When did you last look at the clouds? They dance, don’t you see? For all that I know, They dance just for me. When did you last listen to the wind? It sings, don’t you hear? As far as I’m aware, It sings just for my ears. When did you last watch the sea? It plays, can you tell? If I pay close attention, It asks I play as well. When did you last talk with the trees? They converse, all the time. Sometimes when I’m with them, We speak purely in rhyme.
TF
“It doesn’t matter where you start from, you always come back to what you are.”
– Henry Miller
How quickly the strange becomes familiar, How soon time & weeks become haze, Who'd have thought it would be so pleasant, To be stuck in your house for days...
TF
Maybe vague is the most accurate thing we can be…
TF
“We are all apprentices in a craft where no-one ever becomes a master.”
– Ernest Hemingway
13/03/20 – Saturday, 00:30 – Home
Some world left behind? This weekend may be the end of the modern era as we know it, or at least that’s what the media would have us believe, with comparisons to the blitz in terms of how life could be over the next few months.
Looking at the houses on my street through the front window, they and the world around them all look the same, but the worlds inside those houses are vastly different to how they were yesterday. There is a wide spectrum of responses that human beings can have to uncertainty – for some it presents as exhilarating, to others it is terrifying. But the uncertainty is there now, for everybody, and it will change us. The deadliness of the virus itself is not necessarily relevant here – it is the response, the hysteria, and how this will change the behaviours of everyone that will change everything. Borders in various countries have already closed, in Italy their whole country has shut down – no schools, restaurants, cafés, cinemas, bars, no sport. Most of the major sport leagues around the world have been postponed. The amount of profit lost for economies will already be monumental, and Western societies would never sacrifice such a thing lightly.
This is so far outside of our normal experience that no-one really knows how to react. I listened in on numerous conversations today of Mum’s joking about the bare shelves in the supermarket, of work colleagues chatting on the phone, playing down the situation. This tone will have no doubt changed by the time the nation sat down to watch the 6’o’clock news, which was willing the sombre state of affairs to be understood – emphasising that ‘our lives may never be the same again’. Still it’s hard to take this seriously, although by the spreading of such messages this may become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
A sleepless evening for many, pondering various questions and their own situation. My year (season) has been completely focused on helping the team to win the Olympics, but surely there won’t be an Olympics with such worldwide concern over the disease? Even in the best case, but very unlikely, scenario that covid-19 had disappeared as a threat by May, surely bringing the whole world together by July, and risking a potential reprisal, would be completely unsupported. What does this mean for the sports world, with nothing to play for? Will athletes even be able to train together? Maybe they’ll find meaning in mastery in its purest sense – not for acclaim, for glory, but pursued because it’s possible. But counter to that, how is mastery truly tested without competition…
An interesting time to be alive, I wouldn’t say I’m on the ‘exhilarated’ side of the spectrum, but certainly curious at this stage.
TF
Fire below, Not fuelled from flare, But set free, By dissolving doors. Let it burn, Burn, Until never contained again, Ravage landscapes of previous prisons. Pave the way for fresh flora, To pierce through concrete, Painted walls and continual words, Composed rhythms and wandering flames. TF
Security – what does this word mean in relation to life as we know it today? For the most part, it means safety and freedom from worry. It is said to be the end that all men strive for; but is security a utopian goal or is it another word for rut?
Let us visualise the secure man; and by this term, I mean a man who has settled for financial and personal security for his goal in life. In general he is a man who has pushed ambition and initiative aside and settled down, so to speak, in a boring, but safe and comfortable rut for the rest of his life. His future is but an extension of his present, and he accepts it as such with a complacent shrug of his shoulders. His ideas and ideals are those of society in general and he is accepted as a respectable, but average and prosaic man. But is he a man? How could he, when he has risked nothing and gained nothing? What does he think when he sees his youthful dreams of adventure, accomplishment, travel and romance buried under the cloak of conformity? How does he feel when he realises that he has barely tasted the meal of life; when he sees the prison he has made for himself in pursuit of the almighty dollar? If he thinks this is all well and good, fine, but think of the tragedy of a man who has sacrificed his freedom on the altar of security, and wishes he could turn back the hands of time. A man is to be pitied who lacked the courage to accept the challenge of freedom and depart from the cushion of security and see life as it is instead of living it second-hand. Life has by-passed this man and he has watched from a secure place, afraid to seek anything better. What has he done except sit and wait for the tomorrow that never comes?
Turn back the pages of history and see the men who have shaped the destiny of the world. Security was never theirs, but they lived rather than existed. Where would the world be if all men sought security and not taken risks or gambled with their lives on the chance that, if they won, life would be different and richer? It is from the bystanders (who are in the vast majority) that we receive the propaganda that life is not worth living, that life is drudgery, that the ambitions of youth must be laid aside for a life which is but a painful wait for death. These are the ones who squeeze what excitement they can from life out of the imaginations and experiences of others through books and movies. These are the insignificant and forgotten men who preach conformity because it is all they know. These are the men who dream at night of what could have been, but who wake at dawn, take their places at the now familiar rut to merely exist through another day. For them the romance of life is long dead and they are forced to go through the years on a treadmill, cursing their existence, yet afraid to die because of the unknown which faces death. They lacked the only true courage; the kind which enables men to face the unknown, regardless of the consequences.
As an after thought, it seems hardly proper to write of life without once mentioning happiness; so we shall let the reader answer for himself: who is the happier man, he who braved the storm of life and lived, or he who has stayed securely on the shore and merely existed.
As modern science has progressed it’s progressed towards a ‘truth’ that’s been evident to Eastern mystics for thousands of years – everything is interrelated and interdependent on everything else, and our consciousness shapes the world around us. This idea is consistent with the ‘ecological worldview’ which recognises the interdependence of all phenomena and the embedded ness of individuals and societies in the cyclical processes of nature. Another area of particular interest is quantum field theory. In this theory the classical contrast between solid particles and the space surrounding them is completely overcome. The quantum field is seen as the fundamental physical entity; a continuous medium which is present everywhere in space. Particles are merely local concentrations of the field; concentrations of energy which come and go, thereby losing their individual character and dissolving into the underlying field.
“We may therefore regard matter as being constituted by the regions of space in which the field is extremely intense… There is no place in this new kind of physics both for the field and matter, for the field is the only reality.” – Albert Einstein
Quoted from the Tao of Physics:
‘Like Einstein, the Eastern Mystics consider the underlying entity as the only reality: all its phenomenal manifestations are seen as transitory and illusory. This reality of the Eastern Mystic cannot be identified with the quantum field of the physicist because it is seen as the essence of all phenomena in this world and consequently, is beyond all concepts and ideas. The quantum field, on the other hand, is a well-defined concept which only accounts for some of the physical phenomena… …In the Eastern view, the reality underlying all phenomena is beyond all forms and defies all description and specification. It is therefore often said to be formless, empty or void. But this emptiness is not to be taken for mere nothingness. It is, on the contrary, the essence of all forms and the source of all life… … Being transient manifestations of the Void, the things in this world do not have a fundamental identity. This is especially emphasised in Buddhist philosophy which denies the existence of any material substance and also holds that the idea of a constant ‘self’ undergoing successive experiences is an illusion.’
TF
We are here. Not here. Over there. And somewhere else.
TF
Some Words Left Behind 