Home.

I keep coming back to this idea and now is a fitting point in my life for yet another return trip. I am moving, have been moving, will be moving...am feeling quite certainly homeless. I am living between my old apartment and my new room in the new house of my future occupancy...and not quite belonging to either.

They are only 1.8 miles apart driving. It really should be the easiest thing in the world...which it is. No hang ups, blow outs, let downs to speak of. I even have two more weeks befo

re my old lease ends. It really does not get easier. Except for the silence. There is a certain ineffable vacuousness. It is not a normal silence.

But I do not think it is dangerous either. I have never been afraid of silence and I have never yet been able to find boredom for much time at all. This next while will not change that.

Even now, I am discovering things. Turning ideas round in my hands. Getting a better look at where I stand and what surrounds me.

I have said so many goodbyes in the last few days; and they have been good, healthy goodbyes. Yet, they were not without my requisite not-saying-what-I'm-thinking because when I say it, I feel it and the depth of feeling I find often frightens me. Anyway, to the point and away from bad diary-ism...

In a lot of ways, home has left. I am finding that I have given up attaching home strictly to places. And I think a good many more of us on this planet do this than I previously thought. Any place that was a home can have all of that fondness and safety revoked in a moment. And while the sights and sounds and textures may well remind us of home, it does not take very much for them to betray us and feel empty.

I see and feel and hear now that I have built my 'home' into the people around me; and that is a very hard thing for me to accept. It feels so fragile, ephemeral, and so very likely elusive.

Most of all, it means I have no control once again where the pieces of my heart land or if they are taken care of much less if I shall ever recover them again. I believe I should be used to that by now. This is the feeling of loving and being loved. And that is the lifeblood of living itself. Or at least, I would contend so. It is beautiful in its own dangerous way.

I think life is supposed like that and I am sure I will regret this belief in the future; but I do, believe it that is. I think it should be dangerous in more ways than one. It should be

bigger than one person can handle. You do not need to be the world's most extroverted individual, but it may be easier then. And, contrary to a lot of opinions that I have received lately, it's not the point of marriage. It should come before that, after that, during it, and in spite of it. I do not like that some days. I do not like complicated things, messy things, high maintenance things. But I have to admit, a life that I can handle alone...is altogether too shallow. (And I will not here admit to the hypocrisy involved in such a standard).

This is why I think the feeling of falling never really goes away. I am not the five year old who believes the adults have the world under control anymore. They do not. They never really will. The only thing holding us together and making us safe in anyway is that very love that is so dangerous. And we live in a world under a curse. Love can be falsified, forgotten, and one sided. Despite that, it endures and it is still out there. That is altogether amazing and terrifying.

"I love all these fragile things." ~ Ladonna Witmer

It makes me happy that there are homes I can invade...and belong in after everyone who actually lives there leaves to do something else. I still think home is a very funny thing. It is a slippery thing, the importance of which is something too easily let go of. And somehow from here my brain catapults straight to the stars.

I do not understand what happens to me when I look up at the stars. I feel most myself then, and I wonder if it is supposed to work that way. And I wonder why it happens at all. I think it is something about feeling so small while still feeling safe. It is like all of the questions I have either in me or being asked of me get swallowed and either matched with their answers or rendered irrelevant and content to wait awhile longer for their answers.

Somehow that makes me feel at home. I like who I am there best.

Here are two semi related articles: 1. 2.

New plan:

It is a rabbit hole of discovery,
Finding out that you are different
And that it is not your own rebellious choice.

It feels like whatever authority you were fighting
Finally won and got you in a place you cannot guard
And cannot win back.

You played for keeps
And then you lost.
Lost your independence.

Lost your right to define yourself.
Lost something you do not even know how to grieve
If you are allowed to.

Lost.

And hope must be built on so much more
Than just getting better or by
Because you will not be doing either.

Hope must weigh down your very feet
To help stave off the feeling
Of just fading away.

You will need both hands to hold reality
Both feet to stand on such shifting grounds
And all of your voice to yell Truth

Lest you forget and lose all.

You will need neither eye
For both are blind
In such deep shadows.

Neither will you need your ears
Or else they may take in
Too many heavy lies.

You have enough Truth
If you do not surrender.
So bind them up!

Stop your ears
And clamp your eyes
So tight

That they shut out not only light
But shadows and deep night too.
Do not be distracted by lies and myths and lore

Even as you discover new things inside yourself.
Like how far you can be pushed
Before you finally push back

And what you do when you find yourself
Fallen
Into a rock rabbit hole

And up
Is the only direction
you can see.

But you have to
let go
of who you think you are

--who you thought
You would be
And who you wanted to be--

If you ever
Expect to get
Out.

That, and you can never
Hold those descriptors again
Without climbing [falling] back in.

Learn and be taught

But leave it behind.

This is not a place for living.

I believe I like it better this way. It feels less forced...yes.

This piece has been in the works for a few weeks now. I keep forgetting about it. Oops.

It is a rabbit hole of discovery,

Finding out that you are different

And that it is not your own rebellious choice.

It feels like whatever authority you were fighting

Finally won and got you in a place you cannot guard

And cannot win back.

You played for keeps

And then you lost.

Lost your independence.

Lost your right to define yourself.

Lost something you do not even know how to grieve

If you are allowed to.

Lost.

And hope must be built on so much more

Than just getting better or by

Because you will not be doing either.

Hope must weigh down your very feet

To help stave off the feeling

Of just fading away.

You will need both hands to hold reality

Both feet to stand on such shifting grounds

And all of your voice to yell Truth

Lest you forget and lose all.

You will need neither eye

For both are blind

In such deep shadows.

Neither will you need your ears

Or else they may take in

Too many heavy lies and drown.

You have enough Truth

If you do not surrender.

If.

I am not totally sold on the ending, but it refuses to rest any other way for now.

Dear Faux-Relativism:

Ideas are real things.

Just thought I would get that out there. I have needed to say it for some time because it has been burning in my tissue and my blood and my marrow. I am surprised I have not let it out prior to now.

I am so tired of unnecessary questions. I am so tired of living in a society that simply must call to question anything which does not lie immediately at hand and call those questions hallowed intellectualism or worse, science. Must you really transfer all of your insecurities to everything that exists and require everyone else to live within those insecurities? Because that is what it is.

I understand falling into that abyss of just not knowing and not being qualified to answer life's pressing and fundamental questions. I can even see how one could make a world view of that. I am really not so far away or SO different. But I am tired of being required to play by those rules after making my own peace with what I know and what I do not, will not, cannot or just have not yet in varying degrees.

It is not a real argument to just call to question whether words mean anything or have relevance. They are tricky things that require taming and that seemingly forbidden cooperation, but they are all that we have. And it is fine to question them in theory all alone, but it seems to me a supreme irony that every man and woman must use these selfsame words to form this question. Unless we jump straight to disbelief. And that is just what it is. Jumping.

Words themselves are nothing. But they are communication. If you would like to give that up, by all means, call everything to question. Say none of it has any real meaning, but please be consistent. Do not just use it as a trite way of dismissing an argument. Communication. Words. These are rooted in ideas and the exchange thereof.

Ideas. No we cannot see them. No science cannot prove them to really exist. But they raise up and undermine empires. It is on them that we all build and the second you invalidate their existence, you invalidate your own existence. Be careful. Tread lightly. Consider every facet before you dig your trenches there. More than that, please refrain from invalidating my own existence just as a casualty of your own war. And please, do not use those apparently irrelevant words to do all of this.

On a similar but better thought out train: poetry.

"But change is the kind of force that requires neither your belief nor your permission. It happens, with or without a by-your-leave, and you find yourself getting swept up and carried along whether you like it or not."

These past few days have been good, deeply and truly good. But they have all the marks and textures of time running out... of the calm before the storm. And though I know that time does not actually speed up, it is about to feel that way. I want to hold on and I feel myself trying, straining to grasp more firmly all that is fleeting and passing. But it will not be held.

People are moving, growing, and --most markedly-- leaving. I want to dig my heels in, drop all else and lose myself to the making of memories and the drawing out of goodbyes. However, life, my life, is making demands that I build. It is not mere busyness at work here, but genuinely important and foundational things which need attention. Now. This week. During these selfsame days.

fractures

I have an art piece that I want to do... but I lack the time and resources. Well, I have a lot of art pieces that I want to do and I could list all of those, but that would make me too sad. However, this one is particularly relevant today.

I want a pane of glass that I can intentionally stick a photograph to, let set with goop, and then tear off leaving a partial of the photo (a portrait of some emotive design likely emphasizing the face). Then I want to smash the pane so that the glass spiders. ...and then I have to find a way to keep it together after that.

It sounds pretty simple when I read it. I guess it is. Maybe I just want to smash things. Glass is pretty satisfying.

This piece comes out of living in too many unrelated spheres. It comes from quarantining certain parts of life from others, intentionally or unintentionally. And trying to live in that tension. For some people, it is that distinct loneliness they feel either because their church does not get them and/or their life outside of church does not. Usually both. Or two groups of friends. Or two homes. Whatever it is...it causes this chasm to open wide and you find yourself called to either side, but mostly residing somewhere deep inside it for fear of leaving something of yourself behind upon choosing a side.

And for me, I am caught between the abstractions and philosophizing of my starving muse...and the aircraft hangar. And I love them both for their own reasons. More than that, I do not know who I would be without either. In writing that, I want to rebel and resist definition, but it is useless. The former, is my lifeblood. It is how I think and how I see the world and when I ignore it, I become frighteningly mechanical and somehow less human. The latter is this perhaps overly romanticized dream that I have built for more than seven years. By the time I get to actually being able to learn to fly, it will be well nigh a decade.

Take into account that those were extra formative years in my life and aviation is inextricably part of my identity. Where else would I go? What else would I do? It is theoretically possible, but it would be a divorce with far reaching implications. Divorcing one's metaphorical DNA is a procedure that has never done anything but boost the pharmaceutical industry.

But I need to know if I can build dreams from schematics. If I can keep one foot in both worlds without falling and failing. Can I set my poetry and paintings between my FARs and Aeronautical Dictionary?

Beyond than that, what if I have romanticized flight? Is it possible that I could chase this all the way past every imaginable and tangible obstacle only to be disappointed because I was infatuated with an idea rather than the reality itself? I do not give myself over to love such fragile things easily. I am too timid for that. But I am afraid that this is a lost cause. Even if it is a false love, it is one I carry most fiercely and will never be rid of except perhaps by the very disappointment I fear. Quite simply I am in too deep.

But I knew all of that. This is not new. I wish it was. Then it would not carry the shame of familiarity. But I return here again and again and again. I know how it will end each time. I will climb out. I go do my homework and pass my tests with varying quality and questionable worthiness. And there is grace in time because she keeps moving even when we are not watching. Despite our bickering as to how quickly or slowly she should be going, she keeps the same pace.

So I know how today will end, but I still chafe against these worries. And I know I will be here again. I am creature of habit like everyone else. But I do long for the day when all of me is in agreement. When the tension is gone because who I want to be, is. And I may well be waiting into eternity for that, but time brings that nearer.

ALL of that to say just this: It helps to realize that the schism is less my own mistake today with a solution that I am overlooking and more a matter of groaning as we wait for eternity. It is good to remember. These fractures have their beginnings in the tension between now and eternity. There is an end. But it is not my responsibility. Two kinds of rest.

The irony is that for the past week I have not been able to get past the first few verses of Hebrews. Conspiracies.