Extraordinary Discourse Podcast

Bit Of A Melange But to live variously cannot simply be a gift, endowed by an accident of birth; it has to be a continual effort, continually renewed. Zadie Smith, Speaking In Tongues General Abner Doubleday wrote to Bachelder in this chastened spirit five years after the congressional appropriation: "It is difficult in the excitement of battle to see every thing going on around us for each has his own part to play and that absorbs his attention to the exclusion of every thing else. People are very much mistaken when they suppose because a man is in a battle, he knows all about it." Gettysburg Regress By John Summers New Republic

Key Excerpts In Rough Narrative We need to redefine community and find a variety of ways of coming together and helping each other. Sharon Salzberg Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together. Vincent van Gogh

What On Earth? I am a conservator of endangered wonder in a time much imperilled and imperilling. I am a herder of unruly propositions that kick at the stall, sometimes all night. I am a caretaker of what I have been entrusted with, and I suppose my job is to have some discernment in how and when and if I lift those things up into the light, for others to consider. And in so doing I try to keep lithe and well practiced the ragged hum of human wonder that can bind us in something very like kinship, to each other and to those who came before us. Especially to them. When I remember to, my teaching lifts up my teachers, but always it is a praise song to them and their teaching. And especially to their teachers, and to theirs, to the ones I don’t know and will never meet. These Very Days of Wonder Dec 9, 2013 by Stephen Jenkinson Song clip Everlast - what it's like

Zeitgeist Riffs The themes are familiar, their play is unusual. It's the sequential juxtapositioning. Between depth psychology and the decline and fall of the job system. Between "don't worry, be happy" and legitimate suffering. From the end of the Bible to Mickey Bush to Hitler and beyond, strobed through the fence-slats of silence. I have a better time playing because I have a variety of colors to bring to the table. John Frusciante “I am hooked on talk as a creative dialogue,” she once remarked in her journals, and added:“For me, it’s the principal medium of my salvation." Maria Popova on Susan Sontag ↬ ↬ ↬ ↬ ↬ ↬ ↬ ↬ ↬ ↬ ↬ ↬ ↬ ↬ ↬ ↬ ↬ ↬ ↬ ↬ ↬ ↬ ↬ ↬

In Other Words The public sphere is where competing storylines slug their way out, it’s where politicians, journalists, experts and yakkers connect the dots, find patterns and fashion narratives.  We take all that in, spoiler-free, in a state of genre-blindness, not knowing whether we’re watching a tragedy or an adventure play out. It's Important to Know How the Stories We Tell Ourselves -- True, or Not-- Shape our World... for Better or Worse AlterNet / By Marty Kaplan Let The Slave (Incorporating The Price Of Experience. Text: William Blake) Let the slave grinding at the mill run out into the field Let him look up into the heavens and laugh in the bright air Let the enchained soul, shut up in darkness and in sighing Whose face has never seen a smile in thirty weary years Rise and look up; his chains are loose, his dungeon doors are open; And let his wife and children return from the oppressors scourge They look behind at every step and believe it is...

A Free Box Of Out-Of-The-Box Wisdom ( ejectus in viam ) Arrange whatever pieces come your way. ~Virginia Woolf John Mitchell ‏ @OneJohnMitchell1h You are never alone in life. And certainly not while you have all those voices inside your head

Road Signs From The Road Less Traveled There are two possible answers to the current challenges to the arts. One is to accept the market rhetoric that dominates the rest of the culture. If you move in this direction you may possibly be financially viable but you will be doomed to fit more and more closely within the materialistic norms of our times. You may continue to function but you will lose your own souls. Alternatively, you can enliven the old traditions supported by those who believe in the importance of the liberal arts and the ability to think. You can argue for the right to think freely outside the box. You can reclaim the role of the arts as the breaker of old boundaries and the creator of new dreams and visions. Robert Theobald

Wayward Words And The Woods We start with kids and end up in the forest. "...a flea market or a country fair, a collection of differently colored and designed booths spread around a meadow, with the edges of the fair dissolving into the forested wilderness beyond...the fair is a place of play and discovery. It is filled with a vitality, a wildness, a tumult of different voices and things to see and do. There are jesters and tricksters, magicians and shamans, healers and mystics…." David Spangler The Sound Of Trees by Robert Frost I wonder about the trees. Why do we wish to bear Forever the noise of these More than another noise So close to our dwelling place? We suffer them by the day Til we lose all measure of pace, And fixity in our joys, And acquire a listening air. They are that talks of going But never gets away; And that talks no less for knowing, As it grows wiser and older That now it means to stay. My feet tug at the floor And my...

Piehole Proclamations Part holy fool and court jester, part spiritual lawyer for the human encounter with the divine, the bard is the great rememberer, the librarian of all refused stories. Stephen Jenkinson

Irreverent Revelations I know of no other manner of dealing with great tasks than as play . Nietzsch e Most truths are less interesting than the complex and dynamic intercrossing of forces, intensities,discourses, desires, accidents, idiosyncrasies, and relations of power that produce those culminations. For these networks, while revealing the bifurcations and determinations, the choices, impulses, and propensities, en-route to a particular set of distillations, cannot fail to indicate at the same time unactualized possibilities, fields of indefinitude, and lines of escape. Intro Teachers In Nomadic Spaces Kaustuv Roy

The Cult Of Working For A Living To make the simplest gesture with the hand can convey the utmost sense of life… Activity in itself means nothing: it is often a sign of death. By simple external pressure, by force of surroundings and example, by the very climate which activity engenders, one can become part of a monstrous death machine, such as America, for example. Henry Miller, Tropic Of Capricorn

Matters Of Life And Death But I haven’t described Dream City. I’ll try to. It is a place of many voices, where the unified singular self is an illusion. Naturally, Obama was born there. So was I. When your personal multiplicity is printed on your face, in an almost too obviously thematic manner, in your DNA, in your hair and in the neither this nor that beige of your skin—well, anyone can see you come from Dream City. In Dream City everything is doubled, everything is various. You have no choice but to cross borders and speak in tongues. That’s how you get from your mother to your father, from talking to one set of folks who think you’re not black enough to another who figure you insufficiently white. It’s the kind of town where the wise man says “I” cautiously, because “I” feels like too straight and singular a phoneme to represent the true multiplicity of his experience. Instead, citizens of Dream City prefer to use the collective pronoun “we.” Zadie Smith, Speaking In Tongue...

On The Other Hand All these many thousands of clips are little beautiful animals found by the wayside, which I keep in front of me as I move sideways through life. The octopus arms of the institutions, the military-industrial complex, the financial-corporate complex, the prison-industrial complex, the schooling-industrial complex, the entertainment-corporate media complex, the inferiority complex, the psycho-pharmaceutical complex, never mind complex adaptive systems, all intertwine, like an octopus orgy, and we with our complexes try to navigate them suckers. Jack Saturday Smiley and West radio show The great Stan Rogers Stefan Molyneux, Freedomain Radio

 Back to (ugh!) School A bag of anti-school cookies, fresh out of the oven! This podcast is dedicated to the school teachers I happen to love. Come sup with the great mavericks of "education." People who loved kids more than their careers. John Taylor Gatto, John Holt, Edgar Z Friedenberg, Jean Houston, Robert Anton Wilson, Marshall McLuhan, and more! Thanks to London Real for Tim Freke and much else besides. Here's the Unplugged Mom podcast This is the second in this podcast series to examine schooling. More of the same and different here . I recently received a beautiful paper from a school teacher who spent twenty-five or thirty years right in the front-line trenches, in the classroom. She gives the perspective that armchair generals sitting back in their ivory towers just don't have. Her title tells it all: "Torch This Tower." She states there is no facet of the American school situation which is at all redeemable and be...

Tinkertalk   “I delight,” he [Shaw] wrote, in throwing [ Pygmalion ] at the heads of the wiseacres who repeat the parrot cry that art should never be didactic. It goes to prove my contention that art should never be anything else." quoted by Zadie Smith in Speaking In Tongues

A Bunch Of Goddamn Talk Like Bellow, his only equal in this, Updike is a master of effortless motion—between third and first person, from the metaphorical density of literary prose to the demotic, from specific detail to wide generalization, from the actual to the numinous, from the scary to the comic. Ian McEwan On John Updike The New York Review of Books I enjoy this podcast, you will too. I was turned on to it when Dr Dave of Shrinkrapradio read an email from Jack Saturday. I find it amazing how he can pick out the choicest bits of audio and compile them into an hour long program. It incorporates humor, social issues, contemporary themes, and timeless wisdom. I relisten to many of the podcasts as they are verily thought-provoking. Keep up the good work, Jack! by Trevron0 Review of  Extraordinary Discourse Podcast   Thanks to Utah Phillips for BabyGramps

Cherrypicked Jawboning All the selections had something in common: a determination by their authors to push the genre into new territory, to feature prose that - to put it quickly - depends more on poetic fragmentation than rhetorical coherence and discontinuous narrative than straightforward self-presentation. The trick, of course, is to employ innovative forms without sacrificing ideas, substance, or urgency. Robert Atwan Foreword The Best American Essays 2011 He [Montaigne] followed himself wherever his attention settled, and his regard was always the same - intent, amused, compassionate, contrarian, and irreversibly eclectic (He could jump from Plato's discourse on the divinatory power of dreams to dinner at a castle - "a confusion" of meats and a clutter of dishes displeases me as much as any other confusion" - and do justice to them both. Jane Kramer Me, Myself, and I Let me raise a battered gold coffee cup to U. U...

Indie Spiel It is only a question of finding the right words and putting them in the right order. But we cannot do it because they do not live in dictionaries; they live in the mind. And how do they live in the mind? Variously and strangely, much as human beings live, by ranging hither and thither, by falling in love, and mating together.It is true that they are much less bound by ceremony and convention than we are. Royal words mate with commoners. English words marry French words, German words, Indian words, Negro words, if they have a fancy. Indeed, the less we enquire into the past of our dear Mother English the better it will be for that lady’s reputation. For she has gone a-roving, a-roving fair maid. Thus to lay down any laws for such irreclaimable vagabonds is worse than useless. A few trifling rules of grammar and spelling are all the constraint we can put on them. All we can say about them, as we peer at them over the edge of that deep, dark and only fitfully illumi...

At The Edge Of All That We’re struggling to replace a brittle, top-heavy energy system, where a few huge power plants provide our electricity, with a dispersed and lightweight grid, where 10 million solar arrays on 10 million rooftops are linked together. The engineers call this “distributed generation,” and it comes with a myriad of benefits. It’s not as prone to catastrophic failure, for one. And it can make use of dispersed energy, instead of relying on a few pools of concentrated fuel. The same principle, it seems to me, applies to movements. Can We Pull the Planet from the Brink of Catastrophe?   Bill McKibben, Rebecca Solnit TomDispatch   Stories move in circles. They don’t go in straight lines. There are stories inside stories and stories between stories, and finding your way through is as easy and as hard as finding your way home.   Deena Metzger  Writing for Your Life

Deep Twaddle Freedom, then, to do anything and to become anyone? Informality and spontaneity as the ends of life? Pico emphatically rejected this. Born indeterminate, he says, human beings have to find unity in their lives; a person must make him or herself coherent. In Renaissance Humanism, this quest meant uniting conflicting ancient ideals by bridging the Hellenic and the Christian mindset; in Pico’s own philosophy, it meant making the one and the many cohere, or as philosophers would put it today, discovering unity in the midst of difference. Spinoza, two centuries later, was grounded in just this Humanist project. What does the Humanist quest for unity in the midst of difference mean for us today? Here a contrast between Pico and Spinoza is all important. Spinoza emphasized unities transcending time—timeless unities in mental space—whereas Pico dwelt on the fact of shifting time, and shifting time in everyday experience. Pico dwelt, we would now say, on the phenomenon of...

We Need To Talk Fun institutional critique. …not an interview or a 'conversation' - although it has elements of both. It grows in many directions, without an overall ordering principle. To use Deleuze's term, it is the book as war-machine, the book as 'rhizome'. There is no hierarchy of root, trunk and branch, but a multiplicity of interconnected shoots going off in all directions. Hugh Tomlinson Barbara Habberjam Translator's Introduction Deleuze, Dialogues II Thanks to CBC radio's The Current for Marie Wadden's documentary, Still Sinking: Remembering the Ocean Ranger Disaster

Outside The Scheduled Day I have wanted, in sum, to explain in this essay why the label “humanist” is a badge of honor, rather than the name for an exhausted worldview. Humanism’s emphasis on life-narratives, on the enriching experience of difference, and on evaluating tools in terms of human rather than mechanical complexity are all living values—and more, I would say, these are critical measures for judging the state of modern society. Looking back to the origins of these values is not an exercise in nostalgia; it is rather to remind us that we are engaged in a project, still in process, a humanism yet to be realized, of making social experience more open, engaging, and layered. Humanism Richard Sennett THE HEDGEHOG REVIEW: VOL. 13, NO. 2

Humanities Manoeuvers The rigor of an architectural design is so relentless it can easily appear repetitive and boring. Hopper designed this shortcoming with his use of sunlight, which further complicated the architectural patterns with patterns of his own, privileging certain plains, creating brilliant shafts and vivid diagonals. Hopper's buildings are so alive because they fracture space in such interesting ways. What one has here is cubism without the theoretical baggage. Geoffrey Bent Edward Hopper And The Geometry Of Despair Boulevard Two boys team up and build a full-scale replica of the raft in Huckleberry Finn, using hand-axes for authenticity, and cart it on a trailer to school. It seems the perfect symbol of our object: to get away from the prim widow Douglas and float free for a while. Garret Keizer Harper's

Mothers and Fathers Mom! Dad! Can you hear me? Mother and Father stories At its very best the family can be what many people say it is: an island of acceptance and love in the midst of a harsh world. But too often within the family, people take out on each other all the pain and frustrations of their lives that they don’t dare take out on anyone else. Instead of a ready-made source of friends, it is too often a ready-made source of victims and enemies--the place where not the kindest, but the cruellest words are spoken. This may disappoint us, but it should not surprise or horrify us. The family was not invented, or has it evolved, to make children happy, or to provide a secure emotional and psychological background to grow up in. Mankind evolved the family to meet a very basic need, in small and precarious societies: to make sure that as many children as possible were born--and once born, physically taken care of until they could take care of themselves. “Be fruitful and m...

Parsing The Zeitgeist The nomads invented a whole numerical organization which can be found in armies (dozens, hundreds etc.). This original organization implies relationships with women, plants, animals and metals which are very different from those which are codified in a State. To make thought a nomadic power is not necessarily to move, but it is to shake the model of the state apparatus, the idol or image which weighs down thought, the monster squatting on it. To give thought an absolute speed, a war-machine, a geography and all these becomings or these paths which criss-cross a steppe. Gilles Deleuze Dialogues II

Positions And Juxtapositions You could argue people have different approaches to capturing nuggets of wisdom and committing those nuggets to memory. Sure. But I'm skeptical of passive learning. If you don't write down what you're hearing and learning, what the odds you remember it? I take lots of notes in paper mole skin notebooks; every week or so I go back with a different color pen and circle the key sentences; I then transfer these ideas to Evernote files on my computer; and finally, I blog/tweet/publish/email out the crispest, most important ideas or quotes. And this is nothing compared to Tim Ferriss's extreme "take notes like an alpha geek" system, which is worth learning about. If You Aren't Taking Notes, You Aren't Learning Ben Casnocha Why write down? We have recording devices, we can capture the nuggets directly, or lift them on voice if they are text. Then we can stir them and let them play amongst themselves. Nuggets of wisdom...

Briefings For Intelligent Badasses There are multiplicities which constantly go beyond binary machines and do not let themselves be dichotomized. There are centres everywhere, like multiplicities of black holes which do not let themselves be agglomerated. There are lines which do not amount to the path of a point, which break free from structure - lines of light, becomings, without future or past, without memory, which resists the binary machine - woman-becoming which is neither man nor woman, animal-becoming which is neither beast nor man. Non-parallel evolutions, which do not proceed by differentiation, but which leap  from one line to another, between completely heterogeneous beings; cracks, imperceptible ruptures, which break the lines even if they resume elsewhere, leaping over significant breaks… The rhizome is all this. Thinking in things, among things - this is producing a rhizome and not a root, producing the line and not the point. Gilles Deleuze Dialogues II ...

Countervailing The paradox of education is precisely this—that as one begins to become conscious, one begins to examine the society in which he [sic] is being educated. James Baldwin

Directed Wor(l)d-Weaving Nacheinander Tchotchkes (what a mouthful) Nacheinander : (German: one thing after another; sequence), the space between things. Chatchkes , or tchotchkes : That’s a Sanskrit word, it means “little thises and thats” you have around – little figurines and little spoons. I digress: little figurines of speech, and the occasional little spoonerism.

Zeitgeist Mulch for Thought Garden play. In rhetoric, parrhesia is a figure of speech described as: to speak candidly or to ask forgiveness for so speaking.[1] The term is borrowed from theGreek παρρησία (πᾶν "all" + ῥῆσις / ῥῆμα "utterance, speech") meaning literally "to speak everything" and by extension "to speak freely," "to speak boldly," or "boldness." It implies not only freedom of speech, but the obligation to speak the truth for the common good, even at personal risk. Wikipedia 

Cuts Against The Grain Scholars get their knowledge with conscientious thoroughness along projected lines of logic; poets theirs cavalierly and as it happens in and out of books. They stick to nothing deliberately, but let what will stick to them like burrs where they walk in the fields. Robert Frost This podcast is bullshit! This podcast series is really one long seriously playful associational documentary, like a circus train of thought with (so far) 123 one-hour packed boxcars, or showcars. A train that both wanders and stays on track. That affirms the sound-bite as a vehicle of in-depth social analysis ("analysis" = loosening). That presents both individual voices and a strange chorus. That grows from the "neoliberal years", 1980s to the present/future, the years of money-greed (scarcity mentality) in dominance. Therefore it is not asking for money: no fare to be paid for this ride. To jump metaphors, it is, to the project(s) of the progressives, a ...

Narrative Shmarrative No branded content! I shall talk about the matter which for the moment interests me, and cast it aside and talk about something else the moment its interest for me is exhausted; . . . a complete and purposed jumble. Autobiography of Mark Twain … the misery was not the result of some 'act of God' like flood or the potato famine in Ireland - no - it was the product of social organization including its " organising narrative ". Sharon Robertson [emphasis JS]

Rocking The Narrative From Jesus the economist to naughty little monkeys. Chinese Art and Greek Art Rumi/Barks The Prophet said, “There are some who see me by the same light in which I am seeing them. Our natures are one. Without reference to any strands of lineage, without reference to texts or traditions, we drink the life-water together.” Here’s a story about that hidden mystery: The Chinese and the Greeks were arguing as to who were the better artists. The king said, “We’ll settle this matter with a debate.” The Chinese began talking, but the Greeks wouldn’t say anything. They left. The Chinese suggested then that they each be given a room to work on with their artistry, two rooms facing each other and divided by a curtain. The Chinese asked the king for a hundred colors, all the variations, and each morning they came to where the dyes were kept and took them all. The Greeks took no colors. “They’re not part of our work.” They wen...

Elephants In The School System The theme of schooling has played a part in this mural since the beginning: here it surfaces as the dominant theme for the duration of this associational documentary. So here are the great educational mavericks, those powerful defenders of children who saw and named the elephants in the school system. Links: The Ultimate History Lesson, five hours with John Taylor Gatto School Sucks Podcast John Holt on YouTube A. S. Neill on YouTube 1 What did you learn in school today, Dear little boy of mine?  What did you learn in school today, Dear little boy of mine?  I learned that Washington never told a lie, I learned that soldiers seldom die, I learned that everybody's free, That's what the teacher said to me, And that's what I learned in school today, That's what I learned in school. 2 What did you learn in school today, Dear little boy of mine? What did you learn in school today, Dear little boy of...

High-value flotsam on the rising tide That rocks all boats I think it's [the Occupy movement] thrown open an almost kaleidoscopic sense of possibility... We have no idea yet where it all might lead if the democratic culture we're trying to build really does take root. The main thing Occupy did was to throw open the imagination, to get us to start thinking on a scale and grandeur appropriate to the times. David Graeber 'A Kaleidoscopic Sense of Possibility': Interview with David Graeber on Democracy in America Lynn Stuart Parramore AlterNet

Chopped Chautauqua There is nothing like looking, if you want to find something. You certainly usually find something, if you look, but it is not always quite the something you were after. J. R. R. Tolkien in The Hobbit Sometimes game-changing, immensely lucrative epiphanies lie on the far side of seemingly esoteric inquiries. Questioning the Mission of College New York Times By FRANK BRUNI Published: April 20, 2013

Freedom Dossier Fun with fear, death, slavery, and much else! I know of no other manner of dealing with great tasks than as play. Nietzsche In the world to come, each of us will be called to account for all the good things God put on earth which we refused to enjoy. The Talmud In the language of enchantment, there is this sense of a living continuum that cannot be cut up or divided because of the symbiotic interactions and interpenetrations of everything within it. The lexicon is enormously wide, its spheres of reference global. Everywhere, categories overlap. Surprise synchronistic connections lead us into spell-binding ecstasy. Things configure in their own way, woven together as if in some divine aesthetic kaleidoscope. This is not doctrinal religious practice, but an aspect of "opening to shakti"-the dynamic life force that animates everything. One could say that these works are beautiful, except that the word itself all but vanishes in the glit...

Liberation Miscellany We have to be in the culture making business, and soon. Real culture is not built on bad myths of superiority or inevitability or victory. It is built by people willing to learn and remember the stories that slipped from view, the rest of the truth that the empire won’t authorize. Stephen Jenkinson

Hints from the Edge Again, the kingdom of heaven is like unto a net, that was cast into the sea, and gathered of every kind: Which, when it was full, they drew to shore, and sat down, and gathered the good into vessels, but cast the bad away. Jesus, Matt 13, 47 The chorus of springtime sings: Commodity labor for necessities sucks. It is a mass distraction, a miserable diversion from our evolutionary potential, which is teetering on the edge of a birth - or our death. These long trains of thoughts, past towns familiar and unfamiliar, are hints from the edge, looking down and in (depth psychology) and out to the socioeconomy in contractions or throes or both.

Unauthorized Trails Between the crucifixion and the resurrection. And it is still narrative - just not in the closed-ended Aristotelian way. It doesn't have a simple crisis and conclusion. It just keeps going. Douglas Rushkoff

Spoken Scrapbook Work-life balance?... ...oh, oh, if one but had the body for it one would live out one’s days in van Gogh’s room at Arles, eating up comfort and beauty and having it too, there in one last fell binge of boyhood.... to be there on the featherbed, on the oilcloth-looking floor amid one’s things... You wouldn’t even have to worry whether you can afford it. What, this poor Goodwill stuff...? ...I’d pay my life out there gladly, not so much a hero as a loving dilettante of idyll, using only the plain equipment of beauty. Substituting the hard work of freedom with the even harder work of contemplation... There are worse character flaws than sloth. Nationalism, I think, patriotism, the too-forgiving love of tribe, maybe even of family itself. All the flaws of a restrictive loyalty, whatever makes us want to be part of a small idea, whatever makes us dangerous or allows us to entertain, even for a moment, the idea of a Mother of Battles. Much better to wait it out a...

Healers and Dealers I tried to liberally shepherd this Talk Flock. It is not just sheep chosen from the enormous herds and strays, it is sheep, wolves, lions, snakes, bugs, apes, birds, "workers". From this flock can be heard laughter, cries, musings, dreamings, exclamations, hard-nosed assertions, and, of course, playful imaginative excursions. Jack Saturday Thanks to Caroline Casey for catching the unintended wolf diss last week, and for the remedy I had in my trove. “Words are animals, alive with a will of their own.” C.G. Jung

Reframing The Conversations In our hands is placed the power greater than their hoarded gold. Go and enjoy wise woman Caroline Casey and her enlightening guests , add support if you can afford it. And of course the same with Dr. Dave at Shrink Rap Radio , for his premier psychology podcast. Perinatal Matrices explained .

Where The Hell's The Money? Hopscotching around the neoliberal years, following dollar signs!

A Cocktail Party Of Gurus, Pundits, Poets And Hecklers "This is the city… and I am one of the citizens; Whatever interests the rest interests me… politics, churches, newspapers, schools Benevolent societies, improvements, banks, tariffs, steamships…" Whitman’s Specimen Days, which he described as “the most wayward, spontaneous, fragmentary book ever printed,” is a moving scrapbook of clippings and jottings from the whole span of his life, including his years as a volunteer nurse in Union hospitals. While conceding that “the real war will never get into the books,” in Specimen Days Whitman tried to get at what he called the “interior history” of the war. Unlike more conventional scrapbookers with their impersonal digests of clippings from the distant battlefront, Whitman (who famously boasted, “I am large. I contain multitudes”) wrote himself into the proceedings. ... A hyperactive cutter and paster, Emily Dickinson also repurposed scraps and clippings for ori...

More Of The Different Following our path is in effect a kind of going off the path, through open country. David Whyte Here's some interesting info to go with the inspiring words about Samuel Pierpont Langley and the Wright Bros: When Wilbur Wright was asked, in 1905, what the purpose of his machine might be, he answered simply, “War”. As soon as they were confident that the technology worked, the brothers approached the war offices of several nations, hoping to sell their patent to the highest bidder. The US government bought it for $30,000, and started test bombing in 1910. The aeroplane was conceived, designed, tested, developed and sold, in other words, not as a vehicle for tourism, but as an instrument of destruction. George Monbiot

Clips For The Creatively Maladjusted Cupitt's deeply performative and creative vision of religion asks us to place our faith in the incessant flux of language and discourse - signs and images being our earthly kingdom of eternal plenitude, an accessible realm in which we can exercise our spiritual liberation. At the very least, this is a religion that would chime with the most 'modern' (and perforce, postmodern) of our great play rhetorics - self-oriented play and imaginative play, directing a multimedia performance of the spirit. Pat Kane The Play Ethic

Mindhold By Mindhold "The psyche has many little pockets for tucking things away and sometimes it's a good idea to have a sort-out." Posted by COINNEACH SHANKS

Imaginal Cells Cledonomancy! In the occult of classical antiquity, cledonism, or cledonomancy, was a kind of divination based on chance events or encounters, such as words occasionally uttered. The word is formed from the Greek κληδὼν which signifies rumor, a report, omen, fame, name. Cicero observes that the Pythagoreans made observation not only of the words of the gods, but of those of men; and accordingly believed the pronouncing of certain words, e.g. the word incendium (destruction, ruin), at a meal to be very unlucky. Thus, instead of prison, they used the word domicilium (residence, dwelling); and to avoid Erinyes, said Eumenides. According to Pausanias, cledonism was popular at Smyrna, where the Apollonian Oracles were interpreted. He also mentions its use at the shrine of Hermes Agoraios in Pharae. An individual, upon whispering a question into the god's ear, plugged his own ears, left the agora, and then listened for the god's answer among the chance wor...