Opening paragraphs............

 

I never put up a barber pole or a sign or even gave my shop a name.  I didn't have to.  The building was already called "the barber shop".  That was its name because that had been its name for nobody knew how long.  Port William had little written history.  Its history was its living memory of itself, which passed over the years like a moving beam of light.  It had a beginning that it had forgotten, and would have an end that it did not yet know. It seemed to have been there forever.  After I had been there a while, the shop began to be called Jayber Crow's, or just Jayber's.  "Well, I'm going down to Jayber's," people would say, as if it had been clearly marked on some map, though it was so only in their minds.  I never had a telephone, so I was not even in the book.

-Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow: The Life Story of Jayber Crow, Barber, of the Port William Membership as Written by Himself

thanks Michael

choosing...................

 

You are always responsible because you are always choosing. In every moment, you are choosing how to respond, how to react, how to see things.

-Mark Manson

Willingness.................

 

Deliverance is out of time and into eternity, and is achieved by obedience and docility to the eternal Nature of Things.  We have been given free will, in order that we may will our self-will out of existence and so come to live continuously in the "state of grace."  All our actions must be directed, in the last analysis, to making ourselves passive in relation to the activity and the being of divine Reality.  We are, as it were, aeolian harps, endowed with the power either to expose themselves to the wind of the Spirit or to shut themselves away from it.

-Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy

interested................

 

     The forms of zest are innumerable.  Sherlock Holmes, it may be remembered, picked up a hat which he happened to find lying in the street.  After looking at it for a moment he remarked that its owner had come down in the world as a result of drink and that his wife was no longer so fond of him as she used to be.  Life could never be boring to a man to whom casual objects offered such a wealth of interest.  Think of the different things that may be noticed in the course of a country walk.  One man may be interested in the birds, another in the vegetation, another in the geology, yet another in the agriculture, and so on.  Any one of these things is interesting if it interests you, and, other things being equal, the man who is interested in any one of them is a man better adapted to the world than the man who is not interested.

-Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness

Scaffolding....................

 

Well, let’s go back to David Ausubel’s 1960 experiment. Ausubel gave college students a short conceptual overview before they read difficult, unfamiliar material. The students who got that overview, which he called an advance organizer, retained the material significantly better than the students who went in cold. The idea has held up for sixty years: before you learn something hard, your brain needs a scaffold, a rough map of what’s coming, so new information has somewhere to attach. Without the scaffold, a 2,800-year-old epic poem is just old names and boats. With the scaffold, every page slots into a picture your kid already has in their head.

-Austin Scholar, from this episode

justice.............................

 

People want to see justice done. It’s part of storytelling, and part of life. It’s not virtuous or kind to let marauders prey on the weak indefinitely. It’s not charitable to let brigands upend the order of a palace of a society. There’s nothing compassionate in letting villains off the hook.

-Spencer Klavan, commenting on Christopher Nolan's film, Odyssey

Noah Smith.................

 

...............on intelligence, artificial and otherwise:

The common thread in all three of these examples is that AI may revolutionize productivity not by being much smarter than a single individual human — not by simply solving harder and harder math problems — but by marrying human-style intelligence to the vast, inhuman capabilities of computers. We could simply be thinking about the benefits of intelligence wrong — arrogantly privileging the kind of mental tasks we humans happen to do especially well, while ignoring the value of the tasks we do poorly.

Acceptance.................

 

Acceptance is not surrender. It is the moment you stop wasting energy on what is already true and start using that energy to decide what to do next.

-Shane Parrish, from this week's edition

Out walking...................

 

My Sweetie and I ventured out to the greater Toboso region this morning and walked five +/- miles on the Black Hand Gorge trail.  Hard to imagine a prettier walk.

The Licking River

the "deep cut", created in the 1850s.  Believe it or
not, but trains used to run here 175 years ago.

the site of the "black hand", destroyed during the
canal construction days.  Above the laid up stone, 
traces of the canal tow path still exist

further proof, as if we needed any, that God loves life

hardness.................

 

     The intellectual as a champion of the masses is a relatively recent phenomenon.  Education does not naturally waken in us a concern for the uneducated.  The distinction conferred by education is more easily maintained by a sharp separation from those below than be a continued excellence of achievement.  When Gandhi was asked by an American clergyman what it was that worried him the most, he replied: "The hardness of heart of the educated."

-Eric Hoffer, The Ordeal of Change

prayer....................

 

     I would say yes to a prayer that reaches out over the companionable objects of our day, yes to prayers for more charity, resilience, good-naturedness, and also a listening kind of praying that is tucked somewhere always in our heart, mystically turning to ever greater reality.  What a woeful thing it would be to be denied prayer, to be numbed to its gratitude.  We can live without a great deal, but to live entirely without prayer would leave us lesser human beings.  Prayer changes our relationships with pretty much everything.  It the tribulation of night I turn the wheel of my prayer rope and steer my ship over woeful seas.  In the brightness of the longed-for dawn I stare east and am deep-rooted in the wallop of my amazement.

     In the end, prayer isn't something we do, it becomes something that we are.

-Martin Shaw, Liturgies of the Wild: Myths That Make Us

Insourcing vs Outsourcing.............

 

We have immersed ourselves to a few mega social media platforms. Angertainment is all the rage. If you think doom scrolling, keeping up with Jones’, and entrusting your engrossment to algos designed to keep you in a constant state of anxiety is the path, have at it. Come for the social isolation and stay for the subsequent depression.

-Tony Isola, from this post

Faith...................

 

      Tolstoy searches in science, philosophy, wisdom and reason and finds no answer to convince him that life is worth living.  Science answers many questions, but not the one that obsesses him.  He sees too that meaning does not lie in something superadded to life: possessions, achievements, honours, awards.  Those are externalities, gift-wrapping, not life itself.  The answer that eventually came to Tolstoy was religious faith.  'No matter what answers faith may give, its every answer gives to the finite existence of man the sense of the infinite—a sense which is not destroyed by suffering, privation or death.'  Faith, he said is a force of life.  'If a man lives, then he must believe in something.'  If that something is finite, it will not ultimately satisfy him, since everything finite eventually perishes.  The only thing worth believing in is the infinite.  And, 'Without faith it is impossible to live.'

-Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership:  Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning

On waking up................

 

     There is an old saying that goes, "I slept and dreamed that life was beauty; I woke and saw that life was duty."  If you really want to be in control of your life, and if you want other people to be able to depend on you and look to you for leadership, you must wake up from the dream that somebody else will handle the responsibility.  You must accept the responsibility of leading both yourself and others.  No one else can do it for you.  And if you develop the skills of a highly effective leader, not one else can do it as well as you, either.

-Jim Rohn, Leading an Inspired Life

restricted...........

 

The Master was exceedingly gracious to the University dons who visited him, but he would never reply to their questions or be drawn into their theological speculations.

To his disciples, who marveled at this, he said, "Can one talk about the ocean to a frog in a well—or about the divine to people who are restricted by their concepts?"

-Anthony de Mello, One Minute Wisdom

finding the way..........

 

My senses and faculties help me to find the way from here to Killarney but on the way back to God they bewilder and impede me.

-John Moriarty, A Hut at the Edge of the Village

the last laugh..........................

 

You can do and say a lot of things in hindsight, kicking and screaming and what-about-ing til the cows come home. But the returns are the returns and you can’t change that.

-Downtown Josh Brown, as he interviews Ron Baron, an early (and big) investor in Elon Musk

Old habits interrupted.................

      Every morning for the past twelve years (well, 345 days out of 365 anyway), I have walked for 45+ minutes down the hill from our house, across the little bridge, around the OSU-N/COTC campus, and back.  

      Apparently, bridges do not live forever, as ours has been taken out of commission for the next "111 days."

Younger Steve would have crossed this anyway

Whatever, walks still need to be walked.   There are more that 40 miles of paved "recreational trails" around here. This morning, my Sweetie and I traveled by car to the original Licking County bike path (+/-3.5 miles between Granville and Newark, initially paved in the mid-1970s.)   It is as pretty as I remember it.

We will try a different path tomorrow.

choices........................

 

In judging myself, I confront what is inferior in me and recoil from it. Yet none of us can measure our true worth. I can only live in the hope that those around me might say: he is honest; he is kind to the helpless; when the powerful struck, he stood his ground. Such judgments point to generally discoverable moral truths. We have always possessed Taylor’s shared “standards of value”—we have always loved the higher and shunned the lower, even when pretending otherwise.

From the reformation of character follows the public affirmation of the conditions to which good character should aspire. I would do so humbly, guided by truth as I perceive it. Fit is better than fat, for obvious reasons. Together is better than alone, and together for life better still. Strong is better than weak. Let me name the one and pursue the other, knowing that we are flawed vessels, hostage to fortune, and bound often to fall short. Still, all of us can inch toward our highest selves.

-Martin Gurri, as cut-and-pasted from here

Not sure how I missed it.......................

 

.................but Diana Rigg's birthday was on July 20th.

Aging..........................

 

...................................like a fine wine.

As for "God"...................

 

As for "God," old-time members sometimes comment that "A.A. has only two things to say about the subject:  First, there is one.  And second, you're not it.  From there, you're on your own."

-Kurtz and Ketcham, The Spirituality of Imperfection:  Storytelling and the Search for Meaning

The toughest question............

 

more fun here

Across the threshold............................

 

.........................................of too much.

a very mysterious thing..........

 

     So you see that, in a sense, I know very little about how this story was born.  That is, I don't know where the pictures came from.  And I don't believe anyone knows exactly how he 'makes things up'.  Making up is a very mysterious thing.  When you 'have an idea' could you tell anyone exactly how you thought of it?

-C. S. Lewis, Of Other Worlds, from the chapter describing the birth of Aslan and Narnia

two gifts....................

 

We do not think of it every day, but we never forget it:  the beloved shall grow old, or ill, and be taken away finally.  No matter how ferociously we fight, how tenderly we love, how bitterly we argue, how pervasively we berate the universe, how cunningly we hide, this is what shall happen.  In the wide circles of timelessness, everything material and temporal will fail, including the manifestations of the beloved.  In this universe we are given two gifts: the ability to love and the ability to ask questions.  Which are, at the same time, the fires that warm us and the fires that scorch us.

-Mary Oliver, Upstream:  Selected Essays

Just reading the list....................

 

..............................made me feel smarter.

be stories worth examining............

 

It seems that there's quite the divide between the happy face we post online and the disinterest we actually have in the narrative of our own years.

     The first step is to take a breath and dare to entertain the thought that in the debris of your life would be stories worth examining.  That they are, as I just wrote, a kind of treasure.

     The less we do this, the more unanchored we become, and susceptible to a virtual reality that will fill our entire waking hours given a ghost of a chance.  To give your lost stories some attention is a surprisingly radical act.

-Martin Shaw, Liturgies of the Wild: Myths That Make Us

Let's blame Napoleon...........

 

For most of human history, children learned by living.  A mother's hand guiding yours through bread dough.  A father's voice teaching songs that carried ancestral memory.  Village elders telling stories that encoded wisdom.  Learning was intimate, immediate, and integrated with life itself.  No grades, no bells, no sitting still for six hours.  Knowledge flowed through relationship and practice.

Then Prussia lost a war.  1806.  Napoleon crushed the Prussian army at Jena-Auerstedt.  The Prussian government blamed their people.   Too undisciplined, too free-thinking, too human.  So they built a machine to manufacture better humans.

The created the first compulsory state-run school system in history.  Children were sorted by age like industrial products.  Marched between classes at the sound of bells like factory workers, forced to sit in rows like soldiers, and taught to memorize and repeat, never question or create.

The goal was to produce citizens who obeyed reflectively, solders who followed orders without thinking, and workers who showed up on time and did what they were told.  Humans began confusing obedience with morality and conformity with intelligence.

It worked so well that America imported it wholesale.  Horace Mann, the "Father of American Education," traveled to Prussia in 1843 and came back evangelical about their system.  He called it "the perfect system for shaping citizens."

-Stan Taylor

a metaphysical quest...............

 

Michelangelo identifies with the biblical hero, casting himself as a patriotic warrior who uses his particular gifts not only to advance his art but as a weapon in the virtuous struggle of Florence against its enemies.

     But there is more to these lines than mere chest-thumping.  Michelangleo always conceived the sculptor's craft as a metaphysical quest.  This most material of art forms becomes in Michelangelo's conception a means of probing for pure spirit beneath a shell of gross matter, one that defines the artist as well as the matter upon which he works his will.  This was not merely an abstract conceit: Michelangelo saw the art of sculpture as, crucially, a process of self-discovery, of self-actualization.  In a passage that was almost certainly known to him, the late classical philosopher Plotinus used the art of sculpture as a metaphor for the means by which we perfect our moral selves: "Withdraw into yourself and look.  If you do not see beauty within you, do as does the sculptor of a statue that is to be beautiful: he cuts away here, he smoothes it there, he makes this line lighter, this one purer, until he disengages beautiful lineaments in the marble.  Do you do this too. . . ."  Reversing the analogy, the artist, discovering form within the mass, experiences release from his own carnal nature.  The giant slain by the sculptor's bow, then, is in some sense Michelangelo himself, or at least the grosser aspects of his nature that he defeats through the redemptive power of his art.

-Miles J. Unger, Michelangelo: A Life in Six Masterpieces

Michelangelo        David        1501-04       

In the background...................

 

Joe Bonamassa..............Song of Yesterday

Absolute truth...................

 

          more memes here

Enough......................

 

Being content with what you have, regardless of the number, is the true sign of wealth.

-Ben Carlson

Appropriate advice for....................

 

....................................kids of all ages:

When my kids were growing up we used to try to teach our kids “practice ignore” where they would just ignore a sibling or another kid who was annoying them. 

An important..........................

 

.........................................history lesson.

Collect...........................

 

..................................small astonishments.

Truth.........................

 

Following the crowd isn’t a valid life philosophy. 

-Tony Isola

Hot streak...........................

 

............................................declared.

Glitches..........................

 

When AI tries to create and direct joyous human dancing, it fails. The dancers look like retired accountants at a wedding.

-Seth Godin

Not quite true for us...................

 

.........................the critters beat us to them:

We ate our first tomato and cucumber from the garden today. The garden is a good one this year but I made the mistake of planting too closely.