Blog

The Book Vouch

I’ve started a page on Kokoro 心 Heart called The Book Vouch, a list of books I can vouch for. Imagine a TV show where people sit on a couch and talk about their favourite books, except there’s no couch, no video, and no talking.

This is part of my first crack at affiliate marketing, so you can buy books through this page and I’ll get some money for a coffee, at no extra cost to you.

update: meditation and employment

I’ve restarted my formal meditation practice today. It was nice to sit still on the cushion and give some time to just enjoying the breath and allowing thought to fall away before it takes hold.

I’ve been taking a break from maintaining all such habits since I quit my job a while back. I let myself go a bit because I just wanted to relax and go easy on myself with the routine and discipline. I’d been planning to get back to a more regular practice a few weeks ago, but then things blew up with our housemate and that destabilised us for a while.

That’s okay.

It’s all okay.

It has to be, or else despair sets in and there’s nothing more paralysing for me than despair. It’s worse than fear for me, which at least has a kind of energising power.

The work I’m doing now, since I quit my complicity in traditional exploitative employment, is here on this blog and internal, intrapersonal, work. I’m fortunate to live in a country that has welfare benefits, and I’m choosing to redirect that benefit to the investigation of our culture and the internal environment that creates that culture. I consider it a form of tithing.

What better service can I offer the community than investigating the true nature of reality? By sharing any insights I come across I hope to contribute to the work of changing the narrative around what we consider valuable at the heart of our culture: the acquisition and hoarding of material wealth, which divides us into haves and havenots, creates discord and harms the habitat of our planet; or the realisation of wisdom that unites us in the common journey toward equality, harmony and sustainability.

Of course we all need a degree of material wealth to survive long enough to conduct these investigations, and we can’t all depend on the welfare system forever. To that end, I am beginning to monetise this blog a bit, with affiliate links to things like books I can wholeheartedly recommend. Here’s one, in the spirit of trying this on for size — a fiction-ish memoir account of the ancient search for what the author calls Quality: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig.

I’ve always felt a bit suss about marketing and advertising, but I’ll try to make sure the way I do it here is not grubby. All recommendations will be as much on theme as possible, and nothing I wouldn’t buy myself. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is a classic of philosophical ficto-memoir that has inspired my own metaphysical adventures endlessly, and is one of the few books I’ve read more than once.

I’ve got other income streams in mind, such as meme-coasters and other “merch”, as well as social enterprise ideas that will take a bit more time to materialise. I also want to produce a little chapbook of my published and unpublished writing, so stay tuned.

If this sounds like something you’d like to follow and get involved with and support, there are some links below.

Meanwhile, may your psychospiritual wellness be complete and your contribution valued. I’m looking forward to a bright future, and I’m excited and happy to be stepping into my purpose of compassionate communication about metaphysical adventure.

Nikki put this on the stereo as I was finishing the draft of this post (it’s Ben Harper’s “With My Own Two Hands”, in case the embed doesn’t work):

Very appropriate, and from an album I can highly recommend: Diamonds on the Inside by Ben Harper [link].

~ ~ ~

If you enjoyed this post, please feel free to comment here or wherever you found the link, and share if you think others will be interested. I write here for love and sanity (and coffee money!), any engagement from readers such as your fine self is immensely encouraging.

For more post updates, find me on Twitter, on WordPress at the follow link below, or sign up for my little mailing-list newsletter here. I’m also on LinkedIn and Unifyd.

a question about inflation, wages and the cost of living

Photo by regularguy.eth on Unsplash

I have a question about inflation, wages and the cost of living. If this is your area, please comment below or drop some links to research and resources I can look at for this essay I’m developing about employment culture.

It’s pretty simple really, once I put it on paper, but I need some help understanding whether I’m on the right track here.

So, if wages were to keep up with inflation, wouldn’t the cost of living just continue to sky-rocket?

Increased remuneration for those who make the things we need for living means those things would be more expensive to cover the cost of increased wages.

Does this mean we’re in a proper actual bind? Because I mean, a lot of us need just a little bit more to make ends meet, but that little bit more for each adds up to a lot over-all. How do we increase wages to meet the real costs of living without increasing the cost of living by doing so?

Are we in this bind because we’re actually running out of resources and therefore the cost of things needs to be increasingly high, or because those resources are being shored up by those who already have the power to with-hold and create a false sense of scarcity?

Are the 1% profiting from this scheme we call an economy, or is there just a major systemic problem in the coding of our economic ideology?

So, many, questions. But the main one is this:

If wages were to keep up with inflation, wouldn’t the cost of living just continue to sky-rocket?

through which the motes fleet

(The title of this post should be sung to the tune of “For Whom The Bell Tolls” while imagining James Hetfield doing the splits.)

We’ve got a situation here. This last week our domestic environment exploded in fits of verbal violence that leave my family and I mostly displaced from the dwelling that was intended as a shared home. We’ve been spending the days in our car or with family, coming back to sleep fitfully at night. Our son has thankfully avoided a lot of the fallout, though not for any positive reason – his friend is missing, so Zane and his mates have been roaming Brisbane to find him. Things are calming down now – the main aggressor is talking about moving out, which is a huge relief.

These events are the symptoms of a maligned culture in demise – they are the cracks that result from collective ways of being that are unsuitable for our nature. I say this not to exonerate myself from my part in the verbal violence – I made the mistake of retaliating, yelling, have accepted my responsibility for the maladaptive reaction I contributed to the escalation of a situation that could have been avoided if I and others had been more skillful, and I resolve to learn from this how to do differently next time. There’s more of that at the end of this draft.

Continue reading “through which the motes fleet” →

treaty

I need to get some treatises out because (with)holding them back hurts and compromises my wholeness and integrity. I like the word “treatise” because it resembles “treaty” and each of these treatises are an attempt to resolve the conflict between what I believe and what I know, between illusion and reality.