I just went to see the Punch Brothers last night at New York's Town Hall.
Originally I only went there to see my favorite new artist Jesca Hoop, who was opening up for them and didn't really care about the Punch Brothers, as I hadn't really heard much of their stuff before this... But wow. I am fucking floored. This was one of, if not the best concert I've ever seen. I couldn't think of a more powerful bill: joyous, fierce, emotional... The combination of the two acts was impeccable!

Sometimes you see concerts like this where you end up feeling like you've wasted your whole fucking life. You see someone doing something so well that it hardly seems humanly possible.... I mean, the cover of Kid A that the Punch Brothers performed? What the hell?? Unfuckingbelievable. The musicianship, the abandon, the obvious love for their craft and the originality of the music... Ah! It makes me emotional right now.

I have been carrying a lot of sadness and anger around this week, for the many injustices of my life. It's a grieving process that's ongoing and utterly healthy actually. It pisses me off that I've had to waste so much time on this crap instead of being able to work on what I love in this world. But getting the anger and sadness out will enable me to sink my teeth into all those things that inspire me. Suppressing these feelings is the block that's created between me and the world: anxiety. A performance like the one I witnessed last night reminds me of why I do what I do; why I constantly want to evolve, why I love music, why it's so important in this world....
I thank the universe for experiences like this.

I was just lying on the floor for a long time, listening to music, (Piers Faccini and Kings of Convenience..) experimenting on relaxation and inner peace... Ah, what a revelation! Do people really live like this? At peace with themselves? I want it. Badly. Old habits die hard, and it has required substantial amounts of rewiring of my brain to even allow myself to relax. Though people tend to see me as quite zen on the outside (..?), I have always been full of turmoil.

Figuring out some important piece about life one day doesn't mean that one remembers it on the next. So far, the pendulum is always swinging... This has become very obvious to me throughout my process of healing. My life has for a while felt like a series of triumphs and relapses, back to back at varying intervals. The hardest habit for me to kick is negative thinking. That shit was pumped into my veins and into my consciousness ever since I was a child... But it is probably hard to find a human being in this world who is as determined to be free from negative thoughts. For me it is a matter of life and death... But in all honesty, I think it is that for everyone. One cannot truly Live, if one is inundated with negativity.

The good thing about pendulums is that they eventually stop swinging. Apparently due to friction and gravity... My pendulum is certainly slowing down. I'm creating both the friction and the gravity by becoming more and more focused on Truth and Reality, goddammit. Those two very rarely correspond to the negative depictions of the mind. This is merely accurate. Where the pendulum stops must lie some sort of peace. I see glimpses of it already.

“If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment”

- Marcus Aurelius (my hero!)

I walk a fine line with my blog sometimes, in wanting to express my emotions, in wanting to connect, and yet not expose myself and my life entirely. I find that line especially challenging to tread today, as most of what I'm experiencing right now I feel fragile and protective about. Indeed, I feel quite vulnerable now, despite being stronger than ever. Perhaps it's a function of being more present....

In the recent and coming weeks, I am opening myself up to many things that I've been protecting myself from... In short, I am deciding to trust--myself, my surroundings, people. It's a choice, interestingly enough. I didn't even realize that I had surrounded myself with all these walls, pretty much all of my life; walls of distracting fears that shielded me from true interactions and true connections. It used to be a form of self-protection and it had its place. But now these walls that used to be my best friend are my biggest obstacle.

I understand now that connection with others is what makes life worth fighting for; to allow myself to be seen, and to see and experience others as they truly are. It may take some time for my walls to come down, but I have a good view of what's on the other side now. Brick by brick, I am undoing this distance and isolation.

In case you haven't seen this yet, it's definitely worth a gander:

http://www.ted.com/talks/brene_brown_on_vulnerability.html

One of my favorite stories as a child was The Snow Queen by Hans Christian Andersen... Here's the opening of it, as stolen from Wikipedia:

"An evil troll, actually the devil himself, makes a magic mirror that has the power to distort the appearance of things reflected in it. It fails to reflect all the good and beautiful aspects of people and things while it magnifies all the bad and ugly aspects making them look even worse than they actually are.

The devil teaches a "devil school," and he and his pupils delight in taking the mirror throughout the world to distort everyone and everything. They enjoy how the mirror makes the loveliest landscapes look like "boiled spinach." They then want to carry the mirror into heaven with the idea of making fools of the angels and God, but the higher they lift it, the more the mirror grins and shakes with delight. It shakes so much that it slips from their grasp and falls back to earth where it shatters into billions of pieces — some no larger than a grain of sand. These splinters are blown around and get into people's hearts and eyes, making their hearts frozen like blocks of ice and their eyes like the troll-mirror itself, only seeing the bad and ugly in people and things."

Long story short: main character Kai gets these splinters in his heart and in his eye and turns into a cold and loveless boy. He then joins the Snow Queen in her frozen, cruel kingdom, leaving behind his happy childhood and his loving friend Gerda. Spoiler alert!!!!!! Love melts his heart in the end.

After all these years that story came to my mind today, as I actually had a feeling that my own heart is melting...! Hans Christian Andersen must have known something about losing and reclaiming innocence himself, having written such a story.

Love is the one thing that I find even the smartest people fail to describe in a way that doesn't sound trite. I was able to find one quote that truly touched me though and here it is:

Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold.
-Zelda Fitzgerald

Right now I'm reading a book called Tom Waits on Tom Waits, Interviews and Encounters. Sheer brilliance! Much like his music, his interviews allow readers to immerse themselves into his world... And what a world it is! Tom Waits seems to inhabit his own reality: a gritty, raw, dark, but warm place simultaneously existing today and some time in the 1940's. As I swim through these articles of him with his anecdotes, witty one-liners and his ruggedly captivating persona as described by his many interviewers, I find myself walking differently, noticing details and places I haven't noticed before... Oddly enough, I find myself connecting to myself more--a truer, more honest part of myself.

Great art and true artists have the capacity to inspire us to experience the world in a new way. Certain artists actually motivate me to live a more meaningful and fulfilling life, reminding me through their work that I can choose to live each day in a way that counts; that every moment is an opportunity to be singularly, fabulously myself. For that reason alone, art is a driving force in my world.

I heard a story that during the Second World War, Winston Churchill’s finance minister said Britain should cut arts funding to support the war effort. According to rumor, Churchill’s response was this: “Then what are we fighting for?”

Indeed. Our birthright and a basic need for all of us is creativity. The world we live in these days does not encourage this. Instead it often feels as if the powers that be try to make us all fit into the same neat box, labeled "Consumer." It requires daily bravery to live our lives in a creative and individual way. I thank the universe for people like Tom Waits, who show the rest of us that there are many different paths to choose from. Out of 7 billion paths, (hopefully) we choose the one meant for us.

Talent develops in tranquillity, character in the full current of human life. -Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, poet, dramatist, novelist, and philosopher (1749-1832)

I saw the above quote this morning and it spoke to me deeply... These days it seems that I'm very rarely in my comfort zone; constantly having to push beyond my former experience in all areas of my life. It can feel unpeaceful much of the time, as surges of adrenaline pass through me, repeatedly... Yet I know that I have no choice, as I can't go back now. Yes, I could choose some version of the unfulfilling existence of my past, and remain "safe", in place. Instead, I want the infinite possibilities of the future. Clearly it requires a lot of courage and effort, but what point is there in living a stagnant life?

So, a balance is needed. Time and space to work on that which is important, and full-on immersion and contact with the world and people around me. The latter still regularly fills me with fear... I often go in and out of flashback memories that unfairly paint friends and strangers with a brush of doom, my reality distorted. This, I've been dealing with a lot in the past week--a function of my PTSD. But it's more and more conscious--it's coming to the forefront. And that, is progress, people.

I cannot hope to heal from my wounds sitting in a corner all by myself, immersed in my music. Like Goethe says, character develops in the full current. So I dive in, time and again, bravely.

Never before has it been so clear to me how much power I have over my own thoughts...that the way I see the world and myself is ultimately in my own control. Famous thinkers and writers have always said this and on some level I've always thought that it's bullshit. Wouldn't I be a more positive, relaxed person if I had the choice?

I've always felt very much the victim of whatever has been going on in my life, and whatever thought sequence has come about. What I hadn't fully understood before is that I can't hope to change my thoughts around just like that in one given moment. The way we think is a matter of consistency--it's a long-term process. If I've been cultivating a foundation of negativity in my mind for days and weeks, months and years, I can be sure that one positive (i.e. accurate) thought that I try to force on myself will not take root. It will be a useless struggle, as my mind will only be fertile ground for negativity. If instead I consistently cultivate a foundation of positive thinking, productive and nourishing thoughts ensue naturally.

Initially though, changing one's negative habit of thinking is hard work. Really hard work. I know this first-hand. Changing our thoughts seems to go against everything we are. The way we think is a product of everything that we've experienced in our lives: the influence of the people who brought us up, our peers, culture, media... In some ways, it can seem like the only constant in our lives; as if it's our identity. But, I think that we can't become who we truly are meant to be until we free our minds of negative programming.

Spoon boy: Do not try and bend the spoon. That's impossible. Instead... only try to realize the truth.
Neo: What truth?
Spoon boy: There is no spoon.
Neo: There is no spoon?
Spoon boy: Then you'll see, that it is not the spoon that bends, it is only yourself.

--The Matrix

Reality truly is what we make it.