Night Time

Night time is the roughest part,
This pain inside, it always starts,
The Day's successes drift away,
Setting with the Sun, ending the day,

Darkness falls upon my heart,
Amplifying the agony it feels:
Sitting alone, sapping my will,
I form it into expressive art,

Emotions gnaw on my soul,
They feed, they crave, they wish me not-whole,
But whole I am, as you can see,
For trapped on this page, now they be,

They flow from inside, a powerful force,
I wave goodbye, hoping for relief, a divorce,
I give  them wings to fly away,
Banishing them before the day.

I am a tree

I am a tree,
this is me,

Strong Winds and lighting only prune me!

Ice and Snow only show me my strength!

I bend defiantly against the tornadoes!

I grow towards the scorching, withering sun!

I laugh in the torrential rains!

I sing as all life dies around me!

I invite my enemies to try to subdue me,

There is nothing you, LIFE, can send me that I can not/ have not mastered!

To stop me, LIFE, you must cheat by taking my life away!

I am a tree,
THIS is me!

Fathoming the cost of Trailblazing.

The cost is that sometimes one finds oneself running into obstacles that stand in one's way like a dense North Carolina forest, a solid wall of green with more than its fair share of stinging, biting insects, poison oak, and thorny vines; a dense wall that looks impenetrable. If anyone had ever come this way all trace is gone now. I pay the cost of the forest and make it easier for everyone that comes after me. I brandish my machete, the bug spray, and all the other trappings of trailblazing. Momentum is sometimes my only ally as I blaze. I lean into the dense, dark mystery of life, of what lies ahead, and dare it to stop me, because i am more than the sum of my parts, I have a will that compels me ahead to my destiny, to my dreams.  

There are times when I envy those that get to follow the path of another, a parent, an older sibling, a close friend, a spouse, but for me...no one steps up fast enough, no human knows my destiny, so how can they? Others have attempted to lead me down different paths, but those paths didn't lead where I needed to go. The same old paths hold no sway with me. I make the freshly hewn paths of today, instead of the well traveled roads of yesterday. 

I rest for a moment now, I pause to size up the obstacles ahead. My eyes measure and calculate the cost, as I refresh myself. I watch the wall like a commander measures an oncoming horde of barbarians. I have a plan. I take inventory of my assets and liabilities and decide to push ahead, trusting my instincts: We will be okay, time to keep blazing.

Some Parents

The inadequacies of family...follow
The tendencies of incongruity...make hollow;

The diversity of curiosity...not chosen,
The prosperity of identity...broken;

The felicity of utility...avoid,
The ingenuity of bellicosity...causes noise;

The intensity of frivolity...beckons,
The hostility of love...reckons,

The possibility of animosity...calls,
The ferocity of anonymity...falls;

Our parents follow closely behind us,

They invade our lives, hidden in our actions, our words,
They haunt us, from deep inside ourselves,
They marry with us, they merry with us,
They work with us, they strive against us,
Though they live distant, they are present;

We cannot parse them from us,
No matter how stubbornly we try,
Still, little by little,
Bit by bit,
We learn not to be them,
their clothes don't fit,
Theirs can't be our problems, and they never have been.
Mistakes show us, we are not!
We can never be them, we cannot fix their problems,
We can't solve their sins.

We must make our own way,
In our world, in our life,
There is enough to contend with,
Without their strife.
 

Advocacy for Veterans

                I have begun advocating for veterans every day of my life.  I am not sure when it happened, but now in many conversations I find myself explaining them: their advantages, their disadvantages, their issues, and their resilience.  I find irony in the audience to whom I am constantly educating and explaining.  Civilians cannot grasp veterans, too many differences divide us.  Two distinctly different paths lead us ever away from each other.  The audience with whom I advocate for veterans with is veterans themselves. 

Due to the training we receive, through social learning and operant conditioning, we are able to face a reality of civilized society that most civilians will never be able to stand:  Killing; government sanctioned, righteous killing for the U.S.A.  We are forever changed in many ways by this training, and mostly by killing, and by being vigilant to kill our government’s enemies.  

You see?  Veterans must be convinced that they are not just okay, but that they are a cut above.  They struggle with killing and with death because these are hard realities they have faced, not because there is something intrinsically wrong with them. 

"For those who fought for it, freedom has a taste the protected will never know." 
-- Willie "Bo" Nelson, Mancelona, MI

This semester I have completed two excellent books which have forever changed my perceptions of veterans and thereby…myself:  On Killing and On Combat by Dave Grossman.  These have unlocked an understanding that I believe essential for anyone wishing to counsel veterans.   The new information I have gleaned from these books has allowed me to accept a large part of myself. 

Now with this knowledge I speak to the questions and concerns of my fellow veterans. I assuage their fears and confusion by speaking intelligently to their deepest self with a message: These feelings and fears you now have are understandable, explainable, and more importantly shareable. 

                I looked around about a week ago and realized that I was ministering to quite a few different veterans throughout my week days on campus, speaking life, hope, and information into their disquieted hearts.  I didn’t set out to take these actions, but I, now, hear the hurt between their words, and I have information bursting out of me to aid them.

                For example, one of my friends from the Veteran’s Group Therapy group shared that something must be wrong with him, because he killed people in Iraq and didn’t feel anything, he felt normal.  Dave Grossman specifically addresses this feeling which my friend felt.  So, I delivered Mr. Grossman’s response: (paraphrasing) In light of the social learning and operant conditioning you were trained with, this is a normal response.

We are taught to shoot and kill without thinking about it, if ordered by our leadership and if the ROE’s (Rules of Engagement) are met.  My friend shot and killed under the right conditions, for the right reasons, without emotion, because that was how he was trained, not because something was wrong with him.  Since delivering quite a few of these messages to him from Dave Grossman, we became fast friends.  Every time we meet and talk, he shares more, and I am more than happy to explain from my newly established knowledge and ease his internal strife and suffering a little more.  I do direct him to these book quite often, and sometimes only answer his concerns and questions with a location in either of these books that could help him understand.  He is, after all, the person who suggested the first book to me, in the first place.

References

Grossman, D., & Christensen, L. W. (2008). On combat: The psychology and physiology of deadly conflict in war and in peace. Millstadt, IL: Warrior Science Pub.

Grossman, D. (1995). On killing: The psychological cost of learning to kill in war and society. Boston: Little, Brown. 

Physical Therapy

The nodding, grinning face of pain,

Approaches me,

I smile back with no restraint,

Accepting thee;

Bending, stretching, twisting, scraping,

Ancient tortures await,

Becoming, embracing, facing, erasing,

Making crooked, straight;

Gritted teeth make my smile,

Laughing away the agony,

Deep breaths are required,

Walking through unfathomable, nebulous, change;

I treasure this deep, priceless pain,

I run to it, embrace it, and welcome it in,

Knowing that doing so protects me,

From the debilitation of low exercise.

Transitioning from Religious to spiritual

First off, I was sick this last weekend.  I am feeling better and catching up with my work.

I believe most of us take 'the long way around' on our spiritual journey.  My journey has been no different.  Religion became everything to me from a very early age.  Let me define 'everything':  My emotional outlet, my fun, my friends, my guilt, my shame, my beliefs, my hope, my future, and my food: my world.  This reality is still unclear to me, so let me explain further.  

I don't know what my parents did with the money my father made, but it didn't trickle down to us.  I started working at 15 so I could have clothes, enough food, and fun.  Before 15, we children, literally received the scraps in the 'everything' category listed above.  Church became an alternate source of all these things, and thereby Religion as well.  I was at church every time the doors were open, my parents insisted, but I would have insisted if they didn't, because it was where all my needs were met.

Religion became 'everything' to me, and church was the source of this Religion.  Effectively, the church became my parents in many regards.  I was hungry for knowledge, for growth, for love, and for food.  Church isn't every day, so I found myself becoming two different people, Aaron, the pious (righteous), and Aaron, the normal (bad).  So, in affect I was the epitome of incongruence.  Aaron, the pious, was acceptable everywhere he went, Aaron, the normal, was sinful and guilty every time he appeared.  I couldn't grasp the differences at that age, so I shunned the normal side of myself, and shone the pious part.

Fast forward from 15 to 30 years of age.  I was going through my first divorce, the church, shunned both sides of me, and the Religion I believed in with all of myself made no exceptions for me.  This intense deep pain, this rejection finally allowed me to see these two parts of myself, and they became allies.  When all of me became unacceptable then I awoke to find that all of me was good, and the religion and the church was unacceptable.  I began to accept all parts of myself.  This was the first time in my life that I loved myself completely.  I literally, fell in love with myself.  I gave myself grace for my mistakes, gave myself understanding for my sex drive, gave myself 'everything' that I thought I needed from everyone else.  While, this one moment was somewhat culminating, it was also only the beginning of a spiritual journey to discover myself.  

I can recognize that there were many boons i received from this attachment to Religion and Church.  I studied the Bible fervently, down the languages and contexts of the passages.  The principles behind the words on the page have stuck with me.  Understanding King James English has helped me in my understanding of today's English language, so I have fun with it, my latest discovery is the word meteorology:  the study of meteors!  I have a clear sensitivity to manipulation in words people use, mostly on themselves, but sometimes people try to manipulate me, and I take a step back, recognize the 'dirty fighting tactic' and walk on.

Once I started loving myself, I was forever changed.  Imagine a world where discovery and curiosity are the driving forces.  Imagine a world where all the parts of oneself are working together, instead of fighting amongst themselves.  While it sounds perfect, there are good days and bad days.  The rain still falls, the sun still shines, and I still make what I used to call 'mistakes', now I call them discoveries!