For the Love of Rest.

Reading the 1951 publication, the Sabbath from the beautiful brain of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel right now, and loving every word, letting them linger, as the ideas he sheds light on ought to.

It's a simple story told in a simple way, but it reminds me of the stuff of heart and guts and the ways in which I avoid said organs and truths on a fairly constant basis, to be honest. It discusses the importance of a day of rest, to take time to be. Regardless of your spiritual/religious background or inclination, or lack thereof, I feel like the need for rest and for consideration is something we often universally choose not to engage with, while crying out for it all the more in places deep within ourselves.

I am sure I will be posting more about it, but here's a bit for now:

They who want to enter the holiness of the day must first lay down the profanity of clattering commerce, of being yoked to toil. They must go away from the screech of dissonant days, from the nervousness and fury of acquisitiveness and the betrayal in embezzling their own life. They must say farwell to manual work and learn to understand that the world has already been created and will survive without the help of humans. Six days a week we wrestle with the world, wringing profit from the earth; on the Sabbath we especially care for the seed of eternity planted in the soul. The world has our hands, but our soul belongs to Someone Else. Six days a week we seek to dominate the world, on the seventh day we try to dominate the self.

90-day sensual challenge

My friend Maia, a documentary filmmaker, has been running a project for the past 90 days that she's coined a love challenge. It's been inspiring to listen to what she has to say about it, and the ways in which people are coming together to challenge each other about what love is and how to engage with it in our daily lives.

Of late, I have been feeling completely overwhelmed and over-saturated by the intensity of images and applications being thrown at me from all sides. Today while writing an email to someone a chat-window popped up without any prompting from myself with a conversation from the person I was trying to write a message to appearing out of midair. We are more and more likely to be connected to our phones and wires and knobs and such directly, chip-to-brain and hand-to-machine. I did grow up reading science fiction, so a part of me might be a little more worried about this than parts of you, but I do feel that my concerns about the collective lack of attention span, and the shortening of said fuse by the (seemingly) day are founded, and important to pay attention to.

One way in which this is noticeable in my own life is my ability to go throughout my everyday tasks without being fully aware of my environment. When I am on the computer, I hardly ever notice the sounds of the wind, or what my cats are actually doing. Now I don't necessarily think that the humans I've grown up around have been encouraged culturally to develop those aspects of their bodies, the ones that respond to their immediate surroundings, but I do think we all have a responsibility to do so regardless, even if it means by ways of a rather painful un-learning of the speeds in which we have become accustomed to intaking certain information and ignoring most else.

What I am talking about here, on a fundamental level, is a certain cultural lack of sensuality in our daily experiences, and I don't just mean of the hubba-hubba sort. The rainstorm that poured down on me as I biked home reminded me of this, as I took the time to stand out under its heave and tow for a few minutes before going inside. The power of the plane flying directly overhead reminds me of this if I think about what its sounds represent, and the intensity of the imagery of its trajectory, a straight line above my roof quickly-disappearing-into-other-lands-and-times. The smell of dark, damp soil at night, the way your hand feels against face.

This being said, I feel like in order to begin to reinforce some of the desires I have to unlearn the speed at which I wizz past so much and the obliviousness I often have to the things I have time to notice, I am going to engage my whole being in a 90-day sensual challenge. To remind myself of what it means to really *feel* out my environment, and to ask my body to be less lazy about the gifts of the senses I have been given.

In honour of the painting I chose here, by Georges de la Tour, a dude who was very, very much into subdued and mysterious lighting, the challenge will start tomorrow at sundown. I am going to only use candlelight for the next 3 days once the sun decides to go elsewhere, and act like there's a power failure in the house. I will explain more as to why later, as right now I need to experience the sensual activity of getting into bed and going into the land of nog-nog. Goodnight one and all.

Comittment to messier living

I went camping this weekend, only for a day and during a rainstorm no less. The thunder rolled around the tent, as if the world was an egg it was trying to crack open in its entirety. I believe it almost did.

And I do love the smell of fire and dirt on the hand and the sense you get of being *clean* even if you haven't washed in...some time, but I do want to do that further from all of you and away from these plastic things, I must say. No offense, I promise. Well, perhaps to some, a few here and there, but if so it is by accident or by mistake or on purpose and I take it back, it was foolish of me, and I didn't truly want to.

There's just so much of the camping experience now, at least in the ways I've seen it and been close to it, that is about highlighting the *experience* part of it. CLIMB this with these 200 accessories, BIKE this with these 300 bits of clips and batteries and and CANOE but don't go without these fundamentals. Not that I mind that folks are going outside and moving around, I'm doing it with them, but it all seems a bit staged, somehow - we're having a play about camping and these are the funny props we got from here and here and here.

When everything is so sanctioned (down to the exact amount of logs in the bag of firewood you can buy at the hut that also has nanimo bars and cans of bug spray) the communion with things beyond sanction becomes a bit blurrier or the reception, fuzzier.

While I am truly not trying to be ultra-puritanical and perhaps I am simplifying the deeply rooted ways in which the un-sanctioned things rumble their rumbles to us, I do feel that there's something to be said about looking for a way to commune that has a more direct vibrancy at its heart. Toss aside the restrictions, live with a bit more mess, go with a little less.

Not that I am very good at doing that, a stick drops in the woods behind me and I am convinced that a bear that has been stalking me since birth has finally caught up with me and we must fight, immediately, and I must die soon after.

But I feel that lately, since quitting my job outright, I have been pondering about my inherent values again. And I've begun to realize that I want to attempt to love that fucking bear regardless of what it might do to me, and live out my life with a little more mess, and a little less. An artist friend recently gave me a coin she had, well, coined, that is the shape and weight of a quarter. On one side it exclaims, "security" on another, "courage". I feel like the tension in that dichotomy is one I relate to deeply these days.

Sp put your oars down! Kayak with your hands! Wrestle your morning oatmeal out of the hedgehogs of the world! Go off that path and when you get lost, as Mitch Hedberg says, build a house. Seriously improve your predicaments in life and don't be scared to have them in the first place.