neutrality

the same thing that makes you successful at one thing makes you successful at many things.


one of the biggest lessons i've learned lately is that "being there" is everything. i noticed this most recently while playing ultimate frisbee, tennis, playing piano, and doing yoga. 


In tennis there is a position called "ready position" which is basically knees bent,  racket held in front of you, relaxed, neutral body. The idea is that from here you can go anywhere depending on where the ball lands. you are at your most adaptable, most flexible, most neutral, most efficient, and most effective. What makes a tennis player good is how quickly (s)he can get into the position that allows him to hit the ball most effectively and efficiently and then how quickly he can return to neutral in order to anticipate the next play. This usually always involves backing up as much as possible. For me, someone who doesn't have a very strong backhand this also involves going to the back left so that the chances of me returning a play with my forehand rather than my backhand are greater.


Basically this is the same position you want to be in when you are playing ultimate frisbee; ready position. Except in frisbee you are moving a lot more. But if you are relaxed and ready to turn at a moments notice then you'll be a lot more successful.


Same thing in Bikram (hot) yoga. You do a pretty intense pose that requires a lot of concentration and heavy breathing (because it's hot), and then after the pose is over you immediately let it go and return back to "neutral" (standing still) in order to prepare yourself for the next pose.


In Wing Chun, which is a Japanese martial art, you are supposed to gaze directly into the "third eye" of your opponent, which is the space right in between your two eyes. This is so that while you are fighting you can "see" what's going on all around you because you aren't focused on any one body part. You are ready to defend an attack with the repertoire of moves that you have learned in the most efficient, effective way because you are in a "neutral" position; just like yoga, just like tennis, just like frisbee.


When you are playing the piano and you want to play a chord progression you can use inversions to make the progression easier to play so that you have to move your fingers as little as possible in order to hit the right notes. This is the same concept as ultimate frisbee as tennis as martial arts as yoga; right place, right time, so you can place whatever it is you are placing (the ball, your body, the frisbee, the notes) wherever you want them to go.


I suppose the questions to ask are: what is the quickest way to get into the most neutral position I can get myself into at any one point in time, what moves (throws, returns, defenses, etc. - sport/discipline specific) do I have in my "bag of tricks" and how do these determine where I should go (ie. limitations, strengths, weaknesses).


What's the point of it all? People always say "happiness." But I don't believe that.  Someone wise once told me that my goal should be "survival." Because if you're constantly happy then you have no depth. It's ok to go off the deep end sometimes, to be incredibly high on life and then incredibly low on life, as long as you understand how to get back to neutral. Life is a series of adventures that require you to constantly assess the situation and ultimately ask yourself what is neutral and how can i get back to it.

the kings-felt year

transulcent meanderings light the fire in a thousand red carriages. Underneath them, pebbles melt into pods of fish and gallop through streams of artificial strands of dreams left untold. Woe-begotten, incensenced, and frail. Incandescent nightmares fill up an already boiling trashcan full of mixed chords and fleeting metaphors. But it's the seventh child that always bites the nail. And it's the steeping honey pan that never gets to pray. One knee folded, one eye closed. One step forward, one glance upward. A thousand strands of DNA couldn't fix this effervescent longing. Knock, knock, twitch, fall. On time and off the wall. Hitting puberty before my mother can make amends with the giant pinecone smell that envelops the sporadic jungle of my sprawled out face. Just play the kings-felt year. And hope for macabre hauntings to melt into spring. It's truly, but not rationally, jinxed, if it were to never be told it weren't unrealized. Tick, tock, mechanical garages toiling with each other in fistfights of retention. "Remember, remember," the free-grazing, but widespread shadows say. It's not the table on which the game is played that determines it's effect; it's whether or not there is any iota of doubt that the effect is determined by the game or table.

good and bad and is

What makes something good or bad? 

Fire in the Hole - Hazel

everything has a context in which it fits just perfectly. 

Gorgons and Hydras and Chimaeras, dire

 Gorgons and Hydras and Chimaeras, dire.

The myths that we make...... the heroes, villians, monsters, and Gods that we worship and despise…. the vast unknown 

I remember the sound of dial-up AOL connecting me to the internet. I even remember the picture on the screen; a picture of the world. I remember how BIG it felt to be connected to things outside my living room from within my living room. 

What was life like when we had only nature to reconcile with?

… in the earliest Greek poets a new point of view dawned, never dreamed of in the world before them, but never to leave the world after them. With the coming forward of Greece, mankind became the center of the universe, the most important thing in it. This was a revolution in thought. The Greeks made their Gods in their own image. In Greece, man first realized what mankind was. Until then, Gods had no semblance of reality. 

Before the Greeks, Gods were inhuman. 

Think the Egyptian Sphinx or other ridiculous inhuman manifestations of the divine. 

In ancient Greece, Gods were created according to the needs of society.  Sort of like comic book heros today….

     The many heroes, heroines, Gods, and demons, that have been brought to life in our comic books and our video games are simply reflections of what society needs at any given point in history. In ancient Greece, Zeus was the God of the strong, but the poor needed a God, too, so they created his companion, Justice – protector of the poor.

     Batman didn’t need society; society needed a Batman.

    We’ve been helio-centric and ego-centric. We’ve come up with formulas to describe a reality that the formulas themselves have created. We think that life operates linearly. 

      From cradle to grave; isn’t it long a stay? What is with our fascination with time functioning in an unwavering, linear way; we’re born and need to be coddled  -we’re young and living it up careless and free -we get older, get educated, and get realistic, -we get married, start a family, and breed offspring – we create some good memories and some bad memories, convince ourselves that we’re stressed and come up with different ways to deal with it, have a midlife crisis or two, maybe a second honeymoon or seven -  we get old, we watch as the world turns, we die. Along the way we create memories, try and instill ethics in our offspring and others, find solace in expression and in different people, things, and places that make us feel not insignificant. Really, though, we are very insignificant. Beginning to end. Child’s pose to Savasana. People have developed many allegories that simulate the idea of punctuated time. The reality is that no one knows what happens after we die. Even an Alex Grey painting whose lines suggest abstract things like infinity and interconnectedness, is punctuated by the borders of the canvas on which it rests. 
     Life only progresses accordingly, predictably, conventionally, and inevitably if we think that it does. No one knows what happens after we die and timelessness is both a reality and an illusion depending on the scope of your magnifying glass. The “reality” of time; the illusion that existence is something other than ad infinitum. Ironically, the breaking down of a workday, a workweek, a human life, the history of the world etc. etc. into increments punctuated by the hand of time is both rational and irrational, necessary and completely absurd. 

What must the world be so that man may know it?

Are math formulas descriptive of actual reality or do math formulas create reality?

In quantum mechanics, wave function collapse is the phenomenon in which a wave function appears to reduce to a single state after interaction with an observer. In simplified terms, it is the reduction of the physical possibilities into a single possibility as seen by an observer.

      Upon interaction with an observer, the object is reduced from many possibilities to a single possibility. This is how we process, how we make sense of a world of infinite possibilities. What are the infinite possibilities? What are the opportunity costs? What are the trade offs? There really are an infinite number of possibilities and saying yes to one thing means saying no to many, many others. That's really scary if you're not disciplined. But it can be really blissful if you are. 

I imagine that this is a lot like paradigm shifts in science….

Scientific development depends in part on a process of non-incremental or revolutionary change. Some revolutions are large, like those associated with the names of Copernicus, Newton, or Darwin, but most are much smaller, like the discovery of oxygen or the planet Uranus. The usual prelude to changes of this sort is, I believed, the awareness of anomaly, of an occurrence or set of occurrences that does not fit existing ways of ordering phenomena. The changes that result therefore require 'putting on a different kind of thinking-cap', one that renders the anomalous lawlike but that, in the process, also transforms the order exhibited by some other phenomena, previously unproblematic.

We need stability, but we long to be free. We need truth and create Gods and superheroes who epitomize ethics and honesty, but really we have no clue what those things are.

It’s worth reminding ourselves that we’re not the center of the world…

The planet will be here for a long, long, LONG time after we’re gone, and it will heal itself, it will cleanse itself, ’cause that’s what it does. It’s a self-correcting system. The air and the water will recover, the earth will be renewed. And if it’s true that plastic is not degradable, well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new paradigm: the earth plus plastic. The earth doesn’t share our prejudice toward plastic. Plastic came out of the earth. The earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only reason the earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first place. It wanted plastic for itself. Didn’t know how to make it. Needed us. Could be the answer to our age-old egocentric philosophical question, “Why are we here?:  Plastic…asshole." 
- George Carlin 
      Really, what’s the point of pondering such things? Well, as we get older and as we begin to accept punctuated time within the scope of a reality ad infinitum, we’ll inevitably have to make some big decisions based on the reality that our time is limited..... like whether or not and whom to get married to, whether or not we believe in such things as love, where to live, where to work, whether to explore or settle down, which ethics we believe in, and what we want to teach our children. 
     Much of our happiness appears to be dependent on other people. People say "you have to make yourself happy before you make others happy." Or "no one can make you feel something you don't want to feel." Or "if you can be alone with yourself then you'll never be alone." These things are true, but it is also an act of bravery, a courageous act of love to let yourself be effected by another person. And there's an hourglass sitting on all of our tables. Scarlet O'hara realized she loved Rhett after he had already expended a lifetime loving and waiting for her, but by that time his exasperated response was "Frankly my Dear, I don't give a damn." 


Is it better to have loved and lost then never to have loved at all?


      Thinking about science, about mythology, about the Gods, Heroes, and Villians who animate our history as things that we - humans - have created in response to our needs, wants, wishes, and desires, is pretty liberating. What it means is that if society can have such a huge imagination then so can I - I can imagine a way of life that is beautiful and wonderful and not full of "shoulds." If even logical, rational, concrete domains like scientific truth and math formulations are the products of paradigms, then I can create my own way of being.    


       I hope that at the end of the day, I remember that life is not necessarily linear and that just because I’ve become comfortable with a given situation doesn’t mean that it is my only option.  Fear is the opposite of love. I hope that no big decision I make is made out of fear, with eyes and ears closed to the beatings of my own heart. 

creativity

......happiness and the problems that arise when we try to pin things down or group things into categories or describe things. the many different ways we have accounted for the absurdities and uncertainties of the natural and human world. Inventions, things (ideas, substances, visuals, smells) that we ingest, are always changing, maybe because of our insatiable need to create. People often talk of creative geniuses as these esoteric individuals who pull creativity from somewhere out in the void or who have been somehow "blessed" with a "creative" gene. Which is a load of crap. Creativity is about discipline. Which is why so many people are NOT creative; because truly creative things appear as though they came out of the void and so, in attempting to emulate the Greats, the others mistakeingly try to recreate the experience of traveling into the void (hence the drugs, drinking, jackson pollocky stuff) instead of disciplining themselves to a point at which they can be creative doing whatever it is they are doing. really the only two necessary ingredients appear to be willingness and time. and really there is no secret. just discipline. which is why it's cool to actually listen to people talk about their art; because a dot on the wall can be just a dot or it could be the product of some really deep meditation. an inspired dot vs an uninspired dot.

empty
listen
express
delete
empty
listen
express
delete
show others

until you die. or until your creation is what you want it to be; until it's "authentic." i guess authentic, then, means something intentional, well thought out, inspired because you were disciplined enough to remove yourself from the creative act, disciplined enough to shut up and listen, and disciplined enough to weed out what didn't fit.


 

body

my shoulders sag, rhythmically. one step, two step, slow and lumbering; an eternity seems to pass as I slump decrepitly across the maplewood floor. i'm old and ailing. halfway there I perk up and jump 6 times, jerking my elbows and fingers from right angles to straight lines in rapid succession. my knees touch my ribcage as it expands and contracts on each ascent and descent into space, respectively. i'm young and excited. i settle into a relaxed pace and slowly turn to gaze down at my right arm as it twitches furiously every which way. I'm wise and content with life's often apoplectic uncertainties. you enter and we settle into an intertwining dance of submission and resistance, tailored to the call and response of our exhales and inhales. it's parlously vulnerable and directionless.   

words often seem like those trendy new feathers that everyone strings in their hair. the body can tell so many stories. 

dreams

The winds are sweeping in now. It’s hot, but cold under the red sycamore tree where orchids are growing out of every other branch. I pick one and hand it to my teammate. She eats it and we dance, erotically. Our whirling sends colors splashing across the field and, ironically, (because we started out in hopes of inspiring rain), the rainbow we’ve created slowly dehydrates everything around us. We watch from a distance as the Frisbee flies left and right, secretly plotting how best to sneak into the game and use it for the starcraft transporter that it really is.

I’m dreaming, but I know it. Fully awake and able to manipulate reality, constructing absurd scenarios and directing events from atop my velvety sheets, yet titillated by the spontaneity of my actions. Still and active; an observer and a participant; a desert rose in winter. I send myself off with a kiss and watch as my body floats into a creamy wonderland of mystique and vigor. Like a ghost, but human.

 It’s absurd to think that fairytales and fate can lie within your grasp, but only if you submit to the rigidity of absurdity. Me, I’ve learned how to adapt. Like a rubber ball, acknowledging the obstacles, but using them to rebound into a life of eternal spontaneous response. Jettisoning into the ebb and flow of unpredictability with the audacity of a thousand kamikaze soldiers. If I can dream it I can become it. Follow your dreams; they’ll lead you to your destiny. Keep your dreams alive. As it turns out, all of those worldy anecdotes and aphorisms that we’ve been prescribed as children 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. They’re usually just dreaming…