“Old stories get retold with the endings sanded off. Old holidays get re-branded and merchandised. The old canon becomes an object of suspicion instead of an object of love. Meanwhile the mass migration into every Western capital changes the demographic ground under the story at the same rate the story is being rewritten above it. Two pressures, same press, same output — a population that no longer has a coherent sense of where it came from and therefore no coherent basis on which to object to where it is being taken.”
— Jan Wellmann — 7/11/26
Archive for the ‘Psychology’ Category
A difficult path was mine to walk.
Wednesday, April 29th, 2026“Don’t be afraid of not knowing what to do. Part of the creative process is not knowing what to do. It will appear. It will reveal itself beyond you. There is no big secret. There’s just courage, perseverance, complexity. And complexity is just multiple simplicities. One step at a time. That’s all there is.”
— Eddie Marsan“Does one’s integrity ever lie in what he is not able to do? I think that usually it does, for free will does not mean one will, but many wills, conflicting in one man.”
— Flannery O’Connor“I didn’t know back then that the Christian story is the story of our rebellion against God. I didn’t know that by taking part in that rebellion I had become part of the story, whether I liked it or not. I didn’t know, either, why Christians see pride as the greatest sin.”
— Paul Kingsnorth
I recall vividly when I gave up hunting in my 20s. Having shot a wild rabbit with my .410, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the thought that it was too easy. Perhaps I felt that it was unsportsmanlike or one-sided. What I actually remember is: “Cannot do this. Too easy.”
It took me much longer to understand that I wasn’t necessarily drawn to difficult things, but that I had an aversion to easy. When it came to my creative talents, it caused me to be less interested in things that seemed effortless, even if I was quite good at them. I was more interested in things I couldn’t do as well or had never tried before. I relied on my patience. Make no mistake, I definitely could be impatient, but it nearly always brought failure. Trying my hand at new things could bring failure, too, and that fed my insecurities. I must not be as good as others thought. Easy felt hollow. Especially when my motive was the approval of others. Nothing compared to when patience paid off with achievement or success (whatever those are). I wasn’t well served when that sort of thing led to artistic obsession, or when it spilled over into my life: personal excess, self-destructive conduct, experimentation with danger, and patterns of negative psychology. (Oh, and have I mentioned that I gave up the culture of holy sacraments into which I was born?)
I was miserable, did not know what to do about it, and barely could recognize that I was woefully mixed up. I squandered mentor after mentor. I finally chose to turn things around when it was no longer easy, but now I couldn’t do it by myself. It required the family members who were always there and a woman who cared for the real me, in spite of my superficialities — all as an expression of the mercy of a loving God, the source and supreme essence of true patience.
As everybody who knows me understands, it was a crooked trail, to say the least. A child of television, it took episodes of Kung Fu to get a bit of wisdom to seep through my hard shell, but I didn’t undertake martial arts until I got back from my ordeal in Europe (which had only compounded my self-absorbed bewilderment). I began to meditate when I thought that the TM craze was my answer. I began swearing off bad habits, but flirted with narcissism, dietary fanaticism, and personality cults to pull it off (oh, those hazardous “ISMs and OSMs”).
And yet, even if progress seemed apparent, I didn’t grasp the difference between gifts and grace. Gifts are finite, come with obligations, and are only deserved if met with individual development. Grace is undeserved and infinite. Without grace, gifts or talents are without meaning and can be fraught with pitfalls. This is actually an easy thing to understand in hindsight, but not for somebody with a phobia for easy. And so the difficult path was mine to walk.
At the risk of oversimplification, I came full circle through the intercession of Christ — through prayer, the rosary, and contemplation. There are many souls who played a part. Most of them are those who loved me more than I knew how to love them. Plus the saints and masters whose teachings would pave the way to break through my barriers and open a connection to God through inner silence (including Sister Mary Otho Ballard, Thomas Merton, John Main, Thomas Keating, Bede Griffiths, Eckhart von Hochheim, and the anonymous 14th-century English monk who penned The Cloud of Unknowing).
Eventually, I started hunting again. When it wasn’t easy. When I could appreciate it as a blessing from the Spirit of nature. I don’t know if I have a gift for hitting what I aim at. If I do, I won’t let it go to waste. I know what my true gift is, and where it comes from. I am beginning to put things in context. I can see my flaws, contradictions, and confusion about what to do each day as part of my fallen state of being. Just like every artist. Just like every man and woman.
And now, on my 74th birthday, I accept that the Almighty, Everlasting Creator took on the totality of human nature, with its wretched weakness and suffering, to redeem me forever. To arise in victory over sin, disease, and death. Has he not sent His Spirit to comfort and direct me, to love and enlighten me, to guard and defend me, in every place, in every way, at every moment? To live fully with that recognition is the beginning of authentic freedom. Most of all when I don’t have a clue what to do next.
Friday, August 15th, 2025
“The problem is that AI absorbs and spits back conventional wisdom gleaned from every source, which makes its judgments no better than someone wholly uninformed on particulars but rather gains opinions from the mood of the moment. It has no capacity to judge good quality over bad so it puts it all into a melange of blather, distinguished only because it looks and feels like English. Any writer who thinks this is a good way to pawn off content on unsuspecting readers or teachers is headed for disaster. I shudder to imagine a future in which AI is training the population how to think. It is the opposite of thinking. It is regurgitating conventionalities without any serious reflection on the social or historical context. It is literally mindless.”
Wednesday, July 30th, 2025
“A recent MIT study used EEG (electroencephalography) to examine what happens in the brain when people use AI tools like ChatGPT. The results were chilling. Brain activity dropped — especially in the prefrontal and temporal lobes, the areas responsible for problem-solving, planning, memory, and language. Even after removing the AI, participants who had used it showed persistently lower brain engagement. This lingering drop — dubbed cognitive debt — is eerily similar to patterns we see in screen-saturated youth or early cognitive decline.”
— Daniel G Amen, 7/28/25
Wednesday, December 13th, 2023
“Indeed, it is perhaps the notion of possessiveness that characterizes the fundamental problem of the human being. True freedom involves a kind of self-dispossession, and a letting go of the attachment to the ‘mine-ness’ of one’s actions… We need to be ‘still,’ to empty ourselves of worldly distractions and illusory attachments, to be able to ‘hear’ and come to understand the Word that is eternally communicated by the Father in the ground. In this sense, it is not as though God is absent in us and then becomes present due to some action of ours that we undertake of our own initiative. Rather, for Eckhart, our task as human beings is to come to be able to listen to — and thereby apprehend — the Word that is eternally and always poured out into us.”
— Amber Griffioen, on Meister Eckhart, 5/1/23
March Ex(clusion) — twenty-eighth day
Monday, March 28th, 2022“Cain turns to Evil to obtain what Good denied him, and he does it voluntarily, self-consciously and with malice aforethought. Christ takes a different path. His sojourn in the desert is the dark night of the soul — a deeply human and universal human experience.”
– Jordan B Peterson“No tree can grow to Heaven unless its roots reach down to Hell.”
– Carl Gustav Jung
Yesterday was really something else, and, if I had to live it repeatedly, I could do much worse. Was the promise of this month’s endeavor fulfilled? Perhaps it even suggests a solution to my quandary of the twenty-third day. If I knew that tomorrow was going to be put on a loop, how would I prepare? How then would I live it? A balance of effort and non-effort? How does one avoid crossing a frontier into excessive introspection? How often should action be diluted with non-action? James emphasized to me the importance of cyclic illumination for seedlings, because a young plant grows more during darkness than it does during the period of light. Similarly, a plant can bend toward the sun only if the cells multiply faster on the opposite side. What can that awareness possibly offer to the contemplative? Is there a meaningful difference between negation and denial? What is the March Ex(clusion) hiding that has yet to be revealed?
Today’s sight bite— A tangle of roots, sod, and invasive ivy, —c-l-i-c-k— as the ground is broken for my new backyard berry patch.
March Ex(clusion) — twenty-seventh day
Sunday, March 27th, 2022“We enter the contemplative experience when the movements of the mind — reason, memory, imagination and all their compounds begin to settle into silence. However simple this may sound it is hard work because it demands a radical detachment at the core of our identity.”
– Laurence Freeman
Ah, that every day would behold the inner mood of a Sunday morning, whether quiet preparation for bicycling into nature or loving anticipation of yet another crack at meditation. So there you have it. Make each one like that. Especially Mondays. If you bring that into an outing devoted to art, you may bring that into one more day in the studio, too.
Today’s sight bite— A now innocuous square of concrete, with nearby toppled gravestone and pile of discarded lead strips, —c-l-i-c-k— plus foraging robins and squirrels, oblivious that the site once presented a hatless guy of stone whose story was erased in lieu of a full-context teaching opportunity.
March Ex(clusion) — eleventh day
Friday, March 11th, 2022“In theory, ‘first principles thinking’ requires you to dig deeper and deeper until you are left with only the foundational truths of a situation.”
– James Clear
There are some significant things getting done, like the work bench improvements, Town House yard tasks, the indoor planting of seeds for the 2022 garden, and my hand-tool experiment of early spring greens at Blue Bank. A sense of satisfaction is undermined by the recognition that the overall enterprise is out of balance, with my progress on art projects taking a backseat. Plus, I’ve hit a lull in my fitness line-items, despite a major physical effort at the farm today. I’m probably overthinking, as usual, but it just doesn’t feel right. I have to examine more deeply what I’m really trying to accomplish this month.
Today’s sight bites— Way too many Wes Anderson images, —c-l-i-c-k—
—c-l-i-c-k— —c-l-i-c-k— —c-l-i-c-k— each frame of his delightfully bizarre movie like a miniature painting on the flatscreen.
March Ex(clusion) — first day
Tuesday, March 1st, 2022“Socrates rejected expediency, and the necessity for manipulation that accompanied it. He chose instead, under the direst of conditions, to maintain his pursuit of the meaningful and the true. Twenty-five hundred years later, we remember his decision and take comfort from it.”
– Jordan B Peterson
On the eve of another 31-day ritual that I’ve come to anticipate as the month of March, I had one of my deep conversations with Danny that ranged from Socrates to creativity to monasticism to Ukraine. With this go round, I look to exclude as well as include, day by day, and to allow for a dynamic metamorphosis of its own making. I want my process to evolve organically this time in contrast to a more deliberate agenda. The first thing to exclude is inactivity. To organize, dig, and walk. I cannot define what this regimen is meant to become until it unfolds. And so, it has begun. Let it take shape!
Today’s sight bite— Two doves on a power line, —c-l-i-c-k— golden-pink breasts glowing with the final light of a sun no longer visible to others below their urban tightrope.
Monday, August 9th, 2021
“When something is important enough to you, you do it. So obviously if I haven’t done it, it’s because maybe it wasn’t all that important to me. The secret to happiness, of course, is not getting what you want; it’s wanting what you get.”
— Alex Trebek, via Rabbi Hyman Schachtel
Friday, April 16th, 2021
4/13/21 — “Nothing matters inside of a bubble until it does. The phrase new paradigm is becoming ever more prevalent to justify prices and the tape. Truth be told, there is no new paradigm except this one: More artificial liquidity than ever and more debt spending than ever and as a result people chasing stocks into higher valuations than ever. That’s it. There is no mystery.”
4/15/21 — “People are engaging in investing behavior that would be severely punished in any other time in history, but, because they aren’t, the belief becomes self fulfilling. This is the environment the Fed has unleashed with its reckless insistence to keep printing. What crisis? We are looking at big recovery growth everywhere. Stimulus is flooding through the system. The virus is getting under control with vaccines that are rolled out aggressively. Consumers are flush with cash and ready to spend.”
— Sven Henrich, NorthmanTrader.com
Sunday, December 20th, 2020
“I of course am thoroughly convinced of the value of self-knowledge, but is there any use in recommending such insight, when the wisest of men throughout the ages have preached the need of it without success?”
— C G Jung, 1949
Wednesday, August 5th, 2020
“To straddle that fundamental duality is to be balanced: to have one foot firmly planted in order and security, and the other in chaos, possibility, growth and adventure. When life suddenly reveals itself as intense, gripping and meaningful; when time passes and you’re so engrossed in what you’re doing you don’t notice — it is there and then that you are located precisely on the border between order and chaos… Order is not enough. You can’t just be stable, and secure, and unchanging, because there are still vital and important new things to be learned. Nonetheless, chaos can be too much. You can’t long tolerate being swamped and overwhelmed beyond your capacity to cope, while you are learning what you still need to know. Thus, you need to place one foot in what you have mastered and understood and the other in what you are currently exploring and mastering. Then you have positioned yourself where the terror of existence is under control and you are secure, but where you are also alert and engaged. That is where there is something new to master and some way that you can be improved. That is where meaning is to be found.”
— Jordan B Peterson — 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos
Glaser’s “Ten Things I Have Learned”
Sunday, June 28th, 2020You can only work for people whom you like.
If you have a choice, never have a job.
Some people are toxic.
Avoid them.
The good is the enemy
of the great.
Less is not necessarily more.
Style is not to be trusted.
How you live changes
your brain.
Doubt is better than
certainty.
On aging: It doesn’t matter.
Tell the truth.
Milton Glaser
1929 – 2020
Sunday, February 23rd, 2020
“The advent of civilization is a wonderful thing. It creates leisure. It creates material wealth, luxury. It’s civilization. It’s not tribalism. It’s not barbarism. But in that process, we become tame, and yet the world around us is not tame, and we don’t quite know how to justify using violence against people who want to kill us.”
— Victor Davis Hanson 2/13/20
Saturday, November 30th, 2019
“The essential cultural discrimination is not between having and not having or haves and have-nots, but between the superfluous and the indispensable. Wisdom, it seems to me, is always poised upon the knowledge of minimums; it might be thought to be the art of minimums.”
— Wendell Berry — from The Hidden Wound
back on the trail
Tuesday, July 2nd, 2019“Forget about the knee. It didn’t happen. Get on with it. Put it behind you.”
— James D Dixon
Yesterday I was in Yellow Springs again, to observe the close of a cycle that began with the unlikely combination of an 80-mile bicycling weekend for my 66th birthday and the follow-up knee injury after Derby Day, while I was washing my truck.
OK. Now the abnormal year is behind me, and I was back at the Little Miami Scenic Trail to walk and to declare it over and done with!
Tuesday, May 9th, 2017
“You’ve got to pick the right girl in the first place. And much more important, as a husband you have to remember the crucial importance of three little words — ‘I was wrong.’ That will take you a lot further than ‘I love you.’”
Tuesday, August 2nd, 2016
“Humans appear to have some need to look down on someone; there’s just a basic tribalistic impulse in all of us. And if you’re an elite white professional, working class whites are an easy target: you don’t have to feel guilty for being a racist or a xenophobe. By looking down on the hillbilly, you can get that high of self-righteousness and superiority without violating any of the moral norms of your own tribe. So your own prejudice is never revealed for what it is.
“What does it mean for our politics? To me, this condescension is a big part of Trump’s appeal. He’s the one politician who actively fights elite sensibilities, whether they’re good or bad. I remember when Hillary Clinton casually talked about putting coal miners out of work, or when Obama years ago discussed working class whites clinging to their guns and religion. Each time someone talks like this, I’m reminded of Mamaw’s feeling that hillbillies are the one group you don’t have to be ashamed to look down upon. The people back home carry that condescension like a badge of honor, but it also hurts, and they’ve been looking for someone for a while who will declare war on the condescenders. If nothing else, Trump does that.”
— J D Vance 7/22/16
W W D D ?
Tuesday, June 30th, 2015Putting words in the mouth of our Clan Founder is dangerous territory, and that is why we confine ourselves to the trove of thoughts he left for us in the archives of our family publication whenever we ponder what he would have done or what kind of leadership he would have provided to us in the face of a current dilemma. Nevertheless, I will dare to venture a bit into that territory and seek to characterize something he demonstrated profoundly, and, to my knowledge or recollection, never specifically spelled out in Clandestiny. The need for this arises from remarks at our recent Council that suggested we attempt to measure or take into account relative disparities in service to Grammo or Clan. I might be wrong, but it is important for people to know what I think. The Grandy-bo I remember would have shut down such discussions with a brand of finality that only he could introduce into family deliberations. Why do I believe this? Is it because he did that very thing on one or more occasions which now I cannot pinpoint? Perhaps so, but it is more likely that I hold this view based on the principles he put into evident practice through years of consistent behavior. He was a complex person, with many facets of high character, plus faults like any man, but there are three points of his nuclear-family conduct which stand out in memory and that are relevant to my concern:
He did not play favorites.
He did not hold a grudge.
He did not keep score.
We can only speculate about how he came to these convictions, or if they were an innate aspect of his personality, but they shaped our entire upbringing and also, I think, his vision of how the Clan could survive into the future without rancor, faction, and subterfuge. At its core, it is almost a kind of divine balance that eludes so many others in our society and world. It is a rejection of the extremist temptation. It is a hostility to the easy path that jumps to a false sense of justice and turns away from the more difficult work of discernment that integrates seemingly contrasting forces: the emotional and the rational, or the individual and the community. At the macro level, it is why so-called leaders allow ideologies to inhibit solutions that are both heartfelt and intelligent. Nearly all of them have lost sight of how the microcosm of the healthy family provides the key. They fail to see how the capitalist, private enterprise approach can become a corrosive force without integrity and compassion, or the humanistic, communitarian approach can slide toward the collective repression of individual destinies. Of course, one could choose to frame these ideas in spiritual or religious language, but I like to remind myself that although my father was a religious man, and was qualified to teach Roman Catholic doctrine, he had the great attribute of being able to express himself without a resort to denominational concepts, or even traditionally Christian terminology. Maybe that was the reason he could communicate “heavy” ideas to a wide variety of individuals in such an accessible, universal manner. That is why he would gain the respect of young and old, or priests, generals, teachers, executives, and farmers.
There is another principle he emphasized. He may have spelled this one out, somewhere in the volumes of Clandestiny, but it is always timely to recall the tone of his voice when he stated:
Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice, shame on you.
To me, he was saying that everyone deserves a second chance, with the implication that a first mistake reflects to some degree on the capacity of the guardian, leader, or mentor. After the support of a second chance, if a repeat of the same mistake occurs, the so-called “tough love” would kick in. Accountability now falls to the author of the error. All one can do is pray and let others experience the consequences of their actions. They are still loved. They are not cast out. They are, however, left to bear the brunt of their poor choices and the rejection of the support system that provided initial help. The more harsh lesson must now be learned. It is a difficult thing for everyone involved, but there are times when intervening to protect loved ones from themselves is the lesser form of compassion. It is easy in such situations to ask the question, “What Would Dadbo Do?” (WWDD), and so much harder to let his example infuse our own judgment. And I do not mean to suggest that Mombo did not reflect and reinforce all of these principles in her own more quiet way. What we would now give to bring these issues before her and consult a lifetime of wisdom that is no longer available! It is an ongoing sorrow that we are required to bear.
We shall, and do our best each day.
