Your daily Tarot card, drawn for 2 August 2021 from Alan Blackman
Following on from Friday’s card today we have the Six of Swords. This shows that we have passed through strife and discord into a period of peace.
The Six of Swords
The Lord of Science appears in a reading when we have passed through a stormy or difficult time, and into the safety of a sheltered harbour, where we can recuperate, and consider the difficulties which have arisen around us.
Often we will have passed through a period of dreadful confusion – and frequently a time of emotional suffering. But this card indicates that, at least for the moment, pressure has eased, and we can try to sort out what we really feel. Frequently we need first to rest until we feel refreshed, but eventually we will be required to assess events and make new decisions for our future.
Because we will find ourselves seeing things more clearly, difficult and demanding decisions will be easier to make. We will find ourselves with a more clear overview of the issues we are facing. And we will be able to make choices which bring us peace of mind and happiness.
Expect to find greater objectivity, clarity and new perspectives as a result of the 6 of Swords. This is a card that indicates a healthy balance between the emotions and the intellect, where we can think through even delicate situations, with detached impartiality.
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With Love,Heather C. Williams, HWM Prosperos School of Ontology High Watch Mentor Ontology = The science of BEING Artist, Author of Drawing as a Sacred Activity Learn more: www.drawingtogether.com
The more vulnerable-making the endeavor, the more reflexive the limitation and the more redemptive the liberation.
That difficult, delicate, triumphal pivot from self-limitation to self-liberation in the most vulnerable-making of human undertakings — love — is what poet and philosopher David Whyte, who thinks deeply about these questions of courage and love, maps out in his stunning poem “The Truelove,” found in his book The Sea in You: Twenty Poems of Requited and Unrequited Love (public library) and read here, by David’s kind assent to my invitation, in his sonorous Irish-tinted English voice, in his singular style of echoing lines to let them reverberate more richly:
THE TRUELOVE by David Whyte
There is a faith in loving fiercely the one who is rightfully yours, especially if you have waited years and especially if part of you never believed you could deserve this loved and beckoning hand held out to you this way.
I am thinking of faith now and the testaments of loneliness and what we feel we are worthy of in this world.
Years ago in the Hebrides, I remember an old man who walked every morning on the grey stones to the shore of baying seals, who would press his hat to his chest in the blustering salt wind and say his prayer to the turbulent Jesus hidden in the water,
and I think of the story of the storm and everyone waking and seeing the distant yet familiar figure far across the water calling to them
and how we are all preparing for that abrupt waking, and that calling, and that moment we have to say yes, except it will not come so grandly so Biblically but more subtly and intimately in the face of the one you know you have to love
so that when we finally step out of the boat toward them, we find everything holds us, and everything confirms our courage, and if you wanted to drown you could, but you don’t because finally after all this struggle and all these years you simply don’t want to any more you’ve simply had enough of drowning and you want to live and you want to love and you will walk across any territory and any darkness however fluid and however dangerous to take the one hand you know belongs in yours.
“The Truelove” appears in the short, splendid course of poem-anchored contemplative practices David guides for neuroscientist and philosopher Sam Harris’s Waking Up meditation toolkit, in which he reads each poem, offers an intimate tour of the landscape of experience from which it arose, and reflects on the broader existential quickenings it invites.
Steven Weinberg in his office at the University of Texas at Austin in 2018.T. SIEGFRIED
Mythology has its titans. So do the movies. And so does physics. Just one fewer now.
Steven Weinberg died July 23, at the age of 88. He was one of the key intellectual leaders in physics during the second half of the 20th century, and he remained a leading voice and active contributor and teacher through the first two decades of the 21st.
On lists of the greats of his era he was always mentioned along with Richard Feynman, Murray Gell-Mann and … well, just Feynman and Gell-Mann.
Among his peers, Weinberg was one of the most respected figures in all of physics or perhaps all of science. He exuded intelligence and dignity. As news of his death spread through Twitter, other physicists expressed their remorse at the loss: “One of the most accomplished scientists of our age,” one commented, “a particularly eloquent spokesman for the scientific worldview.” And another: “One of the best physicists we had, one of the best thinkers of any variety.”
Weinberg’s Nobel Prize, awarded in 1979, was for his role in developing a theory unifying electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force. That was an essential contribution to what became known as the standard model of physics, a masterpiece of explanation for phenomena rooted in the math describing subatomic particles and forces. It’s so successful at explaining experimental results that physicists have long pursued every opportunity to find the slightest deviation, in hopes of identifying “new” physics that further deepens human understanding of nature.
Weinberg did important technical work in other realms of physics as well, and wrote several authoritative textbooks on such topics as general relativity and cosmology and quantum field theory. He was an early advocate of superstring theory as a promising path in the continuing quest to complete the standard model by unifying it with general relativity, Einstein’s theory of gravity.
Early on Weinberg also realized a desire to communicate more broadly. His popular book The First Three Minutes, published in 1977, introduced a generation of physicists and physics fans to the Big Bang–birth of the universe and the fundamental science underlying that metaphor. Later he wrote deeply insightful examinations of the nature of science and its intersection with society. And he was a longtime contributor of thoughtful essays in such venues as the New York Review of Books.
In his 1992 book Dreams of a Final Theory, Weinberg expressed his belief that physics was on the verge of finding the true fundamental explanation of reality, the “final theory” that would unify all of physics. Progress toward that goal seemed to be impeded by the apparent incompatibility of general relativity with quantum mechanics, the math underlying the standard model. But in a 1997 interview, Weinberg averred that the difficulty of combining relativity and quantum physics in a mathematically consistent way was an important clue. “When you put the two together, you find that there really isn’t that much free play in the laws of nature,” he said. “That’s been an enormous help to us because it’s a guide to what kind of theories might possibly work.”
Attempting to bridge the relativity-quantum gap, he believed, “pushed us a tremendous step forward toward being able to develop realistic theories of nature on the basis of just mathematical calculations and pure thought.”
Experiment had to come into play, of course, to verify the validity of the mathematical insights. But the standard model worked so well that finding deviations implied by new physics required more powerful experimental technology than physicists possessed. “We have to get to a whole new level of experimental competence before we can do experiments that reveal the truth beneath the standard model, and this is taking a long, long time,” he said. “I really think that physics in the style in which it’s being done … is going to eventually reach a final theory, but probably not while I’m around and very likely not while you’re around.”
He was right that he would not be around to see the final theory. And perhaps, as he sometimes acknowledged, nobody ever will. Perhaps it’s not experimental power that is lacking, but rather intellectual power. “Humans may not be smart enough to understand the really fundamental laws of physics,” he wrote in his 2015 book To Explain the World, a history of science up to the time of Newton.
Weinberg studied the history of science thoroughly, wrote books and taught courses on it. To Explain the World was explicitly aimed at assessing ancient and medieval science in light of modern knowledge. For that he incurred the criticism of historians and others who claimed he did not understand the purpose of history, which is to understand the human endeavors of an era on its own terms, not with anachronistic hindsight.
But Weinberg understood the viewpoint of the historians perfectly well. He just didn’t like it. For Weinberg, the story of science that was meaningful to people today was how the early stumblings toward understanding nature evolved into a surefire system for finding correct explanations. And that took many centuries. Without the perspective of where we are now, he believed, and an appreciation of the lessons we have learned, the story of how we got here “has no point.”
Future science historians will perhaps insist on assessing Weinberg’s own work in light of the standards of his times. But even if viewed in light of future knowledge, there’s no doubt that Weinberg’s achievements will remain in the realm of the Herculean. Or the titanic.
“I still believe that the unexamined life is not worth living: and I know that self-delusion, in the service of no matter what small or lofty cause, is a price no writer can afford. His subject is himself and the world and it requires every ounce of stamina he can summon to attempt to look on himself and the world as they are.”
Centre Place A look of what the Bible does and doesn’t have to say about homosexuality. In contrast to the claims of many Evangelical Christians, the component texts of the Bible do not condemn same-sex orientation. John Hamer, Pastor of the Community of Christ Toronto Congregation looks at how verses from Sodom and Gomorrah to Leviticus to Paul are routinely misread. This lecture is part of a series of events celebrating LGBTQ+ Pride Month 2021.
Roberto Calasso, Renaissance Man of Letters, Dies at 80
A Florentine by birth, he was a polymath as an author and publisher (Kafka, Vedic philosophy, Greek mythology) who reached a wide international readership.
Published July 30, 2021 Updated Aug. 2, 2021 (NYTimes.com)
Roberto Calasso, the Italian publisher, translator and writer whose wide-ranging works explored the evolution and mysteries of human consciousness, from the earliest myths and rituals to modern civilization, died on Wednesday in Milan. He was 80.
His publishing house, Adelphi, announced the death. No cause was given.
Mr. Calasso was a rare figure in the literary world — an erudite writer and polymath and a savvy publisher who was able to reach a substantial readership for books he released through Adelphi Edizioni, the prestigious Italian publishing house where he worked for some 60 years.
As a writer, he produced more than a dozen works over nearly five decades. His writing defied easy categorization, ranging from his first and only novel, “The Impure Fool,” to his reflections on ancient human consciousness, his study of the 18th-century Venetian artist Giambattista Tiepolo, a book about Franz Kafka, books about Vedic philosophy and Indian mythology, and another about the French clergyman and diplomat Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord.
His work drew international acclaim, and was translated into 28 languages and published in 29 countries.
Much of Mr. Calasso’s writing stemmed from his lifelong preoccupation with ancient myths and their meaning, and with uncovering the common allegories and narrative threads across cultures, eras and civilizations. Fluent in five modern languages and proficient in three ancient ones, including Sanskrit, which he taught himself, Mr. Calasso was fascinated by the question of how humans create meaning through shared stories.
“His books are about how the anthropology of stories is universal,” said Jonathan Galassi, president of Farrar Straus & Giroux, the publisher of eight of Mr. Calasso’s books.
Mr. Calasso was best known for a 1988 book (translated into English in 1993) that braided together ancient myths into a novelistic, genre defying work of literature, philosophy, psychology and history.
He was perhaps best known for his vivid and poetic writing on Greek mythology in “The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony” (1988), which braided together ancient myths into a novelistic, genre defying work of literature, philosophy, psychology and history. It found a wide international readership and was praised by Gore Vidal as “a perfect work like no other” in reimagining “the morning of our world.”
Mr. Calasso later published “Ka,” an exuberant exploration of Indian religion and philosophy, which The New York Review of Books praised for its “ecstatic insight and cross-cultural synthesis.”
“Calasso carved out a new space as an intellectual, retelling myth as true, certainly as true as science,” Tim Parks, who worked with Mr. Calasso on the English translation of “The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony,” said in an interview. “His implication is always that we are as subject as our ancestors were to the forces that find their names in Zeus or Venus or Yahweh or Shiva.”
In a 2012 interview with The Paris Review, Mr. Calasso spoke about humanity’s search for transcendence, be it through art, nature or religion, as his central intellectual pursuit. “All of my books have to do with possession,” he said. “Ebbrezza — rapture — is a word connected with possession. In Greek the word is mania, madness. For Plato it was the main path to knowledge.”
Roberto Calasso was born in Florence, Italy, in 1941, into a family of prodigious intellectuals. His maternal grandfather, Ernesto Codignola, was a professor of philosophy at the University of Florence and founded a publishing house, La Nuova Italia. His father, Francesco Calasso, taught the history of law at the University of Florence, and his mother, Melisenda Calasso, was a literary scholar and translator.
With the rise of fascism in Italy, his father was persecuted for his anti-fascist views. When Roberto was 3, the family went into hiding after his father was jailed and accused of conspiring to kill Giovanni Gentile, an intellectual who considered himself the founding philosopher of Italian fascism.
In 1954, his family moved to Rome, where Mr. Calasso fell in love with cinema and with Greek and Roman literature and mythology. In 1962, when he was 21, he started working at the newly formed publishing house Adelphi Edizioni, with the promise that it would be a place where editors could “publish the books we truly liked,” Mr. Calasso told The Paris Review.
A decade later, he became editorial director and quickly developed a reputation for his distinctive tastes and his passion for publishing underappreciated writers like Robert Walser and the German poet Gottfried Benn.
“He was always finding writers who hadn’t had their due and he was always good at publicizing them when he published a book,” Mr. Galassi said. “He was kind of a literary magician.”
Adelphi also published translations of literary titans like J.R.R. Tolkien, Vladimir Nabokov, Jorge Luis Borges and Milan Kundera, as well as books on animal behavior, physics and Tibetan religious texts.
To his authors Mr. Calasso was unfailingly supportive, the writer William Dalrymple said. “If he liked a book and admired an author,” he said, “he could be a loyal and powerful ally and would put his full authority and reputation behind it.”
In “The Art of the Publisher,” his reflections on his decades in publishing, Mr. Calasso was diffident about the commercial side of publishing, noting that “publishing has often shown itself to be a sure and rapid way of squandering substantial amounts of money.” He eventually became the president of Adelphi and helped preserve its independence when he bought a majority stake in the company himself, thwarting a sale to the Mondadori Group, a major European media company.
In a 2015 interview with The New York Times, Mr. Calasso described how perceptions of Adelphi sharply varied.
“At the beginning,” he said, “we were considered rather eccentric and aristocratic. Then, when we started to have remarkable commercial successes, we were accused of being too populist. That was curious because we were publishing exactly the same books.”
As both a writer and a publisher, Mr. Calasso described his works as a single, ongoing project.
“He’s almost impossible to classify, because his range of ideas, his range of thoughts, goes so far and wide,” Richard Dixon, who translated five of Mr. Calasso’s books, said in a phone interview. “He often puts together and juxtaposes ideas where the connection isn’t always obvious.”
Mr. Dixon said that shortly after he learned of Mr. Calasso’s death, he received a package from Mr. Calasso with his two latest books, including a memoir about his childhood in fascist Italy.
“Although Roberto could seem quite intimidating, there was something extraordinarily generous and kind about him,” he said.
Mr. Dalrymple said that though Mr. Calasso could come across as an imposing, uncompromising intellectual in public appearances, he was “charm incarnate” at parties.
And the novelist Lawrence Osborne, who worked with Mr. Calasso on the Italian editions of four of his novels, described him as “quietly inquisitive” and a connoisseur of Negronis, which he and Mr. Osborne drank “in stupendous quantities” while talking about literature and Asian culture.
“For me he was the greatest European publisher of his time and one of our greatest writers — an exceptionally rare combination,” Mr. Osborne said. “Moreover, he was a true Florentine deep down, as I always thought, embodying the urbane tolerance and refinement of that city.”
Mr. Calasso is survived by his wife, the Swiss writer Fleur Jaeggy, and two children, Josephine and Tancredi Calasso, both from his previous marriage to the German writer Anna Katharina Fröhlich.
In his book, “The Celestial Hunter,” Mr. Calasso described writing as something akin to the primordial urge to hunt.
“A book is written when there is something specific that has to be discovered,” he wrote. “The writer doesn’t know what it is, nor where it is, but knows it has to be found. The hunt then begins. The writing begins.”
Wendy Cicchetti | Twixt Earth and Sky Join Wendy Cicchetti and Misty Tripoli to learn how you can access the Akashic Records, what they are and how they will benefit you. To learn more and to sign up for an Akashic Records reading or for classes on how to access the Akashic Records contact Wendy@TwixtEarthandSky.com. https://twixtearthandsky.com/Payments (note: just for you, use COUPON CODE ‘akashic’ for discounted pricing on both readings and classes. The next series of classes begins on Sunday, August 29th. Contact Misty at Misty@TheWorldGrooveMovement.com
Politicians and activists are aggressively asserting religious liberty in their fight against LGBTQ acceptance, public health measures, and other perceived threats. One of the most novel claims: a lawsuit by a Catholic school claiming that anti-COVID-19 masks hide faces made in God’s image and, thus, constitute a violation of the religious liberty of those forced to wear them.-
But something is off when the New York Times publishes headlines like the recent “What the Supreme Court Did for Religion.” As with so much other media coverage and public discourse around this matter, there needs to be a rewrite for the sake of specificity. It’s not what the high court and political actors are doing for “religious freedom.” It’s what they’re doing, for the most part, for conservative Christianity.
Liberal stands are rooted in belief
We need to remember that religious freedom belongs to all – not just one faith or one side in our ongoing culture clash.
More liberals of faith and conscience ought to be like Jamie Manson and invoke religious freedom themselves. A graduate of Yale Divinity School (my employer) and a former columnist for the National Catholic Reporter, Manson is President of Catholics for Choice, which advocates for the availability of legal, safe abortion for those who need it.
Contrary to the familiar and simplistic plot line – religious folks are against abortion; secular people are for it – Manson does not advocate for legal abortion in spite of her Catholic faith. She does so because of it.
Political appropriations of Catholic teaching “are causing enormous suffering for women,” Manson explained to me. “Especially poor women and women of color. I object to my faith being used in that way. It’s about human dignity, human freedom, which Catholicism promotes.”
Protest over a Supreme Court case in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 22, 2020.
Do abortion bans violate her own religious freedom? “Absolutely,” Manson says. “Abortion bans are part of larger agenda to limit sexual education, to limit contraceptive access, to limit certain medical procedures. The theology behind these is harmful – a theology that wants to limit women’s freedom, wants women to have strict gender-based roles, and says women’s primary vocation is to be mothers. These absolutely infringe on my religious freedom, which is about freedom of belief and freedom from belief.”
Manson is right about freedom from belief: One person’s religion should not be enacted into law in ways that strongarm another citizen into living in accordance with beliefs they don’t share. But the especially interesting part of the conversation – one that gets too little airtime –goes beyond protection from other peoples’ beliefs and takes account of the deep sense of religious and ethical conviction that invariably drives liberal positions and behavior.
Take the “faithful providers” – abortion practitioners whose stories Manson’s organization is elevating to counteract the conservative conceit that the anti-abortion position is the Christian position. One of a half-dozen doctors featured on the Catholics for Choice website, Albert G. Thomas is a New York-based OB-GYN, and a Catholic, who sees himself as providing urgently needed support to patients.
“These particular individuals were really torn about undergoing the procedure, but they either had a medical reason or a very strong social reason for why they needed an abortion,” Thomas says. “They didn’t need me to be pompous or to judge them. They needed someone who could hold their hand and tell them it was going to be okay… I think that’s what God would want us to do.”
Don’t run from a constitutional benefit
Safe abortion is hardly the only liberal good pursued out of conscience and conviction. When liberals of faith take public stands against threats to flourishing life, like racism and climate change, it’s more than appropriate for them to cite the beliefs that fuel them. It’s incumbent upon the government and public to accept them as sincere expressions of religious conviction.
When unjust law and policy prevent religious liberals from living out their faith – whether it’s a pastor committed to supporting desperate migrants, or a gay couple called to care for foster kids, or a trans person whose safety and God-endowed dignity are violated by humiliating bathroom bills – they, too, ought to invoke their constitutional right to freely exercise their religion.
Not to say that all conservative religious people should be forced to live as liberals. That would be as wrong as the inverse. The reality is that rights clash and worldviews collide. The challenge is to find peaceful resolutions and accommodations for everyone to the greatest extent possible while still maintaining a functioning society.
For religious and secular liberals, it’s understandable if the very sound of that term “religious freedom” sets off alarm bells. But instead of running from it, liberals of faith and ethical conviction ought to embrace religious freedom for themselves. Not merely to confound and counteract the religious freedom claims of conservatives (although that’s a worthwhile secondary benefit) but to enjoy a constitutional benefit that is rightfully theirs.
Religious freedom is not a conservative Christian thing, and it’s time we stop acting like it is.
My daughters and I once drove past a spot where trees and grass were on fire. We stopped: 100 degrees, no clouds, nothing to fight the fire with. Rain Drop was 5 then. She said she would call the Rain Spirit and she did.
Eyes closed she sat there in the back seat, legs crossed and then she fell right over. She lay totally still. Little Wind and I watched, not sure what to do.
A few minutes and she sat up. A few more and the rain came in sheets so heavy cars pulled over and stopped. The fire was put out at once. I saw it happen. It was child’s play. I do not expect you to believe it;
I only tell you because I saw the price we have paid in trading trust for reason. Rain Drop knew exactly what to do and she did it. I saw it. I do not expect you to believe it.
–Red Hawk, Sioux Dog Dance
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THE TRUELOVE
