Deep Loss of a Fruitfly

That tadpoles are fodder for pond-life is as natural as the leaves falling on the water in autumn; that flies get squidged is as ordinary as apples rotting in the orchard. One’s own death, on the other hand, seems most unnatural. It seems rather an error and an outrage; a cosmic crime; a reason to raise one’s fist and rebel against the regime that ordered this slaughter of innocents.

Nature is a streamers-and-all, non-stop, cork-popping party of death...but that does not mean that death is right or good.

Because life is so teeming with intentions and meanings, the death of each creature really is a catastrophe. But we must live with it anyway.

Philosophers academic and amateur – which is to say, pretty much all of us – prefer to think that paradoxes must have solutions, that they are somehow just the wrong way of looking at things, or a muddle of grammar and syntax. But not this one. It is, as far as I can see, part of the nature of things. To take both sides seriously and to seek some way to live with them is part of what it is to be human; part of what it means to be a guest at the party of life and death.

— More from Stephen Cave at Aeon

Am not I / A fly like thee? / Or art not thou / A man like me? — Wm Blake

Philosophy

It is from the fear of death that all cognition of the All begins. Philosophy has the audacity to cast off the fear of the earthly, to remove from death its poisonous sting, from Hades his pestilential breath. All that is mortal lives in this fear of death; every new birth multiplies the fear for a new reason, for it multiplies that which is mortal. The womb of the inexhaustible earth ceaselessly gives birth to what is new...

But philosophy refutes these earthly fears. It breaks free above the grave that opens up under our feet before each step. It abandons the body to the power of the abyss, but above it the free soul floats off in the wind. That the fear of death knows nothing of such a separation in body and soul, that it yells I, I, I and wants to hear nothing about a deflection onto a mere ‘body’– matters little to philosophy.

That man may crawl like a worm into the folds of the naked earth before the whizzing projectiles of blind, pitiless death, or that there he may feel as violently inevitable that which he never feels otherwise: his I would be only an It if it were to die, and he my cry out his I with every cry still in his throat against the Pitiless One by whom he is threatened with such an unimaginable annihilation – upon all this misery, philosophy smiles its empty smile, and with its outstretched index finger shows the creature, whose limbs are trembling in fear for its life in this world, a world beyond, of which it wants to know nothing at all. For man does not at all want to escape from some chain; he wants to stay, he wants – to live.

— Franz Rosenzweig, from The Star of Redemption, tr Barbara Ellen Galli

Stream Lines

When the Uniting Personal-to-Source vehicle
stops for delivery
the inspector stands to the side.
He looks on nonchalantly.

He is not the sender of the packages
nor is he the receiver
nor the one who delivers
neither does he instruct those
who perform these tasks.

Dressed in no official garb,
he remains unnoticed.
Simply observing
the vehicle’s design
and the efficiency
of the System.
His compassion
is for all concerned
The delivery man is
only there for delivery
He has no knowledge of the contents
nor of the origination.

And those who open the packages
are simply pleased to receive;
remaining unaware
of what goes on
between here and there.

In the end,
all will receive the great package.
The inspector rejects only failure,
never people.
He simply
streamlines the System.
His will is adamantine,
forged by
the love that embraces all.

— Allan Morelock

Art and Activism

Caledonia Curry ( Swoon) started her career as a street artist, but quickly leapfrogged to the attention of gallerists and museum curators, which let her expand to installation and performance art, often with an activist, progressive bent.  Her intricate paper-cut portraits and cityscapes, often affixed to walls in hardscrabble places, are meant to disintegrate in place, a refrain to the life around them. Meanwhile, her socially minded work has focused on building cultural hubs for far-flung artistically welcoming communities.

— More from the NYTimes

Who knew?

When my children were young, I read them books by E. Nesbit. I had no idea she wrote a dozen novels for adults and hundreds of poems, well-crafted and original.

THOUGH you and I so long have been so near—
Have felt each other’s heart-beats hour by hour,
Have watered, plucked, and trampled passion’s flower,
Have known so many days so very dear—
Yet still through every hour of every year
We have sought to win and failed to win the dower
Of perfect insight, and to gain the power
To see what we are, and not what we appear.

Yet you desire such knowledge—would possess,
You say, completion of love; if that were won
—Ah! by it might not haply be undone
The little measure of joy we knew before?
Though we should swear we loved each other more,
How surely we should love each other less!

— E. Nesbit, born this day in 1858

Here is a longish poem of Nesbit that I discovered today, a story with unexpected twists, well worth reading though it doesn’t fit here.

Taktakishvili

Listen to young flutist Emma Resmini play the 3rd movement of the Flute Sonata of Otar Taktakishvili.

Rigpa

If you find that meditation does not come easily in your city room, be inventive and go out into nature.  Nature is always an unfailing fountain of inspiration.  To calm your mind, go for a walk at dawn in the park, or watch the dew on a rose in a garden.  Lie on the ground and gaze up into the sky, and let your mind expand into its spaciousness.  Let the sky outside awaken a sky inside your mind.  Stand by a stream and mingle your mind with its rushing; become one with its ceaseless sound.  Sit by a waterfall and let its healing laughter purify your spirit.  Walk on a beach and take the sea wind full and sweet against your face.  Celebrate and use the beauty of moonlight to poise your mind. Sit by a lake or in a garden and, breathing quietly, let your mind fall silent as the moon comes up majestically and slowly in the cloudless night.

— from Sogyal Rimpoche’s Rigpa web site

An Earth Centric paradigm shift will challenge many of Western civilizations’ underlying foundations, such as hierarchic ordering, viewing the universe as a mechanical system, and the belief that society must be a competitive struggle.  This paradigm realignment challenges the deeply held belief that our species is above nature, and nature’s only value is being instrumental for our usage wants.

We are heading toward culture in which mankind is just a strand in the web of life.  We should be caretakers of this world, all of its life forms, and the earth itself, simply holding it in trust for posterity.  In no way is this indicating that the scientific revolution was a waste of time…

— Anthony J. Gerst

The Moment

The moment when, after many years
of hard work and a long voyage
you stand in the centre of your room,
house, half-acre, square mile, island, country,
knowing at last how you got there,
and say, I own this,

is the same moment when the trees unloose
their soft arms from around you,
the birds take back their language,
the cliffs fissure and collapse,
the air moves back from you like a wave
and you can't breathe.

No, they whisper. You own nothing.
You were a visitor, time after time
climbing the hill, planting the flag, proclaiming.
We never belonged to you.
You never found us.
It was always the other way round.

— Margaret Atwood