On the Move
Hello friends,
I hope everyone is having a good weekend. I had fun introducing The Cancel God at Rachel Haywire’s Elixir Salon today. Also, I was on Terry Patten’s State of Emergence podcast recently which you can listen to here.
Tomorrow’s events:
The Stoic Breath w/ Steve Beattie.Every Sunday @ 10:00 AM ET. RSVP here. 60 mins.
Memetic Mediation Campfire w/ Jason Snyder and Peter Limberg. Every Sunday @ 3:30 PM ET. RSVP here.
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June 27, 2020
We are moving today. We are going to be bouncing around in Toronto for two months, then I do not know where we will be. Maybe at my family cottage, or maybe in a different province in Canada, or maybe in a monastery. We might stay in Toronto longer though, if we open up a philosophical coffee shop.
I do not know, but I like not knowing, and I feel it is important to be on the move, and unsettled, and nimble, and most importantly, simple. I am listening to The Rural Alberta Advantage again, and I am feeling some of that Canadian innocence again. At the moment I want that chop wood, carry water life, and I want to take things slow.
This might change tomorrow. Everything might change tomorrow. I want to take things slow now and I might want to take things fast tomorrow. I started this writing practice on March 23rd and I am approaching 100 entries. I think one thing that is consistent here is my inconsistency.
I am trying to write what is most alive now and maybe that is the other consistent feature here. Sometimes I want to sound like a comic book. Other times I want to write like a prudent Stoic. Most times I do not know why I am fucking writing to be honest. I just want to write.
Why the pressure to know? Why the pressure for consistency of thought? Is it for the sake of appearances? To have fidelity to what my avatar in the spectacle wrote or said in the past? I was a different person yesterday, and I will be a different person tomorrow, and in the present it usually feels I am on a rollercoaster of emotions. Isn’t everyone? Or do most people have emotional consistency? Or are they just pretending that everything is good?
I deeply dislike saying I am “good” when somebody asks me how I am doing. I am never good. What the fuck does good even mean? It seems like it means being numb: I am numb enough to keep up the pretense that everything is good so we can do whatever unexamined thing we think we are doing here.
I am thinking about my friend Rorik right now. He is a fellow Orthodox Christian, who is a deeply religious man. The last time we spoke he said he is a broken vessel, and theosis is out of his reach because of it. I got angry and sad when he said that. I love Rorik, he is such a good man. I sense there is deep wisdom in the way he holds himself in front of God.
I feel like I am so fucking flawed at times. Sometimes I feel like a perennial failure. Most times I feel like this messy guy, with messy thoughts, who inconsistently stumbles his way through life, and consistently cannot shake off this sticky feeling of inadequacy.
Maybe this is why I want to take things slow. I want to chop wood knowing I probably will not swing it right. I want to carry water knowing I will probably spill it from time to time. I do not want to pretend in front of you, I want to be real in front of you, and I want to be flawed in front of you.
Yeah. We are on the move, and we are about to move, but I do not want to move to escape any of this.
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