Author: Tom (Page 64 of 71)

Tom is a stroke survivor, a seeker, a meditator, a veteran firefighter and rescue tech, a motivational speaker, a poet, and a blogger (new site) & author. He is also the father of three and as their student and teacher, has found applying spiritual practices to all aspects of life provides a vast amount of possibility and abundance. Tom has discovered that true forgiveness is the key to a pure heart, and a pure heart can lead us to wondrous experiences.

You can also connect with tom on <a href="https://www.facebook.com/Tomgwriter55/".

The love of a man. Thank you George Hochsprung

December 19, 2012 / Tom

The love of a man.

In the aftermath of the horrendous acts on December 14^th in Newtown, CT, I want to focus on something that has both inspired me and given me a moment to pause in my own life. This story is about the love of George Hochsprung and his wife Dawn. It’s also about the survivors of the victims who are victims themselves.

I won’t pretend to know the Hochsprungs, or in having interviewed George. All I have done is seen his interview on CNN, and I can tell you that what I saw and felt blew me away. His raw emotion, his untempered honesty and his unbridled love for his wife inspired me to continued realization of how special each moment of love we share is, and how we should not take any future we plan as something that is guaranteed.

I love the persistence of the man who had to propose to his woman not once, not twice, but 5 times before she accepted on the sixth. “She turned me down five times,” he said. How many of us would tolerate being turned down 5 times by a woman let alone keep pursuing her? His answer is simple.

“I just fell in love with her.”

Yeah. That’s the best explanation any man could give. It is perfect in its simplicity and wonderful in its completeness. We should all love so much.

As I watched George nestled among most of his and Dawn’s children, I saw a man in more pain than any man should face. I saw a family suffering at the sudden loss of a lover, a mother and a certain innocent none of us should have to experience. The future, however, is not certain.

George and Dawn had built a dream house in the Adirondacks to share, and George had planned on Dawn living there well after his own death. She was much younger than he, so the assumption was not hard to make. She was to live there after he had passed, with plenty of rooms for children and grandchildren to keep her company in his absence. George had though lovingly of taking care of his wife’s needs long after he had gone, and now he was faced with something he could never have comprehended.

“…now it’s me,” he said. “I don’t think I can do that.”

As emotional as it is watching George Hochsprung talk about his loss, nothing was more emotional to me than the raw honesty he showed when asked how he felt about his wife’s heroic actions.

“Dawn put herself in jeopardy, and I have been angry about that,” he said.

It’s not hard to imagine. He’s missing her, he needs her, and their well-planned future together will never be. She could have hidden herself and come home to her husband. She could have chosen to not face an armed killer and retired to that dream house in the mountains.

But that was not her way. Instead, she told two other teachers to hide while she delayed the gunman. She then confronted him.

“She could’ve avoided that,” George Hochsprung said. “But she didn’t; I knew she wouldn’t. So, I’m not angry anymore. I’m not angry. I’m just very sad.””

Yes, that is plainly evident, as is the truth that our futures are fleeting, our present moments are all we are sure to know. Love is forever, even if our physical bodies are not. Dawn’s actions that day were ones of love and tremendous courage, and the actions of George and his family’s remain just as courageous today. All heroes like Dawn leave behind those who must wish that, at some level, they would have made a choice to come home and to secure the future they had all dreamed about.

To those of us who marvel at such love we owe a debt of gratitude to Dawn and George for showing us something wonderful in the midst of so much suffering. Thank you for showing us something else to focus on besides the carnage and anger. Thank you for showing us something that should reside in us for the rest of our lives.

Tonight, I will hold my lover tight and remind her of something far greater than me. I hope so anyway.

Tremor Christ (Little Secrets Tremors, Turn to Quakes)

December 19, 2012 / Tom

A song that seems pertinent to my current mood.

Tremor Christ (Lyrics)
Artist: Pearl Jam
Composer: Pearl Jam
Lyrics:
Winded is the sailor…drifting by the storm…
Wounded is the organ, he left all…bloodied on the shore…
Gorgeous was his savior, sees her…drowning in his wake…
Daily taste the salt of her tears, but…a chance blamed fate…
Little secrets, tremors…turned to quake…
The smallest oceans still get…big, big waves…

Ransom paid the devil…he whispers pleasing words…
Triumphant are the angels if they can… get there first…
Little secrets, tremors…turned to quake…
The smallest oceans still get…big, big waves…

I’ll decide…take the dive…
Take my time…not my life…
Wait for signs…believe in lies…
To get by…it’s divine…whoa…
Oh, you know what it’s like…

Turns the bow back, tows and…drops the line…
Puts his faith in love and tremor christ…

Protected: MY PREDICTION I will open on Saturday night!

December 18, 2012 / Tom

“Stop It”

December 18, 2012 / Tom

“Obstacles cannot crush me. Every obstacle yields to stern resolve. He who is fixed to a star does not change his mind.” – Stephen Covey

I felt a familiar stitch in my mind this morning, a painful cramping that drives me to my proverbial knees looking for relief somewhere. I felt the sting of something riddle my mind with doubt, and I began questioning everything. It’s something I have found is a familiar pattern; one I can trace back to the time when I was taught not only to doubt everything around me, but to also doubt myself.

The doubt starts here, within me. Although I am strong, I often believe myself weak. Although I have a lot to offer, I often feel myself worthless. Although I am kind, caring, and compassionate I often feel myself cold and heartless. I know who I am even as I get lost in the insanity of who I think I am. Actually, maybe the thought of who I am is part of who I am, and when I finally readily accept the Doubting Thomas I can finally accept the St. Thomas.

In that place I doubt that anyone, at any time, could love me, be faithful to me, and accept me. I struggle for aloneness, often telling myself that I am better off the lone wolf than part of a pack that will, at some point in some time, bare its teeth against me. There are others so much better. Fitter. Stronger. More confident. More able. The list goes on and on as to why I am not worthy of the very things I thirst the most for; love, companionship, devotion and loyalty. If I extend them to you, you will invariably bludgeon me with them at some point.

This belief, which has proven true at various places in my life, is my own creation that is like a chain that has always bound me to a wall that is too of my own making. I may want to get there, but the chain of my mind attached to the wall of my own attachment to the past and the false beliefs that experience has created. I can feel me run to open arms but then can feel the chain pull me by the neck back to where I believe I belong.

I belong back here. You belong out there. It’s safer that way. Safer for you, and safer for me.

This morning, as I felt that old, familiar chain tighten around my neck I felt something else too. Something unfamiliar but becoming more a truth than a piece of fantasy. I felt the warmth of love so intense that it could not be ignored for the chill of the steel wrapped around me. It caused me to stop, to look, and to listen. I could see her love reach out to me. I could see her eyes look right through the layers I had created to hide myself from her at least partially. I could see her hand touch mine and utter a command that would resolve me to ending this lunacy.

“Stop it.”

I could see her loving eyes looking into my own.

“Stop it.”

I could feel her hand taking mine and strongly demanding me to hold on.

“Stop it.”

I could feel her lips nearing mine while she whispered into my head.

“Stop it.”

So, I stopped it. I fucking stopped it. And to those of you who do not know how glorious that moment is when you achieve such a monumental goal think back to that scene in Rocky when a battered and bruised man wants nothing more than to tell his Adrianne the truth and she finds him. He has nothing left – no face, no strength, and no thought other than to tell the only person that matters to him how he feels.

And she finds him. She fights her way through the crowd, through her own fear and her own shyness to tell the only man she loves how she feels. She bares her soul to him in front of thousands yet it appears that there is only the two of them standing there, each baring their truth to the other and taking the chance. The world may have been watching but that didn’t matter. What mattered was the complete absence of boundaries, the complete dismantling of walls and the complete destruction of the chains that kept them from knowing the power of that moment. They lived for each other, and they let it be known.

Yeah, Rocky is not a sports movie to me. It’s a love story; a deep, passionate and meaningful love story. Still, enough of the story, let’s get back to a slice of reality. I could get lost in that story all day because I find great meaning to it. I can relate. J

So, I stopped it. I fucking stopped it. I was Superman there, standing on the railroad tracks stopping a speed freight train before it destroyed yet another perfect moment in my life. I stood my ground. I braced for impact.

Nothing happened.

Well, I shouldn’t say “nothing.” To quote one of my favorite books/movies (Peaceful Warrior), “there is never nothing going on.” So, in order to best describe it in the way I know how, let me use a metaphor (I apologize in advance) and let me start from a place where I realized that nothing stopped going on.

We stood there, my chain growing taut and the air becoming harder to force into my lungs. I could see her walking toward me. She wasn’t asking me to struggle with my own limitations to get to her. She wasn’t asking me to break the steel that bound me to my own limitations in order to touch her. She came to me. I could sense her fighting her own thoughts and own experience to get to me, but get to me she did. I marveled at her, feeling somehow pathetic as this remarkable vision made her way through the mud just to comfort me.

Something struck me at that moment. I was not pathetic here. We were both showing one another something, and we were both learning from one another. We both were challenging each other, and we both shared a love that no real boundaries could keep hidden. I had as much meaning to this story as she did. She didn’t just grab my hand for me, she grabbed it because she needed it. She just didn’t look into my eyes to cut through my own layers, she did so to cut through her own. It wasn’t just my truth she wanted to take, it was hers she wanted to give. In that moment she was searching for the same thing I was looking for even if she did not realize it. Hell, I didn’t realize it until it nearly destroyed me.

“Stop it.”

It wasn’t a command to me alone. It was a testament to a new reality. So I fucking stopped it.

So, as the train came bearing down on me and I extended my arm to “stop it” I felt something. I felt her hand on my shoulder. I felt her lips come close to my ears and I heard her whisper,

“Not going to happen.”

In that moment there was no train, no tracks and no need to be Superman. There was her, me, the chain and the wall. I looked at her, and her at me, and I knew. It was time to end it all, and to move on to the sequel where me and this woman…well…that’s a bit private.

Once upon a time she handed me a hammer. Others had tried, but I often found I could not wield their tool. Either they were too heavy, or too soft, or too long or too short. The hammer she gave me felt just right and I have used it to destroy many of the obstacles in my way to where I want to go. Yes, I have been fixed on a star and yes, I will get to where I want to go.

I can’t start by destroying the chain. See, that chain is my friend. It allows me to roam within its circumference, and to feel the taste of liberation even as it binds me to the past. It allowed me to see love walk toward me, and to feel the beauty of being the one. The chain also shows me the direction to the real obstacle in this continuing saga. The wall. The attachment I have to the past that, brick by brick, has created the largest obstacle of all. It’s an obstacle I may not completely destroy, but it is one that I will turn into something I can easily hop over when I need to.

In this mixture of metaphors and dreamy states of mind, there is one constant. Motivation. Love isn’t just a tool of acceptance, it is a tool much like a hammer that we use in conjunction with stern resolve to get to the destination we want to reach. We can either choose to knock down those walls or attach a chain to them. It’s all about choice, and it’s all about finding the resolve to overcome those very temporary moments when the obstacle seems too high to climb or too thick to demolish. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve come to that moment when I just didn’t think I could overcome the obstacle. I’ve given up, walked away, protested that I just couldn’t go on only to find the motivation to continue. Sometimes it has been despair. Others, it has been hope. Sometimes it has been fear.

It has always been love. Always. Despair comes from the failure to follow your loving heart. Fear is the feeling that love is absent even when it is staring into your eyes and holding your hand. It all is a belief in doubt, where the doubts scream at you that you cannot climb this wall until you find the strength to simply say “fuck it” and reach for the top. Love is the motivator and regardless of whatever tool it shows itself as at the end you will feel its power if you just “stop” the activity of forgetting.

Well, that sermon is over. I have a lot of stuff to do, including “stopping it”. I have love to make and dreams to fulfill and good times to create. I have mistakes to rectify, and a wall to tear down. Then, I have a chain to dismantle link by glorious link. Yeah, I’d say I have plenty to do.

Peace.

Gun Control is an Act of Love

December 15, 2012 / Tom

Remorse. Sadness. Grief. Disbelief.

And anger. I can’t forget about the anger regardless of how much I want to.

Those are just some of the very human emotions that overwhelmed me as listened to the news about the shootings in Newtown, Connecticut. Just some of them. To list them all would create something unreadable.

As I sat on I-95 near Philadelphia heading home from a long day at the office, I wept openly. Visions of my own children danced in my head. Visions of children everywhere flooded my mind. Those smiling faces, those wondering minds, those innocent souls. I could hear the banter flowing through those classrooms on what should have been just another Friday as children transformed into students eagerly anticipating a holiday season. I could imagine parents not unlike myself rushing around that morning, trying to get their children ready for a school day while trying to get themselves ready for a busy day at work. I could imagine parents who, had they known this would be the last time they would see their babies, may have forsaken all worldly endeavors for those final few moments of complete presence in lives they had a large part in creating.

Yes, our worldly endeavors seem a bit silly in those moments when we are faced with the loss of innocence and the finality of death. The Eagles losing yet another game is forgotten. The need to make end-of-year sales numbers seems meaningless when the idea of a tiny casket flashes across your mind. The arguments between lovers becomes very unimportant when the knowledge that one day you will not be with her and that one day physical and intellectual separation will be permanent. In truth, very little seems important when faced with mortality, particularly when it is the mortality of our children, our innocence, our posterity.

We fear permanence even more than we fear impermanence. The only thing that is permanent in our human experience is death, and we seem to fear that more than we fear anything else. It rattles us, not only because we don’t know what is coming afterward, but because it is so final. We not only fear our own deaths, we fear the death of our loved ones. Yet, it wasn’t death that found me weeping on a busy highway during rush hour, it was the death of innocence and of promise. It was knowing that each and every one of those children senselessly killed likely had no idea of what death was. It was knowing that each and every one of those sweet angels was left relatively unprotected despite deserving our fiercest shelter. It was knowing the fear they must have felt, and it was in feeling the ultimate betrayal as the shooter did the Devil’s work. How utterly devoid of compassion he must have been; how much hatred he must have held on to. It is quite unimaginable to, fortunately, the vast majority of us.

Now, I’d rather not focus on the man who destroyed so much in such a small period of time. Instead, I want to focus on the reaction many of us had to his horrifying actions. Many of us found love overflowing from our eyes. We found compassion pouring out of us. We found empathy, sympathy, and new-found purpose in each tiny droplet of salty water that made its way into air. We found that piece of ourselves that sometimes gets lost in the hustle and bustle of the illusion in which we “live”. We discovered a piece of truth in the lie, and will hold on to that truth at least for a little while. We will hug our lovers tighter tonight. We will be more present with our children. We will be more present with ourselves.

So, when I am asked “why?” I know what to say. I have no idea why a 20-year old man would lose his grip on his own humanity and divinity. Yet, those children did not die in vain if we, even for one second, pause to be more present in our lives and in our loves. Those children did not die in vain if the final words I say to my own loves is “I love you”. This understanding gives the very thing I can’t understand some understanding. It gives the senseless some meaning. It gives those of us who are doubting some sense of hope. That’s “why” my friends. So, get to it and don’t let those beautiful souls leave our consciousness while we have a chance to make good on the very thing that makes us who we are.

Make love like you have never made love before. Embrace each other like it is the last time you will feel those arms around you. Absorb the “daddy” and “mommy” moments fully as if they will be the last. Don’t live in fear of the end, embrace it and make it meaningful in your daily experience. Don’t go to bed angry with those you love. Don’t do anything that will sour your epithet. Don’t hug anger, hug love and don’t let go. Fight for it. Feel it. And cherish every moment you get to share it.

Love, laugh and live fully. Help others love, laugh and live fully. Let’s get rid of the need for instruments of death in our lives. Let’s cherish life and the living more than we cherish material things. Start saying “no” to your boss and “yes” to your family. Get high if you want. Whatever. Just start fucking living.

This is not an admonition to you. This is an admonition to me that I simply want to share with you. You are free to do as you please. Me, I want to have no regrets at the end of the last day I share with someone. I want to know I lived it all fully, even the bitter moments, and that in the end I’ve loved more fully than I’ve feared.

I am sure that soon enough we will see the smiling faces of those beautiful babies flashing across our televisions and computer screens. We will hear wonderful stories of victims, their families, and their own unique promise. We will cry again at the sight of young, smiling faces and we will make resolutions to end lunacy and seek love as our shelter. We will live, even for an instant, in the warm and loving embrace of knowing ourselves as more than money, more than ideology, and more than nationality. We will find our own promise and potential before settling back into our very human roles of forgetful man as the memory of those smiling faces fades.

I will also remember that the killer himself was once one of those smiling faces, and I will wonder what drove him to such darkness. I will wonder because I don’t want any other child to lose that part of himself that makes him both human and loving divinity. We all deserve our own sense of innocence, and it is time we start treating our children like they remind us of our own innocence and freedom. Children are not afterthoughts, they are not nuisances that keep us from work or our favorite reality shows. They are not weapons, and they are not punching bags. They are wonderful creations that we had some part in, and as such deserve not just the best of who we are as individuals, but also the best of who we are as a society. We owe it to them to pass laws that ensure that it is far less likely that they will be staring down the barrel of a firearm as they cry for a mommy and daddy who aren’t there to protect them.

Yes, I am done being on the fence about gun control. I’m done seeing the “right to bear arms” as equally important to the right of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Those children lost their rights to life. They lost their rights to liberty. They lost their rights to happiness as a madman pulled the trigger over and over again of a weapon he had the right to own. Gun control is not about the erosion of American rights, it is about the guarantee of them. So, fuck you, fuck your need to own a semi-automatic rifle and multiple handguns. You only have two hands, and I doubt Nancy Lanza could have shot both handguns while handling a semi-automatic rifle in the process.

Face it, 27 people, including 20 innocent school children, could have been alive today if our government and We the People had the balls to get rid of guns as a “right” and, instead, made it impossible to get them. End the War on Drugs, that failed social experiment that only ensures more of us spend time in jail than ever before, and begin the War on Guns. Empty our prisons of drug users and fill them with gun owners who fail to see that they have absolutely no reason to own firearms if no one else does.

See, Nancy Lanza was not going to go hunting. She obviously did not find protection in the guns she owned as her son gunned her down. In fact, the guns she owned ended up killing her, so I’m sure if given a Mulligan she’d probably take them back even without a refund. I’m sure she loved the children in her class, so I doubt she felt the Second Amendment worth the lives of 20 of them as well as 6 of her colleagues. I doubt as she faced her end she thought of Charlton Heston and his famous “out of my cold, dead fingers” pronouncement.

I will not use the term “rest in peace” for those children and brave adults who died on December 14^th in Connecticut. That’s offensive to the very nature of the crime committed against them. Rather, we should have been blessing them with a “live in peace” on December 13^th. We should have ensured their safety then, not given it lips service now. Prayers and love and compassion are meaningless to them now, but how much could it have meant to them Thursday? Yeah, that’s what I mean. Tomorrow is too late. Now is what matters.

And for Pete’s sake let’s stop being married to an ideal written 250 years ago in a document that was meant to be changed when necessary. It is necessary now, more than ever, to rid ourselves of the scourge of firearms in this nation. Our children deserve it, and we, as loving, caring, and intelligent adults need to ensure we protect them within a society that demands change. Yes, our society is demanding change. That is evident in the gun violence that is destroying us from within.

It is so evident that all we need to is review the gun violence over the last 10 years and ask, “how is that Second Amendment working out for you?” I’d say not at all. It’s time to move beyond the ideas that violence is the answer (that isn’t really working out for us either) and toward something a little harder to do but much more rewarding (as Gandhi and the independent India he helped give birth to without firing ONE SINGLE SHOT proved). I love Gandhi and his example because he was a tiny, diminutive man who successfully rebelled against a world superpower without ever owning a gun. It’s time we follow that example and bury Charlton Heston’s somewhere far away where we never need look at it again.

For now, I will follow other people who are crying, praying and empathizing with those victims of gun violence who decided to follow the pursuit of happiness rather than the right to bear arms and were shot in the process. Yet I will not let this fire within me be buried with those victims. Instead, I will use it to work toward ensuring that we create no other victims for the stupidity of a few who love the power of shooting something so dearly. It’s time to end the lunacy, and never forget those who died for nothing more than an ideal.

Geminid

December 14, 2012 / Tom

As I watched millions of years of existence end in a flash across this evening’s sky, I felt small, impermanent and grateful for the realization.

It all ends sometime, someday. In an instance what was ceases to be, and what is becomes the new reality. Across the darkened sky of our existence everything ends in a flash that, to some, is but an instant but to others is an eternity. In a moment of intense flame it ceases to be, and the sky again becomes dark save the few diamonds left to prove its existence. Everything returns to darkness; everything returns to light.

I walk to the darkest spot I can find, feeling the emptiness in my hands highlighted by the hope in my heart. Am I but a Geminid in her evening sky? Am I but a flash in the night sure to exist in one moment but be gone before the her eyes open again? Am I but a cold rock floating aimlessly in the nothingness sure to die in the heat of her atmosphere? Am I destined to be but a bright flame across her darkness, across my own darkness; a flame that burns intensely but for only a short period of time?

I look at those lonely hands, opening and closing them as if to prove they are mine. I can see her hand resting nicely in my own, warming the skin left cold by the evening air. I can feel her lean her head on my shoulder and I know. I am not a cold rock floating aimlessly in nothingness. I am one of the diamonds, burning brightly and lighting the way. If only I choose to be, and if only she lets me. Her and I are not them, those strange vestiges of past pains left to scramble in the light of love. We are the light, the source of contrast between the blackness and the timelessness of love. We are what we choose to be, either to be lost in the mix of the mind or found in the millions of suns proving to us that even the darkness is temporary.

So tonight as I am surrounded by the darkness and the destruction of travelers who simply got too close, I am warmed by the heat of love cascading through my soul and the light of the love we both share. Perhaps it is time for us both to take the past and turn it into a chunk of stone and push it into nothingness. Maybe it is time for us both to watch that rock burn in the air of love and vanish into space. I can almost see it, her hand tightly in mine as her head lies softly on my shoulder watching with a smile as those barriers burn away. I can see her smile as I turn to her and say, softly,

“I love you.”

We both know. We have always known. The Geminid is not the love that we share but the barriers we have created keeping us from it. We both surrender in an instant, and utter a silent vow that this time we will know the truth and it will be ours. We make it ours, we own as if it is all we will ever own, and it becomes the reality we cherish. Even as I close my eyes to dream this lovely dream, a prayer escapes my heart as the beautiful mediation begins.

Yes, my love, my fears are in that rock you just watched disintegrate. Yes, my love, I feel the truth around us. Yes, my love, I know you are here, and that you love me.

I have heard her say it in my ear at least a hundred times. “I love you.” So, I vow to her this moment a truth that speaks from that part of me only she can see when her mind is silent and her heart is open.

Yes, my love, my doubt has just burned away in that streak you saw across our sky. Yes, my love, I am here. Yes, my love, I believe in you. Yes, I am ready.

Such truth brings tears to my cheeks. I have never cried in my life combined as much as I have now. Cleansing, releasing, forgiving and, finally, surrendering. Like any good fighter just at that moment of surrender I find renewed fight to continue on. Now, I am finally on the canvas, staring up at her beautiful face thankful for the knockout blow.

Yes, I am done baby. Yes, I am ready to end the battle. Yes, I want to leave this place and walk alone with you. Let me, please. Thank you.

Soon, the Sun will rise above that place where the ground meets the sky. I’ve always loved that place, and it is there that I ask her to walk with me. I deserve the chance and so does she. A chance to smile in the light of love as we push the Sun above the horizon. A chance to walk together without the rocks falling all around us. A chance to know one another without the voices telling us stories that don’t exist here. Yeah, it’s time to walk my love…

♥

When I Look at You

December 13, 2012 / Tom

I want you to know what I see

When I look at you.

I see an explosion in my heart

I see the valleys rise above the sea

I see the mountains touch the sky

I see diamonds in the roughest parts of me.

I want you to know what I feel

When I look at you.

I feel like I could touch the moon

I feel like I could climb the highest mountain

I feel something I have never felt before

I feel something I may never feel again.

I want you to know what I want

When I look at you.

I want to know nothing but that truth

I want to know everything that ever was

I want to know everything that will ever be

I want to know…you.

I know that you are used to this

This feeling you inspire

But I am not used to having it inspired within me

And it takes time for me to understand.

Yet I will never stop trying

And I will never stop striving

To be the best for you that I can be.

I will never stop wanting

And I will never stop loving

You

Regardless of the ideas my mind creates

Or the challenges that you bring into my life

Because the rewards are the most beautiful

And the moments the most perfect

That I have ever known.

So, if you love me and you know the truth of those perfect moments

Stay.

Know them with me, and walk with me into that good light.

Show me the power of the heart that guides you

And the intelligence of the mind that speaks for you

With the strength of the character that makes me want to surrender to you.

I will give you all of me and stay true to you in turn

Knowing that if anyone deserved that part of me it was you.

I am sorry for the challenge of me

and I am sorry for being so unsure

In the challenge that is you.

I am sorry for tripping over my own two feet

And believing the wicked stories of others in my mind.

While forgetting who you are to me, to us,

And trying to prove my own strength in the process.

I am nervous yet I am sure.

I am nervous because of the bruises on our hearts

And the distance we cannot help but share.

I am sure because of the feelings you give to me

Even on the coldest winter’s morn

And the hottest summer’s day

That make it all so perfectly perfect.

Put your hand here, on my chest

And heal me.

I will kiss you where your heart beats loudly

And heal those parts of you.

The story has been written my love

And when the book finally closes for the final time

It will still be you, and it will still be me

And what a story we will have told.

Because when I look at you

I know I don’t see what others see

I see love looking right back at me

I see a woman who loves me

Who wants me

Who needs me

Who saves the best of her for the worst of me

And who saves herself for the best of me.

No, they don’t get to see what looks at me

So I am the luckiest fucking man in the world

A man not used to being so lucky

Now smiles in the glow of your love

Wanting to take the best of you for the best of me

Today, tomorrow, forever.

I love you.

Be Ready, I Am Coming

December 10, 2012 / Tom

I need not ask you what I should do. I know what I should do. I should tell you all to shut up so that I can hear again. Let this wolf walk silently in the woods so that I can hear.

Hear her howling at the sky so that I can howl too. Hear her speak to me in the light of the full moon so that I can answer. Feel her there, in the shadows and in the light as I always have. Search for her footprints in the snow as you all spy on me from your perches high above. I can hear you laugh but I don’t care. I am on a search, not for you, not for yesterday, not for now but for the million days to come when my very soul will know the sweetness of her voice, the softness of her skin and the strength of her love.

Her love will be unrestrained one day, set free from a prison of fear created in a day and age when I did not exist except as some memory in her soul. My love will be unrestrained one day too, set free from a prison of my own making created in a day before I remembered her and sought her out. We will learn from each other and continue our searches for one another in the night. We will find each other in the cold winter’s night, and we will melt the snow in glorious ecstasy. Soon we will look back on this life we’ve lived together and remember the heat, the passion, the pain but mostly we will remember the love. Our final gift to one another will be love, and as we sink into old age together the single voices looking for each other on a cold winter’s night will howl as one in a testament of our beautiful journey.

Hate me if you will, oh voices of reason, for you have no place here in this forest. You have helped me stand again. You have helped me see the beauty and strength of me. Yet, I know those lessons learned were for those nights in the forest when I am searching for her in the most dangerous places I can go. You cannot know the fires within me that drive me onward, toward the only voice I wish to hear. You cannot feel the passion inside of my heart that keeps it beating when all things appear lost. You cannot know me as I know me, and you cannot know her as I know her. So escape now or be lost because I will not tolerate your vengeance. You will die when her lips touch mine, and you will be exiled from my mind as our bodies melt into one divine pool of ecstasy.

I have chosen. I will swim within her or I will drown in the effort. That’s trust. That’s faith. That’s the strength I needed to find. I will taste her again, we both know this to be true. She will know my strength and live from it as I know hers and crave it. She will see all of me, and she will know me to be real. Nothing is done here, we have unfinished business to attend to. Two beasts of the night howling at the moon searching, then finding, then knowing, and forever being. You want to know the truth I have found as I stood strong against the coldest winds and driving rain? There you have it.

So I growl. She knows that growl. I save it just for her. It’s there in the moon, in the stars, in Sun and in the entirety we see. My mouth froths at the very thought of her, and I bare my teeth in hopeful joy. My layers fall all around me as I near her and only she can see what’s there. She growls too as the dance resumes. Yeah, you know that dance my love. You can feel the steam coming off our bodies in the chill, you can feel the sweat pouring out of us in a raging torrent that floods everywhere. Only you know those things, and the sight of my Truth. Only you have seen it, only you know it, and I know you love what you see.

So, I’m coming for you. Howl not at the moon, not at the sky, but at me. Let me hear you, let me follow you wherever you may be. As the armor falls, as the weapons get lost in the snow and we find each other naked in the woods we both know how that story ends. Tell me, can you feel it? Of course you can, I can feel you throbbing in my entirety. Yeah, I can feel it, and I am coming.

Drop your defenses and open your arms. You will know my power and never need seek it again. I heard you in my dreams I am coming. Howl for me, let me feel the power in your soul as it rages in my ears. Let me bask in the heat of your passion as I follow your sound toward heaven. Yes, I am coming my love and I will meet you because I know that you are coming too.

The Rise of the Warrior

December 9, 2012 / Tom

In an instant you realize that you were a fool. A silly, unkempt, pathetic fool destined for the witless agony you now wallow in. You allowed it all to happen, and you sat still while you were prodded, poked and made to feel wrong in the process of finding out who and what you were. In that instant, you stop the tears as you slam your fist in the mud in the realization that you did nothing but accept the lies and deceit of a love lost in the conquest of something well beyond your grasp.

You then pick yourself up, mutter some curse that only you will recognize and find renewed strength in your muscles and resilience in your mind. You stand up, marvel at your nakedness, and wipe the mud from your body. You realize you hardly recognize the man who looks back at you in the mirror, and you shudder at the thought that you allowed this part of you to be silent while the softer part of you was ravaged and beaten by a foe you so wanted to love forever.

With disgust you clean yourself, and you find that suit of armor that once fit you so well. You don it with an oath that it will fit you again, and never again shall you discard it for some promise that was nothing more than the deceit of a weaker heart. You find your sword somewhere in the rubble, and you hold it up in front of you vowing never to part with it again. It feels good there, where it always was, and the weight in your hand tightens the muscles in your arms in a memory of a safe, secure and sure state of mind.

You sheath your weapon and look at the barren landscape all around you. The flowers you once longed to smell now have died, trampled beneath the feet of a fatal dance. The mango trees you once found safe harbor in lie broken and charred as an arid smoke rises from their battered stumps. You make your way down to the once fertile river’s edge only to find a dried and cracked riverbed. The river had lied – it would not provide you safety and it would not accept you in its flow unless you surrendered to it completely. Now, you only see tortured remnants that suggested it even existed at all, and with a certain amount of disgust you urinate where the clean water once had quenched your thirst.

There is no room here for that thirst. She will not quench it again. She has made certain of that. She was no warrior, no princess. Her idea of strength was retreat, and you are certain that she is lying to herself that the familiar acceptance of aloneness she now has made is somehow a sacrifice. She will be in another’s arms soon, she can’t help herself.

You accept your reality and you steady your mind. After days of debauchery and self-loathing you stand straight. You found power as you first planted your hands in the mud and made your way to your knees. You found strength in your legs as they raised you up from the slime. You found certainty in your anger as you wiped her dirt from your mind. Now, you find resolve in your heart as it becomes stone again and you take every vestige of her existence and burn it in a pyre made of every broken promise, every gentle word, and every phony request she made that you be who you are. Those lies burn easily, even if the memories do not as you hope the tears you shed now are the last ones you ever shed at the thought of her.

You take your knife and you slice a deep wound on your chest right where your heart should be. The pain reminds you that you are still alive even if you are not sure you want to be. The open wound reminds you that you once had a heart that beat loudly for your lover. Once…

Now, the echoes of her silence ring loudly as her final words bounce around your mind. You growl. Her words will not beat you this time. Her silence will not humble you as it has before. She knows this game all too well, and you will not be beaten by it. The scars created as her nails dug into your back will fade, and you will find new flesh to conquer. The sound of her whispers in your ear will be forced out, replaced by the ravaging sounds of a raging lion. Fuck her, you say silently, she proved unworthy of your greatness. She took you, slammed you down and rejected the best of you by falling in love with the worst of you.

She turned out to be a scared little girl unable to grow up. You soon followed her into her box and turned into a scared little boy unable to be the man you knew yourself to be. Imagine, a man having to be isolated because of some schoolgirl need to be special. Imagine a man having to be ignored and kept in the box because of some childish need to be the focus of attention. Imagine a man having to be kept away because of some impish need to protect something that does not exist. Imagine a master trying to teach a doubtful student that all of this is special, and that the lie did not exist in the behavior, but in the reaction to it as if the fire burning tender flesh should not be a reason to jerk the hand from the flame. No, she was never wrong, and her love of her box proved more than her love of a man who would have given anything to be with her.

Warriors should never become accustomed to the comforts of a woman’s soft breasts and tender touch. They are warning signs from hell telling the man to prepare to fight. Those lips will pierce your heart like a jagged dagger. Those breasts will choke your soul and drown you in a sea of your own misery. Those fingers that lightly touch your skin will one day wrap around your throat and choke the life out of you. Those loving words will one day drive you down into the mud and nearly kill you as dreams of your own demise dance around your head like a song you can’t forget.

And those eyes. Those eyes will be the death of you for sure. Look away my Warrior friend! Look away before the spell drives you deep into places you may never live to see your way out of. They are the gateways to both heaven and hell, the destination of which is determined by the woman who owns them.

Lessons learned. You know the only way to keep her from your heart is to encase it in stone. You realize the only way to keep her from hurting you any more is to find a rage that has been dormant. You see the only way to end the misery is to end the misery. “She’s not worth it” they say. “You are better than that” they say. “Forget her and move on” they say. “She had to be lying to you, no one is that weird” they say. “How could you have believed that?” they ask.

You sit back and you wonder. Is that voice within you that found nothing but love for her the voice you should be hearing? You believed her. You saw truth in her. She was worth your life, and she made you feel a greatness absent before her arrival. You can’t forget, and even now as she gives you no choice but to question it all you use their voices to find a strength that allows you to move beyond the darkness into at least something partially lit. Still, you do not believe them, but you call her way a lie because she has offered you nothing to suggest it was the truth. Nothing.

Fuck. Enough of this. You stand proud in your armor with your sword by your side. You move beyond the dust and mud and prepare for the night ahead. The dreams. You pray tonight they will be absent and you will find rest in the embrace of something that does not destroy you in the morning. Something wonderful. Something that reminds you of the way it should be.

She Says {Poetry}

December 9, 2012 / Tom

Yes, I know…she says

And I forgive you

I forgive the rashness of your passion

I forgive the deepness of your pain

And I am here…

Yes, I know…she says

And I love you

Despite the blood that trickles from your wounds

And the tears that stain my pillow

I am here…and I will never leave.

There is no place I’d rather be…she says

My lover, my Lion, my man

For I know you’d never leave me

Even as the words spill from your frothing mouth

I am here…you are loved.

You are my greatest joy…I say

And my deepest sorrow and will surely to be the death of me

I reach out to empty air

And wonder where you are and why the silence reigns

I am nowhere…

Do not worry, my love…she says

For I know you – all of you

I can see the beauty in our embrace

I can feel the power in our dance

I know the truth when you say nothing at all

And I am here…and I love you.

Then why can I not see you?…I say

Why is your soul no longer speaking to me?

Why am I alone in the silence of this hell

drowning in the salty sea of this sobbing heart

smelling nothing but my rotting flesh?

You can see me…she says

As the tears cross your eyes and the sobs escape your lips

I am there…right there

With each piece of your breaking heart that lands in the sea

I am there…the water itself.

And I say

Then as the night turns into day

And my mind is driven into the depths of hellish agony

I will drown here…in you…the sea of the only truth I’ve ever known

I am here…and I love you too.

Goodbye, my love…she says.