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

Beyond Judgments and Opinions…

We all have opinions. We all make judgments. None of us is satisfied…. What if these are connected? I’ve long felt a hankering for getting beyond opinions. It’s easy to see this as a form of striving after certainty. We see opinion, as it relates to truth, as a negotiation with authority. Whoever has authority

A Gathering

“The more you walk this road, the farther you are from the ordinary ways of society. You may see the truth, but you will find that people would rather listen to politicians, performers, and charlatans.” -Deng Ming-Dao * I’m struck by the difficulty we have sticking to the basics. Continually struck by our insistence on

“Now the wind exceeding the sail is beautiful.”

Jeff Shampnois wrote the following as a response to “It’s not a process.” My comments are interleaved within… You rang my tuning fork with this. We seem to enter the territory beyond the precipice through a natural negation, a letting go of conclusions, of static structures. Maybe that wind dismantling the meaning of words is

Maintaining the Lie of Invulnerablity

Strength versus power. We tend to see them as synonyms. Or that strength is a measure of the power available to us. In a Newtonian sense this may be true, but what if we go beyond reduction? Let’s start by asking, “Who’s strength and who’s power?”

“Un Moment de Peur”

Jacques Derrida on the Problematics of Deconstruction. A wonderful description of the levels of consciousness at work within a writer. Writing what appears to us out of a “feeling of necessity” brings on a reaction to our “exposure.” To be human is to vacillate between these two positions. I don’t believe we can maintain either

The Reductivist Empire

The weaker we are, the harder it is to hope. The weaker we are, the easier it is to settle for wishing. When we’re strong, we understand life is fragile, contingent, and ultimately tragic; and that hope is the form of our desire to make something of our circumstances, to give life meaning. In weakness, we settle for wishing that things were easier, wishing that someone, somehow will alleviate our burdens. We enter into bargains, looking for saviors, heroes, or just an end to our suffering, suffering that leaves us feeling that life is nothing but a burden.