Shakti Ingenue began his spiritual quest during a commercial break in the Games of the Thirty-First Olympiad. Having just witnessed Katie Ledecky clean house in the women’s 800m freestyle, during which time he had consumed two-thirds of a beer and half a mushroom pesto pizza, he was riding a high and not being realistic about what it was he was hoping to accomplish. Thoughts were colliding willy-nilly in his mind. An entire spectrum of personal […]
A cabin in the woods sounds infinitely better than a shack in the city, which is exactly why I went–to trade in the grime and the grind for the sunlight and the silence. I sold it to myself as two nights and three days. You get these big ideas. You get these big ideas and they carry you along. You move from one to the next like you’re hopping from stone to stone across a […]
Yesterday was perfect. After three months my best short story yet was rejected twice in the span of an hour via form letters of compensatory encouragement, which must mean I’m getting somewhere, in between which I used a shabby putter to sink two twelve footers in a row down the cubicle aisle. We made some jokes together and we laughed. We had to hazard a guess about how much natural gas will cost in three years, which […]
Fear is like knowing with a dreadful certainty there is a sixty-foot troll exploring the corridors of your existence in a pair of rubber-soled shoes like the spies are obligated to wear in all those books to sneak up on one another– a five-story, monolithic brute gliding through you like a dorsal fin through water who might appear at any moment and squish you flat upon sight as if you were a tiny black spider roaming a shiny […]
Things that appear to be so under one set of conditions, are often found to be quite different under another. It is for this reason that most of our conclusions formed historically, in the context of separation consciousness, are erroneous. What’s remarkable about the experience of life is that we can be completely incorrect about ultimate reality, and have a very real and vivid experience of our own false conclusions up to and even through […]
What does it mean to live from the heart? And why does it matter? In my experience, every difficulty I’ve ever faced has manifested itself as a rift between my heart and my mind—between what can be known most profoundly when words are left behind, and what presents itself as a seemingly irrefutable conclusion of the mind’s learning. When this happens we tend to look at circumstance as the genesis of difficulty, without realizing that […]
“I feel better. But I did that thing again, didn’t I, Hafiz?” “Yes.” “How come we both know what I’m talking about, but we can’t explain it?” “The horses giving chase always get mud in their eyes.” “That was easier than I thought. But giving chase to what?” “To whatever you think is over there.” He waved his hand limply towards the distance, indicating that somewhere along the periphery of my mind there were these […]
The last few weeks have been challenging for me, and I have felt the awkward stretching that comes sometimes when change is upon us. There is this desire to be certain of things, to know what lies ahead, to make nothing but informed decisions, and to navigate the consequences with aplomb. We want to understand the right way to go about things, to think about things– the proper way to perceive, and to know. Today […]
The sky in the distance is yellow because it is saturated with the living dust that is emitted by trees, who I happen to notice are standing quite silent on the matter of this atmospheric discoloration, as if you can do a thing little-by-little and it doesn’t count. But I see you can take a thing too far. Fresh from my coursework on the dangers of coffee dust and grain silos, I note that with […]
Authenticity is not unveiled in a swoop of the cape. That only goes to show the last few days or hours or minutes– whatever the length of time has been since the previous flourish of unveiling– have been inauthentic. What the flourish reveals is the port of entry to our truth’s harbor. You enter by submarine. Your instruments have failed. The ballast is leaking and the batteries are dead. The hull is creaking and popping in […]
Embracing Forever 