Entertaining Ideas

I just want to say that I stand with anyone working toward recalling Governor Scott Walker. Right now, I'm entertaining this idea. And, as some of us know the mind loves to entertain ideas. Anyway, I'm a wage slave that is trying to survive in Western Civilization. In other words, I'm an exploitable resource. And if the exploiters could find a way to pay me less for my work, or ship my job off to another place where people are willing to work for less, they'd do it in a heartbeat.

I think Lewis Mumford was onto something when he said this about Karl Marx: "He realized that the French revolution had divided society artificially into two spheres, the political, in which man functioned as a tolerant, liberal, egalitarian citizen, and the economic, in which he was either a grasping capitalist or an exploited worker." [Pg. 203, Interpretations and Forecasts.]

I'm an exploited worker that is becoming more and more intolerant of grasping capitalists therefore as a "tolerant, liberal, egalitarian citizen" I'm going to fight the grasping capitalists.

I love to entertain ideas

Thank You for Fungo Bats and Sugar Maples

I've been wanting a fungo bat (What coaches use to hit groundballs and flyballs to their team) for a couple of years now. I've held off on buying one, though. I just couldn't justify spending the money. Yesterday as we were pulling into Antigo just after sunrise my Dad mentioned that there is a lumber mill in Antigo that makes bats for Brewer's sluggers Ryan Braun and Cory Hart. He said there is a special characteristic to the sugar maples in that part of the state that produces a good bat. I thought it was interesting, but didn't think about it much after that.

Well, it was getting close to dinner time and we were looking at the house my Dad was born and raised in. There wasn't much else we wanted to do, so we were getting ready to head back home. But just than we'd noticed just two blocks down from his old house was the mill where the slugger's bats are made. So we decided to stop in at the office and see if they actually sold the bats right there. The secretary confirmned they did and went it got someone from that part of the mill that could show me the bats.

Twenty minutes and One Hundred and Twenty Dollars later I walked out of their with two fungo RockBats, one 33" and the other 35." I don't really regret buying them. With my families' interest in baseball I think I'll be hitting fungos for quite some time. One thing I will say, though, is that I don't like to see sugar maples cut. I never liked cutting them when I was a logger and I hate seeing others cut them now. I'd rather see the trees being tapped for maple syrup than being killed for lumber. So thank you to the sugar maple trees who gave up their lives to make my fungo bats.

They'll be put to good use.

What Holds The Wheel Together

Off to Antigo, Wisconsin today. My dad and I are making the trip east to visit the gravesites of my grandparents and meet up with my aunt.

We had our second Little League game last night and won. I'm proud of the kids. In the three years that I've been their coach this is probably some of the best baseball I've seen them play.

I still feel like I could be a much better coach though. Part of the problem is that I don't think I understand 9-12 year olds well enough yet. I'm turning to the notebooks for more inspiration.

I often think of this zen teaching that Phil Jackson had in Sacred Hoops: "See beyond what is seen. Never forget that a wheel is made not only of spokes but also of the space between the spokes. Sturdy spokes poorly placed make a weak wheel. Whether their full potential is realized depends on the harmony between. The essence of wheelmaking lies in the craftsman's ability to conceive and create the space that holds and balances the spokes within the wheel. Think now, who is the craftsman here?" [Pg. 150, Sacred Hoops]

A Full Day Ahead

Off to carry mail for the United States Postal service again today. Coaching in our second Little League baseball game afterwards. Hopefully our team does better this time around. Talking about baseball that reminds me: another reason why I sit zazen is because, I think, it helps me concentrate on the game better.

Looking forward to voting in the Wisconsin primary tomorrow. Just think, by this time next month Wisconsin could have a new governor.

Yesterday, a friend posted this excerpt out of Daniel Quinn's Providence:

"Kindler and rekindler of universes, the fire burns forever. It is the flame of life that courses through all generations from first to last, that burns without consuming, that is itself consumed and renewed inexhaustibly, life after life, generation after generation, species after species, galaxy after galaxy, universe after universe, each sharing in the blaze for its season and going down to death while the fire burns on undiminished. The fire is life itself, the life of this universe, of this galaxy, of this planet, of this place and every place: the place by the rock and the place under the hill and the place by the river and the place in the forest, no two alike anywhere. And the life of every place is god, who is the fire: the life of the pond, god; the life of the tundra, god; the life of the sea, god; the life of the land, god; the life of the earth, god; the life of the universe, god: in every place unique, as the life of every place is unique, and in every place burns the same, as the fire that burns is everywhere the fire of life." - Written by Daniel Quinn about 30 years ago, but not published until it appeared in 1994 at the end of his semi-autobiography Providence: The Story of a Fifty-Year Vision Quest.

Soul and Spirit

Lately I've been rereading my journals from the past of years. I ran across this entry on June 6th, 2011:

The Wild Man isn't like an Eastern Mystic: "When it comes time for a young male to talk with the Wild Man he will find the conversation quite distinct from a talk with a minister, a rabbi, or a guru. Conversing with the Wild Man is not talking about bliss or mind or spirit, or 'higher consciousness,' but about something wet, dark, and low--what James Hillman would call 'soul'." [Robert Bly, Iron John]

I've mentioned a couple of times that I sit zazen(meditate)for a half-n-hour every morning. There are times when I wonder why I'm doing it. Robert Bly once said this about enlightenment and the soul: "Mythology is more helpful than enlightenment or to put it chronologically, years of mythology need to come, accustoming the soul to darkness, before the soul is ready for enlightenment."

Part of the reason I do it is to relax and slow my thoughts. But than this excerpt from an interview with psychologist James Hillman comes to mind:

Safransky: What if the goal is merely a few minutes of calm?

Hillman: If that’s the goal, what’s the difference between meditation and having a nice drink? Or going to the hairdresser and sitting for an hour and flipping through a magazine? Or writing a long letter, a love letter? Do you realize what we’re not doing in this culture? Having an evening’s conversation with people; that can be so relaxing. Moving one’s images, moving one’s soul; I think we’ve locked on to meditation as the main method for settling down.

It’s better to go into the world half-cocked than not to go into the world at all. I know when something’s wrong. And I can say, “This is outrageous. This is insulting. This is a violation. And it’s wrong.” I don’t know what we should do about it; my protest is absolutely empty. But I believe in that empty protest.

You see, one of the ways you get trapped into not going into the world is when people — usually in positions of power — say, “Oh, yeah, wise guy, what would you do about it? What would you do about the Persian Gulf crisis?” I don’t know what I’d do. I don’t know. But I know when I feel something is wrong, and I trust that sense of outrage, that sense of insult. And so, empty protest is a valid way of expressing feeling, politically. Remember, that’s where we began: how do you connect feeling with politics? Well, one of the ways is through that empty protest. You don’t know what’s right, but you know what’s wrong.

Quinn Quote Saturday

"We make our journey in the company of others; the deer, the rabbit, the bison, and the quail walk before us, and the lion, the eagle, the wolf, the vulture, and the hyena walk behind us. All our paths lie together in the hand of god and none is wider than any other or favored above any other. The worm that creeps beneath your foot is making its journey across the hand of god as surely as you are.

"Wherever life moves, the hand of god is under it, so no step can be off the path. When you stumble on the mountainside, that is part of your path. When your child is sick and you turn aside from the hunt, that is part of your path. When you wander hungry in the desert and cannot find your way, you're not lost, you're on your path. When cunning fails and your prey eludes you, don't curse your luck; this fruitless hunt is part of your path."--Daniel Quinn, Pg.74, The Tales of Adam

Busy Day

Annie and I are off to work to carry mail for United States Postal Service today. Not much time to write. Getting kids ready to go over to their grandparents while we work. We're lucky in that regard, both sets of grandparents only live about 4 miles from the house.

Baseball practice scheduled for tonight. It's going to be a busy day. I often have to remind myself that most families have to do this everyday.

First Game of the Season

We had our first Little Leageue baseball game last night. We ended up losing 18 to 2. I was nervous as hell the whole day leading up to it, but the weird thing is that I was extremely calm during the game as my team of 9-12 yr. olds self-destructed. I remember experiencing the exact same thing playing baseball as a child. So after 25 years not much has changed. The same sort of thoughts and feelings (I wrote about some of them yesterday) happen leading up to the game, but during the game they fade or simply just go away. Upon reflection I think part of the reason this happens is explained in this quote by Phil Jackson:

"[Players] live for the moments when they can lose themselves completely in the action and experience the pure joy of competition."--Phil Jackson, Pg. 180, Sacred Hoops

Right now I'd say that it happens not only to players but coaches too.

Getting Ahead of Myself

Right now I feel rushed, anxious, and overwhelmed. And I've noticed some minor Obsessive Compulsive symptoms happening like pacing and thinking the same thought over and over. I feel like if I just focus and try harder that this feeling will go away (This a big part of the reason I sit Zazen every morning). It's nothing new, I've felt it on and off probably since the beginning of adolesence. In the past I've blamed our culture, school, my parents and so on about this. All of them, of course, play a factor. Anyway, it comes and goes. I've learned how to deal with it and have adjusted my lifestyle accordingly. As a child this was tough to deal with though. I had no idea what the hell was going on.

This all, of course, ties into Daniel Quinn's work. Ever since running across the sentence below it felt like there was a huge weight lifted from my shoulders. Someone had finally recognized my suffering and showed that others were going through the same thing. It also meant that I wasn't a defective product but the system that I was trying to conform to is.

"It's estimated that, since the days of my youth, depression among children has increased by 1000% and teen suicide by 300%."--Daniel Quinn, Pg. 180, Beyond Civilization

Looking back on my childhood it was pretty pathetic I understood what depression and anxiety were well before I was 12 years old. And from my perspective 25 years later I simply should not have been thinking about that at that age.

Turning to the Notebooks

Yesterday I had a bad day coaching Little League baseball practice. It felt like the team and myself were out of whack. Twenty-four hours later I'm still feeling the effects of this. I've taken the responsibilty of this onto my shoulders because I am the head coach, the team's leader. So I'm turning to my notebooks for some help and inspiration. I wrote this down when I read Phil Jackson's Sacred Hoops back in October of 2010.

"This ancient Zen teaching holds great wisdom for anyone envisioning how to get the most out of a group. Just as fish don't fly and elephants don't play rock and roll, you can't expect a team to perform in a way that's out of tune with it's basic abilities. Though the eagle may soar and fly close to the heavens, it's view of the earth is broad and unclouded. In other words, you can dream all you want, but, bottom line, you've got to work with what you've got. Otherwise, you're wasting your time. The team won't buy your plan and everyone--most of all you--will end up frustrated and disappointed. But when your vision is based on clear-sighted, realistic assessment of your resources, alchemy of the ten mysteriously occurs and a team transforms into a force greater than the sum of its individual talents. Inevitably, pardadoxically, the acceptance of boundaries and limits is the gateway to freedom.

"But visions are never the sole property of one man or one woman. Before a vision can become reality, it must owned by every single member of the group."--Phil Jackson, Pg. 100, Sacred Hoops

I think I have somewhat of a better understanding where my occasional frustration and dissapointment come from. And I'll be learning more about the alchemy of the ten.

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.

Quinn Quote Saturday

"The evangelist John wrote, 'You must not love the world or the things of the world, for those who love the world are strangers to the love of the Father.' Then just two sentences later, he wrote: 'Children, the final hour is at hand! You've heard that the Antichrist is coming. He's not one but many, and when the many of him are among us, you'll know the final hour has come.'"

"John knew what he was talking about. He was right to warn his followers against those who love the world. We are the ones he was talking about, and this is the final hour--but it's their final hour, not ours. They've had their day, and this is indeed the final hour of that day.

"Now our day begins."--Daniel Quinn, the last page of The Story of B

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.

Off the Ground

Off to carry mail for the United States Postal Service today. I'm feeling rushed and rundown. It's probably the combination of many things. Most of all, I think it's the result of running a Little League baseball practice last night and gearing up for the postal work this morning. I don't know how coaches can work full-time and volunteer coach, it must take an unbelievable amount of energy. It reminds me of this quote by Phil Jackson:

There was a time in my life -- I spent fifteen years in my career with New York and New Jersey -- where I always felt if I didn't get those three or four months in Montana to camp, to be on the land, to actually live on the ground and be connected with the ground, then I wasn't really connecting myself with my roots, with that pioneer spirit that is so deeply a part of me. Phil Jackson in Esquire

There is too much going on in my life at the moment to maintain connection with my roots. It'll pass, but it has to be recognized.

My Time Alone

I spent my time alone* this morning watching Billy Ripken explain infielding basics on my Teaching Baseball The Ripken Way CD ROM. Like I said yesterday, I usually spend this time reading, writing and thinking. Perhaps I should call this time soulwork (The poet Robert Bly calls it tending the garden). I don't know. I do know that learning infielding basics doesn't feel like it should fall under the soulwork category. But I'm learning the hard way that if I want to focus on anything without a cluttered mind my time alone is the time to do it.

*I try to get out of bed a few hours before anyone else awakens in my house.

Baseball and Balance

I woke up this morning, sat zazen, poured myself a cup of coffee, went outside with the dog (He ran off and barked and I ended up yelling my head off to get him back to the house)and started a fire in the masonry stove. This is my usual ritual before I sit down to either read or write.

This morning my intentions were to read some of All of the Above (only 60 pages into it and I've had it for a week), but instead I ended up watching Billy Ripken explain infielding basics on our laptop until other family members awoke. I should have known better than to order AotA book from the library. Once baseball starts I have a strong desire to read and listen to baseball fiction and nonfiction. I also find myself(like this morning!)looking for ways on how to become a better coach.

So baseball slowly takes over my life in a way. I don't think it can be helped. I don't know if my character will allow a balanced approach. It's been that way since I've been a kid.

Number Two

I was going to write more on yesterday's subject, but I got sidetracked. Over the winter I read Carl Jung's autobiography Memories Dream and Reflections. And after reading and returning it to the library I remembered two quotes that I regretted not writing down, so I thought I would have to take some time during the upcoming winter to reread it. But while my wife was shopping at a local thrift store a few months back I found one of the Jung quotes while I was paging through Thomas Moore's Care of the Soul. I just opened the book up and there was the quote. I felt lucky. That day I ended up buying two good looking copies of Care of the Soul and Soulmates, both by Thomas Moore.

Well, this morning, the second Jung quote revealed itself to me when I opened up Care of the Soul:

"When I was working on the stone tablets, I became aware of the fateful links between me and my ancestors. I feel very strongly that I'm under the influence of things or questions which were left incomplete and unanswered by my parents and grandparents and distant ancestors."--Carl Jung

There are times when I do to.

Last Night

The other day I posted this. Yesterday he wrote back, and part of what he said was, "Do you have Ishmael? I am curious to read it."

Now for anyone that has read Ishmael you know this is the moment you have been waiting for. It's your opportunity to change a mind and help save the world. All you have to do is get them the book and the rest will take care of itself. Why? Because the books are tools to change minds.

Well, I sat and stared at the computer screen for an hour last night trying to figure how I was going to respond to that question. Here is what I came up with: "Sure, I have a copy you can borrow. Let me know when you have time to read it, I'll bring a copy into town."

Earth shattering, isn't it?

Before I get my day started here I can think of three reasons why I stared at that screen for an hour last night:

One is that I'm revealing to him a big part of who I am. The degree of vulnerability has increased. There is a good chance (He was born, raised and is a practicing Catholic) that he is going to sit down with that book and get part way through it, close it up, and wonder how I can buy into it. The irony in this is: I often wonder the same thing about Christians. The second is I don't want to see him walk away from his faith. I'm not out to convert anyone. And the third is I don't want to get myself into a situation where he will try to convert me. My soul doesn't need saving.

Quinn Quote Saturday

“Man's destiny was to conquer and rule the world, and this is what he's done--almost. He hasn't quite made it, and it looks as though this may be his undoing. The problem is that man's conquest of the world has itself devastated the world. And in spite of all the mastery we've attained, we don't have enough mastery to stop devastating the world--or to repair the devastation we've already wrought. We've poured our poisons into the world as though it were a bottomless pit--and we go on pouring our poisons into the world. We've gobbled up irreplaceable resources as though they could never run out--and we go on gobbling them up. It's hard to imagine how the world could survive another century of this abuse, but nobody's really doing anything about it. It's a problem our children will have to solve, or their children." ―Daniel Quinn

A Question From An Aquaintance

Opened up my email this morning to an interesting question from an acquaintance. He is a practicing Catholic.

"Do you or your wife have any faith traditions in your family- either now, or in your upbringing? Maybe a topic for another day...."

Given the quotes I've shared the past couple of days this question comes at an interesting time.

Here is my answer: No, neither one of us have experienced or currently practice faith traditions. You'd have to go back to our grandparents to find family members practicing faith traditions. Personally, I don't believe or disbelieve in anything. Perhaps another day we could discuss this, I'm always open to listening to other's stories and viewpoints. I will say that my thinking and worldview have been heavily influenced and shaped by Daniel Quinn's novel Ishmael.

Same Theme as Yesterday

A follow up quote to the quote I posted yesterday. It's been well over ten years since I've read Providence, and these quotes still resonate with me to this day. Part of why they do, I think, is they get rid of the idea that God will somehow intervene and save us from the problems we've created for ourselves, especially environmental problems like: human overpopulation, overuse of resources, and climate change. The idea that humans can go extinct and nothing will stop it from happening is very real to me. Quote below:

"Don't misunderstand me. The fact that the gods don't take our side against others doesn't imply that we have to do the same. The horse doesn't wait for the gods to intervene when it's attacked by a puma; it uses all its strength and every weapon at it possesses to save its life. We're free to do the same - as free as any other creature. If a lion attacks us, the gods will not defend us, because they're no more on our side than they're on the side of the lion, but we're at liberty to defend ourselves with whatever weapon we can wield. Our best weapon of defense is of course our intelligence. If there's a cancer growing inside of you, the gods aren't on your side against it, but that doesn't mean you have to throw up your hands and allow it to destroy your life; defend yourself against it with every resource you can bring to bear.

"People have written to me to ask: 'What can I do about the spiders that invade my house? May I kill them or do I just have to put up with them?' Such questions can always be safely referred to our neighbors in the community of life. A dog or a chimpanzee or a sparrow cannot be mistaken in such matters; they cannot mislead themselves with false, convenient arguments. Ask your dog what he does with the fleas that invade his coat, and he'll show you: He does his best to kill them. You can do the same, without apology. The gods will not take your side against the rest of the world just because you're human, but they will also not take the side of the rest of the world against you just because you're human." Daniel Quinn, Providence

Beautiful Summary

The Jehovah's Witnesses used to stop by and do their best to assure my salvation by following their vision. Annie (my wife) used to hate it when they pulled in the driveway, but I didn't mind it so much. There was a part of me that admired their faith and dedication. And, of course, I got to talk about religion, philosophy and hear their stories (My favorite). Anyway, I remember vividly trying to explain to them why I didn't think an all-knowing and all-seeing God was looking out for me anymore than he/she/it was looking out for a red fox, so I didn't accept their vision. Below is a beautiful summary of what my perspective was.
‎

"Another great supporter of Ishmael, Michael Belk, sent me a book called Disappointment with God and asked me what I thought of it. As the title suggests, it's a study of people's disappointment with God: Why did God let this terrible thing happen? Why didn't God respond to my prayers? And so on. I found it puzzling that he'd want my opinion of it, but by the time I was finished I realized that the book had given me an insight into my own relationship to the universe: I am never disappointed with God (or as I prefer to say, the gods). This is because I never expect the gods to take my side against others. If I come down with the flu, I don't expect the gods to take my side against the virus that is pursuing its life in my body. If I travel to Africa, I don't expect the gods to strike dead a mosquito that is about to have lunch on my neck (and incidentally give me a case of malaria). If a wildcat attacks me in the hills of New Mexico, I don't expect the gods to help me kill it. If I'm swimming in the ocean, I don't expect the gods to chase away the sharks. I have no illusion that the gods favor me (or any other human) over viruses, sharks, wildcats, mosquitoes, or any other life form. And if they don't favor me over a June bug or a mushroom, why would they favor me over another human being? If a friend of mine is killed in a random act of terrorist violence, I'm not going to blame the gods for this. To me, this would be nonsense. And I certainly don't expect the gods to suspend the laws of physics to protect me from landslides, lightning bolts, or burning buildings." -- Daniel Quinn, from Providence: The Story of a Fifty-Year Vision Quest

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.

Grocery Shopping

Awhile back, while sitting in the car in the grocery store parking lot waiting for my family to get done grocery shopping (Although rarely, there are times when I can't bring myself to go in push the shopping cart) I once heard author Thom Hartmann state that one of the reasons the right wing made war on the middle class is simply because when there was a thriving middle class in America the youth seek justice, and you get revolutions like you did in the 1960's. Some people on the right don't like that.

Digging Up The Past

Why is it, that after listening to Rush Limbaugh for about ten minutes on the mail route yesterday, that I felt the need to turn on this computer and dig up this perspective that was written almost 3 years ago about President Obama:

"It is said that Obama is wearing a mask, being a deceiver, as if he carefully pretended to be a progressive activist for a quarter of a century because a time traveler from the future told him that would get him elected president in 2008 so he could pursue his secret right wing globalist agenda. "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss" -- but it's hard to imagine two presidents more different than Obama and Bush. The fact that the country is moving the same direction under each of them should tell us something else: the president is not the boss. Obama has never worn a mask -- Obama is the mask, and not a very good one. It has never been more obvious that America is an ossified dying empire with a suicidal inertia that no leader or movement can stop. If Sarah Palin, Dennis Kucinich, or Carrot Top were president, the system that the president pretends to run would still be bailing out banks and insurance companies, escalating wars, hiding atrocities, and generally chugging along to its ruin."--Ran Prieur, December 14, 2009

DQ Quote Saturday

"In the ten years that have passed since its publication, no one (including me) has come up with a satisfactory way of explaining what Ishmael is "about." Franz Kafka once wrote to a friend that the only books worth reading are those that "wake us up with a blow on the head" and send us reeling out into the street, not knowing who or what we are. According to thousands of readers I've heard from, this is exactly what Ishmael does for them. What makes Ishmael important is not what it's "about" but rather what it DOES to you--and this is what you need to share with your friends. If it's taken you to a new place in your life (as many people say it has), then tell them that if they want to keep up with you, they're just going to have read it. Whatever it's done to you or for you, that's what will impress your friends, and that's what you need to convey to them."--Daniel Quinn

ReadIshmael.com

Delusions

Ended up grabbing Doug Brown's Roadmap to Sustainability off the shelf this morning. I've probably done this a couple dozen times now. It just goes to show that thought is nonlinear, atleast my thinking anyway. I ran across this quote by Gandhi:

"The ideal of creating an unlimited number of wants and satisfying them seems to be a delusion and a snare."--Gandhi

This delusion runs The Economy.

Headed South

Yesterday afternoon we headed south to Rice Lake to do some shopping. Afterwards we decided to head 20 miles further south down to Chetek to listen to local author Micheal Perry speak at The Calhoun Memorial Public Library. It was well worth it. He is an amazing speaker and writer. His work has definately had an influence on what little bit of writing I do.

After returning home I picked up the pencil and scribbled down how I would be content visiting small towns throughout Wisconsin to spend a little bit of time at their library and local baseball diamonds. Don't know why, but I'm going to go with it.

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."

A Daily Dose of Despair

A few months back I wrote down this line by the poet Mary Oliver: "Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine."

My despair for as long as I can remember has been The Secret Plan* remains a secret. There isn't a day that goes by where I don't feel some level of grief because of this.

*"Our secret plan is this: We're going to go on consuming the world until there's no more to consume. This does not preclude consuming it "wisely" or consuming it as slowly as possibly. It doesn't preclude supporting every conceivable conservation initiative. It doesn't preclude supporting every conceivable means of recycling. We're going to recycle, we're going to conserve-- but we're also going to go on consuming until there's no more to consume."--Daniel Quinn from On Investments

Ashes

Woke up this morning feeling like I had to search this poem out:

Well, on the day I was born,
God was sick...
They all know that I'm alive,
that I chew my food...and they don't know
why harsh winds whistle in my poems,
the narrow uneasiness of a coffin,
winds untangled from the sphinx...

On the day I was born,
God was sick,
gravely.--Cesar Vallejo

As I get older I'm trying to accept this state of feeling.

Thank you to Robert Bly for introducing me to this poem.

Bunny Rabbits and Easter

The other day my 12 yr. old son asked: "Dad, why do we have the Easter bunny?" Of course, I didn't have the foggiest idea. But, lo and behold, while finishing up reading The Maiden King this morning, the answer appeared:

"The goddess of the spring equinox was Eastre, the hare was her ritual animal and the egg her fertility symbol. The image suggests the lasciviousness of the goddess, the sheer lusciousness of life, sexuality, and birth. And with the goddess, the moon, the luminous white of the moon that carries the imprint of the hare, shines."

"Moon goddess imagery carries the cyclic pattern; it is simply a law of life. The forest knows how to sacrifice parts of itself that have to give way to new growth. The grief in the dying gives place to the miracle of resurrection. The hare willingly sacrifices itself for the sake of spirit: unconscious matter sacrifices itself for conscious awareness.

"Farmers who know hares well think of them as sacrificial animals. When fields and hedges are burned off, they see hares who refuse to run before the fire reaches them, suddenly leap, their fur on fire, to run to their death aflame. The more we meditate on the hare, the more we love this animal that, like the moon, dies to be reborn." [Page 217, The Maiden King]

Perhaps it was moment of synchronicity.

Quinn Quote Saturday

"When our children start becoming murderers, we typically don't wonder what's wrong with the system that's turning them INTO murderers, we wonder what's wrong with THEM. Imagine an assembly line that out of every hundred vehicles turns out one that is horribly defective. Then imagine--instead of examining the assembly line--taking the defective vehicle out and shooting it. Then, when the next one comes along--instead of examining the assembly line--taking THAT one and shooting it. And when the next one comes along--instead of examining the assembly line--taking THAT one out and shooting it."--Daniel Quinn

I pulled this quote from this essay.

A True Coaching Inspiration

Revisiting this powerful article for some inspiration before baseball practices start next week. Mike Powell, in my mind, is a good example of a male mother for his players, and what masculinity is to some degree. He's showed the boys his wounds and in return they've showed him their wounds. I think it was the mythologist Micheal Meade who once said, "I'll show you my wound if you show me yours." I have learned through experience it is a challenge to lay your wounds out there for younger men hear, but they won't trust you otherwise.

Quote from article: "Powell's goal, as he told his friends, was 'for each boy to say that for the first time in my academic career I had someone who really loved me.'"

Animal Souls

The other day our 12 yr. old mentioned that his friend informed him that animals didn't have souls, but humans do. Well, I said, I guess that all depends on who you ask.

“Many Indians have told me that the most basic difference between Western and indigenous ways of being is that Westerners view the world as dead, and not as filled with speaking, thinking, feeling subjects as worthy and valuable as themselves.” ― Derrick Jensen

Giving up Money

I don't know if it was a good idea to read this article before going off to earn some money delivering mail.

Finding God?

The other day our 12 yr. old son mentioned that one of his friends asked him if he believed in God. While he was explaining his answer to me I remembered a moment a few years back when a friend of mine asked me over the internet if I was agnostic. I said I didn't think so. I wasn't familiar with agnoticism to give him a definite answer at that time. So what did I do? I visited the Ishmael Community. And I went to the question and answer section of the website and typed in agnostic. Here is what I read:

I'm simply saying that I'm unable to put myself in any camp with regard to the existence of God. I can't join the atheists (who assert that there are zero gods), I can't join the monotheists (who assert that there is one god), and I can't join the polytheists (who assert that there are many gods). Nor am I an agnostic; I'm not saying I DON'T KNOW whether God exists, I'm saying this knowledge is UNOBTAINABLE. It's not that I don't HAVE it, it's that it's NOT THERE to be had.

Or you could put it this way: God's existence is an object not of knowledge but of belief. It's possible to BELIEVE that there is no God, one God, or many gods, but it's not possible to KNOW any of these things. I should add that, while it's POSSIBLE to believe one of these things, it's not NECESSARY to believe one of them. One is to FREE to choose one of these beliefs to embrace, but one is not COMPELLED to choose one. --Daniel Quinn from Question #538

I put the quote above in my own words and answered my friends question. Why? Because it makes sense to me.

Fears and Doubts

My mind has been consumed with fears and doubts since three AM. They all revolve the question if I have what it takes to coach my son's Little League baseball team. This has happened every year since I first started coaching his team 3 years ago. It seems like as long as I remain a baseball coach I will have to go through this process before the season starts, and occasionally throughout the season. I'm beginning to accept this as part of my coaching experience.

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.

Daniel Quinn Quote Saturday

"We look at the world around us and find that turtles are not flawed, crows are not flawed, daffodils are not flawed, mosquitoes are not flawed, salmon are not flawed--in fact, not a single species in the world is flawed--except us. It makes no sense, but it does pass the medieval tests for knowledge. It's reasonable--and it's certainly supported by authority. It's reasonable because it provides us with an excuse we badly need. We're destroying the world--eating it alive--but it's not our fault. It's the fault of human nature. We're just badly made, so what can you expect?"--Daniel Quinn in The New Renaissance

It's Already Happened Once

This excerpt has given me something to think about before bed:

"Our culture of expansion and achievement has projected its own mythology onto the universe, giving it a spectacular beginning and a linear progression to some kind of end. If, instead, the universe has always existed, then anything that could possibly be done has already been done an infinite number of times. If it's possible for you to win a Nobel Prize, then if you go far enough back, there's a world exactly like this one where you already did it. So there's no point doing anything just to accomplish it, only to enjoy it."--Ran Prieur

Good and Evil

Ran across this quote while reading "The Maiden King" this morning:

"If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to seperate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart." Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Changing the System

I revisited this article this morning. I like this quote:

"You could say paradigms are harder to change than anything else about a system, and therefore this item should be lowest on the list, not the highest. But there's nothing physical or expensive or even slow about paradigm change. In a single individual it can happen in a millisecond. All it takes is a click in the mind, a new way of seeing. Of course individuals and societies do resist challenges to their paradigm harder than they resist any other kind of change."

Fincino Quote

A quote I wrote down before I returned James Hillman's Loose Ends:

"This [the soul] is the greatest of all miracles in nature. All other things beneath God are always one single being, but the soul is all things together...Therefore it may be rightly called the center of nature, the middle term of all things, the series of the world, the face of all, the band and juncture of the universe."--Marisilio Fincino

Things Are Alright

About an hour after I posted yesterday (Read yesterdays post), our 12 year old and I were talking about fear while we were raking up sawdust. And out of the blue he mentions this quote from Frank Herbert's "Dune" (He listened to the book on tape a few weeks back):

"I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain."

I was proud, impressed, and stunned. There are times when we are concerned that he is spending too much time in his room listening to books. Well, yesterday cooled that concern a bit

Kids, Coaching and School

The other day our 12 year old commented that if they made school more interesting kids would pay more attention in class. I thought it was an astute observation. I know that looking back on my schooling experience I was bored out of my skull most of the time (That's one of the primary reasons why we homeschool). But when it came to my response to him, I waffled. My hatred of the schooling system has cooled a bit, I think. And, I think, part of the reason why is because of my experience coaching Little League baseball. I know that as a coach you try like hell to make practices as interesting and fun as possible, and there are just some kids that refuse to quit screwing around and disrupting practice. There is always the child who quips, when are we going to do something fun.

Saturday's Daniel Quinn Quote

From The New Renaissance:

"During your lifetime, the people of our culture are going to figure out how to live sustainably on this planet--or they're not. Either way, it's certainly going to be extraordinary. If they figure out how to live sustainably here, then humanity will be able to see something it can't see right now: a future that extends into the indefinite future. If they don't figure this out, then I'm afraid the human race is going to take its place among the species that we're driving into extinction here every day--as many as 200--every day"

Headed Down the Path

Yesterday, finally finished putting up firewood for next next winter. While we were finishing up my neighbor stopped in to see if I wanted some chickens to run around the yard and eat ticks. This morning mailed my tree order forms for spring planting. Now we're headed out to the pasture to clear some brush. I'm also noticing the word farm and farming coming up more often in our conversations and I'm about ready for another pair bib overalls.

Blind Spots

"Thinkers aren't limited by what they know, because they can always increase what they know. Rather they're limited by what puzzles them, because there's no way to become curious about something that doesn't puzzle you. If a thing falls outside the range of people's curiosity, then they simply cannot make enquiries about it. It constitutes a blind spot--a spot of blindness that you can't even know is there until someone draws your attention to it." My Ishmael

One Reason Why

One of the main reasons I broke down and bought The Maiden King was to have this poem by Rumi, and Robert Bly's commentary on it.

We should ask God
to help us toward manners. Inner gifts
do no find their way
to creatures without just respect.

If a man or woman flails about, he not only
smashes his house,
he burns the world down.

Your depression is connected to your insolence
and refusal to praise. Whoever feels himself walking
on the path, and refuses to praise--that man or woman
steals from others every day--is a shoplifter!

The sun became full of light when it got hold of itself.
Angels only began shining when they achieved discipline.
The sun goes out whenever the cloud of not-praising comes near.

The moment the foolish angel felt insolent, he heard the door close.--Rumi

Voids

Derrick Jensen and Daniel Quinn on voids:

"Quite suddenly, after six thousand years of totalitarian agriculture and civilization building, the people of our culture--East and West, twins of a single birth--were beginning to wonder if their lives made sense, were beginning to perceive a void in themselves that economic success and civil esteem could not fill, were beginning to imagine that something was profoundly, even innately, WRONG with them." (Daniel Quinn, Pg.267-268, The Story of B)

"The same is true on the larger scale, as no comforts or elegancies, no feeling of power over another, no accumulation of property can make up for a failure to participate in the great liturgy. It's an attempt to use increasing amounts of emptiness to plug a great void (or, as R.D Laing wrote, 'How do you plug a void plugging a void?'). It's an attempt to cure loneliness through power. But loneliness can only be cured through relationship, and relationship is precisely what expoitation and abuse destroy." (Derrick Jensen, pg.567, Endgame)

Not In Control

Lately I've been reading up on mythology and fairy tales. I found this quote significant: "The movement to demonize the father gods, and to create a sentimentalized version of the Goddess makes women and men more infantile." [Robert Bly, Pg.88, The Maiden King]

Out of all this reading and thinking about this I can say one thing for sure: We're not in control!

Good Satire

Here is a really good satire talking about the relationship the Alaskan oil companies have with the citizens of that state. The author of the article also wrote The Raven's Gift. I have a signed copy on my bookshelf. It's one of the best novels I've ever read. Here is what Daniel Quinn had to say about it: "An epic adventure, a work of mythical dimensions, never to be forgotten."

Don's work is definately worth checking out.

Quinn Quote Saturday

"As developed in Ishmael, the 'story' we're enacting in our culture is this: The world was made for Man to conquer and rule, and Man was made to conquer and rule it; and under Man's rule, the world might have become a paradise except for the fact that he's fundamentally and irremediably flawed. This story--itself mythology--is the foundation for all our cultural mythology, and I said in Ishmael that it isn't possible for people simply to give up living in such a story. They must have another story to be in." [Daniel Quinn, Pg.183, Beyond Civilization]

Bringing It To Light

Reading through The Maiden King again this morning and found these words of wisdom about depression:

"...the only way out of a covert depression is an overt derpression."[Pg.67,The Maiden King]

He also mentions in this section that most men in the west suffer from a covert depression.

Just Appeared

This quote found its way into my hands again yesterday. I thought I would have to go searching for it ever since I read Jung's Memories, Dreams and Reflections a few months back. But to my surprise, while I was reading through Thomas Moore's Soul Mates at a second-hand store in Rice Lake, and I ran across it. Actually, I opened up the book and there it was.

"Other people are established inalienably in my memories only if their names were entered in the scrolls of my destiny from the beginning, so that encountering them was at the same time a kind of recollection."--Carl Jung

Action and Desire

Pulled the Te of Piglet off the shelf this morning in a last ditch effort to look for a quote to post, and I'm glad I did. Dug this one up from The Tao Te Ching:

Those habitually without desires
Perceive as "subtlety."
Those habitually with desires
Perceive it as "action."
These two have the same source,
But different names.
Together they're called "darkness"--
Darkness of increasing darkness,
All mystery's gateway.--[Lao Tsu, Pg. 54, The Te of Piglet]

Inside and Outside

Saw and heard the first robins this morning. Always a welcome and pleasant sound this time of year.

This quote caught my attention while reading Loose Ends earlier today:

"'The soul functions in the body, but has a greater part of its function outside the body...(and)imagines many things of the utmost profundity outside the body, just as God does'." [Jung talking about the alchemist Sendivogius's perspective on soul, Pg. 153, Loose Ends]

Feeling a Bit Off

The Santee Sioux poet/philosopher John Trudell sums up nicely how I've been feeling the past couple of days: "I'm just a human being trying to make it in a world that is very rapidly losing its understanding of being human." Also, these two lines by D.H Lawrence comes to mind: "I am not a mechanism, an assembly of various sections./ And it is not because the mechanism is working wrongly,/ that I am ill.

Mythological Understanding

Slowly working my way through The Maiden King. I wrote this passage down yesterday:

"With the help of Freud, Western culture has moved from a literal to a psycholgical understanding of the world in only a hundred years. But now we are receiving a request to move on still further, from the psychological to the mythological stage. This is more difficult. We are at the moment, almost incapapable of a mytholgical understanding of the world. That understanding is not behind us, but ahead of us. It does not involve adversarial thinking, but the sort of double vision that develops in the Underworld." [Robert Bly, Pg. 40, The Maiden King]

Where the Problem Lies

The problem isn't with the people but with the story.

"There's nothing fundamentally wrong with people. Given a story to enact that puts them in accord with the world, they will live in accord with the world. But given a story to enact that puts them at odds with the world, as yours does, they will live at odds with the world. Given a story to enact in which they are the lords of the world, they will act as the lords of the world. And, given a story to enact in which the world is a foe to be conquered, they will conquer it like a foe, and one day, inevitably, their foe will lie bleeding to death at their feet, as the world is now."--Ishmael

Teach a Hundred

Another noble effort to spread the teachings of the gorilla

"What you do is to teach a hundred what I've taught you, and inspire each of them to teach a hundred. That's how it's always done."--Ishmael

Growth for Adults

I wrote these lines down this morning. It's becoming clear that when we stop hearing about a growing economy it will be a sign that our society is starting to mature.

"Growth is indeed an appropriate megaphor for children, but in an adult growth also means aggrandizement, overweight, over-population, overkill, cancer, escalation, proliferation. So that growth has become the foolish metapsycholgoy of fat men in a declining culture." [James Hillman, Pg. 85, Loose Ends]

Letting The World Fall Apart

The other day, while reading Jim Harrison's After Dark, I jotted down these lines:

"The study of native cultures tends to lead you far afield from all you have learned, including much that you have perceived and assumed was reality. At first this can be disconcerting, but there are many benefits to letting the world fall apart."--Jim Harrison

Sometimes I wonder if you don't carefully, conciously, and slowly try to take apart what you think is reality there is something out there that will arrange it for you, and sometimes not in a nice way.

Tired

I don't have anything to say or a quote in mind to share. I'm going to shut this thing down and start reading through The Maiden King, by Robert Bly and Marion Woodman.

Our Secret Plan

I posted the quote below with this article over at Facebook. I think they go well together.

"Our secret plan is this: We're going to go on consuming the world until there's no more to consume. This does not preclude consuming it "wisely" or consuming it as slowly as possibly. It doesn't preclude supporting every conceivable conservation initiative. It doesn't preclude supporting every conceivable means of recycling. We're going to recycle, we're going to conserve-- but we're also going to go on consuming until there's no more to consume."--Daniel Quinn, from his essay titled: On Investments

Many Gods

I woke up this morning with a plan to post a simple quote with an article talking about the acidification of the oceans, and than I ran across this excerpt in James Hillman's "Loose Ends." The excerpt shook me up a little, and is important to me, because I learned in reading his autobiography a few months back that Carl Jung's house was being haunted for a brief period until he finished the book this excerpt was from. In other words, the invisible beings were not going to leave him and his family alone until he finished the book, atleast that is the conclusion he came to upon reflection of the experience.

"For me, to whom knowledge has been given of the multiplicity and diversity of the gods, it is well. But woe unto you, who replace these incompatible many by a single god. For in so doing ye beget the torment which is bred from not understanding, and ye mutilate the creature whose nature and aim is distinctiveness. How can ye be true to your nature when ye try to change the many into one? What ye do unto the gods is done likewise onto you. Ye all become equal and thus is nature maimed...The multiplicity of the gods correspondeth to the multiplicity of man."[Carl Jung, Seven Sermons of the Dead]

The Book of the Damned

I pulled out Daniel Quinn's The Book of the Damned this morning to look for a quote, and found this one:

"Imagine that the gods have a care for everything that lives in the community of life on earth."--Daniel Quinn

Know Thyself?

"Know Thyself? If I knew myself, I'd run away."--Goethe

Driving to Work

Years back I remember Derrick Jensen saying that we value production over life itself. In fact, he said, we sacrifice life at the altar of production. Yesterday was one of those days where this was made clear to me. I had to drive to work on unplowed roads that had over a foot of snow on them, and only a one lane track broken through from other vehicles that were capable of busting through that much snow.

Of course, I didn't make it. I got the bottom of the first big hill and decided to turn back for obvious reasons, one being what would happen if I met a snow plow coming over the top of that hill with only one lane to travel in. So, I got out of the car and shoveled myself out a spot to turn around. Hoping the whole time while I'm frantically shoveling that some crazy bastard doesn't come speeding over the hill and smash into my car or me.

Well, I got the spot shoveled out and the car turned around and made it home safely. But the point is I, or other drivers, could have been seriously injured or killed in that situation, and I was angry about it. But who do I get angry at? The United States Postal Service? Myself for bad decisions in the past? My boss? This insane culture (Afterall, this part of the state could have shut down until atleast the roads were plowed)? Past generations?

I don't know the answer to this, but I do know it felt like I was forced into a situation that I had no control over.

The Excitement of Thought

Posting another quote that James Hillman used in "The Force of Character."

"A thought is a tremendous mode of excitement."--Alfred North Whitehead

I just got my notice that James Hillman's book titled: Loose Ends is in at our local library. Looking forward to picking it up.

Did I ever tell you how thankful I am for libraries?

Revisiting George Draffan Interview

Lately I've felt the need to go back and read some of the early Derrick Jensen interviews, and this morning I finally did it. The first one I had in mind was with George Draffan. This excerpt jumped out at me: "As civilization arose, power began to become centralized, as it is in the second face. The powerful created a discourse — later divided into disciplines such as religion, philosophy, science, and economics — that rationalized and institutionalized injustice. After ten thousand years, we all to some extent believe that these differentials in power are inevitable."--George Draffan

Character

"Character is fate."--Heraclitus

Going Against the Dragon

"Mythology is more helpful than enlightenment or to put it chronologically, years of mythology need to come, accustoming the soul to darkness, before the soul is ready for enlightenment."

I pulled this quote from this interview. I find myself returning to it once every couple of months.

Truths

‎"Only gradually did I understand that saying a thing once is tantamount to saying it not at all. It is indeed sufficient for people to hear the laws of thermodynamics once, and to understand that they're written down somewhere, should they ever be needed again, but there are other truths, of a different human order, that must be enunciated again and again and again -- in the same words and in different words: again and again and again."---Daniel Quinn

Brain Imagery

More from The Sibling Society:

"The average child in the United States sees six thousand hours of television by their fifth year.... Television floods the infant-child brain with images at the very time his or her brain is supposed to learn to make images from within.... Failing to develop imagery mean having no imagination." [Pg.186]

Responsibility

"Are people feeling guilty nowadays? Well, if I were asked to lay my finger on one of the most striking differences between the social climate of Europe and the West as it is today and as it was, say fifty years ago, I think I should have to specify the presence in it almost everywhere of a vague, uneasy feeling of guilt. There is and atmosphere of guilt....Responsibility is food for the will, guilt is food for the feelings only....confused feelings of guilt tend to beget paralysis rather than energy.

"Those who are old enough to remember the years between the wars will recall the skillfull use Hitler made of just that paralysis in the 30's, when even young people, who were in their cradles at the time it was signed, were somehow made to feel guilty about the unjust provisions of the Treaty of Versailles."

He then goes on to say:

"Feelings of guilt tend to turn rather easily into feelings of hatred and contempt. We may feel a bit guilty ourselves, but we are very sure that a whole lot of other people are much more guilty, and probably ought to be destroyed."--Owen Barfield

Relationship?

Yesterday, while on the mail route, I was thinking about this statement by Robert Bly: "Among boys, one could say that if the son is released from the oedipal struggle with his father, he will find somewhere in his life areally big male energy that wants to kill him." (Of course, this is what Jack in the Beanstalk is all about.) A few minutes later The Greek Myth of The Iron Cage entered my thoughts.

"As the generations pass they grow worse. A time will come when they have grown so wicked that they will worship power, might will be right to them and reverence for the good will cease to be. At last, when no man is angry any more at wrong doing or feels shame in the presence of the miserable, Zues will destroy them too. And yet even then something might be done, if only the common people would rise and put down rulers that oppress them."--The Greek Myth of the Iron Cage


I'm wondering what the relationship is between the two is, if there is any. I'm thinking that if the oedipal struggle and male to male intiation is lacking in a culture it faces the threat of being destroyed by Zues.

Mr. Gasset

Yesterday, I was paging through James Hillman's book The Force of Character, and in it he quoted Jose Ortega y Gasset and mentioned that he was a great philosopher. I thought to myself I really need to get to learn more about Gasset's work. So this morning I get up, flip open my notebook to some notes and quotes from the past and what is the first thing I come across:

Written on 10/31/11: "Most people cannot 'say' what the person before them is like, but being unable to 'say' does not imply that one is unable to see."--Jose Ortega y Gasset

I'll be learning more about Mr. Gasset.

Einstein Insight

"Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods."-- Albert Einstein

Caring for Stories

"The stories people tell have a way of taking care of them. If stories come to you, care for them. And learn to give them away where they are needed. Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive. That is why we put these stories in each other's memory. This is how people care for themselves."--Barry Lopez

It Wanted To Be Posted

I pulled one of my notebooks off the shelf this morning, opened it up to a page, and the first words I layed my eyes on were written on Sunday March 12th, 2009: "Almost nothing exerts a more powerful hold on people's minds than unexamined and unchallenged received wisdom--and human exceptionalism is certainly part of that legacy."[Daniel Quinn, pg.102, If They Give You Lined Paper Write Sideways]

Children and Mythological Thinking

"What children very deeply want to know of history is how things got to be this way--but no one in your culture would think of teaching them that. Instead they're overwhelmed with ten million names, dates, and facts they 'should' know, but that vanish from their heads the moment they're no longer needed to pass a test. It's like handing a thousand-page medical text to a four-year old who wants to know where babies come from."--[Daniel Quinn, pg.148, My Ishmael]

If I Had The Chance

If I had the chance to sit down with the poet Robert Bly tomorrow I'd ask him this: Mr Bly, back in 1996 you wrote this in The Sibling Society, "We are drawing nearer to what Freud call the 'the pure culture of the death instinct.[Pg.42].'" Given that you're in your mid-eighties now, and it has been over 15 years since you wrote that, do you feel that we're still headed toward "the pure culture of the death intstinct?"

In Partial agreement

John Lennon once said this:

"I think our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. I think we're being run by maniacs for manical ends. I think they're all insane. But I am liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That's what is insane about it."

I partially agree, John. But back around the time you said this there was a U.S Senator from Wisconsin that wasn't totally off his rocker. This is what he had to say to the 91st Congress of the United States on January 19th, 1970:

"There is a great need, and growing support, for the introduction of new values in our society--where bigger is not necessarily better--where slower can be faster--and where less can be more. This attitude must be at the heart of the nationwide effort--and agenda for the 1970's--whereby this country puts gross national quality above gross national product."--Gaylord Nelson

Fear of Going Down

I had something else in mind to post this morning, but this poem by Antonio Machado fits the mood so well that the other is going to have to wait.

Mankind owns four things
That are no good at sea--
Rudder, anchor, oars,
And the fear of going down.--Antonio Machado

And It Spoke

I woke up this morning ready to search for an Antonio Machado poem talking about the human shadow, and stumbled across this one instead:

Every man has two
battles which he fights:
he fights with god in his dreams,
and he fights the sea when awake.--Antonio Machado

My interest in Melville and Moby Dick is growing.

Death Instinct

Robert Bly wrote this 4 years after I graduated from high school:

"We are drawing nearer to what Freud called "the pure culture of the death instinct."[Pg.42, The Sibling Society]

Faces

The other day I found this poem in James Hillman's The Force of Character.

From mirror after mirror
No vanity's displayed
I'm looking for the face I had
Before the world was made.--William Butler Yeats

More on Ishmael

Took the time and watched this video this morning. Now I have a better understanding why I recently wrote a letter into our local newspaper thanking a local high school student for mentioning that Ishmael was her favorite book in 2011. It took me three weeks to finally make up my mind and do it. And the letter really only amounted to a short paragraph thanking her (I'll post the letter within the next couple of days). But after putting aside all of my fears it was clear that: First of all, I wanted her to know that somebody in the community was paying attention to this. Because, like Mr. Bennett said in this video, once your mind is changed you look everywhere for signs of this different vision, and sometimes it's nice to know that others are looking too. Secondly, I wanted to publicly acknowledge that it was good to see that Ishmael was alive and well twenty years after its publication. Lastly, I know that after I read Ishmael, and the rest of Quinn's work, I longed to meet up with other readers (Where I live it's 15 miles to the closest city, so it was tough at times) and sit face to face and talk about his work. And as a side note, and as fate would have it, I met up with a like minded woman (She's an old hippie, just ask her.) that lived just down the road from me, and she mentioned that she had a daughter returning from California that I might be interested in. And again, as fate would have it, we're happily married expecting our 3rd child this September. I'm glad the book fell into my hands when it did.

Show Yourself

Seeking more elder wisdom this morning, and found it in "The Force of Character."

"We look at each other to see into each other. Of course we misjudge and follow the wrong perceptions, but these errors do not negate the idea that it is a citizen's duty to make his face public. Only God may hide his face." [James Hillman, Pg. 151]

Destruction of Fatherhood

Yesterday I mentioned that I was rereading parts of Robert Bly's "The Sibling Society." I ran across a statistic that I have occasionally grieved over since I first read it years ago:

The partriarchal system's destruction of fatherhood continues in the United States: here is its free hours that are 'enclosed.' In 1935, the average working man had forty hours a week free, including Saturday and Sunday. By 1990, it was down to seventeen hours. The twenty-three lost hours of free time a week since 1935, are the very hours in which the father could be a nurturing father, and find some center in himself, and the very hours in which the mother could feel she actually has a husband." [Pg. 36, The Sibling Society]

Primacy of The System

Been up since three a.m. rereading the first two chapters of Robert Bly's "Sibling Society." This quote by Fredrick Winslow Taylor sums up some aspects of the first two chapters nicely: "In the past the man has been first; in the future the System must be first." The System, of course, has given us power beyond our ancestor's wildest dreams.

Regret and Racoons

On the mail route the other day, I saw a dead racoon lying on the centerline. I drove by it twice and didn't take the time to move it, and I'm regretting it now. That's the second dead coon I've seen in the past 3 days. The other was lying in the middle of a frozen lake with tire tracks across it's back. Someone apparently thought it would be fun to run it down and kill it. I didn't move that one either (I was to busy wiping its guts off from my dog because he rolled in it), and of course I regret that too. Ever since reading this passage by Dennis Martinez I've tried to move roadkill off the road when time permits.

"The words conservation and ecology, as we use them in the Western sense, don't exactly fit what Indian people did or do with the land. It was their livelihood, which depended on reciprocity. Thus, the trees were not seen as trees, they were also seen as relatives. The trees are relatives and other species are relatives and they watched you all the time. It was a forest that looked at you to see how you were handling the remains of plants and animals.

"An animals shadow soul is alive for a long time after an animal is killed, and it watches how you treat the remains

." [Dennis Martinez, pg. 93 Original Instructions]

To The Point

A few days back I posted a quote out of If The Give You Lined Paper Write Sideways and mentioned that I was working on a letter to our local newspaper about Ishmael. I was going to try and work two Quinn quotes into the letter, but I just might stick with this:

I would like to thank [Student] for letting us know that her favorite book of 2011 was Ishmael, by Daniel Quinn. 20 years after its publication it's good to see the book is alive and well.

No Respect

The other day we went ice fishing. It was my dad, son, and I. And, for the first time, we took our chocolate lab out there. Before we left there was a concern that he would find something to roll in, perhaps a dead minnow or some fish guts. But I figured the chances were fairly slim that he would actually find something, so we took him anyway. Well, he found something to roll in right in the middle of the lake.

What was it? A dead racoon with tire tracks across it's back. During one of its evening hunts the racoon must have been out there eating dead minnows or fish that fisherman had thrown up on the ice. Unfortunately someone thought it might be fun to run it down and kill it. The first word that came to mind when I saw it was: cruel. And this quote that I came across in David Abram's Becoming Animal also came to mind:

"We know what the animals do, what are the needs of the beaver, the bear, the salmon, and other creatures, because long ago men married them and acquired this knowledge from their animal wives. Today the priests say we lie, but we know better. The white man has been only a short time in this country and know very little about the animals; we have lived here thousands of years and were taught long ago by animals themselves. The white man writes everything down in a book so that it will not be forgotten; but our ancestors married animals, learned all their ways, and passed on this knowledge from one generation to another.[A Carrier Indian From British Columbia, pg.259, Becoming Animal]

I've been working on a letter to the editor of our local newspaper. It's going to be thanking a local high school student for mentioning Ishmael in the paper. I'm going to try and work this quote into it.

"The subject of Ishmael is the unrecognized and unacknowledged mythology of our culture, which Ishmael formulates as a story that spells out the relationships among Man, the world, and the gods. In this context the gods are mythological, which is not to say that they're unreal but rather that their reality is irrelevant. The world was made for man to conquer and rule, and Man was made to conquer and rule it--according to our mythology. It goes without saying that this is a divinely appointed mission. The Europeans who drove the indians off their land and put that land to the plow sincerely believed they were doing God's work."[Daniel Quinn, Pg. 49, If They Give You Lined Paper Write Sideways]

Struggle Within

Lately, while watching the fire in the morning, I've been pulling books off the shelf that have influenced me. I'll read some of it and usually grab a pencil and write out some passages longhand that move me. It's good writing practice. Here is one of the passages I copied:

"Why has the interior judge become so brutal and terroristic? We can say that advertising from a child's earliest years has so influenced the greedy, desirous part of the child's soul that the resisting force, the judge, has to enlarge itself in order to combat the inflamed wanting. The interior judge, moreover, can no longer rely on outward authority in it's battle against impulse. Having to resist without help from the parent or teachers, it has to do it all alone, and so it naturally moves toward primitive, humorless savagery, well expressed in grunge rock, action movies and piercing of body parts."[Robert Bly, Pg.xii, The Sibling Society]

Longing to be Childish

One of my favorite parts from Robert Bly's "The Sibling Society":

There is little in the sibling society to prevent a slide into primitivism, and into those regressions that fascism is so fond of. Eric Hoffer remarked: 'Drastic change [has produced] this social primitivism ... [the] mass movement absorbs and assimilates the individual ... [who] is thereby reduced to an infantile state, for this is what a new birth really means: to become like a child. And children are primitive beings -- they are credulous, follow a leader, and readily become members of a pack....Finally, primitivism also follows when people seek a new identity by plunging into ceaseless action and hustling. It takes leisure to mature. People in a hurry can neither grow nor decay; they are preserved in a state of perpetual puerility.' "[pg.ix, The Sibling Society]

I looked up puerility after reading this quote again. It simply means to act childish and silly.