Life on Earth. We get caught up in the weeds, feeling like this thing’s important, that thing is right, but zoom out.

A blue dot, drifting in a sea of darkness.

That’s us. The light. No matter what happens, how bad it hurts, how good it seems, it’s all just life on Earth. This is what happens here. Love and pain, laughter and rain.

The dark green park, healed by the rain
And I am healed by its life, its color
Sound, the church bell chiming
Brings me to the moment
I am alive
With so much life coursing
Through me and around me
Before me and behind me
The gift of another day
So different than the last . . .

Gray, but there was blue
Present where that was passed
Going to get some soda bread with best friends
It doesn’t get better.

I picked up another human’s trash, a beautiful painting placed on a garbage can. Maybe it wasn’t intended to be trash. I wonder why it was there, drinking in the rain like a tree.

I carried it with me around the city; when I got home I lit a candle and added some color of my own. It’s festive for halloween, fall; an orange moon, purple sky, a wraith, a black cat.

What if I could write my life backwards like Leonardo da Vinci?

Mirror script; he wrote in a way that nobody could read. Maybe he had answers, as if the end of the story he could see. But where’s the mystery?

Why would I want to know how the story ends when today—despite uncertainty as boundless as the stars—is as beautiful as life could be?

I’m sitting on a fire hydrant, scribbling in the Lower East Side. Watching life go by. Blessed doesn’t even begin to describe what I feel day and night. A full life.

Blessed to have so many things I wanna do while I’m here. Everything shifts, the air, the sky, the grass, the night. Things will be okay. All that matters is depth. How deeply can we feel every single thing we experience.

Let in the pain. It’s all part of this great theater called life on Earth. It seems like anything that happens actually has significance over anything else, but nothing has precedence: writing poetry, working on my book, focusing on personal training, just having a conversation.

It’s whatever brings me joy and peace in the moment. Whatever moves us forward. A little bit. Inch by inch.

Flowing.

The things we think don’t matter mean the most of all.

What if we judge success by what we can’t measure, like laughter, or simply how much fun we’re having? If you’re having fun, you’ve won.

These days, I’m kinda in samurai mode, striving for a harmony of strength, peace, appreciation. Sure, samurai were vicious, but this is my take, the modern samurai mindset.

Cultivating strength. Cultivating peace. Focusing on the good; seeing the world through a filter of beauty.

Striving for implies something to attain; cultivating comes from within. Stirring the energy inside—using it to dictate life, instead of letting life dictate our energy.

It’s tough, man. I feel my energy go down by the same stuff over and over. Feeling like I made a mistake. Or somebody’s disappointed, or like I’m gonna fail. I get sick with stress, or frustrated, or whatever, and my energy shifts.

The samurai draws gratitude from the struggles, wisdom from the pain.

And maybe that is something to strive for, to attain. If the goal is peace—attainable no matter the storms life blows our way—why not make that the north star. And use every challenge as a forge for that peace.

Besides peace, joy. The joy to be alive. To get to interact with these strange other creatures, who are beautiful and whacky and frightening too, but damn, we’re all just human.

So much to be grateful for. This city feels like home. You my tribe, my family, squad. It’s why I love this city, because people are energy, and I crave it. To get out of my head, to understand what matters.

These bonds, a spider’s web of smiles, soul to soul, crisscrossing across the universe, spun in silver and gold.

Laughing. Laughing at the absurdity of it all. Tripping down the street, glad I didn’t fall. But I laughed, cause I’m fallible, made of blood and bone like y’all. Sometimes there’s pain in my heart, pain in my body, and just as good as laughter is a consoling word, a nod, recognition.

When I’m blue, I step outside into the autumn sunshine, and I feel okay again.

The world feels blue, too, looks it from the cosmos.

We keep the lights on from afar.

I try to see people for what they are, faults and all, ’cause I know my own, beauty in those ashes, each of us will fall. I wanna be there to help you up. I don’t see any other point of life on Earth.

None at all but to make it shine, and that’s to make you smile.

I hope these words have done that—if not . . . oh well.