From love we come, to love we go
Twenty-three reflections & guiding stars.
From Howl’s Moving Castle
Lord help me for I've aged yet another step closer to oblivion.
Stored below are twenty-three scattered poetics for ambient magician-ing, gathered scales to weave the future beast, miniaturized worlds in amber'd drops of old.
This was originally written for Twitter.
If you prefer to listen, I recorded a rough voice memo:
1.
All my reaches for God will end in failure, which is why I must never cease doing so.
2.
I'm on a quest to become an Idiot.
My armoured heart guards his pride, aloofness and intellectualism tightly (it's his emotional support self-worth, after all). Keith Johnstone: “Some people can't drop their status, so they can't really play.”
I've lived most of my life LARPing as Proper and Smart and Respectable, when really I was (am) Insecure and Confused and Jealous. Many such cases, and I think I make up at least 7 of them.
At the base of it, I'm just a potato channeling the gods because it turns out that when I peer at the edge of inspiration's spark, everything that I thought was from me, isn't.
The greatest King is one who's also an Idiot, for he mediates heaven and earth. His kingliness grants wisdom to rule the earth, his idiocy imbues humility to receive the heavens.
Here's to decades more of foolery before I even dare to start thinking in purple.
3.
A year ago I came into relationship with Beauty for the first time:
Every leaf appeared perfectly placed
Even when the clouds covered the rays and the forest was cast in blue and gray
Even then, among the hints of winter cold, I was still gripped by their suchness
It wasn't that the world ‘became alive’ and Beauty appeared where it was not before, nor was it that I ‘felt’ Beauty or awe
I simply was and things simply were
The is-ness of it all pervaded.
4.
Laugh for a hundred breaths.
Rest in its ripples for a hundred more.
5.
I love Twitter because I get to be in the presence of so many of you who are manifestations of pillars that shoulder the deepest aspirations of my being.
A severely (!!) limited list of people & qualities:
Nick, for enchantment of the world
Visa, for sharp sensitivity & playfulness
Christine, for impeccable vibes, kinship in being, & aliveness
Ava, for moonlit glow
Jake, for biggest brain synthesizing
Renee, for raw vulnerability, intimacy, & integrity of heart
Rich, for irreverent shitposting & grounded practicality
Tasshin, for gentle warmth, brotherhood, & earnest wrestling with shadows
Bosco, for good humour & boundlessly insightful introspection
You are my council of perfectly imperfect sages, the hearty soup of my soul.
Thank you, thank you, thank you 💖
6.
The meaning of life is to fuck around and find out.
7.
Sometimes I feel that I emotionally cling onto things so tightly that it draws blood.
Who are these stomping gargoyles that dance in the shadowed corners of sight? How do they reel the reins of my mind so deftly?
But are they not leaves carried by the wind? Do they not also drift upon the gentle stream? When the fog dissipates and the pressures released, nothing remains — but see, my dear, that is all that's needed to fill your laboured chest.
8.
breath in, I love you
breath out, thank you
Repeat for as long as its enlivening.
9.
Whenever people say ‘child-like’ x, I'm reminded that such useful and meaningful pointers are only thus. These supposedly ‘universal’ experiential keystones turn up blank for many.
My childhood was unenchanted, but nurturing those magic eyes is real and is one of the main life-plants I now seek to tend.
10.
On that same day of Beauty, I also felt happiness for the first time, something that was alien to even the furthest edges of my memory.
That euphoria. I couldn't even figure out what it was until an hour in when — ah — this is what I had spent the past year actively and desperately searching for.
I remember thinking some summers ago that I had not a clue what people meant when they said they loved their friends. Terrible emotional wrenching was certainly no stranger, so I definitely knew what it was to feel things! But I wasn't depressed & my childhood was mellow. Yet, when I looked inside during the better moments of life, all I found was a spotless ivory wall.
When that changed, one thing I came to realise is that the true claims of good love being removed from emotion are only from those who are able to fundamentally root their love in that felt sense.
I'm not saying that every moment and action should have a warm fuzzy feeling for it to be love — that's ridiculous! But rather without that root, how I relate remains stuck in the operations of the detached mind which follows coolly those understandable laws of ‘Loving Well’.
That wellspring of sweetness was never available to me, but that embodied taste splashed fresh colours where there was not, and gave internal conviction that I, too, can become human. And I would joke that I'm a robot who's starting to feel things and it's terrible because now I get all emotional all the time and it's all so inconvenient, but pain only gains meaning in beauty and levity.
God withdrew from the world so that the terror of being dashed against existence can jolt us into becoming transfixed by the glory of creation. And blessèd am the undeserving I, who now, at last, glimpses the divine hiding among those crinkles of your eyes.
11.
Gosh making public some of these things is terrifying — I wanted to say that they're me microdosing vulnerability but really, they're cries for a mutual recognition of those most tender parts.
But it's here, fuelled by your loving acceptance, that I'm filled with courage to manifest it among the raw space of flesh and blood.
12.
Honor that past.
The spirits cannot be set free except in peace.
Stillness settles, restlessness resides, all returns to dust.
13.
Those friends who care for you are treasures among treasures.
They are your ever-glowing hearth. Love them well, love them deeply.
14.
I would like my mutuals to know that I think you're all extraordinarily cool and that if my track record is of any indication, meeting you off Twitter will result in my brain short circuiting.
“They're just some guy” — utter bollocks!! I was completely unprepared for how everyone I’ve met were more lovable and intimidating and endearing beyond expectations.
15.
To dance with lightfooted Now. Flowing in flux, churning in the nebulous — who am I?
I've found it hard to respond in a narrativized way because that shifts so quickly — how can I tell you who I am when no-thing arises even to me? In squint, broad patterns emerge, but as soon as I focus, it becomes kaleidoscopic.
Ever-becoming.
To see all that I am as no more than a cloud of pumpkin'd leaves, waiting to be set adrift by rain.
16.
be like the blooming flower, naturally unfolding
17.
It always amazes me that mutuals whom I chat with off Twitter continues to like me??? Like sure I sometimes write somewhat interesting and poetic things but most of that comes either from the part that screams the loudest, or the most idealised self that I can muster — vibes are the 95% of everything else that doesn't translate in.
The world's a mystery!
and I'm grateful for your grace.
18.
I recently found this Little Man in me who likes to snivel annoyed at the most trivial things, who's fed fat on petty frustrations and groomed smooth by projections.
Oh Little Man,
I pray that you may find wholeness
I pray that joy loosens your furrowed brows
I pray that you may be baptised among strange beasts, the unfound sacred, the tears of leaves
I pray that you may rest easy tonight.
19.
Stomp! with beauty
Shake! among the ineffable
Holler! as touching hearts
& surrender utterly
to the absurdity of it all
20.
Move towards the Infinite, for Totality collapses under its own weight.
21.
Not long ago in grips of cosmic gusto I became enamored with ‘changing the world’. That breeze has now settled in the wings of a butterfly, resting among flowers of ambient dreams. I realised that we become demigods not through mixed blood but by temporary grace.
The steady and exact chronos that turns our world is the time of machines. The creative fruits which birth kairos — that just-right moment — is non-linear and, as I live it, accidental. Kairos cannot be directed, but nor does it come in passivity.
To be accident prone.
To try grasp it directly is to force control over it, and it's nature fundamentally eludes such rigidity. Tending to that space of electric emptiness is necessary for us to ripen into openness, and in that openness we surrender all — hopeless, fearless.1 We can only create the conditions within which it might come, all else rests in faith.
Deep faith.
That is what it takes to keep vigil til it arises, and greater faith still to abandon oneself to that thundering spirit of kairos. There, we become the momentary divine.
Most of living resides on clock time, but on the matters of the soul's movement, I attend to a different rhythm of breath.
22.
Love like the radiant sun, overflowing
Love like the cloud-dressed moon, tender
Love like the unseen lake, still
Love like the windswept dandelion, weightless
Love like the open sky, boundless
23.
From love we come, to love we go.
This idea of surrendering to be both hopeless and fearless is from Stephen Nachmanovitch's book Free Play.