I have started working in a new office space, a shared working environment called kowork here in London.² The vision behind the space is to provide a collaborative working environment for creatives and entrepreneurs. My office companions are working on diverse projects, but there is one thing we all have in common: an understanding that by working in physical proximity to one another and sharing ideas we create, in essence, our own synergistic “creative polis.”

The point here is not that everyone must move to a big city to be creative. Simply, maybe we would all benefit by being part of a creative consortium (regardless of whether one lives in a rural, urban or suburban context). Intermingling ideas, cross-pollinating perspectives, incubating ridiculous, outlandish notions — you gotta have at least a couple toes dipping into a community like this. Are you part of a creative polis?

1. Geoffrey West, Why Cities Keep on Growing, Corporations Always Die, and Life Gets Faster, July 25, 2011
2. See kowork London

After planting, one does indeed contemplate how one might petition the gods of germination, photosynthesis and squirrel plagues to do one’s bidding.

For me, the garden is just a hobby. But what if  my friends and family literally depended on this miracle? (“Miracle” here meaning that the tomatoes actual grow.)

Imagine the severity of this equation: if the plants don’t grow, we starve. To make matters worse, it is now totally out of anyone’s control. After planting, fertilizing and watering, there is nothing left to do but wait…and hope.

Inari, Kokopelli and Pan make “sense” to me. No, you won’t find me performing any sacrifices or ritual rain dances in the backyard, but I think I know why agricultural society and fertility deity worship were inseparable for so many millennia. Gardening to survive is scary. If my life depended on this, you had better believe I would be willing to worship/appease just about anything.

Also, gardening is sexy. It does not appear that the ancients had categorical divisions between their “farming lives” and their “reproductive lives.” Sustenance is required for tribal growth. All growth, literally. No food equals no babies surviving. Fertility in one “department” is required for fertility in the other. Only the very affluent can afford to think of them separately.

Just something to think about (and appreciate) on your next trip to the grocery store.

When the Jews translated their writings into Greek they had to transfer ruwach into another language. They chose the Greek word pneuma, also meaning a movement of air, breath or wind.

But Greek was much more than another language: it was another way of thinking. In Greek thought, the concept of God grew increasing removed from the physical elements of the earth. God became eternal (like one of Plato’s Forms) and existed in another time space dimension. After all, if God had created time and space, he must transcend it. God’s breath, pneuma, was no longer the wind. Pneuma became associated with divine interventions in reality, manifestation of transcendent invasions in temporal existence.

When the Church translated the Bible from Greek into Latin, pneuma became spiritus (Latin for breath), which we later inherited in English as spiritual. Even though the root concept of spirituality is rooted in the wind — God’s breath, the physical manifestations of God’s interactions with the elements of earth — the word has come to mean exactly the opposite of physical.

The point? Ancient spirituality was physical. God was not yet this immortal, invisible, inconceivable mystery: God could walk in a garden. God could be a pillar of fire, real fire. God could talk in a cloud. God had two hands. God had breath — and the wind on your face was literally the breath of this powerful being.

Etymologically speaking, spirituality means breath. It means life. Ask anyone who has had a “spiritual experience” and they will tell you about the moment that they felt most alive. Perhaps the more alive we are — the more conscious we are of our own being here — the more spiritual we become… whether we are “religious” or not.

Spirituality is a very, very physical thing.

If I were a Christian, I’d be ashamed of a greedy, blood-stained history,
justified in the name of Jesus,
who explicitly taught love for one’s enemies.²

If I were a Jew, I’d be ashamed of the oppressive slaughter of the Palestinians
declared as a territorial right in the name of Yahweh,
who called Israel to be a blessing to the world.³

1. Quran, Al-Baqarah 178
2. New Testament, Matthew 5:44
3. Bible, Genesis 12:1–3

He that has knowledge spares his words.¹

Confucius, Solomon and the sages uttered their prescriptions in worlds where writing was extremely costly, a luxury of the rich and powerful. But perhaps their brevity was not merely a result of an economic ceiling; perhaps disciplined restraint with words remains the wisest form of language use to this day.

Fewer words can say more.

1. Proverbs 17:27

Funny question.

It turns out that the vast majority of history’s successful protests occurred before the dawn of the Internet. Protesters and revolutionaries have brought down governments for many centuries… long before Twitter was there to help them out.

Perhaps a more pertinent question is this: in what ways does the Internet subdue and quell revolutions? Turning off the Internet certainly does not stop civil uprisings — if anything it is an act of provocation — but leaving it on could sure go a long way to placating the masses, lulling them into the illusion they are “making a difference” while they gleefully retweet and “Like” all kinds of progressive sounding ideologies. And consequently do absolutely nothing.

If you want to stop a revolution, just leave the Internet switch “On” and let people inoculate themselves against actually doing anything drastic. Hell, all that trumpeting of self-expression is an exhausting form of entertainment anyway. (At least this is what I’m doing right now… nothing but typing.)

Listen up, all you masses — we have a new opiate for you.