The dark night of the soul is here to unfold you

Desire is a roadmap for your future.

Desires conspire with you to create beauty & art.

To unfold a life beyond what you could imagine.

Desires are fuelled by pleasure & pain.

To feel pleasure you must also feel pain, it's part of the sensitivity, they are two sides of the same coin.

Pain cracks you open into little pieces. It can feel violent.

But it shows you what really is important, which is often not much at all.

It cleans you & your life up.

Then you get put back together in a way that is more true, more pure, more poetic.

This is the type of pain that is too great to stuff inside, that feels so heavy, you have to unload all the other bags of pain you've been stuffing inside of you.

And it all comes to the surface to purge.

The dark night of the soul.

So even when desire, love, risks for art, passion can lead to what feels like a death.

Death is not the final destination, it's the catalyst for something new.

For your own unfolding.

Of course there are many ways to handle it, some people do break and don't know how to put themselves back together again, some go numb.

But pain can be turned into a turn-on, not in a sadistic way, but by turning the pain itself into art, into poetry by not abandoning yourself.

By being present with yourself, by being your greatest love, by entertaining yourself with your own perceptions.

Victimhood, blame & desperation falls away.

Because the event itself no longer matters so much, it becomes all about you, about the art of you.

Turn-on exists, even in deep pain, it's a choice.

But isn't desire what creates all this suffering in the first place?

Sure, well then stop desiring.

But don't desire to stop desiring, because that's still desire.

And if you desire not to desire to stop desiring, it's still desire.

It's all too funny!

I don't know anything about doing that, it's not a path that calls me. Because it is a path, and it's about get somewhere else.

I know I see so much beauty in life, I don't need to be anywhere else.

Which is the paradox of following the turn-on, it no longer becomes about the thing itself, but the pleasure in actually desiring, and that pleasure is available right now.

I learnt to trust my turn-on.

That I suffer less now than when I tried to resist my desires. When I tried to resist my desires it turned me into a half-dead, substance addicted productivity obsessed bag of bones.

I know that life is not a goal, I know that we have no purpose, no mission.

But I make it my mission, my purpose, my goal to follow the turn on, because it reminds me I'm alive, it feels like I'm playing with life.

Because it feels fucking great!

And I when I'm in pain it's also beautiful because it's part of the art.

The pulse of life is very obvious in the turn-on, it's much more difficult to feel following the rules, following what's logical, or a path someone else has laid out before us.

Today my Dad said something about coming home & getting a 'job'. I know he said it with amusement & knows that I'd never take that advice. I sent him this:

'Medicine, Law, Finance, are noble pursuits & necessary to sustain life. BUT art, love, beauty, these are what we stay alive for'... (a loose transcription from a meme I saw from a movie that I've never seen)

Of course he knows this. Of course everyone knows this.

The beauty is that you can also turn these noble pursuits into art, love & beauty. It doesn't have to be one or the other.