(no subject)

I've gone nearly a week without writing. More and more often now I seem to find myself with nothing to say. Nothing's wrong, I'm busier during the days, and my evenings have always been crowded, there's just nothing much going on internally or externally that draws me to write. I'm unsure how I feel about this. Sometimes silence is peaceful, sometimes heavy.

Talking with my mother this afternoon she spoke of what she thought my life would be like at my age, back when I was leaving for college. She foresaw an apartment in central Philadelphia or Manhattan, a high paying job/making a living as a writer, having a live-in paid companion caring for my pets and garden. Understand, my mother really doesn't understand how much things cost after a certain (very low) point, nor does she understand how rare and hard it is to keep body and soul together writing full time. Still, some of it is close to my own plans for myself. I had planned on museum administration to put food on the table - not out of burning desire, in fact the opposite. I knew my habit of throwing myself as deeply as possible into things, and wanted a 'job', rather than a 'career', in order to keep from expending all that energy there, saving it for my home, hobbies, and more homely passions.

The differences and similarities in where she saw me going and where I wound up are striking. I'm well off, to be sure, but have done little**directly** to make that happen. My own sphere is narrow, focused on the boundaries of my apartment mainly, and my adopted city to a lesser extent. It brings up an unfortunately phrased question, one that leads only to more questions - am I living up to my 'potential'? Of course that moves me directly to "What is my potential, exactly, and what would living up to it look like, according to whom?" Don't get me wrong, I'm happy with my life, and fulfilled by it. I have my passions and drives, and if I had a thousand years, I'd still never be board. But I have to ask, somewhere, somehow along the line, did I drop the ball? If I did, can I pick it up? Do I want to?

(no subject)

There's an interesting process going on in my mind, and I think it has been happening for a while, it's just that the thought processes I started last night have begun to bring some of it up out of the back of my mind.

The problem with the whole idea of asking 'are you living up to your potential' is that for some reason its got a value judgement already attached to it in the negative. Nine times out of ten, whoever is doing the asking has an agenda, one they want you to follow. This can make monitoring ones own 'life progress' for lack of a better term, a chancy thing. Part of it is socialization - we're socialized, I think, to always be in motion, always be on our way to doing/being/becoming/getting something 'more', something just a little ways away, over the horizon.. We never quite get there, of course, lacking the tools, education, proper clothes, whathaveyou. Since we're always on our way though, we're never able to full stop and look at now, right now, and expand into now. Expanding into now is dangerous, because it might lead one to stop and reach in for the things that make now really expand, rather than buying/getting/doing.

"For I have been with you from the beginning, and I am That which is attained at the end of desire." It's a very Buddhist statement, really. Stop, look, see what is right here, and it has always been here. It's not about running towards something, it's about stopping and *seeing*.

Tangenting, I am as usual a bundle of contradictions. On one hand, I'm cerebral to a fault, going off into hyper-intellectual tangents when an emotional resonse would be more appropriate, distancing myself from everything with the coolness of the anthropologist, surveying all with what became known in college as my "Jane Goodall look". On the other hand I'm full of the energy of the Empress in the tarot, liking nothing better than the earthyness of kneading bread dough, or feeling the softness of the wool moving from my hands to my spinning wheel, building that which sustains from as close to the ground up as I can manage. The two seem to rarely marry, and only with great difficulty. At the same time, they are formed of the same stuff, a desire for shelter I can trust, a surround I know by instinct. I think I shall be musing on their similarities more....

Another, slighter tangent. I can't tell if this idea is impossibly beautiful or impossibly naive. Both, most likely. If you can expand a persons world in just a small way, a tiny way, like by giving them a delightfully lovely meal, or glass of wine, or cup of tea, perhaps, just perhaps, that small widening can lead to an expansion of a more definite sort? I want to believe that could be, because if it could, give me a kitchen and some time, and I will try and change the world.