Corr, brother Paul

Correspondence: April 9th, 2006

PAulBear,

Thanks for the exam luck, likewise to you my partner in crime. I just can’t fucking wait for this summer to begin, despite how much I’ve enjoyed my studies this year.

The summer takes me far away to work with beautiful people and learn from them. I also wish to turn within and discover more about myself. I’ll be traveling across the country to plant trees, though I’ve been having doubts about my physical abilities. I’ve been training for the contract, not too hard mind you, and my knees aren’t exactly keeping up. I sincerely hope for the best.

As for your job, it sounds pretty damn cool. No matter what, you can’t completely stop kids from expressing themselves with spray paint and markers, but I’m sure there are a few things that can help. Sometimes “working-with” is better than “working-against”. Here in Halifax there’s this wall. It is an old open parking lot dug into the side of the sloping landscape. Since it’s dug into the side of a hill, a retaining wall had to be built to keep the ground from collapsing into the lot. The wall is huge and stretches along the perimeter of two sides of “the pit”. Graffiti artists across Canada come to tag their work there. The only people who paint over it are other graffiti artists, the city has accepted its fate as homage to culture and the parking lot has become quite an attraction to everyone. Perhaps in Kingston there can be a similar location established/discovered/donated?

I hope Alley is doing well. Not too long ago I had to tell Ace not let the spell of a girl take his attention away from his youthful growth. Girlfriend’s are nice to have, but they can be distracting to that deeply personal growth which is still important and exists far inside anywhere a girl could ever reach. But I’m sure you know this already.

I’ve had a bit of a roller coaster myself.

As you read, I met a girl names Leandra and fell into something. She’s a 17 year old girl, brought up Hindu and educated entirely at home by her parents (makes things interesting). Her parents, who own a hippy-incense-wooden earring-hackysack-selling store, and who live out in the country with 9 goats and a dog, also named her Lakshmi (which, in traditional Hindu scripture, is the goddess of wealth and beauty, and the wife of Vishnu, God of protection). It’s very interesting to hear stories of her life growing up touring the world. The way she thinks is so different than anyone I know. A lot of the time I can’t relate to her at all, but we clicked strongly at first. I spent almost 3 days straight with her and even took a bus out to the country to see her parents on her mom’s birthday. I think we became over exposed to each other very rapidly, but we couldn’t stand to be apart. Be "damned if you do or don’t" kinda thing. Yesterday there was really strong and threatening energy between us, I didn’t understand it. I was trying to be as open as I could be she had something strong on her mind. I’m beginning to think that this is that kind of scenario where there remains a difference in each person, and words and actions are taken different ways. You know when you get really excited for the first couple days and then suddenly there remains no substance to anything; whenever I try to start a mindful conversation it just dies. There’s no inclination or interest, time for a break I guess. I think we’re in the second stage of acceptance, where you notice differences and negativity. I began to think that maybe I was letting her become a distraction to what should be equally important to me right now, like school and friends and spring training. I told her I wanted to bake vegan cookies with her this afternoon. I’m diggin’ this hole deeper… but I’ll let you know what comes of it.

So about your life, I thought about what you said in the shower and assembled some of my own advice. Here’s what I think about it all.

Imagine life as a path. As you walk forward continuously, you are introduced to experiences, your knowledge expands, your judgments and perceptions introduce you to more and more, and you fall in and out of various kinds of habits. While all these things are happening your consciousness is the only thing that remains consistent, it is exposed to everything you encounter. You are a conscious being in control of a mechanical tool we call a body. As you make progress and advance on your path, so much changes and you notice things you want to change. So you say you’ll change your path, and you turn your mechanical tool, consciously come to terms with your negative habits, and mentally make the decision to have a revolution within yourself. Whether, in the future, you come back to old habits or not, some call this process “changing-the-path”.

My friend Joanna (Corr. Joanna 1/26/2006) thinks about it like this. You’re on one single path, which could have begun when you were born, or long before your physical body was introduced to your spirit and conscious mind.

The difference between this reflection and the changing-path concept is that the life path never diverges. You are constantly on one path. Much like in the other reflection, you can only move forward along this path. You come across things physically, mentally and spirit

ually and all parts of you are open to perception. You’ll come across obstacles, and your journey is accompanied by longs spells of negativity. These spells can bring you to negative states of consciousness and have tendencies to return when you think they’ve passed.

Imagine someone who gets into drug habits. Use of drugs causes them to have strong emotional and spiritual experiences at the cost of physically prompting various aspects and reactions within their conscious mind. There becomes a longing to achieve these experiences regularly and the sober mind no longer provides satisfactory stimulation. This may continue until all spiritual force is lost, or until a change is made. A sequence of enlightened decisions suddenly causes this person to stop their use and turn inward. They begin to find emotional pride within, as well as stimulation from sobriety, and they begin to have spiritual experiences that grow, un-aided, with each perception. Eventually they feel like they’ve reached a new place in their lives, they imagine that their consciousness has evolved past negativity. They describe this as having taken a new path.

This same person, who feels like they’ve grown past their habits and addictions, continues along this new path. Some time passes and then they begin to collect old habits again. Starting with not so harmful substances, this person is slowly re-introduced to the same seriously negative habits as before. This path, as it turns out, has also led them the wrong way, and soon enough they will turn and start along another path.

Now think of this in a new light. Using the concept mentioned earlier, think of this person’s sequence as all one path. Their entire life has begun and progressed along the same path. You travel forward on the same path always, picking things up and letting them go as you continue. Along this path you never start a new, and you never go back to the beginning of anything as the path never changes and movement is indefinitely forward. Along this path, every experience is a lesson, and from every experience you take things with you and grow. The person in the drug story always progressed forward on the same path. When they became enlightened for a brief period of time and put their drugs away, it, itself, was an experience.

You come a long way on your path by learning from mistakes and acknowledging habits. Revolutions are not a change of path, rather part of your enlightenment, and taking action is part of your journey. No matter what habits you dismiss, the possibility of reverting to them remains indefinitely. Your life path is infinite as you march on. Even if you think you’ve chosen a new path, there is only ever one path you can take at a time. Your consciousness remains infinite along this path as your spirituality evolves and deconstructs and your body is temporary. Changing yourself is just changing the manner in which you move forward.

I’m so happy to hear you’ve decided to take science over econ. Although, whatever you do it will be hard work, and I know how strong you can be. Put your %100 into absolutely everything, you life is moving fast, like you said, so take the thing by the horns and drive it with everything you’ve got until the bitter end. Remember, you are your actions, but your actions depend on your decisions, and your decisions depend on your judgment, and your judgment depends on your perceptions, and all of this is your consciousness.

I miss you dear bro, I’ll see you very soon!

I’ll be in Ottawa 25th-28th.

Love Phillium