Hierarchy in School

Back to reading Derrick Jensen's "Walking on Water" with my teenage son this morning. I'm glad that I got to read the paragraph below to him. I wish all schools (I know, I know, children don't need schooling. But we're stuck in the myth of Bottom-Line Economics for now) had this in their vision statement. The world would be a different place. And it would've made getting out of bed a whole hell of a lot easier for the majority of my mornings from ages 4 to 18.

"We perceive the entire hierarchy in school exactly opposite to how it really is. You're not here for me, and I'm not here for my supervisor. My supervisor is here to help me, the administrators are here to help him, all the way down the line. 'You' are the reason we're all here. What do you want to do?" (Pg. 96)

Who Ya Gonna Serve?

The final authority in this culture is its technics and not the health of the land base. We serve the former before the latter. It's pretty fucking scary.

“My thesis, to put it bluntly, is that from late Neolithic times in the Near East , right down to our own day, two technologies have recurrently existed side by side: one authoritarian, the other democratic, the first system-centered, immensely powerful, but inherently unstable, the other [hu]man-centered, relatively weak, but resourceful and durable. If I am right, we are now rapidly approaching a point at which, unless we radically alter our present course, our surviving democratic technics will be completely suppressed or supplanted, so that every residual autonomy will be wiped out, or will be permitted only as a playful device of government, like national balloting for already chosen leaders in totalitarian countries.”--Lewis Mumford

Living Sincerely

Lately, our oldest son (He's 14) has been spending a lot of time in the woods lighting campfires, shooting his homemade bow, watching the birds, climbing trees, etc. So while we took a break from doing firewood I felt inspired to pull down "The Winged Life: The Poetic Voice of Henry David Thoreau," by Robert Bly. Prior to me doing this we were talking about how Thoreau had changed his name from David Henry to Henry David. I wanted to find the passage where Bly talks about the name change but like usual I was sidetracked and read this passage to him instead. It's about what it means for a human being to "live sincerely." I hope he remembers it in times of need.

"To live sincerely is to live your own life, not your father's life or your mother's life or your neighbors life; to spend soul on large concerns, not to waste your life on your neighbor's life; not to waste your life as a kind of human ant carrying around small burdens; and finally, to live sincerely is to 'live deep and suck out all the marrow of life,' as Thoreau declares in "Walden." (Pg.25)

I hope I remember it in times of need.

Flaubert on Order

I wrote down this quote by Flaubert this morning. It was buried in this week's Sports Illustrated article about Detroit Lion's wide receiver Calvin Johnson's drive to become the best wide receiver the NFL has ever seen.

"Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work."

Heraclitus on a Sunday Morning

Some Heraclitus upon my return from the deer stand on this Sunday morning:

What is not yet known
those blinded by bad faith
can never learn-- Heraclitus, pg. 81, Fragments

Democracy Doesn't Last Long

"Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There was never a democracy that did not commit suicide."--John Adams, 2nd President of The United States.

We're in for a long ride...

Why I'm Here

Two decades ago I moved up to northwestern Wisconsin. Right before I left a friend of mine said, "What the hell you moving up there for? There is nothing up there." There are moments when I wonder why I'm still here. As James Hillman has said, we never really know why. But I'm going to speculate as to why anyway. The answer might be found in this quote by Lewis Mumford: "Every generation revolts against its fathers and makes friends with its grandfathers." Both of my grandfathers grew up on farms in northern Wisconsin. I was nourished by stories from northern Wisconsin since I can remember.

Hope and Hopelessness

"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise." (F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up)

Building Things That Fall Apart

It never fails, ever since we've started building with cordwood and other materials on our place this philosophy and image comes to mind. It also has kept me from strangling my kids.

"In the village, people used to build their houses out of traditional materials, using no iron or lumber or nails, but the houses were magnificent. Many were sewn together out of bark and fiber. Like the house of the body, the house that a person sleeps in must be very beautiful and sturdy, but not so sturdy that it won’t fall apart after a while. If your house doesn’t fall apart, then there will be no reason to renew it. And it is this renewability that makes something valuable. The maintenance gives it meaning.

"The secret of village togetherness and happiness has always been the generosity of the people, but the key to that generosity is inefficiency and decay. Because our village huts were not built to last very long, they had to be regularly renewed. To do this, villagers came together, at least once a year, to work on somebody’s hut. When your house was falling down, you invited all the folks over. The little kids ran around messing up what everybody was doing. The young women brought the water. The young men carried the stones. The older men told everybody what to do, and the older women told the older men that they weren’t doing it right. Once the house was back together again, everyone ate together, praised the house, laughed, and cried. In a few days, they moved on to the next house. In this way, each family’s place in the village was reestablished and remembered. This is how it always was.

"Then the missionaries and the businessmen and the politicians brought in tin and lumber and sturdy houses. Now the houses last, but the relationships don’t."--Martin Prechtel in The Sun Magazine

Robert Sund's Mother

What Robert Sund's mother told him:
"Without love of earth
There is no love of Heaven."

(Thank you to George Draffan over at NaturalAwareness for sharing this.)

Getting Old

This 10 minute video is well worth the time it takes to watch. It helped me understand my grandparents (I lived with them for 5 years). It also helped me realize that aging is no accident and with it comes a level of vitality if one has the right perspective.

What Family Is

Thank you to James Hillman for helping me understand what family is instead of what it ought to be.

"The measure of a family's magnanimity is not what it gives to charity but rather its capacity to shelter the shadows of its members." [Pg.199, A Blue Fire]

The desire to win and Lombardi

Vince Lombardi is on my mind today. I learned today from author Phil Cousineau that Lombardi is didn't say "Winning isn't everything but the only thing," but "The effort to win is everything." The latter having much more to do with the desire to excel.

Our Name

"No one knows our name until our last breath goes out."--Rumi

Happiness Happens

"Robert Johnson wrote that the word happiness comes from to happen. Our happiness is what happens. That's different from the Declaration of Independence, which states that each person has the right to pursue happiness, meaning that if we don't have it we have a right to go after it. But Johnson says that as soon as we pursue it, we lose it." -- Jeff Bridges, Pg.33, The Dude and The Zen Master

This isn't the first time I've come across this line of thinking. James Hillman has said the right to pursue happiness should be taken right out of the Declaration of Independence.

A Man After My Heart

"I said we were addicted to innocence, we're also addicted to newness. Every bloody thing in America has to be new, why?...Why are we talking about emergence, evolution...Why are we talking about what the hell's coming, let's face that right off the bat. We know what's here, and it's pretty bloody serious...we are in a very serious destructive phase, and it doesn't do us any good to be wishful and hopeful, it does us a lot more good to be faithful to what is, what really is, and to struggle with it."-- James Hillman in a 2005 debate with Deepak Chopra

Facts and Essences

"He who begins with facts will never arrive at essences." --Jean Paul Sartre

Inspired by The Theory of Truth

I found myself inspired by this small excerpt out of The Theory of Truth, by Robinson Jeffers.

Because only
tormented persons want truth.
Man is an animal like other animals, wants food and success and women, not truth. Only if the mind
Tortured by some interior tension has despaired of happiness:
then it hates its life-cage and seeks further,
And finds, if it is powerful enough. But instantly the private
agony that made the search
Muddles the finding.--Robinson Jeffers

Who Cares About Gays, Guns or Abortions.

Forget about gays, guns and abortions for a minute and ask whether or not our actions are fostering life.

The Law of Life

Here’s a more general statement of the law as it’s followed by goats: "If your resources are of doubtful sufficiency for two offspring, then you’re better off giving ALL TO ONE than giving HALF TO EACH.” Among goats, it’s the mother who enforces this law.

Among eagles (and many other bird species) the law is similar, but it's not enforced by the mother. The female eagle will typically produce two eggs a few days apart, which is naturally a better survival policy than producing a single egg. It's when the second egg hatches that the law comes into effect, and it's the first-born chick who enforces it. The law is: "Kill the newcomer," which it does by pecking or starving the second-born to death. By living through the first few days, the first-born has a survival value that is PROVEN. The survival value of second-born is UNPROVEN and so it must not be allowed to reduce the first-born's resources. (If the first-born DOES NOT survive the first few days, then the second-born will be unharmed and allowed to have its own chance to live on.)

In lions and bears, females will often abandon a litter that has only one survivor—even if this one survivor is in perfect health. This isn’t "good for the species" in any way. Rather, it’s good for the individual’s lifetime reproductive success. Her representation in the gene pool will definitely improve if she invests exclusively in litters LARGER THAN ONE.--Daniel Quinn

Fishing and Essence

Henry David Thoreau once said, “The greatest tragedy in life is to spend your whole life fishing only to discover that it was not fish you were after.” Carl Jung, I think, was getting at the same thing by saying, "In the final analysis, we count for something only because of the essential we embody, and if we do not embody that, life is wasted."

I remember hearing someone say that Carl Jung thought that this is what the second half of life was about. James Hillman didn't think so. He thought it could be realized earlier (The Souls Code describes this well), especially in adolesence. It just takes the right person to see that fish or essence.