Only one circle

Sightings of this hope are sporadically reported, like a species thought extinct, but flitting through awareness in scattered climes and times. I dig and hunt for the line between ends and means, so clear in narrower contexts such as business or war, but find it a blur where it really counts.

There is a love that needs no lover, just the space between.
From process where sacred stone grinds gently on sacred stone flow the sands of time.

When a divergence of experiences convenes bearing lightly their
codes of good and evil, with earnest will to find conciliation
they bind the many and the small, discovering the one and greatest nation

Do not regard that will as mere expedience, a grudgingly tolerated improvement
over bloodshed. It is not the means. It is not the end. It is both.


Not our guns, not our genes, nor the cleverness flickering upon our screens,
Not these tools of sect and tribe that collude for a world of asperity
But our sharing, our teamwork and trust are the true and mighty means
To carry our hopes quietly unending and unfolding to a grateful posterity

A Duelism

How could fruitless arguing drag on for so long?
"Righteous" just means RIGHT to one.
To the other it just means WRONG.

I should not sacrifice reason just to gain rhyme. Then again, who wants to memorize "To the other it just means INSECURE AND INTELLECTUALLY DEFENSIVE"?

They are only hours after all

This bears repeating. And, though their attention is a special and priveleged channel, children are not the only ones to carry our imprint forward in our absence: Lovers, spouses, dear freinds with whom you are yourself are all more of the waters on which the ripple you make will spread out. But only if you will throw your whole self into that pond.

The only hours of your life that get lived again after your death are those you spend with your kids.

Viva La Differentiation

Some of the most educated and influential people can speak as if there were organic differences between the sexes in such sexless and abstract specialties as mathematics. I could not prove such a contention by my experience. My SO earned a more advanced degree than I did and it was in mathematics. But I am a hopeful romantic [worse, I hear, than the hopeless kind] and take a dram of comfort from the notion that there is a feminine way to weigh ones life as distinct from a masculine way. What that difference is exactly, I can not satisfactorily formulate. What I observe is not more than my experience, mechanisms that suggest themselves to me, no more than guesses.

Men are driven mad sooner than women by the differences between what they expected their lives to be like and the lives they feel they have actually lived.

Less realism at the outset? Biologically doomed to a late realizaiton that offspring are our only certain legacy, that fabricating heritage, through craft or empire, is a sham substitute and the only hours of your life that get lived again after death are those you spend with your kids? Men are too rewarded for not talking about their fears and loose that vital relief valve? No...I have no idea why it is so but I see it play out often, especially in divorces.

When the 3rd or 4th shoe dropped,....

I suspected that the topic which had entered my darkened mind was not bipedal.   Religion is my millipede nightmare.   Shoes are banged on the table.   gauntlets hurled, and all the good advice to avoid a topic that could only make me enemies is ignored.

Progress is repugnant to some because it bears this crisis: what was once one quest has split into two and it is as if there were a fissure clear around a meridian.

Science is a framework within which we pursue technical knowledge in vehicles blind to the ancient artificial measures of good and bad.   Religion is a framework within which we can seek self integration and the tools to find or packages of ready made spiritual wisdom in a cart hitched to the allure of certainty, absolution and immortality through sacrifices that establish our ultimate worth.   Science, though it is built on the constant turn over of models proposed and models challenged to provide instrumented proof in a stream of tolerant skepticism, attracts a comunity bent on monolithic consensus.   There is in essence, only one kind of science.   Why can't we have only one kind of religion?

Forging peace within the soul

I came to suspect that this chain of attitudes may hold together the most self-possessed lives because of how repeatably and miserably I failed at the honesty link.

To those with courage, honesty is always worth the prices it exacts.
The wise always find the courageous path is actually the easiest.
The humble do not blind themselves, seeing with their eyes rather than their "I". This enables them to grow wise by gathering rather than shedding the lessons life dishes out.

Correcting correction

It occurred to me that "To attack stupidity head-on at every opportunity passes for a noble goal at least in the mind of the attacker but only compounds stupidity with arrogance." But this adds nothing to the stock of such sayings, e.g. Confucius: "To argue with a fool, shows that there are two." Maybe Socrates had the best way of dealing with fools. Minds have not grown clearer nor the world simpler since his times...how careful we must be in declaring something foolish! When you are about to level your lance at some wrong-headedness, first repeat:

If I can't stand it, how am I so sure I understand it?

Your aggravation is not what proves they are in error.