Hell is the place where nobody loves anyone or anything, and nothing ever happens that is new. You can be surrounded
by the hateful, the deceitful and the indifferent - you be can be
utterly isolated - and still not remain in that place. You can draw love
out of yourself; anything other than none is enough. You can love the
trees and the stars and the wide solid ground and the way the wind
searches out holes in your coat because it wants to be near you. The
silent world echoes back whatever you pour out into it, like a whisper
in an enormous room.
Where there's love there's life and where there's life there's hope.
This is causation. Love, and there will eventually be hope.
Consider this also.
You're the result of an enormous succession of people having kids and
managing to keep them alive to grow up. Somewhere along that line - your
parents, their parents, your great-aunts and uncles from the times of
old - somebody dreamed of the future and loved you in advance. Someone
was rooting for you even though they didn't know exactly who you'd be.
Every time one of your ancestors got fed up with the troubles of their
time and thought to themselves, "curse these troubles! someday I hope
these are gone from the world!" they might not even have known it but
they were hoping it for you. You live in a world they could never have
imagined in their wildest dreams.
And you live. You're alive,
right now. You may not feel like this is a big deal; it may not seem to
be doing you very much good. But every moment you live you have the
power to make the world a little more like heaven. Just by loving it. So
many people are choosing to do otherwise that it might feel pretty
small, but it isn't.
Love is stronger than destruction because
it makes connections, it binds together, it multiplies and sustains. It
opens up space around itself and makes room for what's new. Like those
ancestors dreaming of a world with you in it, when you make room in
yourself for something new and good, you open up the possibility of
sharing that good with others.
And that's how this world
becomes more like the kingdom of heaven. Where we share joyful things
with the people we love, and discover new wonders together.
definition of magic
1. Magic is the art dedicated to optimizing the rate and methods of the adaptation of one's being to the progress of events, in accordance with one's chosen ends.
2. Magic is that by virtue of which a thing is greater than the sum of its parts.
3. Magic is an effective method of achieving a result which is unique to the circumstance in which it arises.
4. Magic is a symbolically representable system which facilitates the orientation of the components of one's being towards the objects of experience.
2. Magic is that by virtue of which a thing is greater than the sum of its parts.
3. Magic is an effective method of achieving a result which is unique to the circumstance in which it arises.
4. Magic is a symbolically representable system which facilitates the orientation of the components of one's being towards the objects of experience.
it is still winter
but inside I'm okay
I can live without your dime
where snowmen never melt
instead they always shine
~ Animal Collective, "Winter Wonderland"
This is the first time in my life I've been romantically unattached.
True, I've been single for almost two years now. But the distance between "single" and "unattached" is best measured in millennia, like the distance between "treatable" and "cured."
Not that love itself is a disease. My capacity to engage in it it was just bound up with some other, painful stuff.
Writing things down again feels strange. There are states of mind I've traversed in the past couple of years which were so embarrassing, so delusional or overwrought, that I'm grateful my word-maker was largely offline and I didn't leave much textual evidence of my thought process. Even so, what's already on this blog is so voluminous I already feel as though, without ever writing another word, I ought to see my headshot in the Wikipedia page for "tl;dr".
Deep down I used to feel that if I had a thought, a sensation, a feeling, which lacked the stamp of approval of another person's awareness, then my experience was null and nonexistent. This was one of those feelings too big to be consciously understood; it drove my actions as though standing behind me, larger than my own awareness and impossible for me to perceive. Compulsively transcribing everything was like a nicotene patch, a more socially acceptable substitute for what I really felt driven to do--ask for permission to exist, a new permission every instant.
My ability to love and to feel lovable had to grow and heal a lot. For that to happen, I needed to stop using my ability to describe, analyze and create words as a substitute for the affection I couldn't allow myself to accept. Now that I can do so, however, I also have the task of coming back to writing with different motives.
Love is different--or it will be, when I have some again. Creation is different too, and I don't know what it is now. It's all new, and like anything new, I feel perplexed and out of my depth. I tell people very often, "Don't be angry at yourself for being bad at something new. It's new--of course you'll be bad at it until you learn how to do it!"
Well. Even if the things I make aren't quite as powerful, because they don't have the weight of my pending impending annihilation pressing down on them, at least they'll still be alive. I believe anything created has a kind of symbiotic life to it; it joins in the lives of those who appreciate it, growing along with them.
But I still feel very cold.
I can live without your dime
where snowmen never melt
instead they always shine
~ Animal Collective, "Winter Wonderland"
This is the first time in my life I've been romantically unattached.
True, I've been single for almost two years now. But the distance between "single" and "unattached" is best measured in millennia, like the distance between "treatable" and "cured."
Not that love itself is a disease. My capacity to engage in it it was just bound up with some other, painful stuff.
Writing things down again feels strange. There are states of mind I've traversed in the past couple of years which were so embarrassing, so delusional or overwrought, that I'm grateful my word-maker was largely offline and I didn't leave much textual evidence of my thought process. Even so, what's already on this blog is so voluminous I already feel as though, without ever writing another word, I ought to see my headshot in the Wikipedia page for "tl;dr".
Deep down I used to feel that if I had a thought, a sensation, a feeling, which lacked the stamp of approval of another person's awareness, then my experience was null and nonexistent. This was one of those feelings too big to be consciously understood; it drove my actions as though standing behind me, larger than my own awareness and impossible for me to perceive. Compulsively transcribing everything was like a nicotene patch, a more socially acceptable substitute for what I really felt driven to do--ask for permission to exist, a new permission every instant.
My ability to love and to feel lovable had to grow and heal a lot. For that to happen, I needed to stop using my ability to describe, analyze and create words as a substitute for the affection I couldn't allow myself to accept. Now that I can do so, however, I also have the task of coming back to writing with different motives.
Love is different--or it will be, when I have some again. Creation is different too, and I don't know what it is now. It's all new, and like anything new, I feel perplexed and out of my depth. I tell people very often, "Don't be angry at yourself for being bad at something new. It's new--of course you'll be bad at it until you learn how to do it!"
Well. Even if the things I make aren't quite as powerful, because they don't have the weight of my pending impending annihilation pressing down on them, at least they'll still be alive. I believe anything created has a kind of symbiotic life to it; it joins in the lives of those who appreciate it, growing along with them.
But I still feel very cold.
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