Kenneth S. Cohen, The Way of Qigong:

The Chinese are fond of repeating, “To relax, you must be tranquil.” And we need to regard relaxation as a process of surrendering to a deeper wisdom, rather than acquiring, through effort, a new ability. Developing large muscles requires effort; cultivating relaxation requires letting go.

“It is important to have a secret, a premonition of things unknown.”

Future Jeremy: if you ever get the “oh my, my lord” earworm again, this is its source. “Shooby” by Nicole C. Mullen

This morning, pumping gas at the station on the edge of our neighborhood, I felt again what I’ve sometimes felt over the past few years as I’ve turned toward my particular place, and learned to love it warts and all. One of Wendell Berry’s phrases came to mind: “it all turns on affection”:

For humans to have a responsible relationship to the world, they must imagine their places in it. To have a place, to live and belong in a place, to live from a place without destroying it, we must imagine it. By imagination we see it illuminated by its own unique character and by our love for it. By imagination we recognize with sympathy the fellow members, human and nonhuman, with whom we share our place. By that local experience we see the need to grant a sort of preemptive sympathy to all the fellow members, the neighbours, with whom we share the world. As imagination enables sympathy, sympathy enables affection. And it is in affection that we find the possibility of a neighbourly, kind, and conserving economy.

Proverb quoted in The Way of Qigong:

In stillness be like the pine.
In movement be like clouds and water.

Kenneth S. Cohen, The Way of Qigong:

Alan Watts used to say that angels, like Daoist Immortals, can fly because they take themselves lightly!

Good interview with Mary Berry, daughter of Wendell Berry and executive director of the Berry Center:

To my mind, the agrarian ideal—the idea that we live in a land ethic, that what’s good for the health of the land is good for us—all that is true, it turns out. So, we tell our students here, If you want to farm, you’re going to have to learn to take absolute pleasure in the place that you are. I think if you can learn to be satisfied and fascinated by the place where you are, contentment is possible, and from contentment, it seems to me, joy is then possible.

Genevieve Harrison:

At the heart of Microsoft’s decision lies an uncomfortable truth about modern corporate governance: human lives have been reduced to variables in an optimization equation.

For those counting headcount reductions as merely statistics, remember this: Behind each of the 6,000 is a person who until yesterday believed they were valued members of one of the world’s most successful companies. People with families, mortgages, healthcare needs, and career aspirations.

The question that should haunt every corporate boardroom but rarely does: If a company at the pinnacle of capitalism, with virtually unlimited resources, treats human capital as its most dispensable asset, what hope exists for workers across the broader economy?

As one employee, a 14-year Microsoft veteran, posted on LinkedIn after receiving notice: “I helped build systems I was told would make all our jobs better. Instead, they made my job irrelevant.”

The algorithm of sacrifice demands efficiency above all else. And in the church of shareholder value, human capital has become the preferred offering.

Charles Eisenstein:

Lord knows I tried long and hard to make the case for peace, going back a decade. … But now we are at a point where those who call for peace are branded by each side as an agent of the other.

That also is the point where miracles are necessary. What is a miracle? It is a happening that is impossible from within a current story, but possible from a new one. Therefore, not only does it seem impossible, but by happening anyway it invites us to question what else we have assumed that may not be true. That is the state of unknowing, the release of old beliefs and what we thought we knew, that prepares the soil for the miraculous in the first place.