spleen

That mind of winter

Preston — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 19:19:48 +0000

To step away from the self and into something like ash or moonlight, to descend to the street and feel the winter sun drop a fat snowy paw onto your back – these are great reasons for waking up and returning to your silly body. Every morning, I am spun back into my mind, and by noon I'm stuck again in the minutiae, the vague quotidian entropy of any given day. But today I have snow to love, and all of these things — integrals and derivatives, prosodies and fragile grammars, bills and dread of bills, the words words words of a seemingly quiet life — drift away like last year's leaves. Today I am self-made and self-unmade, no one in a world of no ones, the nothing that knows what nothing is.

While reading the Dalai Lama

Preston — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 12:05:46 +0000

Life is suffering. This is universal – we are going to be lonely, grow hungry, get sick and die, and along the way, we are going to experience a great deal of pain. Humans respond to suffering as all animals do – we attempt to overpower each other, and take from one another whatever we think will ease our pain. This is a very general description of the movement of history: someone seizes power, someone abuses power, someone teaches their children to seize and abuse power. But all of this only perpetuates and intensifies the suffering. To step out of it, to ease or even overcome it, we must do something that isn't suffering. We have to love one another. Love is the beginning of any spiritual practice, and if we can understand and embrace that, if we treat love as our higher practice, then perhaps we can learn about all of these other things that extend from love and enrich it. No matter how we may agree or disagree about matters of the spirit, we can all agree that all humans respond to and desperately need compassion and kindness. And if we can all agree to that, then we have something universal upon which to build – something that isn't our universal suffering.

Autumnal

Preston — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 14:20:13 +0000

I am clean and unmade, I unfold and stretch, I am new canvas

just to say

Preston — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 18:57:33 +0000

If you want to awaken the people, start with art. If art fails, try entertainment. If entertainment fails, try religion. But whatever you do, don't resort to war. War is a failure of the imagination. It is a refuge for the grim and the dumb.

The Birthday Season

Preston — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 14:46:39 +0000

concrete heart

morning view

dinner

birthday