~ we known they won’t win ~

There is freedom within, there is freedom without
Try to catch the deluge in a paper cup
There’s a battle ahead, many battles are lost
But you’ll never see the end of the road
While you’re traveling with me

Hey now, hey now, don’t dream it’s over
Hey now, hey now, when the world comes in
They come, they come to build a wall between us
We know they won’t win

Now I’m towing my car, there’s a hole in the roof
My possessions are causing me suspicion but there’s no proof
In the paper today tales of war and of waste
But you turn right over to the T.V. page

Hey now, hey now, don’t dream it’s over
Hey now, hey now, when the world comes in
They come, they come to build a wall between us
We know they won’t win

Now I’m walking again to the beat of a drum
And I’m counting the steps to the door of your heart
Only the shadows ahead barely clearing the roof
Get to know the feeling of liberation and relief

Hey now, hey now, don’t dream it’s over
Hey now, hey now, when the world comes in
They come, they come to build a wall between us
We know they won’t win

Don’t let them win
Hey now, hey now
Hey now
Hey now, hey now
Don’t let them win
Hey now, hey now
Don’t let them win
Hey now, hey now

Photographs by Ricky Flores
Lyrics from Don’t Dream It’s Over by Crowded House

the heart of a femen

Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty.
The obedient must be slaves.
—Henry David Thoreau

the universe wrote that you were for me ..

The sun is high and bright and shines in my eyes, warming my skin and reflecting off the deep blue of my nailpolish. And I am tired, a kind of tired that is foreign to me because I cannot understand what has happened to my energy. Except to consider that what I need most in the world is a proper vacation. That would make it the first I have ever taken since I began to work at age fourteen. But something in me resists. It seems so gratuitous, so frivilous, so antithetical to my Protestant Work Ethic.

Except I am not Protestant, I just picked up this belief like so many things, it came up through the concrete and seeped through the shoes cast upon my feet, and invaded my being and made me believe. The only way you will succeed is to work. And there were more words, describing the quality of the work and how hard I must go but those words were but hazy reflections of this unrelenting force. A pressure. An expectation that comes from something I know is sick, but I am still under its spell and it drives me to imbalance. It is everywhere, vibrating off the glass paneled towers that line these streets and it reverberates in my ear, whispering lies like it spoke the truth. But it doesn’t and I know this in my head but my heart is scared.

And so I resist, which is a losing proposition. The paradigm is the problem. But it reminds me of what the doctors told Miss Fitts when she decided to quit benzos: If you stop taking these drugs you will die. Lies to line the pockets of someone else. Fearmongering profiteers controlling the populace with whatever it takes, and in my case, status issues. Which isn’t even it, that’s just obfuscation.

It’s this: charting a path that has no precedent. It is, total independence from everything and everyone. It’s Self Reliance. Is this Emerson?

Man is his own star; and the soul that can
Render an honest and a perfect man,
Commands all light, all influence, all fate;
Nothing to him falls early or too late.
Our acts our angels are, or good or ill,
Our fatal shadows that walk by us still.

I started writing this essay yesterday standing on Madison Avenue, waiting on what might be the beginning of a new chapter sure enough. And it was that feeling that I have been set adrift. Allow me to rephrase, for I am not a passive actor in my fate. I had cut myself off from all to which I had held, to which I had wanted to believe could be my salvation because I was too scared to put it all on me. And the further out I go, the fewer ties that bind, and perhaps one of the last tethers that moor me to the shore is the fear of simply being me. Free from all that I have been taught to believe. Free to discover what it is like to live as God and the Universe always intends.

famous last words

 As to pain, seriously, what of it?
You can spend your life avoiding it, only to die,
and well, believe me or not, you’ll be back (giggle)
and the conflict won’t resolve until you face the lie and own the truth
and the only way you can do this is to walk through the fire.
You can do it now, or you can do it in another lifetime.
I am not actually sure that it matters
because I am not sure I believe in time any longer.
But I do believe in love,
and I find that love has extraordinary powers.

imagination is more important than knowledge

A person starts to live when he can live outside himself.

Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities.
The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit
to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence.

Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.

I never think of the future. It comes soon enough.

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious.
It is the source of all true art and all science.
He to whom this emotion is a stranger,
who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe,
is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.

Quotes by Albert Einstein
Art by Edward Hopper

here we go round in circles ..

On February 29, I set down the final words of the novel. I had to finish it. I had to get that last chapter out. Because it is all I ever knew. When I first set out to write, the only thing I understood was that there would be two characters and one ending. And how to get there? I, just like you, would eventually find out.

And though I wrote the book, for some reason I could not write the end. I started to get the strangest case of performance anxiety known to man. I tried to kill the book, rather than bear it forth. I tried to come up with all kinds of rational arguments to explain why I was not, nor would I ever be, a novelist.

But I couldn’t kill it. I couldn’t abandon myself. So I returned to the manuscript, and went over it until finally it was written. And then it was complete. And I knew I had to stop because reading it was starting to make me ill. And every time the book made me sick, I knew it meant I was overexposed and had to rest. Because, as I am very slowly learning, rest is where growth takes place.

Because.. it wasn’t simply that I was writing a novel, though that makes for a wonderful cover story. Because how can you tell people, I quit my job in order to stop because if I keep going on something bad is going to happen.

Nahh, people ain’t trying to hear all that.

Especially not when you’re prolific, and you’ve made your name making other people happy. People are conditioned to expect you to always be the same—after all, they rely on the premise that a leopard never changes its spots. Of course, most people cannot or will not distinguish between character and pathology, because they do not understand the difference. Because pathology is such a profound condition that it actually forces you to convince yourself—and everyone around you—that you are born this way.

Only, you’re not. I keep thinking of how nearly every psychological disorder is created by environment. And how much society reinforces the environment, in order to profit off of illness. But that’s another story, for another time.

All that matters is I did the thing I never thought I could do. I stopped. I dropped out. I opted out. I shut it down. And in shutting it down, I was left to empty everything out. Cause I remember a year ago, I awoke at four in the morning and I allowed myself to simply ask, What is it? and the answer came back so effortlessly.

My soul looks like Swiss cheese.

I understood, without words, what was happening. I was disappearing, and in my place, society was winning. But fuuuhck that, I might be down but I ain’t ever been out. This is the one thing I was born as: a warrior. I ain’t ever gonna die, even when I am dead. That’s what the dead keep telling me.

So I stopped. In as much as stopping means I ain’t gonna work. Which is hard, you know, cause I was forced to work when I turned 14, because, ohh the irony, my parents believe “Work will make you free.” That’s the German, and that’s the Jew. And that’s Auschwitz. And that is true.

Work didn’t make me free. But it taught me about who I am, and who I am not. And the less I work for money, the more I work for life. And love. And healing, though still, I do not know how to rest. But I do know how to empower myself, so I changed my path and kept falling on my ass. Because I attribute all my success to all my failure, and the same lesson appears every time—love will set you free.

Of course, the problem is simple. What is love? has become a lyric, an existential crisis. Because so few people experience the real thing, and they mistake all kinds of sicknesses for it. And then they go around telling other people, This is love and people, desperate and starved, will take it.

And from this starvation comes the holes in my soul. And as I began to clear out the debris, I find myself facing the void, just facing it and being at peace with it, instead of trying to avoid the discomfort it causes, or distract myself from the emptiness. For I do not believe in an existential crisis—I believe that I am facing the damage that has been done. And just facing it, taking in the view, like the Grand Canyon, marveling at the awesomeness of the power of environment to destroy the individual.

But I also believe that duality is an illusion and that there is no either/or. There is only and, and as physics teaches us, for every loss there is an equal and opposite gain. So I had allowed myself to be enslaved, because that’s how I had been raised. And slowly I have been allowing myself to free myself from the chains of the mind, the patterns of pathology, the words of the sick, and the delusions of the ill.

Freedom. This has become my theme. I am not even sure where it had begun to change though I think there is a confluence between writing, exercising, sunbathing, and releasing myself from people who are traveling in a different direction. And as I wrote, my understanding began to change. But it wasn’t just writing. It was reading. Pictures. I have been reading thousands and thousands of photographs and I didn’t realize what kind of effect this would have upon me. I didn’t even understand what reading photographs meant—and while I still do not understand I finally have some sense of it.

Not only can we read photographs. But so can chimpanzees. And this knowledge has blown me away, because it forever changes my understanding of language, symbolism, and communication. Though I still do not know what it means. But it explains how I could survive abuse. Because I was self medicating with photography. And it explains how the past two months have changed my novel. Because I just wrote three thousand words based on … photography.

As detail oriented as I might be, as much as I can see the big picture and work on several levels to exact my goal, I am not nor have I ever been a perfectionist because I simply don’t care enough. I am not perfect. I never have been. And even when I did things perfectly, I was still attacked. And that kind of negative reinforcement made it easy for me to give up this quest for flawlessness. Because I cannot please anyone else—most notably, I cannot please people who are unhappy. And me, I had been unhappy, and part of the reason for that was I was surrounding myself with unhappy people who expected me to be something other than me.

And in releasing myself of these people, in no longer aspiring or desiring to fulfill their needs, I have found my way back to myself. And I find that while I need to finish this novel, I don’t need to reach 100 percent. Probably because it could only reach 100 percent after it has been published and the world reads it. And then, yea, then ten years later, I should write the remix, and the remix would take into account everything I have learned since.

But since is not an option. At least not today. Though I know me, and chances are if here is a rule I will break it because rules are meant for people who like uniforms and coloring inside the lines. And while I admire form, I create my own before I follow anyone else’s life.

And so it is that I have returned to the novel, for what I hope will be the final pass through. Because it is time to finish what I set out to do—which is to throw my hat into the ring and begin anew. And to that end, I sat down today, and barely made it into the second chapter when al of a sudden the page broke open and I started writing as though I never stopped.

And my head is light as a helium balloon and I feel a little sick and all I can think is, these pages sounds like those photographs. And how did that happen? How did reading photographs teach me to write?

it was not my lips that you kissed, but my soul

I love you
and because I love you
I would sooner have you hate me
for telling the truth
than adore me
for telling you lies.
—Pietro Aretino

let me live, love and say it well in good sentences

And by the way, everything in life is writable about
if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise.
The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.
― Sylvia Plath

one must have sunshine, freedom, and a little flower

four letters

free

11th Law of Ma’at

I offer words of good intent.

every story is us ~

Breathe In For Luck

freedom ~

Everything in my life had become black, bleak, sleek, chic.
I was praised for having no soul. For becoming the machine.
I had to succeed. Because. I had to succeed.
Because. I had to succeed.
That was how I was raised.

Like, you know, in a barn. Like livestock. Like product.
This is The American Way.
The dream is to own, to be owned, but let’s not say slave.
Cause, you know, that’s how this country was made.

I was enslaved by slaves, under Act VII.
The condition of the child follows the mother.
That’s why I ain’t got no chirren.
Not til I break the chains. And free myself from…

the pain.

The Sun

Brilliant. Radiant. Sparkling.
So many of our words reflect the power and glory of light.
When we turn on the light in a room, we illuminate it
so that all the dark corners are visible.
When we turn on the light in our minds, we are enlightened.
We see clearly and understand the truth. Both within and without,
the energy of light expands our limits and makes us shine.

Throughout history, people have honored the Sun
as the source of light and warmth. In the myths of many cultures,
the Sun is a prominent god—full of vigor and courage.
He is the vital energy center that makes life on earth possible.
In the tarot the Sun also symbolizes vitality and splendor.
The Sun is definitely not a meek and retiring card.

In readings, you will understand Card 19 if you imagine yourself to be a Sun God.
How do you think and feel? You have total confidence in yourself.
You are not cocky, but profoundly sure of your power.
You have unlimited energy and glow with health.
You have a greatness about you and stand out brilliantly.
Finally, you see and understand all that is happening within your sphere.
When you see this card, know that you will be successful at all you undertake.
Now is the time to let your light shine.

freedom ~

 I am thinking I could have done better, I could have said it this way or that
when all of a sudden, I see through the lie.
I don’t have to be perfect. Because I am not.
And what is the point?
He has seen me as a train wreck
and
still
me he loves.