Author: lisajhaugen

writer by practice @stardateindefinite

05.06.23 connection

we don’t think our way to freedom
we don’t fight—
we feel, we breathe, we taste,
we fall, we flow, we delight.
We remember, we grow, we surrender
we mix it up, we know, we discover
we share, we play.
We come, we go, but never get away.
Freedom is effortless
fun and focused
and above all else,
freedom is our self-collecting, expansive locus.

03.12.23 turning the tide

When my intellectual work is gummed up, I turn to fiction. That’s often where I find the clarity necessary to move forward with my intellectual work.
I’ve been back at a fiction project that I first started writing in 2018. Essentially, it’s fan fiction based on The Silmarillion and Lord of the Rings.
I wrote a sort of prelude: Dagor Dagorath in my own imagining.
I had an idea for what happened next: a very simple seed that I planted then mostly ignored. I didn’t bother to work any more with it.
And then I heard, last year, that they had made a Rings of Power series. As soon as I saw an ad for the series, it ignited something in me and I began writing the story out in earnest, discovering far more than I had ever expected at the beginning. It continues to surprise me, nearly every time I sit down to it.

You could probably call it a divine comedy.

Here’s an excerpt, a dream that one of the main characters has:

The Leryavalatúrë: Return of the Ring

“…He watches the golden orb float gently back to Nienna’s hand with dismay. She holds her palm out for the silver orb, too.
‘Think not too much of sorrow,’ she says, with a note of consolation. ‘But know it for what it truly is:
a displacement, an upswelling tide; one that rises in volume to match the pressure of joy already dawning inside.‘”

02.21.23 PAMLA 2022 recap

I finally uploaded a presentation of my paper given at the PAMLA conference in 2022.

This paper illustrates the basic governing logic behind paradigmatic frameworks and how to distinguish them morphologically: Dialogism & Dialectics in Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness

So that you don’t have to scroll down to find it, here’s a link to the poem that crawled out of the primordial creative synergy generated by the conference, channeled and focused through my own particular set of lenses: Paradise is Here: an unruly epic ode to PAMLA 2022

The Muser’s Ready Room on You Tube

I’ve finally uploaded a few videos!
Here’s a link to a live stream that outlines the basic mechanics of the human creative process:

Creative Matrix Basics

My response to the responses to the Nashville school shooting:

The archetype of the lost child and its role in school violence

A reading of my “Quantum Politics” Essay (also composed in response to a school shooting):

Heads and Tails: Quantum Politics

02.14.23 Demystifying spirituality (in three parts)

Demystifying spirituality without losing the mystery that makes it what is is—a vital and nutritive source of creative expression and power.
There is a lot to say on all of this, so I’m going to break it up into bite sized chunks. Read them in any order. They are all very brief introductions, the dippings of toes, into topics that can be explored at much greater depth and breadth. Forever and ever into eternity.

[If the link is not active, it is because that part of this essay series is not yet uploaded]

Insight, a never-ending personal story— A (very) brief introduction to my own developing relationship with spirituality and a basic definition.

Weak-emergent social cohesion: codependence— the basic mechanics that govern the massive bulk of our current social dynamics

Strong-emergent social cohesion: interdependence— the locus for deliberate personal creative power and collective social shifts

Excerpt:
“So, after half a dozen years and more trouble and spiritual titration than I can hope to summarize, the most objective way I’ve found to condense and clearly define spirituality is… [drumroll] … social cohesion.”