Potential

I understand that the most important thing to do right now, the most important work we can do as human beings is to to envision, create, construct, and harmonize our realities in accordance with the principles of permaculture and sustainability. That to me is our primary task; there is an intense need for our society to reconfigure, to rearrange this unusable mass of impotence, this garbage heap of useless infrastructure destined to fall fallow in the low tides of the inevitable onrushing lack of energy. The oil will run out, the coal will run out, the slate will run out, the gas will run out, it will all run out. All the alternatives rely on some form of natural capital, and without the concentrated efforts of all nations to create solutions immediately, now, there will be no salvation. We will all die or exist in servitude, except those who have control of everything.

Bleak? Yes. Hopeless? No.

When one realizes that there is no salvation, one becomes supremely free. When one realizes that, in the end, every one and every thing will turn to dust, to particles of sun and surf, to a whisper in the Milky Way, and ultimately to nothing, then one understands that the struggles we undertake to free ourselves and others are relatively meaningless in a cosmic sense, but so extremely important in personal sense as to be almost all-consuming. There is nothing more important then self-realization, to come to some semblance of wisdom, to comprehend enlightenment, because each thing is a universe unto itself, and each universe is a fragmented self, struggling in the infinite confines of time to be whole, to be free.

When one understands these truths inherently, with no need for fragile reasoning, one develops compassion for those who can't or won't or don't understand, or even those who don't feel the need to understand, to come to wisdom, to comprehend enlightenment. One realizes that the fundamental truth of the world is that it is made of energy, that we are all energy interracting with energy. That this is the primary mode of existence, and energy communicating with energy is the primary work of existence. When we eat or drink we take on energy from other energy. When we sleep we store up energy. When we walk or talk we spend energy. Just little balls of energy. Nothing too complex.

And then we find that the earth, a big ball of energy, is rapidly losing its energy, because we, the human conglomeration of energy, are rapidly taking on its energy to expand our masses, and we're suprised.

It all comes down to energy. Simple Zen physics. "Those not busy being born are busy dying."

All I want to do is find my potential and expand my spirit. All I want to do is exist and decrease my consumption. All I want to do is begin again today and tomorrow, be born again every moment of every day, remember myself every breath that I take. And one day I will become more or less a featureless particle of energy, or many, and I will not remember this day, or maybe I will. Maybe every particle in every chair, sofa, hotdog, or rose remembers every thing its ever been. Maybe I remember being a mushroom and a tree and a river and that's why I am attracted to those things. Energy communicating with energy. Like attracted to like.

I feel that the potential of communciation is essentially limitless and that it is so important to continually work on that aspect of our lives. And not just with other humans, but with plants and animals and objects, as well as ourselves. There is so much to learn from yourself. I mean, I'm a galaxy, for God's sake.

10

I have ten minutes. Ten minutes of my life to kill. Ten minutes before I get up and put my wallet in my pants, go outside and lock the door, get in the car and pick up my SO. Ten minutes in which I continue to live, to breathe, to think, to hear and smell and taste the environment. And so I sit here and write about how I have these ten minutes to use up, to waste, to commit to memory. And I continue thinking about the Folk Festival in Winnipeg and how annoying going across the border is, especially on the way back when we're exhausted and just want to get home. They almost always search our car, probably because we're from the Festival and are deemed Highly Suspicious by those in authority. I think about that and the weekend, and work and what we'll have for dinner and the DVDs we might watch tonight and the heat and then I have four minutes.

Four minutes to exist in, to lick like a lollipop of pure awareness.

I just had a shower and I feel refreshed.

And then it's over. My ten minutes are up. And I'm still not famous.

Mind seeds

I sit here on this dark day after reading that article on Zen and composting and I think of why it is that I am enamored with the natural processes that surround me every day. I wonder at the way the universe collides with itself to create a perfect harmony of enzymatic reactions and rainbows of fungal spores. I wonder how we as humans look at each other and speak our words and communicate somehow. I wonder how coffee can taste so good somedays, yet another example of natural perfection, fermented beans roasted and brewed with crystal pure water. Somedays it shines, somedays it seems so dull.

I think of what I have done this summer and what I will do and where I am going and what I really think I am doing on this earth, in this universe. Am I really here to figure out how to be comfortable or am I here to figure out how to communicate with you, with a crooked cucumber, with a maple tree, or with that otter? Trying to decipher the vibrations between what I perceive as myself and what I perceive as something else. Trying to be a cosmic musician, a wordly artist.

When the day tires me out it is so hard to feel like that matters, that anything so esoteric has any validity. But how does it not? How can we just go blindly through the motions to arrive at somewhere so comfortable only to eventually die? Death is the ultimate teacher to us. It reminds us that nothing we possibly can do has any permanance. That doesn't mean that there is no point to anything, only that the point exist only in the present. Nothing stays the same for long. Nothing has any reality based architecture. We live in dreams and rivers, rainbows of fungal spores and mind seeds sprouting in black earth. And someday we will go to seed and spread ourselves infinitely or become mulch. Either way, it has meaning.

Composting Yourself

This is an awesome article about zen and shit:


Growing Ground

Cultivating compost in the murky depths of a monastery toilet, Steve Krieger learns to break down his raw material, inner and outer.

View the print version of this article in PDF format

IT BEGAN AS A FINE PLAN: replace the primitive outdoor toilets at our rural, monastic-style Zen Center. The head monk at the time was an idealistic German, and he made the final call to install composting toilets. CTs are based on a beautiful principle. It’s a principle with great metaphorical as well as practical value. The way the toilets work is, you crap down a long, narrow chute, and it accumulates in a large, plastic box. Once a week you shovel a bag of wood chips into the box. Eventually heaps of rich, earthy soil appear. This manure, or “humanure,” makes primo fertilizer for your gardens. What you took from the earth in food, you return to it as food. Beautiful, right?

http://www.tricycle.com/issues/editors_pick/2458-1.html

The sun comes up and I wake up in a blur. My glasses are greasy and my house is warm. I try to focus on what is real, I try to focus on what is good in life. Life slides past me fastly like broken jelly.

I taste phlegm and brush my teeth. I don't even want to speak about the day time, when I earn my pay. When my hours are counted as something worthwhile. I struggle, I get through, nobody else seems to care.

I just want a shower. I snidely remark about something. The air is too hot. I make excuses. I want to leave or go to sleep. It's killing me, this world.

-blue, a pencil, Tangerines-

I take a breath of air, I inhale the cosmic surf, I smell the pine needles and grubby earth.

Goddamn the day is done.

She's off in the distance, a flying dakini. The choices I choose I chose quickly, with no weighing.

Too quickly, smelling of beef, tired and scared of the bare naked realness. Sleeping.

-night, the rushing of Aspens, zookeeper-

Fellow

Come play

Down in the soil

You remember the rhymes?

The taste of mineral salts?

The stagnant water hanging still in the marsh?

You remember the gravel road bridge over the dark sucker filled river?

Fellow

Come play

With us in the dark

Are you afraid?

flavor of the month

Today today today. What is it about today... Where can I go to play, what can I say?

The man took away the fun. The sun is done. Morning turns inside out and falls apart and kisses the sky. The farewell.

Dust in my eyes. In the cumulous clouds floating so high. I don't want to die.

The sun is undone. A great white bird is floating away. No one cares. No one cares.

Flavor of the month. Give me a lift. The asphalt is hard and smells of death.

terrible terrible terrible things
floating in spurts of black paint and screams

but the ocean does have a bottom!
She outputs.

I give in to my weakness and sleep. Terrible sleep. Waste of life. Morning is broken.

Tell me you stupid fucker do you have a purpose? He says to the mannequin.

Plastic handholds on steel limbs.

Give me a beer and a pizza anyday, he says, he has said, he does not know why he has said it.

Nothing I want to do makes money, he thinks, he has thunk, he doesn't know why he has thunk it.

flavors flavors flavors bittersweet
cooking with shards of glass and steam

No one can steal what he has hidden in his head. No one can replace what he has lost. There is nothing he hasn't lost. There is nothing to lose.

No One Thing