Tea with Mr. Wilde and God

I like my life.

It is small and quiet and often times difficult. I can't really afford much, but there is always enough, every time. I have a handful of close friends here and the circle gets smaller every time life changes. There are healthy good byes and less healthy good byes and there are a lot of far away people that I love very much. But my handful of people that I hold here know me and I like to believe that the depth of love and the miles of life we have covered together is more than a fair trade for the small number. I am ever so slowly learning how to be a healthy human being before God and learning enough about myself to figure out where I want to go. The questions are not all answered, but I am sure that I will have them when I need them. I really do like my life, the people in it, and where I am going.

I need to remember that sometimes. It is so easy to forget in the natural process of moving forward and changing and growing and striving. It can be so easy to lose sight of such a quiet feeling while I am reacting to deadlines and people I like and people I don't especially when those two people are actually the same person. But right now, in the Sunday quiet of my house with too many too busy people, before all of the trying to be who I am becoming starts, and before I begin to take on all of the descriptors for the roles I will play today, I want to remember that I really do like where I am at.

I think life would be a lot less stressful if I could hold onto that while I race through my days. I think I would be better at remembering that if I gave myself the time in the mornings that I promised God I would. It's like he knows what I need, like he's on my side trying to help me first, be healthy and second, stay healthy. Weird.

But I am fighting so hard to be so good that I forget that I do not have to fight him. In fact, most of the fighting I do is fighting that he would gladly do for me if I would just stand on the promises he has made and let him fight for me. As long as I am fighting, however, he stands aside so he doesn't hurt me... so that I know he is there after I beat myself up. I do a fine job of that even during this part of my life that I like so well.

Today, I woke up two hours before I needed to be awake after a whole night of dreaming that everything that I need to do in the next three weeks needed to happen and be finished tomorrow. I was so frustrated and anxious that I could not sleep and then I realized that I was probably going about life wrong again. I was probably fighting too hard when there wasn't really a fight to be had. So today here is what I need to remember (and what I will likely need to know again and again for the rest of my life):

I am loved and I am learning how to love. I am loved by God and by the people he places around me and most days, I don't get to know why. But I do get to know that that is enough. "Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known. And now these three remain: faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love."

One final thought for the rest of today, "Who being loved, could be poor?" [Oscar Wilde]

perwinkle

A few years ago, I looked at various pieces of prose I had written and I realized how much pain there was. I wanted so badly to write something different, but every time I wrote it came out the same--or worse, it sounded forced. It is only now that I see how dark a time I was living in my life. Having come out of that time, I see that I longed to write about what I did not know. I could not write with the honesty I desired when my desired subject simply was not my reality.

I had been asked why I thought it was that it is easier to find dark poetry that is good. I did not have a real answer then. Maybe I do now. It is likely to be because pain forces us to be real. Humanity is seldom happy long enough to record it and deep enough to communicate it genuinely and deeply. It is a world at war, and, when we are honest, we cannot pretend any differently. We all carry our weapons beside our wounds in one form or another. Even those who find true joy, cannot honestly deny the evidence of an inherited curse. It weighs on us all, but it is not eternal.