4.6 billion years

'My Spirituality as an Atheist'

I don't agree with the use of the word 'spirit/spirituality' but this kind of idea, this "essence of human" is what enables me as an atheist to breathe vacancy day by day. An enriched understanding and appreciation of beauty seems the only way to devoid life of absurdity. Not necessarily meaning or significance but simply "to feel wonder, to be in awe" and to allow my senses to marvel in the world.

Currently reading: Cloud Atlas

A gift that keeps giving.

Jiminy cricket

The problem with holidays is that we expect them to be something other than ordinary days. Houses and buildings are forced to fancy dress, there is colour everywhere, noise, people bustling in and out of these very buildings clutching their preparations to the crooks of their limbs, straggling and struggling, pushing and being pushed, there is overlapping music, jolly carols and gaga and no silence, no one can see the floor they walk on but we feel the rubbish rubbing against our soles, clocks under pressure tick their arms harder and faster, everywhere phones are ringing and everyone's digging in the pockets of their clothes and other clothes and bags and other bags and a finger strikes the shiny screen but it has stopped ringing, children are crying from the laps of bearded strangers, teeth are decaying and trees are dying, companies are laughing and knocking glasses, everyone's running and shouting and buzzing with the excitement and anxiousness of a million people who have no idea what they're celebrating. It's Christmas, It's Christmas!

So this is why when I come home to a family who doesn't acknowledge this mess outside our door, and I wake up to the 25th expecting to be woken by Santa himself, and to see trees adorned with glitter and tinsel, and to experience the love of giving, and to see my entire extended family before me, and I don't but instead, wake up naturally from a good night's rest and drink tea and listen to bon iver and wait for the explosion of a joyous day to ensue, I keep blinking myself awake but nothing happens so I just keep drinking my tea and wonder jasmine rice and green or chai or earl grey? So I decide one of each and write a million tiny unfinished blogs because I cannot concentrate because I am still expecting. So tell me to stop because I don't even like holidays that much except the energy, all for the energy, and I'm sure if I believed Jesus was anything other than a magnificent figment of imagination, I would be different but that's just too bad. I just want to enjoy my nothing day because I love nothing days except this isn't a nothing day. Things are good as long as they fulfil their purpose, so this day despite being perfect to me, is imperfect, so Christmas, screw you, screw you so hard for ruining my nothing day. It was meant to be a perfect nothing day.

so ready for us

I like reasons, which is a terrible habit but I like them so what can you do? I like knowing that I laugh because I am shrinking the world so it fits within my cupped hands. I speak the way I speak so no one will understand me unless they understand me and are listening. I listen to the music I listen to because it makes me feel, and because feeling is important to me, because feeling in the beating of my heart, in the signals from my brain, represent false promise, which I also terribly like. I read textually dynamic books because confusion draws me away from living the fear and nearer being stimulated to understanding that which is the truth. The truth of all truths; that there is no truth. I talk to the people I talk to because they think about, and struggle their lives with the the unfortunate circumstance of being nothing, or something. I love my family because I owe them much more, as we all do. I am who I am because I spend my time doing everything I have said, and by not being someone who doesn't do and think those things. At times, I feel like these are the reasons to explain a person. I feel that if I ask the right questions the right way and receive the rightly meditated responses, then I am seeing into their person. That by using the simplest of ways, you and I are helping each other to understand. Do you believe so? In all my life, I have only known few things that would make something like Life an exciting journey rather than constant downfall. I believe in people, and trust that I will find the person who can exclaim this entire passage to me in divergent words with a brain that sends signals that are similiar to mine. I believe that in the moment of silence before my own child cries, I will burst and burst until I can burst no more, then lay down and cry because I always cry because I feel too much.

Duty of Care

From the moment we are born we inherit a swelling sack of losses and failures, they ride on our backs and push us face down into the earth. Then limitlessly, unconditionally, we will feel hands of strength, pushing harder on us, pushing until there is dirt in our lungs and our skin, tortured with bruises, and then there is release. The same hands begin to uproot us, pulling us upwards towards the sky, towards light. What is parenthood? Why should any individual be responsible for another's entire being; their health, their minds, their everything. Torches drop from nowhere into the hands of mothers and fathers, and they super glue these torches to themselves and carefully, so slowly, guide their children through tunnel after tunnel. Children run. They stumble, they are lost at any time but the torch never fails to give light. This is what it means to me. There comes a time when the world is crashing down and we cannot blame ourselves so we blame this light, we hurt the light, thrash our limbs and roll boulders its way. But the world will not crash, we will grow taller, stronger, and we will stop fighting. So that when we are old, when we are learning to finally able to walk confidently, steadily, like a turtle that has been walking for a long time, we can finally, finally every once in a while, turn around and simply smile a little and say 'thank you'. We have a duty of care, we have a responsibility to love the people who have sacrificed decades towards the children they bled tears for. Our love will not compare, but we can make the hurt stop, we can be at peace with each other, tell each other things not because we have to but because we know it matters, because sometimes light switches fumble. Coming to terms with one's adulthood is perhaps a challenge, a rocky stepping stone but summoning the decision to enter parenthood is beyond an unexperienced person's imagination. We learn to love through the way in which we are loved, and for every morsel and every crumb of our lives, we should be grateful and we should care because love may be overrated in so many ways, but in this way it will never be underrated enough.

Skis in Vancouver.

"For what gives value to travel is fear. It breaks down a kind of inner structure we have. One can no longer cheat—hide behind the hours spent at the office or at the plant (those hours we protest so loudly, which protect us so well from the pain of being alone). I have always wanted to write novels in which my heroes would say: “What would I do without the office?” or again: “My wife has died, but fortunately I have all these orders to fill for tomorrow.” Travel robs us of such refuge. Far from our own people, our own language, stripped of all our props (one doesn’t know the fare on the streetcars, or anything else), we are completely on the surface of ourselves. But also, soul-sick, we restore to every being and every object its miraculous value. A woman dancing without a thought in her head, a bottle on a table, glimpsed behind a curtain: each image becomes a symbol. The whole of life seems reflected in it, insofar as it summarizes our own life at the moment. When we are aware of every gift, the contradictory intoxications we can enjoy (including that of lucidity) are indescribable."
‘Love of Life’ from ’Lyrical and Critical Essays’ by Albert Camus
Translated by Ellen Conroy Kennedy