Tell Me

@teachrobotslove yes girl

I thought I couldn't feel God's love because I couldn't recognize the shape of love. I thought it would be a kind of superordinary feeling, elevated above the mundanity of existence, that would lift me up in piercing and transcendent warmth. I didn't understand that the miracle of love was in the ordinary things I'd already dismissed, not just a feeling but the order and experience of reality itself. Love was everywhere I looked, because it was built into the substrate of all existence, and everything good I'd ever known had flowed from its source. I thought I could not *feel* the love because like gravity, I had become so used to its constant presence that it was invisible to me. To be a human being was to be loved. To exist as a single flower in the crack on a sidewalk, straining toward the light in the cool shade, crushed, stepped on, unable to ever experience the grass, was still to be loved. He had built my eyes to experience the beauty of love, to feel the flowing touch of sunsets and the smiles of children, and in return I had not thanked him but foolishly, asked for something better than eyes.

@noampomsky thanks!

@TellMe528606 metaphysics as a guide to morals by iris murdoch

“He does not ‘intellectualise’ love, but sees intellect as passion. A desire for perfection, for clarity and understanding and truth, in craft or intellectual studies, is for Plato the other main road to virtue: a starting point, an inspiration, a discipline of the emotions, a spiritual cue.”

@paul_jkrause are your classes online by any chance? 👀

Teaching this book every year takes a lot, but it’s worth it. I continue to learn as I teach it too.

@occamsriver @FU_joehudson

Someone should write a book about power that’s the antithesis to Robert Greene’s 48 Laws. Power for people with heart, seeking power with and not power over, and zero dark triad

I used to think when Jesus said that anyone with the faith of a mustard seed could move a mountain, it was a testament to the deadened magic of the world, a kind of mockery of our inability to create miracles for ourselves. But we created machines from sand and metal that speak alien languages. We built bombs that disrupt matter by shifting them at the subatomic level. We can fly. We can live under the sea. We can send songs to each other through invisible waves on the air, fall in love with someone we never met, travel across the world with only our fingers while our eyes are closed. We can tell a story so amazing that it shifts the very foundation of reality. We've been moving mountains this entire time. It's only because we've become so accustomed to the mundanity of our miraculous powers that we've forgotten it is miraculous.

Acceptance is the most misunderstood word in the grief vocabulary. It does not mean approval. It does not mean closure. It does not mean the loss was secretly a blessing. Acceptance means you stop arguing with reality about what has occurred. The argument was costing you more than the loss itself.

When clients tell me they don't know how to access what they want, I ask them what they're angry about. Anger is the fastest shortcut to buried desire. Every resentment is a want you abandoned. Name the anger, and you'll find the want underneath it.

@themaddierune yes. so miraculous

A word only means something because we all agreed it did. Meaning is a collective act of faith. Language is the longest running collaborative project in human history. And you are using it right now to reach another consciousness across space and time. Don’t tell me that’s not miraculous.

@SpencerKlavan God, that’s sucha great way of putting it

I find it extraordinarily wondrous when it turns out that microscopic organisms use sophisticated motors to propel themselves, but I find it equally glorious to recall from time to time that this is the point of all the feats of nano-engineering, and not the other way around.

THIS

rofl

Rest in Power John McAfee

Ellen Bass, “The Thing Is”, Poetry of Presence: An Anthology of Mindfulness Poems