Sponges, metamorphoses and psyche
In April 2017 I wrote the following post in an experiment, a form of improvised association and regathering of the fragments of my mind. I will write some more of…
Category: Personal story
13 ways of looking at a bureaucrat
In early 2017 I wrote a series of posts – or let us call them essays – on Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Bureaucrat. I wrote it still aiming…
On living not by lies
2020 has taught us through bitter experience that our societies are not vaccinated against totalitarianism, and certainly not the mutant strain of “soft totalitarianism” described in Rod Dreher’s Live Not…
Dream. Life. Recovery.
For several years in my early thirties, I attended a dream group with the Jungian psychotherapist, Peter O’Connor. Peter, who is now retired, was a gifted therapist who for many…
This grey spirit seeking a sinking star
But more so than the moulted carapace of governing that lies at my feet, I connected to the adventurer of the spirit, weakened by age and misfortune, that Tennyson saw in Ulysses. It was this grey spirit that I turned to this morning for the courage to continue.
Taking time with Szymborska
I have established several practices for the New Year to make it a more mindful, culturally enriched and satisfying year than the plague year of 2020, now buried in an…
Fragments from the Burning Archive: Mikhail Bakhtin
I plunged again into my white box of old handwritten index cards today, and pulled from the archive, laid down in my twenties and thirties, a fragment from Mikhail Bakhtin…
The freedom of internal exile: 2020 in review
The freedom of internal exile So much of this year I have struggled with the moral crisis of how to endure and to live well through a corrupt, decaying, failing…
Fragments from my diaries – the year in review
Throughout the year I have kept a diary in a an A5 black notebook of 200 pages or so. I have followed this practice for quite some years now, and…
The kaleidoscope of 2020: year in review
A tradition that I have embraced on this blog over the last few years has been to write year in review posts in December. In 2019 I reflected on walking…
Axel’s Castle, a mirror and an encyclopaedia
Today I am reposting this post from April 2, 2018 that reflected on some of the literary symbols that formed uncanny fascinators in my mind. *** When I was about…
A solution to political decay: the ordinary virtues of governing well
I am reposting this reflection on the response to political decay in the midst of the constitutional crisis under way in America, which reveals dramatically the rot in America’s institutions…
