post pose pore pork park pack pick tick tock sock!!!!

POST --> SOCK.
I love words. 
It's time for a serious Virgil-post about a serious topic. Don't ya miss those?

"When adults say, 'Teenagers think they are invincible' with that sly, stupid smile on their faces, they don't know how right they are. We need never be hopeless, because we can never be irreparably broken. We think that we are invincible because we are. We cannot be born, and we cannot die. Like all energy, we can only change shapes and sizes and manifestations. They forget that when they get old. They get scared of losing and failing. But that part of us greater than the sum of our parts cannot begin and cannot end, and so it cannot fail." - John Green, Looking for Alaska

John Green is my hero. Have I mentioned that before? Whenever I'm writing something and I want it to sound meaningful, I start using John Green's voice as my thinking-voice. Then everything comes out insightful and sincere. My normal thinking-voice sounds like my normal talking-voice usually, unless I've spent a couple weeks in the UK, in which case my thinking-voice starts to have a bit of a British accent. It usually goes back to normal, though.

Going along with the Looking for Alaska theme, today I'm going to talk about the labyrinth. (Spelled it right on the first try. I should win an award or something for that.) The labyrinth relates to what I did over the weekend, which is a youth retreat called Happening. You're not really supposed to talk about Happening because the stuff we do there is a super-duper secret so that way it's a surprise for future Happeners, so I won't go into detail about the other parts of the weekend. The labyrinth isn't unique to this retreat - people do it all over the world.


The quote up there that I started with isn't about the labyrinth, but I put it there because it's my favorite quote from Looking for Alaska. I actually have a lot of favorite quotes from that book. The whole thing is one giant quote-producing machine, because it's the bestest book ever written (naturally I'm not even including Harry Potter in this, because that is another topic for another day). Here's another one of my favorite quotes from Looking for Alaska:

"What the heck is that?" I laughed.
"It's my fox hat."
"Your fox hat?"
"Yeah, Pudge. My fox hat."
"Why are you wearing your fox hat?" I asked.
"Because no one can catch the motherfricking fox."
[lol the curly fries censored john green^]

I love Takumi. 

Okay, now I'm getting really sidetracked. I was going to talk about the labyrinth. 


So at this youth retreat, we did this thing that a lot of Christians do which is called walking the labyrinth. There's this sort of maze-print on a huge cloth that's laid out on the floor of the chapel. It looks like this:

Except I'm pretty sure ours was one or two tiers smaller. You get the idea. The path is just about wide enough for a pair of feet to walk along, and then there's a flower in the middle. One at a time, each person would slowly wind his/her way through the labyrinth, then arrive at the center flower, where you could sit down and meditate or pray or space out or whatever. Then you would get up and walk out the same way you came. 

"Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia. (...) You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you'll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present."


The significant thing isn't the labyrinth ritual. You see, my small group finished going through the labyrinth one-by-one, and then we had all this time to spare. So we decided that we would go through the labyrinth one more time - only this time with would do it together in a line, and we would dance the whole way through. So, with our arms linked, we danced the labyrinth. 


It occurred to me at that moment that maybe our "labyrinth of suffering" doesn't even necessarily have to have the words "of suffering" tacked onto the end. It's just the labyrinth - i.e., life is life, but we have control over how we live it. So maybe the way out of suffering isn't that we have to somehow find a way out of the labyrinth, but find a way to enjoy the labyrinth. So instead of walking slowly and solemnly, looking for the end, maybe we should all just dance. 

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In other news, I saw House in Boston on Wednesday, and it was fun. We looked at seals. I love seals. 

This is Chacoda. He's my favorite. D'aww!!!

Love,
Virgil