Awareness | Impermanence, Repetition, and Gratitude

31 Dec 2024 Leave a comment

by zeuslyone in Awareness, Buddhism, Death Tags: , , , , , , ,

Some regular themes on this blog are impermanence and mortality. Sometimes, even, musings meander further into the nature of human impermanence within identity, looking at how even ourselves are an ongoing process – there is no static “I” behind them, rather a human becoming. In Heidegger’s Being and Time, he speaks of human perception of our own mortality as being one in which we regularly lose sight of the fact that our death is always looming as an imminent possibility that limits our life. We’re “always already ahead of ourselves”, looking forward to the future, planning the next, thinking that it’ll just keep going on. In some ways, who’s to blame this approach of an existentially forgetful bravado of certainty? We wake up to day after day, where seasons, jobs, relationships, and our bodies, even, change gradually and belie a false repetition a la Deleuze of the apparent more or less same old, same old. To riff on Deleuze again, the truth of repetition is the actually brilliant coming to being of uniqueness in each moment of apparent sameness. Each iteration is different, and ultimately to return to Heidegger’s quandary, there is no guarantee for another.

Even though I’ve pondered all of these for years both in reading texts such as those above alongside similar ideas within Buddhism and Taoism as well as dug into pondering impermanence and human existence in personal practice such as writing posts and meditation, it’s far too easy to get lost in that fallenness of losing awareness that every moment is precious, and that applies most greatly to those connections in our lives that move us deeply.

The last year has been difficult in many ways that feel both like a continuation of the last few years for myself, and yet, a strikingly different set of key tonalities have changed the tune of the song while retaining the same themes. I’ve learned a lot about trying to be mindfully aware of how much of an illusion it is to think “We’re always going to have more time”. You can’t count on the idea that you’ll ever get to do something with someone again, no matter how mundane, no matter how familiar, no matter how routine.

One of my closest friends of my life has been in it for the last ten years. We’ve had a lot of life spent together, and at this point, we feel like family to each other. Last year, she was diagnosed with cancer quite suddenly after months of medical issues. A couple of things became clear immediately – 1) the reports I’ve heard for years that women aren’t treated with full attention and respect by doctors are true: any of the several doctors who had checked my friend in the months before her diagnosis could have discovered the cancer as quickly as the tech who did a simple due diligence check on cancer as a possible cause of the main symptom she had had through that entire journey, and 2) that Heideggerian immanence of death’s possibility moved from being unnoticed to fully obvious: there was no certainty how much longer she’ll be here.

The second follows a bit more of a Kubler-Ross trajectory of coping. We put a lot of hope in her first round of chemo and the doctors’ rosy takes on progress. That was last year. This year has been a long round of finding more and more tumors, finding that the initial chemo didn’t address any of those others, as well as more problematic doctors, more medical procedures, more issues, and more pain. It’s been really hard, particularly because part of last year’s version of this was that my friend was going to have to wrap up her life here in the next year or two and move back to be with her family far away in another country. This year fully jump started that process from a year or two in the future to immediately, as she got all of those medical procedures done abroad. As such, the coming to terms has been one of hope and denial, to pushing for better treatment, to finally trying to come to terms with whatever will happen.

I feel cheated in a lot of ways. My friend is having these severe medical issues at far too young of an age. America’s healthcare system is fundamentally broken, which has exacerbated the course of this entire issue. If it weren’t, she would have likely gotten the full help she needed much sooner, and she could have possibly stayed here for further treatment – the home she’s been living in for years.

The point I’m trying to get to with both the more philosophical beginning and the more personal anecdotes of my friend’s medical story is that you should try to be mindful of the time and events in your life, especially the moments shared with the people for whom you care. As dramatic and painful as this particular story is, it reveals that hidden aspect of death – our relationship’s time duration was never guaranteed. I could have died in a rainy car accident on a late drive home from her place on dozens of occasions, not to mention a myriad of other possibilities. Just like the posts from a few years ago about my dad suddenly and unexpectedly dying too young, there simply isn’t always going to be more time. We never know when any situation is going to end.

So, take a moment right now. Look at what you’re doing. Think about your day. Think about your family, your life, your health, and try to generate some gratitude and equanimity for all of it. Of course, we’re always already sitting in the midst of an array of difficulties, hence the attempt to generate some equanimity, but beyond that, there is very likely (aware in writing this that some people are in dire situations, and I’m writing from a description of more of the generic, day to day life that we generally are ignorant of) so much beauty and wonder in your life to be grateful for if you can take a moment to look past your own far-eyed ignorance.

Thought Experiment: Life and Afterlife

25 Sep 2024 Leave a comment

by zeuslyone in Uncategorized Tags: , , , , , , ,

Let’s take most standard discussions of a Christian afterlife for granted as a thought experiment: some sort of celestial sphere where people go when they die and stay there for eternity as a reward.

Now let’s explore some conceptual corollaries of this that have haunted me as a thought experiment.

Let’s say we have all the people from 1650s England who died in a particular section of this realm. When they died, their souls (we’ll get back to this element in a bit) are transported to their new afterlife home. They’re there with others they’ve known in life. They can share their time with them forever.

First question: what do they do? Do they sing hymns with the angels? If so, isn’t that a fundamentally different idea? Same with the idea that they continue to do, explore, etc. This isn’t life – there isn’t further growth and development to do. Do they bask in the glory of the creator but are otherwise fully passive? Just an overwhelming spiritual high forever? If so, what was the point of the time in a body, in life, etc.? Do they continue to spend time with their community and extended family from past and future speaking over memories of what they did when they were alive (and maybe continuing to view the events of the living)? – Let’s take that last idea as given for our next question.

Second question: given the idea that they’re sharing the memories of their lives forever, what are the structural consequences of this afterlife? – 1) the afterlife is a static data suppository for lives and memories: a true cloud for data that (unlike real technological clouds where data will corrupt eventually) never changes; 2) if they communicate using their learned languages from life – they can only communicate with family a few generations before and after them, giving another degree of being static within humanity’s flow of change on Earth. Furthermore, they have no hope of communicating with the larger array of all the other souls from history. There’s a lingering question here whether new skills (such as new languages) can be learned here as there’s an unaddressed metaphysical problem of what a soul can learn, and furthermore there’s no indication in our framework of some sort of organized learning system for people to study languages or share them with others.

Third question (a bonus question): which version of the person goes to the afterlife? A soul isn’t a body – so it’s fundamentally strange to have it line up with a particular iteration of a person across their lifespan (like an image of the person in their prime, as a baby, or at their oldest moment when they died). However, most any description of the afterlife is one describing a human perspective of being in a place with others, which is inherently one of embodiment – having a particular human form, not some nebulous cloud or something even more abstract which a truly metaphysical dimension would almost necessarily require – it would be a metaphysical place, not a physical one (i.e. not anything akin to the bodily places and experiences we have).

Something about this conceptual idea (which again, is right inline with perspectives I’ve heard described throughout my life) is incredibly cold and inhuman. I find it terrifying to be essentially an element of data for an eternal databank, a storehouse of human memories and experiences forever. This is fundamentally an anti-life, not just an afterlife. Life is about the flow of development. It’s about being a burgeoning and decaying human body-mind in a dynamic little planet with billions of years of history. The idea of being a static data upload set to an eternity of being functionally a human memory/experience data file is perhaps the most inhuman version of a telos to life that I can imagine, and part of that is that that entire data file is not only static but will be static forever. It is there to never be forgotten. There’s something incredibly freeing about our memories in life that we don’t have perfect recall. We forget the vast majority of moments from our lives, and on a larger scale, history is mostly dust – forgotten and turned to fresh soil for future generations to live and create anew. The organic nature of life, society, and our world is precisely what makes life vibrant. Of course, certain experiences both personally and culturally are maintained or “remembered” in the way that all memories are a construction of parts that may be reinterpreted over time, but this is only done insofar as it is adaptive to further function. Some is held onto that is dysfunctional, but it is in burying it and letting it become fully the dust of the past that it becomes room for something new. In summary: I very much affirm the idea of dissolving into this world and disappearing after death, transforming into a different unfolding of the ten thousand things that is not this current, unfolding life of a human body-mind. That seems so much more beautiful and soothing to disappear into the physical earth than for the deeds of my life to be transcribed into a metaphysical sky to statically exist forever.

Meditation on Change – an Experience

21 Sep 2024 Leave a comment

by zeuslyone in Buddhism, Meditation Tags: , , , ,

Focal thought: “Consider how everything changes. Nothing remains the same.”

Consideration: Voices outside the window. Conversation – air leaving the lungs through the changes of teeth and tongue to create a vibration of sound waves passing from ear to ear, the informational process churn of brain cells (chemicals flitting cell to cell, electricity shooting along biological wires), blood flow sending the nutrients and calories for work, etc… A complex system of body-mind encountering another body-mind. The rumblings of cars and trucks from the road below and behind – wheels moving at hundreds of rpms, complex machinery laboring with explosive heat – moving tons of metal at speeds faster than the human body can achieve. The houses outside – some being built, others being torn down – an ongoing process of change, repair, disrepair, creation, and destruction. What was this place like 10 years ago? 30? 60? – a conversation with a local resident comes to mind about the neighborhood of the past – 140 years ago? – when settlers were just beginning to create this city? What about the glorious volcano about a hundred miles distant – icon of the area? What was it like when it erupted hundreds of years ago? What will this neighborhood become in the years to come? What will happen if it erupts again?

Shift: what about the changes within myself within this space? Mind shifts to memories of the last few years, thinking on images and moments of the becoming and unbecoming in a mind’s time reversal of the “me”s before. Friends, acquaintances, and family and their own changes/stories/progressions/regressions come up as the mind flits through this time machine imaginarium.

A previous moment and meditation arises: summers ago, meditating on a paddle board in the sea, looking at the beach and the people on shore. Heart broken. Lost. Desperate for peace. Trying to cultivate equanimity in the violent turbulence of the sea’s swells and life’s swells: “All beings are heirs to their karma.”

A pondering: “Who am I sitting still in this world of ever-changing motion?”

Answer: “I” am movement. Nothing is truly “still”. “I” is not a solid, abiding thing.

Koan: “How can I sit to cultivate “peace” in the midst of this ever-change?”

The answer arose immediately and deeply. The emotional distractions fell away, and attending to breath and moment become fluid, effortless, and profound. Just presence. Nothing to solve.

Cross-Post: The Post-Rock Way–Existence | Beauty | Spotlight: Spurv

01 Dec 2023 Leave a comment

by zeuslyone in Music Tags: , , ,

This post was originally on my other blog about exploring spirituality and philosophy through post-rock music. I share many of the posts from that blog when I write them, as they fit in well here too. This one is about the experimental depth and existential ambience of Spurv, for instance. At the beginning of the year, I wrote a post on the best albums of 2022 in post-rock, so I recommend checking that out if you find the music in this post interesting.

Die Sterblichen sind die Menschen. Sie heißen die Sterblichen, weil sie sterben können. Sterben ist den Tod als Tod vermögen. Nur der Mensch stirbt und zwar fortwährend, solange er auf der Erde, unter dem Himmel, vor den Göttlichen bleibt. Nennen wir die Sterblichen, dann denken wir schon die anderen drei mit doch wir bedenken nicht die Einfalt der Vier.

Heidegger, “Bauen, Wohnen, Denken” as appearing in Spurv’s “allting får sin ende, også natten”

My English translation with a couple notes on Heidegger’s philosophy:

The dyingly (mortals) are human beings. They are the dyingly because they can die. Dying is being capable of death in the capacity of death (i.e. not simply ignorantly perishing without self-reflection on the scope of life rather living with an awareness of death being the limit and finitude of one’s existence). Only humans die, and truly, continuously as long as they remain on the earth, under the heavens, before the godly. When we mention the dyingly, we already think of the other three with it (earth, heavens, and godly), but we don’t think of the simplicity of the four.

This quote is a clip at the beginning of a song with a title in Norwegian that means: “Everything has its end, even the night.” Precisely this sentiment – standing within the twilight of the end and transitioning into new life beyond, the power, tragedy, and raw beauty of death and rebirth is a connecting thread I find in Spurv’s most poignant moments across their albums.

The most moving song, ‘Til en ny vår’, on their newest release, this year’s album of the year, Brefjære, is exactly that – a slow, gentle, cold, dead embrace of winter that grows and grows as warmth and change bring the thaw that eventually bursts forth into new life. I felt exactly that energy on a first listen, only associating the seasonal aspect when looking up the translation of the title. The song title means: to a new spring. The new album explores these emotional resonances in unique and experimental ways, incorporating vocals that feel elegiac, even a chorus that feels like an opera or the chorus from a Greek tragedy. Perhaps these are the elements from Greek mythology they point to as an inspiration in the long album description, as well as the harsh and dynamically alive beauty of the ecosystem in the Arctic Circle. This year’s release feels like a masterpiece of expression, fully bringing forth beauty, life, death – transition in ways that were still nascent yet powerful in their last two albums. In line with their band name, this album takes flight and soars, just like the clouds (the band’s name means Sparrow, and another song’s title translates to “like clouds”).

Honestly, however, this poetic set of accolades undersells this band, if anything. Few other post-rock bands have so flamboyantly charted their own course with exciting and engaging experimentation all of their own. Almost every time a post-rock band incorporates vocals, for instance, I’m dismayed. It nearly always makes them sound like fairly run of the mill alt-rock I listened to in the late 90s/early 2000s. The dynamism of the instruments is turned down to make room for a vocalist, and everything is weakened due to it – composition, power, and emotional depth. Spurv gets around this issue handily: using dynamic choruses, and different solo vocalists, allowing the album to feel like a story or dramatic enactment, rather than just another rock band with aspirations of doing something the same but different. In other words, they understand the interplay of form and content, style and substance.

This was just as clear to me with their previous album, Myra. The cover shows a blond woman hugging a stag in front of a misty forest. They both look sad, perhaps even lonely, and the album opens with trickling water and a pensive, brooding ambience that breaks into horns and a syncopated stumble of drums forward, almost at odds with itself and a heavy, rambling guitar that opens into crescendos of trilling tremolos above the cacophony. In other words, this album is haunting, and the band establishes itself as their own unique sound in the entire genre.

The final song of this album is that existential post-metal epic that I presented to open this post. I have a background and abiding love for the German language and German philosophy, so I was beyond stunned to hear this song for the first time, immediately recognizing from the phrasing, although I was unfamiliar with the voice, that this was the inimitable Heidegger. Although post-rock regularly uses seemingly random clips as part of the musical play, I never ever expected to hear German philosophy presented in the original language, precisely in a way that resonates with such a theme: all things have their end, even the night. This existential analysis is rife throughout Spurv’s work, and I hope that this post will lead you to explore with them.

Cross-Post: The Post-Rock Way–Change | Pre-Post-2023 | Part-1

26 Jul 2023 Leave a comment

by zeuslyone in Change, Music Tags: , , ,

This post was originally on my other blog about exploring spirituality and philosophy through post-rock music. I share many of the posts from that blog when I write them, as they fit in well here too. This one is about the beauty and power of Old Solar’s version of the Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, for instance. At the beginning of the year, I wrote a post on the best albums of 2022 in post-rock, so I recommend checking that out if you find the music in this post interesting.

This is one of two posts in preparation for the 2 days of Post.Festival 2023, the largest post-rock festival in the US and an event I’ve been dying to go to in recent years. I’m going to cover two bands that have been crucial to my love and experience of post-rock as well as difficult touchpoints on my healing journey of the last couple years due to difficult associations.

This is a sweeping album. The concept of it feels like a post-rock version of Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons”, and I think they capture the sentiment of each season well. You’re likely to be moved by one or several of them. Favorite track: Autumn Equinox: A Winnowing Fork in His Hands.

Bandcamp – My Review for SEE by Old Solar

SEE flows through the ebbs and flows of the seasons, the highs and lows of abundance and lack as the course of beautiful, heart-rending change. It is nothing short of a glorious album. Although I suspect the band are deeply Christian, the well-captured experience of the vibrant change of presence and absence remind me of Taoism and my own deep interest in it; this album captures the resonance of something like an I Ching-esque progression of yin and yang through the seasons.

I’ve found the track: “Autumn Equinox: A Winnowing Fork in His Hands” particularly haunting. My first connection with this album was a brief obsession, a spring dalliance of sorts. Months later, I woke from dreams with this song stuck in my mind, hearing it over and over on repeat. I fastidiously dug through my album collection to recall where it came from, niggling in my subconscious until I rediscovered this album. I’ve never had that experience prior or since with any other song.

The song represents my favorite season, fall, and it expresses that shift into a pensive mode of fullness slowing down, being harvested and brought in before the cold. It also feels pensive as though a high feeling is now on the edge of loss – that transition of connection into withdrawal and repose (Hermit – Virgo) and an independent vibrance of compassion, growth, and abundant harvest despite this (Empress – Libra). It also feels like a time of things balancing out, the decisions and efforts of the year being weighed out into their results, karma playing out, and the symbolism of all that balance in the equinox (Justice – also Libra) just before the strong transformation of the reaping and movement into quiet (Death – Scorpio).

As far as I’m concerned, if you can listen to this song and not feel its poignancy, your heart is completely cold. It pulls strongly at a variety of emotional depths like few songs do. Returning to this album has been a slow and difficult process for me, but it’s one I have relished listening to again recently. Old Solar is one of the main bands I’m thrilled to see on this trip to Post.Festival.

NOTE: Use the time stamps in the YouTube description to jump to the song

Philosophy Riffing | “It shouldn’t be this way” – Zen Practice, Living in the Burning House

19 Jul 2023 Leave a comment

by zeuslyone in Philosophy Riffing Tags: , , , , , , ,

This session returned to the experience I only got to the edge of exploring in my recording a couple nights ago and delved in deeply alongside some loving admiration of passages from Shunryu Suzuki’s “Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind” and Dogen-zenji’s “Genjokoan”. I really tried to express some key ideas of non-attachment and sitting within calm presence, even in the heart of painful desires.

Philosophy Riffing | Agency, Neuroplasticity, and the growth and freedom at the heart of practice

18 Jul 2023 Leave a comment

by zeuslyone in Philosophy Riffing Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

I recorded this session with a much different target in mind, an exploration of the sense that “This isn’t the way it should be,” a damning felt sense of samsara. I get to this topic very briefly at the end but speak at great length about how we can’t choose how we feel, and the small space we have in awareness to change our patterns to move towards different emotional and perceptual patterns.

I also reference this element of the famous painting, The School of Athens, by Raphael (retrieved here from Wikipedia):

Cross-Post: The Post-Rock Way–Empowerment | Entering the Path of Micah

11 Jul 2023 Leave a comment

by zeuslyone in Music Tags:

This post was originally on my other blog about exploring spirituality and philosophy through post-rock music. I share many of the posts from that blog when I write them, as they fit in well here too. This one is about Nietzsche’s philosophy as an inspiration for an energetic/emotional stance towards life, for instance. At the beginning of the year, I wrote a post on the best albums of 2022 in post-rock, so I recommend checking that out if you find the music in this post interesting.

I’ve written about Russian Circles a few times on this blog, and in many ways, this won’t differ much, as I find the same refrain of empowerment and an abundant life force that grows above and beyond challenge, oppression, and calamity.

This post won’t differ greatly in that sentiment, but I’ve wanted to express my passion about this song for some time, and the feelings I have around it line up well with another post I just wrote on my other blog – the ending passage of it with an Empress riding her sea turtle Chariot off across the seas of self-doubt in the Moon (yes, all tarot allusions). I’m hoping that this will act as an accompaniment to that other post, offering a different expression and media around it.

If I had to guess, the song I’ve listened to most in the last few years has been “Micah” from Russian Circles’ original album, Enter. There’s something about the progression of this song that haunts me. It’s so simple and complex at the same time, so slowly intentional at first with an uptick in the middle of smooth virtuosity and energy. It feels empowered on every level – a sense that my forward movement is a growing, unstoppable force, but not one of any animosity, rather determination. At the same time, it rests in between movements, taking that considered tone again and regrouping – an open heart that relishes being on this journey without ever giving up, despite the melancholy edges to the tone. The second uptick of the cymbal play with the guitar creates one of the most epically driving and cataclysmic builds I’ve ever heard in a song – to me, it is truly riding that Chariot (the card of agency, crushing obstacles, rushing ahead unimpeded, and reaching one’s goals).

A couple months back, I walked through the dark of my neighborhood – an exercise loop of a weighted vest and climbing hills, while listening to this song on repeat. Somewhere near the end of the walk and the 7th or 8th time of listening to the song, I flashed on those tarot cards and associated meanings as a whole – the Empress (abundant life force) riding the Chariot (the fast, unimpeded forward movement) as a Hermit (finding connection to deeper inner truth – that inner light of compassion revealed, learning on the journey and that learning lighting the way forward).

Truth be told – that combo is currently an inspirational view of myself or who I aspire to grow into/presence as. That’s precisely the feeling of awe and empowerment I take from this song, and I can only hope music like this touches others in a similar fashion.

Self-Worth | Love | A Tarot-Infused Spiritual Fairy Tale

11 Jul 2023 1 Comment

by zeuslyone in Creative Writing Tags: , , , ,

I started this a while ago, and I left it aside, doubting my creative voice here, and it felt more dramatic than I could write in a way that resonates with me yet still feels like a fitting tale. However, various events of late have brought back past memories and feelings, a sense as a friend has said of the universe throwing events out that echo elements of past occurrences – asking the question of me: “Did you learn the lesson at hand?” As such, I thought it worth finishing this little fairy tale story about resilience in the depths of pain and growing beyond those experiences. It is fiction and yet represents learning and catharsis with an emphasis on the lessons learned, as poor as I might be at expressing them. For me – it was almost like a journaling exercise to strengthen my own understanding. I can only hope it speaks to someone else out there across the ether as well.

What is love?

It’s an easy question. People speak about it confidently, certain they know and can express it simply. She, however, thought that the apparent ease was deceptive, uncertain the answer was simple or readily uplifting. The thoughts congealed into thick globules of disbelief in her mind as the Empress bled out on the floor.

Months prior – he swept her off her feet. She resisted at first, having come to believe that love didn’t matter after many a life adventure. He spoke of connection. He understood her in ways that others didn’t. He valued her for more than just her looks or her charm. He was captivated by her mind and heart, and he eventually captivated her in turn. The King of Fire wooed the Empress with charisma, confidence, charm, and passion.

Then the drama. On. Off. Up. Down. I love you. I love someone else. You’re the one. I prefer someone else. At first she was somewhat at fault too, but as it dragged on, any “both” or equality long went away. She was no longer seen. No longer valued. No longer understood. She was a nuisance most of the time, a shiny bauble to be remembered when wanted, and yet, she did everything she could to calmly and glowingly exude: “I love you,” to let it permeate and radiate out of every pore of her being. In seeing his darkness, she leaned into compassion, care, understanding, acceptance, and patience.

In truth, she was an Empress no more, beholden to desire, a reversal of energy, a misplacement of her way in the world. She had lost her self-worth somewhere along the way, the golden glow of the Empress.

Finally, he made it clear that she was no longer wanted, never again. He made it clear that he felt angered by her lack of respect for his other commitments, even though those activities and behaviors were precisely the last iota of self-respect she had: not willing to say that it was laudable to her that something and someone else would lead to the diminishment of and poor treatment from this former King who was no longer anywhere near such. That was the one self-abasement and self-negation too far – a stamp of approval for treating her like garbage. Something that leads people to be worse versions of themselves is not deserving of respect, especially at one’s own expense.

The last of this was separation followed by brief reconnection and an unwillingness to even take accountability to the extent of accepting that he no longer had or deserved her trust and that he had lashed out at her for her last grasp on self-respect, for her struggling to make sense of his slowly escalating self-righteousness. He twisted events into self-righteous dismissal and told her she was obsessive and lost in her own mind, while also lecturing her on topics she had studied for years and he had not studied at all. Even when the lightest of points were made that she no longer trusted him after such behavior, he puffed up and acted as though the need to rebuild trust was ridiculous and beyond the pale. He cut ties with an act as though their friendship’s ending deserved some sort of joyous funeral pyre and as though such a sentiment of joyous festivity would clearly be shared by her.

All of this left her questioning her feelings, her care, her intuition, the time spent, her openness to compassion and understanding, and most of all her ongoing connection despite being told she was wrong, confused, stupid, and lacking emotional depth. In short, she felt like she was mad – she not only didn’t trust others anymore, she didn’t trust herself – her mind, her read of others, and her own emotions.

The ongoing sharp pangs of this deep existential wound were why she decided to move into this moment of pulling out her sword of truth: cutting out the blackened heart of despair within herself. She screamed as she cut through her breast, bleeding everywhere, but she still reached into her destroyed chest to pull out her heart and passed out on the ground.

The Empress is a great being – one of abundance, of the ultimate power of love, not just romantic love – but the loving energy of life, of maternal nurturing, of the life force that loves to exist, grow, and flourish. As such, even cutting her own heart out may have ended her in a sense, but it didn’t really result in a final ending. Death, from her 3 to the 13, was a moving forward of the wheel of fate into an evolution, a transformation into something new.

She gradually, over the course of extended time, pulled herself off the floor, the hole in her chest fused closed again, and the doubts, creeping thoughts, and self-dismissal slowly faded, as the taint of the rot of a corrupted love, an addiction, passed out of her system. First, she gained her self-worth again fully, recognizing her own excellence and working again on growing it to its fullest. She lost her cares of worrying about outcomes or attaching to any intentions of trying to control. Rather, she began to flow with life again – the power of yin, rather than the selfish and short-sighted application of yang. Her doubts were last to fade, but in her healing growth, she eventually blossomed again, a lotus in the muddy waters – recognizing that she didn’t need to trust other people or seek their love again. No matter what, she was pure abundant joy in and of herself. She could give her compassionate love to others without clinging to them or to any story that dimmed her light or limited her.

Perhaps some day she would find an Emperor, balanced, giving, kind, empowered, and insightful, rather than a self-centered, power-based, controlling, egoistic king, but in truth, she knew the rarity of such a person, and would sweat not a single drop worrying, waiting, or even desiring that outcome. She would give her energy to herself, to the world, and to others – fostering compassion, patience, nurturance, and growth in all that she encountered to the best of her ability, listening and caring while no longer allowing anyone to diminish her.

She no longer sat in meditation, rest, and healing from her wounds. She stood up, walked out of her castle, gracefully strode down to the sea below, and rode off into the moonlit night on a giant turtle that surfaced in front of her as her feet touched the sand, her chariot to traverse the depths on her journey forward.

Practice | Presence, I-You, Tao

03 Mar 2023 Leave a comment

by zeuslyone in Mindfulness, Practice Tags: , , , , , , ,

I’ve been writing a journal with a sense of trying to focus on practice like Marcus Aurelius does in the Meditations but with a more open-ended inspiration which pulls at being present from both Buddhist and Stoic points of departure. I haven’t written that regularly, but I had a very flowing moment of expression at the end of a session yesterday that I thought worth sharing.

Rain pittering
Pattering pangs on panes
Wet flow
Just outside the window

It's truly wet in this moment, really coming down steadily outside as I sit at the restaurant just below the office. I'm realizing how much of the basics of the world escape our notice as we go through our lives.

We go through, focused on this thing or that. It's very centered on achieving, doing, or pleasure/avoidance of pain, usually.

Meanwhile, it pours, the wind blows, myriad other worldings world themselves into being. The moment is one of golden radiance, even our narrow reaction that misses most of it.

However, there's also the opportunity to open the heartmind to more. It's there in every moment. We can pause, breathe, open, and truly notice. Body and mind can fall away. In such a way, we can truly exist as I-You, sitting deeply in the everabiding emergent sway that is the cosmic force of love: Love Loving Itself - TAO.

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