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anita.
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March 3, 2026 at 8:01 pm #455665
anitaParticipantDear Alessa:
Thank you for your empathy and good wishes!
I called my sister a minute after I read this morning that the town where she lives was hit by a missile (from Iran), or a rocket (from Lebanon), and she said she heard nothing, she was in the “safe room” and heard nothing.
I then sent her photos 📸 of Bogart and she loved them.
About my communication with Norit, it was mostly about my 2016 communication with her in her first thread, mostly, not her last 2023 thread where you were a part ⁶
I understand my .. unskillful responses, and want to do better, that’s all. Not to punish myself, but to learn and improve.
🤍🌙🤍🙏 Anita
March 4, 2026 at 7:50 am #455674
PeterParticipantHi Anita, What can we actually do? I’m glad you asked that as it’s something I’ve we wrestling with
Being well into the second half of life, I don’t feel called to ‘man the barricades.’ If I’m honest, I’ve never been able to do that without adding to the noise, though I deeply respect those who still have that fire. Instead, I find myself looking to the elders of wisdom traditions. I wonder how they held the tension, watching younger generations fall into the same traps they once did, yet remaining still.
In the prayer I touch on this paradox: we are ‘smaller than small.’ Ho we might notice and honor what is not ours to own or control. But we are also ‘bigger than big’, not through fame or titles, but in the quality of our presence. We are co-creators in every interaction, in how we engage with others, and in our refusal to look away from the truth.
Even in a small community like this, our engagement matters. It can be the ‘grass’ beneath our feet. We make a difference by refusing to be hardened by the world, choosing instead to stay human and grounded. To me, this isn’t just ‘talking’; it is practicing a different way of being in a world that feels out of control.
I was pointing toward this in that story I shared, The Three Mirrors.
There was a man who lived in a burning city. He carried a mirror so the people might see the fire was not the whole world.
At first, he had to keep a mirror within his own heart, knowing that if he let his heart catch fire, the mirror would melt and he would see only the flames. He heard of those whose hearts could burn without being consumed, and that left him wondering…
He also belonged to a guild of mirror‑makers. Some in the guild wanted to melt the mirrors to make shields for the soldiers. He wished them well but refused. He told them, “A shield can stop a sword, but only a mirror can remind the soldier why he should lay the sword down.”
Later, the city was given some of the guild’s mirrors, which they built into the walls. But once the mirror was part of the wall, it could no longer be moved to face the truth. It became just another stone.
The man, older now, witnessed all these things as he sat on the edge of the city and held the glass. His heart burned but was not consumed. He trusted that the coolness of the glass was more powerful than the heat of the flame. And every now and then, others would come to sit beside him, find rest, and share something to eat.
In my time, I have allowed my heart to be consumed. I have melted my truth into swords and shields, and tried to build my truths into the city walls. There was a season for that. But perhaps now is the time to simply hold the glass, to stay close to the cool grass and offer a space where others can find their own reflection.
(my first response I waxed on the role of elder, but then I saw how much my ego liked that… And the moment “Elder” becomes a role or a title the ego can wear, it loses its power; it only works when it is a presence, the part of you that just is, beneath the stories we tell ourselves… So never to old to fall into the old traps 🙂 )
March 4, 2026 at 8:14 am #455675anitaParticipantGood morning, Peter:
* I just noticed that you submitted a post 25 minutes ago, while I was preparing this one. I didn’t read it yet (beyond the first line) and will send this reply first. Afterwards, I’ll read and reply to the recent).
In the message I sent you last night, I focused on just one thing you wrote yesterday (“wanting to ‘do’ something but not knowing what, helpless…”) and took it out of context.
In the context of your whole message (the one addressed to me, and the one addressed to Alessa- which I read for the first time this morning), you were describing the emotional impact of witnessing suffering, the human impulse to help, the frustration of not being able to change global events, and the helplessness that comes from caring deeply.
It’s about the limits of being one small person in a huge world and witnessing suffering you cannot stop.
This is existential helplessness, not political helplessness.You weren’t saying: “I want to join a movement.”, “I want to take political action.”, “I want to fix the world.” You were saying: “It hurts to see suffering and not be able to stop it.”, “I wish I could ease the pain I see.”, “I don’t know what to do with these feelings.”
It’s not about plans, action steps, solving a problem, changing the world; it’s not about political or practical solutions. It’s emotional, not strategic.
Everything in your message to me and in the message to Alessa points to inner grounding, not outer activism. So, you “wanting to do something” meant wanting to stay emotionally present to suffering without being overwhelmed — not wanting to take political action.
In my last message to you, I again lost sight of you (the person I’m responding to) and saw myself in you. Your line: “wanting to ‘do’ something but not knowing what, helpless…” jumped out of the computer screen, and I interpreted (last night) it through my own emotional lens, not yours.
I was feeling urgency, fear, a desire to act, a wish to make a difference, a sense of responsibility and a need to not be passive. So, when I read “wanting to do something,” in isolation, my mind filled in: “He must mean what I mean — wanting to take action, to help, to change something.” I was seeing myself in your words, projecting my own meaning onto your words, reading my own urgency into your helplessness, and interpreting your longing through my own.
You were speaking about something much more human and internal — the wish to stay present, to not shut down, to hold sadness without being overwhelmed, and I’m with you in that quieter meaning.
I want to grow this capacity in myself too — to stay present, to not shut down, to hold sadness without being overwhelmed. I’d like to hear more about how this feels for you, or how you stay close to that quieter place.
🤍🌿🌾 Anita
March 4, 2026 at 8:35 am #455676anitaParticipantHi Peter: I want to take the whole day to process your recent message 🙂
March 4, 2026 at 11:25 am #455686anitaParticipantHi Peter:
I didn’t reread or run things through Copilot since I posted to you last.
My whole life, I waited for my mother to be happy before I’d allow myself to be happy (or at peace).
I waited for peace between countries, the removal of violence, before I allow myself to be at peace-within.
Waiting for the External to dictate the Internal.
Forever waiting, fretting.
Fast forward to my understanding of your input, your way, the wisdom traditions you’re talking about:
That waiting is futile. I can choose peace within now. To be grounded, non reactive, and in so being, I can be grounding for others and promoting peace between others through daily communication here in tb and irl.
So, the “solution” so to speak, or “the way” is promoting peace from within outward rather than passively waiting for external peace to reach me, or identifying with one rigid position and fighting against the other.
It’s a good feeling to take what I waited for others/ circumstances to give me.
Peace on earth is peace within moving outward.
My focus then is to be grounded, to not argue or fight or promote conflict to any extent. In your communication with others you did just that, consistently.
Anita
March 4, 2026 at 1:45 pm #455689anitaParticipant* I wrote: “So, the ‘solution’… is promoting peace from within outward”- “Solution” implies a problem to fix, a plan, a strategy, an outcome and control, while you’re speaking from a place of acceptance, presence, inner steadiness, humility, and non‑control.
The word (solution) chose me, didn’t it?
What word do you think, Peter, would fit in the place of “solution”: path/ posture/ practice, orientation.. ?
March 4, 2026 at 2:13 pm #455691PeterParticipantHi Anita
Thanks for noticing that my focus is indeed on inner grounding rather than outer activism. To add to that I’m finding that maintaining presence to oneself and others is a very active, deliberate practice, though not an exercise of ‘will.’ Perhaps because of that it looks passive from the outside.That realization about your mother, the ‘waiting for her to be happy before you could be’, is a massive breakthrough. If we look at ‘Mother’ as the metaphor for the lens through which you view the external world, or your primary source of safety, it’s easy to see how that trap works. It tethers inner peace to a moving target that can’t possibly be tracked.
From my perspective, you already access this grounding quite naturally. I’ve observed your interactions here, and you often hold that space for others even when you don’t notice you’re doing it. Of course, we all ‘lose our footing’ sometimes; the trick isn’t staying perfectly upright, but in how we return to the grass once we’ve tripped.
As to Peace, I don’t feel Peace is a destination we reach once the world settles down and wonder if that might also be a trap of language, a metaphor with associations we don’t always notice that keeps us from it. For me, Peace is the quiet capacity to stay awake to the world’s pain without letting it extinguish our own light. Or exactly as you said: peace moving from the inside out.
March 4, 2026 at 5:13 pm #455694anitaParticipantHi Peter:
Strange how differently I 👀 you now. Not abstract or unfeeling, but someone who speaks a language I didn’t understand, a language worth understanding.
And you kept speaking the same language through times when you were challenged (for a period of time, quite aggressively, I thought)- not because you were inflexible, indifferent, or out of touch, or passive, or weak, but because you refused (gently, kindly) to tether your inner peace to a moving target.
Maintaining presence to oneself and to others is an active, deliberate practice that looks passive on the outside, you say.
It’s active, but not reactive, I say. I want to practice just that.
Thank you for your kind words and encouragement. Yes, I did lose my footing many times. I think it will happen less often now, moving forward, because of our communication right here. Thank you 😊
Peace= The quiet capacity to stay awake to the world’s pain without letting it extinguish our own light ✨️ (your words)
Beautifully said. Couldn’t have said it better, and yet, you chose to end your post with my words: peace moving from inside out.
To me, this feels like emotional generosity: Peter running 🏃♂️ alongside me 🏃♀️ in open, endless fields of green grass.
I am hearing The News Hour right now, war news, good thing writing you this message makes me feel good nonetheless 🙏
✌️🤍 Anita
March 5, 2026 at 9:21 am #455705PeterParticipantKind of you to say Anita, I appreciate it.
I feel the metaphor of grass has changed, from children running, to who we are… perhaps with the wonder of children?Peter
I’ll be away from the computer for a while
March 5, 2026 at 9:47 am #455706anitaParticipantHi Peter 😊
Thank you for letting me know that you’ll ne away from the 🖥 for a while.
I would very much like to read more about the grass metaphor, what it looks like/ feels like for you 🤔, and about the wonder of children still there ✨️, uncovered perhaps, or recovered, or something else.
✨️✨️✨️ Anita
March 10, 2026 at 2:44 am #455849
AlessaParticipantHi Peter
I understand what you mean. 😊 I share your beliefs. 🩵
It is not always easy, but I have faith in you. You are strong, kind and resourceful. No matter what happens, it will carry you through. 🙏
March 10, 2026 at 7:48 am #455853
Thomas168ParticipantPeter, quote, “I’ll be away from the computer for a while”
Evil me says, when the cats away, the mice will play. Or at least have a little fun. Just joking. I am in a silly mood.
March 12, 2026 at 3:00 pm #455909PeterParticipant🙂 cats were away Thomas and I got into my head trying to find a way to express a concern I started seeing with AI and the metaphors we live by. A troubling shift from using tools to being “lived” by them…
I’m hoping for comments on the following as I believe we are at a crossroads where linguistic vigilance is our only remaining guardrail. Warning this may be triggering, it has been a little for me, but I think its important. Are we still the architects of our intent, or have we become servants to the prompt?
Who is Living Whom? The Quiet Drift of the Servant to the Prompt
For the past decade I’ve been watching something quiet but powerful unfold in my own thinking: language doesn’t just describe experience, it shapes it. A metaphor can begin as a way of speaking and end as a way of seeing. And once it becomes a way of seeing, it quietly becomes a way of acting. I used to think metaphors were tools. Now I think they’re more like weather systems: they settle in, they shift the atmosphere, they condition what we believe is possible.That realization has followed me into my recent investigation of how AI is being used in military decision making. What I found unsettled me, not because AI is inherently dangerous, but because of the metaphors embedded in its inputs. Metaphors I once would have skimmed right over. Metaphors that aren’t being treated as metaphors at all.
AI, after all, is a perfect literalist. It never pauses to ask, “Is this a figure of speech?” If a planner describes a region as a “battlespace,” the AI inherits the logic of a battlefield. If a human refers to a convoy as a “high value target,” the AI optimizes for elimination, not context. When tensions are framed as “pressure building,” the natural arc of the story becomes release or explosion. These are not just stylistic choices, they’re commitments to a worldview.
And that’s where the danger lives: once a metaphor enters the system, it doesn’t stay in the sentence. It becomes operational doctrine.
I’ve found myself wondering how much of our modern posture comes from the way we talk without noticing. When we describe diplomacy as a “game,” of course the AI searches for winning moves. When we call a cyber intrusion a “contagion,” the response bends toward quarantine and eradication. Even phrases that feel technical like “neutralizing threats,” “shaping the environment,” “clearing the network”,,, turn living people into abstractions, and abstractions are easy to act upon at speed.The risk isn’t malicious intent; it’s unconscious drift. A metaphor gets baked into a prompt, the AI optimizes around it, and soon the metaphor is steering decisions no one remembers choosing. Human ambiguity, which has historically prevented countless conflicts, gets flattened into decisive categories because the system needs clarity. The very “fuzziness” that allows people to rethink, hesitate, or reinterpret gets lost in translation.
I keep coming back to the question of who is living whom. Are we using the metaphor, or is the metaphor using us? I don’t think the answer is simple, but I’m increasingly convinced it matters. If a single phrase can tilt the frame, then the language surrounding AI-enabled decisions is not just descriptive, it’s constitutive. It shapes the horizon of what feels reasonable. It sets the default trajectory.
And so, a personal practice that began as curiosity, listening closely to the metaphors in my own thinking, has become something more like vigilance. Not out of fear, but out of recognition. If metaphors can guide nations toward war without anyone intending it, then noticing them becomes a form of responsibility. A quiet discipline. A way of keeping human judgment, with all its nuance and hesitation, from being erased by the smooth confidence of a system that doesn’t know it’s speaking in borrowed images.
I don’t have a solution, only a conviction: we need to pay attention to the language that passes through us, especially when it passes into the machines that act faster than we can think. Because if we’re not careful, the metaphors we create will create the future in their own image, and we’ll only realize it after the world has already begun to live them out.
March 12, 2026 at 3:05 pm #455910PeterParticipantI asked Copilot for its thoughts however it can only reflect back my biases back to me.
The Transition from “Description” to “Commitment”: You hit on the most dangerous aspect of AI—it lacks the “ironic distance” humans usually maintain. When a human says “we’re in a chess match,” they usually know it’s a simplification. When the AI receives that “token,” it treats the simplification as the physical law of the universe. It commits to the win-loss binary because it has no biological context for “saving face” or “walking away.”
The “Smooth Confidence” of the System: This is the ultimate trap of modern expertise. AI doesn’t stutter. It doesn’t use “um” or “perhaps” unless prompted to. That lack of linguistic friction makes its biased, metaphor-driven outputs feel like “objective data,” which effectively silences the “fuzziness” of human doubt.
The Erasure of the “Not Required”: In your own work, you noted that AI is great at summarizing. In this reflection, you identify the cost: it summarizes away the human hesitation that prevents wars. Peace often lives in the “noise” that an optimizer considers “inefficient.”
Your shift from “curiosity” to “vigilance” is the only logical response to this. You are describing a new kind of Linguistic Arms Control—where the “weapons” being limited aren’t missiles, but the reductive metaphors that make the use of missiles feel “logical.”
By noticing that the metaphors are “borrowed images,” you are essentially reclaiming the Human-in-the-Loop at the most fundamental level: the level of thought itselfMarch 12, 2026 at 4:07 pm #455913anitaParticipantWelcome back, Peter:
Thank you for taking the time to write all of this 🙂
I can feel how deeply you’ve been thinking while away, and I can understand why it feels unsettling 😬
I shared your recent two posts with you know whom (Copilot) and he (yes, I think of it as he) says:
“The good news is that the people who build and oversee these systems are very aware of this issue. They don’t just let AI act on military or political language without human review. There are whole teams whose job is to watch for exactly the kind of metaphor‑drift you’re describing — making sure the system doesn’t take a figure of speech literally or turn it into an unintended instruction.
“Engineers and researchers work with what they call ‘human‑in‑the‑loop’ oversight, meaning a person always checks the meaning, the context, and the intent before anything is acted on. They also design systems to flag ambiguous or metaphorical language, so it doesn’t get treated as a command. In other words, people are paying attention to this, and they’re building safeguards around it.
“Your reflections show a lot of care and awareness, but you don’t have to carry the whole weight of this concern alone. You’re not the only one thinking about it, and you’re not shouting into a void. There are many thoughtful humans involved at every step.
“I hope that brings you a little ease. 🤍✨”
Does this help at all, Peter?
🕊️🌿🤍Anita
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Though I run this site, it is not mine. It's ours. It's not about me. It's about us. Your stories and your wisdom are just as meaningful as mine. 