The eyes of our heart

We have to see and hear with our hearts

Not just with our eyes and ears

Words and arguments are tools, weapons, and fortresses

But only a heart can decipher a heart

Only One

That time hits again.
I've done all I can, and there's still more to do.
I look at the clock, and want to just lay down and sink back into the beginning of time.
I want His presence, where I just know...who He is. Who loves me.
The times I can't seem to find that love for myself from myself, from my family, friends, lover or music, art, food, clothes, images, worldly riches...
There is one who is pure Love, the source, the truth, the one and only...infinite and Good!

I've lost my mind and heart to this Person...
The only Person who deserves to have it all

Childhood thoughts

Culture has always been a major topic for me. I have a lot to say about it, if anyone has an ear to hear. But lately I have not been able to speak about it because of the deep pain interwoven with my story that makes me afraid that people will not want to hear it. I feel rejected when that happens, so I usually just shut down. A couple of trustworthy people I have told, but otherwise I have learned to be silent against my own will...But the power of narrative is that I can become free from all that I have experienced if I just let it out.

I don't even know where to start, but not all stories have a beginning and an end.

I was a happy child, sensitive and bright and always full of joy. All my Sunday school teachers expressed to me how I stood out because of my brightness. My parents told me that as a child, I was adored by everyone at church. I remember being so happy and full...I didn't even know I was Korean until a kid in 1st grade asked me if I was Chinese. I remember answering, "yes" and then coming home to tell my mom who corrected me. She was a hard, quiet lady from that time. I don't remember playing with her much, and she was always distant. She told me once that she didn't talk to me until I was 3 years old when I was singing incoherently to myself and she realized that I was singing the lullaby she sung me to sleep. I remember that song and how dearly I felt towards my mother, and how much I loved her.

Gosh, I loved her so much. I almost forgot that feeling.

The song that was really comforting, she would pat my back as she sung it and it was the most beautiful sound in the world and I always looked forward to that feeling. It was like being inside her heart and feeling the beats, like it was inside her womb. I was a part of her and could have carried the wounds within her and heal it, I knew I had that power, if she wanted to let me. She didn't realize that I was closer to the Great Power above that could heal her, and all she had to do was open. She thought because I was a child, she had to protect me from her emotions. Once in a while, my father would explode on her and then the source of that love would abruptly shut off. I loved my father too, so I just wanted him to be happy with us and love my mom. I remember even when he got really angry and pulled out his belt on me I knew I just had to bear it for a little while until he felt better. I always quickly recovered and showered them with hugs and kisses afterward. I just wanted to let them feel the love I felt.

The rain makes me reflective

I met with an older friend for lunch, and went about my usual ramble with unusual restraint because I recently discovered the significance of narration. I wanted to look through his eyes instead of tell him my view, since I have seen all I could see with my own. I spoke of hopeless and an estranged life, and he spoke of the balance of greater things. I felt so safe in a view which encompassed many sorrows and joys into one story of peace, and a victor. The wisdom that comes from age is too often neglected; it is shelter in a storm.

I went to the beach today, driving up highway 1 north of Santa Cruz. The sky looked unusually large above the freeway, the clouds were majestic and I learned their names. The big white fluffy clouds are Cumulus, the white and dark clouds are Cumulonimbus, and Nimbus are the dark stormy clouds. I thought that it must have reflected God's heart because I once could not believe He had room for me there. While we were quiet in the car listening to the synthetic beat of the music, I remembered the times I had buried myself into a cave of illusions. Raves, they called them, where the music and drugs would artificially weave a harmonious state of mind into the collective conscious and overheated bodies melted deliriously in the corners of the room. There was a deep, subconscious belief that we had to escape reality to experience peace, love, unity, and respect.

We wondered how long it would take to ride the 1 all the way down to Socal as we sliced through the fog that hung so carefully in the trees.

Davenport.

Nimbus clouds were hanging ominously over the distant sea, and two great birds were floating still in the air. There was no other reason for them to be outstretched in the wind, in the same spot for the half hour we were there, except for sport. We huddled in a blanket for warmth but the distant Nimbus clouds had arrived to a spot over us and began to water us furiously. On our way back, we found a hole in the wall Mexican place that was actually a deep cavern for happy hour and I took two shots of tequila for the sake of having no occasion and that it was Wednesday and I'm not employed, dammit. The bartender had deep blue eyes like the beach and talking to her was like splashing in them.

Small group was pleasant because a song was birthed out of a prayer for our brother and the fullness of Spirit was aching to fill him. He was in France for business school and the prestige and academic pressure was depriving him of sleep and community. We let the Spirit express itself through song to feed a hungry orphan. I wish we could have let himself respond with the tears he held back but he was rushed off to another meeting.

The next activity was making collages, and we revisited our 5 year old inner child as we cut and pasted magazine pictures, singing childhood songs and making fun of each other. Children are usually very confident, because they know who they are. It is very powerful in its purity, to simple BE. It is the strongest force in the world to Be Yourself As You Are.

Each person presented in front of the whole group and I was amazed at the depth of each person's soul, although perhaps it wasn't so apparent to anyone else. I was ashamed of mine until it was on display and I had little to say, but everyone came in to fill the silence with their depictions. "You're close to the source of Creation, the Creator. You enjoy making something amazing out of nothing, a true creator. You want to do something beyond this world."

Sometimes it's good to be reminded of who you are.

It is not a game, and the rebound may not win

I guess, love is letting go, a battle of hearts
You cannot win until you lose

If you don't share the vibe, then leave me tonight.
I'd rather be alone
To heal from these wounds upon wounds
Of which you have graduated with honors, a general with medals
As in all the rest of the departments of your life

I don't have the energy to try or to fight,
I've lost it before, and I am in the ward.
It's a sick sick world out there
I am but one casualty, invalid
Can't you see what you're dealing with?

The smell of anesthesia fills the air, but we're all still aching in here
Leaving me but the inside of my eyelids
To agree with sound of the promise
Beating underneath the bandages, summoning
The day that I see the sky again

Home

I thought about my parents' careful house, the stillness and the silence as the three of us crept along the dusted furniture and the vacuumed carpets - as though we did not so much occupy the space as move within it like stealthy lodgers. If you left a glass on the kitchen counter for more than five seconds my mother would whisk it away, wiping up the wet ring on the Formica with a furious sweep of her sponge. Covering out tracks, removing evidence of ourselves. It seemed to me we apologized for our very existence in the very way we lived, bowing and ducking as though to escape the notice of some vengeful god. It wasn't life that was lived there, but eternal penitence.

~Katherine Min, excerpt from Secondhand World

Beauty

I wondered what being beautiful had done for my mother other than give her no direction in which to gaze but into her own reflection. The state of being beautiful was indiscriminate; it was there for peasants and kings. You couldn't reclaim it for yourself. You could hide it under chador or veil, but it would be there still, more enticing for its secrecy.

The state of being unbeautiful was a more exacting affair. If a man found you attractive, you knew it must be so, that he must have looked hard and long to see something within you and was not just another wistful aesthete panting after loveliness.

I was suddenly glad I wasn't beautiful, that I didn't suffer my mother's misfortunes of vanity, her disappointment in how far beauty could get you, which was, in truth, not as far as one might imagine.

~Katherine Min, excerpt from Secondhand World

Limerick for the Narcissist

Scrupulous, the work of an arrogant loner.

He becomes vulnerable to all sorts of murmur,

Apprehensively seeking a crowd

To approve him being allowed

To be considered his own intellect's owner.

It's funny how much we can assume we are lonely
When all we are is undiscovered.

Someone called me a jerk today.

For deciding not to go party with them.
It got me thinking. What is a jerk?

(1) a contemptibly naive, fatuous, foolish, or inconsequential person.
(2) a quick, sharp pull, thrust, twist, throw, or the like; a sudden movement.
(3) any sudden, quick movement of the body, as in dodging something.

To sum up,
A naive fool who likes to suddenly thrust away from or dodge the current of the present world, pursuing its opposite direction.

It made me think...
Can you define someone by their movement? Or do you define them by their mass?
A feather in a vacuum falls at the same speed as a bowling ball in a vacuum.
Too bad we can't test all our theories in a perfect vacuum, to treat all mass equally.
At the speed of light, mass increases and becomes a relative mass.
As I move towards the speed of light, I don't even notice that I am becoming larger, otherworldly, and incomparable to stagnant masses. The light defines me.

It makes me realize that no matter what, I will be offensively large to some people who have decided to stay in the same place forever. And my movement might make someone uncomfortable.

Absently used

I am not my own
& I am not yours
I am but alone
But I am not yet one

Our hips align before
Our hearts even decide
There is nothing more
Nothing more resides

Did we hit the finish line
Before we even tried
You're laughing as I cry
You leave me out to dry

The Surburban cement-scape is becoming all too familiar to me in its brutally vacant rawness.
Everyday I wake up to a window with a humble tree tending to quiet sky-whispers, on a tiny plot of grass adjacent to the sea of asphalt. It is a daily reminder of the taxes which are rendered to Caeser, which goes into the infrastructure of the world's most cruel and backwards economy. So all flamboyant illustrations aside, it gets really tiring to drive from place to place, connected to a cellphone to direct my next destination. Intellectualizing the concept of 'space' and 'property' can relieve the tension, but only produces wormwood juice. Maybe it's relevant, but I can talk to myself using a string of disjointed climax thoughts which conceals the valleys in between, pretending to be expressing the highest truths when my fellow vessel detects a desperate scramble within my deepest being for connection and release. I have the most curious ability to detach and then reattach to humanity, but I often pass it by without notice, until my hunger pulls me back. The hunger is so human, and it aches for the purest divinity, but my appetite has been trained to receive an unnatural diet. If humanity were like the natural landscape over which we've piled layers of cement over in order to transport these steel modules which carry money-driven motivations and other fragments of illusions to build the Babylonian empire, as my heart of flesh has been paved over with stone, then where can it find the tiny crack through which a strong vine can break through and all the organic creatures of the earth can find refuge and life in its Majestic, Eternal Growth? Our hunger is this crack. I must'nt neglect this tiniest, lowest voice of my spirit whose cry is for the Vine.

Truth before love. Love based on truth.
Please touch me, hold me, be held by me. Frosting, sweets, junk love.
Growl, I bite you! Wild beasts roam, without a master.
Control is not love.

I'm holding onto the words surrounding you, like an aura and a veil.
Do you love me? My hope fills me with desire
Yet you desire to be desireless
Listen to me, wait for me, care to build me up.
Love builds up, but knowledge puffs up.
When the perfect comes, the imperfect will fade away.
Such is the glory of man.

The glory of man is a woman.
Who was deceived, and caused both to fall into temptation.
Fall of mankind, separation from God.
Who am I to separate man from God?

lonely togetherness

We entered in the new world, together
We ached for the land subdued
You swaggered to its coasts while I dug the soil
It was within our grasp
But distant
And words themselves were unattached, as ships
Without a captain on an unmapped region
Tossed and pulled by an earthly force
To attach our souls.
We held our bodies together, but our minds apart
Sending pieces of our hearts
On the ships across the reckless storm.
Upon receiving news of one, the other's
Yearning is temporarily soothed.
The solitude is gentle but mournful.

I birthed inspiration
last night. The contractions were less severe than usual,
Though it took a little while
The world formed a membrane around my imagination
and my joy was beginning
to suffocate.
I was tempted to plunge into the fog
where there is refuge from reality. Returning
to slumber, to the womb.

I lie awake, and unsullied

Willing to succumb to my mother's heartbeat
Reverberating throughout the cavern of ambition, where corpses of
Ill-timed dauntless pioneers have long since dehydrated

And the newest ones
swell their elastic skins in anticipation
Of liberation

Open and breathe, there is no darkness
Where we are going
In the flow, blowing through the cobwebs
And dust

The man of earth

We chimed the stars with our talk of destiny
Staring into its reflection on the twilight sea
Letting the roots unfurl into our flesh
And the branches intertwine.
You pinched its fruit for ripeness,
And the ripest ones descended from above your reach.

You traveled so far a distance, a sage
Communing with the leaves

Flower beds and snowy peaks cradled a lonely search
For the depths of richness, transcending the eye

Hungrier, still but you searched granite faces
Across mountain ridges
For a sign of divine compassion upon an earthly man.
The surface has yet to be pierced.

Cling

The hardened heart shatters my tongue
I taste the distance with my feet when I
Cling to the Love that binds for eternity

Spirit life

That flesh were mist, I could vanish when you exhale.
Open hearts lay bleeding on the surgeon's table
As He cuts away the garment of flesh.
That hope is reality, I walk on the waves when He calls.
Shadows respond to death, but my spirit responds to Life.
This Life has a name.

burdened

I woke up crying this morning because I was hurting from being in studio all week and weekend, sick and burdened. During our final reviews, the professors were critiquing our diagrams and axonometrics. After two and a half hours of painstakingly poring over each individual's work, as I was feverishly praying to Jesus to calm the storm in my head, they give us a break. I rush back to the studio to finish off the rest of what I needed and pinned it up. My work looks sickly and underfed, like myself. It's time for me to present, so I take a deep breath and exhale a stream of consciousness that seems to disturb the female professor, who frowns at me like I am a weed in a bed of beautiful budding sprouts. The class is a set of chess pieces. They are gentle with their criticisms, although I can feel their disappointment and I meekly nod at their suggestions. Of course, yes, I can do better, I will work harder. I can do that.

There is something serene to the surrender of my ambition to excel in this class. I used to be able to harness this energy, but I have grown beyond the point of grasping these fine hairs of theoretical education. The people in the class are brilliant and focused, but I cannot match their energy. I surrender to God, who is powerful above all authorities and thrones, and He is meek and humble. I find rest.

Z comes by, to give me acupuncture and we have a light conversation about people, thoughts about each other, some words of comfort. I am distraught, but I do not reveal it to him because he does not react well to anything that will upset his balance. I wonder if that will do well for our future. Perhaps I must struggle with this alone. Perhaps this is good for me. I am still learning a lot about myself. I cannot let fearful attraction be the center of my relationship with him.

A good friend comes over for a little while, and he is searching for something as well. It comes out reflectively through tranquil illustrations and observations. He describes a snapshot: A boy with a red helmet stand before his reflection in the pool. He holds an old yellow tether ball, and the pool reflects the blue sky. I want to know about this boy's life, but my friend does not want to put all of his cards on the table. We play with my prism glasses for a while, trailing our rainbow shattered fingers over the light. He ponders on how every experience with a friend may be the last one. I can see how much he has grown.

My inspiration washed over me like a sudden rising of tide, but I lost my grip and let it pass.
Lately, my thoughts have all been tied to the ocean. I wish I could open my heart to him, but I still haven't cracked the code myself.

I'm wasting time on the computer, blogging about my day. I have lots of projects due tomorrow, yet I am not alarmed by the amount of work due and am waiting to become desperate. It is the remnants of my self-destructive patterns, which are slowly washing away with the tide.