Who steals the gratitude every morning and so that I need to be reminded every day of all the stuff that’s lovely? Shouldn’t I have learned to care about it all well enough by now? I love the things that show their faces to me because I am new to showing my face and lord knows I need good examples. I am new to choosing. I am so new to choosing. I promise I wish I were better.
Working hard until the moments where I don’t and finding fault with things I do not remember correctly. With burning stratosphere eyes, I am failing to do you justice in quiet ways. Illuminated by being known, affirmed by close readings of books I do not love. The beatific trials of laying low. The supremacy of gentleness. I get sick sometimes and I think I always will. I promise I wish I were better.
But there are better promises than my own. The ones that know me well enough to promise what I do not know I need. You are teaching me that I am still so young in learning and thinking and I spend so much time not doing either that I am wildly in need of what I prescribe.
Part of good growth is thinking about what you need to think about. And part of good thinking is knowing that that’s not good enough. Thrust facefirst into the immortal and the fundamental, I do not have the answers saved for God. And I cannot think my way into becoming what I wish that I could be.
So I pray for wisdom. I have thought about what I think that means. I think it has something to do with correctness. It feels like the thing that guides thinking. It directs paths to correctness. But it’s not correctness. It’s bigger than that. Older than that. Wisdom exists without correctness but correctness doesn’t exist without wisdom. The delight of the eternal and the wonderful.
It’s something I don’t get to create but it’s something I get to receive and love and honor with the way I move about the world. Loving and honoring wisdom feels like a way towards more wisdom. The attitude that lets you stay receptive to wisdom and disciplined in moving in it. It’s something I don’t have enough of to keep that attitude beyond the few moments where I can look at absolution in eye with even a fraction of the clarity it’s owed.
Maybe that’s what wisdom is. Looking at glory with the clarity it’s owed. I spose that means our wisdom is forever incomplete until it isn’t. Maybe a wise way of living is embracing the futility of being wise and dedicating yourself to a life of searching for ways to refine the way you know the world. Doing it because glory deserves it. Because it’s good.
I am reminded everyday of how far I have to go. But I’m learning a better way to want to learn. I’m not there but I’m moving. Being moved might be more accurate. O God please teach me how to get there.
You are painting sunsets on the inside of my eyelids. Smoking gold sinking over the favored city. The united front of paper children sleepwalking over hallowed paths of technique. Cold growth wisping from the windows of the ones that keep the temples frozen. Scattered young men finding strange ways forward to places where the worst warm nights are worth it in their way. Forgive the ways I worry. It’s just that I have not forgotten.
All Luv.
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