Because AI models are radically literal and cannot infer meaning, they expose the fuzzy thinking and unstated assumptions that often go unnoticed in human-human interactions. 

The discipline of crafting explicit instructions for AI, much like practicing Nonviolent Communication, can help humans practice clarifying our needs, context, and desired outcomes before we ask for help from other humans, too — thereby improving our ability to communicate with greater precision in all relationships.

Ultimately, by learning to be explicit with AI, and challenging vague human requests, humans can learn to reclaim our cognitive agency and, at the same time, develop clearer thinking, stronger boundaries, and more intentional human connections.

Who would have ever imagined this? Not me. But it’s happening to me right now.

Further resources for this discussion include:

In the NVC Dojo: A Dialogue on Communication, AI and Reclaiming Human Agency

What We’ve Learned About Teaching Machines to Think

Requests, Yes and No, and Power Differences

Please come bringing new things.

Let very old things come into your hands.

Let what you do not know come into your eyes.

Let desert sand harden your feet.

Let the arch of your feet be the mountains.

Let the paths of your fingertips be your maps

And the ways you go be the lines on your palms.

Let there be deep snow in your in-breathing

And your out-breath be the shining of ice

May your mouth contain the shapes of strange words.

May you smell food cooking you have not eaten.

May the spring of a foreign river be your navel.

May your soul be at home where there are no houses.

Walk carefully, well loved one.

Walk mindfully, well loved one.

Walk fearlessly, well-loved one.

Return with us, return to us.

Be always coming home.

If you’re reading this, it’s for you. I hope you will share it with your loved ones.

This incantation appears close to the end of Ursula LeGuin’s astonishing ethnography of a future society, the Kesh, a people living in a post-apocalyptic Napa Valley.

It’s a blessing — and an induction into a lodge without walls what I intend to carry with me to the end of my life in this body/mind.

It’s an utter mystery to me how Ursula’s imagination (and, of course, the imagination of the brilliant Margaret Atwood) so clearly anticipated the road ahead and how she used her world-building genius to give readers a map of where we were headed.

Always Coming Home was published in 1985 — long before DJT and his goons entranced enough people to dismantle the tenuously civilized world right out from under our feet.

As the American Library edition describes it, Always Coming Home is a “literary construction” that details the life of the Kesh who are the survivors of an ecological catastrophe brought on by heedless industrialization.

The Kesh live in a hard-won balance with their environment and between genders. Always Coming Home is comprised of Ursula’s “translations” of a their writings.

I’ve been reading the volume again, very slowly, through the spring and early summer of 2025, meditating on the architecture of the Kesh society and the ways they evolved to live together after the Collapse.

Reading Always Coming Home again is helping me grieve the world we are losing, day by day, as DJT and the Church of Project 2025 deliberately dismantle our experiment with democracy. You can find pre-owned copies of the book on EBay for from $9 to $200.

I hope you’re enjoying these stories and poems. They’re helping me find my way in the real world, as distinguished from the mindless trance of cruelty and feat-mongering currently playing on screens everywhere.

Screens aren’t reality, friends. They’re conveyors of the trance of our undoing. Best to just turn them off and devote our attention to fully living our local human lives. In time still given.

This passage is just too long for my fingers to type in today.

I love this passage from Always Coming Home. If you want to read more, you can get a pre-owned copy of the book from EBay for anywhere from $9 to $200.

Gotta keep at it or the parts just freeze up.

Four days a week now, I drive down to the Ashland YMCA and on two of them, I do my best to keep up with the music and follow an impossibly athletic cheerful little Italian dynamo named Gina Gallardi. Gina isn’t just an aerobics instructor or a lifelong girl-jock — although she is both. She’s the leader of the Ashland YMCA. One of the best leaders I’ve ever met — and I’ve met a lot. She’s one worth following.

The class I take with Gina is an evidence-based fitness class for people who can’t do regular “fitness” classes anymore. It’s called Enhanced Fitness which I say is a euphemism for “pace-your-own-damn-self-aerobic-fascia-stretching-balance-and-kind-of-line-dancing-for-busted-people-with-free-weight-torture-and-then-you-get-to-stretch-and-breathe-for-a minute.”

Everyone in the class has a couple of hand weights and a couple of ankle weights … and a folding chair nearby. Some people sit in their chair for at least part of the class but we all do whatever we can to move for the whole hour. I’m still trying not to sit in my chair until the stretching at the end. But I know I’m always welcome to sit — without judgment. And I know I’ll be sitting more in awhile. Just not yet. I didn’t move much for almost five years because of injuries so I’m doing my best to make up for that lost time.

Doing what I can to keep up with Gina — and also honor my limitations — has changed my life over the last 6 months. I actually bought a tent and an air mattress and went hiking at Smith Rock and camped on the ground with Josh early in June!

Impossible!! But it happened.

And it happened 100% because of the impossible generosity and love and encouragement my classmates and I get from our tiny coach. All she asks is that we as best and as much as we can so we keep getting stronger for as long as we can.

I want everyone who used to be young — and isn’t anymore — to have a class like Enhanced Fitness and a coach like Gina.

Gina cut her own reps short a few times today because she’s now in a lot of pain. Looking forward to her first hip replacement in a couple of weeks. Still just a whippersnapper. Several of us are lending her our toys for her rehab…

But, to motivate herself to move through the pain — and to keep the rest of us going strong — Gina turned the music up LOUD and played “Gold” when it was hard for her — and the rest of us — to keep going.

I can’t sing. Not even a little. But I’ve read the lyrics aloud here today for me, for Gina, for my classmates, and for YOU.

It ain’t a smooth ride, life, it’s a winding road… Yeah, it might be gravel but it feels like gold.

You can hear Dierks Bentley sing it like a sunovabitch here. Oh, to be so young again… https://youtu.be/jYf1qjiGeGk?feature=shared

Dierks Bentley and Ashley Glenn Gorley and Luck Dick and Ross Copperman wrote the song. © CTM Outlander Music LC, Cobalt Music Publishing Ltd., Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC.

From Always Coming Home, Pre-owned copies available on EBay for $9 to $200.

Pre-owned copies are available on EBay for for $9 to $200.

Ursula left her body before she ever had to meet this moment we’re living through right now. Maybe she heard of DJT but she was spared having to endure his current rise to power from inside the fragility of a human body/mind.

On the other hand, maybe she’s suffering along with us right now, in spirit.

Maybe it’s her suffering — wrapped in her brilliant foresight and wild sense of humor — that compels me to bring her words forward again in time, using my voice.

Maybe I’m doing this because I can hear her chuckling filled with both detachment and compassion for us all. Maybe it’s that faint chuckling I can’t stop hearing that’s compelling me to re-read Always Coming Home as we Americans are, once again, journeying together through another valley of the shadow of death.

I don’t know. Do you suppose it’s Ursula’s loving kindness nudging me — from outside time — to read aloud these pieces she wrote? Is it her nudging me to “take my time…” while I use my voice to urge you to take yours? Or is the nudge coming from Pandora, herself?

I don’t know. But I’m definitely taking my time. Damn it, it’s my time to take.

I hope you enjoy this piece. To me, it feels like taking a long, cool drink of water.

If you want more of this and would rather read instead of listen, you can find a pre-owned copy of Always Coming Home on EBay for a price of $9 to $200.

I’m reading Ursula LeGuin’s Always Coming Home as I make my own way home. It’s looking like my home won’t be here in the US in this body for a lot longer since the beautiful bill is going to cripple my ability to take care of my body/mind.

So it goes.

With no further anticipation of “reward” for restraining my ephemeral “right to free speech,” why not share some things I value using my own voice? While time allows.

I hope you enjoy the way Ursula’s perspective about life on Planet Earth puts our little lives into the much bigger picture. She left her body a decade before we fell into the chaos we’re navigating today. I have always found Ursula’s way of seeing — and her way sharing her way — profoundly nourishing.

Protein-fortified trail mix for today’s news, for me anyway.

If you enjoy this piece, you can find it and a lot more gold in a pre-owned copy of Always Coming Home on EBay. A copy will run you from $9 to $200.

NOTE: If you find you don’t enjoy my reading voice, I wouldn’t blame you. It’s old and croaky now. So, I’’ve learned today how to get a transcript from Voice Memos that I can copy below.

The transcript isn’t formatted the way the original piece was published in the copy of Always Coming Home that I own. On the bright side of that, I think the way the transcript was formatted by Notes is actually more screen-readable than the original text is. This transcript may have a small error or two. I tried to catch them all but I suck as a proofreader. It’s mostly right on.

Voice-to-text tech is getting more amazing every year for people like me living with arthritis taking over our fingers. I couldn’t share the text here without the transcription. It’s just too long and too painful for me to type it in on my Mac.

Pandora, Worrying About What She Is Doing, Finds a Way Into the Valley Through the Scrub Oak

Look how messy this wilderness is.

Look at this scrub oak. Chaparo.

The chaparral was named for it, and consists of it mixed up with a lot of other things.

But look at this shrub of it right here now.

The tallest limb, or stem, is about four feet tall, but most of the stems are only a foot or two.

One of them looks as if it had been cut off with a tool, a clean slice across.

But who? What for?

This shrub isn't good for anything, and this ridge isn't on the way to anywhere.

A lot of the smaller branch ends look broken or bitten off.

Maybe deer browse the leaf buds. The little gray branches and twigs grow every which way, many dead and likened, crossing each other, choking each other out.

Digger-pine needles, spider's threads, dead bay leaves are stuck in the branches.

It's a mess. It's littered.

It has no overall shape.

Most of the stems come up from one area, but not all.

There's no center and no symmetry. A lot of sticks sticking up out of the ground a little ways, with leaves on some of them, that describes it fairly well.

The leaves themselves show some order, they seem to obey some laws poorly.

They are all different sizes from about a quarter of an inch to an inch long, but each is enough like the others that one could generalize an ideal scrub oak leaf, a dusty, medium, dark green color, with a slight convex curve to the leaf, which pillows up a bit between the veins that runs slanting outwards from the center vein, and the edge is irregularly serrated with a little spine at each apex.

These leaves grow irregularly spaced on alternate sides of their twig up to the top, where they crowd into a bunch a sloppy rosette. Under the litter of dead leaves, its own and others, and moss, and rocks, and mold, and junk, the shrub must have a more or less shrub shaped complex of roots, going fairly deep, probably deeper than it stands above ground, because wet as it is here now in February, it will be bone dry on this ridge in the summer.

There are no acorns left from last fall.

If this shrub is old enough to have borne them. It probably is.

It could be two years old or 20 or who knows?

It is an oak, but a scrub oak, a low oak, a no account oak, and there are at least a hundred very much like it in sight from this rock I am sitting on.

And there are hundreds and thousands and hundreds of thousands more on this ridge and the next ridge, but numbers are wrong. They are in error.

We don't count count shreub oaks.

When you can count them, something has gone wrong.

You can count how many in a hundred square yards and multiply if you're a botanist. And so make a good estimate, a fair guess. But you cannot count the shrub oaks on this ridge, let alone the scantas, buck brush or wild lilac, which I have not mentioned, and the other variously messy and humble components of the chaparral.

The chaparral is like atoms and the components of atoms.

It evades.

It is innumerable.

It is not accidentally, but essentially messy.

This shrub is not beautiful, nor even if I were 10 feet high on hashish. Would it be mystical, nor is it nauseating, if a philosopher found it so, that would be his problem, but nothing to do with the scrub oak.

This thing is nothing to do with us.

This thing is wilderness.

The civilized human mind's relation to it is imprecise, fortuitous, and full of risk.

There are no shortcuts.

All the analogies run one direction, our direction.

There is a hideous little tumor on one branch.

The new leaves, this year's growth, are so large and symmetrical compared with the older leaves that I took them at first for part of another plant, a toy on, growing in with the wide dwarf oak. But a summer's dry heat, no doubt, will shrink them down and warp them.

Analogies are easy, the live oak, the humble evergreen, can certainly be made into a sermon, just as it can be made into firewood, red or burnt.

Sermo, I read, I read scrub oak. But I don't, and it isn't here to be read or burnt.

It is casting a shadow across the page of this notebook in the weak sunshine of 3:30 of a February afternoon in Northern California.

When I close the book and go, the shadow will not be on the page, though I have drawn a line around it.

Only the pencil line will be on the page.

The shadow will be then on the deep-dead-leaf-thick, messy ground, or on the mossy rock my ass is on now. And the shadow will move lawfully and with great majesty as the earth turns.

The mind can imagine that shadow of a few leaves falling in the wilderness.

The mind is a wonderful thing. But what about all the shadows of all the other leaves, on all the other branches, on all the other scrub oaks, on all the other ridges of all the wilderness?

If you could imagine those, even for a moment, what good would it do?

Infinite good.

You can find pre-owned copies on EBay for between $9 and $200 dollars if you need more stories like this to see you through …

This is Episode 4 from Season 1 of the podcast, “No Reward, No Restraint,” read alouds by Meri Aaron Walker.

As part of my own digestion and integration process, I’ve decided to read a few of her pieces aloud here. Doing this, I can honor her deep contributions to me and to the millions of other readers and writers who’ve found handholds in her stories and essays.

In re-reading of The Wave in the Mind I’ve taken to heart Ursula’s argument about the essential orality of poetry and how important it is for humans to rescue poems from the silence of a page of text and put them back into human speaking and listening. I think she’s about 1000% right about how important this is — especially right now.

Nevertheless, in addition to reading “Artists” aloud here (from Always Coming Home), I’ve also copied out the text. My apologies for the way the stanzas all flow together below. I can’t seem to make Substack replicate the spacing between them. I hate that. But using my fingers to plant the lines in my bodily experience, I’m both integrating it into my life today and doing what I can to share the wealth of Ursula’s powerful words here with anyone else who’s looking for a handhold in this relentless, excruciating disintegration of our American democracy.

Take heart, my brother and sister artists!

Even from the center of this collapse, we can still do our jobs. DOGE will always overlook us because we work for ourselves. We don’t count — and never have counted — in the arithmetic of extraction capitalism.

We artists have to do our jobs — as Ursula points out — because we have no other choice. Our jobs are what we were born for. We can and must continue to do them for ourselves and for each other.

Even when no one else seems able to hear us — or find space in the chaos to use our work to care for themselves — we can still do our jobs. Remember Anne Frank.

Artists

What do they do,

The singers, tale-writers, dancers, painters, shapers, makers?

They go there with empty hands,

Into the gap between.

They come back with things in their hands.

They go silent and come back with words, with tunes.

They go into confusion and come back with patterns.

They go limping and weeping, ugly and frightened,

And come back with the wings of the redwing hawk,

The eyes of the mountain lion.

That is where they live,

Where they get their breath:

There, in the gap between,

The empty place.

Where do the mysterious artists live?

There, in the gap between.

Their hands are the hinge.

No one else can breathe there.

They are beyond praise. 

The ordinary artists

Use patience, passion, skill, work

And returning to work, judgment,

Proportion, intellect, purpose,

Indifference, obstinacy, delight in tools,

Delight, and with these as their way

They approach the gap, the hub,

Approaching in circles, in gyres,

Like the buzzard, looking down, watching,

Like the coyote, watching.

They look to the center.

They turn on the center,

They describe the center,

Though they cannot live there.

They deserve praise.

There are people who call themselves artists

Who compete with each other for praise

They think the center

Is a stuffed gut,

And that shitting is working.

They are what the buzzard and the coyote

Ate for breakfast yesterday. 

You can find pre-owned copies of Always Coming Home on EBay priced between $6.19 and $220. The Wave in the Mind can run from $9 to $29.99.