Faith is that which gives us the ability to continue lying to ourselves in the teeth of the evidence.
I need to buy an outfit for my niece’s wedding in June, and to avoid running down my meagre savings any further than necessary, I have been keeping a watching brief on the local charity shops.
On Friday afternoon I saw the perfect dress – a sleeveless crimson sheath with low v neck and matching jacket. But, of course, it was just a little too tight for comfort.
Before I saw it, I had no clue what I was looking for. Now, I can’t get it out of my mental image, but the chances of finding anything similar that will fit are non existent.
During my Sunday stroll by the river, I was pondering this, and another of those eternal conundrums, namely, why it is that a man who formerly seemed so ardent should without warning stop texting in mid-conversation.
And it struck me that, although I profess not to know what I’m looking for, with each unsatisfactory sexual encounter I gain a clearer idea of what it is that I’m not looking for, and hence, in the negative space left behind, a clearer outline of what I do want. But the more that outline begins to be fleshed out, the more difficult it seems to find him.
Is it a greater error to cast the net too broadly or too narrowly?
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“I’d like to write something that comes from things the way wine comes from grapes.” — Walter Benjamin, On Hashish [protocol of March 7, 1931] from Berlin Childhood around 1900 (via bobulate)
The possibility of neighborhoods -
Jay Walljasper on the neighborhood as resource for changing the world:
[T]he age of globalization actually makes neighborhoods more important than ever. Neighborhoods — whether in cities, suburbs or small towns — are the level of social organization at which people interact most regularly and naturally, providing a ready-made forum for tackling serious issues together. Even if the neighbors abhor our political views or artistic tastes, we nonetheless share a bond. When a crisis occurs (a rash of burglaries) or opportunities arise (plans to revitalize the park), these are the people who stand beside us to make improvements for the future.When you get together with neighbors, anything is possible:
That’s because the people who live in a particular locale are the experts on that place, with the wisdom and commitment to get things done. And when you add up all that’s happening in neighborhoods everywhere, it amounts to significant progress. You truly can begin to change the world on your own block.When I moved from the East Village of Manhattan to Brooklyn, I saw neighborhood unlike I’d seen before. “The city,” as Manhattan is called if one is a Brooklynite, has neighborhoods of course. In fact, they’re most renowned. Yet Brooklyn has them at a different scale and speed. Sometimes feeling like a throwback of sorts to the 1970s neighborhood where I grew up, doors are unlocked, fireflies are a pastime, sidewalks are for bicycles and stoop sales. Within a month of moving to Carroll Gardens, I’d been offered protection, welcome-baked-goods, was heading up some sort of block-party planning committee. In my decade here, I’ve been locked out, walked in on, delighted, broken, furious, and everything in between. And I’ve relied on the people on my block to be here for me through it all. Anything is possible.
Leo Babauta on the discoveries of walking:
Today I set out from my house and walked. And walked. I didn’t have a specific destination in mind, but wanted to walk a bit before finding a quiet place to write. So I walked, out of the town where I live and along the tropical, white-sand coastline, to the next town over. As others drove cocooned in their cars, I walked, and emitted nothing but my breath.He later continues:
See also:
The Urban Adventurers, flâneurs, and street photographyI walked for an hour, then wrote and read, and then walked for another hour to get back home, tired but happy. I can’t walk this much every day, but I walk as much as I can, because you need nothing to walk, you spend nothing, you consume nothing, you emit nothing. And yet you have everything.When I moved outside of Kobe, before I knew much of where anything was or many words, I would set off in a direction and walk. I would have a specific goal. “Find water.” Or, “go east.” I would learn that word, and walk as far and as specific in the direction of that thing as I could master. Surprises always revealed themselves along the way.
Life is planned in generalities, but lived in specificities.
Between the two lie the cracks into which good intentions fall.
“How do you know it’s time to wash the dishes? Look inside your pants. If you find a penis in there, it’s not time.”
Jo Brand
Here is part of a blog post I wrote last year, in which I refer to the Crystal Space:
I thought about the Crystal Space again, and felt it opening around me, the threads leading away into the future or futures, the neurones flashing and sparkling in the gaps between the here-and-now and the still-to-be. Wherever I am, I am at the centre, the glittering paths extending infinitely into the gloom around me.
I thought about Monday night, his eyes and hands and lips on me, ‘I just want to make you happy’ for that small sliver of time, we talked about meeting again, as we always do, ‘better planning next time!’, yet who can say when that might be, the long spaces open out between us again, perhaps it’s better that way, but are we both too diffident, each waiting for the other? Or is it just that life is too complicated? Or perhaps if we saw each other more often, it would all burn out, perhaps there is an upper limit on the time we can spend together and we are making the most of it, stretching it out, extending it, as good love-making should be.