Fractured (I glimpsed a reflection in the gathered shards)

and I realized that it was me
I was broken
I was shattered
I was scattered long ago

and the visions I see in shards around me is not a lost God, but my soul (it is both)
I am not the only searcher, wading through the mirrors casting slanted golden light. I am not the only traveler, the only gatherer, stooping for pieces smaller than myself - we all of us are pieces

I am also a sharp-edged splinter, cast down with my brothers, my sisters, and in the confusion, I have thought they were someone else. I am a piece in the puzzle collecting.

The God I saw dispersed in shining lights,
As he was dispersed,
so the self I am familiar with appeared
and wondered

I call to the stars and they call back because we spoke with the same voice. They hear their answer in my echo.

In this moment, it is I who knows this.
But, soon it will pass and reflect from a different piece of fractured glass.

a crack around cracks around cracks
and so the light gets in
and we are dazzled

I remember writing on this very blog how my life was going to be awesome, because I was going to be so aware and try so hard. I've been feeling lately that I've just been doing a lot of doing. I need to find the hole in the cracks to fall through and be somewhere real and valuable. But, that description is misleading because I still think that where I am now is a good place for me to be at this point in my life. So, maybe I'm just being dissatisfied or thinking too much about what I don't have. However, I sometimes reflect on the things that keep me busy vs. the things that feel like being where the life is.

But then again, I guess there's always life to be near and in. Need to tap into that every day. (I've been considering whether up and doing Teach For China would be a welcome and growthful change in my life, or whether it is really more of the same (in the way I'm approaching it).

In the meantime, this is somewhat encouraging, and reminds me of other ways I used to write on here ...

2.20.2012

merge the looking-glass

I was hovering above the surface of the water, on a ferry between China and Japan, contemplating the nature of my fear.

There was a time when I felt established in my concept of the world and of God, even if other aspects of my life were trying.
My concept of God was not unlike as a parent, encouraging me to grow and become spiritually mature and responsible, to stand on my own and no longer need parenting.
This concept began to erode and eventually decentralize, showering every aspect of the universe in a dazzling brilliance, as if to illustrate the riddle: Godisnowhere.
I described it to a friend once as though a long-time pen pal had written one final letter saying that I would no longer be receiving letters from them this way, and that they were not who I thought they were. I didn't know where to look after that.

This corresponded with series of other life-events that wrought general shattering of plane of my life. When I stand on one shard, I feel I have access to the life and memories connected to that shard, but not to memories or self from the other. It feels like it began the morning I was pushed through the ice into cold water and awoke, submerged in my lower bunk, disoriented, homesick for the first time in my life, and trapped, unable to go home. My room was an echo-chamber into which rocks were daily thrown. I first swam, then crawled out and learned to walk again over a period of years. I told myself that I could stay with things because if it ever became /that bad/, I was young. I could restart my life, and still live a relatively long time. In some ways I hadn't considered though, I had already started over, and shouldn't be too hard on myself for only being 5 years old. In the times I could not walk, I learned by being suspended from the mirror of the sky.

I still sensed within me an understanding and desire to know God's will and do it, and a trust that it would be the best way to live, but also a fear that God would call on me to give too much. But, in my difficult times, had not there been provision? Had it really been too much? ...it still feels difficult to volunteer for, although volunteering still seems like the correct choice. I feel conflicted, and I sometimes fear the voice in the sky, though I know that my pain is not from God, and instead, there was provision.

I am reminded the example of a child staying with a kind aunt while his mother is in the hospital giving birth to a baby brother. The aunt is kind, but the child cannot help but link her to the absence of his mother and may resent it.

I was hovering above the surface of the water, on a ferry between China and Japan, contemplating the nature of my fear.

I perceived myself two selves - one contained within me, and the other without. One, the concave reflection beneath the mirror of the sky, and the other spread broad and convex. One side of me, internal. The other side, more external. I perceived that my interior me feared the other, which also feared. A fear of harming, a fear of pain; a fear of abandonment, a fear of insufficiency, and both reflections retreating sadly from one another.

I perceived that these two aspects of me were interchangeable. And both feared. They might as well be one another. I perceived that they did not desire to fear, and that they should be friends. And they were. Reunited, I felt capable and confident in myself and in approaching others.

They were comfortable with one another for several days, until there was a test. I did not succeed, and instead caved and emptied myself like a ship trying to stay afloat, and failed to hold my sense of person, sense of limits of responsibility, and regard my sense of appeasement. I emerged from the scenario, but not with anything of value. I failed to keep from abandoning myself, and I do not know how to ask the reflections to trust again, especially when I am not capable of assuring their safety. They desire to trust me to manage, but I give them no evidence.

Flowers

"One of the things you have to do with a flower," he said, "is let it grow, it's own way. You have to give the flower what it needs to grow.

Collective perspective

I am a dendrite in the mind of humankind

miracle

If I remember right, one of my friends from Reed used to say that a miracle is what happens when a person makes the decision to just pick up and move their life into something vastly different. Like just up and going to a different city. That kind of magic is the kind of thing he would call a miracle. It is a miraculous sort of thing to follow an inspiration and to pull it off.

"I hope

the Pacific is as blue as it has been in my dreams."

- Red
The Shawshank Redemption






I think I just remembered something.

Walls

Walls are stairs that require either more or different effort to climb.

on discovering a bruise

Bad: Getting sucker-punched by life

Worse: Discovering that you got sucker-punched a while ago and didn't even realize it

Confusing: Wondering what else you haven't been noticing.

Embarrassing: Looking back and realizing how you set yourself up for it, and explaining to others how this could have happened.

Difficult: Communicating to straighten out the facts, compare stories, and figure out what kind of music must be faced, and when.


Looking forward to:
Persevering, moving on far enough, and building a solid enough sense of self to no longer feel embarrassed about explaining to others how you let yourself get sucker-punched. Never making similar mistakes again.

SMS

(Some text messages I sent to myself, thoughts to be developed later)


1) Words are masks
(28 Apr 2010)



2) Some priorities we set. Others, we learn. When two important things conflict, we can discover our loyalties.
(20 May 2010)



3) If you do not work hard toward your visions, you will have to be content with what others give you.
(25 May 2010, and the preceding days)


- edit -
4) Words are only good as collateral.
(31 May 2010)

curriculum of collisions

A few days ago -

While walking to the bus, I'd been pondering what I considered to be a connection between early heartbreak and increased maturity due to insight from having to deal with necessary lessons, whether or not they were what a person wants to learn.

There's something about the way that ideals and expectations when followed sometimes collide against the unyielding consequences of reality. And, the only thing to do with the pieces is to learn.

Then later, reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, I came across the following passage,

"He had become much more mature, as if the abandonment of his inner goals had caused him somehow to age more quickly."

This seemed relevant, but I am wary of the kind of 'aging' mentioned. Maturation and aging are different processes.

Later - talking with my brother - we concluded that it is not such a heartbreak alone that induces maturity. The victim must already be mature and willing enough to begin to climb the lessons instead of letting them bounce off ineffectively or in a way by which nothing is really learned.

And today, I noticed a quote from a friend's facebook stating that she thought "...certain maladaptive coping mechanisms are really just a lot more fun than more adaptive alternatives..."

It's true.

Even if the only thing to do is to learn, some people chose to view situations in a way that does not challenge or require them to change who they are. It is easier that way. They don't see anything to learn from.

But, those who have eyes to see find things to learn from and learn not to be afraid of the broken glass and mirrors.

This is a difficult curriculum to follow.
But, I am a student.

Explanations

"You always say that,"

a friend told me when I began to decline trying to explain what I wanted to say on the grounds that I apparently hadn't figured out how to communicate it yet.

"Different things have different meanings to different people," I tried to say, "Finding good words seems like the difference between making oneself understood or being dismissed."

Even this didn't feel true enough.
I thought about this some more.


What feels most concerning to me is that I might make an effort to communicate that falls short. The hazard of this is not just lack of understanding, but that I would be partially understood - that I might communicate some truth, but not the whole truth. I might communicate just enough for the listener to believe that he has heard something, at which point he will complete what I failed to say with his own assumptions. He may mistake a few aspects for the whole story. Believing he understands, he may be more likely to act on inaccurate assumptions and less open to further information on the matter.

This will be even worse than if I had never said anything. Because, now the listener (and maybe myself as well) will mistakenly believe that he has understood. I think it is always harder to correct false understanding than to promote good understanding in the first place. Lack of knowledge might be ignorance, but a truth that falls short is a deception, however well-intentioned.

It sometimes seems better to decline comment and not to try, although I'm stubborn enough that I usually do despite the sense of impending doom.

My concern is that if the job cannot be thoroughly done, all I might achieve is to drive a pipe into a great subterranean well of assumptions which will, under natural pressures of assumptions and perceptions, spew obscuring (even if well-intentioned) crude which I will have to find a way to clean up if I want to attempt communicating anything further.

But, even after my precautions and training,
... in the course of my trying to make myself known, despite how hard I try, it seems to me that understanding often has very little to do with what words are being said.



It seems like things often come down to a sense of those who have ears to hear, let them hear.

I must do my best to acquire such ears.

choices

written as a response to a friend's post, 18 Apr 2010

I have been reflecting lately on how it seems to be not so much whether people can be trusted,

but whether I can trust people (as an internal condition of myself) that improves my life. it keeps me open, and that is important.


I think good things come to those who keep their heads up in any situation-
because otherwise you won't see them.

yin and yang

Oh yes, that's right. Neither extreme is desirable, and neither to be excluded, but it is an appropriate balance.

Not gray. Black and White negotiating.

There is a place for both of them.

New Experiment

1st)

Remember to continue imagining and moving into a world without fear.


2nd)

Imagine a world in which you are very happy with what you are doing and everything is fine. Move in that direction. It doesn't matter where you're starting from.


These exercises are not just for thinking.
Do them

How to Run

In my Origins of Western Morality class, we talked about the Epicureans and their ideas.

The Epicureans thought of the world as consisting of atoms, tiny particles of every sort that fall and swirl, and void, the nothingness that separated the atoms. They tried to apply this model to determining why it is that some things, like horses, have an agency to choose to move and run while other things, like rocks, do not move.

I have been wanting to write about the Epicurean reasoning of how a horse begins to run.

The idea deals with the event that must occur between the before of a still horse and the after of a running horse. They considered that running was caused when an atom for running fit into the right place like an ignition key, causing the horse to begin running when previously, it was still.

The desire to run shapes the horse's mind in a way that is able to receive atoms of running. All things on earth are constantly bathed in a stream of all kinds of invisible atoms, so if the horse positions its mind properly, it is only a brief matter of time until a running atom finds the place prepared to receive it.

Once this running atom fits into the prepared place, this ignites the running ability, and the the horse runs.


I think I believe this.


Things happen because a place has been prepared to receive it.

Sometimes it is said that things are 'for the best' because 'something good will come of it.' I don't agree with the thoughts of good things coming from bad things (to the extent that such a judgment is reasonable). But, I do think that good things will find those who are able to keep their heads up enough to see them.

I must continue to choose open windows.

True Colors

Hey.



When I was in elementary school - like, first or second grade or so, this elementary school guidance counselor woman would come in, and teach us elementary social wisdoms with her puppets - a dolphin and an otter, whose names I can remember pronouncing but have no idea how to spell. I've actually thought about some of those early lessons a lot as I've grown.

I remember her repeatedly encouraging us to be unique, because unique was good and made us special in our own ways - and we should understand that everyone is unique.

I learned that unique was good and also to be appreciated in others. It seemed like an easy fact. What took me longer to learn was that in some ways, it is 'safer' to be like everything else, and so, 'unique' must also be encouraged and expressed from within myself, even if at odds with my surroundings. It is a choice, and sometimes it is not easy.

Even though I wrote a speech for high school graduation about the necessity of guiding oneself beyond what "they" say (because, if everyone listened to "them", then how would we ever get anywhere new?), I am still learning and practicing what it means to choose and cultivate a uniqueness, and to own and assert the sense of person that I am - even when it seems to disagree with the usual accepted expectations.

( In fact, I think this may be when it is most important to follow a sense of personal uniqueness - if I'm doing it honestly, people seem to react mostly out of curiosity. Besides - they all want to be themselves anyway, so I think that if I assert myself as an individual, that this can be enabling for other people, too )

Also, uniqueness does not mean being all things. I have had friends remind me, at various (and necessary) times that I cannot be everything to everyone. Perhaps it has to do with maturing further, but I feel that as I specialize as a personality and make choices about the person I want to become, I must recognize that if there are some things that are particularly like me, there are also things that are not me - and both of these are aspects of who I am. My sense of self demands that I represent both honestly, though there be varied consequences.

Recently, a good friend of mine shared a couple versions of this song with me. They were important to him, and that importance made me think twice about what it meant to me. This is what I've been reminded of.

So, go be the things you are, or that you want to be. How else will anyone be able to see you?

Being a particular and unique personality inevitably means being 'different', and this can take a lot of courage, both to discover and to assert (to yourself and to others). But, don't you like meeting people who are not like anyone else you've ever met? If you don't assert your own sense of individuality and creativity of person - then how can you expect anyone else to?
Go be the things you are. It's very important, and only you can do it.

I'll try to take my own advice too.

It's a courage that we will all (quietly) share.

Thanks.

see how you like it, human: Turing Test 2

The Turing Test is a test of artificial intelligence by which a computer and a human interact, with the computer 'trying' to seem like a human, and the human trying to determine whether he is interacting with a computer, or with a real fellow human being - an unforgiving game of 'Bot or Not?'

Fellow Reedies tell me that a fellow Reedie contributed to this stroke of sheer plot twist brilliance (..no I haven't gotten very far). Man versus machine just got a whole lot more 'meta'.

Try it!

Play Turing Test 2

Perhaps we will empathize with the machines after all.

play to lose

Have you ever played Apples to Apples?

It is a pretty fun game in which a different person takes turn being the 'judge' in each round. So, the way you play is largely dependent on the personal preferences of who is judging that round, which can be pretty arbitrary. It can sometimes be very hard to decide which cards to play.

I recall one game in which, not feeling like I had any good idea of how to win, began an experiment to intentionally lose. I began playing to lose. I played the cards that I thought were worst suited to the round being played. This strategy was a lot of fun, put absolutely no pressure on me, and had the interesting side-effect that I began to win.



I've been considering that this might not be a bad strategy to apply to other areas of my life. Depending on the context, it could even be advantageous. There are many many adventuresome, interesting, and creative ways to lose at something, many of which may have gone entirely unconsidered thus far.

Play to lose your heart, your mind, .. In the New Testament, Jesus tells people to play to lose their lives, saying that this is the only way to really gain something. I am not advocating anything destructive, but I guess I'm just trying to say that, maybe losing isn't as bad as it sounds. .. Has possessiveness ever gotten anyone anything good? Maybe it's not what you thought it would be anyway.

And then, it becomes a whole different game...

為了自由的未來

Vienna Teng is an amazing singer, and
this song is putting me in a good space.