After a revelation – about why I was so enchanted by an author’s work – I stumbled on a technique for story-generation and voice discovery. The jolt came when I realized that her discontinuous, multi-format structure was resonating with the way time and reality feel to me now (erratic), my attention whipsawed by climate news […]
Another “Before Times”
April 29, 2023 by
Explosive accelerations in the development and dispersal of Artificial Intelligence (AI) software are destabilizing millennia of human experience, practice, and shared reality, right now. Thousands of hyperbolic articles and videos careen through the web every hour, signaling dangers to civilization – structural, biological, economic, intellectual, educational. Dangers reach all the way into unreliable authorship and […]
Floating in Solutions
December 18, 2022 by
I’m writing to you at midnight on a moonless night, from inside the warmth of an ink-black pool, a mountainside hot spring in the high desert. Oceans of stars glitter overhead in the clear sweet air. The only sounds are a soft breeze soughing through the trees, unseen critters skittering through pine needles. This is […]
Infinitesimal Star Stuff
July 16, 2022 by
Allowing the first Webb Telescope images to sink deep can be perilous. Trap doors can open and drop the soul-mind into a bottomless spiral of unknowing. I found this exhilarating and, at the same time, annihilating – in a good way. To get this effect, one way is through an analogy: the galaxies pictured above […]
Gold Threads in the Dark
December 21, 2020 by
Feeling creative is, for some of us, a life-support function – especially in recent times. It’s easiest for those who have shelter and food, while holding awareness of those who don’t. For hundreds of millions, just thinking up and acting on the next step toward survival — if survival is still possible — are supremely […]
Generating Quality Time
March 21, 2018 by
Poignant synchronicities unfolded as I drafted a post about qualities of time, to celebrate the Equilux (March 16 in my latitude/longitude) and the Equinox (9:15 a.m. PDT on March 20 everywhere). Two days before the day of equal light and dark, my web connections filled with affectionate remembrances on the passing of Stephen Hawking, most […]
Schrodinger’s Eclipse
August 17, 2017 by
In this moment, before it has happened, my personal involvement with the August 21 eclipse is hovering in maybe-space. Will I feel again the shimmering magnetic atmosphere of long-ago experiences, see the dappling on the ground? Will I swim in air made of silver ripples? Will there be a storm that outshadows the shadow? Will […]
dot dot dot dot pause dot dot
June 18, 2017 by
This (the dot sequence) means Hi. In code. A wave across the waters. I’ve waited in silence for something pithy and meaningful to say, something that wouldn’t get too tangled up in the outer chaos of our time. I’ve been inspired by hi-signs coming through electronic channels I’ve let stay open – photos of Nature […]
Equilux
September 22, 2016 by
An exotic and beautiful new word is reason enough to write about. Equilux. It’s the day of the year when light and dark are equal (not Equinox). I felt like celebrating Equinox and looked it up – only to be astounded at how much I’d forgotten or never known. The celestial mechanics literally disoriented me […]
Black Light
December 13, 2015 by
I’m in a new phase with deep winter: I now feel the ink-cold blackness at breakfast, the shutting down of the world in late afternoon. For days I’ve pondered the people whose pain comes from encroaching darkness, enough to make them stare into banks of artificial light – or take mood-shifting drugs – to keep […]
Mythic Reconception
January 1, 2013 by
My laughter at the cartoon turned heads in the store: a solar system with a red arrow pointing toward Earth saying “You Are Here … If That Helps Any.” The “here” lasts only for a sub-instant, since we are spinning at unimaginable speeds through unrepeatable space. Locating “You” in a chaotic universe (in ancient myths, a […]
A Kaleidoscope of Women
November 11, 2012 by
Visions of “the feminine” started shape-changing for me this summer, watching Beasts of the Southern Wild. Startling imagery, elaborate mythology, a rich resonant soundtrack, poetic and vivid dialogue – and the unimaginable performance of its tiny girl hero-star – coalesced. Ancient self-images, affections, terrors, and enthusiasms got remembered and rearranged, transformed, even though the movie’s surfaces […]
You Do the Math (or Not)
February 28, 2012 by
Getting the giggles about the collision between two emails this morning: one, from webwizard Seth Godin, saying that what we do, in life / business / culture is not math (simple on/off duality), and the other, from a long-ago meditation teacher, pointing out that we live too much from the wrong-headed math of surface interpretation. When […]