The Price of Ease

What if what we’re intuitively motivated to avoid were futility, not the absence of ease?

A Sea Change

Since starting this blog in July 2009 I’ve posted 436 essays for a total of well over 500,000 words. Over the past year and a half the frequency of posting has dropped off. While this is not an announcement of an end to this blog I do find it’s time to let you all know

Investing in Trust

Investment is generally taken to mean following a strategy that allows us to siphon off value. A way of taking value from a living system and turning it into a quantity of abstract financial counters that we can then hold so as to use these at will to gain advantage. We strip a living web

Too Much, too little

I keep running into a single question whenever I consider what might be done. I must admit the question is holographic, its form mirrors its content. It is at once achingly simple and bewilderingly complex. Evidence of its necessity surrounds us and at the same time this question never seems to arise. It’s a question

“The truth for me…”

“The Truth for me must be what I need it to be.” David Bohm describing the justifications of Ego. Whenever we allow our language to atrophy – as we do when we rely on labels to stand-in for complexities – we arrive at a paradox: We feel the need to be concise. We fear no

Musing on Medusa, Reflections on the Gorgon’s Head

Those of us who fear chaos, through our efforts to control chaos, bring about more chaos, a more virulent chaos, a more violent chaos.

The Primacy of Attention

Fear makes you stupid. Fear swamps intelligence. Fear takes us out of Being. We resort to strategies in an effort to re-establish certainty. Fear drives us to reject what-is in favor of any expedient that feels as if it will deflate our fear. We lose track of whatever may have initiated fear, whether an actual

On Reflection… part 2

There have been times when it has seemed appropriate to appeal to the metaphor of a snake shedding its skin. This last year brings to mind a different serpentine behavior, stupor induced by the effort to digest an enormous meal. An Anaconda at these times can be mistaken for a fallen tree trunk….

“Let’s be realistic!”

We feel the weight of this admonition upon us everywhere we turn. It stands like a wall between us and it echoes in our minds. We take it as a warning. In fact it is our prison.

Navigating Quality

We’re inundated with arguments and counterarguments over what are considered facts and counter-facts. There is a scramble to create ever-larger data-farms to handle…, well, all the data. There’s also been a curious turn of phrase used by one buffoon, George Will to describe another, Donald Trump. Will has claimed that “Trump doesn’t know how to

On Isolation

Isolation. I wrote about it here. * Lewis Lapham has had a seminal influence on me. he’s always been a writer pursuing what lies beyond the superficial. I read Harper’s religiously when I was young, amazed at how anyone could see so clearly, write so well…. His recent remarks remind us of the birth of

“Relax! Take it easy.”

We hear this often enough. These days it probably sounds like good advice. Yet behind it is a troubling assumption. One that touches on how we keep running in circles, returning to the same traps again and again. We confuse ease with relaxation. What does it mean to be relaxed?