There is mindlessness everywhere I look! Our only hope is being attentive to what is going on, and to what is called for, where, when and how! Clarity combined with courage and consciousness form a union unparalleled in the field of time. The world is a wasteland waiting for, as Joseph Campbell would say, "individuals living authentic lives out of he spontaneity of their own hearts-- when that heart is a noble heart and that spontaneity is based on compassion, rather than conquest and possession." In the moment of their awakening, they are linked by their original nature, innate virtues (traits, character) and essential identity with the very life that is necessitated by the circumstances of their existence. Just as "it took the Cyclops to bring forth the hero in Ulysses" (Campbell), so it takes the occasion of our present moment to bring us into the full flowering of our possibilities and potential in meeting the moment of our living as those who will not be put off or misdirected, or sat aside by any combination of fear, hatred, anger and desire from our task of seeing and doing what needs to be done and needs us to do it in each situation as it arises-- no matter how useless or pointless it appears to be-- through all of the situations that will yet arise, in the cause of being faithful to ourselves and alert to what beckons in the dimension of action through all the days of our lives. May it be always so!
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Jim Dollar's Photography and Philosophy 