Stuff That's In the Way

...went out to take pictures of a sunset a week or so ago...like people with cameras and artsy-fartsy pretensions do...was kinda frustrated by the opportunities offered by my neighborhood for a good clear wide-open cloudscape...too many things in the way of open sky...so, walked around a bit trying to find a better vantage point....then, looking at the photos last night, ended up deciding the ones I liked best were those with the most interference...

...in the end, we’re always somewhere...always someone...always immersed in context...much as we might, sometimes, like it to be otherwise...

To say we are all God is well and good, but not at the cost of denying our humanity with all its seeming foibles.
Joel Kramer/Diana Alstad

...a week or two ago, got up Saturday morning, did some yoga and meditated, then went kayaking with a friend on a lake I’d forgotten was such a short drive away, then lay on a float in a pool reading a book on mindfulness...and, a bit later, started a completely pointless argument with people I care about...

There are no holy places and no holy people, only holy moments, only moments of wisdom.
Jack Kornfield


...in sixth grade, we read this story by Ray Bradbury...about a shoe store owner and a kid who wants a pair of sneakers but can’t afford to pay for them...the kid pleads, talks about what it would mean to him to have the sneakers, evoking antelopes and gazelles and, for a moment, kinda bringing back the shoe store guy’s own lost youth....in the end, they make a deal...the kid can have them but will have to work off the cost...the kid says thanks, and the shoe store guy says something like you’ve given me so much more...which, the teacher explained, referred to the kid giving his time to work in the store after school...which struck me, even then, as an incredibly shallow reading....up to that point, I’d had disagreements with teachers...but they generally involved matters of behavior....that, I think, was the first time I realized that teachers can’t always be trusted to understand what they’re teaching...

...though, of course, just how clueless a teacher can be didn’t quite hit me 'til I became one myself...

Getting Personal...

...contrary to the impression some may have gotten from that last post, this blog’s not gonna prostitute itself for hits, gratuitously throwing around keywords like big boobs...kinky sex...or hot throbbing orgasms...so don’t worry...

Oh I just don’t know where to begin...
Elvis Costello

...actually been doing some intense personal writing...off and on...since the trip to Mexico...where somebody told me I should write about the stuff I don’t wanna write about...things I tend to hint at before making a joke about big boobs, kinky sex, or hot throbbing orgasms...

...finding I can only dig into that stuff in pieces...going in, then backing off, then going in and backing off again...sometimes it helps to drink three quarters of a bottle of red wine first...saving the last quarter for afterwards...but, in the long run, that’s probably not the best idea...

Humanity’s hope lies in its capacity not to accept the way its past has played out.
Joel Kramer

...I didn’t really need to be told that...I mean, hell, it’s what I’m trying to get other people to do...dig into their deep trauma and put it into words...capture it in narrative...encapsulate it...put it outside where they can look at it...re-envision...reevaluate...reinvent...

...then, other people’s problems are always easier to confront...and it’s not exactly unusual for the cobbler to wear no shoes...ask anybody who’s spent any time with shrinks outside of their professional capacities....I’m the son of a psychiatrist and a social worker, have had a couple messed up shrinks as friends, even went out with one for a mercifully brief time...I’m not gonna tell ya what she was into...

It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.
J. Krishnamurti

...as far as I’m concerned, there’s nothing better, if you’re gonna try and help somebody else, than an awareness of just how fucked up you are yourself...to know you’re not one inch above or below the person you’re trying to help....sometimes I get the impression that the addicts I work with see me as more like one of them than one of the staff...and I take that as a compliment...