A few days from now we’ll have arrived at the northern hemisphere’s autumn equinox, when the Sun crosses the celestial equator to bring spring to my readers in Australia and fall to me and my neighbors here in North America. The equinox is an important holy day to Druids and members of various other nature-centered…
Category: Monthly Post
The Dream of a Managed Society
My essay here two weeks ago on the way that the industrial world’s elites are beginning to back away from environmentalism, using chatter about “ecofascism” as a convenient excuse, got the lively response I expected. To be fair, there was also a certain amount of noise, and a certain number of exasperated demands that I…
The Flight To The Fringes, And What Waits There
Several of my readers alerted me over the last week to an online essay by Christian writer Rod Dreher on the rising popularity of malevolent magic and demonolatry (the worship of malign spirits) on the leftward end of the US political scene. For so loaded a topic, Dreher’s essay is thoughtful and admirably measured; what’s…
A Conversation with the World
Over the last three and a half months, I’ve spent most of my writing time on this blog tracing a series of trajectories that all spiral in toward a common center. Each of those explorations started with some feature of contemporary culture and followed it back to its roots in a very odd set of…
After The Shouting, The Silence
Over the months just past, not counting January’s break, we’ve explored the crisis of our age from various angles, moving in from the discordant jangle of outward symptoms toward the tangled heart of it all. One thing I haven’t really tried to address, though it’s gotten a certain share of discussion in passing, is the…
An Astrological Interlude: Aries Ingress 2019
Today is the northern hemisphere’s spring equinox, when the Sun crosses the celestial equator to bring summer to the end of the planet with polar bears and winter to the end with penguins. Nature worshipers of various kinds will be celebrating the equinox today, Druids among them, but this is also a day that matters…
A Conversation with Nature
There are many ways we can talk about the deeper roots of the crisis of our time, setting out from many different vantage points; as Charles Fort pointed out, one measures a circle, beginning anywhere. This week I want to start from that very curious branch of science called “invasion biology,” and more specifically with…
The Flight from Nature
A couple of weeks ago one of my readers pointed me to an op-ed piece on climate change by Canadian journalist David Moscrop, titled “It’s time for climate change defeatists to get out of the way.” If you’ve watched the slow-motion train wreck of climate change activism for more than a year or two, you…
This Flight from Failure
A little while back I attended an open house at the newly founded What Cheer Writers Club across the river in Providence. Half coworking space, half social center for the busy Rhode Island writing scene, it’s a fine example of the kind of voluntary social institution American society used to be so richly stocked with…
America and Russia, Part Two: The Far Side of Progress
Two weeks ago, in the first part of this sequence of posts, we explored the way that Oswald Spengler’s insights into the cycles of history can be used not only to make sense of the past, but also to get some idea of the shape of the future ahead of us. That’s explosive stuff, because…