Phoenix Rising

I have left the wolf of darkness, at least just for today, inside my heart back in the dusky hollows of my soul space. Today, if only just for today—I am the phoenix. I said 'falcon' aloud but it feels right, I am at least halfway certain, that my fiery wings have grown back. Like Lucifer, I took a hard fall from grace and was bathed in blackness; like Icarus, my wings melted when I flew too close to the sun and I caught fire. The wings that crease my shoulder blades are small, still spreading, testing plyometrics, pliability, buoyancy, air flow. Colorless, invisible to the naked eye. In the spirit realm I stretch one out, feeling the ache of disuse for far, far too long. The other swings out as I flex my latissimus dorsi, feeling the dual wingspan of the bat-wing, the angel-wing—both of my wings. Both sides of the same soul, returned to me. The muscles are ready to work on finding an updraft, playing with the pitch and yaw of how high I soar—and yet, it is not time for the flames to fully find my ignited spirit, Apache Mama and the other fire deities waiting anxiously for the coals to smolder, smolder to kindling catch, kindling catch to a slow controlled burn of past consequence, breathing my air, my oxygen, clean and mostly pure. Until finally, eventually, any day now—whoosh—I am engulfed in the fires that have cleansed my spirit, that have burnt away the oil-black sludge of the Dark Passenger's hold on me. My skin scorched by the desert sun but not yet burned. My eyes enlightened by the last light, the lusted-after stare into the sun that took my sight once, twice, thrice, before it made me blind to the truth. But now. But now I can see clearly, or at least in the light of the 'Real.' The phoenix is a burning cycle, as understood through mythology and the ancients. I have reached the end of my cycle, dove feet first into the inevitable crash, and now—and now, it is time to pick myself up and rise.

Rise.

Rise.

Rise.

To heights of what I believed impossible. To the heavens I never thought I would return. When I get out of here, when I leave this broken world of broken pieces shaped like people, I'll walk out the front gates with a fire in my belly, ready to ignite, ready to burst into flame and soar triumphant on an updraft, launching over mountainous peaks and languid bodies of blue finally freed of the chains of negativity. I missed flying. Not the mania of flight, but the space between the clouds and world below. Where the air is clear.

~"Did I ever tell you the one about the starfish?" Eddie looks down at his shoes, twirling his cane in a semi-circle drawing ellipses in the gravel. "No," I said. "You haven't mentioned that one." He sighs his tired walrus sigh and gives me the grandfather eyes. "Okay. So this man is walking down a beach and sees this boy picking a starfish up from a huge mass of them, turning it over in his hands, studying it, and then throws it into the ocean. He reaches down, ponders and then does it again, repeating the same process. The man asks "Boy, why are you throwing starfish into the ocean? Don't you realize that it doesn't matter? That you can't take all the starfish off the beach? It’s pointless, don't you see?" The boy throws another into the waves, stops and turns to look back at the man. "Yes, I know it doesn't matter," he says. "But to this one," he picks one buried in the sand and grasps it tightly. "But to this one, it matters to him." The boy then casts a great arc and continues on."~

Hope. I went from coping, the inability of learning how to cope, to learning to fly again. Moving to hope, because above all else, hope is what keeps us, me, alive. Hope. Eddie says it is generated through endless love, acceptance of the self and all indiscretions and insecurities. My disease. What disease? I have hope to fly on now.

7/27/16

Three days remain...

"I can do this." I whispered into Eddie's hearing aid, the sounds of street lights and trailer park generators producing a faint chirp from his electronic ear piece as he pulled me in closer for what might be our last embrace—at least for now, in this life.

"You get to do this," he whispers back, grabbing hold of my upper back with tenacious old hands, the limitless black of parking lot space taking up our cigarette smoke, our raw auras, and our combined life force, up, up and away from the sun-beaten asphalt beneath our feet."You get to do this. You get to live again."

And with that discussion, that physical-emotional-mental-spiritual moment on the metaphysical moonlit beach where we shared our laughs about the future, our tears about the past, where we quelled our angers and rode the waves of our disease. We pulled away, time returned to find rhythm on the second hand, Eddie picked up his cane and we walked back through the front gate, the doorway to the reality outside the soul-starred beach where we are architects. We were, and are, the architects of our own invention. We pulled our wisdom from the astral plane into the constituency of our own inception, vibrations received, vibrations passed on. We are mental radios. We are mental radios, highly attune to the world and in to ourselves.

Later in the day the [MH] whitewashed unmarked four-wheeler pulls into Rocks Canyon, home to an indoor complex of air-conditioned rock walls, a ceiling full of hot air, of sweating perseverance collected from climbers pushing the limits, beginners and experienced rockers alike. I chose the hardest gauge, of course, a 5.10B grade wall stocked with a line of purple synthetic chunks of misshapen handholds leading a snaking vertical challenge thirty-five feet up jutting out an impossible face that would push my upper body through a certain kind of hell three-quarters from the top. After psyching myself up for "just another climb" I get up, not for the promise of a free t-shirt, but rather, for the challenge, to test myself at least once, if I hadn't done so already in my 27-day tenure here at this house for wayward boys. Lo and behold, to my sheer frustrated amazement, I was stuck, stuck on a globular slipped block of "nope" a jump just too far away from a toe-wedged in the "I give up" rock from the manufacturer's order form. For more than forty minutes in a harness dancing on a wire I struggled to find the line, the way up. My body was telling me to give; my brain judging the distance, as I mouthed the words "I can't." I can't...do what? I can. I can do anything. I "won't" is just an expression of choice. And then—and then I took a breath. I closed my eyes, forgetting everything. Every thought went blank. Weightless. Opening my eyes, reaching into the chalk bag suspended from my hip, I took a moment. Let it go. I took and moment and jumped. I reached high, higher than before, farther than I thought my forearms could reach. And then I made contact, latching a C-pinch claw with my thumb and other failing digit onto the lip that I thought previously "impossible." My body had said "give in." "Give up." "You're done." My brain overanalyzed, over calculated, thought too far into the aggressive aggravated, "I can't." And then I did. Some miracle of an "I think I can" frequency shook through my fingertips as I pulled up, muscles screaming, loving the fire. The rehab crew, the other 11 adventurers beneath me cheered, the tension faltering in the double hitch around my waist. Surrounding myself to the tenacity of belief, the internal voice just above a whisper: "Don't give up." Not yet. The time and the place are not as important as the space in which I was all in-present mind. Hearing myself say "just be" to others; seeing myself "just be" around others; feeling myself "just being." I am the center of mine own everything-ness. The world does not revolve around me, my world revolves around it. An exit prevention later, physically stopping my roommate from leaving through the breezeway with bags packed, intentions missing as the tensions ran high. I can help him, I can be the empath I was meant to be if I realize my brilliance, stop shooting myself in the foot, and let my soul shine.

Radiate.

Radiate.

Radiate for all you are worth.

Take everything your soul emits and return it in full force, vivacious, back into the cosmos from whence it came.

7/28/16Two days remain...Up before dawn, ready, willing, open to experience. Another morning walk into the desert sands, prickly pears, columns of cacti pointing the trail-way into the hills. Still. All is still now. The familiar feeling of silence is deafening, like hearing the wind for the first time, blowing through thistlebrush, kicking up dust. Roads of commuting cars and industrial vans are a distant memory, lost in the haze of twenty minutes ago and 750 meters into rock formations facing the rising sun in the eastern skies. Not yet awake, not yet medicated. This is the headspace most susceptible for meditative non-thought, the practiced art of being, not thinking. The taking in of all senses, the inner workings of the spirit form as it exists (temporarily) in this consciousness, this dimension, this non-place of in-between space. In betwixt and in between the prior events, the elements, the things to come; the flies circling the extinguished butts day-to-night as an emphasis to the creeping malaise offering mindfulness to the present moment. This is The Way.

The Way It Is"There's a thread you follow. It goes among things that change. But it doesn't change. People wonder about what you are pursuing. You have to explain about the thread. But it is hard to see. While you hold it you can't get lost. Tragedies happen; people get hurt or die; and you suffer and get old. Nothing you do can stop time's unfolding. You don't ever let go of the thread."

—William Stafford

This is truly the way things are, the way It is. The red thread that pulls all the heartstrings in all directions in fell swoop, that also weaves them together in a kaleidoscopic tapestry, where letting go of the thread lends itself to isolation, the desolate deep of rock bottom despair. "Beware," I tell myself in the wax and wane of confidence, "lest you lose the substance by grasping at the thought thereof." While I hold it, while I hang onto this Zen thread of interlaced cosmological suspended belief and emotional irascibility, I can't get lost. Even in the tunnel there is a light that never goes out, that I will, and am, finding step-by-step, day-by-day. There, in the deepest well, the self-pitying reverse of pride had made the invention of alibis into a fine art; the nation had won a war or lost a peace, and that is just how it goes. That is, until the rebirth, where the light grants perspective on the self, ourselves, the ever-ongoing luminance of humility in the face of God-given instincts, Deadly Sins, universal truths, in testimony of evidence or the evidence of testimony. Collapse your light and rise.

7/29/16

"The only way to approach The Way is to relax the death grip of logic, and engage the far more powerful tool of intuition."

—The Tao

Feeling is the key. The way of change, of facing that which is movable and immobile; soft, pliable, or hard and rigid. All follows that of a mastery over self-regulation, of living with adaptability, of thriving with the ebb of a constantly drifting universe. The world moves with or without us. In the sun, under cover of darkness—the earth moves, rotates and caters to no whim of ours. This spinning blue marble doesn't heed our calls, our cries, laughter or snores. We revolve in our own worlds. These worlds don't revolve around us. Recognize truth when it appears, because it will be so brilliant you won't want to look away. Become yourself—and be fucking good at it! No one else gets to live your life. Take charge and be who you are meant to be.