HSU IT Department

"Some people will use a symbolism of the relationship of God to the universe, wherein God is a brilliant light, only somehow veiled, hiding underneath all these forms that you see as you look around you. But the truth is funnier than that. It is that you are looking right at the brilliant light now, that the experience you are having which you call ordinary everyday consciousness - pretending you're not it - that experience is exactly the same thing as ‘IT’. There's no difference at all. And when you find that out, you laugh yourself silly. That's the great discovery.

"In other words, when you really start to see things, and you look at an old paper cup, and you go into the nature of what it is to see, what vision is, or what smell is, or what touch is, you realize that that vision of the paper cup is the brilliant light of the cosmos. Nothing could be brighter. Ten thousand suns couldn't be brighter. Only they're hidden in the sense that all points of the infinite light are so tiny when you see them in the cup they don't blow your eyes out. See, the source of all light is in the eye. If there were no eyes in this world, the sun would not be light. So if I hit as hard as I can on a drum which has no skin, it makes no noise. So if a sun shines on a world with no eyes, it's like a hand beating a skinless drum, no light. YOU evoke light out of the universe, in the same way you, by nature of having soft skin, evoke hardness out of wood. Wood is only hard in relation to a soft skin. It's your eardrum that evokes noise out of the air. You, by being this organism, call into being this whole universe of light and color and hardness and heaviness and everything."

-- Alan Watts

A friend pointed me to this stunningly powerful and beautiful photography project, by Mikael Owunna. The name of the project comes from Chinua Achebe, but it also makes me think of Carl Sagan's famous quote, "We are made of star stuff."

'Every Black Person Deserves To See Themselves This Way'

It brought me to tears...

The Arizona Senate yesterday opted to open their session not with a prayer, but with an invocation from a member of a local secular humanist group. It's short -- only 2 minutes -- but it brought tears to my eyes. Compassion and reason have both been so scarce lately.

"...before dogmatism sequestered our minds to be automatons in a free world, we are human...Know that we are all part of the universality of existence. Our DNA consists of stardust, ten billion years old. Science discloses that we are the microcosm of the macrocosm..."

Watch or read in full here.

Of course, the Jedi didn't go around beheading people who didn't believe in the Force so, y'know, still the good guys. But it kinda makes you think.

No, this isn't photoshopped. It's real. And I could not be happier for the many people for whom today's Supreme Court decision means so much :)



(Click for story)


And there's even a live feed, with the fountain playing and flag waving above. Yay!!

When you consider the only currently available alternative to aging is, well, being dead, getting older suddenly looks much more appealing. But there are times when what seems like a simple, gradual process that you have plenty of time to get used to suddenly throws up a mile marker that startles you.  This one happened to me last summer.

Like many (many many many) people, there is a Starbucks near where I work. Like man (many many many) people, I stop in there frequently. There's a young guy who works there, a graduate student in architecture. Based on my interactions with him there, and more so at the library where he helped us out over a semester with some of our architecture collections, I knew he was intelligent, quick-witted, reliable, nice, funny. Last summer he joined this group that bikes across the US, stopping to help work on affordable housing projects at various places along the way. His colleagues at Starbucks put up a flier about it so people could donate, with a link to his blog, where I learned more about him: that he was an Americorps volunteer, worked with Habitat for Humanity, has a lovely philosophy about making people's lives better, likes to draw, and a number of other very appealing things, all of which summed up to his being a genuinely remarkable young man.

Oh, and did I mention he's also very cute? Shaggy brown hair, nice eyes, sweet smile, etc.

Now, for the last several many decades (exactly how many, modesty prohibits me from disclosing), all of this would immediately have spawned the thought, "Wow, I would love to go out with this guy."

This time? The very first thought that crossed my mind was, "Wow, how amazing would it be to have a son like that? I would be so proud..."

This was quite a shock, let me tell you. I mean, I knew I'd reached the point where my boss is younger than I am, but I had no idea I had crossed the Rubicon from having men in the world that were too old to date, to having men in the world that were too young to date. And it came upon me so unexpectedly and so fully-formed -- it wasn't like I had some sort of internal debate about it, it was just a done deal.

The aftershocks still haven't quite settled out in my mind nearly a year later. Even writing it down makes me feel rather odd. So I think a cup of tea and some chocolate is in order.  And perhaps some voting on English men :)