Musings

Life as battle or quest? Or something else entirely?
Life as battle, war; everything is won or lost, everything is a struggle and a fight, an upward climb and tearing of the heart and soul and flesh. You can only ever conquer or fail, pulling yourself up a cliff's edge by your fingernails and teeth, crashing down onto the rocks below when you falter and lose your grip. Life as some great thing you must win, only one pathway, only one right. Inflexible, binding and restrictive.

But life as quest, a wending pathway of discovery, exploration, learning and seeking, is a beautiful living. Then life is stream and pathway and wind about your ears. Then you can shine and love and really see, really understand, and understand that, honey, you're really never going to get it all, and that's perfectly okay. Life as quest; life as play and happiness, life as learning to be with sadness, tears as rain on the ground, nurturing growth and further beauty. Being in emotion, all emotion, acknowledging and allowing it. Life as flowering, a great opening up and unfurling and shedding color and light. Giving, not taking. Creating; not only destroying. Life as pulse, wave, flow; up and down and back and forth.




Rumi;
"Great lions find peace in a cage.
But we should only do that as a last resort.

So those bars I see that restrain your wings,
I guess you won't mind if I pry them open."

And Hafiz;
"How did the rose ever open its heart and
give to the world all of its beauty?

It felt the encouragement of light against
its being, otherwise we all remain too
frightened."


If I let it be, and don't try really hard to fit it all together, it will fall into place in its own structure. 

Liebster Award

A while back I got a lovely comment from from Mary at Cogitational Counterpoints nominating me for the Liebster award, which is kinda fun and totally unexpected :) Thank you Mary, for reading and the nomination :)
If you've been nominated or would like to nominate somebody, all you have to do is follow the below set of rules:

1. Link back to the blogger who nominated you.
2. Give 11 random facts about yourself.
3. Answer the 11 questions set by the person who nominated you.
4. Nominate 11 other bloggers who have a small following.
5. Create 11 questions for your nominees to answer.
6. Tell your nominees, on their own blog, that you have nominated them.

11 Random Facts About Me:

1. I dislike long sleeves, and nearly always roll or push them up.
2. I miss my dog terribly since he died last January.
3. Lately, I enjoy doing things that terrify me, I've been able to push past fear in the past couple of years, and I've found that I enjoy the things that are difficult for me all the more fiercely once I've somewhat mastered them. Take guitar tuning, for example, once a vast unknowable unknown, now one of my favorite things about practicing the guitar. 
4. I love writing and receiving letters, though I'm not very good at actually writing and sending them in a timely manner. 
5. The San Rafael Swell is my happy place.
6. I have no idea how to go about getting ready for Christmas this year, I haven't got a thing done and it's not much longer until December arrives.
7. The movie Inception was quite the spiritual and enlightening experience for me.
8. Right now I'm wearing my favorite blue sweater which will quite soon probably fall apart, as it is getting fairly threadbare in places. 
9. I say I have no expectations, I think I have no expectations, but I'm quite open to the possibility that I might. I still maintain that relationship is organic and a thing of space rather than just bonds. 
10. I love deep and thoughtful documentaries like Kumare, I Am, and The Nature Of Existence. 
11. Life is terribly interesting to me, adventure, people, discovery. This outlook does tend to ebb and flow though, as all things do. I'm not sure balance is stillness so much as wave, pattern and resonance.

The 11 Questions That The Person Who Nominated Me Asked:

1. What is your favorite past time?

I don't really have any one favorite past time, I'm kinda scattered all over the place. I love hanging out with my friends and family, reading, writing, playing guitar. Hiking, whatever. I love doing everything, and it is all my favorite :)

        
        2. Does art imitate life, or does life imitate art?

Both, yin and yang. Not opposite, but intertwined.

        3. What's your ultimate goal in life?

Enlightenment and deep relationship.

        4. What is the last thing you bought via online shopping?

Light Martin acoustic guitar strings. I'm awesome because I can break a string tuning down...

        5. How did you get started using blogspot?

I got sick of how much I was on facebook in 2009, so I created this blog with the help of my dad to sort of experiment with for a week of abstinence from fb. 

        6. Do you have a favorite film, and if so, what is it?

Far too many favorites, and perhaps all because I have learned or can learn something from them.

          7. What's your preferred fall outfit?

Jeans and a sweater over a t shirt, maybe a hat.

        8. What's your biggest accomplishment to date?

I don't really believe in that. I just live. 

        

        9. Who inspires you the most?

Yo

        10. The best show on television right now is:

Doctor Who :) (That's basically the only thing I watch right now that's ongoing and current, though.)

I don't think I shall nominate anyone else, if someone wants to nominate themselves from me, that'd be great, haha :) Just let me know and I'll come up with some questions :]

Thanks again Mary, you're a sweetheart.

We see what we tell ourselves to see, but this too is untrue

I keep making up all of these stories, but they interfere with sight so much, and I'm so sick of crashing down, running into walls and falling.
Now I'm lost. And even as I see where maybe I should go, or where I could go, I'm still lost. I am in a black room, with no walls, and no ceiling. There is a ring of round lights, evenly spaced all around me, but I don't know which direction to turn.
Even this is sentimental and a little silly, my dear. I feel and I try to explain, but in doing so, whatever I mean is one degree removed from what it actually is. But still I feel like I should, like it's doing me and others no good by sealing it all up tight and turning it back within. We're not meant to be a tightly wound thread, we're supposed to tie strings to others and the world, I think. Yeah, there's a way to do that destructively as well, but my metaphor is falling apart again. They always do. I start to glimpse the truth and communicate it to others, and then something flashes on the edge of my vision and I lose perspective and start spinning again.
Mostly I'm just trying to teach myself, but I do a dismal job of that as well.
I don't mean to make everything into a story. 

Stream of Consciousness: A response to personal knots untangled and Amanda Palmer's "The Art of Asking"

I am closed, but all the people I admire are open.
In my happiest, greatest dreams, I am open.

I am masked and cloaked and closely guarded.
I keep then all out, so why do I so badly want them in, why do I hope they'll let me in?

The things I want most to be, I keep in myself, away from others.
My heart is giving, my soul is tender, but I keep them draped in watchful distrust, not the blackest or heaviest of shrouds, but very interfering in the filtering of light from within and without.
I want to give, but to protect myself from potential harshness from others, I beat them to the punch and make myself feel bad first, even though they had no such intent themselves. I was not raised to be anything but my most authentic, honest self, I was never told that anything about me was anything but beautiful or multifaceted, and none of my friends have really stuck around long enough or been the kind of person to tell me anything of the sort. And yet, here it all is; the shroud, cloak and mask, the stinging barbs of "What you are you should not be" and "Nobody should/could/will ever like or love you".

But it is all lies, the voice that said I need all of this, the need for all of this, this in and of itself.
The Art Of Asking: it's okay to ask, it's okay to be open.
By asking, you are at your most vulnerable, your most earnest and authentic; your most open.
It is great, overflowing, boundless joy, and people respond to that on a very deep level, I respond to that on a very deep level.

Something will probably always be there (though I'm not going to over look the possibility that it won't), the worm-tongue whispering to the light of my being, "Hide. That is the only way to safety. Stay closed." But that voice is wrong; we get from others what we give, and I want the world to be as bright as I sometimes feel always.

Getting Closer (muddling through the concepts in my mind that are generally expressed in feelings rather than words)

Why don't we get it?

"Can Schools really ban hugging?"

We're so uncomfortable with affection, teachers aren't allowed to touch students any more, and there's this strange article about a ban on hugging. There have been a few accidents, problems, tragedies, and so everyone has been banned. Something bad happens, and we make a law against a symptom of the problem. We're slowly whittling down our own humanness with bureaucratic red tape, chaining our own souls to sins that haven't happened, destroying others freedom of expression because someone had a problem and couldn't or didn't get help. 
We're raising our children in competition and greed and hate and mistrust, and we wonder why crime happens. We destroy people's lives, and we wonder why they go to schools and malls and parking lots to kill other people and themselves. We're destroying the Earth's resources and we wonder why people steal and cheat and destroy the Earth further. We won't love, and we wonder why other people hate. We won't accept, and we wonder why no one will accept us. We hold ourselves apart, and we wonder why we can't come together.

Why are people so judgmental?

(Edit: The comments below are helpful.)

Tell me, what are you thankful for?

Well, Thanksgiving is tomorrow, and lately I've been thinking about what I'm grateful for in light of recent events, in the personal and global spectrum. So, without further ado, here's a list of the ten things I'm most thankful for as the hours tick off to Thanksgiving:
# Youtube
# Free internet
# Family
# Raven, B., J., and Kathryn
# My entire family
# The Tao Te Ching
# Lloyd Alexander
# Orson Scott Card
# Innovation
# Free thinkers

Whoever reads this, I'd very much like it if you would post a list of the ten or more things you're thankful for, I'm looking forward to reading your lists :)

Questions of, perhaps, a delicate nature

I'm not very good at these long, rambling online journal-like posts that a lot of people seem to like to write.
I've got these things I want to say, but don't know what or how.
Or if I should say them on here.

I guess I'm just confused.

The world's so weird lately, I find myself basically just not caring about much.
I don't get obsessed anymore. I used to get really obsessed about a lot of things, but I'm just really neutral about a lot of things lately.
I can still feel, I can still care, but not to the point of despair.
I guess I've developed this after years of watching my parents work themselves up because of their beautifully deep empathy.
They were always terribly sad about something, and they're still rather like that.

Do I understand now? I'm not sure.
There are still things I want to say to you, but feel like I can't because they might seem like feeble protestations, like I'm trying to... I don't know, the feeling's there but the words won't come.

Is this how it's supposed to be?

Of prom dresses and eye makeup

Do I now fail to see beauty in mankind and it's works?

No, it is that I fail to see beauty in the facades of mankind.

Random journal excerpt. Just for fun.

May 6th 2010 Thursday.
My iPod seems determined that I should listen to Spanish/Mexican music today, it's been playing that and nothing else for the past half hour. (it's on Shuffle, by the way. Or, it should be on Shuffle. It might not be. Yeah, it wasn't on Shuffle. I remedied that. The first song to come up is "Start wearing purple" by Gogol Bordello.)

Dumbest holiday ever invented

"You’d better watch what you do on April fools, you just might get caught and tied like a rucksack of potatoes on a Wednesday afternoon."

"What’s that supposed to mean?"

"I don’t know, it just sounded good."