http://www.charitywater.org/donate/
Every day, someone does something amazing. Someone changes an old habit, someone turns a new leaf, or breaks new ground in their life. If you have never given money to help people less fortunate than yourself, take a moment to think about that. Especially if you live well, make lots of money, drive a luxury car; how much would it hurt to help give someone some water.
I want to pound the Earth and shake like revolutions.
Back to facing fear. Standing in the middle of what makes you afraid. Just standing there. It’s so human to act, to do. It’s so normal to behave. It’s in each one of us in it’s own way. Fear. Ego. Call it what you want. Selfishness. The next question is, why would I want to overcome that? What is wrong with being a product of me? But, is it really you? What would we be without it? Jesus talked about it a lot. Turn the other cheek. Give to the poor. Give your stuff away, all of it. I don’t know what it would take to get me there. What is wrong about that kind of thinking is it assumes that I have to be “there” before I can do anything. Sacrifice. To quote a wise man from the Degobah System, “Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.” I have found that I am afraid of something. It’s a normal fear and justified. It’s attached to suffering and hate. It makes me behave in a certain way. It makes me be a certain way. I look around and see this fear in a lot of places. Mostly in things I don’t want to do. What does it mean to just stand in the middle of what makes you afraid. What does it mean to face your fear? I guess I need to go and figure it out. The outcome may not be what I want or expect, but that’s part of it. Letting go, giving up, being content, however you want to word it. Normally I would want to pray about something until I felt okay with the idea or just forgot about it. But I can’t get the vision of cutting off handcuffs out of my head. Of snapping them and someone else being freed. My stomach knots up like it hasn’t in a long time when I think about it. Questions like, “What good would that really do?” “You know what’s going to happen so there’s no reason to do anything.” “Just give it time, let all the sharp edges wear away.” “Don’t gravel.” “Make them do what you want.” “Take the path of least resistance, it’s normal and healthy. God made us how we are for a reason.” “Do it tomorrow?”
Face what you cannot face. You know exactly what that is.
When fire dwindles
The end of a candle cut in half
When punctuation starts the sentence
An ellipsis dropped in blood
When rocking on heels, leaning back and then forward
According to the wind and the inner ear
And the winner sleeps alone
The winter dies alone
Change the channel now
Black and white and hiss is better
Change your mind now
A new one suits you better
Change the world into pieces and parts for the poor
Long lost legends eaten away
While trucks meander on
While trucks break down
I am such a product. A product of my environment, my surroundings, what I surround myself with. How can anyone know who they really are when we are so affected by circumstance? The slightest thing turns my head like land does the eyes of a sea captain. And by thing I mean anything, material, social, relational, physical. As if, though, what we are affected by defines who we are. As if we are what we do. We are not our wallets. We are not our marital status. We are not our jobs or what kind of car we drive. To say that is one thing, but to live is another. Dave and I talked about this over dinner at Chili’s. He used the term “content.” I use the term “giving up.” At some point, we, I, you have to give up and say, “I just can’t be everything. I’m just an incomplete person with baggage and a ‘history’ and people have to accept me for who and what I am, period.” And when it comes to dating, marriage, love, ect, if you find that person who thinks the sun shines out your ass, through thick and thin. When you’re down or up, broke or rich, type A or type B, leading or following or getting in the way, good, bad, whatever, they think the world of you, you’ve really found someone worth keeping around. And if a person just up and leaves someone like that, then, their bad. They’re the one who is missing out. They fucked up, wether they see it or not. And if someone is left behind by someone who they genuinely love, the sun shines darker for months, the earth spins slower, the stars don’t shine and meaning is sucked out of everything. I’m speaking from experience. Dave talked about being content in whatever kind of situation. I call it giving up. I call it admitting failure and just giving the fuck up. Toughing out the storm, the tears and the heart ache and the anger and confusion to see the sun shine on the other side. If you’re one of those who got dumped and left, I’m not saying there is any easy answer. I’m not saying it’s possible to just roll over start flying. If you can, you weren’t genuinely in love. What I’m saying is, for lack of a better term, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Be certain of who you are, don’t doubt you. Whatever you do, do not doubt you. You were never wrong for giving yourself in love. You never did anything wrong or drove that person away, it was her or him who wasn’t right. It takes a certain amount of being able to love yourself before you can love someone else wholly, and if they couldn’t love you as much, that says more about them than you. That still doesn’t make things any better, but don’t you believe for one second anything negative about you. Chances are, they doubted themselves more that they ever doubted you. It will always hurt when love is not returned, but don’t think for one second that you are “needy” or “clingy” for still loving them and wanting them back. Don’t think for a moment you did anything wrong by trying to get them back. I fucking hate that shitty things happen on this planet, but they do. People get influenced by their parents, friends, idealistic ideas in their heads and leave someone who loves them more than anything else on the planet and, for whatever reason, think they did the right thing. And maybe they did, but who, honestly, knows? Who can honestly claim that?
I hate how things change out from under me. I’m like, “Fuck, I really liked that.” Regaurdless of other people or the long run. Then God shows me how things are better when they are changed. Like the future would suck if nothing ever changed. Me right now, would be a lump, a pacified lump if I didn’t change. And the change is sublime, subtle and echoes into the lives of everyone around me. Not that I’m special, I think everyone who wants to grow positively effects those around them. What kills me though, what brings me to my knees, what ruins me is the thought that I might settle again. I might become pacified and not challenge myself or those around me. If God has taught me anything in life, it’s to question everything, even Him, and hang on to what is real. And what is real is not defined in matter and energy. What is real cannot be checked off a list or filled in the blanks. What is real takes one hundred years to realize. What is real shakes things in vibrations siesmographs can’t detect. Slow. Steady. Consistant. I would align myself with that if I could, but I’m too unsteady, speedy and inconsistant to. I’ll come as close as I can, and that will have to do.
and who said molecues will collide
who said particles obey rules
we discover their ways
their rules
and we will adapt unimperically
in a universe of infinate possibilities, we have every possibility simultaneously
Outreach. What does it mean to reach out? Meet perceived needs? Evangelize? Demonstrate love? Feed? Give? Why do people need to be reached out to? Do they need to be reached out to? So many live in welfare and poverty like a very comfortable, inescapable trap like the ones wolves chew their own legs off to get out of. So many live in dust covered stacks of junk they’ll never go through. In destructive lifestyles. In front of huge HDTV’s. In arrogant apathy, and indifference. I’m not after social reform, primarily, I’m after healing in people’s hearts. Social reform can only do so much. It can change the landscape of need to a limited extent. What people need is healing. Whether they realize it or not, they need to be emotionally and mentally healed. What I mean by that is, why do people stay in poverty? Why do people continue destructive habits, even through generations? Why do they repeat their parent’s mistakes? I believe it goes back to human brokenness. “Baggage.” Human corruption. Not corruption like greed, murder, stealing, embezzlement, but corruption like a corrupt computer file. Corruption that can only be fixed by the One who wrote the file and has “how it should be” memorized and can reconstruct, line by line, that file. Healing of the human heart that only Jesus can do. Why do I believe He can heal people? Even if you think there isn’t a God, you have to admit the universe came from somewhere. You might say something about the big bang. When theoretic physicists calculate the age the universe all the way back to Planck Time, their equations blow up at about five milliseconds after the big bang. Their math can’t explain the big bang. Something had to cause it, and, even as empirical and scientific as we can get, we can’t explain it. I believe God caused it, all of it, wrote those equations, wrote the program on which the universe runs, wrote Superstrings, wrote us, line by line wrote us and He wants to rewrite us.
I had been struggling, for the longest time with feeling like a man. Everything I did, I felt like a little kid and had to have someone else to hold my hand, take care of me, lead me on, wipe my nose and say, “Blow.” Even dumb stuff, like paying the bills and checking my bank account. Some of that can be contributed to sitting on my ass playing video games. Some of that can be attributed to my weird artistic/creative psychology. Some of it can be attributed to the fact that, in our television, fast food, microwave, everything is provided for me, right now, high-speed, HD culture, our fathers never told us we were men.
In ancient cultures, a boy was taken into the woods to complete a task like, kill a bear, kill a deer, survive for a month alone, travel, and, when he returned dripping in bear guts carrying a dead deer from the far valley, he was a man. Bar Mitzvah. For the most part, that doesn’t exist in the U.S. Becoming a man means you make a certain dollar amount, drive car that’s worth so much, own a house, have a family, have things, lost of things. This whole mid life crisis thing wouldn’t happen if men had to drag the carcass to camp, use all it’s parts, eat the whole thing, fend for themselves, find out they’re made out of solid iron and steel powered by plutonium and dynamite, loyalty and faithfulness, strength and courage. I don’t think every guy has to go off into the woods and go hand to hand with wildlife, though that’s not a bad start. I guess each person would need something different. I guarantee divorce wouldn’t happen so often if men were men (and women were women, but I’m not going to write on that). (And TV doesn’t help. I hate how much of a pushover many of the men are. Like “Friends,” funny or not, all of the guys on that show are sissies; pushover, where’s my diaper, I can’t take the heat for my own actions, little boys.) If we weren’t corrupt in that way. If we weren’t broken in that way, what would we become? A girl at the bar told me, “Happy.” Like a pretentious ass, I said, “But is happiness the point of life.” She said, “ We already talked about that. You said there is no one point in life.” I wanted that in my heart to be healed. I wanted my Bar Mitzvah. I didn’t want to feel like a little kid anymore. I didn’t want to feel like I needed someone to take care of me. After two of the hardest months in my life, I heard the Spirito Sante say to me, “You know all that stuff about being a man? About moving from boyhood to manhood? You just passed.” If I were more of a crier, I would have cried. I was standing there in dirty Mexico, on a dirt floor, hearing an interrupted by the translator sermon on some other topic, and He said that to me. I almost sat down under the weight of it. I could see my whole life like a math equation and I was looking at the answer. Like a line of code with no errors. Like Superstrings. Everything added up and made sense and I knew I was made out of earthquakes and mountains. I felt like the motor that effortlessly lifts an elevator up and down hundreds of stories for years and years.
I had planned to go to Africa to see what I was made of, have my own makeshift Bar Mitzvah. Just buy a plane ticket, land, brush the dirt off and see what happened next. I’m still going to do that, not to find out what I’m made of, but to test it. Not to find God, but to find more of God. If you asked me, a month ago, why I needed to find more of God or God at all, I would have said to become a better person. I might or might not have said to impress some girl or other. If you asked me now, I wouldn’t know how to answer. I just know people need Him, His healing, His love, and I can’t even begin to tell them that or about that if I don’t know it myself. If I don’t know Him like my father.
How do you stop an entire nation from raping the earth? So much of our lives are wrapped up in these little gadgets. So much of our time is spent staring into a screen of some kind. My future depends on my ability to state into a screen and manipulate things on it. So many jobs start and end with technology. So many people depend on technology for their livelihood. I’m one of them. I’m a graphic designer. So much of our entertainment is technology based. Companies like Apple and Microsoft want to fill our homes with their gadgets and things. If it were up to them, they would make everything, even food, so we would need them to survive. That’s not far from the truth. In fact, the ones with the control you may never hear about, or know their names. It would seem they want their fingers and tentacles in every aspect of our lives. They want us to stare at them all day long. I writing this from this side of the fence. I wish one of the very rich people on the planet would read this and think. I want the CEO of some global capitalistic corporation to read this and think. I want him or her to see what is happening and what they have the power to do. How do you stop a nation from text messaging the planet away? Maybe with enough time, we’ll all be driving hydrogen powered cars that don’t harm the atmosphere. Maybe with enough money, we will be able to implant things in our heads so we won’t have to buy millions of cell phones every year. My life was very simple until I got a cell phone. Suddenly, I’m responsible for all of these bits of communication. Suddenly, I’m always connected to people not near me at all. I have the opportunity to reach anyone at any time. Even my parents have one. Maybe with enough time, we’ll become a communal mind. If that happens, I would let everyone know that we need to stop spending money on neon signs to hang in our houses for people to come over and see. I would let everyone know that we need to help people in a poor country were a dictator has been hurting people with out account. I would let all of the rich people know that they need to help the needy. I would let the credit bureaus know that they should cancel debt altogether every seven years and then I would let all of the people who spend lots of money they don’t have on new cell phones and ipods and flat screen tv’s that they shouldn’t be trying to own things they don’t need and at such a high cost (not just money). I watched a video about how consumerism is hurting the planet. It made me think about all of the ipods I have owned. It made me think about how many people I know who have had one and it broke after just a year. My friend says it’s a form of control. They keep us preoccupied with ipods breaking after a year and then, conveniently, a new one comes out. I’m not saying these people want other people around the world to suffer. I’m not saying they don’t care about the homeless or the needy. I am saying that most of America doesn’t care enough. We aren’t willing to give anything up to help them. Who would sell their precious shit to help someone else? I have an Xbox sitting on my shelf I have not played in months. Why do I hang on to it? “Because it’s mine, I bought it.” Or does Microsoft have a very powerful hold on that shelf? If I did sell it I would probably buy something else for me. I need a guitar amp and a pre-amp to record some songs I’ve written. I would probably use it for that. What I should do is just sell it and give the money away. All of it. I’ve heard about people who have a right attitude about money and stuff. They’re always giving money away. I don’t think I can write up a check list of good behavior regarding money and then fill it. I have to come to the conclusion of those checks from my own experience. I want to have a right attitude about money. And about stuff. I’ve heard people say they don’t regret anything. I think they’re full of shit. I regret all of the time I spent with all of this stuff. I regret all of the money I have spent or borrowed to spend on stuff. I regret that I caused harm to the planet while being selfish. I hate that I couldn’t see past my own wants to see what is really going on. This isn’t a manifesto of, “I’m a new man.” This is a retrospective on how I got caught up in the obsession with things and stuff. They had even become more important than relationships (which is too much to write about this time).
What scares me is that I’m average. I’m probably the most average person I know. I’m exactly in the middle on so many things. I’m like everyone. If I’ve had three ipods in the past three years, if I get a new cell phone every time I can, if I buy new video games as often as they come out and old ones when no new ones come out, if I spend hours entertaining myself, then what about the 300 million other people in this country? I read a statistic that America goes through something like 30,000 sell phones a day. That’s over 10 million a year! If you got all of them together and looked what a big pile of stuff that is… If one tenth of America buys a new ipod every time Apple comes out with a new one, that’s 30 million ipods that get thrown away every year. Something is definitely wrong on the face of the planet. I call it consumerism and its most rampant here in America.
I am surprised by how corrupt my heart is. The only honest thing I can do want honesty. People confuse openness and transparency for honesty. At least in my head, openness and transparency were just forms of covering my ass. Just a way to say, “There will be no question later because right now I shared everything.” Is that bad? Is it good? It’s not honest. Honestly, it’s pretty selfish. In this book I’m reading, this guy talks about how when people are “in love,” its really selfish. Being “in love” is all about how the individual feels and no one is really looking out for the other person’s well being or interested in their growth and that one thing that makes relationships last is being able to grow past that. The only thing I can honestly do is seek honesty. The only thing I can really mean is that I really want to mean something. The only genuine thing I can do is seek genuineness. I can’t even keep track of my own thoughts some times. I sat there in church today and had to fight to not wander. I sang a song for everyone and had to wrestle in my head to understand why I wanted to sing that. At one moment I realized that I sang it to impress my ex-girlfriend, and to overcome my own fear of singing in front of people, and to finish something that I started, and all of these reasons, mixed in there was that I wanted to sing it for God. I’m reminded of the French lady in I Heart Huckabees when she talks about the inevitability of human drama. I can focus solely on God or overcoming my corruption, but I’m stuck on this planet in this body, which runs on biochemistry and emotions and logic and metabolism. In any situation, I can honestly seek Him, but I am always drawn back to human drama. I can make all of this progress but I’m in the middle of so much “human drama” I’m always pulled back into, almost against my will. By corrupt I don’t mean I’m looking to rob anyone or take advantage or control or hurt or get ahead at whatever cost. Those things end up happening. They are byproducts of a corrupt heart. In relationships I want to please the other person; friend, girlfriend, mom, dad, whoever. But there is this part of me that is only in that relationship for itself, that’s in it just to be in it, in it for reasons other than genuine love. What I mean by a corrupt heart is, if you have file on your computer that is corrupt and it causes harm to other parts of the computer. Especially if that file is an important one near or actually is the heart of your computer. The only thing to do, in that case, is erase everything and start over. Unfortunately we can’t reinstall human behavior or human psychology. If you had an intimate knowledge of the code, of how software is made, every aspect of it, you could go through a corrupted file line by line and fix all of the errors, take out the corrupt parts. You could turn the whole thing off and do that. People are like that except you can’t turn them off. Their corruption will continue to do harm all around as we try to fix ourselves. That is human drama. Corruption. Inherent lines of code in the human genome, or deep in the layers of our psychology, make us corrupt. The only thing I can really be 100% honest about is wanting to be 100% honest. If I love, there is something in it for me that isn’t real love. If I work hard, it’s because I want to make more money. If I spend time with people, it’s because, at least in part, that I benefit. Anything I do has some impure motive or lacks genuineness. I talked to a friend of mine long time ago about this and he said, “So?” His response was perhaps the most genuine response possible. There is obviously no way to be so pure that every motive is selfless and pure in nature. What I find to be important is I recognize my own corruption and how it negatively affects those around me and take action to work out those lines of code. What I find to be impossible is to trust God with these corrupt parts. I feel so out of control and in the midst of a heart I didn’t come up with, with behavior I didn’t think up, that hanging on to stuff gives me at least some control and maybe if I can control something I can elicit a positive outcome. But in hanging on, not letting go (like letting go of, say, feelings for an ex-girlfriend) some other corrupt part is afforded that chance to behave thus causing harm all around. I can’t even know which part of me is right. (for example, with an ex-girlfriend whom I feel deep into emotional attachment with [I can’t say genuine love, though that’s what it was, because I said earlier that there is always something not genuine about it {though I believe that even if love is only in part genuine, it is still genuine}] part of me wants to do whatever it would take to get her back [it’s a lot more complicated than that, but to explain that I would have to publish a book. “winning her back” about sums it up though], part of me thinks that part is corrupt, the former part, in turn, thinks the latter is corrupt, and I, in the midst of human drama, am stuck watching time glaze things over till I wake up one day and don’t know who she is like in Eternal Sunshine.) I am surprised at how complicated my heart is and I haven’t even talked about what God has done. To explain that I would have to publish a book.