Author: Tom (Page 42 of 71)

I love you. I know it in everything. I know it in nothing. I know it in moments of great chaos, and in moments of complete serenity.

I love you. You may not see it at all. You may not feel its power coursing through your Being. You may not know its peace, its acceptance, or its complete surrender.

In the dream we appear separate, but we are not, my love. We swim in the same vast ocean and dance in the same rain. We bask in the glow of the same Sun, and wish upon the same sea of stars. We tread upon the same sand and sleep in the same wilderness as we feel the same chilly air and wipe the same morning dew off our skin.

We are bound by the inexplicable and a sacred chastity for which we were made. We drink from the same wooden chalice, yet we taste different things from our one, true cup. We hear the same song, yet move to rhythms heard by different ears and translated by different minds. We are together even as much as we are apart. We are One even as much as we are completely different.

It is there, in the place exposed as we discard the layers of taste, of sound, of thought, that I love you. It is on that wonderful universal blank canvas that is adorned by all you are that I find the most beautiful artistry. In that field, gently tilled by a stilled mind and open heart, that I find my greatest power to embrace the parts of you that exist outside of who I think you are.

You are wonderfully recalled in the smiles of my stillness. You are beautifully thought of in the light that blinds my human eyes. You are vilified, denounced, and contested with the same energy that brings you into my arms.

I am easily discarded by you. Perhaps. I am easily forgotten by you in the throes of human pleasure. Maybe. I am simply a part of the tree; a twig, a leaf, a branch bouncing in the breeze.

In our minds we are the tree, yet in our truth we are so much more. There is no tree without the mystery, and it is in that mystery that you and I vanish toward the truth of who we are. We are not you, or me. We are not us, or them. We are. There is nothing more.

There is where I love you. Right there. To love you there is to love me there, for there is no difference. To feel you there is to feel me there, for we are all the same. To seek you there is to find myself, and to know you there is to know who I am without question.

You are not the leaf and I am not the branch. We are not even the tree. We are that which makes the tree One. We are that indescribable essence that takes the many and makes them whole. We are heavy, and we are weightless. We are free and we are shackled to our cause. We are stick and stone and every broken bone between them. We are the Universe, we are everything we’ve ever seen and nothing that we’ve ever known before.

I love you. Know that even as I throw my heavy stone in your direction.

I love you. Know that even as you watch me walk away.

I love you. Know that even as I drive my human experience over every cliff I find.

I love you. Know that even as you cast your words of anger at me, and respond with fires of my own.

I love you. Know that even as you convince yourself you hate me, and you discard me into the fires of your well-fueled melancholy.

And you love me, my dear. Even when you can’t stand the thought of me, you love me. Even when you can’t bear to think of me in the heat of your nightly game, you love me. Even when you are done, walking east to my west, I know that special place where you love me.

In loving myself I have found you. In that journey I have found myself. In that destination I have found the truth. In that journey I have found great purpose.

The trail of your tears are not the destination. They are the path. The beats of your heart are not the song, the silence between them is. The moments of happiness are not the mountains that must be climbed, the gaps between them is. The painted ideas of adoration and hate, fear and anger, honesty and consequence are not examples of love’s great truth, the canvas that allows for their experience is. You are the artist that paints your truth, it is love that accepts your brushstrokes.

Greatness is in simplicity, and confusion reigns in the masses distorted by conditioned, complicated realities. Beyond those, what greatness we will find.

Sometimes I just want to scream, to lie down on a soft space and let it all go…

It’s been a fight, an enormous struggle for the last 4 years. I’ve wanted to just say “fuck it” and let everything crumble, yet the fighter in me just can’t lie down in surrender to the shit storms I’ve experienced. I just growl, tighten my chin strap, and move forward.

I rarely complain about it. I rarely tell anyone about the struggles. I rarely dive into the self-pity that such things can provide, and I rarely make my way behind the shadows that seem to sometime surround me. I stand up, growl, and get ready for the fight. it’s been like that my entire life.

Yet, I’m tired. So tired. I’ve not known a real respite from the struggle. I’ve not felt complete peace in my life. I’ve not experienced the type of joy that spreads out beyond the small pockets of happy moments. There’s always been something.

I realize I am a master of me. I’ve chosen to need certain things in my life. I’ve chosen to adopt a certain paradigm in this existence. I’ve made agreements that make these things necessary, and ending those agreements just doesn’t seem possible.

So, I suffer. My body breaks down, the muscles constantly tense, the energy constantly wound into small balls in my back. My mind worries. I look at my children and hope for so much more. I want memories with them. I want their smiles and their laughter. I want them to have “remember whens” after I am long gone back to the dust from whence I came.

Things. This existence seems all about things. When does it all end?

I know, when i decide it ends. When I decide I’ve had enough. I decide when the old agreements need redoing. I am the Master.

I look back on the pathways I’ve walked. So much change has occurred there. I am nothing like I was, yet I am much more me than I’ve ever been. I’ve not been “fixed”, there was nothing ever broken. Things had to be, they had to happen the way they happened. Now, I scratch and claw to climb out of the holes I’ve dug, and I realize I will never get to this place again.

I will not dig myself into a hole. I will not be someone’s pet project. I will not succumb to the whims of the voices I was taught to hear. I will not fill my arms with empty potential, with angry rocks I can use to throw at myself.

There have been people who have helped out as I’ve walked along the way. There has been so much love shown there, so much understanding and acceptance. For the most part, though, I’ve been an island unto myself. I am here, just me usually, throwing punches at the shadows and slipping counters only I can see. Yes, they are invisible to most, but I can see them. And they sting when they land, especially since it seems I rarely land any shots of my own.

Not that I need many. When i land, I land good. When i miss, I miss just as good, and I stumble around like some punch-drunk has been who has fought for way too long.

Well, I know where I need to be, and what I need to do. Now that this rant is over, it’s time to get back to the business at hand. Surviving. Rebuilding. Working toward a goal that one day I’m part of something greater, something not so alone and not so tiring.

Ah, the lessons I’m learning. The truths I am gaining from tremendous loss. The strength I am finding in this enormous fatigue. The willingness to accept the hands of others as they extend them, the knowledge that in receipt of the gift I offer one of my own.

There is great wisdom in this life. Great wisdom, indeed.

She wasn’t used to men like him.

She wasn’t used to men who had truly found their power. Power not rooted in what was seen as  typical male arrogance, or macho cockiness, but in a true sense of self. She had never seen a man so able to stand tall against the storms of the world while also able to bend to the winds of love and compassion. She had never known a man so strong in his softness, so clearly defined in his own blurry lines, and so rigid in the flexibility of his own humanity.

Such uniqueness unnerved her and, in the unequal light from which she viewed all things, he became a villain. He challenged her ideas just by his existence, and he became an object of obscured venom shot in his direction but at others who had taken their toll on her.

She could see them in him.

She could hear them in his voice.

She could feel them in his touch.

She only knew them in his desire.

He never really existed to her. They did. His name was not his, it was theirs. His heart beat to their rhythm, his smile muted by the clouds others had created.  Clouds that separated two souls meant to know each other.

She considered the thin veils she had placed between them as necessary, but to him they were thick walls he could never climb. He craved her, but he also loved her. That love meant she was free to fly, to crash, to run free or imprison herself behind any bars she wanted. Greater than any desire he had for her body, there was a deep love of her soul.

So his altar was empty, and he slept alone amidst the foggy tales she would tell. He walked with an empty hand, and sat at a table with a single place setting. He’d run in the hills alone, and listen to songs that stirred his heart without her, his maiden lost to the mist of her own fears, her own choices.

She wasn’t used to men like him. Men who could love her even as she played with old memories. Men who could cherish her as much in her absence as they would in her presence. Men who could make love to her simply by doing nothing at all, save the simple prayer of her name in a final breath of consciousness.

In the mix of love and labor we lay, working through the mist and insanity of lives lived in universal perfection. Emptiness known through fullness, love known through fear, passion known through complacency. In short bursts we experience one to know the other, and in short bursts we see the fruits of labor through the love we share not often in the touch, but in the absence of such pleasantries. True love is not known as much on the down slope as it is in the climb, for we find much more relief as we sit upon a summit than we do in staring up at it from the base.

We all know them, we’ve all been them, and in the moment when we find ourselves in complete realization we forgive them. What a summit that is.

Awaken, beautiful flower, to your truth!

Awaken to the beauty that you are! Smell the sweet fragrance of possibility, the aroma of potential that defines  the beauty of your life. Feel the presence of an energy so powerful in its acceptance that it need do nothing to accomplish everything that you desire.

Awaken to the power of your smile, that beautiful reflection of a new day full of hope and promise. Realize the truth of darkness as it reminds you of the illusion of its veil when faced with the light of truth within you. Hold my hand in the space of human desire, and feel the warmth of a body that holds the Sun up for you, even in the moment when you can no longer see it. Know that it is there in the man who holds your hand in the darkness, who warms you in the cold night air, and who walk willingly into life’s walls with you, whether they are yours or of his own making.

You are blooming. You have bloomed. You will bloom again. You have given meaning to the Sun’s rising, to the rays of light that crest over some distant horizon, and to the truth that every flower has its morning because every flower has its night; and that dusk and dawn are similar except in the directions we are looking. Nothing else changes in their moment.

Somewhere, at some time, a man will bend himself to greet you. He will close his eyes to the world outside and inhale your essence, feeling nothing but the truth of who you are in the exchange. He will caress you while discarding some long-stored memories of fragrance past, and adore you for the emptiness that you have filled. He will not pick you, lest you wilt away, but will rather plant himself in the vast fields where you are, and share the fertile soils that give you life, realizing that nothing is true but the Oneness that you share.

A Oneness experienced in your shivers of delight as his lips touch your shoulder, as his arms snake around your waist, and his hands explore the flesh you surrender to his own. A Oneness known in the rhythm that you share, in the sacred space on which you melt together, in the eternal pool you create within each moment united by a common purpose. A moment that never seems to end, a moment impossible to define by space and time, a moment only known by lovers sown to be together, sprouted to know their simple truth, who bloom to the same inward power only seen through outward radiance.

Sometimes you just can’t hide a light under a basket. Sometimes the basket simply gives the light the appearance of life. Sometimes the basket is burned away by a singularity of purpose so intense that a once-separated light becomes one again with everything around it. The basket is not destroyed, it is simply transformed into the very light that gave it purpose. Love, made intimate by the basket, is then made one by its transformation.

Love, made separate in the waves of pleasure as they roll within, united in the peace that fills their gaps. Love, made separate pixels by the human artist that paints it in his image, finally made whole in the realization of love as a great canvas, accepting whatever image the dreamer will create.

Love, arguably complex in its simplicity, hard in its softness, completely united by the human chisel that hewns it. Love, sometimes defined in the outward chaos of the Universal order of things, or in the simple power of a scent that awakens a man to purpose, and gives a seed the power of realizing its potential.

And there I stand as you open, with the Sun cresting above the flat horizon behind me, giving the mountains before me a lovely tint of orange, Do not delay our meeting, or hide your scent from me. Do not close yourself to the possibility, or paint your colors falsely before my eyes. Stand there, open and exposed, and let me take you in as though you were the breath that gave me life.

And together we will enjoy the summers of our life, grow older in the autumn, lay dormant in the coldest winter, and be reborn in the promise of a spring renewal. Then, when our time here has ended, we will leave a space made better by our existence, forever marked by the moments we had shared.

Ah, such a dream can’t be laid waste by a reality…I will see you very soon.

I’ll take it with a grain of salt. I always do.

I’ll take your absence with a grain of salt. I’ll take your reluctance with a grain of salt. I’ll take your withdraw, your forgetfulness, your walls all with a grain of salt. I’ll take your unkind words, your lack of empathy, and the anger with a grain of salt.

I’ll watch you hide your feelings behind a grain of salt. I see you tuck in the aftermath of a zillion stories neatly behind a grain of salt, creating them as both relevant and irrelevant in a single breath. I’ll know you are you collect a hundred tears into a single grain of salt, and cast it into the wind into whatever direction it may go, assaulting whichever sensibility it may find along the way.

Sometimes, the little grains of salt we cast find nothing but open space. In others they find a wound, a single place where the insignificant become significant, the nightmare becomes a certain reality.  It’s ironic how something that may appear to be so small can create so much chaos, how something so necessary to our existence can be so painful.

Yet, our experiences, it seems, are based upon some little grains of salt somewhere.  We often dance around the fires of our lives not to some sacred music shared by all, but to some painful sound created when little grains of salt touch our sorest places. It’s a sound only we can hear, so we shout it to all around us, hoping in some way they will hear it too.

Rumi says, “Don’t turn away. Keep your gaze on the bandaged place. That’s where the light enters you.”

It’s also where the grains of salt enter you. Sometimes the bandage itself is laden with salt, and sometimes the light shows you just how tainted your bandages are. Sometimes you’ll remember that you can’t really heal until you throw those bandages away, and face the pains of healing.

In this life, it seems much more prudent to understand the value of the pain than it does to be a slave to it. How many undiscovered wounds would remain festering if not for the little grains of salt that show us the way to Rumi’s light? How many limped steps would we take? How many journeys would we not begin? How many tears would remain stored in some ungodly cavern burned deep without our soul if not for the exposed wounds that remind us to just let it go?

The purpose of the pain is in the pain. It is not the grains of salt others cast into the ether that hurts me. It is in my own darkness, my own expectations of the world, my own ideas of the way things should be that I suffer. It is in the longing for a touch that I find my lonely moments. It is in the desire to be wanted that I find rejection. It is in the need to feel accepted that I find the words thrown at me like those tiny grains of salt.  The wounds are mine, and I can only blame myself for ignoring them.

I began removing my bandages years ago. I wanted the salt to pepper my wounds like a desert’s wind-swept sands. I wanted to know each of them, intimately, for no other reason than to say goodbye. “Meet the demon in hell”, I would say, “and temper your sacred sword there! Do not run and hide, for the devil himself can only hurt you if you give him permission.”

So, I’ve healed. Some wounds have healed quickly, some have taken more time. Some are still open, but now I accept each grain of salt with a reverence.  Each sting awakens me to something new, each tinge of pain reminding me I am still alive and cognizant enough to know the Sun is coming. Then, upon the breaking dawn, I see…that place where the bandage once set, the light entering.

And peace.

There are times when my naturally joyful, loving, serene self needs a rest.

There are times when I’ve had enough, when it is time to let the Lion roar and have the world take notice. There are times when patience is a virtue I cannot offer and when my kind hand must recoil and return to its home.

There are times when I can’t hear your issues, or your problems, or your drama. There are times when I can’t center my heart on your needs, or your desires, or your comforts. There are times when my attention must return to its home, to the place where it was born.

There are times when I want to be loved, when I want to feel desired, and considered. There are times when I want to be chased, to have appreciation offered not out of some guilty recompense, but out of a sincere love for me, the man. There are times when I want to feel supported and cared for, loved and wanted.

There are times when my beloved words just will not come, and I sit and stare at the blank canvas of my life. There are times when I beg the Universe for some feeling, for some warmth, to course through the numbness. There are times when I just feel so fucking cold that even ice warms my limbs.

There are times when I throw up my hands in complete surrender, when I am ready to just give in completely. I’m ready to withdraw, to fall absently to my knees, and forget that a world beyond my hastily built walls even exists. There are times when I remember things I know I will never be able to forget, and forget things I pray I will never remember again.

Yes, there are these times. These god-damned fucking times when the only words I can seem to muster are, “fuck it.” These times when I give up on every one and every thing around me. These times when I have nothing left to give.

Yet, you will see my calm face and my warm smile. You will feel my strong arms hold you up when you are ready to fall. You will find my steady hand reach out for you when you need help off your knees. See, there are times when I am just a man, but there are never times when I am not who I am.

There are no times when I won’t let you feel the love that keeps me going. There are no times when I’ll hide the joy that defines even moments like these. There are no times when you call and I won’t respond, when you cry and I am not there to offer something to dry your tears.

You will see my shoulders rise even from the pits of despair when you call on me. You will see me stand tall despite the weakness in my legs when you need to be carried. You will see me hold firm against the onslaught when it is a warrior you seek. You will know me, maybe not as some painting of an enlightened soul, or as some sculpture of a god, but rather as a man. A man who succumbs. A man struggles. A man who always rebuilds.

There are times, in this awesome circle of life, when I need you. There are times when the idea of you lifts me out of the mud. There are times when the thought of you brings a smile in the drudgery, and then there are times when the thought of you cause me to curse the empty space where you should be. There are times when I want to be alone, but then there are times when all I can do is reach for you in the darkness, and utter a silent prayer that one day you will be there too.

There are times. So many times.

He’s so lost in those eyes…it’s like he’d run straight into an oasis, a space where the world collapses into lushness, a place where time stood still and all he could do is stand in awe.

When a man has walked, stumbled, crawled and danced through the desert sands of his life, relief comes in small things. A shady place to rest his feet. A cool stream to quench his thirst. A light breeze to help him in his sleep. He doesn’t ask for much, and he finds satisfaction in the smallest morsels.

Where once he needed a jug of wine a simple glass of water will do. Where he once needed unending attention a simple glance will suffice. Where once it was demanded of him to change, acceptance from the souls around him will brighten up his day. There is no need for hours, he enjoys his seconds. There are no need for crowds, he enjoys his moments of solitude.

He breathes in her eyes, her smile. Through the crusty strands of hair a smile crests his lips. Through the caked on mud of time a light shines through his skin. A memory, announced by the mud-streaked path of a tear down his weathered cheek, announces something new. He can feel her…through the ether of time and space…and he remembers her.

He’s pretty sure he’s never met her, yet it’s as if he’s known her all his life. He’s confident she’d never recognize him anyway, for now he is not a man she’d grow to love. He knows her, somehow, and he feels her throughout the ordinary jumps of the beating heart within his chest. He puts his hand on the glass that separates them, and waves of emotion flow around him.

There is so much he can feel.

He can feel her hand grasp his, and pull him in closer. He can hear her laughter as they walk down a pathway lightly shrouded with fallen leaves. He can see the white wisps of breath leave her mouth as she speaks until, finally, she can’t take it anymore as she leans in to kiss him. He can taste her Soul in the kiss, and feel his own body respond to the undeniable energy between them.

And such is the flow, the memory, the dream. He can feel her head on his chest, and the feel of her naked skin snuggled up nicely next to his. He can see her eyes look into his as he shares his wisdom, then her hand as it caresses his chest, his stomach, until…

They make love in the moonlight sneaking sweetly through their bedroom window. He basks in her pleasure, knowing the gift he is giving her is being returned in the heighten senses of his body. He feels every bit of her, every sweet cell, and his own respond eagerly to their truth.

“Move along, you bum” came the demand from behind. The man awakens, or sinks back into their dream, whichever. He looks again into those eyes of true love, then turns away to go about forgetting.

Love, an often forgotten game between human hearts, is never so remembered than by a lover alone with his own thoughts. There, he remembers every detail, every minute scent and whisper, every dark and cold reality. Then, one day, he stumbles upon a picture, and he loses himself in a moment of pure revival.

And, somewhere, a woman dressed beneath the torn and tattered weaves of yesterday, stares at his image through a single pane of glass. A lonely tear rolls down her weathered face as she remembers his words, his strength, and his fingertips as they gently played around her skin. She can remember grasping at his hand, and pulling him in closer while she laughed at the stories he would tell. She can remember the leaves falling lightly on their path, and the colors of autumn gently painting their moment’s picture. She remembers the passion, the love, and the power of a man whose eyes simply held her in the sweetest chaos.

Perhaps they’ll pass each other on their beaten paths. They may not recognize each other, but what their eyes can’t see their souls will surely know. Eyes bent down at the lowly ground will rise up into a glance, into  a moment, and everything will stop. Everything. As eyes finally meet, and as two lonely tears begin to fall, a spring flower blooms and a butterfly announces the moment of their arrival.

The rest, they say, is history. Sweet, beautiful history.