In order to survive, you have to harness your own brilliance.  Brilliance is the process of loving those things which appear to be ugly at first.  By examining their ugliness, you discover their beauty.  Things that are not pleasant become pleasant when they are given space, and allowed the privilege of moving.  Things are happening on their own – you just have to tune in, very gently, and appreciate that.  Then a lot of problems start to melt away.

Let’s say you want to stop drinking, because you’ve been depressed and hangovers are awful if you’re truly depressed.  The wisest person befriends the part of their mind that arises, that considers staying away from alcohol.  And they simply wait, and let the whole situation pass by.  Then they are left without having consumed alcohol.  They befriended the confusion, and it helped them wait it out.

But how to befriend the mind?  Well, you have to start somewhere.  By becoming aware of where you are, you can celebrate that aspect.  If a friend tells you a local avant garde museum is gorgeous, you might initially feel appalled.  This museum is, after all, objectively ugly – you’ve been there!  But in truth, it is not objectively ugly – the person who enjoyed it learned to appreciate the strangeness in there, and once they saw how beautiful it was, they couldn’t unsee it.  They eventually become bored, perhaps, but that is a better way to feel than afraid.

If they were smart, they even appreciated the security guards and the other attendees.  They realized the whole situation was avant garde, and the challenge of appreciation was enlivening.

As time goes you, you start to link up your compassion with mindfulness more and more. You discover that awareness of anything can be an exercise of compassion.  You walk into a room you have to clean, and feel perturbed.  But then, you fall in love with how messed up the room is, and how step-by-step you can clean it up.  And how you can watch that improvement, in real-time.  As you soften and watch the dirt settle, watch the space reveal itself, you use that scariness as encouragement to clean it.

Since we are social creatures, this process becomes very social.  You start to realize that it’s actually an incredibly wise investment to love other people, because they’re connected to you.  Loving them is loving yourself.  And it will definitely come back to benefit you.

Something I’ve been thinking about lately is how essential it is, in today’s world, to control the opinions that you allow into your mind.  There are so many decently intelligent people out there who can express almost any idea with a modicum of intellectual gravity.  You’ll read it, feel a spark of passion, and believe them.

I know that there are many forces converging on each person, pressuring them to have certain opinions.  While we should strive to reconcile our opinions with others, please listen to your heart and also, share that opinion with people who are close to you.

I know it feels almost impossible to challenge political people, whether they are right wing or left wing.  It is also a dangerous thing to do because it can go so poorly that you walk away, having sat through a two-hour long political debate during what was supposed to be a nice holiday meal with your family.

However: once you’ve mastered your mind a bit.  Once you’ve learned how to meditate and you see thoughts less as things to indulge in, and more as sensations.  Once your heart begins to open up to the tragedies of this world.  Challenge yourself.

Embrace the difficult opinions, but simultaneously, if a view is hurting you too much…don’t be afraid of considering that it is simply too heavy to take it ultra-seriously.

There is a feeling, sometimes, that modern society is about to dissolve back into some primordial soup.  Everything will become Mad Max, and we’ll revert back to “primitive” ways of being.  All of the aggression stored up online will pour out into the physical brutality of this new world.

But what if that isn’t the case?  What if the world is actually evolving?  Even though being born into the present age feels almost impossible – impossible, given the chances – and you assume that it only happened because this whole “advanced society thing” is cyclical and we’re bound to revert eventually…what if returning to the old world is actually simply impossible, for all of us?  The reverberations of the modern age won’t go away.

If things do revert after some kind of World War III, those generations will be haunted by what was even if they’re fighting with sticks and stones.  So that new primitive landscape will still be irreversibly affected by what happened here.  In a way, we can still hear the croon of old, dead Martian civilizations when we glance up at that mysterious, Red dot.

Clearly you can flee from life, back into nature.  But only sort of.  And the most successful people find some kind of an equanimity with technology.  They figure out ways to escape into nature while still partaking in this place.

OK.  Here are some more cool ideas!  Let’s just get all of the fringe cool ideas out of my system.  What if hyper-advanced technology is already available?  But it requires advanced intelligence, so those of us who are too dull to see it (at the moment) can’t get it?  So in a sense, what we see out there – this world – is just a fringe world, given to us out of compassion because we are the ones who aren’t wise enough (yet) to get to the hyper-advanced-future-scape.  Woah dude!

Is full of activity.

Cuts slowly healing,

Stresses introduced and receding…

Friends appearing and disappearing and

Wonderful things coming and…

 

A walk through the cemetery makes it all too clear

What happens.

Lord knows what horrors occurred in every abandoned

Castle during its final days.

 

And some people die peaceful deaths

Surrounded by lovers.

 

While I turn memories into copies of copies,

So too does this world.

Visceral historical accounts become

Distant things impatiently memorized.

 

In the end,

All of reality comes crashing back in.

 

In the end,

We can’t keep the weather out of our house;

We can’t wear coats and pants and shoes outside;

Death rushes into us and destroys everything.

 

A human life is very precious.

 

There are so many possibilities.

There are wise people inviting us into their homes

Every evening;

And there’s endless opportunity for artists…

 

Best not take it too seriously, or lightly…

 

So much can be transmitted among people…

And how beautiful our own song is!

It’s clearest in early memories

When the world was still

Unfamiliar.

 

When we could see the whole thing and premonition

What was about to come.

We heard the song as we were lead inside.

 

Maybe the wise can lead us back to that way

Of experiencing.

Bear with me!

If it were so that,

When you gaze out into the night sky,

You were seeing everything without delay…

That is,

You were seeing the Universe in real-time,

And you weren’t seeing the old light of dead stars and such.

One can’t help but wonder

If this isn’t simply impossible

But moreover

Besides the point.

They say that

Due to the speed of light

Distant objects observed with the Hubble Space Telescope

Are old.

The light that reaches our eyes is old light,

And so as we look out into the universe,

We are also looking into the past.

We’re seeing stars from billions of years ago,

The light of which is only just-now reaching planet earth.

We can imagine, of course, a “true” version of distant objects,

Where the light reaching our eyes is up-to-date.

 

When I think about this, I imagine a traveler

Growing extremely weary and beginning to hallucinate –

And although the hallucinations are not true,

He does make it through the desert.

In a sense you can imagine that huge, intergalactic civilizations

Their communication would have to transcend this warping in some way.

 

Maybe there’s a way to ride it,

Or to send out objects along the crest.

 

Just as the sun bends space-time to create gravity,

So our position itself bends space-time to create our relative experience.

And you can’t help but wonder if there’s a way to hurry through

That distortion,

And hurry into a distant world.

 

Maybe we can build our spaceships to respect the dissonance,

And so they’ll easily skim the hyper-overlaps of incongruent

Space-time.

The heart contains all pains,

And was kind enough to contain your whole life.

 

Sparklehorse,

The music you sought to create

Was so special.

 

There’s room for casual

And all manner of creative expression…

But somehow you were more than that…

It’ll always be strange…

 

How all things are an eternity,

But some eternity is juicier than the rest…

I’d be pink and peach

Flavored,

Like a heart.

Gentleness is beautiful,

If only we could see the wind blowing

Up and over beaches littered with light

Pieces of driftwood.

 

 

“Life is not cheap,

It’s expensive”

 

Is that really true?

 

There’s a beautiful anxiety

That I love…

 

It smacks the shit out of me and wakes me up,

Drags me out of whatever hole I was hiding in and

Reveals the world to me.

 

But what world is there really?

This whole world is changing, changing,

Changing and we honor these precious

Forms…

Because what else can you do?

Staring precisely into the river

As it embodies specific bodily sensations…

Life is beautiful and drifting away…

 

“Life is but a dream”

 

 

 

 

I started keeping track of time

When I was in fourth grade

And I hurried home

With the bright

Idea to stuff

Tissues

Into my

Shirt.

 

So,

The bus rolled up to the four way intersection

And I hurried home along Point Caution Drive,

And I opened the secret

Door in our driftwood fence and nervously sprinted

Down the pathway to my front door through the

Blips of sunlight serenely placed in the spring weather.

 

There was a vividness to spring at that age and it

Might only be because this was when I

Started keeping track of the seasons.

 

I opened the front door and my mom cooed to me that she was

Busy napping so I climbed up the staircase to our rooms and

Nervously, courageously pushed open my sister’s door

Knowing she wouldn’t be home for a bit

And I collected a wad of tissues from

Her dresser and stuffed them into

My shirt and then I walked over

To the mirror and with this

Strange foresight that

It mattered to

Genuinely

Want

To

Be a girl I

Said to myself…
“I like this!”

And I smiled,

It was not solemn at all.

 

And that’s when I started keeping track of time,

Because until the fourth grade,

Until that day my life had

More or less been a blur

Without much suffering

But then my life changed a bit,

Like the lives of many other human beings…

 

My life became, “Now, it has been x weeks since

I did that really bad thing.”

 

OK

Two homeless men were awoken by me

Today

OK

I’ve discovered the real reason that

One of them sleeps on the ramp…

OH NO…

There’s a poweroutlet concealed by the bushes,

So he plugs in a powerstrip and charges his

Devices all night long…

OH YES!

OH NO…

 

OH YES!!!

Honey, Seattle’s very different from San Juan

(bats comically long eyelashes, flashes black fingernails)

 

 

There’s something humiliating about realizing the only reason I feel good is because…

I do miss the trees,

I do miss the air and quiet walks through the woods…