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.

This summer was one of the most eventful summers in my life, containing perhaps the most transformative five weeks I've ever experienced, at least in recent memory. I married two people. I traveled throughout the state and into Canada. I fell in love. And I took a whopping four weeks of vacation between July and September. As a result, I feel upended and a bit misplaced.

The three weeks from August 25th to September 15th, I feel into a pretty intense but low level depression. I worked. I talked on the phone to streamsandpools. I watched TV and stared at the ceiling. I spun and processed and tried to be as unmoving and as unmotivated as possible. I didn't socialize. I also didn't create.

In early September, my mother lost half of her finger to an infection. Seeing her at home valiantly trying to work her life one finger short while hiding dishrags stained with blood, still managing to cook more food than I could ever eat, still insisting on cleaning up (I let her) and doing laundry (I did not let her), wrenched my gut. And the mortality of the situation, the embracing of the humor in tragedy that my family has passed to me, is something I've been trying to listen to and sit with.

Nevertheless, my trip to Canada by way of Columbus shook me out of my normal, and this week since I've returned, I've been spending time trying to reconnect to myself and to ease myself into a sense of what I want to do, and what I need to do. It's not very easy. I've been off my practice and out of the habit of creating regular art or expression since the early part of July.

As a result, I find two things are happening. Firstly, I have a tendency to want to gloss over the routine parts of my life I'd like to share here for the shiny images of fiction-tinged narrative. Secondly, I am back at a place where I feel I have a blank slate. So much has changed and so quickly that I have no idea what I really would like to do or play with. The answer to the first is to start writing entries like this one. The answer to the second is relax, breathe, and realize that emptiness is a gift.

I feel like a journey has been brought to me, and it's one that I can choose to take. However, it's not one that I sought or crafted or beckoned. I am going to take it, for many reasons, but somewhat importantly because that's what I do. But it feels like a supreme act of faith to agree to something without fully understanding the shape of it. It scares me more than I've been scared in a while. But I'm coming to see that as a good indication of a life worth living, and an adventure that will challenge and stretch. In my less enlightened moments, of course, I see it as a cause to go to bed and pretend that I'm a piece of driftwood, bothering nobody with nowhere to be.

It's a process.

Tonight I've created a nice, new schedule for myself that involves waking up a full hour before having to go to work. Imagine that. Not rolling out of bed, into the shower, and then into the chair to code. Taking time to do my morning rituals, look out the window, even make coffee. And I've made time every day to read for half an hour. This is because in order to really commit to this journey, I need a set of tools and I need to be fully connected to inspiration and intuition. There's just no other way to do it, and no other way to make it happen. After my nice, relatively solitary (with a fun music concert highlight in the middle) weekend, I jump in and I see what will come of it all.

My mood is somewhat muted, but I also feel more motivated. The rains have come early, but I really don't mind them. They feel quieting and calming after the sunny activity of the last three months. I hope I can hold that fondness for them through the long winter to come.

Tonight, I've managed to be both well-rested and in a good mood. These two things have not happened at the same time since the third week of August. They are feeding each other, my body rest allowing my mood to rise, my mood rising sparking my body to action and thought. In an hour and a half, I'll go to bed, as I plan to do each night religiously, and get eight hours again.

It's been a long time, it has. And I sorely long to be back in this place of writing and of creatively expressing. But I'll come back to it slowly. Now that fall has arrived, the crisp snap of the air plucks the shortened rays of sunlight, the shadows feast and the last harvest sends the god to ground. I'm happy with the fall. I love the autumn time. It's a period of high energy and connection, and I plan to ride it back to practice.

It's time now for the making of promises and goals, the yearly ritual that comes again just a few weeks after my spiritual retreat at Lake Crescent. And as I stand here, at the brink of a journey that requires belief in the other world, that needs full immersion into possibility, it's time to be a Wolf. For the next phase of my life shamanically will be a return to the Wolf Tribe, my work in that area beginning very soon, my connection back to my power totem crucially necessary for what's ahead.

But that's a thicker topic than the night allows. For now, thank you to drshorn for his amazing driving ability in getting us from Columbus, Ohio to Toronto and back. My memories are of one of the best concerts I've seen in many years. My days away were thoughtful and eventful. Now I want to put paws to earth and stir up some magic.

I'm not sure I've ever in my life at a time when so much was going on, when a torrent of energy and activity was seemingly around every breath. I'm doing my best to remain upright in it all, but I have to say, until I can find my balanced place in it, I'll probably be pretty flaky in terms of posting.

The real lesson is that you can never predict the future, even in the smallest of detail.

( Stuff! )

I just received junk mail with the following printed upon it's white surface:
Toni Morrison
Author
DO NOT BEND

I don't blame him. Authors are a sensitive lot and bend very easily. Once bent, there's not much you can do. Oh, you can smooth them out again, but the crease is always there and frankly they are never the same again.

Imagine my disappointment when I opened the letter and did not find Mr. Morrison inside. I plan to write the Postmaster General or one of his Captains tomorrow.

Meanwhile, I have smudged the house tonight, though not with the smoke-alarm-triggering sage, but with sandalwood incense. I walked through the rooms speaking my intent and calling upon my allies and then I moved to the porch to watch the white gradient into darkness.

As I sat, I asked myself one of the usual questions, "What are you afraid of", which usually intersects and dredges up a number of oily customers that form my demonscape. "What is holding you back"... "What is causing you to hesitate"... "What is preventing you from bliss".

In general, I've felt a lack of wildness that stems back to my last birthday and I think is influenced by some of the events around the closing of the year and the beginning of the new. But as I've written before, that disconnected wildness comes in cycles, and the difficulty in gaining and regaining connection is pretty familiar to me. I have gained a tremendous depth of understanding of practice and meaning over the last six months, but I feel in many ways that understanding is sitting happily in my brain and hasn't moved to my body or my spirit where I need it to be.

As I was thinking about this, really feeling some clarity about my desire to let go and leave behind the anxiety of holding on, I noticed a silhouette on the eaves of the building next door. Just as I was perched slightly forward, gazing towards the mountains into the growing shadow of the east, a robin was standing on the very point of the roof, pitched forward as well, peering in the same direction.

We sat a while, looking absently at each other, then off into the middle distance where the sky marbled into a dark blue and white sea that passed with a slow hiss towards the north. And then as the sun set, almost to the minute, the robin began singing. In the dim light, the grey fuzziness of his feature, the ruffles of his neck warbled as his tiny beak opened wide. His breast swelled and his body seemed to shiver out his melodic exhalation.

And when he was finished, as the twilight turned into night, he shot into the sky with a high-pitched call and was gone.

After a few minutes, I shuffled my sock feet across the boards and returned inside to the fragrancy of sandalwood and the call of sleep.

I'm not sure exactly when it happened, but my oft-failed practice of sitting outside once a day and grounding myself into the wind and the embrace of the elements, to fall down in a sense of inner and inter connection through the memory of being, seems to have now become something of second-nature. I think it came as a direct response to being faced with so many things at the same time to which I had to surrender fully that I finally found the solace in the surrendering places.

When the wind blows and I am in the night air, I feel right. I feel like it makes sense, like all the anxieties and all the complications are revealed in simplicities. And it's come to the point where when I feel the spin up, all the stories I make up about the future, all the fears born by my mother, I step outside and sit and close my eyes and listen.

I'm being given a handful of things without definition. There's a wedding I am to perform, a long visit from a soul friend, an uncertain (through multiple possibilities) work future, and wrapped around it all, many questions in regards to where I go next and what I do next. I haven't done well in the face of them, wrapped up in thoughts and whirling in to do lists, and coding for the second largest billing month in a row. And underneath, the new phases of grief from Calin, and the fresh loss of a father of somebody dear to me. No, I haven't done well in finding a balance that allows me to have good health and calm sleeps, or a balance that gives my creative time it's fair due.

But I think that's changing. The things I thought I'd once do for myself as part of a practice, I'm coming to as a means of coping, and they are providing me moments of peace. My "spaces" philosophy is working well and about to enter a new phase with more specificity that I think will lead me back to creative writing. But overall, I'm learning that I don't know anything.

I don't know how it's going to be or what I'll do when it is or is not. And that's hard to accept. But the freedom of accepting it is tremendously empowering.

What I like about the wind is that it doesn't ask anything of me and I don't ask anything of it. It comes and goes, builds in predictable ways but always has within it the possibility of complete randomness. Whether that happens or not is immaterial. It's enough that it could change at any moment, enough to make sure one never fully assumes we know its direction.

Living in a city where it is always about to rain, whether it rains or not, I think is very similar.

Applying that to living a life holds within it an infinite dance that I hope one day to fully embrace.

I was in the kitchen, making myself some kind of tofu-related meat sandwich, when I heard the voice that did not come through my ears but nevertheless landed in the place where I hear sound. It said to me, "You aren't writing this story".

It is late. The winds rise and fall outside my window and there is a distant wail of passenger trains. My heart is racing from pedaling the bike that goes nowhere. An airplane falls down through the cloud layer with a whine and rockets off to return people to loved ones or to take them away.

This last week has been a blur of symbols racing through my open fingers, across my aching arms. In the evenings I have sat and watched the progress meters gain altitude, flipped disks and bathed, unshaven, in the glow of the television.

But the words linger and the clairaudience is crucial. The other evening I had a conversation with Mickie, a forced communication of some length, and afterwards went into the world. Everything was illuminated. The cat sat in the middle of the road watching me, and the crows lit upon the hoods of cars and spoke. The bridge seemed to shimmer against the horizon, buffeted by energy that breathed and buckled. This is the way I want to see the world every day.

There are so many impending things this summer for me that they threaten to weigh me down and crush my bones like matchsticks and straw men. I could easily let them. But I see finally that I am not writing this story. I am not in control of where it goes or how it will end. I am experiencing the story. I am the decider of moments. It's not my job to set it all down, to figure it all out. It's not my duty to be complete or scheme for completion. It's only my job to walk through it, to marvel at where it shifts and wiggles, to wonder which paths to take, but to realize the vast unknowingness of any outcome, of all outcomes.

I've been living my life sometimes as if I am writing my mythic journey, as if I can foresee each minuscule section and can weave together disaparate plots, as if I am both actor and sole creator. I've been living my life sometimes with the tremendous stress of having to explain, of having to make sense not only of my life but having to make sense of myself to myself and others.

I've been asked to stop doing this, and so I'm going to try to. When I think about it, I see it's really what I want now out of life. I don't want to be the keeper of the book of tales. I want to be inside Story. I want to engage and participate, not figure out the ending. But more than this, I want to go a little crazy.

I am realizing that fun and enjoyment are not owed to you. Sometimes fun must be ripped from the heart of living. It must be fought for and held tight. It must be chased down and ensnared, chewed and eaten and worn like a coat. Its up to me to find it in whatever I do. It will never be given. It must be found. And sometimes, it must be hunted.

Tomorrow is Midsummer, a magical sabbat. It marks the beginning of summer for the Gregorians, and the middle of summer for the Celts. For me, it marks the pinnacle of my energy and the beginning of the return back towards Samhain. And it reminds me of where I am and from where I've come. In my life, I've seen and experienced things that I'll never be able to understand, unless I allow for the fact that in general, understanding is much wider than it is believed to be, and that maybe things are exactly as they seem.

I think I'm finally ready to do that.

This has been the biggest billing month in over a year for me. I say that to remind myself what streamsandpools gently tried and eventually succeeded in telling me last night, which was "give yourself a break".

So, I took an actual do nothing day today, which found me sitting in the usual place by the usual lake, ignoring as best I could the overcrowding and the first-days-of-summer jet-ski mania, which took me longer than I'd imagined it would. I unwound all the resident anxieties, rubbed my face clear of the furrowed lines, and reached out. And I reached out. And it took me a very long time. And that made me more anxious, which caused it to take even longer.

( inward... )

The power of my practice is that I can define the boundaries daily, or by the moment. It's a concept that I'm becoming more comfortable with, the idea that when I write, I can write until I am done, regardless of how long that is.

I've been working my ass off again this week, late every night, but I've realized today that it's a choice to do this. Unlike unreasonable deadlines forced upon me, I am choosing revenue over leisure, a choice that is easier to make with the knowledge that in this business, revenue is unsteady and very soon my choice won't be a choice at all. I'll have all the leisure I want, and will probably worry about lack of revenue until the next phase of crazy arrives.

Knowing that's my choice, and that by choosing to work late, I'm not ruining my whole evening - that I can still accomplish small bits of practice in the margins, is freeing and mood altering. With two more hours to go tonight, it's my decision how much practice I shall engage in.

85 degrees today, and the house is still cooling off. Soon, we will reach the times when it doesn't have a chance to cool down at night, only ever increase in heat. I'm in my Tevas now and the cat won't sit on my lap, choosing the shadows of the hallway and the coolness of the carpets.

Welcome June. I never thought you'd arrive.

Tonight, while returning from a dinner with Kim, Kari and Mari to officially launch Kari into the world of the Germans for a year and change, I stepped out of my car, my mind whirling with thoughts. It had been a profoundly joyous evening for me with these beautiful and amazing women in whose company I was lucky enough to spend a few hours of friendship. It made me think of this post and this night, and how happy my mother would be of the man I've become and the way my heart has opened wide to allow love in.

On the way home, my mind started to churn about many favored anxious topics of late that build up and entangle and rob me of sleep. And when I stepped out of the car, my emotions were a mix of happiness and confusion, and a general overwhelm that whined in my ears like a television test pattern. I took maybe six steps, hardly paying attention to anything before me, when I saw him.

( I saw... )

"I like that too," said Christopher Robin, "but what i like doing best is Nothing."

"How do you do Nothing?" asked Pooh, after he had wondered for a long time.

"Well, it's what people call out at you just as you're going off to do it, What are you going to do, Christopher Robin, and you say, Oh, Nothing, and then you go and do it."

"Oh, I see," said Pooh.

"This is a nothing sort of thing that we're doing now."

"Oh, I see," said Pooh again.

"It means just going along, listening to all the things you can't hear, and not bothering.

I spent a good two hours outside on my porch today, writing the last post, listening to our podcast, and noticing the two other people on their porches across the street involved in their own reflection and connection. One thing I can say for myself is that I certainly have been busy. But on the whole, I sense that something rather large is missing.

( What is missing... )

Technology Never Rests
Originally uploaded by blackwingedboy.

One of the things I decided today was that I'd like to take more pictures and post more illustrated Journal entries. But if I took the time to tell you all the things I decided today, I'd wear my fingers down to the nubs.

( but here are some... )

"Hey, William. Aren't you supposed to be updating every day? I noticed you didn't yesterday."

"Who are you and how did you get in here?"

"Oh, I'm sorry. I thought this was the post office"

"Ah, no that's a few blocks away"

"Right, wow, this is embarrassing. I'll just leave then, shall I?"

"Don't worry about it, happens all the time with you voices"

( Voices... )

I saw the shadow of his wings first as the feather tips kissed the glass. But maybe that's what prey see too, a darkening of the sun before the talons and the beak close in. And then the hawk landed on the lantern post and stared in the window at me.

Hawk was the herald of my path, some twenty years ago now. We had a conversation that day, the first conversation of it's kind I had since I was a child, since I was allowed to believe in things childish. I was twenty three and it was in the middle of a college campus on a snowy day. That hawk was grey, and I was brought to tears before it.

We have had more conversations in the years spanning, but only when he comes to me, which he does rarely.

Today we had another talk from across the glass, him nodding his head in the breeze, me cross-legged sipping coffee in front of shiny boxes and radiating screens. He was red-tailed, this one, and sleek, a juvenile.

The content of the conversation is unimportant. But what I've come to realize in the hours since, is that I'm missing something.

I need to take some solitary retreats in the spring and summer, just me and the wind and the earth and the animals and the water. Because I've been talking too much and thinking too much and talking about how to think and thinking about how to talk. And there rises this buzz of noise and distraction, the attempted capture of what is ineffable, and the wheeze and blindness of struggle. I'm missing something along the way, the thing that I suspect I always miss. And maybe it's time to stop missing it so often.

In the interim and around the margins, I need to start my real practice. And I need to balance out my time better so as to give myself those quiet connections, to have time for remembering how to breathe and time to simply roll on my back in the clover, all four paws waving. Because who knows what else I'm missing.

Thank you, Hawk. I do try, but maybe sometimes I don't try as hard as I could. We'll see what I can muster in the coming season.

You may have noticed a distinct lack of words from this wolfish one, and with good reason. Last Monday night I began to develop what would turn into a major back pain event, an event that is still in some ways dragging itself out. The culprit, I suspect, is a pinched nerve and some resulting muscular spasms that were brought on by a combination of neglect and failure to accept that I am not 18 years old and can't expect myself to heal and forgive quickly.

( Ow )

Here is what I have to say. I have had several moments today when I felt like I could better see through all the ridiculousness of life and what we struggle with and worry about, while at the same time being overwhelmed with compassion for it. They scared the shit out of me.

I've been dealing with some very large things this week, among them boat loads of grief and mortality. Everything is fine, but I think I've hit a place where instead of triggering a depression, they are triggering some kind of connection and release. My heart is very gentle and full at the moment.

And so I just want to say that I love you, and I know... and it'll be okay.

People seem to like me. That sometimes comes as a surprise.

This post is not about that.

This post is short.

It contains many pronouncements but little information.

It will be twenty five sentences in length, this being the sixth.

I feel like I'm running on all fours, pads against stone and needle or hushed breath step on loam. There is steam from the nostrils and all ears back. But to the corner, on a parallel track I see myself running even, glancing over at the me of the now.

This other place is big. I can only get a sense of it before it is gone again, into the tree shadow and fog. But it's where I need to be, where I desire to be, and what scares the part of me that holds on to the shell and the bone, to the cracked mask of another life.

A vertical leap. A series of rushed jumps over low brush. The change of switchbacks.

I am on a journey. I began this journey at the end of last year. It's one that I half-picked, but also that picked me and that I followed. I keep forgetting this, keep trying to live as if I haven't left, keep thinking that this arced path is a short one instead of the truth of where it will lead and how long it will continue and what I know I will find along the way.

I want to peel off my skin and hang it on a hook, out there by the last fencepost. Something big is shifting in me. I'm not sure what that means. I'd like the coyotes to howl around my shed skin and tell stories about the short fur and brittle claws of humans.

This post will be one sentence longer than I'd imagined.

But now I sleep and I vibrate. And my dreams are full of moonlight and my body wants to fly.

With half an hour yet to go in the day, I'm still at a post a day for the last three. Good on me.

I had five hours with imtboo tonight and emerged back home feeling like a completely different person. Things seem more hopeful at the moment and less closed and cold and dark. We created a space of honest release together over coffee, theater and woolly gloves. I granted myself the permission to say 'fuck' as many times as I felt like, which turned out to be several thousand, ala:

"You know, the fucked up thing about that fucking emotion is that... FUCK, it's just so fucking ridiculous and I'm not going to fucking do that fucking shit anymore."

Mmm. I love that word.

We also wrote a mini musical while parking. The hit song is "Jumping, jumping, jumping"

An any rate, I feel like I have discovered some tools again that I can use to carve myself out of this funk, which include but are not limited to the return to practice. And I think it's time that I being to develop some of the more psychological workshops I've always had in mind by using myself as an experiment, starting this weekend. I also feel like I can start giving myself the permission to do some things of a more freeing nature for myself.

But I'm going to bed in a few hours and I don't feel empty. That's a good thing.

This morning, I made "chaotic blend" coffee, which is created by grinding the leftover beans from any open bags that for some reason did not make it into previous cuppas. Today saw beans from four different clans all tossed into the grinder and dumped with love into the gold filter.

Results usually range anywhere from horrible to ecstatic. This morning, I felt like I'd created the world's best cup of coffee, but it may have just been the overwhelming influence of the Kona.

In any event, the idea is that once consumed, the blend can never be remade exactly the same way again. It exists in the moment of drinking.

Also, brewing the coffee causes a butterfly's wings to flap in Costa Rica... not sure why, though.

When you live alone, you have all sorts of little games you play with yourself.

( Well, how are you? )