Fear, Truth, Hope

Our want for safety has become our prison. Lock things out; keep them away from our families and our children. Yes, the intent is genuine. It is part of our protective nature. However, locking harm out also locks us into a prison of caution and fear, preventing us from living outside the walls just because we no longer wish or desire to fight. So instead, we lie awake at night, listening to the breath of our wives, our husbands, and our children. In and out. Slow. Rhythmic. We lie awake, not for the sake of listening, but because we dwell within a prison we have constructed in our minds in addition to the physical walls surrounding our towns and cities. It is our own prison, our own making, and we dread the heathen outside desperately determined to discover a way in despite our best efforts.

And slowly, the motive for protection shifts, morphs into our darkest fears because we no longer understand the enemy beyond or at the gate. It no longer becomes a concrete threat, but a shadow growing in the mind, shapeless, abstract, and fuzzy around the edges of our consciousness. Continue to fear until someone comes along, and seeing the fear written in the lines of our faces, will manipulate our good intentions for home and hearth into a menace.

                Whispered or proclaimed from the city centre, their sweet words hide malevolent intent, and our fear continues to cloud our minds, and our mental faculties are rendered immobile. It all just feels so right. All that remains is the warm, safe feeling encasing our bodies from those honeyed words, flowing into our veins like a narcotic. Never mind the bitter after taste. Never mind the words sound practiced or planned, as if said in front of a mirror. Never mind the sick feeling within our stomachs as they digest what we’ve swallowed without tasting, and our brains refuse to register the effect our bodies clearly sense is wrong. No. No one within our own gates, guarded by those solid walls and locks with hidden keys could ever intend to harm us. Because the enemy has no way through our gates; they are impossible to breach… so we deceive ourselves.

The things we fear could never slither in, disguised in white, and pose as the very image that would save us from our fears. Our saviors are flawless, true. Is that not the way of things? The image, the being cannot be the presence or practice of those in darkness, as if there was some protective boundary preventing the evil from promoting itself as good. We locked the evil away, remember? That is what our high gates, our locks and keys, the prison we have created for ourselves is for, right?

 How naive we are in our thoughts!  How reckless!

                Enemies change tactics:

Adapt.

                Invade.

Sneak behind target.

                Blind and immobilize.

                Destroy resistance.

Simple marching orders. Devastating consequences.

                So they take our freedom, and we allow it. And our sense of security, step by step, until we do not even notice we were ever free at all. Safety is only an illusion after all. And that had been decimated the moment we allowed those doors to be locked and let fear rule our minds and become our conscious. We sit idly by, submitting, passive. Afraid. Hopeless. Spineless and weak because that is the way those honeyed words told us to act.

Sign the dotted line, people. You sold your life away, and that of your children sleeping innocently in their beds. You have been dominated, like the land you live on. Beaten into submission by laws and corrupt politicians until honest men are a legend you tell your children in bedtime stories. Legends of the past that leave us with a sense of wanting something more, but we never dare enough to challenge those words we have been spoon fed and reliant on for our feelings.

Yet the child’s simple thoughts and logic, still untainted for now, will always challenge us.

                “Is it true, daddy? Did they really fight?”

                “Yes, son. The stories tell us there is always hope. And it’s worth fighting for.”

                And you see your child with a thought in his eye, confused, and from the mouths of children, you sit convicted: “Why don’t we hope now, daddy? Why don’t we fight, if we’re so sad?”

And there is the question, is it not?

                “There is always hope” is our claim. No. There is not always hope when we choose not to believe, we choose this life ruled by fear. Fear has crowded out the hope. Hope is not some omniscient force. It does not pervade our world. Hope lies within honest men and women, who refuse to retreat, who are held by their convictions. They revive hope, kindle it anew. But in a submissive society, reliant on the oppressor, and defending them like some Stockholm’s victim, then no. Hope will not always exist, especially not in a prison with no room to survive, grow, and thrive, to affect change. Instead, it withers and dies like a neglected house plant. Brown, brittle, dead. And that is what the enemy at the gate, and those cloaked in white desire, is it not?

                Break down the walls of your prison, break the fear suffocating you. Defeat it with the truth you so easily sold away when you locked those gates. Create hope by returning to truth. Revive it and instill it in others. It is our duty. Set aside legend and myth. Stop dreading about heroes, wishing for them to crop up like some fairy tale and become one. Rise. Rise and see through the lies and sweet words, see their true intentions by removing the fear clouding your mind with truth, and the hope will return. We have learned to become dependent on the lock and key for our protection, and then the figures perfect and resplendent in light, and we remain unaware to the shifting forms that have truly made us enslaved. We are blind to it. We are dead. We must come alive again with the very force that created us in the first place. Seek, knock, and find. Truth defeats all.

The path to truth will never be gone, it is just lost. It is our duty to reclaim the gift so dearly given to us. Fear not the darkness that lies beyond our walls. Fear not the walls that have so easily entangled us into a prison of our own making, their purpose twisted from their original building. Such is the path we have brought ourselves to; such is the path that our enemy uses against us. It is time for a new path, a new thought, a new life freed from this dependency. Find the path we lost. Break the fear with hope; create the hope with truth.

Dare to live the challenged life. Dare to live the harder path.

*~*~*~*~*~*~

“And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” John 8:32

“Because narrow is the gate and difficult is the way which leads to life, and there are few who find it. Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravenous wolves.” Matthew 7:14-15

Fire

A fire rages, burning and consuming, unchecked, unchallenged as it devours every particle and invades every nuance of life. It wages its war in the confines of the shadows, twisting, pulling, plucking the strings of the marionette, forcing its will until the doll submits, dictating the steps to the domineering dance. The strings are invisible. We do not care to see them or feel them, yet we move our feet to the rhythm of a song we cannot hear, believing it to be our own will. Imitated, falsified, and deceived into following a course we do not know, and we are not the author.

How then can we know of its existence?

The fire becomes deadlier with each moment that passes because it remains unseen. The fatal foe is the one unknown. Do not mistake the heat for the summer day; the sun is the cloak under which the fire burns.

Watch closely, and see the holes burned into our lives appear. In our families, our countries, our societies. Not seen directly perhaps, but the effects are ever present. It results in the very behavior of the child as they do in secret that which should not be done. In the politicians’ disguised activities they desire their constituents will never learn or the way in which the degradation of moral character declines, day after day, until children are closer to their technology than they are to their parents. Where imagination is overtaken and ruled by a unified will where deviation from the societal norm dictated by higher power is looked down upon as abhorrent. The fabric of our world is being torn asunder by a slow burn that had been kindled, sparked, and set alight centuries ago. Beyond our records, beyond the words. Only, our desensitized eyes and minds cannot use the very analytical skills we so proudly boast of in our race in order to define this change. All we can see are the words. We are words, words, words. A façade structure without definition due to the emergent relativity of every detail in society. Black standardized text on legal pads and white paper.

Fire escalates to an inferno. Raging faster, hotter, until night and day blur, and there is no time to fight or escape, even if we could see it. We play half riddles in the dark, in the shadows cast by the very flame we cannot see until the skin is burnt from our bones and nothing is left but charred remains, half baked dreams, and the putrid odor of scarred earth and melted flesh. We are the ruins of Shelley’s "Ozymandias," “look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair,” while we remain ignorant of our world falling about our ears. We claim it for our legacy, our steps toward a unified and tolerant society, but what will remain? We paint the picture without staying in the lines and the colors blur and mix until there is nothing to celebrate but sameness. The canvas changes from white to black, or rather, grey. There is no black and white anymore. And even as we stare at the artwork, trying to decipher the message hidden within its taints, we still do not see that it will all burn in the end.

Heed warning.

 As the shadows grow longer, our time closes. And we, being too scared to describe what we see, afraid of the truth which is the only thing that will remain after the scourge, shrink away as the time ticks to a close. The last grain of sand in the hour glass will sink into the bottom and the glass will shatter, and we will be impaled with the shards of the consequences we had ignored for the benefit of our immediate pleasure. We will drown in the fire that we have disregarded and chosen not to pay heed. Then, we shall not only see the angry red orange, but feel it as it burns the water and air out of our bodies.

We will return to ash.

Ashes to ashes.

Dust to dust.

The judgment is coming.