We could do whatever we wanted!

Phil: It's the same thing your whole life: "Clean up your room. Stand up straight. Pick up your feet. Take it like a man. Be nice to your sister. Don't mix beer and wine, ever." Oh yeah: "Don't drive on the railroad track."

Gus: Well, Phil, that's one I happen to agree with.

Too early for flapjacks?

Los Angeles - No Such Thing

“The awesome thing about LA: The whole town is like this blank canvas, and whatever you bring to it that’s what it is.  It’s just this random collection of neighborhoods where it’s always sunny, and it basically reflects wherever you’re at, back at you.  So if you’re happy, LA’s great. If you’re not, LA sucks.  But it has nothing to do with Los Angeles, because - get this -  there’s no such thing.” 

from HappyThankYouMorePlease

To be honest

Phillypandle

My brother - who's probably one of 4 people who reads this blog - has offered a suggestion: write more about yourself.

So I shall appease the phillypandle and state the following - 

As a child I was terrified of bees and dolls; I have since found peace with each. 

Twice in my life, someone has literally scared the crap out me. Actually pretty funny both times.

The family is the proving ground for us all.  Unlike some with un-asked-for friction, I find this idea approachable, as I love my family (unorthodox as we may be) and I get excited about drawing people close into that someday.  May more things in life wield such enthusiasm.  

The Tribe

The first movie I remember seeing in the theaters with my dad was Home Alone.

I often wonder if the men of today are lost because we have too many choices, and we don't want to commit to anything until we're solid in the areas that count, but we are engulfed in this expectation to both be something and everything at once, and - lost in the mire - we remain at a standstill; we don't think that we're good enough to fill the void in a woman's life until we've figured it all out because a man should know what to do when it counts, and we're terrified that we won't, or that we don't have what it takes because our fathers and their fathers didn't know how to answer that deep heart question and pass it on, so we falter, and so we run.

(**Substitute "I" for "we" in that statement if you please)

First kiss: 2nd grade, Sarah King.  So there's that.

I think a lot about the heavy things, and I dive deep maybe too quickly with people...but I don't know how else to operate.  Perhaps I so readily bolt "out-of-the-box" that I miss out on some crucial "box-thinking" lessons that everyone else seems clued in on. What can ya do?

Speaking of which, Chip 'n Dale underwear: who was quality-checking those things?!

I mean, these blokes don't even wear pants.


I'm a young dude with a substantial mound of student loan debt.  I try not to let financial upheaval get the better of me.  Maybe I don't take it seriously enough, but if anything, I'm not oblivious.  I try to let it establish my gauges, as I peer through the curtain and acknowledge reality.  But you can never let that sort of friction sit, or else it will take you.  You lube abrasion with inspiration/creativity/gumption/what-you-will, and you continue to build you.  Working on it...

One of my prouder moments in life involves giving an older bully a taste of his own medicine; unfortunately he was a she.  Even more unfortunate: her grandma was psychotic.

(Ignoring the previous statement) much of what I do is driven by that all-consuming love that fuels my breath, that has me longing for something not of this place.  I write a lot of ranting word-vomit about that search party.

So, brother, I imagine my future entries will continue to be abstract ramblings, detached yet infused in the greater story we're all writing.  So. Take what you like; leave the rest.

An Honest Moment

Three things:

1. love what is mortal

2. hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it.

3. when the time comes ... LET IT GO

                                                        (cheers to Mary Oliver)

Holiday (1938)

Lind Seaton (Katherine Hepburn): How does your garden grow, Case?  Is life wonderful where you are?

Johnny Case (Cary Grant): I wouldn’t call what I’ve been doing “living.”  

Linda:  And what do you recommend for yourself, Doctor?

Case: A holiday.

Linda: How long? 

Case: As long as I need

Linda: You mean, just to play?

Case: No. No, I’ve been working since I was ten.  I wanna find out why I’m working.  The answer can’t be just to, uh, pay bills and to pile up more money.  Even if you do the government’s going to take most of it.

Linda: Yes, but what is the answer?

Case: Well, I don’t know. That’s what I intend to find out. The world’s changing out there. There’s a lot of new exciting ideas running around. Some of them might be right and some might be cockeyed, but they’re affecting all our lives.  I wanna know how I stand, where I fit into the picture, and what it’s all going to mean to me.  Well, I can’t find that out sitting behind some desk in an office.  So, as soon as I get enough money together I’m gonna knock off for a while.

Linda: Quit?

Case: Quit?!  I wanna save part of my life for myself.  There’s a catch to it though.  It’s gotta be part of the young part.  Ya know: retire young; work old.  Come back and work when I know what I’m working for.  Does that make sense to you?

I hear ya, Cary.  Ever the straight shooter and ever so relevant 70 years later, no?  One of my favorite movie pairings, these two.  Find it. Watch it. Live it.

What matters?

On the high road, Truth, above all, is paramount. Strip it all away and you find God, for God is the source, is us in essence. If you frame things within the ultimate (even if that ultimate is everything), then other things fall astray and you can gauge what really matters. Time, place, circumstance: "what I know is in the air; breathe and it will be there." Petty nonsense falls away and “the good” finds you. Love knows herself when she recognizes herself in you, “the matter” of that which does, the fight, her stamp of “scars past”.

"It" matters, if in an existential way. This life matters because I choose to give it gravity, and because it "matters," life has meaning, absurd as it may be. 

 Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.  You have to care!  Apply it here. 

Personally, connecting matters: to others, to the world, to God, and to myself.  Science proves this. Listening. Achieving some incremental enlightenment matters, some daily evolution of self.  Lately, I've begun to understand that enlightenment may in fact just be FAILURE (i.e. we're at our most complete when we're most broken, most asunder, when letting go is the only thing left) or maybe failure births epiphany.

With that said, above all (I know I already said that) it matters that I'm progressing, that I'm finding my way: up, sideways, wherever. Ben Alsup told me that this life is, at heart, an examination and discovery of what love and beauty and truth (et cetera) mean to YOU.  Basic relativism I suppose, but you have to own your meanings. I really take this to heart. What MATTERS to me is that I'm living in accordance to my path, that I'm creating and treasure hunting for the good - my good (to start) and the good of it all, I hope.  And if this is more "chasing fireflies" than "catching light" for now then cheers to stamina and patience. May I continue to aim high, and may I wield aliveness in urging others to come alive.

....And this is where I go all Lite Brite and start to fragment....

Tone it down a bit, and it matters that I communicate well, that I aim to connect and sometimes succeed, that I remain curious and always open, poised to taste the winds in motion, that I don’t call the game a wash when the rules begin to change or especially when I begin to change.  It matters that I fight for love and goodness, that I don't settle or accept, and that I tell people how I feel and that they, too, matter.  It matters that I still care when others may not and that I still fight when all is lost.  It matters that it matters. Breathe and it will be there.  It already is.

brothers of the lite brite

too good not to repeat

“We sleep to time’s hurdy-gurdy; we wake, if we ever wake, to the silence of God. And then, when we wake to the deep shores of time uncreated, then when the dazzling dark breaks over the far slopes of time, then it’s time to toss things, like our reason, and our will; then it’s time to break our necks for home…

There are no events but thoughts and the heart’s hard turning, the heart’s slow learning where to love and whom.  The rest is merely gossip, and tales for other times.”  - Annie Dillard

....

Poems_from_the_Past

We are armed with the fragments of our past encounters -

An arsenal of chards: unlinked, incomprehensible.

Under the surface we wield clues to who we need to be,

in attempts to build with these

Pieces of a near-complete.

And though we brood or hurt or sting

we begin to plant in our hearts the seeds that grow to touch the path forward.

The earth yields soft,

And Truth. Love. Purpose –

these gems are mined in our living. -6.19.11

And also a personal prayer -
To drift toward the silly and the superstitious in hopes of seizing the extraordinary: may I see the light.

Where to?

Center Theory

Thought: Everything that exists possesses gravity within it, a magnetism toward "the center."

From EXPLOSION to  E   X   P   A   N   S   I   O   N   to RETRACTION, we inhabit this universe.

So then: are we minor atoms or - indeed - the **cosmos** itself?  Is it all about perception?

What piece of gravity are you? And how do you relate to other pieces in our one common journey home?

If the center is calling, if we are indeed all spiraling back into the heart of God, "breaking our necks for home," there should be no worry about rightness, no shouting for flavors of truth; there should be only listening.

Story in 30 Words

The wind drank my whiskey faster than I ever could; the bottle, empty, dropped below, and I looked at the hands that released it: when did they become my father's?

A Loveable Truth

The void rips open --- tragedy.   
     A car crash kills a young kid...

     You thrash someone's heart to the breaking point....

     You fail miserably...

This is our world.  No sense in denying its shortcomings. No sense in avoiding the wound.  Why do we suffer?  Whether looking to a just God that may not make sense in light of pain, or diving headlong into the absurdity of it all -- we're here -- and wherever we start, it's on us to use what we're handed to mold and transform for the good.  Find meaning if you can, and know that your findings will guide your path.
All scenarios eventually come full circle, as the universe longs to heal itself.
     ...A boy comes into your life looking for direction, hope.

     ...You taste heartache yourself.

    ... Failure blooms you to the forward.

This is how it is.  Take the burn, hurt - willingly at that - but accept healing when it finds you; apply the cream.  
Can we use our pain to grow?  To expose the truth? (Pain, it seems, has that raw ability)
Shams of Tabriz proclaims that while the "intellect does not easily break down, love can effortlessly reduce itself to rubble.  But treasures are hidden among ruins.  A broken heart hides many treasures."  
  
Can we, in fact, turn our scars into maps?
 Is there no better chart to guide?  How I wish, but freedom comes to those who love...even this.

"Man alone knows that he must die, but that very knowledge raises him in a sense above mortality, by making him a sharer in the vision of eternal truth.  He becomes a spectator of his own tragedy; he sympathizes so much with the fury of the storm that he has no ears left for the shipwrecked sailor, though the sailor were his own soul.  The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it." - George Santayana

Open House

I am all the ages of my life at once.

I have been increasingly toying with this idea.  Often when I make a breakthrough or see the path open up before me, I've felt a subsequent dread at the thought of abandoning other options, closing doors to the unexplored corridors of the self.  I suppose if J.M. Barrie were on to something then it would be his idea of our being as a house with many rooms--

Some say that we are different people at different periods of our lives, changing not through effort of will, which is a brave affair, but in the easy course of nature every ten years or so. I suppose this theory might explain my present trouble, but I don't hold with it; I think one remains the same person throughout, merely passing, as it were, in these lapses of time from one room to another, but all in the same house. If we unlock the rooms of the far past we can peer in and see ourselves, busily occupied in beginning to become you and me.

Think about it.  Say you couldn't or didn't do certain things as a child. What comfort it would be to know that you have access to those pieces of yourself, that you can and do often find your way back there, if only in finding those eyes again!  If you are a house, engage and explore those rooms. Compartmentalize when you must, but never lose the keys, and know that you are the most open thing to yourself. 

So then, I have decided to no longer fear losing something that is with me and in me. It’s all a matter of the order of exploration, eh?  These days are the notes of life, and God taps his baton.  Hear the beat?  We must love that syncopation, that music in motion, for we are only as grand as we allow it access to move.  Explore and own the fact that life is good. Courage to choose, wisdom to know.

Take Time to Mature...

This is not a race (contrary to popular belief, Monsieur Hare).  Each step of manhood, of progression must be given due time to be explored, tested, weighed against.  Learning the value of family, of identity/individual health and purpose; living in communion with the divine; how to give in loving another; how to wrangle success; to build wealth; to impart knowledge; to fight for a cause; to educate oneself about the world around him; to pursue interests and passions --- these are all ONGOING DRAMAS, and we do ourselves a disservice when we force or neglect  or bypass the unfolding.

You may feel that you "should have had this figured out by now" (whatever today's this is) - relationships, money, faith, etc. - but if you don't, then you haven't, simple as that.  And this whole "by now" idea is misleading, I think.  Think Groundhog Day.  (I'm gonna preach a little Phil Connors wisdom here.)  Phil, by all accounts, is immortal, trapped in an endless return.  With this, the procession (and the weight) of time are eradicated.  What if this were you?  Hell, what if you were guaranteed 150 years?  Would you approach life, maturity differently?  "BY NOW" is a dead end.  Think "WHAT NOW?" instead.

Acknowledge where you are, truly, and go from there.  And certainly don't weigh yourself, your worth, your path against another's.  This defeats the entire progression.  

Take your time, my friends.