Benblog

The good work

Haven't done this in a while, but it was nice to hunker down and get a proposal out tonight - to just work until what needed doing was done.

The Year I Learn to Speak

I think my primary goal for the coming year will be to learn to communicate visually. I find myself better at it the more I use images and drawings, and I think it will be essential to getting my ideas across to be less textual, more tactile.

I also really need to learn screen writing, to get a better grasp of how to produce the stories we are involved in telling in the new media.

Part of the process that will engage both is working on the book on integrated organizing, and the business plan.

Part of the processes I need to engage are marathon training and meditation.

I need those to pull me through.

New shoes

My wish for this year is that I never become so encumbered with wealth that I forget the joy of donning a new pair of shoes, but that I have enough wealth that I am able to afford shoes that fit me well.

Integrating the real

Life never goes as planned. Suffering is always there, piling up snow balls when we avoid it.

Even so, knowing the inevitability of pain on the journey still makes me wish for ice cream and imposed structure, allowing the sacrifice of self for three squares and a roof overhead.

I think of cattle. They have a not bad arrangement. Food. Shelter. The sacrifice of life for a stable existence.

It's easy to apply that model to the human condition.

We sacrifice aspirations for peace of mind, our humanity to ignore and isolate the ignoble suffering around us. As if by creating more and more boundaries between ourselves and our other humans, we can ignore the luck of our own draw, the chutes and ladders of our souls.

But I am still weary these days.

Wishing for some respite from the war engaged, knowing too much to even be complacent ever again, but dreaming of that blissful ignorance, that papa's going to make it all right, or papa's going to take it all away.

Intimacy and isolation

My neighbor's husband is dying. She knows it. We all know. Hodgkins Lymphoma, which Ruth reminds me is the bad kind.

It's making his eyeballs pop out, a tumor is growing so swiftly behind his eye. She doesn't say near  his brain.

And yet, this most intimate, this most fragile of moments, pretenses, pretexts take precedence. She is almost apologetic when she fails to send a greeting, a smile my way as she walks by, frustrated in her grief, and who knows what else.

A marriage borne out of some sense of obligation?

Brain chemistry? Who knows. These combinations of factors in the modern world all separate us, from ourselves, from one another, with the only hope honesty.

A little cry in the darkness. Authenticity in the face of manufactured truth, manufactured consent.

All of us quiet, as the neighbor two blocks away loses her house. The neighbor two miles away is sent away to prison. The neighbor 100 miles away eats sugar and flour, fried, the only source of calories enough to keep him going, or dog food, so she can buy her medicine.

People wonder how the holocaust happened. I wonder how it doesn't happen more often.

We are so isolated, so separated from one another, and every thing we do to relate involves information being thrust at us one way, from people and institutions who simply want to exploit our energy, divert our life force into thanatos, so that we may help them escape their own manufactured fear.

I want to talk to Ruth about her husband. Her sons. Her disappointments in life.

I want to chainsaw the apple tree down, just to give her one bright spot in life.

I want to unravel all the secrets everyone in the world holds so fearfully dear, so we may come to know one another as the frail beings we all are. All of us lilies in the field. Spring azures.

Our greatest asset, awareness of our mortality, our greatest illusion, mortality.

We are all on this same journey,  quark or queen, dust or despot.

What we do with the conscious dream is all that matters, how much we open up ourselves to the possibility that the only illusion is the illusion of self. Let alone the institutions we prop up to support the worship of biography, of babies unborn, of threats unrealized, when the world awaits us, born babies, people to be loved for their difference, religion to be embraced as liberation, governance as civility shared.

Tinkering

I feel as if I've joined anew the clan of tinkerers, now that I have a basement again.

I spent so many happy hours growing up building things, taking them apart, experimenting with everything from raw wood to celluloid, clay and plastic, with some small compenstation in neurons stimulated as they were destroyed by the chemicals, plastiweld and dark room chemistry, some built, I'm sure, from the ozone air of model railroads chugging by.

When the mind is young and knows nothing, it is easier to spend hours filling the brain with new things. I wonder the exact time in life when we forget that we still know nothing, and think that somehow the world expects a level of knowing, when the rigor of curiousity becomes rigor mortis of the brain, brought about by some transgression, the eating of the fruit of knowledge, an ashamedness at our nakedness, our fraility, which is what is our nature, from beginning to end.

We are simply cursed to know that we are lilies in the field, and blessed with that knowledge as well, should we choose to focus on our blossom, rather than our inevitable decay.

In the neighborhood

One of the things that is most comfortable about this neighborhood is that people still sit out on their porches. Just sitting. Talking.

I felt the tug tonight myself. And just stood out on my porch. Like a prairie dog, just surveying the plains.

It's also fascinating being in the minority here, because everyone is a minority.

I would love to do a neighborhood inventory to find out just how many nations are represented, and how many ethnicities from within those nations.

I will have to fly a Scottish flag underneath the U.S. Flag on the porch. Maybe that and the Episcopal crest. Or some combination of the other major national identities of my ancestors.

Everywhere I go, I am the only anglo. In the local Asian market around the corner, the customer was speaking Spanish to the counter clerk. The were communicating basically in nods and bits of shared English.

Walking the streets here requires an openess to experience. You do run into drunks and homeless characters on Elmwood, but they are extraordinarily polite, just part of the same street scene as the vendors and the cops, except making their way on the generosity of others, in their failed lives.

But unlike other cities, where the gap between rich and poor is much more stark, here, we are all mostly just a paycheck away from downgrading our quality lives. It makes the generosity a little more but for the grace of God go I.

We're a little luckier than most, but that has a lot more to do with luck than it did even just a few decades ago. Being born into the right family. The right skin color. The right education.Those opportunities must be grasped to be made fully manifest, but they were at least within our grasp, ours to lose from the beginning, rather than struggle to gain.

The utimate career path

It's becoming clearer to me know how I can move into a life when I spend most of my time purely thinking, even making part of my living off purely thinking, writing things down, having interesting conversations, especially with the people with whom you disagree. This organization itself may be it. Doing business completely transparently, helping people understand the overall achieved value for everyone when you are able to profit. Left Brain becomes a shared asset, held effectively in common, almost a community of values spawned in virtual space, an Oneida for these times.

That's a stunningly brilliant idea, but details are everything, and everything is a detail.

Rocking the cradle

Some days, I may ride my bicycle the four short miles to the train station, maybe even just walk down the block, take the bus, and find myself a little over an hour later at South Station. Or maybe hop on the train for New York for a weekend. There is something profoundly civilized about living in more densely populated areas. No wonder these places tend to vote Democrat - they're less afraid of fear itself, and more interested in the the have nots having a little more, rather than trying to protect and hoard it all, as if some privileged gift from God.

The boundaries between are much, much thinner, more frail, and facilitated by the very systems that allow the whole region to function more efficiently.

Sounds brutal, but proximity to actual problems, rather than imagined ones, impossibly fearful and damned, such as homosexuality and abortion, and Armageddon, leads to a certain understanding, a certain pact, that there will some balance, enforced to some degree by the crime against those with property, not directly, but indirectly, through the turning of generation after generation to meth and crack.

Unfortunately, that also means that any wealth that could be redistributed ends up being spent on drugs. If poorer communities were more organized, we may end up bringing down the whole roof of the system down upon, or we may make the haves and the fearfuls realize that we can all get along.

That's one of the toughest things about organizing collectively in these times - all the drugs, all the distractions that make a society that could blossom or sink under its own hoarding weight keep distracting itself with the sense that private material wealth has attached to it so much meaning.It really begins to lose its heft when you start living in airconditioned places, and be able to walk the streets at night, maybe take in a movie down the street. take a ride out in the country. These things are an atrociously abundant standard of life, such a beautiful quality of living, but some people get so attached to the things that they lose site of the whys. Why live except to enjoy life? Taking on pleasures or concerns that carry with them being weighed down in the bag of water, even our brains, big beautiful, complex little organisms that they are, already deducing as it has that there is something that transcends itself, possibly at multitudinous levels.

This is the forbidden fruit, eaten of the tree of knowledge, that in coming to know ourselves we release ourselves, as Jesus did, from this mortal coil, transcending the significance of death intentionally, painfully, hoping all the while that this was just a cosmic joke, that the people would simply stop hammering the nails and come together in peace.

Even in glimpsing the power of the brain as an organism, not the self, certainly part of the experience we call self, but not THE self, we cross the threshold into possbility. This is the path that took us across oceans, and a journey that must continue past this idea of the biographical self. I imagine a world that one day opens itself up like a lotus blossom to the possibility of oneness with the universe, delighting in that contradiction itself - the inviduated recognizing the wholeness. Does the wholeness then delight in the individual? Absolutely. This is why it is so important to attempt to create delight whenever we can, so that we can simply delight in the wonder of being, the diviness of being, and share that agape, tha ahimsa with all other beings.

It just takes us an impossibly long time to understand what this messaging that keeps ringing in our ears, telling us to not be afraid, I go before you always. I'm certainly not there myself.

Museum Living

I expect visitors at any minute, to walk past the velvet red ropes to observe how we once lived.

Living in a house for sale is a mix of deep nostalgia and distant sterility. I feel as if I mustn't touch anything, when I most wish to engage my farewells.

The Lenox house, if we get it, will be like living in a dream, especially how close it is to the park. There, we will be able to live in a house that is a museum, sharing more of the shared root in muse, than the antecedent mausoleum.