AncienTrails

Fall                                                                   Harvest Moon

Having purchased lilies and visited the light shop where I had a question about halogen bulbs, I returned home.  The lily sale at the main Bachman’s is at the extreme southern end of Minneapolis and far from our home here in the outer suburban ring well north of Minneapolis.

Picked up many interesting lilies, sticking roughly with the purple theme of our garden, though there are some yellows and whites mixed in for contrast. The martagons, which I wanted, were $22 a bulb, too precious for my taste this morning.

On the drive I continued listening to the Teaching Company’s Great Minds of the Eastern Intellectual Tradition course.  Taught by a professor from UNC, Grant Hardy, this has been, by far, the greatest number of thinkers of whom I had never heard.  It’s a course I’m going to have to listen to twice and follow up with some reading to begin to have even a faint idea of what’s going on.

To give you an idea, here’s a name I’d never heard, Muhammad Iqbal.  He’s considered the foremost Urdu language poet, but was also a philosopher and religious thinker.  In particular his The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam sounds like a very helpful contribution to the current turmoil in the Muslim world.  It was written in 1930 and is Iqbal’s attempt to rethink Islam in light of modernity.  According to Hardy, it’s highly recommended reading.