Wrote a long letter filled with the feelings you can maybe only have midair

like "my soul is flying with me" and so on and "I don't believe in technocratic dystopia(?)"

October 7 happened one week into a re-reading of Paradise Lost.

I actually don't know how I would have held my soul together through that time if I wasn't studying Paradise Lost

On the other hand there is always a disaster and

a catastrophe happening, but

It's also true that my practice started in a

catastrophe and because of one

And maybe it's in the DNA of the projects that

somehow what we are

doing is converting energies of

collapse and chaos

into ....

I don't know, into something

that will endure.

It's an act of will but I don't understand it. But it's also so intuitive which means- I don't

understand it.

But I obey it.

Anyways I wrote my long loopy absurd letter about the soul

and

then I found out about mass shootings in Providence and on Bondi Beach

and I opened Instagram and there is video of students huddling together and the sound of live gunfire.

I swear it's like were being eaten alive by our own images

What I mean is

I think why I wanted to study The Ten Commandments/Quran/Plum Village/Lotus Sutra

Like really deeply meditate

into them

Is I feel like "moral grandeur and spiritual audacity" are gone

We are becoming incapable of thinking and acting ethically because our complicity and sense of powerlessness runs so deep

I mean like

I just feel like language itself is so deluged in sophistry

its losing this sacred fidelity to reality

But like, losing

reality is fucking up our imagination too

Taking action and living one's life increasingly

becomes a

calculated gesture

Maybe this is why fashion is so consoling

And so important right now

Because it's a way to exert some kind of control over the imprint your soul makes as it moves through this world

It's not that I don't love it. I love it dearly. And I honestly think human beings are much less horrible than we're being led to believe; coerced into being.

Like, it's this machine like part of us that is

showing us how seriously ugly