ex vitam

A month since the last time I clicked publish on here.

I seem to write mainly when I’m in a funk.

I suppose that means I’ve had a good month.

Yet here I am at the keyboard.

This year I moved fully into myself. In retrospect, it feels as if I’ve lived my whole life camped in the backyard. There was an entire person with preferences and personality to be loved.

I’ve made amends with my demons & joined the angels’ ranks in warfare. It is surprise that they do not fight each other, but rather attempt to sway a material medium. Choosing monodrone or mesmerism as pace for the sway is up to the soul. I’ve made some choices. I find my soul directed and quelled. It still burns and leaps. At base, it is rooted. And the roots cannot be seen or described.

I’ve surrendered all of my “needs” and have burnt flesh for the “wants” that remain. It’s all I can smell.

The wants I still hold are worth the burning.

I speak of burning while rocking on a porch at a mountain cabin, subconscious subdued by a field of flowing grain, backdropped by a sun drenched valley. I am in no physical trial.

As reflecting with a friend yesterday though - the internal journey hardly correlates with the external. I’ve met those with lives of luxury who live in hell. And so I burn. But not in hell. Something more like the burn of hard exercise or the pain of telling the truth & missing short term gain.

This morning I patted backs and parted ways with another set of fellows I hosted out here in the valley. As I age, relationships become truer & goodbyes become shorter. I’m grateful to be loved, seen, and pursued by men of fine character.

Next weekend begins another round of the same. It is delight.

A bit of my chicken scratches from Thur:

When the cottonwood sheds their clothes and the sky chokes on wandering fairies - there the young autodidact, quixotic as fertile soil, recognizes the succession of the rising and falling of houses, of footholds and strongholds.

I do not talk like I used to, because I am not what I used to be. Others’ dreams are my (seemingly too easily realized) pastime. At the end of it I see that it mattered for what it built in and between me and others.

My purpose is to serve the world. My attitude must be gentle and fierce love of the other. There is no other true path out of one’s mind - and mine is hopeless and entrapping. Chinese finger trap. Surrender to the structure and find yourself free.

I am deep in woods, sitting on a bear canister. A mountain, glaciated - white dripping off sculpted contours - hangs over my words, bearing witness to the boy in the woods. It is like a guardian, reminding me of my smallness, peeling back time to teach my suffering its position. It is all alright and it will all be well. Yet there is work to do.

I am young and making my commitments.

There are seasons for flare and seasons for focus. I’m exiting flare and putting the word “no” to work.

In recent, I struggle to show up wholeheartedly to my commitments, since my heart is elsewhere (buried in another’s, waiting on sprout or drought), but I damn will show up. That is my vow.

It is one thing to be dependable. It is another to be trustworthy. It is another entirely to be irresistibly true.

To pull the best out of others as a magnet finds metal.

That is a powerful thing about owning a home, about hosting. You can set the tone, the environment, the norms. You create culture. & so you can provide a foundation of safety and love, then build structures of rebuke, challenge, and vision that propel the wanderer to renewed hope.

That is where it all unlocks.

I’d like each who passes through my doors to experience love and an awakening. Let ours be lives of consequence. While we have breath, may we toil not for wealth but for redemption. Our names will be forgotten and our works like chaff in the wind, but our spirits, the character and essence of a person, will leave a footprint. Though fleeting and necessarily indistinct, one impression can change history’s flow. As a mighty river curves to adapt to a humble stone. Yet many do not see the potential of their lives. It appears the majority treat time as a container that needs filling. “How shall I fill my days?” The artist has been deceived and imagines their project to be covering the canvas with paint. My soul breaks at the sight of it. Are you not burning with the very fire that animated billions before you? Are you not incandescent, child of the sun, radiating electromagnetism, altering the fields around you? Are you not capable of any imaginable change? Let loose your chains!! Use whatever tools you have - religion, philosophy, spiritual practice, virtue - and take to the war path traveler. It is ridden with trial and beauty and your body is built to be lived in. Use your mind and your hands. Do not outsource your humanness to unnamed, far off strangers. Think your own thoughts and dream your own dreams. Rip a hole in your Truman Show & riposte the plans of the institutions. If you do not work your life it will be worked for you. And how painful it is for a home to be stolen and rented back to you. Ownership a distant blueprint. Burn down the home. We live in domicidal times, so we must give all pro domo. At the end of it, it seems we find home was never here. Home was being. And the spirit never leaves to the end of the age. And so home comes with us. In eschaton base reality is seeded. We die and find husk emptied and home fulfilled. Already, this is true.

ex vita discedo, tanquam ex hospitio, non tanquam ex domo.

By wisdom a house is built,

and by understanding it is established;

by knowledge the rooms are filled

with all precious and pleasant riches.

Prov 24:3-4

morning dew

plays favorites.

washing leper’s

eyes and drowning

lone insects.

on outset, time

preaches death -

hydroxyl extracting

polymer reducing

bio to primordial

lettered soup -

do not lose form

in the bath

water because

morning dew

plays favorites.

written from my porch on 6/23 with so much love for you dear reader.

i bless you, may you have connection & wholeness all of your days.

“I do not like work, but I like what is in work… the dance to find yourself.” - The Heart of Darkness

What questions can you only be asking now?

Because of who you are in this instant, because of where you’ve been, because of what the world has become, because of what you have access to.

What questions can you only be asking now?