The Call to Adaptation

Calculating the many variables is a rather useless undertaking. Humanizing and contemplative, yet leading to dead ends. Passage of time, minutes creep by, checking and checking and checking. Thankfully, I find myself irritated by myself (queue analogy about being tight in a bud, compelled to bloom). Find myself curious, digesting disappointment and landing closer to indifference than the time before. 

The patterns present ever more clearly, generating compassion and resignation. Things are as they are, not more nor less. Even kicking and screaming, dragged to the middle-- maybe even pissed about the lessons. I tire of the diligence and calculated control, the reflections discovered by some mix of compulsion and principle. To learn and to grow from each little stumble, each little proclamation of courage. I've long yearned for carelessness, to not hold such a tight commitment to whatever ethics best frame any situation. But to yearn is, to some degree, a denial of self. 

The many times I've co-signed dishonest entanglements, driven by invisiblized survival maladaptation. Work until they don't, fun until overshadowed by the gutting of sanity. The madness is at work, nearly always. Rarely can spirits unfold and reveal in precisely complimentary ways, a veritable weaving of yours and mine. All the reasons why this way or that. The error, they say, is believing the absurdity and unpredictability might be controlled. Let it fly, let it be, leave it be. The patience and other notable qualities demanded must become so common place, they cease to be seen by oneself. 

And yet, it's not as if I don't calculate in the necessity of play, of unregulated meandering. Just because. And because I am imperfect, am protective, am observant, am scanning the horizon. In knowing myself, I learn to allow space for knowing others-- the ways we show up or don't. Forcing framing is a mostly faulty practice. 

Re-committing to these teachings and gospels, I see the road, the obstacles, the plentiful joys. I can't help but be thankful, that it was, that it is, that it could be. These very many wild and wonderful exposures I've known. A life lived, a life examined. Worth the salt, demanding of perpetual hydration. In these knowings, I am released.

"I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world." -Walt Whitman

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Increasingly Human

Chances are, it's a ripe opportunity to bring myself back to myself. Lovely, perhaps. Delightful, yes. Ok, no matter what, completely. Complete and completely. Internal features I haven't felt in quite some time, many moons and suns ago. Surging up, to and fro. This body has turned over, many times. The current model is caught somewhere in fresh limbo. Like a bitter citrus peel, in need of straining and distillation. Might there be patience and delicacy, still while embracing the magnetics and giddiness of it all? May well also present as a chance to bid farewell to conjurings and wishful thoughts. Often there is a tangible flow that carries one to the rightest place to rest and learn-- something of a different exploration all together. I've no quarrel with pursuing the meanderings of this carved path. Yet I still may protest, may anguish, may dream impossible things. And not because it's dramatic or off, but because it is human. I'm increasingly human these days.

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Thanks to the dear friend who shared this piece with me in an optimal hour. It helped release trapped tears.

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Lemons 11/23

An Absurd and Peaceable Madness

Not overnight has it happened, the shift in perception and desire. Immersed in decay, a prolonged (or maybe just right) stint in limbo. Digging through the remains, deciding what to keep and haul along on this next leg. I suppose I thought I'd be more embroiled in sadness just now, but the relief makes sense considering the expanses of grief and doubt long occupied. 

My relation to sickness, illness, ability has imbued life with an entirely new manner of operation. The politics of it all-- the way I learned long ago that the personal is extremely political. An injury to one, representative of all. Interconnected existences, strained through a convoluted gospel of separateness and innate difference. The basics of us is quite basic. To rely on any practice of dehumanization is condemning us all. The mad and misfit among us tell the biggest stories-- repeated and mutated through generations, waiting to be absorbed. Providing guidance and reassurance, exceedingly amidst the splintering hopelessness that may otherwise drag one into oblivion. And also, some manner of rabbit holes and shadow spaces are entirely instructive-- trials of unrestrained honesty and reckoning. From this view, it's now impossible to not attune to the many ways the foundation is so very sick, claiming to be the normative path. The relative conspiracy of it all, at times, comical (see: absurdism) and all together deeper and [yet] explicit to the inquiring eye. I've identified bits of hope and imagination in fantasy and sci-fi, in depth psychologies and archetypes, in alone-ness and indifference to how I precisely manifest. The immediate accessibility of self care vs soothing. Intentional reunions with historical, cornerstone persons. Initiating bouts of creative pursuit and practice. Poised upon the tightrope of risk, faith, and a balancing of the breadth. Indubitably, there exists a multidate of paths available to grapple with the void-- I'm quite comforted by and proud of this very one.  

All these things I've collected (as I so often do) to identify parameters, interrogate internal hypocrisies and contributors of dis-ease and disconnection-- with myself and external connects alike. The many lists and promises and pleading demands stemmed largely of shame, the most toxic kind. This new space is accountable, yet honest and restful, realistic and less fixated on the treacherous, false comforts of perfectionism and control. Dare I say peaceful, and not the bypass-y kind privy to in days past. If you build it, it will come. Highly likely and not entirely predictable-- all in the let go, the let be, the wait and see. And what of patience? An entirely unruly beast, yet one to befriend as any other. The rewards are not to be depended upon, they come in waves, and are likely already happening right under our noses. Looking back and in the now, an expanded capacity to absorb and proclaim gratitude. I'm no imposter in this life, I'm the only one who can fulfill the role. The only promise is that we are here, we will one day no longer be (in a currently identifiable form)-- left with only an ability to influence what's within the hyphen.

And because I firmly believe in the power of a good soundtrack and capturing speck of time, I’ve fashioned this accompanying compilation: https://spotify.link/KtTDxKqESDb

**of note, check this out: https://youtu.be/xsgpW98q0M0?si=KfI8vQMsd942MFll

Blameless Nameless Faceless

A blameless inventory. That’s what I’ve been doing with my life. It’s a concept I admire, but haven’t always had the wherewithal to navigate. Following a lifetime of experiencing a black/white cultural practice of assigning heroes and villains in any story, I’ve spent plenty of time seeing myself in each of these troupes. Retreating into and embracing my inner hermit has bestowed a certain deconstructed and open-to-possibilities perspective requiring a ground-up, fierce examination and editing of life as I’ve come to know it.

The tendency I stumbled into of internalizing hyper-responsibility and blame, intellectualizing deeply painful experiences, and struggling to grasp the reality of boundaries led me down a path of depleted confidence, sense of stability, and belief in the power of possibility. 

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Trekking back to myself has been the pursuit of many yesteryears, one I am committed to steadfast and wholeheartedly— but damn is it exhausting [and you only know when you know]. I’ve long believed there can be multiple manifestations of the truth, rather than some black/white tidy box as we have been told— nay, the truest recovery has been vast shades of gray. The lessons have been, in the easier streaks, enlightening and humbling, and in the most challenging, shattering and debilitating. 

And yet, I’ve rarely deviated from this pursuit of wellness, better days, and a grounded peaceful knowing. Navigating multiple descents into shadowed wells of despair, I’ve clung to shreds of (sometimes sparse) hope and faith. Often I’ve believed myself a weak specimen, perhaps too delicate for the confines of this fast-paced and sacrificially demanding world. But I’ve also come to understand that leaning into existential discomfort and facing demons isn’t something undertaken by all, it is by-nature a gnarled and often lonesome path. If you’re lucky (and I’ve been quite as such), you encounter knowing fellow travelers battling their own monsters— indeed, over time you sharpen an ability to instinctively identify and form kinship with one another, some reassurance in the storm. You listen to songs and read poetry and glance upon artistic creations, that for even a sliver remind you you’re not the only one trudging through lunacy. 

It takes the biggest courage, it takes unflinching curiosity, and sometimes it takes lives [I’d be lying if I said I’d never believed non-existence a better outcome]. Yet still, we rise and we fall and we rise. And it fuuuucking sucks, but it’s our suckage. It’s the bravest thing I’ve ever done or likely will do. Why this life, like this, with these unshakable truths that scare the shit out of me? I have no doubt (and I can be a fairly doubtful and adorably cynical person), that the strength manifesting within is the stuff of true spiritual freedom. 

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I’ve been called wise and strong and sensitive and confounding and overthinking and lovely and a great many other things, which I may or may not be. What we think we are and know of ourselves/the world/sentient reality can become a self-effacing box, a box of limiting traditions that personally have brought me to my knees time and again. For me, this initially unchosen roast on the pyre stemmed from a multitude of jarring and destabilizing life circumstance. Yet now, it’s the obstinate commitment to comprehending darkness and fear as an enforcing power to summon and wield. 

That which you fear most, know it. “The unexamined life is not worth living" [a famous dictumsupposedly uttered by Socrates at his trial for impiety and corrupting youth, for which he was subsequently sentenced to death (Wikipedia)]. Majorly, I find this life to be worth living— a cornucopia of maddening and delightfully conflicting paradoxes, ripe for the till. Carpe diem with a big dose of momento mori, the whole damn gamut. 

I find myself ever here, nestled in a blessed rabbit hole, electing moment-by-moment to do hard things, then rest and refuel, then repeat. Sometimes, the length of the undertaking is frighteningly disheartening, but I think this is the sensational reality of a life examined. A life spent befriending fears, as much as one might pursue hope and all the like. 

The blameless understanding that I am human, with strengths and flaws. With big emotions and an even bigger heart. Examined, and for all that I can be, contented with here, right now.