It's half noon on a grey, rainy, cold day in Seattle. I'm waiting here for lunches, for showers to be finished, in order to go about the day with streamsandpools. What I'd like to do is sit for a few hours and write a lengthy novel of my state of being, all the things that have happened since I returned from Christmas, all the things that happened in-between my last two posts. It's been years since I've felt this kind of hunger, the hunger to write, the hunger to create, the hunger to make music, the hunger for stepping up into shamanism, into shintoism, into creation, into myself.

That hunger is pulsing inside me. I dream about it, I think about it, I sit in the bath and contemplate it, I carry it on my shoulder, I wear it on a chain around my neck. I worry sometimes about the immensity of what I still want to do with my life, and how to balance that with a relationship, the amount of solitary time it requires to be a writer, the amount of production time it takes for music, podcasts, animations, new technology. I know I'll struggle with taking that space for myself, in asking for it or in just making it happen. But I think it helps to speak that clearly, to realize that one of my big lessons this year is in taking myself seriously. And taking yourself seriously means grabbing for your dreams, investing yourself in your own fulfillment, and seeking the balance in your life that allows for those things to happen.

For a long time, I've considered myself not worthy of making those choices, those choices not worthy of being made for sake of other choices. But I don't feel like that anymore. There's a life beyond the life that isn't being led very well, and a great number of voices in my head falling silent. I have floods and torrents and bonfires of creative passions, a drive for connection that has never been fully met, a world that holds the heart of me that is only visited briefly and only engaged in through periods of intensity that are followed by periods of stagnant fallow. And it's not enough anymore.

The other night, while walking back and forth to my basement, I suddenly was given a moment of clarity where I saw the illusion of reality, the struggles and the spin, the noise of worry, those distractions that take one away from the truth and the soul of being. And I said to myself "I'm being tricked". This thing on top of the real thing, this layer that sometimes completely obscures the light beneath in a penumbraic eclipsing of the source is often the thing we believe in, instead of the source itself. I basked for as long as I could in that moment, seeing the energy and time that is invested in the construct, the small amount of mana that trickles down into the true, seeing how different life is when one chooses instead to seek ways to directly invest all that time and energy into the true itself.

That's the space I'd like to hold in the future, and it's a space that is very difficult for me to maintain, a space I may need your help in maintaining and keeping me to. However, I feel like I've been shown the way in, and so I'm hopeful that it's a place I can return to and work with. Practice is key, and I realize that now, to keep a constant level of connection flowing, to remember and to dive deeper on a daily basis into the true, and for me, to speak to my world and be reminded of its solidity, it's value to me, and how it among all else deserves my utmost priority.