briefly,

i was laid off on monday.

since i have funds to live for some time, this doesn't concern me. and i get unemployment. and i wasn't particularly happy at that job anyway.

but i would like to go about considering my future in an organized fashion.

if anybody has good questions i should consider, or knows of good resources (books, maybe?) that might help me organize my thoughts, this would be helpful.

how to break down questions like, what do i want to do with my life? now that i've spent ten years learning and learning about myself. and what exactly have i been learning, anyhow?

fortunately i can afford to be thoughtful rather than reactive in responding to this, ehm, change of plans.

a funny thing about my church experience is a sense that it is not okay to have and ask hard questions.

that's one i can do without...

On Looking, Intrigue, and Living with Art

When I get work back from a firing, I need time to get to know it, to learn it... so often it's not the physical pieces that I need, so much as an understanding of them.

I like to live with artwork; mine and others'. Incorporating it into my life helps me to be attentive to little things, to learn and appreciate details. They teach. I enjoy vessels; some need to be filled and used, others stand well alone. Finding the passenger that is right for the vessel is an enjoyable exercise. Sometimes it's immediately evident, other pieces stand, empty, for a long time before their proper use is realized. In some ways this is a spiritual exercise: not that a piece couldn't be used for anything, but that sometimes there's a rightness in a particular use.

What makes me need to take a piece home - here I think more of others' work - is often not that it is lovely so much as that I am intrigued by it - perhaps intrigued by looking at it, perhaps intrigued by holding it, by the thought of using it, by something else, that is best described as a reaction... in all these, there's something that fascinates me, whether how I experience the piece or how I experience myself experiencing the piece.

Though sometimes it's something far simpler than that; it's the anticipation of enjoying using something, or it's an object that is simply so lovely to behold that I want to keep enjoying it. Those ones, those are just happiness. Bliss. Others, though not lovely in the same way, have something about them, a sturdy plate-ness, for example, or some other singularity of being, after a more ordinary fashion, that easily joins everyday life.

I've been looking at things long enough that I tend to know that reaction, the one that says, you won't be sorry. It's known in an instant. The logic may trail, sometimes by months.

Whatever that initial reaction is, tends to stay. It clarifies over time, I come to understand it better - even a less-favorable reaction, wanting to like something but having reservations, for example - but it doesn't really change.

"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, design a building, write a sonnet, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, solve equations, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects." Robert Heinlein

Told as a Story

So I walk away from this bewildered that I am not dead, and bummed that while I hung onto the car for awhile that I didn't get it back under control. Thankful, of course, to be alive, but bewildered, too. It has the chance to become one of those "don't f*** up your second chance" incidents, but probably won't, for which I am quite sorry. I hope, too, that you'll forgive me for admittedly drinking to excess (and having a couple of cigarettes) on Wednesday, once I'd gotten the essentials out of the way - followup on the crash and the last couple of Christmas presents bought - to block out the looping that had started on the "I should be dead" thing, because really, that wasn't going to be good.
-Tales of Christmas

Truth

Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God's eyes. If only they could see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time, there would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed... I suppose the big problem would be that we would fall down and worship each other.
- Thomas Merton

Awareness

Awareness is our true self; it's what we are. So we don't have to try to develop awareness; we simply need to notice how we block awareness with our thoughts, our fantasies, our opinions, and our judgments. We're either in awareness, which is our natural state, or we're doing something else.
- Joko Beck