Love’s Growth
John Donne
I scarce believe my love to be so pure
As I had thought it was,
Because it doth endure
Vicissitude, and season, as the grasse;
Methinks I lied all winter, when I swore,
My love was infinite, if spring make’it more.
But if this medicine, love, which cures all sorrow
With more, not onely bee no quintessence,
But mixt of all stuffes, paining soule, or sense,
And of the Sunne his working vigour borrow,
Love’s not so pure, and abstract, as they use
To say, which have no Mistresse but their Muse,
But as all else, being elemented too,
Love sometimes would contemplate, sometimes do
And yet no greater, but more eminent,
Love by the spring is grown;
As, in the firmament,
Starres by the Sunne are not inlarg’d, but showne,
Gentle love deeds, as blossomes on a bough,
From love’s awakened root do bud out now.
If, as in water stir’d more circles bee
Produc’d by one, love such additions take,
Those like so many spheares, but one heaven make,
For, they are all concentrique unto thee,
And though each spring doe adde to love new heate,
As princes do in times of action get
New taxes, and remit them not in peace,
No winter shall abate the spring’s encrease.
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Gratitude Day 1366
“Gather the fragments left over, so that nothing will be wasted.” So they collected them, and filled twelve wicker baskets with fragments from the five barley loaves that had been more than they could eat.” John 6:12–13
My most generous Lord, You not only give spiritual nourishment to Your people, You give it in superabundance. As I daily seek You out and am filled with Your mercy, help me to never tire of feasting upon the superabundant gift of Your grace. Please do nourish me, dear Lord, and help me to consume Your holy Word. Jesus, I trust in You.
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Today I bring you... mini-sketchbook doodles! These are the four latest ones. I have a fantasy cat with an abundance of wings, and a portrait of a fantasy cat. I also have a couple of elaborate doodles of abstract, eldritch horror angels. These two alone have kept me busy through several hours of waiting rooms, car rides, classical music concerts (which I love, mind you, but I also like to draw while listening to music. I know many of you can relate to this.), and family dinners.
These are done with good ol' ballpoint pen. I keep several colors in my go-bag.
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Transhuman Potential is driving us toward our rendezvous with Parallel Multiplicity. Prepare for the shift toward sustainable super-abundance where scarcity-based economies falter. Dimensional Computation is accelerating the Information-Space realities of Rapid Deployment and Complexity. Sometimes the most humane ideals are Transhuman.
The Transcendental Human - A Transgalactic Engagement Platform
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The Ninth Duino Elegy by Rainer Maria Rilke
Why, if this interval of being can be spent serenely
in the form of a laurel, slightly darker than all
other green, with tiny waves on the edges
of every leaf (like the smile of a breeze)–: why then
have to be human–and, escaping from fate,
keep longing for fate? . . .
Oh not because happiness exists,
that too-hasty profit snatched from approaching loss.
Not out of curiosity, not as practice for the heart, which
would exist in the laurel too. . . . .
But because truly being here is so much; because everything here
apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way
keeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all.
Once for each thing. Just once; no more. And we too,
just once. And never again. But to have been
this once, completely, even if only once:
to have been one with the earth, seems beyond undoing.
And so we keep pressing on, trying to achieve it,
trying to hold it firmly in our simple hands,
in our overcrowded gaze, in our speechless heart.
Trying to become it.–Whom can we give it to? We would
hold on to it all, forever . . . Ah, but what can we take along
into that other realm? Not the art of looking,
which is learned so slowly, and nothing that happened here. Nothing.
The sufferings, then. And above all, the heaviness,
and the long experience of love,– just what is wholly
unsayable. But later, among the stars,
what good is it–they are better as they are: unsayable.
For when the traveler returns from the mountain-slopes into the valley,
he brings, not a handful of earth, unsayable to others, but instead
some word he has gained, some pure word, the yellow and blue gentian. Perhaps we are here in order to say: house,
bridge, fountain, gate, pitcher, fruit-tree, window–
at most: column, tower. . . . But to say them, you must understand,
oh to say them more intensely than the Things themselves
ever dreamed of existing. Isn’t the secret intent
of this taciturn earth, when it forces lovers together,
that inside their boundless emotion all things may shudder with joy?
Threshold: what it means for two lovers
to be wearing down, imperceptibly, the ancient threshold of their door–
they too, after the many who came before them
and before those to come. . . . ., lightly.
Here is the time for the sayable, here is its homeland.
Speak and bear witness. More than ever
the Things that we might experience are vanishing, for
what crowds them out and replaces them is an imageless act.
An act under a shell, which easily cracks open as soon as
the business inside outgrows it and seeks new limits.
Between the hammers our heart
endures, just as the tongue does
between the teeth and, despite that,
still is able to praise.
Praise this world to the angel, not the unsayable one,
you can’t impress him with glorious emotion; in the universe
where he feels more powerfully, you are a novice. So show him
something simple which, formed over generations,
lives as our own, near our hand and within our gaze.
Tell him of Things. He will stand astonished; as you stood
by the ropemaker in Rome or the potter along the Nile.
Show him how happy a Thing can be, how innocent and ours,
how even lamenting grief purely decides to take form,
serves as a Thing, or dies into a Thing–, and blissfully
escapes far beyond the violin.–And these Things,
which live by perishing, know you are praising them; transient,
they look to us for deliverance: us, the most transient of all.
They want us to change them, utterly, in our invisible heart,
within–oh endlessly–within us! Whoever we may be at last.
Earth, isn’t this what you want: to arise within us,
invisible? Isn’t it your dream
to be wholly invisible someday?–O Earth: invisible!
What, if not transformation, is your urgent command?
Earth, my dearest, I will. Oh believe me, you no longer
need your springtimes to win me over–one of them,
ah, even one, is already too much for my blood.
Unspeakably I have belonged to you, from the first.
You were always right, and your holiest inspiration
is our intimate companion, Death.
Look, I am living. On what? Neither childhood nor future
grows any smaller . . . . . Superabundant being
wells up in my heart.
source: here.
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Being neurodivergent is hilarious. Conversations with neurotypical people are like: we are two people talking about the topic at hand in a socially appropriate manner. I am moving my mouth and face in a conventional way and my mouth says conventional things. Sports game. Weekend plans. TV show—but not too much! The weather is Fine and So Are We. There is a superabundance of love and exhilaration bundled inside of my body like the compressed seeds of a cattail flower. My heart is too soft and the lights are too loud. Oh, no. I've Made a Face. I desperately want to tell you about loaches.
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One thing I think about sometimes especially in the context of historicized fantasy utopias or historical counterfactual utopias is the dilemma whereby states have to grow or be swallowed by their competitors. It's really hard to build a stable, peaceful society when you're surrounded by conquerors! The Mohists tried hiring themselves out as siege engineers to discourage aggressive warfare, but they did fail in the long run--the biggest fish ate all of China, and the Qin Dynasty was born.
And unfortunately there's no superabundant, peaceful, natural utopia you can appeal to--even prosperous preagricultural societies could be highly stratified, could (and did!) have slavery and warfare, and had to face dilemmas arising out of conflict with their neighbors.
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