A New Year (kinda)
Okay okay. Here we goooo. Another year. Another slew of earnest resolutions and symbolic self-examinations and exercise equipment and new fresh clean saintly unblemished untraumatized versions of ourselves.
Another new start. Another redoubled effort to dig in my heels/jaws/claws, resisting the maddeningly random and inscrutable energetic push and pull of external circumstances, and grit my teeth/eyes/guts hauling myself up from the chaotic earth-colored muck of common life and grimly rebuild myself as separate (dominant, better) from it all, triumphantly holding the shining silver reigns of my own fate and the fate of anything that touches me. (!)
…
I dunno man. Maybe this year I can lay off of this project… Just a bit.
Maybe this year I can stop trying to always make something of myself. And let myself be made and remade, made and remade by whatever it is that does that kind of thing. Maybe I can let myself be myself (small, still, at the mercy of the world), and trust that change won’t demolish the edifice of me but just remake me.
How am I only just realizing/admitting what suddenly feels completely undeniable and fundamentally true? That there are these mammoth cosmic flows of external energy that dictate the entirety of my life. And that all I seem to do is ignore or dismiss them! As if that changes anything! What would happen if I turned to face them? Examined them. Submit to being almost entirely powerless against them? What if my spiritual life became something utterly responsive and participatory, instead of a harried last ditch effort to eke out some small shred of self-mastery from the wreckage of each ostensibly wasted day?
The only two things that ever really determined anything––and therefore, really matter in any meaningful sense of the word––are Love and Death.
It is these two raging cosmic rivers that dictate every single minute detail of my life, of all of our lives. It’s these ultimate forces that shred through human-measured time like fragile lace. It’s Love and Death that propel our lives forward, pulling us deeper into our own lives, into reality, with their three mighty currents of longing and terror and courage.
There are no reigns here. No self-mastery. No triumph. No new clean untarnished version of myself to emerge from the ashes. There is only all of us, together. There is only the live wire current of love-death-love-death-love coursing through time, sweeping us into one another’s lives so messily, unpredictably, almost arbitrarily, weaving us together more intricately than we could ever imagine.
My life is not my own. It belongs to everything that’s ever been moved to touch onto it. Waves merging, emerging, until they dissolve against the shore.
May I remember that a bit more often this year. May I turn my face towards these inscrutably vast, mysterious forces that move us. May I focus my gaze (softly! humbly!) upon them. May I let Love and Death flow through/as/into my life, making me and remaking me. Making us and remaking us.
Amen.
