Arnold Lobel

Books to the ceiling, Books to the sky, My pile of books is a mile high. How I love them! How I need them! I’ll have a long beard by the time I read them.”

“By means of meditation we can teach our minds to be calm and balanced; within this calmness is a richness and a potential, an inner knowledge which can render our lives boundlessly satisfying and meaningful. While the mind may be what traps us in unhealthy patterns of stress and imbalance, it is also the mind which can free us.”

Somewhere in between the metalry of the city and the wildness of the jungle.

My mind is lost in music, a cabin that has been overgrown in the jungle. For the first time in my life I’m beginning to desire to know music theory, like a person who suddenly realizes the value of an aesthetically upkept house.

The next few weeks will be spent cutting down vines, and clearing paths, organizing my thoughts and my mind.

My will to really play, to really learn, has been en hiatus for the past few years, and now–that I am back here in my hometown, it has imprisoned me again, this time it is burning me up and burning me out.

I haven’t really wanted to play music since Jonelle and I broke up. It was our thing. But now, it has reclaimed me and I am determined to start anew.

And all of this in the busiest portion of my summer. Working two jobs, weathering the winds of living with my parents again, and trying to stay humanitarian in my aims.

The sacrifice has been large, it has been in my writing and reading times; at the same time it is like the clouds of Indiana have slipped away and blue ridges and greenery have replaced it. I haven’t really felt depressed in a long time.

That is, until last night. I’m learning to make the transitions faster. Between college and home, dating and single. The romance of two and the romance of one. I’m not sure that I can explain it. I was reminded of this when I left the movie theater last night. The movie was a comedy but I was tragic when I left. Something struck inwardly, tying together my past relationships, my hurt and loneliness, into one sweeping overtone–experienced for but a brief moment, but re-experienced in aftershocks of emotional memory.

I’m different here, it’s hard to explain.

My feelings are still as abstract as ever, but my social life isn’t. Things aren’t so forced here.

It’s a cultural thing.

Wise men don’t judge: they seek to understand. - Fingers Pointing Toward the Moon by Wei Wu Wei…

there are angels in your angles.

Have you ever felt like you were meant for something, something very specific, and that nothing else would ever satisfy you—that everything else was just a passing between you and this very important meaning in your life?

I feel that way right now. What a lonely, light burden to carry—a source of the greatest joy imaginable, and hole in your heart until you’re there.

A cause for caring.

If in my desire to care for others, I care for them out of a compulsion to care for them, I do not care for them but for my compulsion. If in the action of caring for the homeless, it is done out of horror for injustice, or disgust for carelessness, I do not care for the homeless but for my disgust and horror.

Somewhere within, a love for others must resonate as an echo of love for myself. A love that is grounded in peace–not a maelstrom of emotional violence–and a love for God.

To take care of a person from obligation to duty, or out of holding a strong ideal–that is because it should be so–is not to take care of a person, but to wash myself of responsibility by the fulfillment of an ascription. This is my dishonest action, what I do when my heart is far from me. This is what I do when I think that I should be a certain way, rather than be who I am. This is how I act when I am ignoring myself, the truth of me anyway.

And if I am untruthful with myself, then how can I be truthful to others?

I cannot care for someone that I do not know. And yet the phrase repeats “love your neighbor as yourself.” Perhaps the one commandment that cannot be fulfilled by duty or ignoring myself.

Loving my neighbor begins with loving myself, but not this false-self that I think I should be, but myself which I ignore in light of duty, horror, and disgust so that I may seem better than I actually am. If I know myself, I know my neighbor, and if I know my neighbor I can love my neighbor for who they are–not who they should be.

There is also the converse, loving myself so much that I will welcome any and all favor even if it  does not belong to me. When I care for my neighbor, not out of disgust, horror, or duty, but because I want to be a caring person. Then I no longer am loving my neighbor or myself, but loving the appearance of something that I am not–namely of perceiving myself as good or kind.

When I care for my neighbor because I want to be something other than I am, this is perhaps one of the more dangerous untruths. It is similar to caring out of duty, but rather than caring out a duty to others, a duty which is not in the heart, in this case I am caring for my neighbor so that I can love and praise a dishonest image of who I am.

I am simply always acting out of something other than myself, I am acting out of a desire to change myself, not out of a love for myself–in all my limitations. I do not believe that God is calling me to change the world, but to change myself, a process which starts in being honest about who I am, in all of my natural desires.

All love begins in an inner peace, who’s roots grow in my inner-truth, a truth that’s source is a love for God. And so it is that all truth and love flows from God, a source that is not of me, but within me.

We are all abstract (and so are you).

My body may be concretely existent, but “I” am abstract. I am me, but I am also what you make me. My reality cannot be harnessed, nor can it be deflected. I simply am, until I will be no more. My body will remain but I will be gone.

I am not temporal, though I exist temporally. I am eternally now. My impact will remain after I am gone.

Listening to music is like floating on this abstraction, it is there, but for an eternal moment, then it is no more. But I remain forever changed. And music is the wave that carries me home.

Ginger Spam Salad - Serves 1, refrigerate overnight.

I just finished watching Rocket Science. A movie about a struggling stuttering kid who falls in love, and everything else falls apart. Life doesn’t always work out, and at some point you stop trying to figure it out, and you just learn to love where you are.

I found myself meditating on this as I was checking my email and saw this advertisement. “Ginger Spam Salad - Serves 1, refrigerate overnight.”

Because I love the unknown (irony).

Ginger spam salad must be the loneliest meal in the world, and the last half of the advertisement definitely captures that.

Somewhere in between rocket science and ginger spam salad falls my life. I just want to be happy with it. The drive to accomplish, to be something, to change the world, these are grandiose and enterprising. But they will never bring happiness. They will always lead to the chase for happiness.

I want to be happy with a ginger spam salad, that serves one, and is refrigerated overnight. I want to feel fulfilled in the moment.

Because I love the unknown.

Does anyone know where this quote came from?

“We can embody the truth, but we cannot know it.” — Yates(3/22)

It says “Yates” but I think they may have meant “Yeats”

I’ve never found this quote in a larger context.

Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it. - Buddha…

I’m not going to pretend I understand this.

But this is the strangest link ever.  An angel’s blog? Quite literally, linked to Elohim’s blog, as well as his ministry?

I’m sick and I have a fever, but I’m lucid enough to find this really weird.

http://galizur.wordpress.com/

Who put your habits into my life?

The clock blinks 12:37.

My social life sits on a shelf, covered in dust.

Another boring and lonely night is fading to pass.

I have become an uneven blend of contentment.

Staring into the mirror,

my history stares back at me.

It is whispering,

“Some pieces of her will never leave you.”

I spit into the sink.

I turn on the faucet,

and watch my past rinse away,

The toothbrush holder dings, with the sound of gravity.

They are all as much a part of me as I am of them, now.

A sad contentment, a dull satire, a mundane mix.

I thought this was appropriate.

I’m coming apart at the seams.

To be yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you somebody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can ever fight; and never stop fighting.
- e. e. cummings

When you understand, you cannot help but love. You cannot get angry. To develop understanding, you have to practice looking at all living beings with the eyes of compassion. When you understand, you love. And when you love, you naturally act in a way that can relieve the suffering of people.
-Thich Nhat Hanh

Believe nothing,
no matter where you read it
or who has said it,
not even if I have said it,
unless it agrees with your own reason
and your own common sense.
- Buddha

I’m writing, but I don’t want to be writing. I’m home but I don’t want to be home. I really feel without any creative impetus, without any desire to be.

It’s because I am home. Still trying to stay away from ‘just surviving’ but every time I am here, that’s what it ends up being.

Freedom is my out, but an out is never a cure, just an escape.

It’s late again.

And I am settling into my favorite part of the day to write. Too drowsy to analyze and powerfully control my thoughts the mind is free to create randomly and string together beautiful discordant thoughts and possibilities.

I live the strangest life, underneath my potential. I have the capacity to be shrewd, assiduous, and am only ever bound by my detachment and mercy. If I were merciless, no doubt, I would be successful. But for whatever reason, I have always let the gold lay hidden in the mountain, seen myself in the suffering of others, and tried my best to live a life without umbrage. I inherited my capabilities from my father, he’s a mean judge of character, and so am I. But the idea of using my potentials for self-gain, never quite settled well with me.

And so it is that I have pushed so hard against using my potentials for self-gain that I am in fact in need of finding a balance for my capabilities. I have downplayed them so much that whenever my keener nature shows, it is with great ardor that others dig in their heels. It can be as if the world is crying injustice, but it is in fact a very modest showing of my abilities and usually quite under par.

I’m only ruminating on this because, I just finished playing a board game. After finishing board games I’m always struck at how well I do, especially if it is far more strategy based than chance based. In the game, I can exact without any struggle the fullness of my meticulous nature. But more interesting is the way in which I can whole-heartedly indulge in mercilessness.

And here is how I would characterize it–there is a sense in which this world is far more merciless than I am. This I have seen many times; even in those around me. But the world does not measure mercy according to an external standard, rather it is a measure applied laterally–relative to how merciful said person has been in the past.

Thus it is that when I apply my keener nature, a great deal of surprise and repugnation shows itself at how ’selfish or less merciful’ I can be. Honestly, I’m just trying to healthily stick up for myself. I’m just trying to learn that balance. So if you could dispense with your loathing for a moment and consider this with a keener eye, we could move on.

Thank God for mercy though, without it, we’d all be hypocrites and law breakers.

Thank God for the fact that their is a higher nature within me that is far more keen than my earnestness, it keeps the whole person in check. It is not just moral thinking, it is more fundamental.

I have a preconceived notion.

I am staring into it, it is shaping my reality, it is shaping my future. All I have is immediacy and remembrance. But the future is unknown, and a preconceived notion is a structure for this future.

It is daring, treacherous, and uncertain. It is 550 miles away from here. It is the next 3 months of my life. It is possible, but not actual, certain but not necessary.

And you will be here, soon. And I will miss the possibilities that, that could have meant.

At last a peaceful end to a long day, a joyously tilled heart.

It’s 2:26 and I am wide awake.—I’m excited; my mind is sharp and I am excited. But my excitement takes shape underneath a bland dullness, the satisfaction of a hard days work.  This is a desirable drowsiness.  I’m thinking of Derrida, structuralism, and you.

Your smile, a nod of understanding. (It’s inspiring). Your excitement, and a wall of misunderstanding that sometimes separates us. I want to scale this wall, but I am unsure if I can.  It is not insurmountable, it is a mystery.

As my friend put it, we are multifaceted, and to thrive we must have someone that touches all of these facets. Your wall, is a facet that I don’t interface with easily—readily. That scares me.

But this fantasy world doesn’t. The one in which I can think of you and Derrida in the same breath. I will build a structure, and you can undo it—you’re stubborn in your questioning (and that helps).

There is something about the way in which your hair parts, how it drapes across your face, something European, French almost. It’s cute, and endearing, and as playful as your smile. At least they match, but more than in just the way that a hat matches a scarf.

I no longer know if it is something I am remembering about you, or if you have taken on a form of your own , an imagination. Whichever it may be, I am happy with it, with you. And in my mind, a seed is taking shape amongst the black soil of the heart, it is a seed of possibility. (And how possibility breeds hope!)

Sleep well, young seed, tomorrow brings chance.

Excogitate.

The wildness of this scene around me, engulfing me, pressure. An empty room, a rotating world, a world revolving. I am in this empty room, the world swirls about me.

(And it’s wildness is possessing me). I will not be pressured. The strength of the self, holds it back. I am becoming something (out of my control). It is wild, it is subconscious, it is preconscious.

Do I have a choice? My planning, my action, the schemes, they all come to unknown ends. I am different. It is is explication, it is language, it is mine. Translate me. (It is wild).

The imagination breathes. An exhale forms words. There is no lexicon, no dictionary, only intuition and guessing. The wonder of it all, this empty room–the sands of time wearing me down.

It is fundamental, it is semantic, it is syntactical, it is me. My structure, my reality, my subject–expressing itself. Grasp it–melt it down–bring it to its knees and recogitate it.

No applause, originality amounts to nothing, an empty room. Here lies my heart, my brain splayed open on the floor–dust settling.

I found your love letter today.

And I couldn’t help it, I cried without tears. I sat there frozen in the hallway outside my old room, staring at the roof where we used to stargaze. For the length of the letter I was back there, with you, holding you. I could smell your hair, and feel the cool breeze of the summer night.

You are a silhouette drawn on the wall of my mind, the outline still lingers, but you have gone. Your words, tattooed, on my heart, forever remind me.