A Secant Query

Between Meditation and Mediation

If you find my writing inaccessible, take care(,) it's not just you.

Between Meditation and Mediation

You wake to find you are not bare metal, you can't get the water of your life out of the stone of IP law, and you will not be reinstalling the gig app.

How are you about to organize your day? Cloudflare was not your intermediary when you were born. You are not halfway through life. What world do you lead, in the broadest terms?

Why don't you know? Break it down, what is actually happening, what is lived reality? Think small, the cat. Feed the cat. It is your last day alive, what happened?

You are Amelie - you live in a city of Amelies? You host fully decentralized innercity events, invite one another, and share a life? "Who is making cookies," "Who is learning to maintain our neighborhood meshnet?" "Who is moving out?" Your daily agendas practically articulate themselves, you are flooded with demostrations and public retraining and group meals?

I walk up to you (I'm a caffinated squirrel) and start barking. I am your neighbor, the nearest monopole connection your phone has just got a speaker. It translates the barks, something like:

Why do rivers have bases? Do I have a base? Is star juice my base? Or, the two processes folding over each other unfolding into star juice is that more my "base"?

Where I am the bone creasing the page of conversation, and reality is that material which is shorn away as graphine from pencil lead, is the bone my base?

My flesh pours from the bone of my person, which channels the marrow of life and is destroyed by any number of hemeostasis cascades (that's probably not the word) spiraling out of balance?

Doesn't water just "find" its level, what's with the secret base stuff? Why don't rivers just be morning mist? That's just any base? Confused.

Notice how you react to this. What "are" you supposed to do with this? What would you like to do with this? What has "what you've always done" gotten you (in terms of a world)?

...Was it "listening"? Or were you pumping narrative through a caffinated squirrel?

Look again:

The act of drawing a setting element along a narrative to form a crease feels remarkably similar to pulling on a thread orginating from my person. Words (voice, pressure, cycles) create the ripples (resonance, valleys, attractions) around my reference points (values, actions, emotions) perspective may resolve. That's so tidy! Lovely placing that in reach.

What I feel my "bone" is this moment comes more readily to mind: hold in your head a stick - you have it in your hand. There are three rings that were around the stick when you picked it up, and as you listened to the stick's vibrations, you learned the pattern the rings are looking for the stay in cycle with one another.

Of course, the rings are made of different material (the ring of values are one material, actions and emotions are others), react differently to various conditions, requiring you to apply tighter and looser oscillations to the stick, but essentially the model is fine with just you wiggling the stick up and down by actuating musculature over the elbow curling and relaxing.

Almost like you are remembering the grasp in your hand is actually a carefully organized process through the entire person, down to the legs and into the earth as cavities of listening the rings on the stick may "fill" (by the displacement of your body) as a process maintaining its perpetualtion. That might be the "single image."

I'm curious. What has this invited you to feel? Is your elbow the base of the river of grasping here?

What you are seeing is someone wholly aligned, present, not the modern "correct" - punk. "There's nothing to save," lyrics flit by on a bicycle beside you. How mysterious an old woman do you need on that bike to be before you get it?

Listen, reflect back. You already do this. Be a mirror for the lived world, not executive order. Humanity is still earthling. We still want friends and to be liked, just like Earth. Society will eyedropper likes and friends to us through to thermal equilibrium.

Be real, is society still what serves reality? Or is it time for closing night? Final curtain? Strike set? Rejoin what lives? Practically, these questions might be:

What metric are you leaning on? Why are the metric you have inadequate to deal with the "caffeinated squirrel" (your manager, your money). Imagine your money had a conversation with you before each transaction - a new captcha. Maybe it goes like this:

"Are you sure? (y/n) Do this captcha (y/n) Which card (a/b) Which address (2019, 2020a, 2020b, 2021a, 2021b, 2023a, 2023b, 2023c, 2024a, 2024b, 2025) What happened to your phone number? (?/!) Are you about to buy to-your-door cookies? (y/n) Don't you have all the ingredients (y/y) And don't you want to support that cause you were browsing today (y/?) And you can't make cookies and send the cookie money to the cause, maybe giving leftover cookies to neighbors on a tray in a basket in front of your apartment complex (o/h) And, in this context, is talking to you having an effect? (y/n) Ok, just checking (.../...) [Purchased]"

Container neighbors personal struggles to the related snippet in nature documentaries, see what happens; we live the metaphors we love, reality is more a matter of taste than required reading, by day's end. Check back in with the caffeinated squirrel (that I am):

As I hold the stick of our conversation in my hand, I close my eyes. I bring loss to the hand-eye coordination and let it decompose into resonant sensation. The elbow - our narrative - collapses from the weight of the stick almost immediately. There is this one account I tell of needing to cross this river, but the foot bridgewashed away in a flood the season prior. I was able to find another planed timber in the river, about 8m long, and pivot it over a rock in the river to move it into position.

Allowing the river bed to be my elbow, allowed me to lift something that is otherwise way too long and heavy, and position it over a rock in the middle of the river. Once there I could repeat the process from the middle of the river to reach the far end and me and the two people I was with were able to get across a river with a dangerously large flow and rocks big enough to stand on.

This account sticks with me as one of the moments when my body felt closest to how the reality in which I live conducts its affairs. It finds resonance with larger and smaller structures, and meets that resonance where they are at, the way you might pivot from problem-solver to emotional-listener to quiet-reflector - say those are you "three rings" all independantly spinning around the same stick, sliding up and down the length, and generally making a go of things and the rings bump into one another and the microadjustements you perform give you those moments that are entirely yours as we tend to infinity.

You once asked me to map out my watershed - to write down a truth, it's presence, and effect on my person. Perhaps the truth is I'm just four letters attempting to hold the universe a moment, and in that way recognize what it must be like to be as held as I feel this moment by what it's meant to me to have it, to pause, to bring something I thought had shattered, piece by fragile piece back together from finding breath, pausing, and taking notice of all the elbows, all the narratives in my life holding this stick of me.

I like being held. It figures.

Being what figures is a kindness.

Ask yourself: