Adventures in Urban Mysticism: (Aum) Vol. 1: Rebirth

Bullets:

My Heart

My Heart’s like a gun /

And my words /

Each One’s a bullet /

My delivery /

The Trigger /

About Time that I pull It

And So We Begin…

Date Unknown

RAGE!!!

rage is real

so real, so real, so real

it just wants to be acknowledged

just like Love, just like every other feeling

Rage is just as valid…

Ignoring any feeling is an injustice to the human experience, the range of which is what the Soul wanted in the first place.

Rage is real. It is okay. I enjoy rage. I like that I can feel this and understand where it comes from, why it is, it is my feeling. I own it. And sometimes, there are things that I just don’t understand. I cannot understand Life or people outside of what I understand in myself. And that changes as I change; it gets deeper and more complex, so much so it ends up simple. It sucks. It is amazing.

Life is a buffet of options and today I dine on rage. I see why you are on the menu. I’m okay with that. Knowing what you taste like fully will allow me to make another choice on the menu should I choose to do so.

Or I could just choose you. One thing I know, no one else puts you on my plate. I put you on my plate.

Which Leads To…

Date Unknown

Waste…

It is all around. It hangs out with despair. They are also my good friends. Like childhood buddies that I see from time to time and though we are not as close as we once were, still I know them very well. I can no longer cruise with them in the way that I used to but I still Love them for what they are. Great teachers, old friends, reminders of where I have been, who I have been, and how I can grow by choosing to change. I realize that they are always with me because they helped me get here. I see that they are Homies with Love, and a friend to Ole’ Rage as well.

Thx friends.

Relating to Death

Date Ongoing

Death is very real. It happens to each one of us and none of us can know when. Think about it. One can never know, if, how, or when. Our technology affords us to figure out most, if not all the whys and the causes, but the rest, who knows. So why do we worry? Why are we going to care about the why, isn’t it over when we die? Exactly! So again, why do we worry about Death?

I have no Fear of my own Death. I’ve had many experiences where I feel totally connected and in the way that I view it All, I feel the Soul Lives on. That’s not to say I have a Death wish, I just accept it at this point. I accept it is a possibility and I choose to allow it, rather than to be scared of it.

There are a great number of things I do not enjoy about Death. I can celebrate that it is a passing, a transition, but I do not like many parts of it because there is great sorrow that comes with Death.

I really Love people. Even though I believe that the Souls are just going back to the Universal Ocean of Eternal Energy, I feel a whole range of things that pop up when you lose someone you Love.

Encounters with Death came early on in my Life. I remember being a child and playing in my Grandma’s backyard in Kaneohe on the Windward side of Oahu. The yard was super lush and had a huge stone stairway leading down into the brush. It was like going off into another world as a kid, another dimension that ended up by a river. As children we Loved to play out there and one afternoon, my cousin dared me to kill a fish in my hand. I’m guessing that he didn’t think I would do it, based on his shocked response afterward. I didn’t even think twice about it myself, just crushed it in my hand. I remember feeling so bad, like I had just destroyed something special and what place was it of mine to do such a thing.

As I grew older, I learned that one of my Mom’s brothers had died when she was just a kid. Death was a big thing for her early on too. The pictures of Uncle Patrick looked just like me. I often wondered if I was him before when I was still in small kid time (‘a young child’). I didn’t know but I had felt like I had been here before even though much of it didn’t make sense.

I don’t remember too many instances of Death as a child beyond that but the brief respite was greeted again by Death as it followed me throughout High School. There were so many kids who passed away. Our school, St. Joseph High School, was very small and every loss rocked us. I grad with The One, The Great, Class of ’98 and we were the largest class in years with a stacked 54 students. Our class motto was Taste the Rainbow. I know, what the heck does that mean? I remember this couple year period where Sent From Heaven, Class of ’97 had a student die each year. Our school was so small and family oriented, and years later I can say that it was a great place to be. Death was shocking in a small tight-knit community. I felt bad for those families. I remember one young lady’s passing and her boyfriend’s tear-felt statement during a service at school to honor her.

Death would strike after High School as a friend of mine, Keenan, had a younger brother pass away. That one blew me away. It was one of the few times where I even saw my Mom cry. It really shook the Hilo community as a whole. He was just a little kid and close to a thousand people came to pay their respects. His family treated it as a celebration. Yeah, there was great sadness but they honored Colin like a little hero. They had the coolest set-up with elements of his Life on display, including pictures, and some things like his bodyboard, a soccer ball, things that he Loved during his short Life. He was a cool kid, awesome soccer player, and during the service they shared a story about how even he saved someone previously while out surfing. A young kid saving another’s Life… amazing.

I cried when the words were said about how great the Love was that he had for his two brothers, Quinn was his best friend, and his oldest brother, Keenan, his idol. Keenan had been away from home for a bit and that killed me, that he didn’t get the chance to say goodbye.

And how many of us really do get a chance to say goodbye? I never got to say good-bye to Keenan who would pass himself in a car accident when we were 24. It’s the one Christmas I decided to stay away from home for the first time and it’s the one where I really wished I were there.

The next year a college friend, Clinton, also from Hilo, whose older brother, Bronson, was someone I looked up to in High School, would pass. He was young and in crazy shape, a boxer and I remember spending one summer lifting with him and how he gave me some dietary tips. LOL, I always wanted to be buff or swoll’. but for the wrong reasons. Clint passed in his sleep the night of his birthday, 20 something, strong like a bull, and Death got him with sleep apnea like a sucker punch. The tear-felt address his older brother, Leroy, gave tore me apart. It was one of the only moments I felt really close to my girlfriend at the time. I really appreciated her that day because despite our differences, she was there for me in that instance when I needed someone to be there the most.

Our relationship was a roller coaster and it was not the best. I send her great respect because she put up with a lot from me. Every woman I’ve dated has but she had it kind of bad. Well so did I, but that’s the Mirrors we were. Death would not only kill our relationship but it would creep in after we were broken up for three months. We found out she was pregnant and she had a miscarriage pretty quickly after we found out.

I was devastated by that small Death. I really Loved her but we were such a horrible match. I would have made it work if we had a kid because I always wanted to be a Dad. Don’t know why that is. In that situation, I had mixed feelings and I felt like it was my fault that she miscarried, maybe if I had my sh!t together, all of it would have been okay. We’d gotten a dog to fill the void and that caused an extremely odd situation to play out.

Both my Grandfathers passed away, one when I was 22, the other when I was 30, interesting to me in that their passing both came before a big spiritual push in my Life. At 22, I discovered Muay Thai, started learning about Buddhist philosophy, mindfulness, and meditation. At 30, I submitted to the Great Unknown Creator, God, whatever you wish to say, the Grand Oneness because as I said, I think it’s really all the same, Love.

Watching my two Grandfathers pass, both because of cancer was nuts because they were Iron Men. Papa Kenny and Old. Funny how we name Grandparents. My Grandmothers are Gran and Gran’ma Edie. Gran’ma Edie we call Grandma. So I guess in some ways, she got away easy on the nicknames. It was nuts though to really see those men succumb. When Papa died, the only thing I could say was Thank you. I had great appreciation for him but it rocked me in a different way. It rocked me because I felt so bad for Gran. They really represented a deep Love and I knew Gran was going to be hit hard. They just had a connection, you know? Shoot seven kids, you do the math, there had to be fireworks. Before his passing, Papa even went around and cleaned up after himself and left Gran notes on how to use the computer, VCR, and other things.

When Old passed, that was really hard. Old also known as Dirty Harry, Budd, and a host of other nicknames I’m sure, had so many stories. His stories were really cool to me because I never heard one told twice. My Dad had but not me, maybe because I was still Young. That’s what he called me, Young. When Old passed, he was battling a case of pneumonia after being diagnosed with cancer, so I went home to say goodbye…

Old didn’t want to get me sick so he didn’t want me to shake his hand when I arrived and I was bummed because I really wanted to shake his hand. He had one of those crazy grips and that last handshake meant a lot to me. He must have sensed what I was feeling at the close of our visits because eventually he did shake my hand and I’ll never forget the gift he gave me with his last words: You remember, Young. You remember.

The day before Old passed my relationship with the woman I Loved died. I had just realized a few days earlier, while at home saying good-bye to Old that I wanted to spend my Life with her. I always knew I wanted her to be the mother of my children but it was those few days prior that I put the words into the ether. Yeah, what to say about that time other than that was brutal. It’s okay, I’m accepting of it because the unexpected experience has shown me more of who I am. I’ll always Love her and have not met another woman I’d want to have children with yet but remember… I’m still Young.

As that whole thing played out, I felt a great deal of Pain, as though I was dying. It was definitely a transformation. I like to think the time after was a rebirth but still yet a lot of dying had to take place in me. I sorted through a great deal of things and continue to do so each day. Went across the country from Hawaii twice praying for and honoring a series of nocturnal Dreams that charted the way, along with reading some signs and trusting my Intuition on where to go, with each step. In fact, this book right here is one of two I was told to write in a Dream and is a way for me to honor that experience as well. Let’s hope it’s a Bestseller, eh?

Before the relationship ended our pet, Snacks, had died. That was a bummer. He was the King of the Rats. He was also hairless. Not bald, but hairless, as in without hair. Snacks was cool. I got him for JOY because she wanted a hairless cat and I wanted a hairless dog. He was a good compromise. I found him the day I was honoring another Dream that in a way had to do with another small Death, or change, in my Life: moving to a different place to train. I had some cool friends where I had trained before but things were not the same for me when my Coach left, so I had to go.

With Snacks’ Death, a bunch of my selfishness died. I saw how not putting communication and giving Love freely first got in the way of things as JOY and I had a fight the night he died. It was right around the time of my birthday. We had another rat, Dumbo Spot, die on JOY’s birthday a few months earlier. There was a lot of Death building up in our Lives.

The worst was the gradual Death of our Love. I mean, I’ll always Love her because it was the greatest Love I ever experienced in that context, it still means a lot to me, and I feel like she’ll always Love me, it couldn’t have been one-side in feeling. Not a Love of that intensity but I don’t know, we don’t really talk (at the time this was written), so I can’t Live for her validation of it. But man it killed so much of me, still does, I can’t understand this world where two people so in Love don’t work out. I want to believe Love is enough. Unfortunately, not in this world, not the way it is right now anyway…

When Snacks died, I should have known that the end was near. It is so odd for me to write about this. Because for so long did I refuse to look at the possibility that she and I would never get back together. Who knows, it could still happen or not. I’m cool either way because I am enough as I am, with or without anyone. The gradual Death was one of the hardest things I had to go through. I’ve never Loved anyone so much. When I first wrote that last line, it still drew some small tears from me. I guess the intensity of all of it weighed heavy, so heavy, that I had to let it go. If anything, I realize I’m going to die someday so no sense in holding on to what’s no longer there.

I had an experience of the creepy variety with Death once. I awoke in the middle of the night and caught the smell of something quite smelly coming from outside. No, I didn’t wake myself with a nocturnal emission of gas. It was a smell that smelt of decay, rotting. My Intuition peaked and I immediately heard the message: The smell of Death. Yeah, that was a trip. It came on the tale end of a hectic period of Dark energies entering my space and well it would conclude with another message: Death stands at bay. It has claimed your body. Your Soul, the others wait to see what you choose, Light or Dark.

I think the choice of balance is realizing that it’s one foot in both, the Light and the Dark together, and we each are the balance of the