Making the Extraordinary Ordinary

Man on ladderMAKING THE EXTRAORDINARY ORDINARY

By David Harris

Thanks to decades of our own chemical emissions, the climate with which humans have become familiar over hundreds of centuries will soon shift under our feet, the physical premises of civilization will destabilize, and the setting we have long assumed for our species will erode at an accelerating rate.   There will be a lot less of what we need, and a lot more of what we don’t.  Our surroundings will become harsher than most of us have previously known and our margins for error will evaporate. [Read more…]

The Lifeboat Rules

THE LIFEBOAT RULES

By David Harris

I’m always looking for metaphors and finding them in odd places, often despite myself.

I stumbled over this one while talking with Bowser, my Dharma buddy turned Buddhist monk.  The two of us grew up in opposite ends of the San Joaquin Valley and played football against each other in high school.  This metaphor arose when we were sharing our childhood memories of backwater black and white television and the cheesy, low budget B movies that stations back then used to fill their air time late at night or on weekend afternoons.  There were cowboy movies, road racing movies, war movies of every stripe, truck driving movies, aliens from outer space, pirate movies, former serials—both science fiction and cowboy—horror films, and lots of the Three Stooges and the Little Rascals.  And more.

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The Van Riper Company

The Van Riper Company