“Life is physics orchestrated.”
As I think about Character and what it is and how it affects our lives––or rather, how it’s an expression of what our lives are and have become and are becoming––I realize that all things get to be how they are by some process. They don’t just up and appear.
Strange, then, that I never once considered how the fuck the moon came to be. Truly strange! In all my decades of being a living, conscious being, I never once paused to ask: “How the hell did that grey dust ball, umm, begin?”
I’m happy to report, that my seventh physics book of the year, Until the End of Time, answered this question thus: Earth + collision with smaller planet + lots of ensuing space dust + gravity + entropy = Moon.
To what extent have you considered how you have the character you have? What small planet crashed into yours?
Speaking of meteorites crashing: there’s a new music album upon us that reeks of the unprecedented. Read this review:
Fiona Apple’s fifth record is unbound. No music has ever sounded quite like it. Apple recorded Fetch the Bolt Cutters both in and with her Venice Beach home, banging on its walls, stomping on its ground. Self-reliance is its rule, curiosity is its key. Fetch the Bolt Cutters seems to almost completely turn the volume down on music history, while it cranks up raw, real life—handclaps, chants, and other makeshift percussion, in harmony with space, echoes, whispers, screams, breathing, jokes, so-called mistakes, and dog barks. (At least five dogs are credited: Mercy, Maddie, Leo, Little, and Alfie.) All of this debris orbits around the core of Apple’s music: her voice, her piano, and most of all her words, which have always been her primary instrument. It creates a wild symphony of the everyday.
Read the full review of the album and why the music cognoscenti are giving it perfect scores here. “It’s not pretty. It’s free.” Sounds to me exactly what true Character Design aspires to.
Perhaps a communal live Zoom listening session is in order?
“Bubblegum is set in an alternate present-day America in which the Internet does not exist and has never existed.” Who wants do read this alongside CxD? And communicate about it using pigeons and postcards? Serious inquiries only.
(Unless your name is Nathan Zweig, in which case let’s say we’ll read it together and then not read it together.)
“Adam and Eve were condemned to toil in the dirt and through the physical pains of pregnancy and childbirth, but also to enjoy the goods of that physical labour. Even in a postlapsarian world, they knew it to be divinely ordered and laden with meaning. Many of us have left that world and live in one with different, all-too-human hierarchies and forms of oppression.
With this liberation came a new form of intellectual and spiritual work. Adam and Eve’s disenchanted descendants work to produce not just food for their stomachs but also purpose for their souls. Intellectual and spiritual goods are no longer luxuries for an already liberal and unencumbered aristocracy; they are now needs for anyone hoping to realize the promise of freedom and not just suffer its discomfiting effects. Spiritual work is both burdensome and liberating.
Weber didn’t believe in the guarantee of human self-perfection. He rejected the unconstrained expectations of some liberals and more-radical socialists who held out hope that an embrace of human autonomy would make such perfection possible. His was a bleak, not a perfectionist, liberalism for which freedom was inextricable from duty and responsibility.
But it was a liberalism nonetheless, and so his final injunction to his audience in Munich was: ‘We should set to work and meet the demands of the day – of our life’s work – both professionally and personally.’ In these final lines, Weber ties the vocational to the human; the specialized, disciplined and constrained to the responsibility to lead a life. We have no other choice but to act as though such perfection is our potential future. In a disenchanted age, we all, not only the self-christened intellectuals, must go about the work of learning how to live. Whoever continues to look out over the horizon hoping for a prophet or history or reason to bring meaning avoids the work of becoming human.”
Special Event: Great Compassion in the Age of Contagion
“The pandemic has pulled the ground from beneath us but it has also called us together like nothing else. We have the opportunity to participate in the most remarkable act of global solidarity that we may ever witness. We are “on the brink of everything” as Parker Palmer has so powerfully written — medically, environmentally, politically, and culturally. How do our spiritual practices, and especially our blessed communities of spiritual friends, support us and encourage us as we navigate the territory where fear and courage meet? If our various practices have proven to be worthy of our dedicated effort and if our communities are truly a place of respite and renewal, now is the time to commit to them as if our lives depended on them, because they do. Everything is in the balance. Everything counts and everyone matters.
Please join us for this online gathering in which we will reflect on how we might survive and even thrive in the face of such turmoil and terror.”
I wrote about Flint Sparks in several past issues of CxD, but here is his bio once again:
Flint Sparks, PhD. is a former psychologist and an ordained Zen Buddhist priest. He is the guiding teacher for the Open Door Zen Community in Madison, WI and the Appamada community of Austin, Texas. His engaging and wholehearted presence provides an anchor and a guide for attending to life's challenges and opportunities.
Residing now in Molokai, Hawaii, his teaching and consulting activities bridge the fields of health psychology, the psychology of contemplative practices, and traditional Zen Buddhist practice. Flint was scheduled to be at Threshold in person but we are fortunate to have him offer this teaching from a distance, his 12th annual talk in Madison. We are delighted to have friends worldwide join us for this special evening.
Click here for the link to the talk.
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