I've always been a sort of left handed path person; And with that it's always nice to draw the 4 of swords in the throws of life, but as sweet as the sanctuary is, that tiled refuge, one must go out and face the storm again sometime.  It can be unsettling, discomforting and sometimes downright scary but the growth that happens when one faces such burdens is amazing, and in retrospect, always worth it.  I oft wonder about and want a stasis to this pendulum. I think it to be a projection of my subconscious and a capitulation of the kind of life I had as I was developing into adulthood.  You can't see your own eyeball... but damn if I don't try and gouge it out anyway, youknow?  And so here we are...


A strange sense of calm washes over a mood of defeat from the past few days.

I've been here before

I've climbed out bigger holes than this.

I have tools now, a map

maybe even a compass if I look hard enough (or stop looking so hard)

 Again our death ushers us into the appropriate mindset.  Drive on. It don't mean nuthin' it don't mean nuthin' my children love me but they don't under stand (Johnny Cash anyone?).  I don't know when exactly, but at some point in my childhood I created a mnemonic device to induce a certain mindset.  The first memory I have of it when I was 5 being out furniture shopping with my dad.  I hadn't eaten for a long time and I was excruciatingly hungry.  The store was enough to distract me but when faced with a 45 minute car ride home I could barely take it.  Understanding that there was nothing to be done until we got home, I went inside my mind as I usually would. There I found a vast ocean that stretched for miles with no end.  I looked and squinted off into the distance and felt a strange wave of calm come over me.  I felt as though I was seeing through death, like nothing mattered, but in a good reassuring way.  Before I knew it we were home.  It became a regular in my lexicon of mental tools.

And many tools and programs later we see the forest for the trees.... but we're still in the forest, but forests are nice... why would you want to leave?  I dunno a trip to the beach is always nice, but I digress.

The task at hand is realizing that which I pull out into the world is fit for my consumption and the proper mindsets are essential for their success:  

Tabun
Solve et Coagula


InthenameofthegreatPushTyberatleastimnotbored

satieted stillness and the thought of repression

Ah the taste of blood.

Sweet, slightly metallic, and thin.  Sure its thicker than water... but nearly everything is you know (because most liquids have water in them.... duh)

A daily reminder of the things to come.  The irreversible change that happens inside and outside of everyone at some point.

Death.

I was standing on a chair putting up a curtain with a knife in my hand to poke holes in the cloth I was using as said curtain when I lightly sliced my finger;  Not as I was poking,because I was fully engaging my consciousness in the act, but rather as my attention turned to raising the cloth to the screw hook on the wall, the knife gently pressed against my knuckle with enough force to allow my insides to spill out a little.  A little wound, and a gentle reminder of the eventual death that will come of my life.  One quickly witnesses the thought that a well played alignment of accidents could easily spell this event sooner than later;  The chair I'm standing on could tip and the knife fall with (into) me in a way that might make death inevitable.

Don't focus on that for long; You walk in the direction for which you look, you know.

The knife is closed within a split second. The thought lingers for a second more, and as my mind returns to present, I step down from the chair;  It it slides out from under me as I react and hop to the ground.

Good one universe. 



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     So what of our impending death?  Its always been the one great and true adviser to my life.  A genuine pondering of the temporal nature of your being can really put your life into perspective and motivate one to their true will's desire without the cloudy fog of fear and repression that emanates  from your subconscious.  So its not such a bad thing to live close to death;  To be aware of your impending encounter so acutely that you do not waste precious time basking in the uncertainty, and numbing calm of routine that so swiftly sucks the life from us while we (consciously) sleep.

You will die and so will everyone else, it is the one great equalizer.  The one thing ubiquitously present in the world we live in.  Perhaps if we all fully realized this we would live much more fulfilling lives, who knows.

The great lesson of death is to take action in one's life, but also to have a heart of abandon.  That is to live lightly and hold on to things with the proper grip, ready to let go when the tides are a force to free them from your hands.  For when you die, will it not be like a dream?  Slowly fading into another existence and in that "oh so way" that the vivid dream turns to sand as you descend from dreaming to "reality"?  I imagine death to be a process that ultimately tests your awareness in that manner.

I've been in shock before, lost a lot of blood, poisoned myself to some pretty far corners;  I've felt the pull of death. It feels like we are just a collection of feelings, and amassed in a certain way we become souls or arrangements of those feelings whose bonds don't break easily.  The life you live now will disintegrate upon death... you are not that person who you think you are... we all come from a source and the nature of that source transcends our ability to comprehend things that  destroy that temporary bubble of awareness, that for which we identify as being "me".

That notion has led me to always reflect on the proper attitude to a situation. Our minds run programs like the computers we created (projection anyone?) and the language we use to talk to ourselves informs our perception and feelings.  So with an adjust of perspective we can shift the situation in a way that it becomes manageable or even beneficial to our lives at large.  What lesson is there to learn?    How can I transform this into something useful?  What do I have to believe?

I will die, and I don't want it to be a heavy frightful event.  So I will spend my life cultivating the mind that is necessary to face that.  To live with compassion for others but live as well with a swift hand to keep the space around me clean, to feel like I lived a full life without a thousand desperate hands pulling on me.  To be able to let go, but try at least to cultivate the awareness of understanding where my consciousness is going and know that this life too may fade like the dream does.  It is not lost, but forgotten in a way that I don't have words for. 

So I engage my senses in the moment, show my gratitude for the experience of life, and be aware of the process from which pain feeds joy (and vice versa).  It is truly a strange world we live in and I will never forget that.

 

 

Dan Akroyd and the ghost of christmas past.

man its fucking bright in here... ah a button to fix everything... how modern...  freeing us from the shackles of daily survival, technology, a force, enables man to unleash a tsunami of repressed psychological backwash over society at large.  160 min Directed by Danny Glover

Really now... its been a while since we were on the ol tour bus of  ye olde yore but its a trip worth going on I think.  Kind of that whole seesaw idea... go back and forth until you reach a stasis... a medium ... or a large, whatever the case may be.  It gets less difficult to let it all pull you into a vortex, like Ray and Vigo in ghostbusters II.  Don't jump in, just ride on the edge... then you can tie knots in time and make this whole endeavor worth a while.

having to believe is one of the more effective measures... and that cubic centimeter of chance just might be the snag in the tapestry.  It's twisting again and I can see a new wave of nothing come my way.  There is no is.  There is no is. There's no is. Over andover again.


Intermission....