Investing in Trust

Investment is generally taken to mean following a strategy that allows us to siphon off value. A way of taking value from a living system and turning it into a quantity of abstract financial counters that we can then hold so as to use these at will to gain advantage. We strip a living web

Writing, we invoke…

Writing we invoke. If it is ever to be anything more than a display of cleverness, writing is an act of prayer. We seek out; we ask for; we hope to receive something from beyond what we think. What we think we know.

“Relax! Take it easy.”

We hear this often enough. These days it probably sounds like good advice. Yet behind it is a troubling assumption. One that touches on how we keep running in circles, returning to the same traps again and again. We confuse ease with relaxation. What does it mean to be relaxed?

Imagine we had a compass…

This thought experiment came to me while out sailing with a friend. What if we discovered that our boat has a compass? What if we had no idea what it was, or how it worked? There it sat. And, at times we would notice certain apparent coincidences. Certain alignments with other things we were familiar

Drowning in facts

You might say we’re drowning in facts. We have enough information before us to come to valuable conclusions concerning how we’re trapped in a vicious dynamic that can have no happy outcome. A dozen times a day we can realize how a particular institution or corporation is acting to further destruction. And…? We click on

Learning how to see

If we have relatively good eyesight it’s easy to think that’s all we need, “I know how to see! Just open my eyes and look!” One of the first lessons from learning to draw and paint was that I had no idea what was involved in seeing. Not just that I was lacking techniques useful

There Is a Gulf Between Foraging and Mining

There is a gulf between two attitudes and ways of working that can be described by looking at the distance between foraging and mining. When we forage we gather what we need. We also limit our effort. If a spot is too resistant to our efforts; if what we’re after is scarce; we move on.

Out of the Depth of Our Numbness

Once we begin to recognize what it feels like to be alive it can still be a shock to acknowledge how much of our lives is spent in circumstances that are dead and threaten to engulf us once again in the numbness we’ve just begun to leave behind. But, if we fail to let this

The Politics of Nostalgia

As any hope of an actual break with business-as-usual fades into the heat and glare of a summer in which discontent does not lead to action to address its causes; but becomes nothing more than a nuisance of disaffected noise signalling on both sides of our political theater that everyone – with the strongest push

By the time…

By the time we add in the complications and machinations of media it is damn impossible to know what is going on. Some call it Marketing 3.0….

The Space We Need

Art school was where I learned that success was a trap. How limited my teachers were. Experts. Hemmed in by reduction. It would take thirty-five years for this to sink in. Not surprising if you consider the trajectory of the intervening decades, beginning with the height of their positions at the time. The accumulated authority

There’s no freeing the mind without respecting the limitations of the body.

“(Taoism) isn’t a process of learning more facts or greater skills. It is the unlearning of wrong habits and opinions.” — Alan Watts It’s not just the Singularity Boys who get this wrong…. What is unlearning?