Joy lies beyond where disappointment hides…

The will to control is a hard habit to break. It finds places to hide away, working in secret. This shouldn’t be surprising, it is magical thinking after all! One place where I’ve found it hiding has been in an inclination to carry a grim cast of mind, a perpetually pessimistic outlook that seeks to

One more cross-post: Write without disappointment

A continuation, building on yesterday’s post, further meditations on writing. I’ve written about the role of disappointment in my own life and the way understanding this was the key to breaking free of anxiety. In a recent conversation on writing I was brought to the point of considering how an attitude with or without disappointment

Disappointment

* We push disappointment ahead of ourselves like a bulldozer scraping earth. * Whatever attracts us is held at arm’s length. Destroyed as it comes into reach. We seek to break from our disappointment. Instead, all is broken upon our desire. * We push disappointment ahead of ourselves like a bulldozer scraping earth. * Desire

Whiteness, a Community of Narcissists

This post was drafted in August of 2015. At the time I was concerned whether it was complete enough. Whether it said enough. On looking it over today I am struck by how this theme has continued to strike us day after day. And how little, outside of the works of James Baldwin and his

On Form

There’s a connection and relationship between the way we internalize honesty/deception and how we relate to form. Form is the means by which error is recognized and the means by which correctness is recognized. There are, it seems, two Muses: the Muse of Inspiration, who gives us inarticulate visions and desires, and the Muse of

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?

Political Theater

Policing the norms The dynamic in a dysfunctional family maintains itself through elaborate procedures that perpetuate their norm by maintaining a mythology that celebrates the systemic abuse that holds it together. The ongoing dramatizations of these myths maintain their power. Each member has a role to play. And, so long as we remain enthralled by

Contempt

Peeling away layers of Ego I found anger and disappointment blocking the way to compassion. There’s another block hiding beneath them, contempt. We see it all around us. This is a society choking on contempt. Every faction and group is held together by the contempt in which it holds the rest. The path to anger,

Violence

There is a pressure on every interaction we have. A push. Sometimes an impatience to get to a result. Sometimes a leeriness that we are being manipulated. Sometimes a form of disappointment in advance, an expectation that things will not go well. Taken together we might call the result anxiety. Meta-worry another cause to add

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

A Space for Community

Art, even more so than craft, cannot be contained by technique. If you think, “I know what I’m doing!” You’re either mistaken or you are killing whatever art you might have been capable of creating. Hampered your capacity to enter an involvement in an act of creation. An artist’s materials can be a useful medium

“Why Is It Important for You That History Have a Direction?”

This question is asked by John Michael Greer in a reply to a comment on his most recent post. He has been slogging through the log-jam of our cultural resistance to abandoning the bi-polar insistence that we are bound either to Heaven or Hell, Utopia or dystopia. That if we cannot have our heart’s desire