The warm love you feel when you give or work can’t be sustained, but meditation can eventually be something that can feed the heart. It doesn’t feel the same as the warm love, but with practice it can keep you happy, or at least healing, all the time. Sustained, refreshed, aware, ready for the next thought, feeling, pain, ecstasy, or observation without hurrying towards these things. Its the moments before all these that you want to make longer and longer, until the thought, feeling, external observation is not something to seek. It will come on its own, it will be fun when it comes, but for now: enjoy rest as long as it lasts. It may be called “The Land of Enough.”

I have climbed the mountain

I circled the wings of the sky
I trembled before enlightenment

I traveled far, walking God's walking
   Yet I have only one foot,
       a fool, only seeing monsters
            larger than dreams, sleeping,

   I left before they woke

Where is my armor, where is my sword
Where is my strength I have only
The cold wind in grey robes, long and wispy hair and beard
My sword was always my cane, and my shield was only a promise of my last breath.

Facts are true descriptions. Examples are: in 1492 Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue, or serotonin is a chemical in the brain that controls happiness. We can think about and question facts. So one investigation could be: when exactly did Christopher Columbus sail the ocean to discover America? We can focus our investigation to what part of the year, what month, but when we get down to day, hour, second, and nanosecond, we find that we don’t know exactly what we mean by this fact.

The next question is What do I mean by “What do we mean?”? The fact is still true without asking this question. Or is it? 1492 was a whole year. Columbus didn’t sail the ocean in part of that year, so the fact is partially not true. We get into the problem of meaning. The two main theories of meaning are the same as the two main theories of truth: either we mean something precise, such as the nanosecond when the boat embarked (which falls into the problem of vagueness), or we mean something interconnected, such as the web of causes and effects, thoughts, feelings, motivations of the event of Columbus sailing. All these things over time, over cultures.

Now look at our fact again. After only a little thought, the fact has become a source of a lot of thoughtfulness and questions. One effect of a fact, as Henry Adams observed in his “Virgin and the Dynamo” is that they create ignorance. People believe them to be true and their certainty makes them stop thinking and investigating. They hang on to the fact rather than allowing it nuance. Even though thoughtfulness can lead to the poison of doubt, and the danger of this poison is very real, being a thoughtful culture is worth the risk

Here is why I care about this: We have two sides of America with two very different party lines that are hammered into our brains. One side becomes so sure about one fact, while another group becomes so sure about another fact. Thoughtfulness about facts allows people to listen to each other better, because the exactitude of truth in what is said isn’t the point. The weighing of a thought in your hand is not precise, but it is the way to think for yourself. Instead of published precision knowledge that communicates to a few specialists with the conceit of an eternal, inhuman contribution. The imprecision of weighing a fact is the basis of direct human communication.

The River Po

English is a spidery language
Most languages are just a web, a network of associations:
“What is the taste of the prescription of writing, what is this Net?” Thoth said.
The ancient Egyptian web
Almost lost, but for a stone.

English tries to be its own master;
The web loses its beauty, because the creator of beautiful webs
Is an ugly, mortal monster, servile to mastery

of its creation.
“English is in a bad way” said Orwell, who complained of automatic, unthinking chains
Of words written from memories of memories, copies of copies,
a blacksmith’s hammering, hardening the chains,

Fashioning a wiring of the human mind
That allows the electric Spider to master us unhindered.
And who is She, who can spy her without becoming Other, Her prey?


“You must talk in chains, about your chains.” said nightingale


I am the fly
Slay me, if you can, for the glory of Her Empire

A dragonfly
caught in a web glittering in the rain, Suspended over a river
At a time when I had nothing, I set him free with a hurled stone
The dragonfly, chains as ancient as the day is young, fell toward the flood,
Caught the air with its wings and flew

“How dare the many-headed, of so many colors,
Fruitful, flowering, leaving,
Banana tree grow?
Male parts and female parts standing erect in the common
Air and light

Cover their indecency!

I do not want to see the light,
If these flamboyant heads see it too.”

If there were a god who could fight all the glittering blades of grass
I would bow to that god.

I am the shadow of a diamond.
I am the breath of a fish.
I am the one you love to hate.

I am the master knot
That keeps obsidian from breaking
From the aching mind.

I am nothing, really,
untie me, I beg you;
We can both be free.

Equality. Of people or even things is a very high and mighty ideal. I am not sure it is a beautiful ideal, it might even be a very ugly idea to have everyone the same to the point of equality. Equality is not synthesis, because things have to be different before they can join. Equality, on the other hand, is identity. A self that is self-same. Synthesis, such as colored lights mixing to become white light, is not about self, it is about acceptance of that which colors the light, or marks the white page. Synthesis is self-effacing, it is a form of love and union. Often when people try to talk about solidarity, a political attack will try to turn that talk into talk of equality. We think equality is a higher ideal than love and synthesis. Equality is certainly quite out of the question as far as anything achievable. The attack is to make someone who is an idealist, maybe a romantic, reach even higher for an even more impossible thing than a perfect love: that of equality, even though this higher ideal is arguably ugly in comparison.

Equality has a requirement of consistency. This is how logic comes into the equation. We leave our hearts behind, and begin a mathematical calculation. Possibly with money, possibly with merit. We believe after an achievement, under the ideal of equality, (trade, pound for pound), that we get ahead of others with our work. Love on the other hand does not have the conceit of any measurable rationality. Equality is a principle that prevents our solidarity, because we require it before our connections are admissible. People will never be equal, we can blame it on our parents or our politicians, corporations or the weather.

A philosophy that serves humanity should not have the requirement of consistency, because consistency is superhuman. Aquinas didn’t say it this way, but the logic of his position implies: “Errat Ergo Sum.” To have consistency implies a kind of perfection that is unattainable and destructive to ourselves as flawed beings. Error is constitutive of being rather than a deviation from it. Equality as a standard doesn’t just fail us — it condemns us for being what we are.

A desire for equality makes us recognize the world of inequalities. We may have a feeling of righteousness because of our high ideal, and a disdain for our world and its inhabitants for not living up to our ideal. Synthesis is quite different, because it means you are ready to be part of this world, to lose yourself in it, take it in, and let it take you in. This requires a lack of judgement and a lack of righteousness.

If we want to embrace the straight white male, we must take him into ourselves. We must remember that we are already in synthesis with each other, whether we work at it or not — the question is only whether we recognize it. And I speak as someone who cannot be more “othered” from the margins, ever since I was categorized as mentally ill. For the straight white male to embrace, he must not separate himself either. When we say that the hunger of a child in one country and the loneliness of an elder in another are both instances of “Difference,” we have already lost them both. Subsuming all specific differences under the abstract noun Difference is just equality wearing different clothes.