I did manage to set some time aside to run at daybreak.  So splendidly crystal was the frozen air that tore at my lungs.  So yearning to break free my legs from gravity.  Running east and squinting into the rising sun, I felt like a cheetah chasing an antelope down.

 I did manage to set some time aside today to somewhat update my students’ website.  I’ve got to make this a higher priority! 

I did manage to set some time aside today to delve back into literature.  I read an essay by D.H. Lawrence called The Death of Pan.  In it, Lawrence bemoans the intellectual simplifications imposed upon the world for reasons of economy and argues that the true hero is the common dweller who rebuffs the effort of the economized world to reduce him/her and the larger world away.  An excerpt:

      “This was the death of the great Pan.  The idea and the engine came between man and all things, like a death.  The old connexion, the old Allness, was severed, and can never be ideally restored.  Great Pan is dead.

      Yet what do we live for, except to live?  Man has lived to conquer the phenomenal universe.  To a great extent he has succeeded.  With all the mechanism of the human world, man is to a great extent master of all life, and of most phenomena.

      And what then?  Once you have conquered a thing, you have lost it.  its real relation to you collapses.

      A conquered world is no good to man.  He sits stupefied with boredom upon his conquest.

      We need the universe to live again, so that we can live with it.  A conquered universe, a dead Pan, leaves us nothing to live with.

      You have to abandon the conquest, before Pan will live again.  You have to live to live, not to conquer.  What’s the good of conquering even the North Pole, if after the conquest you’ve nothing left but an inert fact.  Better leave it a mystery.

      It was better to be a hunter in the woods of Pan, than it is to be a clerk in a city store.  The hunter hungered, laboured, suffered tortures of fatigue.  But at least he lived in a ceaseless living relation to his surrounding universe.”

Can the “engine” bring man back into “a ceaseless living relation to his surrounding universe?”  Is this the horizon-promise of the internet, the soon-to-be world wireless web?  And what of Xanga and the relation it has helped forge between you and me?  Does the art of Alice, Deevaa, Spiritfoxy…and many others, the trench-digging matched by stratospheric soarings of James, the wonderments about existence as shared by Jewels, Byron, Prometheus, Agrochick78…and many, many others…confer a greater understanding and appreciation of the world around?  I do believe so, to some degree, at times.

 Meanwhile…

With time stolen back,
I’m a knave of the moment.
No handcuffs grip now.

 You have noticed that everything an Indian does is in a circle, and that is because the Power of the World always works in circles, and everything tries to be round.  In the old days when we were a strong and happy people, all our power came to us from the sacred hoop of the nation and so long as the hoop was unbroken the people flourished.  The flowering tree was the living center of the hoop, and the circle of the four quarters nourished it.  The east gave peace and light, the south gave warmth, the west gave rain, and the north with its cold and mighty wind gave strength and endurance.  This knowledge came to us from the outer world with our religion.  Everything the Power of the World does is done in  a circle.  The Sky is round and I have heard that the earth is round like a ball and so are all the stars.  The Wind, in its greatest power, whirls.  Birds make their nests in circles, for theirs is the same religion as ours.  The sun comes forth and goes down again in a circle.  The moon does the same, and both are round.

 Even the seasons form a great circle in their changing, and always come back again to where they were.  The life of man is a circle from childhood to childhood and so it is in everything where power moves.  Our tipis were round like the nests of birds and these were always set in a circle, the nation’s hoop, a nest of many nests where the Great Spirit meant for us to hatch our children.

      —Black Elk,  Oglala Sioux spiritual leader.  Present both at the Battle of Little Big Horn and later at the court of Queen Victoria where he danced for her.