Mental Health Awareness Month → Blah, Blah, Blah

 Eddie Murphy couldn't write a bigger joke. First of all, unless you have a pathogen in your brain, or cancer, aneurysm, etc., it ain't illness, it was just bad programming or it's just the way you are and you just happen to bother the rest of the people around you. Fuck 'em all, yeah I said "fuck" -- it's just a fucking word, it don't mean shit unless you let it mean shit, but then fuck would mean shit and you'd cause confusion everywhere. Second, the people who can actually bring more equanimity to the world, the ones with the power, aren't really interested in doing so. Just keep the people one or two steps away from revolting and all will be well on your yacht, otherwise, likely no yacht.  Lastly, your supposed "mental health" can and will be used against you. When we start weaponizing health (and as we currently do, cigarette smokers and health insurance, hello!) -- so, worth repeating, when we start weaponizing health, it's all over. Sure, if you are rich, go tell your sob story of whatever ailments you have, grab some sympathy and marketing clicks, but if you are poor or in the class of precarity, it's your own economic suicide to do anything but show everyone else that you have zero fucking vulnerabilities. And, while we are at it, can the corporate world stop weaponizing "empathy" -- that word doesn't belong to y'all, you don't need it anyway. 

If You Only Focus On Defending Against The Devil, Then It Will Likely Be God Who Takes You Down

If you never knew what you needed to know way back when, can you ever fault yourself? Stuff gets uninvitedly programmed for you long ago and then you get to spend a lifetime fighting stuff you can't even see. It's either pure luck or divine spirituality if the curtain gets pulled back enough for you to reach back and give the middle finger to past haunts. Even then, even if you get that miraculous chance, you still are likely to run into ego and hubris -- grasping, wants, and striving. Peace ✌️ and love ❤️, together, they make for a great salutation but if they can truly fill your heart, especially fill your heart in the moment, they complete the universal circle ∞ and the relentless torment of grasping is obliterated. Just know the ego's suspiciousness around all of this pretends to be its own god and its voice is loud. Really loud.

Grace At The Bottom Is Beautiful Stuff

Scorched earth, you look up, you look anywhere, dust rising, doubt everywhere. There's a mirror that ironically shows the horizon and you can build anything on a blank canvas. It's abyss staring in ways that could never have been previously imagined, it's living life wholly and resolutely (and somewhere Hesse smiles). And I was so wrong about stoning the abyss, -- it was sitting and staying with the abyss. Accepting, turning towards. But fuck me it ain't pleasant, stoning equals bravado, staying equals owning. Let the hurricane do its thing. I sit cross-legged on the floor, opening my hands to god. I don't know what's next, I'm scared, I accept, one foot in front of another, a new horizon. Grace to all, grace to me.

We must own and work with “our real shit” including the cleverly hidden stuff—the white lies, defensiveness, sanctimoniousness, and all those conceits that we pretend are invisible to others.

As mild as some of these may appear, at their core is the belief that our needs are more important than those of others. Arrogance, hubris, defensiveness, bravado, fear, timidity, aggression—all of these are made possible when we believe how things work out for us is primary and how things work out for others is secondary. We don’t see these subtle ploys because they are so easily cloaked by the drama of the moment. They are cloaked by all the emotional juice that comes with being defensive; they are cloaked by the scheming and strategizing that comes along with justification; they are cloaked by the fear of failure that drives us to blame others.

• Kent Alan Anderson, When Bad Lands: How Not to Numb Out, Freak Out, or Bottom Out – Buddhist Style 

 

Rumination Destroyed My Nails

Rumination also makes bearable the unbearable, perhaps shoved in a paradox you want to get out of but can't get out of. There was that lame commercial circa many years ago that heaped criticism on ending a sentence with a preposition. Well, fuck off. Fill in the object and it all makes sense. Nine months ago I sat alone in bed with Gerry Rafferty's Whatever's Written in Your Heart for at least five hours straight and tonight I’d do the same, only this time with a piece of home (song below). If you open your eyes in small moments sometimes it opens doors to big deals but then you chase the big deals and it brings you to the mountain tops and all the way down and there you go, alone, stuck in self-examination. It's (not?) up to you decide where to go from here (perhaps?).

People always ask me why do you phrase things like you were raised by a Midwestern hack? and I say "well, I was raised by a Midwestern hack."

"He spent all night staring down at the lights of L.A.

Wondering if he could ever go home"

It's a quote, therefore Googleable ^^^. You haven't quite gotten to the highlife if you haven't enjoyed the pairing of a Hostess Crunch donette and some kick-tail espresso -- espresso perhaps from a place like Revolver in Vancouver, B.C. (and if you would not, could not with a fox, I cannot help you -- there are barriers and constraints, you know!) Oh shoot, the aforementioned Seger quote, I got distracted (is it too provincial to quote Seger? It at least sounds cool, if not scholarly: Jung, Kant, Emerson, Seger, etc. Sounds good to me, and, dear god, not Pete Seeger, not that that is terrible, but there's only one Seger really and it's the Bob type. I think I'm still within a parenthesis at this moment, so, here you go -> ). Ha, I feel like I am just lost in Richard Lewis' head at times, and that's cool 'cause I presume it mostly worked out well for him. Right, so, the aforementioned quote, that's where ego gets you. I mean, eventually you can get rich enough and go live in Clam Lake or elsewhere, and that's cool and all, but what about the rest of us who set out for betterment and be-damn the point of no return, then what? I figured out my problem this week -- at least one of them: one cannot seek enlightenment and also simultaneously choose to be crushed by cynicism -- but when has cynicism not won? Ah, nope, don't answer that. I got to at least try to sleep peacefully tonight. Procrastinators always have more fun so I am going to figure this one out tomorrow. 

☮

 

The Laughable Unachievability Of Spirituality

As soon as spirituality is the goal, it's all over. No one escapes it. I think it's why I prefer sunsets to sunrises. The sun rises, alarms clocks go off, I'm checking the market, I'm dodging cruel emails, I've got goals because if I don't, someone else's goals will push me into working for his/her/their goals and you quickly learn that that's not a lot of fun. Being a lanky, undernourished, and nerdy kid, I remember this 5th grade bully shoving my 3rd-grade face into the ground and his desperate desire to want me to kiss it. Man, at some point, you just do it. It ain't your goal but life seems to work better when you align yourself with all the forces (including ground kissing) — what do they call that? Go with the flow 😆? Spirituality seeking will automatically ironically saddle you with a ton of forces that run counter to spirituality. I just don't understand it. And, the flip side, the assured path to spirituality, that is, to let it all go — give it all away, how does that not jam you under the metaphorical bully and completely diminish your emotional, spiritual, physical value to the rest of society? Man, what are we doing to ourselves? I don't have the courage to give it all away and I don't have the courage to not seek spirituality. Where do I go from here? Oh yeah, sunsets. At least with them you have hope, the brutality that is consciousness is forced to surrender to brilliant colors and the much more peaceful and manageable abstract. And night, yeah, well fuck it's distant, but at least you can close your eyes and dream. Sunsets — you get hours until "reality" hits; sunrises — you get minutes and I'll take hours over minutes any day.
"You got time to lean, you got time to clean," it's funny until it becomes not funny.

One Year Ago, The Dark Night Of My Soul

Alternative title: Takers Take What They Want And You Don't Get To Fight It -- Sit Down And Shut Up Johnny. 

I went to a funeral, to my cousin's husband's funeral. I had to miss my daughter's 14th sleepover birthday party but I was mostly OK with it because I celebrated with her on her actual birthday -- dinner, presents, and cake -- and -- being there at the beginning of life and at the end of life superficially seems to have significance. I took two books with me on my trip: Hesse's The Journey to the East and Thích Nhất Hạnh's Our Appointment with Life: Discourse on Living Happily in the Present Moment. Although I flew first class, the rest of my trip was centered around walking and public transport and being in the moment as much as possible. I was seeking something different, a new awakening, a greater spirituality. But, as flying first class might allude to, I only wanted spirituality in a rock star, look at me I'm holy and great arrogant manner. To the north, about 853 miles to the north of Cupertino, god planted a nefarious force in my life. A taker! Someone who most definitely did not have my girls' best interest in mind and although I'm no stranger to nefarious forces, this one is strong. I may not win. Now, there aren't winners in this sort of spiritual struggle, but I am patient. And, perhaps the forevermore duality of good versus evil, light versus dark doesn't end in the way George Lucas would like us all to believe, but takers aren't patient, they can't see context, and they most certainly don't understand the Pale Blue Dot. They get to the end of their selfish orgasm and toss the collateral detritus away, like a crumpled Doritos bag tumbleweeding down Interstate 5. The only game of the taker is to take and they are generally just nuisances -- until they infiltrate and impact your tribe. Fortunately, patience has never lost against a Doritos bag, so there's much more than hope. There are new avenues, more so, a new river to navigate, one that's always been there and yet never too far away (maybe the steelhead are biting too?). And the arrogance of my journey morphed into a a new book via my BFF! and when you lose everything you suffer humility and humility is the true hammer of the gods, the ambrosia for the Midwestern dolts like me. Rock on for now and evermore, here comes a hurricane! Don't believe me? Just rewind six months to the day folks, I had nothing on that day, just two dollars and a Tom Petty song -- motherfuck that slipper's gonna fit!

hot towel and Zen 🤦‍♂️

The Only Thing I Want Is To Be Warm

Well, safe and warm, but if you are from Wisconsin, you take what you can get. Meat Loaf was satisfied with 2 out of 3, but that's a pretty fucking high bar. I really only want warm but it's been elusive my whole life. God found it funny to drop me in Sheboygan and I made the most of it by starting a Johnsonville habit. I make the most of everything, you can think your way out of anything with a pedestrian pair of headphones and some old 70s rock tapes -- doesn't matter the situation. I put everything I have on the line and someday I will be warm, probably just not today.

Gotta Wonder Sometimes, If You Keep Digging For Grace, At The Bottom, Is There A Giant Box Of Irony?

Words.

Concepts.

Truth.

Strive.

Honesty.

Doubt.

Effort.

...

Keep going with the list above, you've got your own terms and you know you want to add a few. You can make each one a knot on an infinitely long (Gordian) knot ladder and climb it, or swing on it (my preference), and shit, maybe even one of those knots comes up sevens for you. "I don't know." In the last 5+ years I realize that I say this phrase like every fucking paragraph when I am having a conversation with someone. The irony is, even if I know or even if I don't know, I seem to prefix it or suffix it with "I don't know." But what do we know? What do you know? If we all knew, we'd either be a saint, luminary, billionaire, or something at least more than we are, and instead, we all buy books to find the guide to make us something more than we are. My thought for tonight was that all the fucking saints died in a sad, depressed, and miserable state, and here we are all are, chasing their supposed canonical BS and really -- likely all that they had to say was some sort contemporary meme that survived history in some ridicu-miraculous way (or was bankrolled or financed by someone who had a a vested, but non-humanitarian, interest). I don't know, you know? 

You're on the thrill of the chase and I am cowered deep in the bushes, frozen, because freezing is a skill. You're making yourself the talk of town, the most illustrious of the illustrious conquerers, but when you miss shit, that -- in and of itself -- is a very unwritten story. Perhaps that story never gets written, I'm guessing it never does, but "shit never found" doesn't surrender its allure just as well.

The Box In The Hall Is Gone

When I was a child (I thought as a child no no no no!!), I was sad and reluctant to use things that required batteries because I knew the batteries would run out of energy and that I couldn't afford to get new ones. Same with magic markers, soon they'd run out of magic and then they couldn't be used to make fanciful pictures with loop de loops to a better place, real or imaginary (in some childhoods it really fucking doesn't matter).

Stream of consciousness prose (from last year) 🤢:

The Whiskey Buddha:

Sometimes you drink the bitterness to make the sweet taste better,

There’s no BS in my blood. 

There’s unrelenting light 

There’s the arc of a madman 

There’s the edge of the moment 

As only the moment knows. 

There’s blistering demand 

To the Demian path

To the things that shatter comfort

And ring the silenced bells 

There’s no pageant with a permit,

My sandwich board don’t have no neon lights. 

There’s demand

There’s demand

There’s demand

To take the pain for the gold,

To paint pictures with loops and curls,

To admonish the mirror, 

To the appointment with the stone.

Deliberate prose 🤮-- written for my beautiful cat who never wanted to let go -- better to have known (than not at all) for absolute sure. Carry on: strength, perseverance, resilience, adaptability!!! 

The box in the hall is gone,

It's tangled in the earth.

And the price that it takes to love,

Is set by the cost of the hurt.

You followed the road to yourself,

To its appointed end,

You never looked back

To the things that might have been.

The light from nothing

Is always there when you're down.

And your light from nothing will be here

When you're gone.

 

The Only Real Courage Is To Give It All Away

I think I am on the brink of this ^ title tonight. Why fight it? You know your truth and forever is a mighty long time -- and this is something I very much learned in my Minneapolis days. And your truth might be the truth but proving it would take eternal energy and all I've got for you (or all you've got for me) is what remains for tonight. I can't even find Lorna Doone's in Seattle anymore, so, what does that mean? Don't be a Capricorn in December? I think it all goes back to the moment. If you want a good moment, spend it with me. If you want a bad moment, spend it with me. I'm both sides of the yin and yang -- it makes it hard when you are betting on the Sunday Night Football game. I've had to stare into some exceptionally challenging things in life and there's zero reward for this. I mean, you may win a game of pool along the way, tell a joke where someone laughs, write a blog post that gets 2+ hits, but where's truth? Where's belonging? I used to believe in sacred shit until someone told me that sacred is just a word that someone invented. On the other hand, I do believe in rivers and Steller's Jays and moments that were meant to be -- and the aggregation of moments, they are the defining pillars of my life. "Save my life I'm going down for the last time" -- I heard that once buying a $1.25 schooner of beer. I was dumb enough believe it. 

Sparkly-Rainbow Was My Daughter's Favorite Color For About Five Years

Sparkly-Rainbow, I get it now, all the colors jammed into one, but that's not enough so you gotta add sparkles to it. Which, inside joke to my non-readers, I still keep promising that I am going to write about sparklers and don't do it. Today at least, we got as close as sparkly and that's going to have to suffice. Sparkly-rainbow represents my emotional state for the past month, all the feelings jammed into one and then add sparkles, 'cause shit, once you are on the roller coaster, make it higher, make it lower, put the cars on backward, let's go. This isn't a bad thing. Well, it is if you are trying to go all Fortune-500 and hide from vulnerabilities and make some sort of impression that can be indelibly printed on a CV. I don't know, we have all these societal ills that could simply solved by real, deep dialogue but then when someone genuinely opens his/her mouth everyone else in the room freaks out and points the collective finger of shame. Everyone is just trying to figure it out, are we not able to give everyone her/his/their grace? And, while I can see the upside to social media, I think social media has really buried truth so far into the ground, it's never coming back. Everything's got to be perfect for now and evermore. Marketing was genius 1950 - 2000 and now marketing is just an insidious presence that no one has any grip on. Ouch! I need to catch myself. This whole post was supposed to be about how old school y'all can't all be wrong was an unfortunate arrogant take about falling into depression and how new school y'all can't all be wrong is a transcendence of that state of mind -- and, it generally has been, but then that first "paragraph" just happened. Maybe the new blog version is just sparkly-rainbow, a preschooler's definition of karma.

I can find joy in that today is September 1st, which could be just a day or could be any date. Or, I can attach meaning to it. It's up to me, and that's the point. Gotta find joy in your environment because when you do, your environment finds joy in you. 

I wrote while listening to many songs tonight, likely all of them (and add sparkles) -- so while the non-marketing decision would have been to choose David Bowie's Let's Dance, I'm going with the varnish of marketing tonight, sap and 70s beer commercial all in one, and hey, Fee Waybill, so it can't be all that bad! 

All The Feel Good You Ever Need Is Captured On Both Sides Of The First Cheap Trick Album

I heart being from the Midwest because to me, "being from the Midwest" means that you are capable of riding in the back of pickup truck, on a hot summer day, on a country road, cheap American beer in hand, and that's all you need. As if the universe collapsed back into a singularity of just you in the truck at that moment and completeness was completed: bliss, nirvana, pick a term. I left the Midwest for California because as a kid in a band in the late 80s, all the cool stuff happened in California: the weather better (truth), the women hotter (partial truth 😆), the music better (umm...) and if only you could get yourself in a van and drive to LA, all your dreams would manifest and life would be lived happily ever after. Well, shoot, I never even made it to California, I flirted with San Francisco, enough so to call on a few apartments, but then I asked a potential employer if I needed a car. The answer? "Kid, this is California, everyone has a car." As an alternative and like everyone else in the Midwest, I moved to Washington State, the poor person's California (and safer too, no hair bands and no women that David Lee Roth would have sung songs about) and this is home. But I will forever miss the Midwest and the polarization of folks (current Zeitgeist) pains me beyond belief because I lived in both worlds and seeking disagreement between the two seems so forced and artificial to humankind. Don't believe me? Pick two random people and put them in the same room with a six pack of beer between them and watch what happens. Face to face, people almost aways try to find what's common and harmonize with each other. 

OK, enough of that ^, don't have enough time today to solve the world's problems, but, yeah, Cheap Trick and their first album, there are no hits but in aggregate it's bliss, it's Midwestern joy at its best, it's a bottle of feel good that you can pour at any moment, and maybe in the 40 minutes it takes to listen to the whole thing, you can forget about polarization and think more about the back of that pickup truck. 

The Original Title Of This Post Was "Freedom At Point Zero" But No, Delays, Always Delays! Why Delays?

Well, I wrote the "Hillary Wins!" narrative and then Trump fucking won the election. Then what to do? Only so many bottles of rosé that you can consume and that's just a path to emptiness; empty bottle, empty soul and I want neither of those things. I wanna listen to the Steller’s* jays tell me their stories on a river's edge because maybe someday I'll get a 'C' or a 'V' in my title but the only fulfillment I need is a great piece of music, an awesome stereo, and well, maybe just me alone, but a coterie of music freaks, intellectual junkies, and spirits who can dance with words, I want them in my heart too. Writing exhausted again because I like writing exhausted, I like metal on metal. If you are looking for liberation, try all 4 parts of Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music on repeat, then get back to me and we will compare notes (I may be writing to Metal Machine Music right now). Truthfully, just bail out of Metal Machine Music, it's bad advice and it will lead to nothing good. Freedom at point zero is never far away, live your life in truth and with integrity, maybe pick up some Hesse influence along the way, and always fight the good fight because a clear conscience is requisite for transformation and transcendence. Sure, grab a six pack of Pabst (every now and then), put on Lou Reed's Rock 'n' Roll Animal, and grab a hold of stuff when's it right in front of you, because, you know, and I will just say it, when it gets too far away, it's too far away. Rock on Milwaukee (and any other city that you may reside in!)

*It's very messed up that a bird name has an apostrophe in it -- how do you even fucking deal with the scenario when a Steller's jay possesses something? Seriously, I may get a 'C' in my title but that just makes me want to quit. 

Grace

Grace is the greatest word ever invented. I learned the word, likely in my Catholic days, but like everything religion, I was just praying to god that we could skip the 2nd and 4th verses and just get home to watch football. Some families say it before dinner too, but I never really thought about what it means. It's like the word sudden, everyone says it, and everyone is fucking convinced that you cannot talk about part of a sudden, but no one really knows what sudden means. I currently have grace metaphorically wrapped around my left wrist in the form of a silver metal bracelet that my sister gave to me when I was in high school. The bracelet is a constant reminder that I've come a long way. I used to never take it off and then hubris said it's OK not to wear it and not wearing it led to sameness and catastrophe. I don't think I'll ever take it off now. People say don't be superstitious and/or believe in the small things that seem to point to fate -- and then you don't wear your lucky socks and then your sports team loses the big game and then you know it -- it was your fault! I'm going to wear my bracelet and my lucky socks!
Grace is hard, grace is like all the hard words: love, hate, anger, elation, betrayal, guilt, they're all easy when you are smoking your cigar, rejoicing on your front porch, drinking espresso and reviewing your brokerage accounts gains from the last decade. So easy to talk about those words when you are removed from them. There should be a law that you are not allowed to expound about grace unless you've been flattened and are in the middle of something where giving grace is the very last fucking thing you'd ever want to do. Someone said that "life sucks and then you die" but it's really "life's tough and then you die." I'm so utterly fascinated and challenged by grace because in some sense you can only learn grace by suffering and empathy and who really signs up for those things anymore? I also have no idea if I can even succeed. (I know I write cryptically, just protecting the innocent, but, god, tonight, I would so ❤️to name all the names). And, not once, but twice in my life I traded a million+ dollars for wisdom, so there's that and that's painful (and who does that?) and I don't even know if I can survive that. But, with grace, it's starts with yourself and you can inwardly examine and love and hurt and cry and then when you survive that, then you can direct it outward, and you're gonna get hurt, likely not permanently, but it will happen -- and, if you transcend, then you will know what it really means to give grace.

The Other Side Of Sparklers

I keep promising writing about sparklers and maybe it's just bait and switch? But it's necessary to consider the other side of sparklers, 'cause you learn something when you go through turnstiles enough. Temper the highs, boost the lows. Got a lesson today from the book I mentioned in my previous post: 

"how much more questionable is the accuracy of our thoughts when bad lands and we are breaking apart? How rooted in reality are our thoughts when we are in emotional upheaval, our stress levels are high, we are traumatized, or we are struggling with PTSD? When we get hijacked by the amygdala and we are deep in fight-or-flight mode, we will say or do almost anything to save ourselves."

For context the quote is in a chapter where the theme is "not believing everything you think" -- so when the spark hits in darkness, what to do with it? It was dark and now the spark hints at direction and you want to chase it. Is chasing it saying or doing almost anything to save yourself? Not chasing it doesn't seem correct either. I guess I can just think both thoughts (chase/don't chase) and then I can choose which of those thoughts I don't want to believe! That's how we would do it in the Midwest -- you just kind of keep tweaking the wheel until it lines up with the sentiment you are comfortable with. Ha, sure, that's funny, but it's the control boat again, who is really steering it? Nobody seems to want to answer that question (and I need to write about this soon!). 

One thing is certain for me tonight, if sparklers had a song, it would be this:

Just Gonna Have To Admit Exhaustion

I know I promised sparklers and I will deliver, but writing about sparklers requires energy that I don't have tonight. I put a lot on the line today, spiritually, emotionally, and physically. Got a great workout in under the hot sun. Had I become a rock star, I would have played all my gigs shirtless in the blazing sun (here's looking at you Phil Collen -- cannot believe I just referenced Phil Collen). For me, the sun only gives and I lost my stuff during the 2017 eclipse. I will forever chase them. Maybe I only get energy when I exhaust myself? But exhaustion is not defeat and if anything a single spark in the sparklers I've promised burned more brightly this afternoon, perhaps even danced. I'm not sure, but like the good Wisconsin kid I am, I'm drinking 50/50 soda under the ascetical sun during my ascetical summer (2020 style) and I can now return to my co-studies with my BFF in the book that we are jointly reading: When Bad Lands -- pulling things back to a personal lens, to something I can own and forget about narratives beyond my control. From the book:

I engineered this hurricane of self-deception. I designed it. I was lost, and without any planning, I steered myself into a dead-end that forced me to choose to either be a coward or to wake up.

I don't know what my point is, other than to say that I am truly exhausted and yet also waking up -- but also that today was off the charts in the energy plane and I guess you gotta pay attention to that? Because what else is there? I mean, machine learning and statistical analysis can take you a long way there, but only sensing gets you beyond the door.

I Used To Have The Courage To Write Two-Line Posts

And now I don't, but the next post will be about sparklers so it will all be worth it (even without sparklers, but, I promise sparklers and more than two lines, so, ha!).

Gotta Post Quickly Before The Chariot Turns Back Into A Pumpkin

Awesome moonset tonight and then I looked at the clock and realized it's been exactly six months since the start of my dark night of the soul. I'm guessing the moonset is the semaphore of change. Dark nights apparently start benignly, long before catastrophe really strikes. You'll know it when you look back but you'll never know it in the moment. Mine was about Zen books and walking everywhere and reconnecting to me. Then I looked at lemons in a tree, heard the hummingbirds overhead and looked down at my glass of wine from a post-funeral reception. There was a cool reflection in the wine glass and I shot it with my iPhone. That was the beginning and I was innocent in the moment, as I have always been. You can vomit on your dark nights but I realize that mine will lead me to greater heights and it all starts in about 15 minutes and you'd better believe that the slipper's gonna fit. 

RIP Peter Green

BFF!

The coolest thing that has ever been said to me was by my best high school friend -- and, perhaps I wasn't her best friend, but I'm willing to admit my vulnerabilities. I want to admit my vulnerabilities. On the back of her senior picture to me, she wrote:

"...don't change (too much)"

And that stuck with me. The necessary canonical part of me that jammed energy into the world, that rocked other worlds up and down. Holy shit, really? don't change? I'd never considered the impact of me upon my environment. It's important to note here that this was a platonic relationship and the lack of other motives strengthens the impact and genuineness of her quote. To that end, she's someone that to this day, I can surf on into her house (like I did a few nights ago) and talk deeply and introspectively and there is trust and respect and loyalty, AND, her husband (thanks B!) trusts the situation. I mean, how fucking cool is that? And, I have done the work, put the energy into this where my trust is honored and respected. Namaste! 

Too much

Those two words of her quote are playful but also a caveat because of course we must change and I have. She gave me a new word this week, adaptability -- something that I know about but haven't considered too much, and, not that I haven't adapted, I just haven't pondered it. It's time. It's also painful, but it's time. Someone told me just yesterday that you cannot transcend until you have confronted grief directly and compassionately, with grace and acknowledgment. And hah, I definitely haven't been there, but, here I am, with open arms, navigating the darkest waters, turning things loose that need to be turned loose and looking to the horizon, perhaps Kerouac style, but more likely and more accurately Pirsig style (fuck that was a long sentence!). Pirsig bled in his book and, then, THEN!, he lost his son. That's grief and I surely don't know what grief is! 

This ↓ BTW, is the worst album cover of all time, but, it's an amazing song. Namaste!