November, a Poem

The days are staying warm as November progresses without say,

Mornings illuminate a calm rarely uncovered,

My gaze is concrete, 

Stuck to the heat I have woken up to.

To sit and watch seems like a victory known by no other, a truth fallen upon.

Be here.

Stay and absorb it all.

Because it will end.

A morning will come when the warmth next to you is gone,

A moment will come when the calm is pushed aside to make way for the progress of the rest.

Be here.

This moment.

The warmth remains.

The illumination of the morning is only overcome by the ignition of an evening next to her.

The music we hear drives my tongue and my hand to list these words,

To relive those moments with you,

The music we choose helps me to push into the uncertainty, 

The unknown of the next moment,

It pushes me to hope.

That insurrection of human presence,

It is a frail grace.

But it is a worthy light to hold onto by your side, to hope,

An absurd humanity but a true summit. 

In this stalled moment,

Among a dry and blank fall,

You pulled my gaze to you in the morning, to you in the night, 

You pulled my gaze towards the summit.

Hope.

Tenses

The brown maples line 12th Avenue as I walk east out of the park. Their leaves are piled high in gutters and in yards and the Capital Hill neighborhood is in the depths of a western city fall: melting snow and brown and red and green adding barrier to my perspective as I walk toward York Street. Dry leaves and dry pines frame and point to century-old homes and new rising residential towers. Cyclists and walkers and humans interact with this new November afternoon. This sidewalk is familiar under my feet. More so than the street signs hidden behind pines, the buildings above give me reference for where I am in this city. I attempt to breathe smoothly and calm my heart rate from a rough day paying for an even more exhausting Saturday evening. It is Sunday at five o’clock in the evening and the fall sun is setting an hour earlier today marking the approaching winter. The early shadows and now quickening darkness added a heavy layer to my Sunday anxiety. But a deliberate headphoned walk while my laundry dried gave me life and a view of the sun that I had not had since yesterday. I was here, at the same park yesterday afternoon, drinking beer in costume preparing for a pandemic Halloween that would prove to be liberating and damaging as only those rare, epically-worthy nights can be. An hour ago, music accelerated but smoothed-out my fast tempo down 13th as I walked past art, around slow walkers, and in and out of small construction zones. I went to Hugo’s to grab a water before I looped back into the park up Marion and then onto 12th and finally into Cheesman from the low northwest corner. I turned south to take in the lined walkway on the west side of the park, covered by tall trees and blanketed by the yellow light of round lamps reminding me of Hyde Park. I saw sunlight on the green slope in the middle of the park. Spots of people dotted the hill side, most of them were facing west back towards the bottom of Cap Hill and the Front Range west of the city. From that vantage, you can see the summits of the Front Range and the peaks of the southern mountains outside of the city’s reach. I walked past pockets of people all seemingly sharing in the Sunday anxiety I still feel or maybe feeling their own with this heaviest of approaching weeks in a heavy year. I found a slight incline near the sidewalk across from my regular spot at the pantheon, never sat there before. It was near the side walk but isolated enough from others that I could breathe and that I could abide by the current, inconsistent protocol of this pandemic. I pulled my copy of The Sun Also Rises out of my back pocket and put it in the grass beside me, I leaned back onto my side with my legs bent and my elbow supporting me in the chilled grass. My gaze went west above the trees, matching most everyone else’s gaze at this park, skimming above the old trees of the Cheesman Park neighborhood right off the park and pushing as fast as a view can to the hope that always resides in looking west: the hope that comes in finding the mountains outside of the city, the land that is outside of your current reach, but very well within the range of your hope. I could see them. I could imagine myself among them. I could feel my body and soul living among them and experiencing the pulsing power that is exerted by the oldest stones on this earth. I set my water onto the grass, not lending attention to the balance needed for a good standing position on the hill, my mind was too infatuated with the imagination and the hope that the mountains offered me in that anxious afternoon. My water tilted and spilled onto the book that was in the grass below it. The cover of Hemingway’s best novel was now soaked by sparkling water. Fuck. I breathed. After saving the rest of the water and drying the book as best as I could, my eyes turned west again. I breathed. I breathe now. 

Definition

The window was pushed open to its limit when I woke this morning. The room was filled with a cold, clean air and my bed gave warmth and weight like I have not felt since last winter. Fall and winter are seasons of solid sleep and long, steady breaths. The morning was filled with moments of ease and focus, a balance of routine and low effort reflection or planning; nothing too heavy on this Thursday morning. My mind grasps and contracts at certain repetitive holes like a climber upon a face, testing, challenging a hold, before clamping in and committing… or moving on and bringing presence of mind onto the next hold. The coffee I pull from the cabinet is a welcome sight after I had planned on walking to Downpours for my seemingly regular Thursday morning on their patio drinking two cups of drip before riding to work. But I wanted to make a good breakfast and rise into the morning unrushed and enjoying the first day of a Colorado fall. So the coffee was there and it allowed my mind to settle into this physical space of my apartment kitchen and my morning table. One of the holes that my mind has been bouncing in and away from for the last three or four weeks has been a task of defining courage, defining vulnerability, what that thing is to me and what role it plays in the person I want to be, the best self I am pursuing. It is one value among a few others that I am currently working through and defining and plugging into my life and my thought patterns and my actions. Maybe I was naive, or maybe I had some confidence from how efficiently I had defined the first two values on my list of things I wish to emulate and live through. I was proud of and confident in my definitions, the clarity and the stone pillar they offered me, but maybe that pride or confidence added a feeling that this task would be an easy one and it would pretty much write itself. But here I am a month after writing “Courage/Vulnerability” at the top of an empty page in my notebook. The only thing I have written under it is that it has been difficult to define. I wrote that last week hoping to ignite some flow of words and tensions in my body that would create the definition of courage, the definition of vulnerability, MY definition of those two things. But the rest of the page lays untouched. Other topics and writings have come and been injected into that notebook, but I kept that page blank hoping to return to it and fill it with gleaming, glorious prose, words that shock me into a burning pursuit of bravery and openness with myself and others, something I can read in my days to come and feel the emotion ripping open my chest and letting my tongue unfold into the world, speaking my truth and speaking my story. Maybe that’s what this is, all of this. This fucking essay. This fucking blog. Maybe that’s what I am. Maybe all that I do, all of my words, written and spoken, and even unspoken, unwritten, are attempts and actions in the pursuit of courage and vulnerability. Maybe I am the courage, I am the vulnerability. But no, my mind pulls away from that as soon as I have written it. Courage is the pain and the warm contraction I feel as I write, as I speak to a loved one, as I pursue my improvement. It is the essence of those things, the energy that pushes me to seek improvement, to be a better person. To pursue improvement, to strive towards your potential, one must expose themselves to the consistencies of mortal life: the uncertainties, the anxieties of the future, the fact that things will not be as imagined, that pain will come, that understanding will not be smooth and perfect within yourself or among others, that the air will catch in your throat, that your grip will fail, that your legs will pulse and shake under weight, that your words may fatigue, that your love and compassion will be tested, that your compass and your ultimate task in life will be doubted, and that the skepticism will be pushed towards it not only by the external world but mostly by you and the mirrors and the faulty excuses you give yourself out of fear. To understand all of that and to continue to rise in the morning, to breathe as steady as you can, to decide to act, and then to pursue a better self… that is courage, that is making yourself vulnerable. Because you know it will be worth it, it will make all of the doubt and anxieties in those consistencies of life frail and whithering in the face of your compass, in the light of your ultimate task. All else falls away when you expose your soul to the elements of the universe and you open yourself to yourself and to those around you. Nothing can touch you when you have liberated yourself from fear. Rip open your chest, let it spill through your words and your actions. Have courage in the shade of mortality.

Forward. And Through.

Everywhere that I look I see remnants of you. I see you in the books stacked upon my floor due to lack of shelf space. I recall the evening you first came here and took your time looking at my books. But I also see you in them in that I search them for understanding and inspiration in regards to my life involving you. I search among the words of my heroes for guidance. I search their words for resounding validation, a call to the forefront of the pursuit, a call to carry the standard evermore into the depths, farther into the trenches, to carry on full speed into the unbending walls of this sliver of eternity. I search my books for an encouragement to lengthen out my mortal chime through the sound of my body crashing against those walls. The velocity at which I pursue and send myself sprinting into the wall will split my body in two when impact occurs. I desire that impact. I pursue what is beyond the wall and I sprint for that which gives my life a steady, comforting contraction and a calm breath… love. It is beyond the wall because it is eternal. And thus I pursue that which is only known by the gods and the intrinsic forces of this world: eternity and immortality. Love offers eternity and immortality through the supreme presence it gives a man’s mind in the moment and the precise fact that it can cleanse a man of all past regrets and future anxieties. It pulls your mind and your being into that exact moment at hand. Love can do this through clear awareness and connection with that person in front of you. Love is eternal as hope is eternal and unbounded. And it is undaunted by the boundaries of mortality. Death does not make a man in love shiver, it makes him smile against the shade. Love is eternal as the stories in my books are eternal; the story will not end on the last page. The moments within the pages are eternal and immortal. Once it has been felt and understood that moment can never be bound or contained, it is eternal and simultaneously it is momentous. I see you everywhere in this room. I see you in this moment. I see you beyond the walls of mortality. I see you in eternity. Sending myself without regard for mortal preservation against the walls that block us from eternity, I know the destruction that will come with the impact. And I am willing to sprint towards that destruction. The reckless insurgency of a mortal pursuing what is beyond the wall can only end in destruction, the ultimate cleansing. But to transcend into the eternity known only by those who are willing to rage into the wall for the worthiness of love, a mortal must be cleansed. That is how the gods became gods. They live beyond the confines of this time in the light of love because of their effort and disregard for satisfaction and comfort, they value effort and ethos and principle and action. I am willing to give my full measure to punch through for that love and for eternity. For your eyes to gaze upon me not in defeat but in admiration of effort and commendation for the destruction of my mortalilty, I am willing to give full measure. Destruction is not defeat. No mortal who is truly pursuing that which he loves can ever be defeated. Forward. And through.

Somewhere.

Life is there. Life is out there somewhere. I don’t feel like I am living it. I feel like it is at a distance residing beyond my reach, but I can see it, and I desire it. Life is there somewhere.  

Dangerous and Alive: Two, Victories

The grace of hope returns. A simple lunch with my father at the Broadway Market between CrossFit classes reminds me of the summit I have dreamed of, the redemption and satisfaction I so dreadfully desire. The tears pushing forward is his eyes during our conversation make real the scenario of regret from a dream not exhausted, from a pursuit not fully accelerated, from a mountain bare of scratch marks and blood and torn muscles resulting from strained grasp. Limbs are over-extended and strained in endeavor of the summit and the views upon the world that it allows. I will stay the course. I will continue this endeavor of my dreams. On this first day of Spring, hope has returned to my bones. I must do this. I must do my best in pursuit of this goal. If I do not do my best I will perpetually question, even beyond this life. But effort is what matters. Not results. Not the summit itself. The summit is only a culmination of the climb. It is an edge. It is a point at the boundary of a ridge. The climb creates the summit. And within that climb I will give my best. I will offer only my strongest steps, my most certain grip, my calmest breath, and my hopeful gaze. Hope now bleeds from my eyes as my rising hands and progressing legs shift them to the horizon of the climb and to the victories of mortality. The victories of mortals are the only other thing worthy of residing among the elevations occupied by the mountains of this world. Like a mountain, against Earth’s gravity, I grow. Against Heaven’s weight, I rise.

Dangerous and Alive: One

They walk fast. He shuffles behind her at an angle as she looks back in threshold disgust. It is cold. It is late afternoon, or early evening, or whatever the hell you want it to be. I don’t know. I see them walk past the front window of the Denver Bicycle Cafe. I have come here looking for calm and solitude away from my mind and anger and the weight I have felt all week. They walk past as I try to find in them a reason or a passion to write about in this moment. The black ink of my pen has pretty much always offered me an easy breath, even a few, in a world that is choppy and uncertain. The pages of my pocket sized notebooks are always within reach and give me a world where I have no pain, where I have transcended fear and self doubt, where I am happy. And the goal is that some day I can grasp those hopes and thus live within the victories I write about on those pages. This place in which I write, these words that you read, will tell the journey of that mountain, that summit which I pursue. You can follow along and see the winds of the high peaks and hear the cracking of the rocks below my boots. But I do not wish for you to join me. Watch me along the incline and the spines of the ridges I follow. I have picked the most dangerous route, I wished for it in my dreams. And now I am here; battered by cold and change and past and future. I am pulled backwards by the gravity and anxieties of earth. I am pressed upon from above by the weight and expectations of heaven and the potential glories of a well-lived mortal life. I am within the most dangerous pitch and yet here I am, alive. I will continue this pursuit and continuously eye the summit that I chose many years ago. I will live this life to my best ability, however dangerous it may be. I am dangerous. I am alive.