What I hope to do with the moments I am present in. I hope to have these moments, more and more until they just are. But until then, I hope:

To see the reflection of the leaves in the dog bowl

Hear the lark call to its friend

I hope to smell the crip scent of pine, expand my lungs

I hope to see the child lost in their unique wonder

Capture the shadows and the light 

I hope to find one of the infinite indiscernible facets of that moment 

tuck it away, for a future revival

to find the grace to listen to more than the words being spoken near me

It was grace that granted me a presence first

When you feel something, do something. This can seem like a dangerous recipe, sure. The goal of action is to feed into or veer away from a feeling you have.  How you choose to act on that knowledge is deciding upon one or another feeling. You might say that this is oversimplified. I think it needs to be said for people to see it in the starkest way possible. Your choices are often an acknowledgement and valuing of emotions, and in each of our cases routinely certain emotions. Your choices to go shoot brings you peace, your choice to stay in and edit pictures may do the same…but the choice between going to hang with your friends or watch something mindless alone are on the same level as the ones that surround your creative outlets. Each of these choices can give you an outlet for your motional health and can provide you insights into your state of being in powerful ways. Choices are both accessing a certain emotional state and either confirming your initial feelings or exploring with more depth the why of how you feel. If you can learn to hone this practice you can be more intentional about your choices to do or not. Whether it is the the for or against, understanding your initial state of feeling and considering whether what your emotional state needs is a choice to do the thing or not can bring about more contentment and understanding of yourself.  

That being said. Do Shit. You’ve heard it from so many people, but not just because if you do it it’s the idea has reached completion, but rather that your emotional state will reach completion. I know that this might be seen as a call to overaction. I might be calling for that, because if the actions you take even for the slightest feelings you have are to be fully realized, then you will both find completion artistically , but slowly develop a sense of what feelings and emotions, large or slight you’ll be most satisfied and then you can create an informed filter, for a while of what to put action into and what to give notice but actively choose to dismiss. To be able to choose to fulfill feelings around the creation of something or taking the decision not to is a great gift, but it must be found found through regular practice and introspection. Thus…DO SHIT!

Knowing how to acknowledge your emotional state is the first stage and it can be the hardest for most people. How do you even say to yourself, that this day isn’t shit but you’re frustrated with something specific? How do you determine your excitement around an idea for a project or action and clearly assess what from it excites you most?! We often have these great ideas and then just as quickly as we have them they become a list, a checklist of actions, a task that we would rather not deal with. IT becomes part of our busy lives. It becomes a block to other things, and we turn what could have been excitement and something we embrace, into something we cosign off on as tedium. Do we understand what about the idea is really driving us in the first place. Is it the act of completing this grand vision? Or is it getting to work with someone? Is it about the development of something helps others? How are we placing value to the ideas we have the emotional response they bring us. 

If we can better access our emotional state, to speak to ourselves with the language of emotions, with the language of patience and consideration we can better understand our motivations, creative or otherwise and that brings with it a lot of present and future control. With curiosity, we can certainly have better access to the actions that best tied to the state of feeling have and understanding where to place the energy that will best fulfill the true underlying causes of our states and we gain control over the things that seem to flow in and out of our life regardless of time and place. 

Side Note:

All of this has been a bit sporadic, I am going to try and have more thematic and dedicate elements to this blog starting with the next post. I will post a theme for each month as well as adding random images, and thoughts along the way. This way I can be more intentional in sharing my thoughts and you more aware of what thoughts you’ll be hearing! Hope it leads to a more constructive dialogue as time progresses. Hell, a dialogue! 

I have worked for a long time at forgetting the idea of myself. The idea may sound strange to some and I can understand. Yourself is your best friend and your longest acquaintance. The idea that you exist is so imprinted on you from an early period that one of the very first ways you communicate with the world is that your protestations are received by love, food, sustenance…your demand for existence, and a happy one at that is nearly immediately your state of mind before you even have a state of mind. 

And so it goes…Your life continues to grow in importance and your value for the acknowledgment of that growth is as immaculately conceived of now as your request for it at the earliest.  You now rely on a machine, an algorithm to receive it, but the values that undergird it are the same. And more often we are able to not only request the attention we crave, but we learn how to “hack” the reality we live in and share the type of narrative that is all but sure to develop notice. The sense of self that comes from this relationship is surely false and produces in its captors a sense of self that they can not see as false since they were co-conspirators in the “hack”. You slowly calcify this idea of who you are, what you’re values are, what you are supposed to do to maintain that identity. This becomes your priority. That you are consistent in the reflection of who you want to be to others is what creates that reality for them and subsequently through your efforts, you. 

It is this ego-feeding that creates the challenges we face, whether in our political sphere or our personal ones. The more we interact, fabricate and develop the idea of our self, current, future or otherwise (historical refabrication is common and our memories are not what we think they are), the more we assume we are in control of our lives, when in fact eh story of our lives is ruling us. That is what adventurers must love, to have no story to maintain, they just get to share in discovery with others of something so unknown that they can not themselves have told it prior to living it. That is the path of some, but not nearly enough of us. I am no adventurer, not in the true sense of the word, but I have been on a journey recently. I have been rediscovering myself and resetting the expectations of my own narrative. I have been in the process of trying to walk away from the ego story. The Sisyphean cycle is often held together by the fear that the “true self” being discovered to not align with the crafted narrative will bring ruin. I have found more and more that this is simply not the case.