What's that in the air?
It's Tew's day, a clear, cool morning in TulseyTown...
Valentine Thought
Committed contradicted romantic that I am, I’ve always been slightly frustrated by the fixed logic of the phrase “The only permanent thing in the Universe is change.” I’ve always wanted it to be love.
Since change, I must now admit, is the only true necessity, love must be born of it, if it be real. Aha! Sez I, there be a clue: Love is born of disruption, out of the dynamic of ongoing change. Love is the world’s way of blowing itself up on a continuous basis. It is the driving force behind chaos and those beautiful images of fractals coming and going.
Wherever love rears its lovely head, change is afoot, attested to by the fact that nearby is someone in horror over it: “My God, how did she EVER find HIM?” “What is HE doing with HER?” “All well and good for dating and all that, but really will the family be able to handle him/her? I mean, he/she isn’t really our kind, now are they?”
As I’m writing this, I’m listening once again to Neil Young’s “Helpless”...(I'll wait)...
Echoes of this same thought-thread keep returning:
The shadow of the 747 falls across the eyes of the small-town-Ontario kid and he and we are helpless but to heed the call for change—for wherever that plane is headed is where we must go, if in no way other than in our imagination, in our wish, in our dream.
That call for change, that permanency, represents choice: the appearance of two—the here and the there. But because it is by definition the only given, it serves as the grand oxymoron: the appearance of the other, representing an alternative, is, in fact, the only One. Change is embedded in the not-two.
Thus is freedom the given of our condition. The place from which we turn our heads. Erich Fromm called it our ultimate fear. Indeed. How helpless we become when and if we make the choice to blame others rather than face the truth of our choice-making. And how frightening that can be.
What if, just what if, love is the manifestation of freedom. This non-obvious fact explains how it is and why for some love lasts only a brief candle’s worth—until our fear of being “out of control” drags us back to a preoccupation with the illusion of past and future. And why for others it seems to last, as it appears to us as some kind of fresh blush on a newly awakened face—one that has learned, or perhaps remembered would be the better word, how in the presence of the other to risk everything in each and every and even this very moment.
Would you be, could you be, my Valentine?
— jb
Loneliness, welcome
The Moon continues its waxing journey tonight in Okieland after a light dusting of snow on the ground in TulseyTown overnight.
The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) appears to be approaching a point of no return with potential disastrous effects for Europe and both North and South America.
Probably the smartest person ever elected to be President, Abraham Lincoln was born on this day in 1809 Hodgenville, Kentucky.
It's also the birthday of Charles Darwin. The author of the concept of evolution was born in 1809 Shrewsbury, Shropshire, England.
It was yesterday in 1858 that 14-year old Bernadette of Lourdes began experiencing apparitions of a "young lady" who asked for a chapel to be built at the nearby cave-grotto.
Unless we are very, very careful, we doom each other by holding onto images of one another based on preconceptions that are in turn based on indifference to what is other than ourselves...The opposite of this inattention is love, is the honoring of others in a way that grants them the grace of their own autonomy and allows mutual discovery. – Anne Truitt
“Shakespeare, Leonardo da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin and Abraham Lincoln never saw a movie, heard a radio or looked at television. They had 'Loneliness' and knew what to do with it. They were not afraid of being lonely because they knew that was when the creative mood in them would work.” ― Carl Sandburg (Lincoln’s biographer).
Mysteries of a Winter Wind
It's a cloudy, cool-to-cold Satyr's day in TulseyTown and the mailbox is rattling from the windy Northerlies.
“Losar Tashi Delek!” Happy new year, wood dragon . . .
Writer's birthdays today:
Playwright and poet Bertolt Brecht was born in 1898 Augsburg, Germany; in 1890 near Moscow, poet and novelist Boris Pasternak was born; and children's author, E. L. Konigsburg, saw the light of her first day in 1930 New York City.
The modern phenomenon of Valentine’s Day gets weirder the closer you look at it.
When you find yourself alone
in this winter's narrow light
. . . let winter be winter
so that you can let the world alone
to think of spring.
– David Whyte, in The Bell and the Blackbird, Many Rivers Press (April 1, 2018)