The Courage of the Voyager

To venture forward on the voyage of love is courage.  The moment you hoist the sails and embark on your journey, you have doomed what you were.

You have killed yourself.

The person you thought you were will cease to exist

The stone floor will scrape your knees

where you fall. And you will bleed.

The trust that you carry hidden deep within your heart will be placed into the hands of another

You will become better than you knew, as pieces of you die. Parts of your armor will clang and clatter to the ground leaving you naked and exposed

Passion heat can ignite a burning inferno, but nothing blisters and scars like silence.

Yet beyond the winter of extremes

Having torn the skin from the knuckles as you climb over insecurities

you will stand...

something new

something stronger

and maybe something smarter

Or more compassionate than you ever were before.

OR,

you will have turned back at the first sign of trouble.

and the person you once were will still be dead, leaving you embittered, fragmented, despondent, and broken.

So be courageous

See what is before you, not as the end of your self that you know,

but the opportunity for new life to burst forth from what you are. Let love build you anew

Destruction of a Seed

 Romance is aborted before it is given the

chance to be carried to term. New life, surgically removed by those whom think that the world is better off without what two people conceived.

Staggering statistics mount higher and higher as the love people have for one another grows colder and colder.

Love is seen as just a sense of cells in sorts. A byproduct of chemical reactions. Love has become all science and no soul. The reality is so very underplayed. With every procedure there are complications. Scars. Scars that are carried on in the lives of those involved forever. Romance is like a new born child. It is majestic and wonderful from the moment it enters the world. Its messy, but also beautiful. It grows, if given the opportunity. It is difficult, and it is painful, it is fragile. It changes can connect two people together, and change them forever. It can inspire them to become something so far beyond themselves.

Romance is sacrifice. Romance is a learning process. Romance is a form of life.

The destruction of a seed has moved all the way to the source... Love. If you can thwart that then generations will never come to be.

Honestly

"Where are you? Where are you honestly?

In a state of emotional vulnerability and spiritual awareness of war. In my depressive state I haven't had much energy to leave the house too often, which is a problem seeing as how living with my parents constant criticism is an agitant. The Isolation, occasionally intentional, sometimes unintentional,  isn't effective for recuperation as the only time that I am really truly physically alone is when I am in the bathroom or in my car on the way to work. I've read your question a few times over the past two hours and wondered how to really answer it. The emphases being on the honesty, and perhaps, this explanation is a bit too honest... but really did you expect me to lie?  Is omittion deceit? are the statements a man makes though completely true, but not truly complete, qualify as a lie? 

I thought long about your question. I'm reminded of God and Adam in the garden, where God asks him something of the same. I'm like Adam. Lost in a familiar place, with a bitten apple, trying to cough up the poison of death. I weigh the cost of life, the spiritual kind, and I look around at all the people that have someone that they can be vulnerable with. I think back to Adam in the garden and how he wasn't deceived when he bit the apple. He followed the woman. HE chose death with his bride. It was almost a noble rebellion. A romantic failure that doomed all man kind. Yet, in his death, there was a promise of a redeemer to redeem all of creation from death... A redemption of a bride.  In those moments, of choice... where he held that apple, both alive and dead in the same moment.. I wonder if he thought about all the times he was alone before God gave him a woman. How much time was spent just him and God, before God said "It isn't good for man to be alone"  And in that sin, God asked "where are you adam" and he had hid because of his shame and his awareness of all that constitutes evil. I wonder how he felt in that moment, standing there cowering with heaviness of his choices. Then again, maybe I'm not like adam. Maybe my choice for sin isn't romantic or noble but steps from a selfishness. A rebellion that we all have in our hearts, you know. The dichotomous heart that is part stone, and part flesh with the commands of God written on them.  So, I struggle with these things, the matters of light and darkness, life and death, good and evil, hope and anguish, sin and redemption, obedience and rebellion, grace and truth... and I fight them to concerts of criticisms with the occasional applause breaks of love. I watch as people wax and wane with waves of self centered focus and sacrificial giving , and I wonder where at any given moment I am in comparison or relation. Am I giving of my self to the point that I am satisfied, while still maintaining healthy boundaries within the scope of what I can take? Reflecting on how streight and narrow the path of the streight and narrow goes, you know. 

I haven't been to church because I've been working.

Knives Out

 Sometimes I think we're born like a hunk of wood. Just a piece of life cut from the wholeness of the tree. That is how we sit until someone, or a group of people take their knives and drive it beneath our bark, pulling away the things that we feel we are protected by. They whittle away our leaves, each one saying to another, that there should be more marks here, or less coarseness there. They scrape away at you with their etching tools and the cutting devices... until you fit some form, a rough image of what they have desired all along. Some of us are born like Balsa. Some of us are as defiant as oak.

A Very Distant Shore

 

I knew she was there.

I turned around and I saw the beach. Where the white foam of the ocean would wrap itself around rocks and caress the face of the sand.

She was barefoot, I could tell. There was a steady, evenly paced trail behind her with indentations and toe marks all set in rows.

She wore black form fitting leggings, a white undershirt and a pink t-shirt.

My eyes saw her as she was walking to the water. She had a look of confusion about her, as if she was walking in a daze. Her nose was turned slightly upwards and she stared off into the distance as if she was listening to a song no one else could hear.

I had known she was there. I can always sense her. I felt her presence.

I can see her walking to the water, and I know, she isn't about to stop. She's about to drown, under the enchantment of some unseen delusion.

It isn't like the other times, When the beast man was chasing her. In the other ways, I would die so that she could escape and live. In this the darkness was not palpable like before. It was wispy and subtle.

My feet held their position at the moment my heart recognized the urgency of the situation. My mind summoned my voice, but it was caged too deep within me. I needed to call out a warning to her, but there was none to call. My hands stretched outwards trying to reach a place beyond my grasp. I parted my lips as drew in the breath that might free my words and I called for their utterance from my mouth....

...and my eyes opened, and I was staring blankly at the textured ceiling in my room.

...and play through scenes I'd never lived, in places I should have been, in protection could not give.Where threats echoed through pride cracked bonds of friendship, and family, and love.

...As blink my eyes awake, I think of the truth that love endures all things.

Foremost being, the weight and cost of itself.

The Weight of Words

As the night air shows the vapor in my breath I contemplate the weight of words. How light some of them are in certain hands and how heavy they can be on some hearts. How meaningless a simple word can be to someone, and how one rightly timed word can mean the world to another. Utterances convey thoughts, the birth of ideas, impregnated with emotions. The calloused words people defend with. The trembling words people profess.

As I sip chai tea I think of the culmination of words yet to be expressed, like an undiagnosed condition. All of the "I want you-s" or the "I'm sorry-s". Beyond the subtext there are words that float as leaves among the wind, hanging in the air. All of those "can we-s" and "would you like to-s" gathering in the corners of the streets and trampled along sidewalks.

I think of the price of promises, uttered in haste, in vanity and poise. There is a look a person gets when they realize that they are not who they thought they were. I'v come to believe the best way to tell someone you care for them is to care for them. That is the best "I love you-s", having been spoken boldly with conviction and truth. Showing up is poetry. To be there is a velvet voiced song.

"Deed, not words shall speak me" - John Fletcher

The War of Worlds

.

Tension builds within. The tensions mount without. In my innermost desire I yearn for the American dream. A simple house that is enough, and a lot of land that separates the peace within and the chaos without. I can see my dream washed in golden light, scintillating and bathed in radiance. I can see the red blood contrasted the pure white, from the sucking stab wound of governance. My desire for solitary peace unmolested by bureaucratic dominance has been held captive by the all consuming predatory machine. The freedom I long for within, is at odds with the monster without. I can feel the air fill my lungs within. I can feel the anger over my skin without. The sleepless nights, and the sleepless days, spent building the empires of another. The line between indentured service and slavery indicates that there is somewhere someone can go.

My dreams seem so distant and fanciful though I know in the deepest parts of my heart that they're footed in plausibility. Like a fable involving some talking mouse inspired to teach some parable, the elements are real, but it still feels like slavery. I speak to God on the issue of my oppression. My cage is adorned with decadence, like a canary held near the window watching the other birds fly. I watch as the others rise up to play and like Ballam, I envy them in a sense. The soul within, contends with the flesh without. The desires to be known and to know, and to hold and held with the fullness of trust and honesty... its marred by death and history. I am a broken mind and a broken body. I am a strong will armoured in rusted plate. A relic of an old time, forged in young bones. Tired within, tired without.