Thursday, July 4, 2013

Celebrate your own Declaration of Independence (abridged)



We can accept: it’s alright to find ourselves growing in ways we can’t yet describe. However much we value sharing human experience, there’s a feeling that is both so incredibly alone, yet profoundly connected to the universe.
What’s independence, after all, without free people? Then, who else, do we decide is, to a similar enough extent to aspire and relate, similar in his or her potential to be a free person?

My purposeful desire to connect with elements and conditions that may have yet to acquire a vocabulary ---or perhaps play part in one developed elsewhere, in the occult or science---suggests a desire for communication. What is that, but to share another side, besides our own apparent mind? We reach into degrees of otherness to inquire about a full identity.

Now, I have found myself attempting to let another, and then another, person into my deepest trust, the foundation of my circumscribed identity. The conditions in which one such love formed made a nice rumination for a novel last month. To exploit a resource that so richly belongs to us both is wise, since we can also replenish and renew and re-experience its flow. There is the more cursory level at which I enjoy sharing culture and talk with many others, which is exactly my online (in my case, Facebook) experience. It’s given me a wealth of attractions. Yet to have this mental material on hand could well be an effort to distract myself from the internal growth process.
The demand to understand someone who I could not see face-to-face, who contained a focus for so much emotional investment and procreatively inspiration to make arts most of all, with the desire to please and emotionally fulfill her. The time has come again for that person not to be an outsider lost to me, apparently by complications, but to fulfill the inner self.

Even the novel was a purposeful attempt, not only to vie for a living as a writer in as uncompromising manner as possible, but to re-join society, the brotherhood and sisterhood of being alive, with an emotionally-resolved story of myself, and my sincere efforts to share. Bring back food for my tribe, as it were. I learned, by describing details of physical movement and experience, I have my best opportunity to open that and share it.

In the process of learning to make a voice to share with others, I have turned to my best honest assessment of what’s going on, just as you each do with your own close friend or conscience.


As I listen to the Marc Kane strumming her way through “Aeroplane O’er the Sea,” after the emotionally soothing recitals of “Your Song,” I realize how very much I enjoy her presence. It seems so natural to lavish affection upon her. Her eyes are shut, the song’s flowing through her. Her attempt to digitally color a panel from the very comic book I mentioned (as presented on my t-shirt) to another person I found warm and friendly in person ties me through that inside out outside in ethos. I lie there thinking of the friends who have entered my thoughts, and some visions of the Lone Ranger, too.
Now, she plays again “Prokleta Nedjelja” and I realize how her performance of the song itself in the moment brings a smile; the moment where I remembered wanting to play this and so many other songs for our love right here in this room echoes, but does not weigh me down. Rather, it becomes a triangulation for that ever-lasting (if in the limited space of a body’s life, or not) effort to “sound out”-- to reach into the darkness of the senses-- and know something new, purposeful, personally revolutionary. There’s a lot of strange vocabulary for the paths there to ponder, and I sometimes wonder if I am reluctant to adopt the words of another because of how it might re-shape what I perceive.


I’ve considered almost non-stop, alongside the agreeable shared and stable experience alongside the Marc Kane as we live in peace, creativity, and just enough agitation to move us into more beneficial personal actions), whatever I may have learned ,and still may realize, from trying so hard to hold onto and understand someone whose behavior seemed to mimic our own, then seemed to belong to someone very different. I think of Egypt tonight, how this effort to live in consensus and its inherent conflicts based on difference (and indifference) happens in so many ways throughout the world, even with military agitation and great financial manipulations at its extreme in the material aspect.


Whoever else we would share inner peace with must have their own sincere declarations of independence. There is the point of radiance, in which we can share energies with the person yet remain somewhat detached from the vacillations and rely on whatever power exists beyond our own personal command to play its part in the fact that we care, but we cannot change the condition of this other person, willfully. The desire to seek that sort of control pronounces a demand for their dependence, for our symbiosis, to ask for a lack of independence.



When my own artistic independence has returned its voice to the songs we wrote, I feel secure I have a friend who will help synergize a production process in which we are capable of letting decisions flow through us, without struggling for control, to run together rather than lean. We have to find the effective way in which we can let another lean on us or the mutual effort is lost, to lack of will and balance. I’ve been preparing myself with practicing popular songs, which have the benefit of that shared experience when I spotlight them in public. It opens me as a vessel to exploring the new music and arrangement and production ability that will enhance the material, because I will be united comfortably enough with my instruments to bear with whatever discomforts emerge in these labors. Maybe if I will not perceive my work in relationship to that of others, I will arrive at something new and innovative, despite the limitations I may have assessed in myself. This bears true, too, in not judging myself in relationship to others in any other way. Take what ideas fit profitably into your sanity, but never drive yourself crazy with how bad anything is. It’s just another form of self-amusement---yes, even our self-inflicted tortures over our lost dreams and opportunities.



There is someone different than me, that is still my future result of directions taken now, and I have been aware I’m interested in investing that kind of love, attention, and determination in that self, as I have for others. The ability to be selfless for others, however, must be nourished, as we must be aware of what we have to give without resentment, without need to control anyone but ourselves. Herein lies the limitations of cooperation, which will determine the success of such energetic gifts to find purpose.

Nothing less than the sensation of the value of living and creating the moments of our experience (all living reflects what is, to the person, the art of living) is at stake. If someone else becomes so valuable, we do, perhaps must, risk the robbery of value gone with their loss. Part of our identity has wandered away, rejecting us. One's integral self, the You you must wake up with each and every day and night, requires our fidelity. We only have, in the end, what we appreciate.


It’s possible, to let something important in our development fracture, is to expose ourselves to an angry repressed self. It’s like the power inside you turning out to be the Incredible Hulk, a force of nature you can only hope retains your core decency while it threatens to smash its foes and leave you penniless somewhere with a hole in your memory. It’s possible that much subtler rages and judgments may emerge in the process of being friends, and the impatience we feel with someone we want to like, in some way, love, may be our impatience with ourselves, for what we would be happier to be, yet will not work towards being…because our self-absorption has come to wear the guise of others, who bear weaknesses and strengths that are, emotionally, cognitively, really our own.




When you make a picture, you celebrate a person. A piece of jewelry, hand-crafted, may celebrate ideas even further open to interpretation. It’s that openness to interpretation that ultimately creates activities for freedom. To make art in any format is potentially to make activities for free people. What’s independence, after all, without free people?

I will have to not be afraid to be alone, take encouragement from unique moments. I need not to return yet with anything, though it’s like to open up a much more self-sufficient mode of approaching people. It’s really not so bad being to yourself sometimes. I think meditating in the presence of someone else might be really great, too; I imagine for those who occasion to pray together, or engage in other rituals, it’s a very similar togetherness of whole and separate beings. I know I offered to start one new friendship on that basis, and if it’s meant to begin in person at all, I think sitting in quietude together would be a great start.


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