking behind the back, putting up a false front, living in borrowed splendor, wearing a mask, hiding behind convention, playing a role for others and for oneself – in short, a continuous flutteringaround the solitary flame of vanity – is so much the... Read More Read More - [Nothing Will Have Happened](https://everyangel.org/nothing-will-have-happened/): Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe which is dispersed into numberless twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing. That was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of “world history,” but nevertheless, it was only a minute. After nature had drawn... Read More Read More - [My God, It’s Quiet](https://everyangel.org/my-god-its-quiet/): The first Saturday in a new year. The year is 2026. America as a republic, administered by a distribution of power, democratically – is finished. What comes next, has yet to be formed. A safe wager to be made that for now, the dismantling of the old status quo will proceed with dispatch. A... Read More Read More - [Strolling To Gather The True](https://everyangel.org/strolling-to-gather-the-true/): The highest men of the ancient days traversed the virtue of benevolence as a path; They borrowed and dwelled in righteousness as a lodging for the night. They ambled in the empty space of Unruffled Repose, found nourishment in the Field Free of Longing and stood in the Garden Free of Possession.    Unruffled... Read More Read More - [Monkey Bitten](https://everyangel.org/monkey-bites/): Have you never seen a well pump? When it is pulled up it goes down, and when it is let go it comes up. It is pulled by men but does NOT pull the men. Whether it rises or falls, the well-pump does not go against men. It is the same with rules of... Read More Read More - [Dissonance And The Music Of Heaven](https://everyangel.org/dissonance-and-the-music-of-heaven/): In the last part of the performance, I played notes which did not have an enervating effect. I blended them with spontaneity. Hence the sounds came forth in dissonance, like a cluster of plants growing from one root, or like the music of the forest coming from no perceptible form. The sounds spread in... Read More Read More - [In A Daze, You Stood](https://everyangel.org/in-a-daze-you-stood/): These verses describe a concert sponsored by the Yellow Emperor. Beimin Cheng, a member of the court is speaking with the Yellow Emperor. Cheng relates that the music effected him. The concert was in two parts. Here the Yellow Emperor describes the second part – the sensations felt by the listener who is enveloped... Read More Read More - [Tao Exam](https://everyangel.org/tao-exam/): 1. Does heaven revolve continuously? 2. Does earth continuously abide in rest? 3. And do the sun and moon pursue one another? 4. Who guides and directs these movements? 5. Who holds them together and connects them? 6. Who is it that, without straining and effort,     brings them about and maintains them?... Read More Read More - [Not To Be Refused](https://everyangel.org/not-to-be-refused/): Duke Huan sat in his hall reading a book. The wheelwright Bian was making a wheel in the courtyard below the hall. Putting down his hammer and chisel, Bian went up the steps and said, “I venture to ask your Grace what words are you reading.” “The words of the sages,” replied the duke.... Read More Read More - [Become Square And Rigid](https://everyangel.org/becoming-square-and-rigid/): The great tao is not named. The great argument needs no words. Great benevolence is not benevolent. Great modesty is not humble. Great courage is not destructive. The tao that is displayed is not the tao. Argumentative words do not achieve their purpose. Benevolence that is predominant is not comprehensive. Modesty that is demonstrative... Read More Read More - [Stepping Back](https://everyangel.org/stepping-back-2/): Shicheng Qi came to see Lao-tsu and asked him, “I heard master, that you are a sage, so I came to see you, not minding the long journey. During the hundred days of the journey the soles of my feet became callous, but I did not stop to rest. Now I see that you... Read More Read More - [Christmas With Bukowski](https://everyangel.org/christmas-with-bukowski/): Received an invitation yesterday to a Christmas service/event at Christ Community Church. An acquaintance here at Starbucks invited me. The printed invitation said there will be festive music, “our traditional giant Christmas tree, and a model train display.” That’s not all – “‘Silent night’ by candle light.” I accepted the invitation without comment. I’ve... Read More Read More - [Unfolding Under The Sky](https://everyangel.org/unfolding-under-the-sky/): Therefore it is said, ‘Those who know the happiness of heaven are like heaven in their actions during their life and at death undergo transformation like other things. In their stillness they embody yin and in their movement they flow outward as the yang. One who knows the happiness of heaven does not quarrel... Read More Read More - [The Mirror](https://everyangel.org/the-mirror/): The sages are stillnot because they possessthe aptitude of being still.Nothing can disturb their mind—that is why they are still. When water is still,it reflects the eyebrows and the beard.It is a perfect level and the craftsman takes his rule from it.If still water has this clarity, how much greater is that of the... Read More Read More - [With Whom Will I Despair?](https://everyangel.org/with-whom-will-i-despair/): Great music does not move the villagers, but if they hear “The Breaking of the Willow” or “Bright Flowers” they will be rollicking with laughter. Noble words do not stay in the minds of the multitude, and consummate words are not comprehended because common words proliferate. Two clay instruments will overpower the sound of... Read More Read More - [The Rest, Into A Ditch](https://everyangel.org/the-rest-into-a-ditch/): A tree of a hundred years is cut and carved into a sacrificial wood vessel decorated with green and yellow. The rest is thrown into a ditch. If we compare the sacrificial vessel with what was thrown away, there is a difference between them in relation to beauty and ugliness. But they have a... Read More Read More - [Not Arriving](https://everyangel.org/not-arriving/): One who knows    that he is ignorant       is not entirely ignorant. One who knows    that he is deluded       is not entirely deluded. One who is severely deluded will not become free of delusion. One who is steeped in ignorance will not become discerning. If three men... Read More Read More - [Integrity](https://everyangel.org/integrity/): “I should like to hear of the rule of kind and virtuous men,” continued Yuan Feng. “The virtuous men are unmoved. They have no thought. They act without fear. Judgments of right and wrong or good and bad do not occupy them. All within the four seas delight in what they possess and are... Read More Read More - [Dogs And Monkeys](https://everyangel.org/dogs-and-monkeys/): Confucius asked Lao-tsu,“Some men approach the taoas a regimentation to submit to.they say a thing is either admissible or inadmissible;it is so or not so.They are like disputers who claimthat they can distinguish clearlywhat is hard and what is white.Can such men be considered sages?” Lao-tsu replied,they are like the subordinates in a courtwho... Read More Read More - [Silencing The Bird](https://everyangel.org/silencing-the-bird/): At the ultimate origin of all things, there was nothing; there was nothing that could be named. From this emerged the One, the first existence without form. Then different things were produced receiving what we regard as their attributes. What was formless was divided and then continued to be interconnected. The two processes led... Read More Read More - [Ecce Homo](https://everyangel.org/ecce-homo/): The tao,how deep and still it is.How clear is its purity. Metal and stone would not reverberate without it.They have the sound within thembut unless they are struck,they produce no sound.Who could determine the characteristics of all things?        ~*~ The man of sovereign virtueproceeds unencumberedand is distressed to be preoccupiedwith the... Read More Read More - [Can You Hear The Music?](https://everyangel.org/can-you-hear-the-music/): What is the Tao? There is the tao of heaven and there is the tao of man. Doing nothing and retaining all is the tao of heaven. Straining with action is the tao of man. The tao of heaven is the sovereign and the tao of man is the attendant. The tao of heaven... Read More Read More - [Origin Story](https://everyangel.org/origin-story/): Permeating heaven and earth, there is virtue.Operating in all things, there is the Tao. It is the duty of rulers to govern the people.Ability was developed into skill,which led to righteousness;righteousness rose from virtue, and virtue emerged from the Tao.The Tao was aligned with heaven. The ancients who sustained the worlddesired nothing and the... Read More Read More - [Yet](https://everyangel.org/yet/): Undistinguished and yet needed for use—Such are things.Low and yet to be relied upon—Such are people.Hidden and yet necessary to be set forth—Such are the laws.Remote and yet necessary to hold within-–Such is righteousness.Near and yet necessary to extend widely—Such is benevolence.Restrictive and yet necessary to be applied broadly—Such are ceremonies. Placed in the... Read More Read More - [Like An Echo](https://everyangel.org/like-an-echo/): The teaching of a great manis like a shadow,following the body,an echo following the sound.All questions find answers in his innermost thought. He abides in silenceand his field of activity is not confined.He guides people to their goalsthrough their movements.His actions leave no traceas he goes forth and returns. His movements arelike the sun–... Read More Read More - [Caring Still Indifferent](https://everyangel.org/caring-to-be-indifferent/): Yungjiang implored, “It has been difficult to meet with you. O Heaven! I ask for one more word.” “Ah, your mind needs to be fortified. Do nothing and things will be transformed by themselves. Be indifferent to your body, dismiss your hearing and sight, And forget the external world. Be one with the ultimate... Read More Read More - [To Save A Ho*](https://everyangel.org/to-save-a-ho/): Cui Qu asked Laozi, “If you do not govern the world, how can you make men’s minds good?” “Take care lest you intervene and disturb men’s minds,” replied Laozi. “The mind, if pushed down becomes despondent; if pulled up, elated. Now elated, now despondent, here it is a captive, and there it is a... Read More Read More - [Simply Abide](https://everyangel.org/when-doing-nothing/): The superior man/woman, when obliged to govern the world, will find that it is best to do nothing. In doing nothing, he can abide in his/her true given nature. Hence one who honors the world as he honors his own person can be entrusted with government. One who loves the world as he loves... Read More Read More - [Pleasure Über Alles](https://everyangel.org/pleasure-uber-alles/): Pleasure in seeing leads to an excessive preoccupation with colors. Pleasure in hearing leads to an excessive preoccupation with sounds. Pleasure in benevolence leads to disorder in virtue. Pleasure in righteousness leads to opposition to reason. Pleasure in ritual leads to artifice. Pleasure in music leads to sensuous indulgence. Pleasure in wisdom of the... Read More Read More - [World Not Enough](https://everyangel.org/the-world-not-enough/): I have heard of letting the world beand letting it stand; I have not heardof governing the world. We let it belest men will push their nature to extreme.We let it standlest men will alter their nature.When men do not carry their nature to extremesor alter their virtuewhat need would there be to govern... Read More Read More - [My Anti-holiday Post](https://everyangel.org/my-anti-holiday-post/): There is a saying, “The greatest art resembles ignorance.” The versatility shown in ingenuous arguments and the efforts to blow off the dust and reconcile different views is great, but the common people are perplexed by the sophistry. Hence there is a prevailing disorder in the world due to a fondness for knowledge. All... Read More Read More - [Principles Of Larceny](https://everyangel.org/principles-of-larceny/): The followers of the Robber Zhi asked him, “Do robbers have any principles?” He replied, “What profession is there which does not have its principles? That the robber decides that there are things of value in the house shows his knowledge; that he is the first to break into the house shows his courage;... Read More Read More - [Becoming A Prince](https://everyangel.org/becoming-a-prince/): Make bushels and buckets to measure and by bushels and buckets people will steal. Make agreements and seals and by agreements and seals people will steal. Make benevolence and righteousness to inculcate what is right and by benevolence and righteousness people will be taught to steal. How do I know this? One steals a... Read More Read More - [Duck & Crane](https://everyangel.org/duck-crane/): What is long should not be regarded as too long, nor what is short too short. A ducks legs, for instance, are short, but if we try to lengthen them it would pine; A crane’s legs are long, but if we try to lop them off it would grieve. Where is a part is... Read More Read More - [The One](https://everyangel.org/the-one/): Will men with intensified visual perceptionnot be confused by the five colors and excessive ornamentation,and be dazzled buy the brightness ofgreen and yellow, white and black?Li Zhu was such a man. Will men with extraordinary power of hearingnot be confused by the five notesand the excessive use of the six tones,which are produced by... Read More Read More - [No Carte Blanche](https://everyangel.org/no-carte-blanche/): A ligament connecting the big toe with the other toes and an extra finger may be natural growths but they are extraneous. Swelling and tumors are growths from the body but they are unnatural additions. There are many instances of benevolence and righteousness and they are connected to the five organs. But this is... Read More Read More - [The Day Chaos Died](https://everyangel.org/the-day-chaos-died/): The ruler of the South Seawas called Heedless,the ruler of the North Seawas called Sudden,and the ruler of the central regionwas called Chaos. Heedless and Sudden frequently metin the land of Chaos, who treated them well.Heedless and Sudden conferredhow they could reciprocate his kindness. “All men have seven openingsfor the purposes of seeing, hearing,... Read More Read More - [To Hold What Is From Heaven](https://everyangel.org/to-hold-what-is-from-heaven/): Do not yearn for fame. Do not make plans. Do not set up projects. Do not be a possessor of knowledge. Embody to the fullest what has no end and wander where there is no path. Hold what is from heaven but do not take it to be anything. Be empty. The highest man’s... Read More Read More - [Gunned Down](https://everyangel.org/gunned-down/): Time moves on with its usual nihilism, mows us all down, jaw-droppingly insensate to our preference for living. Guns us down… We’re caught in a universe of collision and drift, the long slow ripples of the first Big Bang as the universe breaks apart; the closest galaxies smash together, then those that are left... Read More Read More - [Singing Or Wailing](https://everyangel.org/singing-or-wailing/): Master Yu and Master Sang were friends. Once when it rained continuously for ten days, Master Yu said, “Perhaps Master Sang is unwell.” He wrapped some rice and took it to his friend. When he arrived at Sang’s gate, he heard sounds of singing or wailing accompanied by a lute. “Father? mother? Heaven? Man?”... Read More Read More - [Abide And Be](https://everyangel.org/abide-and-be/): “When we say to one another,‘I am this’, how do we knowthat the ‘I’ isthe real ‘I’? You dream that you are a birdsoaring into the sky; you dream that you are a fishdiving into the deep.We do not know whether wewho are now speakingare awake or dreaming. It is not seeing what is... Read More Read More - [A Great Furnace](https://everyangel.org/as-a-great-furnace/): “Here is a master smith casting his metal.If the metal were to leap up and say,‘I want to be made into Moye!”*he would think it is wrong. If I, after having already received the human form,were to say, ‘I must become a man, I must become a man!’the creator would certainly think it is... Read More Read More - [Tranquility In Disturbance](https://everyangel.org/tranquility-in-disturbance/): Having transcended all life,     he was clear as the morning.Having become as clear as the morning,     he was able to see the One.Having seen the One,     he was able to set aside past and present.Having set aside past and present,     he was able to enter where there is neither life... Read More Read More - [No Doing & No Form](https://everyangel.org/no-doing-no-form/): Tao has reality and manifestation but does nothing and has no form. It may be imparted by cannot be grasped. It may be attained but cannot be seen. It has its root and ground of existence in itself. Before there was heaven and earth It existed from eternity. From it came the powers of... Read More Read More - [What Makes Life Good](https://everyangel.org/what-makes-life-good/): There is the great mass of nature –it supports my body. I struggle with my life; old age brings relief and death rest.     What makes my life good also      makes my death good. A boat may be hidden in a ravine, or a fishing net in a lake, and you... Read More Read More - [Waking Without Anguish](https://everyangel.org/waking-without-anguish/): A few more lines from Zhuang Zhou constructing a three dimensional model of what is possible within the Taoist course of practice. A “true” man or woman approaches what is possible for the individual in their place and time.  Sometimes I have a restful night of sleep without haunting of dreams. But not often,... Read More Read More - [Into Water, Into Fire](https://everyangel.org/into-water-into-fire/): What is meant by “the true man”? The true man of ancient times did not protest against poverty, did not boast of plenty and did not calculate the effects. If he made mistakes he did not regret, and if he was successful he did not become complacent Being like this he could ascend the... Read More Read More - [Like Still Water](https://everyangel.org/like-still-water/): “What do you mean by virtue not being manifested?” “Nothing is so level than still waters –this can be a paradigm. There is inner preservation and no outer movement. Virtue is the perfect cultivation of harmony. Even though this is not manifested in the person, things cannot be without it.“ Zhuangzi by Zhuang Zhou,... Read More Read More - [Always Springtime](https://everyangel.org/always-springtime/): Duke Âi said,‘What is meant by saying that his powers were complete?’ Confucius replied,‘Death and life,preservation and ruin,failure and success,poverty and wealth,superiority and inferiority,blame and praise,hunger and thirst,cold and heat; these are the changes of circumstances, the operation of our appointed lot.Day and night they succeed to one another before us,but there is no... Read More Read More - [Seasonal Work](https://everyangel.org/seasonal-work/): One week before Thanksgiving. The weather has been distinctly unfall-like. The days have been comfortable, nearly too warm for a jacket along the Fox River valley just west of Chicago. There has been no frost to speak of. Yesterday with almost seventy degree weather I busied myself raking and mulching leaves. The ideal is... Read More Read More - [A Madman's Advice](https://everyangel.org/a-madmans-advice/): When Confucius went to Chû, Jieyû, the madman of Chû, as he was wandering about, passed by his gate, called out, ‘Oh Phoenix, Oh Phoenix, how is your virtue degenerated! The future is not to be waited for; the past is not to be sought again! When good order (Tao) prevails in the world,... Read More Read More - [Benefit Of Uselessness](https://everyangel.org/benefit-of-uselessness/): A (master) mechanic, called Shih,on his way to Khî, came to Khü yüan,where he saw an oak tree,which was used as the altar for the spirits of the land. It was so largethat an ox standing behind itcould not be seen.It measured a hundred spans round,and rose up eighty cubits on the hillbefore it... Read More Read More - [Afterword](https://everyangel.org/afterword/): When has one written or said enough? That is, said enough, leaving space for the reader, room enough for freedom of reflection, allowing a companion to the conversation to “make up” their own mind. It is always a judgment call. One additional thought rattles around my mind. The crux of my reaction, my aversion... Read More Read More - [Christianity Considered Part III](https://everyangel.org/christianity-considered-part-iii/): Holy Sonnets: Batter My heart, Three-person’d God By John Donne (1572–1631) Batter my heart, three-person’d God, for you As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend; That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new. I, like an usurp’d town to... Read More Read More - [Tu Stultus Es, Part II](https://everyangel.org/tu-stultus-es-part-ii/):                 Moira was the name given by the Greeks to this realm of the incalculable and of sublime and eternal limitedness; and they set it round their gods like a horizon beyond which they could neither see nor act, —with that secret defiance of the gods which... Read More Read More - [We Clever Dwarfs](https://everyangel.org/we-clever-dwarfs/): We haveaccustomed ourselvesto believein two kingdoms,the domain of purposes and volition,and the domain of chance. In this latter domaineverything is done senselessly, there is a continual going to and frowithout any one being able to saywhy or wherefore. We stand in aweof this powerful realmof the great cosmic stupidity,for in most instanceswe learn to... Read More Read More - [Fucktard](https://everyangel.org/fucktard/): The neologism that I used was borrowed as is all language. We inherit a manner-of-speaking, labels which by mutual agreement we decide point to a thing, or an experience, or… As you can imagine any language affords an infinite number of pieces by which to “play” on the game board. Grammar, the rules of... Read More Read More - [Losing The Real Point](https://everyangel.org/losing-the-real-point/): Moreover, skillful wrestlers begin with open trials of strength, but always end with masked aggression (to gain the victory); as their excitement grows excessive, they display fraudulent tactics. Parties drinking according to the rules at first observe good order, but always end with disorder; as their excitement grows excessive, they become raucous. In all... Read More Read More - [That I Was, Has Passed](https://everyangel.org/that-i-was-has-passed/): This conversation takes place between Confucius and Yan Hui, a court official. Can you imagine a more precarious professional role, than a job in the administration of an autocrat? The topic revolves around how a “fasting-of-the-mind” is advantageous to someone such as Hui. Confucius describes a concentration, a quieting of the will, as one... Read More Read More - [Realpolitik](https://everyangel.org/realpolitik/): In ancient times Kieh killed Kwan Lung fang, and Kâu killed the prince Pî kan. Both of these cultivated their persons, bending down in sympathy with the lower people to comfort, to relieve suffering (as they did) from their oppressors, and on their account opposing their superiors. On this account, because of their moral... Read More Read More - [Thinking Lightly Of The Dying](https://everyangel.org/thinking-lightly-of-people-dying/): Along with others, I have struggled to understand the nature of my relationship to the Federal Government. This ancient dialog between Confucius and one of his students illuminates the topic. What frame-of-mind is feasible toward a autocrat, and the high-handed murderous administration for which he is the “front man”? The autocrat’s party regards compromise... Read More Read More - [Quiet Acquiescence](https://everyangel.org/quiet-acquiescence/): Serendipity is coincidence of circumstance that is unexpected. Perhaps occasionally that happens to everybody. Earlier in the day preparing for a session later in the week I composed several questions related to the relationship between life and death. Then, when turning to consider this post was this ancient account of a funeral. The funeral... Read More Read More - [Ten And Thirty](https://everyangel.org/ten-and-thirty/): The pheasant of the marshes has to take ten steps to pick up a mouthful of food, and thirty steps to get a drink, but it does not seek to be nourished in a coup. Though its spirit would (there) enjoy a royal abundance, it does not think (such confinement) good. Zhuangzi by Zhuang... Read More Read More - [To Butcher An Ox](https://everyangel.org/to-butcher-an-ox/): Perhaps there is nothing more satisfying than to observe a skilled artisan work. Here is a widely known Taoist story. A humble cook instructs the ruler of the realm on the art of ruling by his manner of dismembering an Ox in the course of meal preparation. No further comment needed. Cook Ding was... Read More Read More - [Peril](https://everyangel.org/peril/): The Mastery of Life There is a limit to our life,but to knowledge there is no limit.With what is limitedto pursue after what is unlimited is a perilous thing; and when, knowing this,we still seek the increase of our knowledge,the peril cannot be averted. There should not be the practice of what is goodwith... Read More Read More - [There Is No Why](https://everyangel.org/there-is-no-why-3/): The Penumbra asked the Shadow, saying, ‘Formerly you were walking on, and now you have stopped; formerly you were sitting, and now you have risen up: how is it that you are so without stability?’ The Shadow replied, ‘I wait for the movements of something else to do what I do, and that something... Read More Read More - [Gone](https://everyangel.org/gone/): The lyric penned by Chrissie Hynde is more true now than ever. Resist temptation, irrational faith in “the system,” that’s going to take care of us. The system is an abstraction, a collection of imagined, dream-like benefits, (democracy protects everyone’s rights, captalism-gets-us-all-ahead, etc.) quite divorced from the way things actually work, the sharp-edged reality.... Read More Read More - [It's A Human Sign](https://everyangel.org/its-a-human-sign/): Monday, a mild day with 45 degrees F at 6:30AM. The poet James Dickey suggests in his poem To Rise To Walk Again that non-human mammals live in a perpetual paradise. That is, they live in a state of perpetual renewal. A consciousness that is filled with each successive moment would be one that... Read More Read More - [To Rise To Walk Again](https://everyangel.org/to-rise-to-walk-again/):      The Heaven of Animals By James L. Dickey Here they are. The soft eyes open.    If they have lived in a wood It is a wood. If they have lived on plains It is grass rolling Under their feet forever. Having no souls, they have come,    Anyway, beyond their knowing.    Their instincts... Read More Read More - [Hair's Tip In Autumn](https://everyangel.org/hairs-tip-in-autumn/): Under heaven there is nothing greaterthan the tip of an autumn down,and the Thâi mountain is small. There is no one more long livedthan a child which dies prematurely,and Phang Tsû did not live out his time.                ~*~ Heaven, Earth, and Iwere produced together,and all things and... Read More Read More - [When They Awoke They Knew](https://everyangel.org/when-they-awoke-they-knew/): ‘How do I know that the love of life is not a delusion?and that the dislike of death is not like a young person’s losing his way,and not knowing that he is (really) going home? Lî Kî was a daughter of the border Warden of Âi.When (the ruler of) the state of Tsin first... Read More Read More - [Becoming Square](https://everyangel.org/becoming-square/): The Tâo that is displayed is not the Tâo. Words that are argumentative do not reach the point.    Benevolence that is constantly exercised does not accomplish its object.       Disinterestedness that vaunts its purity is not genuine.          Courage that is most stubborn is ineffectual. These five seem... Read More Read More - [Reciprocity](https://everyangel.org/reciprocity/): Yesterday was Autumn Equinox. If we think of the progression of the months as relative to the position of the earth and the sun, September 22nd is the point at which the length of daytime and darkness is roughly equal. A pivot point between summer’s warmth, and the chill of winter’s season of sleep. Of course, fall is a season of reflection. It is natural to pause to look around, to take a measure of a summer’s work, to be thankful for the beauty of the golden rod, to feel satisfied with the harvest, that nourishment as proof of our kinship... Read More Read More - [Roam The Unknown](https://everyangel.org/roam-to-the-unknown/): In order to get underway, we do have to set out. This is meant in a double sense: for one thing, we have to open ourselves¹ to the emerging prospect and direction of the way itself; and then, we must get on the way, that is, must take the steps by which alone the way becomes a way². The way of thinking cannot be traced from somewhere to somewhere like a well-worn rut, nor does it exist as such in any place. Only when we walk it, and in no other fashion, only, that is, by thoughtful questioning, are we on... Read More Read More - [Talking Of Colors](https://everyangel.org/talking-of-colors/): You cannot talk of colors to the blind. But a still greater ill than blindness is delusion. Delusion believes that it sees, and that it sees in the only possible manner,    even while this its belief       robs it of sight. What Is Called Thinking by Martin Heidegger, Part II, Lecture V, page 166 To feel satisfaction, that sense of having arrived, that I have lived long and have learned enough, that I “get it”, is a nudge from the cosmos that I am missing a great deal, my POV of possessing the correct answer, – is evidence... Read More Read More - [A Call](https://everyangel.org/a-call/): “What is it that calls on us to think?” Which is the call that claims man’s/woman’s thinking? This question, one might say, already presupposes that thinking is by nature something that is called for, and is maintained and, so to speak, retained within its nature only by the call. The question “What is This that calls us into thought?” already presupposes that thinking, qua thinking alone, pays heed to the calling within it. The question… brings us to the problem that thinking, qua thinking, is essentially a call. What Is Called Thinking by Martin Heidegger, Part II, Lecture IV, page 160... Read More Read More - [What Touches Us](https://everyangel.org/what-touches-us/): The thanc [Old English] means man’s/woman’s innermost mind, heart, the heart’s core, that innermost essence of man/woman which reaches outward most fully and to the outermost limits, and so decisively that, rightfully considered, the idea of an inner and out outer world does not arise. When we listen to the word thanc in its basic meaning, we hear at once the essence of two words:   thinking and memory,     thinking and thanks,       which readily suggest themselves          in the verb “to think.” The thanc, the hearts core, is the gathering of all that... Read More Read More - [The Cave In](https://everyangel.org/the-cave-in/): Words are not terms, and thus are not like buckets and kegs from which we scoop a content that is there. Words are wellsprings that are found and dug up in the telling, wellsprings that must be found and dug up again and again, that easily cave in, but that at times also well up when least expected. If we do not go to the spring again and again, the buckets and kegs stay empty, or their content stays stale. What Is Called Thinking by Martin Heidegger, Part II, Lecture II I am enrolled in a poetry course. The first session... Read More Read More - [Becoming Who You Are](https://everyangel.org/becoming-who-you-are/): The overman surpasses man as he is by entering into the relatedness to Being— Being which, as the will of the eternal recurrence of the same, eternally wills itself and nothing else. The overman goes toward the eternal recurrence of the same, because that is where his essential nature is rooted. Nietzsche cast the overman’s being in the figure of Zarathustra. Who is Zarathustra? He is the teacher of the eternal recurrence of the same. What Is Called Thinking by Martin Heidegger, Part I, Section X, page 106 I seldom think about thinking. I assume that I am thinking all of... Read More Read More - [Part II](https://everyangel.org/revenge-part-ii/): Revenge, for Nietzsche,is the will’s revulsion against time.This now means: revengeis the will’s revulsion against the passing awayand what has passed away,against time and its “It was.”The revulsion turnsnot against the mere passing,but against that passing away which allowswhat has passed to be only in the past,which lets it freeze in the finality of this rigor mortis.The revulsion of revengeis against that time whichmakes everything dissolve in the “It was,”and thus makes passing pass away… The revulsion of revengeremains chained to this “It was”;just as there lies concealed in all hatredthe abysmal dependenceupon that from which hatred at bottomalways desires to... Read More Read More - [After All These Years, Still Not Thinking](https://everyangel.org/after-all-these-years-still-not-thinking/): I am reading What Is Called Thinking by Martin Heidegger. I have finished nine of the lectures which he delivered in 1951 and 52. One more and I will have finished the tenth one, and the reading though difficult has been satisfying. Anyone who believes that Martin Heidegger is not inordinately difficult to understand is just kidding themselves. I recall when I was in grad school in my thirties, I decided to purchase a copy of Being and Time, his magnum opus work. Since I had read a fair amount of philosophy I thought I was ready for Heidegger. I pushed... Read More Read More - [Maker Of Everything Small](https://everyangel.org/maker-of-everything-small/): Over the past few days I have discussed with two good friends Nietzsche’s notion of the Superman. Both friends, who are extraordinarily well informed, were of the opinion that the hypothetical, infamous individual proposed by the German philosopher was an ego-driven, imperious, and intoxicated with will-to-power. I disagreed with their opinion though such a negative view of Nietzsche’s writings is widely held. Reading Martin Heidegger’s series of lectures delivered in 1954, I believe Heidegger offers a clear description of Nietzsche’s presentation of the Übermensch.  (We Americans typically render Nietzsche’s Übermensch as Super-man.) Heidegger offers that Nietzsche’s over-man is understood by juxtaposition... Read More Read More - [He Blinks](https://everyangel.org/they-blink/): Friday was the anniversary of the collapse of the World Trade Center, – twin office towers in Manhattan,  struck by two hijacked commercial airliners. The event occurred twenty five years ago. We ought to cease lying to ourselves about the overarching context of the attack. What other than a response to America’s empire, could this event have been? Fanaticism of any sort is a derangement of the psyche. Empire in any form, yes the velvet glove-style post WWII American colonialism – was nothing else but an attempt to control others. Of late our effort to hold onto hegemony has not been... Read More Read More - [Nietzsche Screams](https://everyangel.org/nietzsche-screams/): Today is September 11. Every form of media makes reference to the event in Manhattan occurring 25 years ago. It’s unremarkable that memories of the destruction of the World Trade Center reveal many meanings. There is no univocal, “correct” meaning. Many people died on that day, and the carnage was not limited to a single day of September 11th. Nor was the slaughter confined to Manhattan. Violent bloodletting spread to Iraq and Afghanistan. Martin Heidegger wrote in 1954: Learning, then, cannot be brought about by scolding. Even so, a man who teaches must at times grow noisy. In fact, he may... Read More Read More - [What Is Most Dangerous](https://everyangel.org/what-is-most-dangerous/): What is most thought-provoking, then, could be something lofty, perhaps even the highest thing there is for man, provided man still is the being who is insofar as he thinks, thinks in that thought appeals to him because his essential nature consists in memory, the gathering of thought. And what is most thought-provoking — especially when it is man’s highest concern –may well be what is most dangerous. Or do we imagine that a man could even in small ways encounter the essence of truth, the essence of beauty, the essence of grace —without danger? What Is Called Thinking by Martin... Read More Read More - [Tumbling Away](https://everyangel.org/tumbling-away/): Today I am reading, while “leaning in” to process What Is Called Thinking by Martin Heidegger. Heidegger is difficult. At the beginning of the year I signed up with an online book club with two objectives in mind. I desired a virtual “community” of motivated adults to serve as a current of momentum to carry me along with reading a philosophy text each month, a text I wouldn’t otherwise read, if left to my preferences. Also, a circle of subscribers, each offering perspectives from a life-lived in another part of the world, is likely to have a flavor of graduate school,... Read More Read More - [Wild Horses](https://everyangel.org/wild-horses-2/): Lives unfold, shake out, become a revelation, or become a cul de sac in the course of time. What is time? I have read various theories of time. Our dilemma, we find ourselves inside of time, caught in times’ flow, we have no vantage point outside of entanglement in the flow of things. Theories range from the ordinary eight-hour measurement of a working day, to the relative time involving the speed of light according to Einstein. We are story-telling mammals, and we’d not have a self apart from the stories that we tell ourselves. My “I” is just that story collection... Read More Read More - [Event Horizon](https://everyangel.org/event-horizon-2/): It is Labor Day Monday. I spent Saturday at Great Lakes Dragaway in Union Grove Wisconsin. Two lanes of asphalt, stretch for a half mile that allows two race cars maximum acceleration for a quarter mile, then another 1,320 feet of room to slow the vehicles. That’s drag racing, a type of competition originating in California at the end of WWII. I  reflect from time to time, pondering “why me.” Why this unflagging fascination with the beauty of engine and chassis, and body design – purposed for cutting the timing light at a quicker and quicker time. Yes, it is about... Read More Read More - [Relapse](https://everyangel.org/relapse/): I am almost finished the Mumford book of over 400 pages. Lewis Mumford has a way-with-words to stoke my imagination. So I push ahead to read his account of the reciprocal influence of machines and society from the middle ages, about 1000 AD to the early 20th century.  The quoted lines highlight the pivot point of developing a common language, the precursor for a morality of trust. Reasonableness is the child of shared meanings… But there is always the other side of the coin. I mean to say the possibility of relapse to the moral dynamic of mistrust, of medieval, might-makes-right... Read More Read More - [Let It Come](https://everyangel.org/let-it-come/): Friday afternoon. I took the malaise of today to a meeting this morning. One does what one must, feelings aside. To this felt heaviness, as if gravity were double or tripled, even thinking moved as if in molasses, – perhaps you also find it impossible be certain of the cause(s) of such a funk? I heard a snippet of news that the Trump administration looks to revoke the tax exempt status of institutions of higher learning when evidence is found that the institutions demonstrated favor to people of color. A dispiriting change in official policy as far as I am concerned.... Read More Read More - [Life !](https://everyangel.org/its-alive/): At sixteen I discovered drag racing. Performance engines built for extremes, they seemed magic to me. And that sound continues to have the effect for me. I remember the sound of those engines, – a Super Stock Plymouth, an A/FX Ford Mustang being tuned in the pits under the pine trees in North Carolina. A distinct sound, a jagged, loping idle as the engine “wants” more air, seeking harmony for an overly rich amount of fuel drawn into the cylinders… The “magic” remains when I am around for the startup of one of those engines. There’s a knack to firing a... Read More Read More - [Good Things Still Get Done](https://everyangel.org/good-things-still-get-done/): Wednesday is suffused with sunlight, and stands to be summertime hot, though meteorological fall has arrived. No matter! I welcome a day or two more of summer before the tilt of the earth’s axis brings shorter and cooler days. Yesterday was dedicated to keeping a long anticipated appointment with my cardiologist. A needed heart tune-up was received (remedy of irregular heart-beat) with the help of cutting edge technology. My parent’s generation would not have imagined such non-invasive cardiac surgery. And I feel fine the day after… This segment is from a weekly newsletter received from Rob Brezsny, a writer who lives... Read More Read More - [Rubbish Wholesale](https://everyangel.org/wholesale-waste/): I am unable to compose the usual post due to an appointment for a heart procedure which will shortly come. There’s just not enough time to order my thoughts. So, I will leave these words by William Morris: We have seen that modern society is divided into two classes, one of which is privileged to be kept by the labour of the other – that is, it forces the other to work for it and takes from this inferior class everything that it can take from it, and uses the wealth so taken to keep its own members in a superior... Read More Read More - [To Have It No Other Way](https://everyangel.org/to-have-it-no-other-way/): Saturday was spent at Cordova Dragway. I wonder that the race track may be more widely known than the tiny village of some 600 residents. On the other hand Cordova in Rock Island County is home to three nuclear power generating stations. The drag strip is twin lanes of asphalt 1,320 feet in length, with shut down lanes approximately the same length, staging lanes to position the race cars, viewing stands, and a raised tower for unobstructed viewing. All of this is surrounded by a number of acres, a pit area dedicated to parking race cars, as well as ample parking... Read More Read More - [I Grew Up Believing](https://everyangel.org/i-grew-up-believing/): Today is Sunday. I am writing in the afternoon because I “slept in” this morning rather than my 6AM customary hour. Yesterday was spent at Cordova Dragway, a “stone’s throw” from  the Mississippi River. Most of the day was spent on my feet, but happy to be among racers, and fast cars. To be “happy” (a slippery term) one ought to discover one’s tribe, those speaking your language, passionate for life in ways that parallel one’s own. I can’t explain it but I believe that’s the way it is. I stood for the entire day, enjoyed a number of interesting conversations... Read More Read More - [The Floret](https://everyangel.org/one-floret/): We often watch the late night news on channel 7, ABC television. This is our ritual, – the final shared experience of the evening before turning in. The broadcast meteorologist took note of the cloud cover that momentarily obscured last night’s eclipse from view. The eclipse of the moon is not something that happens often. The moon is darkened for a few minutes as the shadow of the earth progressively interferes with the illumination of the moon by our sun. The darkness marches across the moon, not unlike the progression of a pandemic, or the propagation of a tsunami wave invading... Read More Read More - [Bang Your Gong](https://everyangel.org/bang-your-gong/): The mornings are less warm, less humid now. I take that as a sign that Fall is at hand. Starbucks is more busy around 7AM since the beginning of the school term dictates a universal scheduling of the day, for everyone two years old (pre-shool) and upward. Some of us, even in retirement remain in grad school, as reading and writing are high priorities of day to day living. In a real sense this bias toward education conditions the flow of early morning traffic here at Starbucks. Just a week ago, the early morning steady inflow of work commuters requesting a... Read More Read More - [Construction - Secret Garden](https://everyangel.org/construction-secret-garden/): Late summer is construction season. Construction is in progress all of the time, somewhere. This is the nature of things since our ancestors learned that farming was better than hunting and gathering. We began living in villages. That was not so long ago if you use the time scale of the universe. The Neolithic age was only 11,000 years ago. T. S. Eliot described it thusly: In my beginning is my end. In succession Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended, Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass. Old stone... Read More Read More - [I Came For The Show](https://everyangel.org/i-came-for-the-show/): The weekend was “car show” weekend for me. By no means 16 any longer but I remain “bitten” by the “bug”. I confess – I’m a gear-head. On Saturday we attended the car show associated with the Waubonsee Community College 60th Anniversary Celebration. Waubonsee CC is impressive on any number of accounts. The college offers valuable instruction in the automotive arts at a recently constructed state-of-the-art Technical Education Center. If I were young again that’s where I’d look seeking instruction. I was especially pleased that friends from Oswego, Jeff and Dave Lumbert were at the show with their new 1967 Nova... Read More Read More - [Morning Sun Healing Drug](https://everyangel.org/drug-to-bring-me-near/): A feeling pulled me into the lyric of this song, that mellow precussion backbeat. The note anchoring the harmony of the orchestration and the singer’s voice was as if the “heartbeat” of the universe. That I am composed of elemental substances, vivified by the fortunate “gift” of star energy at our edge of the “milky way” — I think reality is essentially collaborative, cooperative expressing a healing intention. Sure things get “pushed out of shape.”  No doubt a shattered childhood is nothing unusual. There are many. I can identify though. In retrospect, no shame to admit that my youth was also... Read More Read More - [Let's Go! A Show For Free](https://everyangel.org/lets-go-a-show-for-free/): Friday by convention marks an end of the work week. As to reality – contemporary societies depend upon labor 24×7, with no general “half-time”, otherwise known as the day-of-rest in traditional Christian cultures. The religious label is borrowed from the Jewish practice of the sabbath. Christians rebranded by asserting that Sunday was the day of resurrection, (an unprecedented victory over death) therefore Sunday was assigned a respite from labor, chiefly for attending divine services at the cathedral or a store-front meeting house. Whether any moderns find literal “resurrection” credible, everyone needs, looks forward to the weekend. The meaning of “free” time... Read More Read More - [Your Own Kind of Music](https://everyangel.org/your-own-kind-of-music-2/): Thursday, presents as an idealized summer’s day. Rainfall has been sufficient here, though late summer is often dry. As is my custom the last hour or so I’ve been situated at Starbucks. Several cups of flavorful, hot coffee, reading, and satisfying conversation filled the time. I continue to read Rediscovery of Awe by Kirk Schneider, Phd, and I am nearing the conclusion. A fragment of Whitman’s celebrated poem was featured by Schneider. I have a copy of Leaves of Grass. Now I feel motivated to read Walt Whitman start to finish. I suspect he is a kindred soul! Great is goodness;... Read More Read More - [A Hymn To Agency](https://everyangel.org/to-praise-agency/): What to write? Morning dawns in majesty, sun on the horizon as a god, blazing with light and life. A retention pond at the rear of Starbucks where I customarily begin each day, is stunning in reflective stillness. The sky is brought down to earth: heaven & earth. There’s a white egret who sometimes feeds by the drainage pipe directly across the pond from my view through the rear glass door here at Starbucks. A few minutes were spent to finish a newsletter received via email from Rob Brezsny. He is a veteran writer that I respect. The August 18 missive... Read More Read More - [Sometimes Roar, Sometimes Trickle](https://everyangel.org/a-roar-or-a-trickle/): Living at this time, but wait, – to be alive at any time in the arc of human habitation on this planet — seemed/seems hard. How else to put the matter. Living well in the “thrownness” of indifferent circumstances is a formidable challenge. That said, we “lucky” ones, recipients of higher strata of education often understand acutely, how arduous is this quest to become a happy individual. In a “world”, the first quarter of my century, I am connected to everywhere, no matter where I may be. In a remote area it is not unusual to read report of events which... Read More Read More - [Paradise City?](https://everyangel.org/paradise-city/): Perhaps you’ve not had occasion to read one of the translations of the Odyssey. I have not. Perhaps a suitable on-ramp for reading the text is a viewing of Christopher Nolan’s film, which features Matt Damon as Odysseus. Odysseus in Homer’s tale is the king of legendary Ithaca, an island kingdom in the Ionian sea. Odysseus was obliged to join the expedition to avenge Spartan king Menalaus loss of his wife Helen to Paris, a prince of Troy. The conflict lasted for ten years, much longer than the aggressor assumed. The Greeks ultimately prevail through the subterfuge of the “gift” horse.... Read More Read More - [You Are Odysseus...](https://everyangel.org/you-as-odysseus/): Sunday comes with the promise of sunshine in the afternoon. Day after day for three days showers have come, when August is typically a dry month. I am thankful for the rain though I am compelled to mow the lawn 2x per week for a while. How happy I feel to see the creek full, and the garden robustly green; the tomatoes are ripening, and I am looking for thumb-sized baby pumpkins to follow the glowing yellow blossoms. A night at the movie theater afforded us the opportunity to view The Odyssey directed by Christopher Nolan. I am not sure that... Read More Read More - [El Burrito Perfecto](https://everyangel.org/el-burrito-perfecto/): Saturday with a gentle rain. For the past two or three days it has rained off and on. Meteorologists describe a heat dome parked over the midwest, circulating humidity, moisture-laden air, elevated heat, interfacing with cooler flows, thus rain and sometimes high winds. So, plans are adjusted to the prevailing outdoor conditions; I lingered at Starbucks to finish a persuasive essay by David Bentley Hart. I didn’t want to put the piece down as the masterful writing described a view of materialist determinism, the infinite regress, “turtles all the way down.” The essay is the first in Hart’s new book: A... Read More Read More - [Darkness At Midday](https://everyangel.org/darkness-falls-in-midday/): What matters in your life today? What challenges and opportunities will I engage? I have plans in mind. Will nature endorse, go along with my intention to replace the missing bolt in the rotating blade of my Briggs and Straton powered tiller or, –  not? Thunderstorms are expected for later today. Nature, that neighborhood in the cosmos of our solar system, this earth, and it’s tides, atmospheric shifts, the collision of temperature differences, the condensation of clouds and respiration of lands and oceans, etc., etc.. Everything matters, has effect, influences my life. What all of that will amount to, respecting my... Read More Read More - [Mailed Fist, No Velvet Glove](https://everyangel.org/mailed-fist-no-white-glove/): Vs. 80 Let there be a little country without many people. Let them have tools that do the work of ten or a hundred, and never use them. Let them be mindful of death and disinclined to long journeys. They’d have ships and carriages, but no place to go. They’d have armor and weapons, but no parades. Instead of writing, they might to back to using knotted cords. They’d enjoy eating, take pleasure in clothes, be happy with their houses, devoted to their customs. Tao Te Ching by Lao Tsu, trans. Ursula K. Le Guin This collection of lines is near... Read More Read More - [Broken Blade](https://everyangel.org/broken-sword/): Vs. 76 Living people are soft and tender. Corpses are hard and stiff. The ten thousand things, the living grass, the trees, are soft, pliant. Dead, they’re dry and brittle. So hardness and stiffness go with death; Tenderness, softness, go with life. And the hard sword fails, and the stiff tree’s felled. The hard and great go under. The soft and weak stay up. Tao Te Ching by Lao Tsu, trans. Ursula K. Le Guin Since my childhood I’ve been interested in the military. I remember my collection of injection molded miniature WWII soldiers. I played with those pieces for hours... Read More Read More - [Disconnected](https://everyangel.org/disconnected/): We’ve all been there. I entertained a purpose, certainly I’ll post something this morning… Then, no matter the effort the Lenovo laptop would not link to the Starbucks wifi. My I-phone found the signal… And yes, I looked at the settings, and nothing was amiss. Having allowed such a circumstance to grow into a ball of frustration in the past, I decided to pivot and read an essay waiting for attention in the red folder. The title of the 6.5 page piece composed by an anonymous substack writer is deceptively ordinary – An Existential Guide to: Making Friends. Almost terse, composed... Read More Read More - [Variety Of Life](https://everyangel.org/variety-of-life/): Two photos which recently came from the garden. The first are of tiny mushrooms growing in the organic debris at the side of the path. Wikipedia writes that these are Parasola genus of mushrooms. They are the size of an adult thumbnail. Likely the unseen underground filaments extend further than the visible umbrella-like shape. The fungus is a reminder that life and death are symbiotic and co-dependent. The other image is of a hosta blossom. These developed late in the season. Notice the magnificent delicacy of shape, and the shade of coloring. - [Others](https://everyangel.org/others/): Vs. 20 Yes and no Are they so different? Good and bad Are they so far apart? What others fear I must fear too Such recklessness! Without and end! Most people are merry making and happy As though celebrating the Great Sacrifice And climbing a lookout in the spring I alone am unmoved! Like one without preferences Like an infant who never smiles Lost! As thought homeless Most people have excess I alone appear wanting With the mind of a fool! Muddled and confused! Others are bright and clear I alone am dim Most people are smart and assured I alone... Read More Read More - [joie de vivre](https://everyangel.org/joie-de-vivre/): Waking again to the light of a rising sun I have no complaint. I expect today will exceed my expectations. It would be well to expect as little as possible, to have a general, somewhat vague sense of direction. Then I could respond to events, to people, with curiosity, most often with delight. Not to be pollyannish about this world and life, still one must have a foundational assumption. To thrive requires faith in a bias for goodness, that on balance everything is seeking homeostasis, a niche of cooperation, of collaboration. The misshapen, the demonic, toxic and destructive occurs, – as... Read More Read More - [Seeing What's Hidden](https://everyangel.org/seeing-whats-hidden/): A cloud shrouded sultry August morning… Another day begins. I realized that I inadvertently missed an appointment yesterday. No matter the note written in my day-timer, my memory is no longer as reliable as in my youth.  I imagined the appointment for today’s afternoon. Therefore an apology is called for. I will apologize and made amends. Also I’ll need another appointment. To be human is to be mistaken. I read somewhere about fallabilism. (from Medieval Latin: fallibilis, “liable to error”) It is always possible to be wrong. Nothing can be proven with complete certainty. If meaning is derived from context, when... Read More Read More - [Nothing To Fear](https://everyangel.org/nothing-to-fear/): Vs. 52 The beginning of everything is the mother of everything Truly to know the mother is to know her children, and truly to know her children is to turn back to the mother. The body comes to its ending but there is nothing to fear. Close the openings shut the doors, and to the end of life, nothing will trouble you. Open the openings, be busy with business, and to the end of life nothing can help you. Insight sees the insignificant. Strength knows how to yield. Use the way’s light, return to its insight, and so keep from going... Read More Read More - [Hair On Fire](https://everyangel.org/hair-on-fire/): “Spontaneously so”means literally “self-soing” or “self-deriving.” We might play with this rather literal meaning…by substituting “sow” and “sew” for “so,”thereby evoking the protean images of “husbanding and cultivating” a world, and “tailoring” of it to suit both one’s own proclivitiesand those of one’s context. Dao De Ching, A Philosophical Translation by Roger T. Ames and David L. Hall In Chinese: ziran. The concept has to do with self-creation, a spontaneous poeticizing of  the self. In English I’d be tempted to write “autopoiesis”. That is discovering/fashioning your sense of self, the layered and changing identity in relation to one’s surrounding of nature... Read More Read More - [Cosmic Harmony](https://everyangel.org/cosmic-harmony/): Monday, the sun shines, – a promise of outdoor comfort. I plan to attend to the back yard. The result of ample rainfall is robust growth of all manner of vegetation. A manicured back yard is a singular delight. A seasonal pleasure by my scale of values. I have read about the holographic dimension of the concept of virtue/power in the taoist view of life and reality. That is to say that each thing, inclusive of humans, contains the totality of every thing else in adumbrated form. You contain the entire cosmos, that is, the noncoherent sum of all possible orders... Read More Read More - [Time's Spell And A Cookie](https://everyangel.org/times-spell/): The big hand of the watch face imperceptibly closes to 11am. I am situated at Starbucks, later in the morning than usual. Reflecting upon the situational context of the past evening, certainly I identify the moment when I decided to consume yet one more cookie. Such a moment can be consequential if one is diabetic. Three to four hours later, I, a diabetic, patiently responded to a spike in blood sugar, – before safely turning in for the evening’s rest. Did I choose to eat the extra cookie, because my reason indicated that I’d be ok? Or was my disposition a... Read More Read More - [More Or Less](https://everyangel.org/more-or-less/): Damn, Friday has arrived! Anticipating the weekend, I intend to closeout this week’s projects. The weekend has its own rhythm, – a farmers market, and a Shakespeare-in-the-Park in Geneva. Opportunities to visit with acquaintances, and some friends that await, is a treat. The question is suspended before each and every one of us. What is possible, what can we imagine that is worthy of us, a joint-effort of creation within the gift of time which we inhabit here? I suppose it’s obvious that to a reader that I spent the morning reading and thinking about the concept and function of “emptiness”... Read More Read More - [BunGeeZus](https://everyangel.org/bungeezus/): Thursday, I am tasked with finishing what I started yesterday. I wrote that a friend promised to send me an image plucked from the seeming bottomless internet meme-well of Jesus bungee jumping… Here it is. This may or may not evoke a bodily sensation. Maybe a tremor of horror, to glimpse the gentle shepherd of humanity, ‘high as a kite’ doing a stage dive into a mosh pit? Or do you feel shock of seeing the son-of-God in disconnect from a cross (essential enforcement tool of empire) sidestepping the agony ritual, attempting a wild embrace of humanity with arms wide open!... Read More Read More - [Bungee Jumping Jesus at Midweek](https://everyangel.org/midweek-3/): Today is midweek. The last two hours were dedicated to conversations between two friends. Three of us sat conveniently close for easy understanding. Music is always in the background at Starbucks. We told of recent experiences. I related the story of the license plate on the front bumper of my Kia. I purchased the plate years ago at a solitary country gas/mini-mart in Bahama, North Carolina. An old stone Methodist Church is across the intersection from the store. There’s little more than than that Mini-mart in the town. It is farm country, with a lot of woods. The plate just says... Read More Read More - [Fuel & Fire Ritual](https://everyangel.org/fuel-fire-ritual/): A postscript to what I wrote yesterday. Additional reflecting on my experience of time spent at Great Lakes Drag-a-way. A forthright form of competition involves two cars driven from exact standing alignment toward a finish line, 1,320 feet distant (a quarter mile) accelerating at the maximum given the engine and chassis design. The first to cross is “the winner.” Drag racing’s concept is rudimentary. Undeniably to arrive at a starting line with a car, to feel the potency of the engine, drivetrain and chassis, to compose the mind, to still the excitation of the body, allowing the flow of power from... Read More Read More - [Dancers](https://everyangel.org/dancers/): Saturday afternoon was spent strolling around the pit area at Great Lakes Drag-a-way at Union Grove, Wisconsin. For many years I’ve come here to renew my interest, to delight in the wild, marginally controllable experience of drag racing. Is it a sport, the competition between two purpose-built race cars, to “see” which accelerates to reach a finish first, a quarter mile distant from the starting line? Or is it a dynamic art-form, not unlike ballet? Perhaps it is not strange to compare ballet to the American tradition of discovering which car will achieve the apex of performance? Both entail a life-time’s... Read More Read More - [Saturday's Fool](https://everyangel.org/saturdays-fool/): Vs. 20 How much difference between yes and no? What difference between good and bad? What the people fear must be feared. O desolation! Not yet, not yet has it reached its limit! Everybody’s cheerful, cheerful as if at a party, or climbing a tower in springtime. And here I sit unmoved. clueless, like a child, a baby too young to smile. Forlorn, forlorn. Like a homeless person. Most people have plenty. I’m the one that’s poor, a fool right through. Ignorant, ignorant. Most people are so bright. I’m the one that’s dull. Most people are so keen. I don’t have... Read More Read More - [Abiding As A Body](https://everyangel.org/abiding-as-a-body/): Today is Friday. A twenty-four hour quantum of life, that consciousness apprehends in order to value, to honor and appreciate the varied relationships, the web that sustains and secures me, body/mind. Starbucks is alive; there’s a hubbub of voices, and a ceiling speaker mounted almost directly above me transmits in crystalline timbre, the lyric of The Flame, one of the pop hits by Cheap Trick. Certainly others begin their day here for the same reason that I do. Homo Sapiens are social by nature. That is, we’d not survive very long without the benefit of economic transactions, and so too with... Read More Read More - [Monster's Ball](https://everyangel.org/monsters-ball/): Midweek.  I add another project to the “to do” list contained in one of those tablets I learned to keep years ago when I carried day to day responsibility for a company. Write it down. Memory oscillates, – how much is lost to distraction? Keep a list. Or forget. The entire point is to identify the truly important, that is, work within my purview, “what’s on my plate now”.  “The world” is a jumble of intersecting relationships, like the collisions of propagating waves, by pebbles simultaneously tossed into still water. How much is the effect of suppressed emotion, of unprocessed rage,... Read More Read More - [One Way, One Power](https://everyangel.org/one-way-one-power/): Yesterday’s was a foreboding post. Monstrous policies, the acts continue apace. We ought not to think that they are not overtaking us in one way or another. Still, reality is complex. We simply are unable to focus upon more than a sliver of the onrush of events. All things are a mosaic of good and evil.  Why not offset yesterday’s highlight by featuring images that indicate delight? These photos come from our four day family vacation. Most are of grandchildren. But first a few lines from the ancient Chinese text, The Tao Te Ching. There is one Waythat is the proper... Read More Read More - [Contra Inanity](https://everyangel.org/platitudes/): We departed Coloma Michigan late Sunday morning. The same lake house has accommodated us for ten years. Grandchildren who were infants on our first visit now approach their teen years. The oldest is now 18 and the youngest is 6. On Saturday Laura and I, our daughter, her partner, and two of four grand kids visited Silver Beach at St. Joseph’s Michigan. St. Joes is only twenty minutes from where we were staying. Silver Beach has been a draw from the days of our grandparents. It was a recreational area in the 1930s featuring the Shadowland Ballroom that could host over... Read More Read More - [Life, A Blue Berry Recipe](https://everyangel.org/life-a-blue-berry-recipe/): For ten years we have come to Coloma Michigan on vacation. We always include a morning of blue berry picking. Year by year we pay a visit to Bumbleberry Farm in South Haven. The farm is own and operated by a family, which caters to families that enjoy the seasonal experience of picking. First, you purchase a white bucket, when filled holds five pounds of berries. Then you walk a short distance to the rows of berry bushes, labeled with the berry variety, one or more varieties ripe, open for picking. Berry picking is a meditative activity. Proceeding slowly between the... Read More Read More - [Nature And Freedom](https://everyangel.org/nature-and-freedom/): Vacation! These images were taken yesterday. We spent a hazy afternoon swimming in Lake Michigan. I enjoyed being at the lake. Honestly though, a persistent odor of burnt pine in the air was constant reminder of the terror represented by the administration occupying Washington, DC. At the moment circumstances are unpropitious for making overt resistance to the climate-warming-denying regime. Perhaps writing as I am able, is act of refusal to their program of “open season for maximum extraction” from parks and lands formerly set aside for the appreciation by future generations. So, we focused upon our grand daughter’s joy in the... Read More Read More - [Standing But Dead](https://everyangel.org/standing-but-dead/): Day one of vacation. Midsummer is always hot. Hot days are typical, and we have sun screen lotion so that we can safely spend time on the sand by the water. However what is atypical is the brown-yellow haze that mimics a cloudy overcast day. A map of the extent of forest wild fires shows fires burning from New York to Detroit, to Minneapolis. Rising temperatures cause desiccated debris on the forest floor to become ready tinder for lightning strikes, or a careless camper leaving a campfire partially extinguished. The upshot: air quality is poor, and if you have respiratory concerns... Read More Read More - [Altar Call](https://everyangel.org/altar-call/): We are taking a few days, a “time out” from the routine, only and hour and a half drive to Coloma, Michigan. Somehow being on the other side of Lake Michigan sufficiently rotates the axis of reality for the family, – change of rhythm, staying together in the big lake house, just a short walk from the beach. Albeit short – the walk evokes a feeling of caution. A steep stairway descends a ravine surrounded by a Jurassic Park-like forest. A further note:  sunset occurs on the far side of the lake here! We’ve made a ritual as it happens, on... Read More Read More - [In Praise Of Artists](https://everyangel.org/in-praise-of-artists/): Just yesterday Laura and I accepted an invitation to help paint a mural which is to be on permanent display on Batavia’s Peace Bridge which spans the Fox River. The park district representative with responsibility for the project mentioned that the mural is expected to last for 20 years or more of display season in and season out. I felt honored to have a small part with the townspeople to place color on the large panels. The panels looked to be about 4 ft by 8 ft, the outlines of the features printed on the surface, numbered to coincide with containers... Read More Read More - [Cold, Broken - Part II](https://everyangel.org/cold-broken-part-ii/): Monday, in midsummer! The day manifests as magnificent, an idyllic copy of a memory from childhood. I recall a summer’s day, maybe I was five or six and not yet allowed to leave the yard. On that day the dew moistened grass felt so delicious to my bare feet. I remember delight on the swing, going as high as I could manage, and viewing the dark woods at the far edge of a neighbor’s yard. As an older kid, I would spend years exploring those woods, – the grove of bamboo growing at the head waters of the creek. That creek... Read More Read More - [Cold, Broken](https://everyangel.org/cold-broken/): Sunday, and summertime is unusually busy. Who doesn’t desire to fill warm days with as much outdoor activity as possible… As it happened my morning session at Starbucks was occupied with conversation with friends. It was time well spent, even without the writing. No one is alone in the madcap adventure of life, unless he/she chooses to be. Without assistance from others, we’d be stuck in a rut. I mean the endless loop of attitudes and habits, some ramshackle and even long practiced for years. Habits of so long ago that I have no idea where or when I picked “that”... Read More Read More - [The Human Way](https://everyangel.org/the-human-way/): v. 77 The Way of Heavenis like a bow bent to shoot:its top end is brought down,its lower end raised up.It brings the high down,lifts the low,takes from those who have,gives to those who have not. Such is the Way of Heaven,taking from people who have,giving to people who have not.           Not so the human way:           it takes from those who have not           to fill up those who have.Who has enough to fill up everybody?Only those who have the Way. So the wisedo without claiming,achieve without asserting,wishing not to... Read More Read More - [Who or What Speaks?](https://everyangel.org/our-hard-god/): v. 76 Living people are soft and tender.      Corpses are hard and stiff. The ten thousand things, the living grass, the trees, are soft, pliant.      Dead, they’re dry and brittle. So hardness and stiffness go with death; tenderness, softness, go with life. And the hard sword fails, the stiff tree’s felled. The hard and great go under. The soft and weak stay up. Tao Te Ching by Lao Tsu, trans. Ursula K. Le Guin Smack down ! Gunfight at high noon! Yesterday a group of us came to the Geneva Public Library in late afternoon. Twice per... Read More Read More - [Expectation](https://everyangel.org/expectation/): There is a “why” to everything. To focus upon a fold-point of experience is signaled by “because” in the normal course of conversation. Also, you could say this mirrors the form of logic, an “if”… “then” syllogism of cause and effect. Is this what is meant by reason? I’ll concede that such is a very big dimension of what is meant by “reason”.  Clearly reason is limited though. Human beings do not all subscribe to the same “issue” of reason. Many varieties of reason abound, due to the many forms-of-life that past events, geography, climate, etc., have enframed for us. What... Read More Read More - [Be Unafraid](https://everyangel.org/be-unafraid/): v. 69 The expert in warfare says: Rather than dare make the attack I’d take the attack; rather than dare advance an inch I’d retreat a foot. It’s called marching without marching, rolling up your sleeves without flexing your muscles, being armed without weapons, giving the attacker no opponent. Nothing’s worse than attacking what yields. To attack what yields is to throw away the prize. So, when matched armies meet, the one who comes to grief is the victor. Tao Te Ching by Lao Tsu, trans. by Usula K. Le Guin Can you imagine a more contrarian prose-poem? The Tao Te... Read More Read More - [Vertigo](https://everyangel.org/vertigo-4/): v. 64 It’s easy to keep hold of what hasn’t stirred, easy to plan what hasn’t occurred. It’s easy to shatter delicate things, easy to scatter little things. Do things before they happen. Get them straight before they get mixed up. The tree you can’t reach your arms around grew from a tiny seedling. The nine-story tower rises from a heap of clay. The ten-thousand-mile journey begins beneath your foot. Do, and do wrong; Hold on, and lose. Not doing, the wise soul doesn’t do it wrong, and not holding on, doesn’t lose it. (In all their undertakings, it’s just as... Read More Read More - [Gathering Spirit](https://everyangel.org/gathering-spirit/): It is Monday morning. The storms of the holiday weekend are a memory (unless you suffered rising water, or splintered trees). Still the first day of a work week is a beginning, and beginnings are worth attending to. One of the prose poems of the Tao Te Ching suggest as much. Here it is. The last two lines deliver the zinger. Verse 59 In looking after your life and following the way, gather spirit Gather spirit early, and so redouble power, and so become invulnerable. Invulnerable, unlimited, you can do what you like with material things. But only if you hold... Read More Read More - [A Day After](https://everyangel.org/the-day-after-2/): Sunday, the day after the flood.  On July 4th we attempted a short road trip to Ottowa, Illinois. Ottowa is a small river town. It features The Lone Buffalo by Tangled Roots Brewing Company, an excellent gastro pub. The restaurant is spacious, and the menu is superior. No doubt we are not the only ones enticed to return to Ottowa by this business. Also there is Washington Square Park where a Lincoln – Douglass debate took place on August 21st 1858. We always find a reading bench near one of the monuments memorializing this verbal contestation between the two men –... Read More Read More - [Rootedness](https://everyangel.org/rootedness/): Saturday. A day begins without oppressive humidity which invites outdoor activity. A promise of a pleasant and congenial session for the Batavia Farmer’s Market. Summertime’s weekly opportunity to gather with others on N. River Street parallel to the river is the counterpart to the Agora, a public square where commerce, where the forming of public opinion took place in the Athens of Pericles. Certainly thereafter where humans have lived, this has been so. A link to our past, our rootedness as social, as convivial animals, – entirely natural. And “that” harmonizes with a sky, with the river that flows so majestically,... Read More Read More - [About Luck](https://everyangel.org/friday-is-for-murder-some-water-and-racing/): Friday is supposed to be an unlucky day. Was not Judas the thirteenth guest at the finale dinner party? Thursday evening was the time for that gala. The next day, was anything but “good”. Never be beguiled by convention, a tagline foisted upon unsuspecting by a faceless, and self-interested priest-craft. Because it’s old does not make it true. “Good Friday” – a grotesque, tasteless phrase. Judicial murder was not out of the ordinary, still isn’t today. A patina of devotion does not alleviate a scintilla of the trauma, if you are in the crosshairs… What you saw is exactly what you... Read More Read More - [Dancing Like A Fool](https://everyangel.org/dancing-like-a-food/): Thursday at Starbucks, seven baristas, each is performing his/her task. To my eye, the vibe received, a choreograph of patterns purrs. Parked vehicles move in turn to the open drive-up window. A beverage with breakfast item ordered just a few minutes before is handed through the window to the customer. This is an effortless alliance, a display of yin/yang the concealed light-speed efficiency of internet and binary programming, in concert with human judgment, the undefinable exercise of judgment to compose the elements of a beverage “just right”, to eye and to palate. Thereby “world”, a vibrating dance of opposites, the giving... Read More Read More - [Small Matters](https://everyangel.org/a-small-matter/): The Great Way runs to left, to right, the ten thousand things depending on it, living on it, accepted by it. Doing its work, it goes unnamed. Clothing and feeding the ten thousand things, it lays no claim on them and asks nothing of them. Call it a small matter. The ten thousand things return to it, though it lays no claim on them. Call it great. So the wise soul without great doings achieves greatness. Tao Te Ching by Lao Tsu, verse 34, rendition Ursula K. Le Guin I cannot describe a rationale for featuring this song. Intuition suggests the... Read More Read More - [Like An Angel Sighing](https://everyangel.org/like-an-angel-sighing/): There is one Way that is the proper course of all that lives and from which all things flow and one Power that animates and perfects all things, and they together are at one and the same time the dynamisms of nature, of practical endeavor, of social and political life, and of spiritual truth. -David Bentley Hart Summer time makes a splendid entrance, as if appearing at the top of a wide, curved staircase, descending to a grand ballroom, — long days filled with sunlight to the nourishment of all vegetative life, and mammals too, and avian life, all busied with... Read More Read More - [We Sail On](https://everyangel.org/we-sail-on/): Divine Ya Ya. The phrase appeals to me! There’s thunder and lightning in that phrase! I completed Rob Brezsny’s email on the topic of fate. Read his post: Fate Bait click here. (Brezsny used the phrase, Divine Ya Ya.) Fate is an interpretation of life as subservient to the effect of prior causes… A crude way of putting it would be: you do what your father done. That’s fate, a grim prospect indeed. Let’s think about that. Thinking, formulating strings of ideas, the progression of thought requires words, symbols that by shared agreement serve as pointers to a segment of experience.... Read More Read More - [Tao Te Ching](https://everyangel.org/tao-te-ching/): I have agreed to facilitate a course of discussion about the Tao. Tao is an ancient Chinese concept of life as a way, a journey. Whereas this has interested me for some time, I am eager to discuss Lao Tsu’s verses with other adults. A discussion is sure to be open-ended. The text, being some two thousand five hundred years old is subject to a wide range of interpretation. I do not read ancient Chinese so I rely upon the work of those who do. I suppose I’ve purchased as many as four translations at this juncture as each affords opportunity... Read More Read More - [Let's Open The Wine](https://everyangel.org/lets-open-the-wine/): Saturday. What will the day bring? I have a vague notion. What is possible? Who will circumstance bring my way? What will we fashion by means of words, and by the visceral body language of encounter? Shall we join the dance! A song to energize the way for us. Jesse by Carly Simon.  Oh mother, say a prayer for meJesse’s back in town, it won’t be easyDon’t let him near meDon’t let him touch meDon’t let him please me Jesse, I won’t cut fresh flowers for you, noJesse, I won’t make the wine cold for you, noJesse, I won’t change the... Read More Read More - [Monster Resistance](https://everyangel.org/monster-resistance/): Friday, the last day of the work week. I a retired old guy, am reluctant to bid farewell to a past and youthful time. Psychologically my routine is patterned by a world-of-work which I suffered, and enjoyed too, for over 40 years. Work continues to be the terrain of my life, while I no longer anticipate a paycheck. Work is important for other reasons. Fridays are looked forward to with gratitude. I’ve survived another week. I mean days of responsibility, of fulfilling my role in this society, that in part, – I helped to create. I sat with a few friends... Read More Read More - [Wither Morality](https://everyangel.org/wither-morality/): Mid afternoon Thursday and I hope to find precise words to describe my latest thoughts about morality. Humans are inordinately concerned with morality. We are the most complicated of all mammals. Wolves, otters, and elephants have a species appropriate manner of associating. A wolf learns to recognize the alpha, to give that male “leader” deference. Perhaps there is a hierarchical reciprocity within an elephant herd. Anyone living in proximity to those creatures would know. Propriety: I am not alone and morality matters. Later today I expect to participate with a group of friends to discuss an essay by a City University... Read More Read More - [Red or Blue Pill?](https://everyangel.org/red-or-blue-pill/): Wednesday comes as another “bonus” day. To be alive, in order to self-reflect is a miracle, an improbable event. As the years click by, I attempt to assess the way I have come, to reflect upon those I have known and how circumstances have constrained us, and do so even now. Many have been taken in another direction by the current of surrounding circumstance. Some have left. I mean to say have died. How much is responsive, as if there’s someone behind the wheel, grasping some mechanism that “makes a difference”… Might I have played my hand differently in times past?... Read More Read More - [Louisville Pride Part 2](https://everyangel.org/louisville-pride-part-2/): More remains to be said about the Kentuckiana Pride celebration event. In the interest of disclosure, I am retired, a “straight” male, and a recovering Christian fundamentalist. That last element still has weight, even after all of these years. My upbringing is still in view even as in a rear-view mirror. Our day was spent at the festival, – a few acres occupied by vendors representing local “mom and pop” businesses, nonprofit organizations promoting a cause, national corporations, food trucks, and several bar concessions to expedite the purchase of libation, alcoholic and alcohol free, etc., etc.. No doubt you can imagine... Read More Read More - [Louisville Pride Part 1](https://everyangel.org/louisville-pride/): After returning to home-base in the Mid-West I now am able to consider the weekend that we spent in Louisville, Kentucky. Our family has visited Louisville a number of times to be with old friends who reside there. Also, we support the recognition of the LGBTQ+ community for Pride month in June. Louisville features a delightful Pride parade and a festival which follows. The festival is a short walk from downtown by the Ohio River. I ponder at some length the reasons I am drawn to the gay community. Family members and friends are members of that community. Over the years... Read More Read More - [Sunday Morning in Louisville](https://everyangel.org/sunday-morning-in-louisville/): Sunday morning is relatively quiet at the Marriott Bonvoy where we are staying. Louisville is in the South. Sunday is a traditional “day of rest” in the South. This is a reflection of the fundamentalist Christian history of the area. English Protestantism left a deep mark in this part of the country. I am referring to Calvinist theology, the hard-edged attitudes of our ancestors who regarded the Bible (as understood by the pastor) the ultimate authority. Sunday was to be sequestered from commercial activity, a day for resting, for pious reflection, for joining one’s neighbors at the house of worship. If... Read More Read More - [Louisville Zoo](https://everyangel.org/louisville-zoo/): Our family is in Louisville Ky for a long weekend. We have memories of Louisville, since our youngest daughter attended college at a Kentucky school, and resided for a few years in Louisville. Louisville is a medium sized city on the southern side of the Ohio river. Historically Kentucky is a border state, divided in loyalty during the terrible four years of the Civil War in 1861. That seems so long ago. In fact, that was not so long ago when one considers that the issue between two ways of life is still very much in play in our nation. We... Read More Read More - [Stopping & Thinking](https://everyangel.org/stopping-thinking/): Stop! Stop! Think for a moment. Light that left a distant star before your ancestors had language, only now is arriving before your eyes. The planet hurtles around our star at 67,000 miles per hour while I sit here drinking my hot beverage. You and I are living at a time when so many things are changing, empires wobble, old certainties dissolve, new visions are being born in many imaginations. You and I are witnesses. If you want, you can participate. Your body breathes 25,000 times a day. The body converts bread and apples into thoughts and laughter. You are a... Read More Read More - [The Horizon](https://everyangel.org/the-horizon/): But you’ve gotta make your own kind of musicSing your own special songMake your own kind of musicEven if nobody else sings along. Once more lyric and melody by The Mama’s and the Pappa’s emanated above us at Starbucks. The voice of Cass Eliot was arresting. We interrupted our conversation to agree how much we liked the song. The song is delivered with heart. No doubt for Eliot the simple and direct lyric, the melody conveys a durable truth. The quest for authenticity though difficult, is a journey worth taking. At times by serendipity we encounter someone with whom in conversation... Read More Read More - [Consciousness](https://everyangel.org/consciousness/): Monday arrives in splendor of sunlight. I discovered a very tiny sprouting “volunteer” cucumber plant in my garden. The diminutive life survived months of winter to sprout on occasion of warm sunlight and spring rains. I rescued the seedling for transfer to a water filled vase. It’s about one inch in length. This will be for Violet. Our grand daughter loves growing seedlings in her room. Someday perhaps she will decide that she wants to become a microbiologists… I cannot imagine a more interesting profession. A life dedicated to study tiny life-forms, perhaps to discover the nature of vegetative, of plant-consciousness.... Read More Read More - [In The Cage](https://everyangel.org/in-the-cage/): A gray and rain-soaked Sunday morning, I take sip after sip of hot coffee to dispel a sense of funk. Until late in Saturday evening my attention was focused upon family related responsibility, the privilege of celebrating graduation of a grandson from high school. This is the milestone-dividing line between childhood and adulthood. Learning as an adult begins after high school. There the journey begins. A celebratory event with food, company with kin, good friends, and neighbors was held in the backyard of my son and his wife. I could not have added anything more to the conversations, the lives shared... Read More Read More - [We Resist](https://everyangel.org/continuing-the-struggle/): Saturday arrives. Brilliant with sunlight, a retention pond just outside Starbucks is full with recent rain, the surface dances white light, a plate of diamonds. Today stands to be a full one. The “big event” will be the pig-roast late in the day. A family member (who constructed the roaster over 20 years ago), supervised the roast over night. I assume our pig lived well, – plenty of food and sufficient shelter, without the existential angst about “the meaning of life.” The image is of my son holding the pig… We celebrate our grandson who graduated from Wheaton North High School,... Read More Read More - [No One Dared](https://everyangel.org/no-one-dared/): …we understand our situationas one of high tragedy,alone in a silent universe,without intrinsic meaning,condemned to create value. But at a later moment, the same doctrine, by its own inherent bent,yields a flattened world,in which there aren’t very meaningful choicesbecause there aren’t any crucial issues. The Ethics of Authenticity by Charles Taylor, The Slide to Subjectivism p. 68 Our flattened world! What of a world that I and others cannot (will not) recognize as “world”? Without a sky-god for and to whom one dedicates a life, or constructs a cathedral, or civilizes simple folk by moral example, by the glamor of market... Read More Read More - [Born Again](https://everyangel.org/born-again/): …authenticity too comes to be understood, as its own goal. It is born, out of a shift in the center of gravity of the moral demand on us: self-truth and self-wholeness are seen more and more not as means to be moral, as independently defined, but as something valuable for their own sake. …the aesthetic wholeness is an independent goal, with its own telos, its own form of goodness and satisfaction. The Ethics of Authenticity by Charles Taylor, The Slide to Subjectivism p. 65 The quoted lines describe a sea change of outlook for many. Not everyone of course is included.... Read More Read More - [Romance & Recognition](https://everyangel.org/romance-recognition/): …this culture puts a great emphasis on relationships in the intimate sphere, especially love relationships. These are seen as the prime loci of self-exploration and self-discovery and among the most important forms of self-fulfillment. This view reflects the continuation in modern culture of a trend that is now centuries old and that places the center of gravity of the good life not in some higher sphere but in what I want to call “ordinary life,” that is, the life of production and family, of work and love. Yet it also reflects something else that is important here: the acknowledgement that our... Read More Read More - [Authentic or Fool's Gold](https://everyangel.org/authenticity-or-fools-gold/): Continuing to consider what I just finished reading in The Ethics of Authenticity by Charles Taylor. My identity, this awareness of agency that I entertain, – can be described as self-creation, an arduous project of construction. The American Psychological Association writes: self-formation as authenticity is the active, intentional process of shaping your identity based on your own values, rather than conforming go societal expectations. The concept comes from the work of Jean-Paul Sartre and Martin Heidegger. There is no essential self. Authenticity is the effect of choices which I make, commitments that I sustain over time. I weave the idiosyncratic values of... Read More Read More - [Not Enough](https://everyangel.org/not-enough/): Sunday arrives… Perhaps a ritual ought to be instituted for greeting a sunrise, a simple and brief gesture, maybe a poem to recognize waking as a beginning, another creation of ourselves, of the world. Sunlight fuels everything. Change is what we mean by the dance of energy, the thermodynamic flow. Would I enjoy earning a degree in engineering school to better understand the science, the calculus language of this effect? I would! But that is an idle speculation, only to be held in the imagination. I have lived as I have lived. There’s no reason for me to believe there’s to... Read More Read More - [La Lotta Continua](https://everyangel.org/la-lotta-continua/): Saturday is yet another gift. Sunshine, mild and comfortable outside. A day of rain would be helpful for vegetation, including vegetables. No matter that everyone is aware of such matters, still I have a background of concern for growing things, in particular those in my backyard.  I just finished reading The Ethics of Authenticity by Charles Taylor published in 1991. These words sum up Taylor’s assessment, what is called for in our time, if the slide toward a raw instrumentalism, the atomistic shattering of solidarity with others – is to be turned. What our situation seems to call foris a complex,... Read More Read More - [Dancing With Myself](https://everyangel.org/dancing-with-myself/): At last Friday is here. Retired, five or so years are in the rear view mirror, I only have a memory of deadlines, of moral and financial and administrative accountability with co-workers and customers. That was my life. All is change, and everything, no exceptions has its season. All is now, – a flow of humankind, transmission of generations beyond the reach of memory to our present situation. And what is this season where I now find myself along with you? As the 17th century poet John Donne eloquently expressed: No man is an island, Entire of itself; Every man is... Read More Read More - [Flattened World](https://everyangel.org/flattened-world/): Another chapter from Charles Taylor’s The Ethics of Authenticity. The chapter is entitled The Slide To Subjectivism. He writes at length about the quest for a true self, when there is no horizon of meaning, (no divinely sanctioned king, or gods/God on high authorizing history as having a point, etc..) Perhaps you can get the drift of the chapter. When the traditional sources, the ground-of-being for countless generations that came before us, has been eroded, shown to be a paste-up, what then? Join a majority of your fellows to make choice after choice anticipating the feelings one expects to have? To flip... Read More Read More - [The Crucible](https://everyangel.org/the-crucible/): Monday is another gift of pleasant weather and sunlight. I cannot be certain of what the day holds for me, though I have the usual short list of matters to be addressed. With good fortune each dimension, the work will be received as an opportunity to “do some good.” It’s as if the universe smiles on occasion that circumstances are harmonious with my effort. Let’s see what develops. Well I am back again at Starbucks. A four hour interlude of pouring over two Excel sheets, since I needed to add records that I had somehow omitted with my initial attempt. Friends... Read More Read More ## Pages - [More About Me](https://everyangel.org/more-about-me/): The Rilke heading for the home page, is a fragment from the Duino Elegies. Every angel… Angel is a metaphor that indicates a divine messenger. To be fair the term sometimes is used as an address of endearment for a partner or a child. Meanings vary according to use. Still even when used ‘lightly’ as a term of endearment, the idea is worth exploration, to consider the origin, its literary uses. A dawn of insight about yourself, or receipt of an inspired solution to a vexing problem often comes as a divine-like illumination. “Every angel is terrifying” wrote Rilke. Obvious correct... Read More Read More - [Evolving Just A Little](https://everyangel.org/): The beautifulis nothing but the beginningof the terrible that we still barely endure,and we admire it sobecause it serenely disdainsto destroy us. — First Elegy by Rilke If you’d like to know more about me CLICK HERE ## Optional - [Agent (MCP protocol)](websites-agents.hostinger.com/everyangel.org/mcp) [comment]: # (Generated by Hostinger Tools Plugin)