Water as a subject became interesting to me only as a consequence of my earlier interest in the ideas of Nikola Tesla, John Keely, and Walter Russell, among others. Not only was their work based on notions of sympathy, connectivity, and resonance, it reflected an appreciation for the hidden, subtle levels of the natural order that give rise to the world we see. Perhaps equally important, their ideas emphasized the balance at work in nature—the […]
Our world is being stretched. The tightened skin becomes translucent. It’s like a magic trick, only the illusion is punctured instead of unfurled. What’s really there can no longer be hidden. The make-up is sloughing off. It’s challenging, but clearly it’s needed. We have far to fall. But the ground is close. As close as we make it. That’s because the ground is us. We are the ones who will catch each other. Not the […]
What is an organism? It’s not an easy question to answer. When faced with such a challenge, it is natural to employ metaphors that help us formulate some preliminary ideas about what it is we’re dealing with. These metaphors relate something that is mysterious to us, like the organism, to one that is well known to us, such as the machine. We know what machines are, and generally how they function, and so this metaphor […]
This week I finished the audio version of The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins, which I discussed in my previous post, and I’d like to give a few responses to the book as a whole now that I’ve completed it. Dawkins’ overall objective with this work is to describe how the dizzying mélange of organized complexity we find in the biological world can be explained by the properties of non-living matter, the blind mutations of […]
This holiday season I received a gift subscription to Audible, and because I spend most of my reading time with works of fiction, I thought I’d use the daily commute for non-fiction. The first book I chose was Richard Dawkins’ The Blind Watchmaker. For reasons I cannot explain, I found myself curious recently about the theory of evolution, how it has evolved with the emergence of genetics, and what some of the open questions and […]
I’m pleased to share that my short story Restitution will appear in the pending Fall/Winter issue of the Tahoma Literary Review. I believe printed and digital copies will both be available for purchase next week, and meanwhile an audible version of the issue has been uploaded on the TLR Soundcloud page that is freely available. This was my first foray into making a voice recording of my writing, and I must confess a challenge. I owe […]
The way a cloud breaks, after wicking water from the sky for several days of a moon’s turn inward, and a droplet of water taps a leaf on its way to the ground, and says, I have heard you, is the way that we are blessed: with premonitions of what has already been given. My heart is Bell’s Inequality. On one side there is meaning and on the other side there is only its absence. […]
The weeds in my heart have gone to tassel. They are purple and rose edged in the soft light from Beyond. The sun here is setting, rising, calling, giving, knowing, holding, flying, burning. And I am listening, watching, walking, dreaming, dying, wishing, burning. Shadows of the unkempt reeds are dancing together on the ground. They are playing in the mud without getting wet. A world without shadows, I whisper, is a world without magic. I’ve […]
My short story “Stella’s Radio” was published this week by Delay Fiction. It’s a story about love and connection, about the awkwardness that sometimes attends the becoming of who we truly are, and about the way life’s circumstances can propel us into the open, out from the cover of normalcy and safety and little dreams. I didn’t know these things when I sat down to write it. A story begins with some little nudge of […]
I have come to an important realization I think. And it’s not to say that I didn’t sort of know this already, but there’s a difference in knowing something and really knowing it. We’ve all seen these dichotomies: the zone defense or man-to-man, materialism or spiritualism, unrestrained capitalism or comprehensive socialism, cardio or strength training, STEM or liberal arts, the Right or the Left… And we all have at least one or two thoughts on […]
