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Commonplace Book

It’s fortunate that other people’s outlook conflicts with ours, since then we have the chance to escape our narrow-mindedness and open ourselves to other values. I have lived in a community for twenty-five years, and I may have received more from people I found it hard to get along with than from those I found congenial. Those I found hard to get along with opened my horizons to other values, but if I’d only met people who agreed with me, I might never have glimpsed any new horizons.

Jacques Philippe, Interior Freedom, pp 62-63.
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Commonplace Book

The most difficult thing in the world is to listen, to see. We don’t want to see. Do you think a capitalist wants to see what is good in the commum’st system? Do you think a communist wants to see what is good and healthy in the capitalist system? Do you think a rich man wants to look at poor people? We don’t want to look, because if we do, we may change. We don’t want to look. If you look, you lose control of the life that you are so precariously holding together. And so in order to wake up, the one thing you need the most is not energy, or strength, or youthfulness, or even great intelligence. The one thing you need most of all is the readiness to learn something new.

Anthony de Mello, SJ – Awareness
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Commonplace Book

One further point: What really hurts is not so much suffering itself as the fear of suffering. If welcomed trustingly and peacefully, suffering makes us grow. It matures and trains us, purifies us, teaches us to love unselfishly, makes us poor in heart, humble, gentle, and compassionate toward our neighbor. Fear of suffering, on the other hand, hardens us in self-protective, defensive attitudes, and often leads us to make irrational choices with disastrous consequences.

Fr. Jacques Philippe – Interior Freedom
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Journal

Walkaway (Akron)

The new Akron, built on the site of the leveled buildings, refused to be a graveyard. The people who’d flocked to it to rebuild after the army and the mercs and the guardsmen had joined returning locals to build new kinds of buildings, advanced refugee housing straight out of the UNHCR playbook, designed to use energy merrily when the wind blew or the sun shone, to hibernate the rest of the time. The multistory housing interleaved greenhouses and hydroponic market-gardens with homes, capturing human waste for fertilizer and wastewater for irrigation, capturing human CO2 and giving back oxygen. They were practically space colonies, inhabited by some of the poorest people in the world, who adapted and improved systems so many other poor people had improved over the disasters the human race had weathered. The hexayurt suburbs acted as a kind of transition zone between default and the new kind of permanent walkaway settlement, places where people came and went, if they decided that Akron wasn’t for them.

– p. 553 Excerpt From Walkaway

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Journal

Happy Easter

  • Chapel
  • Macintosh Classic

Happy Easter from Church of St Pius X.

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photos

Cambridge Post Office

This is the post office in Cambridge, OH (population 11,129). One of the things I love about Ohio is the old, stately government buildings.

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Journal

Have free time, will bake

Recipe via Smitten Kitchen

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Journal

On to new adventures

Yesterday was my last day at ABB US Corporate Research. It’s been an incredible 9 years!

I’m taking a few weeks off. After that I’m ready for a new adventure as a Senior Software Engineer at UserVoice.

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Journal

The Controversial Process of Redesigning the Wheelchair Symbol – Atlas Obscura

“We really like the situation we’re in,” Glenney says. “It gives visibility to the context of people with disabilities. It keeps them ‘in the market’ of ideas, so to speak. Our symbol is most successful when it’s not fully legal—when there’s lots of wrinkles and questions.” As long as conversation channels are open, he says, there’s still the possibility for change even greater than the simple replacement of one blue and white sticker with another.

The Controversial Process of Redesigning the Wheelchair Symbol – Atlas Obscura

I love the idea that the success of this project is not in adoption but in conversation. It’s successful because it raises questions instead of answering them.

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micro

Know hope: The Teens Will Save Us!