Category: Creativity

The State of the Self

From Egoic Identity to an Integrated Self Cultures create, nourish, and defend modes of identity. An individual’s sense of self is dependent on the pathways to identity their culture allows. Cultures have always maintained a duality between its members and outsiders. The present dominant culture has blurred this distinction. But not in the way we…… Continue reading The State of the Self

The question of Bad Faith

I must say that I find myself almost speechless with a sense that there is no form of communication available that has not been buried under an avalanche of disinformation. Like an avalanche this may have been initiated by a single and quite small, relatively inconsequential disturbance. Like an avalanche the resulting destruction has compounded…… Continue reading The question of Bad Faith

Shoal Hope

Musings on Shoal Hope. We begin to write with a sense of urgency that what comes to us in words must be captured before it slips away. Later, after struggling with all that is required – necessary? – To transform, translate, re-form, recast…, make what we have taken down into something…. We turn leery, reluctant…… Continue reading Shoal Hope

Links

Alastair McIntoshArno GruenChristian FordDark Mountain ProjectDavid AbramDavid BohmDesperado PhilosophyDougald HineDr. Gabor MateGalGael TrustGordon NeufeldIvan IllichJames BaldwinJames Baldwin, Letter from a region in my mindJem BendellJeppe Dyrendom GraugaardJoe BrewerJohn BergerJohn TrudellJohnnie MooreJulia MacIntoshJussi PasanenLia GorenMary OliverMegan HollingsworthNegative GeographyPhiladelphia Wooden Boat FactoryRupert ReadStephen JenkinsonSteve ThorpSyndax VuzzSynthetic ZeroTa-Nehisi CoatesThe Boatschool, Eastport, MaineThe Bohm-Krishnamurti ProjectThe ChrysalisThe Negative PsychologistThe Order…… Continue reading Links

Looking back at looking back, What Drives Me,

I’ve just re-read this essay: What Drives Me Confronting the double-bind, Growing up in a predicament we get past incredulity or we take refuge in madness. This has been a difficult time to find the traction with which to continue writing about our predicament. What Drives Me points at an inkling – too amorphous to be…… Continue reading Looking back at looking back, What Drives Me,

Conversations with Jeppe Graugaard, Part I, Practice

I’m just back from two weeks working with Jeppe Graugaard in Denmark. This recording is the first of a three-part series of conversations resulting from our time together. https://soundcloud.com/dramok/dialogue-on-practice More on this and other aspects of what went on while I was there to follow….

Drawing Desire

However we approach our predicament we face a myriad of traps, evasions, and projections. It’s no different when we come to an opportunity to act within a practice. Except it is…. In a practice we interact with complexity outside the confusing complications that abound in our customary, conditioned state. Living inside our reactions it is…… Continue reading Drawing Desire

Carved above Jung’s door

Vocatus atque non vocatus, deus aderit.Invoked or not invoked, the god will be present.Attributed to the Oracle at Delphi

Finding North, a review

Navigation is at the heart of everything we do on the water. I’ve been asked by his publishers to review George Michelsen Foy’s new book: Is disaster… always envisioned geographically, is it always navigational in the deepest sense?Finding North, page 22 George Michelsen Foy asks this question early on in his extended ruminations in the form…… Continue reading Finding North, a review

Communion with the Sacred

Art and craft, these two simple words do a fine job of naming two of the three realms of living. I’ve had some difficulty finding an equally straightforward and simple term to describe and name the third. For a while I’ve latched onto John Michael Greer’s “Theosphere.” It is literal enough. It describes a realm…… Continue reading Communion with the Sacred

More and more… it’s fragments…

More and more it’s fragments that feel true. Fragments show their edges. Edges that intrude into the illusion of completion. Edges that cannot be ignored. Fragments insist there is more we don’t see. Can’t see. Fragments show us how we “piece things together.” Even the smallest, most torn fragment leads us to fill-out its story.…… Continue reading More and more… it’s fragments…

A Question of Purpose

My thoughts have been circling around what may best be described as questions of purpose. This might be considered central to any life led with some degree of introspection. As with most things of value this pursuit has been short-changed by our culture’s dominant modus operandi. It’s taken quite a while to sort this out.…… Continue reading A Question of Purpose

Queequeg’s Coffin

I was fifteen when I first read Moby Dick in a 48 hour long marathon sick in bed with a bad cold in a hotel in the Northeast of Portugal, reading, sleeping, then reading some more. It deeply affected my world view. I’m still finding out what it means…. Atlantic Right Queequeg’s Coffin is a…… Continue reading Queequeg’s Coffin

Confusion is part of the message

Let’s be clear. Confusion is part of the message. This fact has been elusive. One effect of confusion is that we struggle to find some simple way to untangle it. The real lesson of confusion is that it is a sign we are perceiving complexity as complication. Linear thinking and the Machine Model lead us…… Continue reading Confusion is part of the message

Pointing out futility

“That’s what I like about you… you are always able to show me the futility of everything. Well, the futility of everything except Nothing.” Julien Matei Reading this line Julien has posted on Mirrors of Encounters brought a smile. I’ve never been complimented, even sarcastically, for doing this. I have been accused of it, even…… Continue reading Pointing out futility