A pause

Well it's finally the end of the day. I'm at that moment of my last bit of introspective thought of the day. When I was writing madly...I would take a few moments with pen and paper just before I hit the light to doze off to sleep and write some free verse. Lately, I've gotten my self back into the habit marginally, and some of the things that have come out of those writings have been good...some...er not so good.
Anyway, things are starting to look up.

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."

Drifting

Where do we finally draw the line within ourselves? Is there a portal that we cross and we realize that we can no longer go back to what once was? I've seen many of these milestones in my brief life of 33 years. And I'm longing for earlier times when living was much simpler. If I could go back and do all the things that I know I've done wrong again, I would. I'm sure that many people would, given the chance. But, conversely, we must come to know that where we are in our lives is of our own making. It's not some cosmic dice game which we are the subject of, we make our own choices and we are faced to live with them after we make them.
Whether it's a bankruptcy, a divorce, a birth, a death, or a new job...the choices which we make they carry their repercussions throughout our existence. We'd all like to go back to Senior prom and ask that beautiful girl to dance, or long for that moment of indescision where opportunity passed us on in the moment, or maybe to place a bet on something at the time we knew was a sure thing, but for some reason or other we didn't do any of those things in that moment. The cause seemed true enough, yet there was something gnawing at our spirts which gave us just enough pause to miss out on a tributary which the river of our life never allowed to be carved out of our canyons.
We can make our promises to ourselves, say that we're going to do things differently in the moment when it comes again, but will we? Will we have the wherewithal to give those moments the concert in our senses which they truly need? Can we be powerful enough to take the oars in our hands, pilot our tiny canoe down the raging river, and go against the current? Or will we simply choose to let life wash us down the river, taking us with it where it may?

Spotless

The waves which wash over us in solitude, after a movie, a book, a song we've heard that touch us in ways we only feel when we are alone. Those times, when we feel our greatest potential for loving.
Love is only a word to scratch the surface of describing the greatest of human potentials, it's in those moments where we are closest to the divine in each of us. Those moments when we clear out the cobwebs from our mind and see ourselves as we truly are, when we cling to memory, to moment, to that tiny spark of love which we've known in our life.
Across distances over mountians to the top of the world, someone is there, someone who someday I'll share a coffee with at a tiny cafe and laugh together with.

Snapshot

Alone in the sun as the rivers roiling waters churn,
seagulls circling over white caps breaking the surface
on the pier some fish for sport
here in the car I sit, listening to the radio and having my lunch.

A moment's glance backward

We all wonder what life would be like if. Those two little overlooked letters, separate meaning little, but when placed adjacent to each other, pose such grand questions. "If I'd only".."If she did this"...."If he did that"...."If I would have.." We spend hours, unconscious of their passage in pondering the possibles of our alternate untaken actions. To what end? What is it about our lives which lure us to these unforeseen unknowable, yet cognitive outcomes, which barring the invention of time travel will have merit in our conscious lives? Where do these points of introspection lead us to in our daily lives, are they merely escape from our moments of weakeness? Do they carry us to the next moment of defining choice, the grandeur we seek to attain through our ultimate choice of mundane action?
It is in our moments of post-thought that we begin to know ourselves better, when we examine ourselves 'through a glass darkly' that we remove "I" from our very own equation and see the moment of our own personal errors. In each of those moments, we've stripped ourselves bare. Bare of any shred of haughtiness, boldness, overbearing attitude, and inhumanity, that we find that spark in each of us of the divine. Our minds have found the mechanism to know the alternate reality of which we are the unordained master of, that of forethought, of pre-action and wonder, which we only visit after our error, and after each of our own solitary denoument. The stories which we write in each of our lives find their climaxes in the real world, yet we are the greatest author of fiction in hindsight.

When we get done..

Things get in the way of ourselves. Life has a way of interrupting our dreams and hopes, sometimes it's a redlight other times it's a death, a failed relationship, or some other consequence of our existence. We can't control these menial things, we don't ask for them, nor do we seek them, they are given to us. A saint once said that these are what rounds off the hard edges of our character, these trials, these longings, they bring us closer to Godliness. Why would someone say that?
Perhaps the wisdom in those words is not for us, perhaps it is for God to understand, for God to know that we have found a chink in His armor of understanding. Maybe the trials of life do make us appreciate the afterlife more, maybe the difficulties that we face here will make us long for some idealized version of reality that exists for us after this one, who is to say? The Saints? God, Him/Herself?
I've travelled millions of miles in my lifetime. Most of those journeys have been backwards in time repeatedly, to earlier times in my life where I wished I could change something, a point in time on a continuum where I just want to go back and color a different blank in on our Grand Multiple Choice test that each of us are taking, but Alas, it's all been futile. I arrive at the same point that each of you get back to after these moments of introspection. After you've examined your choices and the outcomes, you realize that if you wouldn't have made the choices that you did then you wouldn't be where you are now. So, verity reigns, and you determine that where you are now isn't so bad. Right? Well, what if where you were supposed to be as a result of those 'ill-concieved notions' that you decided made perfect sense at the time were to lead to the ultimate Nirvana? That ultimate joy which your human brain cannot concieve of at this state of development? Who's really to say that you are more than the sum of your choices?
At the end of Life, what will each of us see? Will it be some quick flash of light...a long tunnel filled with darkness that has a bright light that contains every moment in our lives at the end of it, given to us in a million years worth of transmission? Or is there more? Is the last few seconds of life that our brains hold on to, all there really is of our Heaven/Hell? Those last moments where the brain is clinging to what we call perception, is that what there is of our Heaven, of our Hell?
You must realize that dreams sometimes seem to take days, and they are only within the space of minutes...are our brains such horrible time keepers, so poor a perceptor of time to be unconscious of it's passage?

What is there after this life?

These Distance

I look into your eyes
Thousands of miles close to you
Across these philosophical connections
waves, energies, electrons, balance, and wires
The entropic wonder at this disintegration of physical distance
leading to some energy
leading to some joining
Closing the distances between my eyes and yours illuminated on the screen
Pictured in the happiest of moments, behind beautiful scenery
a snapshot of just one moment, preserved in a matrix...
Broadcasted to anywhere electrical wires can travel

Summers last songbird

The lilting last phrases of the summer songbirds, are only an echo now in the depth of winter's graceless embrace. These cold nights, spent shivering in bed dreaming of the summer sun serve as the prelude to the eager blossoms of spring.
The buds bursting forth from the grey twigs, long held by the frigid hands of winter in her icy grasp. Sheltering here, amid these blankets....I know that there are places where the summer never ends, places of eternal springtime, and lands where winter never comes with her shadows and iceflows. I long for those places, with verdant fields full of mist in the early morning that the Sun will burn off by mid-morning, places with jewelled flowers in the early morning and vibrant yellows by midday.

If I pause, just for a moment, the echo of the songbird returns to my mind...that last robin bedding down for the winter.

The interior life.

Thoughts occupy so much of our lives. Whether they are of someone or something, we spend so much time on the interior life. What will we do about ______? I hope I didn't offend _______. Why did _______ say that to me? I hope that ________ really means what they are saying.
This dialogue with our inner selves is very important to us. It grounds us, it helps us make up our minds, it keeps us sane, and lends wisdom to our most menial of confrontations that we face in our living.

I've been in a real mess lately with my outer life, the interior life is good, but all of the events which surround that interior, well.....they've not been the best lately. But, everything in life has it's purpose. We may not see it, but each of us are part of some greater whole, each of us are connected to the 'Great Switchboard' for lack of a better description of it. Everyone on this planet is connected to the people who come into our lives by invisible threads. We may move through reality(the physical world) but those invisible threads are always there, whether they be mere thoughts or some high form of energy, they connect us to the people who matter in our lives every moment of our interior lives.

The generalized life

The human experience is at times a hard road. We face trials in our lives which make the rest of it worth the living, I guess it's true what they say that the 'sweet just ain't as sweet without the bitter,' something courtesy of Vanilla Sky. And, even though there's some grain of truth to that, it's still a hard row to hoe sometimes. We struggle with material, situations, and our own petty fears and desires. There has to be more beyond this veil, our consciousness has to be capable of transcending the day to day. But how? Are we supposed to work and reach our 'enlightened states' in our 'off hours'? Surely there's more to this humdrum existence then, find a career, find a mate, settle down, reproduce, have a few years of 'how was your day, mine was okay, how was yours?'
I'm a happy fella, but yeah..just like everyone else...I do get in those blue moods. Stifled creativity, boredom, stagnation...something needs to be shook up, and I think it's me.