Thursday, February 26, 2009

Letters To Chris Morales

It is not the destination but the journey that is important. We hear this but do we really, truly grasp its meaning. As we sit back in our day to day lives its important to take an account or measure of ourselves. Self. is an important word these days. It is not just that we differentiate our selves from the rest of the world but more importantly we include our selves into the day to day living that is going on around us. I muse that these two things are mutually exclusive. How can we on one hand do for our selves what we as individuals must do to live a full and benefitial life while at the same time tying our selves into the mold that the society we live in dictates that we personify? Talk about an exercise in futility. Society dictates in our culture that to be a person of worth we must have a few and distiguishable traits. I ask you this; why must we be tied to these traits? In every new revolutionary idea their is a break from traditional thinking. The world was flat for hundreds of years till a few men thought enough of themselves to question the norm. Beauty was considered a certain thing until Van Gogh and Picasso decided Beauty was in the eye of the beholder. In today's day and age, and in this country, why is the divorce rate so high? Why is crime rampant throughout? Why, because the bar is not raised high its just slanted. Where is free thought? Where is the adventure that once made things so great. Why don't I live on the moon or mars? Why dont people leave there individual homes and set out on missions of self discovery to find the things in life that they will be passionate about? Where are the risk takers, the dreamers, and the emotional journeys? Why do people choose to live in an unhealthy box of societal unhappy rightness instead of forging there own individual path? The only answer I have for you is that we are cowards. We are afraid to face the unknown. We believe the world and for the most part new experience is something to be disdained and feared than something that should be embraced and cherished. We bury our hopes and dreams for the idea that we should not stray from the flock. It is important to remember that life only holds in its hands what you put into it. So to my friends that read this I would say go outside the box that you may have created for yourself. Reach for the stars even if it seems like a ridiculously long stretch. The only way you will look back and realize it was all worth while is if in the end you are content in the way you took part in the journey. Think outside my friends. Discover yourself and your uniqueness in the quiet of a park or the buzzing of a city. Take a closer look at what could make you happy. We put all of our faith in immaterial things to make us complete and full. Find out what will make you happy that is not set in front of you on a platter. Be a revolutionary in your own self. Make a difference in your own life.

Civil Revolutionary

Today I decided to walk on my hands,
My friends asked me why but I was sure they would not understand.
Someday you must make a stand,
Today I will differentiate and become my own man.

I am a civil revolutionary,
I put my eyes to the sky and see things you cannot see.
I listen to the part of me that I wish to be,
I open my mind to things as vast as the sea.

Do not mistake my course,
I do not indulge in flippant mediocrity of any sort.
I simply believe in discovering

Dominoe Theory

We are all dominoes, standing side by side
Waiting for the man next to us to fall down
So we may in turn fall down.
Clack, Clack, Clack is the defeaning sound or our doom
We know what approaches but our backs are turned
We marvel at our numbers and laugh at the blank back of the man in front.
Ignoring the roar and concentrating on our ignorance.
Should we instead lean our selves toward the tide,
Tip the scales of balance and pull our brothers with us.
Forcing them to turn and see what approaches and to pull the man next to them
Chaotic, inverted, reverse chain reaction.
Halting time and destruction for a moment
Opening a window behind us so we can properly see the path ahead
Is it impossible to change our ways
We fall, that is what is meant for us
This is the cry of the box of dominoes
Setup to be knocked down
Not having the imagination to be something different
Maybe a box of dominoes can only be a box of dominoes

Train from Ankara

I am out of the city now, away from the hustle and flow of life. In the background is Turkish folk music, the constant strumming of guitars, the sad painful song, moaning the sun behind the distant hills and rows and rows of farming tracts. I dosed through the erratic transition between sweltering, jumbled, madness that is a living city and the light, sleepy, slowness of the countryside. The stark light, tan mounds, browns, and cloudless blue skies seem to be awkward and desolate and beautiful all at the same time.
The train rolls on, rocking back and forth, lurching and shaking as if it has some kind of illness it cannot explain. Small clouds dot the sky now and the sun seems to be plowing through them in an unhurried nomadic way, having done its job for the day and retreating to some other place and time. I have slowed down as well. I feel rested and young and indifferent. The ungodly tossing and turning that has plagued me for a week while stopped, has ended and I am painfully aware of being lolled to sleep while moving.
My stomach is full of things that make the whole world I am visiting more surreal. Gifts that are appreciated more while in the belly of the desert, or the long expanse of plain. Melon, sweet bread and water shared by the family in my sleeper car. We do not communicate with words but we are travelers, moving through the world together for a time, and that is enough to bond us.
It is not all space and dust out here. Technology raises its many faceted head in the distance, diffracting light and peace and simpleness, detracting from its surrounding, a cellular tower. A Muslim woman is out feeding chickens. She is probably a decendent from many other women who stood and fed the relations of the chickens pecking around her feet. Hopefully she never realizes what the cell tower bodes. Her man is stuck between rows of cabbages, endlessly toiling for his family, weeding. Another house in the distance and a man raises his arm in a forlorn salute and waves it from his front porch not in greeting but to say goodbye to things and people he will never see. As the train passes him everything is soft, muted, tan and brown.
All the thoughts of whats ahead have been thought and discarded. As long as the train continues on its path I will continue along mine. This train is my destiny for the moment. The quiet before the storm. The path of the train is easy and meandering without deviation except for the lurch and roll, though that too is constant. Maybe the lurch and roll is the trains unhappy way of dealing with the smoking tendrils of thought about life on a straight path. The whisper of a life of freedom and choice.
The train has the same choices as its passengers, to stop or to go, to be or not, for good or not. To close our eyes or to have them opened. I fear for those who have their eyes closed. What will happen when they miss the transitions that life has put before them. Will they be able to adjust to the stark difference of their own reality, of where they were to where they ended up? Will they be able to see how they arrived there?
The sun is setting and is half gone. Just sitting on the rim of the earth making the sky turn liquid, chaotic and crazy. The moon its cousin has made its first appearance now. It seems like a good sign that tonight it will be full and bright in the southern part of the world. Another good sign reaches me from the dining car; the smell of spices and food being prepared. The atmosphere is musky and light, and, ominous and dark all at the same time. It is an emotional thing this train and for awhile I look at the emotions around the train painted like the liquid sky, chaotic and crazy.
Some passengers look anxious to reach a destination, maybe any destination, while others look onto their final destination with trepidation and loathing. A few, like myself, have no idea where the train is going and do not chance to wonder about it. Our only thoughts are of where we are at. What is happening outside those dark windows under that full moon.
Outside of this pent up emotional vehicle a dark slow landscape passes by. It barely takes note of our passing and we barely have a chance to process it. Just more strangers meeting in someplace they thought they would never see each other. Still the music plays on, the mournful voice sings her fears to us and to the dark abyss outside. It makes me feel alone for a spell because I do not understand the words, so I do not understand her worry. Though this passenger feels alive because of it. To be someplace that I have never been before, sitting here with only my thoughts to keep me company.
I could jump from the train right now and be lost to the world forever. I do not though. I roll two cigarettes for me and the night porter. For now this is my home, my path, and the only place I want to be. This train from Ankara.

Optimism

OptimismAh, to start out, to seek something better, to relinquish the pasts hold on you. I seem to be bound by the inexplicable taste of something and the desire to be something I am not. Well, I, of course can only be what I am. I have tasted and moved on in body, now must my spirit and heart follow. I have started to break away and through the web of lies and self doubt to discover the bright shiny darkness of what is me. Not darkness in the sense of light and darkness but the dismal quality of my hidden being. The not looked for, the unearthed, the unwashed, and the unseen. It is when I truly look upon the diseased manifesto of my life that I can amputate the flailing and phosphorus burnings of before and focus on the next. The yet to come is exciting knowing that the last is over and done. The dawn is clear and morbid and somber and loath to peek over the mountainous divides of past soulless trials and tribulations. But, peek it does. And in that oh radiant shred of a beam I see possibility, understanding, awakening. It warms me and I crest a universe for it to shine on me in full. This is why I continue on. So continue on I will.

Jumping off without knowing

It seems I have lept from a cliff or precipice, of my own devising to be sure, but a cliff none the less. What is odd is the timing of the jump. I thought I had just jumped more than a scarce year ago, but in a further study of honesty, I have to say it was a long time before that. As the experience of falling and realizing it is something I had no experience in, I decided to get wrapped up in it. To embrace it and follow it right through to its terminus. The abrupt stop. I am quite lost in the fall.
At first I thought it was inevitable that I just watch as I plunged deeper and deeper in to the core. Most times I just mused that I was somewhere else, doing something else, with someone else. Though, I have realized that by willing myself, I can turn this way and that. I have lost the glue that holds me to a set of rules and structure. In fact I am not falling at all but flying towards something extraordinarily bizarre and real.
At thirty two I was beyond any one persons help. I was smack dab in the middle of a crisis, too early to be midlife, and to late to be anything else. I lost in me the glue that holds me to a society that I was floundering in. At this moment I sit somewhere for no other purpose but to sit and muse and figure. It is a great and seemingly worthless past time. Yet here I sit. Stuck with legs on both side of the fence trying desperately to find meaning in chicken bones, stars, and blades of grass.
Repetition and banality threatened to drive me mad with desperation. Menial, unending servitude to the here and now, the get and give, the stride and climb. The go, go, go. I have flown the coupe. Left life behind and moved on to something different. So long crazy world, I said. Now, I have gone mad, and pirouetted into the grosses of states. I have traveled over twenty four thousand miles in the last year to find myself only accomplishing in creating a monster. Sadly finding love again. I melted and realized that underneath the large iceberg of my outer trimmings was a hollow that stored the fragments of a puzzle that had been not, as of yet, fixed together. It was swirling and trappings of what could be and unfortunately not what was. Terrible shock to find. Unbeknown to me I was a conflagration of nothingness and everything that I thought I should be and wasn't. I was unraveled. Though this unraveling made me into an eagle and I spread my wings and fly here and there at my whim.