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.

— Bashō

The last time I watched a game of the World Cup also was the eighteenth, when Germany faced Portugal. I had been in New York City as resident for no more than two weeks and sat across a table and a salmon brunch from my roommate, Allen, an alien before that day of audaciously hot summer city apartment-hunting walk we did (and to no avail).

God, I hadn’t met you yet.

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.

Though I ultimately decided that not moving was in my best interest (while for years I thought the opposite) one interesting way I have remained connected (and was initially connected) to the idea of New York is my Uncle Mark, my mom’s brother who lived in the Lower East Side of Manhattan for upwards of 20 years.

I didn’t know much of Mark growing up. After all, he was the brother of my mom who’d moved to New York City immediately after graduating college, years before my birth, on to an exotic life of a bohemian artist and carpenter living in the then dangerous and quite dark downtown portion of the Island.

In the mid-90′s, my mother’s side of the family began to arrange family reunions — mostly in the Hill Country of Texas, as that was a fairly central location for those of us dispersed spread about Houston and Dallas. I couldn’t know why we started having the reunions when I was 8 years old — in fact I was a bit too young to have understood that this was a suddenly new ritual without precedent.

It is natural that the terrible things which happen and wonderful things that happen remain more explicit in memory than other than the mundane of course. However, there is a particular ilk of memories which adhere to the seat of emotion so securely and the purpose for their continued presence is hardly identifiable until, well, sometimes decades later.

I grew up riding in Chevrolet Astro vans. When you’re a kid, your reality is tiny and your language for describing reality is extremely specific to the personal experiences you’ve been able to acquire, so it was easy for me to assume that all kids grew up riding in Astro vans. It’s all I knew. Well, that and Amy Grant. It wasn’t until we pulled into Terminal E of the Dallas/Fort Worth airport in July of 1995 that the significance of our van was altered, and my understanding of my family was suddenly widened.

He had a spotty black beard and tinted glasses, a cocky posture and a cigarette woven between his fingers. Only a few little bags. I could tell he was a simple man. When we pulled in to the gate my mom quickly exited the driver’s side door after stopping. I watched them embrace. I could tell that he loved my mother deeply, and that she cared similarly for him — she had begun crying a bit.I didn’t know who the man was other than his perfunctory title “uncle,” but I did begin begin to understand at that moment his importance.

When Mark got in the car, my mom introduced me to my uncle. I’d heard of Mark in some stories from time to time, but it was always a detached description of the guy who lives in New York that my mom knows. And plus, it’s hard to think that conversation is fun when you’re a kid, and listening isn’t always the the highest on the list of Value.

Mark ducked into the van, moving past my sister’s seat which, and plopped into the seat in front of me.  He lit a cigarette, following it with the question, “It’s okay if I smoke in here, right?”

After a peak-hour van ride of careful observation of the quirky and quite eccentric foreigner in the seat in front of me, we arrived home. I remember Mark taking a special interest in me, asking me questions about the things I spent my time drawing and imagining, and commenting on how well done the model airplanes were I built and had strung from the ceiling of my bedroom. He told me he too was an artist, and that that’s what he did “for a living.”

Of course I had my suspicions that this could not possibly be true — an Artist for a living? Another vocabulary confusion. I thought that “for a living” meant either a Home Child Care Provider (my mother’s occupation) or an Insurance Salesman (my dad’s job at the time). I had no idea that one could make money doing the things I loved — drawing, exploring, creating.

Perceiving my doubt, Mark pulled out a piece of construction paper, grabbed for some crayons, and quickly drew a beautiful image of the sunset over the ocean. It was stunning. When Mark left I put it immediately in my top drawer among other important items — a box of pins I was collecting, two books of airplanes my grandfather had bought me, a few pieces of smooth printer paper, and the mechanical pencil I’d used to sketch.

When Mark came to Texas that trip, I felt a stronger connection with him than I had felt with many people, which I can say from hindsight. Of course at that point in my life, I didn’t understand the significance of his presence, nor did I realize the urgency of his timing for coming. I didn’t know why suddenly we were having family reunions.

I didn’t know Mark was about to die.

Mark rode with us down to Foxfire that summer. I could sense my mom was feeling every moment of our time together deeply, and it was curious.  At one point on the trip south our Astro had overheated, forcing us to stop on the side of the road and wait for some sort of help. It was before any of us had cell phones of course. We had been standing out in the Texas sun for a bit, and I was growing bored and sweaty while we waited for someone to come along and help. I remember what Mark suggested, making eye contact with me and pulling the sides of his mouth into a grin. “Let’s go see what’s past those trees!”

Following Mark’s lead, we hurried on down through the pines on a hill, and found a stream. There was a complex community of fire ants whose territory this obviously was, and my mom warned us from getting any closer. We stood there for a little while without moving, studying the water which trickled over smooth stones and ran on down the valley.  It felt like an important few minutes — the kind of minutes that seem to last for days.

When we finally found the car in good repair, we headed on down to the cabin we’d reserved. Mark walked into the bathroom, quickly unpacking a bag before anything else. I walked in curious to see what the urgency was for, and saw the orange bottles. There were over twenty of them, all different sizes and labels.

“What are those for Uncle Mark?”

“These help me get better,” Mark said gently and with a bit of a grin. He patted me on the shoulder.

Later in the trip my mom let me know that this was maybe the last time I would ever see my Uncle Mark. I couldn’t understand. It was only the first time I’d ever seen him, and I had instantly felt a deep connection with him. Maybe because I saw how deeply my mom experienced those moments — maybe it was something else.

When I graduated college and had finally decided to move to New York, my curiosity began to grow about my Uncle Mark and his time in Manhattan, since Manhattan and the type life lived within yields extremely specific experiences which only those who share the space are able to understand. I began to wish I could have known him growing up. I longed to know him as an adult.

When I first moved, some of my time was spent searching for Mark. He had been gone some 10 years before I moved, and so while I knew a lot has changed about Manhattan in that decade, I felt as if at least part of my purpose for being there was to discover who Mark was, and how I might be able to carry out some of the things that he wasn’t able before his passing.

As my curiosity grew and I had a increased capacity to handle emotionally complex situations, I decided to talk to my mom a little more about it. I felt very attached to Mark. I felt like I was quite similar to him in a lot of ways as well. I felt as if he was one person who might be able to understand me — especially at this volatile “becoming” part of my life — which I felt like very few people could. I wouldn’t say I was trying to communicate with him directly, but in some ways I was so intrigued by his search for meaning and for understanding and the simple way in which he lived his life in Manhattan that I began to find ways to connect with his past. Which was, in a way, my coming to know him increasingly so.

Mark’s best friend, Hali, still lives in Manhattan. Mom was exuberant when she made the realization and had the idea to connect us. Mom told me how special it would be if she and I could connect and hear from Hali first hand stories about my uncle, who I had begun to love very deeply as I discovered more about his life and understand the significance of our short time together in person.

When I lived there in 2006 unfortunately I wasn’t able to connect with Hali. I was simply too busy, of course a bit insecure, and honestly a little intimidated by the image of meeting with a woman who was the best friend of a man I didn’t know. A bit of maturity was necessary for that to happen, and of course years and the experiences for which they allow would assist in that.

After I moved back to Texas from Manhattan in early 2007, the years which followed where characterized by quite a mix of confusion, a confusion of emotions, and an inability to understand whether or not I’d actually fulfilled my purpose there or if I’d given up and simply lost my chance to live the life I dreamed there. Of course I realized through those years the immaturity tied up in that belief — in my inability to accept circumstances outside of my specific ideals, and the way in which it affected my Presence among those with whom I lived and actually shared life here in Texas.

However, through those years, my interest in the life of my Uncle Mark increased, and on one of my visits back, having known the East Village to a more nuanced level than when I first moved, I decided to make one last trip through the streets just west of Tompkins Square Park to find where Mark lived, and tried to imagine his life there.

I couldn’t find it.  I didn’t have an address, and all the brownstones look exactly the same save the color of their brick the brass numbers hung over the doorpost. It was August in New York, when the heat is trapped beneath the skyscrapers and made stolid and thick with humidity from the Hudson. I looked quickly for a coffee shop, and ducked into Think, a little place at the bottom of a brownstone on the Bowery.

I opened my laptop and started a letter, using the email address my mom had sent me three years ago.

“Hali, I am the son of Karen Simpson, Mark’s younger sister…”

Since August of this year we have been writing letters back and forth. Hali is in her 60′s, splitting her time between her Manhattan City Hall apartment and her house in the Hamptons. She is a part of a wealthy Jewish family — the very family which became Mark’s when he moved away from his own and found New York City to be his bohemian reaction against the establishment in the 1970s.

My Uncle Mark passed away from HIV/AIDS in 1996, and while I never quite knew him like I now wish I did, Hali and I exchange letters, and in ways I never thought, I am able to know and to love and to cherish Mark. And in some ways I too feel as if he understands me and appreciates me and supports me.

Hali usually will write me letters on occasions during each year that were important to her and Mark as a whole. In September, she wrote to tell me about a plant that she waters regularly. She calls it her “Mark Plant.” She says that when she waters it she cultivates the memories of one of the greatest men she’s known.

In her most recent letter a few days ago, she described her Christmas traditions in the City with Mark. It was one of her first years in a new apartment downtown, and she had recently met Mark. For her it was a natural and easy connection.

“Mark and I became fast friends and naturally I invited him to christmas with my mother and three siblings who were teenagers along other family members. It was my first year hosting at a new apartment I shared with my boyfriend.  Mark was pretty irresistible with his devilish grin and irreverent observations. He fit right into my psychological, dysfunctional, fashionable, fun loving family.  He sussed out the family dynamic and was teasing everyone before they knew what hit them. It was instant chemistry. Mark’s tales of his Baptist Texan family and childhood were so exotic to us, we couldn’t get enough. He had a gift for taking events that must have been very scary and painful to a small child and infusing them with drama and humor.”

I could see Mark sitting at the table, wearing the hat I inherited from him, the one sweater he owned from Banana Republic which I also inherited, a cage of birds in the background, weaving in to the conversation with a group of near-strangers perfect wit alongside reactionary expletive or two. The devilish grin arising out of what serious experiences he must have had as a child and his uncanny ability to use these for the good of conversation and the relationships he now experienced — which he must have lacked in his earlier years.

Last night my mom and I were sitting in the living room of my childhood home. My dad was on a flight back from Hawaii, and it’s actually quite rare that she and I have that sort of alone time, and, well, especially in that specific context. She knows how much interest I have in the life of her big brother, and that Hali and I have begun exchanging letters this last fall, and brought up the fact that she found a VHS of my Uncle Mark, but didn’t know what was on it.

We popped in the tape to the VCR, and after sitting through a few seconds of static, Mark appeared on the screen, sitting on his bed with a lit cigarette in an East Village apartment. I was immediately overcome with emotion, and wondered what measure more my mom must have felt in that moment.

“Hi. I’m Mark Simpson. It’s the summer of 1992, and I have had an idea for about 10 years now that I have HIV, but have been positive for over two now.”

It was obvious the film was some sort of documentary memoir to different types of people who were either victims or suffererers of some sort of disease living in Manhattan. In the video, Mark took us on a tour of his little Losaida apartment, replete with cats, a greyhound dog, and an entire room-full of birds. He took us on a tour of the drugstore where he picked up his medication, and ended the video a few moments later in a short interview about his last days on earth.

The video ended with a centered shot of Mark’s face in a very tight crop, and it slowly faded to black.

“PORTRAIT #4″ appeared in bold yellow letters across the center of the screen. “MARK SIMPSON.”

Hali ended her letter to me, describing her relationship with Mark and the special moment they shared during our current season.

“Mark loved christmas for the excuse to decorate to excess. When everyone else was doing tasteful minimal trees, his had color, blinking lights and endless beautiful ornaments.  Your uncle ronnie got the ornaments when Mark died so I hope you have or can get a few as mark would have loved for you to have them. It was a tradition that mark and i christmas shopped in the West and East Village each year then smoked a joint and went for coffee or a drink. When the light is gray and it’s damp and cold and almost seems like snow, I can feel those days of hunting for ornaments and treasure with Mark.”

So too when the light is gray and it’s damp and cold and almost seems like snow, maybe I too can remember. Mark would have turned 60 years old today.

In my mother’s living room hangs the yellowed construction paper drawing Mark made of the brilliant sun’s set over the ocean for me, that summer of my eleventh birthday. And I am the child who was, and I remain the child who wanted to be.

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.

Certainly we talk to ourselves; there is no thinking being who has not experienced that. One could even say that the world is never a more magnificent mystery than when, within a man, it travels from his thoughts to his conscience and returns… we exclaim within ourselves, without breaking the external silence.

-Victor Hugo, Les Miserables

(via amoslanka)

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.

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