Aesthetics 1

Lately I have been doing a lot of work on applied philosophy. You could call my main project “unfucking my life.” From this experience, I see how much of applied philosophy requires aesthetics -- haircuts and clothes and all shorts of shit that I have never cared about before. But here I wish to communicate the best piece of applied philosophy through applied aesthetics I have come to lately: enjoying squirrels.

Too often the people who try to find pleasure from nature end up feeling either indifferent toward or actively against squirrels. They put out seeds to feed birds, and find that they end up feeding squirrels more than the birds. And this becomes a daoist trap -- the kind that proves John’s point about the Daodejing as strategy guide -- the more you fight the squirrels getting your “bird” seed, the more they thwart you, and more hatred you have ground to feel (assuming no outside re-framing -- applied philosophy[1]).

I have been one of who has put seed out in the past, and of course I mostly feed squirrels. But at least I did not do battle with them, and perhaps that has made all the difference. This year I did not put out seed in the winter, and after some consideration, I have decided to not have a garden this year. Instead, I am in a position to enjoy what comes.

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Much like Melville’s hundreds of pages of details allowed him to just blast through the action at the end of “Moby Dick”, I hope the paragraphs above were adequate set up to say the following: I recently went on a walk to Sutton Urban Wilderness, a wooded area with several trails and side trails. I saw squirrels being their glorious selves, and I paused to marvel at them. Bio-mechanics. Mammalian shine. Pretty... And I believe my ability to appreciate the real world around me is much better for it.

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Also, the common grackle is another gift from God. They add beauty and interest to parking lots of big box stores and strip malls [2]. They show the dao is undefeated, at least with humans as the adversary.

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Learn to love what is really here.

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[1] Out of the Buddhist tool kit you have the lens of dissatisfaction (and then suffering) coming from the attachment to a conception.  I believe the term dukkha tries to represent this whole cycle.

[2] In fairness, I never have to deal with the full bulk of their migration, as people apparently do in Texas. You would really need to find ways to appreciate grackles before these moments.