My existence is an experience. A flash in the pan.
A dreamers waking dream.
Blink and it’s gone.
But if the dream is just a dream,
and life is just a dream as well,
then there is benefit in making friends with nightmares.
If I cannot escape my waking dream
I want to be with friends.
With lovely horrified nostalgia,
I miss your terracotta shop.
The digital process using absurd language for situations,
lead to fantastical thought experiments
that turn the stomach and remain gleeful just the same.
What??!??
“As I create a trap for villagers,
that usually releases them….before they drown.
Wait for them to get hungry so I can lure them into the tiny
shop so they can’t escape.”
Digital situation applied to human affect
Morals leave questions of extension of empathy.
Do avatars feel pain? Or boredom? or Desire?
And it is just a game.
Still… Even in its most extrapolated imagining,
elicits an emotional empathetic response.
Still the slave labor underground vault of colorful blocks was beautiful.
And I miss it.
I made bean soup I like for once
I made it as an act of love towards myself.
There were other things that needed to be eaten.
The ham bone was safely tucked into the freezer.
I made soup anyway.
My navy beans are old, so’s the herb mix in it’s yellowed plastic bag
Soup
The kids don’t like soup.
The kids REALLY don’t like bean soup.
Old beans in the pot with herbs and that ham bone.
Peel and roast carrots, Peel and roast potatoes
Kids do like roast carrots and potatoes.
None left for the soup.
I roast more
Soup.
Garlic roasted garlic,
Second time they make soup.
Soup for ME the way I like.
I only know how to make it by the pot full so there is a lot
glad I like it.
Bean soup.
You want to know why I’m so isolated?
I was told at a young age I was out of control.
I needed to be put in a cage.
So I built myself one.
I don’t know how I justified it
Whether I thought I was protecting everyone from me
or me from everyone.
I suspect there is fluctuation between these points.
None wanted to come into my cage, and no one invited me into theirs.
And since I didn’t even know it was there I bumped into it all the time.
It made me sad and mad.
I blamed myself
my worth
my abilities
my frustration
my lack of self control often due to my frustration
my mental illness
my trauma
My cage that I was instructed to build
made me into a paranoid creature
Trolls in her brain
When you are punished randomly and fiercely
When any effort to demand your worth or feelings is also punished swiftly
When the feelings and thoughts of strangers is more important than your own,
You receive instructions
In code
for cage construction.
Now I’m dedicated to doing what I think I’m supposed to do.
People who love me couldn’t reach me in there.
I gave some people I deemed worthy the key. Encouraged them to open the door.
I still wouldn’t come out.
Now I do, but it’s hard to move, hard to know what to do when no longer confined.
The overwhelm is so powerful.
No one ever says thank you.
The job is just done.
The done, the doing become identity.
The job is just done.
Unless it doesn’t.
Then comes the blame, the shame, the friction and more.
It hasn’t been done.
No one is doing it.
Like clockwork or tides or seasons, it has always taken care of itself.
But it hasn’t, it was always me, but no one noticed.
Oh they notice, now.
Not to step up or support.
They notice to complain, to give advice, to fix
to insist you fix yourself.
You must be broke if you can no longer perform.
The magic stopped.
You didn’t ask why.
The things piled up, nothing got done.
You didn’t ask why.
The space that used to emanate light and music
went dark and silent.
How long did it take to notice?
And I know it’s not enough, never enough.
Utility might pay Capitalism but it’s never enough for a heart.
Hearts need different magic.
Equal magic not servant magic.
Partner magic not prisoner magic.
They feel the same at introduction
but they are not.
In time the dissonance is deafening and the servant becomes invisible,
Only the utility remains.
Until it stops.
I see you friend.
The way you wear that heavy cloak of pain.
Most people can’t see it, can they?
I’m sorry for its weight.
I’m sorry for its invisibility.
I see you.
I see you trying your best.
Being judged for your moods when your world is crashing around you
in the weight of all you carry.
They do not hesitate to blame you and add to your burdens.
Blocking your path making you turn around and go the long way.
I see you.
I see how much fortitude it takes, how much running in painful circles.
The game is rigged against us my friend.
The itching and resulting scratching, maddening
blaze in two patches on my back
two, one on each side of my spine
Inverted teardrops
Blood colored and raw
The itching and scratch fighting continue.
Mind recoils at the signs of impending transformation.
Pain, release of pressure
a small birth of mirrored twins
Returning to my true form.
Have been called an angel (a daemon)
Fae is a more welcoming philosophy, though a more isolated one.
What do you call a person (if that’s what I am) with wings?
Feathered wings of mottled pigeon grey
Flecked with iridescent in the right light
Immaterial and solidly with purpose simultaneously
Does this being, this becoming portend some greater purpose?
Do I have to choose sides, loyalties again?
If so, this time I choose me
To fill my own cup
Take my own space
If my wings bother you, there is an exit in the back.
No one is asking you to bear witness.
I am my own witness.
My wings are what they are
no opinion will change or invalidate what is.
Your blessings and curses just noise
deflected easily with a swish of motion
a feather may brush your face like a kiss.
Becoming is all I have room for
Becoming is all that I am
All that I will be
And before you tell me what you see
what you want,
what you know
Let me just be.
I am almost ready to fly.
The yoke stands wide and menacingly inviting.
All my cares will handled if I just agree to pull the master’s cart.
Don’t I deserve the stability that provides?
I only have to do it during the day, and on market day.
I get days off.
But if I accept I only get fed if I obey
My potential value is so much more than my constrained task sheet
Am I allowed to sing while I work?
What happens to the ideas that I find while my body is busy?
What if I see a better path,
Want to move faster than the master does?
Heaven forbid I need to move slower. Will I be run over? Abandoned?
Will I know where I am when that happens? How will I get home?
That is the deal.
The master chooses the pace.
The master chooses the direction.
The master owns the ideas
The master voices the songs, we echo the songs.
The master does not own you!
What a silly idea.
The master owns the yoke.
You can take it off at any time.
The master can deny you the right to wear it at any time.
Why do you think you are not free?
I trap myself in impossible situations. Stupidly complex.
From my point of view.
I know it’s myopic.
From the outside it’s easy, it’s simple.
Just get up.
Just say hello.
Just send it.
Just make it.
Just do it.
Just smile.
I don’t expect anyone to understand. I may have barriers.
Invisible like a mime. Self imposed pretentious. Superfluous.
Just get up.
Just try.
Just walk away.
Just ask for help.
And when I listen, I really try
when even I can’t explain.
Tell me how to help.
Do what I say.
***Crickets***
I retreat. The cure is worse than the disease.
Explaining myself, justifying my space.
Why are you hurting?
Why can’t you just stop.
Why?
Just stop it.
Stop.
Retreat. Back to my cave with the echos and voices.
Angry ghosts repeat their shadow lessons.
Worthless
Hopeless
Helpless
Forgotten
Invisible
Insubstantial
Nothing
Nothing
No
If I make it until morning. I feel the scraping pain of armor construction.
Of building the prison I keep myself in.
I limit my pain to me.
I don’t want your pity.
I will drown in your worry.
I refuse to do your emotional labor.
If I decide to say no to the sun.
That’s my choice.
If this is my path I will not force you or even ask you to be my witness.
I’ll wait.
My prison, my armor, my pain, they are not your responsibility.
Fuck you and your interest.
Fuck all interest without investment.
When I stop building, fixing, maintaining
If/when it all falls apart.
I will have do one to blame but myself.
Don’t worry.
You’re in the clear.
We hid our depths.
You’d never guess it, probably.
We never stop talking, we never stop finding the beauty in the mundane
We are frivolous and shallow
this is the dervish layer
this is where we protect ourselves.
If you get caught up in the minutia
Won’t get to the bones
won’t go deep, that’s where we stay.
If you argue with us about the way we see the world rather than take a step to meet us closer to where we live, then that’s all you will ever see.
All you will ever know.
Even isolated, losing touch with the shared reality, we are deep.
We know without a doubt. Most people are too.
But there is no time, the depths take time, diving takes time and recovery/surfacing takes time and recalibration too.
You get the existential bends if you do it too fast.
You hurt yourself, traumatize yourself
this motion is more fundamental and sacred
it takes time. It cannot be rushed.
You must stop.
Stop completely and let yourself sink, let yourself fall.
Go deep.
And the murk comes and goes and you descend, deeper
deeper
and the light fades then disappears
and the pressure of loss of control and orientation builds until it collapses in on itself
yet this must be endured.
This is the process of depth.
It is SLOW it is uncomfortable
it expects a lot of you.
And when you go as far as your equilibrium wants.
You settle there, weightless
in the imaginary light that exists in darkness
and your soul can still feel proximity.
Still knows where it lives, still remembers now.
More as a concept down, in here, a belief, a feeling
rather than an experience or center of experience.
And when you are deep, the bones still exist.
They are the sturdy foundation of your personal reality
the places you are strong
solid and wear the ravages of time and communication
the pain of existing
the bones know it all.
Communing with the bones
reminds you who you are.
Why you came to be at all.
You are not who you were designed to be
you are a creature of your own creation in spite of the noise above to the contrary.
Your resistance, your scars at striving to become yourself
exist here in the bones of the deep
they tell YOUR story.
They do not give a flying fuck what any other reality would say.
They are the cold, clear objective existence of you.
Separate from anything else.
It is lonely with the bones.
They let you observe them with sightless dark eyes
synesthesia of the soul
They do not tell you their story,
they do not speak
it is their job to record and exist
not interpret, not speak
They do not observe, they are.
And with them you can remember who you are also.
And the pull will begin, to live the life of sight and shared reality
the pull of the now,
you cannot live forever in the deep.
It is not a home.
The buoyancy will change and the ascension will begin of it’s own accord
again there is no path but through.
It will be a different uncomfortable
it will be a different pressure
this time too loud and too bright
too fast too busy.
But the deep you carry with you will protect you
let you exist in the eye of your very own lifestorm.
That you can choose how and when to leave
How much of yourself you take with you.
And that power is something no one can even determine no less take away.
When all is lost, go deep.
Big Thoughts in Our Little World 