“LIBRA (Sept 23 – Oct 22) The sky will not fall, but something resembling heavenly tokens may cascade down with such frequency that you’d be wise to keep looking up. You never know when another piece of the blessed puzzle will come raining down, and it would be a shame to suffer the embarrassment of having your favorable fortune knock you over. Who’d guess that a shower of good news would be such a tricky trail?”
Latrodectus mactans, the Southern black widow
catching a grass hopper, today at Tosohatchee, Central Florida
in some ways, animals are not like people. the average animal, even my pet, is astonishingly self-sufficient. you know, it doesn’t scold itself for stuff that isn’t even visible to others, except for itself.
a couple years ago, i met a woman who understood her job in life to be to escort people.
as far as i understood it, she escorted quite some people in her life.
and as always, some are thankful for it, some are the opposite.
however, after a while, both groups stopped talking to her.
maybe an escort takes it as part of her job, who knows, and we know better, to not let little subjectivities decide about a real encounter between two people.
number one rule: know who you’re replying to.
if you find yourself replying to the divine, no wonder no one around you understands a thing.
if you find yourself replying to people, no wonder it’s not getting you any closer to anything divine. hence your agnosticism – or mine.
fortunately, there are quite some examples of people who are masters of the art of knowing who they’re replying to.
megan fox, for example, knows she’s not replying to acting.
or take the numerous officials who rejected the appplications that brought you from one miserable spot to the next throughout your life. they knew they weren’t replying to people.
still, some of us feel like it’s their job to establish the connection, from one pole to the other. from the people to the divine: from hustling to philosophy. from the island to the city. from the workers to the academics.
succeeding escortage is rare.
i usually blame it on the poles striving for maintenance of their position. if you want to please people, give them stability with an entertaining amount of change, just as much as they can handle without starting to question themselves. if the latter happens, everybody has lost a friend.
as i am writing this down, the pines in the swamp all around this campus’ food isle are starting to shake off their needles.
everybody knows it’s time to go.
the animals know it, and you do, too.
i’m the only one still sitting here.
my life is uncertain. other people’s lives are uncertain. some of us know it, some of us ignore it, i don’t know which is wiser to do.
still navigating between the borders, with eight tabs open, i remembered osho’s zen tarot, which can be found online. the card i just drew for today is
38. Adventure
Zen says truth has nothing to do with authority, truth has nothing to do with tradition, truth has nothing to do with the past – truth is a radical, personal realization. You have to come to it.
Knowledge is certain; the search for personal knowing is very, very hazardous. Nobody can guarantee it. If you ask me if I can guarantee anything, I say I cannot guarantee you anything. I can only guarantee danger, that much is certain. I can only guarantee you a long adventure with every possibility of going astray and never reaching the goal. But one thing is certain: the very search will help you to grow.
I can guarantee only growth. Danger will be there, sacrifice will be there; you will be moving every day into the unknown, into the uncharted, and there will be no map to follow, no guide to follow. Yes, there are millions of dangers and you can go astray and you can get lost, but that is the only way one grows.
Insecurity is the only way to grow, to face danger is the only way to grow, to accept the challenge of the unknown is the only way to grow.
Osho Dang Dang Doko Dang Chapter 7
this goes well with thoughts about uncertainty and decisions i had just the last couple of days, maybe weeks.
from today’s point, i like to describe myself by describing my needs, as if that was an adequate description of somebody. i always think i better mention how i dislike vagueness and how i’d like to have a somewhat clear idea about a life, with stable things in it, and, yes, material or financial security has become important to me too. you won’t stay 17 forever.
however, i’m coming to realize that it wasn’t my need for certainty that has brought me this far.
i never agreed to let my dreams go because of some fear of vagueness or uncertainty that i had. and that’s the only way i can explain to myself how i made it all the way to here. if i had followed my need for certainty, i would have probably studied near my hometown in germany. i now would have an affordable apartment and maybe a job at a magazine, which wouldn’t be all that bad, but very far from what did happen and where i am today.
what did happen is stuff i would have never been able to imagine, nor can i explain it now to new people i meet or to old friends who weren’t there with me.
there was no linear way to do it, nothing to conclude from certain premises. i had to jump, so to speak, and it was very very well possible i’d lose everything.
and i did lose a lot on the way indeed.
but i figure that it is still a lot more that i kept, and gained.
as i am reflecting on the past, summer has come to florida. and this means people leaving for the northern hemisphere – j & s won’t be back from nova scotia till october, which is four months away from here.
and it means a heat index of 115F, which converts to 46C and leaves me breathless. i thought it could only get that hot in the deserts of Africa and Arizona.
my final thesis has entered one of its last phases. i started reviewing my work chapter by chapter, and can’t believe that 6 months have gone by meanwhile. well, soon it will be over. 5 more weeks to go and i’m back on the road.
as i walk & wonder & shop my way through this odd new world, i come across many things that i don’t understand right away. as a result, i have to ask people. if there is nobody immediately available, i have to post a blog about it.
not sure if i mentioned it before, but America’s media confuses me quite often. i generally spare myself to be exposed to stupidity no matter what country i live in – but sometimes there’s just no escape from the flames CNN adds to their headlines whenever there are fires in some city (as in Rome, a couple weeks ago). And at the grocery store checkout, i bump into those iconic figures who i as a European have no concept of, but who everyone else seems to know and talk about – like Kim Kardashian, Jessica Simpson, Kelly Clarkson, and Hannah Montana.
click to get to image source
today’s featured confusion is about the latest issue of People Magazine, as it stared at me at one of these checkouts earlier today. ignoring the eternally-forced battle of Brangelina and “poor” Jennifer Aniston discussed in all the surrounding magazines, People is running an exclusive story about the possible next American icon: Bristol Palin.
The cover shows Palin and her baby Tripp on a pure white background; possibly interfering headlines of other content has been moved to the blue periphery on the right.
instead, People chose to print a quote of the young mama: “Girls need to imagine and picture their life with a screaming newborn baby and then think before they have sex. Think about the consequences … If girls realized the consequences of sex, nobody would be having sex. Trust me. Nobody.”
as we know, women love to step into new roles, which they will soon complain about again, eventually break out of – and step right into the next role already waiting for them. while some rather vague “third wave” feminism of the late 90s has made it possible for girls age 16-20 to act like nymphomaniacs and feel “natural” about it, the teen mom seems to incorporate yet another role for women to adopt.
we already have a lot of famous examples for that, both fictitious and real, and even Germany has had its share with Eva Hermann’s controversial book “Das Eva-Prinzip” (2006). however, today i was wondering in how far Bristol Palin’s new role as a role model will impact the political atmosphere in the United States.
one might continue to wonder who is going to take the place of meanwhile dumped “White Trash” daddy Levi Johnston. only one thing is certain – it has to happen before the 2012 elections: unlike in Germany, people over here are getting ready for the next election basically as soon as the current election is over.
the only really sad thing about all this (to hell with confused women) is how much more cynical the political game seems to be over here. i don’t know if there even is such a word in the American political awareness as populism.
only this weekend, i had a discussion about the next elections. in this discussion, i shared my secret hopes that stupidity is partially a reaction when you’re being treated as stupid. since i don’t know of any occasion of Obama talking down to the crowd, i was hoping that people would adapt throughout the next few years, so that another Sarah Palin or the like won’t be possible.
but my position was on the lose: S, who had left the country because of bad presidents before but still hasn’t become an expat, told me that “people like Sarah Palin will always appeal to Americans.”
Hallgrímskirkja. Photo by Geir Ólafsson.
[Iceland Review] The Dalai Lama has accepted an invitation to participate in a pan-religious ceremony in Hallgrímskirkja church on June 1, the second day of Whitsun, which will be led by the Bishop of Iceland and other Icelandic religious leaders in unison.
The event won’t be a traditional mass or religious ceremony. “It will be more like a time for peace and tranquility with participation of those religions that are the most prominent in the Icelandic community,” Irma Sjöfn Óskarsdóttir, project leader at the Bishop’s Office, explained to Morgunbladid.
“The ceremony is intended to emphasize that we live together in peace and reconciliation and stand side-by-side despite different religions,” Óskarsdóttir said, adding that this is the first time that such a pan-religious event is held in Iceland.
The ceremony in Hallgrímskirkja hasn’t been fully prepared yet, but, according to Óskarsdóttir, all the religious leaders who have been contacted were very positive about participating.
The Dalai Lama is coming to Reykjavík to hold a presentation in Laugardalshöll concert and conference hall on June 2. He will stay in Iceland from May 31 to June 3.
i’m off to the gulf of mexico for a bit. talk to you guys soon!
[BBC] The Belgian city of Ghent is about to become the first in the world to go vegetarian at least once a week.
Starting this week there will be a regular weekly meatless day, in which civil servants and elected councillors will opt for vegetarian meals.
Ghent means to recognise the impact of livestock on the environment.
The UN says livestock is responsible for nearly one-fifth of global greenhouse gas emissions, hence Ghent’s declaration of a weekly “veggie day”.
as i’m forcing myself from one paper to another while writing my final thesis, or better, pretending to do so until i am actually finished with it, i once again come to notice a certain discrepancy there seems to be between things natural and professional.
likewise, as i’m watching myself change with the changes of the outside, i get the affirmative feeling of how self-evidential change is. it is within our bodies and mind to change. when i am at my healthiest, i feel like a river in the way i search for my way through things and struggles. there mustn’t be any edges, nor any forced intensified flow into only one direction: these things would make me become something artificial and of purpose to a greater industrial system.
enough with the nature metaphors. as much as i know of the necessity that we all need to get a job, i still can’t see any ontological need for specialization. a philosopher who goes all the way into academia loses touch with the world, as we all know, much too often. same goes with the artist who produces for the museums, and the poet who writes for the magazines.
no work can come out of that, only a mere shadow of what used to be my – or your – interests might remain, at best. at least you will have secured the income, which is great and, oddly enough, rather exceptional these days.
my nature does not belong into any of the directions offered by professionality. it doesn’t want to be a professional poet. it doesn’t want to be a professional philosopher. i have gone many different paths at once, telling myself i’d settle for one of them as soon as it turns out which one of them might be the most promising. instead, the future looks the same with all of them: if i follow through with them for the sake of profession, it will not get me anywhere but somewhere far away.
which is not where i need or want to be.
so now, coming to some kind of conclusion after years of studying – studying what i wanted - what would be the difference in following through with it for profession to having a well-paid and rather secured job in the marketing and advertisement business? which is where i didn’t want to be.
i can’t tell the difference anymore. i might, sometimes, be able to catch a glimpse in a text of what used to make me decide for philosophy as my major. but it really doesn’t do anything for me anymore. and with this premise being gone, couldn’t i just as well get back to marketing?
my nature is headed toward simplicity, a profession demands specialization. does that mean i have to look for a simple job, if i don’t want to lose touch with anything i consider natural?
and where would i find such a simple job?
Homosassa Springs, FL
