new book. new things.

Thing One.

"Every book, if it is anything at all, is an argument: an articulate arrow of words, fledged and notched and newly anointed with sharpened stone, speeding through paragraphs to its shimmering target." (this of course, being your heart).

Thing Two.

"Love eminates from the brain; the brain is physical, and thus as fit a subject for scientific discourse as cucumbers or chemistry. But love unavoidably partakes of the personal and the subjective, and so we cannot place it in the killing jar and pin its wings to cardboard as a lepidopterist might a prismatic butterfly. In spite of what science teaches, only a delicate admixture of evidence and intuition can yield the truest view of the emotional mind. To slip between the twin dangers of empty reductionism (scientific formulae yeah?) and baseless credulity (lauren richardson, raging idealistic builder of gardens that exist on clouds), one must balance a respect for proof with a fondness for the unproven and the unprovable. Common sense must combine in equal measure imaginative flight and an aversion to orthodoxy."

Last one:
"Long before science existed, sharp-eyed men and women told each other stories about how people are, stories that have never lost their power to enchant and instruct. The purpose of using science to investigate human nature is not to replace those stories but to augment and deepen them. Robert Frost once wrote that too many poets delude themselves by thinking the mind is dangerous and must be left out. That principle is mirrored in the study of the brain, where too many experts, out of plain fear, avoid mentioning love."

I'm reading a book about the psychobilological explorations of love and the brain.  We had to read a chapter of it in class, and the prose had taken me so easily, so I just checked it out from the library. We'll see.

Yesterday Jeffrey and I were standing at the rock wall.  We talked about the whole pill religion thing ...again. As it is true, and too annoyingly prevelant (although, as someone that believes in jesus, it would make sense that we need a pill -  too bad it's under terribly false identifications of "Christianity".) but either way - - - - he came to this point.
Religion is like a naked girl, cheap. easy. right there.
Science is like a girl that puts on a dress and you take her to dinner, maybe dancing afterwards, the whole time you're kept guessing, you're not really in control. But you are really alive.

I think he has an incredible point. People say "Oh. I'm fine. I'mma go to heaven one of these days and leave all this tribulation behind me."

(these two things will tie together one day )

But if we look, if we look at that tree long enough, it's not just a tree anymore. It's not just, "oh, well that's a tree." And it's not just (in my feeling) a formula for how a tree defies gravity and waters itself. It's more. it's more than science. it's more than a tree.


It's an American Birch. Do you know how old that American Birch is? Do you know how many pounds of Oxygen that guy produces. How large of a root system he has? How much water does he drink a day. How does he manage to carry it all the way to the tops of his branches like that?

Beauty. We can reduce it down to principles. Reductionism. Science.

But holistically, it's something incredible.

And I think it's God. A lot of people I talk to (alexis and sydni and jeffrey included) disagree, and it's cool, but something happens when science is spun like a top on a table.

We're in a new river. We'll see where this one goes.