When you arrive at too much curiosity, call me.

“…You shall never be fear-free. The best you could hope for is to befriend fear. Think of it as such, imagine if you can take the adrenaline of whatever hormones that fear makes the body produce and invest this as a stimulant, a drug, toward deeper and more radical living. How exciting it can be to feel your heart racing and you start to smell your sweat = alive!”

“Let me remind you of what Zizi declared cosmically some time ago or never: Everything Zizi says is possibly the truth and also probably a big lie. Zizi continuously as long as Zizi lives will remain true to changing her mind. Those who claim they know are full of BS gone bad. One can, at best, claim to know to the best of their knowledge. We seek. And continue to seek. Until it all goes silent.”

How do we maintain our sense of wonder and curiosity without feeling exhausted? Why do we fear losing it? How do we separate greed from wonder?

“The end of curiosity is death. Be exhausted. Be tired. Be curious at any price. It is sometimes okay to take a break and float in the mainstream using a traditional structure. Tradition has lots of wild within it, can offer a parachute just in case you needed it, a foundation to rest on – but never ever make it your home. Start by never living in the same place for more than two years. Always have guests, turn a blind eye to the dishes, and always ask why a certain law is in place and break it.”

What do you say to the unrelenting need to do the dishes as soon as I finish lunch or before I go to bed?

“You are a fool. That is what I would say. You are using the dishes as a distraction. Go for a walk and think carefully, what are you so afraid of?”

What if curiosity is a commodity and the need to always be in awe is a sort of addiction?

“Are you there yet? When you arrive at too much curiosity, call me. Curiosity is about listening to the answer when you ask a question. Curiosity involves sitting back, being quiet and listening and watching. And then curiosity is about falling asleep to a world of wonder; go for the rides in dreamland and tell your dreams (only the interesting ones) to a fellow curious. Curiosity is also about sitting back with your emotion and living it. If you get too excited with your curiosity, grab a drink, go out for a smoke, take a break, be lazy, be slow.”

“We, on the other hand, are trying to practice humility, we want to become nothing, we believe that if humans reach a point where they know they are just a moment in time, then we can all just relax and just be and enjoy our cigarettes. We just want to reach the point where we know and believe that death and birth are the only guarantees, and love, for sure love. What if we pause and say that without humility one cannot love or maintain love? By love, we mean creating a safe and solid space for the people we care about to be themselves, to allow for a mutual growth for everyone involved, to be extremely sensitive.”

A conversation between Adrianne Marie Brown, Zizi & the Rocca Family
Pleasure Activism, Pages 332 – 334

End of the Line and a Walkabout. The Traveling Wilburys and Matthew McConaughey

Source: GreenLights by Mathew McConaughey
Time alone simplifies the heart.
Memory catches up.
Opinions form.
We meet truth again.
And it teaches us.
Landing on stable feet between our reaching out and retreat.
Letting us know we are not lonely in our state. Just alone.
Because our unconscious mind now has room to reveal itself, we see it again.
It dreams, perceives and thinks in pictures which we now can observe.
In this solitude we can then begin to think in pictures and actualize what we see.
Our Souls become anonymous again and we realize we are stuck with the one person we can never be rid of – ourselves.
The Socratic dialogue can be ugly, painful, lonesome, hard, guilt-ridden, a nightmare vicious enough to need a mouth guard not to gnaw our fangs into knubs while we sweat feverish panic.
We are forced to confront ourselves.
And this is good!
We more than deserve this suffrage. We’ve earned it.
An honest man’s pillow is his peace of mind. (John Mellencamp). And no matter who’s in our bed each night, we sleep with ourselves. We either forgive or get sick and tired of it. Herein, lies the evolution.
Now with nowhere to run and forced to deal with ourselves, our ugly every day suppressions break out of the zoo and monkey around.
Where we find ourself in the ring with him deciding: No more or let it slide.
Whatever the verdict, we grow. It’s us and us. Our always and only company. We tend to ourselves and get in our good graces again.
Then we return to civilization once again to better tend to our tendencies.
Why?
Because we took a walkabout (pause, refuge)
Honourable mention You Tube comment: Admittedly I’m pretty drunk, but this song is almost spiritual to me. We all go through the same types of shit in life, we’re all human after all, but we’re all riding until the the end of the line. “I’m just glad to be here, happy to be alive.”

A STATIONARY PEOPLE (Source, http://www.travelingwilburys.com/history)
By Hugh Jampton

The original Wilburys were a stationary people who, realizing that their civilization could not stand still forever, began to go for short walks — not the “traveling”, as we now know it, but certainly as far as the corner and back. They must have taken to motion, in much the same way as penguins were at that time taking to ledges, for the next we hear of them they were going out for the day (often taking lunch or a picnic). Later, we don’t as yet know how much later, some intrepid Wilburys began to go away for the weekend, leaving late Friday and coming back Sunday. It was they who evolved simple rhythmic forms to describe their adventures.

A remarkable sophisticated musical culture developed, considering there were no managers or agents, and the further the Wilburys traveled the more adventurous their music became, and the more it was revered by the elders of the tribe who believed it had the power to stave off madness, turn brunettes into blondes and increase the size of their ears.

As the Wilburys began to go further and further in their search for musical inspiration they found themselves the object of interest among many less developed species — nightclub owners, tour operators and recording executives. To the Wilburys, who had only just learnt to cope with wives, roadies and drummers, it was a blow from which many of them never recovered.

A tiny handful survived — the last of the Traveling Wilburys — and the songs gathered here represent the popular laments, the epic and heroic tales, which characterize the apotheosis of the elusive Wilbury sound. The message of the music travels, as indeed they traveled and as I myself must now travel for further treatment. Good listening, good night and let thy Wilbury be done . . .

Hugh Jampton, E.F. Norti-Bitz Reader in Applied Jacket, University of Krakatoa (East of Java)

Prince & Krishnamurti

Song: 1999 – Prince

I was dreamin’ when I wrote this
Forgive me if it goes astray
But when I woke up this mornin’
Could’ve sworn it was judgment day

The sky was all purple
There were people runnin’ everywhere
Tryin’ to run from the destruction
You know I didn’t even care

Say say
Two-thousand-zero-zero party over
Oops out of time
So tonight I’m gonna party like it’s 1999

War is all around us, my mind says prepare to fight
So if I gotta die I’m gonna listen to my body tonight

Yeah

“In other words, can you be instantaneously free? — because that is the only way out of this misery. Perception can take place only in the present; but if you say, ‘I will do it tomorrow’, the wave of confusion overtakes you, and you are then always involved in the confusion.

Now is it possible to come to that state when you yourself perceive the truth instantaneously and therefore put an end to confusion? I say that it is, and that it is the only possible way. I say it can be done and must be done, not based on supposition or belief. To bring about this extraordinary revolution — which is not the revolution to get rid of the capitalists and install another group — to bring about this wonderful transformation, which is the only true revolution, is the problem. What is generally called revolution is merely the modification or the continuance of the right according to the ideas of the left. The left, after all, is the continuation of the right in a modified form. If the right is based on sensual values, the left is but a continuance of the same sensual values, different only in degree or expression. Therefore true revolution can take place only when you, the individual, become aware in your relationship to another. Surely, what your are in your relationship to another, to your wife, your child, your boss, your neighbour, is society. Society by itself is non-existence. Society is what you and I, in our relationship, have created; it is the outward projection of all our own inward psychological states. So if you and I do not understand ourselves, merely transforming the outer, which is the projection of the inner, has no significance whatsoever; that is there can be no significant alteration or modification in society so long as I do not understand myself in relationship to you. Being confused in my relationship, I create a society which is a replica, the outward expression of what I am. This is an obvious face, which we can discuss. We can discuss whether society, the outward expression, has produced me or whether I have produced society.” p.9/10, The First and Last Freedom, J. Krishamurti, 1975.

A Brave and Startling Truth

by Maya Angelou

We, this people, on a small and lonely planet
Traveling through casual space
Past aloof stars, across the way of indifferent suns
To a destination where all signs tell us
It is possible and imperative that we learn
A brave and startling truth

And when we come to it
To the day of peacemaking
When we release our fingers
From fists of hostility
And allow the pure air to cool our palms

When we come to it
When the curtain falls on the minstrel show of hate
And faces sooted with scorn are scrubbed clean
When battlefields and coliseum
No longer rake our unique and particular sons and daughters
Up with the bruised and bloody grass
To lie in identical plots in foreign soil

When the rapacious storming of the churches
The screaming racket in the temples have ceased
When the pennants are waving gaily
When the banners of the world tremble
Stoutly in the good, clean breeze

When we come to it
When we let the rifles fall from our shoulders
And children dress their dolls in flags of truce
When land mines of death have been removed
And the aged can walk into evenings of peace
When religious ritual is not perfumed
By the incense of burning flesh
And childhood dreams are not kicked awake
By nightmares of abuse

When we come to it
Then we will confess that not the Pyramids
With their stones set in mysterious perfection
Nor the Gardens of Babylon
Hanging as eternal beauty
In our collective memory
Not the Grand Canyon
Kindled into delicious color
By Western sunsets

Nor the Danube, flowing its blue soul into Europe
Not the sacred peak of Mount Fuji
Stretching to the Rising Sun
Neither Father Amazon nor Mother Mississippi who, without favor,
Nurture all creatures in the depths and on the shores
These are not the only wonders of the world

When we come to it
We, this people, on this minuscule and kithless globe
Who reach daily for the bomb, the blade and the dagger
Yet who petition in the dark for tokens of peace
We, this people on this mote of matter
In whose mouths abide cankerous words
Which challenge our very existence
Yet out of those same mouths
Come songs of such exquisite sweetness
That the heart falters in its labor
And the body is quieted into awe

We, this people, on this small and drifting planet
Whose hands can strike with such abandon
That in a twinkling, life is sapped from the living
Yet those same hands can touch with such healing, irresistible tenderness
That the haughty neck is happy to bow
And the proud back is glad to bend
Out of such chaos, of such contradiction
We learn that we are neither devils nor divines

When we come to it
We, this people, on this wayward, floating body
Created on this earth, of this earth
Have the power to fashion for this earth
A climate where every man and every woman
Can live freely without sanctimonious piety
Without crippling fear

When we come to it
We must confess that we are the possible
We are the miraculous, the true wonder of this world
That is when, and only when
We come to it.

Krishnamurti, Ocean & Ono

…the problems of the world are so colossal, so very complex, that to understand and so to resolve them, one must approach them in a very simple and direct manner. The problems of the world lie in the creator of the problem, in the creator of the mischief, the creator of these problems, in the individual, you and I, not the world as we think of it. The world is your relationship with another. The world is not something separate from you and me; the world, society, is the relationship that we establish or seek to establish between each other.” – Jiddu Krishnamurti

“When two great saints meet, it is a humbling experience. The long battles to prove he was a Saint.” – Paul McCartney

Song: Moon River – Frank Ocean 

 

Reflections January 29, 2016

“The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.” Alan Watts

Appetizer:

Main Course:

Your own self realization is the greatest gift you can render the world. ~ Ramana Maharshi

A love letter to the moms and dads.

Birthdays feel different to me now. More so than ever. Still a linger of celebratory, it seems they prominently hold a reflective feel to me. As I think of this exact day, a decade ago, I smile. I think of the prelude to the big event, the small details, the suspense, the mini-moments that make up the day/life of pre and post child. Different universes entirely it seems.

10 years ago today I met my munchkin, me being one of the most self absorbed humans you’d meet (and then some). And then, immediately and steadily crescendoing daily, my heart grew a hundred times its size. Looking back, it feels very Grinchesque. I’d love to know the tally on how many times I’ve kissed this young lad in pure instinct, love, gratitude, joy, sadness. My guess – a million trillion. This love is indescribable. I’d highly recommend. What a rad, rad ride.

Thinking is my fighting – Virginia Woolf

Peace begins with a smile. – Mother Teresa

Be brave. Save yourself. Save the World.

Song: Don’t look back in anger – Oasis

Reading Piece de Resistance: Just remember, every single moment you remain coiled in a ball of fear, our world fractures just a little bit more because your heart is breaking, aching to be acknowledged, by you. Listen, and then take action. Taken from Elephant Journal: Rebecca Lammersen

Quote: Nothingman – Pearl Jam

Caught a bolt ‘a lightnin’
cursed the day he let it go…
nothingman…
nothingman…
isn’t it something?
nothingman…
she once believed
in every story he had to tell…
one day she stiffened
took the other side