Deconstructing our happiness . . .
It's the Satyr's day in Okieland. The mailbox opened to easy Northerlies and a slow return to the heat.
Grief is not a malady to be cured. It is a sacred reality to be inhabited – Mirabai Starr
Iris Murdoch was born on this date The prolific novelist, poet, playwrite and philosopher was born in 1919 Dublin and raised in London.
“There is a secret medicine given only to those who hurt so hard they cannot hope. The hopers would feel slighted if they knew.”– Rumi
We try to outrun our grief by staying busy. – Mirabai Starr
It's the 93rd anniversay of French philosopher Jacques Derrida's birth. The the founder of "deconstruction," (which he refused to defined) was born on this day in El Biar, Algeria (1930). Philosophers of every stripe divide into camps to celebrate and/or debate one of his most famous lines: “There is nothing outside the text.”
[We are]co-creators with other intelligences in the reality we are making together. – Nathan Gardels
It is easy to miss our own good fortune; often happiness comes in ways we don’t even notice. – Pema Chödrön
The synchronicity of revolutions . . .
It's Freya's day and the mailbox opened on a cloudy, rainy, cool break in the heat here in Okieland . . .
Together we open the door to the unknown and experience the miracle of being.
Today is Bastille Day in France, celebrating the day in in 1789 that an angry French mob stormed the Bastille prison in Paris, launching the French Revolution.
Continuing in the traditions of revolution, “Woody" Guthrie was born on this date, in 1912 Okemah, Oklahoma, about 85 miles Southwest of where I sit at this writing – 123 years after the storming of the Bastille. Among Woody's revolutionary contributions was “This Land is Your Land” which he wrote as a protest alternative to Irving Berlin's “God Bless America” because he was tired of hearing Kate Smith sing it on the radio. Another was putting a sticker on his street-found guitar that read “This machine kills Fascists.” Don't miss visiting the Woody Guthrie Center in Tulsa (next door to the Bob Dylan Center).
The revolution continued with the Broadway, radio and film contributions by Arthur Laurents who was born today in 1917 Brooklyn.
Revolutions seem to have a synchronicity and long reach to them – the Bastille, Woody Guthrie, The Beatles. Another tied to Paris is the birth of playwright and novelist Irving Stone, born today in 1903 San Francisco, California. On a visit to Paris he stumbled upon an exhibition of the work of Vincent van Gogh, another revolutionary, which inspired him to write his first biographical novel Lust for Life.
This land was made for you and me.
As I went walking I saw a sign there,
And on the sign it said "No Trespassing."
But on the other side it didn't say nothing.
That side was made for you and me.
In the shadow of the steeple I saw my people,
By the relief office I seen my people;
As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking
Is this land made for you and me?
Nobody living can ever stop me,
As I go walking that freedom highway;
Nobody living can ever make me turn back
This land was made for you and me.
– Woody Guthrie
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.