So, not altogether unpredictably I ended taking an unscheduled ice bath by falling into the brook! Although I won’t over dramatise, I’ll call it what it is – wild paddling.
Coffee first and then I have to chop/ prune/ wrestle a fallen tree out of the brook. Typically I have no waterproof footwear so it looks like I’ll have to go in barefoot 🥶🤦♂️!
Huh. Never heard of Próspera before until I read this. When hell looks like a Caribbean holiday.
“Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people.”
— Carl Jung
Another beautiful day out there. What feels like a balmy 12 degrees, a gorgeous blue sky scuffed with the merest wisps of hazy clouds. Just when I think it can’t get any better I stumble across the tiniest, freshest (hours?) looking little lambs in a field. Nothing’s going to top that today.
Lovely post, as always, from Mike Farley at An Open Ground.
“Part of the trouble, it seems to me, is no more than the nature of mind itself. The self is not a settled thing, not a captain on the bridge of the mind; thoughts, feelings, longings, identities even, come and go according to circumstances, or else merely according to the restless patterns of internal weather. Nothing is fixed; intention is only a word, a flickering across unsteady waters.”
“I don’t know… I think I’d like to say only that they (children) should learn to be alone and try to spend as much time as possible by themselves. I think one of the faults of young people today is that they try to come together around events that are noisy, almost aggressive at times. This desire to be together in order to not feel alone is an unfortunate symptom, in my opinion. Every person needs to learn from childhood how to spend time with oneself. That doesn’t mean he should be lonely, but that he shouldn’t grow bored with himself because people who grow bored in their own company seem to me in danger, from a self-esteem point of view.”
It’s become very clear that my mind is incapable of thinking geo-politically or in terms of Realpolitik.
“Reality does not need to be solved. It does not require a conclusion. The mind may demand answers, but life itself moves effortlessly without them. In the absence of rigid knowing, there is an openness - an ease that was never dependent on certainty in the first place.”