The excitement that comes from being young is directly linked to having nothing and taking stupid risks to get more. When you get older, the risks disappear, but the desire for excitement stays, so everyone starts acting like their younger self again, except now their recklessness is directed at each other instead of the world. Cheating, drinking, fighting, lying, stealing, spite. Everybody wants the thrill back, but no one remembers how to get it cleanly, except having kids forces you to go back to the real risks, because suddenly you have nothing again, except this tiny, screaming thing that needs everything you have, and suddenly the stakes are sky high again, and the world is sharp and clear, because you have to go find fire again for real now

God's lovers have always been the bleeding ones, on the road with no clear destination. not the pretty polished pious saints but the ones with dirt under their nails and madness in their eyes, the ones you would cross the street to avoid because their storm was too loud for your liking. these are the ones who will praise until their tongues rot from disuse, praise was made for the dark road, the broken body and the heart that wants to know why but doesnt yet. the ones who have already arrived cant praise, not really. they can recite, but praise is the domain of the baffled and lost, the ones who crawl because they cant walk and speak in tongues because their cognitive mind is broken, who fight with the angel all night and ask to be blessed even when they are dislocated, the ones who grab blessings by force while God wrestles them to the ground

Nothing produces a villain so efficiently as a brilliant mind left to ferment without God. somewhere right now there is a man with a beautiful mind for mathematics curdling into a petty manipulator because nobody ever gave him anything larger than himself to serve. history is full of these rotten brilliant geniuses, every single one of them had the same blank accountant's stare by the end, that same flat calculating quiet that passes for composure but is actually the calm of a man who has already decided everybody around him is less than him and is merely waiting for the correct time to say so

The mind is a lot bigger and deeper than most people use, they just skate on the top layer. but there are fucking cathedrals down there man, temples buried in the mud, and all kinds of wild animals that you can catch and harness if youre not scared to climb down the ladder into the dark

I was a rebel before I was a father - so what makes you think I don’t know you when I literally was you? Like you, the world weighed on my shoulders when I was far too young and small to possess the capacity to take care of myself, and so like you, I was self-destructive, contemptuous, distrusting and rebellious. I too came to distrust authority, because none of what I saw was righteous, fair, or just, and so like you I decided to break all rules, forge my own path, and learn the hard way by making my own mistakes - paying the blood and soul price along the way. What do you know of me then that I do not know of you, or would you pretend we are so dissimilar? Do you think my authority is like theirs when I was (and in many ways, still am) you? No. I do not desire it, and never pursued it - I just fucking have it by simple merit of being the man that I am as an emergent property of my being - it is another burden that is an honour, and so I employ it in the way I think others should have but failed to, because I know better than them - because I do not emulate my inferiors - because I care more for beauty and goodness than I do trinkets or a felt sense of superiority. That’s it. That’s all it is. It is really that simple.

Duality is the condition of all reality. nothing exists without another to define it. up means nothing without down, in means nothing without out, white is invisible without black, right is empty without left. you cant touch any of those things but they make up the grid of what you can see. think about the stories that stick with you, the ones where you couldnt look away. there is always some tension at the center, two opposed forces pulling toward and away from each other, and the whole narrative is animated by that charge. but you cant ever resolve it, because if they merged the story would end. its got to be perpetuated, and thats what reality is, an endless dance of these twins without hope of reunion

Your grandmother knew the names of demons before psychology invented new words for them. She blessed bread because bread is covenant, covered mirrors because reflection is dangerous, threw salt because salt remembers the sea that birthed all life. superstition is what she called sight

The next kings will be carpenters who read Dostoevsky and understand what it means to have an axe in your hand. these carpenters will have spent their nights building things that will not last, tables with uneven legs, chairs that wobble, beds that creak under the simplest weight, because perfection is not the point of carpentry. it is working the wood until its shape roughly conforms to the idea in your mind, and then giving it away because you can always make another. these men will have read Dostoevsky in bad light with tired eyes and saw themselves on every fucking page. they are the drunks and the madmen and the peasants clawing out a space between the walls of history to carve their initials before the plaster closes back over it. they do not care about legacy, they just want to get something made before God taps them on the shoulder and tells them times up

I will teach my son that the comfortable house i am giving him is not his paradise, it is mine, and that he cannot inherit a paradise. Adam did not lose eden, he was freed from it. a garden someone else planted is just a pleasant temple, and the man who grows old inside it dies as a guest. the world is full of sons who never left, who took the safe position, the warm approval, the easy chair, and who now in their forties sit at dinners speaking in the voices of their fathers . i pity them, but i will not let him become them. he must understand that the day when he does the thing that makes me angry, the thing that makes his mother cry, the thing that risks everything he has been handed, that day is his birth. i can only give him the exit, not the land. the land he must take with his own fear drenched hands. and i will make sure he knows that i would rather he be kicked out and build a leaky shack on his own ground than stay in my walled garden forever

The one truth every man must know to survive in this world is that he will, no matter what, no matter how many obstacles pile up in his way, he must know in his bones that he will find a way through them all. this is the only thing that matters, the only question worth asking, not what could happen or who might stand in your path, but whether or not you will, in the end. because if you start with that knowledge, if you hold it tight and let that truth seep into your marrow, then theres not a goddamn thing in this world that can stop you. not fate, not the whole weight of history coming down on your shoulders. youll shrug it off. walk through the deepest rivers of shit imaginable and come out on the other side. and heaven and earth will move for the man who refuses to flinch.

Across time and across cultures, a woman alone is a woman lost, and they will eat you raw if you dare to question that damnation. dont blink. tell her what the world wont admit until it is too late for her, so that it might not be too late for her

What a privilege it is to be lost in a self made dream instead of threading other people's nightmares through your own mind

My prediction is the current suicide of the west is far from over. the ideological possession that has gripped the world since the first industrial revolution will not let go until it has bled every ounce of useful energy from our society and siphoned it all into its own infinitely expanding maw. the confused thrashing of the modern spirit drowning in its own weightlessness is nothing compared to what is coming

Pain is the only alchemy that matters. nothing transmutes flesh into divinity faster than agony properly held. the great lie of this century is that suffering is always bad, to be avoided at all costs, even by those who know better, even by those who preach that sacrifice is the heart of love but still try to live pain free lives, because they have not yet understood the difference between suffering and sacrifice, between pain endured and pain chosen. all pain burns equally at the level of nerve ending, but only the pain embraced will give you wings. the rest is just shrieking meat. nothing else turns man to angel faster than the pain he accepts willingly for a greater love

That statistic isnt just a coincidence or some quirk of personality type, its a omen. the name stands for the union, its a symbolic stake in the ground, the first public act that you are no longer two but one thing made up of two things

The whole point of living in your nature is that when the outer world comes against you, you can say fuck the world i will be myself anyway. and what can they do to stop you, really? if you become untamed inside, nothing outside can harness you again. they can touch your body but they cant touch the place you move from. and when you accept that, you become like an elemental force, not stoppable, bendable, just moving on its own course, like a river. and people will fear, hate and slander you, but at the end of the day they cannot change what you are

Most people chasing fame on here are chasing something that will never love them back. its all just a hologram of connection

My children laugh for no reason sometimes, and when it comes it feels like a spell being cast. i think i might be witnessing the birth of magic itself when i hear them giggling alone in another room for absolutely no reason. there is no sound like it in the world. nothing compares to it. i know of no prayer or substance that will stop me in my tracks and bring me to the verge of tears the way their idle laughter in the midst of an ordinary day does. it feels like being handed a proof that reality isn't what it seems, that there is an undercurrent of mystery flowing beneath the surface of all things, and they have found a way to dip their toes in it while the rest of us go on with our daily lives, unaware of the miracle lapping at our feet. i am so grateful to live with such small wizards who can summon pure joy out of thin air and sprinkle it around my house like fairy dust

Souls bent by life will always puzzle those who walked straight

If you look at instagram and think your life should look like their life you have already lost your soul. you think what you're seeing is a view into what you want but it's just a carrot on a string leading you into a wood chipper filled with lies and copium. dont look to these people to tell you where your life should go, most of them are dying inside and their skulls are full of brain worms optimized to trick you into joining them. focus on your own path even if it feels rough and unseen, at least when you look down you'll see your own two feet moving instead of a fake paradise