Kids these days grow old before their time.  Not just in the way they dress or the way they paint their faces and their personalities, but most tragically, in the way they view the world.  Coincidences loses its magic, dreams are left under the pillow and disappointment becomes easier and easier to swallow. 

At some point in the past few years I’ve begun to feel time slipping through my fingers like grains of sand.  Missed opportunities, regrets and moments where I caught a glimpse of who I could be…

A lifetime, is not long enough.  

By the time I’ve sifted through the stress and suppression of “surviving” will it be too late to leave my mark on this world and its people?  Will it be too late or even enough, to stitch the pieces left of me back together?

justurnitoff:

Just to make a point clear here. It is not enough to just remove Joseph Kony from his safe haven away from the law and end it off here. If Kony2012 seeks to remove him by the end of this year, what is it going to do after that? What about the existing institutions that the LRA is structured upon?…

potluckdream3r: Honestly, it’s sad that the only time we see the invisible and hear the unheard is when something goes viral…when it becomes a trend.  There are so many people in the world who are suffering and persecuting the individual villain is not going to uproot the core problem.  The problem lays in the infrastructure of our societies…our government and that’s what needs to be fixed.  Instead we focus on the immediate target—but the human target is just a red herring.  

What will happen when Kony is captured?  As the third party, we will have a story, we will feel temporary relief that the “bad guy” is behind bars, or killed, and we will return to our normal day lives and forget about the children in not just Africa, but all around the world who will continue to suffer from different hardships and suppressions….and we will forget about our OWN injustices here at home.   

What we should take out of this Kony movement is that we the people, together, really can change the world.  It’s hard to believe that one person can make a difference, but this movement exemplifies how one person can inspire another person…and in the end inspire nations of individuals.  This movement shows how we are all human and WILL respond to the tragedy of strangers—because ultimately, we are creatures of love.  

So why not fight for each other and for ourselves?  Why not create a world where NO ONE is hungry or dying from lack of the proper care or lack of room for the growth of our minds…why not create a world where people can be free to pursue knowledge, art…anything (!) and not be judged by manmade standards?  Why compare our lives to people who have it worse and settle for a life of mediocrity and routine and stress? 

Empathize and get angry about the invisible AND visible people in EVERY part of the world because we are all being deprived of our natural rights in some way.  It sounds impossible to make the kind of change we need….where to even begin….?

….Sometimes I wonder…what comes first, the universe, or thought?  How can the universe exist if it is not perceived in some way?  Maybe it all begins with this: an idea.  

*Some articles I came across that are interesting: via acquaint: article about the group Invisible Children and where the money is really going to, article about what’s going on in Uganda now, foreign aid, propaganda and greed

once

the sky was sprinkled with salt

an invisible magnet

threatening to pull us up into its cavernous shell

the night brought with her a familiar darkness

and the glimmer of fireflies

falling silent 

like the end of a cigarette

when all the air is sucked into the lungs

and locked away by its pink tissue

once

we felt something of the world

the beating of our hearts

and the lull of cicadas

strumming the dawn like an orchestra

filling our souls of summer

that summer we placed in a box

wrapped in precious silk

and buried under the sea. 

Not that this matters to you or you or you but, maybe.

Thinking about 2012 and how it’s different from 1989-2011 and I realize that I’ve changed quite a bit.  

If I could describe the person I ideally want to be above all labels and adjectives, is someone who loves freely and generously.  She is someone I am working to become because I’ve come to realize that love is the most important thing.  Without it, you will never lift your head to whisper your secrets to the moon, and if you cannot speak to the moon, how can you speak to other people’s hearts?  

At the age of 6 or 7 I stargazed all the time in part because the night sky was so beautiful, and also in part because I thought I might have been an alien.  I had and have never felt like I belonged in my family.  My gestures of love through leaves patiently collected and pasted on construction paper only made friends with the garbage can.  People in my life came and went like those leaves and I did not dare love a single one.

I’ve shielded myself from rejection to the point where I’ve become numb and can’t distinguish what I feel from what I want to feel.  I hide behind my pride, my independence and my smile.  This is very sad and pathetic and maybe I wasn’t an alien but I had started to become one.     

I began to see that everyone “loves” a different way.  Some people love through guilt, some people love through envy and some people love through obligation.  But that’s not really love.  That’s guilt, envy and obligation. 

True love is somewhat unconditional don’t you think?  True love, is like gazing at the moon.  You can see her dents and craters but you don’t think to change her.  You take her for what she is, find beauty in her light, and cherish her because there can only ever be one moon.  

I am learning to love people like I love the moon and am not afraid to believe that the feeling is mutual. 

a humid night filled with the hum of cicadas 
the tangy, salty burn of tequila lighting our throats
poison and hope all in one shot.

we cheered the sun up 
with our chants of love and faith in the romance of truth.

it didn’t matter then
that nothing lasts forever. 

sweet dreams are made of these.

It’s 5pm and the sun is setting rapidly.  The orange light reflecting from the high rise labyrinth surrounding me brings me back to Chicago and summer.  For a moment, I forget my numb fingers on the keyboard and I can almost smell what the city where I first began to find myself almost certainly smells like.  Except I can’t find the words or any particular ingredient for that smell.  
I think I’ve always associated certain smells to home, to seasons, even to memories, longings, and the way the sun catches the light.    

No matter how I tell my mother that success to me is not measured by:

1. slaving away to make a lot of money and retiring early

2. high social status

3. marrying a wealthy/ high status partner so I can buy expensive things/ be envied

*note: include kids with all of the above

she does not understand!  

Really.  I tell her patiently, angrily, cheerfully, tearfully, desperately…and my words fly over her.  She insists she wants me to be happy, but she is so used to associating happiness with money that anything beyond her concept of success is failure or a waste of time and honestly that breaks my heart.  To truly show your appreciation for the life you are given is to pick your nose in front of everyone and eat it!  Just kidding.  But really, live YOUR life.  Money and what people whisper behind your back should never mean more than freedom and love.  Sometimes I want to shake her by the shoulders and ask her if she was stripped of all her worldly possessions, what would be left…would she or anyone else know who she was?  

A bank statement, a diamond ring or a “title” does not validate your existence.  Cliche as it sounds; you exist when you are remembered…really remembered!…not for the materials you’ve collected or the work you’ve done for all the wrong reasons, but for who you—as only you can be—are, even if it’s by one person.   

I could say that I don’t care what kind of life other people live, but I do.  I want everyone to live truly and happily and freely, not just through the instant gratification of a couple of days of vacation or a new shirt, but to feel like you’ve run as hard as you can just for the hell of it and even though you’ve skidded to a stop, you can still feel the blood in your throat and the world and your heart roaring in your ears and you think you might die, but you are so alive in that moment that you don’t give a damn about anything else and you’re laughing and crying.    

Such is the world, and the system but we can continue to plant seeds in people’s minds and hearts that we could live differently and believe with all of ours that they will grow, because c’est la vie, but it is still OUR life.   

When we are born, we know nothing of the world.  Little by little outlines become sharper, we learn to see the red of our tongues, the blue of our sky.  We realize that humans, like the fireflies we cup in our palms as kids, are not infinite, and we wonder: what are we living for?

I lived for the memory of my father’s silhouette appearing at the door, for beautiful and sad words strung together like laundry on a clothesline; I lived for late nights on the porch with my grandfather-him burning his lungs and me burning my eyes with starlight-both of us contemplating that there was something more.  

I lived and cried and died when I read The History of Love by Nicole Krauss and when Faye Wong sang if frown is shown then, I will know that you are no dreamer, I vowed that I would smile. 

The summer all us big kids gathered to dream our big dreams in a small cave in the clouds, with only a breeze every now and then to cut through the smokey late afternoon heat, we lived.   

And when he kissed me, the kind of kiss where you are left breathless not by the act, but by the intensity of the connection between two souls, I lived then too.

I lived and live for poetry, music, art and the people and stories that move me, because without them I don’t think I would be here, at least not truly.  If a person falls in a forest and no one is around to see him, did he fall?  Did he even exist? 

I think all of us are just a fragment of our greatest potential.  As we grow up, we begin to settle for pieces, we begin to let the world define us and in the end, we are left wondering why we never found ourselves.  

Recently I’ve had many debates and discussions about the concept of work, money and human nature.  I realize that no matter what I say that ultimately it’s too scary to think that there’s something wrong with our world and that it’s up to us to do something about it.  Instead, it is easier to leave it to the next generation, to just try to survive by the rules of our current society.  Survival of the fittest; to each his own, right?

We are conditioned to feel apathetic to so many things: to the violence we hear in the news, to the homeless on the streets, to the genocide and starvation that occurs in other countries.  We give words of empathy freely, money sparingly…enough to ease our guilt, but when did giving money become an ACT of good?  When did money become more valuable than a hand up?  

Think about this for a second: what if there was no money?   

People tell me we are inherently greedy and that even if we found a way to get rid of money, that some form of it would eventually return.  But if there was no money, and the whole world worked to make resources available to people freely (look up Venus Project for an idea of how) why would the concept of money be reinstalled?  If you want more paper, go ahead.  Even if human nature is greedy and selfish and evil, isn’t it also kind and compassionate and capable of unconditional love?  

Is this too idealistic?  Then again, what is an ideal?  Isn’t it something we should be striving to achieve?  If you believe that a peaceful, generous and free world is too idealistic, then you will never have that kind of world.  

We can’t change the world in a night, but the truth is that the power to, lies in us.  The first step is to educate yourself and others.  Don’t take everything told to you as fact, or truth or justice.  Why do you need to look at the Declaration of Independence to know that you have the right to be free?  We are born free.  Why do you need to read the Bible to believe that there is a greater power?  Why do you need to look at the Bill of Rights to know what rights we do or don’t have-its existence only dictates commandments we should be punished for breaking and justifies its enforcers.  What is the difference between the wrong in killing in the name of God, and killing in the name of the law?  

It’s human nature to look for physical evidence in everything.  We don’t believe until we are given scientific facts.  We don’t believe unless it can be found in a book.  We ask, “how did the world come to be?”  ”How” becomes science, and “why” becomes theory.  But what makes ANYthing more real?  

In the end, these are just thoughts that I am sharing with whoever might listen…there is so much more but I know that many people will dismiss this as crazy, unrealistic, wrong, ignorant, etc. 

This was not to evoke any kind of argument, this may not have been written in the most cohesive way, this may not be the “truth” in the way we’ve been conditioned to believe, but what is truth except our interpretation?  We begin to change the world by questioning its “truths.”