my wife was telling me yesterday that it's funny how whenever i get into something new very strongly, like music, or gardening, or now fiction, whatever, my instinct is to encourage people to do the same. not just be more creative in general, but specifically. i guess idealistically i believe it would be better for people to not only read books by others, but to write their own, and so on with everything else. objectively this is kind of absurd and unsustainable, as i myself am bad at most things and good at only a few like everybody else. but i think it's an ingrained trait to have this expectation, and a bit childish. hopefully also a bit childlike. the theological dimension is that maybe the purpose of any type of creation is spur more of the same type of creation. gods want more gods. men want sons. women want daughters. etc.
the deplorable state of monastic life for men, both east and west and for different reasons, is a sign that the Virgin Mary has abandoned them.
i wanted to be a curmudgeon apprentice. i asked the master curmudgeon if he would tutor me. but he's such a curmudgeon he refused.
i started smoking six months before they shut it all down for good. i remember smoking in the neighborhood mall with friends in the food court. i remember smoking in the hallways in college. and then it was gone everywhere. another victory for satan. of course, by then, long gone were the days when you could smoke in the hospital, in a classroom or an airplane, every place where it's needed the most.
if you happen to have a tobacco plant growing in your garden and you need a quick but strong nicotine fix, you can rub the leaves gently over your skin. i don't recommend it.
mental illness acquired from coming in contact with telescopes, televisions and telemarketers called telepathy
trying to make hands meet
daughter rhymes with water, son rhymes with sun
youtube recommended a series of videos about brits homesteading in relatively remote parts of continental europe and almost to the man it's obvious they are boomer minded imbeciles lying to themselves and others. frustrating. i've seen types of videos like this of many nationalities, german, dutch, french and even american, but usually the brits are the worst.
you absolutely need to consider the reality of spiritual election, and to strive consciously towards it. because if you can conceive it, then that's the call.
we can make new archetypes
maybe not always, but surely more than sometimes
the elect are in exile in every sense
if you keep remaking something you will destroy it
we should use the internet as a very liberal literary repository. just people trying all kinds of different things. then decide which stories are to be saved on paper or not. like in biblical times.
i have no problem recasting past experiences into fiction, but i get a superstitious feeling when talking about the future. seems very dangerous. probably won't publish stuff like this.
try as many things as possible in your garden, see what grows naturally, which spirits want to dwell in the place, and go from there. maybe a certain tree will not want to live there at first, but will want to after you've proven that you are a careful steward of the land. being a careful steward is more about getting to know the place than it is about doing things. most often, it's about what not to do, or about doing less, because that means observing more.
for me the solution was not to abandon metaphysics, but have it be plastic enough to be changed by and through observation and imagination. once i really began to play with the imagination as a way to make sense of observation, lots of things that i didn't understand before started to make sense, but in ways that i would have considered nonsensical before. consequently they are often hard to explain, but not impossible to transmit. it's just that the format needs to be narrative, rather than analytic.
i'm always distrustful of miracle cures. first, they do not address the problem. but more importantly their aim is to hide those who don't need them from each other.
politics... i don't do that kind of drug anymore. it used to be just the news, but now it has advanced towards abstract political ideas and principles and plans. i just don't see how any of it is relevant anymore. it's so boring and stupid.
where there's a will there's a wail
the syncs have been crazy since the new season started. even got my wife to agree to record them.
i suspect there are ailments who are properly cured neither through religion and the spirit, nor through medicine and the flesh, but through faerie and the soul. i think i've reached a level of assurance both in the spiritual world and in the flesh, and now am more interested in exploring this middle place. i feel there are lessons there and we have completely forgotten how to get them. but it's key, cause we're that middle space too.
a sacred scarab flew into our house yesterday. it landed on the fireplace, then walked around a bit, and then i picked him up with a box and let him out in the garden.
the theme of knowing without being told, of seeing and recognizing rather than glance over it and ignore it, is a central part of both my novels. this was not a conscious decision. the part of me that tells stories clearly thinks this is important.
the flesh is spiritual above all, the spirit is material beneath it all
being offended is no longer about strong feelings, but a form of numbness
religious pagans have something invaluable that only very few churches (if at all) in the west have. no one was born into it. they are all there by conscious choice. if their reasons are pure, they will be unstoppable. ironically, since the pagans had to reconstruct and invent, they are implicitly open to the holy spirit. and the opposite is true of the churches. yet i'm not particularly optimistic, just noting a fact.
most people do not believe in good and evil. they reached for the fruit, took a bite and now spit at the tree.
yes, 'ai' is unsustainable. at all levels. from the energy it consumes to the processes it takes over. completely and utterly unsustainable. just like so many other top down policies in the world. that's why it will continue. because its purpose is destruction. that's it.
i reserve the right to change my mind, so i don't feel a duty to change yours
my wife got me a cheap knock off pocket digital camera like those sony ones in the early 2000s for my birthday and i love it. it has personality. it captures that layer of the world that has no smartphones. the pics come out looking like it's somewhere between 1995 and 2005 or so and they seem real unlike phone pics. just perfect. i used to take a lot of random pics and will resurrect this habit.
the cultural war was always spiritual. the evil guys get it. the good guys rarely.
never forget the spiritual dimension of things. always remember the material dimension of things.
man does not live by bread alone. get some butter on it.
being a good person is not the same as recognizing there is a supernatural war between good and evil and taking sides. but the latter is just as fundamental as the former now. any failure to see the larger picture blurs the details, corrupts them even.
being good at something good imposes further duties
a mind that cannot admit of saved and damned, cannot truly believe in good and evil, except in an academic way, as a platonic form, never embodied, never truly existent.
one of the things i love about, and learned from, Chuang Tzu, is that everything we take as an abstract concept, he takes as a character in a story.
so many pagan gods were replaced by specific people that became saints that you have to wonder if Jesus didn't initiate an incarnation movement in the heavens where other gods thought if he can do it so can i. and they may even have done so out of defiance or competition or whatever, but then as they got here they probably understood how real this all is, how much weight and depth the flesh can add to a spirit, and paid their respects
i can also imagine Jesus giving the opposite speech in the heavens, God shall not live in spirit alone, but in every flesh that receives him.
i'm anti 'social smoker' and an antisocial smoker
my role is noble failure. probably will have played it more like ignoble failure by the end
it's not entertainment, it's debasement. it's not school, it's a brainwashing facility. and, conversely, it's not DIY, it's just doing things. it's not organic, it's just normal. etc etc
to beat the devils at their own game, we have to play our own
you can only take things seriously if you have grains of salt to spare
the more you notice it, the more it is what you notice.
describing Jesus as a jewish hippie does not make me like him less. if you look at creation it does kind of make sense that the head creator was at heart a jewish hippie. don't ask for explanations. just try to see it.
sweet music with no words at best
silence only in sleep
and even that quite rare
it's hard for me to worship history when i can see so clearly the untapped potential in the resurrection of the flesh
minds untethered from flesh are called ghosts. they are dangerous even if their bodies are mechanical. and no, holy ghosts are not untethered from the flesh (still dangerous in some ways).
i have a certain talent to offend, but i'm awful at being offended
morning chill
light shower
dog days subside
when change applies to nature, and thus to what is innate to every soul, it is either growing or rotting.
the largest antichrist test is about whether we'll side with the objective manifestation of beauty, truth and goodness, or with the abstractions, the egregore of those values. it cuts right to the core of what Jesus is about, and it's so easy to use him against himself.
the farthest I've been:
north: inverness, scotland
south: rio de janeiro, brazil
east: amsterdam, holland
west: atlantis, my heart
i liked the first and the last, mixed bag on the second, disliked the third
not even the sun knows if in the end he'll swallow the earth whole
i was expelled from the school of hard knacks
i'm very handsome in blurry pictures
Lucy means light, Moses to give birth to.
the peculiarity of islam allowed the persians to reach great heights. in india too, it had some powerful effect of renewal. the same is true for christianity and europeans. now both religions are spent and parodies of themselves, but there's no doubt Jesus is relevant for new consciousness, and islam isn't. funnily it was the opposite in china. in the long run buddhism added nothing. everything there, even communism, ends up in Confucian type consciousness, with Lao Tzu on the margins. i admire it but i'm western. give me change, forward movement
the north looms over the south. the south bubbles up to the north. the east awaits the sun. the west presses further west to catch it.
there is good everywhere, but it's not equally distributed nor equally distributable
if you think of something, it exists. the trouble is figuring out how, and where it fits, how to give birth to it
what do i do. what happens now. what does it mean. important questions.
let go of resentment, especially if you feel it's justified
the theologies and anthropologies of Matthew-Luke and Mark-John are no longer compatible (important to note that it's not the specific episodes of Matthew and Luke that are false, but rather the framing of them that is not of benefit to people living now).
publicly reviled and condemned, slandered and sanctioned against, abandoned and denied even by its closest friends, the cigarette.
good advice to one, decent advice to some, bad advice for everyone
time and time again
space upon space
all over the place
men and women should strive together for the common good, and if they are artists, for the uncommon good too
there is neither greek nor jew for they are one in the anointed Jesus. now, we portuguese are quite another story. we don't look for signs or wisdom. we look to the sea and get both. i whale on the portuguese but we do canned fish really well. and that may not be much but it's not nothing. we also produce great novelists... my wife and i have this joke about the founding city of modern portugal, Guimaraes, being the birthplace of civilization. we are very patriotic in private, as is fitting for civilized natives of our country.
unless they stop growing, people either grow together or grow apart
all kinds of politics have a god shaped hole, some bigger some smaller. but it's inevitable because god's unity is the opposite of uniformity, and in politics it's always one and the same.
do you know the feeling of identifying more with one side of the family, or choosing to. this applies all the way back. this is the process of redeeming your ancestors and also honoring them.
christianity often feels like a superstructure imposed upon nature. why celebrate easter when there's already spring, why celebrate the resurrection of a man when we already see the resurrection of everything else in nature. but there's something more to it beyond the institutional rules and regulations. the moral of the story is that the goal is not mere repetition but expansion and deepening within the rhythms of nature. not saying any church today is capable of this. but we are.
only a fool denies what has been revealed to the eyes of his heart
i think the syncs are telling us somehing about spain. more specifically the marginal cultures and places of spain. for lusitanians like us, this is concerning and bizarre.
minimalism, minimalis, minimal, minima, minim, mini, min, mi, m
my names are germanic, hebrew, celtic and latin, in this order
no nonsense is more of a zen koan than both nonsense and no sense
every time i paid attention in class i neglected my real studies
no faerie creature wants to belong to any church now. this was not always the case
if there is you and trees and a stream, there are surely two or three hundred gathered, giving praise to the Lord
the reason it isn't cool, or interesting, or engaging, and why it has no magic, is that it is official.
when i find someone special, and it's always very clear, i become worried about their soul, about them being corrupted by this stupid evil world, by its relentless tide of bullshit, the pressures to conform, the allure of worldly success. so many traps and snares and poisons. and i pray for them.
the rivers wash the rot away so the seas can drown it
magic and fantasy appear without effort and only without effort. forcing inspiration is a form of interrogation torture. but attempts at torturing wind, air, spirit are more absurd and comical than dangerous and damnable. but why would a spirit want to hang out with you if you're going to be uncool like this. invite them over but don't be a creep.
nature can and does happily bow and obey higher wills, like branches in the wind or heavy with rain. we just need to be the kind of higher will for which nature will bend lovingly, like falling water or blowing wind is to leaves and branches.
it seems rather obvious to me that Jesus is not just bread but also butter, and not just wine but also tobacco.
