Karl the Crow

The reality is you may never get the one thing that you seek.
You can imagine it but it may never come.
You may never wake up feeling invigorated for life, driven by purpose. It may be something you grasp for all your life and never attain. Or maybe for only fleeting moments.

Is life still worth living if salvation is impossible?
Is life still worth living if you will never feel you belong in the land of the living?

Yes.

I’ve built some foundations this year, or that’s how it feels. Touchpoints that I’ve come back to or will come back to in the future.

To be out of the mainstream command-and-control systems, even a little, opens up opportunity, but for some it takes many years for the opportunity to blossom into something meaningful. It took me years to adjust; specifically, to take ownership of my own time and decision-making. It can be just as much a struggle as being under the yoke of corporate bosses. The payoffs come in spurts and over long periods.

This year I have a few projects that I’ve brought to completed milestones. I built an application for tracking my dreams and released that after coming up on a decade of work. I built an algorithmic trading system, two years in the making and nearly a full-time job’s level of time investment. I’m exploring businesses and trying to write. It all is moving somewhere, but the end is not entirely clear.

The end of each sprint of work has been a checkpoint, some place I can put the project down to rest while I place my attention elsewhere. I can then pick it back up later when I’m ready. It’s been a good way to live. I do hope to build my life on this formula, following the FLOW rather than forcing and fighting. I still have not fully freed myself, but I know I am making progress and growing into it

Where will the Dao take us next?

Since I took my new Crow name I have seen them everywhere

The crow perched on the fence by the bay, stationary as I walked by it and stood watching 6 feet away

The crows flying around
The crow in the trees at the beer garden
Crows behind the dumpsters at the office
Crow Canyon on the way out of the bay to go visit C
The crows are everywhere and everywhere is alive

Utter destruction today, and oddly enough, or should I say as expected? It’s my own doing, or, is it not? As expected I have no idea, as expected I am bumbling and fumbling around in the dark again.

My desires are for love and connection. My desire is the light. Yet what happens over and over again is I find myself trapped in the pit. I climb a bit out and then fall back in again.

Will I ever escape? Will I ever escape the pit of despair? The destruction?

Today again, I am destroyed.

I am meandering in the dark; are you?

Giving way to frustration over and over again, my efforts seem to be in vain. I flail. How hard is it to stay stationary for weeks, months, years? How hard is it to feel misery, sadness, angst, fear, frustration, over and over again, with no end in sight? No hope that any action will resolve it, falling down deeper and deeper as if in quicksand, as if each movement of the leg or the arm to clutch and crawl out only accelerates the slow crushing fall deeper into the abyss?

Do you feel this way? That you grope in the dark, that you clamber around in The Pit, ala Edgar Allen Poe? Waiting to be chopped to pieces, in terror, in fear, and there is really nothing at all you can do but wait?

I am still like this. I have spent so many years in this state. Still when I reach for an action I feel pain. I write an email, I make a stand; I feel pain. I feel rejection, but not from the outside. I feel it from the inside! I feel rejected by my soul. No, no, you had this idea; no, no, you thought it might work, and then you reached for action, and instantly: smacked down by the suffering of:

“This isn’t me.”
“I look like a crazy person.”
“I seem desperate.”
“Not again, not again.”

Not again! Not again! Flailing in the dark.

May we find our way. Inshallah.

UPDATE: And after all that, I was well received, and am relieved. A mountain from a molehill. So, so funny, the drama we inflict on ourselves; the tiny mouses we turn into enormous monsters.

Karl Crow, hm?
Where did this name come from?

Hand delivered by God. AKA, Spirit, imagination, creativity. Struck down into the mind from the infinite imaginal into the middle-ground of Thought and typed down into the hard concrete world of Matter.

Today: what will I do? I will follow God today. I will follow the spirit, because, with spirit there is no thing that can be wrong. Do I want to struggle and flail? OR do I want to surf the wave of the Dao? Commit to the wave and ride as it crests, powered forward by the full force of Nature? Yes, that sounds wonderful, and easier. Surfing is not easy, of course. Finding balance and mastering the ride takes its own kind of skill. But would you rather flail and fret, or glide effortlessly forward?

The spirit makes things easy for us. It makes things smooth and slow, rather than fast and frantic. It makes life a hell of a lot easier. We can see people in anxiety, panic, despair, and know they are getting tossed around by the waves, swimming against them, splashing in the water. Do we want to splash and scramble? Or do we want to coast? Set sail?

Today I will choose to ride the wave. Karl Crow, that’s my name today. I will be moved by the spirit and have confidence in my not knowing, confidence that I’m learning to ride, confidence that each time I fall I learn a little more about surfing the life-wave, confidence that I am getting better and better only by seeking to let God move me for his purposes. Today I let go of my purposes, and I submit them to God for approval, I submit my hands, feet, arms, legs, torso, skin, tongue, mind, all of it, to God, for use as he pleases. I am free, today.

I am free.

PRAISE unto God

the Holy One

the Great Lord of Power