No one can help you in this world. Sure someone can pull you from the lake if you can’t swim or out of a burning car for that matter. But I continue to notice — I can’t help but notice, that in this world with all these people — we are very much profoundly alone.

Someone may want to save us in an emergency, but they have no idea what to do with us once this happens.

What are you saving me for?

In the meantime, it is fear that will be a stand-in.

Even if they are family.

You can’t leave.

I don’t know why, but you can’t go.

The loneliness in an unbalanced populated world is something that I am only recently aware of. For many years it was just a degradation without an origin; a emerging idea that something was wrong, but that something could easily be covered over by life’s drives.

But if you steady yourself, if you find a way to slow yourself down just enough; maybe you could get a glimpse of what’s buried underneath it all.

Maybe you’ve found a relationship that has postponed your pining, and you stumble one day with an empty mind into the stark loneliness of things. Maybe it is an event that nothing outside you can soothe.

I have no answers when you are at this place. But it is the reality that sits underneath the makeup of this life full of chasing and speeding and driving and numbness we can feel at times.

The relationship or experience that connects you to it is important. Again, I don’t have any answers. I only have the feeling that whatever answers are here in this place somewhere.

There is no more magic

It has been a rough year.

I want to say that it’s the economy or the government or our culture or anything outside of myself. But there is too much pain and fear in that thinking. It is not a projection that I can warm in front of the fire with.

I wanted to do something different.

I wanted to look at all of these less than agreeable set of circumstances and treat them as stage for mental awareness. I had to become more aware of my mind. And it starts with no more old ways of dealing with the presented experiences; fixing them with mudded exacerbation and projection on those around me.

This year I was forced to do something different.

I was tired, afraid and full of fear.

I wanted to do something different.

And because for the first time nothing I did was showing results.

I started thinking that there had to be a better way.

I finally saw this series of problems as something that would require my full attention not something that was based on past learning or future fear but instead something where I wasn’t the sponsor. My hands wasn’t on any of it.

And because of that; because I was so exhausted and at my wits in and everything coming up the opposite of Milhouse I fired myself for something else.

My magic doesn’t work anymore. I realize it is a relief.

What I notice the most is that the fear subsided.

My year is determined by who was in charge of it.