Category Archives: Philosophy

fiction, Philosophy, Reblogged

drinks

by Michelle Nancy Kennedy

on my desk, drinks. some empty, some half.

today is not the day to ponder half what. today is not the day to ponder emptiness in any capacity. today is a day to put away laundry and watch television and eat pasta and have a coffee from tim horton’s at an appropriate hour of the day.

today is not the day to ponder how bizarre life is or what cell phone plan you need to have in order to complete fulfilledness.

today is not the day to comment on the existence of fullfilledness as a word or not.

my dog needs a bath and the salt grinder needs to be refilled.

Standard
Art and Beauty, Love, Philosophy

Dear —,

You and I shared something sweet that summer: an innocence, a bright hopeful moment. We shared the will to ignore those unfaceable sides of ourselves, permitted each other to avoid our potentials and stay comfortable. Back then, my raw emotions were electric wires without casing, flung wildly around, trying to get a response from your  stoic and distant electrician heart.

It was a long time ago now, and I wanted (so badly!) to love you forever, though I didn’t know how or when or why. The further I get from that moment, the more I can gather a semblance of what my love can be. It begins to take a shape I can define. It begins to exist without a need for words, without scientific evidence. It lives and breathes independently of fearful recipients.

As 40 looms for you, I imagine you living in the house your grandfather built, in the land of the dinosaurs, the air stale with your cigarette smoke. Does the shadow of mortality threatening your youth get cast ever-longer on your brow? Maybe you’ve found a lovely woman to make a family with, though somehow I can’t envision you with a toddler in your arms. Maybe a big bounding dog nearby.

As for me, 30 approaches with it’s golden bright promises and my heart and brain are getting acquainted. There is a mutual respect and a healthy distance as they learn to trust the permanence within the impermanent. That all started with you, dear friend.

Thank you for that glimpse in time, I hope it also offered you some gifts that you will cherish always.

All my love,

Jozel

Standard
Philosophy, Random, Rants and Raves

Leap Day 2012: making up for missed time

The Leap Year as defined by Wikipedia:

Although most years of the modern calendar have 365 days, a complete revolution around the sun takes approximately 365 days and 6 hours. Every four years, during which an extra 24 hours have accumulated, one extra day is added to keep the count coordinated with the sun’s apparent position.

And so here we are, Feb. 29, 2012, trying to compensate for an inaccuracy in the basic system we use for measuring time. A mathematician said: “Wait! it doesn’t add up! 365 days is 6 hrs too short! but I don’t want to start again, so let’s just tack on an extra day every four years. Simple and effective. Plus that way I can finally move on to my next project.” But wait! There’s more!

It is, however, slightly inaccurate to calculate an additional 6 hours each year. A better approximation, derived from the Alfonsine tables, is that the Earth makes a complete revolution around the sun in 365 days, 5 hours, 49 minutes, and 16 seconds. To compensate for the difference, an end-of-century year is not a leap year unless it is also exactly divisible by 400. This means that the years 1600 and 2000 were leap years, as will be 2400 and 2800, but the years 1700, 1800 and 1900 were not, nor will 2100, 2200 and 2300.

But it makes my brain hurt to think how limited this approach is. If you’ve discovered an inaccuracy in your formula, shouldn’t you start again rather than create a more complicated formula? otherwise, your result is always founded on a weak theory.

Time is a mathematical concept, and as Einstein said: As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.

So rather than forgetting about it again until feb. 29, 2016, let’s start a Leap Day Resolution – where we resolve to remember that time is more than mere squares on a calendar, and less than a definition of age or experience.

The idea for Metric Time is an interesting one to look into.

———————————————————————————-

Once you can accept the universe as matter expanding into nothing that is something, wearing stripes with plaid comes easy. - A. Einstein

Standard
Philosophy, photography, poetry, travel

the air she was living off of

There are so many ambitions in this world and yet the only one I seem to adhere to is the ambition to follow the wordless and incomprehensible musings of my heart – whose muffled and distorted signals tend to drive me to make bold and drastic decisions to compensate for a lack in overall design.

Perhaps I am on the scenic route to my own inevitable end, and perhaps that is the material point!

On the other hand, perhaps I’ve got it all wrong and the point is to build an empire; a family legacy that will provide the means for my many (so far unaccounted for) descendants to do literally whatever they can dream up. Compromise my humanity – sell it to the highest bidder – like the Rockefellers, Hiltons etc – ad nauseum.

Does success amount to a bronze plaque somewhere Important with my name on it?

I muse at times on what I will have I accomplished with my life when I die. At this rate, my headstone will probably say -

Here lies Jozel, a floating philosopher – she didn’t succumb – she didn’t commit

If only she could have bottled the air she was living off of

If I could get a famous poet or two to write on my headstone, it would add intrigue… or poetry… at the very least…

  • The grave of Robert Fergusson – engraved by Robbie Burns and R.L. Stevenson – Edinburgh, Scotland

In any case, it definitely will never say -

Here lies Jozel – who succeeded in living 98 years without ever holding a lit cigarette

But by 2081 there won’t be headstones anymore, who am I kidding? They’ll probably be disintegrating my remains to fuel the newest wave of Alternative Reality Social Interaction devices. or something.

The grave of the Lazar family - Bucharest, Romania


Standard
joz' tidbits, Philosophy, Rants and Raves

It’s funny

It’s funny to me that we get so caught up in our minds, in our perceptions, in our ruts.

We forget how many ways something can be considered, how many factors can change from one moment to the next. We repeat an opinion to ourselves in between all the opportunities we take to state that opinion out loud to those we know.

Why are we so afraid of being surprised by ourselves? by others? by the world in general? It’s true that it can seem so comforting to feel like I have a “handle” on a situation, like I know something about how it will all turn out.

The truth is that no matter how many similar situations I’ve seen or how much I feel I know myself or the others involved, there is always an uncontrolled variable, one ingredient that I cannot account for – new revelation of information.

I am starting to understand that despite my greatest efforts otherwise, I am constantly evolving – self-actualizing… whether or not I am doing anything, my senses are gathering insight and information on various levels – my skills and sensibilities develop of their own accord, and my internal emotions and fears are rumbling around waiting for particular moments to be made visible in order to be properly processed and expressed.

Being a human being is already a whole lot of crazy from one day to the next, without even considering the world that exists outside of those seven layers of skin. Let’s strive to be gentle with ourselves (and others) as we dig ever deeper and become (ideally) ever wiser.

Standard
funny, Philosophy, Random, Reblogged

funny stuff to see

found this website today… I’d call it a weblog, but it’s oh so much more than that… she’s Australian, her writing is often hilarious, endearing, colourful and shakespearean, The Wuc is something you really should browse for a chuckle or two… I recommend the extra extra page and the letters to page as well.

or you can always watch a few random animal videos on youtube…

whatever it takes to lighten up, my friends… just keep it light.

Standard
joz' tidbits, Philosophy, Rants and Raves, Spirituality, travel

something i wrote 4 yrs 5 mos ago.

back when I thought I knew stuff.

May 21st 2007

Just as a pebble is polished by years and years of tumbling along the riverbeds and up and down beaches, so must we allow ourselves to be shaped by the elements throwing us around.

First the boulder falls from the highest peak of a mountain, then crumbles as it falls. More often than not it is carried down to a stream by another avalanche and a series of rain falls. Once it has reached a stream, it must roll along the bottom, to be left at dams, or left at points that join a larger river, or even left on the bottom the ocean. Years can pass at different phases – the whole span of transformation takes hundreds of years. The stone must allow itself to be tumbled about and finally thrown up and down sandy beaches by the volition of the tides.

So it is with the effect of life on our human souls. Every fall brings us to a new bump that we can smooth out if we so choose.

The individual does have free will: to decide whether or not she wants to follow the stream or fight against it. Whether or not he chooses to be tossed around until he is smooth of bumps and imperfections. We can decide to stay on the mountain continually abused by falling debris, or we can decide to keep our bumps and scratches even though nature will constantly hustle and bustle us. We cannot change the course of nature, but we do get to choose to let these events shape and mold us into soft, beautiful pebbles, finally collected by a sweet mother and her five-year-old staying at the cottage for the summer.

In life, we must expect to be thrown up against each other, dropped and carried at random by passers by. Every piece of the journey holds obstacles, yet to reach the most desired state, we must be patient with our little pebble-souls. Not all of our bumps can be worn down after merely one avalanche, risen tide, or waterfall. Only with patience and the passing of time does a pebble begin to achieve a somewhat smooth surface.

Standard
Art and Beauty, Philosophy, Quotations, Spirituality

Zarathustra – blissfully flighty

Lift up your hearts, my brothers, high, higher! And don’t forget your legs! Lift up your legs, too, good dancers, and even better: stand on your heads!
This laugher’s crown, this rosary crown: but I myself put on this crown, I myself pronounced my laughter holy. I could find no one else today strong enough for that.
Zarathustra the dancer, Zarathustra the light one, who beckons with his wings poised for flight, beckoning to all the birds, poised and ready, blissfully flighty.
Zarathustra the soothsayer, Zarathustra the soothlaugher, not impatient, not unconditional, who loves leaps and caprices; I crown myself with this crown!
This crown of the laugher, the rosary crown: to you, my brothers, I throw this crown! I pronounced laughter holy: you higher men, learn – to laugh!
-Sils-Maria, Oberengadin
August 1886 

“What, under the lens of life is the meaning of morality? [...] From the start Christianity was, essentially and fundamentally, the embodiment of disgust and antipathy for life, merely disguised, concealed, got up as the belief in an ‘other’ or a ‘better’ life. Hatred of the ‘world’, the condemnation of the emotions, the fear of beauty and sensuality, a transcendental world invented the better to slander this one, basically a yearning for non-existence, for repose until the ‘sabbath of sabbaths’ – all of this, along with Christianity’s unconditional resolve to acknowledge only moral values, struck me as the most dangerous and sinister of all possible manifestations of a ‘will to decline’, at the very least a sign of the most profound affliction, fatigue, sullenness, exhaustion, impoverishment of life. For in the face of morality (particularly Christian, unconditional morality), life must  constantly and inevitably be in the wrong, because life is something essentially amoral – in the end, crushed beneath the weight of contempt and eternal denial, life must be felt to be undesirable, valueless in itself. [...] So then, with this questionable book, my instinct,  an affirmative instinct for life, turned against morality and invented a fundamentally opposite doctrine and valuation of life, purely artistic and anti-Christian [...] I call it the Dionysiac.”

-All of the above taken from The Birth of Tragedy by Friedrich Nietzsche

Standard
Philosophy, photography, Spirituality, travel

time

From their lofty seat, the Salisbury Crags admire the city of Edinburgh, including the Queen’s Palace and the great fortress, mortal-built stone legacies which pale in comparison to the 340 million years that the crags have been here.

Like a great cloud of ancestors, the crags watch the self-important actions of those below in detached amusement.

Standard
Philosophy, photography, Random

post 300 – mortality

I could calculate probabilities and averages. Many logical things could be devised to post-pone it.

But at some point in time, I am going to die.  Maybe today. Maybe in 58 years. Does not make it less true.

This cat will die. Does he know? Does he care?

We die. All of us. Sometimes in plagues, sometimes freak accidents.

Why the emotional attack at the reminder of someone’s mortality? Maybe that’s what makes us human. If so what, then, would be the point of being human?

Why not go forward with the conscious knowledge that you will die? Embracing the temporary nature of things.

I think the attempt to make things permanent is the nature of our wrestle with Meaning.

Standard