Laura Gyre

You think understanding 'one' you understand 'two', because one and one make two.
But you must also understand 'and'.

- #Rumi

I came to Minneapolis to report on what's going on, and one of the main questions I showed up with is "just what is the scale of the resistance?" After all, we're all used to the news calling Portland a "war zone" or whatever when it's just some protests in one part of town.

Do you know things about the races? Because I don't.

Sketch your mind Conference promo with photo of me, description and time Thursday October 16 12PM PT

Pleased to be participating in the Sketch Your Mind virtual Conference! Lots of cool folks sharing their approaches to visual thinking - should be exciting & generative! My talk is Thursday October 16 at 12pm PT (I’ll share process…). Site & free registration sketch-your-mind.com/2025/session...

So, I guess Bluesky gets this post also: I'm going to do The Artist's Way again. It's been 20 years or so and I've been feeling pretty uninspired. Maybe I'll Substack about it? But I'm trying not to get ahead of myself, so I'll start with just buying a notebook.

Good news: there's a reasonable wooden floor under my disgusting carpet. Bad news: went to post this on Instagram only to find that Instagram is now 100% Tiktok, which I regret because I liked following artists and seeing pictures of my friends' lives.

I would also like to watch a postapocalyptic sci-fi thing where the majority of it is about stuff like people trying to figure out how to make cheese without using the internet, so possibly related.

I would like to watch a fantasy ethnographic cooking show where you get a list of unlimited ingredients and maybe one or two random constraints like having to use a certain cooking method or rules about how certain ingredients can be used and you have to invent a whole harmonious type of cuisine.

“How am i supposed to feel joy when the world around me is being destroyed?” 🐿️ “However you can.” 💚

#comic #animalart #joy

Gene Variants Linked to Autism May Have Been Positively Selected For

Why is there so much more autism now than there was in the past? Probably v̶a̶c̶c̶i̶n̶e̶s̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶t̶o̶x̶i̶n̶s̶ changing definitions and testing protocols, but also on a longer scale "gene variants linked to autism [and cognitive ability] may have been positively selected for." Thanks for that, science.

I refuse to use chatgpt when I´m researching my podcast. It´s very difficult to enter a curiosity rabbit hole with ai. A.i will give you specic answers and present a dead end. When I offload my curiosity like that, I don´t get the brain tingles that invoke lateral thinking

#JAMESHILLMAN ON AUTHORS AS PARENTS, INITIATIONS AND ANCESTORS

"Books too can be mentors, even providing a moment of initiation. #RDLaing, writer, philosopher, and revolutionary psychiatrist, tells of this discovery in a small public library, while he was still an adolescent in the 1940s.

Wealth, shown to scale Wealth inequality in the United States is out of control. Here we visualize the issue in a unique way.

This is the most disturbing one I’ve seen today…maybe more of an “interactive infographic”

mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-weal...

Looking at maps and data about the modern world, we can forget everything is dictated and shaped by the past. From ancient continents to terrible atrocities, our world is a product of history, and understanding that past can be key to helping us better understand the present.
-🌟🗝️

This is the score to my piece ‘Falling Water’ based on Frank Lloyd Wright’s masterpiece - one of my favourite places in the world
Listen here if you like - recorded in Abbey Road Studios
#Composition #Architecture #Music #Graphics

https://buff.ly/3OxBl4s

If it were not for the Poetic or Prophetic Character, the Philosophic and Experimental would soon be at the Ratio of all things; and stand still, unable to do other than repeat the same dull round over again.

- #WilliamBlake, 'There Is No Natural Religion'

Thanksgiving. Thursday is sacred to Thor, known for smashing shit, as you may be inclined to do with the dinnerware this evening.

It could have been Wednesday, sacred to Odin. Easier on the plates, but much weirder.

Thor says go for it; it's not your fault. The walls need repainting, anyway.

13. </repost> Hi Bluesky! Sharing this old thread because it's a pretty good summary of what I think about. Looking forward to new conversations about metaphor, analogical and visual thinking, history, tarot, #Hellenism, #Sufism, #intuition, brains,
#neurodivergence, and what magic actually is.

12. Addendum: these chains of transmission matter not just for historical reasons, but because of how analogical thinking works. It's the opposite of what you can fully describe in words, but you can encounter and absorb it in context, and these are some good places to look, IMO.

11. Additional highly recommended reading: Ensouling Language by Stephen Harrod Buhner, Nietzsche's essay On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense, Owen Barfield, Tom Cheetham, #Philosophy in the Flesh by Lakoff and Johnson, Reality by Peter Kingsley, and Plato's Seventh Letter

10. And! Curiously, a lot of these #imaginal threads seem to have rejoined somewhat in contemporary psychology, from Freud's possibly background in Jewish mysticism to Jung's alchemical influences. There is certainly more talk about the power of #metaphor than almost anywhere else

9. Since the renaissance, analogical thinking has fallen out of favor in a lot of academic contexts, but it persists powerfully in a variety of occult traditions. Also, of course, while there's not as much meta-thinking about it, all the arts are excellent practice.

Tarot tangent: Robert Place's introduction to this idea is good, as it Meditations on the Tarot. MOT was written in the mid-1900s by an anonymous Christian Esotericist, and places a huge emphasis on the magical power of analogical thinking and tarot as a tool to practice it.

8. By the renaissance, there's greater evidence of a #Platonic emphasis on visual thinking in European culture. Memory palaces are a great example (Bruno was a hermeticist, in a roughly alchemical tradition) as is the #tarot, which has tons of directly Platonist symbolism.

7. Moorish Spain, where Christian alchemists, qabalists and Sufis rubbed shoulders was a hotbed of analogical thinking. Some related cultural trends also made their way back into Europe via the crusades/troubadors/etc. during the later middle ages.

6. Simultaneously, #Sufi thinkers and others in the Muslim world were studying Aristotle and other #Platonists (I'm with Gerson, as well as the Neoplatonists, on this), to a degree that was unheard of in Europe. You can clearly see the emphasis on visual thinking in Sufi literature.

5. Augustine was an important figure in bringing #Platonic thought and imagery into a Christian context, where it stayed for many years. I need to read more about this, there is a big gap in my knowledge here...but, basically, much of it evolved into #alchemy.

4. Plotinus traces an emphasis on #visualthinking to Egypt and heiroglyphic writing. The Book Ideas Into Images has some interesting work on how imagery may have operated in Egyptian thought, and Orpheus and the Roots of #Platonism also gets into how these traditions connect.

What Aristotle Knew About Metaphor and Paradox “The greatest thing by far is to have a command of metaphor. This alone cannot be imparted by another; it is the mark of genius, for to…

3. Aristotle gives a pretty great discursive account of the state of the study of metaphor at his time, including some insights into the power of metaphorical thinking that feel pretty contemporary to me. I wrote a paper about this: medium.com/p/a452b22a13ed

2. It's the history and theory of that concept (analogical thinking) that I'm mainly interested in, though of course just because we have no record of it before that time doesn't mean no one was doing great work _with_ analogical thinking.