I love this, JG. I loved MIDAS and then HADES, and I really love them together. Strangely, I felt the same mirage...after reading MIDAS, I mis-remembered the title as HADES. How wonderfully odd.
I was talking with a friend this week. He shared that his life of ever-increasing expectation had indeed made life a veritable Hell. Following years of life -- really, of work -- as grayness and dullness and boredom, a veritable Hades. I asked which one he would choose, if he had to choose. He said "Both" and I sensed a faint desire for Hell and Hades to repeat as cycles throughout the remainder of his life. Until retirement, of course, which seemed in his talking eerily reflective of your writing about the death of plants. Some bad luck (younger people push us out, politely or not; the luck coming from whether or not we kinda get to choose aspects of our being set aside). Some simple facts of existence (we're human, we slow down, we age, we can't take the burdens of our younger life; the plant can't help that the radiator gets turned on and you're out of town). And some neglect, perhaps by not having the imagination that other ways, even other cycles, besides Hell and Hades might possibly exist in some way, shape or form on our third-stone satellite.
There are always stars in the skies for those who carry the stars in their eyes. Indeed, even the plants continually strive for the sun. And even in the grayness of their death, the sun brings forth new life. A new cycle. Maybe not a bad ending of a life.
Russell my man, thanks for this great reflection and anecdote—it slipped by me until I saw your latest comment. The connection between MIDAS and HADES does seem to run deeply indeed 🔮 maybe because Midas is the one who seems to be able to break the ordinary with the touch of his finger, and yet gets trapped in new cycles all the same—a Hades of gold instead of drab grey. I'll have to workshop that idea. But in any event, the cycles abound—the cycles of hells, of hadeses, of age, of radiators, of neglect, in your friend's life as in all our lives. There is, though, as you say, something in those cycles that offer something truly new, truly new because simply new. Remaining attentive to that life in the death, that hope in the hopeless (as my favorite quote from Zhuangzi has it, "there is the Way too in the piss and the shit") is real equanimity.
I love this, JG. I loved MIDAS and then HADES, and I really love them together. Strangely, I felt the same mirage...after reading MIDAS, I mis-remembered the title as HADES. How wonderfully odd.
I was talking with a friend this week. He shared that his life of ever-increasing expectation had indeed made life a veritable Hell. Following years of life -- really, of work -- as grayness and dullness and boredom, a veritable Hades. I asked which one he would choose, if he had to choose. He said "Both" and I sensed a faint desire for Hell and Hades to repeat as cycles throughout the remainder of his life. Until retirement, of course, which seemed in his talking eerily reflective of your writing about the death of plants. Some bad luck (younger people push us out, politely or not; the luck coming from whether or not we kinda get to choose aspects of our being set aside). Some simple facts of existence (we're human, we slow down, we age, we can't take the burdens of our younger life; the plant can't help that the radiator gets turned on and you're out of town). And some neglect, perhaps by not having the imagination that other ways, even other cycles, besides Hell and Hades might possibly exist in some way, shape or form on our third-stone satellite.
There are always stars in the skies for those who carry the stars in their eyes. Indeed, even the plants continually strive for the sun. And even in the grayness of their death, the sun brings forth new life. A new cycle. Maybe not a bad ending of a life.
Russell my man, thanks for this great reflection and anecdote—it slipped by me until I saw your latest comment. The connection between MIDAS and HADES does seem to run deeply indeed 🔮 maybe because Midas is the one who seems to be able to break the ordinary with the touch of his finger, and yet gets trapped in new cycles all the same—a Hades of gold instead of drab grey. I'll have to workshop that idea. But in any event, the cycles abound—the cycles of hells, of hadeses, of age, of radiators, of neglect, in your friend's life as in all our lives. There is, though, as you say, something in those cycles that offer something truly new, truly new because simply new. Remaining attentive to that life in the death, that hope in the hopeless (as my favorite quote from Zhuangzi has it, "there is the Way too in the piss and the shit") is real equanimity.