If we cannot love a flawed being…

All honour and reverence to the divine beauty of form! Let us cultivate it to the utmost in men, women, and children—in our gardens and in our houses. But let us love that other beauty too, which lies in no secret of proportion, but in the secret of deep human sympathy. Paint us an angel, if you can, with a floating violet robe, and a face paled by the celestial light; paint us yet oftener a Madonna, turning her mild face upward and opening her arms to welcome the divine glory; but do not impose on us any aesthetic rules which shall banish from the region of Art those old women scraping carrots with their work-worn hands, those heavy clowns taking holiday in a dingy pot-house, those rounded backs and stupid weather-beaten faces that have bent over the spade and done the rough work of the world—those homes with their tin pans, their brown pitchers, their rough curs, and their clusters of onions. In this world there are so many of these common coarse people, who have no picturesque sentimental wretchedness! It is so needful we should remember their existence, else we may happen to leave them quite out of our religion and philosophy and frame lofty theories which only fit a world of extremes.

…There are few prophets in the world; few sublimely beautiful women; few heroes. I can’t afford to give all my love and reverence to such rarities: I want a great deal of those feelings for my every-day fellow-men, especially for the few in the foreground of the great multitude, whose faces I know, whose hands I touch, for whom I have to make way with kindly courtesy. Neither are picturesque lazzaroni or romantic criminals half so frequent as your common labourer, who gets his own bread and eats it vulgarly but creditably with his own pocket-knife. It is more needful that I should have a fibre of sympathy connecting me with that vulgar citizen who weighs out my sugar in a vilely assorted cravat and waistcoat, than with the handsomest rascal in red scarf and green feathers—more needful that my heart should swell with loving admiration at some trait of gentle goodness in the faulty people who sit at the same hearth with me, or in the clergyman of my own parish, who is perhaps rather too corpulent and in other respects is not an Oberlin or a Tillotson, than at the deeds of heroes whom I shall never know except by hearsay, or at the sublimest abstract of all clerical graces that was ever conceived by an able novelist.

— George Eliot

Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802

Earth has not anything to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
This City now doth, like a garment, wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill;
Ne’er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!

— William Wordsworth

Longing for Belonging

How do we reclaim our sense of belonging in the world when it is constantly being eroded by modern society in the form of the economy, technology, education and media?

Here are some of the ways we are experiencing separation:

• Indoor lifestyles, air conditioning, and motorized transportation distance us from the rest of nature, making it alien and other to us.
• Digital media substitute material, embodied experience with virtual experiences, further separating us from participation and belongingness in the material world.
• The commodity economy immerses us in a world of standardized, uniform things, stripping away uniqueness and aliveness.
• The money economy also destroys community, replacing gift interactions with paid services and casting us into a world of strangers. Because it is fundamentally competitive, it also creates the experience of a hostile world in which no one cares.
• The industrial food system distances us from nature in its aspect of generosity, so that it is no longer a friend or partner, but rather a resource from which food is extracted. It turns food into a “product,” reducing plants and animals into mere elements of production and obliterating any sense of kinship.
• The ideology of reductionism teaches us that the universe at bottom is a thing, composed of generic building blocks devoid of consciousness, purpose, agency, or intelligence. We are alone in the universe.
• Modern medicine makes the body into something to be dominated and controlled through pharmacy or surgery, and holds us in a position of dependency on experts. The body becomes “my body,” a separate thing.
• Patriarchal attitudes toward love, intimacy, and sexuality, along with their associated institutions, cut us off from deep connection to each other. Even non-sexual touch is severely circumscribed in modern society

We live within a cultural mythology that tells us we are separate beings in competitive relation for power, even for survival. We long to return to a culture of inclusiveness, cooperation, and the sharing of gifts.

— read more on HuffPo from Charles Eistenstein

An Interview With God

Interviewer: What surprises you most about mankind?

God: "That children are in such a rush to grow up, and adults are so nostalgic about their childhoods. That they give up their health making money and then spend so much money trying to restore their health. That by thinking anxiously about the future, they forget the present, such that they live neither for the present nor the future. That they live as if they will never die, and they die as if they had never lived."

— Reata Strickland video with photos and music

British Labour Party Elects a Socialist

British Labour Party today voted Jeremy Corbyn, an avowed socialist, for its leadership. This means that if Labour attains a majority in the next parliamentary election, Corbyn would be Prime Minister.

Labour suffered a crushing defeat in the elections last May, and ever since has been looking for new leadership. Corbyn’s ascent was made possible by new party rules about how the leader is chosen. Grass roots enthusiasts dominated this election.

Among Corbyn’s policy positions: He favors return to the public sector of many of the services and industries that have been privatized since Margaret Thatcher. He wants Britain to withdraw from the EU. He favors an end to austerity policies, and increase in public investment.

Britain’s economic system is already substantially more socialistic than the US, but less than Germany or France, which in turn do not lean as far left as Scandinavia.

— News article in The Guardian.     Video interview introducing Corbyn.

Everyone is a world

— Gunnar Ekelöf, born this day in 1907
      tr L. Nathan & J. Larson.

Dawn

Ecstatic bird songs pound
the hollow vastness of the sky
with metallic clinkings—
beating color up into it
at a far edge,—beating it, beating it
with rising, triumphant ardor,—
stirring it into warmth,
quickening in it a spreading change,—
bursting wildly against it as
dividing the horizon, a heavy sun
lifts himself—is lifted—
bit by bit above the edge
of things,--runs free at last
out into the open—!lumbering
glorified in full release upward—
songs cease.

— William Carlos Williams, born this day in 1883

Strange bedfellows

This is a story about viruses that became domesticated by parasitic wasps, which use them as biological weapons for corrupting the bodies of caterpillars, which in turn can steal the viral genes and incorporate them into their own genomes, where they protect the caterpillars from yet more viruses. Evolution, you have outdone yourself with this one.

— Atlantic article by Ed Young

Aside from being an intricate tale of spy-vs-spy in its own right, this story stands as an example of the way evolution is far more complicated than the picture of "blind mutations and selection for those that reproduce fastest" which is the standard paradigm. “Mutations” must be expanded to include many kinds of DNA transfer not from the individual’s parents. And “selection” must include robust alliances and communities, commensals, and entire ecosystems that become co-evolved for robust survival.

Ode to Autumn

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;
To bend with apples the mossed cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o’er-brimmed their clammy cell.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reaped furrow sound asleep,
Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers;
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cider-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir, the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft,
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

— John Keats

A physicist pursues psychic research

Russell Targ was a PhD physicist with a specialty in quantum optics, a pioneer in developing lasers at a time when lasers cost thousands of dollars and were delicate lab instruments that required fine-tuning to work at all. Then he discovered something more interesting, and switched careers.

For 20 years, Targ organized a program at Stanford Research Institute, validating the uncanny success of remote viewing. Practitioners would quiet their minds, focus on a remote location (sometimes halfway around the world), and draw a picture of what they saw there. Some people had innate powers to do this with accuracy. Eventually, Targ developed a training program with which he says most anybody can learn to see what is not in front of them—sometimes.

All this was funded generously by the CIA.

— Watch Russell Targ at SAND

Such is Life

The two greatest supra-physical pleasures of life are antithetical in operation. One is to have something to do, and know that you are doing it deftly and honestly. The other is to have nothing to do, and to know that you are carrying out your blank programme like a good and faithful menial.

— Joseph Furphy, born this day in 1885