Memento Vivere
Illuminating the Facts About Behavioral Health and Rising Above the Stigma
The Starry Night
November 23, 2009
The Starry Night
Surely it can be said that to study the stars is to study the very cells of a god.
The more I have to come to lose myself in the deeper contemplation of the microcosm and the macrocosm, I also find myself in the greatest scope of time and space. Dust and gas, these simple things that bleed out into the Great Unfathomable, are in all things… in all beings and in this horror of the loss of individualism I am comforted in the notion that the possibility of my conscious existence is near immeasurable. How grand then it is that I walk the face of the Earth?
I have come to see the Universe as not just some fascinating cycle of chaos and order, but of something far more complex and far more profound. For the Universe itself is my god.
So humble I am in the depths of my own inner expansion and understanding of the nature of the Universe that I feel as though I stand on the verge of both insanity and enlightenment.
The Great Void that encompasses all that is “above” me and that which rotates beneath my feet, harbors so much that a single man will never know the entirety of his own existence.
The birth of a star millions of years in the making, is driven by forces we cannot understand completely. So awe-inspiring is the death of such a star. To know that as we turn our faces to the night sky and see these many twinkling lights and to know that any one of them may no longer exist and yet still glow in the black sky is mind-blowing. So far away are some of these stars that it takes millions of years for their last emanating light to reach us in the vast unimaginable and seemingly limitless domain.
What man could study astronomy and disbelieve that there is a greatness at play before us that we are not capable of naming?
Call not this power God, nor call it Allah, Yahweh, Brahma or any name. For to name this Source of Life, this Sustenance of Life, is to most assuredly saturate its wonder. This Energy, this Force of Order and Chaos, of life and death is beyond the language of mankind. Our minds cannot even grasp its identity for it has no identity.
Give it not shape or gender for these are meaningless things. Petty attempts by humans to command, to control, to claim that which cannot be owned.
My very lifetime is smaller than a nano-second in the timeline of the Universe, but how lucky I am to have that much.
We humans are so young, so seemingly minute and replaceable. One could almost become depressed at the reality of our subtle lifetimes. Like a single grain of sand, compared to all the beaches of this Earth, we could so easily be forgotten and lost in the greater scope of the Universe.
This is the most humbling thought of all. That we are all meaningless.
This is why we have gods of every color, shape, gender and character. We yearn to be seen, to be loved and acknowledged by the great forces ceasing and expanding before us, to know that we have a place and a purpose. Fear grips us and so we dream, we imagine and we pretend so that we may know comfort.
I, however, believe that to do this is to lose the power and wonder of the Universe. We must embrace this fear and accept our own mortality, less we take for granted the gift of our lives.
To lay in wait for something better is to waste the beauty before us now. If only all humans could perceive the world in this way. To be grateful for the chance to breathe, a moment in the sun, the opportunity to let the waves of the ocean lap at your feet. These are things that I cherish, the ways that I know I have already been blessed. Experience is everything.
I believe that all the world will one day come to realize this. That we will focus on the rare gift of life we hold and less on the material things we so ignorantly covet. I hope that this realization is made before the Universe forces us to see it. Only time will tell.
And as for me personally, I will continue on in my journey of self-discovery. For to question my own existence is to challenge the nature of the Universe and the beauty, the splendor, the horror and the humility of human life.
Astronomy and spirituality go hand-in-hand as far as I am concerned. Many people wait a lifetime in the hopes of getting to see the face of their god. I on the other hand look up into the black night and see the Universe overhead and know that I am bearing witness to the face of the source of all life.
This essay is available as an audio track on SoundCloud:
Asylum of My Mind: A Beckoning to Darker Places
November 30, 2009
Asylum of My Mind: A Beckoning to Darker Places
A subtle flickering of light in my head, a missed revelation to coming events. For a moment I think to myself that it’s nothing at all, just something for today. It won’t last. Everything will be normal again.
The faulty wiring in my brain, the lapses in ability to remain here in the moment, leave me feeling withdrawn. Farther and farther I free fall into the abyss of my own thoughts. Or perhaps I’m walking, walking by my own choice and by my own free will through the door and into the darkness. Always searching, always seeking answers to the questions that no one gives a shit about. Only me, only I care to know.
The silence of this place is louder than the voices in my head. The glass from the closing door slips over my eyes and the world is cut away from me. The sounds of the outside world are muffled and every message is delayed. I look out into the faces of the people I once knew. So far away and yet so close.
This barrier was built by my own hands, whether by intention or not, to shut out the things that antagonize the thing that torments me the most… myself.
Continuously, I wander here. Echoes of past events ramble throughout the hallowed halls of my mind and I lose myself in memories and a thousand things that never were.
There are no windows in this place. As I wander further from the glass door, the sunlight is swallowed by the darkness. It’s cold here, a type of coldness that doesn’t just settle on your skin. No, this cold creeps into you until it nearly stops your heart.
At first the endless black is somehow inviting. A sense of quiet peace comes over you. It makes you think that everything will be okay, that in this place nothing can haunt you and nothing can hurt you.
As I travel on into the depths of my mind, I find that the eerie silence is just the threshold of so much more. All the places that scare you, they are nothing compared to the darkness of the human mind.
First, it’s the voices of the living and the dead. The screams of agony, of the torture that I cannot save them from. The lies and the secrets, the false hope and the dying love that rips apart the souls of human beings. The shame and the guilt of bleeding hearts and the irony of our inevitable defeat.
The faces, the faces tell a million stories. They beg and they plea to be heard, to be given a chance at redemption. Chained by the wrongs that they have committed, the freedom they seek cannot be given, it must be earned.
I walk along, deeper into the darkness, never knowing where I’m going and somehow never caring. I ask questions that I don’t understand, expecting answers that I eventually never accept.
The voices and the faces are not all that exist in the darkness. There are flashes of memories and dreams, visions of things that have been and things yet to come. This place makes you dizzy, it makes you remember and it makes you forget. It makes you want to live and it makes you want to die. It teaches you how to love and it teaches you how to hate, it shows you what’s worth living without and what’s worth dying for.
Here there is no today and there is no tomorrow. Every day is now and everything that was, still is and everything that could be, will be. This place is madness and it is genius, it is absolute freedom and absolute tyranny, it is order and it is chaos.
There are twins here. Two beings who are one in the same, living apart from one another. Both rule this place and everything here is manifested by their will. One I have come to call the demon, but both of them are me.
In the center of this vast plane of cognitive incognition, there is a small bead of illumination within the blackness. More powerful than all the quasars of the universe and smaller than an atom. It’s purpose here, I have not yet come to understand, but it summons me here. This small flickering light so seemingly obscure. I sit and contemplate all the things that I know and all the things that I do not know. Ever so vigilantly, staring into the tiny void for answers and reasons.
There is a loneliness here in this place. A sense that I am alone in my thoughts. At times, I beg to be made numb, wish to be seduced by the material things of this world. To be wrapped up in worthless things so that I may forget all that envelopes me. I plea to forget the knowledge, yearn to be free of the burden, cry out to lose my empathy. Make me heartless so that I don’t suffer anymore, drug me so that I no longer concern myself with the human condition.
Sometimes it is hard to travel to this place and other times it is hard to leave it. I weigh the pros and cons of staying and leaving. The world outside is so alive and beautiful, but the people in it seem so lifeless, so lost and corrupted. Always working for something tangible, but never satisfied when they get it. I wonder to myself who is really better off, them or me?
I find myself in the belief that the sun, the skies and other stars, the wind and all the non-human things this planet offers are worth coming back here for. They endow upon me a feeling that I cannot replace with anything else. It’s humanity that I find to be questionable.
This essay is available as an audio track on SoundCloud:
My Heart in the Sun
August 2008
My Heart in the Sun
So long ago a journey to forget all the things that I had remembered, began with the kiss of poison in a cup. Embarked upon in the name of hope and peace, like banners in the sky, flaunted like idols on my alter of redemption. Blood and sweat and tears flowed forth from me, a current of torment and despair; like a spring in the bedrock – my soul broke open and washed away the costumes that I wore. Battered and bruised, all that remained was everything I didn’t want to see. But it was a cleansing that was destined to come, a moment of truth – trial by fire, a scar had to form to guard me from the venom of the world.
Suddenly it was all so different, everything that I perceived and every recollection; the touch of evil that I had felt – the black hand of darkness that came upon me in the night and that had left me stained, broken and used, was lifted and I slipped away from the depths of that hell; away from that dreaded place in time. But the touch of every human hand afterwards burned with the possibility of the same betrayal – a chance of pain once again. Like a photographic memory, every touch made me see the darkness that had embraced me so long ago; haunting me from a far away place, reaching through the portals of time and space and into my life once again. And it hurt every time just like the first time – the crawling of my flesh, an aching in my heart, a crumbling in my soul – taking me to the point of no return.
The beckoning of something better, a yearning to be loved for everything that I was and for nothing that I was not, pulled at the strings connected to my heart. A twinkling of light and truth and honesty, the dawning of hope and peace just beyond the horizon. It flashed in my eyes, a shock to the system, an awakening to enlightenment. My soul was given wings, but my feet remained in the past – a prisoner of time bound by memories and I didn’t want to let go for that was the hardest thing to do.
I wanted to live, to live for the first time in my life because I had never lived as me before. I wanted to be seen and heard and known as me and never again hide in the shadows of shame, guilt and distrust. All that I had been was waxing away into the past where it belonged, I was coming out of death from the desert – for the promise of paradise, an Eden within my mind.
The essence of my soul was ignited by the spark of opportunity – the moment I’d been dying for – a chance to taste the sweetness of someone else’s lips, to feel the compassion of someone else’s hand, to feel the beating of someone else’s heart. Who’s to say that I was wrong, lost in a fog of illusion, easily led astray by the seduction of humanity? To love to live and to live to love – some type of alchemical nirvana to my soul – a drug for the mind, a rush of something primal through my body. I finally felt awake, I was finally alive.
But time has never been on my side, rather a monkey on my back – reminding me that this is just a rain drop in the ocean, a momentary state of bliss in a film never-ending. But every mile that I have walked, every fall that I have taken and every point along the way that I got back up is a testament of my will to survive. Like a charm in my hand, a token of my dreams, a secret to the world that I want to tell, for I have now found the gem of peace, hope and love…
A lotus grows within the swamp, a place full of filth and dying things, but it pushes up through the wasteland of its existence in the knowledge that it lives for the sake of living and nothing more. It knows that all the effort is worth it in the end – those moments of bliss in an eternity of change with storms, pollution and neglect. For the rains will always wash away the filth, the wind will always blow away the storms and the sun will always give the lotus energy to continue.
I have fallen for the sun as a reminder that time continues and that change will always be. I have fallen for the sun as a beacon of hope, a source of peace in it’s power and love in it’s warmth.
The connected spirit knows no distance and neither does the sun – love unbound and without end – the universal language of the world. My heart is in the sun and my love shines unbroken down upon the world and into the face of pain and hate. Blinding away the misery of our own human neglect, casting away the darkness of every tortured past, a kiss of love upon your lips, dancing in your eyes – a momentary wish for something better that I have granted. Enveloping you in warmth, protecting you from the cold chill of loneliness, a gentleness upon your shoulder – a reminder of my loyalty and trust. A beacon of hope to you as I breach across the horizon even after the darkest night that you have ever known, a source of peace given to you through my unrelenting power and the truth of my unconditional love that I have placed upon your very heart.
This essay is available as an audio track on SoundCloud:
Kēphen
Memento Vivere 