mountains you are carrying & what to climb next
i wonder what it is i’m carrying
is the weight of the world love? where? am i navigating around rocks, or trying to get out of myself so i can be real again? this voice of silence has ruined my life, prevented a life from blooming; it is a heavy burden to push every day—is this carrying my cross as far as i can until i can no longer carry it, then waiting for salvation by God? But God is a made up thing;
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thinking about horizons, perception and the soul contract with the devil
GPL 8/30/23
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the mountain i am carrying is an ex; our wounds do always come back to sex, because that is where we’re forged, also work: courting inclusion at the lathe of performance and being perceived; be your own audience, be your own attendant; keep the words flowing, keep wondering
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“formed around a hard kernel of insecurity and shame”
via
(GPL 12/28/22)
the lonely road of integrity, looking for dignity and proof of income, a ticket to the life to come, refusal to accept that this is the end; yes, reality-benders, Inc.—one must turn pro and win, even if we know the future is already the present, only seasons change, half-days and three months at a time, gestation periods of human beings; someone’s born, someone who was winning lost, someone unknown broke into the ranks and is the new name on the scene, in the industry, the lettering is always changing
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checking back in 2/19/21
another mess to make, another hope to need that someone will make sense of the meaning of the gaps between sentences. Again, doubt I can keep a reader with me for two consecutive sentences when they could be anywhere and have their own storm to deal with. It’s hard to write when you know others are suffering, being disappointed by a lack of emotionally intelligent leadership with fierce conviction and strong mastery and vision ~ what is obvious is not so; maybe that is every man’s fate: to be disappointed by the government he lives under (miss you, hope you’re having a good day I think to text, I live on my computer, in charge of my destruction, isolation…watching myself not do things that might save me, as if I need to be saved — I do not and cannot; I’m surrounded by No while surrounded by Yes.
“Editing mountains you are carrying & what to climb next” — funny name for a browser tab
it is never easy to do the next thing. There is no next thing; one just keeps going, in these never-ending days — the line breaks don’t really exist. There aren’t definitive endings; we crave definition and we have learned that nobody can give it to us, because everyone has an agenda: everyone signaling anything has an agenda; they have something in mind for Their Audience; every man is at the center of a carnival show, drawing others into his gallery: “Here, come down this way,” he says. Oh, men. Oh, life.
“These mountains that you are carrying, you were only supposed to climb.”
“No moment is wasted if you pay attention and learn the lessons contained in every experience.”
Nothing bad can happen to a writer, everything’s material: a broken heart, a throbbing heart, an ache, wound, frustration, disappointed expectation, an unfolding you did not expect…this can all be shared
i do coherence differently now; who i was writing two years ago is now very much not who i’ll ever be again — this was always the goal, i just didn’t know it would be both so uncomfortable and under control; i am a master and commander of my heartache
reminds me of what my friend told me recently: “Everything you need is contained inside of you, it’s just a matter of finding and developing it.” He’s watched me struggle through trying to bring my work out of me. Today seems unlike the Mondays before, perhaps because I’m tuned into the notion that the world is full of too many different and incompatible types of people. The young who have been on the internet for half their waking hours of the last 10 years, and those who are not, who insist the world stay as the one they know…the incompatibility feels mountainous — the incompatibility between people.
Maybe the key is this: people want to rein things in half the time, and the other half they want to be reined in; they want their attention to rest.
I need to be a student of energy. People’s incentives and motivations are not simple. The old books are right (I’m thinking of Machiavelli and Plato just as much as Napoleon Hill or Andrew Carnegie when it comes to building a creative entrepreneurship practice of writing, coaching and teaching but not in a professorial way) -
“When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but with creatures bristling with prejudice and motivated by pride and vanity.”
― Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People
“Of mankind we may say in general they are fickle, hypocritical, and greedy of gain.”
― Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince
So how do you buck the trend? AND bring people with you? Because you do need a tribe — you want to do it for a group, a squad, a team, a tribe…there’s no point in winning if you do it alone. The championships won’t keep you warm on a morning like this one — you want someone to see you, to understand what it took — to understand how you suffered, and what you know now, and what it means about being human on this planet, a lonely and difficult endeavor.
Perhaps I speak to the lonely. Perhaps I speak to people like me.
I have a great capacity to ignore what does not speak to me — this is what you ought to cultivate too: an unstoppable progress. But what happens to the people who don’t get included? What happens to the people who no one wants to hear their story? What about people who have nothing to teach, whose suffering was useless and doesn’t serve a good? Where will they live where the space is not contested by developers or landlords? What square foot of earth is not subject to human clawing for ownership and control?
Think again about the tribe and solve the practical questions…
“Anytime your inquiries lead you to say, ‘At this moment we must ask and decide who we fundamentally are, our solution and salvation must lie in a new picture of ourselves and humanity, this is our profound responsibility and a new opportunity’ — just stop. Answer, rather, the practical matters. Find the immediate actions necessary to achieve an aim.”
being is doing — what you are is what you do
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So what are your problems? My only way forward is to try to help with thinking and connecting people: it’s being relationship-driven and curiosity-driven: the desire to build knowledge and make it easy to send, so I can build relationships and build people up. Someone has to take responsibility for the people of earth! I want to be among the powerful and make us good!
tolerance and compassion…those are probably the limiting factors, at least among the class of the personally safe and secure (who stop housing from being built in their neighborhood because it “ruins the character and charm”) who want familiarity — they don’t want to have to change, and they believe they’ve afforded the luxury not to. But human progress does not stop, and old age without welcoming the newcomers is no “old age” we should allow as a society. “Allow” is a strong word, but that’s what society is built on. Politics, remember, are simply two questions: who gets what? Says who? We have the power to ask, and we (the non-powerful) have the ability to see and speak truth about the powerful
and I don’t know how the two classes exist together. The internet is a bunch of marginalized people who are finding their voice while paying attention to what’s going on. The young people coming up with research and networking skills but no money and power…well, they’re gonna want space and time to live their parents’ life: house, kids, leisure time, celebrations, rituals…I feel like we’ve lost that. I want to put on some ceremonial dress and dance and sing.
“There is nothing more notable in Socrates than that he found time, when he was an old man, to learn music and dancing, and thought it time well spent.”
― Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays
there will be no perfect inclusiveness if humans are left to do the work of politics alone
people are getting smarter, and if you’re not, you have to get out of the way — it is your duty to lead, follow or get out of the way ASAP, let the current flow, it wants to flow, people want to be happy, you’re stopping them
