AD.

WALKING ON THIN ICE

The Knot of Reality

September 19, 2012 4 Comments

So I came up with a fairly pleasing design mockup for my friend’s site, Critical Knots.

I like that the site focuses on the booklet so people know exactly what they’ll be getting. I really wonder what prompted my friend to develop the guide. He is so very talented. I wonder how long it took him to design it.

I’d been thinking a lot about the symbolism of the knot. There’s the thought about “tying the knot” meaning to get married. There’s also the thought of the knot as a kind of pretzel of interconnectedness.

In Buddhism the knot might represent dependent origination.

What I like is the idea of making the knot of Reality more simple. Rather than a kind of big messy thing with a lot of problems, let’s visualize a simple knot that represents harmony and solutions that are interwoven into the “knot” of Reality.

I also like the idea of cutting the Gordian knot—in my mind the Gordian knot being some kind of thing like Zeno’s paradox but the cutting of it not something that would refute “all being one.”  According to a Wikipedia writer, here’s what Aristotle said about Zeno’s paradox, and I find this a very astute way of putting it:

Aristotle also distinguished “things infinite in respect of divisibility” (such as a unit of space that can be mentally divided into ever smaller units while remaining spatially the same) from things (or distances) that are infinite in extension (“with respect to their extremities”).

~ Lady

WE HAVE TENTACLES

August 6, 2011 2 Comments

WE HAVE TENTACLES

we have tentacles
extending into the immediate
not only the capsule of skin
tentacles that mix
and throb and meander with
the immediate

innumerable tentacles

innummerable tentacles
permeate into our skins,
our cells
ultimately and immediately

every tentacle
is connected
to every other
tentacle

the thickness of it
is that it is clustered

skin is abstraction
for a bundle of will
a bundle that seems to bump
itself around

eyes, legs, hands, mouth
allow the bundle to move
through the greater mass

it is sticky, the bundle,
pulling itself through this
mother mass

this is what we perceive of
as separation

separation
clumped together again
with gravity…

I pray
and it casts a net of will

tentacles
into this greater mass
of information

I pray
for immediate perception of
connectedness

everything is so simultaneously logical
and illogical, simultaneously banal
and miraculous

the banal part
is mostly the grind of ambition
of getting through the day well
and the miraculous
is the empirical stuff
that I observe “around” me
signs and sounds

it would seem
it should be the opposite
that the mind inside this shell
should be where novelty resides

and everyday sights and sounds
should be not so novel

but I look at our breathing
tail-swagging cat, and hear
the river of traffic outside,

and I know it is an orchestra
and a ballet

and the permeating song
of crickets outside
the lush August sonic carpet

it is thick, This

the carpet of sound
is thick and humid
it is fabric cumming
into my perception
that by handling with mindfulness

I either tune in to
or it tunes in to me…

I focus my ears, my eyes,
my attention and it is a machine
that becomes keener

the volume and quality
pulls itself together
by my tightening attention

Lady