Never oppose anything or anyone.

Instead, choose to express and manifest

What is true for you.

Do not try to find yourself
     Or defend yourself
          Through what you do.

Instead, seek only to express
     Your highest knowing of what you are
          Through what you do.

I heard you call,
     Answered,
          And became the calling.

I thought I wanted love,
     But, instead,
          Became the loving.

How was I to know
     That desire awakens, and
          Becomes the desired?

Awareness woke up me out of being fused with form.

The fictitious me is an accumulation from my past. 

All that accumulation becomes this ME object, sense, whatever label I can attach. 

Only by dispelling this accumulation does the oneness present itself.

It is, for me, not the joy of attaining a state, it is, rather,

     the joy of utter relief from the struggling and the seeking.

This universe constantly advises me that

                this gypsy soul will forever

                                be a mystery to the moon.

But our moments speak of dreams

                that you have been

                                a wandering soul too.

This gypsy heart

                needs to wander.

Traveling to undiscovered mountains and caves

                that guard the world’s mysteries.

As I unturn every stone,

                I will explore every unmarked trail.

I will dive within the darkest seas,

    and, discover the secrets that were meant only for me.

A Warrior’s Heart

From The Dish: http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/

A Warrior’s Heart

JUL 1 2014 @ 2:00PM

In a review of Jonathan Shay’s Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character, Elizabeth Schambelan contemplates notions of wartime masculinity and friendship:

The broadest political implications of Achilles in Vietnam lie in Shay’s powerful critique of what might be called martial masculinity. The entire book enacts this critique, but it is most explicit in Shay’s discussion of the intense bonds that often form between one soldier and another.

“Combat calls forth a passion of care among men who fight beside each other that is comparable to the earliest and most deeply felt family relationships,” he observes. When Patroclus dies, Achilles no longer wants to live. To Shay, the age-old question of the pair’s relationship status is irrelevant: “Achilles’s grief . . . would not have been greater had they been a sexual couple, nor less if they had not been.” The failure to recognize “love between men that is so deeply felt” greatly amplifies the survivor’s pain. “If military practice tells soldiers that their emotions of love and grief—which are inseparable from their humanity—do not matter,” Shay writes, “then the civilian society that has sent them to fight . . . should not be shocked by their ‘inhumanity’ when they try to return to civilian life.”

In a recent interview, Kash Alvaro—an army veteran who served in Afghanistan and who has been diagnosed with both PTSD and a traumatic brain injury—alludes to the lingering, interlinked stigmas around the disorder and around masculine expressions of “love and grief.”

 We’ve been through things that—that’s never going to leave your mind, and it’s always going to be there. . . . And just to come back and have someone tell you, “Oh . . . you’re just acting out. You’re just looking for sympathy,” and those people just don’t understand. Not everybody—I mean, if you have a strong heart, that’s good. That’s good. But there’s people in the world that don’t. You know, you lose somebody, and it’ll break you. . . . And if—you know, if I make it another year, two years, three years, I’m fine with that. If I make it ’til next week, I’m fine with that, too.

The irony that makes this statement all the more painful to read is that, even as Alvaro reels off a checklist of PTSD’s symptoms and triggers (intrusive memories, “acting out,” death of a close friend, parasuicidal fatalism), he seems to have internalized the notion that his post-traumatic stress could have been prevented by a “strong heart,” i.e., by the inhuman lack of feeling to which Shay refers.

(Photo of two-time Iraq War veteran Mikey Piro and his comrade-in-arms, Brian. Mikey did a podcast with me last year about his post-war experience with PTSD. Follow his blogging at PTSD Survivor Daily. The Dish has covered much of those writingshere.)