bye bye blackbird

Winter is here but the leaves still lie in clumps in front of my house like the death throes of autumn. I have lost so much these past few months but it has only served to bring clarity to my eyes and perhaps a slight tremble to my fingers. Everything I know has been marked by dread and the uncertain joy of a degenerate gambler throwing everything he has into the pot. I have thus far succeeded in keeping my head above water, as they say. What immunity I have found is not a result of virtue, but rather a keen sense of disinterest. All the rats left this ship a long time ago. These are the birth pains of a brand new day. We are but dust, and once you have died it will matter little whether or not you made your mark on the world or not. If we are going to live, let’s live for our neighbors and for beauty, for creation, for art, for anything that is not destructive. Life fully lived is a balance struck between intolerable beauty and immense pain. It is flowers on the one side and ashes on the other, and it all ends in tears.

"a dream may be the highest point of a life"

Here in the backwaters, all we do is sit and hold out hope for rain. We are always drinking whiskey out of plastic cups and looking for nature to even the score somehow.
I have found that you can never build on anything in this life; the sands are always shifting beneath our tenuous bedrocks of hope. The moon continues to haunt us through the night, long after we close our eyes and try to sleep. It seems like everything is marked only by loss, and in the end it is the only constant thing we know. I have a great suspicion that in the end, all of our dreams will be as imaginary as the band around the equator.

When the sun falls from the sky all I know is emptiness and disappointment. There a thousand bad tastes in my mouth every time I even start to think about the overwhelming sense of loss that permeates anything good that seems to have happened in this world. It’s not depressing, not the end of the world, just simply the way things rest at the close of the day.

I was riding my bicycle along the beach the other night, with the full moon shining over the Atlantic and following me like an arrow across the water. Right now I just want to be anywhere but where I am. If I could hide from God right now, if I could stop believing that there is something that can transcend all of this loss, then I would take the last train to nowhere faster than you could sell me the ticket. Facing the darkened sea that night I realized it looked like anywhere in the world but where I was, and that feeling sort of hit me just right.

God has us all, from the skeptic to the zealot, from the mystics and fools to the capitalists in their steel towers. In fact he is in all of them, bringing them closer in that unity to the pacific fury of the Eucharist. God is a dying leper in India as surely as he is anything else. I want to forget all of this loss, all of this emptiness, and just be content with the million unrequited loves that slowly paint the masterpiece that is my broken and uneven relationship with the world around me.

the winds of community and the myriad ways in which they blow

Summer is hardly here and already our flowers have wilted and died. The promises of spring have faded into memory, and we are left here in the same desert places that we knew in the first place. I suppose I was sinful in my hopefulness. It may well stand true that it is, in the end, too much to expect anything of anyone; I don’t really know. I have come to a place where my peace is no longer dependant on these things. The days pass like anything else, the nights seem to grow longer and longer, and I am just floating through all of this much like the ghost I have always tried to be.

Though the evidence seems to suggest that I am less dead than before; I am learning to embrace the dark moments as easily as I drink in the lighter ones. It is all becoming part of the same unbroken line. Perhaps this all means that the ghost has been put to rest, that my passage has been arrested for a time and I can just exist in peace with whatever God sees fit to send my way. I am still hurt by the indifference of others, I still grieve over the losses we have been experiencing, and I am still unsure about what any of it means; but somehow I can see that our deaths do not define us in a negative way, but only exist in order to deepen our compassion, to teach us how to love and be loved in spite of everything.

Outside these barren walls that we have constructed, here in this desert place, may we find what life remains and celebrate it. May we come from our distant solitary sojourns and meet at the table that will always wait for us, well-laid and vibrant with the fullness of what we most need.

Some Parting Words

It is the anger that is most surprising. We are a society of large reactions, and if our current state was a ping-pong match and not a social philosophy, we might be doing rather well at the moment. But as it stands things aren’t as peachy as they might be. I know I don’t match up so well and in the future I am going to learn to keep my mouth shut. We have become very adept at fitting into the whole thing but I fear I have become a lost cause. Oh well. Nous habite mais mourir, and more power to it. Everyone wants to bend everyone else to their vision, to make everyone see things the way they see them. I know very few people personally who do not feel this way. I myself have been this way at times.

It is the disease of our days, and it breeds hopelessness. There doesn’t seem to be a line that can be drawn, and for all the line-drawers out there it makes things seem mighty desperate. I don’t even know what compassion means to people anymore. I wish to meet people who live like birds and laugh like fools; but I fear they have gone the way of the buffalo. These are strange times, and I hope to move on to something else before the winter runs its full course.

Draw away from your tyrannies, friends, and embrace your enemies. Try to love someone before it is too late. Let’s not figure things out like a computer, but instead let us leave the ninety-nine behind to search for the one. I don’t wish to speak on this much more in the future, because I have said all I know to say. I am hopeful for the future in spite of everything, but the indictment stands: we live in the age of the cynic, and we’d sooner spend our time counting flowers than smelling them.