A Web of Obligations

We tie ourselves within a web of obligations, forgetting that while these so-called acts of responsibility are meant to help us fulfill our lives, they actually keep us from it. What struck me was the way we handle the mid-term. It’s not just in the short-term that we do everything twice. In the mid-term, in

“Process” may not be the right word for this…

We are accustomed to thinking that what we do involves processes. Let’s stop right there and unpack that statement. “Accustomed” is another term for conditioned. “Thinking…” well, there we go…. So, by the time we get to “process” we’re already in suspicious territory! What led to this question was a mediation on creativity and its

Notes

Genetic Engineering is Creationism’s Doppelganger. Neither trusts that what is does not need, is in fact gravely harmed by, attempts to control it. One does this directly. The other displaces the power onto their Ego’s reflection in a projected sky-god. Abuse, violence, are features, not bugs. They underlie and best express what we strive after.

Relationship, not Integers

As much as I avoid it, there can be something to be gained by listening to public radio once in a while. On a long drive over the holiday I heard a piece on studies being done analyzing the differences between an innate logarithmic sense of quantity and rational, integer-based counting. A French developmental psychologist

Vital Vulnerability

I kid you not! I don’t “make this stuff up!” It occurs to me. That means, as I write, something comes to mind. This is a participation in an act of creation. It is not a commanding or an ownership of creativity. So, as words come into awareness, by writing them down, I can capture

Isaac Newton Wasn’t a Newtonian, Socrates wasn’t Plato…

Perhaps a little one, as insights go, the title of this post came to me last week. I’ve long railed at the power of a reductivist, Newtonian world view that has given those who see the world as a series of problems to be solved the tools, from ballistics to The Calculus, to run down

An extended reply…

John Cline commented on the last post, Coherence is Provisional: I really like what you are saying. I wonder, though, what would happen to human personality if this model of thinking was the norm. We are mostly tribal in our actions. We gravitate too easily toward charismatics, and like lemmings will follow a bad idea

Coherence is Provisional

Ideology works through the process of consensus. Someone’s ideas gain followers and a movement is born to support these ideals and find ways to garner wider support; either through negotiated agreement or through some form of overt or covert coercion. Some movements gain broad support. Others limp along, held in high regard by a few

The Forge of Language

Sometimes writing is an act of excavation. Sometimes it is digging things up. Sometimes it is digging one’s self out…. What is writing? What is it for? Why? How? Once asked, these questions proliferate. Looming over them all, Why ask? Who is asking? These all circle around and bring us back to language.

From Negotiation to Dialogue

From negotiation to dialogue we move from scarcity to gift. Quantities are not affected, at least not over short spans – in the long run scarcity negotiations drive us to collapse and the Gift maintains and develops creation while filling innumerable niches to bring forth abundance. Technology is firmly within the realm of negotiation. Craft

Complicity and Contingency

We live somewhere in tension between complicity and contingency. It’s not a linear polarity, this space. These are not categories with any sort of rough equivalency. Complicity is a state. We are within a relationship to the forces that seek to destroy. Some of these we are aware of, others are hidden from us, some

Nature is a term for that which was born

I’ve studied the meaning of “nature” for forty odd years. I took a class on it in 1972, when there were few such courses. I’ve been as confused over what it could possibly mean as anyone, caught between all the assumptions that have stuck to the term. Then in the first week of this year,