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Building Bridges
A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends.-Friedrich Nietzsche
“Hey you’ve probably visited those foundries where they pour molten steel that goes into those bridges of yours right?”
“Certainly. Many times.”
“Man, those places are scary looking. They make hell look like Aspen. You reckon there’s a lot of different ways they could do that work and they choose the one with heart?”
-Jed McKenna, Spiritual Enlightenment: The Damnedest Thing
I believe that one of the qualities of a great man is that he is willing to devote as much time from his life as people are willing to spend. The majority of people are gainfully employed in the business of being them. Worshippers of the false self. Too busy being you.
Rushing about on the highways that lead to life’s goodies. No concern for collateral damage. Left unchecked, personalities become self-inflicted weapons of mass destruction. The best the average motorist can do is hope that he doesn’t hit too many things as he moves through life.
There is an idea. There is a reaction to that idea. There is an idea about the reaction to the idea. What came in as a simple and clear signal becomes fragmented through egoic personality. There is the one. One becomes two. Two become three. Ten thousand things are born. How do we slice through this Gordian Knot? How do we clean the Augean stables?
A child asks his parents for a drink of water. The adult just turns on the tap. A man is selling water by the river. The airplane is neither good nor bad, it just needs to follow the law of thermodynamics.
The scorpion bit me. I had an idea in which direction my life would go. It didn’t go that way. Turns out it came back to where I started. It went full ci-
A sand castle by the beach. A wave rolls in and destroys the castle. Castle feels castle torn apart. The sand reassembles itself. Now the grains know the taste of the ocean and can hear the waves.
There is a man who wants to build a bridge. Conceptualization begins. Creation and problems, meeting, and preliminary drawings. Sketches turn to blueprints and scale models. Before you know it there is an actual bridge somewhere. Maybe it will last one hundred years or until tomorrow. Creation at work.
Originally published at https://transcendentalist.substack.com on April 11, 2023.
