Water...

 Grateful am I for ... Simple pleasures: morning coffee, feeding my goats, hugging my partner Friendships: on-line and in person, amazingly in the middle of a worldwide pandemic to boot Gravity: yep, keeps my feet on mother earth, maybe your's too? Water, Air, Earth, Fire: and all the scientific discoveries which have led us further than the bounds of our own finite understanding of elemental causes. Freedom: as limited as human freedom actually is, I can think of times in my life when I was less free than I am now. I can imagine things not being free.  Freedom at an existential level can be overwhelming if Fromm and Sartre got anything correct in their theories of human freedom. Maybe I should be more grateful for other things.  I am.  Just as I can also be grateful for the fact that I don't have to count all blessings to be blessed.  It's okay to forget here and there, even important things, and I'm super grateful I don't have to demand perfection of myself any lo

I have an average layman\"s working knowledge of particle physics, chaos theory, and "many worlds theory" MWT ( see here ) to understand that the most knowledgeable among us, knows almost nothing about how the universe actually works.  I\"m not discrediting factual human knowledge either.  If you have read other posts, I don\"t find god or watch-maker-like explanations of the universe very personally empowering.   I do think.  I am a human.  The appeal of the exotic tantalizes me, and the mundane bores me: maybe as much as the next fellow.  We all, perhaps, are escaping from the "freedom" of self-expression at some fundamental level.  So even after a half-hearted acknowledgement (just the fact that I know something of these topics is so elating!), I do put my arms around the reality that I do have before me. I\"ve done the magic trip, (astral travel, or what I think it must be in the creative power of the brains imaginary abilities), it was like

Jamesian by Thom Gunn (pg 34  O'Donohue, John.  Anam cara: A book of Celtic wisdom . NY: Cliff Street Books, 1997.) Their relationship consisted in discussing if it existed. Here I am in this space creating a bit more of Lee.  Of all the things that I might possibly remember ten years from now, I'm pretty sure it's not going to be the worry of this moment.  What I'm doing 10 years from today may have a lot to do with just embracing this next moment and the next. Living. It's such a normal thing.  In the scope of a lifetime, there is perhaps the a deluded sense that "I did this and that".  Maybe so or not. I wonder if my penchant for self-reflection might be slightly informed by the above lines of Thom Gunn.  The winding road of life twists.  After the road turns back on itself, perhaps progress is made with less introspection. Living.  It's more than just taking another breath; and living is "just taking another breath." In living life we liv