Joe's Black Dog

Joe's Black Dog
Joe's Black Dog by Marjorie Weiss

22 November 2014

'leans in and longs to be noticed'

Photo by Rudolf Getel, 'Lost in Field', creative commons Flickr

'And the other saying that has been very present to me for the last twelve months is Tim Winton - 'the natural world leans in to the human world and longs to be noticed' and I think for me sort of God or Other, there is something more if you like - I don't always use God language because it has a connotation about it that some people struggle with - leans in and longs to be noticed.

So the morning weight of things - God leaning in - I think the interruptions of life can often become the invitations.' 

Mary Nolan, mother of Chris, founder of Meredith Music Festival.
'A Day in the Life, pt 3'
Encounter, ABC Radio National, 21 November 2014
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/encounter/mary-nolan-faith-in-daily-life/5902360

02 October 2014

'in order to shimmer on to this scene'

 https://flic.kr/p/pu37th

'As a member of the human species, I have a particular genetic identity. There are about 30,000 active genes in the human genome. Each of these genes has at least two variants, or 'alleles'. So the number of genetically distinct identities the genome can encode is at least 2 raised to the thirty-thousandth power which roughly equals the number 1 followed by 10,000 zeros. That's the number of potential people allowed by the structure of our DNA. And how many of those potential people have actually existed? It is estimated that about 40 billion humans have been born since the emergence of our species. Let's round the number up to 100 billion, just to be on the conservative side. This means that the fraction of genetically possible humans who have been born is less than 0.00000...000001 (insert about 9,979 extra zeroes in the gap). The overwhelming majority of the genetically possible humans are unborn specters. Such is the fantastic lottery that I - and you- had to win in order to shimmer on to this scene. This is contingency with a vengeance.'

Jim Holt, 2012, Why does the world exist? p. 254

26 September 2014

Howard Thurman

 https://flic.kr/p/7i1b7J

'Don't ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.'

Howard Thurman 

https://edition.cnn.com/2019/02/01/us/howard-thurman-mlk-gandhi/index.html