Master Hsueh, as quoted in Road to Heaven by Bill Porter:

You can learn the basics anywhere. There are books. As to learning the inner secrets, when your practice reaches a certain level, you’ll meet a teacher. But you can’t be in a hurry. You have to be prepared to devote your whole life to your practice. This is what is meant by religion. It’s not a matter of spending money. You have to spend your life. Not many people are willing to do this. If you’re ready to learn, you don’t have to look for a teacher. A teacher will find you. Taoism is very deep. There’s a great deal to learn, and you can’t do it quickly. The Tao isn’t something that can be put into words. You have to practice before you can understand. Lao-tzu teaches us to be natural. You can’t force things, including practice. Understanding is something that happens naturally. It’s different for everyone. The main thing is to reduce your desires and quiet your mind. Practice takes a long time, and you have to stay healthy. If you have a lot of thoughts and desires, you won’t live long enough to reach the end.

Be patient. Be natural. Reduce your desires. Quiet your mind. Stay healthy.

Taoist and Buddhist shrines in China. Shinto shrines in Japan. Catholic shrines all over Europe. These all fascinate me. Not a lot of shrines in southern Indiana. I want a landscape filled with shrines. I’m not even particular about which gods or spirits. And, no, Walmart and Starbucks don’t count.

Master Hsieh, as quoted in Road to Heaven by Bill Porter:

Lao-tzu said to cultivate tranquillity and detachment. To be natural. To be natural means not to force things. When you act natural, you get what you need. But to know what’s natural, you have to cultivate tranquillity. Huashan has long been famous as a center of Taoism because it’s quiet. There used to be a lot of hermits here But now the mountain has been developed for tourism. The tranquility is gone, and so are the hermits.

In a recent essay, Bob Turner (local Presbyterian pastor) quotes Gordon Hempton (acoustic ecologist) on the difference between silence and quiet:

Real quiet is not the absence of sound [which is the definition of silence] but the absence of noise.

Weird country track of the day: “Turn on the Dark” by Nick Shoulders. 🎵 (Weird country should totally be a sub-genre if it isn’t already.)

A thought experiment:

Imagine consciousness as a tiny seed of light, and that multitudes of them are spread throughout the universe. These seeds of light do not have personalities; they are awareness as such. They are, possibly, the way the universe comes to know itself.

These seeds of light draw physical forms around themselves like magnets. They cannot be unphysical for long. The seeds take on a new physical form in infants of every species and they leave at death—and then go on to draw another physical form around themselves, which may be of any species.

The purpose of these seeds of light is to gather experience in all its forms. A person—to look at this from the other direction—is a nexus of parents, physical and emotional environment, ancestors, friends, history, everything. A person is a temporary wrapper around a particular and unique intersection of forces, which are continually changing. There is no such thing as a separate individual. There is no person apart from the intersection of these forces.

The seed of light draws these forces around itself, wraps itself in particularity, in order to experience the world as that new person. For one person, their environment is unhealthy, their parents are angry, and that person will live, for example, as an angry and unhealthy person. The seed of light learns what that experience is like. For another person, they may exist in bad circumstances but some force intersects in their life that allows them to find their way out. The seed of light learns what that experience is like. The seed of light is, in this way, neutral; it does not influence or direct the life of the person. It is pure awareness experiencing life.

Whew, this is good. So much here to think about.

I wrote a denunciation of apps.

Ordered a copy of the I Ching through my local bookstore–and it happened to be the translation by David Hinton, whose work I’ve always found helpful. Should be available in 3-5 days, which gives me enough time to read up on how to consult it. Also, Jung’s essay on it and the Weird Studies episode.

Two songs that I discovered as covers and still prefer over the original 🎵

Rachel and I watched the Earthing documentary over the weekend. Basically, it makes the argument for the therapeutic usefulness of actual feet on the actual ground. As with most things like this, I’m less interested in this or that “evidence” and more interested in it as a practice of reconnection.

Michael Bogdanffy-kriegh—who is always worth reading!—has a good post today on the impact of some recent reading on his exercise patterns. I wanted to highlight one part to make a point somewhat unrelated to his own:

I have decided to focus on getting out of the house and going for walks (mind, body, earth, sometimes community) and winding up at local coffee shops, where I can have direct human-to-human contact (definitely community). Even if that contact is superficial banter with a barista whose name I know and who knows mine, it’s better than the social media app stand-ins we are plagued with. Even if I know no one, and talk to no-one, I am in a space alive with people interacting analog fashion. So that’s it, the coffee shops are my analog version of social media apps. They are way more satisfying.

This sounds lovely and it’s something I would like to do. However, we have a problem in my little town when it comes to walkability or even bikeability.

Take a look at this street map. The first thing you need to know is that Highway 37, the main highway on the west of the map, was built as a new terrain road in the seventies. The old highway 37 had a different route. My understanding of the development of that route through Bedford—which has been confirmed by three helpful posts 1 2 3 by Jim Grey—is as follows:

  • Old Highway 37 came south out of Bloomington through Harrodsburg and Needmore into Oolitic.
  • It continued south out of Oolitic on what is now Oolitic Road into Bedford on what is now Lincoln Avenue/L Street.
  • It continued through Bedford on Lincoln until it came to downtown, at which point it jogged down to O Street/Washington Avenue and left town.

You can see these streets on the map above by looking for the largest north/south streets—and notice that they pass straight through the middle of town. I will say I’m a little surprised that it left town by way of Washington Avenue instead of Mitchell Road but Jim Grey has done a lot more research than I have so I’ll take his word for it. But, in any case, that’s beside the point for now.

You can see from the street map that the streets are clustered around those north-south routes and downtown. Walking and biking—I can say from a lot of experience—is pretty easy around that cluster of streets, so long as you understand that Bedford drivers are not overly concerned about pedestrians and are almost oblivious to cyclists.

Then came the seventies. Much as I love that decade for its movies and music, it created a real problem for Bedford with the building of “new” Highway 37.

Snip of INDOT highway map for 1970, showing the old highway taking the route described above:

And then a snip of the INDOT highway map for 1980, showing “new” Highway 37 passing just to the west of the bulk of the town:

This is why you see in the street map at the beginning of this post that there are three legs extending from the heart of Bedford to “new” Highway 37, i.e., 5th Street, Williams Boulevard, and 16th Street. Because of their connection to Highway 37, these three streets have been the site of most of the development efforts for the last forty years (apart from an effort by Mayor Shawna Girgis a few years ago to revitalize downtown, which did some real, if temporary, good).

And so, with the building of the new highway, downtown withered. Bedford was distended toward the new highway to the west and no subsequent, large-scale development efforts were made to build infrastructure to network and incorporate those roads. Today this means that, starting from downtown (where I live), there is not a network of quieter, safer secondary roads to get to the more developed west side of Bedford on foot or bicycle.

Starbucks is on 16th Street near the highway. Even with the drive-through a shambolic disaster, it stays very busy. There have been other efforts to open local coffee shop competitors but they haven’t lasted—partly because they were downtown and partly because they didn’t have drive-throughs (this is Rachel’s theory and I think she’s right).

It’s not news that cities have been designed for most of the twentieth and twenty-first century around cars. It’s obvious in my town that little attention has been paid to the movement of pedestrians and cyclists through the town. It’s also obvious that the planners for “new” Highway 37 in the sixties and seventies had little regard for what impact the highway would have for the pattern of life in the towns on the route. (And no regard whatsoever, I’m sure, for nonhuman life when they built it as a totally new road.)

So, yeah, I have no new insights here. Just an illustration of how short-sighted planners, who care only about economic impact and disregard human and nonhuman needs for movement, can cause everything from inconveniences to genuine problems, cascading across generations.