Beauty

Eagle Nebula’s 'Pillars of Creation'

“We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words – to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.”  C.S. Lewis

Teaching boys what it really means to be a man

Benson Saulo (hat) and friend Hunter Johnson. He started a new educational session that reframed what it means to be masculine. Teaching agains violence and macho/ego identities. Pic Simon Schluter 22 May 2015.

An interesting article about teaching teenagers to be better men.  What really disturbed me was the terrifying data about how many young men die via suicide.

Benson Saulo recalls the day his best friend wound up behind bars.

Drunk on a night out in Sydney's CBD, his friend got into a fight with a bouncer. Before long, the towering former rugby player broke the bouncer's neck, rendering him disabled for life.

"I asked him why he did it when he got out, and he said he felt he had no choice. All his life he was never able to back away, he never learnt how to step back and assess a situation," Mr Saulo said.

Many of Mr Saulo's friends from home, a rough part of Tamworth in New South Wales, endured what he described as a damaging cycle. They learnt early their value was measured by toughness. Starved of basic tools to put emotions into words, they resorted to rugby, violence and women, to find expression.

Mr Saulo said a mission to lower the rates of male suicide - the biggest killer of men under 25 - and to end domestic violence, was driving their initiative.

• Men are three and a half times more likely to kill themselves than women.
• Suicide accounts for one fifth of all male deaths between 15 and 34.  And that excludes many single-driver car accidents which experts suspect are hidden suicides
• Some other top five causes of deaths among 15-24 year olds: land transport accidents (i.e., macho driving, hidden suicides) and assault (too macho to back off).

Our hyper-masculine maleness is extraordinarily dangerous and damaging. But we homos always knew that, right?

Saturday night thoughts

In The Curse of Chalion (which I will review here one of these days), Bujold says at one point, 'a young woman looking forwards and up not backwards and down'.   It is a characteristic of youth, or at least more fortunate youth, to look forward in the expectation of up.  But surely most ppl my age look back.  And down.

Friends who are gone, for whatever reason.  Failing health.  Things you always thought you would do, but didn't: take the number 1 tram in Budapest, for example; or visit the forests of Washington;  or see Venice; or climb Sneeukop one last time with someone you love.  Things you will now never do.  Failure.  Loss.  The realisation that love is transitory and ... not enough.  The awareness of your own arrogance and folly when you were young and the certainty (given your own experience of life) that you will surely be foolish and  make more mistakes before you die.

The greed and short-sightedness which ignore the inexorable logic of global warming, to postpone as long as possible the necessary and inevitable steps needed to fight it.

Yet such are the ironies of life that your horizons contract as you age, and what you need to make you happy is less.  That is not to say that I don't sometimes find myself staring into the distance filled with melancholy.  Of course I do; life is filled with grief and loss.  Sed fugit interea, fugit irreparabile tempus.  Yet as you look back and down there are simple, ineffable, pleasures: a bowl of home-made mushroom soup.  Music.  The deep love which grows between partners in a marriage.  Family.  The first hope-filled creamy green spikes of the daffodils, knowing before we do that spring is on the way.  I am very conscious after recent health scares that I may not have much more time here.  Yet I am happy.  How odd.

Wisdom

“It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.” ― Oscar Wilde

Be kind whenever possible

All Truth

"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident." 

German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer

This is what is happening with the acceptance of gay rights.   From ridicule through hatred to obvious.  In 30 years time ppl will be astonished that gay rights weren't utterly normal and right,

NSW night sky (click to get bigger picture)

Picture from this article.

Sad truths

What others think of us would be of little moment did it not, when known, so deeply tinge what we think of ourselves, -- George Santayana

We Shall Not Cease

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.


T.S Eliot