Juxtaposition of Fear and Love

Beneath an ocean of fear are the plunging depths of mantle and core — the root of all we are and that which clutches the mass of our being — the gravity of our ground, the Self.

The causal forces of emotion, lie both below the roots of fear — fear of who we really are, and above the tree line of hubris,fear of who we’ll become. Fear is self-effacing love — love which mistakes itself as weak for having no attachments and only flourishes when worn as an accessory or talisman. Pure fear is the perfect absence of love, and it stands to reason that it carries a certainty that is inversely proportional to the possibility of realized potential; potential to be who we are already destined to be, or to attain, or to love. Fear is a misperception that all we can ever have is all we can hold today — to a point where all we hold in the moment then exceeds all we’ll ever have in moments to come. Fear carries weight, love is weightless and without volume… it simply is. Nothing to collect up; it holds us.

“… when we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. Let God speak within you, and your thoughts will grow silent. You are anxious because your path leads away from mother and home. But every step and every day lead you back again to the mother. Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all…” ~ Hermann Hesse, Baume. Betrachtungen und Gedichte

Fear is not of a ghost, it is the ghost. The more we fear, the more certain we become that we are destined to remain our own ghosts; neither feared nor loved. Fear is a threat, disguised as a promise and what scares us is the promise. Part the ocean, strip the surface and you’ll see the truth about fear; a hollow, transparent, and forlorn apparition. A brilliant master of disguise.

“Of all the liars in the world, sometimes the worst are our own fears.” ~ Rudyard Kipling

Fear never begins, it never ends — it cannot be measured, it is not greater than the sum of it’s parts; it is other than the sum of it’s parts. Its dissected meaning is as diminutive and sharp as the edge of a scalpel, and to analyze our fear is to simply lose ourselves in the waning interstitial space of nothingness. It stands for nothing unless it stands in the foreground of our own awareness, and then it is only seen as a dark silhouette postured in the brilliance of destiny. If we cast light on fear, we’ll find it is simply love in the shadows of the unknown. Turn this light on ourselves… therein lies comfort.

“My imagination persisted in sticking horrors into the dark- so I stuck my imagination into the dark instead, and let it look out at me.” ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

We all fear something. I feared my father until the day he died and even after. It made me stop and reconsider that I’d rather love the departed as they fade to a point of light in their future, than fear the darkness of their growing memory in times gone by. Fear is a lonely sort, looking for companionship in our memories… stand inside of fear, give it the company of love.

“The sun, red and enormous, began to sink into the western sky. And simultaneously the moon began to rise on the other side of the river with its own glorious shade of red, coming up out of the trees like a russet firebird. The sun and the moon seem to acknowledge each other and they moved in both apposition and concordance in a breath taking dance of light across the oaks and the palms. My father watched it and I thought he would cry again. He had returned to the sea, and his heart was a low country heart.” ~ Pat Conroy, Prince of Tides

Fear and love reflect the divine in their juxtaposition. It’s apogee and perigee. Gravity pulls us in, centrifugal force pulls us away. Fear is neither here nor there and does not reside in now or later. It lets out a gasp with any adjustment of vision, parallax. My father lives in the hinterland of my heart, if I shift this way or that, I see him as a memory far from fear. Like tears of fear, washing away into obscurity in an ocean of, of… no, I couldn’t possibly say something that saccharine.

Let’s turn our heads to look toward the direction we wish to go, not from whence we came — it’s alright… the importance of those who do not follow will be realized in the promise of those we’ve yet to meet. Imagine a translucent fear, and we’ll begin to see the core of ourselves — perfect a transparent fear, and we’ll find pure love.

“…Close your mouth against food.
Taste the lover’s mouth in yours.
You moan, But she left me. He left me.
Twenty more will come.
Be empty of worrying.
Think of who created thought.
Why do you stay in prison
when the door is so wide open?
Move outside the tangle of fear-thinking.
Live in silence.
Flow down and down
in always widening rings of being.” ~ Rumi

I love my children, I fear their harm. I love my sacred union, I fear it’s end. I love myself, I fear the commitment. See, for me, fear and love are two reflections within one mirror. Whichever one has the breath to fog the glass remains the truth.

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The Nearly American Dream

It was dinnertime and these guys were waiting on their truck-ride home. They caught me taking this photo – and we all shared in the amusing irony of the event. By the time the light had turned green, they’d loaded in and driven away, their work behind them. The dull torpor of middle income American expressionism cannot upstage these guys before 800 million Facebook viewers. These were the only strangers who really noticed me today….

The American Dream – a days-end reason to smile and the inalienable right to pop a cap off a bottle of cold beer. (or pop a cap in dat-ass)

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What the Dead May Pray

Make us worthy in our passing,
for what we could not achieve in our living.
For Life subsumes death –
and while the evidence may show
we had not fully lived the way we’d hoped,
we have the right to hope
that what failed to thrive
has died and departed the memory of others;
leaving us nothing but a clean slate
in the continued journey.
May all whom we’ve served and transgressed
step aside and cheer us on –
the race is never over.
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The Talented Tragically Shattered

the tragically shattered can slip into blackness like an anvil through ether.  But they weren’t pushed…they jumped.
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Two Red Rockers

Photo by Phosphorimental

Photo by Phosphorimental

Encouraged by promises I made to myself,
Chased by memories of dreams never come true.
Here in the maundering dereliction of presence,
coffee brown moments in blue.

Stones unturned, life kept at bay,
swept back by aromas and flavors
of a distant past beckoning anew
awoken by the rattling of sabers.
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The silence hurts my ears, time to make my own noise!

Hear it?!
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Love is the finest form of dying

There is a thin fine line between giving up on yourself and giving up on needing another…between striving for that spring green flexibility and tormenting ourselves when we bend in the slightest way, in the slightest breeze. The hollowing pain that rips through our torso like seething heavy balls shot from distant black pig iron cannons. Like when love unbridled goes careening into boundless plains, before it can be tamed…and yet how we hang on to it…until we become – the wild ones.

Love has a place – and that place is in our hearts where it stays and loops in lemniscates of infinity – it doesn’t go out to others, rather they enter into our hearts. Until it all becomes an indistinguishable melt within us. Still, like idiot savants, we squint and study and analyze our philosophies in dialectics with beautiful wayfarers and vigilant family, giving friends and torrid lovers – and we get confused and sad and then more sad – thriving on it, thumping like heart beats. Until sadness becomes as delicate and fragile as angel hair, like fine capillaries at the distant edge of tree roots. Not even those to anchor us anymore in the earth.

I am certain now that my love is not out there; even the hunch I once had that she was is gone. For she is already in me – as the pause in my pulse. So much entwined and in syncopation is she, that I cannot even distinguish her anymore – and so I shed my understanding of love, I give up the search, drop my implements and defenses, I will squander my love to others, as I have for so long and be happy that I can express at all. Spires of joy, dripping with tears. For now I know within, there is an endless supply – of both, love and tears.

Bring on the parade of mistakes and I will curse and scream out my love until I lose my voice…when I can be madly certain no one can hear me. Where my eyes next frost over with saline, and the last streak of glitter rolls to a stop on my cheek, and then I think I shall die.

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just a box of fuck

fuck
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Where Love Lives

Love is such a nostalgic condition, a candle in a familiar window I suppose… filled with this, passion and angst to be home in safe and familiar currents.  Love, a condition where we find peace in the blurring of what it really is about  – “home” that casts hues into our hearts, reflects light in our eyes, and catches rain from low mountain clouds stirred by the winds.  Your city which you ponder, tolls like the sinuous course of life – your allegory is apparent; the air pressed in our lungs by a soaring heart when our city falls away beneath the belly of a jet, and that acquiescing exhale as our home grounds pull us sweetly down in the benevolent current of gravity.  We run hither and yon, finding love everywhere, stuffing it in to our hearts and proudly poising as if we have finished a secret stew of sensationally felt ingredients. Yet I find it quaint that our hearts are eminently nourished through the very soils that sustain our ancestry and from which we sprung…home, the plains of the heart within, where it is said, love grows wild like grains from seeds planted very long ago. And it’s even more than where and what we love, but THAT we love that gives home, itself, meaning…perhaps even home has a home. This week I have been spending time “at home” (painful, tiring, itchy – as my brother and I remodel his house and care for our father…). Home leaves you quenched within – like thirst for water; and I believe as we are within, is how we are loved; especially by all those who know the direction – home.
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We are born, we live, we die…. It was all out of control from very beginning and will be out of control when it ends. The paradox is that the only control we have is the choice to begin and the choice to end everything while living in between.
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