Wednesday, March 26, 2025

Invierno Numero Uno


 "The true horror of existence is not the fear of death, but the fear of life. It is the fear of waking up each day to face the same struggles, the same disappointments, the same pain. It is the fear that nothing will ever change, that you are trapped in a cycle of suffering that you cannot escape. And in that fear, there is a desperation, a longing for something, anything, to break the monotony, to bring meaning to the endless repetition of days."

- Albert Camus, The Fall



I think we can officially say that we have survived our first Omaha winter, and it really wasn't that bad, though just about everyone agrees that the winters here have not been as intense as they once were. The worst of this winter was bearable, even with a job that had me on the streets. There was an ice storm in December that was pretty shady, but for the most part, it was so cold when it snowed that it was like piled dust that you could clear away with a leaf blower.  We did accidentally miss this last storm, though, because we happened to be on an exotic spring-break vacation in Kansas City. We continue living the dream.

Friday, March 21, 2025

The Love That Will Not Die

"On the journey of the warrior-bodhisattva, the path goes down, not up, as if the mountain pointed toward the earth instead of the sky. Instead of transcending the suffering of all creatures, we move toward turbulence and doubt however we can. We explore the reality and unpredictability of insecurity and pain, and we try not to push it away. If it takes years, if it takes lifetimes, we let it be as it is. At our own pace, without speed or aggression, we move down and down and down. 

With us move millions of others, our companions in awakening from fear. At the bottom we discover water, the healing water of bodhichitta. Bodhichitta is our heart- our wounded, softened heart. Right down there in the thick of things, we discover the love that will not die. This love is bodhichitta. It is gentle and warm; it is clear and sharp; it is open and spacious. The awakened heart of bodhichitta is the basic goodness of all beings." ~ Pema Chödrön

The recent video we did about how we met got me thinking about the book that I happened to have with me when we found ourselves in Wonder Valley, Comfortable With Uncertainty. I decided it might be time to revisit this beautiful little book of 108 easily digestible meditations, which isn't even on the list of notable books published by Pema on Gampo Abbey's website. I should probably expand my Pema library, but this is the work that found me in that moment, for reasons and from places that I can’t possibly remember, during a time in my life when I was going through beautiful books like toilet paper.

I needed the books, and I needed to translate everything on that blog every day to process all that information. That is something that has slowly disappeared from my life, and I miss it, but I also don’t. I am ready for the next movement of my life to find me and flow, but I still have no idea what that looks like; I am still sitting in how everything is supposed to be and waiting for that synaptic explosion of our collective evolution into everything and nothing.

That makes sense, right? *upside-down smiley face*

I should probably mention that while I am dabbling with Pema’s little rays of sunshine, I am also still trying to process Dispenza’s Becoming Supernatural, so the one who is watching me have this human experience is wondering why the human me experiencing this is watching the one and all who is watching wonder why the human me is reading Pema again while struggling to be the human me watching the witness witnessing this.


……….. I know.


Just….. bear with me for a little bit.

Saturday, November 30, 2024

Color in Dreams

I dreamt the other night that all my ceremonial whites were stained by color bleeding from the washer, but it wasn’t my ceremonial whites, it was my regular clothes that were stained different colors and patterns, and I had to bleach all my clothes to get them white again. That could mean anything from feeling like I’ve lost that “ceremonial white” attitude, to dealing with the institutional mourning of my medicine family.

In that same sequence of dreams, there was also one where I took all the color stickers off a Rubik’s cube and polished it so that it would be more cool and unique for the girls, only to realize that I could no longer solve the cube with no colors to guide me. The base cube was, of course, black… and useless without color, which I had previously removed from my whites.




I’m getting mixed messages here, unconscious.

Friday, November 15, 2024

The River


This is my advice to foreigners:   
 call it simply—the river;
 never say old muddy
 or even Missouri,
 and except when it is necessary   
 ignore the fact that it moves.   
 
It is the river, a singular,
 stationary figure of division.
Do not allow the pre-Socratic   
to enter your mind except
when thinking of clear water trout   
streams in north central Wyoming.   

The river is a variety of land,   
a kind of dark sea or great bay,   
sea of greater ocean.
At times I find it good discipline   
to think of it as a tree
rooted in the delta,
a snake on its topmost western branch.   

These hills are not containers;   
they give no vantage but that   
looking out is an act of transit.   
We are not confused,
we do not lose our place.

Michael Anania

Wednesday, November 13, 2024

Nine of Art; Six of Heart

erodes the line between being and place becomes the place of being time and so the house turns in the snow is why a ghost always has the architecture of a storm The architect tore down room after room until the sound stopped. A ghost is one among the ages at the edge of a cliff empty sails on the bay even when a ship or the house moves off in fog asks you out loud to let the stranger in ~ Cole Swensen

Tuesday, November 12, 2024

Before the Coffee Gets Cold


"Don't leave anything for later.

Later, the coffee gets cold.

Later, you lose interest.

Later, the day turns into night.

Later, people grow up.


Later, people grow old.

Later, life goes by.

Later, you regret not doing something...

When you had the chance.





Life is a fleeting dance, a delicate balance of moments that unfold before us, never to return in quite the same way again.







Regret is a bitter pill to swallow, a weight that bears down upon the soul with the burden of missed chances and unspoken words.







So, let us not leave anything for later. Let us seize the moments as they come, with hearts open and arms outstretched to embrace the possibilities that lie before us. 







For in the end, it is not the things we did that we regret, but the things we left undone, the words left unspoken, the dreams left unfulfilled."



         ~ Toshikazu Kawaguchi

Saturday, October 19, 2024

Analysis Paralysis

I often feel like I’ve lost my voice, but I really never found my voice.  I thought I did.  In my thirties I yelled with that voice at whoever I thought could understand it, but I really alienated more souls than I helped, even though all I was doing was trying to help…in my own little version of philosophizing with a hammer, but with healing through creativity. I was confident in that philosophically creative excursion because everyone always said that one finds their voice in their thirties. The realization that little to no one was paying attention just made me yell louder because I thought that was it; now or never.

I struggled with that for over a decade, until I finally rested… much closer to never than now….. now… I feel like never would be a vast improvement to the lack of inspiration I feel.  Right after I posted about probate being over and my roadtrip back to Nebraska… a month and a half ago… I wrote a post about a huge paradigm shift in my creative equipment, but quickly reverted it to draft because I felt stupid.  I used to put so much importance on being loyal to Canon for over 30 years, and switching my creative flow over to Sony felt way more important than it actually is… especially when what I hope to do with it seems like a distant dream.  I’m getting too old for dreams.

Hiding that post, and realizing that my voice should be focused on way more important things, kicked me back into creative apathy.  What is the actual point?  Maybe I’m still stuck in that Bufo existential crisis?  Maybe this is what never feels like, and I have completely missed the opportunity of now?  I just want to accomplish something significant, something my kids and grandkids can be proud of, but I am far from excited about it, and no one around me seems to be either.  Maybe that’s just the energy of middle America?  

I wanted to do a whole video in San Diego with “Maya” and I talking about quitting our lives and living on the road.  I had the whole thing planned out with a voiceover talking about the magical and exotic land of… *camera opens to us sitting on camping chairs in grandma’s garage*… Chula Vista, California.  That didn’t happen, like nothing really happened on the road like I planned it out. There wasn’t time to really do anything amongst the constant stimulation and movement.  

I’m grateful to have learned to truly live in the moment with my family, without the constant need to capture and edit and post and maniacally check on likes and responses, but I also feel like we have almost been left with nothing to show for it, including this kind of lack of excitement to keep moving forward with any kind of passion. I’m still not sure if this feeling isn’t simply a kind of guilt that I missed that opportunity, or more importantly, didn’t have the courage and talent to truly capture it. 

Living in the now with my family, and appreciating the now of my family, was kind of the nail in the now or never coffin. And I feel like enough dirt has been shoveled on said coffin that my nails are raw from scratching at the Edgar Allan Poe metaphor.  That didn’t make any sense, though taphophobia beautifully describes how I’m feeling creatively. 



What am I doing, going on and on about my own experience? How selfishly silly of me. The whole reason why we’re here is because of the girls and their desire to experience school, which we couldn’t do in the state of absurdly strict rules and regulations cleverly masked as liberal freedoms. The girls are absolutely thriving in school, thanks to my partner’s homeschooling preparation, though there were some pretty rough learning curve moments in the first couple weeks where the world may or may not have ended just about every night.


V is getting into futbol. Both the girls are learning piano. A cat adopted us, named St. Thomas of Tabasco… at least that’s what I call him. With school and my new boring job, the adventures are few, and the creative accomplishment fewer. I still don’t feel like there’s time for anything. Maybe that’s just what getting old feels like? Maybe everything will slow back down in ten years when the girls whirl off into their individual human experiences? Maybe there will always be something making us feel like we don’t really have enough time?

To quote the immortal Spiros, “You work, and then you die.” Work for me looks like writing this while sitting on the back of a FedEx bulk truck behind an Omaha Target, waiting for a pick-up window to open. Not nearly as romantic as living in an old movie theatre, but there is some poetic ring to the irony of this existence. Sadly, there are probably only three people on the planet who can truly appreciate that I work for Federal Express, and we bank at Wells Fargo.

That certainly makes me smile most days, which is all any of us can really wish for in this life. I really do plan on posting more than once every couple months. I really do. Creative accomplishment is in the doing, not the talking about doing, and when you have grown accustomed to the doing not being did, doing the doing is difficult… regardless of why we’re here… and regardless of what we’re doing. 


I feel like there have been a lot of maybes in this little update, but maybe this is what evolution is?  The kids grow; we grow; things change; we do the best we can to keep up and keep going... keep searching for our voice and place in this world.