What luxury?

The soft solemnity of life's gracious host, occasionally grants us moments of the purest elations. In those moments, we find our hopes, our happiness, and our journey's filled with the bright patches of a sunlit grove of fragrant trees in bloom. I'm finding my way through those shadows of my grove, and allowing the sun to warm my face.

Someone once asked me, 'What luxury would I take from life?' That question and that conversation has stayed with me, and has grown inside me for a long time. From the bloom of friendship, sometimes 'magic happens' and we grow beyond our grove, move beyond our comfort zone and pledge our selves to break forth from the soils where we've rooted our lives inside of, sprouting above, and extending our branches toward the star-filled heavens.

What luxury would I take from life. The luxury of knowing that out there, across the gulf, there is a good friend to share a few moments with.

What luxury would you take from life?

Reaching the top

Across great distances, over hills, valleys and oceans there are invisible strands binding us together.
Threads, reaching out, connections made, broken, remade, and broken again...but ever present...


I know that someone has to do it, why not me. Why should I be the guy who sells advertising on the back of cash register tape? I'm sure that I could make a lot of money at it...someone has to do it...why not me?

I think that each of us set limits for ourselves. Perhaps the measure of ourself is how intimate we are with those boundaries we set. If we set no limits for ourself, then there is nothing to measure up to, no apex to reach and surpass, no plateau to come to rest upon. Having never been one to set limits on myself, perhaps it's time that I reevaluate that thought, to say to myself...this is what I'm capable of, and this is how I'm going to surpass that capability.

To scale the mountian, we must start at the bottom, slowly working our way up to the top, then upon finally reaching the top...we are free to see where we've been.

Hitting Bottom

To avoid revealing the intracacies of living and dying, we wrap pretty papers around our lives. Tying ribbons around our problems, sugar coating them as we impale them on sticks. Because, everyone has their own mini-series reality program that they are living, no one seems to care that their neighbor is in their own feature length film drama. Yet, somehow each of us manage to pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and keep going, on until the commercial break at least.
It's funny sometimes that life throws so many things at us at once, one thing or another and suddenly we are running to the ends of the earth to find something most dear to us, when in reality, all of those things we need are so close. While, a heartbeat seems close, the touch of a cheek is much closer. The electronic world leaves little possibility of the soft touch of finger to cheek, so we are compelled by forces beyond us, larger than us, and outside of our spheres to dream, to desire, and to hope for better worlds elsewhere.
In each of our mini-series, we have the heroes and heroines, the villians, the struggle, the climax, and a denoument. Along the way of our telling, there will likely be a wedding, a birth, probably a few deaths, some heartache, some love, fear, hatred, mistrust, sleep, food, and the rest of the everyday mundaniety the our lifes are subject to througout the living.
Yet, at each of those junctures in our life we face those conflicts, some of us give up with suicides, homocides, withdrawal into our own little caves, or starting over completely from scratch. That's pretty much where I am at at this point in life.
My mini-series has been going on for too long, too much drama in it, and far too little enjoyment. The last time I had Chinese food, the fortune that I got was..

To be a man, means constant revision.

So, that is what has been going on for the last several years of this ongoing drama which has worked out to be the non-fictional tale of some guy, who happens to be me. I've been in constant re-write since October 2004, and my novel is at a dark chapter right now. I'm asking myself, what will the main character do now? How in the world will he get out of this mess that he's allowed himself to get into? But, somehow, things will work out...the show must go on!

Tolerance

I've never understood why tolerance is such a difficult thing for people to have for other people. It's not like a belief, a religion, a skin color, or a sexual preference is simply going to go away. People are always going to have their little idiosyncracies that make them different, what I want to know is what's the point in another group of people creating trouble simply because they don't agree with how other's are? They can't change them, so they are wasting their time.
It's not just a one way thing either, both sides of the coin need to develop their own tolerances for each other.

The welcome mat

I've spent time when I felt lost. With little or no direction, filled with listlessness and restlessness at the same time. It's frustrating sometimes to live in this mortal flesh, like an ant in a maze, waiting to get sqashed by some terrible force.
Yet, opportunity knocks. We don't always have the wherewithal to answer it when it does. We may sit and listen to the knocking, lulling us into a sense of secure complacency, until suddenly, the opportunity leaves our front doorstep, and goes down the street to stand on someone else's welcome mat. It's then that we think to ourselves....
"Why didn't I do that. I could've been there, right now, doing all that..." Whatever it may have been that we find to connect with a 'what if' that resulted from our inactions when opportunities came to visit and our own self-defeating behaviors turned us away from it.

Awareness is a slow and long road, some of us never start the journey, while others remain queued with our own inadequacies of forethought, of embellishment, and consequence.

Is it in our nature to struggle endlessly?

There is more than this.

Sometimes in life, we realize that things just aren't going so well for us. We're faced with trials of living because of many things, some major and some minor. But, in those moments we have to make choices that could have repercussions on us for long periods of time. I've made a couple of those choices in my lifetime, and I'm sure that I'm going to make many more of them throughout the remainder of my days. You have to examine things in the grander scheme, what is this really worth? Don't you think that sometimes, in the face of our greatest tribulations that we have to stop and ask ourselves, "Isn't there more to existence than this?"
That was my mantra once, and it got me through a truly rotten stage in my life. While I knew that the moment was going to pass, I held on to the knowledge that there was more to life that followed the mess I was in at the time.

"There's got to me more than this."

"This isn't going to last."