urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:jcc James Cross James Cross 2006-04-17T20:01:08Z urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:jcc:1019 2006-04-17T20:01:08Z 2006-04-17T20:01:08Z When you wake up with your hands around someone's throat, squeezing, and it's your own, is it just another day?<br />My friend is beginning to wake up to certain hard truths. It's hard on his pride. It hurts. I know. <br />Just a little while longer, and he'll feel much better about things. <br />Just a little while longer, and he'll understand.<br />Just a little while longer. <br /><br />Spring is a time of death and renewal. urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:jcc:750 2006-04-04T20:42:01Z 2006-04-04T20:42:01Z Here I am at a kitchen table. I can hear trains and sirens; I can feel the air getting colder. Ginger and lemon on my lips, I have a body, I am breathing. I am alive. I am awake in the world.<br /><br />Every moment brings me closer to freedom.<br /><br />No sensation could compare. urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:jcc:340 2002-05-01T17:15:45Z 2002-05-01T17:15:45Z A friend I can't escape often asks '<i>What is time?</i>'<br /><br />We are interrogators of the universe, demanding meaning for our own inventions. A child who brings forth from its deeper brain a fantastic monster of crayon and glitter, then asks to be taken to the zoo to see it. What is time, she says, and she may as well say, what is love, or fear, or oatmeal. There are many names for the fantastic monster, and parts of it are often mistaken for the head or heart which really are mere appendages; of course the reverse also occurs.<br /><br />I will answer her now, as I have not before, with another question, then. <br /><br /><i>What is pain?</i><br /><br />This is not arbitrary. Time and pain are linked to such a degree that the one could be exchanged for the other, in the right circumstance. They are the double helix, writing to each other, dependent upon each other for definition and therefore existence. Although it comes before them, awareness also comes from them and through them, in their interaction. <br /><br />That leaves out a lot, but linearity and I are not old or good friends, and my intentions are better served by a chronology of my own devising - naturally.<br /><br />Time is the slave of pain, <br />and pain is the brother of awareness, <br />and awareness is the parent of time. <br /><br />Wouldn't it be just as valid to say that God said "Let there be darkness" inside a universe of light? <br /><br />Is it the light, or the difference?