when you just drive
sitting so far to the right that your face seems half in and half out of the window
windwhipped hair and it is getting all frizzed but the tears drying saltsticky on your face are the most palpable thing above your neck
below though is where the emptiness starts and the emptiness is why you started driving in the first place
the gap in your chest, wrenched hollow - like a kitten grabbed, full fist of his scruff in your grasp, he shrinks, wrapped, sneered into himself - he is paralysed and so are you
that chest hollow, scruff-grappled, drawn... an exhumation, a vacuuming
the feeling remains but the emptiness is the counterpart
when it is not reciprocated where does love go? where do the feelings flow?
where has your heart gone? where has the night gone?
you just drive

when you have no one...

when you have no one...

why go home?

It is warm here... I would be on the net anyway. I can’t eat junk. Only fingernails. I feign at study. At assignments. I bite I gouge... I try. But I don’t do.

Why don’t I do. When I have no one. That is all I should do. Do.

But I do. Have someone. This one. The only one I know is real.

Today.

What to think of it all.

Me 27

What?

Two children

What else?

A mind

A heart

An openness.

The love.

Breathy intonations. Into dust. I wonder of all those. Those I have left in the dust. The pain I feel at my crimes of neglect. Not calling. Absorbed in my own. I want to let people know how much I value and love them I want to do things. I want to be there, I want to go to James’ wedding. Too late. That they may see. How much I care. Because I do. I want them to know. How can you do that, yet remain authentic and not get lost in sentimentality? What does it mean to be a man? What does it mean to be a friend? To love?

When will I love?

When I saw her. That was it. I knew.

Always the imbalance.

Ever unbalanced.

I am searching. What for? Two strangers – turning into dust? No. I don’t desire just anything. I don’t know what I desire. Want. What is it? What can I realistically have? Who cares about realistically... that word is a word cowardly people use to hide behind. Prudence is a rich ugly old maid courted by incapacity. Realistically everything is possible. Realistically that is the truth. The truth is I am scared. I am scared that I am already dust. Dust in my eyes. Dust in my children’s’ eyes. 

The good part is only I can arrest this. That is also the bad part. What do I do? I don’t do...that is what gets me stuck. The not doing. Not the without ado... the not doing of things. But I do do. I think. Not really though as thinking implies process.... progression. I ruminate. I stumble on the treadmill. Over and over again as I apelike apply tools to the skin around my ruined fingernails and emasculate myself and repress the warrior in me. I am powerful. 

How feminine is the workplace. We are all slaves in the kitchen of life. Sorry feminists. It is true. This is bullshit. The sheer passivity. Obviously I don’t advocate that for women. The feminine is a beautiful power. So strong. So radiant. The moon. My god the Moon is my muse. The workplace. The office. A place of sitting and taking it. Responding to emails. Adhering to a list of tasks. The man is outdoors and indoors. He exercises mind and body in his work. His work is a system noun. All encompassing. His work defines him. It fulfils and drives him. Or he turns into dust in the office. The dandruff on the backrest... the crust between the keys. A man feels work. Not stress. Stress of the mental anguish, oh I have so many deadlines to complete. That is not stress. Stress is pain in the muscles. The pump as you lift and as you bend and dig and pull. Breathless and sweaty as you strain. The gym. Feminine. Dehumanising. The office – it robs us of our essential selves. We sit in this cubicles. Staring at a sheet of plastic. That is where the world is moving. 

Online. Into dust more like. Everything that is bad is happening to the world. Get me away from computers. Into the rain. Into the grass. Into the nettles and the shit. What would the world be once bereft of wet and wildness? Let them be left. Oh let them be left, wildness and wet. Long live the weeds and wilderness yet. Under the dust of the rubbish of our comfort. We choke on the farts of our progress. The Earth our Mother? No. Our toilet. Our days, our bounty, our freedom? No, our enslavement to status, to the ideal, to shoulds... Sellouts all of us. We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon! Why shape our loves according to artifice? That I meant to write lives is interesting. The great vowel shift. Lives over loves. That is what it is. What do you live for? Very little. My life is basically a sleepwalk. 

Wake up man. Get mad as hell. Stop taking it. Working indoors. The whole front of the system... the corporate dream. For money. The idea. Hanging it all out. People think this is the sensible option. How is it though? It is so risky. I am risking my youth on the fact that I will one day some day hopefully have enough money to do what I really want. That will surely turn into dust..200 years and nothing has changed. 2000 years and still we are driven by fear and selfishness and greed. I don’t understand my motivation. All I want to understand is motivation. I strive to know why people do things. 

Unpack that and then maybe I can help them see the truth. Really? Do I even know the truth. I used to look to someone for the truth. Not anymore. Without going out of your door you can know the ways of the world. It is all in. Hologram that I am. Though why do I act or not act in a way that runs so wildly counter to who I am. Who am I is the next one? Though maybe that is the essential dilemma who am I relative to who I want to be or who I see myself to be. Ashes to ashes.. Starstuff/dust. Starlight star bright, first star I see tonight... envelope me and know me and fill me. My god if only this environment did not flay the love of my skin. If I could be Me. Who is Me? I am a Man. I am a Man who believes and who feels and knows with utter conviction that breathless and hungry and sexual and powerful I am. I am. This is. I am you. 

You are that. God is. The dude abides. Into dust. We are all literally, physically and spiritually the same thing. One. I am scared. I have doubts. So do you. That I can understand, empathise and feel joy are indications of this. That we can see shared beauty. Know the mysteries of the world. Love. Fuck. Smile. Laugh. All indicators. All the same stuff. Residual memory of what is. Star stuff imbued with the miracle of the genesis of the cosmos. 

How incredible is that. I am 4 and a half billion years old. Maybe. Well, constituents of me are. Diluted. Homoeopathy like. Though the signature remains. I am connected. Where do I end. Why do I try and halt my progression. My nails. My hair. My love. My happiness. 

Realistically is the ultimate limiter. Where where the limits 200 years ago? What do we really need? If you shape your life according to nature, you will never be poor; if according to people's opinions, you will never be rich. Limiting to what people think, expect. What do I think? What do I expect? My wants. Are they compatible with others’? Realistically it does not matter. All is dust. Yet all is magic dust. These little combinations of fairy sand mixed together to create the tool – the ultimate utility with which to engage in my realism. My realism. Not realistic. Unreasonable. To everything there is a season. 

Be in season with your life and your humour. This is the yellow brick road. Me the coward, me the brainless, me the heartless..into dust with those thoughts. A heart a brain and courage and wisdom to know the difference. The yearning begins, the search for another one. Why one. In me I have everything I need. Male and Female. Ranginui and Papatuanuku reside in me. I cleave myself apart in order for light to shine and the children of my ideas to grow and prosper and flourish and go on to colonise brave new worlds of thought, conquering hearts of darkness. Constantly looking to dust and embracing the dust of our crystallisation. The birth into form and coalescing from vaporous notions, dreams in the ether and then the dreams of those dreams and dust comes and brings with it life. 

Into dust.  

all under heaven

A thought came to me, regarding the tale Brian frequently tells in the PhilosophersNotes, about how S.N Goenka tells a story about My.

“The reason why such acute suffering occurs is concealed in the words “my.”

“My.”


My toy. My car. My house. My spouse. My country. My life. My, my, my.

S.N. Goenka, the teacher who led the silent 10-day Vipassana meditation class I took, had a hilarious story about “my.” Imagine someone else’s watch got stolen. Someone else’s car broke down en route to an important meeting. Someone else’s order was messed up at the restaurant. Someone else’s spouse cheated on them. Unfortunate, but not that big of a deal for you, right?

Alright.

Now imagine this: “My watch was stolen.” “My car broke down.” “My order was messed up at the restaurant.” “My spouse cheated on me.”


Takes on a whole new meaning when we add the “My,” doesn’t it?!?

It’s time to quit taking ourselves quite so seriously. Let’s witness our reactions to things, develop the ability to see ourselves as an actor in this game of life and loosen our grip on all things “my.”  (Big thanks to Brian for sharing this, from several PNs and especially the one on A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle)
 
Now - I caught a thought of this as I went about my stuff today... then I recalled verse 13 of the Tao te Ching.

 

 To whomever treats all under Heaven

as he esteems his own body,
All under Heaven may be entrusted.

To whomever treats all under Heaven

as he loves his own body,
All under Heaven may be given.

 

This made me think of combining the two ideas...

 
So if you think of everything as yours, you will be able to experience mudita on a more regular basis. Because if all under heaven is as your body - then every time something great happens anyway you will rejoice in that because in effect it is happening to you.
 
That is a good learning for me today. I enjoyed it.

Blissipline = discipline

I got that slightly back to fronty from the PhilosophersNote on Spiritual Liberation by Michael Beckwith.

I have not explored any of Beckwith's work/teachings other than those distilled by Brian in the PNote on it and also from his participation in The Secret. This sentiment though, that discipline leads to and equals blissipline really grabbed me.

For some time I have wanted to cultivate more of a life on purpose. A life of routines and structure, partly to tame the monkey mind and also partly because I intuitively felt that it was good to have a definite set of actions to engage in every day.

For me I would like that to go:

Tapping
Meditation
Relaxation breathing
Smiling
Sets of physical exercise (2 x 30 sets push/sit-ups, dips...)
Gratitude expression
Writing

That would be a short list of things I would want to do upon waking every morning.

Also I feel that these would all be good to revisit around 3 more times throughout the day. Things like tapping, conscious smiling and conscious breathing and a number of exercises could easily be performed oftener.

Also I enjoy the idea of Eric Harrison's 5-minute meditations - that is doing several short meditations over the course of the day.

There was a song I heard on Triple-J a few weeks ago and the singer was suggesting taking an hour each day for yourself, by yourself, just to do, be and have whatever you want for that hour....this idea appealed to me immensely. So what about an hour a day, a day a week, a weekend a month, a week a year, a month every 7 years.... or something like that.

So for me...

discipline is blissipline not leads to... nothing really leads to anything... it is all now. It is about falling in love with the process... the means.

So, focus on these things. I'll apply these to my life and enjoy what happens.

the first...

It was difficult for me to fully hold this concept in myself - that only I can really help myself.

I had for years thought almost that enlightenment or spiritual growth could be bought, for example that if I won lotto I would travel around and learn with various teachers, take retreats, courses etc...

Now I think the opposite is truer... remain in yourself, know yourself and enlightenment will be found.

This is quite close to the sentiment of this blog - which arose through my wondering why I was no closer to living the self-sufficient lifestyle on my own small holding that I desired. I came to truly feel the idea of "as above, so below"... This thinking is written in all personal development texts - that you must believe within yourself that you are X in order to have and embody X in your life.

I am still working with this growth and particularly the essence of the first sentence of this post.

This has been brought keenly to my awareness recently as I work through my life. Solace has been sought many places and in many hearts... though at the end of the day it just me who is there driving through the tunnel listening to Bon Iver and crying and shouting. And actually thinking that I'd broken the stereo from shouting so hard.

In order to be loved, we must all love only ourselves first. That is what this blog and what Life are all about. Love.