This
for a moment
goes forever

Inhalation forms
then reforms
breath from air

On the art of expressing

Observing but not changing
While feeling and relaying a mood

Intangible expression
And thought

“I thought”

It changes
The moment is gone.

I wanted to write about life itself but I didn’t feel I had the authority. I started anyway, scribbling some words in the pocket notebook, as though a poem in a haphazard sort of way :

from the very air
we exist
inhalation forming
and reforming, exhaled
to the very air
we exist

It’s a difficult subject and I’m not a poet so that’s about as far as I got. The words form the correct narrative, more or less, but it reads terribly. Stilted and odd.

The desire to convey a sort of visual or experiential simile for existence sticks with me though, so I’m going to try it again without the requirements for poetry, or for anything else :

A life can be imagined as a breath. A lifetime’s experience of consciousness and awareness is a reaction, as though a reaction by the air itself to the very act of being formed, existing, and being unformed as a single breath. A life or breath is made individual through this process of being pulled from the vastness of it all.

Finally and always exhaled, there is no ending or death to speak of only the merging and rejoining of the individual back into the air and into life itself.

Just like the breath, your life and mine have a beginning and an end and a transforming, ever-forward, unique and individual experience in-between these two absolutes.

Just like the breath, we are from the vastness of life itself and to that vastness we will eventually return.

And just like the breath, in the here and the now our only requirement is to be.

A single breath has many characteristics, some desirable and some sometimes not, but every breath need only to be a breath to be a precious and wonderful thing.

Just like life. Simply to be here not only enough, it’s the entire answer.

She sits on the floor
Outside tesco every day

She doesn’t ask anything
She just smiles so I smile then look away

But at least she’s happy
I tell myself

As I step around
The ice and the whiskey

She sits on the floor
Outside tesco every day

And I only hope somebody else
Is a better person than I

The traditionally marginalised have more to teach about living with community, kinship, and spirit in the face of rejection, subjection, and abandonment.

A worthwhile future can not be about the ego of I must be heard, when I always have been.

Facilitate the growth of voices and the flow of society from and toward the people who need it. Often by stepping aside.

I’ve started to see the software industry as the biggest con anyway. Creating jobs for the sake of jobs. Artificial boundaries around sharing the output and fruits of creativity and labour, because what we need isn’t a better world - it’s more jobs. We’ve all got the means of production in our hands now, but we’re still toiling away trading our time for scraps at some imaginary table. Building another photo sharing app for the share-holders.

and why is that? Why do you feel unfree to strike out on your own?

That’s something to ponder I suppose. Although self employment wasn’t really what I was getting at. We’re making too many things, and with software and media we’re even imposing totally artificial scarcity on what is physically literally nothing at all, in order to both justify and enable more production, more jobs, and an ever growing financial economy to the detriment of - or more accurately a total apathy toward - everything else.

“Striking out” and doing my own photo sharing app doesn’t really cut it. We all need to stop for a while and look at what we’ve already got in the world, particularly in terms of technology.

A petty example, but I’ve got 8 chat apps on my phone and none of them talk to each other. Most of them come from companies with multi-billion dollar valuations each, and they all basically do the same thing. The same thing XMPP and IRC did 20 years ago.

With all the power of modern technology and communication, that’s what we as a people are working on. Not solutions, not even needs or wants. Just products.

That might sound slightly angrier than I think I am. I’m sure our current systems sounded like a good idea to many when they were devised and implemented, and maybe they were from a certain point of view. But I am a little annoyed at progress (and my own, too) and an apparent inability or unwillingness to see alternatives and improvements to our current mode of living. Although I sense this is changing rapidly.

It has come time for new ideas.

Harrison: “…after that I didn’t need it ever again. That’s the thing about LSD, you don’t need it twice.”

Reporter: “You’ve only taken it once?”

Harrison: “Oh, no. I took it lots of times. Haha. But I only needed it once.”

https://www.rte.ie/news/world/2021/0612/1227767-trip-to-space-with-jeff-bezos-sells-for-28-million/

(38500*35)*20 = 26950000

One unnamed “space tourist” bought a ticket to experience 10 minutes of zero-gravity in low Earth orbit.

The cost of this single ticket would pay the average Irish income for an entire 35 year career, to 20 people.

With $1,050,000 left over.