Faith is Unreal
If you can believe in things, you can believe in yourself.
Don’t like reading? Allow me to read it to you 👈
You can believe in aliens. In the wild and luminous saucers they fly in. Shiny ships piloted by foreign bodies that can stop time with one wave of their spindly, drawn-by-toddler hands. You can believe in foo and missing time and greys and greens and probes and no contact. That the universe can’t possibly be this big and us be the only ones in it, sentient and alone. You can believe in abductions, extra-terrestrial mind games, and impregnated abduction babies.
But.
You can’t believe in you.
You can believe the earth is flat. You can marvel at the fleshy crockery of us, laid upon the disc of it, fighting against the tilt lest we all slip off into the wicked sink of non-existence. You can believe that all the continents gather around the arctic circle at its center, like playground bullies surrounding a flat and icy mark. Climb the highest mountain and observe the world stretch in all directions until the end of time, the flat horizon, infinite and pancake-splayed—the supine proof of your belief. You can believe the earth doesn’t spin, that there is no ball the Pacific, the Atlantic, and the Indian can cling to.
But.
You can’t believe in you.
You can believe people talk to the dead. That they have secret conversations via illustrated cards or receive mystical messages from a planchette touching softly at letters. The door to a spirit world that exists outside the understanding of closed minds is kicked open to those blessed by a paranormal hand. You can believe the deceased seek to listen, to forgive us from the grave for our inattention, a lifetime of mean words, for not loving right or long, or exclusively. You can believe in ghosts, clairvoyants, tarot, seances, and mediums.
But.
For some reason, you can’t believe in you.
You can believe man landed on the moon. That a rocket launched from this flat-horizon world into a dark and smothering space, and that a man one-small-stepped onto the lunar surface of our orbital companion. You can accept his grainy footprint in the dust as true and honest and proof of math in action. Manifest destiny with a scientific backbone. You can believe in NASA and space races, and that we went there because we said we could and we were brave and we believed it was possible and so we did.
But.
Still.
You can’t believe in you.
You can believe in Sasquatch.
The Illuminati.
The grassy knoll.
Love at first sight.
Horoscopes and crop circles.
Fate.
God.
But not you. Never you. Yourself. I.
Why is it so hard to comprehend the success of you and your? The self and the singular? Why can’t you see your power as vast and untapped, absolute and possible? Why is it so difficult to have faith in the distance of your extraterrestrial reach, the flat-out endless horizon of your vision and drive, or the ghostly shape of your dreams?
Why won’t you shoot for your own moon?
If you can believe all the crazy and not-so-crazy things, about the real and unreal things, about the sketchy people and unknown places and time and space and life. If you can find room in your brain to consider the yes, the maybe, the nope, and no way of them, then surely you can make space in your brain to comprehend the impossible possibility of YOU? To believe in you. To know that you can try and you can fail and to trust that the failure won’t kill you. It’s time to believe you will survive and bounce back and move on without slipping off this planet. Be brave. Have a little faith in the process, in each other, in you.
Time is real.
Now is real.
You are real.
Believe.
Yours in tiny thought,
Janeen1
This week’s amends…
Small Kindnesses
By Danusha Laméris
I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk
down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs
to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you”
when someone sneezes, a leftover
from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying.
And sometimes, when you spill lemons
from your grocery bag, someone else will help you
pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other.
We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot,
and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile
at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress
to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder,
and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass.
We have so little of each other, now. So far
from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange.
What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these
fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here,
have my seat,” “Go ahead — you first,” “I like your hat.”
Via NYT Magazine
On Rotation:
Not a lot of footage of Django playing, but here’s some colorized video from a 1938 short film called “Jazz ‘Hot’”.
Via Open Culture
This guy’s got it all worked out. It’s a long watch, but I enjoyed his POV.
Via Swiss Miss
What gets left behind in Ubers? Anything unusual?
Via The Breads
Did any of this spark a tiny thought of your own?
You. Yourself. Don’t at me. I dun did it on porpoise.
Thanks for the reminder… I needed this!