Made of Stone, Thinking, Choices, Identification of Behavior

The thing with this is, due to true experience, I can smell it sooner. This is good. This is also bad, reacting, while it can save my life, can also have me seeing zebras when all that is present is white and black. Maybe this is all still me on the inside when I am screaming and I think that expression is making it to the outside and being erased, I am wrong. Sometimes keeping my side of the street clean looks a LOT like giving others excuses for their own behavior, a lot like enabling abuse. I wish for strong people around me who can handle when I need to blow up and use music to speak more loudly for me and to forgive me when I am mistaken.

I wonder how many times someone makes a choice to give up a thing they wish to express to me because they do not wish to weigh upon me. I am quite sure that it happens. The thought makes me glad and full of sorrow at once that I might inflict what has me feeling like nothing, upon another who is giving me the gift of them.

I wonder if this too, is just life. If the process isn’t to an end, how is there balance? I’ll be rather angry and laugh if the answer is like what I hear in my head. It’s like the law of large numbers.

I REALLY HATE BEING INVISIBLE. and yet, I really like being invisible. If I cannot work that out, how the hell can I expect someone else to do so. Bad, bad form Elisa!

Morning Trip (104)

“The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.”
–Friedrich Nietzsche

“To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.”
–e. e. cummings

Morning Trip (102)

“There have been times when I think we do not desire heaven but more often I find myself wondering whether, in our heart of hearts, we have ever desired anything else. You may have noticed that the books you really love are bound together by a secret thread. You know very well what is the common quality that makes you love them, though you cannot put it into words: but most of your friends do not see it at all, and often wonder why, liking this, you should also like that. Again, you have stood before some landscape, which seems to embody what you’ve been looking for all your life; and then turned to the friend at your side who appears to be seeing what you saw – but at the first words a gulf yawns between you, and you realize that this landscape means something totally different to him, that he is pursuing an alien vision and cares nothing for the ineffable suggestion by which you were transported. Even in your hobbies, has there not always been some secret attraction which the others are curiously ignorant of – something, not to be identified with, but always on the verge of breaking through, the smell of cut wood in the workshop or the clap-clap of water against the boat’s side? Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it. All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it – tantalizing glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest – if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself – you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say ‘Here at last is the thing I was made for.’ We cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the thing we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work. While we are, this is. If we lose this, we lose all.”
– C. S. Lewis

Intimate Inventory

Morning Trip (74)

“It is only an error in judgment to make a mistake, but it shows infirmity of character to adhere to it when discovered”
–Christian Nevell Bovee

Morning Trip (71)

When the Sky Clears
“The drop grows happy by losing itself in the river.
A pain when beyond human range becomes something else.

One man’s heart died when he insisted on treating his own problems.
Sometimes people solve jute knots by rubbing them on rocks.

Since I am weak, I sigh instead of weeping.
My experience tells me that water can change and become air.

The sky abruptly clears following thick clouds and heavy rain.
The clouds, recognizing separation, cried and vanished into non-existence.

We make the back of the mirror green in order to see our faces.
Sometimes nature makes the front of the mirror green as well.

We love seeing the beauty of poppies and lilies.
When the eyes lose themselves in the colors, they are seeing at last.”
– Ghalib
translated by Robert Bly

Livin’ On The Edge

Morning Trip (56)

Art must unquestionably have a social value; that is, as a potential means of communication it must be addressed, and in comprehensible terms, to the understanding of mankind.
Rockwell Kent