Poelogian
A pilgrim’s road notes on meaning, love, curiosity, disruption, consciousness & addiction.
“The object of the pilgrimage turned out to be a pilgrim.”
Jorge Luis Borges
Writing has been a process for meaning making since I was a teenager. I carried a notebook and a pen everywhere and jotted reflections which sometimes became something to work at, but often remained just that, a note. I have four suitcases of such notes. These notes I call ‘Sheddings’.
Sheddings:
layers, skins, peeled off,
detritus of processes,
cast-offs of ongoing growth.
Postulates and pensees, incomplete,
replete with rips and flaws and tears and slips.
Like water drips from ice,
like heat thrown from friction,
Sheddings is my whole soul kitchen.
Featured
Sheddings
When the Sun Goes Out
“If the Sun & Moon should Doubt They’d immediately Go out.”– William Blake: Auguries of Innocence* Dear friends & fam & fellow wayfarers. Today, where I live, in Toronto, Canada, the sun went out.Not completely, but just an hours drive or so away, the sun went out completely, for a brief. I had a ‘1 Thing’ […]
Tiger In A Coal mine
Sometime about 30 years ago, maybe more, I had a dream, just a fragment, which I still remember vividly.There was a tiger in a coal mine,and it was trapped down there by a manic and harsh master,dressed like a circus lion tamer;skinny man in black coattails, a top hat, with a stick.That was it.Never forgot […]
The Migration of Xmas
The Xmas Spell Xmas isn’t my favourite time of year. It’s come, in fact, to be my least favourite time of year. I once celebrated the most magical aspects of the Santa trope, carrying on my parents’ tradition, arranging my kids’ stuffies while they slept around the fireplace, leaving ashen footprints of Santa having come […]
Blame Shame Pain Chain: Gaza
Blame Shame Pain Chain: Gaza Holocaust genocide refugees,Naqbah Amalekh atrocities.IDF Hamas HezbollahJihad US Ayatollah. Great Britian imperialismapartheid Zionismethnic cleansinganti-semiticextremism. Islam Judaism,Liberation Yerushalayim,Sins of the fathers visited on the children.Transgenerational vengeance engine. Uzzi settlers burning olive treesbreeds revenge in helpless teens;torture, memory, Nazis:perpetual collective trauma machine. — One state two statesIslamic state Jewish stateState of constant […]
Exploring The Mountain Within
Download a PDF The way up is the way down.* Out at the edge of the worldtectonic plates,continental shelves,are cataclysmically shifting;colliding,grinding together,crushing and buckling and crumpling,breakingthe surface of the earthopenforcing whole oceans of stoneupwards into the sky,and downinto the sea of magma below,bursting forth in flaming lava conflagrations,mountainous volcanoes. The way up is the way […]
Trust & Power: from “who do you trust?” to “how do you trust yourself?”
The relationship of trust and power is complicated. We all so deeply desire to be able to fully trust someone, something, some people. But, unfortunately, it’s precisely where our desires are greatest, our needs most unmet, that we are vulnerable to manipulation and, in fact, become manipulative ourselves. ‘Trust’ can be a lever worked by con artists for ‘power’. Ultimately, it’s only by learning to trust ourselves that we can become fully capable of discerning not just who to trust, but how much to trust.
Odes to ‘Jim Bad’ and to Love & Longing & Grief
My dear bro took his life in the year 2000.He was, besides my bro, a dear dear friend and confidante and fierce and loyal companion through anything.My life was irrevocably changed.Here’s a series of three poems, spread out over many years, that I’ve written since he died about grief, opening with the epitaph I wrote […]
An Invitation to the ‘Route-Rig-Reel & Roll’ Sessions
‘Route, Rig & Reel’ are three very simple words representing three approaches to identity.
They are three ways of responding to the question, ‘Who are you?’.
the ROUTE-REEL-RIG & ROLL SESSIONS
Fascinating and provocative explorations of the question 'Where are you going?' 'rooted' in the question 'Who are you?'.
Truth is a Refugee
In reaction to my deep dismay at Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, I remembered a song I wrote a while back called ‘Truth is a Refugee’, about wars, and truth. Just piano and vox. And I did my very best to bring it back, and made a recording on Saturday (special thanks to rj fleck for […]
An Ode to Incarnation
An Ode to Incarnation I’m the ephemeral union the temporal assembly the passing coherence the momentary encounter the transient intersection the makeshift collaboration of a trillion organismscomprising a billion universes. I’m a ball briefly burning brilliantly a comet a candle to kindling an also ran flash in the panwhose dwindling gravitational fieldand centripetal forceis devolving […]
Vonnegut on the purpose of human life
“A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.“ Kurt Vonnegut from THE SIRENS OF TITAN, 1959
Notes on ‘Maintaining Poise in the Uncertainty of Complexity’ Workshop
View ‘Maintaining Poise in the Uncertainty of Complexity’ Workshop description POISE to be balanced or suspended; to be ready, a state of readiness; equally weighted, weight bearing, good ‘bearing’. A migratory translibrium. ComplexityStructural complexity vs/and Perceptual complexityI’m approaching complexity as an ‘experience’ we have, rather than an ‘objective phenomena out-there’.“Complex systems are defined by entangled […]
Maintaining Poise in the Uncertainty of Complexity – Workshop
This workshop debuted at Australasian Change Days in Sept 2021. — Complexity is one attribute of the renowned fearsome foursome of VUCA, and it alone can easily generate the other three: volatility, uncertainty and ambiguity. Typically we have a deep desire to find a single solution to a problem, an answer we can ‘take to […]
Featured Track: Undertow
UNDERTOW – electroacoustic Primal, cathartic electroacoustic… an cacophonic emergency of distorting synths and disturbed guitar feedback, eventually wears itself out, dropping into a deep, warm peacefulness, with a question mark at the end… Headphones recommended; ]
Miijmaakijige: ‘bait’ and co-evolution in indigenous natural culture
Yesterday evening I attended my course on Pollinator Stewardship (which I’m attending as part of a grant to create an educational pollinator garden through PollinateTO, Project Swallowtail, LiveGreen & the City of Toronto) (check out our garden here!). This week was focused on the perspective of Indigenous peoples on pollinators which was pretty fabulous. Some […]
Featured Track: Overshadow
Lyla Rye commissioned me to do the music for her video installation ‘Overshadow‘ for the 2016 In/Future Festival (run by Art Spin with Small World Music) which opened the long abandoned Ontario Place. Here’s a note I wrote for ‘Overshadow’:“It features the remixing the of Dolores Claman’s theme music for Ontario Place (Dolores is renowned […]
NOT IN KANSAS: CURIOSITY, DISRUPTIVE CHANGE & THE BLUES’ – Workshop
Using musical structures and techniques, stories and exercises we'll explore 'home/safety', disruptive change, curiosity and courage.
Transcontext, Unknowing, and a Perilous Suspension Bridge
On Saturday I had the great pleasure of giving a workshop at Berlin Change Days 2020. The theme of this year’s event (happening simultaneously with Toronto Change Days – BCD & TCD were all together for a while!) was ‘Building Bridges’ and I gave a workshop which reflected on a poem I had written about […]
And so it grows…
I took this photo of a tree branch pinioned into a piece of metal fence.It was left on the floor of a house I was doing construction in, and I obviously found it very striking. The branch appears to have been pierced – as if on a torture rack – by the metal. It looks […]