Magnitude

Dear Taim,

Every day I imagine what adventures you're going on and what ones we will have in the future. I miss you and your mother every day.  I sit here and wonder, "how can I make it all worth it?"

Working my way from under your mother's magical webs upon my heart and mind has been one of the most difficult things that I've had to do.  I'm unsure of how much of what she did was deliberate manipulations or subconscious programming running it's full course, what I am sure of is that it was meant to break me.  I don't believe in coincidences.  Nothing just happens.  Everything has a cause and everything has an effect.

If I were to break out a life's lesson that I've learned from all of this is that the only thing that you have to be sure of is yourself.  Able to stand and face whatever comes your way.  Able to understand and adapt to change.  And able to see that most people are not sure of themselves so they present something that makes it seem like they do.  But they don't and the best they can do is pretend.

But that is also okay, because like Kurt Vonnegut said, "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be."  Growing up I pretended I was a noble knight in King Arthur's Court, one of Robin Hood's Merry Men, teaming up with super heroes to take on villains, rescuing princesses from castles, and traveling across the galaxy fighting to balance the Force.  I wanted to be strong enough to face every evil and monster that would appear in my path.

That's how I have faced all my problems in the past.  Imitation of the ideals that I read and saw and wanted to be present in my life.  It is what the greatest artists do, it was what the Grand Masters taught.  It's how animals learn their survival skills, and how children pick up traits and behaviors from their surroundings.  Here is the coolest part of the whole ordeal:  For us, human beings, it's a deliberate choice on what we learn and how we behave.  We have the opportunity to break above the lower instincts through conscious will alone.

That also means that love and fear are choices.  Without us consciously being merciful, forgiving, and honorable they would not exist.  There is not a single molecule of love, true love, in the universe.  We create it.  The inevitability of time and death drives us forward, always forward.  But do we take each step purposefully?  Do we tell ourselves how we will be? When we find out that we have locked ourselves away, what experiences are we denying ourselves, what would the cycle of the seasons have brought us had we stepped forth openly and in full confidence in who we pretend to be?

We might be only meat popsicles living a finite existence, there might not be anything after this experience.  Whatever energy we are is released back into the ether, only to be recycled into something else.  Who knows?  Who really cares?  Are we really going to waste this limited life over petty grievances?

That's why when I think of your mother and you I am filled with understanding and love.  It's because it's a choice that I make.  All those years of wanting an opportunity to prove to myself that I am true to that which drives my heart, all it took was you and her.  To find the reason to survive.

And survive I will.

Hopefully I'll see you soon.  I want to be a good father to you and regardless of how your mother behaves, I'll still be a good man towards her. That's all I've wanted to be, and the funny thing about life is that until it is tested, it is all just pretend.

Practice being who you want to be, so that when the test comes, you're prepared. In the end, that's all that matters.

Love,

Dad

Philosopher's Stone

I gather all the memories
And see them in my mind
And from the recesses of my heart
All the emotions I can find

I play the lust, the pain, the rage
The release of my heart
From it's fear laden cage
And I place it upon the fire

To purify the soul
To be reborn anew
Into the copper bowl
The Alchemy must stew

Into the concoction I place in double
All my toil and all my trouble
And into that black mess must go
All the love that I could ever know

As that potion turns to ash
Through the white the embers glow
I reach back in the distant past
For the seeds that I must sow

I cultivated naught but dust and stone
In the garden of my soul
For to myself alone
Must I die

When she came, she gave me shade
I hesitated to sate my thirst
From her waters, drink she bade
My wounded soul she had nursed

The poison that was in my blood
Mixed with Love in a torrent flood
I held the Alchemy within
Mixing the yang with the yin

In that garden an oasis formed
And life came to my dessicated bones
The breath of life filled my lungs
I rang with pain and pleasure in my moans

In the midst of my troubled woes
I panicked and I fought
Fear rang in cavernous echoes
And rage boiled within

All of this my mind's eye did see
Into the copper bowl it went
In the mixture I grasped the key
The universe had sent

Ashes to ashes, the fire burnt
The water mixed with fierce current
The air boiled within the hearth
Seeped within the blackened earth

I gathered what was left of me
Threw it in the cauldron
Surrounded it within the void
And broke the world's illusion

The mixture brewed
The elixir bubbled
The transformation had renewed
The garden for the seeds

In the observers seat I sat
Devoid of all desire
No longer did I have to combat
Death's final funeral pyre

From this process I was reborn
No longer was I forlorn
The brightness of the Phoenix shone
For I had created the Philosophers Stone

Remembrance

I remember staring at
Your outline in the Dark
Memorizing your shape,
The way the Light would spark
To dance across your body's silhouette
And how my heart would quake.
When you asked me "why" I stared at thee
No answer I could make.
My emptiness was consuming me
You were the anchor of my mind
I imprinted all your highs and lows
That in your shadow I could find.
The mountains of your breast
The valley between your thighs.
How your back would crest like water
In pleasure we would share our cries.
I remember grasping your curling black mane,
You wrapping your arms around me.
In the balance of Light and Dark,
With you I could simply be.
I remember everything that you have ever done,
But this I remember most:
The way I loved you with all my heart
And how you gave life to a ghost.

INTERLUDE: Alchemy Part II (FINAL)

I have come
to drag you out of yourself,
and take you in my heart.
I have come
to bring out the beauty
you never knew you had
and lift you like a prayer
to the sky.

-Rumi

***

Normally these things I write happen instantaneously, as if they're being pulled out of me by some greater force.  With this one, my heart told me to wait. I had to delve deeply and listen, and search for the signs the Universe had to show me for the direction I needed to go.

I am a man who would have said that I had lost my faith.  In people, places, gods, and things. I had pursued my dream to the very edge of madness.  When my Dark Lady beckoned me, my Malice of Wonderland, I gave in and lost whatever illusion of control I had imagined.  Then I lost my hope, my godspark, my will to live.  The Demiurge had cast it's trap.  My soul had died, but my heart was still beating.

Since the end of February, I've questioned my entire existence. Never have I really done that before.  I had always known why I existed, whether that was through God's creation or to seek reparations for the dead.  That much had been clear, and will be expanded upon in the next series named PANTHEON, but will only be mentioned here.  I had given everything to Melissa.  Dredged up every grain of myself, held on because of her and my son, and in the end... it seems like it has been worth nothing.  And I had to question:  What does that say of me?

I have reached out to find answers only to be spurred with scorn and hate from her friends and family.  I know I've done nothing to deserve that treatment.  The Norwegian Government has refused to cooperate with me, even to the extent of violating international law and their own civil penal code.  I've contacted Lawyers and schools, the US Embassy in Norway... and nothing.  It's like the Universe has spurred my existence and everything that I had done means nothing.  I was simply used and discarded. Again.

What does that say to me?

I've had very few "Spiritual" experiences outside of the Shamanic realms.  Those I had attributed to the imagination, my interpretation of the outer realms with an inner experience.  Completely valid and real, sometimes more real than this world, but ultimately I had been unable to integrate it to pursue a balanced life.  I had won my war, fought every battle and had overcome, but had been unable to live at peace with myself.  And now I have to fight a war that I never wanted.  One against the very person with whom I love the most.  My Twin Soul.  And all I have is myself, and nothing more.  No money, no support.  Just me.  I have to hope that is enough.

It's driven the knife that rests within my heart to my very core.  It's bled me dry leaving a husk of grief and sorrow.  I had gained my soul back through my deeds, felt the weight of the mountain of duty fall from my shoulders, freed my heart, truly freed it, after over a decade of hiding it away.  In my most vulnerable, the knife flashed out of the darkness, for the final killing blow.

I had lain on the floor of my mother's apartment for months, ready for my final breath.  It never came.  Every day, I'd pull my husk out and greet the day with my dog.  I'd practice my yoga and Tai Chi. The prison of my flesh keeping my spirit bound and the universe ignored my cries for freedom.

And in my loneliest of lonely's, Kali Ma came to me.  The multi-armed goddess of Creation and Destruction stood over my body, with lust and destructive joy, naked and glorious, a mirrored reflection of the Lover I had left in Norway.  Her divine blade came down upon my neck, and whatever was in me holding on, died.  I fell from my head and into my heart for the first time.  It was there, in the desolate wasteland of my own heart that I had found the treasure I had been searching for, that no intellectual thought could produce.  I sat as an observer in my own mind as my intuition tore away at the reality that I had created.  I had found my Philosopher's Stone. It wasn't in the mind or body, or even the soul.  It was the core of my heart, covered in the grime and dust of negativity, compressed and pressured over the years.  The true and hidden driving force behind my every thought and action.  Refined through Alchemy, the desperate and needed process for spiritual growth, I held in my hands the seed that would transmute the grief and sorrow, pain and rage, in the the purest substance in the Universe.  Unconditional Love.

I said to myself, "what does this mean for me?"

***

The process of inner growth and change isn't a straight line. Like any true creation, it takes many prototypes to get a working design, and like any great scientific discovery it usually happens on accident.  And in my case desperation.

When I've searched for answers all I have done is fill my head with knowledge but my application process had been struggling, frustrating, filled with failure after failure. When I would feel like I had gained a measure of control of my life, my feet would be swept out from under me.  I eventually gave in to what is known in the Psychological field as "learned helplessness". And in the recent months since my finding of my Philosopher's Stone and my experience with Kali Ma, I've learned quite a bit about my PTSD and how to utilize what I have to combat it.

I've been in a VA inpatient program for almost seven weeks.  I've been building a framework for myself to hold together and not collapse when I have to weather more storms of depression that are invoked by my trauma.  For many years I had been studying and giving myself the tools confront my shadow and pain, but have had very little success in structural stability.  It was like I had thought that simply having the tools would give me the skills needed, and I had continued to build my house upon the sand so that when the storms did come, it collapsed. And collapsed. Over and over again.  Until finally my tools had been worn out, bandits had lain in wait for me, and I could do nothing to reassure the ones that I love that everything would be alright.

Now I have education in the skills that I needed to utilize the tools that I already have.  Not only that, I have new and innovative tools to use that I had never realized before.  I also have my Philosopher's Stone to add to my forge.  Where before I would have added my grief and sorrow to the weapon I had created of myself, the one that Shattered into a thousand thousand pieces unsure if I would ever be able to put it back together again the night that I had attempted suicide and then struck my Lady Love in self defense, I now can change the makeup of that weapon utilizing Kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing something with gold.

I no longer have to look at my brokenness with shame and disgust, but with pride of the history that I have overcome.  My past and scars are my Legacy.  My blade can finally rest, only to be picked up when needed. I am the Master of my Fate, the Captain of my Soul.  And I will pick the battles that I want to fight.

My heart is whole and pure once again.  And that was the awakening of my solar light.