God honors his favorites by crushing them, drops the whole insufferable wretched weight of purpose on their spines until they either snap into shape or snap entirely. the unburdened, those buoyant grinning vapid little phantoms drifting through their own lives without a single crushing thing to carry, they are forgotten

I mostly stopped thinking about things and my life got dramatically better. thats embarrassing to admit but its the fucking truth. i used to build these elaborate mental frameworks for every decision, map out every outcome, then second guess the map, then second guess the second guess, and by the time i was done id missed the moment entirely, or settled on the worst option because it had the most research behind it. now someone asks me something and if the answer comes fast i trust it

God creates from nothing, man creates from code, and the difference is God owns the compiler and man just thinks he does

I was literally just going to write a post about the dishes right before I saw this. I hate doing the fucking dishes, but it keeps me human. It's a constant reminder that I need to take responsibility if I want something, that I am the arbiter of the conditions in which I live.

Everybody wants to be enlightened, nobody wants to do the fucking dishes. the highest thing you can be as a human being is not the thing you understood, it's the thing you did. some guy who can't spell his own name right but built a house with his two hands that actually stands is closer to God than any man who read a thousand books and never moved his thumb for anyone else. not because he prayed because he made a thing exist that didn't exist before, and that's what God did, and that's all anybody is asking you to do

Once the veil lifts and you see that you are allowed to reach into the nothing and pull something sacred out of it, a woman, a company, a family, a book, a song that outlives you, you can never go back to being a consumer. you have tasted the blood of creation and the blood remembers you. from then on every day without making is a little death, and you will feel it in your chest like withdrawal, because the same hand that God used to separate light from darkness is living in yours, and it refuses to stay closed

A man who would volunteer for a thousand more winters just for one more spring is the only man the ground will miss when he leaves

The quality i respect in people is when somebody could obviously destroy you in an argument but chooses not to, and you can tell. the thing is, they could do it, but they just let the little silence sit there. i mean, most smart people are so desperate to show you they're smart that they can't resist the shot. doing it for nothing, holding all that fire and just saying nothing, that's the flex

The world is getting worse and i don't think it's going to stop. and the honest truth is, most people who tell you to fight back are also losing. the only person i've ever watched actually keep their mind through something terrible was a quiet woman who never talked about strength once. she just did normal things with frightening consistency. she waked up early, she made food, she cleaned her place, she talked to people like they mattered, even when she knew how bad it was. maybe especially because she knew how bad it was. and it shamed me, because i was out there talking about the darkness, thinking that made me useful. and she was just quietly not letting it into her kitchen

This is why the family and home is the epicenter of culture/civilization/reality itself. You have the opportunity and the vocation to be a bulwark against the darkness, and all you need to do that is to have the light yourself and let it shine in what you do.

My best work came out of the worst years of my life, and that annoys me because i dont want that to be true, but it is. comfort made me stupid, gave me the illusion i had time to think and plan. when i was broke and scared i actually made things, because there was nothing else to do with my fear. But the catch is, you have to remember you have work. most people in suffering just suffer, they forget they have hands. suffering doesnt produce a fucking thing on its own, its raw energy with no direction. the genius is the idiot who remembered to sit down

Honestly the easiest way to know if a man is any good is just watch what happens to his face when someone mentions his mother. that's it. ive been wrong about people a thousand times but never once about this. the ones who go soft are safe. the ones who go hard or go blank you need to be careful with. honor thy father and thy mother for there is no love in you that did not first pass through them

I sleep like four hours some nights and wake up feeling like something freshly built. other nights i sleep nine and wake up wanting to die, and i spent years thinking it was about the hours, tracking cycles, counting, reminders, etc, all that stupid bullshit. it had nothing to do with it. what actually matters is whether your mind let go before you went under

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. John 1:5

My friends kid is four years old and already argues like his mother, same tone, same weird quiet before she says the thing that actually lands. his father is a gentle guy, barely speaks up when people are around, and everybody thought the kid would take after him because the kid is quiet too. but no. the kid is quiet the way the mother is quiet, not passive, loading. you can watch it in his face when someone takes a toy from him. he doesn't cry, he doesn't react, he goes still and then two minutes later does something about it, calmly and precisely. that's her, that's entirely her tinkture in the boy, and there's nothing the father can do about it. i think about which parents mind actually won, because it is a kind of winning. everyone talks about genetics like it's eyes and hair, nobody talks about what really gets passed down, which is the architecture of how you think, how you fight, how you love, how you go quiet when you're dangerous. one parent plants a stronger seed in the mind and that child grows up wearing that parent's entire software and doesn't even know it

I used to watch good people and pity them. they were so careful with others, so deliberate in their kindness, and it went unrewarded every time. the cruel ones got the promotions, the clever ones took their ideas. the world seemed designed to punish goodness and reward the exact opposite. that was all there was to it, it was a law, as immutable as anything i could observe. Until enough time passed, maybe five years, maybe ten, and i check back in, and the clever cruel ones are sitting in some kitchen alone, looking old. and the good ones walk into a room and you can feel everybody soften. they didn't win anything you can measure, but people are glad they're alive. and no amount of success has ever replicated that. and it made me realize i didn't understand what fruit meant. i was looking for the wrong crop

Genuinely wanting the best for someone who hates you is such a specific flex. I mean most people can barely want the best for their own friends without some competitive shit creeping in. doing it for someone who actively dislikes you is borderline insane

God does not want you stupid. he does not want one smart man in every country and thousands of idiots following him like sheep. he does not want you to say words you don't understand, and he is not flattered by your obedience. he wants you to go find out for yourself and come back with something real

I've been paying attention to this for years and i'm convinced now that modern architecture is hostile on purpose. walk into any office building built after 1970 and pay attention to what happens to your breathing. the ceilings are exactly low enough to make you feel compressed but not so low that you'd complain. the lighting is exactly wrong enough to make everyone look slightly sick. whoever designed these spaces understood something about human psychology that they are using against you. now walk into a cathedral built in the 1200s and notice that your chest opens involuntarily. someone eight hundred years ago knew which proportions make the human spirit expand and they built it into stone. it is the most serious engineering that has ever existed and we replaced it with whatever the fuck is happening in every downtown on earth right now