Right-wingers of the Bush-Rove ilk have had a tough time finding a human face to put on their failed, inhuman, mean-as-hell policies. But it was hard not to recognize the genius of wedding that faltering brand of institutionalized greed to the image of the suburban American supermom. It’s the perfect cover, for there is almost nothing in the world meaner than this species of provincial tyrant. Palin herself burned this political symbiosis into the pages of history with her seminal crack about the “difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull: lipstick,” blurring once and for all the lines between meanness on the grand political scale as understood by the Roves and Bushes of the world, and meanness of the small-town variety as understood by pretty much anyone who has ever sat around in his ranch-house den dreaming of a fourth plasma-screen TV or an extra set of KC HiLites for his truck, while some ghetto family a few miles away shares a husk of government cheese.

He’s scathing and crude and usually brilliant, but the piece itself is as much a symptom of our cultural illness as it is a diagnosis. The other side of self-absorbed meanness to others is self-absorbed meanness to yourself. They’re both destructive.

Kristin quotes George Eliot:

Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.

I drove to Guanella and Kenosha passes yesterday, hunting a golden tree, or a stand of them, to sit under and listen to the breezy afternoon light. (Also, of course, to take pictures.) It turns out I was a little early—most of the aspens around those passes are still green-ish. At any rate, I found no irresistibly magical niches, no obviously staged pieces of light, color, smell, and texture—too perfect to be real—as you sometimes can in the high country. Probably, I was in my car too much.

Always the altitude snob, I drove back up to Guanella pass—eleven thousand something feet—and walked around until the stars came out.

Autumn above the tree line is subtle. Still there, though.

I remember driving over Tioga Pass in Yosemite, the last fall I lived in California, for the express purpose of hunting autumn. Thousands of feet below the summit of the Sierras, near Mono Lake, a couple of cottonwoods next to a gas station had turned yellow. They made me horribly homesick. I stared for a few minutes. I adore the Bay Area, but after eight years there I was desperate for a real fall. Now I have them, though they’re still subtle compared to the east coast. Mostly they’re lost in all the work and busy-ness. But then, that’s my fault.

Another quote, from the Vinotok festival (which sounds way more fun and meaningful than, say, Denver’s Oktoberfest):

Oats and corn, oats and corn, all that dies will be reborn
Vine and grain, vine and grain, all that falls shall rise again

We’ll bottom out sometime in late December and start a slow acceleration towards the spring equinox. Then the sun will race higher every day until June, and begin to fail in the late heat of summer, and then again the color, and the cold, and the dark.

Seriously though? I can’t freaking believe it’s already almost October.

Does anyone else get the sense that the gods on Olympus are dealing and maneuvering? Inscrutable to us mere mortals, yet sooner or later, some city will be sacrificed in the deal, overrun by hammer-wielding giants and hell hounds.

In other news, are we fallen saints, looking for our lost goodness, or are we evolving towards ever-greater depth? The answer is, of course, both.

The Romantics are absolutely right: we did once walk with God and the Goddess, and bathe in the garden of eternal delights. But that garden didn’t actually or historically exist yesterday. We did not lose Spirit when we went from foraging to horticulture, or from horticulture to agrarian—we did not lose Spirit at any point in evolution, time, or history. We “lost” Spirit in involution, which is what happens when Spirit steps down into time in the first place. And when did that occur? Prior to the Big Bang; prior to your own birth; but most important, prior to the point right now where you recoil from infinity. Growth to goodness is indeed a recaptured goodness, but a goodness lost in involution*, not evolution. With that simple understanding, both views can be honored.

Ken is wordy, but damn he’s a sharp guy.

In a similarly-themed post (in the “forward? back? both.” way, not in the invoking-hell-hounds way), Clarissa outed me: I’ve made a little nest for zeitgeist. Err. Yeah. We’ll see if the eggs hatch. Personally, I am not holding my breath.

On the other hand, if Christ were around these days, my guess is he’d get around on a bike. And dig on hip-hop yoga.

Not an easy request.

The second download took 41.98 seconds.

The initial policy was to commit a complete diff every week, of every netlined mind and its property, but it quickly became clear that the cost of comparing two versions of the human mind outweighed the cost of just dumping a new copy every week. There were too many organic variations to learn, and hundreds of millions of new minds coming online every week, and only so many AIs to do the work.

The exact time of the weekly commit was never published, and you weren’t supposed to feel anything when the cursor reached you. But I have, from time to time. I can tell. Sometimes I lose my train of thought. Sometimes I feel, for no reason, suddenly elated, or frightened, or cold. Sometimes I find myself thinking about a place I’ve never been, or people I don’t know: a green and stone temple at sunset, a smiling girl in a yellow flightsuit, a delicate painting of a dragon in red and black hanging on a white wall.

They’re not my memories.

The ocean is clear and deep, but on the surface its storms can be fickle and frightening.

On the way back, I settled into a nice long-stride pace and focused on relaxing. I imagined that the run was a continuous, controlled fall. I noticed the rhythmic pressure on the heels and balls of my feet, felt each impact compress my foot, ankle, and leg, and allowed the fall to carry my weight forward into the next compression. I tried to fall with an open chest and noble spine.

Off and on, focusing on the feeling of it all, the run dissolved into a sense of floating forward and a gentle pressure—the pressure of the exertion required to maintain everything. That was it. It was not at all unpleasant. It was not a concept in my mind, but a feeling in which I was immersed, like a pool of warm water, or the weight of a lover’s body, and there wasn’t room for much else. All the little discomforts and pains were still around, somewhere. But they weren’t very important. The exertion’s breathing was a wave, and I was what the wave felt like. I was nothing other than that.

During an IM chat inspired by Clarissa’s post on non-attachment, Orwell, and Gandhi last week, I told Enjelani that I don’t usually find running to be very meditative. Maybe I try too hard, maybe I’m too worried about improving my time. Later, Jet and I talked about choosing a direction in life, rather than a specific goal. A goal is too restrictive; liable to anchor your identity to something imaginary. If it never comes to be, what then are you? If it does come to be … what, then, are you?

I do think that, somehow, the feeling of gently losing yourself to the exertion of something—anything—is part of the answer to non-attachment. How can you love someone and still practice non-attachment? I’m not sure, but maybe a paradoxical commitment to both is the exertion itself, is the thing to which you must surrender. It makes no sense, but in the floating-fall of my little run today, there was no need for thought. There was only the exertion. Somehow, that was enough.

That’s not me in the photo, by the way. That’s Karl and Tracy, both of whom are bad ass, and quite senior to me. They’re in front of Mt Sopris, at Boulder Aikikai’s Annual Summer Camp in the Rockies, which was two weeks ago. I’ll post a few more photos here as soon as I get Lightroom working on my laptop again.

So the black belt feels a little overdue in some ways, but not so much in others. I am glad for the recognition, and I do feel qualified to, say, teach beginners the basic open-hand stuff and ukemi. But I was chatting with a friend in the dojo today about how aikido is an apparently bottomless rabbit hole. You think you’re making progress and that you know a thing or two, then you run into someone with whom your little tricks and techniques utterly fail. “OK,” you think to yourself. “I know nothing.”

Or, you train with people who work with levels of effortlessness, grace, and power you know are possible, but still beyond your own practice.

Either way, new expanses of unexplored terrain open before you. That happens a lot. It’s why we keep coming back. It keeps raising questions about body/mind/awareness/relationship/spirit/etc/etc. Also, it’s a lot of fun. And you meet some of the best people: beautiful, funny, strong, caring, flawed. And so on …

Anyway, I think I’ll be doing this thing for a while. Here’s to another 12, 24, 30, or 40 years of training …*

I had kind of an awesome time at the wedding. Who knew Iowa could be so much fun?

I’ve spent a little time trying to decide how to organize the 900+ photos for web-based review by the newlyweds and others. I wanted to categorize the photos by event type—rehearsal, rehearsal dinner, ceremony, reception, and general portraits. I wanted to provide edited versions of those sets—my personal picks—while making sure everything was available for review somehow, in case someone likes a shot that I didn’t think was better than mediocre.

Lightroom offers some built-in gallery templates, but as far as I could tell they didn’t provide as much hierarchy as I wanted. I decided to give Flickr a shot. Currently I’ve got almost everything uploaded to my account, and have basically achieved the organization I wanted with Flickr’s collections and sets.

Two big downsides to this are:

• My photostream is now 900+ photos bigger, and only about 100 of them are shots I’d actually want to keep in there.
• I set everything to the “friends and family” privacy level, since I figured not everyone would want their likeness posted publicly online. Obviously I can’t require everyone who wants to see the photos to sign up for Flickr, but Flickr does offer a “guest pass,” where you send out a secret URL that gives the viewer access to otherwise restricted photos. However, this works for only for Sets and for an entire photostream, not for a Collection. If it worked for a Collection (which can contain Sets), I’d be set. As it is, I’m going to have to send out two URLs: one to sign in as a guest for my whole photostream, and then a second for the actual Collection. Less than ideal.

I’ve never done this kind of mass shooting for “a client” before. Suggestions are welcome.

There may be a real name for this style of image, but I’m calling it Boards-of-Canada-esque. The style involves one or more of the following:

• children
• bokeh
• sunlight
• distressed/discolored edges
• accidental framing and focus

They’re forgotten polaroids of you and your sister in the park, torn 8mm stills of your youthful mother smiling mid-blink. They’re warm and innocent and out of focus, like the memories they evoke.

Of course, in this case, they’re all digital and purposely vignetted and you took them yesterday. Kind of like using digital plugins instead of old analog synths. They’re fun to make, though!