Everything you see is a trick. And Love is the punchline. These skins are just the charade we need, to remember what can never grow old. Children with eyes overflowing— they don’t tire of hearing it over and over and over again. All those goo goo gah gah faces we make— so certain of our personal contribution to their pleasure… They’re not even listening. It’s what’s in our eyes they crave, that punchline peeking through our […]
The limited predictive intelligence of nuance can sometimes permit the obfuscation of the glaringly obvious. Said another way: forecasts predicated on the data typically accrued during the life span of a single human being are known to be astoundingly flawed. This may explain why Hafiz and Rumi stare at me like a pair of dispassionate fieldstones on the verge of sprouting horns when I wax extemporaneously about the day’s events— as if my mouth is moving, […]
There are so many amazing things a person could choose to learn about in this world, enough to fill whole lifetimes– like the way photons make decisions when faced with the conundrum of a diffraction grating, or the way high-speed traders manipulate the flow of money on time scales that make the pace of human thought seem like canyon-making, or how the fashion industry unraveled the mystery of the neons. There was a time when […]
What will it be like to Remember? Rumi advises we give up on this question1. My American football analogy goes like this: this is not a first down that we’re after. We can call out the chains and ask for a measurement, but the umpire will be dumbfounded and probably feint. Our questions are all boats without bottoms. The instant replay, on closer inspection, will reveal ten million angels on the nose of the football […]
When I was young, my favorite Saturday morning super heroes were Aquaman, the Wonder Twins, and Superman. Now they are Rumi, Hafiz, and Jesus, and I am the one in the cartoon. Every day is a new episode in accepting freedom. Wonder Woman had a strong effect also, but I was hesitant to admit it at first. They haven’t made her a movie yet. The thing is: I believe in balance in the Force. I think […]
If this world is not an accident- the fortuitous product of its own basic uncertainty, or strictly speaking the ramification of a series of serendipitous oscillations in a quantized electromagnetic field- well, then it must be on purpose. We are left with no acceptable alternatives. Well… it could have been a mistake, but that is a scenario we hardly ever entertain. That would really be a head-scratcher wouldn’t it? To have been brought into existence […]
Sometimes a day arrives in which the thing to do is just see what it has in store for you. It’s a day free of obligations, a day book-ended by important affairs and thus inopportune for embarking on projects that must be finished once they’ve begun, a day on which taking stock means discovering how you really feel given the space to do so, a day for partaking of simple pleasures. I chose once, on […]
I have really enjoyed the recent flurry of activity I experienced here as we thought together about the word power, and all the tendrils wrapped inside of it, and sundry connected things. I will be away for about a week and think I may not have access to Internet service without going to some extreme lengths. In thinking about all of the feedback I’ve received, and what to leave this site with for the week, […]
Wings aflutter, like a curious dart connecting invisible dots across the sky, a collage of frozen frames- a beak, a wingtip, an eye- excerpted from whirling Possibility, a solitary thrush comes in for a landing on a crackling braid of steel, a stranded iron dance hall populated by troupe after troupe of Hertzian dervishes, a fire brigade of magnetic flowers opening, blooming, and then collapsing into electric echoes. Twenty stories above the desert floor, head […]
Time capsules are intriguing. Your elementary school teacher encourages you to round up some receipts, a few movie tickets, maybe a back-of-the-envelope journal entry with your favorite candy bar or song written on it, along with a note of encouragement to your future self, and then you and your classmates shove all these notions into a box or a tube and bury it. Kickball, the old standby, would probably have been a more thrilling recess […]
Embracing Forever 