at a hospital in New Bedford….

………’wake up young man, its time to wake up’………. melodic in that haunting voice that can only be Layne Staley floats through the buds in my ears or just through my mindpod. This song keeps coming back to me for reasons probably unintended by the writer and at first unclear to me. The lyrics are seemingly so simple yet really not so. They’re quite poignant actually, and ring true as many songs, good songs will. They stay with you for periods of time, come back to your mind when you have need for them and make you think… about everything and nothing, about yourself, about what ‘leaves [you need] to rake up’ in your own life.  Are you ‘a crack up’… ‘dizzy and weakened by the haze’?  He of course wrote all this of his battle with heroin and his need to wake up let go of that which was killing him in a slow form of suicide. In that way it isn’t something my squeaky drug free ass can understand. But maybe in a way I’m not as dissimilar as I think.  I have ‘cracks and lines from where I gave up, making me an easy [wo]man to read.’ there have been times I’ve let ‘them bleed’ me and plead for peace.  I’ve held on to my drug of choice, so to speak, my fear of letting go and putting myself out there; being afraid to fall on my face. I’ve watched this fear take root in my life in ways that weaken and infect me. Not so different.  However, unlike our lyricist I will wake up. I need to wake up, not allow myself to slowly wither into nothing. After thirty-five years I am seeing that my affair with fear is costing me more than I am willing to give. I’ve spoken (or written) of this fear before and yet even the small steps I took to correct things haven’t changed what lies beneath. There is a current of fear that is in charge.  it’s a self chosen level of deceit that gets me through the day so that I’m ‘not a crack up, dizzy and weakened by the haze’.  But that isn’t living. On average I’m not quite half way through my life but I’m close. This scares the living shit out of me.  I can look back and think of a few things that were good and times that were great but fear has kept me from following my heart and taking control of myself. I can’t remember a time where I truly put myself first or understood what that meant. The idea of doing for self isn’t something I really grasp. I’ve never let go and looked at the leaves as they fell around me for the beauty of the leaf.  Thus I look back and have no memories of my own. Nothing that allows me to say ‘I did that and it was amazing’. I’ve born witness to amazing things, but I was a spectator. And really, who wants to be a spectator in their own life? I think my wake up call has come. So many things have piled up as of late and wading through them has been a process I’ve checked myself out of more than once.  Its time to leave behind my tidy pile of leaves and stop raking, there will always be leaves. I need to get up off my seat on the rock, under the shade of the tree and let the sun shine on my face… time to wake up.