«Lightly, child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly.»
– Aldous Huxley

DISCLAIMER

I've had a few things on my mind that I've wanted for a long time to share with you. Nevermind what becomes, after I say it all. The present feels like the time to start, the present overall feels like a new beginning.

First of all, I don't know yet what I mean to say, or what I will mean by saying it, or what it will mean to have said it.

The purpose is to discover. And to share notes in that discovery. In case you may find the notes helpful, and maybe we can gain more understanding of ourselves and each other.

«Until you make the subconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.»
– Carl Jung

UNSEEN, BUT EXPRESSED

As a child, I wrote. I made up stories and drew from the emotions I felt when my mom would read books to me that we had borrowed from the library. I was a sensitive child. I am still, but between childhood and adulthood I lost touch with him.

The point here at the beginning is not to tell that story. Only to say, we find ourselves now—boy and man, child and adult—making up for lost time. In the past two years, I have reconnected with that little boy. And initially our time together was unhappy, rageful, and deeply sad, and I learned quickly that he had developed quite the fluid literacy and fondness for swearing. And now, at this stage communicating with you, we are more interested in replacing an outdated vision for the future, one that had expected and promoted scarcity and abandonment, with one that anticipates and promotes growth.

The path child-me and adult-me have taken to reconnect with each other, to acknowledge and expresss each other's needs, and meet them—to provide love and courage and delight and space for what may seem unreasonable, unconventional, and absurd, and what's unresolved—has educated us both on very real and unseen and often neglected or dismissed psychological and spiritual facets of the world that influence us, and you, and how us and you interact with each other and the world and the world with us and you, together and respectively.

Unseen, but expressed. In that experimentation and exercise, I—we—have realized some insights you may find answer some of your unseen areas of disconnect, and notice where and how they get expressed.

I want to show you where that journey has taken me. Show you some pictures. Share the insights and anecdotes and antidotes against the influence of seriousness. And I invite you to move forward with me.

THE DESSERT OF THE REAL

Eric Fromm begins Escape From Freedom—where this blog ironically takes its name—asking whether "freedom" is a psychological problem. Specifically, tolerance of freedom.

Freedom is uncertain, and like nature against a vacuum, psychologically we have a severe allergy to uncertainty.

We tend to treat that allergy with compliance. Today in our modern dystopia, our psychological tendency to escape from freedom, our allergy to uncertainty, is used to engineer compliance. Increasingly at the cost of wonder, curiosity, and the intuitive and serendiptuous cultivation of taste and authenticity.

But although the Matrix has us, we don't need to run to the desert to escape. Resistance isn't what it used to be.

We don't need to fight the future—instead, we can explore ourselves and learn how to make love to it.

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