Living in the Moment

It is not long till midnight. I am typing in the dark, the deep dark outside a chink in the curtain, the screen illuminating enough for me to see the papers on the grotty desk in front of me, the outline of that cool porcelain sculpture I did quite a few years ago now, the still-unfired one, which makes me happy when I look at it and reminds me that I really need to go and buy another bag of clay and start doing something more now I have some extra bouts of energy in which to do so.

Oh, man, I love that sentence.

Creative commons - free to use but please link back here.

There is something to be said, I suppose, for health issues that force you to see how you're always walking on the edge of where the ocean meets the land just like you're walking on a wire in a circus (thank you, Adam Duritz). That line that is invisible but weaves its way through every single day. For a long time it's been a particularly drab and shabby line, like it's made out of old wool that's got balls on it like an old jumper that's been around too long, and it would lead from the bed to the couch and to the kitchen and the bathroom and often back to the couch.  Other times, like recently, it's been a line that's opened up forests on one side that I can trip off into.  Nothing major or extraordinary for anyone but me. Going to the supermarket and going for a walk in one day.

Other days I walk along that thread and fall into the sea.  Sometimes it's a bit heartbreaking. I never know when I've overdone it.  I'm asked again to give up what I've been given.  Which is the whole of life but with so many couch-filled days in recent years I have a tanty and lose perspective when I fall back into the fog again.  Even if I know that these days it's not going to be a life sentence, that I will climb back out at some point.

On Sunday things were good enough that I went with my mum to see a local Aussie muso, Billy Miller, play live at the Caravan Club. We stood for about three hours. That's nothing to people who do that every day but for me it was a really big deal. There was no way I would have been able to replicate it the next day.  My feet were so fucking sore.

The recplication the next day is the biggest test of CFS. The point isn't so much whether you see me today, walking in Belgrave, coming from the doctor's, into the Book Barn to buy pens, to the library to drop off a book and pick up a new one, to the post office. Doing chores. Flittering.  I would have seen quite chipper to you, I'm sure. But you see the adrenalised version, not the ATP-deprived one the next day who spends more time on the couch.

Still, I've had lucky days recently where I've done something like that and had No Payback The Next Day.  That feels miraculous but really it's just functioning mitochondria.

It's not what happened on Monday though. The day after Sunday's three-hour-standfest the world had that greyness to it unrelated to the sky.  As did Tuesday.  Feeling the anxiety running through my body, different from a mind-manufactured sort.  A buzzing kind that at the same time puts a sense of doomish urgency into everything.  Why are you sitting on this couch?  You need to be not sitting on this couch, or else if you just sit here like this that will be a terribly wrong thing to do and something bad will happen.

This kind of anxious body-fuelled thinking is problematic at any time, and I can generally take steps to ease off its push.  But Tuesday it was difficult because the next day was the funeral of my ex-father-in-law, which I very much wanted to attend. We still kept in touch from time to time. The last time we spoke was via email a few weeks before.  We had great conversations when he lived in the granny flat and Mark and I lived in the house.  He was a gentle man, a kind one too, and I wished to go and pay my respects not only to those who are living, but to him.

I don't believe that we are gone from the earth when we are gone from our bodies.  In our age of one-size-fits-all knowledge, the sort that is peer reviewed, double-blind, placebo controlled, many have little time for the perceptions that come from the subjective space.  That sort of knowledge is good but it brings with it hubris if it's the only kind you ascribe to.  It upsets me, really, this disrespect for our subjective life.  It's my life in here.  It's just as real as the life that is out there.  It can't be branded, it can't be monetised, it can't be shared, it can't have its privacy taken away from it, and I won't allow its dignity to be annulled by those who claim the experience in here is inconsequential just because they cannot measure it with a measuring device.

My ex-father-in-law is gone, but I don't think or feel that he is gone. Even anxious, fatigued, inflamed, the strange toxicity that comes when these fatigue situations happen, as if something in my body is struggling to work and instead is spinning its wheels, splattering genetically dysfunctional mud all over me.  I wanted to be there.  Even though I began worrying about what other people would think.  Paranoid things.  Like, would my ex's sister glare at me at the funeral and refuse to say hello?  Would they all think I was a freak, in my childless, cloistered life?  Would I drive off the road halfway there and cause a multi-car pile-up because I was spacey?  Would people believe me, if I didn't go, that I wasn't pikeing out because funerals are difficult but because I actually didn't physically believe I could get there?

7am is not so much of an issue for some people. For me it's been one for more decades than I care to count. Perhaps this was one harbinger of the CFS that would come in my late 20's, the endocrinal dysfunction that made getting up such a holy horror. 7am for me feels maybe like what 3am feels for some other people if they've got drunk the night before. I dunno. Maybe. How can we compare our own internal experiences to each other?

What happens when you know you have to get up at 7am and you're worried how you'll feel? You wake up at 5.30 and don't go back to sleep.  And so I finally conceded that this wasn't going to happen for me.  That to drive when I felt like that was an irresponsibility.  I would have had to leave home by 8am, drive for two hours in peak-hour traffic, and then turn around and drive back again a few hours later.

And so I just had to be there in spirit instead.  I guess if I'd died and some people couldn't make it to my funeral but were willing themselves there in spirit, that would be fine with me.   Maybe I'd see their colours anyway, flowing out like ribbon, connected to everybody and everything wherever they happened to be.  Time and space not always so constraining.  Do we sense people after they have gone? I feel like I had some kind of communion with Mike in the days after I learned he died. (How lovely of Mark to let me know. He didn't need to). How can we tease out the strands of what we wish to be true about life continuing after life, what we may be inventing, or what we may be perceiving on a plane that's not visible to us, not parked at any airport, not existing at all according to many and yet which many others claim to swim in their whole lives?

These kinds of experiences are between you and yourself.  They are the last bastions of privacy in an internet age :)  Nothing to be proven.  Nothing able to be proven, just felt, or sensed, and wondered at.  A space, like the negative space between two objects that you are taught to see when you are drawing.  Once you see it, you can't not.  You draw better when you draw the shape of the space in-between.  That nifty little technique brings all of the world into the fore.  All the empty spaces fill.

I'm feeling angry this morning.  So beware, if you have a desire to condemn me in the comments section, because this morning I might just damn well bite back.

Such a massive amount of grief porn in my social media feed yesterday, one thing after the other.  I was really saddened to hear that Robin Williams gave in to the whisper.  I get those whispers.  I've had them often in the last decade.

You know what?  There was a part of me yesterday that was jealous of Robin Williams because for him it's over.  The battle is over.  It's not the life that people who feel suicidal want to be over.  It's the constant battle, wearing you down.  It's the constant battle that gets in the way of being able to live life.

And so with these outpourings of grief yesterday, on the one hand I got it, but on the other it creeped me out and even angered me a little.

What gets me about article after article about poor Robin Williams is that nobody was thinking about him last week.  This is where this feels creepy to me.  This giant outpouring of grief isn't about Robin Williams the man, I don't think.  It's about how as a celebrity he is representational.  He is someone safely enough away from us that he is able to become a safe container in which to pour the massive amounts of grief we carry in our own life.  Sometimes, we can't see our own pain until situations like these.

If we weren't a culture in tatters, we would have, like all good cultures do, dances and stories and embodied ways of helping us navigate through life.  But we are at the end of one thing and the beginning of another, and so stuff lies in tatters.  We don't have a  public square anymore.  Somehow, we have allowed our culture to be taken over and turned into a giant warehouse for our stomachs that actually really only benefits a small group of people.  So what better stand-in than celebrities, right?  Robin Williams has become our stand-in, an icon.  What better symbol of our own hidden pain than the guy who many still can't quite believe could battle such dark demons rearing out of the shadows when he was so good at making us laugh.  As if every single person on the planet isn't so multi-faceted.

How about the people in our midst who are suffering as much as Robin Williams?  I used to talk daily with one who suffered like him.  She made the most awesome art.  Beautiful, intricate drawings that she would sell to the very, very few who walked past her on the street and actually saw her every single fucking day.  I am drawn to the weak ones, because I feel so fucking weak myself, and so I did stop.  We'd talk to each other every day.  Because I felt so weak, she was actually the safest person on the street to talk to.  She felt so much more human than the suits going to work at the bank, believe me.

Most people who are struggling like Robin Williams probably don't have the creative platform that he did to be able to demonstrate that they have valuables hidden in the folds of their jackets just because they're struggling with depression, or anxiety, or some other mental illness.  They're probably the same people we generally ignore unless we're forced to have to deal with them, or that we despise on some level because we sense their pain and it triggers our fear.  Because fuck me if we aren't stuffed up to the brim with fear.  Or we've tried to help them and they didn't respond in the way we expected and now we feel rejected.

Maybe some of the grief that we are pouring into the safe container that Robin Williams represents is about that as well.  Maybe we're grieving for ourselves, too, for what we have lost and what we don't even know we have lost.

In the Midst of Summer I Am Dead

The Sinusitis Blues.

Today, it is almost-midsummer and

I feel as dry as a leaf at the end of autumn and

As dead as the midst of winter and

As fragile as a spring shoot.

Today, I feel like I have lost myself again.  I lose myself every day and then find myself again.  Reborn every day.  Today, I feel the monster reaching out his claw from the green murk to clutch my ankle.

I look back on things that I have written in previous years and they sparkle in a way that I feel like I have lost, at least for the moment.  Today, I am beaten down.  Perhaps it's just simply the fact that I am in the midst of yet another sinus-related thing, and I feel bad because I feel useless.  I feel like I want to be a hermit and never go anywhere and yet I feel guilty about that too.  I do not feel like I will be able to sparkle anymore.  But then I look at something I wrote two weeks ago and there it is again, the sparkle.  And tomorrow or the day after or the week or month after I will be back in that space again, actually walking around in it, all three dimensional.

Time is becoming stranger to me as I go on.  And I know that it is a false conception to think I sparkled in previous years more than I do now because I wasn't sparkling then, any more than I am sparkling now.  It's just the benefit of hindsight, the safety that comes from the past that is sealed, combined with reading the things that come from the writing space where I feel more myself and safer than the me who walks around bumbling.

Some days, I feel so exposed, like other people are tsunamis and I am a baby beech.  Some days, I feel like the stuff that is in me, the good and sweet and lovely, is not for any of you to see because how could I trust anyone with that?

I know what this is.  This is trauma.  This is limbic and wordless.

I have gained some traction with this space, believe it or not.  I will tell you about it sometime soon. 

But today, I feel so beaten down by the world, by everything, by the spaces that I love and which for today at least are lost.  I have lost the Godspace.  Which probably means it's closer than ever before.  Sometimes when you feel like you are losing something, what is actually happening is that you are gaining something new.  Transmutation.  My word for the year.  Sometimes the monster swims up from the depths into the space where you can see him.  He's been there all along, under the conscious sea.  But when he comes up, though he is you and he has lived within you perhaps for your whole life, you recoil from him in horror.

But perhaps he is a monster only by dint of him being the Other within your own body.  You react the way all humans react when they are scared and something other than them is facing them:  you feel an antipathy, a horror.  Sometimes the horror is in direct correlation to the things that are stored without your knowing in the undersea of your own self.  And then someone out there pops up and presses buttons you don't even know you have and would be horrified to know that you did.

We are a deeper sea than we like to think.

But it's not all clunking chains and dead carcasses and hairy monsters down there.  There are the most beautiful schools of fish, made of gossamer.  There are laboratories of alchemy down there, sealed from the water and hidden from sight.  The You that you don't know very well is cooking up things and while S/he does, it feels like it is some sort of evil.  It feels like you are dying.  But sometimes hairy monsters do not stay hairy monsters forever.  That's why stories exist about frogs and princes. 

I feel today like I am dying.  But everyone who swims in these waters knows, that's not the end of the story.

And yet even so, I feel like help!, like I have lost myself again, and that feels very unsafe. Even while I know it's not the whole of the matter or the end of it either.

You Beautiful Mofo

Dear Michael Leunig,

I have fanblogged you more than once on this blog.  I don't write these posts in the hope that you will read them.  I just like to voice my appreciation sometimes.  It's difficult to write about, because what your stuff evokes in me is the space inside that I need to protect.  It's childlike, and paper-thin.  It can be laughed at as naive by cynical people who are very rational and very grown up.  I think it's something like hope and belief in a better future worldview, with a slice of mysticism thrown in.



I guess it's pretty obvious that we can do something better than the paradigmatic shit we're currently sewering in.  I s'pose it's the particular viewpoint you come from, but to me our hope lies in the fact that the us living under this destructive rampant capitalistic shit are much bigger than the them for who it is in their best interests to keep facilitating it, even if they're killing their own grandchildren's nest.  Not that I like fostering any more extra separation than we're already living under, but in this instance it's helpful. 

Lots of people have given up hope.  I give up hope regularly, too, but then I tire of the ridiculousness of being caught up in such a 2x2 paradigm so I go searching for a bigger turning circle again.  Your work never fails to bring me there.



So when I write to you, it's hard to harness the bubbling joy that sprites up my guts.  I can't help it.  Even when you draw or talk about the things that make me want to impale my eyeballs down hard on two metal spikes so that my brain spurts out my ears and ends my place in this current insane sphere of inhumanity and returns me to my cosmic swamp, you are like medicine.  Especially there.

Which is the best medicine, of course.  You spill out your guts and make something beautiful of it.  You shine starlight on my dark, Mr Leunig.  You're a fucking marvel.

Yes, yes, I know, I'm platforming you.  I'm Mandelaing you, as an Australian Living Treasure, into the schmaltzosphere and into something evil.  Or am I?  It's not you that makes me feel like that, after all.  It's your words and pictures.  I'm sure you're a pain in the arse at times, a fearful, hating mess, who leaves his jocks on the floor and doesn't pay his bills on time, who's made dreadful mistakes and royally let people down.  Who poos.

I still have this thing about how weird it is that everyone poos.  Like, even the queen, and stuff.  (I will not capitalise the name of someone who inherited their great riches on the back of sweet fuck all.  But I digress).

This human human compulsion to venerate the good takes the good away from us.  Vaunts doing good stuff into the stratosphere inhabited by People Not Me.  It's just one more case of slicing and dicing ourselves up into dissociated bits.  And I've had quite enough of that, thanks.  The reality is that even mofos make good and make art.

Not that I'm saying you're a mofo so much as I'm saying we're all mofos, beautiful mofos.  And even though we're all beautiful mofos we can still do awesome stuff.  The stuff we share as common ground is more than a beginning.

I started writing this post by pen, sitting outside in the grass and the sun of greenly Belgrave.  I have begun writing morning pages again, and this morning I chose as my writing tray of choice The Essential Leunig.  A perfect choice, really, though a little hefty in the weight department, it is a lovely hardback 7/8 A4 size, a size which often seems to be used by books that inspire me in some way.  Of course, it's a perfect size for reproducing cartoons.

So I flipped it open to a random page.  One of them was of a man standing outside with a piano, and atop it a telescope.  One eye was trained through the telescope at the stars while one hand tinkled the keys and the other hand wrote down the music he was seeing.  That made me very happy.

The other side of the page was an interaction between two people.  A Bunnings employee and a customer, maybe, if Bunnings had a New Paradigms aisle.

"I'm looking for life's precious little golden thread," the customer says, having crawled into the store in abject exhaustion from the dispiriting version of 'reality' outside.

"We've got the rusty chain, the tangled wire and the thick rope, but we can't help you with the golden thread I'm afraid.  What do you want it for?"

"I want to just see it.  I want to smile at it.  I want to tell life's precious little golden thread that I love it.  That's all I want."

The employee responds to his consumer, both of them made much smaller by the paradigm of the world in which they live which turns them to turds and turns off the stars, a world which has been largely manipulated by a small percentage of the whole but which is not in fact the last word on the matter.

"We've got the ball of string, the reel of packaging tape and the optic fibre cable but I'm sorry, we don't have the golden thread any more," he says sadly to the sad consumer.

No, we don't have much of anything any more in this dying paradigm, Mr Leunig.  But I suspect you feel the golden thread just as much as I do.  It's because of this you feel like a safe space to me, someone who has a vision that extends beyond the current limitations.  And so even when you point out the foibles of life, the things that make me want to impale my eyeballs in a dramatic death scene, you remind me of what I value most of all and what is there, beyond the aisles of dead consumerist culture.

Thank you for that, you beautiful motherfucker.

Dust to Dust

I recently wrote a how-to on Weekend Notes about raising backyard chooks.

It made me miss my chooks.  It's been a few weeks now since the fox got them.  A rather traumatising situation because it was pretty much my fault.  Instead of shutting them into their coop when it got dark, I had begun leaving it later and later, until I was going out and closing them in just before I went to bed at midnight or 1am.

One night the fox got to them before I did.  A (mercifully short) screaming sound sent me outside with my heart doing cliched things by being in my throat, and there was Selma gone, only her feathers left, and a poor Tristan lying shocked and dying in front of my eyes, on the inside of the coop near the door.

I shut him up in the coop.  I didn't know what else to do.  I didn't want the fox to come back for him.  A part of me was hoping that he was maybe just in shock, that if I came out the next morning he might have recovered somehow.  Most of me knew that it was not true.

I was so sad that I had neglected to look after these creatures.  I want to look after the world.  I cried the way you do when you're a kid, with a heaving chest that's so sore it's like someone has stabbed it with a knife.

Chook-Chook was still there the next morning, in the same spot.  And I wondered what to do with him.  Have you ever seen a dead body in real time?  When my Auntie Dawn died, I wanted to see her one last time to try to reconcile the fact that suddenly she was gone.  As if you can ever reconcile that by anything other than clock time, and even then not really.  She had been made up by the mortician and it just didn't really look like her anymore.  She wouldn't have needed to wear that particular shade of foundation if she was alive with blood rushing through her cheeks.  But it was good to see her one last time.

I saw my grandma too.  In terms of People You Want to Die Like, Grandma and Grandpa were both superstars.  She died on her birthday.  The carer at the nursing home brought her in a bunch of flowers somebody delivered.  She looked at them, said "Oh, how lovely," and then died.  I mean, how awesome, Grandma.  Seventeen years earlier, Grandpa had been out riding his bike to the shop, came back, had a bath, then died. 

In terms of People You Want to Die Like, I totally want to learn how to die as a process the way that Auntie Dawn did.  She was accepting.  Partly I think because she missed her husband and wanted to go be with him, and she was tired.  People might say that you should fight in those circumstances.  To rage, rage, against the dying of the light.  That you have to be brave and fight.  But surely it's braver to turn and face the unknown.  For the light is in the darkness too, and for all we know, death is an entryway back into the light we left when we came here.

I think that sort of view is partly the reason why a few days later after the chooks died, I was able to go outside and open up the coop door, and leave it open.  After all, the fox needed to eat too.  And Tristan wasn't there anymore, any more than Auntie Dawn, Grandma or Grandpa were when the whatever-it-was had left, and their bodies were truly like shells.

I do like to think that they are somewhere.  That they have gone back to that Source from which they came from.  But in a slight twist on the Buddhist, I like to think that this Source has grown bigger and more beautiful since before people were here, because the souls of every person and creature who has ever been born on the earth return to it, enlarging it.  The Source has been giving birth to itself, making itself bigger and more amazing than even the perfection it already was before.  With everyone home.

Memento Mori

You know, it really doesn't pay to trust people who are "up" all the time.  Or who insist on always looking on the bright side of life.  That doesn't ring true to me.  It feels like they're lying.  Or at least that they're hiding their less pretty sides. 

Sometimes I think that people who insist on always looking at the bright side are really in denial and terrified of what they may find if they go scrabbling around in their own closets.  Sometimes people who don't wanna go down are suffering from one of the diseases pertinent to our culture - the sort of excessive hubris that automatically comes after a while when you're up too long.  It starts to feel illegal to go down in a death-denying culture which insists that you must be always up, and that if you go down we'll medicate you.

That's insane.  That's like being a parent and allowing a red lemonade-drinking child to have as much as they want and to stay up for as long as they want.  Who isn't allowed to see dead Uncle Fred in the front parlour because that's too scary for children.  (But then what kid would see dead Uncle Fred anyway these days?  We secrete him away before he can give the game away.  Chances are Uncle Fred will wait out his closed-casket funeral in a funeral home.

It doesn't pay to shield ourselves from the dark, simply because we'll always be afraid of it.

When you are down, there are no end of advisers on hand to recommend how to change your viewpoint,  your habits, your diet, to quite simply harden the fuck up.

But no.  When you fight tooth and nail not to come to the dark place like I consistently do and consistently have, once you are here there is a clear-seeing that strikes you, that is beautiful in its starkness, so that you almost don't want to leave.  There is a space here and a silence that you wish to try to remember to take back with you when you swim back up to the surface.

You want to find a way to bring these anti-hubris eye drops back with you when you go back.  To remind you of that which you keep forgetting, that both sides of the coin belong. 

Darthdowney

And that your sadness is beautiful. Though it not be sociable, or you be palatable when you are in that space.  That's okay.  Let it be.  Despite what anyone else may say, your sadness and your darkness is a holy space.  It is sometimes best to walk the holy and dark space in your own solitude.  It's okay.

I think this is why people have skulls on their desks.  It is a reminder of the darkness, of that which is not able to be seen when you are in the light.  Memento mori - remember that you shall die.  It's not really as morbid as we've been led to believe. 

Death is Underrated

Don't be morbid, people sometimes say if you talk about death.  As if by mentioning it you're ruining the mood of the party.

Death gets a bad rap.  It is considered one of the rudest of conversational topics.  It's bad form even to speak of it, unless it's in a whisper.  Death has become to our always-on era what sex was to Victorian times.  You don't speak of it, but everybody does it.

Which is part of its attraction, I guess.  Anything that our culture likes to deny, there I am, digging in the middle of it.

There is more than one way to view our demise.   Some days, I feel despair at living in a world which is patently insane and dragging its constituents along with it.  (When I speak here of "the world," I am not referring to the beautiful earth that we live on, which is more alive and sustaining and wise than we give it credit for.  The earth in many respects is the salvation from "the world" that is the the stupid and narrow-minded ways of late Western civilisation, where everything is somewhat broken and the emperor and all of his constituents are ignoring the little kids that are telling him his willie is hanging in the breeze.)

This morning I am feeling constrained and straightjacketed as I only can when I wake up tired before I even get out of bed, being at the tail end of a parasite cleanse that is clogging up my sinuses and fogging up my brain.  Add on top of that an impending "less dainty time of the month" and my mood is a little ... well, shall we say black?  But that's okay.  These moods pass and joyful ones take their place, and they too pass.  For me I feel that the more I welcome these moods to learn from them, the more the joy comes in also.  I don't think we can't have one without the other.  Though we try.

Some days, when the world is a drag, envisioning that you are going to some day die is ... well, this may seem strange, but it's a comfort.  Black moods of depression aside, on those days when an examination of the self-destructive-but-let's-not-talk-about-it ways of the world we are forced to live in breeds despair, a reminder that death comes to us all carries two strands with it, flying along behind.  Firstly, there is always the cold slap, like having an icy jug of water poured over the top of your head, that this death thing is not simply an abstract concept for you to play with inside your head, moving it around like furniture to see what happens when you put it over here, to see the way the light hits it, to see how its shadow hangs across the other items in the still life picture in your mind.  That it is something that is one day going to happen to you is probably never going to be something you will get your head or your ego around.

But if you can get past the cold slap, contemplating your own impending death brings with it a sort of sanity.  It's like it shakes you from the stupor that settles over you by virtue of living in 2012;  from the daily doses of reality TV or porn or whatever else is is your particular tipple that you like to take a dose of to try to escape.  The stupor, however, weaves its way through those things, the incessant constancy of the 24-hour 7-Eleven, the 24-hour news cycle, so that there is no rest for the weary, for the wildlife, or for you.  No silent spaces where you are forced to confront the things you are running from, unless you carve them out yourself.  Trying to escape from this madhouse via those means just means you're entering back in through the front door.  It becomes like the alcoholic needing a few drinks to straighten himself up before lunchtime, just so he can feel normal.

Contemplating the fact that you are going to die brings home to you the fact that everything and everyone is going to die.  Civilisations, countries, your children, the dog, the sun, the seeds you are planting right now into the cold soil.  There may not seem to be any comfort at all in that, but there is a fire that exists within its core, underneath the layer of ice, like a seed inside a grain.  When things try to live forever, they die instantly.  Any life that they had was never theirs to hold onto and make their own.   Where they came from before they will go to after, and the only way to live properly in the intervening period is to know that it won't last forever.

The beauty inside this space is perhaps an acquired taste.  The best way to live is to learn how to die.  The news channel does not broadcast this and the 7-Eleven does not sell it, not even under the counter in plain wrapping.

Death Fetish

I'm going to go out on a little bit of a limb, here.  It may be a little too soon.  It may be in bad taste.  (And it is in direct contradiction - but possibly some weird flipside of the same coin - to what Clem Bastow was lamenting in The Age  on Tuesday) but I find it really creepy that Whitney Houston's albums have made a return to the US Billboard charts.

Of course, it goes without saying (but I guess I will in case my point is easy to miss) that it's very sad that Whitney Houston died so young.

But I would really like to know how many people who bought her albums this week, wouldn't have really cared to listen to any of them last week?  I'd be willing to bet that it's a reasonable amount of people.

What has changed about people's perceptions of her that make them want to rush out/online and start listening now?  True, there is an almost-romance about someone passing over to the other side, the mystery of where they have gone (if anywhere).  A full stop has appeared where their life just was.

The shock of celebrity deaths are a container for us to pour our own grief into about our own pending deaths, and those of every single person we know, don't know, love or hate.

So while that's all understandable, it's still damn creepy.  Someone has been put on a pedestal who, when people thought of her a week ago, probably would have had meaner thoughts than they have now that she's dead (like the way people now feel about Michael Jackson.  He was whacko before, but now his life is over he's more sad than whacko, more misunderstood genius than potential-paedophile (or whatever it was you thought about Michael Jackson).  How many of the people who are now re-acquainting themselves with her music thought last week that Whitney was a bit of a has-been, or a bit of a sad old thing who'd lost her way a little in drugs?

The superstitiously-minded of us aver that the things people thought about her last week they shouldn't be thinking of this week.  It is bad form to speak ill of the dead and all.

Which is nice.  But it's also sentimentalism and fetishising death, fetishising something that is coming for us all.

And while celebrity deaths are one of those distancing containers for us to pour some of our grief into, putting everyone on a pedestal who has died is distancing the colour and shape, the dark and the light of their lives.

Wouldn't it be nice if we could instead rose-colour our views of everybody while they're still alive?  When it counts?  Maybe there's something helping in keeping before us the notion that everyone we come in contact with will one day be dead.  There are some who may call that morbid.

But maybe it's just reality.

The Strange Learning

The case for death (and the case against performing animals):

When in the end, the day came on which I was going away, I learned the strange learning that things can happen which we ourselves cannot possibly imagine, either beforehand, or at the time when they are taking place, or afterwards when we look back on them.  Circumstances can have a motive force by which they bring about events without aid of human imagination or apprehension.  On such occasions you yourself keep in touch with what is going on by attentively following it from moment to moment, like a blind person who is being led, and who places one foot in front of the other cautiously but unwillingly.  Things are happening to you, and you feel them happening, but except for this one fact, you have no connection with them, and no key to the cause or meaning of them.  The performing wild animals in a circus go through their programme, I believe, in that same way.  Those who have been through such events can, in a way, say that they have been through death - a passage outside the range of imagination, but within the range of experience.

Karen Blixen - Out of Africa

There is much to be said for learning to die well while you live.  You can go kicking and screaming all the way down, if you want, even if you know that life tends to lie out the other side of all of those deaths.  Even if they are not what you want, or maybe even not what you can see for months or years.  The possibilities that lie within one small seed, maybe they lie too in all our deaths.  Maybe even most in our most meaningless ones.

So you kick and scream all the way down even if you do feel life lying just beyond death because while you know that, you also don't know that, or you forget, because in those perpetual death places you can't for the life of you remember being anywhere else ever.  And then the life breaks in once more and again, you remember the meaning of perspective.

Learning to die to live feels part of the great circle.  Not a line, to me.  Not something linear that ends at some point (even though it will - or will it?)  Yes, a circle, a spiral.  Coming round and round back to the same places again, feeling like a breath of some sort of grace, the different angle examined, the new puzzle piece learned.  

And you come up over the hill and it all breaks open before you for the millionth time, like sparks, and you remember what you have always known, and have forgotten again:  it's love.  Love holds it all together.

Flaky Clay

Yesterday morning I woke with the last vestiges of a dream in my head.  A hand, mine or someone else's, very finely sculpting an almost-finished figure.  Just like I had been doing for several hours the night before.  The slightest of pressure on the cheek area, and tiny flakes of nearly-dry clay were falling to the ground.  And I thought, "This is how I am.  Not so much a pile of mushy clay, but these, like these flakes.  A sort of a gentle falling to the ground and dying.  These flakes are dying and so shall I."

It was a rather melancholy sort of a dream.  There were tears.  I arrived first day back at work later that morning to the news that one of my workmates, Toni, has inoperable pancreatic and liver cancer.  I do not know how much time she has.  Her youngest child is two or three years old.  The photos that adorned her cubicle space are already gone, her name tag taken down, all signs of her workaday monotone plod gone.

No more work for Toni in 2010.  Apparently she had found out just before Christmas.  Had gone to the doctor's complaining of feeling bad and whammo. Mary was the one who told me, before I started my work for the day.   I squatted next to her death and we talked of death bringing everything home, about the frailty and fragility of life, its mystery (what the hell is this about), about the fact that one of our workmates dying brings into even starker relief the dreariness of our everyday work lives.  I resolved to move on as soon as possible.  To get out of that place.  To believe that there is something else out there for me to do before it's my turn to drop off the perch. 

Life is, after all, too short.  The longer it goes on the more mysterious it gets.

I cried at God earlier, asking him why, in this current state of melancholy I am in (oh, do they ever end, dear reader?) it feels as though he is not even there, that he just patently does not give a shit.

No answer.

Okay, then.  Have it your way.

So we move on, we put one foot in front of the other so often living in this strange world of plenty and total lack, we yearn towards life.  We do not know what we yearn for, but for life and for love.  For connection.  For meaning.  For the deeply held cry within all of our hearts that these lives we live have value, that every one of us has value, that God is always working even when lately it seems like he is not even there at all.

But still I meditate.  I breathe in, "mother God/father God" and I breathe out.  I pray.  I pray to a God who does not seem to be talking to me at the moment but perhaps for all I know he is saying all sorts of things and I cannot quite hear them yet.  Whatever.  I am angry and that's all there is to it.  Perhaps that is why I cannot hear.  What the bloody hell do I know?

But I know and have learnt one thing, and it's that these flakes of clay get to be angry, are safe to be angry at God when that is what I feel.  God, who is more baffling than ever to me right now, and who I feel has forsaken me, but in the end you have to just bow and say, What the bloody hell do I know?

The way we bow down to death, the way a reed bows down to the wind.  And welcoming it too.  Defining our lives.  The approach of death, pushing us towards life.

Life ~ Death ~ Life

It woke you to see
suddenly
it flooded in so instantly from
where it had been brewing in
the darkness down below.

Part of the lens wipes
clearly
and you see the view now instantly is
so much more romantic than the
Vaselined lens showed.

You in a rush see
Mercy
had let you to be its donkey and
you brayed the words most
sweetly from your fingers and your keys.

The words that seemed most
urgently
were dripping the most honey
from their letters as though spoken
by a hundred thousand bees.

But the honey the most
drippingly
felt in your mind most trippingly like
flowering someone's garden from
you watering your weeds.

And you wonder at the
mystery
that flows through everything you see
that death does not speak last but rebirths
life from on its knees.

Image: Negative Tree by Camera-Caritatis

The Need of a Dying Man

I once asked a man who knew he was dying what he needed above all in those who were caring for him. He said, 'For someone to look as if they are trying to understand me.' Indeed, it is impossible to understand fully another person, but I never forgot that he did not ask for success but only that someone should care enough to try.

Cicely Saunders, pioneer of the hospice movement in Britain

Conversational Outline Part 1

We can stuff them full of botox and stick them full of collagen. We can mummify them at the other end. But in the end, human bodies are still gonna biodegrade, aren't they? Like wood. In certain conditions, however, wood can outlast a human body; carbonised under extreme heat, it can last for millennia.

But still, everything dies. And so even if your life had been different, even if you'd died in your own bed of old age, you still wouldn't have escaped death in the end, even if you'd outrum the volcano. None of us gets to escape death, unfortunately. There are whispers from some that it's lost its sting. There are some who seem positively in denial about it (hence the whole botox thing).

I wonder how long it takes for things of stone and things of bronze to disappear? Those things stand strong across the centuries, across millennia even. In 1709, an Italian farmer sank a well and in the process hit upon a marble sculpture that existed in the town next to yours, at the time that you lived. Buried 1630 years before and forgotten. That farmer was sinking for that well exactly 300 years before me. We sure do have a lot of space between us, you and me, don't we?

I saw some marbled things from your town today, stone things and bronzed things. The space between you and me is green patina on bronze objects. The things were owned by the rich people who lived in your town. They sat today in glassed-in display cabinets in my hometown across the world. It was interesting seeing how your people lived. They were pretty cashed up by the looks, if they were the lucky ones. Not like you. I saw spoons and measuring devices and beds and frescoes. I saw busts and cooking ovens and plaster casts of a bread loaf carbonised within one of those ovens.

Those things were all interesting. But they were just stuff, in the end. What pricked my heart most of all was seeing you. But not even you. The outline of you. How strange it is that even with just an outline of your body, I know what you were trying to do on 24 August 79AD. You were trying to escape.

Some of us die without leaving behind any sort of imprint. I don't know what the imprint of your life was on the people you knew. Did you have enemies? Did someone love you? Did you yearn for someone? I bet in a million years you never would have thought you'd leave behind the kind of imprint you actually did, though, huh? This life is sure weird, especially when you view it through millennial lenses.

You didn't escape the volcano, nor your own death. I don't know if any volcanic eruptions will feature in my demise, but I guess I'm not going to survive my own life without dying either. But you know what? It seems impossible to me in some ways that I am going to die. Even though I can see it happening before my eyes in slow slow motion. I don't believe my body is going to die. But at the same time, spiritually I do not feel like death is going to be the end. Has it been the end for you?


Part 2

Conversational Outline Part 2

Won't Make Sense Unless You Read Part 1

I wonder, was it easier to come to terms with your own death at the time you lived? All of those gods you guys had. Did they help? Bacchus and his ilk. Victory and hers. Plastered all over the joint they were, in your time. We have different sorts of gods these days. We were invited to indulge in the worship of one of our favourites out in the gift shop after the exhibit.

There's another god we've got. A real doozie if you look at the story but the patina that's been left behind is a rather sickly sort of a green. Claimed he was a man and god at the same time, or from god. He was killed for that, amongst other things. Stories abounded at the time that he beat death, rose from the dead. That the kingdom of heaven was near to all. He was around in your era actually. Funny that.

And yet it doesn't seem to have done all that much to change the whole god concept, from where we stand here in our time. For all of his claims, two thousand years after he trod the earth the god most often represented out of the dead dry bones that have sprung up around him is still one who has about as much personality as a Bacchus marble bust. But still the whispers go on amongst people, even now.

I do wonder if it's much more difficult for us in my time to understand we are going to die. So many more baubles and trinkets to keep us living in la-la land. Things you would not believe. It would seriously boggle your mind. I watched a plane fly overhead as I drove in a car last night and either of those things would probably scare the shit out of you if you saw them out of context. So much has changed since your time. And yet, as they say, I bet so much has most likely remained the same. Human nature is still the same but sometimes it is more difficult to access what the hell we are. We are made dumb by our masses of information you see. I was able to watch today exactly what happened when the volcano erupted, you know? Your people didn't even have a word for "volcano".

It could be easy for us perhaps to presume that we are so much more enlightened than you, that you were a bit dimmer than we. Forgive us that. Our era blinds us. I suppose from your viewpoint we must seem like a bunch of informed dullwits in some ways. But you guys had running water and inside toilets and so what if you didn't have Wii or Facebook or encyclopedias or bachelor degrees? So what if you believed in a panoply of gods? We believe in a global economy. And the stuff we have made is dismantling us from each other and so how far have we really come? And in the end it's all still about the same old shit ~ power and privilege and blindness and the corrupted human nature.

Some things never change. Your doctors had instruments remarkably alike the ones we have now. They performed skull operations. They knew to boil their instruments in water afterwards and they extracted morphine from opium.

The time we live in now is strange; it's like trying to get hold of shadows and outlines in some ways. Our culture is rather a baby sort of a culture. I think yours was too, from the looks. The empire seems to do that to people. I wonder how close hope was to your life? It evades us here but many of us still hope, even if only to ourselves, that death does not have the last word.

My death looms up ahead but it's more like an outline, even though I have seen my fair share of it. I have more family members dead than alive these days. Perhaps it can never seem anything more to us than an outline. Perhaps that is partly what was so poignant about seeing yours today.

Part 3

Conversational Outline Part 3

Won't Make Sense Unless You Read Part 1
Part 2

The crevice that once contained your now-decomposed body had plaster poured into it by an archaologist called Guiseppe Fiorelli. This was 151 years after that farmer first sank a well and hit upon the theatre at Herculateum. The discovery of that town led to the discovery of yours. The archeologist poured in plaster and out came you and the others in all your horror. The agony on your poor faces.

I saw the woman whose tunic had ridden up her back because she was stuffing it in her mouth trying to escape the ash and the fumes. And I saw you, the outline of you. Were you a prisoner, or were you a slave? What sort of a life did you lead before you tried to escape after your owners had fled, the ones without fetters on their ankles?

That volcano, old Mount Vesuvius, has done a lot of damage over the centuries that exist between you and me, hasn't it? Did you know there are three million people living within its vicinity now? Just in the most recent hundred years, it erupted massively in 1906 and killed 100 people and buried nearby towns. The most recent one was 1944. There was a war going on then. It destroyed a few more towns (will they ever learn?) and a bunch of bomber planes to boot.

Ahhh, that war. I wonder how you would see it from your perspective? Would it have horrified you, you who lived in an era that admitted its penchant for violence more openly than ours? The people of your era watched gladiators maul unarmed men, or men attack beasts for sport. That war is probably one of the biggest things to arouse cynicism about the future of the human race in recent times. The whole Hitler thing. The atomic bomb that killed more people in a couple of drops than your volcano has done in its history.

Maybe that's the biggest difference between you and me. Our toys are so much bigger now; it would terrify you. It ups the level of mistrust. And it's not just the destructive stuff like bombs and planes and ICBMs. It's the stuff too like Facebook and computers and mobile phones and all that innocuous stuff that keeps us away from each other in the other direction. But the ICBMs add that nice little touch of paranoia to everything, don't they. A bit more big-time than your shields and bayonets. I really wish the peace message of the man-god had caught on a bit more instead of what has transpired in-between us. Perhaps next millennia.

But you know, apart from all of those things and maybe even overarching it all is this: I find it easier to talk to you as an outline than I would if you were standing in front of me. I felt the tears well up seeing your outline, but would I cry so hard at your death in person? If you stood before me with all the stupid little fucked up bits that go into making up a human, I would be tempted to fear you, dislike you, distance you in my mind and my heart. The annoying things about you. The evil things that scare me. The propensity you would have to steal and kill regardless of whether you were a prisoner or a slave or a rich free man. The ability to demonise that we all indulge in (the deeper, the less aware we are of it) to feel okay about ourselves.

Maybe because of all the bad stuff, we need the distance, it helps us see the good clearer. We can love him as the King of Pop again when he's Wacko Jacko no more. Maybe it's so painful, all this iron rubbing up against iron that in some ways we don't really see the colour of the heart of the other until it's in outline.

The Glittering Net That Enfolds the Universe

Modern science speaks to us of an extraordinary range of interrelations. Ecologists know that a tree burning in the Amazon rain forest alters in some way the air breathed by a citizen of Paris, and that the trembling of a butterfly's wing in Yucatan affects the life of a fern in the Hebrides. Biologists are beginning to uncover the fantastic and complex dance of genes that creates personality and identity, a dance that stretches far into the past and shows that each so-called "identity" is composed of a swirl of different influences. Physicists have introduced us to the world of the quantum particle, a world astonishingly like that described by Buddha in his image of the glittering net that unfolds across the universe. Just like the jewels in the net, all particles exist potentially as different combinations of other particles.

So when we really look at ourselves, then, and the things around us that we took to be so solid, so stable, and so lasting, we find that they have no more reality than a dream ...

Impermanence has already revealed to us many truths, but it has a final treasure still in its keeping, one that lies largely hidden from us, unsuspected and unrecognized, yet most intimately our own.

The Western poet Rainer Maria Rilke has said that our deepest fears are like dragons guarding our deepest treasure. The fear that impermanence awakens in us, that nothing is real and nothing lasts, is, we come to discover, our greatest friend because it drives us to ask: If everything dies and changes, then what is really true? Is there something behind the appearances, something boundless and infinitely spacious, something in which the dance of change and impermanence takes place? Is there something in fact we can depend on, that does survive what we call death?

Allowing these questions to occupy us urgently, and reflecting on them, we slowly find ourselves making a profound shift in the way we view everything. With continued contemplation and practice in letting go, we come to uncover in ourselves "something" we cannot name or describe or conceptualize, "something" that we begin to realize lies behind all the changes and deaths of the world. The narrow desires and distractions to which our obsessive grasping onto permanence has condemned us begin to dissolve and fall away.

Sogyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying

++++

What maketh thee of this? I find it resonates so strongly within me. Perhaps the most disturbing concept to the Western mind is the statement about nothing being "real". We may tend to skip to the notion that he therefore means that nothing exists. I'm not so sure that Sogyal means that - although if he does (and I can understand the conclusion reached), this is where I perhaps begin to depart in my own thinking from Tibetan thought.

But then, in the very same breath, I do begin to wonder to myself whether he and I are not simply looking at the same thing from different sides of the mountain perhaps. I do think here, when he refers to things not being real he is speaking about the appearance of things. That things do not exist simply within their own little containers, separate to everything else. Indeed, the container we look at contains more space than it does anything else. This I can subscribe to. This is trippy. And truly, nothing stays the same, ever. Not even me. Thank God :)

Pic: Nirolo

I began reading The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying yesterday. Written by a Tibetan Buddhist monk, his assertion is that the West and the people living in it are a culture totally denying of death and its 100 per cent assurance that it shall have us also. This book is about living with dying in our sights so that we can truly live. To live fearing and suppressing our own impending death is not living at all.

I wonder how differently things would have been if Christianity hadn't taken its weird twists and warps as the cultural religion, dangling everyone over a vat of eternal hell if we do not conform to the giant god's petulancies? Christianity as it stands is also a death denying religion. Christians are some of the most fearful people on the planet.

I don't think those two are a coincidence.

+++++

Edit: I am not talking here of Christians living life in Christ. I am talking about the empire religion that, I am becoming more and more convinced, is a large beastlike thing that does not remotely resemble whatever it is that Christ may be building. That's what I mean when I talk about "Christianity" in this sense.

Familial Faux Pas

On Saturday night I sat next to my cousin's husband on the couch and we went through old photo albums. It was a really nice thing to do. I don't think he is the type of person given overly much to introspection. Indeed, he hadn't looked at his photos for years and so we went through book after book of photos of a younger him and his younger wife and their two kids as they grew.

For someone who had just carried his wife's body out of a church a few hours earlier along with his sons, he was holding up remarkably well. Denial and numbness are pretty effective at this stage of the game. To help it along, he nursed a straight scotch in his lap as he turned the pages, pointing out different people to the friend sitting next to him. A continually rotating round of people draped themselves over the back of the couch for a gaze too.

It was actually a really nice day, you know, apart from why we were there. It was good to catch up and it was good to reminisce. Losing a family member that quickly (I didn't even know she was ill until the week before) causes you to count your blessings, indeed. Us cousins did at the end of the night make tentative plans to meet up down in Melbourne in October. I like my cousins and we barely see each other any more. Surely it cannot be impossible for us to meet up at least a couple of times a year.

Andrew picked up a loose photo of his brother-in-law Grant (my cousin) with his ex-wife. He explained to the friend next to him who this couple was, and that they weren't together any more.

"I didn't like her anyway," I confided to Andrew, with a broad grin. After I said the words, the sinking realisation set in. Sort of in slow motion.

"That's okay, neither did I," said Grant, smiling at me from behind the couch where I hadn't see him. "That's why I divorced the bitch."

Oh, the shame, the shame :)

"It's alright," Grant laughed later on, as every time I looked at him my capillaries vomited forth 14 litres of blood into my cheeks. "You only said what everyone else was thinking."

Some things are better just thunk :)

Monday morning warbling

Sometimes I wonder just how much stuff we see in one day, but filter out by necessity. If we registered everything we saw, our heads would blow off. But still, sometimes we see the same things again and again and wonder why we are noticing them. Portents maybe. I like portents. I keep seeing flocks of birds. When I am gazing at the sky (a common occurrence) groups of them swoop past my line of sight.

It feels like a new week. After last week, it's nice sitting here on a common Monday. I am planning a few interesting, fun things this week. The concept of meeting new people feels not only do-able but enjoyable (in a friendship way. The thought of dating is quite uninspiring to me at the moment). I feel like I am settling back down into the folds of the material I know so well in myself. It is a delight to feel once more able to fly, after feeling so long like the pigeon who flew into my house the other day.

This is the second one to do so in as many months. Lester's mouth had a couple of feathers sticking out of it by the end of its torrid experience. I do not know if he bit the pigeon or just pulled out some of the poor thing's feathers. It flew into the bathroom, same as the last one. Flew towards the greatest source of light and came up against the glass.

Like the last one I grabbed it quite easily; it was frozen by fear. I so wanted to convey to it that it was okay, that the danger was now past. Its eye looked at me but I cannot read pigeon. I so want to know how pigeons think. When I took it outside and put it carefully on the roof of the garage, it flung itself up and over the apex to the other side. I do not know if it flew off or if the poor thing just continued rolling down onto the ground. I do hope it recovered its senses.

I know those high anxiety fits. They are simply a part of my life, of most of our lives. This is one of the prices we pay for the technology that swirls its currents through our bodies unnoticed. I do many different meditative things that help me feel tethered in my own body, to feel my feet on the ground. High anxiety makes you feel like you could go spinning off into the stratosphere. Conversely, flying on wind currents is a different thing again, an enjoyable, controlled, grounded sort of flying. This is the type of flying that is coming for me now, not stratospheric pingings.

It is a nice thing to think in this way after my cousin Sharon's funeral. I walked towards the church saying like a mantra, "I don't want to do this, I don't want to do this." But it was a lovely tribute to her. I think of all the cliches that surround deaths. You can feel them threatening to fall out your mouth if you don't keep watch. It is funny to me the guilt those who stay behind are inclined to feel. It is a strange guilt. It is as if we think we have got away with something that the other person hasn't. Just turns out that she has left earlier than some of us.

Me, I think I'd rather leave earlier than later anyway. Nothing like the thought of a nursing home and having your bum wiped to prefer the earlier exit. Anyway, I want to find out what pigeons think. But if I have to be here long time, can I make this exit request? It is that I enter the soil in the way of my great aunt, who died the week before last (there's been a rush of exits lately, hasn't there??) She was 90 years old. Lived in her own house, gardened her own garden, and just died. Or like my grandfather. He was 84 years old. Had ridden his bike that same day, came home, had a bath, collapsed. That's my exit request, if such a thing may be requested :)

But everything is so seemingly random. How can we explain why some people live this way, others go on for way too long, and some leave too early, with husbands and sons behind them? Life surely is many things, but not fair.

In the meantime, with all the dark that accompanies, and the pain and the emotions and all of that stuff, I am looking jollily forward to much more flying before I do make that last exit. A bit more living before I die. It still surprises me, the way I feel a young child would be surprised, at how much pain there is in the world. Where does that strange universal whisper come from, the feeling that it should not be like this?

For all of that, it's still beautiful. I guess it's even more beautiful because of the bad stuff. Still, I bid its depths a fond adieu. Me, I've got a bit of flying to do from now on. My anxiety and depression come along with me, but so does my optimism and joy, and I can fly with all those appendages. Funny how even after your wings have been coated in what feels like masses of ocean oil spillage, they heal. You can fly again. The amazing regeneration of Life. Spills out all the pores. Once you see it, you see it everywhere.

First Motives/Second Motives

One of the things that struck me about Michael Leunig last night was that he is a person who operates out of what I call first motives. There are several people like this who I know. Things have become quite simple for them, and they have become quite easy to be around. These people are vulnerable enough to operate out of their heart, their soul, their mind and their guts. You come away from them feeling like they have given you something, somehow. And they have. Themselves. And you are richer for the gift.

The second sort of person is the one who operates out of second motives. They are the hustlers. Their intent is on building themselves up at every turn because they feel so fragile. It's all about the brand. You come away from a hustler feeling like they have taken away something from you, somehow. They have. Your energy. Sucked through a straw.

Often with a second motive person you have the strange sensation of wondering what the purpose is to their actions. Second motive people often speak loudly promoting their own brand while looking over your shoulder to see who is listening. It is like talking to an empty glove.

I guess we are all a mix of the first and second types, aren't we? But oh, how it fills me up just to be in the presence of a first motive person for a few hours. I have a few friends like that. They are cherishable. The first sort of people are gold and when you find them you should treasure them and dress them in fine robes and put rings on their fingers.

They have suffered to get to this place and they suffer to stay here. Part of what keeps them tethered here is the knowledge that they too are second motive people who have simply discovered where the life is.

You can smell first motive people. There is a richness, an earthy loam about them that makes you want to be around them. Second motive people smell like they're on the make and on the take. You can smell the difference.

It is a brave, courageous act to be a first motive person. I just cannot shake the feeling that one day we shall all be first motive people, that this is God's intent. That this is our reality. First motive people are what we look like naked and unashamed. And it's a beautiful thing.

But in the meantime it's all a bit ugly, really.

This all sounds simple and childish, I'm sure, but so do all of the priciest things these days.