Thoughts on Communication Tools

It’s kind of weird, don’t you think, that blogging, texting, Facebooking, Twittering, etc, have become so blasé that no one thinks to even comment on these technological everyday manifestations of our interconnectivity anymore? I mean, these are things that didn’t really exist a mere 10 years ago, at least not in the form of critical mass that makes them truly meaningful in a social context. Now we take it for granted that we can constantly communicate with each other in what is tantamount to another dimension. We can convey ourselves immediately through the written word in a way never before possible, not to mention the addition of video, sound, and photos. It’s all so mundane now, but once upon a time getting onto your modem and then onto a bulletin board to share your hobby or chat with someone about something was a strange new world. Now it seems like there’s a blog for every locale, activity, and interest. And I think that’s a good thing, of course. I’m just amazed at how swiftly and easily we have taken it in stride.

What this portends, I believe, is that–contrary to the fear of a sci-fi future of disconnected blobs hiding behind self-stimulating machines–technology is evolving to enable us to connect with each other more effectively. In every type of way, both deep and shallow, both in sex and in spirit. You’ve got the guy using craigslist to find a prostitute on one hand and the mother sharing photos of her newborn baby on the other. And while there is truth to the statement that internet is the new TV–and I am guilty of wasting away far too much time doing nothing productive–the fact is that what you get out of technology is pretty much what you want to get out of it. The tools that we have at our fingertips are impressive. We can go to zoom in on a city street and find out exactly what the building looks like where we are meeting someone and what side of the street it’s on. We can look up the quote that has been bothering us and not only find out who said it, but furthermore what line on what page it was written in.

A lot of our use of this new power is purely narcissistic or for entertainment or voyeuristic, but then again, that’s what humanity is all about, aren’t we? You take a look at all the wide range of blogs out there, I mean, my god, you could write an anthropology paper on it. And yes, half the time Facebook is just people taking personality quizzes or posting status updates about how drunk they are, but it also gives you a glimpse into the lives of people who you may never have gotten to know otherwise. You may not want to talk to many people on the phone and keep up with them, but there are people that you grew up with or have met that you remember sometimes and get curious about. And it’s nice to be able to see their new baby, or to know that they moved to another city. In other words, a lot of stuff is a waste of time, but it doesn’t have to be. It’s all about how much you invest in it and how much you expect from it. It can be completely shallow, or it can be a tool to communicate things about yourself that you may not be able to otherwise.

Not everyone is effective at socializing in traditional contexts, like at a bar or even just in any face-to-face conversation. Some people just don’t understand body language, or come off as incredibly conceited, or don’t have much to say immediately. But new forms of communication allow such people to interact without confusing signals or ambient noise. Which can create some other forms of confusion, such as misunderstandings over sarcasm (hence the use of emoticons), but overall, there is the opportunity to convey many things that could not be conveyed in a traditional context.

So I’m a big fan of these developments. I feel like all these new tools are an opportunity to explore myself and others more deeply. My fiancee reads my blog and I read hers. We learn things about each other that we would never have said directly in a conversation. We announced our engagement on Facebook. So much more effective and easy than calling a bunch of people, which I never would have done anyway. And I remember farther back, when we were “going steady” or whatever the hell you call it now when you are not just hooking up with someone, how big of a step it was to change our relationship statuses on MySpace. Now look, I maligned MySpace and cellphones and every other social technological development just as much as anyone when they burst forth onto the scene. I resisted having a cellphone for years before I finally gave in. But now I obviously accept social tools for what they are, and I don’t feel weird about “advertising” my life anymore on the web. I think it’s great, that we can share so much about ourselves with each other. Is 85% of it TMI? Most definitely. But in the eyes of a god, it’s all food and fodder for understanding.

The Hollow Reed Goes to Court

I have defined myself by loneliness, a barrenness of expectancy. Any light that passes through me is not my own, I am a hollowness that is sounded by the passing breath of what the universe elects to bestow, just as it so readily and inevitably draws away, to leave me again enshrouded in silence, in the magnitude of a void that lies at the root of every being. For this solitude is not my own;  it is the very concavity of the universe, against whose form I am embedded within, a child pregnant with nothingness, like the deadened sacs of jellyfish that wash to shore, glancing in the moonlight like glass blown bubbles, a horrifically beautiful detachment of alien life forms deadened of meaning. The eye that views us wholly is not our own. It is in the distance of aqueous rock, beholden to a history that extends far beyond the parasitic need of life.

As I unravel from out of my comfortable discipline, from out of the mountainous wilderness of my solitude and into a daily existence that necessitates immediacy, haphazard intimacy, and action, I find myself flailing, looking to strike out again for the deep water, where life slows until it is still.

But I have made a choice. I have turned my back to the night and descended into the electrified city of the people, where we choose to listen to the music of our own crafting. My deepest self, rooted in empty blankness, must belatedly put on the masks of human aspiration and join in the ritual dances of the season. To become a proselytizer of the human future, laboring for fecundity. To have hope, to believe in a collective expansion of spirit, that what we take will be less than what we make.

The individual light within me has been lessened, intentionally, to make way for the lights of other people who will come with me. The one light that we shine can only be stronger, the one song that we sing can only be that much more steady, defined through the legislated breath of each other, not simply by the passing happenstance gift of the beyond.

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.

The Bigger Picture, Based on Our Current State of Affairs

Well, it’s ’bout time for me to post some thoughts about the current state of the world. I sometimes wish that I had a column in a major newspaper, so that I could generate national debate and establish talking points for The View. But, alas, my blog is just too random, too all-over-the-place, too largely mundane and only intermittently insightful, too much me, to ever hold such a place in the pantheon of established punditry. I wouldn’t have it any other way, of course. I will hold forth, in any case, as if the entire world listens attentively to my every last quest for meaning.

To the point: the major news item on our collective plate is the economy. We all know that the “bailout” plan, as it is called, is pretty much a bunch of hogwash, but we also all know that we need to do something, and not many of us are economically minded enough to know quite what that is. We just know that we want our retirement funds to stop being depleted, etc. First of all, I recommend checking in with Paul Krugman’s blog from time to time for some academic economic insight parsed down, relatively speaking, for the average Joe. He has written a short paper explaining what he thinks is going down right now, and to parse it even more simply into my own think-speak, it basically has to do with the global interdependence of financial markets. Which is why shortly after our economy started nose diving, the European economy has started feeling the effects of free-fall gravity as well.

If you follow my random output of thought consistently, then you’ve noted that I have a certain fascination with the concept of interdependence (go ahead and check out my posts filed under the topic of ‘interconnectivity‘ if you don’t believe me). I see interdependence, interconnectivity, the intwinement of multiple beings into one collective entity, as a source of greater strength. An individual vulnerability that establishes greater collective depth and power. This is the strength of the artist, the strength of the family, the strength of the nation. It makes us more open to superficial attack, but better resilient to sustained barrages.

Our economy—and hence, the global economy—is undeniably, at this point, in for some hard times. For how long, of course, no one can say. I have discussed elsewhere about how the economy is inevitably headed towards seeming disaster, but also about how what appears as tragic at the moment could potentially turn into a deeper manifestation of something necessary and redemptive i.e. the movement towards a more sustainable society. However, this transformation can only occur if we are willing to make some changes, such as move towards more Democratic—even *gasp* Socialist—notions of political governance as opposed to continuously giving in to Republican “small-government, big business” ideals. Obviously, putting Barack Obama into office is a great first step on this path. But beyond the presidential campaign, we need to push much harder for a move towards responsible government policy and regulation.

It’s sort of ridiculous that it takes a crisis or tragedy for people to awaken to the importance of individual sacrifice for collective betterment. It’s what we do in hard times, and it’s what people who live in poverty always do: help each other out. It’s about time that we start taxing the rich, taxing or putting caps on destructive and wasteful practices (such as lawns, SUVs, and plastic product packaging), and investing back into our society as a whole.

We all know that Communism and/or Fascism has failed. We all know that we believe in freedom and democracy for all. But it’s time that we grew up and recognized, as mature adults, that firm regulation, investments, and incentives must be established for people and businesses to do the right thing. And we must further recognize that we can’t go this alone. We need Government, with a capital ‘G’, and that means ‘G’ as in Global in addition to national. The US, for far too long, has been able to get away with insouciant and unconsidered behavior because we once were a superpower. We will henceforth be known as the last of the world’s superpowers. There will be no more superpowers, just as there will be no more Picassos. There will always be nations that have greater power, just as there will always be individuals who have greater influence. But no longer will there be a singular entity that can completely dominate and determine the direction of world commerce or culture.

What does this mean for us as a nation, and as individuals, then? It means that we have to become a team player. It means that we have to know our place in the world. It means that we have to not only compete, but cooperate. That’s what it means, at an extremely basic and fundamental level.

This ultimately ties back into deeper issues such as environmental stewardship, spirituality as opposed to religious fundamentalism, scientific advancement and technological development coupled with social progress, etc. But I’m not going to get into any of those wonderful issues at the moment because I’m beginning to get sleepy, and I’ve got another long week looming ahead of me. Due to my inability to post as frequently as I would like to, I’m going to begin utilizing WordPress’ nifty new function of sticking old posts up on my front page, so that you can see some selections of my old shit that I feel is worth perusing. Til next time, piiiiigs iiiin spaaaaaaace. . .

Multiple Points of Convergence

Identity. The schizophrenic fragmentation of postmodern relativism allayed into a collective of temporal disparities, a helixing bondage of singularities, a hyphenated straddling of cultures and unbound references and desires, all bolstered by the descendant nectar abstraction of capital, an ever evolving conception of divinity, the final distension of empire, bloodshed, one-dimensional identities, and coalescence. Black or white, good or evil morphed into uncertain spotted shadows of each other. The invisible movement of power from solid hierarchical entities into amorphous ladderings of pulleyed scales, splayed back and forth between paradigms.

Each one of us is many, our strengths discovered in our multiple outlets. Where we are weak we are shared, a node tangled into impenetrability. We are activists, we are CEOs, we are priests, we are Hollywood bimbos, we are Asian fused Californian Art Deco subway jazz, curry eating freedom fighters, graffiti installation curators, airbrushed, obese, horny, lonely, terribly powerfully unknowingly interconnected, interdependent, intravenous subterranean and astral projected sons of bitches. And how dare you tell me who you think I am.

I am a third generation Estadounidense Swede, an African hand drum player heavily influenced by classical Indian tabla masters, a habanero hot sauce addict, a WordPress.com weblog writing introvert, a fast runner, a master of housekeeping, a French herbal liqueur idolater, a hard worker, a listener of R&B, world folk music, jazz, fusion, hip hop, reggae, Latin, pop/rock, classical, electronic, shit man, don’t you see that I won’t be confined by even labels that I might come up with? None of us can be pinned down, nobody can be so easily quantified by data.

We have so much to share with each other. Our capabilities gather strength from collaborative interaction. I’ll teach you how to understand me. You’ll force me to grapple with your expectations. I’ll sit back and wait for the right time to speak. We’ll dance the night away.

Collaborative Interdependence

I’ve been undergoing a mild case of “writer’s block” lately, wherein everything that I attempt to write just comes out flat or completely uninspired. Frustrating, because then it drives me to playing mahjongg instead of articulating deeper sentiment (mahjongg here being the virtual “bottle” in which to drown my woes).

One of the things I’ve been constantly trying to write about but having trouble clearly spelling out is my perspective on enacting progressive change. I’ve discussed elsewhere my evolving views on politics and economics, and I’ve been trying to find a way to more fully explicate my new views while still embracing, intellectually speaking, the perspectives which I’ve developed out of, such radicalism, anarchism, anti-globalization, postcolonialism, etc.

Rather than present a cohesive thesis, therefore, let me just discuss what my thought process is at the moment vis-a-vis these general topics and maybe I can work my way over the obstacles I’m currently facing just by talking it through.

I think what I’m finding is that I can still relate very well to viewpoints such as socialism and anarchism because such perspectives are ultimately humanist, in that there is an idealistic attempt to extricate humanity from what are perceived as inhuman and oppressive structures. There is still a lot of misunderstanding out there about what “anarchism” really means, and you can see this quite powerfully in The Dark Knight as depicted by the Joker, as one current example. People think of chaos, terror, pimply youth in black apparel heaving Molotov cocktails as an expression of aimless hormonal angst. But anarchism is not about chaos and terrorism: it is simply a philosophical rejection of the need for institutionalized systems of governance. Extending out of this are many disparate branches of anarchist philosophy, but that is its central tenet. Contrary to being a negative and nihilistic perspective, this is in actuality an extremely positivist take on human nature, in that anarchists believe that human society will run much more efficiently and naturally when not subsumed to overarching systems.

I was drawn to anarchist philosophy because of this deep humanism, and some anarchist writing is the most well-articulated writing out there on politics. You don’t feel like you are being talked down to. Go here and browse through the library to see for yourself. It isn’t much at all about violence or chaos. It’s about believing in a world that can be better than what we are taught to accept.

However, one of the problems with this perspective is in answering the question: well, how do we get from here to there? There are many different answers to that, some of which I will agree with, but ultimately, what one comes to understand is that holding the highest of ideals makes it extremely difficult to come to terms with the existing state of the world, generating anger, bitterness, and violence and/or apathy.

I will devolve into an oblique comparison here: in a long-term relationship with another human being, you come fairly quickly to realize that compromises must be made between you and your partner’s ideals in order to live together. If your ideals are too high, it may be that instead of coming to terms with the human reality of your partner and accepting them as they are, you are rejecting parts of them in order to try to fit or mold them to your ideals. These high expectations can blind you to the beauty of the person that already exists right before you, if you could allow them to be themselves rather than what you want them to be. You both can work together on developing towards the ideals that you share and cherish.

This does not mean that you should accept a drab reality. What I am getting at is that there is a process in working towards ideals. There must be development and evolution in order for ideals to become reality. Perfect harmony does not just fall into your lap without extensive effort. So one could feasibly hold anarchist philosophy as the ideal state of human society, but still work within and around existing government and market structures in seeking to achieve that ideal.

That is fairly self-evident, I suppose, but as I talked about in my other post, it seems to me that there are a lot of idealists out there who are constricted, rather than motivated, by their ideals.

In any case, even though I sympathize with the philosophy of anarchism and of radical thought in general, I ultimately feel that it is misguided. Anarchists and other philosophies of dissent rightly perceive that there are problems with institutional and market systems, but they wrongly perceive the correct redress as being a complete rejection of these systems. To use another obtuse analogy, it is like looking at a fan which doesn’t blow air very efficiently or equitably about a room, and deciding that the solution is to throw out the fan. While such a solution might appeal to instinct, it would make much more sense to attempt to analyze the failure of the fan and seek to alter, jerryrig, or otherwise upgrade to a whole new model.

To say this, however, doesn’t mean that one couldn’t choose to live ones life according to anarchist or other radical ideals. One has that right and capability. But what I am talking about is being involved in the greater community, and subsuming some of those ideals to accepted law and policy in order to extend greater influence.

Another issue I think I see with philosophies that reject existing market and government systems is that they are often mired in a mentality of a bygone era. We have come into a time, due to the unforeseen confluence of technology and rapid information dissemination and sharing, in which civil society and individuals as a whole have a power and command that they did not once have. Civil society thus is becoming evolutionarily enabled to play the critical part in balancing and restraining and guiding the efforts of institutions and markets in providing a fairer and more sustainable society. Demonstrators and protesters, even when not covered explicitly by the big media outlets, have a strength that corporations and governments have had to pay close attention to. Anti-globalization protesters, though misguided in their conclusions (multi-national corporations and interconnected markets = evil), have had a tremendous and positive impact on drawing attention to economic inequity and iniquitous barriers to trade. Similarly, the increased influence and power of “bloggers” has given big media a run for its money. Due to this increased power of civil society and of individual citizens, people are not simply oppressed workers underneath the inhumane strictures of the one-dimensional demand of capitalism. In collaboration—not opposition—with public policy, the legal system, and economic investments and incentives, civil society, government, and the economy can work in tandem to address the problems that exist in society.

This is not an argument against dissent or protest. What I’m attempting to get at is that the process of speaking up and getting involved and asking critical and probing questions is in fact a necessary and positive aspect of well-organized and functioning social systems. It is not a movement against the “system” or against the “machine” or whatever one chooses to call government and business structures: rather, it is a movement that enhances, collaborates, and guides these systems into greater harmony.

I have argued elsewhere for the need to view these systems in the sense of design, with a holistic, whole-systems approach. This is especially apparent when it comes to entrenched issues such as the current failure of many of our public schools to adequately and equally educate all our nation’s children, irregardless of race, class, or gender. Educational policy, on both a federal and state level, often nobly, but wrongly, attempts to tackle their problems solely within the confines of the classroom by initiating misguided programs that work to increase performance on standardized tests. Obviously, there are circumstances outside of the classroom that are critical to a child’s success, such as family, friends, and wider local community support, in addition to institutional programs. It will take a multifaceted approach, addressing not only education, but furthermore socio-economic conditions, access to information and technology, not to mention access to healthy, positive, inclusive environments and public spaces for children to study and play in.

Our schools have become effectively segregated due to the seemingly innocuous effort by well-to-do parents to place their children in “successful” schools. The successful schools being the ones with money and community support. It is thus apparent that investments must be made simultaneously not only in education and the public school system in general, but furthermore broader investments must be made in low income neighborhoods, to provide access to healthy public spaces, to provide access to technology and information, to provide smart planning for a sustainable future in employment, etc. The more that the middle class divides itself from the poor, the greater problems will become.

What is evident in an issue such as this is the approach that I am talking about: a whole systems, collaborative approach. Civil society must do its part to draw attention to the problems. Government must do its part to respond with effective and unbiased policy changes. The market must do its part with directed investments and innovative micro-businesses. What is apparent, to me at least, is that we can’t rely on any one of these systems to do the job for us. The market is not going to solve any of our problems unless we direct it and harness it with policy and incentives. Government will not update its policy or open up funding unless it has its attention drawn to the problem. Civil society, NGOs, citizen organizations must agitate, petition, utilize the media, and organize to focus on the problems.

Furthermore, policy making and business governance and legal affairs cannot be over-specialized. They can’t be compartmentalized and vivisected such that they can’t work effectively across the fields of public health, education, fiscal tuning, management philosophy, environmental departments, etc. They need to be able to unite and work within these fields all at once.

This kind of approach demonstrates that no matter what ones particular ideals may be, what is the most important is a pragmatic and responsive attention to the current climate and issues in our society. Putting our heads in the sand, whether due to reactionary or radical or centrist thought, is simply unacceptable. Good management, governance, and policy practices are forged by looking ahead to the future, constantly and consistently. Our future lies in our children. Whatever our beliefs may be, we all want our children to be healthy, to be successful, to have access to the resources that will empower and enable them. We want them to be educated, to be well fed, to be well read, to be sound of body and of mind. We want them to be positioned to respond effectively to reality, to be positioned for a market that looks ahead to sustainability.

The process, therefore, in achieving an equitable and sustainable future is determined by the collaborative interdependence of differing aspects of human identity, mind, infrastructures, and society. Only when these multiple points converge and work together are effective and positive changes made. It is misguided to focus ones efforts solely in rejection and opposition to existing systems. The more positive approach is to focus on working across boundaries to enact changes beneficial to all.

Phew. You can see why I’ve had trouble laying this out. It’s kind of a big mess in my mind. I’m working on getting this out in a more concise manner.

Global Policy Interdependence

“As has been amply demonstrated in empirical studies, the nature of market outcomes are massively influenced by public policies in education and literacy, epidemiology, land reform, microcredit facilities, appropriate legal protection, etc., and in each of these fields there are things to be done through public action that can radically alter the outcome of local and global economic relations. It is this class of interdependences that have to be understood and utilized to alter the inequalities and asymmetries that characterize the world economy.” [My italics]

–Amartya Sen, Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny

Movement Towards Inclusion

“The bell jar [as described by Braudel, signifying the exclusivity of the capitalist sector of society] makes capitalism a private club, open only to a privileged few, and enrages the billions standing outside looking in. This capitalist apartheid will inevitably continue until we all come to terms with the critical flaw in many countries’ legal and political systems that prevents the majority from entering the formal property system. . .

Few seem to realize that what we have here is one huge, worldwide industrial revolution: a gigantic movement away from life organized on a small scale to life organized on a large one. For better or for worse, people outside the West are fleeing self-sufficient and isolated societies in an effort to raise their standards of living by becoming interdependent in much larger markets. . .

Like computer networks, which had existed for years before anyone thought to link them, property systems become tremendously powerful when they are interconnected in a larger network. . . .

Political blindness, therefore, consists of being unaware that the growth of the extralegal sector and the breakdown of the existing legal order are ultimately due to a gigantic movement away from life organized on a small scale toward one organized in a larger context. . .

The primary problem is the delay in recognizing that most of the disorder occurring outside the West is the result of a revolutionary movement that is more full of promise than of problems.”

—Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital

De Soto’s insights are tantalizing: his essential message is that the poor are seeking to become a part of the larger market system, but are denied access through exclusive laws and fiscal policies. Faced with the inability to become a part of the global market, the poor then must operate within small-scale, community “extralegal” markets and negotiations. I have referred to this market activity, so visibly abundant and active within South America, as a “micro-economy,” not recognizing that this teeming market life was not necessarily included within the larger economy in a formal sense.

What I also like about De Soto’s vision is his recognition that the poor have always historically recognized the opportunities inherent in a larger market. The movement to urban centers during the Industrial Revolution is well documented, and the same movement is now occurring in developing countries daily. The poor innately recognize opportunity when they see it, and recognize that fundamentally, global markets can provide access to a wider network of capability and progress.

Of course, simply giving the poor land titles and opening up their economies to globalization does not necessitate a better life, due to the great imbalance of power and wealth in favor of developed nations and small populations within developing nations. De Soto’s simplistic diagnosis has thus been rightfully critiqued. But with corrected fiscal policy and global law, these imbalances can be addressed to become more inclusive. De Soto’s insights can very neatly be coupled with the insights provided by social entrepreneurs like Muhammad Yunus. With the tool of microcredit, the poor can be given the ability to become included within the wider market and use their properties as capital assets.

The wider the embrace of networks can become, the more powerful and effective they will be. A market that can include and embrace all of the teeming activity of the micro-economies of the poor (and thus raise them out of poverty) is a healthy and balanced market.

What I also appreciate about De Soto’s vision is his emphasis on the global movement towards interdependence. Accepting membership into a greater community is to shed a degree of self-sufficiency and isolation. There is a strong undercurrent within environmental activism as well as nationalist reactionaries towards self-sufficiency and isolationism. It is certainly important to have integrity and inner strength. But at a certain point, interdependence within greater networks provides a greater strength and resiliancy.

I can best phrase this within the context of death: when someone you are close to passes away, you can feel a humongous hole cut out from inside of you. It makes you realize just how interconnected you are with everyone else in your life, and of how illusory is the concept that you are alone and detached.

When acts of violence and terrorism are committed, they are best viewed as perverted and desperate attempts to become included into the networks that they have been excluded from. The answer, therefore, in fighting terrorism is not in utilizing weapons and occupations, but rather in fighting poverty, by seeking to include, in an effective and positive manner, the developing nations and those in extreme poverty into the global market and body politic.

It is no secret that those nations mired in extreme poverty harbor terrorists. So what should we do? Bomb them? Or seek to include them into the greater networks of which they so desperately want to become a part of and which they have been routinely denied. Isn’t the answer obvious?

The More the Problems, the Simpler the Solutions

In this day and age, as the perennial problems of humanity grow ever greater in the face of our increased global interconnectivity and environmental fragility, it becomes more evident that all of our problems are interrelated and cannot be solved without an enlightened holistic approach. We cannot tackle the problem of public health without tackling the problems of poverty, which cannot be tackled without confronting the issue of rampant hydrocarbon dependency, which cannot be conquered without resolving fundamental issues of human rights and freedom, and this goes on and on and on. It can also be phrased thus: we cannot ignore human rights abuses in Sudan, nor environmental degradation in China, for the cost will ultimately fall upon all of us.

While that may at first make resolving any of the major dilemmas humanity faces in the oncoming years of increased natural disaster and antibiotic resistant microbes seem especially daunting, these compounding converging problems in fact present us with opportunities to enact revolutionary structural changes that can work to harmonize disconnected and fragmented elements of humanity and bring them together in a greater, unifying global interconnection.

An example of this point could be taken quite literally down to the case of a human body. Our bodies eventually let us know when we have pushed them beyond their capacities of maintaining health, and some organ will fail, or a disease will take hold, or a heart will exhibit stress. At that point, we look at immediate symptoms and seek a means of addressing that sole symptom. Beyond that, however, we then seek to discover how to prevent a reoccurence of this problem, as well as to prevent other related issues springing from the same source, and we thus must seek manners of altering our lifestyles, our behaviors, and our perspectives in order to resolve more fundamental issues.

Our environment is letting us know that we are toeing the line–and may well have already significantly crossed–on the path to complete destabilization of all life supporting habitats. There is no doubt in the mind of any cognizant scientist, activist, politician, nor concerned citizen that we are facing some major problems due to global warming and widespread environmental stress. And so we are now looking at immediate ways to address these symptoms, such as by seeking alternative sources of energy, carbon emission cap and trades, and worldwide standards of environmental regulation. But as we begin to look beyond these immediate symptoms, we also begin to see that we must address even more fundamental issues in our societies, governments, economies, cultures, and perspectives, as they all stem from the same source.

So now is the time that we are really gaining the opportunity, as a human species, to deeply address issues that we have had since the birth of human consciousness, such as disparity between the rich and the poor, segregation and bigotry due to birth and appearance, and all other manifestations of hatred, division, and greed. Does that sound idealistic and glorifying of my own age and time? Undoubtedly. But what can also undoubtedly be stated is that the world we are living in, as of this writing, is a world quite unlike the world that it was a mere 50 years ago. We are globalizing, networking, trading, and traveling at an exponentially snowballing rate. And due to this global interconnection, all of our actions and behaviors become magnified in effect. So while once upon a time we were only destroying some land downstream, now we are destroying the entire globe. We cannot detach ourselves from the fate that we are creating. We cannot ignore the effect that our actions will have on our children.

Anyway, I could go on like this for a while. The point that I wanted to make is that all of these major problems that we are now facing can be seen as an opportunity for widespread positive change. Never before has humanity as a species been so positioned as to fundamentally address our disconnection from our planet, from each other, and from ourselves. The time is now.

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.

Computing Our Selves

I sometimes wonder how technology has transformed our development and everyday lives. For instance, the generation preceding mine grew up utilizing typewriters or just writing by hand; I grew up writing on a computer. Even that little difference is quite monumental, when you think about it. With computers, we can backspace. We can mouse up a paragraph earlier and revise a whole sentence in the space of a few seconds. We can spellcheck and autocorrect. We don’t have to worry about typing precisely, accurately, and with correct grammar and spelling as we type. This must affect not only the flow of our written language, but even, perhaps, our very processing of thought. Writers like Faulkner perhaps derived their drunken ecstatic run-on sentencing from the creative flow that was generated by the sense of forging onward on a typewriter, with no turning back.

I think written language on a computer is in some sense more loose, immediate, and both more improvised and edited. Of course, you can write any way you want on a keyboard. But when you have the option of re-editing everything you’ve just written, even as you write it, in any way possible with no consequences, and you can continuously save it as you go along, then I’m sure that that must in some way change the overall manner with which everyone approaches their writing.

Taking this idea further, think of how computers have affected memory. We maybe have 3 or 4 photos of our grandparents or parents when they were kids. Now we have whole harddrive disks worth of videos and pictures of our children. They are well documented. They have websites. People oggle over their niece and nephews on YouTube. Think of how this will change how these children perceive themselves: perhaps they will have a stronger sense of identity. They will have their memories enhanced with footage and soundbytes.

Furthermore, our memories are enhanced with blogging and email. I personally utilize this blog not only for the purpose of catharsis, fostering a sense of connection with my greater community and with myself, but furthermore to remember. I have a terrible memory. But now I have a reference point for my emotional, creative, political, and philosophical developments. I can scroll backwards through time and see where I was at 5 years ago and compare it to where I’m at now.

Our relationships are also enhanced by computing. We can have immediate updates on our friends, families, and random acquaintances (sometimes with much more information than we need to know). You can find out that your friend in Peru just barfed on a street corner an hour ago on her birthday from your Facebook account. You check up on your friend Manderson on his blog and see that he’s in NYC and looking desperately for a job. You can IM some random girl from high school that you don’t even remember that found you on MySpace and ask how her experience in grad school is. Our intimate personal lives are now catalogued on Google search. We connect to each other through cellphones, videoconferencing, Skype, and all the other assorted candies of the technology spectrum. Our grandmothers are talking to us over the computer. Our grandfathers are buying collector’s rifles on-line and chatting with other old farts about them on discussion boards. Our dads are checking their Hotmail 24/7. Our children are looking up porn and playing video games. It’s one big happy interconnected networking family.

And video games: that’s another thing to consider. Perhaps this phenomena of “ADD” is really just a reflection of the different development that is occurring due to all the new stimuli of our technology. Maybe it’s not a disorder, it’s just multi-tasking in our brains so well that we can no longer learn via conventional, non-technological means. I don’t know. Discuss amongst yourselves.

Stillness in the Eye of the Beheld

At every stage in the evolution of the human species, when we develop tools with greater and greater capabilities of empowerment, we also gain the capability of greater destruction, and vice versa. Every sword is double-sided, every tool a weapon. An airplane as the most accurate of guided missiles. Misguided youth and passion strapped with shrapnel, the stealthiest of dirty bombs. Every versatile development of intelligence bends alternately to creation or destruction—the greater the power, the greater the atrocity.

Yet in order to develop, we must chance our ultimate demise. There is no advancement without struggle. There is no progress upward without the danger of falling. This applies to all of mankind, as well as to the individual existence. The alternate threat and promise of extinction is what drives us to create. To distinguish ourselves from inconscient matter, to approach the flame of divinity, to grasp at it with groveling, greedy fingers of competing awarenesses, until we discover, the hard way, that we are all of each other, all of the light that we seek, all of the matter that we shed.

So on the way to this discovery we slaughter, we suffer, we sear our desperate imperfections across the face of the earth, spreading the disease of despair and hollow complacency with a missionary zeal that results only in complementary rage and anger, in blind lashing-outs by voices bound by their own inarticulate tongues of selfishness. This sickening beauty of humanity, the terrible power of our destiny. Killing ourselves to know of ourselves, so that we may better live alongside of our silences. The way Miles Davis kills everything around him for that solid punch of harmony in the midst of chaos. Creating the space for momentary beauty to shine out of its darkened backdrop of everything.

Not every flower will find the outward sun. But every form of life, whether fallen to the earth for sustenance to the hunger of the future, or rooted into the highest of heights, holds within the seed of bliss, the joyful dance of incomplete perfection. For not any one thing could ever exist without the other.

¡Happy New Year’s from Medellín!

Hope y’all had some good New Year’s festivities wherever you be. Here in Medellín I didn’t do anything too crazy, just went up to a lookout spot to see the city at night, then walked back down along the river where all the Christmas lights are strung up. It is indeed a spectacular sight.

All I could think about was all the electricity being wasted. We then walked the long walk back to the slums where our hotel is located—because no taxi would stop and pick us up, for some reason—dodging street kids, drunkards, and transvestites, to celebrate the commencement of the new year in the security of our hotel room, wherein we imbibed a bit of Ron Medellín mixed with some gaseosa. The firecrackers in the streets, of course, went off all night long.

It is my established tradition to give some kind of commemorative New Year’s speech, and not wanting to disappoint, I’ll attempt to dredge up some inspiration for one here. A lot of the sub-narrative of this trip in Colombia, so far unsaid, has been about my relationship with my girlfriend—as I am traveling with her—and when traveling, relationships are always put under stress and challenged in every way. I will delve more into that topic specifically in another post, but for now, my point is that I have been thinking much about what a relationship is really about, and what I would like to do now is to unite some of those conclusions with a broader vision of what our relationships with each other as a human species is all about:

When you love someone, and are interconnected with them deeply, whether a family member, a lover, a friend, or a co-worker (c´mon, you see them everyday and interact with them—that’s an important aspect of our lives!), you have entered into a new world of relations with the entire universe, whether conscious or not. Because the fact is that you have come to realize that you are more than one singular, solitary individual, alone in all the cosmos. You have come to realize, through the act of empathy, compassion, and mutual perception, that you who once were one are now 3. Another way of stating that last bit is to say that what was once 2 distinct individuals is now one. Whatever way you look at it, there is a triune evolution in your existence, in which you evolve upwards into a greater unifying dimension, which allows you to descend back down into a wider, embracing perspective from multiple viewpoints. Think of it this way: two separate, disparate individuals begin to share a life together, and their once distinct and detached worlds begin to mesh, and at some point, you cannot clearly delineate a clear separation between the two anymore, because whereas before there were clearly two, now it becomes manifest that there is really one; or at least, a movement and development towards unity. But at the same time that there is this unity, there are still two clearly distinct individuals, with different personalities and so on. So there co-exists the two separate worlds alongside the higher unifying oneness between them. There is an evolved trinity.

All of that is rather vague, perhaps. But the idea I really want to convey here is that we all exist in our material selves as detached, separate, distinct individuals, with our own personalities, trajectories, perceptions, etc. All of humanity appears, on the surface, as fragmented shards of a fallen deity, split asunder into factions, fear, and locked in the eternal warfare of dominance, greed, and misunderstanding. When leaders rise up that would try to better unify us, they are shot down ruthlessly by barbaric, murderous, bestial elements, such as just recently Benazir Bhutto was so barbarically slain before the eyes of the world. It would seem, at first glance, that there is nothing that can string all of us together.

But the lie in this deception is apparent when you look closely at your own life, at the threads that tie you so intimately and immediately to others. We are not all detached, alone, and astray. We are all evolving together into the greater unknown that lies beyond appearances, beyond multiplicity and fragmentation, beyond logic and reason, beyond complacency and habit. In this world beyond that coexists right here and right now within and above our own, we cannot yet speak—yet we can sing; we cannot yet walk—yet we can fly; we cannot yet understand—yet we can intuit. It exists and we know that it exists because we feel, because we love, because we always and forever will strive to know of this divinity, this greater unity, even in the face of the greatest suffering and despair. It is there. We have love, and we know that this love takes us there. It is in extending this personal love in each of our lives all the way out to include and interpenetrate all of humanity and the world that lies the challenge.

I would like to end this little speech with a quote from my guru of the moment (because whomever I happen to be currently reading is my guru), Sri Aurobindo: “. . . on one side Nature works according to her limited complex of formulas . . . but on the other side there is an overseeing, a higher working and determination—even an intervention—free but not arbitrary, often appearing to us magical and miraculous because it proceeds and acts upon Nature from a divine Supernature: Nature here is a limited expression of that Supernature and open to intervention . . . by its light, its force, its influence. The mechanical, mathematical, automatic law of things is a fact, but within it there is a spiritual law of consciousness at work which gives to the mechanical steps of Nature’s forces an inner turn and value, a significant rightness and a secretly conscious necessity, and above it there is a spiritual freedom that knows and acts in the supreme and universal truth of the Spirit. Our view of the divine government of the world or of the secret of its action is either incurably anthropomorphic or else incurably mechanical; both the anthropomorphism and mechanism have their elements of truth—but they are only a side, an aspect, and the real truth is that the world is governed by the One in all and over all who is infinite in his consciousness, and it is according to the law and logic of an infinite consciousness that we ought to understand the significance and building and movement of the universe.”

Knowingly Into the Unknown

Standing on the cusp of the breaking wave of my life, I look out into the wide horizon and see only unknown, only uncertainty, only the undefined. And this is as it should be. If I knew any more about who I will be, and what my future will hold, and what I am supposed to be doing in the next year, then I’m afraid that I would start to feel confined. I suppose it’s in my Sagittarius zodiac sign or something. As much as I am self-controlled on many personal aspects, I could never feel comfortable with all of my future already defined. I’ve always been naturally allergic to plans and formulas and expectations. I am firmly in the Fukuoka school of acknowledgment that I know nothing, and will never know much of anything, and that no one else knows nothing just about as well as I do. That’s about the best summation of my view of philosophy, science, religion, and humanity in a nutshell right there.

Who cares, though, what I think anyway? Why do I bother scribing random scribbles across this computer screen? I suppose I am always hoping for the flash of inspiration that only too rarely ever fully hits. I am waiting for that cathartic spill, that cathedral dirge, that cataclysmic splooge of beauty that every now and then filters somehow out through my fingers. Tonight, unfortunately, is not one of those times. But the practice and training of forcing myself to write is good nonetheless, even if I know that I alienate my fickle imaginary audience. But part of why I write (as opposed to why many other people write) is for the very reason of combating the thought (in my own mind, at the very least) of writing as needing to be perfect, grammatically sound, soul wrenchingly deep, suspensefully clever, and/or breathtakingly beautiful. I wish to combat this Hollywood-ified ideal of writing that the industry of New York Times bestseller lists and college writing workshops uphold. I want writing to be about me, and you, and what our actual mundane lives truly constitute. And then, of course, I want it to be all of that other aforementioned stuff as well, but that’s secondary to the mission.

Because our lives be messy, imperfect, trivial, glorious, and filled with worldbreaking news everymoment, everysecond. If only we learned to pay more attention to it. The live-brought-to-you-now of our eyes, of our fingers, of our feelings. And while we might like to think that we’ve got our selves kind of nailed down and our friends supportingly cast and defined, the fact is that we only know our future just about as well as weather stations with the latest up-to-date data and supercomputer technology know the long-term forecast: with some percentage of certainty only for the next few days, if even that. From then on out, it’s all subject to change.

Because every little thing is a part of every bigger thing. Because every door that is opened into a new perception is another pillar demolished upholding the former universe, and another jack sprung up into the sky of some new one. Every part interacting with every other part combining into an incredibly complex whole that is unknowable, uncertain, and uncontrollable. No matter what anyone may think the future may hold, the only thing that is verifiably certain is that we don’t know shit.

So to get back to me and my little trivial bullshit daily life: like I said, I’m just a-sitting here up on the crest of a crescendoing adulthood, looking out into the open unknown that is my future and only knowing this: I’m looking forward to a few months of 90% chances of dancing, aguardiente drinking, malaria prophylactic taking, and numerous blog post making. After that, god knows. And she can keep it to herself.

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.

Beyond Complexity

What drives us is the incessant need to be loved. At the heart of things, we are incredibly lonely, desperate to be fully understood, fully touched, fully appreciated. All of human interaction could be reduced to our fundamental need to be loved. Even the most horrifying of acts. Even the most mundane of interactions. Because it is not simply human love that we crave; for many of us, it is only something beyond humanity that we feel can love us and know us in the deepest and truest sense. So we perform sometimes atrocious acts in the attempt to please this distant god. But at root, it could still be accurately said that all human beings ultimately act in order to be loved, to be most truly and fully loved.

Which leads one to the thought that perhaps love immediately withheld may be one of the root causes of our suffering. It is important to have constant attention, constant grooming, from some source, or else we begin to withdraw into ourselves, withdraw into a quiet bitterness that may one day explode. We all need this steady love, whether it is from ourselves, our god, or our lover. We need to feel that we are important, that we have a purpose and meaning that is beyond the detached existence that our material existence accords us.

Such a simple need, and how easy to fulfill! But what is complex about it is that while the urge to love drives us beyond ourselves, the very fact of our own detached self is itself a barrier. It is hard to conceptualize, let alone manifest, any kind of deep interconnectivity that would eliminate the separation and distinction of your own self. Even while you crave so much at every moment to merge into a viscous stream with all creation, so you also fear this flow, and fight it at every step, in the struggle to maintain your sense of identity and control. It is no doubt a humorous and cruel irony that the very tools that would give us liberation and love would also harness our spirit and repress our instinct.

Recognizing this essential compulsion in humanity, however, is key to understanding other people and the way they act, which can seem at times obtuse. But recognize that everyone is simply trying to be loved in the deepest sense of the term, and you will begin to understand even complete strangers. You will see through violent or self-destructive acts. You will see through smoke screens of intellect or emotional fantasy. You will see human beings as what they are beneath all of the baggage and defense of their created universe: naked, lonely, and hungry to be loved.

Forging Networks

Coming close to this everlasting present, the infinite presence that is almost touched for the briefest space of a few breaths, you know that there can’t be anything more critical then communion. These moments of complete openness. There is nothing more that is needed. To be possessed by something beyond yourself, contained within yourself, incorporated within yourself.

It is an ingrained notion we have as humans to consider perfection, harmony, or love to be something complete, something attainable that could be captured. But that’s a traditional thought process that shatters immediately, and repeatedly, in the face of true power and beauty. Life has never been about the completion and culmination of an individual, nor of any one thing—it is rather the momentary bridges forged between distinct entities that unites them into a greater harmonic vision. This bridge necessarily dissipates, as boundaries are revised, and breaches are created in some other part of being. It’s like an air bubble in a sealed container. The bubble can be pushed, expanded, broken into smaller compartments, but the same volume of air will always be there, until it is released into a vaster field of containment. So we journey ever outward, expanding our capacity for awareness, forever dismantling old bridges (because what was once detached is now one entity) and struggling to cross into new. The landscape of the soul is seemingly ever changing, and yet the total energy remains constant—the states simply shift as they find new dimensions in which to attempt to dissipate into, to merge into, to possess and to be possessed thereof.

Love—like enlightenment—therefore, is something that would appear to be unachievable except for singular moments of time. But inwardly, what occurs is more like the dynamiting of a tunnel through two separate caverns—suddenly the water flows between the two until a steady state has temporarily been achieved—that is until another hole is blasted through into yet wider spaces. Like the roots of a tree, the tentacles of awareness seek restlessly their source. Eventually, over time, as the outer world shifts to reflect the release of tensions into greater harmonic wholes, localized about the exploratory meme, a forest is formed, a network is evolved. So too in love, after ups and downs and fights and many starts and finishes, the heart begins to forge a solid network, the base of a building that can sustain itself for centuries.

All of this is rooted in the breakthrough of momentary climactic impulses. The skin knows. The heart knows. The mind is always playing catch up, struggling to define what has already occurred. All that really must be done is to allow ourselves to change, to continually change, knowing that what we truly desire can never be fully possessed. Until we have built up the forests of the heart, all across the world, then we will forever be restless.

Accepting the Bad

Eliminate the bad, extend the good. This could be said to be the mantra of humanity. It’s an understandable outlook, of course, given that it is in our biological nature. Problem is, people take it to the furthest extent possible, such that in doing away with all the bad (temporarily), we also end up eradicating the good things which originally and naturally kept the bad in check. We upset balances in favor of an idealistic and unachievable victory.

The problem is not simply that we are attempting to eliminate the bad—it is that we are attempting to address immediate symptoms instead of looking at the root causes. We do this in everything from agriculture to health care, from scientific research to judicial systems. Examples are:

1) In the attempt to eliminate all harmful insects from our food bearing crops, we blanket them with pesticides. We kill not only all bad insects, but also the good insects which prey upon them.
2) We attempt to eliminate all malevolent microbes by making everything as sterile as possible with toxic chemical solutions and through the flippant use of antibiotics. We destroy most of the microbes, for a short amount of time, until they mutate resistance, and then they come back even stronger than before.
3) We lock up poor adolescents who are selling drugs in the attempt to find means (as businessmen with little other option) of escaping the ghetto. We render all narcotic substances illegal, even if some narcotics have a proven medicinal use, or are simply relatively benign on their effects on society in comparison to accepted substances like tobacco and alcohol.
4) We incarcerate and marginalize prostitutes and people who are addicted to illegal substances, rendering their lives incredibly dangerous, as well as encouraging the spread of disease.
5) We go to doctors mainly to treat extreme sicknesses or injuries. They barely attempt to address underlying behavioral issues, diet change, and preventative care through education and a holistic approach. Rather, they have a tendency to be mere pill-pushers and organ vultures, as their main function is to treat immediate symptoms and then send you on your way.
6) We reduce and fight forest fires, upsetting natural cycles and balances, and creating extensive brush and fuel, such that we have generated a future of increasingly apocalyptic wildfires.

These are just a few examples of what the conventional outlook of “eliminate the bad, extend the good” results in. One could extend the idea yet further into issues such as rampant hydrocarbon use or conventional sewage systems.

This perspective is extremely childish, selfish, and short-sighted when seen for what it is. In taking a whole-systems, holistic approach to these issues, one begins to see that the simple treatment of immediate symptoms, and the attempt to eradicate all immediately manifested outbreaks of all things “bad”, only leads to deeper and broader problems. What must be done is to take a step back and look at the root causes, and seek a means to realign structures into a harmonized cyclical and balanced system.

Such an approach, of course, takes time and patience, and that is one thing most of us these days are in dire lack of. We want problems to be solved immediately. We are also overconfident in technology and man’s ability to eventually overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles through breakthroughs in technological ingenuity and innovation. But no matter how many immediate problems we may solve through such means, the fact is that our essential outlook is still skewed, and eventually the rooted causes of our suffering will become so magnified as to destroy us completely. Because no matter how advanced we become, we will never be able to completely eradicate “bad” things such as disease, substance abuse, violence, or poverty.

However, in balanced and well-designed systems, we can achieve a sustainable harmony, in which these “bad” things are naturally regulated and subsumed to a greater whole; they can be accepted into the fold, temporary eddies rendered inconsequential by their eventual flow back into the main stream.

Take as an example a well-designed garden (as modeled on nature): when “pest” populations begin to rise and threaten the flowers and herbs, natural predators slim them back down before they can pose a threat. When diseases break out on a microbial level, the nutrient rich soil and humus—which is full of life so dense that it can’t even be fathomed by science—naturally fights back, just as a healthy immune system will work to set itself back into harmony after exposure to malevolent microbes.

The reason such a garden is healthy and balanced is because it fosters diversity (as opposed to monoculture), complex interconnectivity of independent systems, and natural cyclical processes (as opposed to enforced dependency on chemicals).

Now think of our society in terms of this garden, and you may begin to get some ideas on what some root causes might be underlying such immediate symptoms as illness, apathy, war, and poverty. . .

Currents of Thought

I sit and wait for the words to come, listening to the wind tear down through the mountains in the middle of the night. Attempting to get to the rooted source of beginnings, I know that this wind comes from somewhere much farther away than the Pacific Ocean. That in fact, we could never track down that first movement of air, the first current of water, the first shifting of pressure that brings the wind into our moments. Everything in life, whether it is the weather in the sky or the emotions within us, is a part of a process and flow and intertwinement so deep and complex and refined that we could never wholly define it and lay it out on the table completely visible. We have to step outside of ourselves simply to know this concept to be true, beyond theoretical formulations. We have to disassociate ourselves from ourselves in order to know how we are something much bigger, much deeper, much more expansive than what we know from our daily actions, our fleeting thoughts, our stormship emotions. We have to go far away in order to know where home is.

To truly include all of anything that any one person or thing is, you would have to include all the world.

In the surface day to day transactions that we know as our concrete existence, things appear so discrete, boundaries so insurmountable, shadows and reflections so determined. But the farther inward or outward you go from there, the more indistinguishable become the lines. At what point is there me, and at what point is there you? From outer space, we are the earth, a webbed set of links, determined by cycles and currents. On the level of molecules, we are porous chains, determined only by what can be embraced.

At all levels, whether surface, inner, or cosmic interactions, everything is interconnected. To speak of individuals as isolated from each other is to speak of a world that does not exist. It is more accurate, perhaps, simply to say that many people are disconnected from themselves without awareness of it. To be aware of your separation is to be aware of your greater connectivity. We formulate words to string them into creations that stir the pot of what we know, that push our perceptions yet further into self-knowledge. We will never know everything, we will never know ourselves completely, so hence the struggle, the foment of unsayable things, the despair and the beauty, the tragic events and the transcendent moments. The current moves, and a storm occurs, and a child cries in the night.

Roots In the Sky

It surprises me when I find myself loving her more everyday, desiring her more everyday, seeing more beauty in her everyday. I suppose somewhere in some programmed part of my masculine indoctrinated brain I thought that love, like passion, like rain, was a temporal, fleeting experience, to simply be enjoyed while it lasted, and let go of when it faded. I didn’t realize that it was something that could become so deeply rooted into my heart that once it was there, it would recurringly bear fruit, expanding ever outward hungrily into the light, giving gifts far beyond expectation. That love could be a sequoia tree, reigning quietly for centuries, instead of a seasonal flower that wilts at the first sign of frost.

There are tempestuous sweeps of insecurity, anger, possessiveness, etc that overcome me at times. But the roots hold strong, digging down deeper beyond simple walls of self and mind. I am more than me, expanding into her. I question this wonder daily, wondering how it could be, that I am not only now myself, but also us, also we, also this every day connection enwrapping and dancing and strengthening simultaneously outward and inward into an unknown but fully impelled future. These thoughts propel me naturally into mystical contemplations of destiny, soul companionship, and sufi communion with my beloved. But I also recognize fully that every day that exists between us is what we create, what we sustain, what we allow. How fragile at times it seems, especially when I test it too far. But these times also strengthen us, making us see how tightly wound the heart strings hurt when plucked to sing.

There isn’t any way to wrap my mind around this. At some point, I have to lay down my arms and simply surrender to what I know to be real and true and right before me in my heart.

Depressions in the Landscape

On the cusp of a vast depression in the earth, the water flows from slowly melting snow, gravity pulling it downward inevitably into a standing pool that will reflect the sky. Here birds and deer gather to drink, disturbing quietly the still pond. Here at one point in time sit some hikers, refreshing themselves from Nalgenes as they take a respite from 10 miles of rocks, mosquitoes, and uncertain unmaintained trails. The sun bakes the trees, rooted down below rock, suckling sustenance from reservoirs beyond the grasp of human immediacy. The clouds shift in thin rails across the blue, distant and cold in another atmosphere. A chickadee forlornly repeats its ancient refrain of hope, honed into a dirge of spring. The hikers speak of past lives in cities, jobs that stripped them bare of idealism. Office cubicles, running down alleyways and biking through intersections. Of women laid and never caught. Of families strewn on the rocks of Victorianism. Of drug exploration and growing up without expectation.

There is nothing that can compare to the silence of the sun beating off of a landscape as unhumanly manipulated as possible in this day and age. Other than the vast network of trails formed, and the overly rapacious chipmunks developed, and the condensement of trees from lack of fire. But to sit next to this collection of mountain water, and to drink, and discuss. There is nothing that can really be done except to eventually fall silent, and to observe. The hikers do just this, and a jet blows across the sky thousands of miles above, and a lizard scurries from rock to rock to find the declining naked sun, and ants are busy on the treelimbs above, transporting tidbits of food.

It really takes this distance from everything, sometimes, to fully almost realize just how intimately connected you are to everything. Like you have to step away, step far up on a mountain, step far down into some deep abyss, in order to detach yourself from what you normally conceive as yourself, to gather fully the larger context. To look beyond the chains that bind you to your circumstances to realize that the circumstances are only bound by what you can perceive. And that perception can only expand with distance. And retaining this afterimage as you descend back into civilization, the hikers take off their backpacks and throw them into the bed of the truck, and they start it up and disappear down the windy bumpy road into the messy, noisy interstitial madness of humanity. They meet up at a bar later that week and find that they are silent, unable to word their sudden difference, silent mourners nursing single beers in the half light of dusk on the patio, watching the sun setting behind a distant mountain range unseen.

The water falls without purpose, without creed. The mountains are raised by turbulent unseen depths. The stars shine out of death. Humanity is guided by what cannot be fathomed. By what cannot be mapped. By hearts as distant and beautiful as ice capped mountains melting into wildflowered meadows in the spring.

Ever More

This moment is you. Standing hopeless on the brink of your desires, your washed up dreams. All the fantasies that you cultivated in solitary stimulation. The world moves on, distant, primal, alien. You listen to your mind striving to form some narration that would fit you in, lock you into a perfection and beauty undeniable, eternal, broadcast across time and space to shine into understanding and love and sex and money. But you know, of course, that your spirit is undefinable. Incapturable. That the only things that come out of you that are beautiful are not your own. That this darkness, this doubt, this everyday struggle simply to look in the mirror and walk out the door into the unseeing crowd is the keystone to this very moment.

When you stand face to face with your death, you understand then that such moments are everything. That all the times of wasteful heedlessness—spent suckered into some suit’s notion of what you are supposed to want, given your date of birth, sexual orientation, and geographical location—were exactly that, a waste. That most of your life has been wasted. That even despite all of this waste, all it takes is one moment of truth, purity, and honesty to clear it all away. The tally is tipped every time by one simple look into despair. You could never be good enough. The world could never be enough. And yet, it moves, it breathes, it feels, it floods. Death and movement are one and the same. Periods are a pause in the formation of thought, like the pulling back of the sea before it moves to crash itself into the shore. Again and again. There is no stop. No end. No final dark night that has no meaning.

What do we call this thing within us that fears and hides and spits at the world? It has been called ego, it has been called self, it has been called humanity. It is our suppressed divinity showing forth as demonic manifestation. Let it shine. Let it out. You know everything that there is to know about yourself. You were born crying, helpless, misunderstood in your inability to articulate. You learned to buffer yourself by silence, conformity, and following the drawn lines of tradition. You found moments of freedom when you rediscovered connection, empathy, intuition. These are the tools that take us into the future.

Draconian regressive clutchings at domination and anger, addiction and blame, have defined our history. These egos. This humanity. These childlike gods, terrible in their bitterness. We all must grow up eventually, one way or another. To face our extinction or our transmutation. Both which appears the same to the uncritical eye.

The alchemist leaves behind his learning, leaves behind his doubt, leaves behind his fear. To make magic. To believe in what has been taught to us as impossible. To find in one moment the key that would unlock all of sleeping eternity. To move beyond himself, his attachment, and his desire.

Because beyond death there is a greater power. It has nothing to do with the transformation of lead into gold, or of water into wine. Nor the movement of mountains, or of the stars, or of your heart. What stupidity! It is the power and binding strength of communion. The severing of self to find union in your Beloved. The letting go of what holds you back and pins you down to find that you can fly, that you have been flying all along, that the world flies and holds you and cradles you and pushes you beyond yourself at every turn to look down into what seems inevitable and certain impossiblity. Can you handle it? Can you handle what you were given? Can you handle what you were made to become?

It is not one or the other. It is not you or them. It is not life or death. It is love, or it is Love. It is death, or it is Death. Nothing less. Ever more.

Sea

It isn’t there, if you have to look for it, see. It’s already envisioned, already happening. It’s moving. You’re on it. You’re in it. You are it, every step of the way, every hurt, awakening, joy. The godhead, this beautiful presence. That’s what you’re looking at. Don’t look for it. It’s there. It’s here. It is, it be, it now. This has all been said before, but it has never, ever been seen quite the same way, through quite the same eyes, in quite the same form. Quietly, the world revolves into wholly new arrangements of recycled material. Spiraling coils that stretch into any space given. A beauty that is everpresent, evergreen, all inside everything that exists, as long as you can see it. Look at yourself. You really believe that you are anything else? Anything but you? Who you been listening to?

Because it sure as hell can’t be said. This is just kind of a reminder, you know what I’m saying? This is a memo between me and you so that we remember. Remember that nothing in the world is as important as what is manifestly occurring right now within us. Here. Beholden only to our own sacred knowledge of what we feel. No one can tell us that, not even ourselves. We’ve just got to be listening real close to the world which is ourselves in different times speaking in different voices through different movements that we are one, that we are many, that we are all in this shit together and that it really don’t matter what anyone holds onto—because everything has already been made into a picture that moves and defines and clutches at hungry bittersweet beauty when we all know, all we know, we already know quite well that we are this, peace, whole, center focus of all understanding and polyrhythm and harmonious atonal interconnectivity that thrusts and crawls and flies into love, into love. Into what we can only call love, belatedly and in sad departure because we are full, as the apple is full when it falls to the earth, in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of everything, falling out of fullness and inevitability into the future. Because it must be. Because it is. Because this wind has blown in this current out of the circulation of this sea from this sun in this exploding set of dust and stars and energy.

Honey Bees Be Dyin’

Have you heard about the honey bees? That they are dying in vast numbers, and nobody knows why? That’s kind of scary. First and foremost, because I love me my honey. Second, because they pollinate most of our flowers, fruits, and food plants.

There’s endless speculation as to the cause, such as that the bees are getting “stressed out.” Whatever. More like “they’re getting bombed with toxic chemicals.” Let’s face it, the agribusiness in this country essentially grows its plants on steroids and antibiotics. And it’s like we’re surprised when suddenly all the adults start getting cancer, all the children are born with some kind of disorder, whether physical or mental, and all the food tastes like crap unless you add some of that manufactured “natural flavoring.” And we’re in the midst of what is quite soberly termed an “obesity epidemic.” So the human signs are quite readily visible, if you realize what you’re looking at: the cumulative effects of years of growing and serving food based on business instead of health. And so I guess it shouldn’t be all that surprising that now we’re beginning, inevitably, to see the devastating effects on animal, plant, and insect life. And microbial life, such as the growing amounts of “superbugs” that are completely resistant to any form of antibiotic. Forget global warming. I think this complete disassociation of human life from natural cycles is what constitutes the greatest danger to our survival as a species. We collectively have only the dimmest awareness that we are wholly dependent on biodiversity and connectivity with animals, plants, insects, microbes, and the soil.

In order to survive, we have to understand just how connected we are with everything around us.

We Were Made to Connect

We were made to connect with one another, as a species, as an evolutionary cumulative formulation. We were made to mesh, to fuck, to fly across spaces, boundaries, and time into each other’s minds, mouths, and futures. Our eyes and skin are secondary to the ultimate sense that is only to be found within, which entails inevitably a subsequent reaching out. Because what is found there in that lonely place inside is not solely some infinite dark emptiness—what is found is everything living that has come before and is to come and simply is.

We were made to be strong with each other, to interlink into divinity through the tessellation of our bodies and souls. Alone, we find each other. Through each other, we find ourselves.

For the more scientifically inclined, this can be explained quite simply through the sharing of germs. When you love someone, you share their germs, their daily experiences—everything that contacts and interpenetrates them goes into you, to become part of you, such that essentially you two are one—but more than one: a new hybrid identity created from the intimacy of molecules that had individually completely different characteristics. This sharing, this interconnectivity—if properly aligned with the stars and signs and genetic happenstances—makes the both of you stronger. Where one is weak the other is strong. Bodily fluids and mental spelunkings are shared continuously, the diversity of bacteria and permutative emotions are biodiversified into a deeper beauty, an expanded harmony with external shifts and ebbs and floods.

The social studies or psychology major may understand this phenomena in terms of the survival rates of groups of persons subjected to dire situations wherein they are stranded, where their survival is dependent not only upon ingenuity and weather conditions, but also upon their ability to cope with stress, anxiety, and depression. Thus, groups which share strong interconnections and dependencies have higher survival rates. Those who separate and isolate themselves, thinking they will better survive only place themselves at greater risk.

We must be weak together in order to be strong. We must cling to the raft of ever shifting emotions, pain, misunderstandings, miscommunications, and fickle humanity.

In terms of evolution, if our ultimate purpose was to only be alone, isolated, and detached from one another, then why do we instinctively, biologically, mentally, and spiritually desire to bear or foster children? Children renew the cycle; they bring us back down the evolutionary ladder to day one, where we are developing our sense of selves, our sense of cosmos, where we cry and wail beyond language, where the universe centers around us, where we suck nutrients from our bearer’s breasts. Children bring fully developed adults back to reality, back to tomorrow, back to the everexpanding horizons of humanity, the need for not only movement forward but for movement to preserve, a rocking back and forth like the soothing motions the parent makes for a fussy baby. Nurturing, developing, recognizing the importance of all that has come before and what is to come.

Because no one man or woman is the pinnacle of anything but a moment of a spiral that must rise only to fall again as fodder for the next development in time and space. No one moment or thought or action can ever define anything except that current universal vision. The vision must be renewed, from up to down, from back to forth, from human to microbe, from man to child, from tree to fruit—continuously, like the shoreline etched by centuries of waves, a picture will be formed, is being formed, will be erased. We collectively are growing to greater heights, but these heights can only be measured by how inclusive they are of what is unseen, rooted, and fundamentally basic.

Humanity spills into ourselves, into each other, filling the spaces between what is known and what is felt and what is taken for granted. Beyond breakage, beyond war, hatred, and greed, we form a picture of one another that reflects our children, which reflects ourselves, which inflects and extrudes and proclaims our divinity and light and beauty. Only through each other, through ourselves, through the messy beautiful struggles through sex and through touch and through understanding, will we know this source.

Time to Grow Up

Systems of exclusion—this is what we learned in primary school. Find a niche, fit yourself in, make fun of the kid who stands out (even when you were one of them). This is survival mechanics, biological manifestation, pattern recognition. Learned behavior. Although there was always that part of you that understood that the outcasts, the sore-thumbs, were in fact much closer to you than you cared to admit. That you were in fact dependent on them to give yourself purpose and meaning.

You grow older, and as your awareness of the wider world extends, so too does your need for readily definable enemies. Again, there are given culturally or sociologically established minorities: the homeless, perhaps, if you need something closer to home; or homosexuals; or maybe simply the dark-skinned turbaned men from gutteral lands on the evening news waving guns. “Here, it’s ok,” your peers and consumer media tells you, “you can hate these people. They are different.” And thus, you can pretend to know who you are. You are not them—you are God fearing, freedom loving, money making, success driven. You are clean, you are whole, you are pure.

Maybe you come to realize—or maybe you do not, given your level of intelligence and ability to imagine—that at some level, you are only hating yourself. That you are not representative of some cultural, sociological elite. That such an elite does not exist. That this so-called “elite” in fact consists of a conglomeration of power hungry, unscrupulous warlords, gang leaders, fighting like rats for their little piece of turf. And everyone in between either living their lives heedless, caught in the crossfire, or simply pawns in the play by play, puppets on strings. And this is the part of yourself, this subservient mass of complacent fodder and indignant impotence, that you have been pushing away as an “other” and hating. This is the part of yourself that you don’t want to see. The part of yourself that sits at street corners and begs for money, the part of yourself that turns a trick in the spaces between lamplight on side streets downtown, the part of yourself that sleeps in doorways, the part of yourself that picks pounds of fruit during harvest seasons for a few cents, the part of yourself that crosses the border in the desert without food or water, the part of yourself that talks to yourself in tongues, the part of yourself that shakes uncontrollably, the part of yourself riven, stricken, striped with a subharmonic pulse of the moon that can’t be named, can’t be helped, can’t be driven into the light of the day.

Children are reflective of this rift. They are growing increasingly distant from what is understood, while ever increasingly congealed as an easily groomed consumer group. They are labeled with acronyms, thrown into detention centers, fed with pharmeceuticals, whipped with crafty standardized fill-in-the-bubble questions. Toxins, radio waves, video games, free porn, Doritos, Pepsi, Britney Spears shaved sex symbol trailer trash meltdown, ADD, ritalin, SATs, cellphone ringtones, Clear Channel. You know the rest. It’s overloading everyone. The mercury is raiding the fish. The carbon is filling the air. The phosphates are flooding the deltas.

The world collectively awaits its adulthood. We all need to grow up. The biggest threat to our existence, the greatest enemy to be overcome, is ourselves. Ourselves. Not some Korean, Arabian, Venezuelan enemy. Not some teenaged runt with a trenchcoat and a gun. Not some poor, destitute, homeless, drug addled nameless on the street. Not them. Not other. Just us. Just you and me and our kids and our future. Time to include, accept, embrace. Time to grow up.

Lullaby

Flip sides o’ the same coin, ecstasy and suffering–like in the way when you cook a pancake and the first side is cooked deeply til it bubbles through, and then when you flip it, the second side cooks swiftly and lightly: a dark, covered burning and grappled scrambling, and a fleeting, golden cumulative few moments of divinity. The ecstasy comes in the throes of union, in the dissipation of boundaries accompanied by a visceral sense of unity, fulfillment, and flying light exploding bliss. Suffering comes when habitual patterns and perceptions fall back into place like confining walls, and separation, individual isolation, and anxious insecurity again take their status as the norm of daily existence. But the renewal of distinct, opposing forms is the essence of life and love. It is essentially impossible to maintain a blissful sense of unity and infinite harmony with all the Kosmos or simply with your beloved. Simply put, without the valleys there would be no peaks. The peaks are pushed into the stratosphere from the deep inner workings of years of slow burning flames, of frictive forces pushing against each other until the victorious simultaneous movement upward, far beyond the territory so painfully fought for.

What is commonly known as “suffering” is what paves the path to a deeper and lasting inner experience of love. Suffering is to work, traverse the pointed rock strewn wildernesses of the heart and mind, to be alone within yourself, to come close to the silence, the stillness of a concentrated listening and observation, when all the sounds and shapes form together slowly like jigsawed pieces of each other, to know the outward signs of mundanity as intimately as inner hidden wellsprings of divine light, to know humanity beyond words, to know love beyond touch, to know god beyond faith, to know everyday as struggle, to know every night as searching, to scrape the lowest dirty depths of the earth to know the wildest dances of lunar madness.

There is no having one without the other. There is no faith without an accompanying contact of skin, no peace without a tumultuous, bloody birth, no healing without protective, irritating scabs, no light reflectant beauty without brooding darkness.

We fight each other to know ourselves. The universe is cut up into words and diagrams to chart its unity into understanding. The heart is pockmarked with despair to know divinity. The moon is deadened rock reflecting the sun exerting its silent night pull on seedlings struggling to uplift their tendrils to the future. The pull is there in everything, up and down, earth and sky, light and dark–all one wave of one voice making its song to itself to sing itself into awareness of its beauty.

To Be Here

The Zen Buddhists are oft quoted curtly stating, “Here. Now.” Attempting always to snap attention to where it is most needed, the present moment. Because the world is sinuously, continuously shifting. Because enlightment is not some perfect pinnacle to be reached and planted a flag into. Because the only way to be effective, relevant, and alive is to be consistently adaptive, morphic, rooting, exchanging. Boundaries must be extended until they are simply memories, snapshots of shedded patterns of the past. Trails as an imprinted arrow to the impromptu point of now, where we stand attempting to surf the unknown stimuli that floods every moment into our hungry receptors.

So many of us are terrified of what is to come, this dark mass of potentialities. We cringe to look at our breathing selves, at the very raw animal divine life that we are, existing, extruding so many things that we don’t even know where to begin to prune. But what is to come is just as frankly irrelevant as what has already occurred. What of course always takes precedence over anything, every time, is the everpresent here and now. To be omnipresent does not mean to exist outside of time. It means to exist so firmly embedded in this very present, now, now, NOW, that in tunnelling through this eternal presence you come to exist everywhere all at once, through the simultaneous intuitive deep superconscious connectives that link you through to all life that exists in the same moment in other forms, to see through their eyes as your eyes, to know the universe through yourself through the universe.

Such moments are hard to come by. Such concentration is required simply to relax. Such study and discipline and luck and love are required to allow and to accept and to embrace each fleeting moment to its fullest.

The first step is just to acknowledge the utter critical importance of awareness of your present existence. To meditate is not to sit. To enact yoga is not to exercise. These are matters of life or death. This is the purpose for which you are here. To be here.

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.

The Night Horn

A horn blows from atop a mountain through the valley, sonorously rebounding across the snowy ridges, and a boy awakens in the night to find himself not at all sleepy, although he had been utterly exhausted when he went to bed. He climbs out of the sheets and fits himself into warm clothes and sits for a while in the darkness, listening to the horn blowing intermittently, a sustained deep note, perhaps only of some hippie stoned at a ski resort, working the night snowmaking shift. Whatever the intent of the blower, it is beautiful and mystical all the same, this long horn blown across the slumbering mountain town like a pagan call to arms, or an islam call to prayer. As the echoes trail off into ridges beyond, finally into silence, the space is blended back into the stream sounds of cars passing on the highway. The boy stretches out on the living room carpet like a cat and feels how he is only a temporary inhabitant of his own body. How he is in some sense akin to the breaths that dilate and distend his lungs, to the sounds of the lonely horn across the mountains and the silence that it leaves–an emptying and filling that are both equally hollow, equally meaningful, equally dependent on each other for continuance.

He had walked past his grandfather 2 weeks ago in an open casket, and saw how empty his body was, how withered and frail and blue. But just the day before he collapsed in the living room, grandpa had been telling sea stories and waving his pipe through the air like a wand, filled with life and insight, laughter and kinetic silence. There is now that space of energy missing in the house, the space that he didn’t even know was there until it was gone. The boy misses his grandfather incredibly, and feels strongly the emptiness in his heart. An emptiness that parallels his own aliveness, that runs concurrent with how aware and awake he feels at this very moment in the middle of the night. His grandfather has left behind his body like a breath leaves through a mouth. The boy breathes in and feels how his life is somehow inseparable with death, with his own death, with his grandfather’s death. How every movement, breath, and thought is tied equally to its opposite in some unknown world without forms. How every object has a shadow in the sun. How every event has a cause, and an effect. How everything in the universe, it seems, is one giant organism, intertwined, tangled, and slouching towards its omega point.

The boy listens to the passing of the cars for a while longer, thinking nothing. Then he says goodnight to his grandfather and crawls back into bed and sleeps deeply, until the smell of maple syrup will awaken him to the day.

Vision Logic

Every event and thought and action in my life points to realization of the helix of life and death as one and the same, the helix of pain and pleasure as one and the same. Differing faces of the same coin, spiralling through time and space. All pointing inward to the interdimensional connectivity of our hearts. The boundless core of emptiness that is everything and nothing all in one breath. Twisting, turning, we dance about this flame that expels us and devours us every moment. We play games, we push away our deaths, we push away our lives, we put on masks and pretend to be something singular, one-dimensional, and dissociated from all the world. All songs and stories and myths of humanity. All maps of guidebooks to the spirit.

Looking into ourselves, we see a beauty so terrible, so hungry, so powerful, we flutter away into conventionality, we label away our own infinitude, we box up our horizons and hide behind simulations behind simulations behind simulations of this reality.

This world is mine. It is at my very fingertips, it is inseparable from my heart and my vision. This world is yours. We are gods. We are terrible, hungry, powerful divine beings–and you would be so selfish, so small-minded, so vain, as to say that there is some distinction between yourself and God? That you could ever be separated? That this umbilical cord of words and sight and touch is not God? That the emptiness, and the form, and the heart, and the mouth, and the death, and the life, and the pain, and the ecstasy, could ever be anything but God?

The only thing that divides us is our hesitation to accept, to submit to our own ability to see.

No End

Like a tree embedded in the soil, nurtured by the sky, there is no true separation between you and I. All appearance is a veil, like the atmosphere over earth, protecting us from incinerating instantly. You could say that everyone and everything in this universe is really one and the same, existing solely in different space-time, morphic units scattered in morphic fields all stemming from one heart. This is the root of understanding, the empathic placement of yourself into another’s life, seeing the world through an other’s eyes. Like a sonnet structure, like a symphony, all life is on the surface but an empty form. But it is what moves through these forms that gives us meaning.

Does any of this make sense to you? What I am saying is that you–you, exactly as you are–are capable of understanding everything in this universe. Look inward to your heart. Look outward to your friends, family, and community. Feel all the world with your senses. All as one interlocked embrace, all eyes looking inward to the one, all one looking outward to the all.

A New Year to Live, Love, and Grow

As per a sort-of-tradition (check out last year’s missive, or from 2005, or the one from 2002), I feel the need to say a few words to commemorate el día de año nuevo: wherever you might happen to be when reading this and at whatever time, let’s agree to one thing: we are entering a new horizon of existence, and whether or not the calendar system we follow runs according to divine accordance or not, the fact is that every day, every month, every year pushes us farther along the paths to our omega points, the unknown call pulling us into a hopefully transcendent future.

Every New Year’s is not only a celebration, but a remembrance of what has passed to bring us here, and a harkening on what is to come. There are certainly enough problems in the world to give us pause, and cast long shadows onto future generations. But there is hope that humanity will evolve to meet the challenges to our species, and this hope is called love. In the midst of the fragmented shards of war, desperation, and complacency, love is the flower that can break through concrete and connect together alien worlds. To embrace everything that currently exists, and everything that has come before, is the only path to the future. To accept the world, your family, your loved ones, and yourself as what is, in all its imperfection and seeming disconnection.

Beyond the excuse to drink excessively and lose control over your actions, New Year’s stands as a time to look back and look forward, and ask the big questions that your everyday life has numbed your awareness to: what gives your life meaning? Where will you be a year from now? Where were you a year from now? It also stands as a time to give thanks for the gifts from the divine that allowed you to make it thus far, to appreciate the friends that you have, to kiss your beloved, and a time to feel hope that all of which has sustained you thus far will only grow, and grow, and grow.

So I raise my cup of Chartreuse to you and wish you the best–because I acknowledge openly that your future is tied so intimately to mine as to be indistinguishable, on a Kosmic level. And I wish the same to all people everywhere. That we can all find our ways into everyday joy, to a paradise now, to a heaven here.

Multifaceted Universe

You think, perhaps, as you are entertained, that you are simply an observer. You think maybe when you sit alone in your apartment watching your TV that you are detached. You might pretend to be completely uninvolved in politics, war, and other issues relating to the outer world. You might tell yourself, and you may be told: I am a civilian, I am a consumer.
But such reductions of reality eventually lead only to pathologies. Looking at a three-dimensional world in one dimension will only get you so far before you see the blood on your hands, or see your blood on other hands.

You are not a mere observer. You are a creator. You are a destroyer. You are not alone, not when every thought and feeling within you have eventual impact on another human being. You are not uninvolved in politics–every move you make has political ramifications. You are not a civilian, you are a potential target. You are not simply a consumer; you guide the market.

Things are much more complex, much more deeply interconnected than we are taught to admit. We aren’t supposed to know that the decisions we make affect people on the other side of the globe. Remember the butterfly of the chaos theory? A butterfly flaps its wings and a hurricane blows somewhere else. Forget the theoretical butterfly. Consider this: you flap your lips and a storm will blow inside of someone else’s heart. Imagine the compounded effects of that.

People watch sports, they gather together in stadiums, they rise together in staggered sequence, their arms rising and falling in the air, the intentional mass reproduction of a wave. It is cute, it is tame. It is like a child trying out a bicycle with training wheels.

People amass into crowds, into mobs, they can grow suddenly violent, suddenly barbarous. Nothing can get in their way. Cars will be overturned, whole city blocks destroyed. It is disturbing, it is wild.

The inherent power in an individual lies in that individual’s ability to identify with a collective. An empowered collective, aware of itself, can do almost anything.

Open-source Economies?

Something I was thinking about this morning in relation to the world going to shit, etc: the need for a global governing/discussive/economic body. And I was thinking of how that wasn’t going to happen anytime soon–at least, not in terms of politics as we know it. Nations currently are only looking out for number one, and that’s the name of the game in terms of world politics: garnering resources, power, and economic stability.

So I then thought of the only other possibility of correcting a world that’s been thrown to the dogs of money-grubbing and power mongering: the people, the individuals who are all attempting simply to live their lives and love and survive. The internet has proven to be a powerful networking medium, never subject to predictability, subversive but also harnessed just as tightly to consumerism and the market economy. Decentralized networking–a connection directly between individuals, without centralized policing or governing structures–has been proven on the internet to thrive and be effective. Furthermore, the internet has also proven that open-source information empowers individuals to create and innovate far beyond whatever original intention was behind a software or social engineering project.

And I was thinking: this might be the key to our future, to the survival of our species. Not to be overly dramatic, but anyone with any level of awareness beyond their own selfish needs and ideologies recognizes that the problems that we face in the near-future are almost apocalyptic in stature, and will require the utmost in creativity, practicality, and love in order to overcome. It will take money, policy, lifestyle, and consciousness-level changes on a global scale. And I think it is quite readily apparent that we can not rely on our current governing structures to enact these kind of revolutionary and evolutionary changes. It will be much too late by the time politicians and those with over 70% of the globe’s wealth and resources will take their heads out of their oily asses and take a look at what’s beyond themselves. The only ones who can change it are us–the everyday people who put 2 and 2 together. And I’m thinking that the internet may just be the forum in which we can change it.

Beyond MySpace and YouTube and Gnutella other such networks of entertainment and time-passing, it may just be that the internet can provide nodes of not only social and cultural consciousness–but also that somehow money can be utilized and activated across national boundaries. I haven’t envisioned how this could ever happen, because I’m not very technical nor very economical-minded. But I do see a generalized notion here, a possibility, a potentiality.

As in a network may be formed, in which not only ideas, people, and hearts are virtually conjoined, but also in which a new market may be formed–a market in which money goes towards what it is supposed to be going towards: local economies and social programs, rather then to gluttonous super-structures that nickel and dime the shit out of everything so that some fat motherfucker can play golf and perform perverted sexual fantasies with whores and neglect his kids.

How can this happen? I don’t know–but I’m hoping that somebody else will.

Onibus 174

I watched an interesting Brazilian documentary called Bus 174 last night. I’m not sure that I would recommend it for viewing, necessarily, because it isn’t the most pleasant and light-hearted movie in the world; however, it is an incisive look into the structure of Brazilian–and by extension, all–society. It concerns an event which took place on a bus in Rio, where a street kid held all of the people on the bus hostage for several hours. On the surface, it’s just another crime in the city, another sensationalized piece of terror on the nightly news. You normally would have been watching the event and commenting on what kind of sick individual would hijack a bus. You wouldn’t have known that sick individual’s name or life story, where he came from and what brought him to the point of violence. This movie provides all the background, all the societal settings which led to this event. And by the end of the movie, you come to realize that it is not just that individual who is sick–it is society itself, with its inevitable populations of homeless and prison-bound and destitute, that is sick.

I won’t go too in-depth into the movie, as you may want to watch it–but I found it an enlightening approach to a criminal act. Rather than casting blame and simply labelling the criminal as a monster or drugged up or crazy, the movie takes the time to humanize him, to examine his personal history, to examine the world that he lived in. And through this process it becomes evident that there is no such thing as an individual apart from the world–even when that individual is one of the “invisible,” one of the street kids who have no identity apart from hustling because they are given no place to be themselves. Sandro’s act of holding people hostage is then seen as an attempt at empowerment, to make himself heard and seen to an audience that normally wouldn’t look twice at him.

Violence of all forms is, I believe, at root level a desperate plea to be known and understood–it is all of the words and thoughts and emotions that had never before been released. If you are reading this blog right now, then you are obviously articulate and literate–articulate with technology and able to read and write. Imagine if you were illiterate, and that you had no forum in which to give voice to your thoughts and feelings, that in fact the environment in which you lived would not allow you to give voice to your feelings except through the mediation of drugs, social workers, or TV. So you’ve got this whole world inside of you, needing to be shared, but finding no cathartic outlet–only in short bursts, fragments. Eventually it build to a point where it is seething, explosive. It is at that point that a gun becomes a twisted substitute for the pen.

Seen through this kind of light, where one attempts to understand a criminal and an act of crime from the point of view of empathy, rather than anger, fear, or hatred, violence is understood then as a kind of tipping point, of which there are warning signs and pressures–and always a chance of finding a resolution, rather than allowing it to explode. Which means that the violence of the individual is a symptom of the larger body of society. Which means that when some random guy in Wisconsin, or Colorado, or wherever it happens to take place next, walks into a school and shoots random kids–this is an event which should concern all of us. Not only as a media spectacle, but as human beings attempting to relate to other human beings. What drives people to do such things? What sickness is there in society?

Writer’s Block

At periodic intervals in my journey through life, I stop and step outside of myself and wonder if I really have anything to say. There then ensues a period of silence. It happens enough that I’ve stopped going through the “will I ever write again?” anxiety, but it still perturbs me nonetheless, because I know that every single day of my existence I need to get things out that I normally can’t express. My writing goes through phases: sometimes all I will write about are mundane daily occurrences or thoughts; other times all I will write is abstract poetry.

Writing is a constant struggle to root down to the Source of all things. At some cosmic level, I believe all things to be interconnected. This is the basis on which metaphor, the language of poetry and spiritual introspection and surprise, rests. That ultimately, any random thing can be interrelated to a greater whole, in which it is embraced and liquidated, a drop in the sea.

Postmodernism was an interesting intellectual and cultural exercise in which we recognized the idea of the fragmentation of our identities. But we’re moving beyond that cold shizophrenic paranoia, thank god, and evolving to see that even our very selves be simply shrapnel in the sea of a divinity that defines and repels us all in the same breath.

Once it was black and white, and poor and rich, and women and men. I’m hoping that our culture is quietly evolving beyond such facile reductions of our godhead.

In any case, the moon is almost full here on the lake at this fall time, bringing with it a whole slew of questions and remembrances and sorrows and light. I’m writing here at this very moment because I am alone, and you are alone, and we are together. The most important thing, I think, is that we understand ourselves through each other. I will continue to write, searching to uncover the line that strings our hearts together across the oceans of time and space.

Healing Rituals

This weekend I came to realize how powerful ceremony and ritual can be in our lives. Growing up going to church and subsequently rejecting it’s regimented, institutionalized blather and feel-good propoganda, I instinctively shy away from most semblances of worship. But getting together with a group of amazing friends and sitting down and making a concerted effort to truly get beyond appearances and on into deeply spiritual life matters is a consciousness broadening experience. We sat in a circular manner and expressed gratitude to various forces in our lives which had brought us to that moment. We meditated and we sang and we played instruments. We planted trees and plants. We looked into ourselves and we looked into each other. And I realized afterwards just how important doing such a thing is–how in fact it may be necessary. Reaching your own inner realizations is of course a beautiful thing. But when it just sits inside of you and doesn’t bear witness and corroboration in other people, then it can wilt and fade away. Sharing your inner heart with other people who have similarly looked into themselves is a joyful and heartening experience, because you understand then that you are not alone–and it gives you hope. It gives you connection and beauty and power. And then you can go back to your daily mundanity with this flower within you, knowing that it is more securely there, and blooming.

Thank you to all those of you who were there–and for everyone who wasn’t, even if you don’t know it–you were.

Political Visions

I have seen the light. Estadounidenses need more vacations. I am currently on vacation in sunny southern California, and I feel like a bear has climbed down from off my back. (Back in the days when I used to run track, we would say that someone had “the bear on their back” when you could see them struggling around the last corner of the homestretch and slowing down.) I needed a break from the daily grind, a break from the habits and normality of my sort-of settled cabin mountain life. No wonder most Americans are so close-minded and one-dimensional. We are so occupied with work and then subsequent TV and habitual existence that it is nearly impossible for us to envisage situations outside of our immediate and limited scopes. We need vacations to see the other side of things now and then, to break from the same-old and remember who we are outside of the people and circumstances that surround us everyday. It is so easy to get stuck in the mire of other people’s perceptions and gossip.

That said, I wanted to talk a little bit about some political stuff. What started the train of thought was reading an excellent article on the atrocities in Darfur, describing the rogue janjaweeds employed by the Sudanese government to perform “ethnic cleansing” (do we really have to use the word ‘cleansing’? Couldn’t we just call it what it is–mass murder?). The United States has actually been fairly active in providing aid and attempting to garner international action, which unfortunately has proved ineffective due to the loss of respect by the rest of the world for our dishonorable actions in Iraq and our hostile behavior to the UN, and Europe in general. Although of course our actions have still not been enough to save lives, but at the very least we have been more active than in the case of Rwanda, in which we did absolutely zilch.

Anyway, to get to the crux of my discussion: I used to consider myself an anarchist, more for lack of attachment to any political ideology or group than actual adherence to anarchic values. (By the way, if you think anarchy is about molotov cocktails and chaos, then you need to read some Emma Goldman or other real anarchic literature. It’s some of the most intelligent and humanist political writing in the world.) I distrusted the US government for the secret and public crimes it committed and continues to commit against its own constituents and against the world. I distrusted the idea of government en total, for large systems of beauracracy and money seem to lead only to corruption and atrocity.

The book that began leading me to a more balanced and integrated view of centralized governing systems actually was on public health (Betrayal of Trust by Laurie Garrett), in which the reporter meticulously disects the causes and effects of the current despicable state of public health in the US and the World Health Organization. I suddenly realized, through this book, that centralized governing systems are essential for the preservance of human life–we need a centralized public health system, we need clean water, clean air, safe homes. The problem is not the idea of government itself–the problem is that most governments, as they are, fail to perform their basic function and purpose–which is serving and protecting their people.

I never fail to be amazed that the Republican party can make “national security” one of its cornerstone issues, when their xenophobic cowboy war games have jeapordized our nation for years to come, and their slashing of social supportive programs and funding have devastated the heart of their own people.

But let me not go off on a rant lambasting Republicans or conservatives, because that isn’t my target right now. They are too easy to bag on, actually. I could go off just as easily on Democrats, for that matter. Politicans, in general, are easy to pigeonhole, because they almost universally only have one thing on their mind–election time. Which leads me to my main topic. Our political and cultural and economic system is seriously screwed up and needs some jerryriggin’.

I’m not against capitalism, per se. But our current form of capitalism (capitalism in the sense of profit as the goal of the economy) ain’t working. It CAN work. See, the problem is that currently our politics and economy is ruled by short term profit and very large corporations. And these corporations are cut-throat, greedy, and extremely short sighted. They can barely look past one season, let alone one year, in terms of their profit margin. But if they took their head out of their asses, and looked a little closer at the bigger picture, at the wide horizon of the future–then they would notice that in the long run, their current actions in pursuance of solely short term profits are unsustainable. Let me rephrase that in terms of money: they will not continue to make money if they continue to function the way most of them currently do. They’ve got to restructure and re-envision themselves and their functions in society and the economy. If they want long term, steady profit, than they will have to become sustainable operations–sustainable in the sense of taking responsibility for their effects on their society and environment, and making subsequent amendments and changes.

Another way to put that last paragraph is that based on our current economic, political, and cultural trajectory, we are destroying the future of our children and grandchildren. Our current way of life is unsustainable. Plain and simple. So if we want to make changes, REAL changes, then we must look ahead, even as far as 30-50 years down the road, to a time when we will no longer be able to be reliant on hydrocarbons as a source of energy.

As to how all of this got started by an article on Darfur: we live in a time in which the globe is quite obviously deeply interconnected, sometimes forcibly so, by commerce, politics, and lifestyle choices. One earth, all that kind of thing. And it is becoming more and more apparent that we need a world governing body that is effective and able to stabilize volatile situations. The UN was a good attempt, but it’s quite obviously not very effective, especially when it’s so easily dominated by the politics and weaponry of a rogue superpower like the US. We need an effective world public health system, again, something able to distance itself from politics and commerce, which the WHO has unfortunately been unable to do. The time of the United States pretending to play policeman and peacemaker to the rest of the world is long gone. There has to be an international force and body, composed of people unattached to partisan interests, which has the capability both of being an effective peacekeeping force, as well as a strong policing force. Because in situations like Darfur, that is what is needed.

More on this topic will probably be forthcoming: any input would be useful.

Ancient Connections

I went on my first real hike of the year (finally) today, and watched as a forest fire sprung up on the other side of the ridge. I ate thimbleberries and right now I am drinking pennyroyal tea from leaves that I collected. I’m an idiot for not hiking more often. I hiked at least once a week last summer, but a number of things such as the World Cup and mosquitoes have prevented me from going thus far this year.
Anyway, I was thinking about some things as I hiked, and one of the threads regarded our civilization’s conceptions of “primitive” or ancient humans. We regard them inherently as simpleminded and lacking in sophistication. Even when there is ample evidence as to the contrary. We seem to have a hard time accepting that people who lived thousands of years ago could possibly have understood things on a deep level. And so when we come across irrefutable examples of their ingenuity, creativity, and intelligence, we inevitably attribute them to space aliens, or simply relegate them to yet another of the past’s “mysteries.”

Localized ancient wisdom, such as the understanding of herbs, plants, roots and how to make healing medicines from them, is swiftly passing away in the face of globalization and homogenization. But even as it is passing, something makes me think that this wisdom isn’t something that will just be lost forever. The only thing which can be lost is our ability to listen.

Shamans almost universally make the claim that their knowledge of plants comes directly from the plants themselves. I think that this is a claim that should be taken more seriously. Take the example of the Amazonian concoction of ayahuasca. It’s an amazing phenomenon to modern botanists and chemists, because the mixture of different plants which constitutes the hallucinogenic beverage is extremely advanced–on the surface, requiring a knowledge of chemical botanical interaction with the human brain that only modern science could provide. Yet ancient shamans have been crafting the brew for centuries, without science and without “proofs”. To say that they discovered the concoction through trial and error is akin to saying that we invented computer chips by banging rocks together. So unless you subscribe to the cop-out space alien theory, you have to accept the conclusion that there is a different system of acquiring knowledge than what we commonly accept. This system of acquiring knowledge does not rely on logical explanations and research. It relies, I would argue, on creative empathy and sensitive and attuned intuition–the ability to make associations between seemingly non-related and disparate things.

I think that we have a lot to learn from the earth and life itself, and that we have forgotten what it is to listen. We are so full of ourselves and our accomplishments as a species that we assume that we innately possess more wisdom than, say, a chipmunk or a tree. Yet the fact is that the earth breathes. Life is vast and delicately interconnected like the system of nerves and veins in your body. If a shaman says that he learned how to make ayahuasca from the plants themselves, than I would be inclined to accept his statement. I don’t think that plants talk. But I do think that if someone is in touch with themselves, than through the use of their creative empathic abilities, they can hear the call of things related to themselves, and the fact is that we are deeply interconnected with plants.

Humans are an extension of the earth. If you subscribe to the idea of evolution, which is supported quite firmly by scientific evidence, than you should know this. Which is to say that deeply embedded within our own minds lies the roots which connect us to all the world. The connection which we have temporarily forgotton, due to all the blinding surface lights of our modern conveniences, is to ourselves.

Experential Divinity

In order to know divinity, you must know your self, beyond all that previously defined you. You must look within, stripped of all pretension. And there you will find a terrifying unity, terrifying because every little butterfly flutter of your heart has universal implication.

Which is to say that to know of God is an entirely personal affair. I learned this the hard way growing up. I grew up a Presbytarian Christian, went to church and youth group every week. The driving spiritual force in my life, however, was my grandmother, an immigrant from Sweden who prayed multiple times a day and read constantly from her bible. When she prayed, she went into a kind of trance and spoke in tongues. She would tell stories, of which she had many, of prayers answered and miracles in her life. She was intensely spiritual, and I always respected that, and I wanted to believe the way she believed. I tried. For years I tried to pray and to know god the way that she did. And it took me longer than that to finally understand that I could never know god the way that she did. I could only know god in my own way.

And this is where institutionalized, fundamentalist religion goes astray. Religious indoctrination would tell you what the word of god is. It would tell you how to think, how to feel, how to pray to their god. It would tell you of all the mysteries. But you would never experience these things directly. God has to be translated for the masses, according to institutionalized religion. And all of these things may be a good introduction. But they will never take the place of personal realization, a direct relationship and communication with the source.

Bruce Lee concocted his own martial art, a martial art which took him beyond tradition, close-minded indoctrination, and habits, and through which he learned to attack directly and quickly without waste of time and effort. But he admonishes those who would blindly follow his martial art. He tells them that Jeet Kun Do is only his own personal way, not anyone else’s way. That you can learn from it and take what you will from it, but never to follow it as a complete and universal form. Which, of course, people did anyway, and continue to do.

A more enlightened view of any form or school of thought is to think of it in terms of Ken Wilber’s concept of holons. A holon is something complete within its own parameters, yet which still opens and connects into something beyond. In which everything is a holon, a whole unto itself and yet a part of something greater. A cell in your body is a holon. Christianity is a holon. The earth is a holon. To ever say that something has no connection with anything else or that something has no relation or ability to evolve and change with the rest of the universe is fundamentalism of the sort that leads to warfare, anger, and close-mindedness.

People who think that they are completely separate and isolated from all the rest of the world end up killing themselves. People who can never understand themselves and can only relate to themselves in terms of external indoctrination end up killing others. And all the little gradations in between that lead you daily to prejudice your mind against the world.

Within my own lifetime, I simply want to try to make myself better than who I am. I want to carry a light inside me that can not be touched by the wind of another human being’s insecurity. I don’t want to be a human being who just takes, and takes, and takes. I want to give, and take, and give. And give. And the only one who can help me do that is myself–a self that is connected with all the world.

The Battle Between I and Them

The battle, it would seem, is between inner and outer realms. Those forces representing literality and appearances are constantly attempting to destroy the representatives of the heart of matters, the inner essences of things. Because the outer world is based upon order and structure. Whereas the inner can be explosive, creative chaos. The two worlds, of course, should not be and are not really at all diametrically opposed. The tricky matter of language and the way things appear is what leads to the warfare.

I once wrote to explore the beauty of language, the flow of words, the way a sentence could be so perfectly breathed, spaced, punctuated. I don’t write that way so much anymore, because at one point the sound and form of the words overcame their meaning.

I once was so self-conscious that I could never be myself before any stranger, let alone breathe properly in public spaces. I felt as though everything within me could be visibly seen, as though every pair of eyes was a judgment of my imperfect humanity.

Now, I don’t think so much of the ways other people look at me. I think of the way I look at them, if I am going to think about it at all. It is my mind itself which is the veil to understanding. Becoming, as a Zen Buddhist might say, of No Mind is the quickest path to joy. No mind, no judgment, no fear. Things are never simply the way they appear–they become the way in which they are received. I want to be the best Host to all good things in life–selfless, serving, supportive.

Self-help books these days all talk about boosting your self-esteem, building your self-image, assuaging your battered ego. I’m talking about throwing it all away. I’m talking about getting beyond yourself, because there’s something much greater. I’m talking about bridging the inner and outer worlds completely, such that the lie that there has ever been a Them and an I can be denied. We are all of one flame, and the ashes that fall in differing shades on the earth are nothing but something to contemplate, to say a few words over, and then to mix into a mulch from which living things will grow.

To Seek What Can’t Be Defined

A prevalent view of many spiritual seekers, it would seem, is that one who is truly enamoured with God must shed all worldly things–the monastic and ascetic tradition is one of self-flagellation and abstinence from physical pleasure and the love of another human being. I understand self-discipline and denial of desires and pleasures is indeed an instructive and, indeed, necessary practice in life. But to withold oneself completely from such things seems to me fanaticism that leads not to God but to masochism, which is simply another base pleasure, which was supposed to have been avoided in the first place. To accept and return the love of another human being is not a denial of God. It is a reaffirmation and mirror of divine love. To partake in worldly pleasures can surely be a distraction–but if the intention of the one who acts is pure, than the actions too are pure.

I am reminded here of the Zen tale of a master and his student who are crossing a river. The master sees a woman who is struggling to get across, and he takes her onto his back and carries her, even though a monk was not supposed to touch women, and sets her down on the other bank. The two monks continue on their way. After a while, troubled, the student finally says to his master as a rebuke, “You carried a woman!” The master chuckles and responds, “I set her down a long time ago. Yet you are the one who has been carrying her all this time!” Or something to that effect, that was my memory of the story. The meaning being that sins of the body are only sins when they are a distraction on the path to God. And they only become distractions when your intentions, the things you hold within your mind, are wrong.

The Sufi mystics of Islam discuss the purpose behind the act of prayer, where to stand, and then kneel, and then prostrate oneself completely is not simply a physical act–that in fact the physical act itself is but a hollow form–it is in the intention and focus of the person praying that the actions take on meaning. The form is but a vehicle for the inner purpose.

You can take that concept further, and see that even all religions and belief systems of the world are simply hollow forms. That all of the manifestations of this world are hollow forms, termed maya by Hindus. To be distracted by the forms, like the shadows on the wall in Plato’s cave, is to miss the whole point, the inner flame that gives all the outer forms life. People get so caught up in the game, in the nationalities and jihads and this side against that side, when really all it is is one flame, burning through all. All of the pain and suffering, simply to get to know yourself, which is everyone else. How many paths are there to the Path?

I’ve never understood how Christians, for example, can get so caught up in a name. They point to a passage in the Bible, and say that it is only through Jesus, and Jesus alone, that one can be saved. Yet what is the name Jesus to a God who is beyond name, beyond human understanding, beyond our feeble, petty, selfish definitions? What, really, is a name to any of us except as a means to understanding what is beyond names? God could be called anything and it wouldn’t mean anything because God cannot be named. The very attempt to name God is to create a separation from God, a duality that does not exist. Your very existence, as a separate entity, is a lie. All outer forms are meaningless without remembrance of the inner reality that gives them shape. These very words, attempting even to distance these ideas enough to make them words and ideas, are lies. The reality is beyond everything.

Positive Potentiality In Peops

I talk often in my writings of the need for openness in perception, the lack of expectations, such that another human being can exist more fully in their potential, which is ultimately infinite. I write of this often because it is one of my frequent, daily shortcomings in my interaction with strangers. By the way, if you ever feel that my writing is preachy, take it with a grain of salt, because I am not preaching necessarily to anyone but myself. Writing is a way for me to discuss issues and provide myself with advice that normally I can’t distance enough in daily life to see.

Anyway, so in the professional sphere, dealing with rich, complacent assholes is a frequent occurrence. Actually, a lot of them aren’t assholes. They are just weak minded and kind of pitiful in their ignorance of reality. They make a lot of money but they don’t have such basic social skills as courtesy or the ability to hold a conversation with someone outside of their limited social sphere. They drive an SUV mindlessly, without any idea of what cost such a thing might have to anyone else. They have spoiled, obnoxious children who will most likely grow up to be just as dumb and sheltered as they are. They like to power-trip over people who are only courteous to them because it is their job.

I can’t stand these kind of people, and unfortunately I have to deal with them frequently. But the truly unfortunate thing is that out of the numbers of people that I see every day, it is really only a few who are like that. But that few taints my perception of all the rest. And so I end up classifying a whole group of people and writing them off, such that I really don’t give any of them a chance to be anything more than just another moronic, well-off American.

It’s hard, incredibly hard, to shake off negativity once some stranger has been rude to you. I worked as a ticket seller for a gigantic ski resort one winter, and I dealt with a lot of rich to pretending-to-be-rich people who only knew how to be demeaning and dehumanizing to me once they couldn’t get their way. It got to be after a while that I wouldn’t be truly nice or open with anyone at my window, because every individual turned in my mind into a stream of idiots, bitches, and assholes. And everyday, every hour, there would be some idiot to reconfirm that. So I would just be indifferent and cold to all of them.

It’s like that receptionist, you know the one, at the doctor’s office, or that person who you talked about your refund with at the customer service window–that employee who was just outright rude to you, and seemed to derive no pleasure in life except to be rude to you for no reason. We’ve all dealt, way too often, with such a person, and they ruin our day. They are unhappy, bitter people. You know that all they do is go home and then talk shit about people from work.

I’ve been that person from time to time. All it takes is one rude motherfucker, and I close up and try to limit my interactions with guests as much as possible. And I thus effectively close off any potential in any of these people to be anything but what I view them to be. Every now and then there is that one person or family who is truly, genuinely nice and warm, and it is a shame if I can’t allow them to be that in my mind or in my interactions with them. And the fact is, further, that even the worst asshole, even the most representative complacent, close-minded sheltered bigot, has a side of warm intelligence and creativity, in which they can be viewed and understood within their own unique, personal context. It is simply that I must get beyond my own ego, I have to learn to see the bigger picture–such that if someone is being rude to me, that I should not take it personally. Such that even if someone has been sheltered and suckled on ignorance and wealth all their life, they still have that boundless potential as God. To allow myself to be mired in bitterness against them is a waste of my heart and mind.

It is, of course, much easier to say this than to manifest it in my life. But I’m hoping that if I say it enough, it will work its charm. Because I believe quite firmly that it is in the everyday that the world is changed, and if I or anyone else can’t get beyond appearances than we are just allowing the bullshit to perpetuate. It is not just Gandhis who change the world–it is the nurse you dealt with at the hospital, it is the guy who took your change at the Taco Bell, it is the person crossing the street at the stop sign, it is every person in your day, every person in your life, every little positive interaction. You know that warm feeling you get, when you smile at a complete stranger who is only interacting with you because it is business, and you get a smile back, and it is real? And you’ve actually connected to this person, and you’ve made their day, and they’ve made yours? That is what it is to cross boundaries and change the world. Positivity. Every day. Every moment. The potential in every person for love is boundless.

Horus Call For Aquarius

The age of male-dominated involuted asceticism, masochism, and sadism is over. There will be no more Miles Davises, Pablo Picassos, shamans, and other prophets of loneliness. No more art drawn from the degradation of domestic life. No more science or magic used for warfare. The path forward can only be found in the laying down of weapons, magic darts, proofs, sorcery, separations and distinctions of self, power over those who are ignorant of loneliness.

Healing lies in balance, in sharing, in sacrificing yourself for others. Woman is different than man because they need each other in order to survive. Difference arises naturally from sustainable living.

Union of woman and man, union of two sides of the brain, union of past and future, union of indigenous and global, union of binaries and many dimensions.
We are global creatures, capable of understanding compromise, capable of compassion for things we can’t immediately understand.

We have been taught from birth to compete to take everything we can and keep it from others. But this is archaic teaching, bred in bloodshed and men’s struggles for power and money.

True power is to relinquish selfishness. True wealth is to share yourself with others. Who doubts these truths? It is time to put them into action. Here. Before you, around you. Not downtown, not Namibia, not in the church. In your everyday life.

Fusion

Yes, for even grudgingly the western world, even with its science and capitalism, must succumb to the biodiversity inevitable in cross-pollination of dilated perceptions. Minds are opening, even as quickly as commerce can flatten out spiritual planes. Yoga might be lucrative stretching for the masses, but for a few brightened minds it is a way to a deepening of life. The sounds of African djembes and talking drums mixed with electric guitars and drum kits might be old fusion tricks for the latest pop hit, but they also speak to the thirst for tradition to reinforce our future.
Fusion, mixing–the beauty that unfolds in the aftermath and sidestreets of war–the unforeseen sharing that occurs from struggles beyond the everyday, boundaries forcibly removed or erected, lines shifting what was once known into greyness, into in-between, into hyphenations of two seemingly disparate universes. Asian-American. Afro-cuban. Until differences are seen for what they are. Until separation is seen for what it is. Illusions of temporality. Circumstantial placement.
Like why do we get so attached to a baseball team, or to the name of a city we happened to be birthed in? Or to a country? To a college? To a football team of that college? Why do we choose to define ourselves so limitedly? We can mix and match ourselves dependent on what speaks to us. Who cares about if you are white or latino or if you are middle-class or ghetto, except those who would control us? You can be anything. You can be anything that is most true to yourself. The only limitations that exist are your own fears. Who can tell you what you are when no one knows themselves?

On Trees

“The root fungi intercede with water, soil, and atmosphere to manufacture cell nutrients for the tree, while myriad insects carry out summer pruning, decompose the surplus leaves, and activate essential soil bacteria for the tree to use for nutrient flow. The rain of insect faeces may be crucial to forest and prarie health.

What part of this assembly is the tree? Which is the body or entity of the system, and which the part? . . .[Such] separation is for simple minds; the tree can be understood only as its total entity–which, like ours, reaches out into all things . . . Life depends upon life. All forces, all elements, all life forms are the biomass of the tree.”

I finished the chapter on trees in my Permaculture book, and have picked up some new understanding. I had never really quite known just how powerful and affecting trees are on all living things around them. They create precipitation, they recycle water, they protect and nurture the soil, they break and redirect the wind–they harness the light–they cool the heat–they warm the cool–they take life into themselves with the least amount of destruction–they give back more than they take.

This brings my memory back to a time when I visited Sequoia National Park and went on a hike in its forest, and in the midst of this density of trees, far from the road where tourists would drive past the Sherman tree and eat candy bars and take pictures with their kids, stood the most immense living thing I had ever seen–an ancient grandaddy giant Sequoia tree, rising like a god above the surrounding forest. I fought an irresistable urge to prostrate myself before the tree and worship it. Because such trees deserve respect, bearing wisdom far beyond the scope of mankind’s feeble attempts at playing god. All trees are wise, and they can teach you things just by looking at them–where the most light is gathered, from where the hardest wind blows.

Studying this book on Permaculture brings me back to the wonder and mysterious pleasure I felt as a child when I would play in the wild, dense trees and bushes that I was privileged to have growing in my yard. I would lay on the branch of an oak tree directly outside of my bedroom. I would hollow out secret headquarters in thickets that still bear the shape of my childhood to this day. There is a mystery and power and beauty in growing things that is easy to forget in the midst of a city designed for convenience; this can be remembered when you venture back out into the wilderness, when you climb up mountains, walk on swaths of boulders through green trees, listen to a silence punctuated only by animals and wind and an occasional airliner. This sounds like a Sierra Club advertisement, but it is surely criminal to cut down any old growth forests. I don’t believe in religion, but I think if there is such a thing as sin, then it would be to cut down a tree needlessly. You go to the movies and watch dramas that turn morality into black and white, dioramas of good and bad. But there is no simpler and more direct drama of good and evil being played out than the real-life story of the Amazon jungle, and of how every day it’s thriving, truly wild, mysterious, beautiful life is being destroyed by gold diggers, oil drillers, drug traffickers, and short gain agriculture. Here is a story of the wickedness of shortsighted men raping and pillaging something far beyond their understanding–something powerful and wild and dangerous and so full of life in its density that you can’t hear silence, you can’t see the sun, you can’t find your way where you are going or from where you came except by sound and pattern–maps or GPS systems are rendered useless.

Human life is so interdependent on trees as to make our destinies indistinguishable. Disease, drought, and famine follow naturally from deforestation. The promise of replanting trees by loggers is useless in consideration that the trees they are cutting down are irreplaceable–for old growth forest can not simply be “replaced.” The soil will be changed. The climate will be changed. Trees are sacred, and we don’t need to revert to animism to recognize this. The evidence is there, before your eyes, in the science, in the mystery, in the living entity that breathes and dances in the wind, that fosters all creation, beauty, and life.

Every Thing

Every woman is your sister, your daughter, your mother, your friend, your nemesis.
Ever man is your brother, your son, your father, your friend, your nemesis.

How can such unseeming things be so deeply interwoven, complementing,
contrasting,
ever struggling,
strong?

Yet it is so, and you know it is so. It is so because everything which lives, and has passed, and is to come–one can’t exist without everything else, –all, all one, I and I, there are ten million ways to say this, and they will never mean a thing until you have seen it, the millions of eyes inhabiting your very deepest self–the millions of arms and mouths and skins that would seem to separate you from all the world–all working for you, through you, against you.

We put ourselves through such suffering to understand that we are not alone, have never been alone–in fact, we are struggling so hard just to be alone, just to pretend that we are alone, just to maintain these illusions every single day–and it takes a lot of work, a lot of selfishly inflicted pain. It’s somewhat ridiculous and overly dramatic, our daily attempts to convince ourselves and each other that we are isolated and innocent of what another may feel. All along knowing the pain we are causing in this continuation of detachment from ourselves and others.

But there is, everymoment, at all times, the possibility of moving beyond the bullshit onto the next level, and this is offered, everymoment, by love, by the selfless love offered by others, by the love found in giving yourself, by the love which always awaits just outside of the door you are so frightened of passing through. And when you pass through, you look into another’s eyes–you do not see a friend, an enemy, a lover, a sibling–you see yourself. And then you see that person for what they are:
Everything.

Wind Chimes

Listening to the sound of the high sierra wind gusting through the pines, I am reminded again of the absence of Toby. He has been on my mind much recently now that it is summer, because we would hang out a lot more during this time, banding together against the summer invasion of families, tourists, and students. The wind plays in the windchimes my girlfriend got for our deck, and I realized the strange juxtaposition and harmony of past and future, of love and loneliness. Simultaneous happiness and sadness. Life teaches its lessons in painful ways. There is no love without suffering. I understand that Toby’s death and the love I now have in my heart are not two unrelated events. The desolate wind moving through the windchimes.

Timeshape

I had a revelation today of the interrelatedness of the past and the present and the future, of how they form together a shape, a changing formation of time. Of how the past is not some dead, determined thing, forever captured and unchangeable. I was thinking of our lives, of how in our human existence we begin often making many mistakes, many growing pained expressions of angst and anguish that become understood and fully grown in our later lives, when we bloom, and the struggle of our tendrils to catch the light, the fight of our roots to grasp down deep are validated and given meaning, even if at the time they caused us incredible suffering and isolation. Or sometimes events in the past or the way we manifested our personalities becomes darkened by our future actions (he was always such a quiet boy. . .).

I thought of this because a friend who I had looked up to and had many good times with a few years ago has now gone through some hardship in his life and made some bad decisions, and the aspects of him that before were quirky or passable as being weird have taken over the aspects of him that were positive and fun, and he has become, for lack of better words, extremely sketchy. And I was remembering today the good times that I had shared with him, and I realized how much they had been tainted by the negative image of him I now held. This is how the past becomes changed.

Everything that we were shifts in the light or shade of who we are becoming.

Because we make important decisions, along our individual paths, that determine whether we are growing or whether we are allowing ourselves to be blinded by our weaknesses. And of course we go both ways, struggling in our humanity to find our way. But eventually some people run into something within themselves they just can’t get their way around, and they give up and stop growing. They stop growing and then just hold on, they hold on and wither away and everyone pretends not to see what is happening to them, because what can you say?

Only a true friend will tell you when you have blinded yourself to suffering and have decided to stop growing. All the rest of the world will smile and nod their heads when you lie to them and allow you to die slowly. Only a true friend will make the effort to break through your carefully constructed walls of illusion, even if it might mean losing your friendship.

Your enemies are the ones who coddle you, who tell you what you want to hear, who comfort you to your death. Like advertisements on TV, they have no interest in seeing you grow. They want you to shut up and fit in so that they don’t have to be disturbed by you any longer.

It is those who challenge us to grow that are our friends.

But this is a tangent from what I began with. I was speaking of the intertwinement of past and future, of how time is a stream, not a disconnected progression of points. This is why it is so great to keep up with childhood friends, and with all the people that you have run into along the way to now. Who can predict what is to come? The picture that we all collectively form, with all of our varying pasts and personalities, is amazing to behold. We shift-shape, we change, we grow, we diminish, we move, we stay. And hopefully, we all are helping each other along the path to beauty, along the path to finding within ourselves the key to unlock the flow of divinity from our minds, our powerful, creative minds, our powerful, interconnected hearts.

Heat

Within you, like the center of the earth,like the center of anything, lies heat, a burning core of energy, solidified distantly by your outward form. It is funny that beauty is categorized often by what is dead. Because really what is beautiful is the manner by which movement is made, the flow of states, the unseen that is hinted at in between. All things move into one another, sharing the same core, that essential heat which is life–and yet they burn separately, forgetting themselves, thinking that when they sit alone and are lonely that there are none who may see them, who may know them and the things which may pass through their hearts. It passes through all of us, and in our struggle to know ourselves sometimes we destroy ourselves or each other, we pick apart the walls only to see that in another lays the same heat that is the burning of life to see itself, to know at last that life and death are one. To know that beauty is ours. To know that there is nothing that we can do to escape ourselves.

Puzzle

So you wonder just what is it that defines your world. Fragments of songs, advertisements, conversations, websites. What really separates you from the smelly old dude on the street who mumbles seemingly nonsensical bits of sentences strung from the nethersphere of thought like a tetherball of fear? He picks up things in the air like a radio on constant scan, having lost himself, having had his self submerged in definitions that he exists outside of and can never touch. What separates you, what distinguishes you, defines, denotes, demarcates? How are you different?–isn’t what you think makes you different (what you wear, what you think, what you eat), aren’t those things only the things that make you the same? Everything that would make you individual links you to a collective beehive of humanity.

Everyone always thinks they are alone, alone alone. So all of these lonely people sitting in their hotel rooms, in their offices, in their condos, on their balconies, boxed into little windows that shine buildinged and clustered into the night, sitting with their whiskeys, with their teas, their newspapers, their CDs, sitting feeling alone all together in the city. . . It boggles the mind, how disconnected we can be while living so close to one another. We look at each other and we see only ourselves.

What is the central underlying purpose to this madness of endlessly propogating humanity? You try so desperately to remain distinct, afraid of losing yourself, because you do not want to be like the crazy guy on the street, who talks to himself in fragments that he does not own. You are distinct, you are alone, you are afraid.

The hippies are rich. The dumb spoiled son finds Jesus and becomes President. Computers are no longer personal, they are interconnected, wireless, mobile. Intrapersonal. Our identities on-line, our identities at work, our identities with our family, our identities with ourselves. Why is what I deliberately project any less real than what I subconsciously manifest? We shuttle, we transgress, we dance.

Thoughts in a Small Humid Hotel Room

Contained within our minds lies the key that would unveil all mysteries. But to open this door would be akin to opening the pressurized door of a flying airplane–all of what we are would be sucked out into the vacuum and there would be nothing left but space, another mystery to those who came later. Which is as much to say that we are made as much of what we don’t know as of what we know–that in fact it is not a matter of knowing at all, but a matter of accepting that one must look in a certain direction in order to see, and that what will be seen will be what lies before the path of vision. How many worlds there are beyond where you may happen to look! Can you sense these worlds without looking? Learn to listen. You can hear much more than the sound of your breathing when you are alone in your room, much more than the sounds of the outside world filtering through. You can hear the sound of something inside of you that does not belong to you. It is not important what this force is or even why it is there–what matters is that it is there at all, and that you can feel it. The feeling–what could be more important then this? This is a knowledge much deeper than whatever straightforward paths your logic can define.

someday somewhere the sun

Not alone, never alone, consciousness penetrates everywhere. Even in despair you can sense the eyes of the world there. Yes, you stand on the edge by yourself, but you are a particle captured in the flash, a wave brushing out against the sky, a piece of something beyond so deeply interwoven throughout your own senses that most of the time you don’t even understand your own feelings. What is this force that waits behind your eyes, that crouches within your body, unseen and unacknowledged by most of the transient surface world? Everyone knows without knowing, waiting for the swell to break, for the image to be framed, the silent eyes sucking all of the world into one stomach that is forever hungry, and when an individual stands up against the crowd they see what they want and it is never enough. But every sacrifice is a piece of a heart thrown into the flame. Higher and higher the awareness of light is spread. To know itself, life must tear itself into pieces. We look into each other’s eyes and know ourselves somewhere already lost and we move and we move and we need each other desperately and we are alone and we are hungry and we are standing and we are shadows and we are mountains and valleys and we are all together in this together, we are all horribly, terribly, beautifully tied to each other like a puzzle without a purpose and when my heart is empty of everything
then maybe I will be ready to meet you.

Meaning

Everything, people say with a nodding of their heads, happens for a reason. There is some greater underlying purpose to the random personal dramatic events of our lives. Not necessarily due to some god or divine intervention–simply to say that things happen as a matter of karmic inevitability–that as individual entities weaving our lives into a cosmic whole, we must undergo transformations in consciousness to cope with the greater responsibility of being much more and much less than ourselves.

I am sad and lonely as always, but with a much greater weight. Because I know now that everything that I hold against other people will come to light despite any illusions of shadow.

Everything that I am must be shared. Everything that I am is subject to change. Everything that I am is nothing and everything and stands and falls as the basis for understanding with you.

journal entry from 3 years ago

I think we all, as human beings, share that basic fallibility to closing ourselves off from each other and refusing to let the whole truth come into our minds and hearts, and instead holding onto that little piece of self-validating blindness. It is a highly understandable weakness. And yet it is one of the greatest threats to our existence, I believe. All of us, all of us people. We only want to know what makes us feel accepted, content, desirable. And so we refuse to listen to sides of ourselves and other people that need to be heard.

I think it’s easy for me to be withdrawn and keep to myself, because then I always have the upper hand, because I’m not giving anything to anyone, I’m not putting myself out there. Thus, I’m protected. That’s the easy way. And no wonder I begin to classify people and reject them right away by certain behaviors or appearances. Because I’m not really listening to them, I’m not really dealing with them beyond their furthest projections.

continuation of an idea

Another way to put it is in the recognition that there really is no “right.” There are certain actions and mentalities which enact destruction of all that is beautiful. But everyone here exists for a reason, even if it be to cause suffering upon others. Once understood, even the most pathological asshole is seen as life struggling to know itself.

Hurricane Blues

You’ve got all these systems set up, you know, avenues of normalcy, the daily routine, pumping in water, pumping out oil, feeding the market with tourism. And then something like a hurricane comes along and floods every ghetto, every suburb, every living and working place indiscriminately to the point where there is no hope of return. When the toxic waters are finally drained, and the carcasses desposed, what is left are ravaged memories, and the settling in for the long haul of struggle and renovation. Everyone suffers in this process, but of course it is the poor and dispossessed who will bear the brunt of this breakdown of civilization. The winds rose out of the sea with indifferent vengeance and flooded the countryside and the city with overwhelming brute force and the people are starving and living in refugee camps and you wonder why they are looting stores empty of cashiers? Taking what is no longer possessed. The tenuous lines that separates people from one another are laid bare with the universal devastation of natural force. And then humanity is seen for what it has become while hidden in shelled chambers of society: a creature feeding on itself, impervious to the suffering of its own neglected roots, frightened of adapting to the idea of an unknown and newly painful world, where survival is dependent on creation and not on cannibalism. We can flip on the news and tell ourselves that the suffering depicted therein is not our own–until it happens to us, and it is our city that is broken and laid to its knees by the wilderness of what is beyond our control. We can pass by the projects in our cars and ignore the destitution apparent in the streets–until we find that everything that we thought we had has been taken.

Yes, like all things, devastation will pass, move on to another location, and some kind of future will be rewoven from the wreckage, pieces strewn on a string of need, and the lifeblood commerce of the city will begin to pump steadily again, and cars will go and stop and go–but the scars cannot be painted over, the stained memories of what once was. Remember, people of New Orleans, people of the world, think. What was it that you lost? And what is it that you can gain? Is normalcy, is the daily numbing routine of organized profit, is the ghettoes and the suburbs and the downtowns what you strive for in your soul? The city I knew briefly at night was a place of music in the face of despair. People came from all over the nation to stumble like a drunken child through your voodoo streets. What they came for was not racism, was not for oppression of the poor, was not for the forced separation of individuals from each other. They came for the uniqueness of your spirit, for the celebration of light and dark.

When you are broken, you can never be the same. You can be stronger.

To The Light

There is much that flies within our minds in the atmosphere of love, but one knows simply, irrefutably, that to which all of the flies are drawn. Even the hardened heart of the worst criminal–branded by society from the start, never given a chance to pretend to be part of the charade–moves according to this universal underlying rhythm. I’ve always been convinced that even behind the worst, bestial murder there is a desperate attempt at understanding, there is a scream of despair that calls out in its unanswerable need. Because there is always a greater circle beyond that which we are confined. Down or up, in or out, it is all the same, eventually. There is not a substance in the world that cannot be transmuted by the widened irises of loving perception. There is not an enemy, there is not an other strong enough to withstand acceptance. The most imperialistic thing on the planet, who said that? Pir Vilayat Khan. I have no idea who he is, but he said, “No force anywhere on earth is as imperialistic as the human soul. It occupies and is occupied in turn, but it always considers its empire too narrow. Suffocating, it desires to conquer the world in order to breathe.” Even when you are in the deepest throes of ecstatic, passionate love, you want more, your thirst increases with every drop that you taste. Rumi wrote that “the life of lovers is in death.” Because in order to gain everything that you desire you must lose everything that you possess. It is a simple equation that doesn’t translate into the kind of math logic can comprehend. But it is known simply by observing every good thing that has happened in your life. I am speaking from personal experience, but I assume others have seen the same. The minute that I have ever assumed that I’ve had anything, I lose it. And when I have nothing, I will be suddenly blessed. It’s never enough simply to feel this, of course. In the darkest night of loneliness, with no where to turn to but myself, I can’t help but to despair, and in the thrashing about of my tortured need, I hurt myself or others in the temporary blindness in order to know where I need to go next. But then I move, and I move forward, and I move towards the sun.

I Still Clear

are we gonna step up and dance, or are we gonna watch ourselves stumble into despair? the beat is there, you can feel it in your lips when words form like waterdroplets to fall into meaning. why should we be frightened of what might come out when we release our body to a greater rhythm than our mind? how good do you have to be to move? is freedom learned?
no. freedom is earned by letting go of all the bullshit accumulated by years of bullying, freedom is there for those who choose to not police themselves, who choose not to fear each other, who choose to love, love, love everything that touches their heart, and leave behind everything for that moment of connection, for that spark of rapture in the glowing eyes of their beloved.
the only thing that is learned is how to better hide ourselves from suffering. but this suffering is the only thing that leads us to feel, to free ourselves of inattention, to focus on what truly matters. freedom is not necessarily happiness. but it provides the ability to gain happiness, to reach across seemingly insurmountable boundaries, to talk to that beautiful queen whose eyes met yours and flashed with the future, to vault your insecurity and touch what you know is there even if you can’t believe it, to press your lips to her honeyed sweetness and taste ecstasy. what could have prepared you for this?
we have everything we need. we have eyes to see, ears to hear, mouths to breathe. everything else is a shroud hiding us from each other.

My Ire Raised Like Hackles On The Brain

everywhere, a ghetto. suburbs, skyscrapers, apartments, schools, hospitals,
prisons. everywhere a boxed glossed around the outside containing an
addictive core leading to emptiness. cars, tvs, computers, radios. the
small dry twigs of impoverished children everywhere. the deadened hollows
of working parents. where can you go to escape the fire? it is waiting to
happen. we all know that it is waiting to happen. you think you’re safe in
your office? you think you’re safe in your classroom? you think you’re
safe in your car? hell no you don’t. you’re scared, just like all the rest
of us, waiting for the bomb to drop, waiting for the spark to catch, waiting
for the world to explode. who has hope? who can have hope when it doesn’t
matter whether you’re inside or outside, you’re still gonna burn? who can
have hope when we’re all waiting, waiting breathlessly to die an unknown
death?
we’re all so attached to each other, so wound bound intertwined. we’re all
so interconnected, interpenetrated, hyphenated. and yet we are all so
alone, we are all so lonely, we are all so scared, we are all so alienated
from ourselves and each other and our families and our enemies. we are all
living in hell together and each trying to create a bubbled dream for
ourselves at the expense of another. we drink together and try to lose
ourselves in a vision of unity that ends with the barfight or the puke or
the depression the next day. we take pills together and try to lose
ourselves in a vision of unity that ends when the drug wears off or the
music ends or sunlight unveils the reality beyond the pulsating lights. we
gather together in churches, in assembly halls, trying to lose ourselves in
a vision of unity that ends when we begin pointing fingers of blame from out
of the blindness of righteousness. we gather together around tvs and movie
screens and try to lose ourselves in a vision of unity that ends, that is
always to be continued.
i’m angry. i’m scared. i’m covering my ears and my eyes and my heart. i’m
trying to reach out beyond my understanding. i’m hiding a .22 in my closet.
i’m loving my baby tonight. i’m watching the news of the latest local,
national, and international tragedies. i’m reading the autobiography of
malcolm x. i’m drinking pepsi. i’m eating organic foods. i’m suffocating.
i’m on fire. i’m on fire. i’m on fucking fire.

Lux Aeterna

all of the emotions like water running underneath the bridge that you build
to reach the sky like a rainbow, stretching translucent skin over the
chalice of your mind, some words to bless the communion of substance to
feeling. stand with your arms folded against the railing and watch your
emotions moving, swirling, always new, always the same. it is a fabulous
picture show, is it not? somehow, even as you get caught up in the
currents, it seems that you already know the end. the narrative will always
enclose itself. but you–you are free. you are blessed, you are flowing,
and you are so far away shining down into yourself, your beauty a gem so
sacred that it can never sold. i’m trying to refrain from making lists.
what you are is something multi-dimensional focused to a point. one mind,
one act, one moment. shit, there i go again. listen, the fact is that we
are all saying the same thing, everyone in this world is breathing the same
breath into different languages. everything pours down from the source and
dances together and disappears into the spray. around and around and upside
down. suddenly i think of this girl at the coffee shop today, her lips
large, her tongue slipping out from between them before she spoke, questing,
unconscious like a mole straining into the light. what that has to do with
anything is anyone’s guess. but i really wanted to tango that tongue into
my own, to fly soaring on an updraft with wings spread in the space of one
song, then to part solemnly, formally depart into bows in the face of a
family of faceless humanity. yes, and yet: how you can be dry, even when
you are wet. up on the deck of the bridge, the water running through your
hair. a solid beat to a time that is washing. a fragment of a sentence in
the flowing narrative of time. the space is a voice all its own that you
listen to before you speak. here the hum in the echo of the image of your
light.

Running The Gauntlet

here’s a little drip-dropping flow for you, bro, sis, mister, miss: i dive into the alien elements like a dolphin through the light shafted sonorous medium of words, the media of existence, reverent movement of the lettered masses to the radiance of an individual creating, network flashing across unchartered space with a train of thought to carry the coals burning for you all to capture in your scopes, stationed, shameless, timeless,
us.
i share my shadow for the world’s shine, in the spirit of the spoken earth i dig, rhymes like jewels crevicing into the microscope of this moment, nodal points, subliminal ambience beating against the linear fragments of time–
and i am creating to be captured, felt, rhythmed into your skin spirited mind,
represented, reflected, released
into the blind eternity
of nothingness,
divine,
i am.
read me, listen to this song i sing to ease my struggle,
disarm my pain, despite the distance that i feel
in between my heart and the keys boarded along the crawling subterranean
fingers of broken waves;
it’s a process, you see,
the apple and the snake,
seeding, shedding, 1 + 2
and the outcome, you know,
is in the balance of you
and me and our acceptance
of the today in the tomorrow
of the child sanctified moon woman sensualizing sun,
of the old man in the sea,
fishing for the mystery
of giving ourselves,
of sharing ourselves
with one another.

i am here. now get you over, bring your elevation to the bridge, build this positive energy that we need like watered green for the soul, synapse stretch your spirit across the distance, breathe together and look at how the fear of our loneliness falls around our wonder like we one, like we tear drops dropping from the eyes of almighty everything–wordless, endless, forever feeding from our lives unfolding into now.
i think that we are beautiful. i think that we are alive. i think that all of the ugliness in the armored coinage of imprisoned emotions, all the loaded blindness of boxed-in shells, all of the fucking greed of the marketed surface world
can’t stop us from living
beautifully.

it’s a new year, my friends, my memories, my possibilities, my intertwining compatriots on the dance floor of our generation. shed beautiful art for me, for yourselves, cause our creation, our motion, our explored direction is what we’re going
to be treading over
to keep going, to move on,
to love.

this is dedicated
to all of you
who have made the effort
to show me your way
as you pass
by my path.
thank you.

Speculative Revolution Part II

what i am suggesting is a way of life. thinking about things around me in terms of politics and commercialism only makes me angry, and then hopeless, and ultimately negative and pessimistic. and in becoming this, i am only furthering the whole bullshit. you see the problem is that a system is inhuman, and has no relation to my emotions. i thus say that it is not the system that is at fault, but our relation and interaction with it through each other. in tangible terms, take the example of our relations with each other based on cars, personalized packages of modern wonder. we get in our cars and turn on the radios and ac and drive deftly through streets we only know by sign-names and intersections. we get on the freeway and pass by a big bill-boarded advertisement every couple of seconds, just like commercials on tv, only faster. and when someone gets in your way, couldn’t you just kill them? it’s amazing how the most gentle and laidback people can suddenly become monstrous at the helm of an suv. you step into your vehicle and your relationship with the world changes. you become a machine, speeding towards your objective. it is hard to feel much compassion for a machine that is driving too slow in front of you, or cuts you off. now think of how this is similarly affecting your attitude towards the communities you drive through. you couldn’t care less, it’s just scenery, background to the game level you’re on. i’m not accusing you. it’s a natural response to the way we live our lives. we might crash if we started looking around us and stopped focusing straight ahead.
i’ve always been somewhat cynical, but i’ve always been basically positive in my view of general humanity. i’ve been getting more negative in recent years, and i realized suddenly that i’d begun hating people i don’t know personally. i had no relation to these people. they were usually getting in my way. and this isn’t the right way to live. so i blamed corporate colonization of our minds through tv and news and movies. i blamed imperialist minded politics. i blamed gender and sexual misunderstanding. i blamed academia, i blamed science, i blamed religion, i blamed family, i blamed self. and guess what? nothing, noone, holds up to this accusation. not the one asleep and innocent in their dreams, not the one looking away, not the one fucking someone else, not the one holding them down, not the one on the ground naked getting raped. not the one who judges, not the one who is imprisoned, not the parents, not the children, not the man and not the woman.
we are only as strong as our weakest link. anyone ever involved in some group setting understands this on the most basic of levels. it therefore is quite logical that those who are weakest are the ones who place themselves in positions of “power,” “dominance,” and “knowledge.” feeling threatened, feeling in need of some security? the nazis sure did. and somehow a cult of weaklings exterminated millions and threatened other countries’ boundaries. you remember that bully in elementary school? it’s a cliché, but most likely his parents either abused him, or his parents ignored him. and so he is insecure, and the only way he can relate to other people is by dominating them, so that he knows they will take him for real. this is what i mean by weakness. could this boy help the way he acted? maybe, maybe not. but i think it is clear that he is not the one who deserves all the blame. and i think it should not be too much of a jump to say that the parents are not the only ones who deserve the blame. and so on. and so on.
we are all involved in the violence that occurs everyday. this is what it is to be weak. this is what it is to be connected. this is what it is to be a human being. we must be “weak” together to be strong.

Construction

the bat wraps about himself and hangs suspended from the ceiling, filled with blood. the night dissipates into the warmth of the sun outside of the cave as he sleeps, dreaming.

there is a wisdom that floats in our veins.

a voice of the sun:
it is important to know how to open oneself to another being, to draw from its energy and share a life between.

a voice of the moon:
it is also important to know when to leave. there are some things that are not ready to be shared. casting light upon the darkness can become a kind of violence. there are whole worlds that exist without you, that have nothing to do with you.

a voice of the earth:
to live, i must breathe. i have fallen into a space from which i grow. a life requires the independence to be dependent. the singularity of a tree in a forest. a cell in a body. taking what you need to serve yourself to serve others.

a voice of the bat:
i love the world, life, multitudinous perceptions. thus, i share what i no longer need, and i take what others let go.

if you love another being, then let them live
apart from you,
so you can meet freely
in the night shining,
the shores of bodies
coming up against the surface of seas,
heeding the call of gravity.

planet-world-lives circle each other
and do not crash.
they hold themselves together.

Direct

hertice p. domo: so where does one sluice the juice?
jaz: perhaps it is more a question of when. because i believe, i really feel deep down somewhere, that the passageway will be there if you just do it at the RIGHT TIME.
freda: i extemporize with every breath. what other way is there to live? let it go. i find that it all ends up being something that has happened before in some form or another. nothing is ever wholly new, wholly distinct. you would be lost. i don’t even want to contemplate such possibilities. . .
hertice: right. it’s like blindness in certain areas is required.
p.: to be aware and not aware at the same time.
domo: to see where you’re going and ignore what is unessential to you.
freda: i find it hard to ignore, however, the perceptions of all those around me. they seem to demand my attention. they seem to need me to smile at them, to perform for them, to give them something of myself.
hertice p. domo: devouring. the crowd devours, it swallows you up, it cuts you down if you pause to understand what you’re feeling.
jazzy j. rockefeller: here i am, fragments. my body, desired, desiring. we dip into each other, lose ourselves in the spray, become something ferocious. it’s terrifying.
freda: and yet–all this space, all this distance in this claustrophobia. it makes me want to hurt you to make you understand. how i want to get away from you, how i need you to lose myself in. how i understand myself only through you.
jaz: and i don’t like what i see.
freda: so i smile.
domo: and so i pose the question again: how, or when, to sluice this juice? because i feel all this, and where is it going to come out? how? i lose it all in the midst of anonymous faces, i lose everything, i feel ready to destroy myself in order to regain control.
freda: perhaps it’s a matter of contact. i find my energy calmed when someone reaches out to me and touches me while talking to me, letting me know how they really feel, animal. but personal, real. not some empty predator in the jungle sucking my blood in the crowd. but giving me themselves in little, silent ways that i’m scarcely aware of until i realize that i feel good.
hertice: right. communication, learning to pass the light unseen. but it’s not always there.
jaz: and when you’re not getting that connection enough, you get a build-up. you get negatively charged. you need an outlet.
hertice: and then how can i reach out without causing destruction, leaving a trail of pain in my wake? the wall builds, my surface becomes a mask and you look into me and what do you think you’re seeing? everything is bright and neon and shrouded by some pop snippet like a car commercial, dreaming “buy me! buy me! buy me!” and then just when you feel safe suddenly i come out of somewhere invisible and destroy you, devour you, take you into myself.

[hp explodes. blood covers jaz and freda and the walls.]
fade out.
show a pan of the sea, dolphins swimming, gleaming their sleekness into the air, melancholy, yet perky, acoustic guitar plucking.

[domo's face appears in the clouds in the sky, looking down. he smiles beautifically.]

jaz: he looked in, he shouldn’t have looked.
freda: i think there’s a new Tarantino movie out. Let’s go

Voices In A Hearing

the magistrate roosts worriedly upright, his eyes gleaming with the horizon city sun reflection: “i hear myself speak. a distant spark at the end of a long line, cross worked, networked into somewhere descending across the sea, draped over the heaving mountain-breasts of the earth, dangling its way into your life-moment like an infant dropping raw and alien into the electric light.”
judy, 37, the schoolteacher, drinker of neon colored wine coolers, sits purposefully crossing her legs so that her right flank displays a succulent parting of the upper and lower femoris: “i can tell you about infinity. what it feels like growing. it passes every year through the plateau doors of my room like water breaking out of warm and fetid captivity. i hang on. i dominate. i stalk through the minds of children like a whipping wind, pushing them into corners, enforcing alphabetic order, teaching them lessons.”
frat boy #43178a-0023 conscientiously ignores any displays of difference, knowing that he is entitled to whatever he is told to want, that there is plenty of meat in the market for the righteous upholders of the Status Quo. Sensing a weakness in lengthened silences, he speaks loudly, his papered face eagerly pink with the confidence that everyone is just like him: “sections, divisions, ranks of ignorant flesh devoted to keeping knowledge, understanding, true perception of all living things confined within small silent, violent sectors of space. we take pictures of the area and watch it moving in real-time, live, motion-picture fragments keeping it far away, shocking, unbelievable, unrelated to any of the headlining events of your own life. we ride on soft cushions of ignorance, never knowing what hands are keeping us floating. sailing into death tanned, crew cut, and smiling for the camera.”
coffee percolates deftly in the corner.
bobby the bum’s eyes are filled with gargoyle brightness, his aura uncertain, jagged, the indistinct medleyed color of waste. he hunches against the wall, an invisible horror lurking in the shadows of purposeful, structured minds. he looks goggly-eyed askew at a cruise liner pacing silently above the city and farts explosively, with a gurgling, sickening trickle that smells vaguely reminiscent of styrofoam: “lies, lies, manufactured data, it’s howdy-doody time! there’s a suspect wearing jeans and a blue hoody down the corner looking at the clouds. put all the death into a box and keep it cordoned off with clearly visible lines on maps and make children memorize, other countries recognize. name the child, call it horus, label it into a room set up just for it. death, lies, information flooding out reality. the truth is out there, dispersed, silenced, made into static, into noise, into just another piece of a million pieces of a universal hole. the baby screams watching silent fingers twitching the mobile to dance for him, sensing that it is reducing him into something he cannot believe. can you hear yourself? is that you? who is speaking through you?”

fever

Gadhills the iron fleece! Jujubeats in the rain, Circe lets down her hair and sings. Why, if I can see beyond it, am I trapped in this sickness? Shut down the gravy train and mosey down to sleep. Umbrellas, purple, scandalous. Innocence lost, we wake up to find that paradise has been all around us and we have been polluting it. Thinking that we were floating islands in the sky. The hooks are everywhere, in our fingers brushing against concrete, pictures of us nailed into the wall. Like an 8-ball, pieces of us float to the surface, and that is our fortune. Linked by hooks to the deep. Sometimes in the silence of your mind you can hear them tugging, reminding you of your iceberg expanse solid in the darkness. All that could have been, all that might be. When we fly, we get tangled up endlessly in each other. Some have chosen to chain themselves to their allotted space on the earth, making sure that they are not entangled in another’s life. But then the earth heaves, and they fall down into the heat, or they fly up, into the heat. The wires have no end, being twisted into each other. Layers and layers of netting. I love to see fishnet stockings slipped taut over a woman’s leg. Reconstructing a skin from the gaps in the cloth, imagining the fullness given to me, spread out, gleaming. Twisted around, super connected, superconductors. I am sick, and I cannot be healed. I am a wound, and open, re-open endlessly.
I imagine another layer of myself out in the sun, whole, ripe, devoured, loved. Somewhere I am happening. Somewhere I am dead. I look into the mirror and see myself winding into eternity. I am here, feeling this, gazing on the shining surfaces, but I am also somewhere else, perceiving different layers laid open then, there. I want to shut my eyes and feel nothing. I want to sleep and dream and forget.