'I am the one whose life I live' has no alternative

The fact is it is my life I live. There may be theories about alternative universes or parallel spaces from quantum states and the likes but the fact remains that what happens in this moment in time is after the causal physical fact of what happened in the previous. An alternative universe/space has the effect from what happened previously in that space and may and may not have influence on this depending on how much I include aspects from that alternative space in the present moment by which something becomes possible in this and therefore the next moment has the effect of it. Nevertheless, that alternative space has me, even if as an alter ego or whatsoever, but it is me, not somebody else, even if that me is a theatrical version of me whose affects contribute by refraction within the spectrum that is my-space and gives me range to derive and arrive from. It is moot point to think somebody else could have done better or worse because the fact is I am here in this physical space doing what I am doing as a consequence of laws of physics in this space because of which I factually am doing what I am doing in this lifetime.

To hold the sacred flame of madness mindfully

Alone in a space - a loft perhaps - a thought raised its head wanting to think it's way through the humdrum around that seems pretty meaningless unless made sense of, and how else to do that than to put 2 n 2 together? If it holds any water and it makes sense, then put another few Lego pieces together and see if it makes sense. Burning somewhere is a topic that knows no beginning or end but burn it does; like there cannot be smoke without fire, wherefrom this fire. Now that it is here, that which fans this alive must tell of its nature, ay? A toss, a turn, a skip, a churn, in search of its lyre, I find a little cove that might as well be the kind of rabbit hole that Mr.Rabbit went into at the start of Alice's journey into Wonderland. Rest is herstory.

The observer

Every now and then, in quiet spaces never too far from the surface, but not the surface, appears an observer - a witness, if you may - of the transactions between people in shades dark and light, sometimes with an emotional tone but almost always with a sort of tug at the fabric of what is questionably called 'reality,' illuminating in small and big ways the layers in what is passed off as 'everyday life.'

Masks

                   

I havent been in the habit of writing down about every experience I have but maybe it would do me good to develop my expressive abilities, perhaps get over an expressive aphasia if that is not too harsh a phrase. So today I indulged in a bit of woman pruning, if that is a mild way of saying torture and willful torture at that! Haircut? fine. Eyebrows, upperlip...that is torture..and you pay for that...with more time, money and effort into maintaining that after messing with nature in the first place that just gets your tissues to produce more of what you removed and then you got to do the same thing again to maintain that state. Monkeys have no reason to bother with hair (!) and they get to swing the birches but not these modern day monkeys; they go to kitty parties and dab at their lips with pressed paper so their compact powdered face does not get that powder off and reveal the true colors within! And then the bohemian me fights the pretense and masks. It is just so cultivated in the very 'everyday' acts. You wake up in the morning and dab on some powder - bang - mask application right there ! and then layers just keep getting added on as the day goes - smile , 'professional expression,' 'adult, mature facies,' a face for the father, one for the mother, one for the little boy who lives down the lane. Even the owner of the face would not have seen their own face..maybe a brief look in the mirror around brush time before making a hurried cover up with masking stuff, an act sooner done for females than males unless the latter has more vanity is what I think coz I am no man...and if 'man' would not bother too much with it is what i think for i have seen very few if any at all of 'men'..too many boys around. As for the female of the species, "look good and pleasant for you are not good enough" is so rubbed into most of them that inferiority complex in a patriarchal society has them rush for the compact powder or some other form of masking stuff - even an indifferent expression works for a mask; it just takes some practice. Masks! bah.

Spaces

These are strange spaces. I hear of a space called quiescent which is of quiet inactivity. I seem to be in another space - of responsible activity - a space where every word, every thought, every movement, even a slight shift in my consciousness consequences something. There does not seem to have been an acute call for responsibly acting such as this before. The word purpose seems superfluous in this space. Any attempt to capture this space in words at the moment seems premature and yet there seems to be something right about attempting to describe the indescribable; feels like a worthy pursuit attempted by several before through time and space - a skill that could come handy en route. Strange spaces these.

Storyteller us

It is interesting the stories we tell about what is happening around us. There are facts and then there are stories we tell connecting the facts, much like how we join up words in different ways to makw up a sentence. The story tells of the content in the storyteller. Given the same set of facts and asked to join up the facts into a description, two people would tell two different stories linking up the facts. A person's emotional, psychological, intellectual, spiritual, creative, cultural makeup shows up in the stories he/she says..or wven makes up about random happenings in and around them. Some of us are epic story tellers.

Stories have a way, just as anything created, to have a life of its own and to have its own fate depwnding on whose imagination the created goes through. The content convections from the depth of time itself, if the storytellers allows, to enrich the content with the depth of wisdom. We each have story (s) to say. We need more story tellers to connect us as humans and to get more on touch with our humanness and to allow for us to be more humane. "The planet desperately needs more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers ....of all kinds" to have us become human beings again.

Musings...awe (teddy-bear snugglyness)

I was sifting through my blogs and realized i been 'musing' in odd scraps of paper and notepads and creating other blogs..and all just to voice out and give expression to the awe, bewilderment, anxiety, joy and umpteen other emotions and observations, and to capture a 'shooting star' as it were that flashed in the sky of my awareness, and to sort of point it out to anyone and everyone who would listen "look at that" "did you see it?" "awesome." And then I thought I have this old teddy bear of a blog space that I have also named Spaces (conveniently) to voice and capture all of that. It feels like coming back and snuggling up to my ragged teddy bear as a child ( only I dint ever have a ragged favorite teddy bear as a child), but this must be how a child feels that has one, I guess. Sigh (and smiles).

Just for the records

On taking stock of whats there on my board today, there are the things i had been working on - vocabulary learning, phonetics, cognitive trainings, sketching, my take home from the stuff learned from people i have interacted with, my hopes, my struggles, things that people have chosen to leave with me, me, and the whole world with whatever it has to offer, which is quite a lot i fathom from my vantage point as of today. I also have the space for my simple likes and dislikes, for my silliness, quite naive mistakes, unpolished even crude mannerisms that i feel ok going through. Feel human in a way that i have watched other people being but could not allow me to be or think of me as being, or to think that these are the movements through which every child goes through on its way to learning something worthwhile; that i could be going through similar motions en route did not occur to me until now. Being human.

Body music

Heart sang again today. At some level, I let the music come out…or maybe the music was just of such intensity that it nudged against my resistance enough to have it ease up enough to let it through. 

On art ... carried away by the music of masters

Early morning music today - the classics of instrumental symphonies and sonatas and pieces by masters. Each piece tells a story. It is a communication, if one has the ears to hear what is said and a listen to all of it. Of course the language is nothing literal but of a current the underlies verbal communication, of the flavor of a story, flavor of the emotion that animates speech, animates a person in a symphony of everyday talk through everyday living. Makes me wonder what my sketches would speak of; don’t think it is only that which is intended to be spoken for the whole is more than sum of its parts. Not surprising yet surprised that I should think of sketching as I listen to music. Art is afterall a wave of passion and merging with the inspiration that spans across time and space into different media and get expressed, verbally or nonverbally or both, I guess.

Documenting a 'historical' moment in my personal life...for my records.

Took a step today. Bought myself an eisel. In wood. It is the elephant in the room after the treatment couch. Incidentally the eisel made me aware that the couch is the biggest elephant, as it should be, as I want it to be in a certain sense. But of course in the end each thread weaves into an embroidery like an orchestra the feel of which determines its oxygen'ness and oxyneableness.

Don't you shush me!

Sounds, needless to say, play a very big role on our mental makeup. ‘shh’ a dangerous sound. Insignificant and innocent as it seems, is a wordless way to tell the brain to shut up, to not express. A nasty thing I learned to do when I had voices in my head which needed to be heard, to be expressed, for I was busy surviving through what should have been fought against with all my might. The suppression of what makes a person that person; the suppression which makes that person have a secret silent under-the-surface life, that makes a person develop a persona to put up with the world. Shh. It is uttered to stop a child from crying, from speaking out loud, expressing emotions, voicing an opinion..first by people around and then u do that to yourself as a conditioned reflex to quiet down what clamours to be heard.

Yearn

Maybe at the heart of life is a yearn that is just as part of what keeps life ongoing as the Chaos; perhaps both are related. Subtleties. It is like the lingering taste in the mouth, the sentence that says and yet leave soft ripples of meanings, a warm fuzzy feeling from the bonfire or candle, a softness in the eye of understanding. It sort of fills something inside and yet opens a door for more space and lingers on a faint silent yearn.

Tonsured! (like the sound of the movie title, Tangled!..just the opposite)

Getting civilized. Scary. To me it means conforming to the masses - to their views of 'normalcy,' loose ends neatly tucked into place, straight jacketed with a face to put on every time you walk out of your personal space to face the world. After a thrilling, eye-opening, freshen-my-worldview tonsure experience, I have hair growing that needs to be trimmed and made to look 'acceptable.' Gone is the wash-wipe-readytogo ease. In comes mirrors, comb, oilcontrolling shampoo and barbers, and 'the style that best suits me with the hair I have.' Civil-ization. Now I have a hairclip to deal with the elongated hair which I could just as easily snip off with my home scissors to my fancy to make it be manageable, if not for the fear of 'looking' mousy. I could so easily tonsure again. I am this close to doing it.

It has been 9 months since I did it but it is so fresh in my memory. How was it when tonsured? Nude. I thought it was me feeling vulnerable and naked, a free target for any one and everyone to stare and think aloud and be shocked at, but not surprisingly it is the onlookers who were naked. Unguarded in facing unfamiliarity, not understanding 'why' and perhaps faced with their own fears of being exposed mirrored in my 'exposure.' It did feel like I was skinned, leaving my flesh beneath exposed for the unvoiced questions but naked expressions in their eyes. Everything came into the expression in their eyes, differed from person to person but the range is not the everyday questions, or perhaps it was just so deeper that they took on a quality new of their own. Gender. Nationality. Belief. Purpose. Sexuality. Friendship. Fellow human being. Belongingness. Human. Commercial value. Worthy of association. The separatedness/aloneness in being human was pretty stark in their alone, vulnerable, scared, confused looks when they thought no one was looking but me - the unfamiliar entity with whom they could unwittingly drop their guards and be their vulnerable self for just that little while. I felt sad that my hair was growing in fast and yet wished for it to grow fast for fear of becoming a permanent outsider. The pull to 'belong,' to not be the 'odd one out' and thus become 'visible' is scary and hence seek the comfort of being 'invisible' in the crowd, in belonging, and then again to be 'unique' and to 'stand out in the crowd' and be 'famous.' guess the difference is in 'acceptable' fame, enviable fame, shining star, not vulnerable and exposed. It perhaps scratched them where they dint want to but I would do it again for it peeled away a layer of deadness (dead skin?) and freshened something more important, more essential at my core than any training could have accomplished. I could see the condition of being human from the underbelly and hence a tiny peek into what it means to be human.

I am going to do it again. I just want to get 'civilized' again enough to get the kick out of tonsuring again, so now it is clips and comb ...and perhaps I will get some red streaks for a change!

Un'familiar'izing.

The sands have been sifting for a while now, more in a direction that has me see that it is for me to move and it is just my movement that will have anything work. There is not gonna be anyone proding, nurturing, encouraging. Support will come only if I compromise and dance in some manner to someone else's tune but that world will not have me in it, and it is too high a price to pay for too low a life.

My journey has seemed for sometime now a fight: A fight against conformity, compromise, attachment, enslavery, mindless monotony, stagnation, falling in line with the familiar that has been survived through to rags, persistence of dis-ease. My journey is to health. It is worth fighting for. And Life does find a way.

As i am stirred..

As emotions, simple-yet-complex human interactions, experiences and personal journeys ebb and flow from time to time, certain aspects of the components in varying colors and flavors boil up to the surface revealing parts of me hitherto unworded/undefined as well as aspects of the complexity/simplicity hitherto unseen. Such moments make me wonder about who/what the world and its people are to me and who/what am i to the world.

Yellowing out!

Accident! T-bone'd with a bike! Accident on a vehicle first time ever..and now I can say I have that experience too!

And then a blackout (have blackedout earlier at a much younger age, when I couldnt care less about observing how the experience was except bask in the attention it brought)...and I find it is not really black out but more like yellow out. Everything went yellow for a while before the next thing i could remember as waking up on the floor with a vague recollection of hitting my shoulder, I think, on something, which turned out to be the floor.

And then, there are other things going on by which i can gauge if I am ready to get up and bear moving again or not (obvious to many perhaps but interesting while observing it happening detached from my body as though the body occupies a space a lil different from the one where I as an observer am in).

Left leg swollen and skinned a bit, and then a certain stiffness sets in, as though the body in that part shields itself or perhaps it is just resistance against further onslaught, and the stiffness is much like the numbness that the mind has to shield from an onslaught of whatever that is a lil too much to handle or want to handle.

It is the body's time now, to talk in its own language, and for me to listen for it now demands my attention.

Life of the human mind..

Dynamics of human interactions. Flavorizing, color-blending, syntaxing and thus semanticizing. Creating interesting scripts; lending interesting definitions to characters. Layering, deepening, mystifying. Fascinating.

Transitions..movements..anxieties

Choices. Being current and relevant. Social intelligence. Being true to ones own sense of decorum/propriety/inner integrity and exploring options. I am in a transitory phase (again) of finding a common ground that allows for the latter while retaining the essence of the former, inclusive of the uncertainty if the need for retention is also a means to stay in the comfort zone. Nevertheless, of the several options available, there is still a choice, an act of free will, on how one chooses to live ones life.

To catch the bull by its horns.

A way of being that has a willingness more than fear, an ‘iv had enough’ more than ‘what next,’ energy more than patience, action more than thought, here and now more than ‘consequences.’