Moonlights Gift

Good morning ladies and gentleman

How are we influenced by the people in our lives? It cannot be denied that we are influenced by their mere presence, no matter how major or minimal you may consider it. How does your mental space change, do you gain more rooms on the palace of your mind, does it gain an extra wing? If not, what is lost to this new influence? Maybe lost is the wrong word, maybe an evoking of an evolution is better.

I have for many years considered my mental space the “Palace of Darkness.” A vast and unwieldy space, grand and beautiful, almost never ending but always very well defended. Moats surround it, archers prepared to do what needs to be done on the turrets, if you will. More over reaching than that is to protect it from the light, to hold the potential for influence at arms length- on the other side of the drawbridge.

The Palace, to me, has always been unique, for it is mine. Demons run the halls and the throne i sit on atop of it all is a reminder i am the Ruler of my Kingdom, my vanquished enemies to lie defeated beneath me. Its 2023, i’m aware the ages of 865ad are long gone, but i choose for the mentality of the Viking to drive me forward. I can overcome, my demons and I will rule over my domain and i can handle whatever is thrown my way, all while continuing in the lovely dark.

The comforting, beautiful darkness.

In this new age of me questioning an idea i’ve been so powerfully confident of for many years, my belief has started to wain recently. Not at an urge to step into the light after being almost defined by darkness for so long, no. An exposure not to the daylight, but the moonlight.

Let me explain for a second.

I once believed myself “protected” by the defences i had built. As a result of these defences, i was more powerful than ever before. King of my domain, if you will. King of the Dark, with a fear of the light. People since then, of a certain nature, have found a way into my palace, my closest, nearest and dearest you might say. They have found their way through, now living amongst the demons that roam the palace halls almost comfortably, capably co-existing as a part of my life. Recently the defences were exposed once again, but this time the light found its way through but not in a way that it ever did before, exposing the palace to the silvery shine of the moon-rather than the power of the sun.

Potentially disastrous…for someone, anyone to see all of me, the man I truly am, the one living in the darkest and quietest corners of the palace. The parts of me i locked in cages, the parts of me i daren’t even accept the existence of at times.

Truthfully, up to this point i had never considered this a threat for i had never considered it possible. I sit here now, with the defences of my inner workings, the nature of my very existence made aware of, a learning curve of behaviours and patterns that i hadn’t realised, made obvious by someone whom the mere idea of i once considered a fear inducing threat. Onwards, through to the very centre of my being, the demons grow nervous and head for the shadows, preparing their attack, to remove the threat on our continuing cynical nature we have become so familiar with.

They continue down the corridors, through to the centre of the Palace, looking for the throne room, to see all of me, truly everything I have become.

The demons are ready, prepared for battle, claws drawn, teeth sharp. They lean back on their haunches, watching from their hiding place as this new “threat” continues down the corridor. Without warning they leap through the darkness, bounding towards this enemy of the mental state. Claw drawn back ready to swipe…

STOP.

Aware the demons were coming, the moonlight summoner the demons were expecting did not bring the pain of daylight, but the power of the moon. The silverlight shines from the hole in the palace she burrowed to find the way in and lured by the power of the moon, the enemies of the sun, became friends with the moon. They even showed the way to the throne room, built one next to the boss’.

So, i just told you a story about the sun, the moon and the power of the demons that live within us all. Random? No….think of the question i posed at the top of this piece. What capacity for influence do people have that enter your life at certain times and in certain ways?

Everybody has demons weighing on them, sat just on your shoulder, trying to remind you of what might happen, might not happen. Of all the negative emotionally charged experiences you’ve ever had, of every mistake you’ve ever made. Of every time you didn’t think you were good enough, of all the reasons why you locked those parts of you away.

Turning on the switch and allowing the light to pour through you sounds like an easy solution, but like everything is much easier said than done. To even attempt something like that is going to do nothing if not have the demons run for the shadows. Still there, just not directly visible for a while. Ultimately, it leaves you no less frightened of your own reflection.

So…how does one not just overcome, but evolve? The moonlight is different, for it doesn’t destroy the darkness. The demons fear the light and run for the shadows, but in the moonlight they become familiar with their new surroundings, aware of them almost. They believed the enemy was just that- an enemy of the peace I have worked so hard to create. I’m not so sure anymore…She made friends with the very ideas that i always believed could bring about my destruction.

To make friends with the demons, guess in a way that makes you impossible. Sat, drinking rum in the silvery glow, bathed in darkness.

Its a rare one this- for it surprised me. Time to see how this plays out… one roll of the dice at a time.

Yours, with love as always.

D.R x

Running, Always Running

Good evening ladies and gentleman

I think it’s very easy to feel very overwhelmed these days. Be it with emotion, by society, because of your choices or because of the choices of others. Life is like a pressure cooker, stray too far into the red for too long and it all comes crashing down, a catastrophe that is nothing more than another notch in the bedpost of society as it ploughs on regardless.

This is not my interest here though, for I am aware how often my cynicism affects my mood at times and often my writing. The curiosity is coming from a place of wander in what we do when those overwhelmed sensations present themselves, that sensation when the tears hover just below the surface, when the darkness is waiting in the corner, when the king is one wrong move from checkmate.

Where does one run to- when it feels as if there is nowhere left to run?

Perhaps to music. On such a venture i found the song “Hooked on a Feeling” by Blue Swede- whose chorus lyrics go as follows:-

“I’m high on a feeling, high on believing- that you’re in love with me.”

Now, as an instinctual observation of such lyrics this person is clearly in love with someone who he believes them to be loving them back. The idea being the love he feels is giving him a natural high, a superpower if you will.

Surely this illustrates you are the one that makes you happy. The feelings you choose to have, to appreciate and exist within are the building bricks to not just who you are, but who you are going to be. You make you happy, everyone else, that person, that impossible girl, is a bonus.

You are the one with your hand on the wheel, it’s what you allow into your consciousness that gives you true power. You have to release the valve on the pressure cooker and allow yourself the privilege of feeling something- with the steadfast reminder that its all you and whatever happens you will be able to handle it.

I think a lot of people believe when they go for long periods without relationships or when they have never been in love, that they wouldn’t know how to because they don’t want to know, because it upsets the fantasy of what love is supposed to be. Love is ultimately an idea defined by you and created by you and another person, each in a different way.

Most daren’t run towards love, most spend their entire lives running away from it, to comfort, to familiarity, to the easy path towards an easy life, maybe a nice house and car, regular holidays and regular sex. We in society are simply transferring those feelings of questionable self worth and insecurity onto someone else. Why should anyone else be responsible for how you feel?

Truth is i don’t think we really know anyone anymore, not as well as we think. Its as if we don’t get to know people anymore because of the instantaneous nature of the world. As soon as you find someone to be important to you they will be gone, no need to put in the work, the internet ready with it next fix of porn or new dating site ready to bring you back into line.

There are more and more dating sites cropping up everyday, where in a simple flick of the index finger and a quick read of something we’ve “never told anyone,” you know whether you would want to date this person. Maybe there is a dinner date and maybe you become an a part of whatever the early stages of relationships are called these days, i lose track.

Then at the first sign of difficulty, most are off. Back into the dating sites, find someone better. Next round, next game. I talk about a world of instants a lot of the time people assume that there is instant connection. The world would have you believe love at first sight is a thing, but it is nothing more than a carnal desire to fuck. Running the same play you’ve ran over and over. The game where you are always in control- where you always know the outcome.

Why? Because we live in fear of what we don’t understand and fear is a very easy thing to run from these days. The result of this fear is chasing things that we have been told about, that we have seen on TV or in films, or something you may have seen a friend enjoy. You see your friends happy, you start to wander if there is something wrong with you, so turn to those closest and see what they’re doing:-

“They seem happy, maybe i should try that”

So we end up chasing things other people want, for we hope it will make us as happy as it does them.

It doesn’t- and I don’t think it ever will. We are scared of the unknown, so the idea of going out there and not knowing how the day, the date, or the event will turn out would have most people running harder and faster than ever before- the fruition of freedom they aspire to, which just has you running in circles.

Run. Sure, but not away from the stages of the unknown, but towards them. I know that’s inherently backwards, but what is the worst that could happen? Maybe you’re upset for a while, maybe your even sad. In the depths of that sadness, in that darkness, lessons can be learned. Lessons about strength, about powering through, about love and about evolution. Difficulty and misery are key components to growth, to run towards the fear, is to strike fear into fear itself. It may go wrong, but what if it didn’t?

Don’t do what’s expected of you. Falling into patterns makes you nothing more than a number, a statistic on a spreadsheet, forgotten. Running, always Running but towards things, to parts of yourself that make you happy, to explore parts of your mind long forgotten, go on great adventures, be in your circle of powerful people living higher than the conventionality the world tells you that you should be living for. Whatever that means to you, live for it. Work towards it like its the only thing worth doing, run for it like your life literally depends on it.

Because i guess in a way- It does.

Yours, with love as always.

D.R x

Believe

Good evening ladies and gentleman

Will Smith, like him or not these days is a rather powerful speech maker, in particular when it comes to the mindset that drives us to evolve, in all aspects of life…

“He who says he can and he who says he cannot…are both usually right.”

While as i said before there is a power in not knowing what’s going to happen, that knowledge and that power in not knowing the outcome of a situation or connection is a string on a multi-faceted bow in your mental arsenal. That is an undeniably important aspect to you and your evolution, but alone the arsenal could easily run dry at the first sight of difficulty and in particular of struggle.

When winning, it comes with a near unshakable belief that you’re on the hot streak of a lifetime and the end of said streak is the last thing you think about. When we move about in survival mode, maybe literally in your life or in some mental battle you find yourself plagued in, any step forward can feel like a victory that once seemed impossible, a sensation so out of reach it was a mere fantasy that you didn’t really bother with.

I maintain that this alone cannot sustain you, for the surprise will die out and fear will take a hold. Fear, pain, confusion and anxiety will try to take you down, as often they have done before, where a win won’t stay a win for very long for the belief that you “winning” is “impossible.”

To move in that way, to carry on ploughing through life in such a cavalier way, so confident and hopeful of failure is a sure fire sign of confident and very powerful…failure.

The emotions will get the better of you, life will get the better of you and ultimately you will get the better of you as the habits of old take a grasp on your soul once again. So, as i said before- there has to be a better way.

I could go on a pointless rant like conversation about believing in yourself but i’d imagine we’ve all heard that sort of ridiculousness before and I’m tired of the same tedious rhetoric. So no, not that. Choosing to believe your life is going to be a good one is a sure sign it will never reach the standards that you hope, or expect it to achieve. To me, the only symptom to be extracted from such a blind adventure is disappointment, a powerful and toxic like sensation that will sap the very life force from you as it takes a grasp around your beating heart, clawing in so tight the knot in your stomach seems like it will never leave you.

No. Just…No.

I don’t want you to believe you can do anything. I don’t believe that of myself, its hedonistic and the frankly Freudian nature of what is already a powerfully questionable and emotionally destructive idea achieves very little to me. I mean it’s never gotten me very far, often in a circle to the same sensations over and over again.

I choose not to believe i can do anything. I choose to believe i can handle anything.

Read that again.

I choose to believe i can handle anything.

I’ve changed one word and the phrase takes on a new level of power.

“Anything” as a word has very little meaning as a definable term in this context, therefore i think when this belief you can do anything is batted around rather casually in this context it’s always been rather lost on me.

Anything dictates to me that one has to be looking…for an answer, a solution, to a problem or puzzle.

Endlessly looking for something or someone has always appeared the most folly of misadventures to me, for the art of looking for something as indefinable as “something” means that you will never truly find it, let alone comprehend it. The subject nature of the problem is where I think I and so many of us have gone wrong in the past- the focus has been wrong.

It doesn’t matter what that “something” is. In truth, it never mattered, not really.

Everyone is handling something, and in their own way have a power to believe in themselves. You fall down, you get up. They fall down, they get up. I find myself wandering about negativity and the role it has played on me for years now, this idea of the assumption of failure…saving me from the fear of success.

Why? The focus of my efforts and energies was misplaced. Negative energy is unquestionably powerful, but the key is in the emotional context. What you choose to focus on will come to influence almost every decision you make in your life. I have come to realise we have little control of our lives and more so of the universe we find ourselves walking in. Fear inducing- definitely. We haven’t control, but we have influence. You can influence your decisions and beliefs in how you choose to think and feel. It’s just that, a decision. Make a decision to do the exact opposite you’d normally jump to. See what happens. Feel the fear grow and the anxiety build. Bring it on.

But maybe fear is good, we need a bit of fear sometimes. Gets the heart beating, hairs standing on end. The art of the Viking, not knowing what’s going to happen and doing it anyway.

The end result doesn’t matter. The action, right there and then is what matters. Doing. Whatever happens, be your own biggest supporter. You can handle anything.

Believe. You will surprise you with what your capable of when you try.

It endlessly surprises me.

Yours, with love as always.
D.R x