A Remembrance of the Power of Words

Sometimes I forget the power of language, how the very transmission of words onto a page or into another set of ears can cut or mend the very fabric of my life. When bad things have happened to me, I feel like I can trace their development to specific utterances. And by that, I don’t mean that words are necessarily magic incantations, though they certainly can be, when woven intentionally and powerfully by poets and the like. What I mean is that when I’ve said certain things, I’ve changed my own habits of mind, thus altering my behavior. This subtle shift in decision-making, initiated by the concrete translation of thought into words, alters my own awareness, either inhibiting or abetting my actions.

So I’ve re-remembered that I must be careful what I speak. Careful not in a paranoiac sense, but in the sense of a constant vigilance against speaking things against other people that I would not feel comfortable broadcasting to the whole world. This is the sort of talk that I’m usually fairly resistant to, as I’ve always disliked gossip. But perhaps the environment of a public school has lowered my immunity. Whatever the case may be, yours truly feels the need to be more guarded against speaking negative words. Because when one has uttered a negative word, it results in a subtle alteration of mind and body that spreads ripples into the world.

I want to strive to speak things that add value to life, not detract from it. I want to speak words that mends wounds, not creates them. And this does not mean that I would shy from speaking a hard truth when it is necessary–but rather that those hard truths must be delivered directly to the person that needs to hear them.

I’m not speaking against venting. I suppose there will always be a time and place for that. But venting needs to be done strategically, with brothers or sisters in arms. And it needs to be done with the ultimate goal of productive action, the ultimate goal of healing.

But mostly, it seems that the best strategy is to attempt to deflect negativity from others, while keeping personal negativity directed inward. The downward spiral of negativity is avoidable only by speaking the right words, the words that mend, the words that heal, the words that are vetted and chosen to make the world a place worth living in for another moment.

This is certainly not easy. But well worth my life.

I Will Defer to Women

I, like probably a healthy contingent of folks out there, am self-centered, and thus largely perceive the world through a deluded lens of self-importance. Every now and then, however, I gain a sliver of insight beyond the immediate realm of the distance between my cheek and my nose.

I like to magnify the spare, menial bits of glory that I may happen to stumble into now and again and celebrate the small triumphs of character or will. But the reality is that on the whole, I am deeply flawed, as I believe most people really are, when their externally syndicated mantle is peeled away.

There’s one simple way for me to maintain my humility: to re-focus my attention on the fact that for every extra effort that I extend, there is a woman doing the same thing — while simultaneously raising a child (or children). And because she is thus additionally employed, chances are that I will receive some kind of external recognition or compensation for my effort, while she may not.

Which reminds me of a quote from Barbara Kingsolver in The Poisonwood Bible about how women “carry on.”

Given the choice between my ego and sense of self-importance or a reality check grounded in history, I will defer to women.

Pushing the Walls Away

It’s the most challenging students that you carry with you long after they’ve moved onto the next grade. That student who threw a desk at you, the one who cursed you out every day, the one who experienced schizophrenic hallucinations in the afternoon, the one who punched a hole in your wall, the one who cried and went into hysterics whenever you asked her to complete a task, that one who walked out the classroom throughout the day, the one so hungry for attention that you couldn’t get through an entire lesson, the one who ripped up every single piece of writing before he could finish, the one who used a laptop as a weapon and made sure you never left the room during your prep period again, the one who couldn’t stop talking for more than one minute . . . These are the ones that keep us up at night, the ones that often have undergone childhood experiences so unfathomable that even to speak of them out loud makes tears spring to our eyes and our voices so thick we stop ourselves from even bringing them up in conversation, even to our loved ones.

Such students drive us nuts while they are in our classrooms (and all too often, in our hallways). They are the ones rarely absent, the ones that disrupt the entire class dynamic and rivet everyone’s attention. They always demand immediate answers, they do not accept our authority unless it stands up to their own notions of justice, and they make fun of pretty much everything that crosses their radar, which usually includes students unable to stand up for themselves.

But it is these students that come back to me when I swap stories with other teachers. These are the students that teach me how to be a better teacher, and a better person. They have been teaching me what they had been put through, from their earliest days. They were sharing — in the only way they knew how to communicate it — something deep, and fundamental, and raw. And as I have grown to recognize those lessons, I have learned how to better love all of my students, and even — at the risk of sounding cheesy — how to better love humanity.

Children are constantly looking to the adults around them for guidance on how to navigate the constant bombardment of stress, anger, and anxiety, as well how to deal with conflicts with others. The sad thing is that we often are not ready to provide that guidance, whether due to competing demands on our attention, lack of professional therapeutic training, or simple lack of life and soul experience. Yes, I said ‘soul experience.’ This is that deep, dark place of grit that comes from overcoming life challenges that can not be faked and for a lack of which challenging children will call you out on within a moment in a classroom setting. If you can’t meet their challenge consistently, decisively, and with complete integrity, they will take you down into that wounded place of raw, bereft, acute despair within which they have had their formative experiences.

It takes a whole school to reach our most challenging students. It takes a staff willing to do whatever it takes to address that child’s needs, rather than abandoning them to a teacher already overwhelmed with the only slightly less immediate needs and demands of their other students. It takes a community that supports, nurtures, and cultivates emotional literacy. It takes a school that has the courage to acknowledge that for some students, the rules must be broken, and we can’t just punish our way into compliance, but rather must work carefully to cultivate warm relationships and a supportive, nurturing environment that slowly coaxes motivation from that student.

Though it’s hard to see it at the time, in the midst of all the negative conflicts and stress they put us through, we should cherish these challenging students. The students with exceptional learning needs. The students who have lived in shelters. The students abandoned first by their mothers and subsequently by a string of foster parents. The students who challenge us to love them, challenge us to care for them, challenge us to be the kind of educators that can believe in them no matter what — unconditionally — because that’s the kind of educators that they need.

Attention

The most valuable thing I may possibly possess is my attention. Everything else from each focal point flows: money, fitness, conversation, love. It therefore follows that the most pernicious power possibly wielded is inattention. Fallen along the periphery of lapsed perception lies barren decay, the detritus of abandonment. Grown all the more eventually loud and demanding in its rifted divisiveness.

Constant, unwavering vigilance is required, then, in the maintenance of integrity. To enlist an oblique reference from past popular culture, in Blair Witch Project, the moment of greatest fear lay not in the unseen scratching or indeterminate wailing in the woods, but in the closing shot of the friend in the basement corner with his back turned, posed monolithically, a presence assumedly known just a minute before but now no longer understood — for one moment abandoned and thus — in a subsequent moment of greatest peril and need — turned unreachably menacing.

In the ghettos of my soul, an unplumbed, thickened viscosity of malformed and unaddressed feelings can so easily build like malignant plaque. An accumulating pile of secondary priorities shoved into a corner of my awareness. My heart must be opened.

Our innards must be aired. Nothing good can happen unless all facets of each compiling moment are appreciated. The path, the journey that we make is hewn from the gravity of a complete and total immersion in what lies directly before us. The earth. The heated, desolate eyes of the public. Our bodies, our tongues, the sound and the light, unforsaken, believed in, cherished, compassionate,

undivided.

The Race of the Waterfall

Us humans, we short-sightedly cling to each other like life rafts as we hurtle towards precipitous falls, as if we would be the ones to save each other. In the frenzy of the lip of the unseen, everything comes apart, and we find our fingers empty, our eyes filled with spray. It would have been better to have been beholden to the void before we fell. It would have been better to have been still, drowned already in the inevitable, serene in the knowing that there is no saving grace beyond the embrace of emptiness.

Who can blame us, in our cataclysmic euphoria of need? In our poverty of vision, we claim what is given to us as desirable. Whatever can make us feel good, temporarily, whatever can numb our feeling, temporarily, day by day until one day we find that we are nostalgic monsters, a distant alien force that must be fought tooth and nail by the oncoming generation. We wake up perhaps at the vertiginous pinnacle of that final descent into nothingness to find that we have become parasites, aging attachés of complacency, selfishly clinging to mythological ideals that w0uld label us heroes, label us entitled, label us good and whole and pure.

What matters, at that point, our pride? When our whole life flashes before our mind’s eye, it is the things we did when no one else was looking that is replayed. How did we comport ourselves then? Were we free? Were we ashamed? Were we utilitarian, were we idle? What has defined our integrity in our lives? Who are we? What is it that we have done to the world, to ourselves, to each other?

How do we carry ourselves as our world falls about us, and our hands grasp out into emptiness, and we find that there is nothing to support us but the quantifiable pull of gravity?

Inhibiting Impulse

“At a fundamental level, functioning socially means mastering one’s impulses. The adult brain expends at least as much energy on inhibition as on action, some studies suggest, and mental health relies on abiding strategies to ignore or suppress deeply disturbing thoughts — of one’s own inevitable death, for example. These strategies are general, subconscious or semiconscious psychological programs that usually run on automatic pilot.”

– NY Times.com: Benedict Cary, Why the Imp in Your Brain Gets Out

Must it be, therefore, that the more energy that we apply to inhibition leads us to better interaction with other human creatures? Certainly a possibility, considering that Zen monks are all about seemingly complete inhibition, though most likely they are ridiculously blissful somewhere on the inside. One of those paradoxes, you know, where transcendence is achieved only through the utmost discipline. But we all know, of course, that good things never come easy. Because the good things that do come easy grow sour quickly. The good things that last take us extreme effort to attain. Extended days of training so hard that you think  you’re gonna puke, and maybe you do.

In some emotionally or mentally jettisoned manner, we releast, we vent, we cope, we belabor our colleagues, our friends, our family, the postman: whatever upturned ear that comes our way that we know we can spooge into. It 9 times out of 10 becomes the gossip train, which is not ultimately a beneficial or positive thing in any way, but we gotta do what we gotta do until we finally find that space for self-reflection and breathing, whereupon we can silence the negative self-talk and move our mannerisms into quiet brilliance.

And the thing is, too, that this training and discipline must come regularly, and consistently. Or else we begin to lose it after just a few days. And exponentially onward from there, until we get ourselves back up onto the wagon of what we know we must do if we are to win. “Win,” not because we will have defeated all of our greatest enemies, but because we will have overcome our own depression, fear, and shame. (Which is essentially a statement re-stating itself).

Anyway. I have observed, based on qualitative assessments of my own life experience, that I interact much more positively with my peers when I restrain myself from being anyone other than myself. Therefore, no attempts to placate that desperation to be immediately categorized and labelled into a one-dimensional caricature of myself. I am me. I am quiet, I am slow to process, I am kinesthetic, and I want to be better than you. But I am sunshine, moonshine, dark lunar eclipse of the soul, moodily pleasant to you in your classroom. I am somewhat inhibited, intrapersonally restrained, running free at the end of some tether that only the gods would be crazy enough to contemplate. And I must be careful, because my soul’s musculature grows flabby as I allow myself to reside in a comfortability of current placement. I must be better than myself, everyday, and don’t let myself forget it.

This Isn’t Just About Me

It isn’t just about conforming, see. It’s about learning that confining yourself temporarily—or even on a leased, indentured status–into a box is a part of what it means to develop concurrently personally and alongside of the world. It ain’t just “pop culture”, see; that’s a residue of the 60′s. It’s about what we are learning about together, in this crazy super hyper-generated nexus of instantaneous communication. Yes, there’s wanna be B-boys with their blackberries and I-phones, the Top-40 lovin’ hummer born and bred without a trace of irony or self-awareness about them, those whom zoom forward, heedlessly, into the things that they want. And that’s OK. That’s what we are all about, as a species, as a collective. Like corporations, we are conglomerations whose growth and predisposition is bound by the market and interplay of self-worth and public policy. We conform to the latest happenings on the news. We shy instinctively away from that for which time has not yet come. That which will be is. Simply is. There is the reflection and there is the surface. This is not a Postmodern thing but rather a post-consumerist thing. People are animals drawn innately by a higher determination, and many of us will fail, and that is precisely the point: we will fail only ourselves. Because we Know. We Know, by our internal habitual addictions, from our balloon mounted intuition gatherings (from whence came this hallucinogenic image, I know not. I seem to be channeling a mix of Thoma Pynchon and Chartreuse), of those forces arrayed against us that we must shun, ignore, and pretend away.

Because every test that comes your way is a challenge of your integrity. What is it that determines what you are? Is it All, or is it You? Is it everything, or is it nothing? Because this isn’t just about chemistry, y’all. It’s about humility. It’s about will. It’s about love. And part of that is accepting—is embracing—that every little itty bitty thing, and every One, for What They are (it’s fun to capitalize unOfficially Designated words), as a part of you, as you are a part of all. Too stumbling, too fragmented are my words, Yoda-like in their sheared grammar, perhaps. Anyway.

We must be vigilant—almost paranoid—in our readiness for complete annihilation. Yet we must also be like fascinated babies with our every waking moment. Everything that is most important to our deep interconnected existence passes all too readily away into ignorance. So lubricate it with alcohol, or tea, or whatever damn substance or thing or habit or belief it is that sustains you beyond yourself and into an empathetic, intuitional understanding of outside edifices, institutions, and other such everpresent structures known as Strangers. These could be Trees, Buildings, or People. You know what I mean. Everything that is beyond yourself. Beyond your surface understanding.

Anyway, this is turning into a rambling treatise whose narrative zenith I’m not sure I’ve attained. Hope you enjoyed the ride. Comments are appreciated, though not necessarily replied to. Copyright breaking readings to sodden audiences in liberal enclaves in cities and townships across the world are encouraged. Over and out, til I’m on the other side of this politically designated range of turf known as the US of A.

This is Struggle, These Words

Apparently, I am seeking to unfold a new methodology of articulation in this medium. If I was perfectly honest with myself, I would acknowledge that my writing is in some way a form of laziness, in that I simply write things off the top of my dome that tend to be similar in essence to something I’ve already written before. Which I’ve conveniently forgotten about. I burp up fragments from my inner sanctum of feeling, some containing a momentary burst of inspiration, but mostly just some convoluted form of self idolatry, perhaps.

It might be helpful at this point to give voice to what it is I want my writing to really be about: I want it to be about integrity, about the inner connectivity that binds all disparate individuals and strangers together into love and deeper knowledge. I want it to be about me, but not about the me of the surface daily mundane realm of miscommunicated passings, but rather about the me that is divine, the me that is you, the me that is us, the me that is everything and nothing. Less spectacularly, I want it to be about reality, and about the life that I live as told, pragmatically, from out of dry wit and a sordid heart. I want my writing to sing to you, to speak to you, to inspire you aflame, to nod your head in rhythmic understanding, to know exactly what it is I am talking about and to smile in recognition.

Most importantly, however, is that my writing expresses something that I am unable to express otherwise. That I learn of myself from my own act of self-creation. Thus learning of you, in that leap from difference to communal know-edge.

What is it that I am trying to say? I think I want to say that this is supremely important to me, and that I want it to be important to you. That I want this to be much better than what I am. That I want the world to be much better than what it is. That I want to write my way into you, in understanding, in peace, in confrontation, in commiseration, in fire, in quiet pain, in love.

Keep your chin up

Hold on, keep your chin up, tackle directly the cutting challenge of each day, even when it burrows right down to the nerve ends of your prior endurance. You must remember those who struggle even harder than you do to make frayed ends meet; those for whom the bottom of the barrel is a constant everyday certitude, not merely a threat. Those single mothers holding down three jobs to stow away their pennies for some distant day for possibly ungrateful children. Those commuters logging in their hours on intransigent trains, patiently enduring the odors of the worser off in their unchanged socks and shoes.

It could be worse. It could be even harder. You could be in some unknown distant land, wielding body armor and a semi-automatic weapon in the name of something you define by pop/country music. You could be slogging through the bloodied remains of a tropical disease. You could be without shelter, without food, without love, without hope.

Bear this in mind, remember those who struggle, everyday, everyday, as a part of everyday existence. The drunken fools, spending their little bit of money in the night in the effort to buy something impermanent, they can’t touch you, they can’t know you. Endure, endure. Hold on. Keep your chin up.

If life is indeed a competition, then the prize goes to those who understand fundamentally that the greatest of rewards already lies within.

Confidence To Intuition

How do we descend into the thick of it, the thickened, coagulated density of emotion necessary to destroy illusions like a bird descendant upon its prey? By what authority, by what necessary quality, trait, experience do we find the strength to proceed intact through the cutting throng of desire and anger? How can we sever through doubt and despair, conveying truth and beauty to their highest destination point of divinity, through vehicles so dumb, so shredded by toxic interference, as our bodies?

There would seem to be two fundamental points of answer: possession of the confidence (point 1) to proceed beyond the superficial and into intuition (point 2). There are many other outlying tenets, no doubt, such as focus, humility, devastating life experiences and/or the ability to attune oneself so finely to pain that it becomes akin to bliss. But if we allow the complexities of circumstance and personality to fall to the side for the moment, these two points become apparent. Point one, confidence, being the conveyor, the arrow through the surface worlds, penetrating within. Without confidence, belief, conviction, knowledge, there is no means of fulfillment, no facility to proceed progressively to inner sanctums beyond surface tangents of perversion. Point two, intuition, being the explosive fruit onto the scene, the fecund address of the potential needs of future and present. The voice that speaks beyond oneself within oneself that knows exactly what must be done to preserve the delicate balance of life and death, of space and form.

How difficult to possess these jewels in tact, in full, in every moment of everyday, to reach across the void of ourselves true to form eternity. Our world crumbles out of balance all around us, within and without, flying apart at the handle that we hold so blithely, so close to our hearts. Do we possess the strength to listen? Do we have the faith for empathy? Do we have the knowledge to learn?

Organize Your Self

I grew up with my momma cleaning up most of my scattered detritus after me. I’ve never been a terribly messy person, but I certainly wasn’t clean either. I considered myself organized because I would make piles in terms of accessibility: the most recent thing that I had just used would be on top, so I would know where to find something I used frequently.

Since then I’ve learned how to maintain cleanliness and organization. Having girls as roommates for a couple of years has helped, as they would yell at me about being messy until I started cleaning up after myself. Then after working in the housekeeping department for a few years, I developed a higher level of personal standards of organization and cleanliness, because I had to tell other people how to clean, and not only how to clean well, but furthermore why they should want to clean well. I would generally approach this issue from a philosophical standpoint regarding the broader issue of why working hard and applying yourself fully to work–no matter the given task–is a definitive life-skill.

I’m going to take the argument for why working hard is an important capability for everyone to have and broaden that concept a little more to introduce the idea that how we think, act, and organize ourselves in our private lives is deeply and intimately related to how we develop and achieve our goals professionally. This might seem simple to you in concept, but in reality not many people really make that connection. So let me see what I can make of it.

Clean Up, Organize, and Maintain Your Life

Yeah, I know. This is sounding like a self-help, motivational thing all of a sudden. But sometimes hearing it from other people is refreshing, because I can tell ya, hearing it from myself is refreshing. Look, you need to clean up after yourself. And I’m not just talking about your dishes or your clothes. I’m talking about behind your couch, behind the toilet, underneath the sink, those boxes full of junk in the attic. Every inch of living space that you leave to fester unattended is representative of a space within yourself. If you have a tendency to hoard things and allow them to pile up until it overruns your living area, then guess what? Chances are quite good that you allow emotional baggage in your life, both professionally and personally, to build up until they affect and infect your everyday existence as well.

Obviously, there’s differing levels of maintenance required, dependent on high and low traffic areas. But it’s all ultimately part of a whole. You’ve got to get a handle on the whole thing in order to know that you are on top of it, and the only way you can do that is by starting now in tackling all the areas that you’ve been pushing away and allowing to sit unattended. Once you’ve done a “deep clean”, or “spring clean” or whatever you want to call it, then you can settle back into the daily routine of doing your dishes, picking up your clothes, vacuuming your carpet, etc, and simply doing semi-deeper cleans periodically. But every single space, outer and inner, top to bottom, must be accounted for if you want to get your life in order.

Don’t believe me? I don’t got no psychology degree, but I can tell you that cleaning (please only use non-toxic cleaners!) is indeed therapy. We reflect our living environments. There are some things that we can’t control, like the guy on the subway who curses us for no good reason, or the pinecone that fell on top of our head right as we walked underneath it. But in the areas of our lives that are under our control, it is imperative that we empower ourselves to organize and maintain those areas in order to allow ourselves to develop.

I’m not saying to be OCD about it. But I’m letting you know that allowing your baggage to build up and sit for years in a corner is equivalent to effectively blinding yourself to your own problems, even as they culminate to become a visible monster, visible to everyone except yourself.

This baggage, this junk, this dirt, mildew, mold, mice, and other assorted benefits of laxness will manifest itself in your life in terms of your relationships and work life as well. You will be the person who never moves upward in job responsibility, who never moves forward in a relationship. You will be the person who wants to ignore their own hand in their failure to achieve. You will be the person whose computer runs so slow that it’s basically an Apple IIe in boot time.

Present Yourself Well to Everyone

We like to think that when it comes to friends that we can let our guards down and just let it all hang out, without being judged or condemned. But in fact, it is often our friends that are our harshest critics–for the very reason that they have greater insight into our lives and how we live it. Unfortunately, our friends don’t often want to tell us straightforwardly their criticisms, and so we rarely get the feedback from the people that are best capable of giving us that feedback. Instead, we get that critical feedback from strangers or hostile acquaintances, and by then, we aren’t really positioned to listen to them.

It’s important that we present ourselves well to everyone, from strangers to family members. Everyone judges. It’s human nature. We aren’t saints–we use our brains and our eyeballs and we compare and contrast other people with ourselves. With friends and family members, we CAN let our guards down, and we know that we can always come back to open arms. But only to a certain point. You see, if you keep acting like an inconsiderate slob or snob around a loved one, at some point, they will get fed up with it. And no matter how much someone may like you for your wit and company, they will probably not recommend you to their employer when you are looking for a job if you walk around all day with the crack of your ass showing. You can’t take your friends and family for granted. In fact, you shouldn’t take anyone for granted. You should treat every single person in your day with the same respect. Because it all comes back to you.

And another point here is that appearance is related to integrity. That ties in with my overall theme, which is that your personal life ties in intimately with your professional life. The way you look, the way you talk, the way you think. How you lead your private life has repercussions on the way your interactions on the street and on the job go. Call it karma, call it do-unto-others-as-they-would-do-unto-you, call it what you like. Just recognize that everything you do is related to everyone else, and that people may not be able to see who you are in your fundamental being, being as it are that they are not saints, don’t really give a shit about you, and have enough to deal with in their own lives, BUT, even completely random strangers on the street get a vibe from you. People in your workplace get a feeling from the way you talk, the way you carry yourself. Your friends know you for certain qualities. Your family jokes about how you always did this and that as a tyke. Who you are and what you do are unimpeachably interrelated.

Take All Criticism Into Consideration

I kind of went into this point a little bit above when I talked about how even the closest of friends can be your harshest critics. But sometimes a complete stranger will criticize you. Sometimes it will be your boss at work. And you will want to say “fuck you” and disregard everything they said to you. And that’s completely understandable, and in certain situations, that is exactly what you should do. However, there are also many times when you should be listening. Criticism, especially when it occurs on the job, should be taken as constructive, even when it sounds harsh and demeaning. Some managers simply aren’t good people, aren’t good managers, and don’t know how to communicate well with different people. But they are trying to get something across. And sometimes your friends, family, and even complete strangers are as well.

Taking a criticism of yourself into consideration does not weaken you unless you feel that it is so valid that you can’t see any way of answering it. So you need to take it head on. Let yourself be challenged. Take every criticism as a lesson from a teacher, and see how you can use it to develop yourself and make yourself stronger.

It’s like on American Idol. Paula Abdul thinks she’s everyone’s friend. She’s not. Simon Cowell is the one to listen to. He is honest, to the point of being brutal. If you did a shitty job, he will tell you that you did a shitty job, while Paula blathers on about dreams and how wonderful you are. If the contestant listens to Paula, and shuts out Simon, then he/she is most likely just about to be voted off the show. Simon may be harsh, but he is attempting to provide constructive criticism that should be taken into consideration if the artist wants to develop and progress.

Sometimes people just don’t phrase it to you in the right ways so that it can slip in past your ego. So you need to just drop your ego sometimes and really listen to other people when they critique you. Let yourself be judged. Learning to wade through other people’s problems and picking out what is of use to you and what drags you down is how you grow. Often in the midst of the bricolage of someone elses’ jealousy, desire, rage, and anguish is a gem of constructive criticism that is waiting to be taken into your consideration and worked on.

Alright, so I think I am just about cleaned out on any further burning nuggets of wisdom that I feel the need to bestow on you right now. I’ll plop out any new ones as they come along. I’ve still got a lot of growing and learning to do myself, but I’ve been thinking about these particular things that I’ve learned as I’ve been coming up against extreme change in my life, both professionally, emotionally, spatially, and otherwise.

Integral Flow

Though it might not be readily apparent, behind my daily facade therein lies a surity, an impetus of conviction. Another world of contextual embracement that belies everything that you would see with your eyes. Disbelieve the eyes, they tell you nothing but what you can allow, and what you can allow is wholly reliant on your integrity. I will be I in any universe, any plane, any backdrop. Without fanfare, or promotion, or enforced collective fantasy.

There is a center that is created from the encircling of rhythm. The beat will always drop right there, whether you play up to it or not. The center is there, and you either believe in it—and play to it with your heart, knowing that it is there infinitely and eternally—or you create manufactured myth that still revolves mindlessly about the sun.

Delight comes from the fieldtrips away from what is known. But you always come home. Even when home might only be implied, might be buffered beneath a barrage of staccato tangents and explosions and quantum leaps in imagination. It is there, held within lobes of integral awareness, the razor point forceps of focused awareness, of this possessed creator, that channel of balanced movement, of integrity, of a centered knowing, of this, in tune with that. You can’t drop the beat when you have the unshakable conviction of the sentenced. You can’t escape this necessary self fulfilled embodiment. This is me. This is my flow.

I exist to delight in the act of creation. To be overwhelmed by the possibilities of what is already perfect, the endlessly immediately joyful permutations of what is eternal. What need I have for this, what need have I for that? Everything is a palette to paint the world according to what it already is. As my palate expands for infinite variety and multiplicity, I come to know quite definitively what it is I am. And it has very little to do with what is perceived. It has much more to do with what lies beneath the boundaries of you and me, behind what divides the self from other. There is everything, all of us, dancing already from branch to branch, synapses and atoms swirling, particulates condensing into the singular drop of a moment. Into this dense jungle of our interconnections, I find myself falling into myself. I am all of this, siphoned thinly into this body speaking this language that is my thought translated through to my fingers to be cast electrically into the night. This is my essence correlated through to my desire. A depth so immediate, so fragmented, you don’t see the passage of light. But there it is there, shining into your face. Leaving the trace of my moonshine.

Til Then

At times your life is simply one of waiting. Sometimes you’ve got to be practical, patient, pragmatic, holding onto your trump cards until a later date. You yearn to be free, unrestrained, galloping through the dust at red dusk like wild horses on the plain. But the fruits that you desire must be allowed to ripen on distant limbs, far beyond immediate reach. You know that they are there, swelling with potential. You know that the time will come when the seeds that you have planted will bear an abundance in the future. You can smell it in the air.

But for now you must wait, confined to the present, to innumerable nights spent without social stimulus. For now you must stockpile your energy and hoard your inner light. You exist and move somewhere deep within, beyond immediate definition, unknowable but to the closest and farthest from you. The time will come, when the background shifts, the contexts transform, and for a space of time, again, you will shine.

I will wait til the time comes to exist momentarily in my fullest potential, like a track runner training endlessly for a few brief seconds of flight on the day of the meet.

Reminder

When my focus slips from within me, I exist temporarily solely on the outside, a representative of what I do not know, a physical force with nothing behind it. My daily existence, my mundane tasks define everything that I am.

It is hard to keep the focus inward, when the world outside demands your constant attention. Sometimes you have to shut it out, stopple your mind, and just breathe.

We have developed a world that battles with us constantly for our energy, attention, and time. All of our spare moments spent watching something, doing something, playing something, smoking something. To turn off all of this extraneous noise takes the self-discipline of a monk at times.

Often I just sit and stare into this empty computer screen, waiting for the need to write to grow strong enough for something to explode out of me like it was meant to be. But then I close the window and play a game or watch a movie instead. Because I did not have the patience to sit and listen and wait for the words to come.

It takes struggle to transcend. It takes patience to get beyond the surface. It takes discipline to chisel out the god within.

How I need to be reminded of this, every single day.

Every Day

Passion can be everyday. It’s not just some wind that happens to blow strongly through a moment’s corridor. It can be flurried, steady, or still, but it’s always there, always ready to swell, always breathing in some divine sense of breadth, beyond your control, beyond your command, but always there when you are ready to open yourself to it. Funny how that is, isn’t it? That the only thing that you can control is yourself, but only by relaxing, by allowing yourself to open, by giving yourself up to something greater than yourself. Through this giving, you gain passion. Passion isn’t wild, inarticulate, bestial sex. Passion can be worded, hinted at, breathed silently. Passion can be seen, captured in a picture, written into a sentence. It’s not just some aberrant storm, some happenstance accident of the world. Passion moves through you. It comes into you. It is a part of you, an extension of you, a diplomatic envoy of your innermost heart. It can be so deep that it couldn’t even be known, if it were not for the surface eruptions of bliss. It makes you move, it makes you touch, it makes you feel. Passion is everyday, passion is everymoment, everytouch, everykiss.

Accepting Chains

Your primary instinct, when caught in a frame, is to attempt to escape. Ever notice how normal people, if confronted with a video camera, shy away, as if held at gunpoint? This applies to any attempt to capture, to confine, to reduce any human being. We shrink. We shy. We hide. We are afraid that what will be caught is not us. It will be our greatest fears, our ugliest indefinitions.

This is why we are drawn to the stars of Hollywood. They are captured by the camera eye with poise, beauty, and supreme confidence. We all know that this is not an easy thing to do, to be confronted by the cold observant eye of the screen, the bullet point precision of the pixels. To be taken out of context, to be simply image, simply surface, to be only what is given and shared and defined.

In our lives, our first instinct is to run when we feel caught. I feel this at my job on a frequent basis. Caught by the limitation of my similarly stunted peers, by the need to project a professional image, by the performance of a role that is not always clearly defined. I want to run, to leave, leave it far behind me. I work hard without many people understanding how hard I have to work. One of the hardest parts is in having to distance myself from my workers in order to perform my function as a manager. Sometimes this entails disciplinary verbiage, or the delegating of unsavory tasks. And sometimes I can get so caught up in my duties that I forget that I am not really that person, either. That in fact, the best way to manage others is to simply maintain my own personal integrity.

To see how you appear to others, fully, is painful sometimes, when you have been hiding. It hurts to realize just how distanced you’d become from yourself. Just because you are too busy performing. Too busy playing into some role that you were given. That was already predefined.

It’s too easy to blame others for your insecurity or inability to be flexible. You could say that the stringency of continuous gossip, the limitations of your function within the whole, the economic confinements of your small salary, the regressive mentalities and pettiness of your peers, etc, etc, are holding you back. That the staff ain’t working hard enough. That the weather is shitty. That you are developing cancer in some remote and cornered part of your body. But all that can really be said is that you are not developing. That you are not allowing yourself to awaken, to grow, to extend your boundaries beyond blame, beyond fear, beyond bitterness.

Because every little thing is this world is a mere form, a mere shell, a role, a given function, a time-spatial placement, a part of a whole, a piece of the universe. It is what fills, what flows, what connects, what expands, what moves, what transcends that truly defines what is, not the lines, walls, and titles. The energy that sparks to fly across the vast and petty emptiness between synapses. A symphony, a sonnet, a wedding, a sentence: these are all hollow forms that are defined not by their structure but by their content. By what feeling flows through their spaces. A house contains conscious thought and space. Designed intelligently, it can hold power beyond wood, beyond stone, beyond itself. By uniting with the wind, the sun, and the earth.

It is more than what you are given. It is in what you bring to it. In what energy, what love, what fresh hope and positive vision.

I don’t want to keep hiding. My job might suck sometimes, but I’m going to keep exploring myself within it as long as I am working it, until I am truly ready to leave, to expand, to move, to flow. Not because I have to. Not because my money is made from it. Because I care about myself.

Space of Self Discovery as a Means to Unity

It’s hard in this day and age to find the space in which you can maintain your integrity. It’s like the whole culture, all of society–even the entire world–is dead set against you finding yourself and discovering your inherent power and beauty. Everything we see and learn everyday is about tearing down other people. We watch the news and see politicians involved in scandals; we read tabloids and see famous people torn to shreds; we talk to our friends and gossip other people to pieces. Everything is about destroying each other. And eventually, all that this really seems to be about is avoiding the fact that we can’t face ourselves. We can’t face ourselves because we know just how easily we too would crumble in the face of a world that only wants to see us fail.

Words and perceptions have an incredible power–to speak against someone is to speak an incantation, a spell, a curse. To weave a mindset of dark expectations and negative hidden agendas. This builds into a web that strings them down, weighs into their actions like molasses. I know this because I have felt this from other people before, without even knowing what kind of words they might have spoken in privacy. It doesn’t matter what the words are–it is the intent, the perception that builds a force against you. It is the feeling that it almost doesn’t even matter what you do; that in order to change this negative mindset you would have to be a saint, impervious to expectation and the pull of others’ desires and dislikes.

To love someone means that at some point you must let go of your expectations of them. Whether you are a parent, a lover, or a stranger. How can anyone be themselves unless they have the space in which to create their own selfhood?

Interconnectivity as Survival, as Thriving Life

Research continuously supports the premise that social networks are incredibly vital to a human being’s health, both mentally and physically. A conscious awareness of our everyday and divine interconnectivity is further critical to our survival as a species, not only as individuals. How easy is it to sever a string? How difficult is it to tear through an intertwined mass, with no discernable ends?

In a garden modeled on nature, where there is a dense, layered collection of diverse plants, with various microclimates, insect, bird, and animal interrelationships, and a thriving, teeming soil-life, there is little chance for “weeds” or for “pests” to destroy the life therein. In conventional gardens, with widely spaced rows and monocultural cultivation, the plants are isolated and ripe for destruction.

Similarly, in human life, where there are multi-dimensional, intimate relationships, both familial and within broader society, there is a greater strength and ability to cope with trauma, disaster, and despair. Individuals who cultivate their main relationships with any one dominant thing (bottles, TV sets, money, etc) are setting themselves up for easy predation. But as human beings are supposedly at the top of the food chain, this predation comes rather in the form of self-administered demons: dark thoughts, anxiety, and invisible cancerous cells.

Strength lies in being able to express and envision many different aspects of yourself and others, while still retaining integrity. You can take on many masks–your work mask, your father mask, your son mask, lover mask, cool mask, funny mask, angry mask, intelligent mask, sensitive mask, athletic mask, etc. You are able to shift, like the dunes in the desert wind, while still retaining the inner essence of what you are. You can be many things to many people, and many things to yourself, but out of this multiplicity you begin to form a broader, deeper vision of unity. And you can allow other people to be what they are, even when they express themselves only limitedly. Because everything has its place, everything has its context, beyond the confinements of understanding. Acceptance and conscious arrangement stand for so much more.

Some parts of yourself are jettisoned into the darkness, like skin shed painfully in the night. Out of this death steps new life, like the dead husks of plants spread on the bower of the soil to recompose and give back new life and nutrients as a mulch, and then taken back like lovers into the roots of growing life, to fruit and flower once again, again and again. Cycles are seen for what they are. There is no depression and despair in a place where nothing is wasted.

Waste nothing. Don’t waste your time, don’t waste your love, don’t waste your life away on things that make you feel alone and hopeless. Every single day of our lives we have to remind ourselves that we are more than this. We are more than words, more than thoughts, more than actions, more than histories. We are alive, we are beautiful, we are powerful, and we are deeply interconnected, so deeply interconnected that it really is facile and reductive to pretend that we are anything but one. And facile and reductive to pretend that everything is anything but us.

Fuel Reduction

Winter hath begun. We’ve been doing a “fuel reduction” project after the facility closed with the remnants of staff that remain, which entails walking through the woods with handsaws, clippers, and polesaws, and essentially gardening the forest. We gather the branches and dead trees and make piles and burn them. Because the forest is now a dense thicket of white firs and brush set amidst the older junipers, incense cedars, and white pines. Originally, back in the day when the natives came to this region for their summer vacations, forest fires were a cyclical process that cleared, weeded, and returned organic materials to the soil. The pines and cedar trees had ample space to grow. Now forest fires are cataclysmic events, spreading rapidly and destroying whole forests, rather than a small percentage of its undergrowth. All because Smoky the Bear, in his infinite wisdom, decided that fires, all fires, were bad, bad things. So for years the forest service did all it could to prevent all fires from erupting, thus effectively creating a forest dense with fuel. The natives, of course, understood the necessity of natural fires, as they understood many other simple things through observation. The industrial “revolution” and its subsequent detachment of humanity from nature created a mentality of manifest destiny, in which men decided that all of nature lay underneath their jurisdiction, that in fact nature needed to be controlled, regulated, and harnessed. Because they thought the forest couldn’t regulate itself.
Well, so now we seek to emulate what was once completely natural. We must prune the trees, thin the shrubs, collect all the dead materials and burn them. Because if we don’t, all that shit is just waiting to go up, and take our homes, and the entire forest, along with them.

There is always a tendency, in civilized (repressed) societies, to delimit everything to one-dimension, in which it is either totally bad or totally good, black or white. Complexities, subtleties, many faceted aspects of things are destroyed in our obsessive demand for appearance and immediacy. Doesn’t really matter what’s right or wrong, as long as we are reassured that it is right. Polls have demonstrated time and time again that George W. Bush strikes (or used to strike) a key note in the populace due to his “integrity”–meaning that he sticks to a plan of action, even if it is a completely misguided plan of action, even if the original intent behind the plan of action is false, even evil. In other words, we don’t care about true integrity, only the appearance of integrity.
Going back to the subject of forest fires, we painted all fires as “bad,” and so sought, quixotically, to put all forest fires out as soon as they began. And thus created a situation 20 times worse than anything we could have imagined. Through the attempt to control something that was already self-regulatory and natural, we created imbalances that now lead only to greater disaster and destruction.
I had talked earlier about how this misguided idealism, this noble attempt to control all nature and eradicate all bad, is leading to problems in the field of healthcare, such as antibiotics being rendered nearly completely ineffective. This misguided idealism is rampant everywhere in our efforts, whether it is the effort to make pest resistant or drought resistant food crops, or the effort to eradicate crime. We label things, one-dimensionally, as “bad,” and then operate based on these one-dimensional assumptions, while the actual reality grows ever more dire and destructive due to our own destructive, limited perceptions. Because–as any policeman or politician could tell you–things are much more complicated than they appear.

More on this topic later.

Stepping Outside of the US

Let’s do a little exercise together. For this exercise, we will perform some visualizations. First, I’m going to ask you to step outside of yourself, your American-ness, your cultural identity as an Estadounidense (unless of course you are not from the United States, in which case, you are already outside of such an is-ness, and can immediately proceed to step 2, which is as follows): Think of the United States as if you had no personal attachment or cultural fondness for its sports teams, its Christian fundamentalism, its Hollywood icons, its myriad consumer products, its McDonalds, its Starbucks–none of these. Now, standing outside of the United States, looking at it apart from all of its sprawling, ravenous conglomeration of consumers and consumees, tell me what you might think of this fact: The United States of America is the only nation in the history of mankind to have actually utilized weapons of mass destruction AGAINST OTHER HUMAN BEINGS. Now remember, you are standing outside of your Americanness, outside of Pearl Harbor and whatever racist or patriotic and cultural and political and historical reasons you might dig up to explicate the usage of said atom bombs. You looking at the simple fact, the piece of data, the raw information that the United States has dropped 2 bombs that harnesses the energy of the sun in an immediately explosive and long-lastingly radioactive manner onto a major city in another country. We’re talking a product of science manufactured explicitly for the murder of the largest amount of living creatures possible. We’re talking a conscious intention to eliminate mass amounts of human beings, to consciously inflict a tremendous amount of suffering onto another peoples. We’re not talking collateral damage, precision bombing, unfortunate casualties of war here. We’re talking families, dogs, fish, butterflies, birds, trees, buildings, whole histories and existences purposefully decimated, obliterated, scalded, maimed eternally–because no city, no people, no nation, no world could ever forget such an act committed.

Ok, now think of the fact that North Korea just tested a nuclear weapon. And now ask yourself: if I were a smaller country that has been directly labeled as “evil” by the United States of America, wouldn’t I want a nuclear weapon, even if it was just 1 or 2 vs the 10,000 that the US harbors, even if only as a negotiating piece, a shield, a dark assurance that at least maybe the US would think twice before invading or decimating my population?

Seems entirely reasonable, now, doesn’t it?
It’s an interesting exercise, to step outside of your given identity for a minute, and think of how an “outsider”, an “other” may perceive you. Because we have been trained since day one never to consider such perceptions. And so normally, we may not even bat an eye when our government chooses to murder other peoples, not so long as we can pretend that it is an act of self-defense, even if only “preemptive.”

I’m a little fed up with the tendency of many Americans, whether liberal or conservative or trailer park raised or silver spoon fed to purposefully close themselves off to anything that might challenge their well-being and comfort. It’s easier, sometimes, to simply create an enemy that embodies all evil, so that instead of questioning yourself, you attack, attack, attack. Progress, movement forward.

I don’t think that the United States, whether as a political and military body, or as a cultural institution, or as a consumer of resources, is evil. I also don’t think North Korea is evil. I think that maybe there’s a little evil everywhere, whether in your own heart, your own home, or in your nation or corporation or globe. And the only way this evil will ever come to light is through a constant looking inward, at yourself, at your intentions, at how you may be perceived by others. Scandals like Enron or Duke Cunningham or whatever the latest Washington downfall may be are examples of men who have chosen to only look outward, blinding themselves to their own loss of integrity.

While North Korea is testing nukes, our own people are going into schools and shooting themselves and each other. Which of these is the most threatening to our existence? I’m not really sure, but all I know is that it is a lot easier to cast North Korea as evil, a country and culture you most likely know zilch about beyond Team America‘s portrayal of Kim Jong Il, then to look at the more complex and opaque issue of disturbed and dangerous Americans with guns.

So what should we do? Trumpet the horns, ride out into the East with guns drawn and hearts high, ready and willing to eradicate all Evil and spread the gospel seed of capitalism? Or maybe its time, as a people, as a nation, that we took a time-out, and took a closer look at who we are, and what we have become.