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Wendy E. Braun – This Existence

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An Open Letter to the World

Or rather, to The Pinpricks of Light that I see out there in the universe,

There is so much in the world that must change.How is it that we have lived on this planet for so many centuries and yet we do not see that greed is at the root of all of our issues? Why is the path of moderation so hard for us to follow? When did we first believe that the rights of others had a price?

No matter who are, where we come from, or what we believe in each of us is a flame. The heat we give off does not matter. The height and the width are of little consequence. In the end, we are all the same light burning. We think that because we live in the abode of the body that we are different. We believe that because our stories and experiences vary, that we have a single identity and existence. We think that when we take a match to a candle — in hopes of finding peace or a god who will listen — that our beliefs lock into a specific religion or philosophy.

But they are one; they meet right there in that flame. It does not matter if you pray within a temple, or a mosque, a church, or an ashram, or inside of your “own” self. It does not matter if you believe in a god or not when you realize that we are all the same flame, the same heat moving, shaping, calling out into the darkness of the universe. Yes, we call out to the flames that appear to be nothing more than pinpricks of light in the darkness. And yet we call out, each in our own way. And this simple act of devotion, the lighting of a candle that calls out to something or nothing, is the very thing that transcends our divides.

I imagine all of us believing or disbelieving in “something more” when the truth is that we already are “that something more.” We are the pinpricks in the darkness of the universe. We are the evidence of a complicated creation. We can be that something more instead of being evidence of such a cruel and complicated human existence. We can pause, we can still the flame, so that it does not flicker wildly in the winds of entropy that divide us. We can remember that at our core we the same.

Some of us are hungry for food, shelter, and love. Most of us crave healing. So please, let us stop and think of what we might do that will allow us to be kinder, more compassionate beings. Let us consider how we might realize that the father of chaos is Greed and the mother is Ego. I do not believe that our flame ignites from this place. I believe that we are the children of Love and Consciousness. Maybe we have just forgotten. Maybe we do not see our worth, and so we have forgotten to see the worth of others. Maybe we just need to remember what we are.

Sometimes people say that it is one thing to think with your heart and another to think with the mind. This too is a lie. When the heart and mind are united we remember that one is the wick and the other is the match.

  • What thoughts can we release that keeps from us showing compassion?
  • What beliefs restrict us from taking actions that support the civil liberties and freedoms of all?
  • What choices can we make and actions can we take that will support each new flame that arrives with each new dawn? After all, all children are our children no matter where they are or who brought them in.

I do not understand all that is happening in the world. I try to understand why patterns of war have continued to play out of the centuries instead of patterns of peace and abundance. But I can’t and in the end, see little use for it. There can be no good greater than that which respects the rights, freedoms, and civil liberties of all.

Someday, we will remember that we are all children of Love and Peace, that we are one flame burning; because of this we will live and breathe a life that promotes healing, joy, and knowledge.

This is my greatest desire and dream for this world. I don’t know if anyone will bother with my words, but sometimes you just have to call out to the rest of the universe. I see the pinpricks of light and I am sure that they see me too.

Much love,

Wendy

 

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The Age of the Facade

Sometimes the modernity of things surprises me. As if I fell into this world of cool colors. Earth tones providing for a new sense of elegance when the primordial nature of things has been completely lost.

We place trees strategically, contemporary warmth derived from designs birthed centuries ago on factory floors. Iron and wood, and the color of rust pretend to suggest a legacy of use.

         Everyone should have a stone, to hold and cradle within one’s hand. Or so was told as a child, but this is the Age of the Facade.

Language returns daily to forms that would recall the lost languages comprehensible with new appreciations for dots and dashes and misappropriations of meaning. It is as though we are standing on the brink of a digression into babel, a modern age, in which all things are recycled and reformed.

         Something must be lost in this process, I am sure of this,
and perhaps, also        a stone in one’s hand.

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Goodnight to the Army of Mice

By: Wendy E. Braun

The Starlings moved into the kitchen wall over a month ago, and I couldn’t help feeling like they belonged there, my apartment a testament to what would have been, been careful not to wake them when brewing breakfast. I had felt that way about the mice until I opened the cabinet last Sunday and found an army of mice or evidence of the stench of them. The Starlings can stay, but as in all good tales…

I laid out bricks of poison the way the government hands out welfare checks and minimal benefits. We all die with full bellies in the end and are angry for the expense of cleaning up the waste.

In my twenties I cried when my roommate trapped a mouse, its small grey paws glued to a tray like tar on a desert road. Black eyes wide, rounded ears white lined with pink veins, sound pulsing through the fragile frame. She caught me trying to apply grease to its paws and promptly placed it into a plastic bag to ensure the last breath. You see, she had gone after it with an umbrella, which I could never understand, or why it was the problem when the roaches had been the ones to spoil the fruit in the basket, and it was the Bronx, and we were still young.

Yesterday my neighbor scored a raccoon with marshmallow bait, and now its law to end it all owned land equaling a general lack of relocation. Somewhere inside my walls, the mice are dying, and raccoons with bellies full of sweets rot, and thank god for the Starlings wings, and pray that the landlord doesn’t care as he cares little for the mice. But save me from the dreams where the stinkbugs cover my eyes and my mouth, because they are the only ones that I know how to get out, and don’t we just want to get out, all of us out.

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Clear Vision for a Quarter

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I never wear them, the weight of the frames on the bridge of my nose leaves a deep blue indent that refuses to reconstruct itself into a normal skin tone for, at the very least, 25 minutes. When I think of the cost, even with the family and friends discount, the clarity of the view is still flawed by the wickedly hipster-esque brown arches that capture the clarity.

If clarity could be constructed for a quarter what would the world look like?

It appears (all puns intended) that the term “urban renewal” is blanketing the country like a circus on steroids. Wrecking balls swing like the knife throwing traipse artists, while cannon ball girls stand proudly against the rubble. But it isn’t the bricks and mortar that lies in heaps waiting to be carted away, it is the people, trash people, because we treat them like trash, ignore them like trash, like a problem that is so discardable.

We build, we renovate and look down from our newly remodeled pedestals and pounder such a meek existence. We assume that our facades are more real and full constructed, that we’ve made better choices, so we bow our heads and thank providence for our affluence.

But what in life is truly “choice?”

Often when I think about the many unexpected events that occur daily, I realize that it is not my choices, but how I choose to respond to life’s occurrences that creates a larger impact on my personal experience and how others experience me. We are all familiar with the aspects of call and response, and yet we assume that we have been the first to create the call. What I would like to propose is that the call was made thousands, if not millions of years ago, and that we will forever be in response to it. In this we release some aspects of control, gain humility, and hopefully become more accountable for our actions.

I’ll give you a quarter, and you’ll respond.

Yesterday, I found myself waiting on the back of a motorcycle, at an extremely busy intersection. There was a man standing on the corner with a sign, because he was hungry. We spoke for a while, he asked for a smoke, but I don’t, so I couldn’t help. Later, I went to an event where food and drinks were passed through forgetful hands. Of the many stories that were shared that night not one was as sincere or as true that of the man who stands on the corner waiting for a light, some change, and some food.

If change is to occur let it be distributed equally and with awareness.

I’d like to setup a stand, like the one I had as a child, pushing pink lemonade on a dead end street. I’d have two jars, one for renewal and one for healing. But perhaps, I would need a scale so that I could be sure that what was given was equal in measure.

I often wonder how it is that we can renew buildings, so much money for stone, but where is the money to heal the heart and the people who need it the most?

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Risk

If there is one relatable experience that intertwines us, it is the familiar rocky cliff, where we stand in a smokey fog, haunted by the shadowy chasm existing between “the here and now” and the “what is to come.” Our gaze, the closer we are to the edge, falls steadily downward taking note of the jagged edges and the dense darkness that seems to rise up out of the distant ravine. Sometimes we lift our eyes and take note of a weather-worn bridge with greying and rotted wooden planks – held together by fraying horsehair ropes. In this stance, fear resides paralyzing movement, until the outside forces bare in as great gusts of wind pushing us onward – or at least on to our knees sending us crawling back and away to some sort of safety in what is known. Should we choose to stand, we are met with the risk of an unsteady bridge, and a need to be extremely sure-footed.

I think, sometimes, that as we age we become more afraid of the risks. Failure seems to have greater consequences, while comfort increasingly seems like “just trying to get by.”

My father always said that “you should live without regrets.” While I don’t believe that this is remotely possible, as I for one am entirely and happily flawed, I do think that there is a sense of knowing and discovery that comes about through this mindset. Somewhere along the line, regret and risk wove themselves together in my mind. On the whole, I would say that the risks I have taken have outweighed the regret (with the exception of love, but maybe I just “haven’t met the right one yet,” as my cousins would say). Still, the point remains that as life goes on the complications of saying “YES” compound.

When did it become so easy to say “no?” Who taught us to live inside ourselves? How is it that life experiences can hinder us from actually living?

Every day is in some way a risk. The unexpected will arise, and the risk will take shape in how we choose to respond the occurrence. And, while I know these things, I still find myself with a downward gaze, as the sounds of a strong north wind can be heard barreling towards me. The question is not whether I will cross, but rather will I make it to the other side? And, maybe the bridge is sturdy and strong, and I am fooled by the fog. But it can be so hard to shake this feeling when you cannot be sure of your own footing.

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Lost, and Lonely, and Love

As a child, I remember looking up at those who towered over me, noticing clenched fits, hard voices, and faces shadowed with emotions. I stood somewhere around their knees, with a burning question that I could not ask this world of strangers, “do you remember when you were like me?” And then to myself, I would wonder what had happened to them?

While I have found the height, age and a number of personal experiences that would lead me towards the answer, I can not help but to continue to wonder what it is in the human condition that causes people to hang onto anger, to choose bitterness as an excuse for their outward representation of “self,” and then to see themselves as solitary entities whose natural tendencies lean towards selfish pursuits? Was it our parents or teachers, or lack thereof, that promoted an ego-centric mentality? Was it a lack of love or an inclination towards greed, that displaced the heart and fractured its connection to the brain, causing a misfiring of synapsis? What messages were we sent in our shared youth, that taught us to focus on the individual “I” and to forget that we are many sharing in this existence, in a history, in a science where the very air we breathe is coded by every inhalation and exhalation of every being that has ever lived. I wonder. I breathe in Gandhi, and out my mother, I breathe in the woman wrapped in blankets on the park bench, and breath out you.

We exist in a technological world where inventions, that could have only been imaged in the minds of those like Jules Verne, just over a century ago were seen as pure fantasy.   And yet we still fail to find the solutions to meet the fundamental requirements of our own basic needs. What progress can we claim to have made when the same wars that were waged thousands of years ago – to divide and concur, to rape and pillage the body of a being and the body of the land – continue on with new weapons and empty solutions? Where is love?

Often, I find myself watching the faces I pass on the street. It can be dangerous to say hello, but I still try to smile. I listen too, to the conversations, the sighs, the faces that speak more clearly then the mouth would dare to. As an adult, I cannot help but to look at those around me and wonder, “what happened to you, lost lonely soul?” And I realize how desperate we are for love.

My favorite teacher told me, when I was 9 years old, to stop wearing my heart on my sleeve. Though I have worked to keep it close to my chest, the experiences I value the most are those where I left it out there so that when I’ve passed a stranger in need, they could find a piece of humanity within their reach. What has overwhelmed me has been my own acknowledgment that I am indeed that stranger in need. Each one of us, lost lonely souls, with hearts ready for and wanting to love.

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Hello world!

Sometimes, I think I am pretty brave. I’ve said “yes” at least a million times more than I have said “no.” But as a writer, have lacked the courage to share my works of poetry, as well as my personal essays with others. So here I go.
Hello, world!

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