As David Brooks points out, this should be a defining time for the left, if not an era for the left. Yet what we get is a staggering win for the right. This whirlwind of motion and change is left in a dark caldron to be sealed for as long as people let others run …
Rooting
Towards a More Altruistic Society – Matthieu Ricard
Towards a more altruistic society At the end of last week, Plaidoyer pour l’altruisme (The Case for Altruism), a 920 page-book on which I have been intensely working for 5 years, came out in French (the English publication is scheduled for January 2015). Cooperation, wrote Martin Nowak, is “the architect of creativity throughout evolution, from cells …
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Saul Bellow: Letters
Excellent writing about a master of fiction and American life. Saul Bellow: Letters In the newly published collected correspondence of Saul Bellow... BY LEO ROBSON PUBLISHED 11 NOVEMBER 2010 Letters Saul Bellow, edited by Benjamin Taylor Penguin, 571pp, £30 "Of course I am not a Freudian," Saul Bellow wrote to Philip Roth in 1974. "For one fierce …
James Rhodes: ‘Find what you love and let it kill you’
My life as a concert pianist can be frustrating, lonely, demoralising and exhausting. But is it worth it? Yes, without a shadow of a doubt. 'Isn't it worth fighting back in some small way?' Pianist James Rhodes. Photograph: Dave Brown 2012 After the inevitable "How many hours a day do you practice?" and "Show me …
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Scattered
Scattered an ability to go with the natural flow of life and interests of the moment. the feeling of moments flowing in time - it is the feeling of time - it is what time is. it is interactive, time engaging and the mind responding and showing and then the reverse takes hold. it is …
Add Strength In Person & Obsession In Passion
Going To The Sun
The Stranger by Albert Camus - Impressions 1942 Prose that is crisp and spare and precise. Fragments of humanity that are turned this way and that to develop a character in time and place. Meursault is detached and self-sufficient. His social needs are minimal. He is authentic and sure of his senses and is comfortable …
Northwest Oystering – On The Salish Sea
These photographs are of the Taylor Shellfish Oyster operation in Bow, WA and surrounding area just a few miles south of Bellingham on Chuckanut Drive.- rlw
Celine, Reading and Neural Networks
Today I read an article and have a hard time getting through it since I check all of the sources, people, images and so on. ( A 1977 Paris Review interview with Celine and he talks about Paul Morand, Ramuz, and Barbusse and the fall of Stalingrad - so I'm looking up each writer to …
Italo Calvino – Mr Palomar’s Philosophical Book of Mental Illustrations, Or Poets, Take Back The World.
Mr Palomar is an accomplished practitioner of zen buddhism. He is astute at seeing what is before him as it is. Where he gets into trouble is when seeing, or being, is not enough and he needs to develop his strategies and plans together with his angst at trying to do the right thing in …
Native Grove of Rhododendrons
Along the hiking trail at Greenbank Farms woods in central Whidbey Island.
Czeslaw Milosz – Biography – The Wilno Poet Under California Skies
Czeslaw Milosz - The Wilno Poet Under California Skies November 2012 It is not an anomaly to be transformed by the breadth and scope of the Northern California landscape. To stand on a mountain and look over the rocky shore and the expanse of the blue Pacific is a powerful sensation. While one's awe eventually …
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Hunter Thompson – Writing & Transparency
This is Hunter Thompson reporting on many things from Key West, Fl as he pens an article for the Rolling Stone in 1976. Reading Thompson reminds me of his colorful journalism that borders on genius. He took Tom Wolfe's devices and made them his own - he is certainly unique and how he manages to …
Hanging Out On The Saratoga Passage
Its sort of boring here, good boring. Earthquakes north at Queen Charlotte Islands and the hurricane back east. Its raining and fifty here. So much to do. Its Sunday and we have a full house, isn't it wonderful?
Seattle and Its Mayor, Mike McGinn – Were We Ever a Civilized Part of the World?
Seattle and Its Mayor - Were We Ever a Civilized Part of the World? Seattle, like the rest of the nation, has decided that cordiality - respect of opinion and differences - is yesterday's practice. Several months ago a local journalist said this: "I honestly believe that Mayor Mike McGinn is the worst office …
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Obama’s Way – October 2012
“There are some things about being president that I still have difficulty doing,” he said. “For example, faking emotion. Because I feel it is an insult to the people I’m dealing with. For me to feign outrage, for example, feels to me like I’m not taking the American people seriously. I’m absolutely positive that I’m …
Just Want to See The Magic
Scientists Adopt Tiny Island as a Warming Bellwether
Matthew Ryan Williams for The New York Times Cathy Pfister is part of a team of scientists conducting research on Tatoosh Island, Wash. By STACEY SOLIE Published: October 6, 2012 Scientists Adopt Tiny Island as a Warming Bellwether By STACEY SOLIE TATOOSH ISLAND, Wash. — From a stretch of rocky shoreline on this tiny island, one …
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A Day Looking – Northern Whidbey Island
On the Order of Winter – A Ferry Passage
Winter's approach is revealed in the nuances of the creatures that will gain its full presence. There is the hint of hiddeness yet our senses see.
Using Our Eyes To See
A Music Video
Interspecies Bonding – Out On Greenlake
The Fog Moved In This Morning
We have had nearly sixty days of dry conditons, so the fog this morning was welcome.
THEREFORE, YE SOFT PIPES, PLAY ON – ECHOVAR
I have reproduced the following blog post from the ECHOVAR blog site and have given the direct link below. It is an outstanding piece on Steve Jobs. It so happens that I am one third through the book Steve Jobs by Walter Issacson. I have followed Jobs for thirty years and believe that he was …
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Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Passion For Looking, Not Thinking
The following article shows the west meeting the east, particularly Jung and Frued meeting zen. Although the article does not mention Jung and especially Hillman they both demonstrated thoughout their writings that the image was dominant in our minds when it came to thinking, before the word. It is interesting that the internet is following …
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Poem – Living Beings – Near a Western Red Cedar
we are the same as those who came before. yet our distance from our kind is great. do we not see that we the living, all of the living, are a clan? each with natures unique but living and this simple fact: our being. existence is a bond so great in this vast universe of …
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San Juan Islands in Winter
This is a series of photographs taken in the winter of 2012. The San Juan Islands rest between Seattle and Vancouver, BC in the Salish Sea. The Salish Sea is part of a body of water that extends the inland sea of the Pacific from Olympia, Washington to Haines, Alaska.
James Hillman – Dream’s Language
Dreams follow their own logic. And the use of logic is a poor choice of words. Is there a beginning, middle and end? Or does our waking mind force the linear script onto the contents? Dreams often do not recognize time and therefore a linear story line is not the point. What is the point? …
Two Paths
Expression follows two paths of existence — exterior and interior. Of course in reality they are one, they are the same. We are taught that they are different. Interior existence cannot be "seen" with our senses, nor can others see them. Abstraction and the unconscious make up much of this terrain. Photography captures the exterior …
Home Away From Home
Half Moon Bay, CA
Lincoln – Poetics, Character, Precipice of War and Human Design.
Lincoln - Poetics, Character, Precipice of War and Human Design. Upon reading Edmund Wilson's profile of Lincoln in "Patriotic Gore - Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War," I am taken by the literary and poetic drama of the account. Lincoln is shown to be chiefly literary in character — it is what …
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A Walk at Zen Point
June 30
Summer is slow in coming. The air is warmer but the temperature is staying in the sixties and the rain falls nearly every day. The grey skies of winter remain.
West Pacific Review 