Author: phillip

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Quotes for a Creative to Live By

Musashi’s Dokkōdō::

Resentment and complaint are appropriate neither for oneself nor others.

The War of Art by Steven Pressfield

The professional loves her work. She is invested in it wholeheartedly. But she does not forget that the work is not her. Her artistic self contains many works and many performances. Already the next is percolating inside her. The next will be better, and the one after that better still.

The Burnout Society:

Capitalism is not a political question, but a force of nature that must be tamed, so that we may all share in its fruits.

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Quotes on Exploring the Depths

Yet another from Alan Watts in Cloud-Hidden, Whereabouts Unknown:

A great mind is also considered “profound” because it plumbs the depths of things.

From the introduction to Watts’ The Wisdom of Insecurity:

The strategy Watts follows is not specifically Buddhist but goes back to the most ancient insights of the Vedic seers of India: eliminate what is unreal, and all that remains will be real. It’s a simple but ruthless approach, since there are so many things we accept as real which are in fact merely symbolic: “… thoughts, ideas, and words are ‘coins’ for real things. They are not those things.”

The Secrets of Consulting by Gerald Weinberg:

There’s just no escaping Rudy’s Rutabaga Rule: Once you eliminate your number one problem, number two gets a promotion.

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Three Quotes on Intervention

Chesterton’s Fence: A Lesson in Second Order Thinking:

As simple as Chesterton’s Fence is as a principle, it teaches us an important lesson. Many of the problems we face in life occur when we intervene with systems without an awareness of what the consequences could be.

How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie

She noticed that occasionally he did a particularly good piece of work. She made a point to praise him for it in front of the other people. Each day the job he did all around got better, and pretty soon he started doing all his work efficiently. Now he does an excellent job and other people give him appreciation and recognition. Honest appreciation got results where criticism and ridicule failed.

James Clear, 3-2-1: Paying Attention, Staying Hopeful in Bad Times, and Ten Year Plans:

Many problems are minor when you solve them right away, but grow into an enormous conflict when you let them linger.
As a rule of thumb, fix it now.

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Quotes on Mastery

I was inspired by reading Austin Kleon’s post Two quotes to get this blog going once again. I love my daily Readwise quote reviews (642 day streak so far!). Sharing the quote combinations that strike me each day sounds like a great exercise. To start it off, we have an anchor to “mastery”.

Robert Greene’s The Daily Laws:

Daily Law: You must see your attempt at attaining mastery as something extremely necessary and positive.

Alan Watts, Cloud-Hidden, Whereabouts Unknown:

It is said to be “difficult” to master the art of Chinese writing, but this means only that the art must grow on you over many years. We use the word “difficult” for tasks which require extreme force or effort, and over which we must perspire, grunt, and groan. But the difficulty of writing Chinese with the brush is to make the brush write by itself, and the Taoists call this the art of wu-wei—which may be translated variously as “easy does it,” “roll with the punch,” “go with the stream,” “don’t force it,” or, more literally, “not pushing.”

I can appreciate Watts’ description of Wu Wei from my own ideal when cooking.

Daily Stoic, “If You Want to Be Powerful”:

You could be powerful right now, in your own life, in your own mind…if you decided to seize what was already yours. If you stopped giving your power away.

Relayed by Douglas Harding in The Science of the 1st Person:

ST. JOHN OF THE CROSS: That thou mayest know everything, seek to know nothing.
HUANG-PO: Only have no mind of any kind; this is known as undefiled knowledge.

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The Peace of Wild Things

In these chaotic times, I find that I am increasingly drawn to the wilderness. Wendell Berry perfectly captures the feeling of nourishment that comes from spending time in nature.

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me 
and I wake in the night at the least sound 
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, 
I go and lie down where the wood drake 
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. 
I come into the peace of wild things 
who do not tax their lives with forethought 
of grief. I come into the presence of still water. 
And I feel above me the day-blind stars 
waiting with their light. For a time 
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

WENDELL BERRY

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How is the Story of Jonah Relevant Today?

I was reading to Damien about Yom Kippur, and there was a mention that it was common to read the book of Jonah at this time. So, I took a moment to read the book (it is very short) and asked myself a question: how is the story of Jonah alive in my own life?

An odd question for a story about a man who runs from God and gets swallowed by a fish.

However, I am certainly familiar with the experience of being called to do something, feeling fear in response, and running/hiding from that calling for as long as possible. This is Steven Pressfield’s Resistance at work. And, like Jonah, whenever I ignore the call I encounter calamity. A storm appears in my life. Even worse, those around me tend to suffer along with me, like Jonah’s compatriots on the boat. But this storm is my own creation, just as it was Jonah’s – I am hiding from “the call”, from “the voice”, from “the will of God”. The burden of not doing something I know I should be doing is difficult to bear. And hiding for too long leads to destruction and ruin.

Like Jonah, I do not always react favorably when something doesn’t play out in the way I expected. I also give in to anger. I let it consume me and cloud my reason. I, too, have been known in my anger to echo the words that Jonah spoke: “let me die!” God’s question in response to Jonah is one that I would do well to repeat in my own life: “Do you do well to be angry?” Of course, God, Jonah, and I all know that question is rhetorical.

Where Jonah serves as a model for us all is his reaction to the situation he is in. When the storm threatens the ship, he willingly goes overboard to ease the burden on his compatriots. After three days and nights in the belly of a fish, he does not curse God. Instead, he offers his thanks, and he finally picks up the mantle that has been thrust upon him. He repents, and then he is delivered (as the Assyrians are too).

He might pout, he might be angry at the outcome being different than what he expected, but that shows his humanity. Surely, Jonah will atone for his anger and once again reach the state of “at-one-ment” that is the goal of Yom Kippur.

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The Great Wave

What a marvelous blessing
to participate in this life
this wave of consciousness
rolling and roiling through space and time
billions of years in the making

This experiment will not end even when we do.
it will keep rolling on
as YOU will roll on along with it
(even if it’s in a different form)

Connected Thoughts

  • It’s amusing to think of this great wave in the context of things like people complaining about how much time someone spends on a video game. The universe worked for billions of years to develop video games – maybe it’s not such a waste after all.
  • The Book by Alan Watts

    The sensation of “I” as a lonely and isolated center of being is so powerful and commonsensical, and so fundamental to our modes of speech and thought, to our laws and social institutions, that we cannot experience selfhood except as something superficial in the scheme of the universe. I seem to be a brief light that flashes but once in all the aeons of time—a rare, complicated, and all-too-delicate organism on the fringe of biological evolution, where the wave of life bursts into individual, sparkling, and multicolored drops that gleam for a moment only to vanish forever. Under such conditioning it seems impossible and even absurd to realize that myself does not reside in the drop alone, but in the whole surge of energy which ranges from the galaxies to the nuclear fields in my body.”

    the constant awareness of death shows the world to be as flowing and diaphanous as the filmy patterns of blue smoke in the air—that there really is nothing to clutch and no one to clutch it. This is depressing only so long as there remains a notion that there might be some way of fixing it, of putting it off just once more, or hoping that one has, or is, some kind of ego-soul that will survive bodily dissolution.

  • Does it Matter? by Alan Watts

    From this it is but a short step to the realization that all forms of life and being are simply variations on a single theme: we are all in fact one being doing the same thing in as many different ways as possible.

  • This Is It by Alan Watts

    My own feeling, and of course it is nothing more than an opinion, is that we transcend death, not as individual memory-systems, but only in so far as our true identity is the total process of the world as distinct from the apparently separate organism.

  • The Lady of the Lake by Andrzej Sapkowski

    ‘There,’ said the elf. ‘The ancient snake Ouroboros. Ouroboros symbolises eternity and is itself eternal. It is the eternal going away and the eternal return. It is something that has no beginning and no end.
    ‘Time is like the ancient Ouroboros. Time is fleeting moments, grains of sand passing through an hourglass. Time is the moments and events we so readily try to measure. But the ancient Ouroboros reminds us that in every moment, in every instant, in every event, is hidden the past, the present and the future. Eternity is hidden in every moment. Every departure is at once a return, every farewell is a greeting, every return is a parting. Everything is simultaneously a beginning and an end.

  • “Desiderata” by Max Erhmann

    You are a child of the universe,
    no less than the trees and the stars;
    you have a right to be here.
    And whether or not it is clear to you,
    no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.

    With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams,
    it is still a beautiful world.
    Be cheerful.
    Strive to be happy.

  • Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman

    It is not the end. There is no end. It is simply the end of the old times, Loki, and the beginning of the new times. Rebirth always follows death.

  • The Way of Zen by Alan W. Watts

    Buddhism has frequently compared the course of time to the apparent motion of a wave, wherein the actual water only moves up and down, creating the illusion of a “piece” of water moving over the surface.

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The Planetary Organism

Some days I wake up and I can see the world-organism. An entire planetary system breathing and eating and thinking. I can feel the long, slow pulse of each day. 

The internet is a grand experiment, and it increasingly reminds me of this image of the world organism. As humans, we need to converse to think. The world is too complex for one mind. The internet allows us to converse across boundaries, to broaden the scale of our thinking and knowledge. We are creating a single mind on a planetary scale.

We feel like individuals, but how separate can we ever truly be?  We are inescapably connected. Now more than ever.

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Apollonia Chalee

This is a poem which I received inside a bag of coffee. I cannot escape the character of Apollonia Chalee – wise beyond what her rational employers might choose to believe.

Apollonia Chalee
by John Canady

Maid

Mrs. Fisher’s superstitious. She
believes machines clean better than
human hands. She scolds me when
I miss an opportunity
to haul her caterwauling vacuum
room to room, as if my broom
might dirty her linoleum.

Mrs. Fisher still insists her new
electric washer’s quicker than
a tub and mangle, though I mopped
all day last Tuesday when it chose
to spew soap suds and dirty water
down the stairs. I tell her discontented
spirits live in these machines, but

Mrs. Fisher twists her husband’s arm
to buy more gadgets from the catalogs
Sears sends her. Mr. Fisher is
a scientist. A scientist
I think should know a little better
than to let his wife invite|
devils in metal skins into his home.

Appolonia Chalee grew up near Los Alamos and worked as a maid during WWII for families of scientists involved in the Manhattan Project.

From Critical Assembly

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Prioritizing Self-Care

We hear it all the time: you must take care of yourself before you can take care of someone else. And yet, this advice is ignored so often. How many relationships have fallen apart because someone violated this single maxim?

I’ve certainly destroyed a few by failing to heed it.

But now the stakes are too high. I have a business. I have a wife. I have children. I have a house to maintain. I have land to maintain. I cannot afford to go off the rails. When I do go off the rails: things fall apart, time is wasted, and I have to dig myself back out of a hole. The pattern can’t continue like that.

I have to take care of myself because so many other things depend on me being in tip-top shape.

So what do I actually need?

  • Time to work on the business so that I can support myself and the people who depend on me
  • Time to work outside – to prepare the yard, produce food for my family, get some sweet vitamin D, and to refresh my spirit by spending time in the boundless beauty of nature
  • Time to work out so I can maintain my physical fitness, reduce stress, and improve my thinking
  • Time for meditative hobbies: bonsai, growing mushrooms, and playing music. Excellent outlets to cultivate learning, focus, intensity, absorption, and beauty.
  • Time to write: to express myself creatively, reflect, ponder, and document

These are the activities that I need most of all to feel grounded in my own being. And when my body and mind are nourished and refreshed, I am capable of helping others.

The next task is to make sure that I am actually making time for each of these crucial self-care activities each week. Of course, there are many time pressures with a family and a business. That is no excuse. Self-care has to come first, or else I am a ticking time bomb.