My Snow Globe Has Chemtrails

I have found a newer sense of love.  My role as a father is shrinking, shifting, and at the same time I know it will never go away or the concern lessen.  And even on the other spectrum of love I find romance also feels more fluid.  I find myself having to spend less and less time with the loves that seem to linger.  It is more like cherishing what remains of those experiences,despite knowing I can't touch them today.  Hopefully, I'm cherishing these apparent memories, tattooed, and hopefully not scarred.  I am appreciative of this reminiscence because it reinforces that when you fully understand loves nature, love tells us that it isn't lost or gone.  Lost lovers are actually gone, friends can leave, people can die, but the love they shared with me is still embedded in my psychology.  Relationships die, perplexingly leaving me without a cadaver to mourn.  We as a culture tend to focus on what is lost mistaking those things for love itself.  What a disservice to think love can die.  Love is! Love is not the plane dusting a blank blue sky.  Love is the chemical reaction waiting, preparing, combusting, cooling, dissipating, and redistributing all the molecules in way that they can love again.  My little snow globe has chemtrails and they very well can be vapor too.

Man-turing

Once a boy, wondering when manhood would fit.  Wanting my manhood to be genuine, like a dirty work shirt, still functional, completely functional, lying just organized looking folded, enough, next to a worn down broken in pair of leather gloves, making room for a stoic rigid toughness.  I no longer want to love like a boy.  I  am eager for that toughness to protect me from that anxious pain I've felt around love.  More feeling like artificial love.

Maybe not artificial but definitely not love. The desire! I am eager to have that discipline to protect me from my desire.  Not all my desire.  Likely the toxic desire.  The kind that leaves me hungry and inflamed.  I want the real nutrient filled love.

Stop thinking I'm holding the world, and wonder what is.

The love that strengthens boys,  melts the ego, and nurtures the balls, leaving an unwavering, bitter hope for love that is more fulfilling.

When will I have this certitude that men are supposed to have?
The wherewithal that is unaffected by romance's and jealousy's tug;
The immunity to the pain for being alone;
The carefree acceptance for the things about me un-grown;
The Being able to call wherever I have to lay my head home.

When will that come?

I sit thinking how odd it is to suggest, I un-regretfully, today could care less.  I wasted so much time wondering if I was doing manhood right.  I have reached this point where not knowing fits nice, maybe a little tight.

Is manhood a destination or a figment of societies' imagination?

Something about it feels more like humiliation, for falling short, more or less to the obligation that manhood is cessation.

I seem to encounter more lives that are forward looking, while I feel a stronger urge to look back.  These young-bloods look to be encountering choices still worthy of an investment, at a future I remember looking at so filled with stress from the uncertainty of whether I'd get respect. 

And so I sit, alone, not knowing, feeling as capable as ever of being gentle, blown away by not needing to claim something as my own.  I am more interested in beginning to understand we're never really fully grown.  Not so much fearing never reaching complete, just accepting I'm nearing it. 

The beauty seems to be that there is still a curious boy in me.

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In honor of the men who are contemplating on the Cosmic Importance of Male Initiation this weekend at the Center of Action and Contemplation.

What shade of Race Are We - Part I

Race was conceived by colonial cultures to elevate their national distinction.  These colonial cultures needed a justification to objectify other humans and distort their existence.  Colonials defined these peoples as less than, mechanisms, to fuel their industries.  These colonial cultures manifested a convenient economic distinguish-er creating a mindset that allowed them to see their body as superior.  This implied inferiority wasn't fake, but surely wasn't necessarily biological or physiologic.  The enlightenment gave evidence that the European level of sophistication separated them from indigenous peoples.  Colonial's inhuman ideas of superiority seemed to depreciate their progressive cultural uniqueness.  It brings some sadness for how the concept of Race obfuscates the capacity for wonderment and gentleness in the Anglo culture. This need for Colonial or Anglo distinction has grown to be an American blemish still trying to make itself a home. The concept has become a barrier to human unity.

As much as I refuse to acknowledge the existence of Race, I have to own that I have integrated some of its toxic attributes into my own values.  It has lured me into seeing through the lens of racism.  I have to share how I size up Chicanos with the same racist lens Suburbia sees me through. I have to realize that I am the token brown friend at times, sometimes seen through my own insecurity and others times through my interpretation of clues.  I have to see how there are times when I try but can't camouflage my brownness with enough knowledge and wisdom to overcome someone's biased idea that my aptitude and capabilities can't be true.  I see how I do the same bigotry.  How do I dismantle these characteristics in my psyche?

I am challenged, distressed, and flabbergasted by recent racial topics in main stream publications, social interests, and politics.  Where is the understanding about Race's fictitious origins.  Can't we see the fiction? Can't we teach that Race is an idea not a principle?  I become anxious to watch how Race is distorting and distracting large populations from real social progress.  I get torn when I get inspired with a need to express my feelings and grievances, and do it without generalizing, implicating all Anglos , clumping together a spectrum of cultures Irish, Italian, Germanic, Greek, Briton, and various Eastern block cultures unfairly, their unique humanity cultural struggle ignored, their effort to express humanisticly, their contribution to undoing the stigmas and tension forgotten.  How do I speak to the ongoing struggle while honoring the Anglo cultures that don't explicitly contribute to the divisions of Race?

The challenge for me is trying to hold the understanding for how Race is entangled with profiling, vocation, religion and perception.

Part II

Not Racist...rather an Ethnicist

It seems surprising that we still use Race as a categorical demographic despite the word having no truth, being fabricated, and its toxicity.  And this is not to suggest that Racism is equally fake.  It saddens me to accept that Racism is a diagnosis for a form of hatred.  Racism, is articulated elegantly by Rev. William J. Barber as, "a strategic hate that has an agenda" (Barber, W.J (2017). Public Speech at Poor Peoples Campaign, August 15, 2017) .  We all are capable of hate.  And racism is a schism between those needing to tighten down a decorated shroud of hateful fallacies that promoted their industrial economic agenda and a reality that we are an integration of evolved bio mechanisms that are uniquely identifiable through genetics, yet our foundation, anatomy, and physiology functions indistinguishably, all worthy of wellness.  It's unfortunate that we camouflage the ethnic hatred with this schism by validating a fictitious word, Race.

I want Racism to be identified by its real source, Ethnic Hate.  We validate the meaning of Race by perpetuating its usage. We still use the concept to describe and acknowledge the ignorance of people still stubborn enough to believe we are differentiated by the illusion of Race.  It seems ignorant to spend time on this schism rooted in the word "Race" when we have the real ethnic, cultural, bigoted, prejudice, economic, social, and ideological schisms stressing this adolescent American nation.   The use of Race as the root word for the concept of racism, shields the propagation of underlying malice, going undetected in our social systems because Race itself is undetectable.  There are not any indicators for someone who is racist because there are not any indicators for Race.  There are indicators for someone who is phobic, prejudice, or discriminant because their statements and policies make it indicative.

The real concept under attack from imperial ideologies is ethnicity and culture.  Ethnicity aligns more with the real human distinguishers. My study of race, my encounter with my "racism", and the unfolding of the intelligence on the subject has allowed me to differentiate between the fiction, ideology, rationality, economics, bigotry, xenophobia and atrocity.  I can also be sad for how it has continued to be used for 600 years (Smedley,  A., 1997).  I hope to share more perspective on the covert and micro absurdities of Race, the concept, still lurking and giving traction to our unfair and unbalanced social constructs.  Race might be cultural sect-ism, inspired by prosperity, more likely rapacity, and corroded by hate, but it is still illusionary.

It would help shift the narrative around our human nature, to call racism what it really is... Ethnicism.

eth ·nic ·ism

/eTH 'ni' sizem /
noun

1. prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different ethnicity based on the belief that one's own ethnicity is superior.
2. the belief that all members of each ethinicity possess characteristics or abilities specific to that ethnicity, especially so as to distinguish it as inferior or superior to another ethnicity or ethnicities.
3. a form of neurotic hatred treatable with love, cultural immersion, and humility.

References:

Smedley,  A., (1997). Origin Of The Idea Of Race. Public Broadcasting Service. http://www.pbs.org/race/000_About/002_04-background-02-09.htm

The Shadow of Cultura

Am I ready to take a step towards accepting my daughters's independence?  If so, then my writing is now directed at me.  I think my opportunities to feed their ideas and mold them will be expressed differently, more passively.  Their lives are now more in their hands than in mine.  And I transition effort into accepting their choices, support their growth, and encourage an adventurous attitude.  In a more significant way, I feel I am freeing them from my biases and any obligation to my value system.

They will never experience the same culture I did.  They will need contemporary tools that will help them learn to be productive people in their culture.  They will reflect and fall back on the wisdom every generation seems to.  But not because of culture, more because of the human and innate ability to seek healing.  I like to say seeking God, the Divine, the Complete, the everlasting fountain.  Maybe even going as far to say as common as all organisms.  Mi jitas, they will face their own social, ethnic, and interpersonal dilemmas.  They may not need to call themselves Chicanas.

I don't value culture in the same ways I used to.  It means something different.  It isn't worth the same to me either.  It is just as important as ever.  It holds a different meaning for me.  It is beautiful and invasive, a paradox.  Culture is a facade established possibly, in a poetical way, to give the soul a face, and the ego fists.  It makes me sad and endeared.  I am curious what is in store for the New Mexican culture.  What will my young ladies call themselves?

What do I call myself?

I am a Latino, with a Chicano lifestyle, from the northern region of New Mexico.  After a history of identity crises, I stand poetically looking down into a menacing canyon, with the sun in my eyes, preparing to shed all the conveniences that have come with belonging to a group of people, land, religion, foods, culture.  I am practicing being real with myself, more fully human.  For much of my life I have felt obligated "to be", maybe more, "to be...long".  I am a collection of labels.

I am changing, always, yet in some aspect solidifying. With the changes in perspective I am also writing differently.  I feel ready to write about the limits, embarrassment, shame, and contradictions that come with applied culture.  It feels complicated having to grow up "brown".  I'll share what I feel has become generationaly irresponsible.  I want to capture in idea the hardship of having clung to a community built on oppressing, and eventually having to cry out oppressed.  I want to tell me, my Chicano story.

The term Chicano has so many meanings.  It doesn't have a quantitative nature.  It is an identity, a philosophy, a movement, a religion, and what ever the person needs it to be.  It has its traditions, conservatives, haters, and abusers.  Chicano in my writing will be the culture I know as the following:

Being labeled a radical American citizen having a consquistador's heritage, while believing I am seen as lower, asked to be accountable, yet perceived with less privilege, a revolutionary without country.

I was born human, nurtured like a villager, raised to be Christian, and taught to be American as translated by a bunch of New Mexicans, a bunch of Chicanos.  With this I can write my story.

Disease in Homeostasis Clothing

I take words that agitate me and let them burn my thoughts, grind against my morals, weigh on my principles.  It is that beautiful agitation.  The agitation that feels like God just woke me at 5:15 a.m., nearing a winter dawn and asks me to go for a run. It is cold, mind you, its January.  The kind of beautiful that inspires just enough anger to be grumpy, but enough love to be meaningful.  The word Homeostasis does that for me.

Homeostasis has entered my mind through conversations about what is normal, and in particular what is acceptable behavior.  Normal and stable are often used as calibration tools.   Normal carries a stigma for being what is accepted.  

I have grown to embrace the unique.  Even further the radical.  Naturally radical is even more seductive for me.  Technologically radical would be an opposite extreme and un-favored for its mutative tendency.  Technology has shown me a divisive quality in the colonial world.  I see it as becoming luxury.  Luxury in my opinion is not natural.  So homeostasis in nature carries over for me in behavior. 

When I think of homeostasis, I think of it as an orientation towards or away from a state.  I can also see it as a condition.  It can also be dangerous when it becomes a perspective.  It is surely not a position.  It is the state when my wits, effects, or faculties are moving into or near active recovery.  Active recovery being borrowed from the fitness nomenclature, as the bodies search for readiness.  I think of it as if life is telling me, things will be alright.  It is a feeling where I am not exhausted.  I am not indolent.  I am not bored.  I might not be primed for exhilaration.  It's the brief existence when I am least fearful.  It may be a time when my aspiration could be pictured as relaxing.  

I am symbiotic and alive when nearing homeostasis.  Being a New Mexican, Chicano, a brown man inspires me to think about the homeostasis of a culture.  If it is, than my Latin derived culture's homeostasis is illusive.  Homeostasis when it comes to behavior seems to be heavily subjective, but bounded by the construct of equilibrium. It gives me the image as if my existence hears the wild call from symbiosis.  But being a brown man, doesn't make homeostasis convenient for racial, economic, and social factors.  

Identifying as a Chicano makes explaining homeostasis interesting.  Bluntly, and possibly unwarranted, I observe my culture is diseased, or maybe infected. Surely my culture is not completely unhealthy.  I'll explain this perspective in depth soon, but for now I just need to begin with the fact that I see its dysfunction. It makes me understand the need to surround myself with symbiotic systems in order to facilitate personal homeostasis, while I watch my culture moving away from cultural homeostasis.

I see outsiders looking in trying to understand us, describing the New Mexican lifestyle's dysfunctional aspects as potentially being a unique form of homeostasis.  It made me cringe to think how people might consider that our version of the Latin culture is acceptable.  This comes to mind in the realm of machismo, violence, education, apathy, and cynicism.  I am beginning to believe that my New Mexican lifestyle isn't it's healthiest and in denial, being allowed to call itself stable.
  

So as I look from the outside, as drift further away from the lifestyle of a typical New Mexican Chicano, I evaluate my communities with a cultured lens.  I hesitantly but assertively recognize my communities appear naive to conscious progress, a portion seem unaware of the utility for intellect, and enough display attitudes that are uninspired.

I picture my culture with sadness because we appear to admire and cling to our dysfunctions.  Maybe it is the only thing we can own.  It is the only thing that we can contribute to without being doubted or marginalized.  It might be the only thing that keeps us from being white washed.  Clinging to our cultural toxicity seems to keep us from being seen as powerless.  I cling to my cultural toxicity because I don't know where I belong when I let it go.

...

Next post will describe what I see as Toxic Culture.  And yes I will approach homeostasis by also describing the healthy aspects of the New Mexican Chicano, because critical thought requires symbiotic perspectives and homeostasis is my orientation.  

Albuquerque Street Artist Unknown

Be the change

In honor of Gandhi's birthday, I'll comment on living his words.  There has been an extreme amount of education, learning, and circumstances that have helped me understand the non-violent philosophy.  At the same time there have been mistakes, transgressions, and void that have helped me to exercise the non-violent philosophy.  I like to describe how easy it is to know of non-violence, and cannot seem to fully be the change that is so desired by my thoughts and ideals.

Non-violence is definitely not another form of positive thinking.  Non-violence is a human choice.  For me its a lifestyle that defies nature.  There are few examples of non-violence in nature.  Symbiosis requires that others capitalize or threaten others to survive, predator or prey.  The feeding process asks that something be broken down for the building up of the other.  Ecology demonstrates the struggle to keep harmony, and nature itself has storms and earthly restlessness.  So this choice to be non-violent is a call to divinity.

Non-violence is an expression of faith in others, a trust of others, and a interconnection between all, like divinity. Non-violence calls us to an awareness that ask us to understand the paradox that exists between feasting, sharing, and sacrificing.  There is unlikely a pure form of non-violence.  Death seems to be the epitome of violence.  So life and death are in themselves limits to the human understanding of peace. Existence is for me a constant desire for the perfect.  My writing is proof that I have not found peace.  In spirituality most folks like to believe that we continue on living in different forms.  Non-violence might be a remedy to the emotional violence we can feel when someone hates, dies, or separates.

To narrow this tangent that could veer off into further complexity, I appreciate the example Gandhi left because as I try my own attempt at being non-violent I fail often.  With the failure I get to practice self non-violence.  This has helped me learn to appreciate and forgive myself.  I am a precious gift from, what I like to call God, possibly the only pure non-violent entity.  If there is a divinity then it is the only life that does not die, separate, hunger, or fear.  The eternality of God is what Gandhi was trying to help me see, and this tells me that non-violence is not susceptible to the instincts we are given as animals.

P.S.  Another piece of insight that I have been lost in, is that Gandhi was not a Crossfitter...but he was a cross fit.

Criticize to rationalize its a better direction

I am in an amazing space in my life.  I am accruing debt at a higher percentage than ever.  I wake up and it scares me.  I am not buying luxurious things, its just necessities.  I am learning to appreciate the dependence that I have chosen, dependencies that are tied to social norm.  I realize that much of my life is still geared toward a balance between simplicity and convenience.  So I worry, but I don't think I am overwhelmed.  Now how do I synthesize this into wisdom.

What first comes to mind is my self perception.  Even after 37 years of life, 34 years of memories, and 20 years out of high school I still judge myself.  I wake in the morning and recognize that my eyes are a little more tired looking.  My body takes a lot longer to warm up when I work out.  My joints are more stubborn than I remember them being.  But my mind laughs.  My mind says "you can still hang brother".  If I stop now, it will only get harder later.  I  rest more and push myself less but I live the same.  I am borrowing from laziness to pay off the debts I have accrued with anger and discipline.  I am cashing in on some pleasurable comfort, knowing I am going to pay intensity back with interest.  I am not wasting my lazy time though.  I get enough done, but this allows me to feed my dreams, fears, and insecurities.  In my laziness I remind myself of the disappointments in lifestyle, livelihood, and achievement.  I am building a stockpile of motivation that I know I can do without but for humanistic reasons have convinced myself I need.

I realize I am willing to live with others, for others, and in spite of others.  In the past I was living for me, to get mine.  This is a subtle shift towards a community that I can't clearly recognize.  The others in the first sentence of this paragraph is as dynamic as the weather.  I can't clearly identify who is it that I am moving towards, with, or against.  There is appreciation for chaos and a mistrust of planning.  I am seeing balance everywhere.  I am finding meaning in most or at least looking for it.  I am preparing for surpluses and harvests that can't be seen in this drought.  I am accruing a personal debt that may not be able to be paid off tomorrow, but I am not wasting the goods rendered.  I am irresponsibly being devoted to simplicity.  I am choosing to spend credit to keep from having to increase my income.  I am spending laziness to keep from having to increase my intensity.  I am resting because right now life feels like I can.

So this is a demonstration for how I have taken my criticisms and used them to build a rational for explaining my recent laziness.  I might even call it excessive rest to give myself a poetic hug.

Learning from the world

A generation of change and wellness

I think one of the greatest gifts my parents have given me is their mistakes, so to speak. They aren't even mistakes, but rather experiences interpreted from the eyes of their greatest critic outside themselves...Me! I think because of the progress my parents made in dealing with their parents dysfunction, a generation escaping the depression and racism, I am able to understand my own the idea of awareness, balance, and wellness.

I have grown to believe that my parents look outside themselves for answers versus trusting their own insight. I am capable of critically thinking about my lifestyle for the first time in a few generations. I have the liberty to do what I am passionate about versus having to do what society will allow me to do. I am educated enough to understand how to make healthy lifestyle decisions. I am informed enough to discern propaganda and marketing that does not fit my values and beliefs. I am at liberty to question authority, participate in systems, and invent my own. Because my parents had the courage to survive, scrape, and crawl through their generational dysfunction I have the freedom to be critical, thankful, empowered, impactful and loving.

I am proud of my parent's choices, healthy and unhealthy, because both have helped me make choices today. I belong to a generation that is realizing that convenience served its purpose but is not always the best choice. I see this in the organic trending, dietary innovation, environmental awareness, and the emphasis on sustainability. I recognize that my parents taught me to belong in my communities and this belonging has resulted in my taking ownership of how and which to belong to. The corporate model has grown too large and I am part of a generation that will balance the globalization of economies back into a balanced ecosystem of shared communities, sustainable trends, applied research, and reasonable comfort. I see the change from pursuing convenience at the expense of values to the adjustment of values with the assessment and examination of convenience. I see progress! Yes the cynic is smiling, but not ignoring suffering.

Love gone....into the shadows

My last post was the appreciation for the lover that I believe I am.  Now for the lover who I am trying to forgive.  I am a toxic person at times.  I have been described as manipulative.  I have been told I have a way with words that is seen as a way to talk my way around anything.  This is a quality of the romantic in me, the shadow side to my lover.  This is the part of me who I am stopping to look over this month, ironically designated for the lover...the valentine.

This toxic lover has been exposed.  I am a narcissistic person, not absolutely but partially.  I have spent most of my adult life setting goals that make me happy.  I had breakfast with close friend and in a conversation about being a lover, it was revealed and I found how I am manipulative.  I am manipulative and deceptive about my lustful desires.  I decorate myself in altruistic motives.  I convince myself that I am being attentive and caring.  I convince myself that I in this moment for the other.  The other being the person being loved.  There is a paradox in that yes I am an attentive and caring person, but I have minimized the narcissism and lust in the formula.  I have tried to justify my romantic qualities without acknowledging that in most cases I have had a motive.  I have deceived myself into thinking that I am serving my partner for their good, and ignoring that a part of it is serving my own desire.

The analogy that comes to mind is the where is Waldo book.  I feel like my self concept of my romantic quality is so distorted and biased with caring, sensitivity, and creativity that I cannot see Waldo.  Waldo being my narcissism and the busyness hiding Waldo is my altruistic romance.  I have a illusive insecurity to exploit love, to feed off of the vulnerability that I can create with the tools of caring, sensitivity, and creativity.  I had hid Waldo's toxicity in a collage of trusted yet manipulative scenes.  This is tragic and hard to own. I'm ashamed and scared.

As I criticize my romantic facade, I hope to remain kind to myself but real enough to induce change.  This is credited to those who have pulled away the veil that allowed me to enter into the defense of my romantic facade.  I recognize defense as an indicator of vulnerability. I looked for the insecurities that hide behind this deceitful and manipulative romantic facade.  I don't know how to process this realization, but I thank Greg a companion and source of wisdom for opening my eyes.  He revealed the importance for looking for Waldo in my pages of romantic collages.

There is a part of me, the romantic, that loves to hear what I want to hear, and I have learned how to achieve this in wicked ways, not absolutely but in part, I'd like to believe in a small part.  I am not forgetting that my goodness and golden side, true self,  outweigh and foreshadow my shadow.  I am publicly forgiving that I have motives that are driven by insecure understanding that vulnerability is a shortcut to intimacy.  I acknowledge that my insecure need to be desired has driven my romantic facade to exploit compassion and empathy to profit at the expense of another's trust.  I see that there is a sacred contract that must be signed and honored when dealing with vulnerability and I have violated this contract.  Please Lord forgive me!

Patience...slow down please

My blogging was initiated as a tool to let my daughters understand who their father was, and I find it might be more of who'd I like to believe I am.  I tried to be as genuine as I could be.  Genuine doesn't always get received.  Some folks want honesty but only convenient honesty, fitting honesty, not brutal honesty.  I say fuck it, soldiers died, are dying, and will die so that I can express myself, among other dignified rights.  When I write I feel arrogant at times, embarrassed others, and mostly human and alive.  I am experiencing the same existential dilemma that all mankind and possibly all living beings have trusted, who am I, what am I here to do, how will I be remembered, and where do I belong.  I patiently contribute and paradoxically watch my identity being built and altered through my writing.

 There will be consequences and misinterpretations because of my expressions, but I owe it to myself to be genuine.  As I continue to capture my identity, perceptions, and delusions in my blogging, primarily for my daughters, I have to accept that patience is pouring its lessons on me.  I cannot keep up with all the things patience is trying to teach me.  I realize each day that being a good man is only as valid as the people I surround myself with perceive me to be.  The messages and signals I send do not always share the same meaning to those reading, listening, or observing. I see how my audience plays a significant role in how I am perceived.  I am beginning to understand patiently how their experiences, mostly unknown to me, taints, paints, fills in, manipulates, twists, biases, discolors, facilitates, clarifies, stimulates, and enhances my message being sent.  Despite the feedback I receive from being me, I feel courageous enough to share myself genuinely.

Now there is a companion quality, that I have ignored, it's graceful, polished, and sexy, I call it class.  The sooner I can get a grip on patience the better I can get busy being classy.  I think my prayer for the coming year is to share in the fruitfulness of class.

A humble and yet inattentive student of patience,
Ron


 Through Him, with Him, and in Him!

Act of forgiveness

I would never have been able to think of both my parents in the same sentence using the word forgiving.  But as life continues to grant me time, I now can.  When I went through my divorce I accepted how much more responsible I felt for the deterioration of my marriage.  It gave me the courage and context to look critically on my parents relationship during my childhood.  What I found was so many misunderstandings and misinterpretations that left me having to chose sides, defending, and feeling caught in between.   I knew I couldn't let this be recreated for my daughters.  So I confronted the scariest of unknowns,  the details of my fathers reasons, the worries of a young mother, and my own unwanted memories.  Forgiveness and confronting seem to go hand in hand.  I have described forgiveness synthesis and with it comes the encountering of the wound.

What answers I found were sacred understandings  of who my parents were.  I was able to see myself in their sadness, because I was in my own divorce, I was dividing my own family.  I could not hold onto the discomfort, created by years of avoiding my pain, any longer.  I saw my dad as a young arrogant but eager boy trying to live in a world of accolades while being asked to humble himself in order to be a father.  He only had training in one area... basketball.  He never spent endless hours practicing how to be a top notch husband or father.  My mother was a young naive girl seeming to be dazzled by attention.  She was caring, selfless, and exhausted by the realities that come with being a mother responsible for holding together an adolescent family.  This is what I can share, there is a depth that i cannot share but it is a hard look into the suffering of two people torn apart by immaturity, mishandled love, and the fatigue of disregard. 

How does this fit with forgiveness.  I have moved past the need to understand my parents.  I have gradually accepted how they treated each other.  My expectations are no longer sticky.  My hope for happy reunions no longer were a distraction.  My fears for witnessing resentment and animosity have become dull.  And to be clear it wasn't the expectations of them to "get back together" but for the simple experience of having two parents who could value time shared and the creation they made.  That is hard to say and it makes me cry happy tears.  I accepted their pain for the obstacle it was.

This is leads me to yesterday.  My mom and dad shared a happy moment.  For the first time I watched as they both shared a smile and joked.  I watched as they both were genuinely delighted.  There was no agenda, nothing to be gained for being pleasant, just a sunny day and a giggle that brought two people who once loved each other deeply enough to hate, into a joyful instance.  A simple 2 minutes of nervous excitement helped me forget a lifetime of endured resentment and tension.  Forgiveness had broken through.  Un Milagro!

Educating the human in me

I am finding that the most existential part of becoming educated is fully coming to terms with the reality that there is so much to be learned and only a lifetime to try and learn it in. I think what this does is create personalities, classes, philosophies, and oddly even injustice or insecurity.

The more I see how people make decisions, I can see how one might believe that natural selection is real. How can it not be as we see urban cultures starving rural environments. There are times in life when the fittest will survive, and there are times in life when people can live completely with altruistic intent. I can see how a Mother Theresa adds a remedy to the Darwinian attitude by suggesting that there are people who serve the inferior. There is no natural law or science that eliminates the possibility of either theory, leaving me to believe we can't live in one or even a dual mindset absolutely. There is a dependence on circumstance, evidence, curiosity, and emotion that leaves an infinite trail in an unknown number of directions. Victor Frankl expresses this non dual way of believing by describing how we are far more than our genetics, we are far more than our actions, we are completely human in that individually we have an ability to chose our attitude, and this is the direction one continues on when traversing life's infinite existence.

I have never felt more aware in my life. I expect to reach a phase when even this awareness will progress to a new stage of confusion. I think about how I once woke every morning to software problems to be solved, algorithms to discover, and statuses to be achieved, now I am on the outskirts of this mainstream human whirlwind of achievement. Now I am working towards appreciating my garbage man, my immigrant labor (legal and illegal), our recovering addicts, my teacher, my patterns, emptiness, where my food is grown, where I shop, my time with people, and the purpose of money.

Conversion

If my God was about converting I wonder why people are evangelizing Christianity, I think He would have converted all to Judaism, as He practiced Judaism. This Easter I am reminded that God came and was an example to the Samaritan, Roman, Gentile, and Jew, without needing to convert cultural tradition and life. This leads me to believe faith wasn't discriminant or oppressive. He led by example not at the expense of tradition, but by tradition. I am a spiritual critic guided by own mistakes, sins, hypocrisies, and limitations. World! Don't argue with me, show me how I should do it healthier. God has given me a mouth to eat, and I foolishly use it as a weapon for my mind, at the expense of my soul. And lastly I have in the past appeared to be Holy, but in this phase of life I desire and aspire to be Holy.......Happy Easter! With love, Enjoy the rest of Spring.

Smoothing Out the Angst...

I left facebook for three reasons.
1) The superficiality of being virtually connected, and the false sense of belonging that it created in me
2) The idea behind Facebook going public to harvest peoples interests and supply marketing and industry exploiters with the necessary information to propagate their consuming mentality and culture
3) I feel the depth I am willing to share with my friends is not reciprocated in the form of vulnerability, interest, and passion. I was discouraged by the lack of depth and connection people are willing to achieve with Facebook. As if we as a community are unwilling to be our embarrassing selves by conforming and at the expense of what mainstream media finds attractive, chingon, or worthy.

I retreated because I don't by into it. I am embarrassing, and I am proud to say stupid shit every now and again. I know I am offensive. I also know I am loving, kind, thoughtful, and my intentions are not only to let my daughters know who I am, but now to also let you know who I am. I wish the same anxiety for everyone of you because some collective instinct tells me we share in this existential crisis. I am glad to see all your shining faces, but please don't be afraid to share your deeper faces.

I am returning to the point where I can have perspective. I am a recovering cynic, and daily I have to remind myself that there is so much good in the world that despite what I hear, see, and worry about, life has a way of self correcting. I have a feeling of acceptance this week . I am accepting the fact that people change but not on the account of others reactions, arguments, or discoveries.

I changed because of an internal and intrinsic alchemy. What has been produced is a vision for comparison. I no longer am attached to my ideas but to the understanding that all ideas are worthy of understanding, not necessarily belief, but surely understanding. In this view of "understanding all ideas", I still account for health, truth, and validity. This is achieved by effort in understanding, in me, for me, and of me. I can only then integrate ideas that withstand the test of health, truth, and validity. Otherwise I am left conspiring and mistrusting the unknown.