Getting grateful. Dan H used to tell the people drying out down in rehab that
they might have to get grateful. It seems like a band-aid for a hemorrage seemingly
but it works slowly, surely, through the mire and the fire... gratitude. I heard
someone say recently that serenity could be found by looking at what is while fear is always found from looking at what is not... all these bits of advice at times throughout my life have seemed too simple... Hallmark hullaballoo... but truer words have never found. You make a list of the things you are grateful for: you start with the fact that you believe in God. Whether or not you actually think he's an
intervener or not, he's There. He's doing something. Though most people can't seem
to figure out what, or why or how... He's a strange deity. But even so you start with him and then you say friends, family, a place to live, a car to drive,
food on your table, a job, a way to support yourself. A bed to sleep in, clothes to wear, clean water, clean air. Your grateful for moments with friends, moments with family. Your grateful for your health, that you don't look like that guy from Motorhead. That you have some intelligence, that you got an education... that you made it through treatment, that you have information which will help you live a better life. That there is music that makes you joyful, that there is a music that makes you cry, that you can feel emotions again. In other words, you start from the beginning and work your way out from birth... that you are still alive, with a chance everyday to be human.
It seems like Brooke and I come back to that alot-- to being human. It's one of the fundamental properties for us as individuals, as people who are having this experience. Andrea always talked about the fact that we were spiritual beings having a human experience... that it's debatable whether anyone really lives any better than the other...

I know most days recently I walk around like I've got life figured out, and most days recently, I feel like I do. The simple side of it, keeping it simple. Trying to squeeze things down into managable portions. This I was taught. This comes directly from another group of people with whom I am acquainted. That and that only. Only sometimes I fall short of my own ideals. Maybe this is human nature. I brought home two oversized suitcase, I'd say packed to the gills but I get points for humility only in that sense because for a few seconds I thought of the baggage handlers who would have to load the suitcases on my outgoing plane, off the same plane and then reload it onto my connecting plane. So now I have two gigantic suitcases which take up a good portion of room and which are packed heavily with items that seem overbearing to our apartment. This is a fact of which I am suddenly not entirely proud. I mostly wanted to get them out of the hair of my parents, who maybe didn't understand if I was going through some kind of giving up of possessions. And indeed it did feel like a surrender of sorts, but it was a much stronger surrender than just giving up a few clothes... it was a surrender involving giving up of specific beliefs that I had about how things ought and need to be in order to continue with life as I know it... I see it as a facing of the self, and maybe it seems lately as if I were whining to get some of the security I had behind me before the decision to say screw it all, I'm doing it my way. I've seen it at work, the place where it seems I clamor the most for pardon, constantly desiring more recognition because over time I feel like I should deserve it... but where I have a lot to offer my employer in the way of brains and creativity, I also lack in terms of common sense, follow through , attitude, and general disposition. I still think they're foolish for not giving me more responsibility and blame my faults on their reluctance to relinquish the keys, figuratively speaking. Truth is, I feel like I'd be better off moving on to something different, and only I can hope that it might be better. This is still about the American dream, if one can believe it but I think it's more--- the human dream of self-fulfillment. Maybe I'd feel a calling to be a travel agent, and find the love which comes from serving others more fully if I had travelled the world often myself, so that I might have some more experiential knowledge to give... but that hasn't quite happened yet. And the reality is instead working at a cubicled desk, behind a computer screen without any real inspiration behind it, just the knowledge that one can gain from a book or the repetition of information gathered from rote memory. So the time for escalation would conceivably be now. And yet that will need to be done progressively, over time, because that's just the way it seems to work for me. Maybe I could pull together some kind of lightning quick means to be back up to speed, but likely I would have to struggle through the first phase... it is likely, without much experience behind my back. I have faith that all these things will work themselves out if I work toward them. The fact if the matter is that I am tired of taking the easiest path and doing the most formidable thing. It had not served me very much in previosu years and I have reason to belive that it will help now... but I am the catalyst in my own domain, the wheels of the bus go round and round if I let them...

No Direction Home

As long as there is a direction,
There can always be a direction home
Twisting through a bend between Illinois and Alpha Centauri
the galaxies shifted and upon a black river
where the fog rose up, my black magic was spun.
I can’t say it’s been easy being me
for very long or over the miles
But I hung in there like an anchor
off a freightliner plodding the sea,
edging toward heaven or Tangiers, or
I was like the neck of a Morroccan asp
dodging the hawk and the mongoose.
Having sunk down so low, bunkered
in the briar so I might once again return
to my nest, hunch down in the bush
under dark weeds so no man nor
animal nor fear can find my weakness.
But it was more than survival
which kept my colors cloaked and
my brain on fevered alert, the fiery kernel
within my mind ablaze and shielded–
there in the bogs and mist-covered forests
which reflected nothing but the calm dark
that patiently awaits for a stunned prey.
There was love, indeed which burned
deep within my chest, a love fair white
and snow, pristine which twinkled
like the stars before my eyes, that soft
fire, so small and pulsing in the midnight sky
amid the deep azure pool of yesterday
and now in this ether– that love, a compass,
pointing north and I would see her face,
her radiance and my heart would be dragged
back in that direction. and my direction
was found and yet but stumbled upon
as if I were the tendriled catfish, dwindling
through the river; my eyes dull and visionless,
like my cousin the bat, blind & weak,
dumbsensed and mundane, looking for
sensual food in the brackish waters so foreign
but with my craving needing to be appeased,
instead I became martyred by her sinkline,
yanked and pulled until reality stang that life
as once lived would no longer be.
This love, this hungry love where you are
reeled by the song from your heart,
released upon the sea or creek or stream
but does the fish ever seek to be caught
once again by his captor, does he long
to be sucked back into the smooth fingers
of something which suddenly has his rapture.
Directions are our states of fever, they are
imagined and they are determined, which
course will run us back upstream, knock us
two farmhouses and light years from where
we want to be– if our hearts burn and our
hands remain steady, the direction will cease
to have power, our course becomes steady.
Our hearts at last filled with the glory of our human blood.

These hills worth dying for.

You throw your bones upon grassy knolls, and feel the dirt under your skin, the enemy has inched too close, even if only still measured by feet, not a plain intrusion no but close enough to feel its thunder, close enough that you cannot sleep, your whole gentry set to the yards, covering the fence, all betrayals will be met with swift punishment, all the men being told they will not be
allowed to go under, they cannot relent, station to station the next 24 hours, the greedy watch, taking up the grandest energies for the fortifying. And now your bones, your nerves are a jangle, a jumbled mess of powerless wires, But you're leaning upon a great pack of pride, along with the provisions you've stored for battle after battle in this war of degrees. You've already exchanged pleasantries, which you are convinced have fallen to the fray: so this is get even time, line in the sand time, tooth and nail time. This is the hill you've chosen now worth dying for-- its matter does not consume you, you say, but this is where you've told all your friends you will be, where the calls are being forwarded to. Amigo, you hear the hooves of the horses, the boots of the warriors, you've waged your war, now bend your knee to the sod, grab the clay until your nails are caked by it. This is your last grit of tour de force, the testament to the world that no ground is ever ill-gotten.

A guy I once knew named Doyle used to say something similar to this about recovery, except using the analogy of a large and elegant banquet. He said too many people just get the salad bar and settle for that but completely ignore the rest of the buffet. And it's as if that is the very thing which is missing. To think of the spiritual food, and how the only way we are short changed is by simply not taking advantage of all this life truly has to offer us. By turning to material things, which will always be limited and leave us wanting.

"I was raised to believe that the quality of a man's life would greatly increas, not with the gain of status or success, not by his heart's knowing romance or by prosperity in industry or academia, but by his nearness to God...God bestows three blessings on man: to feed him like birds, to dress him like flowers, and befriend him as a confidant. Too many take the first two and neglect the last. Sooner or later you figure out life is constructed specifically and brilliantly to squeeze a man into association with the Owner of heaven. It is a struggle, with labor pains and thorny landscape, bloody hands and a sweaty brow, head in hands, moments of severe loneliness and questioning, moments of ache and desire. All this leads us to God, I think... Life is a dance toward God... And the dance is not so graceful as we might want. While we glide and swing our practiced sway, God crowds our feet, bumps our toes, and scuffs our shoes. So we learn to dance with the One who made us. And it is a difficult dance to learn, because its steps are foreign...And I think to myself, There is nothing I am missing. I have everything I was supposed to have to experience the magnitude of this story, to dance with God." --Domald Miller, Through Painted Deserts: Light God and Beauty on the Open Road.

"There is a serenity in life, after all, and once a withdrawal is felt at having left the lies behind, a soul begins to feel at home in its own skin."
-Donald Miller, Through Painted Deserts.

“If one advances confidently in the direction of one's dreams, and endeavors to live the life which one has imagined, one will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”

“You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment.”

“There is no remedy for love but to love more.”

“Do not lose hold of your dreams or asprirations. For if you do, you may still exist but you have ceased to live.”

-Henry David Thoreau