I think there's a good case for antinatalism. Stephen Hawking has told us recently that we must colonise space to survive, not long after telling us to beware of aliens because they'll probably just do to us as the conquistadors did to the native peoples of the Americas. So . . . exactly why do we want to go on and on, to go forth and multiply in a hostile final frontier? Why?

[My muse] is, in fact, a woman of the world, and precisely because of this, hopes that a diversity of cultures will endure, and that one bland monoculture does not swamp everything.

If you look at the ox-herding pictures - specifically the newer set of ten pictures rather than the older set of eight - you see that after the blank circle of the void, the cycle comes back to a river flowing by the roots of a tree (both strong symbols of nature, the life-force, the unconscious) and to the wanderer returning to the market place, which is the realm of human society and activity.

Non-pantheist models for god seem almost completely untenable to me, though not without interest.

Zen is influenced by Daoism, which is not so much a nature-religion in the animistic sense as a nature-philosophy in a cosmic sense.

She [me muse] feels most at home in autumn, nonetheless, she is glad of the other seasons and loves them all. Without the others she would be unable to feel most at home in autumn, besides which, she almost feels most at home in all of them.

I was in just the right generation to have taken feminism seriously by osmosis - also the generation when the breakdown of the family really began and for whom The Smiths were something new and essential.