There is grace in allowing people space to be alone, to be their own.

There are dreams, worlds that can only be weaved by one, and if time or the elements keep them from it, a world remains incomplete. we must leave them space to do what they must. and if the elements get in their way, we must trust that they have the instincts to weave their way around it, in it, through it. we must trust that in their own heart's song is everything they need, a Source that interacts directly with the divine, a piece of God.

Leave this interaction be. Leave them to their dance. Leave the space for them to catch, sway with the rhythm and the melody. you cannot teach them how to dance; and if you do, you will force them to misstep. you will take away their song.

Do not impose yourself into their dancing space. for in doing so, you are only imposing your needs, your desires into others. it cannot be. it is ego, it is pride, it is lack of faith. Let them be. Be there when they want to share their experience with you. Because there is an allocated space for the both of you to share, and it is in that space that you need each other, where you will learn to fall in step with each other. This is the space which is meant for a dance for two.

that cosmic disruption

how often do you feel it? how often does a look, a touch, throw your world off balance, tipping on the fuzzy sides of a dream? how often does that incendiary gaze burst sparkles in the base of your spine, lights up your world. and then you are thrown into a dream, and then you know no matter what life throws in the way, you are still in a dream, and that cosmic source to which you return constantly for fresh air, can still make you smile through the tears, every time.

**

and when you know that you are two adults, capable of carrying this weight of the cosmic disruptions, able to bear it, to protect it, and to harness its truth, then you know you are set for life. you know that what the stars have aligned, you must bear together, care together, as fragile as it is and as fragile as the both of you must be... you have a duty to guard this spark breathed by God.

what else can love be?

it is the cosmic interference that disrupts the air around us

that thing that lets us know we knew each other the day we were born, the day the universe was created in His eyes. it came to us as it was always meant to.

**

i am not that capable adult yet, for as often as i like to think otherwise, i prove myself a child - with childish desires, selfish needs, fisted hands. i will get there eventually, but you must not wait - and that is as it is. but what light has found out, let it find true. as it has shone us into the seemingly impossible, it will show us a way through, shine through, through what is transparent and through what is impermeable, through the dark corners and through the unreal, exposing the truth from the lies, showing the way out. guided by light, this will be our dance. and let no one box it any other way. let no one keep out the light.

#2

he's drifting away from anything i can grasp,

while i with slippery hands fumble with something bound to break.

At what cost?

While we all have our prerogatives, convictions, ideals - at what cost will we defend or assert them?

Stop asking me to take a side

I don't know much about politics, but i do know by now that things don't happen in black and white.

Even when we were younger it was the action that we were taught was evil, not the whole being - breaking the glass = bad; telling a lie = bad; smoking = bad. Sure whoever was doing that was painted automatically as 'a bad person' at that time, but we all have fibbed, broken promises and littered enough by now to know that its not as simple as that. its not just black or white.

stop asking me to take a side, because it just doesn't work that way. we dont all occupy opposite extremes, we don't have to be either us or them. i don't have to be bipolar to have a stand.

families don't work that way, clans don't work that way, racial communities don't work that way, companies don't work that way, countries and nations don't work that way, religious communities don't work that way.

we can't take any of these groups as wholesale bad or wholesale good just because.

we don't make the lines of good and evil between people. no one group is complete evil and no one group is complete good. the line of good and evil doesn't happen between groups and communities, that line cuts within each of us as individuals.

small gods in a universe of one

#1

i know that even now

ur eyes behold others

settles on the pictures of

women with grace, and style, and soul

the drop of their hair across their shoulders

the sway of their hips in their dances.

i am missing u

as i will for generations

and in a dark sky where our stars would shine the brightest

where we paced the difference

in our own little dance

other stars, now dimly emerging

will start to fill in the spaces

i am already beginning to miss

your eyes, your smile, the tinge in your hair

the sound of your voice, the wrinkle at the corner of your eyes when we speak

that faraway look when you are thinking

that spark of connection when we meet in conversation

that cosmic interference

i am already beginning to miss you like

a memory of old

that is perpetual -

that moment in time in our youth;

that sepia toned photograph we find suddenly in our drawers

which caught us just at the right moment

that mirror of our soul

that moment when

every moment of our lives,

past, present, and future,

came alive.

9.46 p.m. 17 january 2012

just enough

All my life i have feared failing to reach my full potential; this is not the first time i'm writing about it, in fact i feel like i've thought, spoken with different friends at different times and especially wrote about it so many times that its in danger now of repeating without meaning, repeating like an overplayed, broken record i can no longer make any sense of.

Perhaps because i am a dreamer, it seems i have always seen my life in chunks - this is my life, this is my failure, this is my mistake, this is my future. And without realizing it, i've seen every success or every blot of my life as a lifetime's effect. Because i am careless of anything good and destructive about my errors, it sometimes feels like my life is perpetuating one big mess, a non-stop entropy.

Some mornings, like today, when the world is a particular shade of sunlight, i think - i have to stop this spiral. i have to learn to be happy again, like the jewels found of children. i think - nothing else means anything, but this life well-lived, happy, right. (and again, 'right'? all my life i've punished myself about being 'right', without knowing what it really meant...but then again this is my un-childlike self speaking).

Maybe this is my perpetual grief -- that i always suffer all the sorrows of my whole lifetime in one dark moment. Two months ago i was crying for the actual grief i knew would come today. Now i'm crying for the unbearable grief of the moment, but also everything else that could go wrong in the next five, ten years. the grief i IMAGINE i will feel about this for the next five, ten years. everything is finished, my future tomorrows are finished, i have already failed. Plus the grief of all my past misgivings, and the fear of the spiral, and the spiral, and the spiral.

No wonder i feel crippled in those moments, breathless - it is the end of the tunnel.

But every night there is doom,

and every morning there is new light.

And it is not the first time that i am thinking, too, - my, this is why God made days , divided time into light and dark. because he knew we would have to cope, and because he knew we need cycles of hope. he knew we would have to take one day at a time, one step in front of the other. and not to worry about tomorrow's sorrows for each day will have enough to worry on its own.

Every night there's doom, but everyday i still do the little, little things it takes to get through the day. It is enough. in a similar phase four years ago, i remember looking at my feet landing on the road as i walked in heaviness. at the heaviness of that moment, i could not look around me to see anything else. i stared at my feet, going one in front of the other, and nothing else existed. And i realised, this is enough.

This is enough for today.

stay on the track

the strait and the narrow

suffers no fools

dreamers

or lovers

- 1.37, jan 16

Its amazing how we see the world in lines. We divide people according to dotted lines... race, religion, preferences. We divide people according to definitions of 'same' and 'different'. We divide ourselves into poles..just to struggle the rest of our existences with one another, just to argue and fight and war.

I am guilty of the same, everyday. I must learn to embrace difference, to appreciate that i have been given opportunity to expand. This is what it means to love our neighbours - the Samaritan empathizing with someone outside his sphere, someone who, in society's view, would have no claim with him.

This is how Jesus empathized with the women, the widows, the prostitutes, the lepers, the beggars, the Greek, the Roman, the Samaritan. Seeing God's Heart in all hearts.

The challenge of self-righteousness is great. The fear that we cannot hold on to something that would differentiate us from others, from the tax collectors, the corrupt, the liars and the thieves, the proud and arrogant, the dirty and the desperate. The fear that we are actually the same.

This is why religion sometimes becomes a rock that hardens our hearts. It gives us the sense of a heightened ground from which to make our judgements. It can easily be warped to be the thing that justifies our divisions.

**

in this rough and tumbling turmoil

(that i know by heart)

i will seek the unmovable

truth

and while wretched my soul will weep through this,

God

whatever name we call him,

is constant.

He knows me by heart, and you

He has us in the palm of his hands

lest we forget

that deep in our heart we will find the answer

not in our deepest fears or insecurities or uncertainties

but in light

that is constant, whichever way we turn.

7.50 a.m., 12.1.2012, a new breath.

i'll meet you there

"Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,

there is a field. I'll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,

the world is too full to talk about.

Ideas, language, even the phrase 'each other'

doesn't make any sense.' - Rumi

Let's try that again:

If we are not careful to guard our thoughts and actively pursue truth, there is danger that we may unwittingly develop a mindset of exclusivity, and approach all our issues as us vs them.

We may not realize it, and our intentions may be well. It may be the very thing that we say we fight for. but it may have been programming, developed through years, that needs to be confronted, unhinged.

We need to learn to see further - climb the hedge and look beyond it. Or else in the same quest for justice or godliness, we end up enforcing the very thing that hinders love. there should be no division between children of God. if God sees our hearts through His eyes, so much so we need to see through human eyes.

We must learn to see beyond. The day when buying bread can be racist, is the day we all need to check ourselves. Check our responses - do we have, hinged in our mind, that there is 'us' on one side and 'them' on the other?

It is not the government. it is not the issue of scholarships or rights or privileges or what others have done. Our own thoughts, the words that we say, are suspect, and we may not even know it.

let us not be caught blind.

Whither hope?

The day buying bread becomes racist.

Offensive animal parts in holy grounds and sacred spaces within

one man's opinion begins a chorus of voices, accusatory, it wasn't me's, my ideals have been robbed from under my feet, in a circus where

everything is juggled

nothing gold catches our view

anything that falls and crashes are ignored in a shatter of absurdity. we shout even louder.

The day we make god racist

is the day we must check ourselves.

it is not the government, it is not the schools, it is not politics, it is not the other. it is the day we must look deep within ourselves and catch where we start seeing our discriminations before a human heart. is when we no longer recognize it, but we are slowly allowing hatred breed.

but then i am young, and disappointed, and will hold on to innocence to my very last breath.

...now to move on to higher things

i know i have been given plenty. of talents, of thoughts, of heart. and these would be my core as i journey through life. this is the material i am made of, crafted by a Perfect God, and so. these are the materials that react and converse with events of my life, empty ruins, turmoil, or peace.

my confession: there are moments when i would have given everything up, for the comfort of silence. these moments are not uncommon - they have come to me almost regularly for the past... well, since i was ten. sometimes i think these are isolated incidents, rarities. sometimes i think i am past it, but then there i am again. sometimes i think it is my choices, my mistakes that bring me there. sometimes i think if i just changed, stop making mistakes, i would finally reach the mean line, the range of 'normal'. sometimes i think i am all to blame..and it is these times when the noise pushes me too far into the corner, i feel i must find a way out, must escape. i must implode.

i am not sure how much destruction it has caused my life, my relationships (or the distinct void of them) thus far. perhaps much.

the situations have changed. the players have changed. the times and seasons have changed. the feelings and responses remain. so perhaps it is the only elements that have remained the same, how we deal with it, that needs closer scrutiny. i guess i just have to let myself stop going there. destruction is the rule of darkness.

if our hearts, our souls, is how we reach God, i suppose it is easy for us to confuse it with our feelings, the type that is fleeting and flutters in a moment. i suppose it takes more, it takes a whole being, to listen more deeply, deeply into the whisper of God's voice in the heart's heart. my dream is to live a life, as true within as it is true outside. that my inner thoughts will align with my outer words. that what is true in my heart will come true in my conduct. that there will be no more schism between my self as it exists in the community of people, and my self as it is. that i will stop rushing home to be alone, to be myself. that i will enjoy being one with the company of others, as with myself. to live from the inside out, with God and self and man; not like a black hole, sucking everything in into a hidden empty darkness.