I'm good at hiding.

This is a pretty good reason why I love the internet.
Go ahead and call me a crazy cat-lady. I just don't care.
With all the mindless drivel, with all the crap that can easily make me depressed, it's things like this that make me stop, smile, and just puts me in a really good mood. I need more animated gifs like this. I haven't made a cats, paws and poofy-pants post in a while. Very behind. Hopefully, sometime this week, with pictures of Atlas and Enzo.

Therapy, or analysis, is not only something that analysts do to patients; it is a process that goes on intermittently in our individual soul-searching, our attempts at understanding our complexities, the critical attacks, prescriptions, and encouragements we give ourselves. We are all in therapy all the time insofar as we are involved in soul-making.

James Hillman — Re-visioning Psychology, 1975

source: UrbanNautica

When I wake up, I wake to something worse. It's the astonishment of being myself.

–– Jorge Luis Borges

BARNSTONE: I have some questions. Maybe wordy, but your answers won't be.

BORGES: They will be laconic, yes?

BARNSTONE: We know that conciousness resides in every other human being, yet we possess an awareness of only our own mind. At times we wake, as it were, to a puzzling knowledge of the mind's separate existence.

BORGES: Well, but this is a question on the nature of solipsism, no? Now, I don't believe in solipsism, because if I did I'd go mad. But of course it is a curious fact that we exist.

At the same time, I feel I am not dreaming you, or, let's put it the other way, that you are not dreaming me. But this fact of wondering at life may stand for the essence of poetry. All poetry consists in feeling things as being strange, while all rhetoric consists in thinking of them as quite common, as obvious. Of course I am puzzled by the fact of my existing, of my existing in a human body, of my looking through eyes, hearing through ears, and so on. And maybe everything I have written is a mere metaphor, a mere variation on that central theme of being puzzled by things. In that case, I suppose, there's no essential difference between philosophy and poetry, since both stand for the same kind of puzzlement. Except that in the case of philosophy the answer is given in a logical way, and in the case of poetry you use metaphor. If you use language, you have to use metaphors all the time. Since you know my works (well, let the word go at that I don't think of them as works, really), since you know my exercises, I suppose you have felt that I was being puzzled all the time, and I was trying to find a foundation for my puzzlement.

BARNSTONE: In Cincinnati when an admirer said "May you live one thousand years," you answered "I look forward happily to my death." What did you mean by that?

BORGES: I mean that when I'm unhappy––and that happens quite often to all of us––I find a real consolation in the thought that in a few years, or maybe in a few days, I'll be dead and then all this won't matter. I look forward to being blotted out. But if I thought that my death was a mere illusion, that after death I would go on, then I would feel very, very unhappy. For, really, I'm sick and tired of myself. Now, of course if I go on and I have no personal memory of ever having been Borges, then in that case it won't matter to me because I may have been hundreds of odd people before I was born, but those things won't worry me, since I will have forgotten them. When I think of mortality, or death, I think of those things in a hopeful way, in an expectant way. I should say I am greedy for death, that I want to stop waking up every morning, finding: Well, here I am, I have to go back to Borges.

There's a word in Spanish, I suppose you know. I wonder if it's any longer in use. Instead of saying "wake up," you say recordarse, that is, to record yourself, to remember yourself. My mother used to say Que me recuedre a las ocho "I want to be recorded to myself at eight." Every morning I get that feeling because I am more or less nonexistent. Then when I wake up, I always feel I'm being let down. Because, well, here I am. Here's the same old stupid game going on. I have to be somebody. I have to be exactly that somebody. I have certain commitments. One of the commitments is to live through the whole day. Then I see all that routine before me, and all things naturally make me tired. Of course when you're young, you don't feel that way. You feel, well, I am so glad I'm back in this marvelous world. But I don't think I ever felt that way. Even when I was young. Especially when I was young. Now I have resignation. Now I wake up and I say: I have to face another day. I let it go at that. I suppose people feel in different ways because many people think of immortality as a kind of happiness, perhaps because they don't realize it.

BARNSTONE: They don't realize what?

BORGES: The fact that going on and on would be, let's say, awful.

BARNSTONE: Would be another hell, as you say in one of your stories.

BORGES: Yes, it would be, yes. Since this life is already hell, why go in for more and more hell, for larger and larger doses!

BARNSTONE: For two hundred years?

BORGES: Yes. Well, of course you might say that those two hundred years don't exist. For what really exists is the present moment. The present moment being weighted down by the past and by the fear of the future. Really, when do we speak of the present moment? For the present moment is as much an abstraction as the past of the future. In the present moment, you always have some kind of past and some kind of future also. You are slipping all the time from one to the other.

BARNSTONE: But obviously you have great moments of pleasure during your life.

BORGES: Yes, I suppose everybody has. But I wonder. I suppose those moments are perhaps finer when you remember them. Because when you're happy, you're hardly conscious of things. The fact of being conscious makes for unhappiness.

BARNSTONE: To be conscious of happiness often lets in an intrusion of doubt.

BORGES: But I think I have known moments of happiness. I suppose all men have. There are moments, let's say, love, riding, swimming, talking to a friend, let's say, conversation, reading, even writing, or rather, not writing but inventing something. When you sit down to write it, then you are no longer happy because you're worried by technical problems. But when you think out something, then I suppose you may be allowed to be happy. And there are moments when you're slipping into sleep, and then you feel happy, or at least I do. I remember the first time I had sleeping pills. (They were efficient, of course, since they were new to me.) I used to say to myself: Now hearing that tramway turn around the corner, I won't be able to hear the end of the noise it makes, the rumble, because I'll be asleep. Then I felt very, very happy. I thought of unconsciousness.

BARNSTONE: Do you care about literary recognition? Do you want fame?

BORGES: No, No! Those things are nonexistent. At the same time, when it comes to me––and it may come to me––I feel that I should be grateful. I mean if people take me seriously, I think, well, they are wrong. At the same time I should be thankful to them.

BARNSTONE: Do you live for the next poem, story, or essay or conversation?

BORGES: Yes. Yes, I do.

BARNSTONE: It seems to me that you're a lucky man to have unending obsessions to create and to record. Do you know why you had that destiny of being a writer? That destiny of that obsession?

BORGES: The only thing I know is that I need those obsessions. Because if not, why should I go on living? Of course, I wouldn't commit suicide. But I should feel very unjustified. This doesn't mean I think very much of what I write. It means that I have to write. Because if I don't write something and keep on being obsessed by it, then I have to write it and be rid of it.

. . .

BARNSTONE: To go to reverie... you speak much of dream. What do you mean by dream? How is a dream different from any other state of wakefulness?

BORGES: Because a dream is creation. Of course wakefulness may be a creation: part of our solipsism and so on. But you don't think of it in that way. In the case of a dream, you know that all that comes from yourself, whereas, in the case of waking experience, many things may come to you that don't come out of yourself, unless you believe in solipsism. Then you are the dreamer all the time, whether waking or sleeping. I don't believe in solipsism. I don't suppose anybody really does. The essential difference between the waking experience and the sleeping or dreaming experience must lie in the fact that the dreaming experience is something that can be begotten by you, created by you, evolved out of you.

. . .

BARNSTONE: There's a lot of fun in you, Borges. You're very childlike, you enjoy things, you have tremendous humor.

BORGES: Well, I should, after all. I wonder if I'm really grown up. I don't suppose anybody is.

BARNSTONE: No, none of us is. When I was unhappy in the past, in love, some foolish things like that––

BORGES: No, not foolish. Those things are a part of every human experience. I mean the fact of loving and not being loved, that is a part of every biography, no? But if you came to me and said: I am in love with so-and-so, she's rejected me. I think that every human being can say that. Everyone has been rejected, and has rejected also. Both things stand out in everyone's life. Someone is turning down someone or being turned down. It's happening all the time. Of course when it happens to us, as Heine said, then we're very unhappy.

BARNSTONE: Sometimes when I was unhappy I wanted to die, but I knew that this was just a sign that I wanted to live...

––Borges at Eighty, Conversations: When I Wake Up

She also does a decent cover of Donovan.
And I do love me some Donovan.

source: GorillavsBear

I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the people that I have loved; all the cities I have visited.

–– Jorge Luis Borges

I love Steven Alan. So flirty and feminine, yet so simple, clean, and elegant.

The first set of images are pulled from the Spring Collection and the last three are pulled from the Resort Collection. I especially love the short-haired model's make-up, a strong brow with subtle pink hues. I dont really wear make-up often, but looking natural, wearing make-up so it looks like you're not wearing make-up, is really the way to go.

source: Steven Alan

About a month ago, I fell in love with this series via UrbanNautica. I'm just as much in love with color theory as I was ten years ago. In many ways, these remind me of Agnes Martin paintings. So calming. I like the hazy washed out sky, the desaturated colors paired with texture in the landscape.
I don't get jealous of too many photographers. This is an exception.

sources: Carlos Jiménez Cahua, UrbanNautica

I have a crush on Michael Fassbender.
I think I know why. He shares a striking resemblance to a certain someone I know.

Bobby Sands: When you're hung from a cross you're gonna say anything. Jesus offers him a seat next to his daddy in a place called paradise you're always gonna put your hand up and have a piece of that.

Bobby Sands: I have my belief and in all its simplicity. That is the most powerful thing.

source: Mubi, My Mubi

It’s one thing to make a picture of what a person looks like, it’s another thing to make a portrait of who they are.

– Paul Caponigro

Zion National Park

I'd like to stay away from my computer... if at all possible, (not always possible) for the next two weeks. All posts within that time will be scheduled posts, with the possible exception of one from the road.

483
The enemies of Truth
Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.

490
The Illusions of Idealists
All idealists imagine that the cause which they serve is essentially better than all other causes, and will not believe that if their cause is really to flourish it requires precisely the same evil-smelling manure which all other human undertakings have need of.

508
Free Nature
We are so fond of being out among Nature, because it has no opinions about of us.

586
The Hour-Hand of Life
Life consists of rare single moments of the greatest importance, and of countless intervals during which, at best, the phantoms of those moments hover around us. Love, the spring, every fine melody, the mountains, the moon, the sea––all speak, but once fully to the heart, if, indeed, they ever do quite attain to speech. For many people have not those moments at all, and are themselves intervals and pauses in the symphony of actual life.

605
The Danger in Free Opinions
Frivolous occupation with free opinions has a charm, like a kind of itching; if one yields further, one begins to chafe the places; until at last an open, painful wound results; that is to say, until the free opinion begins to disturb and torment us in our position in life and in our human relations.

606
Desire for Sore Affliction
When passion is over it leaves behind an obscure longing for it, and even in disappearing it casts a seductive glance at us. It must have afforded a kind of pleasure to have been beaten with this scourge. Compared with it, the more moderate sensations appear insipid; we still prefer, apparently, the more violent displeasure to the languid delight.

625
Lonely People
Some people are so much accustomed to being alone in self-communion that they do not at all compare themselves with others, but spin out their soliloquizing life in a quiet, happy mood, conversing pleasantly, and even hilariously, with themselves. If, however, they are brought to the point of comparing themselves with others, they are inclined to a brooding underestimation of their own worth, so that they have first to be compelled by others to form once more a good and just opinion of themselves, and even from this acquired opinion they will always want to subtract and abate something. We must not, therefore, grudge certain persons their loneliness or foolishly commiserate them on that account, as is often done.

Friedrich Nietzsche – Human, All Too Human: Man Alone by Himself

I went home for the Holidays. Actually, just for Christmas. New Years was spent in Topeka, Kansas… I really never would have thought I'd ever ring in the New Year in Kansas. Ever.

It's always strange to go back to the place you grew up. There is that person you were in the past associated with home and then there is the new person that is now dissociated with home. I think this feeling occurs because, typically, we've created a new home, either in an entirely new location, or within ourselves. And it doesn't relate to the old home we knew as a child.

This feeling exists even with family. I find myself wondering how much do I know my family and how much do they really know me? If it takes a lifetime to get to know someone, how can you really know a person? Maybe if I share the same DNA, I should automatically feel connected and in this connectedness know them well, but I don't think this is appropriate thinking. Everyone has inner chambers that refuse to be penetrated. I've often wondered if this is where true love happens… when two people feel safe enough to reveal their true identities, to risk feeling vulnerable from sharing their core selves. Maybe that's how two people arrive at home together. Being someone who doesn't believe in romantic love, it's something I think about often. Is home always a place? Or does it change wherever one moves? Is it a house or apartment you decide on as home? Or is it carried with you at all times?

Since I drove to Ohio, I had a good 18 hours to think about it, both there and back. One thing is for sure, I now feel more at home in the West than I ever have in the East. This is certainly not meant to insult my family. This is something that has been growing over time. The more time that is spent in Colorado and exploring the remoteness of the West, the more I've fallen in love with its wilderness and all it offers. I can't get enough of it.

I'll be turning 31 soon. Over the past three years, I've created a new birthday tradition. Every birthday is spent somewhere within nature. One was spent in Rocky Mountain National Park, another on the top of Pikes Peak, and last year, the Sand Dunes. This year it will be on escarpments in the Canyonlands. I'm giddy in anticipation.

Above is me on Pikes Peak (2010). More back of self pictures to come.

Life is a sum of all your choices.

— Albert Camus

The future is not a result of choices among alternative paths offered by the present, but a place that is created--created first in the mind and will, created next in activity. The future is not some place we are going to, but one we are creating. The paths are not to be found, but made, and the activity of making them, changes both the maker and the destination.

— John Schaar

I've said it before, I do not like New Years. I'm not someone who makes New Years resolutions either. I tried explaining my resolution-views recently, he either didn't understand what I was saying or he just didn't care. (Probably the latter, but still a worthwhile conversation.)

Those who make resolutions, often set themselves up for failure. They want dramatic change, right away.

Large life changes take time. If you try to force them... the change just won't happen. You can't adjust fast enough and the result is falling back on old habits, or possibly substituting them with similar, unhealthy habits.

This past year, I set goals throughout the year, rather than the beginning. I kept them manageable, allowed for setbacks, but I was steadfast (and stubborn) in making them happen. When I set my sights on something, I am determined. I want to follow through and I usually do.

One thing you can count on from me is more of these in 2012... to be taken in a tropical getaway and also a very remote, rural location abroad. They'll happen.

I understand why so many love New Years. It does feel good to leave a year (people, places, things, memories) behind. Starting fresh is always appealing.

2012, I'm ready.