my heart, too, is irregular and worn broken and mended many times Read more
September 13, 2015
poems: “the bonsai tree is lopsided” and “Goats!”
September 13, 2015 By Tom Swiss
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September 11, 2015
9/11: The Stage is a Sacred Place
September 11, 2015 By Tom Swiss
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I don’t know if you’ve ever stood on a stage and been the focus of attention during a national emergency. It’s kind of intense. Read more
September 5, 2015
Otalp’s Cave
September 5, 2015 By Tom Swiss
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The ideas that he loved, the roundness of the geometer’s circle, the inarguable perfection of a syllogism, the well-ordered words of a poem or the perfectly timed and ideally harmonious notes of a musical composition — these were eternal and unchanging. Death and decay and renewal and change, the ceaseless churn of the physical world, all seemed…unseemly, somehow déclassé, to young Otalp. Read more
September 1, 2015
Are People Any Damn Good?
September 1, 2015 By Tom Swiss
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But over-engineering the garden ruins the fruit, give us those cardboard supermarket genetically-engineered tomatoes instead of those succulent products of the sun and soil that grow naturally on the vine. Read more
August 28, 2015
We Live For Beauty
August 28, 2015 By Tom Swiss
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Why do we live? Read more
August 26, 2015
Truth, Beauty, and Lunatics
August 26, 2015 By Tom Swiss
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In those moments I feel like I had no choice, in the same way that I have no choice when I sit down and try to write a poem and find that I’ve used a word that is just wrong. Some sense in my brain nags and nags at me until I fix it. Read more
August 20, 2015
You Can Start Again
August 20, 2015 By Tom Swiss
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If there’s something that you wanted to do in the past but never did — it’s not too late. If you quit something and regret it — you can start again. Read more
August 20, 2015
Neopaganism: Looking Forward or Looking Back?
August 20, 2015 By Tom Swiss
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I’ve always held with the old saw that says we should all be concerned about the future, as that is where we will spend the rest of our lives; and I’ve given considerable thought to the topic of Paganism and the future. It strikes me that the word we often use to talk about the contemporary Pagan movement, “Neopaganism”, has “neo”, “new”, right there in the name, suggesting something that’s looking to the future. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that we have so many computer professionals and engineers and technological, future-looking folk in the Pagan community. Read more
August 11, 2015
Why I Am Still a Zen Pagan Taoist Atheist Discordian
August 11, 2015 By Tom Swiss
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I look back at this after fifteen years, and it’s not terrible. I’ve come to deeper and more nuanced understandings of each of these points, but nothing that makes me disavow this explanation. So then, what are those deeper and more nuanced understandings? What have I found that makes me keep each of these elements as a part of my well-balanced spiritual practice, and recommend them to others? Read more
August 7, 2015
Enchantment and objectivity
August 7, 2015 By Tom Swiss
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There can be plenty of enchantment in the objective world-view. There is a form of beauty in seeing how the moon’s orbit and the arc of a pop fly follow the same Newtonian law of universal gravitation. Cantor’s diagonalization proof that there are more real numbers than rational numbers is one of the most beautiful things I know. Read more
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