Kenneth S. Cohen, The Way of Qigong:
Alan Watts used to say that angels, like Daoist Immortals, can fly because they take themselves lightly!
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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.
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.
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.
Wendell Berry’s agrarian values
From this interview, via Sarah Hendren An elated, loving interest in the use and care of the land. An informed and conscientious submission to nature. The wish to have and to belong to a place of one’s own, as the only secure source of sustenance and independence. A persuasion in favor of economic democracy; a preference for enough over too much. Fear and contempt of waste of every kind, and its ultimate consequence in land exhaustion.
If you need a cause, if you need a purpose, if you need a crusade that will do the most to produce the world you want, it is this: Class war. The same damn class war! Taking wealth away from the rich and giving that wealth to the less rich. Our democracy, such as it is, will never, ever be stabilized until that happens. Do not allow yourself to be hypnotized by the myriad results of the rich having too much money. Keep your mind instead on the problem itself. The rich are too rich.
Imaginal pollution
Rhyd Wildermuth: People — many of them friends I’ve known to be otherwise reasonable — have become so polluted by feeding on algorithmic despair that they’ve lost any sense of what is real. In such a state, you lose your mind, which is to really say you lose your body. You feed on and then feed into the despair, spread it, becoming vectors for imaginal viruses which plague your unconscious bodily dreaming.
A proverb is one man’s wit and all men’s wisdom.
Lord John Russell, as quoted by Jackson Crawford in this (as always) excellent video “Odin and Wisdom.”
Josh Radnor: Give up on your war against reality
When I fight reality, when I wail and moan that things should be going ‘some other way,’ I suffer. When I begin with acceptance and surrender – “Okay this is what is happening right now and where we are” – I don’t suffer. Or at least I suffer far less. And the next right actions are much much clearer than when I’m giving equal weight to each voice in my head.
This, from Alan Jacobs, is one of the most clarifying things I’ve read in a while.
- In the current regime, what persons or groups are most harmed or most likely to be harmed?
- Where can I find those vulnerable people in my community?
- What organizations serve and seek to protect those people?
- How can I (placed as I am, with certain specific gifts and resources) assist those organizations?
Once I have answered those questions, I have a plan for meaningful political action.