silent thunder

We rarely quote nowadays to appeal to authority... though we quote sometimes to display our sapience and erudition. Some authors we quote against. Some we quote not at all, offering them our scrupulous avoidance, and so make them part of our "white mythology." Other authors we constantly invoke, chanting their names in cerebral rituals of propitiation or ancestor worship. ~ Ihab Hassan

On extremity of emotion... Be what you are! Get unconstipated! Open up the throttle and live!

fun... celebrate the body, don't demonize it. good stuff.

Was just thinking about @Taomeow as I was brewing a cup, then sat down and read your comment @ilumairen. Now I'm thinking about her potential responses to this thread and grinning like a chesire cat. Even in her absence, she provides content for me. pardon my interruption if you will, carry on...

I can't stress enough the effectiveness and importance to me of light stretching and shaking. Shaking seems nigh on magical at this point in my life. Before and after any forms. And as with my above deseription during the forms work, never stretching into pain, only discomfort. Cheers!

Helped me to imagine my body dangling from a line attached at the bai hui point, top of the skull. I once worked for months with a dancer on posture while studying acting. I wanted to get rid of my personal physicalities so that I could more effectively seem to embody the posture of a character. To do that I had to have someone show me my unconscious physical habits and train them out. Imagining my body hanging from a hook at the top of the head was effective in helping me with sung. It drew my head up with chin slightly down, taking the slump out of my body without added tension that would arise when I tried to 'hold myself up' which adds a bunch of musculuture involvement that should be best left to sort itself out when the bones are aligned. A dancer once gave me potent advice when she was teaching and helping me in that study. I recall it vividly still decades later, she said: "your bones keep you upright, not your muscles. you don't need your muscles to stand, only to move. your bones fit together naturally, stack upon each other naturally, let them. there will be no tension eventually with alignment, the bones will fit together as designed and you won't use your muscles to stand, only to move... that's what the bones are for, support. it will become effortless... your muscles keep your bones in place, your bones support you." There was some discomfort as my muscles had to accomodate correct alignment, but this passed rather quickly with daily practice. The body is so fluid. Looking back I can see she was teaching me ZZ without mentioning it as such, probably assuming I'd dismiss it, this being Minnesota back in the late 80's lol. How grateful I am for her simple attention and instruction. Eyes to the horizon. Chin is slightly down. Natural curve, but not a curved spine. The skeleton stacks up under this point naturally, dangling in perfect alignment. Feet under shoulders, never locking knees or elbows. Mainly for me it came down to: Don't push to extremes, but work into your discomfort zone. Discomfort is ok, pain is not. The old adage "no pain no gain"? I threw that out years ago. Discomfort is progress, pain is damage. In my experience. It will pass with time. Your body will adjust and you'll encounter new thresholds. Seems like a sign of progress from where I'm sitting and reading. I'd say you're on the scent. keep at it mate and congrats.

Our marble of friends Marblehead passed away last December. Not a day goes by I don't recall him with deep affection and often a chuckle thinking of one of his adroit comebacks. What an authentic joy he was to communicate with, even when we steeply disagreed. Truly one of the rare ones. *raises a mug* Cheers Marble... wherever you flow now.

dawg... I'm missing dawg.

wind blows leaves about. sage occupies the center. no disturbances.

little sumpin sumpin...

Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard translation by Sheila Faria Glaser

"All perception is based on gamble." ~Husserl We all interpret our reality and we do so by filtering from a partial pool of information from our senses in the first place. We don't perceive the world as it is, conscious awareness deals with partial information, which it then interprets and seldom are we even aware that an interpretation is taking place. Particularly if we are not skeptical or inquisitive by nature and do not endeavor to question aspect of assumptions that usually lie beneath conscious thought. Religious dogma, scientific dogma and common sense are the most prodigious pools of unconcious reality tunnel construction and projection. Common sense is often just what you've heard from others (ueually before the age of critical reasoning) and thus never really questioned for yourself. Just because most folks agree on something does not connote veracity, only consensus. Just because you thought something, doesn't make it real, true or important. They're just thoughts. Just because many people agree with it, also does not connote veracity. It was one time for example, common sense that the sun revolved around the earth. All it took was to walk outside look at the sun's progression across the sky and then assume your perception of data accurately reflected the reality. This partial and interpreted information forged and projected into what seems like a seamless and very convincing complete picture of reality, but is in fact an interpretation of a partial picture, projected outward and accepted often without question as complete reality. This fallacy is the basis of Naive Realism. I see the world accurately with my senses. Robert Anton Wilson puts it far more succinctly than I can in some of his works, here's a short video of his description of Reality Tunnels and evisceration of Naive Realism.

A nice overview of the materials used and some of the techniques of traditional katana forging.

cucumber sage for the win

on second thought...

McMurdo Valley reminds me of the deep need I feel to experience the vibrations of Australia in person some time. With a lengthy stop in NZ on the way home...

Student: Teach me! Teacher: I have nothing to offer Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

yea... there's a definite creepy factor to this notion... I suspect this old sense is one reason I was eventually compelled to cease watching the news regularly... it was all getting far too personal and flavor filled.

i often feel like a goofy loose tangent tendencied oscillation of myriad counter acting forces... more akin to some grinning guy mumbling to himself on the streetcorner, than some wise man.

I recall my father once demonstrating on a saturday morning while waiting for breakfast, the equations that delineated the likelihood that in any given intake of breath we inhale an atom exhaled by Alexander the Great with his dying breath. This equation accounted for a given the number of atoms inhaled in an average human and then accounted for the eventual dispersion over time of said atoms of an exhale through air currents over a set period of time, until an even distribution over time is likely. For me it caused a reaction somewhat other than the one he intended. My Father was as staunch a Materialist as I have encountered, save maybe for Marblehead. In me, it caused me to immediately feel a deep unified kinship with all things that breath and instilled in my consicous awareness a raw, palpable knowingness, a beingness that we are all breathing each other's breath. We are one fluid process, even though my body is actually a patterned collective of trillions of individual life cells, working in tribal units. We are one flowing unity. Patterns within patterns. Breath is the ultimate recycling and it occurs without any training, effort or skill. How lovingly, all encompassingly, bouyantly, effortlessly this shines with clarity.

Robert Anton Wilson is one of my most treasured gurus and a seemingly endless source of wokeness! How I love that man's verbal brain droppings... like pure gold bliss, even when it's painful.

My Uncle is a retired detective. Homicide/burglary, Los Angeles. He's also one of the most optimistic people I've ever known. It seems a paradox to me. I've got a variety of career military officers and police in my family, from beat cops to CIA operatives. I asked him once out of a pressing need to understand, how he could remain so optimistic, while throughout his career of marines and homicide investigations, he was daily dealing with the 3% of the population that causes 90% of the trouble. His response resonates to this day regarding polarizing thought, self identification and how what we allow ourselves to think becomes our perception of reality, it tempers how we view reality. It was as surprising to me as it was impacting. While a rookie, my Uncle had a veteran pull him aside and offered him potent advice that my uncle absorbed and used to seemingly great benefit. His advice was simple: "keep your civlian friends", 'don't get lost behind the blue curtain'. "keep your civilian friends. Foster civilian friendships. It will remind you that they're not all perps." he said. "Too often in the force, and you'll see this for yourself, too often, we come to start identifying as police officers first and human second. We start hanging out only with other cops and soon with enough exposure to perps, all civilians become 'potential perps'. This is when you get lost, lose your perspective that most of the trouble is caused by a very small fraction of the overall population." I strive to keep a wide variety of friends and to keep diaologue open to those who share my perspective and don't... Ruth Bader Ginsberg and Antonin Scalia were life long friends, taking family trips together and hanging out barbequing... all the while passionately viewing the world from seemingly opposing viewpoints. Much to be gleaned from this, methinks...