Craft and Technique

An aspect of Craft and Strength is the discipline with which their practices demand and develop our abilities to relate to and use Technique and Power without driving us to succumb to their degrading effects.

Learning how to see

If we have relatively good eyesight it’s easy to think that’s all we need, “I know how to see! Just open my eyes and look!” One of the first lessons from learning to draw and paint was that I had no idea what was involved in seeing. Not just that I was lacking techniques useful

It’s not your/their urgency…, it’s mine…

That is the problem. We don’t know what works. We DO know what doesn’t. The whole chasing-after-control-by-wielding-power-thing. Call it civilization. Call it whatever you want. From this abstraction; taken from a moment of survival when wielding strength brings us another chance: to eat, to be left in peace, to protect someone we care about; we

Intelligence

Tossing the Die One thing coming into view is that intelligence is not…. I began to write in earnest when I discovered – not that what I had to say was hard to say – but that I needed to work at…. For me, language is a freedom. As soon as you have found the

Separation Anxiety

We’re expected to, “Get over it!” In a time with few acknowledged initiation rituals this traumatic breaking of unity is almost universally accepted as a rite-of-passage. Why does separation – let’s consider it in any and every form it can take. Why does it create anxiety? What does this say more generally about the violence,

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

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

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

“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

“A Man in a Boat”

The image of a man in a boat in Buddhist iconography represents the combination of name and form. As Alan Watts described it, words bring out shapes. It seems to me this is a description of meaning. It relates, I cannot help but think, to neo-Platonism and the establishment of Christian Dogma. During the first

Measure

Confronted with a recalcitrant reality we all want to measure. In measuring we seek control. In the evidence of the failed metrics of others who came before us we see a challenge to do better. Our method will work! How? The issue is in scaling, a matter we are confronting on all sides as we

Conclusions

Dialogue is an opportunity to proceed as climbers do. We are tied together and are able to alternately anchor each other as we move into precarious territory. We can rely on each other to warn us of dangers beyond our own views. Within dialogue we can go where it is impossible to go any other