Joyful Disillusionment

This last weekend was the WoodenBoat Show held at Mystic Seaport. This luckily is within an hour’s drive for me and by saving up it’s manageable to attend for the three days – with the help of a generously offered Press Pass. I’ll be writing about the experience on Boats for Difficult Times, but I

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.

How do we integrate in the face of bad faith?

This title is not rhetorical. How do we?

Where is the break with our past most apparent?

“Forever.” When I read this simple word no matter where, it gives me pause. There was a time when forever had a tangible solid ring. Today? No more. There are countless assumptions that were once seemingly reasonable, that ring hollow today. It is a symptom of the end of an era. In this situation the

After Comfort

We have resigned ourselves to accept that life’s purpose is to chase after comfort. This leaves us in a very uncomfortable position. We begin to prod and peer to see what might come after comfort…. Money, power, agreement, advantage; these all promise comfort. The key here is in promise. In our appetite for comfort we

Communication, driven by assumptions

We cannot connect or communicate intentionally without some assurance of common assumptions to buoy us through the effort. I find that through subtle hints – the sort of unintended communication that takes place whenever there is one organism perceiving another and “making sense” of what they see. Through these hints, if I feel the gap

All of our myths

It strikes me that today all of our publicly accepted myths are propped up and support profit, for someone, some entity, institution or other. As we fear the commodification of everything, everything, as can be found in the stories we turn to to give our lives meaning, has already been commodified. All the bluster that

On the Impossibility of Mediated Ritual

Attempting to watch a video of a recent gathering in Britain I was struck by this thought; that no actual ritual can survive passing through a mediated filtering intact. Not only will our understanding of it be broken, but any value it might have held risks being destroyed in the process. If we give it

Self Mastery, not Self Control

The title of this post is a nod at an earlier post, Mastery, not Control, in which I laid out a case for distinguishing between these two terms and showing the consequences related to each. In the end, that post did rely on distinguishing self-mastery from the will-to-control. This is still the case here, but

I’m not a Brand, are you?

Vague currents swirl about. I’m between things, in a weightless apogee of the summer solstice and its aftermath. I’m waiting for what’s coming to materialize, and for the ways to talk/write these changes will require. In the meantime, I’m struck by our push to turn ourselves into Brands. It’s curious that as I begin to

The Patholgies of Ego

The Spectacle keeps us contributing to “The Future.” “Stay and be entertained!” It cajoles. “Leave and be fearful!” It threatens. This cycle of abusive domination is evident in politics and throughout media-dominated culture. If we turn away we feel a loss. If we miss the latest developments we are afraid. Just as there is a

Complicity and Contingency

We live somewhere in tension between complicity and contingency. It’s not a linear polarity, this space. These are not categories with any sort of rough equivalency. Complicity is a state. We are within a relationship to the forces that seek to destroy. Some of these we are aware of, others are hidden from us, some