Number game

Ten more pageviews to 11,111!!! Yes, that is significant :)

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Taken Dec 13, 2013

(One away from 2222 emails as well, and the clock recently read 3:33 PM) 4:44

A selection of sunbeams from the SUN Magazine March 2014

"This is the kind of paradox, I think, of what it is to be a halfway intelligent American right now:... there are things we know are right, and good, and would be better for us to do, but constantly it's like "Yeah, but, you know...," and "Who cares?" and "It's all bullshit anyway." 

David Foster Wallace

"The trouble about man is twofold. He cannot learn truths which are too complicated; he forgets truths which are too simple." 

Rebecca West 

"You must begin by assuming responsibility. And you alone are responsible for every moment of your life, for every one of your acts."

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

"All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify des visions and to consume." 

Noam Chomsky

"Revolution does not begin with a group. It begins from the heart."

Shahla Khan 

"Just as the water of the streams we see is small in amount compared to that which flows underground, so the idealism which becomes visible is small in amount compared with what men and women bear locked in their hearts.... To unbind what is bound, to bring the underground waters to the surface: mankind is waiting and longing for such as can do that."

Albert Schweitzer 

"If we should be so lucky as to touch the lives of many, so be it. But if our lot is no more than the setting of a table, or the tending of a garden, or showing a child a path in a wood, out lives are no less worthy." 

Kent Nerburn  

Not So Far Away: Sincerely Reaching Out In This Time Of Tech

It may no longer be the season of holidays, nor 2001, but this post by the coolest man I've ever met rings true even as the glove of winter slips from the slender hand of the year of our lord 2014.

Years

I had forgotten that I used to be taller than all of my younger siblings...
I do believe I shall even end up shorter than little Miya-ni and Ianto-lino.

Inadequate or Inevitable: wearing windows

Basically, little one, none of my words are adequate. Maybe they never will be. I am worn to apathy once again. This week has been a different sort of supernova and collapse.
A little bit dead-eyed behind my windows, and artificial pats on the back saying it'll be okay, I am okay, but really no. Still, I suppose it could be worse. But that does not mean my current feelings are rendered insignificant next to all the other pain in the world, relatable or not to my situation.
I am attempting to ground myself better, to stop dancing around everything and plant my feet and steady my gaze. Perhaps I will be successful in my efforts, perhaps not. The only thing I can count on is nothing will ever stay the same, not even for a minute at a time. I will always miss homeschool group, being in plays, having the friends I did back then. I will always miss scholar class. Perhaps I will find something similar to or better than everything swept away in the passage of time, but I won't count on it.
For all of my life I've felt like nothing was permanent, either beginnings or endings. Nothing would stay the same, and on the other hand, nothing was permanently lost. Things had a habit of returning to me; a necklace I'd made with my mom, lost, then found two years later in the pocket of my overalls. A hand-made tiara essential (I felt) to a minor princess character costume for a play, found two days before the performance. A black comb I bought at a fourth of July celebration, lost and found and lost again. (currently lost, but I hold to the stubborn belief that I will find it once more.)
I suppose it was my hope that the right words at the right time in the right shape could repair anything. I suppose that's been my experience growing up as I have with the family I am a part of. Naive homeschooler... How very much I am learning this year that the world is not what I want it to be. I guess that's good, or something. But not really, because it seems like the world wears tender souls down.
The clearest my voice will ever be is in writing, as much as I hold back from that when I feel my voice lacking. A slanting sort of truth and all that... Still, I am not the only one to ask the questions I have asked. As unique as we little snowflakes are, fragile too, we are all made of the same stuff. Perhaps this makes my words inadequate, or maybe this makes them inevitable. 

Happy Place

Psalm To Life Prayer

Longboard lover, 

Swaying, like a fish through dry desert air, 

I hope I don't take anything for granted in what I mean to say:

I am in love, rapture, with god and all of the world.

Love is everywhere, longing forever lit, 

If you look closely, I wear a dark visage of yearning beneath this pale skin and clear gaze.

Life is not the pursuit of happiness, either you are happy, 

Or you aren't, 

Don't waste life in seeking what is already present, 

Or beckoning so close. 

I am in touch with my forbidden fruit, though I have not yet tasted it. 

A shrug of shoulders, and we find that innocence is never lost, 

But expanded, 

Growth is not innocence destroyed or covered, but innocence maturing, 

Childhood is never lost, 

But instead, made encompassing, knowledgable, and gifted further wisdom as age wears on. 

Wave of Action

Ahhh, hope...

https://waveofaction.org/we-are-a-movement-of-movements/#fpgallery[176294759231015]/2/

Introspective Observation: buds on dead growth

It is strange to know that we're having fifty, almost sixty degree days in February. This month started out new-born in a blanket of white, but yesterday we played kickball with some friends at the old stone church, and I didn't need an actual coat until about 9:30 or 10:00 at night. I've heard tell that the cherry blossoms are blooming in Japan, and my dad's cousin's wife's flowers are already coming up in her yard up North. 

We've been about two months ahead of ourselves all year, in previous years too. Remember that June we had multiple wild fires all over my state? Utaha two months ahead and all that. Photographs of haunting sunsets and towering columns of grey smoke, white clouds of smoke boiling over our Eastern mountains. That Summer felt ominous and apocalyptic. But here we are now, roughly two years later, experiencing an early spring that feels like late fall in the winter. It's certainly something to think about, dear. 

The changes this world is going through --ecologically, politically and socially-- should be interesting to observe, and perhaps, to participate in. There's a lot of hope and beauty amongst the pain and corruption, growing in spite of or because of the things that seem so terribly wrong. 

I'm sorry

Paste Paper

So yesterday I learned how to make paste papers with a few of my siblings at a friend's house. It was a lot of fun, there's next to no limit to what you can do with this medium creatively, even if some people refer to it as "glorified fingerpainting", haha :)

My first paper

I created this pattern with a wad of plastic wrap

Handprints 

The last paper I designed.

I have no idea what happened to the color when I photographed this thing. The feathery splotches are white, not blue.

Gripe

I hate February.
My dad can't stand January, but, this year at least, February is the worst month by far.


At least Listener came out with a new album. I'm just slightly ashamed that I don't know when exactly it was released, but whatever. I discovered it when I needed it. 

(Titles, titles, someday they will not seem always so saccharine)

I feel so trapped on so many levels. I know this isn't always the way I feel, but when I feel like this, it feels like it's how things are always going to be, and possibly how things always have been. I know that's not true though, I've had times of immense happiness and freedom, when all else didn't matter, and all things worrisome became inconsequential.

    I've been having a difficult time lately adjusting my voice to say what I really mean. Another side to this problem is I become disgusted and angry with myself for everything I try to do or think. I feel like I can't write anything worth sharing, and nothing flows as smoothly and clearly as I expect it to. I have an aversion to writing anything remotely like what I've written in the past, but everything I say, I have said at least once before, or I have said in a similar way. 

    I dislike using any format I'm used to working in; stream-of-consciousness, free-form poetry, or loose essay. However, I can't seem to apply myself to anything new or difficult, which only worsens my frustration with myself. 

    I don't know how to end this. I see many pathways, but like I said, I feel trapped and every voice I try seems loathsome in a way. I mean, even just writing all of this out awakens insidious thoughts. Saying anything at all seems demonstrative, but holding everything in isn't working either, and at least writing is a confrontation of fears and thoughts and feelings. 

Hands

Suppose your hands are reborn, 

or die every time new work is accomplished? 

Or perhaps birth and death are as hard to distinguish 

From each other 

As the skin that peels and sheds, 

One thing emerges from the other 

Inseparable.

Nothing is effortless

So yeah. 'Tis one of those awful days where I want to write but I can't and nothing works. I don't want to write anything remotely like anything I've written before, but I try and nothing fits together. I don't want to make any effort. 

Just tell someone how much you appreciate and care for them today

So yeah, happy valentines day, love.

Amoniel's yearly hipster valentine cards post. Yay.

I hope you have a good one, and may your heart be full and light. 

Tread Lightly, Enter At Your Own Discretion (This thing is a mess)

What of the world in my head right now?
What of the ability and struggle to arrange and rearrange words to imitate and represent things no word was ever born from? What of the tangled mess that is any one thought, tied up in everything else dwelling in mind, body and heart?

--However, A paragraph composed entirely of questions is not fun to read, no matter whether or not if I intend to answer them--

But the thought, the idea, floaty as it may be, --flighty as my writing is-- but the knotted thread and pathway of every concept, including god. The inability to vilify or angelicize anything altogether or entirely. This, in my mind, at least, makes it difficult to communicate effectively or confidently. Or even, I suppose, to make decisions.
Catching yourself in your ego-trapping, then writing that sentence and kind of mentally tripping. A shrug of shoulders and we move on, not to take anyone entirely at any one thing said.
What is life going to be like? Every year learning you knew nothing? Continually afraid, but watching for the day fear no longer comes knocking, but perhaps afraid even of that moment? (I'm really not as paralyzed by fear as I sound sometimes, I write more of my fear than of my courage.)

Look at us, finding ourselves every where. Resolving and falling and resolving again, self-conscious. Wondering if there is a place for our voice, flawed and inarticulate, though still beautiful, amongst all of those other voices, similar or not.


I sit here and pick myself apart, lay it all out in the air around me, suspended in reds and purples and whites. Constructing a world around myself, hopefully, but still not finding it altogether to my liking, and at the same time, feeling overwhelmed by what I perceive as the "outside world". Being terribly afraid of a god separate from me who would direct me where I don't want to go, though I say god is everywhere, in everyone, including at the heart of me.
I cannot see everything, but I would say that god sees everything. Even as this lends me trust and some form of faith, it opens all sorts of new intimidating doors, and trust ebbs away.
Not knowing the future, not knowing what will happen, but trying so hard to figure out how. Looking for when, straining to open my eyes, to see things clearly, and then blinding myself from (repetitious use of the word, but whatever) fear of what may be. Trying to know but not knowing and cringing at the prospect and offering of knowledge.
I once heard tell of a poem comparing communication, friendship, and love to two people flashing each other back and forth, lifting and peeling away clothing experimentally, weighing the other person's reactions. Rather ingenious, I'd say.
But that begs the question; why not just be soul and heart and personality-naked from the get go? Honestly though, even if we got past that particular affection, it still takes time to peel the skin away, for hearts to become familiar.

***

I've never attempted to articulate all of this before. None of it is concrete, all of it is a towering, flickering column or cylinder of fire. I have a thousand hands, and on each of them sits a small person, their own hands (more than just two) raised to eternity, mouths open and speaking in tongues on serene or animated faces. I don't know if anything will ever be black and white to me, even as I search so hard for the "right" path.

To break and comment for a moment: This page is not just white, it is flaming in so many colors, tangled with lush living leaves and bone and sinew. And back to the dance;

But bah, It is all in my own head, and who am I to influence the eyes and hearts of others? This is nothing but a page, with not even the barest trace of my fingerprints upon it.
What could it possibly retain of me? I suppose, however, that is the purpose of myth and story and metaphor; to put one's own personal stamp upon words strung together in infinite and impersonal combinations. What is the point of striving for that, though? Why should it matter?
I feel like I myself am fluid and blank, but I'm sure that too is untrue. Even as I so "modestly" back down from uniqueness, I am everywhere; I remember that in some way -on one of those hands- I am only here, therefore nowhere therefore both nothing and no less than everything. Monotone.
Have I lost you yet?
I am trying to leave a trail, but I don't know if it followable, for I created it and in creating it, I follow invisible trails of mind where I neglected to drop breadcrumb, ergo that does not mean it is in any way sensible to another person.

If I can be so many flavors, hypothetically so many people, does that mean I am nobody? Or a new kind of self? But that too is presumptuous. Guessing and theorizing and second-guessing and cross-referencing and doing it all far too shoddily in almost the only way I know how. But life is like cake, there is more than one way to bake cake, and more than one way to live life. There is an infinity of components and combinations to both. That, I suppose, is why I figure I can go about creating my life on my own, and it will, hopefully, be a better fit than the institutionalized, industrialized version of life. The one problem with this is I can see --if not all, a great many different possibilities, and it is difficult to drop my star-struck eyes back to the path ahead and choose, or just walk on.



Yes, this thing is a mess, but somehow I like it all the same.
What of the world in my head? What of it? This is the closest I've ever come (In one piece of writing, at one time of being) to mapping it all out.

Still Life

After washing the dishes
A crescent moon, white and peeling, blooms underneath
The ring finger of my left hand,
Leaking invisible golden dust
Accumulated from shedding music away from guitar strings.

After washing dishes,
Silent, meditative,
Fish in my mouth and bubbles deep in my fingers;
The edges of a cut on my thumb--
The hand I write with,
Begin to look like two lines pressed together,
Fitting perfectly
Like an ancient chinese symbol for balance.
Or like two lovers,
Who have managed to stop time and space
and learned to erase the lines humanity
Drew between all hearts.

After washing the dishes,
Both my hands are
Unravelling, curling back at the edges,
Softened of roughness.


I speak here not of a moral or a metaphor,
This poem will not end in nostalgia or sentimentality,
It is merely a meditation,
A study,
A drawing of a moment in time.
Nothing more.

Hha

Remember when I wrote on here that blogging every day was improving my writing? Remember how I promptly disappeared off the face of this side of the internet for around a week?
Yeah, I'm sitting here laughing at myself about that.

Pause

"We so dearly want to believe everything in the world is against us. 

But oh, my dear, I do believe so much (if not everything) is for us."

Wise words from my seventeen year old self, August 22nd, 2012

Clumsily trying to comfort each other even though we're all so flawed. But maybe that's why we're perfect, we know what the other is going through, imperfectly, but well enough that we can understand in some way and offer clumsy, incomplete, but absolutely beautiful advice. 

Secret Hiding Place ( it had wifi!)