A Self Assessment

Monday morning thoughts

I have constructed my life in such a way that I have the maximum freedom to think, study, and reflect and the barest minimum of obligations and encumbrances. Generally, I don’t consider this to be a major accomplishment, but perhaps it is one. Also, it is a bigger accomplishment because I have done this while living in one of the most expensive cities in the world, where those who hang on tend to be driven by ambition, greed, artistic yearnings or inhuman tenacity.

At 57, I’m not beholden to any academic institutions or corporations for my livelihood. I don’t have to try to impress anyone or convince anyone of anything. I have little capital but no debt. This dearly-purchased freedom gives me the capacity to go into spaces, ideas, and realms that most will not explore (including the darker occult shadows), while I make a constant effort to re-center myself, separating out what I think and feel from what I know through direct experience, or understand from reason. I am grateful for an active community of readers who agree, comment, disagree, and sometimes challenge me.

“It doesn’t matter but it does.”

By the way, if you aren’t a paid subscriber yet, I hope you will become one. I'm delighted to announce this one-week-only special offer: 50% off annual subscriptions ($25 a year).

I’ve already gone through a few cycles of being reviled, detested, mocked, ridiculed, and canceled — psychological death-and-rebirths: I’ve gotten all of that out of the way, clearing more space. At times I feel like I am floating in space (of course we are all, in reality, floating in space — actually, floating isn’t accurate; we are on a sphere moving at an incredible velocity, chasing its local star which is also swirling at high speed around the galactic center, yet all of it brilliantly orchestrate to give us this temporary illusion of stillness and stasis).

But this freedom is also a strange thing.