But I Have Never Been Alone
It’s beeeeen awhile and the world shines quiet cause I haven’t LOOKED at it in a bit too long. I need to taste some dirt, get something real under my fingernails and breathe sunset air not smoked out by flashing lights and eager, well-meaning, probably lovely youngins who I haven’t given a fair chance to be lovely. Either way I have ignored the night I love. I have ignored the sweet, cracking earth in the slow, steady, hush of the dark. I owe the night an apology again because my attention has been trained resolutely inward.
I am these days, kaleidoscopic. Not in the worst ways. Contrary, actually. I am stretched and hurled in directions I used to be afraid of and now I can see a future where I flow on plans greater than I can hatch. I’m learning how to work into the future. I’m learning how to remember more than the things that make me want to be worse at remembering. There’s all this beautiful stuff, all these beautiful people.
And its all very fast, which I don’t enjoy. Though, I think if I only ever grew at the pace I feel safe walking, I’d have retained my stunted understanding of landmarks. When you move too slow and refuse to pay attention, landmarks are scarce. So you start naming the things you do notice as landmarks and you build a whole world around things that can’t support you cause they weren’t meant to support you. I have relied on the things that cannot support me and I have built a world that required routine rebuilding and never once thought to relocate.
Now it’s a bit different. I think I have never been meant to build my own world. There is a world built ahead of me, one higher in purpose and potential than I have been capable of imagining. It’s big and bright and I look back in anger at the years I have spent barricading myself against the glow because I was afraid it would illuminate the parts of me I was not strong enough to confront.
It did illuminate. Everything got bright and everything got dusted with a little more truth than I had ever known before. All my lies and all my unsavory structures and delinquent habits and juvenile reservoirs were exposed and scattered in favor of something I am only just beginning to grasp, something too bright to make out entirely.
There is a figure in the bright, walking purposefully, gentle steps, small echoes but eternal echoes. Calm emanations. Steady breeze of peace. It is ancient and it is more than I can bear.
And sometimes I fail to bear. And sometimes I am afraid and I dive reckless into the cesspool I curated for those decades and I am ashamed and I am reminded of how low I can be brought. But I am reminded how much higher I have been taken, daily in the late summer breeze I walked with a purpose not mine until I began to understand it was and had always been. I was sad under the most glorious sunset I had ever seen and I though of the ways I am far from the moments I imagine.
The dusty sunset over broken back Appalachia. The night I saw fireworks like shouts of joy from the deep woods and the small towns that nobody has tried to love. The somber stars staring thru moonroof, keeping pace with my headlong rush away from accountability, guiding me back towards things that I am intimidated by the depth of. The slow walk in the interrupted dark, the detergent smell on the steps, the sigh stepping thru the door. The teary goodbyes from a place I love dearly and am afraid to go back to. The paralyzing fear that I can lose the most wonderful things I know.
The price of knowing wonder, knowing good, knowing care, is knowing all the destructive power of self protection. The unwise kind that is impartial to grace and careless to life. The fog nobody finds their way to anybody within and nothing is loud and nothing is scary but everybody keeps hurting and bleeding slow until its all gone and there are no kindnesses to hold on to and all the copper sunsets thru the puzzle piece treeline are obscured in the distance and they can’t mean what they mean because you cannot look for them.
Pull back the fog piece by piece, O God. The started work of seeing and knowing kindness for what it is. You are open to the frightening and violent and cutting blade of loss. You see dead forests and plague houses and there are nights that will not abate in their shrieking and you will tremble and you will fall and you will know the cold clarity of breaking. And you will retreat into the fog again and again.
But you will have tasted kindness and care. The nobility of the morning, with breath steaming into the frozen sky all lit with candy flames and the kind eye of the sun unclouded and generous again as it was in older days. The majesty of the night with the chorus of everything you cannot see but whose endless gentleness you can feel pulsing over your skin and the sharp dark breeze that reminds you to hold fast to warm good things and the lonely headlights speeding home to people they will always love and the steady sway of the wind that is always a bit louder in the night.
And I have known kindness and I cannot go back.
All Luv Forever :)