#winter migration

For more incentive, here's a photo from the Pacific Flyway area this week.

Hello!

For the next week I’m opening my inbox to shipping prompts. If an idea really strikes out to me, I’ll turn it into a fic. No NSFW or pure angst, please.

Available ships:

White Rose

Bumbleby

Monochrome

Winter Migration

Rosebird (comedies will get my attention over anything else)

Pyrrhuby

Crosshares

Bubbline (Adventure Time)

Dislestia (My Little Pony)

I’m also taking prompts for stories with two pairings.

Available combos:

Flown North/Elderbird (comedy only)

White Rose/Bumbleby

White Rose/Winter Migration

Monochrome/Crosshares

Bubbline/Dislestia, because a crossover between these worlds would be hilarious

When nervous system is built from borrowed commands and rebellions against those commands, the idea of “what am I” looks impossible. The trick is that both sides of that opposition obedience and rebellion are the same mechanism. They are externally determined vectors that simply point in opposite directions. Neither contains anything like “you.”

So the question “where do we get what is actually me?” looks unanswerable if you search inside the same machinery. You won’t find a third voice inside the tangle of parental maxims, social prohibitions, and younger-I's counter-scripts. You find only conditioning pushing and conditioning pushing back.

The structural pivot is this, “What is actually yours” is not a hidden essence. It is the set of behaviors that follow from adequate causes, not from alien commands. Adequate cause, in Spinoza’s strict sense, means the behavior that is produced by the organism’s own internal structure, not by another agent’s rule or by reflexive opposition to that rule.

Now, where does that come from? From tracking constraints, not from feelings or narratives. Here’s the core architecture.

Foreign rule “Do X because authority A said so.”

Reactive rule “Do the opposite of X because authority A said so.”

Adequate functioning “Act according to the constraints built into your specific body, mind, environment, capacities, and limits.” Nothing to obey. Nothing to rebel against. Just behavior shaped by what is actually present, not by inherited scripts. Adequate functioning is basically the organism updating its policy to reality-in-front-of-it, not to ghosts.

That sounds philosophical, so let’s nail it mechanically. Foreign rules (obedience or rebellion) are culturally injected conditional statements like “If I don’t please, I’ll be punished.” “If I don’t resist, I’ll be controlled.” “If I’m not useful, I’m worthless.” “If I surrender, I’ll disappear.”

Adequate functioning is the nervous system updating to actual data: How much energy do I have? What is the real risk here? What are my real capacities today? What action leads to stability and coherence? What feedback does the world give me? No stories. Just constraints. This is why the “third way” is not mystical.It’s brutally simple and extremely rare

Stop orienting to symbolic authority internal or external and let behavior follow necessity. When you feel “this system is all foreign,” that’s accurate, your organism contains decades of conditioning that wasn’t chosen. But the exit is not to find the pure “Me-essence.” You won’t. It doesn’t exist. The exit is to stop consulting both the tyrant and the rebel. Stop using either of them as decision-tools. You replace both with a third thing, tracking facts, constraints, and consequences in real time. That is the only domain where adequate causation shows up.

This is where liberation sits, not in finding a true self, not in choosing differently, but in ceasing to run scripts whose origin is not in the current situation. Spinoza would phrase it like a blade. Freedom is the recognition that you were never choosing and the shift into action governed by causes that are no longer imaginary.