LA, in all honesty

LA,

I've realized what the problem was with saying goodbye to you in that other letter. It's that my summer wasn't marked by my being in California. It was more about that feeling you get halfway down a roller-coaster when you turn your head to check the top and see if you left your stomach there.

I left my stomach in Nashville and was flung down west for three months. LA, you're probably better than I remember you. I simply never found a feeling there. I looked, under and over. And the closest I got was the ocean. Not the beach, but the freezing cold water itself. I liked being tossed around in the green and knowing that it only gets colder and deeper the farther out you go.

Mostly though, in California I missed feeling American. I missed the unproduction of it all. I missed the faces that no one knows, faces that don't care about becoming important. I missed going out to a hot hanging lake and knowing that only one person could find me.  I missed the trips I didn't even have, and lived mostly in Nashville with a tall boy and beautiful girl.

Although I was in LA, I was otherwise occupied.

Sincerely now,
Brittany

Once upon a something

Maybe Maybe I am my own home.

Sometimes when I speak to you though

I remember things that never happened.

The memories come anyway.

Like they are mine.

Like the high and low has barreled through me.

Things I can feel.

Things I can know.

All places and all my real memories become little plasma boxes on a screen.

And I can’t remember the real people.

The quiet conversations spoken over pillows and the dark air.

Spoken at the ceiling and from the heart.

And to a girl.

But I guess I do remember.

And although I can’t feel it now,

Maybe they are home.

They are the furniture, the lamps, and the sunlight that fill the house of my soul.

And turn it into the place I reside.

The place I exist.

And I keep them.

Even while they are not happening.

Even in solitude.

Do you know their names?

So for Spring Break, I was “stuck” in Nashville. All my plans fell through and I was wondering what I was going to do with myself alone for a whole week, with no car.

Well a lovely Katy S. solved the immobility issue. Thank you, dearest. And I wasn’t bored at all because of your generosity.

I saw at least one homeless person every day. Never the same one twice. The issue of homelessness was absolutely in the front of my mind on Wednesday night when I went to Institute to learn about generosity and tithing. My teacher asked us if we knew what The Contributor was. I do. It’s the paper that the homeless community sells in Nashville to earn money to feed themselves. It’s written by people who are or have been without a home. And it’s a great little paper.

Then he asked if any of us knew the name of someone who sold them. I don’t.

It’s easy to say that when I have a dollar on my person I buy the paper, but I was profoundly shaken by this realization: I don’t know the names of any homeless person.

Do you? People are not meant to be nameless. If one went missing or died wouldn’t we all like to know that someone knew something about us, anything… It’s just a name.

I drove home on Wednesday night at 3 in the morning. It was raining outside and cold, and I passed by a woman carrying a suitcase and looking disheveled. Maybe she has a home, but she looked like she would have liked some help, regardless. And I thought, as I drove right past her, “Why does this happen? Why would a woman be carrying a suitcase outside in the cold rain at 3 in the morning?” To my shame, I didn’t turn around. I was afraid for my own security, if I am honest. But even that excuse does not remove the shame.

Just today, driving, I passed 2 homeless men. One was selling The Contributor, one was just holding a sign. I bought a paper with my last dollar, so when I got stuck at a red light next to the next guy, I had nothing but change left.

I took all the change out of my wallet and rolled down the window. I stuck my arm out the window and said "Hi".” Then I told him this was all the money I had. He wouldn’t even take it before he lifted his head heavenward and praised God for me. He replied to me, that’s fine, you’re friendship is worth enough to me.” Then he returned to his prayer and said that I was the most beautiful woman in the world. After he finished thanking both me and God, he let me give him my change. And he told me I reminded him of Mother Mary and asked me if I was a missionary.

You, sir, do have my friendship. I’m sorry the light turned green so soon. I hope you had a hamburger with that dollar. If I see you again, I will tell you my real name, and ask for yours. That’s what I’ll do. Stay warm in heart. You gave me more than the pittance I gave to you.

The Compassion-Confidence Equation

When we find compassion for others, we will find it for ourselves.
We assume that the way we think is the way other people think or ought to think. So when we are critical of others, something shallow inside us tells us that we are therefore better, but something deep inside us shrinks fearfully.
Afraid of the empathy we all secretly feel for those we are unkind to.
Get rid of the harshness, the criticism, the impossible rubric by which you grade others.
Replace it with love, with understanding, with compassion.  Realize that everyone has a story.  Everyone has soft spots, even if they appear full of hard spots. Because we don’t know what went into their creation. We don’t know what harshness might have brought them here. To the person you think you see.
But we all have a story. Remember that. Do not ever for one second forget when you meet a stranger that he has lived an entire life before meeting you.
We all have immeasurable value.
When I discovered that, when I let my heart become soft, I gained confidence. Because once I realized that my criticisms for others were unfounded and harsh, they went away. And so did my suspicions that everyone else viewed me the same way.
Now I see love in everyone. I see a walking history. A person with deep desires and aspirations. A person who DOES empathize with everyone else, deep down. Even if they haven’t discovered it yet. And I am able to assume that everyone else sees the same in me.

Cafe

Upon the realizations of our nature:
"This has been true from the beginning."
-Andrew Koepp

Write your epitaph:

Ella era amable a todos y siempre vino con Dios.

A "Genius" Video

So here it is. I love this talk. I have felt the very things she mentions. Poems coming up like a linebacker and taking you down on your peaceful walk to a patch of grass. Or a busy day when you don't really have time to be tackled.  But I threw out the idea to Alex, and he backs up the popular idea that we are the genius. And I am wondering now if those two ideas are separate, or if they meet somewhere. 

I believe in inspiration. I believe I am sometimes just an obedient modem for a poem that actually wants, like a physical being, to be recognized. And I write it, and read it later and it's clear that something beyond "me" was happening on the page.

But I believe we can dishonor our genius. We can neglect our inspirations, or reject them outright, having no compassion over ourselves. It starts out as a person thinking of something perhaps only of slight significance. "I want to smile at the stranger." We hear it in ourselves. Someone saying that to us, and we realize for a very small second that it's true. Stranger approaches and something then inside can say yes or no to the desire, to the inclination, to the inspiration, the genius, even...

I know that for those of us who say yes, who always deign to say yes to their artful, brilliant, and good whims, they will head off in the direction of living well. Of becoming so in-tune with their genius, that they can come to understand her. Like a friend. Even having a healthy relationship... When we say yes to the genius ideas, we open the doors of creativity a bit wider, until the door is swung open completely and we are invited not only to visit but to practically move in.

And eventually, maybe Alex is right, and Elizabeth, and the ancients, too. Maybe we have a genius, but maybe we can come so close to it that we lose the lines between us, and we become the thing which is in us, we become brilliant.

LDS Marriage and Family. Thank you kindly Brother Goodman.

What

Girl in class: “You cry in a peaceful way, not painful. You cry because people cannot experience the joy you are feeling.”

So What

I have never experienced the clarity that I do as I live this gospel. Outside of it, the world truly is as in Lehi’s vision, a cloud of dark mist. I remember it. And it’s true. You cried because you were lost, and that you were lost is the only think you knew. You cried because you didn’t understand why you were crying. Because you could not feel the Savior’s compassion over you, but you thought you should. You cried because you actually did believe you were alone and you felt that that wasn’t enough. And then one day you found Him. And you cried again, but this time because of what His atonement does for you: It claims you jealously (as if you can hear Christ saying over you, “She is mine, Satan.”); it allows you to have hope for the world, for your own life, too; it helps you to forgive yourself and others; it allows you to have compassion for yourself and detach from the “old man of sin”; it renews you, makes you gentle and humble; you come to experience charity for everyone you walk past; you finally obtain protection from the gross ambitions of the adversary; so you can finally find direction in the dark mist by grabbing onto the iron rod and running in the direction of that great Tree; and so you can come home.

After all that discovery, you are free in the way you had always wanted to be.

We are not free when we run in random directions in a seemingly unassuming darkness. We are free when we know everything we need to know and then get to decide which way we would have our lives be. And there is not joy greater than having discovered that. And my classmate is right, I think. My greatest sorrows are no longer for myself.

Create

“Everyone has the desire to create something that did not exist before.”

Maybe this is why I have recently felt that conversation is an art… That having meaningful relationships is an art. Because creating connections between unique things and turning out beauty is what creativity is all about. And that’s also exactly what relationships can be. Every human being on earth is so unique, has some deep experience that makes it so they can understand their feelings in a way that no one else ever will. We are all little factories of feelings the world doesn’t know, and ones that it does, too. But there it is. We are unique. And when we can mix unique realities, for example two people, create a bond, and turn out something beautiful, then we have created something.

How to be Alone

Wonderful lonely friends: She affirms our instincts about being alone.

What is something you’ve always wanted to do?

Along the same lines as all my lovely friends answers to this question, I would probably steal the same answer. There are other things I would do too, but it’s late and I conjure any new creative thoughts right now.

But the answer… Reminds me of this daydream and night dream I’ve been stuck in lately. Have you seen inception? Because the dream I’m stuck in feels like that. It’s surreal… I first had it a couple months ago…

I had a dream that words didn’t exist,

And the miracle: that expression didn’t suffer one bit.

That ideas existed hanging in the air, in the yellow sunlight.

The yellow sunlight thick like fog. A haze of illumination…

 

I had a dream that to trade thoughts, feelings, and EVERYTHING occurring inside you, and to feel the very quiet middle of another person, I only had to see them. I only had to look at their eyes… No matter how far away they stood.

Or I only had to sit on park bench with them, not even to look and see them, but to place my hand on their resting hand.

No words.

None.

I wake up trying to reconcile the experience of sitting contently in a world made of silent things and not caring at all that language had never been invented for us. Because I woke up to the remembrance that I LOVE language, I love rhetoric, and I love words.

Then to the realization that I don’t. I only love communion with my brothers and sisters.

I love us. So I chase after your souls by conversation, by words, by poems, and by talking to you, sure…

But I could have existed forever in that dream, in that sunlight, in the infinite and haunting and tender silence.

What is love?

It’s not romance. It’s not a surging moment of excitement around some person. It can’t be. That’s like a hormone. I’m talking about love.

Maybe I should start with platonic love. What is this love stuff made of? How do you know when you’ve felt it? I think it’s much more describable than we make it out to be. And I think it’s much more common too, for some of us. For some, maybe this new definition will destroy all notions of love they thought they had in their lives.

Love is a genuine, deep care for the well-being of another person. I think that’s it. It’s just taking yourself into the shoes, no the heart, even, of another human being and empathizing. It’s feeling their heaviness, feeling their joy. It is becoming the other person for a moment and having an almighty desire for them to find true happiness in life.

I believe that.

But it leaves me wondering where romantic love begins? What is the difference?

I don’t know if there is some sort of mystical element to romantic love, besides the fact that even mere love itself is a miracle.  But for me, at least… being in love, is to sort of allow someone the honor of reciprocating that.

It’s sort of like affirming to another person’s desire to empathize with you and say, “Yes, you can feel what I feel. You do understand. And I would trust you to feel it the right way.” It’s to allow another to sweep in to all of your feelings, your greatest hopes, your most secret fears, and to trust them in the middle of it all to know it as you do.

If you think that my definition here is saying that the person you allow to do this, must agree with you in all things, that’s not what I mean. I haven’t explained it quite right.

I mean only that the person who you love could come in and understand the paths in your brain… why they trail off in the mixed-up directions that they do, why they are wide in some areas, narrow in others… And that their mind would be wired in some way to be able to converse with your  mind. Maybe not one’s mind, maybe their very spirit…

And also, maybe there is some mystical element to it. I have no idea. These are just my most honest thoughts on the subject, perhaps wrong. Perhaps hinging too narrowly on my own personal experiences with life. But I want to know what this “love” is. What’s making the world turn? And how can we understand it, and feel a pure form of it?

Love.

Get-To-Know-You Questions

Good conversation takes effort and planning. Friendships do too. So, in many failures and a few successes, I found that asking people thought-provoking questions really helps. It doesn’t matter if they answer wrong, encourage them to just open themselves to you so you can just see the basic thought-process they go through to get there. Tell them: Interpret widely, answer specifically.

I always change my mind about these questions. And I try not to plan my answers, so I can be in the same boat of figuring my thoughts out as the person I’m asking is.

In varying levels of intensity…

• What is your greatest fear?
• How do you overcome it?
• What is your greatest hope?
• What trait do you admire/value in other people?
• What do you notice first about a person you are getting to know?
• If you had a social resume, and were forced to brag about yourself, what would you say is your greatest personality/character trait? Or, what would you aspire to have it one day be?
• Where did you come from? (A sort of what-made-you-who-you-are-question). A couple big moments or a small quiet process?
• Who is someone who most affected your life or who you are?
• What is your perfect day? Ever.
• What is your life goal?
• What do you think about in your "”quiet”/”greatest” moments? Is there a general theme at least?
• What is your favorite form of art?
• What is something you’ve always wanted to do?
• What would you spend $1 million on? No saving or investing.
• What super power would you want?
• Are you a beach, country, or city person? Or other?
• If you knew you could try anything and not fail, what would you do?
• Favorite childhood memory?
• Life motto?
• What kind of people do you like? Describe your best friend in as much detail as you can.
• In 5 years, what kind of person will you be?
• What’s your major? Why did you choose it? What do you want to do with it?
• What is your language of love?
• words of affirmation
• quality time
• receiving gifts
• acts of service
• physical touch
• If you could have a wish granted, what would it be?
• What’s your favorite season? Why?
• If you could give the world one piece of advice, what would it be?
• What’s your idea of romance? Is it a feeling or an action?
• Have you been in love?
• Do you daydream a lot? About what?
• Favorite books, movies, songs, artists, etc.
• Six flags or camping?
• A week on a dream vacation with your 3 best friends or 10 minutes on the moon by yourself?
• You have 24 hours to live… What do you do? Famous last words?
• You have a month to live… What do you do?
• What makes you angry?
• What makes you happy?
• What makes you sad?
• What is your favorite/most beautiful doctrine?
• Are you a curious person? Do you ever have questions that leave you pondering for long periods of time? Do you have an example?
• Is there a driving question in your life?
• What is happiness to you? What brings it, but also what is it?
• If you were trapped on an island what one thing would you bring? (Not a tool to get you off.)
• If your house were burning down, what one item would you save?
• What is something you’ve always wanted to do?

My walk: line by line.

Nature writes its own poem today.

There is literally cotton snowing sideways in the field.

I can begin to feel the upsetting art in me.

A question: What do you think about in your greatest moments?

Here is clean. I want the messy woods. I want a chaos of trees.

An answer: There doesn’t need to be something wrong for a person to seek solitude.

There is no better moment than when I am alone in my own voice, listening only to my own thoughts.

They read me poems.

They see the world in its exquisite disorder.

They remind me of how richly, how heavily, how excruciatingly human I can feel.

There, the words stop. Can you feel me yet?

Because if you don’t feel it by now, if you haven’t felt it yourself, no one can explain it to you. Not me.

You are a stranger to your own romance, then.

A thought: I don’t want to see another human right now.

But one…

Because I don’t want to speak or hear.

At all.

And we just cannot stop it.

Save for these walks.

Just leave me alone to my art.

My maddening love.

My leaf and this pen—and I will write my heart onto it.

A turn: I cannot help but take the more beautiful one, even if it will get me lost in a place wanting desires.

It had them once, this turn.

Now a conspicuous void.

A memory: The problem is that we own this place.

A break: Do you ever have an indescribable feelings that drive you again and again to this spot, to your attempts to frame it? Ones that overwhelm you and keep you from moving. Ones that paralyze you in the grass while you watch the clouds. Ones that you ever recognize but can never identify?

A question: What are you doing?

An answer: I appear to be lying down, but I am actually writing a poem, collecting myself, doing exactly what I must, thinking, feeling, listening to classical music, monitoring the clouds, honoring the yearning inside me, watching ballet…

A wave: Everything is falling behind me the same way as I pass it all.

A correction: Ah! Alas, I had to see a someone, but she was barefoot and picking at a tree. A kindred spirit.

For the Secret Society of Souls

I went for a walk down music row last night with Hayden. It was spontaneous. And it was perfect. But it made me think of the fact that I usually only equate spontaneity with havoc. And that's just not it at all. Sometimes life just wants to take a warm evening walk down a street and be quiet. And spontaneous doesn't always mean you do something loud and exciting. It just means you do whatever comes naturally.

So now I'm discovering adventures that are more quiet. I'm listening intently and hearing silent secrets spilling over the air like beauty. Floating down the street wheresoever it takes me, not compelling myself to do something to my walk, but letting my walk do something to me.

Um. Wow.

Transcript:
Say Yes
when two violins are placed in a room

if a chord on one violin is struck

the other violin will sound the note

if this is your definition of hope

this is for you

the ones who know how powerful we are

who know we can sound the music in the people around us

simply by playing our own strings

for the ones who sing life into broken wings

open their chests and offer their breath

as wind on a still day when nothing seems to be moving

spare those intent on proving god is dead

for you when your fingers are red

from clutching your heart

so it will beat faster

for the time you mastered the art of giving yourself for the sake of someone else

for the ones who have felt what it is to crush the lies

and lift truth so high the steeples bow to the sky

this is for you

this is also for the people who wake early to watch flowers bloom

who notice the moon at noon on a day when the world

has slapped them in the face with its lack of light

for the mothers who feed their children first

and thirst for nothing when they're full
this is for women

and for the men who taught me only women bleed with the moon

but there are men who cry when women bleed

men who bleed from women's wounds

and this is for that moon

on the nights she seems hung by a noose

for the people who cut her loose

and for the people still waiting for the rope to burn
about to learn they have scissors in their hands
this is for the man who showed me

the hardest thing about having nothing

is having nothing to give

who said the only reason to live is to give ourselves away

so this is for the day we'll quit or jobs and work for something real

we'll feel for sunshine in the shadows
look for sunrays in the shade

this is for the people who rattle the cage that slave wage built

and for the ones who didn't know the filth until tonight

but right now are beginning songs that sound something like
people turning their porch lights on and calling the homeless back home
this is for all the stuff we own

and for the day we'll learn how much we have

when we learn to give that stuff away

this is for doubt becoming faith

for falling from grace and climbing back up

for trading our silver platters for something that matters
like the gold that shines from our hands when we hold each other
this is for the grandmother who walked a thousand miles on broken glass
to find that single patch of grass to plant a family tree

where the fruit would grow to laugh

for the ones who know the math of war

has always been subtraction

so they live like an action of addition

for you when you give like every star is wishing on you

and for the people still wishing on stars

this is for you too
this is for the times you went through hell so someone else wouldn't have to

for the time you taught a 14 year old girl she was powerful

this is for the time you taught a 14 year old boy he was beautiful

for the radical anarchist asking a republican to dance

cause what's the chance of everyone moving from right to left

if the only moves they see are NBC and CBS
this is for the no becoming yes

for scars becoming breath

for saying i love you to people who will never say it to us

for scraping away the rust and remembering how to shine

for the dime you gave away when you didn't have a penny

for the many beautiful things we do

for every song we've ever sung

for refusing to believe in miracles

because miracles are the impossible coming true
and everything is possible
this is for the possibility that guides us

and for the possibilities still waiting to sing

and spread their wings inside us

cause tonight saturn is on his knees

proposing with all of his ten thousand rings

that whatever song we've been singing we sing even more
the world needs us right now more than it ever has before

pull all your strings

play every chord

if you're writing letters to the prisoners

start tearing down the bars

if you're handing our flashlights in the dark

start handing our stars

never go a second hushing the percussion of your heart

play loud

play like you know the clouds have left too many people cold and broken

and you're their last chance for sun

play like there's no time for hoping brighter days will come

play like the apocalypse is only 4...3...2

but you have a drum in your chest that could save us

you have a song like a breath that could raise us
like the sunrise into a dark sky that cries to be blue
play like you know we won't survive if you don't
but we will if you do
play like saturn is on his knees
proposing with all of his ten thousand rings
that we give every single breath
this is for saying-yes
this is for saying-yes

What matters to me.

Today in my ethics class we started to talk about Stoicism. It brought to mind two questions for me:
1) What matters most to me?
2) When I achieve these few things, am I then content, joyful, happy, what-have-you?

My thought process is this: shouldn't I be in a state of happiness when I have or am working towards all things that really matter to me? And shouldn't everything else be insubstantial when considered alongside those greater achievements? For example, I care about God, family, love, virtue, and making the world better. So if I am cooking and I burn the food or cut my finger none of those things are affected, so shouldn't I therefore go on being happy. It seems like this should be the case, but how does life really work??

I think that parts of this philosophy are very very strange, but the broad idea of not allowing my days to be ruined by things that I'm honestly not concerned about in the long run is a good idea.

my hopes for hope

I watched The Duchess a couple nights ago and it made me sad, to say the least. Georgiana endured so much more than I can even fathom. And I wanted to pray for her afterward. But how does one pray for a thing that's passed? What could I say for this long dead woman for whom I wish so much? The most I came up with was to pray for hope in the details of her life not known. That there was some secret joy or comfort that was afforded to her. I prayed that she could have known, somehow, that people then and now are rooting for her.

I wish I wasn't helpless to people that have suffered. People who lived out their lives and for whom circumstances never improved. I wish I could have some hand in the lives of those who were never checked on by the people that should have cared for them. I wish I could hold the hand of everyone who has ever forgotten what hope feels like. I wish I could hold the hand of and 18th century widow, the hand of a slave, the hand of a sick person. But I don't know how that could ever happen.

This is what moves me: the spreading of HOPE. The proving of humanity. And this is why I will never stop loving, in any direction. I want to share goodness with the world. I want to exhaust goodness. I want to meet the world in an embrace and show children in Iraq and in the UK and in Uganda that they are my brothers and sisters. I want to sit with a stranger on a bench and ask, "What happened?" and just listen until he runs out of things to say, dreams to describe, passions to uncover, and pains to reconcile.

I want to be what the world needs most. I want to write charity in my countenance.

the athiest today. the ______ tomorrow.

He is the worst kind of athiest.
And smarter than me, filled with expertise in things I only first hear of when he talks about them.
He lives his life behind his eyes and between his ears. Above his neck and chest and hands and feet.
And I can't reason with him. Because reason isn't important in matters like these, until you first allow yourself to feel. Once he understands the validity of what can be felt, then I will tell him the rest.
I smile at him, and he must think I'm embarrassed, but actually, I'm smiling in anticipation of triumph.
I live everywhere. In my fingertips. In the middle of my ribcage. In my mind. In my feet, in my walk. I live in my rhythm. It goes ba-da-da ba-dum-dum-dum. My life tingles and escapes from my every appendage.
And why I smile? Because I see the futility of his ideas. One day he will feel alive in his hands and he won't be able to explain it except by going beyond his mind... to the hands themselves.
One day, I'll grab his hand and tell him to do this.
I'll ask him if he can feel what I'm sending him.
He'll lie.
So I'll encourage him to quit thinking.
He might go to the hands then.
It will be the sweetest victory.
To show him he cares, and he won't be able to explain why.
Someday...

I won't just convince him of God.
Someday he will experience God.
He will feel Him. And not know what it was that was felt. And then. Then he will go looking for that feeling like his head is on fire.
And the answer is a bucket of water.

One day.
I hope.

someone's "sanity"

"Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives... on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe:, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."
-Carl Sagan


You're right.
In 10,000 years there will be no consciousness left of who Brittany Bailey ever was on earth. People will walk around completely absorbed in their own tiniest troubles more than they care about my most drilling passions.
In fact, forget the time gap:
There are more people alive today who are unaware of me than those who are. But if we're grading on the rubric according to who cares about such things... If that gives us our worth...
[then the only people who matter, are the people who matter.]
I care. And I love. That's proof enough to me that life matters. That what I do matters.
And those people 100 centuries from now, living out their lives in a context I can't imagine, even THEY will be affected by my existence, whether or not it ever occurs to them that they are made of what I cared about, who I loved, and what I did with it all.
As I am made of "my story" and "my people/contributors", so others will be made of "me" and "their stories" and "their people".
I might shatter a world with the farthest, most faded ripple of my influence. I can create an influence so strong that I will never die. Light fires in people that move across and down generations until there is an element of me in them that helps them withstand any situation.
Never knowing that I gave it to them.
Just as I don't know all the sources of my own fire, heart, and mind.

Clayton,
I want you to
[LOVE][FEEL][and CARE]
about this world.
This is the only one you can ever have any notion of. The only real one, the only one that you can relate to on a personal, human level. This is the only world you have any potential in and the only one you can ever give potential to. Understand that you are the center of some ripple whose rings stretch so distantly you will never even be aware of your own influence in its full vastness. Understand this: YOU ARE EXPONENTIALLY IMPORTANT.
Do you understand?
Let me show you...