Category Archives: Raw Passion

Maybe it’s Spring

14 Monday Apr 2014

Posted by in Living, Raw Passion, Reality check?, Sunday loving

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There is an air of change about and its making me high and giddy and all kinds of thrilled about living. These are the ebbs and flows—this is the way of life.

Tonight, as I headed home from work, the sun, still hanging just there in the sky keeping the world light and hopeful, I smiled one of those giant, genuine smiles that say everything and I felt fucking good—no, great! It’s a funny thing, but when things are good—everything else is better—all in the world is beautiful and there isn’t much that you can’t laugh at or fall in love with. Its lucky that this feeling comes to us—that we can look out onto the sky or the plains or the mountains or whatever it may be and say to ourselves, “Fucking hell, could it possibly be any lovelier?” And no other words can really follow that because you feel so damn much that words just don’t give due credit. So you trot along in a loving haze—goofy and mesmerized by it all.

Which is what I am doing…trotting and thrilled. Finding myself writing love sonnets about a pink sunset and friends that call and cats that purr. A leaky exhaust on my neighbors car is music as there dinner on the oven wafts thru my open windows. How have I not chosen to feel like this always? Why must it come and go?

At any rate, it’s in the air now and deep within my lungs. And it feels how everything should feel and I am entirely happy.

Let Me Be Champagne Again

25 Tuesday Feb 2014

Posted by in Living, Raw Passion, Reality check?

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How can I feel

(within such a minor moment)

That somehow the lights within me

Were shut off

And the music turned down?

 

We go at such loud paces

Stomping about madly

And singing with our heads thrown back

That when there is a space of quiet

We simply don’t know what to do

Or say

Or even how to breathe.

 

I can only think that I am homesick

And that my life isn’t lining up as I mapped

And that I must make dinner, but what?

 

I feel that somehow I must take my soul

And shine it like I need to shine my silverware

Polish it back to perfection

So it gleams in the lamplight.

And once again, I will pop like champagne.

It’s Time to Begin Your Story

01 Monday Oct 2012

Posted by in Family & Friends, Living, Raw Passion

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“Shhhh…” she whispered, “It’s time now that I tell you a story…”

At this point you may expect for it to begin with a “Once upon a time…” but that’s not how this story begins; it’s far more fantastical than that.

“We are held in the Stars,” she began. “ We are held there and kissed with magic until it is our time. And then we are here. And most of us forget that we were ever kissed by the Stars—we don’t believe that magic exists—particularly within ourselves.  So most of us live without ever realizing that just being is magic. Most are content in the hum-drum of what this world appears to be; they are nestled in the comfort of a decent job or a good meal. But there are those who cannot live so quietly within themselves—there are those who have somehow managed to discover the wild beauty of this earth. “

“The Stars gave the earth a baby girl. They kissed her two blue eyes closed and sent her on her way…”

Now I suppose that you are waiting to hear what happened to the girl who had been given stars for her eyes? Or perhaps a boy with eyes of the dirt of the earth? Well you won’t find any endings here…the magic, remember is within you. And magic gives birth to the most fantastical stories.

Boys playing with fire

19 Monday Mar 2012

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In accordance with the prophecy, the strong may survive but the willing will endure and endurance is what separates men from boys, or so my father would say.

I like boy stories. The non-sound of harsh lines spoken by silent tongues. Men telling stories full of courageous passion with the blink of an eye. A flame that never dies or oscillates: a flame that endures. I like boy stories but mostly, I like boys who like to tell passionate stories and who sometimes also live it.

Boys with eyes full of a flame I would like to own but can’t while knowing that in life, wanting to obtain an unattainable source of glow is what keeps the wheels turning. Love, after all, is a good excuse for wanting something you can’t quite have but could, perhaps, be close enough to experience… without holding memories as the hopeless hostages of this ethereal flaw of character. Love is usually the man holding the whip, commanding his horse to run faster. Faster.

Run faster, against the rain.

I like these stories. They fill me with the type of passion I always knew of but could never identify as feelings with proper names, colors, flavors or textures. After all,

I know what I speak of but do not know how to tame it.

Mom Says to Taste the World

21 Saturday Jan 2012

Posted by in Family & Friends, Raw Passion

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My mom is an eternal fountain of encouragements. She believes in me with all of her. She believes in my brother and sister with each beat of her heart. She believes in the world in all its grandeur and knows that we will always strive to do well by it. My mother has taught me that I can do anything; that the world is mine as it is yours.

And because I can do anything it is hard to do, to practice, to be any just one thing. It is hard to say that I will dedicate my life to just one cause—one place—one dream. And when people ask me what I plan to do with this one crazy life, how do I put that down into words? How do I tell them that because I can do anything, I will attempt everything?

We are here. We are here only for a short time. The days are ticking and I still haven’t been a novelist, an activist—I’m on the verge of being an anarchist—the days, they are adding up and I haven’t begun my career as a painter or a philosopher.

Why be just one thing when you can attempt everything? Why not take from this life all that you can?

So, “Shine on you crazy diamond, shine on!”

The Rolling Beat

07 Wednesday Dec 2011

Posted by in Beat, Raw Passion

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My love of hip hop is one of the few things about me that my dear friend Alice does not embrace.  In fact, when she discovered my iPod hit list, she says she had serious doubts about our friendship.  In my family, my hip hop love affair is actually quite an anomaly.  My brothers will occasionally crank up some 50cent or Tech N9ne, but I believe that it’s their love of all things loud that inspires them to blow out their speakers rather than a true affinity for the beat.

I’m not sure where my love affair with hip hop started because it definitely didn’t originate in my parents cassette collection.  It could have been those early friday nights with In Living Color when I was 10 & which I had to beg my mom to let me watch.  I used to hum out that opening credit song for hours, rolling my tongue just so, trying to replicate the smooth blending of words, one into another.

It’s not necessarily the words or the style that I love though.  It’s the beat. The simple, unnerving, unapologizing beat of something raw, real & alive. For all its cliches & stereotypes, for me, hip hop is the music of youth, the thobbing beat of life’s passions no matter how misdirected they may be.  And when my speaker is booming & the beat is rolling along with me, I can imagine for a moment that I’m hipper than I am, that I could pull off those crazily complicated dance moves & that there’s some raw passion yet left in me.