happy place

a place where i can sink

deep inside where vitriolic spill

sloshes against epidermis walls

as i find protection

within my hypodermis sanctuary.

another day, another intersection

‘so it goes’, say those who’ve reconciled their past dreams of future planes with present folds and seizures. lately i’ve been encouraged to read (as best as i can describe them) current stoics masked as theologians, priests, Buddhist monks or simply spiritual teachers seeking a less complicated perspective along this journey. Anthony de Melo for one has provided me with a deeper understanding of how my expectations of others simply illuminate their continued failure to meet these expectations. That is, all i can expect is for others to fail me and for me to ensure their failure if they are to live for my expectations. I may think or hope that they can achieve X only in light of the fact that i have at some point discerned that they’ve only truly excelled to O; or as Wilbur would suggest, i see purple in their current redness. We all do it and are, as a result, forced to deal with this imperfect truth.

But that is simply apart of life. And while i find De Melo’s prose somewhat inspiring as well as enlightening, it is clear that he has never been in love; truly in love, where he allowed himself to be naked in front of his lover with the sincerest and most profound trust for this person’s ability to see past the mud and mire to his core and meet it not with measured expectations, but with grace. Yet maybe what De Melo is suggesting is that since we are so enraptured with the hope of this preternatural notion of love that only in the removal of expectations can one truly experience love in the form of grace.

I have always been a sucker for the intersection of theory and praxis, although in looking at my life, one could easily surmise that i find more comfort in the theoretical.

There is so much romance tied up in the potentiality of grace, for instance, that its expression may never actually look anything like what theoreticians have proposed. And yet it exists; it moves; it becomes others experiences; and others experiences become grace.

I so long for grace. To see it; revel in its stories; meet it; own it; and pass it on as my own.

However, if i am to reconcile what i once understood of this grand notion called grace, i must first unpack what it once meant in my life and reform it to my current context.

i have the sinking suspicion, that is, that it starts with me reconciling me with me, and not with any other fucking individual i may come in contact with.

Today, i came to this very intersection, slide my right boot out of its stirrup and swung it up and over the hind quarters of a colt that had neither been broken or wild and in one motion glided to the ground. Unfortunately the intersection was quite nondescript like the northern hinterlands that form the landscape of a McCarthy novel. As I surveyed the ground and options that i ostensibly lay before me, some things were clear: the carrion littered road i once traversed was not an option.