Surrender our autonomy
In gathering we may consciously surrender a piece of our autonomy (“self-law;” living by one’s own laws) to the gathering itself.
:- Doug.
Archive for July 3rd, 2025
Our oral culture
Ours is a print-literate culture. Writing is so pervasive—signs, headlines, emails, texts, and much else assails each of us by the minute. But we miss that we also are an oral culture. After all, “Don’t talk to strangers” came to us not in books. Then there are all those songs. You hum and you sing, and these tell you how to live—and you follow.
So we ought to make conscious some things we live by, but seldom set to writing. Not to give writing a claim to them, but to give us claim to our heritage that is often not acknowledged. These are part of the luggage elders carry for all of us. What oral text of our culture do you carry?
:- Doug.
Need to go unconscious
We humans have an absolute need almost daily to go unconscious as witness our nightish sleep.
:- Doug.
We are prisoners of eyes
We are prisoners, incarcerated by our eyes in pictures of our selves. We have envisioned ourselves as lawyers, interior decorators, laborers, welders, ride share drivers. Have we seen ourselves as world makers, even as worlds? Have we seen ourselves as our microbiome sees us, inscrutable, large, moving to unknown beats? Have we seen ourselves capable with a word or a laugh to topple kings and queens? No, we see ourselves powerless. (But we are powerless as Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s God.) Out beyond our prison bars, past the grey drapes, panoramas!
:- Doug.
