always speak your truth even if it's against your self

"Taking responsibility means recognizing that you’re the one who can now begin to recognize those patterns (which until now have remained hidden and automatic) and start to do the work to change them – which is really just the work of honouring and (literally) embodying your own, true, authentic self. Sometimes it takes a catastrophe to bring us back to ourselves, to what’s really important. For some people that takes the form of a loved one dying or a horrible accident. I know this may be hard to accept right now, but you might want to consider the view that your disease has actually come along to bring you back to yourself. The great spiritual teacher A.H. Almaas talks about 'a part of you that loves you so much that it will make you suffer greatly, to teach you – because what else can it do? That’s its job.' "

~Dr. Gabor Mate

"Do I contradict myself? Very well then. I am large, I contain multitudes." -Walt Whitman

"future shock "

Granted, I write a blog on a social network, but the intellectual property problem of social networking is that social networking has turned emotions/likes/life stories/personal narrative into the ultimate fetish commodity. Soon, with the help of bit coins, silk roads, onion-ed security footprints and fingerprint i.d. shopping, we will be able to attach a value-based number to this isolated emotional currency; there will be links to bank accounts with incremental percentage points of monetary value paid out for every like/feeling/narrative/personal story/photo/and inadvertent advertisement via trends on social networks.

bound by blood, not bloodlines

from Web MD:

"The original meaning of the saying “blood is thicker than water” is that family ties are the tightest of all.

• YOUR ANSWER: True

• CORRECT ANSWER: False

Actually, it’s quite the opposite. In Middle Eastern culture, blood brothers -- warriors who share blood they shed in battle -- are even closer than biological brothers. An earlier expression is that blood is “far stronger than the water of the womb.” Historians think wealthy Englishmen may have bent the meaning to stress the importance of bloodlines and keep money in the family."

the rain

People accuse me of being contrary when I say I love this weather, but I don't mind. It's not overcast, it's tropical balmy. It's soft, bunched-up, pearl grey, Maui overcast. It's not grey, it's Paris grey. It won't rain, but if it does rain it will be something soft and transparent. I've worked 12 hours in the rain, I've slept in the rain and today I don't mind the rain, because I know I can go home and put on clean, dry clothes and open the window and listen to the rain; if I choose. I may choose to go for a walk in the rain. I might enjoy getting soaking wet just because I can get dry again and it will be easy; as easy as going home to where I live, where I can afford to live, where I rent a clean, dry space all my own where I am free to be. Where I have stocked with food and blankets and bed, where I have built in space and time and my own. I don't mind the rain, because I can do all these things, and still get soaking wet and still be okay. It is just the rain. I have loved the rain since the summer we cut the hay and it was lying flat in the field to cure when it started to rain. And it rained. I remember my father coming into the kitchen and starting a fit something awful because it was raining on the hay and it was the end of the world (and it might have been for us at the time. To lose the hay crop meant we would have to buy hay and hay was expensive for all the animals and beds to feed; even I understood this as a small child and understood this import and that that was why my dad was so upset.) Still, I remember standing in the kitchen window, listening to the storm above me, staring out at the rain, and thinking, "but Daddy it's only raining." And I felt bad for the rainy day because it was so beautiful. We lived in Washington state and when it rained it rained. I remember looking out into the yard and it was so green it hurt. The apple trees, the pear tree, even the old scrappy little prune tree that was always trying to die, were green and bright and budded and bending over in the rain to accept the rain. The grass was too long and looked like a horses main, standing up in thick green tufts. The sky was heavy and leaden and dark, and in the window I could see reflected the bright, clear primary red of my favorite sweatshirt. It was like the earth was seething and breathing thick blood-dyed color. I have been in love with super saturated color ever since. And with the rain. So no. I'm not being contrary when I say I love the rain. I want to lie down in it and let it soak me to the bone until my blood threads with the trees and my skin dissolves into the dirt and I wash away from it all. I want to be like a ribbon of water threading through a river, made of rain, made of me.