Another time to take a break. I don’t know how many of you have been with me from the beginning, but I wager not very many. You would know that from time to time, I take a break from writing on this site, usually because there is too much else going on with my life. Generally, all things are very good, but there are issues that I must attend to. Mostly they deal with the line of work I started last June, a venture a long time coming. I’ve been working 32 hour days, sleeping for 16 hours afterwards. It’s exhausting. It’s great. But basically, it’s sapping any and all strength that I have to do anything at all, so some part of my life has to give. This, here, has to be it. Dunno when I’ll have the chance to come back, so goodbye for now. Wish me luck. Hope to be back someday.

[Book.]

(In the buzzing of my mind there is business that actively achieves purposelessness. It is a faux nihilism, absurdity that has no deeper meaning. A billion neurons that each rolls a tiny boulder up a hill, to have it roll back down again: not sound, not fury, merely a swarm of senseless to and fro, to and fro, tossing around futile gestures. And that I realize that this is true makes it not one iota more substantive, for I know not why I so practice this flailing of the sensibilities. I am the ultimate test of free will, to choose not to choose until the whole paradigm collapses in on itself like a black hole of cognition. For in the buzzing of my mind there is a danger to anyone I let in, that they mistake the reality for the illusion, as if these theories go somewhere, and the randomness is merely a fog upon the road. But no. It truly makes no sense at all.)

Thomas a Kempis speaks for all the ages when he represents Jesus as saying to him, “A wise lover regards not so much the gift of him who loves, as the love of him who gives. He esteems affection rather than valuables, and sets all gifts below the Beloved. A noble-minded lover rests not in the gift, but in Me above every gift.” The sustaining power of the Beloved Presence has through the ages made the sickbed sweet and the graveside triumphant; transformed broken hearts and relations; brought glory to drudgery, poverty and old age; and turned the martyr’s stake or noose into a place of coronation.

in my watercolor dream, paints flowed one in another
no psychology could discern the pattern in the canvas’ blur
it all dried indistinct of form, and showed me the shape of sleep

A teenage bride with a baby inside
Getting high on information

– Red Hot Chili Peppers

Paul Klee: Highway and Byways

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Dreaming is easy. Living is hard.

I saw in a vision why there is something instead of nothing: love is simpler than nothing. The heart of God, in its opening, tells the story of which we all have a part, unfolding a perfect mystery of light. And too, in a vision other, I saw these people all as if standing on the stage of the world, when it was revealed to me: “The Immortals!” Each in wonderous variation, all who had taken the meaning of the Christ into their hearts…. How I have gone without seeing that these things were there, even as I spoke of the miraculous in the every day. How are we to notice a miracle among miracles? We take for granted too much. Letting the seconds slip away until years blink by. And wonder what the visions meant, when then you saw far, far.

My wish is that I remember it in the harsher days: “God is love.” For when all is bright day and joy, that declaration rolls right through all your senses, and you are alive in its conceiving. But when the day grows dark, and the storms destroy things that are yours; when in hurt over the seeming cruelty of the world: shall we recollect that sentence then? For it is the duty of a servant of God to count it all joy, even the tragedies. Even the tragedies. And I suppose it is forgiven when we fail to so do, but that He told it to us lets us think that it is possible. Perhaps for the saints, or even the saints inside us, when an angel happens to pass by and lets us be the person we wish we could be. We can be.

Thomas a Kempis speaks for all the ages when he represents Jesus as saying to him, “A wise lover regards not so much the gift of him who loves, as the love of him who gives. He esteems affection rather than valuables, and sets all gifts below the Beloved. A noble-minded lover rests not in the gift, but in Me above every gift.” The sustaining power of the Beloved Presence has through the ages made the sickbed sweet and the graveside triumphant; transformed broken hearts and relations; brought glory to drudgery, poverty and old age; and turned the martyr’s stake or noose into a place of coronation.

we are none of us so wealthy as to wake without fear
the ledgers of destiny strangely sparse in entries
(how many spend themselves in pursuit of themselves)
nothing to desire that costs less than the pain exacts
even hope can rob us of everything in its desire to be true
hearts the deepest when overdrawn of what had filled it
hurt the vacuum of debt we unknowingly signed for
nothing! nothing! nothing! is this to buy a beginning?
(the business of the future is always at our expense)
most of us want to make the little noise of petty change
to wake without fear too much meaning to afford

Maybe it is like in the movies. Maybe the world gets saved, again and again, and we never are the wiser that we were that close to oblivion, destruction, cataclysm, all of us. The only way to know if this is so would be if we stepped into that narrow window of the supernal fates, that only the heroes and villains are privy to. The aliens and the men in black. The bearer of the charm and the hidden world underneath the surface of the present day. Perhaps these stories do that well because in us, they speak to that child within us that never lost their belief in magic. Who wants to think that we are all of us at every step only a wrong turn away from the chance to save the world. Blink, and everything’s alive.

Without a noise
Without my pride
I reach out from the inside

– Peter Gabriel

Piet Mondrian: The Gray Tree

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Ashes to ashes, dust to dust: but in between, life.

He who only dreams of better is no better off than one with no dreams.

He who knows nothing is one better than he who knows it all.

Ask questions, because some of the answers are correct.

Choosing faith over kindness: like choosing love without the heart.

Imagine God loves you the best; now, imagine that for everyone.

Death is the one secret that is shared by everyone.