Spontaneity is a living essence but in naming, we destroy it. I am trapped in and by the very labyrinth of words and language with which I seek through speaking (or writing) to free myself.
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Tag: life
I went on one of my habitually isolated late-pandemic afternoon walks today, just soaking up an ambient not-quite-optimistic Spring mood of renewal with which to soothe my sense of wistfully-idiomatic rebirth amid the decay of winter’s persistent, yet currently overgrown, detritus. Defocussing attention on any one experience or sensation, we open the doors of perception […]
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We are all born broken…
How else is it that we might spend our lives seeking a comfort, consolation and closure that always seems to dwell just out of reach, just beyond our grasp and ever-beckoning as a tantalisingly seductive certainty of reflexive self-definition or unambiguous security and psychological or existential safe harbour in the open arms and tender touch […]
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Blindsight and Barren Repetition
In a world that is implicitly oriented towards the replication of its own processes, behaviours and conventions, all we ever do is look backwards, and even as we travel into unknown futures yet always and already blinded by the fallible visions of a shared imagination and memory that, like systems of belief, is so easily […]
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Letters to Eternity
I went for another solitary afternoon walk today and discovered this small token of human affection attached to a lonely tree on the edge of some farmland in the hills not far from where I live. I’m not sure why anyone would leave this there, exposed to the elements and bound to suffer an inevitable […]
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Boxes of Books
I recently received several boxes of books that had once belonged to my father. He died around 10 years ago now and these books seem to be the last traces of his life left to touch my world in any material manner. I had the strangest sensation and revelation as I stood there and stared, […]
The question might become as of the extent to which integrated biological systems express or manifest an altogether more subtle logic than purely brute-forced calculation. We have a tendency to isolate intelligence and problem solving in the processing unit but, beyond the implicit (or at least plausible) value in any identifiable circuits and cleverly-constructed cybernetic […]
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There are other forms of life…
The truth, or at least a truth, is that the systems that we recognise as life or living are only really a sub-set of a much larger and distributed range or spectrum of entities and artefacts. Where we assert significance to the overtly and materially self-contained aspects of any particular living system, this is as […]
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Time is Running Out
Yes, time is running out – for all of us. For each and every one of us, we inexorably inch closer towards our own demise and existential obliteration. Cheerful? Hardly, but it is a truth rarely acknowledged beyond the feeding frenzy of catastrophically-selfish corporations and political parties at the trough of manifest human insecurity that […]
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Technology: The Great Unmaking
We barely even notice as all this technology sweeps us away, transforms us. The greatest enigma of all is that the more we identify our Self in, through and as this technological hyper-extension of our own minds and bodies – the less we become. Only the greatest of strategists could ever mask their own existence […]
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Compassion, Suffering, Emptiness
We suffer for others and in so many ways but we always do so alone. There is nothing quite so distressing as to live in fear. It is a relentless slow burn of doubt that eats away at us inside and in its haunting persistence and metallic tang generates burdens, not necessarily of fact, but […]
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A Zen moment with Herman Hesse
A friend recommended Herman Hesse’s book Demian to me. I finished this book just now, sitting in my garden in the sun and spring breeze, accompanied only by birdsong and the distant hum and buzz of traffic that seems to me to be endlessly heading somewhere but never, ever quite arriving. Perhaps they would cease […]
Daedelus Kite 