Nothing Is Sacred: Everything is a Product: Occupy Your Self

"I claim that human mind or human society is not divided into watertight compartments called social, political and religious. All act and react upon one another" 

- Mahatma Gandhi

"Your daily life is your temple and religion" 

- Khalil Gibran, The Prophet 

Things today aren't really that different than the feudal ages, except that now even our money is abstract. Someone else (a lord/company) owns the means of production (land/office/ factory) as well as the product (crops/cheeseburger/desk). We work for the owner in return for something we need (money, a scrap of paper with no inherent use or value or an imaginary number in the mind of a computer) so that we can trade it back to the owners-of-the-means-of-production for the very products we made. The shocking disproportion between the wealth of the owners-of-the-means-of-production and the rest of us is hidden from our eyes inside machines and left to the imagination to ponder.

Out in Nature or Within Nature?

"There is pleasure in the pathless woods,

There is a rapture on the lonely shore,

There is society, where none intrudes,

By the deep sea, and music in its roar:

I love not man the less, but Nature more,

From these our interviews, in which I steal

From all I may be, or have been before,

To mingle with the Universe, and feel

What I can ne'er express, yet cannot all conceal." 

LORD BYRON, Childe Harold

Deviled Eggs

This story, or a similar version of it, was also published by Yahoo! here.

When I was growing up in my parents' house, my brother and I shared a bedroom. Our bedroom was the only one on the second floor, apart from the adjacent walk-in attic. Even today (or perhaps especially today), as my brother still lives in that room, it seems like its own space, hidden within and apart from that old house. When it's quiet, you can't really be too sure what is going on up there.