I’m in the process of beginning to project externally an existence which has, up until now, been marked by an internal life not particularly well integrated with the outside world. That’s the mark of the dreamer without the will to do. As I’ve been growing outward, I’ve become more interested in the role of stories.

I once participated in an experiment in college, in which I was asked to keep track of every time I told a story to someone for one week. I thought at first that I wouldn’t have much to report — I didn’t think of myself as a storyteller, and I’m not the kind of person that remembers jokes. But I found, to my astonishment, that I told stories all the time. Not huge, dramatic stories, but small stories like, “Hey, guess what happened today …”

As I immersed myself in Toltec philosophy, I became acquainted with the ideas of “personal history” and the internal dialogue, and realized that there are invisible threads of story interwoven throughout my very identity. Personality characteristics, e.g. shyness, can be related to things that happened in the past, e.g. being made fun of in elementary school. Embedded within the personality matrix are stories that I tell myself on a subconscious level.

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Last December, I ended the latest experiment in my seesaw relationship with the martial arts.

I have a love-hate relationship with martial arts. On the one hand, I’m hypnotically attracted to them, to the idea of being a Warrior in a grand, mythic sense. On the other hand … I hate fighting.

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External expression — the manifestation of inner experience in outward form, e.g. words and actions — is a deficiency of mine. Even the creation of this website encounters some resistance. Somewhere along the line I just got too scared of the violence of the world and developed a habit of shutting myself down.

Hermetic practitioner Rawn Clark’s thoughts on this are inspiring:

I think the ultimate point of initiation is to plummet the internal realm and then to externalize what you find within. It does no good to just leave it inside. If it is not externalized, it has no genuine life. But said externalization is not a matter of externalizing it just in order to change the external world. It’s not a matter of trying to sway everyone else to your way of thinking and being. It is instead, simply a matter of BEing who you are.

There’s an ancient Chinese proverb that says this perfectly: “A bird does not sing because it has an answer. It sings because it has a song.” And as we know, a bird will sing its song in a city full of people just as beautifully as it will in the deep forest.

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Every perception and thought that we experience in our everyday lives has an effect on our consciousness. Someone says the word “sugar” and it immediately evokes certain associations — a feeling, perhaps, or a taste. The word “elephant” evokes completely different associations. Thus, simply by stating a word, we can manipulate the attention, the state of consciousness, of others, as I’ve just manipulated yours. Thus all words are hypnotic in effect.

Everything we perceive and think puts us in a different state of consciousness, large or small. Not just words, but images, sounds, odors, tastes, thoughts, fantasies, fears. All of these represent potential states of consciousness. At any point in time, you can focus your attention on what you are looking at or what you are hearing; this is a microscopic change in your consciousness, but a change nonetheless.

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A defining moment for me in my Christian faith was back in high school, when I went back to visit my Sunday school class at the First Southern Baptist Church after a lengthy absence.

The teacher passed out copies of Parade magazine. We opened them to a short section in which random people had been asked what they believed about heaven and hell. My classmates took turns reading and discussing the merits of their various answers.

After reading aloud one man’s view, the teacher suddenly asked, “Do you think he’s going to heaven?”

Umm … No one said anything.

Her answer? “No, because he’s a Jew.”

Oh. Of course. Duh.

That wasn’t the beginning of the end. It was just the end.

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I’ve always been drawn to magic.

Of course, the sort of magic I used to consider “real” magic was the extraordinary sort: The miracles of Jesus. The powers of Merlin. The might of Superman. An implicit, ironic assumption is that “real” magic doesn’t really exist. That, of course, is why it’s called “magic.”

Right?

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I saw a dead bird by the sidewalk yesterday.

I’m not sure what kind of bird. White-throated sparrow, maybe. That it (he? she?) was alive but was now dead was the significant thing.

Since the weather’s warmed up I’ve started hearing new birdsongs outside the windows, but I’ve conveniently ignored them, as most city-dwellers do. A few years ago I would be interested in what birds and animals lived around here. Just a few days ago, I told Abigail that I didn’t really give a shit anymore.

That wasn’t true. I cried when I saw that dead sparrow.

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As a person dealing with numerous low-grade chronic health issues — including poor posture, flat feet, myopia, a clenched jaw, and a frequent case of mild to moderate fatigue — I’m constantly trying to find ways to bring myself back into balance.

I quickly learned that mechanical work administered by others did me little good. I got a lot of massages at massage school, but I was lucky if their effects lasted longer than a day. I’ve also gotten a ten-session series of Rolfing, which is a method of releasing fascial adhesions to realign the body, but that didn’t really do much for me either.

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