Category: Short Stories (Page 28 of 46)

How can I go another minute without kissing you? How can I refrain from hugging you, from tasting you, from feeling your warmth against my skin?

How can I remain still when the Universe is quaking all around me? How can I look at my empty hand and feign a smile? How can I find my rest when there seems so much to do?

To the fears I cannot censor, I raise my golden chalice. To the courage I cannot seem to muster, I utter a silent prayer. To them, I am just me.

I am discomfort’s sapling.

Lost, like a puppy dropped off in an unfamiliar place, inundated with newness, crippled in awe, cowering in an unfamiliar corner of my mind.

Found, like a man left on the shores of some deserted island, with no one to know but himself, with no songs to sing outside the ones ingrained in his own mind. There is so much to discover here, yet no one to share it with.

I reach out to the stars, they only stare back.

“Happiness (is) only real when shared.” ~Christopher McCandless

And so it goes. One set of footprints in the sand, with only the gulls to hear my laughter. I swear they’re laughing back at me.

I am not alone. I am with me, the rest of you are just illusions. I love the way you feel, the way you move in and out of my reality, but there has always only been one set of footprints in the sand that doesn’t really exist.

I’ve created the sound of the waves as a peaceful song in my mind to calm my wild beast. I’ve created such wonder in my heart as to wish you here, believing that the taste of your lips and the beat of your heart will somehow fill the gaps in the music I’ve created.

Another stanza, another verse. So the beat goes on.

I sit here, nearly naked, allowing the winter Sun to beat down on my longing skin through a giant window. It’s hot, almost unbearably so, but the discomfort creates some space for my vision to grow into the words I type.  This part of me I share, this part of me that is like the Sun, is that part of me I have not created but allow to be. I can’t imagine life without such a creation, without such space, without the tortured seeds that burn deep within me.

Maybe you are there and I am here because it’s the space itself we need to create this dream. Maybe if we were any closer we’d burn out. Maybe any further and we’d face a frozen death. Maybe I can’t count on the gravity of love to pull you closer. Maybe I should just be grateful you exist at all.

“Even after all this time, the Sun never says to the Earth, ‘You owe me.’ Look what happens with a love like that. It lights the whole sky.” ~Hafiz

Maybe the demand that you fill my hand and kiss my lips is too much for this universe to bear. Maybe the skies would burn and the sands would turn to broken glass upon our union. Maybe Venus was not meant to touch the skin of Mars, she was only meant to touch his heart and to tease his holy senses alive. Maybe the earth that separated them was meant to keep creation alive.

Perhaps, in time, wonders will cease to amaze me. Maybe the endless debate with mindless minions living in their past will end as I bathe in my own present moment. Perhaps my imagination will no longer be boggled, and my heart will no longer cry out any one name.

It seems right in its wrongness. It seems sharp like the blade of a well-honed axe. It will cut, I am sure, but to which trees do I choose to apply its mission? Which wood will I choose to burn?

Perhaps it’s not a choice at all. Perhaps its just a function of our Universal reality.

Love, I will leave this to you. I will do a better job of listening, of hearing that melody through the madness. I will see the patience in the lines you have drawn and the vision of the truthful shadows you have created on the canvas all around us. I will pay attention, I swear it as a sacred oath, and I will head your solemn vows.

Time for stillness, for a group hug with those whose arms are open. I simply have no other answer.

 

So, yesterday I answered my first fire call in three months. It wasn’t but the end of October I believed that I would never respond to another call again. So, as usual, I had a realization in the response, and a lesson learned.

I’ve been responding to all kinds of emergencies for the better part of 23 years as a volunteer firefighter, EMT, rescue dude, etc. I had begun to take it all for granted, and had lost sight of the very special nature by which all responders do their thing.

Yesterday, I didn’t take the putting on of my turnouts for granted. I didn’t take the sounds or the lights or the brothers in the rig for granted. It was all so freaking special, so I slowed time down as best I could.

Yes, fire trucks have a distinctive sound, a guttural growl if you will. It sounds different from the inside, as it should, as if those of us who enter the bowels of the beast are graced with a different song than the rest of mankind. Then there are the lights and sirens…and yes, they sound different on the inside, too.

Yesterday brought back a pretty cool memory. When I was a kid, my step-grandmother (whom we called “Nana”) used to burn the tall weeds that stood about 50 feet from her small brick home. When they were burned to her liking, I got to put out the fire with a garden hose. I used to love that, which reinforced my desire to, one day, put fires out in much larger arenas.

Yesterday’s call was a grass fire that was close to someone’s house, which was out before we arrived. We had to pull a line off the truck to wet down the area, and I had an instant flashback to Nana’s house and those weeds. I felt the “coolness” of working the nozzle like when I was a kid, and again the realization that this time, I was in my gear doing what few people get to do. I get to satisfy my desire to help others and to feel the rush of excitement when we answer a call.

And yes, I was a bit excited getting to work the line. I felt alive, and a bit emotional in doing something I have done countless times before. The routine no longer seemed routine, the mundane came alive in excitement.

When we got back to the station, I stayed back to help the engineer fill the tank. I wanted to do all of the things I would have left to newer members before. Hell, I even rolled the hose back up and put it in its proper place. Where is newbie when you need one? 🙂

Sometimes, it seems, the renewal of that love of living takes us back to the beginning of things. That’s where the real zest is shown, a zest that is sometimes blunted by time and experience. Yet when you almost lose something you have always felt called to do, that zest becomes razor sharp again.

I’ve realized that I have been certainly blessed in my life. I’ve love and lost, felt the enormity of suffering and the bliss of relief. I’ve experienced the excitement of a kid in something that seems so awesome become routine, and I’ve experienced a renewal and rebirth not in the dramatic need for faith, but in the real desire to LIVE.

Someone once said something to the effect that to truly live is to see each sunrise like a newborn baby, as if each one is seen for the very first time. I can tell that master nearly lost everything once, and then realized how precious each moment truly is. Even the most mundane are special, they were once very extraordinary.

So, when someone now tells me about my fire service career, “you certainly have a lot of experience” I can smile knowing they don’t know that half of it. Part of me is relieved they don’t, it took a lot of tough times to get here. Yet, part of me is wishing they did. It is that freaking awesome.

Peace.

 

I wasn’t always this way, but the last portion of my life has involved tree hugging. Lots of tree hugging.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t hug a tree as often as I’d like. In fact, I miss hugging trees more often than I actually hug them. Maybe it is high time I change that. In fact, there is a dogwood in the back yard that seems to need a hug.

The best part about hugging trees is that they always hug back. Always. Even when they are near the end of their life they find the strength to embrace whomever asks for a hug. They won’t question your need, or look at you strangely, or doubt your motivations. They’ll just accept, and give.

I love those wise, old bastards who just sit there, allowing. They grow in the direction nature pushes them. They’ll bend, and sometimes break, in the breeze; often issuing little testaments of gratitude in the rustling leaves or the splintered sounds of being broken wide open. They’ll sometimes fall to the ground and never try to get back up. Instead, they’ll hug the ground and understand that this place, too, is worth hugging.

I’ve never heard a tree try to pretend it is a man, or a deer, or some other being judged “better”. They never try to outdo their neighbors, or appear “prettier” in some state of meaningless competition. Oak tress don’t try to be pine trees. Pine trees don’t try to be birch trees. Trees are too busy being trees, too in love with being who they are to be anything else. They love their leaves, their branches, and their experience too much to be anything other than who they are. Everything about them is good enough.

Maybe that is why trees aren’t afraid to hug. You aren’t their competition, and they realize that you can always change your mind.

Trees are rooted firmly in the Earth even as they reach for the heavens. They adore the firmness of the ground even as they bask in the liberation of open air.

Trees love the sun and rain equally. Their dance remains the same regardless of the weather, as if to say “There is beauty even in the rainy days.” What’s not to love about such even temperedness?

Trees don’t complain about the change of seasons. Those who lose their leaves in autumn do so with a splendid display of loving beauty, never taking issue with the impermanence of it all. Even as those trees cry lovely tears of orange, and red, and mixtures in between, those tears lay perfectly upon the ground made hard by winter’s edge, softening that ground, making it a bit easier to tread.

Best of all you don’t even need arms to hug a tree. You simply need to walk among them and pay attention. Raise your level of awareness when in their home, and you will realize the reality of the truth you were born with. Sometimes the best hugs are offered in just being present, in receiving the presence of others while giving freely of yourself.

Trees do that. They will bask in your peaceful presence just as they will listen quite acceptingly to your lamentations. They will always accept what you bring to them, and they will always be giving of themselves if only you are open to accepting.

That’s why I’ve become a tree hugger in my later years. It feels good to hug a tree. They remind me of a place within me just like them. Peaceful. Stoic. Strong. Flexible. Accepting. I like being reminded of those things, even when the world is trying to cut me down for lumber.

Take a walk…and hug a tree. You will be glad you did.

I just reviewed what I had wished for in 2014. At first, I chuckled at the things I had scribbled down late last year. I looked at the rather short list and snorted in an all-too-familiar human way, thinking about how far off what I received from what I asked for was.

Then, I heard my son and daughter laughing at something in the next room. It gave me pause, and offered me a chance to reflect on what I had truly been given in 2014.

Here is the very short list I compiled at the end of a very tough 2013 detailing my requests for the coming year:

• Love
• Security
• Health
• Peace.

See, this is your generic spiritually active guy’s list. It stays pretty general, but does offer what I see as a non-greedy request of the Universe for things that could make this life a bit more enjoyable, this experience a bit more blissful. they are certainly in line with the life I wish to live.

Yet, when I reviewed these requests a few moments ago, I scoffed. I still have not met the love of my life. My life seems to be chaotic with no real clear sense of direction. My health is in shambles, having had both congestive heart failure and a stroke in 2014.

So, it seems that 2014 was a failure as that list goes. Yet, I am readily able to suggest that I have found one thing on the list that I achieved in 2014, and that is peace.

Yes, peace. I feel more at peace in my life despite the turmoil than I ever have. Despite the ailments, the uncertainty and chaos, I feel more at peace now than I ever have.

That peace allowed me to be quiet enough in my reaction to hear my children laughing in the next room. Then came the realization.

I had gotten everything I had asked for.

Love

While I have not physically met the “she’s perfect for me and I want to be with her for the rest of my life” partner, I have found love in many ways. I will say that when you feel close to death not once, but twice over the course of a few months, you begin to see things differently. Very differently.

First, I say I have not “met” that love. She’s there, though, and I know her. I write about her, and I speak to her often. She’s coming, that is clear, I just need to continue to be patient and be open to the possibilities.

Love, though, is all around me. It was in the health care professionals who cared for me. It was in the friends who stepped up and helped me despite my attempts to “take it on my own.” It was in the kids who missed me, the cats who suddenly lay with me, and in the reaction of those who read my writing. It’s in the sounds of the waves for which I never grow tired, and the idea of the mountains I will climb with my little ones one day.

Love is in the loss of friends who no longer serve a positive purpose, making room for those who will. It’s in the constant change I use to fear that now I accept, and in the new-found acceptance of my own mortality. It’s in the acceptance of me, the love I have for myself, which is something I never fully realized until this year.

Yes, 2014 brought me lots of love. Just not in the way I had thought I wanted it.

Security

On the face of it, my life looks like everything but secure. For reasons I can’t really share right now, my life seems like one chaotic, uncertain mess. Yet, I have never felt more secure. Things are happening around me that provide me with comfort even through the chaos.

I once thought security meant a good-paying job in a sound market with no one getting in my way. I once thought making money was the way to security, and that the more I owned the more secure I was.

Today, after another tough year, I find security in simplicity. I see it as only having what I need, and needing what I have. I find security in the cuddles of my children, and the voice from within that just knows I am on the right path. I care less about what others think and find more comfort from within than ever before.

So, while 2014 didn’t offer me a lot of traditional security, it did provide me with the type of security that isn’t dependent on the whims of others, and that is certainly much more than I bargained for.

I’ve developed an inner strength I never had before. A confidence that I have never experienced in my life, and a courage that has never been matched. That, my friends, is real security.

Health

This is the most perplexing one. I had simply written “Health” on my little sheet of paper.

Yet, the answer to this provided me with every answer to every request I had made.

Six months after putting this list together, I was in the hospital with congestive heart failure brought on by malignant hypertension. Fluid had suddenly built up in my lungs during physical exertion and I couldn’t breathe. A friend rushed me to the Emergency Room.

For a man who is used to finding calm and serenity through breathing, not being able to breathe was more than frightening. I was gargling, coughing up large amounts of fluid, and unable to catch my breath.

Whenever I’ve felt fear, whether it was while working a house fire, or dealing with something while SCUBA diving, or climbing a ladder (I have a real fear of falling), breathing would bring me serenity. I learned that as a child, “just breathe” and I could get through anything.

So, when I couldn’t breathe, well you can imagine what that did. It seemed high blood pressure, that “silent killer” you hear so much about, had decided not to be so silent anymore. It nearly killed me.

Yet, I was released from the hospital with a prognosis that suggested with management of my blood pressure, I would make a full recovery and my heart would return to normal. I was quickly weaning off of the drugs they put me on as my body responded well to treatment, including eating a low-sodium diet. I was down to one pill a day within a month, much better than the 7 I started out with.

I’ll be the first to admit I am a horrible dietitian. Don’t get me wrong, I understand what I should be eating, but I’m horrible at eating it a majority of the time. Maybe it’s because I can burn water in the kitchen, and frequently have to ventilate the house after making dinner. Yet, I was on the right track, and I was really trying.

Then came the end of October. It seems that a small clot had traveled to a part of my brain called the cerebellum. I spent 24 hours feeling vertigo, and believed I was getting sick or some kind of ear infection. Then the numbness in my face began, and I lost control of the left side of my body. I might have “poked your eye out with that thing” if I was trying to shake your hand. I had no control.

I knew what was going on, and we got to the hospital quickly. The hospital seemed to think I was having a heart attack, and kept asking me “how bad is the pain in your chest?”

“I can’t tell, it’s numb,” I’d answer sarcastically until, finally, they got the hint.

“Code CVA” was what I heard shortly thereafter through the hospitals PA system, and I knew that was for me.

Soon, I was in a hospital that specialized in strokes, and from there my recovery was remarkable. I was provided contrast. Other people with strokes similar to mine were stuck with feeding tubes, unable to swallow. Some were bedridden with no balance, or ability to control their extremities.

Others were unable to see, their optic nerves completely disabled by the damage to their brain.

Yes, I got lucky.

When I first was asked to sit up, I couldn’t. I listed hard to the left. I had no sense of direction, no ability to tell left from right. My eyes were going haywire, unable to focus on anything at all. I just kept them closed, and listened to my first Eagles (that’s American football for those of you who don’t know) game with my eyes shut and my team losing. How dare they!

Within a week my eyes were getting better, and I was able to walk with much assistance. Within a week of that, I was able to climb stairs, with some assistance. I was discharged from rehab and sent on my way.

Today, I still struggle with dizziness and eye issues. Yet, I can walk for miles, work out to some degree, and have started developing my stamina again. I have new sense of how important my choices are, and how much I love to live this life.

Seems like I didn’t get my health, right? Well, the jury may be still out on this one, but I’d say I may have gotten exactly what I asked for.

Today, I make better food choices, and value my walks on the beach more than ever. I have regained my love of fruits and vegetables. I have a new understanding of my own body, and listen to it more than ever. I value my physical strength, and have made friends with the inner strength that has helped me through it all.

So, I’d say I have gotten my health request answered. Not just for now, but in the very long term.

In the loss of my health in 2014, I regained my sense of peace, my feeling of security, and discovered love all around me. In the gaining of those things I have regained my health. It’s been a beautiful cycle.

Now I see how I got exactly what I asked for even if I didn’t get it the way I thought I would. What have I asked for the coming year? Well, that list will be a secret until the end of next year but I assure you that I have a feeling I’ve already received most of it. We’ll see at the end of next year, if that ever comes, but until then just know that I realize that I will get what I ask for, just perhaps not in the way I expect it to be given.

See, I know now that what I ask for isn’t actually a statement of what I want, but rather a statement of what I feel I lack. Once I realize that there is little I lack, the list not only grows smaller, but also becomes inconsequential. It becomes a meaningless exercise in focus on what I don’t believe I have, instead of taking note of the things I’ve been truly blessed with.

So…off I go with my short list into the great beyond. Maybe.

 

I struggle, at times, to hear your voice, although I know it is never far my troubled ears.

I can remember those soul-filled vibrations that once rippled through my soul. I can remember closing my eyes, as if they were some new-age arms that would embrace your words, each demanding syllable, and never let them go. I can remember the warmth in the songs you sang, in the prayers you issued, and in the demands you offered that were somehow supposed to save me.

I can remember them all, yet I cannot hear your voice.

I recall the urgency in your pleas, the desperation in your tone. I can almost touch the drama in the space we shared, and I can almost feel the fear of loss shaking me to oaths I could never meet, rousing me to great heights of failure. I can recall the ice-cold feel of your touch, the horrible demands for something that neither of us could ever feel. I can recall the lonely testaments of love, and the protestations of eternity as the hangman’s noose slipped suredly around forever’s neck.

It seems even eternity has a grave somewhere.  Even forever has a tombstone.

Yet despite the finality of the end, we were once there, together. Despite the promises of our shallow pits and weakness of our lazy knots, we were bound once in great certainty. Despite the broken oaths and great risk of failure even we, once, thought of eternity as nothing more than certain.

And even though we had fought our battles, and waged our wars, with words as our swords and love as our sacred battleground, I cannot remember your voice. I cannot hear your spoken battle cries, even as I wince as words flow out of others. I can no longer feel the raised protrusions of wounds on my skin even if I can feel the stiffness of their scars. I can no longer relish in the fools’ folly of promising wine from water, for I have sworn an oath to let water be good enough.

I bid you a fond farewell, my old soul. I welcome you to whatever paradise you’ve found not through my own extended hand, but through the hand much sturdier extended by a love more suitable to your liking. It is time, I say to you, to have our own flowers bloom and our own fields tilled by plows much better suited for the task.

It is in such liberation that we give another the promises of eternity we could never offer ourselves. It is in such potential that we find in others that we could never find in us. It is now we part, never to be whole, together, again.

Peace.

Dearest Love,

I want to go on a hike with you this morning. I want us to put our feet on the lonely path, where only silent trees and dampened leaves can hear our banter. I want to hold your hand steadily when crossing frigid waters on wavering fallen trees, and I want your voice to steady me when scaling the shaky climb. I want to hear the twigs crackle beneath your feet, and I want to stop with you when you find something you wish to cherish.  I want to share with you my own sense of marvel, of miracle, and of life.

I don’t want to know our destination. I just want to arrive there with you. I want to see new and familiar views with you by my side. I want to hear the awe on your voice when nature provides its miracle, and feel the twitch of your hand when see things that your heart just screams with joy. I want to hear the love in your songs as we beat a path through the newness, and hear the truth in your words as you describe to me all that you see.

I want to rest with you in the most comfortable of places. Even the rigid stones of rocky fields will succumb to our journey. I want to lie with you under the Sun, and cuddle with you under the blanket of a starry night. I want to make love to you by a campfire with such intensity that it seeks warmth from us. I want nature to see us, for even the most loving of creations could use a reminder that man has not always forgotten his place among the trees.

I never want to leave this path with you. I want to hike the trail for as long as my legs will carry me, and then I just may crawl some. I want to drink from the bottomless cup, find warmth in the infinite fire that has always burned within us. I want to cry with you, laugh with you, and know we share the same earth on our feet and same air in our lungs even if we have not always shared the same footprint.

Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere. They’re in each other all along. ~Rumi

We’ll carve that in a tree somewhere, a tree that begs us for the treasure. We’ll get all dirty in the process, and then wash each other in the warm, clear spring that can’t help but invite us in. I’ll watch you play under that waterfall until I can’t watch any more, and I have to play with you too. I’ll hold you firmly there, watching both the Sun and the Moon tease me in your loving eyes, and I will have no choice but to taste your waiting lips.

Yes, my Love. I want to go on a hike with you this morning. A long hike. A lifetime of footfalls and hand holds, of muddy stumbles and cleansing baths. of making love in places most would not dare to go. I welcome your embrace, your stare, your gently bitten lip, your jostled hair, your strength and your weakness. I long for your voice, your labored moans under the most pleasurable of effort.

I’m waiting for the one I already know, patiently and impatiently at the same time. I want you to hurry but at your own pace, I want you to arrive but not before you are ready.

Then we’ll begin. Not on the trail head of our journey, but on the trail head of the journey that is us.  What a long hike that will be.

 

I heard it somewhere before. The sound had escaped my memory, but it could not escape each cell of my body as it reacted to it. Yes, I had heard it somewhere before.

She spoke to me like she had spoken to me a million times before. There were no awkward pauses, no uncertain grasps and inane commentary that made even stoic minds like ours seem awkward. Every word, every question and every response seemed to flow naturally like the script itself had not only been written long ago, but rehearsed countless times before now.

Yet I could not remember. This was our first conversation, regardless of how natural it all seemed. I was sure of it. I savored every morsel like a child taking his first bite of a sweet fruit. I tasted every letter, held in suspense every word until the next arrived, and responded like it was all just meant to be.

I caved in that moment. Or fell. Whatever you wish to call it, it happened to me during that conversation. I was happy, and she was basking in that glow as if she had found her home there.

That conversation ended sometime around the moment the sun rose. Neither of us had realized just how long we had been talking, but we both knew that it couldn’t, or wouldn’t, be the last time we’d whittle away the morning darkness together. At some point we’d carved out a path for the Sun, and at some point the warmth had blanketed us with such a knowing that we had no choice but to surrender.

Connection between humans Being is a remarkable thing. Sometimes it is like fine art, taking its time to arrive and make itself known. Others, it is born in an instant, creating neither sinners nor saints in the process of its own divine creation. We are all beings of multiple connections, sometimes connected to memories, sometimes to hope, others to now. Yet when another soul enters our space, we are faced with a dilemma.

There, our question, our choice, will always be which connection we choose to honor – the connection to our past where the scars formed and old fear returns, or the connection to this moment, where two old souls newly mated watch the Sun rise in full surrender and complete realization.

Warriors honor their days by valuing their nights, and honor their nights by not wasting their days. While I will not grab a rose by its thorn in honor of the blood once shed doing so, I will not hesitate to seize this moment in deliberate understanding, and I will not hesitate to bend my knee to breathe in its sweet fragrance.

That is, after all, our own unique circles of life where pain gives way to joy, where a wildfires’ destruction makes way for new forests; the sand washes away to form new beaches, and mountains erode to give us a better view of the rising Sun.

We are such remarkable beings of enormous possibility. In the moment where memory fails to recall this angel’s voice now soothing my tired ears, my heart remembers her and my soul recognizes the enormous potential in the encounter. In that short moment before the mind adds its requirements, its rules, and its games to this fine reenactment of love, we both remember what it was like to roam free in open fields, hand-in-hand, laughing about nothing and everything at the same time. In that flicker of light before the curtains are closed, the innocence returns and love is all there is. There, in that small space of remembrance, we can be who we were before we learned to get in our own way, and we can enjoy the sliver of light cresting above our lover’s horizon.

There, there are no crowds to please, no stories to tell, no judgments to question. We are like babes in the cradle again, and we are as pure as we have ever been.

There, I found I loved her. There, she found she loved me, and there is where it all started. Our story, the only one worth telling.