More often than not, a lot of the material that makes it to this site and into my articles and books come from conversations with readers with whom I have become friends. Here is another one I thought I would share.
FROM A READER:
You’re the Man….My Friend…That is the exact thing that screws up a blooming long term friendship…People feel if they have a connection…they must also have a taste of honey….that is the biggest mistake folks make….I feel a emotional connection is more fulfilling..To be honest with you….Sex isn’t something I think about much…..If a person wakes that part of me up…then I know I have falling in love and that isn’t something I ever want to experience again…..Love hurts….Loving someones mind feel so good….Laughing and enjoying great conversation, listening to music and just having clean fun is the key to complete happiness for me…..That is what I like about you….You have madE me laugh, cry, shocked through all that I have read from your writings….especially when you spoke about Black Planet banning you from their site…that was a big one for me…and yes I agree with you…we should wonder who is running that site…have a great day my nice friend that Im growing to like more and more each day…YOU ROCK!!!!!
MY REPLY
It saddens me to know that you fear love. I embrace it. But I have learned to be more disciplined about it. It is never healthy to deny oneself such a necessary part of living. I have found that most people confuse the pressures of love with the societal traditions and expectations of love. Since I no longer live by those rules, I can love you or anyone else as my spirit leads and without guilt or the slightest consideration of fear. I have found that to embrace a fear of anything for any reason is a path of limitation that spreads like a disease throughout your life, destroying both passion and potential.
Out of all the things in our chats that I am learning to appreciate about you, it is that singular fear that you expressed that leads me to think that perhaps our time and experience will serve its purpose and be short lived because I outgrow fearful people very quickly. What I am speaking of isn’t about whether you fall “in love” with me but that you have closed your mind and heart to intimate love altogether rather than to expand your understanding and to conquer. Who knows, maybe my presence at this point in your life is but one element to increasing that understanding.
You definitely possess more strength than you give yourself credit for in fearing love. Or perhaps it is not fear at all. You said yourself in a previous comment that you don’t like games- and face it- most traditional relationship expectations are games. That is why I threw 5000 gamer players off my profile page. That wasn’t out of fear but to get some peace when I am on there without some co-dependent hoochie in lingerie trying to tell me why I am the man for her. (That wasn’t the issue with all of them and I’m sure there ones I booted simply because there was no conversation). The only thing I would offer you is to say that if you don’t like love the way it is- then redefine it and hold your life and others who want to be in it, accountable to your rules of engagement. It IS your world after all. But NEVER become a slave to fear. It does not suit you well at all.
I appreciate that you have found the many emotions you expressed to have experienced through my writings. But also understand that the reason that I am effective in what I do is because I remain real and true to myself. I never deny the “darkness” because it is also a fuel of “light”. When I am blunt or less than “clean” in how I pursue a subject in writing, even if you are further into the light than others and certain language use is not for you, there is always someone else who needed to hear it JUST LIKE THAT. It is that complex balance of writing through all the voices of my humanity that often makes me controversial and rattles people. Not all knowledge is “clean fun”. Most of what we know in this life came out of the horrible experiences of others. We just have the luxury of vicariously learning so much by example that we now are so weak that we view every adversity as some kind of “punishment for sin”. What people miss is that God created sin when we were designed with the ability to choose. And “choice” is the darkness that creates light. Therefore “sinning” is all part of the program.
I sin gladly. With every word expressed- I sin boldly. With every “heart” I long for- I sin deeply. With every free spirit for whom I would defend to my last breath- I sin without regret. Be it a sin of error or that of great changing consequence- there will always be a light of learning created for others. I am a thinking man. I think both with my brain and my spirit. I learned to stop thinking with my heart because hearts can be too easily deceived- mostly by one’s self more than others. But I have found that once you learn to trust your spirit, it will bring peace and understanding to your mind and the heart will soon follow because you have chosen to do SOMETHING. Henry David Thoreau wrote “I came into this world, not chiefly to make this a good place to live in, but to live in it, be it good or bad. A man has not everything to do, but something; and because he cannot do everything, it is not necessary that he should do something wrong.”
This is all to say that I do nothing with malevolence of mind, neither to heap weight upon the megalomania by which we canonize living and enslave our minds to sacred books and traditions and with stagnate hearts persecute progress. For the rock of my salvation- even for all, is more than a single stone that the builders of such a naive and narrow view of heaven rejected. For we are all Simone Bar-Jona “the little rocks”- pebbles of the light and truth ignited by our choices guided not by an intercessor, but comforted by a spirit within. Tho humanity is an oft un-tranquil stormy sea of sadness- sin and choice are the pebbles that break the waters, form the lands, and create the foundation of who we are. That we divide by shape or color or “weight” of beliefs is part of the mosaic created as the waters recede and remove the shifting sands.
We are then given a season to study the picture we create. We rest exposed to the elements- chiseled and worn by the winds of time- new edges formed while others are reshaped and rounded- preparing for the water’s rise where we are reshuffled into our new fit. We continue this until we are so weathered that we ourselves become a part of the sands of time giving way to the next pebbles of truth who have rested beneath us- until we are all ultimately and irrevocably, sand- a cosmic dust infused with the light of generations to become that star worthy to give birth to a new generation of life within the universe. Where we then say as we once read of the almighty “let us make in our own image”. Wherein it all begins anew with love- a love of life, and of living, and of progress, and for each other. Everything else just comes with the territory.