Monday, May 25, 2020

a poet reflects






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The sky said I am watching
to see what you
can make out of nothing
I was looking up and I said
I thought you
were supposed to be doing that

the sky said Many
are clinging to that
I am giving you a chance

I was looking up and I said
I am the only chance I have
then the sky did not answer

and here we are
with our names for the days
the vast days that do not listen to us

—W. S. Merwin



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Friday, May 22, 2020

secrets of the spiritual life








Urpflanze!





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What Goethe means by the Urpflanze is the dynamic unity of the coming-into-being of all plants as the self-differencing of One plant, which in therefore intensively multiple but appears to extensively as all the many different plants. 

What this means is that each plant is the Urpflanze being one possible mode of itself - the number of possibilities is indeterminate. Hence, paradoxically, it is everywhere visible and nowhere visible - although once we begin to think dynamically, this is no paradox at all. Instead of being separate from the many particular plants that we see, i.e., as 'the one over many', Goethe's Urpflanze is One which comes into concrete manifestation simultaneously with the many - with which it is identical because the many are now the self-differences of One. 
This is very different indeed from the two-world theory which separates the One from the many. There is no such dualism in Goethe's thinking, for which in his own words: 'The universal and the particular coincide: the particular is the universal, appearing under different conditions.'


—Henri Bortoft
Taking Appearance Seriously



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tao-of-digital-photography
source and image
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Wednesday, May 20, 2020

4:50






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... actually, climate change is a far more frightening thing right now than this pandemic. The pandemic will go away. It will not actually kill that many people, but if we don't address climate change with as much vigor as people are addressing this pandemic, the globe will heat up and we will reach a time, i don't know when, where basically everywhere is not habitable for humans.
Hopefully, this wakes us up a little bit.
We're vulnerable and we really need to learn to understand that we are part of the natural world, not separate from it.
And we rely on it for clean air, for clean water. We rely on the forest to regulate temperature and to regulate rainfall.
So, we've just got to start thinking differently.


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possibly the most relevant post ever
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