day one: waking to a ground floor previously unseen, but intuitively felt as there
can a man in freefall suspend himself forever?
egalitarian society has wiped the ‘perils of permanence’ from our collective memory. all hail home and harvest. ‘semi-settlement’ is selfish folly — cassidean beat bums and dayglo half-beards stoking fire on the never-to-be golden age of barbarian pans and caulfields.
listen potter — holden & peter went in for supper and we suggest you do the same. wash up, boy!
from a young age, we are taught to believe in the value of things — bodies, monies, careers, status, gods, youth, power.
what does it mean to believe?
a search for meaning in what we are quite afraid to get to know.
an immutable willing and futile shove on that which cannot be moved
a quest to stop time in her tracks, to bid her do.
lacerating worry tumors time alongside kid sister, doubt.
eternal now — you non-visible north star, beauty protected from protecting
it is only upon waking to it: the infinite of breath, can your breath be taken away.
living consciously — being aware of a mind that isn’t yours to control, challenges creation.
challenges what’s been sold at auction
strips you your ground floor on life.
this is a toast to blow the gasket — cosmic champagne to permanently pop the cork on things.
a ground floor: whatever is — is, and forever shall be.
energy is neither created nor destroyed: it is played with — uncovered, manipulated, accepted, refuted, denied, understood.
‘yes-and’ surrender — a radical acceptance of everything that is — frees you to play in potentials and deal in infinite ever-afters.
the message simple: chill the fuck out. unless you don’t want to. but choose.
‘ego’ got us here. all hail ego! ego is man’s word for distinction — for that which gives us motivation and momentum to move.
life is movement.
it is also the word for that which binds us up and keeps us locked and frozen and small.
ego is a powerful (s)word in the language game of life — but it is not life. it is a word in a world of words as ever-cheapening symbols for shared harvest in this vast, inexplicable entangled experience.
‘words. words. words.’ -ludwig wittgenstein
life is this paradox: the cycle of celebration and death of that which makes us distinct.
birth, death, rebirth, repeat.
this everlasting cycle of ‘Ego’ is life is god is God, amen.
this ‘life’ i am ricky, next ‘life’ i am perhaps a billygoat or oak tree or some other such star matter.
it is not a matter of reincarnation. it’s bigger than heaven or nirvana or Whatever Comes Next. existence wholly encompasses religion and her promise, not the other way round. the same with science. with art. with man.
patriarchal sciences and puritanical proofs leave me questioning all findings save this: life is, we are.
what if heaven is awareness — what’s god’s plan anyhow?
what do i unconsciously worship? what am i after?
i’ve been living a double life.
riddled with guilt and confusion: how to reconcile a private life of such blissful fortune amidst the world’s collective miser-y? how to accept my privileged disposition with so many mouths to feed and corruptions to grieve? how to radically embrace this buoyant everlasting peace i come back to time and again even amongst the wrecked shards of global warrings and bigoted hate?
life is a pleasure cruise — gorgeous realities fling at me as if in a dream.
not because i am white. not because i am educated. not because i am male.
simply because i am.
also, yes, because of privilege of being white. educated. and male.
gratitude for breath, for this conscious-creature collective from which no man cannot depart. death — by suicide, murder, sickness, age, or accident — cannot rid my energy. perhaps it can rid ‘me’ my energy, but it turns out ‘me’ isn’t me but rather a ‘we.’
my body can die, but consciousness was before birth and so too shall be after death.
what now?
🌱 courting plants & seed seduction —i choose vegetarianism because chewing flesh doesn’t get me there anymore
transparency — distance kills. it is proximity to our deeds that grows empathy’s muscle
curiosity & exploration — bigotry is perpetual lack of exposure, willful or otherwise — resulting in the homogeneity of imposed views of the self-righteous few, adopted and accepted as the singularity on truth.
we are what we eat — with our mouths and our minds.
a depressed people passively accept what a life in celebration cannot —
after ten years we’ve got about thirteen good sentences out of him. the mind is there, the eye is there, the words are not.
pecked flesh of the recluse — a honed & hardened jackhammer, trafficking his bloated sentences perched atop incredulity’s seat.
only he doesn’t have to be angry anymore. his sentences can flow with the safety of the closed-system randomness of chaos and disorder that he is forever a part of.
he can back bad calls, but little is entropic. maximum homogeniety would cause heat death anyhow. mistakes are not mistakes at all. orientation is but a part of the whole hole — nothing is ‘homo’ or ‘not’ in a universe as queer as ours.
energy cannot erase itself
by the spread of localized grow
let us then look to heat action
the power of thermodynamic flow
nitrogen pulled from thin air
fertilizer to help us grow
let us celebrate swirled minds of memory — dreams and regret, plans and remember whens. decades and faces pummel the boy. regular visits from thomas paine and henry miller and arthur schopenhauer and the buddha. only kerouac don’t come much anymore — beat it, ya dharma bum. but not really. come round middle uh next week, we’ll hone perspective and gaze at our navels and pretend like we’re onto it. ok now, go. go, man, go.