Ants pot by Bradley Macom, 2023

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if i look back, i am lost
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@23oct
Ants pot by Bradley Macom, 2023
« A zoologist who observed gorillas in their native habitat was amazed by the uniformity of their life and their vast idleness. Hours and hours without doing anything. Was boredom unknown to them? This is indeed a question raised by a human, a busy ape. Far from fleeing monotony, animals crave it, and what they most dread is to see it end. For it ends, only to be replaced by fear, the cause of all activity. Inaction is divine; yet it is against inaction that man has rebelled. Man alone, in nature, is incapable of enduring monotony, man alone wants something to happen at all costs — something, anything…. Thereby he shows himself unworthy of his ancestor: the need for novelty is the characteristic of an alienated gorilla. »
— Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born
The Uzbekistan hotel in Tashkent (Uzbek SSR, 1982)
FRUiTS 135
October 2008
Napsnaps 26SS Collection
A superb Jun purple-splashed blue-glazed tripod censer, Northern Song dynasty (960-1127)
Courtesy Alain Truong
Dancers of the Royal Ballet in Giselle — by Bill Cooper
2021-07-28
proval lake, pyatigorsk, russia
my Catholic hot take is that if it came down to it and we had to choose, God would want us to love each other before we loved Him. to love thy neighbor was probably the commandment He focused on most in His teachings.
do you think Jesus Christ died on the cross for the praise of it? no. He sacrificed Himself for us. everything He's done, He did for us. when you betray your fellow man, you're betraying one of His children whom He loves so dearly that He died for them.
A genuine love of neighbor will never contradict the love due to God, but in priority of order the love of God precedes and is the source of the love of neighbor. Christians are called to prioritize God, who is Truth and Goodness itself, over loyalty to our loved ones. Here's a simple proof of that: if someone you are close to is committing an injustice, are you to prioritize your loved one or justice? This is a hard teaching, but it is a necessary one. Fortunately, properly ordering our loves so that our love of God comes first does not diminish the love we have for neighbor, but places that love of neighbor into the context which enriches it. As C.S. Lewis wrote, "By loving Him more than [our earthly loved ones], we shall love them more than we do now" (The Four Loves, 158). A rightly ordered hierarchy of love allows the love to flow more intensely at all levels of that ordering, If we put our neighbor on a pedestal, on the other hand, up and against our love of God, we do them the great disservice of turning them into an idol; and the object of such a competitive love "begins to be a demon the moment they begin to be a god" (ibid, 15). The moment we prioritize a neighbor over Truth or Goodness, the moment we have given them this immense claim over us, we have placed on them an infinite burden that they cannot bear, that of being the ultimate source of our joy and love for others. That is something only God can be.
What does "loving God" look like to you? I think a lot of people think of it as either having warm fuzzies for God or praying a lot, reading Scripture, and attending worship; in both of our traditions this is pretty common, and both our traditions there are absolutely scathing scriptural condemnations of that way of thinking.
In Judaism, loving God means obeying the mitzvos;the question of the prioritization of those mitzvos is an ongoing question, with progressive movements in Judaism tending to emphasize our duties towards one another than our duties towards God that do not involve other people. Orthodox movements tend to hold that it is the observance of the duties towards God alone that lead to the observance of those directed at other humans. Personally, I'm inclined to agree with Isaiah (and to a lesser extent the early Reformers) on this one, but it's definitely a legitimate question that has been part of Judaism since before there was anything to meaningfully call "Judaism."
That is a fair question. I would not identify it with praying and reading Scripture, or even having affection for God (though I think loving God is significantly harder in times where there is no emotional affection for Him). If that is the sense in which OP means it,in which if we have to choose between a stranger asking for help or going to a Bible study, then I rescind my objection. But in insisting "we should love God first," I guess I am expressing two things. First, we should seek to do what is pleasing to God over what is pleasing to our neighbor. Loving our neighbor is part of what it means to prioritize God's will over everything else; feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, visiting the imprisoned, visiting the lonely, consoling the sorrowful, pursuing justice; all of these acts of loving neighbor are also acts of loving God. There is no dichotomy here. And, hopefully, the fact that we can acknowledge that we are imitating and serving the highest Reality when performing these acts will help sustain our efforts in doing them if and when the warm fuzzies for our neighbor fizzle away. And when the desires of our neighbors do come into conflict with the virtues we're building (which, fundamentally, are meant to be the ways in which we are sent out into the world to love neighbor in the first place), we should prioritize fidelity to those virtues and our convictions over the good will of our neighbor. The second thing is a little more complicated. But... friends and family, while really important and probably necessary presences in our lives, cannot be our highest good. It is unfair to make them the source of your ultimate meaning and happiness. This is something that they simply will not be able to do, and it will lead to disillusionment, resentment, and anger. We find our fulfillment in conforming to and entering into communion with the center and terminus of our very being, which is God. We need to recognize Reality for what it (or, rather, who He) is, and learn to fall in love with that. I don't want to get too autobiographical here, but I grew up in a Christian home where the explicit order of prioritization was family, God, then friends. And when things got hard, and duty to loved ones was not enough to sustain me, things got really ugly. When obedience to God was what snapped me out of a really ugly spiral, I felt I betrayed my highest values—not realizing that the very conceptualization of that hierarchy of values was itself disordered, and so doomed to fail me at some point. As I said, I think this is a hard, and at least initially repugnant-sounding, teaching. And I think most people fail up to it most of the time; but, as Nicholas Lash says when he talks about Christianity (but I think it can also extend to other ethical monotheisms), it "is supposed to be a kind of school, the purpose of whose pedagogy is to fostor the conditions in which . . . the comprehensive taming of chaos by loving order, of conflict by tranquility, of discord by harmony, might be instantiated and proclaimed."
Sulfur, salt, and other minerals color the crater of Dallol volcano, part of the Danakil Depression in Ethiopia. At 157 feet (48 meters) below sea level, Dallol is Earth’s lowest land volcano.
Photograph by Carsten Peter
I saw the cutest quarter at work the other day
never related to authors being like "childhood is such a blessed innocent time", catch me with that jane eyre shit like "such dread as children only can feel" and "I then sat with my doll on my knee til the fire got low, glancing round occasionally to make sure nothing worse than myself haunted the shadowy room"
"Adults can change their circumstances; children cannot. Children are powerless, and in difficult situations they are the victims of every sorrow and mischance and rage around them, for children feel all of these things but without any of the ability that adults have to change them. Whatever can take a child beyond such circumstances, therefore, is an alleviation and a blessing."
I find this passage from the Mary Oliver essay "Staying Alive" very poignant and true.
joan of arc filet lace pattern, 1913
did you guys know that imagining something = as good as having it
it's actually better than having it because you dont have to have it
TRUE.
joan of arc filet lace pattern, 1913