The main purpose and outcome of war is injuring

"The main purpose and outcome of war is injuring. Though this fact is too self-evident and massive ever to be directly contested, it can be indirectly contested by many means and disappear from view along many separate paths. It may disappear from view simply by being omitted: one can read many pages of a historic or strategic account of a particular military campaign, or listen to many successive installments in a newscast narrative of events in a contemporary war, without encountering the acknowledgement that the purpose of the event described is to alter (to burn, to blast, to shell, to cut) human tissue, as well as to alter the surface, shape and deep entirety of the objects that human beings recognize as extensions of themselves."

Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain.

an invitation earned through quiet rambling

“As I move back toward the cabin in a wide arc across the forest floor, I see other shapes, other forms in the fallen wood: the curve of a table rail, a knothole shaped like a whimsical recessed drawer pull, the twisted finials of imaginal bedposts. This is where creative work starts for me – with openness, a sense of possibility, an invitation earned through quiet rambling, and a willingness to start with nothing. It doesn’t often stay this way, but the beginning is always a kind of wonder.”

Ross A. Laird, Grain of Truth: The Ancient Lessons of Craft

Thought for the Day

"Hope is an indispensable seasoning in our human, historical experience. Without it, instead of history we would have pure determinism. History exists only where time is problematized and not simply a given. A future that is inexorable is a denial of history.

It needs to be clear that the absence of hope is not the "normal" way to be human. It is a distortion. I am not, for example, first of all a being without hope who may or may not later be converted to hope. On the contrary, I am first a being of hope who, for any number of reasons, may thereafter lose hope. For this reason, as human beings, one of our struggles should be to diminish the objective reasons for that hopelessness that immobilizes us."

Paolo Freire, Pedagogy of Freedom

Nila

I now have a cat, Nila, which more or less means 'bluish' in sanskrit. She's a blue-grey colour with a small white throat-patch, slender, graceful, very affectionate and, bizarrely, she obsesses over the taste of Original Doritos. Who knew? :)

She has decided to stop climbing all over the keyboard and settle behind me on the floor by the wall, underneath the radiator. Seems content enough.

It will be good to have a bit more life around the house :)

Thought for the Day

KATE: I feel like such an idiot.

ANGEL: A lot of that going around.

KATE: I just couldn't... My whole life has been about being a cop. If I'm not part of the force it's like nothing I do means anything.

ANGEL: It doesn't.

KATE: Doesn't what?

ANGEL: Mean anything. In the greater scheme or the big picture, nothing we do matters. There's no grand plan, no big win.

KATE: You seem kind of chipper about that.

ANGEL: Well, I guess I kinda worked it out. If there is no great glorious end to all this, if nothing we do matters, then all that matters is what we do. 'cause that's all there is. What we do, now, today. - I fought for so long. For redemption, for a reward, finally just to beat the other guy, but... I never got it.

KATE: And now you do?

ANGEL: Not all of it. All I wanna do is help. I wanna help because I don't think people should suffer, as they do. Because, if there is no bigger meaning, then the smallest act of kindness is the greatest thing in the world.

KATE: Yikes. It sounds like you had an epiphany.

ANGEL: I keep saying that. But nobody's listening.

Epiphany, Series 2, Angel

Thought for the day

"In order for us to maintain our way of living, we must, in a broad sense, tell lies to each other, and especially to ourselves. It is not necessary that the lies be particularly believable. The lies act as barriers to truth. These barriers are necessary because without them many deplorable acts would become impossibilities." Derrick Jensen, A Language Older Than Words (2000)

Aikido

Finally, finally, I've managed to get back to practising aikido. It's a martial art based on gentleness, very much based on the principle of 'enter and turn', enter into conflict and revolve around the centre of the energies to come to a more helpful outcome for all concerned. It's one of those things that you have to do to get a real sense of what it's about, and it's also something that I find gives me a far greater grasp on the real realities of what I mean when I think of gentleness as a political engagement. Rarely do you step away. Often if you do you make yourself more vulnerable. But it is about coming to a more appropriate awareness of a situation, while also defending yourself without necessarily attacking in the process. I'm glad to be getting back into it, but I'm aching all over today :)))

Caring and University Life

You might find this a welcome change in comparison to some university websites:

http://www.hawaii.edu/coe/home_conceptualframeworkcaring.htm

In between work-to-do

I've been working, I've been thinking, I've been eating too much sugar which got me really depressed for a few days. I've been mulling things over, sitting through, ticking over, I've been getting on with lifestuff. I've been thinking about depression. I've been thinking about violence, I've been thinking about conflict, I've been thinking about affinity, I've been thinking about gentleness, I've been thinking about the differences that people make, I've been thinking about the kinds of ways I might like to raise (who-knows-what-future-possible) kids. I keep coming back to the importance of the children. What attitudes do we raise our children to value? I've been thinking about how best to take care of myself. How can I be expected to save the planet when it sometimes takes me an effort to feed myself? I've been thinking about people I love. I've been thinking about people I'd like to see more of.

I came across a craft-related article today about manual work:

Shop Class as Soulcraft
http://www.thenewatlantis.com/archive/13/crawford.htm

There are specific things to report, I'll get onto them soon ... (cue procrastination ...)

Perpetuating our Reality

From what I have learned about creativity...what we see and notice and believe as "out there" is what we continue to perpetuate within ourselves. Yes the mass mind has created the stuff of front pages but do we not perpetuate this reality inside ourselves by continually feeding ourselves the same mass thought and emotional climate? How do we be the change we want to see? We rarely watch tv or read the papers in my household. Whenever my daughter comes home from watching the news at her dads or her grandmas she feels like the world is an ugly place. If this becomes an established belief how can she create anything new from that?