We Eek Our Way Through
Write the lead. Write your guts out. Eat hearts and take no emotional prisoners because you are here. You have made your way and you are almost out of the tough slog.
We all make mistakes and look for ways to stay alive. We constantly undercut the impression that we are actually making a mark - a carbon footprint on the planet of our creativity.
Light explodes into a ball of frequency and disjointed perception. Our brains try to keep up but they just can't.
The words come too fast - and the actions come even quicker.
It's hard to respond. And some times, we do the things we should have never done. We feel regret like we've never felt it - in stinging waves of hurt and drenchings of anguish and Irish guilt.
We go to dark places that we should not have tread to. We feel the darkness of the moon as we look behind us to see if we are being followed. We do the deed and we embellish upon our deepest and most twisted desire.
And then, in a flash, we see that the deed is not as monumental as we made it out to be.
We want accountability and strive for it at the core of our humanity - but in reality, we reject it. Accountability is hard. Accountability is a continued practice.
But then we find someone. Someone to truly connect with and establish an innate and sibling-like understanding with them. And they get you. And you get them. And it's glory.
And this dark night shall pass.
But the weather turns and all harsh storms must truly end. The river of futures and potential rise to meet my feet as I stand on the banks of uncertainity; waiting and pacing. The water gets higher still and overtakes the grasses and the pine cones and sticks around my feet. I close my eyes and feel the cascade of coolness continue to climb all around me. I succumb. I let go. I fluid-ize as my joints and parts become limber. And I move.
I am at one with the Water.
The bright, cool Water.
Sometimes, maybe our own perception of 'how our lives might or might not turn out' should not, in fact, be the standard that we should set ourselves to -
And maybe, just maybe, the life that we've all wanted and desired and pined after for so long is the exact same one that we are living.
Right now.
Lightening
This morning, I walked to school with a lighter head. The clouds seemed to break open, if only for a moment, and get torn apart by a sun fighting to reach me. The lightness of the barely frigid air comforted me as I didn't even need to wear gloves for the first time all winter.
I've been in a bit of a spiritual funk lately, but it seems as if I'm emerging from the smoke.
I've been watching a lot of Rescue Me lately and in many ways, I'm a lot like Tommy Gavin. I stay strong for others and I gain strength from being a figure of solidarity. Underneath, though, I have my demons. I have a lot of secrets but then again, who doesn't? I like whiskey, too, but I don't drink nearly as much as he does.
I have a theory that secrets can sometimes can provide strength and allow me to learn how to deal with issues on my own and without the need of others.
In other ways, I'm learning to let go of some of the ones I once held dear. This year has been incestuous, in the sense that I spend most of time, days, hours and weeks with the same people, but in another sense, I am building a portfolio and a network of people who want to work hard, write hard and get a lot of information out into the public sector. There are some good people, here, and I've dug the lot of them.
Friends are a weird beast. Those days when you laugh, live and love with them are the days that you could never imagine being without their presence. But when they go, sometimes very suddenly and with no explanation, you feel a tinge of sadness, but you regroup and journey on.
Sometimes friends aren't really friends - and it takes time and distance and meditation to see and understand that truth.
For a long time, I put everything under the umbrella of this special property. This property had (and in some ways still has) a vibrant community of young and old people and I made many connections through there.
But as much as I love that property and that community, it's a very ethereal and almost angelic place. It's romantic. It's star-soaked. It's luster-filled. It's a little bit magical.
But it's also not really real, at times.
Well, at least, not real for me.
But that's okay. There is a time and a season for all things. These days, I'm focusing on an end goal. I'm very, and admittedly, self-absorbed these days but I have to be to get to the next step. I'm honing my craft. I'm working out the kinks.
I'm working on me.
It's getting brighter, out there.
The Desperate Souls and the Lucky Ones
All around me, I see them. They're coming. They're approaching. They lurk on the horizon, just barely out of the crest of your view but still within the whiff of a strong breeze.
They are the walking dead.
I'm not talking about the HBO series - I'm talking about the people who have given up on this life and who are basically dead in their own shoes.
You've met them. Their views are set. They know everything. They judge. They don't need to go out past eleven because nothing good happens after eleven. They drive minivans. They have kids when they don't need to. They own a house that they can barely pay for. They wear sweatpants most days. They enjoy watching others and offer little creatively.
They are done, in every existential sense, but they continue to exist just for the sake of fulfilling some earthly quota.
They haunt me. They haunt you.
They haunt because they are.
I have recurring dreams of laying in a field, on a warm and mystical summer night, in the shower of a billion stars. I feel the grass through my fingers like the hair of the earth. I feel cared for, I feel warm and I feel connected to everything around me. I'm wearing a hoodie my friend Garry bought for me at Value Village. I celebrate the summer. I smile in the darkness where no one can see my expression, but it's as real as the stars. The corners of my lips spread. My face warms. I tuck my hands into my front pocket.
I tap my foot to rhythm of the universe.
And I get it.
Between the highways of and bi-ways of the rocky crags of this great country, I've seen peace and I've seen interest. The arms of the road are endless and they call to me, extending from molten rock into the flesh of my being.
Sadness is all around us, friends. It pervades our thoughts. It perverts our innocence. But in another way, it must be embraced. As children, we get coddled into thinking that the power of 'happy thoughts' will pacify us through the eye of any life-storm. Real strength and spiritual compassing, however, comes from the welcoming of sadness and the learning that is involved with dealing.
Dealing with the fact that we all have our burdens and our own shit to get through.
Sometimes songs say it best.
Torquil Campbell of 'Stars' drips it best from the steam of his pen in Life 2: Unhappy Ending. On one of their best albums to date, images of street brawls, riots and spray-painted hearts cascade through the flow.
'Life was supposed to be a film - was supposed to be a thriller
Was supposed to end in tears
But life could be nothing but a life - could be nothing but a con
Where's my unhappy ending gone?'
What happened to this life? Where did we go wrong? When did we, as humans, lose the passion and replace it with predictable, inane bullshit and comfortable couches?
Whatever we get is short, often filled with regret and never the way we'd imagined it to be. The moments and seconds are machine-click reminders that we are here and in that whatever we do, we need to inspire.
We need to fuel the lifeblood of each other's dreams. We need to stop being afraid of what people think of us.
We must sail on, through the stinging winds of conformity and the cold crash of rejection. Jon Brooks once said that even if one person, through the performing of his own songs, stepped out of their crappy basement and wrote an album, then it was all worth it.
Can we make it all worth it?
Are we desperate or lucky?
Wanting To Feel
I really miss my grandma. I feel that without her in my life, I'm missing a lot of spiritual navigation these days. She was the one who grounded everything. She was the one who brought my father into being who later made me.
She was the one who made me feel everything.
This life is an emotionally and spiritually bankrupt one, at times. I just finished watching the golden globes and though there were some people admonished, on a pearly, glittery stage who I really desire, I kept asking myself; "Is this it? Is this what all of us want?"
What the tract of land that we so desire to perch upon? Where does it rest in those seas of mysteries? Where does it reside in the skies of the great divide?
A friend of mine told me about her grandmother tonight. Some idiot told her that her grandma died and had no soul and that nothing would become of her eternity.
What a shitty, decrepit and ethereally bereft thought. And what an asshole to say such a thing.
How can we think that we have rights or ranks to supersede other people in what they believe and in what comforts them in the darkest nights? We are all working at it the only way we know how on this spinning, floundering, careening ball of mud.
My grandma just made sense. She knew God. And I'd like to think I know Him, too - in fact, I know I do. The One she spoke of loved everyone. The One she spoke of poured light and life into neighbours, widows, cellmates, hangers-on, hobos, artists and all people within its immediate vicinity.
And my grandma emanated those attributes. She was light. She was life. She was joy in a very immediate sense.
She loved to entertain and discuss. She loved to read the bible.
She once gave me 60 bucks so I could fly somewhere and visit a girl I liked to see if it could work out.
I was 19 - that was over a decade ago.
As we sat in her kitchen and I told her the deal, she said 'Well ya know Matt, you're a good kid. You're not on drugs or out screwing around so yeah - I'll lend you the money."
As she worked her way through the oggled logic of her loving mind, it somehow made perfect sense. She respected my dream and my desire.
She was really something.
We dance our way through this ridiculous maze and we only know how to spin, move, intermingle and intermix to the music and the beat that is being played.
I'm trying out this Journalism thing, and I hope it leads to something promising and career-oriented...
But my heart will always be with my grandma. She had a way of speaking into my life that no one else embodied. She was tender, understanding but firm when she needed to be.
Some people get replaced - and some never do -
But some continue to exist in our actions.
In our thoughts.
In our words.
In our love.
