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….

Drowning in facts

You might say we’re drowning in facts. We have enough information before us to come to valuable conclusions concerning how we’re trapped in a vicious dynamic that can have no happy outcome. A dozen times a day we can realize how a particular institution or corporation is acting to further destruction. And…? We click on

The Space We Need

Art school was where I learned that success was a trap. How limited my teachers were. Experts. Hemmed in by reduction. It would take thirty-five years for this to sink in. Not surprising if you consider the trajectory of the intervening decades, beginning with the height of their positions at the time. The accumulated authority

Chasing Coherence

What if we remain incoherent when we seek to establish a coherent state? State, a powerful term, one with many resonances. None of them too good…. A coherent condition?

New Stories to counter the Thaumaturgy of Destruction

…every malign spell has a lie at the heart of it, and if you can expose the lie in a way that the person under the spell can see and understand, the lie dissolves and takes the spell with it. It’s like the old claim that a demon can never change itself wholly out of

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

Coherence is not reasonable.

This statement demands clarification. Coherence it is not a synonym for reason, reasoned, reasonable. Neither is incoherence: unreason, unreasonable, unreasoned. The key to understanding coherence lies at the root of these distinctions. I’ve found this talk given by Anthony McCann valuable in illuminating this distinction. Anthony uses language centered around what he calls Gentleness. His

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

Being Stuck

Déjà Vu is a common experience for those stuck in abusive situations. We find that the current crisis looks much like the last. No amount of feigned surprise, or pronounced insistence from the abusers that, “This time is different!” can shake the feeling we’ve been here before. And, most likely, we’ll be here again. If we

History

I’ve long had a sense that the story of the Twentieth Century is hidden behind the stories that century’s victors told about themselves. World Wars, I and II, were not what they appeared. Actually, they were more what they appear to be and less what was so shrilly repeated about them in an attempt to

Contamination

Our progress today is more of a process of disillusion. We are confronted, assaulted, by evidence of the enormity of what is taking place. We react in various ways. Sometimes we strive to deny what is going on. We distance our selves from awareness at the risk of numbing in-attentiveness. Sometimes we buckle under the

“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