Etymology

We use words without remembering their power or their inferences. Language is a blanket and a single word is the point of contact between one warp and one weft thread: pick it up and the whole structure of language shifts with it. Words have lives, words are born of other words and grow fatter with the signification of their predecessors.

Why is it that there are a few people which conjure in me a sense that they are not 'human'? Their behaviour doesn't feel human. Human is from humus which means earth... meaning that we are earthly beings, opposed to Gods. The particular individuals I am thinking of act with the sort of influence and power that some people describe as Godly. They use the world around them like an offering, they want hymns of praise.

God has a few possible origins. Greek khein 'to pour', Old English ghut 'that which is invoked', Sanskrit huta 'invoked' (from the root gheu 'to invoke') and Proto-Indo-European gheu 'to pour, pour a libation'.
Invoked is related to vocare 'to call' or vox 'voice'.
So a God is something who you want to call, someone you would pour a drink for. Someone to beseech, to talk with, someone we entreat. I'm guessing then that God is pretty talkative, and the kind of dude who might know quite a bit about stuff - otherwise we wouldn't go offering him drinks and ringing him up so frequently.

These people who act like Gods do not have advice, they aren't the sort of people I would call on if I had a problem. They act with a sort of hollow power. False prophets. Power is the energy created by having knowledge. Being attractive is the effect of giving knowledge. These people don't have knowledge... they can't give knowledge.
So really they are powerless and ugly. They don't want people to know so they construct big peacock tails, don crowns and eat double cream without reserve... one thing they do know is the persuasive command of appearances.

Family

This is a promise to the future human beings I take under my care:

I will plan for you, you won't have been accidental.
I will always be honest with you.
I will always respect you.
I will make you a home and put these things inside it: books, artworks, plant life, animals, food from a garden, music from my mouth and also a stereo, bicycles, skipping ropes and balls, and the most important ingredient - people with big minds and knowledge of the world they can teach you, big hands that can hold you and discipline you, big hearts like colossal trees that house ecosystems of emotion with love at the top of the food chain, big ideas that exemplify passion and determination, big eyes that see you as an individual with your own ideas and desires.

I want to raise children in a community so that they don't feel trapped by two parents, so that the lessons they learn are diverse, so that there are more people around to torture them with tickling. I already know individuals whom I would be honoured to bless my progeny in the presence of.
I think childrearing will be the fullest dilation of my heart, a devotion that can't be reversed.
I want to help children learn about themselves and learn about myself in so doing.

From now on I am planning a life that I am going to share with a big family... children, a partner if I find one who wants to join me, friends and parents and anyone, any animal, who I meet who shares their heart with the same ease and consistency with which we give out carbon dioxide.

I want to bring people together in a big family who can talk and crawl and learn and fly and cry and think and  be human together.

Going out or coming in?

Think of the ventricles and arteries of your heart as a rotating door, through which you enter the world and the world enters you.

Negligent optimism

I told someone I've known for a long time but not seen for quite a while about my internal tectonic plate realignment procedure (it involves psychotherapy, allowing the past to pass, becoming comfortably alone, comfortably in company and defining and finding what I want) and she said:

"Remember that it could always be worse."

Whilst it seems like an optimistic phrase, it resonated in me as being a thoroughly apathetic approach.
I would like to gently dispute that everyone should always remember that it could always be better. Everyone should encourage themselves to be healthy and human to the finest of their capacities, and find methods and other people who can help them become a healthy human (don't ask me what that is yet).

Whilst it's true that everything could be worse, thanking the supreme that you haven't fallen down the stairs and broken both your legs or that your mother hasn't committed suicide or that you weren't born in a refugee camp in Mogadishu is a way of ignoring how your own life could be improved which stops you from becoming better and actually capable of helping people with broken legs or no government, no infrastructure, no education and no money.

The hierarchy of duty of care should start with your self and trickle outwards in all directions like a domino effect. How will I know how to care for someone else if I don't know how to care for myself?

Prior to internal tectonic plate realignment procedure

In love and in pain

Writing is like a lover in a dysfunctional relationship, who always turns her head away from you, who always contorts your meaning, who will never quite see you eye-to-eye. You're always trying to kiss her.

Magnetic repulsion between writer and writing

Dissolving

Even if it is just a psychosomatic result of sitting so still for so long that nerve endings fall asleep, the sensation of your body dissolving when meditating is euphoric and beautiful - and why not spend time beautifully?

Afterwards I asked myself what is that experience? And a zen sort of answer arose: inside, I am everything and nothing. It's that dissolving of a feverish mind and the apparent dissolving of a physical body which reveals that beyond both those things, a person can still exist... silent and at large, after having escaped those limits.

How can something be everything and nothing? If I am part of everything there is nothing to separate me. I am no thing if I am inside and inseparable from every thing. The social implications of this paradigm are greater empathy, greater generosity, less fear.

Physics knows we are recycled bits of stars! We're made from other things, our bodies decompose and become other things, so in a comfortingly concrete way we truly are part of everything, our bodies were spangling out in all kinds of directions, whizzing and burring and blooming into galaxies since the time that we call the start of time. And our bodies will go on, invisibly rolling and turning and shifting through  leagues of physical matter over millenia, I imagine a bit like a rat running under a doona cover: rippling along, disguised under the surface.

I know I have written about this many times, important things should be reiterated.

unzip your body                                     unzip your mind                             what's left behind?