Month: September 2020

indiscriminately  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…

fruitfully  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…

 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…

 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…

 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…

 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,…

 (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…

 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…

 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…

 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…