Words

The Source Guides My Work

The Source that guides my work is forever asking me to stay awake to the roar that remembers. That source immutably, reminding me that I am not a small story of me and my problems. I am the infinite, loved and cherished, blessed and moving in ecstasy. This source does not entertain the comfort of my illusions. It dismantles them one at a time. I am not worthless, fragile, being drifting through an uncaring world. It reminds me that I am the cosmos itself given form and breathe and the capacity to love beyond measure.

This source does not teach me to avoid pain. It teaches me to go to the very center of it and discovered that it is the alchemy that turns everything to God. Pain is not my enemy. It is the doorway through which the light enters.

For me, this source as me the painting is not the act of putting lifeless paint on canvas. It is the act of making the living flame of life visible, palpable and visceral. And if I let that flame touched me, I do not return to this world the same. This fire has a flame that burns away everything that is not real. It burns everything that is not true. What remains blazes with the radiance of the Beloved.

When everything else has been stripped away. My roles and rules. My defenses. My withholds. A quiet space I am before I become what the world expects me to be. There are parts of me that can only surface when everything else has been stripped away. Deeper than my name. Stripped away of the noise in my mind. The endless brawl behind the first smile I present is made.

The Second Life (Breath by Breath)

Today I breathe.

I let love be love.

I let grief be grief.

I will not live a fake life, a second life of pretense trying to hide what’s actually happening inside me

I let truth move me forward

without rushing

and without retreating.

I do not push away what mattered.

I will not push it away what matters now.

I do not stay and allow myself to be tortured where I no longer fit.

I will listen pain inside of my own heart

to know when something is complete

and the radiant joy it feels when something new and beautiful

is quietly forming.

There is only this breath.

This step I choose to take with heaven.

And then the next.

And I am living

inside them.

There’s the life of not wanting to feel what I feel… But feeling it anyway

the life of I’m not wanting to care about the people I care about,

but I can’t stop caring about them.

There’s a life of not wanting to tell the truth And the life that tells the truth about not wanting to tell the truth.

⸻

We lead two lives,

though only one has breath in it.

The first is practiced in delay…

in half-steps and careful distances,

in the art of not wanting too much

because wanting burns,

because loving risks loss,

because devotion asks everything

and gives no guarantees.

In that first life

I learn how to survive without arriving.

I keep my heart busy …but uncommitted,

my dreams respectable … but dim,

my days filled with motion

that never quite touches meaning.

I call this safety.

I call this wisdom.

I call this being realistic.

But something in me knows better.

Something keeps knocking

from the inside.

Then…

one day, or one breath, or one breaking open…

I awaken.

Not into certainty,

but into truth.

I realize there is no spare life waiting,

no rehearsal version of love,

no later where courage is easier

or longing is quieter.

There is only this breath.

This body breathing and feeling.

This moment asking to be met.

And so the second life begins…

not because fear disappears,

but because it no longer gets the final word.

In this life

I let what matters cost me the price of burning the mundane,

the insignificant,

the unimportant details that could so easily distract me from real living and true loving.

I let love rearrange my priorities.

I stop negotiating with my own aliveness.

Each breath becomes a vow.

Each choice…an offering.

Each connection…a place where I stand

fully present

or not at all.

This life is not safer.

but it is real.

Here, I care that much.

I love without armor.

I give my days to what feels alive in my chest,

to the people who call me forward,

to the dreams that refuse to be postponed.

And I understand, at last:

there was never a second life waiting for me.

There was only this one!

Only this one…

asking, again and again,

to be lived all the way through.

So today,

I breathe.

I Bled and Cried and Called It Prayer

Last night

I tried to hold myself together

like a cup with shaking hands.

The wine would not stay.

It ran through the cracks

of my chest

and down my ribs

and onto the floor.

I said,

“I am failing.”

The Beloved laughed softly and said,

“No.

You are pouring.”

I have paced the creaking floors at 4am

like a wolf circling a fire

that would not warm me.

I have howled into the dark more times than I can count

and called it devotion.

I have fallen to my knees with my heart bleeding

not from holiness

but from exhaustion.

And still :

the floor held me.

I said, begging for mercy

“Why do you break me like this?”

The answer came

not as thunder

but as breath:

“If I do not break the cup,

how will you know

you are the holy wine?”

I thought my tears

were weakness.

I thought my shaking

was something I needed to hide in shame.

I thought the rage in my throat

meant I had lost my way.

But this wound

Like every wound I have ever had

is freedom’s doorway.

And this blood

is Heaven’s ink.

And the page

is the night inside my own trembling heart.

I bleed

because I refuse to live asleep.

I cry

because my ribs are wide enough

for oceans.

I break

because stone cannot sing.

And I listen

The Beloved does not love

my strength.

She loves

my undoing.

She loves

when I fall apart honestly.

Shee loves

when I say,

“I cannot do this alone,”

and then discover

I was never alone.

I am not a man

trying to reach God.

I am the cry

God makes

inside this man’s chest.

So I bleed,

if I must.

Cry

if the river rises.

Let the floor receive me when I’m down on my knees.

The moon does not apologize

for pulling the tide.

The sun does not apologize

for burning.

Why should I apologize

for loving so fiercely

that it splits me wide open?

One day

I will see …

The fire was not against me.

It was writing me.

And when my tears fall now,

they are not falling away from heaven.

They are falling

into it.