“Under a sky, no one sees,
Waiting, watching it happening.
Don’t hurry give it time,
Things are the way they have to be.
Slow down, give it time,
Still life, you know I’m listening.
The moment that you want is coming if you give it time

When you wake up, when you wake up,
You will find me
When you wake up, when you wake up,
You will find me

Under a sky, no one else sees,
yourself appears in front of me,
*the sky clears, the sun hits* ... i'm here
Waiting, what's happening.
The moment that you want is coming if you give it time

When you wake up, when you wake up,
You will find me
When you wake up, when you wake up,
You will find me”

Still Life – The Horrors 

This song has been rattling around in my head for a week. It has a great hook, sounds really good and I'm a big fan of the band; but that isn't why. I can't shake this tune because of the lyric and the way it describes everything I want with such eloquence. Every morning when my alarm rings the first thing I do after shutting it off is turn my head to see an empty pillow, and I am realizing I am not really ok with that. I'm not ok with settling for some random person either, so I wait. I know you are out there, and I suspect you feel it too.

In the meantime, I am getting a goddamed kitten.

there have been too many reasons to think about mortality this past week. the death of friends, relationships, dreams; all these carry their own weight - it is left to us to choose the direction this heaviness pushes us in.

i don't really talk to many people about this sort of thing. it just gets to be a bit much - i am fine, and will be fine tomorrow, but tonight I am listening to vienna by Billy Joel and crying like a schoolgirl.

life is a beautiful thing, but i fucking hate this part.

"Slow down you crazy child
You're so ambitious for a juvenile
But then if you're so smart tell me why
Are you still so afraid?
Where's the fire, what's the hurry about?
You better cool it off before you burn it out
You got so much to do and only
So many hours in a day

But you know that when the truth is told
That you can get what you want
Or you can just get old
You're gonna kick off before you even get halfway through
When will you realize...Vienna waits for you

Slow down you're doing fine
You can't be everything you want to be
Before your time
Although it's so romantic on the borderline tonight (tonight)
Too bad but it's the life you lead
You're so ahead of yourself
That you forgot what you need
Though you can see when you're wrong
You know you can't always see when you're right(you're right)

You got your passion you got your pride
But don't you know that only fools are satisfied?
Dream on but don't imagine they'll all come true
When will you realize
Vienna waits for you

Slow down you crazy child
Take the phone off the hook and disappear for a while
It's alright you can afford to lose a day or two
When will you realize...
Vienna waits for you.

And you know that when the truth is told
That you can get what you want
Or you can just get old
You're gonna kick off before you even get halfway through

Why don't you realize...Vienna waits for you
When will you realize...Vienna waits for you"


Vienna - Billy Joel

three fishes

today was/is a good day.

like most good days, it was not an easy day - rather the kind of time that shows you what you are.

well, it reminds you anyway.

either way, today i made a decision i have wrestled with for some time; and a part of me is at peace finally. time will be the tell if my choices were right or wrong i suppose. but for now, for this moment, i am at rest.

serendipty

I just had the most bizarre conversation. At a bar of all places.

With a girl no less.

I suppose its a good sign that I didn’t want to take advantage of the place she was in... it was pretty sad really. I hope the advice I gave was fitting, and that she figures out how to be comfortable in that skin she has.  

post -non-rapture rant

 started this as a reply to a post on fb this morning  – got a little long winded, so now it's here.

Yesterday we “survived” another end of the world. Once again someone promised the world a get of out jail free card and people ate it up. It was wrapped up (as usual) in a pretty package of religion, but rooted (again as per usual) in a pretty bow of non-responsibility. Too much debt? No problem. Life not what you thought it would be? No problem. Job suck? No problem – it's all out of your control! The global lottery is on the way to take away all your issues! One wave of this mystical wand and you get swooped away to heaven or nirvana or valhalla or your cosmic vestal-virgin laden harem. That is not how it works, people. There is no fairy dust to be sprinkled. Ignoring personal responsibility is not a viable solution to the problems in our world, it IS the problem in our world. So many folks listen to what jesus had to say about four horses and totally miss the bits he says about feeding the poor, protecting the weak, accepting the outcast. In some twisted horrible irony most seem to want to sit together and hear about these things while simultaneously dreaming up ways to avoid doing any of them. I don't recall any of the stories about his 33 years where he passed on an opportunity to be a part of helping someone in the “here and now” because he thought it would be okay if me made some grandiose gesture later on. To quote Don Henley (yes, I'm that old.):

“ To this garden we were given, and always took for granted
-It's like my daddy told me, “You just bloom where you're planted.”
Now you long to be delivered From this world of pain and strife
-that's a sorry substitution for a spiritual life”

Now, lest anyone be confused, let me say very clearly that I by no means think I have this figured out. Believe me, if I thought for a second that yesterday was actually going to be the end of the world I would have begged the powers that be for more time, not less. I have way to much crap left here to be sorted out. I want to see my children grow and learn their part in all of this.

Life isn't easy, but quitting sounds boring.

(I also want to be around when The Cults finally release their album next month.)

Department of Morons and Vitirol

So I went to the dmv today. Nothing super exciting there, but it did provide me with an hour and a half of mingling with a people group that I otherwise wouldn’t normally associate with – oh the humanity (if you can call it that)… The one constant that I experienced there and pretty much everywhere I have turned today is the incredible amount of hatred people seem to harbor.

Bin Laden is dead. It was bound to happen sooner or later – that in itself doesn’t phase me much, its one more life lost to add to the thousands who have died in these attacks and retaliations. I would have hoped that people were going to react somewhat differently. The cheering, the demonstrations, the mass display of bloodlust has been staggering. I actually sat and listened to a woman today say that she felt “cheated” that he had been killed. Cheated. In her words, he should have been “put in a cage so the public could watch him suffer”. Why? How does anyone derive pleasure at watching someone’s destruction? Don’t get me wrong, I am not writing this in support of his actions. He was an evil man who was responsible for a great deal of suffering. I just cannot understand this mob mentality that seems to have gripped the nation… it disturbs me at my very core.

I want to believe we are better than this. As campy as it sounds, I want to believe we can forgive, that we can heal. That somewhere in this mess the human race can find a common thread and move forward. If we continue to fuel ourselves on hatred and ignorance, we all lose. It’s not sustainable – it is the cancer that eats away at us; and yet here it is, celebrated in our media and embraced by our nation.

To quote Jane Porter, “The best manner of avenging ourselves is by not resembling him who has injured us”

Road-Trip!

I cannot remember a time when I have felt so alone and so connected all at the same time. I am on a really interesting part of this journey, it's kind of like a spiritual road-trip. Traveling along, watching scenery, enjoying stops along the way - and yet no destination in sight. Maybe that is the point, if we are being honest with ourselves and growing closer there is no destination. No forever. No assurances. There is just the road in front of us. We meet others as we move along. We connect. Share. Then we continue on our way.

I do love me a road-trip, and this one is shaping up to be pretty dammed fantastic.

yeah. that.

tonight i find myself in that place. the one where there seems to be so much to be said; and yet no words to utter.

at least none that seem worthwhile.

on the positive side, the silence is comfortable.

beneficial, even.

in fact, the "right now" is pretty great actually. i know that hardly makes for interesting reading but it is the truth - not that everything in my life is great or even good, and it certainly isn't "to plan". it's more the fact that i am learning to not give things more focus than they deserve and also to not give them less than they need.

balance.

peace.

all manner of good happiness stuff.

it's springtime, kids - in more ways than one.

2$ bottles!

Ok, so this is going to be one of those posts where I turn up Fever Ray pretty loud and just type whatever shit pops into my head. Entertaining? Possibly. More likely incoherent and non-consequential.

I had a great talk with a good friend of mine last night over some watery (but more importantly 2$) beers, and came to a bit of an epiphany about myself. Epiphany might be an incorrect word choice , but in the spirit of transcribing my thought stream I will use it anyway...

We were talking about some decisions I am in the middle of and I noticed a bit of a pattern in my personal history. Here it is in a nutshell:

I allow myself to get into a situation where there needs to be immediate action taken to prevent some sort of critical mass event, and so I limit my criteria to only the bare minimum required to avoid disaster. This in and of itself is not so much a bad thing. The problem happens when I choose to dedicate myself to that course; meaning that once the immediate problem or need is met, I choose to stay with that option without considering if it is the best long term solution for me. *I understand that I am being a bit nebulous here – hopefully this makes a marginal amount of sense.* I will then proceed to stay in a sub-optimal situation out of some bullshit sense of responsibility or commitment even though it ceases to be beneficial and sometimes long enough that it actually turns into a determent. This behavior has manifested in pretty much all areas of my life at one point or another for as long as I can remember. The interesting thing about seeing this pattern was that I honestly didn't choose to beat myself up about it. I was/am able to look at it and see it for what it is and know that I am able to choose weather or not I will continue the pattern, I realized on a very base level that I am not bound by my past. Pretty cool feeling if I do say so myself.

With that realization came the knowledge that the criteria I have been using as a base for life choices has been pretty skewed – any time we make decisions based on a sense of nostalgia for what a thing was or on our hope for what a thing could become we by default tend to ignore what a thing actually IS. As I posted the other day, I have been reading Tolle's book “The Power of Now”. For the record, the concept is sound. Be present. Give your undivided attention to what is happening at this moment. That isn't a license to ignore your past or future, it is the key to be able to consider the reality of both of those things while allowing you to be a slave to neither. As he says in the book, the past is the past. The future isn't here yet. The only time they have real meaning is the moment when they were/will be the now. It's pretty amazing how much clearer things become when they are looked at through that lens.

Alright. Drink is empty. Mind is cleared. You can all go back to shaking your heads at the rest of the internets now.

Then See What Happens

A couple of years ago now, someone who ended up becoming a very close friend of mine turned me on to the writings of Eckhart Tolle. When I first read “A New Earth” I was pretty blown away not so much because it introduced me to any shatteringly revolutionary information, but rather that it put words to things that had been on the fringes of my mind. Concepts that in my heart I already knew to be true even though I could not consciously articulate them. That book sparked something in me that has been evolving ever since. I certainly have not “arrived” as yet, in fact, truth be told I have stopped trying to “get” anywhere to be honest. It has actually been a pretty remarkable thing to watch how well life can unfold when I stop trying to force my will upon it.




Earlier today I was able to make some time to be alone. I was driving in the rain and decided I would pull into a small park and read a bit (big props to my kindle app for keeping my library handy).




I opened up another of Tolle's books, “The Power of Now”, and wanted to share what I found.





“What happens to the pain-body when we become conscious enough to break our
identification with it?

Unconsciousness creates it; consciousness transmutes it into itself. St. Paul expressed this universal principle beautifully: "Everything is shown up by being exposed to the light, and whatever is exposed to the light itself becomes light." Just as you cannot fight the darkness, you cannot fight the pain-body. Trying to do so would create inner conflict and thus further pain. Watching it is enough. Watching it implies accepting it as part of what is at that moment.
The pain-body consists of trapped life-energy that has split off from your total energy field and has temporarily become autonomous through the unnatural process of mind identification. It has turned in on itself and become anti-life, like an animal trying to devour its own tail. Why do you think our civilization has become so life-destructive?
But even the life-destructive forces are still life-energy.
When you start to disidentify and become the watcher, the painbody will continue to operate for a while and will try to trick you into identifying with it again. Although you are no longer energizing it through your identification, it has a certain momentum, just like a spinning wheel that will keep turning for a while even when it is no longer being propelled. At this stage, it may also create physical aches and pains in different parts of the body, but they won't last. Stay present, stay conscious. Be the ever-alert guardian of your inner space. You need to be present enough to be able to watch the pain-body directly and feel its energy. It then cannot control your thinking.The moment your thinking is aligned with the energy field of the painbody, you are identified with it and again feeding it with your thoughts.
For example, if anger is the predominant energy vibration of the pain-body and you think angry thoughts, dwelling on what someone did to you or what you are going to do to him or her, then you have become unconscious, and the pain-body has become "you." Where there is anger, there is always pain underneath. Or when a dark mood comes upon you and you start getting into a negative mind-pattern and thinking how dreadful your life is, your thinking has become aligned with the pain-body, and you have become unconscious and vulnerable to the pain-body's attack. "Unconscious," the way that I use the word here, means to be identified with some mental or emotional pattern. It implies a complete absence of the watcher. Sustained conscious attention severs the link between the painbody and your thought processes and brings about the process of transmutation. It is as if the pain becomes fuel for the flame of your consciousness, which then burns more brightly as a result. This is the esoteric meaning of the ancient art of alchemy. the transmutation of base metal into gold, of suffering into consciousness. The split within is healed, and you become whole again. Your responsibility then is not to create further pain. Let me summarize the process. Focus attention on the feeling inside you. Know that it is the pain-body. Accept that it is there. Don't think about it - don't let the feeling turn into thinking. Don't judge or analyze. Don't make an identity for yourself out of it. Stay present, and continue to be the observer of what is happening inside you. Become aware not only of the emotional pain but also of "the one who observes," the silent watcher. This is the power of the Now, the power of your own conscious presence. Then see what happens.”


Eckhart Tolle “The Power of Now” pg29