Less Numbings

Lately, I’ve been tapering off my distractions. Holding the intensity of being present with the work at hand. Working with the urge to disassociate from who I’m becoming.

It’s like a cold shower. Every voice inside telling me not to step into the stream — it’ll be uncomfortable, feel like too much, you’ll freeze to death. Agreeing to reality, breathing with it, noting the way it is, the intense sensations become familiar. From this place new energies can be expressed and broader works can be channeled.

(The rain is coming down heavy now. Darkening sky and the crescendo of sound as the drops hit the endless variety of surfaces around me. I love this place. This spot enclosed but permeable to the weather. The inside outside. Held in the thinnest possible membrane of civilization. A rumble of thunder climbs into towering clouds, the depth of sky making itself known, a single pecan falls to my left.)

You’re (just) writing to yourself. Tending a conduit to your subconscious. Doing this means getting fine with walking around naked in front of folks. Here you are, in all your lumpy elegance. Expression as true as comfort with being seen allows.

You can survive such vulnerability. The little one afraid and crying. Unsure and lonely. Divine spark lives in every calling. Not just those deemed appropriate by the constriction of fear. To play, to dance, to light up with the cavalcade of wildness.

Allow unbounded expression as your prime relation to God. This is, by nature, uncertain. The whole of what it is to be in relation to what is higher is beyond the spectrum of sense. Affording new constraints is the work of art.

To see the world through lenses focused on reality. To smell nature as it is in its complexity. To feel through sensory software what it is to be in this time and what it means to adapt to our explosion of niches.

The best you can do is play with sense and transmute it into the harmonies of meaning. Agreeing to this and sharing out the work. Setting yourself to finding the others and asking for feedback. Going to new territory as a stranger and sharing what sings through you. The work is at hand, will you pick it up today?

Kristen and I are flying out to Las Vegas this week to move our pile of earthly possessions out of storage and onto the truck we’ll be driving back to Austin. We’ve been living in other people’s stuff for 3 years, so it’ll be real nice to sleep on our own bed again. Wish us luck!

Went to a Halloween party put on by Art Island and dressed as my favorite internet cog-sci professor, John Vervaeke. I ended up in two surprisingly deep conversations with folks, so I guess the costume worked.

and finally, a dad joke from a website crammed to bursting with ads…

What do you call a fish wearing a bowtie?
"Sofishticated."

Hope you’re well.