This time it’s global!

Chris Hedges latest essay, This time We’re Taking the Whole Planet with Us! is as concise and clear and exposition of our predicament as you’ll find out there. Two things stand out. They give and then take it away. In his narrative, they take away and then try to give. I’ve brought up this same

The Bad Taste of Clever

System Theory was another of those things, like speaking “prose,” that once it was described to me I realized I’ve been doing it for a long time. There are many fascinating insights to be found there. In the end, I found the “practice” of Systems Theory to be a dead end.

Digested by the Spectacle

Once again violence breaks the surface in a way that brings it home even to those of us far removed from the incident. The shootings in Tuscon have joined the list of assassinations that have punctuated my life time. In all that time I can think of only two “Right Wing” victims, – George Wallace

Futility, the chasm between efficiency and effectiveness

In the tension between our immersion in the fabric of being and the atomized self’s struggle to achieve a stasis, a utopia, not of richness, but an illusory concretion of wealth, in which we wish to stop without falling; we define the human condition. The workings of consciousness are so easily misunderstood as signs of separateness from the rest as epitomized in Cogito Ergo Sum. Yet consciousness, our phenomenological embededness in experience is the only window we have through which to glimpse an awareness of our integration into greater systems and structures.

Reciprocity & Regard

…regard is where our ability to chose beats against the limits to our existence.

Within the Realm of Acceptance

I’ve been asked by a friend to describe why I found a recent boat design commission such a fulfilling experience. Before I’d confessed these feelings I felt uncomfortable deep-down. How could I reconcile taking this on with all I’ve been writing recently about the benefits of turning away from customary paths, of doing no-thing until

Deep Imagining

Here is where I disagree with those still caught up in the optimism/pessimism see-saw. The coming age will assuredly be Tragic, and it will include untold hardship and danger; but it does not have to be seen as a “Fall.” It does not have to be seen as a descent into poverty. As Illich said, “Poverty was invented.” If we can use this opportunity to generate new Forms, actually create a New Age out of the ruins of this one – again, the B.S. attached to this terminology threatens to derail us completely if we do not insist on chipping away the coruscation on our language to find real meanings in what we say. Unless we imagine something else out of the threads that present themselves to us precisely at this moment, we will be condemned to a true poverty, a poverty of imagination, a lack of Deep Imagining.