Vance Dubberly

The guys who maintain the awesome django-storages seem hell bent on forcing you to support mercurial.  That’s all well and good, but it screws up the install.  So if you’ve tried running setup.py and gotten the exception about mercurial.error not being found, just make the installer version control agnostic it’s easy, and will make you feel better.

open setup.py and comment out this line:

setup_requires=['setuptools_hg'],

If you’ve tried installing and already got the error, you’ll also have to delete the file setuptools tried to install as a prerequisite

rm -f setuptools_hg-0.1.5-py2.5.egg

Wow that was simple.  Now you can just run sudo python setup.py install and all will be good.

The problem with transcendentalism is that it teaches men to look for what is not there. It says, “Look here is a rock, but do not look at the rock. Look beyond the rock. Look to what the rock symbolizes”

Wilderness has plenty to show us without having to look beyond it. A rock is a rock. If you wish to look beyond the rock you may do so, thought most likely what you will find is another rock — probably of the same make up. Maybe there are a lot of rocks of the same type and perhaps you will notice they form a canyon. And perhaps if you wander up into that canyon  you will find  the rock is from an outcropping or a sedimentary layer that tells where we are standing used to be a lake teaming with wildlife.

Or. Perhaps as you wander up the canyon you realize that the rock was just that, a stone big enough to hold in your hand and weighty enough to send you on your present journey… ultimately and simply a rock.

The problem with capitalism is that it fails to meet basic needs. The problem with communism is that it fails provide basic inspiration. The former allow a few people to  starve millions, the later leads the millions to starve themselves.

There is something growing in the wastelands of America. Something beautiful, something sublime. Something that will be the end of the world as we know it. Something that will, I believe, be what carries us into a new epoch.

sometimes i catch my reflection looking back at me, as though it is shocked to see me standing there. sometimes i think the apparition is the real one, and i, nothing more than a fleeting myriad of light on a momentary window pane. there, then gone. sustained in the in-between. nothing more than the real me reflecting upon what the lookers glimpse caught for that brief moment. i, a figment conjoined through a reflection to what is real. but then i have always been partial to taoist butterflies.

( inspired by a photo http://OLoboCanta.deviantart.com/art/Ghost-11084318 )

for those who don’t know of butterflies look up Chang Tzu

Autonomic Response to Ekhart Tolie

I am as disturbed by teachers who wish me to believe that the natural state of a human consciousness is loving, blissful, and compassionate as I am by those who would teach us that man is tainted by impurity, selfishness, and original sin.

It seems to me that both teachers wish to instill a false image of “true being” in their students so that when the student in one case feels pain he need return to the teacher for instruction and in the other case that when he feels joy he is stricken by the need to repent.

It is if often the the brash under-informed egoism of youth that grows into the future. The job of the old is not to pear the tree but to provide adequate soil, such that when that future bears fruit it is not withered and bitter, or worse yet, poisoned.

The universe is composed of laws which is to say  nature functions in patterns and not to say that some old man self important deity laid down  a bunch of edicts.

Those who study the laws grow wise.

Those who exploit the laws grow rich.

Those who obey the laws grow rigid.

Those who play with the laws grow happy.

Those who ignore the laws grow weary.

“To find God you must leave man and go into the creation.” says the mystic. “The works of man are tainted with  the sin of man and only by leaving them behind can you commune with your creator. All of mans institutions are sin; his culture, his governments, his cities and his religion–all sin, all corruption. For the more man builds upon his own works the further he is from God, from truth. The more grand his deeds, the more corrupt,  the more sinful.” or so said the Mystic before the Puritan nailed him to a cross.

I know the solitude my mother speaks of. It is what sustains me and protects me from my mind. It renders me fully present. I am desert. I am mountains. I am Great Salt Lake. There are other languages being spoken by wind, water, and wings. There are other lives to consider: avocets, stilts, and stones. Peace is the perspective found in patterns. When I see ring-billed gulls picking the flesh of decaying carp, I am less afraid of death. We are no more and no less than the life that surrounds us. My fears surface in my isolation. My serenity surfaces in my solitude.

Terry Tempest Williams

This bit is from Refuge. A story about a the author and her relationship to her dieing mother and their families multi-generation relationship to the The Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge. The key phrase here, the one that so far best sumarize the book and speak most to myself is “Peace is the perspective found in patterns.” She plays this very well through the book, the water levels of the great salt lake start every chapter, the success and encroachments of the brid refuge, the quality of her mothers health as she under goes chemo, her own ability to deal with each of these fluctuations in her reality. But there is something more there, the statement pin points an underlying true in our own psyches, in fact to some degree I believe in all reality. I’ll leave it to you to figure what I mean by that, or you can just assume I’m nuts. The later of course just proves the point.