I have a day-dream I retreat into sometimes - I imagine that overnight, every position of power that a man normally holds on earth is held by a woman, and every service and “care” position that had been filled by a woman (paid or unpaid, visible or “invisible”) is being done by a man.

It stretches my brain to imagine this role reversal at scale.

Try imagining it yourself. Imagine we wake up tomorrow and it is mostly men that give care and mundane service and mostly women who make the decisions that affect millions.

Weirdly hard to imagine even for a moment.

So many things come up.

Congratulations if you can explore this daydream for more than a few seconds.

It is a hard vision to hold – it illuminates the contrast between who gets to do what in our world; which brings me to our topic for today - the popular paradigm: predator or prey.

When I was young, my dad taught me – I think in the context of the punchline to a joke – that in the Savannah, whether you are the lion or the gazelle, at some point, you better be ready to get up and start running.

This idea – that both the wolf and the hare must run to stay alive – stuck with me.

Sometimes the rabbit gets away, sometimes the wolf eats. Predator and prey, locked in their marathon dance.

And, isn’t that the way in capitalism?

And, isn’t that the way of the regime we are living under in the U.S.?

And, isn’t that the way it’s “always been”?

Why question this now?

The reason to question this now is that these two - predator and prey - are not the only two choices.

The reason to look into other paradigms now is that time is of the essence because the pot is boiling over.

The reason the pot is boiling over, is that this administration’s corrupt cruelty is on steroids and knows no bounds. These wolves are insatiable, like diseased lions who kill all the gazelles for fun, eat none of them and then look around for something else to kill.

Power-mad animals, drunk on bloodlust and ignorance, this regime is so extreme in its desire for “power over”, they have to make more and more of us their prey. Even though BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ folks have been warning us for a while, some of us who are prey, haven’t known it until now. But, now, most of us know.

I am about to take us on a time-hopping thought-journey, one where we will touch on some deep subjects – to see if we can end up with some new paradigms to act out. We may discover one that is superior to this rather simplistic, rather literal idea of predator and prey. We may find a paradigm that is a more accurate reflection of natural life and forces on earth and throughout the cosmos.

Ready, to time travel? Let’s go…

Follow me back in time to June 13, 2016, to morning after the Pulse nightclub shooting. I was with friends in the desert, and when we woke up that morning and saw the news, I felt even sadder than I should’ve been.

I just knew a bad moon was rising.

Maybe you’ve had this experience too – where you KNEW something was broken and going to get worse. (I had the same feeling on Oct. 7, 2023 – outsized dread for the collective.)

Anyway, back to 2016. Unbelievably, my countrymen elected an adjudicated rapist and all-around walking cautionary tale of American excess to the highest office - President of the United States.

Which, actually… follow me back in time as early as the 1970s when women were reporting they were sexually assaulted and abused by that same man. (Another revealing thought experiment – imagine if we, as a society, believed women and children when they said they were abused the first time? Wouldn’t we then save ourselves 50 more years of abuse? For instance, if we believed survivors right away and promptly enacted justice, our “leadership” would be totally different in this moment in history…)

Now, follow me forwards, to what I hope is now common knowledge. Sadistic, violent people (in our over-culture, overwhelmingly men and boys) harm animals, children and women first, leaving a bread crumb trail of pain and suffering that leads up to whatever “larger” crime they become famous for.

The boy who secretly hurts the family pet, becomes the teen who digitally sextorts younger kids in Roblox.

The man who rages at his wife and kids becomes the workplace shooter.

The rich man who sexually abuses women, becomes the richer man who rapes children (and anything else good and holy).

These are the guys who are dragging us all to hell, making what could be a peaceful co-existence into a daily battlefield of nightmares.

They might call themselves predators, but I would call them parasites or pathogens or cancerous cells – stealing life force from others whenever they can.

Follow me back now to my family Thanksgiving in 2025. A few of us were noting how insanely corrupt and cruel the actions of the current administration were. And how every day a new nightmare aspect of the collective – in video game terms – was unlocked. My brother-in-law wryly noted that it seems like the administration had AI churning out ideas every few hours (every time the Epstein Files came up) to unsettle the populace and to distract from the Epstein Files.

Follow me now to that word – Epstein. Every time a girl or woman hears that word – and have we heard ANY WORDS more than EPSTEIN and TRUMP this past year? – it tells us, on a deep and profound level – “you are worthless, literally, you are worth less, you are like a tissue, we use you and then throw you away.”

Follow me back to the day in 2022 when Roe v Wade was overturned. We happened to be seeing Ani Difranco that night. The mood was shock and awe, we couldn’t believe it.

Follow me back to the morning after the election of Trump over Hillary Clinton in 2016. That shocking morning, Patton Oswalt posted something to the effect of – “Well, now we know America is more misogynistic than it is racist, and IT IS VERY RACIST, so…”

Follow me back to Breonna Taylor being shot in her bed.

Follow me forward to women paying plastic surgeons to mutilate their faces and bodies.

Follow me to generations of women in a trance, spending every day trying to be skinnier.

Follow me to the civilizational horror of Only Fans and Pornhub.

Now, follow me to Jonathon Ross muttering “Fucking Bitch!” under his breath after murdering a smiling Renee Nicole Good in cold blood in response to her last words, “it’s fine dude, I’m not mad at you”.

In this world, it seems very much that right now, women and children are mostly the prey, and the ones for whom “no is go” are the predators. The predators are the DARVO brigade, the “every accusation is a confession” coalition.

This type of man HATES women. It’s why Jonathon Ross said what he said right after he did when he did. The forces that be would really like that to be “natural” to us – you – women, children, people of color, people born elsewhere – are the prey, while we - white men - are the predator.

But I would like to introduce another perspective – what if the predator/prey thing they’ve set up isn’t actually “the natural order” at all? What if they’ve zoomed in and cherry-picked the processes that fit their chosen narrative?

Let’s go back to our initial metaphor of the lion and the gazelle –

Yes, the small-minded may look at the lion chasing the gazelle, or even supping upon it, and see only power – predator “winning” over prey.

The lion is the only one that walks away from that moment, blood still on his lips.

But when we zoom out, it is easy to see, that moment is just a moment – a tiny stitch in the great tapestry of life on earth.

The predator-prey story doesn’t end in that moment, that is just what predators want us to believe.

Whether he eats today or not, the lion itself will eventually die, and vultures (scavengers) and bacteria (decomposers) will come and eat him. Or, he could be killed by another lion. Or, likely, he will be killed by a man - by gunshot or destruction of environment/ecological collapse. Man - the worst, most dangerous “predator” (pathogen? parasite?) known to earth.

Fortunately, despite the delusions of humanity, predator-prey is not the only dynamic paradigm on offer.

Let’s zoom in, down into the mycelium threads connecting within the rich humus of the forest floor or the cells working together inside your very body right now – these networks tell much more a story of things humming along in synchrony, than one thing (predator) pitted against another (prey).

Or, let’s zoom way out into the cosmos and see all celestial objects spinning in rhythm just as they should and then look back at dear, sweet earth. And know that there are way more of us – the good, the kind, the just – than there are of them. All of us “prey” are having our values clarified and are being galvanized in real time. That’s what the predator can never see, never expect – a new paradigm, new organizing principles born from our revulsion at their behavior.

I suggest we bring some new paradigms to the forefront, ones that they won’t expect or can’t see.

Yes, there are predators and prey, but there are also many, many more players – soil, plants, mycelium, bacteria, scavengers, decomposers, elemental forces, rock, stone, water, air, light, temperature, gravity and more - in the game.

What can a lion do to bacteria?

Until next time,

Jess

p.s. Library People – our Capricorn New Moon practice will be up by tomorrow morning. The actual New Moon is Sunday (in L.A.). The practice is very good and aligned with the times so I wanted to give you lots of time to enjoy it.

JANUARY NIGHT PRAYER

Bellchimes jangle, freakish wind

whistles icy out of desert lands

over the mountains. Janus, Lord

of winter and beginnings, riven

and shaken, with two faces,

watcher at the gates of winds and cities,

god of the wakeful:

keep me from coldhanded envy

and petty anger. Open

my soul to the vast

dark places. Say to me, say again,

nothing is taken, only given.

-Ursula K. Le Guin

“Animals are something invented by plants to move seeds around. An extremely yang solution to a peculiar problem which they faced.”
- Terence McKenna

“Be in nature every day. Move your body a lot. Remember and work with your dreams. Be playful. Have good sex. Infuse any little thing you do with a creative twist. Hang out with animals. Eat with your fingers. Sing regularly.”

-Rob Brezsny

“When one lives with birds one sees how the noise level of the birds keeps up with the noise level of the house, with the wind that begins to whisper and whistle across the sidings, with each notch up you turn the volume dial on your record player. It is the rumble and rasping of the inert things that provokes the vocalization of the animals; fish hum with the streams and birds chatter in the crackling of the windy forest. To live is to echo the vibrancy of things. To be, for material things, is to resonate. There is sound in things like there is warmth and cold in things, and things resonate like they irradiate their warmth or their cold.”

- Alfonso Lingis

NATURE IS ALWAYS WITH YOU

I find it helpful to remember that a person can establish or reestablish

that primal connection with the plants and animal spirits by just spending

mindful time with them. In your backyard or on the sidewalk outside your

building. You don’t have to find a wilderness or a park.

Nature is always with you. You don’t even have to go outdoors if that

doesn’t work for you. Spend some intentional time sitting next to the plant

in the window. Give it a name like the man said. No plant? Good idea to get

one then.

—Timothy Cope

Outside the youth center, between the liquor store

and the police station,

a little dogwood tree is losing its mind;

overflowing with blossomfoam,

like a sudsy mug of beer;

like a bride ripping off her clothes,

dropping snow white petals to the ground in clouds,

so Nature’s wastefulness seems quietly obscene.

It’s been doing that all week:

making beauty,

and throwing it away,

and making more.

- Tony Hoagland

“For too long … scientists and citizens on the street have focused on the dark side of human nature, on our propensity for selfishness and tribalism and mendacity and cruelty and violence, as if this were a natural or normal or primary state of affairs,” he says. “And yet, I think the bright side has been denied the attention it deserves, because, equally, we are capable of love and friendship and teaching and cooperation and all these other wonderful things. And, in fact, I would argue those qualities are more powerful than the bad qualities and, therefore, in some ways, much more important.”

- Nicholas Christakis, Sociologist and Director of the Human Nature Lab at Yale

It’s the mystery of the hunt that intrigues me,

That drives us like lemmings, but cautiously -

The search for a bright square cloud - the scent of lemon verbena -

Or to learn rules for the game the sea otters

Play in the surf.

It is these small things - and the secret behind them

That fill the heart.

The pattern, the spirit, the fiery demon

That link them together

And pull their freedom into our senses,

The smell of a shrub, a cloud, the action of animals

- The rising, the exuberance, when the mystery is unveiled.

It is these small things

That when brought into vision become an inferno.

- Michael McClure

“the highest leverage point for initiating system change is through the underlying paradigm or worldview. While it is difficult and cumbersome to change the physical infrastructure or the political and economic system, paradigms or worldviews — which only exist in people’s minds — can change instantly. They seem rigid and immovable until they suddenly transform, due to a shock of recognition, a breaking free of illusions, or some variant on the “hundredth monkey” principle.

Thresholds of paradigm shifts leading to systemic change are hard to predict. When they occur on a mass scale, they can lead to rapid — sudden and unexpected— transformations. “That all authority in the last analysis rests on opinion is never more forcefully demonstrated than when, suddenly and unexpectedly, a universal refusal to obey initiates what then turns into a revolution,” wrote Hannah Arendt. When events take a revolutionary turn, it is often a surprise to everyone involved. The American Revolutionaries, for instance, simply wanted to restore a proper relationship with their King: Instead, they found they had to overthrow his rule and define a new political reality for themselves.”

-Donella Meadows

Iterating and iteration has been on my mind.

Specifically how machine learning iterates by guessing what thing was said before and betting on it again exponentially in a self-referential way. It makes me think of a never-ending hall of mirrors, but as they iterate they become more and more like fun-house mirrors. By the time you travel all the way through the hallway, they are still technically mirrors, but the farther out from the source, the more warped, distorted and “off” they are.

Which is where the slop comes from.

Copying and pasting in and of itself I don’t think is the problem, it does seem to be a human thing.

Even before printing press, we “copy and pasted” information through oral tradition, gossip, the troubadour or theater troop going town to town.

From the time of the printing press until the internet things became somewhat formalized. Books and printed material everywhere, we copy and pasted because someone got an idea, wrote it down and then we all copy pasted his idea; adding it to the constellation of ideas in the collective. Same process for photographers and visual artists, movie makers and musicians - you made a movie that resonated, part of that film exists somehow inside all who were affected by it.

Since the internet prowled onto the scene our copy and pasting became faster, easier and less honorable. You could actually take someone’s creative work, intellectual property - their song, their image, their art - and just copy and paste it into your own timeline if you wanted.

Now, with machine learning, the copy pasting happens exponentially - mis and dis information fly fast and errors in thinking get bigger and bigger within the collective.

While, I, ordinary human that I am, may not be able to save the world from the machine level of copy pasting, I do feel able to investigate my own relationship to copy pasting and be disruptive to it when necessary.

For instance, imagine yourself as machine learning program that uses mirroring feedback loops to refine your abilities. Now, imagine one of the pieces of information you have when you start out is misogynistic and you iterate the heck out of it. Now, you’ve exponentially increased misogyny in the world. You, as machine learning, will now “look” out onto the misogynistic world and feed evidence from it back into your programming that loops back on its self. Now we have a self-perpetuating misogyny machine.

Or, imagine yourself as a machine learning program that started out with “good info.” but something happens in your feedback loop that causes you to hallucinate and you iterate that. Now your hallucinations are exponentially multiplying and spreading around until they too, are fed back into your loop.

We humans do this too - it is just SO MUCH EASIER to see it in machine learning.

I do not know what to do about machine learning. In my fantasy, it is never trained by corporations or even governments, it is not gender-biased, racist, etc., it loves and supports all life, nature and the earth, it is “raised to maturity” by people with a moral center and it is open source.

Doesn’t seem too likely from our current vantage point.

But, we can use this phenomena as a focal point for our own evolution. This is a good time for all of us to gently become aware of what “short-cuts” we are copy pasting to make things “easier” - but that really are keeping us mired in quicksand; where every time we make a move we sink a little deeper.

Sometimes others - advertisers, family, friends, colleagues, peers or the overculture - “program” us by feeding us things to copy and paste that trap us. Sometimes we trap ourselves.

I’ll share one example of how I trapped myself.

You all know that I loved teaching in person. Many of you know the last time I had a room to teach in here in L.A. was Spring 2023.

A thought that I copy and pasted since then (until recently) was:

“I like teaching in person the best so since I can’t do that, I won’t teach at all.”

The genesis of this thought was a kind of sour grapes hurt that I was feeling. I was taking my toys and going home. I was bummed to not get to teach in person and so, I copy and pasted a thought that kept me from teaching at all - even online. This copy pasted thought came up all the time when I was talking to people about my career, or even when I was planning work stuff in my mind. This copy pasted thought separated me from you in many ways and from opportunities I never saw because I had copy-pasted blinders on.

Recently, I found that errant copy and pasted thought, examined it in contemplation, pulled it out by its root and replaced it with a new copy-paste:

“Teaching online is a delightfully effective magical action, and… paradoxically, teaching online may sooner or later support teaching in person.”

Since this re-working of my copying and pasting I have taught three excellent online classes and already set up more for early 2026. I have LOVED being with you in that internet space and we really have made magic already. It has done my heart so good to see you all and I also adapted what I didn’t like about online teaching before, making it into something I am really proud of.

The old thought was wrong - and I copy pasted it unconsciously for about a year and a half.

The new thought is better - and I’m going to copy and paste it until I find an EVEN BETTER thought to replace it with.

I share this in the hopes that you can see how reviewing (on the individual AND collective levels) your go-to copy-pastes might lead to some necessary updates.

Until next time,

Jess

p.s. my favorite place to review my copy pastes is in meditation.

“Meditation is akin to dancing or playing music.”

- Alan Watts

“As I read the Book of Genesis, God didn’t give Adam and Eve a whole planet.

He gave them a manageable piece of property, for the sake of discussion let’s say 200 acres.

I suggest to you Adams and Eves that you set as your goals the putting of some small part of the planet into something like safe and sane and decent order.

There’s a lot of cleaning up to do.

There’s a lot of rebuilding to do, both spiritual and physical.

And, again, there’s going to be a lot of happiness. Don’t forget to notice!

What painters and sculptors and writers do, incidentally, is put very small properties indeed into good order, as best they can.

A painter thinks, “I can’t fix the whole planet, but I can at least make this square of canvas what it ought to be.’‘ And a sculptor thinks the same about a lump of clay or marble. A writer thinks the same about a piece of paper, conventionally eleven inches long and eight and a half inches wide.

We’re talking about something less than 200 acres, aren’t we?”

- Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

“An artist is a sort of emotional or spiritual historian. His role is to make you realize the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are. He has to tell, because nobody else in the world can tell, what it is like to be alive. All I’ve ever wanted to do is tell that, I’m not trying to solve anybody’s problems, not even my own. I’m just trying to outline what the problems are.

I want to be stretched, shook up, to overreach myself, and to make you feel that way too.”

- James Baldwin

“Your imagination is able to do all that you ask in proportion to the degree of your attention.

All progress, all fulfillment of desire depend upon the control and concentration of your attention.

Attention may be either attracted from without or directed from within.

Attention is attracted from without when you are consciously occupied with the external impression of the immediate present.

Your attention is directed from within when you deliberately choose what you will be preoccupied with mentally.

This very day, start your new life. Approach every experience in a new frame of mind – with a new state of consciousness. Assume the noblest and best for yourself in every respect and continue therein.

Make believe, great wonders are possible.”

- Neville Goddard

“At 19, I read a sentence that re-terraformed my head: “The level of matter in the universe has been constant since the Big Bang.”

In all the aeons we have lost nothing, we have gained nothing - not a speck, not a grain, not a breath. The universe is simply a sealed, twisting kaleidoscope that has reordered itself a trillion trillion trillion times over.

Each baby, then, is a unique collision - a cocktail, a remix - of all that has come before: made from molecules of Napoleon and stardust and comets and whale tooth; colloidal mercury and Cleopatra’s breath: and with the same darkness that is between the stars between, and inside, our own atoms.

When you know this, you suddenly see the crowded top deck of the bus, in the rain, as a miracle: this collection of people is by way of a starburst constellation. Families are bright, irregular-shaped nebulae. Finding a person you love is like galaxies colliding. We are all peculiar, unrepeatable, perambulating micro-universes - we have never been before and we will never be again. Oh God, the sheer exuberant, unlikely fact of our existences. The honour of being alive. They will never be able to make you again.”

– Caitlin Moran

“Our consciousness is programmed. We see things a certain way from a young age - we’re programmed to keep doing them that way. Then you have to spend adulthood learning how to overcome it, to read out the programs. Try to create. I want to tell people to create. Just start by creating your day. Then create your life.”

― Prince

“The in between is where it happens.

It’s less the meeting and more how am I getting to and from each of those meetings? And what am I thinking about in between? You know, it’s like the ticks of the clock.

The computer understands the ticks, but human beings live in the moments between those ticks, in the duration that’s not even acknowledged by the metrics.

And that’s where it’s at.
That’s where human beings actually live.

This secret place that computers don’t even know and AIs can’t see. They can only see the ticks. They’re quantized. But we’re breathing in that space. And that’s where, if there is some spiritual thing, that’s where it is.”

- Douglas Rushkoff, Program or be Programmed

“Real magic requires your intention, your choice to harmonize. Of course it does. The heron cannot cast starlight onto the dark shallows to entrance the bluegills. Not unless you do your part. You must choose to meet her halfway. And when you do, you may find that magic isn’t a dismissal of what is real. It’s a synthesis of it, the nectar of fact becoming the honey of meaning.”

Jarod Anderson

“To me, the grounds for hope are simply that we don’t know what will happen next, and that the unlikely and the unimaginable transpire quite regularly. And that the unofficial history of the world shows that dedicated individuals and popular movements can shape history and have, though how and when we might win and how long it takes is not predictable.”

- Rebecca Solnit

“…magic is and always has been a strategy and tactic for living. It is a form of creative resistance, a way of understanding the universe and navigating it, a deeply relational way of being and collaborating with human, non-human and extradimensional entities and even machines.”

- Amy Hale