Behold an illusory torso.

Many of our narratives about death ("it happened for a reason", "there's a life after this one", "they deserved it", etc.) reflect fundamental ideas about existence, meaning, and what life is.

Many, many things act as mirrors when they are interpreted, but what makes death unique is how existential it is, and how closely tied so many of our deepest anxieties are to literal and symbolic kinds of death.

Here is an interpretation of death: "We were all born kinda sorta with an urge to keep existing somehow, to nudge the atoms around us, but that existence only stretches so far before it begins to fragment into more and more pieces of physical and abstract data."

In many cases, feeling fear or discomfort about something is an opportunity for introspection.

It's nice to think about this both in terms of curiosity about the stimulus causing the fear and curiosity about yourself and your emotions.

Curiosity can function as its own kind of mindfulness and emotional regulation aid.

The new, unknown or disturbing may be shocking and confusing, and you might have some kind of initial reaction, but if you sit with yourself and the stimulus you might realize you're more emotionally flexible when you let those emotions pass through you rather than holding onto them as a means of structuring your own identity.

Sometimes what you need is to observe, attune, and be receptive to the world's nuances rather than reacting or getting tangled up in fear.

I watched a documentary on Kusama sometime within the past year and it really hit me how closely related these big, textural spaces of meditative patterns are to her installation work with mirrors/infinity/physical spaces, where limited two dimensional spaces just were not enough to fully articulate the vastness of the amorphous, visceral concept they were seeking.

Looking at this, part of me takes in the immediacy of it as a whole visual experience, feeling it as a whole thing but also slipping into the spaces between the shapes, my gaze pressing against them like fingers trying to untangle a knot, tracing the maddening connections. There's repetition, but it's not regular or geometric. There's rhythm, but it's not predictable in a straightforward way like it might be with, for example, Kusama's polka-dot-focused pieces.

I want to touch this place. Is it a springy, scratchy sponginess, or is it a liquid flow that yields, follows, chases, circludes? Is it warm or hot, or would its true temperature be hard to describe, like those icy-hot pain reliever patches? Would it be a net that catches me, or like curtains that greet me and rise to reveal the beyond? Would I be relaxed or overwhelmed inside it?

The rats have clumping behavior, except for a single maverick.

Observe how multiple indecisive rats want to be friends with the maverick and indecisively waver between the maverick and the collective before ultimately choosing the collective. A sad but mundane and very common decision that individuals within social structures may make.

Alternatively, this could be interpreted as multiple friends attempting to encourage the maverick, who is a maverick due to a PTSD-related freeze response, to return to the safety of the group. They are persistent, but not aggressive. They are kind in their protective check-ins with the maverick.

The scavenger has no idea what is going on with the intricacies of the rat social structure. He is simply spooked, overwhelmed, even.

Mind gardening, mind permaculture

The mind equivalent of reintroducing mind wolves (important anti-people-pleasing instincts, will, confidence, self-assurance) to the thought ecosystem after invasive mind farmers tried to shoot all of them for posing a threat to their mind livestock (insecurities cultivated and introduced by outside social expectations)

Thought crop cycling in which some things are specifically cultivated to put nutrients into the soil for the next wave of thoughts to grow strong after this wave is harvested or dies back

Mind spiders which build passive, pervasive systems for controlling the populations of unwanted bothersome worry thoughts

Mind ponds, full of ornate and specific special things like brainworm lilypad plants and hobby comet goldfish that did not exist there organically but have been designed to spark joy and do not colonize the overall natural ecosystem

To be dissociated from one's truer essences is to abdicate one's personhood, no matter what you might stand to gain from that.

To deny yourself change is to deny yourself exactly what makes you a living being instead of a fossil.