Tag Archives: journaling

Journaling

I’m kind of seen as a shiftless good-for-nothing living off the system when I can and cuting corners when I can’t. It’s not true though, I’m thrifty and clever and have gotten by on my own for the most part. I had a little luck here and there, but luck is the unexpected results you get from the work you put in to the world. I don’t want what most people think they want so to them it looks like I’m lost.

My brother told my friend he was worried about me, he thought I had stumbled and was ‘lost’ because I had given up on the faith I was raised with. HA I was more grounded at that point, post-faith, than I ever had been before and I told my friend that. My brother would be lost without his faith, I know that, and I know that’s why he thinks I’m lost.

I don’t want a career either, at least, not some bullshit 9-5 that has no bearing or relation to who I am. I’m a creative mind, WE ALL are creative minds, we’re all creatives! A fucking masters in business is such a sad waste of a mind, and our time, and our reality.

I don’t want a marriage, at least, not a marriage simply to get married. It’s the ‘next thing’ to do after college, you know? And something is wrong with you if you don’t, or at least, once you do you can see what is wrong with everyone who hasn’t found a partner to swear your undying filandering feality to.

Really though, it’s not that I don’t want what you want, I just see through the skin of our desires, and a lot of them are accumulating some really nasty vericose veins. Our desires have atrophied as man has gotten older and more connected so now we are standing on two planets, two planes. There’s the planet of our true desires, honest, red-blooded, passionate desires. And the Victorian, or the Protestant, or the conservative planet, the blue-bloods who have gotten to used to holding on to what they have to remember what they want or need. It’s not a one or the other choice, there is no red pill or blue pill here. We get so good at standing on both worlds and sometimes the red blooded experiences come out of nowhere and shake us wide awake. But most of the time we are so used to the blue blood, our hearts are beating slower and slower, and our senses atrophe and we don’t even notice the real world around us. We don’t notice ourselves in our numb march stepping stepping towards our ends.

I had a dream last night that seemed like an end, it was one of those cliche dreams you start a story with, espeically if that story is about the end of the world. Cliche or not, it had me contemplating what was real and what wasn’t, as I tend to do a lot anyway, because for a minute, it had me convinced that it was the real world and the one I’m typing in now is this silly dream I’m keeping.

Dream

This morning, another of the confused fogs that I’ve been waking up into more frequently over the last year. Mostly I feel disorientation, with a feeling underlying that, a fearful sense that I am being chased.

I make an effort to hold on to the dreams that lead to these mornings in search of understanding. It wasn’t until later in the day I started to have foggy images reveal themselves.

  • a calm tangible darkness like you might imagine a thick soupy fog on a black night
  • the awareness of an unseen dreamlike door, not physical, I was only aware of its presence in the way a blind person must intuit the locations of doors
  • a beckoning feeling, a reaching as if a hand was waiting to grab me and pull me through if I’d reach to meet it

I’ll post again if I remember anything else yet today.

Dream [con’t]

I remembered an important part of the dream just now, I remember the certainty I had that death would greet me if I were to take that hand. And I remember this strange sense I’ve only had in one other dream. A sense that it was just a little too real to be a dream.

Typing now, I feel that it was something more like annihilation, just ceasing to be. Which maybe wouldn’t be as bad. What if the Tibetan Buddhists are right and ceasing to be isn’t the end and complete separation from everything, forever. Maybe it’s the opposite, maybe ceasing to be as we know ourselves to be is instead the complete reunification with everything, forever.

Life ain’t bad but part of me wishes I had taken that hand.

Moments

Moments

I believe in moments.

It’s commonly said that life is a series of moments but I’ve taken that to heart. Even when I was a youngin I remember laying on the bed in the nurse’s office — I was a sick kid. Sinus problems conflated with a general boredom for life and what I was doing. Unchallenged, uninspired, unenabled.

Laying on that bed a lot, waiting for the nurse to come in, waiting for my mom to fanangle out of her routine to come get me and bring me home — a lot of waiting on that damn bed. My bored mind began connecting the moments and thinking of the me(s) not only who were laying there in the prior grade levels but the ones who will eventually be laying there. I imagined the me(s) there and tried to will myself to them and make a connetion that I couldn’t get from anyone else but myself (even myself disembodied).

It was a pattern that I’ve rediscovered tonight in a grungy bar bathroom. I’m not proud of it but I’m still getting drunk in grungy bars even in my advancing age. Maybe I am proud of it — who can prove their life is better than mine?

Washing my hands tonight in that bathroom, I looked up and saw myself with the eyes of a drunken fool and laughed (because who doesn’t laugh at a drunken fool) and then remembered the times before, so many times, looking up and laughing and seeing myself disembodied with those drunken eyes and just for a moment I was connecting to a younger me and with some luck, all those older me(s) too.

A thousand birds

A thousand birds were winging their way around scattered everywhere with very little rhyme or reason and it reminded him to look up. And it reminded him to look around. It was dusk. The trees and ground and buildings were that dark violet silhouette you only see at dusk. The sky filled in the rest behind it and from east to west it was blue then green then orange then yellow. Dan could almost pick the place in the sky where the color changed to the next the transitions were so abrupt. Birds and more birds silently slid amidst this visual beauty.

It was moments like these that Dan found were most easy to find himself and forget the past for a moment, stop rehearsing the future. There in that moment he felt he more understood what it meant to be aware. Being. Awareness. Was this kind of what the books talked about when they talked about enlightenment? Dan saw himself not at all as someone who was enlightened and in fact had kind of given up on the idea of this supreme realization that tore his old perception of the universe in half leaving the solace of pure understanding. Only in times like these when he could be content in the moment did he feel there could be something more, even just a shred of that enlightened solace.

He did gain a deeper understanding of the value of things in that moment. He saw more clearly how that moment, and each concurrent passing moment, or as we just call it: the present, was all we had. There was no value in endings, any ending. Death or loss or heartbreak. None. The universe is ending incarnate, built into everything is an ending. Nothing, nothingness, is inevitable.

Truly beautiful, and all that is worthy of celebration are beginnings. And havings. The briefest of moments when your world rubs against anothers and something glorious sparks between these heavenly bodies. These are the rare and beautiful gems in the universe, worthy of all your adoration and gratitude. When they’re gone, cast them aside, and do not mourn. That moment was special but now it is gone with the infinity of other lost things. Keep your mind on the ground under your feet or you will lose all that you’ve ever had.