Religion as That Which Inspires Awe

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Carl Jung defined religion as “A careful and scrupulous observation of that which one regards with awe.” So what is it that inspires awe?

Awe for me is the tenacity of life, the way a small plant finds a way to grow between two slabs of rock, or between a tiny crack in the sidewalk; how a tree will grow on the side of a cliff even with half its roots protruding over the edge; to watch them angle their leaves towards the sun’s light.

Awe is the power of attraction and the force of love, that overwhelming unceasing energy that draws people together whether in the form of a parent/child relationship or between two lovers.

Awe is the experience of something infinite that comes from being able to love and make love without fear and without a need to possess or control.

Awe is the mystery of consciousness, of awareness itself, that ability to know and comprehend that one is.

Awe is the way an infant or a child looks at the world, seeing everything as a miracle through eyes of luminous luster.

Awe is the beauty and charm of a woman and the wondrous life giving, life nurturing qualities associated with the eternal feminine.

Paragraphics

Posted on by under Paragraphic Poetics

Making Love and Having Sex

There is a difference between making love and having sex. The later is associated with power; it involves acting, a performance, or a show; it denotes something external to one’s self where the verb ‘to have’ as used in the phrase ‘to have sex’ denotes possession, and therefore taking. To have is to possess and to possess means there is the possibility of losing what one has. To have sex means to participate in an action that is merely a function of one’s physical body where love and passion are on the periphery, somewhere on the outside looking in. It means simply fulfilling an urge, or a craving.

Making love is instead associated with a state of being; it involves sharing and giving; being open and being vulnerable. To make means to be involved, means to share, means to express; to make means to create (not necessarily life) where any act of creation is associated with what any two people put into it; the creation and the creators are one; participating and surrendering to something universal. To make love means to treat love, not as something outside of one’s self but as something that one is, something that flows from being completely accepting of and open to who one is. In making love there is no fear since one cannot loose what one is; fear and love are antithetical.

Age is Just a Number

“Age is just a number” is often said by people older in age to make the point that, though they may be old, this does not prevent them from being able to learn, try, and experience new things. However, this same phrase is never used by older people in reference to younger people or even children in order to make the point that, despite being very young and inexperienced when it comes to “life,” young people can and often do posses great wisdom, often greater than those who have lived longer. With age can come experience, new worlds can be discovered, and new ideas given birth, but only to those open minded enough to welcome change. One forgets that with age, it is just as possible for a person to have become more fixed in their prejudices and beliefs, from past experiences. Age is just a number, but we often do not acknowledge or accept in full, the totality of the phrase’s meaning.

Sick and Healthy

When person become sick, he or she makes a concentrated effort to do everything conducive to getting better, to revitalizing one’s health: one drinks plenty of fluids, has little caffeine, eats fresh fruits and fresh vegetables, has soup, takes plenty of rest, quits smoking, and stops drinking; and heals quickly and feels better because of it. Then, once this same person is cured, he or she goes back to all those old habits and rituals of consumption: drinking lots of caffeine, drinking little water, eating cheap and over processed food, takes in a lot artificial sugars, consumes alcohol, and smokes cigarettes – it’s as if the being healthy gives one a license to treat one’s body badly; to do all those things one knows is not conducive to being healthy.

To Want the Truth

Most people assume they want to know the truth about various matters. A person claims, “I want the truth.” But such a person never thinks to first desire the ability or willingness to handle what the truth may turn out to be. There is no point in hearing the truth if one is not willing to accept it no matter what it may turn out to be. One can ask one’s self how willing he or she is to accept whatever truth comes to light, and then perhaps, truth, far from being something unknown, instead turns out to be something one has been unwilling to accept.

Never a Broken Stick

By some kind of miracle I have never broken a stick while drumming. I can’t help but consider, “Why?” Perhaps I play soft since I generally play alone; there is rarely a need to play hard when there are no other instruments to play over. Let me consider how I play:

I like to hold the sticks with touch, that ability to sense the object without grasping it too hard. I don’t cling to it, but instead make it an extension of my body.

When I hit drums I consider what the drum can do and not just what I can do through striking it; I let the drum sing. When hitting the symbols, I never follow through completely.

The word is “finesse.” But I just don’t try to play with finesse; I try to be it; I try to exist in it.

Sequels

There are those experiences one has that are so profound and enjoyable that one tries to relive, recapture, and re-experience them. One tries to do just that, but comes to a realization that the attempt didn’t measure up, that it wasn’t the same, and that something was missing. One realizes that what they were trying to relive is a ghost; a past experience with particular circumstances that cannot be recreated.

Much of life involves such futility; trying to relive moments that have moved on, amassing new experiences that are not allowed to be as they are, and living for past moments and memories that can never be experienced in quite the same way again.

Book Abroad Poetry

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Incessancy

What am I to do

With memories

And the call to move

Through time and back

Against the moment

For a thought

That wants desperately to be alive?

What is it doing here?

Why has it arrived?

–

My Early Mornings

What happened to my early mornings?

That time of day

To rise and shine

And greet the sun

Before it rose high

High enough

To paint the sky blue

And be with me as she did it,

But now wondering where I am,

Seeing me with this girl-

Is she my sun?

(There is no question

More complicated than that)

And so the sun is jealous

Because the sun is her

Asking why I gave this girl

My life in bed for nights

Though she forgets,

I gave them to her as well

And she took my mornings too

–

A Stream

This lovely stream

Cornering the breath I breathe

And the rocks in current

Holding close

Gripping the walls

Of surfaces

Ground still in place

With tress by their sides

And paths still in motion

Heading straight for the sea

–

Curves

This water is silent

Though it moves and it turns

To bend through curves

In clear and calm rhythm

Through the infinite steady

Of constant and quiet

–

Love at First Sight

What could our eyes tell us

If they could speak

Long enough

To let these moments pass

Without silence

As something moves

Through feelings

Struggling to talk

But still and quiet

Long enough

For the wind moving between us

To translate something about love

And the desire to be closer

Without giving up

Permitting what breezes can do

To carry beauty

Across landscapes and oceans

Stretched far and wide

Long enough

To let nothing lapse through time

Allowing everything to be felt

No matter where we are

How we end up

Or what becomes of out lives

–

Where Am I to Go?

Where am I to go?

Nowhere

Left at hand

To be broken past

And behind

A thousand words spoken;

They may never catch up

They’re moving fast

But remain out of sight

–

You Stir My Unconscious

You stir my unconscious

With a whisper

To a sound

Through a pulse

To the rhythm

Of a thousand tree tops

Swaying in the wind

Moving to the life

Of a once being calm

And always breathing moment

–

To Do

In all this

Is there nothing but a yearn for more

A chance to appear

Out from behind

A roosted corners hole,

To fall from skies

And be buried again

Only to pause and mourn

A deft and fleeting soul?

–

When I Draw

I hesitate the line parcel

Because I’m not sure of what will come

Since I doubt the creative emergence

Of some creation that doubts itself

Ignoring me

But forgetting myself

And yet wanting to be created

Only having to break out

–

My Inner Ocean

The ocean inside

Can never dissipate

But still by chance

At times to calm

It rests

Only to stir again

And rage tempestuously

Filling and never un-filling

Forever

Through a myriad

And everlasting life

Reborn to the upmost movements

That no never gone

And knows not a thing

–

Making Love

The sides

And perspectives of love disintegrate

At the approach

To union in kind

Where the felt and feeling

The dealt and giving heart

Bellows without a being

The way the universe as a whole

Gives itself up

In order to be

The Universe as such

–

My Emotions

I am determined to look closely

And see

But this pond of water muddled

Isn’t clear

Since I can’t seem to see the bottom –

For all I know

There is none

–

The Light That Light Displaced

You are the light that light displaced

A star ever bright

And sent away

Since what is space

Without the night?

–

Coda

When one final kiss is never enough;

When the last word never comes;

When you know that no matter what you do,

Or what you say

No matter how many more times you kiss her

Or in the ways you touch her

Or with what glances you try to content yourself

She will be standing there as the girl

Whose side you never want to leave

Then you know…

–

Choosing to Be Offended and the Illusion of Identity

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Today it seems relatively impossible to have a discussion without offending someone. Moreover, it appears increasingly difficult to say or do anything without someone feeling offended. Perhaps this has always been the case, perhaps not, but it should be an obvious reality that one cannot be offended unless one chooses to be offended, and yet individuals often claim to be slighted even when most of the time it is clear that no one is intentionally trying to hurt someone else. In such instances it seems it is no longer about some real aspect of one’s self, or some important issue that needs defending, and more like some fabricated construct that one feels like asserting.

When someone is offended it is because he or she identifies with an issue or with a particular label associated with one side of an issue. That is, a person claims to identify with a specific label; “I am a…” or “I identify as…” Thus one becomes offended because his or her identity feels “threatened.” So the more important question to ask becomes, “Why have an identity?”

Having an identity is associated with being unique, with “standing out,” of being different; but oddly enough the etymology of the word ‘identity’ reveals the opposite meaning. The word ‘identity’ comes from the Latin root ‘idem’ which means “the same.” What one thinks one gains through having an identity is wholly illusory. There is an even better word that stresses the illusion of an identity. The word ‘personality’ is even more revealing. Although the words ‘personality’ and ‘identity’ are not entirely equivalent, there is none the less a huge overlap; both words are used to denote individuality. And yet the word ‘personality’ comes from the Latin ‘persona,’ meaning “mask.” Individuals crave an identity and yet they are only disguises. And still, so much seems to be at stake over having one.

Being without an identity does not mean negating one’s unique qualities and characteristics; it does not negate individuality, and it does not negate one’s right to defend him or herself when being abused to a threateningly high degree. Being without an identity means owning one’s sense of aliveness generated through an awareness and acceptance of one’s feelings. Everything else, all the labels whether they refer to nationality, profession, religion, activism, etc. are truly not real in comparison. Such labels may be useful for the sake of communication, but they are not what a person is.

All identities are inherently meaningless in respect to what every individual is by birth. No raindrop, leaf, or snowflake has to do anything at all to be unique; they just are by virtue of their very being. It is the same for every human person and in fact every living thing; there is nothing any one person needs to do to be unique every person is unique by right of birth; every person is composed of a unique set of characteristics because of a unique individual history against a unique setting and backdrop. The important question is, why is this not good enough?

One does not have to do anything to have a strong sense of self except be able to own and accept one’s feelings, desires, emotions, and thoughts, but these are precisely the very things a person is often running from. This sense of affirming what one is by birth is different from assuming or asserting an identity. An identity is what one asserts when one has lost contact with who and what one really is. It’s what one asserts in order to forget one’s self.

Of course such inherent characteristics as one’s inner feelings are not “flashy” and they do not make one stand out externally as much as one may want, but that is because an individual is not comfortable with his or her inner characteristics; it is one’s inner character and feelings that make one feel whole and yet these are precisely the things one is often running from, often because they involve repressed emotions and painful memories. It is this having to run away that makes “standing out” externally seem like a justifiable and necessary attraction when in reality it is only a façade, an escape. Such behavior is an “acting out,” where ‘acting’ here means “performing a fictional role,” and ‘out’ means departing from one’s inner sense of self.

Many people often try to stand out from the crowd without realizing that before one may stand out from a crowd one must be standing in a crowd. One often assumes that by standing out he or she is asserting an individual identity. But standing out really means standing in since it takes a crowd in order to stand out from a crowd. The consequences of this are that even when one is intentionally trying to be unique and assert themselves, that desire is still dependent on other people, on the crowd; one’s self is still dependent on and mediated through others when the truth is that one does not have to do anything at all.

Prose

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“Have you approached the bareness? A kind of skulking before the spirit, amongst the living, yet beyond the stubborn soul, where indifference pries itself into one’s instincts in order to go on living; marching down on the thunder claps of hesitancy with a wide open determination, vast enough to incorporate their power; obsessive enough to continue moving forward?”

–

“Just this once, give up all your memories and embrace the sensation of the ever present void, that “blank check” of creation, dashing itself upon the shores of discernment, not as a conqueror, but as an all-pervading “what will be,” a kind of sempiternal foundation to which an eternity of constructions may put themselves upon. It does justice to life, much as you believe the opposite, if you could but draw nature in the figure of your imagination instead of your mind.”

–

I lay on the floor. Suddenly it felt like my body was a mound, under the soil and covered in earth. From out of this mound grew flowers, the roots of which were underground, tangled up with my body, growing from my organs. Though buried beneath I could perceive the flowers, I could feel their bloom, feel them grow, feel them age as if through seasons. I felt and became these flowers dying, withering and crimping until they laid low. And then suddenly a tree burst from the mound, rising into the air, fully grown, with huge robust limbs and a solid trunk; the flowers were the source of this new life; my organs were the source of it, and it grew from my body.

–

“He was an incredibly sensitive soul. If you ever sat and looked at him for a long period of time it was if he was carrying the weight of the world’s emotions. You could look into his eyes and see the entire world, all the pain and suffering, but all the pleasure and joy as well.

Most people run from that kind of sensitivity, he never did, but it took its toll, and I’m sure more than once he regretted and hated how sensitive he was. But he never betrayed it because he knew it would be a lie.”

–

How does one survive the challenges associated with understanding the mysteries of life? By that I mean the great wonders and the unfathomable beauty that survive without reason or a lasting explanation, always as an incomplete answer, like a divided number with a constant remainder. Do we survive by taking pleasure in the mystery itself, finding peace in the fact that it is a mystery with no complete answer? By indulging in the mystery, by accepting the unanswerable quality as somehow the source of its majesty?

What is an answer after all? Does knowing how a flower grows increase the splendor of watching it bloom?

–

He did not want to live, but he did not want to die; he wanted be alive and to feel life, and for that reason, living, living in a way connected with the expectations and norms of society, felt pointless, unreal, like the life of a mannequin.

“Why live when one can be alive? Yes exactly!” he thought.

–

Incited to feel the heart of attraction itself, lofted into the realm of a source found past to nowhere; moving beyond to a place without motive; leaving intention itself behind?

–

 

Why Get Up In the Morning? The Meaning and Non-Meaning of Life

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I still remember the day I discovered I would eventually die. I was just a boy staying at my aunt’s house. There was a movie on the television where one of the characters was having a discussion with her relative about death. I don’t remember exactly what transpired in the movie, but I remember asking my aunt if one day I would die as well. She said, “Yes” and I began crying. I was devastated, and it took some consoling before I was able to move on and simply be a kid again. I moved on but the realization stayed with me.

As years passed I became interested in that incident, and I began asking myself what made me continue to go on living despite knowing that it would all come to an end. Surely the realization of death was an intense existential experience for me, but how was it not completely devastating, devastating to the point where continuing to live was pointless? After all, what would be the point if everything came to an end? What was the meaning?

Having a Catholic upbringing many people around me had an answer: things don’t end, your life continues in heaven (if one is “good” enough of course). I can still hear my grandma’s voice telling me when I die I would see the entire family again, they would all be waiting for me; and watching the movie “Ghost” as a kid staring Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore seemed to confirm what she said.

The belief in heaven, probably more than anything, delayed my rejection of Catholicism. It is not that I have completely rejected the belief in one day again being with those one is closest to after death, but the idea of a heaven, of a “life” after death, always seemed too convenient of a belief when it came to answering questions about the meaning of life.

Human beings want meaning, and human beings want a purpose. As Viktor Frankl, the founder of logo-therapy stated, “Challenging the meaning of life is the truest expression of the state of being human.” People want a reason to live and a reason to get up in the morning.

A few months ago a friend of mine told me about his own struggle to do just that, to get up in the morning, to have a purpose in life. The question was not new to me, but it had been awhile since I asked it to myself so directly. And so I asked myself, “Why do I get up in the morning? What is the meaning of life?

There is certainly truth to the fact that people want meaning in their lives or want their life to be meaningful, but I also feel that having to ask the question in the first place almost misses the point. Though the question itself, “What is the meaning of life,” is important, it also seems to me there is a way in which asking the question already betrays the answer or the possibility of finding one. Is not life, that of simply feeling alive, innately meaningful?

When one looks at trees, rivers, oceans, animals, stars, the sun and moon, etc. one realizes that there is no need for any of it, and yet they are; there is no ultimate purpose dependent on things existing as opposed to not existing; there is no need for any of it and yet things are. There may be no ultimate meaning, but perhaps that is what makes everything the more wondrous. All things will eventually pass away and yet all things are anyway. Life is meaningful because it is life.

Asking what makes life meaningful is different from asking what the meaning of life is. The meaning of life is simply to live, but the first question is not easier to answer. That is because one often assumes it depends on what one chooses to do. To answer the first question one assumes that something must be done in order to give life purpose. But the answer should be simpler; life makes life meaningful.

Of course people have to do things to live; one has to eat and drink, have shelter, create social bonds, but one almost always looks at these activities as something one has to “get out of the way first” so that one is free to do something more meaningful and have a “true” purpose instead of finding such activities to be innately satisfying because they sustain one’s life. I am not arguing against having goals, careers, or desires, but there should be an explicit understanding that doing so will probably not give one the lasting satisfaction one seeks; I suspect that simply feeling alive is the only thing that can do that.

One might be initially skeptical of the satisfaction that comes from simply feeling one’s sense of being alive, but if one can do it, he or she realizes that it is enough. A lot of people do not operate from that viewpoint; a majority of people lose contact with that sense of aliveness because most people  become alienated from his or her feelings and from being able to express those feelings either to others or first importantly to one’s self.

Individuals must chose to do something, but the angle from which one operates and choses to do something should be redirected so that what one does stems from a life that one feels to be innately meaningful as opposed to trying to make life meaningful by doing a number of things.

I’ve had a lot of goals in my life, most of them I’ve accomplished, but many of them never gave me the satisfaction I expected. It’s the same for many people I know and have talked to, and many people I’ve read about.

If one reads accounts of famous individuals who left great contributions to society, one might be surprised to learn how at the end of their lives, many of them were dissatisfied or found their accomplishments to be pointless. Many famous people in fact ended up feeling like they did nothing. There is a vast trove of cultural and technological achievements, but most of it has truly been unnecessary, and that is because none of it can ever be as innately satisfying as simply being.

I have come across the writings or teachings of some spiritual people who have laughed off or downplayed many of the cultural and scientific achievements of society. At first I simply thought they were philistines. Now I feel that it is not that they reject culture, science, or the arts, but that they have an innate understanding that what many people attempt to gain through doing and achieving in such areas will not give them what they are looking for.

Almost all of what a person tries to accomplish is often done because he or she thinks that doing so will fill that hole in their life, or will give life meaning. Increasingly I’ve come to realize that it has not been what I’ve done or what I’ve accomplished that’s been satisfying, but how I’ve chosen to be from moment to moment, and I try to keep that in mind as I plan what to do next.

A Collection of Prose

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Lost in thought and daydreaming, he carelessly looked around, moving his eyes from the grass, to the birds, to the clouds; from the porch, to the house, to the pavement. Then his eyes landed on the large green leaves on the lawn. He looked up, realizing they had fallen from the giant tree next to the garage. It occurred to him that this tree was shedding leaves even though it was not Fall. He watched the tree as another group of leaves fell from the top. Then he realized: trees shed their leaves in Summer, not because they are dying, but because they are so filled with the sun that they are literally bursting with life. “That is how I want to live,” he thought.

–

She morphed into a cloud, floating in absence, through obscurity, no one there, and yet, there she remained.

–

For me one of the most important things was to realize that life has no time limits, there is no list of things that must be “checked off,” there is no final destination. You have to live without a care for where you end up or how you get there. You have to be present, content with the simple feeling of being alive, and when you do this, time will slowly come to halt; you’ll be puzzled by the dissidence of your momentum, wondering how it is you can go on after revolting, having thrown off the chains of your own impulses. But you’ll breathe again, only this time each breathe will ground you more firmly and with ever deeper roots into the constancy of the all pervading moment.

–

And so I search for the source of that feeling, finding it somewhere at the center of a great pulsation where the light of the universe refracts through an open stretch of darkness, a vast expanse that has lost any and all characteristics for the sake of transcendence.

–

“I was walking through the city. I passed an older woman with a sallow face, and exhausted eyes. She bore the look of quiet desperation. Seeing her, it dawned on me that everyone is trying their best with what they have, doing the most with what they can to live a happy life. After that, looking around, for some reason everyone I saw became more beautiful.”

–

Her real name is something foreign and irrelevant, but in my own mind I call her ‘The Black Rose,’ both for her black hair and for her stunning beauty, with eyes like caves, but not the part of the cave so distant from the opening that no light ever pierces it, but more like that part of a cave where, as one goes deeper, reaches that part where light will touch it for no more than a few steps. A cave is also an appropriate analogy, for it is a cave that contains dark recesses of space that no eye ever sees. Likewise, I will refrain from saying anything more of this woman, and will keep, like a cave, my thoughts somewhere within the dark recesses of my mind, at the risk of otherwise falling victim to my vulnerabilities and vices.

–

That strange time of year when the seasons seemed locked in ambiguity, when Spring can just as easily be Fall and Fall just as easily be Spring; when one knows not whether Spring is transitioning to Summer or Fall transitioning to Winter; when the cool crisp breezes of morning and night make it so, leaving one unsure where he or she is or where he or she is going, fooling one into thinking there is a choice in the matter; perhaps stemming from the seasons themselves, who, aware of the seeming lull between time, gain the desire to move from Spring to Winter or from Fall to Summer, all the while knowing deep down, that such choices are impossible.

Suicide And The War Within

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A friend recently asked me what my name means. I confessed I didn’t know and so I looked it up. The name ‘Mark’ derives from the Latin ‘Mart-kos’ which means ‘consecrated to the God Mars,’ the God of war. As a boy I would have been thrilled to know this, finding it completely appropriate, and associating it with a kind of destiny I always felt was mine, to go to war.

Now having gone to Iraq and moved on with my life I am still thrilled to have discovered the meaning of my name, and find it just as appropriate, not because of its association with war of an external kind, or as Clausewitz called it, “War as the continuation of politics by other means,” but because of the way I have come to view war. This is war as something personal, internal, and actually worth fighting; it is the struggle within one’s self to know who one really is. This is war of a different kind, but it is one that I have found no less daunting and difficult. As the philosopher Thales said, “The most difficult thing in life is to know yourself.”

What do I mean by internal war? To fight an internal war means to struggle with all those things that prevent a person from getting to know who they really are and why; to know one’s likes and dislikes, and why; to know one’s character traits, especially the unflattering ones; to know the origin and source of one’s anger, love, hate, joy, jealousy, motivations, and drives; why one chooses to act the way one does in any situation; it means possessing the highest amount of self honesty and self awareness. To know and practice such things means freedom in the truest sense of the word.

To fight an internal war means to struggle with all those feeling that are hard to embrace, feelings which nonetheless do one’s sense of self justice, though they may be associated with either painful memories or unrealistic expectations. How able one is to embrace and healthily express one’s feelings and emotions determines how alive and living one actually is. The failure to do this results not just in a deadened life where one feels alive only when “getting crazy,” “having fun,” or getting “fucked up,” but in an actual death where suicide seems the only answer.

A couple months ago another Marine from my former unit committed suicide. Suicide remains a huge problem for both active duty personnel and veterans alike. Some estimates put suicide among veterans as high as 20 a day. During the final years of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars suicide was even the leading cause of death among active serving personnel. Ironically those who have committed suicide were able to walk and patrol through war zones, and yet have lacked the ability to be more open, to speak about, and deal with their problems. It should give serious pause to know that a nation can train its citizens to run fearlessly into battle, and yet fail to make individuals capable of dealing with their inner pain. Sadly, we fight external wars, wars that don’t really matter, in order to avoid the wars we are struggling with inside. This all suggests that there is a dimension to being human that most of us chose not to deal with, a different kind of war we choose not to fight.

Not everyone will join the military and go to war, but almost everyone will find a way to avoid their inner struggles. A distant uncle of mine recently committed suicide around the same time as the Marine from my Battalion. It seems individuals everywhere are vulnerable to seeing suicide as a way out of their troubles. And although physical war may be the most convenient way for tricking one’s self into believing he or she is more strong, confident, and self possessed than they really are, there are many ways to deceive one’s self, and almost everyone will find their own.

Participating in physical war may have its merits, and may test various aspects of one’s self; becoming successful from a monetary and social point of view may bring a sense of fulfillment; constructing an identity around any kind of theme whatsoever, be it becoming a great actor, photographer, scientist, preacher, bodybuilder, etc.; all these may bring a certain degree of satisfaction, but if they do nothing to avail one of his or her inner sufferings, if they fail to bring lasting peace and self knowledge, then they merely represent dead end ways by which individuals seek to displace and avoid their inner struggles, thus preventing the attainment of a kind of interminable pleasure that can only come from embracing the full weight of existence and the freedom it comes with.

Poems of My Ocean

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You are an ocean

A girl whose depths I dive to

Down to the very bottom

If it costs me my life,

If it costs me my breaths

I continue to plunge

And feel my pulse from pressures

As the weight of the water

Collapses my lungs

With air in my chest

Like gold in sunken treasure

Falling fast and silent

Sinking calm and deep

–

In this ocean

Is there a bottom?

Where I can scatter

And settle with the sand

In this cool and quiet place

Forever down below

Away from land to be here

Comfortable and at peace

To call this place my home?

–

Your pale skin

Glows in the moonlight

A complexion

Soft and fair

Beautiful as you lie there

With open eyes inviting me

To an ocean you don’t know is there

And so I catch you unaware

As you grab me

Vulnerable and looking

Open hearted and wondering

Asking me why I stare

–

Because I Don’t Want to Write an Entire Novel… Another Collection of Prose I’ve Written

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They sat at the dinner table. She brought her hands together saying, “Thank you.”

“Who are you thanking?” her older sister asked.

“No one. I’m just thankful.”

“Are you thanking God?” her father asked.

“No. I don’t know whom I’m thanking, and it doesn’t seem to matter. I’m just thankful, I’m thankful there is food when so many children are starving. I’m thankful I have a home, and I’m thankful I don’t have to sleep out in the cold at night. I’m just thankful.”

The rest of the family sat listening, chewing their food with their heads low to their plates, but with eyes up, unable to resist being curious about what she was saying.”

“Well you have to be thanking someone. It doesn’t make sense otherwise,” her sister retorted.

“Yes, it makes perfect sense!” I realize that for some unknown reason I have things that others don’t and I’m happy and grateful for it.”

“But that’s a prayer you said!”

“No it’s not! And even if it is, it’s still true!”

“That’s ridiculous!”

“And you’re stupid!”

–

He lied on the bed, at peace with doing nothing. During such moments it was important for him to find comfort in doing nothing, in doing nothing but being. For here he felt he had hit on one of the secrets of life: to be comfortable with doing nothing. This was not being lazy, far from it. Indeed, he had learned from watching people from the “baby boomer generation,” how hard it was to do nothing, and had come to feel that it was those people working constantly, unable to ever take a rest, and take time to enjoy being alive, unable to enjoy life itself; those people who thought to be hard working meant being virtuous that were truly lazy. To him these were the laziest of people for they were too lazy to stop and take in the pure essence of life; life with it’s good and bad, with its perplexity, and the existential anxiety that came with wondering about it all. Such people had busied themselves with the belief that existing meant doing and doing meant being. But all he ever learned from watching such people, with their incessant activity, was that their drive to stay busy was at heart nothing more than a determination to avoid some inevitable reality about life, and that they were merely trying to escape some unavoidable day when an individual is no longer physically fit enough to occupy his or her thoughts through labor; with the inevitable reality of being feeble, bed ridden, and stuck relatively handicapped with a whole world of doubt concerning the point of life, four cornering the space and time left to existence.

–

He thought about the optimism he had at that time concerning new beginnings. He wondered if he was wrong for having it then; he wondered if it was wrong to want it now; that he desired either the past or optimism itself, he did not know.

He felt buried by the present moment, and was uncertain what it meant. It involved feeling and being comfortable with the past, though it made him want to disappear from the present; it made him accepting of and happy that in the present he was able to be so at home, at piece with his memories and comfortable with the person he had come to be. He thought about this contradiction: loving one’s past from the present moment, loving the present because of it, but desiring to escape to the past nonetheless.

–

Doesn’t it bother you that you have to have sound all the time, that you can’t sleep without music? Shouldn’t it alarm you, or anyone, that you are unable to tolerate silence? What will happen when you’re older, or on your deathbed? Won’t silence catch up with you, chasing the very bones in your body as they begin to age and weaken? You’ll fight the silence with your body through tensions that make your muscles strain and your bones crack. You’ll claim to be upset over becoming old, but secretly you’ll come to love your decaying body because of the sounds emanating from them as they age, and you’ll pass away telling your self there was no other way. And you’ll die screaming in your head through a voice that no one will hear.

–

The endless distractions; a glass of tea here, a cigarette there; a nap, a walk, an endless stretch of daydreams; songs, food, drinks, TV shows, movies, idle talk, video games, gossip. The restlessness that gives way to movement, the movement that gives way to restlessness, and somewhere, floating between, a stillness that seems ephemeral, but only because one tries to hold on to it.

–

He lied in bed, on his side, with his arm by his face stretched over his head. From this angle he could see the pulse in the vein of his arm. He watched and began staring at it drearily. Soon he was thinking of her, focusing on the beat, the pulsation, Before long, the beat became her breathing; he watched and could feel her breath between kisses; he stared, and his pulse became the thrusts of his pelvis while making love; then the beat became the blink of her large beautiful eyes, opening and closing with the rhythm of her heart; staring back at him as if she was there. He watched his pulse and with every beat a memory of her would flash in his mind until it seemed she was his very blood, coursing through his body in torrents of red and blue.