Gifts

long term effects of emotional abuse: a distrust in your perceptions a tendency to be fearful or on guard self-consciousness or fear of how you are coming across an inability to be spontaneous a distrust of people and in future relationships anger that bursts out unexpectedly sensitivity to anyone trying to control you This list

Utopia is nowhere. Dystopia brings forth our own worst fears.

Perseus and Medusa. Perseus is able to kill Medusa and use her head, with its power to turn all who gazed upon it to stone, to destroy Leviathan and free Andromeda. It’s just struck me in a very straightforward manner that there is a lesson to this tale, we might not have considered. I certainly

Driven by Fear

Coercion, hostility, anger, rejection; are all signs of fear. They cease to exist when there is no fear. These are paraphrases of points Krishnamurti made repeatedly. The dynamics surrounding fear cannot be ignored. They inflect not only how we react and respond ourselves, but hold some key to how we can find ways to speak

Innovation as Impermanence

Watching this BBC documentary about the Islamic History of Europe I came across the Islamic roots of Convivencia, a term I’ve associated with Ivan Illich, perhaps its most recent heir, himself part of an Hispanic tradition going back to Al Andaluz. This film is a refreshing look at the contributions of Islamic Culture to the

On Conservatism

Humans have been profoundly conservative for most of our existence. That statement is rendered meaningless if we take conservatism to mean what is sold in its name today, or believe in what passes for the span of human existence as our self-professed conservatives would insist it to have been. Let’s pry the term away from

The World, or the world…

I’ve attempted to carve out distinctions and definitions on a regular basis here. Then I’ve backslid and muddied the waters again and again by letting ambiguity and habit blur these distinctions. Maintaining a vocabulary requires the patience of an archeologist, wiping away the dust of the millennia as a current erupting volcano sifts down a

The Search for Hope without Control

“The Search for Hope without Control” The title of this post is a quote from the most recent entry on the Dark Mountain Project’s Blog. Dougald Hine’s conversation with David Abram is a treat to watch and a treasure trove of insight. You’ll have to see the video to find out which one of them

Work

The dream of technology is to free “us” from the drudgery of work. The “clean” version of this, as opposed to the way it usually works in practice, is supposed to be a world in which machines do all the drudgery, even including the drudgery of creating their replacements in a toxic “evolution.” This freedom