Category Archives: Ethos

Shabbat content

Days can be challenging. Overwhelm and frustration can pile up, grief and despair erode comfort and hope, entropy churns on. At a certain point, as Friday afternoon approaches, there can be a rush to wrap up and a yearning for relief. This is a time-based technology of the work week. There is also the Jewish time-tradition of Shabbat that invites relief. It is a merciful offering – to rest, to put down your burdens. It is also a mighty discernment: the work is over, it cannot proceed.

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Still Silent Spring

Stillness can be found in motion

The balance of yin-yang in contrast to the gray energy of apathy

The stillness of candlelight in a peaceful room

The equinoxes

Moments of balanced day and night, a specific point in spaces at one time but also a range of times representing a particular arrangement in space

There’s a balance of endings and of beginnings

Of calamities and of blessings

Of fulfillment and of utmost grief

“It’s all about the balance.”

So when high, recall low

When low, cherish high

When lost, feel found

And when home, know outward bounds

“What if my perspective at home were as if I were camping? What an incredible camp site! Tap water!”

All happening, everything everywhere all at once

The glaciers, the factory discharge

The newlings, the loving creativities

The oppressions, the mutual aid and liberations

The ending and the too late

New beginnings forever

“This too shall pass.”

“There are two paths:

Path A: The end of The World.

Path B: The beginning of The Next.”


Stillness can be found in motion

The balance of yin-yang in contrast to the gray energy of apathy

“It’s all about the balance.”

Textbook cover "Hyperobjects" by Timothy Morton

Stock Suspicion: What is the Stock Market Appreciating?

Content warning: systems collapse, global economics, food-water-energy nexus

One of the many hyperobjects that define the polycrisis we are in

Is the stock market
Which through many calamaty, trends ever upward
What is the appreciation
appreciating?

~

“It feels like the markets are more irrational then ever and driven by tens of trillions in capital moving around, this is money is cash in hand and insulated from real consequences in the world so not reacting as it should.”

“A few years ago I heard an economist talk about “excess money sloshing around in the system, chasing a profit”. The image has stuck with me, seems to fit really well”

“The stock market is unrealistically insulated. We’ll likely never see a true depression again but just a series of recessions propped up by the 1%.”

“Passive investing has taken perhaps too large a share of the market, making flows less reactionary. When you have XX hundred billion(s) flowing in every month on loop not hard to see where appreciation comes from.”

~

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A deep image of interstellar Comet 3I/ATLAS captured by the Gemini Multi-Object Spectrograph (GMOS) on Gemini South at Cerro Pachón in Chile

TENUOUS: what will be?

Is tomorrow guaranteed? What will the future bring? What song should we sing?


Interstellar object I3/Atlas is currently at its perihelion, or closest point to our Sun at approximately 1.36AU. Among the anomalies associated with this comet-like object, its approach is unlikely: It has been hidden from Earth’s view by the Sun’s glare throughout October (though some scientific reports in review claim to have observed the object’s emissions despite solar glare). This occulted segment of its long trip is also its most opportune time to make orbital adjustments to its own direction or for any probes it could dispatch, using the gravity of our Sun to assist. All this and other unmentioned anomalies to say: while unlikely, there is some cautious speculation that this is a technologic object, directed by an Alien Intelligence (AI).

And I say that to ask: If an alien vessel were in our backyard today and, perhaps at this moment, sending probes our way – for what purpose, one can only speculate – what would one do? Even if that were a fact, there is still much uncertainty.

Top view of 3I/ATLAS's trajectory (blue) through the Solar System, with orbits and positions of planets shown
Image via CSS, D. Rankin; Video recorded and edited by User:Renerpho – https://neofixer.arizona.edu/css-orbit-view, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=169627869

Not commenting on likelihood, but hypothetically: If it were the case that alien intelligence was in our backyard this moment, close and unseen, then these moments would feel tenuous. What would one do? Savor, I suppose. It is risky and significant enough that squandering time would be easier to recognize as foolish. But it would be uncertain and inspiring enough to not throw one into despair and defeatism.

If one was known to have only a week to live, unlike in this uncertain scenario, then I imagine ‘savoring time’ would look uniquely scarce and conclusive: skipping chores, saying goodbyes, focusing fully on favorites. In contrast, with uncertainty of what the world two months later looks like, it is wise both to savor and also to steward. Take care of one’s future but also do not expect one’s future is guaranteed. Do the dishes, while remembering the precious ephemerality of it all. Savor, and also steward.

This kind of tenuousness, a liminal existential space, could be healthy. A reminder, a reorientation, that we only ever exist Here Now.

How will one Be when it arrives,

What’s Next


Moment by moment
Building momentum
What's the best next step?
May peace be up on you!

#BeHereNow #BreatheEasy #OneLove

GROW: I, Tree

Grow
Upward
Toward One’s higher self

Sunbound
Obstacle
Higher Self

Adjust, adapt
Not ambitious,
Actualizing

Self becoming
So(u/i)l fulfilling
Role filling

Niche needing
Now embodied
Reciprocate

Grow the gifts
Heights, rights
Canopy crown leader

Power
Photons become energy become matter become life become photons
Emit

Mature
Canopy co-dominance
Contribute

Seed community
Past and future unity
Earth and sky, one pillar

Emerge
Knew, continue
I&I: You

Gon’ higha
Grow


AND FOR MY LAST ACT

What if this was my final act?
This moment, this action
What’s happening at this breath?
Reading this post?
Well, at least you’re not listening to an Exxon advertisement
If that is the kind of thing you’re exposed to

How we spend our time is affected by the systems around us
Where we are, when we are, much of that beyond us
Under the stars
Here now
Spinning mightily on this big beautiful blue planet

Evolving alongside fellow lifeforms,
It does appear we have some choices within our purview
For if this was my final act,
It was I who chose to be typing at this moment, isn’t it?
Chose in that it arose in my clothes and genes and experiences
And it will be I who lives with, and ends with, that moment
Each moment a new beginning, potentially
Moment to moment
To momentum and beyond

(What’s the best next step?)
(What’s the f(x)?)
With love

What if this was my final act?
Practicing qi’gong, East or West
Perhaps singing a song
Or listening
~ ~ ~
שְׁמַע
~ ~ ~
Taking It All In
One Self
Actualizing
Actual I’s in the vicinity of
Temple

Peace, peace, peace, One Love

A Journey About What Matters

Look around
Your immediate surroundings and select an object

What is it, how is it interacted with? By you, by others, by the ambient space, by invisible forces

Where did it come from? Before it was where it is now, where has it been over the past day? Over the past weeks and months and years?

“Here
Now”

From whence did it come?
From what origin or source?
Before it is what it is now, what was it? What would you have called it before it reached the state in which you’d call it as you do now?

What is its relationship with The Source?

This one thing, how is it divisible or degradable, and how does it aggregate, enlarge, and accumulate if at all? 

Let’s find its constituent parts and ways. Ways and means and matters…

Before this object joined you here
Before you ever met it
Where was it?
Imagine being with this object in the moments before you actually met it
Can you track its momentum backwards?
What was its path over time? Its physical steps through space en route to you? Its transformations? Its self-becoming?
What is self actualization?

Does it breathe?
Did it come from China?
How many places did its original materials come from, Earthling?
How many beings involved in its becoming?
How much love? I ask with thanks.
How much hardship? I&I ask with sorrow.

If we follow the object back, through its steps in spacetime dimensions we’re familiar with,
It probably came to us from an interaction with a human, or from itself in the wild…
Of the humans involved, the supply chain from cradle to current-condition to grave could be very short or very long, in space or in time

<4×4 table labeled distance and duration
columns=space, time; rows=short, long; examples TBD>

Step by step
What’s the best next step?

Be Here Now

===

Mission: optimize for resilient sun-to-life ratio
Minimize harm

This transmission brought to you by a mind picking up litter, detritus, debris
Wearing 3M gear to clean up toxins originating with Big Chem in the first place
Legacy legacy legacy, feeling like a disgrace
Our world sour and what’s it like to be displaced? O habitat
O the grief
O the mass extinction
O the habitat
I give thanks to the Source for the Present
For Home
I try
I participate
What’s the best next step?