What is it all for

We, almost all of us, work and strive toward some end. We struggle to achieve some...thing(s).. goals; visions of what the future should look like. But what do we get in the end? Is the struggle worth it? Is our vision of ourselves one that brings anything meaningful?

I've been doing a lot of thinking lately. No... I've been doing a lot of .. not thinking lately. Soul searching maybe. Seeking sounds better. And this particular chapter began with these questions. It's taken a while, but I believe that I just had a breakthrough and that I now have something to say about the subject that's worth sharing:

Too often these visions of our own future are cluttered with unnecessary details. When we work with things - honing our skills, developing talents and such, we tend - at least in the circles that I run in - to get lost in those things. That is, we lose sight of the actual good that those skills can provide. It's easy to do, because the real value of things has nothing to do with those things at all. [I have to be careful here, as these thoughts are difficult to express in a way that is sensical - let me try to come up with an example] It is so easy to think that the purpose of say, mowing a lawn, is to have good looking grass. It is easy to think that designing a classroom lesson is expressly for conveying knowledge. It's easy to think these things because it just makes "sense" that you do something so that you might have something to show for it. Well, I'm here to announce, to whomever is ready to hear it, that that is not why you do something.

When we are TRULY LIVING, everything that we do, we do for the art of it. Many of us are not truly living... most of us at any given moment.

Whether we know it or not, we are beings in pursuit of artistic expression - in all forms.

Each action, done right, is itself a priceless art form.

True art is life acknowledged by itself.

Life, artistically performed, is a gateway to all of the beauty in the universe.

That gateway exists inside every one of us, and inside every thing, and inside every action, should we choose to see it.

No choice is above or below any other.

No thing is above or below any other.

All is perfect and beautiful.

This is true love (forgive me for some sentimentality here) - unconditional and unlimited, and we are all capable of this ACT.

This is the only act that has any payoff in the end, and there are infinite roads to it.

Nothing is a mistake, there is just doing art or learning to do art.

And, to make matters... better, we will all live art eventually, even those who seem farthest from it. It is inevitable.

When we fail to see this beauty, we are waiting... not living. I am guilty of waiting for almost the entirely of my life. I believe almost all of us are. There may have been a few who were/are fully immersed in life - divine ones. But all of us have that experience from time to time. We are all occasionally completely present in the universe, and in those moments we are, too, divine.

I believe we should devote ourselves to living artfully. I feel that the best choice we can make is to embrace whatever choices we make and exist completely in them.

I think that all of us are infinitely more than we give ourselves credit for, and that regardless of what it might look like, we can all achieve more than any THING could ever amount to.

If this makes no sense, perhaps this idea is too soon for you. All real truths are at least somewhat paradoxical.

This is the most truthful thing I think I've ever said.

A political rant

A response to a "tea party" advocate who complained about our spending and our taxation, claiming that taxation hurts the economy and national debt hurts the economy. That seemed like a contradiction to me and I couldn't help myself. As always, I invite any comments:

The debt problem is bipartisan. The most expensive periods in our recent history were overseen by republican administrations. Not to say dems do anything much better (we're still spending like fools), but the answer isn't republicans. Don't let the "tea party" propaganda convince you of that. They don't offer a real solution. Your own statement is a contradiction, which makes sense because it's their talking point. You can't complain about our debt AND taxes. Taxes is how governments raise money to get out of debt. There's no solution there. Our economy isn't dependent on us spending so much as it is on us profiting from other countries' resources (and our own, though those are less profitable because we insist on some reasonable level of compensation and responsibility for the extraction). That imperial profit scheme is reliant on corporate multinationals, which the government needs to tax in order to pay for our services. That's how it has worked, more and more, for the past century, as we have switched from our domestic resources to those of other countries. Which is why we're in these expensive wars with no end. Which is the real reason why we're in debt. The imperialism game has gotten really expensive lately, which is to say, we're losing the game lately. What we need is a real revolution. Grass roots. Transformation of our society on an individual and community level. We need to seek domestic sustainability, fiscal sustainability (and, by default, environmental too), and turn to our innovation as the source of international relations and exchange. America needs to become the brain trust that it can be and has been in the past. No more petty fruitless bickering with the likes of Glenn Beck and Limbaugh antagonizing and drumming up irrational fear. Trust one another, at least locally, and lean on one another so that we can be more effective, like voltron.