What society thinks of as reality is the hypnosis of social conditioning, an induced fiction in which we are all collectively participating. –Deepak Chopra
Update April 26, 2023: still waiting for results of yesterday’s MRI.
A man walks upright.
For him it is strenuous to climb a steep hill, because he has to keep pushing his own vertical mass upward and cannot gain any momentum.
The rabbit is better off. His forelegs support his horizontal body and the great back legs do the work. They are more than equal to thrusting uphill the light mass in front of them. Rabbits can go fast uphill. In fact, they have so much power behind that they find going downhill awkward, and sometimes, in flight down a steep place, they may actually go head over heels.
On the other hand, the man is five or six feet above the hillside and can see all round. To him the ground may be steep and rough but on the whole it is even, and he can pick his direction easily from the top of his moving, six-foot tower.
Watership Down (1972) by Richard Adams
“It is a long time since my last visit,” said Dumbledore, peering down his crooked nose at Uncle Vernon. “I must say, your agapanthus are flourishing.”
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by J.K.Rowling
What else should our lives be but a series of beginnings, of painful settings out into the unknown, pushing off from the edges of consciousness into the mystery of what we have not yet become.
David Malouf
UPDATE 2026: What’s happening is the weather. Rain this morning, sunshine later today. It’s all good.
UPDATE 2025: “Don’t Die!” is something Voldemort would espouse. “Stay Alive!” is closer to the wizard, Harry Potter”.
UPDATE 2024: Beliefs: 1. Women have a choice 2. No doubt there is a Highest power 3. Science seeks the Truth 4. Sex, like art, is what you make it 5. All good people are welcome to be a great country, yet scoundrels slide. It’s best to have a bias toward goodness unless proven otherwise.
UPDATE 2023: While the snail & snake proved to be problematic, and the mollusk impossible, at least I think I’m over Covid-19. Got one new YOGA pose out of all the suffering. It’s called Sleeping Bear; a good body position for taking the next breath while trying to sleep in the middle of the night.
From 2022: What is on his mind?
Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, having nothing to do: once she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures in it. “What is the use of a book,” thought Alice “without pictures or conversations?” ~Lewis Carroll
One hour drive freeway north; winding backroad south home.
When Lucy woke, the room was already light. The curtains were not drawn and the pane of the open casement reflected a gleam of sun which she could lose and find by moving her head on the pillow.
A wood pigeon was calling in the elms. But it was some other sound, she knew, that had woken her — a sharp sound, a part of the dream which had drained away, as she woke, like water out of a washbasin. Perhaps the dog had barked.
But now everything was quiet and there was only the flash of sun from the windowpane and the sound of the wood pigeon, like the first strokes of a paint brush on a big sheet of paper when you were still not sure how the picture was going to go.
The morning was fine. Would there be any mushrooms yet? Was it worth getting up now and going down the field to see? It was still too dry and hot — not good mushroom weather. The mushrooms were like the blackberries — both wanted a drop of rain before they’d be any good.
Soon there’d be damp mornings …
WATERSHIP DOWN (1972) by Richard George Adams
Cross your eyes to see in stereo. Overlap the two images above to see this work of wooden sculpture art in three dimensions. It stands at the Castle Rock trailhead just inside the Kirkwood Entrance.
