This time. This time period. In my life, in the world, in history. What is it? How does this make sense? Yin and Yang are greatly out of balance, and soon great evil will be afoot...unless.

How far does a little love in my heart push through the Ether, the network...and, if it helps the world a lot, then was I also responsible for all this suffering and weirdness during those times I allowed my ego to wish curses on my enemies?

Yet, if I were so capable, there would be much greater evidence. Alas, it only happens with the next person I meet, and I've been batting pretty poorly in that area.

So, I take the time to breathe, and practice reconnecting deeply with the Dao the best that I know how.

And, mostly, I feel nurtured, and only feel like I go astray once I let those Demons of Discursive Thought get out of hand.

And, these Demons seem to mostly only appear when I am driving home from work, so now I have the last little bit of trigger/habit snarl of Demons to exorcize, via...exercise, since really, the Tai Chi is the main thing that has been helping realign the body with the mind after the endless traumas of the past few years.

Even when the mind does start to get out of hand, I recognize the triggers, the ways in which the lingering attachments to Ego are but reconnecting me with that old DNA self--the DNA Me, that wants so badly to persist on his own terms, as if that were The Mission.

But then, what is The Mission now? Now that all seems destined to be lost or at least at best made mediocre and mainly full of melancholy...

I breathe...I do deep breathing exercises and look myself in the mirror to give me pep talks, no matter how cheesy and silly they sound. Whatever gets me through the night and day...

And about that.

It's like I'm an untethered soul now. No more parents living on this earth. My wife long distanced and soon divorced. My kids growing ever more distanced. The odds of any magic or miracles seem slim. I work off of routines and mostly sleep and loaf at my ease when there is nothing immediate for me to do. All these stupid books from so many years of trying to become a better human being need to go away.

I need a few books--the Dao and selected similar texts, the I Ching, the Bible (yeah, it will be with me until I die because I do love the most perfect and righteous expression of Jesus, free of judgement, full of love, much like the Buddha), and an intro to Buddhism by Thich Nhat Hanh...

The rest, should be passed on to other scholars and would-be scholars or fellow passengers on the road of life.

I am a Passenger...and I ride and I ride...it was silly to think I was The Driver, in charge of the destiny of my family and myself. I accept that the path of Wu Wei is the only one that can make sense for me now. It is my own understanding of Wu Wei that I'm not to retreat completely from life, but only be involved when and where compelled without contrivance or preconceived ideas of when/where/how to behave. The understanding is that we are all capable of getting in touch with the Natural Way of Heaven, ie, the Virtuous Standard of Being. We know how to be when we keep to the middle. It's when we let our minds and hearts race this way and that, forward and backward through time and space, that we lose touch with the Mandate of Heaven that fills each and every Created Being and even seeps into the rocks.

No AI is a match for the Dao, but very few of us (maybe not even me, and certainly not my sons in the stages they are at) are a match for the coming Way of AI that will look Shiny and Perfect compared to any ancient Natural Way.

Yet, I am no prophet, to be for sure. Perhaps even the Dao itself will right any of the wrong paths AIs send humanity down, via humanity's own collective need to re-connect with the True Life Force that Animates Them.

But, I am by most measures, more a skeptic of anything large numbers of people are touting as a panacea when the utility of it so far for me in my unimportant corner has been hit and miss. And for better or worse, my time spent growing up in the country, camping out every month, even in college taking LSD and sitting in a tree...all of that has given me this endless yearning to return to nature as soon as I have fulfilled my requirements as a Co Parent.

I miss the stars. I remember living in the country and seeing a brilliant night sky. Now, a few at best. I miss dark forests and bugs and snakes...I miss being in those dark forests and night with the vibrant life all around. To have lived a life caught up in offices and computers and people's bottom lines has been a hard grind on my soul. However, I see the utility of it, the lessons learned, and the excellent Tai Chi classes that are nearby. I see that my little boys will never likely be such lovers of nature, having grown up in suburban Austin/Dallas and spent their Covid-tainted childhoods getting more immersed in tablets vs. forests.

I also have come to want for almost nothing, and so I can begin to see that the need to spend my last years dying in the mountains as being complaints of the Ego that has yet to learn to be happy with whatever Heaven has granted him as his lot. It's not as if I've lost everything or even suffered as much or more than others. I have my health and so do my children.

I think that most of this writing is probably the output of those flareup moments of the Ego--where Life has dinged me up so much and all my sounding boards have left, so that I have this crazy need (probably could be categorized as an addiction or vice) to spit out thoughts onto a screen and post them somewhere in an anonymous fashion. Unlike Sting, I couldn't care less if someone gets my message in a bottle. It is sheer output of the Ego where the hope is that a few gems may reside--at least signs pointing toward the better and away from the inferior.