If you don't do the things that you want to, the things that you dreamed about in your youth, then you are wasting your life...

I just remembered why I started playing guitar tonight, I came across the CD and the songs I used to love...it was 11 years ago now, only a moment, but also an eternity. It brought back a lot of other memories as well, not only the thrill of learning my first song and playing along to the music, but of everything else I used to dream of. These songs are just so great, so youthful and full of hope.

Moving into the work-a-day world sort of destroys your spirit slowly, and mine has been dying ever since I left college. I knew it, I felt it, even one of my friends commented to me a last year that I wasn't the same person anymore (and not in a good way).

Well, I'm getting out, it might take another year, but I'm getting out.... It's not just good enough if I get out though, that's why there is work to be done.

....

I'm not sure if I have anything valuable to say here anymore.

More and more I am consumed with how I am going to fix this world, I even found a group with my interests that has asked me to expand some of my ideas for making people's lives better. They might want me to speak at a conference.

With work, and its mind numbing grey dullness of computers and cubes, and my nights spent working out reforms and reorganizations, helping my girlfriend and family, I just haven't been having moments or epiphanies anymore.

I guess action is overtaking thoughts, which is both good and bad. All of those late night epiphanies I have had, all of those 3 a.m. ramblings on my life and world, I guess in a way are have come or are coming to fruition.

Now what is there for me? There is moving forward, changing things, making my dreams of a better world a reality.

The scariest step of all, but I'm prepared.

Of course, I must take time for myself again, there doesn't seem to be solitude anymore.

Like a Phoenix

Nothing is constant

Only change

Only change....

Arabia..

"All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act out their dream with open eyes, to make it possible."
- T.E. Lawrence

"What are you going to do for a job."

That's what people used to ask me when I was majoring in history in college. That's all they seemed to care about, obsessed with I might add, relatives, strangers, hairdressers, doctor's, they all wanted to know.

I never had an answer, well I did, but the real answer was never something I could tell them. I wanted to reply something like "I'm going to work through political and social channels to orchestrate a leftist revolutionary change and deliver justice for the poor while abolishing the control of the wealthy."

That answer is not acceptable, it sounds insane at worst and a lofty dream at best.

My other answer is dramatically different than the first, perhaps reflecting a perpetual conflict in my mind to both help everyone or simply go off on my own forever and be left alone. That answer sounded like the following in my own mind.

"I'm going to get a camel and ride across the Sahara, maybe the Arabian desert, live with bedouins, watch the sunset, fly an old airplane across the sands like St. Exupery, write a book about how mankind should behave instead of how they currently act. And no one will ever bother me."

That answer wasn't socially acceptable either.

So I decided to be a reporter, that seemed interesting, and I was able to achieve that goal. I was able to help a few people in that job and raise some awareness, but the environment and reaction from people was so vile most of the time that I couldn't take it anymore.

Now I work in relative solitude, mostly out of necessity as everyone in my family is going to need help one day, so I try to save for them.

But I still dream all day, just like Lawrence, and I plan, perpetually. I research people all day, I learn about them, about how things work in more detail than I ever have known before.

I ran across an old reporter friend and his wife the other day. I was glad to see him after several months, and his wife told me she missed reading my stories about poverty issues. After telling her I now look up the wealthy all day, she said "That's a big change, but I think everything we do in life gives us some kind of knowledge we can use, you'll use it for good one day I'm sure."

I replied "Yes I will, I was thinking that since the first day I worked there. Poverty is still my number one concern."

And I will.

I will continue to dream in the day as I always have. These dreams are not vanity from the dusty recesses, I will find my moment, I will act. And if I fail, I will retreat to the fields, like Lawrence, who lived both of the lives I speak of, one as a dreaming adventurer, another as a simple man in an English field.

Night

I can never go to bed when I'm tired. I always have to force myself. The night was when I used to feel the best, between 12 a.m. and 2 a.m. anything became possible. I could make myself a better person, make the world a better place and the music, oh, it sounds so beautiful at that time.

The daylight kills many of my songs, but at night they come to life, they all mean more, they have more feeling, they are real, they inspired me in those many nights. I furiously wrote all my new ideas to them, then they became real. It was such a night that I started this blog.

Now the ideas are dying. This waking life, this working world, it takes something out of you, and if you aren't vigilant, it will be taken from you forever. I lose my words by the time I get home and at night I must go to bed early and thus I lose the magic time that has always been there for me.

Of course I am up now, but it is only for tonight, tomorrow I will be to exhausted to be here.

My nights, my winter walks, where did those long walks through frozen nights alone go? I miss them, I am always busy now, god I miss walking between the lights, passing between worlds, my breath floating into the air, carrying my words to heaven.

How will I ever get that back? How? I'm not sure I can.

Crossings

"As quaestor it fell to his lot to serve in Hispania Ulterior. When he was there, while making the circuit of the towns, to hold court under commission from the praetor, he came to Gades, and noticing a statue of Alexander the Great in the temple of Hercules, he heaved a sigh and cried, and as if out of patience with his own incapacity in having as yet done nothing noteworthy at a time of life when Alexander had already brought the world to his feet, he straightway asked for his discharge, to grasp the first opportunity for greater enterprises at Rome."

Years later....

"However, after sunset some mules from a near-by mill were put in his carriage, and he set forward on his journey as privately as

possible, and with an exceedingly scanty retinue. The lights went out. He lost his way and wandered about a long time - till at last, by help of a guide, whom he discovered towards daybreak, he proceeded on foot through some narrow paths, and again reached the road. Coming up with his troops on the banks of the Rubicon, which was the frontier of his province, he halted for a while, and revolving in his mind the importance of the step he meditated, he turned to those about him, saying: 'Still we can retreat! But once let us pass this little bridge, - and nothing is left but to fight it out with arms!'

Even as he hesitated this incident occurred. A man of strikingly noble mien and graceful aspect appeared close at hand, and played upon a pipe. To hear him not merely some shepherds, but soldiers too came flocking from their posts, and amongst them some trumpeters. He snatched a trumpet from one of them and ran to the river with it; then sounding the "Advance!" with a piercing blast he crossed to the other side. At this Caesar cried out, 'Let us go where the omens of the Gods and the crimes of our enemies summon us! THE DIE IS NOW CAST!'

Accordingly he marched his army over the river; [then] he showed them the tribunes of the Plebs, who on being driven from Rome had come to meet him, and in the presence of that assembly, called on the troops to pledge him their fidelity; tears springing to his eyes [as he spoke] and his garments rent from his bosom." - Suetonius