314.365: On this election day, I can think of the worst thing for the environment in this election season -- the death of facts.
315.365: So beautiful, to be of the field, or in the field. The farmers home after the season, the urban farmers, working small farms for more than an economic reason.
316.365: My magic, my organic magic was:
-to be alive to significance.
-to have relational responses (to not turn away from you).
-to not fit in, to
Be awkward and unending even
When I tried to end.
Thank you, good bad magic. Thank you, friend.
Like Earth -- around
The bend.
317.365: There is some literature that gives one the sweetness and infinity of life, like aspects of Kierkegaard or parts of phenomenology --but even more much poetry, and some religion, and art, too, welling up from street level, or cocooned inside museums where masses of people turn it over in their talk. In its own way, also, I've found meditation to do this work --to bring the edges of daylight into the sentiment of anticipation. And as I watch students now who have grown up under corruption of the highest order -Clinton deregulating our future so that his time could be honeyed; Bush sacrificing young people and families to a war based on lies; and corporations who have used globalization to pollute and rend the environment; common people forgetting what citizenship's basic civility means; people losing it, fighting, insulting others over five minutes or seconds of time; the death of journalism as a source of facts that stick in the public mind ... Well. It would help to find ways to build in the recall of the sweet infinity of life, at least for these young people who should be our hope, but who are so lost, they do not even know they are.
318.365: The first thing I did is to go into the chapel. Why did I do that? Because the focus was pure -and purity as muddled, struggling, bending commitment, not purity as exclusion, Victorianism, fascism, anorexia, repression. The chapel was a teaching device, at the center of which was intelligent, loving flame. There is a single-mindedness that is more thoughtful than endlessly nuanced complexity. Here, for instance, with the Earth, whose scope and lag are wide and long, long term. What does it take to focus on them, to genuinely care? An intention to see and to think beyond the endlessly proliferating trivia -the baroque complications- of our short-term, individualized, media and economic worlds. It is not thoughtful to get caught up in the epiphenomena of the quarterly return, the viral and fractal dance of identities and desire amounting to an individual life. Even the philosophies which do this, the smooth, self-consoling painters of globalization who cast themselves as its left-wing critics -- all these modes of life remain mired in the here and now. The long intention, the love of Earth that demands the reaching simpleton of our collective imagination and abstraction beyond our life and world... it is lost in the generalized thoughtlessness that is the presiding feature of our civilization. So pull yourself up, pull yourself up then, out of the mire, out of the sweet desire. Focus on the next thousand years.
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319.365: To let alone reasons, and to not let reasons be alone, so that: we are not trying to make life more orderly than it is, either by denying its pull and sense or by denying its funny buzz and unsettling blur ~ that involves patience, and humor, and not making a big deal out of one's life. And it also involves insistence and care ~ moral attachment. ... I'm thinking of this today in the early morning, feeling warm, and imagining a citizenry that can handle talking, working and living together while it pulls apart the rough and tough tangle of industrialism and the cynical systems that organize today's irresponsibility. It's about keeping our heads.
