Category: Altered States

Many people hide away and bury their love, closing it off to where it thins to only the merest underground spring’s trickling.

Others are unaware that it thrums thick in their veins, calling those who quest to find, become nourished by, and to revel in it.

Its interestimg that depending upon which emotions seize the reigns for the day, how life is viewed either positively, neutraly, or negatively.

Born first of three children from three sires, being the eldest and of the only absentee father with siblings’ gap distance of ten and fifteen years, the younger children got the ecperience of an attendant mother, engaged extended families, and a sense of being loved and wanted in their own marriages.

Per usual, the need to survive pushes aside writing and music.

From death to light.

From dark to life.

She loved us, and loved us dearly.

I do not know if we had even half of a chance to succeed with all of the weighted circumstances stacked against our family.

What determines who rises and falls?

“Should” we seek “perfection” to start from, in the hopes of having a good launch – when perfection, itself, is only temporary illusion?

“I don’t know what to do to save my situation.

All I know is to Just Start Working.

Maybe, just like you would have.

Funny, for all of our differences, how perhaps so much we were alike in belief’s core foundations.

Help me.

I need your guidance – like at the graveyard where needed truth was revealed, thus enlightening.

Am I missing something important, here?

Or am I “on the right track” and “doing the right things” toward my own next levels of “greatness.”

I cannot tell and do not trust easily.

I feel disoriented and clumsy

You know why.

You’ve seen what’s happened to me.

Yet, I must shake out this shroud of jaded memories so that it smooths down gently around me.

I must become something more – yet again – than I was before.

Perhaps for you, too, it was never easy.”

“I tried…I tried so hard to hold it all together…

But no one would listen to me – not without you –

And it all slipped away from my grasp, into nothing…”

(Title of dual meanings)

She had earned my love and respect because she had grown.

She’d evolved.

She’d pushed aside her biases, regrets, and grievances, and had looked for essential core values by which to strengthen the family.

She would have never needed to choose sides – or rather, she would have chosen both “sides” and pushed back those who wished to keep us separated.

She would have opened her large, warm home to all of us, kept us all safe and “off of the streets” – and maybe even would have advocated for couples counseling.

The point is, she would have given us all a buffer, a neutral ground, a place to recallibrate and regain bearings after the fall and hits we had all taken.

But she was gone.

Our family had been the last one standing since, with all of the weight of bitter prior generations haunting and pressing upon it to crack and shatter.

And no matter how innovative I was – how determined, how full of love, hope, belief, and far-seeing persevering perspective – it needed the command of our elder’s respect that she’d weilded to help save our fragile marriage.

But she was gone.

And the house along the sea ledge once so full of the triumph of love overcoming all still sat vacant, silent, and weathering away by ensuing neglect –

A testament to the greed and avarice of an inheriting daughter-in-law’s need for revenge upon her father’s memory –

With our matriarch’s memory unable to hold further sway beyond the symbolism provided in loss left holding the ashes of her mortality.

When the structure of a marriage falls, extended family members take sides, forgetting the common purpose once shared that gave us all nourishment to thrive.

They’s call me a fool, but rose-colored brightens and makes the ugly beautiful.

It would be nice to feel like I am making progress, but my attention keeps getting conscripted toward survival priorities.

Renegotiating who I am and want to be in each moment, despite what’s happened in the past.

The experience as if one is always existing within a dream – with a tendency toward nightmares, if I’m being honest.

I see that I have some more clothes, yet… having come through circumstances, it is hatd to think there will be replenishing continuum.

I feel disrupted
Center-spiraling

Unsure of bearings
Extend-contracting

Every thwarted moment; every denied kiss: chance buried by yesterdays; Heaven missed.

Only Through.

“I’m strugglin’ here – but I’m showin’ up!”

It is good to reclaim my skills, but not to have the wound reinjured.

If being gently honest, vulnerable, and inclusive has the result of others reacting by running away, there’s really nothing more that I can do or say.

Fighting for functionality with my phone puts me in a foul mood!

Say it 5 times fast…

There were only so many more shallow feedings that she could endure before her passion’s wrath would break free and force her to consume the world.

“I filled your life with madness. Playing phone recordings over and over. Seeking the thrills. The extra relationships. The secret appointments. None of this that you knew, while you kept showing up trying to be here for me.”

He gestured to the bedroom where they could sit more comfortably. How she just wanted – needed him to get to the punchline. Being quiet so that he could get it all out and she would finally hear the truth was agonizing.

She felt pretty sure where his confession was leading. She had felt his distance, avoidance, and rejection of her all these years – but had also known that he needed what she had been providing.

Other people would have left him to himself to sort out the mess of his life out on his own.

She wasn’t “other people.” She was the exception.

And she had wanted to provide him with better options – even though hanging onto him in the hopes he would return to who he had been had been a huge expenditure in unreturned love, time, and constricted living.

You do this for a loved one who is hurt and damaged if you truly care. You create an environment within which hopefully they can repair.

But this can put you in the position of being projected upon as a caregiver, an authority figure – someone that is resented when dealimg with a mind almost completely broken.

The once vast inner strength she had poured out to stay here for him for so long was dwindling. The denied deficit within her was screaming as she felt with almost certainty that someone else had won him.

But she was expected to listen. He needed this confession for his own resolution.

She had become a martyr against her best intentions. The scenario had been a setup to crucify her from the start.

Sometimes love is not returned nor redeemed when you have worked so hard to earn and deserve it.

The gift of love’s clemency is a mysterious art.

January 20, 2023

Bowing only to one who is worthy.

Investing in more school.and workshop training, diverting limited funds for rent, in the hope that I can return to work sooner and replenish these funds – despite injuries.

Something that slides so easily in, could slide so easily back out.

Why want something that is “impractical?”

And yet, these have often been my pursuits.

Can be stark, and exhausting.

Perched

Sensing

Analyzing

I had to stop myself from trying to conform to another system’s track.

I had wanted to lean out in sculpting my muscles, but my body says it is built to be a warrior!