Is our drive for survival or for creation of art? If not for creation of art, what is making it so that we are driven by survival, by fear of not being able to pay our rent, our mortgage and have our shelter taken away from us?
5 days. 5 days of their lives most people give in order to afford shit. afford rent, afford food. And then as a wise lyft driver once said, “people are influenced by the dumbest shit.” My sister racked up credit card debt when i was growing up so that everyone could get some really nice presents for christmas. she sacrificed her financial freedom so that we could have nice material stuff. it was really cool stuff, and i wish i could go back in time and tell her i want nothing for christmas than for you to be financially free and not have to take shitty jobs and do not-fun things in order to pay off your credit cards. I would much rather you have that time and money to take classes, to exercise, to help others, and to most importantly achieve your dreams. But perhaps your dreams were to go into debt to give everyone one really nice christmas? in that case, can we acknowledge that the dreams might need changing?
Can we change our dreams, so that instead of dreaming about being rich, we can start dreaming about how we can impact the world from exactly where we are? Because in becoming rich, typically people abandon their values and then become jaded. They lose their connections as money gets in the way. That’s what happens when the focus is on money and what it can buy. (I’m visualizing rap songs and their lyrics and what they say about money that I heard in the car with the wise lyft driver) What happens when the focus is on a project or a dream, and money helps that, is that money no longer becomes distancing, it brings us together. It can become a bonding glue that tastes of honey instead of being pepper spray.
I am currently assessing my career options (read jobless), currently staying open to different possibilites of housing and relocation options (read “homeless”/ sleeping in my vehicle some nights), and yet (!) I can use what I have to make a difference in the world, right now. I chose to take some of what I have saved up and put it towards paying artists to create art. I’m allocating some towards travel and spending time with friends. I've allocated some towards my dad and supporting him in his journey. And that’s just money. My time? I am putting effort into co-creating art, investigating different ways of housing myself, of earning money, supporting organizations that I care about. I put in time to help out at Sex Positive LA orientation as they teach about consent in touch to people who may be new to this. I put in time to share my bodywork with Ron Finley who is changing the culture around food. I went to a non-monogamy discussion group and a men’s group and shared cuddles and what i’ve learned from some challenging experiences. I am doing all of this while being jobless and homeless.
Which says something. It says there is more freedom when we are not immediately sucked of what we earned from work. It says we don’t necessarily need as much as we think we do to live happily and contribute. It says 5 day a week workweeks are exhausting and don’t allow room to grow and explore and learn and share. It also says if we must work, let it be on something that we are immensely proud of and that we would be working on in our free time anyways. That’s why I’m looking for jobs in food change, or culture change. I want the money I earn to come from a sacred place so that when I allocate it to different areas, those allocations are now meaningful. My purchases now carry weight. When I support an artist with my money, I am making a motherfucking statement.
PS, i dont' know what exactly the below photo means, but like Will Farrell says, it's provocative! (And ties together my disorienting arithmetic in the subject heading)
I’m going to take a page from Allison Moon’s amazing writings and share a couple of fun things now. (:
What I’m reading: The Soul of Money by Lynne Twist
It’s amazing and I’ve already cried a lot and shifted my way of being significantly. I highly recommend it to all. Seriously.
My little life tweak: I write a note at night in my calendar the night before for what I want to do in the morning when I wake up. It almost always includes stretching. Spending the first 5-10 minutes of my day stretching or rolling out my muscles on a lacrosse ball makes my whole day fucking great, and takes me out of my hyperspeed mind babbling. The other two articles are 1. deal with parking ticket and 2. job decisions This little tweak helps me stay focused in the morning where i normally would get up and just wonder about what to do today and then go into a huge fat scary thought cave of how everything is horrible and the world is terrible and it takes me 4 hours before i come out of that cave again. So yeah, a little calendar reminder for tomorrow’s important things is a game changer for me. (:
An area I want to explore: A wonderful human in my life recently shared with me about how he was able to relieve a chronic undiagnosable lower back pain by sticking a finger up his own butt and manually releasing a super tight muscle in his pelvic floor that was the source of his pain. Awesome right?
So here’s the thing about dudes putting fingers up their butts, the narrative I grew up with is that it means you’re gay, and if you’re gay in a small rural town, it’s physically dangerous. The most aggressive language ever associated with a word in high school towards me was faggot. So much hate was infused with the shouting of that word towards me. And as someone who had a childhood laced with homoexploring experiences, I really questioned if I was a faggot. And then got kind of scared and hoped I wasn’t one and felt lucky that I jerked off to photos of women.
With that said, I’ve come to love and enthusiastically support butt stuff (plus I've been able to explore my sexual preferences and have a very healthy relationship with myself and my desires now). My friend wasn’t the only one who had lower back pain relieved through what I and some others like to call internal massage. I was a body demo for an advanced sex skills class and chose to have another person put fingers up my butt to demonstrate just how pleasurable that area can be for a human, especially one with a prostate. Well, she found some tight muscles and also some blocked areas of muscle and then shifted her attention from demonstrative to healing. I broke down sobbing. I had never felt seen as a whole human being before. This was the first time someone was lovingly touching my genitals as part of my whole identity. My sexual side was now integrated with my sense of self and so their was no longer my non-sexual and sexual aspects and body parts, there was just me. After that life changing experience, I started to explore my own butt. I bought a dildo and tried moving it around to different areas inside my butt. What I found was one area that I could feel in my thigh, lower back, and groin. I leverage the dildo so that I could release that muscle and low and behold after about 5 minutes, I had full relief from a pain that had been aggravating me and keeping me from physical activity for YEARS! I applied the same knowledge with an intimate companion who had similar symptoms, and BAM! immense relief for her as well. Fucking neat stuff is what it is!
I’m not sure what exactly I want to do with this knowledge yet, so for the moment I’ll just share it here. I’m open to ideas or thoughts of co-creation! How can we create culture where it is ok, even supported, for straight and not-straight men to explore butt stuff without them being hurt, shamed or killed?
No comments:
Post a Comment