Sanctuary Of Sanity

/ BeLove / 11 Comments

The strangest of things occurred to me the other day as I lingered around a certain consideration within this ongoing crisis that creeps back around in a sense that accompanies sporadic.

One should hope that the circumstance from this considered idea would turn my sneaking suspicion in the right direction. From the corner of my eye, I see something—that said so-called crisis—a wretched caricature slinking with stealth through the shadows of my mental ruin, quietly slipping through an opening at the other end of my abandoned approach.

It would be an oversight to employ the fact that I have been drained of all creative motivation as of late. I would be speaking upon the terms of honesty that I am lacking the necessary ration of inspiration to excuse the absence of my muse. I have found that when we descend towards the fluidity of disorientation, we tend to take a hankering to all different sorts of mischief, especially in the mental compartment of ones’ self.

It is probably nothing more than a false pretense regarding the mending of the cracks in the foundation of my own suffering.

During the most recent spell of this ongoing existential crisis—something happened that had yet to happen. I began to question my own voice of reason. Was this an actual crisis, had I finally booked my one way ticket upon the crazy train? Had I finally cracked?

I have always leaned into the more eccentric curves on this road of existence.

I have always leaned into the more eccentric curves on this road of existence. It is often that I pass the projected passerby who lives life in the façade of normalcy. As I see them fade in my rearview, I wonder what life would have been like, had I….

Then I remember a lesson that I once tried to teach myself via this blog. The one I passed—now far behind me—dim their driving lamps and their taillights vanish into thin air. It’s like they never fathomed an existence upon my being.

I cannot cry with teary eyes, nor deem this noise as crazy at this point in my life—the less abrasive way of putting it, would indeed be nothing short of extraordinary.

Though, it is that little extra that defines those of us who shutter the blinds of our comfort zone, separating ourselves from the mentality of a world where thoughts are being herded with the same logic as Orwellian mind control.

Whatever it is that shook me to my foundation would be fortunate enough to learn that it worked quite well. It has been quite the pleasant diversion from the routine of gluttonous behavior that most men seek as their only salvation. It somehow intruded itself upon my spirit and exalted me into the vague realm of the romantic. I do know that the distracted recreation of writing keeps my mind on the same path as my heart and for that I am grateful. If a curse was cast upon me, it should be known that instead of haunting me with weakened knees, it has soothed my soul like a spell smitten with providence.

All kidding aside, I do not believe that I am going crazy—my mind is simply inflating with archaic apprehension. I have read more in the past 18 months, than I have in the past 18 years. Some of these books are antiquated with philosophical lore; others were read amongst an event of becoming wise, while some were written in the way of achieving awareness, one even mapped out a structured Russian ideology about the pillars of geopolitics, that one carrying quite the fright and very articulate in the way it is being demonstrated in the present day.

This knowledge has opened the windows of my mind while the drafts of wisdom flow through them like an autumn wind. Fragments of the old me sneak through the same window, seeking freedom from self-inflicted suffering.

There is something you should know about me, for my entire life I have always been searching for something else. What that is, I do not know. If I did, insert smartass remark here. I often feel as though I have been split in half and if there is a lick of truth in said feeling, then it is very possible that I am searching for that other half of me.

I have taken to the industry and application of writing, trying to find my misplaced “Holy Grail”. I have given my soul to a band called Widespread Panic, listening for it. I have climbed a mountain, reaching for it. I have had financial freedom upon my fingertips, only to throw it away, searching for it, and I have lingered in love, longing for it. I went so far as to leave the nostalgia of home fifteen years ago, yearning for it.

It is in the fullness of time that the answers we seek usually arrive bound with astonishment, whilst we are left scratching about our head with a perplexed air.

Now I know what it is and where I must find it. It is I, and I would be stunned if I don’t spend the rest of my life digging for it. It is in the fullness of time that the answers we seek usually arrive determined in astonishment, whilst we are left scratching about our head with a perplexed air.

It is not time to write this whole thing off yet. I have not flown the coop, bounded away towards some vast wilderness, butt-naked, with fluttering clothes behind me, waving goodbye in a primitive man sort of way. But if the time does come for me to welcome the handicaps of older age, I’d like to consider crazy as a way to go, because being customary ain’t shucks to being crazy.

I must tackle this newfangled method of mending my mental faculty. The only way this is to happen is to suspend the being of this blog. I am not sure for how long, one cannot say, especially me. I guess however long it takes to finish the book and more importantly to find me. I would like to say that there is a way to prevent this but there isn’t at this time. Everything could change tomorrow, or the next day, but at this point that is even farfetched. I am aware that this could be detrimental to the loyalty of my support staff, a.k.a., you, the one reading this right now. I have used excessive caution in my reasoning process and it is my hope that you consume these words with curiosity and excitement, looking with forward eyes, waiting with the anticipation as to what comes upon the structure of next.

This short-lived season of my life has been one that weighs with anxiety and it is time to turn the corner towards the spring of redemption. Hope will always hang on to make a show of revival—not needing any reason to back it—but only because it is in the nature of hope to revive itself when the spring in its step has not been lost to the inferiority of old age, nor with the familiarity of failure. I have always found it better to explore one’s surroundings than to bear the heaviness of weight with idle behavior.

As much as I love this blog and the elasticity of its message, the only way I can make the world a better place is to attack change in the vicinity of personal presence. I have to get out and approach the revolution with the acoustics of an auditory voice. It should be noted that I do not intend to stop writing—it is my intent to strengthen the bones that have built this blog by simply stepping away with the brevity of an intermission.

As of late I seem to merely pick a topic and screw it into my own twisted reality, while trying to relay the message to the reader in a rhetorical kind of way. While intriguing, I feel that my words are becoming errant in their ability to be genuine within the sanctity of novelty and progression.

Words are wont to make a difference, this doesn’t mean they always will, especially in the five o’clock world that we call the comforts of home today. Words built with argumentative structure won’t change the mind of someone who doesn’t see things the same as you in certain areas of established opinions, you’d be none the wiser to talk over a bottle of liquor to get your point across.

What works better than either of these, is to instill and cultivate courage over the duration of time in a tight knit community and watch as they learn to support each other under the veil of what it is that is right. The challenge is not to find the better angle of an argument’s approach, or retreat. Yet it is to change, not in the sense of radical fanatics, but by building on what is already there.

It is an errand I must run; full of such gravity that it pulls me back to where I belong, and that seems to be lost and fallen. It ought to be remembered that should a word become lightning, it will leap with stunned suddenness upon this paper, while the ink drips from this sword, only to write again. If not for anything more than to right the ship, that is lost at sea, with the sail set in the direction of the good fight.

Sometimes silence sounds sweeter than a symphony of sympathy. For now, I must stare into the sunset of life with the spirit of adventure and bewilderment as my only companions. I must rest in the sanctuary of my sanity until the facilities of my thoughts give way to the sublimity of their meaning.

Or this could just be, in its simplest sagacity, some sort of ignorant bliss by way of sleep depravity.

-Bubba Love-

Thank you for taking the time to read.  It is with hope, that I shall see you all sooner rather than later.

On The Fence Of Freedom

/ BeLove / Leave a comment

At the height of where I am perched along this fence, I can see the valley and all of its splendor in its entirety. I am satisfied to sit here and contemplate upon my day, but something sits idling in my mind and it keeps on spinning ever so gradual. Nothing but nature surrounds me; the stillness of this setting inspires a seed of optimism to grow within me.

A storm begins to take its shape with gusto as it checks in from the west, it outdoes my sense of serenity, if just for a moment. The mountain that cradles this valley has slipped beneath the quilted softness of a mammoth thunderhead. The glowing embers of a shrinking summer’s sunset speak with eloquence to a sliver along the southern slope; they cut through the darkened clouds, as if trying to get in one last word in a sort of adolescent squabble. If words could better describe autumn’s first day, I would be obliged to present them to you, though sometimes there are no words to describe a dream.

To the right along the edge of this fence, lies a field of weeds being tilled with conservative blood spun red morality and to the left, a field overgrown with weeds of a bluish tint, the sort of noxious redemptive weeds that are twirling wild and without.

This fence upon which I am resting, separates the two fields as far as the eye can see. On one side, the scattering commerce of kudzu wraps its insatiable roots around the fence, consuming it whole, the other side, all the while, doing nothing but pointing its florae in the opposite direction of diplomacy.  Both are discreet in their constructive growth, yet concrete in their ability to wreak havoc in the garden of truth.

These weeds of greed have been cultivated to grow so great on both sides that the fence has almost vanished in areas further than I am able to see, and with no proven method of madness they grow wild, rampant and without caution in the way of retrogression.

From this fence I watch an internecine war being waged on the heart of America, a internal cold war is being waged upon us, and we are taking on significant damage from the inside out, much in the same way that cancer thrives on liquidating the life that allows it to grow in the first place.

It is from the bottom of my heart that I call this fence, Freedom, and from this fence I must enrich my own existence. I must continue my work and plow forth with the seeds of inspiration that must be planted amongst these farcical fields of belief.

I have found a patch of well-manicured grass that I call common ground and it is lush and well fed with hope and hospitality. I sit here for a while in silence, but my mind won’t settle down, something has to be said before it will find stillness again.   So I ask myself the question what will it take to make America believe again?

On The Greatness Of America

When I define America, I define it with one word only, that being the greatness of Freedom. It’s all I had ever known. It is in the way that I define Freedom today that has drastically changed how I defined it a year ago. A year ago, when I thought of Freedom, one side was within the jurisdiction of irresponsibility.  I thought this meant being released from all prior obligations. The other side, being in the patriotic sense, I viewed Freedom as being protected from authoritarian regimes that spread malicious seeds of animosity amongst the landscape with the sole intention of propagating division and disunity.

Over the past year, I have come to understand that Freedom is unlike anything I have ever known. Our leaders and their alleged pledge to Freedom have wholly misrepresented us, it is they who are free and we are the hostages in which they hold for ransom. In a time when laws are created to better the administration rather than protect its people, it becomes our duty as the general populace to stand up to the tyranny that government has become and demand a revolution in the practice of thought.

In modern democracy, the law safeguards people’s lives and liberty, so that we are safe from the attacks of fanaticism. When laws no longer safeguard sustained life and liberty because of fanatical beliefs, what are we to do? Fanaticism does not thrive on the harmony of revealed truth, but it is obsessed by the “idea” of false Freedom, this excludes all other ideas and becomes blind to the manifold of stimulating life. Fanaticism is a species of madness due to the incapacity to grasp the whole truth.

I find it remarkable that the conflict of feelings born from fanaticism implies a dislike for freedom and the incapacity to fully grasp the idea of it. These feelings become consumed by a false idea of Freedom instead of seeing Freedom as what it really is, reality. And yes there exists, more so today than ever before, fanatics of Freedom who perform acts of wicked cruelty in the name of Freedom.

Every idea has the chance at becoming a source of fanatical madness—the idea of God, of moral perfection, of justice, love, and knowledge. When this happens the living idea disappears since everything living and concrete can only exist in the harmonious correlation of parts in a whole. All virtue turns into an idol and becomes a lie and a deception.

A man’s soul is damaged and distorted by fanatical behavior, and that which can damage the soul should be feared more than that which can damage the body. Fanaticism must never be allowed in ideology or theology—especially when it comes to Freedom. If Freedom becomes a fanatical idea, by which man is possessed it will only degenerate into a tyranny.   It is important to strive for Freedom, but one must never forget about truth, love, justice—or Freedom becomes an empty glass once filled to the brim with the water of creativity. Freedom when emptied befalls into meaningless fabrications that can no longer be used with the energy of restoration.

It is important to contemplate upon and to strive for the fullness that life offers. Strive for goodness and perfection, but heaven forbid that you should forget about Freedom and try to realize goodness and perfection by brute force. Strive for spiritual unity, if it cannot be accomplished, allow multiplicity its shot at free reign and give a chance to the search for the still undiscovered single truth. Strive to liberate your emotions, but do not allow yourself to be overpowered by fanatical feelings that detach you from the fullness of life, which includes thought and the life of intellect, free will and moral duty. Strive for spirituality, i.e. for the wholeness of life and its creativity in every sphere of existence. Fanaticism destroys both wholeness and creativity with the tool of fear.

Fear experienced by man is a consequence of original sin and of the separation from God. Fear is the expectation of suffering, illness, poverty, deprivation, and the attacks upon an enemy that threaten to take away all a man has and his very life. The experience of fear carries no reference to the heights of being which man longs to attain and from his separation, he suffers.

The herd-mind creates an ethics of fear, substituting anxiety for transcendental terror and intimidating man with future retribution. Fear creates chaos amongst even the most pristine structure. Fear will use whatever means necessary to cause chaos; it will use division and race as its primary tool to incorporate the power of fanaticism.

Fear is opportunistic, and in a state of acute fear a man will agree to anything. Fear humiliates man instead of exalting him. Fear is always present in the subconscious layer of human nature. This is why fear has become such a useful tool of manipulation for ideologies to use against the commonality of man. Fear must have been the first emotion that Adam felt after the Fall. Absence of fear is the main feature of a life consumed in bliss.

I look at the fields before me. I admit to myself that the work ahead of me is a little overwhelming, yet it must be done. Before I am able to plant the seeds of hope I must bushwhack my way through these fields, killing the weeds of fear growing out of control. This fence and these fields is where I must sweat till my soul is cleansed.

I am parched and so I collect the bucket from the well and the water refreshes my thoughts. Man is a universally thirsty race. We thirst for everything, knowledge, wisdom, love, and goodness. I myself seem to have become thirsty for freedom.

I fix my eyes upon the goals of my hopes and dreams, and bend my work to win them over.

Love’s Will

/ BeLove / Leave a comment
This delusion of grandeur
with what you think
may divide and conquer,
when what you speak
as right
is forever left wrong,
just to rip us from the grip
of common ground,
while you took the dream
right out from under me.
So take your ego
or whatever you wish
to feed
while I continue
to plant these little seeds.
But what goes up
must always come down
but the stars and bars
will forever fly
even in the midst
of all your petty little lies.
But humanity
is not a game
for your politics to play
with the distractions
in which you convey.
And maybe you’ll see compassion
is something
that has never been fleeting
but instead
a shot at redeeming
who we are
even when we’re bleeding.
And so it’s time,
we all learn a little lesson
in the long lost word
of what they all call
reverence.
For what it means
we already sense
when it comes to our own
expectation of
something called severance.
And so the battle begins,
one that which
will one day end,
and one in which
love,
my friends
will always win.
BeLove © 2018

An Ode To Tahoe

/ BeLove / 7 Comments
Should I stand perchance
and gaze upon your shore
while your waves they dance
—abrupt and still
where my thoughts
shall spill
forevermore
deep into your emerald depth
it is as much
as what I seek
likened by your clarity.
Beneath a mirror
—tinted zephyr
here I stood
dreaming awake
fifteen years to the day.
For my gladness
you have given
and my wish as true
as your hue is blue.
It is in your reflection of me
that I will always see
a storm-savaged sea
amongst waves of tranquility.
Floated by your youth
upon a buoyant breeze
with your water and your sand
you took me by the hand
and so I swam
through the depths of you
so deep and blue
so tried and true.
BeLove © 2018

Hieroglyphic

/ BeLove / Leave a comment
He thought of her
as an emblem
her impression
—hieroglyphic
drawn through the ancient
along a cliff in sanskrit
and painted upon a cave
with his soul
in which he gave.
For when he saw her
he could only scribble
until a word made sense,
an archaic expression
in an image of perfect tense
like the heart shaped crest
she thrust upon his chest.
For she was the prayer
in which he knew worship.
She held the wilderness
in which he lost himself
and in her nature
where he found his peace,
she was the poetry
in which he understood
what hope meant
and in her beauty
he saw something
no man had ever seen.
And they say
that it was she
who lit the love
that showed him the way.
BeLove © 2018

My Preoccupied Mind

/ BeLove / Leave a comment

Every so often I hear this voice, it is filled with desolation, this voice it tempts me, lures me, it is the desire to fall, of which, I am terrified, so I must of course, defend myself, and I do.

My mind has been an over-stimulated mess since the holidays. There are many contributing factors, I started a new job and it has affected my daily routine a lot more than I supposed it would. I am just now starting to get all of my ducks back into their respective rows and consistency is becoming a reality again. My son, who will be turning four in a few weeks, swallows up any extra energy I may find from time to time to sit down and write. I, of course, mustn’t disregard his feelings or growth for my own; his routine is even more out of whack than mine, of that I am sure.

I am starting to realize that every year this decompression stage that follows the holidays has a detrimental effect on my self-organization process. I find myself moving from one means to the next without much of a groove. It is a vicious cycle and one that I intend to interrupt in the years beyond.

All excuses aside, allow me to explain why I haven’t felt the sense of direction I often need to know, insofar as to which way my attention is headed. It is in the explanation of knowledge that knowingly twists my tongue around the knots in my stomach until my hands have tied themselves together. The use of “hands” here is meant to be a metaphor for my creative prowess, or lack thereof. It is intellect that moonlights as a dagger—one that discerns and rifts its way into the enigma of my thoughts. It is knowledge that divvies man into two separate beings. One being for the better, the other being for the worse, either way is not at all in the essentialness of a bad thing.

It is my instinct that pushes me to the edge, and as scared as I am, I must make my way to it. I must peer over the edge and overcome my mishandled fear. It is the only way that I will ever find balance. If my writing is the way to this or not, I do not know, but I am not going to sit around with idleness waiting to find out.

If I could borrow a few moments from your day to allow me the chance to litter your mind with my mental waste, I would forever be indebted to you and will always be around to lend a helping hand with whatever cerebral chores you see fit..

So if you would like, feel free to join me on this penned and splendid adventure. It is with diligence that I must advance caution towards you, the reader, before going any further—the woods are thick in this lush and uncharted wilderness of words that separates the head from the heart. It is a journey that stretches a meager ten inches in distance, but it will take a lifetime or two to navigate. So if you wouldn’t mind, please allow me the time to get a “head” start?

Almost a year ago, I published a blog post that pertained to the “Mechanics Of Change.” I recycled a quote from the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, it was he who said, “and no man shall ever step in the same river twice.” In the sense of nostalgia these words alone were the inspiration for that post and while I would rather not dive into the schematics of the past, those words do ring with more truth and value to me today than they did a year ago, not only because I understand them more today, but because I have watched the same river change its course without heed or warning. I have seen its flow go from a patient trickle, to a raging flood in mere moments. More important than any of those, I have seen the serenity underneath its surface become agitated by an outlying disturbance, only to settle back in to the same serenity that was once so still.   It is the wisdom I have gained since that post, that I understand that I am the river. You are the river, we are the entire river and whomever we were yesterday, or last year, we have changed, whether it be with heaviness or lightness, it is in its simplest and most ambiguous form, change.

It is in the reconciliation of change that reveals the moral perversity in a society that breathes essentially on the nonexistence of return, for today everything is absolved in advance and therefore everything is cynically acceptable.

This is where my thoughts tend to go awry. I do not know what to make of the outlying or inlying change that surrounds my family and I these days. Whether you believe it or not, our democracy is being threatened by a malignant tumor that festers in greed and has an endless appetite for the comfort of the bourgeois and would rather feast on the destruction of liberty than make whatever it is great again.

I try and not allow the things I cannot control wrap their fingers around my being but I sometimes cannot help it, call it an empathetic flaw if you’d like, I call it absolute love for all that surrounds me. I spend more time worrying about the future of my child than I do myself these days and I know it is not healthy for the mind but it makes my heart thump with more purpose than ever before, so on we go.

It is when I start to think about the things that are heavy and those considered with lightness that I stumble upon a vacuum of thought. Could that which is heavy be deplorable and the lightness be glorious? Beneath the sunset of dissolution everything is illuminated by the aura of synergy.

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The heaviest of burdens can crush us, we sink far below it, it pins us to the ground, and we fall. But in the sense of love and all that is poetic, the woman longs to be weighed down by man’s body. Therefore the heaviest of burdens is portrayed with an image of one of life’s most intense fulfillments. The heavier the burden the closer we come to the earth, the more real and full of truth everything becomes in the light of synchronicity.

On the other side of converse, in the absence of burden, a man becomes lighter than the air he breathes; he soars like a winged creature towards the heights of heaven. He takes leave of the earth and his movements as free as they are insignificant.

What then shall we choose? Shall we choose to be burdened by weight or to float through life with nothing of significance whatsoever?

For today I am burdened by the lack of love in the world and therefore choose to be weighted down by the purpose of what little inspiration my words may choose to inspire.

Love embraces a hint of an empirical tendency within it. Love after all is said and done, is like an empire, when the idea it was founded on deteriorates, it too, will fade away. Like all of us, love is also a river, one that we should all be satisfied to stand upon its banks and look with longing and hardness upon its waters, for it is soothing and can heal even the most tortured soul.  It is a shame that the simple things like love and water have become more and more scarce throughout my life.  Love, nor water is either a privilege or a right, it just is.

Love is, as it were, is the universal vital energy capable of converting the passion of evil into a creative force of goodness. Hmmm. Somehow I gather that this thirst for knowledge is love directed in a certain way, and the same should be said of philosophy, which means love of truth.

Love can only transform evil passions into creative ones if it is regarded as a value in itself and not as a means of salvation. Love in the sense of good works is useful for the salvation of the soul—it can give rise to a creative attitude of life and be a source of life-giving energy.   Love is not only a source of creativeness but is in itself creative. Hence love does not pass judgment but gives life, receives life, heightens the quality and the value of life’s contents.

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I am approaching the edge, this is where the fear starts to set in, and of what it is I am frightened, I do not know. Sometimes I want to give up from fear of sounding batshit crazy, from fear of losing myself, from the apprehension of not being able to come back from the depths of my own mind—then my heart beats harder and the chill bumps that sprout upon my arms like seedlings on a Spring day—can only mean that something inside me begs to keep driving down this track in the direction I was meant to go.

Then I see it, the optical illusion that love has become in modern day society. This illusion has become its own entity, it breathes falsity, and with each exhalation it pollutes even our children’s minds. It is an illusory train that must be stopped and I aim to do just that, but first, I must engineer my thoughts into the equation of where they need to be.

I once believed love to be an optical illusion, this should allow me the needed experience to conduct a train of the same magnitude. I hop aboard and take over the responsibility of leading this train into the promise land.  I envision myself steering the train through these mountains of purpose carrying enough dynamite behind me to rewrite history with its own antiquity.   I rummage through these mountains annihilating my way through the masses of granite with the sole intention of the discovering new caverns of wisdom and maybe something in the schism of myself.

This train that I must conduct, I will call it knowledge, I must then divide this knowledge into a couple of different parts, those which are thought be in the nature of classic and romantic. It is in the term of comparison that classic knowledge is taught by reason, and should be considered as the engine. Romantic knowledge is little more abstract to the herd-minded eye, one must be aware that this knowledge taught by the mystic is not static but endless in its own creative nature and the purpose it serves, and one must be willing to embrace the change before one can fathom it.

Romantic comprehension isn’t any physical part of the train; it is the mechanics of the classic engine that keep the train moving somewhere towards change. Romantic knowledge is the vigor that pushes or sees the train along the track of life and then onward to the edge of experience. It’s when we begin to understand this that we no longer divide the train into parts since all this really does is impede the train’s momentum and creativity becomes stuck in a particular moment.

Knowledge in the sense of wholeness is not static and cannot be stopped and divided. The train of knowledge always has somewhere to go down life’s track. The train and its cars of classical thought do not go anywhere without the direction in which it is pointed by all that is romantic. It’s not that this train is lacking romantic qualities but most people just choose to ignore the fact that there are two ways to look at all things, including life, and those ways belong to two wholly different dimensions of existence. The quality of romantics is the hidden force behind the train that takes us all down the same track with the same final destination.

The romantic reality of your dream, that is the sharpest edge of experience—it is the momentum behind the train of knowledge and it keeps the whole train on the track. Classic reality is nothing more than the collective memories of where experience has taken us before.

It is upon this edge that there are no subjects, no objects; it’s only the dream and the spirit that guide us. If we have no way of evaluating or acknowledging the quality of life—then the train has no way of knowing where to go, which is fine sometimes. The voice of reason is not pure reason if you do not know where you are going it is considered reiterated confusion. The edge of experience is where all of the action is. This edge it contains all of the infinite possibilities of the future, as well as containing all the history of the past. The edge of experience is where the value of existence rests waiting to be rescued from the clutches of torpid thought and brought back to the presence in which we all belong.

As I come to the reality of myself, I am the only thing holding me back; I am the one that allows my daily demeanor to be interrupted by the things I cannot control. I am the goodness in me; I am the darkness in me. I can also control my balance with enough gumption to push the vertigo away from me, and into it’s own dizzy spin, but every now and again will allow vertigo the chance at manifesting itself. Call it a test of strength, if you will.  It is my choice to choose what I do. I will always rise from it’s fall and I know that it is by the grace of God that I am living and it is by the grace of God that I will die, but I cannot speak without skeptics about love and the grace of God. Unless I were discuss the fact that my heart is clapping with a thunderous beat as we speak, so maybe he hasn’t given up on me just yet. But if the gospel in which you preach confines its attention to love with commands and laws then you fail to grasp the meaning of parables and the call to freedom—for you have sought only what is revealed and not what is hidden. Freedom should not be repressed but enlightened with love. Look for what it is that is hidden within you and you will find yourself.

With that being said I must go, a child reckons my attention from his afternoon slumber.

I am not sure how far we made it on the journey, in the reality of time, about twenty minutes has passed and we haven’t even touched the surface.   Until the next time.

A time must come in the life of a man when he will take upon himself the burden of freedom, for he will come spiritually of age. It is in this freedom, that life may appear harder, more tragic, and full of responsibility, such is the austerity of freedom and the reverence it demands.

Good Night.

Musical Emotions

/ BeLove / Leave a comment

Music is often sung as the language of emotion. Some maintain that poetry portrays emotion more so than music. Some would also contend to the end that writing is the maestro of all emotive outlets. I feel that all of them are measured with equal parts of creative pattern and emotional baggage, and all are resultant upon pleasure and that of pain.

All channels of creativity move beyond emotion in their own way. It is my opinion that emotion is merely reactionary; it is how we react towards the outlying energy that surrounds us. All of these separate channels all flow from the same spring of sensation, which feeds the rousing river of passion. The pleasure sustained from these artistic agendas is most often derived from the feeling of our own pattern. It is how these patterns feed off of our experiences and the emotion of the art we create that seems to have mixed-up my attention span as of late.

I am going to stick to the emotive pattern of music when it comes to the arrangement of this poignant performance. It’s in the mystery of music and the emotion it creates, as to how pleasure and pain can perpetrate the patterns of our life. Music must be regarded as emotional in the sense that it transports us to the furthest extremities of emotion, these being toward the likes of exuberance and melancholic.

We tend to think of emotion as a grab bag of moods filled with rage, angst, and delight. Emotions are as primitive as the man who wandered through caves his life’s entirety. Over the last couple of decades, cognitive professionals have started rejecting the older notions of emotions. It is still acknowledged that man will always carry with him the primeval mechanisms of fight or flight. Emotion has been recognized as being critical to reasoning. With this emergence of newfangled thought in the direction of reasoning, the old school notion of emotion is now perceived as irrational.

Many theories have been born since the inception of emotion as critical to reason. Emotion could be seen as a means of weighting the attention one is given to an incoming experience; others see emotion as directed and instigated thought. There is one theory that fits music’s emotional experience so well, that it should in fact, prove that music alone is postulated by the confirmation needed to give the theory validity. It is called the “discrepancy theory,” which regards emotion as a reaction to an unexpected experience. We will discuss how it works later.

One of the reasons for the ever-changing view of emotion is the congregating evidence that victims of emotion-related mental damage lose the capacity for self-organization. This is true when the right frontal lobe is injured—the part of the brain closely concurrent to the system that is vital to emotional value.  It is proven that people become emotionally impassive when this part of the cortex is impaired. They do not notice their infirmity, or they just don’t care. In comparison, someone with left frontal lobe damage retains emotive response and reacts with despondency.

Why are these frontal lobes imperative to emotion? They are fundamental for planning elongated sequences of activity, but in the end, these lobes demonstrate themselves as the disciplinarian of the brain. They carry the torch for the rest of the brain, without them, other parts of the brain would meander in their activities, going the direction of least resistance, and trending towards habit.

The frontal lobes are very active in the construction of short-term memory. This is achieved in cooperation with the sensory mechanism. When we keep an image in our imagination, it is constructed with a visual but sustained by the frontal lobes, which inhibits the image from waning away. In the sense of similarity, these frontal lobes act upon the auditory senses, which allows us to hold the anticipation of music for many seconds while we wait for the resolution.

These frontal lobes are also the main control center for our attention, deciding which path to take, which direction to look, or what kind of music shall we immerse ourselves in today? For brevity’s sake, it is the damage done to frontal lobe by of emotional distraught that almost always results in short attention span, or the inability to…..

Planning. Short-term memory. Attention span. These functions seem like diverse activities that just so happen to be packed into the same region of the brain. But if you take a closer look, they are facets of the unpretentious phenomenon called restraint. Planning restrains our brain from wandering off the chosen path. Short-term memory restrains the senses from moving on to a different image. Attention constrains the infinite amount of senses from cluttering the sensory mechanism.

It is in any given moment that our brains can only process a slither of the torrent of experience that comes our direction; the body can carry out only one action of the hundreds that are possible; our intellectual response can model only one fragment of reality amidst infinitesimal possibility. There is no point in trying to possess the marvelous resolving power of our visual and auditory senses, if these mechanisms are applied to trivial ends. The nervous system must always be on the lookout for the most significant activities to which one should dedicate themselves. This is the definitive purpose of emotion.

Emotion could be considered as a special case of motivation. We carry out plans by anticipating desired results and seeking to satisfy those anticipations. Let’s use money as an example. Let’s say you have twenty dollars in your wallet, you pay for something with that twenty dollars and go about your day. First you anticipated its existence and then moved on from it. But anticipations are not always met. You may find that the twenty dollars is missing and become annoyed, or even furious. Or you may find that you have much more money than you thought, and will be pleased or even ecstatic. The state in which you find the anticipated twenty dollars draws no particular response and is motivation in its simplest state. The other two cases exemplify stronger responses because there has been a discrepancy between anticipation and reality. These discrepancies are the basis of emotion, of e-motion (from the Latin word exmovere, or to “move away from anticipation”)

All emotion is either positive or negative. There is no such thing as neutral emotion. Negative emotions arise when the anticipation of experience does not meet your expected reality. Positive emotions come around when the experience exceeds the expectation of what you anticipate. Most anticipation is small in the grand scheme of things, and most discrepancies are minute and barely register a beat on the Richter scale of surge and outburst. Emotion mostly bobs up and down in the sea of motivation. We are inclined to experience a feeling of well-being when these little pieces of positive emotional events occur with persistence, and we become dejected or ill-tempered when a train of trivial and adverse events steadily accosts us.

It is in these principles that we see how easy it is for music to generate emotion. Music sets up anticipation and then satisfies it. It can withhold its resolution, and heighten anticipation by doing so, and then it satisfies the anticipation in a flood of resolve. When music goes out of its way to violate the very expectations that it sets up, it is called expression. Musicians breathe feeling into the arrangement by introducing minute deviations in timing and loudness. But it is a composer–or in this case–writer that builds expression into the composition by purposely violating the anticipation that he has established.

See you soon.

BeLove © 2018

One For The Road

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In the wake of my own flood

where these words

have dripped from my blood

scripted from a heart

that I tried to jumpstart,

well that my friends,

that was just the first part.

And in the light of all this

there is something I found

in a moment of silence

is where the story begins

to make all the more sense.

As it is in this

coming of age

that has opened up

the parts of me

I could never see

always sitting there hiding

hiding behind a stage

where up a flight

of beaten stairs

awaits an inner sage.

And so it was in time

that I learned

what it meant

for a word to rhyme

as I hung them out to dry

for the world to pry

upon what

a word was about

the one that I scream

in a silent shout,

though some are tangled in rhapsody

others touched by heartfelt melody,

yet so soon will come the day

when words shall come back to play

never left to go astray.

But first I must look,

look within my own damn mind

for what’s left of it

and the voice it carries

I myself, am the only one that can find.

til then it is what i have to say

that i will once again pray

for that something

like the me i find in you

along that lonesome way.

But before i get on up and go

here is one,

one more for the road.

BeLove © 2018

Be back in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.

The Task At Hand

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I will always walk
bound by the perpetuity
of two endless eternities
one called the future
and that what has long passed
down my own sort of path,
where my left foot
drags on through the bygone
and the right
towards the future of you.
And in this precise moment
for which I live
it is in the nick of time
that I shall continue to toe
this here eternal line.
Not for yesterday
or even tomorrow too,
so be that as it may
it is my feet that shall stay
right here in the now
or in the present,
whichever and the hell
that way that went.
But I guess that is all
one can ask
of this painful life
and it’s mysterious little task.
BeLove © 2018

When Stuck In Life

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The older I get the more I am coming to understand that life is just a chain reaction of events. All that has happened in my life is a direct result of something that has happened prior to that. It is important to remember that this includes my thoughts, desires and choices. The logic behind this is that things like choice and will power, even though they do exist, they are nothing more than the consequences of what I have been through beforehand.

It is in the cultivation of coincidence that reality rises above fear and fantasy inches closer to reality than one ever dreamed. It is through reason that we can’t allow ourselves to detach from the past. I first started to understand this a couple of weeks ago. I was stuck. I had no creative motivation whatsoever. I wasn’t willing to let go of the past as much as I liked to lead on.

It was in this state of stuckness that I did what I thought was the reasonable thing to do and evaluated my process with the rigidity of classical thought. Why was I not able to finish this or that? I had done my due diligence on the research and there I was still stuck. I had so many ideas running through my head that I couldn’t descend from one message to the next. All this process did was stress me out even more; I was so stressed that I couldn’t think straight.

Finally after a couple of hours, I got up from the desk and walked away, with little to no thought about what I should write, I felt like giving up and I did, in every sense of the phrase. I threw reason by the wayside.  I had to detach myself from all of the past ideas that I felt were worth writing about. I woke my child from his nap and we went for a hike to explore a new experience.

As we talked and laughed about childish things, we came upon a river where he was more than happy to throw rocks into—without much thought—for hours on end. The serenity in this maneuver alone got the momentum flowing. The water was curving at a crawl and I decided to pick up a few flattened stones and weave them across the ripples of this river. He has seen me do this numerous times but hadn’t yet quite developed the motor skills to actually make the stone skip across the water. This time around it was my goal to be patient and allow his creative process the time it needed to come around.

This time around I shared with him the knowledge of how to skip a stone with the angle in which you release the stone and the follow through which one must achieve to get the rock to spin. It must be noted that follow through is one of the most critical aspects in every facet of life. He slid the rock out of his hand at a slight angle and the stone skipped gently across the water. He was so ecstatic and happy that it almost brought me tears.

The romantic parallel of thinking came rushing over me like a river. It skipped across me like the stone he just threw, it skipped passed my creative process, followed by a few times across my heart and then it sunk directly into the soul of me. In the metaphorical sense, I was the river and he was the stone.

It was in the moment of stuckness that the solution to my problem seemed so very important, it was reasoned to sit back and stew on the problem.  Then as I thought about it more this stuckness when allowed time, will assume its true importance, the importance of figuring itself out. In the rigid evaluation I made, it seemed like a gargantuan matter. Maybe it was, but by allowing my mind to be stuck in the place it was without overthinking, well that was when the problem started to become more and more diminutive. The less my mind thought about it, the more my mind let go of reason and it started to move freely and naturally towards the resolution. The lesson learned is that stuckness need not be sidestepped because it is the precursor of total understanding.

It is when I took a different approach towards a new avenue of experience that my creative wheels started rolling again. It was in this moment that I started to understand things and see things with more clarity that I finally understood what it felt like to be a teacher. In my profession, I find it easy to be a teacher, but it takes a lot of work to allow that to translate over into your own personal life. I guess maybe sometimes we do ignore our own premise of self-growth and put all of that focus on the burner of our professional career.

What I learned from this experience is that if you can’t explain something in a way that even a child could understand, it is because you do not fully understand what you are talking about. The greatest teachers are able to convey complex messages with ease. Poor teachers cannot accomplish this and it would be wise to realize that they must become students first.

And that is exactly what we all are; we are all students of life, figuring this thing out as we go. Some of us yearn to learn, some of us give in to all of the distractions of life, but we will always find ourselves stuck at some point or another, and it will not do you any good to become frustrated in that stuckness, instead ride it like the wave it is and you’ll see the beauty that follows, all you need to do is allow time and patience their deserved chance at making the problem disappear.

You must suffer at playing the fool before you become the master, because if you cannot explain it to a fool, you are not a master.

BeLove © 2018