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

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 question

A Painting Is a Presence

A painting is a presence. Not that it has presence, though it does. We’re talking about good paintings, real paintings; whatever any of that might mean, in them presence is an essential quality. Maybe quality isn’t the right word…. Is a being reducible to its qualities? Is presence something beyond quality as well as number?

“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

Musing on Medusa, Reflections on the Gorgon’s Head

Those of us who fear chaos, through our efforts to control chaos, bring about more chaos, a more virulent chaos, a more violent chaos.

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 actual

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 his

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….

On Reflection… part 1

David Bohm and Jiddu Krishnamurti were right in posing that the incoherence of thought is our greatest challenge. Some thirty years later the burning question is; why has their legacy not borne fruit? What did they miss? What’s gone wrong?

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.

Twists and turns…

…the story of a man who inadvertently got into the role of himself. He saw it as a mistake. That is what people say who fall into a hole. “Hell and damnation, I have fallen into a trap and the trap is myself.” They always treat themselves as the greatest mistakes ever made. Carl Jung,