“Of the two witnesses, hold the principal one,” is saying that one witness is everybody else giving you their feedback and opinions (which is worth listening to, there’s some truth in what people say) but the principal witness is yourself. You’re the only one who knows when you’re using things to protect yourself and keep […]
Wisdom
Something to Say
Green glass in my studio window Continuing on a theme of Fitzgerald… To have something to say is a question of sleepless nights and worry and endless ratiocination of subject – of endless trying to dig out the essential truth, the essential justice. As a first premise you have to develop a conscience and if […]
Choose Ye This Day
Outside a Hindu shrine in Maharashtra, India In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. –David Foster Wallace If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If […]
The Broken Mind
Path following, reconsidered: Not sure where this one is going other than away (Sidewalk markings in Boston) Looking back over the last few months, I have been sensing a particular leitmotif in my thoughts, postings, concerns. It isn’t as easily identifiable as a melodic sequence in music, but I can feel something taking form, as […]
Transitional Space
Istanbul: a child connects with her grandmother (Photo: Collin Key) Every once in a while you find a post that says it just the way you would have. Here’s one at All Girls by Sally Reed, regular reader of Slow Muse, about so many themes and ideas that I find compelling—the work of D. W. […]
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Discreteness
A watercolor by Renee Collins, from my collection. I don’t know the name that Renee originally gave it, but I’ve always referred to it as “Leaky Margins.” If you spend a fair amount of time online, you have probably come up against The Membrane. It functions a bit like a cell wall, as the boundary […]
Both/And, With a Bit of Pure Paralyzed
Winter view looking out from my friend Anne’s house in Carson New Mexico. The chair feels inhabited, and yet not. To attain knowledge, add things every day. To attain wisdom, remove things every day. –Lao Tzu And what do you get when you are in search of both? Martha Beck, a fan of the mangled […]
Sages of Silence and Fear
A painter and a poet. Martin and Stafford have been (and continue to be) elemental influences on me. *** Agnes Martin (Photo: Charles R. Rushton) To discover the conscious mind in a world where intellect is held to be valuable requires solitude, quite a lot of solitude. We have been very strenuously conditioned against solitude. […]
The Sound of Silence
View of the desert sky, this one in the American Southwest I am having an ongoing attraction to the concept of silence, of what happens when you choose to move into the spaces that exist without language, without the need to speak. I’ve written about this here on and off for months, and the attraction […]
Hangin’ with Tom
Who knew that Tom Robbins would keep surfacing as a personal wisdom source? These things happen, and when you least expect it. (Another great Robbins quote is here.) Our lives are not as limited as we think they are; the world is a wonderfully weird place; consensual reality is significantly flawed; no institution can be […]