Water...

"Some voice said, Here's a map, drive off it. When do I come back? I asked You don't." * On vacation with my partner, near Mill Creek Bridge, CA June 2025 near Mill Creek Bridge, CA Highway 1 (PCH) a bit south of the Bug Sur Landslide This haunting:  some parts still remember being stuck in pretend straight.  My pulse still quickens, adrenalin still rushes in anxiety at times, and then I remember that was then.  Now is different.  Some time ago, back in some other part of the journey, I once startled at  the long-held premonitions of "driving off the map?"  Now I can call it: "my journey toward wholeness."  Some rumble, from beyond the joys of today, groan on about loneliness and rejection from others--voices once believed. It was only a few, who could not accept gay.  Many are just fine with gay, even before I was okay with admitting to myself--"I am gay".  Most were just fine with gay.  The journey, that map, wasn't pointing toward...

 https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RDRxU-Ccl8s-sl0_KK7fn1ClrYlLP_YISlFKlAA0BVw/edit?usp=sharing It's longish, full of real-life questions. Maybe something to ponder.

I know, I know, but hear me out. I have still, a book in my library (for occasional reference to remember what I came from).  The title is telling:  "The Complete works of E.M. Bounds on Prayer".  How far I have come/fallen from grace depending on the view. The American, gay poet Walt Whiteman defines prayer and "god" for that matter somewhat better:   “Why should I wish to see God better than this day?  I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment then,  In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass;  I find letters from God dropped in the street, and every one is signed by God's name,  And I leave them where they are,  for I know that others will punctually come forever and ever.” Then this morning, Katie's "God Poem" really resonates deeply with me.  And Sylvia Plath does a smashing job of depicting life's fig tree.  For context: see https://thursdaypoetry.com/ 2017/04/23/go...

A copy of a post to my fellow gay fathers who journey with me. -------------------- Hello all. I'm doing pretty well. My partner is facing a concerning cancer diagnosis, and I keep doing my own internal work. I like to do exercises that spur my internal growth. Here is one that I found challenging and perhaps even helpful after taking some defenses down. I'd put the book down for a good while, and perhaps Blackwolf & Gina Jones' ideas on internal growth are not for all, but I felt a sense of triumph this morning, as I did some re-framing. In-spite of wading through considerable non-sense, I did tap into something that is real for me. (I tend not to read in this specific spiritual pop psychology genre. Far too often, for me, it has side-tracked me from facing reality as it is, and perhaps old mis-guided attempts at self-improvement did have a net benefit of helping me figure some things out. For my own reasons, harder sciences, better researched ideas, satisfy...

  Empty is a full space. The void contains timelessness. I have been anxious to meet empty     very, very anxious. I have avoided empty feelings     only to notice empty more prominently. Sometimes I have saught for empty spaces     nature dressing up the unfathomable     sheltered, I have for brief moments,     relished a deep inhalation of empty air     pregnant with morning dew, ladened with pollens     empty air rushing into gasping, expanded     lung-sacks, permeable organic things     squeezed into companionship among billions     of cells made up of stardust.   The spaces between stars, empty? Between breaths, universes? Empty is not so empty: impish a-void-er!     Nothingness vastly embraces and fills you. Full of space, I step through the portal of this Thursday morning: 6/22/23

Listen to the voices: cacophony, perhaps, but only at first.      Animal voices, tree voices, fish voices: Trout shouts with a slap of his tail upon glassy lake Orca sings a harmony far, far off. Ash and oak whisper to each other, l eaves rustling in gentle breeze. Lion roars as Sun guilds the savanna sky with radiance: A voice of a mammal and a voice of warm photons. Listen closely: individual voices emerge amongst the hum of rising sea temperatures. Coffee-shop chatter: human voices, willfully ignorant. Insurrectionists screaming their credos, claps of thunderous violence. Two lovers entwined whisper in ecstasy: the voice of joyous sex. Populists, echo-chambers of the powerful reverberate with senseless platitudes— incoherent self-congratulatory-grunting-gravely, grating, death-rattles… Choking screams of something precious: the perishing voices of suffering, democratic-thirsty, freedom loving human individuals. Will our children ha...

I started this page thinking about so many details from this day.  It's okay not to write anything down at all. Electric is off, due to area specific thunderstorms, so working off my cell phone signal and this laptop.  I would like to write out longhand but probably won't.  Guess my son is in the writing mood tonight as well. I do not always find peace in solitude.  I often feel anxious when I go into solitude.  Sometimes I long to turn down the noise...the fan, the TV, the daily living noise. Do I want to really think about shit?  Do I want to think about how bothered I actually am by trivial stuff---that probably does not matter all that much in even 30 minutes and definitely not in 30 weeks. I am here now.  The rain is falling, the pebbles of rain fall across the landscape.  The order of things is unchanged.  Mary Oliver's eyes see what my eyes see.  I don't know my place in the order of things.  I do and I don't.  There is ...

 The validation of all a person, another human,     can mean to another....          may only be felt. Men have emotions:  deep emotions, not singular either.      The setting:  ( Provisions Bakery & Deli in a sleepy Ohio town, waking up amongst sweet smells of baked goods and people coming and going.  Two tables over a venerable elder sits, walking-stick stretched out on right of table.  As a dawning, attention is transformed, the table has become an altar: his wife is framed in a small 3x5 window in the center of that flat square. Three empty chairs surround the small table.  "Tuesdays through Saturday--it's my morning ritual," he almost has an apologetic tone.  It's Friday.)     Across the span of something we might call, Occupancy, that transitory reality       has dictated a type of musical chairs.          One two three or more....

 I am already home. If to be home already brings the possibility of having never left, It might follow then that strong arms have always held me safely:   Strong arms of my own existential beingness. These thoughts rolled through my mind as a I fitfully slept the other night.  There is fear.  There is storm.  There is peace and shelter in the inner sanctum--even for a free-thinker/atheist such as myself. The shelter within: fortress, bulwark, hearth, walls, gates, doors, windows. A castle secure from the onslaught of exterior circumstances.  I might say I am a castle impregnably stalwart.  Perhaps death is one enemy that I won't vanquish--thankfully.  And then there is this feeling: castle feels cold.   Home feels warm.  Warmth of hearth, joy of good family meals, chatter, companionship, all that it means to be at home, and be home.  It seems to me like it should be shoes kicked off, just pure relaxation. Storms do rage, ...

I've had a broadening realization:  I know more of the source of my anxiety.  I know my own anxiety(ies) all to well.  I've spent much of my life fighting against anxiety.  Today, we (different parts of me) have arrived at some uneasy truce. What is so striking is that at forty-five years of age, I think there is a part that is still growing up, I wish to emphasize the "a part".  This part feels the pressure to give out of it's non-existent resources. It got stuck in a time loop. The source of my anxiety has to do with parent/child role reversal.  Parentification is the technical term.  This part had to give to my mother, when it was actually my mother's responsibility and duty to give to me.  It was an impossible task for such a small boy. I had no life experience, and I tried so hard, and everything I tried seemed to fail except playing smaller and smaller, and not being a pain to mother and trying to guess how to make her happy, and then I was ...

This may be a 30,000 foot view of life.  He's been in the planes looking down between the clouds to see a landscape, one that looks miniature.  Tierra firme!  He's a terrestrial.  Feet upon the ground and brain sometimes in outer-space. The steam of hot coffee, a Spring morning that is shaping up to be a Winter morning, but that is all part of the cycle of Springing in the Northern Hemisphere.  One cannot have Spring without som'more Winter.  Winter may not want to let go (please allow a personification), much like this man does not like to let go either of that which feels safe and the comfort of the "expected".  Then there is the "usual" which has changed and metamorphosed, and nothing is all that predictable.  Covid-19 perhaps it was more predictable than he or anyone thought possible.  Then there is the toy like scene from 30,000 feet of Ukraine and Monster Russia playing at something awful: war.  Predictable as well, he supposes, bu...