Changing language—changing paradigm

Gretchen Reynolds writes her NYTimes column under the headline, Does Exercise Slow the Aging Process?

Just a few years ago, the unchallenged wisdom was that nothing could affect the aging process, that it was a force of nature on a time scale of its own.

Even more impressive, the article describes a study about telomere length in blood cells drawn from people who do and don’t exercise. Just a few years ago, the medical wisdom was that human telomeres shortened in order to protect us from cancer, and it was just a curiosity that older people had shorter telomeres. Now it is well-known that longer telomeres portend longer life spans, and even conservative medical researchers are beginning to talk about telomeres as an aging clock.

— Read Gretchen Reynolds’s column

Come into the deep water

I beckon you from ocean shores on the other side of time
I have such wonders to show, it is a great mystery
All things will be made new, let the old things pass away
What are you afraid of?
Don’t you hear your DNA singing the Cosmic song of Truth?
Cast yourself off the shore into the deep waters of the self

Know you are timeless in me
What do you know?
I tell you what you know will only entangle you in this world
I am calling you to the stars, come claim your inheritance
Walk without fear in Love
Probabilities increasing and decreasing with the ebb and flow of your fear
Be free, come deeper deeper, you are no more
Deep calls out to deep
I AM ALL and you are in me, no more fear
YOU ARE ALL and I am in you, where fear was…

— Eric Garza

How are you? Fine.

“[Joy] is an exhilarating state of appreciation and presence. It feels like you’re connected to everything, including the subtler aspects of the universe, whatever they are. Certainly you feel more connected to yourself, and more connected to others. There’s nothing boring about it. So I don’t buy the idea that we actually feel that happiness is boring.

“I’ve got a different explanation—we are scared of happiness. We say it’s boring because we want to back away from it, out of fear. Once happiness comes, we’re afraid it’ll go. The realization that once we find happiness, we will eventually lose it, seems somehow worse than the continued day-to-day trudgery of a luke-warm life. Better to stick with what we already know than risk the comfort of sameness in search of variety.”

from the blog of Julia Mossbridge

I have noticed myself retreating from joy for a long time, and it seems to me connected with a fear of death. How is that? If I am working now toward some future wonderfulness, then I can promise myself some imagined compensation for the ultimate loss, but if I admit to enjoying the present fully, I am choked with a feeling that asks, “Is this all there is?”–JJM

Democracy movement in Syria

Perhaps the last place you would expect to find a thriving experiment in direct democracy is Syria. But something radical is happening, little noticed, in the eastern reaches of that fractured country, in the isolated region known to the Kurds as Rojava.

Just as remarkable, perhaps, is that the philosophy that inspired self-government here was originated by a little-known American political thinker and one-time “eco-activist” whose ideas found their way to Syria through a Kurdish leader imprisoned upon an island in the Sea of Marmara. It’s a story that bizarrely connects a war-torn Middle East with New York’s Lower East Side.

Vimeo about the New World Summit, Rahava

‘House of Supposition’

‘This timid life of evidence’ –
This low roof over restless light
Impends perceptibly on distance
Of unrelenting night.

Faith apprehends the dark disclosed
In words creating their own sense.
Love over-reaches sound, and knows
Rest from this diffidence.

— Isabel Chenot

THEIR height in heaven comforts not,
Their glory nought to me;
’T was best imperfect as it was;
I 'm finite, I can't see.

The house of supposition,
The glimmering frontier
That skirts the acres of perhaps,
To me shows insecure.

The wealth I had contented me;
If ’t was a meaner size,
Then I had counted it until
It pleased my narrow eyes

Better than larger values,
However true their show;
This timid life of evidence
Keeps pleading, “I don’t know.”
— Emily Dickinson

Serfdom in Depression-era America

Aaron Copland was an iconic American composer, romantically patriotic and devoted to creating music that could be appreciated by the Academy as well as The Common Man. But his 1952 opera about poverty in America was too far left for NBC TV, and it earned him the honor of an interrogation by the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Listen to The Promise of Living from the opera The Tender Land, by Aaron Copland, born this day in 1900.
Here is an orchestral arrangement with old film clips.

The promise of living with hope and thanksgiving
is born of our loving our friends and our labor.
The promise of growing with faith and with knowing
is born of our sharing our love with our neighbor.
— Horace Everett

Beyond Scientism

Old wives’ tales, humble kin of ancient lore
Like road signs carved in stone durable.
Traditionalists are deemed incurable
By bright authorities who can’t ignore

A single variance with “fact”, yet Science
Is but a construct based upon the shared
Beliefs of those with mindsets unprepared
To entertain a whisper of defiance

Toward what is now their lawful paradigm.
The world runs deeper than its strict description
And frequently defies complete decryption
In terms of numbers, matter, space or time.

Ideas seem to fall out of the blue,
And everything beneath the sun is new

— C. B. Anderson

“Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself and that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams, because every second of the search is a second’s encounter with God and with eternity.”

from The Alchemist, by Paulo Coelho

“Life is a shipwreck, but we must not forget to sing in the lifeboats.”

François-Marie Arouet, who wrote under the name Voltaire, was born this day in 1794

In 1726 Voltaire responded to an insult from the young French nobleman Chevalier de Rohan, whose servants beat him a few days later. Since Voltaire was seeking compensation, and was even willing to fight in a duel, the aristocratic Rohan family obtained a royal lettre de cachet, a decree signed by French King Louis XV, which was routinely used to dispose of troublemakers of many kinds (drunkards, violent people, unequal marriages, and so on). This warrant caused Voltaire to be imprisoned in the Bastille without a trial and without an opportunity to defend himself. Fearing an indefinite prison sentence, Voltaire suggested that he be exiled to England as an alternative punishment, which the French authorities accepted. This incident marked the beginning of Voltaire’s attempts to reform the French judicial system. —Wikipedia

Spinoza

All happiness or unhappiness solely depends upon the quality of the object to which we are attached by love.

— Baruch Spinoza, born this day in 1632

The more clearly you understand yourself and your
emotions, the more you become a lover of all that is.–BS

What’s wrong with this picture?

For it is as if a man, going on a journey, summoned his slaves and entrusted his property to them; to one he gave five talents, to another two, to another one, to each according to his ability. Then he went away. The one who had received the five talents went off at once and traded with them, and made five more talents. In the same way, the one who had the two talents made two more talents. But the one who had received the one talent went off and dug a hole in the ground and hid his master’s money. After a long time the master of those slaves came and settled accounts with them. Then the one who had received the five talents came forward, bringing five more talents, saying, ‘Master, you handed over to me five talents; see, I have made five more talents.’ His master said to him, ‘Well done, good and trustworthy slave; you have been trustworthy in a few things, I will put you in charge of many things; enter into the joy of your master.’ And the one with the two talents also came forward, saying, ‘Master, you handed over to me two talents; see, I have made two more talents.’ His master said to him, ‘Well done, good and trustworthy slave; you have been trustworthy in a few things, I will put you in charge of many things; enter into the joy of your master.’ Then the one who had received the one talent also came forward, saying, ‘Master, I knew that you were a harsh man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you did not scatter seed; so I was afraid, and I went and hid your talent in the ground. Here you have what is yours.’ But his master replied, ‘You wicked and lazy slave! You knew, did you, that I reap where I did not sow, and gather where I did not scatter? Then you ought to have invested my money with the bankers, and on my return I would have received what was my own with interest. So take the talent from him, and give it to the one with the ten talents. For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away. As for this worthless slave, throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’

— Matthew 25:14-30

One thing we might learn from this is that the Church has been in bed with the Bankers for longer than we like to think.  Another is that human sensibilities about right and wrong have come a long way since the New Testament, let alone the Old.  A third moral is that each of reaps each day a harvest which we have not sown.

Happy Thanksgiving

Cuba gets a lot of things right

In Cuba today, population growth is stable, malnutrition is low, higher education is free, and most tropical diseases have been eradicated. Cubans can expect to live seventy-nine years, slightly outliving Americans. No other country in the world has achieved such longevity while at the same time polluting so little. The average Cuban has a 4.7-acre ecological footprint, the total amount of land area needed to grow the food they eat, produce the goods they use, and absorb the carbon they emit. For humans to avoid depleting the earth’s ecological resources, we would all have to live on about 4 acres each, according to the environmental nonprofit Global Footprint Network. As of 2011, Costa Ricans each used 5.4 acres, Norwegians almost 12, Americans nearly 17.

Cuba owes this ecologically lean development to strong social programs, a dedicated cadre of conservationists, and, despite revolutionary leaders’ grand visions, a chronically erratic economy.

— read more from Chris Lewis at Harper’s