AppliedPhilosopher

Each coin has two sides, but mine keeps coming up "To Blathe" over "True Love." Despair keeps muscling aside Hope for place of prominence, demanding to lead in this bizarre discordant tango. There can be no love without heartbreak, no light without dark, no life without death; all this I know, and I know, and I know. But I miss, I ache for moments when hope and love linger long enough to ripen, take root, provide shade from the sun, shelter from the storm. I struggle to find faith to believe what I fear I have no right to ask.

Dreaming of lost vocabularies, forgotten tongues that might express what we no longer have words to say, anticipating yet- unformed nomenclatures to whisper the unimagined into being. Souls aching for transcendence cannot long endure narrow boundaries nor truncated proportions of this mundanely measured existence. Immeasurable aspects of ourselves persist seeking rare contours hidden within and beyond, auroras swirling in formations too wondrous to describe, ethereal mysteries in whose presence perceptions must expand, holding space for paradox, allowing moments wherein multidimensional healing may occur.

Too many among my people who claim to take bold stands for "religious freedom" too often mean the other thing. Following true Puritan tradition, they define freedom largely as power to make others adhere strictly to their beliefs, treating others as no one wants to be treated.

There is something silently romantic about rainy nights, shimmering colors of light reflecting on the wet pavement. They arouse something unnamed within me, distant fading memory of past enchantments, unspoken promise of transcendent encounters yet to come.

Holidays have mutated into experience entirely foreign; cold lonely exile wherein I dwell as stranger and alien, uncertain if home yet exists in any form that would receive me.

My calling, my craft: seeking, finding, bestowing true names; articulating, acknowledging, liberating each soul to be and become wholly itself. Yet still I am beckoned by songs from beyond, challenged to sit in stillness and silence, to exist without striving in presence of unnamed mystery, that which transcends power of any language to describe or embody. There in some unmapped and unmappable true place, much that has dwelt long unseen and unfathomed with me is beheld, accepted, enveloped in wordless understanding.

We're too busy assessing, grading, evaluating, documenting, accrediting, filling in endless little boxes on too many damn screens until we're all reduced to cogs in a vast machine some might call the Educational Industrial Complex, human resources with essential aspects of our humanity amputated to fit into equations demanded by almighty crunchers of numbers. Stop. Breathe. Step outside the spreadsheets and rubrics; open space for yourself and the souls around you to encounter the mysteries of life we struggle to find words to describe; space and time to ponder and consider questions whose answers remain mischievously immeasurable.

I followed the call to go out from my country, my people, my father's household to the land I was shown, urged on by whispers, the memory of whose promise yet tingles in my ears: that deepest desires would be fulfilled. Two score and more years since, I dwell yet as resident alien, living in exile. My home left behind is Home to me no longer; I can summon no names, recognize no songs to identify where or with who I belong. Companions, kindred, found family have entered and departed; loves found and lost again and again, leaving my heart scarred and afraid to dream anew, afraid of forgetting how to dream at all. I'm torn from this vantage between concluding there is no plan, no story, no Home yet waiting, and holding mind open to consider whether I walk inside Narratives too vast and winding to discern. For now clearest hints of Home linger in echoes of half-remembered songs, calling me to continue this long strange trip until its End, though destination remains un-named

This Story, like Tolkien's road goes ever on and on. This Narrative I inhabit defies description or categorization into any known genre or form, beginning long before and continuing long past my horizons of perception. Unable to discern if I am the Dreamer or the Dreamed, I frequently wonder if such distinctions ultimately matter. In moments when I peer through cracks in the facade of these proscribed binaries, something unnamed within me beholds and is beheld by the Infinite.

I need to step off into Dreamspace; my consciousness suffocates within these mundane, overly measured and articulated dimensions. Deep calls out to Deep; I must rise far beyond, descend down to innermost fathoms, walk across Planes seen and unseen into undefined realms of Story and Song. I seek unfound spaces wherein what is boundless within me may find and be found, welcomed and received into havens of souls kindred who dare to dream new realities, new worlds whose unknown shapes, colors, and rhythms wait patiently for our senses to ripen.