Ever so slightly obsessed with Wichita Lineman by Glen Campbell at the moment.
I first heard it as a little kid and it’s haunted me periodically ever since.
It popped up unexpectedly on the radio the other day and it gripped me again, as it always does.
I have no idea why it feels so emotive. It’s not the kind of music I listen to and yet it gets me every time.
It takes great resolve to enter into the darkness of our own chaos, to give up the familiar path and begin to trust our own experience.
— Marion Woodman
Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.
— Aldous Huxley
True action—be it the step toward a new perspective, a tangible effort to create, or the humble choice to care—rarely claims the spotlight.
It comes as a great relief to realise that you could not have lived your life in any other way despite all the reasons and stories you tell yourself about how things could have been different.
They weren’t different because they weren’t.
The degree to which we think our conscious awareness has control and agency over our actions is greatly overstated.
Indeed I would go as far as to say what we think are choices and decisions are pure fantasy applied after the fact to instantiate a sense of a separate, autonomous entity of selfhood.
Beautiful cool morning. Grateful to simply be today. What a glorious start to a twelve hour shift.
I don’t read a lot of fiction but an author I had never heard of popped up in my feed today – Fleur Jaeggy. Her work sounds incredible. She’s been described as a master of hyper-brevity.
Years later the bigot Agnes Blannbekin, on the 1st of January, again and again turns in her mouth, tender as egg-skin and very sweet, Christ’s foreskin.
Just ordered this collection of short stories from Abe Books. Can’t wait!
Fleur Jaeggy is often noted for her terse and telegraphic style, which somehow brews up a profound paradox that seems bent on haunting the reader: despite a sort of zero-at-the-bone baseline, her fiction is weirdly also incredibly moving. How does she do it? No one knows. But here, in her newest collection, I Am the Brother of XX, she does it again. Like a magician or a master criminal, who can say how she gets away with it, but whether the stories involve famous writers (Calvino, Ingeborg Bachmann, Joseph Brodsky) or baronesses or 13th-century visionaries or tormented siblings bred up in elite Swiss boarding schools, they somehow steal your heart. And they don’t rest at that, but endlessly disturb your mind.
It’s easy to succumb to the soothing embrace of words and language when often we’re really falling into a trap.
After years of practice and contemplation, trials and tribulations, an eventful life with its fair share of contentment and trauma – I still can’t better these three simple words to sum it all up…
This is it.
Having ventured out towards a beautiful dawn, I arrive at work only to be shrouded in freezing fog!
A freezing frosty morning and a beautiful dawn to guide my way to work.
When it comes managing personal tasks and to-do’s the best piece of advice I ever heard came from Jason Fried of 37 Signals in the context of product development.
Instead of keeping an endless log of all the user feedback that came in he would ignore everything until he noticed the same issues being repeated again and again. This signalled importance and so became a task to be noted and addressed.
I have repurposed this behaviour in my own life. Instead making endless lists and notes of things I think need to be addressed, I let everything go and don’t make a note of anything until it keeps coming up repeatedly, which indicates its importance.
Apart from simplifying my life dramatically I also came to discover what was really important and what could simply be ignored, which turned out to be a hell of a lot!
If you can’t integrate/ assimilate traditional ancient wisdom into the ordinary reality of your own lived experience then you’re completely missing the point.
Knowing is new and spontaneous. Knowledge is remembered and rehearsed. One is accumulated, the other an empty space. As a window is a hole in the wall.
The difference
In the absence of adequate rites of passage, ad-men become the high priests of an initiation into the addictions of consumerism. Everywhere the ceremony of innocence is exploited. Without recognized rites, members of a society are not sure who they are within the structure.
Later on, life forces us to make one-sided differentiations. But that is why we get lost to ourselves and have to learn, again, to find ourselves. When you are whole, you have discovered yourself once again, and you know what you have been all the time.
— Carl Jung
Where is home?
Here, always right here, right now. Which is, of course, everywhere we happen to be.
…he won’t get to the root of his problem, because the root of his problem is himself, and he doesn’t know it.
— Anon
If I don’t know who I am, whatever I do to make the world better will only serve to make it worse. Herein the experience of remorse through which all must pass on the way to self-knowing.
Gnothi seauton
Still, clear air outside. A dog barks. Flames rage in the wood burner. In the distance the gentle hiss of the occasional car on the wet road. Cold feet on stone floor. Nothing done yet everything happening.
What’s here now? 