Today was lived in a schism torn through the fabric of time. Somehow inexplicably all of the torments of yesterday were digested overnight and excreted into compact little fragments of total comprehension. The strange feeling of dread which I had been unconsciously harboring suddenly dislodged itself and bubbled up to the surface of my consideration. My body was strong, functioning smoothly and without cravings. There were voices all around me today; my own self grinding against the stone of its own calcification to shear off the musty dusts of years of callous negligence, the mischievous dialects of my soothsayer friends resounding through memory and interfacing across the etheric divide to whisper various messages of psychedelic prognostication into my inner catacombs, and all the while the toasty warm words spread over a thick British accent slicing anecdotes about Zen into my soft gray folds. I had some powerful visions today, and some realizations, some elations, some much needed elasticity stretched into my bands.

Today I was painting. There is this chemical that carries a name so comical that one can't help but chuckle at the linguistic toxicity. This seemingly innocuous brown liquor is a chemical designed for wood, for the boards to suck up into their dermal recesses, to rush in and intoxicate the pulpy fibers effectively cleansing them of all the microcosmic spores and minute mycelium lurking in the pores. It is a thoroughly unnatural cleansing process, a real act of hygiene which reveals how unsanitary human cleanliness can be. It's made from turpentine and turpenoids and other distilled solvents produced from acidic tree excretions, different trees from those that need to be treated, that I am treating to a medicinal dose of distillates. One kind of tree is immune from parasites, is infallible to mushrooms and molds attempting to infiltrate its sinuous skins, but other trees are highly susceptible to the incessant encroachment of the dark decomposers floating through the atmosphere. We kill both trees and combine them together, with the meat of one and the "spirits" of the other, to form a board which is more than wood and less than tree, a timber which is not grown but is made, a combination of natural materials which compose a thoroughly synthetic component of our quintessentially human architectures. After this alchemical sap was applied we moved on to the stain, a delicious cocktail of pure color concocted from plant oils, insect casings, and a combination of exotic mineral dusts collected from around the world. My skin darken under the sun as the sticks darkened under my bristles which made a profoundly intimate impression on me. Such a product is mind blowing - at least on this day, to this mind - in how it can contain representation from all of the "stuffs" of this world and yet remain completely apart from it, absolutely harmful to the person and toxic to the environment, non-water soluble, ozone depleting, cancer causing, unbiodegradable, all for a color. A brilliant color, an unbelievable color due to its purity, something that is found in nature, comes from nature, is natural, is made of nature, yet also completely synthetic to the extent that its materiality amplifies its components through sheer accumulation. We can observe this color in the world but it is always lost amongst the diversity of the landscape, amongst countless other ingredients spicing the nutrients of life. Only here, out of this can, dripping off my brush, impregnating this more-than-wooden board, does it exist in such a high (visual) volume.

Today I listened to a very articulate English gentleman read a very fascinating book about Zen written by the endlessly charming Alan Watts. I've listen to this book before, while driving across Europe in a big white van, definitely while driving through Denmark and Germany, and as I listened to it again today some images of those long lonely journeys came back to me. Mr. Watts cracks open the Taoist, Confucian, and Buddhist histories contributing to the unique cerebral-spiritual practice of Zen in a most reaffirming way, always calling attention to the contradiction inherent in any "study" of such a philosophy - even calling out the fallaciousness of referencing it as a philosophy as such - rather than a way of life. Zen must be lived and experienced, cannot be strived for, defies analytical scrutiny, is completely and irreconcilably illogical. I realize that (to a certain extent) I am this Western subject being defined: academic, rational, in search for answers through empirical comparison to what is known, driven by an elucidation of what is unknown, keeping a special compartment down in the basement for the mystical "unknowable" experiences always at a distance from my own distinct lived reality of tentative truths. I have certainly been practicing a process-ing of creating problems to perpetuate more projects, of applying a mechanism of optically oriented, logically lopsided, ontologically omnivorous inquiry towards the transcendental potentials of life. Today I was reminded of this fact and was more so surprised at my realization - because of course I am aware of this and practice it consciously - that perhaps I am no longer interested or invested in pursuing this methodology. I can easily imagine myself living and process-ing another way, so if I am going to continue in my philosophical rambling then I must become wiser as to their potential dangers and initiate the more subversive project of contorting the parallax paradoxes back upon themselves and avoid becoming subject to them, or perhaps I could even drop the empirical project altogether and be all the more satisfied for doing so. Not that I'm about to move to Japan and become a Zen monk. That would be like going to Italy in search for the authentic Italian pizza, which everyone knows was invented in New York. No, the realization I had pertains more to the angle of my trajectory and the application of the accumulated research to my daily life, and of course to my art practice. Everything I read, listen to, think about, and am affected by in general tends to become fodder for some idea about Art, being an artist, making art, or something along those lines. Zen is not about making, it's about growing. The Tao cannot be seen, cannot be described, but can certainly be felt, is already inside me, is the me that I refer to when I say me. There is a reality beyond language that I have tapped into before and that I am continuously interfacing with, so the realization has more to do with my orientation to the language and the experience of the words themselves than a change in life path. It was a subtle shift, but a significant one. I wish to reconcile these two conflicting motivations to my being - of an abstract philosophy of the mind and the concrete reality that I am immersed in - and I believe art is the arena in which to enact it.

Today I thought about my friends that were here recently. I thought about how great they are, how much it pleases me to know them and to know that they live in this world with me, and how important it is that they challenge me so. Mostly I thought about this challenge itself, some inner conflict manifesting out into all of my relationships, a very much welcome friction which has spurred profound creativity and paradigm shifting conversations as well as heart break and headache. These friends whom were part of the group that came to Iceland recently to manifest the opera project, they are truly amazing people that challenge me in the most amazing ways. After the opera project was over I was exhausted and disheartened, as you know from me telling you and also by being a sensitive instrument that can feel it for yourself. It doesn't really matter why. It's not important to recount all of the events that transpired. Today I realized precisely what it is that I am feeling from this event. Today I realized that I no longer wish to be challenged in that way, that I feel more confident and capable in my abilities and interests than I ever have before in my life, and that the thing that I have been looking for these past 3 years has been found. I have begun growing something which sustains me and it makes me feel liberated, a powerful freedom made all the more potent from being sourced from my self, from my own being. During our rehearsals I was very frustrated that my friends were not more flexible with their participation, more receptive to the needs of others, more sensitive to the potentials of the project I was outlining, more willing to explore the idea of the "unknowable" with me. They were critical and unaccepting of the others, acted selfishly with unbelievable hubris, rejected my project which was the reason for us to be assembled in the first place, and seemed generally ungrateful for what I had provided them with, complaining that the situation was always less than ideal. All this is to say that the behavior they demonstrated was much less self-aware and interpersonally tuned than I was expecting, which made me feel outright fucking insane for expecting this of them, as though I didn't really know my friends or my self. In the end they held me accountable for the failure of the situation, and revealed some aspects of how they view me as a person which I found to be deeply disturbing. That also made me feel insane, to hear a description of my self through their trusted vantage points that was so divergent from how I see myself; this was mostly what upset me. Today I realized that perhaps they had a point with this perspective, but that I was no longer that person as I had changed so much over the last 3 years and exponentially in the recent months. I suddenly feel incredibly confident to reconcile the relationships and not hold a grudge, but also to release my grip upon the understanding of the dynamic as such by continuing to pursue that which has brought me here, allowed me to feel so thoroughly enriched, and to leave the darker aspects of my history in the past.

Today I had some powerful ideas about future projects. I could hear the music I want to make next and see clearly what I need to craft it with, which is allowing me to feel completely at ease with selling my equipment now in order to be able to afford these resources when I return to the states. When I'm in New Mexico I will write, and I will build a website, and I will make a prolific bundle of new art works, and also look into acquiring some new skills like carpentry and ceramics! I realized that I am very much looking forward to spending some time in the desert at the height of summer with my parents and making very good use of the time I will have there to concentrate on realizing all of the nuanced percolations of experience I have sprouted during my time in Iceland.

Today I acknowledge that I am completely in love with you while also feeling absolutely grounded in my own sense of self, even if its a dissolving self by which I mean a self which is far less rigid than any self I have previously been. I am active in my own becoming and I know you will be essential in my becoming-able to articulate this person to myself and the world. I am in love with you for what we have and what I believe it can become while also feeling radically open and wonderfully unsure as to how we will continue knowing each other, unraveling and interweaving in and through each other. I am in love with you in a way that I have not been able to be in a long time, because of a tormented relationship to love itself, because I was questioning my love of myself, because I was not available to be loved. I am so surprisingly excited to know you and be communicating with you, and amazingly inspired at the thought of knowing you on a deeper level, and completely ready to encounter you upon a plane of existence that we are equals in constructing. I don't believe in destiny but I do recognize the enchantment of serendipity: we met at exactly the right place at exactly the right time and I intend to pursue you as far as I can until experience proves to me that I should do otherwise, which I don't think it will, in fact will prove quite the contrary, that we have something profound to offer to each other. I am confidently prepared to meet you there and ecstatic at what will and may become of it.