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Think Great: Be Great!

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Lailah Gifty Akita

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“I am sitting here, you are sitting there. Say even that you are sitting across the kitchen table from me right now. Our eyes meet; a consciousness snaps back and forth. What we know, at least for starters, is: here we- so incontrovertibly- are. This is our life, these are our lighted seasons, and then we die. In the meantime, in between time, we can see. The scales are fallen from our eyes, the cataracts are cut away, and we can work at making sense of the color-patches we see in an effort to discover where we so incontrovertibly are. I am as passionately interested in where I am as is a lone sailor sans sextant in a ketch on an open ocean. I have at the moment a situation which allows me to devote considerable hunks of time to seeing what I can see, and trying to piece it together. I’ve learned the name of some color-patches, but not the meanings. I’ve read books; I’ve gathered statistics feverishly: the average temperature of our planet is 57 degrees F…The average size of all living animals, including man, is almost that of a housefly. The earth is mostly granite, which is mostly oxygen…In these Appalachians we have found a coal bed with 120 seams, meaning 120 forests that just happened to fall into water…I would like to see it all, to understand it, but I must start somewhere, so I try to deal with the giant water bug in Tinker Creek and the flight of three hundred redwings from an Osage orange and let those who dare worry about the birthrate and population explosion among solar systems. So I think about the valley. And it occurs to me more and more that everything I have seen is wholly gratuitous. The giant water bug’s predations, the frog’s croak, the tree with the lights in it are not in any real sense necessary per se to the world or its creator. Nor am I. The creation in the first place, being itself, is the only necessity for which I would die, and I shall. The point about that being, as I know it here and see it, is that as I think about it, it accumulates in my mind as an extravagance of minutiae. The sheer fringe and network of detail assumes primary importance. That there are so many details seems to be the most important and visible fact about creation. If you can’t see the forest for the trees, then look at the trees; when you’ve looked at enough trees, you’ve seen a forest, you’ve got it. If the world is gratuitous, then the fringe of a goldfish’s fin is a million times more so. The first question- the one crucial one- of the creation of the universe and the existence of something as a sign and an affront to nothing is a blank one… The old Kabbalistic phrase is “the Mystery of the Splintering of the Vessels.” The words refer to the shrinking or imprisonment of essences within the various husk-covered forms of emanation or time. The Vessels splintered and solar systems spun; ciliated rotifers whirled in still water, and newts laid tracks in the silt-bottomed creek. Not only did the Vessels splinter; they splintered exceeding fine. Intricacy then is the subject, the intricacy of the created world.”

SoulPhilosophyGodLightScienceJoySpiritPoetryReligionFaithBeliefEnergyGrowthNatureFreedomPrayerConsciousnessWonderBeautyPowerFireGraceFateSeeingMysteryCreationHumilityPoetPrayingWalkingPoemMindfulnessPraiseCuriositySeekingToleranceFearlessExplorationGapsJoyfulFreeIlluminationDisbeliefEpiphanyPrayersAmenMultiplicityJoyfulnessHallelujahWatchingIntricacyReligious DiversityLife ForceLiving In The Present MomentEnoughnessPhilosopher S StoneExultantStalking The GapsThe Tree With The Lights In It
Book:PILGRIM AT TINKER CREEK
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“Radi se mnogo više - i to isključivo - o pitanju kako uopće valja govoriti o Bogu pred neizmjernom poviješću trpljenja svijeta, 'njegovoga' svijeta. To je pitanje, kako ga ja vidim, glavno pitanje teologije; ona ga ne smije niti eliminirati niti svojim odgovorom prepuniti.”

GodSufferingPassionTheologyTheodicy
Book:Memoria passionis: Ein provozierendes Gedächtnis in pluralistischer Gesellschaft
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“Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery. The surface of mystery is not smooth, any more than the planet is smooth; not even a single hydrogen atom is smooth, let alone a pine. Nor does it fit together; not even the chlorophyll and hemoglobin molecules are a perfect match, for, even after the atom of iron replaces the magnesium, long streamers of disparate atoms trail disjointedly from the rims of the molecule’s loops. Freedom cuts both ways. Mystery itself is as fringed and intricate at the shape of the air at times. Forays into mystery cut bays and fine fjords, but the forested mainland itself is implacable both in its bulk and in its most filigreed fringe of detail.”

SoulPhilosophyGodLightScienceJoySpiritPoetryReligionFaithBeliefEnergyGrowthNatureFreedomPrayerConsciousnessWonderBeautyPowerFireGraceFateSeeingMysteryCreationHumilityPoetPrayingWalkingPoemMindfulnessPraiseCuriositySeekingToleranceFearlessExplorationGapsJoyfulFreeIlluminationDisbeliefEpiphanyPrayersAmenMultiplicityJoyfulnessHallelujahWatchingIntricacyReligious DiversityLife ForceLiving In The Present MomentEnoughnessPhilosopher S StoneExultantStalking The GapsThe Tree With The Lights In ItRing The Bells
Book:PILGRIM AT TINKER CREEK
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“You are supposed to know how to fly or you would not be here. You will now learn to fly all over again. Our way. I have examined your logbooks. They contain some interesting and clever lies. If you are lucky and work a good solid eighteen hours a day in this school, it is barely possible that a few of you may succeed in actually going out on the line-that is, if the company is still in such desperate need of pilots that it will hire anybody who wears his wings in his lapel and walks slowly past the front door.”

FateAviation
Author:Ernest K. Gann
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