Following the most beautiful

Now is the time for me to go to another country in order to find my community. Going overseas by myself into unknown territory was always something I would do in the future and now apparently it is something I am going to do very soon. I am doing this because for the first time in a long time I feel a desire for something I do not have. Maybe this is the "passion" my dad was telling me about, the driving force of my life that will provoke me to get up and do something, go somewhere and be somebody. I live in the country because I feel the need for a community. There is a small human community there, yes, but I often feel more connected to the more immediate community of other animals who live in immediate proximity to me; many different species in various degrees of domesticity. And then I come to the city and it's almost entirely humans and I don't necessarily feel very connected to many of them.

~

I have been to the other side of the planet now and yes, I made so many wonderful friends.  My passion for community and companionship has taken me all over the planet.  I tend to live my life on the philosophy that I go to where the people love me the most.  I receive invitations to people's homes and we enrich each others'  lives for a short or long while.  The most beautiful people draw me in with their eyes and I can't help wanting to feel as close as possible to their lives and their bodies.  Sometimes they even see my beauty and draw me closer; sometimes they revolt and I feel the pain of rejection and move on as quickly as possible.  It amazes me how the most simple guides can lead me to the most beautiful situations.  However, I fluctuate between alienation and communion.  I move from city to country to gathering to lonely wandering.  I look into the eyes of a beautiful human being or touch the trunk of a beautiful tree and then I must leave because permanence is too scary to face.  Nothing is permanent, I tell myself, don't stay too long.

I want to see what happens when I return to the most beautiful person I can think of and allow myself to stay in their presence for as long as it seems necessary, as long as it sustains us both.  Will we upset one another?  Will we abandon one another on some subtle fundamental level?  Will I leave at the critical moment or will I depart at the exact moment when the stars indicate?

I will follow this beauty anywhere and sacrifice everything for it.

Just chatting about stuff and shit, you know

It joys me to be reminded, over four months out of New Zealand, of the smallness of the cultural discourse.  When I was a small child I did not know that the rest of the world existed.  I knew Australia was a place that people went for holidays sometimes and was startled when some family friends moved to Australia - I didn't realise people actually lived there.  I heard of a place called the United States of America in a song and I visualised it as a large gymnasium.  I knew the mythical Disneyland is in Los Angeles and I imagined this as a very sad place where a poor little girl called Angeles was lost.  Even my awareness of New Zealand was limited to a few hundred kilometres in any direction.  When my sister went to Auckland the place was beyond my powers of imagination.  Now I am 26 years old and have spent a few months on the other side of the planet and I get this funny feeling that New Zealand is a rather strange place - a little attempt at European culture on a couple of little islands deep in the South Pacific Ocean.  It is perhaps understandable that our attempt at cultural discourse is equally little and with any attempt at reaching beyond our little culture we should receive a pat on the head and congratulations. 

In a culture where the norm is to mumble and make a point to not be understood completely because that is embarrassing it is difficult to create a public discourse that is anything but childish.  It seems intensely exciting and subversive to partake in a conversation that really cuts to the heart of the issue in a way that enriches the understanding and maybe even the sensitivity of the interlocutors.  Consequently our understanding of even the most superficial and simple aspects of our own culture are limited.  However it is possible for two people, or even hundreds of people in my experience, to engage verbally on a matter and through this engagement and mutual desire to deepen and diversify understanding actually find a solution that is greater than either party could have even considered alone.  This is of course far beyond the dynamics of arguing a point and attempting to be right, this is a type of communication that uses language as a medium but actually connects to a far more profound and subtle energy.  I hypothesise that this energy is a psychic connection between the two communicants or maybe even to a larger awareness, but I don't know this of course.  I can only speculate on the experiences I have shared.

I know that New Zealand is a beautiful place filled with many intelligent sensitive people who are waiting to be engaged on a deeper level than they are currently being engaged on.  My suggestion is that we stop mumbling and stop pretending our vocabularies are so infantile and really start exploring the possibilities of this language we have developed.  Perhaps we will understand ourselves and our others a bit better and political correctness can be replaced gradually with a respect and admiration for a culture that is more interesting than we realise.

Baptism by dumpster juice

Last night I found in a dumpster behind the supermarket the exact organic spelt bread that I mentioned yesterday morning I would like, but is too expensive. I cannot eat gluten, so it was very nice to find sitting peacefully on top of this dumpster three loaves of organic spelt and organic kamut bread. Is this merely a coincidence?

When I was in Australia last time, travelling with four Swedish men and dumpster diving everywhere we went, we noticed a lot of these coincidences and started joking about "Dumpster God", who would regularly answer our prayers and provide us with exactly what we needed or wanted; especially when we didn't realise we were praying.

This god is obviously a metaphor for something real that we experience. Does this mean our god exists? Does this mean our god does not exist? We continue to be amazed at the abundance and joy that Dumpster God brings us through her divine dumpsters, or even an average dumpster transformed by her divine presence.

Of course Dumpster God does not exist because we made her up. Every time we reference her it is a joke, though in terms of our own communication as a group, she has entered our language and has become a useful metaphor for communicating something palpably real to us all. It makes me question whether metaphor and myth are as real as anything else we experience. We must create a word to describe it because there is no physical measurable scientifically-proven word to explain this thing that is clearly a daily part of our lives.

If Dumpster God is the only god that we experience, what about all these other gods people talk about? Yahweh, Allah, Krishna, Baal, Zeus, etcetera; can these gods really exist in comparison to the true god, Dumpster God, who I know exists because I have experienced her presence and her benevolent effect in my life? Surely Dumpster God is the one true god because she is my name for the infinite inexplicable benevolence of the universe.

I know that in Australia, where so much food is thrown away every day for no reason and usually with no benefactor, I will never be hungry, because Dumpster God is on my side, protecting me and providing for me and my friends. Only, however, the ones who show their belief with a joy and exuberance and shameless confidence that brings us together and brings us into the sticky glory of baptism by dumpster juice.

What I happen to notice

I suppose I am supposed to follow the guidance of the universe.  This is more simple than it sounds.  When I find myself in a surprising and delightful place, perhaps there is a reason for me being there.  Perhaps it is not accidental that I find myself here.  I do try to think about these things.  Often the most irrational and exciting messages can be much more useful than obvious factual ones.  The causality of our world, we now know, is an infinitely complex collection of influences not at all bound by time and locality, which we consider absolutes.  We can at any moment be affected by an influence far far away that otherwise appears to be unconnected.  We can received influences from the future or the past as easily as we can from the present because modern science and intuition will tell you that the future and the past do not exist; obviously.  When attention is given to the subtle things in life, the irrational things and the possible meaningless things that may in fact be more meaningful than anything logical, I happen to enrich my life immeasurably and I also tend to feel much more well informed.  I am mostly completely ignorant and now that I recognise this I am much more inclined to take information, however unreliable, from a variety of sources, not just the newspapers.  In fact I am much more inclined to believe my dreams than the newspaper; maybe I am an idiot, maybe I simply don't trust the editorial process.  I don't trust censorship and the limits that capitalism places on honesty and expression and sensitivity.  I find that one must choose their level of sensitivity relatively consciously.  We can regulate it easily by the amount of cigarettes smoked and wheat eaten.  The more sensitive one becomes, the more she will notice about the world she finds herself in.  Depending on the environment one chooses to live in, a certain degree of insensitivity, a degree of disconnection from the self and the world, is necessary in order to survive and not be overwhelmed or confined to a mental institution.  Luckily we are relatively free, especially if we stop watching TV, and we can easily choose our environment and regulate our sensitivity to the subtleties of the world to suit that environment and our degree of desire to know what is really going on.  It seems we all have a powerful psychic potential, but I personally don't have a great deal of experience in that area.  I just pay attention to what I notice and try to make sense of it.

Employment for the accumulation of economic benefits

To get the job you first must learn the language.  We understand that there is a special language associated only with job descriptions and job applications and this language must be mastered.  Despite how you might feel about the strange and confusing nature of this language it actually makes the entire process much more honest.  Nobody speaks this language, although there are many individuals involved in recruitment who are fluent in it.  It is not a language that in any way enables human expression, which almost every other language on the planet it designed for.  What it does make perfectly clear, however, is the first thing required of you if you would like to fit this position; repress your natural flow of expression.  It is not appropriate and it is not acceptable.  What would be truly inhuman is if we provided a warm and friendly interview process and a job description that is lucid and in the native language of the writer and the reader.  This would be inhuman because we then need to proceed to the workplace where this type of warmth and normality is completely unacceptable and the role we are paying you to perform is the only acceptable presence.  We adhere to this recruitment method because we do not want to become swept up in the natural process of the universe in which the right person comes to us at the right time.  Submitting to this process not only undermines our ability to control as much as possible of our business and the people associated with it but it also leaves us open for problematic and unnecessary developments and evolutions in the culture of our company.  It is important that we continue to provide a consistent unchanging service to our shareholders.  We all need money in this world.  One cannot live without money, and so we must do what is required to make this money that we need to remain alive.  We must submit to the will of the employer, who after all is only submitting to the will of her employer.  To be profound for a moment we must in fact submit to the will of employment itself.  We are human and nothing is more human than employment.  It has become the natural way and will now always be the natural way of humanity.  To be initiated as an adult one must seek, submit and adhere to employment for the duration of one's adulthood.  This is responsibility.  This is maturity.  And of course the economy is our secular god though we don't need to talk about that it does not pay to think about these things.  Now is the time, brothers and sisters, to release yourself to employment for the accumulation of economic benefits.

I am Kristus Kirkko

How do we decide who we are going to be today?  Last night I relaxed into the bath, knowing that when I woke up in the morning I would be a different person.  I have woken up now and my beard is gone and I know I am different, but what this difference will look like has not yet been defined.  I am still free at this early hour to define who I am going to be today.  It is of course easier when I am meeting people who do not know me and therefore do not harbour any expectations of me.  I have spent many years searching within for the Real Me and found nothing.  I know that if I find out who I really am then there will be no more confusion about how to act and what to do because I will simply know my character and understand my morality and act with the integrity of the person I have always been and will always be.  However I have never noticed any evidence that there is a consistent person within me.  All I see is potential and experience and the hope that is the mixing of these two in the present moment.  All I can do in this moment I am experiencing is mix a little bit of experience with a little bit of potential and see what I am capable of.  This seems to change from day to day based on what food I eat and the people I associate with and the environment I expose myself to.  Otherwise I am an open book, a notebook in which anything can be written, from the most banal drivel to the most profound literature with the power to shock the world into catharsis with its novelty.  It seems to me, at least from the outside, that some adults find a persona they enjoy and try to stick with it throughout their life.  Will I too find such a successful and enjoyable persona that I will hold onto it for the duration of this lifetime until a physical death ends my ego and my lifetime and my career?  Or will another kind of death come along every few months or every few days and kill the person I am trying to be, forcing me to look around and build a better version based on the information and resources around me?  It is just a shame that I feel so silly and pretentious changing my name all the time when really it is supremely appropriate because "Chris Kirk" has too many connotations for me to receive too severe a re-imagining.  Do I have the integrity to undermine myself and start introducing myself as Kristus Kirkko and therefore figure out who I can be under that name?  I am the manifestation of my own fantasy.  I am a mythological being inhabiting a physical body and until I leave this body behind I have forced myself to deal with the reality or unreality of this world.  I personally can't tell whether it is reality or unreality.  I am not sure whether the image I use my senses to gather and my mind to correlate and project is in fact reality because it differs significantly from the reality of even those closest to me who I am able to communicate well with.  If my experience of this world is so different from another human being then how different is my experience from that of a tree, another life form, who my communication with is less certain?  I no longer claim that the holographic image of reality that I project onto the world is in any way accurate, but it is what I have to work with here and I am happy to see such a beautiful sky when I wake up in the morning.  It reminds me of the vast limits of even my limited sphere of this universe.

I'm living like this and I'm okay

How long can one immerse himself in the doldrums of domesticity?  How long before he must break free and find his destiny like a real man?  After a period of stasis is continuity possible, or does he have to begin again?  There was a young man once, who broke free from the chains he thought he was wearing only to find that their nature is psychic, they had no physical weight.  He literally stepped out onto the road thinking he would surely need some sort of organisation to protect him from the chaos of the universe and finding that he could simply hold out his thumb and he could get a ride anywhere.  He found that on his way along the road he forgot what he thought his destination was and began to follow and enjoy the synchronicities that would guide him through his days.  He met people who surprised him by not fitting anywhere into his prejudicial hologram of the world.  He began to appreciate any person or experience that would contradict his current limited perspective of the world.  He began to appreciate his ignorance of all things.  There seemed to be a greater force at work that he would notice clearly at his most sensitive moments.  He called this force God for  while, but then stopped.  This was like discovering one of the natural forces of this world, like gravity.  Though he did not credit himself with the thought that he was the first to discover this force.  He tried to mostly live but he also spent time wondering why most forms of human life were attempts at control when this profound force was so powerful and required nothing but submission.  He wondered what could possibly be achieved by the extremely complex and exhausting combination of a massive sprawling global capitalist structure to provide more than everything one needs and the responsibility and restriction of a career that provides one with the capital to satisfy this massive mother structure.  It seemed like a lot of work for a lot of people when it would be so much easier to just submit.  If he and many others knew about this force that he tried to think of a good name for, why all this exhaustion?  He noticed there were large groups of people who collectively described a remarkably similar force to the one he experienced and called it "God" although they too did not seem to be in touch with the reality of the force he had experienced because despite their words they were clearly setting up complex structures of control in defiance of any divine force that is real or unreal, God or not God.  The more relaxed he felt in this world and the more he sought out environments in which he could really relax, the easier it became and the more ignorant he became of the reasons why those around him were desperate to maintain some illusion of control over their own lives at least, if not some country or some group of employees.  It looked so difficult to him and he wondered whether he was just lazy or whether it really was all a waste of time.  There wasn't much he could see that he wanted that was not provided for him easily.  He was told he is special, not everyone can live like that because if everyone was giving there wouldn't be enough to go around.  But he noticed more and more people were getting into the habit of giving and he was not worried that this tendency was not more widespread cos that merely reassured him that it is not a fad.  Okay, he thought, maybe I have something divine to offer for this perpetual kindness, maybe I can just do the dishes.  Either way, I'm living like this and I'm okay.

The Post-Economic Environment

I am an optimist.  I don't intend to be that way, that's just how it turns out.  I am intelligent and I think a lot about things and optimism just makes sense to me.  I could enslave myself within a life that does not support, enrich or excite me, that would surely defeat my optimism, but I'm not interested.  Instead I live the life that offers me the most value, the most beautiful present and the most exciting future. 

I am dismayed sometimes by abstract institutions like economy, but any brief analysis of the economy clearly highlights its perilous position.  This is why I am an optimist.  It is obvious that the economy will collapse.  This is inevitable.  The economy is only programmed for one thing: growth at the expense of all else; it is willing to take out anything for this purpose, including itself.  It has collapsed before, under its own weight and too many layers of abstraction; only last year in fact it was artificially supported by large influxes of money from the governments.  It will happen again and it will happen worse and maybe this time the governments won't have enough money to pump into it to stop the middle sinking in like a disturbed cake that will never rise again. 

I know this all sounds very optimistic; the economy will survive, you say, it will come back and be strong again.  Whether I have explained my reasons well or not I think that it won't.  I think that very soon we will enter a Post-Economic Environment in which different lifestyles will predominate.  The rich will realise suddenly that they no longer have any power whatsoever and that in fact all along they have been completely dependent because now they have no idea how to look after themselves.  Like only the infants in the animal kingdom they have no idea how to feed themselves.  However, the poor who live off the earth, who eat from the soil and from the trees and from the ocean, will have the power over their own lives that the rich have lost.  As Jesus and Bob Dylan said, "Many who are first will be last, and the last will be first." 

I guess the times are changing and in this post-economic environment we will take the emphasis off the abstraction of money and place importance on resources.  How could greed exist in this environment?  There is of course never enough money, but in the post-economic environment we realise that the reality of our resources is abundance.  One family with one tree are abundant in apples.  One man with one fishing rod who loves to fish all day is abundant in fish.  Anybody with a house is abundant in shelter and rather than protect her house from the others, who need to steal to get more money, she is able to share her space with anyone who offers consideration and friendship in return.  This is a gift economy where generosity is the normal reaction, rather than greed, because there is too much.  The only indication of wealth is of course how much you have to give away.  And the result is not anxiety at the possibility of loss, but the comfort of friendship and the knowledge that even if you lose everything there will be someone nearby to offer you a meal and a warm bed; and maybe even some love. 

As an optimist, I don't see this as a future possibility, I see this as a present reality.  And it seems to be growing exponentially, as is the economy, but one sustains life and one restricts life, one is sustainable and one is unsustainable.  Only time and your actions will tell which is which.

Imagine being here right now

2010 is on its last quarter and who could have predicted such a year of intense change and novelty.  Who would have thought that the world would so intensify and speed up as it has done?  Who would have thought that the whole world would just open up as it did?  Is it just me?  Was this an entirely subjective experience?  Was I simply sensitive enough to experience it?  Did I happen to place myself in situations in which I was able to notice it and respond to it?  Whatever the answer, this year has opened up our world in a way that was inconceivable even 12 months ago.  What are the consequences of this new world we live in?  Anything is possible, as always, but the sphere of possibility has expanded and more people are dropping the comfort and illusory security of their accumulations to explore and share this sphere with the other forms of life who happen to be present.  There are mild forms of organisation which bring many people together temporarily to intensely experience this new direction and there are many friendships in which the same thing can happen on a smaller scale.  It is possible that a friend or two visiting your home and your life allows the possibility of a small-scale festival of joy.  I can't think of anything better to celebrate than joy.  I can't imagine anything better to pursue than friendship and the love embedded in it and the profound beauty in every atom of these beings who share this friendship with me.  Perhaps it is only possible to ramble about something so indefinable.  Perhaps something beyond language cannot be talked about and any attempt to do so is destructive.  Perhaps something that is not present in this physical dimension cannot be talked about in our physical language despite being so strongly experienced by these physical beings called humans who are so dependent on this language that tends to limit us to what we already know and therefore already have a word for.  It is hard to share something new when first the word must be created, learned and published in the dictionary.