Rise with your hopes or fall with your fears

Guard your ears, till your heart

Our fears can so limit our ability to thrive, some fears fed by a passing comment in our past that takes root and grows into a humongous impediment to progress and success. The caution we must exercise in who we lend our ears to is one of eternal vigilance, for the grounds in which seeds can grow in our lives, are more fertile than we ever realise.

Words from the mouths of our parents triggering involuntary responses that determine the course of our lives and can make a difference in a lifetime, you wonder, how do you escape the clutches of what you have taken to heart? There are damaging consequences, from people of considerable influence that you can still hear their voices decades long after you have forgotten who or what they look like.

We can be different

We should not however concentrate on the negative, there are other inputs that engender the amazingly productive, that word of kindness, of encouragement, of hope, of prayer, of beauty, of praise and the good of our humanity, lighting up a path for us to travel, rescuing us from danger, infirmity, or calamity, bringing a sense of determination that girds us and strengthens us that we have no choice but to win. Those voices are begging to be heard but we are too attuned to the contrary.

As individuals, we fight our uniquely arranged battles, but when we enter into partnerships where our fortunes are pooled, we can rise with our partners or sink with them because of the baggage that burdens our inability to either live beyond our fears or the grip of the impending defeat sowed by experiences or words we have heard before.

Imagine where you can be

The greater disaster is not to see the newness in life that gives you hope against all situations to write a better story and create a worthy narrative of your life beyond the fears and low expectations of others who stole our power to thrive with their selfish perspective of what your life might be if it turned out different and successful.

If I am saddened, it is with those who never tried to dream of the extraordinary and when given the opportunity take off from the ground, rise to have the wind beneath their wings to soar with the eagles. It is possible, only if we uproot the forests of fruitless trees that took hold clouding the warmth of the sun with the fear of a future we do not know. Fears based on broad stereotypes when they should have based on the uniqueness of the individual.

Even more, the pity is you and your partner are left down in the dumps in an unproductive life just because fear robbed you of the spirit of hope and the experience of better things that you could ever have imagined in your wildest dreams.

Brian, My Funniest Valentine

Brian with an I and I

Like a dream, I never thought I’ll dream,
I have smiled wider than ever dared I could,
We played like children often do daydream,
With my Valentine, I am good.

I did wonder, if ever this could be,
Then before me, this beauty really stood,
But I feared, it couldn’t be for me,
Felt my Valentine, too good.

To my hearing, some lips did say hello,
Too astounded, to think it was to me,
Then I looked up, could this be Romeo?
Dreamy Valentine, I could see.

From that moment, I’ve lived a fantasy,
Fun and laughter, this loving is so fine,
In each other, we’ve found deep ecstasy,
My funny Valentine is mine.

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Our song, he gets so emotional when he hears this song.

I remember the other Valentine blogs I have written all until I found my amazingly, handsome, beautiful, funny Valentine.

Happy Valentine, my love.

Blog - Where is my funny valentine?

Blog - My Funny Valentine, 2013

Blog - To My Funny Valentine

To My Funny Valentine

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When the time lags

What the passage of time is, long and enduring like tomorrow would never come and then in its passage, the speed at which history takes hold is amazing if not unfathomable.

I once lamented where my funny valentine was having just lost one who I so desired to take that place, it was painful knowing the person had passed away just exactly 4 months before.

Blog - Where is my funny valentine?

Three years later, I wrote about the quest for love and companionship that had so eluded my grasp in many ways I could not understand. Much about love unrequited or the knowledge of what one did not want beclouding what might have been available. In the background, grief still held one back from exploring opportunities, I guess I never found one to lead me into love again.

Blog - My Funny Valentine, 2013

When the time comes

We arrive at another Valentine’s Day with a different story as a journey that appeared to start 9 years before, now has the hold of something meaningfully amazing, for I have found my funny valentine and in him the words of the song brings a reality that I could not even dare to dream when the last season passed without event.

In paraphrasing an excerpt of the lyrics to the contemporaneous, we find the truth to something that transcends everything, for love conquers all.

Blog - South Africa: I was caught in up the rapture

My funny valentine, now I know where you are – Sweet comic valentine, so would I like to laugh to the sound of your voice – You make me smile with my heart, such joy you bring.

Your looks are laughable, who cares you are the best – Unphotographable, but I see you every day so perfect – Yet you’re my favourite work of art, and nothing can compare to what I adore.

Source

A play on the lyrics of My Funny Valentine

Dedicated to my funny valentine, you know who you are.

Thank you!

South Africa: I was caught in up the rapture

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A mystery

I probably have not had the time to reflect on my trip to South Africa as I have been caught up in the rapture of something indescribable, yet so amazing.

One on an outing before the year closed, unexpecting of anything and anticipating nothing, my gaze fell upon a mystery of nature exuding beauty impossible to process as neuron bombarded synapse trying to make sense of what my vision and perception gifted my senses.

My rational self concluded, like the Mona Lisa, this work of exquisite genius and art belonged to where it was seen and nothing else. I could not aspire to fulfil a desire that I had judged to be completely out of the league of what was observed.

A wonder

Yet, fortitude works in ways to birth opportunity and for what you could never have planned, the substance of dreams creates a reality that blows you away. That was the gust of wind that blew me off my feet that night and in its wake was my heart enfeebled by an emotion stronger than love.

Never in my thinking had such a thing occurred in my subconscious for me to dare that in my wildest prognostications, the situation that presented was ever possible, but if we are such deterministic creatures, surprise and accident, luck and fortune, experience and reminiscence, love and adventure, would not feature in the stories we get to tell of life.

A dream

The crazy thing is, in a hopeless place, love turned an ace and gave me a jackpot of the person I wish, and hope would be a companion for the journey called life. This was something I had given up on from the time that one I did really care for suddenly departed this mortal coil almost a decade ago.

Not for once would one have thought there was a hope for the heart in unison with another for a future of dreams and excitement, but here we are – caught up in the rapture of love.

South Africa beckons again to reunite with one who has stolen my heart away. In due course, there would be an unveiling of what makes my heart race like a gazelle hopping in delight in the savanna plains of Africa.

Thought Picnic: Cutting away

Of wonder

In the body of work that is the anatomy is much of what one might want to understand of the things we need to cut away, for until recently, that organ was considered useless that made an appendectomy just routine.

Then maybe twice a year it is a phlebotomy for which many vials serve the needs of a vampire’s convention, the by-product a conversation with my consultant about how healthy I have become from the last time. Yet, from the much I have given, I fail to swoon, no catching of breath nor the loss of it to need a tracheotomy.

To ponder

When my throat did hurt not for the need of a tonsillectomy, but for the fact that the words I wanted to say never came out in the way I wanted it to play. What might have been an appeal began to repeal what I thought I had, what once looked like mine to have was never once on offer.

We have reached a dichotomy, my head to divest, my heart to invest, when in reality, I might just have my head examined, maybe a lobotomy to remove that longing and desire. For I have been cut up in many ways than I can care to remember, incisions, injections, intrusions and infusions, I am left with many confusions of the mind, of the body and of life.

And if you realise you cannot produce anything, you have the choice between the mild vasectomy and the brutal orchidectomy. What a quandary of -ectomies to contemplate or better still, the necrosectomy of prospects going nowhere.