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#1627 - Tuesday, November 25, 2003 - Editor: Jerry  


Some Quotations of ALBERT EINSTEIN (1879-1955)

Imagination is more important than knowledge. The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.

I have repeatedly said that in my opinion the idea of a personal God is a childlike one, but I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist whose fervor is mostly due to a painful act of liberation from the fetters of religious indoctrination received in youth. I prefer an attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual understanding of nature and of our own being.

A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.

Science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind.

...a doctrine which is able to maintain itself not in clear light but only in the dark, will of necessity lose its effect on mankind, with incalculable harm to human progress. In their struggle for the ethical good, teachers of religion must have the stature to give up the doctrine of a personal God, that is, give up that source of fear and hope which in the past placed such vast power in the hands of priests.

I cannot conceive of a god who rewards and punishes his creatures or has a will of the kind that we experience in ourselves. Neither can I--nor would I want to-- conceive of an individual that survives his physical death. Let feeble souls, from fear or absurd egotism, cherish such thoughts. I am satisfied with the mystery of the eternity of life and a glimpse of the marvelous structure of the existing world, together with the devoted striving to comprehend a portion, be it ever so tiny, of the Reason that manifests itself in nature.

There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.

I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings.

When I examined myself, and my methods of thought, I came to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge.

The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.

I do not believe in the immortality of the individual, and I consider ethics to be an exclusively human concern with no superhuman authority behind it.

The religion of the future will be a cosmic religion. The religion which based on experience, which refuses dogmatic. If there's any religion that would cope the scientific needs it will be Buddhism.


from Clyde Butcher's Muck About Journal: http://www.clydebutcher.com/newsletter10.cfm  
Our adventure in St Joseph Bay began with day after day of rain. We sat in the motor home and read books until an overcast day with no rain blessed us with the opportunity to take a few photographs. We wondered through the forests and I marveled at the neat little puffy lichens that grew on the ground. We had never seen anything like them before. When we came across a dead log, Clyde thought the soft texture of the lichen and the rough feeling of the dead log would contrast nicely against each other.

    

                                                                                        St. Joesph Dragon

     We came across another image to photograph that needed overcast lighting in order to achieve depth and texture…a scrub oak with palmettos. The texture of the two together is always stimulating to the eye.

    
 
After several more days of rain, a clear day brought Paula Allen, DEP Environmental Administrator of the Aquatic Preserves, out to join Elam and Clyde on a boat trip to the point of St. Joseph state park. The light was marginal, but while they were enjoying their time at the point it cleared up with just a few clouds in the sky allowing Clyde the opportunity to take some nice photographs of the point.

  

Clyde, Paula, and Elam                                                        Having a picnic with everyone


                                         St. Joseph North

Then it started to rain once again. It rained for another couple of days before a morning arrived with partial clouds. We drove to a scene we had located earlier and spent the morning photographing it. We spent a long time waiting for the clouds to dance in the sky giving the image depth and rhythm. The scene appealed to Clyde and I so much that Clyde set up both his 4x5 camera with a 55 mm Grandagon wide-angle lens and his 5x7 camera with a 72 mm Super Angulon XL  lens. The 4x5 had a wider angle lens than the 5x7 so that he’d have the best of both worlds when he developed his film!



Clyde with his 4x5 and 5x7 view camera                     Clyde using his changing tent to reload film




St. Joseph Bay #3 is the photograph that was selected to be the “Living Waters” – Florida Aquatic Preserves poster.  Poster will be available soon.










             St. Joseph Bay #3


 

Mazie Lane

Listcology

 

The (Email) List is a Garden and a Hero 

 

"A hero is one who pierces the veil
that separates one individual from
another – in effect, a manifestation
in real life of the realization
that All are One.

The hero acts in recognition of
'…the breakthrough realization that
you and that other are one,
that you are two aspects of the one life,
and that your apparent separateness
is but an effect of the way we experience
forms under the conditions of space and time.
Our true reality is in our identity and unity
with all life.' This is a metaphysical truth
… according to Schopenhauer, the truth of your
life. The hero is the one who has given his life
to some order of realization of that truth."

~ Joseph Campbell, Power of Myth, p. 82.     ~ image by Jim Gasperini

 

The purpose of seasonal festivals is periodically to revive the
topocosm.  Gaster coined this word from the Greek - topo for
place and cosmos for world order.  Topocosm means "the
world order of a particular place." The topocosm is the entire
complex of any given locality conceived as a living organism -
not just the human community but the total community - the
plants, animals and soils of the place. The topocosm is not
only the actual and present living community but also that
continuous entity of which the present community
is but the current manifestation.


~ Dolores La Chapelle,
Ritual is Essential

 

 

Gardens, scholars say, are the first sign of commitment
to a community. When people plant corn they are saying,
let's stay here. And by their connection to the land,
they are connected to one another.


~ Anne Raver

 

 

One of the most delightful things about gardening is the freemasonry it gives with
other gardeners, and the interest and pleasure all gardeners get by visiting other
people's gardens. We all have a lot to learn and in every new garden there is a
chance of finding inspiration - new flowers, different arrangement or fresh treatment
for old subjects. Even if it is a garden you know by heart there are twelve months
in the year and every month means a different garden, and the discovery of things
unexpected all the rest of the year.


-~ Margery Fish, We Made a Garden, 1956

 

 

The true meaning of life is to plant trees,
under whose shade you do not expect to sit.


~ Nelson Henderson

 

 

It's the flock, the grove, that matters. Our responsibility is to species,
not to specimens; to communities, not to individuals.


~
Sara Stein, 1998, Noah's Garden

 

 

If the earth is man's extended body, to be loved and respected as one's
own body, those who do no greening of themselves will hardly bring
about the greening of America.   The idea of 'greening' involves color,
flowering, freshness of spring, and, above all, respect for what is
organic and vegetative as distinct from the mechanical and metallic.


~
Alan Watts, Cloud-Hidden, Whereabouts Unknown, 1968, p. 111

 

 

You ask how many friends I have? Water and stone, bamboo and pine.
The moon rising over the eastern hill is a joyful comrade.
Besides these five companions, what other pleasure should I ask?


~ Yon Sun-do (1587-1671), Korean Poet,
Sijo
Translation by Larry Gross

 

 

The true spirit of conversation consists in building on
another man's observation, not overturning it.


~Edward Bulwer-Lytton

 

 

A garden is a public service and having one a public duty.  
It is a man's contribution to the community.


~ Richardson Wright, Truly Rural, 1922

 

 

A garden is an expression of Man in a state of society.

Friendship is a sheltering tree.


~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge

 

 

The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual. 
The impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community.


~ William James

 

 

The object in America is to avoid contact, to treat all as
foes unless they're known to be friends.  Here you have
a million crabs living in a million crevices. ...  But the
garden's greatest benefit, I feel, as not relief to the
eyes, but to make the eyes sees our neighbors.


~ Paul Fleischman,  Seedfolks

 

 

Go often to the house of a friend; for weeds soon choke up the unused path.
Shared joy is a double joy; shared sorrow is half a sorrow.


~ Swedish Proverbs

 

 

The best things that can come out of the garden
are gifts for other people.


~ Jamie Jobb

 

 

Friends are like the pillars on a porch.  Sometimes they
hold you up, sometimes they lean on you, and sometimes
it's just enough to know that they are standing by.


~ Author Unknown

 

 

I have been much afflicted again lately by visitors . . . and they
gave me to understand that if they had had the arranging of the
garden it would have been finished long ago - whereas I don't
believe a garden is ever finished.  They have all gone now,
thank heaven.


~ Elizabeth von Arnim, Elizabeth & her German Garden, 1898

 

 

Gardening can be a compelling cooperative activity.
Your best harvest may be the pleasure you get from working
with family and friends. There's never a shortage of things to
do, no limit to the lessons that can be learned, especially for
children, and there's always plenty of credit to go around,
even for the mistakes.


~ Steven Willson

 

 

Snowflakes are one of nature’s most fragile things,
but just look what they can do when they stick together.


~ Vista M. Kelly

 

 

But there's more than just solving the how-to problems. 
I've often said that if we're going to have a real rural
renaissance, I'd just take the solving of the how-to
problems for granted.  The first thing I'd provide
would be festivals.


~ Ralph Borsodi

 

 

~ http://www.gardendigest.com

 

Joseph Campbell on -- The immovable spot, the absence of ego

The immovable spot.

It is a psychological relationship status with respect to your relationships to the forms of the world around you.

 

The biological urges to enjoy and master (with their opposites, to loathe and to fear), as well as the social urge to evaluate (as good and evil, true and false), simply drop away, and a rapture in sheer experience supervenes, in which self-loss and elevation are the same.

 

Such an impact is "beyond words," for it is not such as can be explained by a reference to anything else.  The mind is released--- for a moment, for a day, perhaps forever---- from those anxieties to enjoy, to win, to be correct which spring from the net of nerves in which men are entangled.

 

Ego dissolved, there is nothing in the net but life--- which is everywhere and forever.

The Zen masters of China and Japan call this state the state of "no-mind." 

 


The classical terms of India are moska, "release," bodhi, "enlightenment," and nirvana, "transcendence of the winds of passion." 

Joyce speaks of "the luminous silent status of esthetic pleasure," when the clear radiance of the esthetic image is apprehended by the mind, which has been arrested by its wholeness and fascinated by its harmony.

"The mind," he says, "is that mysterious instant Shelley likened beautifully to a fading coal."

 

So the esthetic vehicle, the instrument of the rhythm and beauty that induces esthetic arrest, is the revealing powers of maya.

 

~images by Steve Bennett

~Joseph Campbell, "Reflections on the Art of Living."

 

 ~ Mushroom People living harmoniously under the living room window (Remember an old sci-fi flick called, "The Mushroom People?)

 

I and Thou

 This time when you and I sit here,

two figures with one soul,

we're a garden with plants and birdsong

moving through us like rain.

The stars come out.

We're out of ourselves,

but collected.

We point to the new moon,

it's discipline, and slender joy.

We don't listen to stories of frustrated anger.

We feed on laughter,

and a tenderness we hear around us

when we're together.

And even more incredible,

sitting here in Konya,

we're this moment in Korasan and Iraq.

We have these forms in time,

and another in the elsewhere that's

made of this closeness.

~Rumi by Coleman Barks

 

title

"ScruTiny in the Great Round is an interactive work of art on CD-ROM.

It is a meditative collage of images and sounds; a wandering through our collective imagination. Each scene is a painted animated landscape embedded with symbols, artifacts, poetry and sounds from cultures and religions around the world. The story has a dream-like sensibility as it follows the encounters of male and female, each portrayed in various guises and transformations. Taking place in a background of chlorophyll and blood and in the mystery between the body and spirit, are episodes of he and she enduring the dramas of sex, marriage of birth.

An international jury headed by composer Jean-Michel Jarre awarded ScruTiny the "Grand Prix du Jury Milia d'Or" at the third annual Milia conference in Cannes, France."


vase View a short demo, including one of the twelve ScruTiny scenes, some transitions and interactive music but no animations.
egg View a
Shockwave version.
egg Download
Mac version. (1.9 Mb .sit file)
egg Download
Windows version. (1.5 Mb ZIP file)
 

 http://www.thing.net

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