"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

Pushing.

I think I may start posting a bit more about what I am thinking about my training here. Other mediums are for every everyone else, and for the biz. This medium is for me. 💃🏻

The lizard brain is hungry, scared, angry, and horny.

The lizard brain only wants to eat and be safe.

The lizard brain will fight (to the death) if it has to, but would rather run away. It likes a vendetta and has no trouble getting angry. 

The lizard brain cares what everyone else thinks, because status in the tribe is essential to its survival. 

A squirrel runs around looking for nuts, hiding from foxes, listening for predators, and watching for other squirrels. The squirrel does this because that's all it can do. All the squirrel has is a lizard brain. 

The only correct answer to 'Why did the chicken cross the road?' is 'Because it's lizard brain told it to.' Wild animals are wild because the only brain they posses is a lizard brain 

The lizard brain is not merely a concept. It's real, and it's living on the top of your spine, fighting for your survival. But, of course, survival and success are not the same thing.

The lizard brain is the reason you're afraid, the reason you don't do all the art you can, the reason you don't ship when you can. The lizard brain is the source of the resistance. 

 - Seth Godin, Linchpin

"You are most yourself when you are alone."

How to be a Poet (to remind myself)

Make a place to sit down. 
Sit down. Be quiet. 
You must depend upon 
affection, reading, knowledge, 
skill—more of each 
than you have—inspiration 
work, growing older, patience, 
for patience joins time 
to eternity… 

Breathe with unconditional breath 
the unconditioned air. 
Shun electric wire. 
Communicate slowly. Live 
a three-dimensional life; 
stay away from screens. 
Stay away from anything 
that obscures the place it is in. 
There are no unsacred places; 
there are only sacred places 
and desecrated places. 

Accept what comes from silence. 
Make the best you can of it. 
Of the little words that come 
out of the silence, like prayers 
prayed back to the one who prays, 
make a poem that does not disturb 
the silence from which it came.

― Wendell Berry, Given

Mt. Zion, Israel, 2006

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've really got to stop buying books of poetry...

Utah, 2015.

The Journey

One day you finally knew

what you had to do, and began,

though the voices around you

kept shouting

their bad advice – - -

though the whole house

began to tremble

and you felt the old tug

at your ankles.

‘Mend my life!’

each voice cried.

But you didn’t stop.

You knew what you had to do,

though the wind pried

with its stiff fingers

at the very foundations – - -

though their melancholy

was terrible. It was already late

enough, and a wild night,

and the road full of fallen

branches and stones.

But little by little,

as you left their voices behind,

the stars began to burn

through the sheets of clouds,

and there was a new voice,

which you slowly

recognized as your own,

that kept you company

as you strode deeper and deeper

into the world,

determined to do

the only thing you could do – - – determined to save

the only life you could save.

- Mary Oliver

Here is what I know about now.

The view from Chalet Bellevue

Do you take pride in your hurt? Does it make you seem large and tragic? ...Well, think about it. Maybe you're playing a part on a great stage with only yourself as audience.  - John Steinbeck, East of Eden 

 Deciding every morning to set my feet down there are some days where every part of me wants to walk away from everything here. 

Literally everything. 

 Other days, I'm in love with it all. 

 Here is what I know:

I love to run in a rainstorm more than anything and have looked for these storms since I was 16. I love the exhilaration of working so hard that I'm a complete wreck. I love the loss of all pretense. I love thunder and lightning. I love forgetting what I look like. 

 I love learning, and feeling into what the body knows all on its own before I do. I love a new page, a sharpened pencil, and a fresh start. I love to stack the deck against myself and walk into a room knowing that I am being challenged by what is in front of me. 

 I love the physical. I love touch, movement, breath, and beauty wherever I find it. I want to sit with it, study it, feel it, photograph it, and mull it over until I have tasted it long enough to remember it when it is not there. Every person I've ever met has a shade to me, a pattern that I can see in my mind's eye when I'm not with them - and I love that. 

 I love a walk in the woods; the green canopy, the sense of adventure, the wild, wide road of possibility. I love a walk in the woods with no obligation for the day, with stops along the way, with time to climb, step, cross, and sit. The smell itself is a memory all on its own. 

 I love the voice inside - the deepest most sacred part of our selves, the part that you have to become so very still to really hear. I love that part of me. I love that it is always there. 

 I love truth-telling. Wine, and a moment to see the flush of passion in a person's face. "Dust thou art to dust returnest, was not spoken of the soul." Give me the rawest truth; the truth that we are afraid to say, to live. Tell me your story. 

 I love the real people. The ones that I see across from me every day - that open doors to all kinds of worlds. The more I listen the more I see everything that I have been missing: all of the assumptions I have made about who a person is, what they want, what I think ought to happen for them. The more I seek to give, the more I see what I have been given. I believed I was here to make things known or better, but I see now, I am only here to bear witness - to develop a better question. But I love the moment when I see this, and I unclasp my hand... and let it be. 

 Love, is a kind of wonder, a kind of fascination, and these are things that I truly love. Love is awe, and deep abiding respect for the other. Love is a sense of recognition ringing in the heart. These are the things that send joy surging from somewhere dead inside me - like a name I have not been called in years by someone who loved me, someone who knew me as a child.

 The beginning of our happiness lies in the understanding that life without wonder is not worth living.  

- Abraham Joshua Heschel