It is disease that makes health sweet and good, hunger satiety, weariness rest.
Heraclitus
Category: bubbleseeds
Eye of practice
You see and understand only what your eye of practice can reach.
How do you mean?
Meaning is something we do – not something we find at the end of the rainbow.
Maximizing
I’ve never “monetized” this blog, but i think the time has come to maximize it. My contributions to it have been minimal of late, meaning that this blog has made very few claims on your attention. Bog knows your attention is busy enough already! But “maximizing” in this case means aphorizing. Aphorisms, or maxims, are my favorite art form anyway. They say the most with the fewest words, so they are maximally economical for the attention. They are like seeds in the ecology of meaning. Here’s an example from Herbert Simon:
Everything is connected, but some things are more connected than others.
You’ll find this in Turning Signs ·12, where of course you will find more context, more links, more connexions. If you are so inclined.
Turning Signs 2.14 is now ready for download from the Contents page.
It takes two
If you don’t argue with me, I don’t know what I think.
—Alan Watts ‘On the Nature of Consciousness’
To find out what we think, we need to argue with each other, not against each other.
betimes
If it be now, ’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all.
Hamlet, V.iv.210
The rest is silence.
Faith and semiosis
Inkling of the day:
There is no time for more than a little consciousness.
— Gregory Bateson
Privatized understanding
Inkling of the day:
To become open to multiple layers of vision is to be both practical and empathic, to practice the presence of God or gods and to practice wilderness.
— M.C. Bateson
Outlink of the day: Wikipedia and Shoshana Zuboff on surveillance capitalism.
Communion
Inkling of the day: The time has come to lower our voices, to cease imposing our mechanistic patterns on the biological processes of the earth, to resist the impulse to control, to command, to force, to oppress, and to begin quite humbly to follow the guidance of the larger community on which all life depends.
That was written 32 years ago. Is it too late now?
Outlink of the day: David Bollier has for many years been researching the commons, and the practice of commoning in many places around the world. His recent book with Silke Helfrich, Free, Fair and Alive, presents it as an alternative to the extractive capitalism which has turned out to be ecocidal and pushed global civilization to the brink of self-destruction. The book includes a glossary of terms we will need in order to shift our understanding and think like commoners. One of them is communion, an old word redefined with the help of some other key terms (rendered here in all caps):
Communion is the process through which COMMONERS participate in interdependent relationships with the more-than-human world. COMMUNION shifts a person’s understanding of human/nature relations out of the economistic framework (e.g., “resource management,” or the commodification and financialization of “nature’s services”) into one that respects the intrinsic value of the nonhuman world. This fundamental self-awareness leads to feelings of gratitude, respect, and reverence for the sacred dimensions of life in the ways that human PROVISIONING is organized.
— Bollier and Helfrich (2019, 76)
In and out of control
Inkling of the day: Due to circumstances beyond our control, we have no choice but to make choices.
Outlink of the day: a selection of articles on Resilience.org related to seed saving – our lives may depend on it. See also how it’s being organized on Manitoulin Island.