The Rubicon near Tintern
It's Thor's day and his heat-hammer continues to pound the ground in Okieland today . . .
In the mailbox this morning . . .
It's the birth date (speculated) of Julius Caesar in 100 BCE Rome.
Inspired by paradigms of wholeness and purity, our conception of psychological healing often comes to us heavy with metaphors of cleanliness and subtraction. Remove the trauma. Make a boundary. Identify the inciting incident. Disentangle it from your other parts. Separate, analyze, quantify, medicate. A patient is a fiction created by the a conceptual framework with its foundation in capitalism and colonialism. – Sophie Strand
Fear is a natural reaction to moving closer to the truth . . . . To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest. To live fully is to be always in no-man’s-land. To experience each moment as completely new and fresh. – Pema Chödrön in her book When Things Fall Apart
Our brains have not evolved to make us happy. Our brains have evolved to keep us alive. They’re really good at being anxious, seeing the negative, and what can go wrong, and really bad at seeing the present moment just as it is .To live fully doesn’t mean to solve the many crises of modern life—or to fix oneself. To live fully means to be in touch with the impermanence of living in the service of greater compassion and equanimity, like a steady bamboo reed on a windy day. – Anthony Tshering
It was on this day in 1798 that William Wordsworth saw the ruins of Tintern Abbey, which inspired his poem "Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798."
… from Tintern Abbey
Therefore am I still
A lover . . . of all that we behold
From this green earth; of all the mighty world
Of eye, and ear,—both what they half create,
And what perceive; well pleased to recognise
In nature and the language of the sense
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being.
"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." – Henry David Thoreau, whose 206th birth anniversary was yesterday in 1817.