The norm.

Creating a norm is a clever trick. It develops a standard ledge that should be carefully walked by anyone who is in the efforts of pulling the static from the dream. (Written with the dreamer in mind.) How does a system prey upon the dreamer? Oh, in so many ways…

What is to be done, then? Well, to take a look at the system, we need first to extract some visions. Social platforms come with an idea (again for the entrepreneur) that they are tools to be used to help push the agenda of the creative. And in many ways they are. But, unlike tools that exist in the shop that do specific tasks, these tools wrap around in a way that work to extract resources from the creative.

Tools need maintenance, right? Sure, but the maintenance costs of social platform predation upon the hearts and minds of the creative so quickly embed into the rituals of what progression is that the justification outranks the thoughtful. Our dollars and time are not the only things being consumed…

Anyhow, work that work that needs working.

The Time Warp

Being overwhelmed and having a mind without rest is as much a teleportation of life across the great expanses of time as is sleep. Perhaps, not as enjoyable, though. One day, we sit up and this sort of awakeness develops. We become aware of the month, the day, the year, and then consider how quickly it had gone. Something that is almost like a reflection occurs and we attempt to chart the course and the reward. But, what happens next?

Awakeness is not for the keeping. It requires a practice. A special motive that does not yield so easily to the mundane and the minutiae of life’s rapid successions of days into weeks. A place to moor the vessel of the self to so that the gift of the tethered mind can roam at will untethered. That seeming like a contradiction should be better placed – a mind that goes too far falls once more into the deliriums of infinity. We wish to jump up in the air and float and experience space, but should we not be able to come back down, and instead float away, our experience of space will be lost on our own selves. The tether simply allows us to recompose our thoughts outside of the experience thus solidifying the expressions as a growth marked upon our lifeline.

Anyhow, good journey to ya.

Value in people

Sample size. What is the sample size of your population? It is usually pretty small, and, although we must use it to the best of our ability to determine certain life things, it cannot describe the majority. It does so ever more poorly the more we try to force it as the global explanatory device.

It begins to make sense how other people can think in so many different ways. Their environments are different. Experiences are different. Foods, habits, friends, operands, function forms, etcetera, are all different. Righteous thinking is so often, too often, not even presented to the self as being something that is occurring, but it is. It does. Over and over it happens in this new connections format of the social cluster.

With our access to other people via the social hubs, we are only getting one side of the information. The things that are being done – the thinking behind the product of self – the style of life and thought. To assert our understandings of how things should be once more assumes a role that we should walk with carefully. Many, however, barge his/her way through with corrupt thinking that is corrupt in a way that makes it believe is it righteous thinking. It lacks the fullness of the required empathetic knowledge.

A city dweller that knows nothing of the country will have a difficult time solving the problems that exist in the country. Because they can see the problems on one side of the social media platform now, still does not give them the ability to solve the problem’s’. The person must be in the environment and experience the path wise mechanism of existence that manage the thinking of the people’s’ living there.

Be easy with your thinking on the people. The questions are heavy and wide and require time and effort to be moved off of the answers.

Shelter

This is one of those words that, when first heard, suggests a place of refuge, retreat, and safety, but immediately we begin to dig into the complexity of it as being something more.

My life at home is physically cold. I live in an actual near-cave, so that probably has a lot to do with that, but it is shelter. It can get almost warm on the most brutal of days, but I’m never looking in the window’s reflection without a hoodie – long sleeve shirt with a hat was an awesome idea! These are the days where the length of the Sun’s time grows, but like a vacuum drawing up the fibers of space and with it the downdrafts of Earth does the cold come. We are sheltered from the heat. I am sheltered from the heat.

I expected something mild, I suppose. Something easy. Being on the road is easy. Nothing is close. All of my problems, or that mass gathering of them, live in a place called, home. It’s different there. When a problem occurs out there it doesn’t belong to the catalog of itemized agenda-based problems that live at home. Problems that breathe and grow and yield the most colorful variety of fruits. Watch out for the seeds; don’t break your tooth on one of those.

When I got home with my lively, all is well, life is but a project that I’m happy to invest in attitude, I was ready in one way, but not another. The dark cycle always comes – that is a truth for many of us. What got me was not the list of things in disrepair, but the growing list of things in disrepair; that was hard. The most hard thing wasn’t even that the list was growing, it was that the only best thing to do was watch. Tormenting the face at the window and the hands that attempt the repairs that are now also afraid of the heat because it burns as much as the cold – cold has, for the moment, become the friend that gives.

I have been sheltering my hardships and keeping private while holding my stress close and measuring the distances from what is known of what is to come if what is happening doesn’t change. Spring, I need you to come. Please come soon. Wu.

From where we came

To look back over a short interval of time suggests something similar to an eternity has past. What madness it this I wonder? The time has indeed gone quickly on tour, but to feel as though the beginning was years ago and coupling that with the rapidity of the journey, some strange conflicts of perception permeate the mind’s connections to reality. We are speeding ever more into the next moments. Inside these moments we develop expectations, hopes, fulfillments of what has been dreamt, sorcery of the kind that changes our bodies and our minds to become the most best parts of what we wish to be. That is a grand form of sorcery, indeed.

My gear has shown me on this tour just how much it has aged. The wear marks are ever deepening. The bumps on my ‘f’ and ‘j’ keys are worn flat. The connections are loose and even still they send the signals on their rightful paths. At times they give off some hesitation to do so, but with a little fidgeting and coercing, the find it well enough.

We are today nearly home. For the first time in 3 weeks we see mountains. We are mountain people. That is clearly present in every moment we see them and amplified when we see them for the first time in a long stretch. We will be within less distance to our homes for the next two night, than the distance we have traveled after most of our shows, but still we do not go home. We carry on. We play this music that must be shared. We carry on doing what it is that we are driven to do, and for that I am grateful. I am grateful for what’s been given – for what’s been taught so that I might honor what’s been given the best. Thank you, Moah – thank you for the blessings and the life we get to live. Be safe out there you travelers.

Brothers

Having been partitioned from the whole mass of all potential – this being not an absolute but a relevant trajectory of focussed efforts – I have known before community. Once again I know the essence and physical boundaries of a ‘new’ community. It is a brotherhood – a band-hood. We move through the motions of learning behavioral patterns, intentions, skills, language, and proximities as we work our way across the country to perform our talents and dream-minded hopes of music composition and presentation to the listening ears.

They are sometimes, and most often, unsuspecting. We do not have fans where we are – and the same waits for us where we go – but one by one we compress the available waveforms toward our will with our music to pull and tug at the attention of the people. We work together to make this our life’s priority and purpose. To set it as a certain form of daily opportunity to do what we are drawn to do – music. We do this in strength together. Each holding a place in the community that comes before the stage, demonstrates it skill of unity on the stage, and then works after to make each cycle tighter, better, and more applicable to the outcomes we wish for ourselves to have as our own.