Dougald echoed more than a couple of us around here when he said if anyone besides Vanessa Machado de Oliviera and her crew had gone out into the sands of AI with a butterfly net following the game would have been uninteresting at best. But that cat has dragged in both chrysalis worth sleeping in and imago worth begging a ride.
As a scavenger earthing tip to toe who figures the alchemy of feast and color and music is how to fit everyone in straight on til morning I don't find myself stopping much on this silk-over-silica road at the recent glut of blankets hawking monks and knights, neither either/or nor both/and.
But seeing you, Yitzak brother-lost-by-birth, seeing something here I suspect more eyespot on wing.
But it is mostly by faith.
Pearl-diving for cask to tap to fill the flask to pack for ruin maybe should lean one over the rift of less is more, yet I pull back in the name of the fruitful and the dancing.
I am attracted to this read of the revolt that you can honorably wage, without the eating of one's own children. But what about those children? I can't hear any scrambling in the shade of these sails or digging in the sun of these shores. Did way of being fully animal and company arise as these trees rooted deeper? Honest question. No idea. If not, maybe what you are after isn't so much the rewinding of the tape of this pup, but the opening of a blowhole for it to breath and breach its own sea-bed?
If what was done as these saplings outside the camp in a pinch became the fruit that gave us that un-yidded wine-less Galilean simulcra that greyed the world with his breath, then how not rewind the tape? But maybe that is just propaganda and the desert led somewhere else. I don't know what I don't know about much about these histories though I did love a Henri Nouwen book on them in another life time.
It was good to be reminded of Shane Clairborne. In that same other life I think I thought he was a good one. Need to see what he has become.
Forgive the rummaging of the drawers aloud. I will shut up and listen. Tell me more of this mutiny as model if you have that in your pocket.
This is a very good question, if I’ve rightly grasped it. I’ve been wondering the same thing for a while. It’s a peculiar movement — as though it were wilfully made to vanish in time, without the relationships that embed life across generations. (All famine and no feast, and long after the branches had divorced the root). I’ve not explored enough to know, but I don’t sense much of that messianic immediacy that says, “There’s no point having children because it’s happening any day now…” It feels, rather, as though escape from the world also meant escape from the family structure. I have not understood why. Had celibacy among holy sorts become so normative by this place and time? There are some stories of hermits becoming parents through a lapse of discipline (as they saw it); children then raised in the desert hermit way of life by some penitent parent. The exceptions prove the strange rule.
I agree, there's so much hot air about this sort of thing these days. My questions are political and economic in slant, so hopefully not just more of the same music. I’m likewise strongly inclined against hope of finding some blueprint to "get back to." It is, for me, as I think you suggest: so much to learn from this old image, but I think it is a thing of its own (of dubious historicity), and not a model that can be popped out the box again in the present with a few tweaks.
I met Shane Claibourne once. He was one of the kindest and gentlest people I’d ever met.
Hi Kevin. Thank you for posting your thoughts. For myself, I am wary of language that suggests a inherent sense of competition between God and self. I think that framing of competition might itself be an expression of what ails: a worldview Hobbes summarised as "the war of all against all," which could only be solved by subservience to rule. In his view, everything is competition and the only question is who wins. I suppose it's a matter of personal conviction, but I dont see that being at the bottom of God's character: I dont see any zero sum game between God and self or God and the body. If a God exist who made both selves and bodies, I assume that that they rejoice in both these things. For me, the issue is something else: the accumulation of power, and thereby the creation of narratives of competition. My leaning, therefore, is toward the reconciliation of all things, and to life lived in goodfaith. But I know very little and it is early days for this research project. Your perspective is welcome. Blessings
You are very intelligent, my friend. Thank you so much for all your insights. But it think we are speaking different languages. When we come to know, balls to bones, that we are far, far more than just this material body, then there is no competition with the body or God or anything else. And until we try to facilitate that understanding in individuals and society as a whole, we will continue to spin ego and group-ego mind games on the way to nothingness.
The desert fathers and mothers knew what’s at the heart of all human wisdom: I am not the center of my life—God who is love is the actual center of my life. It’s not theory—it’s reality itself, and they just simply lived it. Believing we are the center of our life (i.e., the ego perspective which is so narrowly focused on the body and not the possibilities that we are something far greater) will always lead to oblivion because it’s an untenably false conception.
Only a society of individuals who begin teaching their children that their center is far more than their own narrow self will have a future.
Hi Kevin. I've responded to your thoughts, but accidentally posted it as a separate comment, and I'm too dull to work out how to rectify on the app! You can find my comment addressed to you up there, or down there, or wherever it lands. Blessings to you.
Dougald echoed more than a couple of us around here when he said if anyone besides Vanessa Machado de Oliviera and her crew had gone out into the sands of AI with a butterfly net following the game would have been uninteresting at best. But that cat has dragged in both chrysalis worth sleeping in and imago worth begging a ride.
As a scavenger earthing tip to toe who figures the alchemy of feast and color and music is how to fit everyone in straight on til morning I don't find myself stopping much on this silk-over-silica road at the recent glut of blankets hawking monks and knights, neither either/or nor both/and.
But seeing you, Yitzak brother-lost-by-birth, seeing something here I suspect more eyespot on wing.
But it is mostly by faith.
Pearl-diving for cask to tap to fill the flask to pack for ruin maybe should lean one over the rift of less is more, yet I pull back in the name of the fruitful and the dancing.
I am attracted to this read of the revolt that you can honorably wage, without the eating of one's own children. But what about those children? I can't hear any scrambling in the shade of these sails or digging in the sun of these shores. Did way of being fully animal and company arise as these trees rooted deeper? Honest question. No idea. If not, maybe what you are after isn't so much the rewinding of the tape of this pup, but the opening of a blowhole for it to breath and breach its own sea-bed?
If what was done as these saplings outside the camp in a pinch became the fruit that gave us that un-yidded wine-less Galilean simulcra that greyed the world with his breath, then how not rewind the tape? But maybe that is just propaganda and the desert led somewhere else. I don't know what I don't know about much about these histories though I did love a Henri Nouwen book on them in another life time.
It was good to be reminded of Shane Clairborne. In that same other life I think I thought he was a good one. Need to see what he has become.
Forgive the rummaging of the drawers aloud. I will shut up and listen. Tell me more of this mutiny as model if you have that in your pocket.
Hello dear Andrew
This is a very good question, if I’ve rightly grasped it. I’ve been wondering the same thing for a while. It’s a peculiar movement — as though it were wilfully made to vanish in time, without the relationships that embed life across generations. (All famine and no feast, and long after the branches had divorced the root). I’ve not explored enough to know, but I don’t sense much of that messianic immediacy that says, “There’s no point having children because it’s happening any day now…” It feels, rather, as though escape from the world also meant escape from the family structure. I have not understood why. Had celibacy among holy sorts become so normative by this place and time? There are some stories of hermits becoming parents through a lapse of discipline (as they saw it); children then raised in the desert hermit way of life by some penitent parent. The exceptions prove the strange rule.
I agree, there's so much hot air about this sort of thing these days. My questions are political and economic in slant, so hopefully not just more of the same music. I’m likewise strongly inclined against hope of finding some blueprint to "get back to." It is, for me, as I think you suggest: so much to learn from this old image, but I think it is a thing of its own (of dubious historicity), and not a model that can be popped out the box again in the present with a few tweaks.
I met Shane Claibourne once. He was one of the kindest and gentlest people I’d ever met.
Hi Kevin. Thank you for posting your thoughts. For myself, I am wary of language that suggests a inherent sense of competition between God and self. I think that framing of competition might itself be an expression of what ails: a worldview Hobbes summarised as "the war of all against all," which could only be solved by subservience to rule. In his view, everything is competition and the only question is who wins. I suppose it's a matter of personal conviction, but I dont see that being at the bottom of God's character: I dont see any zero sum game between God and self or God and the body. If a God exist who made both selves and bodies, I assume that that they rejoice in both these things. For me, the issue is something else: the accumulation of power, and thereby the creation of narratives of competition. My leaning, therefore, is toward the reconciliation of all things, and to life lived in goodfaith. But I know very little and it is early days for this research project. Your perspective is welcome. Blessings
You are very intelligent, my friend. Thank you so much for all your insights. But it think we are speaking different languages. When we come to know, balls to bones, that we are far, far more than just this material body, then there is no competition with the body or God or anything else. And until we try to facilitate that understanding in individuals and society as a whole, we will continue to spin ego and group-ego mind games on the way to nothingness.
God is love, love is forever,
Brother Kevin
The desert fathers and mothers knew what’s at the heart of all human wisdom: I am not the center of my life—God who is love is the actual center of my life. It’s not theory—it’s reality itself, and they just simply lived it. Believing we are the center of our life (i.e., the ego perspective which is so narrowly focused on the body and not the possibilities that we are something far greater) will always lead to oblivion because it’s an untenably false conception.
Only a society of individuals who begin teaching their children that their center is far more than their own narrow self will have a future.
God’s love to you, and our own,
Brother Kevin
Hi Kevin. I've responded to your thoughts, but accidentally posted it as a separate comment, and I'm too dull to work out how to rectify on the app! You can find my comment addressed to you up there, or down there, or wherever it lands. Blessings to you.