Von rolled out of bed, scratched his head, more from habit than itch, and prepared a pot of snizzle. With the brew on, he rubbed the sleep from his eyes and sat down at his desk, his quarters as quiet as an abandoned barn in the afternoon. Pulling out his black notebook, he began to jot down ideas, as he always did, in no particular order, with neither rhyme nor reason.
You are one day away, one action, one moment from having no influence.
Life is an opportunity, a gift—not a guarantee, not a given.
Everything matters—every word, every look, every touch, no matter how small, it matters.
Better to be kind than to be right.
Power, authority is never what it appears to be.
Space is not all that different from Silus and those twenty-one day solitary retreats. Where others see the void, the unknown, I see and feel the infinite ocean that gives all, takes all, is all.
There is no escape. No matter where you go, there you are. On Hyneria, one was under the illusion of escape. The illusion that if I don’t like it here, I can go somewhere else, and it will be different there. Don’t like this job, find a new one. Don’t like this town, move. Don’t like this spouse, divorce them or find another. The problem, however, is there is no escape from ourselves. Travel 100 million parsecs and in that place, everything you ever were, everything you are, is right there. In fact, the very idea, the very thought is wrong, false and only leads to pain. Problems are the illusions. To run from an illusion is to believe that a dream is real. The lover in slumber warms not the pillow beside us.
So step one is to see problems as the mist in the dawn—only does it persist until the light of awareness burns away those eidolons of our imagination.
A vessel is only a vessel when it is moving. If it won’t move, if it doesn’t move, is it really a vessel? Or is it simply an idea of a vessel or a former vessel or what could be a vessel. Life moves. Not-life doesn’t.
What does it mean to be the same? If I am different today than I was yesterday, if I am more or less, am I the same? I killed some brain cells last night. I also created some new connections in the plasticity of my mind. Still other electrical connections have faded such that what I knew yesterday, I know not today. So I ask myself, who am I? Or, perhaps, who was Von yesterday and who is Von today and are the two the same?
If I show you a picture of me as a child and I ask who that is, is the anwer—that’s me? If it is me, can you arrange a meeting with that young man? No? He does not exist? Really? Where did he go? Did he die? Who was he? And who am I today, if not the ghost of a thousand former me’s, all forever gone. To be born to the present, I must die to the past and so my whole life is nothing but coming and going, living and dying, forever changing, moment by moment.
When I say I’m here, what does that mean? And if I am here, am I totally here and if not totally, then where is the rest of me and how do I perform this magic act of being here and there at the same time?
Do I see or do I construct?
Do I hear or do I translate?
Do I love or do I judge?
In the spirit of oneness—I should have told Kyra this last night—it is impossible to piss on someone else without pissing on yourself. We all swim in the same pool.
In the flow of love, which is the flow of oneness, life is good and easy and natural. Outside the flow of love, life is painful and hard and filled with the friction of resistance.
We join, we belong for either love or fear. Where there is one we do not find the other, but only love beats within our very fiber. Fear is the intruder.
So what do I love and what do I fear? And how honest is my inventory? Can I eat my list or does it evaporate like cotton candy?
When the slate is blank, what is my default position? Who sets my default position and who can change it?
Note to self: spend more time with my bamthems and flutrices.
The way of no way is the only way to avoid the wrong way; but before one can know the way of no way, one must first master the way of way. Ultimately, the way is both way and no way without being one or the other.
Von placed his pen down and took a deep breath. His snizzle was ready and his mind, well, it was still damn itchy.
Categories: Story, Von, Journal
10 comments:
"Connections" and the journal entries are wonderful, love the flow of brief thoughts, yet each powerful in just a few sentences. Connections has to be one of your best chapters. Very well done my friend!
Thank you Tubie. Sometimes I just want to throw thoughts down without having to craft them into a chapter with dialogue and all the rest. So, I suppose, in a way, these journal chapters are the Lazy Poppet's way to chapter production. :-D
Always good to see the Tube in the house. :-)
A post of windows, love it! And at the same time, I think, I have caught Von's itch. I'm in two minds whether to just sit back and silently be both enthralled and awed, entertained by those ever-increasing windows, or whether I should so not as to get lost within them, note it all down here. :-D Hmmmm...
Whichever, this was an amazing chapter, and the thought of you behind it all makes me smile in wonder. Brilliant, through and through.
Sunshine, this is what you get when you stick me in an all day meeting that has very little to do with me. :-D
I would love to see what else is in Von's journal or even better, to sit and listen to him tell stories at night around a campfire and a bottle or two of snoot. Bring a blanket and we'll sit together. :-)
I am amazed at the wisdom in these "Von" chapters, not only for them for for me too. Several of the "jottings" in this chapter went straight to my heart. Most excellent!
This is such a fascinating insight into Von, uninhibited, thoughts flowing freely without other thoughts to get in their way so to speak (ban has clause that I may use it once per day).
There are some easy statements here, that I am guessing would speak to each person reading in much the same way, but there are others, and these stand out, where meaning is very much more open to interpretation for the fact often enough that one perhaps hasn't thought in those terms before or even anything remotely near to what Von is writing. There was one that just made me giggle, giggle as I scratched my own head wondering whether it was yesterday's snoot talking, but then what makes sense to us in one moment doesn't always the next.
I couldn't quite, and still cannot figure out, what I can really say to this chapter other than wow. That's what I really want to do, to just sit back and think wow (wow at Von's mind - yours) At the same time, each of those statements, heard before (to some extent or another) or introduced for the first time makes me want to treat them like I have been asked a question, the question of what do I think, what is my view. And yet 'the answers' are not what is important per say, rather the possibilities.
The rise.
This chapter gave rise. And I loved it!
90% asleep, I am. 50% should be the limit when commenting and my guess 25% might have put me as close to Von as I could hope to be capable of. :-D
Did fall asleep.
More later, x
Karen, so glad you enjoyed Von's random thoughts. I'm sure we will see more of these in time. :-)
Sweetest, many times when I jot down random notes like this and I read them back later, I wonder why I thought that was important enough to write down or what I was thinking when I wrote it. Now, when I think about this, I find it fascinating in that the text is not always the text and that meaning is not always as clear, on either side (writer or reader) as we would like to believe it is. In that context, I like to think that books and writing are living things, something that grows and expands and changes with each reading and each reader, including myself. And to me, there is beauty in that, beauty in life and love and text. :-)
To be born to the present, I must die to the past and so my whole life is nothing but coming and going, living and dying, forever changing, moment by moment.
Love this! "Von" is so very insightful. ;)
Gotta luv Von. :-D
Post a Comment