Thank You

Everyone is an opportunity. Everyone is an experience. You, in the abstract, have been brought into my life for a reason, as a testament to my capacity to love, to be understanding, to be patient, to be kind, to be selfless, to be a servant. This seems to involve reconfiguring the roles that the people in my life at this juncture in time play and reimagining how I might continue to grow in love. Ironically, this "relationship" is making me extremely empathetic towards my last, in which I was the one who picked and choosed when to call, when to be involved, how much (little) of my time I was willing to sacrifice from week to week, if/when I was going to be there when you needed me. And I see why it drove you crazy - the uncertainty, the selfishness, the lopsidedness. But I could only hear you speak those things and try to empathsize/understand because I was inside of it/that. It is always in retrospect that these types of things are brought into the light and that we begin to experience a version of ourselves that we couldn't see from inside the shadows of that former self. I guess that is what might be called wisdom, which can only be gained over time, through experience, over experience, through time. It sort of sucks that people are often the outlets through which these less than extraordinary versions of ourselves are discovered, but it is what it is and this is why forgiveness is so important - because everyone needs to go through the fire, be bad, be ordinary in order to be extraordinary. And in the process we often hurt each other or use each other to unwrap/create/discover ourselves. If only we could be born with wisdom!

It's 5 in the morning. I can't sleep partially because I watched the Shining, partially because I had a good amount of sugar, partially because I am trying to remind myself that you don't call me because you are busy.

It's 5 in the morning and I am crying. I just had a deep coversation with a friend who told me that she was raped... more than once. My advice to her was to thank him/them. I think that, as harsh as this sounds, it is good advice (pats self on back.. hehehe...just kidding..I am simply reiterating lessons I've been taught and ones I've adopted from others..an On the Shoulders of Giants approach to education and living in general as it has so aptly been named). Thank him/them. For the opportunity he has given you - the potential for you to empathize with other people who have experienced similar things is now there. It is a blessing in disguise to be able to enter this new terrain, to speak of horrific things and spread love and awareness from a new, enlightened vantage point. We all have particular sufferings. I sort of wish I had a harder life - weird huh? - it's been pretty awesome... I guess what I am particularly empathetic towards is loneliness.... Anyway, the fact that my friend was raped not once, but twice, the reaccuring nature of this experience, might be interpretated as a suggestion that she is meant for a greater purpose. She is a vessel for something bigger than herself. 
I think that gratitude is more proactive than forgiveness. It's like... a branch of forgiveness, but an extremely important one because it enables us to use our experiences, our sufferings for good, to make the world a better place, not to create expressions (via writing songs, creating social networks, other acts of revenge etc.) that simply keep the cyclic wheel of human suffering in motion. We had a Harvard professor speak at our yoga teacher training and she told us that "no one gets out of childhood unscarred" (Why did I feel the need to cite the fact that she was a Harvard professor in order to make that mundane statement seem more weighty.. new blog? haha) We are all scapegoats at one point or another for other's misfortunes. I remember reading about greek theater when I was an undergrad. I forget who said it, but someone was concerned that the spectacles involved in greek theater were serving merely cathartic functions. That they were a way for the audience to purge themselves of their sufferings by watching others suffer. This is a practice that is manfested in new, yet similar ways today. We do all this stuff to make us feel good. We take medication to numb our suffering or have sex and drink and get high or get lost in the media or..jeez virtually everything.... as a way to distract ourselves, numb ourselves...wow that could be a long tangent...

this is why I like laughing.. because my thoughts are deep... and laughter reminds me that life is not that serious..but it is, sort of not really. It's seriously funny! ha. ha. ha...

......................Is Nothing Sacred?
©SFS

this is a weird memory that is coming into my head right now... I remember being in Brooklyn once sitting my living room. There were 2 other girls and the conversation turned to sex. They started talking about sex and boys and pleasure and how they expected their men to do these crazy things to them and make them feel good and reciprocate favors and whatnot. I remember thinking "Wow. I think I might puke." Not because of the topic... I'm all for talking about sex, baby! But because of their interpretation of this very sacred activity. I guess I'm thinking about this now because it falls under the category of selfishness, which is how I feel when I think things like "why don't you call?" "why don't you care?" which is how I began this blog. So it all relates, I swear!

This blog rocks... it always transforms me in some way, shape, or form. Tonight, the transformation occured outside, in another virtual realm, while I was in the process of sorting out my thoughts. Here I am worried about myself while my friend is out there experiencing this enormous physical/emotional pain. Or is all pain similar? Sort of like.. when you are in love, little things become big deals.. like how the grass feels on your bare feet or your personal experience in an awkward social situation..  love makes these things matter, resensitizes you. Similar to personal sufferings? 
And now I am simply grateful. Thank you people in my life, no matter what you do, who you are.

 To have never suffered would be to have never been blessed.

Life Formatted Visually?

In the business of love. Unwrapping it, finding new ways to do it, growing in it. Growing in it above all things. I've been thinking about a way to create something that serves as a visual representation of the way I feel about life, as a way to regain my perspective when I start to lose it. I want this picture to be the foundation of it.. the mind/body/spirit triad. As a way to remember that I am a mind; a thinking thing, a (sometimes) intelligent being who can rationalize and construct and create and understand. But that is just one part of me. As a way to remember that I am a body; a walking and talking and breathing thing - I experience life from within this thing with skin and limbs and bones that restricts me from lots of stuff, but also enables me to experience the world, life - it is my house, my temple, my vessel. But that is just one part of me, too. I am also a spirit with a soul that feels and loves and hurts and is connected to all things, something matterless, something that for the cultivation of virtues. But that is just another part of me. I am all of this together - ultimately something divine.

I also want to create a visual representation of Love. A heart just doesn't seem to cut it anymore. It's nice as a quick, socialized, commercialized way of transmitting a message because people all speak the language of hearts, but I want something more me.  I'll have to define that concept more.. personally I guess before I do that though. This is a pretty solid defintion that seems to have worked for me my whole life. The most attractive thing about it is the way it deals with resilience.

Love
If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when perfection comes, the imperfect disappears. When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me. Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.
But now faith, hope, love, abide these three; but the greatest of these is love

 

I've been writing for a while now, but after studying language and culture and people and especially Phaedrus and works like it and doing lots of stuff involving silence, I've come to acknowledge that words are just too inadequate. They are useful, just not all-encompassing. Neither are visuals obviously, but maybe they come closer to embodying emotions, feelings, and truths because they are simultaneously (not to generalize) objective and subjective. How can you write about Love or God or the Human Condition and expect that the mere 26 letters that you have to work with will do the job? When I write, I always feel like I have to follow up one thought with another, like I have to explain myself. There are always "buts" and assumptions to be made and tangents to go off on and one idea always flows into another. Not that I have anyone to whom I am writing or explaining myself, but when I look back on my catalogue of meanderings I want to be clear about they way I felt about life and its frictions.

A picture is worth a thousand words? Maybe? Why, though... because it says something without saying anything? Maybe? I like that, though, so, yes.

Pondering the Absurd

 I feel a slight paradigm shift coming on that will hopefully alleviate the paranoia that unfailingly sets in when I encounter certain manifestations of the absurd. It resulted from a conversation I had with a friend whose thoughts, opinions, and overall approach to living I deeply respect.

I am in love with strangeness for its own sake, which is to me the truest representation of the divine. 

 Word. so cool - a more abstract notion of the divine. I've historically (in the history of Leila) been petrified of absurdity and strangeness - of things that are contrary to what they appear to be (the mayor in the nightmare before Christmas is the archetypal example of the sort of thing I am referring to). To me, things of this sort have always been untruths, depictions of the way things are not, manipulations of reality as we know it, dishonest. I think this is the natural outgrowth of a childhood composed of sports, church, and family. I was pretty grounded. My head was not in the clouds. Ironically this is what happens in life: we either grow to fear things that are unfamiliar to us or we swing the other way and distance ourselves from the lives we have been brought up in. Sometimes it seems like we do this not because we truly believe that the lives we have been brought up in are false, but because we want to create something that is our own. In this way, the creative imperative ironically obscures our pursuit of truth. Or because we come to learn that life itself is false and we project this onto the practices, rituals, and ways of being that our parents have adopted for us. Anyway, as strange as this sounds, I didn't really encounter art or music or abstract manifestations of creative imaginings until I was almost in college. Well, I guess I encountered them, but I never thought twice about them, never let them touch me. Then, when I did, and when I started experimenting and becoming enthralled by things of absurd natures, I was scared. "OMG life is not what I think it is! I have been prepping myself to live and thrive in a system that could malfunction at any given moment!" I guess I did not want to come to the ultimate realization that life IS absurd. Anyway, this idea is really cool because it means that I don't have to be scared anymore. I don't have to be scared of things that are unfamiliar or dichotomous or contradictory because they may be the truest representations of the divine, of that which cannot be identified, of the unknown.  They may be the ultimate way to come to terms with the fact that as hard as we try to become gods ourselves, to manipulate nature or create social structures that dominate the way we think and act or prescribe commerical values to material things, all our attempts are in vain.

I still have to think about the -est at the end of tru.

http://www.stanford.edu/class/history34q/readings/textualizingscience/babelshort.html
Maybe this mode of thought is outdated. After all, isn't that what art in the 1920s was all about? Art that was evacuated of figure - a movement that reflected the predominate mode of thought of that period, that there was nothing to figure. Yes and no? Solipsism and all its correspondingly despondent reproductions didn't provide a solution, a new way of looking at the world, just a conclusive argument that private experience can never completely be shared. I've already come to terms with all of this stuff about the world being created and blah blah blah....what I am proposing is something more proactive. something that allows us to use our creative powers for good!

The other cool thing about this idea is that it soooooooo nicely correlates with the direction I want to move in. I love God first and foremost, yes. I love art and theater and writing and music and abstract thought too and sometimes the ideology that religion espouses (not so much the actual doctrines themselves, but I guess the social aspect of it, the lifestyle) makes no room for creativity. But here is a way to embrace everything that I loveeeeeeee, or, rather, to find new reasons to loveeeeeeeeeeeeeee the worlddddddd... always a good thing =D


The simulacrum is not what hides the truth, it is truth that hides the fact that there is none.

Along the same lines, I'm thinking about linearity and how pervasive it is. I'm thinking in terms of geometry and architecture and how the construction of our world into boxes (ie. when you look out the window of a plane everything is square - also..square shaped fields, rectangular buildings, rooms that are square and the furniture that is created with sharp edges and angles in order to fit them, technology - ipods, computers, etc.- books, newspapers, etc.) informs the way we think. The way we think is in a linear, boxy fashion. We categorize things and draw rigid lines around them and view life as a calculated, step-by-step processes from birth until death, at least in the West. I guess to bring up reincarnation or cyclical agricultural cycles or other "circle of life" type dealioz would be a long tangent. Our illnesses or non-physical sicknesses are pinned down to one or a few variables. We love, we live, we think in a linear fashion and I am wondering if this is a product of the way we have visually structured our world. I realize that in order for capitalism to work efficiently it must adhere to this process - from production of whatever is being produced to consumption of that same thing - the process is linear - however, it seems as if this linear mode of thought preceded capitalism. the way our whole world is structured seems to adhere to this principle of linearity. Even the way I have reduced the way I am today to being the product of certain events and circumstances from my past is linear.

What I think is that linearity allows us to be held unaccountable for the destructive behaviors that we constantly allow to shape our lives - it always us to live under the illusion that what we do to ourselves doesn't effect other people, the planet, future generations. And this is reflected in the physical, visual, geometrical way we shape and literally make the globe conform to us.

Anyway...yay I wasn't a hopelessly emotional romantic in this blog!! Which doesn't mean that I am not. I am still steeping with love love love love love love love love, but it is nice to write about other philosophical meanderings, too. It's cool that I am starting to come up with my own philosophy on life, taking into account the lives, the philosophies, the day-to-day interactions and contemporary movements that are real to me and shaping them into some way of living that works for me. The creative imperative drives life forward!

externalizing

I can't sleep. i feel too full. of so many things. I am so happy I want to cry. too much passion and no way to get it out. everything is so fucking beautiful i don't even know how to express it. i want to create, express, dance, hug inanimate objects, say i love you a trillion times, roll around in the leaves, literally jump for joy. i feel like i have to hold so much back though. i can't even breath! wetw43t43tqwr.

Fall

Fall. Changing seasons and something else. Transience. Reminders of what it is to be alive. As it encroaches, there is a newness, always an energetic something, indescribable, dynamic, kinetic, spirited, and strangely always exactly the same and exactly different. Breathing color into life. Where did it come from? It always happens overnight. Time? Moving, changing, accumulating. Wisdom? Moving, changing, accumulating. Love? Moving, changing, accumulating. Stepping into something brand new and blindingly beautiful. My thoughts are fragmented, whirling, not to be bound by words, of which there are none. None. What? How? Yet every one chosen with care. No borders, and yet I’m standing at the margins. How? Falling into something incommunicable. My eyes into yours, seems the only way to say it. Or a country road, private, bursting with color, no end in sight. Fall. Brace yourself? Or just Fall.

Fuck You.

I like rock music. I liked it before I got into any other music, before I realized how powerful music could be or how different rhythms moved me. To be more precise, I like rock ideology. I always find that after I listen to something really passionate or something weird or something moving or something that tugs at my heartstrings, I retreat back to rock music. After I started questioning things and trying out different beliefs and different lifestyles, rock music was always a sort of constant - something refreshing, relaxing, unemotional. Weird that these are not qualities that are typically associated with rock music, but this is how this genre made me feel.   This is sort of strange since rock music seems to be the antithesis of everything that I really deeply love about life (love, truth, yoga, silence, natural beauty...things of this sort). However, in pondering why I love the things/people/experiences/ect. that I love, I've come to conclude that they all have that "Fuck You" quality about them. I love yoga (as a metaphor for a particular kind of lifestyle) for the same reason I love Rock music. I think it is encapsulated in this poem, which, ironically, also has that "Fuck You" quality about it...

People are unreasonable, illogical, and self-centered.
Love them anyway.

If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish ulterior motives.
Be kind anyway.

If you are successful, you will win some false friends and true enemies.
Succeed anyway.

The good you do today will be forgotten tomorrow.
Be good anyway.

Honesty and frankness will make you vulnerable.
Be honest and frank anyway.

What you spend years building may be destroyed overnight.
Build anyway.

People need help, but may attack you if you try to help them.
Help them anyway.

In the final analysis, it is between you and God.
It was never between you and them anyway.

- Mother Theresa

Grad school is showing me exactly what I thought that it might, except in new,  interesting, and more esoteric ways - that the world is socially constructed and reality is never what it seems to be. This is cool because once we realize the latent paradigms that underlie the way that things function, we can create or choose our way - like the autistic child did in The Curious Case of the Dog at Night.. not that he could help it, but still (another book of "Fuck You" quality). So, fuck who? Fuck you socially constructed, ideologically perpetuating "reality" and all of the standardized products, services and creations that you propose to be true. I love you, but fuck you.

This blog sounds harsh. I really hate the F word, but it seems appropriate and not interchangeable hahaha.

On another note, fear and love are opposite sides of the same coin and I have been excessively afraid lately. But this is not really who I am, it is just something temporary. Anything that comes out of my mouth (or anyone's for that matter) that is written in letters or blogs or spoken or acted out that is not all-encompassing, unconditional love is fear - fear of transitioning, of relinquishing the past, of newness, of being on my own, things of this sort. Any words, thoughts, actions or creations that I manifest and bring into the world or thrust upon you/anyone that are not aligned with this ultimate goal of seeing the beauty in all things, of truly saying Fuck you to everything that is not unadulterated, unconditional love are not really me- they are just some ulterior me, some ego-bound me speaking or acting or thinking on some worldly whim. 

And this, I think, (what do I know?) is where the logical fallacy of life and love occurs - in the space between the real and the false - in assuming that one is the other, that my very essence is validated by what I say, do, act out, or create.... even though these manifestations of "me" might be motivated by fear - a transitory state of being. And this is why we tire of love, why we move on from a person or get anxious about the circumstances that we are in. But, ironically, it is these material manifestations that draw people to each other... so how now brown cow? hahaha... I just felt like saying that..... but really, people come to love each other for their idiosyncrasies so... I guess how now brown cow is a good way to end that thought.... hahahaha.  


again, what do I know?.

I like you a lot because I think that you realize these things -and because you also seem to have that fuck you-ness about you.

And I like myself a lot because I know I realize this. In this way I am so, so small, yet can be so large.

Thanks for serving!

.... we had an OCF conference call the other day and our leader ended it on this note of gratitude. It is such an obvious thing that my role in this new job title, and in life, is to be of service, to serve, to be a servant for a greater purpose. But it is something that I had forgotten somehow. I think this is natural when we are caught up in the busy-ness of life - we get caught up in the here-and-now and forget to make mental/physical time for all the stuff that isn't a temporary distraction. It's sometimes hard to remember that that is what all of this "stuff" is. It was especially hard during Pippin to not get hypnotized into thinking that the show was not but a fleeting bit of a nice experience in the grand scheme of life because I loved it so much. But I can't help but wonder... then what? and then what? and then what? and then what? and then what? and then what? And ultimately I come to the conclusion that we are meant to love and serve and that is the end of the then whats? And then all of these experiences that we have.. school, sports, music, theater, work, family, etc. take on a new transcendent purpose and we can go through life not consumed by the worldliness of each of them, but by the opportunities for loving and serving that are inherent in each one.

I've been questioning what my role has been in each of the schemas that currently comprise my life recently and, today, this statement somehow made its way to the forefront of my consciousness and made me feel blessed that I have so many opportunities to fulfill this calling. What immediately comes to mind is my role in Much Ado About Nothing - a waitress/bartender. I am literally a servant. I serve drinks and tend tables and clean up after everyone else and backstage I make sure everyone is comfortable enough to perform to their greatest capacity. It is very much a role that takes a backseat to the other leading roles -and I love it! In fact, when I think about it, I can reimagine my entire life as being made up of opportunities to serve - family, school, athletics, theater, relationships, etc. They are all glorious opportunities for us (me) to realize how/what/in what ways we can give of ourselves.

The greatest thing you'll ever learn, is just to love and be loved in return.