Essays

Writing, notes, and updates. Mostly about building durable systems, avoiding performative complexity, and making infrastructure legible.

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Essay

The Gap

The gap between what a symbol promises and what its delivery produces is not a flaw in history — it is its constant companion. What determines whether an idea survives is not the purity of its vessel, but the willingness to see and maintain that gap rather than perform around it.

Feb 23, 2026 311 views
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Essay

The Answer Isn't Macro

The debate over AI and jobs is missing a crucial question: not whether employment will exist, but what holds communities together as systems erode. In upstate New York, one local newspaper is using AI not to replace people, but to build community-owned infrastructure that strengthens coordination, accountability, and local resilience

Feb 17, 2026 148 views
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Essay

Listen to Grandma

A reflection on how each generation learns to armor itself against pain, and how wisdom sometimes arrives not as answers, but as a quiet warning from those who’ve already seen what happens when we close too soon.

Feb 8, 2026 108 views
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Essay

The Living Flame and the Fatberg

What we call love is a living pattern that appears across many forms, from human presence to natural systems. It endures through relationship, grace, and openness—and fails wherever fear hardens into closure.

Feb 8, 2026 118 views
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Essay

Love Across Time

Love appears to learn as it flows—between people, across time, and through relationships willing to remain unfinished. What I notice is not a doctrine or a claim, but a pattern of recognition that seems to teach itself wherever presence meets vulnerability.

Feb 8, 2026 113 views
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Essay

Returning to the Ground

Boundaries hold as long as consensus does. When they don’t, systems must return to what predates agreement. This essay uses centuries-old boundary markers to explore why re-grounding—not negotiation—becomes necessary under stress.

Feb 6, 2026 114 views
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Essay

Same Surface, Different Weight

Most “role-based UI” problems aren’t about hiding fields—they’re about unmodeled authority. This essay shows how treating actor and subject as distinct restores structural integrity across interfaces, data, and time.

Feb 6, 2026 495 views
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Essay

The Third Step

Before choices harden into direction, there is a pause where attention gathers. This story traces the quiet power of staying with uncertainty until orientation, not certainty, emerges.

Feb 6, 2026 77 views
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Essay

The Prompt That Makes My Local Coding Agent Possible

This isn’t about prompt engineering or better answers. It’s about orientation. I describe the context prompt I use with my local coding agent, and why telling an AI where it is matters more than telling it what to do. If you want it slightly sharper, warmer, or more technical, say the word and we’ll dial it in.

Feb 4, 2026 510 views
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Essay

Ubuntu: I Am Because We Are

The word comes from southern Africa. But the truth it carries is older and wider than any single language. It appears in the Rumi's poetry and the Sikh Gurus' lives. In the Kabbalists' repair work and the Taoists' effortless action. In Buddhist restraint and Thomistic participation. In the Sufi's submission and the Animist's listening. Different traditions. Different centuries. Different metaphors for the same shape: the self cannot cohere alone. The "we" is not optional. Coherence is relational all the way down. Ubuntu is not new wisdom. We are always rediscovering it because we keep forgetting it. And each time we remember, it feels like discovery—when really, we've just stopped pretending we don't already know.

Jan 28, 2026 465 views
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