Cosmos Café [6/11] - Lost Knowledge of the Imagination

Thank you kindly, Doug, for letting me know this up! Listening now… :slight_smile:

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I really enjoyed hearing about your Monarch experience.

It’s no fun to cast a shadow over such things, such moments, but when you said the Monarch landed on that word “Epilogue” and then you defined it as “a final or concluding act or event,” I couldn’t help interpreting the choice of that word as perhaps more connected to the dire trouble that Monarchs (and other insects) are in right now. If that were my experience, I would have interpreted the choice of that word as a message something like Rilke’s “you must change your life”. . . Or even, “will you help us survive?”

First, on the personal front, I have a a garden patch of milkweed and also one on my front porch which have, for the first time, had zero Monarch visitors which can bet known because there is not a single bite-hole from caterpillars and no eggs laid (underside of leaves). Neither have I even seen a single Monarch for the first year since I moved here 10 years ago. My neighbor a couple miles from here, told me the same thing.

And then, here’s the scientific news: "As recently as the 1990s, an estimated 1 million butterflies would overwinter along the California coast each year. But over the past several decades, that figure has rapidly plummeted.
“The Xerces Society, an international nonprofit focused on the conservation of invertebrates and their habitats, released the results of its Western Monarch Thanksgiving Count, and the news is dire ­ just 28,429 over-wintering Monarchs were counted in California, which is an 86 percent decrease from the count at the same time the previous year. Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Utah, Nevada and Arizona are seeing similar drops in numbers during the breeding season.” from recent issue of Science Institute News.

I’m not sure how it helps Monarchs to respond to your post this way, but…I decided to do it because just as I was convincing myself not to, I got a call from a friend telling me that near his house a crew is chainsawing down eucalptus trees…which happen to be the Monarch butterfly’s favorite roosting trees.
I planted those milkweeds as a esponse to a previous drop in Monarch numbers, and now their unchewed beauty causes me a kind of pain. I raised Monarch for two years, feels like they are part of my inner circle of family, though all beings are our family, and the Monarch’s decline is the bees’ decline is our decline…
What can we do to turn the Epilogue toward Sequel?
I understand we can’t all do everything. We have to choose a few beings to help and say a prayer for the others. Which is what I asked my friend to do as he listened to the chainsaws…

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Anatheism by Richard Kearney

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I ask not for whom the bell tolls-

Dreamed last night of meeting my father, a man I detested, who died a few years ago, alone and forgotten, in a nursing home. He had alienated everyone by his violence and cruelty.

In the dream, there is no father-son subservience. He was to me just a man as any other. I was wearing a nice suit, a nice shirt, very crisp. And a formal feeling was felt, as others were gathered to hear my presentation. I sat across from him in a chair and got a sense of what I wanted to communicate and saw through this occassion to a final summary. There was a sense of an epilogue as what comes at the end of a clear, harsh narrative, articulated completely, fully absorbed, responsibility acknowledged. And It is finished.

And after the loss of faith, the return of faith…

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It is mid-June and even though I live at the edge of our small rural community, I have not seen a single bee this year.

Maybe Joan Baez could sing “Where have all the insects gone?”

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I consider myself very lucky this summer. Manhattan is an old island, where the Native Indians hunted, but avoided during the harsh winters. I feel the rhythms of the ancient, enchanted island underneath the concrete, an island that is still alive and resonating with a weirdo like me. My firescape overlooks a lush garden, two tall trees and yes I get blue birds, robins, mourning doves, monarch butterflies and bees! I take full advantage of their noble company and sit on the firescape with a soft pillow to cushion me, and perched above I can gaze at the sky with a criss cross of jets streaming, and catch the last hours of light that comes over the Hudson River in the long, late afternoons. I read and do my pranayama. In the mornings I sip my coffee. In the evenings I sip my vino. I am a lucky man. Sometimes, life is good, it is very, very good, and the alien voices, have vanished, and I don’t take anything for granted.

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Thank you, Ed, for noticing absences, as well as presences.
Yesterday a woman screamed next door: she thought a rat had brushed against her foot. Turned out it was a rarer visitation: a Pacific tree frog! Which we used to have lots of around here, and I haven’t seen for two years or maybe three, but as of yesterday there is one frog trying to survive in our greenery. Yesterday, too, I noticed there were no bees at all in those flowering bushes as there have been other years.
These days, often find myself these days writing elegies…

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Howdy @ccafe crew,

I will be traveling /out-of-town until Monday midday with limited access to the internet.
I have set up a bare Café template for next week. Let us see what arises from the edges over the weekend. Feel free to add content to the Café page for June 18th.

Personally, I wouldn’t mind continuing with the exploration of the Imaginal. Richard Kearney has an alternate take on the imagination in his works around the anatheism idea, quite similar to Lachman’s explorations yet with its own twists and turns. Thanks to @achronon for asking @johnnydavis54 which book was being read . . .I checked out Kearney’s Reimagining the Sacred when I was studying Paul Tillich in 2017. Reimagining the Sacred has some insight/praise/criticism based on Kearney’s Anatheism book. I will be reading Anatheism this weekend and also revisiting some of Wallace Stevens’ essays/poems on the imagination + some Tillich perhaps.

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I found a PDF on the web with chapter one and two of Anatheism and I really am taken by this author and very engaged with the concepts and interpretations. I found myself nodding and smiling throughout chapter one. Have not yet read chapter two, but definitely will. Deeply refreshing… I want to go back and re-read the poems, especially thinking of Denise Levertov now since I am writing about her (again) and looking at a picture of her tender luminous face…
Here is a quote from Kearney himself which I love (all pronouns referring to God replaced by “God” is my current practice):

“God is revealed après coup, in the wake…
in the trace of (God’s) passing”

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Logic%20%26%20Imagination

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“Myth is about what happens…all of the time” I am/we are discovering this anew each day.

(I took out “to people” in order to enlarge it to include all of life and…cosmos!

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“The courage to accept along with the mental time concept the efficacy of pre-rational, magic timelessness and irrational, mythical temporicity makes possible the leap into arational time freedom. This is not a freedom from previous time forms, since they are co-constituents of every one of us; it is to begin with a freedom for all time forms.”
Jean Gebser
(EPO, 1985, p. 289)

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That Makes Awe -Some Sense…Can I Get Amen(Let Be So)!

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So mote it be.
For All.

(Mote is the exe form of might)

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I just ran across this from T. Mckenna: “…seek to live by myth, to write breath back into being, even when suicide’s lungs have fallen silent.”
Part of what he calls “…Bio-pantheism…the religion of Life.”
He could get pretty far out there, but was a brilliant scholar, too, and right on about many things.

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