Water Wisdom

Water follows the path of least resistance, but in doing so, it intensifies and regularizes its own path by eroding the ground it travels over, creating a new path of least resistance. In time, greater volume and discharge propels water flows out of their carved paths, generating new paths in turn, which pool and sit where gravity pulls downwards.

Damn, Feeling Good!

The path to becoming skilled takes fear, uncertainty, and the pain of growth and transformation, so that after one becomes skillful and confident, one is loath to return to the pain, fear, and uncertainty, or to risk being wrong, which can lead to hubris if one isn’t careful.

Echoes

Whether coming up against annoyance, suspicion, or fear, one is really coming into contact with pains echoing far from past genesis, which will persist and sustain themselves without a countervailing force.

Maybe Ask the Food

Should one eat lettuce when it has gone to seed, perhaps not tasting as good? Or eat a cow or chicken after it has naturally died or at least died at old age, past its prime tenderness? These questions are never asked because our food is constantly entered forcefully into the flows of reserve pleasure objects. All that is allowed is for this phenomenon to be reacted against. To start to contemplate these questions is to ask what these living things actually want, and to sit in the pain of not being the center of the universe.

Moving On

The cold is really coming in now, and we are hustling to get everything out of the ground before the deep frosts. The end of the farming season is near, and I'll be on the road for some time after that, so posting may peter out temporarily.

I feel a bit apologetic for the recent rough shape of posting. I have to do a lot of writing offline via word document, and then paste that writing into the Blogger interface, which gets a bit weird when it has to deal with other formats than its own. With only a certain amount of time and energy to spend getting this stuff up, and without the basic formatting chops needed to get everything looking good again, I just opt for the rough patch-over.

I'm working on a large post on longer time-scales, and then after that I'll be pursuing other subjects as they come up. Till then. 

Behind Every Solution is a New Problem (Or Two)

One of the problems with any sort of reaction against the more flagrant abuses in the modern age is that the reaction tends to bear the imprint of force. Of course the nature of reactions happens to be that they mirror the original forces that produce them, and usually proceed as force themselves, only in another direction, draped with another set of values.

So one turns against the cruelty wrought by individuals and institutions organizing authoritarian and capricious power, but oftentimes to turn against a power is to exercise power – oftentimes in an authoritarian manner, which will eventually be exercised with some caprice, reproducing the original cruelty reacted against. So what does one want? An alternative to modernity as it exists? Or an alternative to cruelty in general? How does one define cruelty, and how does one come to accept the forms of destruction necessary for new forms of creation?

On the Other Hand

Though old machinery tends to work well and last a long time, its design suffers from the lack of experience with prolonged use. Early design iterations are more concerned with the machine working well, for longer periods of time, and so it often lacks the protections built into later models. The machinery lacks safeguards developed over time to address various injuries and dysfunctions. As a result, older machinery tends to be more brutal in general, and more harmful to those who use it. In some ways, the machines become more ergonomic and humane, while at the same time suffering from a degradation in productive organization at the institutional level.