Yesterday I experienced heartbreak. And I came home feeling like a thing incapable of being loved by anyone. All the light in my life seemed to have been chased out, cast under great shadow. And all beautiful things turned formless and dim.
Were there a pile of gems that glittered at my feet I would have passed them unnoticed.
You cannot see very far in the dark.
In my despair I wrote a poem. Which for me is a good way to cope. Thinking about things may put the thoughts out but not the feelings. You need to pour your feelings into something to understand them better. A friend taught me that.
There are diamonds and coals made of the same stuff
One is smooth, and the other is rough
Diamonds are loved and cherished by all
Coals are burned, their ashes let fall
Coals wish to be diamonds, glittering lit
For diamonds have homes in rings that they fit
And coals gather gravely in pits.
Burning,
thick smoke in the air
In furnaces, pizza parlors, and steam locomotion
Lost and forgotten in daily commotion
And to the coal that wants love we say
How could it dare
And the coal that is burned again and again
What mercy, what kindness can it then defend?
Against a world so unfair burned now to sinters,
Where green glens gone, combusted to splinters
And diamonds fly high,
into the sky
Shining in the air,
with little to care
coals they gather in pits of despair
And I am a coal doomed there to stay.
All of my life,
forever and a day
I reached out to a few friends then, and was met with an outpouring of love and support. And for that I am grateful. They reminded me of dim things in the distance that were once bright under day, and that the sun would rise again. And some others gave me
advice on exactly what to do with the pain I was experiencing.
You need to feel it. And I believe that is the thing to do. And there is great wisdom in that. I believe that If you were to push away these feelings, ignore them, you train yourself to be tough and distant. For you either accept the pain or delude yourself with thoughts such as: why me, life is unfair, when will it be my turn, the world is backwards. Or you fill your mind with thoughts of ill woe towards those who caused the heartbreak. These thoughts are poisonous, and to pay heed to them would be to stray from the path of wisdom. And they would not heal you, though they would comfort you. It would be wrapping many bands of iron over the wound and then forgetting about it, and where once was warm and soft now is cold hard metal.
"Take the L" as she said, you need at least one to spell love. And if you take many then you may write it many times over1.
Others still spent the rest of the night with me, nursing me back to good spirits. And it is only with them that I began to really feel it. To let the pain in, in a safe place.
And it was in the lasting warmth from all my friends that I wrote my second poem that day.
Diamonds and coal are the same the end
And diamonds glow brightly
because they are held tightly
And we often look at the tips of mountains,
ignoring the valleys, admiring fountains
And all things can be loved in this worldly garden
Be they gold or gems, or lumps of carbon
But beware the hardening of the heart,
For that is where all responses start
In times that are rough,
becoming distant and tough
Love is hard, and that is why its valuable
The heart must be soft, and like gold malleable
for the souls of people come in many shapes
Jagged and smooth, closed and agape
And if you are like iron
You will be too hard to mould
And if you see a place high and beautiful
And for the rest of your life you would like there to sit
There is a good chance that you will not fit
Much like lines that are supposed to rhyme
Or fall into rhythm, they step out of time
And
Even in the right time,
When all the world is gleaming
the angels on high, a choir singing
And all the suns light is beaming
Your heart will lay there,
in dark slumber
dreaming
So awake and open your heart
Do not harden, do not start
And love will come from a hidden place
ever streaming
and where we go when we die, and what life is. Basically all the usual suspects for deep midnight conversation. It was during this time, and during my attempt at verbalizing my ideas on the subject1, that I realized I had a model that worked very very well for me. I don't really have existential dread, nor do I fear dying2. I don't have the words yet to describe it in detail but I did write a poem about it that I recited at an open mic in San Francisco recently. It captures much of what I would try to say otherwise.
I speak now of a tapestry unseen
Woven quite at random; Or so it would seem
With humble beginnings in the annals of time
It's image mysterious, obtuse, and sublime
And each thread is woven guiding themselves
Ever on West to East do they delve
Some threads are thick and vibrant and long
And some are weak and brittle,
And shine but little
Some start small and end big and tall
Some start high, take hubris and fall
Some colors are organized, patterned black or white
Others are mixed, intermingled for the eyes delight
And some threads are rich with colour suffused
Others are old, faded, abused
Some threads are wound, and go for a while
Here they are bound, in friendly style
Some they flock like birds, at every bend
Some others they part, their fellowships end
And Where two threads meet,
their frayed ends greet
And make new colours
upon one another
And these threads should go
together to the end
Forming a band
A marvellous blend
And so this tapestry it grows
it grows and it shrinks
And some threads are wise
And others don't think
Causing such mighty tears
The tapestry must bear
And many threads cut short or lost
But where one thread ends
another begins
So the cycle continues
Again and Again
But does one thread know the image it makes
other threads feel the space that it takes
And all these threads, they cross and they mingle
And there are no threads that exist which are single
Even the shortest of Strands
In the Tapestry has a hand
And even the oldest and earliest of strings
Still go on
hidden, unseen
And I do not fear the day that I die
For a thread on a tapestry, simply am I
I have thoughts, sometimes... not always1. But often these thoughts are born and die inside my mind and they aren't useful to anyone, myself included. Some of them, I think, could be quite good if I took the time to communicate them; and in that process they would crystallize into something more fully thought out. In order to produce something good you have to do so with the intention of showing others. Otherwise things don't get finished, everything becomes virtual2, and you never actually care about what the end product is.
And so I made this as a vehicle to crystalize and improve the quality of my thoughts.
But that someone exists only in the abstract. As I envision the audience, the topics that I'm comfortable approaching and the manner in which I write change vastly. If I think about close friends or family, I get shy and probably won't write about things I'm afraid of sharing3. If I think about strangers, then I'll write only about serious things. If I think about people in my field, this will quickly turn into a technical blog. I think the best way is to think of no one in particular and write for myself. But if that's the case then why publish any of this, i'll be better off just letting it sit on my hard-drive4.
And so I have settled with: Writing for myself, knowing that someone will read it5.
You will likely see, a blur of many things. But at the top of my mind are, poems, and stories, and musings on life. And maybe something technical every now and then. And a lot of rambling.
And so I made this to share the parts of my mind that I deem interesting
I'm usually the kind of person that doesn't really share their opinion. Not unless I think its really good, and absolutely ready. But by then the ideas are overcooked, or the moment has passed. Or they've been fine tuned to be always correct in every circumstance to the point of saying nothing and being of use to no one.
And so I made this to be brave.
And so putting my thoughts down and sharing them on my blargh is a way of doing that.
Will I be brave enough to write about the things that I want to?
Will I be able to be open and honest with my audience?
Will the quality of my thought actually improve and can I keep this going?
I don't know. And I think that's okay. Half the fun in anything is not knowing, the other half is finding out6.
is as hard as you make it? I could have used square space or that wordpress thingy but I wanted to learn something a bit more low level.
I followed this tutorial https://reactjs.org/tutorial/tutorial.html and was able to make some sort of tic tac toe game in browser. Pretty neat.
From there a friend of mine suggested that I try out Gatsby and that's what this current site is built off of. All I really wanted was a site where I could convert markdown into html kind of automagically and format it into a nice page. Gatsby lets me do all this with some extra work so I was pretty happy with that.
Some useful links to accomplish this
Using these three things I can automatically create web pages for each markdown source file and that gets turned into its own blog page.
Glossing over some details that I don't fully understand...
There seems to be some step in deployment that fills pages named like {markdownRemark.frontmatter__slug}.tsx} with the correct data from a graphql query inside.
The blog page has some extra logic around it that lets me display summaries for the most recent blog posts. Its quite simple. I just made a react component with a div and a gradient (for the bottom fade) and it was just some CSS to hide the extra html. It was, for the most part, straightforward. CSS is terrible though. Very... unintuitive.
The mozilla reference helped me out alot. Very useful for seeing CSS in action.
I'll probably have to tweak the translation process from markdown to html since it seems like line breaks aren't done well. At least double space or 2 whitespace doesn't work so I have to insert the br tags by hand which is painful.
Otherwise its working very well :)