February 2009
On the occasion of a actual Hawaii Chair sighting...
Greg: Wouldn't it be weird to have a town entirely composed of As Seen On TV products?
Mandy: Pretty sure they have that; it's called HEAVEN.
Living at Altitude (via berniceshaw.tumblr.com)
BILL MOYERS: You've also written on the politics of the broken hearted. Now, you know, I grew up to think that broken hearts are a personal matter, not a political condition. What do you mean by that?
PARKER PALMER: Well, there are two ways for the heart to break. When we hold these tensions and we don't know how to hold them, the heart explodes like a hand grenade. And we sometimes want to throw that hand grenade at the enemy. I think that's what happened after September 11th.
But a new habit of the heart would allow us to take that broken-hearted experience in a new direction, not towards the shattering into a million pieces but toward a heart that grows larger, more capacious, more open to hold both the suffering and the pain of the world. I think that's teachable stuff. I think that if our schools and our religious communities worked on that, that we would have a greater capacity individually and collectively to do it.
BILL MOYERS: I came upon this passage in one of your books over the weekend. "While writing this essay, I have been dealing with some personal heartbreak. The details are commonplace, familiar to anyone who draws breath, especially to those of a certain age, the deaths of people I love, the transitory nature of the work to which I have devoted myself for 40 years. And the impossibility of realizing some of my dreams for my life." What's behind those words?
PARKER PALMER: What's behind those words, Bill, is that my closest analogue to some of the economic suffering that's going on right now that I don't share in is my own journey with personal darkness.
BILL MOYERS: Depression?
PARKER PALMER: Three times clinical depression, which I've written about and spoken about-
BILL MOYERS: Yes.
PARKER PALMER: -most recently when I was 65 years old. I think it's a very important thing to talk about partly because it remains a subject of shame in this culture. And I think those of us who have come through to the other side and have a new appreciation for life and its realities need to talk about it on behalf of those that suffer and those who are standing with them.
I got tremendous help from a therapist at one point, in one of my depressions, who said to me, "Parker, you seem to keep treating this experience as if depression were the hand of an enemy trying to crush you. Would it be possible to re-image depression as the hand of a friend trying to press you down to ground on which it's safe to stand?"
Well, those words didn't mean much to me immediately because when you're there you can't hear that kind of counsel. But they grew on me, those words did. And I started to understand that in my case this very situational depression that I had fallen into, not the result of bad genetics or brain chemistry gone awry, but the result of getting crosswise with some of my own truth had resulted from my living at altitude.
I was living in my intellect. I was living in my ego. I was living in a kind of up, up, and away spirituality. And I was living in a set of ethics that didn't really have anything to do with what my, how I intersected with the world-
BILL MOYERS: I don't understand that.
PARKER PALMER: -rightfully and properly. Well-
BILL MOYERS: You mean you're a hypocrite?
PARKER PALMER: Yeah. I was living by oughts that weren't mine to act out. I mean, there are a million oughts in the world. There's a million ways in which I ought to be serving the world. But the ways I'm gifted to serve and the opportunities that come to me to serve are not a million. They're more like one, two, three, four dozen over the course of a 70-year journey. And so when you live at elevation and you trip and fall, as most of us do every day, you have a long way to fall. And it might kill you.
Transcript: http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/02202009/watch2.html
“Sorrow is like a precious treasure, shown only to friends”
– African Proverb (via berniceshaw)
“Marry her? You don’t just walk up to a girl, hand her a bouquet, and say...”
– Robin Hood, 2:09 in pt 4
“Work which remains permeated with the play attitude is art — in quality if...”
– John Dewey in Democracy and Education, chapter 15
WatchWeekend Treat
All of Disney’s Robin Hood movie as a playlist on YouTube so you can just sit back, press play, and enjoy.
Start watching it for the awesome beginning credits sequence, and stay hooked for the whole thing.
Anyone else old enough to remember the original...
Greg Brown...
wikirocks:
Have you had to read Spinoza’s Ethics or Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect??
Nope. :(
So I have to write the first act of A Midsummer...
yoholmes:
New England accent is too hard to type, by the way.
Fresh Prince of Bel-Air theme song.
NATURE FIGHT (in HD!) →
Sardines vs. Birds and Dolphins and Sharks!
Vanilla Ice, MC Hammer Join Forces for One-Night... →
A friend of mine gets to go see this tomorrow night. So jealous.
Ruh-roh
My (maternal) grandma has colon cancer. :(
I am now 18.
thebalaclava:
= )
A-ha! I had my suspicions after your post mentioning a birthday last week, but this confirms it.
Happy birthday!
Things I joked about Mindy giving up for Lent over...
Me and Zoe :(
Caffeine
Tumblr
Swallowing (beverages you perv)
Crime
The Formula That Killed Wall Street →
A slick Wired article covering the math that led financial institutions to drastically underestimate the amount of risk they were carrying with real estate investments.
Blackalicious - Paragraph President
A very State...
Nap + State of the Union at 7pm CST = AWW YEAH
A 2009 record!
5:30am and I’m still awake and ticking. :(
At this point I’m not so much looking for sleep as I am for my tummy to just stop hurting. I’m also rapidly approaching the point where I’ll just turn off the alarm clock and not worry so much about making it to Philosophy of Mind in the afternoon.
I need philosophy help!
lifebehindalens:
Ok, I have a Philosophy test coming up, and some of the things that I need to have a firm grasp on are Crito and Socrates arguments in Plato’s Crito.
My problem lies in this statement which helps to ‘summarize’ the central idea of Socrates’ arguments.
“An early version of the central thesis within the modern social contract tradition.”
Is this idea simply the idea that when...
Godspeed You Black Emperor - Dead Flag Blues
In...
"Techcrunch are full of shit." →
langer:
Amen.
Worth noting is the awful, awful, AWFUL update by the Techcrunch author which goes:
From the very beginning, I’ve presented this story for what it is: a rumor. Despite my attempts to corroborate it and the subsequent detail I’ve been able to gather, I still don’t have enough information to determine whether it is absolutely true. But I still don’t have enough information to...
Update: not going to OPE. :(
… which means I get to go tomorrow to Best Buy and return the FM transmitter I got for the twelve-hour car drive. Glad to save the money and five days of my time, but blah.
One of these days, I’ll know what I want to be when I grow up.
WatchAn action scene from the upcoming Watchmen.
Looks boring. :(
I'll admit it: I giggled and clapped at the magic...
