I had a very clear goal

When I started this post.
Its been two months.
I want to contribute to the expanding web of literature poetry prose and opinion on the internet, in print.
But I cant keep up! Queue hands in the air!
I’m still catching up with everything that led up to this point!
Words are pouring out of me at all times!
I’ve got to take some time to write them down.

Its been….two months? since I last touched this blog. This is why.
How do artists find the time to blog? Read everything? See everything?

The internet is like a library, packed with people reading in every section, but everyone has the option to see through everyone else’s eyes, read what any/every given person is reading/thinking, one at a time, a few at a time, all at once, as much as one can handle. Also, the books in the library are multiplying by the thousands everyday.

The internet makes me feel nervous, excited, inadequate, creative. But I can’t keep up.

The days that I don’t go to use the internet at some coffee shop or bar, I feel calm. I read a book, feel inspired, close the book and pick up my notebook. I pick up newspapers off of the seat next to me on the bus. I listen to the radio. The transcripts of thousands thinking outloud speak only when spoken to.

These are symptoms of life in a closed system, a white dome. A beautiful white dome, thick with moss and light, but a dome. I am not made aware of what others are doing, printing, drawing, singing. There are countless literary magazines where little freaks like me are finding their audiences. Who tells them where to submit? Who tells them who to read? How do they all find each other?

I have no shortage of reading material/authors to worship. The flow of material from my head is a raging spring. I follow my own path without issue until I start exploring the net and see every-thing/one that I’m not reading, all the places that I could be submitting.

But I cannot read everything at once, nor do I have any idea what kinds of publications would accept my writing. Hell, I don’t even have any real writers reading my stuff to tell me if its any good. I pass it out to my family and friends and they either tell me that its great or that they dont know how to read poetry. The random times I’ve sent my stuff to another poet/artist, I didnt get any response.

I don’t mean to complain, I am really more confused that anything else. Thus, my answer is school and patience. To keep doing what I am doing, deep breaths while researching, and expose myself to events that will force me into rooms with other writers/artists.

Everyone had good intentions.

Egyptians bad at following directions

Mubarak spoke and he expected everyone to shrug their shoulders and go home. Now the recently instated vice president is saying that there will be no negotiations until the protests stop. That is ridiculous. If this were a bunch of Americans, they would probably do what they were told and go home. These people have been dealing with corruption for far too long to just go home now.

With condescending announcements like this, things are only going to get worse from here. Especially because Mubarak supporters are choosing now to make their presences known via molotov cocktails and random assaults on anti-government protestors (while the protestors form human chains to keep the Mubarak supporters out of Tahrir Square). The military, that was keeping the peace in the past week and a half, is now threatening violence to those who don’t go home now. Go check out the live stream at Al Jazeera, no one is going home. People are just getting worked up.

Stay tuned, folks.

UPDATE: The Egyptian government’s secret police are seeding themselves among the Mubarak supporters to lead them into the square and incite violence.

Mubarak wont step down now but in the “few months remaining” of his term.

Mubarak has just addressed the people of Egypt, saying that he will fulfill his final term as president and calls on both houses of parliament to re-examine the terms of candidacy for presidency. The people are chanting, live, out of my computer “Leave! Leave!”

While the people Egypt are screaming for him to leave, I cant help but note that Mubarak did make an interesting point in his address. He said that “political forces at work” are mostly responsible for the violence that occurred and the media coverage of it (which may or may not be why he banned the internet and Al Jazeera from the country). While this is clearly the self-defense mechanism of a corrupt government, there may be some truth to it.

This story has exploded across the world in the past week while protests in the Arab world, namely in Tunisia, have been occurring for over a month. But why the coverage now? Revoltuions are no common thing but unrest in the Middle East is something we’ve been conditioned to expect, from the point of view of westerners who have been at war for a decade. Perhaps its just more Western liberal mentality but one has to wonder what strings are being pulled behind the scenes, at least as far as filtering information goes.

The U.S. government is being demonized by Egyptians as supporting the corrupt government of Mubarak. It looks very bad for the an administration that seeks a second term to have ever stood on the side of a leader like Mubarak. Naturally to follow, the press continuously reiterates that Obama has spoken with Mubarak not to run again as this story rips across the internet.

Other forces he could have been referring to are the ones who could be grabbing for power in Egypt. The Muslim Brotherhood, according to one exiled professor interviewed by Al Jazeera, accounts for 20% of the people in Tahrir Square. Mubarak stepping down now may create a power vacuum; how to choose a non-corrupt leader in this youth culture revolution?

There have been precedents for this kind of thing in other countries, and the results have been all over the map (so to speak). The coverage is focusing on the voices rising from the streets, their anger and certainty of their desires. But what is the next step if the president steps down? In the past thirty years, he has created a system of bribes and negotiation. Parliament and the police force are in the palm of his hand. Even as I write this- the national television in Egypt is broadcasting video tribute-montages of Mubarak and his wife, to reiterate the pride with which he spoke of his years in office during the address.

No one can say what is going to happen, nor can they say what should happen. All we know is that the people want him out now. His administration and his media are attempting to soften his image as he says he wont run again, but behavior in the past five minutes may suggest he is giving himself, in these final months, another chance. Here’s to hoping this isn’t the beginning stages of Egypt’s collapse.

North Africa

I dont understand- Tunisia has been in revolt for the past month. Egypt only followed suit in the past week and now everyone is talking about Egypt- but not Tunisia. This is happening all over North Africa but because Egypt has all of the familiar trappings of a media trope- westerners can now give a damn.

Strictly Platonic

(click to enlarge)

The Way

I’m pretty list-obsessive (as the little wolf will confirm). Here is a list of guidelines for life that I made a while ago while surrounded by dogs, (I am posting it now because I could use reminders like this…well… every day, actually):

The Way

+Keep magic close, all around you.
+Avoid controllers and attention seekers (or teach them the way).
+Do not fall for tropes.
+Expose yourself to the disturbing, seek its beauty.
+There is no reason to lie or withhold truth.
+Need nothing, be self-sufficient.
+Fear no one, let no one fear you.
+Beware complication- seek the old ways.
+Know the goings on of the world.
+Know when to hold your tongue and when to speak.
+Do not compare yourself to others.
+Do not hate yourself for not being some version of yourself you think you could/should be.
+Neither let anger control you nor seek to control your anger- work with it.
+Rejoice when you would complain.
+Remember- the universe is not your instrument, rather, you are one of a trillion of its faces, created so that it may experience a different aspect of itself, through the filter of you and in the eyes of others, and in this way, you are an instrument of the universe. Use your will to do right by the universe, that is yourself, that is everyone and everything.
+Expect nothing from anyone.
+Expect nothing.
+Never propose to know what is the best for someone else.
+Never propose to know the story or lot of another.
+Seek ascension, not perfection. Dig deep to ascend high. Understand your own history and with that information, learn your own way and live it every moment for the betterment of yourself and others.

That Morning Guilt

Waking up in the morning and running through my list of bookmarked new sources can act both as a necessity of brotherhood and a catalyst for guilt by inactivity.

The struggle of the human condition spans the entire globe and stretches from the orphaned infant the leader of the highest super-power. It is our duty as people with access to regularly updated information to make ourselves aware of the struggles of our brothers and sisters.

There is little need to gripe over the number of Americans who, by choice or ignorance, turn a blind eye to these topics. It would be a close call to have to choose which is worse: those who don’t want to know or the ones who do yet do nothing about it.

It would be near impossible to keep track of every global war, uprising, natural disaster, genocide, corrupt government and social injustice (just to name a few possibilities) without devoting all of ones life to one or all of these events.

What we can do is read the news before we have to head off to work, but there is only so much we can read. We could donate money but where do we draw the line? We don’t know where that money goes, anyway, and how do we choose who deserves our dollar more?

So we scan our sources, read about the uprisings in Tunisia and insider accounts of North Korea’s regime. We can do our duty.

After we are finished reading (if we read) we are likely going to read some bright and shiny posts on our favorite blogs, or go mentally criticize the fashion at the latest award show. We are going to blast some feel-good music from our car stereos on the way to work and fantasize about the coming weekend where we are going to drink ourselves silly.

The fact is, one can never know everything that is going on in the world. We can pay close attention and watch as much CSPAN as possible and listen to NPR from morning til night, but we can’t know everything. And even if we do, it really only serves as a conversation topic. We aren’t helping the cause. How could we? Everyone has seen the bumper sticker “If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention!” Well, what do the people who are paying attention do with this outrage? There is much to be outraged about! People are still pumping dirty, bloody gas into their cars, they are still buying unethical meat, still buying into institutions that practice discrimination- and that’s just in this country.

The most action taken, that I have seen, short of heading over to the country in question or appealing to the United Nations, is taken by bloggers, reporters and politicians. These are the people who bring the news of all of these terrifying tales to our computer/television screens. The reporters may be in the thick it, or simply processing information streaming from it through various mediums. The bloggers process all of this, post it to libcom and Wikipedia, and send out the petitions. Often they are connected to groups like Amnesty International or the ACLU. That’s where the politicians come in. These are the people with the power to make change. Whether or not they want to make change is another story. The image of the politician with his or her own agenda is a cliché but one that maintains itself pretty well (we seem to be living in an age of flip-flopping talking heads).

Each of these groups, with or without their varying levels of devotion to their various causes, still make up a miniscule subset of the population with access to news. They are in a constant struggle to get people to pay attention. The flow of action seems to stop here.

At the end of the day, it becomes an issue of the fittest surviving. Those of us lucky enough to be the ones reading about these tragedies get to step away from them and live in our thinly veiled paradise. Once I’ve posted this, I’ll get up, shower and head down the hill for a job interview. If I’m lucky, I’ll get the job and start spending those hard-earned dollars on luxury items like candles and books and neat new clothes and way cool records. I’ll write self-centered poetry. Maybe I’ll write poetry about the pain and corruption wafting into the atmosphere but it will just be another useless shout into the aether. I’ll still keep doing what I’ve got to do to survive, just like everyone else, without taking any real action to fight the injustice felt by my fellow human.

Hence: that morning guilt.

I Just Woke Up

WAKE wake WAKE wake

Yesterday I meditated for ten minutes. TEN MINUTES? what? That is nothing! you say.

Ten minutes, yo. I thought ten minutes would feel like an eternity, I didn’t think I would get through it. I thought I would open my eyes to check the clock, I thought my boyfriend would poke his head in to check on me and I would mentally collapse. When I am literally waiting for time to pass, ten minutes usually feels like an hour. My ADHD homies can attest to this. Thankfully, this ten minutes was a different beast.

I decided that I would meditate while doing this skin treatment I am supposed to do every other day. It requires me to wet my body, lather, step out of the shower and wait as I shiver my balls into yesteryear for ten minutes until I can rinse off and finish the normal shower. I thought it would be good to have some kind of anchor or test (being freezing cold) that would gauge how far from my senses I could drift. So I jumped in the shower, lathered, got out of the shower, folded a towel onto the floor, set the alarm on my phone for ten minutes forward and, without drying off, sat cross-legged on the towel resting my wrists at my knees.

Fighting against my chattering teeth, I closed my eyes and I envisioned the inside of my house. In my mind, I was standing in the middle of the living room, which is roughly the middle of my house. The little wolf was in the kitchen, then at the desk. He was really just a shadow- or I was a shadow- and he couldn’t see me. It felt like we were operating on different planes- both somewhat aware of each other but indifferent because we “weren’t” occupying the same space.

Looking around my living room, I tried to expand my mind, literally, to occupy its entire space, to feel its shape. The shelves he built were sharp and blocky. The little plants on the shelves were rubbery and dying. The bookshelves were over-cluttered. I could feel the weight of the books on the taller shelf, I felt that it could collapse at any time, it being very old and leaning slightly to he right. The sofa on the other side of the room was a cluster of springs and taught threads- it had a feeling of strained desperation- it was marked with some kind of energy stain that explained why it was so difficult to sit on sometimes (its cushions always slip and slide out of place). The kitchen felt the most comfortable. Nothing in there was sharp or strained or abrasive. Everything in there was warm, as if the same kitchen existed in several worlds and every one of its occupants loved it fully, and it loved us back.

One might think that this little exercise took the whole of the ten minutes. On the contrary, I felt all of these things at once. It took much focus, if I hadn’t forced myself to turn back to the exercise, all of the sensory distractions would have led me out in a few seconds.

Once I filled the house as completely as I could (for unexplained reasons, I couldn’t even enter the bedroom, something deflected me as soon as I focused on it and with that feeling came the knowledge that I did not want to go in there) I did what I had been imagining since I first started to consider meditation.

I became a seed.

I took the entire expansive form that my consciousness had become, that filled the whole house, and compressed it into a seed. With it came the images of the house and everything in it. I was a seed in a white space. But I did not want to think of white, I wanted the space around me to be empty. As soon as I thought of this, the white started to dissipate. The space around me faded, like clouds drifting away to reveal a black sky. It didn’t stay black for long. Instead it took on a glassy nature, like a stack of translucent paper. It was the absence. I had to focus very hard on maintaining this emptiness. The mind’s natural state is to be full, occupied. I had to fight against this or else the seed that was me would have busted open to birth a galaxy of thought.

Once the space around me had been empty for some time (I had imagined about two minutes had gone by at this point, but it could have been a few seconds or an hour, time was the first thing to drift away) I was suddenly aware of a tunnel directly beneath me. I could face downward, looking out from the belly of the seed, and see down into the tunnel. It wasnt bottomless but I could not see the bottom. Lights were reflected onto the sides of it- like the light that dances at the bottom of a swimming pool reflected from the surface of the water on a sunny day. This tunnel was good. I knew I could drop down it if I wanted, as if I had already seen this, as if it was the most natural feeling in the world.

Before I knew it I was at the bottom of a lake. I had dropped down the tunnel but I had not been aware of it at the time. I simply found myself at the bottom of a lake. No longer was I a tiny brown seed. Now I was a smooth black rock, one that would fit in the palm of your hand. I could look up to the surface of the water. The sun was out. There were slim little silver fish swimming over me, bits of moss and lake sludge drifted by. I could look to my left and see that this like was a big lake. I could see through its waters clearly and there were thousands of other stones just like me. But I barely thought of them. Looking back now I am surprised I didn’t pay more attention to the other stones.

There was something in the water with me. I never saw it or heard it but I felt it. I never even really thought about it, I just knew it was there. It was keeping me in the form of the stone. It also had a high level control over what I could do and look at. I couldn’t have left the form of this stone if I wanted to. I could look up at the surface of the water, I could look to my left but my attention was trapped. It wasnt uncomfortable. It felt important, as if it was trying to show me something. I decided to looked down. I could only see darkness but that was only because I was looking down into the lakebed. Then it hit me.

Where is this lake? What is on the outside of the lake? The other thing in the water, I felt, had a flicker of satisfaction. It had wanted me to feel the outside of the lake. It wanted me to feel the shape of the lake, to feel that I was this stone and that the bottom was right below me. I had figured it out, or I was about to- figure something out- what was I trying to figure out?

This is when the alarm on my phone went off.

My eyes snapped open and my chest jumped. I hadn’t been expecting that. I had forgotten about the alarm and the bathroom and the house. When I said “That was ten minutes?” out loud to myself, it didn’t feel like I was saying it. It felt like my head was just talking, the way its trained to, with one of its trained responses. The feeling stayed when I stood up and walked to the shower.

Before I turned the water on, I realized my body was quite warm. It wasnt cold but it wasnt exactly dry either. I had forgotten completely that I had been cold. As I stepped under the water’s stream I realized the “going through the motions” feeling I was having was akin to what I’ve seen trauma victims do after the trauma- the way someone with a concussion has no idea their head is bleeding and they driftily insist that they have to go to bed because they have work in the morning. I felt like a disconnection from my body as it washed itself. I had to slowly return to myself. By the time I stepped out of the shower again, the bathroom felt like it had before I meditated. I stepped out of the bathroom in a towel and say my little wolf sitting at the desk in front of the window.

A slight feeling of surprise washed over me, at what, though, did not occur to me.

For the rest of the day I felt like tiny links in my joints had been unlocked. I felt a degree of control over my body I haven’t known in years. All of these feelings were very slight but I felt that they could have been emphasized and broadened.

This was an unguided meditation- I didn’t consult any traditional forms or thought processes, I just followed what came naturally. I did cross my legs and I had to correct my posture several times. I could have paid more attention to my breathing. My plan is to continue on the path of natural discovery and eventually, when I have reached places that confuse me or keep me from moving further, I will start to consult older forms and practices. For now I have got to take this one day at a time.

Why do I want to meditate?

I spent last night and most of today studying Wikipedia’s page on meditation. I knew that it would be an extensive history but I did not know how many forms of it there were. It’s quite dizzying to think about. Where does one begin? After becoming exhausted with note-taking I realized that making sure I knew about all of the forms meditation can take doesn’t matter for me right now. I should be asking myself why I want to meditate. What do I want to accomplish by studying meditation? What do I want it to do for me, or, what do I want to do for myself?

A brief list outlining why I want to meditate:

-To touch the things behind the veil, those things I perceive in the room between my sensory perception and my imagination.
-To explore the logical conclusions I have come to about the nature of the universe.
-To test the limits of my mind.
-To achieve a level of focus that allows me to perform the tasks I’m always trying to start/finish; from creative endeavors to home improvement projects to personal study.
-To love fully.
-To perceive, in full , the world I live in, to carefully examine the beauty, function and connectedness of all things.
-To make the most of this life.
-To meet my highest potential of mind, body and function.
-To access and surpass, with only my mind, levels and planes which are usually only accessible through the use of psychedelics.

It’s a long road ahead.

Just- Do you see it?

The reason I want to create is to make windows into the world of symbols, the immaterial world of thought, of immateriality.

I want to live in that world, to exist both at the atomic level and the level of the whole, within everyone and…what if I am living in everyone and I am just experiencing what this person is experiencing but to experience anyone’s perspective it must be taken on its own, without any glimpses of any other-

I already live in that world. I just don’t see it around me, nor do I do any work to perceive it. All I do is fantasize about it, like a kid who wants to participate the Olympica but never ran a mile in his life.

The erowid vaults fall far short in the way of instruction. There must be people in this world who can access those planes of existence without any kinds of drugs. Those would be the kind of people who are existing constantly on that plane, rather than occasionally visiting it like tourists.