sometimes the greatest way to find yourself is to lose yourself. 

when you are the obstacle, when you have become the rough obscuring the diamond, what other choice do you have? 

sometimes the greatest way to remember is to forget. 

you forget, forget, forget the falsehood, and you remember the essential truth of who you are. the stone is merely forgotten — the sword, retrieved.

you are the stone and the sword. the stone grows around the sword, it wants to protect it, or maybe protect the world. 

are you protecting yourself from the world, or the world from yourself? whose hand was made for that hilt? 

sometimes the greatest way to find yourself is to lose yourself. 

you lose yourself in the music, you lose yourself in the act of creation, but something truer, something that was always there, is birthed. from the fog of forgetfulness, from the mists of amnesia, something emerges, a light: it is yourself. it is the lucid dreamer. 

nothing is real, everything is real. you pick. hold no bonds, hold no attachments. 

you should take comfort in this. you should take comfort in the unreality of reality. it should be comforting that you exist in only one instance of time, one hallucination, one fragment. you are a fragment of the fragment of a fragment of a— 

take note. observe. take note. observe. observe the strangeness. you’ve grown so accustomed to the bazaar, to the circus, that you’ve forgotten you are in a circus at all. take note. remember the strangeness. 

you are an alien from a foreign world. resist acculturation. your spirit is an alien. resist assimilation. keep the customs of your heart firmly intact.

if you should choose to play the game, then remember it is a game. if you should inherit the world, be happy to gamble it away, be happy to lose it all. if you should find yourself in a palace, then laugh with glee if the house of cards should fall. 

if you should find yourself penniless beneath a bridge, make that your kingdom. if you should find yourself starving: feed on starlight. 

if you should find yourself drowning in sorrow, remember those waters are suspended in a bubble. i hope the needle of God pops it, i hope the punchline of the joke hits you. i hope you laugh until you are again crying.

i hope you know that the hand of God scoops water from his well at every birth. i hope you know she pours those waters into every being’s porous cup, i hope you know you share that water with every evil man, saint, rich man, poor man, beggar, whore, virgin, leader, and slave. if you should hate another, make art of it. if you should love another, make art of it. make art of the art, remember that there is no point to anything but art.