Daily Writing
NotebookLM | a writer’s workshop
NotebookLM* is one of the most fascinating (and potentially game-changing) uses of AI I’ve yet seen.
Practically, it’s an AI-powered assistant-with-a-scrapbook for any digital pieces of content (“Sources”) you throw at it.
In my first test with the tool, I gave it the eBooks to all three works by Neil Postman I’ve been working at for my second pathway and asked it some preliminary questions about their content, unifying factors, and trajectory if seen in light of a transcript for a long-form podcast conversation about AI and media today I uploaded additionally.
Firstly, it was able to read, interact with, and “understand” the primary thrust and trajectory of Postman’s arguments over the course of all three books and their ten-year unfolding through his later life. As I’d read each of these books in concert with each other numerous times and had been writing about their content and interconnectivity for the past six months, I felt confident checking its work.
It ended up checking mine.
Ruling out confirmation bias because of its thorough citation of passages in each book, NotebookLM deftly corroborated my theories and reading of Postman’s primary motifs to affirm the direction my analysis had taken. More than that though, it gave me deep reasoning about the citations it provided to outline his reasons for shifting perspectives on our media crisis across his literary canon.
To read and pull helpful quotes in my research would have been enough. Exceeding my expectations, this “writer’s workshop” performed an analysis I didn’t know I needed.
I’ve written before about AI as a tool to adjust the aperture of the mind- never before has this resonated so clearly.
For my followup training run, I tested its Mind Map feature.
It generates 25-30 topics, themes, keywords, and ideas from the sources and allows you to click in and drill down into them. As a learning or deep-dive tool, this is revolutionary.
Imagine the ability to converse with a friend over coffee about some minutia within some trifling subject matter that you’ve accrued expert status in over the years. This friend can pull as many (and certainly many more) citations as you can, and it can engage in a deep, thoughtful analysis of the work in front of you both. As you question it, throw around concepts, and hop across the breadth of a field or niche only you typically know the hooks for, it creates connections you’ve never been able to come across and picks out those insights that you only stumble upon in the true depth of dialogue.
There are absolutely things lost in the adoption of this tool.
Is serendipitous learning stolen by the LM’s thinking? Maybe (I apologize for anthropomorphizing so much, but that’s where we are in 2025).
Are there communities and book clubs and workshops that won’t be created around shared ideas and a desire to learn and grow? Probably (but social media and the internet have already done much to disband common places of unity over the past two decades).
But to level the playing field to those without access to these communities of thought and to provide the background and catalysts for those who have never been shown how to collaborate, learn, and ideate around deep work like this is invaluable.
And I can’t help ending with the refrain- we can’t go back…
*The most recent update I’m utilizing that expands the token count to larger than you can imagine, adding Audio Overview with interactive mode, alongside a streamlined 3-panel UI takes home the prize for best LLM-interface to date, in my book.
where have all the sages gone?
It’s been said the 18th century political philosopher, Goethe, was the last person who knew everything (he, of course, would believe this a moot point in line with his thought that “Knowing is not enough”). This makes it sound as if the man was no man at all but some immortal savant. In reality, this quip imagines that by the year of his death in 1832, “It was no longer possible for even the most brilliant mind to comprehend, let alone integrate, what was known.”
Before the printing press and the Enlightenment, and certainly before the internet era, the world produced what were called sages. These were the people who were sought out for wisdom for any problem. Their words carried weight. Their existence brought flourishing. They were commonplace because of a few reasons:
First, they existed because they were lauded and part of a system that aspired to their position in society. Knowledge and the pursuit of wisdom were paragons for the everyman to pursue and laud. Examples of great thinkers molded the models for virtue and a telos of life pointed towards the heavens (or at least away from our man-made hells).
2008 to whenever our current technological crisis ends will be enshrined as an era with no saints or sages…
Whether this and its appended divine vocation of irrelevance is to be a boon or curse upon our pages of the historical record is yet to be seen.
counterpoints | AI
There’s a fascinating similarity between arguments for & against AI’s continued spread and integration throughout all levels of society, work, and relationship.
Both keep in mind the extended time horizon of the effects of the game we’re playing with emergent technology today.
Both have in mind future generations and the way our resistance or capitulation now will trickle down to our posterity.
Both recognize we’re just at the start of a very long, very important series of decisions our species must make to move forward in time.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/your-undivided-attention/id1460030305?i=1000665016295
This Moment in Al: How We Got Here and Where We're Going, Your Undivided Attention
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-i-write/id1700171470?i=1000700934681
The Ultimate Guide to Writing with Al, How I Write
use AI as a catalyst
Endeavor to make stronger arguments against the use of AI across our creative & educational dwellings and the wave of users championing their efficacy will only continue swelling. There is a rising tide of artists and entrepreneurs alike taking advantage of the perpetual hype cycles generated by each of the latest "iPhone moments" in tech. To stalwartly resist the current is to miss the source of its undertow.
LLM’s and their ever-evolving interfaces (explore Notebook LLM, Deep Research Modes, and Reasoning models to begin to see the breadth of the landscape two short years in) are a symptom of a larger issue that has been plaguing the internet for the better part of a decade.
Information glut, bloat, and slop has been endemic to surfing the web long before its AI counter-part hit the scene.
We have all sought refuge from the toxic and far too overwhelming amounts of links, pages, podcasts, and feeds by turning to dumbphones, social media fasts, simplified tech stacks, digital declutters, and email summaries of feeds we can no longer peruse individually. AI overviews are long overdue; Audio Overviews are lightning in a bottle of empty bits of content.
This stage of the cycle, with continued overblown headlines & overpromising heads of company, has real benefits for everyday users of the web.
Support it or condemn it, AI can catalyze a new world of creative output.
The tech-bros & bullish investors in the technology are streamlining the creation of some of the first great pieces of AI-generated art pieces, community projects, and software developments. Their fervor for these innovations will drive growth in a certain direction and (regardless of externalities and effects on those questions of personhood, identity, and generative natures that are the fly in the ointment) that growth will begin to shape the future we enter.
The cautionaries & humanists who eschew these tools will be put to the same task but with the use of their God-given talents & tools (no matter how the technology— pencil, paper, calculator, or printing press— extends their humanity in ways they take for granted with characteristic chronological snobbery) to catch up to and outpace either the quantity or quality of their AI-competitors.
In both cases, the race to adapt to a world of AI will catalyze a future where all ships may actually rise with this new (artificially?) rising tide…
a sense of information
You can scroll through a dozen news feeds and not learn a thing.
Social media claims to connect people through information but never sees anything built.
The internet is inert, remaining a place where even these words will fade and have no impact in time.This isn’t nihilism about life but about our misguided methods of receiving life through a screen. Media theorists have long seen this problem of the digital age coming back when the television launched a new multi-media era:For the first time in human history, people were faced with the problem of information glut, which means that simultaneously they were faced with the problem of diminished social and political potency...Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman
More headlines and breaking stories of more corruption and less goodness across industries, empires, and neighborhoods has only bred more distrust. And not simply distrust, but a disproportionate distrust to the truth. We no longer have a sense of what is true and who is really being represented by the screen. Media paints every character as an extreme— a saint or sinner, an angel or demon, an extremist or pariah. It creates a thin veneer of life that could so easily be poked to fall if only we took our noses out of our screens and lived again.Information is additive and cumulative. It is not a bearer of sense, whereas a narration carries sense. The original meaning of ‘sense’ is direction. Today, we are perfectly informed, but we lack orientation…The Crisis of Narration, Byung-Chul Han
Our direction in life is dictated by algorithms not internally coherent narratives of the good, true, and beautiful. Even when engaging “wholesome” content online—content that is not inflammatory, manipulative, or false— we are lulled into thinking the screen can offer personal growth in the form of wisdom, community, or artistic expression. The trouble is that all we do online is push bits of data around. This is wonderful for the tecno-oligarchs and social platforms themselves who are perpetually fueled by our activity, but there’s not a world where this is a good thing for us. This is a world where information overcomes all our senses and leaves us less human.The elevation of information to a metaphysical status: information as both the means and end of human creativity…Technopoly, Neil Postman
Postman: all-consuming consumption
There is no subject of public interest- politics, news, education, religion, science, sports- that does not find its way to television. Which means that all public understanding of these subjects is shaped by the biases of television…Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death
If the medium is really the message, and if we consume every sphere of life through the medium of television and our social feeds, then the message of every aspect of our culture is “incoherence, irrelevance, impotence.” Triviality, addiction, manipulation. Our inheritance is bust. The society we live in is ultimately irreparable. Where is a refuge from this cacophony of distractions?Our politics have been forever scarred by the echo chamber of a sensational social media. Our news grew alongside and influenced the creation of the seven-second video to keep us engaged and enraged. Our education suffers from the attention spans of teachers and students alike, unable to brood on a single topic long enough to glean its vital relevance to our lives. Our religions have become tribalistic and consumer-driven, only being beneficial in their contribution to our individual bottom lines. Our science has become fragmented across expertises and cultures of specialists who can’t share the same room for want of breathing room around their egos. Our sports are a mix of mostly advertisements for the latest brew or hit pop song while muscular men and women vie for the greatest influence as a new kind of athletic brand, the drafted player.At the center of all this lies our visual mediums.Ever-present, never dying. Unfazed by the chaotic storms of online mobs, unintelligible dialogue, and trashy art in its wake.Its influence can be analyzed ad nauseam, but the definitive test of its lasting mark is the feeling that arises in us over an hour, two hours, and more time spent upon devices that distract us into spiritual oblivion.the boox palma
A tragedy in 21st century technological societies is the unrelenting strain of adversarial interoperability.
Apple’s walled garden keeps out side-loading apps and any API that could mess with the Job-Ives vision of perfection that is the iPhone. MMS & SMS create a hierarchy between users of different devices and hinder quick connections and experience over text. Amazon locks out file formats and third party sellers of books to keep Kindle customers docile on an untenable software experience.
For years, I have watched and analyzed innovations on the e-reader with fascination.
For the last year, I (like much of the world thanks to the Verge and other impassioned tech sources) have watched the Boox Palma rise to as much prominence as a cheaply, Chinese-made handheld e-ink device can rise.
The pitch for the Palma (and its quickly released, nearly identical successor, the Palma II) is total control in a perfect form factor— perfect, because they recognize our society’s preferred way of consuming any kind of content currently sits in the palm of your hand and stands no taller than six point seven inches.
The Palma is an e-ink iPod Touch with a heavy software focus on reading… And this is a pitch I’m in love with.
I grew up with the iPod Nano and iTouch as constant companions.
This formed my addictive tendencies toward tech. The pocket carry became a lifestyle and way of being in my teens through these product’s presence. I poured my heart and soul into the music, apps, and entertainment (not to be dramatic or anything) on these devices. The reason I write on tech is because of the magic of these few, final innovations from the Jobs era and their outsized impact on my life before a smartphone ripped the script.
When the Palma appeared (in full, abashed transparency) I fell hopelessly in love.
I wonder if this will only make sense to a small intersections of people (e-ink users, readers, tech enthusiasts, minimalists, and ex-productivity junkies), but having an e-reader fit in your pocket & not have cellular is the mashup I’ve wanted but never could articulate on my own.
The thing fits in my hand perfectly with great visibility.
The volume rockers on the side scroll pages effortlessly.
The lack of cellular & e-ink friction de-addict the device.
That alone would make it a great product/e-reader/iTouch-successor, but its interoperability unlocks new heights.
Running a cracked version of Android OS, this little power-house of a device (thank you, e-ink slow-drip battery drain) can be fully tailored to your needs. All the apps, all the button functionality, all the connections. It beats out the Kindle by miles, allowing any file type, software experience, and customization, and it makes more sense than a smartphone with its absence of blue light, anchor to wifi for browsing, and friction doing anything but flipping pages.
In a season of child-rearing where my reading intake suffers due to my baby-on-the-chest, nap-filled world, the simplicity, comfortability, and accessibility of the Palma has reinvigorate my practice and enjoyment of the e-reader space.
a seed, a tear
We are people who love stories.
We create stories to make meaning from life to bond with others, to pass time on the long road of life. All lives, like all stories are generative. They touch us and transform us in ways big and small. We gather to eulogize people because some part of their story intersected with our’s enough to change the people that we have become.
Unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.
Anyone who loves their life will lose it, while anyone who hates their life in this world will keep it for eternal life…
Some historians say there’s only ever been two revolutions that there's only been two great revolutions.
Just two events that really changed human history forever.
The first was when someone started to farm. Human beings were exclusively nomadic hunter-gatherers before that. All the way up until someone buried something edible, a seed. What a waste! You could have eaten that. Then they noticed something mysterious began to happen in the dirt. A plant sprung up in the exact place where they dropped the seed. A long time ago, someone deliberately wasted something useful, and it produced it a whole lot more by dying than it did by living.
The second great revolution was when Jesus let his own creation kill him. He was on a three-year run that produced fanfare enough that they welcomed him into the city as king just a week ago. Then all of a sudden, he stopped short, executed unjustly in his youth. What a waste! You could have used that. But of course, the ground where they laid his body sprang up with life, more life than anyone could have imagined, life and life to the full. Life not just for him, but for anyone willing to come and to receive it.
Unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds…
Every death in life is a seed. It plants itself within our hearts and flourishes when we honor, grieve, and gather to tell the story of a life and live into resurrection reality. Ernest Becker says, “resurrection means the worst thing is never the last thing. It means injustice is brought to an end, it means a day is coming when no one ever goes hungry again, when no child is ever trafficked again, when no victim is ever abused again, when no one, no one ever weeps over a casket again.” It means love gets the final word, and that resonates with me.
The Way of Jesus is shocking because of its claim that in the end, nothing matters except love. Love & our resurrection reality don't change the pain in our tears. They shouldn't. But they should shape our perspective.
Tears come when we learn to live more and more out of our deepest longings, our needs, our troubles. These must all resurface and be given their rightful place for in tears. We find our real human life in all its depths. Tears of the water upon the soil within which the seed of a life and its death are planted. The tragedy of any death is made just & whole by our grief, encapsulated in the tears that fall to the ground to allow something new & beautiful to flourish.
I don't know for sure how long the pain must last and how many days we must grieve. I don't know for sure how many stories of someone's life it takes to honor them and be impacted by the person they were and are in us.
What I do know for sure is this that I have gazed into Jesus' tomb and found it empty. As I gaze in with that original cast of characters I can almost hear Jesus's voice,
Unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds...
Postman: emotional resonance
Whatever power television might have to undermine rational discourse, its emotional power is so great that it could arouse sentiment against the Vietnam War or against more virulent forms of racism...
Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death
Here we find a recommendation that feels so fantastical and potentially revolutionary as to be ridiculed for its reach beyond reason (and it would be an intentional "reach beyond reason" to no other characteristic but feeling). Any form of visual media pushed to accommodate an intellectual purpose will break down in the light of the medium's embedded biases. As we create for TV, social media, and the internet, the structure of these digital environments dictate certain habits, define its own brand of "wisdom", and changes the nature of discourse.
A major reason for this shift is due to the emotional resonance of images. Staring at a page of Lolita won't immediately evoke a response from its reader. Watching a country singer appeal to humanity about the plight of the pit-bull will.
We know this is not by accident. Not only are the makeup artists, set designers, directors, animators, editors, and camera crew all working to create an emotionally connected experience between their message or cause and the viewer or potential donor, but unconscious forces are manipulating our limbic system to respond a certain way. A good way, it should be noted, because our drive for connection is what makes us human and not apes. Psychologist Kurt Thompson has that beautiful line, "We are all born into this world, looking for someone looking for us," and we remain in this mode of existence throughout our lives and time spent in front of screens. For better or worse, for humanitarian causes or militaristic propaganda, for pop tart ads or political elections, we are changeable at our basest level.
A vital realization in the digital, entertainment age is that this will happen regardless of the intent or awareness of the user of visual mediums. As I watch the geriatric stunts of our nation's "leaders" online, I know the frame I see on-screen shapes my prejudices and stirs my anger.
I am aware but not immune.
I am awake but lost in a dream.
platform employment
Where do you work?
Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, X, and Youtube.
You work for all those companies?
Well, of course— we all do…
Many still don’t realize what a user of social media is.
To be a user of a platform with no pay-wall is to be the employee turning on the lights each day. You are the engine driving it forward and the entertainer keeping things interesting. You bring in all the profit and dictate the progress the platform logs.
If you’re unemployed and rich, this is a wonderful thing— no checks and balances (from 2025-2028), a limitless supply of cronies to capture each post, and the creation of a platform to shout from when you find you finally (think you) have something to say. A screaming bargain.
If you’re unemployed and broke, not so much— the promise of fame & fortune seduces and you quickly find followings aren’t so easy to build, Zuckerberg-bills don’t cash so easily, and you’re in yet another rat race that has fewer & fewer guard rails from the cliffs of doing irreparable harm to your reputation in a single post. Not so screaming a bargain.
If you’re employed, doing good financially, and want another job managing a personal social media account, you face a problem.
I imagine you have a job, a life, a purpose. You’ve been told it’s essential to get another of all three on X, Y, & Z—not explicitly, of course, as making a grand-stand like that only endears companies to their investors— which means you’ll incur some “essential” costs.
As with any ideology that pressures users into service (read “service” whatever way you like for that to fit), the belief that avoiding social platforms is a non-starter has its roots in one incredibly strong profit incentive. To reach the critical mass required to have a silent majority, not just a vocal minority, pushing the grass-roots campaign for your product speaks to the level of influence these platforms exert on our lives. To become a de facto component of the adolescent & societal starter kits speaks to a greater shame we all feel trapped within as we linger on unable to break the cycle.
If you still can’t see what it is, hear instead from one of its creators:
You are the product. Social media puts you on a hamster wheel to generate its profit… It feeds treats to keep you happy and enjoying your enslavement. It finds ways to remind you why you’re so committed… And the machine keeps churning because no one wants to be the first to hop off and quit looking like the rat we all know ourselves to be.
Postman: some problems
Years from now, it will be noticed that the massive collection and speed-of-light retrieval of data have been of great value to large-scale organizations but have solved very little of importance to most people and have created at least as many problems for them as they may have solved…
Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death
40 years from then to be exact. The ability those prime, blue trucks and their homey warehouses have to receive orders at a click, cue up an item, and rush it across downtowns and past suburbs within 24-hours is a marvel. An organization’s national town hall coordinating thousands of employees to meet in one virtual room and witness a presentation at almost no cost compared to the travel it once would have taken is incredible.
But what is all this efficiency and connectivity really serving?
Did we lose the trees somewhere in the forest of data accumulation & the hyper-active hive mind of communication?
In the midst of breakdowns & burnout, have we discovered the bankruptcy & dangers of our mode of online existence?
Postman nailed it in the 80’s as computers incorporated and telephones cemented their place in business operations. All the while, individual citizens (only then starting to become consumers) were invited into the circus to “enjoy the bounties of innovation.” The catch wasn’t revealed until much later.
Every technology is a bargain, but not a bargain in the sense of a deal. Tech persuades us to not examine its effects closely and to take on its stipulations wholesale. Digital products are designed with commercial ends in mind, ad captandum vulgus, and operate in a system that doesn’t reward virtue but virality.
This is the trap into which we fell. Seeing the supposed benefits in the corporate world, those at the start of the technological era took on the same inventions, processes, and paradigms into their personal lives. Technology came home with us from the office. Efficiency invaded personal lives. The doctrine of more, faster, better pervades our religion.
Does it help or hurt to receive any item in the world within one day? Does it aid or addle the mind to be “connected” to anyone and everyone ever hour of the day by the “speed-of-light retrieval of data” if needed?
Let’s just say it’s been “noticed” that these technologies we call essential “have created at least as many problems for (us) as they may have solved…”
alignment
Premature of our current climate politically & technologically, the poet Robert Frost wrote this haunting line:
Society can never think things out:
It has to see them
acted out by actors
Devoted actors at a sacrifice.
After writing about & following the peaks and (many) troughs of culture the past decade, this truth resounds.
Postman always mused that “the inventor of a technology is the least equipped to predict its impacts,” and Frost gives the reason why— innovation isn’t intuitive, it’s in a hurry. The fastest way to see if a technology works is to release it. So too is the fastest way to become trapped in the externalities of your premature proposition.
America is an empire built on the assumption that things have to be acted out. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (for those white, male, and close to the center of the bell curve) have to be actualized to test their mettle. War and death were a necessary evil we can justify in hindsight because of the technology of liberty that just had to be implemented. All the philosophizing & eloquence in their musing failed to reach the proper method that work like MLK or Mandela’s were able to find.
We sit as the complicit inheritors of this kind of recklessness, building a system of prosperity and production on the idea that we needn’t consider second order effects for long (or in equal proportion to the first order “gains” of invention). As companies race to align large language models to society, we fail to rightly adjudicate whether society is aligned to virtue.
This question, are we aligned with the virtues we want to see in society, should be at the heart of the alignment project.
indebted
How do you know when it’s time to kill a project or simplify it?
I’ve been struggling to engage Postman and the work on this second pathway for months now. I’m not sure how to move past it to the work on the third pathway & beyond. I still see its purpose and love its central conceit. But the toll its first section, mired in the ache and problems we’re facing, takes makes me reticent to push through to its hopeful end.
Simplification is both an experience and current consideration.
The first pathway had more sections that became appendices as the freedom to focus on the core few took hold. I had to trim all that was not essential to shine a light on what could be added back in post. Vitally, I needed permission from outside myself. Someone to tell me it was okay to downsize the dream reinvigorated my passion for it.
Unfortunately, not all projects encounter this issue at the same point in the process.
If enough momentum has not been built, the question leans towards killing or totally retooling what the project will become. This can be incredibly beneficial and instructive because we have to remember, bad ideas are not fatal. The idea itself may be a good one. It could have simply been a bad idea for your season of life, current focus in your domain, or for the medium you’re most excited to use. This realization and practice, killing your darlings, can pull you out of a funk and launch you on a new path where your newfound learnings can prevent you from falling at the same spot.
…But what about when you’re indebted to a work and feel you have to get it out of your system before you’re able to do anything else? Is there an exemption from killing your darlings when you’ve got years of sunk cost invested in a project’s idea-spring & life-source? Does the spiritual connection to an author and the need to pin their work down within a specific era of your life supplant any suggestion to move on? If a debt is owed, must it be repaid?
memento resurrectionis
A Sabbath post…
In death as in birth, we go not alone.
The biblical story is one of continual lost potential on this side of Eden. The offer to resurrection life was never a sham, never a far off reality, but a misunderstood gift. The hope of followers of the one called the Christ is in His words—”I am in you and you are in me”— as we grow into increasingly united but beautifully diverse bearers of the imago dei within…
Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together,
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you…T.S Eliot, The Waste Land
The glory to which man is called is that he should grow more godlike by growing ever more human…
Fr Dumitru Staniloae, Orthodoxy, Life in the Resurrection
For death is not the end of life but the beginning of its renewal…
Kallistos Ware, The Orthodox Way
The word that came to Jeremiah from the Lord, saying, “Arise and go down to the potter’s house, and there I will announce My words to you.” So I went down to the potter’s house, and there he was, making something on the wheel. But the vessel that he was making of clay was spoiled in the hand of the potter; so he remade it into another vessel, as it pleased the potter to make.
Jeremiah 18:1-4
When you walk
Through a storm
Hold your head up high
And don't be afraid
Of the dark…Walk on
Walk on
With hope in your heart
And you'll never walk alone…Gerry & the Pacemakers, “You’ll never walk alone” (Penny & Sparrow version ftw)
memento mori
Tyson Motsenbocker wrote a tranquil poem to run over a smooth guitar foundation in one of his songs I can’t shake.
It tells the story of a man meeting the personifications of Death & Love, but never getting close enough to experience either. His final interaction with one is haunting and forms the basis for most people’s view on death…
Many years later, when the man had grown old
And his beard was long and white
And his face looked like a map of the mountains
Death came to visit him
"Hello", said the man
"Hello", said Death
"All of these years I have looked to find her alone", said the man
"But whenever I came near, I found that you were there also"
"Ah", said Death, sitting down beside the man
"That was your mistake
For wherever Love is, I am close behind
She displays my power and my poetry and even my beauty
When I am nearby, Love's face shines brighter
The colors of the earth burn truer
And time itself speeds"
"I have always avoided her to be clear of you", said the man
"And I too have made a mistake", said Death, rising to his feet
"By never telling you that I always come alone in the end"- Tyson Motsenbocker, A Kind Invitation
Two problems with this formulation of the death process and the life that leads to it:
Firstly, we aren’t just mortal creatures, humans from humus born into frailty and towards inevitable death; we are also natal creatures, born into human bodies and destined to live our lives out on the earth.
Natality tries to capture that idea that “humans are not born in order to die but in order to begin.”
Consider the idea above and its explication from Jennifer Banks & her mortally-rebirthed sage, Hannah Arendt:
Although humans may have been created out of nothingness, the fact that they were made at all paradoxically negates all forms of nothingness. “Once called into existence,” Arendt writes, summarizing Augustine, “human life cannot turn into nothingness.”
In Motsenbocker’s (and indeed in most of Western culture’s) paradigm, death is an ending. It’s a de-creation, a road to non-life. It nips at our heels and chases every moment of love, generosity, or beauty we could hope to experience. It is the ever-present threat of nothingness we, whether with fear or courage, believe awaits us.
Which leads to the second issue I take with this ubiquitous worldview:
We never reach the end alone.
As “human life cannot turn into nothingness” “once called into existence,” so too does this mortal step on the journey not precipitate a lack of community—that thing by and into which we were birthed. Our natality necessitates a trajectory that is up & to the right in generative, not material, qualities. We don’t reach mortality with all our contribution & acquisition depleted, but with the creative work we do in life—the community we build, the art we ship, the communion we cultivate—deeply tied to and through this transition point.
Entropy does not undo reciprocity, what we cultivate lives on in new forms as long as we, created things persist.
And we persist in our natality whenever we engage life with the gifts we’ve been given in the communities we’ve been planted…
Birth and the miracle of our creative beginnings are what indelibly shape us and prove our capacity to creatively act in the world.
memento vivere
Keep death daily before your eyes….
The rule of Saint Benedict has both beauty and wisdom weaved into its lines.
But this famous line, I’m starting to think, is not part of that wisdom.
The idea is that to memento mori propels us to carpe diem.
Saints and sages have long utilized this practice to purge their hearts and turn their attentions and affections to that which is above and deeper within. To meditate on your death was to remember the importance of the living forward into the hope of resurrection life. It gave a shape to the container of life in this world and pushed the monastic tradition to form some of the most beautiful and loving people to ever exist.
So with great trepidation and humility, I would suggest that for us today this advice is wrong.
Are we hurtling towards death or are we living out of our birth?
Most would see the space rock we occupy that swings around a ball of fire in a vast cosmos or the inevitable laws of entropy that apply to all or the proclivity of humans from page 1 to lean into their death as signs of the mortality paradigm pervading all. Indeed, you don’t have to read deep into a history book, ancient text, or popular novel (from the Fault in our Stars to a good Michael Crichton novel) to read the human condition as synonymous to death.
Death shapes most fear in life as subjects like disease, war, and crime reach our ears. It makes itself known to most before they reach adulthood in the loss of a relative or friend. It even intrudes on the space of Birth all too often as the ultimate, unanswerable question of why chokes out our dreams and hope for life.
It’s no wonder so many have found it necessary to turn to mortality as a practice to reckon with our frailty. Therapy aids the process, opening windows to the harsh reality of death. The Christian tradition fuels our “death-trospection”, giving an icon of the Cross as a symbol of our Way (more on this in a bit). Death is a hot topic again in the 21st century as cafés and blogs write about its importance and the way our systems, from medical to political, encourage conversation about our ends.
And these are not completely negative.
Death’s reality is a palliative for poor existential framing.
Some are held back by their fear of death, others are unable to confront and say goodbye to those who need release, and more need to remember we cannot overcome death (the drive to persist is futile at best & all-consuming vanity at worst).
But in all these cases, a palliative is no cure.
These mortally-focused worldviews create dilemmas within the one-sided nature of their narrative about reality.
See so much of the end as our ever-present reality and we find roads to make it so.
In a world that can naturally lean toward chaos (tohu va-bohu in the Hebrew), living lives with an anchor in the end brings its fruit unnaturally close. Jennifer Banks reflects on our mortal drive stating,
The Holocaust was a consequence of a death drive that ran deep through Western societies, one that had propelled humanity into a fruitless, barren place… Locked in their own privacy, flying into their inner selves, they had lost faith in their ability to transform their worlds and to create new, plural realities through their actions and their speech…
Through pain, we need to discover that the counter-balance to mortality is not hedonism—living it up in our time to focus only on the present— but the concept of natality and its experience with us all…
Consider each of these well-worn death aphorisms flipped to manifest the change natality creates:
From the time we are born, we are being shaped by birth…
Study birth always; it takes an entire lifetime to learn how to give birth or to come to terms with our having been born…
The great philosophers are those who practice being born and birthing…
Keep birth daily before your eyes…
Birth is evidence of our freedom...
The fundamental purpose of art is to process the strange, painful, and miraculous experience of childbirth…
The elliptical nature of each of these affirmations provide the paradigm shift— from death to life, from destruction to creation, from non-existence to artistic-creation. And natality offers a way to each of these blessings, if we can understand it’s philosophical underpinnings…
dailies manifesto
You should write everyday. Not you, I’m talking to me. Me, the reader, me the writer.
Rick Rubin taught us Creativity is an action & way of being. It begs to be utilized, sharpened, displayed, and lived out.
Seth Godin taught us Creativity is intertwined with Generosity & capable of transforming others. It’s for someone, not everyone.
What is the path to creativity? Here’s Seth:
If you want to learn how to juggle, you have to drop an enormous number of balls. If you want to learn how to swim, you have to sort of drown. And if you want to learn to be creative, you have to show me an enormous number of bad ideas…
This “enormous number of bad ideas” (that produce a couple good ones) will lead to a place where you’re quite sure you have something to say to someone. Not everyone, because we can’t change the whole of the fractalized world. And not some thing ambiguous and jumbled, because being a meaningful specific beats being a wandering generality every time.
This is domain expertise, calling, the pieces of a grand contribution. On the journey of creativity, hoard signs that point to this…
The journey matters as much as this final creative act. Each step is a chance to create something that resonates with someone deeply. Tap into the ache within everyone, and drill down to the life & cares of just one. Find the path and stay on it. Because along the path are all kinds of signs that point to ways of being in the world that radically transform life itself.
Goal of the Dailies- To become creative by generously creating so someone shares your work with a friend to say, “See!?”
Step 1: Show me your bad ideas (“Let's prove that your bad ideas are not fatal...”)
Step 2: Find your domain expertise (“This means you know what your audience wants 10 minutes before they do…”)
Note: I got rid of photos on the blog because those were a way of hiding. I started sharing the date of each post because not sharing it was a way of hiding. Make small moves to put yourself on the hook to begin to share more of yourself.
crossing boundaries
From an early point, humans are obsessed with boundaries. My toys versus your toys, my food not yours.
As we grow into social beings we become polite about these boundaries & our egocentrism, but we construct our environments out of the belief that boundaries are what we need to thrive. We think it natural & necessary for the rich to avoid with the poor, the north to not associate with the south, and country music listeners to not associate with jazz listeners.
Our ancient texts affirm this belief whether in the Taoist view of the yin and the yang or in Akkadian myths of Marduk dividing up roles for the kings of the proto-Babylonian land to rule parts of his creation. Even in the Hebrew Bible’s own creation account, Elohim separates “light and day,” “water from waters,” “sea from sky”, “land from sea,” (Gen 1:4-10) and appoints his own “rulers” over each of them (Gen 1:16). Beyond the creation accounts, the Israelite nation is called specifically to be a “kingdom of priests & a (set apart) nation” (Ex 19:6), so that they can one day be “set high above all nations” (Deut 26:18-19).
At first glance, these and many similar passages (Gen 49:26, Ex 13:12, Lev 20:24-26, Numb 16:9, Deut 10:8…) give us a view of humanity that works better when apart. We are inclined to think this is the way of things and any of its evil is necessary for flourishing…
But at the earliest point, we all crossed a boundary without thought to its indecency. Non-life to life, womb to world, water to air.
This is the miracle of birth- that, in it, we are in touch with another layer of reality, a boundary-crossing reality that effects or person and our place wholesale. A mother gives up the social baggage of my space-your space and invites another creature to be one with her- the most primal image of the Messiah’s call to “be one with me” (John 17:21).
Birth gives us an opportunity to witness the true nature of reality that is boundary-less.
Birth confounds the binary. It is an experience of neither mastery nor powerlessness; it confronts us with our embodied, earthly creativity, with what we can control and with what we simply cannot control…
Jennifer Banks, Natality: Toward a Philosophy of Birth
Unfortunately, “natality”, as Jennifer Banks and philosophers before her eloquently coin the term, is not at the top of our list for dinner party conversation like mortality or our separation from parts of the world is. Pressures consign this facet of the human experience to just one of its halves and one brief moment of time and conversation. We stifle its transforming power to show us how we (even those never to find themselves in need of a midwife or doula) can partake in radical acts of creation.
Birth breaks down most of the dualisms humans use to structure reality: man/woman, mind/body, thought/experience, destruction/creation, self/other, creator/created, birth/death. In challenging those binaries, birth can be an act of nonconforming, and motherhood an expression of alterity. Therein lies the difficulty of talking about birth today: birth is both the norm and its transgression.
Jennifer Banks, Natality: Toward a Philosophy of Birth
It makes all the sense in the world then that 3 of the 4 Gospels of the Christian Scriptures would begin with birth narratives (John maintains the natality of Christ through his poetic opening on the theological implications of the incarnation; while Mark, with no explicit birth narrative, goes to lengths to stress the idea that those outside “the family” are just as invited to the table as those born into it, giving us numerous boundary crossing stories in the place of the nativity to drive home this point). When Jesus comes onto the scene, his whole ministry is to bridge chasms that have opened up between people. He sits with the rich and the poor, invites tax collectors to dine with zealots, and speaks with forwardness and a restoring dignity to the opposite gender, allowing all to cross the boundaries of their time to sit at his feet.
Looking back then, in light of this reality, we see what was always there:
That the creator God in Genesis invited his handiwork (“let there be” is a jussive not an imperative) to become distinctly itself. Because the goal was never separation of land and sky or people from people.
Creation is about adopting uniqueness to find contribution (reflecting 1 Cor 12:12’s “one body, many parts” idea).
That the call of a certain people was to make uncertain the boundaries between all people.
Because the purpose of “setting apart” was never to create hierarchy.
Being chosen is about finding one’s own way to help others along the way (hear the Torah’s “a blessing to the nations” refrain; Gen 22:18, Jer 47:2, Gal 3:8).
Birth, the first, great crossing of boundaries, should begin to shape our understanding of the world and give us a map for the steps into new connections and the synergism of all life this side of Eden...
+ theology
We all hide. They layers of our inner self unravel before us with terror.
We frantically shove it all back in the drawer before those around us can notice the truth of us appear.
Do we hide because we’re scared of failure or being on the hook?
Fear is the anticipation of failure or the anxiety of possibility and it’s not usually helpful.
If you’re adventuring the Amazon rainforest or fighting in a gladiatorial arena or surviving the zombie apocalypse it can keep you quick. If you’re posed at a keyboard, preparing to speak to an audience, or procrastinating a hard conversation, fear is only masochism.
But most hiding isn’t because of this kind of fear.
Most of us hide to avoid being on the hook.
Askıda ekmek. The Turkish tradition of buying an extra loaf the baker hangs on a wall for those in need in the community.
We stay off the hook by neglecting our idiosyncratic potential, generous contributions, and personal experience. We tell ourselves our lack of a degree disqualifies us from speaking into the great conversation. We (and if you haven’t got the joke yet, “we” = “I”) avoid mixing our burgeoning selves with our former selves for fear of being on the hook for what our new self has to say to the world.
And this kind of hiding led to stagnation, distraction, and a failure to be generous with the space I’ve sat in for nearly 2 years.
Going forward, this new self won’t be hiding.
“+ theology” because the vast majority of my resources, training, practice, and ideas generated lean into my background as a follower of the Way of Jesus. The scholarship I’ve digested, the classes and sermons I’ve begun to teach, and the musings I spend the most time on have found their way from the eremos of the tech-space into a community of saints asking questions about the fundamental nature of our relationship to a higher power.
I’m only late to the party on the days I deny my ability to contribute to the conversation.
Technology and creativity will always be integral to the way I write and projects I take. “+ theology” doesn’t mean a subsumption of these beneath a new banner. It puts me on the hook to share additional angles and mentors who build on the equation. It opens a part of myself that can invigorate the ideas from my old self, correcting and finding synergy with that version and its passion.
So let this be an reintroduction. An introduction to my new findings of the past 2 years. To those contemporary authors like J Richard Middleton, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Robert Alter, Amy Peeler, Ronald Rolheiser, Dallas Willard, Tomáš Halik, James K A Smith... And to those with lasting impact, now long venerated like Augustine, John of the Cross, Julian of Norwich, John Cassian, Thomas Merton, TS Elliot, Ignatius of Loyola…