metsä

Conceit

It is conceit that kills us

and makes us cowards instead of gods.

Under the great Command: Know thy self, and that thou art mortal!

we have become fatally self-conscious, fatally self-important, fatally entangled in the Laocoön coils of our conceit.

Now we have to admit we can't know ourselves, we can only know about ourselves.

And I am not interested to know about myself any more,

I only entangle myself in the knowing.

Now let me be myself,

now let me be myself, and flicker forth,

now let me be myself, in the being, one of the gods.

On the other side of the screen,

A showy cavalry shot down a Native American

I wish he’d used that shiny gun to shoot my depression instead.

....

Just by knowing my birthplace or my skin or the color of my eyes

What is it that you really know about me?

“...the !Kung* Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert in Botswana have an explanation for the Milky Way, which at their latitude is often overhead. They call it “The Backbone of Night,” as if the sky were some great beast inside which we live. Their explanation makes the Milky Way useful as well as understandable. The !Kung believe the Milky Way holds up the night; that if it were not for the Milky Way, fragments of darkness would come crashing down at our feet. It is an elegant idea.”

- Cosmos, Carl Sagan

Ha! Xương sống của đêm. Great insights of ancient tribes regarding the universe before it was replaced by religions =.= 

A conversation between the Martyr & the Trickster - basically 2 opposite forces of energy, 2 ways of approach to things - taken from Big Magic. I giggled upon reading it, but it actually switched on something inside me.

“Martyr:    Life is pain.

Trickster: Life is interesting.

M: The system is rigged against all that is good and sacred.

T: There is no system, everything is good and nothing is sacred.

M: Nobody will ever understand me.

T: Pick a card. Any card. (!)

M: The world can never be solved.

T: Perhaps not. But it can be gamed.

M: Through my torment, the truth shall be revealed.

T: I didn’t come here to suffer, pal.

M: Death before dishonour!

T: Let’s make a deal.”

:)) So that’s it. Martyr is the dead-serious, inflexible, unforgiving, tormented soul while Trickster is the gamer, the lighthearted, playful, cunning, flexible guy. And I realized that I have often had anxiety because my approach to creativity or to life was much of a Martyr, while it might have been better to see things as a Trickster. Which is to say, everything, life, is just a Big Freaky Wonderful Game. It is better if I take myself, and what I do seriously, but not SERIOUSLY, not so much that it puts a burden on the mind and body. Enlightening! And I think this can be applied to all who feel that they have a mission to accomplish, because sometimes the burden can be so heavy it does you more harm than good, and you can not even enjoy the journey.

2005年5月19日にスピリットがグセフ・クレーターで撮影した火星の日没（青い夕焼け）

On May 19th, 2005, NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit captured this stunning view as the Sun sank below the rim of Gusev crater on Mars...

Other images have shown that the twilight glow remains visible, but increasingly fainter, for up to two hours before sunrise or after sunset. The long martian twilight (compared to Earth's) is caused by sunlight scattered around to the night side of the planet by abundant high altitude dust. Similar long twilights or extra-colorful sunrises and sunsets sometimes occur on Earth when tiny dust grains that are erupted from powerful volcanoes scatter light high in the atmosphere.