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@@ -1,119 +1 @@ -2024-10-12 14:25 @quote Your power is proportional to your ability to relax. - -2024-10-12 14:25 @quote The next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines. --- Wendell Berry, An Essay Against Modern Superstition - -2024-10-12 14:26 @quote what you contemplate, you imitate. - -2024-10-12 14:28 @quote The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one's self. -And the arbitrariness of the constraint serves only to obtain precision of execution. Igor Stravinsky - -2024-10-12 14:28 @quote Almost every article you'll ever find on attention will at some point repeat Simone Weil's statement that 'Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity. - -2024-10-12 14:29 @quote It seems to me that we all look at nature too much, and live with her too little. --Oscar Wilde, De Profundis - -2024-10-12 14:29 @stat The average person spends 87% of their time indoors and another 6% in enclosed vehicles https://indoor.lbl.gov/sites/all/files/lbnl-47713.pdf - -2024-10-12 14:30 requirements for property: - -at least 6 acres. Water. existing well or drillable. ability to capture water. Spectacular views. on a slope. good sun exposure. - -2024-10-12 14:30 @quote Pleasure in the job, puts perfection in the work -- Aristotle's prescription for excellence - -2024-10-12 14:30 @quote God is not a being, but being. - -2024-10-12 14:31 @quote @god Is something good because God wills it or is it good because god willed it? - -The good and the true are convertible with being, they are fundamentally the same as being but as related to our faculties of reason and will. The good then is simply being as it relates to will. It is being under the aspect of its desirableness. Something is not good because god wills it, neither is it some standard outside of god which he is measured by. God who is the ullness o being simply wills his own goodness, the goodness that he is, he himself is the highest good. he wills himself. - Aquinas. more or less - - -The counter argument is that God should not be constrained by his own nature. Therefore something is good because god wills it. (voluntarism). But this then leads to the idea that Not the nature of a thing, its being goodness and truth, determine reality, but the sheer act of a will. e.g. Schopenhauer. The problem is overemphasis on the will leads here, where we are divorced from the world as it really is. If I decide entirely what is true, then I can decide what is true then I can weigh 600 pounds and declare myself healthy. I can say I'm a cat and force my employer to provide a litter box. johanas the monk - -2024-10-12 14:32 @quote Security is mostly a superstition. -It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing —Helen Keller - -2024-10-12 14:32 @quote @tech One of the horrors of the online world is the way in which it cuts off the senses. - -2024-10-12 14:33 @quote S.M. -Stirling’s characters*. 'History becomes myth, myth becomes legend, and legend becomes history [as people act it out in their deeds]. Time is not a straight line. Time is a serpent.' - -*The character was our old friend The Wanderer, here seen as an old mountain man in a sheepskin poncho, making coffee over a campfire – who suddenly, for an instant, is also seen with long black braids, a black Stetson, and the face of Coyote Old Man. - -2024-10-12 14:34 @quote @stuff As Matthew Crawford observes in Shop Class as Soulcraft, 'shared memories attach to the material souvenirs of our lives, and producing them is a kind of communion, with others and with the future.' - -2024-10-12 14:35 @quote @anarch In his 1870 essay What is Authority?, Bakunin wrote: - -Does it follow that I reject all authority? Far from me such a thought. In the matter of boots, I refer to the authority of the bootmaker; concerning houses, canals, or railroads, I consult that of the architect or the engineer. For such or such special knowledge I apply to such or such a savant. But I allow neither the bootmaker nor the architect nor savant to impose his authority upon me. I listen to them freely and with all the respect merited by their intelligence, their character, their knowledge, reserving always my incontestable right of criticism and censure. I do not content myself with consulting a single authority in any special branch; I consult several; I compare their opinions, and choose that which seems to me the soundest. But I recognise no infallible authority, even in special questions; consequently, whatever respect I may have for the honesty and the sincerity of such or such individual, I have no absolute faith in any person. - -2024-10-12 14:36 @quote Other Owen, and for good reason! But that’s an important part of what I was talking about. A market economy depends on the fundamental agreement that the seller will provide the buyer with a product worth buying. Now that corporations by and large no longer do this, the market is collapsing, and they have no idea what to do about it — since listening to consumers and providing them with what they need and want is nowhere in the modern corporate vocabulary. - --JMG - -2024-10-12 14:38 @quote Making sense of the ideas of one great culture from within another great culture is notoriously hard. -(It’s an interesting detail of history, for example, that the first two European scholars to study the I Ching both went incurably insane.) Thus I don’t claim to be able to sound the depths of either of the two future cultures I’ve sketched out here; I was raised in a culture weighed down by the Faustian veneer, and I live in a region that mediates between western Europe and the North American heartland. (The ground under my feet is part of the same long-vanished continent as the western half of Britain.) Being who, when, and where I am, I’m poised unsteadily between two great cultures, the fading Faustian culture and the future American culture. That’s part of the hand I was dealt when I was born. - -That awkward position, between the dissolving forms of the Faustian vision and the first stirrings of tamanous culture, seems to be becoming common among my American and Canadian readers, for what it’s worth. (I haven’t yet seen it among my European readers, which comes as no surprise—again, each great culture is rooted in its own land.) Here in North America, the Faustian veneer seems to be cracking very rapidly just now, outside those classes that have adopted Faustian thoughtways as the basis for their identity and their power. The widening gap between the Faustian managerial caste and the post-Faustian masses is among the major facts in American public life today, and it accounts for a great deal of the total incomprehension with which each side regards the other. - -One of the chief questions in my mind right now is how that gap will evolve in the years ahead. Most great cultures, once they leave their ages of reason, wind up their creative eras, and settle into stasis, can expect a long slow decline—in cases such as ancient Egypt and traditional China, this lasted for many centuries. The surge toward infinity is so central to the Faustian ethos, however, that the total failure of the will to power that drives it may send the nations of the West down another, harsher route. We’ll talk about that in two weeks. --JMG - -2024-10-12 14:42 @quote The true warrior is not the one who is willing to kill. -That doesn’t make a warrior. The true warrior is the one who is willing, if need be, to die - Charles Eisenstien - -2024-10-12 14:43 @quote A thousand times in history—a million, more likely—visionaries, prophets, artists, and philosophers have wandered away from the social world that made them and sat themselves in nature, to see what could be seen when you stop demanding that nature echo back precisely the creeds of your community. -We can think here of Elijah or John the Baptist, Muhammad or the Buddha, or Christ. Closer to our own time, Thoreau, Whitman, and Emerson went to nature to find a renewed, energized version of America. Analogous solitudes have been sought and found even in prison cells—think of Martin Luther King Jr. or Fyodor Dostoevsky. As much as all of these men’s cultural formations accompanied them into solitude, shaped what they would see, there is also—in nature, in reality—more than is contained in any philosophy or culture. The main things that are needed are silence and trust—and not just for the would-be prophets among us, but for all of us: teachers, policymakers, clerics, parents, humans of any stripe. Panicked catastrophism will only ensure that our challenged cultures stay brittle and stuck. https://hedgehogreview.com/issues/hope-itself/articles/deep-down-things-in-a-time-of-panic - -2024-10-12 14:43 And stupidity combined with greed and arrogance is frankly more dangerous than deliberate evil. -Someone who's evil and smart usually has the common sense to know when the risk of blowback is getting too high, and backs down fast when that happens in order to save his own skin so he can enjoy his nasty pleasures and ill-gotten gains. Somebody who's arrogant, greedy, and stupid doesn't do that, and such people go charging ahead and create major disasters that cause much more suffering and misery, and get dragged down with their victims. - -2024-10-12 14:45 @quote Richard Wagamese's lovely movie (from his book), Indian Horse: - -Mystery fills us with awe and wonder. It is the foundation of humility and humility is the foundation of all learning. So we do not seek to unravel it. We honor it by letting it be that way forever. - -2024-10-12 14:45 @quote Passive consumptions displaces agency. -One is no longer masters of one's stuff but a servant of its makers. ---matthew crawford - -2024-10-12 14:52 @quote One used to meet up with an old friend and ask, 'How are you?' And get a little recap of how that person has actually been. -Today, when we ask how someone is, it's quite common to get back a 'BUSY'xcalib Yes, of course. Busy. - -I'm not asking about the tempo of your life, I'm asking about you. I'm interested in you. Tell me about you. - -We've come to somehow equate worth with how harried we are. We are the VIPs of our own little worlds, engrossed in the importance of our serious affairs. Busy! So busy! To me, this busyness is evidence of a mismanaged life. If all I can say to someone when they ask me what's happening in my life is, BUSY! I’m doing a poor job of it. It's like a thermometer with the temperature climbing, a little tell of something going askew. - -We can have much to do, deadlines and meals and kiddos and never ending tasks, but that doesn’t mean we need to feed the busy monster. We don't have to allow frenetic energy to drive us into that whirlwind of tasks. It's not helpful. I've learned that my perspective truly does determine how I show up in my life. Who I am to my people. How I experience my time here. By a shift in that perception - say from focusing on the overwhelm to one of gratitude, everything changes. https://www.slowdownfarmstead.com/p/to-dawdle - -2024-10-12 14:53 @tech Gurdjieff notion that you should do a task by hand. -if you have to dig a ditch you should do it and dig it by hand because there's an opportunity there for spiritual growth. if you're offloading it to a machine you're losing that opportunity for spiritual growth. if we offload tasks to machines we lose the opportunities that they have for spiritual growth and we may not fully understand the consequences of offloading things to technology because we'll never go through it to see what Spiritual Development we might have had if we had done it ourselves - -2024-10-12 15:16 @life I think this goes the heart of the question of existence... -why are we here? Are we here to optimize our days in service to some unknown thing are we here to be entertained? Or are we here to understand the world around us, to take part in the co-creation of our world? Are we along for the ride or are we standing at the helm, trimming the sails and pointing the bow into uncharted territory? - -2024-10-12 15:23 I think after a while the novelty of anything wears off. -even living on the road. or perhaps its that I felt the need to dial back the novelty a little. first we returned to places we'd already been, but that wasn't the answer. Then we went to new places, but moved much slower. settled in a bit. but that wasn't entirely the answer either. it wasn't until we enrolled the kids in juijitsu that i realized, oh, this is what i am supposed to do. i am supposed to look more closely at these places. to befriend the people within in them, to understand them to a greater degree. I do not know why, I just know that this is part of it. i still do not have all of it, it is still not perfected, but every day that passes i get new ideas and things fit more. - -as a spin off of the moving slower idea i came to realize that okay, i have achieved the thing I set out to do. we live on the road. now what? it wasn't until i sat twith this question for a long time in meditation that something like an answer began to form. and a big part of the answer was, now you make stuff. now you write, now you build, now you create, now you fix. now you do all the things you have always done, but you find a way to do them on them within the constraints of how you life now. Fewer tools, less space, in some cases i've added some ttools that seem strange at first glance. - -the answer is to put the art back in. to blend the books and the life and use them to make some kind of art. mechanical, analog art. and digital recordings to supplement it. but that mechnaical stuff needs to happen. it has been missing too long. - -2024-10-12 15:26 @quote For Midgley, the post-Enlightenment myths that orient us in the modern world are so potent because they base their authority, paradoxically, on the myth of mythlessness. -That is, the Enlightenment project was, among other things, committed to overcoming the restrictive chains of religious dogma, inherited belief systems, and, yes, grand narratives of mythology. But this was only to change one set of answers to our biggest questions for a host of others. We can’t escape myths; we only exchange them. And some of the post-Enlightenment myths by which we continue to live tell a tale of humans as autonomous and atomized beings, of an inert world of knowable laws scrutinized by the detached and disinterested rational gaze, of an environment whose value is reduced to commodification and utility, and of a human species that is on some ineluctable frog-march of progress. - -But myths are not just intellectual abstractions. They manifest in the real. The industrial—and arguably now digital—revolutions and the built world of mass manufacturing, global trade networks of shipping lanes and rail lines and interstate highways, and the ever-increasing consumption of fossil fuels and the mining of scarce and precious resources in whose name we will even wage international war are, in part, the physical embodiment of this deeply ingrained post-Enlightenment mythology. What we make reveals to us what we love and believe. And over centuries, these lived, incarnated mythologies shape our posture and stance to the world. - -https://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2022/08/what-in-the-world-is-the-world-a-review-of-this-sacred-life-humanitys-place-in-a-wounded-world/ - -2024-10-12 15:27 -Paul Kingsnorth on solutions: - -Climate change is a great example of that. It’s really interesting to me that we talk about climate change as if it were somehow disconnected from all the other things that are happening to the planet. The industrial economy’s assault on the earth, which has been going on for a couple hundred years, has basically wrecked the health of the planet in all sorts of different ways. And there are a lot of things happening — large rates of extinction, soil erosion, ocean pollution, a changing climate, all sorts of smaller, subtler things as well — but it’s climate change that’s just a one-off, almost self-contained phenomenon that has somehow grabbed the headlines and has become this enormous thing that we somehow have to stop. That’s the problem, so what’s the solution? And the solution inevitably is always technological, because nobody can think about anything else. That’s the way we think in our culture: we’ve created the problem with technology, so we must have to solve it with technology. So the issue has boiled down to, the wrong kind of gas is going up into the atmosphere, so we need a fuel technology that doesn’t put it up there, as if that were the problem, rather than the way we’re living our lives, the entirety of the economy, the value system that it’s based on. It’s the kind of notion that we’re extractive individuals and we just live in a market system. All of these complex things have happened over the last hundred years where we’ve completely retooled the way we live — we’ve disconnected ourselves from nature and culture and community, and we’ve made ourselves consumer individuals living in a machine. And the problem then is seen as, the Machine is using the wrong fuel, so let’s do something else. It’s not going to work, anyway, but even if it did work, what would the solution look like? Is that the world we want to be living in? Are the values correct? Is our disconnection okay as long as it doesn’t pollute the atmosphere? Is it okay to live in this kind of radical individualistic machine world as long as we’re not putting carbon up into the air? - -It’s very difficult to ask the bigger questions because, as you say, relentlessly, as soon as you do, there’s an immediate backlash, which usually comes in completely familiar clichéd language —“So you’re saying we should go back and live in caves?” etc. And there’s not really much you can do with that. - -it’s not neutral technology, it’s only designed for one thing. A gun only does one thing. But a smartphone is not neutral technology. If you use that thing, you are going to get addicted to that thing, you’re going to be taken into a certain way of life, you’re going to be acting in a certain way, you’re undoubtedly going to have your brain rewired by your use of it. Yeah, sure, you could be using it to promote organic farming rather than pornography, but you’re still on your phone all day, and so is everybody else who has to do that, and you’re still pumping carbon into the atmosphere — but more to the point, you rewire your whole life. Nobody has time to go folk dancing when they’re on their phone all the time. It doesn’t matter how well-intentioned you are. - -I perpetually would like to get the internet out of my house, but then I wouldn’t be able to earn a penny, so I can’t. So there it is! So we have to make these choices. I would genuinely like to live without the internet, but I have no idea how I would feed my children, so I can’t at the moment. So there it is. But you know, maybe it’s just the process of drawing lines, like it is with anything else. You just say, okay, I’m not going over this line. It’s just a thing I’m not going to do. So I’ve said for a long time I’m not having a smartphone. I’m just not going to have one. And I don’t care what that means. It’s inconvenient for me in all sorts of ways, but I’m just not going to do it, so that’s that. I don’t have to think about it. And that’s one of my lines. There are things I’m just not going to do, that I’m not going to compromise on, and then there are other things I go, Well, okay, I have to do that because we’re all living in the world. So I think that’s probably the way to think about it. - -https://mereorthodoxy.com/following-christ-in-the-machine-age-a-conversation-with-paul-kingsnorth/ @@ -14,4 +14,3 @@ [ ] return amazon items [ ] Build closet frame in bus [ ] move into cabin - |