There’s a lot of art out there that avoids ethics entirely, and a lot of art and artists, like Ocean Vuong for example, who explicitly weave care into their creative process. Finding language for some ideas that have been simmering of late. 1. Raw material ≠ licenseInner intensity is material for art, not permission to

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I’ve been thinking about both personal and organizational ethics, as I’ve encountered limitations of capacity of different theories and approaches as I disentangle them. After retroactively discovering deep ethical incompatibilities. I’ve learned it’s not enough to say I value integrity, and “acting spontaneously in the right” and for the other person to effectively agree. These

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Written during the administrative aftermath of a forced exit. Preserved here as a record, not an active account. Finally I think I’ve tended the last bit of cleanup related to my forced exit from an org. I now know that I should not have had to ask; that my leaving should have automatically resulted in

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Part of my sorting out process has been about how I would think I was getting the messages I needed, both interpersonally and organizationally, but these conflicted with my embodied experience. I discovered a whole land of pseudo-everything, at so many levels. Navigating these is really tricky, as what is said actively and intentionally blocks

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Last week, I found power in the naming, the telling, the presentation of power and accountability and responsibility to those it belonged to. In the best way I was able to. A small, actionable request that would meaningfully improve my safety. Sadly, they dropped it. The spiritual pablum that accompanied it, ick. I did go

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(image: bicycle chain whip, which is used to fix bike chains) Finally, a really great bike day in awhile where my body felt back. My very best bike friend is moving for work, and I put together a farewell ride for him. 56 miles, 5000′ of climbing, and I’m so proud of my body for

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Now I’m at a point where I realize just how little control I was able to exert in this last relationship, every choice seemed to be about choosing the least bad option, rather than have a both/and positive outcome, which was not even realistically possible. It’s handy to get granular with it, if also pretty

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Most of my sporting endeavors involve endurance and taking a long view, and as I’m focused on the distance, sometimes the details of my surroundings or of a moment become a blur, or I ignore them. I’m not a terribly detail-oriented person, unless I’m in hyperfocus mode, like for my work. It’s not like ball

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Written during private processing. Preserved here as part of a personal archive, not a public essay. I’ve been thinking about mutuality, and querying the assertion that high asymmetry necessarily makes mutuality impossible even with safeguards. I’ve also been looking at what mutuality does and doesn’t look like inside of relationships with manageable asymmetries. While I

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I absolutely hate AI, but it’s weirdly been a better source of analysis than the Magic 8 ball in the wake of my last relationship. I think the main things that drew me more recently to a high-risk relationship scenario have been some illusions (of safety, of having limited versions of one person over a

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Arriving in Zana, I was approaching full circle. The imaginary meeting at a place she had been, and still wore her sweatshirt from stopping at the coffee shop there while on a road trip, at approximately the time of my first coastal visit in my new state, more than a decade prior. Maybe we had

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Sometimes a memory surfaces of an experience I had while backpacking through Europe, at age 19. I carried the same heavy Mountainsmith 65 liter backpack I’d used to climb Mt. Rainier and lead backpacking trips at a summer camp in the Colorado Rockies, and the same attitude of exploration and desire for new vistas, carrying

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