Consonantia is a Latin word that means “sounding together” to refer to the essential inner unity of the universe—a unity which, alas, is not always easily observable. "I sit in the cool back room, where words cease to resound, where all meanings are absorbed in the consonantia of heat, fragrant pine, quiet wind, bird song and one central tonic note that is unheard and unuttered. ... In the silence of the afternoon all is present and all is inscrutable in one central tonic note to which every other sounds ascends or from which it descends, to which every other meaning aspires, in order to find its true fulfillment. To ask when the note will sound is to lose the afternoon: it has already sounded, and all things now hum with the resonance of its sounding."
...I live in the woods as a reminder that I am free not to be a number. There is, in fact, a choice. It is a compelling necessity for me to be free to embrace the necessity of my own nature. I know there are trees here, I know there are birds here. I know the birds in fact very well, for there are precise pairs of birds (two each of fifteen or twenty species) living in the immediate area of my cabin. I share this particular place with them: we form an ecological balance. This harmony gives the idea of "place" a new configuration. "Esteemed friends, birds of noble lineage, I have no message to you except this: be what you are: be birds. Thus you will be your own sermon to yourselves!" Day of a Stranger - Thomas Merton
Tranquility - Time Solitaire. Music United with Nature.
Day of a Stranger by Thomas Merton
Watermark by filmmaker Jennifer Baichwal & photographer Ed Burtynsky( an exploration of the ways in which humanity has shaped, manipulated and depleted one of its most vital and compromised resources)
Franz Liszt - Hungarian Rhapsody No.2 in C# Minor
Edvard Grieg - Piano Concerto in A minor Op. 16
We can forget and even lose completely what is known into oblivion, but is this true? Are there not always some trace left(For instance, Göbekli Tepe). It was in oblivion for us but now it has come back. We knew it once in our history, andeven built it, but we covered it up, and now it is back to haunt us. When you have two levels of illusion, basic illusion that covers over existence as interpenetration and advanced illusion that sees perduence in things by postulating a substrata that perdures as things change we get by the layering of illusion (dukkha, maya, mara, dunya) that we get a mirroring effect within illusion itself, Illusion becomes reflexive. Now illusion itself is already very complex and tricky without this reflexive quality, so when we get the mirage of the mirage, so to speak, i.e. raise illusion to a power then we get something very complex, as well as something contradictory to experience where we see that the only thing that does not change is change itself, and paradoxical due to the reflections of contradiction in the reflexivity, and absurdity in which paradoxes reflect each other.
Grey Owl (born in September 18, 1888) believed that Canada's wilderness and vastly open nature was what made it unique from other countries of the world, and this was disappearing at an extremely fast rate due to consumerism and the modernist emphasis on capital. Grey Owl discussed in The Men of the Last Frontier how the Canadian government and logging industry were working together to project a false image of forest preservation in order to gain possession of Canada's forests and rid them of their resources... This was a call of desperation for the people of Canada to awaken from their immobility and resist the destruction of their country as the forests were being turned into deserts for profit
African Classical Music Ensemble - Kasse Mady Diabate
Thich Nhat Hanh, Deep Listening with Compassion
The Once and Future World began in the moment J.B. MacKinnon realized the grassland he grew up on was not the pristine wilderness he had always believed it to be. Instead, his home prairie was the outcome of a long history of transformation, from the disappearance of the grizzly bear to the introduction of cattle. After revisiting a globe exuberant with life, what remains today is an illusion of the wild -an illusion that has in many ways created our world. He traces how humans destroyed that reality, out of rapaciousness, yes, but also through a great forgetting. He calls for an "age of restoration," not only to revisit that richer and more awe-filled world, but to reconnect with our truest human nature. Here are fish that pass down the wisdom of elders, landscapes still shaped by "ecological ghosts," a tortoise that is slowly remaking prehistory. "It remains a beautiful world, and it is its beauty, not its emptiness, that should inspire us to seek more nature in our lives."
In Lak'ech, as Namaste, means you are my other or I am you and you are me, a statement of unity and oneness. When we live our life based on this principle, we know that every action we take is out of respect for all life, and we are livingand giving from our hearts. Remember when and what we give to others is giving to ourselves. If we feel drained or exhausted, it is possible that we gave out of fear, lack, obligation, ego, or a need to be accepted or liked rather than giving from our hearts. When we live the reality of unity, abundance and wholeness, we can share and help each other with our connections, ideas and resources without fear that there will not be enough to go around.
In Lak'ech
FOLI (there is no movement without rhythm)
Reality TV shows: Innate interest in coarseness and uncouth; a culture of ego, avarice, scheming and vile obscenities.
Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Insulted and Injured for a deeper understanding of people and how they work with enduring themes — desire, sin, pain, death, despair, hatred, love, forgiveness, reconciliation, joy, hope, peace, and more — touch and transform their lives, their relationships with others, and their very souls
Eric Satie (1866-1925) was a French composer and pianist. His work was a precursor to later artistic movements such as minimalism and repetitive music. He referred to himself as a "phonometrician" (meaning "someone who measures sounds"), preferring this designation to that of "musician" after having been called "a clumsy but subtle technician" in a book on contemporary French composers published in 1911. Gnossienne whisks me instantly away to the silent, pebbled shores of a quiet lake, where the wind softly blows through my hair and ruffles the hem of my dress, breathing the warning of an oncoming thunderstorm. Ah! Yes, I can see it in the sky; big, booming grey clouds, swirling over the lake like vultures to carrion. How beautiful, though - there is a heron, preening his fine plumage with such delicacy. Is that the first spot of rain upon my cheek? Lydia Jefferies
Eric Satie - Gnossienne
Eric Satie - Gnossienne
Five common elements of financial crises: new kind of investment or financial instrument, bandwagon mentality, leverage, the assignment of blame after the fact, short memory and tendency to repeat past mistakes (There can be few fields of human endeavor in which history counts for so little as in the world of finance. Past experience, to the extent that it is a part of memory at all, is dismissed as the primitive refuge of those who do not have the insight to appreciate the incredible wonders of the present) A Short History of Financial Euphoria by John Kenneth Galbraith
Jeffrey Sachs, card-carrying member of the international elite, who helped to nurture the kleptocratic crony capitalism of post-Soviet Russia and later came up with technocratic fantasies to end poverty in Africa and elsewhere with his Millennium Villages Project on his more recent book, The Price of Civilization, in which Americans have grown obese, ignorant, and apathetic. Schools are collapsing, infrastructure is crumbling, great companies are selfish and predatory. politicians have been thoroughly corrupted by power and money and live mainly to serve the interests of their wealthy patrons. The diagnostician traces the source of these evils to the "free market fallacy" leading to "Washington's retreat from public purpose". He identifies the good society with the happy society. For the latter one needs a philosophy of the good life, which the good doctor lacks.
In memoriam: Marshall Berman on civic engagement and critical culture, suffrage, freedom from suffering, freedom from the fetishism of commodities, freedom to dance alone. The great injustice of modern life was not the inequities alone butthe high tax they placed on us: the ways in which they limited our range of expression as well as our formal freedoms, our libido as well as work week, the ways they helped turned whole neighborhoods into expressways.
Down River- Ben Ratner; a film about mentorship, friendship, living life to the fullest, and ultimately letting go. A story of three young women teetering on the edge between creative breakthroughs and personal breakdowns, and their connection with the older woman they rely on for guidance, support and inspiration.
Still Life (1974) by Sohrab Shahid Saless, an ethnological documentarian – interested in what his protagonist is doing, but never wanting more than that.
What’s the use of chronology when time repeats itself by going in cycles? Within this loop, all time is one and each day is virtually indistinguishable from the other?
The Journey Beyond – Kofi Awoonor The bowling cry through door posts carrying boiling pots ready for the feasters. Kutsiami the benevolent boatman; 5 When I come to the river shore please ferry me across I do not have on my cloth-end the price of your ewardship. This poem is an appeal. The first line tells us that there is a cry and so we know that all is not well. People are crying as they carry boiling pots ready for feasters. It is most likely a funeral and if Awoonor’s Ewe background is to be well considered, this tells us of a typical burial occasion among the Ewe people where feasting is a norm too. But who is the dead man? Awoonor calls a man by the name Kutsiami. This is a word that translates literally as Death in Ewe. And this is supposedly a benevolent boatman who must needs carry the dead man across a certain river. This is traditional among Ewes to say that “someone has crossed a river” as a euphemism for “he is dead”. Awoonor is, in a sense, talking about himself as the dead man. He makes a plea to the boatman to take him across without asking a price for the duty, for “I do not have on my cloth-end/ the price of your stewardship”. Awoonor cries out for some kind of commitment. It is the cry of a man who wishes for bonds-his desired bondage is for community, identification with his brothers. The cry is a plea for recognition, for acceptance by his tribe. Awoonor, in his lyric voice of despair and frustration attendant upon his self-exile in the U.S. for seven years, wrote that “I have wanted the friendship/of the manacle/and the luxurious joy of the rose”
Jeffrey Sachs - The Price of Civilization
Jeffrey Sachs, card-carrying member of the international elite, who helped to nurture the kleptocratic crony capitalism of post-Soviet Russia and later came up with technocratic fantasies to end poverty in Africa and elsewhere with his Millennium Villages Project on his more recent book, The Price of Civilization, in which Americans have grown obese, ignorant, and apathetic. Schools are collapsing, infrastructure is crumbling, great companies are selfish and predatory. politicians have been thoroughly corrupted by power and money and live mainly to serve the interests of their wealthy patrons. The diagnostician traces the source of these evils to the "free market fallacy" leading to "Washington's retreat from public purpose". He identifies the good society with the happy society. For the latter one needs a philosophy of the good life, which the good doctor lacks.
Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfactions, our ego satisfactions, in consumption. The measure of social status, of social acceptance, of prestige, is now to be found in our consumptive patterns. The very meaning and significance of our lives today expressed in consumptive terms. Journal of Retailing, Victor Lebow
And with every birdsong that goes unrecognized, every flower that goes unnamed, every droning cicada that gets ignored, our boys and girls take one step further away from an abiding sense of what it means truly to be human.
How signals from the eye are processed by the brain, like a microprocessor, deconstructing and then reassembling details of an image to create a visual scene to generate edge detectors, motion detectors, stereoscopic depth detectors and color detectors, building blocks of the visual scene. Also physiological effects of sensory deprivation. David H. Hubel & Torsten N. Wiesel
Beatrice Rana - Chopin - Prelude Op. 28 No. 16
Evelyn Glennie: How to truly listen: listening to music involves much more than simply letting sound waves hit your eardrums.(Glennie became almost completely deaf by 12 but her hearing loss brought her a deeper understanding of the music she loves)
Erik Satie: Gnossienne No. 1, 2, 3
“Up Stream” by Mary Jane Jessen Collage and oil paint on canvas, Adams River Sockeye, BC, Canada
Margaret Atwood Selected Poems, 1965-1975 "The moving water will not show me my reflection. The rocks ignore. I am a word in a foreign language."
Rimsky-Korsakov - Scheherazade: Symphonic Suite, Op. 35 (1888), based on One Thousand and One Nights, sometimes known as The Arabian Nights.
