R.E. Slater - Everyday Attitutdes

EVERYDAY ATTITUDES

"Being is as much about Becoming

as Becoming is about Being." - R.E. Slater

Process Living is:

upLifting and uniting,

motivating and encouraging,

being and becoming...

bearing all things,

being all things,

becoming all things...

abiding all people,

reviving all relationships,

surviving all difficulties...

when pursuing faith,

overcoming obstacles,

suffering as Grace...

in sacrifice and service,

with diligence extended,

abiding, staying, doing...

reclaiming and redeeming,

renewing and resurrecting,

regenerating all about...

everyone,

everything,

everywhere,

ever and ever...

---

process amplification

is singing, throbbing,

all around and in us,

across heaven and earth,

hearts and lands,

about, within, and from us,

unstoppable,

instoppable,

withheld no hand,

no soul, no land,

we are... as creation is...

as life and death are,

immortal wonders,

are, and are becoming...

R.E. Slater

December 15, 2023

revised December 19, 2023

@copyright R.E. Slater Publications

all rights reserved

Quotes & Sayings by

Alfred North Whitehead

AZQuotes

Wikipedia - Alfred North Whitehead OM FRS FBA (15 February 1861 – 30 December 1947) was an English mathematician and philosopher. He created the philosophical school known as process philosophy, which has been applied in a wide variety of disciplines, including ecology, theology, education, physics, biology, economics, and psychology.

In his early career Whitehead wrote primarily on mathematics, logic, and physics. He wrote the three-volume Principia Mathematica (1910–1913), with his former student Bertrand Russell. Principia Mathematica is considered one of the twentieth century's most important works in mathematical logic, and placed 23rd in a list of the top 100 English-language nonfiction books of the twentieth century by Modern Library.

Beginning in the late 1910s and early 1920s, Whitehead gradually turned his attention from mathematics to [the] philosophy of science, and finally to metaphysics. He developed a comprehensive metaphysical system which radically departed from most of Western philosophy. Whitehead argued that reality consists of processes rather than material objects, and that processes are best defined by their relations with other processes, thus rejecting the theory that reality is fundamentally constructed by bits of matter that exist independently of one another. Whitehead's philosophical works – particularly Process and Reality – are regarded as the foundational texts of process philosophy.

Whitehead's process philosophy argues that "there is urgency in coming to see the world as a web of interrelated processes of which we are integral parts, so that all of our choices and actions have consequences for the world around us." For this reason, one of the most promising applications of Whitehead's thought in recent years has been in the area of ecological civilization and environmental ethics pioneered by John B. Cobb.

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Religion is the vision of something which stands beyond, behind, and within, the passing flux of immediate things; something which is real, and yet waiting to be realised; something which is a remote possibility, and yet the greatest of present facts; something that gives meaning to all that passes, and yet eludes apprehension; something whose possession is the final good, and yet is beyond all reach; something which is the ultimate ideal, and the hopeless quest.

- Alfred North Whitehead

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The purpose of education is not to fill a vessel but to kindle a flame.

- Alfred North Whitehead

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The misconception which has haunted philosophic literature throughout the centuries is the notion of 'independent existence.' There is no such mode of existence; every entity is to be understood in terms of the way it is interwoven with the rest of the universe.

- Alfred North Whitehead, (2014),

“Science and Philosophy”, p.54, Open Road Media

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Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance, is the death of knowledge.

- Alfred North Whitehead

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The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order.

- Alfred North Whitehead. Alfred North Whitehead, David Ray Griffin (1978), “Process and reality: an essay in cosmology”, Free Pr 

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The total absence of humor from the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature.

- Alfred North Whitehead

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If a dog jumps into your lap, it is because he is fond of you; but if a cat does the same thing, it is because your lap is warmer.

Alfred North Whitehead, Lucien Price (2001), “Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead”, p.183, David R. Godine Publisher

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It takes an extraordinary intelligence to contemplate the obvious.

- Alfred North Whitehead

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After you understand about the sun and the stars and the rotation of the earth, you may still miss the radiance of the sunset.

- Alfred North Whitehead

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The worship of God is not a rule of safety - it is an adventure of the spirit, a flight after the unattainable.

- Alfred North Whitehead,
1925 Science and the Modern World

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Philosophy begins in wonder. And, at the end, when philosophic

thought has done its best, the wonder remains.

- Alfred North Whitehead (1968),

“Modes of Thought”, p.168, Simon and Schuster

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Not a sentence or a word is independent of the circumstances under which it is uttered.

- Alfred North Whitehead

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Great people plant trees they'll never sit under.

- Alfred North Whitehead

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No one who achieves success does so without acknowledging the help of others. The wise and confident acknowledge this help with gratitude.

- Alfred North Whitehead

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There are no whole truths: All truths are half-truths.

- Alfred North Whitehead, Dialogues prologue (1954)

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Fundamental progress has to do with the reinterpretation of basic ideas.

- Alfred North Whitehead (2014),

“Science and Philosophy”, p.142, Open Road Media

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The foundations of the world are to be found, not in the cognitive experience of conscious thought, but in the aesthetic experience of everyday life.

- Alfred North Whitehead

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Everyone is a philosopher. Not everyone is good at it.

- Alfred North Whitehead

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Knowledge shrinks as wisdom grows.

- Alfred North Whitehead (1967),
“Aims of Education”, p.37, Simon and Schuster

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We think in generalities, but we live in detail.

- Alfred North Whitehead 2014),

“Science and Philosophy”, p.20, Open Road Media

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In a certain sense, everything is everywhere at all times. For every location involves an aspect of itself in every other location. Thus every spatio-temporal standpoint mirrors the world.

- Alfred North Whitehead (1997),
“Science and the Modern World”, p.91, Simon and Schuster

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There are no whole truths: all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays to the devil.

- Alfred North Whitehead, Dialogues prologue (1954)

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When you're average, you're just as close to the bottom as you are the top.

- Alfred North Whitehead

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How the past perishes is how the future becomes.

- Alfred North Whitehead (1967),

“Adventures of Ideas”, p.238, Simon and Schuster

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The foundation of reverence is this perception, that the present holds within itself the complete sum of existence, backwards and forwards, that whole amplitude of time, which is eternity.

- Alfred North Whitehead (1967),
“Aims of Education”, p.14, Simon and Schuster

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I consider Christianity to be one of the great disasters of the human race... It would be impossible to imagine anything more un-Christianlike than theology.

- Alfred North Whitehead

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There is urgency in coming to see the world as a web of interrelated

processes of which we are integral parts, so that all of our choices

and actions have consequences for the world around us."

- Alfred North Whitehead

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"I imagine we will have to apply for a Royal Grant."
- ANW to Bertrand Russell

Whitehead papers are now available online
- Whitehead Research Project

R.E. Slater - Autumn Wonder + Other Fall Poems

@copyright R.E. Slater Publications

Autumn wonders

Makes me happy

Rolling and tumbling

On crunchy leaves

Smelling their colors

Hearing their crinkles

Beauty bursting all around.

R.E. Slater

November 4, 2023

@copyright R.E. Slater Publications

all rights reserved

When the leaves

are on the ground

I like to make

a pile of them

way up to my knees.

- Anon

Red, yellow, orange, and brown,

Leaves are falling all around,

See them dancing in the wind,

Twisting, falling, fairykins,

Swooshing, blowing, here and there,

Happy, running, dervish flares!

R.E. Slater

November 4, 2023

@copyright R.E. Slater Publications

all rights reserved

@copyright R.E. Slater Publications

Leaves

by Elsie N. Brady

How silently they tumble down

And come to rest upon the ground

To lay a carpet, rich and rare,

Beneath the trees without a care,

Content to sleep, their work well done,

Colors gleaming in the sun.

At other times, they wildly fly

Until they nearly reach the sky.

Twisting, turning through the air

Till all the trees stand stark and bare.

Exhausted, drop to earth below

To wait, like children, for the snow.

Theme in Yellow

by Carl Sandburg

I spot the hills

With yellow balls in autumn.

I light the prairie cornfields

Orange and tawny gold clusters

And I am called pumpkins.

On the last of October

When dusk is fallen

Children join hands

And circle round me

Singing ghost songs

And love to the harvest moon;

I am a jack-o'-lantern

With terrible teeth

And the children know

I am fooling.

@copyright R.E. Slater Publications

Nothing Gold Can Stay

by Robert Frost

Nature’s first green is gold,

Her hardest hue to hold.

Her early leaf’s a flower;

But only so an hour.

Then leaf subsides to leaf.

So Eden sank to grief,

So dawn goes down to day.

Nothing gold can stay.

@copyright R.E. Slater Publications

To Autumn

by John Keats

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,

Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;

Conspiring with him how to load and bless

With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;

To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,

And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;

To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells

With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,

And still more, later flowers for the bees,

Until they think warm days will never cease,

For summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?

Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find

Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,

Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;

Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,

Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook

Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:

And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep

Steady thy laden head across a brook;

Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,

Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

Where are the songs of spring? Ay, Where are they?

Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—

While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,

And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;

Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn

Among the river sallows, borne aloft

Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;

And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;

Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft

The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;

And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

@copyright R.E. Slater Publications

Fall, leaves, fall

by Emily Bronte

Fall, leaves, fall; die, flowers, away;

Lengthen night and shorten day;

Every leaf speaks bliss to me

Fluttering from the autumn tree.

I shall smile when wreaths of snow

Blossom where the rose should grow;

I shall sing when night’s decay

Ushers in a drearier day.

@copyright R.E. Slater Publications

SONNET 73:

That time of year thou

mayst in me behold

by William Shakespeare

That time of year thou mayst in me behold

When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang

Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,

Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.

In me thou see'st the twilight of such day

As after sunset fadeth in the west,

Which by and by black night doth take away,

Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.

In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire

That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,

As the death-bed whereon it must expire,

Consum'd with that which it was nourish'd by.

This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,

To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

@copyright R.E. Slater Publications

The Heat of Autumn Poem

by Jane Hirshfield

The heat of autumn

is different from the heat of summer.

One ripens apples, the other turns them to cider.

One is a dock you walk out on,

the other the spine of a thin swimming horse

and the river each day a full measure colder.

A man with cancer leaves his wife for his lover.

Before he goes she straightens his belts in the closet,

rearranges the socks and sweaters inside the dresser

by color. That's autumn heat:

her hand placing silver buckles with silver,

gold buckles with gold, setting each

on the hook it belongs on in a closet soon to be empty,

and calling it pleasure.

First Fall

by Maggie Smith

I’m your guide here. In the evening-dark

morning streets, I point and name.

Look, the sycamores, their mottled,

paint-by-number bark. Look, the leaves

rusting and crisping at the edges.

I walk through Schiller Park with you

on my chest. Stars smolder well

into daylight. Look, the pond, the ducks,

the dogs paddling after their prized sticks.

Fall is when the only things you know

because I’ve named them

begin to end. Soon I’ll have another

season to offer you: frost soft

on the window and a porthole

sighed there, ice sleeving the bare

gray branches. The first time you see

something die, you won’t know it might

come back. I’m desperate for you

to love the world because I brought you here.

@copyright R.E. Slater Publications

Poem

by Paul Carroll

Fall a scrimmage of yellow leaves today

All over Lincoln Park

like the mask of the Yellow Mule who travels between the next

world and Tibet inside its house of glass in the Field

Museum by the lake.

I am carrying the night.

I am carrying it as if it were a dark blue dish with stars

for the dinner of the Dalai Lama.

It is the sky two nights ago;

Its voluptuous rich blue looks almost black before the word

for blue had been invented;

The clouds like continents, like huge, majestic prehistoric

creatures moving in a dance;

The stars are brilliant ants. They may have died

a billion years ago.

I feel so happy. It is as if I'm with my wife who's making

sculpture miles and miles away on Ada Street.

I like everything about her.

The way an angel, say, might look upon this early autumn scene

and love everything about it for its reality—

These trees flanking the lagoon at Fullerton are quiet as green fish,

The pale khaki maple leaf lying on the ground, its veins

intricate as the practice of a Tartar cavalry,

Its delicacy like the penis of a cuttlefish,

The grass pale lime and brown as dreams when they are turning brown

Is almost ghostly,

The way the family album on the table in the living room has

a gallery of ghosts.

There is only wonder.

Like the wonder in the worn thighbone of the dinosaur

We're allowed to touch

As often as we want on the Main Floor of the Field Museum.

I bike along the lake and watch

The whiplash of the waves and think,

I didn't have to be here in the first place: I could have been

a star:

Or cuttlefish. The shadow of that tree. Or been one of the

bees of oblivion

In any ordinary orgasm.

If there were no moon our hearts could take its place.

Autumn

by Alice Cary

Shorter and shorter now the twilight clips

The days, as though the sunset gates they crowd,

And Summer from her golden collar slips

And strays through stubble-fields, and moans aloud,

Save when by fits the warmer air deceives,

And, stealing hopeful to some sheltered bower,

She lies on pillows of the yellow leaves,

And tries the old tunes over for an hour.

The wind, whose tender whisper in the May

Set all the young blooms listening through th’ grove,

Sits rustling in the faded boughs to-day

And makes his cold and unsuccessful love.

The rose has taken off her tire of red—

The mullein-stalk its yellow stars have lost,

And the proud meadow-pink hangs down her head

Against earth’s chilly bosom, witched with frost.

The robin, that was busy all the June,

Before the sun had kissed the topmost bough,

Catching our hearts up in his golden tune,

Has given place to the brown cricket now.

The very cock crows lonesomely at morn—

Each flag and fern the shrinking stream divides—

Uneasy cattle low, and lambs forlorn

Creep to their strawy sheds with nettled sides.

Shut up the door: who loves me must not look

Upon the withered world, but haste to bring

His lighted candle, and his story-book,

And live with me the poetry of Spring.

@copyright R.E. Slater Publications

November for Beginners

by Rita Dove

Snow would be the easy

way out—that softening

sky like a sigh of relief

at finally being allowed

to yield. No dice.

We stack twigs for burning

in glistening patches

but the rain won’t give.

So we wait, breeding

mood, making music

of decline. We sit down

in the smell of the past

and rise in a light

that is already leaving.

We ache in secret,

memorizing

a gloomy line

or two of German.

When spring comes

we promise to act

the fool. Pour,

rain! Sail, wind,

with your cargo of zithers!

November 1981

@copyright R.E. Slater Publications

Missing You Poetry

I AM LEARNING HOW TO LIVE

by Jamey Wysocki

I am learning how to live
In a new way
Since that day
You were taken away.

I am learning how to live
With the things left unsaid
Knowing I got to say them
With every tear that I shed.

I am learning how to live
By embracing the pain
Knowing that you live on
Through the memories that remain.

I am learning how to live
Knowing I will never again see your face
And I have peace knowing
You’re in a better place.

I am learning how to live
Knowing you’re in God’s care
It gives me the strength to move on
And makes the pain much easier to bear.

TIS A FEARFUL THING

by Yehuda HaLevi (1075 – 1141)

‘Tis a fearful thing
to love what death can touch.
A fearful thing
to love, to hope, to dream, to be –
to be,
And oh, to lose.
A thing for fools, this,
And a holy thing,
a holy thing
to love.
For your life has lived in me,
your laugh once lifted me,
your word was gift to me.
To remember this brings painful joy.
‘Tis a human thing, love,
a holy thing, to love
what death has touched.

SANCTUM

by Beulah B. Malkin

I built a tiny garden
In a corner of my heart
I kept it just for lovely things
And bade all else depart
And ever was there music
And flowers blossomed fair;
And never was it perfect
Until you entered there

DAYDREAM

by Shanike Priyananda

Every moment I spent with you

Was like a beautiful dream come true
It was the best dream I ever saw
More colorful than a rainbow
Your pretty voice is echoing in my ear
The splendid sound I ever hear
No Nightingale’s song
Can compare to your glamorous tone
Those alighting brown eyes
As bright as twinkling stars in the sky
I always wanted to hold your hand
Between my arms close to my heart
My wish was to hug you hard
And listen to the beat of your heart

I can still feel your smell

The wonderful charming spell
You taught me about love
Your love made my life alive
Whenever I see your face
My whole heart fills with grace
My life was like a dark cold night
You were the only luminaire warming light
My dream was to see your smile
And walk with you all over this glorious isle
You were the queen of my dream worlds
I don’t know how to explain my feelings in words
But, when you leave me alone with the feeling of spleen
I could realize that was just a daydream.