Shhh.

The world problem is the individual problem; if the individual is at peace, has happiness, has great tolerance, and an intense desire to help, then the world problem as such ceases to exist. You consider the world problem before you consider your own problem. Before you have established peace and understanding in your own hearts and in your own minds, you desire to establish peace and tranquility in the minds of others, in your nations and in your states; whereas peace and understanding will only come when there is understanding, certainty and strength in yourselves.

-The Pool of Wisdom, by J. Krishnamurti

Like With Myxomatosis.

Shreds of carrion underneath my fingernails, the last remaining bit of the life I would have resigned myself to; ambivelence. At one point I had resolved simply to sit at the water's edge and wait for any storm to come along and clean out the stagnant pools; an overwhelming abhorrence of proaction. No longer. Idle youth! Enslaved to everything. By being too sensitive I have wasted my life.

We had a three day discussion about the way that things are. I don't know what happened, or why it happened, but it feels now as though he respects me, as though he understands something that he didn't understand before. Oh these millions of universes that exist in our heads and never once come to fruition. Sunday evening he put his lips to my ear and in a hushed and fragile voice asked me, "how is it that you have come to be in my life?" We never let on how tenuous happiness is, do we? Then these tender moments come, and you are bowled over, and there is no precedent by which to act.

Sometimes the words change, but the message is always the same. How can any of us pretend to know what we're doing? Trying to remain conscious of each moment in a life that is itself just a moment. In pitch dark I go walking in your landscape. Broken branches trip me as I speak. Stop acting as though every outstretched hand was there to save your life, as though every slap on the face was there to take it. It's all just adventure.

This Road Is Real.

It's like getting a long, snuggly hug from the dearest of friends when he calls. Conversation cuts right to the root, and he actually understands the choppy and fragmented thoughts that spew out of my brain. How gloriously lovely. He always manages to remind me that life is terrifically splendid, and to be fearless, and to watch for all of the marvelous things that fly around our heads, the beauty in the minutae that we so readily take for granted and become accustomed to. For we must certainly have chaos within ourselves in order to give birth to a dancing star. My philosophy will be ferocity! The Wa in Olympia. Thank you for the simple fact of your existence.

What I'm trying now, is to learn how to trust. To learn how to have relationships that are on my terms. This is an entirely new experience for me; over the past week I've realized, to a small degree, just how much I waffle and bend and compromise in order to sustain relationships with people. It's not fair to either party because it's not honest, and there is always some amount (usually a large amount) of personality degredation involved. Oscar Wilde believes that the moment humans begin to interact with each other, they simultaneously begin to lose their individuality. Perhaps this is a tad hyperbolic, but I believe there's truth in it. When a relationship begins to require fundamental personality changes in order to operate, it's time to reevaluate the motivation for maintaining the relationship. Where do you draw the line? Existence is not a sin. Individuality is a virtue, and should not be impinged upon. I don't even fully know what I'm trying to say, it's as though I'm looking at the world through newly cleaned glasses, for once. Good and bad have ceased to exist, there simply is what works for you, and what doesn't. Ah, this brain! These words. Language falls short. I know nothing. And it exhausts me. And all the while Iggy Pop is convincing me that he's got a lust for life. Yeah, me too! What a beautiful place, this existence.

Trying To Recapture the Green.

To remember that I’m intelligent, despite everything. To try to bear in mind Ahniwa’s clarity of thought, about not personalizing everything, about not being responsible for the fact that other people can be and often are, assholes. Oh, how the mind becomes weak and emaciated. I remember what it’s like, to be regarded as an intellectual equal. For thoughts and ideas to not immediately be put asunder. To stop speaking as though walking on eggshells, tread carefully or the span of attention will break. There is something wrong, something that has nothing to do with me. These are the things that aren’t up to me to fix.

I begin by lying on my back, feeling each limb, then the trunk, then the head, gravity pulling me toward the earth, lungs expanding my consciousness upwards. In-breath. Out-breath. My headache alleviates.
Through the poses without as much strain, I feel myself making progress, feel my hamstrings limbering, my muscles lengthening and growing stronger, always conscious of the breath-rhythm. My organs begin to feel cleansed. Everything slows down.

Tich Naht Han says,
"breathing in I calm my body,
breathing out I smile.
Living in the present moment,
I know this is a wonderful moment."

Thoughts of the day quiet down and subside, and I remember a faint thought from yesterday, "there is time for everything." There is, there is. Even if there is no tomorrow. So much stimulus in modern life, buzz-hum-whir, it's constant, sensory overload, so far from what is natural. I think about my trip out west, the simple perfection of nature. Humans have expanded upon it by creating so many bright lights, glitzy-glamour this is what everyone is doing/wearing/saying this season, advertisements that speed past at sixteen frames every second, chop chop chop, our attention turns toward the outer, a labyrinth is constructed between our minds and the calm depths within.

Maharishi Ayur-Veda describes the lack of connection with the body's inner intelligence as the primary source of human suffering. In the ancient Ayurvedic texts, this condition is referred to as "the mistake of the intellect," or pragyaparadh. Pragyaparadh is mistaken perception that the ever-changing display we experience through our senses is all that there is; we do not perceive the underlying wholeness of life, the home of all the laws of nature.

It's as if we sailed out into the sea, looked out over the waves on the surface, and concluded that they comprised the total reality of the ocean – without perceiving that there are unfathomably vast, silent depths beneath from which those waves spring.

In-breath. Out-breath. When you really think about it, this is all that we have, this tiny space between breaths. And it's enough.

I have just finished reading Atlas Shrugged by ayn rand, this is her salute to individualism, the book is like a worm inside my heart, festering and picking away at it. She believes that the "right" path is the one in which individuals make choices based solely on the ego, there is no need to consider the "fellow man," human beings are not made to be concerned about anything or anyone other than themselves. She lauds the ego, her philosophy is accurately described as being entirely self-centered. All choice is based on the question, "what is good for me?" This is so unlike anything that I've ever heard or read, I have no idea how to counter it, but my mind immediately wishes to do so.

The leader of the burmese people, Aung San Suu Kyi says to people in free nations, "you must use your voice to speak for those who cannot speak for themselves." This is something that I have ingrained into my core; Ayn Rand's philosophy is like an univited party guest that comes in drunk and starts loudly gossiping about everyone's families. Sophism. How to even address it?

I flip through a book of some of the buddha's teachings.

"How easily the wind overturns a frail tree.
Seek happiness in the senses,
indulge in food and sleep,
and you too will be uprooted."

I instantly feel kinship with the words, but I have no idea how to explain to myself why. Why this path, and not the path that Ayn Rand espouses? The quantification feels tenuous, but I feel it in my core. The beliefs in my head are so ghost-like at present that it feels that assigning words to them would scatter them, like ash in a down draft.

301.

I believe in honesty over pain.

I believe that love must be selfless, but that it can't exist in a vaccuum.

I believe that the human reaction towards suffering is to lash out illogically. This makes me sad, immeasurably sad. The one doing the lashing out will only ever to get beyond it when they realize that their suffering is the root. A Gordian knot that you will probably not untie in this lifetime. I wish you were smarter, but these are things that we can't change.

I will always choose strength, every single time. This I am sure of.

I have been blessed with a family who would go to the mattresses with me.
Nothingsevergonnastandinmywayagain.

500
Street
Fights.

If you had been calling someone your boyfriend and he had been calling you his girlfriend for several months, and then you discovered something like this, what would you do? You would talk about it, right? What if when you talked about it you got a story that you couldn't necessarily argue with? What if rather than being heard in conversation, you were constantly left with the feeling that the other person was simply waiting for their turn, once again, to speak? What if hearing another drinking or ex-girlfriend story made you want to start punching teeth out.

What if you were a sea of violence just below a calm exterior, a calm exterior that is two pushes away from the collapse. The ears, man, watch the ears. What if you were in a relationship that was absolutely bereft of any respect, and you knew that nobody in your family liked him. And every minute of every day you were coming around, too. It's just my name on the lease, motherfucker.

This 14 year old kid at the show kept talking to me, and at the end of the night he took my picture and said he wanted to have a keepsake of the "pretty photographer." You remember the one comment you made about how I looked? You told me that I'd have to keep my arms down since I was "growing my armpit hair out." You thought you were pretty funny. I wonder if it occurs to you, that I am capable of breaking. That you are the one who will cause it. That it will be ugly and I will be ashamed of my actions but secretly proud, as well.

And last night I kept thinking that if Libby had discovered something like the above links, she would have absolutely murdered your trifling ass. What I'm hoping for is some strength like that.

And Kat and I were talking for so long about Evergreen, and Olympia, and how college should be. It was so absolutely incredible to be conversing with someone, and to have them actually listen to me. Then they started talking about what dogs would eat in the wild, and you were so sure that you were right that the notion you might be wrong never once entered the equation. She presented her argument logically, and you presented yours like forty orcs with a battering ram trying to get into Helm's Deep. Finally she just looked at me and muttered, "jesus, he doesn't listen, this is pointless." That was the first time in several weeks that I haven't felt crazy.

Don't let me talk myself out of this. This is the right decision. Hands on the wheel. Vperyod.

Mantis attack. 

For Nothing At All.

Hate that damn cop instinct, the one that told me to keep looking. Hate that the first reaction was to find some glaring flaw within myself. Hate that it made me cry, and that I had to hide it, hate that bottomless loneliness. Hate the parallel that I suddenly admitted, the one that made me think "she was so happy..." Hate that I can't figure out a fucking way to talk to you about it, that there's no precident. Hate that there is no one to be in my corner. Hate that it used to be you I thought of that way. Hate that I talked to Orion about you, that I trusted you, that I let my guard down. Hate that more than anything I want my sister and a cigarette, and that those are the two things furthest from the list of what I'll get. Hate that it just hardens me even further. Hate that at this moment I agree with that woman who said that the Y chromosome is really only a broken X. Hate that you can put your arms around me with any amount of honesty. Hate this almost overwhelming desire to do violence. Hate that I'll never understand, the why. Hate the promises we made at the beginning that are now meaningless. Hate that there is such a huge threshold of what I would put up with. Hate that you will never realize what you have. Hate that I will only hurt myself instead of the one who really deserves it. Hate that I know I'm a thousand times smarter than this. Hate that I've forgotten how to tap into that.

My beacon, Myzel, if you please.

Note From Underground.

And you look around and begin to realize how absolutely intangible this whole idea of "social justice" really turns out to be. At the HSP meeting the crazy marionette woman who runs the program would hardly let anyone get a word in edgewise and it was though she was incapable of processing information in any real or helpful manner. She just kept saying the same things over and over and acting as though this potential funding cut was the most impossibly dire scenario to ever exist, and the blowhole from United Way was there, he started talking and all I heard was buzz words. He has eyes like beachstones, the kind that make you feel as though you're looking into glass and there is really no one on the other side seeing you. He kept harping on about how "this was the type of program that filled an immediate emergency need, United Way will certainly have funds for it and we are experimenting with a new format and just write something up and present it to the board, that's all." And at this news the plastic woman began to grovel and I thought that perhaps I was actually watching live sketch comedy. Who calls the shots?

Who says that this is important, and that isn't? And do these people actually follow through and learn anything about the programs and agencies that they so readily pigeon hole? Is there really anything other than the application of bandaids. The people who need HSP are the people who goofed off in school or spent all their time in the office because they couldn't control their tempers are the people whose parents have been clients for eleventeen years are the people who decided to get married at the age of seventeen to someone who had no high school diploma are the people could recite to you what public assitance agencies exist and for whom better than even Anne could. And so I pigeon hole too. Social Justice. The chasm is too huge, between the givers and the takers. The givers are the ones standing up on marble pedestals, hands outstretched, thinking themselves to be quite holy indeed. And the takers are the average joes who couldn't even pass english 101. Couldn't get to their construction job without a morning nip. We don't even know the names of our neighbors in this society where madness prowls, how can we hope to help anyone when common decency and random kindness with no thought to a quid pro quo has become almost a non-existent entity. We don't even know who's hungry. We close our doors, all of us. And though I employ hyperbole, this system is nothing if not flawed, we'll never get anywhere this way. We're just keeping ourselves afloat. Using the materials to bail out a ruptured craft instead of redesigning. Our efforts are misdirected and not enough. And I have no idea of how to fix it.