“our fear: this is what we are made of: our weakness”
– Deborah M. Gordon in Lukas Felzmann’s Swarm
Tag: Lukas Felzmann
SWARM: “Fly on… right through” … or, “Differentiation + Linkage = Integration”
To write beautiful.
I knew where I was, momentarily.
The paradox: making awareness an habit.
By definition a habit, meditative or otherwise, becomes somewhat “automatic” and therefore something other than “awareness” or novel or differentiated… and yet…
Taking in the good… being lived…
“Implicitly, and more fundamentally, this practice means a relaxed opening into the love – in a very very broad sense – that is the actual nature of everything. Moment by moment, the world and the mind reliably carry you along. This isn’t airy-fairy, it’s real. Our physical selves are woven in the tapestry of materiality, whose particles and energies never fail. The supplies – the light and air, the furniture and flowers – that are present this instant are here, available, whatever the future may hold. So too is the caring and goodwill that others have for you, and the momentum of your own accomplishments, and the healthy workings of your body. Meanwhile, your mind goes on being, while dependably weaving this thought, this sound, this moment of consciousness.
It’s hard to sustain a felt knowing of this nature of everything. The brain evolved to keep our ancestors afraid to keep them alive. But if you look, and look again, you can see directly that right now, and in every now you’re alive, you’re cradled by the world and the mind like a child carried to bed by her mother. This cradling is a kind of love, and when you trust it enough to soften and fall back into it, there’s an untangling of the knots of fear and separation. Then comes both an undoing of the craving that drives suffering and harm, and a freeing and fueling love living through you and as you out into the world.
Imagine a single day in which you were often – not continuously, not perfectly – lived by love. When I try this myself, the events of the day don’t change much -but my experience of them, and their effects, improve dramatically. Consider this as a practice for a day, a week – or the year altogether.
More widely, imagine a world in which many people, enough people – known and unknown, the low and the mighty – were lived by love. As our world teeters on the edge of a sword – and could tip either into realistic prosperity, justice, and peace, or into growing resource wars, despotism, or fundamentalism – it seems to me that it’s not just possible for a critical mass of human hearts to be lived by love. It’s necessary.
How?
The essence of this practice is a yielding into all that lives you. This is a paradigm shift from the typical top-down, subtly contracted, moving-out-from-a-unified-center-of-view-and-action way of operating . . . to a relaxed receptive abiding, feeling supported by the ocean of causes creating each momentary wave of awareness. Then on this basis, there is an encouraging of love in all its forms to flow through you. The suggestions that follow are different ways to do this, and you can also find your own.
Soften and open in the heart. Notice that you are alright right now: listen to your body telling your brain that you are basically OK. Feel the fullness that is already here, all the perceptions and thoughts and feelings pop-pop-popping in this moment of consciousness. Feel the buoying currents of nature and life, waves of gifts from over 3 billion years of evolution on our blue and green pebble. Look around and see objects, including your own hands and body, and consider the unfailing generosity of the material realm, blossoming for over 12 billion years from a seed of light.
Be aware of the warmth and good will from others toward you. Sense your connecting to others, how you are supported by a net of relationships. They don’t have to be perfect. Some people do care about you. You are almost certainly loved.
Feel carried by consciousness, the effortless knowing of perception and thought. When stress, worry, pressure, or pain appear in the mind, see that the fabric of this suffering – the underlying operating of the mind – is itself fine, is always already fine.
Again and again making this little but profound shift, this giving over to the carrying cradling of mind and matter, you can afford to let your own love flow freely. Bring this down to earth: if you lived from love in your first encounter with another person today, how would you be, what would you do, how would you speak? What would a week, a year, be like in which you lived by love? How about trying this? Who knows, if enough people share in this practice, the world could become a much better place.”
– Rick Hanson, Just One Thing-
Differentiation
Linkage
Integration
Difference
Similarities
Meaning
Perception
Mayhem. Chaos. Disregulation. Con-fusion.
Brokenness. Openness. Wounds. Seeping.
Connecting. Contaminating. Communicating. Constructing.
In other words: fly on… ride through. Take note, make it a habit to take note. Attend, automatically attend. Love, freely, openly, love.
PARTICIPATE.
There is so very much good happening. Arriving, passing through, departing… HAPPENING.
Don’t forget. Don’t ignore.
Beauty. Hands. Hair. Voices. Language. Gestures. Meanings.
the PROCESS.
ENJOY. DELIGHT. LAUGH. NOTICE.
Fly on.
Ride through.
Notice (differentiate, conceive, perceive, attend)
Link (conjoin, participate, connect, find similarity, solidarity)
Integrate (make meaning, story, intention, purpose, gratitude)
Novelty Similacrum Meaning
I have felt overwhelmed by meanings. Flooded with good. Surprised by kindness. Taken off guard (guards unnecessary) by humans. How much good there is — children discovering, struggling; coyotes chasing cars; peacocks squawking; handshakes and smiles; innovations and ideas; hopes and dreams; sounds and shapes; disappointments and losses; grief and gratitude; desire and refusal; romance and death…
BEING LIVED
a body materially exchanging, interacting, interoperating with all the materials that surround it
a consciousness, awareness alert to emotion, interpretation, possibilities and limitations
a being responsive to other being
LIVING
in the midst of
and with
alongside
and because of
interacting
exploring
interpreting
engaging
SWARMING
existence
BEING LIVED
-all images – Lukas Felzmann, Swarm; music – Coldplay, Ghost Stories
Places
The Essence of Place
“To record the essence of a place, so that it can be inhabited by something outside itself, is to start a story. This means searching for a language, one that we know intuitively but cannot spell out.”
-Lukas Felzmann, Landfall–
“The time has come to talk of whatever we want”
-Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, Xenia–
“the work drives beyond promise, craving and time”
-Louis Zukofsky, Prepositions–
Sometimes there were birds there. They passed through in groups, in swoops.
I’ve seen people there too, but not swooping or grouping. It just isn’t that kind of place.
It felt large and open yet cloistered, contained. There were large trees all around and throughout. Somehow it seemed level.
I don’t recall there being water, but I believe it staid nearby. As if it were ready for when it was needed.
I’ve no memory of critters or pets, cycles or frogs. Only birds that might swarm like the leaves filling trees as they swayed.
Oh my, but the blur! The soft focus in apprehending! It rocks and it waves, it flows through you while sitting, I say!
I wonder the eyelids of storms. I leap lying down. I silently sing out the shrieking of birds. I love in this place. As wild or as calm as is needed, a respondent surround.
When I’m here I try to tell you, by searching for words or the making of pictures. That don’t capture.
Have you wandered here before? To the essence of a place?
Please do tell me or show me what’s yours…
N Filbert 2012
New Arrivals…New Invaluables
“meant to detect just how slushed our insides were from too much speech, how blighted we’d become from the language toxin…
The know-it-alls are always the last to know. Everyone’s a diagnostician, and everyone’s wrong…”
-Ben Marcus-
“As is usual with me I would not go on with the rest of the story and come back to the difficult sentence later. With others it may be different – but when I am that far in a work the story must exist in each word or I cannot go on…”
-Louis Zukofsky-
-Lukas Felzmann-
I know….there’s a LOT of envy fuming out of you readers eyes!
(use your local library!)
Swarm. Absorb. (the words, pt. 2)
Swarm. Absorb.
metaphor: the entire discography of Mark Kozelek (+ Sun Kil Moon, Red House Painters) / each version of Max Richter’s “Haunted Ocean” on dizzying random repeat – this is the setting: atmosphere. environment. “context.”
metaphor: the Kansas sky in storm
metaphor: dealing with Ache. (“being human”)
metaphor: “Control without Hierarchy” by Deborah M. Gordon…on some page in a book called Swarm by Lucas Felzmann:
“A flock of birds turning in the sky is doing something that people don’t know how to do: moving together, beautifully, without a leader or choreographer. It’s a spectacular version of the collective behavior that goes on everywhere, in groups of animals and among cells within our bodies…Life in all its forms is messy, surprising, and complicated. It’s difficult to imagine how any social group could be organized without any hierarchy. We are used to hierarchy as the principle that organizes human institutions. Think of companies, armies, governments, orchestras, schools, and clubs – without any person directing another, or having more power than another. Although we are so accustomed to hierarchy that we think of it as necessary, it is rare in nature.”
think of language.
what is scattered widely or uniquely ubiquitous – call it “swarm.”
“I”…lost.
I know I cannot gather to a grown pillar of I-ness, something you might recognize, could “identify.”
I know I cannot be where I am as long as “time” and “space” function effectively in my frames of reference…
I spread.
I swarm.
“I-swarm”
(the “human” world-situation)
Leaving that aside.
How might one (dependent on two or more in order to, well, in order to simply “be”)
how might that one (singular mark – “/”) handle (manage? survive?) “its” Ache?
“To be or not to be, that IS the question”
(o wise god)
So I split…up…
I canvas the sky, the context, the landscape, the sitz im leben, in fragments.
I approach, engage, invade the world like shot scattered from the anguished burst of a wombgun.
I-particle.
I-swarm.
Absorb.
Seminal-syllable words resound –
– Let their pulse reverberate your bodies like hymns –
God. Void. I. You. Song. Life. Death. Love. Real. Being. (Not).
and so on…
all with no definition…
IS. IT. THIS.
nowhere near
where we mean to be.
Absorb.
Swarm.
In this situation then,
of too much
of grave luck
(all that hope and final destitution)
I swarm. I absorb.
I decenter. I explode.
I desist in pretense
in sense
I spread.
One mark….thousands of pixels….without hierarchy
(a swarm of cells)
(a flock of birds)
(a fish in school)
I swarm.
I absorb.
[ – I love you – ]
-for my wife
All my Words are Silent 