Along that wilderness of glass
I've always been interested in stories. From novels to films to plays to textbooks, my vita contemplativa has careered through literary devices, design, drama, and mythology. The tools of narrative, now applied in a larger human context, are mindbending.
The conflicted howls in all formats of fiction and history echo against the walls of a cage we cannot see. We mistake as validation the reverberation of our voices, and voices of those who preceded us in recorded history.
I have a pet lizard who has not explored beyond her walls; she has no cause to imagine that her food supply might be compromised. She is free to roam the world to the extent that it exists, and able to dine on crickets without concern that they might, one day, be unavailable. She has known nothing else.
Our cage is our economy of infinite growth. We contribute to a division of labor to afford to live-and we feel free to do whatever we want within that complex system because it is the only world we know. But like the crickets (think passenger pigeons or oil), infinite growth is only infinite in theory, and we are still in a cage.
I’ve stopped writing in successive breaths of shock and discovery. The most encouraging thing about unlearning assumptions about our dominant culture, for which recorded history (and the ordinary events of our lives) provide stalwart underpinnings, is that there is no leader, no organized movement, no obligation to action, no reason to believe anything that cannot be easily checked-only personal initiative to pursue the obvious.
The undenoted entries dotting the last 359 days are islands sinking as consciousness rises with a deepening objectivity toward the story of civilization. As the shifting sea shimmers with inverted reflections of those things it continues to absorb, I'll do my best to note the play of colors on its surface.
The conflicted howls in all formats of fiction and history echo against the walls of a cage we cannot see. We mistake as validation the reverberation of our voices, and voices of those who preceded us in recorded history.
I have a pet lizard who has not explored beyond her walls; she has no cause to imagine that her food supply might be compromised. She is free to roam the world to the extent that it exists, and able to dine on crickets without concern that they might, one day, be unavailable. She has known nothing else.
Our cage is our economy of infinite growth. We contribute to a division of labor to afford to live-and we feel free to do whatever we want within that complex system because it is the only world we know. But like the crickets (think passenger pigeons or oil), infinite growth is only infinite in theory, and we are still in a cage.
I’ve stopped writing in successive breaths of shock and discovery. The most encouraging thing about unlearning assumptions about our dominant culture, for which recorded history (and the ordinary events of our lives) provide stalwart underpinnings, is that there is no leader, no organized movement, no obligation to action, no reason to believe anything that cannot be easily checked-only personal initiative to pursue the obvious.
The undenoted entries dotting the last 359 days are islands sinking as consciousness rises with a deepening objectivity toward the story of civilization. As the shifting sea shimmers with inverted reflections of those things it continues to absorb, I'll do my best to note the play of colors on its surface.