Smiling when I die...

Outside, the ocean was crashing, waves hitting sand, then pulling back to sea. I thought of everything being washed away, again and again. We make such messes in this life, both accidentally and on purpose. But wiping the surface clean doesn't really make anything neater. It just masks what is below. It's only when you really dig down deep, go underground, that you can see who you really are.

It goes a long way back, some twenty years. All his life he had been looking for something, and everywhere he turned someone tried to tell him what he was. He accepted their answers too, though they were often in contradiction and even self-contradictory. He was naïve. He was looking for himself and asking everyone except himself questions which he, and only he, could answer. It took him a long time and much painful boomeranging of his expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: That he is nobody but himself.

Someone to talk to for hours...

Just to see what I can find...

Do you ever feel that way? Lonely I mean. If I would search for more words, I would say restless. As if you haven't really met yourself yet. As if you'd passed yourself once in the fog, and your heart leapt. Ah! There I Am! I've been missing that piece!' But it happens too fast, and then that part of you disappears into the fog again. And you spend the rest of your days looking for it. Don't feel stupid for having said it. It's sentimental and true, and you've revealed a part of yourself you shouldn't have. Do you know what I think? Sometimes, you can glimpse it in another, and that's as far as you can go.

I have to start somewhere...

Yesterday felt like my graduation,

but now some of those kids have got their own.

Been a while since I took a vacation,

it's been a while since I really let go.

Don't wanna look back,

thinking I could've done this,

or I could've tried that.

Don't want to look back,

because it's going by fast.

Search and rescue...

I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with his pals and doesn't even know that I'm alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck. I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.

I'll be the rubber band...

One thing at a time...

It wasn't that he was sad - sadness had very little to do with it, really, considering that most of the time, he felt close to nothing at all. Feeling required nerves, connections, sensory input. The only thing he felt was numb. And tired. Yes, he very frequently felt tired.

Have you ever died before? No really, I want to know. Because when the illusion of self is shattered, you simply cease to be. Though it may not seem that way to others, you know when it is true. You can feel it, a stranger in your own body, an imposter, and nothing is the same ever again. The beauty of being shattered is how the shards become our character and our marks of distinction. This is how we are refined by our pain. When the storm rips you to pieces, you get to decide how to put yourself back together again. The storm gives us the gift of our defining choices. The gift of letting go forever.

Smiling when we die...

Fight the feeling...

Sometimes it looks like I'm going nowhere or that I'm headed in the wrong direction. I'm learning that the decision itself is rarely the point. The point is becoming more fully myself and living my life as though I believe I am headed somewhere. The point is being honest about where I am and what I need and then looking around for loved ones to walk with me. I spent years wishing people would support me only to later realize I was waiting around for something to come to me when I was perfectly capable of going out and getting it. I'm convinced the universe is less interested in where I end up than in who I am becoming. Encouraged or discouraged, filled with vision or fumbling in the fog. 

Let me tell you what's up...

I got a heart like a truck,

it's been drug through the mud,

runs on dreams and gasoline,

and that ole highway holds the key.

It's got a lead foot down when it's leaving,

lord knows it's taken a hell of a beating,

a little bit of love is all that it's needing,

but it's good as it is tough,

I got a heart like a truck.

Someone to be patient with me...

I want to leave a mark but the marks I leave are too often scars. I feel like a dog squirting on fire hydrants. I know it's silly and useless - especially useless in my current state - but I am an animal like any other. Hazel is different. I want to walk lightly, like a child, and I want to know the truth. I want to be remembered as someone who was loved deeply but not widely. And I don't want to be sad, but triumphant. Heroic. I realise I don't get to choose if I get hurt in this world, but I do have some say in who hurts me. I like my choices. I hope you like yours too.

Lots of wine and mistakes...

Here's the deal: although we have a common destiny, each one of us also has to work out his own personal salvation for himself in fear and trembling. We can help one another to find the meaning of life no doubt. But in the last straws of our shared existence, the individual person is responsible for living his own life and for finding himself - whatever that means. If he persists in shifting his responsibility to somebody else, he fails to find out the meaning of his own existence. You cannot tell me who I am and I cannot tell you who you are. If you do not know yourself, who is going to know you?

I'm all these words, all these strangers, this dust of words, with no ground for their settling, no sky for their dispersing, coming together to say, fleeing one another to say, that I am they, all of them, those that merge, those that part, those that never meet, and nothing else, yes, something else, that I'm something quite different, a quite different thing, a wordless thing in an empty place, a hard shut dry cold black place, where nothing stirs, nothing speaks, and that I listen, and that I seek, like a caged beast born and then dead in a cage.

A sinner can't atone from a lone prayer...

I've been under scrutiny...

Our last night...

I've come to be quite dependant on the feeling of relief. I see it as the emotional and physical reward I receive from my body, when I am finally able to let go of pain, pressure and struggle. A moment in time when I really get to bask in the lack of the negative. And yet, as I realise that it's become sort of a constant in my life, I wonder if relief is actually just the status quo, a negation of my suffering, a nothing in itself. It is the way things were before the pressure and struggle began. In a sense it's a step backwards. Nothing is gained, so why was it there in the first place? 

Just trying to write a song...

If your kiss, turned me to stone,

I'd be a statue standing tall in ancient Rome,

and if your touch, shattered me like glass,

I'd be in pieces tryin' to make the breaking last.

If it took one look to turn my days to night,

at least I'd have the stars,

the sparkle in your eyes.