in my beginning

How come some can be so unmoved by the things of the spirit? It seems a miserable and delicious state. How freed I'd be from my current stress.

The acknowledgement of god within my own spirit has been slowly followed by the awareness of my distance from him. It is terribly painful. My heart is rended in two and I yell for him to save me. I tear up even now at the thought. He is there and he is far. Draw near to my soul. Bring to my awareness your patterned affections fashioned into the air I breathe. It is to the detriment of many, your hiddenness. Or so it seems. I cannot know to trust you, unless you grant that vision. Even my faith is gift from you. There is no thing that begins or ends with me.. This is ratifying and provides a consorted relief.. Joe is not of importance or centrality. Yet not of unimportance or tertiary in nature. But he is one with what is. Never detached, unless disaffected, disavowed of passions.

It is love that makes a person. When one is seen as a being, acknowledged as precious, thanked for presence, they feel as one. We love each other into healthy existence. On another level, cosmic love represents one's own wholeness to themself - and this is what I miss. My existence is vacuity and I am held afloat by the shallow love of friends and the well-wishes of my own ambitions. I am girded by a conviction to be brave and step into my fear. This is my end and my beginning. That I step without second-thought, because the second thought always brings self-negotiation. And self-negotiation is what converts virtue to vice. Thought is rust and nobility lies in action. When the action itself is thought, the actor can get confused. I am confused beyond coherence - nothing connects and all does at once. Glowing from the inside, I burn top down - wick to some deeper thing that will not tell me its name.

I pray to the god Jesus. I ask for forgiveness, for a return of love, for sight into his authority, but I am cast into the desert. I'm not told a thing. I want only to see, but the light continues to strike and to blind. I have no company but wandering tears drilling a hole in my hollow chest.

I am woe'd by the beauty of the life I cannot have. I am fulfilled in the life I do have. There is no greater beauty than to feel a heartbeat and the sensation of warm tea down my throat. Each small instance proof of my being and feeling. There is a person here, within me. Beyond me. I can come back to them, and I do and I must.

The only people I know that struggle like me are in their fifties! I've spoken to over 60 people of my pain and process at this point, inviting them in and exploring their own journeys. Why does it hurt so for me particularly? Does it or is that an illusion? I am grateful for those who are struggling in their own season and are able to make good company.. I hope my words can be used by the healer to treat their wounds. Knowing another's pain, not as phrase but as feeling, is a gift. A knowing glance and empathetic touch changes lives. I am waiting for mine.

A tremendous gift was given to me in the work of T.S Eliot. He is a spiritual father to me. If I can write 1/1000th of his depth into my work, it will change many lives. I pray that comes to be.

"The wounded surgeon plies the steel

That questions the distempered part;

Beneath the bleeding hands we feel

The sharp compassion of the healer's art

Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.

Our only health is the disease

If we obey the dying nurse

Whose constant care is not to please

But to remind of our, and Adam's curse,

And that, to be restored, our sickness must grow worse.

The whole earth is our hospital

Endowed by the ruined millionaire,

Wherein, if we do well, we shall

Die of the absolute paternal care

That will not leave us, but prevents us everywhere.

The chill ascends from feet to knees,

The fever sings in mental wires.

If to be warmed, then I must freeze

And quake in frigid purgatorial fires

Of which the flame is roses, and the smoke is briars.

The dripping blood our only drink,

The bloody flesh our only food:

In spite of which we like to think

That we are sound, substantial flesh and blood-

Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.

V

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years-

Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres

Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt

Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure

Because one has only learnt to get the better of words

For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which

One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture

Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate

With shabby equipment always deteriorating

In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,

Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to

conquer

By strength and submission, has already been discovered

Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot

hope

To emulate - but there is no competition-

There is only the fight to recover what has been lost

And found and lost again and again: and now, under

conditions

That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.

For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older

the world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated

Of dead and living. Not the intense moment

Isolated, with no before and after,

But a lifetime burning in every moment

And not the lifetime of one man only

But of old stones that cannot be deciphered

There is a time for the evening under starlight,

A time for the evening under lamplight

(The evening with the photograph album).

Love is most near itself

When here and now cease to matter.

Old men ought to be explorers

Here and there does not matter

We must be still and still moving

Into another intensity

For a further union, a deeper communion

Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,

The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters

Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning."

See how he struggled with his own ability to structure prose. Always each word became a husk as it left the soul that imagined it. Each time I read his work it animates me in a new way for days. It moves me. The greatest gift I have received, is to walk with his poetic works in my life. Meaning, I will see my own journey in a portion of the Four Quartets. At each moment in my life it is at a different place in the work, yet still there is a deep and resounding place that draws out the melody and muck of my experience as a being... How astoundingly attractive then does that make the rest of his work. I draw from and on it constantly.. A deep thing it is, to be spoken to personally in art. My relationship with FQ has made me rethink my relations with art as a whole. Months back I realized how shallow I am when I go into an art museum. I consume and consume, following the school of fish as we react to the fame or notoriety of the authors, reflecting that onto their pieces, their souls laid bare on fabric.. I no longer practice beholding this way. In an art museum, I will wander until my spirit is sufficiently opened. Then, at most, I will move between 8-10 paintings, giving each at least 10 minutes of reflection and absorption. This is the only way to see.

I have so much to be taught.

I wish to give all the soul-podium that affords wisdom. There is nobody too simple or short-lived to speak into my life. Rear the bucking mare in your own heart, let it be known to me that which has been revealed to you. Speak what fruit is in season. I welcome any to stroll in the orchard.

It ails me that most do not open their deepest wisdoms in company. And so it decays, waiting. The wisdom of the friend is only unearthed in tragedy or treachery. I've come to see, through my learning, that I am the most unlearned. As wisdom has atrophied and each of its institutions have been secularized, I choose to open my soul. None are too lowly to be my teacher - even the river stone, softening with time, just taught me humility. I bless and thank, as humility is wisdom's mother.

This is the most important season of my life so far. I have an instinct. An attempt:

Spring reminds me we all have to die to get here.

Bus pass bought in blood, no budding before burial.

Scratching and starving

Months of harrowing

Shadowed souls searching

Searching. Lurching.

Reject burial and never be planted,

Forget Winter and take Spring for granted.

So you were the victors,

fateful few,

petalled pattern perpetuating promise of

the suffering servant.

It's I that fails to die, electing husk over peace.

How long haven't you lived?

Was I ever really here?

Stupor is stipend of stubborn staggering -

Kneel! Or forget your name.

Self goes stochastic, multiplicity unthreading your

nightgown - there is no rest of the wicked or

crown for living long enough, full enough,

rich enough, enough!

Presence licks death's bloody heels and reveals

fate is from fatality.

Because absence absolves but loss stings.

The tragedy is not affection's abolition

but remembering her taste.

Feeling her weight.

Change has serrated edge and time intentions

of a butcher. Not all pruning yields, but

some death seeds - and so

I wait.

In my end

and my beginning.

In the dance

at the still point of the turning world.

I can try! lol. I am not he.

joe - I love you & am grateful to be. Be sharpened by your pain and open with your story.