An emergency prompted I sit in a lawn chair on the Gulf of Mexico with my family this weekend, slathering layers of pink pigment from the Sun’s demand on to my shoulders and chest. I wore a shirt in four days the same amount I stood under the shower faucet — once total, to the agreement of my self and my what would seem the inner interlocution concerning my life’s direction, which is not as large and complex as I once thought it to be.

Ask a year ago — or to another extreme — two years ago, what I ought to be doing with my life, and surely some insecure pretense would say “I know exactly what!” though no actions embodied seem to provide a paralell verdict. Of course, much of that’s been discussed here and rather than repeating motions of awareness I only wish to build upon them and show some forward movement.

My family continues to be a strong source of scaffolding for my existence — not only a reassurance of who I am, but moreover a reinforcement of who I ought to be. My sister especially, for in our adult years all the shared experiences of she and I with our parents, whom I love deeply and understand more and more deeply that who I am is because of who they consistently have been for no less than some two decades and more than a half, her understanding of unintelligibly long sentences if this is an example.

I love them much that I find more and more my placement here is a man of Family — a man who understands his household is what best embodies who humans in general ought to be: the mutual selflessness, giving, benevolence, and well, ability to laugh at each other.  And with burned shoulders and the curliest hair my mother framed on my face and the dimpled grin my father placed in my cheekbones, I’m sitting in bed, back in Dallas, hoping for so much, after years of what seems like missing out on it all.

Some things from this weekend have stayed, where as some were meant to stay with the weekend. And specifically how it ought to apply in my life. What ismost valuable?

I’ve spent the better part of the last decade resolving I was a single man, fit for the work of the Kingdom and what extra time singleness allows for study and for service. I searched deep and wide for whether or not it was that precise calling or my own anti-calling (that of selfishness and to control my own time, effort, and finances). I’m coming closer to the understanding that it’s indeed not the former.

These newfound (though not sudden) discoveries have also shed intense light on how I ought to live. I told my parents only a few months ago (on their extravagant back porch, somewhere aloof my memories of that very same space growing up though it occupies the same; lawnmower sounds and allergy attacks), that the next roommate I have will be my wife, to further solidify earlier statements.

Probably the best thing I have done in years is move in to this house — Maté — benefiting from and hopefully benefiting others by sharing this communal space to musicians, scribes, searchers, the depressed, the most burnt and bitter to the most reverent and rejoicing. If ever I have grown socially in such a compressed amount of time, it’s surely these past six month. And even after a few months living here I might have had the thought, “I am never living alone again.”

After all, I am quick to say things far too soon.

Tonight I spent a drive to Whole Foods in Lakewood, an equal distance from both Ellsworth and from Vickery as is Maté, and purchased a plot of goods I might dine on the steps of either/and. I had accumulated much in my silence on the beach this weekend, and when I returned to Dallas proper after the four days away, I wanted nothing more than to revisit past nights of unpacking I have hardly known but one night a week or less since moving here.

In so doing, I lead west up Abrams to Richmond, took a left and went on through Skillman, making a left at Matilda. A few minutes later I was at the stoop of Vickery in which so much clarification internally was reached about my time in New York — so much was spent with one I love — and so much searching was exercised in light of, well, what seemed to be the entire world staring. I sat with an Avery Seventeen and looked to You, great God, and thought how I had missed trusting you like I once did, and that thankful that I am now again learning more sincerely and truly than ever.

I spent a good thirty on those steps, before I knew the next stop was ultimately to take a right from Mockingbird and on down to the Williamson trail-mast swingsets. I didn’t swing, though at those picnic tables we know I sat and stared at the inertia above the gravel pit, the question “why would you tell me that?” & a smile I have not felt as genuinely since.

W an icon of Present’s kin; perhaps an in
experience, the x-height a proper stand
For a tiny little Ampersand. Then & Now;
Now & Forever, and so and so on.

That curly twirl of a typographical trick cures a mortar
between Liquid bricks (someday seemed a prickly
kiss, but as is known not all will writhe & wilt)
stacked to the top of the Spillway wall.

I’ll sprint with wind here, many times have I
laid bare in the summer scorch, some
days I show my face, for worth. That in
accessibility that yelled anonymity
is the now impossibilty, thank GOD: I
need no one to be myself
under a cloud formless as it
Was, Is, and Yet.

Think is where I’ve come since my friend Esther told me about it a few years ago. Hidden away on Mercer in the basic center of New York University, I am typically the only one here not to work on a paper due the next morning, or to share heavy-handed opinions about my psychology professor. I’m this odd hybrid of outsider-in(sider-out), and know enough about the city to feel comfortable, and some of its nuance from having tapped to its rhythms for a year; while outside of an understanding of the context as more current than my time living here.

Each time I’ve flown into the city in the past four years, accompanied by the portion of motion sickness I inherited from my mother is an overwhelming shame or desire for reconciliation — to make right what I thought was so wrong, and that in part my purpose in some trips past was that. However, on Wednesday night my plane flew over Citifield near Jamaica, and already I could tell something was utterly different about the hue of this trip as compared to all the cyclically-caustic-carbon-copy colours preceding it.

The appeal of New York is gone for me in so many ways — at least in the ways that relate to my past belief that by moving back here I might be able to fix the failure I considered in leaving. But why did I feel the failure? And why did I let that shit seep into my every thought, trickle down my limbs, and surround every sinew and stem in the obscure corners of my brain?

In the way that the prideful man is at the center of his own universe, the victim too is at the center of his. Made less himself by entitlement, self-preservation, and self-seeking, while misled that it is actually these things which make him more himself. And the deeper one becomes in his entitlement (or misperception of it), the greater the victim he becomes. And through all this, the victim was never a victim at all — though the psychological framework he himself has constructed continually, subconsciously, fortifies it all, and layers and layers build up. And the cycle is terrible, if for the mere fact that none of it is grounded in reality, though for other reasons as well.

In the deep parts of this past fall, something remarkable happened. I began praying again — I began trying to believe that kind of thing was actually effectual, and that it actually had some function in my life. It wasn’t some existential-theological-battle to begin again. I didn’t start for selfless reasons —  I started to pray again for therapy. But the activity itself definitely lends itself to a posture of selflessness — of admitting that I myself lack power to fix stuff. I started because it provided me cathartic satisfaction, and I didn’t – at that point – think that it was accomplishing little anything past that.

I’ve sung all the hymns. “My chains are gone,” and the Gospel’s power to do so and such and such and on and on. “But from what,” I’d always thought. Sure, I’d memorized the Answers, but had I ever come into an experience of slavery in need of liberation? From what was my Exodus?

It wasn’t until the fall of 2009, when I started to try to start to try to pray again that I realized how enslaved I was to so many things — of shame, guilt, self-seeking, and the behaviors allowed by all of those, and that also allow for all of those.

On my first night in the city only days ago, I called my dad from the thirty-second floor rooftop, looking out over Lower Manhattan — Wall Street, The East River, & the Brooklyn Bridge. Sipping a Brooklyn Lager, I told my dad about the consummation of these realizations, that I think only could really reach this point with the assistance of another visit, especially since I consider my last trip in August to be the absolute center of that low season.

I told him I was ready to be home, and that I no longer felt like I had to either visit, and, especially, move to New York to truly find the meaning of that word. I no longer have a need to fix anything here — not because anything was repaired, but because my perception of it was.

I want to believe the messy parts of me are being redeemed, and I’m learning that a big part of believing that is, well, believing it.

If the waters could quit to rush so quickly to surround my knees in an instant and be gone the same, I might at least have caught a ripple from your skip, like at the lake, at Willow lane, just to the south of Winsted and the winded runners of White Rock.

And If I could save a ripple from your skip, I’d bottle it in the best mason jar my mother could find, and I’d place it on top of our white armoir, and I take the a small, savory sip each night just before sleep, until it’s gone in a week. And when it does I will always return to the gulch, liken it to the lake, beneath the bur oak tree, and that delicious, swallowing cycle.

It’s steamy even this early on an April morning — the sidewalk grit cakes on my boots, and between the buildings the street-scent is a thick wall of waste and exhaust through which all of these hurriers-along must pass. I dodge a few pedestrians and slide into the back of the line of about 25 people, in a location just outside the door. Peering into the building, everyone is dressed in black with facial expressions to match.

I began planning the trip downtown, processing my past experiences in that peak-hour Six Train, and how accustomed I’d become to standing beneath the armpits of rail-hangers, tightly pressed at the perimeter of the man’s belly off a Queens-bound graveyard shift. I tried counting the stops in my head, but even this soon after moving away I couldn’t remember how many were before Bleecker, where we were to meet, like in the song. “I’ll just need a coffee,” I thought, my head pounding, and ended up ordering two.

A text message exchange and the trip was shortened to the exit at Astor Place — the spot where, when I first moved to New York, I sat with my father on a June-dawn patio over a cappuccino and a sack of almonds, after having driven together up the east coast with everything I owned. Apt that a place so special for me early might take on a newborn meaning.

So off the train and finding each other, we walked around the West Village, took a few photos, and before realizing it lunch time had come and gone and nothing remarkable had happened, except for some shared experience of weight. And almost avoiding anything that either implied or required connection, we could focus on the buildings and the history of the place and really struggled to find anything else that might squeeze out the silence.

We boarded the train again to head north to Central Park to walk around the reservoir to Belvedere Castle. Under the fortress walls, we walked into the long, cool shadows of a Manhattan afternoon, and at the corner of the stone wall where the sun emerged, we took a right up a green hill to the exterior of Sheep’s Meadow, and sat on a bench. And sitting there with pale lips, I stared at your hand, which, like so many things that April afternoon, I couldn’t hold.

Better than any argument is to rise at dawn and pick dew-wet red berries in a cup.

I can recall explicitly when I appreciated this belief enough to embody it. Readying for the early mornings of Spring, preparing to rise with creation, as much happens in the rhythmic rising I forfeit by the sleeping late, by the rising slow, and by the ales that help me into that. And the redemption of this space is to help me to keep covenants much like this one. To assist me in the awareness that what I have written is not only what I — at one point — have wanted and believed, but rather what I shall continue to believe, what I shall continue want, and the ways in which I will continue to behave that express these beliefs, desires, and renewing inclinations.

In the coming months, I have decisions to make (and I always do of course — decisions are how we are active, moral beings). And the point is not to consider these as with less levity than those preceding, but with as much gravity; with as much opportunity as it provides to be more myself by, in increasing and greater measures, denying myself. Denial of my own pleasures, that which protects and preserves and gratifies me, in trade for what impresses upon the community, provides to the community, and what strengthens and makes it less than simply a collection of parts and more clearly a unified whole.

This process is slow. But at least I’m finding some sort of patience as a replacement for despair. The last year I not only had little vision for this, but I even came to points where the last desire among mine was to find the vision for this — to understand ethics specifically in light of the coming Kingdom — and rather how I might be able to live bereft of its gigantic, effective reality. A journey in humanism! I found that while it was a new process, and one that allowed me to see reality in some different light than what my upbringing and the decisions of my early twenties might have protected me from, I came to see that the results were my own isolation, my own attachment to habits self-gratifying, and a personal climate of self-full-ness. And that light which I might have come to find was no less than the cold shadow of laziness and of self-seeking (and the means through which I might worship to that end).

When we come to a clearer and more sober estimate of our own limitations and responsibilities, that makes it possible more genuinely to love our neighbor.

Last night, the most Silent Saturday, I went to bed early with the express purpose that I could be with with the sun as it rose, to experience what This day has meant and means as the Centerpiece of History, and how, somehow, in spite of the ways which I am able to be and to do terrible, I am being made into something beautiful, which is a thing I must remember & and I must rehearse. And by keeping those covenants I lay here, I lay down my self.

Christos Anesti;
Alithos Anesti.

Christos Anesti;
Alithos Anesti.

Christos Anesti;
Alithos Anesti.

scurrying up to Mt. Saint Helens last night I laid deep in the ash — burrowing an aperture some six-foot-three; a taller-two-unit benevolence. Crawling inside, shoveling the ashes with cupped hands into a stifling, sooty roof, I pulled the particles in through my mouth, and on into my lungs. Embers, cinders, scoria and slag — some seaweed and kelp in this awful ocean!

And I could know the moon hung hard on its indigo precipice, shouting:

“From Dust You Came! From Dust You Came!”

dust, with some semblance of Life. If
I can at all accept, this
among the most beautiful
paradox — welcome most
when most unwelcome.
Give without promise to
receive, be dust, if dust
might perceive.

It’s been an interesting three months. Saturated by work, by much exploration, and by new contexts through which to understand reality. I’ve lived in a house known as Maté for going on four months now, and my roommates and all these new guests they bring, continue to make me a better person, whether I am able at the time to see it.

Honestly, a lot of the time I can’t see it. I’ve been extremely sad — I’ve been extremely lonely through it. Some wiser, older (people who don’t like to call themselves) artists I’ve talked with about this — in pursuing passion and the meaningful Work, and they mention the same. Some about those of us who choose this line of work and how it makes sense for our melancholically natural disposition — some saying it’s the work itself which leads to the feelings. We can’t help but believe it’s bits of both.

When I first decided upon living alone and working alone only 1.5 years ago, I sought ways to become a communal artist, namely — how do I involve the Body (The Whole) into the part that is specifically me, and the behaviors which I only can do by myself — into the process. I’m still seeking that (I’m sure always I will, unto Perfection), becoming confident in what I do, and most importantly, becoming confident in who I am within my community in light of that and how this what I’ve been given is given to give to others.  That, I’m finding, is the point.

Two weeks ago, my friend John came to Dallas from Wheaton, where he is a student in graduate school, studying Biblical languages, exegesis, and all that which might make him a more prepared missional worker for what we know as the Kingdom, here now and not yet fully. I was surprised by all the ways illuminated through our past, his presence here, and his presence in days to come by who I am, who I was (when we met and when we on a regular basis shared life), and who I will be, and what light that shed on the anxiety I’ve recently felt in terms of my living situation, my work situation, and my Kingdom situation.

The latter the most important, because I recognize him to to be perhaps the most significant indicator and catalyst among men (besides he who is God who became the New Man) to make a difference in my life. We shared good gifts of the creation — including the best of ale, food from his African context (ethnic!), and the most wonderful conversation. Among the most poignant and valuable memories I am positive John and I cultivated two weeks ago.

It’s Palm Sunday, and we as believers say Hosanna! Christ has come, Christ is coming, and Christ will come. And what this means for us as those who seek Life Renewed is nothing to downplay. I pray, I pray, I pray, I pray.

I never pray.

From this spot the observations are new, and in another way they are the same observations from a slightly different angle. No more front steps at Vickery; no lawnchair ellipsis by the barn at Ellsworth. And while in the physical sense there is no presence of these things, the past is ever-present to me, and the future rightfully less (rightfully, if for Now). Much of what I have tried to reconcile within my self over the last year is that which I can not reconcile, as these types of things rarely ever are.

The decisions I have made that have negatively affected people I enjoy greatly, care for deeply, and those with whom I long to relate, well, indefinitely, bring a huge dissatisfaction that I can not fix by either worry by sincere sorries, which, I think, might have brought a huger dissatisfaction months ago. But I’m realizing the move-on; the life-lived properly and thoughtfully. Redemption is much less about applying a topical cream for the treatment of a virus and altogether more about treating the source and inward condition that leads to outward expressions & behaviors.

I’ve had a few friends mention to me I think too often about what other people think, and that I am a bit too hard on myself for it. That might be (is) true, but there are a few different ways that general category can express — one sits in looking to other people for security, and another (among many I suppose) is in looking to others because you value shared ideas.

I want to believe it is mostly the latter (and I do think it is — or at least it is the motive from which a lot of decisions I’ve recently made flowed), but I also can’t deny the complete invalidity of the other, which is where care must intersect and inform. Of course much of what I want to value is not what I actually value, if to take a taste of my behavior. What I mean to say is the things I value in ideal or in hope are not the same things I value in embodied existence, which rather than meaning I am unable to connect with reality ideality, but rather that I don’t actually value them.

Which is to say a lot about the extent to which I hope for them. Because if truth is ideas less than it is embodiment, how am I to create a path with word feet can’t don’t follow?

Baileys and a Christmas kiss, sticky on the lips, ether in the mass; either in a mask. Ink spun from the sinew and marrow, deep from the blood that pulses to the toes and back. Rehearsals to be shared. Memories to redeem, to dream, the memories to create; create to memorize.

Lick the bubble-gum seal and stick it to the back, wax stamp, and send to Surrey.

“Text Edit.”

There.

It is Christmas Eve here in Dallas. In some places it is Christmas Day – the places across the Atlantic. I can imagine (I haven’t had a TV in years) each network news channel in the majority of living rooms tuned into Santa’s Route, tracing his trajectory from the North Pole to Norway, Holland, to Ireland, England, all across Europe. Into China, India, a long stop on the coasts of Australia, on to the South Pacific, and then for the long flight in a sled to the Americas (another form of ethnocentrism, as if us here are the grand finalé).

The anticipation is growing. The cheeks of children in the culture who trusts in the image of Santa grow warm and red, and mothers are making Snickerdoodles for him to feast just after his descent down the chimney chute.

My 25th Christmas looks quite different from that for obvious reasons, not limited the lack of innocence achieved not only from the realization that the idea of Santa is an idea more about benevolence and giving than it is a literal character who spends the majority of his life in the North Pole.

The lack of innocence is greater. And with the removal of innocence and the illiumination of reality — which ever place on the spectrum we can speak of — comes a great responsibility. Some shock. Some discouragement. But ultimately with it comes responsibility. And a greater regard for those who are not pawns in our own game. With innocence pride is more easily practiced in its forms. With the removal of innocence and the revelation of things greater comes the necessity to practice life (the ethic of Love) in as nuanced a way as reality is becoming.

My Christmas Eve 2009 is markedly different than all before for a number of reasons. With it comes a kind of great loss. The loss of not only the idea of something possible but the loss of a person with whom ideas and those related were shared.

With it comes me sitting in the dining room of an apartment which, in my mind, I have not been a resident for nearly six months. A courageous wind rattles my windows, and the sleet we in Texas tend to call snow out of optimism and hope spackles and pounds the panes, dripping as quickly as it melts into an icy slush on the sills.

With it comes me clumsily searching my computer directories for the program called Text Edit, which would allow me to put to flesh ideas which are circling in my head and not completely formed so that what is necessary to put down in black characters on the white canvas becomes what will allow me to remember the experience, and eventually to rehearse it.

My trips to Colorado with my family near the Christmas climax have become for me not only a time to share thoughts, memories, and our total selves together outside the context of work which usually prevents it, but it has also become for me a gauge on the particular growth I’ve experienced as a person. It is the only tradition left, from what I can tell, that remains solid and necessary for my family, and therefore I attach a giant significance to it.

I was in Colorado only one day ago for this very trip. At 4am yesterday my family and I rose (prematurely, I’ll add) to come home. Not once has Dallas felt like that. When I was overcome suddenly in the early hours of the day to be Home — meaning Dallas — I welcomed what sort of new reality this was for me. For the first time I was not imagining myself in some future that, to have been made possible, was in a different location geographically. Of course there are things to expect and to hope for in Dallas that excited me — living in a house with friends, becoming increasingly connected to and meaningful from within the community, and the possibility to, with what I’ve been given, participate in the redemption of parts (and eventually the whole) of culture.

Even with that, I was surprised by this new experience of actually being drawn to Dallas. To take advantage of my life here in a way that could actually make a difference in the lives of others. To focus less on what my travels would take me from and more on where my committment would lead to me unto.

Make sure you run from something
And not away from

It burned my ears in September when I bought my plane ticket to Queens, NY for December 1. And it is still easily as meaningful.

It is this very thing, and by the power of the relationships I share with people I consider to be some of my closest friends and sharers of contextual experience that has stopped me from moving to New York City after years of planning to do so. It is this very thing which formed a giant hole in me for any of the things I’ve been planning that have fit into that kind of plan.

So with Christmas Eve I know that what has been lost will eventually be revealed in the way other things have been found. This is what Advent is about, is it not? And the hope is, of course, that what comes forth on Christmas Day is the very reality through which redemption comes, is made available to us as humans, and allows us to share and to give, and to redeem ourselves what has been broken. The power is not ours — but may we be agents. And may we plead to be.

I am sure I have little idea of how to fill that role.

These words have never meant as much
As they now mean to me.

But again now better paired with the color and variety and movement in my late life are the little knickknacks and ornaments and sparkly, glittery toys I hang with a hook to each blog post, tie a little ribbon of a Title to the top (with a little purple Permalink), Categorize and Publish the piece. It’s not called WordPress for a reason. It’s not called reason for a WordPress.

Is this the same “I’m sorry I haven’t written!” or “Excuse my silence” that you’ve read (and from which you’ve subsequently unsubscribed) on every other Starbucks-sipping quaint little Monday morning blog at least once a month? I guess. Is it to tell you I’ve lost the creativity that before made it possible to pen and prod and proliferate with all-too-awful (awesome?) attempts at alliteration? Not as much. In fact when I’ve heard people say something similar to, “I just don’t have a creative mind” I mostly hear is “I need an excuse for the work I’m not willing to put in” and “I just don’t feel creative” means “I’m feeling lazy.”

I am coming to understand better if only in personal rhythm that Creativity is not the result of some monsoon or heavy rain of inspiration, but rather a synthesis of the Rain, the Soil into which it sinks, and the dedicated farmer who bloodies his hands to cultivate it. It is far less a gift freely given and freely received than it is fruit of discipline.

So I’m sucking in my gut, throwing out an obnoxiously loud expletive at myself, rolling out of the figurative bed, ironing my proverbial pleated black chinos, and getting to work by banging the keys so loud my grandma in Victoria calls to complain.

Suddenly I’m sitting in the aisle seat in the Emergency Row Exit next to a man named Barron. He repeatedly calls me a Tall Drink of Water with an aggressive snarl and wink, not stopping with the comment on my jawline.

He orders me a vodka tonic and I drink it down without coming up for air. It is my oasis in the middle of a wilderness with an undesirable companion. Barron leans his head on my shoulder, and fastens his sleep with a snore or more.

A good thing for the Wendy Worriers is that the emergency row (while in some ways building on the paranoia of the possible plane malfunction or air attack or whatever way you want to direct your anxiety) is that the flight attendant during the early-flight-emergency-directions is clearly heard and loudly so through the intercom, directly overhead.

Add or subtract a few rows and, well, who knows. Maybe you’ll miss out on the details of how to use your seat as a flotation device in case you crash into the Bermuda Triangle or your oxygen mask if you exceed the atmosphere and end up somewhere out there.

Intercoms are not evenly dispersed among the passengers, unless you’re on one of those fancier international versions with the headphones and Robin Williams films. No, not everyone gets their own personal pan pizza! But each does get a slice of the whole — even if it’s not evenly cut portions.

In the airplane ceiling, each intercom is placed in seat increments — usually something like 1 for every 6 passengers. What makes it work so that all passengers hear what’s coming from the distant or not-too-distant speaker is cranking the volume in one intercom so that sound waves carry the distance to the passenger furthest.

Seat 3 of 6 of course has the best position because the stereo effect is least lopsided, considering they are sitting just behind and just before a speaker. The person furthest away might have a difficult time hearing while the person closest might have a hard time not covering their ears.

In some ways, the realities which I have been forced to believe or accept (as one whose experiences accumulate and gain or lose meaning) have been much like placement near or far from the intercom, and the ways in which I choose my seat assignment ahead of time for ease and laze — if I could keep the most painful things at a distance by sitting a few rows back from the speaker, the content of what was said might be heard enough for awareness, but, also enough for detachment.  And somewhere around row 4-6 is where I’ve been for the last year.

In the cycles it is the way it must be — when tickets are claimed on the flight for everything but the emergency exit row, and the red signs surround and flash, and the voice from the intercom is surly and gregarious and prudent. And suddenly it is all heard more clearly than before — the warnings and the instructions. And just as suddenly I know what I’ve failed to hear in the past (read: what I have ignored), and that it must be time to do something about it.

The rain alone doesn’t give me a thing to reap. I need the soil, the sow of the seed, the rake & hoe, the patience, the humility, consistency, and the confidence that That toward which I am working will yield gain, even if the process itself feels mostly about what’s being lost. It’s time to bloody my hands.

And sure, Fall is a one. That isn’t what is meant. It is much greater than college peacoats and pipes – it is one which transcends the annual Cycle – one no greater than language for those within it to better understand themselves and the ones to whom they have been given.

I have lived in this space over a year and a half, and, in many ways I am a different person than the one who moved in, eating eggs on a bun and peanut butter from a spoon. But perhaps I am equally the same and different (and more and/or less of each) as when I moved in, full of some vision and in some worldview which this place accompanied or resourced.

I have dealt with addiction, with deep dependence, with awful depression, with considerable despair, with alienation, with a loneliness I thought I would only read about in poems. But also I have known real sharing, with an extent of beauty I had not yet, if by the common revelation of those with whom I share it.

Oh! And then I have been low and dark and terrible and insane and I have been high and I have experienced balance and things have at times seen perfection (if at least a compression of it), and so given is the ability to compare and contrast and, most importantly, to synthesize. And John calls. Trae’s hello. And each of Us collect on the rooftop; the treehouse.

And it is what it is as a human, to be, and to be within a certain framework in which some things are and will be chaotic (but perhaps not forever), and in which some things are characterized by order and sense, and that the two are not as much in a tennis match as they are taking a stroll together in the local Farmer’s Market.

I search for a house. A house to be shared by many, whether that mean only roommates or that mean also the gatherings and the music and the finest ale and thoughts on humanity and human thoughts and porches where those exchanges and experiences might be shared.

I am, I know, more myself than I have ever been, and yet I am less myself than I have ever been, and I can only think that this next step unto will be another step into the discovery these antitheses when synthesized yields.

Who knows when my thoughts on church will coagulate, or if they ever will. And what Ever means. And whatever Means. And this process is what is most important to my being-in-belonging/becoming. Here I am, & I am here. And now. And now I am here. And always there are Cards, and you’re wanting to best play them as they’re dealt.

My lease ends at the end of November, and what has been the Thing my life for years was planned (New York or rather Place Other) I have begun to see and to realize what I would like for my life to move towards — a deeper understanding of Home, of Belief, of Sharing, of Mutualism, in which value for the greater things exceeds the smaller ambition within which only lend to betterment of self.  There is again a hierarchy of priority, and I am thankful it does and hopeful it will exceed my self at all times and in all places.

If my self could die! I would want a singular understanding of reality to be redeemed into what is Whole and Greater, and I would want what has been lost in my own desires for career and/or for comfort to be displaced forever and yet replaced by what makes each of us better — Each Other.

A sip in and suddenly I’m slipped into a circle of lawn chairs around the makeshift centerpiece of guitar road cases and some citronella blaze. The solemnity of that sound – the cooperation of the wind some & fading leaves which catch and carry the overture, descending periodically in to brush & tap our shoulders, eventually settling to neighbor our black boots.

We both cinch the collars of our peacoats to our neck, fasten the scarves in a way that they rub at the hair on our jaw and secure in some warmth to our necks. As you light your Camel and flick the ash to your left, I raise the Malbec sip and it is as rich and spicy and this is a compression of how I viewed my own life again, finally.

I have not felt as I do now in years. It’s odd to think how quickly years pass and yellow. Perhaps since I moved from New York and my child was before me in greater measure than before, and I explored possibility more than previously – maybe the realization of capability?  But no end was in sight for my time here. It was a sweet and innocent episode (but no less genuine) – a time portioned for growth but mostly I see for experience of others, for understanding of self, and for the enjoyment and distribution of God’s great gifts to us as his creation. I think I was the most joyful (I often avoid that word for its subcultural connotations) I have ever been, and perhaps that I have been since.

October is a quite important month.  Not that I have rationed it so, but experience in recent years past seems to remark that this is the time when Things are revealed. Cycles are rebuilt and recalled, rhythms of death are replaced with rhythms of life and of renewal, and deep, sometimes caustic searching of self – of motive personally and socially led into a greater self-awareness than that which preceded (and giving light to what proceeds).

Ellsworth will remain, I assume, forever, as the place I began to learn to live. To feel no need for control or paramater or answer. Accepting the grey, working hard, and loving deeply. It is within this context that I began to understand the importance of mutuality, its balance with introspection, and the necessity for slowing, silence, and trust. And my relationships were strong, and my desire for them as strong, creativity rich and my experience of and search for Truth more hopeful than before.

Things since that time I have not consistently been able to incorporate into the rhythms of my life, especially since leaving my office job and entertaining the particarlities of freelance and the way living alone is (and must be) fleshed out with comm-unity in world-view.  And I have tried, but then there are scars. Little pieces of pink skin that are indicators of believing one thing and seeing it not embodied as it ought to be, but I refuse to allow only personal experiences be the hinge between Reality and my own perception of it, though I also can’t deny or avoid the effects of it periodically.

I want to look back at this October and know that it is as monumental as the past three consecutively, and from what I am currently experiencing, realizing, and adjusting to in my own person, I have few doubts that this will be among the most important yet.  I welcome the realization, and look forward to how it receives flesh in my daily behavior and the eventual behavior to which it leads.

If this is an Ellsworthian season, I do not think of it as anything but positive. Extremely so. My things are gone, the excess is stripped, and I’m left with nothing but camera gear, a few plaid shirts, one pair of jeans and the book collection I only temporarily attempted to rebuild after I left my entire library on the front steps of East 97th Street.  I feel more free in my person than ever (the connectivity of things and experiences is real, but this is not even half of what I mean), without expectation, and willing to trust more honestly even than I did in the year before Ellsworth when I thought I had nothing to lose.

And at a time when I finally feel like there are incredibly important aspects and parts that make up the whole of my life to this point, I do have have a great deal to lose relationally I believe (and what is left is the supporting data to that headline), and that I shouldn’t do so especially for my own self-seeking, comfort, security, and service, or because I understand and perceive myself to be much more important than I am. That would be foolish, and of course if there is any direction my life is taking I would want it to not to be that. And so I’m not.

it is a Good thing to continually realize my importance is far less than I once I thought.

I invite the self-perceptions of it to keep drowning.

Here is an empty room, (but less the emptiness) years of hardwood cigarette stench in the glossy tops of tables; a red light sparkles stern in the shadows, and the overture of yells for a band who hasn’t played here in years — it burns and sticks.

I wouldn’t have known the difference of some oak tree branch squealing in the friction of glass, an eloquent sweep through the midnight caught up by the pane and your voice. Centered, provocative, magenta-skin voice.

Can you believe these are the sorts of things we wrote to each other? Assume it’s par for that year’s course. And when you take all your cues from (or the breadth of your personal reality is defined by) a movie, there can’t be more to expect. Even though — terribly — expectations were all we owned.

As it goes, though, the definitions move from wide to small as our experiences go from few to many, and you know that if I do by now. You’ve always known things a few years before me whether or not I could (I never could) admit to them.

I hope you are well in Denmark. I’m still in the town I grew up, and everything is not different. I’m stowed in the loft of a bar where we once swept the billiards.

Winter is on it’s way, however slowly and playfully.  Wrapped tightly in a black trenchcoat I bought in SoHo, I can’t help but guess each of these seasons from now yet will be subsumed by the head of the one we knew.

I still wear the scarf you knit and I’m damn proud of it.

Archie

[First objective, make up words.  Second objective, mull through some sentences and bruise syntax and fight my way to the period, if not a semicolon first. Third objective, don't stop.  And press "Publish" {which makes it sound quite romantic} without a redaction.]

Lately I have written more letters to persons than I have journals here, and I mean that is currently what it looks like for me to document a certain sojourn, and, well, I think that is more of the point anyway.  A point I have been missing for a while.

It is not that I have not taken to the discipline of letter composition in the many years of stops along thispresentsojourn, but perhaps it is that I have begun to understand its importance at the expense of this site more than another time before.  I won’t think that is something for which I will never apologize – silence — especially I think if what is silence to some is to another laughter and tears and hours and hours laying on our backs in a pre-war bedroom on the cold wood floors of fall.

So as I prepare in the next few months to take quite a heavy step on the way which Call carves, I might begin to post some letters from throughout the past year, some anonymously, and some maybe as a fictional correspondence 0f fictional characters. Who the narrator is we might or might not be able to gather, but what is the point anyway is that people are built in such a way that they are incomplete without others, and letters speak to this more than what I’ve been so focused on here.  Not to say this is unimportant (or I wouldn’t be writing these words at all).

Here is to another shift, and to the acknowledgement that each day is a shift in a Shift, a becoming in a Becoming.  And on the days we are shitty and destroyed do shitty things and destroy others because of it, our hope that somehow and someway we through and by that and moreover our dedication to the interconnectivity with others we are and (I think) miraculously being made whole and right.

If reality is a fabric that is stitched together by participation and by mutuality and by love, then the snags and tears and rips caused by the inverse will be repaired, and the repair will somehow be better than the original garment. I can’t say I’ve believed that for years — at least as much as I wrote it down and wanted (forced myself) to think it True.

Anyways, as is my fascination with letter-writing and the desire to see that sort of correspondence on a deeper, stronger, more human level than the lofty, propositional, self-examinatory, open-audience sort of way (that was congruent with my stage of life that began in a certain City and carried on as a deeply search-full postlude) which in fact became the reason I purchased a domain name and hosting in the first place. A documentary of a becoming. Of course this is still that, but how that is fleshed in writing is as different as how it has been fleshed in experience.

True is a certain connection between tangible items of the past — a colored pencil, a moleskin and a polaroid, a pin you wore on your pique collar — to the reality they present.  The connection is, one might like to think, the Thing itself.  Or another might argue it is a thing less than the Thing itself but no less a medium of the compressed reality of the Thing.

What is worth arguing at all is that these products of a past can (though this capacity is one allowed) become the Connective Tissue between the producer of the idea to the Produced, or how a particular memory is wrapped in the flesh of What Is.

And so then becomes an act important, while unseen (like the great majority of important practices) of the removal of these tangible valves of memory, through which a certain rehearsal is allowed, where hindsight can curate certain then-truths and allow for new readings of the past. The hermeneutic helps to sweep up the coffee particles, acknowledging this act meanwhile never forcing or granting one’s self to believe they did not spill out on the corner to begin.

In me there is a me that was him living there, there is a me who loved her, there was in Us that will or won’t and so on and so forth. Something of the fluidity of Time and of the way our shared experience both affects it and is affected by it; Narrators within the Narrated, and the balance (or is it friction) of that participatory embodiment.

So where you might find the valve leaks (or where this particular analogy breaks down like all must), identify the missing part or the clipped wire or that rusty nail and replace it, making it to function like you’ve never allowed it before, allowing Understanding to flow both In and Out and eliminating a the false-ethic of the former alone.

Then this requires an eye for the glitch, an ear for the hiccup, and a cognizance that is gift at least unremembered, if Original at all.

And how to speak of Its residence?

And Venn if one were to Locate it, have not you left a thing to Trust, and, has not an Anything seemed to have meant as much as some Things which (sofaras) appearance mean Everything?

+

“You don’t, but you may.”

Or something like, “You can’t, but you can!”

“And again, any sort of prophecy is true to the extent that it is fulfilled!”

He walked out of the classroom with a grin that plumped thick his cheeks.

“White is not surrender, despite what you’ve been told,” Paul leaned over to whisper.

“It’s clouds of Hope.”

A herringbone trim on mahogany curves,
you gumstuck to my sides. There are bones
where a flesh once wrapped so tightly, thick ribs
from a gristly orange chorizo, the Russian, Black
palpable winter, carbonated dreams of Dream.

But it’s a purpose, by some means, end-
ed not abruptly without foreshadows
stretching wide and chuckling, falling sun.

I’ve my tickets.  I’ll go, to return?
Is it why I went?  Is it why we’re sent
to say how it’s spent and some acts did?
Repent!  And believe

Finally.

Today was like any other.  I found my running shorts (which I hope none of my friends should ever have to see) a tanktop, and those running shoes which are so graciously buoyant on a great variety of surfaces.

After suiting up, I set out for Westshore Drive — which ultimately leads past a few stop signs to White Rock Road and then Lawther — the famous road which circles White Rock Lake and plays host to some of the most expensive homes in Dallas.  But of course that’s not the matter.

Just beneath the willow tree I began my run on towards the spillway, which, indifferent to my changing and growing person remains as constant as I remember it in the late winter months of 2007.

My strides are becoming more confident, my breathing more consistent, and my resilience ever-increasing. Since I don’t run with my head between an iPod, I’ve developed in the past three years all sorts of little games to keep me occupied while my mind explores things deeper, systematizing what might and leaving afloat what shouldn’t.

The most common among these includes one aural — namely on the sometimes symmetrical connection between breathing and steps taking, and I think this particular game will perhaps never be loosed if only for the short-term focus it provides.  (Another which involves the specific numbering of steps between each division of the concrete barrier above the spillway is a less-practiced type, but no less helpful to the fulfillment of specific goals.)

Recently, a few rowing teams from a few select private schools have been paddling and pacing along the side of the spillway during my afternoon runs, and on top of my once-established rhythms of breathing and counting steps has been superceded by a race with those in the water.  Much of why I’m able to keep up or even consider it a race is that they are a bit far off and the distance provides the illusion that our speed is comparable, though I know theirs is much greater.

It’s 100º today, and I’ve mustered the courage to continue in the discipline regardless of the heat (while taking special measures towards to find the equilibriums among hydration and rest.  Of course I shower more often too, but that’s beside the point, I think).

Each lap on the top of the spillway is somewhere between 3/10 of a mile and 1/3 of a mile, and so I usually round up in this regard, which essentially means I allow myself to believe 3/10 is an equal portion to 1/3.  I’m able to justify such an allocation due to the fact that the wind is at my back on the first lap of each round and blowing fiercely at my front the second lap of each.

Finishing sweaty and not a little red from the Texas sun, I walk through the only place in the path around White Rock Lake that seems a maze, and carry on up the hill, where my car is parked in the grass, perhaps too close to the fire hydrant.  Of course any rules I’d be breaking would never be enforced by the security guard on duty who is mostly concerned with guarding his own air-conditioned comfort.

The drive back is about 4 minutes.  I’ll usually reward myself after a long run — and especially as we come deeper into the summer heat — with some sort of chilled drink on the trip home.  Ultimately I’ll return to Vickery some 45 minutes after I originally left, covered in saltsweat and a certain sense of accomplishment.  The first thing I do when I step into my apartment is make an effort to reach the shower.

Trying to remove the layer covering my torso, each day I recall that the very thing which makes the removal of the piece from my body so urgent is the very thing which keeps it still so fastened and snug.

When the task was complete, the only thing between me and my exit was the need for the trenchcoat which hung in the closet across the room, still knowing both it wasn’t really cold enough for this heavy a coat but — with priorities in view — that there is no other piece of clothing that would pair so amicably with my demeanor.

I flung the coat off its hanger, swung it around by the collar to my back and slid in carefully each of my arms. I began to fasten the buttons which ran a vertical line down the center of my body, beginning at my chest and descending to a far point below my waist. [It's my preference that the collar button of any jacket must always be fastened despite whatever fashion advice, for I adore the comforting sensation of cloth fastened tightly to the flesh of my neck.]

For good measure, I raised the collar like one might in the misty, indigo streets of a Film Noir, and felt the edges of the cloth play with the bristles on my jaw.

Now fully clothed in my winter true, I set out through the front doors of the house, contemplating how no more than year ago I thought I’ll never last here. I passed down the dark center hallway of the antique building and carried on into the entryway, a place with walls and walls of mailboxes. Unable to recognize most of the names above each one, I’m reminded of the transience of neighbors in the city and resolve — this is okay.

+

In the fall, when I had more nights like this one, I spent the greater majority of my time with Robert Frost or William Carlos Williams (or even Ted Hughes if I’m feeling a bit more stolid and staunch) alongside a Russian Imperial stout, but tonight wouldn’t be one of them. I headed on down the street whose only sound was the bzzzzz of my next-door-neighbor’s front porch insect killer and the clicking of my heels across the pavement.

Daylight Savings Time still has not arrived, though the sun had been staying up later than when deeper in the Winter months. I still much prefer the dark closer to lunch than to bed, especially if it leaves more occasion for these sorts of evenings.

I snapped my bookbag across my chest, not for support but rather for the snug sensation across my chest, and walked on down the block on towards Greenville Avenue. Taking a right in the alleyway just before I reach the famous, elderly street, I curve on the path towards the Dubliner. In late fall, the Dubliner had become my Monday evening office, first because its happy hour extends until closing time and for another it is typically fairly empty the night after the weekend’s death.

+

A split of the Celtic stained-glass doors in in the pub front, a wave at that guy I’d met last summer when the Rangers lost to the Yankees, and a right across the cigarette stained hardwood floors, I carried on down the railroad-car room.

There’s a certain station I call my own. It’s highly likely this spot will always be vacant, mostly because it’s the most dimly lit corner of all and I am drawn to all ilks of dim corners, not least for the way it allows one to observe all the surrounding activity, but also because the space is amenable to thought and to uninterrupted focus, should it be needed [which it usually is].

I unfastened my bookbag from my shoulders and chest, and lay it gently across the the small table which stood proudly in the Eire tradition. Unwrapping my coat is more a task than originally wrapping it, since the newness of the thing has tarnished a bit. But the process must be initiated sometime, especially since it’s no less than 60º out and even warmer in.

Detaching one at a time each of the large, black buttons in a vertical line down my body, I begin again with the chest and descend towards the bottom loop which sits hangs below my waist. And as I always do, I pulled off the coat from first my left arm and last my right, gripping the collar material between my forefinger and thumb. Swinging it around with less imagination or vigor or mystique than before, I lay it over the back of my chair, imagining it to be the fragile shoulders of my delicate wife.

And before the inauguration of a the finest tap-drawn Brooklyn Lager in the city and the text editor on my computer, only three important things were missing outside these two.

“What to type! The world is before me.” I thought it to myself.

I reasoned to let my fingers begin, knowing that my mind would follow [It's another thing to believe it actually works in that order.] I entered a “+” as a title, knowing the content of the thing should precede the naming of the thing.

I began in on my thoughts on this first day after Lent, this third day after the Great Sabbath, and this thirteenth day past my return from planning some future.

Some weekend’s worth-of-work later, I escaped finally, the Right bookend to descend into a rest on patio by a pit of fire, in came the dandelion dust with what was at best the warm we wished in Winter’s deepest.  So a sneeze then carry on, a knitting, some weaving together in love later. Seems a mini-mexican drinks make malleable the callous – might moisturize the cracks; should stir up the stolid, Really reveal the Hidden, and conjure up consciousness forms deep below some seen skin and the hardly heard. Could it be that I can’t remember what is most real or that I choose to remember what I wish wasn’t?  Surely there’s a movie to match this (meaning I am sure. Maybe).  This may be the best way to know what it is to be made man.