Come Here, Boy
I turn now to document a peculiarly true tale of my undarkening adventure in the sun. Mine seems to mirror the destined course of all men. After all, we men are really just boys missing their courage.
Women, steeled maidens whose mystery molds mankind.
I was rescued, not from, but by, a miraculous tragedy. Those fearful depths eventually flipped me to the fearless heights flooded in an exuberant vitality I will attempt to explain by a word. It is the life upon which I always dreamed since I was a starry-eyed child who still knew what to wish for.
And somehow, this awakening from all mankind’s slumbering call ravaged every villain in all my false nightmares to rouse me once more as a proper wise, and rowdy boy.
And what happened to me is what happens to everyone who rejects happenstance through dreaming of a truer awakening tomorrow. Then the sun will shine forth seeds of wisdom, power, and love through the window of pain.
Laying down as dead men trusting the light will rise us back up as brave boys the next morn’.
But the sun seeds a wisdom that was never knowledge, philosophy, or religion.
A million invented religions thirst,
Pleasing an infinitude of wandering minds.
In their kernel, stands the million and first,
That anti-religion rendering religion itself cursed,
Called truer than true, to bind.
Innumerable arguments of reasoned minds,
Tickling the ears of we intellectually-learned fools,
In their midst, reigns the billion and first,
Meek anti-argument needs no defense,
Never helped, ever helper, cannot lose.
A cosmos filled with lyrically prosed fools,
Searching for acknowledgment’s meaning,
In their midst, deafening grace enthroned,
Wisdom’s silence beaming,
More eloquent than speech itself then rose.
I perceive the exalted in vision cast,
True intuitive glean arrives only through the gaze from within that highest object.
Where you stand dictates what you can see.
Wisdom’s Truth as billion-faceted diamond splendors forth in dazzling fractals.
Resplendent light seems to enter that glassy crown, but
Glory generates to beam outward, in
Brilliant eternal exaltation.
Our borrowed light,
Light-life of our being.
Sends, though never received.
Gives, though without loss.
Flows, though never slows.
Such is this sovereign stone, Wisdom.
Instead of growing up, we’ve grown down.
When we were young enough, we could all intuit the joining of all;
childlike logic tasted the imaginative fount at which we once maturely succored.
Majesty harmonizes with Mahler.
Vedic scriptures sing of Krishna.
Grand Dostoevskesque probing of mankind’s depravity.
Eastern, Western, and savage religions worshiping and damning.
Rembrandt’s calling from within the canvas both higher and taller.
Homerian mythical heroics living in history’s most real battles.
These unguessably unified chant the melody of the ages.
Each whispering the same tune to disparate benefit;
Producing both wit-terrifying treble and spirit-glorifying complete score.
Such enthroned in the mired material world, merely meaning’s shadow.
Projecting outward from that faceted paver of reality forms our world,
Enchantment, not from, but through the greatest minds dispatching wonder.
Your calling is to fuse your origin to your destination;
your purpose only then may be rightly aimed at that true significance.
Only the rightly aimed may know this harmonizingly toked melody.
Motif so familiar when we were children, lost as we get older.
Man, willed to stand up,
Always willing to lie down.
Children, still imaginative enough to rightly curtsy,
Never condescending to rise up frowned.
The finite must bow to the infinite at last.
Truth promenades, as
All others meander.
Essence
After the millennia pass, mankind’s reckoning will doubtless reveal that no people has ever re-matured up to their childlike imagination.
We long to discover what thought cannot think.
Perceive what no one else has ever recognized.
Imagine what has never been considered neat.
Only a miracle is worthy of your only life’s worship.
We fools believe we must be motivated first, then act, so we conjure up a mass of knowledge and conditions we think necessary to create the perfect environment for movement.
Believing requires action.
Motivation’s perceived purpose to act.
Yet, action must precede motivation.
Motivation fuels further action.
If you will let it, this pedal of action cycles your life’s every revolution.
Infertility of your work, and dreams, would be forever fertilized if you truly believed this seeded truth.
Order matters.
The fool only swallows knowledge from the knowable,
The acceptance becomes a medicine turned poison.
Yet, belief is what should proceed knowledge, to then understand. Bellowed belief ignites the fires of your understanding, overcoming all formidable conditions to set aflame the tango of confidence and competence.
You must crucify the expected to inherit the unfathomable leap.
What recipe succeeds without rightly ordered steps?
For you shall think, not in order to know, but because you already understand.
Truest truth evades all straining of the mind and struggling of the heart.
Imagination rightly enslaves the mind’s observations.
Mind may only inspect the observable because the mind is higher, but
Your finite mind cannot judge your infinite imagination.
Order matters.
What Exists?
Imagine a world with only two objects, both apples. I need not describe these apples to you, for you intuit them already.
Your mind pictures red, not green apples, slightly larger than normal, with some shimmer, your mouth corners stretched to bite, the refreshingly crisp crunch between your canines, the sweet jazzed juiciness on your tongue. Symmetrical, except for a stem branching off slightly. To the right.
At present, imagine only these two glossied sweet apples exist in reality. They represent the only perception of the number two, as the sole existing objects.
If we destroy these two apples, nothing exists.
But in actuality, the idea of the number two still remains, and so too does the meaning of an apple. The meaning of what an apple is does not merely refer to the memory of the apples which existed. For you knew both apples prior to picking up this essay.
Which is more real now: the destroyed apples which no longer exist, or the universal concept of an apple and the quantity of two?
And herein we are confronted with the Platonic primacy of the ages; the post-Kantian notion of the noumenian view against the phenomena’s appearance.
That apple idea which sits outside nature is not only more real than the observable fruit inside but also
More true than everything ever seen.
The material world defacto less real.
The unseen meaning, actualizing reality.
For you would never recognize any apple or any pair, without the defining idea of an apple and the concept of two, defining the physical world from beyond.
Purpose defines matter.
Matter reflects its definer.
If a thing can be observed, then destroyed, it exists less than that which cannot be seen, yet can never be destroyed.
The two fallen apples were once really there.
The idea of the apples is forever more real.
This is true of objects and all great ideas, religions, art, history, stories, and lives.
What would you do if you knew you could never die?
Encouragement
Destroy every Bach score and recording, yet his corpse shall repose reigning, to usurp the assassin’s reality for a thousand more years.
Each lyrical three-chorded pronouncement always singing his testimony.
Every ear ever interpreting beauty as he defined, yet unknowing his name.
The tap of every child’s foot wafting his praise for generations.
But do not let my vague prose of imagination and short sentences lure you into thinking this a weak and wandering endeavor. No, it will take all of you, your heart, soul, mind, and death, included.
Hope
In my darkened moments of weakness and the infanitle surety of my demise from my most recent hated loss, I recall the hoped-for words which hop into my hopefully hearted chest which defines who I am yet again. For my every loss becomes lesson. My every step-missing trip, a truth found to lead me on every trip beyond.
Yet, struggles fulfilled.
Men, built for battle.
Women, loved for living.
He, fills to become tranquil.
When I let my wife down yet again, I realize it is I who looks down missing my higher righting:
Show me a man without purpose, and I will show you a man who needs a worthy enemy.
Show me a woman not living, and I will show you a boy who considers himself a man by her.
The endeavor towards joy is a yellow path of solitude.
For you are only really free to grow when alone, buried beneath sunlight.
Pondering sunward rise from your seedbed darkest fright.
Dancing proves our race is more eternal than our never conceived interlude.
Thinking I was only looking for the better strategy to grow into my next evolution of stablely fool-proof power, I soon stumbled on the gift of Lewis:
“You don’t teach a seed how to die into treehood by throwing it into the fire: and it has to become a good seed before it’s worth burying.”
I had to become a good seed. Only good seeds can become good trees.
Only dead seed can ever become living shade.
Learn what you love.
Let it use you.
Let it kill you.
Order matters – both- vertically and horizontally.
If what you love most also happens to be eternally true, you may truly live.
If what you live most also happens to be eternally real, you may really love.
Truth.
Ever most elegant naked.
Known to free all once flogged and triple-pierced.
Raised high while stately seated.
Truth.
Only buried seed will ever hope to hang our protecting shade.
Only that which was worth keeping was worthy to give away.
Only that which is worth keeping is worthy to give away.
Only that which will be everything must be given away.
In the end, you keep only that which you give away.
Deepest truths, driven not by the train of logic, but by a creaking cart of conundrum.
Remove paradox, and all you shall have is a lazy Kierkegaardian dictionary.
Paradox will undo your disorienting charms if you let him.
Ascent
For to gain means surrendering to spread out defeats.
Your ascent towards True Paradox begins now,
But will come only first from loss-seeking humility.
If the best is to come, mere good must abdicate its throne.
Insurrect the good for the great.
The smart considers he has nothing to learn.
The wise knows he has yet to really know anything.
I’ve frequently found myself working toward the opposite of what I wanted. My prideful priorities took centerstage. It was Shane Parrish who taught me:
“When we make a decision to prove we’re right rather than get the best outcome possible, we only end up with a mess to clean up later.”
Yep, that was me every time I assessed my progress.
To make progress when you are going in the wrong direction means to turn around.
The surest way to safety and purpose is always the about-face.
You cannot see that from which your eyes point away.
Turning first, as action best proceeds motivation, your feet must direct your eyes.
Your eyes shall direct your very becoming.
To turn around means you can see light and truth while still very far away.
Before a single step.
And if you can see, you may come to believe,
But if you believe, you will certainly breathe.
When darkest, the light home shines most exceedingly.
Light inverts darkness.
That is its very purpose.
Welcome to the adventure, my friend.
