"I was playing hide-and-go-seek with M. and found mommy's pot in the closet." -- J.'s 10 year old daughter.

I am humbled by the spectacle of creation.

"If all consciousness is subject to essential laws in a manner similar to that in which spatial reality is subject to mathematical laws, then these essential laws will be of most fertile significance in investigating facts of the conscious life of human and brute animals."
-Edmund Husserl

Like a flashlight in a dark room, consciousness can only illuminate a small area at any given time. We rarely stop to question where the flashlight points and why, or what the effects of it pointing in one direction as opposed to another are. I would argue that the effects are profound. A number of seemingly distinct psychic struggles find a common origin in misplaced focus.

Happiness is focusing on what you have as opposed to what you don't have. Self-esteem is focusing on what you like about yourself as opposed to what you don't like. Enthusiasm is focusing on what you like about an endeavor as opposed to what you don't like.

Darkness is palpable in the wake of firecrackers that splutter across an empty sky. We want to throw caution to the wind but convention restrains us.

Sunlight slipped through gaps in the venetian blinds and imbued the running water with iridescent highlights. The water was hot and felt good on my dry hands. It felt like maybe I was washing a part of me as I scrubbed an off-white bowl.
"I don't want you to worry," she said.
I waited. "If I can't even help one person, I can't help anyone."

Prostitution is a symptom, not the cause. Salvation is psychic, not tangible. J. may have stopped but she is still secretive and ashamed: she hasn't really healed. She needs to own it instead of letting it own her. G-d puts us through trials so that we can grow and learn. We should be proud of what we've been through, not ashamed. J. has been to hell and back and lived to tell the tale. She's been through horror's we can't even begin to imagine, and somehow, despite it all, she's full of light. That's not something to be ashamed of.

Real salvation is achieved through targeting the cause. We live in a world where everything is disposable. Apathy has come to envelop people too. It's not just about prostitution. It's so much bigger than that. How many of us have felt worthless at some point or other? How many of us have felt disposable? G-d give us the strength to heal.

What's going to happen to x, not what's going to happen, is what gets us to follow a narrative, because we are accustomed to synthesizing characters through time (i.e. identifying--ourselves and others), and we do it with fictional characters. The gaps between scenes are much broader than we recognize because of how we make arbitrary brackets distinguishing a part and a whole. A movie? There's no such thing as a movie. The distinctions we make between homogeneous and heterogeneous frame the way we see everything.

At Last

I've been too visual to write coherently, so I'll update with a few excerpts leading up to production.

Sunday evening, I'm running as fast as I can though I'm not quite sure from what--responsibility perhaps?--in any case, the important thing is to stop running, but for the life of me, it's hard; I've lost perspective you see, and fear lurks in the darkness, fear of failure, fear of challenge; my whole body is wracked by fear; tension runs like electricity along muscle fibers and reverberates through all that is me; "fear of god," said Jeff. What am I going to do about it? It's hard to say. Drink. No. Write. Yes. This is the beginning, this is the boon, the beauty, the blessing, the grace: how lucky we are to have this indispensable tool and how ungrateful to use it so infrequently that it collects dust in the darkness....

****

You are the blink of an eye, the time it takes a leaf to drift to the pavement, a break in the clouds or a cloud that scuttles over the moon, a raindrop that ripples the surface for a brief second before submerging. Everything will continue as it was before and nobody will know the difference.

Wonders creeps like vines over the skein of reality, entwining the mundane with ineffable glory; for those who choose to see it, the mystery is intoxicating. I trace my fingers over the curvature of space and time and crumple dreams between my thumb and index fingers; I destroy civilizations with a casual glance and forge chaos from bars of gleaming darkness. Life curls and unfurls and wraps around itself, repeats itself, destroys and recreates itself and we are victims swept up by the tumultuous sea.

I saw Monica sitting cross-legged on the bed when I entered the room. I sat down next to her, placed a pillow on her lap, and rested my head on it. She ran her hands through my hair and asked me if everything was alright.
"I was offered a lumping job. I don't know if I should take it or not."
"You should stay." It felt good having her run her hands through my hair like that. "Your work here isn't finished."
A blue shirt draped over a corrugated lamp shade dimmed the only light source available in the room. Monica must have put it there to accommodate her failing vision.
"What are you going to do when you go blind?" I once asked.
"Vision's not that important," was her reply.
The dim light hugged the contour of her jaw.