In the time since I have disappeared from our television screens, I have spent more time back here in this valley, in the land of my ancestors.
An excerpt (not a summary):
Maybe I never respected the craft. There is something shallow, ultimately un-serious about it all. Journalists think events determine our world, yet events tell us nothing.
If we follow events we miss what the French call questions d’existence. We miss the meaning of it all.
My yearning has led me to physics, philosophy, theology, accumulating a library of books, completing a PhD, writing books of my own and all of it maybe amounts to less than a falling leaf.
Saint Thomas Aquinas after experiencing the presence of God late in life, said that all he had written was straw.
We do not derive the truth from knowledge or news, we feel it. We participate in God — what Aquinas called ipsum esse, the act of existence — in our repose, in the quiet, in nature and in our mortality, the finality of our existence.
No one reads yesterday’s headlines. But we return to the poets. A line of poetry is greater than a mountain of newsprint.
I really emapthise with Stan Grant in this piece. I have been feeling similar things myself, and I strongly believe that if I was indigenous and had a traditional family land l would be going back there too.
As it stands I am a city raised person who has experienced living in various country places. I’m living in a city right now, earning good money, but dreaming of moving back to the country to a quiet life.
I was also raised in the Catholic tradition, have been athiest for a long long time but really missing the sense of community that came from the church/school community when I was young.
I feel so pointless as a human. The money I earn doesn’t seem as important as what I could be doing for my family. The work that I do doesn’t seem relevant amidst the insanity of the world. I thought a great career would give me self worth but it just feels made up…
…like every other aspect of adult life. It’s just all made up. Nothing means anything.
I’m lucky I have kids and pets to anchor me in the day to day. But that just reinforces my desire to move to a quiet country town, maybe have another child, maybe get some goats and grow some vegetables.
sanctimonious happy clapper 💤
Looks like Stan discovered feelings. How mundane.
I have mixed feelings about this.
There is probably a lot of truth to what Stan says, and perhaps a lot of wisdom in the quotes he has chosen.
But most people simply cannot devote the time to contemplate such matters. They’re spending all their time simply trying to battle the lower rungs of Maslow’s hierarchy
It does kinda remind me of something I was thinking the other day. People spend hours at the gym/exercising/sport working on their physical wellbeing, but do they spend any time on improving their mind? Or, perhaps beyond that, on challenging or improving their ‘spiritual’ understanding? It seemed to me that, at a surface level, there seems to be a big imbalance to the physical. And maybe I also should think and plan to balance more on the other two. If I could spend less time on the bottom tiers of Maslow’s hierarchy, maybe I’d have more time to spend at the top?
Anyways, I’m glad Stan seems to be finding some peace.
I guess posting here we’re mostly part of the terminally online crowd; it seems likely to be true that for this demographic if we spent 50-90% of the time we currently spend reading social media and news on instead reading books or meditating or something it would probably improve our lives (without ever interacting with the the part of the pyramid where a lot of people are struggling over more fundamental needs). Idk.
There is nothing terminal about my onlineness. It is in great shape. Could go for years and years, decades even.
Every morning I wake in the cold before dawn to walk the hill past the shedding trees, from my house to the graveyard to sit with all the stories of all the people buried here.
this sounds awfully depressing
But good for him if he’s happy
