Le Lapin

A human soul cannot be contained in a linear box. So what if I will always love the philosophy I could get from learning Norwegian and the profound expounding that comes from understanding a priori through English? How dangerous can semotics and linguistics be? Apparently in the emotionally charged West- very.

Words are not just words. They are misused and often fail us, and yet what is communicated is not only words…people are icy, defensive, warm, and yet the leery among us are regarded as smart while the naive are idiots. What happened to openness and naïveté being a form of intelligence?

Instead of wanting what is not had; why not embody what is wanted and weather the consequence. Trees do it all the time; so all those tree lovers can stand to actually practice this.

And because of anguish….I learned the value of ginger. Kval is what anguish means in Norwegian. And this is to set your eyes upon the most beautiful place in the world and experience the utter turmoil of pursuing longing and love and a vision to create life with the reality of being alone; but not with yourself but alone in a relationship.

Sure we have all touched limerance in varying degrees; but did you ever let limerance eat your heart, your small intestine or perhaps even parts of your mind? I hope not; but the complexity of meaning in Kval….may be best summarised with an image instead of these words because sometimes I wonder if humans are destroying beauty because it scares them too much:

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lelapin.substack.com/subscribe

Awhile ago, Harriet Sundström painted scenes of hunters foregrounded by their hounds with prey, often rabbits. For as much conceptual art school as I could barely stomach after starting in on Kant around age 14 (a bit late to philosophy by Nordic standards), I began to delight and stand wide eyed in a bewildered horror at the complexity of colloquialisms evident in traditional painting, graphics, and screen printing.

Never could I have imagined the decentering and deconstructionist idealism practiced at graduate school, pieced together by American Academia from the Frankfurt school would have sent me, literally and actually, down a rabbit hole. Several of my close friends affectionately prodded if I was digging a hole to China these last years and if that was really a good idea. The thing about digging deep through history and understanding semiotics and the symbolism operating on the level of appearance in our daily lives, at a certain point, less energy is required to keep digging than to backtrack through the center of the earth.

While that all sounds like metaphor-ary, I also experienced this dig not only psychologically but somatically, within and around my body and life story. It was as if the notion life as a dream was real, and that dream included a malleability of the contents of life based on the choices made at a soul level. There were no compass or guides…but instead objects, signs, gut signals, conflicting evidence to try to distinguish what was illusion and what was real.

Now as if this didn’t sound like a bad trip, I assure you; I have avoided burning man and drugs in this life. Life is already trippy enough…perhaps due in large to my curiosity and tolerance. Colloquial phrases, as it turns out have material meaning. And so I took an interest to the symbolism of art, particularly of those who spend time to develop skill to select their subject matter carefully. This is not to say abstract paintings cannot have as much consideration, but that there were often gross mishandlings due to posturing and conceptual whims that left my soul empty these days in art. I know I’m not alone. Most people say this in whispers to me, but dare not speak aloud to the imaginary board of esteemed art officials.

Before I drift off into the imaginary realms of ‘art worlds’ to avoid sharing with you my personal symbols…here are some of my personal symbols to begin to scratch upon the coinciding experiences that indeed felt like a kind of dying was occurring.

Dead rabbits….as if to say what? Dead rabbits appearing in waking life seemed like a warning sign to me to be careful which trails to follow. Sometimes ignorance is not bliss (rarely if ever) but ignorance could mean avoiding intersections with predatory creatures that apparently kill for fun…such as this beautiful bunny found on an evening walk as if in mid stride…just there. A hungry animal could have at least used the creature, but this sweetheart was just there casting a soft shadow of a mountain from the streetlamp in its last moments of breath. I struggle so much coming upon these creatures, as if hugging them might help them revive their breath. Alas, their softness and delicate beauty I am taught to not touch, particularly moments after death. I don’t know if rabbits really are dangerous or if dying creatures are either. I do not look upon the dead rabbits my deceased relative painted now as triumph of survival but this weighty reverence for the transmutation of one form of life that becomes loss as transferred to a greater ether despite weighing upon the temporary scale of a cement sidewalk.

The Matches. This simple box of matches inspires horror in my heart. It’s only now writing this I notice 10 matches in each direction, 5 one way, 5 the other. When I looked up these on the internet, I found they are still manufactured in The Netherlands, though were indeed Swedish. The reason I still feel so scared of this symbol today is their being seems to defy the realms of reason which I rely upon to reassure myself of reality’s existence. Despite toying around with notions of spooky action at a distance, space-time collapsing, and Schrödinger's cat, these were fun as mere metaphysical and equivocal theories until the reality of this matchbox’s appearance in my life. Thankfully I have witnesses, prior to these photos made with my iphone. Not to be dramatic, but I heard a THWAK while I was preparing for bed one evening in Santa Monica. Hearing something fall to the floor and wondering what or how, I looked around. As a well known minimalist and type-a clean personality, what could have fallen? I opened the cabinets and the drawers of the bathroom, checked the shower for falled soaps or loofas….nothing. The last place I looked was under the waste bin, which had about a 1/2inch inset in the bottom, to find a matchbox under the bin. There is nothing within the realm of reason that produces a sound of an item falling that would already be contained within that small of a space. A sound that inspired my roommate at the time to ask if everything was ok…to which when I showed her the matchbox, she giggled…well isn’t that funny. I asked why, and she said she had never seen them before and they clearly looked quite old. And indeed the box appeared to be from decades ago, perhaps during WWII. Part of me wishes I held onto the box, but another part of me was glad to leave them in the bathroom when I moved out of that apartment.

Now here is what intensive blood work looks like. For about 6 years, I had several vials of blood drawn, along with MRI scans, ultrasounds, physical therapy and alternative treatments and exams such as massage, biopathy, sensory deprivation, all of which to find out why on earth my immune system was malfunctioning. The doctor in the USA I saw in Culver City, put my copay in his pocket. Randal Gilbert…I’ll never forget how 10 minute visit with some blood tests gave him the idea to diagnose me with a life threatening condition, of which I found out in Norway to not even carry the genetic factor for having. Thankfully what I can point to as intuition for lack of knowing what the impulse was, told me to get second opinions. Blood labs seem more reasonable to me than the matchbox event…alas, just as spooky as at one point my blood was watery, kool-aid consistency, and slowly over years, and even many blood draws, began to deepen and thicken to a more “normal” consistency. The quality of my blood also coincided with the vigor and strength regained over those 6 years. I will save you the graphic image of the bloody noses I would wake with in the middle of the night, or the time I was out to see a choir perform at the Black Box Theater in Oslo, with my friend Maya, and how she called another friend, Enzo, to help because the blood was filling the sink, and I was going into shock and panic wondering why. The people assumed I was on drugs; but yet again, I don’t take drugs…so what was creating this in my life?

Then there is the whole allergy to cats (I am); and the notion of the shadow in Jungian psychology, as well as mirroring in Buddhism and other theological orders. Combine the shadow with the meridians we know now as vascular and nerve channels stemming from the organs in the body, the somatic and physical (real) experiences were indeed expressions of some kind of psyche. And in etymology, psyche means spirit. Spiritual signs, attacks, were realms of darkness in Orthodoxy, and the occult or just cults in general were things I avoided like drugs…who would knowingly invite trouble into their life?

One of the external signs was the categorization in Norway for the things I was examined for being in the wing for women and children. What kind of things are women and children historically subjected to? That does not require much imagination now does it? or even a new painting? The horrors humans survive is so widely known….how few abstract symbols are required for people to paint the image in their …

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lelapin.substack.com/subscribe

Much of The Cookie Jar has been available for free. And so I often wondered the past 23 years or so when creating becomes worth charging for.

Creating as done in nature is defacto. The flowers do not charge the hummingbirds to drink their nectar. However, those flowers are vulnerable to being clipped or hacked down.

There isn’t evil to be found in charging fees but rather a sort of buffer layer that enables bodies to decide for themselves what roof and flooring to have around them, what kind of food to collect instead of deal with what is given. Commencing with commerce is often miscategorized for numerous reasons which feel justified, but I do not yet think humanity is ready to live on barter and trade.

I also do not think life was better in the 1800s. Humanity, as nature, as often been brutal, unfair, and so we stand to not reduce each other or our structures but rather improve them. When we bath, we know now to not merely toss our water but we wiser with all things in which we do and engage. We are living in times that can transform the pasts’ patterning. And all this said because my next Substack I want to share a story I survived, but I am terrified to.

I am scared because of how many people will think it is attention seeking when my intention is to lay myself down and let you know how I learned how weird and loving life can be; how terrifying it is to do what you do not know what you are doing, and by the impulse to live and figure out what was going wrong so that pattern could stop.

There are droves of articles on the internet that seem to be helping people out, but I think a lot of ideas drive people further apart. Ideas have a different kind of power than wisdom. So it is maybe not wise to share the next post I plan to, but I will do so behind the paywall.

I do not have anything to hide really, and all that will be in there; but I do not think I owe the public my personal life story more than is already visible in the art that has been made, as I reflect on what is what in relation to historical, visual, performative and constructed discourse. And whether or not you are a paid subscriber; please know I appreciate you both ways.

My reasons? You save me from having to login to Facebook very much; because I have major cognitive dissonance when I do go there. I don’t know if I am imaging things or becoming more psychically sensitive to the cacophony of energy amalgamated there.

Your free and paid subscriptions also allow me to break off pieces of my website and also my archives which never see the light of day without this substack. So thank you all; because without people to connect with, I would just be another orbiting vessel creating on this sensorial plane, and it is through connection, with life and with each other that reminds me, we are never alone.

Solitary at times, sure, but never alone.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lelapin.substack.com/subscribe

Mayonnaise is a bit like the word moist; it contains a lot of icky feelings of repulsion for some folks, and indeed contained a great lot of yuck not so long ago for me. Maybe because I had made too many salads and sandwiches working at delis, or because I was afraid of the sauce in incumbering my stride while running or hiking. So how could I regress my taste to accept the condiment I had condemned for the better part of my life? The better part being the part where I did not eat mayonnaise, to this part where my rules are so open to say, sure, I could use the calories if they came my way.

I had an artistic residency mate to thank. For one, I was afraid to spend a month alone in Switzerland, and for the rest, once I realized how joyful the spaciousness I was inclined to - wished he would change the dates so I could actually be alone. Luck would have it, that I had to share a week with a truly incredible British artist wrestling with whether or not to continue painting the way he does (incredibly well), or not. This feisty fellow’s wife happened to bear the same name as me, and yet worked as a nurse and a mom; a far cry from my determination to support ways people would not need nursing or mothering for…but a sort of generative energy that would fulfill some kind of postmodernist ideology that probably has nothing to do with reality.

And that’s what Dean Melbourne taught me, the foolishness of a low fat diet. Why on earth would I pay more to have more of the nutritional qualities of a food removed? By halving the serving to a more substantial nutritional load, I could cut down on time cooking, time eating, and spend more time making art and hiking and reading. Brilliant. Thanks not only to Dean but also to Nina and Pascale for giving us space at Angelot-Trélex for a month.

A glorious month I never ate mayonnaise but experimented with my gluten allergy a few times to realise, ok, I will have to find time to invent a croissant recipe that doesn’t make me bloat like a pregnant goat. This month I worked on art, developed teaching programs, did freelance writing (which seems like a mainstay), and hiked up mountains I knew nothing about, ran from mating foxes in the dark that I had presumed were wild humans hurting each other, and generally felt oddly at home despite knowing so little French.

Our spirits are foreign to even the most introverted of us. I have vivid dreams, things that pop in my head after going to bed with a question have been things like:

Annona

Le beau monde creatif

Others…..which I will save you from for now.

But mayonnaise is something that both Dean, and ok, Kafka, somehow had to open my tongue up to. 2019 until 2022, now I can eat the dastardly gross condiment with pleasure. I have to say it’s best with Scandinavian Spice; and though it would be nice if Santa Maria payed me for saying so, they didn’t.

You know what’s so odd about today’s mayonnaise eating and internet, is not that the rules are made for breaking but rather that the most accessible and honest conversations are missing, because of things like projection, of jumping to conclusions, of saying one thing but doing another.

So I suppose I’m a little scary, because I want to invite people to say things and learn and grow and change out of the oscillating patterns of yesterday.

Mayonnaise is really not the point here, if you are getting the fragrance of this batch in the cookie jar. But it’s something a bit tangy, healthy in small doses…and that thing maybe…change. Survivable even if not palatable. A bit like the way some people who feel like money justifies some pretty mayonaisseeee behavior. Saturated whatever they be, are still probably better best kept at a minimum for optimum health.

Speaking of palatable, since when did community become the buzzword for tribalism. What happened to pluralism and moderate liberals? I know you’re out there….

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lelapin.substack.com/subscribe

we presume everything posted on the Internet happens now

and why not?

everything could be happening now and in some ways is when we look closer at the biology of our beings becoming matters

den blu sjel i kroppen min are blue stone confettis of gravel on a sun-stained road, imagined with the well named iPhone, birthed from a great lot of technological bodies to show us to ourselves and gregariously and aggressively share what we find with others

the light into each others’ dark spaces, infuse the literal meaning of psyche means spirit with intricate lace cables with each other’s minds

these lines of drawn breath are enacted as time through our bodies which are not shells with souls but souls with all the life in the layers

liking and unliking what is mirrored back to ourselves

some mirrors lie and people lie and call those mirrors fun houses, but I am pointing toward the mirrors like the rivers that reflect the skies, the stars that point ships to sound lands which echo the canyons made by the voids of our loved ones passing

we are not gone to them neither them to us but whispering for those who want to hear badly enough

we have choices that chips are built for, but those chips don’t have the same lineages as our DNA, they are circuits built with materials of the earth and so the story of the earth will become more prominent through their inception

we do not have to RAM our anthropogenic orientations down each other throats, feeding our stories like chips ahoy binge fests but consider the origin of impulses themselves as graces of celestial and terrestrial bodies

we are already a technology with a heart

hearts are not merely subversive but feeding the mind

so I must beg the mind teachers to also feel deeply sensual and the sensual not misconstrued as sexual because everything that exists is already in some kind of stewy exchange we need to become more nuanced and less broad here

turn down the sun some, no, but approach conditions with proper attire so we can assume a more substantiated role in actively participating in creating ours and each others experiences

not that of a mirror but rather through a sense of deja vu

where everything from within becomes out there, while the horror and ecstasy of real existence beckons the minds of the bored and disembodied

to drop down

way down

into the beating resonate sound

filling your body with an impulse to draw breath.

Poetry informed by the Pattern Recognition process developed during artistic residencies in Norway and Switzerland, and yes, really informed by notions of intelligence and artificial intelligence.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lelapin.substack.com/subscribe

Anatomy, the parts that create the whole has been one of the greatest interests developing over time. For when I take apart a structure and look at each piece, my mind becomes able to articulate the kinds of qualities, aspects, sensations that accompany such a formation. The energy of things tends to be difficult to relate directly with, and so I find these kinds of ancillary objects which have tactile qualities to describe and move forward with, from that cerebral space.

Melancholy, does not often seem like a choice...and seeing it as one is something I have always wanted to come to. As a choice, sometimes takes a lot of effort and sometimes next to none. This kind of easiness in choice I find appealing. For there is only but a short time even 90+ years of living could offer.

And if I am going to kinds of thinking, I liken to kinds of thinking that apply not only to what is happening in the world - but towards things I am creating or somehow contributing toward.

Melancholy as a recipe;

melodrama, childhood clinging, fear of death, shame…

Ever sit on the computer too long? Look at a TV or iPad or some kind of screen…

to see liquid crystals so tantalising?

As if looking into a pond to find some kind of feedback, some kind of self, of appreciation, adoration, new idea, all kinds…

the surface as understood as superficial and narcissistic seems misguided

the screen seems as a product of melancholic affinity,

for what easier method to access such ingredients such as melodrama, childhood cloning, death fears and shame than through internalising other people's experience intimately with your body.

The field of vision narrows. the myopia spreads across the population. and here I am making these words on a screen. alright. we are all playing along.

Can someone exist in a life without a screen? do we want to? there are so many privileges that come by association to melancholy. it's a long string of connectivity, sure.

The funny part about the medium of the screen are how often the channels are talking about the here and now. The right here and now, the present, the wonderful unfolding is...the promise of concepts and ideas coming through the easiest mode of distraction known to human kind outside of genitalia. and these kind of critiques are not to prove any kind of wrong in the existence of these things, these objects of speed, of lighting fast interface, of pleasure-no. These kinds of comments and thoughts are funny. And for one simple reason:

Thoughts don't change things. Conversations start to. Actions really do. 

Maybe the screen can be seen as a tool. As it surely informs the brain and the body, But I am advocating here a change in value, toward balancing efforts toward creating humanity in a way that has less shiny surfaces, and more soft and warm embraces. That has less ad appeal, less excitement, and more weirdness, and more calm.

But I'm curious also, what kind of nervous systems will humans be handing down when their nervous systems are maxed out?

Photographs from Lofoten Norway, 2018, Rachel Marie Wolfe Ammann

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lelapin.substack.com/subscribe

There are so many words that can be used and fail even as we take our understandings of meaning for granted. Perhaps there are as many images or more to fill the cracks words severed, but the relationship between art and words goes both ways. This long relationship between disciplines is nothing new, but seems to disquiet those who are playing the reductive programming act. The pursuit of closure or the finitive itself seems to make messes out of life’s processes which are continually opening and evolving. That is to say, there are people who try to drive other people’s lives. This is such a commonplace activity it is often regarded as good citizenry. There are distinctions to be made within the ways of help, as the saying goes, give someone a fish and they have a meal, show them how to fish and they can have a livelihood. Well that helps if the person can eat fish now doesn’t it. I’ve already tossed a lot of ingredients into this cookie, so I’ll try not to dive into the ethics and politics of philanthropy but steer back into the possible wholes, pieces of art aim to join or fill.

Art has the ability to keep us sane in times of conflict. And that form of confrontation that both opens up, solidifies, and continues to grow. My own mental process is wrestled by memories of Microsoft Word telling me my ‘voice’ was passive and in turn my making attempts to be more definitive, to then being definitive and being called bossy in real life. This business of ‘the right way to be’ is something I have also misused much energy for. Misused energy tends to suck the vitality and joy from life, and a social policy of ignoring that could create a pretty drone like culture. Properly used energy tends to balance and harmonize, much as different voices of a choir. There are books and books on flow for this reason, which is a state that might be much easier to create than chase after really.

Presented now with new technological choices, I would continue to wrestle with thoughts than have a machine or person tell me not the commonplace: what to do, no,, but rather the things I cannot do. Now if art became a crime, telling someone they cannot do what they are already doing, and working on developing, we would live in an even more perverse world. So I find it not art that is dangerous but rather the recent witness of accepted criminality. Alas human behavior, the way the landscapes make our physiology, these are the kinds of things I care about that end up in art. Because of the discomfort I find so readily in human behavior, art is not merely therapy but a form of exorcising pain and creating relational connections for a jouissance that requires no drugs or copulation at all.

Yet we know our eyes and minds are hungry when culture fails to nourish us and instead fosters regression and condescension, when sophistry becomes revered instead of mutual support to expand and learn, express and do. This is not to say inhale life only or to hold exhales out but that the range of human capacity has some direct relationships to the landscapes in which we are held. Earth, in the elemental impermanence depicted in Undulation, invites acceptance to loss and grief, and aims to not radicalize culture but offer an open door to spaciousness with the feelings civilization pathologizes, and in the archway of acceptance bio (real) diversity occurs.

Poetry and art comfort me in times people do not. Rilke’s call to live with the questions helps me sleep at night. There is sufficient evidence written in memory to show the answers reveal themselves through synchronicities.

Even after decades of study, work, practice, and inquiry, I can find new links between ideas and reality. The image above was titled Undulation around 2014. The diptych consists of 2 analogue film exposures (a redundant statement, I know). However these variations of the whole, was first shown outside of my personal studio in L.A. during Variations of a Whole at Bolsky Gallery. As reality is not black and white, nor linear as we falsely believe of time, the futility of making art has revealed itself useful by holding opposing views and becoming comfortable (not fearful) of difference. So while I was contending with notions of the Visceral, a decade later I realized I was fixated on understanding notions of the Parietal; that is by the definition of the word, relating to, attached to, or denoting the wall of the body or of a body cavity or hollow structure. This is where Platonic allegory comes in; the cave, which Freud flattened with his underdeveloped notions of sexuality, where Jung offered individuation through dream landscape, and where Lacan offered relational comedy through both tragedy and self-responsibility.

Making art isn’t often a feel good activity, though it offers a channel for understanding and allowing feelings to come and go, as meditation. The notion of professionalism: doing when even you do not feel like it. To show up for what you love regardless of feelings of discomfort, to work with it, to see where it evolves instead of ignoring it, made me realize new work isn’t always the solution. Sometimes reexamining ‘done’ work changes it as well. In this way the virtue of art offers more than most of my advanced gadgets, and fits more like a favourite sweater or piece of jewellery.

I often fantasize that other professions have it easier, but I know that is a lie…meaning a myth, easily falsifiable. Everyone I have met is facing someone’s voice who is trying to reduce their effort, value, or life. The cruelty humans put onto to each other seems to stem from projection, transference, and putting blame onto those so we can try to lessen our own burden. The image above does not suggest rugged individualism as a solve; instead it shows the hollow areas are contingent upon each other to form a whole; even though they are made of the same material. As uncomfortable as it may feel, most of us have more in common with each other than we want to acknowledge; and at least as many differences we have more to gain by accepting as well.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lelapin.substack.com/subscribe

Self-help books are popular; understandably based on the social policies’ celebration self-improvement. I tend to prefer to think about development or growth in terms of cultivation, or maybe even fermentation if you’re down for getting saucy. And this is going to get a bit mystisk for a moment because this cookie is going to dive down the rabbit hole of free-will and choice.

The reason self-help books are referred to is due to the nature of their contents. The schools of thought tend to be based in making rational analytical choices or follow-your heart and make your dreams real choices. The premise of these books is that those methods of being are totally opposite of each other on the spectrum of driving your body through life.

The list of motives keeping bodies in motion, beyond the 460mps/1000mph speed the ground beneath you moves, are vast and quite long. Some are motivated by love, by objects, by mental pursuits. Whatever the thing that drives someone usually doesn’t come into question unless they’re on trial, or applying for a job. The institution/employer always aska for your letter of motivation as if it wasn’t entirely clear there is a transaction of value and labor running the luxuries we have in our lives.

One of the great philosophical tools given to me by Cletus while attending graduate school in Los Angeles was to turn ever “is” statement into an “as” statement. Therein you would find someone’s subjectivity. So when someone says life is weird, or strange, or beautiful, the notion would be that is the way they see the world.

In the Vision-Body theory in Canonical Chinese Medicine, the conception vessel is that which connects the sacral region of the body to the ocular flow. Despite our way of seeing things upside down and having our brain/nervous system circuit that back around to give us a right-side up view, the notion of prophecy in relationship to dream time visions provide clear insight into the motive of a person.

Some people say there is no better way to know what someone is than to sleep with them. That’s not the slippery slope I want to go on here. Some cultures consider saying your dream out loud is back luck. And while I don’t give much weight to notions of karma or superstition, not that they aren’t real, because on a metaphysical level everything has some significance, I would say sharing your dreams with someone is the best way to get to know someone.

The cultural phenomena I have often felt was strange is the caution against that, because of the innate tendency the mind has to be manipulated. It’s pretty much impossible to not digest images, information, motives of what someone else wants you to do. So even if you were raised in a monostatic situation, you would still encounter different beings. It’s a bit of a utopian (nonreal) question, in the context of the idea of free-will. What motivates someone? Because in dream time, whatever you think you are is out-of-office. Pointing towards regular dreaming here, not the lucid, play with the psychosphere stuff, but just your run of the mill, tired, dreamt and happened to remember it stuff.

What organises events that transpire on this earthy plane, are often driven by people’s choices. Individually and collectively, but what is making them do those things? Revenge? Love? Curiosity? Hunger? Those impulses organised in the unregulated self, the one that thinks it’s perfect as is, are the impulses that personally causes me the most distress. The unexamined life, as in one lived by someone who is not addressing what their actions are doing to others, might be a blissfully ignorant life. So strange then culture values happiness so much.

This is not to invite greater value on misery, no, because self-pity might be one of the most selfish acts there is to wallow in. Remorse, when rejected, tends to enable violence, whereas remorse when reflected on tends to produce peace.

Perhaps that is why I found so much reprieve in the Lofoten landscape. I visited there in 2018, by way of body, but I had been there in my dreams as an 8 year old. Not knowing that landscape was even a real place. I stood still upon a rock watching the scenes below flattened by an intensely surreal experience of time stopping. I believed I lived my life following my heart and practicing free-will, withstanding its many breaks from knowing I hurt those I loved following this way.

So when I wonder about dreams and what makes them, while we sleep, in my waking life I do my best to exercise the golden rule: do unto others as I would like to have done. Baked into this is the good dreams, because who really wants to confront a nightmare? While many cultures vilify desire, we have the privilege of living in a time we got to and get to experiment bringing dreams to life. And it would take these kinds of experiences for the wisdom friends, who tend to run 10 - 30 years my senior, generously offered to make sense.

With so many changes and prophecies about the future going on, I wish culture worked a bit healthier and less hatefully. The way elders are discarded and mistreated, the favouring of youthful self-absorption, the attempts to erase “sides” of history instead of embracing the plurality of the reality that created those stories, any of us can go rotten from the ideals of happiness and freedom. Maybe it takes an invisible force to help people return back to their true nature, which is the ability to grow, to be cultivated, fermented. This is how I have been able to reconcile the idea of agency amidst the spooky and weird experiences of something beyond comprehension, happening to run through my dreams. The only choices then are to keep walking toward the dreams and avoid mainstream prophecies which are often much worse than anything that ever comes to pass.

Thanks for reading my dreamtime journal. Even if it is not possible to travel today, I suppose psychic travel is what we do on the internet today.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lelapin.substack.com/subscribe

Every time we impose our will on another, it is an act of violence. - Gandhi

This quote has recently zinged me, and had me come to terms with why I felt so intensely sensitive to instructing dance, meditations, and movements. Because on some level I knew that sharing knowledge had a connection to will. And movement and breath the absolutely closest we have to knowing the divine. Beyond refined mechanics alone, my deep concerns for notions around intelligence spring from discerning between false empathy and true empathy.

In Midwestern speak: where the rubber hits the pavement. This distinction between false and true points not only to the action, or the effect, but also the point of friction within the movements of what occurs and not what does not, as well. In these virtual times, possibility and speculation, almosts but not entireties, are forgiving because the labour of actualities is not only fantastical. Ographies such as bios, porn, and the ifcations such as game are realizing real things in meta spaces. This mind space is your divine space, a place where permission is granted by attention. And this space has been receiving soft echos of ‘having nothing and be happy’ conflict with the materialities of presence. No longer are science fictions pretences but closer to our realities…which illustrates in real time our collectives’ consciousness to imagine things into being, not through thought alone, but through subliminal movements.

I find myself in the forest or out walking among the pasture and fields a lot. Not romantically asking the riverbeds or mountains for an idealised answer, but a real answer, a knowing from the terrain because the main answers I get from heaven are wind or rain.

This agrarian approach to questioning the rapid procession of technocratic idealism is performed with caution. I am, afterall, engaged in Silicon Valley tech by using Substack, Meta products, and other orchestral tools of the digital. And so our interconnected world, as it always has been, carefully crafts another layer of veil, one that seems to never end, where the difference between myth and actuality are the currency.

I do not know about you, but I have noticed how much energy it takes to engage in speculation, and where the realm of the probable comes into the actual requires action. So I am careful with this action to propose we are at the precipice but not too far beyond any point of return as people claim: the genie is out of the bottle.

Yet the complexities of the realm of the ideological and the realm of the real are pressing into each other (perhaps a bit like what could have been depicted in this abstraction):

As Annetta Kapon’s wisdom rings in my eyes; nothing is just. I use the word just accordingly, in that just serves a form of reduction or othering. Just this, just that; hard to get at since all things are related in the quanta. The people in charge know it; and they know it because they have taken the charge. That seems to be essentially where ‘just words’ hits the pavement to charge.

This is not a post of empowerment, because if someone is aiming to empower, that would imply you didn’t have it already. And I insist, if you have the eyes, the ears, the heart, the means to have come this far through time and space, arriving at this juncture in history, you have power you may not realize, right in your hands.

God was not just a mythological persona used to control populations, the ideas and the stories were also ways to describe a motive that could lead to:

* health

* generating life

* creating harmony among people, otherwise prone to fighting

Was the fault of religion to give rise to people who abuse power? And whose responsibility is it now to attribute the actions of humanity to? When all that exists in our reality has given us so much; perhaps much more than we can give back. It’s not futile to try, to be generous as nature, to improve integrity a little better. The mushrooms are not going to be bad at having less things to decompose because there are facts like dust and rust and such.

In the face of reality, I have noticed a repeated abdication of responsibility, the complicity buttresses the avenues for corruption to take place. Corruption also gives avenues for motives, to use the metaphor of plants again is risky: invasive or imported species and indigenous. I understand raising these appointed axis is dangerous because of cancel culture. People become so unwilling to see, to understand and to relate to what the meaning of the outcomes is, and instead respond in inflammatory ways. It’s again, not terribly far of a stretch to see the rise of inflammatory diseases. When species thrives outside of its original context, is that opportunism or the species ability to adapt? So both constructed sides are valid. And in the realm of people, who decides is up to each and every body.

Publicly we are witnessing an acceptance and normalisation of an increasing amount of life motives which would have been imprisoned or burned not so long ago. Thankfully those barbaric behaviors are banned, except we know there are contexts in which they are permitted, and those latent desires still motivate a great deal of socioeconomic aggression or influence, which is why Ghandi’s quote has been such a clarifying force in discernment these last days.

We do have great freedoms in the West. So where are the restraints coming from in actuality? Maybe those restraints imposed by humans are more permissible than the restraints of nature? I tend to think otherwise. Nature is in charge here, and far less forgiving than humans can be.

I too once believed the media stories I was fed, about moral and economical superiority without having the lived experience to back up the claims. And then I witnessed a silencing of certain voices and a raising of the loudest. Well I do not think history is being written by victors right now but by sophists. Sophistry being making the weaker argument appear stronger. It’s operating on such a subtle level, until people do not realize it…but I think, because I have great faith in humanity, that they do. They feel this unease, and they don’t know what to do about it. And that is the scariest part really, because without agency, and authorship, a person is prime for being commanded on what to do.

So I tend to ground my questions in primitive terms: does this create health or illness? does this give life more beauty and joy or does it detract? Is it nourishing or depleting? Because a luxury belief will function on the mode of depletion, benefitting a few but not the whole.

In thinking about what is true and real, or what is good as life-giving, there is benefit to gain in approaching ideas to see their contents and results. The study of history has led me to noticing patterns, something humans believe robots can do better at. But data alone, without sensed context is hovering. Data alone are the choices people make in space…but we are not on an aircraft. We are on earth, where everything is real. Methods of charting the course of the future with responsible choices for generations not yet imagined reap benefits and mistakes of those prior to. So I wonder how much faith people have in the miracles that brought us to now, when so deeply invested in the control.

And because I do not know everything, and as before, posited if any entity could be all knowing, it would probably be water, I only ask one thing of you this week: to consider what water means to life, yours, the concept of other lives, the future.

Oslo, Norway 오슬로, 노르웨이OMNISCIENT  전지(全知)Rachel Wolfe  레이첼 볼프

The wisdom of water is the emergence of the emotional body in social practice. Water,…

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lelapin.substack.com/subscribe

Mindfulness as a practice has grown into a bit of an objective. In mindfulnesses’ thingliness, the trend has over time revealed virtues at some particular costs. To be mindful feels comforting and acceptable, assuring the practicant they are doing ok in life. As a sort of self-soothing for people with a conscience. People with a conscience are routinely regarded as neurotic by those who seem to truly not care at all about anyone else. And such in these simultaneous orientations, neither one of them is true or false but are. So this cookie presents a recipe of the continual discomfort in paradox and welcoming of complexity, without the gross reduction of human activity to motorised parts. Perhaps the differences end up being more tasty than singular ingredients or maybe the singular ingredient has more complexity- these kinds of evaluations often come down to taste; and while we have recently had our senses tested, the ability to deeply sensitise maybe our distinguishing characteristic in our ages’ romanticism: the race towards roboticised life of transhumanism.

To want to know whether or not we are doing a good job at being human has significance. For one the crushing weight of being a failure seems better than revealing the truth of our vulnerabilities, and for another alleviates us from the mental traffic jam of accepting life as is it fully is. The reach to peace, even that of my own, can be a form of personal tyranny. As yoga teachers once said; it is easy to be peaceful in contexts of peace, it is more practice to be peaceful in contexts of unrest. And on the converse, there are contexts of peace which enable some of the most violence among complicit bodies encouraged not to think. Prone to snapping when hungry, angry, lonely, or tired, the human animality was made as a counter point in sophistication which seemed to imagine a fully self-restrained body at its own free will.

Within a particular view, mindlessness must to be the reason for all the problems in the world; yet I often witness people tossing rubbish who know full well they are placing garbage outside of its socially acceptable place for being dealt with. If everyone was more mindful things would be different. Right? And if that notion were correct, then what are the mindfully rebellious up to? I personally find it is not mindfulness alone but the ability to communicate and sustain conflict without spiritual (psychological) annihilation that builds healthier scenarios and relationships.

Mindfulness in this way can be used as a tool to subdue, and does not always account for key areas of relational importance: nuance and difference. Cultural differences, personal values, social policies are not neatly dealt with in a single world order-though there are staggering number of beliefs floating around about this. A kind of unitarianism, in its utility creates a kind of homogenisation. It’s not much of a stretch to see how the realm of mind reflects losses in biodiversity. And that realm of mind could be feared because on some level, a human being knows, they are not a 2dimensional being, not a singularity in an unchanging essence but a being full of biological processes that change and evolve through several stages of life. And in each stage of life are cultural and real phenomena forming fundamental boundaries of acceptable and punishable behavior. In this and several other pursuits, questions unlock the dogmatic and get the ball rolling.

What associations do you have with the term: mindfulness? Where did those associations come from? Did you come up with them up yourself? Entirely? If you follow the ways the thoughts were put there, will your brain be stretched apart like putty? Will you feel like the world is unraveling, will you feel stressed and uneasy? Saddled with doubt? What’s wrong with those kind of feelings? And why is it psychotherapy is the first place you might start to think about where this kind of thinking “belongs.” Calling something crazy or a conspiracy theory is often a fast way to write-off, wrong ways of being mindful to accept the so called right ways of being mindful. But if your mind is your freedom to choices, your pathway to creating the life you want, with the responsibility of the creating of life with you at the driver seat, would it really be so dangerous to consider the associations to mindfulness were not put there by some kind of accident, but rather through a history of considered actions.

The basis of thinking itself can be considered formed out of social policy, or the invisible but real social boundaries of acceptable and unacceptable thinking. In this day, we can look towards the boundary as a line, acceptable or unacceptable, and mindfulness as associated with positive or negative thinking. These kinds of constructed ways of thinking create an axis of acceptable or unacceptable mindfulness, or in practice, acceptable or unacceptable thoughts, otherwise known as thought policing.

This makes mindfulness practices ripe training grounds for rhetoric and social policy training if one has not be forewarned. I found cautionary words often absent as what could be so harmful when people appear so peaceful? This effectively subverts well intentions of mindfulness as a means to control thought and subdue libidnal urges.

Controlling thoughts, based on the premises established in social psychology, or the tendency the human will have towards conformity as a basis for survival. Survival within the social group, and survival as a living entity. The two are deeply intertwined in Psyche so that it feels like the soul, or who and what we are.

In this way, invite yourself to not be mindful, but instead to think for yourself and in whatever proper proportion means for you. Meditation can be used as a tool without a goal, to openly be critical and considerate, to be and exist with yourself, and wonder about thoughts themselves as much as you’re aware or unaware who or where those thoughts came from.

You are whether or not you think. As far as any one can know, you exist.

The experience of life comes not alone from being but forms and reforms based on relationships with concepts otherwise known as choices. And choices constitute the realm of divinity. Therefore making the right choices are often not discernible by appearance, as appearances do not tell the whole story. A path of inquiry into thoughts begins to unravel for the sake of observation and study. And in this study we find there is no self in the ways often assumed, but rather aspects of physiology and psychology performing themselves through behaviours, both conscious and unconscious. A life of choosing, is not free from thinking. Non-thinking shifts energy from forms of words to dreamforms, embracing presence which remain elements of consciousness. It requires a diligent practice. A mindful life then offers itself as a life full of thoughts, full of consideration, of giving attention and mind toward toward yourself and others. Neither of these cancel each other out but exist in their entirety on spectrums of life whether or not they are related to thoughts at all. If I have not lost you on this culinary endeavor of philosophical chemistry, let’s consider:

Does a plant or color think itself that shape or color? Or is the plant or color the way that it is? And does your positive or negative view of the plant or color change how the color is, or does it rather change how you would regard having the plant or color in your proximity. And if you tried to banish the negative category of form or color from your mind, would it obliderate its existence? or would you be lying to yourself about its existence? And instead of forcing yourself to like a colour or not, you accept the simultaneity of the isness and your preferences. Both exist without the need to annihilate the other. The resilience to exposures directly impacts both the quality and longevity of your experience here in a realm that indeed contains every multitude…

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lelapin.substack.com/subscribe