'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.

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.

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. 

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.

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!

Demons

Literature talks of energies sometimes occupying the human body, the absolution of which requires not rejection or resistance but compassion and acknowledgement of its own strength and presencing its strength for itself. When transliterated, the cliche, 'we have our own demons to deal with,' may not be any different from that of the 'dead souls' or 'ghosts' that are the subject of horror stories. Just like the horror stories usually having tormented souls that seek redemption, the demons in our own psyche need acknowledgement and appeasing, one after another. Question is the frame of mind when one is ready to face the demon in our mind's closet and see it for what it is and be willing to appease its distress.

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.

There is only love..

When love glows, it is bliss.
When it flows, it is compassion.
When it blows, it is anger.
When it ferments, it is jealousy.
When it is negative, it is hatred.
When it acts, it is perfection.
When love knows, it is Me!
                           ~ Sri Sri Ravi Shankar

Unlearning-Learning-relearning

Habituation. An action -> an experience -> a result, over and over until the experience gets familiar and then is no more an experience but something that has settled down as 'real' - an 'is'- like a fact. Automation in the nervous system. Sudden changes in a habit causes confusion and disorientation at the level of predictibility and confidence/assuredness - an uncomfortable space of 'not knowing,' which is a blessing for it allows for something new to happen and a curse for then 'known' knowledge is insufficient and introduces doubt and fear until some semblance of familiarity ('knowing') gets established, reinforcing predictability and confidence. A new habit.

moving to not move

Nothing has really changed yet nothing is the same. The spaces are the same yet the spaces are not the same. I have moved i thought only to find i am more now where i started than when i started. Strange but not so strange: I may be running to come home to me. Nothing has changed: nothing has changed.

Peg

A whisper of a twig is sufficient to hold on to, and the life within, with its support, will find its resources to pull itself up and breathe again.

Listening to the body..allowing for its movement

In this part of my journey, slow almost meditative movements calms, opens space, and has it be easy for the mind and body to come to a kind of truce for the while instead of the almost constant different directions and speeds that both want to go in. If not for this pace, it is much like managing children/people with different temperaments.

Movement

Deal with completion, not incompletion. If considered that anything that moves is possibility and all else is concerns/reactions/effects and more reactions, and they are all valid no matter how bizarre they may seem, then wonder if only dealing with the completion would be all that is required. The shortest distance to cover the gap and most economical.

Freedom to be is when..

The ultimate inaduthenticity is that there is any innate significance to me or to life. It is when the ultimate inauthenticity is accepted and owned that any freedom to be becomes possible.

Growing up

I fought to have a space in which I could choose for myself all through the teen and growing up years and when I do get to choose, I have a problem with that! And now I got to be responsible for making the choices too! This must be further evidence that being in the comfort zone includes everything that is also familiar including the struggles, the discomfort, unhealthy stimulus along with the things that makes one feel comforted and safe. Whoever said being grown up was all fun and wonder why was all that hurry to be grown up!

Labor's child

Had forgotten the warm comforting embrace of music (of a work of art from careful labor), of care taken in minute details, of surrender to create something bigger than oneself and of the solace and strength that of itself is to one and all it touches, moves and inspires. Where there is no longer the artist but a life that are the creator's carefully chosen moments strung together over time and now complete and having a life of its own.

World in words

A world lies open to the one listening - a world that lies in the words, sequence of words, and between the words - woven from the fabric of the speaker/writer’s mind. Entropy and analysis and whatever else be kept aside. The uniqueness of the person is getting worded, if only one cares to listen.

I know

Consciousness. Conscientiousness. One as I understand is being aware and the other is being aware in reference to a principle of inner integrity, an integrity that over time would have me traverse a path that determines if in time I can face myself in the mirror and look into my eyes with dignity for I know and my knowing that I know makes any second opinion secondary.