Gaps between Home and Burning
Landing back in Holland, I felt driven for a change. Inside I felt my insides bursting for space: I needed to find a place to live, as soon as possible!
Something that provides some stability, though not permanence. Permanence is still something I am not ready for right now – even now as I reflect 3 weeks into the past with my blog.
Landing back in Holland, I felt driven for a change. Inside I felt my insides bursting for space: I needed to find a place to live, as soon as possible!
Something that provides some stability, though not permanence. Permanence is still something I am not ready for right now – even now as I reflect 3 weeks into the past with my blog.
That same night, 1 day after I got back in Holland from England, I made a new friend named Anat. An art student from Israel. As she left the squat bar I had met her in she said to me: “oh btw if you hear of anyone who needs a room…” – my eyes opened and I said “me-me-me-me!” – i saw the house the next day, loved it, I’ll move in monday was the decision. So Anat is not only a room mate now, she is also a really great new friend.
From this point forward I did some corporate work again, dealt with my past for the tax-man, enriched my understanding of myself and relationships, developed ideas related to the permaculture software I’m developing with Ruby, finished a book and contemplated deeply the varied potential purposes and meaning of my USA trip to burning man that is coming up at the end of August.
Not too much to say about work, except that its good to not be working 40 hours a week at the moment. It’s mainly 2 to 4 days a week of development time. The cash flow is welcome, charging my battery up.
In my romantic life, I’ve been learning new levels of interaction – and shifting certain emotional needs more internally. I am aware of the future growth that I will accomplish in this area to come, and also more in tune with my current direct motives and desires. It’s a broad and simple-direct conviction.
Revisiting my past for my tax battle was a really bizarre experience. I’ve never looked into my past as deeply as I needed to do so now. Every day of 2004 and 2005 was dissected, each activity i did was broken down in hours. Each idea was measured against potential and actual income generation.
From the experience I can tell you that music was a huge time-machine these last few years. Literally hundreds and thousands of hours were spent in this direction. It is true that as I left on my world trip I had an album half way done, things feel so different now. My world trip has changed everything, so it feels bizarre to be doing the same things I had been doing in the past. I still have a conviction to finish the tracks I worked on previously, but for me to be true to myself, I also need – want – to shift direction now.
Oddly its not art nor music that is drawing me, but writing. Either software code for projects I believe in, or writing to express concepts that I believe I have a talent at grasping and simplifying for others. There are certain complexities that my mind can grasp and then visualize – this is true in life, and of my observations of the elements within it, but also for concepts that surf on the edges of accepted limits [more on metaphysics at another time].
I’ve been doing some research on permaculture, but so far I find lots of material on the agriculture aspect of permaculture… but very little on the cultural aspect. This ‘gap’ – if there turns out to be one – this will provide the focus point for my near-future efforts.
My desire for a necessary change also comes from my back ground, I was literally raised to be multi-dimesnional. Every place I moved to as a child and teenager required, offered and then stimulated a completely different facet of my dormant character-potential. As an adult, this impetus continues. To truly be the person “I am” requires me to continuously be something “new” and different. This is a very contradictory proposition – but the more refined my experience becomes, the more necessary it is to accept the nature of my nature.
If I lived in a world where things seemed to be taking care of themselves, and wasn’t such a broadly raised cookie, I’d probably still be a musician, or an artist. But this isn’t the world I grew up in. Fundamental subjects need to be dealt with.
Very soon now, actually already right now in the present, decisions need to be made. What kind of a world do YOU want to live in? Can we identify areas where we can focus and improve proactively? Or will we simply accept unguided impulsive reactive reactions?
Will we become sustainable and stop the media machine? Or regress in blind aggravation as controls [securities] fail us?
Most people I meet, live in denial about the world. They believe in permanence or the impossibility of change, and any fracture of that sense of permanence unleashes deep settled feelings of despair. the thought process is literally: “I don’t want to feel despair, therefore I will believe in permanence because I can’t deal with a ‘potential’ change to reality. And any change is always ‘bad’, I can’t ‘imagine’ it any different”.
And yet imagination literally ‘forms’ every aspect of your reality. We are all creationists in this regard.
Put another way: Denial = is that belief that ‘the past will remain the future’. We wish for the present to always be present. It is linked to the desire to always be young, or immortale.
But to exist we constantly NEED to change. Most people, if probed will admit that something that doesn’t change is dead. However even death is change. Be it ‘death’ of an idea, a way of life, a structure, or a living thing. Viewed in this light, death is simply the explosive release of change that was necessary to instigate new levels of growth that were no longer forth coming. In these words, and from this living perspective, death becomes the ‘ultimate’ growth that occurs when life itself no longer provides sufficient growth.
So change is not ‘bad’, change is always good. Even if change appears bad, it is only bad because it is compared to something lacking – something that we know exists and should be felt. A full experience is a full one, it is all aspects of all things. You can not write about the beauty of the sun if you have never seen the night. The purpose of living is not to experience nothing then, but rather to experience everything.
Despair is felt when we feel that we must change, but we don’t know how to change – so we panic, cling or fall into a mode of powerlessness. This is rooted on a deep feeling of powerlessness that most, if not all of us, seem to have within us to some extent. It is echoed in our religeons. Especially in Christian’s, but even in eastern religions as well. This makes sense because beliefs form ideas and ideas form structures, these structures can be nations, but also religious [or god property] beliefs. And while most of us claim to be ‘atheists’ or ‘agnostics’ or ‘gnostics’, this modes of thinking are also a part of our cultural building blocks – and hence they are knit into any of our beliefs, be them conformist or an accepted form of anti-conformatisim.
But reality is always ours to form, and change we can – and must – to grow. Once we realize: one person at a time, that we are always in control of our reality, and that growth is always the unknown, the power will return and despair will fall away. We need trust. Trust in ourselves, our [spiritual] meaning, trust in our abilities…
Burning man, and my related trip to the states, has been taking up a lot of my time – and I’ve experienced much joy through this preparation process. My return to San Francisco again, so strange, unexpected and spontaneous, now feels like a new powerful arrowhead. All my energy seems to be projected forward now to this point, and in this permeable future place there lies a new gateway. A cross road where a new powerful choice will lead me into a new possible future. That’s an exciting feeling – and it’s the door I feel I have been preparing for ever since my return to Holland [but also for some time before then as well]. I can say this all with certainty because I can sense levels of my psyche at work in creation.
In terms of permaculture, my links in the bay area [bay area = san francisco] are exploding; every person I contact passes me several new contact details – from one person appears 5 more and 5 more again… burning man itself is looking to be just one big permaculture event in itself!
The issues related to ‘where will i settle’? Are vitally important, I think about it every day, but it also feels like this will become clear at the moment clarity is necessary. For now I am capitalizing on my mobility of thought-feeling-being to capture the essence of global opportunities. I know my travels go against my beliefs; it disturbs me, but I also still have faith that the work that is being done here will out weigh the negatives.
There is no expectations on my behalf related to where this opportunity/clarity will come. It could be entirely internal, or external in one person, or in an opportunity, or location… I leave the details up to the inherently unpredictableness of life to surprise me, as it always does, should and will.
Charging into the San Francisco for the festival and then right back to my “reclusive unclear” dutch routine seems non-sensical… not to mention resource wasteful, so I plan on staying around after BM in California for at least a month, but maybe more – really I have no clue. I will stay there until it feels like I should move on. My hunch is 4 to 8 weeks time should suffice to know.
This week I’ll be finally starting work on the dinosaur costumes [for burning man]! Other cool developments in our camping group include solar panel grids for our camp, a massive parachute tent for general shade, a bike transformed into a mobile music machine and night-light-wire [thin bendable lengths of phosphorus wire you can bend which glows brightly] which I plan on integrating into my costume and bike so that at night I can be as fully into the experience as possible!
This is already a long blog entry, so my book review on the title I just finished: Seth II: ‘The personal reality’, will be done in my following posting instead.
Sweet dreams! I’m turning in for for what is left of the short night.
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Hi Sebastian!
Good job manifesting your new place to stay!
Culture as a neglected aspect of permaculture– very interesting.
Change… No change is death(figuratively), but death(literally) is change. I agree!
That was some learning from Burning Man that took a while to sink in– for the new (and better) to occur there must be space for it. For space to occur the thing that was there before must go away.
Since people are mostly past-oriented they place greater value on the things they had than the things they will. Or perhaps it is the whole very powerful ideology of scarcity.
Cool website I found recently… worth signing up for the notices, I think: http://www.whatsuponplanetearth.com/latest.htm
Have fun with the EL wire!
Love,
Bruce 🙂