(Aug 3, 2011)
I think I've decided to start blogging again. It happened unexpectedly. I was sitting at a Nationals baseball game next to an old friend, and he mentioned something about my life that I was surprised to hear him know. And he referred to my blog. Another friend just a few weeks ago did something similar, and it occurred to me that people actually read it. And maybe people actually liked it. That vaguely crossed my mind before, but the reality didn't sink home.
Suddenly when I realized I was returning to Portland in what will be my second go at making a life there, I wanted to write again. Maybe I'm becoming an addict. The current question, as the scope of my life shifts, is what to rename the blog. What better place to find a name than Rumi's poetry?
The presence rolling through again
clears the shelves and shuts down shops.
Friend of the soul, enemy of the soul,
why do you want mine?
Bring tribute from the village.
But the village is gone in your flood.
The cleared site is what I want.
Live in the opening where there is no door
to hide behind. Be pure absence.
In that state everything is essential.
The rest of this must be said in silence
because of the enormous difference between light
and words that try to say light.
The new title is “A cleared site.” And this is what I will try to be. There's a long, joyous path in front of me, and simultaneously I am weighed down by a new understanding of my grief. I feel the wound dealt me when born – the one I've been picking at, not letting heal for 27 years. I see it now, and I see all the ways that I made it deeper. Now comes the process of recognition, of moving towards that vulnerability that I so long denied. Now comes the truth and the healing. And with it, just maybe, success.
My ambition is no smaller. In fact, the past year has made it larger, and the past months have honed it. I drop away all that is unnecessary, and what remains defines the path of my life. There is little I can do. I still feel like I got on an express train, and my faith alone keeps me from going mad thinking that the whole thing is headed nowhere. I could never be a nihilist. Long ago, in the recesses of my mind, I stumbled across solipsism, and in fact I may still be a believer, but nihilism reeks of untruth to me. How can one deny the deep lost connection, the wound of separation from something that I have no words for? I never could. And now I will consciously never do so again.
There is a deep need to acknowledge the truth of my existence. I hope that as I learn to do this, I turn myself into a cleared space. I hope that I take this knife and do my killing. I am not walking the path of consolations.
