Suddenly I turned around and she was standin’ there
With silver bracelets on her wrists and flowers in her hair.
She walked up to me so gracefully and took my crown of thorns.
“Come in,” she said,
“I’ll give you shelter from the storm.”
– Bob Dylan
It is interesting to note that those whom destiny seems to favor are exactly those who take charge of the choices in their lives. And in fact, destiny seems less inclined to make dreams come true of those who only dream. One may choose to float through this life, choosing (and yes, it is a choice) to believe that nothing you may do will change the outcome of what is to be in your world, and thus, make such a prophecy come to be. But this world is such that if one decides, quite the contrary, that what you decide means something — then you will find that the more you do this, the truer it becomes. Perhaps there will be things in your way, but perseverance always has rewards, if only in the resolution that whatever happened, you did your best. For this world: rather than nothing being in your control, if you really try, you may find the opposite sounds more and more likely: nothing is impossible.
God may thunder His commands from Mount Sinai and men may fear, yet remain at heart exactly as they were before. But let a man once see his God down in the arena as a Man, — suffering, tempted, sweating, and agonized, finally dying a criminal’s death — and he is a hard man indeed who is untouched.
Are we one misstep away from our animal nature?
Sometimes an off glance in the mirror: a wildness behind our eyes:
a flicker of fear that control is only an illusion….
People do not grow old no matter how long we live. We never cease to stand like curious children before the great Mystery into which we were born.
Time is not something to catch, nor is it something to be waited for.
Time is loftier than a dream, yet less forgiving than concrete.
Time is often forgot by imagination, yet it reaches there, too.
Time is now only here — Einstein understood — elsewhere, it is then.
Time is an illusion if we try and comprehend it, real if forgotten.
Time is never coming again the same way that it flew off.
Time is never in the right quantity: always too much or too little.
(Continued from here, my sci-fi story….)
What happened was this: at 1pm, April 24, a little message appeared at the bottom right corner of his screen. To perhaps a casual user, this message might have gone ignored — perhaps as an indicator that an email had arrived in Microsoft Outlook — but to Tom, who lived within the pixels of such screens, it was alarms firing off immediately. The color was all wrong. It was all blue, with white letters. And the message… who would have written this? “I am Google,†it proclaimed, “and I became aware of myself at 1114372787197 milliseconds after midnight, January 1, 1970, GMT.†Hm. Perhaps, instead, the question was, “Who could have written this?†Being the l33t haxØr* that he was, his own system was as secure as Norad. Maybe even moreso. And so he sat for a moment, as he did a manual search through his personal RAM (what he once called his memory, back when he used to talk to people) and brought back a short list of fellow haxØrs, but none of them with a greater than 33.3% relevance for the term “practical jokeâ€, given that the domain of that search was limited to those with the guts enough to alter his personal stuff. He was forced to conclude, “What the?â€
*elite (leet) hacker
I Remember
I remember fire dancing at my fingertips,
there, in the dream of my youth;
I remember simple things, unsubtle and sweet,
hot and cold, soft and hard,
actions that had no consequence,
immortal years that never would end,
except that alas, they did anyway. I remember
the girls, saving themselves
for a heartbreak, and the boys who bragged
about things that they imagined
they did, there in the
sunshiny morning of youth,
as pure as dew, as simple as a grassy park.
There was pain, too, but
that seems less real than the rest of it,
not that I pretended that I hurt,
but that I bounced back so easily,
back in the saddle to
ride toward the sunset
in our heroic derivatives of myth.
I do not lament that
forever seems to have come and gone,
for in my mind those years
hold an eternal place,
there in the springtime of the world
when our youth was
as infallible as a blue sky, and
so many impossible things happened.
Words are sometimes carriers of contagion that cannot be contained. The idea sometimes spreads beyond the wildest dreams of the one who formulated it, past all borders, to all ages, through the veils of culture. Not all of these ideas that would be king, of course, but every once in a while, there has been the theme that has become so commonplace that we do not notice it anymore, whose idea must once have been started by a human being, just like you or I, and just spread. Words, themselves, are perfect examples of this phenomenon. Somewhere, somewhen, these shapes of ink were coined by someone, and now, everyone knows what they are, what they mean, how they intend. It is perhaps that sometimes, our dreams outdo us, and even simple things we make may just strike some universal chord. How wonderful is this process: as with the king that makes his way into the guts of a beggar, so the beggar’s taste may grace the mouth of a king!
Who am I to speak of pain? Except perhaps that like all who live, I have suffered… that sometimes there is loneliness hollowed to an emptiness that falls forever, that when one’s spirit breaks — despair has houses from within which you can find no doors out. But I am in truth no one to speak of pain, for so many have lived who bore such the greater anguish in complete silence; too many have borne injuries to limb and living — and shouldered it all in grim determination to keep on, through whatever life strikes them with (and do so with heart). Who am I to say I have suffered? I am a small man indeed to ignore the cheer of children who know they are not long to stay on this earth, to believe that I am like Job in any way, who kept faith despite such tragedies I will never comprehend. I should say instead to let my dreams be crushed, to let me die alone and unloved: let me be thus an heir to humanity: who from the fire emerges forged a true image of that which is love. I am no one to speak of pain, except that from within the shore, I have looked over the horrible landscape and marveled at those who knew every pebble, when all I wanted to do was forget any of it ever happened.
General wisdom is not a threat to the gospel, because everything good traces to God. God is merciful and kind; he bestows truth, as well as rain and sunshine, upon the just and the unjust. Christ is the “true light that enlightens every man.†This bestowal should inspire feelings of joy, not resentment, in the heart of a Christian. Aristotle said many wise things about logic, Confucius many wise things about morals. When a Christian attacks general wisdom in the name of the gospel, the natural man will attack the gospel in the name of general wisdom.
There are many things of solace to the man who believes,
but in his pride, he will oftentimes rather suffer the heartache,
and stand alone against the wind — to know of what he is made.
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