tribeoftrees

[tribeoftrees]

12:03 AM

I used to post here because I think it helped me feel like I was holding close to something. I’m realizing now that this is just an empty room now, and I’m just listening to the echo’s of my own voice. I think I’ve been ready to turn off the lights, and move on. I’m just going to leave a last etching on the wall, incase anyone ever goes looking for my wake. 

It’s been 6 years since I was forced to sit down and really evaluate who I had become. At the time I would have told you that I had lost everything, and hit the bottom of my soul. I guess the world’s only as big as your perspective, and at the time, my world was pretty self contained. Turns out, when you’re struggling with something, you have a tendency to lose sight of the “big picture” in favor of introspection. You make your world smaller, and in turn, you become your own echo chamber. Looking in is important, but you can’t turn your world outside in. Your life is just as much the world around you as it is yourself. The two go hand in hand. You have so much going on around you. Try not to spend too much time looking down because soon your hair will be turning grey, and you’ll suddenly realize that you spent the better part of your life so far struggling with things you can’t control. 

Always move forward. Life does suck sometimes. The whole “pain makes us who we are” type of thing is very much a part of that, but you don’t have to torture yourself with it by holding on to things longer than necessary. It’s hard to let go of things that made you happy at some point in your life. Especially when you’re sad. But the truth is, no matter how hard you try, you can’t rewind your life. So take a breath, hold it in one last time and let it make you smile, then exhale it away and walk through to the next thing. 

Every experience in life has a lesson embedded in it. Everything from watching a small crab walk across the wet sand on a beach, to staring at the leaves as they fall from trees. Watching people come and go. The sound of frogs when you drive by a creek. Lying awake and staring at the blackness of the ceiling. The world is full of things to learn. The meaning of life is to experience it. There will always be so much more to this world than you think there is. Like the depth of eyes, the harder you look, the more you’ll find.

Love has many forms. Love between souls, love between bodies, love between friends, love between siblings, love between parent’s and children, love between desire, love in pain. Love is a word that cannot possibly ever describe what it seeks to illustrate. Don’t cling too tightly such an oversimplified meaning of it. 

Dependence on something or someone is a prison. Some people will seek to trap you with dependence on them. Identify that as soon as you can, and always seek your own independence. 

Not all truth’s are scientific. Some are simply things you know. Sometimes, when nothing else makes sense, it’s really okay to just trust yourself.

Forgive yourself and the people that hurt you. Always. It’s impossible to be happy if you hold grudges. You’ll never find the satisfaction you desire by talking to yourself in the car, saying the things you wish you said.

Say the things you want to say. Even if they hurt.

Let yourself be happy, even when you want to be sad. 

Always be on your own side. Sometimes, you’re the only friend you have.

Never take the people that love you for granted. 

[tribeoftrees]

Retrograde

It’s hard not to get lost in a past so beautiful. I’m worried I’ve already lived my best years, and I failed to save the freshness of life for later. Perhaps I’ve just allowed myself to grow stagnant, in my search for peace with myself. Or maybe, I’m just slowly falling back into the void.

For a while, I tried to erase memories that were some of the most beautiful times of my life. Losing so much separated the past from my life. Memories that once brought a smile to my face and the warmth of the sun, now burned holes in my heart. Telling myself that the past is no less beautiful now than it always has been feels more and more like a lie I keep telling myself so I can maintain some degree of acceptance for the hole I dug.

I know it’ll never be the same. As hard as it is to accept, we’re all just falling through time with no control.

I know how insignificant it all really is. But you lose perspective when life has otherwise been so good to you.

I know life will never be the same. That should be okay. But it hurts too much to accept sometimes.

Does it even matter? Sometimes, I really don’t think it does. Accepting that seems to be when I’m happiest anymore. Just finding contentment in this cloud that’s been following me around for 4 years.

I’m sure I’ll sleep it off, and let it come back to me another night when I’m haunted by the sound of this clock’s second hand.

[tribeoftrees]

3:08AM Summer

An observation of time, as I’m letting the dogs out in the late night routine. Stopped to notice the lighting bugs, glittering against the dark shapes of the tree line. I wonder if this is what life looks like to a galaxy. Stars, born and destroyed, in fractions of time. Billions of years passing in fleeting moments of tiny glory. The relationship of mass and time, illustrated through the nightly orchestration of an insects persuit of a mate.

Reality describes itself to us in metaphors that take show as some of the most beautiful shapes.

Taking time to listen to the echoes of our universe is one of the greatest justifications of our own existence. As life, existing souly to observe the sea of reality. To give proof that it is there, then to return to the elements that make it once we are gone.

Maybe we’re the senses of the universe. Created from it to validate itself. To live, would be simply to perceive the complex dance of our universe. Life, a perpetual chain reaction of energy moving from place to place, with the gift to observe from eyes mirrored from the death of the stars we’re born of.

[tribeoftrees]

4:40 AM. 30 Years.

I wish time wasn’t linear. Like I could have a reasonable expectation of re-living my life, but with the information I have up to this point. Knowing that through thick and thin, I’d end up right here, at this very point in time regardless of the decisions i’ve made, just to experience it all again. All the joys and pain. Every tear and laugh. Just to experience seeing you for the first time, on our first date again. To see the depth of your beautiful irises. Our first kiss. The first time you touched my hand.

That’s the problem with memories. Especially beautiful ones. They just settle in our minds with no hope of returning. We re-live our years, through the murky waters of our mind’s eye. The haze of time pulling those golden shades over images of your past. I guess that’s the impermanence of everything. The one inevitability we can count on. The reality I still haven’t come to terms with.

I don’t want to see our dogs get older anymore. Nothing could fill the void of my cat not greeting me on the pool table when I come home from work. I don’t want to miss my youth. I want to keep it.

Selfish. I guess so. Here I am, Devon, one of a kind, going through my midlife, existential crisis at 30 like everyone else. I’d thought I would have been overly prepared for this phase of my life. But each time the waves of realization come crashing against my shores, they seem to hit harder and harder.

To even try to conceptualize ceasing to exist…the simplicity of it, is so real.

These are the thoughts that keep me awake until 4 in the morning, on a week night. It usually hits harder when you’re away. I can’t hold you, my anchor to reality. My here and now. I love that about you. You’re basically gravity.

And I’m slowly becoming an insomniac, because I can’t keep my brain from swimming in itself.