Music and Feels

Yassin told me to go on more walks without music, listen to the sounds of nature around me, clear up my mind and clean up the creaks of my Heart. Too much of anything can be a drag, especially music. When I listen to a song I feel it, I empathize with the sentiments or lyrics of the music, I supplement it with my imagination. That can be troublesome sometimes because how I feel is usually tangled up with how I think; thoughts and feelings are both formed from the same substance, just moving at different octaves. When I listen to a song about love, and feel the music, my mind fills itself reflectively with the closest thing to love it knows. If the closest thing is someone I really need to let go of, the association between the feeling of love and the thought of that person, my filtered perception of them too, will be all the more tangled with one another. All because of my desire to feel with the music rather than my honest wish to feel more loving with that person. Love only grows in the light, the present you and your partner share in real life. Not in our imagination. Living out our love for someone in our imaginations, especially as a means of escape from the daunting vulnerability of living our love in real life sucks. Running laps in our minds about a crush will have us too exhausted to actually hang out and be intimate with them.

Being Real and some wandering notes

Being Real is the craziest thing. You can be sad, happy, angry, an asshole, a kind person, a funny, rude, stupid child if you wanted! You can be straight up be whatever you choose to authentically and intentionally be, and it's already the coolest thing. Standing by your wonderful mess. Honesty with one's self about who we are and embracing that wholly, unapologetically and better yet effortlessly!! People are freakin awesome, and I have so much respect and awe for those who honestly embody themselves. Just real, for no one but themselves, from no where else than their hearts, in no other time than the present. Shit's dope! The moment we start trying to be one thing or another, instead of just becoming, we stop behaving like normal people; we perform or posture or sell our constructed image of ourselves in exchange for love.

If I give myself love at Home, I don't have to look for it in places I can't find it. If I give my friends Love at Home, they don't have to look for it anywhere but my actions.

You know what else is really cool? When someone is so comfortable in their own skin that they’re comfortable in yours too. They wear their scars proudly, their imperfections and wildly unique, unhesitating and unapologetically flowing mess of a self they so lovingly own, THAT’s cool. When you’re so aware and loving of everything that makes you You, and you still brave its unmitigated expression. Not to prove something, or win some external source of approval or validation, no, fuck that noise, but because it's a necessary outcry against the world of the dead and the blindly living. When someone embraces the totality of their lived experience without a care for either the world’s rejections or embrace of who you are. If you fuck with me, if you don’t, it doesn't matter, it’s not part of my concern when the only person who I care about fucking with me, is Me, and the Lord. When someone is gently and patiently caring for themself, so open and embracive of their brilliant imperfections that they love so dearly, the imperfections that demark us from the rest, the cuts that no one could ever truly feel with you, no one could understand why you are the way that you are, the violence it took to be this gentle, no one other than our loved ones. When you’re so comfortable with every aspect of who you are, that you signal to those around you that maybe their scars, their unique expressions of being, are worthy of the same care and fresh breath of air. If suffering does anything for us, it’s softening our hearts to the compassion we hold for others, for their struggles, and our own. If isolation teaches us anything its that we never suffer alone. If our humble sobriety to the incomparibility of suffering offers anything, its that if we’re to deem our human experience as worthy of liberation through struggle, and freedom through faith, we must be willing to grant that same humanity to every other human being that shares in nature. We all suffer, we all live on or die trying, everyone experiences their predicament uniquely and one person’s struggles can rarely be compared to another’s unless it's done by an empathetic heart, in solidarity. We are owed nothing for our suffering other than the right and responsibility to truely live. If I am worthy of this liberation, unless I misname my human nature or that of other humans, then so is every other human being who honors me with their story, their unencumbered and total expression of their unique self.

When I was younger we still celebrated Christmas before Allah sent a memo to all the local mosques about Santa being a Kafir. I freakin loved Christmas, the jingles, the hot chocolate, decorating the tree, making snickerdoodle cookies, those online Christmas games where you get to haul ass as an elf or a reindeer(!!!). My favorite part, weirdly enough, was untangling the Christmas lights. I was the Jimi Hendrix of Christmas lights, I'd untangle them for our own tree, my neighbor Orfali's tree, any tangled mess I could get my hands on, I was there. It brought me comfort pulling the lines apart, every untangled knot felt like one step closer to harmony. The messier the better hahahaha. I enjoyed finding order in storms of wire and bulbs, drawing paths out of labyrinths on the back of cereal boxes, finding clarity in the pictures of scattered puzzles. I think that's when I developed this sort of hobby of mine. I like picking up on the central thread in something's rhythm. People, books, conversations, STORIES, they all have their own rhythms and melodies. At the centre of each of them there's an essential thread, a line of harmony that we all return to, a homecoming in people, a central message a book always returns to, constellations stringing different views in a conversation, an intimate touch of individuality in every shared story. I'm not always good at parsing out the background noise, but when I see with my Heart and feel with my Mind, I tend to find what I'm looking for, and it tends to find me.

Some reflections on Freedom

Kant distinguishes between appearances and experience, in that to truly experience something both your mind/understanding and your heart/sensuous presence have to be engaged. The unity of experience happens when we surrender not only to the naturalistic present, the here and now, the spontaneity of an experience that presents itself a new at every beat, but also when we’re neither caught up in our minds nor drowning in our hearts, but rather, floating in a seat distinct from both. “I’ is capable of observing its thoughts without succumbing or identifying itself with them, just as it can observe the passage of emotions without being consumed by its affect.“I” am no more my intrusive thoughts than I am my joy or anger, “I” is the being observing them.

Now lots of things can clog up our minds and block the creaks of our heart, effectively interrupting the unity of our experience by either wholly intellectualizing and mechanizing it, or by succumbing to an indistinguishable and unintelligible blurr of affect. The later is a peculiar state because in some states of consciousness this affective unity can be nourishing, and in others it can just be confusing. When the whole world melts into color and not only do ‘I’ become indistinguishable from the world out there, but objects in the world would be composed of the same towering blend of affective paint. Whether this ‘sense-certainty’ contributes to a sense of freedom or confusion is what Hegel would call the difference between sense-certainty at the initially stage of consciousness, and sense certainty at a higher octave after consciousness gained the experience of self-conciousnesss and understanding. To experience the world freely, in the most essential meaning of the world, both our minds and hearts have to be free, from arrogance and indoctrination, from attachment and desires. To experience the world freely, we must first clean the creaks of our spirit, remove the pollutants that obstruct the inflow of experience into our hearts and minds, and learn enough about who/what/when/why/where/how we most essentially and naturally are so that we may allow our being to flow truly, authentically and unapologetically into a world in which our beings' role is made clear to us. Our beings are composed of many parts, hearts, minds, souls, spirits and bodies, harmony between these instruments in an orchestra requires they all work together toward the same ends, or purpose. No end unites our being like the Gates of Life and Death.

The irreducible ‘I’, the observer of our inner and outer worlds, the watcher of their exchanges and the currents that flow from our being outwards or the world out there, inwards. It's a humbling thing, to know that who we most immediately and honestly are can neither proclaim tyranny nor dominion over our inner worlds and the potential that flows from ourselves, nor over the world that is much older and bigger than us. ‘I’ is just a floating simple, an aberration of space and time, an intrusion of the infinite into the finite, and the finite in the infinite. The point of convergence between future and past.

Freedom doesn’t necessarily mean a constant experience of joy and peace, in fact, the beginning of one’s freedom involves coming to terms with our own and collective suffering. You can be free and miserable about it, but its often more constructive to use that freedom to choose liberation and peace instead of the cycles of momentary pleasure and pain we bond ourselves to.

Some people are tourists in their hearts. The archetype of the Newtonian, calculative scientists that must make a pilgrimage every time they'd like to feel in the empty halls of their hearts. Contrastingly, some people are tourists in their minds. The archetype of the remorslessly feeling artist, too caught up in the indistinguishable and unreflected currents of their pre-reflective minds. These artists are tourists of the mind that treat reason as irredeemably egoistic, divisive, and unempathetic. Often times they’ll find either too little constraints in their guided dives into their imaginatinos, or too much control over the outcome and deliverable products of their imagination. It can be difficult to float above the currents of our affective imaginations without a mind to parse out its messages or patterns, to make out the drunken lulls of the hearts and make them intelligible, communicable. Similarly, it can be confusing to dive into our conceptual imagination without a heart to guide us with its love and personal intuitions. The ideal is to have a well lived heart and fulfilling life of the mind. The constraints of reason offer our limitless imaginations a great friend.

Allow your heart and mind to converse. Sometimes the mind has to bring the heart in check, other times the heart has to remind the mind not to intellectualize an experience that demands to be felt.