To Do What You're Moved To :: Joseph Robertson

There doesn't need to be a doctrine on the basis of which you act in order to do what you're moved to, and to do it well and with all your faculties...

what is needed is energy, attention, self-awareness, the dedication to be authentic in your pursuits, the time and inclination to participate and to follow through, the genuine pursuit of a known and engaged art...

what is needed is atmosphere, circulation, metabolic refinement, the full scope of the problem, reinvented and shaped to meet its own new forms...

in politics, in love, in daily living, there must be action that flows in syncronicity with what we aspire to; the life lived as solstice, as waiting or as total balance, creates fissures around it, pitfalls that tempt the fragile and the treasured to tip over into the abyss...

a good idea, an inspired love, a passion for change, a sense of injustice, the moving up and forward, out and openly, after the first act of the enacting, after the new shape of home and happy takes its place on the horizon and moves in like a trusted beam of light, can be as much the impetus as the final frontier, as much the respite as the rapture...

I feel a grandiose disappearance, either of roots, or of hope, of superstructures, or of the intimate confidence of a specific crowd, a fading that is tempered by guilt and a rebirth spurred on by a stubborn half-remembered sense of resilience...

if dreams can come into being, if they sometimes expose and sometimes guide our hand, if mischief in the metaphysical realm can haunt the corridors of reason and tease out a spiritual breakthrough, heal or healthen the zeitgeist, then we must see that:

moving toward the light is not always salvation, though moving toward the dark side is always a choice to let go...

the day is not at all definitive, has none of the characteristics of a deciding moment or of long-term fulfilment; it is, feebly, hopefully, in tune with the necessary pressures, and with a surprisingly unhurried aspect, what it is and what it can be, and more — more is for the making.

WRITING & NAMING: the medicine of acquiring knowledge
Joseph Robertson

Language is that point of contact in the abstract, that plane where the intellectual life within us is enabled to assert itself as part of the overall experience of living. Language is that plane where the individual self is allowed repeated attempts at manifestation. What takes place in the process of writing, in the spilling of ink or the posting of digital characters, the slip toward defining a landscape, however brief, is the sanctification of an individual, and by extension of the human condition as such...

Not every person is a writer, by trade, nor should they be, but there is something about the act of writing that serves the writing individual as if it were a medicine for selfhood, a healing venture into clean waters. Especially so when its intent is to be expressive of secret regions of the mind or to lay out new experimental vessels for such expression. [Keep reading...]