I love this song.

Somebody made a nice video from Lost In Translation

Enjoy

How to Unmake a Life and How to Get Living

There have been several people who have known me on a level of personal involvement through some very difficult situations and over and over I've been told that I should write a book. I guess, its a bit flattering and so the sentiments seem to be undeserved at times-- that my life has experiences that would warrant an interest from others. Its a hard thought to reconcile, even though I've been encouraged my whole life to use my voice and express what I've lived and seen. There used to be a time when what I told people seemed unbelievable to them. Situations of a very glamourous life, high-profile experiences for a kid in his 20's... meeting celebrities and partying on tour buses, seeing the world as if I were riding the wind, business people asking for my advice because they felt like I had my finger on the pulse of the next big thing. Looking back on it all, it appears like I was everywhere at once... I was constantly moving, constantly looking for stimulation in every form. I'm not even sure if it was self-destructive in any way but what motivated me was a kind of fearelessness mixed with innocence to experience a larger than life feeling that would take me away from where I had been. It continued to make me. Until a kid in his 20's became a friend to no one... and all I could do was fly away as I burned bridges and left a path of destruction. But that's not what really happened... it's just how people made me feel that it happened because they were jealous or scared to live their own lives and the tensions began to make us all react in ways that were anything but the love we may have felt for each other before then... People had expectations of me that I can't say that I wanted live up to.

But as I believed them, the guilt and shame began to accumulate and I began looking for solid ground and answers to how I could escape these feelings. I began to form a routine of heavy drinking and actual self-destruction... and I met an incredible young woman who seemed to understand me. She believed in the ideals of sharing her whole self with my whole self and there was an answer that seemed to be in getting married. She has a daughter from a previous marriage and what I had in my life now consisted of a family and a home that I used as a microcosm of my own and that I could excel in the creation of as we developed our insulation from the world. As our sense of security become more and more established we began to desire approval from others and we acquired more responsibilties of maintaining a kind of lifestyle that may have been different from where we started and was more motivated by her sense of compensation at a pace that was faster than what I was willing to move. She wanted what I had before I met her. She wanted the exotic for the sake of it being exotic. It didn't work well for me and I began to sabotage the relationship by not participating in at the level I once had... about 2 years later we divorced and I began to realize that I didn't know what I wanted anymore. My life had been a series of choices that made me and not choices that I had made... and yet I fully recognized that I had allowed them to take over what I wanted.

My dad commited suicide when I was one. My mother didn't remarry until I graduated from high school. So in terms of the family dynamics it was difficult for me to determine what a man was, so I rarely thought of myself in terms of the patriarchal influences that society tends to catagorize the sexes... although I got bullied some and so I gained a distorted sense of what strength and power means. I was constantly challenging authority, particularly school administration. I was not scared of them. I was a brilliant student and I leveraged my academic abilities against them and got away with alot of things that any other kid may not have.

We were very poor. My mom raised three kids by herself on $1000 a month in our small town. The money came from Social Security from my father's death and so my mom was able to stay home and raise us, but then again she was a woman who no doubt has had the experience of her husband killing himself. The burdens she must have placed on herself of what she didn't do "right" to save him and the rejection she had to go through. I couldn't understand it then, but now I think I see it more clearly and I know she still deals with it today. Being his son, I've also realized that in many ways I'm a reminder to what happened and so her way of compensating for that was to always check on me to know if there was something "wrong" with how I felt or what I was doing. It became so regular that it seemed easier to just have something wrong so that she would stop bothering me about something... I don't even know what was supposed to be wrong, so I began to act and believe I was depressed so that she would satisfy her needs to take care of me and "prevent" the next suicide. Just saying this now angers me and makes it difficult to understand how I ever did survive my upbringing. I do know that she taught me how to not like my family and how to see people's concern for me as a threat to my own sense of self-sufficiency. The greater consequences of how my life spun around me is almost too much to even consider in this light.

So for right now, I'm going to change the subject to what has happened since my divorce and what I've done to resurrect myself.

Approaching the seperation with my former wife I began dismantling all of the influences of the people I had surrounded myself with and began to move backward to find the me that had existed before all of this application of other people's desires for what I should be. It very, very hard to keep your strength as you do this. There was no one that I could count on to understand me and no one I could trust to help. I couldn't even trust myself knowing that I had made the decision to allow so many people to make my life for me. For three days I laid in the corner of my room, not moving, for fear that I would take my life from me. I can't say that I really wanted to die, but I certainly can say I didn't want to live if what I had been doing was what life was about. And in those moments (three days worth of moments) I kept http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3htOCjafTc going back and forth across my life looking for a decision that I could just make for myself, a desire that I may have had that no one else could say that they made for me.

When you're 5 people ask you what you want to be when you grow up, and when you get older they start determining your aptitude for certain career choices that will yield you the most money and encouraging you to pursue life in terms of being pat on the back. Well, my ability to use a pencil and brush was well acknowledged by EVERYONE and there was no question that I loved being an artist, but people have very little faith in art as a career choice, especially in a small town in east Texas, and there is a favorite stereotype that people only seem to know about artist and that is the "starving artist" --although the "struggling artist" is also popular... and so in the corner of my room, I was willing to set this aside and look for an answer somewhere else...

In the 2nd grade, 7 year old children have very little exposure to the vastness of the world. There are vague concepts of what a map is (especially ones with big red X on it locating treasure!!) and maybe where your school is and some friends houses and then a relative who you have to sit in the car for a long time before you can get there kinds of ideas about the physicality of location in the world. My 2nd grade teacher was a young woman who told us that she was from Chicago. She was super fun with us and we just thought she was wonderful. She even looked like a Monchichi doll that was popular at the time... but this place Chicago, if Ms. Koyzes was from there it must be a great place... maybe like a jungle or a big playground! She showed us a baseball game between the Chicago Cubs and the Pirates... well that appealed to us as kids. The game was played at Wrigley Field... "they make gum in Chicago!?!?" It seemed this place couldn't get any better! and so as I got older my perception of Chicago became more realistic, but not much. It still seemed to hold a magical quality to me, because in reality Chicago is an amazing city with a history that is exciting and full of innovation in its contributions to the American culture, especially in the Arts. So there it is, my Eureka! ...my answer after three days of laying in the corner of my room... the decision I knew that I could trust for myself ...the secret desire for my life that no one could take away from me or make for me. I was moving to Chicago! I crawled across the room and it so happens that the Tim McGraw and Nelly song that I had in the Cd player also had another song on the Cd, but I had yet to hear it because I wasn't interested in the rest of the Cd or country musid for that matter, but I wasn't even aware that that Cd was what was in my Cd player at the time, and so when I reached up to push play this song came on ... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xSGLZd9Vg4

And my life changed!

Lets bring it to its final end

One day there'll be a place for us.

Moving on.
Breaking habits or being shown the value of something to move towards.
keep your eye on the rising sun/son.
Morning is breaking.
the distance.
now leaving
across the sky.


Discipline.
I can do what I want.
So what do I want.
The commitment emerges and freedom subsides.
You stupid shits who think freedom is forever.
It exists only to come back from
the most important part of freedom is the return to the body.

the unlikeliest of places

Sometimes the stars are in line and the lightning strikes
and the meaning is unescapeable
albiet a keen perception can see some things coming down the pipeline, to lose touch of that vision and give up on love
is to be human today.
When I walked away, I didn't mean for love to follow.
I didn't mean to have this happen today
and in the unlikeliest of places.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UVO-Dbb2-s

On Love

He who knows nothing, loves nothing. He who can do nothing understands nothing. He who understands nothing is worthless. But he who understands also loves, notices, sees... The more knowledge is inherent in a thing, the greater the love... Anyone who imagines that all fruits ripen at the same time as the strawberries knows nothing about grapes.
-Paracelsus

Is love an art? Then it requires knowledge and effort. Or is love a pleasant sensation, which to experience is a matter of chance, something one "falls into" if one is lucky? This little book is based on the former premise, while undoubtedly the majority of today believe in the latter.

This peculiear attitude is based on several premises which either singly or combined tend to uphold it. Most people see the problem of love primarily as that of 'being loved', rather than that of 'loving', of one's capacity to love. Hence the problem to them is how to be loved, how to be lovable.
- Erich Fromm
The Art of Loving

A Reflection of One's Contemplative Attitude

Le que l'homme a de plus profound, c'est sa peau
--Paul Valery

Bad literature belittles, but the true one reveals to us the regions as yet uncharted of the soul... One must never be afraid of going too far, for truth still and always lies beyond.
--Marcel Proust
Letter to Ernst Robert Curtains
Sept. 18, 1922

"if he cannot build his work as a cathedral, he will build simply like a dress.
The essential elements of a work of art are often hidden within the warp and the woof of the material.

the description associated with M~ conforms to the demands of his... conferring upon her the vague contours of someone seen amidst many, as in the manner of an illustration. Not until he begins to anticipate her in his imagination, will she detach herself from the many and become an individual.

Watching the Swimmer

Aristotle claims 3 different types of change:

Locomotion- change in position
Growth- change in quantity
Alteration- change in quality


When we desire changes in our lives, what do we expect it to be like when the change occurs? and how do we expect that we will be different in the occurance of an external change?

Is there any health in intelligence above the energy of the blind groping worm?
___________________________

Authenticity refers to self-knowledge and to making choices that are congruent with that self-knowdge.

"Do I REALLY feel this way or only if I think its safe... and then, even I worry about the wrong things sometimes.
why?
To continue in being honest as a priority.
This is the way I feel. This is the problem... to think that I'll always have the presence of mind to acheive the level of Love that I wish to know.
All the torches are out."
-No, You Shut Up

I remember years ago someone told me I should take caution when it comes to love. I did.
-Shontelle

Sometimes life is like surgery while awake.

We sail within a vast sphere, ever drifting in uncertainty, driven from end to end.
-Pascal

A way a lone a last a loved a long the riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to hot the Castle and Environs. -Joyce

Be a full bucket pulled up the dark way
of a well, then lifted out into the light.
-Rumi

I am so small I can barely be seen.
How can this great love be inside me?
Look at your eyes. They are small,
but they see enormous things.
-Rumi

Lord, I believe; help my unbelief
Mark 9:24

Sweet are the use of adversity;
which, like the toad, ugly and venomous,
wears yet a precious jewel in his head
And this our life exempt from public haunt
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones and good in everything.
-Shakespeare
"As You Like It"