a dream

i have just had a dream. not of my usual sort by any means. i do not have dreams like this one. i rarely dream, and when i do the nits that remain with me upon waking are hazy. foggy. indeterminate. on the rare occasions when i remember anything with any clarity it is usually of the brain dump sort - like when a computer's hard drive that has become overfull and various unrelated files must be purged. these clear dreams are like that recycle bin: a twisted and jumbled nonsensical mess. but not tonight. tonight there was connection. and tonight i was not fully asleep. tonight i had a waking dream which i can remember as though it were happening to me now.

i am alone, on a pilgrimage of a sort. i do not know exactly why, beyond that i have dreamed for years of coming here, but i am come to lumbini in nepal. birthplace of siddhartha gautama, he would become the buddha. i am not here religiously, at least not in the strictest meaning. i am not here to find myself. i am not here for enlightenment, i am not here to worship. yet i am here all the same.

i have come at a good time. the hills are full, the bodhi tree connected fully to surrounding landscape with cords that bear countless prayer flags. their colors are myriad, their shapes shift and play like the dancers i left in the clubs of kathmandu. there is a difference, and yet a sameness - while their reason for being here is so separate from those dancers, their nature is so very much the same: dissolution, oneness, connection, celebration, impermanence. i feel the colors physically, shocking me against a sky as blue as any i have ever seen, lush grasses and tree-lines hills thrusting their greens up into the blues almost as if to make the reds and yellows and oranges of the flags all the more wondrous.

this is a holy place, someplace i can touch without touching. there is something special here. moreso than just another simple place of worship. i am a white face here, a kind that is not seen terribly infrequently but seemingly greeted with some understandable measure of doubt as to the honesty of the visit. the faces i see are brown, lovely reddish and yellows and weathered to a point not often experienced in our cities. i am of little concern to the faces, white face or no. i am but another part of the landscape, another warp or weft in reality's fabric for this moment. this is an altogether novel experience for me; i am not being viewed with indifference, but with recognition and a lack of concern. i am not being overlooked, i am being seen with eyes that understand that my presence has little bearing on their experience but must be honored all the same.

i come to the tree. not a tree, but *the* tree. this is the focal point, the reason they are here. i can feel this too. the colors come rushing to me suddenly, the songs and breaths and breezes and prayers descending as i descend to my knees to pay some respect to this place. i have no plans nor expectations of anything momentous, not even of anything special at all. but as i come to my knees i can feel something crack inside of me, moses rock smacked with his staff and flowing blood and water in the depths of whatever it is that is me. this is a beautiful sound to me, and peaceful and quietly thunderous roar, and a new softness grows wildly from a strange spot in the middle of me.

and then it comes. a single, beautiful tear. there is no outpouring, no deluge. one small tear, which wends its way to my eye and finds itself balanced at the base of my nose. and it falls. i see it drop, each inch traveled toward the ground a lifetime. and when it finds the soil, it simply disappears into it with no apparent effect.

but i hear another drop hit. it is not my tear. i hear another. others have joined me in my small outpouring. the tears begin to come together in a pattering, quietly enough to be unmistakable for what they are but still loud enough to be heard. and then comes a larger drop. and another. these are not tears of the congregants. this is rain, the cool and bracing kind. the kind that is mostly unseen here.

our tears gather together with the coming rain and soon the skies have opened in a torrent to join with our own crying, and i rear back on my knees, fingers buried in the soil at my knees and i wail. for the first time in years i wail, and the whole of nature wails alongside me. the ground around smells of life and ashes, the winds of beginnings and ends, and i am with them and of them.

we wait, and we cry. and the clouds open apart and there comes a sunshine the warming likes of which i have never seen. from the spot where my first tear touched grows a shoot of purest green. i raise myself to my feet, gather my senses and turn to leave. i do not need to see this flower. it is enough to know that it grows.

i see things

before any one of the apparent 2 people who read this calls the men in white coats on me again, i don't mean i see ufos, greys, jabberwockys, leprechauns, the ghost of christmas past, or scenes of crimes that have yet to occur. i do not see things that are not there, at least not in the manner of which most would immediately think. what i mean to say is that i frequently live in that daydreamed world where we all live from time to time, thinking about how i might like to do this, or how the world would be better if we could only do that. i think the major difference for me - at least as i understand it to have frustrated some people surrounding me - is that while the vast majority of people out there will come back from a woolgathering session and think to themselves 'that was a lovely little dream', i will possibly never fully return to the world and see it the way that it was before i dreamed it to be something new. i dream dreams and to me they are something to act upon as though they are facts, until it becomes clear that in doing so i am tilting at yet another windmill. i don't mean to say i am deluded, merely that i can see no reason to let a dream die simply because it was a dream.

and so i will wander off in what must to someone not living in my head to be some aimless direction with no forethought or plan or even any idea of where i might end up. and while i can understand that might be the way it looks, i rest assured that i have every idea of where i may end up, and that where i actually end up is likely to be far better than what i dreamed in the first place.

the funny thing so few people really seem to grasp is that just as there is no need to let that dream die, there is no need to hold it so tightly that it is smothered to death by the dreamer. no dream has ever been brought into reality without reality exacting some toll on the form of the dream. for some this is frustrating to the point of seeming futility. i know that feeling. i lived there once myself. it is a perfectionism born of the ego, the desire to have what one wants become real with no change whatsoever, the belief that one's dream belongs to him alone and should be his own perfect creation. i lived there. i know that way. it is the way of the fool. it is the way of death for the vision.

no, reality s powerful and fickle and must be allowed to act its force, and the dream will live. it will perhaps not look the same as when it was dreamed, but if one can stand apart from the dream as if it were a child to be reared - love it, comfort it and foster it and guide it, all while allowing it to grow in the way it desires for itself - it will more often than not grow into a shining and beautiful thing larger and more wonderful than one person ever could have dreamed alone.

i think of it in terms of a work of art, the medium in which i work and in which i learned the lesson. there will come an inspiration and an image, a picture of an idea that the painter wishes to put out into the world. there are limitations, though. the canvas is rough and has flaws. the paints will have colors they cannot reproduce. the brush will fail to capture the subtlety of a smallest line of form. the light in the gallery will never be just right to convey the luminosity of the imagined subject. the artist could fight these things - prepare the canvas to a glassy-smooth surface with gesso and sanding, select a different medium to avoid the paints' limitations of color - or give into them, work with them, allow them to shape the form in their own way. in not fighting the medium, the medium does not fight back but rather cooperates, and together the artist and medium produce something final that, though different from the imagined image, is it's own wonderful creation.

these things - for me they must be felt richly and treated as though they are already what they will become. your dreams are real. the just haven't happened to you yet. but they are already happening all the time.

forgive me father, for i have sinned...

...it has been i year and some-odd days since i last have posted, and i am all the poorer for it. my life has been lived, my thoughts have been kept, and i am nonetheless confused and lost as i'd have been without changing my method of navigating this sad old world.

i am now single. as of somewhere in the neighborhood of 9:45am, tuesday march 16th my marriage is officially and technically no longer. this comes with mixed emotions, obviously. i feel like a failure, like i am less of of a man, less of a human, less of an acceptable member of society than i was on monday. foolish, yes, but the truth. i have lost the mother of my children and the stability that brings with it for them. i have lost the person who was my best friend for 13 of the almost 14 years we were married, and i am unquestionably poorer for that. on the other hand, i am finding that when i am able to look past the immediate hurt, the misery and the failure and the wallowing in self-pity and guilt, i see before me a world i never thought i deserved, or one that i never thought could exist and for which i certainly never would have asked.

this has been a long, strange trip. i have made a mess of things, no doubt. if i were to quantify the issues that led to my divorce i could not come to any conclusion but that this is my doing, my fault. no matter how i try to lay some blame in other places, my reactions and behaviors are the ultimate source of the end. and i loathe those things about myself that brought about this end.

and yet, it is those very things that i find within myself to be the very core of who i am as an individual within this world. the things that made it impossible for me to be a decent husband and partner are the things that make me who i am. this is a startling and liberating revelation in spite of the unsettling and difficult implications of such.

i am resolutely and unerringly me. i see things differently from many others. this is not always good; sometimes it just is, and oftentimes it is irreconcilable with what others in my life, or society as whole, would have make sense. this is not to say i am unapologetically individualistic. i will apologize, and happily so, if i can be brought to see that what i see makes no sense or is hurtful. and yet this is not to say i will deviate from my chosen viewpoint; though apologetic, i will not always capitulate.

i am, for the most part, an easy fellow. i have few hills on which i am willing to die. for the majority of my existence i am willing, and gladly so, to abdicate the things that are deemed important to the whims and prejudices of others. the color of the rug? happily left to you. whether to donate to habitat for humanity or heifer international? as long as there is charity, the choice is yours. but i have my hills, and they are varied and indeterminate.

i have a miserably obstinate streak in me that wants little for the requirement to seek approval. i don't need it, and i don't want it. though i may well suffer from an anxiety disorder that would have me believe that no one likes me, i also find myself not caring to modify myself to fit whatever would have the world appreciate me. i am stuck in the middle between a viewpoint that the world does not care for me and i am destined to be disliked and alone, and a relentlessly independent streak that honestly think i should have to give a crap. i am a worst possible scenario: someone who cares deeply about others' opinions of him, but who is unwilling to compromise himself to fit their molds.

i want little out of this life than this: to be able to look at myself in the mirror and know that i spent today as myself, uncompromising. to know that i can awaken tomorrow and decide that the wall of plywood decorated with wood-stain-drawn trees is a brilliant idea to finish out the dining room only because i will want to live with it. to write without concern for what someone may find threatening or offensive. to live happily in the knowledge that though i have few friends, those i have love me for who i am and not for who i am willing to be. to know that when my children spend their time with me, they will know that they are welcome to be who they are because the world into which they step does not act like the rest of the world around them: it is ours and theirs and mine, and in a way for which we will apologize and move on as we wish.

i know that this is not a personality that lends itself to a partner. perhaps that is my destiny: to be partnerless. at least for today, that idea does not hurt or concern me. i have no desire to have a partner, both because i want not for one and because i have no willingness to ask someone to be mine and bear with me. have already asked too much of someone in this world, and i have no desire to do that to someone again.

i am me. i am mine. i am relentless and difficult. i am weird. i am odd. i am brilliant and i am a moron. i care too much, and i care not at all. i am easygoing and i am impossible. i am warm and compassionate and i am heartless. i worry what you think of me and i say that you can fuck yourself if you want me to change.

i am me. i am mine. i am alone. and for now, though new, that is good.

we build excitement

this journey is quite an exhausting one. i am finding more and more that i would far rather hike for days through rocky mountain national forest, lugging my own gear and food and sleeping wherever i find myself at night, than explore my own inner landscape. i fee like i'd be far less worn out.

each day, or at least each week, brings the discovery of yet another block i have placed onto the wall i have built around my inner self. i have written rules for my own behavior that keep me in check and don't allow the five-year-old inside me to run freely. i'm not speaking of my inner child as the term is commonly used, at least i don't believe i am. but down inside me is a little kid that never grew up because i didn't allow him to exist, so his growth was stunted and he's just now beginning to emerge. and he's an annoying little cuss.

i have found that i seem to have more in common with my elder son than i would ever have thought possible. caleb is relentlessly emotional, so completely ruled by his feelings at times that he literally cannot control what he does or how he responds, and as frustrating as that can be for me as his parent, i have always had a but of a grudging respect and even admiration for it. he can be so overwhelmed by his adoration for you that couldn't stop himself from hugging so impossibly hard that he uses ever fiber of muscle that he has. if he has his heart set on something that does not work out, it is the end of the world to him, not for selfish reasons necessarily but because he has invested himself so fully in that dream that it has become his reality, and something so simple as a friend not being able to play a particular afternoon is devastating to him on a level that would to most seem more appropriate for a death in the family. once upon a time i was like that. i can remember it. and it was not welcome.

and i started to build. i gathered block upon block and stacked them one on another, creating a wall that manufactured with each row a newer and deeper sense of stoicism, a dam to hold back that flood was so strong that it would take me over and not allow me to control my own reactions. those waters of whatever feelings i was having would wash over me and there nothing i could do to swim in them and force my direction. i would simply ride that tide, letting it take me where it would. it was easier, more natural, more accurate and more right, but it was unacceptable and would not work. so came the wall, and the wall has grown so very high.

but it has outlived its usefulness. i no longer live in the world that required that control, and the waters on the back side of that structure have risen to the point that the wall can no longer contain them and they spill over the top of it in subtle waves and splashes. for now. but there have come to be times when those splashes and waves become larger and pour over the edges in torrents, and it is impossible to hold back flowing water with nothing more than your hands. i find myself running back and forth, trying to gather the waters back up as they fall and toss them, press them, mash them or simply to hold them at the top, praying the spillage won't be too great.

but it is becoming greater than i can muster the energy to keep up with. i can longer run quickly enough, my hands are no longer large enough and i have run out of blocks to add to the wall, and the waters are seeping through my fingers or eluding my hands altogether and they have begun to pour over onto the ground around me and make their wet and difficult way into the world from which i had managed to isolate them.

it is a weird and terrifying experience to know that at any moment i could break into tears or unexpected laughter. i don't believe myself unstable, but it feels that way to me because i'm simply not accustomed to it. random moments of beauty can overwhelm me, moments of sadness can become unbearably poignant, moments of disappointment manage to breed themselves into anger and resentment the likes of which it would take days, months or years to cultivate for someone with a proper lifetime's worth of experience. i can find myself taken over by music to the degree that i am moved quite literally to tears while driving, a particularly soulful song grabbing hold of me and taking me with it, and for now, anyway, no matter how foreign the feeling i am willing to let myself go for the ride. it's a wonderful and magnificent and frightening and exhilarating thing to be one of those people whom i have always secretly respected.

i remember a scene frequently from the movie 'philadelphia'. i thought that film was overwrought and overrated, and i still feel that way, but that overwrought sense made this one scene work. i believe it's at a party, and tom hanks's character is singing with an opera and is so overcome that he is left a shuddering and balling mess by the time it has ended. it is over-the-top, almost silly in its overdone-ness. but that scene has stuck with me because i never thought myself capable and i would have loved to understand what that was like. i hated that scene when i saw it, thinking it foolish and ridiculous, but i have never forgotten the look on hanks's face, the camera sweep up and over him as the piece rules him. secretly, i wanted to be able to do that.

well, i can do that. i am actually built that way and have made myself not believe it, forced myself to control it, tame it and keep it under wraps. no more. i am my own son, and i have tidal waves of emotion that i have never let myself experience in which i am now going to be happy to swim. i will let myself daydream. i will stand and stare at a piece of art that moves me until i can no longer bear it. i will let myself be sad about something not going the way i had hoped or be overjoyed by something that did. i am standing still and watching those waters spill, and i intend to dance in them as they fall like a kid playing in the rain.

this is a test

mostly just to see if this thing still works! it's been forever since i wrote anything, and a lot of that is because i haven't had much in the way of inspiration of late. also, with time the desire to churn everything out through the keyboard fades. all the miserable thoughts i might have start to lose the need to be expressed the longer i am in therapy. it doesn't feel yet like i am past the point where depression is a risk anymore, and i certainly haven't made any breakthrough that has magically made me fart sunshine. but therapy is such a good thing - it's giving me a place where i can spit out all of my c0ncerns and worries and sadnesses with someone else, and that almost negates the original point of this blog.

and so i am considering what to do with it from here. i have enjoyed writing. a lot. thus, i think from this point forward i'll likely have sporadic mental health and emotional musings, but that this will either become a home for my general philosophical ramblings or nothing more than a relic that documents essentially the final quarter of 2008. only time will tell.

the secret

is no secret at all, i'm sure. the secret is simply to be open. i am reading a book right now co-written by the dalai lama, and his contention is that his openness is what allows him to be happy. could it really be so simple? of course it could. but simple is rarely easy.

one is rarely more open to attack than when open to another person. if your arms are spread wide for a hug, you are never more vulnerable to a blow to the stomach or a kick to the groin. but without that openness, you are also never open to the hug you seek. and it is as simple as being strong enough to be willing to weather the blows in order to allow for the hug. we reap what we sow in all regards, but i feel it is most especially true in this one.

the fear? becoming overwhelmed. i am exhausted with myself right now. i have but dipped my toe into the waters of own emotions, and i already fear the overwhelming nature of what lies under the still surface. there is an undertow to the human soul that can become so strong to drag one down, and i am afraid of that, but i have already been there. i no longer am cripplingly afraid of my own dark side. but the light - i am also afraid of the light.

if i open myself, are those blows too strong? i have been battered about by winds of feeling already, opening myself little bits across the years, and what lies inside me is strong, so strong i fear my ability to control it. i can feel inside me something that wants out; it is not malevolent or bad, but just strong. i fear it's wanting out, because i feel like it may be a dog off the leash at a park, an openness that leaves me unable to protect myself or hold myself together.

which is nothing to fear at all. what have i to protect? in many ways i am only a shell anyway, the result of shutting myself off from the world for so long. and so why should i not let myself make that opening? all it will take is one small crack, and everything inside me can come pouring out, a torrent of beauty spilling out onto the floor and climbing the walls and radiating outward from me into my surroundings and over everything i can see. i can build a beautiful outlook that will make all the difference in the world for me, and maybe just all the difference in the world. i am finding over nights and through the relentless barrage of images and stories that my mind generates that i want to pour myself out, but i am afraid of losing myself in that process.

but isn't that what it's all about? isn't it about losing one's self to allow one's self to become what it is meant to be? if i can give up that control, the things i see will no longer be threats, but loving opportunity. that which i have will become no longer responsibility but gratefulness, that which i do not have will no longer be resentment but only that which i do not have, and at the most hope, but no longer regret.

i feel this morning like i have spent too long curled in a ball, tossed about while floating disagreeably on the waves of this ocean, allowing myself to be thrown about by waves and baked in sun. i feel like it is time to open that ball, allow myself to drown and become part of this ocean, moving into the newness that is what life is meant to be: all one, all together, open and free and connected. no longer fearing those brushes at my own edges, but feeling those brushes and embracing them.

i am afraid of this. i do not know how to do it. but i want to figure it out. can i do it slowly, opening a small crack and letting myself trickle out? or is the secret that i must dash the wall and let the torrent flow forth? must the opening be complete first in order to function? only time will tell. but it is time to tell. baby steps are what i have. they may not be enough as yet, but they are what i can take. i must take them.

lines

i wonder what it is that we find so attractive about the straight and narrow, the black and white. is it comfortable for some reason to deny that there is not more than varying shades of gray and infinitely curved and twisted shapes? why on earth must we fight the very nature that spawned us?

one need only look out the window to see the flaw in our design. man plans; god laughs. we tame and whip natural form, attempting to straighten and simplify things, codifying the complex and lyrical shapes of nature into ever-simpler volumes of boxes and spheres and triangles, every surface smooth, every edge razor sharp and perfectly defined. and for how long does it work? not very, when the grand scheme is seen.

a tree has no lines, a river no planes. there is no smoothness to a field, no mathematically simple perfection to a flower's petals. the world that was given to us cannot be tamed, but must be live with in accord. we section off pieces of the land with attempts at straight line fences to guard our boxes; mother nature blows them down and tears off our roofs. certainly, she tears down her own trees as well, but this is all part of how it works for her. she builds, she destroys. we build, she destroys. and yet we fight her and try to tell her that mean paternal rationality and logical progression are her masters. she has yet to lose.

i believe we are killing ourselves, evolving ourselves into irrelevance with our need for straight. nature abhors an absolute, and yet we attempt them. we build religions of absolutes, laws without subtlety, societies of relentless 'progress' and consumption. we manufacture new imaginary boundaries to define 'us' and 'them', more lines that exist nowhere but on sheets of paper just so we are able to say 'this is mine' keep out'. there is no wisdom in tilting at windmills - though romantic, it will eventually lead to ruin.

why can we not allow nature to take her courses? why must we always seek to understand? what is it within us that causes us to be unable simply to allow something to be what it is without the need to reshape it or somehow attempt to improve upon its form so that it becomes more useful to us? there is beauty in the bohemian, the poetic and swirling and curving and notched and twisted and decaying and fuzzy and gray.

i find comfort in the black and white, but it is a comfort that has never sat well with me. i blanch at the yoke of rationality that i put on myself. i see the pattern in my numbers, recognize the theoretical beauty of a straight line and a right angle. but they feel wrong somehow. when i let myself stop thinking, my inner landscape swirls and twirls, it odes not follow linear progressions of logical step and logical step.

there is wisdom in the stream of consciousness. there is beauty in allowing what is to be. the twists and turns that life throws at us are nothing more than the natural order; they are not obstacles, but simply the next turns or twists. the mind of god is very likely not a giant computer, crunching numbers and logically spitting out causes and effects, but a chaotic and self-organized system of unexplainable mystery, wheels within wheels in spiral arrays that have an order far beyond a pattern we will ever grasp. it is like wind: we know what it is and what its effects are, we know the mechanisms that create wind, but we will never really understand the how and the why. every discovery leads to another mystery. the one answer is never found, and if it ever were it would likely be a very unsatisfying 42.

and therein lies the beautiful joke douglas adams gave us. thousands of years spent crunching the numbers and the great computer responds with the final answer to life, the universe, and everything in it being 42. we will toil relentlessly to find the answer, but when we get it we won't like it. we're not supposed to. we're not built for that. we're part of nature, not its overlords. this is our charge, not our command, and we are not wiser than the mind which set it up.