One Thing

If there is no other thing you take from my words, now or ever, receive this: the great question of your life is your response to what the universe presents to you.

I call the motions in history toward the Best 'acts of God,' and seek to join in them. I want to be part of the work of the best, even if my only work is to stay out of the way as the Best unfolds and fulfills itself. Remember that "they also serve who only stand and wait."

Your response might be a question. 'Why, god?' seems to be a common one.

Your response might be a complaint, or a curse.

Your response might be a deed of mercy, an act of compassion, a thought, a song, or a whisper.

My point is that any of these can be good or ill, depending on what is necessary to the best. If one dedicates oneself to the best as one knows, and the God who knows and wills the Best (the God who loves, the Beloved), then one is usually on to a true, good, and beautiful response.

Above all, I charge you, constant reader: remember that your response may be informed but can not be mediated by the actions of others. I call the response to the world that one embraces the Best, worship. I declare this of worship: that the one thing it cannot be is stereotyped or simply copied. If it were so, one could not exist, because one would be unnecessary to the ultimately efficient Great Work.

5 Levels of Communication ala Powell

My paraphrase:

I. Phatic (Cliches)
II. Factual
III. Evaluative (Opinions, I believe statements, I think statements)
IV. Emotive (Gut, Conviction, I feel statements, I want statements)
V. Communal or Peak (Needs, perforce Vulnerabilities)

"If you are on fire, folks will come to watch you burn." - paraphrase of Dale Calvert, in his blog post about public speaking referencing the five levels.

So, when I speak to you, I notice, I know, I think, I believe, I feel, I desire, and I need all at once. In fact, I do all these things all the time every conscious moment of each day.

With the possible exception of believing. I'm understanding "beliefs" psychologically here, to mean mental structures somewhere in the no man's land between thoughts and feelings. That is, beliefs are neither evanescent impressions, like feelings; nor chains binding assumptions and propositions, like logical thinking.

Mood is a close word to what I mean here. A belief is abiding like a mood, but may include rather more thoughts. In fact, a belief might be simply a coupling of mood and thought--not merely what I think about something, but what I intend to do about it because ... . If one follows the linked causes all the way to their root, one will find somewhere a transition from objective statements to normative statements, and it is this transition that I find beliefs. At the interface of fact and feeling as it were.

One Thousand Hours

Either we see another day, or we don't.

I have fifty odd years to live, statiscally speaking. I should plan for that time; if I endure so long, the time will pass anyway whether I am intentional in my use of it or not.

A friend of mine started playing guitar when he was thirteen. He's thirty three now, and he estimates he's got 23,000 hours or so logged on guitar. It shows.

In one thousand hours I might:

*learn to please myself calligraphically
*finish the first draft of a novel
*write a cycle of sonnets or songs
*finish and produce a game, from soup to nuts (or apple to egg, as the Romans said)
*read a couple hundred novels
*watch all the movies I must for my Master's in Creative, as well as make my own forty minute film
*work half a year full time (40/168 h per week)

What could you do, if you started now?

Remember, you can't start, except where you are.

Three in one: Humans

Genesis 2:7:

And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being.

So there existed this man named Nee To-sheng, which in English is Watchman Nee. He lived in the twentieth century, and he died in prison on account of his faith in what Kurt Haley refers to as "that love."

Br'er Watchman taught (probably in some book like The Breaking of the Outer Man and the Release of the Spirit, but I'll need to check) that from this verse, which he thought pivotal to understanding some other passages in the Bible, we receive a trinitarian notion of what humans are. So the dust of the ground is Adam's body, his physical form, what John Sewell calls his earth suit. And the very breath of God is Adam's life-breath, his motive force, that marvelous synergy that distinguishes corpses from babies and belles and beaus. And the life of the man is in the relation of body and spirit, the "living being" of the passage above.