The trail/not the trail.

It surprises me I've only made 846 posts. I would have thought at least a thousand.

Shall I make it a thousand?

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From an everyday state of mind, trails woo me. A path through chaos, aligning everything around its single axis—that intoxicating pairing of mystery and certainty. On the trail, nothing could be worse! I can only get my kicks stepping back into disorder.

I have to laugh at the constant contradiction of it all. Any dichotomous parsing of reality leads to irony and silliness. It's the most natural phenomenon in the world: just as I hide from the roads on a trail, I hide from a trail in the bushes.

There's pleasure in the pathless woods.

Little babies, Spring 2017

 While I wish I could go out to music, I don't miss standing around at somebody else's show.

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2018-19

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My heart is trying to get through.

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I feel drawn to spirituality. Rather than trying to whip existence into shape, why not see what it has to say? Maybe stop trying so damn hard, blaming so much, indulging perpetual psychic tantrum. Maybe it can be what it is. Maybe I have things to learn, not figure out.

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I'm alarmed by my reflexive apathy, this resistance to feeling anything at all. I can see how it snuck up, a muscle overdeveloped after years protecting me from emotional overwhelm. But I can be stronger and more flexible. My consciousness has outgrown its need for a bodyguard. Resilience emanates from a deeper place, a wellspring of love with no need for guards or battlements.

Norfolk Southern

Ellet VA, 2016.
Scans 2019.
GIF 2020

some old shit

Happy Earth Day!

Not really sure what's going on, what convolution of public and private is about to twist itself loose. I want to share with the world insofar as making something is always a meeting of internality and externality. (This is not to say that I want to be physically present with other people.) (Except when I do.) I play with the idea that I myself am enough, that pleasing myself is enough, that the song and dance put on for others is ultimately empty.

And also I think... what you want is what you are. There's no line, no becoming. I'd like to adopt a lighter touch, skip from moment to moment like a stone.

new friend.

RIP summer hat.

RIP summer.

The biggest transition this year might be my adoption of the square format. 

RIP humidity.

Buckingham.

Blacksburg.

Cracker Barrel someplace.

Norwich.

Listened to a lot of mysteries this fall.

I've been living in Massachusetts.

Plenty of cats hanging around.

The way back from the grocery store.

Today.

My big thought right now is that love is a universal currency, self-love not in opposition to love for others, but one and the same. If you're fostering self-hatred, you're slighting the universe synecdochically. We cannot pretend to own ourselves, after all. We are a part of a bigger thing. We flourish together or we die together. There's the tricky problem of predator and prey... is everyone flourishing there? But if all must go... we can't be afraid of death, and indeed, death is correct and beautiful in its turn and truly the ground from which life can spring again.

I'm reluctant to embrace sensation over creation, although some part of my heart knows this is where I ought to go. I also crave legacy, definition, something solid for grasping, to say this is it. But what is it (is it?) is the ongoing sensory moment, which at the top of my game I could observe for the rest of my life.

When people disappear from the internet I suspect they've mastered it, that they're out there living instead of thinking and documenting the living. But then again documentation is an act like any other. As we look around our gaze can come to rest on ourselves, as much a part of the world as anything else.

I've felt the force of time lately pressing me back, making it hard to catch my breath. The documents are how I find my bearings in the stream of everything.

The only end to desire is the end of desire.