Faith To Let Be, To See, Really

Can you imagine, how it feels, the day you decide to walk on by, past excuses, past the little cowards of encouragement, through the wispy veil of fear, and out into the light? There, where the rain reminds you of rebirth and not the gloom of past days kept sickeningly frozen, you'd finally see me. Not with your eyes, but with your breath. Not with your ears, but with the thousandths of inches of spaces in between your freckles. You'll realise that death parted us not, but that we forgot to laugh our puerile confusion away. I'm smiling as I write this. I remember what it was like, before we lost ourselves to who we weren't. Funny moment. Funny timelessness. Inoubliable, yet it passed and the skies felt grey when drops dropped from it. What happened?
What happened to us?

I am here, in the sentiment of the day, experiencing fullness to the rim yet patiently waiting to overflow; for you, to come beyond the doors. To smile. A genuine regard never looks at something, but beyond it. When you look him in the eyes, you but gaze into me. You hate him. And you fight for him because you want him close to you, you want to prolong the pain. Just days ago, you willed peace, and it was given you, the feeling that you are. And you still are. What happened that made you look away from the mirror? Did you see a glint in his eyes, a fabled attraction, the hallucinatory guise of attack, about to pounce? Were you scared? Were you doubtful of his trust in you, or yours in him?

This is a crisis of faith. You and the magical window. I talk about reflections, them being everywhere. Sometimes you look and see them, then a shiny surface again scares you. Because you don't see yourself in it.

But you're in them, I know this, yet it makes you want to run aground, push back the ocean so you can hide away from it. Fear isn't real. What you are afraid of, this enemy that you perceive you are, is not there. But you hate him. That's what it sounds like. But if you looked not into his eyes but beyond them, you'd find yourself there, but without the timorous visage.

You don't trust him because you don't see you're him. You lose faith in God because you forget He's there. You choose not to listen. You choose not to see. You choose not to be who you are, because, love scares you. You are so petrified of being hurt by what cannot hurt. You stone man, you can walk because your feet are not frozen. You can sing because your tongue is not still. You can speak because your breath has motion.

It's not any of these things that makes you alive, though. You know.

Faith. And Love. And Joy. And Harmony. And Peace. Sweet Peace. It is all here, where we are.
Let me show you.

Take Me Up

There is piano music playing in the background. You try living without your other half, without two quarters of your ego. It's a liberating nightmare, a full-blown dispatriation in split senses. And anywhere you go is the potential of the moment to remove the earth beneath one of your feet, testing your balance, checking to see whether you are able to shift your weight onto the right foot in time. Watch your back, try to prepare and you end up projecting your fears onto the future, a half-wish come true halfway up the stairway to heaven. Just then, you hit that bump, that wooden plank that's rotten to the touch and gives way under the weight of your guilt as you step on it. I thought you would have left your baggage at the bottom. When you refused to take the elevator, the doorman told you to leave the luggage downstairs anyway, that you couldn't possibly take it upstairs with you. But you, stubborn and foolish, held on to it. At least half of your mind did.

But I have told you, you cannot achieve anything with half of you. It's either all or nothing, the decision has to be whole. And so, climbing the stairs has been an uphill struggle. You see happiness at the top, but it's a narrow road and you know you can't hold all your shit with you, mountaineer.

You wish I'd just move on, but so do I, believe me. Tell me you're not an idiot, and I'll believe you, but for fuck's sake don't tell me you can handle what you hold in your pockets. You have a half-burnt cigarette for your middle finger and are squeezing a removed doll's head in your left hand's crush grip. Exhausted, are you not? Perhaps you'd like me to go on, say 'anyway' or 'regardless', and just move on up the steps. I don't have to lumber your ball and chain of course, but I swore I'd take you up, and that's what I'm going to do.

So, I implore you, leave those things you value downstairs. See, just unclench that angered fist and your broken toy will roll down the steps along with those painful memories. This is about letting go of the past. You can't heave it up, heaven doesn't accept things that have passed their expiration date. You can't go in with broken mementos, or with souvenirs of suffering. Believe me, you don't need them anymore, there's enough childhood and joy there to satisfy all of the world's children that have ever lived. Have faith that you will find it.

Now that you're looking into my eyes, I want to assure you that the way we travel is the right way. Your doll's head cannot talk, even though you hear its voice. It's but a passing wind, one that will cease its whispering once you're no longer in range of its emission. So when you recall those visions and thoughts that mean nothing even here, even before we have reached where you want to go, you cannot forgive yourself. Why are you holding yourself to such an obscenely distorted standard? What have you to die for? Rolling emotions? Unrooted sentiments? Fear that you have hurt? You cannot hurt, I'm telling you, it isn't in you. All you can do is make these images in your head of being a tyrant, a deceiver, a betrayer, a cheat, a liar, a destroyer, a dictator, a fallen angel. These are such violations of reality, of what you are, that if you knew, if you only knew, you would instantly let go of all the pain you're holding on to and go up. Since you have forgotten the difference between what is true and what isn't, I've come to take you up the stairs, to teach you what that is. You don't need to understand. It's better that you don't, actually.

So, stop. Let go.

Then, lighter, keep walking, and it will feel more like you are traveling a flat path, closer to the truth.

Finally

Those words, those words that you said,
I took them and burned myself with them
Hoping that the pain would be great joy,
But it wasn't.

Hea rtbreak
Is like that.

I know you knew nothing, suspected some
Things maybe, but you didn't know. It's how
It turned out. Nothing to do about it, but
Forgive.

The Root

Happiness. I want it, you want it. We both have it. It's time to realise that there is no reason for it there, because if we limit ourselves in thinking that we can only be happy if certain things happen, if so and so isn't there or if such and such happens, we'll have big fat gaps in our enjoyment of life. And the spikes that we do get will be even less short-lived.

Euphoria doesn't occur all the time, no, and it doesn't need to. Let us not make the mistake of conditioning our happiness, because when it comes to joy, it is our natural state. We are children after all, in the midst of our childhood. You could be happy because of so many things, or so you may thing, but you are happy because of you. Because you respond. Because you live, and breathe, and encounter life wherever you go. Because you are honest, because you are light. Because joy is you. I say these things and it may sound like you have to 'do' things to be happy. But that is precisely my point - you do not have to do anything. Do not make the mistake of depending on someone else for it. It is within you, and from there must it radiate, never from the outside, although it might look like that.

Be happy. We are human beings, not human doings.

Exploration Of What I Vaguely Remember As Emotion

Being apart ain't easy in this love affair. I get the joy of rediscovering you. And since we're here together, let us not part ways with broken promises and lies told. We both know that light shines so much brighter when our lives are intertwined, together as one.

Insignificance belittles our magnificence as artists, not as works of art, although we are neither, and one more than the other. Flattering smiles, brushed cheeks and unknowing, the singers make up songs about us, about themselves.

Everybody knows that nobody really knows. Somber messages are drunk, and being sober pushes us to drink further from the chalice of poison. I don't understand where the soliloquy began but there was a sound at the start. This petite utterance was a golden voice in the sun, glaring at the darkness as if it wasn't even there. Such bravery. Why do we not share the moments when we are together and how can we not realise the futility of estrangement, of difference, of any reasons why there is no celebration? It's not always going to be someone's birthday, but there is a day today, and here it is.

Embrace suchness, for it creates a sensation of being, and that means it's one step closer to reality than potions and cocktails. Makes us feel rather than think. We both like pressing the keys instead of voicing it, and as such we both /emote rather than shine a light on our sentiments. Let's not run away again, we are in this together after all. We can hold each other's hand and be there for each other, not just like in the movies because the movies are movies. But because we care.

Language betrays. Questions are asked, and answers are given so more questions can go back to the end of the queue. Now there's no point in placing the blame. Hurt is just an empty plastic bag in the wind, hiding silhouettes of nothingness. The people are the ones who shine. Their spirits glow, and I can see. This is vision, when punctuation ceases to mean anything.

Faithfully, To Joy

Don't give up on the promise you were made
Never stop believing in the one you are
For to no end will you suffer and away fade,
You are saved, glad, loved close and afar.

Sentences, words on a page
And the music in the background
Oh, hello joy
You surprised me with your light.
Sunlight touches my skin
But you reach in from my soul
And touch everything around me
And make it glow.

The melody, the sweetness,
I'm forever yours, faithfully,
I never took apart my chances
But merely wrote romances
Which never came true.
In the background you lay
Smiling, never ceasing,
Always singing, always being faithful.

Tug you go, sounding golden
Never skipping a moment;
In your permeating aura
You never leave anything out.
So the angels fly with you
Bringing the light in the sky
And to the eyes of many
To hearts, and lives that shine.

Oh joy,
Ode to you,
For knowing everything
For not skipping a beat
But for getting it right
Every single time.
I know that to you
It's all the same,
Because it is all the same.

But thank you in any way, shape, form and formless.

Yours faithfully.

Child's Play

I remember when we were children. I remember it because that time has not ended. We are all walking around as if we had only learned how to a few short days ago and are discovering the world for the first time. Everything is amazing, even though we've seen it so many times before. Everything is just fantastic and fascinating, the tops of trees, the shine on windows, the clouds, the faces of the other children. Oh joy, childhood lasts a lifetime. We don't grow up, we just decide to abandon our innocence for irresponsibility. Mate, that decision is not practical or plausible. We are children, we walk the Earth hand in hand and we play together in so many locales and ways. It's so much fun to be. Adults don't exist, so don't fool yourself into thinking that we are old or that we are somehow mature inhabitants. Insecurity doesn't make you mature, but it makes you feel like a scared child who has let go of our hands. Don't worry though, you'll eventually stop crying and open your eyes. You are going to smile then because you'll realise we were always here for you, with open arms, ready to laugh with you once more. The disorientation will just serve as a joke for a while, and we'll get much entertainment out of it. Come on, we can laugh at anything.

Let's play with our building blocks. We can make so many things. If we put them one way we can make a pyramid, or another way and we can make a wall. We can fort ourselves around the bench and protect the doll on her throne. From the elements? I don't know from who? But psychology might be able to tell us what she is afraid of. Yes, I know she's a doll. We are playing pretend aren't we? Like when we used to play pretend when we pretended to be bus drivers. Oh, how fun that was. I had so many pencils, pens and felt tip pens. Excellent markers for roads; an experience that allowed me to visualise cityscapes. And back then, I did. And I didn't have a bus, so I used a toy car. Not Hot Wheels, but some tiny ones that probably broke very easily because the plastic was cheap. You could find them with the cheap cheap cheap gum. What a treat, ephemeral, but that was part of the deal. Cheap doesn't last long. But it lasted enough time, or else I would have lost my appetite and would have wanted to try my mum's or grandma's food afterward. But back to the vehicle sandbox, remember when I put my thumb and finger onto the car and drove it around the roads I had made? I'm smiling. I pressed a bit too much sometimes to the point that the small wheels either snapped or stopped working properly. That's okay. They were buses anyway, and when I went from room to room through those roads that led me to interesting and unlikely intersections in differently congested areas (traffic-wise), I could always stop by gas stations/repair stores/anything else I wanted them to be. What a simple time that was. I'm not quite as naive as I was back then. I don't believe in it anymore. I don't find roads as fascinating anymore. Sometimes traffic lights make me anxious.

But, as I was saying. This is all child's play. No one's really very grown up. We fight over things because we think that what we are fighting over matters. Politics, a toy car. Democracy, a rubber chicken. The sexualisation of young girls, flowers picked from the field. Homosexuality, the broken lead of a pencil. Choice, innocence. Close-minded people, honesty. Lies, telling the truth as the most natural thing. Loneliness, love. Fighting, smiling. Hell, heaven.

I want to make sure I get this. Salvation is here. The only reason I would be confused about salvation being here is if I was told that salvation was elsewhere, which I believed before but now realise I trusted someone who didn't trust themselves. But I know now. I am a child, a son.

We Are

Love, it travels by everywhere,
Reaching us where we are most,
In the heart
In the mind.

I'd digress if I wasn't being honest
When I say I care.

I am learning how to speak from my heart,
Finding out that there are simple ways
To unite those pieces fallen apart
In love.

And for this to occur, there must be peace
There must be acceptance and truth,
There must be the things that are already there
For they have never gone anywhere.

And love, love, it never disappears
For it is more than what meets the eyes,
More than a box of chocolates, more than a surprise,
It's more than what makes it up
Because it's whole.

This sentiment, it yearns to expand
For it holds its holy place in all the land
In all the land
Where it flows, it transforms,
Where it breathes, it seethes,
Where it springs, it knows its way
To a brightest day,
Today.

And it's all around, in every space,
Upon every face,
There is the light of grace
Through which we see.

Are we not lucky?

We are free.
We are love.
In many attitudes, forms and formlessness, we burgeon
And touch each other's hearts with our own.
Whether we cry out in pain or in joy
It is love that we employ;
That which we call upon, we already have
And so we are reminded.

Are we blessed? We are.

We are.

We are.

The Note Of Joy

Afternoon rain, blanketing somewhere
Those somewhere, rather nowhere
Sitting down, caught by surprise,
Reveling in someone's troubled eyes
Seeing passion, seeking free,
No end to their destiny
Intertwined and permeated
Such dreams dilapidated.

Pathos granted, motions set
Upon the desire to be let,
Answering the questions
Staring into the oppression
Opening the jaws of synergy
Into fascinating formations of energy,
The door is answered, the said said
And the repressed memories are shed.

If there's really to be happiness, there must be a note of joy left somewhere among the remains of our altercations with ourselves. I am fortunate and blessed to have others read that note from themselves to me when I forget where I put mine. I'd hold it in my hand but I could easily crumple it because I'd hold onto it too much. The solution is thus to keep it close and to form the habit of reading it often.

Let the story thus be told
In a manner that shines true gold
And let no obstacle stand in its way
So it can be heard by ears far away
Or those that are close, that wish to listen
To a word unspoken, unwritten, unhindered
Of faith.

Cracks In The Walls

From here, they look like tiny Lego pieces, all the same off-white colour with a faded orange stripe. These apartment buildings, home to a slew of people that I never knew, rise up in ordered lines. The rectangular windows are equidistant from each other and as they dot each storey of these homes, it becomes a message in Morse, a cry for help. With my two eight-year old feet planted on a grassy descent, facing away from civilisation, I look at the camera, hands on hips. My childish smile – unaware of the truth behind me – turns into a smirk that I see now, some ten years later, to be a question: what happened?

Today, there are cracks in the walls that used to be my home. The security that they once provided, the warmth during winter and the shelter during storms, remain but memories of a place I know does not exist anymore. The process of leaving Romania, leaving childhood, leaving my home and learning about the “real” world in New Zealand shattered the window through which I looked out and put a filter in its place. Romania was not a comfortable place to live in with its corruption, its disorganised system of government, its apathetic politicians, its victimised mindset and its overall squalor. Blame the communist dictator Ceausescu for his totalitarian regime. Blame the gypsies who are marginalised and look for food in the rubbish dumps. Blame the people emigrating for not loving the country enough. Spit on the ground in frustration at the wretch of a life you live – no one is going to clean it up. Blame every single other person, except yourself.

I sometimes wonder what would have happened if I had stayed in Romania. How much would my family and friends have changed? Would my mind be as open as it is today? I don’t like to dwell on the ‘what if’s because they inevitably distract me from the reality that I do enjoy and appreciate life. But I imagine that, when seen from an unlike perspective, my experience of the world would have differed quite dramatically.

Romania – a simple place when viewed from the curious gaze of a little boy with eyelashes girls would kill for and a face that looks a little bit too much like his mother’s. A boy with a happy childhood, because what else would you call it when his grandmother ties both ends of a rope to two branches of a tree to make a swing because the metal ones in the nearby kindergarten were vandalised and broken past the point of repair; or when his brother builds a tower of bricks around him so that he only has enough room to poke his head out and smile as his mum takes a photo on his eighth birthday, the same day he would witness a solar eclipse at 1pm. These snapshots are not few in quantity, because they fill about ten photo albums of family history. But their quality, their ability to preserve a reminder of childhood joy for a teen to revisit as he matures, is what really indicates their value to me.

I find myself looking back at these photos to relive the emotion of the tale they tell. I used to feel nostalgic within the first few years of living in New Zealand as I was still reluctant to accept that the reason we moved was because it was better for us here. My childhood ended on arrival in this foreign place with palm trees, clean roads in good condition and personalised houses, as opposed to small unkempt streets between copy-pasted apartment buildings that Ceausescu had built in an attempt to attract workers to the cities. The contrast was and still is quite stark.

My coming of age story thus has elements of adjusting to a whole new culture and keeping from being absorbed into it. I’m not a Kiwi. I’m not a Romanian either, despite my saying that I am when asked because although I empathise with what is going on back home, I do not share the survivalist view that the world is cruel and unfair. And yes, Romania is still home, because so much of what I knew to be happiness originated from that place and those people there that were close to me. You can tell this from the number of smiles in the photos, and the amount of smiling they in turn cause.

Growing up is magical for any child, for they cannot see the cracks in the walls. So much of society is built upon righting past wrongs and realising a world better for the next generation. Children only find the present, and what a gift it is to them. What can we say about ourselves then, as humans, when we take that away because we lost ours, too?

The Paradox of None

Whereabouts would
Would wishes be
Wishes be
Without someone to grant them
When we need



Nothing.
There is no need.
Because none of us are imperfect. No one is so.

We are one. And this means that my being who I am is the same as you. I'm you. Your face is not mine just as much as it is not thine. You are whole, and you know this, because I do, and I am whole. And knowledge is universal - true - and therefore it is shared.

And I have nothing to say for it. I live joyfully. Joy, fully. What do you feel?

I am nothing
I am no one
Yet we are one
I am one
I am all

And it is thus that I express, so that I can become aware, so that I can learn that I cannot learn for there is nothing that I do not know. But I have become lost, and only now do I see the path that I am walking on, illuminated by the light of God.

Among people
I am none.
I am one.