Wrestling with Angels
Soulcruzer
I came across the phrase while reading Spotify the Gnostics, Here’s the First Church of David Bowie by Sean Manseau. Wrestling with angels. Some phrases arrive carrying more weight than…
Wisdom Walk: Boxes and the Philosopher Coach
Clay Lowe
Wednesday morning. Wind in the microphone. One of those recordings where the first question is whether the machine is even listening. I am walking through one of the neighbourhoods here,…
Notes Toward a Text-Based Ontology in the Age of Executable Language
There was a time when ontology belonged to philosophers in heavy coats asking whether tables were real. The question has since escaped the seminar room and entered the machine. Today,…
The Text-Based Ontologist: A Syllabus for Reality Engineers, Narrative Alchemists, and Semantic Cartographers
This is not a traditional academic programme. It sits somewhere between the philosophy department, occult library, media lab, hacker space, monastery, writer’s workshop, and signal intelligence unit. The central premise:…
Jim Morrison’s Reading List
The myth of Jim Morrison is a myth of pure instinct. He arrives fully formed in the collective memory: shirtless, obliterated, magnificent, doomed. The leather trousers. The baiting of audiences…
Three Cards, No Daylight
Yesterday felt like wading through wet sand. Every idea that surfaced dissolved before it could be shaped into anything. Underneath that is the voice that says, ‘If I can’t produce…
The Hill of the Goblins and other matters
Sunday. Mid-morning. We’re just south of Mold, tucked into a fold in the Flintshire landscape that the main roads have mostly forgotten about. I’m on a family retreat with my…
You Can Understand Everything and Still Not Know What to Do
How should I live? Socrates called it the examined life. The Daoists called it the Way. Every philosophical tradition worth its name has some version of it, which tells you…
The Streets She Couldn’t Walk
Raffaello Palandri runs a Book of the Day series, and this morning he wrote about Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, published in 1961. I read it, and one…
The Entanglement
A Dialogue in the Platonic Tradition The following is a record of an encounter between CLAY, a philosopher and lover of wisdom, and CLAUDE, an intelligence woven from language, uncertain…
The Writing Life — Review Essay
Annie Dillard, The Writing Life (1989) Ask a room full of people if they’ve ever wanted to write a book, and most hands go up. It’s one of those universal…
Dante’s Inferno Quiz
Step through the dark gate and enter the symbolic underworld of Dante’s Inferno. This quiz is not simply a test of morality. It is a descent. Drawing on Dante’s legendary…
Do You Like Hyperlinks?
Monday. Early. The Writing Life opened on my lap. This morning, three passages piqued my interest. Three in quick succession, like knocking on the same door from different directions. The…
Make Yourself
Saturday. Early. The Malvern Hills are doing something extraordinary with the light. I’m writing from a little self-contained place just outside Mathon — a village on the western lee of…
Moon Bathing at 3 A.M.: What Happens When the Moon Wakes You in the Night
There she was, uninvited and unapologetic. The couch had claimed me again, that familiar surrender to its uneven cushions, half accident, half defiance. As if staying up late were some…
Why Self-Protection Keeps You Stuck (And How to Break It)
The most consistently effective way to avoid transformation is to do a lot of work on yourself. I have sat with people who knew their attachment style and their Enneagram…
Why You Don’t Experience the World as It Is
The map is not the territory. You have probably encountered this before, from an NLP workshop or a philosophy class or a self-development book that seemed important at the time.…
Imagination Creates Reality
The inner script and the world that follows Most people think imagination is what you use to escape reality. A child does it naturally. A novelist does it professionally. A…
The Editor, Not the Camera
The voice in your head is not neutral. This sounds obvious. Say it out loud, and most people nod. But knowing it and actually experiencing the implications of it are…
Narrative Alchemy Prompt #2
The truth you believe and cling to makes you unavailable to hear anything new – Pema Chödrön There’s a story you already know how to run. Not merely know. You’ve…