I have a couple of days off work so I’m planning to get some small stuff done. Things that have been neglected during the last several weeks of heat.

This morning I replaced the ignition switch on my 96 F150. Very simple. It’s been sticking for a while; now it turns like a corrupt politician.

I also picked up some work shirts at Goodwill. Why does anyone buy new when you can get like new for $6?

My fun project will be to install Linux Mint on my laptop. I used Ubuntu many years ago. Don’t recall why I stopped. But I thought about it again this week when @johnbrady mentioned using Linux.

My palm, my eye, the light
serendipitously aligned
and, in a flash, palmistry
made all the sense in the world.

Acting within the ecosystem of the self

I learned two actionable models of the self from Gordon White, which he learned in turn from others: The soul incarnates into three bodies, i.e., the physical, emotional, and spiritual/mental bodies. The center of the physical body is the gut. The center of the emotional body is the heart. The center of the mental body is the head. I prefer the ambiguity of “gut” and “head” because specifying “stomach” and “brain” invites materialism.

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Sometimes you’re so excited that it’s persimmon season in Lawrence County you eat persimmon pudding for breakfast.

We are now the proud owners of two burial plots in our town’s historic cemetery. Through a series of events, we actually got them for free. The cemetery holds some of my favorite examples of limestone carving. It was definitely the place we wanted to go. Bonus: the Owenses are there.

Ibn ‘Arabi:

Receptive, my heart became, to every form.
A meadow for gazelles, and a cloister for the monks,
A house for the idols, and the pilgrim’s Ka’aba,
The tablets of the Torah, pages of the Qur’an.
My religion is love’s own and wheresoever turn
Her caravan, that love is my religion and my faith.

A word in favor of sticking

Marco Ament recently wrote something I have thought so many times over the years: If I learn today that my neighbors have political views that my “side” considers unacceptable and unforgivable, should I be able to have dinner at their house, shovel their snow, or even greet them outside? … Maybe we were better off before we knew everyone’s hot takes on everything It also reminds me of this passage from Wendell Berry’s The Need to Be Whole.

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One of the blessings of getting older and gaining a bit more emotional maturity is the ability to recognize when it’s just not my day. I had a weird morning and now I’m grouchy. Everything is annoying me. So my job today is to do some easy work, shush my mouth, and think about Lord of the Rings.

The fox squirrel's hymn

Proclus, as quoted in Corbin Alone with the Alone: For, in truth, each thing prays according to the rank it occupies in nature, and sings the praise of the leader of the divine series to which it belongs, a spiritual or rational or physical or sensuous praise; for the heliotrope moves to the extent that it is free to move, and in its rotation, if we could hear the sound of the air buffeted by its movement, we should be aware that it is a hymn to its king, such as it is within the power of the plant to sing.

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While Attending the Annual Convocation of Cause Theorists and Bigbangists at the Local Provincial Research University, the Mad Farmer Intercedes from the Back Row
Wendell Berry

‘Chance’ is a poor word among
the mazes of causes and effects, the last
stand of these all-explainers who,
backed up to the first and final Why,
reply, ‘By chance, of course!’ As if
that tied up ignorance with a ribbon.
In the beginning something by chance
existed that would bang and by chance
it banged, obedient to the by-chance
previously existing laws of existence
and banging, from which the rest proceeds
by the logic of cause and effect also
previously existing by chance? Well,
when all that happened who was there?
Did the chance that made the bang then make
the Bomb, and there was no choice, no help?
Prove to me that chance did ever
make a sycamore tree, a yellow-
throated warbler nesting and singing
high up among the white limbs
and the golden leaf-light, and a man
to love the tree, the bird, the song
his life long, and by his love to save
them, so far, from all machines.
By chance? Prove it, then, and I
by chance will kiss your ass.