The Harvest: Potatoes & Words
Posted: August 14, 2026 Filed under: Art & Healing, consciousness 1 Comment
In August, the summer vacation season peaks. Somewhere around 20.5 million people stop work in France, 18 million in Italy, approximately 3 million come to Maine, to vacation at the peak of summer. This has been a scorching hot summer both in Europe and across the United States. What better moment than this to pause and relax at the ocean?
Almost no one goes to the operating room, but I, thinking differently, seized the moment.
My summer plans most certainly did not include surgery, but one day in May the pain in my left hip was too much and so I called the orthopedic surgeon. Like a nuclear reaction, a chain of events was set in motion.
This was my second total hip replacement. The first was done during COVID, and that surgeon has since retired. I needed to choose someone new. That is one strange a la carte menu.
A friend mentioned that he had been diagnosed and cured – twice – of heavy metal poisoning, metallosis is the official term, resulting from metal-on-metal, an old school hip replacement. I confirmed that my first replacement involved a ceramic cup with titanium shaft, so there was no possible metal-on-metal in my body. The surgeon who helped my friend was, ultimately, a fine choice for me as well.
I had a meet and greet with that Doctor, and so, based upon five minutes’ conversation, made my choice.
I was given a date in mid-September, which seemed odd because I had been certain I would have the surgery in August. But then, the next day there was a cancellation, and I was offered the very much earlier date of 10 August.
At first I panicked, that felt far too soon, but within a few hours everything settled out, and it became clear that it was better to move full speed ahead, than to wait, endlessly until early autumn.
Like cogs in the modern medical machine, the surgeon’s team leaped into motion. I met with nurses, had bloodwork done, cancelled dental work and requested clearance from other doctors, began daily exercises, and signed, with Notary and Witness, my Last Will & Testament and Advanced Healthcare Directive. I rallied the home team – my children – to finish chores around the house and yard.
We harvested all of the potatoes.
There is no way I will be on hands and knees in late August and September, and so we pulled them all now: Reba, buff skin with white flesh; Red Norland, the classic “new potato;” and Russian Banana Fingerlings, that heirloom, crescent-shaped tuber we grow every year.
“All hands on deck!” I ordered, as my manicured-nail daughter grabbed the potato hoe and shovel and hopped to it.
The sun blazed hot and I reminded her, “This is your Irish heritage.”
I skipped the lecture on autochthony, from the Ancient Greek word αὐτός (autos) “self”, and χθών (chthōn) “soil.” Locavore chefs speak of terroir as the specific taste resulting from soil, climate and geography but they only get it half right. Given the human animal’s nature, the Greeks went further, asserting that the self is of that soil; place as the essence of identity.
The Irish lineage seemed concrete enough for my daughter to get the point. Perhaps I will chat about that while we grill and then eat those luscious tubers.
In the mornings we toiled in the garden, but in the afternoon I scoured the public library to assemble a reading list for the next six weeks of recovery. Of no surprise, the list is rather broad, encompassing philosophy, Indigenous authors, magical realism, and the seething anger of a deep ecologist, who was influenced by Jacob Needleman.
Letters to a Spiritual Seeker, Henry David Thoreau
Money and the Meaning of Life, Jacob Needleman
A Sense of the Cosmos, Jacob Needleman
To Hell with Culture, Herbert Read
The Way to Rainy Mountain, M. Scott Momaday
Wisdom Sits in Places, Keith H. Basso
Building: A Carpenter’s Notes on Life & the Art of Good Work, Marc Ellison
Rust Belt Boy, Paul Hertneky
Blood Orchid: an unnatural history of America, Charles Bowden
Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Common Sense for the Healing Arts: Essays by Robert M. Duggan
The harvest gathered – potatoes and words – I began to enter the silence.
A friend, an elder, sent me this advice, which I found deeply centering:
Give your body a heads up that it is happening. Do some visualization to it and travel around the inner scape with your love and gratitude. Thank the left hip for its years of service and amazing performance. Have a conversation between the left and right hip. Travel through the body with color and joy and appreciation. If there’s a way to take an hour to tune in uninterrupted, take it. Let the anatomy be informed. Cast a love circle around the medical team. Enter the theatre with awe, wonder, curiosity, grace and welcome. Love to you is coming from many. Ride the ride, brother. …
As I learned from my Mother, “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.”
This week’s events brought that concept into a simple clarity. It allowed me to prepare both to go under the knife, and to return through the light. On the other side of surgery, now I surrender to this healing, which is a gift.
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The Knife and the Light
Posted: August 7, 2026 Filed under: consciousness, Portfolio - Elena's work 1 Comment
When I was a child we would eat fish on Fridays, scrambled eggs and bacon at Sunday brunch, charcoal-grilled eight-and-a-half-minute hamburgers on weekends, and in the scrum that was an Irish Catholic family dinner, cross talk by everyone at once, the push-pull of ideas, food passed with the caveat “Don’t spill the milk!” From her end of the table my mother would speak up, raising the mystery of duality in humans, “we are souls in animal bodies.”
In her college days, my mother had read Teilhard de Chardin; he was the pioneering but controversial French Jesuit scientist and priest, while she, wearing a beret and smoking cigarettes in the greenhouse, had been a young radical artist. By the time I entered the story, she was married with children but still encouraged us to ponder the great mystery. The dinner conversation would rapid fire move on – my extrovert father quick with puns and one liners – while my mother was quieter, introspective.
We are endowed with spirit within a mortal physical body. A very long time ago Aristotle explored the material world in his Physics before turning to first principles in his Metaphysics. The task of reconciling the two still is left to us.
We live at the crossroads of duality: mind and body, male and female, good and evil, past and future, animal and divine. The divine cannot be superior nor the animal lesser. Wholeness depends upon their balance, the fuel required to build consciousness. That is a most challenging place to be, in a culture obsessed with the rational, material and physical – the quantitative – much less so with awe, stillness, and the intuitive mythopoetic – the qualitative.
We have perfected the machinery of output, efficiency, optimization, and hyper-rational self-interest. Jacob Needleman, the philosopher and religious scholar, observed, “we have come to know the price of everything, and the value of nothing.” We increasingly live in a culture of Mammon. We deify money. Human life is cheap.
How do we find our way out of this rabbit hole? The challenge is to remember, always, that we live in the present through consciousness, which is experiential awareness. The rational cognitive mind excels at analysis, but on its own, it tends to zero-sum binaries: us versus them, profit versus loss, winner versus loser. This is the outward focus. But consciousness is personal and internal, functioning in the present moment, receiving meaning and feeling. Consciousness is a light; the rational mind is a knife. We need the knife but cannot live by cutting alone. Consciousness, like a fulcrum, can balance the duality, and feeling is key.
In Money and the Meaning of Life, Needleman wrote: “It is far better to understand a central truth with the whole of oneself than it is to know many things only with the mind. When one knows only with the mind and the feelings are not integrated into the knowing, then the knowledge one has becomes harmful. Technology without ethics is the result of having knowledge without developing the instrument of ethical perception, the feelings. As it was said long ago, ‘The mind is for seeing what is true; the feelings are for understanding what is good.’ ”
What is needed is to restore the qualitative. When we say the purpose of life is healing, this is the qualitative path. When we value the relational over the transactional, this is the qualitative path. When we resist the dopamine of doomscrolled outrage, and replace it with a silent presence to the friction between our animal selves and our spiritual longing, this is the path to a simple, grounded sanity.
If the quantitative goal is accumulation, the qualitative goal is wholeness. Healing is not about erasing our animal limits or eliminating the tension between sacred and profane; it is about bringing them into harmony, a peaceful coexistence. It is learning to stand at the fulcrum without demanding that one side destroy the other.
Facts easily divide people, while cultural stories can unite. When we rely only on the rational knife, myth becomes its necessary counterpoint. I was fortunate, at college, to study Classical Languages, reading the Iliad and the Odyssey, but also, to meet and hear Joseph Campbell speak. His work on comparative mythology showed that cultures across time share common narrative forms of consciousness – the hero’s journey to transformation and truth.
From Gilgamesh to Odysseus, from Arjuna to King Arthur: stories of departure, initiation, and return bearing newfound wisdom. The renewed fascination with The Odyssey seems culturally telling. As dissent and argument build to a crescendo, I can’t help but wonder if we the people are simply yearning for any path forward.
“We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.” This saying attributed to Teilhard de Chardin captures the supreme adventure of creation. I was awakened to this mystery at my childhood dinner table, and it challenges my mind still. Now raising my own children, we begin the story by breaking bread together.
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Lead photo by Elena
Yellow Sky
Posted: July 24, 2026 Filed under: consciousness 1 Comment
Yellow skies press down from the Great Lakes to the Northeast. From Minnesota to Massachusetts air quality issues abound. “Code Red” and “Code Purple” alerts sound in the Mid-Atlantic, Detroit’s Air Quality Index (AQI) hits 724, while Duluth, MN skyrockets to 924, an environmental emergency far exceeding the threshold for “Hazardous” air. The concentration of fine particulate matter is so dense that it poses immediate, severe health threats to every person, regardless of their health status. But real men do not wear N95 masks.
More than 1,000 Canadian forest fires are the cause of recent events. Science shows industrial activity and fossil fuels contribute to this weather, but politicians express outrage at forest management practices. A warming climate is just another Chinese hoax, or, to use the popular cliche, “it is what it is.” Or, is it symbolic?
This week our July Book Club read “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky,” a short story by Stephen Crane, one of the most innovative authors of his generation. In 1895 he published “The Red Badge of Courage” to critical acclaim, what H.G. Wells called an “orgy of praise.” Crane’s storytelling prowess was so fine that he crafted “The Red Badge” entirely in his imagination, since he had no experience on the battlefield. The use of color and chiaroscuro are vitally present in his writing, and scholars compare his writing not only to Impressionist painting, but suggest that he influenced the painters. Vivid, that is.
Yellow Sky is the name of a fictional town in western Texas at the end of the wild western frontier. In “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky”, the town marshal, Jack Potter, has gone east to find a bride, to embrace domestic life. As the story opens the bride and groom ride west in a train, from San Antonio. The plush car is no stagecoach. They dine in the parlor car – cost is no concern – where the Negro Porters wait upon them. “They were evidently very happy.” Potter was “…a man known, liked, and feared in his corner, a prominent person….” who trades his twin revolvers for a suit and silver pocket watch. He went East to court a woman, no longer to fight with men.
During his absence, several men drink in the town bar, when a drunken man named Scratchy Wilson appears to terrorize the town. The barkeep explains, “You see, this here Scratchy Wilson is a wonder with a gun—a perfect wonder; and when he goes on the war trail, we hunt our holes—naturally. He’s about the last one of the old gang that used to hang out along the river here. He’s a terror when he’s drunk.”
Behold the classic myth of the American west manosphere: the man in the white hat fights the thug dressed in black, rugged independence everywhere abounds in a frontier wild, open, and free. Western movies, foundational to American culture, commanded almost 30% of all Hollywood films in the post-WWII era. With 50 Westerns debuting annually and saturating television with serialized shows, the genre established a new cultural temple of patriotism and masculinity just as we Boomers were born.
“The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky” speaks of the end of an era, of change. Railroads, the “Iron Horse,” thundered West bringing consumer goods, fashion and ideas from the East. The wild west changed when self-reliance was replaced by shared modern culture. Jack Potter’s bride from the east represents feminine grace, his rough edges smoothed; no guns brought to court her. Their homecoming represents family, home and permanence, the antithesis of a home on the range. The “yellow sky” represents sunset, which is an ending, lights off, curtain down.
This week’s short story bears striking relevance to the world in which my son, and his peers, come of age. Our society seems to teeter on the edge, both sides of the political aisle locked in an endless struggle of “us versus them,” divisiveness all the rage, tempers hot, like the climate, only get hotter. Masculine aggression is on steroids, like cage fighters dueling on the front lawn, modern heroes of our wild west.
Scratchy Wilson enters “into the middle of the main street of Yellow Sky…in either hand the man held a long, heavy, blue-black revolver.” He is dressed “in a maroon-colored flannel shirt, which had been purchased for purposes of decoration and made, principally, by some Jewish women on the east side of New York.” The last of a dying breed, even he wears the clothes from an Eastern city.
Looking for a fight, he begins shooting at a dog. “At sight of the man, the dog sprang up and walked diagonally away, with a sullen head, and growling. The man yelled, and the dog broke into a gallop. As it was about to enter an alley, there was a loud noise, a whistling, and something spat the ground directly before it. The dog screamed, and, wheeling in terror, galloped headlong in a new direction. Again there was a noise, a whistling, and sand was kicked viciously before it. Fear-stricken, the dog turned and flurried like an animal in a pen. The man stood laughing, his weapons at his hips.”
Scratchy Wilson wants more violence, and so he sets off looking for the town marshal, Jack Potter. The myth of the isolated individual is built upon the illusion of separation, of “divide and conquer.” This is the dying breed, to my son’s generation, when science increasingly shows that a forest is not separate solitary trees but an integrated ecosystem, while studies of humpback whales suggest they adopt complex songs from neighboring groups; an animal form of cultural transmission. Research continues, showing interconnectedness is a growing theme.
For millennia, many societies have celebrated an ego-centered dominance, a focus upon conquest, violence and material quantity, rather than healing and an internal quality. There is reason to wonder if the excessive preening among authoritarian-minded males today is not their yellow sky moment, their plaintive war cry of a dying breed, the end of an era that has lasted too long. My son reads “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky” in this context.
On the topic of myths from the manosphere, consider this combat search-and-rescue prayer recently recited at the Department of War:
“The path of the downed aviator is beset on all sides by the iniquities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who, in the name of camaraderie and duty, shepherd the lost through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother’s keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to capture and destroy my brother. And you will know my call sign is Sandy 1 when I lay my vengeance upon thee, and amen.”
Contrast that to the words of the Aramaic-speaking radical, from 2000 years ago, of deeds such as walking on water, raising the dead, multiplying loaves and fishes, “These and greater things ye shall do.” This teaching speaks of elevating reality toward a unified healing life, not an aggressive combative individual struggle.
Amidst signs of social decay, the New York Times bestseller “A World Appears, a Journey into Consciousness” writes of a Copernican Moment of awakening. There is good reason to pause and consider what might be possible, where we collectively are now, how we choose to go forward in an awakening consciousness.
If life imitates art, then the outcome would be already known. In “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky” the climax occurs when bad man Wilson intercepts the marshal Potter and his bride. But the shoot out does not happen. Potter, already married and unarmed, has moved forward leaving Wilson to wallow in his lost past. The old code of the Wild West was never to fight a married man, so Wilson, dressed in boots with “red tops with gilded ornaments, such as are used by little boys” is adrift. The bad man always was just a buffoon.
But our moment now is not the climax, our outcome is not yet known, because symbolically, we are earlier in the story, when the bad man Scratchy Wilson is terrorizing the town, shooting at dogs. This is the lesson for my son to learn as yellow skies hover low as he reads the short story.
My generation, we Boomers, have been trained, generation after generation, to obsess over the climax of conflict, high drama of a courtroom, the cavalry charging in a Saturday matinee, the pistol drawn at High Noon, killings in the streets, the hyper-masculine male at the podium, finger raised, barking at the moon: the court jester of Camelot whose time has passed. The Zoomers and generations to follow will live entirely with an awareness of – and can choose to build community through – ecosystems that are interconnected and interdependent.
My son and his peers must learn to distinguish noise from message, must look past the clown parade of politicians’ false promises, must find within themselves a deeper feeling of purpose simply in being kind and thoughtful; the long journey of healing and restoration. My role, and the purpose of our July Book Club, is to give him a vocabulary to help him on that path.
About those July yellow hazy skies, we can only hope that all people on Gaia wake up to their new reality.
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The lead photo was taken in July 2026 by a community member (such as Chance Paavola or Wayne Wastaken) fleeing the Namaygoosisagagun First Nation (Collins First Nation) in northern Ontario, Canada, as a massive wildfire overran the area. The image was used on Bill McKibbens’ Substack “The Crucial Years.”
Failure
Posted: July 17, 2026 Filed under: Child Centered Activities, Chronicles of a First Time Parent, consciousness 1 Comment
Here at the Art Farm Homeschool, summertime living is easy, but not idle. We have created a July Book Club, in which the Magister zooms in, via telecomm, to discuss with my son a short story masterpiece. My son’s recalcitrance to join any club with peers, his aversion to leaving the house, his preoccupation with online gaming left us no choice. The book club is only 4 weeks, while summer break is 12, so the balance of time is definitely skewed to his leisure, but this month, like a fulcrum, he will engage in reading and thoughtful discussion.
This week’s short story is “The Egg,” by Sherwood Anderson. The story is set in the first decade of the 1900s in the fictional town of Bidwell, Ohio. The story’s narrator is a young child, and its protagonist, “the Father,” was “a cheerful and kindly man” whose work was idyllic as a farm hand on a pre-industrial farm. Once married, he “became ambitious. The American passion for getting up in the world took possession.…”
Their path to success was to raise chickens, but the venture fails badly. Having lost that farm, they move into town to start over. They borrow a horse and wagon, load their “cheap chairs” and a crate of live chickens, on top of which, like a crown jewel, the narrator’s baby carriage. “Why we stuck to the baby carriage I don’t know. It was unlikely other children would be born and the wheels were broken. People who have few possessions cling tightly to those they have. That is one of the facts that make life so discouraging.”
The father rode on the wagon, while the Mother and son walked the long eight miles into town, “…a tiny caravan of hope looking for a new place from which to start on our upward journey through life.” The scene eerily foreshadows Steinbeck’s “Grapes of Wrath,” when the migrants flee the Dust Belt, traveling Route 66 to the promised land of California. Long is the dark shadow of the American Dream.
Sherwood Anderson revolutionized 20th-century fiction with a probing and unsparing prose. His stories are set during the Second Industrial Revolution, the transition from steam to electricity, from iron to steel, assembly line production, urbanization, corporate consolidation. His core theme was the lonely, isolated individual, whose youthful truth had grown hardened, an unfulfilled longing, struggling for connection.
During the First Industrial Revolution, seventy years before Anderson, Henry David Thoreau railed at the “Iron Horse” of the Fitchburg Railroad, the tracks laid one-third of a mile from his beloved Walden Pond. The deafening roar of industry intruding on his idyll, he wrote, ”We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us.” He warned the machines were becoming our masters, rendering people into an impotent servitude, “The mass of men lead quiet lives of desperation.”
From Thoreau to Anderson the Industrial Revolutions had completely altered the American landscape. And yet the American Dream held firm, the myth of upward mobility, that each generation would succeed its parents; the tireless labor of one’s youth to acquire wealth, spent in later years to regain health. “Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.”
As a child, I remember family discussions, at the Kitchen table, about the American Dream. For my generation the realization has been remarkable. Nearly 90% of Americans born in the 1940s and 50s earned more than their parents. Because of compounding asset growth in real estate and an essentially bull market since the 1980s, the Baby Boomers hold over $85 trillion in household assets.
The Third Industrial Revolution, the advent of semiconductors and the internet, unfolded during the careers of we Boomers. Since 1993, when the browser Mosaic was launched, catalyzing widespread access to the world-wide-web, the stock market has surged 3,100% further widening the gap between the have and have nots.
Now the world of algorithms and artificial intelligence represent the Fourth Industrial Revolution, during which my son’s generation, the Zoomers, come of age. It goes almost without question that the American Dream fades, the thought of upward mobility increasingly out of reach, while the mental health epidemic spikes.
A recent study published by the Dove Medical Press, an open access peer-reviewed journal, found that “17.14-24.19% of adolescents developed AI dependencies over time, while studies consistently show that mental health problems predict subsequent AI dependence, with social anxiety, loneliness, and depression serving as primary risk factors.” The isolation that Sherwood Anderson wrote about, and the desolation of which Thoreau warned, have only increased. Jacob Needleman, the high school teacher my son learned about in May, cautioned, “When thought races ahead of Being, a civilization is racing towards destruction.”
My son will not read juvenile fiction this summer. The short stories that the Magister has chosen are considered masterpieces, and their hard edge is appropriate for a young man coming of age. Among his age peers, suicide rates have increased 62% since 2007, with boys having significantly higher rates, while Black youths ages 10 to 17 have increased 144% over the same period.
My son comes of age in a conflicted time, an age of skepticism. Sitting on the front porch, we discussed the American Dream, to which he replied, “That may be what it was supposed to be, but that is not how it is.” He is already aware that the American Dream was, at best, a cultural myth, or at least an historical aberration.
It is a sad irony that bankruptcy is used with increasing frequency by older individuals. According to the Consumer Bankruptcy Project, in the last 20 years, the number of people 65 and older filing for bankruptcy has increased to become its fastest-growing demographic group. We Boomers have enjoyed an economic abundance of historic proportions, but now aging, increasing numbers are falling behind.
At the age of 44 I declared a Chapter 7 bankruptcy. Mine was the good fortune to fail while young, to still have time to start over. I learned that forgiveness lies at the core of civil jurisprudence, and failure can bring a “fresh start.”
The legal doctrine known as the “Fresh Start” came from the 1934 landmark Supreme Court ruling in Local Loan Co v Hunt, 292 U.S. 234, in which the unanimous opinion, written by Justice George Sutherland, reads,
“One of the primary purposes of the Bankruptcy Act is to ‘relieve the honest debtor from the weight of oppressive indebtedness, and permit him to start afresh free from the obligations and responsibilities consequent upon business misfortunes.’ … [It] gives to the honest but unfortunate debtor… a new opportunity in life and a clear field for future effort, unhampered by the pressure and discouragement of pre-existing debt.”
A financial reset is a civil right, but an interior reset is a human necessity. The depth of my experience redirected my life and taught me that the purpose of life is healing, forgiveness a means to that end, which stands in stark contrast to American culture. Jacob Needleman commented, “The root of materialism is a poverty of ideas about the inner and outer world. Less and less does our contemporary culture have, or even seek, commerce with great ideas, and it is that lack that is weakening the human spirit. This is the essence of materialism. Materialism is a disease of the mind starved for ideas.” Our antidote to the isolation that AI and gaming breed is for my son and the Magister to read short stories during July and exchange ideas.
“The Egg” is told from the perspective of the son, as a grown man, remembering his Father’s failures. My son, a keen observer, forms his own thoughts now, which will include his reflections on my failures. His inheritance from me will be moral more than material. My task is to teach him skill with his tools, depth of character, and an informed view on the isolation plaguing his generation. What he chooses to do with that will become his healing story.
My career advice, should he ever ask, shall come from Thomas Carlyle, who influenced Thoreau and the Transcendentalists, “Make yourself an honest man, and then you may be sure that there is one less scoundrel in the world.”
Babel in Ur
Posted: May 29, 2026 Filed under: Child Centered Activities, consciousness, Money & Banking 1 Comment
My son comes of age at the dawn of the post literate age, when seven fictive persons with valuation exceeding $23 Trillion USD own artificial intelligence and employ robots at scale, developing plans to colonize Mars while enjoying unrestricted freedom of speech. These fictive persons’ capitalization exceeds the EU’s entire economic output, is roughly 123% of China’s nominal GDP and is greater than the market valuation of every other nation on planet earth, except for the United States.
To put into perspective this 21st century tech vanguard, my son and I looked back to the 27th century BCE. The Epic of Gilgamesh, carved in stone during the third dynasty of Ur, is one of the earliest stories in literature, the first epic poem. The story is cautionary; technology, literacy and centralization tend to consolidate power and over millennia, the more things change, they may, in fact, stay the same.
I will proclaim to the world the deeds of Gilgamesh. This was the man to whom all things were known; this was the king who knew the countries of the world. He was wise, he saw mysteries and knew secret things, he brought us a tale of the days before the flood. He went on a long journey, as weary, worn-out with labor, returning he rested, he engraved on a stone the whole story.
In Uruk he built walls, a great rampart, and the temple of blessed Eanna for the god of the firmament Anu, and for Ishtar the goddess of love. Look at it still today: the outer wall where the cornice runs, it shines with the brilliance of copper; and the inner wall, it has no equal. Touch the threshold, it is ancient. …Climb up the wall of Uruk; walk along it, I say; regard the foundation terrace and examine the masonry: is it not burnt brick and good? The seven sages laid the foundations.
Uruk was a city in Mesopotamia, the “cradle of civilization” between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Agriculture and irrigation were introduced there, around 5000 BCE. The world’s first writing system – cuneiform – emerged by 3200 BCE and was used to record the Epic of Gilgamesh. The Sumerian Kingdom developed the state-of-the-art technology for “burnt brick” as building material.
Southern Mesopotamia (present day Iraq) lacked stone quarries or forests, but mud and clay were abundant, and when they learned to control high-temperature kiln firing, they created durable, water-resistant “burnt brick.” Secured with bitumen “tar” mortar, the bricks became waterproof allowing larger, taller, more complex structures to be built.
By 2100 BCE, in the neighboring city Ur, the oldest existing legal code, the Code of Ur-Nammu was developed, and the King began massive building campaigns. The stepped temple towers he built, known as Ziggurats, became monuments to his centralized power; “built by Ur-Nammu” stamped on every brick.
The temple and palace as centralized control, using one language – cuneiform, an intelligence not available to the common person – to manage ever expanding economic power, by means of an algorithmic governance with slave labor, bears relevance to the dilemma of my son’s generation: the Magnificent Seven fictive persons own and control AI using chips made of sand and silicon by robots at scale, their massive data centers our modern day Ziggurat.
The First Patriarch of the Hebrew people, Abraham, was born in Ur, and would have grown up in the shadow of the Great Ziggurat, pondering the King’s divine right and his shrine to the moon god Nanna: collective monumental religion. Called to a different path, Abraham wandered in the desert, seeking the divine in a covenant of personal conscience and individual responsibility: monotheism.
Centuries later, when Abraham’s story was written down, very likely during the Jewish exile in Babylon, the Hebrew scribes wrote the story like this:
1 And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech…. 3 And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for morter. 4 And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.
The story of the Tower of Babel was certainly inspired by the Ziggurats of the Sumerian Kings whose temples were a highly organized center of commerce and religion, a holy staircase built to invite the gods down, an act of supplication, as though upon “bended knee”. The Jewish scribes, however, saw it as an act of arrogant pride – hubris – humans empowered to climb up, as well as the dangers of empire and lock-step uniformity; “confounding their language” forced diversity.
5 And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded. 6 And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. 7 Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech. 8 So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city.
The power of empire or the sin of hubris? A God of judgement and wrath or one who gently “confounded their language”? Our homeschool assiduously avoids the either/or as we seek the both/and multi-dimensional reality. We reached out to our Soul Brother to inquire of the Buddhist perspective. His reply: Dogen Zenji’s Genjō-kōan.
Dogen Zenji was a Zen monk, poet, philosopher who introduced the practice of zazen – seated meditation – to Japan. As a young monk, he travelled to China to study Chan Buddhism, the paradox-heavy, oxymoronic strain that challenges the rational mind. “What is the sound of one hand clapping,” Chan’s classic aphorism, applies surprisingly well to our AI era.
Chan Buddhism teaches that reality is nothing more than direct physical experience, not a conceptual framework defined by words, letters, or logic; information is not realization. Information is a tool – like the hammer and nail in my carpenter’s tool belt – and the real person must command their tools. AI unchecked can become a barrier stopping us from experiencing the physical world. My son should learn to use AI, but more importantly, to see the limits both of AI and of words. “A finger pointing at the moon is not the moon itself,” says the koan, so my son will soon confront the paradox; I have no answers, only questions, which he must resolve from his own direct experience.
In the Tower of Babel story, the perfection and harmony of one language was a conceptual trap, an imperial uniformity; reality is neither single nor rigid as the autocrat desires but is the diverse, varied “ten thousand things.” Written as a story of divine punishment, people “scattered…upon the face of all the earth,” Chan sees the Tower of Babel’s fall as liberation from delusion, a return to the earth where life unfolds with the friction of physical experience. Shame has no place in reality.
The act of building a tower to reach heaven is the delusion of separation, heaven as a destination attained via material accumulation. About reality Dogen Zenji wrote: “When ancestors gave expression to it, they did not search for it as something outside.” The ego may be chagrined, but clay and slime, the material used to make the bricks, is reality itself and the path to realization is to be wholly present in this current moment. There is wisdom in quiet receptivity, allowing reality to meet you as it is, on its terms.
Emperors, tyrants and the wealthy build monuments to themselves – “built by Ur-Nammu” stamped on every brick – such is their delusion, but so too deluded are the people who aggrandize and support same. The ego desires a permanent unchanging self, separate from others, but Dogen taught the self is fundamentally empty and interconnected with everything else: “To study the Buddha Way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self.”
In the end, after the people had been scattered, the decaying monument of mud and slime would have fulfilled its unintended symbolism, showing the impermanence of human constructs. For Dogen Zenji, reality is never something finished but rather a continuous dynamic process, the entropy of physics, real persons becoming, not being, which is the magnificence of humanity, even in its varied confused uncertainty.
“Firewood becomes ash, and it does not become firewood again… life is a period of itself, and death is a period of itself,” the Dogen wrote. My son is the firewood, now. My role to fuel his fire, to kindle his flame, to teach him to go, forward bearing his light.
To Have and to Hold
Posted: May 15, 2026 Filed under: Child Centered Activities, consciousness, Money & Banking | Tags: abraham-lincoln 2 Comments
Our pursuit of personhood continues. Plato’s plucked chicken and Aristotle’s “thought bearing animal” both centered on materiality, to which Aristotle added the rational mind. There should be no surprise with that, given materiality and the rational mind were absolutely central to Classical Greek civilization. The birthplace of philosophy and science, the “life of reason” was considered their highest calling. Their art and architecture, such as the Parthenon, the perfect embodiment of geometric harmony expressed in material form.
Our homeschool emphasizes not the mono-rational mind but instead the multi-dimensional self; a person is more than a mind in locomotion. The Greek definitions, foundational to western Civilization, seemed too narrow and so my son and I travelled to the other side of the globe, to Asia, to see what thoughts would emerge.
Pudgala is a Sanskrit term (पुद्गल) that can mean “physical matter” or “person.” At its root, pud means “combine” and gala means to “separate,” so the core understanding is that change is the constant, clusters of indivisible atoms forming and breaking apart, all of which create matter, the building block of life. The term originated in Sanskrit around the 5th century BCE.
In Greece at that time, Heraclitus, the pre-Socratic philosopher, understood the universe as the “unity of opposites” constantly in flux, always becoming, never being. His writings remain only in fragments, sayings like “everything flows” and “no man ever steps in the same river twice.”
Known as the “weeping philosopher,” Heraclitus was followed in the 4th century BCE by Democritus, known as the “Laughing Scholar.” He reasoned the universe was composed of atoms (indivisible units) and the void (empty space); atoms, the building blocks of matter, never break or perish, but combine and separate to form clusters, differing forms of matter, by moving through the void. The co-founder of Atomic Theory, Democritus described the essence of fusion and fission, which is the foundation of modern atomic physics.
So whether from the Greek or Sanskrit, physical matter is clearly one trait of a person. Aristotle added in “reason” while Asian philosophers went further. To the Jain Dharma path pudgala was the non-living physical matter that makes up our bodies, breath and the physical brain, ever changing, both supporting and restraining consciousness and the soul. Within Buddhism pudgala usually refers to a mere person as the suffering self – the burden bearer – experiencing birth, death and rebirth. The Shaiva tradition of Hinduism went further, with pudgala as the person, bound in material form, whose path was to overcome physical impurities in their return to universal consciousness, the “man seeking to know divinity [śivatva].”
Such was the “Great Conversation” between these schools of thought, with multiple varying meanings hotly debated, but which seems remarkably similar to the “body-mind-spirit” concept of holism, popular today. Our pursuit here is to define a person including the dynamic of constant change. Maslov’s hierarchy of needs comes to mind; physiological, safety, love and belongingness, esteem, and self-actualization are all parts of a whole person.
After much discussion, we settled on our definition of a person as “a thought bearing biped mammal with consciousness of purpose, meaning, intuition and connection.” We are, after all, in pursuit of the multi-dimensional self, and how that compares and contrasts with the “fictional person.”
At the most basic level, consider the body. Corpus verum (real body) struggles with mortality, while the corpus fictum can exist in perpetuity. Kongo Gumi, a Japanese construction company building Buddhist temples, was founded in 578 and is the world’s oldest continuously operating company. The Hudson’s Bay Company, founded in 1670, was the oldest surviving joint-stock company until it was forced into liquidation last year. The fictional person is a superb entity to amass power and wealth over the very long haul.
Civil society is necessary for the fictional person to function, which requires real persons for that task. Real persons can be remarkably clever, to a fault. Consider that artificial intelligence is owned by the fictional persons, who have a combined market capitalization surpassing $30 trillion United States Dollars. As fictional persons employ robots at scale, will freedom of speech and personhood be extended further? Mind-boggling how creative we the real people can be, for better or worse. Caveat emptor.
But about that physical body, the corpus verum, a noteworthy thing happened long ago in England. Charles II, the King, convinced of his Divine Right, was unaccountable to Parliament. He raised taxes arbitrarily by decree and desired to send prisoners to remote overseas jails, beyond legal recourse. He was a rake and libertine, and the reaction was swift and complete. The Habeas Corpus Act 1679 was approved by the Parliament of England, taking power away from the King replacing it with a legal process preventing unlawful, arbitrary imprisonment. Habeas in Latin means “you have” and when the King would hold any body in prison, that body, the person, was assured their day in court. This became a cornerstone of democratic rule of law.
Our homeschool operates on the “friends and family” plan, and so for socialization I recruit help from Uncles, Cousins, and friends. My son’s Cousin happens to be an expert in Habeas Corpus, having clerked on the 2nd and 9th United States Circuit Court of Appeals and published, in the Stanford Law Review, the following:
“American habeas corpus, long conventionally known as the Great Writ of Liberty, is more properly understood as the Great Writ of Popular Sovereignty—a tool for We the People to insist that when our agents in government exercise our delegated penal powers, they remain faithful to our sovereign will. Once we grasp this conceptual shift, the implications for the law of habeas are profound.”
A noble argument, and yet in the history of the United States, American Presidents have suspended that Writ four times – most notably the “Great Emancipator” during the Civil War – plus one attempt concerning detainees at Guantanamo Bay, and the current occupant desiring to do so to immigrants. Last year the Cousin joined us by teleconference to chat about the Great Writ and why the corpus fictum (the government) would suspend the rights of a corpus verum (the person). A transcript follows here (edited for clarity and brevity).
Cousin: The basic theory of US government is: “we the people are in charge.” Habeas is a way to enforce the principle of law. If an Executive (President, Governor, etc) locks someone up, then that person is entitled to go to court. But in war, you can’t follow an ordinary process. [Discussion of Abraham Lincoln suspending the Writ during the Civil War, holding 12,000 civilians without due process.]
My son: It seems good and bad. I can understand Abe’s thought process but you should have a fair trial.
Cousin: [a discussion of prerogative writs, court orders restraining government officials from exceeding their authority] …In summary, these are regulating the question of who has power. “Prerogative writs” concern the royal prerogative, the privilege or powers specific to the King. In the USA this is the sovereign people, as exercised by the agents of the people.
[There followed a long discussion of “writ” and its derivation. I used example of “to write” which my son understood. The question arose of the phrase “the great writ of popular sovereignty” concerning whether, per use of the definite article, habeas is the one or are there others?]
The Great Writ of Liberty is the traditional name. Habeas was a mechanism through which all other liberties could be protected. Habeas was the vehicle for asserting other rights we have. The jailer must be held to account. [Discussion turned to Stephen Miller’s proposal to suspend habeas corpus.]
My son: Because (1) he likes DJT he would say this, and (2) he wants it to be really simple, any immigrant gets picked up, and gets locked up.
Cousin: A logistical simplicity. Yes. But why would many people think this is a good idea?
My son: Probably just a similar thought, just get rid of them.
Cousin: There are 11 to 22 Million people here illegally. There is a political will to change that. But what is the argument on the other side?
My son: There are many immigrants, and some are illegal, but this is not like Abe Lincoln at the Civil War. Now it is not really necessary. Everyone should have a trial. If Stephen Miller was being deported he would want a trial. If Donald Trump was being deported he would want a trial.
Cousin: At a basic intuitive level, it feels the crisis facing our nation is not as critical as Civil War. Was Lincoln’s suspending good or bad? If suspended, it is really important to guard our liberties, but all lofty ideals matter nothing if the country ceases to exist. How do you weight that?
Milo: Suspending habeas corpus should be a last resort. I don’t know what problems – people’s free will – but on a large level, it would fill up the jails.
In closing, the Cousin brought up Aristotle’s concept of the good as it relates to government; the state exists not only for economic survival, but to cultivate virtue, promote justice and to provide a forum for citizens to engage in rational, virtuous political activity; the “thought bearing political animal” oriented to the virtuous, not only the capitalist, life.
In Jay, a Person
Posted: May 8, 2026 Filed under: Child Centered Activities, consciousness 1 Comment
Chapter 1 verse 1 of the Gospel of John states, “In the beginning was the word.”
1 U.S. Code § 1 begins “Words denoting number, gender, and so forth…”
Words, at the core of our homeschool curriculum, define the sacred and profane. As my son learns the sacred Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος, καὶ ὁ λόγος ἦν πρὸς τὸν θεόν, καὶ θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος so I study the profane.
1 U.S. Code § 1 continues “…the words “person” and “whoever” include corporations, companies, associations, firms, partnerships, societies, and joint stock companies, as well as individuals”. Corporate personhood is a fictional person, “corpus fictum” is the Latin term, and so, this being May, it becomes clear our year end project shall ask: ”What is a person?” and, “what are the rights and responsibilities, thereof ?”
We begin with a chicken plucked of all its feathers. In his dialogue “The Statesman,” Plato defined human beings – persons – as “featherless bipeds.” A clever definition, in response to which Diogenes the Cynic threw over the walls of Plato’s Academy a plucked chicken to emphasize the difference between abstract theory and practical reality. Duly noted, our homeschool needs to be practical.
Aristotle, more pragmatically, defined humans both as a “political animal” (ζῶον πολιτικόν) inclined to form societies and as the “thought bearer animal” (ζῶον λόγον ἔχον). Of note, the word λόγον is the same as John’s λόγος, a word fundamental and rich with multiple meanings. “Word” is the common definition, but also “reason,” “logic” or “principle;” λόγος represents a divine ordering intelligence, a structural coherence. The German philosopher Heidegger would later argue “rational” is far too narrow as the defining human trait; “having” speech, discourse, and the capacity to articulate the meaning of our world is our defining trait. In the beginning, indeed, is the word.
All of this talk about persons and words brought to mind the landmark case Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010) in which the Supreme Court granted to the fictional person unlimited freedom of speech. For better or worse unrestricted corporate spending is free speech, supporting or opposing political candidates; persons real and fictive do articulate the meaning of our world.
All of this was becoming too abstract, so I hopped into my truck and drove north to Jay, Maine to see first hand what happens when the fictional person and the political animal come into conflict. We all know the rights, but what are the responsibilities?
Jay is a town of 4,620 people nestled in the foothills of Western Maine, on the banks of the mighty Androscoggin River. 178 miles long, the river flows from Errol, New Hampshire down across western Maine to Merrymeeting Bay before it empties into the Gulf of Maine. The river drains 3,530 square miles as it drops an average eight feet per mile, making it a prime location for hydro-powered mills and factories. The history of the fictional person making paper by the toil of many “thought bearer animals” largely began in Jay, on that river.
Hugh Chisholm, a baron industrialist of Portland, Maine, made his first fortune selling picture postcards. A shrewd capitalist, he decided to vertically integrate and control pulp and paper making. He opened the Otis Falls Pulp Company in Jay in 1888. It was among the most modern facilities of its time and, by 1898, Chisholm had merged 20 paper and pulp mills to create the International Paper Company, controlling over 60% of the newsprint industry.
History is rich with irony, bitterly so for Jay. Chisholm formed his paper trust, just before the “Rough Rider” President began busting the trusts. International Paper survived, thrived, and expanded but when the B-movie actor, who had served eight terms as President of the Screen Actors Guild, a 45,000 member Union, became the union-busting USA President, then International Paper Company turned its sights on Jay and decided to bust Local 14.
In 1987 International Paper Company was thriving. For more than twenty years it had been a component of the Dow Jones Industrial Index, and its profits that year increased 33% while net sales rose 42% to $7.8 Billion. Despite near-record profitability, the company demanded concessions in the form of wage cuts and givebacks (increases previously won), high monthly payments for health insurance, an end to double-time pay on Sundays, and the elimination of all holidays (including Christmas). Jay Local 14 went on strike.
The fictional person locked out the living breathing persons. The fictional person is responsible legally to its shareholders while the living breathing persons who toil in the mill are but a fungible means to that end. For the living breathing person responsible to family, friends and community the day is long, those are ties that bind, many of those families having lived in Western Maine for generations. The people of Jay stood tall. Those “political animals” inclined to form societies became a beacon to the world.
Solidarity is a noun, meaning “unity that produces or is based on community of interests, objectives, and standards.” Since 1915, the word has been the anthem and rallying cry amongst union workers. August 1980, workers at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk, Poland used that noun in naming their Independent Self-Governing Trade Union “Solidarity.” That union’s membership peaked at 10 million and played a central role in the end of communist rule in Poland. 1987, in Jay, Maine, solidarity was key as the strikers, community and people from away all came together in support of real persons fighting the fictional person.
The United Paperworkers International Union local 14 organized a focused community-based pro-Labor campaign: 24/7 picketing plus food and clothing banks, letter writing and a media campaign to broadcast the news. Massive rallies were held, including a 10,000 person march, and caravans sent across New England – one demonstration at the Bank of Boston – and even to Alabama to build support. Presidential candidate Jesse Jackson, in October 1987, visited Jay and spoke to 3,500 people. Support was widespread. The Chinese Progressive Association Workers’ Center in Boston mailed checks weekly to Local 14 to stay the course. A young woman, age 28 who happened to be studying art in Maine, created a mural showing the solidarity.
In the end, International Paper broke Local 14. The strikers were permanently replaced. In 2006 the mill was sold. Like a bad neighbor, the fictional person moved on. Its waste remains.
The Androscoggin River is known as “Cancer Valley.” From Rumford downstream incidences of cancer and illness are high, well above average, both from the chemicals discharged into the river and the mountains trapping pollutants in the air. The Androscoggin was named in the 1970s as one of the most polluted rivers in America, so polluted that it would lose all of the oxygen in its waters. Edmund Muskie, who authored the Clean Water Act, grew up on the Androscoggin River, and that legislation made a difference. The river has significantly recovered, but toxic chemicals remain in the fish while untreated sewage overflows during heavy rains. The river is still the most polluted in Maine. No one drinks its water. Except for animals.
The fictional person has the right to move off shore to find cheaper labor, while living-breathing persons, with homes and families, remain settled in the river valley. We the people – or, our elected representatives – have granted to the fictional persons extensive rights, with minimal responsibilities, it would seem.
“The company has gone, but the union lives on” is the motto of Local 14. On International Workers Day, I drove north to attend a rededication ceremony for the Local 14 Strike Mural in Jay. Standing room only, the event was robust with speakers and memories, including the artist who painted the mural, 40-years ago. The Local 14 chorus sang and we all joined in. A toast of sparkling cider was made, a meal was served. Solidarity and civility were shared in Jay, on 1 May.
Words and relationships are central to our homeschool. “Person” and “solidarity” are words to be discussed, with the crux of the matter: ”What is a person?” and “What are the rights and responsibilities, thereof?” And so begins our end of year summative, which will include an art-making mural project. Mark-making is meaning making, and the difference between fictive and real is an essential truth.
Karma
Posted: May 1, 2026 Filed under: Chronicles of a First Time Parent, consciousness 2 Comments
Spring Break 2026 was, for me, no vacation but a grueling gauntlet, repairing wrongs, like a cat on a hot tin roof. The Quaker school where I work has its ongoing lawsuit, and the roofer – whom I shall call the Industrialist – had offered to provide an in-kind repair, at no cost. The quid pro quo was a release from all future claims. The lawyers worked hard on that language of release, and once done the work was allowed to proceed.
We agreed to make the repair when the school was on break, no children around. I hired carpenters to handle the non-roof repairs, plus a structural engineer to opine on the condition of the framing lumber, and a Forensics Expert to advise overall. My role is to oversee everything, and give final approval; redundancy was built into the plan.
The school was built to passivhaus standards – the highest voluntary standard of energy efficiency – and was the first passivhaus commercial building in the State of Maine, and the third passivhaus school in the nation. Built in 2015, the school was a model of hope for the future, but now the roof leaks; “The Audacity of Hope” once was a bestseller but today the “Art of the Deal” reigns, and when it rains water pours into the building.
The roof is covered in metal, beneath which is 6” of foam insulation. The roof should be dry, but 80% moisture content has saturated the foam insulation. Passivhaus construction is air tight, so once water gets in, it has no means to dry out; in other words, the building slowly rots from within, which will lead to black mold.
For the spring break, the Goddess and our daughter had gone to New Orleans, leaving my son and me at home, alone. On Monday morning, while my son slept, I was at work early when the Industrialist and his crew showed up.
Our agreement was to open four panels of the metal roofing – about 6 feet wide – and replace all wet insulation. But that section was so thoroughly saturated that when the foam was removed the wood sheathing was slick with water. It glistened in the sunlight. In stunned silence, we stood.
The Industrialist curtly told his crew to remove the entire roof. On the ground below, the carpenters waited at their trucks, nothing to do until their turn to remove the wet sheathing and see what lay beneath. And there was I, leading the charge, alone on behalf of the school. Neither a Quaker nor an employee, I am a part-time independent contractor and could have quit long ago. This task so far exceeds the basic maintenance I was hired to do, but when work and life are viewed not as transactional but relational, I chose to stay the course. Such is my karma.
I speak of karma not in the yoga-centric sense where present actions cause future results but from the Sanskrit root “kr” which means a movement (r) within space (k). “Kr” ‘does’ ‘works’ and is ‘action’ itself. Thus, karma ‘makes.’ Karma ‘creates.’ I came into the job as a carpenter, which is one who moves, while making, creating the built space.
This root definition of karma was entirely new to me, shared by my soul brother, after he saw photos from the work. His “Kr” lead me back to the Bhagavad Gita, which, over 5,000 years old, is an epic work of moral science, ethical duty and balance. Ghandi said, “Gita is not only my Bible or my Koran, it is mother…my ETERNAL MOTHER.”
Gita verse 3.19 states, तस्मादसक्तः सततं कार्यं कर्म समाचर।असक्तो ह्याचरन्कर्म परमाप्नोति पूरुषः।। १९ ।। which translates as, “Therefore, without being attached to fruits of activities, one should act as a matter of duty, for working without attachment, one attains the Supreme.”
That private school has been a source of tremendous experience, powerful relationships. Early in my tenure I arranged a donation of Peter the Polar Bear to the Pre-K class. I had helped build Peter, one of seven sea monsters from a Public Art exhibit. When the exhibit ended, the maker sought new homes for the sea monsters. The Quaker school welcomed Peter, gathered in circle for an assembly, after which the Pre-K cherubs lead Peter out of the Meeting Room, down the hall to his new forever home. I lead that march.
Another time I sat in circle among the 7-8 grade students with an elder, who, in 1965 for the Committee for Non-Violent Action, helped coordinate the Selma to Montgomery Marches. The elder gave voice, in the first person, to Martin Luther King’s presence and the enduring role of civility and non-violent civil disobedience.
And later, when those 7-8 grade students studied the Holocaust, I sat in circle again to share the story of my son’s Great-Grandfather and Great-Great-Grandmother, Jewish in Austria 1939; he, the Great-Grandfather, was persecuted but escaped on the last flight out, while she, the Great-Great-Grandmother, was exterminated. The official letter from the Ministry of Social Welfare, Repatriation Department – Tracing Section states she was deported “to Terezin (Theresienstadt) on June 20th, 1942, and from there to: Auschwitz (Poland) on December 15th, 1943.” The number of her transport was Dr – 1490, the official correspondence signed “For the Minister” with a counter signature vouching “For the Correctness.” Age 74 at the time of her transport, below the signatures, the certificate states, “Notice: Persons more than 50 years of age did not return.”
Dark is the cauldron of hate; our duty is to bear the light, without attachment. Having borne witness, my relation with the school grew profoundly deep, and so I stayed to fight on their behalf, to do battle over a roof and its design, even on Spring Break, when everyone else was on vacation.
The work last week was grueling. By Friday it was clear to a man, that all of us wanted to be anywhere else but there. One of the carpenters looked me in the eye and said, “The next time you need to remove plywood, don’t call me.” Forearmed, I replied swiftly, “You know I was thinking I never want to see you again!” Laughter broke the tension. We got back to work.
Ours is a testosterone-driven age of dominance, where the transactional drives pursuit of rational self-interest. The relational is different, a compassionate path which is the core both of the Homeschool Academy and my karma, which is how I teach my son.
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Meanwhile, Gaia pushes up and starts go down, into the ground. We weed the beds. The growing season begins.
The Path Not Taken
Posted: April 24, 2026 Filed under: Chronicles of a First Time Parent, consciousness | Tags: John Dewey 2 Comments
The local school that my son does not attend is $8.4 Million in debt, needs to cut 70 positions (including 30 teachers), plans to close and possibly to sell one of the Elementary schools, all just to hold the property tax increase to 6%. Two years ago, the School Department opened a new state-of-the-art $70 Million Middle School.
Going from state-of-the-art to layoffs in two years is a frightening whiplash, and you might wonder if the local public school is a nurturing work or learning environment these days. No longer in that school system, my son’s path not taken, it is edifying to compare our curriculum to the public school system; what are the “pros” and what are the “cons?”
One hallmark of the public school system is the “No Child Left Behind” Act, signed into law in 2001 by the Second Patrician of Kennebunkport, Maine. “We’re gonna spend more money, more resources, but they’ll be directed at methods that work,” he growled, “Not feel-good methods. Not sound-good methods. But methods that actually work.” Throwing money at the problem proved a futile waste.
The No Child Act was reviled and despised by teachers and parents for its emphasis upon standardized tests. “Teaching to the test” brought draconian penalties for schools that fell behind. The focus on math and reading left less time for science, history, music and the arts. Recess was cut back. To avoid sanctions, some states lowered their definition of “proficiency.” The Act drove the expansion of charter schools, further draining money from public schools, especially those carrying a debt load for buildings and infrastructure.
“The skinny kid with a funny name” President changed the law in 2015 – the Every Student Succeeds Act – that reduced testing time and gave the States more control over accountability. But regardless of the metric, math and reading levels continue to drop; as of 2024 “The Nation’s Report Card” shows only 22% of high school seniors demonstrate “proficiency” in math and 35% in reading. The system seems flailing.
Homeschooling once seemed out of the question, but when COVID struck during my son’s 1st grade, we were forced to homeschool. He returned to the public school for years 3 and 4, but then abruptly began Middle School in the 5th grade. Nationwide, COVID brought increased rates of inattention, anxiety, depression, and behavioral changes such as opposition and aggression. For my son, the classroom situation became unbearable by the 6th grade and so – at his request – we launched this holy experiment.
Our great unknown is “compared to what?” Am I preparing my son to succeed in life? And “What is success? What is our standard of proficiency?” Here at an art farm we value emotional intelligence more than sheer mental horsepower. Too many are the stories of brilliant minds – MENSA even – who struggle with mental health issues, left unaddressed. The IV league is not for us. I value honesty more than politeness; I prefer to live close to the ground. I believe, in fact, the purpose of life is healing, not the acquisition of assets, honors, or accolades. I may be in the minority, but not silent.
We are required to submit an annual assessment, which is handled by Our Aristotle, a State of Maine Certified Teacher, who works in the public school system, while pursuing a double Masters in Education and Social Work. A remarkably perceptive young man, he was the student teacher for my son’s 5th grade class. They have worked together in a classroom, as well as via the internet. His insights are invaluable. He speaks clearly with my son. One of his gifts is that he is ADHD.
His students are of the “Anxious Generation” and the data are chilling: 20% of US adults ages 18 – 25 report high levels of anxiety; for the period 2010 through 2022 Emergency Room visits for nonfatal self-harm among teens ages 10 – 14 spiked 311% for girls and 171% for boys, while suicide rates for the same age group increased 117.4% for girls and 66.5% for boys. The system is failing, horrifically.
Our Aristotle, who works on the front lines of the Public School System, explained to me, “Relationships are key. The system gets in the way of relationships because it is focused on output, on tests, on metrics. That does not mean you cannot get a good education in the System, but anxiety makes it harder to learn in the System; to thrive there you need to ignore the influence of the negative teachers. Individual teachers do care about education but the system values output.”
The relational approach is based upon the attachment theory of how infants and children form relationships. Developed in the 1960s, the idea is that infants need a strong and secure relationship with at least one caregiver to provide the security and protection for normal emotional development. Absent a secure nurturing environment, children develop as Anxious-Preoccupied, Dismissive-Avoidant or Fearful-Avoidant. Our Aristotle explains, “Attachment is the blueprint for how you relate to others. It can change over time but change is hard fought. Public school becomes a matter of survival if there is a strong attachment to the parents.” The antithesis of the Tiger Mom; attachment bolsters the sense of self to provide deep rooted courage and self-reliance to push back against social norms, opening to the vulnerability of a different path.
STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics), our Aristotle argues, is about output, training for high income jobs producing more output in pursuit of the ever expanding Gross Domestic Product. The Second Patriarch of Kennebunkport admitted as much, shortly after the trauma of September 11, telling the country, “Fly and enjoy America’s great destination spots. Get down to Disney World in Florida. Take your families and enjoy life, the way we want it to be enjoyed.”
“The goal of education,” Our Aristotle continues, “is for kids to transcend us, not to focus on output. They need to learn what good and bad is; the purpose of education is to create a society in which ‘we the people’ can think critically to fight back against oppression. Public education is for all, not for the royals.”
The key to this goal is reading and writing. STEM topics are helpful, but, to Our Aristotle, are meaningless without a solid grounding in words, an understanding of language and how the mind frames thoughts, in order to comprehend what is virtue. The ability to think critically is, he says, the key to the fulfilling life.
John Dewey, a foundational American philosopher known as the “father of progressive education,” advocated against the rigid rote memorization of the Gilded Age in favor of child-centered experiential learning. He viewed schools as vital democratic communities preparing children to live well and gain skills to contribute to the greater good.
In My Pedagogic Creed, written in 1897, Dewey notes that “to prepare [students] for the future life means to give him (sic) command of himself; it means so to train him that he will have the full and ready use of all his capacities….education is a regulation of the process of coming to share in the social consciousness; and that the adjustment of individual activity on the basis of this social consciousness is the only sure method of social reconstruction.” Our Aristotle explains, “School should be about helping people to become critical thinkers who can create their own knowledge of the world. Because we are all inherently good, if we are able to direct our own learning, we’ll naturally come to see the world through a pro-social way. I think that kids go down the “wrong” path because they feel totally disengaged with their learning, and they feel disengaged from their learning because school is mainly about compliance.”
In The Child and the Curriculum, published in 1902, Dewey advocated for the child’s relationship to the subject matter because the relational allows the student to link the information to prior experiences, deepening the connection with new knowledge. Dewey opposed a curriculum focused on data and facts with the student as passive recipient, where “the child is simply the immature being who is to be matured; he is the superficial being who is to be deepened.”
Our Aristotle challenges the authoritative model where educators are the experts, “An educator should be a coach for the students’ own journey in teaching themselves… connecting current learning to previous learning makes it relevant rather than [some] nebulous piece of information that they need to learn because we said so…. many times in school I was forced to learn something in order to perform well on an exam, but I didn’t retain any of it because it seemed like “school” stuff…[the goal is] to meaningfully engage in my world which, in adulthood, becomes bridged with the broader social world.”
Ever deeper we go, our meditation on the purpose and process of education.
https://www.anxiousgeneration.com/research/the-evidence
Copernican Moment
Posted: April 3, 2026 Filed under: consciousness, Farming off the Farm, What is an Art Farm | Tags: artificial-intelligence, consciousness, philosophy, science, spirituality 1 Comment
“The earth is flat” held firm for tens of thousands of years, until Aristotle, during a lunar eclipse, noticed circular shadows and thought differently: the Earth must be round. But still, all thought, the Earth must be at the center of the universe: “geocentrism” was a given.
And then, in 1543, a Renaissance polymath spoke truth to power, publishing De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres), the defining and pioneering moment in the Scientific Revolution. Nicolaus Copernicus changed the world.
Johannes Kepler, the German mathematician and musical theorist, followed suit, between 1608 and 1621, with the three laws of planetary motion, a much needed defense of Copernicanism. Rene Descartes, in 1641, sealed the deal with his Meditations on First Philosophy; “Cogito, ergo sum” and Cartesian coordinates became the law of the rational mind.
From Copernicus to Descartes, in 98 years, the modern world was conceived, a conceptual shift so profound that life on planet Earth irrevocably changed. Rational science is so central to our age that it is hard to fathom how bold and pioneering were these men who challenged the Pope, Emperors and Kings, the entrenched orthodoxy, and the learned guardians of Medieval culture.
Martin Luther, no wallflower, reportedly said, “This fool wishes to reverse the entire science of astronomy; but sacred Scripture tells us that Joshua commanded the Sun to stand still, and not the Earth.” Calvin wrote, “Who will venture to place the authority of Copernicus above that of the Holy Spirit?”
Descartes, in fact, replaced the God-centered with the human-centered universe, and then separated the mind from the physical body and world, a duality that reigns still. But now, we are at a “Copernican moment of redefinition” of what it means to be human, argues Michael Pollan, the widely read author, journalist and professor, in his new book “A World Appears.”
The science of consciousness emerged in the 1960s as a niche fringe among eccentrics, then became mainstream by the 1990s, as Nobel-laureates Francis Crick (the DNA double-helix) and Gerald Edelman (unlocking antibody structures) published papers on neuroscience and consciousness. With the advent of AI, consciousness has become a high priority scientific field. Science empirically proves the physical world has stunning and myriad examples of intelligence, consciousness even, so the question pertains: what if the world is not the cartesian 2 or 3-dimensions, but multi-dimensional, not either-or but both-and?
Darwin, Pollan writes, “suggested that we think of the plant as a kind of upside down animal, with its main sensory organs and ‘brain’ on the bottom, underground, and its sexual organs on top, aboveground.” Man was the measure of all things, but in 2012, at Cambridge University, esteemed scientists gathered to issue the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness, “the weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness.”
Pollan describes Mimosa pudica, a tropical plant that can be taught to ignore a stressor, and remember what it has learned for more than twenty-eight days. “Plants can send and receive signals from other plants and alter their behavior in response to those signals. They can distinguish kin from competitors and both from their own selves.”
Intelligence is basically “the ability to solve problems,” so Stefano Mancuso, a plant scientist at the University of Florence, developed an experiment in which the root of a corn plant navigates its way through a maze, to locate and feast upon a quantity of ammonium nitrate – a cheese equivalent – which is to say, a great reward to a plant. The experiment has been repeated many times, with the exact same results.
Pollan continues, “In addition to sensing gravity, moisture, light, pressure, and hardness, root tips can also sense volume, nitrogen, phosphorus, salt, microbes, various toxins, and chemical signals from neighboring plants and fungi. Roots about to encounter an impenetrable obstacle or a toxic substance change course before they make contact with it.”
The intelligence of plants leads to the work of Suzanne Simard, the forest ecologist, whose work on the Mother Trees is empirically proven: fungi and roots facilitate communication and interaction between trees and plants, by exchanging carbon, water, nutrients and defense signals. Rather than competition, nature is cooperative. Which changes forever the Darwinian model of rational self interest.
In the “year of our lord 2026” artificial intelligence is being used to decode the communication among whales, crows, dolphins, elephants, primates and rodents. And so it might be that not “we the people” but all life “is created equal,” which means this “Copernican moment” brings the realization that intelligence – perhaps consciousness – is empirically found to be widespread, neither narrow nor limited to humankind.
So let’s revisit Descartes’ duality, the mind body split, in a world where men, since the advent of agriculture, have held the dominant role. Antonio Damasio, a Professor of Psychology, Philosophy, and Neurology, at the University of Southern California, and, additionally, an adjunct professor at the Salk Institute, believes that male scientists long considered feeling too “feminine” to seriously study. “It is one of the paradoxes of computer science,” he writes, “that the ‘higher’ capabilities we once thought of as uniquely human—reason, language, intelligence—have proved easier for machines to master than the more elemental capabilities we share with animals, including feelings and emotions.”
Pundits would have us believe the scepter of AI hangs overhead, but prudence urges that we remember AI has been modeled by and upon the narrow confines of logic, algorithms and statistical probability, not the elemental array of emotions that make up the extraordinary depth and breadth of life, among all species. I am not downplaying the serious risks of AI but pointing to emotional vitality as a largely under explored and resilient domain. AI is a tool, and every tradesperson knows we need be smarter than our tools. Once we accept that intelligence is pervasive far beyond mere humans, even gender fluidity seems but one small step for humankind. It is a wild time in which my children come of age.
Rumors of social decay are not exaggerated, but they may be an early indicator of a more fundamental flowering that begs to emerge. Multi-dimensional consciousness may be to the mono-rational what monotheism is to panentheism; an expanded consciousness neither makes science moot, nor does it push God aside, but expands dynamically the potential for understanding and embracing all of life, which could bring new solutions to today’s ever increasing problems.
Annaka Harris, author of “Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind,” explains why consciousness is foundational and ubiquitous:
We’ve done all our science with the assumption that consciousness emerges at a certain level of information processing. But what if we started from the opposite assumption — that consciousness is fundamental and everywhere? Instead of treating conscious experience as a byproduct, we’d treat it as the foundation. That might help us understand phenomena we’ve struggled with.
There’s something exciting about realizing that something you felt 99% sure about wasn’t quite right — or was entirely wrong. It paves the way for new questions and better understanding. If we’re willing to admit we have made incorrect assumptions and apply our tools more creatively, we might finally get somewhere. We might start seeing the Universe for what it is — maybe even as conscious.
an Art Farm 