Last month, when I looked across the vast gray wasteland of the calendar page ahead and noted that there were five Wednesdays in November, I asked readers—in keeping with a newly minted but entertaining tradition here on Ecosophia—to suggest a theme for the fifth Wednesday post. This blog being the eccentric phenomenon that it is,…
Author: John Michael Greer
December 2017 Book Club (plus reflections on the Bitcoin bubble)
This week’s post is the fifth of a monthly series of open-discussion posts focusing on books I’ve written. Our theme for the present is Mystery Teachings from the Living Earth, and this week we’re discussing “The Fifth Law: The Law of Cause and Effect” (pp. 54-62). It so happens that just now the Fifth Law…
A Few Notes on Nature Spirits, Part Two: Into A Living World
Last week’s post here on Ecosophia.net dealt with some of the reasons why so many people in today’s industrial societies are acutely uncomfortable with the suggestion that the forces and processes of nature might be persons rather than things. That’s what we’re discussing, after all, when we talk about nature spirits. The world of spirits,…
A Few Notes on Nature Spirits, Part One: Nature as “It,” Nature as “You”
We seem to have established a nascent tradition here on Ecosophia.net around fifth Wednesdays, and I’m by no means distressed by that. The first month with five Wednesdays since the new blog launched, which was this last August, I decided on the spur of the moment to ask my readers to propose a topic for…
November 2017 Open Post
As announced earlier, this blog will host an open space once a month to field questions and encourage discussion among my readers, and this is the week. All the standard rules apply — no profanity, no sales pitches, no trolling, no rudeness, no long screeds proclaiming the infallible truth of fill in the blank —…
The One Drop Fallacy
Last month, in the process of exploring the awkward fact that most people in today’s industrial world have never learned how to think, I talked at some length about thoughtstoppers: those crisp little words or phrases that combine absurdity and powerful emotions to short-circuit the thinking process. Thoughtstoppers, as I noted then, very often keep…
November 2017 Book Club
This week’s post is the fifth of a monthly series of open-discussion posts focusing on books I’ve written. Our theme for the present is Mystery Teachings from the Living Earth, and this week we’re discussing “The Fourth Law: The Law of Limits” (pp. 43-53). I’d like to ask readers to keep their questions and comments…
This Thing Called Freedom
I’m not at all sure how many of my readers are aware that this year marks an anniversary of some importance in the western world’s cultural history. Three hundred years ago, in 1717, members of four old lodges of stonemasons that had met in London “since time immemorial” climbed the stair to a private room…
October 2017 Open Post
As announced earlier, this blog will host an open space once a month to field questions and encourage discussion among my readers, and this is the week. All the standard rules apply — no profanity, no sales pitches, no trolling, no rudeness, no long screeds proclaiming the infallible truth of fill in the blank —…
A Field Guide to Thoughtstoppers
It occurred to me a while back that one very simple issue is responsible for much of the crisis of our age. No question, that crisis has plenty of causes, some of them recent, some of them much less so; to get a clear understanding of the way that modern industrial civilization has backed itself…