Replies

Thanks for being playful.

Charles, you are a treasure trove of possibilities for reading more. I see in another comment you recommend David Griffin’s Unsnarling the World-Knot as the best book on consciousness you have ever read. That’s a pretty good recommendation and one that got me to put the book on my “to read” list along with Nobo. I’m wondering if you could offer a list of some of your favorites. No pressure. Just gratitude.

Thanks for the helpful comments and conversation. I love the “islands of possibilities.”

Charles, this is beautiful. I’ve never read Nobo. I hope to hear more, especially since so much of what you say resonates with what has drawn me to Whitehead and the Cobb Institute. Thank you.

Terry,

I found two of his poems. Also, found that they have a poetry prize named after H. MacKnight Black at Lafayette College.

Here’s the link to the poetry:https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=16865

I found the poetry to be very masculine, which would be typical of the era he was writing in and flowing through.

Karen Carpetner grew up in Downey, CA, a suburb of Los Angeles. She exemplifies tragic beauty. Another artist from Downey, Dave Alvin on his Dave Alvin and the Guilty Women wrote a song about Karen titled Downey Girl. It is beautiful.

As I am understanding what I heard in Patricia’s presentation, intense harmony encompasses positive intensity and negative intensity– zest, novelty, life and discord, tragedy. Diversity itself is an uneasy harmony– a process of harmonies of harmonies. This all sounds very Daoist (Taoist) to me. On a more practical and personal level, it is me listening to Leonard Cohen and hearing the deep melancholy and tragedy inherent in many of his songs. There are novelists and poets who work on the same edge, flowing between life’s zest and novelty and the tragedy and despair inherent in living in the world where we find ourselves. It’s all Beautiful. I’m contemplating merely capitalizing Beauty and what that does to seeing, touching, tasting, feeling….

Hello all, I am Rolla Lewis from Portland, OR, professor emeritus at California State University, East Bay, who coordinated the School Counseling program…. That takes care of the question men ask when they meet each other. Like any other professor, I can drone on and on about it and my work in teaching lifescaping action research. I’m here in this class because beauty (or as Patricia is orienting us Beauty) informs my life all the way down. I articulate my deep sense of Beauty in my morning rituals walking in the forest, reciting loving kindness mettas, and poetry to the trees, practicing chi kung and tai chi, etc. Or merely gardening, showing my granddaughter something beautiful– a Stellars jay on the feeder, a daisy in the yard, etc. I come from a post-theistic perspective that embraces a panexperientialist/pantheistic/naturalistic understanding of our living world– life as the sacred object. I have stumbled back upon the process philosophy last year and it resonates with the ideas and practices I have been engaged in my entire life. I am finding the process folks as offering a big tent for a wide-range of beliefs and space for many voices to sing in intense harmony celebrating life’s Beauty and our own becoming as individuals and as communities.

Thank you to Patricia for inviting the conversation and Richard for his technical help and compassionate care for neo-Luddites like me.