My heart is so full tonight. I don't know whether to be joyful or to weep, so as usual I am just conflicted. I feel so much ever day, every moment, so much that it frightens me. Even when I am doing relatively well, as I am now, I feel that I am still standing on a precipice, but instead of staring into my abyss, I merely have directed my gaze elsewhere for a while to calm my shaky nerves. To what am I looking now?
If I had to chose a word, it would be fragile. I feel fragile in the intensity of my emotions, the power of my brief discoveries. I feel the nearness of overbearing life and death. I still feel mundane, but the mundane is only a pale sheath over my life, and epic things are happening underneath, all the time. It is exhausting. I feel strong, almost too strong, with a whirring, shaky stregnth like a machine that is running too fast and could fly apart at any moment.
Friends, there is so much that I wish that I could tell you, but that is the kind of fragility that I fear the most. And God forbid that someone should take my words for more than what I mean them to say. But nevertheless, I have to tell you that these days I am learning much about love. People are so extraordinary. Sometimes I think, this could be real. I could be loved.
Sometimes I can sink my hands into it like rich soil in spring. Sometimes it leads me down to sit beside a soft ocean and sings in the midst of my turmoil of safety, of rest. I am beginning to believe, and yet I'm still being secretive, still holding back the whole story. Can you believe I'm still lying, or at least not telling the whole truth? It is for your sake, and for mine. I don't want to hurt anyone, and, can you believe? I would still like to be thought of as resilient, as sufficient unto myself.
If I had the words and the boldness, I would like to invite you in. You would knock our secret code knock and I would let you in. I would invite you into my fear and we could sit together in the dark and listen to the rushing sounds made by the wings of death, of loneliness, of meaninglessness, of a future without hope. I would invite you into my pain, and we would both grimace in shock at its rawness, both want to look away from old, old wounds that have been torn open, but force ourselves to be very present together to the stains. I would invite you into my anger, and you would find me blinded by it, destroyed and destroying, feral with rage and bitterness and frustration. But you would have nothing to fear, so together we would shake fists at the skies, and scream in the car until our throats burned, and break glass and set things on fire.
Oh, my friends, I want to protect you. But I still want to invite all of you into the place where I am, instead of coming out and walking seven miles to meet you at the same old holly bush where we safely rendezvous, and walk back to the cave of my secret self alone. I want to lay bare the wreckage of my soul and invite you to help me rebuild.
But perhaps, because of your kindness, because of my slowly unfolding trust, I just did?
The gift of your myriad kindnesses is hope, and determination. Not forever, but for the last fading hours of today, and the first fresh, cold moments of tomorrow. What becomes of me when those moments pass? I don't know yet. It may be that more stregnth swirls in like the eddies of an incoming tide, that you yourselves bear it in like sunrise, and I go on for another night and another day. It may not come, but if it doesn't, I will lie very still and wait as fiercely as I can for the next day or the next.
Life is still beautiful. I still walk amazed.
