[FRIAM] Everything she knows...

Tue Apr 16 14:51:01 EDT 2019

1.  Come to Santa Fe when you can.

2.  La Mott says that writing, rather than being published, bestows the
benefits.

I understand your struggles with the story of your parents' lives.  When I
wrote my little memoir I made discoveries like "this couldn't have happened
before that" that I had to straighten out.

-----------------------------------
Frank Wimberly

Phone (505) 670-9918

On Tue, Apr 16, 2019, 12:43 PM Jochen Fromm <jofr at cas-group.net> wrote:

> About the last point 14, death: I believe the best way to fight against
> the destructive force of death is to be creative, to create something. It
> is what genes repeatedly do. They create bodies as survival vehicles for
> themselves, again and again. As Barack Obama said about Notre Dame "It’s in
> our nature to mourn when we see history lost – but it’s also in our nature
> to rebuild for tomorrow, as strong as we can" (Do you miss him in the White
> House as well?)
> https://twitter.com/BarackObama/status/1117886698568830976
>
> After my parents died a few years ago I'm trying to write a biography
> about their life, which is quite hard. The more you write, the harder it
> gets, because it becomes harder to fit everything together and your own
> text puts you down. And if you want it to be good, you have to proofread it
> over and over again until you can't see it anymore and then 10 times more.
> However I think I have finished it now and will publish it this year
> together with the other book. It is not perfect and will not bring them
> back to life but it is the best I could do.
>
> I'm thinking of Doug Roberts sometimes, who frequently wrote to this list
> and died too early as well. Honestly I don't know much about him, except
> that he had a parrot farm, and often wrote some funny or interesting stuff
> here. It would be wonderful if someone could write a book, ebook or
> something about the FRIAM group, the real one that meets in Santa Fe. I
> can't do that because I've never been there. As you know everything which
> is not recorded or written down gets lost in the course of time.
>
> -Jochen
>
>
>
> -------- Original message --------
> From: Frank Wimberly <wimberly3 at gmail.com>
> Date: 4/15/19 04:06 (GMT+01:00)
> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
>
> Subject: [FRIAM] Everything she knows...
>
>
> This is an essay by Anne La Mott that I came across 4 years ago.  It may
> seem that a late middle-aged non-scientist could not could contribute
> philosophical thoughts that are worthy of the heights of Friam but I find
> that it integrates the sublime and the ridiculous quite well.  Kind of like
> Friam meetings.  The posts on the List are a little more coherent.
>
> I was ten years old when she was born.  She is a successful novelist,
> essayist, and short-story writer.
>
> "I am going to be 61 years old in 48 hours.  Wow.  I thought i was only
> forty-seven, but looking over the paperwork, I see that I was born in
> 1954.  My inside self does not have an age, although can't help mentioning
> as an aside that it might have been useful had I not followed the Skin Care
> rules of the sixties, ie to get as much sun as possible, while slathered in
> baby oil.  (My sober friend Paul O said, at eighty, that he felt like a
> young man who had something wrong with him.). Anyway, I thought I might
> take the opportunity to write down every single thing I know, as of today.
>
>     1.  All truth is a paradox. Life is a precious unfathomably beautiful
> gift; and it is impossible here, on the incarnational side of things.  It
> has been a very bad match for those of us who were born extremely
> sensitive.  It is so hard and weird that we wonder if we are being punked.
> And it filled with heartbreaking sweetness and beauty, floods and babies
> and acne and Mozart, all swirled together.
>
>     2.  Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few
> minutes, including you.
>
>     3.  There is almost nothing outside of you that will help in any kind
> of last way, unless you are waiting for an organ.  You can't buy, achieve,
> or date it.  This is the most horrible truth.
>
>     4.  Everyone is screwed up, broken, clingy, and scared, even the
> people who seem to have it more or less together.  They are much more like
> you than you would believe.  So try not to compare your insides to their
> outsides. Also, you can't save, fix or rescue any of them, or get any of
> them sober.  But radical self-care is quantum, and radiates out into the
> atmosphere, like a little fresh air.  It is a huge gift to the world.  When
> people respond by saying, "Well, isn't she full of herself," smile
> obliquely, like Mona Lisa, and make both of you a nice cup of tea.
>
>      5.  Chocolate with 70% cacao is not actually a food. It's best use is
> as bait in snake traps.
>
>      6.  Writing: shitty first drafts.  Butt in chair. Just do it. You own
> everything that happened to you.  You are going to feel like hell if you
> never write the stuff that is tugging on the sleeves in your heart--your
> stories, visions, memories, songs: your truth, your version of things, in
> your voice.  That is really all you have to offer us, and it's why you were
> born
>
>     7.  Publication and temporary creative successes are something you
> have to recover from.  They kill as many people as not.  They will hurt,
> damage and change you in ways you cannot imagine. The most degraded and
> sometimes nearly-evil men I have known were all writers who'd had
> bestsellers.   Yet, it is also a miracle to get your work published (see
> #1.). Just try to bust yourself gently of the fantasy that publication will
> heal you, will fill the Swiss cheesey holes.  It won't, it can't.  But
> writing can. So can singing.
>
>      8.  Families;  hard, hard, hard, no matter how cherished and
> astonishing they may also be. (See #1 again.)  At family gatherings where
> you suddenly feel homicidal or suicidal, remember that in half of all
> cases, it's a miracle that this annoying person even lived.  Earth is
> Forgiveness School.  You might as well start at the dinner table.  That
> way, you can do this work in comfortable pants.  When Blake said that we
> are here to learn to endure the beams of love, he knew that your family
> would be an intimate part of this, even as you want to run screaming for
> your cute little life.  But that you are up to it. You can do it,
> Cinderellie.  You will be amazed.
>
>      9.  Food; try to do a little better.
>
>      10.  Grace: Spiritual WD-40. Water wings.  The mystery of grace is
> that God loves Dick Cheney and me exactly as much as He or She loves your
> grandchild.  Go figure. The movement of grace is what changes us, heals us
> and our world.  To summon grace, say, "Help!"  And then buckle up.  Grace
> won't look like Casper the Friendly Ghost; but the phone will ring, or the
> mail will come, and then against all odds, you will get your sense of humor
> about yourself  back.  Laughter really is carbonated holiness, even if you
> are sick of me saying it.
>
>      11.  God; Goodnesss, Love energy, the Divine, a loving animating
> intelligence, the Cosmic Muffin. You will worship and serve something, so
> like St. Bob said, you gotta choose.  You can play on our side, or Bill
> Maher's and Franklin Graham's.  Emerson said that the happiest person on
> earth is the one who learns from nature the lessons of worship. So go
> outside a lot, and look up.  My pastor says you can trap bees on the floor
> of a Mason jar without a lid, because they don't look up.  If they did,
> they could fly to freedom.
>
>      11.  Faith: Paul Tillich said the opposite of faith is not doubt, but
> certainty.  If I could say one thing to our little Tea Party friends, it
> would be this.  Fundamentalism, in all its forms, is 90% of the reason the
> world is so terrifying.  3% is the existence of snakes.  The love of our
> incredible dogs and cats is the closest most of us will come, on this side
> of eternity, to knowing the direct love of God; although cats can be so
> bitter, which is not the god part: the crazy Love is.  Also,  "Figure it
> out" is not a good slogan.
>
>      12.  Jesus; Jesus would have even loved horrible, mealy-mouth
> self-obsessed you, as if you were the only person on earth.  But He would
> hope that you would perhaps pull yourself together just the tiniest,
> tiniest bit--maybe have a little something to eat, and a nap.
>
>      13.  Exercise: If you want to have a good life after you have grown a
> little less young, you must walk almost every day. There is no way around
> this.  If you are in a wheelchair, you must do chair exercises.  Every
> single doctor on earth will tell you this, so don't go by what I say.
>
>      14.  Death; wow.  So f-ing hard to bear, when the few people you
> cannot live without die.  You will never get over these losses, and are not
> supposed to.  We Christians like to think death is a major change of
> address, but in any case, the person will live fully again in your heart,
> at some point, and make you smile at the MOST inappropriate times.  But
> their absence will also be a lifelong nightmare of homesickness for you.
> All truth is a paradox.   Grief, friends, time and tears will heal you.
> Tears will bathe and baptize and hydrate you and the ground on which you
> walk.  The first thing God says to Moses is, "Take off your shoes."  We are
> on holy ground.  Hard to believe, but the truest thing I know.
>
>     I think that's it, everything I know.  I wish I had shoe-horned in
> what E.L. Doctorow said about writing: "It's like driving at night with the
> headlights on.  You can only see a little aways ahead of you, but you can
> make the whole journey that way."  I love that, because it's teue about
> everything we tey.  I wish I had slipped in what Ram Das said, that when
> all is said and done, we're just all walking each other home.  Oh, well,
> another time.  God bless you all good."
>
> -----------------------------------
> Frank Wimberly
>
> My memoir:
> https://www.amazon.com/author/frankwimberly
>
> My scientific publications:
> https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frank_Wimberly2
>
> Phone (505) 670-9918
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
> archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/attachments/20190416/93d347ee/attachment.html>