Remind Me
Rocky Mountain National Park
The mountains remind me of how small I am. Humbling.
Travelling reminds me that the news never tells the whole story of a land and its people.
Conversations remind me that we all want the same thing at our core.
Lands tell a story, both beautiful and brutal.
Closing my eyes reminds me to listen to the wind,
to see with the third eye.
I am reminded that those who lead and govern do not serve in the best interest of the masses.
Was it always this way? Was there ever a time in history when a government served all?
What does it mean to serve?
I'll give you my perspective if you care to read.
Equality needs to begin at the basics.
Food, shelter, water, clothing. If all beings do not have these, then we are failing.
All of humanity is failing.
It matters neither to the micro nor the macro spirit—the karmic merry-go-round will continue its circular motion.
The exits are closed until the lessons are learned.
Personally, I have no issues with billionaires. We can have billionaires and nurture all beings.
We can have differences on what system is better, but honestly, it matters little to none.
If the heart is closed and the mind is corrupt, the system has no relevance. A system does not enlighten one.
It does not open our hearts.
If we love from the mind, then love is a manipulative illusion.
It is not love, for love is unconditional.
Mindful love is conditioned and coated in judgment.
We do not judge the mountains, the winds, the oceans, and the forests—
but we judge each other. Why?
Because most of us love nature from our hearts,
yet we forget that we too are nature, baked from the same ingredients as the fox that trots and the winds that sing.
I am reminded, and for that, I am grateful.
Lighten the Load
Abundance, presence, love.
For those who take more than their share, ask yourself what impact this has on others, and, more importantly, ask what impact this weight has on your soul—to collect all these things that will remain behind.
Nothing you have will come along for the ride except your deeds, intentions, and stories carved into your mind and spirit.
The mind goes with us to the next.
We may leave our bodies behind, but the programs of our mind will remain intact.
Ask yourself: if I were to die tomorrow, is this the mind I want to travel with?
This day, and every moment that follows, will be another opportunity to lighten the load, improving the chance of transcendence.
Time is a Trickster
Land the plane, aka the mind, on the page.
It wants to be in the skies, but it is down here where its services are required.
Tap in, but do not be seduced by its grandeur.
You come from there to here, so be here.
Acknowledge and respect the desire of your soul to experience that moment in time.
Time is a trickster. There is less of it than you know, and the spaceship is moving faster than you can imagine.
Respect the soul. It is the reason you are here.
This YOU is once in a lifetime. You will perhaps return once again, but the next journey will be or could be, with new companions.
So enjoy the ones who are journeying with you now.
The ones that were, the ones that are, and the ones still to come.
Love is Not a Construct
Love is not a construct, something that happens with one soul,
Love is something that is expansive and has no rules and regulations, no systems, no borders.
We are sold the need to follow a model of love, and when we don't meet this model, we suffer and suffer and suffer.
Some of us suffer all the way till our deathbed and take this suffering into the next merry-go-round of our karmic cycle.
Round and round and round we go, cycles of illusions constructed through layers of manipulation.
Maybe you can't see in this moment, but can you feel it?
Can you feel the pain that lives in your body, the suffering sounds of chatter within your mind?
A soul that is crying and begging you to cultivate the spaciousness to express itself, to love fully?
Why do you think your soul came here?
It came here to love to its fullest capacity.
Infinite capacity.
I Want to Kiss
In this moment, I will not be taking anything.
Just me, this page, a matcha latte.
I feel the energy moving in my heart space, the center of my chest. My tongue is pressed against the top of my mouth, the tip of my tongue pressed behind the back of my two front teeth.
Energy flowing in my throat, a cooling sensation that is moving upward, dripping onto my tongue, wanting to pour out. I want to kiss. I miss kissing. My favourite pastime.
A lover comes to mind.
No one to kiss in this moment.
How else can I express this love yearning to pour out? What if I never meet someone?
What would I do with this energy and love?
How can I express it and share it other than making love to a woman?
Why would I even contemplate this?
It’s not an either-or; it’s about everything.
The Earth below and the Universe above.
Meeting within the centre of my vessel.
Jigsaw
Is there another way?
At some point, at some number, we need to pause and ask: Is this it? Is this the way?
The gauge is fear and stress. The higher the fear and stress, the more likely it’s not the way.
Or maybe it’s the other way? That’s for each of us to decipher.
A calculation I’m still calculating.
Left or right? Flip a coin and walk in the direction it tells you. Heads—left. Tails—right.
Upside down. Inside out.
It’s all a zigzag, back and forth. It’s the illusion of a straight line that brings pain to our hearts and minds.
Nothing about you is fucking straight, and in this jigsaw of a world, you want to walk a tightrope.
There is a guaranteed fall—and nothing below to catch you.
Embrace the upside down, and only then can you know what is right side up.
Double-Sided
Separation is an illusion.
Colour is everything and yet means nothing.
Everything is double-sided, and there is no one-size-fits-all.
Do with that what you will—or throw it to the side if your preference is to do nothing.
But there will be a lifetime when, one day, you will need to pick it up if you want to graduate to another playground.
The same merry-go-round gets tiring.
At some point, the soul is so dizzy it can’t tell whether it’s awake or asleep.
The Dark Never Travels Alone
Getting off track or maybe it's on track. Who fucking knows.
The stress of doomsday lives in my heart. I know it's a possibility but I also know that I can look out another window and sunshine is waiting to receive the gaze of my eyes. It's all perspective.
MANASIAH AKPALIAIPIK - Screaming Faces, 1991
Ask yourself, is it really gray outside? Is the future bleak? What data are you assessing that justifies a narrative that causes commotion in your heart? What's first, the emotions or the narrative? The feeling or the thought? It's hard to tell at times. It's that whole chicken and egg thing. What came first. It's so swift and fast, difficult to decipher the order of operations.
Sunshine is there. Darkness never travels alone. But it requires effort and awareness to change the direction of our lens, pointing the binoculars towards another horizon and suddenly you see the rainbow above.
This makes me reflect on the miracle of this moment. The sun. The sun shining down on this planet. I mean, how do we make sense of such a grand gesture from the divine? Names don't do it justice. It cannot be named, it can only be experienced with awareness, yet we will never experience the whole, simply bits and pieces when we take a moment to pause and remember.
Oof, what a trip of a fucking world we live in and I'm not talking about the world as in this planet, I'm referring to the little worlds we create within our minds and hold onto a pseudo truth, then we kill for this truth, we die for this truth.
Illusory certainty will be the death of humanity.
This brings a smile to my face. Fills my body with joy to remember. To look through another window.
Light. I can dwell in the dark.
She reminds me, we remind each other, there are other windows.
Little Me
I've been solely dancing and displaying words with pen and paper, but I miss this space as well. Fingers and keys have a different kind of dance. They carry their own friction and flow, unique from the slow flow of pen on paper.
I have yet to reflect on year 47 of this cycle. This time last year, I was in Morocco. It feels like another lifetime. To excavate the memories, I would need to open my old journals and sift through my photos.
For the last couple of months, I’ve been carrying around a photo of little me. I think I was five years old. Below the Polaroid, someone wrote, "HI EVERYBODY." This sentence is me—it's who I have become, or maybe it’s who I’ve always been. It took a while to return to this authenticity because, for much of my life, I wasn’t able to flow in the way that was natural to me.
I was a happy kid—joyful and loving—but my environment was not welcoming to my nature. It was difficult. Still, it taught me to find joy in an incognito way. I learned how to protect my spirit from a very young age. I touched that place of safety when I was alone, playing in my room under the tents I would build. It was my place to be me.
I did this for a long time and still do, though as I got older, I learned to find calm and peace beyond my own space. To find peace under all roofs.
It has taken many years. The last few years of being nomadic have helped me reach this place. I consciously lived under shared roofs to learn how to flow with the energy of others. The one thing I am yet to master is how to flow—how to be this little guy with a smile—despite the chaos in romantic relationships. I’m still yet to find someone I can intertwine with and not lose myself.
I keep this photo with me because I want to reflect on how we started this journey. I want to ask him: How did we do? How are you feeling now? You carried us through some really difficult times.
Little me is getting emotional. I feel goosebumps throughout my body. I, too, am getting emotional as I write this. Or maybe it’s he who is getting emotional.
Tears want to flow, but I’m in a café, so I hold them back. I’ll save them for later. I love you. Thank you.
We made it through. What bigger accomplishment is there than to arrive at this destination of openness? To move through this world with an open heart and grand compassion. Compassion for self, compassion for others, and compassion for this life.
This maskless place. This happiness that rises deep within, without external dependency.
What a beautiful place to be.
I’m not going to look back and analyze this past year. Instead, I’ll observe the present, because the present tells me all I need to know about my past and the seeds I’m going to plant for my future self.
Unfulfilled Yearning
Three Americanos yesterday. I was buzzing and didn’t sleep till 1:30 a.m. I watched a few episodes of This Is Us, and it ignited some ancient emotions inside me.
A sadness, a longing for the family I haven’t yet had in this life.
I love the way the show moves between past and present. It inspires me to weave my own memories, to explore the threads of my own story.
I love that the desire to have a family has returned. I don’t think it ever really left. I just tucked it away, deep into unlocked drawers within me.
It’s something we all do with unfulfilled yearning. It’s too disruptive in day-to-day life to carry these longings openly, letting them sit on top of our hearts and minds. Some we save for another day, others we save for another life. And some yearnings rise back up from the depths of our soul to remind us that they need to be lived now, in this fleeting blip of a moment.
So I open myself to the desires that won’t wait for another day, for another life, and I pray for another chance. I pray for courage. Life has gifted me many chances, but I spent so much of this life moving through the world with a ball of confusion around my heart, clouding my mind and smothering my truth.
A fear birthed out of chaos. I chose what I feared less, which created an illusion of safety. An illusion that had no legs to carry me toward what I most yearned for, a yearning that couldn’t be saved for another day.
This longing reminds me that it will come with its own beautiful chaos—a love that I’m now ready for, as ready as one can be for something so grand.
It’s not that I’ve hardened my heart; rather, I’ve softened it. I’ve learned to embrace, endure, and appreciate the cracks that formed rivers from broken experiences.
Finca Mia Retreat Centre - Rivas, Costa Rica
Life Dreams, Wet Dreams
Sometimes, you just need to release the valve, in whatever way works best. I feel better, less erratic. But I know it's not the only reason I was feeling scattered. I’m consuming a lot of information, trying to make sense of the world we're in, and at the same time, I'm sorting through my emotions anticipating the current to come. It's another reason, but not the only one, for pouring media onto my mind.
It’s hard to predict the end of something so far in advance. But I'm grateful for the chance to grieve, and even more grateful for my awareness of what I’m grieving. It’s not easy to say goodbye. When you do, memories of gratitude rush to the surface, and the longing begins—sometimes more painful than the grieving itself. Maybe they’re both steps within a greater process called death.
I'm scared. There’s no other way to put it. One Chanel, the other Gap. One is wet dreams, the other ignites life dreams. I’m drawn to Ms. Gap—madam life dreams. That’s always been my dream: a partner, two kids, a life we build together. But my soul had other plans: healing homework for both the soul and the whole. I was a strange mix of "too nice" and rage, birthed from chaos and conditions both now and passed down from those before me.
I learned from the screen. It was in the room where I shined. If only I could make her emulate the sounds and expressions I absorbed with my ears and eyes. I’m a man of contingencies, always with a backup plan—or maybe a forward plan, depending on the moment. The skills of the tongue. I did well. Sometimes not so well—it depended on the sun and moon, the alignment of the planets out there and in here. I achieved a passing grade, a high C, and maybe even a B+ at times. I guess it depends on the student who came before me.
A grading system that only she controls: the teacher. Once upon a time, she was the wise one in our historical eyes. Today, she is underground, difficult to be found but if you listen, you can still hear her subtle sounds.
Where was I? Ah yes, wet dreams and life dreams. It's not that life dreams can't have the thrill of wet dreams, but if I had to choose, I’d choose the illusory "happily ever after."
I said nothing. The fear of the past tightens inside my heart, holding back the words that yearn to rise up the channel and dew-drop off my tongue.
Feeling scared. Scared of what? Rejection? Possibility? That what you want might actually come true? One dream at a time. Wait why not two dreams at a time?
Rewind.
What stopped you? She was literally in front of you.
Judgment. Judgment of who she was surrounded by, judgment of her likes. Judgments that make no sense, judgments meant to distract and deter you from the truth of that moment. All you wanted was to say hello, to start a conversation. She felt good. She felt calm inside my heart. Maybe she had a man, maybe not. Maybe she was a million things or a million different scenarios, but it didn’t matter because she felt like a potential life dream.
The Elevator
I recently realized that for the last 18 years, I’ve been putting myself back together since you broke me, since all that I was programmed to believe came crashing down—like a home built without a foundation.
I want to blame my parents, but is that fair when they were simply reflecting how others were toward them? It’s probably more fair to blame the lineage, at least the last three generations, for the love that never had a chance to fully blossom because of the defective seeds planted and nurtured within me.
Maybe that day I was supposed to stop you. But how could I ruin your life? I was a mess. I wasn’t ready, nor did I feel deserving of you. Too many programs running inside me. Too many wires crossed, needing to be untangled and rewired.
I recently met 'her' again. It was a knowing, the same knowing I had when I walked into that club, and we locked eyes for the first time. I just knew.
It’s been hard. Not the hard times—they’ve passed—but it’s the good times that are hard. It’s on the elevator going up that I wish you were here. Someone to celebrate with. Someone to witness all my growth. I’m about to step into yet another elevator, and it looks like I’ll be walking in it alone once again. I have my friends, family, coach, and a few of them will fit, but at some point, they too will step off.
The Leeches Beneath
They aren't the root nor the trunk,
Branches or leaves,
They are the leeches that live beneath.
They have strayed
From the collective belief.
They are not friend but foes,
They are the ones who need to go.
They don't believe in thee,
The one through whom the divine helps us see.