Joyful Saint

The truth with this post.....

I noticed myself in one of my friend's sidebars, and well, with my "last post" being seven months ago, I felt kinda sad.

I don't post a lot, because I have such visions of beautiful pictures, and delicously profound words, (I am capable of both, you know) and yet it seems I rarely take the time to craft them.  So sorry.  If any of you might really care. 

Deep thought of lately circle around Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Persig.  What an odd book.  So full of importantly deep and difficult concepts, and yet bogged down with the pathetic father-son story. 

One idea perhaps:  Persig speaks of "knowing" things.  He asks the question framed by Kant:  "Are we capable of knowing something a priori (before it is physically before us)?  Kant was a little confusing for me, but my own take and take-off of his ideas is (are)  that the broader and deeper our knowledge base is, the more substance, form, categories, we are familiar with.  This leads us to be able to begin the understand, to perceive, to envision more and more truth (quality) around us.  

I simplify it by likening it to explaining a crochet pattern to someone who is competant at crocheting versus someone who has never done it before.  Because of a previous familiarty with the vocabulary, the forms, the patterns, someone who has crocheted before can easily visualize a new article made from a pattern that they are not specifically aware of.  The latter will most likely have a very difficult time. 

Even though this is a very simplified example, we can see how it can apply to the deepest questions of our being.  All of our previous experience, and knowledge really colors our lenses.  Try to consider how an astro-physicist might examine a starry night.  Would the physicist see things, understand things that are so blatantly clear and visible - and yet might be so completely obscured to someone else.  Could the physicist better understand and see an emerging truth in the universe?


Walt Whitman

                A NOISELESS, patient spider,


I mark’d, where, on a little promontory, it stood, isolated;

Mark’d how, to explore the vacant, vast surrounding,

It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself;

Ever unreeling them—ever tirelessly speeding them. 5



And you, O my Soul, where you stand,

Surrounded, surrounded, in measureless oceans of space,

Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing,—seeking the spheres, to connect them;

Till the bridge you will need, be form’d—till the ductile anchor hold;

Till the gossamer thread you fling, catch somewhere, O my Soul.

Are you filling your mind with knowledge broad enough and deep enough, that your bridge will be built as you connect, connect, connect, and sift for truth all around you.  The clear and the obscure, the new and the old.  Will you be prepared for what stands ahead?