Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror

Direct your eye right inward, and you’ll find
A thousand regions in your mind
Yet undiscovered....
Henry David Thoreau

...I tend to meditate on the desire to do just about anything other than meditating...it’s easy to ascribe that to boredom...but, then, it seems unlikely I’d be a writer if I really found my thoughts so boring that I couldn’t stand sitting with them for half an hour...

We can as easily become a prisoner of so-called positive thinking as of negative thinking. It too can be confining, fragmented, inaccurate, illusory, self-serving, and wrong.
Jon Kabat-Zinn

...have said in the past that taking antidepressants without therapy...or otherwise deeply working on yourself...is like turning up the radio so you can’t hear the noise your engine’s making...

...now wonder if maybe most things we do, or own, or strive for, or tell ourselves, are simply an infinite variety of upward motions aimed at subtly manipulating internal volume knobs...ways to avoid the noise we know is there but don’t want to hear...

...not to mention the silence...

It's All In Your Mind

Dreaming is free...
Debbie Harry

...unfulfilled fantasies can be painful, says a friend...and yet they’re better than no fantasies at all, says I...yeah, I know, live in the here and now...and that makes sense, too...and yet there’s something to be said, while you’re living in the here and now, for letting the mind wander and stretch...even if that means mixing metaphors...to see what we can explore even as we create whatever it is that’s to be explored...that the line between creating and exploring is far hazier than we usually think...that wandering and wondering are essentially the same word...to see what pleasures are possible within the mind...since, ultimately, all pleasure is both created and experienced in the mind...it doesn’t exist anywhere else...that’s one thing you learn from antidepressants...acids flowing, momentarily flooding the grey tissue before receding...even God, they say, may exist somewhere in the frontal region of the cerebral cortex...not far from where the yogis say the third eye is located...or maybe I’m making all of this up...

‘Prisoner, tell me, who was it that wrought this unbreakable chain?’
‘It was I,’ said the prisoner, ‘who forged this chain very carefully. I thought my invincible power would hold the world captive leaving me in a freedom undisturbed. Thus night and day I worked at the chain with huge fires and cruel hard strokes. When at last the work was done and the links were complete and unbreakable, I found that it held me in its grip.’
Rabindranath Tagore