A Brief Introduction

"I grok, you grok, the happy green grass groks....thou art god!" - Robert A. Heinlein

My cats and I have agreements.  On the stairs, I walk to the right, and they walk to the left.  We negotiate.  Love before typing, but only for five minutes.  If they ask for food, they get it.  If I ask for them, I get a pile of fur, no questions asked.  When people ask who I live with, I count them.  They are persons, residents of my weird kingdom--an indeterminate number of humans, two cats, and a million unspoken understandings.

These understandings are where meaning is made, the meaning that art tries to speak.  It is the connectedness of life, the way that warmth seeks warmth.  I know the boundaries of myself only so that I can find my way to others, much as light delivers the world to the human eye.  All of humankind's best discoveries revolve around light: fire, electricity, biological possibility.

I would like to uncover this light with my curiosity, awaken it with my imagination.  I would like to walk bravely into the existential crises of our species and connect with our dreams and our demons, our politics and our poetry and the moments that wake us up in the middle of the night, burning with life.

Ignorance begets fear, and fear begets hate; open minds make way for open hearts.

I would like to push the limits of myself, so as not to be trapped in a skin-sized prison of my own making, our own making, by crawling out of the earth made word by my mind, and letting my voice become light, finding the world by sending it out into the battle.

This is not a religious journey.  I do not have a camp.  I speak for no nation, no sect, no cult.  I speak for speaking.  I speak beyond the idea of superiority, the necessity of reductive binary systems.  I will shout down the wall between myself and the other; we will dance in circles until the world spins...the world doesn't need to be told what it needs.  I will give myself and you will take what you like, as is always the case.

This is a place of boundary work--rants, fiction, poetry, thoughts--voices like light, questions to drill airholes where I fear I might suffocate beneath the weight of ugliness and shock, dead bodies and and hate laws, dictatorships of the mind.

I know, somewhere, there is real choice: not for or against, not with or without, but a being with other beings that can unlock us from our self made cages.  Do not reduce me to tree-hugging, rationalism, spiritualism, or cut me up with any other dichotomous ism --I am, simply, myself--another voice from underground.