Conspiracy: ‘They’ like to abuse their power; they make us suffer gratuitously. Postal rates rise while postal service deteriorates, because they have us by the short and sweets and they know it.Metaphysics: What do you expect when you call it ’snail mail’? Poor critter has no choice but to respond to our collective perception and judgment.

So which is true? Neither. Both. Reality is too fractally complex to be defined in words, even many volumes of words. So there. My problem is I know too much, I see too much. I am higher than acid. Acid just randomizes what I already perceive just fine, thank you. But I am not mentally organized. On the contrary. My mind is both stuck in old past patterns and confused by perceptions which differ radically from eye to eye and sense to sense. I am plugged in. It’s not my fault, it just happened that way.

I blame my childhood.

As a child, I was planted with seeds of both grandiosity and humility. On the grandiose side, I was given to believe that I was gifted far beyond the average. I would ‘go far’. My teachers planted this particular seed, some letting me know in overt and subtle ways that they believed I was once-in-a-lifetime exceptional. Grandiose.

Humility came from home in the bare fact that it didn’t much matter what sort of grades you got or how good you were at stuff. Everybody is equal and the same, nobody gets special treatment. Good grades? Huh. Good for you. Bad grades? Well, you tried and that’s what’s important. Good for you.

Still, real humility only came when I encountered the big world for the first time. I wasn’t nearly the great frog I had seemed in the backwoods ponds that nurtured me. Exceptional to a northern teacher in a school with fifty or a hundred students is not nearly so impressive to a city teacher with thirty different kids in every class of the day, all in the same grade.

All those people freaked me out. I was shocked into surrendering the expectations, the ambitions that had burned so bright in my last school, when I competed with the kid in the glasses for the best test scores in class.

Poor little me (there, there), wandering lost as a cloud shoved about by strong winds and crashing into treetops and mountains, don’t you feel for her, scared little girl?

Of course I do, and I’m not ashamed to admit it. Why shouldn’t we love ourselves-as-children, sympathize and commiserate with them when they got crap thrown at them by their lives? Kids go through hell, and my little kid / I went through more than the norm. Mine was, if not a deeper or darker hell, at the very least, a weirder one. Of course I feel sad for her / me. That’s not self-pity. It’s self-love. And that’s good, right?

When I say ‘hell’ I mean extreme circumstances, the kind of agonized intensity that we all spend so much energy avoiding now because we couldn’t handle the way it felt when we were children.

We were too young to process those intense states of being then, but we need them now. The current passion for extreme sports satisfies the letter of our denied need (extremity of experience) without satisfying the essence (to feel deeply and intensely our vulnerability to life, to others and to our own sources).

Humans need to live deeply, to embrace life fully. It’s the way we are designed, upright, heart open, arms all set for embracing. And naked, all set for sensuous pleasure. Why not?

I haven’t much of a conscious mind a lot of the time. Often my thoughts seem heavy, weighty things; the pot gets stirred so often I can’t keep hold of one thought long enough to really grasp it. Any apparent intelligence I exhibit is instinctual. Words grow up through my bones and arrange themselves in an order that conveys what my body knows without my mind having to engage much except the most basic awareness of watching them as they write themselves.

When I first learned to read, I commanded the letters to reveal their meanings to me. They crawled about on the page like ants, rearranging themselves into words and then I could read, just like that. It was impossible until, suddenly, it was happening. The moment it became possible, it was easy.

If you look at anything closely enough, it complexifies. To reduce to the so-called simplest, most basic elements of life, you need first go through many layers of ever-increasing fractal complexity. When you look at a stone closely enough, it is indistinguishable from a living cell seen at the same range. Everything lives, everything dances in its own secret heart. It is wrong, inaccurate to say that the difference between animate and inanimate is the difference between life and death. All matter is alive. All life is aware of itself, even if it’s only a vague background sense of awareness. All things matter.

‘All things matter.’ There’s a play on words in there, but I wonder how many would grok it. Why is it adjudged a waste of time and energy to bother looking at things with love? We don’t even look at people with love, except on special occasions with special people. Why such collective heartlessness?

When I let myself know the truth of what I feel and sense, which is that my attitude toward things can be felt by them, that my thoughts and prejudices affects their experience of existence in some way, I am horrified. I want to push the idea away and call it crazy. The idea of loving everything seems terribly overwhelmingly difficult.

It’s truly tragic that love is perceived to be such hard work. But really… it’s far from it! Love is the easiest thing in the universe. Love is what happens when we surrender everything, give up every fight, agree to lose and win at the same time, embracing both winner and loser as parts of our own self. Love is the body of the Whole relaxing and releasing tension. Love is the default state of things.

Why did we decide to be the resistors and battlers within this system of love?

There must be something right about it, for nature can never be wrong, and we are, believe it or not, part of nature. So, what is right about this picture?