I have thrown all caution to the wind, and I’ve jumped. Completely and without hesitation, I’ve leaped into the arms of the unknown, waiting patiently for her embrace and the soft winds to take my wings to flight.

Yes, I am scared. I have no idea where I will land and how. Yet, under that current of fear lies a sacred confidence that I am where I am supposed to be, and I am fulfilling the greatest promise for which I was born. Fear has exposed that confidence, acting like a thermocline that once broken, exposes the truest and warmest waters of a life meant to be lived.

I have no fall-back position. When I jumped, I had no idea where I would land, or how I would fly. Love, like a Great Mother, pushed me from the nest into a great abyss. I trust in Her, so while my humanity struggles with doubt, my heart rises to the occasion. I have a lifetime of experience that has prepared me for this moment. I have lived to be here, and I was born to live in a limitless field of pure potential.

I have won the lottery. We all have. We have been born with gifts that can lead us to great abundance. We have passions, loves, desires and wants all meant to be guideposts toward our greatest realization. My work is in eliminating all of the conditioning heaped upon me to see myself free. My practice is to face the adventure with a sense of pure abandon, utilizing the gifts Love has sent me, basking in the glow of true abundance that shows itself in every smile, in every nervous moment, in every gift I have been given.

I will not fail. This experience is mine, and mine alone. I will succeed in it, and I will swim lovingly in the warm flow meant to take me to places I have yet to see. I have jumped, and I cannot return to the nest unless I fly, and if I fly I will have no need for the safety it has pretended to provide. No, the real safety is in the sky, not in the nest. It is the sky I seek to roam.

Come with me on this journey. Support me, my friends, and share my words with those who could use them. I promise I was meant to be here, and you along with me.

See you soon, I love you all.

Photo by Tom Grasso

I’m coming, my love. I’m coming.

Remember when I used to ask you questions, and peace was your reply? I’d feel the sense of emptiness, and you’d fill the void with peace. I’d utter syllables of suffering, and you caress me with love. I’d fight with the tools of resistance offered to me from birth, and you’d lead me with the sweet embrace of surrender…

You loved me before I loved myself, and you knew me before I’d even uncovered my own mystery. You’d rise to meet me when the moon had risen, and sink to greet me when she had fallen beneath the distant horizon. You’d let me leave my footprints in the sand and then erase them in your time, teaching me that nothing lasts forever, not even the memories of pain or the sweet suggestion of love discovered by the touch of humans Being.

You allowed me to see myself in the places you were still, and to discover myself in those places where you weren’t. You taught me much in the fatal grasp of your current, and in the sweet release of my own surrender. You’ve cooled my feet scorched while walking in the sun-drenched sand, and healed the wounds born as I walked in the rocky places of my life.

You’ve taught me much, my love, and I am coming if only to say goodbye.

You’ll laugh, knowing that you’ve taught me well, and you’ll sing knowing that I can hear your song. Then you’ll let go, knowing you are part of me, and you’ll erase any evidence of my existence, save those parts of me that can never be erased.

You’ll become my long-distance love affair, my dream again, and I will visit. You’ll know me then, and we will remember who we are. To my Ocean home I say farewell, to my sand I say goodbye, to memory you go.

Sweet dreams, love…until we meet again.

When we die, we not only take with us an experience of life, but we also take with us each and every possibility, each and every bit of potential, we have ever been blessed with. What we leave is the concrete portions of our journey, save the ambitious delusions of a certain few who make us much more than what we were as they, too, deal with the certainty of loss. We, take with us any hope for forgiveness, any hope for our own sense of redemption.

My mother has passed on, leaving this world and taking with her any hope of such things.

I’ve kept busy in this strange sense of loss, struggling as I do between the battle of great hurt and great love. Yes, I am angry in my pain. My mother never made amends for her actions. She never acknowledged the pain she caused, or even sought forgiveness for a past rife with hurt. She never addressed the ripples she caused, or the fiery destruction in so many of the lives she touched.

Her obituary touched, as they always do, on the great things she had done in life. She had her goodness, her joys, her loves, and she was not without purpose. Yet her son sat in despair wondering where the sanity was, and wondering if anyone in the family he left behind would have the strength or truthfulness to offer an open embrace. I questioned, often aloud to the full moon rising above my ocean, which was more likely the reality –  their lies or my truth. There is no true winner there.

No embrace ever came, and the chances for redemption seemed to pass on with the soul of my mother. Tonight I offered a solemn wish into my hand, dove it beneath the surface of my ocean’s waves, and let it go into the sea. I’ve symbolically made it part of every thing, of every life, of every action in this Universe we call ours.

I didn’t learn of my mother’s passing from my sister, or my stepfather, or a person I call “cousin”, or any of the “family” I left behind. No, was told via Facebook message from the only woman I’ve trusted my entire life, from the only family I’ve ever truly known. I was told my mom had died, and I realized with her went the only chance I would ever have of being recognized as her son. Not as a traitor for telling the truth. Or a bastard for not living the lie. Or a heathen for never, ever, wanting to lie to my niece and nephew.  No, in my family you are ostracized because you won’t lie, because when you tell the truth with as much veracity as they tell the lie, you are simply not welcome.

So now I am sad, but I certainly was angry.  That anger brought me back to a place I haven’t been to in some time. I don’t like it there, and although I know the choice to visit was mine, I felt it a place I had to go. Even if for one last time.

I am one who believes that sometimes it is necessary to burn bridges, and burn them right down to their foundations. I want to see them in ashes, and then I want to see the swirly winds of time take those heated embers to places I will never visit or see again. Let those who love the pain burn themselves. I am not one of them, I want mountains or the beach. I want a place where few bridges remain, and those that exist take me to the sound of breaking waves or the view of majestic summits tickling the clear-blue sky.

I’ve tried to burn that bridge down in my heart, in my mind. Yet, I’ve found it is often water-logged with the tears of a lonely boy, a misguided man, a lost son and an impossible friend. Sometimes the puddles I’ve left behind just won’t let that fucker burn, and large parts remain to be dealt with another day. I’ve always hoped that they’d dry in the summer sun but, alas, they are still here pointing the way to chaos. Chaos I’m sure to visit now that the Queen of that place has died.

We do, sometimes have to revisit those places of turmoil. I don’t fear those places, I loathe them. I am slow to draw my sword for battle anymore, something that is more a sign of experience than age.  Instead, I sink in despair when those battles come, and I find myself warring with soldiers of delusion, of misspent hostility and ridiculous drama. Their flag seems empty, their battle cries futile, and their strategy that of toddlers playing in knee-deep sand once used by kittens as a toilet.

I’ve discovered over the last week just how much I loathe that battle. I dove out of it as fast as I could, finding victory not in defeating this dwarf army, but in getting out of the fight as quickly as I could. In the end, all I could do is shake my head in disbelief, then smile in the recognition that is was not them who grew smaller since we last we met, it was I who had grown much larger.

In the end I offered them love, and an understanding. At least from my perspective. To a vampire the Sun is a lethal poison and the darkness quite a paradise, and to those in the enchanting embrace of pain and suffering love is, often, a cross too great to bear. I can’t apologize for loving them, and I can’t stop being me just because they want to fight. I first reacted much like I would have when I was but a sapling, but now I stand tall against the wind, graciously accepting its challenge and offering repentance to my pain. I love myself in my tears, in my throes of anger, and in my final, much deeper, recognition of who I a truly am.

I often go back in time to the boy who was me. I tell him to hang in there, and deeply experience the pain for the lessons it will provide. Funny, but I remember when I was a boy going forward in time to the man who would be me, telling him to hang in there, that somehow this would all make sense one day. We are both right.

Even though the world was burning around me as a child, I survived. Even a world seen as desolate and devoid of love has changed. Through the fire I came, and through the heat I was tempered into something much stronger than I would have been without it. My mother made me, and through a myriad of my own choices I now stand firm in a place of my own choosing saying words of my own making while sharing thoughts from a mind unafraid of itself.

Mom, I say thank you. Thank you..for…me. Pardon me if I say that I don’t want to be much like you, even as I wonder if a part of you has always hoped I’d say that. Excuse me if I try to live my life in a much different way than you had lived yours, even if I smile at the thought that perhaps that was ALWAYS your plan. Forgive me if I smile while fondly remembering you singing into your microphone/shot glass to Tammy Wynette songs. Allow me to remember the first puppy you brought home, or the many times you’d pretend to sleep while I’d sneak into your room to tickle your feet. I’m sorry if I remember the best times of our lives as the times when we had nothing but each other. I’m lucky to have such memories when you were a single mom of two and we were dirt poor. God, life seemed so good then.

Don’t worry, I will stop by to see you before I head westward. While you seemed to stop being my mom I am, still, your son. Yes, I know, perhaps you were saving me. Perhaps you knew that the best place for your boy was in the place you were not. Perhaps you knew what kind of man I’d become if only I were free from…you.

I know your life wasn’t easy, and the choices you made were hard. I know that you were tortured, misled, misguided and hurt in many, many ways. I know you were not perfect in the eyes of others, and in that, we have much in common. Such things seem all-too-hereditary.

I will be alone when I visit, and what we share will be uniquely ours and shared with no one else. To that, I swear.

Good night. I’m done. I have nothing left inside me.

When we see ourselves in the mirror, what is it we see?

Do we see the beauty we are, or do we see the definition of us through the eyes of others? Do we see a trusted lover, or do we see the villain in some Biblical play? Do we see a savior or an executioner riddled with guilt he can never seem to shed?

We are, it seems, nothing more than a cacophony of ideas born through a myriad of experiences.  Each unique in its way, each different in the space from which it views all others. To the rose the muddy waters are poison, to the lily they are home, to the Observer both are equally beautiful.

I do love you, me, that man in the mirror. 
I do love you, me, that woman whom I see. 
I do love you, me, that stranger in the distance. 
I do love you, me, that song that set me free.

And yet, a man sits smiling at himself, nearly laughing at his own debacle. In the voiceless pasture he smiles, knowing what must be done to till this sullen field. On the crowded side he sighs, knowing what must be done to stir the sunken stew within the cauldron the voices will not let him forget.  When on the fence he sits, studying the marveled meaning of it all, knowing each side has it merits in the experience he certainly wants to have.

I curse at you while in the mud before that lily blooms. How dare you assault me at my core, disturb me in my peace, berate me in my solemn slumber? I throw my stones you at you cursed sinners, never quite hitting my mark but knowing I’ve hurt you just the same. The muffled thud, the risen welt, the bruise begins to form.

I curse at me in the well-tilled soil before the rose bursts alive her gifts. How could you lose control, forget your inner light, curse the darkness that gives you rest? I cut myself with the sharpened shards of glass born as I fired bullets within my simple house of glass. ‘Tis lost too many a moment stuck wiping up the blood from places I simply should have left, a frail man pretending to be strong when surrender was all that needed to be done.

I laugh aloud as I sit upon my withered fence. My, how beautiful that lily blooms once the mud has been stirred beneath her feet! How wonderful that rose opened to meet the summer sun! “What is the problem?” I ask from atop my aged perch?

“There is no problem here,” the muddy voice lies. “Certainly no problem here,” comes the calling of the rose. I laugh alive in merriment, not know which is truth and which is lie, but not caring the least in either.

In the spaces that I’ve sat, the waters that I’ve swam and in the rose bushes that I’ve bled, it all comes down to this: Two feet stuck firmly on the Earthen heaven that I stand, a body assaulted yet not succumbed, a mind tested but not defeated, a heart weathered but beating loudly. On either side of the middle there are the places that I play, but it is in the middle that I know. It’s a place of not-yet-Sun but not-yet-storm. It’s a place where the greenest pastures meet and lie to one another, each protesting that “I am greener yet” even if they find no wanderers there to tease. It’s a place were the stones and broken glass dissolve into some wonderful harmony. It’s a place we all can visit, if only we’d sit and play still for a while.

To those I’ve hit with rocks from my garden, I beg for your forgiveness. To those who’ve clunked themselves with rocks tilled from my own soil, I’d bet you to please let go. To those who’ve marveled at my broken glass, please put on your shoes. I’ve grown tired of the crimson treasures you leave behind.

Now I say “good night”, and tomorrow I let come. There is so much to do.

Photo by Tom Grasso

“I am leaving you soon,” I said quietly. “I’m not sure when I’ll be back, but know you are forever in my heart.”

I kicked the sand at my feet, afraid to look at Her directly. She had been there for me during the toughest of times, and had given me peace during moments of shear terror. She had been my friend, my confidant, and my partner through some of the toughest moments of my life.

She always whispered softly to me, and always knew just what to say. She’d softly caress me when I was unsteady, and let me know when it was time to move. She’d listen without fear, answer without judgment, and always loved me with the best of who She was.

“My heart is happily breaking,” I went on. “I don’t want to leave, but know it’s time. I need to move on, and I need a new beginning.”

She just loved me, in Her usual patient way.

Little tears formed where She was kissing me. I watched them fall to the Earth, as in paying homage to the power of our connection, leaving a trail behind that seemed to be a reminder of the moments we had shared. Even tears, it seems, know when to move on.

I heard a gull sing loudly in the background, breaking the steadfast silence between us.

“I will visit you often in my dreams, and when I climb the rocky trail of my new adventure. I just wanted to share these last moments with you, these last few days of remembrance, these last few heartbeats with a part of me that will never leave.”

I saw the spot where I had once broken down, unsure of what was coming while being blinded by what had been. I saw the spots where we talked and walked together, sometimes silently, others with words spilling out of my soul like raindrops from a hurricane. I saw the spot where I once stumbled and fell, and where She did not laugh or hold me judged, but instead forgave me for my weakness and prodded me to keep going. Then there was the spot where I first saw Her, where I stood in awe at Her majesty, knowing fully that I had found my home.

Yet if there was one thing She had taught me is that nothing lasts forever. Even in the spots I held dear there was no evidence of my existence, no proof I’d ever come to visit. Now, it was time for me to vanish, too.

I think She always knew this day would come. She was a wise one, and I think She stood by me to get me to the place I always was destined to be. She picked me up to keep me going, listened to have me empty my soul, and healed me into a strength I never thought I’d see. So, I will always hold Her dear, me a part of Her, Her a part of me.

“Goodbye, and thank you.” Perhaps that was the only homage She needed to hear.

There is a certain delight in being human.

As one, I can take all of the supposed errors of my ways and turn them into some beautiful masterpiece. I can take the so-called mistakes of my past and make them into a wonderful story. I can create a wonderful symphony simply by existing, and I can make a good thing bad or a bad thing good simply by changing my direction.

Yes, there is a certain delight in being human.

I can be a fuck up on one day and a saint on another. I can be the answer to your prayers today and a bastard tomorrow. I can bring you ecstasy now and then make you vomit later. I can bring you joy at sunrise and by sunset be the blame for the flood of tears soaking your pillow. I can be whatever you want me to be, all you have to do is believe it.

I can do nothing, too. I can just sit and watch the waves come at me from some distant horizon. I can just watch the birds dive for their food or fight each other for some lonely piece of bread. I can just hear the cacophony of drama around me without ever letting the tiny reactions within me see the sunlight. I can master myself or lose all sense of control, as a human the choice is mine.

I can lose myself in the shape of your body. I can find myself in the lust in your eyes. I can fly high above the clouds without ever spreading my wings. I can swim great waters without ever getting wet, and I can weave great tales without ever having stepped outside my box.

I can hate you with one hand and hold you in the other. I can fear the sight of darkness while seeking refuge from the light. I can swear an allegiance to liberation while tightly binding my legs in shackles. I can do so much with so very little, or very little with so very much.

I can search so hard for the approval of others that I never truly gain a love of myself. I can become so defined by the wrongs of life as to never see their virtue. I can be a victim and the victimizer all at once, my glory never coming to a mind so filled with beliefs that put me in a place so beneath my true virtue.

I can forget how good it feels to just kiss you in the quest for something more. I can remember nothing but the pain sometimes, because the pain is where I feel at home. I can walk on a beach and never feel the sand, or swim in the Ocean and never feel the water until I am on dry land. I can view the mountain’s sweet majesty and only be focused on what I can’t see beyond it.

Yes, there is a certain delight in being human.

Mostly, I can accomplish miracles. I can end hunger, thirst and injustice simply by choosing to. I can rid the world of my own waste simply but making a choice. I can make a great difference simply by wanting to. I can be myself and find great things beneath the veils I had once heaped upon me. I can find great joy in suffering, great happiness in a life lived not to attain perfection, but to discover perfect is all we are. I can find truth by no longer agreeing to the story, and I can live in harmony simply by forgetting what I’ve seen.

So, I wonder, what keeps me holding on to a god I do not know and a story told to me by men I have never met about experiences I’ve never had. I wonder why I bothered to climb a ladder I refuse to get off of to see a sight I’ll never reach on a land I’ll never till. I wonder why I choose to be the great limiter of my life, and why I’ve chosen to make the truth of others my truth, and their lies my lies. I wonder when I made fiction fact, and fact fiction.

I wonder why, as the rising seas swallow me whole, and the storms rattle me to eternity, I only regret my destruction after it is too late to change it. I wonder when I will learn from my suffering, when I will no longer beat myself with someone else’s whip, and when I will find just sit my ass down, as see, at listen, and act like the Being I wish to be.

The delight of being human is too often defined by its misery. The greatness of man is too often defined by his stupidity. The strength of man is too often defined by his violence.

In Oneness I cannot give up on you even if in separation I have rejected you. In spirit I can’t help but love you even if in mind I despise the ground you walk on. I truth I can only adore you even if in the lie I wish to crush you. It’s in the humanity, in my great delight in being human, that I can make the choice in which space I wish to stand.

It’s all a choice, and it is mine to make.

Peace.