Tag: Ascesis

• June 22, 2012

  Heat and Summer Solstice

  I The temperature will itch toward 100 degrees and we will want to itch. The key will be ascesis: to breath and be calm, to be skin. II One day after the Summer Solstice the gods are smiling divinely. Some are in fits. The rest are philosophical: loving the steadiness of breath. III Joan most…
• May 26, 2012

  The good camera and the stillness of transience

  Dearest C, I am looking at your photos. You have such a good eye for these quiet moments that open in the midst of all else. I think what all your photos share–not just these but all those you’ve shown me–is a sense of wonderment and a meditative eye for what is just now coming…
• May 25, 2012

  The teapot in the coffee shop

  I noticed the texture first, the graininess, that is. Then the color or rather colors, especially the white light coming from the viewer’s far left, the lantern lit up like a gig lamp. Then the wooden chairs with their swooping, semicircular backs. And finally, behind the traced-out line, my eye came to rest on the…
• April 13, 2012

  ‘The infinite value of life itself’: 3 examples of spiritual exercise

  “I did nothing today,” the man says. “What?” Montaigne replies. “Did you not live? That is not only the most fundamental but the most illustrious of occupations.” * This week a number of conversation partners have spoken to me about spiritual exercises (ascesis), asking further about what they are and how to practice them. (The…
• March 28, 2012

  On holding converse with myself and on taking proper care of myself

  I have been holding two thoughts in mind for quite a while and I now think it’s high time to bring them together. The first thought appears in Book VI of Diogenes Laertius’s The Lives of Eminent Philosophers. Diogenes Laertius relates that “When he [one philosopher named Antisthenes] was asked what advantage had accrued to him…