this feeling. it is of passing through, of being forged, shaped. I can feel how this is shaping me, slowly, gradually, eventally. is it towards the better? that is for my own grounding to do. it is possible for this to turn me bitter, angry, suspicious, hard, thin-lipped. it is possible for me to pass through this into a realm of compassion, soft eyed, a kind of deep-sighed, oh, you know, I know, full of hurt-driven understanding. I know, you know? that you were all trying your best. that we were all trying our best to protect ourselves.

yeah.

behind this of course, is a well of sorrow, of deep sorrow. is this how thoughts ought to hold shape? is this what this all is worth? I remember talking to K a few months ago, on the pier. do you not understand? I said, in mock outrage, first shaking in the air, mock outrage but sincere sadness. do you not see these connections? understand how special and precious they all are? the shimmering mass of relationships? they've what we've got, the starstuff, the tender filaments that shape our environments? and is this what it's worth? what years and decades of connections is worth?

some time ago I half-joked that being in love with white people has given me the patience and understanding to think about race in a different light. there is no enemy in a person, no bad person, just people, bearing the history and weight of beliefs and processes, somehow believing that protecting a way of life requires to be on the attack, that protection requires damage. self-defense, hold your ground. and that these things congeal into a self-reinforcing system. the colony, the castle. the psychogeography of fortification come to bear on the self. it's a half-joke. a quarter-joke. an asymptotically-approaching-zero joke.

I can feel this experience shaping my understanding of people. where does belief come from? how do systems knit together? the fear of being left out of the group; how does that operate as an action of shunning? how does harm happen from a place of hurt? how often is harm justified, not as harm, but as a form of self-protection and preservation, retribution from the language of future-self-preservation?

if retribution is supposedly for a future self, against a future scenario, then what is at stake is our imaginaries, our understands of what the future could hold. does it keep on playing out the way it has? are there any possibilities of transformation, or change? I imagine drawing the future trajectories of planes in the sky, pool balls across a table, someone wanting to hold them to their linearity. this will go straight. this will go straight.

--

the questions I have are myriad. they spill over and pile onto the table and I am in the midst of wondering how I should talk about this, openly. should I draw a system diagram? write scattershot? just mull it over, wander amongst it?

or: in the end, are such systems things I cannot and should not understand? people act in the way they do, and I will do so too, and we make whatever system we do? is it part of my own unhealthy pattern that I may seek understanding in order to move in a way that guides us towards a harmonious whole?

or: this notion of the self; where does it come from? whose notion are we using? we love to say 'put on our own oxygen mask', but we wouldn't say that about food, would we? and the fact of the matter feels like, that I want to argue is: most things are like food, than oxygen masks. most places that we inhabit are not burning planes crashing to the grounds, but full of days, days of pain and hurt and joy and satisfaction and love, but days, in which the sun rises, then sets, and rises, and sets. if I live my life like there are oxygen masks I need, then I live my life like a burning plane.

if I live my life like there are days in my life, then there is food, on the table. we serve ourselves, we serve each other. we look each other in the eye, and smile. 'wine comes in at the mouth, love comes in at the eye.' and we start eating, together, and the act of eating together, itself, nourishes us. together.

--

i imagine us as these galaxies, these universes, holding stories. inside of those experiences there are shimming loops, graphs, that twinkle. past experiences hold the trembling energy of emotions, in the body and in the experience. in the present, an encounter puts us in the same body, in a similar experience, and that emotion reverberates out, shaping the present moment's experience. the present day plays out, according to the same way, a kind of sports play shape, football diagram where the dynamic is actually the movements in-between. are we sadly doomed or happily destined to repeat these out, well-worn paths of hurt and joy?

to me the answer always has been yes and no, we see it and we shape it, we move around, we shake our bodies, play a little bit, learn how to dance. find meaning in the movement. sometimes, the answer is a shaking trembling gasp in the body making its way into the world. sometimes, the answer is stillness. sometimes, the answer will be ... well, I don't know.

I guess we'll find out together, self.