What happens when a wisp of smoke slowly fades away until it disappears, and form and substance gradually begin taking its place? What happens when a lifetime of self-denial meets a life of the self? What happens when for decades, a heart, mind, and soul full of emotional feeling had been held captive in an impenetrable prison with its Gordian knot lock, are suddenly released and their newly found freedom allow these emotional feelings discover their true selves?
As a life lived organically evolves around the answers to these questions, the answers seem obvious, but this apparent obviousness begs for this caveat, “life isn’t simple nor is it simply understood.” With this in mind, when I existed as a wisp of smoke, darkness had shrouded my true self within its seemingly “ever before” time. In darkness, my life remained fixed and steadfast in the menacing grasp of being static. My life remained still and lifeless, never moving or doing, never feeling joy or happiness, and of never experiencing heart smiles as life stayed forever moored in one singular point of time and space. But once Alexzander arrived and his wisdom showed him cutting the Gordian Knot was the only means to escape so great a prison, my life, along with my requisite emotional feelings could, for the first time, begin to move forward, breathe fresh air, see and experience the wonderful and exciting azure sky along with its brilliant sun’s light, and with all the colors this newfound light affords, beautiful lived life portraits are allowed to be painted. This is when wisps of smoke become substance, living life is realized, and emotions are finally felt.
So, with this newfound freedom, I’m happily experiencing both the release and discovery of my emotional self. With this experience, I’ve been discovering the intrinsic core of what makes me very much real and alive. As a result, this part of who I am as an emotional being has arrived at a place that finally allows for my feeling of exuberance and exhilaration that’s attained with finding what wasn’t allowed while I was held captive within my prison, that is this - light and color - which afford me what my life has always desired more than all the gold in all the world which is this – all the beauty that can be found with happiness. Now, here is where honesty demands to make itself known - I’m slowly coming around to understanding and accepting a brand-new truth about myself. This truth is that I’m finding my emotional self had always existed - even while it was being held back and denied in captivity. And here’s the thing about this new revelation, while in captivity, although my emotional self was being held back and denied to the point that it was forced to “just” exist, that is, to exist without expression, I’m finding this part of me had always been overly big and larger than the small captive space it had always been forced to occupy. This discovery is a strange, exciting, and thrilling epiphany for me. It lends exciting explanations to how and why my nerves are always so vulnerable, raw, and exposed and why the mysteries of life are received by me with an intensity that sometimes ravishes me to the marrow of my bones.
So, please allow me to recap and add further explanation. With the cutting of the Gordian Knot lock, my emotional self had been released from what I now understand was my very own, self-imposed horrid, terrible, and hideous confinement, and while it was held in this confinement, my emotional self was held back and denied its desire of expression. Still, without either my knowledge or understanding, my emotional self was always full of life and overly big for the small space I had so desperately tried containing it in. As a result, whenever my emotional self wanted to express its feelings, even while I tried to keep it cloaked, my feelings and emotions would often allow thin slivers of the tiniest fragments of light in to brighten my dull, dreary, stagnant, and static life. For instance, I’d hear a song and in hearing the song, I’d not only realize I very much enjoyed hearing it so that I’d play it over and over, but somehow, someway, the song would touch me. The song would touch me so deeply, that said song would always cause me to feel things I didn’t understand, let alone know anything about, but somehow, I just knew that I knew, I wanted the strange experience the song was giving me to stay and linger by my side for a very long while. Sometimes, this response was caused by the melody of the music, its frequency, or the loudness or softness of how a note was lovingly struck by the musician. Sometimes it was caused by the want and desire I found in the singer's voice, like, was her voice showing me her hurt, her pain, her triumph, her victory, or her loss or gain of love and affection? Sometimes it would lie in what were the words of the song saying. Did the words of the song speak to a life that was lived with darkness or lots of light, color, beauty, and happiness? Hmmm, this all seems very complicated to understand, and indeed, I hadn’t a clue what or why this - I don’t know - transcendence, was occurring within me during these times when music so deeply affected me. Thankfully, I’d eventually come to realize I was allowing my emotional self to experience everything it needed, wanted, desired, and hoped to feel, vicariously with the help of these songs. And “transcendence” is a good word because, during those times when I’d hear those songs and my captive emotions were allowed to experience everything they so much needed, that was when my emotional self took all this feeling of emotion to the max and beyond, that is - far above any rational height, breadth, depth, or width of what they should have felt. So yes, on these rare and hard-to-find moments when music penetrated my stronghold prison, there was a transcendence my emotional self found that was irrationally good and wonderful. Now with no lock holding my emotional self back finally removed, yeah, my nerves are very raw, naked, exposed, and vulnerable and allow for my emotional self to feel at any moment every emotion to the very marrow of my bones.
Yes, life isn’t simple nor is it simply understood. My emotional self has only relatively recently been freed from captivity. My lived life is trekking a path that just a couple of years ago was different in every perceivable way. Picking one and then my other foot up, in order to push myself through time and space has proven to me, and my emotional self, that I’m no longer still, static, lifeless, dull, or dreary. What I and my emotions had previously only occasionally experienced vicariously through music - my mind, heart, and soul now enjoy as often as I choose. Honesty demands I thank my past captivity because that is the place I can look at to understand my depth of feeling. More honesty would have me admit how I pity those not able to experience their emotions to the fullest.
So, now I get to experience life new and differently. Instead of the constant darkness of captivity, I get to experience a life lived that’s chocked full of emotions that are, bright with light, full of colors, and as beautiful as I choose to feel them. And even while this is true, I’m learning that from my painter's palette of many colors, I can’t always choose the brightest, most intense colors. Paintings, and beauty it turns out, need balance and harmony - bright and dull, intense and dim, azure and navy blue, white and gray - because this is the way, the only way we find contrast and it’s where our lives find clarity and definition.
So, the caveat of this truth will always remain, “life isn’t simple, nor is it simply understood”. A confession: a life lived only recently taught me this lesson about harmony and balance. You see, upon my emotional self’s release from captivity, my vulnerable, raw, and exposed nerves desired only feeling the light of intensity where only bright colors existed, and I found that on my painter’s canvas where I write out life-lived lessons as beautiful paintings, I only ever wanted to paint pictures that were of wonderfully obvious beauty. You see, with their newfound freedom, emerging from a lifetime of what used to be neglected emotional feeling, my emotional self desired insanely intense light, color, and beauty. My life-lived journey had already taken me through the world in extreme darkness and self-denial, where I only existed as a wisp of smoke. Freedom bequeathed to me substance and the opportunity to experience everything I’d never had the chance to enjoy. Freedom allowed me to find light with every color that ever existed, and I found all this light with all its marvelous colors everywhere my journey was taking me. Because of my newfound freedom, for the first time in my life, I was being exposed to beauty and I was learning this beauty was exponentially better than I’d ever experienced it in any of the best songs I’d heard, and I realized this was true for me because instead of experiencing my emotional self vicariously through music, for the first time in my life, I was experiencing all these feelings, and all of this emotion within myself, just because I breathed and pushed one foot and then another through time and space - in other words - I experienced all this beauty just because I was living life, not as a wisp of smoke, but as substantive flesh and blood.
The newness of all of this gave me the gift of experiencing the feelings of exhilarating exuberance, and I was thriving in it. It seemed everywhere I went, my substance was allowing all the light, color, and beauty I’d ever missed to flood my mind, heart, and soul, that is, flooding everywhere my emotional self called home. Living life for the first time in my many years was no longer a drudgery, living life meant a life lived with beauty, and for the first time in my life, that meant living was filled full of extreme pleasure found in happiness. Within this extreme pleasure found in happiness – the family, friends, and people near to me seemed to always move their lips to smile, as breezes gently pushed white clouds across a sun-kissed azure sky and a samba song always played a soft and melodic song for me. I wrote about this in June of 2020:
“Life is funny you know. So full of light, color, and beauty - life is amazing and gives each of us a choice to allow our hearts to fly at the height of any ecstatic emotion at a moment's notice. Can you see the power we possess in this ability? Can you allow this knowledge to give you a heart smile that feels like, "I really do love myself, my life is good?" This very heart smile is possible and it's a very good thing.
When I step outside and I look up at my crystal-clear azure sky, I know what good means and I feel this goodness smiling happily at me. If I look too long at this azure blue sky, I ain't going to lie, the goodness of the moment can overwhelm me as this azure sky lets me know I'm loved without any condition and in fact, it wants me to know I'm loved just because I took my last breath, and my next breath is coming to me. With this knowledge of her unconditional love, the azure sky freely and easily gives me tears of joy and happiness along with all the reasons I'm always frantically searching to understand my life lived.
Across that azure sky, the sky that's smiled down just on me, the sky that has given me all her love, she's joined by white puffy clouds. My happiness, my heart, my joy, and my feelings were already full, but this azure sky and these white puffy clouds come together to assure me that if I didn't feel like my heart smile was real, that if I'd given it a moment's fleeting thought that my head had only imagined my azure lady was only "a nice story" to consider, together they conspire to orchestrate a soft samba melody for me. They know when I allow music to flood my heart, it makes my smile feel complete and more real than anything that was ever real. When I see the white puffy clouds sail slowly through her azure beauty, their song is all I hear, and never is there a time when I'm happier than at this moment with this very song given with so much love, just to me, by my azure sky and her friends - the white puffy clouds.
Well, as I've described them, everything seems right just now, then science taps me on the shoulder and whispers in my ear as I feel the warmth of the sun caressing my body. You see, it's actually the sun whispering in my ear, "Hey Tod w/ one d, the azure sky you're in love with, I wanted you to have her - you're amazing buddy!" What am I to do? I give in! Who am I to argue with all these emotions? The azure sky, the puffy white clouds, the sun - all this beauty, all this music, all this warmth, all this love, my heart smile - why should I turn it down? Asked another way, why shouldn't I just continue to look at everything they're offering me and feel every emotion they're asking me to feel? And the question grows exponentially as the entirety of this experience takes my heart to the height of ecstasy.
But then, I started out this little ditty this way, "Life is funny you know." Here in this part of a very big world, here where we grow a lot of corn, the azure sky is a wonderful lady that I love with all my heart. I love it when she conspires with the white puffy clouds to sing me a soft samba to capture my heart. I accept that I'd not have my beautiful azure lady if the sun's warm light hadn't given her to me, and I accept he wants me to feel warm just because I'm pretty darned amazing. But where is my beautiful, warm, azure lady serenading me with her soft samba melody - where is she in flesh and blood?
NO WORRIES, lol, just musing out loud, she's here somewhere asking similar questions and waiting for me to find her.”
So, that story represents a life lived that as a wisp of smoke I had never imagined, BUT, it was also what every tiny fragment and sliver of a ray of light that had managed to pierce the darkness of my “ever before” time, had always promised me. It also shows how my life lived meant living life with my emotional self ready to feel any and everything that can possibly be felt, and in all actuality, far beyond what should be possible to feel. In painting out my life lived, from my painter's palette, very bright and extremely beautiful were the only colors I was choosing to apply to my life's canvas where I painted out my life lived in beautifully written stories like this one. What I didn’t understand, and what wasn’t obvious to me at the time, was how this new lived life had me painting my life as though I were trekking straight toward the sun. This is a life lived, which speaking for myself, I could not sustain, and while beautiful, and completely full of the brightest colors, the painting on my life's canvas was not only distorted, but it was also not organic or honest for reflecting the reality of my life lived as this truth remains stubborn and steadfast - "life isn’t simple nor is it simply understood."
It seems that after a long-lived life (of 58 years) in the utter darkness of constant anxiety, depression, and severe emotional pain, caused by locking up my emotional self within a fortress of solitude, as I emphatically denied I even possessed emotions at all, this newfound freedom of my emotional self, sought out every insanely intense good, wonderful, warm, exciting, exuberant, bright, lighted, colorful and beautiful feeling my emotions had never been allowed to experience. So, as I’ve already admitted, because of the years of being held in the confinement of darkness, the nerves of my emotional self were (and I feel, will forever remain) vulnerable, raw, and exposed - another truth for me - and I have to admit that I was naturally soaking up every good and wonderful feeling this new life lived was giving me to the point that I often had those awesome moments when the sun in the sky, the azure sky, and soft puffy white clouds seemed to conspire to play those samba songs for me, and without exception, each and every one of those experiences caressed me, tenderly, gently, and lovingly to the very marrow of my bones. Though I was unable to recognize it, feeling my emotional self in this brand-new and ultra-exciting way kept me in a constant state of ecstasy and it all felt so good and so wonderful that I’d not deny nor disabuse myself of feeling this way.
This was the state I was in when I’d meet, fall in love, and marry a wonderful woman. What I didn’t understand then, but what is clear to me now, was how when I met my future wife, the new trajectory of my lived life was taking me perilously close to the sun. This after-the-fact knowledge doesn't reflect badly on either her or on I, it does however show how in painting out beautifully written life lesson stories, of a necessity, both life, and its lessons are in need of harmony, balance, and greater defining shades of gray alongside the hot bright whites and yellows of say, an intensely hot sun. Without accepting and applying this balance, life is lived without definition, and disharmony along with discordance distorts both life and its lessons. With my wife, while it took a little time, our entwined life would, of a necessity, begin to fill in with those shades of the reality of an honest and organic life lived. When this reality hit me, as it should be, my vulnerable, raw, and exposed nerves would experience these real and organic, duller and more drab shades of life-lived colors. To each and every one of you Points of Light, I need to confess to you how these shades of color began to feel very familiar to me, as memories and feelings of the ever-before time crept into my consciousness, and in what should have given my life some much-needed definition, I allowed my near past to make me feel disoriented and out-of-balance. As our life lived together continued, more of these duller and drab colors began appearing, and with them, not only was I falling away from the sun, but I was rushing toward a crash course with the earth. The thing is, while this crash would eventually happen and prove an invaluable lesson to me, it wasn’t a lesson without a great cost, because this wonderful woman I had married followed me all the way down.
It was during this time that I began writing less and less. I feel like had I written during this time; my stories about life's lessons would have been painted with darker colors that would have been reminiscent of the life I'd lived as a wisp of smoke. Honesty demands I add here, that while this life experience reflected my life lived with my partner - internally and intrinsic to myself - as the exuberance of life's ecstasy was fading for me, and while my life lived wasn’t showing me a consistent and ongoing stream of intensely bright and insanely happy light, color and beauty, it was more of a reflection on my life lived within my “ever before” time that was haunting and scaring my vulnerable, raw, and exposed nerves. I mean, I didn’t ever, not for any reason, surrender, retreat, and then return to that place. I’d worked too damn hard to remove myself from what was my living hell. Still, had my emotional self chosen to honestly paint out our life together on my life-lived canvas, I'm now certain that I’d have chosen to apply many of the darker colors from my painters' palette. Had I done this, perhaps (we'll never know for sure), our entwined lives may have found the clarity of balance we both so richly deserved. But as we both breathed breaths and picked up our feet to push ourselves through time and space, the uncertainties of life-lived realities crept into our life together. As a result, ecstasy naturally seemed to disappear, and the mundane was naturally occurring. The more this happened, the more we both realized neither one of us was good for the other. For me, this was one hell of a lesson to learn when it of necessity had to involve someone else, who had herself, previously experienced her own "ever before" time. Are we together now? No. That being said, looking back and reflecting on our wonderful time together, looking at this time as a whole, with both the bright and dull shades of color that bring balance and harmony to life lived, and with my newly discovered realities revelation that life needs the harmony, clarity, and definition found in both the good and bad, bright and dull colors of light to write and paint out a true masterpiece work of art, our life’s canvas and time together will paint an astoundingly beautiful story of all the good and happiness light, color, and beauty can coalesce to paint!
So, my journey continues. I’ll be forever grateful for meeting and marrying my wonderful wife. Our story together added more beauty to my life than I ever thought possible. All of you Points of Light know that my search for all this light and color that give us all an ability to find beauty is, and always will be my attempt to find and attain, well beauty, or – happiness – in my life.
As Always,
With Both Profound Love and Wanted Peace,
Tod w/ only one d
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