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Anxiety, Trying, and Other Alarms We Might Learn to Heed


What if we saw anxiety not as a condition, but as a useful alarm? First, we would invest less energy in striving to quash it. We would heed its warnings, but then, equally importantly, we would turn it off. Why is this such a hard thing to imagine? When an alarm goes off, it isContinue reading “Anxiety, Trying, and Other Alarms We Might Learn to Heed”

Routine, Another Cost of Efficiency


The ripples keep expanding from Krishnamurti’s insight into the way knowledge, especially psychological knowledge, locks us into routine responses that, as he put it, atrophy the brain. In my penultimate post, I speculated on how this could be a way to speak directly about a significant aspect of what’s led us to where we findContinue reading “Routine, Another Cost of Efficiency”

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 webContinue reading “Investing in Trust”

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 questionContinue reading “Too Much, too little”

“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 noContinue reading ““The truth for me…””

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 actualContinue reading “The Primacy of Attention”

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 hisContinue reading “Whiteness, a Community of Narcissists”

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….