Hot Summer Nights 3

What I hope to do with the moments I am present in. I hope to have these moments, more and more until they just are. But until then, I hope:

To see the reflection of the leaves in the dog bowl

Hear the lark call to its friend

I hope to smell the crip scent of pine, expand my lungs

I hope to see the child lost in their unique wonder

Capture the shadows and the light 

I hope to find one of the infinite indiscernible facets of that moment 

tuck it away, for a future revival

to find the grace to listen to more than the words being spoken near me

It was grace that granted me a presence first

I have worked for a long time at forgetting the idea of myself. The idea may sound strange to some and I can understand. Yourself is your best friend and your longest acquaintance. The idea that you exist is so imprinted on you from an early period that one of the very first ways you communicate with the world is that your protestations are received by love, food, sustenance…your demand for existence, and a happy one at that is nearly immediately your state of mind before you even have a state of mind. 

And so it goes…Your life continues to grow in importance and your value for the acknowledgment of that growth is as immaculately conceived of now as your request for it at the earliest.  You now rely on a machine, an algorithm to receive it, but the values that undergird it are the same. And more often we are able to not only request the attention we crave, but we learn how to “hack” the reality we live in and share the type of narrative that is all but sure to develop notice. The sense of self that comes from this relationship is surely false and produces in its captors a sense of self that they can not see as false since they were co-conspirators in the “hack”. You slowly calcify this idea of who you are, what you’re values are, what you are supposed to do to maintain that identity. This becomes your priority. That you are consistent in the reflection of who you want to be to others is what creates that reality for them and subsequently through your efforts, you. 

It is this ego-feeding that creates the challenges we face, whether in our political sphere or our personal ones. The more we interact, fabricate and develop the idea of our self, current, future or otherwise (historical refabrication is common and our memories are not what we think they are), the more we assume we are in control of our lives, when in fact eh story of our lives is ruling us. That is what adventurers must love, to have no story to maintain, they just get to share in discovery with others of something so unknown that they can not themselves have told it prior to living it. That is the path of some, but not nearly enough of us. I am no adventurer, not in the true sense of the word, but I have been on a journey recently. I have been rediscovering myself and resetting the expectations of my own narrative. I have been in the process of trying to walk away from the ego story. The Sisyphean cycle is often held together by the fear that the “true self” being discovered to not align with the crafted narrative will bring ruin. I have found more and more that this is simply not the case.