There’s no way out but through No other avenue There’s nothing left to do There’s no one left but You
I stand before the gate With time and place and date I can no longer wait To proceed to my fate
I’ll lose or I will win I’ll end or I’ll begin I’ll find out what’s within I’ll die or live again
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Sometimes you run out of moves and have to fight the giant, slay the dragon, face the judgment of God, or make the long put off appointment with a doctor for that nagging pain that you hoped would go away but instead of it going away it has gotten worse.
Often these are the turning points in our lives that either crush us and our dreams, or in facing them and succeeding, they free us to live more abundantly than ever.
(Ex: “You mean that I could have gotten rid of that pain in my lower abdomen with this medication 5 months ago if I’d just made a doctor’s appointment instead of ignoring it? Now that I feel great I’m gonna dance!”)
You know, maybe these are the people who are always so happy in the medication ads that they show in the U.S.
Psy definitely has the look of someone who went through something and won. And on the other side of his thing was ‘Gangnam Style.’ Maybe you’ll find your own Gangnam Style, too.
He followed his heart, But left his mind behind, And his unguarded thoughts were captured.
She was led by her mind, But went apart from her heart, And her untended love was stolen.
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I want to do this (but it’s a bad idea.) I should do this (but I don’t want to.)
It’s not always possible to get your heart and mind together and in a state of agreement, but you live in greater peace if you make that the goal for your own decision-making.
You can also evaluate people by how well they do this, or whether they even attempt to do this. More often than not, when you meet someone who seems to be a magnet for drama, or a person who lives to complain, their decision-making framework is not an internally cooperative one. You aren’t likely to find peace in the vicinity of such a person.
Rise up, dear body, face the day Refuse to let fatigue hold sway You’ve life to live and much to give Dare to venture, be active Left foot forward, then the right Your journey lasts until it’s night Walk hard, good body, but be wise Know where your outer limit lies You once flew fast with eagle’s wings When then you drank from youthful springs But now you’re aged, and not yet home With many miles left to roam, And crucial matters to attend — Press on, my body, ’til the end.
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It creeps up on you.
After a couple of decades of being able to do seemingly anything, with no ill effects, one day your neck hurts when you wake up because the pillow you slept on was either too firm, or not firm enough. Or maybe it’s that the food you’ve been eating for your entire life all of a sudden doesn’t digest as effortlessly as it once did. Or maybe your lower back hurts when you stand up and sit down.
It just gets more difficult from there.
But what do you do when your body starts to betray you and you still (God willing) have decades left to live? You cajole yourself into action and you start taking better care of yourself. I won’t presume to give anyone specific advice on how to do that, but my philosophy has been to just try forming one good healthy habit at a time. It takes about 90-100 days to form a habit. But over the course of a few years, the good habits start adding up.
When I held you beneath the surface A few lonely bubbles floated up, Wet, soggy, and limp – I removed you, A cookie, made better, in my cup.
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The twist in this poem works better if I don’t give the ending away with a picture. Oh well.
There is definitely an art to dunking a cookie into your milk. If you hold it in too long, the structural integrity of the whole thing falls apart and you’ve got a soggy bits of mess just sitting at the bottom of the milk. Often the cookie bits don’t leave the bottom of your cup alongside the milk. Wasted cookie, dirtier dishes – not ideal. But you do have to leave the cookie in the drink for long enough to absorb *some* of the milk. It’s a hard balance.
One time I was staying at an Airbnb with my family. My vision impairment frequently means that when we travel, I stay behind with our luggage and read / write / watch movies / etc. while the vision able people in our group go and do the things that require vision to be fun. This was one of those times. I wanted to drink some non-black coffee and found myself without milk or sweetener. What I did have was a package of Oreo cookies. So I dissolved the cookie into my coffee and stirred it up. At first I thought I was a genius. My plan worked. The coffee was a bit sweeter and had just a hint of a mocha taste to it also. Then as I finished the drink, I encountered the chemical bits of the Oreo that God (probably) forbade man to consume. It was isolated from the rest of the tasty ingredients that mask its abominable presence within the cookie, and let’s just say it was an unpleasant-to-the-taste bit of gloop.
When I did it again, I stopped just short of finishing the drink and then I dumped the chemical gloop out into the sink. Modern problems require modern solutions.
Stunning and insane, she raged, I should have felt more fear, I knew she couldn’t be assuaged, But her face still drew me near.
Some grapes grow to hate the vine, Then mature to be a sour wine, But who can tell without a sign? Some flowers turn their face from light, They hide in shadows of the night, To hold them you abandon sight. Some creations think themselves divine, A lamp aloft designed to shine, She sees all shadows as a fight Some fools must learn beauty will bite.
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Sometimes I’ll see a news article about a woman who did something horrible, and just below the picture of her mugshot is a guy commenting, “I can fix her.” And sometimes the girls who end up in “mugshot hotties” successfully parlay that into a modeling contract.
Tori Black aka Michelle Chapman: Arrested for domestic battery after punching fiance in the head(Image: DFA Pictures)
Dangerous beauty is a hard lesson to learn. Human instinct innately associates beauty with safety. Wisdom is learning to see beyond the pretty face to the person beneath.
When we had no steps left in us, No roads that we could roam, When light was just remembrance And the shadows were our home
When the next thing was the ending, No race left to be run, We endured the night – unbending – Anticipating sun
Then the dark began to weaken, As orange reached the edge, Hope rose upward like a beacon, For us still on the ledge
The journey’s road became revealed As night gave way to day, Our old foes, their fates now sealed Had made each other prey
While hope prevailed until the light, Hate hastened its own end, When love shone bright throughout the night The darkness had no friend
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I’m not really sure what this one meant, or where my head was at while writing it. I’ll try to interpret it, though.
Generally speaking, I think we all go through darkness and adversity. Sometimes you hang in there, cling to hope and love in some type of like-minded community, and you eventually come out on the other side. You might be battered and bruised, but a version of you, that is recognizably still you, survives.
If due to adversity, you let yourself become consumed with hate or fear or some other negativity, you may end up destroyed by those things.
It’s a danger sign – and perhaps a cause for self-reflection – if you find yourself pushing old friends away and dramatically changing your appearance. Some people even go so far as to change their name.
I walked a path toward a wood, A forest black in truth and name, For on its edge, I had long stood, And something new I yearned to claim.
I left the places light perceives And journeyed through the wooded door Beneath the whisper of the leaves, Through shadows cast across the floor.
A watchful owl sat perched ahead, With feathers white, and eyes that glow, She spoke a sound to wake the dead Who might be napping just below.
Fear demanded, “reverse course!” But I continued on instead More quickly, but with no remorse, For the route that I had tread
Forward, forward, into blackness Armed with nothing but a light Onward, onward, with no slackness Of my steps into the night.
Along a twisting, winding trail, I walked ’til I lost track of time, Then through a clearing, on a hill, I spied a house with steps to climb.
There seemed to be no need to knock, I pressed my hand upon the door, Unimpeded by a lock, And through the wooded door once more.
The creaking boards beneath my feet Spoke loudly as I looked about, As did the woman in a seat, Who at my presence gave a shout.
My heart stopped first, then so did I, Though my thoughts raced to the door, She demanded I say why I stood there thus upon her floor.
She was pale and silver, stooped and old, Her eyes alight with fear and fury, I mumbled an apology and told Her that she had no need to worry.
As I explained my wooded walk Her eyes relaxed but not her scowl Then when I paused for her to talk She asked why I ignored the owl.
I told her that I could not heed The warnings of the watchful bird For greater still had been my need Than calls for caution that I’d heard.
She broke the silence with a cackle And asked about my great desire I heard a sound, a burning crackle, And smelled the burning of a fire.
Scents of smoke soon filled my nose, With unease, my voice froze swiftly Then I watched her as she rose And to my astonishment she kissed me.
The old woman, old no longer, Transformed before me to her prime, Her cheeks were flushed, her body stronger, “I give to you abundant time.”
I looked down next and saw my body Lifeless on the ancient floor, And a thought came to me oddly, As though I’d seen this scene before.
Forward, forward, out of blackness I ran toward home without a light Onward, onward, with no slackness Of my steps out from the night.
I emerged out of the trees, Sometime later – days or weeks – And with a gift no man could seize Though he diligently seeks.
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Sometimes you write a thing, and it all comes pretty quickly, and you have to puzzle out what you meant in the same way that other people have to puzzle it out. This one was like that for me.
Passion is consuming fire, He reaches inside to remove All that you don’t need, for the pyre, So that what’s left just might improve.
As your flames reach to the sky Most will see and stay away Lest sparks jump off as they pass by And scorch them with your light display
But those not burnt are chilled and dead, So do not embrace jealousy, Your burning may mean pain and dread, But a stone cold corpse is worse to be.
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If you’ve ever been uncomfortably passionate about something, to the point that you have to avoid monologuing about it when you’re around new people, then I think this poem is something to which you might relate. I’m probably writing to an audience of these people considering the nature of blogging. Eventually you are left with the choice to “burn” publicly, or to smother the fire for social reasons. If you’ve chosen the former, you have almost certainly experienced the awkwardness and discomfort that comes with that.
At some point, in at least the last several decades, “passion” kind of became weird and socially unacceptable. To be “cool” was to be above it all and to not care. The world largely embraced nihilism and absurdism, both of which sort of make the case that everything is meaningless. You can die somberly like a bleak character from a Russian novel, or while laughing, like a madman from a Russian novel, but none of it matters. If everything is meaningless, caring about anything is both pointless and weird.
But where does that lead? Definitely not to any great works of art, difficult but necessary moral corrections, or new pro-human discoveries. I think this isn’t an overtly political thing to say, but would a society of passionate people be okay with the fact nobody on Jeffrey Epstein’s client list has been named or investigated, let alone arrested and prosecuted? The lukewarm indifference of the population is how that is allowed to happen. Would a passionate society be okay with our architecture growing steadily more oppressive and ugly? Every period of civilized history prior to the 20th century left behind beautiful art and architecture worth preserving. Our descendants will be tearing down and replacing a lot of what has been built since World War 2. Would a passionate society be okay with not visiting the moon in over 50 years? That’s such an absurdly long span of time, in the face of technological advancement, that it has spurred the widespread belief that we never went to the moon in the first place. Most technological advancement over the last century has been driven by military expediency, not passion or yearning for flourishing.
You are often in my dreams Reliving times when we were young – Forever young, or so it seems – Inside the place from whence we sprung.
We had so much in common When we were together, long ago, Poor college dinners sharing Ramen, With hopes and dreams and things to know.
As I see you from this distance, I know our paths went separate ways, So I treasure every instance Of dream reunions, in old days.
I miss your eyes, so blue like mine – I wish there was a way to see – To travel backward down the line, When I was you and you were me.
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It really would be awesome to have my old and somewhat more functional eyeballs back. Then again, the dimming light has given me insight I would have otherwise missed. It’s irritating that life works this way.
I don’t dream all that often (at least not in the sense that I remember anything) but when I do it’s usually with good eyesight. I suppose that will probably change eventually. I also quite often have the ability to fly in the world of dreams and I have occasionally been borderline convinced upon waking that gravity is an unnatural restraint. As that is a dream talent that was never reflected with my waking body, I anticipate that the gift of sleep flight will remain, even as the old eyeballs flicker out.
[Note: investigate whether birds ever become blind and what happens when they do.]
[Note 2: scratch that. we don’t want to know.]
Because I borrowed his song title, I am contractually obligated to share the following:
Feel free to go back and re-read the poem now in Rod’s voice. For all you know that’s what I sound like.
A thousand waves sparkle With lights not their own The sea’s golden beauty Is a trick and a loan.
When the water undresses And cold darkness remains The ocean is ugly And its cruelty reigns.
The hearts of men sparkle With lights not their own Man’s goodness and beauty Is a trick and a loan.
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When I wrote this, I’d recently been staying at a place with a good view of the ocean and some time to be contemplative. #Blessed Is there something inherently beautiful about the ocean, or is the source of the beauty the sunlight that is reflecting haphazardly from its surface?
To be honest, I’m not entirely certain I believe my own writing here, but the goal was to consider. It’s certainly true that the ocean in the dark, and in its midst, is a much different experience than during daylight and from a beach. Perhaps though it is a disservice to the waves to discount their role in scattering the light that touches them.
The comparison with mankind is a philosophical or a theological one. Does love and beauty originate from within, or is it a thing that is given or learned? Do we reflect the love we receive from our parents, or from the divine, or from the Mangani great ape who raised us after our parents died as a the result of being marooned on the African coast by mutineers?
Dusty Writes 