not the same man...

If you love a person, you say to that person, “Look, I love you, whatever that may be. I’ve seen quite a bit of it and I know there’s lots that I haven’t seen, but still it’s you and I want you to be what you want to be. And I won’t be happy if I’ve got you in a cage. You’d be a bird without song.

Often times when we are wronged, we naively believe that in order to be aligned with divine forgiveness, we are supposed to allow this person the same access to our lives that they once had. Also false. Forgiveness is freeing yourself from the resentment or pain that this person caused you and enabling feelings of freedom through this understanding that respectful absence can be a form of forgiveness as well. Not everyone whom desires access to your life, your heart, and your spirit are worthy of the access they seek. Protect it. Your time is your most valuable asset. By all means be selfless to those whom will appreciate it. But to continuously allow yourself to be used and suffer through other’s actions, you’re doing no one any justice. Take care of you first so that you can take care of your purpose and be all that you were meant to.

We all have bullets beneath our skin
we pray our lovers won’t flinch at when they find.

The doctor sits me on a table and asks me to stick out my tongue.
I do.

I ask him if he sees the paintings I carry in the back of my throat.
He laughs as if I’m telling a joke,
I’m not.

I’ve got Basquiat, Schiele, Van Gogh, and Da Vinci
so when I laugh, I taste brushstrokes.

I ask him if he can stick out his tongue
so I can see what he has trapped inside of him.

He hesitates a little then he does and I see a man who
struggles for acceptance and chokes on the word
Love.

I see a lot of pretty amazingly bad global warming denial online. It ranges from mildly cherry-picked data to such baldly transparent garbage that you have to wonder if the person who wrote it can possibly, actually believe what they are saying is true. After reading dozens, hundreds, of such mind-numbing articles, I think we’ve found a winner. One that is so sweepingly wrong and based on such a ridiculous premise that it’s weapons-grade denial. Unsurprisingly, it was published in the Wall Street Journal, which has a lengthy history of printing reality-free OpEds about climate change. Perhaps surprisingly, it was penned by two actual scientists, William Happer and Harrison Schmitt. I’ll have more about them later. I present to you the article, titled—seriously—“In Defense of Carbon Dioxide”. At least the title isn’t misleading; it really is an article that is saying, “Sure, we’re dumping vast amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere, but don’t worry, because plants love it! We had lots more CO2 in the air millions of years ago and everything was fantastic!

Nonviolence is an inherently privileged position in the modern context. Besides the fact that the typical pacifist is quite clearly white and middle class, pacifism as an ideology comes from a privileged context. It ignores that violence is already here; that violence is an unavoidable, structurally integral part of the current social hierarchy; and that it is people of color who are most affected by that violence. Pacifism assumes that white people who grew up in the suburbs with all their basic needs met can counsel oppressed people, many of whom are people of color, to suffer patiently under an inconceivably greater violence, until such time as the Great White Father is swayed by the movement’s demands or pacifists achieve that legendary “critical mass.

The little I have learnt about this place makes me realise that I am very ignorant about it. It’s a vast continent with huge differences between even neighbouring countries. Like anywhere, it’s full of ordinary people just getting on with their personal, complicated lives. Anyone who claims to be an ‘expert’ on Africa - as if it were a homogeneous region where simple rules apply - is either arrogant or just plain silly

When you recognize that there is a voice in your head that pretends to be you and never stops speaking, you are awakening out of your unconscious identification with the stream of thinking.

The urge to destroy is also a creative urge.