Nov 26, 2023·edited Nov 26, 2023Liked by Graham Pardun
It is wondrous to perch on the windowsill of this conversation. Thank you both.
I want to know more about this Evagrius and natural contemplation. I Experience this but I didn’t have a way of thinking about it outside of my own mind yet. Can you put me in the direction of any texts! Thank you!
An addendum - from my reading of the NT the enchantment received by the first Christians was that when you came to Jesus you got dosed with the Holy Spirit and knew God. Note Acts 10:43-46
Nov 24, 2023·edited Nov 24, 2023Liked by Graham Pardun
As a son of a Midwest pig farmer my default is K.I.S.S. Keep It Simple Sweetheart. To me “enchantment” is that Jesus came so ordinary folks could be sons of God also, filled with the Holy Spirit walking with and knowing the Father as he did, the loving, personal Isness of the Father, all as accessible gift. Jesus simply said “pray to your Father who is there in secret” and in another part of the NT “draw near to God and he will draw near to you”. Let us become little children to enter the Kingdom of God and as William Blake wrote “like lambs joy about our Father’s tent”
I think the robust, so personal Father is now the ignored, unfashionable person of the Trinity, but Jesus wasn’t ashamed of the Old Man, the Ancient of Days. IMO the Neoplatonic influence has etherealized, philosophized, and distanced the Father, the Living God, after all Jesus said, speaking to his and our Father “ now this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God and Jesus Christ, whom you sent”.
Jesus in John 4 proclaimed that the living water he would give would be in us “a spring of water welling up to eternal life” meaning we would filled with a splendid knowing of the Father and the Son. Now that’s magic radiating the light of life on all we see.
So much salt and light here! I could read these sort of conversations all day. The sympathetic vibration between the two of you harmonizes well and begs for more instruments to join the symphony.
After reading Mircea Eliades book on shamanism I saw how we have patholigized peoples differences rather than encouraging those differences as gifts. I think Martin Shaw understands this and why he often uses the word Shaman in a positive way. He'll probably get in trouble from those who have become religious pillars of salt and fluorescent lights. In premodern, aboriginal cultures things like autism or schizophrenia would have made someone a shaman. Their unique gifts of seeing and feeling would have made them guides. The machine aura is predictability and control which tends toward too much order and not enough beauty. A home is not a frame, walls and a roof, but all of the potential to fill that space with careful attention. I believe that we have a collective intuition of sorts that is crying for the feminine beauty to hold the machine in a balance. Historic trends like the feminist movement seem to be attempts at this, but rather than it being a celebration of the deepest feminine sensibilities, its mostly angry women throwing rocks at men. Rather than celebrating and demanding that feminine attributes like mothering, beauty, creativity, intuition etc become more central to our ethos as a culture, we have "women's healthcare", which is code for "the right to not be a mother". I could go on and on about ways our culture needs guides like Grant, Natasha and Martin Shaw to help us respond appropriately to these deep, collective impulses toward the good the true and the beautiful. You are our prophets of earth, water, wind and fire. You may even have to live outside and cook food on a fire of your own feces, to wake up the general cultural audience. Become our holy fools and keep writing beautiful things!
Great stuff to sit with here, Natasha and Graham. A friend who cannot subscribe for lack of connection and, most nights, fingers upon her limbs was intrigued yet also a bit hurt. I think she misunderstood a coulple comments of Graham's, not knowing him as well as I. She asked me to pass this along.
Greetings gatherers of extracts and flowers, you citizens of empire gone to its rest. It did hurt a bit to hear my own kind turned out a bit from such a fetching exchange. I cannot speak from my hearth kin. It is the burning season and as such we two peoples keep a distance (understandable I am sure) until the buds return and the cinder is returned as payment to the roots but we, spirits of the trees, are as much enmeshed with the feasts of the Galilean peasant as any primate from what we have seen. It isn't a question of Pan's death but of the human waking to his confusion in kneeling before a sibling.
Enchantment is the singing within. Why one would ever wish for an end to music, the wind-words in leaf, promises of water circling through the channels, is beyond me but none of us can pick what sort of thuggery will sit in the chairs built from our pith. Even the timber of the God-man can be nailed to nonsense I guess. I don't blame you for so-called Chrisitians first dreamed that they alone peopled the earth and then sought to make their dreams come true. But I do think you might want to take it easy on the tinkerbell jabs. You primates have so few friends in the dark these days. And the nightlights of yours may prove less eternal than your people had promised. Surely, having seen the vapid portrayals of the magic with which you are deeply familar, you know better than to dip your brush in that ink of diminshment. I think the problem is not too many words about faerie from the vapid but too few thoughts about the diversity of the angelic among the companeras.
Rumors of disenchantment are similar to claims of being without a god. Everyone is in-filled with song. Some filter out all other voices but that of their own kind, prefering a solo akin to monologue while others let in the symphony. The fruit of the former is the city as opposed to the forest which, of course, is where my people make our stand.
In that quote from Weight of Glory Lewis, I think, does seem to be suggesting that world is a synonym for earth with the opposite of them both being, I suppose, heaven. All I know of that is my people do not live in your world, or partake in your worldliness, but we certainly share the earth with you, if share is a word that can be applied to how your species relates to much of anything these last centuries. In the mother tongue of that brown-eyed peasant of note, the root of the word for tree is also that of counselor?
It is wondrous to perch on the windowsill of this conversation. Thank you both.
I want to know more about this Evagrius and natural contemplation. I Experience this but I didn’t have a way of thinking about it outside of my own mind yet. Can you put me in the direction of any texts! Thank you!
An addendum - from my reading of the NT the enchantment received by the first Christians was that when you came to Jesus you got dosed with the Holy Spirit and knew God. Note Acts 10:43-46
What a joy to read such a beautiful and insightful dialogue. A lot of thanks. May God bless you both!
As a son of a Midwest pig farmer my default is K.I.S.S. Keep It Simple Sweetheart. To me “enchantment” is that Jesus came so ordinary folks could be sons of God also, filled with the Holy Spirit walking with and knowing the Father as he did, the loving, personal Isness of the Father, all as accessible gift. Jesus simply said “pray to your Father who is there in secret” and in another part of the NT “draw near to God and he will draw near to you”. Let us become little children to enter the Kingdom of God and as William Blake wrote “like lambs joy about our Father’s tent”
I think the robust, so personal Father is now the ignored, unfashionable person of the Trinity, but Jesus wasn’t ashamed of the Old Man, the Ancient of Days. IMO the Neoplatonic influence has etherealized, philosophized, and distanced the Father, the Living God, after all Jesus said, speaking to his and our Father “ now this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God and Jesus Christ, whom you sent”.
Jesus in John 4 proclaimed that the living water he would give would be in us “a spring of water welling up to eternal life” meaning we would filled with a splendid knowing of the Father and the Son. Now that’s magic radiating the light of life on all we see.
So much salt and light here! I could read these sort of conversations all day. The sympathetic vibration between the two of you harmonizes well and begs for more instruments to join the symphony.
After reading Mircea Eliades book on shamanism I saw how we have patholigized peoples differences rather than encouraging those differences as gifts. I think Martin Shaw understands this and why he often uses the word Shaman in a positive way. He'll probably get in trouble from those who have become religious pillars of salt and fluorescent lights. In premodern, aboriginal cultures things like autism or schizophrenia would have made someone a shaman. Their unique gifts of seeing and feeling would have made them guides. The machine aura is predictability and control which tends toward too much order and not enough beauty. A home is not a frame, walls and a roof, but all of the potential to fill that space with careful attention. I believe that we have a collective intuition of sorts that is crying for the feminine beauty to hold the machine in a balance. Historic trends like the feminist movement seem to be attempts at this, but rather than it being a celebration of the deepest feminine sensibilities, its mostly angry women throwing rocks at men. Rather than celebrating and demanding that feminine attributes like mothering, beauty, creativity, intuition etc become more central to our ethos as a culture, we have "women's healthcare", which is code for "the right to not be a mother". I could go on and on about ways our culture needs guides like Grant, Natasha and Martin Shaw to help us respond appropriately to these deep, collective impulses toward the good the true and the beautiful. You are our prophets of earth, water, wind and fire. You may even have to live outside and cook food on a fire of your own feces, to wake up the general cultural audience. Become our holy fools and keep writing beautiful things!
Great stuff to sit with here, Natasha and Graham. A friend who cannot subscribe for lack of connection and, most nights, fingers upon her limbs was intrigued yet also a bit hurt. I think she misunderstood a coulple comments of Graham's, not knowing him as well as I. She asked me to pass this along.
Greetings gatherers of extracts and flowers, you citizens of empire gone to its rest. It did hurt a bit to hear my own kind turned out a bit from such a fetching exchange. I cannot speak from my hearth kin. It is the burning season and as such we two peoples keep a distance (understandable I am sure) until the buds return and the cinder is returned as payment to the roots but we, spirits of the trees, are as much enmeshed with the feasts of the Galilean peasant as any primate from what we have seen. It isn't a question of Pan's death but of the human waking to his confusion in kneeling before a sibling.
Enchantment is the singing within. Why one would ever wish for an end to music, the wind-words in leaf, promises of water circling through the channels, is beyond me but none of us can pick what sort of thuggery will sit in the chairs built from our pith. Even the timber of the God-man can be nailed to nonsense I guess. I don't blame you for so-called Chrisitians first dreamed that they alone peopled the earth and then sought to make their dreams come true. But I do think you might want to take it easy on the tinkerbell jabs. You primates have so few friends in the dark these days. And the nightlights of yours may prove less eternal than your people had promised. Surely, having seen the vapid portrayals of the magic with which you are deeply familar, you know better than to dip your brush in that ink of diminshment. I think the problem is not too many words about faerie from the vapid but too few thoughts about the diversity of the angelic among the companeras.
Rumors of disenchantment are similar to claims of being without a god. Everyone is in-filled with song. Some filter out all other voices but that of their own kind, prefering a solo akin to monologue while others let in the symphony. The fruit of the former is the city as opposed to the forest which, of course, is where my people make our stand.
In that quote from Weight of Glory Lewis, I think, does seem to be suggesting that world is a synonym for earth with the opposite of them both being, I suppose, heaven. All I know of that is my people do not live in your world, or partake in your worldliness, but we certainly share the earth with you, if share is a word that can be applied to how your species relates to much of anything these last centuries. In the mother tongue of that brown-eyed peasant of note, the root of the word for tree is also that of counselor?