Realms. How we position.

“How we position.” Seems to call for an object, “What?” before we can get into wondering about “how;” or even, who “we” are; we want to know what.

Lies

We fall for lies because we want to be told what can’t possibly be true. This formulation came to me recently. Shouldn’t be much of a surprise why lies might come into focus these days….

So much that is irrelevant…

How do we move beyond rebellion? Implicit in this question – if it is to be anything but futile – is another, How do we keep from cycling back around? Only to end up that much further down the same barren path?

Tangible

Reaching after whatever strands of connection may pass though this virtual medium’s cables; we are reminded, yet again, just how limited it all is. The promise of instant, frictionless connectivity across any distance in the blink of an eye looks thinner and thinner with each passing day. Some wonderful connections have been made this way; but

A Gathering

“The more you walk this road, the farther you are from the ordinary ways of society. You may see the truth, but you will find that people would rather listen to politicians, performers, and charlatans.” -Deng Ming-Dao * I’m struck by the difficulty we have sticking to the basics. Continually struck by our insistence on

The Quietest Voices

Ideas pull on us. They work to turn our perception in particular directions. We are compelled to make-sense in only a few ways. Ideas, call them voices, are insistent, demanding. They drown out any other response. Instead, let us listen to the quietest voices. –

Compassion is Attention

Attention is Compassion One of the first things we encounter on beginning some form of meditation, any way for us to empty out the rush of unbidden thought and pause to see what might lie behind it all, is the question of compassion. Does this come directly from our confrontation with attention in and of

Awe and Wonder

It’s customary to link awe with shock these days. “Shock & Awe!” Followed by that grimacing grin primates and dogs instinctively make when something that pleases them also uncovers a deep well of shame. The look we came to identify with W…. Shock & Awe would come to be the signature spell of the late

A Monopoly on Violence

This is the term of art used to describe and justify government’s control of military and police functions. There is an obviousness, an inevitability to the rationale behind it that leads from, “There are bad-guys.” to “We need to defend ourselves against evil-doers.” to “Stop! Or I’ll shoot!” And, then we accept the entire package,

Falling Awake

We say, we “fall asleep.” We imagine a vertiginous scene, leaning over a precipice. Just a moment’s loss of attention, and over we go. We see this as a kind of death. A conflation of self-consciousness with life? There is an expectation that attention and reflexive self-awareness are identical, or at least that we cannot

The Proprioception of Power

Finding what needs to be said is a challenge. In large part it requires letting go of reacting to things and getting caught-up in complaining. Chasing disappointment… It requires allowing the force of what is not being said to make itself felt. This is a combination of internal listening with sampling what comes to us

Ideological Justification

In recent decades, American politics has been dominated, at least rhetorically, by a battle over the size of government. But that is not what the next few decades of our politics will be about. With the frontiers of the state roughly fixed, the issues that will define our major debates will concern the complexity of