Good morning, Digital Neighbors! Happy Monday Friends & Refuges, Early Birds & Later Dayers, Conversants & Lurkers, Phamily & Misfits, ADD Irregulars, Weird Shit Niche Aficionados and all the rest of you Wanderers, Seekers, and Lost on Locals. Blessed & Happy Easter to all! I was away for Lent, but I hope to make more frequent visits to the Report and the PHAM. I hope you all have been well. In Cath-o-landia the Easter season is meant to be days of joy, David Whyte has a great reflection on joy in Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words.
JOY
Few things will attract people to you or your passions than the joy with which you embrace them. It is one of the most intoxicating realities in life. What or who brings you joy is so amazing as to seem almost magical and all consuming. Joyful people are naturally attractive, the joyless are universally repulsive. I don't mean sorrowful or troubled souls, I mean joyless, embittered souls who feel that life is not a gift but an obligation that some cosmic reality or social community failed to deliver. The joyless souls are multiplying, people seduced that life owes them something, that they have been cheated by the joy and prosperity of others. The joyless are the envious, and they will never know any solace let alone experience the joy they so resent. Enough Tommy-boy, on to David Whyte and his wisdom. I am sure I will have more ramblings to share. 😁
JOY is a meeting place, of deep intentionality and of self-forgetting, the bodily alchemy of what lies inside us in communion with what formerly seemed outside, but is now neither, but become a living frontier, a voice speaking between us and the world: dance, laughter, affection, skin touching skin, singing in the car, music in the kitchen, the quiet irreplaceable and companionable presence of a daughter. The sheer intoxicating beauty of the world inhabited as an edge between what we previously thought was us and what we thought was radically other than us:
Self-forgetting - so, so, so much the opposite of this current chapter of reality in the WEST when self-obsession has mutated into intersectionality wars and grievance mongering at previously unseen levels. It is a bitter irony that when I obsess about myself, I have a far greater chance of never understanding who I am. Self-reflection and self-obsession seem so similar at onset but yield very different fruits. Self-reflection knocks at the door of self-awareness, of wondering about your story and its unfolding chapters. Self-obsession almost always gets mired in the woundedness of life and never gets past real or imagined injuries. Not only do you not knock on the door of self-awareness, but you also accept that you are the summation of your wounds and shortcomings. It is the serpent's whisper leading you away from your true self and selling you the empty promise.
dance, laughter, affection, skin touching skin, singing in the car, music in the kitchen, the quiet irreplaceable and companionable presence of a daughter.
So, so many joys in life. Once one is open to the gift of living, life can become an endless parade of joy. There will always be trials, sorrows, and disappointments, but there are so many hidden and surprising joys to be received and celebrated in life. It is difficult not to end the majority of my days in gratitude.
Sheer intoxicating beauty - it is one of the reasons I look for all those barn and other photos that I so often share with these posts. It is one of the things I find most hopeful about social media when I see expressions of beauty and joy in your shared photos and musings here. There is so much more beauty in life than ugliness. There is so much more joy to share than the bitterness that isolates and warps our attitude and eventually our soul.
To feel a full and untrammelled joy is to have become fully generous; to allow ourselves to be joyful is to have walked through the doorway of fear, the dropping away of the anxious, worried self, felt like a thankful death itself, a disappearance, a giving away, overheard in the laughter of friendship, the vulnerability of happiness and the vulnerability of its imminent loss, felt suddenly as a strength, a solace and a source: the claiming of our place in the living conversation, the sheer privilege of being in the presence of a mountain, a sky or a well-loved familiar face. I was here, and you were here, and together we made a world.
Untrammeled - a word seldom seen or used. Fun stuff with words!!!! I noticed that spell check prefers the one L instead of two LLs. I speak 'Merikan, not English. 😉
To become fully generous - that is a praiseworthy goal for our striving. I suspect it is something like humility, when you pass that threshold, you don't know it, but everyone around you does as they become the recipients of your generosity of heart. The laughter of friendship, the vulnerability of happiness, strength, solace, and a source - such a gift with words to open a well of meaning on just a single word/reality called joy. David Whyte has some great things to share and he has stirred my soul in deeper appreciation.
the claiming of our place in the living conversation, the sheer privilege of being in the presence of a mountain, a sky or a well-loved familiar face.
Have a great day my digital neighbors!
Today marks the three hundred and thirtieth birthday of the Frenchman François-Marie Arouet, better known by his nom de plume, Voltaire (1694-1778).
Born into a bourgeois family during the reign of Louis XIV, the “Sun King” (r. 1643-1715), Voltaire suffered tragedy at a young age when his mother died. Never close with his father or brother, Voltaire exhibited a rebellious attitude toward authority from his youth. His brilliant mind was fostered in the care of the Society of Jesus, who introduced him to the joys of literature and theater. Despite his later criticisms against the Church, Voltaire, throughout his life, fondly recalled his dedicated Jesuit teachers.
Although he spent time as a civil servant in the French embassy to the Hague, Voltaire’s main love was writing—an endeavor where he excelled in various genres, including poetry, which led to his appointment as the royal court poet for King Louis XV. Widely recognized as one of the greatest French writers, and even hyperbolically referred to by ...
Padre - Tom Miller invites you to a Coffee Talk, Speakeasies, Schmoozes, Tea Times, Afterhours and other gatherings.
https://teams.live.com/meet/93792382189049?p=DiBHsYfuECPgDrG7vO
2026 Coffee Talk with the ADD Irregulars
Thursday, January 1, 2026
6:00 AM - 8:00 AM (CST)
Occurs every day starting 1/1 until 12/31/2027
Coffee Talk - Daily beginning at 6:00 AM Central Time Zone - USA
White Pilled Wednesday - A break from the heaviness of news and current events to focus upon things more personal & positive for the first hour of Coffee Talk.
Afternoon Chats - Most Tuesday, Friday & Sundays 2:00 PM Central
Other chats as posted in the community.
I have a large number of blue Ball jars that I inherited along the way.
I know a number of people who have collections of the blue telegraph/telephone insulators.
Indiana's most famous natural landmark doesn't exist anymore. We sold it, one shovelful at a time.
The Hoosier Slide was a sand dune about 200 feet tall, standing where Trail Creek meets Lake Michigan at Michigan City. People took trains from Chicago just to climb it. There were picnics and weddings on top of it. Ship captains used it to find the harbor.
Then glassmakers figured out the iron in that sand turned molten glass a unique blue color.
From roughly 1890 to 1920, about 13.5 million tons of the Hoosier Slide left town. Wheelbarrows first, then steam shovels and railcars. Much of it went to Ball Brothers in Muncie and to Hemingray for telegraph insulators.
By 1920 the dune was flat. A power plant sits on the site today. Mount Baldy, now the tallest dune on our stretch of the lake, is about 126 feet.
If you've ...
XIII
The Proud Minister
One day there came into the Garden a man in torn clothes badly bruised and cut, who said to the Lover, “In the name of the Beloved I demand your help.”
So the Lover and the Disciple let him in and dressed his wounds and prepared the best of the vegetables from the Garden for him to eat. When his wounds had been dressed and he had eaten and rested the Lover asked him how he had fallen into this plight, to which the man replied, “I was Minister of the Beloved in a city near this place, where I preached His gospel and expounded His doctrine to the people. I pointed out to them how their sins had made them wholly hateful to the Beloved and how therefore they were utterly beyond the range of His love and He would condemn them to eternal torments, whereon some fell into despair and wept bitterly but many were angry. One day the magistrates called me before them and begged me to leave the city and preach elsewhere for they said I had made many people so angry and desperate that they feared there might be a riot and they might not be able to protect me but that I might suffer some injury. I, however, very zealous for the Beloved and believing that the magistrates only feared that their own sins might be proclaimed, preached the more vehemently, denounced the magistrates and made it abundantly clear that the whole wicked city was foredoomed to eternal punishment by the just provision of the Beloved. Whereon a mob, stirred up no doubt by the corrupt and venal magistrates, fell upon me with sticks and stones, nearly killing me and driving me out of the city in the state in which I came to you.”
“My friend,” said the Lover, “this was not a good deed of yours, for besides denying the unfathomable compassion of the Beloved, you have by your obstinacy caused these people to commit a grievous sin, and this cannot be pleasing to the Beloved, that through you who profess to be His minister the people should become worse. Surely you remember that He Himself said, ‘If they persecute you in one city flee to another.’”
Therefore the man was very angry, and cursing the Lover, said, “I see that I have had a very false report of you and I do not believe that you are a servant of the Beloved at all. When I came to you so injured for the Beloved’s sake you set before me only herbs and fruits although the garden is full of birds which you could have killed to make me a worthy meal. I shall proclaim everywhere that you are no true servant of the Beloved but a mere falterer who dares not suffer in the cause of the Beloved. Be sure that you are foreordained to eternal torments who suffer nothing here.”
For the man was so blinded by his own pride that he could not perceive the scars on the hands and feet and the brows of the Lover nor how the cloth beneath the armpits of his tunic was dyed with a red dye. So he went out of the Garden cursing and shouting.
But the Lover looked sad and said, “A man like this does much harm to the cause of the Beloved, for by thus speaking falsely about the Beloved he may bring men to fear Him but none to love Him, and by love alone can any man approach the Beloved.”
