Fossil

There is a war within me. Two opposing forces that are playing out an epic life long battle of wills. It is a war of sentiment, on one hand good enough, on the other - never. They are reactionary but they are also inherent.

I have come home to a place where familiarly is only implied, no longer expressed in the essence of things that have waited in animate apathy for my return.

I have lived a year of restless solitude, inhabiting a dark-like space and filling it with glory, mercy and grace through great moments. The beautiful sunrises, the mountain landscapes, the warmth between new friends, challenges faced and surmounted. It has been a year of tremendous change and tremendous struggle and now, face to face with the context provided by home it seems impossible to hold on to the revelations, impossible to transfer the feeling of being so in charge yet so out of control it nearly kills you. But of course, it doesn’t. It creates texture and color and music in the deepest parts of you. It isn’t always joyous, but it is a melody of allegory and change, sometimes somber, sometimes rapturous, but always ringing out within. To say that I know myself now would be disingenuous. It would presumptuous to think that there is some type of constructed personality, or internal character that you can know this way; as one would uncover an old dinosaur bone in the layers of hardened sediment.

The creation of the fossil is the discovery of it.

Each experience is hot magma, compression and the scattering of carcasses. Each day that I woke up with challenge in my heart and the newness on my tongue I pressed these things together and saw that they were mine. That is how the self becomes myself, you claim it, one bone at a time.

So I wandered Europe, collecting bones and looking for new light to see them in. Looking for the meaning that would truly set straight the confliction between wanting to fit in and tear the whole thing apart. Tear apart all conceptions of reality so there were no more lines to draw, no more crosses to bear, no more have to’s. I wanted there to be only me and the open seeable universe to sink my feet into.

And I have seen it this way; sitting on a cliff overlooking a blackened midnight ocean being eaten by the reflecting stars. It’s in the knowledge of inevitability, how fate and fortitude walk hand in hand when you finally put all those chips on the table. When you look the future in the eye and say ‘this is what I’ve got, I’m either going to make it or not’.

And you do.

And you do.

But like any migrating creature the time comes to return to home. Here back in the snow globe of old hang-ups, old anguish, old fears are so many unanswered questions. Maybe we’ve been inside this glass dome all along? Thinking we were traversing great distances but really we were just spinning in concentric circles around the same thing everyone is; the gravity of pleasure, to please and be pleased.