Life is a huge dream. Why work so hard?

You knew the tree and the earth were the same as you.

"When you focused on the leaves fluttering in the dappled light, they vibrated and shimmered into one, becoming a million tiny particles. You felt a shift inside, and you began to vibrate too, on the same freequency as everything else. All secrets were there, all truths, all knowledge. You had to scan with your heart to find what you were seeking. It might not be spoken in words, it might be hidden in rhyme, in song, in images. You knew the tree and the earth were the same as you, made of particles, like you, come together in a different form. You loved it all as you loved yourself." -- "This Life Is In Your Hands: One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone" by Melissa Coleman.

Breather.

Sometimes you have to take a minute to sit by yourself and breathe for a minute. Feel the hot sun on your skin and say to yourself, "This is okay. Everything will be okay."

Unlock my body and move myself at last/to dance.

The first song here, "Chinese Apple," is a beautiful song by Loose Fur aka Jeff Tweedy of Wilco and other folks. Fun fact: I walked down the aisle to this song! The lyrics are lovely, which brings us to fun fact #2: the lyrics "unlock my body/move myself at last/into warm liquid/flowing blowing glass/classical music/blasting masks the ringing in my ears" repeat themselves in Wilco's "Heavy Metal Drummer," a very different song. Except in that one he says, "move myself to dance" instead of "move myself at last." I like how changing the "at last" to "to dance" totally changes the feeling of the lyrics that follow, and what it might mean to "unlock your body." Both are awesome songs.

The purpose in life is not to find yourself.

This New York Times op-ed, "It's Not About You," was really wonderful and illuminating. My favorites:

Most people don’t form a self and then lead a life. They are called by a problem, and the self is constructed gradually by their calling.

and

Most of us are egotistical and most are self-concerned most of the time, but it’s nonetheless true that life comes to a point only in those moments when the self dissolves into some task. The purpose in life is not to find yourself. It’s to lose yourself.

As a whole, our culture likes to preach about "self" -- and it celebrates finding your own path and passions and charting your own territory and being, it must be said, like a Maverick. I certainly indulge in it all the time (see: this entire blog), but I like to think the truth I am leaning into is not so much about me, but about my place in the "we," the great big universe around us. What if we changed our discourse from "you" to "we"? What if we asked ourselves, "How can I best benefit the whole?"

I just finished the Chaos Walking trilogy by Patrick Ness, and I truly thought it was brilliant. It's a dystopian young adult sci-fi thing, where settlers have inhabited a distant planet, only to be "infected" with what they call a germ -- the thoughts of men are suddenly audible/visible. It drives many of them completely nuts and is quite tormenting. By the end of the third book you see what is actually happening is that these settlers have become, in a much more tangible way, connected to the greater "we," and they struggle with their own voices and how they fit into that "we." How the many voices can coexist peacefully. That struggle leads to all kinds of terrible things -- genocide and war among them.

In the third book, we get insight into the alien race on the planet. The settlers call the aliens the Spackle; the aliens call themselves The Land. They exist within a collective identity. They are not their own "people," but part of The Land. They are at peace with, and find comfort in, being part of the "we" on the planet.

There is so much more to the book than this, but I think it's that wonderful metaphor that strikes me so much, just as the author's message does in his "It's Not About You" article -- maybe one of the greatest lessons I can teach my children is that yes, they are very special, not so much because they are their own amazing individuals, but because they are part of the "we," and they can do amazing things within it.

Tell me what you know about dreaming.

I can't stop listening to this cover of Kid Cudi's "Pursuit of Happiness." I love the, I don't know, desperate melancholy of it. The original has the same vibe, with Kid Cudi's added....smirky affectation, I guess. Both are good, but I think I like this version better.