“There’s a Source. From there you have you, me, and all we know and countless details more.
Creative energies bring all forms. Kindness allows all to shine. Love allows all forms. Beauty answers our awe and stirs our most challenging questions. These things expand. They exist in abundance. We receive this, and contemplate all that comes to us with these faces. Whatever guises some say also exist, it seems unnecessary---but there it is. Without these faces not that nor the rest of it exists.
Creation has been making faces at us, all this time. This is a story of some of the faces Creation has made.”
Something like that should be my first words of the next prolonged and first complete novel I wish to write, in a blistering pace over a few weeks, preferably. I want to humorously follow the flow from All Potential to the forms and friends I know, and all that stands between me and that is an ethical consideration I need to here mull over, for I wonder if I must not write what I dread writing the most in order to turn loose and clear-mindedly work all the many hours and days on energetically giving form to so many very cool ideas I want to try, if I can just effectively generate, and not leak, energy.
I can be willing to write some of this just for my own personal life dealings: describe the nature of friendships. The Stux are a bunch of weird, contrary friends making their place with M’magination.
The personal things I have to say that I don’t want to hurt anyone are the consideration, but how about I just say them here?
The saddest thing to tell of late was the loss in my life of three people who had been my best friends and were or were like family to me, over the last six months. There are much sadder things in this world, and I don’t know why we’re not all working together in our part to alleviate some of those, when our own precious miseries really just revolve around a way of thinking.
We disagreed, and not one bit of my energy can be brought to bear to make it a’right, save in the peace I wish each time they cross my mind. I decided I could do without how they each treated me these days, and would use anything negative of what they thought of me to cultivate a better person in me, to believe better in myself no matter what these people dear to me said, and to be better while incorporating and healing those feelings that need not fester doubt, but rather call my own actions to answer.
I want to write about celebrating the good of them in my life, without dwelling on the history of how I have judged them, and however I may have misjudged them each, I believe in my intentions with them and chose freedom from cycles of behavior I thought took me apart in my efforts to put together my own life with conscience and competence. I realize they all are doing their best, too, so for now best for me not to expect more from them, and keep nurturing and challenging myself in this life I honestly find really full of joys.
I envision setting up my happy memories of them, how they seemed like people I could really talk with and used to go so many places with. Then, provide something of what went wrong? Do I really want to dwell on that again, and how would I not feel like crap writing about it? Maybe I should relish the distance I have from those words; how can my own discussion of these things not be self-serving? But to serve myself with understanding, and what I’ve chosen in life to do nothing about, I wish them the best and wish I could make it all better for them. I really hope it IS getting better for them. And I wish I could be part of things getting better for them, and enjoy that with them. Maybe some day.
I have a deep affection for my creative ideas, too, and cannot abandon them to stare off too long across the seeming abyss between me and those people. I was not finding in them the friendship I need for this time in my life, and it seemed true what they took from me was not the ongoing friendship they need, too. I really thought a lot about why they took me that way and had to remember carefully what I should truly see in myself.
I gave them the apparent last of my best thought out answers, each of them. I decided at the very least I should take a year off from each of them, and while I wouldn’t want to spend more time revisiting how much they pissed me off, physically, just took that anger and subliminated it in the realization we should stop talking for now, informing them why in only so many words as it took, then deciding I believed better about myself and saw the reasoning in my intentions. I rather imagine they did the same. Now, only time will tell the value of whatever’s been said.
Maybe this is the start I needed. I’m so highly uncomfortable with airing their dirty laundry in any direct connection with who they were, and the good news about fiction is that you can blur certain lines and keep the essential truth. It is not imaginative writing in the sense of things being allowed to take any form they want, but would it be destructive to write closely about the benefits and circumstances that fit into their lives? I do not want to write anything for revenge, or maybe I don’t want to publish it for revenge, but write to help people relate. Even with changed names, I find my commitment to telling about life at odds with my desire to keep their privacy, and I remember them in considerable personal detail such as they shared, so . If I didn’t write about it at all it might feel like some kind of skeleton in my closet! I just know that, a week ago, I was feeling, and my wife with me, like having this happen with a third person I’d considered a best friend, mutually, at some points in my life was driving me crazy. But I decided not to be crazy that way. It’s not fair to my wife, for one, who never had a lot of the benefits of those relationships, just has me, and from her perspective, each of those friends had been more entrenched in their own troubles than active in being my friend in recent years. So, the break seemed unnecessary, but there it is. Now, while I don’t have the quiet but, I thought, ongoing friendships of those people (or maybe more than I know), I questioned if I might find the necessity in these situations, what deep-seated psychological issues of my own I might resolve with the dissolution of certain attitudes about myself that I found so limiting for my friends’ considerable chagrin.
That was the difficult thing: I knew each of these people, by evidence of their relationship with me as they practiced it now, had their own troubles, and here now I could do nothing about those for them. If I could just go through those troubles with them some more, maybe I would see them overcome those, as I believe they each in part want to do. Part of me is certainly with them. I know they can do it, each of them. My description of each of them would reminisce over what I found cool about them as people. For all the hours I spent thinking about their problems, their problems with me and my possible problems with myself, I just want to make a few truth-filled pages and still feel like the door’s open to leaving them out—but I want to write about something with heart, and if I start with things on my heart, honest problems I’m trying to quantify in the world alongside the sometimes-less-than flattering silliness in people and the immediately pleasing silliness of the Stux interpretation of being human and things human. My lasting belief in them would be the detail that marks the completion of each brief portrait. Then, I want to nestle this in a hilarious book, about “my lasting belief” in the Stuckwayze. It’s really about a particular (or not too particular?) brand of comedic philosophy, the funny side of our wrong answers and creative deviation. I just wonder if it’s not that little bit of seriousness occasionally necessary to keep the humor from being so light-weight as to fly away from meaning. It grounds these words of life in something about which I wish not to simply forget, but about which I need to lighten my heart the way “being Stuck” lightens our own hearts around here. It is all these many laughs that help keep us together so well. Flying away from meaning towards the simpler things in life as we set the language on its head is the joy of Stuckwayze humor. But without our own stuck ways, would we need a laugh?
Inserting these relationships blown apart by problems might be deeply enriching to someone else’s life. Then again, there they would be alongside how I really feel. It’s sad to know the asshole side of them when there’s so much more they are to other people. Using my voice to try to hurt them would be an asshole thing for me to do, too. But what if what I learned from our problems together is what other people need to read from me, for benevolent reasons? I thought deeply about what justifies my life, what drove my very certain decisions and then, through sometimes melancholy reflection, why those had been necessary, and what I needed to see in myself from the experience.
What words I can provide will be the most trustworthy ones I can write. I gained them from being trustworthy.
See, I really wanted to deal with them in some way that gave the impression of how it was without getting caught up by the illusion of what was and the pain we had to overcome, a price that comes with loving people sometimes, and even being loved. No one ever said everybody’s going to do it the way you would’ve wanted, after all.
I am trying to find my own next necessary important steps.
I never meant to hurt any of them with my life. I just wanted to live mine, my way, and love them and support them in living their own, their way. If they appreciate it at all, if they spend time thinking about me at all, I hope they honestly evaluate what I was saying to them. Now, for myself, I need to act with the wisdom of my own advice, and make my private pain weightless, so my mind can be free to enjoy the many other imaginative concepts that only need hours and hours and hours of my undivided attention. There are so many things about which I cannot write a word without acknowledging that it is all right for me to come to grips with what has troubled me, for it’s like this: I can’t really forget about a story, can’t stop working on it, until it’s finished; otherwise, it’s bound to return someday. Maybe it’s meant to be this way with these things: if they become part of something that requires years of procrastination, perhaps I will have the essence of these problems cast into details formed without hurtful resemblance to people who’ve trusted me. How much of they see of themselves in this is actually quite fine with me because they’ll never need doubt how I saw things after that. But I may simply go with this idea: describe them personally as outlandish made-up creatures, imaginary friends, and from there attach the problems and my modest thoughts towards their resolution. I spent a lot of good and sad times as well with their companionship. It may seem in their retaliatory words they may hate my pride in myself, but I have to both maintain my love for the right things in my life and still be able to answer to my own conscience. It could be my conscience has had a thing or three to learn about how to function properly of late. I know that doing what I believed was right has made me uncomfortable and unhappy in a rather immediate manner, as only one who knows only the distractions of his own choosing may know, for it’s freed me to think about these things in as much depth as I could stand. By writing about them, I can lift them into the light. I’ve been living without being so troubled in between each of these friendship-ending quarrels, as I have again in the past week. I may have considered not making them happy a failure of mine, if not one made cooperatively, but in honesty I did not fail them, nor myself. The value of what I shared with them and what I had to decide of myself might be part of my most precious gifts to the world. I believe we all bring precious gifts to the world, and must actively observe what this world takes from us and what of value we need in the moment.
So, I realized, while I’d avoided honoring my troubles with written words, I had given of them much futile energy, but also much care and consideration, so as to become adept at understanding my feelings and what I could of those of others as well. Perhaps these experiences I owned needed a place where they would not be the primary body, but rather, humanizing elements amidst comedic anarchy, just as they themselves were born of an inevitable dramatic anarchy that seemed so unnecessary, yet there it was. It can seem so self-righteous to know answers to others’ problems, or even to offer attitudes, thoughts and ideas that seem so useful in fulfilling life, so maybe a book full of imaginary characters doing everything whatever wrong way occurs to me is the proper, if ironic home, for such discussions. While they might ground, in passing, a breezy narrative, they expose real life stupid decisions in a way that may be useful to someone who hasn’t made them but might. I was going to say something about how writing joke after joke, as I used to make in times past with these friends, may be some kind of vehicle for carrying away burdens I’ll need to let go if I hope to concentrate on what’s to come.
I hesitated to do the work because I did not want to have those sad, sometimes angry feelings anymore, and wanted to get up with projects I’d be much more happy to share with everyone, based on events that are a good more “made up” to say the least. Perhaps detailing them, to whatever point I’m inspired to detail them, could invoke bad feelings again, but they’re even unsafe without the interface provided by writing, which is why I recommend this activity for everyone, no exceptions. Perhaps detailing them without feeling bad, as I’ve done in discussing them with my wife, and avoiding elevating too many of the negative things said or the neglect to a primary and chronic irritant, has already been done, but what if writing about them was not the gateway to continuing on, as whatever wisdom they provided may be left ungathered? These things were urgent enough to put me off much of my creative output, after all. I have been writing a single story, presently near ten thousand words after about a month, and have been unable to write much on any other one. Granted, I’ve been giving my all to my relationship with my wife and the growth of our music to a viable professional standard, and if this has served the confidence in the success of those things, it’s time well spent. I’ve given to friends as well, but what I’ve longed to do is fashion whole bodies from among the works of my interest, for in this I find purpose in the world, a skillful and diligent version of the sort of more spontaneous words I find in me that belong to whoever I find needs them. In the case of a few friends, a creative effort to present them is an existing goal within the body of our friendship, inspired by them. I want the things I write, draw and play to come from me just as spontaneously as those deeds and words on the spot to friends---to put my mixed vocation into form and practice arriving at said form with the same kind of certainty as I feel in offering those words and deeds, and for the same reason: they seem to belong to you, and that’s why I make them, because they were words in recognition of you, inspired by our shared ability to understand.
With this much written, I wonder if my effort to shut this out was denying a necessary inspiration that must be claimed before the rest of these things falls back into my hands, now boosted by the increased experience of my writing about difficult personal things well and reasonably. (It’s like, in a video game, you need the experience of clearing each board before you’re prepared to do well on the next. And it’s the same sorts of things over and over again, too, dressed in different forms, ideas, and strategies.)
I try to go from the Source of all things to each of the various faces of everyone and appearance of everything that Source becomes in the first pages of this new book. That decision to feel how you are going to feel, with care towards the sort of thoughts those feelings dictate you illuminate in your inner world, is a primary point we all share with existence, from which we derive our individual lifelines.
And then, there’s the Created People, the ones whose faces smile in vacant, teeth-clenched grins, with their deliberately different and funny observations of us and the world we made, alongside joke after joke that makes up their own versions of the various things in the world we made.
In my life, they began with faces my sister and I made, which could be drawn as simply and slap-dashedly, haphazardly as possible, a particular kind of face I taught my wife to make, a face we make while we make some of our stupidly-clever kinds of jokes that sometimes give us belly laughs. Those faces were not Ugly, as we used to call them; she identified them correctly as Stuck. An entire "nation" of made-up people have these faces, and it's their way of thinking and doing that we creatively make up to make one another laugh, sometime in the presence of other people.
They are said to be “smooth down there” so a lot of what we do as humanity really seems ridiculous or curious at best, so while we may agree there’s something “wrong with them” we have a drive towards the absurd that is apparent to them, too. It seems the Source wants to flow into a few of “them” too, though they only “appear” in our personal cutting-up and have thus far run too wild to document with something so tame as words on a page. But it seems like their story’s about ready to become well-documented.
I am at peace now with how little control I have over their fictional adventure and how little plan I have for its plot (besides those who look for the UnStuck one rumored to live in the world---a secret revealed on a visit back to the place where they first set foot in the world, the Isle of Venju). Look how little control I had over the personal and more broadly in the world general difficulties: “they seemed unnecessary, but there they were.” Should I be overly troubled over where one laugh line after another then takes me? Will ever be funny to me how nobly I tried to say the most thoughtful and right things I could find in me to say, and how, while it’s boosted so many people in my daily path, those things stung three people with whom I had so many days made of them my first choice in company? Can the friend that Nature is, the friend that Creativity is, the friends that going outside in the world now announce each its own place in the present moment into which I must ever welcome my future?
By next week, I may find the Stux were impossible to tell, that they must remain our hilarious in-joke, and the desire to give their Creator my troubles as detailed by me may disappear beneath the flood of other inspirations, for the flow’s given me a precipitation of possibilities which each provide something to drink of my time, each of which I’d like to see come to life. At this point, I simply want to be unleashed to spend all of my time doing all of them I can to my fullest creative potential, and for my friendships to blossom in the creativity and receptivity I can bring to them. A lot of the things I want to do with my time, involving friends---and all my active true friendships center around the creation of something, even if it’s just a bit of warm company—can fill out the book, too, so it need not be depressing at all, as the most potentially depressing things are not the center of its world. I think the Stuckwayze will have their own twists on most everything I do, so there should be no shortage of words dedicated to thinking funny may arrive ---which is good, because between the songs and the comics I’m drawing and the places I have to go, my writing’s going to have to keep coming out in an industrial-strength flow whenever I can make time to do it. The intention has been, okay, let’s see what I need to get rid of in order to unleash the Renaissance man I feel called to be. I don’t want others to compare myself to them, the little I’ve done, for the purpose of putting and keeping themselves down, but I’ve been shown sometimes I have no power over that, they’re already looking for ways to be troubled about that and other things, however much my intention to make things that make people feel good and feel deeply.
It’s what my real friends want for me, anyway, because it’s silly to think I need anyone diminished in any way for me to reach my true value. In this, I have abandoned for a time so many ideas that still I think promise a greater, complete form, and so abandoning the idea of contacting these few people, who I could not get upon request to treat me and maybe themselves the way the way I needed becomes natural in this light. Once you make the problems you’ve had part of the world of ideas, they become ideas, and you become aware of what your own ideas are, and can decide which ones to express, explore, or avoid examining with lost perspective. You can poke yourself in the eye with those if you’re not careful!
Spring Flowers A couple of years later, I was beginning a Graduate program @ Naropa University, a Buddhist College in Boulder CO. It was an intensive summer program in Contemplative Education that included meditation 2-3 times a day, yoga, tai chi and various Dharma Arts. This particular day, I was taking the introductory Qi Gong class from an elderly Mandarin gentleman who was reportedly one of the first to bring Tai Chi and Qi Gong to the United States. He was a lovely man, gentle and joyous to be around. After holding animal postures as long as possible we took a break and I approached him with a singular question-“Why are my feet on fire!” He smiled and put his arm around me, while I rubbed on my feet that genuinely felt hot. He gestured to the man next to me and said, “This man here has been in training with me for the past 8 years and has not felt this yet and here you get it in the 1st lesson!” He put me in a headlock and ruffled my hair continuing, “Oh, but don’t you get the big head about it, everyone has this-you just got lucky and were receptive today!” “What is it?” I asked incredulously. “Qi, Chi, Ruach, Spirit…whatever you need to call it”. 
