In Progress.....Like Me.

So here I am.
                                                                  
   Flailing, aware, sometimes really aware.....
I awake from a thick medicine that frees but suffocates.
And the virus that it impedes, is opportunistically feeding, ready to infect the inner sanctum.
And the blanketing society, with it's puppet strings tied to countless extremities.
And the infection of self-centered dismissal shuts down my softness. 
The virus is diagnosing the end again, with a new day and a new finality.
Just like a tapeworm that weakens, it siphons pulsing joy from my dimensional awareness .  
With it's vicious malice of fear.
   
    Throbbing, vibrating, acting.....
Condensed energy blows out my centered equilibrium.
And tears out small veins in the struggle to remember identity.
And what character is needed to play now. 
Yet it is our task as we enter the battle.
Of survival, revival, a gentle yearning.

   Sometimes thriving, often striving, always diving.....
In the mirrored funhouse,
We rarely look into our tired eyes.
But strive for something better,
as long as it doesn't mean changing our lives.
Get up and face the dragons that aren't there.
So we can meet the swirling grayness of apparition.
But as I move slowly towards your kiss.
And the eternal comfort of our embrace.
I ask myself the questions of life.
But never stop allowing myself to nurse my wounds with a loving hand.

Secluded Prowess

So here I am, a guy in a brown corduroy jacket and recent haircut, sitting quietly in a Starbucks with a green satchel and recently finished coffee at my side. But amid the simplicity of the superficial, the torrential winds of change billow by as I face the crossroads of life. For some reason, whenever I think of the word crossroads,  my mind flickers to some Britney Spears bubble gum pop movie that I saw on the shelf of some pharmacy years ago and I reflect on the awful disservice that movies like that give to the daunting realities of true crossroads.
 I sit here as my college career winds down and the blue skies of freedom beckon me through an open door ahead revealing open blue skies. It reminds me of a 'Calvin and Hobbes' imaginative dream sequence in which Calvin walks out of a door into the beautiful freedom of spring air but is shocked to find that his house is actually miles above the safety of the ground. He falls abruptly with a dramatic 'AAAAaaaaaaahhhhh' and then wakes up.
But the simplicity of childhood comic book dream sequences are but a fading wisp in contrast to the real questions that beleaguer my spirit. Questions as safety and the known battle the mysterious and eternal swirling grayness of the unknown. Deep questions of right and wrong, of expectations and safety.
Safety. 
The word that has beleaguered my mind for the last month and changed the future in my minds eye like a slide show on a dusty old projector. A slide of me teaching English in Europe is quickly switched with another in South Korea. Click to China, click to starting a DJ business, click to just getting into a funk.
I think that my favorite advice came from my professor and mentor Paul Bueno De Mesquita. After absently placing my overloaded and wary mind into his hands, to my surprise he responded, "You know, I'm kind of jealous of you right now, you have no responsibilities and the whole world right in front of you". And he was right, with one word  he handed me the world that I held all along, and with it a newly jump started heart, slowly but optimistically ticking away.
But it all comes back to one word, the creeping word of the hour. A word that will tuck you in way before your bedtime and spoon feed you chemicals that quietly dream away a life unlived. It's the deadly friend that will whisper sweet poetry into your ear until you hide from the world and it's terribly twisting concoction of changing colors,  caloric chocolate, and speedy surprises.

Safety.
I must recapture the adventure and desire that my college career left me without. I must become the man that I dream of becoming, one that I get closer to everyday. I want to feel the car crash and gallop towards who I am and who I want to be.
But something is pulling at my pant legs.
My integral work as an activist in a small state and a tiny organization that is brimming with such beautiful force and spirit that it sometimes burns through it's own encasing. An organization that has managed to bellow it's angst and desires into the ears of national malls and large state wide papers and news stations. I fear that I am necessary and without my energies it will go down the road that so many before have veered off of, the road of political self combustion, as intense light sabers of the mind run through clumsy but well meaning friends instead of the monstrous enemies who would delight in nothing more than that.
Fear.
I fear that if I take a leap and go to the strange and different world of teaching English abroad that I may hate it and be stuck in a year of waste, being depressed and lost in the turbulence of the daring that it will take to jump out of my prickly Winter nest.
But even stronger than the burning angst of fear and the warm beckoning of safety is the desire for flight, a desire to reignite a light that inspires me to run through the winking half smiles of safety and the cold calculations of fear to embark on a life well lived. A life of letting the pain unlock the doors to the beauty. A life of uncertainty becoming dependability. A life inspired. And a life of falling in love with the one man that started this journey with me and the one that will take my last gasping breath at the twilight. Myself.
From their plush chairs, Safety and Fear wink at me from across the drafty coffee shop , their shiny black striped suits a stark contrast to the white student loan papers they hold and the marriage equality bill that they tear up with a smirk, as they speak my mother tongue and hold a dirty smoking pipe. But my heart beats for something more as I quickly look away.

If it takes everything within me, if I'm going to go down finding it, I must leap. I haven't gotten this far to just lay down my arms to the gremlins that circle my feet and control me with their well practiced lies that they know will halt my flight.
Maybe it will take time in Korea to appreciate what I have here.
Maybe it will take time in China to appreciate other worlds and cultures.
And maybe it won't.

But I know that as I step out into the sunshine and with a shudder, free fall,  I have taken the road that only the brave can take and only the foolish can hide from.

Or maybe not.

Summer in the Cabin of Self

So it's been a really interesting summer. One that is much more interesting in reflection. Full of personal growth and definitely more of an understanding of what I want to do with my life. One of my realizations include less avoidance of living circa those wonderfully avoidant chemical reactions and more tangible book reading and reflecting that makes up the sandbox of my adult mind.

Unfortunately, the dark clouds of life's necessities and realities have encroached on the freedom of a summer full of new friends, a new fire of activism within me, and some really interesting experiences with a grandfather that is grumpy as hell but deep down needs more love than he'll ever know.  I find that his negative, yet in his mind, necessary habits that he has repeated throughout 93 years of his life end up alienating himself from just about everyone, and brings himself further from his needs for connection, acceptance, and understanding. So, I think I am making some pretty startling and new discoveries about psychology and people.


So other than not having a solidified understanding of how I'm going to make money at the end of this tiring college career, I am heading in the direction that I want and I think that it is important to remember that. Money is how I make a living and as long as I keep living and understanding myself I can only get closer to the goal of living itself.

I am almost done with 'The City and the Pillar' by Gore Vidal and am completely enchanted by his honest, straight forward literary style. The man is a genius, plus it is incredibly inspiring to know that this brilliant piece of work was made at an incredibly high price career-wise for it's sympathetic depiction of a gay man (The New York Times refused to review his next five books which forced him to write his next few novels under a guise). Inspiring, I want to be more like this man.

(you listening Bandura?)

Kahlil Gibran on Love

I recently read 'The Prophet' by Kahlil Gibran and it was an exhilarating find. I was greatly moved by his description of love and the idea that one must follow it's beckoning and experience the great triumph and great sorrow that often go hand in hand with any great force in life. Deeply moving and wise, enjoy!

"When love beckons to you, follow him,
Though his ways are hard and steep.
And when his wings enfold you yield to him,
Though the sword hidden among his pinions may wound you.
And when he speaks to you believe in him,
Though his voice may shatter your dreams
as the north wind lays waste the garden.

For even as love crowns you so shall he crucify you. Even as he is for your growth so is he for your pruning.
Even as he ascends to your height and caresses your tenderest branches that quiver in the sun,
So shall he descend to your roots and shake them in their clinging to the earth.

Like sheaves of corn he gathers you unto himself.
He threshes you to make you naked.
He sifts you to free you from your husks.
He grinds you to whiteness.
He kneads you until you are pliant;
And then he assigns you to his sacred fire, that you may become sacred bread for God's sacred feast.

All these things shall love do unto you that you may know the secrets of your heart, and in that knowledge become a fragment of Life's heart.

But if in your fear you would seek only love's peace and love's pleasure,
Then it is better for you that you cover your nakedness and pass out of love's threshing-floor,
Into the seasonless world where you shall laugh, but not all of your laughter, and weep, but not all of your tears.
Love gives naught but itself and takes naught but from itself.
Love possesses not nor would it be possessed;
For love is sufficient unto love.

When you love you should not say, "God is in my heart," but rather, "I am in the heart of God."
And think not you can direct the course of love, for love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course.

Love has no other desire but to fulfill itself.
But if you love and must needs have desires, let these be your desires:
To melt and be like a running brook that sings its melody to the night.
To know the pain of too much tenderness.
To be wounded by your own understanding of love;
And to bleed willingly and joyfully.
To wake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks for another day of loving;
To rest at the noon hour and meditate love's ecstasy;
To return home at eventide with gratitude;
And then to sleep with a prayer for the beloved in your heart and a song of praise upon your lips."

Pictures from this weekend