My gentle readers, all 4 or 5 of you (hey, thanks for hanging out with me) might be saying what is the point of all this hyper-intellectation? Why should you care about definitions of mind and theories of aesthetics and mapping and materialism? I really have no idea why you might care. Why do I care? Sometimes I'm not sure myself. To replace one folly, one set of words, with another seems hardly worth the trouble. The world is, and that's enough. But here is why I care about all this, really, and it's the most dorkiest reason in the world: love. Yep, the most cliched word ever. But you see: 1. love is a verb, not a noun, and 2. there's all kinds of love, and as long as you live, you can keep on learning to love, in different and maybe better, braver, bigger ways.
This morning in the pre-dawn dark as I was driving my daughter to the bus and thinking about Bateson's use of Jung's distinction between Pleroma (dead matter, like stones) and Creatura (living things) to counteract the medieval Christian/Cartesian mind/matter dualism that has really f*cked us up as a civilization, I looked out into the distance across the Ka'u desert and saw the fiery orange glow of our local live volcano Kilauea, and knew that Jung's distinction is not very, very distinct.
Also that I love that volcano.
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(the wind of Ka'u that) beats up the dust
Blog Archive
Books to Bring Along
- Braiding Sweetgrass/Robin Wall Kimmerer
- Rancher Farmer Fisherman/Miriam Horn
- Animal Happiness/Vicki Hearne
- What is Life/Lynn Margulis
- Under the Volcano/Malcolm Lowry
- Silent Spring/Rachel Carson
- A Sand County Almanac/Aldo Leopold
2 comments:
I love that volcano too, in the sense of, "when i think of that volcano, i feel an emotion for which i can come up with no better name than love." But it doesn't make much sense in the more common definition of love, "that volcano's happiness is essential to my own." I'm really not sure what would constitute happiness for a volcano. :)
Living rock. It just is.
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