charcoal

charcoal hard

A notion of space

Zipping zig-zag of the dragonfly:

when the white clouds dream
and the sun is like sleep,
and the shadows come alive
in a dance at noon;

how they break into view
and startle you
by how they amplify
a notion of space you never knew.

Time stamped

pencils

Misc.

While driving one day I saw a car with these words on the back of it: 100% Electric.

It was nice to see an ardent supporter of hydro dams. Hydro dams are where the bulk of the electricity comes from in British Columbia.

Of course, that is assuming the words were referring to what makes the car move and not the car itself, which required all sorts of chemical compounds and industrial processes making waste byproducts. In that sense the words 100% Electric would be entirely false; or if they were true in that sense then the driver would be an electrocuted mass of burning flesh.

*

Canada could practically supply the entire world with water and electricity while having its own citizens use electricity for free. That is an idea my friend had. I like the idea.

*

Did you know that free trade has destroyed the sovereignty of nations around the world? Basically the economy of each country is held hostage to the economies of all the other countries.

*

Did you know that when Canada was using debt-free money issued by the government, who controlled the quantity, that school tuition was free?

I suppose that's where Canada's engineers, scientists, doctors, inventors and so forth came from - schooling that was free, which in turn benefited the country. That is what you call honouring your citizens' potential and productions and studies by issuing to those things the bills that open them up to as many potential kinds of transactions as is humanly possible. Which becomes the basis for the economy that those citizens then build: real wealth and production and creativity.

Do you know what the politicians today will tell you in response to this as their reason for rejecting it? That other countries will not then invest in our currency. Seriously.

Do you have any idea what slaves we have all become?

*

In fact, it was while using debt-free government issued and controlled money that Canada came into itself, as they say. In the schools today they do not teach this. They teach that Canada came into its own because of World War II.

That is a lie.

*

Did you know that CN Rail, which my Granddad Stilwell had his career in, was sold off to another country? Did you know it was sold off only in order to make interest payments on the national debt, which is there because that's how the money is brought into existence?

Understand that: the company was sold in order to make payments not on the debt itself, but to make payments just on the compounding interest on the debt; and the debt with the compounding interest exists in the first place because that is how the country's money is brought into existence - as an interest-bearing debt.

Do you have any idea how freaking insane that is?

*

Once I bought a case of local craft beer that stated it was brewed using wind power. I bought it just to try it because I like trying local craft beers; in fact, local craft beers are pretty much the only kind of beer I buy. I like the skunk of Becks and a few others but really, imported beers are a shadow of what those beers are in their own countries. Imported beers really are not that great. I did not buy the wind power beer because it was brewed using wind power. Anyways, I won't be buying the beer again because the beer was so over-carbonated you could barely taste the beer.

*

I really appreciate beer when it is room temperature. Or just ever so slightly chilled. These beer and wine stores that advertise that they keep their beers super-chilled at zero are one of the many signs - along with unisex hair salons - of the demise of western society.

*

One day while driving I saw a car with its back entirely decked out in various stickers. Beside the sticker about Tolerance was one bearing a quote from Gandhi; the one about the supreme and all-seeing Gandhi liking your Christ but not liking your Christians.

I've always thought that quote from Gandhi alone was enough to show him for the hypocritical fraud that he was.

*

I'm friends with an East-Indian family who are quite Anglo in their ways, though if you were to ask them what their religion was, I suppose they would say Sikh. Anyways, they absolutely abhor Gandhi and consider him a fraud.

*

I won't use the term rad-trad anymore. I'll just say Pelagian instead.

*

It does make sense, doesn't it, that priests preach against usury as much as they preach against contraception.

Oh, they do indeed preach against love of money. That's a win-win. People love hearing homilies against the love of money - especially the rich.

Anything that introduces a dualism where one needs to devote more time to spiritual things and not the material...you see, suddenly the money thing is fine. It and the spirituality...never the twain shall meet. The rich love that.

But one squeak about usury, by which we mean making money from money - of which our entire economy is based - and not just credit cards and loan companies, and oh, you would get it in the ear. Just like with contraception.

But keep it quiet. You know, as our Holy Father Pope Francis has said, don't make a mess, don't cause upheaval, don't make a noise or stir things up.

Hard charcoal

Salut!

Hard charcoal with white

Hard charcoal

might be b

I think hb and some others

How many Universalists are in Hell?

As Hans Urs von Balthasar said, we can't know for sure, but we can hope that all of them are in there.

HA HA HA!!!

Laugh it up people, it's a joke.

But really, hell is no joke.

Fr. Longenecker has a great post that reviews Ralph Martin's book Will Many Be Saved?

The extra terrestrials have been real all along

The aliens are coming. They are already here. Their flying devices are in the air, shining on the horizon!

We called them aliens, only to our detriment. We made fireside tales in our dim primitive theaters, making do with the flint and tinder of celluloid and then thinking ourselves so far advanced for going digital, like one going from the flint and tinder to a bic lighter.

We pretended they were like foreigners from the remotest regions unknown - and even then, only in the remotest region of the imagination. When in fact the universe is there's, and our imagining them is a result of their own direct communications. The dimness of the imagining is owing to our own pathetic faults, like morse code technology receiving information from the most advanced wireless telecommunications.

We are the occupiers of the remote corner, the grubby little parasites sucking up life and taking up too much space here on the planet earth. They are the enlightened beings. They never knew of the Fall, and the mark of the paradisal state is known by Progress - technological advancement.

We failed to listen to them, to the warnings they have been communicating to us. They tried teaching us the technological advancements that would guide us into the cosmic era. And now they are here to blast us with their cosmic laser rays!

Only the initiate will be left unharmed. Others that are not killed but which are not of the initiate will be taken for experimentation and as primitive artifacts to be preserved in the museum that will keep record of the degenerate art science that preceded the cosmic new age.

Will you not now cut your throat as a libation to the enlightened ones?

Hard and soft charcoal

pencils with the white

Bunya Bunya related to Monkey Puzzle

I grow monkey puzzles from seeds I collect, the source being nearby. But I don't want to mention the secret location - though I've mentioned the location before - because I don't want to have to fight people, like Italians who go in for the chestnuts, if they were ever to discover that you can eat the monkey puzzle nuts, which are the monkey puzzle seeds that I grow, which I already knew you can eat, which the squirrels like, which I've tried a little bit raw, but which I haven't eaten in any substantial way since I grow them instead.

Dean is right about the seed "cones" (for both the bunya bunya and the monkey puzzle). They're huge and explode on falling to earth. Ka-BOOM ka-BLOOEY!!! BUNYA BUNYA!!!

Someone told me once that he thought spiders really like housing in monkey puzzles. Don't know about that. But I could see it being true. The tree dost appear to don the spidery limbs - and like attracts like.

There are quite a few good specimen monkey puzzles in southwestern British Columbia. You can find them in just about every neighbourhood, some which have reached the seed producing age (for which is required male and female, with the very rare exceptions of "self-fertile" ones). Lots of monkey puzzles especially in Victoria, which produce viable seed. There's a place on the island that has one of North America's largest monkey puzzles. Ronning Garden, in Holberg. That site says, "World’s Tallest Monkey Tree".

Uhhhhmmmmm, I don't know about that...taller than the ones in Chile?

Something I like about them is that from their very inception out of the seed shell, their "leaves" are every bit as sharp and pointy as when they are adults - which is very sharp and very pointy.

Still Life Painting

Title: Four Lemon Cucumbers and Jar

Medium: Oil on canvas paper

Size: 16 in. x 12 in.

Pencilmania

Quote

"The Pelagian solution. This basically appears as a form of restorationism. In dealing with the Church’s problems, a purely disciplinary solution is sought, through the restoration of outdated manners and forms which, even on the cultural level, are no longer meaningful. In Latin America it is usually to be found in small groups, in some new religious congregations, in (exaggerated) tendencies to doctrinal or disciplinary “safety”. Basically it is static, although it is capable of inversion, in a process of regression. It seeks to “recover” the lost past."

--Pope Francis in his Address to the Leadership of the Episcopal Conferences of Latin America during the General Coordination Meeting

Time stamped

Quote

"If I have found any fruit, it has mostly come from home-schooling families."

--Fr. Sauppe in his article, You’ve contracepted our parochial school out of existence

H/T: Domine, da mihi hanc aquam!

6B and others, nubs

Nub

Fr. Barron

Quote

"Any idea that the traditional Latin Mass and Gregorian chant and Gothic architecture will save the world was ludicrous in that setting."

--Fr. Longenecker shares some learning points from his experiences in El Salavador in his article, The Pope, the Dog and the Bicycle Bell

Tarkovsky Tuesday

“Artistic creation, after all, is not subject to absolute laws, valid from age to age; since it is related to the more general aim of mastery of the world, it has an infinite number of facets, the vincula that connect man with his vital activity; and even if the path towards knowledge is unending, no step that takes man nearer to a full understanding of the meaning of his existence can be too small to count."

--Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time

Charcoal

Blog Post

One of the things it seems one never gets around to squaring with - to facing and pinning down and rejecting - is this notion that at some point in the future one will attain in this world to some kind of perfect timeless satisfaction and peace and prosperity (often so modestly envisioned). Whatever it may be called subjectively from person to person, the notion can objectively be stated in the negative: that at some point in this earthly life one will no longer face upheaval.

The modern world - our western culture - is geared towards the propagation of this lie of false security, of false life. It can be summed in this phrase: a life that is absent of transformation. This is ultimately why physically healthy people kill themselves. There may be other reasons involved, but the ultimate ticket that decides a suicide is the continued absence of transformation - which is a persistent absence that our modern culture forces upon us and drums into our minds, incessantly.

Faced with this ongoing blockage by our culture that tells us in varied ways that we are complete and self-sufficient purely observing individuals, we don't find the freedom of hating our sins, of hating being atrophied by them in the stale dust of decades of our old self. When you live, you see that life is its own intrinsic deepening. The mystery of life deepens. That is not just a personal view; that is what happens; that is life: its mystery deepens. When the opposite happens we know on some fundamental level that something is off, something is wrong. What is wrong is one's self - in conjunction with being told damn lies all of one's life.

We sense this, but lacking understanding, we are prone to say that it is the quashing of individuality. We fail to see the paradox. We lack individuality to the extent that we are robbed of transformation. When we are not being transformed, we are not ourselves. The more loudly one proclaims one's individuality, in myriad forms, the more nightmarish becomes one's state of lost identity.

This is why people who are diagnosed with terminal cancer can live in the present and be living realists, while some people who have nothing of that sort and whose lives are quite cushioned can hardly get out of bed in the morning.

There is only one true transformation: Jesus Christ in the Sacraments of the Roman Catholic Church.

You cannot get yourself to die, and this is why people have anxiety. You can get yourself to die with Jesus. It is He in His mercy that allows you to die in Him. It is the only way you can get yourself to die.

This has nothing to do with "eastern nihilism". It has everything to do with the absolute truth that Jesus is Life. Life to the full and brimming over: the living water.

Which transforms.

And often when He transforms us, we have made ourselves too large (and loud) to see the transformation.

Charcoal

B, 6B, Charcoal

B.C. Day

May I never cease to see the mountains freshly.

B pencil

B, 2H and the other might be 6B - don't know for sure, it's down to nub