Lion Kimbro’s Blog

I’m showing my full support for Barack Obama.

Three reasons I support him:

• He’s challenging, and he believes in us. He knows deep problems can only be overcome if people change their thoughts. So he focuses on what is in people’s minds. He challenges you to uplift your thoughts, and he believes in you — he challenges you to strive for the noble. I like that!
• He has House Atreides virtues. Leadership, idealism, unification. He is spiritual, and he is rooted, in the day-to-day realities of Americans. He’s serious, true to his word, and does not dodge.
• Foreign correspondence. I have a sense that Obama can have positive global impact. He can certainly repair our perspective in other countries, but I think that with his insight, sincerity, and power, that he’ll actually be able to make huge steps towards mending global rifts. He’s going to go to other countries and talk with the people of those countries, enacting the same change in thought, the same re-centering, that I believe he can enact here. He clearly strives to speak from and to what is divine, what is True.

That’s all I need to say. Thank you for your time.

It’s been a beautiful weekend.

Saturday

Ballard Saturday House – I’d had difficulty at prior Ballard Saturday Houses (few people with my nature / inclination,) but not so this time!  6 people came.  I shared my picture book on Damanhur, and my research on it.  Talked abot “New” / experiential games, (and pointed people to Damanhur’s “School” of the Game of Life.  Also geeked out with Michael Wolf re: regular expressions, GraphViz, and myriad other topics.

Then I visited Shawn Kilburn (and Sarah and their son Max,) discussing educational materials, Max, and Damanhur, and then visited Blackhat w/ Amber, for all of… about 5 minutes..!

After getting home, I spent ~3 fascinating hours (I think!) talking with Craig Meyers about a book called What Men Know that Women Don’t, which is an absolutely extraordinary book.  (Book homepage.)

The ideas in the book are quite surprising;  All 15 Amazon reviews are 5 star — the one review that isn’t — it’s clear that the reviewer hasn’t even read the book.  This ideas in this book are very unique.  It’s unique, but if I had to say what it was similar to, I’d say: a surprising combination of Ishmael, animist / naturalist / spirituality, and … a men’s movement?  You have to read this to get it.  A unique but powerful vision of masculinity that I cannot shake.

I went to sleep around 1 AM, I think…

Sunday

…only to wake up 4 hours later at 6 AM.  Oh-hoh!  Daylight savings time gotcha!

Why so early?  Because Amber was going snowboarding (turned out that couldn’t happen,) and I was going to …  Misogi Shuho. (”Harae do no okami harae do no okami harae do no okami…”)  8 AM (should it be 7 AM?) misogi is a powerful experience, and the highlight of the day.  I am hard pressed to think of a better way to begin the day, and can only remember Autumn.  It’s dramatic, in a way not ordinarily associated with prayer (”mumbling”) or ritual (”boring.”)  It feels more like a climatic action scene in a movie.  I am hard pressed to describe it.

After 8AM misogi (and then chouhai,) I weeded the garden, until Amber picked me up around 4:30PM.

I do not have statable reasons for helping out at the shrine;  It is more of a strong reaction from within myself, to the shrine, or an emotion.

When I perform manual labor, I often tend to fall into something like dreaming.  Normally, manual labor (such as weeding, blackberry root removal, etc.,) induces awake nightmares in me, and I find it incredibly unpleasant.

But today was very different.  I had two competing voices within myself:

• action – a voice that was striving to weed more efficiently, in an Inner Game sort of way
• vision – I was experiencing a number of visions, while working the ground

By visions, I’m not talking about full immersion virtual reality astral projections or anything mystical like that;  But I do mean (and take seriously):  Having ideas, feelings, insights, and visions.

The first experience was of poising myself above the weeds I was separating from the rock, and I realized:  “I’m facing the Earth, from the side.”  The whole Earth was in front of me.  I was removing weeds quickly, smelling the ground, looking at worms, and my mind creeped into envisioning beautiful worm cities under the ground, and then consideration of the planet as an entirety.

One of the (perhaps the) principal kami of the shrine, is Sarutahiko no Ookami.  My understanding (which is not to be trusted) is that Sarutahiko no Ookami is a somewhat unique kami, because he is an Earth kami, (rather than a heavenly kami,) but also has the distinction of being an ookami (honorific; one of the few great kami.)

So it makes sense that, with the nature of the shrine and the Earth being what it is, I should reflect, and see myself, almost as something of an astronaut, on the edge of the deep (enormous) Earth.

My emotion was something like this picture, but much closer to the ground, and with a sense that the Earth was much larger.  (Somehow, this picture makes the man look large, and the Earth small.)  This was a very strong feeling I found developing in myself, and remeniscent of the mystic vision of Saint Seiya and Osamu Tezuka in Phoenix.  (see also: Evolutionary Spirituality, Mystical Realism.)

My second vision was an idea:  That I could a birthday with a death celebration.  For my 31st birthday, I may do this, but I suspect it will be a later birthday, in order to give the idea some time to grow.  Basically:  Invite people (such as yourself; please email me, dear reader, I’d love to see you there,) not only to my birthday, but also to celebrate my death.  Not that I will die that day (hopefully not!), but so that people know that I am celebrating my death (when, say, I am 80 years old, or whenever,) with them.

The idea is that if I do this regularly, (if every birthday, I have people present also celebrate my death with me,) then people will know in their hearts, “Lion is with us, in the celebration of his death.”  Thus, on the day that I materially die, when there is a celebration of my death, the people present will remember, “Lion is with us, in the celebration of his death.”  Even though I am not materially present with them at the celebration, they will know that my spirit is present with them, because we will have done this many times already.  As much as possible, I would like the celebration of my material death to be just like (same color balloons, similar music, similar ceremony,) the celebrations of my death.  It is important that, when we get to the death-celebration while I am materially alive, that people actually pretend that I am dead, and go through the motions of remembering me and feeling that I have died, but also knowing in their hearts that I am actually there with them.  Whether I am materially present or not, is actually irrelevant.

There is an idea around that Shinto is somehow “weak,” with respect to death;  That that is only properly the domain of Buddhism.  This is due to how religious practice in Japan grew to accomodate Buddhism, when it came to Japan.  That relationship is a very sacred thing, and I’m not the right person to comment on it.  But, (and I may well be wrong here,) in my own heart, I perceive that there is a special understanding of death that is unique to Shinto, and I believe that, respecting the mythical world, the mythical time, that my practice and spirit lives in, that the kami have given me a special insight into death.

Aside

A moment of prayer for my grandmother, Tiger, who has passed away recently.  Now my dad and I have both lost our mothers.

I respond to death differently; I don’t grieve at the “moment of impact.”  (Another person with similar.)  This causes stress between myself and others, who misinterpret that I either do not care, or am somehow “in shock.”  I do not really understand it myself, even.

I do grieve, (and am grateful for it,) but that grief is not positioned at a particular moment in time.  For example, I grieve for the future deaths of my friends, affections, daughter, and so on, not only grief for past deaths.  This feeling generates in my life spontaneously, mysteriously.

My mom died almost 3 years ago, and I was at home (just so many 10’s or 100’s of feet away) when she died.  My dad wept profoundly.  I was sad, but I was not grieving, like my dad was.  I felt more embarrassed, than anything, while people were encouraging me to cry (”It’s okay to cry,”) which I simply wasn’t feeling.  I know that I deeply love my mom, so I asked myself (more, felt the questions of others:) “Why aren’t you crying?  Shouldn’t you be crying right now?”  But I didn’t feel the emotion that backs crying, and so I didn’t.
I believe the difference is (A) that I wasn’t living with my mom continuously, (like my dad,) and had separated years before, but more importantly, I believe it is because (B) my spiritual sense of time and life are different.  When the person dies, perhaps it does not shock me, because the person was already dead.  Some people can intellectually understand what I mean by this, but I have made this a part of my body.

When I say “mythological time,” I am talking about something concrete, not “not true.”  But this is another conversation for another day.

Regardless, here it is.  I’ve been blessed with a very special weekend.  Thank you for letting me share it with you.

It’s been cold at Tsubaki Jinja lately!

The thought of Kannushi doing misogi in the freezing cold waters and air really gets to me.

Here’s a picture from a warmer day:

Some day, I’ll be out there as well, — and I’ll be sure to do it on at least one of the cold days, as well.

(Waters so cold, the water purification site is frozen over, and you have to crack a hole in it to purify yourself..!)
…

…

So, I was browsing around to day, and encountered this… :
Apparently, there’s an anime called “Lucky Star” (no idea,) that features a shrine. When the shrine’s location was found out, fans of the show flocked to the real life shrine in droves.

The result is this:

Documented at:

• A Zazu’s Lucky Star Pilgrimage
• Lucky Star Cast, Fans Flock to Visit Real-Life Shrine
• 3,500 Lucky Star Fans Flock to Real-Life Shrine for Event

I know nothing about “Lucky Star,” except what you see on these pages, and that it is adorable. (Ask me about Urusei Yatsura; I know something about that.)

One thing I find kind of funny, is that the wooden plates are called “ema.”  It sounds like the Japanese for “horse,” or “pony,” (”uma,”) but with “e” at the beginning (”絵”: picture, painting, image; spoken as the Canadian “eh”) instead of the “u.”  That is, the ema is a picture of a horse, to substitute for the real thing; a sort of imitative magic.  There’s an interesting conversation around, “What is sensible about this idea?” (rather than absurd) but that’s not my purpose right now.

Rather, I bring this up to note that: In the Open Source developers world, there was recently (but it seems to have passed) fad around the, “No, you can’t have your pony.”

Some articles as example: [1] [2] [3]
Well, in Shinto, you can have your pony. Or at the very least, you can wish for it. Shinto is very encouraging of dreams and prayers. (We bought Sakura a wishing omamori recently. Brandy has two omamori, I forget what for, but one is for wealth.)

I think this is actually a very good thing, Napoleon Hill always said, “Keep your mind on what you want, and off of what you don’t want,” and that was a big part of his Positive Mental Attitude trip. All in all, overall, I think it’s a great thing.

Other links:

• Shinto Norito — blog by a woman (30’s?) who practices Shinto, that I’ve enjoyed reading; I wrote a comment (post commented) that I’m waiting on approval for (may never appear)
• Tsubaki Jinja – the Shinto shrine Amber, Sakura, and I, make omairi (shrine visitation) to
• Ema boards at our shrine.

Here’s hoping you’re having a great day!

I can’t understand this tradition of watching Taiko.

The entire point of Taiko — …

… I’m flabbergasted!

Is Taiko merely a gentle suggestion of motion?!

Is Taiko a museum piece?!
How can Taiko audiences sit still!?

I don’t get it!  It makes no sense to me!

When I hear Taiko here at home, I have this irresistable urge to clean, to do the dishes, to dress up the table, to do the laundry, to move.

How can people not experience something like this?!

How is it that there are indoor, buy a ticket take a seat performance recitals of Taiko?!

I do not understand it at all!

Brandy & Amber bought a book on “How to draw Disney Princesses,” or something like that, for Sakura.  Sakura walked up to me and said, “Here daddy.  Draw me a princess!”

Here is my first drawing (click to zoom in):

I tried to clean it up in the Gimp, but it was very difficult.
I decided to redraw it, tracing from the first.

It didn’t come out so well (click to zoom in):

It’s 4:36 AM and I just woke up in the middle of the night with a flash if insight. I don’t know what my brain was up to, but it was busy working on something, because when I woke up, a bunch of stars in my head had lined up and formed a whole constellation by the time I was awake.

What I realized at a very deep visceral gut level was that there is that theatre is not art.

I realized that what we call “drama” in daily life, is connected with Zeitgeist, the Spirit of the Times, which is connected with the “new age of rudeness” which is really just a name from the formal register for what it does not understand. When Grandmaster Flash created Hip Hop and recited The Message he was not being rude but if you’ve always lived in your head or live in a culture that’s always lived in its head separated from the Heart, I can understand how fishing around for “this is inappropriate interaction, this isn’t what I’m used to” will recast to “rude.”

I have fresh insight now into what Skye Burn meant, when she said that as we move forward into the world of global communications and the awakening of the Global Heart within the Global Brain, — when she said that we should be studying the patterns of indigenous cultures and indigenous people.

Because when they got around in a circle to “talk,” when they spoke of the Sacred they were not conjecturing about metaphysical spirits and aethers, and when they spoke they spoke in the ways of living drama but they were not talking about art.

When people repeatedly sit together in a circle for days to talk about things, the facades of politeness and formal register, which are really made (and genuinely useful) for interactions with outsiders anyway, go away. Then one of two things can happen: People can fall into barbarism, or they can stay together. If they choose to stay together, then something new, and even somewhat miraculous happens: drama.

We disdain drama in our individualistic culture. It is not “neat and orderly,” it does not appeal to us like the commercial providers do. It reminds us of… …ourselves.

The inner life of our head is drama. If you were to take the inner life of any person, and play it outside of them, (and people fear this exposition,) what you would find is drama.

We view it as an embrassment, because it seems so petty, so human.

But life hasn’t always been like this.

There have been people in this world who have said things like, “There is a spark of the divine in all people.”

And this isn’t about metaphysical speculations or aethers or whatever — you can be a perfect materialist physicalist atheist, and still recognize the existence of what is noble and Godly and sincere and beautiful, and see it as a possibility that can live in all people.

That’s why it’s called a “spark.” Because it is so fragile.

When the drama comes out, we see all these forms, these personalities, these tendencies, these geists. And people have called these Gods.

The word “enthusiasm” means, literally, “To be filled with a God.”

This is nothing otherworldly. When the self-help books say, “Get enthusiastic,” what do they say to do? They say, “envision yourself wealthy, successful, important,” and so on — They say to really dig into the imagery. Imagery. Now I don’t think our society needs to be full of people worshiping getting wealthy without consideration for others, (something more socially and nature aligned makes more sense to me,) but you can start to see where getting in-theos-iasm has to do with the invocation of Gods within oneself; the very same Gods that emerge in the drama stories of the community that is ceasing to play pretend with each other.
The living current of a healthy community, a real community, has been identified and named by indigenous cultures that have sustained themselves for centuries if not millenia, and they have called it things that would translate like Spirit.

Let it be utterly clear that this is nothing about the supernatural, and speaks just as clearly to our present day scientific culture as anything. In the formal register we speak of “psychological realities,” but realities they are none-the-less. Gods are not only the products of the land of the Imagination, they are also the products of abstraction not just within an individuals mind, but a whole society. Yet abstract we must, both in our heads, and in society. This is not an apology for superstition; It’s a recognition of how we work as [a] people.

I went and saw Enchanted with the family;  It was a good movie.  (If you watch it, pay attention at the end, and notice the revolution in thought taking place in fantasy-land… ..!)

I talked with Amber afterwards about our relationship.  We’ve not ever modeled our relationship as a “romantic” one.  People ask us why we aren’t married, and we say a number of things;  One of them being, “Because we respect marriage.”  The idea that couples should get married just because they have kids doesn’t seem to me to really capture what marriage is (or rather, should be.)

(more…)

I’ve recently begun a new wiki project; The “Lion Wiki!”

• Recent Changes
• Front Page

It’s for stuff that’s “not quite CommunityWiki fare.” Presently, I’m writing about gender & sexuality, which… …is not quite CommunityWiki fare. ;)

I’d been wondering, for ages, “How am I going to write about this stuff online?” I’d told (told! not asked– told!) John Abbe so many times, “How am I going to write about this stuff online?” Well, now I have a wiki for it, that’s disconnected from both my blog and CommunityWiki, so it feels right.

I often tell people the following story, about my time at college — about how it was so wonderful — and then about how we exploded out into the world, each person taking up a different, new apartment, far away from everybody else — and about how the magic died.  I tell people about how I made a small atomic family, like everybody else, and found a small cadre of friends.

Recently I talked with Seb Martel, a coworker at RealNetworks.  I told him about Saturday House, which I was making.  I asked him to come;  His response, composed after some thought with his wife, was:  “My wife and I asked ourselves, Why are we putting so much effort into making our own place so nice, if we’re going to come to Saturday House?”  I couldn’t tell if it was a challenge to Saturday House, or a question they were earnestly asking themselves.

But I get ahead of myself.

College.  When I was in college, it was amazing.  I always tell people, “It was like I was walking on ideas, it was like I was walking on light.”  These are people I lived with for two years.  The college was 600 students, total.  At breakfast, I’d hear three new ideas, every day.  West dorm turned their dorm into an entire theater, by constructing a canopy out of melted together trashbags, rigging the whole place with a profoundly comprehensive speaker set, and stealing / “borrowing” the powerful projector from the main lecture room.  One day, while walking through the East dorm lounge, I saw some other students doing something on the floor with long flat panels.  “What are you making?”  “Flat panel speakers,” they said.  The next time I would see flat panel speakers was 4-5 years later at an investor gathering.  Living at Mudd was living in ideas.  I learned about anime, and taught myself some Japanese.  There were all sorts of adventures and mis-adventures.  It was a place of learning, living, life, and ideas.  It was glorious.

The conclusion, you all know.  We break and go our separate ways.  We shoot out over the nation and globe, and form atomic families in houses and apartments in the distinct cities around the world.  We get jobs, we do projects on the side, we have a small cadre of friends.  We spend our days working on pointless stuff, doing very ordinary works.  A lucky few may become achievement people, the rest live lives of … well, work.  Whit joins a monastery.  Some people console themselves that, well, at least they have health and money.  Shouldn’t we really just be thankful?  But the magic of life is completely drained out of everyone.  And we call this, “growing up.”  And when we ask our elders what this is, and they have a phrase for it.  The call it, “Growing up.”

“It’s good for you,” they say, not looking entirely happy about their own decision.  They then go watch some movie for kids, that’s chipper.

A moment for some silence and reflection.

“Growing up.”  It’s the phrase we use to describe the process of stopping our thinking, killing our dreams, isolating ourselves from others, getting into consumerist patterns, looking suspiciously at the other guy, striving for individual lusts, having very few to talk with, and keeping them at an arms length even then, — “Growing up.”

No wonder we call porn movies “adult,” and no wonder we consider movies more mature, if they’re more somber, dire, and black.  No wonder we call them “old people,” rather than elders.  And no wonder everyone’s becoming depressed.

The other day, I saw a TED talk about 10 crises humanity could face.  The first listed (”#10″), was: “Humanity loses the will to live.”  I also read on wikipedia, on a page called “Happiness Economics,” …

Children tend to decrease parental happiness, at least until they leave for college, although in terms of a broader life narrative the opposite may be true. 

I was struggling with this in my mind.  There was a super-freudian account, as well.

Whether or not politicians back policies that support marriage and having kids doesn’t really matter, because people embrace these happiness myths quite willingly, as part of a larger societal growth conspiracy. “We are the product of our genes and our societies,” says Gilbert. Traditions will trump the empirical evidence that money and kids won’t make us happy.

Wow.

It was with this, that I began to really say, “Now hold on just a second…”

…

Here’s a moment where I give pause, to our post-modern world.
…

Yes, it’s possible that I’m coming under the influence of some memetic programming here, some evolutionary strategy come to take over my brain, and ensure the survival of our species, and so on.  It’s possible that romantic notions are visitating me, and doing unspeakable cruelties to logic and sanity in the quest to perpetuate its fiendish, lichlike leeching.

But let me pause here, and consider another thought:

Could it possibly be, that our society is just really fucked up in the head about happiness?

…

Could it be that, yes, adults in our society are less happy because they have kids, (empirically speaking,) but that — it’s not an objective situation, but rather that — collectively, we’re all a bit loopy about happiness?

Perhaps we’re “doing something wrong?” …en masse?

I say this in the context that, last Wednesday, coming back from Saturday House, was one of the happiest times I’ve felt in the last 10 years.

Not the only happiest time, but one of the few happiest times in my last 10 years.

Coming back in the van, listening to C89.5, dropping off people, having just spent a wonderful night talking with a bunch of friends, knowing that I was going to see them again, people I could talk with about anything, that it wasn’t just a momentary thing, but that it was sustainable, that it was free –  I felt tremendously happy.

…

I have more to write, but I don’t have the time to write it.  Think about this.

Argh! I’m failing miserably at pushing this out of my mind!

It’s this!

Propeller Chip ($12, $7 in mass quantities) (different sizes for different pin arrangements)

• http://www.parallax.com/propeller/index.asp
• http://www.parallax.com/dl/docs/prod/prop/PropellerDSv0.3.pdf — datasheet

Demo board, with on-board breadboard, so you can hook up RAM chips or special UI devices, …

• http://www.parallax.com/detail.asp?product_id=32100

A guy made something like a mouse w/ tilt:

• http://youtube.com/watch?v=VhNhFyN0oHw

HYDRA — Propeller + board & interfaces & devices & manual & dev-kit & cables:

• http://www.hydraconsole.com/
• http://www.parallax.com/detail.asp?product_id=32360 — game dev kit
• http://youtube.com/watch?v=kA8sq_7nYlE — YouTube vid; Propeller game kit

Make Magazine on Propeller:

• http://www.makezine.com/blog/archive/2006/02/first_look_at_parallaxs_propel.html

Honestly, this is “scary cool” to me; What it represents to me is:

• zero latency,
• easy hardware access,
• smooth, steady, and efficient learning curve
• 2-3 years of mad addiction

• hence the “scary”

You totally control the whole chip, and attached devices.

Everything is modular. There’s a big community of people uploading codes for individual cogs, for interacting with different devices, along with schematics. It has a single designer, so the design is compact: You can understand everything.

This is, as far as I can tell, the keys to the kingdom of the material world.