Extravagance

The theme for today is Extravagance

Exploring, wandering around, if you will,
in ideas of a certain dimension of human action and freedom.

This theme is, when we are alert,
another guise for last week's theme of Finitude:
an exploration of limits

that make us who we are
or that we accept without awareness
or without resistance

or perhaps
resist without awareness

Sometimes it seems as though western philosophy
at least the implicit, habitual, average of it
wants you to live in a static and silent world
losing much of life's dynamism

by asking you to choose sides
to speak now or forever hold your peace
conceptually speaking.

What we might call a taoist way of understanding
sees whole phenomena
with their seeming opposites
working together and ever changing.

Tai Chi Chuan,
a physical embodiment of tao principles
knows things can be entered through their opposites

if you want to go left, first go right
if you want to go up, first go down

if you want to go forward and take a step
first you must sink into the earth

the more so, the more powerful you want the step to be.

In terms of human freedom,
the "fasting of the heart" story of Chuang Tzu
in which a man needed to act,
free of a rather thorough and powerful tyrant

is not a collapse into limits
but a preparation for freedom of action.

Do limits come from "inside" or "outside"?
Who knows!

We hold ourselves in place,
discipline ourselves to "appropriate" action,
feel oppressed by circumstances,

or sheltered by them.

Let's consider another relationship to limits
through the imaginative gateway
of the word Extravagance.

We can tap into the collective unconscious
and the cultural time machine,

and see some meanings
people have wanted to associate
with the word Extravagance

Extra:  going out from, out of

Vague:  wandering around, outside well-defined limits
a person whose life is defined by this
is called a vagrant,
a wanderer.

Notice we're cautious, maybe suspicious
and have the impulse a little more control and discipline might be needed
for such an outsider

in later times, the word also took a connotation of waste
we're so, normally, parsimonious

and often for good reason

and can't quite imagine how this could fit into sensible human behavior
or the penny-pinching, cost-watching version
of evolutionary theories of nature.

But there are times for extravagance
in nature and in human affairs.
The profusion of spring and the bounty of the fall seasons.

What are some conditions surrounding human extravagance?

The word-time-machine is revealing.
It tells us, the word came from a latin term
meaning "to wander outside or beyond"

Describing "a non-codified decree of the Pope".

This is interesting, that in public life
extravagance was a creation of authority
not only of a political nature
but a spiritual authority

and that a "decree" was needed to give it force:

a declaration of intent
to overcome the status quo
of parsimony
and well-defined, codified, duty-bound or productive activities.

I might mention the critique some people have
that mindfulness meditation is employed
in service of this fix-it attitude and the productive ethos behind it.

Getting back to the theme of human freedom
and the modern idea of autonomy, or rather agency
as self-authorization

One may notice a necessary spiritual act behind it
the "decree"

and get a sense also of the out-of-bounds nature of the act
and the risks that come along with it.
__ __

Where do you have "extravagance" in your life?

It could be big or small,
your action or someone else's, if it touched you

something in your life now, in the past
or in the future
that your inner spiritual author imagines

Something you released from bounds and expectations
released it to travel,
to wander in undefined territory

that comes back, seemingly __on its own__
with an emergent glow
and more significance and value than you put into it
when you created it
with an engineer's or banker's mind

as an experience, an action
extravagance is not an investment
on faith of return

It is direct, immediate --
feels a certain way in one's heart and limbs,
or brings a look to the eyes and face.

Even as it starts out subtly
and comes to fullness over the natural span of its expression

it carries a spirit of freedom with it
even as you go on with the normals of daily life
chopping wood and carrying water, as they say.

How can extravagance be seen in your life?

An extravagant project?
An extravagant gift?

A extravagant smile?

How do you embody Extravagance?