Passing in a river

The deep source of the stream (hear it now?)
is implicit in what everybody knows.
That's why no formula
can fully explicate or comprehend it.
The process of recognizing
is not the kind that can be completed.
That's why nobody knows very much.

… we are all putting our shoulders to the wheel for an end that none of us can catch more than a glimpse at—that which the generations are working out. But we can see that the development of embodied ideas is what it will consist in.

— Peirce, CP 5.402 n2 (1893)

And we can sense the turning of the wheel
as its myriad expressions,
in the weight of light,
the turbulence of time,
the living edge of possibility passing,
selected by choice or circumstance
for falling into permanent place as the past
or vanishing into the might-have-been.

Waking to time

When you wake up in the morning, some range of possibilities lies ahead (whether you are aware of them or not). The day will determine which of these are realized. At the end of the day, those living possibilities have either been fixed as definite facts or vanished into the unrealized. Time is the transformation of possible futures into the actual past, where possibilities no longer live.

Does the prospect of your death matter more than the presence of time?

Survival

If we don't survive, we don't do anything else.

— John Sinclair

I've got better things to do than survive.

— ani difranco

Differences

The world presents resistance to your will: in other words, you and the world exist.
The separation of self and other created the space in which you can act. Thus it also created good and evil.
The meaning (to you) of what is not you generates your guidance system, recreating you and the world together as inside and out.
Semiosis is self-organization.

On this January morning, the walls of this house make a difference of about 50 degrees (Celsius) between inner and outer space. I am burning birch (harvested last summer) to maintain this difference – the aspen i usually feed the woodstove with is not quite equal to the task. The goldfinches, nuthatches and chickadees are feeding their inner fires with nyjer and sunflower seeds. How they do it is beyond me.

The real meltdown

The snow cover, some of it two feet deep, has nearly vanished after a day of rain that rose to +8 C. Rain at this time of year is not so very unusual, but after all the snow and cold this month, it seems truly bizarre. Well, that's life in the last days of '08.

Life itself is the imperative to continue by self-renewal. No force in the universe is more ruthless, or more creative, than life. It is the root of all suffering; it drives the mutual interference among life-forms; it is therefore the ground of compassion. It is the source of suffering and of release from suffering: when we learn from suffering, we go beyond it. Only by learning from experience of life-and-death can we know something deeper.

The explicit intricacy

Today i'd like to introduce a passage from Blake's Milton, a long poem about its own genesis. In Book 1

Milton, who walkd about in Eternity
One hundred years, pondring the intricate mazes of Providence

descends back into the fallen world of everyday life to unite his prophetic inspiration with Blake's, and thus to correct some errors of his earlier life's work. Blake and Milton together become one with Los, who might be defined as the Creative Imagination who expresses, or makes explicit, what Eugene Gendlin has called the implicit intricacy.

The division of being into beings or systems, each with its inside and outside, is what makes it all so intricate. On Plate 26 of Milton we find a vision of the natural environment as the work of Los. Here it is (replacing some of Blake's remarkably quirky punctuation with my own):

Thou seest the gorgeous clothed Flies that dance & sport in summer
Upon the sunny brooks & meadows: every one the dance
Knows in its intricate mazes of delight, artful to weave;
Each one to sound his instruments of music in the dance,
To touch each other & recede, to cross & change & return –
These are the Children of Los; thou seest the Trees on mountains
The wind blows heavy, loud they thunder thro' the darksom sky
Uttering prophecies & speaking instructive words to the sons
Of men: These are the Sons of Los! These the Visions of Eternity.
But we see only as it were the hem of their garments
When with our vegetable eyes we view these wond'rous Visions.

Our eyes are ‘vegetable’ when they are not animated with the creative power of vision – the same power with which you the universe are at once wholly guided and animated.

Bubbles

The current credit bubble – which has hardly begun to burst – inflated because systematic inflation was a way for clever and powerful people to make money instead of providing real goods or services to others.
—Good for what? Service to whom?
Nothing permanent, that's for sure.
Mutual good or service depends on differences.
Even the web of life is a bubble, held together by surface tension.
Yes, it's bubbles all the way down.
I think the Buddhists call this ‘emptiness’ – or ‘interbeing’.
It's the source of inspiration, which Jesus calls the bubbling spring that I have tended (Gospel of Thomas 13.5)

Take a deep breath.