Writing

Exploring the world of blogging can be incredibly insightful. I recently found blogs from writers – real writers – writers who struggle and toil in their quest for writing worthy of their exceptionally high standards they set for themselves. Writers who get stuck, writers who lack direction, sometimes words and often confidence in their capabilities.

Someday I hope to stand with them, simply and only to know I have gone through the same efforts in an art I deem so highly. To know myself in a way that only a writer can and how he relates that in his characters and to be able to express that to others with honesty and openess.

I am finally trying for this. In my teenage years I loved it. And I am certain in my adult years, it is the only constant I have managed. But to actually put myself into that category I hold in the greatest esteem?

So far, in my limited reading, I have discovered that writers (or those trying for it) don’t place limitations on their work, constantly trying for something original or something profound can lead to frustration. Finding something commonplace and ordinary and articulating it in a way that is accessible and true certainly makes for brilliant writing. Why the urge to always leap to the extraordinary?

Further, being a good writer does not necessarily rest on experience, but writing something that you would like to read.

And lastly, my favorite piece of advice read so far, fake it until you make it, from an incredibly creative soul, Austin Kleon. Literally, be writer/creative/musician. Make your world about what you hope to see or achieve, surround and immerse yourself with such things and the universe will respond accordingly. The world will reflect it and give back what you are seeing, thinking, feeling. Fake it, till you make it.

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Voids

Sometimes I think I forget how to be human,

As if the veil falls from my eyes and I see things in a different way,

Where this dance of interaction makes no sense at all

Where I am standing so far outside myself, I have forgotten how to be,

Perhaps forgotten the appropriate response, any response.

Sometimes I wonder if all my responses are simply conditioned reactions,

And where the real ‘me’ lies, if it exists at all.

Sometimes I step so far within, I literally have to focus on each word and their desired linguistic value in my brain,

Just so I can fathom a hint of what you are saying.

Sometimes I lie on my floor for hours and wonder if time remembered to move forward.

Sometimes I wonder if my existence actually makes a difference to anything at all,

And I don’t mean that in that need for attention kind of way,

But more like what does this lifetime mean in an expanse of a trillion life times.

I would like to just for a while, borrow your consciousness and your mind,

Just so I could experience a different pattern of thoughts and views and for a while,

To know what it feels like to feel other than this.

Why we are really here…

So this mad Life that leaves me inspired on a good day and depraved the next, I realise your challenge to me. I can see your naked awareness and your truth and the gifts you offer me. This is what I will give back to you in return.

I promise not to be complacent. I promise not to be tepid. I promise not to be mediocre. Instead dear Life, I offer you my heart and soul, the very essence of which I am and the essence of which you are. There is no joke about it; we cannot wait for anything, we cannot wait for life to start. We have to hunger for it, and then search it out with all of ourselves. We have to long for it, and endure it and work for it, and treat it tenderly when we have found it. We have to make this happen. We cannot afford to idly sit by and if we have to wait, make our waiting active, that is ready for the opportunity as it arises, at any moment, poised, concentrated and awake.

If it is romantic love we want, we have to be ready – ready to be intimate, ready to be open and receptive, to love and to give love to share the depths of ourselves with another, else we are simply hiding ourselves, paying more into deceiving ourselves into the fake cocoon that we are actually being open when are are not. We have to know ourselves inside and out, or else how can we truly offer ourselves to another? We cannot play with the heart of another.

This art that we want, this creative soul that drives us, we have to open ourselves so radically to this that there is no going back. We have to commit to being torn apart in order to be whole. We have to cultivate this art, dedicate time, passion and our sanity to it in order to fully become it, in order to fully know it, in order to fully integrate it and be a master – in order to fully let it go and become one again without it.

We are dying everyday, and we live in so much darkness of our own life and love because we do not truly know who or what we are. I challenge you as I challenge myself, to go out, to find it, to be raw, to be open, to embrace loss, madness, fear and death, only so that we can return to sanity again, truly and deeply. This life means so much, we are constantly affecting others and consciousness itself, we cannot feel that we do not matter. We have to make this count, we have to live by example, we have to live by our hearts and we have to live by our truth. And to everyday, live like this, and everyday, to let it all go again because essentially, it is all bullshit and in the end, we have to let it go anyway. And we have to be perfectly unattached, so that we can be whole again.

With this, I want to know what moves you. I want to know what makes you feel, I want to know what brings you joy and I want to know what brings you pain. And all of it, to sum it up again, in this word – Life.

This is what I have to give back to you, dear Life.