Revolutions
7.8.22
I turned 25 today.
Now that I've had 4 years of experience drinking alcohol, and 7 shooting guns & ripping cigs, I'm finally ready to rent a car.
Thanks to a lot of amazing people & hard work, I'm also able to wake up in the morning extremely grateful and wink at my reflection as I floss my teeth.
Around this time last year, my ship left its port. I've since casted a wide net, caught a lot of fish, and sampled enough sashimi to tell you a yellowtail doesn’t want the bed of rice.
Between us, I don’t see any land in my horizon, but I’m sailing straight enough to know I’ll strike the shore with enough omega3s to baseline the brain chemistry of whichever post-pandemic society I land in.
To 25, liking who I see in the mirror, and the act of fishing.
Love,
7.8.23
I’m 26 today and the only thing that’s changed is I’ve dropped the chopsticks and begun eating with my own two hands.
Turns out I’m better working with the tools I was born with than the ones I’ve adopted.
This helped me digest how this world operates in loops and whirls.
At 25 I was becoming of 26 and at 26 I became of 25. I hope to one day became of 26. I think the becamed would say that the old “he” didn’t need his hands to stuff his face and digest.
If you’re a part of my past, present, or future, I thank you for guiding me to this place in which I am already full.
With wonder, awe, and love,
Nitai
7.8.24
At 26 I got in touch with my loops & whirls - the cycles of life.
On this day last year, I wondered what “the becamed” would have to say about the nature of that work.
What I didn’t understand about “the becamed” is that it never “comes to be”. We do.
The image of “the becamed” is eternity (0^0 = 1). Within eternity, the cosmos mixes the paint, time stretches the canvas, & we are painters - bloodying our carhartts throughout the process; sometimes for the look of it, & other times a byproduct of the actual work.
As a painter, I’ve come to realize that we can’t look to eternity for its image. As the becoming, we can only experience processes. For us, the image always changes.
To depict eternity, the “beings” that paint it must eternally “be… becoming” (0.999…repeating = 1).
After 1 year of finger painting, I just realized that I have 8 whirls, and my 2 loops connect my pinkies to marry the left & the right hemi-spheres. There’s both beauty & truth in that.
So who’s the real artist?
To 27/♾️ & becoming eternity together.
- love
7.8.25
At 27,
I willed forward with hunger,
waiting for the veil to lift
somewhere between my fingertips.
But when it came,
it wasn’t revelation.
It was a curtain call at the end of an old act,
whispering,
“You had it backwards.”
I wasn’t the actor.
I was waiting to clap
to a performance that had no end.
At first, it felt like loss.
But in truth, it was relief.
I was never becoming.
Because there only is.
I asked to know love,
so I built walls
just to feel what had never left.
I asked for communion,
so I became an island,
until the ocean spoke my name.
I asked how the world was made,
so I forgot the sky
and became the soil.
It’s funny now.
How I thought I could see my way
beyond sight.
Thought I could think my way
back to the beginning.
But there was never a beyond.
And no back.
Only here.
Now.
We forget to remember.
We lose to find.
We cry until we laugh.
We bleed so that light might see what reality looks like
from the inside.
We live to love.
And if we could only love to live,
we’d hear it again.
That song we’ve been humming
all along.
This was the year I stopped trying to make meaning
and started noticing
It’s been everywhere.
The path:
a circle drawn
by a barefoot god-child
with dirt on his face
and a hell of an imagination.
To 28,
and going back to 1.
All over
/
Again.
- Love
