Lighthouses into Safe Harbor

I take a deep breath to calm my nerves and open my mind because as I think about life and its purpose, I lose my mind. I find myself shifting focus from the things that I see as important and the new realities of what sometimes seems a hate driven world. I find it hard to take the next step, to give love and affection to someone hurting or to see beyond myself.

It seems that this world is careening out of control. If you watch the news, our country continues its bipolar mentality of Democrat versus Republican, Conservative versus Liberal, etc. Our politicians bandy words with each other, often muckraking their opponents to get the people to see that their way is the correct way. The news reports on war, death, destruction, famine, murder, malice, and every other pain inducing story they can get their hands on to deliver to the masses. However, what is the truth and what is politically driven to sway the vote or the majority belief? There is so much War, Pestilence, Famine, and Death being dealt out that you'd think the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse were riding on our world to bring the final fall of man revealed in Revelations. You can't turn on the news without the depressing onslaught.

Then, you take a breath and the world continues to spin. You take a step and see a young man open the door for his mother or an elderly couple that he allows to go first. You feel depressed about the news of the day or you feel like you aren't worth the star dust that created you and a friend or co-worker notices your suffering; they hold you in their arms or make you laugh. You cry and wish the world would end today and your loving parents somehow know; they call you to check on you and tell you how much they love you.

You see darkness in the world, but in every step you take or every breath you breathe, you notice that in spite of the darkness, light and love are still shining bright. You notice that in the eyes of the youth, you see the hope of a new generation. In the cry of a newborn, the death and destruction can be wiped away with the hope of a new life. In the thrilling laugh of your niece, nephew, daughter, son, or grandchild, the looming darkness lifts with the happiness that that laugh infuses in your day.

Much like the Spring is the infusion of new life and the promise of beauty that washes away the bleakness of Winter, the beauty that we seek in the light, the love, the joy, and the hope of life, we can help to clean the muddied eyes and we can lighten the darkness like a lighthouse in the harbor. Our lighthouses (i.e. friends, family, lovers, husbands, wives, children and all the others that fill our lives with joy and love) stand at safe harbor to give us love, make us laugh, let us cry, hold us through the darkness and bless us with their light. They remind us why we keep trying. They keep us breathing. They help us to continue believing. They bring the darkness into their light and they welcome us home.

I love all of my lighthouses in safe harbor. To all of you I plead, keep bringing me out of the dark. And keep welcoming me home. 

Standing Out Within the Background

"To exist is to stand out, away from the background...You aren't thinking or really existing unless you're willing to risk even your own sanity in the judgement of your existence" ( Herbert, Frank. Children of Dune. 226-27). Have you ever wanted to stand out as someone more than the Average Joe or the Plain Jane? Have you wanted to be noticed as something more than the unnoticeable background? I have. Everyday, I look in the mirror and pray for something more than a part in the background.

It wasn't until thinking about what constitutes the background, than I came to realize that the background is seen from perspective and is the focus of the viewer. For example, as you look at the hillside or the mountain, the background is sky or the colors on the mountain. However, when your focus shifts to the trees that give color to the mountain, the trees become the focus and the massive mountain becomes the background. Who would have thought that the imposing mountain would become the background?

So, what is the background we are seeking to stand apart from to be noticed? We are all completely different, but amazing in our own ways, so how do you stand out or out-shine all the amazing and beautiful people and things that surround us? And by standing out, does that truly give you the ability to claim that you exist simply because you stand out? wouldn't the true test of existence be to not stand out alone, but to help others stand out and by doing so, stand out together? I think testing yourself and questioning things is important, but in standing out, who are we truly trying to stand out from and whose focus are we seeking to gain? God's? Our family's? The hot guy or girl down the street?

I want to be noticed but at what expense? I am risking my own sanity or my ego in thinking about the importance of the beauty in everything and everyone and seeking to see beyond myself and help others to stand out. My ego keeps pulling me back and screaming for its own five or more minutes of fame, but I continually keep rebutting with, "why?"

Perhaps, for some people, they need to stand out from the background. They have the glamour, beauty, and color to stand out and be noticed. However, for the Average Joes and the Plain Janes, the way we stand out is giving color, space, shape, and life to the background. Our way of existing is not standing apart from the background but adding to it. Maybe, by not standing out, we stand out in our own ways. We become the beauty of the background and bring the others the background from which to stand out. We have purpose. We exist. And we enliven and brighten a world with diversity, difference, and beauty. We stand out within the background in our own unique ways.

Each New Moment: Knowing the Need for Now

I was riding the bike at the gym a few days ago, which is usually a time I let all thoughts die away. However, as I road listening to pop and dance music so that I maintained the pace, a fragment of thought whispered to me above the music. I heard "tomorrow" and "today." I don't have schizophrenia; I don't hear voices. I promise. However, when I heard "prospect," "tomorrow," and again "today," I turned off my music to listen with an open mind. This time I heard, "At the prospect of tomorrow, I see the need for today." What would that mean? Why was I being whispered this phrase?

I have been thinking on it for a few days now and still don't know where it came from, but I know where my desire to hear it came from. In my current condition, a.k.a my preoccupation in the present moment, one of my friends, whom if he knew I was writing about him would freak out because of his need for the close confines of his personal "closet" and his affinity for his alias, has expressed his concern for my need for the present moment and my continual residence within the solace of the moment. My friend said that I needed to keep the future in mind because if I don't, problems, unforeseen, would sneak up on me.

While this may be true and may be a necessity for him, the future is too dark and shadowy to remain in my troubled mind. When I think on the future, I can't help but stress out at the prospect of dead-end jobs and the inability to pay my student loans. Also, the prospects of future wars and civil disturbances leave me in an agitated state. Fear takes hold and darkens the day. The future holds within it unnecessary stresses and worries that don't exist yet. They are shadows beyond the next moment that I can't seem to touch or meet. As soon as I meet the future, it becomes the past and so on into infinity.

As I struggle to maintain fragmentary moments of peace and sanity, I find that dwelling on the past leaves me bitter because of perceived failures. As I look to the future, I am struck with unmet pleasures or pains. What I've created in the past and the nonexistent future are continually and unnecessarily focused on. However, I understand my friends concern for my focus solely in the present. Understanding that concern is why I was given that moment of inspiration. That whisper came to me because the creation of each new moment allows for the betterment of each new moment.

If we become aware of what we do now and how it effects the next moment and the next after that, eternally, we must strive for an eternal betterment of the present moment. For example, a smile now can carry a smile to someone else's now and so on, but it also effects your personal present moment. Our joy in turn effects the joy of others' nows and continues the joy of your eternal moments. Thus, "at the prospect of tomorrow, I see the need for today" and the must see the need for now.

Now

Soaring high
above the plains of sorrow
my soul rises to greet
another day
     another blessed moment
I am jarred toward reality
and welcome the light
shed on me in the
    bright, sumptuous morning
of the moment.
Each moment
cleanses my soul
awakens my heart
and lightens my mind.
The past is not
but a figment,
an imaginary groan
it is vapor in the wind.
As the future is
safely hidden in
the dreams of something
better.
But, too, is
    but whispers and moans.
All that is
is now.
A coalescing of energies
a meeting of souls
and we touch each moment
with new eyes
and we are aware.
We are.
We exist in the now,
breathing and releasing.
We exist.
We are.

Self-Discovery

I am.
   Therefore you tremble
I have seen beyond the fences,
Beyond the highest hills and mountains,
Beyond the furthest reaches of your universe,
To see myself
    And my many faces.

I am
    Therefore you quake.
I was hidden in the darkness
In the darkest pits and traps
In the deepest abyss.
See me
    In living color.

I am,
     Therefore you weep.
I am flesh and bone.
Desire, passion, and feeling
I lead and follow; trust and hate
And I wake to see myself,
     in dreams

I am
    Therefore I exist,
To go beyond that is foolish
To risk self-destruction is childish
I see myself for who I am
    And I like me.

My One

It is silly for me to pen,
To suggest to fate
That there is one
Who could compliment me.
One who could stir my soul into being.
One who could calm my angry sea
And simply, purely be.
Awoken from his own despair
Lively in his very movements.
His eyes would lighten with my coming
His heartbeat would quicken
And I would be the only one around,
Though we are surrounded
He and I together. One.

With him, forever seem perfect
With him, paradise and earth co-exist
Without each other, we are not.
But together, we grow stronger.
For he strengthens me, and I, him

God be praised, when I have my One
He completes me
Like a missing piece to a puzzle
The gaps in me be complete
      and whole through him
And together, we simply will be.
He is breath to my lungs,
     Life to my soul.
He is mine and I am his. Forever.
Forever One.

Communications of the Heart

I never said I love you
     even though I do
I never spoke the words
     I wished for you to hear
Even though I wanted to

I never told you how much you mean to me,
     Though I truly care for you,
But it is not the spoken words
That let you know
     Of my affection for you.

A smile when you are near me
And a kiss when you come home.
A hug and meaning behind each moment
      I listen to your hearts complaint
And am there to comfort you.

Actions have spoken more loudly
     Than words can ever do.
And though three words can do so much,
I speak of my affection for you
Through these communications of the heart
   To tell you that I  love you.

Lawmaking

Constant disappointments
    From the Hollow Men*
Puffing their chests
Expelling promises
    Unfulfilled and empty
Raising fists in the air
    Arguments of stone,
Thrown in the pond of justice
     and law,
        Ripple and sink.
"Not for us?" the Hollow Men ask
     "Serve the people?"
Laughing and jeering
    Putting straw, empty heads
      together.
Hollow Men united,
"We know the answer
    to crisis averted."
Take more jobs
    And give raises to
       the Hollow men
   One and all."


*My inspiration for this poem came from T. S. Eliot's poem "The Hollow Men." You can read the original poem online to see where I am coming from.

We Are All Connected

In a voiceover monologue at the end of the movie Latter Days, the protagonist Aaron Davis says, "Sometimes it all still feels like a mass of dots. But more and more these days, I feel like we're all connected. And it's beautiful... and funny... and good." I have seen this movie many times and the truth of this statement has never really hit me until the start of this new year. I think part of the reason that it is hitting me differently now and that I am writing about it is an experience I had when I was down in St. George working side by side with my two amazing parents and creating beauty through landscaping the backyard. 

While I was in St. George, every morning before my parents and I got to work on the backyard, I would wake up and take my yoga mat out on the back porch that faces the rising sun. The blue hues in the sky and the white, wispy clouds greeted me with the joys of a renewed day. I laid my mat down and sat in the lotus position. With my headphones in but at a low volume, I put the meditative practices of Thich Nhat Hanh and Sister Jina van Hengel from the "Plum Village Meditations" on and began to exist solely in the moment. 

Sister Jina van Hengel guided me through breathing and exercises in dwelling in the present moment. At the end of "Plum Village Meditations," Sister Jina van Hengel guided me through a meditation to relieve anger and resentments toward my parents. (This mediation can be used to release resentments towards others too, but she focuses on the parents.) As I went through the meditation, envisioning my parents at the age of 5 years old, I saw them as fragile and pure beings whom, as they grew, experienced their own sufferings, struggles, and pains. Realizing and acknowledging this, I was able to have compassion for my parents and my love for them grew and continues to grow. I continue to try to water those seeds of love, compassion, and knowledge.

As I sat on the porch with my legs losing the circulation of blood and tingling with sensation, my awareness opened to the pigeons cooing in the nearby trees, the faint breeze caressing my face, the purifying light of the sun as it washed over my face, and the sounds of the neighborhood children waiting for the bus, I felt the connectivity of everything. I became aware of how everything touches everything with souls, if you want to call them souls, or energy. The hum of the pulsing energies of the universe coalesced and washed over me. 

With the compassion I felt for my parents, at that moment, I realized that everyone deserves that compassion because we are all connected, whether through our creator or through the chaos of creation. Our souls or energies meet, touch, and connect with one another. I felt pure joy for the moments I have and for the souls and energies that have touched mine, in pleasure or in pain. Sometimes, I still can't see through the confusion and chaos of life, but "more and more these days, I feel like we are all connected. And it's beautiful...and funny...and good." 

Good Parenting: Experiencing Unconditional Love

A good parent can go a long way. A great, loving parent can carry a child on a journey through the brambles of life when that child's legs won't carry them much further. Now, add another loving parent to that child's life and the load that child carries will be lessened that much more.

I have been one of the lucky ones to have two loving parents to have on my side and by my side during this perilous journey of life. At times, during those moments of growth when I felt so alone, I forgot that they were on my side and by my side. Sometimes, I think I took that fact for granted too often. And I fear, sometimes I cursed them for how protective they were of me. I didn't realize, during those times, that they were doing their best to shield me from the darkness they had seen in this world.

Today, I feel extremely grateful to my parents, who not only have my physical well-being in mind as they protect and have protected me, but they also have my spiritual well-being in mind. I don't know how often, as I've called home to talk, they have said, "We always have you in our prayers," or "we put your name in at the temple." If all else fails in this world, I know that I have two loving people who watch out for me and pray for me. I fear the day when their physical bodies are absent in my life. However, believing in something more than this life allows me to know that they will still be there in spirit and in my heart always.

It is thinking of my parents love for me that I wish with all my heart that every child could be this lucky. I wish everyone could experience the love of a parent. I wish children could experience the unconditional love a parent gives even when they disagree with where your life is headed. I know that not all people will agree with me, but in my wishing, I have a hope that people can see past sexual orientation when the well-being of a child is concerned and know that love is love. That child will be cared for. Whether by a mother and a father, two mothers, two fathers, a single mother, or a single father, that child will get to experience unconditional love. And that is a beautiful gift.

In one of the cover pages of Gordon Merrick's novel The Lord Won't Mind, it says, "I say, if it's love the Lord won't mind. There's enough hate in the world." And how can I disagree with this. There is so much hate in the world. I can't allow other's to suffer if they could have the chance to love and be loved, even if that structure of love goes against what society says is a "normal family." Because really, what is a "normal family?" Can anyone really say they have normal parents or a normal family?