Zachary Feder

Welcome to being human. Evolution’s most recent creation. You have been designed to exert maximum devastation. Your thoughts, emotions, words and actions are the most advanced delivery systems that have ever been seen in cosmic production. But they have been installed with a single significant safety precaution. Your every shot fired travels equally in the opposite direction.

That’s right, you are a carpet bomb that cannot escape your own napalm, America and the VietCong, Hiroshima and the Atom Bomb. Black, white, rich, poor, Christianity, Judaism, Atheism and Islam. Now look at the violence in the world and tell me if you see haters, hatred or simply a pain within … your self.

Look closer.

What is it?

Be honest.

You are a weapon of mass destruction. Your will is all that stands between you and a hair trigger. How often do you pull back the hammer and think that when it cracks you will not be its benefactor? Every day your lovers, friends, family members, and fellow travelers have shots fired at them at random. How many hit their mark? How much damage is collateral?

Yet when the time comes to disarm ourselves the pattern is always the same …

1. Love your body.

You let your legs walk you, your lungs breathe you, your heart beat you without ever saying thank you. The result is that you do not love you, hear you, are completely out of touch with you. So when illness comes it will surprise you. Not because your body hides it to spite you, but because you have trained yourself to be deaf when it cries out to you.

2. Honor and respect women.

You think you respect women but you don’t. Because you have not yet been broken by one yet. And you think you honor women but you don’t. Because you have yet to see one break more courageously than you ever could. And you will.

Here’s to the fathers who were not enough, to the ones who were never there, to the ones who got it “wrong.” Here’s to the fathers that no one talks about, to the ones that we wished we’d never had to the ones that hurt us. You were the perfect fathers. Not because you did […]

Dear life,

I know that you are going to bring me pain, I know that you are going to bring me suffering, I know that you may even take my life, or the lives of those who are close to me, but I want you to know that I am ready, as much as I am able to be, and that I too will be bringing you something …

For all the tears that you bring I will cry every last one and then some. For all the grief that you bring I will mourn, and wail, and howl harder and deeper than I have ever done, out of gratitude for yet another love that has come, and pierced my heart and gone.