Thursday, June 17, 2010

One World, Two Humans

From the waves that drew you across the ocean to my gaze across a crowded room, a globalized world drew together two children.  Eyes met: stepping out of time and space and defying gravity itself as the power of the human spirit worked its magic.

Every variable was thrown to the winds as two lips met across a thousand years, across the land and over the seas.

Our embrace would envelop the world and encompass all of life within our enfolding arms.  Our minds and bodies smarted with the realization that the world truly is one and in Gaia’s blood flow its guardians: the woman and the man.  We were becoming.

The 7th Brother

I suppose I am like the 7th Chinese Brother: whom his brothers always tried to keep happy and smiling because his great salt tears could drown whole villages.  All the tears that I had shed for humanity, for this world, for you, by all rights there should be no dry land left.

I have never shed so many tears for one person.  Tonight I felt that I could outcry even the 7th Brother himself: drowning the world in a deluge of my own making.  For a moment even my age old faith in the invincibility of the human spirit slipped and in my horror I said, “Oh God, she’s really going to break – for Christ’s sake stop writing! I don’t want to see this!”

I could picture my tears flooding the streets and sweeping Guelph away: down the Speed River, into the Great Lakes, over Niagara Falls and down the St Lawrence River into the ocean where it would sink like a modern Atlantis beneath the waves.

Wednesday, June 9, 2010

Call to Arms

I can no longer hide.  I’m at war.  From the moment I came into this world, kicking and screaming like a geological upheaval made breath and skin, I WAS BORN TO STRUGGLE.

Eleven years ago I first heard the call to arms: I was fourteen years old, a boy, too young to fight, but humanity’s need for soldiers was great and my summons was clear.  IN THAT MOMENT I knew my childhood days were done.  My family was no longer my family; my home was no longer my home: I entered into war as a newborn enters the world: My second birth burning my weak and childlike skin, shaping it into something new.  I CHANGED - like steel from the furnace I was shaped, hammered, and sharpened until age-old lies split before me like a chopping block splits under an axe blade.  Innocence withered and died as the scales fell from my dark eyes.

Wednesday, June 2, 2010

Bad Dreams

All this pain, divided and alone, we stand apart like so many battered monoliths on a featureless plain under threatening stormy skies.  It reminds my tortured brain of a dream that terrified me as a child and haunts my memories to this day.

I would see three prisoners: a man, a woman, and a child – all one family – and each of them in turn would be locked in their cells with walls of concrete and steel sealing them away from their incarcerated loved ones.

I can only remember the look on the man’s face – the deepest expression of pain I have ever witnessed, as though his world was disintegrating around him.  The look of a man trapped in hell, guilty and alone.

I couldn’t see the guards except for their hands as they went to each cell, looked into the faces of their terrified prisoners, and said to each of them two terrifying words “no light”.

What followed was always the same: the guard would reach through the bars and blindfold the prisoner within, plunging each of their rapidly contracting worlds into darkness.  Confined, blinded, and alone.

For two decades I have feared those images.  Images no young boy should rightfully have dreamt.  Already the nature of the society I was entering was coming clear through dark whisperings and the peculiar feeling that something just wasn’t right.

Nightmares always lingered on the very edges of my vision, as if daring me to build a force, a love, defiant enough to free those people.

My fight had just begun.