freedom

Freedom - G. Michael

I won’t let you down
I will not give you up
Gotta have some faith in the sound
It’s the one good thing that I’ve got
I won’t let you down
So please don’t give me up
cause I would really, really love to stick around, oh yeah

I think there’s something you should know
I think it’s time I told you so
There’s something deep inside of me
There’s someone else I’ve got to be
Take back your picture in a frame
Take back your singing in the rain
I just hope you understand
Sometimes the clothes do not make the man

All we have to do now
Is take these lies and make them true somehow
All we have to see
Is that I don’t belong to you
And you don’t belong to me

Freedom
You’ve gotta give for what you take

I think there’s something you should know
I think it’s time I stopped the show
There’s something deep inside of me
There’s someone I forgot to be
Take back your picture in a frame
Don’t think that I’ll be back again
I just hope you understand
Sometimes the clothes do not make the man

Well it looks like the road to heaven
But it feels like the road to hell
When I knew which side my bread was buttered
I took the knife as well
Posing for another picture
Everybody’s got to sell
But when you shake your ass
They notice fast
And some mistakes were built to last

That’s what you get,
I say that’s what you get
That’s what you get for changing your mind

That’s what you get,
And after all this time
I just hope you understand
Sometimes the clothes
Do not make the man

All we have to do now is take these lies
And make them true somehow
All we have to see is that i don’t belong to you
And you don’t belong to me
You’ve got to give for what you take

Freedom, Hold on to my freedom

May not be what you want from me
Just the way it’s got to be

stressed out

restating the obvious

Its time for us all to start being nice, being responsible and quit effing ourself and others up.

Grown men and women should act like grown men and women and not act like a dingleberries*.

* a small clot of dung, as clinging to the hindquarters of an animal.

gifts we give, gifts we recieve

Giving is the natural energy of the universe.

When I breathe in I receive oxygen
Which was emitted from the oxygen producing plants

When I breathe out I give C02 carbon and H20 hydrogen
The elements that plants need to produce oxygen.

This is the cycle of giving that is the law of nature. To the point that eventually it becomes impossible to distinguish what is giving and what is receiving.

This is positive symbiosis, living in perfect balance though interdependence.

However, interdependence is not the same as attachment.

Even though breath comes from you, it is not yours.  Each breath taken and given is a small gift that goes out in the world and is of use to others but you are not attached to it.

So the very essence of giving, giving anything is non-attachment. 

Its open hearted, spontaneous and without strings.

When you breathe, when you give, this leaves you empty. Your lungs fill with air and expel the air, which is the only time you can fill your lungs again with live giving air.

Generosity leaves you empty but the emptiness is what attracts the gift of breath in motion and replenishes it.

wal-mart, religion, and unwritten stories...

greymatter:

Unless you’ve been living in a rock or under a cave, you’ve heard about that Wal-Mart employee trampled to death by a mob of bargain shoppers on the news. Black Friday continues to be an enigma to me. Sure, I like buying new shiny stuff as much as the next guy (hey… Leica M8 for Christmas, anyone?), but these Long Island shoppers that broke down the Wal-Mart doors, trampled the employee to death like a herd of angry elephants, stepped over his dying body as they rushed to grab the $20 Guitar Hero represents an entirely new level for me (and if you think this is just one isolated incident, read this).

My outlook on shopping is basically “if I see it and like it, I’ll buy it/If you see it and like it, I’ll buy it for you.” I know I’m lucky - I have a job that affords me luxuries. Unless we’re talking about something outrageously outlandish, I don’t really think about price. I don’t do comparison shopping, I don’t cut out coupons, I don’t scour bargain bins. I just don’t understand that life. If I want it, they have it in stock, it’s probably coming home with me.

The thing that bothers me most about the Wal-Mart story is that this guy was a temporary maintenance employee. I didn’t do any research on the guy’s life or anything, but there’s a few conclusions you can draw. He was sent by a temp agency so he probably didn’t have the money to buy the things that were on sale at the Wal-Mart in the first place. And was probably working so that he could buy Christmas gifts for his own family. In an economy like ours (oh, did you hear? Today, our nation’s greatest economists declared that we are in a recession. Thanks for the obvious. Tomorrow, the government will declare that the sky is blue and space is big), that temporary employee could have been any one of us. We all could lose our jobs tomorrow. I have no illusions. I do work for a bank that helped fuel the disaster that is the subprime mortgage crisis, after all (I don’t work in mortgages, by the way, so don’t blame me).

It makes me lose a bit of faith in the world. And I’m starting to run out of faith to run out on. In the past few years, the world has gone a bit haywire, hasn’t it? Hurricane Katrina, Darfur, 9/11, Mumbai… we seem to have made a mis-step along the way.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently. There was a point a few years ago when I read every religious text I could get my bony fingers on - the Bible, the Qu’ran, Tao te Ching, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, you get the point. Even though my life seemed to be a careful tip-toe through a field of landmines - I felt that I was really lucky. I had survived. I was learning from my mistakes. I made peace with a lot of my regrets. I looked at all the difficult things in my life directly in the eye and laughed. That had to be proof that there was something, someone looking out for me, right?

Recently, I’ve had these two stories floating around in my head, both heavily saturated with religious undertones. They’ve been bouncing around in my head for about two weeks - but I’m not ready to commit them to paper yet. I really don’t know where I stand on it. Plots are being written in the neurons in my brain… but still, I don’t know. They seem incomplete without me really knowing where my head is at. They seem wrong - not because they are sacrilegious, but because they don’t seem to fit correctly.

I’ve gone back and forth on god. I went from Daoist to Buddhist to atheist to agnostic and semi-circled back to atheism. I’d like to believe that free will really exists, but if God exists and She (yes, She because, really, it makes much more sense than He) is an all-powerful all-knowing being and She knows what I’m going to do before I do it, how can there be free will blah blah… that just gets to me. There’s a place in my head that believes that religion is simply a way to make the masses fall into a moral line. Without it, perhaps that line wouldn’t exist… just like at that Long Island Wal-Mart.

the irony that the one thing I believe in wholeheartedly is nothing

does not escape me