#mark utter

to let something go you must first feel it recognized as your own i’ll never forget the relief and meaning and gutteral satisfaction i felt the first time i heard Mark Utter speak about this feeling (the link connects to an interview with Mark on Erica Heilman’s amazing podcast Rumble Strip; very recommended) on inhale i truly feel the expansive joy of this insight inflating the raft of my body, the one that floats me, surviving, through this world; yet ownership is definitely, always, overrated (anti-capitalist to my core). on exhale, i recognize how untrue it also is. like thoughts and feelings, identity and everything, it can all float through and past and into and beyond my consciousness without anyone needing get attached to it, not me nor anyone else. there is a sense of... essence; we can call it *my* essence to satisfy words but it is more and less than mine; it is an essence beyond “self” i did find it important to first claim my visibility before i was willing to accept and sometimes revel in the ways i am both visible and invisible; i do love both. probably need both to survive over the long run.   like most creatures. (even rattlesnakes who have no natural predators do encounter accidental death... and the boa who ate the porcupine and then fell of a cliff... and...so on and so on...)

i do believe this regarding identity and pain (link)  - be it physical, social, institutional, cultural, personal, collective, or as is always the case some critical combo thereof and more to quote: “as long as you make an identity for yourself out of your pain, you cannot become free of that pain this is the ego (which is attached to the pain-identity in order to exist) sabotaging any real healing that has the potential to separate identity from pain” i do not really  need pain, or identity, to exist well and within the realms of both pleasure and meaning (more on the relationship between these below) pain, identity and all suffering require energy that only the individual who experiences them has the capacity to commit to them the limits of physics exist and impact us all differently and the same but... limits exist. ubiquitously. limits can only be translated into pain, identity, and/or suffering by the expense of human energy you always have a choice about where you expend your energy within whatever limits you face; Jarvis Jay Masters teaches me a great deal about this... (here(1) AND here(2)) from a very oppressive situation, one that undeniably ranks high on the list; revisiting his stories is always good study when i feel sorry for myself  feeling sorry for myself is occasionally inevitable and can be useful if not indulged; like...