"Why?"

Draw a tarot card sometime.

Doesn't matter if you don't "believe" -

just look at it from the perspective of looking at yourself from another perspective.

Some glasses of a different color to see some grasses of a different color.

After all, sometimes the obvious is genuinely startling.

How many times have we read or watched or listened to stories where we from the outside can see how blind this character is to themselves? They're going through their own journeys, in these petri-dish experiments we call the concocted human dramas in imagined universes,

like mad scientists in stone towers on high hills,

or dervishes dancing in the desert, their limbs and the wind weaving a story in motion, their feet looms in the loam of memory. Or the ancient ones, who killed and clawed to paint their visions in the silent darkness of the first cathedrals, spires of great size inverted, the dark piercing down into harsh reaches unseen where no light has ever touched yet the mind knows there is life that thrives and crawls and hungers in the dark and perhaps one day it will become like you,

whoever "you" even are or "are" even is and what was that?

Who goes there?

Speak, speak, I can't speak, if I speak then my fate becomes meat, my future moot, its fabric meted out in matted pieces for the cubs to rip into reams.

Which is just one example.

Whole moments and worlds and mythologies we've imagined for ourselves to study

and so decode the secrets to elevating this experience we call life.

I couldn't think of a question for the card. What I could think about, because I still let my mind race off on its own, was how much having a question going in would inform an answer I perceived to be some deeply insightful, nigh-on perfect fit for my life state at that moment of turning over the card.

So I decided instead to do something that probably doesn't prove much of anything per se, let alone accord with the more ancient manifestations of this practice,

and turned over the card.

"Why?"

And then I'm remembering my last conversation with my father, where in a last ditch effort after an anxiously long descent, I thought I had cracked a code. My wild card, something I thought might begin to serve as a reconnective conversation. And he some expressed interest, as well as concern for my purpose in bringing this up. In my own relationship to this wild card. And many months later, it rings again in my ears. His presentation may have been poor, but his insight was spot on.

It was, to me, the question of why. Idleness in the bask of a fire's low, cracking warmth is too easy.

Because we are in the midst of a continual becoming.

And it sounds like a fuck of a lot of work.

It sounds like it could hurt you.

It sounds a little like you could fail. That there's something wrong with you if you get stuck. That there's value in staying stuck, a value manufactured out of little but lies large and small by people who have invested themselves in keeping you stuck.

Why am I doing whatever I am doing how I am doing it?

I don't enjoy stories where I experience people's lives completely fall apart.

I've never liked it when a horror story has the characters escape the monster - only at the last second to be caught by it, or another monster, or the like.

I don't want to watch movies full of suffering, to invest myself in the surrender of emotional engagement, unless I believe that creator has an intention for my takeaway from that experience. If I can find reason to trust that they have a vision for the purpose behind this journey through suffering and the dark, then I'll go. I recently saw a trailer for a film called Good Time that looks like a very rough time, but something about the archetection of tone, design, energy, rhythm, music, performance, text - I've watched this trailer again and again and again.

But it all comes back. This may not work for you, but I hope it helps somehow.

Here's what I'm asking myself: I don't want to watch movies full of suffering.

I don't want to go through that unless I know the story's creator has a reason.

Has intention. Has strength, confidence, courage, love, and a little mischief.

My life as I live it every day is a story I tell every day.

I tell it in what I write, in how I speak and move, in what I say, in the way that I say it.

In how I live.

So why am I still living in my suffering?

Good Time https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AVyGCxHZ_Ko