Month: September 2019

There are countless moments of despair in crossing an ocean, especially a new one.  But all of them contribute to your exhilaration when landfall is finally made.  Without the despair, that joy would not be possible.  There is no other way.

In life, you have to take risks, not knowing where they lead, if they will pan out.  Quite often they don’t.  But all of them build gratitude for what does work.

Whenever I see people wrestling with a risk, I always say “go for it”.  The worst that can happen is you learn something you could not have found out any other way.  You don’t have to wonder “what if”.

To the extent of my recollection, I have no “what if’s” in my life.  Certainly, there have been many cases where I could have been smarter, perhaps should have been smarter, might have chosen different words or silence, or generally might have done things differently.

But there are no large chances I refused to take.  I have set sail into the unknown many, many times.  I prefer dry land, but I have not found any yet which was congenial to the home and world I want to build.  So I keep seeking my own Promised Land.

My terror is awful sometimes, so too my confusion, my fatigue.  But my Faithful Three hold me up: rejecting self pity, persevering, and being curious.

It makes me happy when I see “my” ideas out in the public domain.  Obviously, it is far from clear they are my ideas–that someone read something I wrote on the internet and repeated it in their own way–and in most, quite likely all, cases are not.  They are just someone else thinking the same thing.

But I am trying to build something good, and my name need not be attached.  I prefer it not be, in fact.  If I have influence, let it be silent, covert, hidden.

I remember reading about the church builders of the Middle Ages.  Their names, by and large–the masons at least–are nowhere.  But their work still stands.  They kept their eyes on the prize.

I place no restrictions on the use of the content I create here, or that I created on Goodness Movement, or which I create from time to time under my real name, other than I do not want to be sued for copyright infringement for stating my own ideas.  You can take them, but don’t try and take them away from me.  That is my only restriction, and it is a very small one.

Here is a nice and, I think, relevant poem from Mary Oliver:

I had an odd dream last night–odd in its complexity and in its clarity, although of course all dreams are odd.

I somehow found out some person had been accused of something, but was unclear what it was.  He was being universally condemned, and I found myself shouting “innocent until proven guilty”.  I found myself yelling at some young college coed “this is one of the most important principles of the Anglo-American tradition” (I will note, there are some countries where it is guilty until proven innocent; this is still a thing even today, even in our modern world).

Then I was with a group of people I knew and respected, friends, who were all looking at me somberly.  I realized something was wrong.  What did I miss, I asked them.  One of them, a black woman, started telling me about this terrible man–the man I had been defending, without knowing the details of the accusation–who was a serial killer who tried to strap her to a hospital bed and kidnap then kill her.  It was quite obviously a true story.

But my friends were still there.  They did not agree with me, but they stayed by me.  They supported me. And I realized that the point of loyalty is to help bring your friends around.  I was in the wrong, but they were willing to patiently explain to me how, without judgement.  Friends allow their friends to be wrong, to support them in being wrong, but to privately TELL them they are wrong.  If you cut people loose the first time they fuck up, you cannot influence them for the better.  You cannot create a safe emotional space for them to experiment, screw up, learn, and then do better.  None of us can.  Loyalty means you creating that for them, and them creating that for you.

Without loyalty, the first mistake means expulsion.  Without loyalty, you have to live in constant fear of exposure, of being cast out, of solitude.  Without loyalty, none of us can really trust one another, because all of us make mistakes.  Without loyal friends–or at least an internal capacity to value our selves, and to forgive ourselves–growth is impossible.

My mistake, there, and it is one I think I make often, is placing principle before people, of placing abstraction higher than concrete fact.  As I have been writing as long as this blog has existed, you have to have regular perceptual movement, which I have called Perceptual Breathing, from the abstract to the concrete, the specific, the small, the infinitely diffuse.

And I will point out again that the reason the Left is so monolithic is that they are without loyalty.  They will cut people loose on the smallest of pretexts.  If you don’t march in lockstep with them, you WILL be cast out.  For people who need people–which is most people (all people, if you believe Bruce Springsteen)–this prospect is terrifying.  This terror, in turn, gets channeled into anger.

I would actually draw a triangle: if you can’t handle your anger, it is introjected as shame.  If you can’t handle your shame it becomes fear/anxiety.  If you can’t handle your fear, it becomes anger.  Trauma survivors go through this loop all their lives, with all three present most of the time, but one nearly always presenting primarily.

In any event, this story felt like progress.  Within my own psyche, I need to be able to make, and forgive, mistakes.

In human life, there is an inherent dance/dichotomy between the need for rules, and the need to ignore the rules.  If you go too far in either direction you become an unhappy society filled with unhappy individuals.

I had a story I was going to tell, but it’s too personal.  Suffice it to say it is possible to be intellectually correct, correct fully and pragmatically within the realm of rules which exist for solid reasons, and still be wrong as far as specific people.

If rules can be broken, they are mutable.  If people can be taught over time to follow them, they too are mutable.  Somewhere in the sky is the meeting place of all good children.  Somewhere in hell is the meeting place of rules that would not bend and children who would not bend.

I don’t know what I’m saying, but I think there is something there somewhere.  When I joke that I agree with 90% of what I say, it is because I don’t always know why I write what I write, and because I literally am not sure I agree with what I find myself typing, although in those cases I try to make that clear.

Do we all want to worship as one people at one altar to one idea–think some ugly edifice along the lines of Nuremburg which is a distillation of everything bad all totalitarians ever have created, with a single or small number of triumphant men and/or women atop it–or do we want to gather at countless fires around the world, to seek shelter from the cold and darkness of life, in small groups where we can see everyone, and they can see us?

I see the altar.  I see the fires.

What I think the “diversity” people don’t GET is that the leaders want to destroy all distinctions, and all barriers between the individual conscience–or lack thereof–and state power.

Right now, destroying the notion of gender differences feels radical.  It feels chic.  It feels transformative, new, rebellious. 

But biologically, I don’t think the human species can be happy, can thrive like that.  These people want to destroy all religions, all tribes, all creeds but their own, all sensitivity to or pride in ethnic or national heritage.  They want to destroy EVERYTHING which anyone can cling to and say “this makes me me”.

They want, in other words, to induce and harness mass psychosis, as they have done on very large scales a number of times now in the past century, but on a global scale.  This is what I see.

I think Burning Man is going on now.  Around now.  I have not been there, and will likely never go there, but I have to think some of the best times are had in small groups around fires (or some functional equivalent) in the dark of the night.

Think of deep conversations you’ve had late at night, perhaps with a few drinks in you, or perhaps some weed.  All of this will vanish, disappear, if certain people who hold places of high power even now get their way.  They won’t SAY that.  They may not even be thinking that, but history is clear that if they don’t get immediate compliance with radical and ludicrous demands, the violence starts nearly immediately.

We live in a nearly perfect surveillance state now.  If they care, the NSA knows if most of us snore.  Imagine if the government pursued the thing to it’s logical end systematically.  Implanted cell phones would most likely do it.  Something you can’t turn off and can’t remove.  That technology is here today.

I continue to wonder at how blindly so many freedom loving people follow the lunatics on the Left.  I don’t think they get that those people may have room for them now, but that won’t last forever.  It never does.  Once in power, privilege is quickly removed from circulation and left for all but the most connected.  In other words, some concoction is brewed which contains the worst elements of theocracy, aristocracy, monarchy, and even abusive capitalism.

What I work for is the fires.  There is a different conversation around every one.  Differing conclusions are reached around every one.  The fires go out in the night at different times, and some burn all night.  This is civilization.  This is the dignity of humankind.

If you think about it, up is really out.  Down is really in.  This would be more obvious if we were not oriented vertically with respect to gravity.

I got to thinking about the qualities of motion in the universe.  We easily enough speak of color and shape and texture, but of things which are not in motion.

As lines, things can move away and toward, or in a circle.  A jagged, curvy line is still away or toward, and if it ultimately makes its way back it is a circle.  A triangular path is still a circle, conceptually.

Three dimensional shapes can expand and contract, or both at the same time, perhaps in some cases in lines.  The Sun sends its light and heat straight out, forever.  But solar flares go up and out, then come back.  Eventually, if memory serves, it is believed it will begin expanding in all directions, after which I assume some sort of contraction.  Perhaps to a very small mass which then again expands in a supernova.

And there is a time aspect.  There is continuous flow, there is intermittent, rhythmic flow, and there is randomly interrupted flow, all three in all directions.

And there is a quantitative aspect: sometimes things flow a LOT, sometimes less.  There can be rhymicity or jaggedness to this quality–quantity becomes a quality–as well.

I have no idea what possible use these musings might be, but pass them along as they came to me.