Author: Tom (Page 63 of 71)

Reborn and shivering
Spat out on new terrain

Unsure, unconvincing
This faint and shaky hour

He stared out at the vastness of the ocean fumbling with thoughts and emotions he simply was unsure of what to do with.  He couldn’t feel the rather chilly waves embracing his feet while sending his body deeper into the forgiving earth that once held him firm and steady in a place he called “paradise”.  The firmness, it seemed, was an illusion just as sure as that place of paradise was a dream.  None of it existed in his present moment.

This was nothing like anything he had ever known.  He wasn’t losing something he desired. He wasn’t seeing the end of some ideal he valued, or the failure to achieve some goal he strived for.  No, as he stood staring blankly at a deep blue sea he realized he was losing something he truly loved.  He was losing the truth of love in the undertow of his mind and there was nothing he could do to save it.  Instead he allowed his eyes to follow the Love he felt as if it were the foamy trails of sea water fading out to the deep and disappearing into the soft sand that gathered all around him.  A piece of him was being washed out into the abyss, never to be seen or heard from again.

This moment was not about right or wrong, about winning or losing, it was about the pureness of love being washed away in the currents of the mind.  He could feel those little pieces of the remarkable experience he shared falling into the water and vanishing.  He could feel the broken shards of the deepest experience of his life falling into the sea to be weathered into smooth pieces of glass that one day would be picked up, marveled at, and kept as a souvenir by someone else.  A part of him just wanted to walk into that sea and find those pieces of glass and experience them whole again just one more time.  Maybe now that one time would last until his body returned to the dust it was created from.  Maybe they could get it right this time.  Maybe…

Day one, day one, start over again

Step one, step one, I’m barely making sense

I’m faking it ’til I’m pseudo making it
From scratch, begin again, but this time I as I…
…And not as we

He shrugged off the melancholy and sat.  His mind was in clear turmoil between what it said and what his heart screamed loudly beyond it.  The fight was no longer out there but was now within him.  The struggle wiped him out most days, yet he knew that with time the transformation would be complete.  The struggle itself created a focus within and forced him to deal with the truest conflicts of his experience.  The need to leave and to stay all did battle with the reality that he could do neither.  All he could do was sit there, shiver, and watch the ocean take away those parts that no longer existed within him.

Even then, even now, he knew that there would always be one piece that would never be shed from him.  It was like the Sun as it became the only star in the sky as the others faded away.  It had warmed him in his coldest moments just as it had left him frozen in its absence.  It had offered him promise of today just as it had reminded him of the darkness of yesterday.  It had told him that it would never leave just as it had vanished from that paradise that he would never be able to hold on to.

Even in its absence the Sun was there creating havoc in the evening sky.  Even now as he sat shivering and alone he could see the Sun reflecting on everything around him, and he knew that neither time nor distance would save him from the memories of the day even in the realities of the night.  It was not, after all, truly completely dark even in the height of the evening’s darkness.

From scratch begin again

…but this time I as I

and not as we.

 

It was time.  It was as it should be.  The Sun and the Moon had decided that this is the way it should be and no man or no man’s mind could change it.  He sighed loudly as if the exhalation would blow away the weight that had fallen onto his head.  This time I as I and not as we.  This time it’s me.  This time there is no us, or we, or “together we can conquer anything” line of bullshit to fall back on.  This time it was him, his naked body, and the will to find the strength that had carried him throughout his life.  Yet he knew that he would never be the same.  He would always…always…be different.  Something would send him back to her even if only for a second within the confines of his mind.  He would always see that smile in his mind.  He would always hear that voice in his head.  He would always walk with that little piece of what was attached to that little piece of light that reminded him.  Yet he now walked not as we, but as that awesome creation of strength and fragility that he was.  It both saddened him and renewed his vigor.  It both depressed him and gave him great hope.  It both made him cry and made him smile.  It was, after all, a dichotomy just as every single aspect of life was.  This time, though, he would not resist it, fight it, or pretend it  didn’t exist.  He would embrace it, experience it, and love it as part of who he was.

He kissed his hand gently, closing his eyes to see her one more time press her lips to his own.  As tears formed in his eyes he knelt to the sea and let that kiss go into the water.

Goodbye my Lover.  I shall never forget you.

…and then the sun rose.  Then he inhaled deeply and spread his wings to fly once again.

Figuratively of course, but he did fly.  It’s a great feeling when your heart is finally released from the shackles that have weighed it down.  Suddenly it beats stronger.  Suddenly it beats louder.  Suddenly you begin to feel alive again.  With a smile and a growl of gratitude he peered at the light just beginning to peek over the horizon, breathed deeply the crisp, clean morning air and turned to face the world he had all but ignored in the imprisonment in which he had exiled himself to.

The Ghost had held him in a place where he failed to see his value.  She had created in him beliefs that were untrue.  Finally, however, it created in him the conditions for that great journey toward the figurative heavens we call healing.  He began to recognize the truths of his time with the Ghost, and he began to recognize the illusions he had created during that time.  He had lowered himself to a place of servitude, a place where he ignored his needs and a place where he began to be a weakened version of a once-stoic figure.

My, how the ego loves to see the stoic figure of a strong man quiver beneath its feet!  A sorrowful voice echoed out within his mind…he craved the idol that was the Ghost.  He craved the attention.  He even craved the drama to some extent and yes, he craved the sex.  He could journey there and feel peace; a strange mixture of stillness and desire wrapped in a blanket purely of his own making.  Now, the voice, the idol, the blanket were all uninvited to the vast clearing that was his New Earth.  Here he ruled his kingdom with a sense of purpose the Spirit herself determined irrelevant.

In some respects his time there had been a blessing.  He had learned again to trust his intuition, and that the stories people tell are a mask of their own design that they must learn to deal with.  Even as he wondered about the stories the Ghost told now he discovered he didn’t care.  The truth has a miraculous way of rising to the top of any river regardless of how quickly or chaotically it flows.  He now knew the truth and knew that the truth and the Ghost could not live in the same place.  If he wanted to live the truth he had to banish the Ghost to that world where only she could reside, where only she could exert control.

The sun moved even more over the horizon.  The pink and orange tinged clouds began to announce the coming of a new day and a new moment.  He looked to the left and there was no one.  He looked to his right – again no one.  He raised his hands and looked at their emptiness.  No sadness.  No remorse.  Nothing but a smile at the knowledge that he was free.  There would be no drama this day.  There would be no lies to deal with.  There’d be no question in his mind of where he stood.  He looked down at his feet solid on the beautiful, green Earth and he found that familiar warmth in his heart.  He closed his eyes and where the Ghost once came to life all he could see now was the light of the sun coming in through his closed eyelids.  He had been exorcised and where the scar existed that announced her departure there was nothing but smooth skin.  He could now again hear the voices of possibility echo in his heart.  He could sense the beginnings of something wonderful rumble in his Being.  He was free, and he was feeling the beauty of all around him.  The smile was his, and the emotion was him.

In the turmoil of “The End” he had often wondered if his soul would ever heal.  As the quakes subsided and the truth was revealed he understood something even more simple than he could have ever imagined.  He was healing from the very beginning.  The End was the culmination of a process.  It had brought him to the realizations he needed to move beyond the turmoil and to once again find a trust within him that counted more than the stories some Spirit had told him.

He could hear other spirits calling out to him and he would follow.  They were the winds of his kingdom, and he meant to sail them to whatever worlds they had meant for him to see. The freedom of an eagle who would dare spread his wings to summit a mountain, or glide just above a prairie, is as exciting as it is awe-inspiring.  There are no false idols in the eagle’s nest, only a sense of the wind, the air, and the sky itself.  He had never felt this freedom, and he meant to experience it.  There would be a “yes” in every questions of “should I?”.  There’d be a sense of limitless in the vastness of his kingdom.  There’d be a story in every moment and a truth in ever breath.  He was truly free, and he was truly home.

Now, he just sat still in as the sun finally made its way completely above the horizon.  He turned to those who truly loved him and smiled.  He embraced them in his heart as he touched them with his mind.  Romantic love would come as the river in his heart ran cleaner and purer with ever beat.  For now he would be happy with the touch of his friends, the embrace of his partners, and the love of his soul.  His new vow had become a simple one.  He would just be happy and he would be free.  That would be enough and anything else would be promptly uninvited to his Earth.  If it didn’t make him smile it wouldn’t stand the trial.

With that the wind took him and with that the sky itself opened up to…

Δ

How do I say I am sorry?

How do I take back all of the words I have said to you?

How do I touch you and make you feel like you are whole again?

How do I lead you to joy? To happiness? To the land that you were promised at birth?

How do I reach you through the glass, oh man in the mirror?

The wall I have to tear down is not made of stone.  It is made of unbreakable mirrored glass.  I cannot escape my own gaze as I search frantically for the gate.  I cannot shut my own eyes as I watch the struggle against the insanity of my very human existence.  I can only stare, compassionately and without judgement, and love the man who stares back at me with such hopelessness, such trepidation, and such humanity and show him that love is not a pool into which we dive deeply, but rather a reflection of the very essence of who we are.

Sense yourself, my friend, and know that you are loved here.  Feel the caress of your own hand along the scars you have accumulated along the way.  Feel the warmth of forgiveness flow across your Entirety until you become that warmth.  Nurture it.  Know it.  Be it.

Love the parts of the man who cannot heal.  Tend to those wounds and accept them as they are.  Then miracles will happen as the unhealed become healed and the scars become smooth testaments to the power within you.  Do not attempt to hasten the journey, but do not stand as an obstacle either.  Tend to the flock within you, and the storms outside of you will cease to exist.  Let go.  Feel it escape the loosening grip of your wary fingers.  Feel it slide through your calloused palms until nothing but air exists where once ideas stood.

Then you will be free, for all falling is free even when you hit the ground.

∞

“Why haven’t you written?” asks the Voice from Within.

I am distracted I say.  I wince each time my skin is touched.  She is not near me, but within me.  I feel her enter me with each inhalation and she does not leave me as the air escapes me.  She is there, in my lungs, burning me.  She is there in my heartbeat, reminding me. She is there in my blood as it spills out of my body onto the white carpet of my dreams.  She speaks to me in tongues and in languages I cannot understand.  My body is rebelling against my mind.  Just look at my eyes.  Just look at my skin.  Just look at who I have become.

“Are you ok?” asks the Holy Soul of Friendship.

I lie as my mouth says I am fine.  I stand strong and firm even as my body just wants to crumble to the ground.  I am clean even as I want to roll around in the mud and become one with the Earth, and then fade away into Her and into that one whose name I cannot seem to say.  I am so full I am starving and so starving that I cannot eat a thing.  I am so tired I cannot sleep and when I do my dreams remind me of what could have been.  Ah those mango trees!  Bless that loving river!  See the joy in the Lion done searching for his Tiger as the cool embrace of a shade tree finally protects them both from the searing sun.  See the butterflies born and dancing in a field of endless flowers where I would pick a few and give them to her.  See it all painted in black.  See it all awash in the broken shards of a shattered window where they once gazed at each other in complete adoration.

Or did we?  I cannot say for sure anymore but I can say that all that exists for me in this present moment is the forest, and the mountains, and the snow around my feet.  I stand alone in the darkness of this place and see my own light shining brightly.  I feel the warmth not from there but from here.  This is no false sense of male bravado I say to myself as the strength builds in my legs, in my core, and in my chest.  This is no bullshit act of desperation I hear my heart say as the blood returns to my manhood and the sight is restored in my soul.  You are NOW motherfucker I finally say out loud to the world around me.  This Wolf is about to howl, and you will hear him.

Yeah, I am fine.  I’m just changing.  I’m just now seeing the full moon rise above my horizon.  I am getting stronger even as I fall to pieces.  I am feeling warmth even as I see the breath paint white the frigid air around me.  As the ice forms on my face and the shivers run up and down my body I feel the fire within me burning fiercely.  I have stumbled and I have fallen and I will pick myself up.  I am not beaten.  I feel those primal urges building within me.  I know that I am still here.

There is no song of pity or of sympathy that I want from you.  I don’t need your understanding.  I don’t need you to cut a pathway for me.  You can walk with me if you’d like, or you can go your own way.  I can carry this cross all on my own, in fact give me two and make them heavy. I can still make you scream in the light of a flickering candle or I can go my own way and leave you to your own devices.  You are free to ignore me all you’d like.  You are free to pretend I don’t exist.  Do whatever you must because I am here, I am strong, and I am fearless.  You know I am there as well, in your thoughts, in your dreams and in the ache that is nothing more than your body reminding you of where I should be.  Pretend if you will, but this wolf’s howl echoes in you as freely as it echoes in the moonlit desolation of my beautiful space.

I’m done being distracted from this life by the voices of fucking insanity.  I want to live damn it, and live I shall.  I shake off the thin crust of ice that has formed on my body, look up at the large, white full moon and begin to sing my song.  I am here motherfucker, come get me if you want.  Come take me if you are woman enough to handle it.  The stillness remains even as it is broken and the world begins to revolve again.  Breathe you bastard, breathe.

Exhale.  Sweet exhale.  It gives me space for that long and sweet inhalation.  You know you are on to something when both the inhalation and the exhalation both taste sweet.  Now, I can smile.  Now I know where I am.  Now I am here, motherfucker.

A growl escapes my lips.  You know that growl, and if you want to hear it you’ll have to tell me so.  That growl reminds me of who I am at my best and what I have to offer.  It echoes in the snowy forest where I am now, all but certain that I want to be basking in the moonlit glow of this moment accepting all that is.  I am at home here.  I am at peace.  Only those who wish to be here are here.  Only those who can hear my growl and love it bend their ears to my lips.  Only those who look into my eyes and see something wonderful can turn their heads this way.  Others turn away lest you go deaf and blind.

Inhale…sweet inhale.  Fill my lungs with the passion my heart beats for.  Let me smell the crimson rose as I walk in the sweet meadow brought to life in the springtime.  Let the butterflies land on me and remind me of where they too have been.  Let me lay in the soft grass and cuddle with the warmth of love as I bathe in the air that has not quite decided if it is yet winter or summer.  Let me walk along that line where both cold and heat are a certain truth, where both snow and grass live together, were both the smells of life fill my nostrils and the crack of deathly ice echoes beneath my feet.  Let me live in the line between Yin and Yang, between light and darkness, so that I may know this life to its fullest.

The peace spread like wildfire within him.  After months of a tortuous war between his soul and his mind his soul had won the battle.  He settled in, relaxed, took a breath and wished it all away.

It was gone.  The struggle vanished.  The voices silenced.  Need evaporated like a shallow puddle in the desert sun and the sense of vultures circling ended.  It was what it was, not what he made it out to be.  He smiled, and journeyed back into a place he hadn’t been in quite some time.  There, he found himself.

He had been struggling in this, the “worst” year of his life.  Gone was the sense of family he so loved.  Gone was the woman he had gotten so used to seeing, to talking to, to being with.  Gone was the family who had taken him in, loved him, and made him feel part of something bigger.  Gone was the income he had gotten used to, the lifestyle he had grown accustomed to and the things he had grown attached to.  In a flash of fire and brimstone his world had turned to ash.

She softly caressed his soul.  That beautiful vision of love he experienced during that raging inferno caused him to sigh and smile at the same moment.  He smiled as he sat in stillness at the thought of her and at the realization that she was his vision.  She didn’t really exist outside of his Being, and although her physical form still laughed and cried, breathed and slept, the part of her he loved existed in here, not out there.  He could sense her moving through his Soul, and no longer could feel her moving outside, stirring up the ashes and reminding him of the sources of the burn marks that scarred his heart.  In a moment of pure love he let her go, allowing her to walk freely in her own experience while holding her tightly in his own heart.  The others did not matter.  What she could do to him became irrelevant in the knowledge that she could do nothing to him that he did not allow her to do.  Her willingness to hurt him or not hurt him was also irrelevant as she had no real power to do either without his consent.  Even so, he could see her own light shining brightly in his heart, and he knew her then to be a beautiful, honest soul.  Regardless of his complicity, he knew she would not hurt him because that was not who she was.  She was love, devotion and honesty.

He knew their Souls walked eternity together.  He felt her in his breath, in his heart, and in his Entirety.  He could sense an outward need for her but felt a much greater inward Love for her.  He trusted his heart, and with each beat his heart said her name and reminded him of the beauty they shared.  The fear, the mistrust, the desire for the things his ego demanded be given seemed trivial to him as he realized the Truth.  What mattered is what is in here.  What’s out there is just an illusion, a place where ego could ruin even the sweetest of dances.

Then he forgave himself.  He had become a lover-turned-fighter who simply wanted to be a lover again.  He could hear Something say “drop the illusion of strength.  There is nothing to fight and nothing to protect yourself from.”  His ego replied, but the voice seemed garbled in this sense of stillness.  He could feel himself floating on the River, and he put his ears under the surface and focused on the sounds there.  The ego cannot speak here.  Instead it is forced to sit and listen too.

Then does not matter in the presence of Now, it cannot survive in that space.  What is gone ceases to exist and ceases to matter in the experience of this moment.  When he dropped the attachment to then, something beautiful happened Now.  He began to live.  He began to cry.  He began sense his Self.  He could love as a matter of practice, not as a matter of condition.  He could trust as a matter of fact, not as a matter of proof.  All he needed to trust was within him as nothing outside of him was real.  All he needed to know was here, right now, and nothing that was outside of here, right now, existed.  Where he sat was truth, and where he was he called “home”.

He began to truly love those he had once believed had harmed him, as whatever had decided he was harmed in the first place went silent.  He began to see beauty in everything as the voice that once spoke of ugliness faded into the light.  He took the fig leaf he used as a tool of separation and threw it away.  He stopped hiding behind the Tree and walked out naked into the world.  He no longer wished to eat of the apple, and he no longer wished to be a slave to the serpent, the sinner, or the saint.  He was the book, and in it he would write the story himself, creating words and definitions of his own along the way.

He began to realize the potential of his sexuality with the absolute knowledge that Divinity showed itself in the art of making love.  Pleasure is a unifying experience, the act of One knowing Itself.  It is that ripple upon our surface that echoes throughout our Beings, gently giving rise to the tsunami that ends with a body spent and a soul renewed to its purpose.  Sex becomes dirty only in the mind of the unholy, those who are afraid to touch the face of God and actually have God touch them in return.  The unholy thrive in the distance between God and Her Son, manifesting itself in a voice of ego that calls us away from home in the moments we forget where we are.

He had risen out of the smoldering remnants of a life he believed he lived to see the Universe renewed within him.  Everything he had believed as true within him he saw now around him as a dream conjured up by his ego’s need for control.  He had found a great star in the sky and followed Her to a birth of a new king.  He now sensed a new understanding, one where the facades of a human’s existence would drop away like dried mud from his skin exposing the Being within.  There would be times when his spirit would be tested from the onslaught of his own mind.  Fully aware that fires could burn again he steeled himself in solid stillness in where he sat, focusing on the coolness of Now.

“They are not here now, so they do not exist.”

He had surrendered and he had won the battle.  Yes, he was home.