Men and Women

"It appears that neither man nor woman want to be so dependent on each other as they have been in the past. Each gender aims for independence, and that seems natural for us. But as the obligatory dependence between men and women lessens, dependence itself if not lessening, dependence on the state increases." -- Robert Bly

The Holy In The Ground

I received this book in the mail yesterday. When a new book lands in my hands I usually open the book up and start reading a few lines or just page through it. Here are the first lines that I ran across after opening it:

"Civilization could probably be defined as humans with lapsed memories who live forgetting that people in the long run are not in charge, nor are they truly ever going to be. Whereas the Indigenous mind does not give the direction of the world to the 'will' of God, but to the desire of the Holy in the ground to continually unfold as nature."--Martin Prechtel

Good stuff.

It's Opening Day!

It's Opening Day! Looking forward to hearing the voice of Bob Uecker through the car speakers as I pedal mail on this first day of April.

“[Baseball] breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall all alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.” ~ A. Bartlett Giamatti

The Difference Between Madness and Insanity

"The difference between blessed madness and insanity is: insanity is following the wrong God."--Michael Meade

Quinn Quote Saturday

"People in America (perhaps more than elsewhere) are used to being organized into "campaigns" -- support this cause, elect this president, boycott this product, vote for this legislator, support this bill, and so on -- but there is no campaign that is going to assure us having a livable world. For many generations, we've all been collaborators in bringing us to the point of extinction, but we weren't following any "course of action," as we did this. Rather, we were following a vision (or as Ishmael put it, enacting a story). Political leaders and captains of industry followed the vision in their own way (and contributed in their own way to our situation). Shopkeepers and workers followed the vision in their own way (and contributed in their own way to our situation). In reversing the situation, how could it possibly be different?"--Daniel Quinn in an interview with Bob Conrad

A Pennsylvania Judge Holds That Corporations Are Not “Persons”

I usually don't post news, but this brief news clip is truly inspiring.

"These communities believe that if ten thousand other localities do the same, that those tremors will begin to shake loose a new system of law – a system in which courts and legislatures begin to elevate community rights above corporate rights, and thus, begin to liberate cities and towns to build economically and environmentally sustainable communities free from corporate interference."--Thomas Linzey

Green

"Hope and growth, like youth, are green."--James Hillman

Pope and Unregulated Financial Capitalism

I never thought I'd find myself posting a quote from the Pope.

“It is alarming to see hotbeds of tension and conflict caused by growing instances of inequality between rich and poor, by the prevalence of a selfish and individualistic mindset which also finds expression in an unregulated financial capitalism. In addition to the varied forms of terrorism and international crime, peace is also endangered by those forms of fundamentalism and fanaticism which distort the true nature of religion, which is called to foster fellowship and reconciliation among people.” ~ Pope Benedict, Message for the Celebration of the World Day of Peace, 1 January 2013

Practice

"It's very important to distinguish between a practice and a task. You can succeed or fail at a task. This is a practice, you can’t fail at it, you just keep doing it. That's why we call it practice. It’s not about success and failure." ~ Ken McLeod

This resonates given my relationship with Buddhism and baseball.

Urging Strife

Up to this point in my life the lines below are some of the most important lines I've come across:

"Part of separating and drawing apart is the emotion of hatred. So I shall be speaking with hatred and urging strife, or eris, or polemos, which Heraclitus, the first ancestor of psychology, has said is the father of all."--James Hillman, pg.114, A Blue Fire

Our Form Of Display: Rhetoric

I'm following my fascination with Hillman's work this morning. I like the idea of our speech as a form of display in the animalistic sense.

"I think that the human form of display, in the ethologist's sense of 'display,' is rhetoric. Our ability to sing, speak, tell tales, recite, orate is essential to our lovemaking, boasting, fear-inspiring, territory protecting, surrendering, and offspring-guarding behaviors. Giraffes and tigers have splendid coats; we have splendid speech."--James Hillman, Pg. 295, A Blue Fire

God Is Life In Abundance

"God is life in abundance wherever life is found, but not for all in every season. When the locusts thrive, the birds feast and the bison and the deer go hungry; still that place is as full of life as it was before and as full of life as it can be. No place where there is life is a desert, except to man."-- Daniel Quinn, pg.8, Tales of Adam

More on Diderot

Someday I'd like to learn more about Denis Diderot. James Hillman has called him the spiritual father of our democracy. He had a big influence on James Madison and the other thinkers that had a hand in writing The Constitution. Diderot interests me because he'd given up on the state leading us. He also gave up on monotheism. Two ideas that we still think will lead us into the promised land, unfortunately. On his deathbed he said:

"I do not believe in God the Father, God the Son, or God the Holy Ghost."

A Certain Kind of Coin

"Each God makes a claim on us which we may pay only in the God's coin--this is an inescapable fact."--Euripides

Einstein and Fairy Tales

"If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales."--Albert Einstein

I think Einstein is onto something here. Living the life of an homeschooling/unschooling parent has taken me into to the world of fairy tales. Growing up I heard very little of fairy tales after 6 or 7 years old.

Quinn Video Saturday

I think he makes an important point in saying that we don't have the power to destroy all of life on this planet. We do have the power to make it uninhabitable for humans, though.

This LINK will take you to the video.

Money Cow

Baseball season is right around the corner. So, like years past, I find myself flipping through Robert Bly's book, The Sibling Society. I've learned that this isn't a conscious thing, it just happens. I would guess it's for the adult male wisdom in it. I'll be working with adolescents and children in one capacity or another on the baseball diamond this year, so it's always nice to get my bearings straight before I go at it. Anyway, while looking for a quote by Dostoyevsky on how adolescence naturally use language like soldiers and sailors I ran across this tale by Bly. I've probably read it a half-a-dozen times or so in the past, but this time it really had an impact on me.

A Curious Tale

Once upon a time there was a country, far north and far south of here, where farmers found a new domestic creature, superior to sheep, pigs, or chickens. It happened just after money had been reclassified as an animal. One day it was a thought; the next day it was real, and had horns and an udder.

The breeders soon found that the new animal needed much air and water; and some of the poor had to be moved to the inner cities and others to the suburbs, to make room. Although it was regrettable that people had to lose their old homes and their security, nothing could be more important, the Senate and the House said, for the future of the nation than this new money cow. What they needed was one great money bull for the development of the line.

A perfect money bull was finally discovered; his name was Bottom. For a while, everyone was satisfied with Bottom, and many gifts were brought to him. Boys wore their caps backward as an honor to Bottom. He finally learned to speak, and his words and his sperm were sent all over the known world.

When Bottom began to demand sacrifices, some people became uneasy. But Congress agreed to his demands. Hundreds of people lined up to be sacrificed to him. This line of people about to die was called Bottom's line.--pg. 153-54

The first people I thought of after reading this tale was Donald Trump, Ronald Reagan, and Wisconsin's very own Governor Scott Walker.

I'd say we've sacrificed a lot to Bottom since 1980.

Soul and Spirit Again...I think

"Spirit yearns for meaning, transcendence, and fullness. It asks for dedication to life and a mystical connection with all that is above and beyond us. Soul, on the other hand, is our ordinary life of deep connections, emotions, thoughts, and important attachments. Both soul and spirit need our attention? We are at our best when they work closely together."--Thomas Thomas Moore

This reminds me of Robert Bly talking about the masculine and the feminine. I've heard him say that it's vitally important for us to define what it means to be masculine and what it means to feminine and live somehwere in the middle. I would think the same would go for the soul and spirit.

Skulls, Eyes, and Sockets

Once again I was moved by this man's writing and wisdom this morning:

"The old natural philosopher, who was usually both physician and philosopher, pondered with the skull upon his table. Not only did he see death from the viewpoint of life. He viewed life through the sockets of the skull.

"Life and death come into the world together; the eyes and the sockets which hold them are born at the same moment. The moment I am born I am old enough to die. As I go on living I am dying."--James Hillman, Pg.59, Suicide and The Soul

And A Quote Presents Itself

Well, I was searching for a quote in one of the first on-line interviews that I ever read back in the late nineties. I didn't find the quote, of course. I usually never do. What usually does happen, though, is that I find a better one:

"But I think everyone knows secretly that if we’re going to save the world, it will have to be by a new religious awakening that technology isn’t going to be able to address. Governments aren’t going to do it, laws aren’t going to do it for us, police aren’t going to do it for us. It has to be an awakening among people of a religious kind. This is so serious here, we’re talking about the extinction of the human race; that’s what’s at issue. If the extinction of the human race isn’t a religious issue, what is?"--Daniel Quinn

Speaking of religion, I have a philosophical insight, I think. Those who have too much love for heaven end up hating the world around them to some degree. Of course, the opposite is true as well. If you fall in love with the world around you too much you end up hating anyone that speaks of religion or Christianity or manners or morals, etc. In other words you could be a fundamentalist-leftist-marxist.

Diderot and Democracy

"If we look to the city rather than the state it's because we've given up hope that the state may create a new image for the city."--Denis Diderot

Diderot is considered by some to be the spiritual father of our American democracy. I'm also really starting to like the idea of organizing folks at a community level and starting hammer out what our vision of a sustainable community is. It's becoming more and more clear to me that we can't expect government at the federal and state level to stop things like frac sand mines or factory farming.

Quinn Quote Saturday

"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."--Daniel Quinn out of If They Give You Lined Paper, Write Sideways

The Hopeful Illusion

"Most men, the huge majority, in fact all of us, are dyed-in-the-wool Christians, fully immersed in hope. We are unconcsiously converts to the hopeful illusion. But hope itself converts into what it covers, its ever-faithful nightime companion, despair, and we have been instructed, deceitfully, in only the the upper half of this truth. Look up; and new day is coming!"--James Hillman, pg.216, A Terrible Love of War

Kant on Discord

"The means nature employs to accomplish the development of all faculties is the antagonism of men in society, since this antagonism becomes, in the end, the cause of a lawful order of this society."--Immanuel Kant

Like It Or Not We Are All Christians

One thing is for certain: Simply rejecting Christianity isn't going to be enough to stop us from going extinct. Years back I thought it would be. That aside I trudge ahead fearless in my foolishness.

"The fact is clear: Western wars are backed by the Christian God, and we cannot dodge his draft because we are all Christians, regardless of the faith you profess, the church you attend, or whether you declare yourself utterly atheistic. You may be Jew or Muslim, pay tribute to your god in Santeria fashion, join with other Wiccas, but wherever you are in the Western world you are psychologically Christian, indelibly marked with the sign of the cross in your mind and in the corpuscles of your habits. Christianism is all about us, in the words we speak, the curses we utter, the repressions we fortify, the numbing we seek, and the residues of religious murders in our history. The murdered Jews, the murdered Catholics, the murdered Protestants, the murdered Mormons, heretics, deviationists, freethinkers...Once you feel your own personal soul to be distinct from the world out there, and that consciousness and conscience are lodged in that soul (and not in the world out there), and that even the impersonal selfish gene is individualized in your person, you are, psychologically, Christian. Once your first response to a dream, a bit of news, an idea divides immediately into the moral "good" or "bad," psychologically you are Christian. Once you feel sin in connection with your flesh and its impulses, again you are Christian. When a hunch comes true, a slip-up is taken as an omen, and you trust in dreams, only to shake off these inklings as "superstition," you are Christian because that religion bans nondoctrinal forms of communication with the invisibles, excepting Jesus. When you turn from books and learning and instead to your inner feelings to find simple answers to complexities, you are Christian, for the Kingdom of God and the voice of His true Word lies within. If your psychology uses names like ambivalence, weak ego, splitting, breakdown, ill-defined borders for conditions of the soul, fearing insistence upon unified, empowered, central authority. Once you consider apparently aimless facts of history to be going somewhere, evolving somehow, and that hope is a virtue and not a delusion, you are Christian. You are Christian too when holding the notion that resurrection of light rather than irremediable tragedy or just bad luck lie in the tunnel of human misfortune. And you are especially an American Christian when idealizing a clean slate of childlike innocence as close to godliness. We cannot escape two thousand years of history, because we are history incarnated, each one of us thrown up on the Western shores of here and now by violent waves of long ago.

"We may not admit the grip of Christianity on our psyche, but what else is collective unconsciouness but the ingrained emotional patterns and unthought thoughts that fill us with the prejudices we prefer to conceive as choices? We are Christian through and through. St. Thomas sits in our distinctions, St. Francis governs our acts of goodness, and thousands of Protestant missionaries from every sect you can name join together to give us the innate assurance that we are superior to all others and can help them see the light."--James Hillman, Pg. 191, A Terrible Love of War

A Daniel Quinn Quote On A Saturday Morning

“But why? Why do you need prophets to tell you how you ought to live? Why do you need anyone to tell you how you ought to live”--Daniel Quinn out of Ishmael

The Furies and Resistance

This brief excerpt about the Greek furies knocked me on my ass this morning. It's sort of dark. Then again I'm feeling dark so what can be expected.

"After a blood-crime the ancient Greek Furies (Erinyes) demand vengeance. They do not let go and they work by disturbing the mind. There is no escape from their pursuit. Heraclitus says that if the sun itself were to leave its ordered course, the Furies would find him. To forget a major wrong is to neglect the laws of the cosmos, which are also reflected in the order of the family."[James Hillman, Pg.157, A Terrible Love of War]

This is part of the reason why, I think, Derrick Jensen heavily criticizes the dogma of non-violent pacifism. We are destroying nonhuman life at such an alarming rate there isn't one of us that can wash the blood off from our hands by claiming the moral high ground of nonviolent pacifism. And besides, the furies (Erinyes) will find a way to torment us anwyay. I'm beginning to think the deaths cannot be transformed by love. Perhaps underground acts of resistance will be inevitable for some simply because of the torment.

Rumi on Blindness

"The eye goes blind when it only wants to see why."--Rumi

Cheating On One Religion

I read this a few days back. Since I don't get out of Washburn County much let alone the country, it's interesting to learn how the Japanese handle religion.

"People in America are very committed to their religions. A religion to them is like a wife/husband or girl/boyfriend. You can only have one of them! If you are a Christian and you do yoga, you are cheating on Jesus!

"The Japanese, on the other hand, are very religiously promiscuous. They’re like polyamorists when it comes to religion. Lots of people over there go to Buddhist temples on the Buddhist holidays, Shinto shrines on the Shinto holidays and maybe even occasionally to Christian churches on the Christian holidays like Christmas or Easter. Lots of non-Christian Japanese people have church weddings, often with foreign guys pretending to be preachers. It’s no big deal."--Brad Warner on his blog titled: Hardcore Zen

Initiatory Books

Lately I've been thinking of Daniel Quinn's and Derrick Jensen's work somewhat as books of initiation. I've also thought of my struggle to express myself here and in my journal as an initiation also. Why? Because I think Western Civilization is dying. It's at its end. And when the majority of the people in this society don't understand this on a conscious level one needs someone to articulate this to them or they'll think that they are going nuts. And eventually after one has this articulated to them they have the urge to express themselves also. Anyway, I ran across these quotes in A Terrible Love of War by the 20th century philosopher Michael Foucault that rationally explains what I'm getting at.

"For Nietzsche, Bataille, and Blanchot, experience has the function of wrenching the subject from itself, of seeing to it that the subject is no longer itself, or that it is brought to its annihilation or its dissolution. This is a project of desubjectivism."

"...however boring, however erudite my books may be, I've always conceived of them as direct experiences aimed at pulling myself free of myself, at preventing me from being the same."

"Which means that at the end of a book we would establish new relationships with the subject at issue: the I who wrote the book and those who have read it would have a different relationship with madness, with its contemporary status, and its history in the modern world."

Simple Marriage Quote

"It's better to marry than to burn."--St. Paul

The Reasons For War: Does The Land Demand Blood Sacrifice?

James Hillman on why the Civil War might have been fought:

"Suppose the entire American Civil War that has permanently marked the land and scarred the character of the American people was a sacrifice by a secular Christian society to a god or gods that had not been honestly remembered until the war, gods of the land, gods honored who had been there for centuries before the combatants donned the blue and the gray.

"Suppose the gods in this 'new world' soil were saying: 'You may not land here; you cannot claim this land by labor alone, nor by law or treaty, nor even by expulsion of others and the rights of victors. To claim this land you shall pay for it with your own blood, and until you have paid you have not truly landed; you remain colonists, attached still in soul to another mother as refugees from her, rebels against her, secretly fawning upon her, and have not let this land bring forth its birth in freedom.'"--Pg.103, A Terrible Love of War

Suppose this is why Derrick Jensen has often said that we must ask the land what it wants. It has its own wants and desires that we must pay attention to before we act to help it. I don't know. I do know that Heraclitus once said: "The true nature of things loves to hide and to stay hidden."

Quinn Quote Saturday

Imagining extinction this morning. One of the affects Quinn's work had on me was that it opened me to the possibility, and perhaps the inevitability, of the human species going extinct much like the dinosaurs.

B's Beattitudes

Blessed are those who do
not exalt themselves above
their neighbors in the
community of life, for their
children shall have a world
to live in.

Blessed are those who
listen to their neighbors in
the community of life, for
they shall escape extinction.

Blessed are those who
refrain from imposing on
others their "one right way
for people to live," for
cultural diversity shall be
restored among them.

Blessed are those who
hunger and thirst for the
survival of all human
cultures, for they shall
preserve a legacy of wisdom
accumulated from the
beginning of time.

Blessed are those who do
not fancy themselves to be
rulers or managers or
stewards of the world, for
the world thrived for three
billion years without their
rule or their management
or their stewardship.

My First Book Of Rumi

My first book of Rumi fell into my hands on February, 20th. It's title: A Year with Rumi: Daily Readings. This book was given to President Obama as a gift from the author during the beginning of his first term as President. Rumi is the President's favorite poet. The poem on the day I received the book knocked my socks off and made me laugh at the same time.

Imagining is Like

Imagining is like feeling around
in a dark lane, or washing
your eyes with blood.

You are the truth
from foot foot to brow, Now,
what else would you like to know?

Citizenship and War

This quote by Machiavelli and James Hillman's commentary on it is stunning and inspiring.

"A prince...should have no other aim or thought, nor take up any other things for his study, but war; [he] ought...never let his thoughts stray from the exercise of war; and in peace he ought to practise it more than in war."

James Hillman goes onto say: "The prince, as generous metaphor for responsible citizen and concerned member of the polis, will keep a focused mind, a mind undistracted by the multiple diversions of peace, and a psyche neither numbed nor in denial. And he will maintain this clarity not merely by meditating or praying to benefit his own 'mental health,' but for the common good and the defense of the community. Hence, the prince 'ought never let his thoughts stray from...war.'" Pg. 36, A Terrible Love of War

I'm also beginning to see why Derrick Jensen titled one of his CD's: Now This War Has Two Sides.

Gods and Porno Flicks

Could it be that Aphrodite finds her way into one's home through the porno flick? Maybe Jung is right, if we look hard enough we'll find the gods in our diseases.

Philosophy: A Frozen Form of Mythology

I'm going to take a stab at answering the questions I asked yesterday. Here is what I've come up with: I've heard it said that the gods speak through mythology and poetry. It's universal. I've also heard it said that philosophy is a frozen form of mythology. In other words, every philosophical idea is associated with a myth. Perhaps this is why an author like Daniel Quinn (Well, he had Ishmael say it to Alan) can say one cannot argue with mythology. It is universal and fluid unlike philosophy which becomes frozen and stiff.

I know that it would be bliss if there was a cafe down the road for me to sit and discuss these ideas.

Wingless Angels

"Philosophy will clip an angels wings."--John Keats

What's Keats saying here? Reading too much philosophy will never get you off the ground? Was he just being a high-flying spirit boy when he said this?

It's time to cut firewood. That'll ground the brain, and work some this coffee out of my system.

Stuck in Muck

I've always been interested in psychology, especially after getting to know depression and anxiety well in my late teens and early twenties. They scared the shit out of me to be quite honest. I never thought I'd climb back out of whatever hole I was in during that period. And once I did, I've never wanted to go back, atleast not to that degree. This, of course, leads me to a quote that has been popping into my head the past week or so. I made an attempt to find it yesterday and couldn't, but this morning I was successful.

"It must be remembered that sensations of the ugly and evil impress us more violently than those of what is agreeable...sickness makes the rougher mark...Illness...makes itself by it very incongruity."--Plotinus

Whatever the hell had a hold of me then left a mark.

Teach A Hundred

"What you do is teach a hundred what I've taught you, and inspire each of them to teach a hundred. That's how it's always done" - Daniel Quinn, Pg. 248, Ishmael

Another Quote on Beauty

Lately I've been thinking a lot about Beauty. I don't think we consider it enough.

"The awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and devil are fighting there, and the battlefield is the heart of man."-- Fyodor Dostoyevski

D.H Lawrence on Beauty

Question: What is Beauty?

Answer: According to D.H. Lawrence "Beauty is a mystery. You can neither eat it nor make flannel out of it."

New Strategy To Save The USPS

I've got a new strategy this morning. If any of you have friends or family working within the United States Postal Service please pass this PETITION onto them and urge them to pass it on to others within the USPS. My thinking is that if approximately one-fifth of USPS's work force signs this thing we'll reach our 100,000 signature goal by the 21st of February. And why wouldn't a USPS employee take the two minutes it takes to sign this thing? Their job, and the survival of the USPS, depends on it.

We Petition The Obama Administration To: Save The Post Office

Two posts today. Yesterday I had the intention to post this PETITION:

We Petition The Obama Administration To:

Save the Post Office

The Postal Service is not a federal agency. It does not cost taxpayers a dollar. It loses money only because Congress mandates that it do so.

What it is is a miracle of high technology and human touch. It delivers to more than 151 million addresses every day but Sunday. It's what binds us together as a nation.

If Congress does not take action soon, the Post Office will have only enough money to pay its bills through October. After that, it will go bankrupt.

Before it’s too late, we urge Congress to free the Post Office from its congressionally mandated obligations and allow it to raise additional revenue so that it can become self-sustaining once again.

Read DO WE REALLY WANT TO LIVE WITHOUT THE POST OFFICE? from Esquire's February issue: http://tinyurl.com/ap8vsen.

#savethepostoffice

It's been 24 hours since I signed. I was signature number 4176. I just now checked it and there is 4237 signatures. That's only 61 signatures in 24 hours. We need 96,000 signatures before February 21st. Please sign it and share it. My goal isn't so much to save my own job but to let the President know we value the Post Office and are paying attention. In other words, I like to know active citizenship is happening.

A Reader Responds...And I Respond Back

Recently I had a response to my blog post titled: Where is Marx When You Need Him. I'm going to attempt to respond to it using a method that I learned in Daniel Quinn's If They Give You Lined Paper Write Sideways. In that book he asks his readers to look for the unquestioned hidden assumptions in their own and other's thinking. I admit I don't do very well at this, but this will be good practice.

Responder: "There is something wrong with your argument, that high paying jobs should be saved even though they aren't warranted. And how could Karl Marx make things better?"

Me: Karl Marx can't make things better because he is dead. But I think we look at the world with the ideas that we hold in our heads. And I think it was Marx who came up with the idea that people don't have to labor for a wage that the owners of production have set up for him without a fight. In other words, a laborer doesn't have to be a wage slave that blows like a feather in the free market winds.

Responder: "Karl Marx would probably save your job and others like it but to the detriment of all. This is why the Soviet Union collapsed, because unnecessary jobs were constantly saved. Thus the whole communist economic system became unproductive and lazy, eventually atrophying and collapsing."

Me: Ah yes, you're letting me know that my job and others like it are unnecessary, and that people working jobs like mine are lazy, and we will be why the United States economic system collapses. The old I'm a burden on the taxpayer argument. But my job isn't supported with taxpayer dollars. It's payed for by pedaling stamps.

Responder: "The ending of unproductive jobs may not be the fairest thing to do. But it is one of those things that has help keep America dynamic and vital."

Me: In other words I should work for half of what I make and be a good patriot. No, I'll choose to be a prickly, pissed off citizen.

A Big Hole In the Ground

Yesterday, I listened to 5 hours of citizen testimony against what will probably be the largest open-pit iron-ore mine in the world today. It was some of the best radio I've heard in a long time. The hundreds of citizens that stood up and had the courage to speak with heartfelt conviction against this travesty deserve to be honored in some way. Also, after listening, it's clear to me that the citizens of Wisconsin must do everything within their power to make sure this mine does not see the light of day. If you've made it this far take a look at the Sierra Club's write up on the potential damage this mine would do to the Lake Superior watershed to see where I'm coming from. It's enough to make a guy want to....

Saturday's Daniel Quinn Quote

Quoting Daniel Quinn out of the New Renaissance:

"If there are still people living here in 200 years, they'll know that humanity doesn't belong to an order of being that is separate from the rest of the living community. They'll know this as surely as we know that the earth revolves around the sun. I can make this prediction with confidence, because if people go on thinking we belong to a separate order of being, then there will be no people living here in 200 years."

Good Bye Post Office

I'm still thinking about the post office. My family is patterning itself around it through Saturday. My wife is working a three day stint. So I wrote this in my journal this morning:

Perhaps I should try to look at the post office going away through the eyes of an old indian hunter. Their families patterned their lives around the game they were hunting at the time. My family patterns itself around the post office when my wife or I are asked to work. In both cases we're doing something that eventually leads to putting food on the table. Besides the obvious cultural diifferences there could possibly be a similarity: We're both watching the demise of what helps keep our families fed, sheltered, and clothed. The Sioux hunter watched the buffalo go. I'm watching the post office go. In the Sioux's case no one stopped it. In my case no one is going to stop it. We're both colonized. They had it done to them and we've done it to ourselves. Civilization will eventually eat itself.

On a different note. A few people have emailed me and I haven't gotten back to them. I promise I will, it just might take a few days.

The Postmaster Should Resign

I have a theory: If we, the American people, thought of ourselves as civic-minded citizens instead of falling victim to market forces Postmaster Donahoe wouldn't be so quick to announce getting rid of Saturday delivery. Why? Because we'd be on the phone calling our congressional representive demanding he or she ask for the Postmaster's resignation. This current Postmaster has proven himself much to eager to cut services to the American people all under the pretense of The United States Post Office falling victim to the internet. When in reality the USPS has been saddled with unrealistic financial obligations (See article by Ralph Nader) that no other organization trying to turn a profit would willingly accept without a fight.

Where Is Marx When You Need Him?

I just found out from my Dad that The Postal Service will be stopping Saturday delivery. My wife and I will probably be working less as a result, so we'll be making less money. It bothers me. But what bothers on a deeper level is that the labor force will once again be losing good paying union jobs that pay a livable wage. THAT'S what saddens me. It's just another blow to the person who gets up in the morning and labors for a wage.

Where is Karl Marx when we need him?

Smash The Machine

Back on August 22, 2004 Derrick Jensen signed my copy of Welcome to the Machine with this statement: Smash the Machine! When I first layed my eyes on those words I was excited. I was finally reading a book by someone that finally had the courage to say such a thing, and on top of that write a book about it. It's been almost 10 years and I still think about it. But there are times I pull back and question why smashing the machine and taking down civilization appeals to me. Of course, there are the fantasies of doing things I shouldn't be doing under the cover of darkness. And then there are the thoughts and questions that accompany those fantasies like: If only I was normal I wouldn't be thinking about this. If only I wasn't so barbaric. I'm being too male; women don't think about this. If only my childhood was better. If only I'd went to college and became a doctor or a lawyer or a teacher. And, finally, could I actually sit down and utter these fantasies and thoughts to a psychologist?

This morning the last concern was answered.

"Suppose we entertain the idea that psychology makes people mediocre; and suppose we entertain the idea that the world is in extremis, suffering an acute, perhaps fatal, disorder at the edge of extinction. Then I would claim that what the world needs most is radical and original extremes of feeling and thinking in order for its crisis to be met with equal intensity." pg. 151, We've Had A Hundred Years Of Psychotherapy And The World's Getting Worse

I'd express them to Dr. James Hillman. Perhaps the world needs us to be as radical and intense as Derrick Jensen writes.

DQ Still At It

It's good to see Daniel Quinn is still answering questions from his readers. He just answered one on the subject of anarchism. He's been doing this for well 20 years. I remember when I first ran across his work back in the late nineties. I'd spend hours over at the Ishmael Community trying to absorb what he was saying to his readers. Always anticipating the next new batch of question and answers to be published to nourish the soul.


It's also interesting to note that Derrick Jensen is currently working on a book about why he is not an anarchist.

Empty Yourself Out: Start Bitching

Yesterday I ran across some of the best political advice I've seen in my 38 years so far. It appeared on page 104 of We've Had A Hundred Years Of Psychotherapy And The Worlds Getting Worse. But before I type the quote I want to say one reason why I like James Hillman's writing: he stays within Western civilized thought and brings ideas that are thousands of years old to the table.

"I used to get stopped cold in political arguments. I would be going on about something, and the other guy would say, 'All right, if you're so smart, what would you do about it?' And I had no positive idea what to do, no program, nothing. It wasn't just that I was impractical; I was empty. My protests were suddenly emptied out because I had nothing positive to offer. They say that the '68 revolution in Berkeley and in Europe among the students were so easily crushed or petered out because the revolutionaries had no positive programs.

"Kenosis puts the emptiness in a new light. It values the emptiness. It says "empty protest" is a via negativa, a non-postivist way of entering the political arena. You take your outrage seriously, but you don't force yourself to have answers. Trust your nose. You know what stinks. Don't try to replace the helpless frustration you feel, the powerless victimization, by working out a rational answer. The answers will come, if they come, when they come, to you, to others, but don't fill in the emptiness of the protest with positive suggestions before their time. First, protest! I don't know what should be done about most of the major political dilemnas, but my gut (my soul, my heart, my skin, my eyes) sinks, creeps, crawls, weeps, cringes, shakes. It's wrong, simply wrong, what going on here."-- James Hillman, Pg.104

So, there it is. The planet is burning up, nonhuman species are going extinct faster than they should be, the human population is doubling every 50 years or so, the tension between women and men just keeps increasing, I can't eat too much fish out of our local lakes because of mercury, the whitetail deer in my area now have Chronic Wasting disease, the elite in this country have to much money, our food has been poisoned by pesticides, the cancer rates are increasing, forests keep getting cut under the guise of improvement, we keep losing top soil, my house might get bombed by a drone, the local landfill just keeps growing, the post office is falling apart, and I could go on and on and on.

Daniel Quinn Quote Saturday

"Only our politicians still insist that the world was made for Man, and Man was made to conquer and rule it. They must, as a professional obligation, still affirm and proclaim the manifesto of our revolution. If they want to hold on to their jobs, they must assure us with absolute conviction that a glorious future lies just ahead for us -- provided that we march forward under the banner of conquest and rule. They reassure us of this, and then they wonder, year after year, why fewer and fewer voters go to the polls."-- Daniel Quinn, The Story of B

Highway 53 in '93

Pulling some books off the shelf looking for writing inspiration. I turned to Robert Bly's Iron John this morning. Why? I really like his style. I also think it's because I have a 13 year old son that is well on his way to becoming 14 living in our house.

"We are living at an important and fruitful moment now, for it is clear to men that the images of adult manhood given by the popular culture are worn out; a man can no longer depend on them. By the time a man is thirty-five he knows that the images of the right man, the tough man, the true man which he recieved in high school do not work in life. Such a man is open to new visions of what a man is or could be."--Robert Bly, Iron John

I remember the day this realization hit me. I was driving up highway 53 on a gray, cold, frigid day in February. I was 18 at the time. I was returning to my grandparent's house in northwestern Wisconsin after visiting my parents and high school friends in southern Wisconsin. I was tired, hungover, and on my own. Then the darkness set in. Of course, at the time I didn't know what the hell it was. I still don't know if I have an answer, but I think I have a better idea.

A Slice of Morning

Aristotle once said, "It would seem that experience of particular things is a sort of courage." I think I know what he's getting at. There was a period in my life when on a daily basis I'd just go sit in the woods behind my house for half-n-hour up to a half a day. I'd take in all the surroundings and activity with my senses. In other words, I payed attention. And it had a revolutionary feel to it when I was out there on a weekday when everyone else was at work. I eventually quit, though. Why? I didn't want to go broke. There is no money in it. And besides how can one pay attention to particular things if one is living in a system that, as Lewis Mumford so eloquently pointed out, is based on "order, power, predictability, and above all, control."

The system has to go. But I'm hoping I find the courage Aristotle is talking about before that happens.

#

Today, I work with wood. I'm either going to get a load of firewood or work on my son's bunk bed. Working with wood, I've noticed, grounds me.

#

Conversations with 13yr. old son.

Son: Are we going anywhere today?

Me: We're journeying to the center of the universe.

Son: What!?

Me: Haven't you ever heard of that song from sixties or seventies? (I hope I'm not just imagining this. For some odd reason I'm think the Moody Blues had a song with this lyric)

Son: No.

Me: Yeah, it came out during the sixties. When your grandparents were young. You know, when a lot of them were doing acid to find out the meaning of life. Or, like Robert Bly has said, they were trying to dynamite the water out of the pond.

Son: Oh yeah, instead of bucketing the water out.

Not So Poor After All

Over the years I've considered myself living in poverty. I'm simply not a part of the middle class that the politicians are always talking about. I don't know if I've made over $20,000 in a year since I've graduated back in 1992. My grandpa used to say when we were logging together that if you made $300 in a week in northwest Wisconsin you were doing pretty good. That was in the mid-nineties.

But I need to say that I don't feel like I'm living in poverty. There isn't a day that goes by where I'm not thankful for my living situation. I've got three healthy kids, a house and land paid for, and a good job (I carry mail for post office part-time). Plus I have time to sit down and do this.

What's got me thinking about all of this, though, is a quote that Daniel Quinn used in an essay by Wisconsin's very own Thorstein Veblen (Once again, Kurt Vonnegut could be right. Sensible people are born and bred in the Midwest). Veblen's theory is called The Theory of Leisure Class. I'm interested in it here simply because of the name: Leisure Class. Veblen has separated out a class of people from the rest of us--or as my grandpa used to say, "us poor slobs"-- and theorized about them.

Over the years I've considered myself not a part of the Leisure Class. I consider Mitt Romney and Warren Buffet to be a part of that class, but not me. My family and I spent 5 years living in a couple of rooms, without running water, in the old farmhouse on our property for crying out loud, how could I be associated with them? But it occured to me yesterday there is a good chance that I could be a part of the leisure class that Daniel Quinn was talking about in his essay. Given there are 7 billion people in the world, and I'm part of that global community, I'd be willing to bet I'm in the top 1% of the income bracket.

Now what?

There is a lot more I'd like to say here. But right now I'm trying to get out a post a day before the daily chores need to be done. Taking care of kids, animals, firewood, and the rest of it.

Aurelius on the Gods

A quick quote this morning. For that is only what time allows:

"What I do I do always with the community in mind. What happens to me, what befalls me, comes from the Gods."--Marcus Aurelius

Perhaps a true warrior has both in mind always.

We've All Been Abused

I remember a few years back, on an Ishmael related discussion board that I participated in, someone made the remark that they didn't philosophize from the standpoint of a victim. This was in relation to Derrick Jensen's work. At the time it made sense on the surface. But given the depth and subtlety of Jensen's work I knew it didn't go far enough. That Jensen wasn't just sitting around whining about the abuse he suffered at the hands of his father.

Well, I ran across this insight by the psychologist James Hillman this morning:

"So we don't want to get rid of the feeling of being abused--maybe that's very important, the feeling of being abused, the feeling of being without power. But maybe we shouldn't imagine that we are abused by the past[For example, by parents, teachers, etc, from the past] as much as we are by the actual situation of 'my job,' 'my finances,''my government'--all the things that we live with. Then the consulting room becomes the cell of revolution, because we would be talking also about, 'What is actually abusing me right now?' That would be a great venture, for therapy to talk that way." Pg.39, We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and The Worlds Getting Worse

The system we live in is abusive. I think this is the first time I've ever typed that.

Fathers, Uncles, and Older Men

It's been well over a decade now since Iron John was recommended to me to read. Now, looking back, a few people mentioned it at the time. Author Daniel Quinn was one of them. One day on an internet discussion board I asked him some questions about his current marriage that he talked about in his autobiography titled: Providence. I wanted to know how his current wife was able to deal with his infidelity in a previous marriage. Of course, I also wanted to know if it was possible for a woman to love me given that I'd just lived with my grandparents for five years during what was suppose to be the prime of my life (18 to 23 yrs. old). He answered the question in a way that made logical sense (He's good at that). And in his response he mentioned that I might want to check out Iron John. So, I did.

I've read it a couple of times since then. And the excerpt below has always stuck with me since the first reading. Why? I'll try to answer part of if below.

"Throughout the ancient hunter societies, which apparently lasted thousands of years--perhaps hundreds of thousands--and throughout the hunter-gatherer societies that followed them, and the subsequent agricultural and craft societies, fathers and sons worked and lived together. As late as 1900 in the United States about ninety percent of fathers were engaged in agriculture. In all these societies the son characteristically saw his father working at all times of the day and all seasons of the year.

'When the son no longer sees that, what happens? After thirty years of working with young German men, as fatherless in their industrial society as young American men today, Alexander Mitscherlich, whom we spoke of in the first chapther, developed a metaphor: a hole appears in the son's psyche. When the son does not see his father's workplace, or what he produces, does he imagine his father to be a hero, a fighter for good, a saint, or white knight? Mitscherlich's answer is sad: demons move into that empty place--demons of suspicion.

'The demons, invisible but talkative, encourage suspicion of all older men. Such suspicion effects a breaking of the community of old and young men. One could feel this distrust deepen in the sixties: 'Never trust anyone over thirty.'"--Pg.95, Iron John

My dad worked at the same factory for 30 years. I never once stepped into that place. I never once saw, felt, or touched what he produced. And, of course, like Bly said in the excerpt, the demons arrived. They're there today.

This is something, I think, we need to think about as we move ahead with this industrial experiment (I remember Derrick Jensen in his book Welcome to the Machine referring to it as Hell). The quote also reminds me of a conversation I had recently with my uncle. I ran into him at the local gas station. And while we were pumping gas we got to talking about the most recent school shooting. He thought maybe it would have helped if the guy had an uncle to take him out in the woods to atleast "plink away at tin cans." Like he used to do with me. And maybe the guy did, I don't know. But it's a perspective I take into consideration. He's my uncle. He's raised three kids. I've fished, hunted, and logged next to him.

Quinn Quote Saturday and Some Reflection

"Everyone in your culture knows this. Man was born to turn the world into a paradise, but tragically he was born flawed. And so his paradise has always been spoiled by stupidity, greed, destructiveness, and shortsightedness."--Quote from Ishmael, by Daniel Quinn

A brief reflection on this quote out of Ishmael. One of the effects that the book had on me was that afterwards it felt alright to be human again. Yes, there was all of the ridiculous stuff I'd done to myself and other people throughout my life up to that point, but for some odd reason Ishmael helped me get above (Or maybe put aside for a moment is a better way to say it) those acts, and take a look at the bigger picture. And surprisingly enough, the personal baggage lost some of its power. It never goes away, but it puts things into perspective. Perhaps, my psyche, or soul, moved out into the world soul. In other words, I started paying attention to it.

To be clear I'm not advocating Ishmael as a self help book. I'm trying to express the effect it had on me. I've often contemplated renaming this blog: Life After Ishmael. It seems like since ever since I've read the book I'm periodically reflecting on it.

The Weapon of Honesty

I wrote this in my journal this morning:

After reading my local newspaper it seems like some of us are expecting John Wayne to ride into town and protect us from insane criminals with guns. Except this time we're all going to be like Big John. The logic seems to be that if I'm packing a pistol crazy criminals won't harm me or my children.

How about instead of all of us going out and buying guns, and going through the trouble to use them, we try a different weapon: Honesty. Having the willingness to look at the person sitting closest to you at the moment, whether that be man, woman, or child and simply say: You're not crazy, but the culture is crazy. In other words, our way of life is driving us mad.

Writing and Giving Birth

I've been writing more often lately. For the past week or so I sit down on a wooden chair pulled up to a T.V tray as the morning fire is burning. I set the timer for ten minutes and write whatever comes to mind. I keep my hand moving the whole time. I try to get this done before everyone gets out of bed. But there are mornings when the baby and Annie get up before I get started. And during those occasions I'll do my thing and she'll sit there quietly in the recliner, watch the fire, and hold the baby. Quite often, as I'm writing, I wonder if she thinks I'm nuts. But than it occured to me this morning that it could be somewhat similar to what it was like when I watched her give birth. In both occasions the universe is gifting you and you're trying to birth it. Perhaps writing a novel could be at the same level as giving birth. I don't know. I do know that both are hard work.

Power Without Resistance

I was thinking about resistance to power this morning. As a result I've got books scattered about looking for quotes and ideas. I stumbled across this idea in James Hillman's Kinds of Power that has got me thinking.

"Power, without the resistance of a counterforce, mimics the intertia it strives against, becoming an unhindered, tensionless expansion, following the lay of the land, flattening out into stagnant accumulations without intention, much like the pictures we make of inert despots on fat pillows in their pleasure domes, all resistance to the plenipotentiaries overcome." Pg.144

In search for clarification I read the sentence to my wife as she was lying on the bed nursing our daughter. I wanted to know what inertia power was mimicing. I read it. She, like usual rolled her eyes and said speak English. So, I read the first part of the sentence. We still couldn't figure it out. Oh well, I thought, just another question gone unanswered. Nothing new. But as I was randomly paging through the beginning of the same book I ran across this:

"The deeper syndrome is inertia of the spirit, a passivity that feels no vocation and shies from imaginitive vision, adventerous thinking and intellectual clarification. That we imagine ourselves today as a nation of victims attests to a vacuum in the spirit of the nation. These are symptoms of the soul in search of clarity. Clarity is the essential.

If I'm understanding Hillman right, he's saying that without resistance power mimics spirit. Without the process of soul-making spirit becomes passive, shallow, expansive and unclear. It reminds me of a poem by Swedish poet Harry Martinson:

When Euclid started to measure Hades,
he found it had neither depth nor height.
Demons flatter than stingrays
swept above the plains of death....

There were only waves, no hills, no chasms or valleys.
Only lines, parallel happenings, angles lying prone.
Demons shot along like elliptical plates;
they covered an endless field in Hades as though with moving
dragonscales.

victims of flat evil,
with no comfort from a high place
or support from a low place

That's how I'm starting to see the removal of mountaintops to provide us with coal to light and heat our homes. It's all part of the process of what I've heard poets call flattening. And now I can understand why author/activist Derrick Jensen ended an email to a fellow activist with this phrase: Welcome to Hell.

Frost on The Father

"You don't have to deserve your mother's love. You have to deserve your father's."--Robert Frost

She's Cold This Morning

The thermometer read -10 this morning. It's not suppose to get much above zero here in northwest Wisconsin today.

Pulled Robert Bly's "The Winged Life: The Poetic Voice of Henry David Thoreau" off from the shelf. These two lines will be with me today:

Greater is the depth of sadness
Than is any height of gladness -- Henry David Thoreau

The poet Robert Bly has said that women don't like it when men are always cheery and happy. They're too dry.

Yeats on A Quiet Mind

"We can make our minds so like water that beings gather about us that they may see, it may be, their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps even with a fiercer life because of our quiet."--William Butler Yeats

A Saturday Quote by Daniel Quinn

"We have a secret plan that is never discussed openly AT ALL. Someday perhaps we'll know whether it's discussed at the highest political levels and whether it's discussed in code or in plain. We don't teach our children this plan, but they know all about it by the time they reach midschool. Courting couples don't discuss the plan to see if they're in agreement on it. It's THE PLAN. It's there in place, and we're investing everything we have in it. We're investing our future in it, our children's future in it--for generations to come. We may actually be investing the future of the human race itself in this plan.

"The Nazi plan to exterminate the Jews was a shameful plan, and this is why it was kept secret. This is also why our plan is kept secret. It too is shameful and we all know it.

"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.

"We don't know when it will all be gone. We don't WANT to know--just as the people of Germany didn't want to know what happened to their Jewish neighbors when the Gestapo carried them away."--Daniel Quinn quoted out of his essay titled: On Investments

Rumi, Robert Bly, and Manners

We had a homeschooling moment this morning. My 13 year old son and I were talking about manners so I pulled out this poem by Rumi. I read it and played the Robert Bly reading. It's worth taking the 3 minutes to watch him read it. He's an amazing man.

It's also interesting to note that Rumi is President Obama's favorite poet. To me, that says a lot about the man and his faith. And I'm not implying that President Obama is a closet Muslim. My thinking is that he is a devoted Christian that enjoys reading ecstatic poetry because it's not available to him through his faith. Robert Bly claims that Christianity threw out its ecstatic tradition close 1500 years ago. That's also why Rumi is the most popular poet in America. It's just not available to us anywhere else.

Kant on Going Crazy

"The only feature common to all mental disorder is the loss of sensus communis [common and communal sense] and the compensatory development of sensus privatis [private sense] of reasoning."--Immanuel Kant

That Gorilla Koan Has Got Me

The koan from Daniel Quinn's Ishmael:

With Man Gone
Will There
Be Hope
For Gorilla?

With Gorilla Gone
Will There
Be Hope
For Man?--


I recently picked this up out of John Daido Loori's Eight Gates of Zen.

"Too see is to be it. To see the koan is to be the koan. The only way you can see the koan is because you are the koan."--Pg. 99

I had no idea what I was getting myself into.

Quinn Quote Saturday

“The people of your culture cling with fanatical tenacity to the specialness of man. They want desperately to perceive a vast gulf between man and the rest of creation. This mythology of human superiority justifies their doing whatever they please with the world, just the way Hitler's mythology of Aryan superiority justified his doing whatever he pleased with Europe. But in the end this mythology is not deeply satisfying. The Takers are a profoundly lonely people. The world for them is enemy territory, and they live in it like an army of occupation, alienated and isolated by their extraordinary specialness.”--Daniel Quinn

The Begnning of Why This War Has Two Sides

I woke up this morning ready to listen to my James Hillman podcast about war. Why? Because for years now I've wanted to understand why Derrick Jensen titled one of his published works Now This War Has Two Sides. Why he decided to call this a war. But I'm not going to have time to this morning. I was sidetracked by a blog post that Thomas Moore recently published. In it there is what I think reveals part of the answer to my question.

"Another archetypal psychologist Rafael Lopez-Pedraza, who taught me with raised voice to honor the dark, says that we therapists have to enter the rhetoric of the archetype. If we are in a mess, or our client or friend or spouse is in one, it is best not to go somewhere else for comfort, to offer sweet promises of better times or moral persuasion to shape up or pseudo-religious pieties about it all having a purpose. No, the thing to do is to enter the mess and speak for it and use its language."

Part of what I think Derrick has done is entered the mess of the phenomenon of industrial civilization and is speaking to us in its languauge.

Slightly Confused

I'm confused. I've got two books going: The Thought of the Heart, by James Hillman and The Eight Gates of Zen by John Daido Loori. Yesterday I ran across this quote in Eight Gates that has stuck with me since.

"Arnold Toynbee, the historian, has said that a hundred years from now, when people look back, it is not going to be atomic energy, space travel, computers, or any of the remarkable leaps and achievements we have made as a civilization, but rather an incident that most people are hardly aware of, that will be seen as the most significant advance of the twentieth century. That incident is the transmission of the Buddhadharma from East to West. Each and every Zen practitioner is part of that process."--John Daido Loori, Pg.78, The Eight Gates of Zen

All I can say to that is time will tell. I know that what I'm getting from reading James Hillman is that we need a lot of deep and differentiated thought. That's why we have minds, he says, to think with. He also says it's good for the soul. Than I read a line by Dogen yesterday where he says stop deep thinking:

"Cease from the practice of intellectual understanding, pursuing words and following after speech, and learn the backward step that turns your light inward to illuminate yourself."--Dogen out of Fukanzazengi

Can't you have both? Perhaps from the spirit's perspective you follow Dogen's advice. And perhaps from the soul's perspective you follow Hillman's advice. Or maybe if you take one them seriously enough the other just happens. The higher you go the deeper you go. You can't have one without the other.

Onward. I'll be carrying mail for the United States Postal Service today. An organization that is slowly falling apart.

The Coyote Tree

I've been thinking about the coyote tree that Derrick Jensen talks about in A Language Older Than Words. Anyone that has read it knows the story. Derrick takes off his clothes a couple of times and lays underneath it so the tree can talk to him. To me, it's a profound and subversive act given the way we've been conditioned in this culture. Trees aren't suppose to be able to communicate with us.

This morning I ran across a quote in James Hillman's The Thought of The Heart and The Soul of the World that, I think, explains how this happens.

"Third, 'taking in' means interiorizing the object into itself, into its image so that its imagination is activated (rather than ours), so that it shows its heart and reveals its soul, becoming personified and thereby lovable--lovable not only to us and because of us, but because its loveliness increases as its sense and its imagination unfold. Here begins phenomenology: in a world of ensouled phenomena. Phenomena need not be saved by grace or faith or all-embracing theory, or by scientific objectiveness or transcendental subjectivety. They are saved by the anima mundi, by their own souls and our simple gasping at this imaginal loveliness."

Perhaps what happened is that Derrick opened his heart to the tree and in return the tree opened it's heart to Derrick and communication was possible.

Memories

Well over a decade ago now, after spending the day freezing my ass off watching tip-ups on a northern Wisconsin lake in the middle of January, I remember coming home and lying down on my couch and being captivated by these opening lines:

"There is a language older by far and deeper than words. It is the language of body on body, wind on snow, rain on trees, wave on stone. It is the language of dream, gesture, symbol, memory. We have forgotten this language. We do not even remember it exists." (Derrick Jensen, Pg.2, A Language Older Than Words)

Almost Five Years Ago

I'm feeling aged. I've been going through some of my old journal entries. I wrote this down in April of 2008. It's hard to believe that I wrote this down close to five years ago. I pulled the book of the shelf and he signed it in 2004. Must've wrote the quote down on a second reading. Time flies.

"So far as we know, you have only one life, and there's almost nothing more worth fighting for than to figure out what you want, and then pursuing that if it takes you to the ends of the earth and to the end of your life."(Derrick Jensen, Pg.48, Walking on Water)

Quinn Quote Saturday

"My frame of reference is that of a Martian anthropologist. I'm like someone who has traveled millions of miles to study a species of beings who, while supposedly rational, are destroying the very planet they live on."--Pg. 5, If They Give You Lined Paper Write Sideways

Nature In Extremis

“It is possible that the world is in extremis because we don't know how to go to extremes”.--James Hillman

A Brief Differentiation Between Soul and Spirit

A small attempt at differentiation here, for that is all time allows me. I've been reading about the difference between soul and spirit this morning. I think soul is comfortable with animism and spirit is not. Spirit despises animism and calls it a primitive religion. Spirit tries to rise above it and unify us as one. Hence that's why I'm now beginning to think that Daniel Quinn's statement of: "There is no one right way to live" is more of a soulful statement than a spiritual one.

One Of My Friends

I consider the books on my bookshelf friends. And there are times I make my way over to my shelf and read some opening lines. Here is one of my favorites:

"It's the worst of times; it's the best of times. That's how we feel as we navigate from a paternal society, now discredited, to a society in which impulse is given its way. People don't bother to grow up, and we are all fish swimming in a tank of half-adults. The rule is: Where repression was before, fantasy will now be; we human beings limp along, running after our own fantasy. We can never catch up, and so we defeat ourselves by the simplest possible means: speed. Everywhere we go there's a crowd, and the people all look alike." Robert Bly, Pg. vii, The Sibling Society.

Quinn Quote Saturday

“Everyone in your culture knows this. Man was born to turn the world into paradise, but tragically he was born flawed. And so his paradise has always been spoiled by stupidty, greed, destructiveness, and shortsightedness.”
― Daniel Quinn, Ishmael

A Poem From One of My Heroes

A poem from one of my heros:

The crucified planet Earth,
should it find a voice
and a sense of irony,
might now well say
of our abuse of it,
"Forgive them, Father,
... They know not what they do."

The irony would be
that we know what
we are doing.

When the last living thing
has died on account of us,
how poetical it would be
if Earth could say,
in a voice floating up
perhaps
from the floor
of the Grand Canyon,
"It is done."
People did not like it here.

-- Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

One Of My Favorite Articles For 2012

One of my favorite articles of the year. And here is my favorite line:

"You and I," he finally said, "are very different, but we have the same enemy: monotheism."

I would've loved to have been on a bar stool near by to listen to the conversation that happened after that statement.

Guns and Penises

Quote from article: "A gun does not signify power, but the lack of power. Always.

"So, a gun is a symptom. But what is the cure for a gun? What would replace the gun and be real, have power? Why not a penis? Not the symbol of neurotic power but the means for being erotic, expressing love, incarnating desire, creating children, and offering pleasure. Maybe these qualities could be therapeutic for the gun. If everyone got serious about them, maybe they’d forget their guns.

"In these times when women are rightfully correcting an excess of the power-penis, it isn’t always easy to appreciate this aspect of the male body. Our imagination of its mythic properties has become too narrow, partly because of Freud himself. He was too narrow in his vision of myth and of Medusa, and he limited far too much the imaginal implications of the penis."--Thomas Moore

Quinn Quote Saturday

"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."--Daniel Quinn out of the New Renaissance

Masculinity Quote

A quote that I pulled off from Wikipedia:

“A woman simply is, but a man must become. Masculinity is risky and elusive. It is achieved by a revolt from woman, and is confirmed only by other men."--Camille Paglia

A Demonic Child Killer in our Culture

The last 15 minutes of this interview with Michael Ventura and James Hillman gives us insight as to why children and adults are shooting up schools. From interview:

Michael Ventura: "Freddie Krueger is a contemporary myth of a demon that many, many, many children are feeling."

James Hillman: "So we are back at the beginning of what we're talking about. There is a demonic child abuser, a child killer, in our culture killing children."

Quinn Quote Saturday

"For some men--perhaps all men--it's almost a necessity to do insane things from time to time: to confront the wild boar alone, spear in hand, to see the world from the top of an unscalable mountain, to risk one's entire fortune on the turn of a card. I thinks it's true of all men, personally, though nowadays most try to get along on risks taken my deputies--deputies in the boxing ring and on the football field."

"You mean...they have to test their manhood."

"Oh, it's not as simple as that, Mrs. Kennesey. When a man sets out to do something like this, he's not testing his manhood. He's testing the universe itself--he's testing the gods, if you will. He's finding out where he stands in the order of things. To best the rabbit or the deer means nothing, tells him nothing. But while he stalks the boar, he puts his fate to the test: he lives in the hands of the gods."

"I don't understand."

"To die falling off a ladder or being run over by a drunk means nothing, But for the man who lives and dies at risk, who puts his fate in the hands of the gods, death is never meaningless."--Daniel Quinn, Pg. 161, The Holy

Zen is American

"Zen is not Japanese and it's not Chinese. It is American. It didn't come from Asia; it has always been here. It is a way of using your mind and living your life and doing it with other people."--Gary Snyder

Concentration Camp Existence

"Concentration-camp existence...taught us that the whole world is really like a concentration camp...There is no crime that a man will not commit in order to save himself. The world is ruled by neither justice nor morality, crime is not punished nor virtue rewarded, one is forgotten as quickly as the other. The world is ruled by power."--Otto Friedrich, quoting the poet Tadeusz Borowski in The End of the World

Not so Fast

This thought sets the mind at ease to some degree:

"For a predominantly Eurocentric culture, the Greek/Roman patterns are the most relevant and most differentiated, and thus the most powerful. By powerful, I mean influential, authoratative, prestigious, controlling, and tyrannical. Even if these patterns of imagination that govern our thought and action are utterly patriarchal and therewith condemned as dangerously death-dealing, like a toxic dump of the spent fuel on which civilization has live for millenia, they are the roots. Inescapable. Multiculturalism cannot jump out of the melting pot that was cast in bronze in Greece centuries ago. So long as this culture is traditionally and officially committed to Indo-European languages and institutions of government and education, of family structures, and modes of thought that define the arts, sciences, religions, and human nature, we cannot change our minds, though we may beautifully extend them, revise them and reimagine them.--James Hillman, pg. 245, Kinds of Power

Reimagining the Boss

I ran across this quote in James Hillman's Kinds of Power. It gives us something to think about when it comes to our expectations of a boss, and also when we are bossing others.

"Enjoy, says the waitress; why not also the boss when you sit down to work? Not only to take pleasure in the work but to give pleasure, like a lover. Isn't this a capacity of power, as much as control, leadership or influence?"

My god, I'm 38 years old, and I don't think I've ever had a boss consider this.

Quinn Related Quote Saturday

"By disembedding humans from The Community of Life -- the basis of Takerism and civilization -- the only way to reconcile this condition of estrangement is through a God who gives freedom with one hand and offers salvation with another."-- Doug Brown, Pg. 123, Roadmap to Sustainability

Blake On Her Body

"The naked woman's body is a portion of eternity too great for the eye of man."--William Blake

Depth and Mystery

"Why do we crave the sight of the human body? Why do men especially need to look at breasts and that part of the woman's body that not only has to do with intercourse but also with birth? It's a great mystery that probably shouldn't be expl
ained, but I think we can say this much: Men have identified with the hero. We have to be adventurous, fight and conquer. We have no time for the mysteries of nature.

"Fully occupied with their heroic quests, men haven't had an opportunity to consider the great deep mysteries of sex, life and death. But a woman's body forces us to consider them. We try to turn our eyes away from it, but we can't. Over and over again we want to see those objects that say so much about our sheer existence: breasts and vaginas, nurturance and continuing existence.

"Beneath all the display of nipples and crotches lies a desperate search for self-understanding. Where do I really come from and where am I headed? Men devote their lives to achieving a position at work, a decent bank account and the reputation of responsibility, and yet, as we have seen so many times, they risk it all on the sight of a woman's body or an hour of foreplay."-- Thomas Moore

Santayana on Fanaticism

"Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim."-- George Santayana

I got the idea for this post HERE.

Diakrisis

Picking up old ideas out of Kinds of Power. This is one reason why I like James Hillman's writing. He is always bringing ideas that are thousands of years old to the table.

"The old theologians called this filtering diakrisis, discerning the spirits. Without discernment, they thought you could become a dupe of the devil. Discernment allows you to be more sophisticated about the forces, hearing them metaphorically and not yet literally, so that you do not become a mouthpiece of your mentor or a channel of visionary wisdom masking as genius."--Pg.143, Kinds of Power

Our Secret Companion

"What I am calling the 'angel' that was born with us and is our secret companion, Socrates called his daimon, who guarded him from wrong moves. The same figure appears in German thought as the Doppelganger and in ancient thought as the genius. Our birthday celebrations with cake and candles originate in a ritual honoring, not you, but your genius who was born with you. You are never a genius, can never be a genius, but you are guided and protected by a genius, and your life must be led so that the genius is not damaged. Damage to it through wounded reputation (and Cassio uses the language of wounding as Gaunt uses the language of shame) reflects especially on the family, for one's genius derives partly from the family and is generated in the family marriage bed (lectus genialis). Your genius or angel is concieved with you, descends into you through your generators and like an invisible twin at birth, part of your psychic inheritance."--James Hillman, pg.138, Kinds of Power

Quinn Quote Saturday

"Nature is a figment of the Romantic imagination, and a very insidious figment one at that. There simply is no such thing as nature--in the sense of a realm of being from which humans can distinguish themselves. It just doesn't exist."--Daniel Quinn, pg.53, Providence