Author Archives: Janine

Desire’s dark side

Lustful affairs bring consequences. The lovechild of the compulsion to consume is the unwanted bastard offspring Debt.

Oh Debt. We are not shy about conceiving you.

Australians lead the world with an average household debt (which includes mortgages) footprint of 1.8 – this means that people are spending nearly twice what they earn. All of their income and 80% of a whole ‘nother wage. Staggering. (ref ABS Data May 2014 ) No really.

‘Yeah’ you say ‘but that’s including houses and everybody knows that the Australian housing market is overvalued. That’s why I rent!’ Ok fine.
Australians owe billions on credit cards, about $4 400 per person.

Just for fun, this clock (ASIC Moneysmart ) shows how much Australians currently owe on the plastic. Your factoid for today is that 49% of those who carry $5,000 or more in credit card debt have a degree or a diploma. Oh wait, last one! Two in five people have no idea what interest rate they are paying on their card (and that was in March 2013! ).

Much as those figures stimulate the curiosity and sound all newsy they actually distract from the human story that sits behind them. It is all too easy to evaluate yourself immediately against those figures so you can dismiss them. Relief – ‘mine’s lower!’ Or to judge – ‘how could they let it get to that?!’ I chose to include them because they’re real. Most Australians of age have one or more credit cards. They owe money on them that potentially they will never ever actually pay out. Or like dieters who know better, they yo-yo in and out of debt on the cards in tides of recrimination and stoic, forced budgets.

None of us is alone with our debt baby. We live in culture where it is normal to carry debt. That’s what we call it, not ‘tortured by’ or ‘enslaved by’ an endless burden. No, we just casually ‘carry’ it. We consider it part of the ‘cost of living’. Everyone does it. Those who do not have a credit card have an uneasy aura of either a do-gooder or a bankrupt (depending a bit on the tone of voice used to convey the information) but are a bit creepy either way. Not someone you’re going to listen to anyway.

Would you listen to yourself though? If your future self could tunnel through the time vortex and whisper in your ear, what would they say to you about how you left them holding the crying, hungry baby? Can the future you remember the emergency purchase or convenience of takeaway dinner or the money you saved by buying on sale with credit? Did you ever fall in love with a book that you simply must have only to get it home and put it on top of the pile of other books you haven’t yet read? I did. Many times.

When ANZ handed my debt over to a hard-nosed collection agency and I had to own up to my past indiscretions there was no way I could remember a single thing that had been so important it had to be bought with that card. My past self had blithely given me a big stinking problem to deal with and I hated her for it. If that’s not a perfect example of provisional living going bad, I don’t know what is. I don’t know that I would have listened to future me though, if I had tried to deny those lustful urges. In the end, it was an affair that took me years to recover from.

Why do we assume that our future selves will somehow have more resources, more ability to deal with the consequences of our actions? Because we’ve inadvertently subscribed to the doctrine of progress. We do it in our personal lives, we do it in our communities when we build houses on every next block of land, leaving no space for anything else. We do it as a nation when we use every bit of energy we can grab because ‘they will figure out a new technology soon and we’ll all have limitless lives and won’t have to work’ or something that sounds like winning the ‘infinite planet lotto’. Not going to happen. Addictive and easy, sure, but not real.

The reality is that it is impossible to be free when we are in the thrall of endless compound interest on debt. In the next quiet moment you have to yourself, ask your future self what it is that you both want most out of life.

It is not going to be more debt.

Kiss your loved ones and plan a different way forward. We’ve got a lot ahead of us.

Consumption compulsion

Muddling forward into our shared future, let’s have a cuppa and talk about the elephant in the room. Lust.

Yes, you’ve felt it. Unbidden, from deep in you rises that heady, powerful urge to purchase. New things. Shiny things. Perfect, desirable, cool, promising things. We have an affair with that orgasmic moment of transaction. The Purchase. *sigh*

This is what gets us into trouble in the first place. It is easy to believe that we’re all immune to the lure of the marketing demons and advertising parasites, yet our houses, garages and storage units are bursting with gadgets and gear that we’ve barely used. We’re cheating on the side with stuff, and it’s an affair we swear off and crawl back to. I’m not pointing any fingers or throwing any stones here, I’m coming clean and asking for help.

It starts off, as every affair does, innocently. You see it in a picture alongside an article, or as a prop in a film or tv series. Maybe you notice it, maybe you don’t. Then you spot it in another feed or your favourite blog or pinterest board. Oh, here it comes, the momentum is building and it is already too late. You click through. You note the hashtag. You check the site and are appalled at the price, and then all over again at the shipping. You close the window. Swear off but you know you’ll be back.

Whatever that item is, you DO NOT NEED IT.

You don’t. You just want it.

A friend and I were talking this week about notebooks (We’re mad for stationery. Don’t judge.) and we’ve both been “looking at” (you know what this is code for) a particular name brand ‘notebook’ that is actually just a cover that you buy inserts for. The covers are expensive and hard to get. Perfect. They’re also not all that practical for how I live and work. Even better. Plus, they’re made of leather. Watch two committed vegetarians rationalise how this is ok because at least it will be long wearing. Oh dear.

Why? Why do we sometimes want these name-brand items, no matter what? How does it become, out of nowhere, such an urgent passion? We can drive ourselves almost crazy with the craving, even though we know it can cripple us financially (or send us into a spiral of unmanageable credit card debt).

I wish I knew how this happens, so I could unhook from it. I feel it *all the time* it is like a constant undercurrent in our culture. Watching a lot less TV does help – but now the internet is littered with visually driven content – and these ‘notebooks’ seem to be everywhere that aspirational images are and nowhere in my mundane, suburban reality. They exotically promise creativity, freedom, and a life unfettered by the necessity to carry anything other than this in your tiny, light bag. Probably you’re too cool for a bag because you’re such a free spirit. You travel so light you just live out of a pocket.

Let me tell you why I’m a tiny bit bitter. It is because I’ve been down this road before. Let me introduce you to The Filofax.

My 20 year old Filofax (almost exactly the same size and concept) is still in perfect condition but now just looks daggy and old-school. So 80s! Yet at the time, it was the same, I burned for a Filofax. Burned. Planned it for so long, shopped around (pre-Internet!). The fact that the card slots in it are US size and none of my cards ever, EVER fit was shaming but I pretended that I didn’t care. I still use it at home to keep all my friends’ addresses in (yes, by hand, on paper!) but I would never carry it around (like we all used to) because it is just too heavy and really it is a back-up for my phone (yes, before there were mobiles!). Even carrying my B5 journal feels bulky and I sometimes see people with kindles smirking at me. I have a little pad of A6ish post-its in the back of the journal and that works really well for any notes on the go, so I know I would never really use this notebook and even so, I STILL WANT ONE.

For now, I recognise that my affair with compulsive consumption is destructive. The seductive allure of fresh pages; or the glamour of pristine, unscuffed bags; the excitement and promise of exactly the right shoes is the frisson that hooks me in and keeps me coming back. I’m getting better. I tell myself little white lies (“I can’t afford it”) or keep a 30 day list. But what really keeps me on the straight and narrow is the thought of that perfect, beautiful almost useless Filofax on my cluttered desk at home.

I’m going to get that Filofax out tonight and give her a glass of wine and gentle rub. Make it up to her. Let her know I still appreciate her patented system and secure papers and useless card slots. Most of all, I’m going to thank her for being a lesson well learned from days long past about how lust fulfilled fades so quickly and leaves a wake of bedraggled leftovers cast aside to make way for tomorrow’s rising favourites.

Let us settle for love and honesty in the face of these incessant temptations. You have enough. We are already enough.

Confessional quirk

Over the last two weeks we’ve looked at themes of provisional living and choice. Like all victors I get to write my own history so they’ve been about fairly positive aspects of that experience. Both focussed around ‘stuff’ as that is an external thing and it can be quantified and measured. So reassuring. Stuff has let me start exploring the topic of freedom, which is what I think we’re edging towards talking about.

Before we get there, it is worthwhile talking about a choice that didn’t go so well and some payoffs from provisional living that haven’t been so easy to give up.

I haven’t given up making voluntary contributions to my superannuation account. Even though I know it is essentially futile. I still want to believe that somewhere in a future I might get to are golden days of leisure where I am ‘retired’ but still physically functional. I *know* right?! That retirement age went up to 70 years of age already. As the Boomers’ demographic bulge really hits the retirement costs wall, that will be bumped up again, we all know it.

I haven’t given up on fantasising about which set of high-end luggage I will buy (I favour Rimowa) when I start travelling the world in this mythical parallel life where I have the same income but somehow no costs of living or debt responsibilities (and I don’t get homesick every 5 days).

I keep promising myself that *next* spring I’ll get the garden going properly and get back into growing at least tomatoes so that I’m not totally dependent on other people and fossil fuels for every single thing I eat. I believe there’s still plenty of time to get that organised and somehow it doesn’t quite make it up my list of priorities, but you can guarantee I’ll rant about toms being $10 a kilo come February.

This little list of hypocrisies is barely indicative of how many deals there are still in place. Maybe you’ve got some deals of your own – where rationally you know one thing, but behaviourally you just keep hooking in to doing the thing you’ve always done. Maybe you’ve ‘made’ a whole bunch of choices without ever really thinking about it. Why aren’t you vegetarian? Why do you have a credit card? Why do you watch tv in the evening? Why do you assume this is the only way it can be?

Last year, as these questions began piling up, I tried to find the unified theory that would answer these conundrums and deliver unto me a blazing, pure path of honesty, integrity and clarity. I hoped that wanting this very very intensely and visualising it as though it had already appeared would help to manifest this life-changing awakening. I knew in my heart that when it came, I would be incandescent in every sense, the wisdom of all the ages would illuminate my problems and my failings with pure love, and they would melt into submission in the face of ultimate reality.

Beautiful no?

Ah, beautiful indeed. While I waited for this magnificence to manifest, I kept working hard and diligently at everything. I felt the pain of my failings and of my compromises. I felt like a fraud at the deals I made to keep going. I pushed through the fatigue of commuting, the hollowness of a meaningless job and the maintained the façade of a good modern cog – I was productive.

Without making a choice, I had chosen denial. I was, with the very best of intentions, breaking myself.

Eventually, I failed at breaking myself. In the aftermath, I realised my golden answer, my unified theory, my ‘access all areas’ lanyard was simply not coming. (Let me be clear, this is (or will be) a Very Good Thing even though at the time it was hard to handle.)

Where I am struggling, is that in-between the pushing to make it so, and the failing to change, I’m in a place of confusion. Some things (stuff!) are under my control and some things (climate change) just kindof aren’t. No matter how much I reduce my carbon footprint and make my boyfriend think twice about his use of the clothes-dryer I can’t stop the polar ice-caps melting. If no one is going to listen to Al Gore without getting snarky about what car he drives, who am I to try to change the world while I own a car at all? Hmmm.

More than confusion. I just gave up. But that’s not living from my values either. The sun keeps coming up each morning and the wheel of this year is turning. I am asking, not for a golden answer now, but for a way to muddle forward. I’m asking for sustainable freedom and my deepest wish is that you and I will find it together.

Last week I shared with you the idea of provisional living and touched a little on the bubble of the myth of constant and inevitable progress. In writing, we’re always making choices. We’re constantly selecting one word or phrase over another, crafting images and stories that will resonate with our chosen audience and choosing when to pause or stop a narrative and leave the rest to our readers.

An aphorism that I’ve tried to live by for the past decade or so is “There are no answers, only choices” and I’d like to share that today in the spirit of exploring how to live inside of and create from a position of values in what feels like an aggressive, shallow and purely commercial world. I will disclose at the outset that I have a day job. I pay my way in the world from the position of a cubicle in which I write for my corporate overlords. I chose to get (and keep) this job and bear the consequences of that choice. One of those consequences is that I do not have the bo-ho credibility of ‘living off my art’. I don’t see it that way, but you might. My skills in communicating with people (and translating between people who speak the same language but can’t understand each other) make me useful in a business environment. It is no mean feat to remain useful, relevant and employed these days, but that’s not the most interesting choice to talk about.

Instead, let’s think about giving up the emotional and psychological payoffs that come from the behaviour of provisional living. In place of daydreaming about what life might be like ‘when I win lotto’ there were questions that started with ‘What is wealth?’ and ‘What do I think of as freedom?’ and lead to ‘What if I already have enough?’

Money wasn’t the only topic that came under review. Relationships of all kinds, working, debt, health, writing, travel, relaxation. In some ways nearly everything had become infected with an expectation that it would just get better by itself (thanks Progress!) or that eventually a day would dawn where I would be handed a golden answer. To *everything*.

While I lay on the couch, watching the sun pass across the ceiling and really getting it that the golden answer wouldn’t come, I started to play a game of ‘what if?’ Maybe you’d like to play it too?

What if I already have enough?

What if every life really is sacred?

What if I could help someone every day, just in the course of my normal life?

What if there are no unsacred places?

What if my purpose is simply to love and be loved in return?

What choices would I make if these things were true? What would I chose to live by – if I could chose anything? How would I be in my life if I sought out ways to bring my choices to life? Would I select different experiences, people, priorities?

What would you do if you turned out to be responsible for your life and your choices without recourse to any wish for it to be different than it is right now?

It is what it is. Then what?

One little thing at a time, you make choices.

For stuff, I decided that one thing in meant one thing had to go out. That tiny choice created a cascade of implications and considerations, not least was creating a kind of mindfulness about quality, emotional shopping, waste, recycling and boredom. So many choices we make without thinking. There are no answers about how much stuff is right, or which stuff is better or why stuff is such an obsession. There are no answers about why, or when, or who. I just made that one choice that felt right in my situation, and I committed to living by it and within the consequences it produced.

It took some time, but inside that choice came a new type of freedom.

No brighter future

One of the ways that I’ve been blindsided in the recent past was by the idea of ‘provisional living’. You know when someone you respect tells you something and you have that “uh-oh, I totally do that” moment? yeah, that. Damn!

It was introduced a while ago on The Archdruid Report (http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com.au/) and this week was very helpfully featured by the site’s author John Michael Greer in a post The Gray Light of Morning (http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com.au/2014/07/the-gray-light-of-morning.html) with his trademark practical responses beautifully summarised (just to let you know, JMG’s posts hit the 2500 word mark usually and this one is no exception, so I encourage you to read it, but you’ll be expected to concentrate. Just so you know).

I’ve stolen the title for this blog post from him too – he first introduced the counter-incantation “There is no brighter future” in a post in 2010 Waiting for the Millennium http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com.au/2010/06/waiting-for-millennium.html and it is as challenging in itself as it is effective in response to our culture’s addiction to the PROMISE OF PROGRESS (insert booming music suitable to your tastes for the overblown and flags waving in majestic animation).

The reason I raise these points (and sorry about the dodgy links I will try and fix those later) is not just to point out that the Archdruid’s blog is well worth reading, which it is (as are the comments, and he tends to respond to the first 80 or so) but to talk a little about some difficult things that most individuals in the first world are all either coming to terms with, struggling with or about to be blind-sided by and that is the “where’s my hover board?” question (for ‘Back to the Future’ fans) which starts to pop the bubble built so assiduously by decades of Star Trek and our news services being taken-over by corporate interests.

When trust in that bubble about the bright and shiny future starts to wane, or it pops, we’re left lurching around with our hurty hollowness and a lot of questions that taste bitter. Or at least I did. The last five years that I’ve been reading The Archdruid’s Report I’ve been nodding along, learning and taking notes but rarely feeling surprised. I’ve found a lot of wisdom in his words and they have helped me shine light on the path for others too. None of that prepared me for the day I stumbled over my own addiction to the promise of progress and started to join the dots. I mean really join them, not academically, not theoretically, but in my life for the food and shelter I depend on.

And then everything changed.

That’s a choice, obviously, you don’t get involuntarily infected.
You’re not going to catch radical honesty or anything from reading this stuff. But if you think about it… well you might find yourself trying to argue your way out of it, or around it, or that somehow my case is different.
Good luck with that.
Once you start recognising it, you see it everywhere. Then it is nearly impossible to watch any form of tv, or read the newsfeeds without recoiling from it. You’ll see it in how we deal with the ecological crises (‘when all the scientists agree’ or ‘someone will come up with something’) or the economy or our health or our personal finances (“when I win lotto”). Provisional living and the promise of a bright future go hand in hand. They keep us quiet, compliant, docile.

Without them there is a gap that I scrounged around to fill. In that gap I realised I had stuffed my life full of things and was somewhat self-suffocated. My creativity had been channelled into keeping the bubble intact and into threading together alternate stories of what might be, and how somehow it might all work out. I was never able to convince myself, and I certainly wasn’t able to convince anyone else. and on the other side? Hmmm, I’ll let you know when I have more of a clue.

In the short term, my challenge is to live inside of making choices, not hoping for answers. I must act in a way that lets my values breathe in every day. It isn’t glamorous but it is so practical as to be a real head-slapper. That’s my choice, to engage with the world as it is and find ways inside my life to simplify, to act, to be humane, to love, and to forgive.

There’s no big secret to attracting the life you want. The magic is in the daily choices we make and in the willingness to respect that there are things bigger and more valuable than our childish fantasies of entitlement-fulfilment.

Hermit muse

Just a quick note to let you know that I’m over on another blog this week – guest posting on the wonderful Two Sides Tarot about one of those darker cards, The Hermit.

It is in two parts the first is on the card and the reading I designed for it and the second is a sample reading to give a feel for how the positions play off the cards.

Such a pleasure to write something quite different from the usual day-job of translating corporate jargon into plain English. That has some rewarding moments, but it certainly isn’t generally spiritually enriching.

I’m looking forward to sharing a wider range of things with you over the next six months, and this is a good step in expanding my comfort zone and showing more of the range of work that I do. I do hope you enjoy it.

Hiatus

There’s an odd sense of guilt that I experience when I am ill (as I have been recently), that somehow, despite barely functioning physically and mentally I should be maintaining an “effective public presence.” In sideways conversations over cuppas I’ve discovered that other people feel this pressure too. It is not just on social media that we try and hide the clunky bits of our lives, it is in our conversations with acquaintances and colleagues. We down-play our dark days and try to skip through recuperation as though our soul and our heart can rebound to the pace of the paycheque. I know one woman who keeps the symptoms of her bowel disorder even from her husband. Why do we do this to ourselves?

We invented clocks to help us manage things we want to do but somehow we’ve lost control of the idea of time. Now time is a commodity and we humans must work feverishly under the relentless ticking. Things inside us must be allowed to be a bit slower. We have these tides. The sun comes up but part of us is still in yesterday or last year, or in the moment our life changed forever. We sometimes struggle to honour where we’ve come from and still have enough left to get out of bed. Some people have an internal commanding officer, a big yeller in them who gets them going. They mean well, when they share these yelling people with you, but they don’t work for everyone. The phrases I remember most from my mum while I was growing up are “pull your socks up” and “we’ve all got to do things we don’t want to”. These never made sense to me, and then once day I discovered that that’d become part of my unquestioned -ness. The system that runs me that I’m not consciously aware of.

So when there are times that staying functional in the world is a challenge, the internal edict I hear is to not let it show. To be sad or weak or worn out is to be a failure. Tick tick tick tick! Every tiny tick a hammer-blow of judgement.

This time, I tried to do it a bit differently. I let those metaphorical socks flap around. I did things I needed to do and then just rested. I took some time off from being that me and the ticking. It took longer than was comfortable and the guilt and self-consciousness about that became a topic for another round of gentle reflection and learning and resting.

Six months is not so long in a life. I consider it a good investment.

Poetry on Twitter is Tweetery

Twitter’s hard limit on characters is a temptation too delicious to ignore.
What a marvellous space to evoke a mood or relationship in.
I’m surprised it isn’t more of a popular pursuit to craft poetry inside Twitter.

Tweetery
To me (and of course to many others) it is our digital age’s haiku. A widely accessible and understood form that is shared, public and ephemeral. I think of it as Tweetry, “poetry in tweets”. I saw that it is called micropoetry. Really? No poet came up with that name, I can assure you. Twihaiku too, but too direct a link to haiku I think (and it sounds like something rude that is being used as code behind your back). No thanks. I like my perhaps daggy Tweetery, and I know I’m late to the party too, but that’s how I roll.
I’m the slow anything movement.

I dabble. I’m experimenting. It is a little pleasure. I know I’m not great at it, but sometimes, gee sometimes that single little tweet reminds me of my own love and puts a tiny little poetry back into my step and that can be enough.

Here is my January 2014 tweetery for your non-Twitter based pleasure (I’m @orbitaltorch).

Jan 5
Your night sky softly waits for a cool calm to return.
Bring the fire of your heart for a torch.

Jan 18
Tin roof cooling in the night, tick ticking against crickets singing, My heart calling too All calling Into the dark

Jan 21
Master sets a test.
I take it every day
pencil scratching, heart pounding.
Do I pass!?
He won’t say, just
“Start again, stop trying”.

Jan 26
Imagine there’s room in you for all hopes, all courage, all loves.
Imagine that potential is in you now.
That is your heart.

So there you are.
I’m still learning, always anyway, and about line breaks.
Do you like it? Let me know what you think.

Revising a first draft for the first time

Last November I wrote about being half way through writing a first draft of a novel. It did get finished (triumph!) and now I am half way through revising it.

This edit has already taken as long as the entire drafting process (in calendar days – I should have tracked working hours and didn’t) and the single word I would use to describe this process is humbling.

The focus for the first draft was to get it down, just get an entire draft done. Revising (with a patiently waiting small group of ‘first response readers’ standing by tapping their feet) is about all the usual editorial stuff, but the big thing has been to address all the bits that got tagged with “fix this later” or summarised as “something great happens here so they get to blah”.

Those were fine stopgaps at the time and the right thing to do to keep the draft moving, my challenge now in this first mammoth rewrite is to find fresh creative juice to solve the problems I made and then walked away from. Coincidentally nearly all of them are where the story took another turn away from the outline.

Each step away from the outline made the final shape of the story and of the characters different to what I had planned. A better, more interesting, and authentically driven from the characters’ viewpoints story, but different enough that now I feel on my own and overwhelmed trying to patch it seamlessly into a readable experience.

I’m loving the process, by the way, in case that sounded like a moan.

I’m learning too (I can’t help but learn when the red pen tearing the draft apart is my own) which is delightful. This is my first time on a big job. Over the New Year break I took the opportunity to read and re-read a few tips from those who’ve been down this path before me, and they all agreed on one thing “stop procrastinating and get back to work”.

What is your number one tip for taming a first draft?

Ripening New Year

Like many people around the world I sat down to write out what I wanted this new year to be like. Unsurprisingly it was very similar to how I had hoped that last year might be. At first I was despondent about my life having turned into a drab kind of “rinse and repeat” cycle.

No. Honestly I was gutted.

Perhaps this would be all that I could hope for into the future – fresh chances to try and get just one year right. One year where my modest goals could be met; where I might weigh a little less instead of a lot more, where I might see my loved ones more than my work colleagues. Simple, humble goals that I have failed to achieve in the last year. And indeed the year before that too.

You might suggest that having a process fail regularly would be a good reason to let it go. New year’s resolutions are for chumps, everyone knows that. Yes, so just give up, roll over and let it happen how it will. After all, I am 42 now, a middle-aged lady. Nobody cares. All my rage and fury and desires are unbecoming on podgy hips and graying hair. Passions and hopes are for young people. I should just shut up and pay my taxes. After all, I had my chance, I made my moves. Time, as they say, moves on. Every new year just reminds me that I’m racing against the clock and I don’t get to start from scratch, I’ve got a handicap from all the time I spent learning the wrong things, following stupid advice and bumbling around life’s maze.

But time has moved on without so many of us I cannot be alone in hoping for a second chance.

Then I remembered an amazing phrase that had lodged like a burr in my mind since I had read it on the Archdruid’s Report sometime in the last month or two which I have remembered as “we ripen towards death”* and it took the sting out of my haunting sense of another ‘failed’ year. It hinted of slower, gentler rhythms and reminded me that life’s purpose is not to ‘arrive’ at our final destination. We will, most certainly, get there in due course. Our purpose is really a deliberate and mindful process of combining our own selection of influences and inspirations to constantly become our own selves in relationship to the world around us and its major events.

This then is why I keep my little lists in the front of each diary of my intentions and goals. They are my deliberate and mindful process of who I wish to be in face of what life will throw at me.

In the midst of the year’s wheel, I will have a compass to help me towards what will make sense of this world for me. We all want it to make sense, for there to be a reason behind the pain and the obligation and the duty and the frustration and the lost days.

So many lost days in the life that is ticking down to a long cold end but let us each at least be ripe in our own time. If you are thirsty, seek water. If you are fearful, leap. If you are on fire then burn as bright as all the fires in the heart of the sun. Your path is towards your own end. Let each step on that path be your decision as much as possible. Seek your own flavour in this new year.
Say ‘yes’ to your time.
Be brave. Be incandescent.

* the quote is actually quite different – and a lot better!:
“These people aren’t looking for salvation, at least in the sense that word has been given in the religious sensibility of the last two millennia or so, and which was adopted from that sensibility by the theist and civil religions of the Western world during that time; they are not pounding on the doors of the human condition, trying to get out, or consoling themselves with the belief that sooner or later someone or something is going to rescue them from the supposedly horrible burden of having bodies that pass through the extraordinary journey of ripening toward death that we call life.”
http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com.au/2013/11/at-closing-of-age.html

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