Adios Ano Pasado

2012 is ending.  Good bye to another year, farewell to an organized collection of sunsets and morning dews.  Good bye to a filing cabinet of structured periods of time that fit nicely into a concept called weeks.  Good bye to this rotation around the sun that held many of my own tiny orbits around topics, people, and places.  Good bye to a series of "getting it wrongs"and strung together "you should of done betters".  Fuck you to the sun burns along the way that prove too much of a good thing can be damaging.  Good bye 2012 I'll cherish you. 

This year I said hello to my Shadows.  Greetings pity, I am sorry to disturb you under my bed, I rarely look there.  Let's dust you off and frame you to honor the struggles you've helped me accept.  Thank you cynicism for going on a diet and loosing the flat tire around the waist of suffering, suffocating your ability to help me breathe life into possibility.  I think the new disgruntled you looks good in well thought out perceptions.  Hello grey hair, I see I've earned the right to introduce you to my narcissism.  Shadow it has been nice getting to know you.  You are as discouraging as I imagined, and it has been rewarding embracing you.  You've always demonstrated and whined about how your always misunderstood, you have my attention.  Well for what its worth, I couldn't face my fears without you.  I think I like what you can bring to the table, like wasabi, that stimulating briskness that awakens the senses.  You make my grind so much more informative these days.  Thank you for helping me discover ways of seeing your dignity, you are the greatest asset to the maturation of my love.  2012 brought my shadow into the light.

2012 you give me momentum to launch into 2013.  Endurance get on board this segway to the New Year, you did me well.  Injustice you are not welcome but I've been told you must come with us.  I believe you are truly and always misunderstood, maybe societies shadow.  I will defend your right to exist even if you continue to misuse the weapons of deceit and pride.  No good byes to suffering, I need you to keep me real.  No tears for 2012, I cried them on time this year.  No cheers for time gone, remembering you slows me down.  Appreciation for lessons recognized through arrogance's mistakes and mercy's fight.  To a 38th chance at orbiting the sun.  This year may love find me without collisions, and may it shine on the lady who has struggled to not give up on understanding me.  May peace be upon me and let it be an epidemic.

With words of care for myself and you.  I am who I'm being,  I was who I thought I should be, and I will never get a chance to be who I could have been.  I am adjusting.

This year I fell in love.  I don't have permission to describe it but this is my way of yelling it from a rooftop, this is my way of telling the world how wonderful it is to be in love.  The only caveiate is that it's been a rough and tiring love.  It's been a love that her friends and family can't understand, and sometimes I can't either.  But I stay up late at night wondering, hoping, and praying for ways to make it fit.  I can't describe the opportunities I have squandered.  There are too many events to demonstrate how we don't fit.  We've called ourselves incompatible.  We've been told we should move on more times then we've been told we're happy for you.  I've been selfish and arrogant enough to be told "I don't know why I keep getting back with you".  I've cried tears that fall heavy on journal pages leaving bookmarks of pain.  Her name is Stephanie and she freezes me with her eyes, she melts me with her life stories, and ignites my body with hers.  But I just didn't have what it took to fit.  I just couldn't get it right or correct what I got wrong.  This year ends with hope that she might read this and feel inspired to say hello in ways we once were good at and learn together how to never say good bye again.  But love is one of those feelings that I will gladly fall for despite the pain when it ends.  Our love has shined brightly in brief or scattered moments that struggled through a thickening layer of clouds representing misunderstood love message.  I might be the only fool who loves so paradoxically that getting it wrong feels so good too.  I'm curiously stubborn to see what our love will look like when we get it right.


Dedicated to Stephanie, the woman who dances around my heart with a mirror.

A candle in a brown paper bag

Surrounded with optimism.  This Christmas has been a flash, it sprinkled itself throughout days of winter.  There has not been the strong anticipation for Christmas day like I once had when I was a boy.   This year I didn't realize it was the most wonderful time of the year, until now.  This year, the Christmas season was opened on a beach, saying a long over due good bye to some lingering memories of marriage sentiment, tucked alongside a senior trip encounter with a special woman who became my wife for a little bit.  In Cancun for lovely wedding I got to stitch tightly the history between my ex-wife and I, closing the circle symbolically.  The Christmas season creeped up on me during a play called a farolito Christmas.  It was here where I was warmed up to the importance of tradition.  I spent this Christmas not as a preparation for a day but a indulgence of a season.  I am optimistic again.

I am faithful with hope.  I understand Christmas not so much for a savior's birth but for the importance of the new beginning, being born in humility, born in a manger.  Time is the Christmas currency.  This Christmas time was on my side.  This Christmas I used my time for the people and events that presented themselves to me, versus Christmas past where most my time was spent doing was what I felt I should be doing.  This Christmas has been a lesson in sincerity.  

I have a small burning candle in my heart that trusts the dim little yellow glow will be enough to guide my thoughts, harness my fears, and sustain my dreams.  This year was trying, and it feels like a lonely, cold, dark night perfectly challenging the weak but untiring flame still lit in my soul. 

 A flame needs oxygen and my flame has found pockets of oxygen in this Christmas season.  The pockets of oxygen are like optimism ignoring the darkness, riding the frigid wind, and circling my flame.  The family and friendships encountered have been like the luminaria bag, taming the threats that can putout my flame.  My flame of faith is flickering.  Each day this Christmas was inspirational, not because it was in anticipation but because I was surprised by what revealed itself in the practice of patience. Patience allowed for oxygen to feed my flame.

"Let my heart become a manger that Christ may find his way and be born again"

Feliz Navidad

Patience...slow down please

My blogging was initiated as a tool to let my daughters understand who their father was, and I find it might be more of who'd I like to believe I am.  I tried to be as genuine as I could be.  Genuine doesn't always get received.  Some folks want honesty but only convenient honesty, fitting honesty, not brutal honesty.  I say fuck it, soldiers died, are dying, and will die so that I can express myself, among other dignified rights.  When I write I feel arrogant at times, embarrassed others, and mostly human and alive.  I am experiencing the same existential dilemma that all mankind and possibly all living beings have trusted, who am I, what am I here to do, how will I be remembered, and where do I belong.  I patiently contribute and paradoxically watch my identity being built and altered through my writing.

 There will be consequences and misinterpretations because of my expressions, but I owe it to myself to be genuine.  As I continue to capture my identity, perceptions, and delusions in my blogging, primarily for my daughters, I have to accept that patience is pouring its lessons on me.  I cannot keep up with all the things patience is trying to teach me.  I realize each day that being a good man is only as valid as the people I surround myself with perceive me to be.  The messages and signals I send do not always share the same meaning to those reading, listening, or observing. I see how my audience plays a significant role in how I am perceived.  I am beginning to understand patiently how their experiences, mostly unknown to me, taints, paints, fills in, manipulates, twists, biases, discolors, facilitates, clarifies, stimulates, and enhances my message being sent.  Despite the feedback I receive from being me, I feel courageous enough to share myself genuinely.

Now there is a companion quality, that I have ignored, it's graceful, polished, and sexy, I call it class.  The sooner I can get a grip on patience the better I can get busy being classy.  I think my prayer for the coming year is to share in the fruitfulness of class.

A humble and yet inattentive student of patience,
Ron


 Through Him, with Him, and in Him!

Lion's are not meant for cages

Quit trying to cage us! What a beautiful sound.

Bon Vayage!

There was a time in my life when I used to think about marriage as an end to freedom.  How foolish I once was.  What a tarnished perspective on union.  I've changed, progressed, and matured.  This past weekend I watched a brother take the woman of his dreams into marriage.  I was a passenger, figuratively and literally, on the boat ride out of friendship into fusion.  I watched the fusion of two souls becoming one.  I watched a brother raise his glass in celebration of a long hard road of ups and downs.  I watched tears fall because of sadness and joy.  Over the years and through the engagement I watch this man cry tears of hurt, smile smiles of pure infatuation, and toss and turn through nights of wonder and hope.  I sat on this boat believing in love's ability to answer prayers because I watch the calm in his eyes and the eagerness in hers.  Marriage might be an end to freedom but I recognize that it is also paradoxically the beginning of loving servitude, the most beautiful of all contradictions.

Richard just finished making room for a woman. We use to stay up some nights in our adolescents describing the women of our dreams.  We would share his twin bed, crammed and sometimes head spinning from a few beers.  We would share complaints  and wishes about that one, her, yeah that other one, and her too.  We would make our lists of who we wanted to be with most.  I watched this unfold for real, in one of the most beautiful places in the world, on a boat, the beach, and among family.  When you want the best for people you love it looks like a fantasy.  I couldn't have painted this experience for my brother, only participate, but the love that pours from his heart is so deserving of the perfect experience her father was able to create for them, and it was a fantasy come true, a fairy tail with an ending that doesn't matter.  I watched how to make room for a woman.

Good bye to a companion.  His priority is now his wife, and I have come to terms with having to face the rest of my journey without my compa.  He is now a soldier in her army, helping fight their battles.  He is obviously not gone but in a way he is completely gone.  I am so happy for him, so proud of the man he has learned to be for himself and for her, and I am grateful for the influence he has in my life.  Tanya is a lucky woman because Richard is an advocate for happiness and he has a special way of finding the blessings in situations, people, and mistakes.  Richard I love you, and it has been an honor sailing these waters with you by my side.  Go and get your new coordinates and sail that vessel with the peace and prosperity you've shared with me.  Vaya con Dios, mi amigo!

Music the way it should be!

I came across this station on YouTube and it is amazing. It would be great to experience our favorite artists as if they were street singers.  It creates the unique perspective grounded in humility and void of perverted glamor.  Elitism, experiences shame when the public sees through these artists for the human beings they are versus the typical grandiose stars we can turn them into. Enjoy!

It's Christmas

Can love be a stripper?

As I get older, swagger doesn't carry the same vibe... or I don't let it.  Can love be a stripper?  I feel worried about painting this metaphor.  There is such stigma behind this vocation. But in my life love has revealed itself in the most rarest of places.  I find myself being seen as an odd ball because I look at the "shameful", "regretful", and "avoided" with compassion and interest.

Can love be a stripper?  The ultimate hope that most humans strive for is to be loved, adored, admired, and desired.  If I disarm my defenses and what I am really saying is I wish to be loved, adored, admired, and desired. Now I can see the foundation for the glamor in eros.  I can begin to see how love is recognizable in appeal but possibly exploited and distorted by becoming erotic.  I can recognize how seduction becomes a vacuum creating a currency out of attention.  I see how love can be seen in the dance of a stripper.  There is a perversion to it, but what role does perversion play in love.

Is there a home for perversion in the dignified world.  If you describe a woman as sexy does that pervert her dignity?  If you don't see a woman as sexy does it make her more dignified? Please be critical of love and look for its shadow! If love has a shadow I would describe it as jealousy.  The assessment tool for love's shadow might be described best in following way.  If you ask men if they find a stripper attractive, most would say oh yeah, some might say well sure, and some might say yes but in a raunchy way.  This describes for me the role dignity has played in life.  The first set of men I've tried to represent as that man who is still working out of an adolescent state of dignity.  The second set of men represent those men who recognize the importance for dignity.  And the third set of men represent those men that have become prisoners of dignity.  There are infinite number of responses but this paints a spectrum.  Each of the three demonstrating loves shadow.

When a stripper isn't love it might be a sign that your dignity has gotten jealous.  When perversion damages the elegance that glamor can create, my dignity has become jealous.  When I cannot appreciate the allure that is created by "sexy" and I move to judgment and shame, my dignity has had to share loves attention.  Love is a stripper, love can be erotic, love can be admired so deeply by dignity that in jealousy, dignity retrieves the shared attention love has yielded to the Eros.

"Love you spin my head right round, right round!"

Swagger, you have haters, and they are the jealous soldiers of "dignity proper".  As for me, a stripper is love. Stripping is love intoxicated, asking to be desired, yet desperately a prisoner to survival through economics. A stripper is love misrepresented and exploited by perversion.  Love is a stripper naively hoping there is another way to be seen, sought, and surrendered.  I like to think that the gaze just beyond the stigma of perversion has helped me recognize love on the shameful stage of seduction.