thoughts

Time-struck

stars

Why must we keep on pretending
When clearly everything we’ve come to know is soonly ending
I wish I could lock this moment in a box
Take a second to put it all on pause
In desperate attempt to infinitely grasp this sense of continuous perception
Not to mention, the fact that all my beliefs are held in suspension
Finding it hard to feel grounded
When the concept of sanity seems to elude me
Religious beliefs fail to sooth me
It’s when this pen touches paper that the world begins to move me
As I get further lost in taking my thoughts
And transforming them into something new
Creating a new perspective for me to view
While leading my heart towards living true
And expressing this thought from me to you

—
Photographer: Josh Felise

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

 

Grow Everyday


You don’t need more time
You just need to live it
Stop putting off your growth
As if this is your limit
You can do so much more
Just breathe and believe
That you can still rise up off the floor
I know you feel hurt, I know you feel torn
But that’s just what you get since the day you were born

This life is ultimately not of your deciding
But remember the power in your own hands to create
No, not in the future, but here on this day
Today we live in our own way, not afraid
No longer too scared to live it brave
Now stronger than yesterday
The dues that we just have paid
Give us what we have today

So help me make a better tomorrow
Where instead of choosing a life fueled off of our sorrow
Let’s choose one of love
No longer letting pain remain the status-quo
Hand in hand, let’s truly grow
Let’s come to know
That we exist together in this shared show
Each playing our own part, our own role

—

Photographer: Jamie King

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

Time to Live

It’s time to begin
Time to bring together the lost pieces
The ones flustered in disarray
Spread out in a land of pure dismay
Where we were too afraid to live it brave

It’s time to release the tension
Been in class for so long, but never got the lesson
That it’s better to be and let be
Than cling to the depressing feeling of self pity
Feeling shitty
Self induced chains restraining the growth within me
Preventing me from finding the strength to sing free

Once disconnected in reflections of fear from imperfections
Let me cast away the state of mind that can’t hear this message
All you have is one life, make it fun and live it right
You won’t always know what that means but you will definitely feel it
This moment reveals it
No more illusions to conceal it
Awaken to the love and let your heart wield it

Express yourself and let love flow through
Grow, grow, grow as you become you
Before our days are done, there are moments to renew
We’ll likely never know all of what is true
But this music sounds so good, and oh! what a view