Yesterday, friend Dan, who lived here in this house for four years, and the another year in the third house (of Green Acres Permaculture Village), came over yesterday to do what he’d said he would do a few days earlier; a very dirty task, getting up on roof to remove a rotted mess of old mosquito infested, plastic covering that we used for a temporary greenhouse way back when. Of course, he would do this. That’s what friends do, follow through on their agreements. Plus, of course we hung out for quite a while. He told me that he’s noticed life is very different in his 30s (I met him at 25, he’s now 34); that he’s more “in control” of himself. Dan is really struck by the difference between one decade and another.
I responded, yes, every decade is like that, very different, and as a result of the accumulation, much more interesting than the one before. The older we get, the more meaning we can create for ourselves, as we look back on events in our past, and how they form patterns, increasingly larger patterns over time
Grow older, rather than get older. That’s key. Most people just get old, and resent the passage of time, wish they were eternally young.
This morning, I was getting my hair cut at Jeff’s barbershop, and he was telling me about how thrilled he is to have probably influenced 1000 kids’ lives over the past 13 years he has been teaching them martial arts at the YMCA. He loves the fact that he can model, for them, what actually growing up can look like. “Grow from the inside out,” he says, as he snips around my ears, turning me into “an aging boy” once again, for a few weeks.
Startled that someone I know also uses the phrase “from the inside out,” I reiterate, with emphasis, “LIVE from the inside out. That way you don’t worry about your ‘reputation.'”
He told me of one of the scenarios he uses with each new class of karate kids. It’s to bring the martial arts suit that he used to wear when he was ten years old, the one he started with, to class, hanging on a hanger. Then he’ll ask the kids, “Did someone leave this here? Does it belong to one of you? It’s size zero. Are any of you size zero?” And of course, all their hands shoot up. But then they ask, why is it such a strange color, why doesn’t the belt look like the one we use, on and on. At this point Jeff turns to them and says, “Actually, this was my suit, the first one I wore, when I started martial arts as a ten-year old. Just think, you can be like me! You are where you are now, and you can grow to become a black belt too!”
These are but two of the conversations from yesterday and this morning, eons away from the madness that seems to have descended upon the world, if, that is, you only pay attention to what’s on screen, for our consumption. What’s designed to get us triggered, furious/fearful, and thus, emit “loosh,” to be lapped up by who or whatever ever it is that loves to feed off us.
As the outrage at the Olympics Opening Ceremony begins to take the back seat to whatever comes next, I found this Tessa Luna substack particularly compelling.
https://tessa.substack.com/p/olympics-triggeroo
Excerpt:
Yeah, that’s not how real friends operate. Real friends, which, if we ourselves are real, living, moving, growing from the inside out sovereign souls, then we attract other sovereign souls. The more of us who connect, truly connect, on a soul-level, the more we can simply ignore what those “upstairs” are trying to do to us, to make us into, force-feed us via media of all kinds, to transmogrify into robots.
Yuck. No thanks.
