-”This is for all them girls who have ever been made to feel ugly by an even uglier man”. – Violet

 I told a man to go fuck himself today; it was after he looked me deep in my eyes and whispered those sweet sweet words. It was after we made love. It was after he revoked the meaning of every meaningful thing he had ever revealed to me. It was after he draped a cloak around his secret vulnerability and reacted like the coward who fires his gun before the bear begins to charge; it was after he looked me deep in my eyes and whispered those nasty, nasty words. Ya’ll know what I mean, no matter the actual content it was the way he said it; I mean, he said a million things and acted a hundred colorful ways but I absorbed only the base line of his poisonous message and it went something like this: “boom boom, I don’t want you in my life, boom boom, I don’t want you in my life, boom boom…”. I felt it. It hurt. I felt ugly. I felt small. I felt like runnin’ and divin’ into the coldest water to freeze the growth of sensitivity and pain, but I didn’t. I just swallowed and smiled and said, “its alright boy. You are the last brother from the tribe of indifferent men that I will ever dance with. I can say a proper goodbye now. Thank you for the challenge mister, now go fuck yourself”.

 This is gon’ be my new way, I think, makin’ it my bus’ness to know where those men come from, and tellin’ ‘em how I truly feel. Ain’t like I’m doing nothin’ wrong, I mean I ain’t hurtin’ nobody really. It ain’t my problem if he takes it personally, right? I’m just livin’ my life is all, and he should know better anyhow. Its like, what do you think is gon’ happen when you wear your selfish expectations as openly as your troubled grin? I ain’t here to please nobody! I ain’t layin’ down the right to bear myself, no way am I gon’ spread my legs kindly so he can have a taste of true power. I ain’t givin’ nothin’ to nobody that ain’t already pourin’ freely from the flow of things; why force myself further? Ain’t enough you’ve got that girl between your legs you wanna sew her up after you done, you wanna brand your name like a pretty little scar that she’ll forever wear as a reminder that she’s a missin’ a piece of her heart to you.

 I’ve been had and I’ve been a means to an end for many a mischievous man but I say enough! They made me, ya know, as a girl comin’ up in this world, tricked by every fake kiss and every false prophecy spoken from the filthy grave of his soiled dreams; I believed that love was when your name felt safe in the mouth of a well-respected man. Uh, uh, no way; and now I’ve paid my dues and I have been God-honored with the authority to love nobody but myself, and if the mosquitoes want a taste of my blood then let them have it; they’ll prick the skin of another man soon, and that will be my victory when the shaft of his cock is swollen with regret of having behaved a devil’s fool; guilt itches, my friend. Itch it long and good, watch how it changes you, I’ll wear a rosy dress to celebrate the rise and fall of your oozing fantasies, ha! I’ll bite harder than any alligator I swear, I’m tired of resting in the swamps next to other second-hand ladies; through rouge and globs of lip paint they slur from too many sips of moonshine while the moonlight shines on their tears that the water beast dries with his yellow eyes.

 I ain’t one them girls who jus’ wanna man, ya hear? I ain’t wanna sit ’round, and sip tea and talk about fancy things with lace, and whisper lyrics and batter my eyes and smell nice things and have nice things: I ain’t lookin’ for nothing from you: not acceptance nor approval, not a warm blanket or a humble bed, not a compliment or a dare, not nothin’ you can do to change me slightly, not no way for you to keep me comin’ round cause I dance to the beat of distant drums, harmonic gifts of direction granted by higher things, higher than the way you feel when you see me smile that smile that ain’t got nothin’ to do with you, not no more; I’m stronger than I seem, grace is not weak but tender like a mother lion with her cubs. Don’t you know boy? When spirits are suppressed, when they are confined, ya see, they revolt to any extreme; the spirit knows only how to be itself and it will do so under any condition, under any circumstance, whether you speak its language or not it will rise within and swell like the tides of the sea when the full moon calls. It’s like, you can take a person and you can train them and mold them and teach them how you want them to be, you can tell them that some things jus’ ain’t right and others are plain wrong, but it ain’t no use; you only gonna make a murderer, or a liar, or a rapist, or a drunk; stiflin’ energies morph and manifest in unwholesome ways when left to rot on the shelves of a restricted heart.

 So, boy, I release myself from the bonds that have held me down; turns out they were of my own makin’; but ya’ll can’t convince me to stitch them again. No way, I have a voice as strong as a million angry bees and though my soul is lyin’ on the side of a road a ruby stone in my chest has been graciously restored. So again, i”ll say it with mighty conviction, those sweet sweet words I’ll whisper in your ear; “go fuck yourself”.

Letter From Anonymous:

“When I met your friend at (location not mentioned to protect identity of actual characters), he lightly patted me on the shoulder. Who does that? I almost laughed, I almost let my tongue free. It was insulting, and let me know that he is probably rich, definitely condescending, probably has a superiority complex, and is insecure. I noticed when you and I took a picture, you also were leaning on my shoulder. I thought to myself, do these folks go around feeling a little superior? Just food for thought ”.

Thanks for the food! Here’s the thought:

Every person you encounter is an amazing resource for something, and the instance you form a judgment, you have blocked the lesson; you have disrupted the flow. It takes more work to restore the flow than it does to disallow judgments.

Judgments are our way of making sense of things so we may understand them better. So often we form judgments, devaluing our experiences by valuing what we consider the validity of our observant and critical minds; we interpret and define, label and assess, dissect and pick apart; all so that we may form an idea of an experience or thing in the language of our thoughts and context of our personal histories. To this idea we become attached, perhaps for many reasons, though mostly because it feels good when the world fits our pre-established judgments of it; our learned, acquired, and adopted preconceptions that contribute to form what we call our reality. Our reality is not to be confused with reality; indeed, our reality means our interpretation of what is, but reality implies ‘what is’, and what ‘what is’ is pure being; it exists independently of our assessment of it, and is free standing and infinite. We come into the world and inhabit a tiny space for a small amount of time, and we are allowed the mental capacity to experience it with our senses and form ideas and thoughts, and figure stuff out, and communicate about how we lived it. That’s great, but it is not reality.

When we form judgments we take away from the thing being experienced; we pull it from its inherent reality (its pure being) and make it a form in our minds; it becomes like a test subject on the operating table of our imaginations, and we take from it and add to it until it resembles little of what it actually is because it is no longer real and it is no longer itself as it bears characteristics of our own personalities while missing aspects of its original form.

We now control it as we strive to control everything; through judgments we discover we can control everything because everything becomes something to which we can attach in some way or another.

It feels good when the world fits our pre-formed judgments of it; otherwise we experience FEAR. From fear is born the binding power of our own minds: from fear is born judgments. The unknown, the unfamiliar, the unsettling, the new; these types of experiences give rise to fear;fear sparks the desire to understand; desire to understand stimulates the process of forming judgment; judgment forms opinion; opinion becomes action and action leads us either to regret or embellish; either way, to act on a judgment is to act selfishly, trusting in the mind and allowing it the power to guide us in isolation from the guiding force of truth, actuality, and pure being. Selfish is to trust the mind and its judgments, to wander through life an ego on a spine, walking and talking and forming relationships as one sees fit; judging, therefore resenting, elaborating, denying, repulsing, blindly influencing and ignorantly interacting as though the head is impervious to all and all else is impervious to it.

This is not the case; a friend described people as having tentacles, and every word, action, interaction, smile, and look that manifests within us extends to affect others like the tentacles of an octopus extends through space, influencing the flow of the surrounding environment with only mild intention: we control the birth of the action or word, that is, we can decide to extend our tentacles, and we can direct it towards a desired result via intention by choosing how to deliver the word, action, interaction, or smile,  BUT how our tentacles are received is out of our control. Therefore, we mustn’t be careless with our tentacles; we must be impeccable with it. Never let loose a tentacle of judgment: from it can only be born more tentacles of judgment and more tentacles still until the original thing is so swallowed by tentacles it ceases to exist or has been sentenced to exist in a state of misery, or it passes us by like dissolved possibilities for great friendship, opportunities, adventure or service.

Tentacles are our connection to each other and our world: why spend them freely and carelessly? To feel safe from fear is the desired state: but when the bearer of thought is open to the truth of impermanence it seems that security is nothing but an adjective used to describe the way life sometimes is, sometimes isn’t. That’s all everything is really. It sometimes is this, and it sometimes isn’t. These are not judgments; they are affirmations of acceptance of the nature of life’s flow.

It doesn’t bother me when people share judgments, I simply don’t reply: when someone shares a judgment they have actually invited you to become impressed by their words whereby they expect some reaction: even when there is no reaction they interpret lack of action as reaction. If I choose to play, I can either defend myself against the judgment or partner with it, forming a judgment of the judgment either way, committing to a conversation bound for nothing but failure, amounting to little more than wasted time.

In order to maintain a peaceful presence, to engage humanity on a higher plane I smile at judgments and seek to offer these words as a reply, skipping gracefully over the sloppily strewn tentacles: ‘is that so’?

I hope people get it; with judgments, you move nowhere, you get nothing and your tentacles become so rotted that no other tentacles born from healthy beings are willing to unite; you will be alone with your tentacles in the company of other rotted tentacles. While all the life of the sea is available in limitless potentials those rotting tentacles will forever isolate you from the rest so long as judgments are allowed to maintain you, the bearer of precious consciousness.

BUT, with openness and a willingness to see beyond what you think is, or perceive as, or assume to be; to recognize the power of your tentacles and to accept that the ways in which we all collide in thought and action are inevitable and constant, though changing and with variance, you can have EVERYTHING.

Energy is precious, life is priceless, and though love is infinite our bodies are not: I choose to engage people in conversations of betterment and progress: undress the mind, simplify, and practice practice practice laying those tentacles with pure intention and grace. “Watch as the whole world becomes you friend”, is what was said to me. It truly has. It can be for you too.

So!

Dear Anonymous,

I will neither embrace your judgment nor deny it; it is neither right nor wrong; it merely has no place. If we were face-to-face, I would have swallowed my pride (as I am a beginner in studying the art of ‘being human’), and replied, ‘is that so’?  And, despite the context of your message and message of the subsequent discussion, I love you, anonymous you who has lit my fire and allowed me hours of pleasurable writing. I love all of you. You see: Love is not limited, it certainly is not founded in judgment: to say I can not love this thing because I am already in love with this thing is a gross misunderstanding of love. Love is not mine to decide the quantity, it is not born in me and requires no rules of distribution to be felt and experienced. Love is not to be rationed or controlled or denied or accepted. Love is. I am love. I don’t need love. I don’t want love. I have nothing to do with love. Love is greater than me. I am small, but I am loved, whether I exist or not.

Namaste,

Rasham Writes

Although the candidates differed, the substance of the on-going dialogue remained the same: each interviewee spoke of themselves, of their strengths and favorable characteristics, of their experiences and history, while the receiver nodded in encouragement of the conversation. The energy permeating the space around the subjects was tense, as the contestants, in the uncomfortable silence that would befall the pair at the end of a brief, nervously awaited approval from their host. They feared rejection, humiliation, embarrassment, and this fear was present in the slight movements of their hands and legs, and the awkward inflections in the tones of their voices. They were selling themselves, placing themselves on the shelf marked ‘for sale’, elaborating on the benefits of that which they were offering.

We do it everyday, in every aspect of our lives. We sell ourselves as thin, fit, healthy, intelligent, witted, and funny. We buy what we value and pay for that from which we benefit.  It rules our civilized lives; we are constantly concerned with maintaining the well being of our bodies and our minds, decorating and educating ourselves so that we may one day be highly valued by our peers. We are conditioned by media and market, by economics and mainstream ideals to respond to the egoist impulse to strive and achieve, and we have fused the idea of happiness and success with knowledge and wealth, appraising those accomplished individuals for greater worth than those who have neither the brains nor the goods. A poorly valued individual is like an unattractive hooker: she struggles to survive in the business of life because she lacks that which makes her appealing to potential employers:  she may be disregarded, discounted, and placed in the half-off bin with other useless items and moral waste.

Although illegal in its most sexual application, the essence of prostitution is that upon which our modern day society is constructed, survived by the philosophy that if you have nothing to sell, you simply don’t get the job.