out with lanterns (looking for myself)

healing: a process of returning to the empty center of consciousness, the song of innocence, the child-mind. Christ: “Therefore whoever humbles himself as this little child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.” everything I study now returns ways of healing.

how to heal collective trauma, stacked calamities, sedimented debt. what reparations (in the financial sense) and reckoning (in the moral sense) must we undergo? (both central to Ta-Nehisi Coates’s plea for reparative justice).

one must always start with the one: if one cannot command an open heart and open mind, then they cannot guide others. “Man is the microcosm: I am my world. To convince someone of the truth, it is not enough to state it, but rather one must find the path from error to truth” (Wittgenstein). and with that, “an open heart and an open mind are the optimal conditions for social change” (Ram Dass). or, one must supply their own oxygen before delivering breath to others.

have we reached a moment where practices of self-care can be revelatory and shared? look at certain expressions in art and culture right now: in music, Kendrick Lamar’s Mr. Morale, Angel Olsen’s Big Time, Alabaster DePlume, Sharon van Etten, Big Thief,; on TV, Undone and BoJack Horseman, Fleabag, I May Destroy You; in film, Everything Everywhere All At Once, the latest Matrix, Pig; and countless volumes of poems and memoirs and novels all on various journeys toward peace and self-realization. this has always been the case, but the constant and higher-decibel levels of generalized anxiety that blankets the 21st century demands a different, more transparent, and provocatively transferrable desire for healing. what can be said about this except collective consciousness is evolving, little by little, as more people wake up; how can each of us, each individual cell, contribute to the cosmological body’s awakening, coordination, unified breathing?

the ending of the Sopranos: David Chase confirms Tony is murdered in the diner. so he goes on to another lifetime. and in another lifetime, a different ending to the same show: not death, not unconsciousness, but satori: the shattering of knowledge, the release of the mind into the world, peace, acceptance, a meal with your family, no desire. maybe someday.