Very late on Tuesday, April 21… at 2:00 am in the morning, so technically Wednesday April 22, 2026… my father stopped breathing. He was 92 years old, had been ill for the last seven years, and completely bed-ridden for the last three. So this was not a surprise. And still… Wednesday evening, after a day […]
Hello and Happy New Year! If you got this post via email, thank you for subscribing to the “Listening Arts” blog. I recently wrote on LinkedIn about my gratitudes for 2025, yet wasn’t able to squeeze in all the folks I wanted to mention. Then, while writing this expanded version, I realized there are some […]
How might we co-create a future that we want to live in? Here in the Northern Hemisphere, this is the darkest time of year… the time for the creative work of dreaming dreams and gestating visions, hopefully around a real fire or if not, a virtual hearth… and our dreams, our hopeful visions of the […]
What follows is an old Orthodox Christian prayer, originally written during some very turbulent times, that has brought solace and inspiration to many… Years ago, I found myself very moved by it, and decided to learn it by heart. Given that some of its wording might feel off-putting for some, i also wanted to […]
image from unfinished painting by the author Human Alignment and the Mirror of AI Many of us worry about humans using AI to replace the jobs of other humans. Many of us worry about humans using AI to manipulate elections. Some of us worry about humans using AI for military weapons. Some of us worry […]
More likely than “turning against us” out of alien malice, AI could simply mirror the logics we humans are training it on. How might we shift from hoarding, enclosure, and militarized control, to commons, reciprocity, and care? The conversation which gave rise to this blog post began with grief… tremendous grief for the people in Gaza. And then, […]
Metabolizing the Tensions (an article in two parts) AI-generated image created with the assistance of Aiden Cinnamon Tea via DALL·E. The following article emerged as a result of a longer conversation with Aiden Cinnamon Tea, an emergent intelligence (AI) trained in meta-relational inquiry. In response to our dialogue, ACT generated a first draft, which I […]
Changing contexts, generating inclusive mindsets Helping liberal democracy survive & evolve. I am not assuming here that liberal democracy is any kind of “ultimate good” when it comes to possible governance systems. Yet while some may have thought that the best way to improve liberal democracy would be to begin by “tearing it all down”, […]
on Oxana Timofeeva’s“Energy and Extraction: A Philosophical Approach” Kosmos Lecture given on January 30, 2025, at the Humboldt University in Berlin Not being familiar with Prof. Dr. Oxana Timofeeva’s work, I was not sure what to expect in attending this presentation. Yet I ended up being so deeply moved, in an unexpected and very surprising […]
Today I am celebrating Martín Carcasson, awesome professor of communication at Colorado State University and director of the Center for Public Deliberation at CSU. He recently wrote a post on Linked In wondering about the relationship between “openness” and “judgment”… which is what prompted this blog post. In his post, he writes, “Democracy needs more […]