My Musings

Halloween creepy Frankenstein head. Painted it myself. Yes, 2018 is waning. The sun sinks into the horizon lower and lower each coming day, until the 21st of December, when the pagans celebrate the rebirth of their sun god Tammuz. Until then, the leaves of the trees will sprinkle themselves over the soil until only arboral skeletons are remaining. I like this time of year. Exactly one month and one day ago, I began writing a book. There I was sitting at my desk reading and contemplating, and it struck me as ridiculous that, though I've wanted to be an author (off and on) since I was in 4th grade, I've still not written any published work. Nothing was really stopping me other than my own lack of discipline. After all, pretty much anybody can publish a book through Amazon and sell copies through Kindle or in a print on demand format. The only challenge anymore to any aspiring author is the task of writing the book - the most basic, yet most difficult part. With the fodder...

I realize that I write a lot about this blog itself when I post, but nobody really wants to read a blog about itself. That's why I'll make this reintroduction brief and leave it at that. It's been another long time since I've "used" this blog. Isn't that what people do, "use" a blog to elaborate thoughts? Most blogs don't get read much, so the writing isn't for other people. The blog is just a mechanism for people that are too lazy to write with pen and paper (me, increasingly) to organize their thoughts on life, hopefully precipitating out some kind of meaning or improved understanding of what some may call the "human condition". So blogs aren't really an end; they are a means to an end that leaves the blog behind. My last post was about my new "site" on Medium.com. Since then, it has become obvious that Medium is full of a bunch of pretentious wanna-be intellectuals that push their political propaganda a...

Well well well... It has certainly been a log time since I've written on this blog. It is with mixed feelings that I've switched to this Medium site to host my random thoughts and photography expeditions. https://medium.com/river-rock I'm not quite sure of it. My ways of thinking have changed quite a bit since I've written the stuff here, but this blogger site has a homey feel to it. We'll see how this new "medium" goes...

Here is the result of my first modeling tutorial. I think it's pretty cool. It took quite a while. I think it looks reasonably realistic. Many of the ones on the website looked like the sky was too dark.

It feels like one of those times that feels like the right time to say something, but nothing readily comes to mind to answer the question of what is to be said. A little pondering (which works best when the fingers are moving) is in order. Here it comes. The infinite void slowly becomes material, and I step from the shore into the shallow waters of purpose. Do my toes experience a biting cold, or does the vastness welcome an inquiry? It is pleasant, and the sun still tarries above a dusky grave, so then it is safe to roll up my pant legs and venture at least a little ways into the water. False alarm... I've got nothing.

So what do you think? The thought that came to mind is that maybe some schooling tends to suppress the right brain - the intuitive side. I'm studying engineering, and sometimes it becomes difficult to break free from the ultra-rational method of thought and come to an understanding of things in their relationship to one another. Perhaps the flaw with education is that it tries to institutionalize the learning of intuition. Isn't the only real way to understand the world to experience it? Doubtless, there is great value in learning the concrete and compartmentalizing information, but maybe we have tried to shift learning into a spot where it can do both but have only ended up teaching neither adequately. Lately I've become aware of a decreased ability to understand concepts. It has gotten worse over the years of my schooling. Granted, there is the possibility that the material is simply harder to comprehend, but that doesn't explain the more general feeling of a cloud or...

This is the latest of the books I've read. It was written in the 50's by Owen Barfield . Somewhere I read that he was a member of "The Inklings", a group of men that included the well-know philologist/author J.R.R. Tolkien. Barfield , like Tolkien to an extent, is a believer that knowledge of people of the past can be derived from their language. The book History in English Words opens to us a sense of the mind of ancient people and also shows the reader the influences of events on the language we speak today. I have to admit, here at the outset, that it took me a great length of time to read this book. It is one of those books that I have to be in the mood to read. Specifically, I have to be in the wordy, etymology mood to really delve into this book. But once I was in, I was truly fascinated by what I read. History in English Words is not simply a book filled with random facts about words that most people don't care about. The book ends up being about th...