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:
“In our mainstream society, the term “spirituality” still sparks cynicism in many, and I’ve come to find that, oddly enough, even spiritual communities can have narrow-minded views and a sort of tunnel vision about themselves and their relationship to the rest of the society. One way or another, it’s an unnecessarily loaded word.

It’s like we live in a world where every single branch imagines itself as the entire tree. It’s been interesting, sometimes discouraging, but most often amusing to stand in the middle, tree-hugging and gazing upward, bare toes feeling their way around the lifted surface of exposed roots for different angles, different views.

It’s the method of all my musing. It always has been, whether I knew it as “spiritual” or not.

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.”

forward and back, backward and forth.
Considering little things in life.
Link to full post: deliberation

It’s a peace of cake.

Read the full post, inspired by my local café, here: Choosing

My response to the response to the unresponse to the recent mass-shooting in a Texas elementary school.

The full essay is linked here: Heads and Tails

a very short block of meta discourse that came about as a result of working on my thesis and being a person alive and learning in the world: tangential

Happy Earth Day! I wrote a rough draft of an essay to celebrate. I may or may not come back and refine and/or pilfer from it. Here are some excerpts:

“To claim, to describe, a crisis we must draw on referentials derived necessarily from a desirable state of non-crisis.

Nature is desire, manifested. What else can it be? A hungry animal doesn’t simulate lack. It desires food. The planet is teeming with desire in the form of creatures, flowers, plants, rivers, oceans, insects, earthquakes, eruptions, storms . . . what are they other than the pure expression of planetary passions, various and emanating, disseminating, desire brought to life?

Rational.

Of course, we too are nature. There is no dialectical relationship between “humanity” and “nature,” only a simulation of separation…

We are all cells in a social organism—cellmates—inhabiting the dermal microbiome of the planet itself: a body thrumming with desire for life, and wellbeing. What kind of co-author will you be?”

Link to full post: Self-acculturation

I take a side trail from my thesis,
because all roads lead back home.

“I articulate these things in part to help myself, and also to help others who may not yet appreciate the organic and natural brilliance of their own hyper-attentive idiosyncrasies in a culture suicidally determined to apply the industrial, factory-informed assembly-line model to most of human creative endeavor…

…It’s no wonder this thesis has taken me so long. Sometimes it’s like being a chihuahua sent out as part of the party on a fox hunt: trembling and tail-tucked, dodging the baying hounds, shrinking from the coat-bearing, horn-blasting riders astride living, breathing, snorting beasts barreling through the brush—scrambling out from under the heavy drumming ground-churning hoof-beats of their horses.
(oh, there’s the flow.)

But this fox is definitely worth finding, and this chihuahua aspect of myself is the one most keenly oriented to the objective. Someone brought it along on the hunt for a reason that was probably more than absurdist amusement.
Probably.”

Link to full post: no dirt, no daisies

I observe, bent on life. A casually brief (and extremely rough-drafty) literary analysis of Star Trek: Picard, and its relation to other cultural narratives.

“I’d been brewing components for a post about the historical phenomenon of Covid-19 (or the novel coronavirus) as a literal “novel” — the strong emergence of a narrative metaphor made real, actualized into the environment as part of a historical wave much like we could describe the emergence of a war . . .

. . . “‘There may be nothing new under the sun,’ . . . however there is everything new as we are subjectively unified within its scope, and empowered to turn our gaze into the unknown.”

Link to full post: mind meld – part 1: impetus

“. . . le non/le nom du père is a psychological concept originally articulated by Jacques Lacan, here articulated by me: it is the forgetting of fragmentation (le non, which disallows objective dependence), the remembering, the recognition of integrity (le nom, grants subjective interdependence)—a restoration of intact psychic structures which properly boundaried with integral subjectivity are allowed to resonate, balance, and blend.“

Reflections on and around the month or so it took me to process Father’s Day in 2020. 

Link to full post: le non/nom du père