Cradle to Hearth

Cradle of earth,

Crucible of fire,

Mirror of water,

and Weather of wind.

A princess cries from deep below,

A prince recalls their summer's air,

A queen portends his moonlit fall,

To delve below the winter's snow,

A knight springs up and lights their hearth.

Have you ever

Asked yourself if building the thing you are building is the toughest thing you ever built?

I'm back!

Desintegración en la danza del granero

A moment of time where trying to stop
Allowed us to see something had started
Speaking of why we shouldn't
Allowed us to hear why we should
The empty feeling of separation
Demanded reunion
The cold concrete below us
Became a warm roadside huddle
And so the end was the beginning
Of constant reminiscing
And continual evolution

Matters of Trust

I have a strong attachment to people who matter to me.
Very few people come along and bring about that feeling.
When someone does, I start to fear the return to living without that feeling.
Most of my life has been lived without that feeling.
I get lost in the fear.
I forget what made them matter in the first place.
I begin to fear that I chose for them to matter.
If I don't trust my own feelings,
How can I tell myself I am capable of anything even resembling
Love

More Questions?

Do you ever question your motives?
Do you ever wonder if it is right or if you just really want it to be right?
Do you ever let what feels right to you matter more than what might be right for another?
Do you have trouble being without trying to be?
Do you know what you want?
Do you know how you feel?
Do you know why you feel?
Are your desires fueled by fear?
Can you ever be certain of anything?
How do you act in the face of uncertainty?
How do you trust with so many egos involved?

Bob's Remix Stuck in my Head

Sun is shining, the weather is sweet, yeah
Make you wanna move your dancing feet now
When the mornin´ gather the rainbow,
Want you to know, I'm a rainbow too
To the rescue, here I am
Want you to know, y'all, can you understand?
Sun is shining, the weather is sweet yeah
Make you wanna move your dancing feet now
When the mornin´ gather the rainbow,
Want you to know, I'm a rainbow too
To the rescue, here I am
Want you to know, y'all, can you understand?
Do you believe me? (x 5)
I'm a rainbow too (x 7)
But to the rescue, here I am
Want you to know just if you can, here I stand
To the rescue, here I am
Want you to know, y'all, can you understand?
[Sun is shining, the weather is sweet yeah
Make you wanna move your dancing feet now]
To the rescue, here I am
Want you to know, y'all, can you understand?
[When the mornin´ gather the rainbow,
Want you to know, I'm a rainbow too]

New and Empty

If full moons are the beginning of an end then new moons are an end and a beginning. Knowing what has just finished and what is to start isn't so intuitive, or perhaps it is if you allow it to be. Grappling with it keeps me awake at night wanting the answers rather than getting prepared for them to reveal themselves. I forgot how wanting things hurts so much keeping me reliving the past and anxious about the future. The present just feels a little empty at the moment. I must be missing something.

Fleeting Moments

I’m tired of trying, tired of wanting, tired of thinking, tired of hurting, tired of being tired. I once found a place within myself which accepted an apology for a pattern of disrespectful behaviour. It is that same place that aches when I am afraid; afraid of judgment, afraid others will suffer, afraid to lose her again. I listened to that place within quietly and patiently and felt a deep subtle and persistent shiver. An ever present tremble only perceived with diligent and vigilant observation. I can’t always feel it but I know it’s there. Every now and again it gets amplified to an appreciable level; an overwhelming fear that the peace, connection, wonder, and security will come to an abrupt end. I hate living in the fear. I fight it with pride but this also takes me away from the peace. Those feelings of love become fleeting moments. Then I remember to live in the peace, feel the connection, experience the wonder, and be certain of the security, but by then she is gone again. I try to pick up the pieces and put them back together a little more beautifully than before. Perhaps some day she’ll return.

Fresh pain

Focus on fresh pain
(Not ancient pain as a child
instinctively fearing primal sensation,
Not old pain as an adolescent
fearfully reacting to recognized experience,
Not new pain as an adult
reactively clinging to familiar habit,
But fresh pain as wisdom
impartially observing
the impermanence of body and mind,
the ignorance of certainty,
and the cyclic patterns of existence)
For just beyond awaits reality.

Simple Mindfulness

Almost two years ago I had a profound experience and as a subtle reminder to myself I added a link here on this blog under the "Listen" header on the sidebar. The link points to the lyrics to the song Don' t You (forget about me) by Simple Minds. These lyrics popped into my head around that time in my life and encourage me to remember. The memory I encourage myself to reconnect with is not one I can distill down to a catch phrase or linguistically expressible statement of truth. The memory is of an experience, of who really experienced it, and how it was experienced. The difficulty of remembering this experience is that the memory is not what was burned in abstracted neurological engrams but the raw input itself; the experiencer not a controlling part of this psyche but the distributed whole; and the experience not tainted by historical bias, or judgment but free of reactive duality. Thus the memory is not to be revisited to analyze the past or to plan for the future but only to remember that the present moment exists.

First time again

Where is all of this going? What am I building again? Do I do what feels right or just make sure that I feel it when it feels wrong? There are tensions physical and mental that need to be let go of. Easier said than done when you realize that the tension is not a result of holding on but it is the holding on, it is the desire for a lack of tension, it is the illusion that there is some distinction between the observer and his predicament. I oscillate between amusing myself to death, horse blinded labouring, and inert contemplation. I take myself way too seriously. I'm moving for the first time in over a year and a half, headed to the other side of the ocean for the first time and I have very few preconceptions about how it will go. I forgot how writing about yourself forces you to ask yourself questions you tend to avoid. I've met so many good people over the past few years but most of them have moved on. Bringing an old friend into my little world. Random thoughts should coalesce soon.

That Bloody Moon

Gets me every time!

Awareness before Action

The word holistic gets thrown around quite a bit these days but I’m not sure that many people fully understand what it means. When I think of holistic I think of operating in a massively parallel and non-linear fashion. This language may not make a whole lot of sense. When I say massively parallel I mean inclusive and concurrent in time, space, and scale; all things simultaneously considered. Non-linear meaning letting go of the idea that you have seen it all before, that what you are experiencing can be completely predicted or understood with a finite number of variables or an existing set of categories and forms; take care in the degree to which you extrapolate and interpolate your past understandings into the present moment. I may have said this here before but I will repeat it: Nothing much matters but everything.

What a Tool

I was at a small art opening at a local gallery the other night and I got to talking with the artist. There were a handful of pieces that had a particular impact on me and I wanted to ask her about motive, message, and meaning. She answered with only the physical and logistical challenges of making and transporting the works. I asked again in a slightly different manner and again only details of the process of creation. This reinforced the idea that we are but tools of a creative force that we do not understand. We are the brush of a mysterious muse. Do we understand sufficiently our implement before arogantly removing it from the hand of its steward to wield ourselves?

Be Happy

I sit.
Gross apparent surface;
Painful and personal;
Coarse, blunt, and abstracted;
Continuously ignorant;
Fearfuly distracted;
Desiring escape.
I remember.
Subtilty lives beneath;
Dispassionate and equanimous;
Fine, sharp, and fresh;
Occasionaly present;
Bravely attentive;
Escaping desire.
Be.
Beyond conditioned relativity;
Detached and impermanent;
Unask the question;
Never and always;
Ultimate truth.

Lunar Convergence

There is a very beautiful feeling that comes with taking the time to do something that deep down you have known you should do for some time.

On Duality

I got to reading about ontology after pondering a friends predilection to use the word semantic. The papers and definitions I was reading pointed out differing schools of thought regarding the differentiation between entities and collections of entities and asked the question "What categories of being are fundamental?" I prefer to think of every human conceived entity as a categorization and that fundamental being or existence is that which is without categorization. Us humans seem to have difficulty with non dualist concepts like this. How can we understand that which is not categorizable? It requires a different form of understanding than we commonly acknowledge using. One based on the experience of intuitive recognition rather than logic. Perhaps the ability to recognize the uncategorizable stems from the fact that we are the uncategorizable.

Thrive

I will not blame my miseries on the words or actions of others.
I will not unearth the past to triumph in the present.
I will not make excuses for genuine inadequacy.
I will develop a deeper connection over time.
I will grow and learn on my own terms and schedules.
I will at times step back so as to move forward.

Strong relationships are built upon sharing what you have experienced of yourself rather than what you believe to have understood of anything else.
Healthy relationships are built upon the ability to accept and see past weakness rather than reacting to it as if you could demand that it disappear.
Thriving relationships lack expectations of strength and health.

Indistinguishably Fresh

Every day I wake up fresh
Which depending on my mood
Might mean being quite stale.
The burden of choice only recognized
When I chose outside of my pattern;
A choice to be made noticed
Or long ago choice remembered.
Regular surrender to the status quo,
Usually,
Except for right now
Except for right here.
I can feel creativity swirling inside
Certainly everything I’ve tried
Was necessary but not sufficient.
Mine the past for a new trajectory,
Hypothesize being wise
And experiment my effect.
A patience virtuoso
Rushing cautiously to the starting line.
My own private Frankenstein
Living proof of life
Indistinguishable from the rest.