Orts #990
For years, normality has been stretched nearly to its breaking point, a rope pulled tighter and tighter, waiting for a nip of the black swan’s beak to snap it in two. Now that the rope has snapped, do we tie its ends back together, or shall we undo its dangling braids still further, to see what we might weave from them?
— the opening paragraph of a long, extraordinary, inspiring, ultimately infuriating and altogether remarkable essay,
The Coronation, by Charles Eisenstein
https://charleseisenstein.org/essays/the-coronation/
a further quote:
When the self is understood as relational, interdependent, even inter-existent, then it bleeds over into the other, and the other bleeds over into the self. Understanding the self as a locus of consciousness in a matrix of relationship, one no longer searches for an enemy as the key to understanding every problem, but looks instead for imbalances in relationships. The War on Death gives way to the quest to live well and fully, and we see that fear of death is actually fear of life. How much of life will we forego to stay safe?
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Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us.
— Bill Watterson (author of the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes)
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In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned . . . find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.
— Eric Hoffer, Reflections on the Human Condition (1973)