anamnesis

as I reduce my possessions to a small and efficient set of qualitative choices, I will also strive to release the baggage accumulated with my identity, so in both respects I can move more freely and lightly in the world, inside and out "I clean out all excess clutter in my life. I phase out all trash. I give away my neglected things that others may use them. I make room for the many, many blessings coming my way. I joyfully bestow my blessings by sharing my excess abundance with others. And, as the useless and the unwanted depart, I experience the freedom and the lightness of an unburdened life. What then comes in to fill the void spaces will be a joy and a delight."

If I wasn't aware of it -it's new to me- is my definition of news. Yet a collective... (group? weirdly normalized demographic? meme herd?) ...races to limits of jittering (GO away spell checker with your red squigly furloughs!)(but thanks for the help with "furloughs") attention spans to the edge of know the instant something is known, and deride those arriving late with derivatives or repostings, a day, or perhaps hours later. Your channel policies may vary. My personal news sphere works a little more chilled. Since it's all history anyway, it may be years old and still be relevant. Maybe even more so. Like this young man who seems to know what's going on in his country, much to the surprise of the news media crew. It's an intelligence politicians try to marginalize or ostracize and all those other tricky social instrumentation functions that reduce the chance that they will be listened to by the law of large numbers. Us small numbers don't matter, ...

An underlying sense, always at the baseline of being, that everything is ok, and everything will always be ok. Getting as excited, worried, joyful, depressed in the moment as much as we like, but always at the core of our being, when we return, is this vibration, this bigger picture than our little self that doesn't know what's going on, and fears the worst, or thinks the best will last forever, if it can only catch it for good this time. And it's ok -that we're running amok, because we are so much larger and so much more than these monkey minds and primate hearts, that we are almost bemused spectators to the antics of our attachments. And this is not a running away, it's a making a space for us to participate fully but it doesn't define us. We are not of any of our experiences. It's not a new skill, it's been with us all along, we just never gave it much thought, but we notice one day there's always been this part of our awareness that's ...

 Speaking into the void. A black hole. Even read by a million eyes through-out history and beyond, any missive, any form of expression, communication, is only received, only processed for a flash in time and then  *poof*  it is gone from any individual mind. Only in the collective is its relevance. Visiting kin in the South while growing up I was privy to warm nights like blankets and the smell of growing earth in open fields of fireflies. Like fire flowers on the stalks of long grass. We collected them bare-foot, in jars, on magical dusks. The few captured we released, after close scrutiny. Maybe a worse for the wear. Information today reminds me of these fireflies. The best hope a burst could have would be to trigger or resonate with something larger in the psyches of the reader or viewer. Words take up with the thinking mind, but they can trigger the feeling mind and even create images or things like images. portraits maybe. we don't have the words for aggregates ...

I could totally make stories for each of these unique faces.

Bigotry is a curious impulse to make the world more like ourselves. Because of the fear of those unlike us and the fear of the unknown. We are wired to bet on safety, we are wired for life in the herd. It will take time for these instincts to encompass more than our families, our countries, religion, gender or race or even our own species, much less other indigenous life forms. We are still a primitive and precarious stage of evolution that could go either way, for both our own survival and that of much of our planet. In the long run, it may not matter, I think other intelligences are at work and it's not just up to us. I just hope we have it within our species to give our best showing before we are destroyed by our own ignorance. Nature may just write it off as a path explored, with some fatal flaws, but somehow I think we take it more personally. Which may be part of the problem.  

"In trying to improve myself, I'm always trying to find underlying principles that influence large swaths of my behavior." I read this article today, quoted above, from a friend's tweet. I've been thinking about similar themes of late. He makes a good point regarding the "long term aggregate" as a lens to look at how our day to day decisions impact both how we ended up here and now and where we may be headed in the future. Neither deferred pleasure nor immediate satisfaction but rather daily actions that reflect and demonstrate our core values, most of the time. There's an authentic part of each of us that is never fooled or impressed by words or intentions, only what it observes repeatedly in our behavior. I believe much of our self-esteem is an unconscious tally of these actions.  The note I scribbled to myself last night, that made the article particularly relevant, was this: Great goals and proclamations are lies and bullshit It's wha...