It happens all too often; we allow our lives to empty us. The stress grows without, the pressure builds within, our light fades. We let our responsibilities pack away our joy, and keep it hidden from ourselves until we forget we even carry it within us. We cover our radiance with masks that divert and deflect the attention of the heart eaters, and our intention to nurture self.

“In most of our human relationships, we spend much of our time

reassuring each other that  our costumes of identity are on straight.”

~Ram Dass

We feel our souls, every once in a dark while, clawing to get out. Our lungs fight to expand after being solidified by shallow breathing. If we are brave enough to ask our hearts what they want from us…the answer is “unbind me~set me free”. Our voices are rusty from lack of use when the words are fluttering like frantic birds to be freed from the gilded cage of a sorrowful silence.

“At every moment of our lives

we have one foot in a fairy tale

and the other in the abyss.”

~Paulo Coelho

We long to step away from the travesty we perpetuate, but our limbs have fallen asleep from a lack of hope. We are weakened from the endless bleeding of a thousand shallow cuts from shattered dreams left untended. We long to be Lazarus rising from the dead, so we keep waiting-desperate to hear a voice that commands us to rise and come forth.

We feel us in there sometimes when we’re very still. We hear our name spoken in the silence between heartbeats. In the gap where anything and everything is possible we understand that we are our only hope, we create our own reality, we are the key to free ourselves from ourselves.

“Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.”~Anais Nin

So now the pain of opening our eyes fully to see what flickered briefly in our peripheral vision~was that life? Do hearts implode from lack of use, or is that tearing feeling coming from each one pushing themselves free of the razor wire that binds them? Now comes the time to claim our sanity, or insanity, whichever is the opposite of our current diagnosis. Now is the time to quit ignoring the whispers of faith, the voice of our truth, the face up screaming into the heart of the universe that we live.

“We are only as blind as we want to be.” ~Maya Angelou

See with the eyes of the living, tear that heart wide open, leap fearlessly-trusting the wings of the soul to maneuver the storms that come.

Live a life worth living goddammit, before the face you see on the milk carton at breakfast is your own.

“Do not weep, for she is not dead but sleeping.” ~Luke 8:52

I have written the guts of my heart as long as I have memory of the ability to write. I write because I have to speak even when I have no voice. I write because I need to be heard, even if it’s in the silence of my own world. I write because it is the safest expression of my soul, of everything I am or hope to be. It is what I do when communication is imperative to the continuation of a relationship.

Because people interrupt. They talk over you, they manipulate your words to work for their benefit in their twisted little minds. They mis-under-hear you. They paint their own meaning in milli-seconds and obliterate your truth with their own means to an end. They take the words from your breaking heart and use them as a weapon against you and themselves at the same time-because they don’t know any better, thereby silencing your voice.

My words paint the picture of my Truth. They are clear and focused like the sun through a magnifying glass. They burn, and reveal, and create chaos and change. They help me, hurt me, break me in two. When I write, the masks are gone, and my scars are visible, and I don’t give a single shit that my heart is exposed. Not when I write.

The gift of painting a world with words is one I never take for granted. It creates a beautiful place for me to abide, to comprehend circumstances, to grow in wisdom. It powers my spine to speak the Truth as I see it without distraction. If you read my words, you have to hear my voice, you have to see (at least a little bit) my heart.

The truest and most soul-felt of all loves has been expressed in my written voice. My most toxic angers, my most hideous injuries, my most debilitating pain has been spoken in the silence of the written word.

The years I spent not writing were a form of self-punishment for being gutless. I paralyzed myself from both pain and joy. I accepted ordinary as real. I quit dreaming and put in my time. I bought into the suck it up, do the deed, joyless non-life way of existence. I did not write, did not allow much thinking, did not do more than go through day by day by day…

“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.”
― Anaïs Nin

I had no words to pen, because I wasn’t even living once, much less trying to taste it the second time. Who would want to taste shit a second time? Who would want to relive a non-event?

“The role of a writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say.”
― Anaïs Nin

Who would want to read the coma inducing prose of a gutless fool? Who would heed the words of the shadow hiding behind the rock, the mask, the self-imposed stupor? Don’t we all want to feel our hearts race, our eyes tear, our breath catch on the words of a kamikaze heart? Keeping in mind that the true meaning of kamikaze isn’t to kill yourself fruitlessly in the name of honor; the true meaning being “Divine” or “spirit wind”.

“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”
― Maya Angelou

There are few joys as illuminating as your heart expressed in a painting of words, or the soul grip of another person saying “thank you for speaking what I could not”. What a fucking honor that is. But Truth be Told, I write for the ability to breathe, and smile, and dance in place when I must, and to throw back my head and sing at the top of my lungs. I write to look the world in the eye and say “This. Is. Me”. I write to reach my heart out to that person who is totally devastated and alone to say “Hell No.” I’m right here my friend, bleeding the same tune, mourning the same paralysis, dying the same death of monotony.

My words are written to say “Rise up!”, to tell that twin flame to wake up, speak up, never give up. To be a reminder to dream however you want to, sing whatever song, paint whatever picture, and dance the dance of life.

“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”
― Ray Bradbury

Drink up, my friend.