What is at the root of our crisis of leadership?

We expect a leader to “play the part.” Anyone caught-up in roles has nothing to offer us in our predicament. Facing our predicament requires that we embrace uncertainty and set-aside the doing-things-twice role playing forces upon us. Someone acting in this way just does not, “Look like a leader.”

What is missing…

The change of the seasons is so powerful…. It is disorienting…. We tend to view this as a collapse of whatever momentum we had developed over the months spent within a circle of similarity that allows us to feel a kind of certainty building. Yes, even for those of us talking endlessly about the pitfalls of

“What IS the problem?”

The title comes from a comment made to a recent post. The “answer” seemed too glib, unfair actually, to throw the question back by responding that the problem is our habit of looking at everything as if it were a problem needing to be solved. But this is true. It could be useful to say

What is

Listening to, or reading Krishnamurti, as he gives a talk, has been something I’ve had to ease myself into. It’s funny, the same has been true of David Bohm, of John Berger, of David Abram – my first reading of the Dark Mountain Manifesto! There is a floodgate of excitement that threatens to over power

What is innocence?

It seems we consider innocence to be a state of ignorance, held at no fault of our own, in which we are not acting out a power-play, or negotiating within the bounds of a power struggle; but acting out of a clean regard. We consider innocence to be an immature quality, but one we look

What does it mean?

Tying our existence to a belief in destruction as the ultimate good is such a contorted position to be in! How we got here, what it means, where it will all lead; these are also questions whose answers appear in glimmers and hints, passing doubts, premonitions and inklings of what is down there, at least as it all appears from “up here.”

Nuclear Jitters

Do any of us show any glimmer of intuitive self-preservation? Do we feel the slightest twinge of shame at what is being done in our name? Our betters, our owners, will spread the word via their organs of propaganda, “That’s just nuclear jitters!”

Double Binds

In a life of double-binds there are no useful “answers,” because every way “out” leads to another barrier. We are shocked by this. We spend all of our energies trying to avoid this truth. We will do anything to get out. At some point, if we’re lucky, we come to realize there is no way out, but death or insanity. The choice then narrows to a decision to succumb or accept what is.

Beginner’s Mind

Maybe there is a simple way to state this difference? These toxic dynamics pit the will-to-control against life’s uncertainty. In the name of “eradicating” uncertainty they permit an escalating violence against all life. They act out a systematic program with an ever-widening scope of destruction “in our name.” They are locked within an Ego delusion of accelerating urgency to provide permission for their ill-considered but overly elaborated “plans.” What is missing, what is aggressively stripped from their equations, is any genuine compassion.

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

“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