I decline to be judge of you or of me
Needing the light that men cannot see
We get us but better by the bit and the bit
Committing again to the dogged doing of it
7% Battery and Far Too Many Things
Someday we will have better batteries for laptops, or maybe coffee shop tables that charge them through contact (while giving us only minor skin cancer on our forearms).
6%, stop being self-referential Mike. Things to do today, church to attend, in one manner or the next. I weep and cheer for this world, and that makes no sense but it is where I am, I can assure whoever asks. When I was young, I had enough breaks and love and support and safety, and I thought the world was basically Good.
5%, as I grew older, I started to see that I was an edge case, and while there were many of us, there might have been many more who had different experiences and maybe did not see the Good as easily, and could not touch it, being prevented. The TV was telling me this was so, though my parents kept me from seeing images of the very worst of what we could do to each other. I thought the world was basically Good, but flawed – and then, as I watched more TV, and then the Internet, I saw complexity, and saw the flaws were everywhere, and entangled with the Good I still knew to be there.
4%, and I begin to make mistakes in my adult life – the usual kind, like acts of Good not taken, work not considered seriously enough, friends not kept in touch with, pets not pampered (they are a direct channel to our own empathy), insects not given a second chance, animals framed in boxes for entire lifetimes for their meat and hide and extra bits, and I began to wonder if the Good was just a story, and even if so, was there still a value in a Good story. I had by then read Life of Pi, and so began to consider things I hadn’t before reading that, like what happens after one reads anything, or hears anything, or sees anything new.
3%, and my adult mistakes and missteps led me to the steps of the local church, where I had always at least found the Story of Good to be hiding – past all of the Terrible that had become attached to its symbols – and I had to admit, I could not save myself, much less the world. The place is too messed up, and we’re all careening off in our own directions, looking for some reason to keep on careening. I felt determined to see the experiment of my life progress to its next stage, and through to some other thing.
I am leaving so much detail without, because of the limits of time and energy (and my tea is getting cool).
2%, and I’m nearly here, I’ve had my own kind of Very Hard, though not all remotely like Yours. A friend recently reminded me I’m allowed to feel that, no matter what Good I’ve been given to hang on to. My week has been unlike any other, and I’ve been to the edge of what I might call a bit loopy, but hopeful, but full of regret and worry that I won’t be able to be just some part of the light that will help guide others back to where they were headed when there was only Good to see.
1%, and this is for you, typos and all – tired, but true.
xo
Dry Tank
I was taking inventory today of the things I’ve been dealing with, stressing about, putting off, regretting, worrying over (different than stressing about, but I’m not quite sure how), missing very much, committed to doing, expected to succeed at, hoping to accomplish, managing to do in spite of, fearing might result, probably forgetting, and all of those sorts of things and then likely more, and for one brief, self-respecting moment – just one, mind you – I thought maybe I had earned the right to have a snack and take a nap.
Oh, the moment of guilt-freeness has longed passed, don’t get too excited on my behalf. I’m back to typey-typing my anxieties out to a very safe distance, and those waffles could have waited and napping is for babies. I don’t believe that second thing, it just ended the sentence better.
This has been a week of taking stock. I see only TODOs in front of me and a trail of DIDs and DIDNTs behind. It’s in some sense all in my head but then also in the heads of others too, so at some point soon some other head will remember to ask mine whether the X got done and if not, then when might it happen.
All I want to do is go to sleep a bit earlier and wake up a bit later – at least for a while – but people are starving somewhere and being terrorized somewhere else and being lied to and cheated and left alone and it’s all a bit much sometimes. It just really is.
I’m not giving up, I’m just saying. We have to be more kind to each other, but then to ourselves as well. Hope is precious and therefore maybe as a result, a bit hard to find now and then. But the word Hope itself gives me hope, and so typing it a few times can’t really hurt.
And again I’m not giving up – on myself, or on the greater We.
xo
Open the Source
For the record (or are we now officially onto usb keys?), this blog, along with its words and images (except for some attributed ones I use now and then), and its ideas and its mistakes and intentions and all of those things… it’s all free and open-source (for what it’s worth).
I’ve said this before, though quietly and in a sly-ish sort of fashion, but now and then I try to speak more plainly if possible (hard to do, as I’m going through a playing-with-too-many-syllables phase, from which I might not emerge for some time), so I thought I might reiterate and even clarify.
Use this stuff if it’s of use, I don’t need credit, I don’t much want credit, credit weighs things down.
I am also on The Instagram (feeling understandably old after taking a tumble on Tumblr), and this is where I am now giving away my sketches. Or trying to. I guess I’m succeeding? The robots of the future will have algorithmic opinions of what to do with all our stuff, I have no doubt. Maybe they’ll make sitcoms for cyborgs with all of our dreams.
I am not good at marketing, and I am unsure if giving away one’s Things requires marketing anyhow. A wifi connection and a functioning computer seem pretty sufficient.
What does open-source (or Open Source, or OpenSource, or whatever) mean to me, in this case? That I would like to someday see something I have done somewhere else on the Internet, quite by accident when I wasn’t looking for it, being used by somebody else, and not at all unkindly, and with truth attached. The leash of attribution, I freely cut; I do not care to sign things or have them linked back to me, I feel that fetters them when they could be free.
Take this sentence, for example. I own no part of it, nor the whole of it. That it is a fairly pedestrian sentence as sentences go (they go by foot, I suppose), matters not a bit; it’s yours to dissect and then recompose.
I might also endeavour to grasp at the aether, then fall to my knees, enraptured, but please – use what you will of that and of these.
Wisdom Payload: On Blooming
Conversing with my Mum about her two Amaryllis…(es?) on the window sill this morning, and how to get them to bloom (and all about the hope that they would) and this was then said:
Mike: So they regrow every year then? [Knowing there were such plants that did and such that did not]
Mum: Yes. You cut them down, put them in a dark place, and they come back.
And then I knew that anybody could be an Amaryllis.
tiny tired typing @ the dawn of day
To me this morning and somewhat too early though never too late was given then shaped something thusly and such:
—-
Come to believing
Unfaltered receiving
A hope goes misplaced
While forgoing the grace
Unpause in this yearning
Our listen-and-learning
Your plans into pieces
They fall into place
—-
I am here, to be clear, speaking solely to myself (though of course in public, for open sharing reasons; see recent and more distant elsewheres), having struggled a lot lately with finding and fixing upon hope, like a compass, to get me through my todays and then on to better tomorrows. If it all sounds ever a bit preachy then I think that has something more to do with word association and less to do with intention.
(That last bit i think is the sound of a Canadian pulling up from an almost-apology at the last minute – or else a highly obfuscated apology; see other recent elsewheres for an unsatisfying account of this phenomenon)
I have been attending lately to spiritual teachings that resonate with me personally at this time and place, though those books are, I am led to believe, meant as a means and not as an end – the end as always is finding how best to live in harmony with the rest of life on planet Earth (and maybe someday soon, some places beyond, where we may be bound to go, and of course of those things I can’t rightly know). There are I think many means to that same end, just as we have many languaged words to mean the same things.
May you find your own kind compass in your own early dawn, and I hope to travel with and meet you, along the way and in the end.
Xo
craftsperson / criminal
Human beings mess up literally everything – we are, after all, pretty damned messed up. Ask anybody – they’ll tell you.
It makes one wonder if it’s wise or worthwhile to write anything down at all, really – and if only some things, then who gets to say which is what, and why? A hammer is a tool, and so is a sentence, and so are the structures and stories you can craft with either or both.
So be cautious where you swing those things- the best of intentions can still lead to un-mendable impressions.
My own great hope is in evolution (and quickly, please – have you seen the news lately, or worse yet, lived it?). God would agree, I think – evolution is Very Good, and She’s been asking for ours all along. It’s within our nature to have the will (He put it all there, after all), but will we change and save our Nature soon enough?
It feels at times like it must be a photo-finish – and could it be any other way, given all the terrible and beautiful things we know to be true about Us?
