The brevity of life
is so incredibly horrid;
they say it's what makes life sweet,
I've tasted it - it was sour.
It was putrid, repulsive.
I'd rather eat a flaming bagel
with protruding knives
than be up close and personal
with the brevity of life again.

One flick of your switch,
and you're snuffed out.
Death doesn't care of the plans you've made,
of the aspirations and dreams you had.
It only cares to claim another victim;
to feed its uncanny desire
to mess with the mind of the living,
to make them question.

If I could kill death,
I would kill it with compassion, kindness.
(Isn't that what God did, in body form?)
I would approach subtly, yet pleading softly,
as a noble night would be chivalrous:
"Please don't take the ones I love.
Please don't take me.
I'm unsure of what's to come of me."
As the terrified wayfarer that I am,
death would look me in the eye
and deliver the final, crushing blow: no mercy.
Never mind a shield of armor;
it will not save me here.
The armor is but a tactic, anyway,
to appear tougher than I actually am.

Now, I have discussed death
and the thoughts that I have on demise.
But we have yet to discuss God;
who I believe is the beautiful, opposing
force of the universe
that likely has a mesmeric and radiant
solution to overcome
our unwilling grapple with death.

The story it to be continued.

thoughts by the graveside - 4/26/14

By the graveside
you cannot hide.
You are beside death,
and who, when they are beside death,
can distract their mind?

No one. You are forced
to face the reality that
this mound of fresh dirt,
these fake flowers,
they are your destiny.

You are returning to dust.
Every day you live,
you are a little closer
than the day before.

2.
You will one day leave your home.
You will one day leave the only home you've ever known,
often unexpectedly.
And where will you go?
Of this I do not know with assurance.

3. 
Sometimes I wonder
how life is even real.
There are so many surreal moments -
or is that just life?
A web, a collection
of unexplainable moments
that morph together and
equate to our reality.

Such is life.

4.
Life is equal parts of living and dying.
We are living everyday and dying everyday.

5. 
I am very much in love with life;
I am also absurdly preoccupied with death.

6. 
You must believe in God
in a place such as this.
What do you think of all this?
Was it meaningless?
All these lives, lived and lost.
And look what they amount to.

bike ride

In that one moment in time,
those few seconds of existence
on this floating orb
in the vast universe;
I felt infinite.

Everything was mine.
I possessed every treasure
that the heart could hold.
Every experience, every emotion,
every day that I had lived
morphed in an instant; I felt it all.
And I was content.

It fit together so lovely.
I felt so beautiful and free
and welcomed by the world
and the people that passed.
(Did they know of the
euphoric moment I was experiencing?)

The clouds lowered to the gravel path
and I glided along on them,
two wheels effortlessly carried my soul,
my hopes, my dreams, my passions.
All that I am weighted on a bicycle.

The answer to life
lies in moments like these.
And the question is -
where do they come from?
Is it You, God, are you in control -
serendipitously supplying
these intoxicating moments
for us humans to live
in hope that we will
credit You for our happiness?

I have yet to realize if thinking deeply
has created in me a new sense of
renewed, glorious existence,
                   or
If it has stunted me from the life that
I once lived, the one-path life
characterized by a distinct
explanation and meaning.

9 a.m. on a brilliant & sunny morning 

I get a certain, semi-indescribable infinite feeling when I look up.
The clouds - fluffy, white masses of hope - tell me that this life is exceptionally real.
It is right here, right now. It is fleeting.
Why do you think the picture-perfect clouds move so fast?
No beautiful and surreal moment lasts,
but that doesn't mean that the clouds won't float freely again on another day.
There will be more and more and more of these moments.
But quick - look now! Don't waste another day.
Because the days go on and on, sometimes they drag,
but the stark reality is that they will not last forever - only a lifetime.

A lifetime! - what an extensive period of time, right?
No, I think otherwise: life is faster than our minds can process, slipping from our tight grasp.
"Life, stay with me!" I plead and cry, but it always refuses.
It moves anyway, like the clouds - shifting, changing, fleeting, momentary.

The horrifying part of this thought, the part that nags the back of my mind (the part I recall in tears),
is that the clouds will go on even when I fly away.
When I am no longer a wayfarer friend to this earth, they will continue to float on,
shedding their beauty on the day, keeping the sun company.

Another, brighter thought, an easier recollection:
when I fly away, will I then become one with the clouds,
and know them greater than I have before?
Will I reside in their comforting shape and
in turn, bring comfort to those below, still present on earth?

They have an answer -
but they won't tell me.

two thoughts on human life

one
I can't help but consider
how beautiful life would be
if we had nothing to prove
to anyone but ourselves.

If we were totally, wholeheartedly
free to be who we are,
what would this world be like?
(Surely there would be no
carbon-copies of humans,
and individuality would be praised.)

A desire pulses in me
to create this world. 

two
Celebrate diversity
and different paths of life,
different paths to truth.
(And love God while doing it).

We don't have to be cookie cutter.

the composition of a wave

My mind is racing.
I'm treading water - stay alive!
faster, faster, the waves approach.

They knock me this way and that,
my mind bursts with thought as I
tumble side to side.

The fluidity of the waves amazes me,
they topple freely, tumble indefinitely,
they don't question when or why,
they just do.
This brings peace to my mind.

Such is life.

That me that I've always wanted to be,
yes, that me, that me lives inside me -
I am she.

I am who I've wanted to be.
Who did I want to be?
I wanted to be me;
the best me I could be.
And that best me
has always lived inside me -
She is me.

I am my best,
even at my worst.
I am myself,
even when I desire to be a better me.
I am always the best me
because no one can be a better me
than I can be.

She is me
and I am she.

Alanis Morissette

We are but a breath,
a flash, a vapor.
We're here and gone;
often unknowing of when
we will disappear
into the clouds.

The brevity is real;
you will not survive this life.
It will bury you into the dust,
the mystery from which you came.

One day you, yes, you,
will cease to exist.
You will simply no longer be
alive and well on this planet earth.
The only world you've ever known
will be pulled out from
under your feet.

Death takes all prisoner.
None get out alive.

We are fleeting.

words that have influenced my mind this week:

"I love people. Everybody. I love them, I think, as a stamp collector loves his collection. Every story, every incident, every bit of conversation is raw material for me. My love's not impersonal yet not wholly subjective either. I would like to be everyone, a cripple, a dying man, a whore, and then come back to write about my thoughts, my emotions, as that person. But I am not omniscient. I have to live my life, and it is the only one I'll ever have. And you cannot regard your own life with objective curiosity all the time..."

-Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

I've always wondered what it would be like to live the life of another. Why I was placed in this body at this point of time, I do not know; and I will not know until I acquire the answers when I go somewhere greater, maybe God will tell me. But to live your own life with the curiosity of what it would be like to live the life of another - this can be both a futile and sympathetic curiosity. Futile in the sense that it will never happen. We can be compassionate and attempt to understand another human's life, but at the end of the day, we are still ourselves, and that is who we will remain. But it is also sympathetic; we can gain a sense of empathy and favor for the person's life that we are desiring to live as, to be placed in their shoes is extremely different from observing their life and creating our own ideas about what it would be like. 

Sylvia Plath said it right - we can not overlook our own lives, our own frailty, or our own subjective experiences because we are preoccupied, wondering what it would be like if we were another. 

"Do you know, 

that every day's

the first of the

rest of your life."

- Thriving Ivory, Angels On The Moon

Yes, I knew that. But have I thought about it? No. 

I can feel the brevity of my life, I can feel it slipping away, I am incapable of making it stop. And I hate that. 

But I am amazed at our ability to create our lives, to put our past behind us and step ahead.

When I hear the phrase "the rest of your life" I think of it as a whole. I hear people often asking, "what are you going to do with your life? What are the plans for the rest of your life?" I think that when I hear this (and I am assuming that this happens to others, too), I automatically assume that we are referring to the future, what is to come, instead of what is right here, right now. 

This moment right here, this living, breathing moment, is the rest of your life. Not tomorrow, not next week, it is right here. You are living it.

The rest of your life is a continuum of every moment that you life from this point on. 

This is a radical concept to understand; and if more of us did, it would change the way we live. 

Have you felt life lately?

I'm asking you,

have you stopped to just feel it?

To peer up into the world you are inhabiting. 

To feel breath as it enters, exits, as it sustains you.

To stand in contentment and notice your frailty.

To be quiet with your emotions, let them be.

To feel one with something greater. 

You are here;

you are now.

Feel your existence,

because it's the 

truest aspect of life

that we know. 

a bewildered mind at 2 a.m.

I am amazed at the fact that every time I lie down to sleep, I am still the same person that I was yesterday. And the day before that. And as long as I've existed. I've always been myself, I'll always be myself. I am me. And not anyone else. I am incapable of being someone else. This seems like a simple and silly and obvious though, but it's not. It's quite dynamic, really.

I go through many changes in a day, so many shifts and tears and emotions. How can I possibly be the same person that I was the day before? Life is shifting, moving, it is never stagnant.

Maybe we do change who we are. Maybe we change when we are shaped by our circumstances and by things that we have no control over. And we do change our physical appearance and we do change our attitudes. And we do change when we have a broken heart. And I suppose we change when we fall in love. And I've seen a human meet God, and I've seen that human change and become quite different.

But there's something inside us (or I'd like to think that there is) that is unchanging, it will not shift. It is constant; it is the essence of who we are. You are only you. There will never be any other you. You are the only you that you can be. And yes, as humans we will be shaped by the life swirling around us, and we will change and become different as we were before. Our qualities and traits are not static; you may gain more joy, your mind may grow in darkness. The human will meet God, the human will lose someone they love, the human will fall head over heels in love, the human will gain a new passion for nature, the human will be angered beyond words, the human will be lonely. Humans experience countless changes. What is beautiful is that in the midst of all these changes, the human is still itself. It has something that can never be taken away - the essence of its being.

I live in my body and experience in my body, but I am not my body. There is a spirit within me that is beyond my body, beyond my mind, and in that spirit lies the answer - the answer to how we can lie down at the end of the day and still be ourselves.

There is an intrinsic nature to humans, very much lovely, very much to be appreciated, very much full of God. We are who we are, and that can not be taken from us.

There's a guilt in surviving.
There's a guilt in going on
and living life
when the one that you love

is gone.

Dhammapada - Buddhist scripture

let today be today

let yourself feel today

let yourself love today

let yourself grieve today

let yourself free today

be yourself today -

whatever "you" today brings

don't feel how you

think you should feel.

feel how you're feeling

and let it be. 

sorry for the bleakness (I'm not really apologizing)

Pissed off at the world
because nothing is the same.
You're gone and I swear
that the world has shifted
and now turns on a new axle.
A detrimental axle.
(Why can't everyone feel it?
Am I the only one?)
And what the hell is wrong
with my mind?
I have thoughts that
I didn't even know
my brain was capable
of having: chaos in my mind.

My advice to you;
never lose someone,
this may happen to you.
And if you do?
Read this and know
that you're not the only
messed up one
out there.

this new skin

this new skin
this new skin
this new skin
that I'm in
will take some adjusting,
I suppose.

But I did not ask
for this new skin;
I did not willingly
shed the old skin;
it was ripped off me
as I cried next to
your lifeless body
on the living room floor.

With each tear,
with each touch
of your hand,
feeling it grow
colder and colder,
life as I knew it
was ending.
Death likes to take
sanity along with it,
and skin - involuntarily.

I am not living
my life anymore.
I am living in
a new skin.
A skin with the
absence of my
faith, hope, and love
(as I knew them).
These were ripped
off in death.

this new skin
this new skin
this new skin
that I'm in
is not enjoyable,
but in what other
skin will I live?

This is my fate.

Lao Tzu

I am a collection
of all my thoughts;
I am a collection
of all my actions.
I am a collection
of all that have come before me
and all that surround me.

I am a collection
of beautiful mystery;
a piece of the great unknown
(which is life).
I am a collection and connection
to God, the God of Love
(however you see Him:
nature clouds, people,
doubt, exploration)

We are all a collection of one -
each being is our neighbor.
We each express stark individuality
but have a unifying connection
of life-giving Beauty
(I see Him as clouds)
living inside us.

a brief look into my mind on 4/1/14 (scattered thoughts)

1.) The way I see it is this -
grief can create a fool of you,
or it can be a way to glorify
the life that was lost,
and to express your love
to that person by living
a brighter and more
beautiful life.

2.) I sat
and I saw
a long journey
ahead of me,

a necessary journey
with light at the end.

3.) I took a step
to start my new life today.

As a new being,
a new spiritual being,
a new life with one less,
but in the process
of gaining much more.

Your death will be glorified.

Those days where
the sky doesn't
look (even slightly) real;
it's far too beautiful,
it's far too lovely
to be in plain sight
for the entire world.

Surely it's a painting
or an outcome of
my imagination.

On these days,
I find myself believing
in the power of
the great Unknown -
whatever is beyond
those clouds
is the answer.