Journey

There are times when I need space to reflect, a mountain to climb. A venture into the wilderness, where I can become, momentarily, a lone animal following his instinct, reliant solely on his own wiles. Once I am there, at the peak of solitary vision, all I can think about is going home. And so when I return to my safe harbor from the world, it is new, it is warm, it is imbued with the light of re-discovered love.

Grace Full

To be grateful, grateful, full of grace and grit and compassion and loving for every event and person that crosses your awareness, even when your caffeine coffee high is on its wending way downward. The people that before might be registered in your awareness as incidental or fixtures of the trash laden pavement become transformed creatures reflectant of a certain hue and shade of light that is dependent on their placement in that certain spot at that certain time on that certain street. There is nothing, yet, that you can say to them, but what must and needs be said is conveyed through the placement of your head upon your neck, the way your shoes plod onward, the way your hips and arm swinging and laden satchel are balanced moving forward beyond and through and with them. Because you have nothing to hide, no empty barren space of shame nor fear nor any diminishing of divinity that might take place in any human heart at any time when we grow distant from ourselves and thus and subsequently, each other.

When the tongue is full and pressed to the roof of the mouth in silent and overwhelming praise at the smell of this summertime air that swoons so softly up into this apartment where I sit, grateful, singing and typing rapidly into this network of praise, that I may reflect, as a deliberate practitioner, this life that I am so lucky to live and to choose to live and to have the opportunity to fulfill with fullness of life and love and complete awareness of everything that I am so fortunate to be capable of losing.

This is Struggle, These Words

Apparently, I am seeking to unfold a new methodology of articulation in this medium. If I was perfectly honest with myself, I would acknowledge that my writing is in some way a form of laziness, in that I simply write things off the top of my dome that tend to be similar in essence to something I’ve already written before. Which I’ve conveniently forgotten about. I burp up fragments from my inner sanctum of feeling, some containing a momentary burst of inspiration, but mostly just some convoluted form of self idolatry, perhaps.

It might be helpful at this point to give voice to what it is I want my writing to really be about: I want it to be about integrity, about the inner connectivity that binds all disparate individuals and strangers together into love and deeper knowledge. I want it to be about me, but not about the me of the surface daily mundane realm of miscommunicated passings, but rather about the me that is divine, the me that is you, the me that is us, the me that is everything and nothing. Less spectacularly, I want it to be about reality, and about the life that I live as told, pragmatically, from out of dry wit and a sordid heart. I want my writing to sing to you, to speak to you, to inspire you aflame, to nod your head in rhythmic understanding, to know exactly what it is I am talking about and to smile in recognition.

Most importantly, however, is that my writing expresses something that I am unable to express otherwise. That I learn of myself from my own act of self-creation. Thus learning of you, in that leap from difference to communal know-edge.

What is it that I am trying to say? I think I want to say that this is supremely important to me, and that I want it to be important to you. That I want this to be much better than what I am. That I want the world to be much better than what it is. That I want to write my way into you, in understanding, in peace, in confrontation, in commiseration, in fire, in quiet pain, in love.

Togetherness

We are rooted into each other, unabashedly interwoven, each one heart the sap that sustains the other. You are my best friend, my worst enemy, the one who knows me most and least, for without you, I would be someone else entirely. We can now only define ourselves together; apart, what would we be? Of what is our history but the discoverance of each other? Our love is something much more mundane than eternity; it is something renewed through struggle daily. This love is something that grows, that flowers, that yearns for ever more sun. This love is not simply something we have stumbled into but that we have earned, that we deserve. This love is something that we create. We discover each other again, every day, growing increasingly confident. We are still here together, in this new place, in this new day. It only gets better. Our love only grows stronger. This work we have put into our future will bear its fruit.

Engagement

I had surreptitiously slipped it in at the end of another post, but just to reiterate it more formally and proudly: I am now engaged to be married. My fiancée and I have been living together for some time, and we could have continued to live together for some time hence without the formal commitment of betrothal. But I came to an internal realization vis-a-vis formal and informal commitments: I had already demonstrated to myself that I was deeply committed to my relationship. Whatever my superficial doubts, fleeting emotional resistance, and mental ruminations might be, I want to support and love my beloved as fully as I am capable. I have lived with her in the mountains and pine forests of the Sierra Nevadas, journeyed with her through the jungles and mountains of Colombia, been bored to tears with her in San Diego at the home of my parents, driven across the American South in a truck with my Amazon parrot to live with her and her family in a dense city on the other side of the nation, and am now enslaved in a long commute and demanding work in order to make it in said city. Why would I do all this if I was not deeply committed? So why not ask her to marry me, and cast away both of our doubts and fears? To formalize this commitment is to turn away from the past, turn away from doubt about the present, and face fully the future.

It’s a demonstration of just how much I have changed from the Monk of yore, the fact that I would even consider getting hitched. I have bloviated in the past against the institution of marriage, and swore that I was never to be married. I was an anarchist, a free spirit, a subversive and enlightened alien whose journey was determined by the happenstance wind. However, my resistance to the institution was challenged when both of my sisters, whom I love very much, became engaged, and I became involved in assisting them with their wedding planning. Because I admire and love my sisters, I had to come to a grudging embrace of their decisions to become married, and finally even came to recognize the reason why individuals would deliberately choose to formalize their temporal relationships. This was around the same time that I was becoming aware of how the personal is political, of how our personal development is integrally attached to our professional development, of the necessity for planning, diplomacy, and collective agreement in our lives.

So when the decision now came before me, it actually wasn’t a hard one to make. My life had already made it for me, and it was really just a matter of coming to terms with my reality. It didn’t feel weird to set about finding and purchasing a ring. It felt just about right.

As to the story of how I proposed, I’m afraid it was about as unromantic and informal a procedure as could be. Everyone loves hearing “the story,” as I’ve quickly come to realize once I made the announcement at my workplace, and so I might as well relate it here.

I had ordered the ring online from a reputable retailer, where you can design the ring yourself. I then left for New Jersey for a two day management training session, knowing that the box would arrive while I was gone. I was hoping that I could just put the box aside without opening it. But as soon as I got home, she kept asking me about what the box was and insisting that I open it. The box had no markings on it that would betray what was in it. I told her that I thought it was an Obama T-shirt that I was getting for having donated to his campaign, which is in fact being delivered to me shortly. I thought that she wouldn’t be that interested in seeing a T-shirt, and that I could then re-direct the conversation to something else. But she was not to be deterred: she wanted me to open the box. I tried several times to redirect the conversation, and had even hidden the box from sight while she was in the other room, but she continued to implore me to open the box, or to give her the box to open it herself. At that point, I decided that I might as well get it over with anyway, and so I said, sure, go ahead and open the box. It’s for you anyway.

She opened it up, and then got still when out of this big box was discovered a little tiny ring box. She said quietly, “What is this?” Even though she must have known quite well what it was. I said, “Open it up.” And then I asked her to marry me, while she was sprawled out in bed, and we were both in our pajamas.

I had had a whole proposal speech typed up and printed out, and I had meant to wait until my days off, so that we could take a walk together in the park and I could make it more dramatic. But instead, I just handed her the speech I had written and we read it together. In a way, this was more fitting for us as a couple in any case. We are pretty low key. For us to have one of those dramatic, publicly announced proposals, where the guy gets up on a table or loudspeaker at a stadium or something, would just have been too weird.

I think we both felt a little tripped out by the “adultness” of the situation. But it feels good to be able to make the announcement. We aren’t planning on a ceremony anytime soon, as we would both like to be more secure in our careers first. But at least now we can start thinking about plans together without feeling scared or weird about making them. Before, when we talked about future long-term plans, there was always this element of “maybe we won’t still be together at that time.” Now that doubt can be erased, and we can move forward in our relationship and individually in our lives.

Separation in Harmony

A friend said to me the other day something that resonated with me greatly, when we were discussing relationships and the problems or non-problems thereof: “It is important to separate, in a relationship, your own personal issues and development from the issues and development of the relationship.” Well, she didn’t say it quite like that, but I was already getting drunk off some wine that I was drinking so I disremember what it was exactly, but that was it’s general import. It struck me because it was something I had been attempting to articulate to myself internally, but had not yet arrived at in the cusp of outside understanding, which of course is why we have friends, so that they can state the unstated for us.

This is an important insight, on many different levels. At its most obvious, we must pay heed to the distinction of restraining ourselves from blaming our own internal problems on our partners, or from projecting our insecurities on each other, or what have you. But at an even more fundamental and general level, think of this in application to our relationships with wider society. How often do we blame our own issues on the problems of our society?

But let me disregard the more abstract and generalist applications of this idea and bring it back to myself. I have discussed my problems with over-analysing my relationship in the past, and it is a constant issue with me because I have strongly defined myself based on long bouts of loneliness, self-sufficiency, and a lone wolf lifestyle. For me to be in a long term relationship is still something that I find to be a novelty at times. I thus almost automatically question it and challenge its presence. How essential is this to my self-definition? Is this restricting my ability to be myself? These are the terms by which I question things. But we must note that these questions are fundamentally skewed, when brought into the light of the original insight with which I began this post.  Because I bring my own personal issues and stages of development and project them onto my greater relationship with my loved one, thus delimiting the capacity of my relationship on the terms of my own need and hubris.

Because the fact is that my relationship is quite beautifully stable in and of itself. It is only when I bring my own personal instability and lone wolfishness into the mix that I complicate and negate positive things. In separating my own problems and personal issues out of my relationship, and in learning to distinguish these issues from whatever issues I might share with my beloved, am I able to better appreciate what I do truly have before me.

This Selfishness is Selflessness

As the storm whips around us, we settle into the deep water, we sink slowly overcome by the weight of the mindless water, a calm, quiet drop as chaos wages outside of our chosen nested halo. There is at first the sense of entrapment, a frenzy born of our own device, our own story-line plot written in ambition. But it becomes apparent that this is where we are meant to be, weighted down by our decisions, enduring the everyday forces of dislocation. Now, here, we must wait, deathly breathless, riding out the storm. Sacrificing for our future. Nibbling at crumbs to await a feast that may not even be our own.

Little beams of divine mystery sometimes make it down into the deepened vacuity where we are poised. Is this enough? It must be enough. Even these fleeting moments of beauty makes worth the space in between the stars.

Strength lies in rootedness, in the quiet, searching sap of endurance. What is dead and fallen will be  converted and resurrected in our veins. Upward, the branching movement into light. Our territory, our place, our time, established by the work and rut of our past. We are growing into ourselves, nurturing the steady development of our own narratives. This selfishness is selflessness. This work is the world’s work. We will shine out of the darkness of our creation. We will make of ourselves a voice that will speak of encouragement, of betterment, of love. Together. Unbalanced. Fighting. Enduring. Developing.

Steady Love

Summer Bloom

Love evolves in my life, broadening its branching to include all the world in its fruit, while narrowing its focus to the sustained, steady, and slow nurturing that comes from daily persistence. I once thought of love as a passionate, momentary outpouring of connection discovered from the sudden rupture between two worlds; this it certainly can be, but found more plentiful, more sustainably in the constant rediscoverance of love right here at home, in the one world that has been forged through struggle and dedication. The recognition that shambala is already here before me, and there is no need to hold myself apart. That perfection and attainment of bliss are not unattainable images of desire; they are at my fingertips, ready to expand with attention, flowers blooming within each step of awareness. They have always been there, pinnacled tips of contentment, but self-doubt gets in the way, blinding me to my own wonder. Forget about ideals; how much better is this reality fulfilled!

Nesting

It becomes apparent, as we face new challenges in life, that we are much stronger together than the insecurities of our past selves could tear apart. There are plenty of chances, daily, for demons to climb out of the hidden fear within us and jump out into the air over nothing to take a chunk out of each other’s hearts. Because when you are afraid, you hurt the one closest to you. Because when you are insecure, you hurt the one who is most able to see through your self-created fortifications.

But I am not afraid of being with you. I am not insecure enough to ruin what I have right next to me. You are the quiet tide that keeps me balanced, the ebb and flow of constant nurture that helps me grow. In our many differences, we have created something between us wholly new. I can’t wait to build another nest with you.

The foundation for our future has already been set, and we are carrying out the hard work of manifesting our dreams. The blueprint lies between us, unspoken but knowing, hidden but clear. Just as a bird weighs each fragmented piece of the world in its beak, instinctively knowing what will work neatly as the next brick in the lining of its nest, so we find each piece of our home to be scattered before us, patiently achieving the outline of what will come.

A Drop of what was once Passion

There comes a point when you can no longer forfeit what you feel for what is the more comfortable compliance, without some serious loss of presence. All of this time that you once spent in development can so easily be lost, and you are left with a shallow shell of what once was, and all of your capability is a memory. Achievable, you know, with disciplined time, but the window recedes further with each passing day, with each fleeting moment spent unfocused, unbalanced, untuned.

There must be some way to way to reconcile the need for introspective stillness with the needs of nurturing others. Some way to find concentration in the act of complacency. Some manner of extreme cognition in the shelter of what is acceptable. I don’t even know what I’m talking about.

There is a certain unreachable distant loneliness that resides within us all, and how to understand this, cherish it, embrace it, while harboring the movement of the wider world? To be an oyster with the pearls around your neck? To move ever inward, ever deeper, while fostering acceptance and even love in the face of mediocrity?

It is easy to mock the hungry passion of the misaligned, but not so easy to mock yourself in your dry stasis of daily existence. Where is the key that would unlock this door? Where the wind that would rustle skirts? Where the tiniest tip of real blood that would give credence to your emptiness?

Patience, patience, patience is the rhythm of your future dreams. It remains to be seen, the fruits that might fall from beyond your reckoning. Can you measure up to your potential? Will the secret corridors whose shapes are suggested in the profile of your silences open up one day to the masses, tickets sold out?

All remains to be seen. In the meantime, there is only our imagination.

Travel Story

Traveling is an experience that always compels a re-evaluation of your own habits and customs, and throws you continuously into new situations that further impel you to critique your own perceptions, your own self-image. During my trip to Perú, I had found myself going through a lot of introspection, for I was traveling alone and often had little else to do but contemplate and turn inward. I also had been dealing with the death of a friend and co-worker, and overall, the whole trip became rather spiritual in nature due to this thought and self-exploration. I was learning self-reliancy, confidence in new and challenging situations, and the ability to allow the universe to manifest some of its boundless potential.

As in any trip, therefore, my trip to Colombia has a sub-context, a narrative that extends throughout, present beneath all of the surface-level passings of circumstance and activity. The whole trip has not been anything at all like what I experienced alone in Perú, and the reason is quite simple: I am traveling with my girlfriend. And thus the underlying story of this trip has been one of our relationship. I had foreseen this before we’d left, knowing that travel is always stressful for relationships, whether between friends, family, or lovers. And it has indeed been a rocky road. All of my experiences on the trip have been filtered through the window of our togetherness.

At first, I found myself frustrated with the lack of freedom. While traveling alone is often lonely, it also gives you the ability to freely associate with strangers in ways that you are buffered against while traveling with other people. You tend to drift into random conversations with people in bars, on the street. You speak only in Spanish because you don’t have any other option, other than just hanging out with other gringo backpackers. You are more open to being placed into potentially sketchy situations, because you have only yourself to worry about.

Traveling with someone changes all of that instantaneously. You have someone to conversate with at all times in English, so thus anywhere you venture into, you always have a buffer of safety with you, wherein you can speak your own language and avoid contact with strangers. And traveling with your girlfriend, you feel much more protective, and less willing to be placed in potentially sketchy situations. You are more secure, and thus more unwilling to take risks.

So I had to contend with these differences and realize that this trip was not going to be the trip that I had envisioned before coming to Colombia. I was not going to go out dancing all the time, I was not going to meet and hang-out with many locals, and I was not going to speak much Spanish beyond the interaction of commerce and transport. Thus, other than the time spent with my extended Colombian family, I have had little insider insight into the culture, and have rather been stuck on the outside, and somewhat bitter about it, I suppose. This has resulted in some squabbles between my girlfriend and I until I came somewhat to terms with the trip as it is and will be.

And on the other side of this has been the self-questioning I’ve been undergoing about our relationship in general. Basically, I was getting something like cold feet, because I was thinking too much about the future, and could only envision the looming mirage of marriage, kids, etc, and this only made me frightened. When all of this internal torment finally came out and I laid it on the table, my girlfriend made me understand that I can’t think that far ahead into the future. I was thinking so much about some distant, uncertain future that I couldn’t allow myself to enjoy what I have right now, which is all that really matters anyway.

When you spend every waking and sleeping minute with another person, all of the bad sides of yourself can’t be shuttered up or given the space needed to be released without inflicting suffering on the other person. I’m the type of person that doesn’t know what he feels immediately, and I need some time to process and work through things before I understand where I’m at. So sometimes, before I know what’s happening, I’ll just start to be mean, because I’m trying to work through something and I don’t know it yet, and I’m trying to get space.

So this journey in Colombia has been a learning experience in ways that go beyond the bus trips and hostal stays and excursions and forays and food and cafés. I’m learning that I’m not always the person I want to be, neither for myself, nor for my girlfriend. I’m learning that I need to learn how to lead, and not just hesitate and wait for things to happen. I’m learning that I can be a difficult person to get along with. I’m learning what it is to be loved in all of my daily and eternal imperfection, and I’m learning how to try and give that love back, unconditionally.

So where my trip to Perú was about introspection and self-questioning, this trip in Colombia has been about my relationship, and about going beyond myself. I think it is somewhat fitting in some ways, given that Colombian culture in general is more fast-paced and based on the fleeting moments of the everyday, with its coke and its plastic surgeries and its ongoing warfare. On another post, I will attempt to grapple some more with what impressions I’ve gotten of Colombia as a whole, as that is a whole ‘nother beast to tackle. Til then.

¡Happy New Year’s from Medellín!

Hope y’all had some good New Year’s festivities wherever you be. Here in Medellín I didn’t do anything too crazy, just went up to a lookout spot to see the city at night, then walked back down along the river where all the Christmas lights are strung up. It is indeed a spectacular sight.

All I could think about was all the electricity being wasted. We then walked the long walk back to the slums where our hotel is located—because no taxi would stop and pick us up, for some reason—dodging street kids, drunkards, and transvestites, to celebrate the commencement of the new year in the security of our hotel room, wherein we imbibed a bit of Ron Medellín mixed with some gaseosa. The firecrackers in the streets, of course, went off all night long.

It is my established tradition to give some kind of commemorative New Year’s speech, and not wanting to disappoint, I’ll attempt to dredge up some inspiration for one here. A lot of the sub-narrative of this trip in Colombia, so far unsaid, has been about my relationship with my girlfriend—as I am traveling with her—and when traveling, relationships are always put under stress and challenged in every way. I will delve more into that topic specifically in another post, but for now, my point is that I have been thinking much about what a relationship is really about, and what I would like to do now is to unite some of those conclusions with a broader vision of what our relationships with each other as a human species is all about:

When you love someone, and are interconnected with them deeply, whether a family member, a lover, a friend, or a co-worker (c´mon, you see them everyday and interact with them—that’s an important aspect of our lives!), you have entered into a new world of relations with the entire universe, whether conscious or not. Because the fact is that you have come to realize that you are more than one singular, solitary individual, alone in all the cosmos. You have come to realize, through the act of empathy, compassion, and mutual perception, that you who once were one are now 3. Another way of stating that last bit is to say that what was once 2 distinct individuals is now one. Whatever way you look at it, there is a triune evolution in your existence, in which you evolve upwards into a greater unifying dimension, which allows you to descend back down into a wider, embracing perspective from multiple viewpoints. Think of it this way: two separate, disparate individuals begin to share a life together, and their once distinct and detached worlds begin to mesh, and at some point, you cannot clearly delineate a clear separation between the two anymore, because whereas before there were clearly two, now it becomes manifest that there is really one; or at least, a movement and development towards unity. But at the same time that there is this unity, there are still two clearly distinct individuals, with different personalities and so on. So there co-exists the two separate worlds alongside the higher unifying oneness between them. There is an evolved trinity.

All of that is rather vague, perhaps. But the idea I really want to convey here is that we all exist in our material selves as detached, separate, distinct individuals, with our own personalities, trajectories, perceptions, etc. All of humanity appears, on the surface, as fragmented shards of a fallen deity, split asunder into factions, fear, and locked in the eternal warfare of dominance, greed, and misunderstanding. When leaders rise up that would try to better unify us, they are shot down ruthlessly by barbaric, murderous, bestial elements, such as just recently Benazir Bhutto was so barbarically slain before the eyes of the world. It would seem, at first glance, that there is nothing that can string all of us together.

But the lie in this deception is apparent when you look closely at your own life, at the threads that tie you so intimately and immediately to others. We are not all detached, alone, and astray. We are all evolving together into the greater unknown that lies beyond appearances, beyond multiplicity and fragmentation, beyond logic and reason, beyond complacency and habit. In this world beyond that coexists right here and right now within and above our own, we cannot yet speak—yet we can sing; we cannot yet walk—yet we can fly; we cannot yet understand—yet we can intuit. It exists and we know that it exists because we feel, because we love, because we always and forever will strive to know of this divinity, this greater unity, even in the face of the greatest suffering and despair. It is there. We have love, and we know that this love takes us there. It is in extending this personal love in each of our lives all the way out to include and interpenetrate all of humanity and the world that lies the challenge.

I would like to end this little speech with a quote from my guru of the moment (because whomever I happen to be currently reading is my guru), Sri Aurobindo: “. . . on one side Nature works according to her limited complex of formulas . . . but on the other side there is an overseeing, a higher working and determination—even an intervention—free but not arbitrary, often appearing to us magical and miraculous because it proceeds and acts upon Nature from a divine Supernature: Nature here is a limited expression of that Supernature and open to intervention . . . by its light, its force, its influence. The mechanical, mathematical, automatic law of things is a fact, but within it there is a spiritual law of consciousness at work which gives to the mechanical steps of Nature’s forces an inner turn and value, a significant rightness and a secretly conscious necessity, and above it there is a spiritual freedom that knows and acts in the supreme and universal truth of the Spirit. Our view of the divine government of the world or of the secret of its action is either incurably anthropomorphic or else incurably mechanical; both the anthropomorphism and mechanism have their elements of truth—but they are only a side, an aspect, and the real truth is that the world is governed by the One in all and over all who is infinite in his consciousness, and it is according to the law and logic of an infinite consciousness that we ought to understand the significance and building and movement of the universe.”

Beyond Complexity

What drives us is the incessant need to be loved. At the heart of things, we are incredibly lonely, desperate to be fully understood, fully touched, fully appreciated. All of human interaction could be reduced to our fundamental need to be loved. Even the most horrifying of acts. Even the most mundane of interactions. Because it is not simply human love that we crave; for many of us, it is only something beyond humanity that we feel can love us and know us in the deepest and truest sense. So we perform sometimes atrocious acts in the attempt to please this distant god. But at root, it could still be accurately said that all human beings ultimately act in order to be loved, to be most truly and fully loved.

Which leads one to the thought that perhaps love immediately withheld may be one of the root causes of our suffering. It is important to have constant attention, constant grooming, from some source, or else we begin to withdraw into ourselves, withdraw into a quiet bitterness that may one day explode. We all need this steady love, whether it is from ourselves, our god, or our lover. We need to feel that we are important, that we have a purpose and meaning that is beyond the detached existence that our material existence accords us.

Such a simple need, and how easy to fulfill! But what is complex about it is that while the urge to love drives us beyond ourselves, the very fact of our own detached self is itself a barrier. It is hard to conceptualize, let alone manifest, any kind of deep interconnectivity that would eliminate the separation and distinction of your own self. Even while you crave so much at every moment to merge into a viscous stream with all creation, so you also fear this flow, and fight it at every step, in the struggle to maintain your sense of identity and control. It is no doubt a humorous and cruel irony that the very tools that would give us liberation and love would also harness our spirit and repress our instinct.

Recognizing this essential compulsion in humanity, however, is key to understanding other people and the way they act, which can seem at times obtuse. But recognize that everyone is simply trying to be loved in the deepest sense of the term, and you will begin to understand even complete strangers. You will see through violent or self-destructive acts. You will see through smoke screens of intellect or emotional fantasy. You will see human beings as what they are beneath all of the baggage and defense of their created universe: naked, lonely, and hungry to be loved.

Forging Networks

Coming close to this everlasting present, the infinite presence that is almost touched for the briefest space of a few breaths, you know that there can’t be anything more critical then communion. These moments of complete openness. There is nothing more that is needed. To be possessed by something beyond yourself, contained within yourself, incorporated within yourself.

It is an ingrained notion we have as humans to consider perfection, harmony, or love to be something complete, something attainable that could be captured. But that’s a traditional thought process that shatters immediately, and repeatedly, in the face of true power and beauty. Life has never been about the completion and culmination of an individual, nor of any one thing—it is rather the momentary bridges forged between distinct entities that unites them into a greater harmonic vision. This bridge necessarily dissipates, as boundaries are revised, and breaches are created in some other part of being. It’s like an air bubble in a sealed container. The bubble can be pushed, expanded, broken into smaller compartments, but the same volume of air will always be there, until it is released into a vaster field of containment. So we journey ever outward, expanding our capacity for awareness, forever dismantling old bridges (because what was once detached is now one entity) and struggling to cross into new. The landscape of the soul is seemingly ever changing, and yet the total energy remains constant—the states simply shift as they find new dimensions in which to attempt to dissipate into, to merge into, to possess and to be possessed thereof.

Love—like enlightenment—therefore, is something that would appear to be unachievable except for singular moments of time. But inwardly, what occurs is more like the dynamiting of a tunnel through two separate caverns—suddenly the water flows between the two until a steady state has temporarily been achieved—that is until another hole is blasted through into yet wider spaces. Like the roots of a tree, the tentacles of awareness seek restlessly their source. Eventually, over time, as the outer world shifts to reflect the release of tensions into greater harmonic wholes, localized about the exploratory meme, a forest is formed, a network is evolved. So too in love, after ups and downs and fights and many starts and finishes, the heart begins to forge a solid network, the base of a building that can sustain itself for centuries.

All of this is rooted in the breakthrough of momentary climactic impulses. The skin knows. The heart knows. The mind is always playing catch up, struggling to define what has already occurred. All that really must be done is to allow ourselves to change, to continually change, knowing that what we truly desire can never be fully possessed. Until we have built up the forests of the heart, all across the world, then we will forever be restless.

For this

Because no one else has gotten this close. Because no one else has loved you in all of your glorious imperfection. You don’t have to pretend. You don’t have to be something that nobody could ever be.

Loving this woman, day by day, is loving yourself. Is loving your quirkiness, your spontaneity, your little inner parts that you are accustomed to hiding.

No one person, including yourself, could ever know everything about you. It is unimportant, really, to know yourself completely. What is important is that at any given moment, you are projecting what you feel. Feelings shift like the sand dunes in a storm. Even glaciers are melting beyond millions of years of definition. So this cinema of you, this panoramic view of your inner self, these snapshot photos of personality are necessarily vague and indeterminate. Necessarily, you squabble with her, you shout at her, she hits at you. You make up, and you re-connect at some essential level. It is this potential for long-lasting harmonizing beyond momentary partisanship that constitutes love.

I don’t ever want to stop squabbling with her. Our playful wrestling often ends in tears. Our uncertain future creates stress, sleeplessness, and so forth. But the re-uniting. The reconciliation. The reinforcement of all that is truly meaningful between us is worth everything. It is worth the years of loneliness before I met her. It is worth the suffering of uncertainty that every day brings. It is worth myself, and my fears, and my ego, and for this, I gladly sacrifice.

Women as What They Are, Not as What You Want

Men, why is it that you must limit your view of women to that of solely sex organs, as symbols of your need? Why is it that the level of desire that you feel for a woman has no relation to your heart?

What a waste of time it is just to use women for sex, when they can offer so much more. Women are more than bodies—they are minds, they are voices, they are perceptions. They are more than anything that could be defined by your understanding, or by your desire, or by what you see.

Any father who loves his daughter knows this; any brother who loves his sister knows this; any son who loves his mother knows this: women are the bearers of the light. Respect this source and you may come to know true wealth.

Just to be around beautiful women is a delight, like breathing in rainforest air. Just to talk with them, to sit near to them, to be with them, to watch the way they draw in the currents of the unseen like magnetic birds in the sky.

You are infatuated with untouchable whores when goddesses walk beside you. You are fed porn airbrushed Hollywood dreams and blinded to the reality of beauty in your everyday life, all around you.

While you are wasting your time idolizing sexuality, the sensuous numinous world exists right here beside you. You don’t need to reach out for her. Breathe. Look within. Beyond need there is knowledge, and beyond knowledge there is love.

To love a woman, to love women, to love yourself. Honestly, I really don’t see why there is anything much more important than this.

Roots In the Sky

It surprises me when I find myself loving her more everyday, desiring her more everyday, seeing more beauty in her everyday. I suppose somewhere in some programmed part of my masculine indoctrinated brain I thought that love, like passion, like rain, was a temporal, fleeting experience, to simply be enjoyed while it lasted, and let go of when it faded. I didn’t realize that it was something that could become so deeply rooted into my heart that once it was there, it would recurringly bear fruit, expanding ever outward hungrily into the light, giving gifts far beyond expectation. That love could be a sequoia tree, reigning quietly for centuries, instead of a seasonal flower that wilts at the first sign of frost.

There are tempestuous sweeps of insecurity, anger, possessiveness, etc that overcome me at times. But the roots hold strong, digging down deeper beyond simple walls of self and mind. I am more than me, expanding into her. I question this wonder daily, wondering how it could be, that I am not only now myself, but also us, also we, also this every day connection enwrapping and dancing and strengthening simultaneously outward and inward into an unknown but fully impelled future. These thoughts propel me naturally into mystical contemplations of destiny, soul companionship, and sufi communion with my beloved. But I also recognize fully that every day that exists between us is what we create, what we sustain, what we allow. How fragile at times it seems, especially when I test it too far. But these times also strengthen us, making us see how tightly wound the heart strings hurt when plucked to sing.

There isn’t any way to wrap my mind around this. At some point, I have to lay down my arms and simply surrender to what I know to be real and true and right before me in my heart.

Every Day

Passion can be everyday. It’s not just some wind that happens to blow strongly through a moment’s corridor. It can be flurried, steady, or still, but it’s always there, always ready to swell, always breathing in some divine sense of breadth, beyond your control, beyond your command, but always there when you are ready to open yourself to it. Funny how that is, isn’t it? That the only thing that you can control is yourself, but only by relaxing, by allowing yourself to open, by giving yourself up to something greater than yourself. Through this giving, you gain passion. Passion isn’t wild, inarticulate, bestial sex. Passion can be worded, hinted at, breathed silently. Passion can be seen, captured in a picture, written into a sentence. It’s not just some aberrant storm, some happenstance accident of the world. Passion moves through you. It comes into you. It is a part of you, an extension of you, a diplomatic envoy of your innermost heart. It can be so deep that it couldn’t even be known, if it were not for the surface eruptions of bliss. It makes you move, it makes you touch, it makes you feel. Passion is everyday, passion is everymoment, everytouch, everykiss.

Giving All

I think that culturally, through movies, advertisements, and the like, we have been taught that love is about receiving things. Like Valentine’s Day. It’s about getting what you desire. For girls, it proceeds from getting the bouquet of flowers, to getting the diamond ring. For men, it proceeds from getting the poonanny, to getting the trophy. As if all you really had to do was go out there and succeed. Conquer, divide, and rule. Get a nice house, acquire some kids, and there you are. All tied into the American Dream.

As if you just put yourself out there, and worked hard enough, and were good looking enough, then all your dreams would be fulfilled. Some perfect person would walk through the door and everything would suddenly fall into place.

But love isn’t about comfort, ease, and mere fulfillment of desire. It’s about giving. Unconditionally. How many people, besides truly loving parents, really know about unconditional love? We have been taught that the world should center about us (and all the things that will make us feel bigger, better, and more complete). But when you truly love someone, the world centers about them. No matter if they are perfect or not. No matter if they fulfill some adolescent fantasy or not. Simply because they are them.

The things that make us beautiful are the most natural aspects of ourselves, that we would consciously hide if we knew that it was showing. The flaws, the silliness, the shy craziness waiting to be unleashed by adoration. The beauty that we see in the marketplace, the airbrushed glossy masks, are manufactured to fit into some collective fantasy of perfection. But they are not beautiful. They are desirable, simply because they are unattainable. Yes, unattainable. Just like advertisements for products try to sell you some simulation of happiness, contentment, and eternal well-being, if you just had that one thing. But the very idea that you could find nirvana through a product shows just how unattainable such a state of happiness really is. Did it ever occur to you that perhaps it is not in your nature to always be happy? To be perfect? To be desired by everyone?

This reminds me when I was in college, when ‘E’ was making its journey from hippy new age raver desert parties to mainstream clubs and consumer groups. I knew people who were taking E every weekend, and taking more and more of it, attempting to prolong their sense of belonging and connection to other people, the feeling in music, the beauty of dance and touch and scent. These people became ‘E-tards’, and you could visibly see the effects of taking way too much of the drug in their faces, the draining of nuance and groundedness, the flattening and glossy extension into disassociated fantasy. They totally missed the whole point of the experience, just as most people miss the whole point of all ecstatic experiences. It’s not about always being high, happy, and united with all the world. That in fact to prolong such experiences is to flatten out reality, at the expense of yours—and other’s—feelings.

We have to feel everything. We have to feel not only happiness and beauty but also pain and loneliness. And when you truly love someone, you lift up the barriers that separate you from them by accepting everything that they make you feel. You open yourself not only to their kisses and hugs, but their insecurities and pettiness. This is all part of the deal. You can’t have one without the other. Well, you could, but then it wouldn’t be love. It would be a conditional relationship based on your desires.

Some people are happier to flit from one person to the next like a hummingbird, sucking nectar from each one and then moving on before they run into emptiness. It takes a lot of work to hide what you feel from other people. It takes even more work to constantly hide what you feel from yourself.

Try loving someone for more than what you want from them. Just for them. Not only for the beauty in their eyes that first drew you in like flames in the night, but for the complexity and human nature and stark, bare, raw beauty in their hearts. Root yourself down into them deep. Because down here, in this other person, in the darkness of the unknown, in the ripping wind of the void and formless ancient beginnings, you may just find yourself. Complete. Beyond desire. Beyond suffering. Drenched in love. Immersed in love. Drowned in love.

Ever More

This moment is you. Standing hopeless on the brink of your desires, your washed up dreams. All the fantasies that you cultivated in solitary stimulation. The world moves on, distant, primal, alien. You listen to your mind striving to form some narration that would fit you in, lock you into a perfection and beauty undeniable, eternal, broadcast across time and space to shine into understanding and love and sex and money. But you know, of course, that your spirit is undefinable. Incapturable. That the only things that come out of you that are beautiful are not your own. That this darkness, this doubt, this everyday struggle simply to look in the mirror and walk out the door into the unseeing crowd is the keystone to this very moment.

When you stand face to face with your death, you understand then that such moments are everything. That all the times of wasteful heedlessness—spent suckered into some suit’s notion of what you are supposed to want, given your date of birth, sexual orientation, and geographical location—were exactly that, a waste. That most of your life has been wasted. That even despite all of this waste, all it takes is one moment of truth, purity, and honesty to clear it all away. The tally is tipped every time by one simple look into despair. You could never be good enough. The world could never be enough. And yet, it moves, it breathes, it feels, it floods. Death and movement are one and the same. Periods are a pause in the formation of thought, like the pulling back of the sea before it moves to crash itself into the shore. Again and again. There is no stop. No end. No final dark night that has no meaning.

What do we call this thing within us that fears and hides and spits at the world? It has been called ego, it has been called self, it has been called humanity. It is our suppressed divinity showing forth as demonic manifestation. Let it shine. Let it out. You know everything that there is to know about yourself. You were born crying, helpless, misunderstood in your inability to articulate. You learned to buffer yourself by silence, conformity, and following the drawn lines of tradition. You found moments of freedom when you rediscovered connection, empathy, intuition. These are the tools that take us into the future.

Draconian regressive clutchings at domination and anger, addiction and blame, have defined our history. These egos. This humanity. These childlike gods, terrible in their bitterness. We all must grow up eventually, one way or another. To face our extinction or our transmutation. Both which appears the same to the uncritical eye.

The alchemist leaves behind his learning, leaves behind his doubt, leaves behind his fear. To make magic. To believe in what has been taught to us as impossible. To find in one moment the key that would unlock all of sleeping eternity. To move beyond himself, his attachment, and his desire.

Because beyond death there is a greater power. It has nothing to do with the transformation of lead into gold, or of water into wine. Nor the movement of mountains, or of the stars, or of your heart. What stupidity! It is the power and binding strength of communion. The severing of self to find union in your Beloved. The letting go of what holds you back and pins you down to find that you can fly, that you have been flying all along, that the world flies and holds you and cradles you and pushes you beyond yourself at every turn to look down into what seems inevitable and certain impossiblity. Can you handle it? Can you handle what you were given? Can you handle what you were made to become?

It is not one or the other. It is not you or them. It is not life or death. It is love, or it is Love. It is death, or it is Death. Nothing less. Ever more.

Sea

It isn’t there, if you have to look for it, see. It’s already envisioned, already happening. It’s moving. You’re on it. You’re in it. You are it, every step of the way, every hurt, awakening, joy. The godhead, this beautiful presence. That’s what you’re looking at. Don’t look for it. It’s there. It’s here. It is, it be, it now. This has all been said before, but it has never, ever been seen quite the same way, through quite the same eyes, in quite the same form. Quietly, the world revolves into wholly new arrangements of recycled material. Spiraling coils that stretch into any space given. A beauty that is everpresent, evergreen, all inside everything that exists, as long as you can see it. Look at yourself. You really believe that you are anything else? Anything but you? Who you been listening to?

Because it sure as hell can’t be said. This is just kind of a reminder, you know what I’m saying? This is a memo between me and you so that we remember. Remember that nothing in the world is as important as what is manifestly occurring right now within us. Here. Beholden only to our own sacred knowledge of what we feel. No one can tell us that, not even ourselves. We’ve just got to be listening real close to the world which is ourselves in different times speaking in different voices through different movements that we are one, that we are many, that we are all in this shit together and that it really don’t matter what anyone holds onto—because everything has already been made into a picture that moves and defines and clutches at hungry bittersweet beauty when we all know, all we know, we already know quite well that we are this, peace, whole, center focus of all understanding and polyrhythm and harmonious atonal interconnectivity that thrusts and crawls and flies into love, into love. Into what we can only call love, belatedly and in sad departure because we are full, as the apple is full when it falls to the earth, in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of everything, falling out of fullness and inevitability into the future. Because it must be. Because it is. Because this wind has blown in this current out of the circulation of this sea from this sun in this exploding set of dust and stars and energy.

Love and Despair

How low we can go. These killers, these suicidal fanatical devotees of destruction, these prophets of despair, bitterness, and devastation, they bring home how far we have to go. How far away we can distance ourselves from ourselves. How bestial and bloody and pathetic we have become, stuck inside of our blind armored suits of ignorance. How lonely and desperate, disassociated by untouchable airbrushed images of desirability, broken apart by inability to connect, unable to relate to the lines drawn to direct flows into grids, chaos into consummation. Fragments. Shards destroying innocence. Corrupting all the outer world to communicate your despair.

How hard is it to enact the simplest of connections. To reach across the void into another human heart. To reach across the void into yourself, to voice words from this emptiness, to articulate out the stretch of separation. Maybe because we are afraid of what will be unleashed that has been pent up and waiting. Because the words that are revealed may not be easy, may not be perfect, may not be boxed, defined and put into a frame to hang, to admire. Because to speak this inner detachment is to struggle. It is to expose your vulnerability. It is to hurt. It is to become a human creature, to be imperfect, mortal, and needing to be held. Needing to be loved. Needing to be understood.

A gun is a tunnel into inhumanity. Nothing will ever be healed or resolved or advanced through weaponry. Every new weapon manufactured and sold is another tear in the fabric of our connections to each other. How we are crawling to escape these rifts, how we are running, bolting our doors inside of ourselves, shutting the windows of our minds.

We are scared of strangers. We are scared of our hearts. We are scared of the unofficial information that waits to flood into our minds when the TV or radio is off, when there is only silence, and we are scared, and we are alone, and there are no words that we yet know of to communicate what we see there in that place within us. The lights that flurry behind our eyelids. The knowledge that simply being innocent will not protect you from anything. The knowledge that we must plunge deeper into suffering to root out this evil. We must go there daily. We must go there with every other person in our lives. We must go there and connect these places inside our hearts to each other and build heaven here on earth. Not from superficial pretensions. Not from lies and deceit. Not from weapons and warfare. Only out of the softest, most delicate, fragile parts of our hearts can heaven be formed.

How do the students who were there that day on that Virginian campus feel right now? I think I might have an idea how they feel. They feel like they are black holes in the darkness of the night, that there is nothing to protect them, that there is only despair, and pain, and this dark emptiness inside that cannot ever be breached, that cannot ever again be healed. That they have lost some part of themselves. And they have. We all did.

And we will continue to lose parts of each other until healing is officially sanctioned, not relegated to fringe hippy new-age books. Until we recognize that every action we take has a consequence. That every product we sell creates a stream of waste. That human beings need each other, not holes in which to hide. That what we feel is real. That what we imagine can happen. That despair is everywhere, rampant, dominant, wreaking its havoc on the outer world. But that love is here and ready to be unleashed, and how close, and far, we are

to allowing ourselves to be loved,

completely.

Run On Spiralling Tonic

You go out into the world, far away, distant into the all. Then you come back, dressed in darkness. You come back to me to give to me a light that you had been keeping, that you had been molding hidden from the world, building upon itself like of clay, of hard-soft snow, collected, you give it to me, you bestow it unto me, you place it into my heart like a light into a light, two lights turning blue, the most quietly intense of flames, burning without flicker—and you give yourself back to me, and here in this place far away from everything, far away from yourself, close to me, you give yourself again to me—taking me far away from myself, close to you, far away from both of us, close to divinity, close to something unnamed, unplaced, imperfectly slidingly slipperingly slopingly beautiful. Here, in this place, we are affirmed, confirmed, firmed, fitted, whetted. We were meant to be apart to come together like this to break apart into something new, surprised, glistening in newness, shining in compound simplicity. We go there to know that it has been there, will always be there, for us to find again, for us to forget, to renew, to discover, to share, to shed, to find again. Again, and then again. To go away to return dressed in darkness, to unshroud the light, to build the light, to know the light. Back and forth. The light dancing the shadows of the tree in the wind against the blinded windows into this night. Up and down. The journey of the droplet to its source to tear itself into the earth to know of the ocean. Like this. Just like that.

Dropping Out The Sky

Do you feel sometimes as though you were waiting to fly, and that you are simply awaiting the proper environment, the correct medium, the right chance, that somehow you will sense just as it occurs? And yet somehow this perfect runway never shows up—or maybe it even does, but the lighting just isn’t good enough so that you can recognize it, or people were getting in the way so you could never get up to speed, or . . . something. Something just is never right.

Well, the fact is that most of us need a good solid kick in the ass to go beyond what we are accustomed to. We can get used to anything, even getting abused on a daily basis, even mortar shell fragments whizzing by our ears, even junkies outside on our doorstep shooting up, even being the junkies ourselves, dependent on the next small change to get us to the next fix to get us by, just to get by. We need to be booted out of the nest to find ourselves falling, with only our god given instinct to save us from gravity. We need to be hurt, we need to be pushed, we need to be upset, we need to cry, we need to come to limits beyond ourselves and stand there in that cold and airless night and feel the vacuum beyond the impetus of everything that we thought held us into ourselves and understand just where we stand in the grand scheme of things. And realize that we are really nothing. And to realize that in the midst of this nothingness we act as anchors and stars to everything else that is also nothing. Like the cold stars in the dark sky, shining mindlessly through space to you to call to you in a language beyond understanding.

To fall from the nest, to be pushed into the wide open heartless sea, with nothing but yourself to save you. Your body knows what it needs to do. Your mind is there to revel in the mystery. Your spirit can only be drunk in the awareness of itself.

Everything in our lives acts to push us beyond ourselves, beyond our comfort zones, beyond our knowledge, beyond what feeds us, beyond what clothes us, beyond what defines us. So why fight this movement into the wide blue yonder? Delve, dive, fly, experience, hunger, desire, reach, pull, cry. The only thing holding us back is ourselves and our fear. Well, you’re always going to be scared. Every single time you have to leave what is known and what is safe and what is secure, every single time you will be scared. And every single time this fear and adrenaline will turn into exhilaration and bliss in a heartbeat once you have stepped out the door and onto the stage and into the light. This is what it is to have faith and surrender and to love. To let go of yourself to give yourself to something beyond yourself. To find yourself, to truly know yourself.

A kick in the arse. A drop in the water. A fall from heaven.

We Were Made to Connect

We were made to connect with one another, as a species, as an evolutionary cumulative formulation. We were made to mesh, to fuck, to fly across spaces, boundaries, and time into each other’s minds, mouths, and futures. Our eyes and skin are secondary to the ultimate sense that is only to be found within, which entails inevitably a subsequent reaching out. Because what is found there in that lonely place inside is not solely some infinite dark emptiness—what is found is everything living that has come before and is to come and simply is.

We were made to be strong with each other, to interlink into divinity through the tessellation of our bodies and souls. Alone, we find each other. Through each other, we find ourselves.

For the more scientifically inclined, this can be explained quite simply through the sharing of germs. When you love someone, you share their germs, their daily experiences—everything that contacts and interpenetrates them goes into you, to become part of you, such that essentially you two are one—but more than one: a new hybrid identity created from the intimacy of molecules that had individually completely different characteristics. This sharing, this interconnectivity—if properly aligned with the stars and signs and genetic happenstances—makes the both of you stronger. Where one is weak the other is strong. Bodily fluids and mental spelunkings are shared continuously, the diversity of bacteria and permutative emotions are biodiversified into a deeper beauty, an expanded harmony with external shifts and ebbs and floods.

The social studies or psychology major may understand this phenomena in terms of the survival rates of groups of persons subjected to dire situations wherein they are stranded, where their survival is dependent not only upon ingenuity and weather conditions, but also upon their ability to cope with stress, anxiety, and depression. Thus, groups which share strong interconnections and dependencies have higher survival rates. Those who separate and isolate themselves, thinking they will better survive only place themselves at greater risk.

We must be weak together in order to be strong. We must cling to the raft of ever shifting emotions, pain, misunderstandings, miscommunications, and fickle humanity.

In terms of evolution, if our ultimate purpose was to only be alone, isolated, and detached from one another, then why do we instinctively, biologically, mentally, and spiritually desire to bear or foster children? Children renew the cycle; they bring us back down the evolutionary ladder to day one, where we are developing our sense of selves, our sense of cosmos, where we cry and wail beyond language, where the universe centers around us, where we suck nutrients from our bearer’s breasts. Children bring fully developed adults back to reality, back to tomorrow, back to the everexpanding horizons of humanity, the need for not only movement forward but for movement to preserve, a rocking back and forth like the soothing motions the parent makes for a fussy baby. Nurturing, developing, recognizing the importance of all that has come before and what is to come.

Because no one man or woman is the pinnacle of anything but a moment of a spiral that must rise only to fall again as fodder for the next development in time and space. No one moment or thought or action can ever define anything except that current universal vision. The vision must be renewed, from up to down, from back to forth, from human to microbe, from man to child, from tree to fruit—continuously, like the shoreline etched by centuries of waves, a picture will be formed, is being formed, will be erased. We collectively are growing to greater heights, but these heights can only be measured by how inclusive they are of what is unseen, rooted, and fundamentally basic.

Humanity spills into ourselves, into each other, filling the spaces between what is known and what is felt and what is taken for granted. Beyond breakage, beyond war, hatred, and greed, we form a picture of one another that reflects our children, which reflects ourselves, which inflects and extrudes and proclaims our divinity and light and beauty. Only through each other, through ourselves, through the messy beautiful struggles through sex and through touch and through understanding, will we know this source.

Loving You is Loving the Universe

Loving you is more than loving you. It’s loving strangers on the street, women passing by, couples holding hands, ocean spray in the breeze. It’s loving the feeling of the sun pressing down on my skin, the way ivy climbs up a wall, the way a baby is constantly amazed by attention. It’s loving everyone who has come before, it’s loving myself, it’s loving my family, it’s loving everything in the world that has served to bring us together, that keeps us together, that witnesses this magic to be true. It’s loving the caress of breath out of my lungs, the sense of consciousness leaping across synapses, the vision that filters through my pupils to flip into sensory information, chemical conveyed thought cloud evolution. Like waiting for the rain to come sometimes we sit around, dry, desperate, fighting one another with hope. Then like necessary revolutions of the earth around the sun love breaks into our hearts, undeniable, flooding through to our fingertips, our lips trembling with life force. Loving you is loving nature, loving the cycles of nature, the pull of the earth, the tug of the moon, the kiss of the sun, the blood of the month, the night and the day and the rain and the drought and the leaf and the fall and the wave and the shore. Because through you I am glimpsing insight into all of the universe. You concentrate the power and beauty and might of existence like a lens directly into my consciousness. I love you—and that is enough.

Space of Self Discovery as a Means to Unity

It’s hard in this day and age to find the space in which you can maintain your integrity. It’s like the whole culture, all of society–even the entire world–is dead set against you finding yourself and discovering your inherent power and beauty. Everything we see and learn everyday is about tearing down other people. We watch the news and see politicians involved in scandals; we read tabloids and see famous people torn to shreds; we talk to our friends and gossip other people to pieces. Everything is about destroying each other. And eventually, all that this really seems to be about is avoiding the fact that we can’t face ourselves. We can’t face ourselves because we know just how easily we too would crumble in the face of a world that only wants to see us fail.

Words and perceptions have an incredible power–to speak against someone is to speak an incantation, a spell, a curse. To weave a mindset of dark expectations and negative hidden agendas. This builds into a web that strings them down, weighs into their actions like molasses. I know this because I have felt this from other people before, without even knowing what kind of words they might have spoken in privacy. It doesn’t matter what the words are–it is the intent, the perception that builds a force against you. It is the feeling that it almost doesn’t even matter what you do; that in order to change this negative mindset you would have to be a saint, impervious to expectation and the pull of others’ desires and dislikes.

To love someone means that at some point you must let go of your expectations of them. Whether you are a parent, a lover, or a stranger. How can anyone be themselves unless they have the space in which to create their own selfhood?

Flash Writing for the Astronaut Collective

The Astronaut Collective is a monthly occasion when a theme is presented and anyone who wants to contribute has an hour in which to come up with a piece of work reflecting their spontaneous output of said theme. This is the piece I wrote for the latest A.C. expedition, with the theme of impulse (also found here):

On a whim, Loopy turned off onto a sidestreet he had never ventured down before called Juniper on his walk home from work. It led him to a little Mexican food joint, where they served burritos from a sliding glass window in a faded blue building the size of a trailer home. It was called Super Burrito. It was meant to be. Loopy could smell the refried beans before he could hear the steady fuzzy polka beat of ranchero blaring over the Super Burrito radio.

He ordered the standard Super Burrito, sour cream, cheese, rice, beans, carne asada, lettuce, tomato, salsa. He dabbled hot sauce into the gaping mouth of his gargantuan burrito between every bite, and had the thing demolished within 20 chomps. It was pretty good. The last 1/3 of the burrito consisted largely of grease, but he just couldn’t stop wolfing it down even though he was stuffed. He belched softly into his mouth and then looked around as if newly awakened, noticing a pretty Mexican girl sitting at one of the tables across the fake green turf talking on her cell-phone. He caught her eyes, and knew prospects were good when she looked away and fiddled with her hair and then looked straight back at him while chatting swiftly away in Spanish. Loopy pulled a paper napkin from its tabletop container and carefully wiped the remainder of beef and Cholula from the corners of his mouth. He sauntered up to her and waited for her to put down her cell-phone. She talked for a minute or two longer, watching him, never taking her eyes off of him until she said “Adios” to her friend and flipped it shut.

“Hi,” he said, suddenly laughing at the silliness of the whole thing, unable to find anywhere to begin. Luckily, this loss of poise and purpose broke the ice, and she laughed too. Everything was understood, without speaking. They were young, full of life, and both had eaten phatty burritos within minutes of one another. Suddenly conversation was easy. Loopy sat down at the table and they talked for what seemed like minutes but turned into a half an hour, and the Super Burrito was closing. The Cholulas were collected from tabletops, napkin containers rounded up, the window slid shut. And then Loopy was suddenly unsure, as always, of when and how it should end. Should she be invited out now, or was that too soon? Should he simply settle for an e-mail, or a number, and stroll on back down the way he had come by such happenstance? He sat in silence uncomfortably for a minute, and she relished this, allowing him to wallow just a little bit longer, seeing how true he was, how unguarded his inner workings. He would be more than just a night of drinks. She took his hand and wrote down her number on it and kissed him on the cheek.

He walked back down Juniper stepping sideways every now and then to ease out a Super Burrito fart, excited about his place in the universe, amazed at how some kind of force of god had led him so impulsively to love, to his destiny contained so mundanely in a Mexican burrito stand. And now he must wait, deliciously, until the right moment will come again to proceed to the next unknown pathway to the heart.

Lullaby

Flip sides o’ the same coin, ecstasy and suffering–like in the way when you cook a pancake and the first side is cooked deeply til it bubbles through, and then when you flip it, the second side cooks swiftly and lightly: a dark, covered burning and grappled scrambling, and a fleeting, golden cumulative few moments of divinity. The ecstasy comes in the throes of union, in the dissipation of boundaries accompanied by a visceral sense of unity, fulfillment, and flying light exploding bliss. Suffering comes when habitual patterns and perceptions fall back into place like confining walls, and separation, individual isolation, and anxious insecurity again take their status as the norm of daily existence. But the renewal of distinct, opposing forms is the essence of life and love. It is essentially impossible to maintain a blissful sense of unity and infinite harmony with all the Kosmos or simply with your beloved. Simply put, without the valleys there would be no peaks. The peaks are pushed into the stratosphere from the deep inner workings of years of slow burning flames, of frictive forces pushing against each other until the victorious simultaneous movement upward, far beyond the territory so painfully fought for.

What is commonly known as “suffering” is what paves the path to a deeper and lasting inner experience of love. Suffering is to work, traverse the pointed rock strewn wildernesses of the heart and mind, to be alone within yourself, to come close to the silence, the stillness of a concentrated listening and observation, when all the sounds and shapes form together slowly like jigsawed pieces of each other, to know the outward signs of mundanity as intimately as inner hidden wellsprings of divine light, to know humanity beyond words, to know love beyond touch, to know god beyond faith, to know everyday as struggle, to know every night as searching, to scrape the lowest dirty depths of the earth to know the wildest dances of lunar madness.

There is no having one without the other. There is no faith without an accompanying contact of skin, no peace without a tumultuous, bloody birth, no healing without protective, irritating scabs, no light reflectant beauty without brooding darkness.

We fight each other to know ourselves. The universe is cut up into words and diagrams to chart its unity into understanding. The heart is pockmarked with despair to know divinity. The moon is deadened rock reflecting the sun exerting its silent night pull on seedlings struggling to uplift their tendrils to the future. The pull is there in everything, up and down, earth and sky, light and dark–all one wave of one voice making its song to itself to sing itself into awareness of its beauty.

What is Love?

I use generalized terms such as “god“, or “love” often in my written discourse, of which I have sometimes unconventional personal definitions. I generally feel that it is more useful to glean meaning from the context of a statement rather than picking apart individual words, but sometimes it is good to pause and step back and ask what, exactly, is meant by such over-used and yet broadly defined and abstract terms. And as it is nearing Valentine’s Day, I feel that it might be a suitable meditation to pontificate a bit on the word “love” and its possible deeper implications.

Love as defined by Merriam-Webster is (1): a strong affection for another arising out of kinship or personal ties (2) : attraction based on sexual desire : affection and tenderness felt by lovers (3) : affection based on admiration, benevolence, or common interests.

Don’t those definitions all seem rather far off the mark? Mere “strong affection”, “attraction”, “sexual desire” . . . no, no, not quite. True love is something much deeper. And yes, of course, how could one ever put such love into a simple, clean, brisk definition?

I was going to attempt now to try my best to define it myself, but I suddenly realized that I’ve already got a whole stack of writing on the subject. At the risk of seeming self-indulgent, I think I’d rather just let what I’ve already written speak for itself, define itself as collected fragments, like pieces of a candy necklace, strung together now by one single word through time. So I’m going to present a series of quotes from 23 selected pieces, extending back from the last 7 years of my life:

In the midst of the fragmented shards of war, desperation, and complacency, love is the flower that can break through concrete and connect together alien worlds. (1)

Love is not a complacent plateau of stasis; only through constant struggle and transcendence does it grow. (2)

Love is the flow of divinity through the vessel of you. Love imbues anything and everything with new light. Love is the only reason life has to exist. (3)

To love is to realize the myth of your solitude. The beloved is within you, at all moments, even when you are not touching, even when you are not speaking. It is only through selfishness that your suffering is created. (4)

The potential in every person for love is boundless. (5)

Love [is] found in giving yourself, the love which always awaits just outside of the door you are so frightened of passing through. And when you pass through, you look into another’s eyes–you do not see a friend, an enemy, a lover, a sibling–you see yourself. And then you see that person for what they are:
Everything. (6)

There is no love without suffering. (7)

Love, love is the only way to live.
It is the only way to die.
It is the only way to do anything worth something
in a world that is dying to live. (8)

Wonder, and wonder, and frightening joy. (9)

Amar una otra persona
es amar sí mismo,
es amar el viento, el cielo, los nubes,
es amar la tierra, la luna, la luz. (10)

Love in its deepest incarnations necesitates a form of death, a scraping of the insides to mold out a hollowness that could cradle divinity. (11)

Amor esta afuera todo, esta dentro de todo, esta incontenible, movimiento a través de todo, afuera palabras, se bastado solo con manos, con contacto de cascaras–palabras se amoldado de bocas sino allende de sonidos. Amor es un creacion de la luz buscando sí mismo. (12)

Love is like an ocean, somehow keeping you afloat in the midst of continuous swelling and ebbing change. Like an ocean, it accepts everything, the only rejection coming from the mind that fears the heart that is opening to suffering like a flower. (13)

Amor es el crecimiento mas profundo de la vida. Nuestras mentes y nuestros cuerpos son huesos huecos por el incontenible de la medula de la divinidad. (14)

True love is always worth the sacrifice of long periods of lonely suffering. Even if it might mean a lifetime of sadness. There is never a reason to hold back when love is near. We must give all, we must give everything for something that can never be possessed. (15)

. . . in love there is no control, & there is no turning back – but it places you in the center of the world. (16)

Rumi wrote that “the life of lovers is in death.” Because in order to gain everything that you desire you must lose everything that you possess. (17)

We love, we love, we love, and we understand, finally, that each and every love is the ultimate purpose for which we have been placed into our bodies. (18)

What brings me higher–when my heart is widened with new, unforeseen love–also breaks me open to a new realm of emptiness, a deeper, rawer despair. (19)

Love shows you the way into this place where no one can enter. You leave yourself behind. You leave it all behind. Everything. Everything. Everything. (20)

Love is the verification of everything that you have become. Love is the refutation of everything you have been. Love is here. Love is now. (21)

It was a rollercoaster, it was a movie, it was a cup washing over the rim into aether, it was ink sloshing into indecipherable patterns, it was beautiful, it was horrendous, it was shocking and powerful and new. (22)

Love is letting go. Love is letting it all go. (23)

 

Of Each Other

Every single day, you are there, ready to move our lives together forward. I feel like sometimes I force us to squabble, simply to reassure myself that we are still separate, distinct individuals. But by now we are more akin to meshes, blending somewhere between us to form a oneness that is also a trinity–I, you, us. Through you I see not only deeper into myself, but into all of existence. We form together a lens that focuses the light of divinity to a single point of vision. There is nothing beyond this. There is nothing that is not included in this. There is only this love, and all of the world is shaped by it. Like glass blown bubbled worlds, love breathes through our singular hollows to craft harmonies containing everything and nothing. Whole lives are decimated and rebirthed in this song.

I eat, sleep, and write through you, with you, beside you. To even claim that I could exist outside of you would be, by this point, a conceit. We are each other, as the moon on the surface of a stream is still only the sun.

Subtle Degrees

subtle degrees
of domination and servitude
are what you know as love

but love is different
it arrives complete
just there
like the moon in the window

like the sun
of neither east nor west
nor of anyplace

when that sun arrives
east and west arrive

desire only that
of which you have no hope
seek only that
of which you have no clue

love is the sea of not being
and there intellect drowns

this is not the Oxus River
or some little creek
this is the shoreless sea;
here swimming ends
always in drowning

a journey to the sea
is horses and fodder and contrivance
but at land’s end
the footsteps vanish

you lift up your robe
so as not to wet the hem;
come! drown in this sea
a thousand times

the moon passes over
the ocean of nonbeing

droplets of spray tear loose
and fall back on the cresting waves

a million galaxies
are a little scum
on that shoreless sea

–Rumi

Insomniac Scribbling

I can’t sleep right now, so I’m back here, writing again, just trying to work out the anxiety and tension that won’t allow me to fall into sweet unconsciousness. I’ve realized that there’s this strange swirl of emotions going on inside of me, and I need to work through it, consciously, so that I don’t turn into a basket case. I’m simultaneously sad and happy at the same time. Sad, because someone I respected and looked up to (even as a father figure of sorts) died unnaturally. Happy, because I am in love and my love grows ever stronger and deeper every single day. This is indeed a confusing mix of emotions, because when I am feeling happy, I suddenly remember the sadness, and then almost feel guilty for the happiness, even though I know that I shouldn’t. And when I am feeling sad, my beloved gives me so much comfort and love that it is impossible for me to remain sad.

Which is to say, I guess, that dealing with untimely death this time around is more bearable simply because I have someone to support me.

And it is this love that I am so grateful for. And witnessing the heartbreaking self-destruction of people I know only makes me more grateful. I am incredibly blessed. I know what it feels like to be lonely, depressed, and only wanting to die. I’ve been there. I’ve been taken back there through Rod and Toby. And this only makes me realize just how important it is to have deep love and connectedness in life. It is the only thing that saves us from ourselves. When we tunnel down deep into the emptiness, the only thing that ties us to life is this knowledge that we are more than only ourselves. If you can go deep into this darkness with love in your heart, open to your suffering, then you can withstand the loneliness, you can withstand the surface storms of circumstance.

I had thought that maybe this place I work and live in is cursed. And while there are certainly some problems there that are in need of some major healing, I just got an email from a friend, and he also just heard about one of his friends killing himself. And I know someone else whose friend killed herself last year. So this sickness is not only in this place I’m at. It is in all of us, everywhere. This sickness of loneliness, inertia, and addiction. This sickness of disconnectedness, detachment, and disassociation. And all I can say is that we need a lot of love in this world right now. We need a lot of healing.

And when I say love, I’m not talking about finding some perfect person like in Hollywood movies. I’m talking about loving yourself. I’m talking about loving strangers. I’m talking about loving being alive, loving the light that comes through the trees, loving the mountains, loving the skyscrapers, loving the fall of clean water from your faucet, loving every minute, every second, every day.

A New Year to Live, Love, and Grow

As per a sort-of-tradition (check out last year’s missive, or from 2005, or the one from 2002), I feel the need to say a few words to commemorate el día de año nuevo: wherever you might happen to be when reading this and at whatever time, let’s agree to one thing: we are entering a new horizon of existence, and whether or not the calendar system we follow runs according to divine accordance or not, the fact is that every day, every month, every year pushes us farther along the paths to our omega points, the unknown call pulling us into a hopefully transcendent future.

Every New Year’s is not only a celebration, but a remembrance of what has passed to bring us here, and a harkening on what is to come. There are certainly enough problems in the world to give us pause, and cast long shadows onto future generations. But there is hope that humanity will evolve to meet the challenges to our species, and this hope is called love. In the midst of the fragmented shards of war, desperation, and complacency, love is the flower that can break through concrete and connect together alien worlds. To embrace everything that currently exists, and everything that has come before, is the only path to the future. To accept the world, your family, your loved ones, and yourself as what is, in all its imperfection and seeming disconnection.

Beyond the excuse to drink excessively and lose control over your actions, New Year’s stands as a time to look back and look forward, and ask the big questions that your everyday life has numbed your awareness to: what gives your life meaning? Where will you be a year from now? Where were you a year from now? It also stands as a time to give thanks for the gifts from the divine that allowed you to make it thus far, to appreciate the friends that you have, to kiss your beloved, and a time to feel hope that all of which has sustained you thus far will only grow, and grow, and grow.

So I raise my cup of Chartreuse to you and wish you the best–because I acknowledge openly that your future is tied so intimately to mine as to be indistinguishable, on a Kosmic level. And I wish the same to all people everywhere. That we can all find our ways into everyday joy, to a paradise now, to a heaven here.

Focusing On Love

Love is the focus of all energy down to a singular point in all of the cosmos–the Beloved. This might at first seem to be reductionist, for what of all the friends, family, and various facets of the wider world that demands and requires your attention? But as love for your Beloved deepens, ripens, and evolves, you find that to devote all of this love to solely one point does not necessitate a loss of awareness nor a destruction of other potentialities; rather, as your heart deepens and expands through the medium of the Beloved, you find that your external connections to all the world also deepen and widen. That in fact, this love is the ONLY WAY you could ever grow. To evolve is to increase your ability to love. Love is not a complacent plateau of stasis; only through constant struggle and transcendence does it grow.
I have shut out everything but my Beloved, and my future lays itself out before me like a gift, and the only thing that is important is this love.

Making Love

Love isn’t something that you find or discover, latent somewhere in some hidden offspring, but rather something that you must create, re-create, every single day, every single moment. There is a reason why there is the term “making love.” You must make love, you must forge it in the transmuted fires of your soul, mind, and body. It is not something that simply comes to you, that appears out of thin air like fairytale gnomes. It is the purest of human endeavors, a task both magical yet wholly rooted in mundanity.

Don’t sit around waiting for love to rise out of a hidden abyss in some stranger. Create it. Make it. Love is a gift beyond the giver. Love is the flow of divinity through the vessel of you. Love imbues anything and everything with new light. Love is the only reason life has to exist.

Knowing the House

Playing house is an enriching task, I’ve discovered recently, having moved out of my bachelor cabin at work and into a new apartment in town. We discuss placement of furniture, items to be acquired, what kind of meals to be cooked. Eventually, what was once chaotic uncertainty begins to coalesce into a space where no more thought is required. The glass of wine goes here. The alpaca jacket hangs here. The blinds are pulled up in the morning, both locks are locked on the door at night. As settled life commingles with the onset of winter, I find myself struggling to retain the wildness within, without sacrifice of comfort or happiness. When someone else is reliant upon me for emotional support and constant stability, it is more difficult to find vent for things that I don’t even know yet I need to express, because I had previously used the space of solitude to give it form.
I have long been on the road to getting to know myself, and had thought to have made some headway. But this knowledge was based on myself alone–and now, finding myself with someone else, consistently, I am temporarily lost. The context has shifted. It’s like waking up in the morning and you have no idea for 2 seconds of where you are and how you came to be there. It has quickly become evident to me that it is much easier to know yourself when you are lonely. It is much harder to explore yourself when the boundaries between you and another person have become so blurred as to be at times indistinguishable.
It is a matter, as with most things, of letting go of preconceptions while looking at the true reality with full awareness. What I have been doing is struggling to maintain my self-identity as what I knew before–while in fact who I am is now a larger self, encompassing more, a mesh of two persons, like the definition of embrace. To embrace is to accept into oneself someone who is beyond oneself, such that in that moment of conjunction, the two become unified while still maintaining their own prior integrity. To put that less technically would be to say that who I am now is no longer what I had come to know, because my orbit has fallen in step with another’s. The gravity has changed. The light has changed. I keep looking for myself where I once was, but that person leaps away. The person I see now is looking me right in the face but I haven’t learned yet how to say it. I am now longer simply I. I am now me-with-her. I am now her-with-me. I am the same man-boy I was before, but I am also someone different. My role has changed, my function has changed. I was once only a lonely young one searching for his place in the wider world. I still am that. But added to that I am also man loving woman, steadily, every day, building brick by brick a house of dreams that floats on the visible world like a palace, accessibly to all only by connection to the heart stream, the flow of magic that is love, that is everything and everyone but that comes to be encapsulated quite simply between only 2 people.
So here now I build my house, searching wildly for myself out the windows while my own breath fogs up the glass. I then turn around to find myself being embraced by someone else. The vision clears. When living itself–simply living, breathing, eating, enjoying the fact of being alive–gains precedence, the search for myself loses meaning. Which is to say that coming to know myself is coming to know simply the moment in which I exist, which is never anything but now. Now, and now, and now. Which is life, which is death, which is tied all together in one ultimate, universal embrace by love. I’m getting too vague, so I’ll stop now.

Tear Drops

A thousand teardrops
are worth every moment
you hold me close.

A thousand nights
of solitude
I would gladly surrender for every drop
of suffering from your long black lashes.

We hurt each other to remind ourselves
why we are inseparable.

Two faces, each portending to be one,
draw away from each other,
crafting a mirrored distinction,
all the while tied to the same nurturing root–
the picture of a heart.

The heart is not simply a bloody vessel,
working to sustain our motion.
The heart is a symbol
of life’s struggle for unity:
two spheres at the top–one point at the bottom;
a metaphor for emotion.

Our love is beyond
anything.

In the approach to this open understanding–
this terrifying, beautiful unknown–
we fight,
we dance,
we crash our unshaped differences–
until a shore is formed,
and the waves are freed,
and what was once turbulent pain
is seen for what it always was:

playful, wonderful
bliss.

A thousand tear
drops are worth
every moment
you hold me
close.

Healing Rituals

This weekend I came to realize how powerful ceremony and ritual can be in our lives. Growing up going to church and subsequently rejecting it’s regimented, institutionalized blather and feel-good propoganda, I instinctively shy away from most semblances of worship. But getting together with a group of amazing friends and sitting down and making a concerted effort to truly get beyond appearances and on into deeply spiritual life matters is a consciousness broadening experience. We sat in a circular manner and expressed gratitude to various forces in our lives which had brought us to that moment. We meditated and we sang and we played instruments. We planted trees and plants. We looked into ourselves and we looked into each other. And I realized afterwards just how important doing such a thing is–how in fact it may be necessary. Reaching your own inner realizations is of course a beautiful thing. But when it just sits inside of you and doesn’t bear witness and corroboration in other people, then it can wilt and fade away. Sharing your inner heart with other people who have similarly looked into themselves is a joyful and heartening experience, because you understand then that you are not alone–and it gives you hope. It gives you connection and beauty and power. And then you can go back to your daily mundanity with this flower within you, knowing that it is more securely there, and blooming.

Thank you to all those of you who were there–and for everyone who wasn’t, even if you don’t know it–you were.

Experential Divinity

In order to know divinity, you must know your self, beyond all that previously defined you. You must look within, stripped of all pretension. And there you will find a terrifying unity, terrifying because every little butterfly flutter of your heart has universal implication.

Which is to say that to know of God is an entirely personal affair. I learned this the hard way growing up. I grew up a Presbytarian Christian, went to church and youth group every week. The driving spiritual force in my life, however, was my grandmother, an immigrant from Sweden who prayed multiple times a day and read constantly from her bible. When she prayed, she went into a kind of trance and spoke in tongues. She would tell stories, of which she had many, of prayers answered and miracles in her life. She was intensely spiritual, and I always respected that, and I wanted to believe the way she believed. I tried. For years I tried to pray and to know god the way that she did. And it took me longer than that to finally understand that I could never know god the way that she did. I could only know god in my own way.

And this is where institutionalized, fundamentalist religion goes astray. Religious indoctrination would tell you what the word of god is. It would tell you how to think, how to feel, how to pray to their god. It would tell you of all the mysteries. But you would never experience these things directly. God has to be translated for the masses, according to institutionalized religion. And all of these things may be a good introduction. But they will never take the place of personal realization, a direct relationship and communication with the source.

Bruce Lee concocted his own martial art, a martial art which took him beyond tradition, close-minded indoctrination, and habits, and through which he learned to attack directly and quickly without waste of time and effort. But he admonishes those who would blindly follow his martial art. He tells them that Jeet Kun Do is only his own personal way, not anyone else’s way. That you can learn from it and take what you will from it, but never to follow it as a complete and universal form. Which, of course, people did anyway, and continue to do.

A more enlightened view of any form or school of thought is to think of it in terms of Ken Wilber’s concept of holons. A holon is something complete within its own parameters, yet which still opens and connects into something beyond. In which everything is a holon, a whole unto itself and yet a part of something greater. A cell in your body is a holon. Christianity is a holon. The earth is a holon. To ever say that something has no connection with anything else or that something has no relation or ability to evolve and change with the rest of the universe is fundamentalism of the sort that leads to warfare, anger, and close-mindedness.

People who think that they are completely separate and isolated from all the rest of the world end up killing themselves. People who can never understand themselves and can only relate to themselves in terms of external indoctrination end up killing others. And all the little gradations in between that lead you daily to prejudice your mind against the world.

Within my own lifetime, I simply want to try to make myself better than who I am. I want to carry a light inside me that can not be touched by the wind of another human being’s insecurity. I don’t want to be a human being who just takes, and takes, and takes. I want to give, and take, and give. And give. And the only one who can help me do that is myself–a self that is connected with all the world.

Beloved

To love is to bridge what seems at times the insurmountable distance between individuals. To have a beloved is to discover that you belong to another, and that that person’s fears, strengths, and history all have become your own. Holding hands, hugging, kissing–these are the physical expressions of unity. What is most important is the inner essence, the burning flame, the secret that none of the outer world can see–you could give up everything else and still be in love. You could be worlds away. What matters is the place in your heart, the intention in your mind. Even one moment of attention spent away from your beloved can be felt in the rift that divides you, even if she lays right next to you. It takes much more time to heal and repair these rifts than the moment that caused them. You have to focus your whole being on your beloved. The myth of separation is dispelled. Nothing else matters, the future, your hopes, your fears, what people think. To love is to realize the myth of your solitude. The beloved is within you, at all moments, even when you are not touching, even when you are not speaking. It is only through selfishness that your suffering is created.

Positive Potentiality In Peops

I talk often in my writings of the need for openness in perception, the lack of expectations, such that another human being can exist more fully in their potential, which is ultimately infinite. I write of this often because it is one of my frequent, daily shortcomings in my interaction with strangers. By the way, if you ever feel that my writing is preachy, take it with a grain of salt, because I am not preaching necessarily to anyone but myself. Writing is a way for me to discuss issues and provide myself with advice that normally I can’t distance enough in daily life to see.

Anyway, so in the professional sphere, dealing with rich, complacent assholes is a frequent occurrence. Actually, a lot of them aren’t assholes. They are just weak minded and kind of pitiful in their ignorance of reality. They make a lot of money but they don’t have such basic social skills as courtesy or the ability to hold a conversation with someone outside of their limited social sphere. They drive an SUV mindlessly, without any idea of what cost such a thing might have to anyone else. They have spoiled, obnoxious children who will most likely grow up to be just as dumb and sheltered as they are. They like to power-trip over people who are only courteous to them because it is their job.

I can’t stand these kind of people, and unfortunately I have to deal with them frequently. But the truly unfortunate thing is that out of the numbers of people that I see every day, it is really only a few who are like that. But that few taints my perception of all the rest. And so I end up classifying a whole group of people and writing them off, such that I really don’t give any of them a chance to be anything more than just another moronic, well-off American.

It’s hard, incredibly hard, to shake off negativity once some stranger has been rude to you. I worked as a ticket seller for a gigantic ski resort one winter, and I dealt with a lot of rich to pretending-to-be-rich people who only knew how to be demeaning and dehumanizing to me once they couldn’t get their way. It got to be after a while that I wouldn’t be truly nice or open with anyone at my window, because every individual turned in my mind into a stream of idiots, bitches, and assholes. And everyday, every hour, there would be some idiot to reconfirm that. So I would just be indifferent and cold to all of them.

It’s like that receptionist, you know the one, at the doctor’s office, or that person who you talked about your refund with at the customer service window–that employee who was just outright rude to you, and seemed to derive no pleasure in life except to be rude to you for no reason. We’ve all dealt, way too often, with such a person, and they ruin our day. They are unhappy, bitter people. You know that all they do is go home and then talk shit about people from work.

I’ve been that person from time to time. All it takes is one rude motherfucker, and I close up and try to limit my interactions with guests as much as possible. And I thus effectively close off any potential in any of these people to be anything but what I view them to be. Every now and then there is that one person or family who is truly, genuinely nice and warm, and it is a shame if I can’t allow them to be that in my mind or in my interactions with them. And the fact is, further, that even the worst asshole, even the most representative complacent, close-minded sheltered bigot, has a side of warm intelligence and creativity, in which they can be viewed and understood within their own unique, personal context. It is simply that I must get beyond my own ego, I have to learn to see the bigger picture–such that if someone is being rude to me, that I should not take it personally. Such that even if someone has been sheltered and suckled on ignorance and wealth all their life, they still have that boundless potential as God. To allow myself to be mired in bitterness against them is a waste of my heart and mind.

It is, of course, much easier to say this than to manifest it in my life. But I’m hoping that if I say it enough, it will work its charm. Because I believe quite firmly that it is in the everyday that the world is changed, and if I or anyone else can’t get beyond appearances than we are just allowing the bullshit to perpetuate. It is not just Gandhis who change the world–it is the nurse you dealt with at the hospital, it is the guy who took your change at the Taco Bell, it is the person crossing the street at the stop sign, it is every person in your day, every person in your life, every little positive interaction. You know that warm feeling you get, when you smile at a complete stranger who is only interacting with you because it is business, and you get a smile back, and it is real? And you’ve actually connected to this person, and you’ve made their day, and they’ve made yours? That is what it is to cross boundaries and change the world. Positivity. Every day. Every moment. The potential in every person for love is boundless.

Open Your Heart to Yourself

To your open your heart, steadily, day by day–this is the toughest thing in a relationship. For some reason, we have this societal notion that men function not by exploring their emotions and coming to terms with what they feel, but by holding everything back, giving little, taking more. Yet it is the strongest of men whom are able to relax their defenses completely and give themselves to faith in love, faith in life, faith in themselves. It is the toughest of men whom are able to see their enemy within themselves, whom are able to see the god within everything, able to see all things within themselves. Men who must take out their problems on their loved ones and the world because they are keeping love pent up inside are weaklings. A true human being knows how to recognize joy–and will work ceaselessly to preserve it.

Forgiveness

To give up your pride, your ego, your enkindled bitterness–this is far easier, far more healing and preventative of further damage, than holding yourself apart and waiting for some unachievable perfection from another human being. Why are we so attached to our suffering? When someone causes us pain, even unintentionally, we will hold it against them long past the fleeting suffering it has caused us, even re-inflicting the pain, re-enacting the scenario in our minds just so that we can continue to harden our hearts against them. Why? All it takes is to let it go and forgive the other person for being imperfect. All it takes is for you to get over yourself. It is that hard. It is that easy. Try it. Every single day.

Anger, violence, and bitterness perpetuate in an endless feedback loop, drunken fathers beating their children just like their daddies beat them; embittered, righteous bigots murdering others under the banner of god and religion; angry young men used as pawns murdering others under the banner of patriotism and freedom. Angry men on radio talk shows, calling for hatred and warfare. Academic fools with their heads stuck up their assholes on the news on the TV, pretending to be “experts” on issues they have no life experience with.

There is only one way to break this endless chain of idiocy, lunacy, and anger when someone has done you wrong. Let it go. Let it fucking go. Get over yourself. Even if you know that you are right. Forgive them. Talk to them, apologize, open your heart to them and understand them in their imperfection. Love them. Don’t hold their faults against them, talking shit about them to other people. Because you are only hurting yourself. You are hurting your heart, increasing your stress, giving yourself headaches, tensing your muscles, weakening your immune system. What is the point in holding onto bad things inside of yourself?

It is that easy. It is that hard.

Burning

Love is an everchanging,
up and down sine wave ride–
sometimes I push you away
just so I can find the space
to breathe–
only to find that I am suffocating
to think that I could lose you
so easily.

I know when I’m being unfair,
when I’m being mean–
which is as much to say
that some part of me
hurts you deliberately.

I watch myself doing it,
loathing myself.
I can only theorize
that I do it because I am scared
and I am looking to make something up
against you, so that I can run away.

Don’t let me run away, beloved.
Fight me, be aflame with righteous anger,
put me in my place–
which is next to you, with you, for you.
Be strong in yourself.
Don’t let me wallow in my fears
by digging into your insecurities.

I can be so cold to myself–
and now that you are in me, in my life,
in my every movement and thought,
I have to learn to be better
to myself, to all of the life
which resides within.

Don’t leave me alone.
Keep me burning, love.

Every Thing

Every woman is your sister, your daughter, your mother, your friend, your nemesis.
Ever man is your brother, your son, your father, your friend, your nemesis.

How can such unseeming things be so deeply interwoven, complementing,
contrasting,
ever struggling,
strong?

Yet it is so, and you know it is so. It is so because everything which lives, and has passed, and is to come–one can’t exist without everything else, –all, all one, I and I, there are ten million ways to say this, and they will never mean a thing until you have seen it, the millions of eyes inhabiting your very deepest self–the millions of arms and mouths and skins that would seem to separate you from all the world–all working for you, through you, against you.

We put ourselves through such suffering to understand that we are not alone, have never been alone–in fact, we are struggling so hard just to be alone, just to pretend that we are alone, just to maintain these illusions every single day–and it takes a lot of work, a lot of selfishly inflicted pain. It’s somewhat ridiculous and overly dramatic, our daily attempts to convince ourselves and each other that we are isolated and innocent of what another may feel. All along knowing the pain we are causing in this continuation of detachment from ourselves and others.

But there is, everymoment, at all times, the possibility of moving beyond the bullshit onto the next level, and this is offered, everymoment, by love, by the selfless love offered by others, by the love found in giving yourself, by the love which always awaits just outside of the door you are so frightened of passing through. And when you pass through, you look into another’s eyes–you do not see a friend, an enemy, a lover, a sibling–you see yourself. And then you see that person for what they are:
Everything.

Wind Chimes

Listening to the sound of the high sierra wind gusting through the pines, I am reminded again of the absence of Toby. He has been on my mind much recently now that it is summer, because we would hang out a lot more during this time, banding together against the summer invasion of families, tourists, and students. The wind plays in the windchimes my girlfriend got for our deck, and I realized the strange juxtaposition and harmony of past and future, of love and loneliness. Simultaneous happiness and sadness. Life teaches its lessons in painful ways. There is no love without suffering. I understand that Toby’s death and the love I now have in my heart are not two unrelated events. The desolate wind moving through the windchimes.

Blessed

To be blessed
is to recognize
what you’ve got,
what you’ve been given.

To wake up every morning to her bright eyes is a pleasure I never could have anticipated. I’m used to operating alone, to relying on myself, to taking my doses of loneliness and ecstasy in equal indifference. It continually surprises me when she does things for me, and I realize suddenly that I’ve got someone to rely on, to help me through daily existence.

I don’t know how to process this domestic bliss, how to invert it inwards to the inner eye and discover the depth and distance with which to craft words from it. It’s new for me. This is coming from the guy who has never been in a relationship for longer than 3 months. I’d begun to get used to fly-by love, to opening my heart to suffering–I haven’t yet experienced steady loving like this. I have to get used to this, to being . . . happy.

This Wine

What you looking for out there? What can ever be better than now, than what is held here, in your arms, in your heart? There is nothing more to be found beyond yourself. We could go as far as torrential spotted Jupiter, we could go as deep as the dark deathlike peace of the bottom of the oceans–and find nothing as surprising or strange or beautiful as the treasure found within ourselves. Go out to the mountains, go into the wilderness, and look into the face of a living interconnected crown of divinity, see it in the trees, the way they stretch out into the light, hear it in the birds, calling out across the density to each other, hear it in every manifestation of everything, look on its flowing beauty. This is a glimmer of the surface of what you can contain. Where the sun can never reach, where logic can never penetrate. You, your life, your every breath and movement into the next moment. The only thing that keeps you from god is your lack of discipline. Listen! You are telling yourself something–life is telling you something–every single person in your life is telling you something! Listen! Concentrate! Look! Everything that is before you lies already within you. Uncork it and pay attention. Swirl it in the sunlight. Sniff it carefully. Think about what it is that you taste. Feel its weight on your tongue. Let yourself go with the drunkenness it bestows. Wine, what is wine in the mouth of a close-minded fool?
Wine is as good as those who know how to taste it. Life is as good as you will accept yourself.

Loveliving

You are incredibly brave,
you who place your safety on the line for love.
You who decide to give up your future
for that which you aren’t sure that you can hold.

There is nothing higher than to live your life
based on love.
It might mean giving up everything that you’ve ever had.
It might mean gaining everything you’ve ever wanted.

There’s an easy way to tell:
look at a person who has lived their life
based on security, money, and success.

Then look at a person who has lived their life
based on love and an incurable desire
to be free.

Then look at who is happy in themselves.
Wherever they go,
whatever happens to them,
who holds a light that shines through the darkness?

Love, love is the only way to live.
It is the only way to die.
It is the only way to do anything worth something
in a world that is dying to live.

The Flower Blooms

An harbor from the sea, your presence against mine, entwined to stillness, so perfectly unmatched, so humanly fitted. Warmth, the finding of softness between our angularities, jutting elbows, folded wings, a language surpassing articulation. Preening, grooming, contentment in constant attention. The flower blooms.

Amazement resides within the most slippery of moments, easily missed, easily relaxed. Here it is, life, love, touched by your fingertips, responsive to your dreams. Cherish it.

The sunlight which comes through the window every morning is the burning force of a new sun, the open scope of a new day, the birth and the death of a new self, a new mode of being, a new way of seeing, never to come again, always dipped into the shadows of night to be lost. A new day. A new life. To be cherished, to be nurtured, to be loved.

Touch

Touching is the closure of distance, a wondering exploration of that which can never fully be known. At the same time an opening, a window of the senses thrown ajar, a new world of scent, texture, and taste flooding inward to the heart. An aperture, a fixture of differences attempting to reconcile, a shore and a sea and the tugging of the moon. To touch you teaches me about myself. I learn what I want, what I like, what I fear, where I am strong. The crenallation of our edges, the edge harmonics of our desire. What is tomorrow when there is tonight? You are the moon catching the light of las estrellas, I am a cloud formed of thousands of tadpoles of sea, this is a hymn and a realization that there is nothing yet of these swirling emotions that I can put into something so concrete and sudden as words. To speak of the deepness of what one fleetingly feels is scary. It is scary, yet when you finally say them, they are true, you know they are true, almost unnecessary, but necessary for reaffirmation, to know that the heart shimmering underneath the touch is there mirrored, two hands reaching out from unfathomable distances of night to touch and pass wonder. Wonder, and wonder, and frightening joy.

Alchemy

Our bodies pools in a river,
wells in time, we meet,
dip into one another, share,
the stream moves onward.

Worship a tree, worship a flower,
worship yourself,
every action worship.

River of life,
bodies dripping with collection,
sources of energy,
channeling of past into future.

What comes into you
is what you allow into you.
Allow light.
Allow love.
Hollow yourself to be filled.
Lose yourself to be hallowed.

True alchemy is not the transmutation of metals into gold.
It is the transcendence of yourself
into God–
which is another way of saying
the discoverance of the sea
within the raindrop,
the revelation of wholiness
in every little piece of your world.

We make decisions,
we choose to act
for better or for worse.
But what causes the rifts in our hearts
is the fear
that we made the wrong choice,
that we can never go back.

Nothing is wrong,
and we can never go back.

Everything is right,

a matter of acceptance.

Accept, allow, embrace.
Love, love, love.

The Well

In the lamplight, there, by the well, can be seen the old man of gnappy beard who sits all day and night in the same place, fed scraps like a venerable dog by nearby shopkeepers. He asks for nothing and accepts everything. He watches the world and the only judgment that he passes might be simply through his very existence, his everpresence at the well, flies unacknowledged at his forehead and ankles, unrelatable to the commerce and bustle of the day. At night, drunken young men might harangue him from time to time, but find nothing much of sport in his fragile compliance. He is like the well, an object of what is taken to be always there and thusly ignored largely except as backdrop. A few who have been around as long as him know of his history, and know him as a man, and know wherefore he sits like so much dust. Even a few of the next generation treats him with the respect of an uncle, albeit a slightly crazy but harmless uncle, and they will give him treats on holidays, or pull out a cigarette if they happen to think of it as they pass on their business. Ola comes and talks to him everyday at lunchtime and gives him a glass of milk. She tells him of the gossip of her workplace, and to be sure he knows nothing of those people or of how they may relate to him, but he nods intermittently and Ola is content to use him as a whiteboard upon which to trace different theories of the daily dramas and conflicts that form her world, and which she will later present to other, more opinionated and vocal judges. That he is even listening is uncertain, but his gentle gaze contains little of insanity, and he seems to be in full possession of his senses even though he chooses not to utilize them, or at least, to relate any of these sensations to the outer world.

Jale is a young boy of somewhat noble heritage–the somewhat being that his ancestors have served nobility honorably and well for untold generations, and thus they have become intertwined almost indistinguishably with the history of kings and of princesses and the other various trappings of power, such that now in these shifting times his father could proclaim his bloodline link to an ancient king of mythic yore and not many would dispute it, or even really care one way or the other, to be perfectly honest. Jale didn’t see much evidence of any difference between his family’s life and any others, but it was nice to think that there was something special contained within him, traced through his very marrow, a grandeur sleeping, a blessing of those who came before. He likes to imagine that the quiet pretty girl 2 streets away is also secretly a princess, and that they are destined to become lovers. She averts her eyes from him whenever they pass, but he feels that there is something between them that need not be spoken, that links their very spirit long before they were ever born. Jale passes the old man at the well every evening when he goes to fetch water for supper. He is slightly afraid of him, and tries not catch his eyes. But more important is that the pretty girl sometimes is there also, and he watches her slender arms drawing the water, and there is the possibility that she may look up at him and notice him. This evening she is not there, and he gathers the water absentmindedly, wondering how he can get through another dry night without a fresh glimpse of her red shirt, of her bare feet in the mud next to the well. He steps upon a sharp rock and twists his ankle slightly and falls, spilling a portion of water upon the old man. The old man slowly wipes the dripping from his face and beard and looks gently upon the boy, who fearfully looks into the old man’s eyes, not sure of what to say, not having spoken to such a person before and not sure of what is said to such a person. Everyone ignores him and Jale thinks perhaps he should gather himself and run and pretend nothing has happened. But he has lost a significant amount of water and does not wish to be slapped by his mother and laughed at by his younger sister. But he cannot move back to the well to gather more water and pretend that he does not see the old man, does not feel his mysterious silent eyes upon him. He stands irresolutely. The old man smiles, seemingly perfectly knowing and not crazy or strange at all, understanding of the boy’s plight and of his reasons for fear. The boy finds confidence in the smile and offers the old sitter a drink of the remaining water. The old man sips like a bird from the mouth of the clay and nods. He does not mind that his shirt is wet. Jale rejoices inwardly and quickly gathers more water, almost oblivious until the last moment that he stands face to face with the pretty girl, always in the same red shirt, her raven black hair falling like living vines down her face to curl around her shoulders, and that they are gathering water together. He stands with his full bowl, looking at the top of her head. She looks up at him and smiles, and they both move away at the same time, and he feels that he wants to run but that it is too late to do such a thing without looking like a fool, and the old man smiles after them, nodding with water hanging in beads amongst the gnarls of his beard. Jale begins to talk to her, and she listens quietly, moving with her burden of water like an unseen princess, and only Jale can see it within her, the way she carries herself, the strength of her spine. He tells her of the old man and he wonders of why and wherefore such a man comes to rest forever by the well, and he speculates that perhaps the old man is really in fact an old king but has been forgotten and all of his subjects have been put under a spell and the king waits for them to awaken patiently, so that he can again come unto his throne. The girl says nothing but does not seem to reject this theory, and Jale continues talking until they come to a parting of streets and then he tells her farewell and she smiles again while looking at him and he feels so strong, so stupid, so like a little boy, like a prince, like everything and nothing all at the same time and he runs to his home, spilling nothing all along the way.

Una Carta

El viento en mi vida es un corriente de dios. Ahora hay silencio, no puedo definir qué está en mi corazon, estoy esperando por eterno para entender la amor que está dentro. Sentimientos venir y ir, amor respirar como el cielo, lleno con lluvia en este momento, completo con nada solo azul y sol en ese momento. Qué es eterno?

Es certidumbre que todo venir una otra vez más. Las estaciones como un rueda, hilado adelante.

Ahora en mi vida hay no mucho sino espacio y soledad y el esperando para amor volver.

Te extraño.

Amar es

Love is not a stable thing, it is not solid ground. It shifts and changes, it flows through all things and all people, all times and all places, but is never contained, never bottled–because as soon as such an attempt is made, it has turned into a longing for something no longer there

Amar una otra persona
es amar sí mismo,
es amar el viento, el cielo, los nubes,
es amar la tierra, la luna, la luz.
Amar una otra es que aprender
que cosa estamos
juntos.
Amar una otra es regalar su pasado
para el futuro.
Amar es amar
es amar
es amar.
Nada más.
Nada menos.

Love Decisions

On the road again.
Estoy en San Francisco ahora, a city which grows on me a little bit more each time I visit, because I always have a good time.
I did some jamming last night, and it was good to play drums again–after three months in Peru I wasn’t sure if I could still play. I can still play, all praise due to Allah.
Back in Tahoe a few days ago, late at night with the snow outside silently, fluffily falling, I was sitting up looking through my past writings. I do this from time to time when I get lonely or bored and feel like I have nothing to write about. In some ways writing for me is a preservance of memory, because I have a bad memory and will forget how and why I ended up where I am today.
And I was looking at emails that I received and sent from last winter. And I remembered why I had ever decided to go to Peru in the first place: it was because I had fallen in love with a Peruvian girl and I wanted to see her again after she had left the United States to return to her home.
I raised this topic to ponder an issue that we have all gone through at some point in our lives: that time when you ask yourself whether you are going to make a life decision based on your love for another person–whether you are going to move somewhere for them, or stay somewhere for them, or in any way alter the path of your own direction for this person. Is it right to alter your path for someone else?
At one point in my not so distant past I had made the statement to myself that I would never alter my life for another person again. This was after I had elected to stay in a place I didn’t really want to last winter for someone, and the relationship didn’t work out. I was left feeling depressed and hopeless and angry with myself that I had made that decision for someone who didn’t care for me.
But in the end, being where I was turned out to be a wonderful experience when I finally gathered myself back together and remembered where my balls were located. And I ended up meeting someone else who did care for me.
The question of whether or not to change your life for someone is obviously dependent on circumstance and a certain level of practicality.
In the end, I had elected not to pursue this Peruvian girl–I still went to Peru, but not until the end of that year. If I had wanted to pursue her I would have left immediately after she did. Well, I did want to, but the practical voice in my head informed me that if I did that I would only have enough money for the flight and less than a month there, and that when I returned to the states I wouldn’t have a job.
So when confronted with the option of pursuing her love, or staying in the states, getting a job, and saving up money for a later trip, I opted for practicality.
At the time, I told myself that I would still be able to see her later in the year. But of course the long distance phone thing fizzled quickly. And so the original reason why I decided to go to Peru was for a girl, yes–but the girl quickly receded from the picture.
It is interesting how decisions that we made for someone else can lead us into beautiful eventualities that are completely beyond the relationship that we were pursuing. The love we altered our direction for fades, but in its place we discover something new.

Roses for the Stone

I sunk into your love like a stone, diving to the darkest pressure-filled depths of what might become. Inside of this place I discovered the space of what we are, of what life is–all of everything a form sheltering stillness–all of everything a construction pointing to the heart of silence–all of everything a song sung to express what can never be said.
Entry into your love was like entry into the earth´s atmosphere, burning away all of what I couldn’t shield. You burnt away everything that you could, razing parts of my heart, my mind–but you could not take away my future.
Love is a like a game in which you try to take away everything that the other person is so that you have something to keep, something to hold onto. Except when you approach the end with their pieces in your heart, you find that you’ve taken everything of yourself and thrown it out the window. As if you were sitting before a mirror, steadily and exactly destroying yourself. When you get to the peak you realize that you have been looking at yourself the whole time–and that you knew all along. Are you some kind of monster, tearing the world to pieces to find your existence?
The circles circling toward themselves can never find completion. Coming to where they think they once were, they find instead the space of the future.
Is it monstruous to seek love, and not simply to seek it, but to seek it in its fullest expression? Because love in its deepest incarnations necesitates a form of death, a scraping of the insides to mold out a hollowness that could cradle divinity.
We create fantasies to shield our minds from the burning that comes from our hearts.
I knew all of the fantasies that you created in me, and I led you through them knowing that I was leading you to your disillusion. It was in suffering that I loved you. I knew it then, and you will know it now. My heart was filled by your presence. Now you are far away, and I am empty again. I knew that I could never keep you. I gave you everything that I could in the moments that we were together. That was true, that was real. That is all that we can ever really hold onto. This knowledge of what we once had, the faith that it can and will come again. Not me, not you. What passed between us. What is passing from the base of my navel through my wind-pipe on the disposition of my tongue through the arrangement of my lips. What is flowing from the tip of my spine across the spaces of nerve endings to my fingers.
I loved you. And when I see you again,
I will love her too.

Un Beso No Es Solo Un Beso

Un beso no es solo un beso para eses personas con consiensia de la luz; un beso es lleno de sentimiento, es una extensión del corazon, una forma de algo no puede definir. Porque amor esta afuera todo, esta dentro de todo, esta incontenible, movimiento a través de todo, afuera palabras, se bastado solo con manos, con contacto de cascaras–palabras se amoldado de bocas sino allende de sonidos. Amor es un creacion de la luz buscando sí mismo. En aquel momento de unidad, no es nada sino una fuerza fuerte penetrando todo, desterrando el oscuridad. Por supuesto, el oscuridad volverá, cubriendo los espacios lejos del corazon. Necesite crear amor incesantemente para su vida, para que el corazon puede recordar por que se existar, se existar solo para amor, para respirando la luz afuera sí mismo al dentro del mundo. ¡Mantena su respirando, divida la luz! ¿Que mas es en vida que cual esta dentro de su corazon?

Amor Como el Ocèano

Love is like an ocean, somehow keeping you afloat in the midst of continuous swelling and ebbing change. Like an ocean, it accepts everything, the only rejection coming from the mind that fears the heart that is opening to suffering like a flower. Yes, love comes from all places and goes in all directions, dependant solely on the circumstance of placement, the happening of a moment in time when skin contacts skin and knows again the truth that it is one, has always been one, and with this can be prepared to break again in two. Breaking breaking to know the source.
The mind always strives for eternity, to make this thing last forever. The heart knows that tomorrow isn’t really all that important, not when the beloved is right here next to you and inside of your heart. Tomorrow, yes, of course, will be full of suffering. But what would be the point in attainment of ecstasy if it could be retained? Simply hollow echoes resounding without resolution. You reach a point where you are outside of yourself, watching yourself become what you are, a piece of human history reenacting the drama of life.
Dive in headfirst, because then at least when the cold hits you it will be complete, without fear, and met with grace.

Translation

Every new love is a fruit borne by the gift of water sought by subterranean ascetic roots.
Love is a symptom, an outgrowth, a sign of a life much deeper. Our minds and bodies a hollow bone for the fluxing uncontainable marrow of the divine.
The passing of one love is the inevitability of the gravity of a force much greater than ourselves, the falling of fecundity, the gift of death bearing the encapsulation of the future, ripened for foreign palates.
The source remains forever below what can be seen. The sun comes and goes, the seasons circumambulate. Our roots, our beginnings, our formative grasps of the infinite beyond ourselves–these are what give us the promise of our eternal future.
Love is a passageway, not a room with a key, never what it was before, twisting and turning but always moving forward.
Why turn and look backward when everything that came before already lies ahead?

Traducción

Cada amor nuevo es una fruta había producido del regalo de agua buscaba de raizes subterraneos.
Amor es el crecimiento mas profundo de la vida. Nuestras mentes y nuestros cuerpos son huesos huecos por el incontenible de la medula de la divinidad.
El pasado de un amor es inevitable de la gravedad de una fuerza mas grande que nosotros mismos, cayendo de plenitud, el regalo de la muerte esta lleviendo de semillas del futuro, madura para paladares extranjeros.
El nacimiento se queda para siempre debajo del poder vista. El sol venir y salir, los estaciones divulgar. Nuestros origenes, nuestros comienzos, nuestros agarres formativos del infinito fuera de nosotros mismos–estos esta que nos damos la promesa de nuestro futuro eterno.
Amor es un pasillo, no es un cuarto con una clave, no que nunca estuvo antes, esta girando y dando las vueltas sino siempre movimiento delante.
¿Por que se dar la vuelta y ver hacia atras cuando todos los partes que a venido antes ya se echar en el futuro?

Feliz Navidad

I was a tourist today through and through. I got onto a big bus that stopped off at local markets where I bought items and stopped at Incan ruins where I took pictures. Ah yes, to be one with cattle. However, something much more important beyond the commercialism of my soul took place today. I met a beautiful woman and had some great conversations. Last night I had been feeling lonely–as you can see from the prior entry–but feeling the ultimate necessity for integrity and personal space. Last night I went to sleep with a good feeling in my belly. Today this feeling was validated. What was validated was the fact that the more centered within myself I am, the more receptive I am to the confluence of beneficial occurences. Not even to say that I am creating them, because I rarely go out of my way to make things happen, more to say that they have more of a tendency to occur.
At lunch the bus stopped off at some place where they were charging 15 soles for almuerzo. First of all, I was beginning to get spiteful about being part of a herd of cattle; second of all, I didn’t want to be forced to pay 15 soles for the meal. So I went across the street to where it was the more civilized 6 soles for a full meal (for the record, by the way, you can get a full meal in local food joints off the beaten path for 2 soles. That’s about 59 cents in US dolares folks.) I was sitting at my table and drinking my Inca Kola, and I was actually thinking that it would have been nice if I had made an attempt to talk to this woman, because I had noticed her earlier at the ruins. But true to my nature, I did nothing. And then she walks in and ends up sitting down at my table. And we have a little small talk and change seats to sit next to each other when we get back on the bus to talk more. During the next set of ruins we visited, it began pouring rain (it’s the rainy season in the mountains right now) and so we went into a local restaurant to get out the rain, wherein we drank a couple of Cusqueñas and talked about Sufiism. To me this was a much more satisfying than looking at broken rocks.
And of course, as is always the case whenever I meet a cool person, she left for Bolivia tonight. But what is most important to me is that I met her at all, and not just that I met her–that I know that I was meant to meet her. And I don’t mean that in the sense of stars aligning, etc. I mean that as in I needed to meet her today for myself, I needed the space within me reconfirmed, because sometimes when you get lonely you begin to question yourself and what you believe in. The reconfirmation of what I believe and know to be true is what occurred for me today. I may never see her again. But that´s ok. There are connections much deeper that are formed in the spirit even in chance one time encounters. Because ultimately, we are all the same person, no? And getting that momentary glimpse of the window to the divine in another and seeing yourself . . . This is what it is to live. This is why I am here.

Love Is Reckless

Love is reckless; not reason.
Reason seeks a profit.
Love comes on strong, consuming herself, unabashed.

Yet, in the midst of suffering,
Love proceeds like a millstone,
hard-surfaced and straightforward.

Having died to self-interest,
she risks everything and asks for nothing.
Love gambles away every gift God bestows.

Without cause God gave us Being;
without cause, give it back again.
Gambling yourself away is beyond any religion.

Religion seeks grace and favor,
but those who gamble these away are God’s favorites,
for they neither put God to the test
nor knock at the door of gain and loss.

–Rumi

someday somewhere the sun

Not alone, never alone, consciousness penetrates everywhere. Even in despair you can sense the eyes of the world there. Yes, you stand on the edge by yourself, but you are a particle captured in the flash, a wave brushing out against the sky, a piece of something beyond so deeply interwoven throughout your own senses that most of the time you don’t even understand your own feelings. What is this force that waits behind your eyes, that crouches within your body, unseen and unacknowledged by most of the transient surface world? Everyone knows without knowing, waiting for the swell to break, for the image to be framed, the silent eyes sucking all of the world into one stomach that is forever hungry, and when an individual stands up against the crowd they see what they want and it is never enough. But every sacrifice is a piece of a heart thrown into the flame. Higher and higher the awareness of light is spread. To know itself, life must tear itself into pieces. We look into each other’s eyes and know ourselves somewhere already lost and we move and we move and we need each other desperately and we are alone and we are hungry and we are standing and we are shadows and we are mountains and valleys and we are all together in this together, we are all horribly, terribly, beautifully tied to each other like a puzzle without a purpose and when my heart is empty of everything
then maybe I will be ready to meet you.

You

I keep remembering our last night,

the way we struggled to create

chains that would bind us through eternity,

knowing that nothing would last.

The way we finally fell asleep,

til the alarm on my phone

came buzzing like a call

that someone had just died,

3:45,

and you immediately

began mourning

as I set about being practical,

like a puppet

hollowly enacting higher commands.

Our love was amputated, no matter what long distance conversations filled with silence we gave. Hopeless seances, groping longingly for something no longer there except in memory. And here you live still in my heart, an apparition of what could have been.

Being with you was like constructing an intricate pyre of our desire, carving out all of our deepest dreams in each other and setting it on fire. It was desperate, it was everything that reality could not be. I don’t regret a minute of it. I don’t regret breaking our hearts. Because it was the right thing to do, there was never a question in my mind that creating a window of beauty only to be broken was worth it. I finally understood, with you, that true love is always worth the sacrifice of long periods of lonely suffering. Even if it might mean a lifetime of sadness. There is never a reason to hold back when love is near. We must give all, we must give everything for something that can never be possessed.

So yeah, I miss you. More perhaps now than I ever did, missing the very idea of you, the place in imagination that allowed you to exist within me.

It’s amazing how something so fleeting can be worth all of my life. One must, of course, always look back down at the ground and climb back from the mountain top and return home. I walked in the front door and everything was the same but everything was different, and would never be as it was. Every time something in me dies, another world opens up before me and it is like being born again, shuddering in the light with only pain to wake me.

I walk through the world with your emptiness before me. And I will remember you when my heart is filled with love again.

A Final Scene

Hunter moved through the door to see her standing in the mirror looking at herself with something like despair. She reached for the soap and washed her hands. He watched her, thin browned arms and slender fingers moving slowly, drying against the towel, her hair falling down the side of her face. He moved from the room before she looked up at him. He sat on the edge of the bed and watched cars moving down the boulevard from the window, listening to the apartment building filtered sounds of the city. She came in and stood at the door, leaning against the doorjamb, her fingers gripping the wood. She sat down next to him and watched the side of his face, the sadness there. Everything they had to say they already knew, but there was the danger of explosivity when it came into the air. She felt something like love for him still, but in the war within her heart, he had already been categorized as enemy, and there was no turning back from her duty now. She looked out the window too and listened to the words she had prepared in her mind. Hunter, she said.

Stop it, he said. Stop it. Just go.

She started to say something and then he looked at her and shouted. Leave now. Get your shit and get the fuck out of my life. She got up and gathered her things from the drawers as he continued to sit and look out the window, his hands clasping his knees. Bitch, bitch, bitch, he thought. He knew even as anger flooded his mind that he would miss her the minute she walked out the door. He didn’t want to be left like this, with angerness and bitterness filling up the space. He stood up, clenching and unclenching his jaw. Marcela, he said. She continued to gather up her things, folding her clothes with a quiet, controlled calm. Marcela, I’m sorry. I’m sorry that I couldn’t change for you. I’m sorry that I couldn’t be who you needed me to be. I’m sorry that it has to be this way. She stopped and regarded him levelly, saying nothing, her hands at her sides. He stepped forward.

You know that you have been nothing but distant to me, she said. This is not what I had been prepared to tell you. I was going to tell you that I had found another and that he was good to me and that I was leaving. But what is really true is that you have shut me out of your life. You have shut me out of your life and you have been waiting for me to leave. So now I am leaving. This is what you want me to do. I tried. I have tried with my heart for you, and you have left me standing here with my love in the air, falling to pieces. I will not destroy myself for you.

He listened to this, and stood reeling in the silence, letting all of the hurt penetrate everywhere, the true nature of their battle coming into consciousness. I would never ask you to do that for me, he whispered. He grasped at the table by his side for support. He could not believe in this version of himself so monstrous.
Marcela, he said, lurching as if stricken. Forgive me if I have been far from you. I know that it is over, but I don’t want you to go thinking that I have not loved you. I loved you, but I did not understand it, and I did not know how to show it. Every morning waking up to your dark waiting eyes, your eyes with the questions in them, waiting. I did not know how to answer. I am sorry. For what it is worth I loved you and I love you still. I don’t want you to hate me when you think of me. Please forgive me.
I have already forgiven you, she said. I tried hating you. But what use is it in ruining my heart?
They stood looking at each other, with nothing left to say. They touched each other like frightened children, and hugged each other to themselves in a silence that was deafening. A dog barked in the dusk. Hunter clutched his fingers around her shoulder blades. She had one hand on his neck and the other on his lower back, a heat interlocking. And it was now that the tears came. They pulled back and looked into each other’s flooding eyes. They kissed one last time and hugged again but now it was over. He left the room and walked into the kitchen and looked blindly into the refrigerator. She packed up the rest of her things and went into the bathroom and blew her nose and washed her hands again and came into the kitchen and said goodbye. They said that they would keep in touch. Hunter knew that he would not speak to her again.

Untitled

There are times when you need to press forward, & there are times when you must question yourself about your appearance. Because there are various concerns beyond yourself that must be taken into consideration. The territory that you occupy is but a boundary – the inner and outer spaces extend away into intangibility. What you can control is the way you flow with the wind on the waves. & the way the world comes into you is what determines your integrity, & the way you come into the world is what determines your desire. The filter in-between is your thought. Throw away the filter, & what is left is love. Because in love there is no control, & there is no turning back – but it places you in the center of the world.

Here

Here in this everlasting moment of flowing ether, here, watching your hair falling around your face, here, looking deep within the mirror of your love to mouth the words I didn’t know were there so apparent in my essence, here. Here, tasting the salt of your tears in the moonlight fading and calling the taxi for you to leave forever, here, carrying your suitcase up the stairs through the snow, here, holding you one last time. Go. You must leave. You must catch your plane. I cannot keep you. Here, listening to our loss on the phone, here, hearing my heart harden in resignation, readying myself for another long period of loneliness. Here, sitting in my office alone at night, remembering you. Here. Where can I go to see what has happened to me?

loss and gain of worlds

It is hard to believe your own eyes sometimes. What mystery you once saw in this woman has turned devilish with deeper understanding, and then, like all things demonic, vanished in the light of confrontation, leaving a hollow in your heart that hardens you against all things before you, ready to set sail again. Ready to sing in the night with only the waves and insects reflecting. Your eyes could see nothing beyond your desire, and once again you were led like a child into delusion. So enwrapped in the shroud of solitude like jalapenos in a burrito you dug a cave between your ribs to the place where the wind sounds beneath the trees and the light sifts evergreen across the sea bottom like bony ghost fingers and your knowledge of self is contained within a stillness cool and clear. And here is a world she could not imagine and she is gone now in the way the shore is gone. A paradigm left behind, named and defined as memory. Yes, there is always something to be missed. Pieces of yourself that drop away into time to shine outwards through the darkness into some alien nightsky, forming patterns that can be functional as points of reference as the unknown is further plumbed. All skin that is shed can be fed to the flame.

Trust not in the eyes. Trust in the heart that creates.

Reflections

We are like many surfaced mirrors, reflecting many different things from many different angles. These surfaces, these tops, tell us where things end. We must explore down deep within to find their beginnings, their roots, the quiet sacred places from which they’ve drawn their existance.

Never define someone based on what you know. For every person can be seen differently. So forget what you think, & learn to live by your heart, be guided by your love, & relinquish your desire over that which you cannot control. I could sermonize all day about this righteousness that can only be lived. I am human, & I will always feel this neverending need for security. I want to be warm, I want to be held, I want to be without individuality. So everyday I must make my way into words to be translated by the world’s empathy. Listen. You may find yourself here.

To The Light

There is much that flies within our minds in the atmosphere of love, but one knows simply, irrefutably, that to which all of the flies are drawn. Even the hardened heart of the worst criminal–branded by society from the start, never given a chance to pretend to be part of the charade–moves according to this universal underlying rhythm. I’ve always been convinced that even behind the worst, bestial murder there is a desperate attempt at understanding, there is a scream of despair that calls out in its unanswerable need. Because there is always a greater circle beyond that which we are confined. Down or up, in or out, it is all the same, eventually. There is not a substance in the world that cannot be transmuted by the widened irises of loving perception. There is not an enemy, there is not an other strong enough to withstand acceptance. The most imperialistic thing on the planet, who said that? Pir Vilayat Khan. I have no idea who he is, but he said, “No force anywhere on earth is as imperialistic as the human soul. It occupies and is occupied in turn, but it always considers its empire too narrow. Suffocating, it desires to conquer the world in order to breathe.” Even when you are in the deepest throes of ecstatic, passionate love, you want more, your thirst increases with every drop that you taste. Rumi wrote that “the life of lovers is in death.” Because in order to gain everything that you desire you must lose everything that you possess. It is a simple equation that doesn’t translate into the kind of math logic can comprehend. But it is known simply by observing every good thing that has happened in your life. I am speaking from personal experience, but I assume others have seen the same. The minute that I have ever assumed that I’ve had anything, I lose it. And when I have nothing, I will be suddenly blessed. It’s never enough simply to feel this, of course. In the darkest night of loneliness, with no where to turn to but myself, I can’t help but to despair, and in the thrashing about of my tortured need, I hurt myself or others in the temporary blindness in order to know where I need to go next. But then I move, and I move forward, and I move towards the sun.

Moon Shore Sonata

There is a rocky shore illuminated by the moon on its rocks, & the water choruses up against it, an alien form inevitably integrated, for the water is unforgiving & completely compassionate. I sit on a high tide inscripted bench, witnessing this primal interaction & trying to understand. A language beyond translation. The birds bob unperturbed on the crest of waves, their rotund opaque eyes capturing everything. Clouds coagulate on the horizon, enlightened by the moon and its reflection. & I am lost in the possibilities I missed this day. That beautiful smile leveled at me that I let go like an unharnessed sail, shooken without change. & here this water mocks me, for its armies conquers all, yet it never captures anything. So who am I to deserve grace? The rocks are hewn by relentless love. My heart is soft, & I am missing you. This moon & its ocean music mean nothing to me.

A Love Song

I loved loving you, pretty princess of the slipstream, come to me out the abyss of the unexpected. But like a breath, I’ve let you go, slow, so slow it hurt, the emptiness so close, it hurt when I drew back new blood into my heart again. I am sorry to have lost you, but I cherish the knowledge of the space you once filled. I am growing from your transference of primal understanding, the metaphysical data that has passed like your wind through my reed. We crafted together a song, an art form that was so powerful that we could only wonder in amazement after it had been passed, after it had come out of us and stood hung before our minds. I am still amazed at your memory, glazed into my skin. There is a loneliness so deep within. There is a hunger you fed that nurtured the flame. Do you know this light that comes from my heart? It is my mind and my body, thirsting for you in this unreachable void. It falls, it travels, it spans into a million stars in the nightsky of our dreams. I loved you, guapa. See the evidence written in the darkness? It may take forever to forget this–for every breath I take is an echo of the birth and death of this love.

Life, the venture of inevitable failure–we live for the fullness of balance that can only be achieved through death. In between there is the beauty, the spiralling movement forward and outward and toward the door in the sky that lets into the space. We love, we love, we love, and we understand, finally, that each and every love is the ultimate purpose for which we have been placed into our bodies.

And now I can sleep without fear of tomorrow, because I know what I have left behind.

Out In

What brings me higher–when my heart is widened with new, unforeseen love–also breaks me open to a new realm of emptiness, a deeper, rawer despair. Even in the midst of a bliss I had forgotten could exist, I am falling. I imagine that there is a point where the depths meet the sky, a point where intense ecstasy and intense pain are indistinguishable, a point where I am rising and falling and torn apart and left with nothing, nothing but a sweet residue of self that sits empty in the midst of the universe, filled only with the sonic wind of the sun, a puppet played but by god. But right now, my heart is strummed and snapped by the eyes of a woman, by her touch, by her lack of touch. And the penetration of her desire takes me to a level of beauty I had not known for so long. Beyond the blinded eyes of the world, beyond the compromise of daily need, beyond the groveling hunger of loneliness. Here in this place against her body, there is no such thing as victory or defeat–there is only the holding . . . and the letting go. And I pull back into myself further, feeling yet more the incredible, unfathomable distance that lies between two hearts, and marveling that this could ever traveled, and wondering, and wondering, and hoping, and despairing, that this road could ever be found out of the darkness again

Me In A Lonesome Mode

The world revolves around the space from which it was created, the word of the godhead a formless first sound breathing into the horribly beautiful noise of the many worlds crashing together in escape of themselves; the gravity of the unknown bends all of this mess of thought somehow, gathering the light back inward. Hunter S Thompson shot himself on the phone to his wife. Such is love, perhaps. A giving of the final, terrible glimpse of emptiness that huddles within all to another. Displaying naked the inhuman terror that is truly love: everything, everything, everything. There is irony in all of our efforts to communicate ourselves to the world. Our words are petty, defined by a tradition of linguistic patterns, barely capable of offering more than a momentary commentary of our incapability to look beyond ourselves. Our gestures are habitual, we grope at each other as if in the dark, desperate to reassure our minds that the world beyond will feel as what we have been taught. There is horror in the night; we lie awake looking at the blue shadows cast by the moon, meaningless without us, but all meaning lying far past comprehension. Our animal selves long dormant within us tremble into adrenaline, awoken yet unseeing. It is all right, it is all right, it is all right, you tell yourself, sensing an incredible danger but unable to locate its source. It is not all right. All of creation sparks within your mind. And there is no one to wrap their arms around you and cradle you into oblivion, not here, not within yourself, not so deep that no words could penetrate, no mind know. Not in the incredible vastness that takes the light back even before it has left. Shining into nothing, the moon, the sun, the reflectance of nothing. The naked spark of a beauty too powerful to be seen. Love shows you the way into this place where no one can enter. You leave yourself behind. You leave it all behind. Everything. Everything. Everything.

You’ve Got A Valentine From Mark! (Shoot it up your ass, Cupid)

So have you found that one who completes you yet, your “soulmate”? According to all pop music and Hollywood movies, this should be the defining purpose of my life. I sure wouldn’t mind finding some chick that somehow resolves all the inner and outer dilemmas of my existence. But from all my experiences thus far, women only complicate things. I’m about ready to throw in the towel on the quest for the Holy Girl. Not that I was really stressing myself out looking for her, or anything. Not that I ever really even tried, in fact. But still, just feeling the possibility of any such a thing existing exerts some kind of unnecessary pressure on my brain. It’s like if you think Santa Claus or Satan exists–you have to craft all sorts of confusing tangential myths simply to address the movement of getting out of bed in the morning. Let’s be blunt and to the point here. Basically, if you do not “possess” someone, if you do not have “someone to love,” then in this society you should be fundamentally ashamed, there is something wrong with you, you should desperately seek to find someone to claim and you should post an ad on Yahoo Personals or something. I mean, it’s almost like if you don’t got nobody, then you can go to the supermarket or the club or the bar or the Personals and buy someone and try them out. Me: I’m smart and funny and rich and I like to lick perineums. You: Bovine and well-endowed and can type up to 80 words per minute. In other words, based on things completely unrelated to anything having to do with divine intervention, you strive to formulate a bond based upon the ideal of simply being claimed. Because once you are claimed, then there’s no more need to stress out about being “one of the losers.” Who wants to be alone, unhappy, unpurchased? Buy me, buy me, buy me!

Who is my soulmate? Who will buy me and use me forever and recycle my soul? Who will complete my fragmented, insufficient self? Who will take my useless days and give them meaning? Who will understand what I can never say? Who will endure my stacatto farts? Who will look beyond my heart-stopping good looks?

Guess I’d better just devote the rest of my time to Allah . . .

An Early New Year’s Sacrament

a new time–according to our inconsistent calendars–is coming, a new year, another age to be added to our accumulated life span. the years pass so fast now, it seems faster every year that i grow older, my memory can barely keep up with my birthdays–i have to think to remember how old i am–mostly because it doesn’t seem to matter anymore. time, what is time? i measure time more accurately by the ups and downs of my relationships with others, and the development of my self–how we grow, how we move on, how we hold on, how the light slips through the cracks into everyday everymoment communion, how love holds my mind high through the bullshit. some of yous i haven’t talked to or seen since buddha knows when. but i can feel you here with me as i stand on the precipice of my life looking down into the future, ready to witness a world i have never seen, ready to experience things i’ve never known, ready to fall to my ever eventual death without the fear of losing what i have never had. yes, another year, another calendar to be crossed off. i look back at this year, and all the years before them, and feel supremely grateful, and blessed. i think of all of the love i have felt and continue to feel. i think of the turmoil, and pain, that i have caused in others, and that i have caused in myself. and it’s inconceivable to me that i should be so blessed. how i try to tear myself down to mold myself into the suffering i think that i deserve, only to find rays of light coming through my heart, only to find my hands taken and gripped by the most beautiful people i could imagine–and how i have been raised to heights by you, by all of you, angels to my mind, bathed in sharp light, spiralling forward endlessly crying out in the name of that which we cannot possess–this joy, this sorrow, this communal know-edge–this is why i live. this is why i struggle to press my heart to words. this is why i send this now to you.
happy new year.

Contemplation Next To The Fire Drinking Wine

I
why are we withheld from the world? why are we frightened of each other? why is it that the one whom you greatest love brings you the most suffering? there are no answers to the wounds we take, and inflict. the only hope we have is to find a solitary peace–to discover wisdom and bear fruit and cause no more suffering to this world that tries continually to draw us into this chain of neverending violence.
II
after a while in life you come to realize that there are no expectations that can be met–and thus, you learn to let happen the things that will, and let what will not happen go. ah, yet still, how i clutch to my thoughts as if they might change anything, as if who i am devolves around an ingrown desire to center everyone else’s eyes upon me. how barren, how bereft must my heart get in order for me to love, to simply love? what does it take for me to reach across myself to find my way into understanding of another’s needs? how much must i break myself down, and let myself be broken, before i can share this light i feel with you?

everybody feels the wind blow

i will tell you what i have discovered of love. it opens up your core and your eyes can see so deeply into each moment that before were veiled by fear of pain. you can look at the impassive beauty of the sunset on the lake and truly experience it, because you know what gives it meaning. i am like an alien in your bedroom, baring you to my curiosity. yes, there are walls of suffering everywhere trying to stop our bodies from knowing eternity. but despite all insecurity, we cross into each other like boundaries were the dream, and our freedom scientifick reality. when i fall through space to find my lips on your surface, i sense shimmering waves billowing from far below what can be known. hunger to get there, to get to that place that we spend all of our life to remember. i would wait forever by this emptiness just to feel the gentle quiver of my heartstring plucked from another universe, breathing for the moment when my deepest self is hooked into you.
love is the verification of everything that you have become. love is the refutation of everything you have been. love is here. love is now.

Set Up

jacob scaled his fire escape to the 3rd floor and pushed up his window and
slipped into his room dukes of hazards styles, knocking over a glass of last
night’s scotch. he did a jig of pure joy, slapping his ankles and twisting
into a pile of clothes on the floor. it was hard to believe that it was
real, and yet it was, god fucking-a, it was, this feeling of belly
shuttering ecstasy, this love, this world of raw pleasure that he had
forgotten could ever exist. he pulled out his pipe from his desk drawer and
packed it chock-full of hash, giggling insanely. one hit a two hit a three
hit, all in a row, getting fucked up now, not enough, four a five a seis, a
sex, a two multiplied by a three, resultant in an exponential increase in
explosive sensory information. what was this his heart was saying? this
was unbelievable, that his own bodily mechanisms could speak to him in firey
chemical rhythmic tongues. alive, alive alive! conscious movement, jacob
practiced tai chi to aphex twin in his boxers. water! food! this was
amazing. yet it could be regulated, channeled, communicated. he picked up
the phone and dialed the now instinctual number.
“yeah?”
he jumped up and down. “honey goddess baby queen.” his mind’s noise
suddenly quelled.
“hey sweetie. what’s goin on?”
“i am scaling heights i couldn’t ever have imagined a whole day ago, a whole
universe away, like so fast that i feel g-forces. shit. i feel so fucking
good!”
she laughed shyly. “yeah, i think i know what you mean. you’re fucking
crazy, you know? i love you.” she paused, looking out the window. “i need
to finish my work. i’ll talk to you soon” she hung up. he hung up.
the silence reverberated with cosmic force. jacob wanted to cry, his heart
was an open wound, his mind was upside down, his body ached for immediate
enwrapped alien warmth. he laughed. life was so fucking amazing. it was a
rollercoaster, it was a movie, it was a cup washing over the rim into
aether, it was ink sloshing into indecipherable patterns, it was beautiful,
it was horrendous, it was shocking and powerful and new.
“for good. for good for good for good,” jacob whispered to himself as he
rocked, clutching his knees. “always use this energy for good. it is not
yours. it is not for you. this is for everyone. this is for the world.
this is for what all of us thought was missing. it is here, it is
everywhere, it is in her eyes and her hair and the sucking sea sound of
sweat between our bodies. wonder! wonder! wonder! i am in love. i am in
love and i am frightened. i am in love and i am insanely happy. i can feel
the blood pushing through my veins to the pulse of my heart. i can feel the
heat of astral connection spreading throughout my limbs. i can hear the
sound of my dreams resonate in the hollows of my brain. i have been here
before. i am here. in this, the deadly still center of the eye of the
storm. i am incredibly lonely. i am incredibly hungry. i can never get
enough, enough of her.” he smiled sadly. “for good, for good for good for
good. she is not mine. and i am in love.”

Skyward

everyday the flood of feelings crashes over my view of the sky and i sink
down into the silence of blindness, frenziedly struggling to reach the air
in the deadened stillness of an empty vacuum, the emotions weighted down in
my body, my mind anchored to darkness, my heart fluttering for escape.
everyday i struggle to find moments where i can breathe, i struggle to find
calm, i struggle to let myself go and rise into the sky like a bird of
flame. and like unearthing a gem, sometimes i can reach a space where i do
not need anyone to make me happy, and i do not let anyone make me sad.
once you open the door to your heart, even for a moment, the flood will rise
and the levy will threaten to break, and all the bridges you’d spent so long
to build to the dry high sky will collapse, and you will be drowning in your
fantasies, and crying in the face of a reality in which you must start anew
with nothing.
you see, one day you might start thinking that you got something. and you
will begin to operate based off of this assumption. and suddenly, another
day, you wake up and the paradigm has shifted, and what you thought you had
has disappeared. and you are left clinging to the fragments of a past that
is no longer relevant.
i know this. i know this, and i know this. i know that i’ve never got
nothing. and yet, suddenly i’ll find myself falling in love with someone,
and even as i know that it is hopeless, i begin to grasp out, and i begin to
craft fantasies in which i do not fully believe, and when they break, my
heart breaks, and my emotions bury my face in the facts that i always knew.
it’s the same old song. and motherfucker, i’m tired of singing it. i’m
sick of hearing it’s pop culturally looped refrain in my mind. and i’m
ashamed of playing it for you.
it doesn’t matter what i have achieved in my life, of what heights or of
what lows i’ve been through. it’s doesn’t matter who has loved me, or who
has despised me. it doesn’t matter what i’ve written, and what i’ve left
unsaid. what matters is that i recognize that i am nothing, no matter what.
what matters is that i recognize that i am divine, no matter who. what
matters is that i recognize. what matters is that i change. what matters
is that i will build that bridge to get to heaven no matter what storms the
earth or my heart or your heart may arouse. i am going to find my way to
god. i will find my own way.
no matter how much i love you, i am going to find my own way. no matter how much you love me, i will find my way. no matter how much hate, how much fear, how much anger, how much hunger, how much how much how much, i will do it. i will reach it. i will
find my way without anything. i will find my way within everything.

Janused Coin of Suffering, Which is the Side to Land Cat Down?

connecting to someone is a sad thing. it is a sad thing because when you
finally share with this person your heart, and they have the power and the
ability to look into you and see you as you really might be, then when they
turn away into themselves, they leave you feeling the falling down into
infinite darkness. you fall down, and down. because you begin to believe
that this person could love you. and they do. and you are still
not good
enough.
not good enough to be everything. not good enough to be nothing. not good
enough to be anything but the mundane human child crying out to be cradled
mindlessly into oblivion.
because you want. because you create out of reality a world which does not
exist anywhere except in your mind. because you are not willing to
sacrifice your wants
for another’s needs.

connecting to someone is a happy thing. it is a happy thing because when
someone finally shares with you their heart, and you have the power and the
ability to look into them and see them as they really are, then when you
turn into yourself in wonder, you discover that you are flying, that you are
floating on the wings of god. and you believe that you can love this
person. and you do. and you love them so much
that you can let them go.
you love them so much that you can let them be themselves. you love them so
much that you don’t need to keep pieces of them for yourself. you love them
so much that you can give them as much as they truly require.
because you know. because you accept. because you relinquish your power.
because you devote yourself to something which is higher than any one person
could ever be.

Running The Gauntlet

here’s a little drip-dropping flow for you, bro, sis, mister, miss: i dive into the alien elements like a dolphin through the light shafted sonorous medium of words, the media of existence, reverent movement of the lettered masses to the radiance of an individual creating, network flashing across unchartered space with a train of thought to carry the coals burning for you all to capture in your scopes, stationed, shameless, timeless,
us.
i share my shadow for the world’s shine, in the spirit of the spoken earth i dig, rhymes like jewels crevicing into the microscope of this moment, nodal points, subliminal ambience beating against the linear fragments of time–
and i am creating to be captured, felt, rhythmed into your skin spirited mind,
represented, reflected, released
into the blind eternity
of nothingness,
divine,
i am.
read me, listen to this song i sing to ease my struggle,
disarm my pain, despite the distance that i feel
in between my heart and the keys boarded along the crawling subterranean
fingers of broken waves;
it’s a process, you see,
the apple and the snake,
seeding, shedding, 1 + 2
and the outcome, you know,
is in the balance of you
and me and our acceptance
of the today in the tomorrow
of the child sanctified moon woman sensualizing sun,
of the old man in the sea,
fishing for the mystery
of giving ourselves,
of sharing ourselves
with one another.

i am here. now get you over, bring your elevation to the bridge, build this positive energy that we need like watered green for the soul, synapse stretch your spirit across the distance, breathe together and look at how the fear of our loneliness falls around our wonder like we one, like we tear drops dropping from the eyes of almighty everything–wordless, endless, forever feeding from our lives unfolding into now.
i think that we are beautiful. i think that we are alive. i think that all of the ugliness in the armored coinage of imprisoned emotions, all the loaded blindness of boxed-in shells, all of the fucking greed of the marketed surface world
can’t stop us from living
beautifully.

it’s a new year, my friends, my memories, my possibilities, my intertwining compatriots on the dance floor of our generation. shed beautiful art for me, for yourselves, cause our creation, our motion, our explored direction is what we’re going
to be treading over
to keep going, to move on,
to love.

this is dedicated
to all of you
who have made the effort
to show me your way
as you pass
by my path.
thank you.

Your Whole Life Must Be Given

girl, straddle oblivion, slipped so fast into the mystery and remaining still instinctively controlled. intoxicated until spiritually mundane, how we sweat for the sickness pleasure, how we fold, and squat haunched over the earth, time lathered in production, pressing a silent burden into the furrowed dew.
i cultivate my emptiness with you,
insane forbear, igloo suburban transience, the light of exclusion sharpened out of autistic pen, the bloody voice of life, the suffering isolation of beauty. frigid beyond: let me never catch you. ail me forever.

A Last Touch Of Earth

i watch the flame eating wet and circular into the wax, a descending well, dripping solidified heat. soon there will be no wick left to burn, and the flame will fizzle, smoking dissipating into the darkness. tonight i let you go; i wrote you goodbye and sealed my heart of our history.
i had contemplated war. i was bloodthirsty with distance, yearning to break apart the boundaries of our worlds, to penetrate your space and wash my wounds in your river. i wanted reparations for all those moments of emptiness when i reached for you and you weren’t there. for all the words i wanted to speak and couldn’t because i knew you didn’t want to hear them. for feeling like what i feel needs to be hidden.
there was a sacred space once where we would meet. i look for it now and it seems to have been a dream. or perhaps it was a reality we sullied by our pretending. sharing an intimacy requires honesty. anything else and it shutters the world into a box, into a room with no light, struggling for freedom. i cannot claim innocence.
i’d been holding it in and lying to myself for so long that when it finally broke out of me i couldn’t understand what it was. here they were, my emotions, staring me in the face, and all i could see was red. after i let them bleed and scream for a little while, i began to see their true colors.
this is what happens when you stop communicating. your words clot together and then you can’t breathe and you have to explode, you have to break down and spew them out like they were nothing, like they were everything. so i did. i sat down and i wrote a letter to you and strung up the words like a declaration of cold war, like a manifesto of love lost. for the first time in a long time i was personal, i was honest, i was pure. and i decided to never show you that letter, because it would only be fodder for your distance, a little piece of me. i don’t want to struggle with myself against you any longer. i am sick of killing, and i am tired of dying. so now i write this for myself. you will never know. you will never understand how i feel. and now you can go.

Fern Goddess Waves In Breeze

just generally vague, wispish sorts of dialogue, presenting the strange vivacity of the alien lifestyle. throw in a little jack daniels and the syrupy residual attack of the words leaves you gaping open to the sound of what you do not know. extraterrestrial whispering down to the ears, push the hair around, ring crafted slopes, enwrapped within yourself sits the jewel vibration, stone which causes the waves to move in its after-path. the music reaches into you, let’s dance together, get away from standing against the wall and burst sweaty into open, crowded space, where things brush into each other, move together, move apart, together, and generally interact.

I
Jack realized that there was no need to feel ashamed. just himself acting instinctively. he is where he is, moving into something he is not.

II
Jill fell down the hill like water to catch him, and they trickled side by side until they rushed into each other and fell fell fell into themselves before they ever departed again for the sky droplets coalescing. ocean mother child, we are family.

III
Aint no point to pretend to feel nothing. something’s goin on. pay attention and stop thinking about how you look on satellite tv camera pictures. we are meant to be here, if we are here. i have arrived. you have landed. open the doors and les greet formally and then probe and press and get to the truth of the reality by putting on the masks of each other. glove habits of every day slipping over our naked souls, quiet darkness of our solitude holding each other into the eternity of this moment. shared life, rosebud opening into smell, unfolding glowing colour, life that clouds the scenery in the sun with its beauty.

IV
Nothing nothing nothing. I feel so good, so good so good. I am scared. I don’t know what is going on. I don’t know who I am, I don’t know where I am going. The rush of empty space and the stars wavering eternally changing.
Nothing is set.

V
And you. the bleeding of the moon calling to sleep remembrance. the pain of renewal. pyre burning birth like a pair of lungs moving contrapuntal to the embrace of balance, swaying to wind.

VI
Lets be ourselves together, with nothing.
Lets be ourselves together, with nothing.
Lets be ourselves together, with nothing.

The Story Of Being Alone

the shot of a glance. kurtle decided that to be was to not exist knowably. and to hold it in, until the dreams were destroyed completely, brutally. he took in the hit of inspiration and died honorably, soaring into the mud in pieces. this is what happens when you have nothing and want everything.
kurtle created fantasies which turned into nightmares. and then they were nothing but awakening pain, full of watching, full of someone else’s eyes watching distantly, shutting off the understanding. skin. stranger. at the wrong place at the wrong time.
‘nothingness produces snow; quiescence produces yellow sprouts (Chang Po-Tuan)’
the silent bearing will lead to spring. kurtle sees that now the sails have sunken beneath the weight of their own production, waiting for wind that will be strong enough to lift them. thirsty in the sun, there is nothing panic will do. this is something of survival, not of triumph, not of victory, bringing home the spoils. i am lost, kurtle exclaims, looking
into the horizon, i am pointless, dying in my ignorance. the only thing that will save me now is not myself. the only hope i do not possess. i may die here, and i creep forward heavy still, never knowing.
and suddenly the rain comes, part of the season, part of the wind, part of the time. kurtle finds himself alive, growing into himself.

the other is an illusion. it was his desert. his jungle. his mind. his desire.
and what is left? who is kurtle? what shell shade under which he hides?

there is only the point at which he departed, and the point at which he arrived. there he is, sand steps painted on the dunes.

now where are you? where do you fit in?

The Reaching In To Out

a shroud cast off to pass the light around, the breath moving balanced, her body against mine, honestly touching. I have learned how to tell the difference between the light others attribute to me, and take, and the light which I bear, and give.

I fill the space I move within—there is nowhere, now, that I cannot fall. Indefensible, I break open my eyes into every interrogator I pass, and it is their minds that must deal with me.

woman,
channel of flame,
it is to you I owe this passage.

Construction

the bat wraps about himself and hangs suspended from the ceiling, filled with blood. the night dissipates into the warmth of the sun outside of the cave as he sleeps, dreaming.

there is a wisdom that floats in our veins.

a voice of the sun:
it is important to know how to open oneself to another being, to draw from its energy and share a life between.

a voice of the moon:
it is also important to know when to leave. there are some things that are not ready to be shared. casting light upon the darkness can become a kind of violence. there are whole worlds that exist without you, that have nothing to do with you.

a voice of the earth:
to live, i must breathe. i have fallen into a space from which i grow. a life requires the independence to be dependent. the singularity of a tree in a forest. a cell in a body. taking what you need to serve yourself to serve others.

a voice of the bat:
i love the world, life, multitudinous perceptions. thus, i share what i no longer need, and i take what others let go.

if you love another being, then let them live
apart from you,
so you can meet freely
in the night shining,
the shores of bodies
coming up against the surface of seas,
heeding the call of gravity.

planet-world-lives circle each other
and do not crash.
they hold themselves together.

Song of Spring

to be lost in a voice. the movement becomes you. her words spoken smoothen lullaby in the night when i scream lonely. textures of reassurance, rocking, lulling back to rest in the void. now i lay me down to sleep. the pictures come in the night vivid, taking me in, encapsulating me. the pores of her skin. the closing of my mouth around her nipples. i fold inward. into the floating laxity of the waves. into the darkness we travel.
how alone i am here, letting go of everything, letting the gravity of the ruts speed me forward engine, fuel fuel fuel, so much noise that i hear nothing, and the faces of the world jumping into my eyes as the warmth fades, firelight wavering in the wind, smoke intaken and billowing into moving pictures that turn meaningless, empty, echoing in the silence, jackolanterns carved to charm, give me my candy, lost in a narration that cannot be heard, tongues that have passed away, directionless, pointing nowhere.
struggling to uplift. to wet the beak of. to whet. reawaken the blood to its purpose, programmed. functioning beautifully, spreading wings, preening, singing pretty songs with no distinction between notes. patterns adapt to chaos, pixellating. the stars make so much sense. the buildings in the night. windows electrified. it doesn’t matter what you believe, there is always life on the other side. let yourself die and you will see.
this voice screaming in the night, disrupting, subverting, awakening. life. rock it into yourself. coo it quiet. sing yourself comfort. believe.
this is what it is to move together alone. music voices, webbing each other, network. but where is the backdrop? the narration, the tune, the history? there is nothing. pay attention. each singular drop sphered and crystalline is the news. the form through which juice moves in between. pores, pouring. into the mouth. and tomorrow. where not have been, but where are going. processing. doesn’t it always amaze you? didn’t quite expect so much, so fast, it was just atari then, look at the sprawling industrial children now. don’t stop looking. no one expects you to see. not past the game, not through it. becoming clear. the light moving through. just forms. just words, conveyor belts, cars. understanding for what is. for what is being done. tools in your hands, creator. use the world to construct yourself. graffiti your nickname on the train.
destroyer. this voice may go unrecognized by consciousness, conscientiousness. it may be whited out, slurred, and muffled. but it is there.
is was there. and streaming through the night window it may cross your windshield, screaming into your sleep to be held, understood, and led like a child to its death in the cauldron of your heart. and so you may cradle it, you may feed it, you may kindle it into flame. you may beat it senseless, hail it in the storm of your own noise. you may put the pillow over your own head and wait for forgetting.
but a voice once heard must be dealt with.
she told me not now. i held her in my arms until we were ready to let go again. and now, i am here, voicing myself into the night. i can feel the coming of the light. i will move towards this ready
to be accepted.

Thing

this is about time, and how to let it break against, sculpt, caress.
do not deny the shape once were. the limbs can still feel moving, ghosts in dreams.
slowly change. different surfaces in different light.
every day a kind of violence. every day an acceptance.
you

you broke me yesterday

and today i took you in my eyes
and made you whole.

and tomorrow
i will see you nothing.

pieces of myself yearn unreachable in the night.
a phone call to a machine in a distant room, playback.
time, the water tears away brittle,
smooths sharp,
my hollows defined.
time breaks the shore of bodies
to the form that years shaped
that is language, now, speaking
in the barreling baby hurting lungs
of ancient alien timeless meeting.

Release

i once thought of love as something eternal, as something you keep inside of you that never goes away. i once thought that i would always feel this way. it’s funny how time washes away your most cherished assumptions. it’s funny how you learn to forget, how you need to forget. layers, different sides revealed in the sliding change. what was beautiful fades into nothing. it almost seems ridiculous now, like a child playing games. like all dreams, the myth of love must die in the face of social reality. i sit at my table, drinking coffee, watching full grown men and women around me playing games with each other like children, asking each other to believe, to just believe. if you looked into my heart, you’d see the wind rustling through an empty room, the sun shining warm on the walls. whatever inhabits my heart grows there on its own. i give it space, and time. i’m not going to lock anybody up in there. sometimes people come and stay for a while, looking for shelter. then they leave again, looking for something more permanent. i let them go, singing and sighing, away into the world. i know what it feels like to wake up suddenly in a dark room out of a dream, to claw cold walls blindly, beating violently, the feeling of another’s blood on my hands. i know what it feels like to be locked up, monstrous. what is love? i sit at my table and sip my coffee. i watch the men and women around me playing games with each other, looking for someone to catch, looking to be caught. love is letting go. love is letting it all go.