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It Will Only Take A Moment

The blogging gurus tell me I only have 5 minutes of your time. And I try to respect that.  But then I think about all the other things we give 10 minutes and more too, and, well, I get jealous.  If I could figure out how to compete with your favorite sitcom, or the 3 hours movie special, I would attempt to pour into your soul the value of contemplation, and the richness found in knowing the truth about yourself, and the ultimate Truth.

I would aim to be the distraction worthy of your break from other distractions…

To the untrained ear it could come in a petri dish of thick silence, an orgasmic epiphany, or reality dawning after a long numbing night…

Even if you just gave me 3 minutes, I would try to baptize your soul in a sea of words, holding you under the tow, long enough to hear the popping of your conscience, the calling of your better angles, the dull pounding of your heart, and the longing of your soul.  Finally allowing the buoyancy of deaths tart taste to push you up.  You would re-emerge french kissing the sky.  Reborn, with a thirst for life.

And if you only had a minute, for somethings only minutes can hold, we would tiptoe through the cemetery, and count the limp bundles of color as they crown the tombs of differed dreams.  Wet with the due of regret and tears.  We would want to leave, but we would stay, breathing in the truth of this moment.  Of our life…

And maybe I would fail; for I too need these minutes.  These moments of infinite possibilities.

#Life

Featured Photo by: h.koppdelaney

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Alive

Somewhere behind the walls of our own making, we sit…sometimes…

waiting as we do, for life to present to us the answer…

half remembering that everything worth finding must be sought with the entire being…

with the whole heart…feeling our way into the blackness of life…

wandering into…and out off…

unafraid to confront the paradoxes, and contradictions….

BUT you will not choose the leisure of complacent apathy…

A life without legacy….waking with only the breath exhaling

from your upper chest…never deeply inhaling…never truly loving, never knowing the secrets that lay just below giving instead of receiving …

for you are moving, and twisting in the cycle of the hyper wheel…and twirling around like the dervish…trying to connect to the sky…

trying to understand the why…

trying to understand the gapping silence…

daring to enter the kings presence without being summoned….or to be king.

For to simply exist…is no longer an option for you…your soul has been lit, and you will not be put out…

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Red Lights Mean Grow

Red lights have gotten a bad rap. So has getting locked out of your house, or car.  Or getting a flat at 1:20am in the morning, when you happened to loan you brother your jack the week before, and..well..having to walk 6 miles to your house, in a light drizzle…with dress shoes…

Highway drivers can be so insensitive.

Inconvenience has the potential to be underutilized.  Its the art of disruption that flies under our radars ability to appreciate the moments that are still, arduous, and dare I say even painful.  The kinds that demand of us the kind of contemplation that comes only through long weary walks down roads we have always speed past…going somewhere quickly…A life lived at 90 miles and hour.

These inconvenient moments slap us out of our hysteria.  Grabbing our attention…shocked and wide eyed we focus in on what matters.

“They” told us stop signs compromised our inner sense of rebellion.  That’s why the kids sprayed paint over them, and shot at them with paint filled balls of suburbia styled revolution.  But the revolution for today’s age may not be as sexy.

No raging fires or wailing sirens.

No service announcements to interrupt a regularly televised dinner.

And definitely no t-shirts with hammered fist or blood red logos to certify your allegiance to the cause.

But just the still small turning of your soul, amidst your crucible.  This revolution is an invisible genetic alteration.  Open for newness.  As still as a cool summer night pregnant with possibilities beneath a star dust peppered blackness.  And you… below, flat on your back, forced to look up.

The situations in our lives right now that are slowing us down, confining us to reclined seats of sickness and pain; these can be the thrones where new kingdoms are formed.  These are the barriers, motes, and enemy affronts that flatten our backs and butts against the walls of life, jagged edges and all, and slowing us to a humble crawl.  But don’t we need the foreshadowing of life’s finiteness?  Aren’t these the very moments, where the seeds of truth are waiting, embryonic…and waiting to be born?

Anyhow….let these words be hands around your shoulders…or if you’re a guy, and that makes you uncomfortable…let these pixels remind you that you are not alone, and that it’s ok to be still and know…

One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star. – Friedrich Nietzsche

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The Calf Path

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Field Of Swords

In the distance see them there
moving in increments bare
to the top of that hill
onward and upward, steadily they rise…

with the sun in their face, and grins in their eyes…

And we watch below the alter

Into the grassy plateau of souls….whispering of yesteryear’s
they march towards the point….

men from the east to the men of the west
The sky looks down and rumbles in knowing….and the earth trembles beneath the iron hoofs, and boots of steel
across the red river, and the skulls and ravens…they go…to the field of swords…

Look to your hips soldier…

take from your holster the venom from tongue….
for across the field…table…or room…comes your brother, sister, mother and friend…

and we plunge our swords together into the souls of our reflections…and fall together again again and again

onto the field of swords…..

feat photo by Rita Crane

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A Thousand Miles In The Sky

She sits nightly on her stoop
with her book and the orange juice colored vodka mix…always more vodka than juice…

Amidst the silence of the night and below the mysteries of a trillion stars that inspire the guttural cry of a thousand questions…heavy and swollen…

Jade, her jet black cat, saunters through the cracked front door.  He crouches between the crook made between her reading hand poised just below her downcast gaze.

Jade knows….

and rubs the back of his head against her right side. I imagine both to comfort himself, and to speak the language that only grief can hear.

The book is rich with cliches.  It speaks of other worlds, away from this one.  Polite answers lay between the pages, with raw truth, laid next to lies, the clean next to the mess of inconsistency and randomness.  Random acts of kindness, and memories of a dark yesterday.  Of love given and unreturned.  Of sour, scorching regret.  Of last words never spoken.  Of phone calls never made…

She slams the book down, looking away, and nervously flicks a lighter to the newton cigarette now dangling between her lips.  Sickened at the thoughts invading her mind.  Reminding her away from this place…of escape.

Her stoop, with her book.

The ice gently melting away into transparent floating icebergs.  Rocking and rattling within the tall crystal walls of her souvenir beer mug, with the words:

A Thousand Miles In The Sky

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Route 66

I began writing this fictional story a couple years ago, and then tossed it aside.  Today, I thought, hmmm…maybe I’ll see if I couldn’t get some help finishing it.  If you’re game, it’s now going to be a Chain Story.  However, I am open to awarding a prize to the most creative story teller!

Here are the simple rules:

1. Continue where I left off by adding up to a few short sentences. Each section/entry should elaborate and follow the plot-line of preceding sections.  I’m not sure how many folks will jump in on this, but feel free to post more than once, as long as you let others have a turn.
2. Make his story contain something you wish you could do in 2010.

***The GRAND PRIZE!! A copy of Donald Miller’s newest book: A Million Miles in A Thousand Years***

Let The Story Begin

The head lights shimmered like diamonds on that foggy Saturday night. The misty air threatened to engulf even the last signs of the oncoming traffic that was my only hope for meandering down the narrow two lane, historic road they call Route 66.

There was nothing highway about this now historic country road that connected Springfield, Missouri, and Tulsa.  And when you see your life flash before your eyes every time a semi truck races inches past you, you know you’re not on a real highway.

And if to make matters worse, it had began to drizzle. I could see in the distant night sky, the foreboding flicker of lightening.  Fighting back every pessimistic premonition, I turned on the windshield wipers and glanced down at my watch.  “Crap,” I muttered underneath my breath, quickly realizing that I had forgotten to change the eroding rubber windshield wiper blades.  The quiet hum of the air condition was now accompanied by the sounds of nails on a chalkboard, as the metal arms scrapped back and forth over the windshield surface of my 1995 Jeep Wrangler.  They provided little relief from what was now beginning to become a torrential downpour.

She would have to wait, I thought to myself, as I slowed to a crawl and parked along the shoulder of the road. Even though I risked missing the opening scene of the play, and hearing her never live it down, I just had to wait this thing out.  Besides, I had seen “The King and I” as a child, and I wouldn’t be heart broken if I missed it tonight.

I now couldn’t see a thing.  I sat there with the car running, but the head lights off, almost feeling relieved that I actually didn’t have to come up with an excuse this time for being late, but also still wishing I had left work a bit earlier like I promised her I would. Mother nature was my perfect alibi.  If she didn’t believe this one, I’d have verifiable proof she truly was crazy.  But I was equally as crazily in love…I couldn’t help it.  And its not that I was always lying to her, it was actually the opposite.  I sometimes was just too honest.  Honest about how I felt about her religion, about wanting to quit my job, and about having kids. This is the stuff I don’t remember them ever mentioning in marriage counseling.  7 years together and you’d think we would know each other by now, but we were learning that people grow, and knowing takes work.

9:33pm.

If I planned on getting any of this I would have to leave now.  The rain was still pouring down, but at least the white foamy fog now gave way to the clarity of a pitch black night.  I fumbled to turn the keys again in the ignition, wondering to myself why I bothered to turn it off.  With the roar of the engine, I quickly flicked the switch to turn on the headlights.  The light erupted into the darkness revealing the road ahead.

And that’s when I saw her…

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Little Red Lizard

I told myself, like you told yourself.  This wouldn’t happen again.  Driving away into the night, we muttered the silent promises people do when they’ve reached the end of themselves.  When they have discovered that they really are not just one person.  That we all have to fight a war between the best of ourselves, and the part of us that continues to do us in.

I clicked the radio on, and then quickly turned it off.  I didn’t need another memory to haunt me later.  The last time I had driven away from regret I made the mistake of listening to some jazz station.  Now every time I hear smooth jazz, well, she comes to mind.  And not just her, but the lack of control.  I return to the scene of the crime against myself, in my mind, again.

Thinking you can wash your hands so quickly of memories stain, is one of the biggest lies told.  They don’t live like people do.  They stick to your skin, and smell up your clothes.  And hour-long showers don’t wash them away.
So it’s 3:23am, and although she wanted me to stay the night, I couldn’t sleep there.  I couldn’t awaken to the reality.

So I drive in silence,

to the shower that awaits,

the bed that is mine,

and the sunrise,

that I hope will erase the guilt and ….

Who is she?

Her name is addiction. If you have not met, I hope never to introduce you.  But maybe you already have met.  She is the one that hides behind your predominant self.  The one that allows you to hold its reality at arms length.  To just barely deny its existence, although, like a world wind, it crashes into your life, and whirls you away ever so often.

She is your guilty pleasure.  Your mess of pottage. The last puff of smoke before the lights go out. She is you…doing the thing you said you would never do….again.

She’ll make you trade Life’s love for lust…or passing up real food for a pacifier..casting your eyes from a horizons vision, to the short lived bliss of today.  She is your kindest pimp, and sometimes all you have.  She may even love you.  Smiling, while your heart grows cold, and numb to the seesaw of broken promises, while she whispers into the night that she is doubtful of tomorrows hope.

In other ways, he is the 800 pound gorilla in the room. Territorially invading your space, staring at you with those piercing and dominating eyes. Grunting you into submission.  Denying the option to be ignored, but daring you to confront its undeniable presence.  And when polite company come over, he/she transforms into that little red lizard, and scurries away, deep inside dusty corners of abandoned, cobweb infested attics, or uncleaned verandas.

To the world, you are a self respecting citizen of civility.  In control, and put together.  At church you leave him at home, knowing good and well that here, you do not speak of such things.  Here you sing loudly, smile widely, and keep you mouth shut.

But these are things that must be spoken of.  For they are true.  And a lie lived in secret will kill you.

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