people are de-centred and multi-vocal

People can change, and people don't always say or do wise things. They might be angry and say something cruel, but they're not always angry and cruel.

Make allowance for that and you'll free that person from fitting a narrow expectation, and free yourself from being hurt.

Obsession

It's admirable to be enthusiastic, degenerative to be neurotic.
Realising the difference is important, having the capacity to stop is critical.

The difference between doing something well and overdoing it is being awake. Awake enough to know that you're tired or that is looks resolved or that you're hungry or that there are other things that need doing also.
Drawing is like digging a hole, getting in the hole and digging until you can no longer dig. You get deeper, it gets darker. I don't draw that often because I've always felt there has been a capacity to get lost and I like knowing my bearings.

This is very indulgent, enough.

Truth

People would prefer to know the truth than not know the truth. As far as I can see, the only truth external to our often opposing perceptions is that we are here, together.

Who I am (upsurging through a mortal mind, enfolded in the linguistic lung)

I think writing about this is not sacrilege because I think writing is an abstraction of existence. I've written about that before, and seem to restate it a lot. It's what makes writing breathe - the gap between my life and these words form a lung which insufflates its own space, a living, breathing space that is prone equally to collapse (build some sort of climatology, become an aeronaut, study pneumatics: that is the readers job).

Inside meditation, which is as unstable as the lung of language, things emerge from spaces unseen and move on rapidly, or sometimes stick and drag along a trailing mess. Those things I am reluctant to name, but suppose they are commonly understood as thoughts or feelings or memories but are better described as hybrids, misappropriations, overstatements, aliens. They go on all the time, meditation reveals them.

Living alongside those things, there is no choice but to live trying to cope with distraction and division. In mantra meditation, hearing the consistent sound of a mantra is a difficult task because these other images and sounds are relentless. But today it became apparent that the person listening to the mantra is me, and that I am someone nobody else has ever met.

I am the only one who can hear that sound, it is information exceptional to my experience in that moment.
Avoiding all activity and simply listening to that sound means I have the opportunity to spend company with the thing that listens. Imagine spending time with the quiet part of yourself that nobody else has met, the part which just listens. It's like meeting somebody for the first time: but someone who doesn't talk, isn't biased, doesn't argue, won't complain, hasn't been hurt, isn't unfair, wouldn't lie. Just a person who observes, which is what everybody is underneath the temporal bedlam of social interaction and identity crises.

Being calm, collected, and cool in the kinda way that bullies would respect.

Even if you are the kindest, nicest, most compassionate and complacent person in the world, there will be someone, maybe more than someone, who makes you angry.

I spoke with two friends tonight who helped me to put things into perspective. The most important thing is to know how you feel, wring your hands instead of wringing their neck, and at the right time make sure you are heard.


And even if at that time you aren't heard, tell that person again at the next right time, and then the next, and the next, and the next... And if they still have cotton wool in their ears, don't be sorry that they're confused when you exit that situation, because you did tell them so.