Maintaining My Equilibrium

I’ve been neglecting this blog even more of late, since I’ve been dedicating a lot of energy and attention–the little that remains at the end of most days–to my professional blog, Schools as Ecosystems. Unfortunately, my personal life in general has taken a big backseat to my professional life, and I can sense my creative capacity withering as a result.

In one way, I like losing myself in my work. It keeps me positive, focused, and motivated. I’ve been making some great connections with like-minded people. But I also feel that there is a danger in losing my sense of self and keeping myself grounded and focused on the bigger picture.

The bigger picture is god or nothing or all-is-one or whatever moniker we can come up with to rationally address something wholly irrational.

One way I’ve been trying to maintain my centeredness is through daily meditation. I get up at 5 and sit for 20 – 30 minutes, and this helps me to prepare for the stressful day that ensues.

But for most of my life, writing has been a necessary form of self-therapy, an outlet for catharsis, reflection, and discovery. In some senses, my professional writing performs these functions, but as excited as I am by my nerdy quest to create a new lens for education reform, the reality is that I need to write–just to write–to focus within and shed, or transmute, some of the psychic detritus of my daily existence, and to keep myself rooted.

To face the void that sits before me, the blank screen, and to charge myself with scribing words across that vast space, is a terrifying thing. It is belittling, it is demeaning, to sit and stare, fingering keys and knowing that nothing I could possibly ever say will be good enough, complete enough, to encompass the utter magnitude of one moment entire. Perhaps the proper word is humbling. This is why, I’m sure, my ego rears and kicks and strains to be elsewhere, anywhere, captivated in mindless consumption, reading Twitter, watching a show on TV. It takes humility to recognize in written form the great nothingness that is one self. To know that one self is nothing except as a part and parcel of one whole–that any accomplishment that one could possibly achieve is a mere subsidiary of a stream that is falling headlong into itself to realize itself as the ocean. Eventually, however, words must be chosen and strewn across the screen. And in the breadth of a sentence, perhaps, a glimmer, a sheen, a reflectant hue of the truth may lie. One can only hope.

It is the rush of words, the passionate night embrace of a drunken beauty that all too often ends solely in lonely morning, that drives the written dirge. The swelling of the tongue, the Dostoevskyian splay in the struggle to voice an ideal, the Wintersonian sexing of a passion for what can never fully be captured–it is this bloody, full-throated play that compels my quest to wrestle the unknown into this, ullage of words.

I will return to this space to spackle some more of my life here again. Because it is of necessity that writing occurs.

Buddha Nature

In order to write something, anything, my mind strives for some overarching purpose. But what is the overarching purpose of my life? Could this be defined? And if it could be defined, would it be worth writing?

It is better, perhaps, for me to recognize that writing itself, like life itself, is purpose enough, worth enough, to enact for it’s own sake – for my own sake – here within this very moment of being. I can write, so I will. I am alive, so I must live.

Writing is an act of transcribing waves of thought into the structured symbols our ancestors developed to amplify their minds. Through this amplification, they – and all their subsequent generations to the point of me at this point of now – enabled this text that sits directly before you on your phone or your tablet or your laptop or your desktop monitor, ferrying this current of my thought to you.

There are so many ways to amplify our minds in this day and age – due only to become ever more exponentially electrified – that it bears questioning as to what occurs when there is much amplification of little mind? Springing from that visualization (big waves circling outwards from a small pebble) comes the possible insight that the eventual zenith of all of this streamlined jetsam and flotsam is no mind. No mind as the end game of much effort applied towards mind amplification. This sounds koan enough that there must be some truth to it.

And as Meta as all of that sounded, it really is just an outgrowth of the overarching purpose from which this thought flow had begun, which of course could not be uncovered until I had allowed it to unfold without consciously steering myself to it. I commenced writing here on this post in order to calm my mind, which was preventing me from achieving the “no mind” of sleep. And in allowing myself to tap, however superficially, into the wellspring of my existence within the here and now, which is being for the sake of being, via writing for the sake of writing, I have found a sort of quietitude that will hopefully allow me to slip into the cover of my dreams. Buenas noches.

Unlocking Wilderness

We tend to lock ourselves in our own devices, then blame others for their design. Fits of animal lucidity that may appear madness to the habituated — such as going out for a run in the middle of the night, fasting for no external reason, or simply typing unpremeditated words into the stillness and emptiness of a blog — are perhaps wholly necessary to maintain some freedom from our own tendency toward confinement.

In the flurry of my working urban existence, as if that were any excuse, I have grown complacent, as I am wont to do, being human, in a perpetually exhausted consumptive silence, threading endlessly through the vision of others amplified on my outdated laptop screen. But there is a wind that speaks from deep within that cuts through concrete and forest alike, past and present, a sort of primal divulging light that trumps all, if it could just be heard. . .

I once struggled to understand the language of the ocean as it laps relentlessly against the shore, like a fish-eyed harbinger of hunger, desire, and the wild thrall that lies just at the boundary of death, a  3D sinuously pixellating sound of the loss of everything that had previously been defined, yet comes back again, never to be fully known except perhaps, fleetingly, as beauty.

Like San Narciso expulgated of meaning, there is simply, terribly what lies here, before us, utterly barren, utterly beautiful, utterly unknowable yet wholly tangible through shizophrenic descent into frenzied sensory and metaphoric experience. Here we touch the subway shuddering plastic lights that flash the graffiti of someone who has long since passed onto their way into everyday. . .

The image words of the ocean wind, cutting through the forest mountain of my mind, take me away to your place of desolation.

Something to Write About

I don’t know what to write. I spluttered out a few meagre sentences that fizzled before they could even hit a period. And as I stared at the blank screen, bereft, I recalled observing this struggle in my 5th grade students as they sat “brainstorming” something to write in class. It’s all right, I would tell them, this is something every writer experiences. There’s even a name for it: writer’s block! Just write down anything that comes to you, the first thing that comes to mind, and keep going with it. You can always go back and edit it or start something new.

And perhaps there is some smidgen of wisdom in those encouragements, even though all I’m really doing is trying to force them to write because I need something to quantify, something to show, something to assess. The wisdom being that we can’t wait for genius divine inspiration to strike – we have to just put it out there, now, while we have the chance, however imperfect and trivial it ultimately may be, or else we risk saying nothing at all, and holding it in, and losing an opportunity to better develop our capability to articulate what is within and to be understood. These opportunities seem like they should be legion, yet they really are quite rare. There is always something demanding our immediate time and shallow attention. Errands, family, TV, Facebook, email, video games, news, books. Something for us to become immersed in, for us to consume. For us to not be lonely, bored, depressed. For us not to confront the dire reality of our own solitary existence.

To create something out of nothing is indeed tough work. It demands humility. It demands that I lay down my pretensions and measure my distance from my own self and from others and step forward into the light of temporary understanding, thus opening myself to misunderstanding and belittlement. But beyond this threshold of fear lies love. An acceptance of my frail attempts to formally communicate myself. An acceptance of my humanity, however proud, however blind, however imperfectly stated. An acceptance that even though I don’t really know quite what to say, or how to say it, somehow I’ve still arrived at a better shore than the one I left but a moment before. And can now go to sleep feeling better relieved, slightly more whole, like I’ve taken one small step towards re-finding myself in the dark empty night, renewing the self that had been sleeping, hidden in the everyday veil of my movements. Enough. I think I’ve found something to write about.

Attention

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

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

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

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

undivided.

One More Gin

I’ve almost forgotten how to allow my written words to surge from behind some unknown internal weir. Writing, once something I required in the formation of self-definition and well-being, now has become an occasional dirge or some type of social notification. But it is pointless to lament the loss of something one has sacrificed, whether deliberately or by way of necessity. My life is something sometimes beyond the scope of my own creation. I am formulated by forces that are chiseling me into some enmossed hybrid of scales and vascular tissue. The path before me, once a quiescent omega pull sensed only as the horizon, has become more greatly defined, even as it remains unknown. This means, I suppose, that I am simply gaining age, and thus, economy. A self-delimitation that oddly increases power.

This trivial taste of creation whets my will to allow for the vulnerability of writing to overtake me again. There is something of despair here, something of a rugged strength that draws one into a crumbled beauty, a traumatized clarity of vision. It can only inevitably be good for the soul.

Posing at the Crossroads

What is there to say? The world can be a terrible place. To live, to truly feel with all your senses, can be at times horrific.

The worst of it is that none of it is really about me. I seem to have not much to do with it at all. I walk through the streets like an alien, a specter, a fleeting speck of insignificance. I stand upset in the warzone of my classroom, a flailing impotent bystander. I never seem to have enough air, or time, or space.

The important things seem to be sneakers, and the cut of your trousers, and the way your coat hangs. How aloof you can be in the face of despair. Or better yet, nonchalantly sincere. Untouchable in a crowd. Photogenic on the subway.

I can feel the cavity in the frontal lobe of my brain expanding. I’m not sure if that’s schizophrenia, or just mere psychic or physical exhaustion.

What is it that I want? To make my world a better place? Or to make my life better?

What is it that I want? To embed myself in the dense thicket of the inner city? Or to escape to a manicured expanse?

More importantly, do I have what it takes to consciously make that decision?

The Battle of the Bereft

Last weekend a friend was visiting, and of course I began discussing my students, because what else do I have to talk about now? I talked about their problems, their behaviors, their tough home lives. So he challenged me to say what they were good at. And in that moment I realized just how bereft my understanding of them is. I couldn’t think of anything. Not one thing. I wanted to weep.

When the entire world tells you you are worthless, in what place do you claw to find succor?

I watch them clutch empty-hearted at the manufactured dreams of the complacent, and shit on the very fabric of their own existence.

Dreams of graduation into comfort seem to be the defining tunnel vision of my own survival. All I can envision are green trees, rolling hills, an empty swatch of air and bird ringed silence across my bedroom window. A river, somewhere, without the brown slogs of industry.

Already, I have abandoned them. To leave them to their trash strewn streets, the steps of apartment buildings that serve as the template for passing the time. To their endlessly working, endlessly shopping mothers, who give them whatever they want whenever they can.

In this ghetto of the soul, it’s all about power. You take it any way you can, you drag down those who might love you and beat them into submission.

This is the game we play, whether in the streets or in the classroom. Who is the powerful? Who is the one who will lead by the blood on his hands?

I am too battered right now to step away from the battle. I see only red before me. I am angry. I am filled with despair. And this is when I know that this is the only fight worth

losing.

Go Beyond

Gotta escape that zone of sameness and bland expectation, where your complacent everyday self knows exactly what it will do (nothing) and who it will see (noone). Break the cycle of doldrum limbo stagnancy and force yourself into a situation wherein you know you will be uncomfortable and scared to go, cuz in that place of strange alien modish pressure you will be taken beyond what you can control, and you will be forced to be exactly what you are in that exact moment of place-time circumstance. In all of your imperfect, half-formed glory. Go, no matter your status, your age, your defined self in-context: go to places that you have never seen, go to people you have never met, stick yourself into sketchiness, fear, gray dim areas of uncertainty, where you don’t speak the language, and you have to gesture to make yourself understood, and people are tattoed and pierced and confused and full of life. Do this, and you will never despair. Do this, and your fear will lessen. So that you are not scared to live. So that you are not scared to die. Because the two are one and the same. So go go go go go. The tether that holds you to yourself cannot be broken by anyone except yourself.  Be yourself and go to places where you do not belong.

Territory (NYC style)

Eventually, it’s time to put down your roots in each step of your foot, to deny the possibility of stepping aside for anyone, to declare, firmly, that you belong here, that you have a purpose and a direction that cannot be ceded. You have a right to exist and to move unimpeded towards your destination. Others may move aside. You will only stop, patiently, until they acknowledge that they must move around you.

That you will bow to no one.

There is only one power to submit to, and it exists beyond the superficial territoriality of the street.

(Contrast this with another Territory post from LA long ago)

Gaining the Loss

The rule of the cosmos: you can’t ask for anything. You’ve got to just take what you need and give what you have. Seems to be the way things work, more or less. Like, if I get a little bit too screechy, needy, desperate for love and attention, then all I can hear is the veritable waves on the shore in the shell held up to the ear. So I have to regroup, sit down in the empty night space and meditate on my nothingness. How I have nothing, I am nothing, I will gain nothing. I’ve got to keep it all in perspective, somehow. Clam up, button the hole, and just observe, just watch the way the world works. The way that light seems to be generated not by light but by some other order of power. How all of the good things in life are really just a residue of extreme evisceration. The trickling out of beauty from the suffering awareness of despair.

So how to live life in this full declaration of madness? The masses recline before the injection of beauty. So dawn it upon them in full, without shame or fear or denial. There is nothing to lose. There is nothing to gain. There is just what you allow yourself to be, here, in this place of moment.

Equivocation

There is what is within. And then there is all that is without. However, in essence, the without is but a collection of other withins. So if I stepped out of myself, I would observe that what is within other people is proportionate to that which is within myself. Without–in all of this collection of withins–is an extroverted form of myself. Or an introverted form of the cosmos.

But to directly and immediately equate the two together would be a fallacy, because while at some ultimate level everything within and without harmonizes like a yolk harmonizes within an egg, they are not one and the same at any given moment in time. It is only when seen from a steadfast, timeless, eternal viewpoint that they pan out into one. If you flash framed the Now right now, then you would notice more the contrasts, the differences, the distinctiveness of all people from one another from different peoples in different times. The yolk would seem to be distinguished from the egg just as when you cut in half a hardboiled egg. You could pop it out as if it were a separate piece altogether.

As if the children were distinct from the adults, who are distinct from the old. As if the college students were distinct from the young professionals, as if distinct from high school students. As if the sun were distinct from the moon, and this solar system distinct from the milky way.

As if my thoughts and my feelings were distinct from your fingers. As if your eyes were distinct from the concrete, from the summer air, as if the currents carrying a Florida thunderstorm were distinct from the waves cutting at the Taiwanese shore. As if this breath, this moment, this pinnacle of your rushing heart was distinct from the world.

Modality

Sometimes I have to force myself to settle on back to accept the shadowy recesses of modal shifts ‘twixt sunshine and moodiness. I tell myself to remember Miles. That dark master, a warlock that straddled the transition into an almost openly psychedelic world (momentarily), a paradigm psychological shift that erupted out armpit sized jazz clubs into studio produced cut/spliced internalized packages that traversed boundaries cultural and physical and otherwise, united in an aural depth of explorative bliss that was generated through uniquely disciplined collaboration, managed quietly by the ultimate anti-micro-manager, he who directed simply by presence alone. If only I could be so comfortable in my own inner vision skin, to sit back and preside over numinative formations in moments of over-riding mass mentality, in those times when the crowd dominates knowledge of self and I am lost in the over-arching eyes and critical judgements that come from fear and past submissions to low self-esteem.

Lost Over Here (&, furthermore, Celestial Hip-Hop)

Hello! Mr Manderson foolishly gave me the keys to his kingdom, as a guest blogger, with the suggestion to try writing a bit more inwardly (in his blog’s style), as a release from the narrative distance I maintain over at my public arts blog (www.itwaslost.org). Now, I don’t live in New York City, where the angsty gray-clad individuals, unable to communicate with their fellow citizen, fester inward thoughts worth blogging about. If you look into the soul of a Berkeley resident like myself, it looks like one of those early Disney Cartoons with smiling trees bobbing back & forth to the music.

However, I just came up to my parents’ house on Lake Tahoe (where I first met Mr Manderson), & after a splurge of creativity, had some thoughts about the creative process I thought might be relevant over here.

Wow, WordPress is super slow on this computer I’m using, I wonder why.

First thought. Motion revitalizes the creative spirit & pushes us in new directions. I was not exactly having writers block in Berkeley, but I have been living in the same place for a long time, & artistically was beginning to feel a bit tepid. I had been writing hymns, & just by taking a train ride home, I changed course 270 degrees & mapped out an entire hip-hop EP – a genre I previously had no interest or push to explore. Moral: if you’re stuck, hit the road.

Palinode to that thought. It’s important to have roots, & altho ramblers can constantly rejuice their spirits, there’s a link between nomadism & fraudulence (think Dylan’s famous phrase “no direction home”, he’s affected roots. I’m not saying it isn’t beautiful, but where do you go home?) I relate all this to how I have no business in the genre of hip-hop.

Second thought. There’s something in a Tom Stoppard play (Indian Ink may be) about how when a multicultural couple was living in England, they decorated their house with all of their Indian flavors; but when they lived in India, they found themselves taking high tea & putting up pictures of England, &c. Not just nostalgia, but how we can focus & be inspired by a place we live or we have lived in, better when we’re in the other place. For instance, I was only able to rap about the East Bay when I was traveling by train up to Tahoe.

These may seem like simple thoughts, but there they are. Meanwhile, while I’m here, I’ll advertise the test-runs of my EP, The Celestial Hierarchy, with beats by Gold Diamonds. Warning, if you’re offended by bawdy ironic sexism, sacreligion, or Medieval Christianity, you might want to skip out on this project. The first five tracks are up & there’s a few more coming. Here!

Inhibiting Impulse

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

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

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

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

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

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

Grace Full

To be grateful, grateful, full of grace and grit and compassion and loving for every event and person that crosses your awareness, even when your caffeine coffee high is on its wending way downward. The people that before might be registered in your awareness as incidental or fixtures of the trash laden pavement become transformed creatures reflectant of a certain hue and shade of light that is dependent on their placement in that certain spot at that certain time on that certain street. There is nothing, yet, that you can say to them, but what must and needs be said is conveyed through the placement of your head upon your neck, the way your shoes plod onward, the way your hips and arm swinging and laden satchel are balanced moving forward beyond and through and with them. Because you have nothing to hide, no empty barren space of shame nor fear nor any diminishing of divinity that might take place in any human heart at any time when we grow distant from ourselves and thus and subsequently, each other.

When the tongue is full and pressed to the roof of the mouth in silent and overwhelming praise at the smell of this summertime air that swoons so softly up into this apartment where I sit, grateful, singing and typing rapidly into this network of praise, that I may reflect, as a deliberate practitioner, this life that I am so lucky to live and to choose to live and to have the opportunity to fulfill with fullness of life and love and complete awareness of everything that I am so fortunate to be capable of losing.

How could I write this?

How could I possibly sing into this despair, this thin air of the void between distant strangers? What could I create to withstand my own insecurity, that could remain standing apart from listless self-concern in the overwrought perception of the wind from others eyes? I look into myself and see mostly fear, a defensive readiness, a reflection of my environment. This is not an excuse. I need to speak of what is within me, this bottled up genie of anger, petulance, and routinely denied divinity. Is it that I am getting afraid to die? That the more patiently I stock up for the future, the more loss of presence I incur? Enough questioning. This is not an inquisition. This is the attempted cultivation of understanding. Between estranged parties. The tentative negotiated establishment of dialogue.

It’s hard, sometimes, to empathize with strangers when they seem to ask something of you that you can’t imagine. Yet that much harder to ask yourself to begin to articulate your own emotions. Because you are so estranged from yourself that you fear a stranger may yet somehow know you better. May see into you directly for what you are. A human. A somewhat pitiful collection of experiences determined by circumstance and placement. How can you transcend this? How can you transcend this? How can we?

You can’t. You suffer from this realization. You shake, you cry, you wail. You stand silently with hands in pockets, overwhelmed, underheld, simply shelled. You can’t be any more or less than what you are. Until something within you is shed. Until you jettison the weight of your dreams, the afterbirth of your desire. Leaving a hollow form waiting to be filled. Leaving the space of a song that is waiting to be sung, in fullness of pain, to fill the voiceless silence in every person that they may or may not have known that they had.

We must cling to each other, like life rafts in the fearsome storm of the unknown. We must watch each other, drink each other, live each other. I am aching to tell this to myself, so that I remember when I am with you. That I love you, everyone, that I love to live, that I am willing to suffer to know this again everyday. Because this will soon be forgotten. This will be misunderstood. This will need to be reiterated, revoiced, rebirthed tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

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.

Needs and Needles

Take everything that you think you need, and have it be denied to you. Go ahead, have it dangled in front of your nose and then yanked away everytime you even remotely make a movement towards it. Eventually, you delimit your sphere of desire and you fight for what you know you need and that you can and will obtain. The things that aren’t obtainable are abstractions. If you had them, they would slip just as easily through your fingers anyway. What is a title? What is a car? What is a home? What is money?

All of what you need resides so close to you that it would be ridiculous to even reach for it. Yet it takes the greatest of efforts simply to recognize its proximity, to focus on its closeness. Each moment that passes bears your fading name away from you. You struggle to inscribe yourself, again and again, failing to encompass everything that you want to be. It’s silly, really. You are already everything that has been and will be. Your atoms, your carbons, your matrixed energy.

Who are the homeless? Who the hungry? Who are the powerless, the oppressed, the victimized tatters of a cannabilistic civilization?

We are all on the same boat. The same journey. The Titanic of misplaced dreams that sinks together as if all, the served and the servers, were of the same ill fated density, destined but to sink beneath the weight of a retrospectively immense folly.

But I’m not talking about a mere fatalism. It is indeed complacency that is the greatest of man-made evils. To know yourself, to recognize your divinity, to ask nothing of the world—this is the greatest of life’s many challenges. As we ride this inevitable path that must be trodden on the road to total gain, and total loss, the ledger sheet that will tally our outcome is a mirror that looks into our heart of hearts, the psalm of desire, the desert of pain. How much can you suffer? How much can you delight? To be as soft as a baby and as hard as bamboo, to be everything and nothing, to be yourself and to be yourself. To take only what you need, to give everything that you are.

This is the most difficult of demands. This task of life and death. This existence that we have been chosen to become aware of. All that we need to be we are. All that the world needs us to be we can be. All of what we desire is impossible.

New Year’s: Cultivate What We Can’t Have

¡Feliz año nuevo! Hope this turnabout of the calendar system finds you celebratory and hopeful in turn. My new year’s eve has been about as quiet and boring as you could possibly imagine, but that’s alright with me. I’m not really into the whole horde of drunken people out in the street thing. I just don’t relish getting into fights and vomiting, silly me. Plus, it’s fucking freezing out there tonight. Yes, you heard that alliteration correctly: Fucking Freezing, folks. This So Cal lad is aching for some boring seasonless San Diego weather right about now. But at the same time, it’s kind of cool/weird to get to wear a girly scarf everyday.

Let’s see, I just don’t have a whole lot of rhetoric left in me this particular New Year’s. I generally have some kind of speech to make to commemorate the yearly paradigm shift. Let me see if I can dredge up anything from out the depths of exhaustion:

As time passes and we age into our bodies, becoming increasingly aware of both our power and our limitations, we learn that learning never stops. We branch out and develop in complex synergistic dances of exploration, multi-faceted twistings to catch the light. Maturity is about adaptability and empathetic capability, not about knowledge. Development is an everyday occurence. Stasis denotes the foreshadowing of death/rebirth. Because if you are not developing/learning/being challenged, then you know something is stagnant about your situation. We all want to hide, ride out the storm, wake up in some perfect world where everything has been solved and straightened out for us. But there is no mythical god mama to wipe our collective asses. Everything’s gonna be alright; but not because a switch gets hit and some divine wind sweeps on through: everything’s gonna be alright, because we’re going to struggle, and we’re going to work, organize, and develop.

Humanity is disgusting and beautiful. Every sword cuts two ways. It is a matter of how the tool/weapon is wielded. Enough with the cryptic shit: beauty comes quietly out of despair. There is no such thing as easy beauty. There is that which glitters and reflects the light, and there is that which is assigned arbitrary value, and then there is that which is beyond classification, a substance that ebbs from the unseen, invaluable to us all. We must cultivate only what we cannot hold.

Happy new year.