“Each day is another opportunity to choose to partake in the process of discernment. In implementing discernment, I stay on equal ground with all. In judging others’ behaviors, I automatically give up energy, and view myself as lesser- or greater-than. In observing, while gently releasing judgmental thoughts, I remain energized, at peace, and available to serve.”
“There are those who would profit off of their victimization. They make the most callous of leaders and point others astray. Listen with open heart to unveil deepest intention. Seek purity. Especially beware the individuals who magnify their victimhood, who justify their hurt — their proclaimed suffering masked as boldness. Be weary the wolf who appears meek and wounded; there in lies the deepest of traps. Step away from those who lead with a metal clapper.”
“An amulet of honor houses strength of character, a sense of right and wrong, and faith. It fortifies gentle wisdom, demonstrates patient maturity, and amplifies clear sight. True integrity shines in the deepest of caverns, silencing the monsters at bay without need of sword or flame. Be that which is true and free. Free of the damaging ways of the world, dictated in a million ways through a million voices. Shut out the dark of days, with truth and dignity, that which is the light of you.”
He helps me up the stairs with a gentle guiding hand.
He hurries to the room, when I call out his name, whatever room I’m in.
He comes home with surprises from the local bakery.
He wheels me through the airport and museum, even as he is uncomfortable with crowds and it hurts his arms.
He doesn’t complain.
When I say I am thinking about growing my hair out grey, he encourages it, and says he likes grey hair. When I say my hair is actually more white than grey, he says he prefers white.
When I put on a bit of makeup, he says I look nice but also look fine without it.
When I look down at my growing tummy, he says, “I like it.”
When we have a spat, he gives me space and then asks to come in, and then apologizes for his part–sometimes with handwritten letters.
He rubs my back and kisses my toes. He holds me close when I cry and have trouble falling asleep — from anxiety, pain, or fear.
He listens to my frequent nightmares, the ones from dreams and the ones from the past. He asks if I am drinking enough water, and then brings me water, in my preferred mug (the clean one that doesn’t smell bad), with water he has collected from the artesian well downtown.
He leaves his office room for ‘object permanence checks,’ as he knows if I can’t see it (him), sometimes I question if it (he) exists.
He never comments on my messy, unbrushed hair or mismatched clothes. He doesn’t readily point out when I’ve made a mistake or error . . . in words or judgment.
He finds my oddities and antics and misuse of words to be charming.
He doesn’t laugh at my ways or mock me, or shake his head in disapproval.
He gives me the space and freedom to be me.
He is proud of my efforts at home and beyond, and tells me so. He stops to look at me, I mean really look at me, and offers a kind, gentle smile.
He makes a point to tell me this is the happiest he has ever been in his life.
He doesn’t objectify me or compare me to other people.
He doesn’t offer ways I can improve myself.
He rides the waves of my hormonal outbursts.
He prays for patience and to love me the best way possible.
And he does.
He tells silly, off the wall jokes and riddles.
He dances with me in the bedroom to ‘Brown Eyed Girl,’ and sings out the lyrics in a bashful voice.
He takes me to doctor appointments.
He helps shop for groceries.
He stocks the car and attic with emergency supplies.
He lends his dress shoes to my eldest son for that important interview.
He is silent and full of grace in harder times.
He is resilient and full of spunk in lighter moments.
He has introduced a genre of movies and shows that add spice to our collection. We bird watch together from balcony chairs, the ones he bought cushions for.
He refills the birdbath and worries for our feathered friends, scolding the neighbor’s cat . . . to go some other place. He says he will do something, and then he does it. He speaks the truth.
Means what he says. Says what he means. He says he’d die for me.
His hugs are tight and warm. He is a gentle giant, and my steadfast cheerleader and protector.
He doesn’t say I’m beautiful. He shows me.
In the act of identifying as outside the norm, or in presenting outwardly with attributes which fall under the encompassing label of anomaly, one is thusly distinguished by self and society as an outcast.
Cast away from the middle ground, removed and divided from the dot that hovers on the center of number line– the heart of box, the eye of needle–one becomes adrift in a land of make believe constructs.
Broken truths, as yoke from egg, fall as they may; the sun of knowledge blinding the eyes from beyond. Beyond what is, removed. Beyond what is, replaced. Beyond, existing still in another time and place, forgotten and lingering on the threshold of reasoning. A waiting watchman set upon a hill of misty sky.
Society, as too a construct, dictates limiting and finite truths based on anomalies in perceived character. An interdependent system of preordained order that creates something of nothing, collecting assumed data as input, to produce a tangible interdependent product of conclusion.
Thoughts built upon thoughts. Castles in the sky illuminating bricks layered upon bricks of a builder’s wants and truths.
Even as the watchtower keeper rises, his naked eye upon the many, parading his power and dominating might, the causation blossoms. It’s blooms as dark petals penetrating what was in a place of no end, nor beginning.
As a bonafide noun and as a moving verb of action, the keeper himself, who houses his truths, in baskets woven by weaver same, cannot exist as a singular, without observing below. His careful watching a method for collecting truths and making sense of senses. A complicated matter, as even the senses were once eradicated from the mist, gathered in safekeeping to make sense of what seemed of something.
Interdependent is the onlooker, whether glancing in the clear lake or within the walls of decorated turret.
One, in himself, split he wanders; footsteps marching, pounding through the differences within and without.
Within, erupts comparison to aspects of other parts of self. In how fingers move to become separate from hand, as the heart from the mind. Likewise, spirit from soul, life force from nature.
Nighttime fails, and he, the one, divides and divides into separateness, not as an organic substance, of blood and pulse, but one moving in way in which the outside orchestra is silenced.
A singular onlooker, the outer world wiped clean, what is recognized, other than wholeness, other than a new one: undone, unraveled, re-birthed.
His mind drifts and a voice enters:
“As the baby is of all, undistinguished, as is man, though he knows not of this. By nature we take from what has been seen and create that which is unseen, illusions twisted into fabrics of causation that speak of a forbidden truth of naught.
A twisted, again, labyrinth of makeshift corners and caravans, marauding living forest of unknown potential. A potential to mask the substantial of what is, to procreate what has come before.
We are neither here nor there, but bound to the evidence set forth above and below us, as even the ground and sky become tangible in their blundered separation. How the blue that is not blue, divides the sky that is not sky, from the earth that is not ground.
And still, we seek this separation to makes sense of what is naught. Keying the inlet of mind with a cause for opening, as fish spawning in river too cold. What is birthed is naught, as creation is numbed in the shivering-blind.”
Opens the eyes, the keeper, if such word as ‘eyes’ existed. If such word as ‘words’ survived; if either ‘existed’ was scribed. For if person existed to scribe, with instrument to hold, and hands to grasp, had he grasped for the end, recognizing no beginning, recognizing his recognition was not of him?
A some semblance of a once someone drifted. Neither here nor there, in being, but in believing he be, and believing he believe.
For who is the one who believes?
Said I, “I am I.”
Said I, “I am.”
Irradiate the one (of I), irradiate the all of illusion.
Irradiate the illusion of more than one, irradiate the separation, the norm, the typical.
For it is not this ‘them’ that breeds and dictates isolation and destruction and ill-ways, but the belief of the belief.
For when all is erased, as pounding wave to sand, what remains out of sight, are the intricate makings of mountains crumbled, smoothed over by the ages of time within time. A barrier to existing within existing.
And how can this gentle mind of man, this watchtower keeper remain nimble, yet taught? Centered, yet swinging? A spectrum concaving into the unbearable light.
And though he be the mountains still, and the very sand beheld. There is nothing of nothing. No words in his tale, as the very breath that is blown, becomes wind to cast sail to sea drifting in existing, unseen.
The wandering keeper, stepping: a dream within a dream.
His castle, shifted.
The bricklayer, the valley, the very bricks, merged.
The one who watched becoming the one watching. The one who waited becoming the one who arrived.
In the break of slumber
Thine eyes open
To black-feathered beauty
Sunray’s preamble
Trickling through ebony dark
The first call
Before first call
Silence sings
And dawn song echoes
Treasured daylight
Brought forth
Ribbons waving
From etched beak
Melodic fragrance uplifts
The chasms of nature breathes
The prelude before note
Adrift in honeysuckle
Boundless sky
Floats
A gentle gratitude
A gracious yearning
A blossom heart blossomed
A surrender sweetly surrendered
The last step brought back
Slipped between sheets
Heart song bumping in the overlap
Broken and re-broken
To bring forth deepest yoke
Nibbling its way in drippings
Forging a path of glitter-gold
All shattered weeping wrung dry
Longing’s longing
Announced in the rising
His platter of lickings, good
Lapped up
With hungry eyes
With starved gratitude
Of last crow awoken
Carry forth the new dawn
I am not just kind
I am aware
I am aware of my thoughts, my motives, my inclinations
My doubts, my worries, my fears
My loves
My woes
My struggles
My hopes
I am not just kind
I am open
I am open to my frailties, my flaws, my imperfections
I am open to new ideas, new ways of thinking and experiencing
I am open to radical change
In myself, in the world, in another
I am not just kind
I am wild
I am wildly compassionate, a fierce defender of the voiceless
A reckoning to the lonely, a chasm to the fear bound
I am wild in my imaginings, creation, connections
My loves
My woes
My struggles
My hopes
I am not just kind
I am strong
I am powerful in my convictions
I am powerful in my abilities
I am powerful in my attitude
I am strong in what I choose to take in, and in what I choose
To leave behind
I am strong in my determination to be the best I know to be
In my realization that I am enough
And that we are enough
I am not just kind
I am finely tuned
I am tuned with the precision of decades of introspection
I am tuned with eons of acceptance
I am tuned with the grace of self-dignity
My adobe is the musical reef
My loves
My woes
My struggle
My hopes
I am not just kind
I am a fortune
I am a boundless treasure, transmuted from the darkness
Upheld from the dungeon reserves
A fortune to be found and returned
To that which is
My loves
My woes
My struggle
My hopes
I am not just kind
I treat people, no matter their age, creed, beliefs, values, economic status, celebrity status, political stance, the same, regardless. I accept people at face value.
I am not easily offended.
I respect others and they respect back.
I try my best not to take things personally, and if I do, I step back and analyze what is in myself that makes me fear.
I have no need to prove.
I accept others have bad days.
I recognize the energy I put out there is reciprocated.
I attract kind people and open-minded people.
I believe most people have good intentions at heart.
When something doesn’t sit right, I say “thanks, but no thanks.”
I respect and accept those who are expressing anger.
There comes a time to let anger go in order not to breed further separation.
I appreciate others looking out for others.
I try my best not to participate in gossip.
By nature, I don’t choose sides.
I recognize I can do my works by staying true to my nature.
What I bring up from the roots directly reflects my intentions.
My intentions are not for self and self-alone.
My roots drink from a space of emptiness—a nurturing fortitude of love and service.
My roots drink from a place of absorbing and sharing knowledge.
I radiate kindness, because at the root of me I have others at heart.
People are drawn to what they innately are.
My life is filled with kindred souls who are open-minded, accepting, and honest.
They respect my fruits because they sense my intention.
By following my heart and calling, I have created a life full of richness.
People need to be seen, heard, and believed.
When I am an equal student, I am the very best of who I am.
I am in a state of neutrality and logic or a state of loving grace.
I recognize my opinions change over time and that nothing I do or say is stagnant.
There is a force that lives through me that urges, even pushes, me to love.
About the author of this article: Samantha Craft is the author of Everyday Aspergers. Ten Years in the making, Craft’s book is receiving positive reviews and support from professionals in the field of autism and autistic individuals. Craft is in touch with thousands of autistic individuals throughout the world. Her book is available on Amazon in soft back and as worldwide e-book in many countries.
There comes a point when we all choose to keep silent. I think if the motivation/intention behind the silence is a peaceful reckoning that all is as is, unfolding as intended, that silence is of benefit. When it comes down to it the most silent are often the most at peace.
In situations where someone is silent based on fear, such as being criticized, ridiculed, ostracized, singled-out, or any a number of measures of enduring emotional and/or physical wounds, that is another matter.
Keeping silent has become a modern-day hero. We are being indoctrinated with WithHOLD YOUR TRUTH.
It doesn’t seem like it at close inspection, but digging deeper, there appears to be a gross monogamy of error circulating the collective networks of communication. We are being told in a series of random bombardments to BE POSITIVE.
There is an error in such dogma that eats away at the bone of spirit.
There are drones of individuals gathered proclaiming that in order to change the world we must put out, literally extinguish, the negative thoughts and replace all states of being with this so-called positive.
The potential outcome is feasibly explosive.
First off, the very fact of proclaiming one knows a way or truth or path over the other creates immediate separation. In instilling onto others, whether through a degree of good-intentions or not, that to be a better person or to live in a better world, we ultimately must shed or disgrace the negative aspects of self, is to at the exact same moment determine that we are inadequate in our wholeness of being.
We were not given our so-deemed negative aspects of thought in order to extinguish them like a proverbial fire of the master’s home. We were given, and have therefor received, our negative aspects to learn, to be students, to flow and work though the ebbing of our very existence.
The way is not found in abstracting a part of ourselves as one abstracts the rotten, damaged tooth. I see this as bigotry towards the very self—an outcry to destroy what in completion we are.
There are fools and there are wolves, I have no doubt, in this instant about that. And to proclaim that the act of forgoing the rupture of negativity will smooth out the edges of deemed ‘evils’ is absolutely non-substantiated and nonsensical.
We are not built to master the positive and siphon out the negative, to inject ourselves with painful dissection and elevate the status of happy, while squeezing out the rest, drop by drop.
First of all, none are built wrong, and to imply there is something to hide, something to shame, or something to counter, is to imply wrongness and utter disassociation with the whole.
True, we are a part of the collective, a hive of sorts, very much a flock of birds, moving and flowing with the direction of our shared vibrational energy. And yes, to a degree, the premise of advancing our thoughts to a place of painless outlook is beneficial, but this cannot and will not be achieved through conjuring, force, or subversive measures.
As free as we are, we are not free. And to think one has the power to shift the collective through dominantly choosing and domineeringly forcing others to follow a laid out path is both confusing and stifling to the sensitive searching soul. The energy truly does not match the passion of service and love, and instead is a type of dictatorship in which innocents are trapped into thinking, in the very worst measures, that they are inherently flawed in their own thinking.
It is not enough to tell someone to hold back a thought, or, in an equally stronger fashion, to not proclaim a thought. It is not enough to tell someone to spread love and happy feel-good feelings; in this manner we withhold the very edgings of the soul that are weeping and crying.
There is strong and dignified error here. The same error found if a man was to open a flower upon himself and let the fragrance slip through, and then following, watch the flower decompose into the ground of earth, while concluding the decomposition and regeneration was purposeless and meaningless—negative and unnecessary.
Let us hold onto the scent of joy and discard of the withering—this is the mentality. To take a singular part of the cycle of life, of the human/spirit condition, and highlight it with marker as the best and ultimately only, while diminishing all that is before and after.
Beauty is not found in the eye of the beholder, when the one seeking is already in a state of separation and judgment. When the one seeking is still attached to the definition of positive and negative—he, in this instant, has made himself at once judge and jury to the masses. He at once has determined in the layering of his own mind and balancing of his own perception what is worse and what is better. He has failed to see the line between good and bad does not exist, but rather merges together in a murky grey area that is endless in potential.
Where he chooses to stand, in proclaiming to be the bearer of good, or all that is positive, is on a line somewhere between the good and the bad of his perception, perhaps further towards the good, and many a step away from bad. But the question remains of where and how he chooses to stand. What led him to this point? What did he collect in his basket to determine his reality, his illusion of positive and right? How did he decide? Who did he put his trust into? And where did these conclusions stem from?
Numbers are not meant to determine outcome. They are simple measurement. They measure the temperature, the degree, the value; yet, man lets numbers rule his life; in this instant, in where he stands is a factual number. Let him stand ten degrees east of bad, or one degree west of good on the linear scale of judgment; let his feet rest where they may, and in his standing he has chosen what is the best and what is the worse; he has chosen his limit and his extreme, and he has deemed in the exact same instant that everything on the other side of him, the deemed ‘negative’ side, as separate.
And this is where the pain begins: by stepping onto the line of attachment of good and bad.
For one to proclaim that his thoughts, and his mind’s ramblings, and his deciphering, decoding, and self-actualization are the right way, the positive way, the acceptable way, is to in the same moment to pour out all the elements of union from the collective and to designate himself a separate being.
Though he thinks himself honorable and purposeful in doing so, he is in theory delegating his ego and his illusioned ego-power as dictator to his soul. He is announcing to the world I know enough in my singular standing-form to point the way for myself and for you.
Here he stands: In being as I am, I am enough, and I know. Follow me. And in following me, swallow the same pill of recognizing you are not enough in and of yourself. For if you were enough, I would not need to lead you in such a way; I would not need to dictate to you where to go; I would not need to point such finger. And as I candy-coat my presence and essence with soft and sublime messages of positive, I so penetrate into the soul of your being the essence of inadequate, non-substantial and lacking.
How much more beneficial to say to another: I accept you in completion, in all of your meandering states, for you are ever constant, you are ever shifting, ever moving, never stagnant, and the representation of self is neither here nor there; I accept the changes in you with open arms and open heart, embracing neither your triumphs nor challenges, for you are not what you seem to be. You are more than you seem to be. You are an intricate part of the universal whole playing out as magnificently as you were made. I see in you all that you are and love all that you are.
There is no need to hide, to stifle, to pretend any longer. Your truth is my truth. Your frailties my frailties. Your heart my heart. We are one. And here we stand together as brother/sister reborn.
How much more beneficial to lather someone in unconditional love than in conditional directions.
I had been ‘told’ months ago that when I created art, energy would come through. That my art, essentially, was a doorway. The same was ‘told’ to me about my words years ago.
Here is an example from my other space of creation:
When I connect to create, I believe I am connecting to the heart-mind of compassion. I believe in the collective unconscious and the river that carries endless channels of geometric unions. There is not intention when I create, except to connect, and even that intention can block me from being.
I am at most peace when I am joined in union with source. I seek comfort in aspects of spiritual wisdom that conveys the unity of all and the release of all suffering. I am at peace when focused on serving and loving the All. I am most out of sorts when I focus on a select one, whether that be an individual of my projected affection of my own self.
This focus on self or another singular of choice feels as an addiction; I way to escape the reality that is not. To avoid the recognition that I am truly alone in my oneness. To avoid the present reality that I am only united in the truth of All. I struggle to surpass my individual nature and travel the road of courageous unhindered and unbridled universal love. A part, an old history of cyclic lives I am, longs to return to what he/she thought once was the truth, the power of love of objects, including people made into possession.
I often, in my ‘weakest’ moments, long to connect to a one that is of flesh who can fill me with the potential promise of connection and escape. I have sought this since a young child: the eyes of a human one to take me in and harbor me safely there. I know to a great degree that the essential one is already this that I be; and following, in so recognizing I am of not, I understand the essential healing is found within the beyond viewing of the observer. In the stepping out of self and maintaining the eyes of constant viewer whilst alleviating the suffering woes of judgment and wanting something outside the moment.
What leaves me trembling is the way I now walk in the world; unable entirely to find joy in the simplicity of objects and collections, in the planning of excursions and accomplishments, in the coming of gatherers and givers; and wonder beyond creation through what earthly source shall I seek comfort.
Nothing of me is left that was; yet, everything that is remains. I am certainly a lost voyager, still rediscovering the pathways to self , merely to move beyond self and enter the outer ways of not being. Still the corridors can be dark and uninviting, the longing to connect moving as drafty air and circulating through the space I am.
In my saddest moments, I am curled, very much a child, into myself, on the floor of a small room, screaming through agonizing tears, washing out all the ways in which my humanness predicates my disconnection; though ironically, my human form is what I return to in finding connection.
The contradictions are unworldly. The thoughts plummeting through me, carrying beyond self over and over, and across the years that must have been the blink of my last consciousness. I am somewhat divided and opened, and then shut again. Re-circling and dying through the daylight and into the night.
When I am at most peace I beg to be re-carved and set deeper into the knowledge, so I might find my own peace in the process of relieving the suffering of All. There is no other purpose for me now. And the human flesh dislikes this deeply, the one who is noticed and signified by ego’s mask.
I am a duality. Just as the male and female aspects of self reawaken, the whole of me sleeps. And as the whole of me awakens, the dual spirit of naught resurfaces. There is a battle without a feud. A coming of day into night and night into day, when added up and viewed over a lifetime would seem natural, even irrelevant. Though, here, in this spinning cycle, the transitions and transferring, the switching and forging, the surrendering and forgiving, repeat over and over before the hands on the clock have time to move. I know not what to do, yet know enough that to know not is enough.
I am enough in my being, even as I see no being. And so I find this gentle solitude in creation, in which I release all expectations, beyond being guided and having something to substantiate my experience. I ask that the truth of me come through. That the universal all slip through my fingers onto the screen or awaiting canvas. I know not how I do this or why, only that I am called over and over. Only that to live the life I was is to die again, and to live the life I am is to finally breathe.
A few thoughts:
Belly of a Star 