At its best, the Obama candidacy is about ending a war—not so much the war in Iraq, which now has a momentum that will propel the occupation into the next decade—but the war within America that has prevailed since Vietnam and that shows dangerous signs of intensifying, a nonviolent civil war that has crippled America at the very time the world needs it most. It is a war about war—and about culture and about religion and about race. And in that war, Obama—and Obama alone—offers the possibility of a truce.
I’ll take the risk of hope over the certainty of fear.
The minute I believe in the inevitability of either success or failure, is the moment I begin to suffer under illusion and find myself either running toward one, or from the other. Either way, I loose the “stillness of an instant.”
Two figures are standing on a beach. I am outside of them, watching them, but they do not speak. However, I can see the images of their thoughts, almost like thought bubbles in a cartoon. Intuitively I know that one is the guru and one is the student.
The guru’s thought image is white, while the student’s image contains a myriad of symbols, forms and colors. I feel the student’s discomfort.
In an unspoken whisper, the guru conveys ‘focus’ and the student’s thoughts shift to the myriad shells on the beach, an array of brown, gold, amber and pink. I feel the student relax.
Again, in an unspoken whisper, the guru conveys ‘simple’ and the image in the student’s mind changes. All the colors drop away, leaving a vast ocean of sea shells, all white. I feel the student exhale.
Then the guru reaches out his hand and grasps the clenched fist of the student. As he gently uncurls the student’s fingers, the guru reveals three small white conch-shaped shells, forming a line down the middle of the student’s palm.
And in unison, the three of us understand, “focus only on what you can hold.”
Suddenly I feel a simple, clear realization, more of a feeling than a thought, “Do not focus on eternity, but on the stillness of an instant.”
Then my dream state shifted and instinctively I knew I needed to remember the dream in the morning.
Rhode Island …here we come. Just got the tickets today.
Heading there again this year with the ever youthful ‘rangutan. Fun is sure to be had.
I wonder if there will be any good food?!?
(Also on the 2008 travel planner: San Francisco/June, Chicago/July, RI/August, Montana/September and (Varanasi, Dehli, and Rishikesh) India/December. More details to come.)
Common game theory has held that punishment makes two equals cooperate. But when people compete in repeated games, punishment fails to deliver, said study author Martin Nowak. He is director of the evolutionary dynamics lab at Harvard where the study was conducted.
“On the individual level, we find that those who use punishments are the losers,” Nowak said his experiments found.
Those who escalate the conflict very often wound up doomed.
It may be merely another brand statement (and of course it is ironic in that regard), but I can relate:
Because there is complexity in purity.
Elegance in plainness.
Intricacy in streamlining.
Richness in reduction.
Depth in minimalism.
Surprise in uniformity.
Innovation in re-use.
Cool in the avoidance of cool.
And there is true sophistication in simplicity.
Apparently I am doing the EveryOtherHoliDailies this year and that is just fine by me:
Lately I feel that I am less inclined to really “communicate” in my blog because I am in a season of planting, rather than reaping…creatively. Throughout my life I have experienced fairly prolific times, and good/bad or indifferent, I can hardly contain the flow of words that emerge. Then it seems there comes a fallow time, where I neither write nor really consume much (other than the daily news upkeep). Then begins the curiosity again, when I seek and gather a wide variety of thoughts and ideas to digest, before the spew of words begins anew. I know… I know…very cliché cyclical…and nonetheless a fitting description of the turns that seem to be my life.
That said, I haven’t felt “good” about just deluging my virtual pages with vast chronicles of quotes and words by others. (Of course the occasional quote post is fine.)
But lately, spending more time on thoughts and words from outside sources leaves me with little of my own to divulge.
So to blog or not to blog…that has been the question. And the short term answer is to lift the self-imposed restriction on quotes and just freely share the ideas that most amuse, befuddle, inspire and delight me. Of course they offer as much insight into my psyche as a personal entry and perhaps they offer even more.
