I have made mistakes.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=czFgKa7YcIQ

"I am trying to get at something utterly heartbroken." - Van Gogh

I forgot how much music can breathe life back into your days.

Just one example of this. 

Resonate.

res·o·nate

ˈreznˌāt/

verb

1. 1.

   produce or be filled with a deep, full, reverberating sound.

   "the sound of the siren resonated across the harbor"

   • 
     

     
     
   • 
     

     
     
2. 2.

   technical

   produce electrical or mechanical resonance.

   "the crystal resonates at 16 MHz"

Lately, this is a word that has been rumbling around in my head. I feel like there are moments when we know deeper than words can say, that something is merging between two people (and sometimes more).  

The physics here says that our electrons can get this close. Even the composition of every atom is about balance - none of us is fully fused together; we are continually falling apart and being put back together again. 

Resonation. 

When I was younger, I learned to play the classical guitar first. I received my first guitar on my 10th birthday. I can remember the smell of the finish - Italian wood and a cavernous sound that echoed through it as I unwrapped it. I can remember running my finger along the rosetta, along the bridge and strings. "This will be a voice for me", I thought. 

I named her Isabel. Mostly because it felt right, and I was 10. 

Before you play the guitar, you tune it. And this, was one of my favorite parts of learning to play. I took a tiny tuning fork, slung it against my knee and gently tapped the cold end of it to the belly of my guitar. Immediately a sound from nowhere would reverberate. This was a shy, but sure, sound - an 'A'. 

By this 'A' I would then lean my ear to the body of the guitar over and over, reach up, and gently creak the strings into sharper, or flatter pitches. I'd match the 'A' of the tuning fork to the 'A' of the string, then match the 'A' of the string to the 'A' I could play on the next string. 

And so and so forth - down the frets you go. Always going back to match the 'A'. Always strumming two strings together to see if they were dissonant. Always perceiving, listening, leaning in to hear more closely. 

Dissonant strings create a sound that sends two separate pieces. Played together the pieces just don't fit. Strings that are tuned play out a kind of hum that pulses together. It's so very clear when it happens but only when you play the two together, never when they are apart. 

I am taking 6 weeks to hear my heart and to begin to know what does and doesn't resonate. And I'm ok with anyone who thinks that sounds too mushy to make sense. As Rob Bell says, "Some things you do for you, and you alone." 

This is one of them. 

Why begin with mindfulness? Because mindfulness (among many other things in the last few months) has allowed me to be awake in my life for maybe the first time in 8 years. For all the time I have spent accidentally sleeping in meditation, practicing mindfulness has allowed me to really see what's in front of me. 

Honestly, this is a daunting task for me. Big picture-wise, I'm not used to asking for what I want, or knowing what that is. Most of the last 8 years has really just happened to me. I've been like an ant following the trail come hell or high water. I spent a lot of time flicking ants like these off their trails on the floor of my tent just to see how they'd react when thrown off course. 

I don't know what to say about the fact that they generally scramble back on their previous trajectories but with greater resolve. 

Right now - I'm embracing the not knowing part of this entire journey - but I'm hitting the tuning fork repeatedly and holding it to my chest.

"In the end, it's about what you want to be, not what you want to have. When you sign up to run a marathon, you don't want a taxi to take you to the finish line." - Derek Sivers 

"You can't plan on the heart."

My Heart by Frank O’Hara

I’m not going to cry all the time
nor shall I laugh all the time,
I don’t prefer one “strain” to another.
I’d have the immediacy of a bad movie,
not just a sleeper, but also the big,
overproduced first-run kind. I want to be
at least as alive as the vulgar. And if
some aficionado of my mess says “That’s
not like Frank!”, all to the good! I
don’t wear brown and grey suits all the time,
do I? No. I wear workshirts to the opera,
often. I want my feet to be bare,
I want my face to be shaven, and my heart–
you can’t plan on the heart, but
the better part of it, my poetry, is open.

-Dallas Clayton

Soothing.

She said, "What do you do to comfort yourself?"

1. Move

2. Eat

3. Sleep

4. Create

5. Listen

...not necessarily in that order. 

"Live through this, and you won't look back."

"I have created myself a soul, big as the world, that leaks all over, and I have to keep calling for the plumber. I have to be rent and pulled apart and live according to the demons and the imagination in me. I'm restless. Things are calling me away. My hair is being pulled by the stars again.” 
― Anaïs Nin, Fire: From A Journal of Love - The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin

I was 22.

I was 22 when I started my own training business. I had no business really beginning. I started my business to survive. I started my business to be with a person who didn't love me. I started my business to help people, and to help myself.

That is, simply, how it all began.

I looked like this when I sat on my front stoop:

I wrote this then:

http://cbs3.com/topstories/Welch.Accident.Fatal.2.607116.html

Parle come magni. "Speak the way you eat", they say. 

So I will.

It seems it's my lot in the world to be around those who are grieving, to grieve myself when no one near me seems to be particularly bothered by a thing.  I'm sulky, what can I say? But I have always been this way: dreadfully happy, because life is so light when you allow it to be, and terribly broken, because life is simply, so hard.

And I still say, anyone left standing after the sun's gone down is brave. VERY BRAVE.  

I remember being small and attending prayer services with my mother that would last for hours.  Korean mothers lining the aisles weeping.  The sound rings in my ears.  

When I was 12, I watched my grandfather's life slip away from his face, like water running through your fingers, so tangible, but nothing you could grasp.  And I remember being fascinated by grief, by the absence of what was just there, by the finality.

And when I was older, I spent my weeks in music, in singing sappy songs crafted to bring forth emotion and allow people to feel that some greater being knew why.  And I would make people cry.  They would come up to me, eyes gleaming, hands shaking, faces pink with the glow of feeling: "The Spirit moves in you."

And how could I help but believe them?

My time in other countries plots me with roommates who have been sexually and physically abused, and those who bear the scars of abusing themselves through their insecurities, their need to see the wounds they cry about.  And I have seen real poverty. Social, psychological, economic poverty. Miles of waste down beautiful hillsides, the vibrations of bombs felt through sand on beaches, and addiction everywhere and to just about every thing.  My year as an RA was nothing short of one tragedy after another.  Rapes, suicides, deaths.  And on and on it goes.

And I'd be lying if I said I didn't have those wounds as well.

I'm not saying I've a magnet for sorrow and suffering so much as I'd just like to say that I'm awed by the prevalence of such things.  Because I forget just how horrible it can all be.

I've thought about this, an old Buddhist teaching: "The world is afflicted with death and decay, therefore the wise do not grieve, knowing the terms of the world."

And yet, there is a time for everything in the book of Ecclesiastes.  I have not learned to be wise, so much as patient.  

The terms of this world are that we can only ever do as much as is humanly possible.  And even if the Universe is a manifestation of loving Will, the truth of this place is the old cliche: death is a part of life.  How death comes, is brutal, unpartial.  Death is a blind judge as he should be.  As Life is.

And you say it over and over again to yourself until you realize that the particularly frustrating thing is that some part of you will never believe you're mortal.  Not really.  Because mortality is not a thing you are acquainted with.  We're led to believe in life from the moment we're born.

You're not given the terms of life before you walk into it.  You're thrust through like the rest of us and you learn the terms.  You learn just how bad it can get, just how little you must learn to appreciate, just how beautiful something so simple as time can be.

And so I'll say it like I eat it: I'd like to live life deeply.  I'd like to love my friends more, and continue to believe in the good, in spite-in spite-in spite of all the horrid things in myself, in people, in the world.  I'd like to be less afraid, and more brave about things that actually matter.  I'd like to fuck the terms of the world and be where I am as long as I can.  I'd like to create and wonder at creations.  And I can't say I'll ever stop searching for God like a man looks for water with his head on fire.  Because it matters.  THIS is it.

"Life's too short to make things last." -Haley Bonar

^^^^^^^^^^^
Who WAS this person?

I hate the phone.

"One day I will find the right words and they will be simple." 

- Jack Kerouac

“My dear, Don’t use the phone. 

People are never ready to answer it. Use poetry. 

Take pen and paper, and scribble words so utterly moving that whosoever reads them believes that the world is shaking and that, somewhere, mountains are crumbling. Write your ideas down. If they do take a hundred pages or more let them. Then condense them down to a few simple words. Let each of those words be like a shotgun; Let each hit the reader as if their life was at stake. Their soul! 

But… don’t use the phone." 

-JK, 1950

Dandelions in Aspen.

"To truly listen is to risk being changed forever."

A short passage from Mark Nepo, Book of Awakening: 

 “We all suffer, at times, from the effort to study something instead of living it. Or from the effort to fix or advise rather than to listen and to hold. So the first duty of love is to listen. When I think of times I have truly listened in my life – to the sea’s endless lapping, or to the sighs of my loved ones when they thought no one was near – it is receiving these simple truths that has made me a better person. So often when we refuse to listen, we become obsessed with remaking the world in our own image, rather than opening the spirit within us to the spirit of what is. At the deepest level, ours is not to make ourselves heard but to be still enough to hear. To truly listen is to risk being changed forever.”

Among other things, here's what I've been listening to lately: