Fifty years ago...........................

David Essex........................................Rock On

 

Somewhere....................................

 

......................................There's a Man.

not everybody.......................

 

"Everybody loves raking as a temple activity," my friend Gil explained to me after he returned from his sojourn practicing Zen in Japan and vipassana in Southeast Asia.  "In Japan they say, 'When you rake, watch your mind.'  So in Japan the monks can be seen raking energetically, sometimes stirring up a cloud of dust, while in Southeast Asia, the monks sometimes stand unmoving with a rake in their hands."

-Edward Espe Brown, No Recipe: cooking as a spiritual practice

Endarkenment......................

 

..............from the essential pen of Martin Gurri:

The Endarkenment is the pathological disorientation that convulses a society after it has extinguished all sources of meaning and lost sight of all paths to a happier future. It’s the triumph of wish over facts, the infantilization of top echelons of the social pyramid—of hyper-credentialed, globally mobile people, wielders of power and wealth and media, who, on a routine basis, confuse their self-important imaginings with the world itself. It’s the widespread descent of everyone else, now deprived of teachers, preachers, and role models, into a cognitive underclass, prone to the most bizarre theories about how things work.

thanks Kurt

Focusing on.......................................

..............................................nutrition.

 

Thinking about.............................

.............................................dumb stuff faster:

 But what if we spent less time figuring out how to do dumb stuff faster and more time pointing out how dumb the stuff is or finding ways to avoid it altogether. Not always possible, sure. But sometimes, it’s possible. Might be possible more often than we think. 

yep.............................

 Things that have never happened before happen all the time.

-Ben Carlson, as he tries to make sense of the market

Fifty years ago.............................

Grand Funk Railroad..................Locomotion

 

feel..................

 

To feel deeply is dangerous.

To do anything else is a tragedy.

-Jarod K. Anderson

skills.............................

Sometimes, those focused on remaining calm and contained are not always learning the skills necessary to perform, to function in the world.  They may be stable and not raise their voice in the kitchen, but they don't know how to make salad dressing.  They may meditate steadfastly but not develop their communication skills.  While busy generating calm, beautiful states of mind, they are not developing the skills, capacities, and practices that could actually and realistically manifest delicious food or wholesome relationships.

-Edward Espe Brown, No Recipe: cooking as a spiritual practice 

louder please........................

 Read me a lesson, Muse, and speak it loud

-John Keats, channeled here

Happy Halloween.........................!

 

           via

Fifty years ago.............................

     Redbone....................Come And Get Your Love

 

The right kind of........................

.................................stubborn. 

Be careful out there.....................

 No power on earth is more fearsome than a highly educated class that faces a constrained, even dismal, future. 

-Joel Kotkin, as he starts this entry

Be careful out there - Part 2.....

 

The core issue is that changing political mores have established the systematic promotion of the unqualified and sidelining of the competent. This has continually weakened our society’s ability to manage modern systems. At its inception, it represented a break from the trend of the 1920s to the 1960s, when the direct meritocratic evaluation of competence became the norm across vast swaths of American society. 

-The Palladium Letter

Can I get an Amen......................?

 

                via

on mickles and muckles..............

George Washington’s favorite saying was “many mickles make a muckle.” It was an old Scottish proverb that illustrates a truth we all know: things add up. Even little ones. Even at the pace of one per day. Because, as the Stoics would say, it’s the little things that add up to wisdom and to virtue. What you read, who you study under, what you prioritize. Day to day, practiced over a lifetime, this is what creates greatness. This is what leads to a good life.

-Ryan Holiday, from here

be the change.....................

 

It is yourself as perceiver of the world, not the world, that you should be attempting to change.

-John Moriarty, Dreamtime

inestimable.................

 

What a difference in the hospitality of minds!  Inestimable is he to whom we can say what we cannot say to ourselves.

-Ralph Waldo Emerson, Considerations By The Way

technically speaking....................

 

Technically speaking, you can look at any human life as the sum of a complex collection of chemical reactions, in much the same way as you can look at any beautiful painting as a simple collection of pigments, which is to say, you can miss the point of anything.

-Jarod K. Anderson, Something In The Woods Loves You

strange and wondrous...............

 Philosophy, if it cannot answer so many questions as we could wish, has at least the power of asking questions which increase the interest of the world, and show the strangeness and wonder lying just below the surface even in the commonest things of daily life.

-Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy

Why are we governed badly................?

 

....................Arnold Kling weighs in:

But I want to articulate two reasons for government failure. One is that without the profit incentive, government selects for the wrong behavior in managers. The second reason is that government tries to do too much. As a sprawling enterprise, government is bound to be clumsy.

One of my aphorisms is that an organization gets what it selects for. Successful firms select for people who can manage the business so that it meets customer needs.

Government and non-profits do not select for managers with the ability to deliver results. They select for people who are good at playing the game of status and power within an organization.

life its ownself.......................

 

. . . man's main concern is not to gain pleasure or to avoid pain but rather to see a meaning in his life.

-Viktor Frankl

Sundown..............................

 

.........................................at Torch Lake:

Thanks Kyle

every day.........................

 

The hard part isn't knowing what to do; it's doing it daily, whether you feel like it or not.

-from the Farnum Street blog