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…
Author: brian
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
February 7, 2012 I wrote this open letter to corporate America a little over two years ago as a “new year’s message,” at a time when I had been unemployed for 10 consecutive months. I present it here exactly as I wrote it then because it seems that “the light that…may someday overcome your darkness”…
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…
Of Claim
December 2, 2012 Karen Horney, the brilliant post-Freudian psychoanalyst, had an expression that informed much of her work, her contribution to the still-evolving process of retreat from the Freudian religion. Her term for one common source of the psychological distress she encountered in patients was “neurotic claim.” I guess my only complaint with it would…
Chopin: Artist of the Underworld
March 5, 2012 Amid tough and painful times we must seek consolation — handholds of inspiration on the cliff beside the abyss. Too many in our culture turn to false and artificial means of consolation. Consumption, for example. It was once the name of a fatal disease now known as tuberculosis; it is now the name of…