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
When someone complains about another sharing an opinion, that, in itself (the complaint), is an opinion shared. Almost everything we scribe or say can be deciphered, at its core, as an opinion. Viewed in a specific lens, the act of criticizing someone for sharing opinions is hypocrisy. Most of what we say is predetermined by a side we have already chosen or box we have placed an idea into. Most of the world divides into good and bad, pretty and ugly, middle ground or extreme, acceptable or not acceptable. Nothing spoken is truth, when all is based on short-lived, contradicting, ever-changing factors. Few live in a place of neutrality. Few see past the illusion. Our outlooks are based on choice and circumstance. We are susceptible to prior perception, biological factors, others’ viewpoints and interpretations, and memories, and even our capacity to remember. What we take in is slivers, what we pull out from the slivers is specks. Furthermore, our outlook is a reflection of where we are in life at the moment. Are we content? Are we in mourning? Are we worried, anxious, terrified? Are we threatened, vengeful, cautious? Are we looking forward to a happening? By default we are influenced by the collective. And then, logically, the few, those who see these words I scribe, who abide by this perception, and then proclaim it as a possible truth, are then, themselves, by their very act, hypocritical. For how can one proclaim there is no final truth through the vessel of a truth? There is no final answer, no final right, no one way; and still, even this, these words, are empty. That is why some spiritual practices explain to take what is needed and leave the rest. Or to forget all that was taught. To avoid the hypocrisy. Because at the very end, when concepts, when words, when sounds, are broken down to the bare bones, there is nothing but dust.
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.
I am as the wind. I am the wind. And was the wind. Pressure pulled through, substance rallied and released, treasures unfolded, emptiness astounded. Less here than there, and summoned forward.
I am an eternal balancing beacon. Twice-revealed and mastered, rectified in my indignation, made whole in my completions, eradicated from the darkness. Tethered to what awaits.
I am human, made flesh and broken through. Divided into regions of unknown territory, sifted with flecks of gold into the adobe of awakening. Branded by self-made-self.
I am sight emerged, free to take what is and what isn’t. Seared at tattered seam, edged shut and welded wide to the masses. Prisms merged. Opaque glass pouring spectrums through high window.
I am everywhere and nowhere, and all at once I am splintered. Burst into centrifuge, cascaded upon the spawned pond of unraveled surrender. Pierced, as dawning gait emerged. Sunlight beckoning distant traveler.
I am the exact measure of awareness, bewildered by all, twisted into form, neither recognized nor denied, taken to the layers beneath the layers, the tunneled chambers of desires struck down and left flailing.
I am there, in the under regions, chasing my dreams as salmon-pink to pounding stream, pushing upwards upon a tear filled staircase to destiny. Standing, once-removed: birthing, dying and rising through the cycle.
I am there, some undone wind, seeping through the fissured stucco into the unyielding corridors of reason.
Samantha Craft
Everyday Aspergers the book available in 2016.
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Twitter: Samantha Craft @ aspergersgirls
You came to me in distant dream, trumped out in your making, meandering through the causeway of ever more. I saw you there, and starlight shifted, beckoning me forward in the routine fashion made of man; and yet, as dove undone, you vanished in the skylight regions of my mind, as I sat vanquished by your doings, with eyes that danced as merry men alive, bending to the stardust ripened, harvesting the dew, listening to the avenger’s touch caressing vapor skin.
I seasoned, say ripened, in this hallowed out space deemed mine, situated between the burly blade and the spearing spine, tingled and tantalized by the mistress named me. I came to her desperate, in search, in want, determined to sever out her remains, to section what she’d become into distinguishable identifiable sectors.
And there I stood, as daffodil unopened, marrow-filled rapture segregating self in want of rescue. I listened to the voices of unknown trekking past my soul, forgetting my presence, erasing my cause. I became abandoned again and again, wrapped round the corners of my own doing, laughing at the shadowed self as another set near, raven to the blind man, pecking at the wounds I’d left behind.
How I’d wished to be seen. To be scooped up and caressed. To be harness against the strength of a million upon a million, and set free from the prison of endless self. How I wished over and over for the rupture of tangled substance, to disassemble and be brought back as something recognizable and just.
There I bathed, in the dismal garden dying, created of my own suffering woes. Dripping of blood-let talismans—signs, symbols, flashing tales of what was naught. I gave up then, beneath the gravestone I’d erected. Eradicated the beginnings with the end, and brought to life the newness reborn.
The failing called out. The failing caved in. I curled in submission, the babe to the tender yoke of my very own soul. Evicted, I was, in the terrible eternal voice of self, seizing the days and bringing back to the torturous home deemed hell. There I was, forlorn, forgotten, dedicated to the bleak and black, bathed in the destitute, naked in the face of what could only be the devil’s own foe turned sour.
Mocking, haunting, grinding, leaving, coming and abandoning once, twice, and ten times more, I was there. Yes, I was there. And in the ways the memory grows old, my soul grew sightless. What appeared once before as hope, now faded in the background, as clovers do in an expansive field blurring into green; a tender turtle belly up to the singe of a penetrating light field, named death.
And I remained, there, in the twilight of my spirit, inching through—worm through core and back to the depths of suffocating dirt. Shifted and sifted, brought forth as a burden undone, fertilized through the tunneling of causation. Circumvented once more and made flesh. I came out scathed, peeled and pinched into a version unrecognizable. And rested there along the curbside in an unfamiliar way, until you came once more, grazing towards my cause. The champion of the sun bride nestling between your legs, the virgin dough I be.
Heated, I bled out the blue I knew, and emerged risen thrice in fashion, braided bread for the masses. And it came then, in gentle knowing, this voice of unreasonable kindness venturing into the platitudes once known as this vessel me. And I cried, aching for the place she’d once been, the face she’d once had, and anchored in the vestige brought to center stage.
I called for her, pleaded for her, to return, though her battered bones now rest beside the cave dweller’s refuge. And thusly I sat, huddled in between the shadow I’d been and the canvas I’d become—chiseled remains here and scattered light there. And nestled I wept, pinpointed in the extended space, in the lap of plenitude, graced in the end gone and the beginning once more returned, tracing the furrowed path of fear, with fingers made chariot wheels, merging into the human reformed. And I danced there, within my vast becoming, twirling into the daylight, set loose into the wild woman’s psalm.
I know what I am not but not what I am. I know when to stop but not when to stop starting. I can inch my way into the middle and get stuck in the molasses of neither here nor there. I don’t know how to swim upstream without pounding pain, and instead, in alternate route, float downstream away from the waters where all else abounds.
Somewhere I have forgotten myself, and I search to find her, thinking I have arrived, only to once more find I am at the backdoor looking into what was and thinking I had known then.
I cannot remember who or where I have been, anymore than I can visualize where I am going. I am lost, in a time maze of confusion, falling upon a self I cannot fathom or detect.
She is there, in the shadowed-tunnel, collapsing and reborn into another, faster than humanly feasible. She is multitudes unopened and reopened—an anomaly in form. To be and not to be. To care and not to care. To unravel into the very depths of reason and peer down into the pond of ‘me.’ Only to question what it is that stares back with such disregard and wonderment.
I am but enough and then I am unequivocally lacking, never measuring up to the enforced standards absorbed from the path I walk. I clamor for explanation and find a thousand books untouched, though in some fashion taken into the realm of reason. I can feel the words: the spoken, the whispered, the silenced, the ones that never came and ones that never speared the element that is I.
They make me. They form me. They penetrate me into something I know not. Clay to my mind. Dirt to my heart. Scattered residue of earthly wants and needs. Goods that I am neither capable of grasping or acquiring.
I am this existence that the observer watches. Reformed with the passerby. Morphed into their reality and then left, unscattered and splattered, broken and unbroken, in a pool of endless duality.
I am what I am—yet only for a fleeting moment; a chance to take glance towards the outline of my palm, the beat of my heart, the opening of a billion universes. Everywhere I am, and at once I am alone. Isolated. A loneliness no less difficult to explain than the essence of what I have become. ~ Sam, 7/24/15
Of She…
She mounts, as the tuft ribbon, torn
Riding the circumference of questioning
Mind turned, trembled-wavers
Across endless cause
I cannot, I can, I will, I shan’t
And over the mountain terrains
She treks
Feet, aching soles
Upon beaten battleground
Heart opening to the chasm of reason
She is, and she is not
Twisted and reborn into
This something new and un-new
Opened and closed
Reexamined and brought into the light
Distraught and brilliantly aware
Carrying the global basket, woes
Torrid tears racing down bones
Outlining, this shadowed-speaker
Born into prism
Walls, resurfaced and reshaped
Made into what almost is
Until fleeting moments weep away
Left idling, still,
In creviced thoughts
Of what has come
Fragmented semblance
Slivered whispers
Claimed identity
The torrential gathering
Of she
~ Sam, 7/25/15
The opinionated folk deems his self more worthy than the next, more educated, more correct, more substantiated in his tethered-viewings. He is the man who ties himself to his beliefs as marionette to the puppeteer. Surrendering his last performance for the making of a hopeful sequel.
He stands on the cornerstone of his own reality, perched on a soapbox made of rubbery-soles; erect in his being, creating hurts, as he plucks out the feathers from those deemed ‘wrong.’
He is the judge. And his seasoned-eyes seek out justice for self, and for self-proclaimed truths.
He creates chaos through the subconscious quest to establish an enemy in order to make himself the victor.
He seeks out that which is wrong to feed his own tattered ego.
The more he builds himself up, the more he merrily tears the others downward into spiraling nonsense.
He latches on to one truth, and then another, exchanging viewpoints to suit his individual needs. Adapting his ways to suit his desired outcome.
He eradicates plans and schemes, even as he sees this not as so.
He is blind to his own ways, and thinks himself clever and keen.
He has an eye for truth, and establishes his world as so. Truth begets truth and all else in dangerous makings of others’ minds.
He knows himself, inside and out, or so he thinketh . And in thinking in limited scope, he believes he sees the world about him endlessly.
He is the maker of mankind and the destroyer, and he sets himself on high while wearing a robe of futile-humility. Though, buried beneath the cloakings are the mere wobblings of brittle bones.
He erects flags of righteousness in his name.
He is the enemy of spirit, as he claims his views worthy and right.
He is the enemy of self, as he hides in the shadowed sands, head buried to the reality undone.
He builds and builds an illusion in order to feed and feed that which is established upon as self onto self.
He becomes that which he wishes, and has opinion for all that does not fit into his gently spawned parchment.
His arrows are as ink on treasure map, pointing thusly to where the answers rest.
He knows, and he knows naught, and in so doing he believes he is the wisest of wise.
He layers himself in the latherings of riches, sought in the grounds of others’ burdens.
He is neither miser of gold nor pauper of the trenches; instead he is both. Combined, as the one collecting and discarding. Scooping up in ‘veracious’ heaps that which serves his truth, and throwing out that which does not.
He cannot see his weary ways, and instead labels the rest unjust and wrong, except the select few that follow his way. His light shone bright in the ability to feasibly proclaim his truth as collective truth.
He is not satisfied unless others see him, others hear him, others lift him and validate his existence.
His way is made the only way. And the others, though innocent they be, gather around him as sucklings to his tainted nectar.
He nourishes them with lies—his own.
He lures them in with a sense of belonging. And then, too, they become as him: stagnant in their youth, nurturing nothing and no one, and taking as they please.
They satisfy self to please self. They play with self to please self. They collect and establish more truths.
Until the beggar returns—uncloaked—he is made burdened with entrapment; invisible, trumpeting his drum. Pounding out the horned owl’s screech. Demolishing what is, in hopes of fissuring all that is the entrapment of mankind.
Formidable-forbidding. A lingering, unsurpassed longing, to surrender his making for the unmasking of the man beneath the cloaked resilience.
To give only to give, without expectation, without gain, without bursts of ego-gratification. To give without proclaiming, sharing, and classifying one self as giver. To just give, and know that in the cornerstone of heart, whatever ripple comes in return, is merely more energy set into reserve for future gifts. ~ Sam Craft
Elemental Cause
We are riding a wave of a collective unconsciousness that predicates actions, reactions, opinions, likes and interests, as well as disinterest. It’s mediocrity made insane, and semi-tamed.
I can’t help but see this all around me, from the fashion trends, to hairstyles, to the modern music craves, to the buildings erect and idolized. Divine design is all about; and yet we cling onto that which is perceived as the collective norm and acceptability.
Digging deep into the psyche, this pattern of behavior all comes down to the desire to be accepted and assimilated, even at its assumed worse; none is left untouched. Even the so-deemed ‘reject’ or dark sheep is masked himself, surely to be absorbed by another sort. If not the masses, then the anti-masses: the secluded seduction of isolation.
To be evaporated into the state of ‘not being’ in hopes of instilling a cloak to shield self from the chaos of being. Still this shield, self-made and created for the primary purpose of protection, serves as the resistance of what is not real. And the more one opposes a force, substantial or not in it’s reckoning, the more the force that is objectified grows.
In this way, the very act of retaliating against that which is perceived as wrong, or even ‘evil’, substantiates the existence of such force, and erects it as formidable in making. And more so, the process of chastising and banishing, even pretending the existence out of view, is equally detrimental—as the energy required to dismiss something from the mind, again substantiates the value of such.
Predetermination in and of itself seems to procreate and bring into existence what is naught. That is to say that the act of accepting something as so gives the mind’s creation power. The abstract made whole. The nothing becoming something from mere effort of mind.
The more one focuses on the abstract, the more the collective eradicates nothing into something. Whether this be judged or labeled as ‘good’ or ‘evil’ in theory makes no difference. For whatever is countered, in so countering the opposite thusly grows. In so being: if ‘good’ is countered, evil grows, but good also grows in equal measure. For the act of resistance, or the force of undoing, both equally grow that which is of primary focus.
And whose mind is to choose which energy is pushed towards the one, if not the other? Therefore if I focus on the sun—the light—the glimmer of whatever one chooses to associate with the source—I also, in equal measure, focus on that which is without the light. For to have light I must have dark.
To proclaim something is good, I must establish across the scale of justice that which is un-good. To have the un-good I must create and establish rules and boundaries. I must become judge. I must have basic standards. I must start somewhere. Or so it seems.
When in actuality, I am starting not. Instead, I am as climber on the mountain peak digging down into the depths and cores of endlessness, crumbling self and existing selves that linger about. I am tearing apart my essence from the inside out in effort to eradicate that which has been established is not enough and not ‘good.’
In this manner, I am my own avalanche. I am my elemental cause excavating below in hopes of bringing up that which is tarnished—the root explanation—the growth—the cancerous vector in which truth, once established, has been attacked and need surrender.
In unmasking a truth that is neither buried or alive, in seeking to find that cause that I believe is the unmarked burial ground of chaos, I render into exactness the very thing in which I wish to expose. I become that which is my enemy, in thinking my enemy is. I become that which is terror, in believing terror reigns. I buy into the acts upon acts that in turn render treason upon my soul.
I bleed out my beggar’s mentality in the very utterance of non-equivalent. In staking claim, the spot in which the flag bears my name and flies in high-wind is the same mound of nonexistent land that becomes my territorial truth. That which I proclaim as full enemy I proclaim as my reality. For whatever the opposite of enemy becomes, there in the act of proclaiming, becomes, too, my life-blood, that which in some variant degree, though at times almost invisible, I worship.
Tis truth, then, that in being, in thinking, in existing, I am forced to form sides, to single-out camps: those that are unbearable to the mind, body, and soul; and those that are acceptable, and often deemed desirable.
In order to set my mind apart from this useless game of mousetrap, I must first scoop out that which is the bait, the essence that captures first my appetite and then manifests my fears. For if I am deeming something desirable and in wanting, in exactness, still, I am deeming another undesirable and unwanted.
That which I shun gives power to that which I crave. In the same measure, that which I long for in dream-state gives recall to that which I dread. The unbearable stakes are set; and life becomes not of pleasure-seeking quest, though the game is curtained as so; instead, my daily burden becomes that to which I seek naught and find naught eternally.
This becomes that which I claim as real. And the real feeds off as stinging nettle to skin, lingering in pain-stricken cause with reminders of escape. The mind becomes the battleground, as in action; it begins as slave to sort out the mind’s cause. The it becoming the enemy of the it, when both were deemed innocent.
How this is, is. And how this is not, is not. And those that linger in this place of knowing, in their act of lingering, substantiate the facts furthermore, building a wall between that dark and light that serves as the landmark from deep space, indication that the war has begun. And the more the battle is spun, the more victims that are laid down in erect fashion. Standing as phantom ghosts as the shadows sleep in the ground that burgeons, spun from the fertilizer of demented abstractions of formed reality.
Here is where I walk, in the weeping hours, footprint after footprint, marking my territory as mine. When all the while the burial grounds seep blood from the sleeping masses of a thousand centuries.
I am innocent and kind and good, and in so being I think others will be the same. I believe that people are innately good, because that is all I know of me. I punish myself for not being good enough, even as I know that is not beneficial in mainstream thinking, even as I know it seems to be evidence of perfectionism, or other earmarks for some form of self-deprivation. I see, it in truth, of knowing who I am innately and wishing to reflect to the world the source of who I am.
I am not discouraged by not meeting my own self-inflicted standards, nor am I able to set myself in comparison to another. I am not surrendering my faults and labeling myself bad or wrong, I am merely longing to reflect to the outside source, beyond me, the purity within me. I am the light, as are all, and in so being I wish to be light; yet, I am wrapped in this skin of humanness, and here I become blinded to my own ways.
I wish not to do harm, and wish not to falsely represent my true self. But in this wishing there exists constant barriers abstracted from the reasoning mind. For what is harm and what is of this ‘true’ form of self? From here I become lost, at times, in a down-drift of self—a snowstorm of sorts, blinding me with the cold-bindings of temporary frigidness, a standstill of thought, circulating through me as movement of choice. Where in truth there exists nothing but nonsense of what a part of me has collected from an outside source.
I wish to be me in a world that tries to dictate who I shall be and reinforce my existence with fear and trickery. I am a truth-seeker amongst wolves who deem me unworthy, and stand doused in an arena filled with blind followers wanting to please and be recognized for their worth. The dilemma being that this ‘worth’ they choose to be recognized by, or wish to be recognized through, is based on illusion and thievery.
I feel fear. I sense fear. I recognize fear. And in moments of temporary illusion, I too become this fear. I am unable to be within the scope of this land without repercussion to my very soul. For I know all at once so many truths and deceptions, that to mediate with the opposing forming thoughts in my own mind becomes a task requiring abundance of energy. To release the thoughts, is at times, the only means of escape. For as burs from the open fields, thoughts collect upon me, torturing me with the tearing open of wound after wound.
I am no longer then a truth-seeker, but rather a victim of my own ways, letting in what is deemed poison by the ones who mask the venom as truth. I have sense, and thusly, open rightly soon enough into the scope of reason and ideal beyond the dogma of this society set before me as rigid path. I have reopened the part of self that sets me free to my own demise or own victory.
Rather here, there are opposing views and polar opposites that move as friends in a room of lathering hope. There is nothing here of truth, beyond that which mind grasps as so. No societal whims or structure is made ready to identify my reality. Nothing taught is left bound, but rather unraveled into a whirlwind of speculation surrendered into relief.
For nothing exist beyond what thought has formed as walls, and nothing moves forward in my world except that which I have allowed for my wellbeing. I am neither dictator nor director of my reality, yet a gentle surrendering waiting for the next venture.
Nothing I grasp onto or erect becomes what I wish, for wishes are for the dreamers still trapped in the dream. In my land, I am the very wind that carries the wish, and in so being, I release the heaviness of the dream itself, and allow the power to be in where I am carried and not in the limiting boundaries of what is gifted. The present is boundless, and yet the gifts are limiting through the process of reasoning itself.
Therefor, I remain twice-removed from where I stand. Present without being present, in a reality that is masked over and over with deception. For I cannot remain in a land without foundation and continue to step whole-heartedly forward. I move instead freely, the wind at my threshold beckoning self-to-self, and reminding me with the echo of now that I am what I am, beyond the reach of the limiting mind.
I am that scaffold—I am the one standing on the scaffold—and I am the wall being scaffolded. I am the one being built upon, the substance being offered, and the one offering. Again, this trinity upon trinity.
My self is endless and to pinpoint an exactness is to remain stagnant, an impossibility in an ever-expanding and ever-imploding world.
You are the missing piece, and the missing answers, but in truth, I am the missing piece and answer; for you are merely a nearby reflection pointing the way back to the foundation formed—the sideway walls, and the vertical mass slathered in circumstance.
I do not want promises, nor predictions, nor even possibilities. Instead I long to be sheltered in a knowing that nothing will change still, even as everything tilts and spins about continuously.
I long to be held, as the nearby one turned into union, enveloped in a space of adoration, chosen, given and returned to the whole from which I came. Released into captivity, back to the cornerstone of faith, before reason and inquiry established doubt.
I can no longer stand on the platform broached, the planet that holds and teaches to rise again and again with each coming fall. I can only drift, the lost traveler found, and stand face-to-face with her own homecoming.
I am essentially alone, battling my way across a field of war with no soldiers, no weapons, and only the sound of the horn. And yet I am the horn. I am the sound carried through the empty space of nothing, and I am the ear in which the sound follows: a tail of faithful foe twirling round in loyalty—the hound come back to master.
Again, I wonder, and cast out all of everything, only to return more broken and forlorn, leaning upon my established perch of knowing, singing a song as bird gone wrong, trapped in the latitude of frozen sky. If ever there was a time for rejoicing the lost soul, it is now.
Though, even as I glide through in the darkest gown shredded, tumbling through imaginary ghosts and imaginary grounds, I feel alive. Torn open and let out. Free. My every soul-bone and soul-blood moves in irreplaceable manner. Reemerged into the grand merry-go-round—a child no longer asleep.
Belly of a Star 