Initializing: 2026

Hello, and welcome to the year 2026.

I am eagerly awaiting opportunities to move myself forward in ways that cause no harm as I wend my way through this prison sentence. It is an interesting place to be alive as I work on my dharma practice, with unexpected aspects of lessons being presented to me on a regular basis.

To have an unending desire to leave behind a name instead of those wholesome actions that benefit and alleviate the sufferings of the many speaks an interesting volume on a person. And yet, I find I have much to learn from my observations of this person who lives in a prison of their own architecture, namely in how I have been responding to their work.

What I will make the time to do going forward is a prayer for this person to learn and grow, even in their advanced age, that impermanence applies to everything. Names can be scrubbed from buildings. Policies can be rescinded, and new policies can grow from their ashes. Approvals can become denials can become approvals.

I also am working on this self, as such, because while that above policy might well describe someone we the many know, the desire to leave behind a trace of "myself" does extend to this self as well.

Once upon a past, I had the most awesome counselor ever (hi, Sophie!), and in one session with her, I emphasized my fear of death. I was afraid that upon my death, people would stop putting as much good into the world as possible, that things would fall apart and turn to... 💩. Pure, unadulterated 💩. It was a delusion of greatest importance, which I needed to pull apart with help.

After all, we are eight billion humans on the face of a gigantically tiny rock hurtling through what we perceive as 'empty space', with other rocks of indeterminate size taking the same trip through time as us. 'I' am not in prison: this 'cell' of 'us' is in prison. Prison shows this self an important lesson: impermanence applies to everything, even my tenure at the company that brokers non-emergent medical rides. People are still getting to and from their appointments daily, and this self is not the only self that's engineering good outputs to affect others.

This is not to say that 'I' have less of a drive to get out and join in some aspect of good-doing; it just shows this self that there are many other selves doing the same work, supporting and guiding others upward to a better realm which can exist even inside this lifetime.

Other Worlds

I have the beginnings of a theory that other worlds, other realms truly exist. Art, for us, is a gateway to those other realms or worlds where we see or remember parts of our past lives. Dreams are another gateway, a peek past the mental veils and into a stream so deep that it defies naming. To have vivid 'dreams' of things our awake selves recognize as implausible in this world suggests that these things, these people exist either now, or in our past, somewhere beyond our merely human-centric perceptions.

When you remember how different your body felt, how it perceived, how it experienced life, it just makes sense that these other worlds, the ten-thousandfold worlds, exists. We just simply lack the capability to transport ourselves across the veils and stars that separate us. On the other side, there are dreamers just like myself, wondering, "Will we ever get good enough in this lifetime to reach out into the great black beyond and explore, contact, befriend?"

Despite all other signs screaming no, I'm going to continue to dig in the snow to find the first tender shoots and leaves of yes.