Mushy Like Mash Potatoes
Learning to love my way through life
Thinking only takes you so far
Breathing into my heart
Breaking the bricks, breath by breath.
Being a blob, underrated
Puddles
Tears
Floods
Love
Mushy like mashed potatoes
I’m good with that.
Are you?
Piece by Roxy Paine - Scumak - > AI Edited
Play-Doh
Imagination,
use your imagination, child.
Looking up at me,
eyes wide open,
curiosity and confusion.
Choosing Play-Doh over the truck.
Three.
Home.
A seed planted.
Hours with Play-Doh—
an ice cream store,
a hot dog stand,
play.
Imagination.
Not knowing,
but knowing.
Redefining intelligence.
To change is to imagine.
Peter Pan.
Non-fiction.
What We See
What We See
What we see is colonization, live.
What we see is what we have been given.
What we see is those who have gone beyond their means.
What we see is a way to fill the unfillable void.
What we see is the insatiable thirst for more.
What we see, we don’t want to believe.
What we see, we will regret.
What we see is the opposite of love.
What we see is selective care.
What we see is up to you and me.
Robert Colescott - School Days 1
Remind Me
Rocky Mountain National Park
The mountains remind me of how small I am. Humbling.
Travelling reminds me that the news never tells the whole story of a land and its people.
Conversations remind me that we all want the same thing at our core.
Lands tell a story, both beautiful and brutal.
Closing my eyes reminds me to listen to the wind,
to see with the third eye.
I am reminded that those who lead and govern do not serve in the best interest of the masses.
Was it always this way? Was there ever a time in history when a government served all?
What does it mean to serve?
I'll give you my perspective if you care to read.
Equality needs to begin at the basics.
Food, shelter, water, clothing. If all beings do not have these, then we are failing.
All of humanity is failing.
It matters neither to the micro nor the macro spirit—the karmic merry-go-round will continue its circular motion.
The exits are closed until the lessons are learned.
Personally, I have no issues with billionaires. We can have billionaires and nurture all beings.
We can have differences on what system is better, but honestly, it matters little to none.
If the heart is closed and the mind is corrupt, the system has no relevance. A system does not enlighten one.
It does not open our hearts.
If we love from the mind, then love is a manipulative illusion.
It is not love, for love is unconditional.
Mindful love is conditioned and coated in judgment.
We do not judge the mountains, the winds, the oceans, and the forests—
but we judge each other. Why?
Because most of us love nature from our hearts,
yet we forget that we too are nature, baked from the same ingredients as the fox that trots and the winds that sing.
I am reminded, and for that, I am grateful.
Intertwined Minds
The state of my mind and my search for love. If I were to die today, what mind am I moving on with? Is it lighter than that with which I arrived, heavier, or has it remained the same?
Perhaps I did let go of the old and then refilled the suitcase—aka my mind—with new thoughts, patterns, emotions, and habits. My feeling is that the load is lighter for my mind and the mind of my ancestors. We are intertwined. It’s how we stay connected and communicate with each other.
The more I clear, the lighter my lineage becomes, and the clearer the lines of communication will be.
This visual of minds being intertwined has never presented itself with such clarity. A clear mind is strong and holds the ability to connect with ease to the minds of the seen and unseen. The act has been more unconscious than conscious, but now I have more clarity around the workings of the mind.
This is the next evolution: to connect with the minds of the unseen, those wiser than I, and be open to their teachings that are needed in this moment in time.
When you watch the news, it is static for you, and it’s not only impacting your mind but all the minds you are intertwined with, blocking the wisdom of your ancestors, the sages, and other beings yearning to communicate through you.
You are to simply learn how to be a vessel for your Higher Self and beyond.
In the past, your meditation was for clearing and strengthening your own mind over the years, but it became a comfort, an escape.
Now that you have been away from it for some time, return to sitting.
Open yourself to receive from those wiser than you, who can show you, teach through you. Be a conscious vessel. You are not your own.
Always watched over.
Keep your channel clean, your mind pure, and your heart open.
Love.
What is love’s role?
Lighten the Load
Abundance, presence, love.
For those who take more than their share, ask yourself what impact this has on others, and, more importantly, ask what impact this weight has on your soul—to collect all these things that will remain behind.
Nothing you have will come along for the ride except your deeds, intentions, and stories carved into your mind and spirit.
The mind goes with us to the next.
We may leave our bodies behind, but the programs of our mind will remain intact.
Ask yourself: if I were to die tomorrow, is this the mind I want to travel with?
This day, and every moment that follows, will be another opportunity to lighten the load, improving the chance of transcendence.
Time is a Trickster
Land the plane, aka the mind, on the page.
It wants to be in the skies, but it is down here where its services are required.
Tap in, but do not be seduced by its grandeur.
You come from there to here, so be here.
Acknowledge and respect the desire of your soul to experience that moment in time.
Time is a trickster. There is less of it than you know, and the spaceship is moving faster than you can imagine.
Respect the soul. It is the reason you are here.
This YOU is once in a lifetime. You will perhaps return once again, but the next journey will be or could be, with new companions.
So enjoy the ones who are journeying with you now.
The ones that were, the ones that are, and the ones still to come.
Be With Her
Be with someone who makes your heart change its rhythmic state.
Be with someone who disrupts your insides—not so much that you lose yourself, but the right amount of disruption that ignites new parts of you.
Be with someone who makes you feel, activates your heart—someone you are excited to see at the end of the day.
Release the naysayers, the narratives and internal dialogue of the others, of those who know nothing about you, by those who don’t even know themselves.
Be with the one that… you don’t even need to write anymore. If she activates your heart, be with her.
Be with this feeling right now. Hold onto this. It’s a gift from her to you.
Be with the one who has the potential to break your heart.
Be with the one who reminds you of your existence and why you came here in the first place.
Be with her.
Love is Not a Construct
Love is not a construct, something that happens with one soul,
Love is something that is expansive and has no rules and regulations, no systems, no borders.
We are sold the need to follow a model of love, and when we don't meet this model, we suffer and suffer and suffer.
Some of us suffer all the way till our deathbed and take this suffering into the next merry-go-round of our karmic cycle.
Round and round and round we go, cycles of illusions constructed through layers of manipulation.
Maybe you can't see in this moment, but can you feel it?
Can you feel the pain that lives in your body, the suffering sounds of chatter within your mind?
A soul that is crying and begging you to cultivate the spaciousness to express itself, to love fully?
Why do you think your soul came here?
It came here to love to its fullest capacity.
Infinite capacity.
I Want to Kiss
In this moment, I will not be taking anything.
Just me, this page, a matcha latte.
I feel the energy moving in my heart space, the center of my chest. My tongue is pressed against the top of my mouth, the tip of my tongue pressed behind the back of my two front teeth.
Energy flowing in my throat, a cooling sensation that is moving upward, dripping onto my tongue, wanting to pour out. I want to kiss. I miss kissing. My favourite pastime.
A lover comes to mind.
No one to kiss in this moment.
How else can I express this love yearning to pour out? What if I never meet someone?
What would I do with this energy and love?
How can I express it and share it other than making love to a woman?
Why would I even contemplate this?
It’s not an either-or; it’s about everything.
The Earth below and the Universe above.
Meeting within the centre of my vessel.
Jigsaw
Is there another way?
At some point, at some number, we need to pause and ask: Is this it? Is this the way?
The gauge is fear and stress. The higher the fear and stress, the more likely it’s not the way.
Or maybe it’s the other way? That’s for each of us to decipher.
A calculation I’m still calculating.
Left or right? Flip a coin and walk in the direction it tells you. Heads—left. Tails—right.
Upside down. Inside out.
It’s all a zigzag, back and forth. It’s the illusion of a straight line that brings pain to our hearts and minds.
Nothing about you is fucking straight, and in this jigsaw of a world, you want to walk a tightrope.
There is a guaranteed fall—and nothing below to catch you.
Embrace the upside down, and only then can you know what is right side up.
Double-Sided
Separation is an illusion.
Colour is everything and yet means nothing.
Everything is double-sided, and there is no one-size-fits-all.
Do with that what you will—or throw it to the side if your preference is to do nothing.
But there will be a lifetime when, one day, you will need to pick it up if you want to graduate to another playground.
The same merry-go-round gets tiring.
At some point, the soul is so dizzy it can’t tell whether it’s awake or asleep.
What Now? Versus What's Next?
“The journey begins here with whatever is capturing your attention.” —Radiant Sutras
The lake. The sounds of birds. Sounds of kids playing. The trees. The sounds of humans working their machines. But this last one is subtle.
Nature is capturing my attention. Softness, silence, solitude.
In this moment, it’s me, my writing, this pen, and this beautiful journal. So much love was poured into creating this journal. It’s taken me years to have the courage to inscribe my thoughts and reflections onto these pages.
Now is the moment to enter the beauty that I have felt unworthy of entering. It’s off limits. Or so I thought.
Now is the moment to enter the beauty with perceived barriers. Sacred. Quiet. Silence. Listening. Stillness.
Emotions want to encapture all, to flood my being with the sacredness of the divine essence of love. There’s a reaction—fear to this movement—an attempt to reject. Noise from news. Actions and procrastinations counter one another.
Return to the blank space. Be present with nothingness, with emptiness. Observe the yearning to consume, but be still in the yearning.
Pausing at the doorstep of beyond. Enter beauty with nothingness, emptiness. Enter with space so that the extraordinary may dance in your presence. Weave in and out of the space that is you.
Unattended, unattached. Leave the doors open. It is not yours to keep. You own nothing.
The beauty is only that in the presence of freedom. Its opposite leads to suffocation and drainage.
Possession is the death of beauty.
Blessings, Infinite Blessings.
“Encircled by splendor in the center of the sphere. Meditate where the body thrills to currents of infinite communion. Follow your senses to the end and beyond into the heart of space.” — The Radiant Sutras
Into the heart of space.
Be present today. Notice the spaces in which you play, the blessings waiting to be seen. How are others fitting into the space? How are you moving through space?
I often underestimate space, its existence and its importance and how it shifts depending on who or what occupies it in any given moment. Space is not static. We change it with our presence, our awareness, our gaze, our words, even our breath.
In a moment, you will leave this space, your new home, and dance in spaces with others. How does your space adapt to you? Observe how you adapt to the space and those within it.
How do I want to move through space? What about the space inside of me? The space inside of others?
Why is it important to cultivate spaciousness in our minds and hearts? How can we hold and flow with ease if we are full, if our minds and hearts are stuffed with what we consume, transmuting us into a dense and weighty object?
How am I breathing?
The Void
This void that lives inside all of us — it can't be filled. Or can it?
The void itself is an imbalance; we inherit a dominant energy. When we are born, we are split. This split causes a fracture, leaving a void.
A relationship with the feminine fills this fracture — and vice versa. It empowers when it comes together. The energy ebbs and flows.
Leave the desire to attach, to keep it permanently in the void. It’s not ours to keep.
It’s essential for it to move freely, like a bird in a cage with the doors open. We have a tendency to want to trap the energy, thinking it's the safe way. But energy is only energetic when it can flow freely.
An addiction to the illusory idea of certainty and stability. Even if it stays there forever, it needs to know it can dance and fly if it so desires. That keeps the energy healthy.
It’s a dance between the masculine and the feminine.
Being caught up with material labels at the physical layer takes us away from the source of what’s important — the energetics within the layers that make us whole.
The energetics of mind, body, heart, and soul.
This is where we need to shine our attention, from the moment we awaken to the moment we lay down to sleep.
The Dark Never Travels Alone
Getting off track or maybe it's on track. Who fucking knows.
The stress of doomsday lives in my heart. I know it's a possibility but I also know that I can look out another window and sunshine is waiting to receive the gaze of my eyes. It's all perspective.
MANASIAH AKPALIAIPIK - Screaming Faces, 1991
Ask yourself, is it really gray outside? Is the future bleak? What data are you assessing that justifies a narrative that causes commotion in your heart? What's first, the emotions or the narrative? The feeling or the thought? It's hard to tell at times. It's that whole chicken and egg thing. What came first. It's so swift and fast, difficult to decipher the order of operations.
Sunshine is there. Darkness never travels alone. But it requires effort and awareness to change the direction of our lens, pointing the binoculars towards another horizon and suddenly you see the rainbow above.
This makes me reflect on the miracle of this moment. The sun. The sun shining down on this planet. I mean, how do we make sense of such a grand gesture from the divine? Names don't do it justice. It cannot be named, it can only be experienced with awareness, yet we will never experience the whole, simply bits and pieces when we take a moment to pause and remember.
Oof, what a trip of a fucking world we live in and I'm not talking about the world as in this planet, I'm referring to the little worlds we create within our minds and hold onto a pseudo truth, then we kill for this truth, we die for this truth.
Illusory certainty will be the death of humanity.
This brings a smile to my face. Fills my body with joy to remember. To look through another window.
Light. I can dwell in the dark.
She reminds me, we remind each other, there are other windows.
Layers
So many layers.
It’s not about any one particular person, so don’t get attached to the physical form. It’s about the energy, the essence of the being—the parts that can’t be seen but are deeply felt. Keep your attention on how it feels within the layers, both vertical and horizontal. We are layered in both directions.
Even when we look into the mirror, we tend to focus on the physical structure, the vessel we’ve chosen to embody. But what about the essence? The unseen? The felt?
This always brings me back to the heart. To its opening. To the practice of keeping it open—daily, moment to moment.
In a city like this, where rivers are covered and dammed with concrete, we become its reflection. Humans are masters of adaptation, consciously or not.
So what is the energy in this particular dynamic? It’s repeating again. What do I want to leave behind? Is there anything I want to carry into the next cycle?
I don’t know the answer yet. And I won’t find it in my head. I need to feel it in my heart. I need patience. The language will come on its own.
I’m still learning how to translate feeling into palabras. There are traits in this dynamic I appreciate, and others I’ll leave behind before the next roundabout.
Maybe, if I can learn the final lessons this karmic cycle holds, I’ll complete the homework. And then, I might be ready to step fully into the next cycle of this incarnation.
Little Me
I've been solely dancing and displaying words with pen and paper, but I miss this space as well. Fingers and keys have a different kind of dance. They carry their own friction and flow, unique from the slow flow of pen on paper.
I have yet to reflect on year 47 of this cycle. This time last year, I was in Morocco. It feels like another lifetime. To excavate the memories, I would need to open my old journals and sift through my photos.
For the last couple of months, I’ve been carrying around a photo of little me. I think I was five years old. Below the Polaroid, someone wrote, "HI EVERYBODY." This sentence is me—it's who I have become, or maybe it’s who I’ve always been. It took a while to return to this authenticity because, for much of my life, I wasn’t able to flow in the way that was natural to me.
I was a happy kid—joyful and loving—but my environment was not welcoming to my nature. It was difficult. Still, it taught me to find joy in an incognito way. I learned how to protect my spirit from a very young age. I touched that place of safety when I was alone, playing in my room under the tents I would build. It was my place to be me.
I did this for a long time and still do, though as I got older, I learned to find calm and peace beyond my own space. To find peace under all roofs.
It has taken many years. The last few years of being nomadic have helped me reach this place. I consciously lived under shared roofs to learn how to flow with the energy of others. The one thing I am yet to master is how to flow—how to be this little guy with a smile—despite the chaos in romantic relationships. I’m still yet to find someone I can intertwine with and not lose myself.
I keep this photo with me because I want to reflect on how we started this journey. I want to ask him: How did we do? How are you feeling now? You carried us through some really difficult times.
Little me is getting emotional. I feel goosebumps throughout my body. I, too, am getting emotional as I write this. Or maybe it’s he who is getting emotional.
Tears want to flow, but I’m in a café, so I hold them back. I’ll save them for later. I love you. Thank you.
We made it through. What bigger accomplishment is there than to arrive at this destination of openness? To move through this world with an open heart and grand compassion. Compassion for self, compassion for others, and compassion for this life.
This maskless place. This happiness that rises deep within, without external dependency.
What a beautiful place to be.
I’m not going to look back and analyze this past year. Instead, I’ll observe the present, because the present tells me all I need to know about my past and the seeds I’m going to plant for my future self.
Unfulfilled Yearning
Three Americanos yesterday. I was buzzing and didn’t sleep till 1:30 a.m. I watched a few episodes of This Is Us, and it ignited some ancient emotions inside me.
A sadness, a longing for the family I haven’t yet had in this life.
I love the way the show moves between past and present. It inspires me to weave my own memories, to explore the threads of my own story.
I love that the desire to have a family has returned. I don’t think it ever really left. I just tucked it away, deep into unlocked drawers within me.
It’s something we all do with unfulfilled yearning. It’s too disruptive in day-to-day life to carry these longings openly, letting them sit on top of our hearts and minds. Some we save for another day, others we save for another life. And some yearnings rise back up from the depths of our soul to remind us that they need to be lived now, in this fleeting blip of a moment.
So I open myself to the desires that won’t wait for another day, for another life, and I pray for another chance. I pray for courage. Life has gifted me many chances, but I spent so much of this life moving through the world with a ball of confusion around my heart, clouding my mind and smothering my truth.
A fear birthed out of chaos. I chose what I feared less, which created an illusion of safety. An illusion that had no legs to carry me toward what I most yearned for, a yearning that couldn’t be saved for another day.
This longing reminds me that it will come with its own beautiful chaos—a love that I’m now ready for, as ready as one can be for something so grand.
It’s not that I’ve hardened my heart; rather, I’ve softened it. I’ve learned to embrace, endure, and appreciate the cracks that formed rivers from broken experiences.
Finca Mia Retreat Centre - Rivas, Costa Rica