A Simple Request

And it all comes down to leaving it all behind, moving on to the rivers of love, and never be lonely again. How long have you waited? How long 'til you drown?

This gives me hope. The piano is tuned to play on my emotions, the strings that tug at my heart in vulnerability. It soothes my silent despair, my loss, my drama-addicted fuse. It tells me that they are not needed, that I can let go of them and really live. The music moves me because it sings to me what I feel, what I hope to be true.

How many times have I questioned my worth?
How many times have I lost myself in my mind?
How many times have I forgotten peace?
How many times have I not been able to answer my own questions?
How many times have I spoken to anyone truly?
How many times have I spoken to myself truly?
How many times have I taken a leap of faith?
How many times have I felt guilty for what I have done?
How many times have I been confused by my fears?
How many times have I really said something that I meant?
How many times have I gone around in circles?
How many times have I felt something to be true?

It doesn't matter. Quantity is a number and it doesn't matter. Numbers can repeat themselves over and over and not matter at all. Stock markets, Lotto tickets, binary. Rien.

Yet my focus has been programmed to concentrate on quantity. How much, how many. But the wonder of life comes from quality, the truth resonates qualitatively. It is from within me, from within depths and limitless yonders and beyond horizons and sunrises and sunsets, that life really lives. It's not magic. It's not magic. It's real, and I love to know it. To witness it. To feel it.

If you lift me up, just get me through this night, I know I'll rise tomorrow and I'll be strong enough to try.

A simple request. It is done.

Shedding Skin

Gotta wonder when it's time to feel right, when it's time to live the right life that you wanted. Don't you? Sometimes, I listen to songs and I reminisce, to myself, about the feelings that they have brought me. Somehow, those songs that once struck me with a sentiment of sadness, loss, loneliness, feel comfortable now when I listen to them. Maybe it's time to shed my skin, my exterior, for the form that's an expression of love.

Can you see how I sound? Ridiculous. Talking about love as if I even know what it is. I'm still a boy, dreaming of what love could be. Yet I know I am love. Seen from the eyes of the lost, it sounds vague, unfamiliar. Seen from the eyes within, it's true. But toggling between two visions is tiring, as I am in the transition period. I know which one I'm picking but focus isn't yet straightforward enough.

I need to know me, to remember me. I have forgotten, I have lost, which means I can regain. I can discover, I can come once more. I call love, I drink the beauty of you in.

To do this means I am willing to give up my secrets, the shades of darkness. Love is total, so must be my surrender. I don't know what it is, but I know it is worth being. Being love. Let me shed my skin so I may know.

Now is the perfect moment. Eternity beckons.

Readjusting The Focus

Today I realised I didn't really know how people and life worked. I thought I did, with my expertise and experiences under my belt. But I don't actually. I have made the present into a very complex image based on the past and it didn't turn out as simple and easy to interpret as I thought it would be. So I got some advice from some good friends, about living life and breathing. They told me to take it easy, to chill out, to not think everything means something. We give meaning to things, I should know that, and now I recognise it because I see that this is what I have been doing. I am the one that places value on Facebook, on clothing, on imagery, on things said and unsaid. I am the one that allows doubts to be placed in my mind about the most trivial of things. I decide what's in and what's not. The basis that I have been making these sorts of decisions on is experience. Things I learned in high school don't apply as rigidly to life in general. For example, friendship in high school taught me that friends were around all the time and the ones that you stuck with in the cluster/clique were the ones you would leave with and that would be happiness. The world is not high school. There is a much much wider variety of forms and people out here, and that certainly adds a touch of flavour to this great moment we call life. I have learned that I have put my faith in the images I have of people instead of the people themselves. Mistake made, lesson learned. People are more than just what you see, and the surface isn't just a cloud of irrelevance. Faces, particularly eyes, lips, cheeks and teeth, are used to make connections. I've gone for the quick version of getting to know some people, straight to where I thought was the heart but was instead just a piece of paper with a heart drawn on it. People have to let you in. And I admit, there is a sense of urgency that makes my own search for people seem desperate. I recognise that and am willing to change my gears and my approach.

In the back of my mind, there used to be a voice that was saying how I was manipulating everyone, that I was a controlling bitch, because I was able to make friends by building them up instead of breaking them down. That voice never got loud until this year when making friends suddenly became obligatory and more unconsciously feared and now I thought there had to be a process involved. That was a mistake, listening to the voice. Manipulation comes from a lack of security, a fear that people acting autonomously would mean my demise. Now I know that not to be true - manipulation causes people to stop understanding you and forces them to interact with a projected image of yourself, of someone better, of someone you think they need. And this is how it complicates things, because then the friends you are trying to make no longer comprehend how your world functions. Mine didn't. I was torn between manipulation/seeking attention and authenticity, an imbalance which is poisonous to relationships because it injects confusion and blurriness, and what we see then is not what we get and the complexity suddenly becomes very foreign.

Life is simple. I see now that I looked at people and discerned what their problems are and somehow made that part of who they were in my mind, thereby somehow giving me a way into their hearts if I could repair the damage. But this is a misperception. If you only see the problems in people, you stop seeing people and see problems instead. And how can you befriend problems? People carry problems with them, but as a person who understands that they carry them, I realise that what they carry is simply their past, which is no longer here, so they are in reality carrying nothing.

The aforementioned friends made me realise this because they were looking at me as a person, as a friend, not as somebody with a perception problem. And I awoke. I was making them into what they were not. The removal of my filter made me see that I had made a big error. I was seeing broken people, but people are not broken.

So I thank you for the lesson :)

I think the following reiterates it well. It came to me in the library while I was taking a break from studying for exams.

"I want you to know that in each of us there is a light, a light so bright that it penetrates through our grievances, our guilt and our mistakes. It radiates from within our soul, so this light keeps us always warm, always at home in its peace. And whenever we are lost, it is only because we stop seeing it when we close our eyes. But it never ceases to shine, and neither do we, for we are that light."

Focus And Delivery

Greetings are in order. Hi. Salut.

Headphones on, here's an attempt at channeling emotion into a piece of writing. Self-conscious this one. The consensus that I've discovered indicates that one needs to be in a place of sentimental disturbance for one to churn out a particular strand of art. For example, that one needs to be sad in order to funnel the feeling into a piece of art which will embody the tristesse that they initially felt. A case of lightening a load, or rather transferring energy from the body into an object where one can clearly see it, thereby looking at a reflection. Is art a mirror? Could this piece of writing that I see as pixels on a light screen be a mirror of my inner questions? Sure. I'll go for that. I've heard many a time before how the world is our mirror. We see outwards what we feel inwards. A case of projection. Call it, if you like, your own special pair of glasses that you wear and perceive the world through. Your oyster. If it tastes like crap, it might just be your taste buds. Or not. It could be your act of projecting crap onto the oyster. Like you have a grapefruit before you eat the oyster. Nasty aftertaste? My point is, we have what we ask for. Ask and ye shall receive. Oh that phrase is in a plethora of books, Bible included.

The paragraph above is infused with a myriad of words and phrases, some that clash. Some invoke the senses, some bore, some may remind of a self-help book, some of a French dictionary. In any case, I wish to know if consistency is a factor that needs be considered. Should I have to explain how I feel in a particular way and be consistent with that throughout the piece? No. Got the answer. The reason being that I feel all the emotions that I describe above; it feels all over the place when I take a step back and see it as a whole picture. It's the details that come together to form the mixture. There's a worry that it might be too mixed to discern the individual details and to some, maybe, I say maybe, it might be too difficult to make out any patterns at all. Blah blah blah.

The point? Umm... little focus. On and on and on, place to place, word to word, until a trail appears. My headphones are off and I can now speak. Hear my voice:

Learn from this. Know that your attention is where you will get your results. The world is your canvas, your sight is the picture. The paintbrush and colour palette are in your hands, and all you have to do is see what you want to paint. You don't need to know how. And if you now know that you can paint on the canvas anything - anything - that you want, then paint that. See it, feel it. Focus on it. Make it the centre and then watch, notice, appreciate, how the world spins its web of rainbows onto the canvas, your oyster, your world, your experience.

Seek and you shall find. Ask and you shall receive. Knock and the door will be opened.
What you have sought has always been found. What you have asked for has always been what you have received. The doors that you have knocked on have always been opened.