Note No. 7523

This semester, especially recently, I’ve been playing a fun game of What if?

What if I worked at a coffee shop?

What if I learned to fly?

Or weld.

What if I made another issue of The Journal...and got paid for it!

What if I took up cycling!

What if I got a grant to make art in Antarctica?

What if I became a big time editor. 

What if I threw a party and let the people draw on the walls,

and pretended I was a performer under spotlight…

What if we played Frank Sinatra

and someone showed up to fry dumplings.

What if we were all in space and I had lost myself...

What if we all clasped hands in a circle and screamed!

What if I slept til noon. 

What if I acted as if I were travelling?

What if I wailed in wonder every week?

What if I sought to see human excellence in everyone?

What if I learned to play the piano?

What if I got into data science?

What if I got a French tutor?

What if I went to the museum every month,

what if I witnessed art everyday?

If I felt moved everyday, where would it take me? 

What if I danced!

What if my crows feet walked me to class?

What if I win?

What if I’ve already won?

What if I realize I’m alone

with no one to think of me...

What if I realize I’m wrong.

What if I become afraid?

What if I lose my zest for life? 

What if I forfeit certainty?

What if I waltzed into worlds that aren’t “mine”?

We are all very curious creatures. We all want to know what would happen if…but what would happen if you went to take a look see.

Note No. 7511

Everything becomes so much more saturated with meaning when you learned the context of where it came from, for it then becomes a decision that someone has chosen because they were informed and had taste and chose it out of an array of choices from feel and everything that you now see is a product of choice and tacit study and now you have the gift to see it as it falls under your index. 

No more objects on white sheets. Return to the ruins of where it came and see the full picture. Turn a corner and peer beyond. Bump into what you found.

Note No. 7507

The reflexes that keep us alive momentarily are the same states that keep us from living presently, long term.

They briefly excise the self from the body in order to get the body to act upon what it knows best.

The body knows what to do. The mind gets in the way.

But then the mind begins to operate independently of the body, and the mind, oh so needs the body to operate. The mind needs a home. It needs vessels of connection and fluids and legs for feet to grip sweet green grass.

The mind needs a body.

The mind cannot go anywhere without its body. And the body will merely be in living rigor mortis. The mind needs signals to shoot up from its body to light it up and the body needs the mind to send all of the little chefs and mailfolk and brick folk and painters all the right messages.

The micro mailman was concerned. It all became urgent. He was trying his best. The coal woman was scared there wouldn’t be enough to keep the house warm. The coal woman was afraid the home would never be warm again.

And there the brain sat, over there in the corner, popping like a firecracker, sparks and lights flashing and smoke billowing out. It had become a machine, out of order.  The body was cold and tight. The brain worked and made those around feel a great deal of fright. It had become a great three-legged dance.

But then someone said, “hi there,” and while trying to keep carrying on, zombie body and firing mind, they said, “you were really scared”. And all the little stewards of the body paused and looked up….

Note No. 7286

I just caught a glimpse of the last note I wrote, about 200 days ago. The last italicized line reads: “Believe whatever the fuck you want if it makes you show up better in this life”. 

Yes and no: what’s good for one isn’t always good for all. You often can’t assume that everyone comes to the table playing by the same rules. Assume so, and you’ll be fighting before you can even play. 

Today’s theme has been consciousness. (if you italicize a period does it turn?) 

It’s been 10 days on Abaco so far. 

“You’re still in your robe? I’ve already worked up, showered, and had a work call...I’m becoming you and you’re becoming me” Michael said to dad. He just arrived yesterday from the Bay. 

We’re often regulated by the pace of the place around us, but when that’s taken away or changed, what pace do we naturally settle into? Maybe our happiness in certain places is an indicator of us liking the speed and rhythm it lets us settle into.

“Did you even miss me at all”

“No, well because you seemed happy in the Bay”

“Oh yeah RIGHT”

“Seems to be much more your vibe than Colorado… or just where your friends are…”

I think we’re just happy where we feel like we belong. 

Note No. 7029

I’m on a stoop of a house on a warm Fort Collins morning. All is well. There hasn’t been much thinking these days, aside from woah, I have no thoughts. Why don’t I have any thoughts? (I guess I didn’t realize how essential writing was for drawing things to the surface...I guess writing gives shape to the shapeless.) 

My quarantine practice of working out, meditating, and writing has dissolved quite a bit, but in a grander solution.

That analogy works quite well actually, because I’ve really been going with the flow this past week, whatever that means. 

Been doing a lot of driving. Driving solo.

I catch myself breathing a lot.

I mean, I’d hope so, but more in the sense I catch myself aware of breath, of life, of place, and of self. 

I need people. I’m ready for roots. 

If energy creates magnetism and magnetism creates draw, then we, as people, are mobile force fields, either attracting or repelling. 

In n out, give n take. 

It’s all of these dichotomies. 

God, I hate that word. 

Today’s meditation was on that exact idea, dichotomies. 

There’s even a certain magnetism to that word, the “division or contrast between two things that are or are represented as being opposed or entirely different” according to Webster. 

Though they are different, they are one. Two ends of the same chord. 

Funny that this idea’s coming up again because a couple weeks ago an idea came to me in a very abstract, non-linear form: that for each nuanced emotion we experience, there’s an equal and opposite emotion that counteracts it (very Newtonian), and in some intangible way those blips of time escape the linear realm and are one in the same. That, in simplest terms, the moments when we’re sad are directly tethered to the moments where we’re happy, and in that, we are, in ourselves, the balancing force in our lives. 

There’s a notion out there that kindly suggests that in order to feel the heights of happiness we must feel the depths of pain and sorrow. But I think it goes farther than mere suggestion. If all my highs and lows are the opposing heights as perhaps the jagged peaks of an EKG graph, my secondary claim is: not only are highs and lows likely, they are inevitable in the same quantity and same amplitude. That if, at the end of your lifetime, you could somehow quantify the sum of all highs and the sum of all lows, they would cancel out.  

At the end of the day,  I don’t think beliefs in themselves matter. The very secular, and spiritually removed part of myself urges me to believe beliefs as a means to and end. 

Believe whatever the fuck you want if it makes you show up better in this life. 

Note No. 7016

Haven’t written in a while. And I’m ok with that. No point in being too rigid in routine. 

It’s 5 pm and I’m finally in mountain time. It’s green as far as the eye can see. And lush! So very lush! Especially refreshing after spending several days driving through the seemingly endless nothingness of Nevada and Utah. 

Our directions out of Reno were literally: In 627 miles take exit yeehaw onto weehoo ave. Thank God for cruise control. 

For the past three days of driving we (my brother, Michael, and I) have been averaging out at approximately 60 mph for the sake of the Borobooth (which I’ve tentatively named Boogie - she likes to wiggle...this’ll make sense in a little bit).  

I designed and built (with the help of a carpenter) the Borobooth last year for my high school senior project, with the aim of it being a portable glassblowing studio. 

About this time last year I was certain it would just “rot away in the driveway” as my dad was so certain it would, but when covid cancelled all foreseeable spring and summer plans I returned to doing glass at home  in my at-home garage studio.

March turned to April and by May I knew I wanted to be back in Colorado (where I was when covid was just starting to affect the US).

And I wanted to do glass. 

Very convenient that I had the very trailer to make it happen. 

And so we took off, cruising up the bay until I realized shoot! I left the box of colored glass! And so I called my mom and she agreed to ship it out to me in Colorado within the following few days. 

Just as Waze was reminding me to exit off to 101, it hit me. 

OOOOHHH no. Ahah we REALLY need to turn this party around.

I had remembered to load up the box of tools and studio equipment, but somehow had forgotten ALL of my glass. 

And so, with a very frustrated Michael in the passenger seat, we drove back home. 

At least I get to say bye to mom and dad in a less stressed out state. (Unsurprisingly, the four of us were mostly just yelling at each other moments before our first departure, which, also unsurprisingly, led to me forgetting all of my glass)

Hitting the road again, Michael riding the comedic glory of my timely forgetfulness (and I quote, “HOW DO YOU FORGET YOUR GLASS?! WE’RE TOWING YOUR GLASS TRAILER!”) and our full load this time, we cruised up the bay, through the uninspiring six-laned land of wait?-this-is-our-state-capitol, and over the Sierra foothills at a whopping 55 mph, 60 if I was feeling gutsy (Michael, again, found great comedic traction in my hesitance to meet the speed limit).

AND THEN THERE WERE MOUNTAINS! 

You know the question everyone always loves, Are you a mountain person or a beach person? 

Yeah...there’s kind of no doubting I’ve become a mountain person through and through. 

MOOUUNNNNNTAIINSSSS!! I squealed repeatedly. 

We were finally crossing the Sierras over a mountain pass that would drop us into Reno.

And it rained and flurried and snowed and on our descent into Reno it eventually hailed.

Fast forward through two days and racing RC cars, binging Hulu shows, chilling on the shore of Lake Tahoe, and some now-laughable-but-then-highly-irritating arguments with Michael, we were on our way and on the road again. 

It took us twelve hours to cruise through Nevada, through Salt Lake City, and just past Provo, Utah to our campsite. The following day we’d have a very doable 360ish miles as our last leg of the drive. 

At this point we were pretty comfortable pulling the Borobooth, Michael especially. I was always wary and was frequently glancing at my mirrors to make sure the damn thing was still attached. We’d know if we’d lost the trailer, I reasoned. 

The worst were open valleys where crosswinds picked up, because it’d make Boogie boogie. The trailer would sway, I’d reduce speed, and we kept on our merry way. 

Well, that was until we were in Utah.

We were about 70 miles from the Colorado-Utah border when we heard a big CLUNK and Michael, behind the wheel assured me we’d lost a tire or something. We pulled over immediately to a wedge of median between the main highway and an exit to a rest stop and hopped out to assess the damage.

It was IN the air. The WHOLE front of the trailer was IN the air. And the rear—glued to the highway. 

The Borobooth’s primitive suspension (thank u craigslist) meant that any bump we encountered stressed the frame at the connection that kept the trailer level, and after 950 miles of wiggling and jiggling it finally sheared off, kicking the entirety of the structure up at an angle only rearing horses achieve. 

Well that was unexpected, I laughed to myself. Michael, of course, with Colorado within reach, had a very different reaction, but we dealt with it as best we could and we eventually settled on a plan to call AAA for a flatbed trailer to bring us to the nearest hardware store were we would MacGyver the trailer upright and cinch it down with straps for the remaining couple hundred miles or so. 

During this time one truck pulled up and tried to offer assistance with very little promise. We thanked them, sent them on their way, and assured them that AAA was on its way. 

With a 60-minute AAA wait time, Michael and I bunkered down in the sweaty little cabin of ours, trying not to melt before AAA came to rescue us. 

BUT THEN!! OUT OF LITERALLY NOWHERE! ANOTHER TRUCK PULLS UP. 

And before they could really say anything, I said something along the lines of “no, yeah we’re ok, we’re just waiting for AAA to come…”

“We’re welders…”

“OH NO WAY!  Well in that case, we’ll TOTALLY take your help.” 

What. Are. The. Odds. 

Like saving stranded trailers was their full time job, the two guys (who I later learned were named Garrett and Tony) hopped out immediately, and in perfect unison, lifted the back of the trailer upright, dropped its legs to keep it propped up, and had their generator running in no time. 

I learned that they had just finished a big project in Moab, and were on the way back to wherever home was for them when they saw us from the other side of the highway. They said that they just had to check us out, and Michael and I, hardly in belief that this was happening, were very glad they did.

“What is it?” Tony asked.

“It’s a portable glass studio”

“No way! You two are artists?!”

“Well, I do glass...this is my brother, Michael.”

“You coming from Salt Lake City?”

“No, California—the Bay.”

He said something along the lines of “No way! That’s rad!” and in that moment, maybe for the first time ever, I felt like I really was an artist. I felt proud to be recognized as an artist (though I’ll forever have a strained relationship with that term). 

I was extremely giddy the entire time. How can you not be, though, when two dudes pull through out of nowhere like some god-send with the perfect skill set AND equipment needed fix the problem on site. 

If this isn’t divine intervention, I don’t know what is! Thank you universe! THIS is why I meditate and pray every day. 

Garrett sprayed a final coat of black spray paint to match the frame of the trailer (ARE YOU KIDDING ME?! PAINTING IT TOO!! Now that’s craftsmanship if I ever saw it.), I slipped them a wad of cash I had stashed in Mary Lou (my truck) to split between the two of them to thank them for their outstanding generosity and display of humanity. 

I asked to take a portrait of them on my film camera and they kindly, perhaps awkwardly obliged, before peeling off in their truck. 

And soon enough we, too, were on our way as if nothing even happened. 

“Who do you want to be? I think those words have taken on a whole new meaning in the past several weeks...I said in my last session that I miss my dear Maya Angelou so much in this moment...many times I wonder what Maya would say, I wonder what Maya would do....We were making biscuits...and I had just came back from opening the school [in South Africa] and I said, ‘Oh, Maya that school’s going to be my biggest legacy’...And she said, ‘you don’t know what your legacy is going to be”. ‘Yeah I do, I know this school is going to be my biggest legacy, and she said, ‘I SAID, you have NO IDEA what your legacy is going to be’. And I said, ‘yes ma’am,’ because only Maya could make me feel like I was seven or eleven…‘You have no idea what your legacy is going to be because your legacy is not one thing. Putting your name on a school and even being supervisor of that school is one thing, but you have your whole life. Your legacy is not one thing, your legacy is EVERY life you touch.’ She said, ‘it’s everyone who’s ever watched a show and made the decision to go back to school, to leave their husband, to not hit their kids anymore. [It’s] anybody who’s ever heard something you said...and made a change in their life’...Do as Maya always taught me: When you learn; teach. When you get; give.” (Oprah Winfrey, Week Four of WW Presents Oprah’s Your Life in Focus: A Vision Forward)

Note No. 7008

One of approximately 5x10^67 thoughts of today that will probably never be articulated:

What percentage of arguments are over the words we use vs. the ideas we are trying to describe...it would be so much easier if discussions were strictly visual. Like if I could see someone’s mental picture of what they were trying to say and cut out articulating altogether. Like oh you have that same purple tree, me too...sick, we agree that purple trees are legit.

Telepathy....basically telepathy...but like visual telepathy. 

If we heard someone else’s claims in our language (our word choices, ways of framing things, etc.) I think this would direct a lot of potential arguments to just straight dialogue. Dude wait before we escalate into a fight let's pull up our mental maps...hmm ok loading loading...oh wow wait this is what you mean?? We actually are coming from the exact same place....why the hell are we arguing?? 

Maybe that’s what transparency means...actively showing people how we feel, what we think (again, much more convenient with telepathy and without the clunky necessity of employing words).

What is the aim here, huh? Am I trying to win? Or am I trying to pave common ground? And if I’m really trying to win, for what? Do I really gain in the end? And to what potential loss? (Are the two circles of a Venn diagram drawing closer or farther apart as a result? These two entities being me and you or you and whoever)

...anywho...

Some Funkadelic wisdom:

Good Thoughts Bad Thoughts (1974)

“Travel like a king

Listen to the inner voice

A higher wisdom is at work for you

Conquering the stumbling blocks come easier

When the conqueror is in tune with the infinite

Every ending is a new beginning

Life is an endless unfoldment

Change your mind, and you change your relation to time

You can find the answer

The solution lies within the problem

The answer is in every question

Dig it?

An attitude is all you need to rise and walk away

Inspire yourself

Your life is yours

It fits you like your skin

The oak sleeps in the acorn

The giant sequoia tree sleeps in its tiny seed

The bird waits in the egg

God waits for his unfoldment in man

Fly on, children

Play on

You gravitate to that which you secretly love most

You meet in life the exact reproduction of your own thoughts

There is no chance, coincidence or accident

In a world ruled by law and divine order

You rise as high as your dominant aspiration

You descend to the level of your lowest concept of your self

Free your mind and your ass will follow

The infinite intelligence within you knows the answers

Its nature is to respond to your thoughts

Be careful of the thought-seeds you plant in the garden of your mind

For seeds grow after their kind

Play on, children

Every thought felt as true

Or allowed to be accepted as true by your conscious mind

Takes roots in your subconscious

Blossoms sooner or later into an act

And bears its own fruit

Good thoughts bring forth good fruit

Bullshit thoughts rot your meat

Think right, and you can fly

The kingdom of heaven is within

Free your mind, and your ass will follow

Play on, children

Sing on, lady”

Note No. 7005

I deleted the Instagram app a few days ago. 

The theme of Oprah’s Your Life in Focus virtual tour this past Saturday was Adapt. 

Humans are highly adaptable. 

I remember thinking this to myself sometime in late January of 2018, in the middle of the Utah desert at the end of my first ever backpacking trip. It was our first expedition at HMI. It was ten or so days in the desert, and most of the twelve of us students had never backpacked before (myself included). 

Those ten days the desert stripped me from an iphone-wielding teenager to the most raw version of myself I had ever experienced. 

I remember early on in the trip hitting a figurative wall and breaking down (or rather, breaking open). 

I’m really alone out here.

I didn’t necessarily feel lonely, and I wasn’t physically alone, my group members at this time were all within eyeshot. 

But it was the first time I was without my family, my home friends, and my home environment. Oh, and without a toilet, or much toilet paper, or water that didn’t come out of dingy potholes, or food that didn’t crunch with desert seasoning...aka sand. 

Who am I without these things??

It was liberating. I could be anyone. I could do anything.

But back to humans are highly adaptable.

New norms can be established much quicker than we think. 

It’s like the “Day 1 on…” TikToks.

Soon you go from swiping to the hole on the homescreen at a rate of 13x/minute to hardly realizing you lived any other way. 

I needed a break from Instagram because it was starting to infect my thoughts and how I went about my day. 

This past week the #BlackLivesMatter movement has taken the nation (and other parts of the world) by storm. People are finally paying attention. Institutions are finally taking action. It’s cool to see how powerful social movements are first hand. It’s also extremely heavy—the reasons why it’s happening in the first place. 

One thing that helped me grasp my feelings was research. Looking into organizations and nonprofits that are doing the work first hand. 

Here are three organizations that I looked into yesterday:

1) NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund (LDF)

“The NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, Inc. is America’s premier legal organization fighting for racial justice. Through litigation, advocacy, and public education, LDF seeks structural changes to expand democracy, eliminate disparities, and achieve racial justice in a society that fulfills the promise of equality for all Americans. LDF also defends the gains and protections won over the past 75 years of civil rights struggle and works to improve the quality and diversity of judicial and executive appointments. LDF is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.” 

Additionally, “LDF’s widely recognized and historic efforts to end segregation have been complemented by its scholarship program” that for the past “five decades” that’s supported close to two thousand students with over $5.5 million of financial support. (LDF)

2) Campaign Zero

Campaign Zero’s mission is to “end police violence in America” by “[analyzing] policing practices across the country, [researching] to identify effective solutions to end police violence, [providing] technical assistance to organizers leading police accountability campaigns and…[developing a]model [of] legislation and advocacy to end police violence nationwide”. 

What I found incredibly informative is their comprehensive breakdown of how to end police violence tangibly. 

For each of the10 key points they list, they feature half a dozen to over a dozen studies, articles, etc. per point (making for a really informative landing page!).

The key points they list include: “End broken windows policing, community oversight, limit use of force, independently investigate & prosecute, community representation, body cams/film the police, training, end for-profit policing, demilitarization, and fair union police contracts”. 

They have a lot of really compelling articles and videos linked on their site. 

3) Loveland Foundation

“With the barriers affecting access to treatment by members of diverse ethnic and racial groups. Loveland Therapy Fund provides financial assistance to Black women and girls nationally seeking therapy...Established in 2018 by Rachel Cargle in response to her widely successful birthday wish fundraiser, Therapy for Black Women and Girls. Her enthusiastic social media community raised over $250,000, which made it possible for Black women and girls nationally to receive therapy support. Black women and girls deserve access to healing, and that healing will impact generations.

The Loveland Foundation is the official continuation of this effort to bring opportunity and healing to communities of color, and especially to Black women and girls. Through fellowships, residency programs, listening tours, and more, ultimately we hope to contribute to both the empowerment and the liberation of the communities we serve.”

The great thing about all of these sites (and most organizations/nonprofits in general) is that you can commit to recurring donations on a monthly, quarterly, bi-annually, or yearly basis from $5 to $500 and more. This makes giving a no brainer, and doing it this way, if you have the capacity to, displays your sustained support of whatever cause it may be. 

Note No. 7004

It feels hard to continue on to “normal” life. Trying to go about my daily happenings and to-do’s feels like going into a burning house to make pancakes. 

I feel quite overwhelmed with the news and with social media. 

There’s constant debate in my head, and I don’t know where to land and how to feel and especially what to think. 

No matter how hard I try to direct my feelings more positively and productively, to try and think hopefully, there’s always a rebuttal to undermine hopeful sentiments.

And so what do I do now?

When I feel like no matter what I do it won’t be enough?How do I sit with myself when my mere existence in a place of privilege is an injustice?

If I’m not doing everything, I’ll be deemed complacent. I don’t even know what “everything” is though.

It’s like the “if you’re not growing you’re dying” sentiment.

But that’s not sustainable. That’s just scrambling for traction on an ever-crumbling cliff. 

There’s a lot of calling out on social media (I don’t know why we even bother to call it social media, because it’s really just Instagram). 

Calling out of complacency, injustice...all extremely valid.

But I think this leaves some people, some populations targeted, attacked, and more prone to sit in non-action or even resistance. 

I think it’s wise to think about ideal outcomes, which from what I gather, would mean something along the lines of  having the country unanimously on the side of claiming responsibility for systemic injustice, providing reparations and adequate education that speaks to the truth of our history as a nation, and individuals speaking out, taking action for wrongdoings within our reach. Obviously idealistic on many fronts, but if that’s the direction we’re trying to go towards it takes calling people into action. 

Blame and shame only ever alienated people. 

And I don’t mean that we stop keeping people accountable to their actions, we just do it in a way that invites them to step up to the plate rather than be ejected from the field. 

Creating empowered allies instead of bitter enemies.

It's kind of  like the whole if you give the man a fish he’ll be satiated for a day, teach him to fish and he’ll never be hungry again except actually not really lol...what I’m trying to say is that we all have a ripple effect, whether we intend to or not. And that effect is heightened (for better or for worse) by how we interact with others. Empower others to be accountable for themselves and pass that message to raise those surrounding them, and that collective wake will be broader than anything the one person could ever do. 

Basically, we can have action that lasts one day, or action that manifests for generations.

But, like it says at the bottom of this page, “Take it what you will, but take it with a grain of salt”. 

Note No. 7003

Having trouble articulating thoughts...quite frankly don’t know what my thoughts are, but here’s this:

There is something to be said about radical accountability. 

Time will tell

“Today’s curse is tomorrow’s blessing” 

“What is this trying to teach me?”

We only have our legacy...being on the whole “good” does not mean we are perfect. Maybe an honorable legacy is that “she was honest and she tried to forgive as best she could, and she chose what light she had instead of being swallowed by the vacuous darkness in the world, and she realized time and time again she didn’t know all, and she never would, she strived and that’s what counted. She turned to love, and that’s what mattered.  

The state of our upset and anger and sadness goes deeper than situations at hand...sometimes we figure out the root of our hurting…and sometimes we don’t...we can’t...and we have to be okay with the inconclusivity too. Maybe radical accountability, sticking to our paths, revolves around radical forgiveness, radical acceptance. 

“Being right with yourself makes you right with others”

Note No. 7001

This week has felt especially draining, and there’s a tangible lack of order to the routine that I’ve fallen into the past month or so. For the past couple days, I’ve said no to glass and no to regimented workouts and no to writing these very notes because running through the motions just to run through the motions would be missing the point of why I do these things entirely. A lot of the things that we just have to do, are simply obligations we assign too much arbitrary weight to. 

I’m going to eat with my family instead. 

And this means not bitching ‘n moaning either when things don’t go as planned, and you don’t get to do what you want to do (regardless of how long you’ve been looking forward to it). This is something I am (and will continue to be) endlessly guilty of: “...not right now, I have work to do”, or some snarky semblance of this. And it usually follows a simple request like: “Can you feed the dogs?” or “I need your help running to the post office” or “Can you please finish up X, Y, & Z?”.

If you’re unconvinced of my selfish tendencies, just ask my mother, and she’ll gladly enlighten you.

This fits beautifully with this week’s theme: honoring. 

Sometimes honoring other people just means putting your head down and saying yes. 

Yes, period. No commentary. No bitching. And especially no inner begrudging. 

This connects especially well with a three-and-a-half minute self-titled animation I came across recently called “Brené Brown on Blame” (an all-too-real must watch, along with the clip linked below).

On another note, I think we’re all fatigued by the atrocities against people of color in this nation, especially with its growing media coverage. It’s all largely unprocessed in my head, and the question of how I even begin to process it remains unanswered. 

It’s incredibly abstract and faceless in my head and the unrelenting pace of our news cycle sure doesn’t help.

I think the difference is that when we experience personal tragedy or trauma in our lives, it’s expected that we take time to mourn and process the event(s). But when it’s a series of widespread national atrocities, or global ones, we lose (or at least, I lose) this sense of “mine-ness” or ownership, so-to-say, over the event, making it feel like I’m not in the position to feel as deeply as those more nuclear to the event. 

What makes suffering unique is that usually we are alone in our suffering. I’m the only one experiencing this, though many others struggle with similar things. And in this, I think it makes it easier for us to feel what we really feel, because we acknowledge I’m the only one feeling these feelings, so no one can tell me otherwise. 

And for those reading this that know me, don’t be concerned about my wellbeing, I’m writing this for the pure sake of exploring thought. If I was drowning in some unnameable pool of suffering, you’d surely hear the gurgling. 

Anyyyywayssss….

There is no end to human suffering, as there is no cap to love. It’s not a zero sum game. The capacity for the collective human (and might I offer, non-human) experience is infinite. Hurting is hurting, period, regardless of its scale. In order for us to honor the gravity of our emotions, we must not tie the validity of our hurting (or uncertainty or whatever we might feel) to its worldly relevance. There is always going to be someone, some population suffering in a greater, more inconceivable way than you, and additionally, it is not your duty to bear their burden for them. 

We are not responsible, nor should feel obligated, to aid in someone else’s evolution. That is their journey, and their journey alone. 

But this does not mean that we don’t practice empathy or action. 

To put it as Brené Brown does in another one of my favorite clips of hers, “On Empathy” (also a three minute animation), “empathy is feeling with people”. To reference my word of the week again, this is the purest and most whole way we can honor each other’s humanity. She continues, “in order to connect with you, I have to connect with something in myself that knows that feeling”. It’s not enough to recognize someone else’s display of vulnerability. The act of empathy, as Brené describes, is bridging our own humanity to others in an act of building collective integrity. 

---

Note (Added 5/30): In light of recent events and to hopefully prevent misinterpretation, I’d like to clarify a few points above. First being that when facing systemic issues and injustices, it IS our place to step in, and step up, in whatever capacity we have. To at least display solidarity. And sometimes that means we are of great, direct action, and sometimes that means supporting someone in that place, and sometimes that means taking a moment to understand what it all means for ourselves before moving forward. What I stated above: “it is not your duty to bear their burden for them” is to follow in the line of personal/spiritual growth, and is not a statement of how to react (which, regardless, I have no jurisdiction of advising) to how one should deal with civil unrest and injustice, in fact, quite the opposite. What I was urging in the statement: “We are not responsible, nor should feel obligated, to aid in someone else’s evolution,” (which on second thought I should’ve phrased in the positive), is that we will never be able to take away someone’s hurting by doing the work for them. Again, someone else’s evolution “is their journey, and their journey alone”. Our job is to not fix our friends and loved ones. At the end of the day we only have control over our own evolution.

Note No. 6998

This one’s a short one. 

Short and sweet.

This is a time for honoring.

For honoring each other.

Turning the damn phone off when someone’s talking, 

especially when they’re talking to you.

To show that

I value you 

through action.

This is a time for honoring ourselves.

You’ve done a lot of work, 

but things

just 

take 

time. 

Pull yourself outta that grave, honey. 

Lets walk.

If it ain’t working,

it aint working. 

I went on Instagram this evening after feeling quite exhausted and frustrated from working on the computer all day, and the first post I saw was a series of analog shots, a barn, a brush-lined road, a street sign...and a caption about walking, evening walks. 

And it saved me. 

I was reminded of the beauty of solitude, and solo-strolls, and unspectacular spring sunsets. It was warm. I felt warm inside.

And I was thankful that this person had taken those frames for the pure solace of shooting film for no one.

Note No. 6997

There are certain times in the creative process that are absolutely soul destroying. For instance, I’m two Squarespace glitches away from ripping the fucking screen off my laptop o’clock, or when I’m doing glass and it reaches half past I’d rather torch my goddamn hand off than fix this crack.  

Luckily, I have things to diffuse such frustrations, so my hands and computer can live to serve another day. 

For the past two Saturdays my mom and I have been tuning in to Oprah’s virtual rendition of her 2020 Vision Tour that got cut short because of the virus (and they’re free on YouTube!) Last week’s topic was focus and the word I chose to guide my intentions for the week was purify. For me, this meant weeding out the crummier habits of my day and replacing them with sustainable habits that make me feel full (of life, of love, of passion, etc.). I don’t mean to rhyme here, but having a built in retreat of movement, meditation, and writing every single day has really been a treat! No matter how shitty I feel, how much anxiety I have, or frustration, or anger, or defeat I experience, there hasn’t been a day where I’ve executed the magic trio and not felt remarkably better after. 

I was joking with my friend, Zoe, yesterday (at a car’s distance in a parking lot off Skyline) that working out in itself is like mouthwash for the body...just makes you feel all fresh and tingly and alive again.

I feel like this is all I talk about on here: movement, meditation, and writing, but it has seriously been a game changer for me to feel more in control of my emotions and in tune with life’s bigger picture.  

I’m partially behind the belief that consistently probing inwards through meditation and journaling is why this daily exercise is fruitful, but there’s also the more basic side to me that reasons if I’m spending on average three to five hours a day working on the computer, shouldn’t it take an equal amount of time, if not more, to untangle whatever mess I created for myself in that initial duration of time?

Last fall I spent three-ish weeks living in a four-storeyed homestay house in Patan (aka Lalitpur), the third largest city in the Kathmandu valley of Nepal, and each evening I’d sit on the rooftop of my borrowed home for the sake of sitting. During my 83 days in Nepal I wielded no technology, (a liberating experience on its own that requires zero travel). This basically meant I got real good at sitting with myself. 

Even without the damaging presence of technology, I’d get caught up in the day-to-day maneuvering of a foreign country, which was why I sat at each dawn and each dusk. In the dust-free refuge I sought above the streets, I was acquainted with the entire Kathmandu valley. Even to this day, I can close my eyes and really, truly be there again. The details come flooding back. The man across the alley balancing on bamboo scaffolding to lay brick for a third storey. People, stacked two, three in a row on motorbikes dodging street dogs and each other. The jetliners screeching down in the only clearing of buildings in the valley. And when they went up, I’d lose them to the nameless peaks of the Himalayas closing in the view on my left. The planes were always a reminder that my time here is finite because some early December day, I too would be on one of those planes kissing the skyline one last time. 

But to return to the point, I sat a lot. Sometimes several hours. Just sitting. Sometimes singing. Until I felt like I had touched bottom, and could return to the scheduled doings of my life. In doing this daily writing, I feel like I get that same feeling of touching bottom. And here’s what I mean by this: Imagine you have a balloon. Or even, you are the balloon. When we’re fully present, caught up with our thoughts, and have no internal inventory of things that are on our minds, we’re grounded or in other words, have touched bottom. As we get carried away in the happenings and drama of our lives this balloon slips our grip and in slow motion, carries on upward. Luckily, if we are also steady in our groundedness, we realize the balloon has escaped and we grab the string before it gets too far from our reach. But, unfortunately, usually we allow too much time to pass before we realize and the balloon is beyond our reach. By sitting every day, I stay within arms length of the balloon.

Another way of imagining this, maybe more comprehensive than the last, is to picture yourself on the seafloor, a deep, quiet space where nothing of the above world can reach you. This time though, the daily distractions fill you with air, sending you closer and closer to the water’s surface and farther away from the peaceful sanctuary at the bottom. When we sit, we are in the process of releasing air, and eventually, after some time, sink down to the bottom and return to an at-ease state of being. 

Hmm….I feel like I’ve drifted quite a bit (no pun intended).

Here’s what I was trying to say (but in two sentences this time): It is the act of sitting for a duration of time, not the headspace when you sit, that really matters. Sometimes you just need to catch your breath. 

Note No. 6995

Trust and all will come.

See it before yourself and know it has come. 

The prying and stirring has subsided, so was the writer's block I thought I had. But the feeling of writer's block hasn’t gone away, I’ve just had some time now to reinterpret it. 

It takes some time for me to find my groove. Probably 65% of the first fifteen minutes of writing consists of me staring at a blinking cursor, index fingers mounted on the nubs of the F and J keys. I’d say another solid 15% is riding the backspace key. So basically that leaves me with a solid 20% of creating words that stick.

Thirty steps forward, twenty four back, and a few spins later I’m on the right track. 

I want it all NOW! That’s why I can’t pursue it now...I need a solid five or ten years of growing up to have the patience to stick with it...but if I start now in five or ten years at least I’ll have something! This, along with some uninterpretable shrieking and flailing, was pretty much the gist of a conversation I had with my parents last night on an idea I’ve been pursuing on and off since I was 15. 

Yesterday I found myself on a scenic detour up in the hills parked on a car-sized pullout overlooking the ocean in the distance. This was the first time I had really been out of the house in a while, excluding grocery and gas runs. 

So this is what they mean when they say, “my heart is bursting with joy”. 

I literally thought I was going to have a heart-attack. It was like running to the point where the running catches up with you and your heart and lungs suddenly get punched with the weight of the work you’ve been doing. 

Except my vital organs were bursting with vitality for the sheer bliss of being alive and seeing aliveness before me. 

I always find the disconnect between job titles and job descriptions quite perplexing. 

Why do all of these super legit and esteemed jobs actually just suck day to day? 

Chief Executive Officer of a large corporation....more like I do emails all day and sit in on calls. Or I constantly bear the weight of this organization on my shoulders. 

I don’t know what job title constitutes this, but I want my job description to be professional sun-bather, feel-good-do-gooder, bliss manifester, spontaneous breakdancer, and flame-bearer.

Quarantine, in some aspects, has felt quite self-indulgent.

Like feeling blissful for any prolonged amount of time in itself is too good to be true and the indigestion after the sugar rush is bound to kick in.

I do not believe in this, though.  

I believe, and this is not without acknowledging that this statement may just be an embarrassing marker of naiveté, that sustaining wholly blissful lives is entirely within reach. 

But it isn’t without sacrifice and intentionality. 

My old lifting coach used to say, “Easy choices, hard life. Hard choices, easy life”. 

What we are privileged to have in life, to varying degrees, is choice. We get to choose what we tolerate, and what we don’t, and as soon as we raise the bar for what our experience of life should be, we don’t see any less. This is not to say that the course of our life suddenly veers to a trajectory without pain or hardship or suffering, but rather we have a say in how we experience these inevitabilities. Our grasp on perception is much more firm than we credit it.

Note No. 6993

I had to verify that, in fact, this was Note No. 6993. Writing 6992 yesterday morning seemed like an eternity ago. It’s 6:14 pm. Just listened to a guided meditation I’ve listened to a couple times before. It's from a tape recorded in the mid 90’s by this woman named Shakti Gawain. Her tapes are now poorly converted Google Play audiobooks with no-name chapters that start and end in odd places. Kind of wish it was a tape so I could just blindly reach over and eject it before the next mediation inevitably starts. 

She begins every mediation on this tape by describing a visualization of your inner sanctuary. Essentially, a mode of winding down and regaining focus, starting by walking down an imaginary path. There’s eight or so meditations on the tape, all starting this way. I’ve done the tape a little more than twice through now, and each of the twenty times I figuratively walk down the path to my inner sanctuary I end up in a new location. Some I forget, and some stick. The “stickiest” of places have been aside an alpine lake on a starry summer night, a grassy mid-afternoon meadow,  a cozy little beach in Guanaja, a dreamy ocean cliffside with a cabin, and a misty mountain clearing in chaparral.

Today I found myself in a plain white bed wedged in a corner of a plain white room. I guess even my most deeply relaxed self needed to relax. 

I haven’t been able to enter that deep restorative state in a while, and I was quite relieved to be reacquainted with the feeling. 

“if all 10 billion interconnected nerve cells [in your brain] discharged at one time that a single electrode placed on the human scalp would record something like five millionths to 50 millionths of a volt. If you had enough scalps hooked up you might be able to light a flashlight bulb.” (Scientific American)

According to this very conveniently self-titled article, What is the function of brainwaves? by Scientific American, there are four distinct brain waves that capture certain states of being; Beta, Alpha, Theta, and Delta. As you step down the neural oscillation staircase from Beta and Alpha to Theta and Delta, the height of the waves increase as the frequency decreases, which basically means, as you can imagine, that the graph goes from shallow jagged scribbles (highly focused waking state), to long, loopy waves (deep, non-REM sleep). The space inbetween, book-ended by Alpha and Theta, can be expressed as anything from loosely-focused daydreaming and zoning out, to creative visualizations, and deep, restorative meditative states. 

If I had to recount my day today from the moment I woke up, it would be delta, theta, alpha, beta...beta, beta, beta...alpha, beta, alpha, theta, delta, theta, and finally back to beta again. 

Quite a morse code I’m living.

“Individuals who do a lot of freeway driving often get good ideas during those periods when they are in theta. Individuals who run outdoors often are in the state of mental relaxation that is slower than alpha and when in theta, they are prone to a flow of ideas. This can also occur in the shower or tub or even while shaving or brushing your hair. It is a state where tasks become so automatic that you can mentally disengage from them. The ideation that can take place during the theta state is often free flow and occurs without censorship or guilt. It is typically a very positive mental state.” (Scientific American)

This “free flow” of ideas “without censorship or guilt” is the exact reason why I meditate. 

The ideas that come through me, as an artist or creator or whatever you wanna call it, did not originate from me. The biggest thing that will tear down anyone with any creative inclination (which is everyone, yes you) is to claim that this idea is mine. It came from me. Such self-attachment is surely a recipe for self-destruction. Our job is to be a conductor of ideas, not a collector of them. We must funnel thoughts through ourselves and into the world, to others, and to places beyond the individual that is I. That is our duty.

The moment we reign one idea supreme is the moment we cut off the figurative faucet that allows us to tap into ideas beyond our own creation. It’s all a give and take, you see. The more I put out in the world, the more I give, the more I receive. 

I’ll finish this off with one last thought, which came to me right as I was sinking from Alpha to Theta, and it was: To live with integrity is not to fear the weight of your truth.

Note No. 6992

Since March 25th, 58 days ago, I’ve recorded 38 workouts on my Quarantine Workouts doc. I didn’t start it for the purpose of tallying up my days, but it's cool to know that I move my body at least 66% of the time. On the days where I feel compelled to move, which is most days, I write up a workout consisting of four or five rounds of seven minutes each. Each round cycles four movements of varying reps, and I run through the movements until the timer taps me out, or until I physically can’t handle anymore. And on days where even the thought of writing up a workout proves too exhausting, I do yoga. 

For me, movement is merely meditation prep. And this approach has proved to be the most sustainable one yet. I like phases. I like getting real into something, and then finding something else to be real into a few weeks later. That’s just my nature. Always has, and always will. Some things are worth reforming, the nature of who you are isn’t. 

I move well so I can meditate well, and I meditate well so I can create well, and so on. To be sustainable is to be cyclical, it’s a fundamental rule of natural systems. Again, no use fighting the nature of things, it is much bigger than what is in your control.

Words are hard this week, which is frustrating because thoughts come to me easily. Somehow there’s a disconnect. Maybe I just need to warm up. A block is always promising though, it usually means that some crumbling and rebuilding are in the works. It always does. Dead end, evolution, etc. 

Quarantine has gone like this: the first week or two I was a big ball of sad, then there was the Masterclass and watercolor phase, which was also when I started doing Facetime workouts (which then kicked off my quarantine workout doc). I almost forgot, but this was also the time of venturing into the Bay with my dad on the boat and chasing striped bass (emphasis on the chasing part). This was also the peak use of I’M SO OVER IT. It primarily being the final details of a magazine I had been working on for a couple months. There gets to be a point in every creative process where no matter how great, or inventive the product you create is, you just can’t stand looking at, thinking about it, and especially, working on it. Remind me to NEVER pursue graphic design. But it turns out that, just like running, graphic design for me is an excellent pursuit in Type Two Fun, namely, the fun that is no fun in the moment, but great fun in retrospect. Ah, the beauty of time to erase misery. 

Then was the era of creative visualizations, and also when I hopped back on the torch after a solid ten months without doing glass. This was also very much the era of excessive seeking. Seeking primarily for an escape. 

I counted, in early March, how many planes I had ridden since New Years. It was something like 14. Fourteen planes in a matter of eight-ish weeks. This was no anomaly. Since I had graduated in June, I had traveled and fished all summer, met friends I would come to know as soul sisters, and departed for a three month program in Nepal that would strip me down to the very purest core of who I was. From June of 2019 to March 2020, I had spent maybe eight weeks at home in small, scattered parcels of time. 

And then I was to spend at least two months at home, straight. Like really at home. Like not leaving the house. 

To say the least I had some major work to do. Constantly moving became automatic. Every time I was in need of a restart, I would conveniently have some sort of escape tightly bound in my calendar, and hoards of United flight confirmations in my inbox to prove it. 

Last night I watched Aeronauts, a fictionalized story of the first highest flight (or is it float?) of a hot air balloon in the 1860’s. They haphazardly reached something like 35,000 feet with pretty much no reinforcements to help them survive such heights. 

Anyways, much of the CG footage was them soaring above the clouds. It was magical. But also super normal. Anytime you hop on a plane you soar at such heights, and you see, just like they saw with such wonder, life above clouds. Except everyone always bitches about plane rides, the stuffy air and crappy food, the child squealing three rows up.

Sitting in my childhood room on Hillview Road, I finally had to sit with myself. There was a lot of catching up to do. 

But one day, after cycling through guided meditation and visualization tapes for a few weeks, I finally felt ok. It was momentous, but in that moment of realization there was profound calm. I’ve conquered home. 

The times that I had felt truly alive and at home in my body were always these altered experiences of life (High Mountain Institute my junior year, 2018, and my Where There Be Dragons Nepal trip, fall 2019). Somehow through these experiences I had calculated and set in stone that I could only ever feel this way in these circumstances, in the most foreign and wild places, with folks from all over, doing things I could’ve never imagined for myself. And in this, I set myself up to fail upon my reintegration home. 

But now I’ve conquered home.

This basically meant that my plane of existence at home had risen to the plane of existences I had experienced in those ultra-pivotal periods. 

If I can feel this way here, I can feel this way ANYWHERE.

And suddenly the world was at my fingertips, and I was flooded with life. 

This room, what I can sense for myself, see with my own eyes, is the only thing that exists right now.

Note No. 6990

It’s taking everything inside me right now to want to keep writing. Of course I am still showing up and still writing, but the key part of that statement is the want to part. I knew this would happen, and maybe that’s why I’m doing it, to somehow engineer myself out of this self-induced writers block. Every system is perfectly designed to get the result it gets. I heard this quote in an episode of Armchair Expert some time ago. And by some time ago, I’m guessing it was probably sometime last week. Anyways, I just Googled the quote. It’s by some now deceased engineer named W. Edwards Deming, who is well esteemed for his writing in The New Economics For Industry, Government, Education, Out of Crisis, and my favorite, purely for its seemingly-vague-but-probably-too-technical-for-me-to-even-understand title, Some Theory of Sampling. Gotta love it. Also I’m assuming this dude’s esteemed. I actually have no idea who this guy is beyond his Google pop up bio. 

But back to the quote: Every system is perfectly designed to get the result it gets.

Hmmm...it’s all coming back....lemme back it up (Is it fat enough? When I throw it back, is it fast enough? If I speed it up, can you handle that?...now watch me throw it, throw it back, throw it back…ahah ok enough of that)

Anyyyyywhooooooo…

The guest on the episode was Dan Heath, who, according to Wikipedia, is “an American bestselling author, speaker and fellow at Duke University’s CASE center” (CASE standing for Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship). He was invited on the podcast to discuss his new book, Made to Stick; Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die. 

Somewhere along the course of the episode, made possible by Zoom, in between some technical difficulties, also made possible by Zoom, Dan told a story that would both describe one of his personal and professional beliefs, and the reason I stuck onto the W. E. Deming quote. 

You and a friend are having a picnic by the side of a river, and you just spread out your picnic blanket, you’re getting ready to eat, and then you hear a shout from the direction of the river. You look back, and there’s a child thrashing in the river, apparently drowning, so you jump in, you save the child, and you come back to shore. And just as your adrenaline is starting to recede, you hear a second shout. You look back, there’s a second child drowning, so back in you go, you fish them out, then there’s TWO more children. And back and forth, back and forth you go, and it's exhausting! All of this life-saving work! Then you see your friend swimming to shore, [s/he] steps out, and starts walking away as though to leave you alone, and you go, “Hey! Where are you going? I can’t do this by myself!” and your friend goes, “I’m going upstream to tackle the guy who’s throwing all these kids in the river!”. (Dan Heath, Armchair Expert with Dax Shepherd, Episode 205)

He goes on explaining that this is exactly the pattern we get stuck in at work, in life—that we “just get stuck reacting to things” instead of “making our way upstream to deal with things at a systems level that could’ve potentially prevented us from needing to be in the river fishing out drowning kids” (Heath).

Yo hold up. Like two seconds after saying all of this, he goes, “Probably my number one quote I learned in researching this book is this one by Paul Batalden…” and I thats where the music in my head screeched to a halt….Who the fuck is Paul Batalden and why when I googled every system is designed perfectly to get the result it gets DOES W. E. DEMING SHOW UP?! Someone’s being a goddamn imposter...or, as my Nepal trip leader, Hemant once said, so stoically, “nothing is ever being created for the first time”...or something along those lines. But what about the iPhone??

Okay, well I already hyped up W. E. Deming, and y’all know I ain’t revising what I said above (#1 rule of me writing on here), so here’s a lil about our new friend and runner up author of our favorite new systems quote, Paul Batalden. Hopefully the internet will be truthful to me this time. Hmm...ok, on first glance, I’m starting to think this Paul dude actually co-opted our dear Deming’s quote. First of all, he has no google bio...negative clout points… AND he’s alive ‘n kickin’, so either he, as a young boy, crafted the quote for Deming to use in his incredibly niche engineering books, or, more plausibly, the quote was miscredited. 

Anyyyyyywaysssss…

If not already completely evident, I am back into “wanting to write” mode, so my job here today is done. I’ll leave it to you to contend what the “point” of this was.

Note No. 6988

I entered a dark and vacuous space that I knew was outer space as Maggot Brain by Funkadelic played. It was the gravity that draws towards your head after breathwork. I had begun prayers. Listing off people to pray for, which I had drawn from Tom Hanks’ portrayal of  Mr. Rogers. Yesterday when I did this I listed names, a contest to drop as many as possible. This time their faces appeared out of the darkness of space. Holographic, almost. Consciously drifting out of the exercise, the gravity of my head and chest grew. Like particles from all over gathering tighter and tighter to birth a star or a new planet. It’s a gravity that both acknowledges self and the weight of self and the expansiveness of the beyond. 

I meditated with mom to Shakti Gawain. 

She’s left now. 

Seemed to be rather in a hurry if I do have to say. 

I lost myself.

Not in any grand way, but my awareness slipped. 

With mom in the room it seemed if I was just doing it for her and was gladly accompanying her with my body. 

God knows where my mind went. 

Weekend one of the Oprah series began this morning. 

Focus was the theme. 

She has a special grounding quality, but what makes her so spectacular is that she has earned public legitimacy. 

She’s no hippie spiritual leader. She lives in this linear world. She’s real and showing achievable goals. Like the Mr. Rogers. The title of being a living saint is alienating for both him and those who follow, because it marks his behavior as unachievable, exceptional, rather than a product of work and determination. Don’t quite like the word determination, seems too “work harder not smarter” to me. Maybe the correct term is intentionality. I like that. 

My word from the workshop was Purity. 

To work well, think well, move well. 

To live well, period. 

I don’t remember where I heard it, must’ve been some podcast way back in the dark days of Tony Robbins and Lewis Howes binging in early high school. It’s funny because at that time I’d hear a line and be like that’s IT! And for a moment truly believed that I had figured life out. Had thought my way, studied my way into mastery. Or being clued into some sort of higher knowledge. A sneak peak into the exclusive club of people that had “figured it out”. But then I’d just forget about and grab on to the next tidbit of info that seemed mystical enough. Our spiritual maturity does mirror our physical growth. At that time I could be best described as a distractible toddler. 

But eventually, I’d begin to catch on that to really learn something, fully understand it was to feel it, and feel it on your own terms. It would just have to click, and most times (all the time) it would require a force outside of myself to snap it a conscious part of my everyday existence. 

There is one belief that is really becoming loose, to the point of rattling its final shakes before ejecting itself off me. The belief I’ve been dissociating with the most in the past year has been expectations of what life and work should feel and look like. 

There’s some sort of survivors guilt...no that’s not the right term. Anyways, there’s this guilt that goes along with settling for only things that make you feel well. Well I can’t just not stress or struggle. If I don’t do any of those things I’m not working hard enough. I’m copping out. I’m being lazy. Everyone else is doing it! Look at them running around all ragged. Literally strength in numbers to everyone’s disadvantage. 

It’s like I’m on some sort of twisted scavenger hunt, interrogating all the bits and pieces of what I think in why like a ripe game of Mafia. 

Today I finally caught the little bastard that is grow up! You’re heading into real life. It’s a shit show. No fun. You’re required to suffer and be miserable, it’s a tenet of adulthood. Except that this metaphor isn’t quite right. It’s not a violent game of capture the flag, in where the flags are the things I’m missing. You can’t forcibly strip the old things from you, because they are you. Identifying old obsolete gears and cogs is one job. Putting them to rest is another. 

It’s more like the feeling of finding a lost kitten. There’s a sense of compassion that accompanies it. Oh there you are! I got you now, I see you. So you were the little thang that was getting me all caught up! And this warm reunion in a sense comforts the bit of ourselves that created this believe, that crafted this troublesome little kitten into existence. 

Move with grace. Shine light onto the dark and unknown parts of me. 

When you remove urgency to the process of self-restoration, self-healing is when bits and pieces of yourself begin to come. 

You can’t chase a dog into coming to you. You must draw attention to yourself, and make yourself worthy of being come to. 

Note No. 6987

I’m in a very dream-like setting. Sound is pervasive, and it’s like it’s being played over a PA system in the big dome that is the visible sphere I can see. The only things that exist are what I can hear, see, taste, smell and feel inside. Time is completely irrelevant. Day of the week as well. Like a dream. Is it night time or is it day time is all that’s relevant in that front. It’s perfectly dream-like. Also the linearity of time has been disregarded. Everything feels perfectly small and local to me. The light on everything is perfect and warm. A clear fuzzy glow if such a thing exists. There’s also a falsity to everything. Like everything’s staged. There is little to no internal monologue or separation between “outside of me” and “inside of me”. It’s like the inner world has moved out to the visible sphere, not hallucinations, but the dissolution of a body barrier, a skin barrier. All I have to do to cue this is I am in a lucid dream, look how clear and vivid things are. Feel how dreamlike and light this is. Wow look at....Or playing “invisible”, that you are merely a scope into a foreign reality. I am only visiting here. A straight line that goes goes goes and then suddenly dips down to earth...from infinity to definite finiteness back to infinity again....Feels now that life is the exception, not death or pre-living. Why does nobody talk about where you are before you’re conceived or born, and only about where we go after? Fear of death only occurs when the idea of consciousness is tied to flesh. If I did not have eyes, was not born seeing, would my sense of self and world-centeredness be the same. Is consciousness pinpointed to our heads because we are taught that’s where our brain is, and it’s near our eyes and ears, two very primary sources of feeling and experiencing the world. It’s like I’m a comb and the outside just passes through. I’m here but only as an outline. There’s a quaintness to this feeling. A high attention to feeling and detail and experience, like entering a high. Of seeking. Going into seeing and feeling and smelling seeking. Seeking and choosing to be awed or wowed or curious. 

“‘All of us ultimately choose the path of science or the path of spirituality’...but Griffith doesn’t see the two ways of knowing as mutually exclusive, and has little patience for absolutists on either side of the supposed divide. Rather he hopes the two ways can inform each other and correct each other’s defects, and in that exchange, help us to pose and possibly answer the big questions we face…’The Johns Hopkins experiment shows, proves that under controlled experimental conditions psilocybin can occasion genuine mystical experiences. It uses science, which modernity trusts, to undermine modernity’s secularism. In doing so, it offers hope of nothing less than a resacralization of the natural and social world, a spiritual revival that is our best defense against, not only soullessness, but against religious fanaticism. And it does so in the very teeth of the unscientific scientific prejudices built into our current drug laws’”. (Pollan, How to Change Your Mind)

It’s like the game where you pass an object around one by one and propose an item to bring to a theoretical picnic the game’s initiator has made up. The initiator describes the picnic, and kicks it off with, “I’ll bring some 80’s cassette tapes,” and so frustratingly, the members of the group name off, person by person, a collective list of obscure objects relating to 80’s cassette tapes in varying degrees from 90’s cassette tapes to a bologna sandwich. And in a dozen too many rounds of “can I bring leg warmers” and “what about corn on the cob” according to the frustrated, and even enraged participants, with only the odd person or two successfully having their item accepted to the picnic, does the group figure out you just have to say thank you when receiving the object cuing your turn. It’s one defeating lesson, but it requires participants to think bigger, and on another plane of thought, not harder or necessarily in relation to what others have said.

Practicing staying present to visualizations while meditating helps align the visual aspect of feeling transcendent in waking consciousness. In visualizing, we have to actively buy into what we’re seeing. The more we prompt ourselves, the more comes. Where am I? What’s the temperature? Have I been here? Places we reach in our visualizations are usually blissful in scenes where we feel delighted to be there and delighted to greet what we find. There’s a dream-like aspect to it. We are consciously leaning into the understanding that this is a product of the imagination or subconscious, or we are tapping into a source beyond ourselves. The main indicator of being in a meditative state are steady, uniform inhalations and exhalations, like we are being breathed effortlessly. There’s a softness to everything. Depth to everything. It’s a period of collecting energy in our physical forms, which usually manifests as pulsing or throbbing in extremities, fingertips most notably, and sometimes the acknowledgement the rotation or sliding in a back and forth motion of a focal point, or undefined object that isn’t seen or doesn’t take form, but is felt and known to be there. Usually at eye level and within a foot to my face. Usually either making quick and steady clockwise circular revolutions or thin elliptical revolutions starting from my eyes or head region extending out at a forward angle from my left shoulder and beyond, creating the sense of this focal point bouncing back and forth. It’s not independent of myself, though. It has weight, gravity to it. It pulls my upper body to gently rock as a result of its draw. 

The flickering of things in the wind reminds me of the feeling of tingling energy. I want to learn more about what things are made of. Energy at the very, very core, but I want to be able to understand it more fully.

There’s a smallness to time. Nothing feels urgent. There is no wall of a deadline I’m running head into. Time seems to dissolve completely. It’s just being, and trusting of endless amounts of time. This is the only thing that exists. This is the only thing that exists. This is the only thing that exists...this mantra draws me back into the dream-like state again and again. Drishti, breathing, this is a dream. 

In states like this...sunbathing states...I can remember in perfect detail when I sunbathed against the house, in the driveway, next to the front door of the annex, the annex pathway. Entering in a meditative state, I recall and send myself to the last location of a meditative state and visualize as best I can being there. And soon the barriers of what’s a memory and what’s a visualization seem not to matter. It’s all just an extension of the same thing, the same moment, if we’re speaking non-linearly and removed from time in dream explanation. 

States of being are locations.

Today I’ve been to anger. I’ve been to bliss. I’ve been to claustrophobia. I’ve been to ease. I’ve been to  stimulated.  

The smaller your world, the bigger the realm of existence is. 

I looked at the dogs in the kitchen while I was cooking, and they all looked back, knowingly.

It’s like they were all in on it, and I was just catching on. A practical joke that somewhere along the line or all along they were in on. It’s like if this physical, real world presence was heaven. And the bees were having their shot at eternal glory, and the flowers they were pollinating. That we had so serendipitously crossed. And as I saw them, I saw them as I saw myself. 

Experiencing the world anew, almost comically rich, like in the land of ABC’s The Good Place. Very similar to passing some dude on the street and exchanging peace signs or some sort of head nod to acknowledge each other, and each other minding their own business doing the same thing. You’re walking, sick, I’m walking too, catch ya later. But oh you got this earth time slot too? Rad. Ok catch ya another time. 

Why did this come to me today?

At first I was like, am I high?

It’s like cuing “high mind”

It’s a very plausible thing. 

Not even that because I know it to be possible. 

I think there’s two very real parts to being high, and this only applies to getting high after already knowing what being high feels like, how your mind works, etc. Half of it is the drug kicking in and doing it’s biz. The other very real half of it is a placebo. I’m high and so therefor I’ll be extra intrigued by sensation, by color, by beingness. When I’m high, life is full and everything’s endlessly curious...It’s an aid to seeking. And once you’re tuned into seeking, you no longer need the aid. 

One of those if you can dream it, you can do it scenarios, although with less annoying and you’ve been watching Disney channel false charm.

It’s literally about getting out of your head. Or just denying that your head is separate than the outside. Less fighting that way.

It’s a beautiful way to see and frame and experience life, everything as just another landmark to notice, and where our internal landscapes are seen perfectly integrated outside of us. 

Note No. 6985

There’s a little world inside me, an alternate reality, where I’m still twelve and the alfalfa still smells of Cinnamon Toast Crunch and Sis is there behind me, head in her feeder, as I sit on the stall’s  ledge. I did it for so long thinking about it now I only now realize its incredibly weird for me not to be at the barn. I have a life in Alpine barn, stall six, that still lives on. It’s my ultimate sanctuary, my safe space. There was no world outside that stall, that U-shaped courtyard, Jonty and Jesse. That woman with the white horse and its melonoma’ed ass. That other odd woman with the equally odd bay arabian.

Maybe that’s the purest life ever felt. Riding our lease horses through the summer sprinklers. Remember life without a phone. Very synonymous to life at the ranch. 

All those tack room critters. Those beatles, those mice, those bins in front with her grain. Beet pulp, rice bran, senior. First in that pool-shed-esque bin which she almost disassembled before I even made my way to the back of the car, IE driving, as always. 

Lunging. I wonder how many revolutions I’ve done on the odd end of a rope. 

When did I grow up?

I was twelve,

and then childhood was over. 

I miss it.

Dearly.

Blink blink blink

How am I only just noticing?

Have I really been moving too fast to notice?

God I miss the days where I didn’t know anything but posting on the outside diagonal and cantering on the right lead. 

It was the best feeling, popping off your helmet, the foam saturated with sweat and being COMPLETELY. COVERED. IN. DUST. 

So much so that when the pool of sweat in your elbow crease dried it left a certain kind of tea leaf reading on your skin. 

What happens to the worlds we no longer live in? 

Do our alternate selves keep living on.

I hope so. 

But not the ignorant ones.

The pure ones.

Of sweat,

And dirt,

And endless sun. 

Of four walls and a mossy bucket and some shavings in my hair. 

And a padlock, first SISY then 1997. 

I hope she’s still running with Katie.

I hope she’ knows how special those summer days are

and never forgets the feeling of getting sprayed down in a wash rack.

If you can hear me, you will never know how perfect things are….and that’s perfectly ok.