goodbye 2010

the last things i'll do in 2010:

1) listen to "go do" and dream of what 2011 and the subsequent years will bring (unless, of course, 2012 is as exciting as it's been predicted to be).

2) say "i love you."

good ending, i'd say.

"tie strings to clouds/ we should always know we can do anything."

keep on believing. lovewins.

glow world

glow world.

giant forest, sequoia national park, ca.

04 october 2010.

"this is a world filled with love & other things that have the sense not to waste time talking about everything under the sun & see how it glows with no help from us whatsoever" -brian andreas

illogical things

Do you hear the people sing,

Lost in the valley of the night?

It is the music of a people

Who are climbing to the light.

For the wretched of the earth,

There is a flame that never dies--

Even the darkest night will end

And the sun will rise.

They will live again in freedom

In the freedom of the Lord.

They will walk behind the plowshare.

They will put away the sword.

The chain will be broken...

-Les Miserables the Musical

What is it I believe, in a world of which parts would strip away all my idealism, all that is truly within my heart? The other parts of this world would have me hold on to what I believe, holding fast to the true and good things as "the darkness tries to rob me of all my sight."

Those different parts oppose each other within my heart just as they oppose each other within the world--some cosmic battle of light and dark, good and evil, hope and despair. To ignore that battle would be, in a subtle way, as destructive as following that evil side of things into the void (see Lewis' Screwtape Letters). Solzhenitsyn put it this way:

"Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart, and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. Even within hearts overwhlemed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained; and even in the best of all hearts, there remains a small corner of evil."

So then, where is the good and true and light and hopeful? What is it? I think it's in the illogical things, the things that don't make sense, the things that go against everything that makes sense. It's the things the "mad ones" are after, in a world where there are so many sane people.

Things like this, when taken only at face value, looking for the depth of truth within them:

"Blessed are the poor in spirit,

for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are those who mourn,

for they will be comforted.

Blessed are the meek,

for they will inherit the earth.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,

for they will be filled.

Blessed are the merciful,

for they will be shown mercy.

Blessed are the pure in heart,

for they will see God.

Blessed are the peacemakers,

for they will be called sons of God.

Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness,

for theirs is the kingdom of heaven."

-Matthew 5:3-10

It's easy for me these days to forget the truth found within these words and many of the others because of the vast amount of religious baggage that alights upon my shoulders whenever I open that book--bags filled with the pain I've felt from ideology and dogma, bags filled with laws and labels and doctrinal statements, bags filled with knowledge that the same things have us hurtling toward a crumbling future of unsustainable ways of life, and bags filled with the screams of the innocents burned and tortured and killed for some man's interpretation of similar words. That darkness seeks to rob me of my sight when these things that are, at heart, true are tied up in a place and in people where I grew up who continually tell me that everything I know to be true is wrong and stupid. Illogical. Misguided. Irresponsible. But regardless, there is truth in these words, truth that could change everything, that can and will change everything, that has been changing everything since the beginning of all things (that truth is embedded in the threads that run between and beneath and above and within all things).

So how to know the difference?

"Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable--if anything is excellent or praiseworthy--think about such things."

-Philippians 4:8

But what are those things?

I think it goes back to Solzhenitsyn's words--all of us have something within us that can tell where those things are, because "even in hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good remains." And it's a confusing world we live in, where the good things can look like the bad things, and the tiny corners of evil that remain in all of our hearts can look like the good things, but I have hope and have to keep believing that when we peel back the layers of our environments and all of our humanity, we can tell the difference, because there's something that each of us feel or have felt or can feel that always seems to come through the fog or the clouds or the night and cannot be covered or hidden. I think that thing is love, "for to love another person is to see the face of God" (Les Miserables the Musical).

What is it I believe?

"Love is patient. Love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails."

-1 Corinthians 13:4-8

That's a powerful thing, the most powerful thing. The thing through which our eyes can tell the difference between good and evil, through which our eyes can see the lines cutting between. The thing that can change everything, will change everything, IS changing everything. Like a lens through which everything hazy becomes sharp, or which everything in color becomes monochromatic, this thing will show us the way, illogical as it always seems to be. But only if we let it.

I would rather follow the illogical things, and be mad,

than follow the logical things and be sane.

I would rather experience the deepest sorrows to feel in their entirety the truest joys

than to seek the easy status quo, where everything exists in mediocrity.

I would rather feel the worst pains to feel the deepest love,

than avoid them so as not to feel at all.

I would rather search for vividness in all its peaks and valleys

than be comfortable.

I would rather remember what that vividness felt like, even when it hurts,

than forget so as to feel no pain at all.

I would rather live dazzled by the mystery of it all

than be confined to a box built by human hands, for what are boxes but things we create to "understand?"

I would rather set sail into an endless sea or set foot in a trackless forest

than sit within cathedrals that crumble and fall.

I would rather put my hope and faith in love

than quantifiable things like markets and economics and rationales and empirical observations.

I would rather burn, with all the pain of hope and fire,

than cooly walk through life in the safe places, for those places may indeed be the most dangerous of all.

And apparently I would rather wax philosophic than... grow up?

I would rather love.

And upon that ground, will I take my stand--will I fight.

:-)

Love wins.

Hope and fire,

Will

living

"Die Slowly" Pablo Neruda (1904-1973)

He who becomes the slave of habit,
who follows the same routes every day,
who never changes pace,
who does not risk and change the color of his clothes,
who does not speak and does not experience,
dies slowly.

He or she who shuns passion,
who prefers black on white,
dotting ones "i's" rather than a bundle of emotions, the kind that make your eyes glimmer,
that turn a yawn into a smile,
that make the heart pound in the face of mistakes and feelings,
dies slowly.

He or she who does not turn things topsy-turvy,
who is unhappy at work,
who does not risk certainty for uncertainty,
to thus follow a dream,
those who do not forego sound advice at least once in their lives,
die slowly.

He who does not travel, who does not read,
who does not listen to music,
who does not find grace in himself,
she who does not find grace in herself,
dies slowly.

He who slowly destroys his own self-esteem,
who does not allow himself to be helped,
who spends days on end complaining about his own bad luck, about the rain that never stops,
dies slowly.

He or she who abandon a project before starting it, who fail to ask questions on subjects he doesn't know, he or she who don't reply when they are asked something they do know,
die slowly.

Let's try and avoid death in small doses,
reminding oneself that being alive requires an effort far greater than the simple fact of breathing.

Only a burning patience will lead
to the attainment of a splendid happiness.

on listening

Come, come, whoever you are-

wanderer, worshiper, lover of leaving-

what does it matter?

Ours is not a caravan of despair.

Come, even if you have broken your vow

a hundred times,

come, come again, come.

Fireside haiku

small flame glows brightly.
it carries hope, but faintly
waning with the night.

the mirror of

the heart must be

polished constantly

before you can see

clearly in it

Good and Evil.

-rumi

through love,

disaster becomes

good fortune.

through love,

a prison becomes

a garden.

-rumi

work for peace

"870 some years ago was the last time the full moon fell on a friday, saturday, and sunday. This was also the last time that all christians, jews, and muslims were at peace. This weekend the full moon falls on friday saturday and sunday night, the holy days of the muslims, jews and christians. I think there is nothing greater for anyone than to work for peace."

-steve hildebrand

It's interesting to think that everything went wrong when we decided to do anything other than just be.

dear world, be more like the trees.

Journal entry:

Monday, November 1, 2010

Sewanee, TN

10am

"I'm back home to a forest full of colors. And yet, to some extent it feels as if the combination of the people and the place are skeptical about my presence here, wondering why I am here and what my purpose is...

Yet the trees never need a purpose. And they are always welcoming, beckoning me to return to the grace of their ancient fingers, offering healing and peace in their silent, watchful gaze."

Dear World,

Be more like the trees.

If, when you ask me, "What are you doing with yourself?" or "Why are you here?" or "What's your plan?", you want any sort of an answer other than, "I don't know" or "Living" or "Being", then please just don't ask. Instead, yes, I would love to go with you on a hike, or go drink tea and soak up the autumn sun as it fades into the west.

Love,

Will

Journal entry:

Sunday, October 23, 2010

"Culture has instilled within me that I always have to be moving in a straight line, and yet so much of me feels that mystery is ok."

"People moving all the time

Inside a perfectly straight line.

Don't you wanna float away?

It's such a perfect day."

shannon.

about the better way.

yes.

the rub and the task

"It is easy to go down into Hell; night and day the doors of dark Death stand open. But to climb back again, to retrace one's steps to the upper air - that is the rub, the task."

- Virgil, from "The Aeneid"

bones of light

storypeople from yesterday:

I remember we sat in the swing on the front porch & as the dusk came on us like a song, dark throated & sweet, he told me about the beginning when we had bones of light & hair that burned like the sun & I asked what happened then? & I felt him floating there in the soft dark & finally he said we forgot & I said I never would, but sometimes I do & I understand now why he put his arm around me & said nothing more.

"The old wound, if stricken, is sorest,

The old hope is hardest to be lost..."

-Elizabeth Barret Browning, in "The Cry of the Children"

impressionist sky

Texas sky is usually of the school of realism, like the Jan van Eyck Arnolfini Portrait, or maybe a Vermeer, if the sky could be a portrait.

But lately it's as if the whole sky has been painted by an impressionist. But not in a Monet kind of way where there are broad brush strokes and pastel colors and his essence flowing through his brush onto the canvas in some expression of the reality that passes through his and becomes paint. It's more like someone has shifted the paradigm again, just as they did in the 19th century, when real became impression.

Some great painter in the Texas sky has changed the convex and concave of the lens through which I see the sky in such a way that all of the clouds have extra fluff around their edges and they stretch across the endless sky in some great panorama that takes full seconds to move through in a 360 degree rotation. But I could spend hours looking at that one place he says because it's my favorite part of the sky. The colors seem softer as if that same painter has placed an invisible film over the lens, just like how it all seems a bit hazy, as if the fine brush was switched for the flat one.

It's actually humidity, but I like to think of it as a painter as I stare at the soft sunset going down and the crescent of red becoming a shimmering point and then disappearing.

What if the sky was a Dada painting one day? That'd be a trip.

Steve Jobs on "How to Live Before You Die"

Follow this link, and follow your heart?

tin man

Best lyric I've heard in a very long time:

The Stable Song by Gregory Alan Isakov

Now I've been crazy, couldn't you tell?

I threw stones at the stars, but the whole sky fell

Now I'm covered up in straw, belly up on the table

Well I drank and sang, and I passed in the stable

That tall grass grows high and brown

Well I dragged you straight in the muddy ground

And you sent me back to where I roam

Well I cursed and I cried, but now I know

Now I know

And I ran back to that hollow again

The moon was just a sliver back then

And I ached for my heart like some tin man

When it came, oh it beat and it boiled and it rang

Oh, it's ringing

Ring like crazy, ring like hell

Turn me back into that wild haired gale

Ring like silver, ring like gold

Turn these diamonds straight back into coal

Turn these diamonds straight back into coal

there's currently a one-way ticket from dallas to nairobi for $800.

melville said true places are never found on a map, and tolkien said all who wander are not lost and i guess that means i should just GO.

i need it.

"a person susceptible to wanderlust is not so much addicted to movement as committed to transformation." -pico iyer

weird

razzledazzle

coffee shop in which i grew up. you know, the one with the paintings i've wanted for five years on the walls, the ones no one would buy but for me they're all blues and oil drips and swirls that have sat on those red brick walls since early high school when we sat across from one another and heard the swell season for the first time on the radio. the one with the loft, where we all gathered round the leather couch that seemed to swallow our youthful joys of senior year, when we felt on top of the world. the one where we climbed the red ladder up above the city and watched the sun go down, dropping like a rock does into a river 700 feet below, where it disappears in the distance as you wait breathlessly for the pop that you'll never hear in the roar.

walk in today. older now. smile at the girl behind the counter who seems to get lost behind it, like she's lost behind a lot of tall counters, quiet and scared. order the frappuccino for old time's sake, the one i always got just 'cuz it tastes good. sit in the same chair meredith used to sit in and do her crosswords, when we were all in love with her. high school boys in uniforms, getting ready to conquer the world, our only way to show individualism being the shoes on our feet.

put my head down underneath the blue painting of nothing really that i always saw as oceans deeper than could be painted. headphones on my ears, ones i pulled out of the closet for the first time in a long time. i put them away because i wanted to hear. but now i dug for them and put them on because i wanted to hear again. and i opened the soft leather book in front of me and wrote,

"i'm coming alive again in sherman, texas, and it's a funny thing and i think it's ironic, because of how many times i left to do just that."

don't give up on me, i'm about to come alive.

in my ears that song, and i smiled and thought about the arbitrariness of that phrase, coming alive, and how i'm always searching for it, and saying it, and trying to feel it, whatever it is today. and i pulled off one side of the headphones because a little boy came in with grandma to get the non-caffeine frappaccino, smile from ear to ear and tapping his feet impatiently while she made it, wishing he could watch her over the same tall counter too tall for him. the type of kid who cuts his hair short because it sticks straight up out of his head too big for his body. and he's got a goofy grin, with a crooked tooth, like travis had in fifth grade and tried to cover up with a scowl. one of his socks was lime green, and the other a neon blue.

and behind me, the old man who lost his wife three years ago and told me everything i needed to know about his car insurance plan, and his brother who is lazy, and how he used to paint until his wife died, which was why he knew oil was more expensive than acrylic, and how those oil paintings on the wall must have taken forever to dry, and he just wouldn't stop talking because when he slowed, tears drifted into his 61 year old eyes of the memories that he don't ever forget, because his high school teacher told him he had a memory like a steel trap.

he called the boy over to him and pointed with a chubby finger to the same painting i've stared at for five years, the one that rachael always loved, and he told the boy, "do you see the dragon? it's right there, in the corner. i think that's a dragon." and as grandma smiled after realizing he wasn't going to hurt grandson, little boy's confused "who the hell are you" look turns to one of realization as he sees it too and he says, "whoa. yeah. it's right there. and there's its fire. whoa."

there's its fire.

then his drink was ready, and he and grandma leave and he waves goodbye to the old man whose two sisters are both bipolar, and one of them sometimes is manic and one time he was manic after his wife died and six men tried to keep him down and he threw one against a brick wall without even trying and broke his wrist but didn't mean to and they sent him to behavioral counseling and he stuttered as he tried to speed up, still blinking away that pesky wet corner. and as he waves back, the tears creep back into the corners of his dark brown eyes, from under the ball cap above the beard that hasn't been touched since his wife died, next to the white hair with streaks of deep brown leaving slowly, as if they won't go until he remembers that he is alive and there is time left, like she would have wanted.

that he is alive and there is time left.

i get up to leave, and as i go, he says thank you for your time, sir, and i think, no. no. thank you. i'm so sorry. i'm so sorry.

i wave goodbye, and say, "i think you should paint again." and he says, "you think so?"and i say, "yes sir, i think so. i think it would be good." and because he just couldn't stop talking, he shows me his readers' digest trinket on his bag, the one that is a tape measure and a pen at the same time, since you always need a tape measure when you're writing. you know. and he just didn't want me to go. "i think you should paint again."

"Our truest responsibility to the irrationality of the world is to paint or sing or write, for only in such response do we find the truth."
-Madeleine L'Engle

and jonsi sings me home. and jonsi sang us home from california across those flat lands on that highway i've driven too many times for my soul to handle in the past three months. capers said sometimes we move too fast for our soul in the middle of the cold, light-filled LA night, on that steel landing above traction avenue when we talked about the beauty of love that doesn't last, but leaves as quickly and as beautifully as it came.

jonsi sang us home, and in his lilting, flying high voice, he started throwing off those shutters all over my heart, that had begun to break in the midst of sheer light-filled days of presence in those those mountains, days when the tension between peace and war within myself opened my eyes again, if only because it hurt.

"because what you give up violently you are forever bound to."

but this coming back to life, that i'm starting to feel in sherman, tx, even if it hurts, is coming from this:

Go sing, too loud
Make your voice break – Sing it out
Go scream, do shout
Make an earthquake…

You wish fire would die and turn colder
You wish your love could see you grow older
We should always know that we can do anything

Go drum, do go out
Make your hands ache – Play it out
Go march through a crowd
Make your day break…

You wish silence, released noise in tremors
You wish, I know it, surrender to summer
We should always know that we can do everything

Go do, you’ll know how to
Just let yourself, fall into landslide

Go do, you’ll know how to
Just let yourself, give into low tide

Go do!

Tie strings to clouds
Make your own lake – Let it flow
Throw seeds to sprout
Make your own break – Let them grow

Let them grow (Endless summers)
Let them grow (Endless summers)

(Go do endless summers)

You will survive, we’ll never stop wonders
You and sunrise will never fall under

You will survive, we’ll never stop wonders
You and sunrise will never fall under
We should always know that we can do anything

Go do!

go do. when was the last time you went? screamed from the top of some great heights. stood in front of the wind and let it blow everything out of you, back far behind. ran on the beach with sand making it hurt to hold hands, as you pulled each other down into surf that was endless and bottomless like the way you looked into each others' eyes. bought a one-way plane ticket. stared deep into space, with the universe spinning above you, pulling you up and up by centrifugal force of the cosmos. or watched that first point of light that means the sun, it rises. it rises again, i promise you, and you gotta hold fast to the break of daylight. when was the last time you jumped over, or fell under? when you believed that we can do anything, and then did... when you felt your hope and fire rise up and out of you like a volcano, erupting and spilling all over you, leaving you breathless and sure and free to go and do and be all that you are.

i don't think we should listen when they tell us we should do this list of things now, so we can have time and money to go and do later. the same people who told us we can do anything are trying to fit us into cubicles. no. go.

i believe that hope and fire will give us wings.

here's my hand, i've been wanting you to grab it and come along.

"i wonder if i'm allowed ever to see

i wonder if i'm allowed ever to be free

i wonder if i'm allowed just ever to be"

only because

we all want to say this to somebody, sometime. and we should.

"don't give up on me, i'm about to come alive."

train. with all their cliches:

"In every frame upon our wall
Lies a face that's seen it all
Through ups and downs and then more downs
We helped each other off of the ground
No one knows what we've been through
Making it ain't making it without you

Maybe I'm not but you're all I got left to believe in
Don't give up on me
I'm about to come alive
And I know that it's been hard
And it's been a long time coming
Don't give up on me
I'm about to come alive."

Yosemite sunrise

"and after ten years of wandering and wondering in the heart of it, rejoicing in it's glorious floods of light, the white beams of the morning streaming through the passes, the noonday radiance on the crystal rocks, the flush of the alpenglow, and the irised spray of countless waterfalls, it still seems above all others the RANGE OF LIGHT."

-John Muir in The Yosemite

North rim sunset.

Paul, I'm broadcasting my life on the Internet for you. Enjoy your prostate exam training.

the nature of vividness

I-40 west under a starstruck Arizona sky. Eric and I are trying to make flagstaff tonight, after leaving from sherman this morning. Grand canyon tomorrow--north and south rims--with time-lapsing at both. Then to Zion for Angel's Landing and through Death Valley at Sunrise. Yosemite Valley in three days. Then my month in the high sierras, which John Muir apparently called the "Range of Light." I'll be hiking the 240 miles of the John Muir Trail through Yosemite, Muir Wilderness, Kings Canyon, and Sequoia. The Range of Light.

My dark soul needs serrated mountain knives of light to cut through the shades I've drawn across windows that I used to insist never to be closed.

"crack the shutters open wide I want to see you in the light of day, watch the rays play all across your face and body."

Left Sewanee and its gently curved ridgelines and deep, dark blue coves for red rocks and serrated mountains and cliffs of the west. What is it that draws people westward?

We're both wanting to get lost. Why? Because in the losing, we're hoping to find, and sure that's old, cliché, and breathless rhetoric, but that's the only way I know to explain it. Hoping to find something we once knew, once felt, and once believed that all of life onward would always feel that vivid. Only in the subsequent numbness, I think, did we realize the vividness of the prior time in it's absence, a time in which I didn't think life could be anything but.

And the numbness feels a certain sad nostalgia juxtaposed with it's comfort-- a comfort derived out of protectionism, because the vivid is hard, and painful. The remembrance of vivid moments, or chills during that song, or those songs, or the way you felt naked in the rain (as if it were washing something out of you, or washing you out of something), or the way we swam in Cheston in the thunderstorm, or the way we felt wind for the first time at Byoona Amagara in Bunyonyi, or the way that first firetower sunrise blasted white hot light through a heart that had been gathering dust. Those moments paradoxically opposed to the painful, but no less important moments like the changed relationship status, or that damn letter, or that boy beaten in the streets, or that morning where they told us their stories, or that plane ride to LA after she broke up with me. Or the email I got tonight. All those things like colors in a painting, tied up within and around one another like a Pollock tonight.

Eric was sleeping after dinner, and I was driving, listening to "Happiness" by the Fray, and there was this surreal moment where he sang, "happiness was just outside my window, and could it crash going 80 miles an hour" and I looked down and saw the speedometer reach 80 and the reds and oranges ahead on the road blurred simultaneously with the voice that said that gone for now feels a lot like gone for good. Light blurs with hot tears like in the AVA song where he sings about closed eyes and tears flowing out beneath eyelids. So much music tied to so many vivid moments but now it falls flat when the shutters are closed and the tears are blinked away. Do souls die?

But they told me resurrection happens.

"I go home to the coast it starts to rain and I paddle out on the water. Taste the salt taste the rain I'm not thinking of her again, and I've never felt so alone but I've never felt so alive."

And Eric talked about love and hardness and the earning of love all tied in with the vivid times and we wondered if the love we've found that's comfortable and healthy that just doesn't seem as vivid is what we want... It's not that one is better than the other, but my eyes reflect the hope and fire deep beneath the shutters and the shades somewhere within me, and that hope and that fire wants it to be hard and vivid and beautiful.

We wondered if vivid and hard is better than numb and comfortable, or vice versa, and which is best for the world. Our brothers and sisters walk around asleep and yet alive. Come awake from sleep-ARISE. Do you not want to be awake? But maybe vivid is irrational.

It's my turn to drive, up out of flagstaff in coconino, but our closing thought was that we want to ask these questions, and live free and on fire again and let that fire burn away shutters and shades. And yet, what's more important to us in this range of light is to listen to the landscape, because although the landscape may possess answers to question we bring, it may possess answers altogether different and more important. Answers that have been lost in time.

We'll be time lapsing. And that will be reflected. Light reflecting on our faces and through us.

this morning i got up for the sunrise at the firetower and went and it wasn't one of those sunrises where there was this prick of light... this pinpoint of white hot light. it was like the clouds guarded against that and there was this explosion of fire right on the horizon line and all the clouds lit up so bright with the daylight that you couldn't discern the single point. it was lost in the orange fire.

hold fast to the break of daylight.

back again tomorrow for my last sunrise before leaving sewanee for who knows how long.

heart's breaking a little bit.

glenn beck from the weekend: "Obama is a guy who understands the world through liberation theology, which is all about victims and victimhood; oppressors and the oppressed; reparations, not repentance; collectivism, not individual salvation. I don't know what that is, other than it's not Muslim, it's not Christian. It's a perversion of the gospel of Jesus Christ as most Christians know it."

FoxNews on it: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/08/29/beck-amends-obama-racist-comment-questions-belief-collective-salvation/

FP: http://rothkopf.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/08/30/all_god_s_children_got_intolerance

And media matters:

http://mediamatters.org/blog/201008310014

sunrise reminiscence (again)

"It is necessary to be present alone at the resurrection of the Day, in the solemn silence at which the sun appears, for at this moment all the affairs of cities, of governments, of war departments, are seen to be the bickering of mice. I receive from the Eastern woods, the tall oaks, the one word DAY, which is never the same. It is always a totally new language."

-Thomas Merton, When the Trees Say Nothing

love like a sunrise

what is it about sunrises?

addendum

"On the night you left I came over
And we peeled the freckles from our shoulders
Our brand new coats so flushed and pink
And I knew your heart I couldn't win
Cause the seasons change was a conduit
And we left our love in our summer skin"

"sometimes, you just gotta listen to the music"

this'll be fifteen posts in one:

speechless again.

the overwhelming combination

of the highest highs and the

lowest lows

all jumbled, twisted, wrapped

around into one vivid color:

beautiful in its intensity because it's

hard.

being in sewanee for the past two weeks is one long blur. so much of my life these days is so unstable, changing every day, with plans shattering in morning and new ones forming hours later. dreams dashed, and new ones appearing in their place, prolly 'cuz i'm a dreamer, all underneath the summer sun in my summer skin that has always seemed to soak up everything so much more than the dull gray of winter's constant ache. i see new freckles appearing every day, as if each represents another thought.idea.person.confused piece of my life.

summer skin, don't come out of the summer sun, even if you get sunburned sometimes. 'cuz even in all this confusion, and jumbled time of life, we've got to keep soaking everything in deep, because this vivid life is as good as it gets right now, here, on this side of eternity.

color of the day: stripes. the brightest yellow and the brightest deepest blue, which should be the colors of some girl's swimsuit somewhere, strolling along the sand of ocean blue, holding a white coverup blowing in the wind from the sea, whistling to a summer tune. she's only happy in the sun.

so much music in the last three days. adventures everywhere, from the waterfall at fiery gizzard, to warm nights spent laying down on rocky beds staring up at stained glass, to days spent laughing underneath blue sky and white clouds, to lightning storms from greens view, to firetower sunrise. laughs and tears and thoughts and frisbee. you know, rippin' cigs and doin' the math. joke.

and pradip summed everything up in one of his moments of tipsy wisdom: "will, you know how to love in the abstract, in a way that is difficult for many, but this is what i will tell you... in this year, more than anything else, no matter where you are or what you do, i want you to learn how to love a single person right in front of you."

love one at a time. seems to be a common theme lately. "if it's lonely where you are, come back down, and i won't tell 'em your name." i gotta come back down, learn to love again in this summer skin, and be at peace with the present.

sorry about the random musings.

love wins.

as if we could

"yeah, we can't think we're going to save the world, but we have to be crazy enough to act as if we could."

thank you, paul dixon.

potential is different from reality, and should therefore not create expectation, but maybe it is true that a change in perceptions can change reality. einstein thought it could, he thought we have the ability to reimagine the future.

so we must step forward--default toward action--as if the world can change, and the destructive systems that are destroying humanity and our world don't have to win. that we can change them, and turn them into beautiful, creative systems, with the potential to allow creation again and again. creation of new life.

crazy enough to act as if we could.

but how do you help make that potential for the creation of new life a reality? what's the best way?

i know it has to do with throwing off the chains that bind us into our current systems. but this question has been prevalent in much of my thought lately, because that's what i want to do--that's what i want to be--someone who is a part of the fight against that oppression seeking to bring freedom in unfree places. i know that is where my liberation will be found in some way, for our liberty is truly collective.

but about that question regarding the best way:

later in our conversation, paul said, "i think if we enter a community with an intention to change the world, it can corrupt our love for those around us. but if we love those around us, and change the world because of it... that's what i want. we don't have all the answers. it is arrogant to assume that what we are doing will ever be noticed or that we are even doing the right thing at all, but we have to act as if every second could be the difference in life or death for one of our loved ones."

the motivation must be love, and the way must be filled with it.

"When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always won. There have been tyrants and murderers and for a time they seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall. Think of it: Always."

-Gandhi

love wins.

and another random thought (this is one of those songs that puts words to my thoughts):

i feel like i've been living in a city with no children in it
a garden left for ruin by a millionaire inside a private prison
you never trust a millionaire quoting the sermon on the mount.
i used to think i was not like them, but i'm starting to have my doubts.
when you're hiding underground, the rain can't get you wet."

-the arcade fire in "city with no children"

The way of love.

"When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always won. There have been tyrants and murderers and for a time they seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall. Think of it: Always."

-Gandhi

not through my complicity

“At its birth, violence acts openly and even takes pride in itself.


But as soon as it is reinforced and its position is strengthened, 
it begins to sense the rarefied atmosphere around it,


and it can go further only when fogged about with lies,


cloaked in honeyed hypocritical words.

It does not always nor invariably choke its victims;


more often it demands of them only the oath of the lie,


only participation in the lie.

Simple is the ordinary courageous human being’s act
 of not participating in the lie,


of not supporting false actions!


What his stand says is: So be it that this takes place in the world—


that it even reigns in the world—
but

let it not be with my complicity.”

-from Beauty Will Save the World: The Nobel Lecture on Literature
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, 1972