Lead Singer of a Rock Band

2012-01-26T04:39:00.000-08:00

"Now is life very solid or very shifting? I am haunted by the two contradictions. This has gone on for ever; will last for ever; goes down to the bottom of the world—this moment I stand on."
— Virginia Woolf, from a diary entry dated 4 January 1929

2012-01-16T04:40:00.000-08:00

"The quote is always fascinating because it changes out of context, becomes different and sometimes more mysterious. It has a directness and assertiveness it may not have had in the original. I think the quality of inaccessibility, the mystery, is important—that whatever matters can’t be taken in on just one reading or one seeing."
— Susan Sontag, from a 1984 interview collected in Conversations with Susan Sontag

2011-12-20T16:35:00.000-08:00

"I emphasize the distinction between brackets and no brackets because it will affect your reading experience, if you will allow it. Brackets are exciting. Even though you are approaching Sappho in translation, that is no reason you should miss the drama of trying to read a papyrus torn in half or riddled with holes or smaller than a postage stamp—brackets imply a free space of imaginal adventure."
— Anne Carson, If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho

2011-12-15T04:09:00.000-08:00

"trust your heart
if the seas catch fire
(and live by love
though the stars walk backward)"
— e. e. cummings,

2011-12-14T17:52:00.001-08:00

Jim

2011-11-26T20:18:00.000-08:00

There was, as time usually dictates, a sentimental journey about to take place in the life of Jim Crenshaw, the man who invented the label for bottled vitamin water. His invention, not too specific or wise, looked appealing to the marketing specialists on the 49th floor of the building where Jim worked as a copywriter. His desk, next to the pictures laid out in the hallway of clever vintage add posters depicting a life of luxury and carefree sentiments of days gone by was the topic of one of the ad men who frequented the floor for where Jim worked for inspiration. Inspiration, not usually found on any floor of this particular building was in short and small quantities (much like the nutritional content of the vitamin water this company was looking to procure.

Finally, and without warning (as most big things either start or end) the man in the grey suit and loose yellow stripped tie came knocking on Jim's door. The man looked puzzled because for a second he looked at Jim as if he were going to burst with excitement. That moment Jim felt suddenly important and then quickly deflated. Jim looked similar to the man in the grey suit's football teammate from his college days at Cornell. Much of the conversation that followed was filled with references of some guy that Jim knew nothing about, but he listened because the man in the grey suit talked. Talking wasn't ever Jim's strong point. Jim was good at talking. He didn't like talking. Jim didn't even really know why people talked. He just knew that he had to listen because if he didn't listen, he would end up being forced to talk and again, Jim didn't like talking. So therefore and in summation, Jim fell into a category of being "a listener."

"Sometimes listeners," thought Jim "are thought to be introspective." And Jim didn't like that stereotype. Because to Jim, everyone was introspective, insomuch as they allowed themselves a time and space to communicate. Either outward or inward.

"Jim" said the man in the grey suit "let's go for a drink. You drink don't you?"

"Yes" said Jim.

"And where do you usually go, Jim cause I just like that old cheap bar down the street. Full of more real people. Ya know?"

The man continued to babble and Jim continued to listen to him.

They walked and Jim listened with an added "yes" and "I see." Phrases he picked up from some of his courses at the community resource center where he volunteered to scan membership cards. While at the community resource center he and the other volunteers were asked to participate in a training on "effective listening." Something Jim thought was humorous because either you're listening or you are not. And if you are then there's no need to but in with an intermittent "I see" if the person is doing just fine talking. And then if you throw in a phrase here and there, aren't you then in turn not listening but talking? Paradoxical, nonetheless, but humorous to Jim altogether.

The man in the grey suit said something after a couple of beers that Jim couldn't help but question. The man in the grey suit said "I'm beginning to think that the world isn't so much a world as it is a picture."

And Jim thought about that in a way that he didn't think about most things. Jim saw in his head a big photograph hanging in the universe filled with some Monet like dots and Vangogh swirls. Lots of green and textured strokes of twinkling white rivets along the outer ridges of the painting. The frame gold, and think; heavy with a pattern reminiscent of a baroque style adornment hanging along the edges of a ceiling painted in pink and blue.

The money Jim paid for his beer ended up being a $5 bill from his wallet after Jim said "you pay the tip, Jim."

Jim didn't have any other cash on him and felt it awkward to have the waitress charge his debit card for a tip. Feeling slightly embarrassed about leaving a $5 tip, Jim...

33 Years

2011-10-13T06:11:00.000-07:00

It's literally insane and categorically mystical to me; I'm 33 today. 33-years-old! What does that mean? I remember turning 16. That was like a billion years away/just yesterday. Speaking of yesterday, I went to the DMV. I renewed my drivers license and it's a milestone in a way. Applying for a new license makes you think back about how you got where you are. How did I get where I am? Baffled. Grateful.

Speaking of "Baffled. Grateful." I've been in this constant state of awe and gratitude and wonderment for the past couple of days. What is my life!?! I'm so lucky! I love my job! I love me. I love the person I'm sharing my life with! I love waking up in the city where I live! I love having people who love me for me! I'm so blessed. Blessed. Blessed. Blessed.

And speaking again of yesterday, I was thinking just yesterday "if I die, I don't care. I don't care because in this moment I'm happy and complete and fulfilled and honored to have lived the life I lived and to be the person I am and to have everything I want right now."

I look back and wonder if past lives were all leading up to this moment, like I was a poor woman in Tibet who's life's lesson was to let go of other's approval and seek my own bliss. And that I was a Scottish prisoner of war in the 18th century who lost family because I was too prideful to acknowledge that everyone wants to give and receive love no matter how resistant they appear. And that the culmination of all these lessons have propelled me to this very instant. Am I making sense? Probably not, but like I said: I'm in this life. I've been Wyatt for the last 33-years. I was born in Provo UT to two young beautiful parents who just wanted the best and wanted a simple life and they got it. I have three siblings and they are golden and they are much more strong and ethical than I could ever begin to emulate.

I have a niece who is perfect and lively and has a burst of zeal in everything she does and it's like I've known her my whole life but she's two-years-old, so that's not really feasible.

Whatever my life is, whatever it has been and will be, all I want to establish is that loving hard and loving good and loving beautifully and loving with bliss and with gratitude and bewilderment is all anyone needs in order to be complete. Just love. Love everything and anything.

My birthday wish is to embody love everyday of my life. And if I fail, then I love the fact that I try.

2011-10-12T20:50:00.000-07:00

2011-10-07T21:43:00.000-07:00

"Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart."
-Steve Jobs (1955-2011)

2011-10-03T21:12:00.000-07:00

2011-10-02T16:07:00.000-07:00

"...a box of loose paper & dust
floating against the decades..."
-Rob Mclennan

2011-10-01T10:49:00.001-07:00

"I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle
not to stray."
— Stanley Kunitz, from “The Layers”

2011-09-29T10:23:00.001-07:00

2011-09-28T13:43:00.000-07:00

Birthing The Self

2011-09-27T15:56:00.000-07:00

Pondering about the process of 'rebirth' and what it means to be 'reborn' is an experience altogether insular. Only one, the individual, can judge for a personally subjective meaning about the events and outcomes of being renewed and rediscovered. Can we be reborn in an instant? Without baptism or confirmations, or life altering experiences, can one be instantly renewed. Religion dictates a formulaic stance on rebirth. You must be baptized, according to some god theologians. You have to be treated with someone who has been given authority, and most importantly, you must have an experience similar to the steps laid forth by said religious sect. These sectarians might just call a colloquial rebirth or renewal as a 'change of heart' or a 'different perspective.' But what is so life changing about water, about symbolism and ritual that is not valid with a change that comes profoundly felt and organically experienced?

Say for instance you learn something new, you speak a personal truth and you utter a sentence that reverberates in you a completely new perspective? And that that perspective is the basis for your change that sends forth rockets of new behaviors and new forms of thinking and new visions of the self. Is this not rebirth? Is that not even as life shattering as a dipping of one's own body in water?

"Everything around me is evaporating. My whole life, my memories, my imagination and its contents, my personality - it’s all evaporating. I continuously feel that I was someone else, that I felt something else, that I thought something else. What I’m attending here is a show with another set. And the show I’m attending is myself." — Fernando Pessoa

2011-09-26T16:07:00.000-07:00

"We must select the illusion which appeals to our temperament, and embrace it with passion."
-Cyril Connolly

2011-09-25T10:05:00.000-07:00

“'To understand the present' is, as has been well explained by the existentialists, to grasp the incoherence of things, to adopt the artistic perspective on existence.”
-Asger Jorn

2011-09-24T16:04:00.000-07:00

"The only thing worse than nostalgia is no feeling of loss at all."
-Paul Outka

2011-09-23T10:47:00.000-07:00

2011-09-22T11:03:00.000-07:00

"One doesn’t simply run head-on into Goya snorting some interpretation, or other. Nor stroll through the gallery of history as Nietzsche warns against in his Untimely Meditations without suffering life from the ground up. "
-Robert Gibbons

2011-09-19T22:37:00.000-07:00

"Refine your singularities"
-Randall Jarrell

2011-09-18T04:02:00.000-07:00

"Yet each of us were there with desires and passions which were thought of as different but which were the same."
-Martin Burke

2011-09-17T12:28:00.000-07:00

2011-09-16T11:30:00.000-07:00

2011-09-15T23:26:00.000-07:00

"There is no there; it’s all degrees of here."
-Rachel Blau DuPlessis

2011-09-14T13:01:00.000-07:00

"Suspended in the void between old and new, past and future, man is projected into time as into something alien that incessantly elludes him and still drags him forward, but without allowing him to find his ground in it."
- Giorgio Agamben, The Man Without Content

This Blog Has an Expiration Date

2011-09-10T15:23:00.000-07:00

TBD

2011-08-31T11:26:00.000-07:00

"It subsequently defines the idea of ‘progress’, which considers translation as aesthetic resistance, as a process of construction in constant deconstruction."
-Burghard Baltrusch

2011-08-30T07:45:00.000-07:00

"If you were awake, you would understand that you were the whole universe, pretending, projecting itself at a point called here and now, in the form of the human organism. And you would understand that very clearly, not just as an idea, but as an actual vivid sensation, just the same way you know you’re sitting in this room."
— Alan Watts

2011-08-29T00:14:00.000-07:00

2011-08-28T10:29:00.000-07:00

"Today, it is impossible to write without thinking or considering the inadequacy of language, the conflict between the internal and the external and most of all, without taking a long engrossing bath in your own self."
-Haider Shahbaz

2011-08-27T10:18:00.000-07:00

"...chaos, into disorder wherever you turn, discontinuity, disparity, difference, discord, contradiction, what they're calling aporia they took from the Greeks, the academics took the word from the Greeks for this swamp of ambiguity, paradox, perversity, opacity, obscurity, anarchy the clock without the clockmaker."
-William Gaddis

2011-08-26T14:05:00.001-07:00

2011-08-24T08:39:00.000-07:00

"Every man is the builder of a temple called his body…We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and blood and bones. Any nobleness begins at once to refine a man’s feature, any meanness or sensuality to imbrute them..”
-Thoreau

Abraham Maslow's 8 Ways to Self-Actualize

2011-08-23T08:38:00.000-07:00

-Experience things fully, vividly, selflessly. Throw yourself into the experiencing of something: concentrate on it fully, let it totally absorb you.
-Let the self emerge. Try to shut out the external clues as to what you should think, feel, say, and so on, and let your experience enable you to say what you truly feel.
-Life is an ongoing process of choosing between safety (out of fear and need for defense) and risk (for the sake of progress and growth): Make the growth choice a dozen times a day.
-When in doubt, be honest. If you look into yourself and are honest, you will also take responsibility. Taking responsibility is self-actualizing.
-Listen to your own tastes. Be prepared to be unpopular.
-Use your intelligence, work to do well the things you want to do, no matter how insignificant they seem to be.
-Make peak experiencing more likely: get rid of illusions and false notions. Learn what you are good at and what your potentialities are not.
-Find out who you are, what you are, what you like and don’t like, what is good and what is bad for you, where you are going, what your mission is. Opening yourself up to yourself in this way means identifying defenses - and then finding the courage to give them up.

2011-08-22T08:30:00.000-07:00

2011-08-20T08:24:00.000-07:00

"I will not let anyone walk through my mind with their dirty feet."
— Gandhi

2011-08-18T08:18:00.000-07:00

"If you touch one thing with deep awareness, you touch everything."
-Thich Nhat Hanh

2011-08-17T09:00:00.000-07:00

"The poet’s business was to purify the dialect of the tribe, or clarify it, or otherwise keep words clean and sharp, so that men, who mostly think in words, could have thoughts with sharp edges."
-Basil Bunting

2011-08-13T13:34:00.000-07:00

2011-08-11T09:00:00.000-07:00

"Curiosity-driven activities like insect-collecting and star-gazing have been downgraded to the status of mere hobbies."
-Justin E. H. Smith

2011-08-10T11:49:00.000-07:00

"A meta-work. Something that transcends (the) simple creation, takes it up a notch, and makes translation a sophisticated intellectual exercise, simultaneously creation and philosophy, since it’s closer to what may be the essence of language."
-Lścia Bettencourt

2011-07-29T14:23:00.000-07:00

"Life does not accommodate you, it shatters you. It is meant to, and it couldn’t do it better. Every seed destroys its container or else there would be no fruition."
— Florida Scott-Maxwell

2011-07-28T07:43:00.000-07:00

2011-07-27T09:34:00.000-07:00

"For there is only one great adventure and that is inward toward the self, and for that, time nor space nor even deeds matter"
-Henry Miller

2011-07-26T11:24:00.000-07:00

"His attention was drawn to that which, because we did not build it, we must make a particular effort of empathy and imagination to understand, to a natural environment that is uniquely unpredictable, for it is literally unforeseen."
-Alain de Botton

2011-07-21T13:45:00.001-07:00

2011-07-20T09:24:00.000-07:00

"I seek images that don't exist."
-Adam Zagajewski

Spinozism

2011-07-19T10:26:00.000-07:00

"...is the monist philosophical system of Baruch Spinoza which defines "God" as a singular self-subsistent substance, and both matter and thought as attributes of such. Spinoza claimed that the third kind of knowledge, intuition, is the highest kind attainable. For Spinoza, our universe (cosmos) is a mode under two attributes of Thought and Extension. God has infinitely many other attributes which are not present in our world."

2011-07-18T01:42:00.000-07:00

2011-07-15T10:16:00.000-07:00

"Many of us, through the shock of change itself are being broken out of the collective trance. Yet, there are no maps that can guide us out of our wonderland. Each of us can only try to distinguish the life around us from the always fading text and images of a dream."
-Ralph E. Melcher

2011-07-14T13:01:00.001-07:00

2011-07-10T11:09:00.000-07:00

"Don’t be bothered with the next moment, or the next life, or the next world. Make this moment rejoicing, make this moment a moment of bliss, and the next will follow it, and the next life, and the next world. And everything that you are this moment is going to become deepened more and more. And when you see that you are responsible for your bliss, your bliss will be far more. When you see that nobody has given it to you, that you have not been a beggar, that it is not a gift from somebody else — because nobody has given it to you, nobody can take it away — when you see this you will be far happier."
— Osho

2011-07-08T11:28:00.001-07:00

2011-07-05T10:10:00.000-07:00

"Under its impulsion, everything (every object) moved into place. "Emptiness!" The word was equivalent to the invocation of the Muse at the beginning of an epic. It provoked not a shudder but lightness and joy, and presented itself as a law: As it is now, so shall it be. In terms of image, it was a shallow river crossing."
-Peter Handke

2011-06-30T10:09:00.000-07:00

"As if some man walking out of antiquity
who can hear the growth of snow, I’m crossing
a chasm on sagging bridges, it seems,
and the whole of time ticks on stone clocks."
-Osip Mandelshtam

2011-06-29T10:06:00.000-07:00

"While his writings, and drawings, are punctured by disconnects, detours, deadends, and mythic grabs, he has always seemed to me as one who fought to maintain a central core (for had he lost it, he would have been dispersed into incurable insanity)."
-Clayton Eshleman

2011-06-27T12:04:00.000-07:00

2011-06-24T10:04:00.000-07:00

"If you dedicate your existence to being likable, however, and if you adopt whatever cool persona is necessary to make it happen, it suggests that you’ve despaired of being loved for who you really are. And if you succeed in manipulating other people into liking you, it will be hard not to feel, at some level, contempt for those people, because they’ve fallen for your shtick."
-Jonathan Franzen

2011-06-23T10:02:00.000-07:00

"Inspiration is important, but if one is not a born genius or prodigy, the act of writing genuine poetry can only be learned, or awakened, through a life of patience, observation, omnivorous reading, and hard work."
-George Evans

2011-06-21T15:41:00.001-07:00

2011-06-20T11:08:00.000-07:00

"The moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself."
-Henry Miller

2011-06-16T08:44:00.000-07:00

"The thought becomes more and more intense until, finally, its intensity is such that, with no transition, one is beholding it in three-dimensional, visual space."
-Terence McKenna

2011-06-14T09:11:00.000-07:00

"Family is eternal. You can see it in the shape of the ears, or the initials carved into hearts, on trees. Divorce can't destroy it. Television can't devour it. We're still standing. Loud and proud."
-Lance Loud

2011-06-13T00:27:00.000-07:00

2011-06-11T09:10:00.000-07:00

"Does the forest have a shape without its trees? Nonetheless, I will continue with my conceit, on the justification that I am also a writer and writers gleefully play with any patterns they see, even if an anthropologist would tell them that without context, there is no meaning. No writer believes that; her job is to create meaning, not analyze it."
-Jenny White

2011-06-10T09:08:00.000-07:00

"The verb 'to kiss' in many languages is formed by onomatopoeia. When the verb is not onomatopoeic, it often emerges from a semantic cluster that is even more revealing than the natural sound of a kiss. Thus the Russian tselovat' is connected to tsel', which is to say 'target'. And isn't that what kiss-compressed lips in fact are? Isn't that what bodily orifices are?"
-Justin E. H. Smith

2011-06-09T09:03:00.000-07:00

"Zhi yuan is Chinese for 'reach further.' The phrase dates back to the Han dynasty. 'Zhi yuan' is shorthand for 'Be still and your mind can reach farther.'”
-Fred Zackel

2011-06-08T20:19:00.000-07:00

2011-06-07T20:14:00.000-07:00

"You must teach your children that the ground beneath their feet is the ashes of our grandfathers. So that they will respect the land, tell your children that the earth is rich with the lives of our kin. Teach your children that we have taught our children that the earth is our mother. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons of earth. If men spit upon the ground, they spit upon themselves."

—Chief Seattle

2011-06-06T08:50:00.000-07:00

"Rumination can lead to self-exploration. Self-exploration can lead to self-improvement. And we haven’t talked yet about memory, which isn’t that important in a random universe. We can get by on autopilot."
-Fred Zackel

2011-06-03T20:06:00.000-07:00

2011-06-02T08:49:00.000-07:00

"The ordinary is always elusive and difficult to grasp—even as it is the most present actuality. And my sense, when talking about the ordinary, is always how extraordinary it is. Paradoxically, any attempt to fix the ordinary pulls it out of the everydayness in which it is situated, from which it seems to derive its power."
-Charles Bernstein

2011-06-01T10:25:00.000-07:00

"Strange enlightenments are vouchsafed to those who seek the higher places."
-Flann O'Brien

2011-05-31T14:09:00.000-07:00

2011-05-27T22:59:00.000-07:00

"The avant-garde by definition exists in a perpetual state of apostasy — a denunciation or disaffiliation from the dominant thinking — and acts by way of taboo-breaking, iconoclasm, blasphemy."
-Steven Toussaint

2011-05-25T07:56:00.000-07:00

"The stories we read in childhood have a potency that cannot be destroyed, not even by the nostalgia which is normally the most powerful disinfectant known to man."
-Dennis Potter

2011-05-24T07:54:00.000-07:00

"So what I’m saying, I guess, is that we’re constructing the story of our lives all the time, and memory, in the end, is no different than the telling of another kind of story."
-Kianoosh Hashemzadeh

2011-05-23T00:05:00.000-07:00

2011-05-20T07:51:00.000-07:00

"...something in him is already moving forward to the next place, and yet he is also never going towards something, but always away, away. This is a defect in his nature that travel has turned into a condition."
- Damon Galgut

2011-05-19T11:38:00.001-07:00

2011-05-18T13:50:00.000-07:00

"Repattern your past from the present. Whatever your circumstances, you use the past as a rich source, looking through it for your successes, restructuring it. When you search it looking for what is wrong, then you become blind to what was right, in those terms, so that the past only mirrors the shortcomings that now face you."
— Seth, The Nature of Personal Reality

2011-05-17T11:07:00.001-07:00

“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
-Carl Jung

2011-05-16T18:52:00.000-07:00

2011-05-14T08:33:00.000-07:00

"One has to arrive at a specific temperature, at which the objects become malleable."
-Georges Braque

2011-05-13T20:34:00.000-07:00

2011-05-11T13:21:00.000-07:00

“If in our daily life we can smile, if we can be peaceful and happy, not only we, but everyone will profit from it. This is the most basic kind of peace work.”
-Thich Nhat Hanh

2011-05-09T10:11:00.001-07:00

2011-05-08T23:14:00.000-07:00

"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate."
— Carl Jung