m f g f m c . c o m

March 2025

One of those people
who takes up a lot of space
while sat quietly
observing all around.

Offering insights
that trail away before they land.
Never quite engaging.

He reminds me of those guys I used to fall in love with
back in school.
Only this time I’m wise to that—

or perhaps I expect too much.

Here I am again;
unnecessarily lost
in his next thoughts—
if they ever find their way to me.

January 2025

Next time
Look into their eyes—
Not a lover, not a friend.
Not another.

This time
Through those eyes,
Through your own—
The same.

January 2025

what I am
this experience of moments
from particular perspectives
perhaps there is none without the rest
no self to exist without the circumstance
or—what I am not.

January 2025

Unpacking goes deep.
Unravelling time
while travelling through
toward a point of interpretation—
or a point where we meet.
Toward a moment
where we find ourselves,
we find each other.

December 2024

Thoughts are also an experience. Is that what the Dharma is saying? In Buddhist Dharma teachings the mind is treated as the 6th sense, I am told.

In the physical material world we know that one experience will lead to another, and thus some experiences can be obviously and intuitively cultivated. Throwing the object at the wall will cause it to shatter into a mess of pieces. Not throwing the object at the wall will avoid the unpleasant mess of pieces, and is usually the choice we make.

The same patterns also exist for experiences of the mind, though we often fail to realise it. Emotion. Thought. Fear. Happiness. Unease. Just as we plan and act to produce favourable outcomes in our material world, we can also cultivate favourable outcomes in our mind and in our spiritual existence. Being mindful of how a thought and state of mind will lead to another and learning to cultivate not only a pleasant external life but a pleasant internal one, too.

November 2024

No place to be

nothing to do

just sit

November 2024

I need to go in and get her.
Reach out a hand and take hold.
Not to drag, force,
jolt, or threaten— we know that doesn’t work.

Maybe we’ll get out together.

November 2024

It was actually the Covid lockdowns that gave me some initial reprieve. In Ireland those lockdowns were long; months of living alone in a city without the usual traffic, shopping, tourism, commerce. And I loved it.

Throughout my mid 20s to my mid 30s I probably never would have said I was depressed, only that I realised we were all wasting our time going through the drudgery every day. Then suddenly with the lockdowns there was this peace, a lack of expectations and a wonderful unknown. Sure there were moments of unease while we couldn’t help but contemplate the worst outcomes, but mostly I enjoyed those years and they brought a new freedom to think creatively about the future.

When the lockdowns finally ended I didn’t want that feeling I had found to end with them. I started to feel my new found peace and happiness drifting away as the people and the cars came back to fill the city again. Except, now that I knew a different way of being with the world was available, I realised I’d just have to work to cultivate and preserve what I had discovered. For me, the long term version of that is giving more deliberate attention to my spiritual life, which at least for now (and my teachers might have some words to say about my lack of commitment there) has taken the form of the dharma, the Buddha, and the sangha.

November 2024

“The map is not the territory” is a phrase I first heard as a teenager when a good friend lent me his Robert Anton Wilson books. Taking the common understanding of “map” at it’s most literal, it’s obvious enough: a map of the city is not the city. Unpacking it as a metaphor, as usually intended: our understanding of a thing (any thing) is not the same as the thing itself.

And importantly, in both cases, alternative maps are almost always available. Any thing, any concept, can be understood in a number of different ways that are all perfectly true and accurate, if only for a given purpose. In the classic example, navigating the city of London with a map of the London Underground is a fantastic way to get around London when using the London Underground. But probably not such a fantastic choice when walking, driving, or catching a bus.

Similarly, while looking at our world through a materialist lense can be entirely useful in order to maintain ourselves in this material world, having a spiritual understanding of the same territory is certainly no less valuable.

Often problems arise when we conflate understandings, get our maps wrong, or cling to one perhaps outdated idea above all others. Demanding the London Taxi driver take the route we know to be true from our map of the London Underground, straight through that next building and straight on into the river. Or that all there is to have from art, poetry, music, or spiritual practice is inherently less-than, perhaps not worth our time, unless and until we find a way to utilise it for material gain.

Notwithstanding, while there are plenty of good and useful maps and ideas for our world, any wrong or misused map, such as the London Underground map to navigate through traffic, or a map of nations to assign a persons worth, can be useless and even dangerous, sometimes maliciously so. Alongside an open-hearted understanding that “different opinions are available”, so to speak, we need to remain aware and able to identify the opinions which share a truth and a positive value, and to resist those which do not.

Politics as a whole can be another useful example here. Nation states, ethnicity, cultural backgrounds, can all be useful maps at times to better understand our world, but whichever one we might be using it’s always important to remember that it’s just a map. It’s a way of simplifying in order to understand. The subject of our observation itself is always more nuanced, and often has many more ways in which it can be understood.

November 2024

Open source software as an alternative or as a movement.

A passive protest or an active protest.

Privately owned profit motivated social media services are harmful and bad. Case in point: all of them.

October 2024

How you respond to other people
on the dance floor,
in the hustle at the bar.
Intoxicating.

October 2024

We’re falling through life
not wishing to be always happy
but learning to sit with the unhappy
moments too

October 2024

Time and self are an illusion
But then, so are most things
So I guess it cancels out.

October 2024

We’re just making too much stuff now.

Is this just austerity from the inside? The bank lent too much in the good days and we need to do nothing but sell shit to each other in order to make enough money in taxes to pay them back.

September 2024

Thinking about how the mind works. Pure and impure mind.

That word “pure” is a bit much though, isn’t it?

I had an annoyance earlier today when reviewing work from a colleague. I nearly wrote ‘subordinate’ there, which would have been another… unskillful, that’s a better word. Unskillful thought. Or state of mind.

The original one was the annoyance I was having. They handed in some work that I know I could have done better. I called them out on the quality of it very indirectly and then later wrote my own version of the code, which I’m quite happy with. I think all of that was a little unskillful. Not necessarily the actions, they almost don’t matter at all. The actions could have remained largely unchanged if the state of mind was more skilful.

Which, actually, might give me a way out. I can continue from now, after having changed my state of mind, and treat the actions of the past with this new perspective.

But first, to understand the mistakes.

Maybe writing ‘subordinate’ above wouldn’t have been the second but instead was still the first unskilled thought, only never until now written down and examined. But that is what I thought, I think. Not even a colleague to be assisted but a subordinate. Synonymous with ‘dependant’. That’s something I could do without.

I wrote that code almost out of spite. I wanted to prove to… my self? “the world”?… that I could do it, and better, and what was I wasting my time dealing with people who couldn’t. And then I got annoyed at the thought of not having the courage or mental wherewithal to make any use of what I’d done. It was just to prove a point to no-one and I was still preparing to wait, arms metaphorically folded, while they produced the inferior code and then sulk every time I come across it in the years to come.

While actually, with the same actions and a more skilful mindset I instead have a friend who might enjoy learning a few new tricks in a field they’re interested in. And I have a tested example I can enjoy sharing with them.

And there never was any rush, either.

September 2024

The answer is only the destination, a single event. The journey of discovery could last a lifetime or more. It’s better that we can learn not to grasp at the answers but instead enjoy the time we have to work it all out. It’s better to enjoy the journey.

September 2024

Why do I come to Buddhism?

Living the dharma. A set of ethics which, so far in my knowledge of them, ring true for me to the point of familiarity.

The sangha. The group of friends who can share guidance and inspiration on the path.

Following the Buddha. An example of what is possible.

April 2024

As a software engineer I’m not sure this should count as a real job, most of the time.

The skill is certainly valuable and yes creating software can be creating something new and useful but often, and probably for my whole ‘career’ so far, it’s creating versions of things which already exist (how many chat apps you got?) or making unhelpful and unnecessary changes to existing software in order to justify continued sales and subscription (rent, basically).

Real software, useful software, is not like physical goods. If I build you a table, that table now exists and provides value where no table had existed before. A second new table will require additional labour and will provide additional and unique value upon completion

Proprietary copy-restricted software, on the other hand, is a con. If I create a piece of software for you, the only thing stopping that single creation from providing value to everyone who needs it (copy+paste) is our laws and the threat of violence that goes with them. This keeps me employed, but the job has become bullshit. It’s no longer a value-add.

In my experience this is most software engineering jobs today.

April 2024

What’s the rush? With everything, I mean.

I’ve always wondered.

March 2024

meditation a thought came to me during meditation as it tends to do and I thought a thought contained in front of me like a sphere in a void not lived in but with in a vast expanse where I swim

March 2024

Straight parents clutching their pearls and demanding they know more about what’s good for LGBTQ+ youth than the LGBTQ+ adults who have been through this shit already

February 2024

YouTube just seems so ubiquitous at this stage that “just don’t use it” doesn’t feel like an option. It’s too close to “don’t consume culture” and how dare anyone put a fence around that. (Not that YT are the only ones doing it).

But I absolutely think that advertising is harmful to a person and for society and the ad-driven business model is wrong and needs to stop. If YouTube can’t survive without me watching the ads then I’d prefer it didn’t. It’s ubiquitous now but not irreplaceable.

January 2024

This week I’ve been mostly reading/watching/listening about #anarchism, largely via David Graeber interviews, related content, and looking up Irish Anarchy groups (not many!). Also been reading Graeber’s ‘Bullshit Jobs’ and I don’t know how I’d managed to avoid it until now; this shit is exactly my jam. Like I say this stuff all the time, I should have read this ages ago.

I think Graeber is a bit too narrow in his definition of BS jobs though.

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchism

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs

His criteria for bullshit jobs depends heavily on the workers perception, whether or not they feel it is a bullshit (pointless) job, and he doesn’t really try as much to assess the job in terms of its actual utility to people.

I think many people don’t realise how unnecessary their job is or could be, for instance, if it were not for imaginary copyright laws and the associated threat of violence or harm which prevents us from openly sharing ideas, software, and other tools.

Jobs which exist because “competition is healthy and leads to innovation”.

Evolutionary methods try to simulate what an anarchist society might be like, but revolutionary tactics, which have historically taken a violent turn, aim to overthrow authority and the state.

Wikipedia

Libertarian socialism is an anti-authoritarianand anti-capitalist political current that emphasises self-governance and workers’ self-management. It is contrasted from other forms of socialism by its rejection of state ownershipand from other forms of libertarianism by its rejection of private property.

Wikipedia

December 2023

I used to be a proponent of a rosy sci-fi view of exploring the stars and the importance of expanding human “civilisation” because… well, you just gotta, I guess!

I don’t know if it’s my age or just the apparent state of the world but I’m much less enthused and actually probably quite opposed to it now. Listening to Jeff Bezos talk about the grand undertaking of humanity that the likes of Blue Origin and Space-X are partaking in to build habitable space-stations and moon-basses and I’m just like… why, though?! Where do you think it is that we all need to be in such a hurry?

Alright so we’re running out of resources and burning the planet alive with all this crap we’re producing… but half the time it feels like we’re only producing this shit so we can afford to stay alive while you’re spending billions and trillions on space rockets!

September 2023

Learning to love the winter months
for turning inward,
not toward a void of introspection
but to a world unchecked by stimulation
of any other than I can conjure
while sitting here in isolation.

August 2023

Ever have an experience that seemed to impact the past as well as the future? Like thinking of earlier events, the memory of them is now so coloured by it that it feels as though the earlier memory couldn’t exist without the later experience. What is time anyway.

August 2023

Ridding myself of the algorithm, mostly.

No Facebook, Instagram, Twitter.

Firefox web browser. uBlock Origin.

Kagi search.

Subscribe to YouTube channels, use the subscriptions tab.

Enjoy the fediverse. Social by nature, connected communities not customers. People not content.

August 2023

Giving up on privately owned social media is like coming down from a weird trip. Not a bad trip necessarily, it’s just the coming down experience starts to feel uneasy as ou edjust back sfe wisjefp…

I love thought. I love the ones that get away before the fingers can type it out. The ones that defy expression in written letters anyway. The ones chattering away knowing that there’s more to say.

I love sitting with them, not going anywhere but here. Looking around now and explaining it a few different ways.

I seem to get so far with a piece of writing and I hook on a phrase or a word, turn it into a bit, a bit. I’m afraid I’ve done it again.

I wonder if consciousness is sort of working in reverse of biological matter. While the matter is congratulating itself on bigger and more complex configurations, the consciousness is constantly finding the simpler and more succinct way of being

July 2023

Learning to drive this year has been an enjoyable experience. It’s perhaps the first time in a long time that I’ve learned something “from scratch” and it’s been fun and fascinating to see how the mind absorbs each stage of the process.

Doing anything enough times over a long enough period becomes rote eventually. So much so that you often come to forget how to not know a thing, or how to not do a thing when a corresponding situation arises.

It’s something we easily forget; the time before we knew. Looking at markings on a page without reading the words they form becomes an oddly difficult task, should we ever think to try it, once a person has learned to read.

Learning to drive over a relatively short and recent period, I can still recall what it was like to struggle with the gears or when 10 km an hour through the empty shopping centre car park felt like quite enough for one day.

Slowly I have felt, and still feel, these actions and experiences becoming more learned, more a part of me, as though I’ve been pulling at those teaching and dragging them in. Then grabbing them again as they try to escape. And again. And again, retaining a little more each time, until they finally find a home with me.

And then I don’t change the gears any more, insofar as I no longer need to think too much about it. Once I was required to pay attention, putting this foot on that pedal then moving this stick like this or like that. Now my foot moves the peddle and my hand moves the stick and I’ve barely noticed it happening, certainly not the particulars, except to know that it should and it will and it has been done. Now I am free to do other things, like looking out for where we’re going.

July 2023

The monkey mind is the constant chattering of unsettled ideas, hopes, worries, fears, desires, and so on, which are a part of the human experience.

At times we can find ourselves scrambling endlessly to appease the monkey mind, explaining away worries and fears over and over to that dumb monkey up there to no avail. There’s always something else to want or worry over.

Practicing meditation and mindfulness is as if to sit in front of that monkey mind and acknowledge it. Hearing it, gently. Allowing it its say, and allowing that to pass. Allowing the monkey mind to get tired of its games, and to fall silent.

We spend so many of our days following out the instructions (desires, thoughts, worries) of the monkey mind that we even conflate what it is to be “I” with this endless chattering in the head, leading into traps of fears and desires that leave us unable to fulfil our potential as human beings.

“I think, therefore I am”. Rather – I am, therefore I think. The mind is a wonderful tool and asset, but it need not and should not be your whole being.

Train the monkey mind to be silent, simply by sitting, being aware, and letting it pass, and you unlock the world of self that had been lost in the noise all this time.

February 2023

The pub is a nice place to sit and read or write.

People in the pub knowing each other when I hadn’t realised they did. I don’t know them.

What’s the secret.

Talking, probably. Not sitting here with my head in a phone, or a book.

November 2022

November 2022

June 2022

From what I hear
of the stability and the on and on
of little things,
I’d grow tired of the conformity,
apprehensive of the certainty,
revered more than a discordancy
that I’d miss inside my heart.

Rather, I’d say—
not normal nor decent
unless by some accident or twist of fate,
this odd life
is my favourite one
I’ve had to live to date.

June 2022

Electronic
Engineering
Graduate
Required
Forthwith

Good pay
For enterprising
Entrepreneurs
With sophisticated
Salary schemes

Upward
Thinking
Onward
Motivation
Compensation

Can not
Afford
Not to
Apply
Within

June 2022

Just to sit
Without plans
Without desire
To be free

June 2022

I’m sorry my love
For I’ve ordered what I’d wanted
And in the correct amount
To satisfy my need

April 2022

Was it all so easy to be apart,
even from myself, when I was there.

Much too much for me to handle.
I pushed back, I suppose. I know.

And I wondered where they got their charm
while I lost myself in thought

forbidden and unwanted—
but they care on and on and on.
The arbitrators of cool, sexy, wonderful, sociable—
and other unassailable heights.

A hard stop.
Did you feel it too?

April 2022

What was it you said in response
to a thing that I said that time
maybe the first time I was here

It’s all an illusion
I said
or something to that effect

Yes it is
you blew my mind
none of it is real

then you paused for a moment
before leaning in to say
“and so?”

April 2022

Beyond beyond beyond beyond beyond beyond
beyond beyond beyond beyond beyond beyond
beyond beyond beyond beyond beyond beyond
beyond beyond beyond beyond beyond beyond
beyond beyond beyond beyond beyond beyond
beyond beyond beyond beyond beyond beyond
beyond beyond beyond beyond beyond beyond
beyond beyond beyond beyond beyond beyond
beyond beyond beyond.

March 2022

This
for a moment
goes forever

Inhalation forms
then reforms
breath from air

February 2022

Have I been afraid?
It’s not right to say
“I don’t care”.

I have romantic notions
of revolutions and revelations,
of spiritual awakenings

into worlds where we work
only to provide, and strive
only to be here, now.

At the end of the day
it’s harder to know
for sure that I would—

I would give it all up
and risk some sort of
relative contentment

for something in a dream
that looked like the way
we could be.

But it’s not me—
I don’t know.
It’s not me.

February 2022

You look through it all
Turning it over and inside out

You’ve seen it a million times
And you can’t put it down
Not yet

From this side it tugs
From that side pushes back
But not yet

You turn it over and look
A million times more

February 2022

On the art of expressing,
observing but not changing,
while feeling and relaying a mood.

Intangible expression
and thought.

“I thought.”

It changes,
the moment is gone.

February 2022

Thought of me and of you.

More than thought.

We’re here.

November 2021

I wanted to write about life itself but I didn’t feel I had the authority. I started anyway, scribbling some words in the pocket notebook, as though a poem in a haphazard sort of way :

from the very air
we exist
inhalation forming
and reforming, exhaled
to the very air
we exist

It’s a difficult subject and I’m not a poet so that’s about as far as I got. The words form the correct narrative, more or less, but it reads terribly. Stilted and odd.

The desire to convey a sort of visual or experiential simile for existence sticks with me though, so I’m going to try it again without the requirements for poetry, or for anything else :

A life can be imagined as a breath. A lifetime’s experience of consciousness and awareness is a reaction, as though a reaction by the air itself to the very act of being formed, existing, and being unformed as a single breath. A life or breath is made individual through this process of being pulled from the vastness of it all.

Finally and always exhaled, there is no ending or death to speak of only the merging and rejoining of the individual back into the air and into life itself.

Just like the breath, your life and mine have a beginning and an end and a transforming, ever-forward, unique and individual experience in-between these two absolutes.

Just like the breath, we are from the vastness of life itself and to that vastness we will eventually return.

And just like the breath, in the here and the now our only requirement is to be.

A single breath has many characteristics, some desirable and some sometimes not, but every breath need only to be a breath to be a precious and wonderful thing.

Just like life. Simply to be here not only enough, it’s the entire answer.

October 2021

She sits on the floor
Outside tesco every day

She doesn’t ask anything
She just smiles so I smile then look away

But at least she’s happy
I tell myself

As I step around
The ice and the whiskey

She sits on the floor
Outside tesco every day

And I only hope somebody else
Is a better person than I

September 2021

It’s all just a play
A game and a laugh

Write a poem, paint a tree
It’s all just a play, a game, you’ll see!

Let’s laugh and play and game
And be

September 2021

A little shiver signals
Settling in again.
Another last days of
Summers gone. Heavy days
Of grey begun.

What’s the other side
Of the grand aul stretch?
A shrinking sun.
The one they don’t talk
About so much.

8. 7. 6. 5. 4. . . .

I start to plan
To avoid the madness
Preparing to surf the wave
Or body-board. Or Paddle.

October through to Halloween
Remember the dead
Or gone
Or in-between.

November best spent alone.
Allow the change
Changes freely flowing
To freely grow.

December is spent
Spending. Gone.
Make it through this.
Nearly done.

January recuperation.
A whole new year
Some spiritual mending.

February says
We’re not there yet!

March then April
- I wouldn’t bet.

Sure it’s grand of course,
No bother. You know.\

September 2021

The traditionally marginalised have more to teach about living with community, kinship, and spirit in the face of rejection, subjection, and abandonment.

A worthwhile future can not be about the ego of I must be heard, when I always have been.

Facilitate the growth of voices and the flow of society from and toward the people who need it. Often by stepping aside.

September 2021

I’ve started to see the software industry as the biggest con anyway. Creating jobs for the sake of jobs. Artificial boundaries around sharing the output and fruits of creativity and labour, because what we need isn’t a better world - it’s more jobs. We’ve all got the means of production in our hands now, but we’re still toiling away trading our time for scraps at some imaginary table. Building another photo sharing app for the share-holders.

and why is that? Why do you feel unfree to strike out on your own?

That’s something to ponder I suppose. Although self employment wasn’t really what I was getting at. We’re making too many things, and with software and media we’re even imposing totally artificial scarcity on what is physically literally nothing at all, in order to both justify and enable more production, more jobs, and an ever growing financial economy to the detriment of - or more accurately a total apathy toward - everything else.

“Striking out” and doing my own photo sharing app doesn’t really cut it. We all need to stop for a while and look at what we’ve already got in the world, particularly in terms of technology.

A petty example, but I’ve got 8 chat apps on my phone and none of them talk to each other. Most of them come from companies with multi-billion dollar valuations each, and they all basically do the same thing. The same thing XMPP and IRC did 20 years ago.

With all the power of modern technology and communication, that’s what we as a people are working on. Not solutions, not even needs or wants. Just products.

That might sound slightly angrier than I think I am. I’m sure our current systems sounded like a good idea to many when they were devised and implemented, and maybe they were from a certain point of view. But I am a little annoyed at progress (and my own, too) and an apparent inability or unwillingness to see alternatives and improvements to our current mode of living. Although I sense this is changing rapidly.

It has come time for new ideas.