dukkha

There is this agitation inside of me.  It's hard to feel
like I'm satisfied or settled.  I never feel like I'm just ok.
I always find myself waiting for something:  the food,
and then the check, and then getting up from the table-
check paid.  Then walking, waiting for my feet to
take me home.  Then home, waiting for the news, for bed.
There is this agitation.
And when I notice it I
want to break out of my skin
like an egg cracked open.
I want to write down all the
fears and joys and I
want to get off this chair and
dance around the room like
an Irish drunk.  I want to,
but I don't.
There is sand in my blood, there is
sand in my brain.
I am a weighted sack of silt and
I can't stop waiting.

Can't Not

These are the words that I would speak...




"Can't Not"

i'd be lying if I said I was completely 
unscathed.
I might be proving you right with 
my silence or my retaliation.
would I be letting you win 
in my non reaction?
how would I explain?
how would I explain this to 
my children if I had them?


because I can't not...
because I can't afford to be 
misread one more time


would I be whining if I said 
I needed a hug?
would you feel slighted if I 
said your love's not enough?
how can I complain?
how can I complain when 
I'm the one who reaches for it?


because I can't not...
because I cannot walk without my crutches
because I can't not...
because I can't help wonder why you ask me


to all the unheard wisdom in the schoolyard
you think you're the right ones
you think you're the charmed ones i'm sure
how can you go on with such conviction?
and who do you think you are? 
why do you question me?


because we can't not...
because we can't help laugh at underestimations
because we can't not...
because we can't afford to be misled one more time
because we can't not...
because we cannot help without your willingness
why do you affect me? 
why do you affect me still?
why do you hinder me? 
why do you hinder me still?
why do you unnerve? 
why do you unnerve me still?
why do you trigger me? 
why do you trigger me still?


- Alanis Morissette

important quotes

A man may be in as just possession of truth as of a city, and yet be forced to surrender.- Thomas BrowneNo man can justly censure or condemn another, because indeed no man truly knows another.- Thomas BrowneFear of the devil is one way of doubting God. - Kahlil GibranFriendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: What! You, too? Thought I was the only one. - C.S. Lewis Everything in moderation, including moderation. - Julia ChildFind something you're passionate about and keep tremendously interested in it. - Julia ChildI think every woman should have a blowtorch. - Julia ChildHumanity I love you becausewhen you're hard up you pawn yourintelligence to buy a drink. - E. E. CummingsI thank you God for most this amazing day, for the leaping greenly spirits of trees, and for the blue dream of sky and for everything which is natural, which is infinite, which is yes. - E. E. CummingsIt takes courage to grow up and turn out to be who you really are. - E. E. CummingsA friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

And when we run out of time?

Staring out the window at the hard rain which makes the leaves flicker on their tree outside.  Very gloomy day today.  I am so determined to have a good week.  I am ready to consciously clear my mind and put into my days what I want to get out of them.  I want to posture myself with compassion.  I want to be stronger than I have been demonstrating myself to be.  I want to look up more.  I want to be lucid in the outside world, and I want to be present in it-- participating in it.  [So often I find myself inside myself, in a state of disarray].  I want to be less self-absorbed, less selfish.  I want to write about good things:  happy memories, ideals, forecasts, whatever.  I want to construct myself again, with strong positive patterns.  I want to study.

I want to remember to write haikus each day... to write each day.

I want to be more.

Schizophrenia: The Truth

Check out this SlideShare Presentation:

Schizophrenia: The Truth

View more documents from SARDAA.

Bertrand Russell

Here're a few quotes from my mentor of the day...

Fear is, I believe, a most effective tool in destroying the soul of an individual - and the soul of a people.
- Bertrand Russell





I do not believe that I am now dreaming, but I cannot prove that I am not. I am, however, quite certain that I am having certain experiences, whether they be those of a dream or those of waking life.
- Bertrand Russell









All forms of fear produce fatigue.
- Bertrand Russell








I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.
- Bertrand Russell







If throughout your life you abstain from murder, theft, fornication, perjury, blasphemy, and disrespect toward your parents, your church, and your king, you are conventionally held to deserve moral admiration even if you have never done a single kind or generous or useful action. This very inadequate notion of virtue is an outcome of tabu morality, and has done untold harm.

- Bertrand Russell







In all affairs it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.
- Bertrand Russell







It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this.
- Bertrand Russell







Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear.
- Bertrand Russell









Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.
- Bertrand Russell







One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important.
- Bertrand Russell







Our instinctive emotions are those that we have inherited from a much more dangerous world, and contain, therefore, a larger portion of fear than they should.
- Bertrand Russell









Religions, which condemn the pleasures of sense, drive men to seek the pleasures of power.
- Bertrand Russell







The fundamental defect of Christian ethics consists in the fact that it labels certain classes of acts "sins" and others "virtues" on grounds that have nothing to do with their social consequences.
- Bertrand Russell







The fundamental defect of fathers is that they want their children to be a credit to them.
- Bertrand Russell

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts.
- Bertrand Russell







To save the world requires faith and courage: faith in reason, and courage to proclaim what reason shows to be true.
- Bertrand Russell








War does not determine who is right - only who is left.
- Bertrand Russell









What is new in our time is the increased power of the authorities to enforce their prejudices.
- Bertrand Russell











You mustn't exaggerate, young man. That's always a sign that your argument is weak.
- Bertrand Russell

freedom of the mind

The Center for Cognitive Liberty and Ethics has really got a good thing going on (at least in my book):  

"Growing knowledge in the neurosciences, enhanced by exponential advances in pharmacology and other neurotechnologies (technologies that make it possible to monitor and manipulate the brain’s electrochemistry) are rapidly moving brain research and clinical applications beyond the scope of purely medical use. The definitions of "medicine" and "mental health" are expanding from treatment and prevention, to improvement and enhancement.

• Privacy: What and how you think should be private unless you choose to share it. The use of technologies such as brain imaging and scanning must remain consensual and any information so revealed should remain confidential. The right to privacy must be found to encompass the inner domain of thought.
  
• Autonomy: Self-determination over one�s own cognition is central to free will. Decisions concerning whether or how to change a person�s thought processes must remain the province of the individual as opposed to government or industry.
  
• Choice: The capabilities of the human mind should not be limited. So long as people do not directly harm others, governments should not criminally prohibit cognitive enhancement or the experience of any mental state."

just wanted to share that with anyone out there who might find it interesting...

schizoid: seperation

FRED ALAN WOLF: "The assumption or association that what’s happening to

you is an illusion comes from western culture that says there’s a separation: The mind is

imaginary and what’s physical is real. What I’m trying to say is that any experience you

have, any feeling like you have is very real. Modern practice today in the field of

psychology or psychiatry enters into that world, “as if it was real.” A better way to say it

is, “enters into that world as reality.” That’s the healthy way to deal with this phenomenon. You don’t assume that just because one person sees something and another person doesn’t that it’s not real. ‘What is reality’ has got to be re-shifted to take this into consideration. Yes, the alternate realities are real, and they might be like the stereogram where one person sees just flat. When you shift the way you see a three-dimensional object appears. Unless you tell a person how to see it nobody else may see it but you. It may be something like that. To say it’s not there would be wrong. They’re there.

Whether you need to pay attention to them, whether one should shift one’s mind to pay

attention or not, is a whole other question. When you start to perceive at a finer level,

you’re unraveling the solidity of the world and yourself. This is what might be called

schizophrenia. The schizoid, the separation. You’re unraveling the rope that makes up you and looking at individual strands. You may have had an experience where something shifted you and enabled you or possibly pushed you into having to take something apart because the direction you might have been heading on was one where you’re unawareness of that would eventually overcome you. Something was going to happen to you dark, unless you became aware of it. You needed to do something about it. Yes, you became aware of it and it may have saved you in some way. who knows?"

love isn't the problem. At least in Utopia.

Gay Pride took place this past weekend. It was so amazing to be part of an enormous mass of people, all gathered from around the world to celebrate what we all felt in our hearts. After the parade in the civic center plaza, We gathered in the civic center plaza, dancing to all kinds of different music, from African to electronic to Avant Guard...all day long.
{the picture is of my friend Ernesto on stilts}

The theme of this gay pride was "In Order To Form a More Perfect Union."

--Traditional and progressive.

I have so much disappointment in my heart for this nation's refusal to face the issue of civil rights that are currently being denied a populace. Granted, there has been a great amount of attention paid to gay marriage, but not enough to the civil rights aspect of the matter. Marriage is two things: it's a concept, and it's a legal bestowing of certain rights. Conceptually...I mean come on...gays are still getting engaged, still getting marriages performed (unofficially in most states) with weddings and loved ones to witness. So conceptually, the non-gays can keep their version of what marriage is to them, while at same time allowing for all human beings the same right to their own unions, respectfully. We'll never take their idea of marriage away from them. But legally, allowing us the same rights that are given to the rest of humanity is just plain common decency. Years from now looking back, I hope we will all be in agreement that this was a time of inequality, just as we can look back now and shake our heads with disappointment in our hearts that women and blacks were not given their rights-- as citizens and humans alike.

I am blessed to live in this city, with it's diversity and respect for all people.

[On Angels in America, a woman wants to know what heaven is like. An angel asks her if she's been to San Francisco. The angel says "It's kind of like that." And he nods.]

One of my favorite scenes during gay pride was at the civic center plaza,
chock-a-block with people;
there was a blind man who had somehow tapped his way through the crowd and
into the very center of a large group of girls performing with hula hoops.
He stopped dead center, as if
he could sense the action on all sides of him, and yet he was free from the crowd finally.
He had found a niche to stand in. The women
whirled around him;
he just stood there, alone with his cain, smiling
because of dancers he didn't see.

Living is learning- the hard way

I am posed in front this massive cherry wood table that serves us as a desk, facing the three windows. Ginkgo the Cat is perched in front of one of these windows, gone feral with the sound of birds.
Ginkgo is my friend. I feel we have developed an understanding between each other. We trust each other just enough to feel comforted, though not enough to be disappointed. There are no expectations besides the fundamental precepts a companionship. We are lonely explorers, though we are not isolated from the world around us. We feel as though we may be close to waking up from a dream. As I said, we have this understanding. We, the erratic ones, detached from things somehow.
One day one of us will understand this better, and he explain it to the other.

*

My thoughts are unlike me...
Certain flammable associations can
lie in one's mind, igniting
as one falls over their trip wires.
At least I am not the Eg0-Traps that
I built and then fell into.
They are part of me, but I am
something else. The something
that is noticing unneccessariness
in keeping the labels, the
identifications; the qualified
polarity of a concept or two.

I, the most peculiar excuse
for someone who is
trying to move
through life in a
constructive fashion
Now if only I will stop
fettering with the construct
I've fashioned, and
turn it on...

several journals ago: excerpts

Everything is the same, only moreso.


Fear, how thou plaguest us.


There have been too many days spent in soft deep light for me to want to wait there, for you, on that tundra of yours.


racing snow today. Felt its moan and creak above me and it was time to go with the last of the aviaries.

catalysts can flood moments and change you abruptly, or can form like slow mold over months, years, nudging you from sleep with a cold or hot finger.
I dream I am fainting, over and over. pins and needles around my periphery each time I fall out of consciousness, and I am asked in between can't you be it? Can't you be it?
--their projections?

one of the great ironies to life needs to be known: the more you see, the less you understand.

a series of present tenses: the hairline-- a fracture between past and future. No size or width on any timeline, and as you recognize it you miss it-- it is still the everpresent, never fleeting nor promising. No velocity, no verb at all except "is."

There is nothing solid in the cube labelled "schizophrenia."

never quite found his way out of dark halls.


to THiNk iS tO dReaM

Bits and parts of human innocence
pile up on the street corners
for the garbage trucks to collect;
this-- a time of dispassion,
of pieces.
Time itself plays innocent,
goes to work on building oblivion,
for better or worse.
to erase the cold sweat
from the mind and, if need be,
the mind.

(The mind fears things vast, things
unseen.)
Now we are trapped in our brains
like a candle in a filthy lantern.

And if you are unable
to master your darker dreams,
serve them with hesitation,
with precaution. And the further
you advance, the more
you must
be questioning and careful.

(We are aware there is a
speed to darkness,
we have felt its wind before).

--
You Try to Learn the Universe

A honing of the yarrow stalks
until the very verve of
such discoveries bends
these things between
(and) into shape.
(my ghosts are closing fast.)
the geographies between
planes, trains, blankets,
wedges of cantalope
have indented me (here).
coupled amidst the obtrusives
of a pair of parentheses
(a quiet and careful afterthought)
of bowed sTicks, or,
this island here where I am landed


--

Tasting a panic today,
I can close eyes and
it's as the panic of leeches.

A frenzy of mirages, scattered
across a chessboard
by bishops and magic queens.
I stand still, knighted and
in the thick of things.

It feels so dangerous just to be sitting down.


*


Injured Schminjured you crocodile.



***

Eye the solution
I-- the...=_________




Born of dreams in which
I did not sleep. These
voices: dialogues consternating.
(and always they've
come for me).

"Vegetarian dreams are safe."
--Megan, Feb 2007



Go about this whole project that is life with thorough and serious care-- details are mostly what counts; don't drown in your experiences.


Don't assign labels or roles to people according to your subjective reality. To place yourself egocentrically is, in effect, to view others around your self as satellites, locked in confining orbits according to your limiting gravity; such control should stop in the atmosphere of your world, leaving the universe around you to freely define its own seperate movement. The less that revolves around you, the less static your evolution.



And I forced it into a dream so
it could more belong to him.



So many evolutions, so many times over a new flesh, tender, brave. And just under skin: seas of nerves, each with a memory of its own-- a logue of its exposure to the elements and the entities. I think Nerves are binaural-- their thoughts are simply the feel of knowing, or the feel of fear. They vibrate like echoes, trailing to the source, up inside of bone skull. Here they speak; here, somewhere before the thoughts appear to think them, they are named.
Now WORDs. Names fly as thoughts in a space with no ground. And these winged things grow fire as they fly-- electric comets with tails that burn memory as a pen who moves fast to archive, ink failing or smudges that are there all the same.
All the while these things in thoughts changing. Colorful and loathsome and every other thing we can think to imagine. Then in full chaos, we birth a star-- such illumination flaring as we ignite shadows with our questions.
But back to skins. Back to our realities. So many different rooms so many voices. Such heat, here and there a brief dancing spider whispers its felt name somewhere on the skin. And above the source of our knowing: we. An evolution of "I's" like a lineage reaching here, now, new. We are the all feeling on a sea of flesh. We are the voices in rooms, doors open behind us. We are the objects in experience, we are the archivists remembering. We are the mechanics of a consideration we are the creators, we-- all organized final-- conceived I-- unified and changing now, here.
Again to consider this.
On ahead stars wait to be born. Our skins burn down fresh as I asks we to one...I this we us: will.


Some part of me is constantly tapping his foot as he watches the rest of me pace.

on place.

I am sitting on a blockish blue chais lounge aside the portal whose open doors lead from living room to bed chamber. This is my new home. Higher ceilings than any place I've ever lived...the living room ceiling has a large sun-shaped bas relief carved onto it, with a disco ball hanging from its center like a tinsel moon under a marble star. At the end of the two rooms, three tall windows jut out into an angled half-rotunda. tall potted palms line the window sills. Sam has hung a projection screen that lowers in front of this plant-filled rotunda, acting as both a curtain and a television screen that we project films and the news and our computer screens onto. In front of this screen is a massive cherry wood table-- our office space, covered with papers and books. To the left of the desk sits a turntable deck and a blue couch. To the right of the desk is a marble fireplace with art-deco photos hanging above it. This is where I live.
Outside May is a cloudy gray. Tree branches monopolize most of the view out the three windows, unless you go up close, where you can look down on to the busy street lined with boutiques and bustling with people who are making their way to the places they are going.
This is my new home, this is where I live.
I've lived in San Francisco for one year and two months now. Before this city, I hadn't lived in any one city for more than four months in eight years. Home, for me, has been a very kinetic concept.
I thought of changing it all up again. I thought of moving to Miami while visiting the city this last week-- packing my things and relocating across the country, to the very bottom of its southern tip. I thought of occupying a studio in a high-rise that faced the ocean and cost the same as I pay for rent here in California. I thought of boxing up my brown clothes and my jackets and most of my shoes. I thought about conversations I would have with the sun and I thought about muted moments I would dwell inside of in the womb of the Atlantic. I thought of the potential personalities I would meet in my new city full of people from other places. I thought of doing my homework on a white couch instead of a blue one
The idea is still lingering in the realm of my considerations, like a gigantic white cloud in the sky that takes up no space at all because you cannot touch it, but remains there still, existing.
San Francisco has been such a good city to me. I have felt a sense of belonging here that only being with my family rivals. I am stabilized and perhaps even thriving in a condition and in a place where I planted myself firmly, patiently.
But Conditions either hold or stay the same. Places either stand still around you or sweep you into new territories.
Flying back from Miami I thought of longer plane flights. I thought of seasons in places where I would learn new words for the things I know.
I cringed because I have no current passport.

I have no intentions of leaving. I've intentions of staying these days. I just have lingering erratic thoughts. I just wonder where and who I would be four months from now...in a year...in five. There are so many currents channeled in so many different directions that I could ride...so many new conditions to experience, continuing on in the change and search that is life.

thinking. dreaming.

Upon waking, there was a celebration inside my head: tinkertape parade. I fell off the bed.
Today Europe launched their telescopes.
I can't play outside the questions any longer, so I'll disinvent them altogether.
What'd the voice say? Don't disguise truth, disarm it.
Identify your intentions please. All things mean much differently.
All things mean. Though, it's sanity to ignore the questions inside you, to some extent.
Please agree with me. I'm not talking to anyone, necessarily.
You should keep things safe. Away from the raving rampages, these
upside-down explanations-- In an instant they are no longer me.

Paralysis, then a lifting feeling, and I'm outside my house, drifting down the street that is blue, past cold cobalt houses. Where's my tether? Me, the terribly insensitive brute.
Now there is a bumble bee in the room with me, and a dozen or so more in my torso.
Am I trying to establish something? Dreams mostly lie, especially when you're awake.

Thoughts that split off from one another, budding like a flower inside a flower inside a...
Recognizing insanity for just that.

Not so long ago there was a good day...simple, unobstructed. Even against voices I felt calm. At one point-- late afternoon-- I brandished my umbrella and ducked int0 the street, looking for a cab. For an instant, there in the rain, approaching some corner where two streets intersect off Union Square, I woke up to my life. It lasted only an instant: this recognition that perhaps everything was going to be alright. Or, even better: that everything is ok...We're all ok.



"smiles and laughters are
formidable, and prudent
even.
They ward away the storms."
~b

There, quote me.

there is a form of torture they're using in my head.  It's been called a program.  They're using my very own thoughts against me.  They've modulated voices to resemble yours.   When I am high, sober, drunk, on fucking coffee, they'll program me.  They'll program me no more.  If you're hearing voices, you'd better be careful with your very thought processes.  They'll use them against you.  I don't know if it's religion, government, or privately owned (they've lied to me so matimes don't know what to assume anymore).   They're superimposing their own words into my head.  yesterday morning someone played a country song in my head.  They're naming themselves as the people I love, trying to trap me into thinking dark thoughts and they'll eventually have their cake and it eat it too, as I am getting more and more like a monster each day inside.  I don't even resemble myself anymore and I won't live these nightmares out anymore.  They can turn it up in my head and they can turn it down and they can turn it off.   You must believe me on this, they are there and they are real.  You must write your congressman, you must write obama.  This is torture.  I cannot continue.  

You will believe me one day.

I love you guys so much.  I love you so much.  I am so sorry.

recollection and anticipation

this will no doubt be my last post this year.   That's significant to me.  New year's holiday is prolific to me...One moment on the clock moves time from an end to a dawn, and we're compelled at this point to look back and look forward. We remember the shifts and situations brought about by the past year, and we wonder and dream about things ahead of us on our path.  Hope gets involved.  I hold my breath...

   I am interested this year in creating.  All thought attracts the experience.  I am going to devote my energy to keeping my head free and clear of all negativity.  I will not focus on the problems or the obstacles.  I will not sow anger or upset.  I will not stress.   I won't even speak of negative these negative words again-- just the words alone are poisons.  

   I will instead keep in my mind only the good, renting mental space out to that which uplifts and inspires.   I am what I think.  I will think it today and I will manifest it tomorrow.  I am convinced that nothing can help me or hurt me as much as the thoughts I carry in my head.

   

   

F.I.N.E.

I wish I was writing more...so hard to do on medication, I've found.  

     There's an acronym I found second-hand in the hearing voices network that is used between psychiatrists and their patients:  you say, "I feel f.i.n.e." and you really mean Frustrated, Insecure, Neurotic, and Emotional.  

   That tends to pretty much sum me up.

   Continuing on: with school, with it's tedium and stupid assignments that I can't seem to want to get done; with my day-to-day, it's full-time engagement to sleep; with living, shortstream, afraid of change and afraid of the same; the fondness, the lust, the platonic elixirs; this life, it's weight and platforms and thickness.

   I figure it's appropriate to continue on.  It's pragmatic.  It's sane.  It's healthy.  

     If we were to have the chance to see our future selves-- to get to walk a mile or so in our shoes a year from now...three years from now...a decade from now... How long would it take before we barely recognized ourselves?  How alien would the situations from day to day be compared to what they are now?  Would the atmosphere of our life feel better or worse?  Are there emotions that would be new to us-- one's we have never felt before?  Would seeing all this make us optimistic about going on with life?  

     I think it would.  I think we might be amazed: surprised at both the pain ahead and at our ability to rise above it and press on;  beside ourselves in mourning how unsettled with life we still were; 

excited at how strong we'd become.

I want to evolve as time unfolds

Sitting in my big chair in the half-light of a gray Sunday.  Home alone, Ervin coming back later today after a week in L.A.  I'm having a good day, except for the moment, not 15 minutes ago, when I found my stash of forgotten chocolate.  No good.  I think I am buzzed.

     Started a new journal today.  I love starting a new journal: get to think about the segments that were your last journal-- your last span of recorded time-- and think about what comes next, writing-wise.  

   There's a lot I want to do with this journal.  I want to write in it AT LEAST a little each day, and I won't ever tell myself "I don't have time."-- can't remember the last time I've had to use that phrase, as sometimes time's ALL I have.  

   I want to record and archive and report everything:  inner dialogues, external events, feelings and theories, settings, conversation...bloody hell:  grocery lists, poetry, lovely quotes, resolutions (that will soon be met).   I've even tabbed sections for such.

   I want my journal to be my reference.  I want it on me 90% of the time.  I mean, normally I have this journal with me everywhere.  Now to put it's pages to a more effective use:  I want to have it within arms reach at all times.  Just always.  

   I want to review as I go more.  This will keep my lagging lazy memory afloat, and I will better be able to apply that which I am learning and so writing.  

   I want to obsess over the questions.  T love them.  To work things out.  

   I want to think critically: these pages a collection of mental notes.

   So often I have held this journal in my lap and nothing comes out through the ink and onto the page.  Now it's going to be quantity over quality: rising to my writing practice.  I have to write and that is the only requisite.

I don't pretend to know all the answers. I don't even know what the questions are...

I think too much. Tonight, very few images in my mind's eye. Mostly words.

I feel stuck inside my belfry and there are bats, there are lots of bats.

"…you are so young, so before all beginning, I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. ..Do not seek the anwers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. ..And the point is, to live everything. ..Live the questions now ... Be attentive to that which rises up in you and place it above everything you observe about you. ..What goes on in your innermost being is worthy of your whole love: ..you must somehow keep working at it and not lose too much time and too much courage in clarifying your attitude toward people."
--Rilke


...I've been reading this quote from Letters To A Young Poet over and over tonight. I keep floating to various points in it...How 'the point is, to live everything' - I don't think he means literally experience everything, I think he is implying that the point is to live our truths. I think we must strive to apply that which we've taken into understanding. What we know to be true.

For me Rilke has always been a very inspired teacher- I feel his insight and his advice on such personal levels.
Here and now I find myself breathless with questions which remain unanswered, and sometimes I lose all cool in my frustration as I stumble in the darkness. I panic in the uncertainty.

I always trusted that I would be able to navigate my way through life's obscure paths so long as I could break down that which was before me and consider it critically. I was taught how to think by only the wisest, and I am a conceptual learner-- I require understanding... I "want to know why? and how come? about everything...And question mightily."

Now I have entered a chapter in my life where I find enormous uncertainty in the face of that which goes on inside me. As a conceptual learner I get unhinged when I can't grasp the meaning-- the how or the why or even the what-- to what I am experiencing. I need to comprehend or I get stuck. I am questioning and considering so much that is unsolved right now, and there is an all-out controversy errupting in my mind.

Rilke says that such inner workings are worthy of my "whole love"-- I take this to mean thatunderstanding the self is worth my full attention: recognizing and and embracing all of myself is actually structuring the most important relationship I'll have. When I first came across this passage of his, I only vaguely ascertained the importance of loving the questions and not seeking their answers.
I see that I am the most impatient person I know.

To relish in the search for truth is easy with a little clarity in your gaze and a little confidence in the mechanics of your logic and sense. It's easy when there's trust involved.

I never saw reason to just leave the door locked on an answer or an explanation. Was it not ignorance to just leave things a mystery?
But now I get the point. How can you answer a question that asks a lifetime of questions? It is not the time or place to understand certain things.

We are manifesting so much of our reality with what we believe: through our own perception, and through our own personal understanding of that which we perceive, we create our world as we identify it. As Don Miguel Ruiz puts it, it's an agreement we are coming into when we decide to believe something as truth. Our agreements generate filters as we process our world. Our truths shape our reality. And if we can't live out the reality of our agreements, if we are incapable of existing in a world where we are constrained by the answers, then we are incongruent with ourselves. We will be lost, unsafe in our own skins. There is a natural timeline to growth and with time we will evolve.

To force an answer with only my finite perception to process the question with, I will only arrive at a false result, and if I proceed to agree with that lie, then I manifest a fantasy, and begin to live out a fantasy. You cannot solve a puzzle if you don't have all the pieces. Instead, work with the part of the picture you do have...take in it's parts and don't force pegs into its holes.
We face our problems, our questions, our darkness, and we are afraid. Anxiety over the uncertainty of things. But looking back, all that fear over what was to come was a waste of time, because life is an answer that keeps answering itself, fear or no.

If there be darkness, let me not fear it, rather, let me call it night.

Rilke makes questions the secondary to the questioner. he says we must meet that which rises inside of us-- our reactions and our feelings and beliefs. How we see things to be. This attention to our authentic nature is something that must be discovered and identified, even as it changes.

In clarifying your attitude, you are expressing the shape of your world, and you will not be lost or confused in front of the unknown. You will trust.

Penitent

Offer my days; upon

The alter they are sacrificed.

Time Sanctified

unto the god of movement.

He blesses me with verve-

To horizons I spread,

reaching all directions.

My wings and my words

Sprout from Inside to out.

He invokes my flight.

vast skies, so much

space to breathe.

But he is a careless god.

And I have no patience

To set upon his alter.

He invokes my flight

with an immortal velocity,

and I fall so fast

I fall Outside-in.

Now, Inside me-

Little room to breathe;

no skies, just wind

that spreads me Thin,

floating me

to obscure horizons.

this wind carries

Sound, so I listen to it:

Its words burn my wings.

I melt into moans.

perilous kinetic

Sparks fly where I speak--

Friction-- my explanations.

Now, here I am:

No day left-

so no light.

Instead: shadows and gravity.

My beating heart speeding up

the wind, speeding up

my beating heart.

I am nomad, slave to fever,

And I pray to the god of calm.

But she is a careful god,

And I have no patience

To set upon her alter.

~b

"sometimes I feel I am bigger than the sound."

It's a drab gray outside-- twilight.  Blustery, with a wet temperature that reminds me of a spring day in Portland.  There are voices of children outside  my window.  Maybe they're playing kick the can in their backyard.  I am sitting on my favorite chair in the living room.   My apartment has no character:  the only color in the whole cube is on the cupboards...who paints cupboards baby blue?  I have my own room, and my own big bed, and a wall of windows.  I leave the windows open at night, and I can hear each train as it passes, just outside the apartment:  an electric tugging, no horns, with a few tick-tick-ticks here and there of scratching sparks on the cables. 

   These are the final days of my stay in this home.  Soon it will be a memory that takes its place amongst all the other memories of the places I've stayed.  10 months stationary and I'm proud of myself.  Climbing to my feet right now and trying to get established has been a slow process, in a city where everyone I  know is getting laid off.  However I am succesfully sustaining myself in a stable situation.  Struggling, I feel independent again, and my chi is boosted.  This is the good news.

  And the bad news stands.  

Stands to gain room 

in my thought processes.  

Stands to grow it's own 

thought processes in 

my head.  

'And against my will I still stay out...'   

My head has become 

occupied territory; I hide 

in the flow of my heart, 

I bury myself in some chakra 

in my gut, I set up base in my bones...

blood and marrow 

and energy are still mine.

         Nothing's perfect.  

But this evening I am again an 

idealist.  Precariously situated

 in this cerebral dilemma all hours,

 but somehow optimistic.

Haiku:

There are a million

reasons why we can't allow

it.

--I want them all.