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.

The Growing

Another days passage has faded to memory
These sullen moments find us....wanting more of living...more of the hours of joyousness....and triumphs life offers...but we end only in solitary sleep...

I spent much of the day with my son. Whether I was watching him in his first basketball game and observing his wild unfocused energy, or I was taking him into the woods with me to see his destructiveness of appreciation for nature....I find that the waking life has it's merits most when it's shared. The solitary world is nice, for the comforts it offers you, the hours spent reading, listening to music, writing, walking....whatever it may be which moves you. But, the moments of shared experience is what we crave as humankind. The human animal is a social animal. Perhaps, not so much as some animals...but there is a high degree of socialization which we require for our survival in this life.

In witnessing early attempts at socialization..in some ways it's on it most basic levels...baser communication, brutality, affection, and mutual identification. I watched my son today with his teammates, and I find him to be unfocused. Perhaps it is the age (he's only 5) or perhaps it is another element which is lacking from his world. The unity of a home where mother and father are united in daily communication, presenting a solid foundational form of interpretation for the world around him, scripts from which to act out his desires from, and the discipline for response to stimulus. The other children, some of them flowed with grace through the play, seemingly more knowledgeable then my own child, seeming to see more the outcome of their actions, and the necessity for what they should do. While, my son was ever-present, though unfocused.

Where does this 'focus' in our lives come from? It follows us throughout living, and we find it in different areas of our living. Some of us are focused on ideas, while others are focused on objects, acts, or some other esoteric concepts.

Patterns

I took this today on another visit to the John Muir Trail which runs alongside the Hiwassee River here in Tennessee. The main reason it jumped out at me was the pattern which seems to exist in it. I've been in a constant search for understanding of the whats, whys, and hows of the natural world for many years. I'm not anywhere near the understanding of it, but its always a joy to see some glimmer of something which makes some sense. I dont think it's a perfect pattern by any means, but there's definitely some pattern at work here, it's not just in plantlife which there's pattern...but the most basic blocks of life have pattern in them.

Everything seems to have reason, everything seems to have rhyme.

I'm guilty too

Dreaming again of those far away places shrouded in mists, high above the treeline where there's nothing but the wind and rocks of the mountain tops.
It's a vision that I've had for a long time, just to escape into the wilderness and live like a wildman. Closer to the earth and the elements, not depending on anyone but myself for sustenance, only taking that from the earth that I had to to survive. But, it's pretty much just one of those dreams we toy with in this era. Something we escape to for a few days or maybe a weeks worth of hiking, but to live that way now? You'll be branded as a nutjob, or a psycho! Why do you want to give up all this modern convenience? Why do you want to eschew television, Big Macs, Craft-Matic Adjustable beds, Cheetos, Saltine Crackers, and sliced bread to go live in a tent and eat berries and fish?
The modern world is nice, but it's soulless. Sure, there's a lot of caring people in the world who love each other and reach out to one another, but how far below the surface does all that go? Last night I watched a program on Nightline about the aid that is pledged in the wake of a natural disaster as well as the coverage that those disasters receive. I was a bit saddened to hear that some of the aid which is 'pledged' to be sent by nations and leaders, doesn't actually make it after all. It's just a superficial thing, for the newsmedia by some of the world leaders. The same with the coverage of disasters by the media, after so much of it the public becomes desensitized to it. They turn the channels and tune out any further mention of human suffering in the world, until the next time. I think that if people could just live closer to the earth, develop more of a harmony with the world around them then all of the superficiality which is a result of the ball and chain of television in our day to day lives would vanish.

Where I'd rather be