Acute Interventions

This is from a Marine Corps officer training exercise; turn the map upside down and see it from the enemy’s point of view. What areas will be attacked? Where do the defenses seem vulnerable? Is the enemy susceptible in ways you haven’t seen? Use the map as a mirror. Look at yourself from the other side. Get behind the other’s eyes. Change your perspective. Step outside yourself and see the opposite 

When Things Want to Collapse, Let Them It is the conclusion of a rose to dissolve. The bud opens and the flower swims into air. Then the petals drop. Same motion, same force continuing. What is held up, kept from falling down by force or craft, has nothing more to reveal. It is arrested, made to remain in place, long after its potency is spent. When a thing is mature it dies and begins to rot, which is a transformation of matter. Therefore, collapse is allied with, and a continuation of, growth. The permanent object is in the past; life exists in the enduring, impermanent moment. The next step can't reveal itself until you let go of the last one.

Tease what is inert. How do you get a cat out from behind the sofa? Grab for her, get scratched, and drive her deeper out of reach, or dangle a string just in front of her? How do you get a laggard out of bed: yell and throw the alarm clock or go to the kitchen, make yourself coffee and bacon, and let the smell drive him crazy? And so for your ideas: offer a stimulus to provoke a response. Preferably a playful one, though taunting has also been known to work.

Questions Are Seeds Let me plant a question. Planting something means you hope to see it grow. Easy answers nip a question “in the bud.” Don’t be premature. Let’s plant a question and compost the answer. Then it can grow new questions. Before a seed can grow it has to split open. Then there is no more seed. Blow that question up. A question in a dry mind yields a stunted answer. Have you ever “solved” a seed? In this hyacinth, first of the season, a hundred streams flow into one and out again in a thousand waves. A good question doesn’t convert A to B but A to alphabet.