Patience and Contemplation

Time is made from honey, slow and sweet. And, only the fools know what it means...

We're a very impatient lot, on the whole. The human animal, always rushing from point A to point B, never allowing a modicum of time for quiet contemplation. Well, most people at least. But, I've found that patience and contemplation, yield their own rewards.

Patience in friendships, leads to life long friends who you'll be able to depend upon.

Contemplation, gives you an inner strength to cope with all of the tribulation to which life subjects the spirt.

Now, both of these are intertwined. It takes a lot of patience to contemplate anything, most problems in living don't have simple clear cut answers at which we can arrive at simply by filling a box with a lead pencil. Much of the splendor of living is making the errors and learning from those errors, seeing where our failings were, growing, and moving along to the next crisis, similar to a constant state of rebirth.....

"each passing moment, is another opportunity to turn it all around."

With patience and contemplation, we can find our places in the world, reach our truest potentials, and evolve our selves beyond our immaturity of living to gain wisdoms for our future error.

We should have patience with ourselves, and even moreso with our fellows while on this Earth. I feel that if we seek patient contemplation of our own life, than we should more easily find it in others and for others.

Wave

I wonder sometimes. Can you feel me thinking of you in tender moments of solitude?
I wonder sometimes, if you know the depths beneath this surface.
If the connections across the great divide are functioning
If the thoughts sent travel at the speed of spirit?
I wonder sometimes about the world and the distances between points
I ponder thoughts of packing, travel, jumping trains, boats, planes
and car rides alongside you.
I wonder if the madness in my spirit will overtake me,
and those tender moments of solitude will turn to tender moments shared.

The life unlived

A life unlived, the dream is released. I let it go, and move along to brighter horizons. Mystics and soothsayers have divined these passings with the throwing of bones, tossing of cards, and the readings of the stars. Simply put, some things in our conscious existence just aren't to be. We follow a part of our paths down until they reach a cul de sac, then we are left with the questions of settling in the dead end, or turning our pale tiny canoe around and rowing against the stream until we see a brighter horizon. It's the beauty of living that makes us go on most of the time, while we err, sometimes on the side of hope, we still realize that our path in life is the one that matters. Finding our way through this maelstrom that is our consciousness perception of reality is our lot in life, which ever compass we choose, be it religion, intuition, or reason will typically guide us to where we feel we should be, at least for a time until the upset of living jostles our tiny canoe and the ripples force us to reconsider.

Cracking the shell..

I'm stepping outside my comfort zone. It's the only way to grow beyond these bounds, the constraints that I've allowed to be placed upon me for far too long. I think that it's necessary for us all to find a way to get out of our comfort zones occasionally. A couple years back, I'd read an excerpt of something that was rumoured to have been written by Kurt Vonnegut, but then it was revealed to have been some sort of hoax; regardless the piece called....'Wear Sunscreen' is chocked full of hit and run wisdom. One of the things that's stuck with me from it was:

Do one thing every day that scares you.

I think that we all get very complacent with our living, and just do the things that we know we're expert at, or that we find we've a special affinity for excellence in, but those things don't make us grow. They just show what we're capable of, but not what we can reach.

Are we all just happy to live within the shell of our own makings and not to explode that shell and explore the world around us, cracking open the chrysalis, spreading our wings and floating off on the warm winds blowing?

I have to say that I feel that I'm in a period of growth right now. I'm being forced to learn some new skills, as well as choosing to learn some new ones on my own. I have a very strong sense of freedom and growth, and confidence. I may fail, I may succeed, but I think I'll be richer for the journey.

Destiny

It's essential in life that we set goals for ourselves. Having something to look forward to, a milestone to pass, or an accomplishment that we want to make gives us the purpose that we need everyday. I've spent a lot of my life not planning, letting my dice fall where they may, sometimes picking them up and casting them again, while others being tossed about by the whims of fortune. There is something to be said of a fatalistic method such as that, it can lead you to your ultimate state of being eventually, but upon getting closer to that state...it's time to take the reins and begin to drive that wild horse of destiny to the place that you want to go.

Destiny is no slave to be mastered,
she is a vicious, trying horse
and you..
but a rider.

How's it going to end?

The other side of the universe yields it's mysteries in moments of the closest connections.

Shared moments of laughter, expose the swirling arm of far away galaxies.

A sigh hints of the collapse of a star.

Sometimes to categorize feelings, it's very difficult. Putting the mixture of emotions that we're capable of in any given moment into a succint twist of phrase, is at times an impossibility. The conflicts we have with our inner voices, the faiths in living we embrace, the knowledge of the coming day and it's events, all swirlling in our minds trying to find a grasp on the formation of that turn of phrase to describe our inner struggle. Yet, somehow...we manage to filter out the conflicting emotions, constrain our faiths to reality, and curtail our conveyance of our own knowledge enough so that they all work in tandem to create this dialogue with the rest of the world. Whether those feelings are of love, nervousness, fear, excitement, or despondency...somehow the spirit is able to distill them into a few phrases to pass along those feelings to the rest of the world.

I think that I'm in a sort of a swirl right now. I've always felt that I've been in a state of 'static change' or a state where there is a constant change going on in life. Perhaps all of us are in a static change, well....I will refute that immediately because I know people who never change, who resist change and neglect to ever allow themselves to change. Let me rephrase it, Perhaps some of us are in a static change where we're constantly opening ourselves up to the universe extending our spirits and allowing them to be affected by the world around; always seeking knowledge and understanding; and just trying our best to comprehend why we're here. Perhaps that makes for a life that is difficult to live, but doesn't the saying go that the 'unexamined life is a life not worth living."

(I'm really happy.)

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.