The inner world colliding with the outer world
The tension between the two worlds creating life
The surface tension of the drop of water on a strand of hair
The hair woven together like galaxies

What we think of as beautiful is the movement between states of being?

It was beginning winter

It was beginning winter,
An in-between time,
The landscape still partly brown:
The bones of weeds kept swinging in the wind,
Above the blue snow.
It was beginning winter,
The light moved slowly over the frozen field,
Over the dry seed crowns,
The beautiful surviving bones
Swinging in the wind.
Light traveled over the wide field;
Stayed.
The weeds stopped swinging.
The mind moved, not alone,
Through the clear air, in the silence.
Was it light?
Was it light within?
Was it light within light?
Stillness becoming alive,
Yet still?
A lively understandable spirit
Once entertained you.
It will come again.
Be still.
Wait.

-Theodore Roethke

I have meandered to a place where I can see back on the course of my thoughts and feelings.

I am wondering if the spiritual/scientific split is again another attempt to divide the world into black and whites. And if that is necessarily good or bad.

Forward. The growth spiral. Words are not helping anymore.

cloudy is the stuff of stones

Cloudy Is the Stuff of Stones
Wisdom that fits in your pocket
by Anthony Doerr
Published in the March/April 2010 issue of Orion magazine



WHENEVER I’M OUTDOORS for more than ten minutes I start picking up rocks. In Patagonia, in Phoenix, in a Home Depot parking lot—my gaze is invariably sucked downward into the gravel. I weigh the merits of pebbles by some fickle and mutable aesthetic and either pitch them back or pocket them and stack them among hundreds of their brethren on the counter behind our kitchen sink like fortifications against an army of tiny invaders.

Pebbles from Canada, pebbles from Cleveland, pebbles from carriageways in Caledonia. Maybe the echoes of miners reverberate in my genes; maybe I share a That’s-Pretty-and-I-Want-It covetousness with thieves and princesses and bowerbirds. Maybe I hope someday I’ll finally overcome the fundamental truth of pebbles and find one that looks prettier dry than wet. Or maybe I’m just an introvert, a down-gazer, a bad conversationalist.

But every night as I wash another dish or fill another mug with water, my little hoard stares up at me with its thousand imperturbable faces.

Oh, him, the stones seem to whisper. He’ll be gone soon enough.

Take this nugget of quartz: milky, egg-shaped, the size of a breath mint. Quartz is hard, harder than all the common minerals, and on its journey from mountain to dust this pebble has reached the way station of my kitchen counter by passing through an almost unfathomable series of gauntlets. This little thing is a master of endurance: survivor, abider, traveler; inside it is folded a story of creation and time so large it threatens the imagination.

Born as a crystalline vein inside some huge extrusion of granite, it probably rode a thrust fault into the light a few hundred million years ago, helped bulldoze up a mountain range, got pulverized by a glacier. Over a few millennia ice, weight, and lichen weathered the vein into boulders, the boulders into stones. Maybe this pebble was driven by a cloudburst into a great fan of other pebbles; maybe it was—after another ten thousand rainstorms—sucked back underground where it was compressed into conglomerate by heat and pressure, until it rose again, smaller and rounder, to be polished for a few more centuries in a creek bed before the creek disappeared and the sand swallowed it, incubated it, and hatched it years later into the gulch below my house.

Until last Tuesday, when it traveled into the whimsy of my frail attention. Into my pocket, onto the pile behind the sink. It sits there now and dares me to outlast it.

Read the rest here

"No coffee?? I've got to have some coffee in here somewhere..."

"Oh here, the little package of flavored coffee I got as a gift."

"Hmmm...I don't like flavored coffee."

On another note, I still have some slight problems with my ears, after months. Strange.

sonic boom meets sun dog

Skip ahead about 1.5 minutes.

For some reason I started to consider the concept of the negative.

In photographic terms, it is simply the print in reverse.

It can mean something we consider bad. But I started to think about how a negative situation can be a positive for somebody else. There are many sides to each situation, each problem is a facet of the struggle.

Today I am just tired. I feel neglected, a little empty, hopeful, somewhat content. I feel let down.

There is a negative.

snow, oil, concrete, pine

To wake up the senses. Steering toward the world I know. Open heart, beginners mind.

megahole sunday

Good morning, monkey friends.

Here in frigid Minnesota we're all drinking beer and eating nachos in homage to the coming battle between the forces of good and evil.

But I am not. I am intent on doing some maintenance and visiting today. A productive conductive day. I have even brewed a full press of coffee, and am now sipping some French roast in a French original ceramic mug. The Frenchman is here, man.

If you are supping on gallons of mead and mutton in anticipation of the barbaric display of pointless distraction better known as Megahole Sunday, then my hats off to you. You keep the world spinning, my friends.

reposted

This is something I wrote on Myspace in 2006.

Wednesday, September 13, 2006

This is the end
Does anybody read this? The only reason I started a Myspace blog was because Sunshine was on here and I wanted to communicate with her. Now I find it somewhat interesting to check out her friends and Beth's blog now and again, but I don't know if it's worth it. I have another blog that is my primary one, so I probably won't write here anymore very often. I would like to communicate with some people but I think Myspace is weird and it's owned by the evil Rupert Murdoch, the supreme dictator of Fox, which we all know is a neo-conservative bastion of the media. So there.

Maybe a few words here about my last month or so.

I turned 28 on the 28th of August. Old man. I gave up on some long-held idealistic dreams, I gave up smoking, I quit my job, and I'm re-evaluting my life and how I've lived it up until now. I know a major change is needed, I know I've overlooked some major parts of who I am. I love my girlfriend and I want a family at some point, but before that I want to be doing meaningful work, I want to be able to provide for them and myself. I have been too irresponsible.

Life is a dream. But even in a dream we can be hurt, be sad, eat, make love, fly. We must consider everything we do as transitory, like a stream. I realize I was all dammed up, by emotional and physical situations. Now I need to flow. A stream knows where it must go, it follows the lay of the land and gravity. I need to follow my dreams, down into the ocean of nirvana.

When the beautiful and wonderful Sunshine killed herself, I realized that I am alive. I realized that each second of my mortality was slowly ticking away while I watched as if I was a bystander. For years I have been this way, and now I am approaching 30. Thoughts begin to convalesce, and the fractured figments of my imagination begin to melt together into a giant mirror. I stared into my own eyes and saw nothing.

When I die and go deep into that great night, I will have accomplished nothing.

I felt sad about this. But I also felt happy about some of the memories I have with friends and loved ones. I realized that my life, any sentient beings existence, is nothing if not defined by our relationships, our webs, our networks of connection. All life is dependent on all life. There is no individual existence in this morass of relationships that isn't defined by it's dependency on an infinitude of individuals. In other words, the mirror that reflected me exploded into trillions of shards of mirror that exploded into trillions of shards of mirrors, and I dissolved.

But losing my ego only strengthened my spirit.

If there is one thing that Sunshine would want me or you to do in our lives, it would be to be happy, to be free, and to fulfill our dreams. I don't think many of us know how to start fulfilling our dreams, or ourselves. We mistake our egos many desires for real peace or happiness, but in the end it is the ego that causes us the real pain and sadness. Without the ego to boss us around, we can see what is real and what is not. From the moment we are born, we are trained to feed the ego. When the ego sees your spirit soar free it becomes jealous and begins to make demands and create lists for you. Fuck the ego, is what I say.

In any case, I will spend the seconds I have left living with the spark of life in my guts learning to breathe and searching for my path. In practical terms, I may have to take an unpleasant job or go back to school to find my path. I may have to leave everything I know and disappear into the woods, or join a monastery. I may have to learn a vocation, and have a family. I don't know. But now I know why so many religions talk about faith. Without faith, it is hard to continue on sometimes. Maybe Sunshine lost all her faith in the future, and maybe that is why she decided to stop trudging forward. I know damn well how she felt. We were in the same boat; no college degree, in crappy service jobs, trapped in a town. She gave up. It is tempting to people like us. We have no prospects in this society. And yet she would always remind me that she thought I could do anything.

"I hope that you know that you are amazing to me. I talk about you a lot because you are oozing with talent, and I truely believe that you could be anything, do anything, but you choose to be you and that I respect more than anything else," She wrote in her last email to me.

Can I do anything? I ask myself this constantly. Can I be what I want to be, can I be what Sunshine thought I could be, can I be what my girlfriend thinks I should be, or my parents, or you? The questions rip through my heart until I realize I am what I am, but what do I want to do?

Life doesn't give you time to catch your breathe. We exist as a complex network of love and pain and suffering and joy. We eat or are eaten. We run and fall and run again. We lose ones we love and we can't even tell them about the pain it caused us. We can't even tell anyone, because no one can really know what it's like inside our heads. But everyone lives inside their heads, we all are alone inside ourselves but are connected to eachother by that very fact.

Thank you for your support and please contact me if you feel the need to talk or take a walk or anything. I'll be around.

shout

Up, down, all around.

What we put out there is what is out there for all of us to share. There is no shame in pain or joy. Why do we hide these things like something to avoid? We may be rich or poor in many ways, but we are here, alive, and that is all we have. And we should give it all away in some way before we end our journey here in this place. Care of the planet, care of people, fair share. Good enough wisdom for my journey.

My personal pain is a stone thrown into the lake. I reverberate outward.

I want to remain present, to remain silent until I must shout for joy or pain. And in that shout I want to dissolve into the infinite, until silence comes once again to comfort me. Maybe that's all we are, a shout in the infinite.

Oh, the loneliness.

Lighten up.