It matters what thoughts we think with

Klein and Updegraff, Tools for Engagement: It’s necessary, absolutely necessary, for us to first recognize that it’s good to be human—inefficiencies, blunders, and all. We are not machines, nor should we desire to be. This means taking a strong stand against what author Wendell Berry describes as “our slovenly willingness to allow machines and the idea of the machine to prescribe the terms and conditions of the lives of creatures, which we have allowed increasingly for the last two centuries, and are still allowing, at an incalculable cost to other creatures and to ourselves.

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Picked up a load of wood from the Amish farm today. Ol’ Green struggled a bit under load on the hills between here and Buddha Bypass Road but we made it. The farm was, as I suspected, open despite the holiday. What to the Amish is your Fourth of July? 😉

Looky at Rachel’s tall, lovely sunflowers

Finished reading Daimonic Reality by Patrick Harpur. Highly recommended, if you couldn’t tell by all my quotations from it. The great gift of strange books like this is a fresh pair of eyes. There’s always something invigorating in a Jungian perspective, even when I don’t end up fully adopting it.

Despite what I said the other day about not wanting to analyze what I love, I’m listening to a podcast where David Benjamin Blower and Lydia Catterall discuss his new album. He’s just confirmed my suspicion that “The Boot is on the Other Foot Now” is about the Gazan genocide:

We are all here
Be upstanding for the hellscape yonder there
Roman stakes sprawl across Judean hills again
Scroll through the dust. Meander round the famine
Vespasian, who wears your crown now?
Done something with your face. Wearing a different gown
Wearing the boot on your other foot now
Hear the screeching tables turning round round
Aeola Capitalina on the mount again
You recognise yourself? Tell me what you’re thinking…
Making offerings to Moloch there in topheth: these
Never crossed even God’s mind: you’re a genius
Your king keeps his throne for another year
And Rachel is weeping for someone else’s children
Your king keeps his throne for another year
And Rachel is weeping for someone else’s children

Make room for the daimons

Patrick Harpur, Daimonic Reality: To make room for the daimons is to set a distance between us and them. This enables us to reflect, and reflect on, them; or, perhaps more accurately, allows them to reflect themselves through us. Reflection is “an act of becoming conscious.” If we become conscious of the daimons, and remain mindful of them, we avoid becoming possessed by them. For we are always vulnerable to neurotic fixations and compulsions when unconscious daimons drive us to act out, against our will, their fixed mythic patterns.

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Remember the reported UFO sightings at Malmstrom Air Force Base and other sites associated with nuclear missiles? One way of understanding that phenomenon is as some kind of manifestation of our collective fear. How long until we start getting UFO sightings at data centers?

The gods have become symptoms

Patrick Harpur, Daimonic Reality: Too much of our recent history has been soul-slaughter, imagining the past as merely primitive and, muscle-bound with technology, bulldozing the sacred places, hunting the daimonic animals with high-velocity rifles, dispatching the jets to shoot down the UFOs, violating the moon-goddess with phallic rockets, and so on. Having severed all connection with the gods and daimons, we reckon we are getting away with it. But we aren’t.

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I’ve revised my “Memory is an Otherworld” post and added audio narration. I may start doing this now and then. Nothing improves a piece of writing like a rural accent with authentically dropped g’s. 😂

Meet Fred and Ethel (named by my adorable wife). You should get one of these feeders that sticks to your window. It’s wonderful to be able to see birds within two feet of my chair. The marking you see on the window are flowers drawn by Rachel to make sure the birds don’t bonk their noggins.