“Peace is the acceptance of what is. Music is the total surrounding of some kind of emotional-Spiritual presence which links us. Sitting here with my headphones, I am completely interconnected. Is this what I have been missing? I only want love and Light that is lasting. I am always growing and changing and I want to learn to be entirely okay with it. If writing isn’t my thing anymore, maybe it’s singing? I am not doing much other than what I am doing. I am riding my bike instead of driving. I am living instead of dying. I am thinking about avoiding meat and alcohol. I do a pretty good job avoiding processed foods and I only SHOP shop at Chico Natural right now. One thing I would really like to do is express myself more..to communicate. Writing seems a little dead to me. I only want to nap now. The words don’t even come out. It almost even feels like there are none.”
Tuesday – 17 September 2013
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How interesting to have had the opportunity to record myself..to catalogue my thoughts somehow and capture that moment in time…that moment of empty, apathetic, stagnated hopelessness. I’ve just realized that, as I sat here intending to explore the fascinating topic of human companionship, jealously, control, fear, possession, and polyamory, in fact, I’d end up exploring the subject of “peace.” Tonight, I was faced with the question, “What does peace mean to you?” I was caught off guard and volun-forced to come up with an answer to this hugely important question while in front of a video camera. I came up with the following: “My name is Mercedes Macias. I live in Chico, California [close-mindedly neglecting to mention that I live in the United States of America..] and I am a writer and a peace-activist. [I then froze and became blank-minded for a moment. The woman behind the camera smiled and encouraged me to continue with raised eye-brows and an enthusiastic shoulder shrug.] Peace, to me, means the simple living of all beings – human, non-human, and plant-life – together in harmony, without the need for violence.” Then, I froze again and awkwardly laughed, saying, “yeah, that’s it..” I simply could not articulate a more thoughtful, collective answer to that question.
Here I am, reading back to roughly a year ago, where I can see that I was feeling empty and meaningless in that certain moment. Yet, even in that dead, floating helplessness, I was able to articulate some kind of philosophically-interesting, though incomplete and over-simplistic instant of what “peace” is. Music is significant in many ways in my life; yes, this is true. But why start with such a thought-provoking narrative and then divert onto a topic such as, “music?” What an interesting and flowing creature I am Being.. I can hardly keep my mind disciplined enough to sit here in a chair and write something focused for even 15 minutes. I seem to continue to distract myself with other things. I just interrupted my expression to get q-tips from the bathroom…to clean the dust and grime from the nooks of my laptop keyboard. How in the world am I going to succeed and highly function under these kinds of thoughtless, lazy patterns?
In any case, “peace,” cannot be simply the acceptance of what is. For one thing, someone living in fear may accept that they are constantly under duress and consumed by stomach churning worry that they might be physically harmed or otherwise assaulted, but they are certainly not living in peace. Similarly, I may have accepted the expressive retardation of my current roommate as something I am going to choose to continue to tolerate until the lease on this apartment has expired, but I am certainly not in a state of “peace” in a unjustified situation. Because he chooses not to communicate with me, I am now about $200 under where I should be in the present moment’s finances because he has chosen not to pay his portion of 3 months’ worth of utilities.
Thursday, 09 October 2014
Articulated Jargon 