Congratulations.....You Are An Author!

Our history is weaved with stories. Stories which are true and even those which are not can offer many benefits including wisdom, entertainment, and education. Stories of strong leaders give us a desire to pursue inner fortitude, stories of injustice inspire us to rise in the face of adversity, and stories of everyday heroes show us that sacrifice is indeed the greatest gift of all. We look upon these stories through eyes of wonder, almost enchanted by the lives led by others. We watch movies and are captivated by the threads that hold the characters' lives together. We hear of triumphs and disasters on the news and we are truly moved by them. That is our heart. We feel these stories because their characters are human like us. We sympathize with them through their struggles and victories. There are people in history who have changed the faces of government, industry, and compassion and we are the living proof of their successes and failures. Human beings are enthralled by stories because we know how important they can be.

What we sometimes forget though, as we're taken in by all of the stories around us(our family's individual stories, the stories of celebrities, the stories of our neighbors) is that we are also authors. Each morning we wake up with a pen in our hand. We are all writers. The pages we write may never be read but they are written all the same, added to daily. What if those pages were tangible and you could hold them in your hand and read them? What if you could could read your own story cover to cover without bias? Would you praise the main character's decisions? What if your story were a movie? What kind of a movie would it be? Were you watching it would you be laughing, crying or cursing at the television? This is food for thought because if there are parts of the story you aren't fond of you are the only one who can change them. You are the author. You decide were the twists will be.

When you wake up in the morning, remember the pen in your hand. Choose carefully what you write with it because there is no eraser. Remove your habits and hurts and write yourself as a character with possibility and optimism. Craft a story that will warm hearts, comfort pain, and inspire. Make your story a story that others will tell to impart wisdom or entertainment or education. There are many more blank pages to fill. Fill them with something amazing!

A Fortress

A fortress grows around our hearts
Inside it's walls our hurting starts
The parts of us we keep within
Keep the bricks from caving in
With longing then we forward move
With bitterness and things to prove
So on we walk for miles and miles
And navigate through tears and smiles
Calling out for truth and love
For what we have is not enough
Begging from inside our shells
To fill a space that can't be filled
For what is true and what is real
Is one can't touch what we conceal
For we have built this fortress strong
To shelter us from any wrong
And if we want for something more
We know we must open the door
Once we open soon we see
What's been hidden, now set free
And brick by brick our fortess falls
With nothing there to hold it's walls
Our hearts exposed can feel the air
The sun, the rain and all that's there
The beautiful machine they are
No force can truly break a heart
With patience time heals every wound
But opening doors, that's up to you

Empathy and Selfishness

Almost every problem people have in their relationships can be traced back to feelings of being unloved, underappreciated, or misunderstood. This is because people, for the most part, only pretend to be in relationships. A relationship, you see, should come with an assumed and insurmountable degree of empathy. Selfish is, instead, the third and invisible member of most relationships. We don't realize it because we push those thoughts away in the interest of portraying the image of ourselves we wish for other people to see. We may not care to admit our selfishness, our actions may in fact speak to a more gracious and giving nature, but thought, though easily hidden, cannot be denied. Selfish thoughts live inside all of us and are most often kept at bay, sacrificed for a more "acceptable" and considerate way of living.

It is the distance between what we say and what we actually feel that determines the emotional state of our relationships. I am not saying that we should all be selfish and fight for every miniscule idea that presents itself. It is the lack of honesty and empathy that makes our selfish nature ugly, not the selfish nature itself. It is nothing to be ashamed of, we were built this way. It is the way we were made. Most of us see a situation, a person, an act and first think of our feelings and how it affects us and then second we introduce everyone else into our thinking. Whether you choose to admit it or not that is the truth. We rarely act on these inclinations, taking the high road, choosing others best interests instead but that doesn't make our thought processes any less real.

Selfish is the birthplace of bitter, angry, and depressed. Negative emotions are what happen when we finally reach a breaking point. This usually happens when our outward giving nature doesn't reap us the rewards we seek and any suppressed, self serving thoughts come to the surface. We don't want to hurt anyone and we certainly don't want to tarnish the way we are viewed. Our apologies after the storm are sincere. But we will continue having to make them if we don't recognize the simple truth. We are selfish just like everyone else. Every single person on the planet harbors selfish thoughts. When they make us feel unloved or unappreciated or misunderstood, they are simply acting out the same internal battle we all are fighting.

Empathy is the key to ending that battle. Understanding that we are all trying. We can understand our own thought processes easily because we know what they are born from. We know where they begin because we have walked with them for our entire lives. When we apologize and our sincerity is shunned we long for understanding that other people can't always give. What we need to do is to stop relying on our relationships to give us the lift we desire. We need to accept the fact that the flaws in others that hurt us are flaws we all share. It isn't a personal attack when we are hurt by those we love. It is a simple, outward expression of the internal battle we all fight to remain good in spite of our respective selfish natures. Our love for others is constantly put on trial in the midst of the many mistakes we make, but even when doubt surrounds us we know our own hearts and the truth of the love we feel. Before you put someone else's love on trial, remember that they are just like you, flawed and fighting.

Emotional Habit

There are many positive ways to change your life but in order to guarantee that the change is permanent you have to take an honest and sometimes brutal inventory of your negative emotional habits and the choice patterns that have led you to were you are. And second you must make a conscious decision to create healthier reactions in yourself. Remove judgement (of yourself and others), quell the need for outside approval, and take back ownership of your life. Once you've done this, the people around you will no longer stake a claim in your stress, your happiness, or your decision making. Their woes and triumphs will be theirs and yours will be yours. This does not mean that you should stop caring about others. It simply means to stop being consumed by what you can not control. The first step to ownership of your life is accepting that it is yours and only yours. That is freedom. That is where you find content.

How to Fail

Do not be the one who loves with all you have inside

Do not be a worthy friend, never truth confide

Live forever in a shell and always looking out

Upon the things that others need but you choose to live without

Always lie and always steal, never show remorse

Be certain to burn every bridge and close every door

Make sure your words are weapons, be certain they cut deep
Never give forgiveness, never secrets keep

Look upon the world and judge, take all that you can get

Never think you have enough and never be content

Always wear two faces, be petty, cruel and trite

Never smile, do not be kind, make everything a fight

Be afraid and live in fear of everything you see
Do these things if suffering alone is what you seek

Believing in Fairies: The Possibility of Possibility

Perfection does not exist and most people are willing to accept this yet still don't find it wildly unreasonable to aspire to perfection and then punish themselves for not attaining it. I am not exempt from this reality. I, too, have found myself meandering down paths riddled with failed attempts at perfection. Knowing all the while that I was seeking that mythical pot of gold. Knowing that it can't be found. What worries me is when I see the damage this quest can cause. The way our failures can chip away at our ambition and our ability to see the world for it's possibilities. The way we allow weariness and feelings of futility to rob us of the desire to aspire to anything perceived as being outside that magical, invisible realm of possible. Impossible endeavors, after all, can only end in empty hands denied their much desired reward. But is that really true? Or is that just what our failures impose upon us to prevent us from taking on too much damage.


I challenge this idea as the combination of the words impossible and endeavor seem to me to be an oxymoron. Impossibility is the crutch of a broken man who does not wish to push boundaries but instead wishes to build boundaries and live surrounded by their walls. A comfortable, predictable life no doubt. But a life that exists only to watch time pass which, in my eyes is no better than being sentenced to life in prison......no possibility for parole, no possibility for possibility.


To be alive is to see that all things are possible. To really live is to always aspire to more and to always believe that face value isn't very valuable at all. To never stop seeing through eyes of wonder, to never accept a loss as an end. Life should be better than muddling through. Life should be magic. And yes, I do believe in magic. I believe in everything that most people don't. When my daughter asks me questions like, "Are fairies real?" my answer is always the same, anything can be real if you believe it is. This is not just me trying to appease a young girl's fantasies. This is what I actually believe. Who am I to doubt the existence of fairies? Who am I to decide what is and is not possible? Possible is a relative concept and I don't feel that anyone has a full grasp of what is or isn't possible. What people rely on is belief. Limitations are real to those who believe in them. Power is only as real as the people who believe in it and yield control to it as a result of this belief. Most aspects of our emotions are based on our belief system. Whether or not we believe we are accepted, loved, and appreciated is a deciding factor in how we live our lives. Believing in something's reality is so powerful and most don't acknowledge it's importance enough. The question isn't, however, what do you believe? The question is why? Why is it so easy to believe in some things and not others?


Life is not meant to be this complicated ordeal that leaves people feeling powerless. Life, instead, is an endless, illuminated expanse of possibilities. And what exists in each of us is an amazing ability to imagine those possibilities and view them with hopeful curiousity. Imagination, you see, is the magic we all have inside of us. It is our own personal proof that the impossible can be real. For if we can imagine something, if it is in us to give our thoughts to it, to feel something about it then it is no less real than what we have seen with our own eyes. What we see we can touch and prove, but what we believe in doesn't need proof and is what touches us.

Open Arms

Through all the turmoil of all my days
I forward go to a better place
For though I've lost some of these fights
I've never failed in my whole life
For every step not placed with care
Every moment of despair
Every second spent in dark
Every tear bled by my heart
All of it has led me here
To be this person without fear

It's taken time to understand

The wondrous ways fate moves it hand

The way it knows to knock us down,

To leave us longing to be found
For when it feels like we are done,

As though the battle can't be won

There floats a bit of hoping in

So we may feel the urge to win

And stand ourselves up in the storm

And fight for air, and peace, and warmth

For as we are we are enough

We're built to learn and give and love
And even on the coldest nights
When sadness robs light from our sight
We can recall our grand design
And find the will to push and try
To fumble foolish with our hearts
And welcome life with open arms...