Seeing the hand Nature dealt Japan this past week made me recall the philosophical change in how I treated stuff a number of years ago.

The adage "if you haven't used it in 6mo throw it out" is good as a quip, but not as an overreaching philosophy on stuff and existence as a whole.  Too often we treat people the same way, relegating them to the bin of unused things at the back of the closet.  We exist.  For how long depends on the reach of the incorporeal, which is (for now anyway) a matter of faith.  Our body, the stuff we see, the corporeal reality as we experience it, is transient by nature (if anything just by the law of entropy).  It is our connections to each other involving compassion and love and anguish and hate, that can permeate for generations and centuries.  How that happens can touch the corporeal (temples, monuments, lore), but the seemingly genetic memory and imprinting of safety, love, belonging remains a constant example in numerous places in nature, across species and millennia of observation, that's beyond what we can see. As soon as a thing becomes more important than the intent of it's creation, it is no longer useful.  What is corporeal doesn't define the connection with others, it only augments or changes the intensity of it.

Seeing the tsunami erase entire towns where tens of thousands of people live, it isn't the destruction that effects my emotions. It's just stuff, though a great amount of it including irreplaceable things.  Seeing the *people* being claimed by the water makes this a personal matter and not a "some people really far away" thing.  Having walked many kilometers in Japan, and smelling the air and walking through the trees and down the streets, and speaking and interacting with the people, it will always be a personal matter for me.  I know a couple of people living in Japan, they, as of after the largest aftershock experience in Tokyo, were okay.  They aren't close friends, but I know them.

That said, it was walking from Yamanouchi into Kamakura, a shrine town and previous capitol (1/10th the size of Sendai) south of Yokohama that really made me realize how much energy a place can hold over the centuries.  The personal history of everyone that's walked the roads I did, whether a school kid, shogun, or Buddhist monk, leaves some impression.  It can create a personal connection deeper than "friend in place where bad chaos is happening." And seeing those type of towns, not big, but not tiny, all but removed from existence, is all the more upsetting.  The death toll is probably going to be >30k people once they're able to take stock of who survived and able to get through the rubble of the original earthquake that started it. 

 

The average human lifespan is around 30,000 days.  If you interacted with 1 new person every day for your entire life, spent an hour with them, played a game with them, or heard about their family or their work or their aspirations and was completely present with them, you can understand the magnitude when, just in the time of having lunch, 30,000 people are just gone.  30,000 people that you know.  This reality is today for the people of Japan.  The aspirations and memories, are just gone, stopped in place-- the purest definition of violence I know.  Violence isn't good or evil, there is no intent, no malice, no consistent feedback. It just is.  If someone has malice in their heart, violence can occur. If someone has compassion in their heart, violence can still occur.  Violence is a litmus of our ability to connect to the world around us. 

 

You can't have an act of violence against a building.  Vandalism, destruction, arson, there are many names, but violence should not be one of them.  It's a thing.  It might be a gathering place, a place of memories, of belonging, of experiences, but in the end it's still a thing.  If you intended to remove, by intent, in an instant, everyone that's experienced something there, and any record of it's existence and impact, that's a form of genocide, one of information and human connection.   Without intent, it is irremediable catastrophe.

 

The information age has given us the ability to remove the irremediable aspect of catastrophic loss, but at the price of sadness and grief across all the connections made that didn't exist before.  It is the price of being more than our corporeal shell and the things we construct our reality with.  It is the imperfect elucidation of the point of being human.  It is a price, I feel, we should all be willing to pay.

 

If stuff allows us to be more of a human, to reach out, to share experiences, whether of joy, of suffering, of kindness, it is good stuff.  If it allows us to be more present with ourselves, in recharging or learning or creating, it is good stuff.  If it detracts and preoccupies and could only lead to other things like it, and not to ourselves or others, it is useless junk.  If it is something that can no longer be good stuff to you, then it no longer belongs to you, and it must be cast out to someone who it can fulfill that role for.

 

This distinction has been my philosophy on stuff which, until now, I didn't have a clear defining line across all of it.  My personal struggle is with the breadth of paying potential experiences forward. However, as I interact more with the people around me, the "back stock" of items quickly falls away.  No longer used things find new homes, objects are created or constructed with the tools and resources I have.  As I become more present with others, knowing them reduces the load as well.  Choice can be made clearly rather than fretting over "well maybe" and other excuses to keep something collecting dust.  I have things that I consistently use, about once every 2 or 3 years, for these purposes.  It would fail the 6 month test, but not my connection test. This is my overall mode of defining importance.

I take the time today (in addition to other days, but today gives room for more thought) to thank the Veterans of the US Armed Forces.

I thank you for believing in the ability of bringing the light of hope to those that have none, and defending that hope both here and abroad.
I thank you for incorporating risk of life into your character and standing where others cannot or will not.
I thank you for living in the destruction that humans can so easily cause so that those affected can build anew and one day break the cycle of pointless conflict.
I thank you for your service to this country, which is bigger than any one person, one opinion, one goal, one administration, one faction, one party, one congress, or one belief.
And I thank you for your belief in this country, even when one of those smaller pieces diminishes the whole.

"And when they have emptied and swept clean the soul of him who is now in their power and who is being initiated by them in great mysteries, the next thing is to bring back to their house insolence and anarchy and waste and impudence in bright array, having garlands on their heads, and a great company with them, hymning their praises and calling them by sweet names; insolence they term "breeding," and anarchy "liberty," and waste "magnificence," and impudence "courage." And so the young man passes out of his original nature, which was trained in the school of necessity, into the freedom and libertinism of useless and unnecessary pleasures."
-- Plato _The Republic_

Tonight I witnessed one of the best Buddhists I've even known pass her energy back into the universe.

Scooter was my familiar, teacher, and friend. In her 14yrs on this planet, she saw everything I was, I am and I wasn't, and was there to pull me back to center if I went astray.

Her ability to heal was not just witnessed by myself, but the many others her life touched. The compassion and knowledge when something was wrong and was there when you needed it and often there when you didn't think you wanted it.

I will miss her immensely.

I invite those of you who met her and experienced her in your life to comment with memories and thoughts of her.

Matter can neither be created nor destroyed, only reconfigured and redistributed. Her being is cast, and in doing so moves to her next exalted state, whatever form it may take.

I want to thank those who supported me tonight both in person and in your thoughts and words. I am fortunate to have friends such as you.

I had determined some time in the last couple of years that we're no longer "entering the Information Age" as we were in the 90 and early 00s, but are fully in that Age and now moving into the Age of Understanding (where we figure out, as both a society and as an individual, what and how we absorb all that information).

The thing that drove it home for me was a quote in an article about the Uiaghur/Han clashes in Xinjiang:

"Urumqi Communist Party boss Li Zhi defended the crackdown and confirmed the government had cut internet services to parts of the city to prevent violence spreading." [emphasis mine]

We've been used to censorship clampdowns for thousands of years, but the gov't doing civilian control via access to the Internet (as with Iran, which included SMS messaging as well) as a primary means to quell (other than riot police) very distinctly elucidates that the point of no return is well behind us.

The fact that this barely salient post (or at least the notification of this post ;) will be seen by people in the UAE, NZ, UK, US (4 timezones), CA, and NL (that I know of) implies a level of connectedness humans are now figuring out. It is now a determination of what we do with that connectedness. The Twitter/Iran thing was purely critical mass of connections. The edges of the body got stimulus and the body reacted to protect. Those that acted, more often than not, had no connection to anyone in Iran, but had a connection to the People of Iran, because they are part of the whole.

I just really hope that this trend continues and that other nations' people will step up for us when the US's time comes for massive clampdowns of information and civil control in the coming years...

A pseudo-random sample photo of my Paris trip with Cady (mainly to placate the parental units until I can get the pictures sifted and culled).
I have like 200 stained glass images (between Notre Dame and Sainte Chappelle), so I'm curious if this image lasts as the best of this window.

So today Cady and I were resting from our trek to the Eiffel Tower and the Trocadero, and had listened to the march go down Blvd Ste-Germain out our hotel window for a couple of hours. We decided after it was quiet to go grab a crepe and follow the huge trail of paper and trash left in the wake to see the match.

For those that don't know, today is May Day, a.k.a. International Labour Day. In the US it was deemed "Law Day" because we can't be the same as those filthy socialist and communists in the rest of the world (a.k.a. almost all other industrial nations in the G8).
Whatev. \/\/

By the time we wound our way past Notre Dame, through Île St Louis and up to the Bastille plaza by the opera house, the bulk of the crazyness of the march had subsided and only the pro-Socialist Protesters remained in play. It was obvious that the Protesters were struggling to overcome the deficit they faced when the red card came out. The Gendarmerie tried to keep the game light, but that only angered their opponents and the orange banners came out and the crowds chanting began anew. As if by a collective sigh the boss of the blue team decided to end the constant stoppage of play with petty penalties the red team was invoking and sent in fresh strikers to end the match. Wave after wave of walled posititions frustrated the red team until they had to relent and pull back. The orange banners dissapeared and their brandishers melted into the local match crowd as if on cue.

With no one but the Gendarmerie left on the field, the match was called, and we wandered back to our base in-between the Latin Quarter and St. Michel to rest up for our next adventure.

Video via cell phone of some of the key plays when I return to the states ^_^

Full explanation here.

He's a dancing spleen.



I love the Japanese, they make me happy.

Rubert Hine not good for Rush (if it is synthpop, he's good, otherwise, um, no).
Peter Collins good for everything that I know of that he's done and I've heard, especially Rush and Queensryche.