silent thunder

Life sustains life through decay. Decay nourishes all life. Life is a fluid process of acquisition, acquiring living food be it plant, insect, animal or fish, which as it decays in the gut, nourishes life. Decay is a fluid process of nourishing and providing nourishment to other life. Part of my living body now is decaying while the decay of other life, nourishes and replenishes it and it continue to flourish. It is the same with stars, planets and galaxies. Each in their cycle will come and go. Simple beautiful. As Marble said... birth and death. One fluid process, not two separate static things. Simple, beautiful, ever flowing toward balance, yet never quite in balance. Never static.

Such an intriguing sensation when it arises! I oscillate between deep ancestral knowingness and a misfire in memory. The materialist in me always considered it a physical misfire kind of thing. A rather simple misappropriation of a present experience which instead of being held as a short term memory, is mistakenly appropriated instead into long term memory storage, giving a present experience the sense of coming from deep past memory. That sense has mostly dissolved and unfolded through repeated experience into what now seems more like a function of ancestral memory, a deep biological knowingnesses hard wired into the living dna fabric of our bodies. When it arises lately, it's one more indication of the ceaselessly interconnected nature of the universe... the one long flowing unfoldingness that never ceases, never runs out and I usually refer to as dao. It is a biproduct of what we are and who we've always been, unfolding in awareness now, while connected to the unending flow of the all in all. Take the Monarch butterflies for instance. The butterflies that return to the North each Spring are the great, great grandchildren of the Monarchs that left for the overwintering trees in Mexico and Southern California the year before. It's akin to me, moving back to the same house my Great Grandparents Hannah and Haagen lived in in South Dakota when they immigrated here in 1861. In animals we call it instinct and it seems utterly natural, yet magical. Closest I can describe it in is a type of ancestral memory woven directly into the biological structure of our very human bodies. The more I sit in simple presence and stillness the greater the sense of awe in this physical manifestation I refer to as my body becomes. Our bodies have such wisdom in them, such deep, deep awareness and wisdom. Like they're woven from the wisdom of awareness and survival itself. The visceral sense of something previously not encountered in this incarnation.

Here you go, this is how it is lately, When sleeping on my side I have two under the feet and legs in the shape of a T. Two to support my upside arm and keep the chest open. And two to support my head and keep my neck in line with my spine, one firm and one soft. cheers!

Love your list. You remind me, I've yet to see the Green Mile... Also, I'd love the names of those soviet films.

All that is gold does not glitter, Not all those who wander are lost; The old that is strong does not wither, Deep roots are not reached by the frost. From the ashes a fire shall be woken, A light from the shadows shall spring; Renewed shall be blade that was broken, The crownless again shall be king. JRR Tolkien

Work is utterly nuts this last month... a near fantasy world of incredible noises, construction machinery, indoor cranes hoisting thousand pound lighting instruments overhead, forklifts, dust everywhere. Five departments simultaneously trying to prep a high end product for the pickiest of clients. In midst of this cacophony. Routinely, i unfold into silent emptiness in the midst of my task, for the last several days, amidst this losing of self in the task a thought repeatedly arises... what is least obvious? While i've spent countless evenings contemplating what is most obvious, only recently has this question been arising, unbidden, unsought... but repeatedly. what is least obvious?

Is space really comprised of nothing I often wonder? I've never heard an answer that brings certainty to me on this. Although I recall a lecture by Nassim Haramein that had some lovely attributes to it regarding the nature of any given point in space, but that isn't among my bookmarks to add to the convo, so I'll just mention it in case someone else is familiar with it. I find his approach to physics intriguingly fringe. I was taught that space is a vacuum comprised of nothing... but my certainty on this has never been very... certain.

awareness and light seem related to me for some time now. my mind routinely interprets awareness as a field a simultaneously expansive/contractive field made of light this field of light... unfolding... ever unfolding and where motion arises, it pivots about a point of empty stillness I deeply appreciate science and its many dependable observations. Yet our faculties are so limited and our apparatus, both biological and mechanical... are so limited that any time science claims (this is how it is 100%) The words echo with the dogmatic projective assumption of certainty that was offered by our evangelical pastor back on Sundays. Science does the best it can, but too often, our most recent understandings of things are touted and received as 100% truth, when the reality in my experience is far less certain. I take scientific claims as 'given observation... this is the best way we have of describing this at this time' and all claims are in my mind, destined to evolve as observation, awareness and insight unfold. That is a beautiful, wonderful thing to me.

is it a flowing target that one must strive to maintain or to acquire? is it a flowing state that requires some things to be abandoned before it is achieved? is it achievable? maintanable? does it require skill? or is it always flowing regardless of what story our local mind is telling and all the seeking, skill making, abandoning and acquiring are noise so to speak that masks the silent unfolding presence underlying all else?

Fun conversation! My interest when topics of this nature come up always seem to lean toward the properties of light lately. Gravity just has... well, no real gravity for me lately. I was pretty tweaked when I learned some time ago from multiple sources that the measured speed of light, long touted as a constant, like... the constant, actually measures variably. Is this due to a limitation in the instrumentation based on our own perspective oriented limitations that are built into any tools we design, or an actual feature of the nature of light itself... this fascinates me no end. That and the seeming fact that where vision is concerned, we're always viewing the past is another property of light that peaks my interest. Since there is always a bit of time that it takes (however slight) for light to reach our sensory organs from whatever it rebounds off of, which then must be first transduced by said organs to electrical signals before those are interpreted as what we see... We are always literally seeing the past. This always strikes me when I'm out at night walking and staring up as our night sky is a veritable visual story of the light of the past. Some stars we see no longer exist as we see them now but have long died out, or burst and the signal flashes of their dying have yet to reach us. One astronomer Larry Molnar and his team claim through observation of increased orbital rates of a binary star, that they have already collapsed in collision and the light of said collision will reach us in a few years... interesting stuff for sure, since the estimate is only a few years off, so confirmation is eminent in this case. Also intriguing to me, is the notion that we only ever see with our eyes the colors that objects are technically not... since our eyes collect only the frequencies of light that bounce off of objects, not the frequencies that are absorbed by them... so technically we only ever see the colors that things are not often comes to mind for whatever reason. Fun stuff, good convo... thanks all.

books are returning. Churned through a couple on my Sami heritage, which set in motion a few others. Secret and Sublime was a real stunner as was Saltzman's The 10,000 Things and a couple books on Toltec wisdom tradition. Now I'm back into reading plays. I'll be through with the complete works of Conor McPherson. I also realized, I've been reading to my son nightly all through my personal drought. We just finished The Alchemist, which he was unsure of at first, but came to love by the end. He's reading one of my first favorites. The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper. I'll be having a go at it when he's done. That one grabbed me by the collar as a kid and never let go. It's a pleasant surprise and a simple joy to have some gravity in books and stories again.

I'm human, so they tell me, yet my humanness is woven entirely from non human elements. Curious that. No where inside me is the element human present. I wonder when it is exactly that in the process of growing this body, I ceased being some mixture of elements and started being human? And all of my humanness, made entirely non human bits... even the most human dna, (had that analyzed a couple years back to shut my sister up about our being 100% blah blah), that human dna is comprised of non human bits. The same non human bits strewn about the rest of manifestation that everything that is not human is also made of... Yup, curious. Nowhere inside my human body, is the element human present... and yet... human my body be. That's sticks out to me recently, though for no reason but that it makes me grin and giggle a bit inside when I ponder it and it seems to pop into my head steadily yet seemingly randomly.

while for me, manifestation seems utterly magical.

I used to consume books nonstop, there was always one in my possession. I was insatiable for more, I'd burn through 2-3 a week. It started in college and continued on to my early 40's. It was often synchronistic, how books would fall toward me six and seven at a time, all with interlocking and interrelated topic ideas, even across genres. Then a full stop and no book on any topic could draw my interest for several years. At first it was fiction that dropped off, and then shortly after, all books lost any sense of pull, or purpose. This went on for six or seven years it seems. I'd try on occasion to during that time, but usually to no avail. Nothing cut through the fog of lack of interest and I'd soon just stop in mid sentence and put a book down for good, something that would have been nigh on impossible in the past. Very recently, in the last year, several titles mentioned here have peaked interest and so there has been a mild return. Nothing of the manic, constant chewing of words and ideas as before, but there does seem to be a steady flow of interest in certain titles and topics. It's a welcome return, but the interaction with words and ideas has shifted and now it's a light dance, not a distilled pursuit.

When i was blind... all of my girlfriends were 10's.

Or those with experience just aren't interested in talking...

Had he but turned back then, and looked out once more on to the rose-lit garden, she would have seen that which would have made her own sufferings seem but light and easy to bear--a strong man, overwhelmed with his own passion and despair. Pride had given way at last, obstinacy was gone: the will was powerless. He was but a man madly, blindly, passionately in love and as soon as her light footstep had died away within the house, he knelt down upon the terrace steps, and in the very madness of his love he kissed one by one the places where her small foot had trodden, and the stone balustrade, where her tiny hand had rested last. Baroness Orczy ~ The Scarlet Pimpernel

Some time ago practice shifted. Where it used to be dietary, it is now medicinal.

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I'll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about. Ideas, language, even the phrase "each other" doesn't make any sense. Rumi

My son is a morning kid. On weekends he wakes up shortly after I do and we usually take a long slow walk through the neighborhood before sunrise, before the busy folks wake up.. Satie utterly nails the feeling with this piece...

Even here in the desert they seem to thrive and are very expansive. I can only imagine how well they do in your humid area with all that moisture. I brought in a milkweed last year to start raising monarchs with my son and now find it springing up in neighboring pots and plots regularly.

i find giving up seeking for more, or striving to achieve through externals full of potential. It's been quite empowering to cease seeking and abide simply, here and now.

We normally work in pairs in my business. And on this show, I'm fortunate to be paired up with one of my favorite people on the planet. I've known Scott for about 8 years now. He is rapidly closing in on retirement. In my biz, it can be rare to work with a friend as we all follow the work wherever it's available. So to not only get on the same crew at this point in his career, but to also be paired up, is a rare gift for me. Scott is a rare man. A font of joy, passion, humor, always humor... driven by an intricately deep critical thinking mind and potent insights. He also has a magnificent baritone voice and sings often while he's building. Never paid much attention to Todd Rundgren until I met Scott. Scott is a very big fan of Todd and I'm beginning to see why as I listen to more of his lesser known work. He reminds me of Bowie in this tune. All that set up to share this... (sheesh I talk a lot sometimes)... The lyrics to Parallel Lines really resonated for me as Scott sang them yesterday. Particularly resonant for me given the current political atmosphere. Here's the song