Attention

 “Do stuff.  Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehead.  Pay attention.  It's all about paying attention.  Attention is vitality.  It connects you with others.  It makes you eager.  Stay eager.” -  Susan Sontag

"Attention (prosoche) is the fundamental Stoic spiritual attitude. It is a continuous vigilance and presence of mind, a self-consciousness which never sleeps, and a constant tension of the spirit. Thanks to this attitude, the philosopher is fully aware of what he does at each instant, and he wills his actions fully. Thanks to this spiritual vigilance, the Stoic always has "at hand" (procheiron) the fundamental rule of life: that is, the distinction between what depends on us and what does not." p. 84

Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault.By Pierre Hadot.  Edited with an introduction by Arnold Davidson.  Translated by Michael Chase.  Malden, Massachusetts, Wiley-Blackwell, 1995.  Index, extensive bibliography, 320 pages.  ISBN: 978-0631180333.  VSCL.

"Everywhere and at all times, it is up to you to rejoice piously at what is occurring at the present moment, to conduct yourself with justice towards the people who are present here and now, and to apply rules of discernment to your present representations, so that nothing slips in that is not objective."
- Marcu Aurelius, Meditations

Simple As: 0123456789 ...

The Fireplace Records, Chapter 25

Simple As: 0123456789...

In 2000, a young mother was teaching her 4 year old daughter every day about counting and numbers.  The little girl could count to 10 using number songs/ditties, and knew the correct order from memory.  She used numbered blocks and her fingers for counting and displaying quantities.  If asked by her mother to pick out seven cookies from a jar she could do so accurately; and, knew that no cookies in the jar had something to do with zero.  She could count backwards from 20, and upwards to over 100.  She could sort quantities with a high degree of accuracy.  She was learning to read and write numbers.  She was, obviously, a bright four year old, and liked matters orderly.   

In 2020, that same girl was studying mathematics at the University of Oregon in Eugene.  Her learning at the age of four is not forgotten, just buried deep in the Mind Matrix of brain-language-skills-habits.  She is now ready for "Mastery!" 

Step by step, little by little, one by one, day by day, year by year our bodies work and play with things, and our minds play with languages and concepts.  There is an order for learning, just like an order for numbers.  Skills and habits develop and improve with long orderly sequences of practice.

Some sequences and patterns in our lives are rigid, fixed, set, established, formally ordered, and, as it were, "set in stone."  Mathematics is like that.  Orderly!  Formal!  Done just one correct way!  Only one ordering: 0123456789 ...

Time is like mathematical order.  The Past before the Future; 6 before 9.  The Future after the Present; 6 after 0.  The Present between the Past and Future; -34 before 0 and 8 after 0.  April precedes May, and October follows September.  These Nature-socially established patterns and sequences never change.  We visually represent these ideas on a numbered clock or calendar.

We can interpret and organize our experiences via mathematics, one of the key foundations of modern science.  

A Student's Considerations:

Some aspects and patterns in life are formally ordered and fixed.  Learn them well to cope with your challenges in living with others.
Arithmetic is an essential skill in our lives in 2020.
Find the best "order" for your learning of some new skill or body of knowledge.
Reflect occasionally on your childhood experiences and upbringing.
Music, writing, and math all have components of fixed orders for optimal functioning; however, we can also be creative and think outside the box in most fields, but failures are more frequent when doing so.  Staying inside the box is safer for people and cats.
Choose yourself, on practical grounds, when not to change some established order or rule, sticking to the tried and true; and, when to abandon old fixed views.
Some aspects of our lives rarely change, they are ordered and fixed (e.g., the need for sleep each day).  Deal with the facts and move forward!
We don't need supernatural beings to bolster our insights as to the orders of our universe.  The devil is not in bed with numbers.
Try to keep things Simple!
You will benefit from keeping a very orderly lifestyle of your actions each day!
On Your Marks, Get Set, Go (Bang!)!!!  Simple as 1, 2, 3.  


"Lord I'm One, Lord I'm Two, Lord I'm Three, Lord I'm Four, Lord I'm Five Hundred Miles From my Home" - Peter, Paul and Mary 1966

Related Links, Resources, References

Koans: TFR 24

Refer to my Cloud Hands Blog Posts on the topic of Koans/Dialogues.

The Daodejing by Laozi  

Pulling Onions  Over 1,043 One-line Sayings by Mike Garofalo

Subject Index to 1,001 Zen Buddhist Koans

Chinese Chan Buddhist and Taoist Stories and Koans

Taoism

Buddhism

Fireplaces, Stoves, Campfires, Kitchens, Pots, Firewood

Chinese Art

Tai Chi Chuan and Qigong

Meditation Methods

Zen Koan Books I Use

Koan Database Project

Brief Spiritual Lessons Database Project: Subject Indexes

Sparks: Brief Spiritual Lessons and Stories

Matches to Start a Kindling of Insight
May the Light from Your Inner Fireplace Help All Beings
Taoist, Chan Buddhist, Zen Buddhist, Philosophers
Catching Phrases, Inspiring Verses, Koans, Meditations
Indexing, Bibliography, Quotations, Notes, Resources
Research by Michael P. Garofalo

The Fireplace Records
By Michael P. Garofalo

Subject Index to 1,001 Zen Buddhist Koans

Tintern Abbey by William Wordsworth

 

William Wordsworth

Tintern Abbey
Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, on
Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour, July 13, 1798

Excerpt:

"The coarser pleasures of my boyish days,
And their glad animal movements all gone by,
To me was all in all. – I cannot paint
What then I was.
The sounding cataract
Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock,
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,
Their colors and their forms, were then to me
An appetite: a feeling and a love,
That had no need of a remoter charm,
By thought supplied, or any interest
Unborrowed from the eye. –  That time is past,
And all its aching joys are now no more,
And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this
Faint I, nor mourn nor murmur: other gifts
Have followed, for such loss, I would believe,
Abundant recompence.
For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth, but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity,
Not harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue. And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man,
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods,
And mountains; and of all that we behold
From this green earth; of all the mighty world
Of eye and ear, both what they half-create,
And what perceive; well pleased to recognize
In nature and the language of the sense,
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being.
Nor, perchance,
If I were not thus taught, should I the more
Suffer my genial spirits to decay:
For thou art with me, here, upon the banks
Of this fair river; thou, my dearest Friend,
My dear, dear Friend, and in thy voice I catch
The language of my former heart, and read
My former pleasures in the shooting lights
Of thy wild eyes."

Eye to Eye Memories from Cape Disappointment

 Eye to Eye Memories

Raccoon in a tree:
me looking at him
him looking at me

Deer at a mailbox:
me looking at her
her looking at me

Two eyes looked at two eyes—
Four eyes make memories
for a curious raccoon and me
or a white-tailed doe and me.

Animals in the forests, swamps, clearings
at Cape Disappointment, in January—
Memories of Seeing:
others as they seem to be,
Beachcombers searching carefully
focused clearly and true
Looking around by my shoes
right before my very eyes
A happy dog runs to my side
seeing is believing some believe
Many clouds and wind, rain will come
"I saw it" is a claim to truth
A Seaview Cafe sign says "closed"
seeing gives birth to memories
A stray cat begs for food from me
memories give context to what I see
The Big Picture is my biggest scheme
    the gestalt I see
    sets the stage background for me
I invent what is seen
Did I imagine or did I see?
He testified "I saw..."
what I saw is a memory
A seagull searched the sand
    the new glasses helped me see
    my memories more clearly
I forget most of It—
sleep caused me not to see
Not talking increased what I saw
watching someone talking
children yelled, we looked
I remembered, I forgot
memories weaken, pictures fade
I remembered to look, fortunately
remember, two eyes is all you need
    Seeing the 101 North sign
    my memories aligned geographically
Did I see a tree or a memory?
without memories it is
    just a blur to see—

The Raccoon and I met on North Jetty Road,
he between two spruce trees on a branch,
and I, sitting in the shade, entranced;
For our quick and passing Glance,
    assessing dangers with four eyes—

Reading opens up my open eyes
memorizing a poem brings it to life
naming what you see builds memories
watching someone talking
Seeing and Looking and Saying What—

Did I really see that or just imagined it all?
For the reader, writer, speaker, audience;
Who makes the call?
Real or imagined, fiction or fact—

Dali's drooping melted clock
Pollack's abstract overdubbed sprays
Van Gogh's perfect rolling clouds
Memories hanging paintings in my mind

That Racoon's mask and eyes
    are still looking back in my head.
    The Raccoon was real,
    Not so sure that I
        was very real
        in my head
        anyway.

[Is that Real or real? God or god?
A painting or a photograph?]

 

 

25 Steps and Beyond Anthology
by Michael Peter Garofalo

Highway 101 and Hwy 1

Stepping Over Epiphanies

Haiku - North Sacramento Valley

A Fork in the Crypto Road

Exhibits at the Cyber Garden Gazebo: TextArt

At the Edges of the West

A Wreck Ahead Comes Into View

Cloud Hands Blog

Stuck in Some Concrete Poetry

Pulling Onions: 1,000 One Liners

Four Days at Grayland Beach

Meetings with Master Chang San Feng

25 Steps and Beyond Anthology

More Poetry by Mike Garofalo

Poetry Research

Five Senses

Fireplace Records Koan Collection

the scissors of my decisions

more to come ...

 

Even the Ring Finger Remembers

“The body uses its skin and deeper fascia and flesh to record all that goes on around it.  Like the Rosetta stone, for those who know how to read it, the body is a living record of life given, life taken, life hoped for, life healed.  It is valued for its articulate ability to register immediate reaction, to feel profoundly, to sense ahead.
        
     The body is a multilingual being.  It speaks through its color and its temperature, the flush of recognition, the glow of love, the ash of pain, the heart of arousal, the coldness of non-conviction.  It speaks through its constant tiny dance, sometimes swaying, sometimes a-jitter, sometimes trembling.  It speaks through the leaping of the heart, the falling of the spirit, the pit at the center, and rising of hope.

     The body remembers, the bones remember, the joints remember, even the little finger remembers.  Memory is lodged in pictures and feelings in the cells themselves.  Like a sponge filled with water, anywhere the flesh is pressed, wrung, even touched slightly, a memory may flow out in a stream.

     To confine the beauty and the value of the body to anything less than this magnificence is to force the body to live without its rightful spirit, its rightful form, its right to exultation.  To be thought ugly or unacceptable because one’s beauty is outside the current fashion is deeply wounding to the natural joy that belongs to the wild nature.”

-      By Clarissa Pinkola Estés,  Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype, 1996  


Body-Mind Practices, Somaesthetics

The Five Senses

Touch, Skin, Feeling, Hands, Tactile

Even the Little Finger Remembers

   “The body uses its skin and deeper fascia and flesh to record all that goes on around it.  Like the Rosetta stone, for those who know how to read it, the body is a living record of life given, life taken, life hoped for, life healed.  It is valued for its articulate ability to register immediate reaction, to feel profoundly, to sense ahead.
        
     The body is a multilingual being.  It speaks through its color and its temperature, the flush of recognition, the glow of love, the ash of pain, the heart of arousal, the coldness of nonconviction.  It speaks through its constant tiny dance, sometimes swaying, sometimes a-jitter, sometimes trembling.  It speaks through the leaping of the heart, the falling of the spirit, the pit at the center, and rising of hope.

     The body remembers, the bones remember, the joints remember, even the little finger remembers.  Memory is lodged in pictures and feelings in the cells themselves.  Like a sponge filled with water, anywhere the flesh is pressed, wrung, even touched slightly, a memory may flow out in a stream.

     To confine the beauty and the value of the body to anything less than this magnificence is to force the body to live without its rightful spirit, its rightful form, its right to exultation.  To be thought ugly or unacceptable because one’s beauty is outside the current fashion is deeply wounding to the natural joy that belongs to the wild nature.”

-      By Clarissa Pinkola Estés,  Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype, 1996  


Body-Mind Practices, Somaesthetics

The Five Senses

Touch, Skin, Feeling, Hands, Tactile

The Verses of Memory

"However that may be, I now wish that I had spent somewhat more of my life with verse. This is not because I fear having missed out on truths that are incapable of statement in prose. There are no such truths; there is nothing about death that Swinburne and Landor knew but Epicurus and Heidegger failed to grasp. Rather, it is because I would have lived more fully if I had been able to rattle off more old chestnuts — just as I would have if I had made more close friends. Cultures with richer vocabularies are more fully human — farther removed from the beasts — than those with poorer ones; individual men and women are more fully human when their memories are amply stocked with verses."
-  Richard McKay Rorty, 1931-2007  American Philosopher
   The Fire of Life, 2007


Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature: Thirtieth-Anniversary Edition


"We thank with brief thanksgiving
Whatever gods may be
That no life lives for ever;
That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea."
-  A. C. Swinburne, "Garden of Proserpine"


Last year, Karen and I watched a fascinating and touching documentary about the efforts of Dan Cohen to bring music to persons in nursing homes.   "Alive Inside: Music and Memory", 1 hour and 20 minutes.  A worthy cause!!  A fascinating discussion about how music effects our minds from infancy to old age.  How is it that you can remember the verses to songs you learned when you were three years old?

As for Tai Chi Chuan and music ... I recall only T. T. Liang recommending you play music while practicing Taijiquan and timing your moves to the music as if dancing.  Maybe Sophia Delza also advocated doing Taijiquan to music since she was an expert on Asian dancing.  Now, in 2015, you can use an IPod or Sony Walkman or other devices to play digital music and listen on ear phones or ear plugs while practicing Taijiquan or Qigong.  I have also purchased and listened to prerecorded music especially designed for specific Taijiquan forms or Qigong which are timed to match a proper performance of the form.  I know that the Tai Chi Kung Fu fan form is specifically timed for performance to a specific piece of music.  I am not particularly fond of the tuning and twanginess and lively pace used in traditional Chinese music, but anyone can find music they favor to suit the ambience desired for Taijiquan or Qigong practice.  I like a lot of New Age music or Japanese Zen flutes. 

Even the Little Finger Remembers

     “The body uses its skin and deeper fascia and flesh to record all that goes on around it.  Like the Rosetta stone, for those who know how to read it, the body is a living record of life given, life taken, life hoped for, life healed.  It is valued for its articulate ability to register immediate reaction, to feel profoundly, to sense ahead.
       
     The body is a multilingual being.  It speaks through its color and its temperature, the flush of recognition, the glow of love, the ash of pain, the heart of arousal, the coldness of nonconviction.  It speaks through its constant tiny dance, sometimes swaying, sometimes a-jitter, sometimes trembling.  It speaks through the leaping of the heart, the falling of the spirit, the pit at the center, and rising of hope.

     The body remembers, the bones remember, the joints remember, even the little finger remembers.  Memory is lodged in pictures and feelings in the cells themselves.  Like a sponge filled with water, anywhere the flesh is pressed, wrung, even touched slightly, a memory may flow out in a stream.

     To confine the beauty and the value of the body to anything less than this magnificence is to force the body to live without its rightful spirit, its rightful form, its right to exultation.  To be thought ugly or unacceptable because one’s beauty is outside the current fashion is deeply wounding to the natural joy that belongs to the wild nature.”

-      By Clarissa Pinkola Estés,  Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype, 1996  


Body-Mind Practices, Somaesthetics

The Five Senses

Touch, Skin, Feeling, Hands, Tactile

Remember the Songs and Become Alive

"However that may be, I now wish that I had spent somewhat more of my life with verse. This is not because I fear having missed out on truths that are incapable of statement in prose. There are no such truths; there is nothing about death that Swinburne and Landor knew but Epicurus and Heidegger failed to grasp. Rather, it is because I would have lived more fully if I had been able to rattle off more old chestnuts — just as I would have if I had made more close friends. Cultures with richer vocabularies are more fully human — farther removed from the beasts — than those with poorer ones; individual men and women are more fully human when their memories are amply stocked with verses."

-  Richard McKay Rorty, 1931-2007  American Philosopher
   The Fire of Life, 2007


Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature: Thirtieth-Anniversary Edition


"We thank with brief thanksgiving
Whatever gods may be
That no life lives for ever;
That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea."
-  A. C. Swinburne, "Garden of Proserpine"


Last night, Karen and I watched a fascinating and touching documentary about the efforts of Dan Cohen to bring music to persons in nursing homes.   "Alive Inside: Music and Memory", 1 hour and 20 minutes.  A worthy cause!!  A fascinating discussion about how music effects our minds from infancy to old age.  How is it that you can remember the verses to songs you learned when you were three years old? 

As for Tai Chi Chuan and music ... I recall only T. T. Liang recommending you play music while practicing Taijiquan and timing your moves to the music as if dancing.  Maybe Sophia Delza also advocated doing Taijiquan to music since she was an expert on Asian dancing.  Now, in 2015, you can use an IPod or Sony Walkman or other devices to play digital music and listen on ear phones or ear plugs while practicing Taijiquan or Qigong.  I have also purchased and listened to prerecorded music especially designed for specific Taijiquan forms or Qigong which are timed to match a proper performance of the form.  I know that the Tai Chi Kung Fu fan form is specifically timed for performance to a specific piece of music.  I am not particularly fond of the tuning and twanginess and lively pace used in traditional Chinese music, but anyone can find music they favor to suit the ambience desired for Taijiquan or Qigong practice.  I like a lot of New Age music or Japanese Zen flutes. 

End of Year Reflections

"Here are some suggestions to get you started in mulling over the past year:

What did I learn (skills, knowledge, awareness, etc.)
What did I accomplish?  A list of my wins and achievements.
What would I have done differently? Why?
What did I complete or release? What still feels incomplete to me?
What were the most significant events of the year past? List the top three.
What did I do right? What do I feel especially good about? What was my greatest contribution?
What were the fun things I did? What were the not-so-fun?
What were my biggest challenges/roadblocks/difficulties?
How am I different this year than last?
For what am I particularly grateful?

Another Suggestion: Consider listing all the things in your life of which you’d like to let go—anything you no longer want. Give thanks for what they've brought you in terms of learning and usefulness and then burn the list. It's a symbolic gesture to help you release the old and be open to the new. The next step is to list what you do want—experiences, knowledge, material things, relationships, healings, whatever.…"
-  By Michael E. Angier