Nothing's ever felt more like home...

Feeling like there's nothing at all...

Everyone has that moment I think, the moment when something so momentous happens that it rips your very being into small pieces. And then you have to stop. For a long time, you gather your pieces. And it takes such a very long time, not to fit them back together, but to assemble them in a new way, not necessarily a better way. More, a way you can live with until you know for certain that this piece should go there, and that one there. My shattering happening quite a while ago. Sometimes I have trouble remembering some of the details. But I know it happened for sure, for what stands before you today, is a testament to that. Piece by piece. Little by little. Into something I would once find unfathomable. And as I set sail to lands unknown, I am certain I have all I need to weather the storm.

Know that I'll answer the call...

The undiscovered is not far away, yet it's not something to be found by chance. It is contained within what is right in front of us. Reality is constant creation and destruction, and in this constant change is something unborn and undying, something that cannot be approached through the known or the past. It isn't seen through striving to become something based on ideals stemming from former experiences. It comes to that which is simply being, not striving. In this state, without the known, without knowing at all, with neither past nor future, is a space that is not filled with time. And in this space, the undiscovered and ever-changing moment exists - a moment containing all possibilities, the totality of existence, absolute reality.

Please make it work...

Let's go below zero,

and hide from the sun.

I love you forever,

where we'll have some fun.

Let's hit the road,

and live happily.

Please don't cry no tears now, 

it's almost Christmas, baby.

That sweet time of the year...

I'm swimming in a mirror...

The only choice we have as we mature is how we inhabit our vulnerability, how we become larger and more courageous and more compassionate through our intimacy with disappearance. Our choice is to see it as generous citizens of loss, robustly and fully, or conversely, as misers and complainers, reluctant and fearful, always at the gates of existence, but never bravely and completely attempting to enter, never wanting to risk ourselves, never walking fully through the door.

You can build walls all the way to the sky and he will find a way to fly above them. You can try to pin him down with a hundred thousand arms, but he will find a way to resist. And there are many out there, more than you think. People who refuse to stop believing. People who refuse to come to earth. People who love in a world without walls, people who love into hate, into refusal, against hope, and without fear. Those that realise that there are battles worth dying for, and that death itself is not to be avoided, but welcomed. For it is coming. Coming for our memories and our faith. Where will he be to answer the call?

My home for all seasons...

Heavy missing, heavy reminiscing...

The patterns are simple, but followed together, they make for a whole that is wiser than the sum of its parts. Go for a walk; cultivate hunches; write everything down, but keep your folders messy; embrace serendipity; make generative mistakes; take on multiple hobbies; frequent coffeehouses and other liquid networks; follow the links; let others build on your ideas; borrow, recycle; reinvent. Build a tangled bank of different facets of your personality. Don't be afraid to follow fragile threads. They might lead your to paths less taken. Take deep breaths; try to focus your thoughts. They led you to happiness once so they can this time as well. You can do this. You're almost there. 

Meet me at our spot...

There is no real ending. 

It’s just the place where you stop the story.

December knew, of course, that the action of turning a page, of ending a chapter or of shutting a book, did not end a tale. Having admitted that, I would also avow that happy endings were never difficult to find, as long as we knew where to look. It is simply a matter of finding a place of solace, where perhaps the sun is able to penetrate the gloomy sky. Maybe a garden, where the light is golden and the grass is soft; somewhere to rest, to stop reading, and to be content with however life might have unfolded. To not get wrapped up in loose ends, because there are many, and so many more to come. To realise that it's not about having the last word, or getting a confusion of guilt or shame, or an apology that rings hollow after all these years of silence. It begins, in fact, with simply looking up at the sun, and knowing that, despite everything, you did the best you could.

To be loved...

I'm so afraid but I'm open wide,

I'll be the one to catch myself this time,

trying to learn to lean in to it all,

ain't it funny how the mighty fall?

Looking back I don't regret a thing.

Yeah, I took some bad turns that I am owning,

I'll stand still and let the storm pass by,

keep my heart safe until the time feels right.

And my wide eye gaze...

On an impulse he went into the room and stood before the window, pushing aside any doubt he might have still had to watch as the world was slowly covered in snow. Now nearly eight inches high on the lampposts and the fences and the roofs. It was the sort of storm that rarely happened anymore, and the steady white flakes, the silence, filled him with a sense of excitement and peace. 

It was a moment when all the disparate shards of his life seemed to knit themselves together, every past sadness and disappointment, every anxious secret and uncertainty hidden now beneath the soft white layers. Tomorrow would be quiet, the world subdued and fragile, until the neighbourhood locals came out to break the stillness with their tracks and shouts and joy. He remembered such days from his own childhood, rare moments of escape when he went into the woods, his breathing amplified and his voice somehow muffled by the heavy snow that bent branches low, drifted over paths. The world, for a few short hours, transformed. And he transformed with it.

I will be true, if you let me...

Not much time to spare...

Cry your heart out...

I wish I could say I let it all out that night. All of the tears, all of the screams, all of the lies. But I didn't. I couldn't. It would take something much stronger to bring all that out of me. Still. By the time the sun rose the next morning, one thing had changed: I was no longer full of shit. I walked in any direction I could find; needing to escape the gravitational pull of all the forces that were telling me I wasn't good enough. And there were many. I needed to wallow in uncertainty, without the balancing effects of my addictions to cling to. If I was ever going to figure out who I was, I needed to be a stranger again.

Oh my god...

I'm a fool, 

but they all think I'm blind,

I'd rather be a fool,

than leave myself behind.

I don't have to explain myself to you,

I am a grown man,

and I do what I want to do.

Rather be a fool than leave myself behind...

Isn't it silly to worry about the arbitrary moment some person long dead declared to be the end of one year and the beginning of another, as if our attempts to divide time into meaningful chunks actually means anything. Yet still, I seem to always get so nostalgic when this time of year comes around. Did I do enough? Will it be the best year I ever had? And like a mockingjay, it seems I won't get my answer until the very end, waiting for the countdown to tell me it's okay to believe in myself again. And my moment will come. Things will happen the way I envision, or perhaps nothing at all like I do, but still. They will happen. They will happen to me.

State of grace...

There are days when I feel like I've seen enough, done enough, felt enough. When I call my wandering days over and slowly accept the quiet life from here on. When the dreams of making waves are a vague memory and the songs I meant to sing feel more like a finished painting, something to just observe and hang on the wall from now on, to those who wish to observe it. But then the night falls and the morning rises and horizons are calling once again and I'm on my way. Forests fresh and pastures new. I'm on my way.

Our higher power...

How the punchline goes...

How will people remember you when you are gone? And for how long until they forget? Were you selfish or selfless? A gossip or a patient listener? Did you add value to the world, or did you simply take from it? Did you add significance to the lives of others, or were you a constant drain? Were you a plus or negative? Meaningful or meaningless? Someone even worth remembering? 

It's the same struggle for each of us, and the same path out: the utterly simple, infinitely wise ultimately defiant act of loving one thing and then another, loving our way back to life. Maybe being perfectly happy is not really the point. Maybe that is only some modern dream of the point, while the truer measure of humanity is the distance we must travel in our lives, time and again, twist two extremes of passion - joy and grief. However much I've lost, what remains to me is that I can still speak to name the things I love.

Looking over at you...

And maybe we were just two friends

that got lost in translation.

Maybe I asked for too much

But maybe this thing was a masterpiece,

until you tore it all up.

Running scared, I was there,

I remember it all too well.

A crumpled up piece of paper lying here

My sweet disposition...

Not sure about my destination ...

but I'm on my way.

Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it. Where is there a place for you to be? You needn't look at the sky because it's not going to open up and show no place behind it. You needn't search for any hole in the ground to look through into somewhere else. You can't go neither forwards nor backwards. You yourself right now is all the place you've got. If there was any fall, look there, if there was any redemption, look there, and if you expect any judgment, look there, because they all three will have to be in your time and your body and where in your time and your body can they be?

All too well...

I turned away from the ocean as not to fall for its plea, for it used to seduce, and consume me and there was this one night a few years back and I was not yet accustomed to farewells, and just like now I stood waving long after the ship was gone. But I was younger then and easily fooled and the ocean was deep and dark and blue and I took my shoes off to let the water freeze my bones. I waded until I could no longer walk and it was too cold to swim but still I kept on walking at the bottom of the sea for I could not tell the difference between the ocean and the lack of someone I loved and I had not yet learned how the task of moving on is as necessary as survival.

You look perfect tonight...

The kind of man you want in the end...

Riding high, 

when I was king,

I played it hard and fast, 

because I had everything.

I walked away, 

but you warned me then.

But easy come, and easy go, 

and it would end.

He belongs to the world...

The heat finally left space for breathing and crisp air. The trees undressed and coloured the streets and I found myself changing with the season. I so badly wanted to be that force of nature, that fire no one can touch, but I was tired. Tired, tired, tired, of being me and if I had one inch of energy to be something beautiful, I would have, but all I could care about was to make it home before it got dark.

I always pictured it a grand thing, the moment I would take off. Someone waving long after I was out of sight and some tune playing soft from somewhere I couldn't see. I pictured it a clear line, some sort of sharp edge between before and after. But there is no such thing. You can take a U-turn where you're walking on the pavement but people are just on their own path, and now you're in their way. You keep walking against the tide and you think you're doing something great but really you're just pissing people off and when you finally get out on the open field where no directions exist, you find yourself lonely, not free, just a big, vast lonely world that surrounds you and you can go anywhere you please but suddenly you don't want to go anywhere at all. You just want to go home. 

The paradise before my world implodes...

Was it possible to feel nostalgic about something that had never happened to him, possible for nostalgia to be taken in by the body as a free pathogen to infect the consciousness with stray sentiments? Perhaps, in his dreams, he had traveled back in time, or even drifted into another dimension of space-time and inhabited the body, experiences, and nostalgia of another. To even envisage so allowed the trauma of those lost moments, though not his own, to draw from him a certain envy for the entity in whose memories he had basked vicariously. Perhaps, nostalgia was a microorganism, the bacterium that infected ... yes ... maybe he was sick.

Until the sun cracks...

I can be by myself because I'm never lonely; 

I'm simply living in my heavily populated solitude, 

a harum-scarum of infinity and eternity, 

and Infinity and Eternity seem to take a liking to the likes of me.

I am the contrast. I am forever the crack in the window that lets the winter in. I am forever the moment between laughter and tears, happiness and sadness. I am light and darkness. I am fire and ice. You will try to take me into your life, but I won't fit, and you will not know how to tell me that there is simply no place for me. And I will choose love, even though I am scared and shy, of everyone and everything, to make a fool of myself; to be laughed at; to not be what people would like me to be. But I will choose love because that’s the sort of person I want to be.

Feels like a holiday...

Hearts don't break around here...

I found my heart and left it here,

made friends and lost them through the years,

and I've not seen the roaring fields in so long,

I know I've grown

but I can't wait to go home.

Be patient while I grow...

Something only mine...

I know the hard ground and the taste of the salt water I'm made of and the way even getting out of bed feels impossible some days. I know how some moments there's not even enough air. I know what it means to be desperate and the bargains we want to make in those moments with the universe and every last prayer we pray to gods we don't even believe in. But does that make me stupid? No ... I don't think so. I don't think so at all. Not stupid. Not after all I've been through. Infinitely, impossibly, beautifully human perhaps.

Let's show them we are better...

Around 2 a.m. the rain started to fall again. It was quite a lovely view, so far away from home, and I breathed it in like I only do when I truly love something, and there was a small sadness creeping in through my chest because I knew I would have to leave it, go back to reality where the stars don't seem to shine so bright anymore. But I pushed it aside, and rather hugged you as you soundly slept, because those moments are rare and I'm happy because I get to share them with you.

You must be a myth that your lover can't grasp and you must chase the moon like a wolf in the night, as if it will show you something only you can understand. Everything you do is a ritual that can mean something more and you must connect and create bonds with the spirits both outer and inner. Seek the strange and mysterious, otherworldly explanations for yourself and things around. There is always more. You must love and live and write like you're obsessed and possessed. Go mad for what you believe in.

I'm swimming in a mirror...

I had always believed that we leave a bit of ourselves wherever we go. And also that we took a bit of for our own, a tiny bit of every place we ever went to. And as we walked these streets for the first time as a couple deeply in love, it was as if the act of touching these places, and asking these questions had added another column to our being. And the only possible explanation I could find for that feeling was that a spirit existed in many of the places we visited, and a spirit existed in both of us, and all of them had somehow met in the course of our travels. It's as if the godliness of the land and the godliness of our being had fused.

If we go down, we go down together...

Good intentions and the highest hopes...

I never have time to write anymore. And when I do I only write about how I never have time or I find quotes that somewhat vaguely describe my current circumstances. Though not really, not at all in fact. It's work and it's money and I've written more lists than stories lately. I stay up all night to do all these things I need to do, be all these things I want to be, playing with shadows in the darkness that shouldn't be able to exist. Empty bottles and worn out cheeks from all the laughing while watching the sunset. Why do I complain? I have it all, everything I ever asked for. Everything I ever wanted. 

Give me the shivers...

I wanna be that guy, 

I wanna kiss your eyes,

I wanna drink that smile,

I wanna feel like

my soul's on fire, 

I wanna stay up all day and all night,

yeah, you got me singing like.

Just about over it...

Picture perfect memories...

If nothing else, we can say that we are one of few, who crawled up from the gutter and made something of themselves, despite the odds and despite others who tried to keep us down. We should be proud of that achievements. At least I am. We must also never forget the struggles we went through, because we are a living example to those who wander in darkness, a staunch reminder that light is within reach if you can find the strength and determination to keep going.

You know what, sometimes it seems to me we're living in a world that we fabricate for ourselves. We decide what's good and what isn't, we draw maps of meanings for ourselves. And then we spend our whole lives struggling with what we have invented. The anxieties we feel are really a byproduct of the walls we built around our heart, of our vision of the castle we want to one day live in. It's all a projection of what we once decided we want to be. The problem is that each of us has our own version of it, that's why it's so hard to understand each other. To find meaning in those around.

Hope in these waters...

Moments never stay, whether or not you ask them, they do not care, no moment cares, and the ones you wish could stretch out like a hammock for you to lie in, well, those moments leave the quickest and take everything good with them, little burglars, those moments, those hours, those days you loved the most. Sometimes the strongest thing you will ever do will be is let something go. It will be painful, you will suffer guilt, and you will second-guess yourself, but for your own sanity and quality of life, there will come a time where you hand the circumstances to the universe, and blindly have faith that whatever comes next is a little better. A little calmer. A little more true.

Drowning in the silence...

There ain't no gold in this river...

I was still a child,

didn't get the chance to

feel the world around me.

I had no time to choose, what I chose to do,

so go easy on me.

Watch me blast off...

I never claimed it was easy to find your place in this world, but I'm coming to the conclusion that if you seek to please others, you will forever be changing because you will never be yourself, only fragments of someone you could be. You need to belong to the deepest reaches of your heart, and let others belong to themselves too. You need to be free and detached from things and your surroundings. You need to build your home in your own simple existence, not in friends, lovers, your career or material belongings, because these are things you will lose one day. Probably a lot sooner that we think. A lot sooner than we hope.

I got you, moonlight...

Because we come from different sides...

But in life, no one is spared, no one is let off the hook. 

Those buried sensations had to come out, 

be felt, addressed, and lived through.

Despite being quite content, I still have a longing for freedom, and it seems that desire has become my cage. I don't actually even realize what I am specifically missing, or what it is that could make me whole once and for all. But something in me calls out to be aware. I have become parched in the desert of apathy, and thirst for an oasis forever out of my reach. And while my highest aspects hunger for freedom, so too my basest roots thrust outwards and strangle any hope that might be left.

More than just anybody...

You are my universe...

In the night, 

I lie and look up at you,

when the morning comes, 

I watch you rise,

there's a paradise they couldn't capture,

that bright infinity inside your eyes.

These days, I'm way too alone...

That was the fall of learning about the empty space. Learning about a tight pressure around my chest, waiting to explode and break out. But no matter how far far I wandered, how cold it grows or how drunk I got, the tight pressure just stays in there. I try to meditate, pray, workout, thinking it's some kind of detoxification process. A stone of toxic memories from all things yesterday and I just need to release it, let go and clean myself pure. But the stone stays in there. A big, black stone of heaviness.

And so you live like this, day after day, striving and fighting simply to become, or even better - to be. Something better, something more. Something you can live as, live with. A little more developed, a little more define and decluttered. But then there's the world, telling you over and over who you are and what you actually like and who you actually want to be, and so that real voice in your head speaks softer every day, until one day you wake up and it's gone. They killed it, these bastards, with their empty words and doing tasks without a heart. They broke it.

For me it happens all the time...

It was like when you make a move in chess and just as you take your finger off the piece, you see the mistake you've made, and there's this panic because you don't know yet the scale of disaster you've left yourself open to. And more often than not, when something like that happens, I have a strange, instinctual desire for things to get even worse. I think of a terrible outcome and then wish for it. I recognise the pattern, but I don't understand it. It's as though my mind is running simulations and can't help but prefer the most dramatic option - as though, in that eventuality, I could enjoy it from the outside.

Something just for my dreams...

One thing was certain: life was a maze. There was nothing straight forward about it. Everything that pretended to be consecutive somehow ended in unexpected twists and turns, only to leave you full of wonder at how you possibly made it through to the end. You couldn't just pack a pair of hedge trimmers to take a shortcut and hoodwink fate. No, you had to walk the path of life given to you with all its detours. The goal wasn't to avoid getting lost sometimes - in fact, that was most unlikely given that you were in a maze. The trick was simply to keep walking. To enjoy the process of getting lost and finding yourself again, different and more grown-up than when you had left. One step after another, that was all that it took. One step after another, so simple and so utterly enough.

Easy come, easy go...

Every try, every breakthrough and every cry...

He won't always spoil you, or treat you like a prince. He won't tell you you're the love of his life every single day. He won't make you smile every night - heck - a lot of nights he will make you cry. And he won't always want you the way he wants you now. That fades. Those giddy little stomach flutters wane with time and you're then left with reality. There will be day's he will forget to tell you he thinks you're amazing, even though you will need to hear it. 

There will be days both of you will say "I love you" and there will be days you'll forget a birthday or an anniversary. There will be a time when you will walk past each other and you won't want to ravish one another, the way you do now. Those things slowly whisk away, and when they do, what's left is what's truly worth fighting for. Love isn't always beautiful, mostly it's not even close to being perfect half the time. Feelings keep changing, the spark dies down and what you're left with is something you either chose to uphold or you don't. When you know that even though those things are gone, you're still willing to commit to every breath, then you know the love is real.

As I'm sharing, I rewrite my story...

Oh, never forget me,

like I'm your favourite song.

I'm fading, replaying,

these thoughts I thought while sinking down.

Oh, never forget me,

and evеrything I've done.

Giving me shivers...

Glitter in the sky...

Life is indeed a race, 

but there is no finish line.

You're done, when you're done.

I believe, if there is some sort of higher power, the universe is it, and whenever people ask me where it came from, I tell them that it has always been here, and was never created. The Big Bang theory is based on the fact that the universe is expanding right now. And if you rewind the tape, the universe appears to be shrinking. If you rewind the tape far enough, eventually the universe must be just one singular point. Or so the theory goes. But what if the universe has not always been expanding? What if it's pulsating, and one pulse takes trillions of years, and right now the universe is inhaling, and before that, trillions of years ago, it was exhaling?

I had a premonition...

That's what I want...

To the extent you identify and honor your true path in this lifetime, you will know genuine satisfaction. Real peace in your own skin. You will be infused with vitality and a clarified focus. New pathways of possibility appear, where before there were obstacles. You will know a peace that will buffer you against the madness of the world. A clarity, a direction, that will carry you from one satisfaction to another. Life will still have its challenges, but you will interface with them differently. Coded in an authenticity of purpose, that sees through the veils, to what really matters. To the extent that you avoid the quest for purpose, you will live frustrated. A half-life.