Riot and Rage
By Billy | February 7, 2010
I want to use words like riot and rage
resist and (I) refuse(!)
revolt and rampage.
I want to climb mountains and sing from their ridges
or poison the fountains and burn all the bridges
I want all the answers to climb in my hands
and own lady Time and her infinite sands
I want my echo to be unfathomable.
…
I want to remember the marrow that lives
deep within the the bone…
and see past the skin
of this dampened perfection
into the perfect unknown.
…
I am whispering softly and no one will hear. I want my echo to be unfathomable.
Topics: Uncategorized | No Comments »
Things: We Forget To See God
By Billy | February 1, 2010
In a very similar style to the evolution/discovery of a mantra from a while back… I am frustrated with my abilities regarding expressing myself. What do I mean when I say certain things? A simple expression of how I’m feeling turns out to hold a lot more. Dissecting my thoughts as follows reveals a bit of hidden wisdom I didn’t know I had. I wrote the sentence that said best how I felt, examined it, realized it wasn’t complete and wasn’t articulate, fixed the words, and ended up with an answer. Huh.
I am looking for control
I am hurting and I want something to control.
I am hurting and I imagine that having control will stop the hurt.
I am hurting and I imagine that I can have control over something and that it would stop the hurt, even if I could.
I am always going to be hurting in some way. Control? Even if I could have it, the hurting wouldn’t go away completely.
The only source of real comfort is God. God can and does stop the hurt. God has the control.
God will heal me. God will guide me.
God is already healing me, already guiding me.
My hurt is the denial of Jesus’ sacrifice. The hurt wont exist if I allow Jesus to heal me. My clinging to control is my denying that God has my life in his hands.
Both parts of this problem are cured by faith. Faith that Jesus loves me (and the many weighty implications of that love). Faith that I am not lost, but that God knows exactly where I am going and how to get me there.
Faith is something I can do. Faith is not passive. Faith is an action, and an involved one at that.
Take a handle on your faith and you will see the Love and healing for which you have been yearning.
The only thing you can do is transform is your relationship with your God.
Have faith and grow in your God and you will be healed.
Faith in God requires more abandonment of that supposed control. (Remember that faith involves believing God loves you)
Trusting God’s plans, God’s power to transform, and God’s love is the only source of comfort.
Prayer will comfort you. Ask for comfort. Ask for faith. Ask for trust. Ask to transform. Ask to see love.
Pray. Just pray.
Nothing happens without God.
Prayer is the only thing that acknowledges our powerlessness. To pretend our finite existence is anything but transient and small is to deny how BIG God is. What better way to access this un-finite God than to smooth ourselves into the canvas and give God control. Who are we to pretend we have an ounce of control?
God, help us with our unbelief. Help us do these things. Help us forget those things.
Topics: This is my life | 2 Comments »
You Will Do It
By Billy | January 27, 2010
I found a piece of paper in my desk. It had questions typed on it. I had written answers. Here they are.
Your History?
∞
Your Future?
I have been broken, lost, patched up, and fallen to dust. From the mud I have risen up, not to anything more or less than a perfect creation of God. I have been prepared for things I wasn’t sure I could handle and am training for the obstacles I will conquer in the future. In the future I will look back and be unafraid to do the things my heart tells me to do.
What drives you?
(Everything) HOW COULD I NOT BE DRIVEN?
Your Present?
I AM A HUMAN BEING.
I belong here, standing in the footprints I presently occupy. If the ground beneath my feet crumbles apart, I will tumble down the mountain, proud to have been where I was and looking forward to life in the valley below.
Who do you want to be?
I will someday be a human who loves himself as much as he wants others to feel loved.
Faded in the background of the paper, I now see the faint letters that form the words, “Who are you?”
Topics: This is my life | No Comments »
and God Noticed…
By Billy | January 20, 2010
Geneis 1:4
…וַיַּ֧רְא אֱלֹהִ֛ים אֶת־ הָאֹ֖ור כִּי־ טֹ֑וב
viyar elohim et-ha’ovr ki tov…
Viyar is usually translated as “saw.” God saw that the light was good. Viyar also means see-to- something. Like, see to it that our guests have enough food…
God created light, separated the light from the dark, then saw to it that the light was good. He took the chaotic world and made good with it — that is one thing this undefinable thing seems very capable of.
Then, humans ate of the tree of knowledge of good and evil — the serpent said it would make them like God (the serpent never lied when he tricked the humans). (Thank you Rachel Sarah) After they ate, they learned that they will die. A real punishment, but not without a loop hole. After that they were given the chance to create (like God) through sexual reproduction. (The Tree of Knowledge… the world for Knowledge is the same as the word for Sex)
When we tango with the LORD, he will see to it that it becomes good. God created then worked to turn to chaotic universe into something good. We have the ability to create chaos, as was the case in the Garden, and between Cain and Abel, and in Noah’s time, and all throughout Exodus and… wait, did I mention the name Israel means To Strive With God ? The whole freaking nation was called Fights/Struggles with God.
He’s going to see to it that goodness happens.
We are humans. We mess up, we hurt ourselves, we hurt other people, we do things opposite of what our Maker says to do. We steal from our parents, punch our girlfriends, eat forbidden fruits, and it’s OK. God will see to it that it is good. When you read that, it should be encouraging to continue working, not just standing still.
Be still and know that he is The LORD. The Hebrew word for Peace, Shalom, is a homonym for the word Complete. If it’s seems “bad,” it’s just not complete. Keep moving, keep praying, keep loving, and you will find the Shalom there.
Topics: Philosophy | 2 Comments »
Monsters
By Billy | January 20, 2010
I fell for the lie of a world where control
was something i held in my hand
i know i will die
if i give up my soul
and let things exist as they’re planned
i fell for the sparkling of choices
and chose to ignore what was coming
i swallowed the barking and voices
i choked hard but just kept on humming
if monsters and demons have ever existed
i know very well on who’s enlisted
and the company bell told thirteen times
the clang was so clear and ironically clean
when compared to the world who had so lost her sheen
where the new had been being now are sights not worth seeing
they are shabby
and cold
and crumbling
when the mudslide subsided
i’d been left divided
insane
and old
and mumbling
there’s a bottle of lightning
under your bed
and you’re thinking it might be
thunder instead
while the difference is real
you’re not going to feel
the difference
if you are dead
Topics: poetry | No Comments »
The Fires had Just Started: Part 3
By Billy | January 11, 2010
Soot.
Everywhere.
My pants, my hands, my face, her bed skirt, that enigmatic little box. My fingerprints made smudgy little guilty eggs wherever I roamed that day. She was in enough of a tiff for some reason that she think to make me bathe, I am always so manic after a fire, I couldn’t let myself simmer in the washroom. Not today. Not with the one, solitary, lonely thing in the house, with a lock (and certainly a key) waiting to be liberated.
I still loathed the vulnerability I’d come to feel outside, but found comfort and distraction sitting in my room. biding my time. Thinking of ways to open that box. Thinking of when to open that box. Thinking of where to open that box.
Mania is something I’m not accustomed to. Mania in the midst of lethargy is unexpected, welcomed, overpowering, exhausting.
I woke up around noon the next day. My walls were covered with sooty fingerprints. My face stung. My body ached. I awoke on my floor, with my floor rug lazily covering the lower half of my achy body. I must have passed out. I should maybe clean these walls.
Hannah Nathan. She is a river of forgiveness and patience. I emerged from my sun room to find her preparing a sandwich for me. ”I was juss’a bout to wake you up, mister. Long night, indeed?” She asked, but she really told. Half way through my sandwich I realized she was talking about her more than about me.
Mrs. Nathan’s box was perhaps the most focused on thing in the history of everything. I neither ate nor breathed without it on my mind. It sat waiting, nestled under the spare blankets beneath her creaky bed.
I pretended to busy myself with cleaning the soot off my walls while waiting for the right moment. It came shortly after our eerily silent afternoon tea. While she cooked supper, I would tried to open it.
By the time she came in to tell me about supper’s readiness, I had practically set up camp on her bedroom floor. My multi-purpose pocketknife lay discarded to my side, many of the tools bent or broken, a spoon I had taken from the drawer sat precariously on the edge of the bed, bent fully in half. I had nearly opened it when I realized, to my horror, that she was standing in the doorway, watching me fiddle with her treasure chest in the dying sunlight of her solitary bedroom window. The box was small enough for me to consume it in a full fledged bear hug, which I did promptly and began to run, hoping to slip right past her.
I was caught red handed, I was bad, I was confused. I don’t know why I obsessed about that box, I don’t know what I was holding at the time, I don’t know where I was intending on going with it, but I knew I wanted in. She seized me in a furious moment of desperation. I think it was her elbow that found my face, perhaps her hip bone. We piled on top of each other, the three of us. We fought like bandits. I don’t know where I was clawing at, I don’t know how I was held down, I don’t know what struck me where… I don’t think anything in the world would have stopped me from fighting her. Nothing in the world but the sound of the contents of that box breaking apart and kissing each other with the haunting beautiful jingle of entropy in action. I closed my eyes and thought, nay, wished I had died.
————-
more later.
Topics: Works of Fiction | No Comments »
Lucy and I
By Billy | January 9, 2010
The following is the exact text of a paper I wrote for a psychology class last semester. The assignment was to write about a part of my life that affected my total development. I wrote about the girl whom I’m having lunch with in 45 minutes.
Lucy and I
I will call her Lucy in this paper. A year ago, I would have used her full name as if to say, “That’s her! Everyone look at this one. She’s the one to blame. Everyone should know what she’s done and therefore who she really is.” Lucy it is. We did it to each other, Lucy and I, and we did it to ourselves.
Lucy and I became, “Lucy and I,” on May 7, 2003. That progressed quickly into, LUCY AND I (look at us, everyone!) and then on into LUCYANDI. LUCYANDI were inseparable. LUCYANDI were dependent. LUCYANDI were confused. We were a single unit and we were definitely, definitely, definitely in love.
LUCYANDI knew we were in love pretty quickly. Nobody else could really comprehend our transcendent experiences, but that was ok, we could just look to each other, rely on each other, grow with each other. Nobody else understood. My friends would take me aside, literally 3 on 1, my back against the wall and say, “this isn’t the Billy we used to know. YOUANDLUCY have got to straighten some stuff out.” They couldn’t understand. My parents’ critiques of us were expected. ”We miss you at home and haven’t seen you for days; you always look so tired and grumpy.” They couldn’t understand; what would my parents know about love?
You’re probably wondering at this point what I knew about love by this time. Well, I knew a lot, thankyouverymuch. I knew that love was patient and kind; this meant that when she’d strike me, it was my chance to prove myself — it was my chance to be her rock. Love didn’t envy, so it was easy for me to close my eyes during entire movies because the girls on the screen might make me envious of the guys near them. Love doesn’t boast, and isn’t proud, so I found ways to belittle my accomplishments, even in my own head. She was to be exulted and I would work behind the scenes.
Imagine you take every thing that has ever been said of love, all the powerful, whimsical, inflated, inspirational things that have ever been recorded. Now distort them to fit the selfish mould of a lost human looking for a bit of validation, and that’s what sort of love I was in. I took everything Paul of Tarsus wrote about love and completely misconstrued it to exclude every human being who wasn’t Lucy. I made Romeo and Juliet look admirable. I made up my mind and I stuck to it.
I have given so much attention to what our relationship was and why it existed to try and answer the question, “why?” that I can’t help but still ask myself, and that I have such inadequate answers for when asked by friends and family. Why did you stay in it? Because it was the loving thing to do. Beyond that, the introduction to my relationship with Lucy should contextualize why the story affects me so much to this day.
Four years is a long time. Four years is longer than most commitments I’ve ever made. I was a high school student for four years, but only for 1/4th of the day, 5/7ths of the week, and 3/4ths of the year. LUCYANDI were a full time deal. I was her boyfriend for the entire four years. (We literally broke up 4 years to the day after we started). Four years is a long time.
At the beginning of this past summer, I was eating dinner at a local soup kitchen and was approached by a woman who claimed to be a gypsy and that she could read palms. ”You are not who you say you are. I know your name,” she said to me. I was more than a little perplexed and felt my privacy had been invaded as she seized my arm, felt my palm, and counted the most obvious scars on my arms. ”You… I will call you Phoenix.” She spoke it with such conviction; I didn’t know how to respond at the time. I am thankful now, though, because she has given me a very helpful metaphor for me to rely on.
LUCYANDI is the ashes out of which this bird has grown.
I am taking the opportunity to use this assignment to reflect on the events in my past collectively known as LUCYANDI. How has LUCYANDI impacted the person I am today? In what ways has it affected my total development?
“Impacted the person I am today…”
I’ll warrant we should examine who “the person I am today” actually is while we look at the things that got him there. The person I am today is, as every person is every day, dynamic and changing. What is true about this today will not be true on another day, perhaps. Perhaps it will change in the next hour.
The person I am today is a person who is not willing to settle any longer for the thought of stasis. When Lucy and I were LUCYANDI, we stayed in a vacuum. Human beings grown and develop with interactions with other human beings. These interactions were lacking, especially on my end. For months of my freshman year of college, I lived (unbeknownst to my parents, her two roommates, or her parents) in her room — and often bathroom — in her apartment. I washed myself with water from the sink at 5 AM and snuck out of the apartment before her roommates were awake to take notice of my living there. I would frequently come home and stay in the bathroom with the lights off until everyone could be assumed asleep and there was no worry of a roommate walking in without knocking and seeing me there.
Lucy was uncomfortable with me talking or interacting with females. There were certain people whom she had given me a green light to talk to, but otherwise I limited my contact with people, especially girls, to virtually nothing. I remember coming to her house at the end of the day and reporting exactly how many times I had looked at, spoken to, or acknowledged another girl throughout the day and receiving a decently powered punch or a slap for each infraction.
Lucy did her best to keep me to herself. Whether done consciously for this reason or not, the seclusion I found myself in stunted our growth as people. For the four years I dated Lucy, which were exponentially oppressive as time passed, I didn’t challenge myself with the views of other people that I should have been in contact with. I didn’t learn to assimilate with the lifestyle of a random roommate who would have been my dorm roommate. During my freshman year of college, I didn’t meet hall mates from other states, cultures, religious backgrounds, sexual orientations, and education levels. As a direct response to the seclusion I experienced during the last two or three years of LUCYANDI, I now appreciate the variety life has to offer to a degree I don’t know if I ever would have reached otherwise.
Lucy hurt me. She was nearly the death of me many times over. I feel like the entire LUCYANDI event was a huge hurricane that came and swept through my emotional state of being. Everything was tested and nearly everything came down. After the storm settled, I was left with only the foundations of my house. Everything beyond the basics was in shambles or on the brink.
My sense of personal worth, first and foremost, had been obliterated. For years after the relationship I would ask myself, “What did I do to deserve what I got?” rather than telling myself, “I didn’t deserve to be beaten and controlled.” I have finally begun to see and feel the difference, but for most of the aftermath, I let her words and actions sink in. I was beaten, put into seclusion, starved, and belittled because there was surely something wrong with me, I thought, and that needed to be addressed.
My concept of self worth needed to be reconstructed in an entirely new fashion. My simple log-cabin-style home just didn’t make sense any more and I needed to design a structure more reliable and capable of enduring stress, should another hurricane sweep through. I needed to make sense of a world where people who tried to do the right thing would get broken down for their intentions.
I am a person today with a well defined opinion about the world and the way she operates. I have developed strong beliefs regarding human nature, right and wrong, cause and effect, determinism, and grace. These beliefs are the result of the introspection induced and demanded by experiences connected with LUCYANDI. I began developing many of them while hiding in her bathroom during my freshman year.
Because of Lucy, in many ways, I actually consider myself a human (a term that now carries a lot of implications). I hadn’t really considered things too much before the hurricane, and now I have refined opinions about it. Before I had just let things be. I didn’t think about my rights, my needs, or my comfort levels. Now I am conscious all the time of what I deserve as a human and what other people around me deserve as humans, too.
Because of Lucy, I am pretty good at knowing when I’m out of my comfort zone and standing up about it. I have abandoned conversations, asked people to watch their word choices, ended relationships, started dialogs with my parents, and in turn learned to be more sensitive to other people’s particular triggers and discomforts. That’s not to say I’m awesome at expressing my discomfort appropriately, as I am often on the defensive too readily, waging battles against people who aren’t actually fighting with me.
After my relationship with Lucy, I felt weak, useless, undeserving, bad (wicked), and hurt. The hardest of these to grow from has been the last one: hurt. Feeling weak and useless is a response to my position of relative powerlessness in life for many years. Undeserving and bad come from constant physical and emotional abuse. I can sit down with these and remind myself that I am strong, that I can accomplish things, that I do have goodness in me.
Being hurt is different. To feel hurt, there’s nothing I can or should really do about that. I should feel hurt. I spent two years post-LUCYANDI ignoring the fact that I was hurting. One day my friend held my by the arms and told me, “It’s okay to be hurting.” Those were some of the most important words I was ever told. I am learning these days to be hurt and to just let that be. I am learning to be alone and carry weights by myself, rather than growing restless by myself and sharing my load with every human I know. I am learning that it’s OK to be hurt and that pain isn’t always deserved.
The person I am today is one who thinks about why he’s doing things. He constantly questions his motives and whether it falls into accordance with things he’s comfortable with. He’s terrified of stepping into more pitfalls like Lucy, and is trying to balance the feeling of “I made a horrible mistake for four years,” with “as long as we choose to grow from things, they aren’t mistakes.” The person I have grown into being is a person with relentless hope, the type that of hope that exists only after you lose everything. The person I have developed into is one that sees things in a broader sense. My ego was smashed to pieces and while rebuilding it, I had a chance to see the world more objectively than the first time I set things up. This time I had a better perspective. The person I was when LUCYANDI broke up was carrying a lot of facts and not very much sense of it. I had to sit down and think about how the world works, where my source of validation and happiness came from, who was in control of my life and emotions, and what I wanted my life to shape up to be.
LUCYANDI played an intimate and vital role in my personal development. Lucy was a refining fire for me — the most painful and confusing refinement I’ve ever experienced. Nonetheless, I gained insight and found many foundational things to rely on. I have found who I am and want to be as a result of being forced into so many roles in the past. I still ache and mourn for missed opportunities, I often close my eyes during movie scenes involving domestic abuse, and I still feel wicked from time to time…
I am thankful that I am where I am now, and I can almost say that I am thankful that I got here the way I did. Regardless of how I feel about it, Lucy is huge in who I am today.
Topics: Nonfiction, This is my life | No Comments »
Things Fall Apart, in Time.
By Billy | January 8, 2010
The glass prison had been smashed, long before the hands knew how. They hung there lamely waiting for the hour to change. One should never throw stones when living in a glass house, but perhaps throwing ones self through the walls and getting the hell out of there as fast as possible is acceptable. If you move fast enough, the deadly jewels will neither harm nor notice you on their way down.
So was his escape plan, with a face set in stone. How many years had he been counting, how long had he stared blankly waiting for this moment. He taught me a lesson about survival.
Nobody does.
His body ached and creaked agonizingly. His heart seemed to have stopped beating years before. His chest cavity was an empty room, filled with heavy weights, also waiting for their chance to be cut free.
Entropy always happens, sometimes it strikes like a cheetah.
With a silent smile, he relaxed his face for the first time in his life. My grandfather sighed his last sigh and let go.
I had let that clock sit there in the hall for ages, never thinking to maintain it, never thinking it wanted to be wound. The springs had rusted, the windings stayed tense. The hands all hung lifeless at 6:30.5. I never thought the housing would give way, I never imagined that potential would actualize. I thought someone had broken in through a window that night, but only found that someone had broken out. I examined the gore and put him to rest on the sidewalk. It’s trash day, anyway.
Topics: Uncategorized, Utterly Random | No Comments »
Standing in the Hurricane
By Billy | January 6, 2010
Your weaknesses are your strongest points; your greatest potential for growth, learning, understanding, and to spread knowledge. The universe has a great ability to manifest the perfect storm for you. Your perfect storm. Maybe you should run from it and wait for four more tornadoes to show up, or maybe you should just brace yourself and charge in there. Maybe the winds will strip you naked and smash you. Maybe you’ll feel shamed. Maybe you’ll get broken bones and scars.
(Probably)
Sometimes you have nothing left but to raise your head and scream back at the lightning. Sometimes you have to look like a fool. Sometimes you will be a fool.
(Probably not)
Surviving the storm might leave you more emotionally than physically shaken. The whole reason for running was that you were scared for your physical life, but your body got over it much more quickly than your mind. Chew on that.
I’m going to go out today with a quote spoken to Bart Simpson. I love that the quote itself is contextless enough to stand on it’s own and be relevant to most of life.
“Let me start by saying… Good for you, son!
It’s always good to see young people taking an interest in danger. Now a lot of people are going to be telling you you’re crazy
and maybe they’re right. But the fact of the matter is:
Bones heal, chicks dig scars, and The United States of America has the best doctor-to-daredevil ratio in the world!”
If you’re capable of reading this post, you can 1) read. 2)find a computer someplace, 3)have the spare time to read a blog post.
I’ll warrant any death-defying stunt you engage in will likely not permanently destroy your life. Rather, it will likely enhance your life beyond your imaginations.
We’re all running from something. Stop.
Topics: This is my life | No Comments »
Step Towards Peace: 1
By Billy | January 5, 2010
Drink tea.
Drink coffee, drink milk, drink water, drink juice, drink viper blood. It doesn’t really matter. Drink something. Really drink something.
You have 24 hours tomorrow, that’s 1,440 minutes. I promise you that you can find 10 minutes in there to do nothing but sip, smell, taste, feel, swallow, and smile. It’s not that we don’t have time for doing stuff we probably should, it’s that we choose to not make time. Not choosing to do something is a choice.
Put your hands on the cup, feel the temperature. Put your lips to the brim of the cup but do not sip. Just smell. Exhale and feel the temperature. Think about a time in your life that you’ve tasted the taste you’re about to experience. Think about the number of people in the world that have the exact same liquid in their cup. Think about the plants, people, animals, energy, and time that brought about your ability to drink. (You’re cup was made by someone or something, your tea leaves were grown, harvested, carried, packaged, etc., your viper blood came from a viper who had a family…)
Smile. Smile because the universe works.
Smile because you have told yourself you’re not allowed to frown or worry during your milk-drinking-time.
Sip. Sip however deeply your body wants you to. Let your drink sit in your mouth, taste it, feel the cool or heat against your tongue. What do your teeth feel like at that moment? Someone else in the world is swallowing the same drink as you.
Smile. Smile because you are never alone.
Put your cup down. This is sipping time. You are protected from the supposed evils in the universe while you are drinking your juice. Inhale. Inhale again. Inhale once more. Hopefully by the third or fourth time, you’ll actually be breathing. Have you ever really breathed? It’s the best.
Smile. Smile because your body works.
Drink again.
This time, be greedy. Take a deep swig, forget to savor every molecule. Indulge in it.
Smile. Smile because you are free.
There is infinite potential in your cup. The Brownian motion in your drink is ineffably complex. Chaos is reacting to your infinitesimally small actions between and during sips. You are the Causer of everything in the future — near and far from you. You are the Effect of that same infinite. In this very cup is everything. You are experiencing complete unity, and you will never fully appreciate it. You are swirling through existence as the exhale of God. You are drowning in your own Buddha nature. You are. You BE. You be.
Enjoy your beer for as long or as little as you see fit. Allow peace to sit on the floor with you. Welcome happiness to your your table.
Smile. Smile because you are alive.
Smile because you are loved jealously. (Trust me)
Smile because you can.
Topics: Philosophy, This is my life | No Comments »
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