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  • unaffiliated, clashing & adapting


    between us there seems to be a world of difference
    a world of experiences
    a world of culture
    a world of morality
    a world of value systems
    a world of thought
    and yet our neurons fire in similar ways

    our egos are becoming so fragile
    that we cannot stand the difference
    we cannot reconcile that another should percieve a situation in a way that clashes with our own

    yes, the other is not like us
    how we respond to this realization says much more about us than about them

    the older I get the more I realize that the orders that we impose on the world are constructed
    order provides the psychic and social structure with stability
    this is good
    this should change
    this should be avoided” 
    this order/morality is the least oppressive” 
    this is correct” 
    these are the most appropriate politics
    the question is how much of this is constructed? 
    Life and death are not constructs. 

    I am practicing. It is uncomfortable, but I am making the effort to understand and see the world from the eyes of someone who percieves it radically different from me. I am trying to understand the values of someone with whome I share none. 

    It is much more difficult than ever imagined it would be. I still do not know yet if I am capable. 

    no means no

    a lot of us struggle to accept rejection

    But refusing to accept this boundary, only assures that the next person will say no harder, louder, or more confidently.  

    Every no is a double-edged sword for the fragile ego. With every accumulating no, the emotion will be harder to move past. For the fragile ego, a no is an opportunity to prove their worth, their value. It fuels their spurious indignance and quest for power that they deeply crave. This thirst and desire for power evolved from a more basic need that wasn’t met. It grew to successfully occult a deep wound of feeling unloved, rejected, or neglected. 

    The first no is the hardest one but the most important one to accept. You should walk away from rejection and you make the most out of the life you have. Obviously there are exceptions, but the way of life is to walk away from the no’s and walk toward the yes’s. That is what my father did. Most are not as wise as he. 

    being moderate is bad?

    “The only way out from the group-narcissism trap is up, by transcending your group’s feelings of entitlement and connecting with fellow humans—even when it’s easier to believe that you’re special.” Scott Barry Kaufman

    Reading this last line reminds me of Eric Wilson’s On Human Nature. Wilson explains altruism exists on a spectrum in the animal kingdom. Altruism can be complete, such as that in bee and ant colonies, or nonexistent, such as that experienced by lone sharks. Humans have always resided in groups with nuclear qualities, so we are no where near either extreme of the spectrum. 

    I am fatigued by the political rhetoric of the last half of the decade. The prejudice, ignorance and intolerance nauseates me. If it is only ethical to not be tolerant to the intolerant what does that mean when so many of us are on the extreme?

    Left and right have become cut-throat words. Friendships are severed based on ideas. People, with real minds and hearts and souls disregarded because of the cultural and psychological phenomenons that have led them to take a political stance that is insulting to another. 

    Let us be above psychological splitting. Let us be above collective narcissim. If we are passionate about politics, let us examine why… have we or have past generations of ours experienced political trauma? political injustice? financial trauma? Politics is more about emotions and feelings than anyone wants to acknowledge. Otherwise where does the anger, indignance and frustration com from? What parts of ourselves are projected onto our position? 

    We cannot be sharks, aggressive and selfish, and we cannot be bees or ants, and let individual’s conflicts be nonexistent. We can only be human, and every single human needs an individual identity and a supportive community.  

    01-12-2023

    On the winning the love (adaptation) of the desired object

    The child that breaks the toy they did not want to share in a tantrum, toils and blames others over the broken pieces may never learn how to move on from what they perceived to have lost. The lost object may have not been entirely theirs to begin with. They are a scavenger in a world of scarcity and fixed perception.

    There is no such thing as “mine” or “yours” or “his” or “hers” or “theirs”.

    The child that quietly observes, mourns, adapts and moves on to a different, although insufficient, toy has possibility for greater things. They are a creator in a world of prospective abundances. 

    My father taught me how to be quiet and content. Success is to not desire things outside yourself such as recognition. One of life’s greatest victories is forgiveness. We cannot truly love others or ourselves if we cannot forgive faults and accept insufficiencies. 

    Success is to be rich in contentment. Success is not wanting to change or alter the past or the present reality. We can only have the opportunity to change our future if we do not let the story of our past define the future. Success is feeling peace, integrity and that the objectives behind our efforts align with real needs and creative potential. 

    You have to keep playing and living. The choice is in the approach. Scarcity, ego, conflict and scavenging…. or acceptance, vulnerability, non-resistance and possibility. 

    Object relations really do permeate through so much of our shared realities

    Love complicates this process ever so bittersweetly. 

    12-12-2022

    Love & effort & conflict

    “Adversity does not build character, it reveals it.” - James Lane Allen 

    Not all conflict is bad. Conflict means someone cares. 
    Conflict implies the investment of energy to achieve something that is lacking, to right a perceived wrong, to provoke change…
    Effort, conflict is creative & destructive. Apathy is anergy, nonbeing…

    I say thank you to all, for any invisible or tangible conflict that may exist between us.
    It feels wonderful to be seen, although without empathy
    It feels good to be significant
    Thank you for caring, despite being misled by our egos
    I am realizing that conflict carries a special kind of love - maybe not for the the thing we are in conflict with but the love/desire/insufficiency that the conflict reflects

    The illusion that we ever will understand honestly what is going on in the life and heart of another is one of life’s biggest temptations. This is the illusion of assuming to “know” the picture in our head is “the” picture… that what we “know” about the situation is partially correct, that it is partially complete… when it may be neither. 

    My father frequently said to me…“Cada persona es un mundo.” Each person is a world. 

    Sometimes doing nothing at all means you care the most about something else. 

    I am ultimately thankful for any revelation, any adversity, any conflict. It is one of the many double-edged swords of life. 
    A simultaneous challenge and opportunity to align myself further with who I am to be. 

    November 21, 2022

    La vida consta de capas, de muchas realidades desempeñandose
    Transformándose, encontrándose con los límites de una, los comienzos de la otra
    Me han guiado a tener una vida, a trabajar, a estar, a hacer
    Me encuentro que entre el abruma-miento del afecto,
    Me he perdido y cuestiono la importancia de la dirección del camino
    Cuestiono la importancia del rumbo del camino
    Cuestiono la importancia de las reglas implícitas y explicitas del camino

    Solo importan las necesidades, la compañía, la conexión visceral con el mundo que nos rodea
    La sensación que corre por nuestra piel al bañarnos,
    La emoción o curiosidad de, al salir de casa, encontrarse con dinámicas nuevas o diferentes
    El abrazar esos seres que te hacen sentir que, aunque brevemente, el mundo en el que nos encontramos puede estar seguro
    Puede ser suficiente…

    El tener un mundo suficientemente bueno, aunque muchos hermanas y hermanos no lo sean, da paz y tranquilidad.
    Estoy decidida en vivir en ese mundo, porque confío en que existe.

    11-18-2022 
    (based on Winnicotts’ ideas of a good enough mother)

    r^2

    I am finding a rich rich

    A rich rich of peace

    A rich rich of non-resistance

    In order to be still, we must give way

    In the way that water gives place and yet stays whole

    She cannot be changed by you

    She changes you

    For remnants of her adaption, her kindness, remain in your skin


    These are the echos of love, kindness, and compassion that keep emanating from within.

    11-8-2022

    Lost (and wanting to be found)

    Grief confronts you with the lost object (person/place/thing)
    The unconscious pain is a heavy blanket 
    When you’re laying down it is bearable, maybe even comforting
    You forget why everything feels more difficult day to day
    And yet you tread on. 

    Continuing life with the burden of confrontation is disheartening;
    Observing the imprints, reflections and encounters that shape you
    Identify you
    Constitute you
    And realizing that they, too, are fallible…

    They too are fluid, destructible, and only briefly tangible. 

    11-6-2022

    solitary soldier

    The plight of the solitary soldier 

    Is also her victory

    Only when we stand alone, can we know surely that we stand in truth

    But has a life alone ever existed? 

    The dichotomy and illusion of separation is what governs so much of our reality…

    To what purpose? 



    It is contradictory to be a solitary soldier. Soldiers are trained to groupthink. Soldiers die and fight and sacrifice because they self-identify so greatly with the idea of their state. Today there is a different kind of soldier in the West, and a different kind of groupthink. 

    Ideological soldiers self identify so greatly with ideas, that they go to great lengths to defend them. Ideological soldiers, be they academic, scientific, or political… may try to police the mind, the thoughts, the opinions of others. Starting a conflict over ideas is equivalent to starting a conflict over religion. Many peers worship and practice political theory in the same fanatical ways as has been done in history with religion. 

    Our state lines continue to become more invisible for some, and more highlighted for others. Are new *state* lines possible? Could they be for life? For the persistence of nature as we know it?

    We must walk united as solitary soldiers (all with our own complex and dual ideas) fighting for lives, for nature, not for ideas. 

    What great victory exists that is not the persistence of lives?

    8-23-22

    A reflection on the psychology of splitting in the U.S. - duality, suffering, identity, politics

    I live in the generation that grew up with the internet

    A lot of us are infatuated with dogma’s, ideals, politics, ideas, versions of our own egos, versions of our own suffering that are sold to us. 

    I don’t want to be infatuated with anything but the present. 

    I want to remove the pictures that blind my vision of common reality.

    I want to scratch away at the perceptions of this world that make me feel unsafe in it… When in fact we are safer now than we have ever been in a lot of ways. 

    Ask yourself… How is it that I am genuinely suffering? How is it that my brothers and sisters are genuinely suffering? Do I seek out that suffering? Do I self-identify with my suffering or that of others? Am I able to let go of any way that I suffer and have suffered? In my body, in my relationships, in my identity politics….

    Do I do something about my own suffering to overcome it… am I actively helping myself?

    Blaming power systems will likely get you nowhere. For in blaming anyone you give your power away, and let it dissolve into nothing. Power is something we must assert within our circle of control. We must practice to attain it with stern passivity and moral integrity. 

    Every perspective lacking duality seems to me either ignorant or innocent. 

    We get stuck in political extremes when the only things that are truly important are people’s needs. 

    We seem to be devolving into modern states of tribalism. Us vs. Them. 

    Well the truth is that no one is wrong, and no one is right… but everyone with extreme politics has responsibility to take in the conflict. 

    Imagine if all political propaganda where just stories, examples, statistics of human suffering as a reflection of certain needs not being met. 

    The problem is no longer just human suffering. The problem is now also that we fundamentally disagree on how to solve it when we are all standing on the same sinking boat. 

    Instead of looking at colors, ideas, he said/she said, can we look at the data together? 

    Can we make an effort to see people in their skin and bodies? Not their beliefs, not their ideals, not in their way of being? Can we observe their living,  breathing, finite selves?

    Let’s stop compartmentalizing the body, the mind, and the spirit (vital energy/motivation) from politics. Humanize it. Humanize your “enemy” even if you feel they don’t deserve it. Fundamentally disagreeing with someone else’s morals and perspectives doesn’t mean we should give up on them, on it. 

    No one’s suffering justifies lack of empathy. No suffering is superior or inferior. No one is God to judge anyone or anything. 

    When we attempt to promote or politicize certain suffering as more worthy of care, attention, resources, we place our selves in a position of power, a position that is “God-like.”  If we do this, if we give ourselves the power to judge and evaluate… we can’t be upset when our neighbor judges a different suffering more worthy, more deserving of resources. We can’t be upset when our other brothers and sisters also adopt “God-like” statures. Thus the personified Gods,  Franco, Castro, Mussolini and Lenin were born and made. Democracy cannot exist if this is the power game we want to play, regardless of the extreme. This is the fundamental flaw and catch-22. The aspiration to any extreme political ideal is anti-democratic if there is a demonstrated history of duality. 

    We must all step down from the power pedestals that we build for ourselves. “I am more right.” “This is righteous.” “This is better.” None of this can be true until we agree to disagree under certain conditions and regulations. 

    So let’s do our duty, let’s be human. Imperfectly human, but let’s try to stop the us vs. them. We all engage in splitting, but we can make an effort not to. 

    7-15-2022

    proximity

    sometimes tender, sometimes hostile

    Tender closeness may be full of fear

    Harmful intimacy may be comforting

    Degrees of separation are dwindling

    Its only a matter of time before boundaries are tested, questioned, speculated about

    Nevermind the fight or flight, there is an entire social dynamic, social duty, power play that requires a level of containment. 

    An assumed standard of emotional ignorance that should be maintained

    There is no space for tears, there is no space for anxiety, there is no space for vulnerability and humanity. 

    Even if I don’t want to… even if we don’t want to…

    We must (not) be proximal in our encounters (even) if it is what we are aching for. 

    7-7-2022