honestly..?

I’ve been having trouble writing an honest blog for a really long time. Probably because I have a few people who read my blog and have strong opinions about right/wrong that make me feel like I can’t express myself as honestly as I want to.

Ironically, the person who introduced me to the idea of hating a person was the person who taught me the most about love. Self-consciousness always gets in the way… of everything! I grapple with self-consciousness all the time. About how important “me” is and how much of myself I should let go of in the name of learning, feeling, and sharing. I’m definitely attracted to things that require you to surrender yourself for something bigger- I think that maybe everyone is. Playing music with others is one of these things. Dancing is another. Theater is another. The military is another. Spirituality is another. I’ve noticed this most recently in teenage girls trying to learn how to move and be in their bodies. I can’t teach them as well as small children or more mature gymnasts because they are too busy thinking about how they look etc. etc to really allow for freedom of movement. This is who I am when I am at my best – carefree, giddy, silly, focused. People tend to love me when I’m in this state (which is cool feedback) and I love myself too and I try to be there as frequently as possible.

But there are things that get in the way of me being there. These things are all fears. The fear that I don’t have a solid, consistent, core group of friends with whom to share things with. The fear that I’m not consistent enough myself – too unpredictable for people to accept or rely on. The fear that I’ll get sucked in to contributing something(s) that are less than honest to the world, that I’ll have offered a series of facades or episodes in which I’ll have introduced a self that was really not myself for some superficial, ulterior motive like security.

I’ve been attracted to musicians for a while now. Namely because you have to lose yourself in the music in order to play good music – transcend yourself. I've found some free-spirited dancers who are like this too, and I love them just as much. 

 This is what you tried to beat out of me- any iota of self-consciousness. You said it in so many ways and did it mostly with music. I have to make some decisions now, like where to move to, whether or not to be in a relationship, how I’m going to survive, what kind of direction I want to steer my life in. Really, though, almost anything is enjoyable if i can get to that place.

I’ve experienced some divine moments, some really loving moments. Some of them have stretched on for long periods of time. Others have been fleeting glimpses of bliss. But they all make me think about eternity. And I've experienced some really scary moments too - mostly those involving loneliness.

Bonnaroo was great, again. But there, just like in Cali, NYC, with any sports team or movement-based discipline or any group that has any sort of an identity at all - I could almost instantaneously discover the "formula" for what it took to become a member of the "music festival" gang or the hippie gang or whatever you want to call it- consumerism gives you a good idea of what you need to do to be a part of whatever it is you want to be a part of. ironically, the very thing that i was initially attracted to because it offered the appeal of carefree unself-consciousness, out-of-body, love and connectedness proves to be just another example of role-playing - namely hippie culture - listen to the grateful dead, participate in some drum circles, get some dreads, do a lot of acid, smoke a lot of weed, wear earthy colors and tie dye things, talk the talk, walk the walk - consumer culture gives you a pretty good idea of how to be whatever it is you want to be and other people let you know whether or not you are successful at whatever image you are pursuing by accepting/rejecting you through the manifold ways we have to communicate. But any time I've found myself gravitating towards fashioning some predictable/reliable imagine of myself is when I've felt the most empty - like a walking advertisement or a visual math formula - nothing genuine, nothing honest.

ironically, the jist of this blog is the thesis for almost every piece of academic work i've had to write for school - maybe that's why school was so enjoyable for me - because I wrote honestly about transcendence and connectivity and roleplaying and the many ways that different cultures/political groups/artists/other groups of people do it. But then towards the end, I had thought about this so much and knew it so well in theory that it started to make me angry that it was so pervasive and I stopped knowing it in practice.

Really knowing something is so painful. You have to be so brave, so willing to get hurt.

What I know is that I can feel when I’m in love – it’s effortless – and I can feel when I’m not in love – it’s when I’m focused on image maintenance or preservation of some scene. Sometimes I’m unable to get to a place of love because my mind is clogged up with so many different fears. Consistency is I guess my main concern at this point in my life. There was a brief span of time where I felt like life was about adapting. In order to be in a place full of love I need to surrender any idea of myself as maintaining some sort of image or being an agent in helping to preserve some schema. I guess this is what I mean by “consistency.” It’s what puts the majority of people at ease I suppose – but maybe that’s only because the majority of them are also trying to preserve some sort of scene, whatever it may be, because then everything is OK. And if that’s what it takes to have a consistent group of people in your life or a consistent anything than I’m not so sure that’s what I want. I want to be consistently in a place of love, surrender, sillyness. I guess that is ultimately what all of these quirky little fall-backs are for – blogging, callisthenics, music, theater, my box in the woods, spirituality, books, movies, games, whatever whatever – in order to feel good and have fun doing any of them I need to surrender and sometimes they help retrain me, refocus me on that ultimate task when I’ve lost my way.   

I hope to offer something genuine to the world –whatever I do, whoever I’m with, wherever I am. I hope this blog was honest. 

Intimacy

I find that I'm heartbroken every time I perform an artistic piece I've been toiling with, especially a solo piece, because it means the death of it. I love them all intimately and with every new chance to perform, I find that, from experience, I can tell when I've fallen in love with it. If the exhibition occurs before I've gotten the chance to fall in love, then there is something amiss and I feel unfulfilled and unimmortal. When I get to the point at which I can say I am in love with you, dance! then I am ready to share it with the world, because I believe in what I am sharing. I'm giving the world a piece of myself, I'm sharing true love, I've transcended myself, and hopefully I'm awakening the desire for true love in others. Anything less, is brown bananas.


Emotional attachments give me depth. Intimacy warms my body.

As it turns out, all of those worldy anecdotes and aphorisms are true, but the people who say them usually have no clue what they mean and the people who know they're true feel strange vocalizing them because they are truly doing them no justice.

"If I've learned anything in my 21-or-so years, it's that 'singer-songwriter's can neither sing nor write a song, and that, by the same token, 'workout-buffs' are never fit. 'Workaholics' are usually lazy/unproductive, and 'creative writing' is often plagiarised."  -CM

helium

Flabbergasted. This usually doesn’t happen until sometime after 1 o’clock, but I guess being surrounded by so many balloons is sufficient enough to incite such an emotional state. In a world of so many lost causes, how could there be so much helium? I know, I know, this too shall pass, but until then, I’ll continue to take my time in the shower. Depending on which way I turn the knob, it’s hot on a cold winter’s day and cool on a warm summer’s day. Unless by some fluke chance it’s a warm winter’s day in which case I’d take a bath. As luck may have it, I am not German. But if I were, I’d probably still be flabbergasted since I imagine German folk are not immune to such provocations of the mind, although by the intonations of their language you might think otherwise. Sure, Wir dreschen leeres Stro, but I’d still like to consume my wienerschnitzel with relative haste. Everything is everything, that’s what I keep telling myself. Ultimately, it’s meaningless, but also and ultimately meaningful, and if they accepted aphorisms at insane asylums I would write a hearty letter of recommendation on its behalf. Give it a 7 on the Altman Self-Rating Mania Scale and diagnose it as an outlier, the everpresent goal being to normalize the spectrum of human expressions, when all I want is my MTV. And maybe a small veggie burger. Accordingly, it’s out of our hands and up to the government to decide what to do here. That’s usually a good answer to every question and a great way to evade responsibility, second only to hiding in the closet and plugging your ears. Unless you telephone capitalism and have the two go at it on some remote farm in Nebraska. Corn has been known to be an honest witness, except in March. Farming, on the other hand, a completely dishonest trade, has been known to produce crops. It is in this setting that Uncle Sam meets the Invisible Hand. My money’s on Apple. And still, how is it that there is so much helium? 

everything is everything

that scene with the over protective father who screams at his daddy's-little-girl daughter. after she rolls her eyes, yells "but dadddddddd," and stomps away his scowl dissipates into a knowing grin. like, you may hate me now, but this is going to be the stuff of birthday cards in a decade or so.

self

The moment I start to feel slighted because people don't realize how great I am is the moment at which I am not great. I've been confronted with the idea that I am selfish more than once now during my past 2 relationships. And both times I've noticed that my immediate reaction was usually "how dare you, I am most definitely not selfish." Is this not, if I had not been before, proving that yes I am selfish? The minute  that I develop the attitude that I somehow understand things on a deeper level because I devoted more whatever to trying to figure them out is the minute that I only understand them on a shallow level. The minute I say I have nothing to learn is the moment at which I have the most to learn. I'm sure there's some witty anecdote for this truism, but I'm writing from my heart, almost emotionally, about something that could have been deduced logically and rationally. I've graduated school, yet there are so many things that people who are less educated than I know better. I look at my little girls in the gym and think, damn, I have the greatest teachers right here. It's like getting paid to learn vs learning because you paid. And the things that have "shoulds" attached to them, the things that have kept me "grounded" are the same things that hold me back.

just thinking

Old man #1:  See, I was just thinking....
Old man #2: Well that's your first problem!


- habitat for humanity NC 

There's this thing that I like to do at the end of my yoga classes and anytime I'm in a contemplative mood... like tonight when I was watching the sky darken in the forest. I like to listen (I haven't really experimented a lot with the other senses) and let everything sort of jumble into ambiguous sounds. Like I'll be lying there and people will start moving all around me and I'll hear the floor creaking and clothes shuffling and voices whispering or like tonight I'll hear birds chirping and leaves rustling and the wind howling and sounds of cars driving by in the distance and If I'm real good then everything will just be "sound" instead of "footstep" "bird" "wind" "whisper." I'll stop my mind from labeling. In these moments, I am neither happy nor sad, anxious nor peaceful.. I just am. Maybe you can call it being peaceful? I think I like just being better. These moments of just being are among my favorites. At least I think they are? I guess I can only appreciate them in retrospect. But I'm so beyond words happy that I have them because sometimes I feel so alone being around so many silence fillers. And when I'm not categorizing then I'm also not drawing any conclusions ie. I should be anxious right now or somewhere other than Here or going through a laundry list of other things.

I like the relationship I have with this blog at the moment. Now, when I write, I feel like I'm getting a hug. Like tonight, I was in this weird mood and I didn't know what I needed - meditation? company? food? laughs? something to stimulate my intellect? And I'm happy that I've given myself a place to write.

Silence can be the most courageous act. So can speaking. And vice versa. so funny, how we react to things ephemeral.

One of my uncles seems pretty hot tempered sometimes, pretty adamantly convicted of some of his decisions (ie. can I go out tonight with friends?) but as soon as you throw in an "I love you" he melts and you can get him to do whatever you want! I hope that I never grow so callous and numb that I am not moved by an appeal to love. I hope I am always capable of being (when necessary, a least a bit, maybe a lot...) vulnerable.

I've been thinking a lot about this: you are what you repeatedly do. Time always seems to be the necessary ingredient. If I decide that I want to be forgiving, keep forgiving, even when it hurts. If I decide that I want to be healthy, light-hearted, ultra-disciplined, insane, a good whatever....  repetition. Keep forgiving, especially yourself.

I've noticed that, for whatever reason, I REALLY like learning. It's not that I love music, dance, contemplation, etc. etc. etc. in and of themselves... it's really just that playing music or ballroom dancing or anything new gives me something new to learn. And I'm most happy when I can get to the point of being able to improv or "speak" with ease through any of these mediums. People keep saying why do you keep going to that stupid bar or why don't you find another job and the biggest reason is because anything that I've held tight to is a fertile garden of education.

And then what is all of this for, this learning biznas? I was thinking about "for better or for worse" the other day and I like it a lot, but I'm going to give whoever/whatever is at the other end of that as easy a job as possible by keeping my mind fertile, my body healthy, my spirit pure.