Freely oppressed under winding mythos. Not yet filled with the stuff of weeping. Complicit in the sin of numbness.
Paths of growth. I am refining my handling of immensity. But still, I am not a creature of surety. Or boldness. I am a creature of questions. An immensity of questions, and questions have their own immensities. I am learning to sit under them. To demand of them answers is to forsake the joy of knowing gently, at the pace of immensity.
These have been months of beautiful instability. I was saved in the summer. I learned in the fall that I didn’t know how to believe. I’ve spent the winter learning how to seek. What it means to want.
I am learning the magnitude of my questions. That answers are slow in coming and always incomplete. But there are such piercing fragments of beauty. Such intoxicating minutes of refuge. A thirst for quiet like i’ve never known. An impulse towards self emptying I am still afraid to act in the name of.
There is a strange kind of fear I am noticing in myself. Of loss, most generally. I’ve always known it, but as I’ve learned what it means to want things well—wanting gently, wanting patiently, wanting things for better reasons—I’ve noticed a keener edge of fear than I’ve known before. It’s a function of having had more mature experiences with what is good. To know a potent good is to risk a potent loss. The trouble is, it’s far easier to rationalize—to enclose in intelligible frames—goodbyes, losses, inactions than it is to embrace the indeterminacy of possibility. In my fallen way, I have known the impulse to choose a determinate loss over an indeterminate risk.
It is, I’m learning, a terrible lie. It is an evil urge. I mean that. It runs counter to every offered mercy, every incipient joy, every invitation to transcendence, love, or purpose imaginable. And for so many, myself included, it is the first instinct. That my nature would instinctively choose to fester in a wellknown room, killing the potential of joy, of transcendence, of ecstasy, before it would choose to be cast into the ether-river of gifted life, where joy and meaning is promised in a real capacity, where wisdom has the potential to blossom, where it is possible to be filled by what is good, is a tragedy that I cannot possibly hope to understand.
A historically fearful creature such as myself finds it deeply convenient to revel in the double-determinacy of choosing to lose what is good; the perverse comfort of self-pity and the ease of wakelessness. The urge is dominant. And yet, I’ve been graced with brushes with the alternatives.
Moments of depth where I have spoken with honesty and vulnerability. Moments of truth that have begotten further truth, further hope, further dreams. Moments of being known that taught me how to know. Moments of prayer that have left me bereft of the lackluster pride that swallows chances at potent love. Moments of humbling realization of the perfect intricacies that have christened my nascent faith.
I have tasted and seen, as it were, of something I cannot reproduce. O God, please continue to purify me of my dependence on determinate loss. Allow me to develop the wisdom and the courage to seek beyond. To love with motion, not simply with silence. Breathe in me the courage to live in the abundance of motion. Grace me with the wisdom to know my unwise silences and end them. Let me lose as you would have me lose, foregrounded in abundance.
West of Weeping
Gray city, eastern city. Air hazard of the steppes. Kinetic at the moment of wake-up. Fumigate soul with morning rhythms, launched in to ‘acts of figuring.’ Is this a numbness you invited? Did you ask for the years of accidental meditative pulling-out of sawdust from your soul? Effigy of yourself, did you ask to be made half-whole?
Lockstep with an iron young woman. Stone streets and stonier sky. Pool of oily water sings flooded promises. Learning how to meditate backwards, like praying yourself to sleep, God on my lips, beggar’s heart. I have asked for so much. I have made myself pitiful.
Those mornings were tense forever, cold forever. I have felt them in slight bursts, old explosions, tumescent ways of knowing. Do we fabricate our cold as to have something to get to know? As to have a means of speaking a foundation into existence? The word-home we make to explain ourselves, the story we perfect to cry into, to prove we have known something, to watch crumble underfoot of slightest grace.
The world I made could not withstand grace. The immaterial make the immaterial, imaginative freezing, narrative storm, story hunting, wordthief, student in apocryphal standing, my wandered cursive melting under stunning sudden heat.
Paper and pretend toil. Unwise fabric dispersed like spider silk under strain of toddler leg, careless grace, boundless grace. I thought I had to make a ground to stand on. I did not know how terrific my limit could become. Shrinking faster, pretending to coil around solid sun. Disciple of the magic careless. Caressed by pride of survival, lulled sleeping into land of knownness. I did not like being known for what I was.
I did not like being known for my immateriality. Pretense of depth, in reality appetite for anything but the nutrition of truth, goal of sleeping thru meals. How could I have expected to hold fast to you? To anything? Blind in the sober accidental, how could I have listened to you?
I do not like being known for what I used to be, I am halfway empty of all the mulch I was made of. I spat on nurture because I could not fit it into my words. I had to watch my words fail so tremendously as to bleed them, watch them spiral into showerdrains and lack substance to stand on their own. I had to watch my words die and see myself as one who could only make things that died before I saw that in trying to make myself, I was making myself dying.
Shocked by white-hot fear of grace, pulverized by the substance of love, of knownness, of being loved despite being known for what I was, broken by knownness, knit back into being by mercy. Forced to listen by tenderness, forced to see by gentleness, forced to learn by stillness. Forcefed life by things beyond words, thrust into the miracle of substance.
Who has words for healing? I am healed in having been shown how to limp towards healing. To pat sandcastles of words, childish words, childish structures, childish substance, but substance nonetheless. To stare back at the comfort oozed by old Sodom and be spared a fate as salt every time. To have been held gently into a chance at substance. To stumble as a habit and be given the stars in return. Who has words for healing?
Who has words for redemption? I have walked so carelessly, so cruelly into warm rooms of feasts and music. I have wasted so many moments. I have hated so many angels. I am beyond explanation and i am given form in ancient light, in mystery I used to hate. I am the product of my own broken covenant with death and I am given license to imagine endlessness. Who has words for redemption?
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I got out of bed at 2 PM today, fistful of sawdust, headful of old death. A broken day, a failure’s day. I prayed that You would redeem this day I had wasted, O Lord. Tonight I am awash in unearned recompense. Thank you for honoring the prayers I forgot I had prayed.
Absolutely gutting-ly beautiful as usual