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How interesting!

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I love semicolons and sometimes worry that I use too many of them; perhaps I can send some of the excess to you?

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That sounds like the start of a great crypto project ;)

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YES! Incredible joy at the return of away message, a part of my Sunday tradition now along with coffee and a walk around the Ridgewood Resevoir.

Thinking about "We are reborn in hard times, gooey and everything. But not as new people—as who we were as kids": reminded me of Buber, his way of making a relationship between our highly associative state as children and the (spiritual? primary?) need to experience the maturing of this state as adults (neither just return, nor forget entirely) that I thought I'd throw in here for some food for thought for a future away message...excerpt from I and Thou:

"The prenatal life of the child is a pure natural association, a flowing toward each other, a bodily reciprocity; and the life horizon of the developing being appears uniquely inscribed, and yet also not inscribed, in that of the being that carries it; for the womb in which it dwells is not solely that of the human mother. This association is so cosmic that it seems like the imperfect deciphering of a primeval inscription when we are told in the language of Jewish myth that in his mother's womb man knows the universe and forgets it at birth. And as the secret image of a wish, this association remains to us.

But this longing ought not to be taken for a craving to go back, as those suppose who consider the spirit, which they confound with their own intellect, a parasite of nature. For the spirit is nature's blossom, albeit exposed to many diseases. What this longing aims for is the cosmic association of the being that has burst into spirit with its true You. Every developing human child rests, like all developing beings, in the womb of the great mother-the undifferentiated, not yet formed primal world... But this detachment is not sudden and catastrophic like that from the bodily mother. The human child is granted some time to exchange the natural association with the world that is slipping away for a spiritual association-a relationship...

From the glowing darkness of the chaos he has stepped into the cool and light creation without immediately possessing it"

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I feel like your description is better than his! But he and I both reference the gooeyness of the womb so thank you for that connection. But I really don't get his point in the second paragraph. I don't understand - he says we do not want to go back? We want to become the True Self? I dont understand - The human child is granted some time to exchange the natural association with the world that is slipping away for a spiritual association-a relationship...

From the glowing darkness of the chaos he has stepped into the cool and light creation without immediately possessing it"

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