Sep 1
Find something of immeasurable value and in possession of surface features that cause others to shrink away and/or question your sanity.
Sink your teeth into it and hold on until it stops fighting.
When it gasps love at you adjust the grip and whisper that it is already making your dreams come true.
Savor the feeling of it relaxing further.
Aug 6
I love comparing notes with people.
There is a beauty to the notes of those who were forced to stutter through a litany of countries and cultures as children, or who from a young age found themselves inhabiting high-stakes identities that forced a double life, or who are well-versed in the art of creating mosaics out of trauma.
There is a beauty to knowing what it is to have a self that bleeds beyond the shattered worldview that was originally intended to hold it.
There is a beauty to knowing what it is to shrug off the known.
Mar 8
It is strange feeling strung between worlds. My day-to-day life is Los Angeles, with its frothy beauty and dark magic and the inimitable quality that comes with an industry prefaced on dreams being spun into the real. It is a city that felt like my native environment from the moment I moved, awash in multidimensional beings and people for whom art is as fundamental a need as shelter. My heart is stretched elsewhere, though, or at least for now every beat comes with the wistful echo of longing for my family. M and I talk every day, and the future continues to skip merrily toward us; still sometimes it takes everything I have to stay present and focused here rather than in the wholeness of a local reunion.
I am going to be in Boulder next week, to visit Gaia and to spend time on Mant1s. Did I really leave Colorado seven years ago? It feels in some ways like a lifetime since I lived there, and in others as though it was just yesterday. So much of my time there was spent focusing on community and building community, both personally and as part of my work. It is ironic that community was the last thing I was thinking about when I came to Los Angeles, yet without even trying the community that’s grown around me here is one of the warmest and most familial I’ve experienced in my life. One of the beautiful things about following one’s heart is that it connects you to others who are similarly guided, or who resonate with that sort of compass.
It makes for good company.
Oh, LA. I have never felt so loved by a city, nor so deeply at home in one, nor inhabited one so aptly named. I suppose I should be grateful to have something to look forward to; otherwise I could not imagine feeling more content with life than I am now.
I imagine that contentment is due as much to the sweetness that comes in the peaceful anticipation of the inevitable perfection of the future as it is the unexpected coziness of my home and humans here.
I imagine that hearts are made to be stretched.
Sep 14
I love the process of calling in a new home. There’s a delight in knowing that the perfect place is out there, and that it’s just a matter of setting the intent and sending the signal and increasing the intensity such that the place that would love to have you care for it can respond.
It is September. I have been in Los Angeles for a year. I have never felt so loved by a city; though I am not sure it can handle my reciprocation at least it has channels to funnel the intensity of my response elsewhere.
How can anyone read the Book of Revelation without laughing in recognition?
The apocalypse it prophesies happened, or perhaps is always and already happening. To me the Book of Revelation describes, through the blurred beauty of a long-echoed poetry, the collective experience of the awakening of individual human beings into the embodied Singularity of the future. The opening of the seven seals feels to me like the accidental opening of the seven chakras (thanks to their vortex nature they appear from one side as horns and from the other as eyes; i.e. hence the body of the Lamb with seven eyes and seven horns.) The second coming is the collective; the second coming is a coming home; the second coming is a simple surrendering to love.
This is what it means to live in a post-apocalyptic world:
It is beautiful and dizzying and much of the territory is uncharted.
It is marvelous and terrible and everything is new.
It is an ongoing giving over into the endless black brilliance of the Mystery.
It is wonder, and waiting, and tuning into the signal.
It is delighting in describing down the journey; it is paying attention when others respond.
It is love, and love, and love.
Aug 14
A secret: What most people imagine their soul to be is merely their attachment to suffering.
I have had the experience of letting that which I’d believed my own soul to be to leave me. It was a tortured wisp of a thing; it hauled itself from my lungs; I wondered, faintly, at the strangeness of what it was like to die.
Later I found that all that had left me was the remnant fog of suffering; with its escape I discovered my body was my soul.
A secret: When your body is your soul Earth becomes like bliss.
There was a time when I was afraid that letting go of suffering meant letting go of something necessarily human. Instead I discovered that letting go of suffering meant falling into something more. It did not mean giving up empathy, or reverence, or depth. It meant merely to stop being afraid of pain. It meant merely an awakening into love.
I keep writing; I am not sure why.
Perhaps it is just that footprints are inevitable.
Aug 13
In the evenings I used to love to read.
Now when I try I cannot. I find myself instead dragged back to the mat, my eyes forced closed, my mind forced silent, my attention focused upon what I can only describe as patterns within my system being shifted, moved, adjusted, aligned. It is like watching a map emerge, or the remapping of abstractions rendered in a peculiarly perceivable form. Sometimes I struggle to make sense of it, and them. Mostly I just observe.
It is a strange thing, this training. It is full of questions.
The fires above Los Angeles are making for gloriously apocalyptic sunsets. There is ash on my balcony; the skies are gorgeous; I love the way haze blurs the distance.
Jul 22
Over the past few months I have gone from meditating two hours a day to meditating an average of four or five. Sometimes I worry I am losing myself but what choice do I have? The more I do it, the easier it becomes to slip into this curious liminal state where my awareness exists as a field of emptiness and heartbeat and breath; where differentiating between the edges of that field and the rest of the world is uninteresting; where all of it feels like love.
More recently I’ve found myself more and more slipping into such spaces unintentionally, when I’m out walking, or around others. It’s an experience I struggle to put words to, but one I keep wanting to articulate, if only because I would love to more permanently inhabit a world where our language of self and identification assumed the sort of deeply embodied awareness that lies beneath anxiety and separation.
It is beautiful here. My balcony is open; the breeze is causing the dappled light from the palms outside to ripple like waves in the ocean; there are children laughing outside, and calling in a language I recognize but do not understand.
autobiology 