This overall sequence has been some of my favorite writing this year, and I like this as a capstone to it.
If you’re just tuning in… this isn’t the greatest post to start with (given that it’s, well, the last one). The sequence is very long, and each post deliberately meanders through it’s subject matter in a marinating, guided-meditation-y sort of way. I can’t tell you a simple takeaway from the sequence, because the takeaway is something like “subtly orienting to a kind of wisdom.” The marinating meditation is the point.
This particular essay doesn’t help me with that question, but previous essays that stand out as helpful to me were On green and On attunement, which gave me a crisper sense of where I’ve previously been confused about that sort of wisdom, and what it’d be like to be unconfused.
With this particular final essay, what stands out to me is that this sequence that is a reflection of things I was thinking through 10 years ago – the first Winter Solstice ceremony I ran began with the quote from Lovecraft (“We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity...”) and tried to grapple with that spiritually.
I feel like I have some deeper understanding of that now. I like the concept of the Lovecraft-Sagan spectrum, and the question of “okay, so, we do sure seem to live on an island of ignorance amid black seas of infinity… but, how do we wanna feel about that? What do we want to do about it?”
Curated.
This overall sequence has been some of my favorite writing this year, and I like this as a capstone to it.
If you’re just tuning in… this isn’t the greatest post to start with (given that it’s, well, the last one). The sequence is very long, and each post deliberately meanders through it’s subject matter in a marinating, guided-meditation-y sort of way. I can’t tell you a simple takeaway from the sequence, because the takeaway is something like “subtly orienting to a kind of wisdom.” The marinating meditation is the point.
This particular essay doesn’t help me with that question, but previous essays that stand out as helpful to me were On green and On attunement, which gave me a crisper sense of where I’ve previously been confused about that sort of wisdom, and what it’d be like to be unconfused.
With this particular final essay, what stands out to me is that this sequence that is a reflection of things I was thinking through 10 years ago – the first Winter Solstice ceremony I ran began with the quote from Lovecraft (“We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity...”) and tried to grapple with that spiritually.
I feel like I have some deeper understanding of that now. I like the concept of the Lovecraft-Sagan spectrum, and the question of “okay, so, we do sure seem to live on an island of ignorance amid black seas of infinity… but, how do we wanna feel about that? What do we want to do about it?”