Imperative, catagorically

It's the Moon’s day and Earth Day. To celebrate, the Budding Moon is putting on on a full show.

Today is the 300th birth anniversary of Immanuel Kant. The Enlightenment philosopher was born on this date in 1724 Königsberg, Prussia, in 1724.

“We should judge our actions by whether or not we would want everyone else to act the same way. – Kant

Poet Laureate and Nobel Prize recipient Louise Glück was born on this day in 1943 New York City.

And, Jack Nicholson turns 87 today. The consummate film actor was born on this day in 1937 Neptune, New Jersey.

The earth, it seems, operates with the Categorical Imperative as a fundamental principle.

The belief that the world is brute matter us relatively recent, dating back to the rise of the concept of sola ratio – reason alone. The 16th Century saw science dividing from an association with faith and in the process dividing humans from an animate world. Now, five centuries later, we are slowing coming to grips with a new reality.

Turns out, the world isn't dead matter after all. Under the sloppy paint job of materialism and rationalism the animate world was just asleep. We have been living in the nightmare long enough. Fortunately there are better dreams to be had. Outside our own heads. What does it mean to wake up to the animacy of the world outside your front door? Reason, it turns out, to be complete must embrace that which it is not, in the same way that probability embraces error. There is reason in what appears to be chaos. Which clearly has a mind of its own. – after Sophie Strand in “Sleeping Beauty, Sleeping World,” The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine, Inner Traditions, Rochester, Vermont, 2022.

Affirmed, demonstrated, measured: Plants communicate with each other. So why would you feel stupid when you talk to yours? Try talking with them. Requires looking with your ears, listening with your eyes.

A love letter to the earth from Thich Nhat Hanh.

The society which scorns excellence in plumbing as a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy: neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water. – John W. Gardner

I am part of the sun as my eye is part of me. I am part of the earth my feet know perfectly, and my blood is part of the sea...I am part of the human race...an organic part of the great human soul…There is nothing of me that is alone and absolute except my mind, and we shall find that the mind has no existence by itself, it is only the glitter of the sun on the surface of the waters. – D.H. Lawrence

At the River Clarion

Sitting in the river named Clarion on a water-splashed stone

all afternoon listening to the voices of the river talking...

Said the river: I am part of holiness.

And I too, said the stone. And I too,

whispered the moss beneath...

You don't hear such voices in an hour or a day.

You don't hear them at all if selfhood

has stuffed your ears...

I don't know how you get to suspect such an idea.

I only know that the river kept singing.

– Mary Oliver, from “At the River Clarion,” Evidence Poems, Beacon Press, 2009.