It wasn’t five minutes before I found myself in the same situation. I can’t get up, and I don’t know how I can get back down. My knees are shaking. Why have I done this to myself? I seek adventure and challenge, but it’s more than this. I’m phobophilic, drawn to the experience of fear, perhaps to relive childhood traumas, perhaps to anneal my courage. Now that I know this, I resolve to seek thrills in safe places. Roller coasters and horror movies should serve. Skyscraper windows can provide the same thrill.

Over the years, I have broken this promise on several occasions. Yesterday, climbing Mt Jefferson in the wind and the rain, I was acutely aware that a slip or a twisted ankle could lead to hypothermia. I relied on my mountain skills to preserve my life. Phobophilia.

I’ve long thought that our nightly dreams are stories concocted by the imagination to support a pre-existing emotion. We create the experiences that we need for learning and emotional growth. How many of the trials that we experience in real life can be explained the same way?

"Sometimes I think we're alone. Sometimes I think we're not. In either case, the thought is staggering."

R. Buckminster Fuller (1895 - 1983)

Imagine communicating with other life forms, that have evolved on distant planets. Do they breathe? Do they have eyes? Do they fall in love? What do they have in common with us? Can we imagine all the assumptions we take for granted that are not part of their world? Someday they will talk with us, or our descendants....

Equally dramatic is the thought that the in the vastness of the universe, on billions of planets, some of which are very like the earth, that intelligent life evolved exactly once, and here we are witnessing the results. Would that make you think in terms of an intelligent creator? Or in terms of a many-universe model, in which the great majority are constructed in a way that makes life physically impossible, while a tiny minority have a tiny probability of evolving life in some corner, somewhere, perhaps only once...

22 July 2004

"Every morning when I wake up, I experience an exquisite joy — the joy of being Salvador Dalí — and I ask myself in rapture, ‘What wonderful things this Salvador Dalí is going to accomplish today?’"

Dali’s take on life is bold and joyous, but there’s something missing as well, and it’s not just humility. Connection.

Every morning I wake up grateful for my eyes and ears, for the glorious visions of nature and music of the spheres that fill them; eager to explore the chaos and to celebrate the order and the connections, the surprises that stretch and exceed the ability of my intellect to encompass them.

or

Every morning I wake up grateful for my  family, for new friends and old, who never cease to surprise and delight me, for love and connections and sharing.

"Every morning when I wake up, I experience an exquisite joy — the joy of being Salvador Dalí — and I ask myself in rapture, ‘What wonderful things this Salvador Dalí is going to accomplish today?’"

— Salvador Dalí

19 July 2004

At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.