what you are

As an empath you are the still waters upon which the restless float, the shade under which they sleep and the road leading them back to themselves.

why this blog

Some ramblings are in fact about my own personal experiences but more often then not they are about those around me, sometimes people I am close with, other times random strangers like the check-out girl or pizza delivery dude or bald buy walking down the street. Sometimes images and stories of lives come from songs or movies or photos while other times they appear out of thin air with the force and quirkiness not unlike a hair-ball in a hurricane. It ranges from a fleeting impression to a deep hole of intenseness, depending on if I talk to someone or see them interact with someone else.

It's not seeing the future, it's seeing all that has come to pass and all that IS right then. It is like reaching through a concrete wall to shake someone's hand, eerily effortless, oddly unique and frequently perplexing.

end

Outcome to the abstract is the drowning of possibility, the slamming shut of potential. He should have catapulted it out to the world, brazenly, stoically and without explanation. When instead he wrapped it up, a thousand times over, and slipped it into the pocket of some random street person.

drip

Such a gentle, almost undetectable rain. Birds busy with their business. Clouds sagging down to the earth, yet just out of reach. Quiet is a state so rare, even in the middle of nowhere something still hums. Lines and connections and metal rods like steel trees of the future keep us impossibly in touch, albeit indifferently, aloofly. Solitude at odds against the wave of the world, washing all things together to run, drain, into one giant cesspool of information. Nature finding some way to defeat it, impressively resilient, more so than us humans. Even with two hands and a brain we are at a loss of how to cease this Earth’s genocide. Some of us twitch in silence, remembering the stolen days of simplicity, when love was obvious and joy was a given. Now we scramble for a moment to do nothing more than listen to all that falls from the sky.

the art

But there will always be metaphors and poetry. There will always exist sulking temperaments molded into gawked-at sculptures. Why is there so much beauty in the most misunderstood places? Perhaps beauty is just the potential of something and not the something itself. The art is the perception, not the realization.

both are one

Half the time it is like I’m drunk, but just barely, like I’m teetering between a world where everything is clear, logical and matter-of-fact and one that is fuzzy, contradictory and a lot sexier. I want to believe that both are one, that they are not mutually exclusive, that they are in fact all part of the same reality that I call reality. I think then intoxication is reality without the water wings.

bushman

At first we believed you to be so sure, so unshakably solid. There existed no element that made you twitch. You stepped forward so mellowly confident as if you had seen it all, survived it all, and now with your overly relaxed advice we wondered what brink you had just arrived from. You looked like a bushman with a ball cap, as if you paddled here from the middle of nowhere in your hand carved canoe.

But something didn't jar into place about you. So close to mimicking the workings of a wise man yet narrowly ajar from syncing with it. I think your sunken voice and thick facial hair reminded me of Santa only their repressed and sullen nostalgia's prevented them from every knowing it. That, or because you were a brunette.

Your perfectly timed tone, smooth and peak-less was evidence enough of your harrowing escapades in the underbrush of all things living out of sight. We pictured you under the moon with the flames of a lucid fire drifting with hallucination, into the bark of a fallen aspen branch.

You were not just the man of the land, you were the land. Every wisp of sound, every drop of dew, every cluster of sap, every animal's eye, every last footprint from here to the horizon and from that horizon to the next.

tone

His tone was demanding, his acute body posture, tight, and unwelcoming. He thought in absolutes, his absolutes, like he invented them, like he had a say in how they were used. I wanted to understand but I was always interrupted with irritation, with disgust. And she, who shared his bed, hid her cookies when he was around.

by air

She had a smile that could melt the cement. Sidewalk chalk running and mixing with the liquidity until it was a colorful swirl like a neapolitan smear. I wanted to steal her essence and mix it with a gin and tonic. Perhaps then things would be more ethereal, or at least more promising, more sensual, more brave, fearless, happy. Girls like her made it look effortless, being a woman, impenetrable, jolly, together, irresistible. They wore dresses so feminine, showing their bubble gum skin while the rest of us clunked in our corduroy man pants and oversized ribbed shirts. I loathed and admired them at the same time. Curious how they vied for the attention of men without a single slip up, without a hint of introspection, worldliness, or sincerity. Just smiles and laughs at the right time, just waxed and primped in all the right places, just dusted off with the finite precision of an off the cover persona. She appeared to never dip down like the rest of us, susceptible to the human condition. No, she was always a float, hovering a little above the ground constantly demonstrating how beauty could oppose all universal laws. I wanted her not to exist but I also wanted to exist as her. An impossibility for she knew no hypocrisy, no contradiction, no internal struggle, no dark days, no self-doubt. She could never be me and I could never be her. We would just have to run parallel then, me by foot and her by air.

buzz

Dreary today, flanked by dreaminess and impatience. Longing for time to hustle yet nervous it's all used up. Words not coming today, not together, only mish-mashed like flashes of a movie, B-rated and entirely unglamorous. Consciousness is the barrier I cannot breach today. There is something out there, on the chaotic and mind-buzzing wind, something odd and obscure and worth pondering but it purposely avoids me in that bratty way things do when you have your mind set on something.

rote

We say we have come to the end when things are so bad. This is it we tell ourselves, no more this, no more that. How man times have we said this only to allow slowly over time these things back into our lives until once again they take over, leading us down that same dead end road. And we are dumbfounded at our own stupidity, at our adherence to such ritualistic behavior, repeating with such accuracy and consistency all that destroys us. If we can master self destruction and self sabotage, can’t we then master self mastery itself? If we can voluntarily and willingly drive ourselves into a brick wall can’t we also avoid doing so?

notion

It is all so magnificent and terrifying at once, the notion of the whole, you, I, each a pushpin amongst millions creating that “light-bright” effect on a map of the world.

example

Mostly this is about other people's experiences through my eyes, well, more accurately through my nervous system. To explain the almost unexplainable I am like a washing machine and the people around me are the laundry. They get dropped in, are swished around a bit and then are spit out in the same form, with less grunge.

haze

This place heats up. So much haze. This must be what my brain looks like when I'm lackluster. Bumblebees crash into their own reflections even when open windows are right next to them. They don't want in though. They're just buzzing around trying to catch a glimpse of themselves.

cavity

There is man I know who knows words. He shows me a poem but I don’t understand it.

And he, who shows me this poem is above me, academically, intellectually. I wish I could say something profound but there is only profoundness in that which I struggle to explain. How given the author, in the flesh, in sight of me, at the precise time, then I would know something a little more substantial, slightly more redeeming. I’d know his motivation, what was in his heart as he penned it, if he was anxious, sad, broken, lugubrious.

Just as I know of this man, standing close, with the book open, of how he hides, of why his eyes like thorns and mist, tear me apart. I want to tell him I love him because he is fragile and needing of it. And because I mean it.

I barely know him though, and all he knows of me is that I don’t understand what he’s just read to me.

I am in this moment both the idiot and the savant with no way of defending how information is carried to me, invisible and inarticulable.

So distracting with him so close, in body, in mind, in emotion. I am not the lunkhead I appear, I want to say.

He stands there post-reading and I look at him with blankness. I barely know him and yet I care for him.

Silence, awkward with my non-reaction to the scribe and to the pause filled with so much bulging emptiness.

I want to reach for him, but know this is a ditch not yet dug, and so I settle for concealment, not of my supposed ignorance to this piece of literature, but of the precarious way I see into his heart.

mutated

Sulking, pitifully, laying in the grass, damp from the dew. It was such a letdown of colossal proportions. Dreams were beginning to seem logical, now that reality had eclipsed the line of unbelievable. He had walked through the tempid, viscous wall, effortlessly, impossibly so, and yet what he found was a world even further entrenched in fantasy. He had just come from a place where he could levitate and now he was in a place where he could morph back and forth form solid to liquid, from dirt to water, from oil to ice. And for what good he mused, insincerely, being the only one left to bear it witness. How could the end of all things trump his yesterday off-white days?

In a flash, it was his feet, eyes, heart, skin, blood, body that burdened him, doomed him, salvaged him, here, in the wasteland of what was once the planet. He was just an unwitnessed catastrophe, miracle, genetic anomaly, sentenced to forever unravel the before with the after. He was now, just a person, a mutated superman with no hope for glory. All the power, beauty and freedom to do nothing but die alone next to the pulsating dandelions, crawling like sea urchins with legs towards the sea. He thought of following them, thinking all might still be normal in the black oblivion of the Atlantic. Maybe he was meant to go there. Maybe it was his home now.

thing

Every one of us has that ‘thing’ we think we should chase away, shoo off like an abhorrent house-fly when in fact that thing may actually be chasing us, wanting, needing to be in our lives, desperate for us to just welcome it in like a wise-yoda-type-man in need of a hot meal and long shower.

Joy is there, underneath who I am.