Cold Again

It didn't get much above zero again today. I had -20 on my thermometer at 5AM. I'm wondering if this past December has been one of the coldest we've experienced in northwestern Wisconsin. And with the consistent cold temperatures I found myself going back through author Timothy Scott Bennett's Facebook updates to find where he talked about his experience with the cold and the stories he tells himself about it. With a little persistence I found it. It was a pleasure to read again before I get ready to go out for another run in below zero temperatures.

TSB's update from 12/17: "Isn't it amazing? I get up and it's 4° F below and still there are gulls in the sky, still there are crows looking for handouts, still there are deer stepping quietly across the driveway trying not to wake anyone. How do they do it, I won...der, and why can't I? Over the years, I've schooled myself to walk barefoot on the ground, and can now easily do so when it's 15-20°F. I go out without coat and hat for as long as I can, and let the wind rip right through me. It seems that story and fear and culture and belief are as much a factor as anything else, when it comes to our experience of cold. So I work at that level, knowing that I won't always be able to control my external circumstances, knowing that the stories inside of me will determine my experience just as much as any outside force, knowing that if I can meet things like cold, hunger, and discomfort without fear and judgment that that will give me an edge, knowing that Nietzsche was right about what makes me stronger. In the end, it's my resistance to what's so - whether it be cold, heat, biting ants, or feelings of anger or grief- that causes me all of my suffering. The story 'this should not be' creates so much of my upset. And it's a silly story, don't you think, as anything that "should not be" surely "is" already. The cold surely "is." And I think the gulls and crows and deers just take it as such, with no thought of personal punishment, no offense, no inner mumbling of 'this should not be.' Thank you, teachers."

The Insanity Inside

Working my way through All of the Above this morning. This excerpt really resonates:

"Most of us are not insane, if you define the word in terms of brain dysfunction and bad chemicals. You're right about that. But if we're not mentally ill, Mrs. President, would you agree that we're certainly culturally ill? Spiritually ill? Wouldn't sanity mean being consciously connected to reality, to what's actually so? And if we start from there, how should we then regard our society? Our culture tells us that we can fix every problem and control every outcome, even though we can see, if we just look, that most of our solutions simply lead to more problems. Our culture tells us that we will find true happiness through the things we own, that the material world is all there is, and that the rest of the planet is here merely to serve as our resource. Yet we know in our hearts that money does not, and has not, bought us true happinness and fullfillment, only comfort."

As Obie spoke, his voice grew louder, and his eyes glinted, like a televangelist reaching the high point of sermon.

"In this physical plane, Mrs. President, it's the soil and water and forests and sky and plants and animals upon which our very lives ultimately depend. The structures of civilization cannot exist without those things. And yet we live inside of those structures - houses, offices, stores, factories, cars, roads, subdivisions, cities, whatever - and those structures keep most of us almost totally disconnected from the real world that serves as their foundation. So you might begin to see the benefit of just sitting for a while with the notion that not only is this culture not in touch with reality, but that this insantiy lives inside of you." Pg.293, All of the Above

A Good Morning So Far

Behaved myself this morning. Woke up and sat zazen for a half-n-hour. Afterwards pulled out the notebook and journaled, read some of Timothy Scott Bennett's All of the Above and then reread the section about fathering out of James Hillman's The Souls Code. As a result of waiting a couple of hours to get on the internet I feel less overwhelmed and rushed. And, of course, I found a dandy of a quote by James Hillman about fathering and parenting.

"When your child becomes the reason for your life, you have abandoned the invisible reason you are here. And the reason you are here as an adult, as a citizen, as a parent? To make a world receptive to the daimon. To set the civilization straight so that a child can grow down into it and its daimon can have a life. This is the parenting task. To carry out this task for the daimon of your child you must bear witness first to your own." [The Souls Code, Pg. 85]

A Bit Wiser, Atleast I Thought

I'm still working my through All of the Above. The other day at the dinner table I attempted to explain to my family how Dwight Eisenhower was the first president in our nation's history to have to deal with aliens. And, of course, how the aliens didn't like Kennedy so they had to got rid of him.

Their response to my newly gained insights was: You can't believe everything you read in a book!

Purpose

Off to carry mail for the United States Post Office again today. I don't think I've mentioned this yet but I'm a substitute rural mail carrier. Which means I work an average of one day a year carrying mail. Given our lifestyle that's about enough for me.

Planted thirty-five red pine and an apple tree over the weekend. It always feels good to plant a few trees in the spring. Now the work begins trying to keep them alive through the summer dry spells.

Yesterday I got the chance to sit down and read close to 50 pages in All of the Above. I bookmarked a page so I could write down a quote(I usually do this but never write down the quote. Then I end up pulling books off the shelf looking for the quote that never got written down.)that I think would have went well with yesterday's post.

"It's the last thing he would have expected, but there it was. For the first time in a long time, Cole felt fully alive, as if the state trooper had given him a blessing instead of a fright. He could still feel the Earth moving majestically beneath him. And he could imagine himself standing straight and true on this slowly-spinning ground, as if, finally, finally, he belonged here. There were huge forces at work all around him: spinning underneath, flitting overhead, stirring deep inside. There was some vast story being enacted in the universe. He understood very little of it and he was scared as hell. But he was also needed. He was involved. He had a role. His actions now mattered in a way they never had before. Like a pupal moth beginning to form it's wings, Cole could feel the first hints of some new purpose he might serve in the wider world, some grander meaning he might discover beyond the caretaking of his family. Rather than finding the right script to follow before he could live his life, Cole now found himself thrust onstage with no script at all."--Timothy Scott Bennett, Pg.140, All of the Above

Although I wasn't married after I had read Ishmael, most of the paragraph describes how I felt. There really was no script to follow, and that felt odd but good. It still does.

Shipwrecked

It's been a couple of days since I've watched The River of Vision - On the Works of Daniel Quinn, Author of Ishmael. It's got me thinking about the effects of reading Ishmael. One thing that I think happened to me after I read Ishmael is that I became one of the shipwrecked. Ortega y Gasset once said:

"The [person] with the clear head is the [person] who frees himself from all fantastic 'ideas' and looks life in the face....Instinctively, as do the shipwrecked, he looks round for something to which to cling, and that tragic, ruthless glance, absolutely sincere, because it is a question of his salvation, will cause him to bring order into the chaos of his life. These are the only geniune ideas; the ideas of the shipwrecked. All the rest rhetoric, posturing, farce...."

Come to think of it, right now I would say that I was shipwrecked before I read Ishmael and still am over a decade later. The possibility of the human species going extinct still looms on the horizon.

Videos: Ishmael and The Ripken Way

Again, immersed in learning baseball fundamentals The Ripken Way via CD Rom this morning. Last practice of the week is tonight. Our first game is next Wednesday. I have so much that I want to show the kids and not enough time to do it. A couple of the main reasons I don't have enough time is because the northwestern Wisconsin weather doesn't always cooperate(It snowed for awhile yesterday morning) and I live close to 15 miles from town.

I checked into Facebook to look for an idea for a post and found this YouTube video immediately. It's title: The River of Vision: On the Works of Daniel Quinn, Author of Ishmael. About 3 minutes into the video I wrote this quote down.

"What I have left is an invitation: Jump into the river that is already flowing and let this river carry you. Nevermind that you cannot know with your rational mind where exactly this river might take you. That, indeed, is the whole point. This river may be taking us to a million different destinations. This is something very different from being in control."--Timothy Scott Bennett

It's been over ten years now since I jumped into that river. I still don't understand what baseball and The Ripken Way has to do with it. I'm just going to go with it.

Postal Service and Libraries

Opened up my email this morning to discover a library notice stating that a copy of All of the Above has arrived for me from Bellingham, Washington. That's a long way for a book to travel. Feeling the need to express my appreciation for the United States Postal Service and our library service. One helps put food on the table and pay the bills, the other helps keep new ideas flowing into our house. Mind and body satisfied.

Control and Hope

Getting ready to carry some mail for the United States Postal Service today.

I came across this quote and interview that resonated with me over at Timothy Scott Bennett's Facebook page:

"I don’t think we need hope. I think we need imagination. We need to imagine a future which can’t be planned for and can’t be controlled. I find that people who talk about hope are often really talking about control. They hope desperately that they can keep control of the way things are panning out. Keep the lights on, keep the emails flowing, keep the nice bits of civilisation and lose the nasty ones; keep control of their narrative, the world they understand. Giving up hope, to me, means giving up the illusion of control and accepting that the future is going to be improvised, messy, difficult."

TEOTWAWKI

I try on a daily basis to check out Timothy Scott Bennett's Facebook page. For those of you who don't recognize the name, he is the author of All of the Above. I consider him to be an author with a changed mind*, and that's one of the reasons I follow his work. And to be honest I haven't read All of the Above yet, but I plan on it. The other day I had one of the librarians at our local library check to see if she could get it for me through inter-library loan. She located two copies: one in Missouri and one in Washington. She put the order in and said, "we'll see what happens." It's a long way from Missouri to northwestern Wisconsin, so I will probably just end up buying the book.

The point of this post, though, is to mention what he said on his facebook page yesterday. It resonated with me. It's what I've felt and what I've heard others express in one way or another. It's something that my great-grandfather(He was a Jehovah Witness) spent alot of time thinking and talking about, so I've heard. It's what Derrick Jensen means when he says that this culture has a death urge. Here is what I read on Mr. Bennett's page:

I've said it before and I'll say it again: the problem with "warning" that "civilization is at stake" is that, at a deep emotional, psychological, and spiritual level, and likely unbeknownst to the vast majority of people in which this is at work, the Civilized™ humans on this planet seem, to my mind, to actually be craving TEOTWAWKI (the end of the world as we know it.) I'd much rather we become conscious of, and speak about that possibility, and why that might be the True™.--Timothy Scott Bennett

My great-grandfather died when I was around a year old. But given the chance I would have asked him why he thought the world was going to end. I was never convinced by the "he was just a nutcase" argument. Why? Because I think at some level we're all craving it. It's just that some have better ways of expressing it than others.


*His work has been influenced by Daniel Quinn.