Le Lapin

what are you doing?

If I was glitter, I’d be made of matte paper

If I was the her, you thought you had dreamed, before

Though I never know, which way to answer

Because I can’t, or rather I won’t

Be all that is asked of me

So when they ask

who are you, where you going?

I wonder more than thirty years

of walking around listening to

people pretending to know

how on earth can I answer questions like that

when everything’s always been kinda strange

so not at least we’re all

sorting out the same pages

even if we were once all cut by some paper

the wondering and simmering to

Sing, dance, and listen

to what those trees whisper’d

driving through this body

Who are you

Where you from

Where you going

And how come?

Nice to meet you

I try to really mean it

I only want to know why

we just have to sing it

Going along

Stories but not songs

quite suddenly nice seemed to

turn out a tragedy

after awhile those tears

of drama-dy become a comedy

a movie to make bad reviews about

So sleep it off

Laugh, instead of scoff

My goodness

Aren’t we strange?

taking in opinions, so seriously

As if we all, had advanced degrees in

Etymological chemistry.

-Mari Amman

Trondheim, Norway, December 2021

updated, Posillipo, Napoli, Italia, November 2026

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Making Sense, is something humans are kinaesthetically made to do. So when it comes to the ways those senses work, how much trial and error is required to establish relationships between subjectivity and objectivity?

As a thought experiment, how to establish intelligence? How does rationality and irrationality draw lines of tolerance and intolerance? These are the kind of questions I dove into during the independent studies Annetta Kapon mentored me through while completing a master in art. What befuddles me to this day, is the Descartian manoeuvre to separate science and art, to the realm science begins to take on the funny flavour of belief. And how much of the psychic realm of belief impinges into the realm of the materiality of existence?

While many people run around devaluing education, celebrating the traits of self-absorbed children (while scolding anyone for recognizing aloud what any parent knows to be true) I wasn’t so keen on the charade. I went to learn because I was aware of my ignorance, and sensed a slippery slide into history repeating itself, and wanted to make some kind of small improvements to the events to come. And since this urge is (thankfully) shared by many, I wanted to understand why phrases such as “follow the money” are flippantly tossed around and used to prove motive; why such power would be given to what has shown itself as an invisible realm of transaction. And if such invisible realms have such powerful connection to material reality, then why are some cognitions considered intelligent, and why collectives permit the erasure of voices in favour of a verifiable attitude.

And so Omniscient came about. An image composed of a frame of half frozen water, coupled by a poem. This transgression an artifact of earnest learning processes. While getting scoffed at for naiveté, the image and text, if we could call it art? became a bit of an epistemological proof. And while people scoff at those using words they don’t yet understand, consider an author isn’t trying to talk down at someone, but rather use the best word for the job. Learning can go different ways, to pull folks down, or help them lift themselves up.

So bare with me just a moment longer. The other thing is saying something like, “Nature speaks to me,” can be about as spooky as someone saying, “God told me to.” Empathetically, the phrase is understood in today’s time as the result of a social equation. Place Logos A, with Action B, and you get Imagined Result C.

And since thinking isn’t always a well paid activity, the tendency to avoid thinking prevails. Que the cognitive bias dances: THAT’S CRAZY!

Guilty; I’ve said the phrase many times myself. The relevance of the way words are digested reminds me of the visit the writing course led by Benjamin Weissman had to the Jurassic Musuem of Technology in Culver City. There we could find all the so-called intelligent ideas people thought they had, laid to rest. Toxic poisons used for medicine, the violence permitted in the name of healing were astounding, the Space-Dogs book laid among Heidegger and Dr. Emoto; the museum and books inviting independent thought and conversation instead of a singular oratory voice of “they,” “society,” “them,” or institution.

The attention I would like to draw toward here is who is the authority? What person, entity, institution, is allowed to say the same thing someone or something else did without getting erased?

Right now, it seems those who are heard are selected by a PR team to generate cultural acceptance. When Stanford goes and verifies what was previously determined pseudo-science, doesn’t that mean Stanford is the catalysing agent for making pseudo-science real? Or perhaps what was called crazy, told to shut up, talked over or put down was always true. The specific area of epistemology in reference here is in relation to water and vibration.

Not that the Wiki is writing knowledge (though it tries) says: “Masaru Emoto was a Japanese businessman, author and pseudo-scientist who claimed that human consciousness could affect the molecular structure of water.”

Meanwhile Cymatics is a field of study. A REAL *winkwink study of visualising sound frequencies. So when Stanford physicists proclaim to discover what was previously called pseudo-science, doesn’t anyone say, “Hold-up a minute?” Moreover the knowledge established and already known as true, seems to have been ignored and called crazy just so that someone new could discover what was already true?

OUCH! Sorry, but this makes my brain feel like it’s tied in pretzels. This brand of institutional hypocrisy reminds me a bit of learning about gaslighting and the dark triad in psychology. These words are in no way to diminish the so-called Wests’ ability to break things down into smaller bits to attempt to understand ancient wisdom in new formulas, so the attempt to assert agency over life, repeats itself. The line between Logos and Pathos seems to get quite thin here. So instead of getting upset about hubris, I make art. (An oxymoronic action, perhaps?) Because I’m not sure if there is an Omniscient being here or there but one truth people seem to agree on is we would not exist without water. Put all the complex structures of being and awareness together, and materiality would struggle to form without water. And that’s the how I came to Omniscient.

As always, looking forward to your thoughts through the comments.

OMNISCIENT, exhibited in Making Sense, 2015 Bolsky Gallery, Los Angeles, CA, 2016 Imaging New Eurasia, Asia Culture Center, Gwangju, South Korea. Monolithic image and text:

A monument of future history. The image stands as a totem for the change in social structure toward the wisdom of water. Water emerges as the discourse for the emotional body. The emotional body serving as the pathway for the wisdom of intuition. In the new world, emotional suppression as poverty and polluted waters cease through the cleansing of pain into ecstatic expression. Responsibility for water comes through the reverence of its high wisdom. Sacred in the new society, water is respected, protected, cherished and shared freely among people to create humane societies upon all lands. A reverence for water solidifies the respect and preservation of the emotional body constituting a humane society for humans to exist in.

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But I didn’t go blind; so why write about it? For one, to squelch the rhetorical rubbish of having to tell this story over and over. Next time it happens to pop up, I can get over the hiccup in conversation and send a link to right here. Further, the experience blew apart and confirmed the cliché about appreciating something before its’ gone.

While I seriously doubt publishing the experience will do wonders for me, my hope is it may help someone else in ways I could never know. Quite frequently, I found relief in reading someone else’s experience; and since books and reading are like doorways to other worlds, you may be well warned this story tends to incite grimace.

People don’t appreciate things until they’re gone, isn’t always true. I’ve always appreciated all my senses, as uncommon as some of them are. The spectrum of sensory experience facilitates the perceptual faculties, and can invite individuals to reflect upon the narrative and lineages they’re running on.

As the issue in the air the last years has been on the loss of senses and life, human perceptual motors are not without error. With the proneness life offers on the road to loss and grief, navigation in a human body tends to rely heavily on the eyes. Nearly going blind was a bit traumatic and quite painful. Moreover, I nearly went blind while living in Norway, a place where most people do speak English; and I know basic Norwegian, but tend to lose the faculties to speak in a relatively new layer of embodied memory, in a time of crisis. So I default to English, and this definitely added a gauzy layer of confusion to the experience.

When making choices in life, one may make a list of pros and cons. This list is referenced often from memory and knowledge. There’s this funny saying about not knowing what you don’t know, and this is one of those things. Most people usually do not dwell on all the things that could possibly go wrong while traveling or moving states or countries. To propel forward, the focus tends to be on the possibilities.

Now I grew up during in a liberal ideological period. Anything is possible, as long as you work hard enough, or more recently, wise enough. I’m not sure if that’s true yet or not. But the ideas running through liberal mental states have come into some intensely confronting situations in reality. This conflict between ideas and reality has afforded a great lot of mind opening experiences, but when those conflicts or tensions bridge from mindspace to physical bleeding, the call to pause and reflection isn’t always an invitation more than it is a command.

Physics and metaphysics are areas I’ve always been interested in, which tends to go into structural dynamics and principles not so much involving causality but rather laws of nature such as costs and sacrifices. Everything matters is a concept so enormous, it requires teams of people working across the globe to sort through. This makes our human relationship with the nature of life often deeply subjective. And even in our reach for repeatable objectivity, there are still tendencies for the human minds’ ability to make stories up or rationalise actions and experiences.

Tension works on principles of pulling or pushing and release. Tension pulled far enough in one direct tends to exert equally or exponentially in the other direction. I found these principles in physics written in clear terms and diagrams in a book by Robert Fritz, who explained structures of advancement, and structures of oscillation. Without vilifying one structure or the other, he used the rocking chair as an example of oscillation, and walking as a form of advancement. In some ideological or political instances, oscillation or hypocrisy tends to be viewed as destructive over time. The question of slow poisoning without notice, or fast poison with rapid results or response, another more extreme site.

What happened the day I went blind drove me to look more deeply into these areas. And what I mean by look, is to think and learn. While I’d passed physics more easily than chemistry, I would say the learning was about useless, unless I could apply the knowledge to life. And in this case, life applied the lesson directly to the back of my eyelids.

On a Sunny, Sunday morning in Oslo, a cherimoya I picked up at the market was finally ripe. Food, and particularly imported fruit, in Norway reminds me of my time in Japan. Every bite is savoured because it is expensive. The cost doesn’t make the extra pleasure but gives the mind reason to pause. Internally, I had friendly memories of eating cherimoyas while doing yoga teacher training nearly a decade prior, and so to find something familiar in a new place I was finding quite challenging gave me a lot of comfort. Having just enjoyed this delightful experience, I recall my partner sitting on the computer watching YouTube videos. YouTube is quite a funny experience to come up quickly through culture, and for whatever reason he was watching a woman using an exercise band. She was demonstrating how to strengthen her thigh muscles, to which I thought sure, I could try that! Even though I preferred walking and yoga, I had received an advice to use these exercise bands. I was skeptical because the PnF techniques yoga uses is pretty similar to using exercise bands, but I tried it anyway. If you can’t tell by now, I still regret it.

That wonderful and playful day turned into a nightmare as fast as that band slipped off my feet toward my face. My reflexes to shut my eyes and turn my head got as far as closing my eyes when the tension from the band hit my them the pain that seared through my whole body shut off my brain and caused me to howl. I tried to stop but then I began crying; as I opened my eyes I realized I wasn’t just crying but the view of the world was becoming dark. I was losing my vision. My partner rushed to my side and jumped back with a gasp. I couldn’t really see that happening, but I could feel it. And his tone of voice changed quickly. I told him to call 911 or whatever fast because I remember Maggie, a neighbour I had, telling me a story of her friend losing vision in one eye from getting hit with a ping pong ball. How short of time in critical moments we have to change the course of the future.

I couldn’t understand a thing, as he spoke in Norwegian; I shouted I need an eye doctor now. The person on the other line was saying I had to go to the emergency room and wait in a queue. The infamous social healthcare queue line. Sit and wait with all the rest who are there with runny noses, fevers, perhaps broken appendages, to then see or not see anyone who could help me. Somehow we managed to walk down to the car, and as he continued speaking he began yelling at the person on the other line, NO she has to see an eye doctor or she will go blind.

As we drove away, he explained these details to me, and I tried to calm down. I had noticed the darkness increasing the faster my heart raced, and was generally dark and closing in as I calmed down. As we arrived to the hospital, on a Sunday, he had to pay for parking…more time. Scared out of my mind, I shouted at the building HELP! HELP! I couldn’t see any doors or signs, and someone came to the window and told me in Norwegian to turn right, and the door was there, and climb up to floor 3, which is actually floor 4 when you’re in Norway. So I held the railing and counted the floors I passed to open the door to an empty hallway shouting SOMEONE HELP ME! Upset does not get you faster help in Norway; it actually scares people. So it wasn’t until my partner had made it up the stairs that I remember a nurse grabbing my arm telling me it will be alright, and showed me to a seat where I had to wait.

For some reason unknown to me, I needed to call my friend in Italy. It was as if I believed she could know my fate. Here people telling me everything was going to be alright, I didn’t believe them. I needed to hear the voice of my friend. She was very calm, when she un…

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Pain. Probably not the most favoured of topics. A sensation often sought to be avoided. Yet at some time, pain invades or strikes your body. The key I’d like to convey today is in developing a relationship with pain. Not as a way to attach and identify with the pain, but to process the signal as an invitation to come to know something about your body or yourself, that you hadn’t before.

As new life emerges into existence, pain sensations are often part of that process. The realities pain has revealed to me have been more generative and serving toward development and learning. Through the humbling acceptance of pain, working through pain, allowed more long term changes, then attempts for quick fixes.

There are times softening can be of service to working through pain. There are times when numbing pain can be of service to addressing the root. The red thread here is not about going through all the kinds of (tooth, joint, muscle, organ, mental) pain there are, but to rather consider pain sends a signal. This signal can be seen as a light attempting to draw awareness to an area previously left in the dark.

Tears can accompany pain, and maybe they can, more often. Tears have acquired cultural significance that doesn’t always relate to their actual purpose of releasing tension from the nervous system. Even if the pain signal is from an Idea being confronted with a different Reality. You maybe didn’t even know you had that Idea, until you’re going along doing whatever you do and then ouch! externally or internally, physically or psychologically, ZING! This kind of disruption in the stream of experience invites attention to the cause of discomfort.

It has long been said salt and water heal everything. Whether that’s swimming in the ocean, a salt bath, or the passing of tears, the common sense recalibration is real because anyone who’s dipped in salt water cleanse shares a similar story: the feeling of clearer and calmer, came after.

Addressing pain can make certain psychological structures go run and hide. As a friend put it, lick the wounds. Even through moments of hubris, humans are still animals. So what are the cultural constructs around pain really about? Villain and victim making? Maturation measuring?

A couple cookies ago there was a post on courage and strength. You know there are some folks pained by asking for directions and others pained by asking for help. The definitions of courage and strength vary, and so does pain. While some pains feel better in the morning, there are some pains that need more than a good sleep. Here’s a nifty chart about the cool thing the body does to your brain while you’re sleeping:

So back to pain. Interestingly (at least to me) when I started learning Norwegian, I noticed there were fewer words for pain than I perceived in English. I had immediately wondered if that could explain various taboo phenomena, such as the prevalence of addiction or even darker, subjugating dynamics common throughout the world. As it turns out, even creating a society where everything looks ideal from the American continent, there is still pain and distress. Conceding the alleviation of mental pain, say in breaking a bone not breaking your bank account, there is great merit in such organised social cooperation. Culturally, treating pain with inquisition and curiosity, is something I found to be deeply liberating. While I had previously only found this perspective from yoga and meditation settings in the USA, this perspective has been part of an ongoing experience I had in the Nordic healthcare system. No pain, however small or large is ignored by those with the courage and strength to seek understanding. Maybe we have Ibsen to thank for his tireless work to elevate taboo social subjects into the shared psychic space.

And that psychic space, by definition is our spiritual space. (If you haven’t checked out etymology.com, I highly recommend it.) Making the spiritual space more spacious invites distance in viewing the pains fo life, and makes the teachings gurus said about pain acceptable. I mean, it all comes down to being able to digest different ways of thinking. How hard can it be? *winkwink. Pain when accepted as another shade of experience transforms those waves of experience, producing all kinds of actual change.

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Celery makes my mouth itch. Particularly after I have eaten something sweet. Could there be some kind of science to justify my experience?

Everyday I find someone has published some kind of study, that conflicts with the knowledge we thought we owned yesterday. This discovery seems to be infused of an energy akin to that of rushing metal filaments squealing toward magnets.

Perhaps the lines between the metallisation, the word, and physicality of celery are in play here. Just as my friend John said today: everyone can agree on the value of art, but the question is always about who will pay? Everyone seems to agree celery is good for our bodies, but who wants to eat it?

Chewing on celery passes the time, the kind of time needed to make another discovery eventually revealing something wrong with something that is how it’s always been. This wrong gets marketed as a fix. That’s the tidy business coaches advice: find a problem, market a solution. The thing about this approach is the solution almost always creates another problem, and the never-ending story relents until the chewing of sugary stops. I’ll take the confounded glory of the vegetable floss and let it curb the acid holes candy bars bore through my teeth.

An itch, after all serves an expression of desperation to heave out something naughty. An itch can’t be ignored unless with great meditation training. Acrobatics of the nervous system, strengthen to endure the sort of masturbatory articles celebrating the greatness of a species. Wouldn’t nature love us a bit more, if we paid her a bit more of our time, and a little less of our mind?

What’s all the excitement about the revelations we prove to ourselves? There’s this bar called Stopp Pressen, or Stop the Press, in Oslo. Which is pretty fun name and invitation to wonder what we are pressing on about.

Maybe nature would throw fewer tantrums, or maybe we would discover there are certain combinations that don’t work for anyone (celery and sugary cacao, for example?). The (written) law is whatever is boldly asserted and plausibly maintained. The laws of nature require no writing but continual adaptation. Instead of taking nature, understanding nature might prove far more kind.

Text adapted from a journal entry made on 26 November 2018, Oslo, Norway

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If you do not feel strong and courageous on your path, look within and around. Are you treating yourself and those around you with care and compassion? Are you being treated by those around you with care and compassion? Are people shouting? Are you succumbing to fears and doubts?

Love has been marketed and mythologized as an elusive ghost that has to grace one’s life. Yet other cultural perspectives would see any aspect of reality within the realm of choice. The choice to love may not appear or seem easy, and so the option is entirely written off as a nifty feature of cognitive bias. That CUT! sure can spell drama. Is the film rolling yet?

At the beginning of anything new there are often a great area of unknowns that can cause falls. If one is lucky to simply stumble, practising to choose love grows stronger and easier. However, if you go in real deep and find yourself in the abyss without any rope, practice the rip tide technique. Let yourself float out and eventually you’ll come back up before you sink completely. Sound bleak? The abyss is funny because it’s inside out and outside in.

Before this Cookie gets too spunky in abyss seasoning let’s get back to sipping the tea of courage and strength.

Over time, following the choice of the heart feels more and more what we humans like to call natural. This word usage tends to point the meaning of natural toward the word habit. And this is not to mar the use of the word habit, not a bit. Your heart has this habit of beating for you, circulating an energy current. The size of that current, while a habit, still has a lot of bandwidth for you to play around with. You can grow that current of energy, the subject many schools of theology attempted to teach.

The nature, or habit of following the heart, is a way of being guided from within. Not from external voices of approval or often voices that aim to shape you into what they think you ought to be. External landscapes have a tendency to shift and change. So often those landscapes shift and change, people tend to proclaim decade after decade the world is ending! Attachment to attachment can circumvent the focus on building from the heart.

Alas, presuming we are still right here, your heart is beating and always with whatever “you” are, regardless of what you think you might be. For all that transcends generations and withstands time, works in tune with Mother Nature. This nature or habit of generating life has its connection with the human body through the heart.

Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage. – Lao Tzu

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Senses rely on developing, maintaining, and adapting levels of receptivity and perceptibility. The senses and our reliance on trusting them have long been under a subtle subversion module of trusting external agents. These agents could be clergy, gurus, institutions, laws, or Apple watches. These modules of social policy are not inherently corruption making methods, but continually lead attention toward specific modes of accepted intellectual and sensory development.

There is a belief certain perceptions are only available, induced through substances, drugs of relating, or techno-submersion. And while making some modes of perception “out there” and taboo for the sake of unanimity, such taboos may lead seekers to take on trips they do not necessarily need to go on. As Kirkegaard is often quoted for saying something like, you will regret if you do and regret if you don’t, this exercise is an invitation to circumvent the form of consensus bias that can entice and bite any unsuspecting form of life.

Contextual set-up almost done; what for? Well, appearances are fun, sometimes funny, and more often foggy, blobby, and deceptive. Affectively, appearances can seduce.

Seduction is not sexy. Seduction leads one away, corrupts, isolates. This form of seduction has become so widespread, being an individual has come at the cost of other choices available. Not to hate on margins; if you have ever tried to read a free-form book, it’s understandable the contemporaneous homosapien has finite tolerance for ambiguity. What I’m trying to say here is the traditional structures and the expansions of tolerances are obviously possible but also have their own costs. The energy load of heightened awareness could lead to all kinds of consequences, perhaps drawing conclusions without enough evidence, jumping ship because what seemed like rock bottom was actually just a rough patch in the sea, or the need for more naps.

The etymology of words has become one of my go-to tools for double checking my own logic and reasoning skills (or lack thereof). And since I have felt the burn of hot stoves and fright from being ensnared, I do not intend for this jungle vision cookie to get all victim-y.

Instead I would like to invite the practice of seeing towards the goal of personal clarity. Instead of subjectivity, the embodiment of animality offers a form of training in-vision and in-body. Images activate the energy circuitry of the body; not in an esoteric sense, but the sense the nervous system is in fact circulating charged particles, cells, and information to compose images, movements, and the belief those ideas may somehow originate from within.

Butoh dance works a bit like that, using the imaging apparatus of the sensory-motor systems of the body. Differing from other modes of performance where a well trained body and practitioner uses repetition of a drawn-out movement plan; choreography to tell a story. The butoh dancer moves from the haunts of imagination. The picture of a memory drawn into the field of mind-vision and performs the body through that. Instead of being in the subject-object setup often used in art and photography history discourses, a type of double bind akin to Schrödinger’s cat, the Butoh method engages in the sensitive system of the body before it became stuck in the narcissus puddle of identity. At the very least, the invitation to the jungle in this week’s cookie can be a grounding practice of being present.

So what do you do? Sort of let your eyes haze over and see what kind of animal is inside a person. I tried this with applying the mechanics of single-reflex cameras to start; meaning, trying to get at the sublime impression from vision, the upside is downside. So when someone is talking, mentally flip the field of vision updside down. You can also do this looking at something upside down, but without a Hassleblad, you could pass out if you hold the inversion too long. Over time, looking this wat through the mind’s vision started to get funny; mouths where the forehead is, and foreheads where the mouths were. This made people kind of look like fish. But the invitation to practice seeing what kind of animal resides in someone is different. Admittedly, it took some months to start to be able to notice; and my brain wanted to shut down the whole practice pretty fast. So I thought I could try with my own reflection; and that seemed even harder. I don’t want to prescribe the way for you to see animals in people, but I did turn off the lights; look in the dark, look in different lighting, unfocus my eyes, and see what kind of forms emerged. Zero drugs needed or used. Use your senses and imagination - only. What do you see?

“There is no one as evil as all of us,” has echoed in my mind from my friend’s graduate project of layering faces from internet search engine results. He had also made a portrait of me in a day, laying the images over each other. The concept was to see if there was an identifiable essence in the appearance. Sounds simple enough, but it was an impossible project. As most photographers understand, a photo is not reality; it’s at best a close approximation to the real but still a story, a myth, a lie. It’s not an equivalent even if we appropriate the use of a photograph as document. The difference between layering documents or representations and inviting the emergent vision of the interior animal in someone is that it engages the senses, the subtle, deep systems of the vision-body circuitry. Whereas pictures alone, still hover, and that’s what my day-portrait.

Instead of taking in features, seeing identifiable forms, give it a go; using all your senses to see what kind of animal you are or are sitting across from. Whether or not that essence is there or not, it might be a cognitive bias circumvention tool in service to avoiding the seduction of appearance. Be patient with the practice and compassionate with yourself. This kind of vision seems to be pretty common in children, and is killed off in the faulty cultural constructs we so often rely on.

What kind of things can people see that are really there, not just appearing as something, but are deeper beneath the surface. Maybe we remember to be able to see where colloquial slangs came from: he’s a snake or a bear, she’s a fox or a raven, are not merely colourful, affective language mechanics or word games, but are instead based on perceptions circulating beneath the flesh.

For me, this practice of accepting the wildness of being alive, has not turned me into a hallucinating tribalist (or any other kind of ist for that matter), but invited me home with sensing. This sensing, using all of what I can, with all I got, doesn’t require a charging station or satellite GPS to designed to save me from myself. These kind of technocratic messiah products may dazzle some but the technology I still get the most out of are the pre-analogue kind. This sensing ability allows me to find a way to feel safe and at home in my body, whether or not I have the right hair, makeup, or clothes on. And the times I went against these kind of perceptions, trying to second guess what some refer to as a “gut-feeling,” I regretted it. Imagination as a tool to avoid regret? Why not.

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social media makes personal universeswith walls permitting those who agreeto graffiti, erasing those who differan echo chamber of personal sovereigntyprivilege became an assault wordjoy became something to hidesomeone so over communingserving a discourse in fiery mindsa way of saying this way not thatno because I know betterwondering how communion breaks downthe gaze, the look, assumed empty embracesdiscourse tracks adjacent opposed to communicationa train wreck destined to happenthe path clear from ivory towersfarmers, human callerscities have also their beachesthe blame media and material objectsand hold in their body a free willto say, to do, to chooseturn up a noselook sidewaysreach outembraceface the fellow who tossed out the trashreached beyond a respectable graspcommon sense says we senseright and wronglong before anyone tells us tothe limits of tolerancewhen did fighting corporationsunholy alliances and snide marksbecome valued more thanmaking the most of everyday.- Mari Amman

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Training bras are a soft way to introduce women to the world of having their bodies examined in public. The funny part about that any man walking around without a cup on will also have his parts examined in public. The less funny parts about these actual parts of being human grew to an offensible posture. Susan Sontag made evil out of the male gaze. It is not that her work was without merit; for many bodies benefited from being able to speak up for how they feel objectified but body language and physical communication owes at least a two-way dynamic.

Anyone who has survived a less than friendly, and perhaps abusive relationship can understand how unproductive blame and blame-shifting tends to go. The lines or boundaries around what constitutes healthy relating can be found in pretty highly agreeable quotients. That last statement, I am pretty sure Microsoft Word would have underlined as a “passive voice.” That was something that happened a lot throughout my work in copywriting, editorial, and frankly in my everyday life.

That passive voice seemed to open up an experience of behavior that I was responsible for creating. However, questionable as I found bra burning to be, because I remember being ecstatic about training bras, I found myself puzzled. Why burn a bra when the option to not buy one at all was always there. Setting things on fire, somehow became socially more acceptable than abstaining from buying the thing set on fire in the first place really puzzled me.

In the last decade I feel like I stepped into one of those spirit mazes in Ojai, California, to realize I don’t have to walk on a prepared stone round to get to the center. All along that route, you are there right there with you. Those spiritual mazes are often only wide enough for one person too, such that I found it quite obvious ancient spiritual practices would service the separating of people.

Maya Angelou is often quoted for the saying (paraphrase here): those who know better, do better. What better actually implies or means is perhaps at the poetic heart of any beloved phrase. I’m not sure what can be said for setting things on fire outside of the context of serving an ecological growth process. Was bra burning really a fair activity or did it scrape the surface of something deeper?

If you recall last week’s cookie touched on the Nobel Prize for Physiology was describing something most people I’ve met consider common sense. The article in the media barely scraped upon the surface of what the innovations were about or could be deployed for. Humans are social creatures; we need touch. And while people are parading for the rights of animals and humans, there are a great lot of people not raising noise and raising their families instead. But we don’t hear about the good news. Again most people I meet agree. So why is good news still regarded as sentiment (low value) and inflammatory news regarded as progressive (high? value)?

The aggression towards traditions and structures humans has relied upon is understandable, particularly when trauma is involved. But a fight happens when people enter the ring. And bodies separated from each other have to gain more self reliance than interdependence. Try as humans might believe, outsmarting ourselves isn’t that easy; and it might not be a great idea.

The list of things that did not go how I thought they would seems to grow with every birthday, so no wonder the nostalgia for days past grows. Everything that gave us the comforts today could not have been THAT terrible ALL the time. This kind of cultural hissy-fit has always fit as well as a training bra. Not that well. So what are we in training for? I want to write more on the human relating situation, touch, and how expectation for closeness can face cognitive dissonance when the idea of independence is unfounded in reality. But I think this medium week was needed first.

Stay tuned for next week’s cookie because there I want to bring up more of the ways human relating hurts or benefits from ideas, and what it can mean in the technological today to develop healthy trust and respect for each other. No fires or manipulation required. For now, a few ways to look through the prairie:

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Mirror neurons, empathy, simpatico, compassion. All of these phenomena and perceptions of being human has suddenly been recognized by The Science as real. Somehow we have arrived at the moment in time where our experience of life must be reconfirmed and validated through an expert panel.

This is not to demean the objective the Nobel Prize for Physiology offered this week to two scientists, David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian, but rather the headlines and articles themselves. The objective is made to sound as if science will save people from heart disease and the pain generated by lack of touch.

Was it not less than 50 years ago researchers discovered babies who failed to thrive were those who received shelter and nutrition, but not love and affection. Serious medical conditions aside, the value of touch has witnessed a serious devaluation throughout cultural rituals. Add the social distancing effects from the recent ongoing viral outcry, and the social stigma around questioning whether or not the reportedly profound new discoveries are or are not new, but carry with them a new technological motive. The refinements in proclaiming the common sense as new discovery go deeper into the cellular and genetic structure of the human beings.

Anyone who’s been in a relationship knows, at best, things are a two way street. Where one area opens up, the opening creates a vulnerability, and where an area closes off, there are barriers. Such as heart beats and healthy HVAC are involved, the ebb and flow, inhale and exhale rely on each other. We are not talking about rocket science here.

The next time you go to hug someone, notice if they pull away after a few seconds. Hugs, largely free and thanks to the discovery of hygiene, are free doses of good feelings. In this flood of good feelings, everyday people including scientists, agree makes people kinder, more empathic, and considerate of each other. We realize another human being has a lot in common with our being. Our bodies are build to give and receive.

One of the confusions I’ve noticed over the years is the conflation with closeness and sexuality. Hugging has become a downright intimate act after spending so much time apart. The non-sexual good feelings can easily be mistaken for the procreation drive to bond, mate, and settle down. Add to the mix the cultural proliferation of destroying the structure that served humanity for years: the family, and we have ourselves a lumpen mass of confused bodies. Oh yeah and dating apps! The list of challenges are perfect breeding ground for clapping to new discoveries, which actually open up what the human being can be used for.

When humans jump head-long into thinking hugs are more than sensibly sensual, and instead something sexual, there is a huge spectrum of life experience missing. Feelings are meant to be had, and also thanks to the invention of language, able to be spoken about. This part requires listening and speaking up. A great lot of Agency and Trust involved in the hug. Something obviously more intimate than rubbing elbows or shoulders. Hugging invites our humanness into the moment with that of another. Be that humanness vulnerable, broken, strong, adamant, weak, striving, accepting; all of that humanness is yours, whether or not an expert agrees.

It’s not entirely clear whether or not people are welcome to critical thinking about the implications and the high level of trust involved in recent science discoveries. Do we really need The Science to tell us hugging is good for us? Personally, I seriously doubt people are that far out of body to need to be told hugging is good for them. Instead, I am noting the metallisation of human behavior. People having these instincts to hug each other, care for each other, are primarily sawed off by the thoughts that possess their beings. Add to the fear, as a writer, simply suggesting hugging might be considered a murderous or violent invitation.

I kid you not. I was told just two-nights ago by a well-meaning individual a hug could be deadly. This kind of cognitive dissonance where touch is essential yet dangerous all point to this: abdication.

Now I’m not encouraging sick people to go around hugging people, but the lack of digesting information and questioning what is going on has reached all time highs. This reminds me of a painting an artist made of a man breastfeeding a baby. No one is supposed to bat a false eyelash nor utter a peep. Are the thought-police really so strong as for people to hate the person that says what everyone knows to be true: milk comes from women, for children.

How on earth has humanity arrived at this point? As last week’s article described about bad truths being better than good lies, each person has to examine what on earth truth really feels like.

Does it feel good or is there pain in being estranged from human touch? Does it feel correct to trust in new discoveries than rely on empirical evidence? A life without hugs is not a very funny life at all. The pain is not just in your head, but all over the body. After all, the blues, would not have been so popular for so long if there were not people aching and seeking to be heard.

Whether you’re a human, a cat, dog, horse, ape or so on, Touch itself asks each of us to feel. Because I don’t know about you, but the truth settles me down, gives me a sense of peace, and lets my mind rest. Even if it is not pleasant. And the so called new, or the truth that incites hate, creates distance and pushes people further apart does not sound like something I would jump head first into.

As the common phrase, a clock tells the truth twice a day, let this week’s cookie be something to nibble on regarding the way we relate to touch moving forward.

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