Hi-jacked by comfort . . .

It’s Thor’s day and a light snow is falling here in Colorado Springs this morning.

“It takes strength and self-love to say goodbye to what no longer serves you.” ~Rumi

Today in 2007, Apple unveiled the iPhone.

What doesn’t kill you will make you stronger, right?

The very first life forms on earth figured this out a few billion years before science decided to call it “hormesis.”( …)Basically under the right amount of stress living things (from cells to plants to mammals) grow stronger in their attempt to return to homeostasis (…) practical examples include cold plunging and fasting (…) women are the natural ninjas of hormesis. ..practicing physical pain management from the onset of puberty, navigating hormonal fluctuations and uterine contractions on a monthly basis for years (decades!) (…)

(W)hether we put that low-grade stressor to use in childbirth eventually or not women continually apply these principles (consciously and unconsciously) in their emotional and spiritual lives… ‘feeling’ more – and suffer greater rates of anxiety and depression – but also forge deeper personal connections and largely create the social web that undergirds functioning societies.

— Commusings: On Strength & Being Human

Our biology has been hijacked by the comfort trap.— Jeff Krasno at Commune. 

Injustice

The beautifullest bird’s the pigeon,

but “pigeon” doesn’t rhyme with “love,”

so poems praising love, religion,

or nature all ignore the pigeon.

Their iridescence doesn’t get a smidgen

of the honor granted to the dove.

The beautifullest bird’s the pigeon.

But “pigeon” doesn’t rhyme with “love.”

— Jared Campbell, “Injstice,” in Rattle, online.

Bombarded by coconuts . . .

Wednesday the 8th of January, 2025. It’s Tiw’s day … and here in “the Springs” of Colorado after a lovely snowfall it’s 10 degrees with a 1 degree wind-chill.  

When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be. — Lao Tzu

We need to overthrow ... this rotten … industrial capitalist system which breeds so much suffering…Personal “salvation” cannot be divorced from social and systemic implications. — Dorothy Day, cited by Fr. Richard Rohr, in Meditations from The Center for Action and Contemplation.  

…passing with the speed of life

drifting in circles in an eddy

joining the current again

as if the eddy were a few moments' sleep

— Jim Harrison, The Theory and Practice of Rivers, Copper Canyon Press, May 2025 (new edition)

Yield to the blessings of the flow as it gently pulls you from the eddies.

 …in the garden of gentle sanity, may you be bombarded by coconuts of wakefulness. — Chögyam Trungpa

It’s the Moon’s day … and yer’s trooly is. writing from a cold, clear morning in Colorado Springs.

It's important for us to remember January 6 with clarity for what it was, an attack on the Constitution and the country...We need to reject that effort to normalize the insurrection with an accurate history of those events as Donald Trump, inexplicably, returns to office. — Joyce Vance, “The Week Ahead,” in Civil Discourse.

National Book Award-winning novelist E.L. Doctorow was born on this date in 1931 New York City.

Today is the Feast of the Epiphany in the Christian Church. The word "epiphany" comes from an old Greek word meaning "manifestation" or "striking appearance." In ancient Greece, before Christianity, it was a term used to document occasions when Greek gods and goddesses manifested themselves to human beings on earth. The term has evolved over time from that religion’s focus on the day mythical three kings visited the baby Jesjua. Following influences largely attributed to James Joyce, the term epiphany is now often asssociated with the sudden "revelation of the whatness of a thing," the moment when "the soul of the commonest object ... seems to us radiant."

Jimmy Carter died and is on his way to rock and roll heaven enboard Voyager.