Awake In Ashes: Diary Of A Dead/Reborn

So, Will You Give Me Your Hand?

Hands stretched out,

Longing for a caring touch,

A passionate pull,

An honest heart.

12:30 a.m. calling.

The morning turned beautiful,

By your contact picture,

A glow that split the darkness apart.

But soon, morning's murkiness unfolded.

The ship that was closer to the horizon,

Was already tipping toward the planet’s edge.

It was never coming home. It was meeting its oblivion.

Hands that came for me,

Didn’t come to pull up to the shore,

Hands that came, pushed the ship down the ocean.

Sending into the abyss,

Mind and body drowning being anchored to the betrayal,

Suffering and unknown

Where no light ever reaches.

Monsters of failure and self pity down there,

Its claws dug into the eyes and lungs,

Tears bled

Breath suffocated,

You see the end,

But get pulled back to go over this ordeal again and again.

Every step you climb,

The staircase beneath breaks down.

Forces pulling the neck down like there’s no gravity,

Guts spilled down like Da Vinci’s sketches and breath left in brevity.

5:30 a.m.

A cold bed, hot skin, faint heart,

Soul burning at the peaking sun.

Body cut up open.

What did you find inside that I already didn’t give you?

Showed what I’m made of,

Still, love.

Love that never stopped caring,

Love that welcomed the pain and suffering.

Love that was honest and valued what we built.

Love that trusted the light in you.

Love that was kind to the gentle and deep heart that we shared.

Eyes gave up the light,

Breath was quieter than the silence,

Heartbeat slowed down the life.

And the next dawn never came.

Only waiting,

Existence was only left with pain.

The promised tomorrow never came,

Of you looking if the craters of the Moon hadn't completed engulfed itself to the point of no return.

That tomorrow became yesterday’s shadow,

Casted by the Sun abandoning the sky and fainting the galaxy’s light once and for a lifetime.

Intimate With Fear

Fear is no enemy,

It’s the echo of life stirring,

A shared breath in the face of the unknown.

Everything alive knows this trembling.

It’s not wrong to feel it, it’s not failure.

It is the body’s way of bowing to the truth that nothing is certain,

And everything, eventually, will fall away.

So not turning away, but looking it in the eye,

Not conquering it, but to letting it unravel you.

Not solving a problem, but to unlearning everything I thought I knew.

A humbling road.

Striping you of your stories,

Road that has nothing to do with believing in anything,

But more to do with having the courage to die,

Die continually.

Sometimes there’s no way out and somehow,

More alive than ever.

It is then the most profound spiritual truths seem ordinary.

There is nowhere to hide,

We see it as well as anyone else,

We see it better than anyone else.

So next time fear visits, my dear,

How blessed and lucky you are.

Not as a curse but as the beginning.

The bravest among are not fearless, they are familiar.

They are intimate with fear.

When Things Fall Apart

Somewhere I read, 'Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over again to annihilation can that which is indestructible be found in us.'

Loving the truth is no soft thing.

It doesn’t cradle, it crucifies.

Asks to stay exactly where it hurts,

Where there is no certainty,

No refuge.

Suffer there but something tender begins to stir.

Nothing is working,

All the pieces scatter,

Closer to truth than ever before.

This is the edge.

This is the trembling place,

And tenderness lives here.

The kind that can shut down or open wide,

The kind to curl in on itself or pulse like a new heartbeat.

Let it pulse.

Let things fall apart.

Let them test you.

Not by solving them but by making space.

For sorrow and sweetness,

For rage and rest,

For joy you couldn’t fully welcome,

And grief you couldn’t stop.

Because the truth is life doesn’t fix itself.

It breathes in, it breathes out.

It holds you close and then lets you go.

Everything comes together and falls apart.

And somehow,

This is enough.

The real path is staying there on the brink when the rug is gone and the ground won’t hold.

Staying with the heartbreak.

Staying with the shaking hands,

The emptiness in the belly,

The feeling that all is lost.

That is where awakening begins, my dear.

(Not) Causing Harm

Harm does not bloom in a heart steeped in love.

Where love lives, in thought, in flesh, in breath,

There is no space for cruelty, no shadow for violence to root.

Yet still, within each of us lies the quiet seed of harm,

A potential not to be feared, but to be honoured with deep responsibility.

It is not only fists that wound,

Nor lies that steal,

It is also the sharpness of our thoughts,

The harshness we turn inward,

The restless craving to fill what feels empty.

The refusal to meet ourselves with honesty.

The greatest mental aggression and the deepest harm we cause,

Is the harm of looking away and not having the courage and respect to look at the tender truths curled inside us honestly.

Wound the very soil in which healing grows.

True mindfulness asks us to stay.

To not fill every space or smother every silence.

To feel the quiet gap, the ache of boredom, the twinge of loneliness, the raw crack of emotion.

Greet the truth of who we are.

And when we finally pause,

It comes as a shock how our mind, it’s survival mechanism,

Has disguised harm as protection,

Blindness as survival.

That piercing, unbearable clarity hurts,

But it is a sacred hurt.

Chödrön speaks of refraining.

The noble, aching pause between the rise of pain and the strike of reaction.

In that space lives something we fear,

A flicker of grief,

A tremble of emptiness,

An unbearable tenderness.

Most never stay long enough to feel it,

We flee, we entertain, we lash out and in doing so, we harm.

But if we stay,

If we truly stay…

We touch the heart of kindness.

---

Loneliness. Why run from it?

Part of a deeper human pattern,

We fear, we desire, we run, we grab, we make up a victim storyline and we feel deserve a resolution.

Is it that we deserve or is that we suffer?

The Love That Never Dies

It is said that in difficult times,

Only Bodhichitta that heals.

A sanskrit word that means noble or awakened heart.

When inspiration has become hidden,

When despair whispers it’s time to give up,

This is the time when we are closest to the medicine,

The tenderness of pain itself.

This is the time to touch the genuine heart of Bodhichitta.

In the midst of loneliness,

In the midst of fear, rejection, feeling of being misunderstood,

Beats the quiet rhythm of all things heartbeat of all things.

The genuine heart of sadness.

Healing with Bodhichitta isn’t a climb to some distant peak,

Its not leaving behind those who hurt you,

Or transcending what wounded you.

No.

The journey goes downwards, not up.

Into the centre of the mountain,

Into the trembling core of your own being.

We go not to rise above.

But to touch what's real.

So walk slowly,

Day by day,

Into turbulence and doubt.

The messiness we once tried to outrun.

Turn toward the pain.

Everyday a little more than the day before,

With mindfulness as the lantern,

Explore what we once feared to feel.

It’s taking months,

Even if it takes years,

Let it.

Let it unfold at its own rhythm, child.

Let it move at its own pace,

Without force,

Without speed or aggression,

Without clinging to hope,

Without recoiling in fear.

You are not alone, my dear.

With every step,

You move millions of others,

Take your companions in awakening from the fear.

Awaken this Bodhichitta,

And the tenderness of life will show itself to you.

Shield not yourself from the vulnerabilities of your condition,

This is where the light comes in.

At the bottom of your honesty,

You will find water.

The healing water of Bodhichitta.

And right down there,

In the stillness beneath all striving,

Discover the love in you,

Love that will never die.

Going Against The Grain

Go against the grain, dear one.

Turn from the usual logic.

Not away from pain, not toward pleasure,

But into the heart of what is.

You will find true freedom,

In the soft undoing of self-interest.

Stay even when the grain grows thick,

When the honesty feel hardest,

Stay with it.

This is where love begins.

Lovee that holds both you and me.

Others.

With equal tenderness.

Chödrön called this ‘Tonglen’.

A practice of turning towards suffering,

Breathing it in without fear,

Letting it melt the armour around your heart.

In that breaking open,

Compassion is born.

In that moment,

You catch the glimpse of the vastness, the unlimited spaciousness of ‘Shunyata’.

In it everything arises.

Everything dissolves.

And what remains,

Is the gentle truth of emptiness.

Not void,

But space enough for everything to be held.

---

Heart as light as a feather,

As heavy as the sun,

My dear, how’re you still here?

Everything breathing,

But the life in you.

Supple breeze tears apart the soul,

Oh why, such a hole?

Open the windows,

There’s a voice calling your name.

Have you forgotten everything you are,

Then only remember the kindness, love and the becoming of you that goes far.

It is you,

Who is becoming.

Step out in the dawn,

It’s waiting to give you the love and kindness you shone.

---

Am I well?

Because I could not answer.

How am I doing?

Trying to do better is all I’m saying.

Is this all there is left?

I could reforest the entire Amazon jungle with the effort it takes me to cling onto life and reason.

How are you doing?

A question infinitely repeating.

Are you well, meine liebe?

Answers rushing to form from care and fear.

Fleeting Moments Without You

There is a world out there,

With fleeting bodies,

Rushing at you like flies through air.

They see you.

They see bodies,

Moments,

Surface of your consciousness,

They see a tiny glimpse of life.

You notice them.

You notice their reality,

The sadness in their eyes and the curves of their smiles,

The way they move to the tunes are fleeting, they are not felt,

Their words like finite threads meaninglessly weaved together and repeated infinitely,

You notice their desires wrapped onto every way of thinking and being.

Fleeting interactions,

Fleeing into a void within,

Feeling nothing that I felt with you,

Floating in space at the sight of these bodies.

The sad reality.

Where did I come from, where I want to go.

Leaving the bodies, seeking yourself.

You are what you are looking for.

Find who you are and you never have to look for any body.

Where The Wind Returns Us

Settling into stillness of meditation,

A quiet ground of being that neither clings nor pushes away.

Unlike every other doing, meditation adds nothing to the canvas.

No brushstroke, no polish,

just space enough to let things come, and let them go.

The art of not interfering,

The softest rebellion,

A gentle refusal to chase or resist.

In this open field, real change begins.

Not through effort but through the courage to stay with what seems impossible.

And maybe it is.

The longer we sit with impossibility,

The more it begins to breathe,

To whisper,

You’ve been home all along, my dear.

Grasping at thoughts,

Like chasing mirages through shifting light.

But to touch and release them is to find the hush between echoes,

A sudden clearing,

A crack in the sky where light pours through.

This is your inheritance,

The wisdom seeded in the bones,

The boundless unfolding of what has always been,

Primordial openness,

Primordial brilliance,

Primordial knowing.

And all that’s asked from you is simple.

Rest, just rest,

Here, now,

In this pulse of time.

Yes, the wind will carry us away.

Yes, again and again, we will forget.

But like wind returning a fallen leaf to earth,

We are brought back.

Between one thought ending and the next not yet begun,

There is a silence that holds everything.

Learn to return to that still point,

The unchanging heart of now.

And from there,

From that silence,

Compassion rises like the dawn of the sun

And inspiration, like breath of the moon.

Though I'm in the depths of misery, there is still calmness, pure harmony, music and dance inside me.

- Vincent Van Gogh

Cover artwork by Fallen King