Sunday, December 23, 2007

One Thing

Everything is one thing until one thing is one thing. Then everything is everything. Or as Lao Tzu puts it:

The Tao is nameless.
What can be named is not eternal.

The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth.
The name is the mother of the ten thousand things.

“The Heavens” separates the universe from our world then “sky” cleaves from “earth”. The definition “tree” divides it from the earth from which it springs. “Wood” kills the tree and “Plank” carves it up.

This is the intellectual path by which the thing we are part of becomes the things we can use.

Saturday, December 15, 2007

Face Lift

Friday I drove to WKU to drop in on my contact with WKU Finish. He wasn't in and I ended up speaking with Dean(name not title) Kahler, Vice President for Academic Affairs/Enrollment Management, who graciously accepted me barging in without an appointment. We reviewed my transcript. At the very bottom of the page was the F I received for the psychology class I failed to drop in time by the appropriate date. In '82 I thought little of it, I would just take the class the next semester and the F would be removed from my transcript. F... for failure., It was the perfect closing statement on the official record of by early experience. Irony can be so ironic. I will remove this mark from my past.
I feel like I am preparing for cosmetic surgery. I am going to pay thousands of dollars and invest a chunk of pain in an effort that will have dubious effect on the reality of my life. The hope is to heal the scar that has caused anguish and embarrassment and festered for a quarter of a century.

Monday, December 10, 2007

Starting

This morning I took the first step to finishing my bachelor's degree after a 25 year hiatus. I found program at Western Kentucky University designed just for this purpose. I was so excited this morning at prospect I could not keep from crying as I drove Ella to Playing School. I plan on posting about every new step along the way.
Rudi