Cosmic Trickster

"To explode or to implode - said Qwfwq - that is the question: whether 'tis nobler in the mind to expand one's energies in space without restraint, or to crush them into a dense inner concentration and, by ingesting, cherish them. To steal away, to vanish; no more; to hold within oneself every gleam, every ray, deny oneself every vent, suffocating in the depths of the soul the conflicts that so idly trouble it, give them their quietus; to hide oneself, to obliterate oneself; perchance to awaken elsewhere, unchanged."

- Italo Calvino (1923 - 1985)

Sacred Contract

"Our individual souls hum actively within a kind of global soul comprising all life on the planet. Our words, thoughts, deeds, and visions influence our individual health just as they affect the health of everyone around us. As a vital part of a larger, universal spirit, we each have been put here on earth to fulfill a Sacred Contract that enhances our personal spiritual growth while contributing to the evolution of the entire global soul."

- Caroline Myss (1952 - )
Sacred Contracts

Inward Gathering

"Nature looks dead in winter because
her life is gathered into her heart.
She withers the plant down to the root that
she may grow it up again fairer and stronger.
She calls her family together within her
inmost home to prepare them for being
scattered abroad upon the
face of the earth."

- Hugh Macmillan (1833 - 1903)
The Ministry of Nature

Nature's Calligraphy

"Just as writing can become calligraphy when it's
creatively, skillfully, and consciously performed,
so can all other activities become art.
In this case, we are reflecting upon life itself
as an artistic statement—the art of living."

- H.E. Davey (1961 - )
Japanese Yoga: The Way of Dynamic Meditation

Cosmic Rhythms

"Yesterday and today and tomorrow are not an arrow that shoots from past to present to future; rather all tenses, and sleeping and waking, mix and cohabit in an atemporal duration beyond clocks and calendars. The Aboriginal world began long ago when the Ancestors sang in Dreamtime the cosmic rhythms that give shape to the things we see, and it is the beginning right now, when a living Tiwi sings the Dream songs that continue, or are, the world."

- Huston Smith (1919 - 2016)

I Seem to be a Verb

"I live on Earth at present,

and I don't know what I am.

I am not a thing - a noun.

I seem to be a verb,
an evolutionary process -

an integral function

of the universe."

- R. Buckminster Fuller (1895 - 1983)
I Seem to Be A Verb

Silence and Stillness

"When I detect a beauty in any of the recesses of nature, I am reminded, by the serene and retired spirit in which it requires to be contemplated, of the inexpressible privacy of a life - how silent and unambitious it is. The beauty there is in mosses must be considered from the holiest, quietest nook.

...

Silence is the communion of a conscious soul with itself. If the soul attend for a moment to its own infinity, then and there is silence. She is audible to all men, at all times, in all places, and if we will we may always hearken to her admonitions.

...

The gods delight in stillness, they say ’st-’st. My truest - serenest moments are too still for emotion -they have woolen feet. In all our lives we live under the hill, and if we are not gone we live there still."

- Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862)

There is No Path to Truth

"The whole point of meditation is not to follow the path laid down by thought to what it considers to be truth, enlightenment or reality. There is no path to truth. The following of any path leads to what thought has already formulated and, however pleasant or satisfying, it is not truth. It is a fallacy to think that a system of meditation, the constant practicing of that system in daily life for a few given moments, or the repetition of it during the day, will bring about clarity or understanding. Meditation lies beyond all this and, like love, cannot be cultivated by thought. As long as the thinker exists to meditate, meditation is merely a part of that self-isolation which is the common movement of one’s everyday life."

- Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895 - 1986)

Dimensions of Reality

"My images were surreal simply in the sense that my vision brought out the fantastic dimension of reality. My only aim was to express reality, for there is nothing more surreal than reality itself. If reality fails to fill us with wonder, it is because we have fallen into the habit of seeing it as ordinary."

- Brassaï (1899 - 1984)

The Brain's Three Milliards

"Thought is the brain's three milliards
Of cells from the inside out.
Billions of games of billiards

Marked up as Faith and Doubt.

My Faith, but their collisions;

My logic, but their enzymes;

Their pink epinephrin, my visions;

Their white epinephrin, my crimes.

Since I am the felt arrangement

Of ten to the ninth times three,

Each atom in its estrangement
Must yet be prophetic of me."

- Aldous Huxley (1894 - 1963)
Island

Timeless Schema

"For the myth is the foundation of life;
it is the timeless schema, the pious
formula into which life flows
when it reproduces its traits
out of the unconscious."

- Thomas Mann (1875 - 1955)

A Framework for Intelligence

"So I want to be clear that intelligence is a really, as you well know, is a very complex issue. I’m not going to claim that I have the only appropriate definition or the best answer. I’m just going to give you my thoughts on it and the framework that I found useful in my work. I think we’ve, you know, can fully accept that there are other people with other useful definitions and so on.

So for me, some work that has to be done by any theory of intelligence is that it has to be able to help us directly compare and interact with what we now call diverse intelligences. So I’m not interested in theories that apply just to mammals or to mammals and birds or that break down when we have to think about octopus or insects or other things. I want a framework for intelligence that is going to handle all possible agents. This means not only the things we see in the phylogenetic tree here on earth, but novel synthetic biology constructs, artificial intelligences that we may build, either in hardware or software, potential exobiological agents, weird beings at other scales, including individual cells, subcellular molecular networks, uh, enormous things like social structures, and basically and perhaps the evolutionary process itself."

- Michael Levin (1969 - )
Michael Levin on Multi-Scale Intelligence and Teleophobia

Stillness

  

"When I am liberated by silence,
when I am no longer involved in the measurement
of life, but in the living of it,
I can discover a form of prayer in which
there is effectively, no distraction.
My whole life becomes a prayer.
My whole silence is full of prayer.
The world of silence in which I am immersed
contributes to my prayer."

- Thomas Merton (1915 - 1968)

Limits of Perception

"The human mind is only capable of absorbing a few things at a time. We see what is taking place in front of us in the here and now, and cannot envisage simultaneously a succession of processes, no matter how integrated and complementary. Our faculties of perception are consequently limited even as regards fairly simple phenomena. The fate of a single man can be rich with significance, that of a few hundred less so, but the history of thousands and millions of men does not mean anything at all, in any adequate sense of the word. The symmetriad is a million—a billion, rather—raised to the power of N: it is incomprehensible. We pass through vast halls, each with a capacity of ten Kronecker units, and creep like so many ants clinging to the folds of breathing vaults and craning to watch the flight of soaring girders, opalescent in the glare of searchlights, and elastic domes which crisscross and balance each other unerringly, the perfection of a moment, since everything here passes and fades. The essence of this architecture is movement synchronized towards a precise objective. We observe a fraction of the process, like hearing the vibration of a single string in an orchestra of supergiants. We know, but cannot grasp, that above and below, beyond the limits of perception or imagination, thousands and millions of simultaneous transformations are at work, interlinked like a musical score by mathematical counterpoint. It has been described as a symphony in geometry, but we lack the ears to hear it."

- Stanislaw Lem (1921 - 2006)

Solaris

Expecting, Hoping, Wishing for - Ice...

"Anyone who keeps the ability to
see beauty never grows old."

- Franz Kafka (1883 - 1924)

...and savoring nature's bountiful beauty in its absence. Each year around this time I look forward to going out to one of our local parks in Northern Virginia to do some "ice abstracting," as I like to call it (e.g., see my Jan 2024, Feb 2023, and Dec 2022 posts). Unfortunately, while this year's winter has only barely started, there have thus far been precious few contiguous days of below-freezing weather to yield any "ice" beyond what might be barely visible with a microscope. So, as the Northern VA/Wash-DC region braces for its first major winter storm of the season (along with a sizeable chunk of the entire country), and as temperatures have dropped precipitously due to the polar vortex blanketing our neck of the woods, I looked forward to my first "ice abstracting" photo session of the year this morning. I grabbed a mug of hot coffee, bundled up as if trekking to the Himalayas (it was 17 deg/F when I woke up), threw my camera in the car (gently, but urgently), and raced to Burke Lake. Only to find this: 

Beautiful - indeed, extremely, delightfully, joyously beautiful - but no ice! None, nada. To be sure, I could make out (barely) a few feathery strands of quarter-mm-sized icicles adhering to tiny twigs along the shore, but there was no real ice of any worth to compose with (such as in this Jan 2023 portfolio). I must admit there was a part of me that just wanted to get right back into my car, head home, and dive into a warm bed (17 deg/F temperatures tend to have this effect on me more often now than when I was decades younger). But, it is in the nature of every photographer, young or old, experienced or just starting out (or perhaps just trying to figure out what it takes to become more "experienced"), to clear your head of preconceived wishes and expectations and just revel in the beauty that surrounds us always. (This being said, I still want to do some ice abstracting! 😊)

Mitote Maya

"He realized that everyone was dreaming, but without awareness, without knowing what they really are. They couldn’t see him as themselves because there was a wall of fog or smoke between the mirrors. And that wall of fog was made by the interpretation of images of light — the Dream of humans.

...

Your whole mind is a fog which the Toltec called a mitote (pronounced MIH-TOE´-TAY). Your mind is a dream where a thousand people talk at the same time, and nobody understands each other. This is the condition of the human mind — a big mitote, and with that big mitote you cannot see what you really are. In India they call the mitote maya, which means illusion. It is the personality’s notion of 'I am.' Everything you believe about yourself and the world, all the concepts and programming you have in your mind, are all the mitote. We cannot see who we truly are; we cannot see that we are not free."

- Miguel Ruiz (1952 - )
The Four Agreements

The World as a Neural Network

"If the entire universe is a neural network, then something like natural selection might be happening on all scales from cosmological (> 10⁺¹⁵ m) and biological (10⁺² − 10−⁶ m) all the way to subatomic (< 10−¹⁵ m) scales. The main idea is that some local structures (or architectures) of neural networks are more stable against external perturbations (i.e. interactions with the rest of the network) than other local structures. As a result the more stable structures are more likely to survive and the less stable structures are more likely to be exterminated. There is no reason to expect that this process might stop at a fixed time or might be confined to a fixed scale and so the evolution must continue indefinitely and on all scales. We have already seen that on the smallest scales the learning evolution is likely to produce structures of a very low complexity (i.e. second law of learning) such as one dimensional chains of neurons, but this might just be the beginning. As the learning progresses these chains can chop off loops, form junctions and according to natural selection the more stable structures would survive. If correct, then what we now call atoms and particles might actually be the outcomes of a long evolution starting from some very low complexity structures and what we now call macroscopic observers and biological cells might be the outcome of an even longer evolution. Of course, at present the claim that natural selection may be relevant on all scales is very speculative, but it seems that neural networks do offer an interesting new perspective on the problem of observers."

- Vitaly Vanchurin
The World as a Neural Network

Morning Fog

"Space and silence are two
aspects of the same thing.
The same no-thing. They
are externalization of inner
space and inner silence,
which is stillness: the
the infinitely creative womb
 of all existence."

- Eckhart Tolle (1948 - )

Yesterday was one of those special mornings that makes photography ... heck, life! 😊 ... so wondrously special.  Anticipating a long weekend "work" day (a long technical paper I need to start writing but that I've been putting off for days), I had wanted to get a bit of extra sleep before I got started. My wife, who is well attuned to my photographer's soul - and predilections - all-too-well, woke me up early saying, "Hon, there is "heavy fog" outside, maybe you'd...?" .... I was out the door before she finished her sentence. I was so entranced by what I found at the nearby lake I raced to - a dense fog that was gently caressing the water and surrounding woods, a preternatural stillness in the air, and not another person in sight - that, initially at least, all I could do was just stand by the lakeshore, not doing - or thinking about - anything, cradling my camera with a smile on my face, soaking in the precious Zen moment. The photographs I captured in the hour or so that followed (some are shown here) are perhaps nothing special. But, "My, Oh My!" what perfect Alfred-Stieglitzian "equivalents" they all are of what I felt during my early morning sojourn around the lake that morning!

Movement of Colors

"Light in Nature creates the movement of colors."

- Robert Delaunay (1885 - 1941)

"In nature, light creates the color.
In the picture, color creates the light."

- Hans Hofmann (1880 - 1966)

The Color Nearest the Light

"[Yellow] is the color nearest the light. It appears on the slightest mitigation of light, whether by semi-transparent mediums or faint reflection from white surfaces. In prismatic experiments it extends itself alone and widely in the light space, and while the two poles remain separated from each other, before it mixes with blue to produce green it is to be seen in its utmost purity and beauty.

...

As no color can be considered as stationary, so we can very easily augment yellow into reddish by condensing or darkening it. The color increases in energy, and appears in red-yellow more powerful and splendid. All that we have said of yellow is applicable here, in a higher degree. The red-yellow gives an impression of warmth and gladness, since it represents the hue of the intenser glow of fire.

...

As pure yellow passes very easily to red-yellow, so the deepening of this last to yellow-red is not to be arrested. The agreeable, cheerful sensation which red-yellow excites increases to an intolerably powerful impression in bright yellow-red. In looking steadfastly at a perfectly yellow-red surface, the color seems actually to penetrate the organ. It produces an extreme excitement, and still acts thus when somewhat darkened."

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 - 1832)
Theory of Colours