Life does have its bumps and curves, valleys and mountains, and rivers and banks. My friend Tom Brown has experienced all of those in his 72 years of life. He is a man of integrity, truth and belief. He lives behind bars in a prison in Arizona. Tom spends his days teaching other inmates so they can attain their GED and start their lives over right, where they are now. He writes essays about life behind bars that are published by Internet magazines and newsletters. He follows his truth by accepting where he is and how he got there. Tom has spent the last 12 years in this environment doing what he does and being grateful for the experience. Tom did not kill anyone, he did not rob a bank, nor did he commit any act of violence that would bring this kind of sentence to life. Tom was an investor who made some questionable choices. Those choices landed him where he is now.

Tom is up for parole this year. I know he will be free soon. I also know we all will be hearing Tom’s voice in many more publications around the world. He sent me one of his essays that he wrote this month and I want to share it with you. “Peeling The Onion,” is about acceptance. It’s about faith and it’s about love. When all the layers of physical life are peeled away, love is where it always has been, within us. Tom explains this fact in a very understandable way.

Peeling The Onion

Circumstances of life often have a way of stripping us of pride and ego, and when layer after layer are peeled away, it’s like peeling an onion. Dropping all the layers that we carry- all our preconceptions, our lists of the ways we’ve failed and the ways we’ve been wronged, dropping all regret and expectation, allows us to be born again into the simplicity of spirit that arises from unencumbered living.

No matter how we protest, life keeps coming, and we cannot stop the river of time and its cleansing’s that scour us into who we are. Underneath our particular cuts and disappointments at how the dream has unfolded, we are all formed by the same force of life passing through. We finally realize that the only way to know the truth is to live through its many changes.

The current of life requires us to stand up again and again, and we are not defeated when we are pulled and worn down; we’re just exposed anew at a deeper level. In this way life keeps getting more and more precious. It is a natural law like gravity and osmosis: stand up to be worn bare. It is how everything in the way is thinned, so we can feel just how thoroughly alive we are.

In this process we find everything is lost and then rediscovered, hardship is followed by peace, suffering is followed by bliss. Everything is followed by love. Love follows even as we search for it. It’s the truth we see when the superficial preoccupations compete for our attention and rob us of our life force and it begins to melt away. When the core is finally reached, everything becomes more real; everything is felt in a new and deeper way.

No matter what occurs in our lives, we can become better people because of it. If we had not stumbled, we could not have gotten back up. And now that we have gotten up, our backbones are a little straighter and our step has more of a bounce. When we have suffered and transcended our suffering, we emerge with a sacred knowledge embedded in our cells. There is nothing more illumined than the new personality that emerges when the old one has been laid to rest.

Charles “Tom” Brown

Howard (Hal) Thomas Manogue, was born in Philadelphia, and is a forerunner to the Indigo children, a now age term for misfit with an intuitive nature, a desire to know his truth with a gift of giving and sharing. Hal retired from the shoe industry after 35 years of sole searching, and discovered his real soul.

He enjoys art, music, philosophy, psychology, nature and people.

His poems have been published by: Mystic Pop Magazine, Children Of The New Earth Magazine, New Age Tribune, Seasons Of The Soul Newsletters, Lightship News and Writers In The Sky Newsletters. His essays can be found on Hal’s Blog and Website: http://halmanogue.blogspot.com/
http://www.shortsleeves.net
He lives in Franklin Tennessee.
Hal’s new book: Short Sleeves Insights: Live A Ordinary Life In an Non-Ordinary Way will be in print in April. Visit any book store or go online to get a copy.