Imagine deep within your soul you want to give gifts to the world..but then life happens and you get tired.
Imagine having the passion of a Content Creator but not knowing how to put your thoughts into words.
What am I protecting? Is this modesty.. its own form of honesty?
In order to be a popular platform poster you need to “post every day” or at least a few times a week.
Ah
That might not work then.
Where is the passion I’m looking for? Where is the spirituality I once had or the zeal for living life as if this life is a rare commodity?
How do I take life for granted so much? How do I lounge in carefree boredom narcolepsy or not? Am I pregaming my midlife crises, getting ready for it, double fisting it?
Seems like a me thing to schedule such a thing rather than to be surprised by it.
Well why on earth am I surprised that there’s no element of surprise when I feel like I already know what the book of my life is about..like God and I deliberated and threw the book at me?
Sometimes I feel like I have some crystal ball or a blueprint to my life in my subconscious mind. I don’t want to see it. I don’t want the left hand to know what the right hand is doing. I’m tired of it. I’m tired of watching my movie from the outside.
Life and the enjoyment of life seems rather to be that the eyes and the ears and the nose would hear, see and smell what is here or at least whatever senses we have available to us. So strange that even Spiritual Doctors have remarked on sense “All knowledge comes through the senses.” Good job St. Thomas Aquinas for being like the Doubting apostle in your search for faith. I feel that heartily.
So there is that darkness in the soul of understanding (nous) to wit my life gives reference that I keep remembering that I don’t know and I do know. Part of me know my spirit though living in my body and not separate has separate agencies, faculties and ‘abilities’. I find it hard to be a gnostic because I’m an earthen vessel and yet though trying not to be “too heavenly minded to be of any earthly good” I find myself trapped between worlds, like a ghost with a preternatural stain on the ink blot tests of the collective unconscious of this age.
In my heart I watch kingdoms rise and fall revolutions turn and the sun set many a year. The ages of time acquiesce to an Apocalyptic dance that never seems to end. All of this is beautiful and is a verdict to my and the worlds mortality. I hope that I can learn lessons of this knowing that “the spirit gives life and the flesh is of no avail.” so that perhaps life can come to my dry bones again.
I’m nervous as all get out tonight and I don’t really know why but I can say for sure that part of it is exemplified in how long it has taken me to make another blog post.
Cohesive senses of identity are difficult for neurodivergents like myself who have goldfish level attention to the present unless the deepseated passion quota within is met.
As a father and a husband I find myself struggling between the pragmatic mercantilism of St. Francis of Assisis father and the universal trustful love of St. Francis as if there were no way to balance the two.
I’m torn; comparing myself to the subjective standard of success I see in others and my fear of not measuring up to the imaginary ‘standard’.. all the while fearing the giving up of better heavenly real estate, my truest goal because I could only ever justify being a capitalist in the kingdom of heaven because I’m pretty sure it doesn’t work very well for human nature down here on planet earth.
And yet somewhere deep inside my conflict (deep conflict) is that I of assurety believe in balance and yet I desire for the extremes of childlike trust in God and radical trust in His free miraculous work through His creation like I knew in my youth.
What do I need to become not only who I used to be but the next chapter of me?
Am I perhaps meant to be both? Sometimes a turned page is merely the front and back of one turned page.
I’m convinced I’m too young for a midlife crises but perhaps I’m early! If I die before I’m old perhaps I’ll have the luxury to live before I’m dead.
As a guy I knew once said.. “I don’t know what I’m doing and so can you.”
Original clay and mixed digital media art by me: “Blood and Water”.
In this current time and in contrast to long ago cynics excoriating each other for their personal ‘utopia’ of choice, ‘dystopia’ seems to fall from the lips enough to be nearly cliche.
In our present age of mass political polarization, paranoia and ignorance of the leprous ‘other’ we have gated our walls and shut our minds.. only venturing out for serious business.
Of course much of this is justified. Stupidity has run amok and no boogeyman doesn’t reside under rocks unturned. We can’t be too careful and thus so we are..to preserve whatever little vestige of stable world-to-self awareness the social zeitgeist challenges in the everyday existences of us all.
Even so.. even so, when some of the worlds richest men during global pandemics fly gleefully to space while many regular folks can’t even make their car payments on time to make it to their self same Amazon jobs it seems to drive home the megalomaniacal nature of late stage economic dystopian billionaires.
Feeling like ants working for the magnifying glass kid all the while hearing the gamut of superiority speeches from one’s own Job’s mourners.
“How dare you question what made you thus as if He made you not?”
All the while we pray on our rosary beads “There is no capital without labor and there be no labor without capital. “
Providing jobs? With income inequality its more like providing “Job’s”.
The common folks arguing all the while about what economic system is superior and doting trifles about backing up currency with gold, or corn or silver all whilst Elon Musk Tweets about the similar worthlessness of crypto to fiat currency.
People across the world striving for an illusion, megalomaniacal billionaires capitalizing off of it and beaurocracies never able to meet a need on time.. all based off of the same illusion.
It is a strange and sinister evil to laugh about an illusory system you capitalize from while the same illusion kills others.
If currency was born after tribal epidemics as a fitting alternative to handshakes perhaps as the pandemic finally fizzles humanity must learn to shake hands once again.
Le sigh for my se la vie. For my vitality you see I just need to just be.
I often write to get my edge off when nothing else suffices, nothing else cuts it.. nothing else works.
I don’t really understand this world sometimes but knowing it understands me sometimes is a real cure for depression.
Yes I said cure and yes I only said it to spite the backlash of ‘factscism’. Sure it might not be the cure the test tube demonstrated but life doesn’t always happen in a test tube either baby.
Today is me and my wife’s 3rd wedding anniversary. A beautiful day and a cure to my ails all it’s own but even so today had it’s inner challenges for me. My desires to be more, to give more, to provide more, my ‘perfectionisms’ are riding on me and exhausting me.
Business associates not cooperating with me and returning emails so I’m stuck and cannot work because of technical issues. A pine tree fell on a power line down the road from my house so we couldn’t cook at home for our anniversary but had to go to my parents .
…Update: I just returned to this draft half a month later. We survived and had a good dinner. All is well.
Problems really seem more problematic when they’re happening.
It is rare in this generation to avoid the reductio ad absurdum method of criticism.
The discourse tends towards the assumption that – “Never is a thing ‘not meant’ where a thing other than what we thought is meant could ‘be’ meant!”. That’s impossible! No alternative meanings to words and idioms exist!
But the speakers of words and their context are their own custodians even if they may be clumsy or downright innane in how they carefully or uncarefully craft their speech in interaction with culture. The punishments for these indiscretions are rarely inadequate.. they always seem to get the job done!
In our society it could be likened to the experience of one who has lost faith in the true order of numbers. When I say 1+2 some think I’m saying 1+3.
This they do because they think that 2 is actually “2” come after 3 like 1-3-2 rather then the proper order of 1-2-3. Of course we know this isn’t the case as it is indeed 1-2-3 and yet somewhere down the line communication has been similarly vacuously disconnected from reality and left to serve individual fears.
This too is soundbite inequality. But what is soundbite inequality?! Soundbite inequality is the tyranny of the hashtag, the cloudiness of group pressured group think, the relativism of right and wrong not averted to but rather the cultural might vs right.
Soundbite inequality is the fear baiting social darwinism that gives no room to understand the other or even to understand at all.
It knows no political preference. It dines with right wingers and leftists.
Soundbite inequality does not visit the offending party in secret like Christ with Nicodemus. It is opposed to new beginnings and forgiveness. It eschews the sacralism of allowing redemption. “You mustn’t be born again!” says soundbite inequality Christ! It’s bad for business! Soundbite inequality doesn’t believe in a gospel of forgiveness because it doesn’t believe anyone can repent.
Soundbite inequality Christ is a clamoring, noisy businessman after all and he is very busy making sure ‘that’ never happens. Soundbite inequality always assumes our opponent is very deeply below us and like a classic country western demands a public quick draw. Sadly this is Americanism at its finest. Forsaking a culture of transcendence we have become individual czars and yet our kingdoms are deeply atomized and even more deeply limited. We say everyone has human dignity and is our equal. Our own actions typed or trod condemn us.
We describe soundbite inequalities as critiques but we are not present at an art show. We describe soundbite inequalities as an admonishment but we are remote and safe behind our desk not even before our opponents human eyes. We describe our admonishment as righteousness but we forsake all opportunities for true peace for even the remotest risk of false peace. We do this as an excuse. We don’t want true peace after all. We don’t want ‘peace’ at all!
In this we sin and we lose. It is not because we know we knowingly sin! But our sin is that we don’t know we sin and in this context it is worse of all!
Soundbite inequality as a principle is NOT the acknowledgment of a feigned moral equality between the variable issues of left and right politics in their individual cases and case by case particularities nor is it a critique of politics by it’s sole variabilities alone… though it may have many examples of its play in political theater.
Soundbite inequality is the anti-zen plain and simple of refusing to listen to another human being from their individual core. It is the refusal to answer another’s fears or to acknowledge that positions may be taken from family indoctrination or from mistaken and patently false but sincere platitudes. It is the race of Cain fallacy applied to those whose personal philosophy we do not know. It is the destructing not instructing of the ignorant. It is to ignore sound interpersonal principles of human nature and psychology. Soundbite inequality is taxation by misrepresentation.
And yet the worst part of soundbite inequality is that it bespeaks unbending positional rigidities so stark and so cocksure that it admits in broad daylight that its goal is not the revolution found on the surface of it’s words..or its hashtags.
Soundbite inequality is a rose of another name to the status quo but its just as sweet to those who savor it.
In the last analysis soundbite inequality ‘is’ simply the status quo.
It is easier than people think for you to have an opinion when people are listening; contrary to the modern proverb “You can’t even have an opinion anymore.”
I know this because I wanted to be heard for years.
I had been glossed over. I had been forgotten. I had been passed over.
For about 5 or so recent years though I was performing live very regular as performing artist/ musician and in what could be considered a pendulum between a new entertainment extroversion to never before experienced levels and on the flip side semi extreme hermitism.
Then in comes the pandemic and I assume the role of a stay at home dad, the multimillion dollar company that used to pump posts about the show I leaded was no longer boosting my content with consistent and gratuitous amounts of ad revenue and that even in cahoots with some of my personal accounts.
The connection of my activity to Facebook translated mysteriously into my person seemingly having value to said algorithm (even if I wasn’t by any means even close to making the type of money the company I worked for was). To all possible intellectualization I could make out however, that the algorithm believed I was famous whether I was much at all. I was noticed somewhat. I was heard. I wasn’t so passed over.
Let me give you one lesson though. Facebook is not censoring you because they do not like you. Facebook just isn’t ‘boosting you’ because you aren’t making them money. At that time I was but now the algorithm believes I am noone, caput, basically a nobody.
This is the sad value testimony of human value in our crapitalist society. Nothing is usually popular in the way it was in ancient Athens.. back when intellectual values, philosophy of ideas and metaphysics were valuable of their own accord and merely for the fact of having mused upon them and nursed them into schools of thought. Now even that value is worthless unless it’s ready to pay the piper. I wonder how much money Facebook wastes not investing in these ideas. But I guess every time a toilet flushes at Walmart a tax deduction angel gets its wings!
So I’m settling in to a more long lasting version of my hermitage but I would be lying if I said that my depression has been totally at bay.
And yet still I’m doing something that some in the medicine/ science only crowd might think muddies the waters into dangerous hippy sentimentalist territory. I’m taking alot of walks in nature, exercising, taking my cbd, eating better, avoiding excessive alcohol or cussing at puppies and of course writing my blog as one part of my weekly healing process.
And you know what .. it helps; because sometimes even after a good helping of protein rich organic peanut butter pancakes.. on a rainy day, when your mind is racing and the sleep disorder demons have clocked out, they need someone to pick up a shift and of course the depression demons are ready and rearing to go. Even so when I write it out it has been transmitted from the realm of thoughts to the realm of words and in my subjective pseudoscientific opinion it seems to help.
I always knew I was an ‘ideas person’. I was always desperate to be stuck in a college academia library studying theology, philosophy, science, physics, social theory (EVERYTHING)!
I have always been mad that whatever secret branch of the government that hires for think tanks hasn’t broke their silence and reached out to me yet. But patience is a virtue after all! Le-sigh.
Re-sign. That’s my miraculous auto predict shake out of writers block! And that’s precisely what I’m getting to now.
The first step to embracing and truly enjoying solitude is getting past the loneliness and just because I’m married doesn’t mean I don’t get lonely when it’s just me and my daughter during the day. Yes.. even with my daughter there I get lonely sometimes and that’s ok even if her just being there really really helps!
You see loneliness is no respecter of persons. And yet perhaps its more helpful and comfortable to be all St. Francis like and call her Sister Loneliness.
Loneliness is like engaging a Jericho wall and sometimes you just got to blast a trumpet in your heart and shake yourself up a little to get past the false barriers it suggests and remember somehow, right now, life is still being lived.
You also must be humble if your’e more the type to be desirous of the hermit lifestyle because whether Pentupium Introvert 5.0 or not you just have to face the music that people aren’t always terrible and in many ways many of them are much better than you… and that’s ok! After all you have your own strengths and weaknesses too!
Most saints probably don’t mantra on that word too much or at the least they think it means something different than most people think it means.
So also a healthy hermit has to be humble and it is as intriguingly intricate as this idiomatic tongue twister.
The healthy hermit is the balance of ones needs and “the Others” needs.. whichever other or Other that may be.
Healthy solitude is a gift for a heart that is healing. It is the opposite of the crusted bitterness of undealt with trauma. The deep irony for he, she or they that seek solitude is this.. one can only seek solitude well as they find a supporting cast.
Musings of a Picture Frame Conversationalist. 