From 9/11 to 11/9…

Fifteen years between these two dates. Seventy eight years since Kristallnacht…. Landmarks on the path to disillusionment. A road we’ve not seen the end of…. A road from complacency and an unearned certainty to humility. A humility we may feel we don’t deserve. A humility that brings us no where we wanted to go.

Two Fragments

The distinction between strength and power. As we discover how these terms are far from synonymous we find ways to use their differences as a heuristic.

An Illusory Economy

We are caught between beliefs that are untenable and hard limits that will not go away. Let’s look at what falls under the name economy. It is a mental construct that has been accepted as the rational way to organize how we interact to meet our physical needs within what is now described as a

Being Stuck

Déjà Vu is a common experience for those stuck in abusive situations. We find that the current crisis looks much like the last. No amount of feigned surprise, or pronounced insistence from the abusers that, “This time is different!” can shake the feeling we’ve been here before. And, most likely, we’ll be here again. If we

Sufficiency without number

Sufficiency is an attitude not a quantity. Chasing after desires we have lost any sense that happiness can be anything other than a list checked off. Pursuit. Nothing could be more destabilizing. Either for an individual or a culture. And, before we get caught up in some form of zealotry…. Yes, the desire to control

Telling Strength from Power

A useful image occurred to me. Strength is what we use when we break free of a rut. Power runs us harder along the same old trail, bouncing through the ruts until we destroy ourselves. Strength is a capacity. Power is an external source of energy. Power seduces. It gets “results.” It’s just that they

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

On Wealth

Wealth is an abstraction. It is the taking of value from the realm of the actual, the fabric of a living earth, and creating a gradient of poverty. What is read as wealth is a condition of lesser poverty than those wealth pushes into the maw of destruction and diminishment it shoves along ahead of

Between Wanting and Finding

There is a point at the start of a painting when there is a precariousness between what the painting “is to be about” and the first touches of what is actually there. Something I’m only arriving at now is that the former, while of great interest and concern at the start, is of no account.

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.

Joy lies beyond where disappointment hides…

The will to control is a hard habit to break. It finds places to hide away, working in secret. This shouldn’t be surprising, it is magical thinking after all! One place where I’ve found it hiding has been in an inclination to carry a grim cast of mind, a perpetually pessimistic outlook that seeks to

Love is Being

“Who is free of myths knows love” – Krishnamurti I just came across this quotation. It struck me. It made sense, immediately, but in a way that leads me to want to air it all out, to find and put down the connections this statement set reverberating within me.