Sheldon B. Kopp

[Video: “Retro-reflective Fireball Aimer.” (See the “Operation On Target” page at the Boy Scouts of America site for details.) For this project, Boy Scout teams on adjacent mountaintops learned to signal one another using just mirrors and sunlight. The “fireball aimer” simplifies this task, as I understand it, by enabling the sender to aim the mirror precisely at the distant target: when looking though a tiny hole in the mirror, the sender sees a ghostly “fireball” positioned at the exact point where the reflected signal is aimed. The receiver sees only the brilliant pinpoint flash of light.]

From whiskey river:

Unwilling to tolerate life’s ambiguity, its unresolvability, its inevitability, we search for certainty, demanding that someone else must provide it. Stubbornly, relentlessly, we seek the wise man, the wizard, the good parent, someone else who will show us the way.
Surely someone must know. It simply cannot be that life is just what it appears to be, that there are no hidden meanings, that this is it, just this and nothing more. It’s not fair, not enough! We cannot possibly bear having to live life as it is, without reassurance, without being special, without even being offered some comforting explanations. Come on now! Come across! You’ve got to give us something to make it all right. The medicine tastes lousy. Why should we have to swallow it just because it’s the only thing we can do? Can’t you at least promise us that we will have to take it just once, that it won’t taste that bad, that we will feel just fine immediately afterward, that we will be glad we took it? No? Well then, surely, at least you have to give us a lollipop for being good.
But what if we are talking to ourselves? What if there is no one out there listening? What if for each of us the only wise man, the only wizard, the only good parent we will ever have is our own helpless, vulnerable self? What then?

(Sheldon B. Kopp [source])

…and:

I believe I know the only cure, which is to make one’s center of life inside of one’s self, not selfishly or excludingly, but with a kind of unassailable serenity—to decorate one’s inner house so richly that one is content there, glad to welcome anyone who wants to come and stay, but happy all the same when one is inevitably alone.

(Edith Wharton [source])

…and:

The Neurons Who Watch Birds
We have to think now what it would be like
To be old. Some funny little neurons,
Developed for high-speed runners, and quick
Handed bowmen, begin to get tired. They fire

But then lay down their bows and watch birds.
The kidney cells—“Too much thinking!” the Chinese
Say—look around for help, but the kids have
All gone to the city. Your friends get hit by lightning,

And your enemies live on. This isn’t going to get
Better. Crows yelling from the telephone wires
Don’t include you in the stories they tell, and they seem
To remember some story that you haven’t heard.

What can you do? We’ll have to round up
All those little people wandering about
In the body, get them to sit up straight, and study
This problem: How do we die?

(Robert Bly [source])

[Read more…]

[Image: “All I See Is Gold,” by Billy Wilson on Flickr.com. (Used here under a Creative Commons license.) Says the photographer: “I took this this evening — the windchill was unbelievable. This is the edge of the ice at the end of a pier in the Saint Mary’s River. There is enough current at the end on the pier that the water doesn’t freeze there in the winter.”]

From whiskey river:

Eighty-three problems

There is a story of a man who came to see the Buddha because he had heard that the Buddha was a great teacher. He had some problems in his life, and he thought the Buddha might be able to help him straighten them out.

The Buddha listened patiently to the man as he laid out all his difficulties and worries, and then waited for the Buddha to say the words that would put everything right for him.

The Buddha said, “I can’t help you.””What do you mean?” said the man.

“Everybody’s got problems,” said the Buddha. “In fact, we’ve all got eighty-three problems, each one of us. Eighty-three problems, and there’s nothing you can do about it. If you work really hard on one of them, maybe you can fix it — but if you do, another one will pop right into its place.”

The man was furious. “I thought you were a great teacher! I thought you could help me!”

The Buddha said, “Well, maybe it will help you with the eighty-fourth problem.”

“The eighty-fourth problem?” said the man. “What’s the eighty-fourth problem?”

The Buddha said, “You want to not have any problems.”

(Steve Hagen [source (in slightly different words)])

…and:

If the boundaries of the self are defined by what we feel, then those who cannot feel even for themselves shrink within their own boundaries, while those who feel for others are enlarged, and those who feel compassion for all beings must be boundless. They are not separate, not alone, not lonely, not vulnerable in the same way as those of us stranded in the islands of ourselves, but they are vulnerable in other ways. Still, that sense of the dangers of feeling for others is so compelling that many withdraw, and develop elaborate stories to justify withdrawal, and then forget that they have shrunk. Most of us do, one way or another.

(Rebecca Solnit [source])

[Read more…]

At the Attenuated Center

At the Edge of Enough