Risk of Destiny

And God said,” Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” – Genesis 1:26

With God’s breath, life was given to man. The Divine dreamed that man would find the Kingdom within his own heart. All of us were given unique fates at birth. Our fates are unchangeable factors of life, such as socioeconomic status, family, and nationality. With each fate, there is a destiny. Destiny is a call to reach beyond fate for a greater quality of living. This will raise a person above the mundane, fated life and into the spiritual, destined life. Each individual must accept or reject the destiny God offers. When seeking destiny, humans will know when it is discovered because their hearts will be opened to the essence of their life’s purpose. By recognizing our nature and essence, we become in the likeness of God. These are “God’s dreams for us,” as Robert Lawton states.

As a consequence of God’s dreams, we find man’s insecurity in the form of questions. Am I doing the right thing? Am I taking the right path? Do I even have a path? I have felt these insecurities before. To understand and overcome them, I began seeking my original purpose, which I believe is to tell stories. In my life, the greatest risk is not understanding God’s dreams for me. By cultivating myself with formal education, I will be better equipped to confront life’s spiritual and moral challenges. With this ability, I will not only be born in the image of God, but I will be more in his likeness.

This is our original nature, but we frequently find ourselves astray and must realign with our true purpose. This journey to be ourselves is the riskiest, as Lawton purposes. Lawton points to how easily people lose their nature in the face of worldly stresses. Adam’s fall in Genesis is an ideal example of the risk involved. After he ate the Forbidden Fruit, God’s first question was “Where are you?” God placed Adam in Eden with an original nature and a destiny to stay in the likeness of God. When he ate the fruit, he fell from his nature, thus falling away from God. God poses this question as an exclamation of betrayal, rather than a query of his physical location or an inquisition of his psyche. This is the root of our insecurity: falling away from our nature and God’s dreams for us.

On our journey, there are many attractions that lead us in circles. Social exploits and economic comfort can make us turn from the spiritual path we are set on. In today’s climate, we seek a socially acceptable path to “getting a good job,” and if we are lucky, early retirement. Trading one’s nature to please the masses is the bane of morality and God’s dreams for us. A poet, for instance, is born to a business-owning father. The child loves words and wants to weave them into beautiful songs. One day, the child tells his father that he wants to be a writer. His father, being a man of business, will steer the child away from this foolish, unprofitable profession. The father chisels away at the child’s nature until he has become the same statue of a man. By defying his nature, the child becomes an adult who wanders in spiritual darkness. He transmutes the Kingdom is in heart to stone.

In my journey, there are innumerable risks that lie ahead. For many college students, they expect the greatest dangers to be found in the questionable behavior of their peers, as well as themselves. The use of destructive intoxicants and predominance of sexually-driven relationships mark the stereotypes of the college youth. These things hold little sway over me. The risk I am concerned the most about is the one people don’t usually see. I fear the choice to settle for economic gain rather than treading the path of being one’s self. Today success is marked by a person’s ability to gather money and resources. Albeit most become financially successful through hard work and personal sacrifices, their hard work becomes negligible in comparison to their wealth. I can already feel the pressures from friends and family, encouraging me to obtain a degree that quickly unfolds into a profitable career. My risk comes from the temptation to be “successful” in the eyes of the masses.

I want to tell stories. More specifically, I want to tell stories through film. Trite phrases and clichés aside, this gives me a true sense of happiness. Not the emotional happiness derived from the taste of something sweet or the soft feeling a woman’s touch. It is something deeper in my soul that beckons to me, “Nick, tell them a story.” I am at risk of losing this voice, not because it will leave me, but because I won’t listen. I could settle for becoming a career, or I could stride through the path that was set in front of me and become myself.

Such is Water

Three great waterfalls
Always in turmoil and rapids
Yet, always water
Science surges in one stream
Spirit drifts in another
Humanity flows between them
Humanity feels the urge to flow to one or the other

Patience reveals
Three waterfalls pour into one tranquil lake
Such is water, such is life

Riches of Rags

Draped in riches
Covered in gold
The Holy Men, they will pretend to be
Of spirit and love
Spectacle is all you will see

The true love comes from men in rags
Happiness is being free of greed
See the riches of rags
Look to the past, look to the meaning
Of what the poor men spoke
For it changed kingdoms once before
May it do so again.

Death

Something as beautiful as birth
Is mirrored by death
The death of a flesh vessel
Fashions a stench and turns the eyes away
Man can’t see past the vase and the flower
To see the void which holds the water, the true beauty
The life giver

One must love the death
As they love the birth
Do not mourn the flesh
Rejoice for the soul
For the creation was a gift to the world
And the ascension is a gift to the universe.

 

 

*wrote this one for my family-in-law's dog after it died. Bye Rush.

Sunshine

One act of love
Planted the seed of the galaxies
Let there be
And there was
Soon humanity was born
All with a piece of infinite love
Imbued in their essence

Open your gift and love
Let the sun of your soul shine on the hearts of others
When the sun sets
Darkness will come
Keep the fire burning
Because the world is still turning
Only by the grace of His devotion
Keep the world spiraling and the sun shining
By Loving

The Philosopher’s Insomnia

In the bedroom there is an awkwardness
it resembles a joke at a funeral.
Funny it may be,
but oh-so inappropriate.

The celluloid love stories only show a place of sanguinity
Lovers bask in blue moon light giggling as if the walls themselves were comedians
Or they have the sweetest, most choreographed, faux sex the world has seen.
Never silence, never that awkward feeling

Never that tidal wave of nausea which locks you down
Never does the bed seem to sprout hands that pinch your legs.
Rarely does the ceiling turn into a maniacal serial killer waiting to cut your heart out.

Soon the existential tragedy sets in and you lack a view of reality.
I wish for metaphysics.
Because I want to believe in Love.
All I get is blank sheets of ice
as Sartre crucifies Plato
and Nietzsche’s mustache replaces God.

In the void of human silence I bask
It makes a hot summer’s night
fill with a chill that aches the bones.
Breath starts to fog
As my heart freezes over

Is this the ice age of Love?
It’s time to build a fire.

Freedom Dies

Freedom to eat
Freedom to shop at will
Freedom to yell what you want
Freedom to walk down the street
Freedom to collect what you want
Freedom to mock freedom
Freedom of will.

How we hold these dear
How they blind us with fear
Of losing such freedom of will
We have forgotten our original freedom.
Freedom to become ourselves.

We will trade self discovery for cash
The cold hard kind
That hollows our soul

Modern self discovery
Is finding what clothes look good
Strapped to our fake bodies
Or what color pallet our face paint should be.
Finding oneself is as easy and looking in a mirror
Not too much thought just a sensory recollection

The easy way out
Be what you own
Success is how little you can know yourself
And how much you can buy.

Freedom to choose
Not to be yourself.

Manly Men, Not Men

In construction business men champion the manly.
The gruffness of slamming a cup of mead
on table filled with cards comes to mind.
More specifically the howling one hears
as a female, attractive or not, walks by.
Standards, my friends, are very low.

Today, working with lumber
I got pitch stuck to my hand.
In fact my fingers are stuck to this pen
in some poetic way.
So I feel I must write of a friend’s sadness.

My friend who could be called a man’s man,
expressed a simple sadness.
The sadness you see in the eyes of a foster child
before his parents are taken away.
You see my friend’s father,
another man of the manly,
once turned his back on a child.
A schism in the family left my friend with no father
to show him how it is to be a man.
So he became a man’s man, not a real man.

The sadness slipped into my friend’s face
as his father by chance passed by.
My friend flush red sadly said “hi.”
His father looked back and nodded,
with childish eyes.

The father was a child just like his son.
He gave up being a man when he gave up on his child,
now they are both only men of manliness.
It is nothing more than a child
pretending to be a man by howling at women
and drinking too much beer.

I only hope my friend won’t do the same
and will love his child in the way his child should be loved.
Then maybe someday he will be a real man.

Fathers love your sons
Sons love your fathers
Because I never want to see this sadness again.

It Gets Lonely...

It gets lonely over here
where the objectivists once played.
A few here and there pass by.
But only to give waves of goodbye
as they jump into the ever growing subjective.

It’s the Promised Land I hear.
Man becomes God,
they scandalously whisper in my ear.
Your tastes rule everything,
it’s all in the eyes of the beholder.
There is no Beauty with a capital B
only the perceptions of the lower b.
Truth is as easy what your feelings tell you.
Why, they even tell me
you can find justice in the masses!
Man has it good over there,
not too much to think about or worry about.
Just stay true to your feelings, they all say.

But here I stay,
even with the promise of living the easy life.
I prefer it over here.

I can nibble on baklava with Socrates,
while we discuss where to find Justice.
“Not the masses” he will surely say.
I will question my feelings,
over coffee with Boethius.
Soon I will even better my taste of the Beautiful,
as a student of Plato.
Over here I sip tea with Chuang Tzu and Meister Eckhart,
while facing the dark waters of Genesis and the Non-being of Tao.
Maybe later in the day I’ll take a hike with Confucius,
while discussing sincerity.

Yes, wave all you want,
my place is here.