Caitlin Johnstone

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

The US government is simultaneously (A) justifying Israel’s land grab in Syria by saying the nation has been taken over by terrorists, and (B) talking about removing those same forces from its list of designated terrorist organizations.

The US podium people have pivoted seamlessly from celebrating the liberation of the Syrian people in the removal of Assad to citing the fact that the nation is now overrun with terrorist factions in defense of Israel’s rapid move to militarily occupy large swathes of Syrian land while hammering Syria with hundreds of airstrikes.

At a Monday press conference, State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said these moves by Israel “are temporary to defend its borders” and that Assad’s ouster “potentially creates a vacuum that could have been filled by terrorist organizations that would threaten the state of Israel and would threaten civilians inside Israel.”

“Every country has the right to take action against terrorist organizations,” Miller added.

US Government: It is great and wonderful that the dictator Assad has been deposed and the people of Syria have been freed!

Press gallery: Do you oppose Israel grabbing Syrian land?

US government: No way man, don't you know Syria's just been taken over by a bunch of terrorists? pic.twitter.com/zfilinDn4L

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) December 10, 2024

During a Tuesday press conference Miller further clarified the US position on Israel’s land grab, saying, “What precipitated their move into the buffer zone was the withdrawal of the Syrian armed forces, which, as I said yesterday, creates potentially a vacuum that could be filled by any one of the numerous terrorist organizations that continue to operate inside Syria that have sworn to the destruction of the state of Israel.”

During the same Tuesday press conference Miller also stated that “there is no legal barrier to us speaking to a designated terrorist group” such as HTS, the group which led the run on Damascus whose leader has been an official in both ISIS and al-Qaeda.

And as it happens the US government has now taken a sudden interest in removing HTS from its listing as a designated terrorist organization, with Politico reporting that there is now “a furious debate playing out in Washington” as to whether or not the group should be removed from the list immediately. Somehow I doubt the debate is actually all that “furious”.

So according to one narrative Syria has been liberated by brave freedom fighters and that’s wonderful, but according to another concurrent narrative Israel obviously needs to invade Syria because the nation has just been taken over by evil terrorists, and by yet another concurrent narrative those evil terrorists aren’t evil terrorists anymore because they’re going to be running a US puppet regime.

These are the kinds of contradictions you run into when your policies are guided by the blind pursuit of planetary domination instead of by truth and morality.

US Considering Removing HTS From Terror List After Syria Takeover
US officials say they're in contact with the al-Qaeda-linked group
by Dave DeCamp@DecampDave #Syria #HTS #AlQaeda #BasharAlAssad #AbuMohammedAlJulani https://t.co/ddZoePMsim pic.twitter.com/IBr0H0xDyr

— Antiwar.com (@Antiwarcom) December 9, 2024

In reality, “terrorist organization” is a political designation, not a behavioral one. It has a lot less to do with how an organization acts and operates and a lot more to do with whether or not they advance the strategic interests of the US empire. 

Pick any group of non-state actors who fight against the US and its allies and you’ll find them on the US government’s list of terrorist organizations. Hamas. Hezbollah. They’ll even put official state militaries on there like Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. They used to list the East Turkistan Islamic Movement as a terrorist faction back when the US was expanding its global military presence under the banner of the “war on terror”, but they were removed from this listing at the tail end of the Trump administration because the Uyghur Islamist group has been fighting Assad in Syria and may prove useful in the empire’s cold war aggressions against China.

Even now the US House of Representatives is moving to ban the US government from using the statistics of Gaza’s health ministry to calculate deaths from Israel’s genocidal atrocities in the enclave on the basis that the health ministry is run by Hamas, a designated terrorist organization. They need to do this because the Gaza health ministry’s death toll is considered so reliable that the US State Department has been using those stats in their own reports.

The group that is committing the genocide necessitating such analysis is of course not a designated terrorist organization.

The House tomorrow plans to ban the U.S. govt from citing the Ministry of Health in Gaza’s casualty figures.

Instead of working to end the genocide, Congress will instead do this. pic.twitter.com/gi0H3AIjTB

— Ryan Grim (@ryangrim) December 10, 2024

This is because the label “terrorist organization” is nothing more than a tool of imperial narrative control. In empire language it just means “disobedient population who need bombs dropped on them”. If they are determined to no longer be disobedient then they no longer need bombs dropped on them, so they are no longer considered terrorists. 

You can kill all the civilians you want using whatever methods you want without being considered a terrorist organization, so long as you are a friend of the US empire.

__________________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to find video versions of my articles. If you’d prefer to listen to audio of these articles, you can subscribe to them on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud or YouTube. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

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It’s pretty wild how the west went directly from “We need to occupy Afghanistan for two decades to prevent it from being taken over by the Taliban” to “Yay! Syria’s been taken over by al-Qaeda!”

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The IDF has moved to occupy new stretches of Syrian land in the name of protecting its safety and security in the wake of Assad’s removal, to approximately zero condemnation from the western power alliance. 

One of the dumbest things we are asked to believe about Israel is that the only thing it can ever do to ensure its safety and security when a danger presents itself is to grab more land. Land grabs are always the answer.

So to recap:

Russia invading a country in the name of protecting its security interests from perceived threats on its border = wrong, evil, worst thing ever.

Israel invading a country in the name of protecting its security interests from perceived threats on its border = fine, normal, nothing to worry about.

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The US is considering removing Hayʼat Tahrir al-Sham from its list of designated terrorist organizations following the al-Qaeda affiliate’s victory in Syria. I have said it before and I’ll say it again: “terrorist organization” is a completely arbitrary designation which is used as a tool of western narrative control to justify war and militarism. In effect it just means “disobedient population who need bombs dropped on them”.

We remain committed to bringing leading AQS figures in HTS to justice. #Syria pic.twitter.com/R8evqffWum

— U.S. Embassy Syria (@USEmbassySyria) May 15, 2017

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I find it hilarious how empire simps are still shrieking “ASSADIST!” at me for criticizing western regime change interventionism in Syria like that means something. Assad’s gone. They can’t claim I’m helping him stay in power anymore. This shows they were never mad at me for “supporting Assad” or any of that nonsense; they were always just mad at me for criticizing the western empire, which was all I was ever doing. 

Assad’s not a thing anymore. Your guys are in power now, and your beloved empire got the regime change it’s been chasing for years. You don’t get to pretend you’re sticking up for the little guy any longer. If you’re going to keep simping for the empire you’ve got to do it right out in the open now; you can no longer mask your bootlicking by hurling bizarre false accusations of treasonous loyalty toward some random middle eastern leader at anyone who criticizes the empire’s actions in Syria. You need to find different tactics for your empire apologia.

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I personally do not believe western interventionism in the middle east leads to positive results and peace, because I am not a newborn baby with a soft squishy head who joined the earth’s population yesterday evening.

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Empire apologists rely heavily on the appeal to emotion fallacy when discussing Syria, because they have no real arguments. They can’t counter criticisms of the years of western interventionism which destroyed Syria, so they babble about Assad’s victims instead. But no matter how many sad stories you tell and no matter how much sympathy you elicit, it will not amount to a counter-argument against the extensively documented fact that the US and its allies worked to destroy Syria with the goal of toppling Damascus from the very beginning in 2011. You can rend your garments about barrel bombs and prisoners all you want, but it still won’t be an argument. 

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I personally don’t blame people for misunderstanding what’s been happening in Syria all these years. Some of my favorite analysts got Syria wrong in the early years of the war. It’s a complicated issue. It’s hard to sort out the true from the false, and it’s hard to sort through the moral complexities and contradictions of it all as a human being. What matters is that you stay curious and open and sincerely dedicated to learning what’s true instead of bedding down and making an identity out of your current understanding. 

For years Syria was awash with some of the most complex psychological operations and hybrid warfare the world has ever seen. It’s okay if you didn’t understand it at first. The world is a confusing place, and is rapidly becoming more so. Just do your best, stay curious, and keep learning.

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The US House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed the “Crucial Communism Teaching Act”, a bill to allow the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation to develop a teaching curriculum to educate American students on the evils of communism and authoritarianism. 

That’s right kids, the US government believes capitalism is so self-evidently awesome that it needs to pass laws to indoctrinate children into supporting it. They oppose authoritarianism so much that they’ll create entire reeducation programs to train your mind to embrace the freedom of the western empire.

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It’s interesting how Israel uses its extremist settlers to get away with doing things it couldn’t get away with doing as a state. The government officially distances itself from these Nazis in front of its western backers, but then lets them do whatever they want and gradually gives them everything they demand piece by piece. This allows Israel to present itself to the west as a liberal free democracy in theory while in practice having a state that’s so far to the extreme right it’s falling off the edge of the spectrum. 

We saw this illustrated recently in the way the IDF collaborated with extremist settlement movement leader Daniela Weiss to help her scout parts of Gaza for future settlement locations, and then released a statement saying that doing so was “illegal and against protocol, and will be handled accordingly.” We all know there are unofficial plans to allow those settlements into Gaza at some point, but the official Israeli government position is that it isn’t happening.

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It must be awesome being a supporter of the US empire. You get to see the national leaders you hate get killed and ousted, you rack up win after win, you can trust mainstream western pundits and politicians and believe everything they say, and you get to keep the same worldview they gave you in elementary school.

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Police have arrested a suspect in the killing of health insurance CEO Brian Thompson. Interestingly the social media of the alleged shooter indicates a political worldview that sits well to the right of the average person who sympathized with Thompson’s killer. The further to the right people are, the more likely they’ve been to sympathize with Thompson.

This disparity in sympathy in the discourse around this shooting has been interesting to watch, because it highlights the contradictions in the US libertarian “non-aggression principle”. According to right wing libertarians, the guy who got rich depriving people of lifesaving healthcare committed no aggression. The abuses inherent in a system which prioritizes the generation of profit above all else go unacknowledged in such a worldview. The violence of the tyrants who grow wealthy exploiting the suffering, sickness and struggle of others; who harvest the income of those who can’t otherwise afford necessities like healthcare and shelter via insurance fees and rent payments; who plunder the biosphere and externalize the costs of industry onto the ecosystem we all depend on; who leverage the exploitative sociopolitical system known as capitalism to extract labor from workers at extortionate rates; who maximize profits by crushing unions, eroding workers’ rights and fighting minimum wage increases — they are seen as entirely legitimate, making any attempt to resist such tyranny entirely illegitimate. 

If your worldview doesn’t acknowledge that violence isn’t limited to the physical act of shooting someone, and that force isn’t limited to the physical act of locking someone in a prison cell, then you’re not going to see the violence and force in the way the capitalist class leverages inequality, human need, and the law to force the masses to live their lives in ways that make them miserable and unhealthy. You’re just going to see a bunch of successful businessmen peacefully going about their business, who are loathed by evil leftists for no legitimate reason. The abusiveness of the means by which those businessmen become wealthy is invisible to you.

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Things are getting so unpredictable. Nobody saw what happened in Syria coming, or October 7 before that. Used to be the imperial drums would start beating for war with Iraq or wherever, and then later on it would happen. That kind of predictable development you see coming far off in advance is happening less and less now.

Now we’re regularly getting blindsided by these rapid explosions of movement. We’ll spend months warning about something ugly brewing on the horizon and then something completely unexpected happens somewhere else. I spent years warning a war with Russia was coming but got surprised when it happened when it did in Ukraine because of my own personal biases and blind spots.

I’m learning to observe without making predictions, whether for good things or bad. Nobody knows what tomorrow might bring. Lenin said “There are decades where nothing happens and there are weeks where decades happen,” and even that’s an understatement nowadays because there aren’t decades where nothing happens anymore. There aren’t even years where nothing happens. Things are getting way more dynamic and unpredictable. Anything can happen.

The good news is that in a completely unpredictable world, hopelessness is irrational. Anything can happen means ANYTHING can happen. The end of war. The end of the western empire. The end of capitalism. The birth of a healthy and harmonious world. Anything. In a sea of increasing unpredictability, there is no rational basis for ruling out any possibility.

The great unpatterning is upon us. It’s a hell of a time to be alive.

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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to find video versions of my articles. If you’d prefer to listen to audio of these articles, you can subscribe to them on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud or YouTube. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

Bashar al-Assad has fled Syria to Moscow, where he has reportedly been granted asylum by Russia. The al-Qaeda affiliates who drove him out have declared victory for the “mujahideen” in Damascus. Both Biden and Netanyahu have publicly taken credit for assisting in the regime change, and of course Turkey’s Erdogan deserves a heavy share of credit as well.

And yet there’s still a bit of a taboo in mainstream western discourse around calling this a regime change operation backed by the US and its allies. We’re all meant to pretend this was a 100 percent organic uprising driven solely and exclusively by the people of Syria despite years and years of evidence to the contrary. We are meant to pretend this is the case even after we just watched the US power alliance crush Syria using proxy warfare, starvation sanctions, constant bombing operations, and a military occupation explicitly designed to cut Syria off from oil and wheat in order to prevent its reconstruction after the western-backed civil war.

People get mad if you say this, but it’s true. It’s just a fact that major world events do not occur independently of the actions of the major world powers who have a vested interest in their outcomes. If my saying this makes you feel uncomfortable, that discomfort is called cognitive dissonance. It’s what being wrong feels like.

Maybe it bothers you when people point out the involvement of the US power alliance in Syria, and maybe you would prefer to believe that a plucky band of heroic freedom fighters bravely overthrew an evil supervillain dictator all on their own like some Hollywood movie. But real life doesn’t move in accordance with your preferences. In real life, the globe-spanning empire that is centralized around the United States will reliably be deeply involved in such events.

I thought the official script was supposed to be that this was a Syrian popular revolution, but according to @JoeBiden, the fall of the Syrian government is "directly" thanks to Ukraine and Israel, "with unflagging support of the United States"! https://t.co/gHALMeIWO5

— Ali Abunimah (@AliAbunimah) December 8, 2024

When I say this you may want to believe I am “denying the agency of Syrians,” and that “denying agency” is the worst sin a person can possibly commit. But nothing I’m saying actually contradicts the idea that Syrians have their own agency. Obviously there were many Syrians who wanted Assad gone, and obviously there were many people who had their own reasons for fighting him which had nothing to do with the US empire. There is no contradiction between this obvious fact and the well-documented reality that the US-centralized power structure has been balls deep in Syria from the very beginning of the violence in 2011, and that its involvement led to the events we are seeing today.

The claim isn’t that the US empire controlled the minds of Syrians and forced them to turn against their government with no agency of their own. The claim is that the empire put a big fat thumb on the scale to ensure that one group of Syrians got their way instead of a different group.

You can argue that western regime change interventionism will lead to positive results this time (so long as you’re prepared to ignore mountains of historical evidence consistently demonstrating the opposite), but what you cannot do on any rational basis is deny that western regime change interventionism occurred in Syria.

Western liberalism is funny in that its adherents lean heavily on their ability to psychologically compartmentalize away from the actions of the western empire, and indeed away from the very existence of that empire. The western liberal lives in an imaginary alternate universe where western powers pretty much mind their own business and western leaders passively watch violence and destruction unfold around the world whilst pleading for peace and diplomacy from their podiums. They pretend the empire does not exist, and that it is only by pure coincidence that conflicts, coups and uprisings keep occurring in ways which favor the strategic interests of Washington.

In reality it is impossible to understand what’s going on in the world unless you understand that the US is the hub of an undeclared empire which has been working tirelessly to bring the global population under a single power umbrella over which it presides. The few countries who have successfully resisted being absorbed into this imperial blob are the Official Bad Guys we westerners are all trained to hate: China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and a few socialist states in Latin America. I used to include Syria in this list, but that’s over now. Syria has been absorbed into the blob of the empire.

Genocidal war criminal Netanyahu took credit for the overthrow of Assad in Syria, calling it "a direct result of the blows we have inflicted on Iran and Hezbollah"

You can't support Palestine and also support Israeli-backed Al-Qaeda-linked Syrian "rebels"https://t.co/QelOACQ953 pic.twitter.com/jeH0mh16ct

— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) December 8, 2024

And tomorrow the imperial blob will move its crosshairs on to the next unabsorbed nation. That’s the underlying dynamic behind all the major conflicts on earth. This dynamic gets redacted from the mainstream western worldview with the assistance of the western propaganda services known as the mass media, as well as the western indoctrination system known as schooling. This dynamic is redacted from our worldview and hidden from our attention by the plutocrats and empire managers who work to manipulate our information systems, because otherwise we would realize that the US empire is the most tyrannical and abusive power structure on this planet today.

And it unquestionably is. No other power structure has spent the 21st century killing people by the millions in wars of aggression while circling the planet with hundreds of military bases and working continuously to crush any group which opposes its dictates anywhere on earth. Not China. Not Russia. Not Iran. Not Cuba. Not Bashar al-Assad. Only the US empire has been tyrannizing and abusing the world to this extent in modern times.

And now the imperial blob rolls on to absorb its next target, having grown one Syria-sized increment larger after spending years digesting that nation via proxy warfare, sanctions, relentless bombing campaigns from Israel, and a military occupation designed to steal its food and fuel.

Our world cannot know peace as long as we are ruled by an empire that is fueled by endless rivers of human blood. Here’s hoping the end of that empire comes sooner rather than later.

______________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to find video versions of my articles. If you’d prefer to listen to audio of these articles, you can subscribe to them on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud or YouTube. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

Featured image via Pan Photo (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

Well it looks like the government of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad is on its way out, likely to be replaced by one or more US puppet regimes depending on whether the nation maintains its current borders or is carved up into separate states. The empire notches another win.

I am not a military analyst, but analysts who are normally supportive and optimistic in favor of Assad like Elijah Magnier and Pepe Escobar are saying this is the end. Assad’s whereabouts are unknown as Turkish-backed fighters and al-Qaeda-linked forces with a history of western backing have swept through the country with alarming speed, and now Russia and Iran have joined with the governments of US-aligned nations like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and Turkey in calling for an end to the fighting in favor of a political solution. CNN reports that opposition forces have entered Damascus in search of Assad, and footage reportedly shows Assad forces retreating from the area where the president’s main residence is located.

The US proxy warfare in Lebanon and Ukraine makes a lot more strategic sense now; by tying up Hezbollah and Russia in other conflicts, the path was opened up for another run on Damascus and a chance to further cut off Hezbollah from supplies. Many pundits on my end of the commentary spectrum had been calling those proxy wars self-defeating and framing them as the desperate flailings of a dying empire which will only accelerate its demise, but now here we are watching the empire score a victory it’s been chasing for years, with the western/Israeli stranglehold on the middle east growing tighter than ever.

Looks like “our side in Syria” won. Let’s all hope it now doesn’t go like the last time we “won” in Iraq and Libya. pic.twitter.com/F3HbpE5uiv

— Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) December 7, 2024

Meanwhile the press is falling all over itself to support this regime change by promoting the narrative that al-Qaeda is woke now. 

CNN just released a coddling softball interview with Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, the former ISIS and al-Qaeda member who leads the Syrian opposition group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, which is itself a rebranded offshoot of al-Qaeda in Syria. Jolani told CNN that he has reformed from his radical ways of the past, saying, “Sometimes it’s essential to adjust to reality,” adding, “someone who rigidly clings to certain ideas and principles without flexibility cannot effectively lead societies or navigate complex conflicts like the one happening in Syria.”

Now the imperial press are full of headlines like “How Syria’s rebel leader went from radical jihadist to a blazer-wearing ‘revolutionary’” from CNN, “Syria’s rebel leader Golani: From radical jihadist to ostensible pragmatist” from The Times of Israel, and “How Syria’s ‘diversity-friendly’ jihadists plan on building a state” from The Telegraph.

Only a matter of time before we start seeing former ISIS and al-Qaeda members chatting it up on liberal western talk shows with their preferred gender pronouns listed next to their names.

As luck would have it, these “diversity-friendly jihadists” have been telling the Israeli press that they “love Israel” and won’t do anything to harm its interests, so it’s safe to say that this “revolution” has been about as organically grown as a sheet of crystal meth.

Lmao, I cannot believe this is real. pic.twitter.com/TxsA0MJKnD

— Alan MacLeod (@AlanRMacLeod) December 4, 2024

One of the many perks of being the world’s dominant superpower is that it gives you the luxury of time. If one regime change operation fails, don’t worry, you can just move some chess pieces around and take another shot at it. If a coup attempt fails in Latin America, relax, there will be other coup attempts. If your efforts to grab Syria fail, you can just smash it with sanctions and occupy its oil fields to impoverish it while overextending its military allies in proxy conflicts elsewhere and grab it later. 

A good kickboxer throws many combinations with the understanding that most strikes will miss or be blocked or cause minimal damage, trusting that eventually the one knockout blow will get through.

No empire lasts forever, but there’s no evidence that this one is going away any time in the immediate future. This ugliness could conceivably drag itself out for generations.

_________________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to find video versions of my articles. If you’d prefer to listen to audio of these articles, you can subscribe to them on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud or YouTube. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

Featured image is a screenshot from CNN on YouTube (Fair Use).

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

I have learned a few things in my time on this earth. Not many, but a few.

I have learned that western regime change interventionism is reliably disastrous, and that men like John Bolton and Bill Kristol are always on the wrong side of history when it comes to such matters.

I have learned that organizing human civilization around the pursuit of profit has had devastating consequences for our ecosystem, our health, our hearts, and our happiness.

I have learned that there is an entirely unacceptable amount of human suffering in developing nations, and that it is largely caused by the western power structures we live under and the way our civilization behaves.

I have learned that rich and powerful people pour tremendous amounts of resources into psychologically manipulating the public using all forms of media, and that their efforts to indoctrinate the masses have proven very successful.

I have learned that because our civilization is so saturated in propaganda and our consciousness so indoctrinated, I stand a much better chance of forming an accurate understanding of the world by trusting in my own learning and insight than by trusting in anyone else’s.

I have learned that it is possible to awaken from the egoic delusions which are responsible for most of our suffering, and begin moving harmoniously on this planet with an open heart and eyes full of wonder.

I have learned that the self is an illusion and the way most people perceive things like thought, time and separateness is not truth-based, driven instead by wildly inaccurate assumptions about the most fundamental aspects of human experience.

I have learned that it is possible for two people to dedicate their lives to loving each other with total abandon, holding nothing back for themselves and pouring everything they’ve got into their beloved, without ever becoming depleted because their cup is continuously being re-filled by the other.

I have learned that everything is stunningly beautiful, and that any failure to perceive beauty anywhere is a failure of perception by the beholder.

I have learned that our lives are so much more intimately intertwined than we would ever dare imagine, not just with each other but with every non-human life on this planet.

I have learned that a life dedicated to learning what’s true and to expressing truth is the only kind of life that can ever satisfy.

I have learned that I am still learning, and always will be for as long as this body draws breath. 

I have learned that the more I learn, the more mysterious life becomes.

I have learned that the more mysterious I allow this life to be, the more enjoyable it is.

The learning continues, even as the conclusions crumble in the radiant light of the mystery, and I stare bewildered at a universe made of question marks.

________________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to find video versions of my articles. If you’d prefer to listen to audio of these articles, you can subscribe to them on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud or YouTube. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

Featured image via Adobe Stock.