Plex: 5 June 2024

The Biweekly Plex Dispatch is an inter-community newspaper published by Collective Sense Commons on first and third Wednesdays of each month. Price per issue: 1 USD, or your choice of amount (even zero).

In This Issue

• Expanding Your Peripheral Vision (Peter Kaminski)
• Steps on a Journey of Waking Up, Gradually (George Pór)
• Thoughts About Food (Klaus Mager)
• Spring on the West Coast of Europe (Hank Kune)
• Around Town in San Rafael (Ken Homer)
• Winter 1989–Those Crazy Canadians and a Brush with Fame (Ken Homer)

Expanding Your Peripheral Vision

by Peter Kaminski

We’re still in the early stages of language-enabled AI, where big companies and individuals alike are experimenting and building new things.

I recommend watching a short demo by Marshall Kirkpatrick on a recent Open Global Mind Thursday call. Marshall demonstrates an AI-powered no-code tool he created, which takes some of his key takeaways from the day’s reading, and expands outward from them to “brainstorm” new connections, concepts, and ideas. Watch for both the tool itself, and for Marshall’s approach to developing the tool, using GPT-4o in Google Sheets to do cascading processing, without any programming.

He thinks of his tool as an “advisory historian,” and a tool for “bolstering our peripheral vision.” (The idea of “expand your peripheral vision” comes from Chapter 2 of April Rinne’s book, Flux: 8 Superpowers for Thriving in Constant Change.)

To see Marshall's demo, start at 0h 1m 47s in the 2024-05-23 OGM Call recording on YouTube.

Marshall discussed much more about current LLM tools and news a couple weeks before; for that, start at 0h 3m 19s in the 2024-05-09 OGM Call recording on YouTube.

Steps on a Journey of Waking Up, Gradually

Evolving questions for the focus of my contemplative meditation in the morning, 1970 to 2024

by George Pór

Who am I?

What God wants me to be, today?

How can I love myself better, today, if the self includes All My Relations?

How to live in the beyond, where there is no self, today?

How to relax into, observe, and enjoy the dance of the expanded self and no-self?

The last question is my current one.
Holding it lightly throughout the day helps me learn remarkable dance moves.
Someday, I may open a dance school… 

Condensation

I can put a lid on the omelet to prevent the top from remaining uncooked, which helps cook it more evenly and quickly. However, the steam taking off from the surface gets condensed under the lid, and the droplets fall back into the omelet, making it watery, which I don’t like.

In the “beyond” dimension, the self dissolves in the formless steam.
The condensation turns it back into form, into this body, this consciousness.
With the last out-breath, I will keep the lid off.

The body is the garden

From its Christian beginning through the many New Age-y self-development courses to today’s pop psychology the “body is my temple” mantra had its day under the sun, at least for me. I’ve been reciting it for decades, even taught it, but with a certain guilt because I never really lived up to its implications.

Thanks to my wife's loving care, we have a beautiful garden attached to our house. In it, we have a Medicine Wheel, a little pond where frogs live, birds, squirrels, and the occasional fox come to drink. There are also many fragrant and medicinal plants, strawberry and other berry bushes, and pear, apple, and cherry trees. Near the pond, there’s a bench, where our meditation can be nurtured by the scent of the honeysuckle on the trellis.

Before we moved into this house 8 years ago, the terrain was abandoned and covered with thick overgrowth. We are planning to move to another town, and I am having a hard time saying goodbye to this garden. Then I realize it is not our garden; it doesn’t belong to us; we were merely caretakers of this piece of land and we hope that the next one will take as good care of it as we did. 

The condensation that appears to be my body is the form that the formless steam inhabits temporarily. When I’ll move on, the formless will release its hold on the world of forms, just as we might leave our beloved garden for someone else to tend.

Thoughts About Food

by Klaus Mager

While there is general awareness of climate events and conflict zones around the world, missed in the media is a focus on the impact that has on the food supply. It may be a surprise to learn that the US has become a net importer of food.

Klaus has written a compelling article that delves into the often overlooked impact of climate events and geopolitical conflicts on the global food supply. Continue reading:

Thoughts About Food (Google Docs)

Spring on the West Coast of Europe

Photos by Hank Kune

In the dance of water and wind, sun and sea, clouds and cliff-edges, there are so many things that sing.

It’s in the singing of colors that West Mayo knows spring.

Around Town in San Rafael

by Ken Homer

Winter 1989–Those Crazy Canadians and a Brush with Fame

by Ken Homer

In 1989 I was working for Pixelogic
A third-party manufacturer for Apple 
We made the first video digitizer for the Mac
I was the National Sales Manager 
I landed a plum assignment as part of an Apple Road Show
25 vendors would travel across Canada for six weeks from February to April 
We visited: Quebec City • Montreal • Ottawa • Toronto • Edmonton • Vancouver

It was a young and crazy crowd of wild 
rowdy and hard-partying Canadians 
I was one of a handful of Yanks along for the ride
There was woman on the trip who lived in my town 
she worked for Adobe and was super talented
I’ve forgotten her name but I remember she
had dark eyes and eyelashes but half of her
left eye had blond eyelashes–not dyed
It was a striking look that suited her artsy personality
I was in awe of what she could do with Illustrator

Among the fond memories I have of that time
was when Apple chartered an L-1011 widebody jet
that flew us from Toronto to Edmonton
We were only about 50 souls on this huge plane
we had the run of the whole thing from first class
to the galley at the tail of the plane
There was lot of drinking and partying going on
The flight attendants were saints to put up
with the foolishness that we unleashed upon them

We landed at about 2:00AM in a deserted airport
Several of the guys got on the luggage conveyor
and rode if through the plastic dividers until they 
came back out on the other side
Others were conducting an elaborate ballet with the luggage carts
The lone security guard shook his head and went out for a smoke
This was before 9/11 when things were more relaxed

I met a wonderful woman and fell in love on that trip
Her name as Pascale and she was from Paris
I had noticed her right away but it wasn’t til
we arrived in Edmonton and a bunch of us went out dancing
that we really connected with each other
Someone had a joint and few of us stepped outside to smoke it
When we came back Pascale and I started dancing
we danced together for at least an hour not speaking words
but our bodies were having the most fantastic conversation!

Pascale lived in Montreal and I near Boston
I drove to Montreal every weekend for five months 
as we got deeper and deeper into our relationship
Then she took a job on an organic farm in British Columbia
As so often happens with long distance relationships
we couldn’t sustain our love without regular visits
But that’s not the story I want to tell here

When we arrived in Vancouver my friend with the eyelashes
told us that two friends of hers were playing at a club
She said they were on their way up and would be big stars soon
About six of us accepted her invitation to go to a club
I approached the concierge at the hotel to inquire
if it was safe to walk the mile and half to the club
Safe? He looked at me as though I were an alien species
Are there any dangerous neighborhoods to traverse?
Ah, right, you’re from the states (so, I was an alien species!)
I assure you that in Vancouver it’s safe to walk anywhere
I hope this is still true 35 years later…

We all set out and arrived at a club that could probably seat 150 people
But there were only about 15 other people besides our group
The lights went down and two women took the stage
They played their guitars so hard that they kept breaking strings
I was really caught up in their lyrics and the quality of their singing
their playing and their songwriting–they were ridiculously talented 
Thanks to Ms Eyelashes they sent drinks to our table
Then they came over and chatted with us between sets
We were all effusive with our praise which they accepted graciously
They were from Atlanta and had lovely accents 
We all enjoyed talking with them and listening to them
little did we know that just few months later 
These women would be selling out stadiums
Their names were Amy and Emily now known to millions as The Indigo Girls

Ken Homer • March 2024

Thank you for reading! The next edition will be published on 19 June 2024. Email Pete with suggested submissions.

Grateful appreciation and many thanks to Charles Blass, Ken Homer, Hank Kune, Klaus Mager, and George Pór for their kind contributions to this issue.