April 18, 2015 The secret of the mountains is that the mountains simply exist, as I do myself: the mountains exist simply, which I do not. The mountains have no ‘meaning,’ they are meaning; the mountains are. The sun is round. I ring with life, and the mountains ring, and when I can hear it, there is a…
Month: September 2020
Night Life of the Troubled Mind
February 3, 2012 I’m sitting on a horse, the wrong way (tail-facing). I am facing a woman who I don’t know well but have long loved, reaching to embrace her. As I hold her in my arms and feel her energy entering me, I feel the horse starting to move. The question arises: “can I…
Of the Journey Downward
March 11, 2013 I write, in part, because it distracts me, diverts me. This is more than about “keeping me off the streets at night.” The diversion is not away from external reality, but towards my own. It is about seeking — and occasionally finding — meaning within where there is none around me. If…
3 Foxes, a Hawk, and a Toe: The Way of Deliverance
May 18, 2014 The older I get, the more I find that my only enemies are inside me; that when I can defeat and kill these adversaries, what I once saw as threats and strangers around me are just illusions, the misperceptions of derived and superficial belief. Opposition — the belief in me versus the…
Crow Calling, Winter Dream
March 15, 2015 A bank of storm clouds, dark with their burden, came into view at the bay windows of my apartment. Even as I watched them, their black deepened, until they resembled more a cosmic nebula than a bank of clouds in our local atmosphere. Then, in the midst of this dark, a crack of…
A Lesson of Night: The Cosmic Brain
June 9, 2014 I still talk to her. I imagine that will be so for a long time. Over the space of the years she learned my language. Not the words, of course — she learned the real meaning, the “deep structure,” as Chomsky would call it, of my sounds, intonations, and breath. Animals can do that,…
A Message to Corporate America
(Originally written around yearend 2011) A resuscitated orthodoxy, so pervasive as to be nearly invisible, rules the land. Like any religion worth its salt, it shapes our world in its image, demonizing if necessary, absorbing when possible. Thus has the great sovereign territory of what Nabokov called “unreal estate,” the continent of invisible possessions from…
Some Principles of Corporate Communication
September 22, 2012 These are some notes from a book I’m working on about surviving as a worker in a modern corporate environment. “I don’t know (yet)” is a valid response. (And ignoring me is not). I get this all the time; perhaps you’ve experienced it once in a while too: I want to know what’s…
Of Consumption and Reception
September 23, 2012 I guess someone put these out so they’d be taken. Well, I “received” them. It’s a point I’ve made before about language: when you think about “taking pictures,” you’re in that mindset of getting-consuming-owning that I think is at the root of much our culture’s weedy darkness. Whenever I go out with the…
Affirming the Coalescent
January 17, 2014 We all experience the invisible world in our lives. Even those of us who believe in the methods and proofs of science, to the exclusion of all other modes of reaching belief, know of love, truth, insight, and trust. Such things do not fit comfortably into the systems built by and upon…