Stop Counting

In dreams we approach a form of knowing that we find difficult to access while awake. We tend to discount the sensation that there was “something to it.” Or, we displace our fascination within the dream in a vain attempt to narrate its dramatic particulars. As this fails to match our original wonder, as we

Accounting

Externalities. The term has been hidden within Economics since the beginning of its study of human endeavor and its look for potential ways to measure our activities. It’s been there since the first human error in judgment, the first break with the world of pure instinct, our first attempts to outsmart the balanced books that were our pre-human inheritance. The behavior was there, but until a profession created a meretricious term for it; giving these blunders a safe place to hide on our balance sheets, we were ashamed, or at least embarrassed by these holes in our understanding of how our accounts broke down.

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?

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. –

Uncertainty and Cause & Effect

There’s something tickling out there at the confluence of our refusal to accept uncertainty and our belief in cause & effect. Even here, as I ponder these two concepts, I’m falling into the expectation that relation equals cause. I was about to say that we refuse uncertainty – vehemently, violently, with suicidal insistence – because

It’s Religion

In a recent post John Michael Greer has continued to bring to light how a religious impulse underlies the current governmental crises. Not as the superficial coverage narrates a battle between conservatives and progressives, but how all these contending forces share in the overall religion of Progress. Reason with a capital R, as much as Fundamentalism,

Sufficiency without number

Sufficiency is an attitude not a quantity. Chasing after desires we have lost any sense that happiness can be anything other than a list checked off. Pursuit. Nothing could be more destabilizing. Either for an individual or a culture. And, before we get caught up in some form of zealotry…. Yes, the desire to control

Relationship, not Integers

As much as I avoid it, there can be something to be gained by listening to public radio once in a while. On a long drive over the holiday I heard a piece on studies being done analyzing the differences between an innate logarithmic sense of quantity and rational, integer-based counting. A French developmental psychologist

Measure

Confronted with a recalcitrant reality we all want to measure. In measuring we seek control. In the evidence of the failed metrics of others who came before us we see a challenge to do better. Our method will work! How? The issue is in scaling, a matter we are confronting on all sides as we

Rivers of Blood

Listening to much of the conversation between Paul Kingsnorth, Leire Keith, and David Abram in this podcast from Orion Magazine, I am left with a snippet, I’ve used as a title for this post. Rivers of Blood. I must admit, I can only intuit the context. After listening to most of the first half, I

Are We Lacking Information?

Doing the Web 2.0 Dance, checking up on feeds, following links, keeping up with Twitter…. Scanning, scanning, what are we really looking for? Back in the old days – as recently as about ten years ago? – information was rather hard to find. We had to ferret it out, spend time with original sources, either

Craft’s Collision with Civilization, a starting point

Andrew Taggart recently asked me to clarify how I see the deterioration and loss of Craft resulting from its confrontation with civilization. This is a big question! Let’s begin with a few definitions. I’m beginning to see Craft as a central focal point in examining how our confrontation with civilization has led us to where