IN THREE PARTS
11 ENTRIES
ABSTRACTIONS
I will not limit myself; I will leave my scope wider, my lens softened to absorb the panorama before me; I will learn to see what I’m looking at.
FEAR OF IMPERMANENCE
What is the goal of progress? Is it to achieve more progress? Is there no goal and if so, why? Should not the goal of society to better not just processes, but lives, ecosystems, and general wellbeing? Why do we cling to that which inhibits progress towards a better life for all? We could be going about our business in an attempt to make it such that we as humans could live in harmony with ourselves, each other, and the planet. Instead, we hold on desperately to a pointless bid for domination and control over everything, despite being intimately dependent on everything around us.
We are all part of the same organism seeking to dominate the other systems to maximize our convenience which leaves us empty and unsatisfied. Dying from excess while we extract resources from those who die in disparity. All the while, few are healthy and fewer are happy. What then, is the point of our trajectory and why are we so resistant to changing course? Why do we prefer to passively ride the wave into a shore of grim death for ourselves and other beings on this planet rather than paddle towards a pristine beach full of an endless garden teaming with the fruits of enlightenment and joy?
A path of least resistance that serves but a few to the detriment of all others. We could strive for a world in which people were able to pursue their passions, find joy in their daily lives. We could live out our days serving ourselves and others rather than self appointed overlords for the sake of their supreme convenience and gluttony. What does it take to live? What does it take to be happy? In truth, not much. But we are addicted to convenience and instant gratification. As with all addiction, this is neither enjoyable nor beneficial and it’s become glaringly obvious that our affliction is not sustainable. Why should we even seek to sustain what we have striven for if its result is pure destruction; rampant poverty, sickness, and ecological deterioration on one side and crippling depression, anxiety, and disease of excess on the other?
Deeper satisfaction lies within our ability, our need, to become one with the organism we are a component of. To breathe deeply with all other life on this planet of the bounty and riches before us. Greater beauty lies in the resource, not the product. An escarpment of rock contains deep geologic history detailing billions of years that far exceeds the value of any temporary product we might drill out of it and in so doing, transform a monument to the fantastic processes of life in all forms to a horrifying gouge. A rotting cancerous sore metastasizing to the atmosphere, the oceans, to the bodies of every being on earth.
ATTUNEMENT
Perhaps, on the distant horizon, my mind’s eye has glimpsed the first rays of dawn’s early pastels. My brain seems to have begun to settle in reasonably more than I would have expected. Today, I begin with a much more secure sense of self and the memory of the accessibility of any emotional state that I want to embody. Furthermore, the color of my emotions need not dictate the success of my day or obstruct my daily pursuits. The only mistake would be in avoiding the experiences of my emotions. I am extremely fortunate and have been afforded opportunities and resources that have brought me to the threshold of this moment.
All moves through me — my consciousness is a filter of the waves of existence that rejects nothing but colors the world according to my affect. What a universe to experience and life to live — to experience the art drawn on my psyche in each moment. I am becoming all by absorption, acceptance, and with wonder and curiosity.
MASTERPIECE
Living as you wish is simply a matter of choice. Time travel is just as simple — furnish your space with objects from days past, anachronisms that ground you in the reality of your choosing. To travel the infinite is simply to relinquish the hands you clutch so tightly around the razor’s edge of now, slicing yourself to pieces, fragmenting your consciousness in desperation, a desire for familiarity. You have but to cease the maiming of your soul, to become unbounded, free of physical restraint, finding mental clarity above the fog you’ve gathered so thickly about yourself to hide what you call flaws but which others will see as perfection; you are a masterpiece in progress.
PATIENCE
Often, I find the world of my unconscious antithesis to my waking reality — happiness and peace in the conscious reflected by nightmares in the dark. In my darkest nights, I dove into the happiness of dreams with reckless abandon. I strove to forge a new reality in an existence that’s never been mine to control. I sought ethereal bliss in a world of fantasy. Now, I find myself here, delving into the reality of the waking moment, letting in the light and obscuring the terrors of the night that surround me.
Mornings are a coalescence of intention. These are the holy times, moments of solitude and careful listening, a transitioning between realms. The night holds a boundless existence fruitful with insights, lessons, joys, tortures — a glorious chaos. The morning is wisdom, a slow return to life, a daily rebirth. I do not come into this world running from the darkness. I put the night to rest, tuck it in to sleep for the day. I will not separate my conscious or unconscious selves, I will not abandon either to a lonely existence. My part is to integrate and facilitate, to watch life unfold and create.
Today, I intend to change, to focus less on that which I can no longer do or be — to become through remembering that which I’ve always been.
VISITATION
The clarity of my dreams resolves in ever finer detail. I have answered many of the deepest quandaries that still trouble my ancestors. We instill in our children the unresolved challenges we’ve failed to face before creating new life. Or maybe it is that our children are the manifestation of greatness beyond the potential of our bodies to make real during their animation. Each moment is awakening in realities newly created in the cleaving away of possibility — decision. Collisions and probability dictate the rhythm and melodies we find ourselves immersed in, this particular take on the grand symphony of life billions of years in the making and playing.
I want a home made of earth. Walls sculpted by the hands that hold my heart, stone floor laid at my lover’s feet, a hearthstone to warm us in winter, awash richly in the same glory as the greens of saguaros and reds of iron-rich soil. A place filled with love and light, a living space flooded with the sun’s luminance each morning, a table to place our wares upon and enjoy the fruits of our nurturing of the land, a place filled with music, color, birdsong, the smell of firewood and palo santo, a quiet and peace unknown before we found it; a feeling of remembering.
There is little that I want in this life beyond the ecstasy of experience, the feeling and the doing of things. I want to create meaning, to nurture myself and my love and my home and to build a community, a connection to an earlier version of our species, one with ears attuned to the songs of plants and other beings whose rhythms we’ve been too busy to dance to. I want to embrace my love in our home, to kneel at the foot of our bed in a rapture of blissful gratitude, to imagine a world for our children, one where they may laugh and know what it is to be of this earth, to bury their toes in damp soil in the village that raised them, to remember. That is our task — to remember and recount; what is there to be recalled without experience?
PRACTICE
A mind and body left untrained fall to lesser habits of a lower form of self. Where one seeks absolute consistency of experience, one becomes absolutely reliant on a constant stream of exogenous input which becomes rapidly and immensely expensive. The chaos in my mind has not been resultant of the acute and recent changes but to a long break in consistent positive action. My mind has degraded as my routine has. With no one to invest my energy in, I become steeped in debauchery, misery, or both.
I must return to a dedication to practice. I want to take seriously the capacity and needs of my brain and body. I came here not seeking comfort or solace but exploration, learning, mastery of discipline and self. This path is inherently a lonely one. I am determined to overcome this discontentment. Loneliness is a proxy for satisfaction with my lifestyle. In the chaos of late, I have fallen to a version of myself that is brittle. I will become strong again in the forge of self-love that is discipline. I will never find myself at peace without training my tranquility. Without structure, I will soon find myself drunk on the misery of wasted opportunity and self-imposed isolation. I am grateful for the abundance that surrounds me, I do not wish to waste any of it.
RITUALS
To continue as before down the path I imagined is to commit myself to scouring the Earth with a fine-toothed comb for evidence of decay, warning signs of collapse. Understanding the wound of the world with ever-increasing granularity is not conducive to my empowerment. In cultivating my health and happiness, I will find myself willing and able to enact change in the world. I am no longer content to sit and absorb technical definitions from people whose lives are but a facsimile of textbooks. There I would find myself: completely informed and completely powerless. I am determined to enjoy life, regardless of how it unfolds. However, it’s safe to say my life as a shaman would be preferable to my life as a scientist — I will find more joy in the redwoods than I will in the lab. I’m an integrator, a seer, a recorder, a vessel; I am not a conscious manipulator — existence moves through me and my subconscious intuition has always brought me to places of peace, love, and realization that have been found nowhere else. I want to put my feet onto the earth and walk it.
OBLITERATION
You are already dead. You were dead the moment you first experienced fear deeply enough to change you. Some pieces of your future self cast backwards in time from your fading body and buried themselves as shrapnel in the psyche. What is hazy is that which was not lived. If I am here to re-experience my life in my final moments, this piece of spacetime in which I awoke must be wondrous.
If you were to choose what sort of organism you were reincarnated as, would you choose a being whose experience is so limited in scope relative to your own? We are as ghosts in a world where once we were material, contiguous with our surroundings. We may learn to be at one with the breath that animates the forests, oceans, deserts, and tundras if we learn to listen, to broaden our gaze beyond its horizon. The infinite complexity of all experience can be understood in the most baren of landscapes and the smallest of seeds. All that has ever mattered…
AFFLICTION
Once, I saw myself the victor, a phoenix from the ashes. The ruse became clear as it materialized behind the sheer cloth of a coat I first thought royal. Tattered rags I drew around myself like heavy wool curtains. I built an empire from what I could find — bits of foliage and leaves to stand against a storm I didn’t see on the horizon. It ripped through in seconds all that I built. And now, I am left in the shadow of a future never realized. I am heavy and burdened, yet somehow empty.
Am I surprised? Haven’t I done much the same before? Haven’t I always sought the path of some sort of hero? It is a lonely one. The world that I’ve created has never been so kind to me. That’s what pulls me in — the care of another, a warm embrace. Now I am cold, sheltering myself against the wind that never seems to break or weaken. My love for a frontier at odds with my longing for home. But who am I in comfort? Who have I been running from?
This has always been the cost: everything.
MOLTING
The time has come to relinquish this mask. Take down the scaffolding that supported my previous identity. This heaviness is a plodding mourning — each step forward is a step away from that which I once was, that skin I so painstakingly shed — its claws are at last being extracted, slowly, from my tender being. The greatness of this era has passed; it is time for a winter, a hibernation, a recovery. The only mistake is in avoidance; rest now the wakeful pieces of your fractured consciousness. You will never again stand upon this threshold, but rest not in the splendor of its shadow — a world awaits beyond as you overdose on memory. Shake out your mane, dust away the cobwebs at the edge of your vision; your new identity is being retrieved from the depths of your being, those neglected selves abandoned behind locked gates, in painful rifts, desert canyons.
Stillness found in the relinquishing of resistance to the undercurrents, sleep overtakes —
TERRA FIRMA
As the clouds thin, the air chills, the anxiety fades slowly — a soft and final exhale. The memory of rebirth veiled behind a vague remembrance of death, the final sleep merely another night of fitfulness, restlessness, insomnia. The world simplifies with a clarity of vision, pieces of consciousness cleaved from the glaciers of the unconscious. So few have seen these giants, the residents of the frontiers.