with the passing of each day and moment i see new

Maybe I was being a little too heroic thinking I was the only person, we were the only group trying to stop the coming battle or at the very least preparing for its blows. With the isolation of our guild it seemed like we could leave no benefit of doubt for the other guilds to follow through. I forgot that everyone has a stock in a fight. Whether it is for the side I fight for or the side I seek to stop. There are back door deals taking place. There are business ventures and palms greased. Maybe I'm so principled that I cannot see past my supposed virtue and realize the power and clout a good business deal or allied treatise could bring to the right side.

I just didn't know I would be a leader of a global network of evangelical shadows fighting an invisible fight that the human race only knew very little of. I say I didn't know- but really, I'd known all along. Isn't this what I'd wanted? To change the world. To inspire and thrill and motivate and change hearts. Sure, when I envisioned it all I was sitting behind a nice table topped high with my ravingly popular books that people would travel far and wide to come meet me and have me scribble ink in their perfectly good books. I would go home to my cozy office, one of my many homes, and pen a new master piece. Maybe I would even be an elusive hermit who hides behind eccentricity and my talent. I wouldn't be really reaching out to anyone. I wouldn't be reaching anyone in such a small world.

I wrote a manifesto. It has been what I meant to show the world. To reveal to them. There is a place for everyone in a destiny we have yet to fulfill. That role does not mean a spot is available for a soldier, nurse, or diplomat as one would think this sort of battle would procure. Instead, there is a deep meaning, and idea to the forms we have in life as Plato thought it, the can be felt. Is it the heart that is touched or the soul? I suppose I don't really know. You'd think a prophet would know something of that sort. What I can say is so very little. It is so very simple. It is sad almost how little I do have to say. I know I've cried from the sadness of it. Should I be sad at the truth of it? I feel such an imperfect truth is tragic.

Who is this manifesto for? Well with the knowledge and experience I have acquired of late there is a very small population who knows or hears the sentiments I share with others. A small population, a community. We are those that know. You'd think we'd chose a better word for it like chosen or blessed as other religions have. But a religion we are not- or a least... I am unsure. Does one think upon an ideology they hold and think "this is _______ and I am a devout ___"? No, when you have an ideology that is true and young and so imperfect, I think it is just a cardinal rule to just believe. The act of believing. The act of being what you mean. A purpose. A drive. A meaning that you weave through every fiber of your being and blot on every part of your life and what you do blindly because- isn't that what the devout do? What do we know? I know what I am truly capable of. I can feel those around me. I can see the pain and the love. It is like a fog or a scent or a shadow. This ability to see is not just mine anymore. When I found I could share it, shared it I did and with a fervor that has only made me exhausted and more confused. You'd think I'd be tireless and inspired. I have a heavy heart. I know what is coming. An ending to the world. I saw it. I feel because I saw it that I should be responsible for stopping it- why? I feel responsible. I don't know yet if it is my own personal actions that lead to this end, but I know I feel a sense of collective responsibility. A foreboding. It is an irrational fear you feel seeing not only your own death but the death of... what- life? humans? the planet? I guess a death of being. Nothing left to be. What does a planet, solar system, universe matter if there is nothing there to be, to give any of it any meaning? The material without the meaning, the form without the idea. Seems to me to be a type of nonexistence.

This manifesto wasn't difficult to write. It was more difficult to realize. When I first starting writing, I was a young girl fresh out of a failed career and a failed marriage. And writing I too failed at. I drank myself into an oblivion of shame and guilt. After I recovered and stayed sober I thought I'd never feel such pain or such self disgust and self hate. I was wrong. A helplessness far more meaningful and far more dangerous was to consume my entire world. It was no longer about just me and my cup and my couch. It was a life altering event, or series of events that showed me how the world would end. It is then that I started to write again with the knowledge and pain of a philosopher having left the cave and forced to have a revelation, an apocalypse of personal proportions. I was shown and I now know, and I pay the favor of that burden of knowing on to every person I meet. They hate me for it. They don't all love me. I am not the lover or the saint. I am not the celebrity. I feel the martyr, but then I shouldn't be so callous or dismissive, we all will be martyrs.

How do you reveal truth? Simply tell people? I was dismissed and labeled crazy. I was institutionalized briefly, though some of that time was deserved and great vacation from the pressure I faced. After failed attempts and near death experiences, I realized just how far we have come. I took to showing people. I felt the truth had to be shown. I had to do terrible irreversible deeds. I had to crush hearts and batter souls. I watched and cried and felt the pain of every person I altered, I changed, I showed the truth to. I was fought tooth and nail. I was cursed and threatened. I have truly been changed from my form of the young naive and protected girl. A girl whose dream to become an admired author was one that fell short of changing the world and amounted to a disgraceful pandering and addiction to people admiration and even their paparazzi violence the fed a vanity so convinced of its power. I would fantasize about changing lives, but I tell you now that I have never been prepared. Nothing prepared me to destroy the lives I do each day in order to make them anew. I change, I destroy to have those who burned rise from their ashes with the knowledge I am too burdened with. My victims become my brethren and my team and my saviors. They span the globe and they too ruin lives and dreams like the dream of a girl seeking love and fame and riches when she really should have sought to find meaning in all the glory of her innocence. But to realize innocence and to truly know it is to have lost it and have an irreparable loss of that innocence. The irony is not lost on me, and I think the balance of an innocence and knowledge and the equilibrium of destruction and birth is what I believe in more than anything. Silly how the thing I feel ruined me actually saved me. But that is what an apocalypse is. To have yourself lost, to miss yourself, you realize what you would give to get it back or to fight for it to return. I know innocence will not return to me, but I will protect it for others until they are to know the truth. And when they know, know the meaning of this life, they too will fight. Cowards will find opportunities to save the world. Heroes will stumble. And so it goes. That is how it shall stay as long as I breath and fight to keep this world from its own end. Naively heroic? I know, but that is my nature. And so it goes with the passing of each day and moment I see new.

Recruit

When a recruiter goes out into the field looking to snag a candidate recruit, what do they look for?

So many people have the conception that what "they" look for, whether it be a college or a job, that your accomplishments show your value. I feel the whole system of viewing a recruitment with this perspective keeps the focus too narrow. Instead of looking to the past, looking for someone that wants to be found, maybe a recruiter needs to be three steps ahead of everyone. A person's potential does not need to be realized by some nondescript age. X, Y, or Z. No, I think expecting a resume to speak about a person's future success is flawed.

Imagine that one person has the potential to heal thousands. Their minds, souls, hearts, or bodies are all affected by just one person. That person does not need to have a picture perfect past do they? If I were hiring someone for a job, a criminal record is written off before it hits my desk. Don't want to hear excuses. Don't want to hear a back story. But life is hard and it has challenges that we don't all recover from so easily. Some falter for far longer in that valley of death. Rising above tragedy is not a sign of strength, and I say this because I think each person is strong enough to recover. Rising above tragedy is about hope. It is about hope for something still left in the world worth living for. If a recruiter enters a field cold and doesn't now the hardship or pain people struggled through then the might as well leave. They won't understand. They won't see that people don't need your judgment or your pity. They need a steady arm to lean on just to get on their feet. No one likes being a burden, but it is an addiction for some to remain a burden as a means to an end. What tragedy teaches us is beyond the shadows of the cave, for it is when you see the source of shadows and are revealed to the truth that you kill a part of you where naivete lived. You self loathe for once believing. If you recruit without moving from your bounds in that lonely cave, then you are not saving them.

I knew very little pain before the truth was revealed to me. The pain and sadness that resulted from my escape from the underground orchestration of lies was necessary for me to love the truth. Despite the terror of knowing, I am glad I do because now I can show others.

I "recruit." I see three steps ahead because I am who I recruit. I know the real life scenarios that people actually live. I'm not a college admissions board reading applications, personal statements, or hearing interviews. I don't expect you or anyone else to sum up their current being or future potential in a 5 page essay. I think the act of articulating "being" is a rare gift. Those that I recruit are a special bunch who know what towing the line of "being" and "no being" is like. They've spent weeks, months, or years of their lives working, hoping, pleading to no exist, not "be." They were those who wallowed in the valley of the shadow of death. Yet, no matter their own tortured existence, they lacked the follow through to cease existing. You'd think more people would kill themselves. Really, if they are as depressed as some of the people I recruit, there is little holding them back from flinging themselves into death's arms. Every decision they make is one that means their death. Though they may say they don't care, I think it is instead a frame of mind where they don't exist, they aren't, they cease to "be." What holds them here? Why not just pull the proverbial plug? I have been there and I know why. Hence, I am the best kind of recruiter.

Each human has a sense of being, a creational potential. I didn't kill myself because, as I have realized since, I had a profound and deep knowledge that my path was not meant to look like this. I was meant, not for the stereotypical "great things," but I was meant to change the world, to send a ripple through the world with my creations, my very being. A feeling of purpose the likes of which no word can possibly describe. Knowing bitter histories makes me a seasoned philosopher. The best philosopher does not think he is brilliant. Indeed, he or she knows just how LITTLE they know. I knew a few things and those are what I teach to recruits. The rest I've learned has been yet to be revealed to me.

A Manifesto

I'm just like you. I'm not you. If it seems like, than it is not. Seem does not mean similar. Seem means foreign, unidentifiable, not the same. Wrong. Off. Weird. Now only if people understood this they would see me. But they choose to see the similarity... what I seem like. I am unlike anyone. I am no one and yet, because I seem I am them in a way.

If life were about the magnetic pull we each feel to other people, than we wouldn't break those ties. I think instead we consider ourselves as centers of a gravitational pull. We think we are the center to which others gather, move towards, and desire to be. Like a cozy home, a place to find comfort. Where do you run to when you feel ill or bullied? Home. Home evolves. From scent, to voice, to place, to things, and into people. Who do you follow? Who do you worship?

See I know this about you because I am you. I fill with joy and I cry in pain. I am vain, callous, and dangerous. Just like you. I am an angel and I seek forgiveness. I am holy and powerful. I am vengeful and I will betray you. I am evil and sinister. I don't feel pain and I die from pain, depending on the weather. I am greedy and prideful and beautiful. Though shallow, you'll never know the depths of my mind. I'm open to the wild, the strange, and the safe. The excesses of life fill me with guilt and show me the light. This is not a paradox. I am not a paradox. I am a messy art piece painted by the biggest mover and shaker. Still and calm, I hear nothing. The truth of it is that I soothe my woes and torture my reflection. So, you see. I don't seem strange. I am strange, and I'm not strange. I am you.

The truth I tell you was revealed to me, shown to me, and it is a gift the tortures me.

R