happiness

Time to Create

Oh but don’t you worry for we are bound to make mistakes
Whether we take it slow or we hurry, there’ll be plenty of outtakes
For it takes more than just one moment for a heart to succeed
It’s continuous motion, to love and be free
Means to truly believe in what it means to freely breathe
We are beings of oxygen, of big bits and little bits
Atoms and molecules all fused together with hidden rules
All acting together to bring to life what we call existence
Each passing moment, each passing instance
Here we are, able to think this
Awareness, mindfulness

Sharing fading memories while traveling through these distant trees
Uncovering ideas and unknown philosophies
Able to be grateful for this sweetest breeze
Here is what I see
Interconnected families
Growing in all directions, becoming something new
Or perhaps a reflection of dreams coming true

For society as we know it was at some point constructed
Grown institutions imposing ideals on how life should be conducted
By the hand of man, we built the life that we’ve always wanted
Creating our own world, despite its future being forgotten

—

Photographer: Joshua Earle

How to Change Your Life

A part of me is completely conflicted about desiring to write an inspirational post. This isn’t about the 3 Ways To Easily Lose Weight or The Secret Preventing Your Happiness. It’s about identifying the elements in personal growth.

Generally, these are long term changes. This entails a combination of:

  • time
  • discipline
  • consistency

With the nearly infinite amount of positivity blogs, inspiration hype, and self-help hoopla to go around, they nearly always revolve around these concepts.

Kind of like how all these lose-weight-fast ads come with an asterisk that say, “Regular exercise and proper diet for maximum results”. Well, if you worked out and ate healthy already, you probably wouldn’t need the quick-fix!
Ok sure, there are some problems where it’s necessary but I’m specifically talking about the “do it quick” type of things.

The funny thing is, this isn’t anything magical. We already know what to do! We just get lost in the games we play in our head. Turns out, some things are fairly simple. Getting a salad instead of fries is easy. All it takes is a simple sentence. Hitting the gym instead of being lazy  is easy. All it takes is a bit of effort.

The problem with reading all this inspiration-porn is that reading is incredibly fast. Just this sentence took you less than 10 seconds to read. On the other hand, committing to change your habits can take a month to kick in. That’s helluva lot more time than the 5 minutes to read this piece. So to truly benefit from this writing you must do more than play along idealizing your own self-growth. The entire point of this piece is to remind you those dreams don’t need to stay in your head. They don’t end after my last word. You carry your dreams forward.

To truly benefit from this piece of writing you must internalize and resonate with these ideas and follow through.

FOLLOW THROUGH.

Don’t just fantasize, actualize! Make it happen. Do it. Do it before your excuses make sense. Do it before your day ended. Do it before problems get so bad you hate yourself for not handling them earlier.

We all know you can do it — so why are you hesitating?

Set Your Sails

I didn’t always have the confidence
To stand up tall for my own stance
Only giving ground to external forces
As if my soul wasn’t mine and wasn’t even worth it
Not worth the fight of choosing to live right
Where I fell out of light and into more vice
As if insatiable addiction could suffice
To be a life to live, just a roll of the dice

Yet one day I looked in the mirror  and saw the picture clearer
Saw my own chin rise up
As if confidence was the direction of a head held high
Fueled by the dreams as vast as the sky
You see, it took me some time to truly believe
That in my own hands, my own mind
I too have this power to shine
Power to grow and become one step further
One bit stronger
A future to nurture
No longer in search of sweet salvation
No longer procrastinating the most important sensation

The feeling of living by one’s own side
Not just running from problems, for there’s no need to hide
Letting fear and doubt come but then it subsides
Living a life of love, not one of lies

—

This last Thursday, I went to my college’s poetry club for the first time. I wrote this piece for the prompt:

Something that took you a long time to believe in

—

Photographer: Kelly Sikkema

 

A Reminder to Live

Raise your chin and begin again
For this moment is differing
A new song now for you to sing
A new chance for you to bring together your soul into a single fraction of time
Every ounce of your being, all put on the line
To live a life worth living, not just for dying
Not just complying with every rule given
As if life itself had a directions page, straight from the beginning
Where the laws were put in place with no room for disagreeing
No, life is defined through the process of your being
Through your growth and your love while continually seeing
This gratitude for existence, appreciation for feeling

Not afraid of confronting my own pain
Once broken and stranded, only left with the remains
Trying to figure out how to salvage the wreckage
As if life is a conversation with just a hidden message
As if there’s one secret answer, and then I’ll just get this
Acquire my own bliss
No longer in loneliness
No longer alone and feeling the torment of emotions stuck on hell-bent desires
Self-destructive tendencies lighting personal fires
Where I kept falling into currents of depravity
Easily giving up, avoiding all that challenged me
Impulsive desires urged living lazily
“To sit back and take it slow
Why do it now, when tomorrow you can grow?”

To that voice in my head, I say take a closer look
You’ve seen a friend die, like the unexpected end of a book
What about Ben Zukoff
The one who can not graduate
Whose sudden cancer changed his fate
Don’t give me this bull-shit preventing your dreams of late
With breath in your lungs, your power can create
Can create the ideas and dreams that fill your mind
Bringing time and space into something to find
Giving meaning to life in attempts to unwind
The difficulty of living philosophically blind

—

Last Thursday I shared this at an open mic poetry slam at my college. First time reading my work in front of more than like 4 people! I tried to recite it from memory, but 3 lines in, I forgot the whole thing. So I grabbed my phone to help me remember it all. Once I read one line, I was back to performing it from memory. I wish I could say the rest went smoothly, however, I stopped mid sentence during the end of the piece. Having to stop and repeat my favorite part of the poem did not make me a happy camper. But, I signed up again and shared Welcome to Blue Skies, and didn’t miss a beat! 😀

 

Gateway to Emotion

Trying to slow down and prevent time from moving so fast
Day after day just simply pass
Given several moments to be aware of the ride
Existing in time and space with a heart open wide
Aware of the fact that what we are is more than just what’s inside
Loves, fears, and pains we hide

Living in the age of anxiety, uncertainty
Born with the notion that we can live free
Overwhelmed with emotion, just ever so briefly
That we can grow as a collective humanity
Undiscovered, remain the depths of our sanity

Bringing back the awareness, the mindfulness
A receptive experience of one particular happenstance
Thrown into a world already in existence

With the power of our brains to convert light into meaning
It is us, with perception, that give the Universe feeling
So let us do more and truly start believing
That with our hands, we craft life into being

—
Photographer: Moyan Brenn

Don’t Tell Me You’re Stuck

Wake up from denial
Open your eyes as it’s been a while
Been a bit of time since you last cleared your mind
Of all your self doubts, worries, and binds
Self created shackles, illusions of a kind
Where instead of living free, you chose to live it blind

Forgetting that whether or not you choose to act
Time continues its march forward, never going back
No more repeats or second chances, let’s pick up the growing slack

I know this failure hurts, but it can be oh! much worse
For if you do nothing but sit by and curse
You’ll take it to the grave, from this chair to your hearse
For this reason alone, I write you this verse

Don’t tell me you’re stuck, give it a different name
Shift your perspective to one embracing change
Let this directive flow through your growing brain
You have the power to love, live and be brave
So keep moving forward, day after day

—

Photographer: Matthew Wiebe

All in a Moment


Here we are on this journey
This bittersweet mix of joys and of worries
Some slow-paced but many hurried
Heads buried in flurries of distractions
Valueless stimulation stealing our time in fractions

Little moments to never again be retrieved
Let’s make them count, instead of failing to see
That this is our life
A chance to love and be free
Not just miserably
But with a head held tall
With a sense of awareness for what we know above all

That the galactic process begun eons ago
Had never really ended, we are still the show
The show of life, the days and nights
Wrongs and rights
Pulsations of lights against the darkness
Suffering amid this one bliss

Here in this moment exists our awareness
The heartbeat of a Universe with a second to witness
The magic and wonder of knowledge without limits

Surrounded by patterns of some known but many not
Where the answers remain elusive in our ever-dynamic plot
In a temporary world condemned to be forgot
And yet here we are, able to give all we’ve got

—
Photographer: Keith Misner

I’m Disappointed and Here’s What You Need to Do

Open your eyes and see the projects you’re denying
Letting them shrivel up and face the threat of dying
You haven’t worked hard enough to secure these dreams of your mind
So start moving already and begin making use of your time

You already know these kinds of days won’t last
The clocks move the same but each second’s too fast
Leisure not worth the price of letting dreams pass
So start paying attention and get off your ass

I know there are unanswered questions outstanding
But trust me on this, it takes some understanding
That none of it exists, your time just a series of blips
Wibbly-wobbly bits of information
Stored in symbolic logic for mental integration
With many unknowns still due an explanation
So don’t get too caught up trying to escape our situation

Instead, dive in and become fully aware
No longer blind to the love in the air
Notice it here, feel it there
Start finding your reasons to care
Reasons to share a life worth living
A hero who knows that this is the way
Living with love, making use of each day
Knowing that it’ll pass regardless what we say
So let’s make a past worth remembering today

I love you and only wish for you to grow
Just trust me on this, for I definitely do know
That the hype is real, the potential in your heart is truly surreal
Melting into emotional journeys of free will
The power you have can still become a force to be reckoned with
The power of the hero not just held in myth
But in the way your soul moves forward
Moving towards a day that you believe in
Aiding dreams that need relieving
Bringing oxygen to struggling lungs that keep on breathing
Able to become more than expected, don’t ever stop dreaming

Welcome to Blue Skies

At last this feeling is finally back
Here we go, let’s have a blast
One step at a time from the first to the last
Let’s create memories worth calling the past

Allow these hardened walls to crumble away
Insecurities from a different time, the fears of yesterday
Let go of the pain you’ve come to know
Come in closer and let me show you
This is how the Universe has thrown you
A unique perspective aware of it all
Aware of the rise and of the fall
Here for a moment to haul in all these memories
Slipping seconds of new and old dreams
Fleeting senses in the midst of your journeys

Welcome to life, here is your mask
No defined purpose, no specific task
Welcome to the moment, one not to grasp
But to truly let go, feel absorbed at last
For this is what truly matters
Keep working and growing
Disregarding other factors
Choose a life that your heart can follow
Live it well and avoid that hollow sense of void inside
Where all you wish is to run and hide
You’re not alone, you have friends by your side
So stand up tall, become a hero to recognize
Resonate with emotions that continue to amplify
The sense of connection with all under our grand blue sky

Grow, My Friend

I’m trying to fall into love
To exude it like the sun exudes its warmth
The power to heal not given just to time
But in these hands, in these words
These moments of mine
A power to shine
But at the same time
Growing uncertainty begins to unwind
Any fought for sanity, my calmer state of mind
And enter the scene comes a part of me I ever wish to deny
The part who doesn’t care, the one who lets love die

Because he doesn’t quite understand how it all works
As love on the surface appears like something to be obtained
But rather, it’s already within you, flowing through your veins
From your head to your toes, love always remains
As there’s no better time than now to renew
A stronger sense of living true
Your dreams of late deserve daylight too

So let this re-spark an inner passion, let me lead you towards action
Perplexed consciousness amid a world of big numbers and small fractions
I know you feel stuck
But I need you to move
This is your life
Whose time there’s little left to lose
All I want is for you to grow
For you to choose
A life worth living without the self-abuse
Making smart choices so you can produce
Works of art instead of a noose

—

Photographer: Dustin Scarpitti