Food

WHY should one read Poetry? That seems to me a good deal like asking: Why should one eat? One eats because one has to, to support life, but every time one sits down to dinner one does not say, ‘I must eat this meal so that I may not die.’ On the contrary, we eat because we are hungry, and so eating appears to us as a pleasant and desirable thing to do.

The necessity for poetry is one of the most fundamental traits of the human race. But naturally we do not take that into account, any more than we take into account that dinner, and the next day again, dinner is the condition of our remaining alive. Without poetry the soul and heart of man starves and dies.

The only difference between them is that all men know, if they turn their minds to it, that without food they would die, and comparatively few people know that without poetry they would die.
Amy Lowell

You might replace the word poetry with the word education, and it would read just as well. The problem is surely that while most people realize that without food they will die, not enough people realize that without training and education their minds will whither – or, in the case of children, will never get the chance to blossom and develop.

Balance

Data @ NASA GISS: GISS Surface Temperature Analysis: 2005 Summation
Record warmth in 2005 is notable, because global temperature has not received any boost from a tropical El Niño this year. The prior record year, 1998, on the contrary, was lifted 0.2ºC above the trend line by the strongest El Niño of the past century.

Global warming is now 0.6ºC in the past three decades and 0.8ºC in the past century. It is no longer correct to say that ‘most global warming occurred before 1940’. More specifically, there was slow global warming, with large fluctuations, over the century up to 1975 and subsequent rapid warming of almost 0.2ºC per decade.
(Via Slashdot)

I read the above news this morning. Amazing how NASA can have the facts while all our politicians seem to stick their fingers in their ears and sing I can’t hear you!

Anyway, the news seems to dovetail nicely with some of what I learned this week regarding Native American ways to view the world. Roshi Joan Halifax allowed me to attend seminars at Upaya this week, even though I was not able to take part in the whole intensive.

This retreat is a powerful way to explore the core teachings of the Buddha and indigenous perspectives in relation to the contemporary world. It includes daily meditation training and practice, morning samu (service work), afternoon seminars exploring historical and engaged Buddhism, as well as indigenous perspectives on the natural world and the mind.

Selfless

David Byrne Journal
What if there is no self? No such thing as being the unique personalities we think we are? What if, and this is very convoluted, there are even parts of our brains that have evolved to convince us that each of us is unique – as a cover up or mask for the awful truth? The truth that parts of our brains deceive other parts of our brains. And that this trickery evolved because it’s useful.

Sounds buddhist, but David Byrne is actually following a different angle. Interesting read.

Music

• New Podcast of La Luna, recorded live in Clearwater, Florida, at the Ruth Eckerd Hall. December of 2005. With String Quartet. Tell your friends.

• I have started recording Silence: No More Longing for the next album up close several times already. There was always something about it that made me stop. A subtle inflection of a melody that wasn’t quite right, a sound of the guitar/strings/nails combination that didn’t fit… I also noticed from the live recordings that I played it quite a bit faster during this last tour – but I think slower is better. So anyway, I have been playing the song a lot during this past week and a lot of good ideas have emerged. Ideas that will make the piece more of what I want it to be. Back to the beginning and start over. It’ll be worth it, trust me.

TerraBlog

TerraBlog
Our tires, despite looking perfectly normal, are over 8 PSI under-inflated! Using some data from the EPA, I did some calculations showing that if we were better about keeping our tires properly inflated, we could save 266 lbs of CO2, 14 gallons of gasoline, and about $35 each year. All this for about 2 minutes once a month.

As if this wasn’t enough, I extrapolated to the number of US cars (220 Million), and came up with the $7B, 52 billion lbs of CO2 number. The impact is tremendous, both in terms of climate change and money saved.

Yes, I have been aware of that for a while. Of course, cars should be checking their own tire pressure continually and either add the air automatically or give a warning signal.