Oops! Still Chewing

Last updated on 20 Aug 2025

Yeah, I've bit off more than I can chew.

This week I'd planned to embark on writing about the pillar ideas underpinning the Fractal Praxis theory. These are ideas I'd encountered and internalized in my early 20s, 15 years ago, that had exceptional "staying power" in my worldview, because of their profound explanatory power—that is to say, as ideas they did WORK in helping organize my assumptions and beliefs and allowed me to get closer to the truth.

But being that I'm such an amateur at academic writing, I didn't realize what a tall order this task is.

These pillars, as pillars, underlie so much material. Having come into my mind many years ago, and naturally shaped my perception and judgments since, they are entangled with so many aspects of what is now a holistic worldview, made up of my original ideas and others' ideas too in a matrix of sense made. Where do you begin the thread, when the reality is a fully reflexive strange loop?

Don't worry—I am dedicated to this task and have already started. But it's going to require something more from me.

I'm a painfully amateur academic, having eschewed social validation for my whole adult life. But what I've instead gained mastery in is flow-based, stream of consciousness style sense-making as a generative process. The ability to speak into or think into a topic, generate revelatory insights, and surface novel language for how to think of something. This entails a mindset prioritizing associative thinking, open-mindedness, holding contingent and conflicting ideas, and drawing from a lot of reference points in my synthesis.

Synthesis, a word with biological and cognitive connotations, is probably the best way to think about what I offer. Combining intellectual and embodied knowing into something more gnostic-like. This is the crux of what I offer thus far—yet I've lately embraced the disciplines that will make me a top notch traditional philosopher, too. All this is done for the benefit of all beings.

So I got ahead of myself thinking I could simply unpack the pillar ideas and do them any justice—within the framework of creating weekly WEWS.

You see, because I'm an emergence based creator I've typically decided what to focus on & created a piece the same week. But if I'm really going to take the time to unpack the concepts, I need to afford myself a writers' retreat. Ideally, without completely abandoning the WEWS rhythm.

So I'll be switching gears: Desynchronizing the weekly production with the weekly publishing of these talks. For the next few weeks, while I'm writing privately about the pillars, I will publish placeholder, "hold you over" pieces from my archives. ...Think of it a bit like intermission music. 🎶

I will prioritize poetry, music, and sermons (spoken word). Centering the liminal space between a soft, supple, sensitized mind and the robust sense-making, synthesis that can stem from it. This kind of work from me is best followed through just sitting back and going with the flow, like a hypnotic stream. Save your linear rational argument reads for when I'm back with my essays in a few weeks.

This week I'll share two poems, written around 2019 and 2020, and originally published on my very first prototype Fractal Praxis blog, on the Cosmos.coop platform.

Language of life is lessons (love is bliss of learning)

This one is about the liminal mindset from which one can "read" the patterns in the environment and apprehend directly their fractal teachings. It stems from my rapt observations of pelicans compared with hawks, while standing there on a cliffside trail beside the Pacific Ocean in San Francisco and watching them from just such a oneness mind. Originally published in two columns so as to heighten the comparison and contrast in the (1)(3) and (2)(4) segments.

Pelicans glide
easefully
on the choppy breeze
In formation
so as to feed off
each others’ lift
like people do
when their conversations
circulate lift
under the wings
of our dreams.

The falcon stays put.
Hard and still
against the changeful air
deftly riding nuanced
flux to stay in place.

This is because
the falcon hunts.

I too, have stayed still,
stoic, a seeming stone
against the tides of life
while hunting Truth.
Watching keenly.
As the world around me
danced interactively.
For years such a stance
served me. I seized and
fed on Truth, getting fat.

Though today, I am rather
ready to paint the sky and sea
with collective arcs
of easeful beauty,
friendly to the forces
that encompass
us and me.

I think it may be
that to Make Meaning
from our living
is all
our living
needs

Living the Art of Patterning

This poem was co-written by 2020 me and present-day me; I kept some pieces and completely altered others.

We are the semi-conscious carriers of patterns. Those we can wield, with sentient mind, we can redeem. Those we cannot wield, we lose ourselves to.

When I use big words it’s because they are the right ones.
When I invent words, it’s because they are needed.
I’m not trying to sound smart.
I’m not trying to make you feel any way with it.
I am curating words with care.
And it matters to me.

Because it is only the strength of the stories we tell
the defines the strength of our movement.

That last statement, as with much I proclaim—
is fractal: equally true at individual and collective scales.

And this is how I live my art.
I endeavor to directly transcribe the fractal patterns evident from the environment
into inscrutable, ineffable claims.

I am an artist and with that comes choosing the moments I’m in
and my contributions—
the patterns I let stem and sing from my being.
My agency expressed through the curation of patterns.

And I'm always optimizing.
Pressurizing the claims to gain more explanatory power.
And break through into new insights.
Attempting to be radically, holistically good—
as a model for how we can make up ground and time
in our re-humanizing, re-inhabiting process now.

Take these as contributions. Amendments to your soil.
If they don’t serve you that is fine, leave them behind in the wake of creation.
Just know that, as radical as I am, I reflect a fragment of you.
I've only multiplied it.

I am used to people having strong reactions to my presence because I am not just a seer I am also a teller.
At my best I will tell what I see as artfully as you let me.
These medicine forms may be for you to sample, to dose, or to douse yourself in.
Or, your body may reject these, your soul finding them ill-blending, its information non-conducive to your growth edge.
That is your karma and it is empty.

Yet I cannot live without re-creating our world and myself, without attempting to add lucidity, to raise sentience, to harness fitness.
Some patterns i.e. forms are more adaptive than others, more enduring across profound environmental changes.
Some knowing amounts to right understanding.
Some insight reaches radically into the realm of what is required of us—
and reveals it.

If we do not awaken to this pattern curating evolutionary context,
we shall be unraveled by it.

So I implore: awaken to the powerful agency inherent in meaning-making.
In the development of ever more efficacious stories and durable assumptions.

And may my strange invocations inspire a perturbation beneath the surface of your mind, a shimmering under the skin like a bacterium's whirring cilia, so that a process may spark that you deign not to suppress, one that will work through and rework you, making you evermore an instrument of life—

Embrace the art of selection.