annalee

“Bodily delight is a sensory experience, not any different from pure looking or the pure feeling with which a beautiful fruit fills the tongue; it is a great, an infinite learning that is given to us, a knowledge of the world, the fullness and the splendor of all knowledge...the individual...can remember that all beauty in animals and plants is a silent, enduring form of love...
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I am aware of and am most grateful for the benefits of the age. No matter what complaints we may have, Japan has chosen to follow the West, and there is nothing for her to do but move bravely ahead and leave us old ones behind.... I have written all this because I have thought that there might still be somewhere, possibly in literature or...
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One of the basic human requirements is the need to dwell, and one of the central human acts is the act of inhabiting, of connecting ourselves, however temporarily, with a place on the planet which belongs to us and to which we belong. This is not, especially in the tumultuous present, an easy act (is attested by the uninhibited and uninhabitable no-places in cities everywhere),...
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***And, on the positive side, it should produce changes in consciousness more interesting, more intrinsically valuable than mere sedation or dreaminess, delusions of omnipotence or release from inhibition.***

I was just thinking that this great Aldous Huxley observation should apply to everything in human life, not just drugs. It could be pretty useful if we applied it to the internet. Yes Aldous, yes.

I was recently rereading and feel certain that Aldous Huxley's Doors of Perception is one of the best pieces of advice that society could take and certainly one of my favourites books. It's such a gloriously multi-faceted text in that it also happens to be, along with his Heaven and Hell, the best art history essay I've ever read. I can't recommend this book enough,...
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I've started the Everest task of clearing out my room so I can make space for painting. And making space to breathe and move. One of the most important things we may do is to make space I think, in all aspects of life, in an organisational sense and in the way we carry out our life and daily tasks, in our environment, in our...
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I just spent the last few days with so many great people. I'm really happy. Thanks to everyone I met and to SG and @sean for bringing me there. Tomorrow is my birthday. My very grand birthday at that. Haha, how did this ever happen?! Picture from my roomie @elliott behind the scenes while the wonderful @lavezzaro shot my first set in about 2 years
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I've realised the time has come that I must give in and get a computer again. I've rediscovered love of my camera and I want to work on my pictures and make a website for my paintings. I haven't had my own computer for the last 4 or 5 years, had a wee iPod thing for a while but dropped it in the bath a...
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Milarepa: “When you run after your thoughts, you are like a dog chasing a stick: every time a stick is thrown, you run after it. Instead, be like a lion who, rather than chasing after the stick, turns to face the thrower. One only throws a stick at a lion once.”

My room is getting filled with plants. They are all stretching towards the window, this being Scotland and us not facing South, the sunshine is short. One of the succulents got a little tear when I moved it a few weeks ago and I thought the pale bluish-green leaf/petal/limb/part was going to fall off but instead, tiny pink roots have started to grow out of...
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I'm boycotting those automatic checkouts they've started to put in all the supermarkets. Probably if I had been around at the time when big shops moved in I would have boycotted them too but as we are, they are such a normal thing now in a city and soon those machines will be. Everything by degrees, everything relative. When I go to pay the real...
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