3 Main Ideas we are circling around

First Thought Experiment - 500 Nations -

First Point to Work With:

Can we stay with the both the pain and with the eros.

Can we have double vision and stay with the sadness and pain AND at the same time the eros of the “Great Eastern Sun”.

Eros here referring to Diotima of Mantinea’s idea of the foundation of eros being the longing to participate in the intimacy of life.

Second Thought Experiment to Work With - Whipscorpion - A discovery that to label anxiety is to reduce anxiety. How do we endure the anxiety of staying open and vulnerable to care for others.

Second Point to Work With:

Can we stay with the vulnerability.

The movement between contraction and expansion is where we find intimacy with life. And particularly

Third Thought Experiment to Work With - Floating Bracket - What do we anchor ourselves to, take refuge in, when we live in unstable times. What do we anchor to when there is no solid ground.

Third Point to Work With:

Find refuge in care or compassion.

Resources and Quotes:

Michael McCarthy - The Moth Snowstorm - Nature Joy

Donna Haraway - Staying with the Trouble - Making Kin in the Chthulucene

Thomas Fleischner - Astonished by Beauty: A Field Guide to the Practice of Paying Attention

Adam Gopnik - Angels and Ages: A Short Book about Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life

Chögyam Trungpa –

“Hold the sadness and pain of samsara in your heart and at the same time the power and vision of the Great Eastern Sun. Then the warrior can make a proper cup of tea.”

Adam Gopnik -

“There is the vast expanse of time in which generations change and animals mutate and evolve and then there is the gnats breath, hummingbird heart time of creaturely existence where our children are born and grow and sometimes die before us…

That’s a kind of pathos of which Darwin is acutely aware, and its essential it seems to me, to, for lack of a better word, the spiritual experience of modern people that we have to have double vision of exactly that kind. We have to be double eyed, we need to be conscious of both of those expanses of time, at the same moment, at the same time, and that’s terribly taxing.

So taxing that often people cant do it and they either insist that only the vast expanse counts and what we think of as our experience is of no consequence or they insist that only our immediate experience can count and that that vast expanse of time must be some kind of an illusion.”