my longing to be face-to-face with . . . .

091215 05:33
The slow orderly minuet of death is fascinating to me.
By choice, or chance, I’ve attended both birth and death, plus much of the in-between, called life. It is my bliss at the cusp of departure to speak of values, meanings and beginnings and endings; the joy of a grandfather/grandmother to watch and applauded the play of children yet to be ground into the earth as I/we are and anticipate their adapting, improvisation and prevailing the trials and joys of their lives, safe in seeing them do so.
Curious? Of course!
From where and to what do they go? And of course--Why?
Happily I am not President of The United States, or have any authority to give or take life, save in what I am willing to live and/or die for. The Passion is something entered into as a consequence of my curiosity. Of the courage I found there I am too well aware that I lack it, in most of my days, hours, moments. Yet I remain conscious that “my time will come.” No one escapes; 100% die. And in death we become equal. The frenzy ends and everyday a Sabbath day, endless days of rest, all the same by any other name. All languages sing the same song in the end.
Fiction and children’s stories couch life in sugar coated pills unpalatable to me. Perhaps I read too much as a child seeking sanctuary in libraries?
I chortle at my choices. What would I long to have in desolation? Bible, Dictionary and Willie Shakespeare. Yes! Yet it seems in my slow dance toward what lays forward I would rather read the self who sees what I adore, present/past. And in reading that I see what sees me in the before and after life.
The Author of me/us, and all creation, is wonderful, and judges the ordinary of life, telling me to write instead of heal those whose pain I am all too well aware. And I welcome the shortness of my reach knowing that so long as I attend the extraordinary of everyday life, I am well, safe and going where intended.
I realize that I am terrible to know in my rage and passion for others since, it is so very inconvenient to have one’s attention drawn, involuntarily, to that which is otherwise avoided or denied. I am guilty of attempting to cling to many different constructs which I now analogize as rapidly deflating ‘life preservers.’ Addictions, fetishes, fixed and immutable truths, never really became more than platitudes, or palliatives, inadequate to my needs.
I am humiliated by my longing to be face-to-face with God outside God’s presence in everyone and thing I see. . . .What human hand, invention, convention could hold my heart and mind healed now so sweetly as those hands holding me vertical when I would otherwise sleep?
I am no thief of other’s truths and generally, gently, leave them to their conceits. In that statement of intention and practice I discover that there is very little potential in one individual without community or communion; not war but negotiation; win-win.