Five Beautiful Things

“Praise to the Melodious Wisdom Goddess Saraswati, Called ‘The Melody of the Youthful Display of Joy,’ by Kunkhyen Longchenpa in Sunlight Speech That Dispels the Darkness of Doubt: Sublime Prayers, Praises, and Practices of the Nyingma Masters, translated by Thinley Norbu. I was struck by the beauty of the words and the single-pointed focus of the praise given to the Goddess. There is also a beautiful exhortation in the book’s intro to handle the book with respect due to a text filled with religious teachings and insights.

The Valley of a Thousand Hills on Netflix (note: this was incorrectly coded as being in English, but it isn’t, so make sure you’re using subtitles; disregard if Netflix has corrected the error). It’s a Zulu lesbian romance, and it happens to have the most tactful traditional healer scene I have ever seen in a movie. Fair warning: the movie covers a lot of heavy topics.

I had mixed feelings about the book Household Gods: Private Devotion in Ancient Greece and Rome because the author sometimes took a tone, but the book was overall a very inspiring and cozy read if I ignore those bits and pieces. I deeply enjoyed writing down some of the photographs’ item numbers and looking up a few of the devotional figurines from the collections. This statuette of Minerva was shown with a new sideways view in the book; the website image is not as striking, but still beautiful. This image of Salus/Hygieia is breathtaking.

The way that Tim Addey gathered together the Herakles myths so beautifully in his exegesis of them in The Seven Myths of the Soul’s overhauled second edition. That section was impressive and so uplifting.

“The Earth, through plate tectonics, builds and shapes the entirety of our sacred landscape, bringing forth and letting pass away series after series of natural temples and spatial resonances and relational matrices, and those of us who move and breathe upon her encounter these and weave them into our own cultures and transmissions as we interact with this malleable landscape,” a thought that occurred to me as I started wrestling with some questions in an essay that will end up on KALLISTI sooner or later. Or two essays, as I haven’t yet joined them together into a coherent, unified idea — merely causally. The observation I have shared here draws on Proclus’ discussion of Athene and Neith in his Timaeus commentary. A very Chladni plate vibe.