It is the center hole, the emptiness inside, the inner space…that holds me. These phrases from verse eleven of the Tao Te Ching in my mind serve as an anchor chain this morning. I awakened with a high blood sugar reading, which perhaps is not unusual for anyone diabetic. The condition nevertheless is unacceptable,…
I am revisiting the Tao Te Ching, written by Lao Tsu, a contemporary of Confucius. It is old by the standard of my short lifetime. And it is not so old in terms of our Earth, estimated at 4.5 billion years. Thus the text of the Tao Te Ching is both old and not…
Neither divine punishment nor the nemesis of history. It is difficult not the see the pandemic as the consequence of our devastating, short-sighted choices regarding the environment. We have treated planet Earth as a dumping ground, a warehouse for dross and garbage, a heap of ruins. Yet it is impossible to save the planet…
The rain falls steadily non-stop, then in sheets. Weeks of mounting drought, then today flood warnings. Nature is a condition of extremes. After all, is not “the mean” a quantity that humans judge to be “just right” for the purposes of life? Nature, being “blind,” the feedback of cause and effect, “knows” nothing of…
We are no longer alienated and passive spectators but interactive extras; we are the meek lyophilized members of this huge “reality show.” It is no longer a spectacular logic of alienation but a spectral logic of dis-incarnation, no longer a fantastic logic of diversion, but a corpuscular logic of transfusion and transubstantiation of all…
Biopoliticsbecoming immunopolitics…The latent catastrophecoursing through and troubling the early decades of the century. The catastrophe is ungovernableand brings to light all the limitsof neoliberal governance. It has the tone of the irreversibleand the timbre of the irreparable.Nothing will be like it was before. Yesterday’s world appearsas a remote, collapsed worldthat has now slipped away.In…
And you know that she’s half-crazy but that’s why you want to be thereAnd she feeds you tea and oranges that come all the way from China… And she shows you where to look among the garbage and the flowersThere are heroes in the seaweed, there are children in the morningThey are…
Saturday morning. The air is clear and clean, the green of spring is iridescent. Birds are calling, hidden in the foliage. I heard report that we received a half inch of needed rain. For now that goes a long way to relieve the mild drought we’ve experienced. Perhaps my neighbors have not noticed. I…
“Humanity’s pasthas been relatively brief:some 300,000 years as a species,a few thousand years of civilization.Its potential future, by contrast,could extend for billions of years,encompassing many trillions of sentient, rational beingsyet to be born.” The future – the adulthood of humanityis now in jeopardy. “If our species does destroy itself,”wrote Orville Schell, “it will bea…
It is Wednesday morning. I am certain that the spirited discussion the night before about the realms of science and theology is working to transform my psyche, the hidden submerged dialog within, — when I wake up remembering and thinking about words that were written, comments made, and positions taken with strong emotion. Eight…
