Monday, February 16, 2015
Our philosophy… reduceth to a single origin and relateth to a single end, and maketh contraries to coincide so that there is one primal foundation both of origin and of end. From this coincidence of contraries, we deduce that ultimately it is divinely true that contraries are within contraries; wherefore it is not difficult to compass the knowledge that each thing is within every other.
Wednesday, December 4, 2013
Don’t part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist, but you have ceased to live.
via IFTTT
Friday, September 24, 2010
NGC 628 - Novalis On Love
"Love works magic. It is the final purpose of the world story, the Amen of the universe."
- Novalis
Edward Burne-Jones (1833-1898) - Love Among The Ruins - Katherine Anne Porter On The Arts
"For myself, and I was not alone, all the conscious and recollected years of my life have been lived to this day under the heavy threat of world catastrophe, and most of the energies of my mind and spirit have been spent in the effort to grasp the meaning of those threats, to trace them to their sources and to understand the logic of this majestic and terrible failure of the life of man in the Western world.
In the face of such shape and weight of present misfortune, the voice of the individual artist may seem perhaps of no more consequence than the whirring of a cricket in the grass, but the arts do live continuously, and they live literally by faith; their names and their shapes and their uses and their basic meanings survive unchanged in all that matters through times of interruption, diminishment, neglect; they outlive governments and creeds and the societies, even the very civilization that produced them. They cannot be destroyed altogether because they represent the substance of faith and the only reality. They are what we find again when the ruins are cleared away."
- From Flowering Judas, Introduction to Modern Library edition (1940)
Thursday, September 23, 2010
Egg Nebula - Jorge Luis Borges On Time And Existence
"Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire."
Rumi - Fragrance of the Unseen
"The branch might seem like the fruit's origin: In fact, the branch exist because of the fruit."
Fragrance of the Unseen
"If you catch a fragrance of the unseen,
like that, you will not be able
to be contained.
You will be out in empty sky.
Any beauty the world has, any desire
will easily be yours.
As you live deeper in the heart,
the mirror gets clearer and cleaner.
Shams of Tabriz realized God in himself.
When that happens,
you have no anxieties about losing anyone
or anything. You break the spells
that human difficulties cause.
Interpretations come, hundreds,
from all the religious symbols
and parables and prayers.
You know what they mean,
when the presence lives through you."
- Mevlana Rumi
Translated by Coleman Barks
Tuesday, September 21, 2010
Leonard Cohen - What Is A Saint?
via en.wikiquote.org
"What is a saint? A saint is someone who has achieved a remote human possibility. It is impossible to say what that possibility is. I think it has something to do with the energy of love. Contact with this energy results in the exercise of a kind of balance in the chaos of existence. A saint does not dissolve the chaos; if he did the world would have changed long ago. I do not think that a saint dissolves the chaos even for himself, for there is something arrogant and warlike in the notion of a man setting the universe in order. It is a kind of balance that is his glory. He rides the drifts like an escaped ski. His course is the caress of the hill. His track is a drawing of the snow in a moment of its particular arrangement with wind and rock. Something in him so loves the world that he gives himself to the laws of gravity and chance. Far from flying with the angels, he traces with the fidelity of a seismograph needle the state of the solid bloody landscape. His house is dangerous and finite, but he is at home in the world. He can love the shape of human beings, the fine and twisted shapes of the heart. It is good to have among us such men, such balancing monsters of love."
- Leonard Cohen, Beautiful Losers (1966)
Monday, September 20, 2010
Alan Moore On Nuclear Disarmament
It doesn’t even matter if we ever fire these missiles or not. They are having their effect upon us because there is a generation growing up now who cannot see past the final exclamation mark of a mushroom cloud. They are a generation who can see no moral values that do not end in a crackling crater somewhere. I’m not saying that nuclear bombs are at the root of all of it, but I think it is very, very naïve to assume that you can expose the entire population of the world to the threat of being turned to cinders without them starting to act, perhaps, a little oddly.
I believe in some sort of strange fashion that the presence of the atom bomb might almost be forcing a level of human development that wouldn’t have occurred without the presence of the atom bomb. Maybe this degree of terror will force changes in human attitudes that could not have occurred without the presence of these awful, destructive things. Perhaps we are faced with a race between the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse in one line and the 7th Calvary in the other. We have not got an awful lot of mid ground between Utopia and Apocalypse, and if somehow our children ever see the day in which it is announced that we do not have these weapons any more, and that we can no longer destroy ourselves and that we’ve got to do something else to do with our time than they will have the right to throw up their arms, let down their streamers and let forth a resounding cheer.
- On the issue of nuclear weapons, in England Their England: Monsters, Maniacs and Moore
Tuesday, August 17, 2010
Earth's Overdraft Notice
The Global Footprint Network has announced that Earth Overshoot Day is fast approaching:
This Saturday, we will reach Earth Overshoot Day: the day when human demand on nature surpasses what nature can renewably supply...as of August 21st, humanity will have demanded an amount of ecological resources equivalent to what it takes nature 12 months to produce.From now until the end of the year, we will meet our needs by liquidating stocks and accumulating greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere.
According to the Global Footprint Network humanity crossed a threshold three decades ago when we stopped being able to live off of nature's interest -- "consuming resources and producing carbon dioxide at a rate lower than what the planet was able to regenerate and reabsorb each year" -- and started living beyond nature's capacity. They call this gap between human demand and nature's supply "ecological overshoot" (a concept that was devised by the UK-based new economics foundation).
The pace of this overshoot has grown each year (see links for 2007 and 2008 in the Worldchanging archives). Now the most recent data shows that "it takes one year and five months to regenerate the ecological services (production of resources and absorption of CO2) that humanity requires in one year." While this year's overshoot day comes about a month earlier than last year's, this is not due to a sudden change in human demand, but rather to improvements in the calculation methodology that have enabled the Global Footprint Network to more adequately capture the extent of overshoot. As an example, they report that the world has less biocapacity available, primarily in the area of grazing land, than previously estimated.
2010 Global Ecological Deficit (via "Global Footprint Network, National Footprint Accounts, 2009 edition. Available at www.footprintnetwork.org)
To learn more about how the Earth Overshoot Day is calculated, click here. Global Footprint Network President Mathis Wackernagel had this to say of the calculations:"We would expect our estimates of overshoot to be, if anything, conservative. We know we are far from living within the means of one planet. The good news is, much of the technology we have to begin to address this problem is available and it is open source: things like compact urban design, energy-efficient housing, ecological tax reform, removal of resource subsidies, safe and affordable family planning, bicycles, low-meat diets, and life-cycle costing."We couldn't agree more.
Some strategies for addressing the problem in the archives:
- My Other Car is a Bright Green City | Alex Steffen, 23 Jan 08
- The Politics of Optimism | Alex Steffen, 25 Mar 08
- Principle 14: Density, Compact Communities and Smart Growth | WorldChanging Team, 22 May 07
- Al Gore, Clean Energy and A Better Nation | Alex Steffen, 21 Jul 08
- Defusing The Population Bomb | Adam Stein, 11 Sep 09
- Bike-frastructure 101: Sharrows, Street Parking, Superhighways and More | Sean Conroe, Sarah Kuck and Kamal Patel, 28 Aug 09
- Cows Aren't Part of a Climate-Healthy Diet, Study Says | Clark Williams-Derry, 8 Jun 08
- The Eco-Nutrition Label | Jeremy Faludi, 17 Sep 07
Related stories in the archives:
The Emergence of a Biosphere Economy | John Elkington and Alejandro Litovsky, 28 Jun 10
Ecological Footprint 2.0 | Alex Lowe, 17 Jun 07
Principle 2: Ecological Footprints and One Planet Thinking | WorldChanging Team, 8 May 07
The Future is Climate Neutral | Alex Steffen and Sarah Rich, 22 Jan 07
Europe 2005: The Ecological Footprint | Jon Lebkowsky, 2 Dec 05 
Monday, August 2, 2010
Leonard Cohen - The Partisan (Live) Isle of Wight Festival 1970
"What is a saint? A saint is someone who has achieved a remote human possibility. It is impossible to say what that possibility is. I think it has something to do with the energy of love. Contact with this energy results in the exercise of a kind of balance in the chaos of existence. A saint does not dissolve the chaos; if he did the world would have changed long ago. I do not think that a saint dissolves the chaos even for himself, for there is something arrogant and warlike in the notion of a man setting the universe in order. It is a kind of balance that is his glory. He rides the drifts like an escaped ski. His course is the caress of the hill. His track is a drawing of the snow in a moment of its particular arrangement with wind and rock. Something in him so loves the world that he gives himself to the laws of gravity and chance. Far from flying with the angels, he traces with the fidelity of a seismograph needle the state of the solid bloody landscape. His house is dangerous and finite, but he is at home in the world. He can love the shape of human beings, the fine and twisted shapes of the heart. It is good to have among us such men, such balancing monsters of love."
- Leonard Cohen, Beautiful Losers (1966)
Posted via email from Joshua Oakley - Dreams Poetry Visions Imagination Beauty