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ethics and philosophy

my thoughts are sometimes better expressed by others.....

Judith Browning

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posted 2 weeks ago

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The only choice we have as we mature is how we inhabit our vulnerability,
how we become larger and more courageous and more compassionate through our intimacy with disappearance, our choice is to inhabit vulnerability as generous citizens of loss, robustly and fully, or conversely, as misers and complainers, reluctant and fearful, always at the gates of existence, but never bravely and completely attempting to enter, never wanting to risk ourselves, never walking fully through the door.

David Whyte
Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words

"We're all just walking each other home." -Ram Dass
"Be a lamp, or a lifeboat, or a ladder."-Rumi
"It's all one song!" -Neil Young

Judith Browning

Posts: 10392

Location: a temperate, clay/loam spot on planet earth, the universe

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posted 2 weeks ago

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"Below the surface stream, shallow and light,
Of what we say and feel—below the stream,
As light, of what we think we feel, there flows
With noiseless current, strong, obscure and deep,
The central stream of what we feel indeed."

Matthew Arnold
St. Paul and Protestantism (1870)

"We're all just walking each other home." -Ram Dass
"Be a lamp, or a lifeboat, or a ladder."-Rumi
"It's all one song!" -Neil Young

Judith Browning

Posts: 10392

Location: a temperate, clay/loam spot on planet earth, the universe

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posted 2 weeks ago

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Uniformity is not nature’s way;
diversity is nature’s way.

Vandana Shiva
( 1952 to pres., scholar, environmental activist,
food sovereignty advocate, ecofeminist)

"We're all just walking each other home." -Ram Dass
"Be a lamp, or a lifeboat, or a ladder."-Rumi
"It's all one song!" -Neil Young

Judith Browning

Posts: 10392

Location: a temperate, clay/loam spot on planet earth, the universe

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posted 2 weeks ago

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We need movements rooted in love right now,
movements powered not by difference
and exclusion and punishment,
but by common ground, compassion,
humility, healthy boundaries,
patience and healing.

Adrienne Maree Brown
(1978 to pres., author, editor, ritual singer-songwriter)

"We're all just walking each other home." -Ram Dass
"Be a lamp, or a lifeboat, or a ladder."-Rumi
"It's all one song!" -Neil Young

Judith Browning

Posts: 10392

Location: a temperate, clay/loam spot on planet earth, the universe

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posted 2 weeks ago

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And this our life,
exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees,
books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones,
and good in everything.

Wm. Shakespeare
(1564-1616, English playwright, actor, poet
from As You Like It Act II Scene I)

"We're all just walking each other home." -Ram Dass
"Be a lamp, or a lifeboat, or a ladder."-Rumi
"It's all one song!" -Neil Young

Judith Browning

Posts: 10392

Location: a temperate, clay/loam spot on planet earth, the universe

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posted 2 weeks ago

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As long as we are caught up,
identified, and entangled
in the view of self,
then we spend our lives defending it,
gratifying it, grandiosing it, judging it;
we have all these responses
that come out of this felt sense of the self.
It’s because things are ungovernable
and not subject to our will
that the material form, for example,
is going to go through stages of suffering,
unpleasantness, decay.
This is not a mistake.
This is just the nature of physical elements
and it’s true for everybody.

Joseph Goldstein
(1944 to present, Vipassana Zen Teacher)

"We're all just walking each other home." -Ram Dass
"Be a lamp, or a lifeboat, or a ladder."-Rumi
"It's all one song!" -Neil Young

Judith Browning

Posts: 10392

Location: a temperate, clay/loam spot on planet earth, the universe

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posted 2 weeks ago

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Each one of us is alone in the world.
It takes great courage to meet the full force of your aloneness.
Most of the activity in society is subconsciously designed to quell the voice crying in the wilderness within you.
The mystic Thomas a Kempis said that when you go out into the world, you return having lost some of yourself.
Until you learn to inhabit your aloneness, the lonely distraction and noise of society will seduce you into false belonging, with which you will only become empty and weary.
When you face your aloneness, something begins to happen.
Gradually, the sense of bleakness changes into a sense of true belonging.
This is a slow and open-ended transition but it is utterly vital in order to come into rhythm with your own individuality.
In a sense this is the endless task of finding your true home within your life.
It is not narcissistic, for as soon as you rest in the house of your own heart, doors and windows begin to open outwards to the world.
No longer on the run from your aloneness, your connections with others become real and creative.
You no longer need to covertly scrape affirmation from others or from projects outside yourself.
This is slow work; it takes years to bring your mind home.

John O'Donohue

"We're all just walking each other home." -Ram Dass
"Be a lamp, or a lifeboat, or a ladder."-Rumi
"It's all one song!" -Neil Young

Judith Browning

Posts: 10392

Location: a temperate, clay/loam spot on planet earth, the universe

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posted 1 week ago

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The world at present is full of angry self-centred groups, each incapable of viewing human life as a whole, each willing to destroy civilisation rather than yield an inch.
To this narrowness no amount of technical instruction will provide an antidote.
The antidote, in so far as it is a matter of individual psychology, is to be found in history, biology, astronomy, and all those studies which, without destroying self-respect, enable the individual to see himself in his proper perspective.
What is needed is not this or that specific piece of information, but such knowledge as inspires a conception of the ends of human life as a whole: art and history, acquaintance with the lives of heroic individuals, and some understanding of the strangely accidental and ephemeral position of man in the cosmos — all this touched with an emotion of pride in what is distinctively human, the power to see and to know, to feel magnanimously and to think with understanding.
It is from large perceptions combined with impersonal emotion that wisdom most readily springs.

Bertrand Russell

"We're all just walking each other home." -Ram Dass
"Be a lamp, or a lifeboat, or a ladder."-Rumi
"It's all one song!" -Neil Young

Judith Browning

Posts: 10392

Location: a temperate, clay/loam spot on planet earth, the universe

3642

posted 1 week ago

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Each life is a mystery that is never finally available
to the mind's light or questions.
That we are here is a huge affirmation;
somehow life needed us and wanted us to be.
To sense and trust this primeval acceptance
can open a vast spring of trust within the heart.
It can free us into a natural courage
that casts out fear and opens up our lives
to become voyages of discovery,
creativity, and compassion.
No threshold need be a threat,
but rather an invitation and a promise.
Whatever comes, the great sacrament of life
will remain faithful to us, blessing us always
with visible signs of invisible grace.
We merely need to trust.

John O'Donohue
(1958 to 2008, Irish poet, author,
priest, and Hegelian philosopher)

"We're all just walking each other home." -Ram Dass
"Be a lamp, or a lifeboat, or a ladder."-Rumi
"It's all one song!" -Neil Young

Judith Browning

Posts: 10392

Location: a temperate, clay/loam spot on planet earth, the universe

3642

posted 1 week ago

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The reasons by which people back up their prejudices are mostly negligible — not reason at all at bottom, but just instinctive self-justifications;
but prejudice, rising as it does in emotion, has its roots in life and reality.

Jane Ellen Harrison
(September 9, 1850–April 15, 1928)

"We're all just walking each other home." -Ram Dass
"Be a lamp, or a lifeboat, or a ladder."-Rumi
"It's all one song!" -Neil Young

Judith Browning

Posts: 10392

Location: a temperate, clay/loam spot on planet earth, the universe

3642

posted 1 week ago

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In the course of the years a close friendship will always reveal the shadow in the other as much as ourselves, to remain friends we must know the other and their difficulties and even their sins and encourage the best in them, not through critique but through addressing the better part of them, the leading creative edge of their incarnation, thus subtly discouraging what makes them smaller, less generous, less of themselves.

David Whyte
poet and philosopher

"We're all just walking each other home." -Ram Dass
"Be a lamp, or a lifeboat, or a ladder."-Rumi
"It's all one song!" -Neil Young

Judith Browning

Posts: 10392

Location: a temperate, clay/loam spot on planet earth, the universe

3642

posted 1 week ago

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To trust in the heart
has a lot to do with trusting
being in the body.
It’s very difficult to be thinking
and be with your sensations
at the same time.
The heart is a felt experience.
Faith is not certainty,
it’s steadiness inside uncertainty.

RamDev
(1965 to pres., Indian yoga and ayurveda teacher)

"We're all just walking each other home." -Ram Dass
"Be a lamp, or a lifeboat, or a ladder."-Rumi
"It's all one song!" -Neil Young

Judith Browning

Posts: 10392

Location: a temperate, clay/loam spot on planet earth, the universe

3642

posted 1 week ago

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WEEDS

The danger of memory is going

to it for respite. Respite risks

entrapment. Don’t debauch

yourself by living

in some former version of yourself

that was more or less naked. Maybe

it felt better then, but you were not better.

You were smaller, as the rain

gauge must fill to the brim

with its full portion of suffering.

What can memory be in these terrible times?

Only instruction. Not a dwelling.

Or if you must dwell:

The sweet smell of weeds then.

The sweet smell of weeds now.

An endurance. A standoff. A rest.

Diane Seuss
born 1956, an American poet and educator.

"We're all just walking each other home." -Ram Dass
"Be a lamp, or a lifeboat, or a ladder."-Rumi
"It's all one song!" -Neil Young

Judith Browning

Posts: 10392

Location: a temperate, clay/loam spot on planet earth, the universe

3642

posted 1 week ago

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Where love rules,
there is no will to power;
and where power predominates,
there love is lacking.
The one is the shadow of the other.

Carl Jung
(1875-1961, Swiss psychologist and philosopher)

"We're all just walking each other home." -Ram Dass
"Be a lamp, or a lifeboat, or a ladder."-Rumi
"It's all one song!" -Neil Young

Judith Browning

Posts: 10392

Location: a temperate, clay/loam spot on planet earth, the universe

3642

posted 6 days ago

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Solitude is the human condition,
the universal vocation to be human.
It is the willingness,
with Love indwelling,
to go to the heart of pain
to find new life and share it with the world
even though you may be separated from it physically.
It is from this commitment to be focused
through the narrow gate of solitude
that self-emptying love is outpoured,
and the heart of the community,
the heart of its pain,
is transformed into the heart of joy.

Maggie Ross
(Quaker Poet)

"We're all just walking each other home." -Ram Dass
"Be a lamp, or a lifeboat, or a ladder."-Rumi
"It's all one song!" -Neil Young

Judith Browning

Posts: 10392

Location: a temperate, clay/loam spot on planet earth, the universe

3642

posted 5 days ago

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A Psalm to Wisdom

In the pouring forth of wisdom
all things have their being;
wisdom in my shining,
wisdom beyond me shining.
All things are branches
of the Tree of wisdom
wisdom in me growing,
wisdom beyond me growing.
In the circle of being
all things share a blessing;
wisdom in me turning,
wisdom beyond me turning.

(from the Chinook Psalter ed. by Lee Henderson)

"We're all just walking each other home." -Ram Dass
"Be a lamp, or a lifeboat, or a ladder."-Rumi
"It's all one song!" -Neil Young

Judith Browning

Posts: 10392

Location: a temperate, clay/loam spot on planet earth, the universe

3642

posted 4 days ago

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We cannot have a healed society,
we cannot have change,
we cannot have justice,
if we do not reclaim and repair
the human spirit.

Angel Kyodo Williams
(1969 to pres., writer, activist, ordained Zen priest)

"We're all just walking each other home." -Ram Dass
"Be a lamp, or a lifeboat, or a ladder."-Rumi
"It's all one song!" -Neil Young

Judith Browning

Posts: 10392

Location: a temperate, clay/loam spot on planet earth, the universe

3642

posted 3 days ago

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For all the advances of modern societies, traditional tribal communities may have better served the essential needs of people for emotional support, nutrition, and exercise than does contemporary society.
We don’t need to return to the ways of our ancestors, but we do need to learn from them.
What are those lessons?
Instead of building more single-family dwellings, we should build multigenerational, multifamily homes in vibrant eco-villages that share facilities, tools, labor and resources. Instead of designing cities for self-driving, single-person cars, design them for walking, biking, and public transportation with lots of places for people to meet and greet, mix and mingle.
Instead of growing an economy dependent on global movements of money, people, and goods to maximize profit uncoupled from place, create economies that bring people together to maximize health and well-being in the place where they live.

David Korten
How the Economy Affects Our Mental Health, Yes Magazine, (18 September 2018)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Korten

"We're all just walking each other home." -Ram Dass
"Be a lamp, or a lifeboat, or a ladder."-Rumi
"It's all one song!" -Neil Young

Judith Browning

Posts: 10392

Location: a temperate, clay/loam spot on planet earth, the universe

3642

posted 2 days ago

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In choosing our story, we not only cast our vote of influence over the kind of world future generations inherit, but we also affect our own lives in the here and now.
When we find a good story and fully give ourselves to it, that story can act through us, breathing new life into everything we do.
When we move in a direction that touches our heart, we add to the momentum of deeper purpose that makes us feel more alive.
A great story and a satisfying life share a vital element: a compelling plot that moves toward meaningful goals, where what is at stake is far larger than our personal gains and losses.

Joanna Macy
Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We're in without Going Crazy

"We're all just walking each other home." -Ram Dass
"Be a lamp, or a lifeboat, or a ladder."-Rumi
"It's all one song!" -Neil Young

Judith Browning

Posts: 10392

Location: a temperate, clay/loam spot on planet earth, the universe

3642

posted 1 day ago

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The ideology of development has implied the globalization of the priorities,
patterns, and prejudices of the West.
Instead of self-generated, development is imposed.
Instead of coming from within, it is externally guided.
Instead of contributing to the maintenance of diversity,
development has created homogeneity...

Vandana Shiva
Monocultures of the Mind: Perspectives on Biodiversity and Biotechnology (1993)

"We're all just walking each other home." -Ram Dass
"Be a lamp, or a lifeboat, or a ladder."-Rumi
"It's all one song!" -Neil Young

Judith Browning

Posts: 10392

Location: a temperate, clay/loam spot on planet earth, the universe

3642

posted 11 hours ago

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Around the world, people are realizing the current path will lead only to disaster, and they’re beginning to ask the hard questions about what to do next.
We humans now have the knowledge and technology to move beyond the violence, fear, and daily struggle for survival that besets the lives of so many.
We have the capacity to secure a world of peace, beauty, diversity, creativity, material sufficiency, and spiritual abundance for all people, and have all that in balance with Earth’s ecosystems.
Achieving such a goal requires that we make this vision our common goal and transform our cultural narratives, institutions, and infrastructure accordingly—a steep but imperative challenge.
Success requires leadership from all levels of society, including from people everywhere working to grow community-facilitating cultural values, institutions, and infrastructure in the places where they live.

David Korten
Why I Have Hope in the Face of Human Extinction (1 November 2018)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Korten

"We're all just walking each other home." -Ram Dass
"Be a lamp, or a lifeboat, or a ladder."-Rumi
"It's all one song!" -Neil Young

Always respect your superiors. If you have any. - Mark Twain / tiny ad

All of the video from the Eat Your Dirt Summit - more than 42 hours!

https://permies.com/wiki/106759/video-Eat-Dirt-Summit-hours