silent thunder

The breath skill employed in this work is breath-taking! And unboxing that LP... What a find!

I'm not often serious any longer in this life, but I'm sincere. Kind of like my friend @Limahong Whom I dearly appreciate. One interesting thing I do, is play. Seriously... I love to play, sincerely. When used sincerely, play transforms a mundane task into a joyful one. These daze, a lot of folks seem to mistake lack of seriousness with lack of sincerity. The two are not mutually exclusive... At work, when things are crazy, I'll often make a paper airplane and toss it from the perms (40' high floating platforms above stage floors, used for lighting rigging). I'm expanding my retinue of paper airplanes lately... mostly adding new models to my skill set. I make them while I listen to satsang (daily), or watch a film (once in a while), fold em flat and store em in a bag. Once I've made a thousand of them, I'm going to rent a top floor room in a nearby hotel for a couple nights of play. On each plane a poem, or quote is written on the wings. Either one of my own, or one I've encountered that inspires me with joy, compassion, hope, etc. My son and I will then launch them into the surrounding community and see how far they fly from the 16th floor, which is seriously an act of littering, but with the sincerity of sharing a bit of joyful playful poetry and love with my neighbors. This may irk a few folks (the serious ones). I'm ok with this, sincerely. I suspect a few will also find moments of insight and joy and they may also play a bit.

Deeply appreciate Adya... His method and manner of sharing his experiences resonate with my own process almost seamlessly.

The Dunedain. Descended from Isildur, gifted with long life. Who was descended from Elrond's Brother Elros. Denethor, Steward of Gondor (in Aragorn's absence).

Evades the Wasps emerged @ 10:19 this morning. We sat with her for a little over four hours while she inflated, dried and then stretched her wings. Purging her abdomen of the unused fluids for the wing inflation, she eventually fluttered off the to North. and the cycle continues...

One does not heal through fighting. Do not fight illness, care through it.

Truly, we've likely crossed paths there mate... Whenever I find myself on locations for work that are nearby, I'll spend my lunches in those rooms perusing for gold among the elder books. My workmates "where'd you go for lunch?". Me: *holds up bag of books* "I went to the Gold Mine!" My time at University, taught me one really enduring and useful thing... how to teach myself, or rather, how to learn. When my time there was done, then my real education could begin in earnest. Life is now my teacher, every stone, leaf and flutterby whispers lessons. Cheers Mate!

Could be this afternoon; could be a couple days yet. But Evades the Wasps is developing well it seems.

Today's loop...

Hey 1Bum In recent years, repeatedly awareness is reminded that there are more miracles unfolding in a square meter of 'ordinary earth', than are recorded in all the combined stories in all the books in the library of congress... combined. The simple act of a flower, growing from seed and unfolding in sunshine... The soil composed of the bodies of decay, nurturing life, with no teachers or training... The water endlessly recycling life through the process of growth and decay... i no longer encounter the ordinary, no matter where I turn. Welcome to the Bums

Not even owing to the processed foods and contaminated city life and horrific qualities of chemically neutered water sources... blockages in humans I encounter every day are the norm in my experience. Combine that with the generally stunted emotional temperment of The West, it seems a quagmire of blockage, repression and delusion. Given the state of our environment and the corruption saturating our human aspects of life... I'm with Robert Anton Wilson when he said...

today's loop...

"Your Father is the Wind at your back. Your Mother is the birds in the trees..." ~Ghost of Tsushima an example of the dialogue from the game.

Real dialogue is where two or more people become willing to suspend their certainty in each other's presence. ~ David Bohm

Malazan is intriguing... It sounds similar in scope, breadth and level of world detail to Terry Goodkind's: Sword of Truth series and Robert Jordan's: Wheel of Time saga. I devoured both of those series in similarly devoted, sleep bending fashion while living in Brooklyn in the 90's. They were constant companions on tube rides and fire escape reading sessions. Though reading them back to back, caused some cross-over of details where they have now, become relegated in memory to something of a parallel universe experience for me, the two tales and sets of characters merging into one massive double world. They came at the right time for me, I don't think I could get through them now, but thoroughly relished them at the time.

me too!

Transglobal Underground, feature heavily in my "Liquid Spine" playlist. Songs that cause one's spine to rotate in spiral liquid bliss...

Always loved Dead Can Dance, from the first moment I heard them at a friend's place back in 1990. This one saturates me in ancestral memories... chanting around the firepits on Solstice and Equinnox in the Clan Lands of the Great Northern Forests.

It's really striking, how much we cross over... on so many topics. Much Love Sis!

I could never get into Dune. Didn't hate it. It elicited no response. Tried to read it on three occasions, due to the immense hype. Each time, the words just lay there, so eventually, I let them. Jules Verne was similar. Heard the hype, tried it out. nada, zip, zilch. C'est la vie.

I gather info until I'm sated. I mull it over for a time and actively forget about it, putting it out of monkey mind and allowing spherical listening and the unconscious to work at it. When the time comes to decide; I follow my strongest impulse. Though I should qualify that, I don't believe humans engage in choice, or decision... what others describe as decisions... I experience as compulsions and conditioned responses to stimuli that arise from the unconscious, which are later rationalized as a decision but when present in the moment, arise from a nonplace of which I know naught and are experienced as coming through me, rather than stemming from me. As for spiritual or not, to me it's all spirit... I've yet to encounter anything or non thing in awareness that was not spiritual in nature.

Mentioning Murakami puts me in mind of Tom Robbins and his book I loved Robbins' nonlinear plot and use of a diary format to convey his views on religion in particular. Highly humorous, his commentary, as hilarious as it is scathing and deeply insightful throughout was nigh on perfect for me when I encountered it. I used many excerpts from this book as powerhouse audition pieces in my acting daze. brief summary: While unwittingly infiltrating a band of Catholic Monks who operate as assassins for the Pope, the main character stumbles down into the catacombs under the Vatican, revealing the ancient horde of secrets that lie at the heart of the Papacy and the Holy See, as well as the confiscations and the bodies of innumerable nuns and children... Mercilessly scathing and hysterically critical. Loved it.

I was listening to Neil read this on CD on my long commute home, finished it right before the lockdown. Neil is amazing... and Haruki Murakami! Pure lyrical genius.

Strugatsky Brothers! They're at the top of the Sci Fi heap for me hands down, even translated. Encountered them after seeing the Tarkovsky film Stalker about 20 years ago, which instantly became my favorite Sci Fi film of all time. The book Roadside Picnic which inspired the film was amazing, but I suspect Taomeow is correct, compared to the film, which was subtitled over the native Russian and was lyrical and poetic throughout, the book's translation seemed more literal... still, I was gobsmacked by the story and world. Instant fan for life of both Tarkovsky and The Stugatsky's. I've always favored High Fantasy though and my two most influential authors are Fritz Lieber (Fafhrd/Grey Mouser Anthology) and JRR Tolkien. Lieber has a small but fierce cult following and his seven books carry a unique style of phrasing that I've always treasured. I found Lieber in the early 90's due to a friend who found out I enjoyed playing the old pen and paper rpg's like Dungeons and Dragons and Palladium. The six or seven books by Lieber are credited as bulking up the early Sword and Sorcery genre. Each of the six or seven books are collections of short stories that aside from the first, can be read in any order, most in a single sitting and come together over time acting as a chronicle of the lives of The Greatest Thieving Duo Nehwon had ever seen. Fafhrd (pronounced Faf-heard) the Great Barbarian from the Snow Clans of the North, and his wily, slim companion known as The Grey Mouser who hails from the immense cities of the South. They face living castles, cultists, hordes of the shadow realm, elder and younger gods, all while trying to skirt their duties to their two patron Wizards, Ningauble of the Seven Eyes and Sheelba of the Eyeless Face. Also have to mention Susan Cooper, whose The Dark is Rising series is the first I ever read at 10. She set the stage for my love of fantasy. I also was deeply impacted by Stephen King's The Shining. Which of course led to Lovecraft...