The Blip Report for Friday, June 21st 2024
going off the grid
I’ll be going off the grid for a month or so, to get some badly needed R&R [i.e. rest and relaxation], and hopefully to re-charge my batteries. Except for saturday postings of ‘To Shining Sea’ and sunday postings of ‘Poems of Mao’, that I would like to continue.
Anyway, I wanted to leave you with something that I still think about at times, in fact, every morning - the last part of an earlier blip report from Tuesday, August 29th 2023.
… Now, I’m one of those weird people that likes to get up early in the morning, before the sun comes up, and to just sit there and listen to the birds while I drink my morning cup of coffee.
It’s funny how the birds start chirping and singing BEFORE the sun comes up – they somehow know when it’s coming. And sometimes my wife complains to me - to tell those birds to be quiet, she’s trying to sleep.
Anyway lately, we … (me and the birds) … we’ve been pondering about ‘esteem’, and we thought that maybe the word ‘esteem’ could be sort of like another word for ‘love’. Now, this would be very helpful for us baby-boomers. Because our idea of love has really been distorted and entangled by all that counter culture crap we were subjected to when we were growing up, and so, we go all goo-goo gaa-gaa when someone talks about ‘loooove’. But, if we substitute the word esteem for the word love, it’s not so bad.
OK, there’s different kinds of esteem, though. There’s agapic esteem and filial esteem. And there’s erotic esteem – which is the one that us baby-boomers have trouble with. Because when we think of something ‘erotic’, we think of something pornographic and lustful, instead of loving. And ‘eros’ gets a really bad name that way.
But eros, or self-love, is not so bad when we think of it as self-esteem, instead. Because we all need to have some self esteem. Even birds - it’s natural!
And that reminded us of Shakespeare’s sonnet # 29 (one of our favorites):
When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.
Now, that’s what we should call self-esteem – “sweet love remembered”. And because of that esteem - “I scorn to change my state with kings”.
[it seems to me, that this is an important idea that we see clearly in this sonnet - that our own self-esteem comes about because of receiving esteem from another person! As Lyndon LaRouche wrote once, while a baby becomes a biological human at the moment of conception, that baby becomes truly human, at the moment when its mother holds him or her, and says ‘I love you’.]
And that’s how we should think of ourselves – we would not want to change ourselves for anyone else! Not for someone who’s faster, or looks more colorful, or who sounds sweeter. And when we esteem ourselves, it’s because we did something good or something beautiful, or said something truthful. That’s not arrogance, that’s esteem!!!
And perhaps, when we wake up in the morning, and sit up before we get out of bed, we should say to ourselves – “I scorn to change my state with kings”. And then when we get out of bed, our feet would hit the ground running. Esteemed.
And perhaps, we should write that down on a piece of paper, and stick on the mirror in the bathroom, so that when we go in there and look at the mirror to see if we need to clean up our looks so that we’re presentable to go out in the world, instead we’ll say to ourselves - “I scorn to change my state with kings” and then we’d walk out of that bathroom, like we’re going to go and change the world. Esteemed.
[our bathroom wall, thanks to my wife’s highly-esteemed craftiness]
Anyway, me and the birds had a good talk today, and after I’d finished my cup of coffee and was getting up to go inside, I thought I heard one of the birdies say to me:
“Esteem the lilies of the field, how they grow …”