In the spirit of “how great things start” keep in mind that the picture you now own started as nothing. It was blurry, underexposed and noisy. By adding some passion, vision and creativity it became something to the world that it wouldn’t have otherwise. This is how all dreams begin and this how all dreams, one day, become reality.
Your Friend,
Jonathan
My Only Hope (“Rare are second chances” …continued)
By J. Keys
My personal preferences aside I can’t give you permission to do this, no one can. In this regard the decision will be heavy and so will the consequences, though in the latter you won’t be alone …if you can survive the adolescence of the impact.
What you need and where you need to end up are as unformed questions as the solutions to your problems and, maybe, perceptions. Nevertheless I can hear the desperation and the desire in your voice and pauses. And though my mantle and way often call me to rescue… I can’t this time; not from where you are or where I stand. The best I could do is steal what is clearly not free and that is clearly not enough anymore.
I know… and maybe you do as well but that alone does not change the gravity or the power of circumstance; both constant. Today those powers mock you, one day they will carry you and, my personal preferences aside, we will each smile from the inside out… knowing. This is my only hope.
Sincerely,
Caleb
Friend,
Strange… I don’t know him that well but it sounds out of character. People do change, though, and quite often without much notice. They also, at large and in my experience, tend to make turns like that of a clandestine operation because they don’t want to deal with the details in retort or face the potentially hard guilt that comes along with executing someone from your life –they’d rather just shoot you in the back of the head and pretend it was ‘for the best’. I’ve written about this in several articles and letters of my own.
There’s something else to consider as well; some people you think you’ve lost were never really there at all. They showed up one day and you said hi, shook hands and you got along… but they don’t grow with you or even at the same pace. I don’t know if they just don’t want to be left behind or they just don’t want to be second in line but either way? They don’t get it. They don’t get what it means to understand another human being as that human being sees, hears and tastes the world; only themselves. They let you lean on them but they don’t feel the pain that you feel. They can be strong in your presence but they’re never really strong for you, therefore they can never understand your weakness –the very thing that allows us and drives us to connect and stay connected.
My advice, for those you really love and want to fight for, is to state your case and stand your ground. If they don’t want to stand with you or have something they can’t forgive you for or see past… it’s time to move on because you can’t change another person’s mind; you can only hope to inspire them. It’s sad, I agree, and it makes me angry as I recall my own experiences with it… but it is they who are the exception and not the rule of the humanity in others out there waiting to be as great as you deserve them to be, to you.
Sincerely,
Jonathan
My Friend,
Yes, all good things in time –I know. I’m not running off or away… but just changing the nature of many things that have needed change for a while. All things happen for a reason; all events that occur do not occur out of time and therefore they affect each moment and person that they touch. To ignore that or not examine it is to deny the need to grow in every thing we do and that affects us.
This experience, though nauseating, is bringing me ideas, thoughts and questions that I either didn’t ask or chose not to address. This is a good thing because I think I’ve shied away from a number of things I need to be better at, stronger at and that will get me to the point in my heart and soul that I can not only be great as an individual but also be great for others I share my life with.
None of this is me complaining or whining. No “boo-hoo, perfect harmony eludes me” 
I have many times said that conflict is a milestone of civilization despite the various grotesqueries it can entail; and so it is true as well for our souls and spiritual growth.
Externally this has brought about a much more acute vision, for me, in a manner of high specificity for those people that are indeed “good”. Even though the mass moves, mostly, amenably to one another there are only a handful that have “the right stuff” You are, without question, one of those few. This is just as important as any other realization because as my life moves on (as all of our lives move on) we’ll be able to go beyond any one place –perhaps even together and in parallel.
That, to me, is the diamond in the rough of life. Because change will come and it will not be stopped. No person or place is safe from it –not one. The trick in making it through is in going with it and not trying to escape it. The bulk of my life has been built on a blessed foundation of such a thing. Living with that concept is what taught me to adapt, fight and soar where others wouldn’t for fear of the ground not being there when they returned… and the difference that always separated me from them, in the end, wasn’t that I knew they were wrong or pointlessly full of fear… but that I simply never planned on coming back down to the ground again, myself.
This is not a legend to become but a legacy in its infancy…
Sincerely,
Caleb
Dear Sarah
By J. Keys
Your voice makes me want to cry
This may seem strange
Maybe even something you wish to correct
But I believe that joy and sorrow
Are one in the same
Separated only by circumstance
Therefore they are both
Like your echo
Beautiful
I wanted to tell you this for a long time
But then one day you went away
And all I had was your voice
In those familiar lyrics
But it never faded
And now it has returned
I wish I could tell you this now
Because you should know
So perhaps one day I’ll be able
And you can know how far you’ve truly reached
No longer waiting
The mystery solved
A world singed, but standing nonetheless
All separated by nothing more than circumstance
Beautiful
Caleb’s Journey : To the World at Large
By J. Keys
Well it’s on now. It’s been crawling around in me for sometime. I don’t know where it went to sleep or what woke it up but it’s back and I’m reloaded, black-coated and without a hint… of anything you doubt or expect otherwise. I need this place for not just my words that rattle around my brain but for the words that can’t come out any other way. For the things you feel but do not say because you weld your steam valve shut when you’re happy or mad or filled with abnormal levels of good or bad. My other cheek is turned now, to here, and yeah it’s me but it’s not me from the top down, the inside out or my total indeed. It’s that gentle breeze across the water, like the dark and those things we can’t say in real life. Our way out, our superhero, our big “if” without consequence of action or regard therein and, sadly, most times without the strength to actually do something…. well this is something… it is the beginning… reloaded, black-coated and without a hint….
Sincerely,
Caleb
Albert Einstein once said that the world is a dangerous place; not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing. The salient, fundamental precept in that statement being that a resultant condition of existence is not a matter of fact but a matter of influence precipitated by a discrete lack of balance most critically centered at the core of our greatest weapon and most obvious weakness as human beings -choice.
For better or for worse choice puts a magnificent amount of power in our hands. Too much, too little… a balance that often escapes us because of the very free will we are granted. Nevertheless I have come to learn that people are capable through choice to do two significant things; they can change the world and they can move people. God, however, is the only one who can move the world and change people. Efforts to the contrary either fail or simply don’t last; at least in my experience.
Though I have a great deal to say in reply of your explanation of what and why, I don’t believe I’m going to this time. Its entirety speaks to a history and reasons that I really don’t have a place or right to question –even if I do question the logic or the line. Nor to that effect would I tell you that you’re wrong whether I understood or disagreed with any of it one way or the other. In a broad stroke I regard it much like the delivery of an imposing strike in combat; you either accept it or you move out of the way because attempting to stop it, though not always obvious, is in fact counter-productive.
From your words and introspection I surmise that you have made your choice and, too, I have made mine; each different but both based on something we believe in and believe should be. This does not negate my faith, my belief or my desire -some of it kept away and some of it even still unwritten. Nor does it enforce or in place create a tombstone of regret. Yesterday is still the last chapter, tomorrow is still the next. I regret nothing and continue to hope for more. And though certain things can bring forth clarity, clarity does not entitle the truth… though it often sets the stage for it. I pray this for us both, tomorrow and the next.
Sincerely,
Caleb
I suppose if someone’s going to misinterpret or get the wrong idea about anything I write there’s little to stop it –not that this is news to anyone; it’s certainly not news to me.
Comments, however, are revealed here and I find it time, here and there, to step back in as words can become frozen and timeless in an inappropriate way. People see and read a word and then suddenly make summary of the thing, the idea or even the author without much else consideration… it is the quintessential error of every slanted perspective and the need to attack or defend those words even the idea of an idea that in fact is not static nor linear.
My words always have reasons. They are complex but they are not complicated. These words have purpose otherwise I would not share them… much less write them down. My thoughts and challenges do not require a grain of salt, only a greater mind though they often incite the lesser.
The decision, either way, is yours… but you’re probably wrong and I’m probably right
Sincerely,
J. Keys
-[Amendment]-
The above was not retaliatory but an exposed review in my own mind of how so many things I have written that become so stale and static because of the nature of this medium (of all written mediums really) that is then not correctly considered in the context of time/space in which is was written and, more importantly, whyyyy… such presumptions not only lead to misunderstanding but even a gross mis-characterization of, well, anyone (this happens all too often even on the merit of a simple piece of literature when so much is presumed of the writer and they no longer exist to defend or explain those words).
Having said THAT I believe my original above response is thus proven by the very need for this amended explanation you now read….
Quot erat demonstrandum (QED) = {thus it is demonstrated}
A Memory of Epiphany
By J. Keys
You know there’s something almost divine when you share with someone a revelation or truth that was revealed to you along your path of life. I remember when I told her about “looking up”; it was as if all other processes, thought and concern stopped in that instant -dropping everything to experience the gravity of its profound nature as I correlated it to Davinci’s remarks on flight.
I find even the whole idea of the situation tragic. How many chances and how many times is the genuine connection made. Not just someone reading your words, being impressed and wishing they could do that too… but someone who was just changed, before your eyes, by something that changed you and inspired you to write it down.
I fearfully suppose that I am being taught a hard but needed lesson; that what I suppose is a large part of my problem in finding earthly equilibrium and thriving on heavenly faith. That what I, think I want, and should have or think I see… is in actuality beside the point and might potentially be irrelevant.
My only question, then, is this –is circumstance a detail or a dictator? Maybe that depends on what you’re willing to give up… you might just be exchanging one predicament for another. Then again you might just be missing out on the chance you were supposed to take…