Category: Study Circle

Are you sure?

a short essay in Content and Context (TS ·15) – it includes plenty of links you can use for more context or disambiguation.

As a companion piece, i recommend a podcast (‘Frankly’ #60) by Nate Hagens, where he asks the question “What (if anything) are you absolutely certain of?” – and lists 17 answers of his own. On Youtube it’s at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPv0wa5U0WA.

If you’d like to participate in a small-group discussion of this excerpt from Turning Signs, send Gary an email proposing a date and time that’s good for you, and we’ll see who else is available at that time, and i’ll send everyone a Zoom link for it.

For a while we had a series of regular sessions to confer about the chapters of Turning Signs in order, and we might revive that if enough people can make a long-term commitment to a regular time slot for this purpose. Let me know if you’re interested. Meanwhile we can try having single sessions on stand-alone points from the book at any time you choose.

Easter edition

Turning Signs 2.2.2 is now ready for download. I call it the Easter edition because I’ve just finished revisiting/revising Chapter 4, which only contains a little of the traditional Easter story, but leads up to the resurrection of the body. And the TStudy circle is meeting tomorrow morning to spring into that chapter. May all readers flourish.

Self-organizing systems: Chapter 3.2

I’ve now revisited and revised, where necessary, all of Chapter 3 of Turning Signs except the final section. Our Saturday morning study circle will pick where we left off last week, somewhere around here. Meanwhile the equinox approaches … another opportunity to celebrate the glorious tilt in the Earth’s axis that gives us the seasons as we revolve around the sun. Where would our systems be without them?

Even some galaxies appear to be unravelling …

photo from NASA

Guided from within: Chapter 3.1

The weekly TStudy circle is moving on to Chapter 3, so this coming Saturday morning we’ll be conversing about the first three to five sections of it. Once again i’ve made a few tweaks to the text, mostly for the sake of clarity, so even if you’ve read it before you may need to read it again. If questions or comments occur to you while reading, feel free to share them in a comment on this post.

interFaces and Flukes: Chapter 2.3

Last week’s conversation took us further into the looking glass, and the homework assignment for our TStudy circle is the little phenoscopic experiment described here. Our next gathering (Sunday morning, February 19) will take another step into the semiotic view of life. Bearing in mind that, as Dirk Hamilton observes, signs look silly when nobody reads them. (Skip the ad.)

End of the beginning: Chapter 1.3

Our next gathering of the TStudy circle Saturday morning, 28 January, at 10:30 Eastern, will wind up the first chapter, beginning here. The conversation so far has been most illuminating, and prompted me to make a few changes to the text, so i hope it’s a little more user-friendly than it was last year.

This final part of Chapter 1 brings us to the Anthropocene Apocalypse. I see that the Anthropocene Working Group is now trying to pick an exact date for the beginning of the Anthropocene (follow that link for today’s graphic). But the AWG already voted in 2019 that the primary guide for the base of the Anthropocene should be “one of the stratigraphic signals around the mid-twentieth century of the Common Era.” This would mean that the stratigraphic Anthropocene coincides roughly with the cultural Great Acceleration, and with my own lifetime so far. But i don’t suppose my birthdate in 1945 is on the shortlist for the exact beginning of the A-cene, so i guess the “fundamental Anthropocene dilemma” isn’t entirely my fault.

Because: Chapter 1.2

The Turning Signs study circle will meet again Saturday morning, January 21 at 10:30 Eastern time.

The reading will begin at this point in Chapter 1 and will include a Zen koan delivered by Dōgen zenji featuring a dialogue with a wild fox about cause and effect. This will take us into a conversation about turning words and signs and semiosis. We might even reach the apocalyptic end of the first chapter!

If you can’t make the circle, you can still leave a comment here …

Chapter 1: Flight Path

How many birds appear in this image?

The next session of the study circle around Turning Signs will be Sunday evening, 7 pm Eastern. (I’ll be sending the Zoom link by email.) In focus will be the first part of Chapter 1, and the first question i’ll put to the group will be the one above (How many birds?). This question will follow my reading of the paragraph that begins here. How far we get into Chapter 1 will depend on how the conversation evolves, but i expect it will take a few weeks to absorb the first chapter.

This study will be continuing for quite a long time, and slowly, so anyone who wants to can join the circle at any time. It’s just that the longer you wait, the more catching up you’ll have to do!