Rain on me tsunami...

And the black cat laughed...

He leans back and tilts his head so all he sees are the clouds in the sky. He's looking back inside his head with his eyes wide open. He still doesn't know where he's going; he decided he's not crazy or alien. It's just that he's more like one of those kids they find in remote jungles. A wolf boy. And they've dragged him into this fear riddled state, snarling and spitting and walking around on curled knuckles. He in a state of shock. Flight no longer an option, every single interaction is a fight. Foes and friends are blurred. There is only one way out. To go through. 

As legend has it...

If anything, this year has made up in the quantity of lessons the previous few have lacked. What it means to be a good partner, brother, son, and friend. Things I severely took for granted have come crashing down on me relentlessly these past few months. And perhaps the reason I needed this wake up call is because I was too lenient with my deadly enemy. My fear. Instead of fighting my battles, I chose to retreat from them. Avoiding conflict and not allowing myself the opportunity to grow. But all too obviously, my inability to bend, has caused me to break. My failure to let fear pass over me and through me has sent shockwaves through my body. Ones I'm not sure I can fully recover from. Fear is the mind killer. And mine is almost too fractured to ever repair. 

I'm out of my head...

Someone just told me to leave all my sorrow,

if that is true, I don't know who to be.

Could be these troubles are part of the plan?

Could be I need to just to take a chance?

So I forget what was taken from me,

I will bequeath from the victor your vacancy.

Tell them: these troubles are out of your head.

Tell them: I'm free to use them to clap and dance.

It sealed the deal...

I need to dream. I need to believe. I need to know that I have some control in my life. That if I work hard, that I will be rewarded. That life is not arbitrary. I need to believe that bad things happen to good people, for a greater reason. That dedication, sacrifice, hard work, discipline are all worthy attributes that will eventually produce extraordinary results. That if I live a certain lifestyle, that my family will be better for that. That there is a direct link between my actions and my results. That If I prepare properly that I can face the insurmountable foe and look him in the eye, knowing that I have defeated death. 

Sometimes events that lead him bereft of anything but grief just happen for no reason other than happenstance. A car turns left instead of right, a train is missed, a call comes too late. Then the real test of his humanness becomes front and center. Is he able to, in light of that knowledge, ever to recover? When he again finds his way despite the inability to manufacture a deeper meaning in his suffering? When he is able to march forward, with no grand design that would explain why the universe tore him asunder? That's when he can say, that he's finally grown up. 

Chasing after finer days...

I got lost in the pool...

Never breaking my vow...

Another way to be prepared is to think negatively. To be completely enamored in scenarios and circumstances that can hurt you. So when trying to make a decision, I often think of the worst case scenario. The always present factor of being eaten by wolves. If I do something, what's the most terrible thing that can come of it? What could happen that would make me lose everything? And now that I can imagine it, I can create a contingency plan for when all hell breaks loose. There are a lot of things I don't worry about, because I'm learning that all I need is a plan in place, for when they do.

Dancing through the lighting strikes...

Gave up a piece of my heart,

then I turned to run.

My head is in the clouds,

but I don't feel close to the sun.

And the light fades away from my face,

and the tears fall like rain.

So I turn all my words into faith, 

hope it's me that they save.

That's the crazy part...

I spend so much time thinking about regret. Imagining the outcome of different paths, trying to figure out where they would lead. So much mental capacity deciphering my own thought spiral and its accompanying conviction that there is a perfect, placid life, my own alternate existence, pristine and simple, existing in a neighboring reality in which certain turns in the road were never set upon. But it isn't true, is it? Any of it. I knew that. I had learned it. But it is an irresistible fantasy, if only because it implies I have some control over my own fate.

Layers I can’t unfold...

Only one way to go from here...

He is the interpretation of the prophet. He is the artist in the coffin. He is the brave flag stained with blood. He is the wounds overcome. He is the dream refusing to sleep. He is the dance that swings till dawn. He is the grass on the greener lawn. He is the respectful neighbour and the graceful man. He is the encouraging smile and the helping hand. He is the straight back and the lifted chin. He is the tender heart and the will to win. He is the the rainbow in rain. He is the shoulder to lean onto. He is life running away from death, and tripping every step in between. 

I'm wondering; what is the most profound difference between between us, between you and me? Between the people that seem to skate through life, and those that barely float above its surface? I wish I could have full access to my ancestral memories. For them to come at me in the full glare of awareness and not like whispers from my blind side. Some call it instinct or fate. The memories apply leverages to each of us - on what we think and what we do. Am I immune to such influences? I stand here and tell you: yet it moves. And that which moves can exert its force in ways no other power ever before dared stem. I am here to dare this.

Feel the fade...

Make a spark, break the dark...

Your name, I'll never know,

as we get down in the world below.

Caught up in an overflow,

my hands, your bones,

wide eyed, you look at me.

Set on fire in a silver dream,

spin round you can feel the breeze.

Next to you...

I guess it took a long walk through the darkness, a long walk through the darkest shadows and corners of my soul to realize that those are a part of me as well. I have refused to shine a light on something that is imperfect, because my fear of judgement and rejection. But I am now choosing to look towards the light as the only source of true beauty and love that can help me in the cleaning process. I no longer hope for understanding, no longer hope for the opinion of a calmer being. But I hope to find the words that touch the soul before the mind. I hope to find the touch that warms the heart from deep inside, and hope to find that far away abandoned part of me which I've left behind.

When the sun is not burning...

You will be the light

that leads me through. 

Sometimes I scratch, claw and climb so hard to conquer a mountain that, once achieved, I cling to its summit much too long and it ultimately instigates my fall. As I dangle by my fingertips I grasp and claw at what's no more; with a fear of falling into the dim unknown. But, ironically, it's in that very moment that I am empowered to choose. I can stay cliff hanging in my darkened fears clinging to a time that has past me by or I can faithfully and freely fall into the hands of a new destiny. Sometimes, persevering is simply having the courage to let go.

The storms won't steal my thunder...

Hear that sound ringing in your mind...

I have spent my life clinging to my own shores for safety. Flying like a bird above the storm waters of my own body, too scared to land. I guess that is why the sea floods in to visit me. I have been too frightened to venture out into her depths alone. To scared to take flight.

The central core of me is dark and churning, I can only sense it vaguely. It scares me with its power. I realise that this experience is partly neurological. My sensory abilities are all hyper-aroused on the surface, and my nervous system melts down when it becomes overwhelmed in everyday places. But my ability to know what is going on within is flawed. Instead of an accurate information readout, there is a big, dark, unknowable mass within. I am sailing blind without a map or a lighthouse within my own skin. It feels a very daunting place to have a life sentence. This is why I write: to attempt to find words for what this big scariness is, to try and find images to give form and name to the wild churning expanse.

Chasing vultures and black crows...

Hey, miss sunshine, 

I took a tab and felt the sky.

It's a good life and then it's bad, 

but that's alright.

On the bright side, 

we all sit and sympathize.

So in the meantime, 

might as well enjoy the ride.

Don't ask for forgiveness...

I find me, leave me, go towards me, come from me, nothing ever but me, a particle of me, retrieved, lost, gone astray. 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 of caged beasts born of caged beasts born of caged beasts.

Hear that sound ringing in my mind...

We have each other, at least. Even though in many other lifetimes we lived apart; we finally understand now what it means to be together. Our failure to touch, to belong to each other has cost us dearly in the past. Now it's all we know. But soon it won't matter anymore. Everyone is gone eventually, and we will be alone again. We are born apart, driftwood on the banks of an endless dark ocean. And we will be carried away by the swell soon enough. But in between, even if in a single day of living, dancing in a strip of sunlight, we can find what we've been missing. The love that makes us whole. The imminence. Not everyone finds their other. This pattern is ours. 

There's no telling what comes next...

They're here for his soul...

Just keep watching...

When I'm overwhelmed within,

from the weight of all my sin,

I need a friend to call my own,

I need a house to call my home.

When I'm broken down inside,

and there's nowhere else to hide,

I need a place where I feel known.

Can someone help me?

Then I hear your reply,

bringing teardrops to my eyes,

saying I'm not alone.

Worst case scenario...

If he truly had understood what that meant, that time runs out. he would have done it all so differently. Maybe you can't understand until you're the one standing on the brink. Maybe we're not meant to. Maybe it's some biological trick designed to keep us safe from the saber-toothed tiger, only now it keeps us building big homes and worrying about deadlines. Maybe we're not supposed to get that it will all be gone, we will all be gone - until it's too late to do anything about it. If life's a joke and death's the punch line, in any good setup, you never see it coming. Because if we did understand, we would spend it all in the sun with the grass between our toes. What else was the point? 

We're here, then we're not. And before that and after that, the mountains stay put and the waves keep crashing and the storms come and go and none of any of that is aware that for a brief, fleeting moment, we were here too. I was a part of it too. In some sort of way it's a relief to know that I don't matter. Understanding that brought me the first moment of peace I'd known since you had passed. Surely you must have seen that too? After all, you had walked ahead; I was the one just catching up. None of it, none of us, matter. And once you see it, once you get it, once you're free from the false belief that you think you have time, you can just enjoy it for what it is. And it is all so, so beautiful.

Forever be mine...

He will never accept life for what it is. He doesn't need an easy life. His road was meant to be hard because anything worth having in this world will take him to the very edge of himself. He will overcome everything he has ever gone through and will make his future the one the universe intended him to have. He will pick up the pieces of this pain and sculpt it into something beautiful. He will not settle for the ordinary and never will. He walks into his birthright as a king with his head held high. He was born to do this. He was born to ascend. 

Get up and do it all again...

I see the lights, and I slow down...

Nothing is wrong. Everything is right just the way it is. I mustn't try to understand this or figure it out. I have to leave it alone. It will happen by itself, by keeping myself quiet and still. Let it be calm. In all situations, I will be calm. Let it be still and quiet. The world doesn't need any help from me. The world came out of me, of my mind. The world that I am in, is a creation of my own mind. When the mind becomes still, the world begins to disappear. And I'm in divine harmony and joy. Happiness comes to me when I stop thinking, when I stop judging, when I stop being afraid. All the answers are within me. Everything I'm looking for is here, everything.

I've been gone for a little too long...

Because I'm back in the saddle, 

like some old cowboy,

who dug his way out of his grave,

pulled up his boots, 

put his pistol on his hip,

climbed up and took hold of the reins,

don't worry where I've been,

I'm back in the saddle again.

Whatever it is, you know I can take it...

That's my time...

You have bled. You have cried. You have had sand kicked in your eyes. On your dreams all before. There is no difference then. Now. Twenty-six. Twenty-two. Eighteen. Twelve. You did not cave. So why do you think you should now?

It's so hard for me to forget pain. I guess because it's so visceral, hard to ignore. But it's even harder to remember sweetness. I don't have any scars to show for happiness. I learn so little from peace. Peace feels like something I'm entitled to, and so I don't really pay attention to the quiet lessons it offers. Perhaps the reason I learn so little from peace is because it asks nothing of me. It doesn't force me to grow or change. Pain, however, demands transformation, leaving me no choice but to adapt. To do anything, to make it go away.

He's going to be golden...

Put these patterns in the past...

I see the beast so clearly now, hovering above me, tangible and in a recognizable form. It's wrapping its stickiness around my throat - and I was helping it. It's grabbing me tightly, making me believe it's my friend. But it isn't. It was a thing I created as a child to allow me to imagine a world where I wasn't in pain. But now it has morphed into a harbinger of the very thing it was supposed to shield me from. Conjuring up fantasies no longer shields me from the present, it prevents me from understanding it. It sets me into overdrive, imagining all the ways people can hurt me, not seeing how I am in fact, hurting myself. I am not my emotions. The beast is not my handler. I will break it, before it breaks me. 

My time, no fears, no lies...

I'm done hiding, 

now I'm shining,

like I'm born to be.

I'm dreaming hard, 

I came so far,

now I believe.

Can't find my own place...

The more things shatter, the more clear it becomes that the brittle and broken things will never again be made whole. 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. You will be a different person after the storm, because the storm will heal you from your perfection. People who stay perfect and unblemished never really get to live fully or deeply. You will not be the same after the storms of life; you will be stronger, wiser and more alive than ever before.

Just another day...

Like an attack this melancholy comes from time to time. I don't know at what intervals, but it slowly covers my sky with clouds. It begins with an unrest in the heart, with a premonition of anxiety, probably with my dreams at night. People, houses, colors, sounds that otherwise please me become dubious and seem false. Music gives me a headache. Talking with people is torture and immediately leads to me making a scene. Anger, suffering, and complaints are directed at everything, at people, at the universe. But they have no effect on things and are deflected from everything, back to myself.

The changes I make in my life often happen when I have a degree of certainty. However, the pain of my past failures often fuel my indecisiveness. This inability to predict the future is why I find myself stuck and unable to move forward. It's not like I want to feel the emotions of failure. I just prefer to talk myself into settling for an "okay" life, rather than the life I really want. However, as I found, failure is a matter of perspective. Is it not failure when I don't take a chance on the one thing I want most? Am I not a total disappointment to Her if I don't even try. 

It's a long way home...

Sorry, I'm here for myself...

Play a sad song on a tiny violin...

Wish someone told me,

living this life would be lonely,

trying to get away from the old me,

still stuck singing these blues,

all I really need is a little good news.

The universe holds me tight, then lets me go...

I think I have to make a clear cut. Or at least pretend I'm making one. Go off on a new journey. Force myself to see myself in a lighter way. Allow myself to say no. To be disliked. To walk away and not feel the need to explain or get an explanation. I am at the heart of what is supposedly my life, and I am squandering it away. Fuck my childhood traumas. I will grow past them and I will be at peace with my decisions. It has always been as simple as that, but making it hard was always my way of avoiding pain. If I want to change my trajectory, I have to change what I am doing and force myself to choose. So, life doesn't choose for me. Because somewhere in that crazy mind of mine, time stopped. I thought someone would rescue me, but they didn't. This is not a fire I can put out; I have to walk through it. Getting burned is half the fun of life, didn't you know?

Hold on, hold on...

What I want to say is, I think the main reason for my anxiety and unhappiness is my almost superhuman ability to think too much. To weave even the most minuscule of moments into an elaborate tale of my downfall. I know that I'll never be truly content, until I can calm the voices in my head. So why then can't I make them stop? Books, games, fantasies, other worlds, nothing can overcome the fear that races inside. Am I then doomed to never be happy again? To hell with patience if my insides are on fire. The overly developed faculty of thinking comes at a price. How do I make it go away? Can someone tell me please? How can I use my mind so I don't lose it? How can I stop using it, when it's not needed. And when using it won't serve any purpose.

Hear the clock ticking on the wall...

The abyss was awake, and its entire population was stirring, some to flee, some to investigate, but many, all too many, to feed. Fish with fangs came. Bulbous bloated creatures came. Shelled monsters with massive jaws came. Things that defied description came. Every form or shape that stalked the nightmares of a child lurked there in the deep, and they all descended on him, no eyes to see, but many mouths to taste. 

Deal with all this, and find ways to live with myself? I honestly don't know if I can do that. If I'm strong enough to deal with the pressures of going through life with integrity. I stand often enough at the abyss of my soul, asking that same question, looking down into the dark crevices where the black monsters dwell on the bottom. They gaze up at me, and I look them in the eyes and they taunt me, almost making me fall into the void. Sometimes I wish I would just let myself fall. But I don't. Not yet at least. I turn around and go do what needs to be done. What else is there?

Neverland is home to lost boys like me...

Not sure I can take it...

The summit is believed to be the object of the climb. But its true object - the joy of living - is not in the peak itself, but in the adversities encountered on the way up. There are valleys, cliffs, streams, precipices, and slides, and as he walks these steep paths, he may think he cannot go any farther, or even that dying would be better than going on. But then he resumes fighting the difficulties directly in front of him, and when he is finally able to turn and look back at what he has overcome, he finds he has truly experienced the joy of living while on life's very road.

And it's all I can take...

These symptoms of my sensitivity,

feels personal when no one's listening,

there's things that I can't change, 

lord knows I've tried,

we can leave it all behind.

Play another verse...

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

Headfirst into the abyss...

I don't know, either way...

I keep quiet and look out the window. The light is weak and watery-looking, like the sun has just spilled itself over the horizon and is too lazy to clean itself up. The shadows are as sharp and pointed as needles. I watch three black crows take off simultaneously from a telephone wire and wish I could take off too, move up, up, up, and watch the ground drop away from me the way it does when you're on an airplane, folding and compressing into itself like an origami figure, until everything is flat and brightly colored - until the world is like a drawing of itself.

He's been falling, tumbling through the air. But this time the darkness is alive around him, full of beating things, and he realizes that he's not surrounded by dark but has only had his eyes closed all this time. He opens them, feeling silly, and at the same time a hundred thousand butterflies take off around him, so many of them in so many brilliant colors they are like a solid rainbow, temporarily obscuring the sun. But as they wing higher and higher they reveal a landscape below him. All green and gold and sun-drenched fields and pink-tinged clouds drifting underneath him. And the air around him is clear and blue and sweet smelling, and he's laughing, laughing, laughing as he spins through the air because, of course, he hasn't been falling all the time. He's been flying.

What it sounds like...

Dig in some roots...

Maybe that plane wouldn't ever take off,

maybe that dust wouldn't fly off the drive,

maybe that tumbleweed and me,

wouldn't leave every other sunrise.

Maybe I wouldn't be already gone again,

if it weren't for the wind.

Something I won't talk about...

You are wrong. If there is anything I have learned in my travels across this absolutely absurd concept that is life, it is that many things may change the nature of a man. Whether regret, or love, or revenge or fear - whatever you believe can change the nature of a man, can. I've seen belief do mystical things, make my grandmother stave off death, and turn my jaded heart into something resembling life. This entire thing that is not a blog has been constructed from belief. Belief damned all those whose heart clung to the hope that another loved them when they did not. Once, it made a me seek immortality. And it has made a posturing spirit think it is something more than a part of me.

Weren't for the wind...

It's during these times when we are weakest, when our feet tremble and we are being pushed down to the ground by the sheer weight of existence. I have to remember that this is when the universe can show itself the most dramatically. And I'm not talking about just taking way my panic attacks, although if it wanted to do that, it certainly could. What I'm talking about is giving me the grace and freedom and courage to live out my life - stress, anxiety, and all - in front of others with a vulnerability that can only come from above. Are you there, universe? It's me, Karr.

It might not let me go...

Fix what you didn't break...

He exists in the tears that you shed when you stumble upon a song that brings all your memories and pours on you at once. He exists in every touch of you, that kills a rose for a second and then makes it immortal. He exists in that thunder that shakes the heart of your world and brings it down to its knees. He is everywhere inside you, where you know he would exist, but you would never search.

Sometimes it's okay to be surprised. It's going to sound stupid, and I wouldn't ever say this out loud, but the way I have stumbled through the last six months er was sort of like getting caught in a thunderstorm. Storms can suck when they're knocking out power and ripping apart houses, no doubt. But other times the thunder is a soundtrack to something unpredictable, something that gets our hearts racing and wakes us up. If someone had warned me about the weather, I might have freaked out and stayed inside. But I didn't.

Go forth and have no fear...

Watch the only way out disappear...

Fold down your hands,

give me a sign,

put down your lies,

lay down next to me.

Don't listen when I scream,

bury your doubts and fall asleep,

find out, I was just a bad dream.

It's breaking his heart...

His whole life, the gnaw of anxiety has made people opaque to him. No matter how well he knows someone, no matter how deeply he loves, no matter the logical patterns, no matter how many allowances he knows someone might make for him, that bone-deep fear of rejection has always made it impossible for him to see any of it. It frosts over the glass. He never had anyone to begin with, then he had someone and she died. And every since he let it be unsurprising that nobody would want to have him around or truly trust that anyone would stick with him even as he's yelling at them to go away. 

Don't loosen your grip, get a hold on me...

Dear solitude, how I missed you in the times I was so attached to the illusion of loneliness, how I secretly longed for you in times of distraction with music and addiction, how I desired to dive into the creativity of your silent whispers. Oh, solitude, I remember you there when I started writing, I recall your inspiring voice when pen hit paper. When I was no longer by your side, oh solitude, how you silently tried to draw me back, by showing me the continuous struggle to feel full among unfulfilling relationships or restless nights of loneliness.. Oh, solitude, if it weren't for you, where would I find all that you could provide, only you?