I want you. I long for your touch, the smell of you, your hair, your essence, the heat that warms my senses. I crave you, the mind, desires, questions, expectations and whimsy that floods me with passion, fills those dark, empty places. Flesh, heart and mind all ache to suckle that which you have kept hidden, locked away, as if it were finite. But what's real, is that once awakened, each source can last far, far longer than would be imagined, and is, in fact, an addiction that takes us away, but leaves us whole. And forced to stop, each flow resists, with pain, saturation and aching need. We are creatures of our passions, we may choose to cage, muzzle and nurture them, but we still remember, we still dream, we still crave...

It's an interesting thing, this thing called life.

For so very many all it is, is existence, the time, effort and pain of getting from one place to another. Hopefully, ending at the place they've been taught they should be.

For a few, it's the rush of emotion, the rage, fear, excitement, rut, despair of the unknown. One high after another, looking for more, more, more...

For even fewer, it's an awakening, a discovery that not all is as it appears, that how you chose to define what you see, live, feel, closes as many doors as it opens. Maybe, even more.

It's strange in a way.

It feels like I'm withdrawing again, closing up, hiding.

It feels like it, but I'm not sure. I know I'm falling into my fantasies, feeding them, nurturing them, coaxing them to life on the page. What's strange is that in so many ways I'm opening door I forgot were there. Recovering the notes and pages from collage is part of that, but not all. There's so much I've hidden away, for so long. Things that happened almost forty years ago, things that changed me. I guess it's always been about touch for me, what my fingers held, how I felt when I did, who touched me, why...

Why did I do it, any of it?

Why did those cravings hold so much power over me?

Why won't the memories fade?

Why do I crave you? Now? This way?

Just another fantasy. My only hope? To maybe turn it into words...

Is it withdrawal if I still write about it?

I've known that trust is important for a long time now, more important than almost anything else when it comes to relationships. But I think it's also almost as misunderstood as love itself. Just how do we define trust, measure it, experience it, use it... and lose it. Until recently almost everything I thought was trust, was based on things like being truthful and honest.  I thought if I watched you, paid attention, I'd be able to see the truth no matter what, that there was no way to hide the real person inside you. Partly, that is true, I think. But in the last little while I've become aware of other things, as usual.

I know that one of the things that's been important to me has been being accepted for who I am. I doubt that's an uncommon thing. But a week or so ago something I read got me thinking, again. Lol... something I'd read more than once, so it was something I missed before, not that that's anything new either. But what struck me is that a lot of how we judge people is based on what we think they know about us. Everyone we know sees a different person when they look at us, they have to, because we never act way or and say exactly the same things to the different people in our lives. The problem I see is that far too often we watch people and expect them to see something, or get a hint, or understand things and when none of that happens we want to blame them for not paying attention, or being insensitive, or...

When people don't react the way we expect them to, when we think we could trust them to see what we wanted them to, we get hurt, angry, confrontational... be want to blame them for not understanding.

But it's not their fault.

It's ours.

Because every time we hide something from the ones we want to trust we make it impossible for them to make real judgments about us. And never, ever doubt that they judge us, because everyone does. It's a fact, everything we know, see, feel, hope, dream, is based on comparisons we make between other things we've experienced. We judge and compare the color of the sky to our love's eyes, the supple feel of their skin to a new born babe's, the soft whisper of a kiss to the faint brush of a spring breeze...

We compare, we judge...

And so do they.

 And the hard part? They judge us by what we allow them to see.

Every deceit, equivocation, lie, everything we hide, makes it impossible for them to judge us honestly, not in our own eyes, because we do know what they don't. And because we know, and judge ourselves, the difference breeds mistrust. We can't trust their judgment.

I've come to believe that the only way to be able to trust someone completely is also one of the hardest things any of us will ever do.

Trust is earned in stages as each hidden thing get's revealed.

The more we keep hidden, the less we can trust anyone, including ourselves.

Not long ago a friend of mine was telling me some things about her life. During the conversation I made a few comments and suddenly she came back at me with: "please, don't judge me..."

I kind of brushed it off, telling that I was just making some observations, that I don't judge people. I even thought I was telling the truth.

The problem though, is that I was lying. Both to her and myself.

We do judge people, every one of us. We can't help doing it. We judge everything in our lives, every experience... we have to. Everything that happens, every thought we have, every person we meet, every idea and concept gets compared to what we already know. We judge it, so fast in most cases that we never even notice that we have. And whether we admit it or not, those judgments color our reactions.

It is true that we can ignore those judgments, sometimes, but whether we voice them or not, the comparison and judgment has been made.

We do judge everything.

Maybe, the real question isn't whether we judge or not, but whether we lie about it. To ourselves, or anyone.

again... this needs more thought...

For the last several years I've been seeing articles, about studies, that tout various things, some seem pretty straight forward, others are just fluff, and some, very few I think, have some real truths hidden in them. The ones that strike me most are almost always about awareness in some form, how our lack of awareness hurts us, or how heightened awareness can open us to new ideas, creativity and insights. The thing that everyone agrees on is we have a limited capability for awareness, and that there is simply too much going on in life for us to keep track of it all. That means that there will always be things we miss. Always.

But every study has also shown that we can increase our awareness level and train it to show us things we would otherwise miss. Of course, in the process of doing that training we can get caught in the trap of thinking we already have all the information we need about a lot of things. That it's inconceivable that I might need more information, or that things might happen differently than I expected, or that I might be wrong, or that some one may know more than I do... or...

That's one of the basic problems of awareness I think. We spend far more of our mental resources working to fit what we see into the framework we've already chosen to actually see what's really happening.

Any of us has all the skills we need to twist what we see into things we can accept. It's easy to rationalize, to use logic, to claim ignorance, to excuse our emotional response... we do these things all the time. Even when we're faced with proof that what we've chosen isn't true we keep falling back and defending it. We simply do not want to face all the things we've been hiding behind.

If that was as far as it went, I doubt I'd care all that much. If you, as a stranger to me choose to be blind, why should I care? It's your life, not my business.

But the truth is that our societies work to enforce certain views in the name of stability. Even when it's publicly proven that the view is false, the same denial tactics swing into play, just yell louder and longer and it'll all blow over, or I'll convince enough people to drown you out...

I've come to believe that awareness of the things we don't agree with, and the ability to test them, and our beliefs, is our best hope for a better life for all of us.

and last... understanding that it will always be the things we don't expect that will challenge us the most.

I told myself it was your fault, that you were the one who'd failed to measure up, and that was another lie. But every time I told myself one lie, I had to tell another to justify the ones that came before it. So it was your fault, not mine, because if I admitted my own failures, I'd have to admit my lies...

Yes, you lied...

Yes, you failed...

But so did I...

Over, and over, and over again...

How many times have I felt that way, that life, relationships, work, the news, TV, books, moods, hopes...

I sit there, in the ashes of my own problems and ask "Why? Why did I do that, again, I know better, I know I do..."

I watch as people I know make the same horrible choices they have before.

I listen to people smash their heads against the metaphysical wall, berating themselves, or asking why things don't change, they don't change.

Life... we know that life is filled with change, hell, it's obvious isn't it, we aren't the five year old we once were. But we also do much to control that change from what I see, it just seems to happen and we ride along with it, not even looking where it's carrying us. I can't even begin to tell you the number of times I've heard the phrase "it's not my fault." And it's come from my own lips far too many times.

We are creatures of habit, but I've always thought that we can change, and I know we can, because we do. But I think we look for excuses NOT to change more than we look for way TO change. It's a lot easier to walk a path we know well, our feet, and minds, know the way. We don't have to pay attention, we don't have to look at what's out there, we've seen it all before. It doesn't matter if the path is the route to and from work, or the series of thoughts that lead us back behaviors we know hurt or anger us, it's all the same, habits we choose to follow.

What are the things you keep going back to?

Knowing that you won't like what happens?

But you go anyway, because...

"I've made this decision before, I don't need to again, why do all that work over... I'll make the same choice anyway."

"There are a lot of things that factor in, and no matter how much I analyze it, I feel that I'll still do things the same way."

We are built to learn. Our ability to do so is why we do progress, both as individuals and as humanity as a whole. But it's also clear that we do choose to ignore what we've learned.

“Do not get trapped into prior thoughts.
It’s perfectly O.K. to change your mind as you learn more.”
~ Dr. Donald A. Redelmeier

“A lie hides the truth. A story tries to find it.”

Paula Fox

No matter what method we use to hide the truth, the purpose is always the same. Misdirection, deception, outright lies, half truths, avoidance... they are always chosen so that we don't have to face the truths we know. The liar always knows the truth, that is why they hide.

The liar also knows that ever lie, in any form, can be seen, if someone chooses to look hard enough. All they can hope for is that people won't care enough.

Because of my job I see, almost daily, some of the most fundamental differences between people who achieve their goals, and those who never do. I don't know if I revealed it here before or not, ( I don't think so) but I work in a homeless shelter.  Almost every day I am having to turn men away because we have no more beds available but there are guys there who make no effort to use any of the options that might help them move on. Some, far too few, are gone in days or week. They don't let the fact that they needed to walk though the door and ask for help stop them from getting back on their feet. I watch them take what is there, accept it as just the first step back to where they want to be and use it to get their life moving again.

The majority... I watch as they cry and moan that life isn't fair, that no one is coming looking for them and handing them a perfect life. When it's pointed out that other do get out and move on, they scoff at the thought, saying that it's too much work.

The thing is, this trend seems to part of life for more than just the homeless men I deal with. I hear the same arguments almost everywhere I go. I hear it from the teenagers hanging out in front of the mini-mart, I hear it at the deli packed with the lunch crowd, I see it on blogs from all over.

Fewer and fewer people seem willing to simply take the reality in front of them and find something useful as a tool to move forward.

I wonder, do you act, or talk about why you can't act?

I wonder, why I choose not to act...

as always, a question leads to more questions. The journey isn't always smooth, but it can be entertaining, as well as enlightening.