Tag: Soul

Origins Of Love

I’m not interested in just being a lover, I’m interested in just being love.

To truly understand the origin of love and compassion means to understand the interdependence of all living beings. It means to understand that we are all part of one another.

On one hand, to know the origin of something gives one a better understanding of it.  On the other hand, ignorance to the origin of anything will give way to its inevitable abuse, and love is far from the exception. 

To know love and its origins, we must look to the book of beginnings—where it all began.  To know, that love came from eternity and will eventually make its way back to eternity. Love is a spirit and it dwells in eternity.  Before time, love was, and after time, it will still be.  Love is the same, yesterday, today, and forever too.  

It is apparent that love came into being by divine intervention.  Love fell upon our reality to fulfill a purpose.  So of course, it was left no choice but to manifest itself at that sweet blind spot of creation when it came onto the scene amidst the cosmic chaos. 

LOVE’S PURPOSE

You see everything, even all of us, on this earthly realm are here for a purpose.  If we did not have a purpose, we would not have been manifested in the eyes of divine timing.  It’s the same reason that we are not simply here just to be a living being, but are here for a more clear-cut and unique purpose. That purpose is to create love.

That is why we are here now, as a manifestation of love. Love was created for us and we were created to love. We were created from One’s certain image, and I am damn near positive that image was layered with shards of love.

The wisdom of love is within us all and it is infinite. But love has its seasons of which we must also be aware, and which is why it comes with its unique nature, outlook, demand, and gratuitous levels of graveness.

The difficult adjustments of life and love to these said seasons and their deaths are what better allow us to see love’s unconditional worth. This worth of course, makes it easier to undertake a creative activity that help love’s creation fulfill its purpose.

The misunderstanding of love and its seasons will ultimately result in its abuse. The abuse of something, such as love, impairs its purpose, and for this reason, the importance of divine intervention can never be stressed enough in every little situation.

A TIME TO LOVE

Because timing, and time itself, help to repair the purpose of healing ourselves and the landscape in which we are surrounded in the holistic sense.

Appreciating the importance of the little things that love and its celestial timing bring to the table, could be the most crucial aspect that distinguish our purpose on this earth. The nature of love operates with a remarkable sense of timing, which reveals the mystery of love’s essence.

And this essence of love is in fact, God. The sun knows when to rise and when to set, just as the birds and the bees know when to be wherever, whenever they need to be. For they see that love is not about the destination, as much as it is about its endless journey. A journey long, winding, and to be honest, often confusing as hell.

But we as human beings are essentially one with everything. And this we see in all the lovely little intricate and infinite signs that life shares with us every single day. In the nature of everything we find the essence of ourselves, every fawn, every blossom; every bird and wilting flower. These are all metaphors meant to address the nature of our soul.

METAPHORICALLY SPEAKING

These metaphors with their symbolic demeanor try to reach us by teaching us a fundamental truth of life.  That we are part of an external exchange, that we are infinite transformations of pure beauty.  They teach us that love and growth are all a part of the journey on the road to what we are meant to be.

They also tell us is that there is a season for everything.  And that seasons change and blend together. But there is a path, unaffected by these seasons that lead our mentality in every which way but loose, yet sometimes haphazardly in the direction of that what is within you, that being love.

There are times to be, and times not to be. It is how we see the world around us which teaches us that the only way to make things better, is to see things within yourself better. Then you will start to see everything else as, better. Maybe you’ll fall in love with yourself all over again. And once you look at yourself from the standpoint of your soul, you’ll become addicted to bettering you, and you’ll start to see that love is all around you.

Though love, like life, is a daunting path through the seasons of the soul, its summer, autumn, winter, and spring, or as in the desert, arid and hot, then damp and cold. But to come to understand these seasons enables us to prepare ourselves for the gardening of surprise conditions, while love grazes in the barren pastures of our hearts, with only the intent to feed the soul.

TO UNDERSTAND LOVE

Understanding that the timing of love is infinite is the springboard for finding our true purpose.

In the gardens of Psalm it says that we are all created for a purpose and we’re given an exact time to fulfill that purpose. When this time is not used for its manifested purpose, it is wasted and lost forever. What makes the issue at hand so critical is that at the end of our lives, we will all have to stand before the pearly gates and give an account of our time on earth.

But what if….?

All we can account for is what we’ve given. Because we only take with us what we give and all we can give is the sacrifice of ourselves.

Yes, we are all stewards of love, and love, much like time, does not belong to anyone, as we belong to it. As it with life, time begins when we are born and ends when we die. And though we may pass and time no longer exists, love keeps giving itself away.

But to waste time in the sense of idleness is suicidal to the creative spirit of love. Love is something that sets time and the spirit ablaze, burning it all away, as to shed a little creative light on the darkest corners of the mind.

IN CLOSING

We are all given twenty four hours in a day, with seven days, making up a week. What distinguishes love from the other things is the premium one places on their purpose and how tall they rise amongst the confusing illusion that it takes to see that the journey is never-ending.

It’s about loving life every step on the way, it’s about finding and creating inspiration in the things that feed your soul. Its about getting back to you, and finding the love that grows within you, by spreading it far and wide.

And It Spread.

In the end, our purpose and our being constitutes the very essence of love, and the only way for this purpose to truly be is to be proud of who you are, as you are love in the infinite sense of all that is considered as pure and unconditional.

The origins of love implies that you are dividing yourself between the lover and the beloved. But if you find that place inside of you that is love, you will no longer just love yourself, you will just be love.

You just have to remember who you are, and where you came from, which is what the confusing journey through the creative wild has always been about.

—BeLove


The Path To Understanding

When it comes to self-isolation and shutting the world out, things are bound to get wild.

In the beginning of his experience as a thinking being, man faced a vast unknown. Everything was unknown until it was experienced, and even then its function or, we may say, its cause and effect continued to be unknown. Man was more than able to reach a valid explanation in his own mind, or at least with own his way of thinking, upon the fact that fire was hot and water was wet. Experience validates this.

He could not, however, explain the change in the seasons of both the external nature and that of love, or the change from daylight to night. Nor could he fathom the changes that took place within himself mentally and physically as he grew through the various cycles of life.

It is as well he could not find a satisfied explanation in regard to the phenomena of nature’s wild accord, such as an unforeseen winter storm, the sonic boom of thunder, a bolt of lightning, the eclipses of both the lunar, and the solar kind, and as of now, a certain virus, let alone any of the other magnificent and novel wonders brought to you in part by mother nature and quite possibly the media.

In this sense, man once faced numerous more unknowns than man today, and still after many many moons and millenniums of existence man still lives in a universe much of which remains unable to be explained.

To many individuals the word mystical fosters images of strange and mysterious practices and ideas. When in actuality the mystical is nothing more than the meanings that lie beyond the range of ordinary knowledge. That which one cannot explain or is beyond comprehension one classifies as unprecedented.

For example, the antiquated man, who couldn’t understand where thunder and lightning came from, decided that they were actions or the result of actions demonstrated by a being which he was unable to see, a being that was beyond the range of all his physical senses.

It is an idea that may have presented one of the building blocks that caused man to develop superstition and religion. This as to assign the cause of conditions that were beyond his immediate apprehension, beyond the grasp of his environment, to the factors outside himself and outside his environment, which led to the establishment within his mind of the concept that there are celestial forces that lie beyond his ordinary range of perception.

Therefore, all that existed outside of his experience which had been accumulated by memory and in the mental misinformation that lay in the area between that of the grand insane and the great unknown, is a concept that is paramount to the beginning of mysticism.

A PROGRESSIVE PURPOSE

As man progressed in his thinking and uncovered the boundaries of the unknown into the known, he developed what we now call science. That is, man studied the phenomena with which he had to cope with and gradually dug up the answers to some of the questions that previously hadn’t been unearthed.

So the concept that mysticism has to do with strange or weird practices, a concept so very prevalent nowadays, is not without some basis. Science, as we know it today, has taken over the boundaries of much that was considered mystical in the past. What was unknown has progressed into the known and no longer hides in the shadows of doubt.

The mystic still confirms, however, that there are experiences still not completely understood. We are not able to explain the philosophical problems that occupy the mind throughout the ages, or the sweeping hysteria of fear-induced fascinations. It is in this instance though that the problems of philosophy are considered suffice enough for us to touch base on.

These problems of the philosophical offer a plethora of possibilities which often include, but are not limited to; the question of reality, the nature of God, and whether or not fate, and or purpose actually exist in the universe.

It is also on the fundamental basis that we are not able to ever truly know the meaning of life, or the whereabouts of the soul. Nor are we to figure out the perennial problems in regards to the nature of evil, and the relationship between our heart and the mind, without looking within ourselves first.

There are some out there that criticize philosophy and its purpose for never reaching a concrete conclusion. It is valid criticism, because when a final conclusion is reached, the subject has been handed over to science. The problem that is solved has been passed through the realm of speculation straight into the lab to be dealt with on a concrete basis.

This does not mean that all such problems in the arena of science have reached final solutions, but the trend often heads in that direction.

Philosophy though, leads man to a deeper understanding. The depths of this understanding then leads him to the creative experimentation of certain things. And from this experimentation he is led in the direction of accumulative laws and principles that become the basis of an inward quarantine that leads to him understanding himself.

Man will use this knowledge to the benefit of all that is positive, or to the detriment of his well being. This all depends upon which way he wishes to exert his creative energy, and how he responds to the environment in which he finds himself surrounded.

And so it is to be believed, that philosophy, man’s wild contemplation of himself and the universe is considered a prerequisite to science, has its roots firmly embedded in all that is mystical.

THE UNCERTAINTY OF THINGS

There are some phenomena which are not yet explainable through physical science, insofar as much as we know, the mystery of what comes next is left to speculation. This mystery is nothing more than a mere extract of the mystical, the invisible immensified.

Neither are these mysteries dutifully explained in present day psychology. As the realm of the reactionary human mind is less explored than the realm of the entire universe.

Thus leading us to consider our self first via isolation and then by gauging our surroundings and the underlying methods in which we see fit to survive within our own inner environment, all the while trying to explain the circumstances in which we cleverly operate and live our individual life.

To contemplate upon our purpose and our placement in the universe, we must think in terms of philosophy, not as a rigid discipline, such as mathematics, physics, or chemistry, but with an inward speculative and healthy discipline, albeit spiritual.

Many may consider this way of life as being too detached from actual day-to-day experience, too visionary, and therefore, pretentious and academic. When it is the opposite that should be seen as the popular concept. And we are all about to get a healthy dose of detaching ourselves from the conditioned routine of life.

Yet philosophy, at its core, is a reflection of your own solitary thoughts and the conclusions in which you reach. Anyone whom has considered a thought after an experience has happened, becomes a philosopher. Each individual has developed their beliefs throughout their lives, which in turn, will guide their actions on the path to their fateful purpose.

The Path Leads Within

These actions are the means that lead to certain ends of things. These beliefs and aspirations help us to chart the course through the turbulent waters of life. The process of charting the course is all about setting a new aim for ourselves, which is in itself a healthy and philosophical function.

We may come to conclude that life is a process of thinking, about both the positive and it’s negative. Man is a wild thinking animal. And the process of the way he thinks is just as important as the steps that lead him through a wildly unknown experience, as he directs much thought towards his place in the universe.

Thoughts of such wild nature lead him to his reality, his philosophy, his own way of life, and the actions he takes to get his point across while coming to discover what life really is all about.

THE TAKEOUT

In the end, man is always intrigued by what he does not understand, in our daily routine we read of events that are mysterious and unexplained. These always attract too much misinformed attention.

The report of an unknown object moving through the night sky, the report of an individual who seems to gain knowledge other than through physical perception, the reports of a sort of virus sweeping the globe with its pandemic fear—these the cynics will say, are not verified. Some will state that miracles cannot take place in a universe controlled by established laws.

Possibly the cynics are right, but also possible is the fact that there are events and conditions that do not give in to the existing limitations of human analysis. There are unforeseen forces playing in the universe which in terms of man’s advancement go, sometimes seem to have no basis for valid explanation. And yes miracles do exist if one believes in them, and all of the mysticism they have to offer.

So with that being said, live life to the fullest while being careful out there, stay healthy, always avoid unnecessary exposure to certain things, and most importantly look deep within yourself and maybe create something more beautiful than you ever imagined, like love.

It is in the way that I have long seen things, when it comes to self-isolation and shutting the world out, things are bound to get wild.

—BeLove

Depths Of Discovery

Without leaving himself, one grows with the vastness of the cosmic scope within; and yet: the farther one goes, the less he knows.

“Backwards and downwards,” the laughter and then the deep breaths, for long durations there had been nothing else. These were the only pieces of me left intact, or that I was able to find in my animated demeanor.

I sometimes felt like a memory of three words, carried by a broken down glory on the back of an empty pack of cigarettes. But it sufficed. The experience of life has been both essential and delightful in regards to the growth of me.

Over in the corner, on the fringe of awareness, the light still lingers; and in a flash of two memories colliding, my sensitivity to the light has somehow improved. 

In the beginning brightness had been all over the place and everywhere the same. It was a shining spectrum of silence, boundless but uniform. Essentially, it was without flaw, still indeterminate. And yet, while It remains all that It has forever been, it was as though the gentleness of bliss had been limited by the interpretation of an activity.

Poetry. 

The first time I finagled with the rhythm of rhyme, I felt like my soul was bouncing all over the place. Funny enough, it was when I first stepped off a plane in Colorado with the deepest cut by my side some twenty years ago. It’s true—every movement in genuine love is poetic, if not hallucinoginec.

This is how I behaved over the next few years. I was determined to stabilize myself from this exercise in spiritual growth and self-recollection from the grip of an adolescent lesson layered with love and loss, all the while doing it with a smile. I felt that the aim of poetry would saturate the deserted depths of my arid soul, only to revive the active connection between my self and the divine powers that Be. I felt that it helped to heal. I realized that it was, as it is that follows.

Poetry is an activity that is at the same time a pattern, a kind of living lattice of discovery; universal, infinitely complex, and exquisitely delicate.  A vast web of knots and divergences, of parallels and spirals, of intricate figures and their curiously distorted projections—all shining, active, and most importantly alive.

It was from then on, that first written poem, that I wanted to drape the world in the radiance of poetry, but I didn’t have enough material, nor the confidence to boot. My first attempt ended somewhere back in my twenties between my head and my heart. Sure poetry was lovely and generous, with its fields of gold. Still its goodness was the sort of goodness society had long considered out of date, so I gave it all up.

Besides, the radiance I wanted to deal in was an antiquated kind and in short supply throughout this shallow world. What I needed was a newfound radiance altogether, something a little more gorgeous and chivalrous that wouldn’t allow my imagination the time to pine away in the darkness of me. My imagination had to assert itself so that the art manifested the inner powers of my own nature, that which is love.

Without leaving himself, one grows with the vastness of the cosmic scope within; and yet: the farther one goes, the less he knows.

Then I found it again, that need for poetry, out west, a few years ago, this time it hit pretty close to home.

Does poetry have the power to pick you up in California and land you in sunny Salt Lake City a few hours later? Could it validate the distance between ourselves, and that, which lies ahead of us? Some think it has no such power. And nowadays public interest only grew wherever power did.

In the days of old, poetry was a force to be reckoned with. The poet had real romantic strength in the material world. Of course, the material was different then. Souls were still being wrapped in the fabric of divine magic, right up until the Industrial age slithered its greed around the heart and soul of mankind.

The romantic poets of society’s influence have always done what they were expected to do, they sprinkle beauty amongst the chaos, only to eventually give in to the pursuit. They chase ruin and death harder than they chase women. They set their talent ablaze, followed by a mental decline just before they reach home, and they dive headfirst down a slippery slope that slides upon a watery grave.

No, society is proud of its dead poets. Most everyone takes tremendous satisfaction in the poet’s self-taught testimony that reality is too tough, too big, too damn much; too awfully rigid with an expectation that bounces off the emotional checks and balances of a soul.

It is often thought that to be a poet is a school thing, a skirt thing, a church thing. The weakness of an unhinged spiritual prowess was proved in the childishness, madness, drunkenness, and despair of such marvelous martyrs.

So poets are loved, but loved because they just can’t make it here in the real world. We exist to loosen the grip on the feelings of experience by unraveling the tangled knots of life. We justify the cynicism of the hard-hearted men who say, “If I weren’t such a corrupt, unemotional piece of work, I couldn’t get through these times either. Look at these good, tenderhearted men, the best of us. The poor bastards perished by their own weakness, crazy sons of bitches.”

All the same, the desire of a poet will at times intersect at the corner of contradiction within himself. Maybe it’s an urge to be magical and cosmically expressive, shadowed articulate; to be able to approximate anything. Maybe it’s to be wise, philosophical, to find that common ground between the beauty of words, spirituality, love, and science, to prove that the animated emotions of the spiritual imagination are just as potent as any well-oiled war machine. Maybe it’s to believe in an ability to free and bless humankind with an unconditional love that spills from the light in the sky above.

But all the same, there in the shadows of his drive and desire, hides an inkling of expectation to be famous, and in this expectation of fame, there always hides a muse, a woman, there was always a woman behind the scenes.

Of course, it always came down to women. Freud himself believed that fame was pursued for the sake of the women. But the women were pursuing something else.

Everyone of us, both man and woman alike, are always looking for the real thing after being had and had by all the phonies. So we pray for the real thing and we rejoice when the real thing comes along. That’s why the world will always romanticize its love for poets. This is the bittersweet truth of poetry.

“Upwards and forwards,” I say silent to myself shadowed by a sudden glorified onslaught of distant laughter.

Once more a few lit fragments of self fall back to me—the same as they always were, but in some way associated, this time, with a particular light in the bright lattice of an intricate relationship, located somewhere in between what is right and what is wrong in the middle of me. It situates itself approximately on one of those little infinite nodes of intersecting alignment that shines from the core of all souls. I believe we can all agree from where in which I believe this light shines.

This pattern of intersection projects itself from another pattern, and within the other pattern I find another, larger fragment of me—a long lost memoir as a boy, scrambling out of the puddles of an adolescent ditch, wet and muddy to my knees in childlike poetry.  I shout at the shadow of a man above, “jump you chicken shit, just jump.” And as the shadow jumps, I hear a faint howl echo with laughter.

An indeterminable voice within my immediate surroundings introduces itself as gentle as possible to my contemplative state, startling both me, and my thought process awake.

“Ladies and gentlemen, please be seated and fasten your seatbelts, flight attendants please see that all tray tables are folded forward and seat backs are in the upright position, and that all overhead baggage is put away and bins are secure. We are clear for takeoff.”

Yes, it is true that a poet cannot perform societal open heart surgery, nor can he heave a bird of pewter steel thirty thousand feet in the air at seven hundred and seventy seven miles per hour, only to land soft, gentle and safe in good ole sunny Utah.

But he can damn sure die trying.

—BeLove

Soul Education

Could there be a greater miracle than for all of us to look through with consistency, the eyes of all others?

Life resides in learning to live on one’s own, spontaneous and footloose. To do this one must recognize what is one’s own—to be familiar and at home with oneself. This means basically learning who one is, and learning what one has to contribute to the growth of this fashionable world, and then learning how to make that contribution valid.

The purpose of creating is to show us how to define ourselves with authentic spontaneity in relation to the world around us. Though it is no longer authentic if one tries to impose a prefabricated definition of the world, as anything less than the capricious definition of the individual themselves.

The world is filled up with folks who are fully alive in it: that is, of the people who can be fully themselves in it and can enter into a living and cultivating relationship with each other in it.

The world is, therefore, more genuine in proportion as the people in it are able to be more humane and alive; that is to say, better able to make a lucid and conscious decision of what freedom truly is. This freedom must first of all coexist with the capacity to choose our own lives, by finding ourselves on the deepest possible level.

It is a superficial freedom to wander aimlessly here or there, to get a taste of this or that, to make the choice of certain distractions. This two-dimensional freedom is simply a sham.

It all claims to be a freedom of “choice” when in fact it evades the basic task of discovering who it is that chooses. It is not freedom because it is unwilling to run the risk of facing self-discovery.

The function of creating is, then, first of all to help the individual to educate and discover themselves: to recognize themselves, and to identify with whom it is that they choose.

This descriptive aspect of creativity will at once be seen as unconventional and, in fact, simple to most of society. To go further past the terms of outrageous, the function of creating is to help one’s own, as well as, maybe help other men and women save their souls and, and in so doing, maybe save something of society from itself.

From what you may ask? From the hell of meaningless arguments, of obsession, of complex artifice, of systematic lying, of criminal evasions and neglects, of self-destructive futilities.

It is now my hope that it is evident, to you the reader, that from my context above, I mean the following:

That the business of “saving” one’s soul means more than saving that of an imaginary object; and entrusting it to some institutional bank for deposit until we recover it with interest in Heaven. 

And that in speaking on the terms of a somewhat Christian existentialist, I mean by “soul” not as simply as the overthought Greek essential form but the mature personal identity, the creative fruit of an authentic, organic, and lucid discovery, the “self” that is found after other partial and exterior selves have finally been discarded as metaphoric masks.

This metaphor must not mislead: this inner identity is not “found” as an object, but is the very self that finds. It is lost when it forgets to find, when it does not know how to seek. Or when one seeks his soul as a material object. (Such a search via external avenues is futile and self-contradictory.)

Hence the paradox that we find when we stop seeking: and this is the point of creating. It is that when one learns to let his mind sit still and be what one has become, which is one that one does not know and never will he need to know.

This is when the miracle happens, when the paradox of life has reached maturity, we understand that to love is nothing more than a simple gesture of compassionate communication. Could there be a greater miracle than for all of us to look through with consistency, the eyes of all others?

It is when the imaginary “debts” are paid, one no longer seeks something else. One no longer looks to be told by another who one is. One no longer demands validation. One just does what they do and smiles at everything they love. After all, man is but a byproduct of everything he’s ever loved.

But there is the whole and infinite depth of what is remaining soon to be revealed. And it is not revealed to those who seek it from others. It is only revealed in the truth via self-discovery.

BeLove

The Good Fight

Instead of casting blame and hate, let’s cast shadows of our hands in figurines of hearts on all the walls that were meant to be broken down for the revolution of love.

My animated imagination may not neccesarily be relied upon for certain guidance here today. I am too excited, I must admit, by these currents of joy. I feel the need to laugh rising, mounting, which has always been a sign of my weakness for the extraordinary. My creative blood has a hankering for high stimuli, absurdities and extremes. Yes be aware, my soul is awakened.

Sometimes I am ashamed at the way that I have come to trust the light in my own darkness more than the light radiated by others. How have I come to be so captured by this kind of neurotic creativity? All of these pictures and words with their rhyme like sentences; they have me wrapped around this little pen. Lest we forget about this lens and through writing! Though I do not mind it, it keeps me on my toes.

The light that shines in this darkness from within myself is nothing more than a sacred glow that spills from the solar plexus. It’s true that I have, too often, found it nourishing and liberating to fathom what a fiend I am beneath all this business that has to do with biological cells and creative contemplation, which is more than likely, only divine in appearance and upon the surface, but oh so lit up and infinite below.

Over the past few years, the incubation of these words has become an exchange between my heart and soul. Writing these words is nothing more than a thread that has woven my head with that of my heart, by way of my soul.

Now I must struggle with the contradiction that I have to live with, in appearing before you with what I deem a disguise, because I hardly ever wear both my heart and my mind on my sleeve like this in my day-to-day routine. What I typically wear are a pair of chef pants and a tee shirt.

Which brings me to a few questions that folks have recently been asking me to great extent?  Whom do you represent?  Which religion do you embody?  Which political party do you represent?  My response is often the same, which is does it really matter? 

All in all, these aren’t difficult questions to answer, because at the end of the day, I represent me. I choose to represent love in all arenas of life. I choose to believe in the moral good of society, as a whole and that alone should grant you the knowledge as to what side of the fence I lean on. I could come with the notion of perhaps speaking on the grounds of a starving artist. Even though I may not seem like one.

In speaking for artists I really am speaking for a very eccentric kind of person, a marginal personal, because the starving artist in this modern world is no longer an established person with an established place in society. Most of society realizes with keen sense today that the artist stands outside the boundaries of establishment. But is anyone really established, and if so, under what pretext?

We are marginal people who withdraw deliberately from the margins of society with a purpose that pertains to expanding the essence of human experience. From the consequence as being one of these “strange” people, I speak to you as a self-appointed representative on the periphery of people who have done this sort of thing with or without consideration of consequence.

Thus I now find myself representing the artists, perhaps the hippies, the so-called liberals, and perhaps even the poets among you. And let us be honest, all the term liberal stands for nowadays, is a more politically charged way of calling someone a hippy. More on the freedom and liberation of things down the road.

But we are the people, regardless of what anyone says, who are seeking in all different directions the way to a better day, and who have no established absolute status in this confused world whatsoever. So yes, maybe in an underhanded philosophical way, I speak for everyone, including you.

So instead of casting blame and hate, let’s cast shadows of our hands in figurines of hearts on all the walls that were meant to be broken down for the revolution of love. Because in the end, love will save us all.

And now I must ask you to do me a favor of considering me not as a figure representing any certain institution, but as an insignificant person who comes to the table now asking for nothing but your charitable patience while I say one or two things that has nothing to do with where my head was headed when I started writing today. If you are interested, then good, it is here for you to read. But there is probably a whole mess of other things you’d be better wise to spend your time doing.

Are we as hippies, artists, and poets relevant? No, we are deliberately irrelevant. We live in the shadows of an ingrained irrelevance that is appropriate to every human being. The marginal man accepts the basic irrelevance of the human condition, an irrelevance that is manifested by the reality of death.

The marginal person, the artist, the poet, the displaced person, the prisoner, every last one of us lives in the presence of death, which will eventually make us call into question, the meaning of life.

We struggle with the fact that death will one day happen to us, so we instead seek something deeper than death, and the purpose of the artist, the marginal person, or the poet is to go beyond death even in this short-lived life. And it is the purpose of “we the people” to go beyond the opposition within, and amongst that of ourselves, including life and death, and to be, therefore a first-hand witness to that of the light of love and life.

And now here we are moments from morning, the birds start to sing. The bells begin to ring, and in the distance, the whistle of a train sings. I stand up without much thought. The light creeping through the curtain could not have come at a better time. I adjust my mentality to grab the thoughts from a box I wrapped in prayer beside my bed last night.

There is a freshness to this morning I haven’t felt in a long time. My mind is finally cleansed.

It’s time we fight the good fight.  

—BeLove

Branching Out

“You can, you should, and if you’re brave enough to start, you will.”

“There’s no such thing as a perfect piece of writing or poetry for that matter. Just as there’s no such thing as perfect despair.” So said a poet friend of mine I knew back in my adolescent years. He’s no longer with us on this spun little sphere. Well not in the physical sense. I miss him, more now than I did then. He was awfully real in a forsaken world full of fake.

It wasn’t until recently that I could grasp his full meaning, but even back then I found solace in his advice—there is no such thing as writing with perfection. 

All the same, I quailed whenever I sat down to write. The scope of what I could handle was just too limited. I could write all day about the elephant in the room, so to say, but when it came to the elephant’s trainer, I was prone to draw a blank. Writing needs that kind of built-in accessory of a subplot, wouldn’t you think?

I have been caught in the web of this particular writing bind for quite sometime—twenty plus years to be exact. Now color me crazy all you would like, but that is a very long time.

If one operates on the principle that everything that happens to us can be considered a learning experience, then of course life needn’t be so damned painful. That’s what they tell us, anyway. Life though, has a way of letting pain dictate the steps in which we take.

From the day since I have picked up this pen, time and time again, I have done my best to live according to that philosophy. As I result, I have been swindled and misjudged, used and abused, day in and day out. I am though, one hundred percent guilty of doing the same, if not worse, to others. I have also done my fair share of returning these favors, in my own shameful way.

And yet still, it has brought about many strange, distorted, and wonderful experiences. All sorts of people have told me their stories, some I’ve tried to figure out on my own accord. Then they left, never to return, as if I were no more than a bridge they were crawling across to get to where they were so desperate to go.

I, however, have kept my mouth sealed shut.  And so these stories have stayed with me over the years until I have found myself sitting here today, walking out, not necessarily wound free, but happily, from my very own existential crisis.  

The time though, has come to shake it all off and tell my story.

This doesn’t mean, by any means, that I have resolved even a single one of my problems, or that I will be somehow different when I finish. There is a very good chance I haven’t changed at all.

In the end, writing is not always an overeager step toward self-healing, it is in my opinion, an infinitesimal step, a very exploratory move in said direction of promise. But in order to get to where I am to be—with writing I must lean into honesty.

All the same, writing with the bittersweet taste of honesty is very grim. The more I start to write honest with myself and my words, the farther we may slip into darkness, but of the dark, it is true, the only way out is through.

Don’t take this as an excuse. I promise you—I’ve been telling the story as best I have known how, and this I will continue to do. But there will always be more to add to it.

A story, like life, is much like a tree. Branches grow, and branches must be cleared. They keep growing and you must keep trimming. Some will branch out farther than you could imagine, and those are sometimes better off left to grow.

I can’t help thinking with hints of confidence—if all goes well, a time may come, years or even decades from now, when I will come to discover that my self was somehow salvaged and redeemed from these articles of my life.

The elephant in the room will then return to the veldt, and it is of my hope, that I may tell the story of the world through my very own eyes with words far more beautiful than I could have ever imagined.  

So with that being said, sit back, relax, and settle on in.

It’s time this story begins.

—BeLove

After Life

“In every waking man, death dreams asleep.”

At this particular moment I must, almost in the delivery of a confession, without conviction, say that I do not consider that my birth began my original existence. Not yours. Not anyone’s. 

On creative grounds, if on nothing else alone, I cannot accept the view of death taken by most everyone, and taken by myself for most of this life—on creative grounds I am therefore obligated to oppose that something so extraordinary as a human soul can be wiped away forever.

No, our dead are about us, shut off only by our metaphysical denial of them. It is as we lie nightly in our own little astral hemispheres asleep by the billions, our dead approach us in our dreams, sharing certain ideas upon the spectrum of our souls. It is possible that the dead may consider these ideas to be their nourishment.

And maybe, just maybe, it is that by seeing these ideas in our dreams come to life is all they really want in the realm of Eternity.  And just like this particular idea of mine, all of our ideas could be considered as these sort of fallen leaves that maturity transforms within us as we approach the autumn of our lives.  

Our souls are fields of fallen leaves that cover this life with layers of metaphor and spirituality. And there are times when we may find ourselves barren with boredom, and instead of getting creative to pass the time, we starve these ideas of our dreams with the aridity of our own doubt. We let them dry up and wither away, which yields our dead from ever harvesting the sweetness of life again, and this our dead do not like.

And for some of us, the time comes in our life that we burn a lamp upon our fields of ideas so that our dreams may set our soul ablaze.  It is damn near dreadful to think of waiting for our dreams to illuminate our natural lives with all that is love and light. Especially when time has become of the essence of all that is oh so precious. So instead of think, one must light the flame in the cavern of their soul and see what shows itself.

It is by setting fire to our souls we see that the flames of divine love burn on the pyre of fervor, as our wildest dreams come to life. This is the ethereal eagerness of creative development, that burning of the mind that wipes the slate clean kind of thing.

But to take a seat and watch this short little life pass us by without looking to leave behind some kind of mark is to invite death on our way to rock bottom, only to shorten the timing of its demanding pursuit.

Don’t kid yourself though; the dead are with us, protecting us, living with us in our dreams, and within our hearts they live through us.  They are always watching over us on this spun little sphere, which is our institute of freedom.  In the next frontier, things are much more cosmic and clear; the kind of wide-open clarity that eats into freedom with a certain balance of bliss.

We are free on this earth because of cloudiness, because of human error, and because of marvelous contradiction of law and limitation. It is as much because of beauty and goodness as it is because of the blindness of evil. These have always gone hand and hand with freedom. Good and evil, like life and death, are two sides of a coin placed long ago in the mouth of the Departed.

If we lived only one of our days to the fullest, filled with consciousness and goodness, we would find the density of an entire lifetime in the simplicity of one day.  But we have become so intricately dispersed with our distracted recreations that natural life must allow us tens of thousands of days so that we may finally come to understand…

“In every waking man, death dreams asleep.”

But there is hope for us yet, and it sleeps in the possibility to be more profound than we were long before and way beyond that of good and evil. 

For now though that is all I have to say about this matter. The songbirds are rustling in the distance, the sun soon to waken. Besides, all of these thoughts about a dream of death are likely to be nothing but a waste of breath, and now the time has found me in a hurry, under such pressure—all this unfinished business.

BeLove

Written With Love

Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind, is written in his works.

All roads lead to the heart of a man; where he plunges unhesitatingly into the rivers of passion that flow through his life. He swims with madness in stride, but love forever at his side.

Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind, is written in his works.

When one dips into the madness of himself, he has only two options. He can either tiptoe upon the edge of insanity as long as he wants, forever wondering how deep his depth really goes, just to lose himself even more. Or if he wishes to to become one with himself, to harness this madness, he can jump from the edge of his cultured conditioning into the dark caverns of his heart and soul. This is by societal standards, also considered crazy and insane.

Though by way of a mathematical apparition that skirts the fringes of an analogy, a negative multiplied by a negative always equals a positive. This in theory is a fact. And it is finally that after all the time spent in the adolescence of an standardized algebraic equinox, I have found a way to use it in the daily routine of a word spun mind. Is it not the little things that make us whisper Hallelujah to ourselves?

It’s with a fine fury and frequent fanatics that by making the leap into the great unknown of myself. I allow my mind the best opportunity to get to the bottom of my heart, my soul, and that of me. Those eighteen inches from the head to the heart, is a dark path, but with enough light left in the tank of the heart, love shines and keeps the engine purring with purpose.

TAKE The Leap

The industry and application of spilling my heart and soul through the medium of writing, poetry, or any other sort of artistic application has proven to both churn and calm the amplifying currents of my psyche. It is after all, by the writing of these words that hum from the timbre of my soul—I find the only place where I’ve known to resonate whole.

Some may call these thoughts and obsessive inspiration of my mind—madness—and some may call them beautiful. I for one, consider them my sanctuary of sanity.

Some see me as crazy, some see me as strange, and there are those who may see something genuine. But at the root of it all, it’s the nature of all that is wild. It’s a little feral and a whole lot of real. And nowadays it seems that the only thing real in this world is borderline bat-shit crazy.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not like I’ve flown the coop, bound away, butt-naked, clothes fluttering in the loose seams behind me, blazing the trail of my mental stability. Running off and away into the windy wilds of life, much like a primitive man would.

No, I know I’ve always been a few sandwiches short of a picnic, but I’m more than capable of foraging the fruits of wisdom from the seeds planted within this wilderness of me. The seeds by those I have loved and those who have loved me and those I’m learning to love with all of my heart. This is how I feed my own hunger for healing. Is it not in our roots, wherein lies our strength?

It is true that sometimes it feels like this journey up the mountain of my mind, and through the forests of my wild is nothing more than a metaphoric saunter through the dark night of depression and the bright lights of my soul.

Is writing my way of healing? My way of escaping the clutches of a mid-life crisis? I’m starting to believe that yes, it is. So with these sneaking suspicions of mine, it is of my chivalrous concern to turn the circumstance of my creative crisis in the right direction.

TELL THE TRUTH

It is when we search our soul via creativity, we come to see all things within ourselves through an inner eye. We begin to see that failure is fleeting, unless we give up, then failure grabs hold of the foundation of our lives. Success doesn’t give up. This is true no matter if others agree. The elastic youth of our souls have never been held to the shapes of constraint, and failure is a constraining shape only to the ego.

The judicial altitudes of earthly judgment do not have the true ability to rise to the astral heights from which we fell. It is through creativity, and it alone, that allows us to saunter through the landscape of our very own cosmic totality. To see the truth of the cosmic and divine law. And that truth is the exact same as the very last word we hope to feel before we die, and that feeling is love.

All of my life I have often took to the hankering of all sorts of mischief, the mischief of walking through life at my own pace, whether it be riddled with anxiousness or more geared in a sauntered stride of ease. I’ve always been one to look for things I can’t find, whether it either be my car keys, my mind, or the ability to understand something I’ve yet to learn, which could very well be unconditional love. I’ve always done things my own fumbling sort of way. I have questioned every damned thing, mostly myself and my own ridiculous thought pattern. And my style of writing through pain with healing in tow is no different.

EMBRACE YOUR PASSION

It is my god given right to choose my desires, my path, what it is that hurts me, which is proving to be myself and my expectations. It is up to me to choose the decisions that lead me in the direction towards courage, healing, detachment, and—sometimes—a touch of madness. And it is my god given gift to create however and whatever I may please.

It is important to embrace our passions and enjoy them with intensity. But there is not a need to renounce the pleasure and pain that comes with our passion; both are simply a part of life and should amplify the emotions to all who took part in them upon the landscape of our time.

We must not lose sight that the spirit of all “things” were always built to last, but is ourselves that get in the way. Nor, should we forget the bonding of lost souls that have been forged by the divine fiery parcel in the short time we’ve been on this earth.

If you take anything from this post, let it be this image.

Remembering this is more important than we realize. The small synchronicities throughout life teach us more than any textbook ever will, and this is only achieved in the awareness of the lesson that creativeness helps us to learn about ourselves. And I am learning this by writing with love and the truth.

THE TAKEOUT

While there is no greater priority than the truth, writing is also a spiritual discipline that is akin to all other prioritizing qualities of creation. It involves both the production of beauty and the beautification of the soul. As with other forms of art, writing involves a form of essence. The form is material: this paper, this pen, this table, my physical posture, my current state of mind, and so forth. There is a certain quality to the very act of writing, a quality becoming more lost in the age of twittering and emojis.

It is my wish to hold fast to the lost art and to the reverence of writing. This wish is related to balancing the influence of my wild nature and the pace of human thinking.

The truth of writing, both as an act and a product of this act, involves a harmonious blend of love, purpose and beauty. One cannot reduce words to the tasteless function of mere vehicles of thought. Words and their placement have to engage our sense of beauty, harmony, music, and the love inside each and every one of us.

THE NATURE OF BEAUTY

This beauty is nowhere more accessible to a writer than within his own creative nature and through nature itself. Nature distills this essence that is the fragrance that emanates from the divine parcel, otherwise known as the heart; and it is of certainty that the catalyst for writing, is none other than the peaceful landscape within us that we see as beautiful. It is a landscape that carries with it the gentleness of green slopes that cascade into a lake in the sky, with a promise of a peak shadowed by the horizon of Heaven above.

The reverence of writing is akin to the loving landscape that leads to all metaphysical and spiritual summits. The routine connection of the writer with nature in the broad sense, is no more the source of inspiration as it is to the chivalrous actions of a romantic poet.

In the end, writing with love forms an integral context that brings balance and shape to our souls, and to the truth of who we really are, and maybe, just maybe to all hearts it will make a difference. I’d guess to put it plain and simple, we were all written with love a long, long time ago, by the Those above, and that is the Truth.

So no, I am not crazy, very far from it. I’m just getting comfortable.

-BeLove

For What It’s Worth

A warrior does not give up what he loves, he finds love in what he does.

The warrior stands rebellious, graphite sword in hand, contemplating over a cosmic plain.  Below him or her is a spinning sphere full of trials, tribulations, threatening adversaries, and tempting shortcuts.  Across the plain rises a mountain called mentality, full of promise but harboring a myriad of challenges.  On the other side of the mountain awaits something of which they are not exactly sure.  Could it be valor, transcendence, illumination, possibly enlightenment?  Or perhaps something more sinister hides behind the mountain in the shallow shadowed valleys below.     

All he or she knows is that they must carve a chivalrous path through life’s uneven landscape and scale the mountain, leading the way for those who seek something better on the other side.  They must guide with empathy and compassion through the shades of peril that lay ahead.  They know that death is an option from which they cannot opt out of.  They are very aware that survival could escape them, but they are prepared and are capable of leading those they love to safety regardless of their own well-being.  But they are also confident and their spirits can barely contain themselves.

Follow Your Heart

The warrior wears their heart as a shield, protecting what they love from the evil that lurks in the dusk of fear.  They defy the nightmares of deceit, false belief, and the judgments that create suffering and false happiness.  It is a war that once was waged within their own hearts and minds.  They stare fear in the eye with an awareness that the inner conflict of adversity has already taught them.  They know that truth, divinity, and unconditional love are what lie ahead on the other side of fear.  They know what is at stake and it is more important than anything else to them.  It is Freedom.  Or call it cerebral liberty if you will.

The warrior breathes benevolence for what they wish to protect, in this case, the reverence of love, and freedom of the mind.  Their tears are hidden behind their eyes, for it is love, not hate, which motivates.  They acknowledge that bravery comes in the presence of fear and not in its absence. Afraid or not, they keep emotional arousal at bay and instead use its energy to finish the task at hand.  They are confident in their skills of struggle and that conceit is an exploitable weakness.  They feel everything that everyone does, but answer otherwise.  Their commitment to peace and harmony is deeper than any river they have ever crossed.  It is what they live, love, fight, die, and write for. 

The warrior knows that in order to win the war against fear, they require awareness, valor, discipline, and promise in order to transform the emotional body of the whole.  They know their inner strength is a weapon but how it is used depends on their hearts and minds, and of course their soul. 

Be Aware

Awareness is the most vital tool of a warrior.  We often think we are aware but to be purely aware does not involve thinking whatsoever.  Awareness is unpolluted because there is no interpretation to the thinking process.  To be aware means that we perceive with clarity the truth of what is happening in the present without opinion.  In a moment of pure awareness the dialogue in our mind stops.  We see from a point of view separate from the scrutiny of our mind.  It is in the awareness of an epiphany that balance finds its way beneath the warrior’s footing, balance being extremely important, as we will discuss later on as we stumble down this road. 

Awareness is essential because it is a state of consciousness that allows us to discern between the facts and the truth, and between the story and the lies in our mind.  Our mind is filled with false perceptions and false beliefs.  The mind is crafty, but it is also full of assumptions and limited patterns of perception, it is easily fed with distraction. 

Self-awareness is the clarity to know who and what you are, and not become so entangled in the image of yourself.  Your self-image that is your utmost distraction will often misrepresent the sense of who you really are.  False internal images can lead you to lower self-esteem and self-confidence, or they can lead to being self-centered. 

Mind Your Head

If you have an idea of who you are, then contemplate that you are not that idea in your mind.  You are the one creating and discerning it.  When you become aware that the images of self that you hold in your mind are nothing but illusion, you recognize the essence of freeing yourself from self-importance.

The warrior has the courage to question his or her own beliefs.  By challenging our own beliefs, we begin to recognize the lies that cause our own suffering.  To challenge our own beliefs requires courage because it is a means to the end of the illusion of safety.  A warrior learns not to defend what we believe, but to challenge those very beliefs ourselves.  It is in this way that we are able to sort the truth from illusion.

Discipline is of the utmost importance in the spirit of a warrior.  Discipline is stringent upon staying the course when faced with the inward challenges of the mind.  A warrior must have the discipline to continue to practice against his or her own mind, without any outside motivation.  They must exercise their own free will at the command of their heart without outward representation.  This often means going against the fearful opinions in our minds that allure us with patterned illusions of both punishment and reward.  They must also carry close the discipline to follow their heart when tempted by judgment.

Love Yourself

The warrior must commit to self-love.  They can then extend that love amongst others, as well as humanity.  Self-commitment is required because along the journey we are certain to fall many times.  It is with strong commitment that the warrior gets back up again.  It is common to fall upon the fleeting judgment of others.  It is easy to love some people, particularly those who treat us with mutual respect.  However, it requires an incredible commitment to love in the face of those who reject us.  This commitment will challenge us.  It will challenge our beliefs about our own judgments, while teaching us that pure compassion is the only defense required. 

The warrior is committed to love beyond their own self-serving interests and what it will bring them.  This is how we become happy past our own paradigm of longing.  Over time, we become committed to love for the sheer enjoyment of expressing love.  This is what the spirit of a warrior lives for, to love.  They nourish themselves with the love they express.  A warrior will always express their love, even when challenged. 

The warrior always expects the best from themselves.  They may not always overcome everything they are faced with, but it is with certainty that they will give it their all to rise above failure.  They will make the best of every situation and seek to unleash their greatest potential even if they do have to dip into the madness of their own mind.  They expect to set the example of what it takes to lead and inspire others, no matter how close to the edge they take themselves.  Therefore, they must be ready, willing, and able to carry the burden, even when lost in the arid desert of their mind.   

A warrior understands that they only have one life, so they treat it with reverence and fill it with those peculiar moments that make life worth living and with those they find meaningful.  Sometimes a warrior must walk away from everything he was to find out where he truly belongs.

The Takeout

But what do I know? I am not necessarily a warrior, I am just some guy who likes to write, but I believe in something much more greater and graceful than the good we are promised.  I have a vision and I believe in it with such passion, I will seek it out until the day I die.  The funny thing is that it’s right here within me.  It always has been, somewhere deep, and probably pretty damn dark.  But it is true; there is a light of faith that will always shine through.

It is in these moments when I write that I find meaning.  The means of myself seem to meet with pen and paper.  For some odd reason, I associate words with leaving a mark on the world.  I’m not sure why. I do know it is borderline brutal to be an open book in a world that barely reads anymore.  But writing allows my soul to saunter with creative experience and not wither away to the misuse of boredom’s mediocrity.  I guess it allows my mind its daily serenity and by treating every minute as a gift—with a gift—is a great way to align my life the way that I see fit. 

So, let us stop wasting these precious minutes, and start running towards those dreams.  Starting with today, go get whatever it is you wish to deserve from this life.  Or you could just continue to put it off until tomorrow, but eventually, you will have to either walk away from what it is the spiritual path demands or stare it down and give everything that you have got to get to the results that Heaven and the One Upstairs desire. 

And for what it’s worth, the warrior knows that he doesn’t have a lot to offer, but what he truly believes in is worth something, as long as he can manage to stay out of his own damn way.

–BeLove