How to Build an Ark
How to Build an Ark
Falling in Love with Fate at the End of the World
Four years ago, I bought an old school bus to turn into a mobile monastic tiny house and prowl the United States in mystic visions. I was at the end of my rope, and finding a faith in Existence I’d never known before.
It’s impossible now to explain the headspace I was in. But there is something in my journal from the time that captures the experience (framed, for whatever reason, as an exchange between a soul called “Leaf” and a mysterious figure called “The Chellist.”)
The project ultimately ran aground—but set me on my current path. So how do we judge success? (“Amor fati…”)
In the final analysis, I conclude whatsmilingly summarizes as his own ultimate existential calculus: “I love God.”
Amen.
7/1/19 Entry 1: A New Chapter
Dear Cellist,
You know little about me, and neither do I as it turns out. So what else is there to do but paint in large letters and muted tones the sketch and volume of my life, so standing circa Now?
Being a musician, surely you understand ebb and flow; transition, development; cadence. Surely you see these, too, played out, writ larger, lifewise; rising, tension, dissonance and resolution; change. Surely you have traced in quietest reverie the large hand of God as it, too, saws its own bow strokes out against the resined fibers of the world; looked into the orange sky at evenhour and seen Grace, tenuously gifted, playing. Old Kepler in his pointed beard could see it turn, elliptical, and traced the contours; ...Giordano Bruno; “Musical Spheres” some said, or Harmony; or maybe just old Fortune wheeling and dealing, tuning out of tune.
Anyways and always: dynamics; change. Vibrations, cyclical; the recollected and re-stranged. And the whole endeavor, like a symphony of places, moving...turning... taking turns, angelical on up to all high pale Heaven, glowing glory.
—Bliss.
Ah, but I digress. Surely, as musicians, we can see the Movements and progressions, as in music, shift in trees, in the seasons, and in our light frail beings; shift, and make some newness breathe through shorn life. So has it mine in me, and I have lost a season (well, lost thirty); but, new seasons turn! new passages develop on the sheets and reams of leaves the Cellist reads, no?
Dixit: I’ve bought a bus. I’ve named her Abbey. And, like a wooden temple lathed in metal, she will be my monastery, edged in black gilt; engined monastic cloister, where, under pinelight and fireshadow, I will read the mystics and their journeys; chart the chiliocosms, counting lotuspetals sprinkle-showered down by a billion bodhisattvas, smiling; peer into consciousness—my consciousness, and yours, and Everybody’s, Cellist—and will feel the old Earth grow inward, lose my body on a mind mountain, look through fog, find it again laid up in the pure Void, put it on, laugh, wiggle, wonder; wander through a million nebulas, and the Great Universal Lattice of Eyes, kaleidoscopic, peering up and everywhere into the Enigma like a giggle...
Then I will rise from Lotusland, and pull the break, and screech out of whatever canyonbed or creek-silted canopy I’d parked beside, and wheel towards Life. Life. Drink dark craft potions brewed in hipster taphouse hollows, meet old painters in Montana, harvest garlic on a WOOFer’s beat in Appalachia, steal Pinocchio’s nose. Who knows?
All these, friend, “plotted and set down.” But we shall see. For now, a close. And this first letter but an opening, to set the stage for more, and eye the open, turning road. My diary of the next chapter starts.
For now, friend—matter-less and mostly-imagined half-projected Anima, dear Cellist—I must end. More coming. But
adieu.
- Leaf
7/2/19 Entry 2: Why
✓ Buy bus. ✓ Remove seats. ✓ Seal floor. ✓ Insulate floor. ✓ Install OSB subflooring.
And so, dear Cellist—mon amour fantastique, mon semblable, mon frère—being apprised now of my new direction, its crude shape and substance, its rigid outline and base form, no doubt you may be wondering next, inquisitive, smiling: “Why?” Why do this thing? Why climb this mountain?
But what is it you really wish to hear? Merely the immediate catalyst of this madness? Of failed relationships? The ended engagement? This sudden and unexpected need to secure for myself a new life away from a still-inchoate and aborted future—in towns removed, under a new roof? Ravens and foxes have nests and dens, but naive poets no place to lay their pens.
Well, this is all true enough. Every day, no doubt, worlds end—and some as unexpectedly as mine, I’m sure. Here, a diagnosis; there, a sacking; here, a mother learns of his affair, and there: old God is falling from a heartheld monarchy. A hundred causes for a hundred souls, disworlded. It doesn’t take so much to pop the bubble of a wellset world. We live in snowglobes fraily glassed, and every flake: potential pinpricks, flurrying. The tumult of the seas bring word daily of drowned sailors; and who is left, when tempests cease, to bear the sinking’s burden on? Unless the sea claim two, we build, from shipwrecks, second ships, and bear our burdens in their cargo-houses. We, we carpenters, spackle walls up with our losses, tile roofs from what has floored us, setting cornerstones with all that time has flung. We float in ignorance our spot of foam upon a wavy surface—till the wild tidal mountings crash, and break us open, breaking, broke open, there to float in chaos, lost in cold seawater; thrown open, naked to abysses—lost in cold seawater—possibly to drown...
Unless, by some proficiency (so token of our species), we find a way to blow a globe out of the molten sea, and take up shelter in it. Perhaps the Universe, itself expanding like molten glass from Zephyrlip, was started even so, and God, dovepregnant, brooding over chaoses, breathed all that is into an Adamsod we call the galaxies, then jumped inside, and Let it Be.
It is, and so it is, and all that is is what it is, and this, perhaps when better wisdoms fail (like promises), is cold comfort enough. And so it is that I have found myself in need of some new vessel, a captain without a ship, life all mutinied, and Pequod smashed to pieces in the sun. But from the shards that flotsam on the surf, I cull a raft, and set my ragged rudder legs to paddle Godward. Let there be light! And let it warmly flicker from a fireside. And let it soak into every pore of my poor cottage, soul a’ tow in some old metal buzzard, where I can write, and read, and learn a thing or two from memory about the frailty of all worlds. Then might some wisdom pick me up, haggardly islanded, towards a land that is no land, but Brahman Atmanned: sea and land united.
And so, dear Cellist, mon amor fati, there is that whole part of it. These, the circumstances of my circumnavigation; contingencies of mission. And let those be as well! For all that happens happens; but “for a reason”? That’s up to us. Aeneas wanders with a Rome in his heart. Odysseus, Penelope. And I—I you, or God, or Buddha; Jesus Christ; angels upon angels; wisdom; sacrifice; the mystic vision of the mystic crossroads; the Empyrean, and loss; experience and suffering; and the will, the holy will to Life. And hope is in there, too, of course (my badge and talisman); Transcendence; truth; enlightenment. And shall I couple Love? Yes, Love, which is all these and more, I think (but, how, I’m not quite sure…).
Ah, but I’ve only scratched the surface, and already so much ink spilt. The rest in entries to come. The rest to come.
Adieu.
- Leaf
7/10/19 Entry 3: Flood
✓ Frame walls. ✓ Install clean water tank. ✓ Install water inlet. ✓ Install gray water tank.
Dear Cellist,
...Yes yes, all this is true. True, but not all. For, besides this most immediate occasion for my own individual withdrawing into miniature living—into sparse comforts and spartan needs—there remains, unchanged, what has always been the case, for all of us: the new reality—dogged and demanding, ominous and invariable, like a storm impending…
Storm clouds, friend. Looming darkness up ahead, hulking its goliath span, foreboding, brutal; a long far gray haze bringing midday darkness, and the unseen lightnings; bulked up thunder in the distant belly architectures of its lumbering mass… I tremble when I think…
For now, we sit. But even now, beneath its creeping shadow, everything ornately beautiful in the organic tendrils of Earth’s elderly weather withers. The once vast networks of connections fray. Enshadowed, the species die. The rich array of nature’s copious bounty: bungled—beaten into ruin under plastic boots and our stupidity. Millions and millions and millions of beings and sentience: forever decimated in a hidden holocaust—for syrups and toys, syrups and toys! Eradicated for cheap fat in Teflon frying pans, frying enslaved gizzards, tortured to the beak in long dark huts across the once wild plains of Great America. Brutal, bungled world. Stupid, stupid idiocy! Stupid, stupid and ugly. And for what?
Convenience moving things. Convenience, God of everything. Idol of our brutishness, and the sick sleek stupid ignorance with which we move, and fat ourselves, and grow large on cushioned couches, and buy more houses, and rape in oafish ruin everything of any value, and laugh at screens!
Fools. Everywhere. Felling. Toiling. Stealing. Selling. Profitprofitprofitting like little pigs their pigbellied mansions, and slurping from electric wells. Slurping everything dry. Feeding the furnaces with all the final dregs of fuel as if tomorrow were eternities from now, and Now was all there is.
Fools. Meanminded, fatnecked fraternity stockmen heaping pennies stolen from old widows into their bank accounts to pay their beachhouse energy bills. Golfing as the flower-seeders die, as Venice sinks, as the divine abundance of biology is whittled down, commodified, and sold to slake a banker’s hunger for a Caribbean jaunt.
Burnt to ferry ogres from ogre mall to ogre villages.
Burnt to heat a hundred thousand uninhabited palaces.
Burnt, to watch it burn, and pay a dominatrix for the thrill of losing.
Burnt, consumed, and vomited into the sky, to better burn the world, burning.
Melting continents of ice because they left the heater on.
Burnt and belched and vomited into the sooty, befouled, all-chemical sky. And, seeing no stars, demanding billionaires launch rockets over blanket smog so they can ride them for an afternoon, and snap a pixel picture of some purity they blame the poor for ruining.
Burnt, burning—the world all up in flames! And up ahead, the storm! The deluge. The rivers rise. The oceans, overflowing…
Oh, my dear friend, is it no longer prudent to speak of Godwrath? Does the burning Earth not moan and weep and cry out for some justice? Who will give it? Who, in this awful matrix of systemic impudence and thoughtless slog? Of awful, stupid, careless, heartless luxury and license? Who, if not some waking deity, in light and thunder, rising, roused from slumber, furious, with boulders dropping like thick sand from off its arms and from its eyes, and, rising, wretched, infinite and wild, wreaking retribution. And in the harvest fields the poets chant: Wake, O Lord, and put on your armor. Woe, that this awful Day should now last centuries…
Centuries, through which the pent-up consequence of all our tomorrow-borrowing will blaze, and see the rains drop thunderous and horrible upon us, flattening beneath their epic turbulence all prideful city skylines, all supply-chains burning silkroads through the forest ghettos, knocking down the walls of Wall Street, of Wal-Marts, disrupting the million miles of cable hissing underneath the waters, sink the frigates and the tankards, from whose inexplicable sudden silence shall ring out, in one great symphony of angelsound, the songs of innumerable whales, rejoicing, lowing hallelujah in the depths of light as, finally, the maddening cacophony of human industry and awfulness has ceased its screaming, and the world is still again.
Oh friend…
The world is on fire, and what grim future lies ahead, I shudder to consider. Shudder, but prepare (as best one can). And even if no cataclysm strikes, or godheads stir to shake the Earth out of its hubris, still I’ll live: sunfed, frugal, far from the pulsing grid; at peace with whales. Should all the world go on in even evermadness, mingling, toiling on into exponential growth and turning star-imperialist, I’ll sit, and read, and warm myself by firelog light, and keep no fridge, and mind my lights, and make wide gardens for the birds and me, and drink the rain that slithers down my rainchain chimney, demanding all the while no tax from widows, no loans from tellers, no returns from stocks or receipts from sellers. I will just be, and try not to offend the Earth by being so, but to make Her glad, and be a shepherd of the Lifeforce flowing.
And that, dear friend, my lovely Cellist—child of Gaia and goodness; wide-eyed smiler above the bow and string—is not so bad I think, and in fact may be as noble as nobility can be these days, in a sordid age of thanklessness, waste, stupor, incivility, and hatred.
And so I shall frame my bus: my ark, to ride out rough waters still ascending. The flood is coming, is here…
And so I frame my ark and pray.
- Leaf
7/10/19 Entry 4: Yes! say the jolly monks coming…
✓ Insulate walls. ✓ Lay electrical wiring. ✓ Install solar panels on roof. ✓ Install propane tank.
Ah, and so, dear Cellist, laughing-eyed, kind—we come to the heart of the matter. For while all this is true, and all the perennial darkness of our days gloams over, still this:
Yes.
My goal above goals is just this Yes. To cultivate Yes-ness. To say Yes to all things. Not in some tepid bypassing of true darkness and misery, but in spite of and (here, Mystery) somehow because of them. This, the Nietzschean dispensation. This, the inspired madness of every Kerouacian hero. This, the final ecstatic exclaim of Molly Bloom in bedded (g)nostic glory. This, the daimon of every Dionysian maenad and initiate crying “Evoe!” to the open night. This, the stuff of bonfires and gladness—but also, yes, the dogged blear-eyed affirmation needed in all awakenings to the cold cold drear day one more day. The acceptance and, nay, indeed, assertion of what is as is, and to all Is and I AM: Yes. The commitment to rise, and rise again, and find, in rising, every scrap of blessing in the cold earth imaginable. This, the straw for “sucking the marrow out of life.” Yes. Yes to all, to everything. Yes: my dawning catechism.
But how is this done? Hard wisdom. A notion only chipped off in discovery from the massive marble of experience relatively recently. For the Stone Tablets of the Hebrews gave us “Thou Shalt Nots” and the Church’s doctrines “Mea Culpas” and “Nay, verily’s”; even the bliss-eyed Buddha only “Dukkha! Dukkha is life! And desire its cause.” And, sure, all these hard insights in their place and time. But the odd enlightenment I seek is only “Yes!” Yes Yes to the whole world. To slay the god of gravity, as Nietzsche said, and dance, not over abysses, but over vast vistas and open roads and even the immense expanse of ineffable space within my psyche. To look on love and sorrow and say “Yes yes, well there it is.” To look on laughter and the joyous crackling exhalations of exuberant honking men in overalls squealing on saxophones at swirling fans and say “Yes!” to them, and thus Yes to life. And Yes, likewise, on the dark dimensionless loneliness of my own inner cosmos as it circles in uncertain turns and gyres before immensities of beauty opened up unaudienced but to my eyes, and say “Ah, yes. Ah Yes. This too. And yes, all this, forever.” To be Faust forfeiting daily his fool’s bet—to invert it with old dry Mephistopheles and say “My soul, if I don’t wish every moment to stay. My very ghost, if I don’t weep for all moments to linger, as if the very Insight, as if Transcendence glorified in every tip and stipule of the leaves, as if this Now were not all Nows, and Now was not Eternity.” Ah! Yes! Yes Yes to the Spirit of Negation. Yes, to the Spirit of Gravity. Yes yes yes, to all paleness, and all desiccating brittle time. Yes to all and everything—yours, dear Cellist, Yes; and mine.
This, this Yes, is my Commandment, and Precept Numero Uno of my burgeoning catechism: Rule 1 for a new Order of Jolly Monks I’d be fathering: eager oddball seekers who shall live on Yes. A monastic troupe of cock-eyed sillymen-and-women (and-everything-in-between-and-onward). A Yes to live by for strange initiates into a fledgling ragtag temple diaspora, roaming America and beyond in little arks they sculpted from the castoff debris of a sunsetting civilization. Holy fools and mystics seeking Yes in every corner, giggling, smoking pipes in Thereauvian mobile shacks—an army of odd new spiritualists, engrossed in Earth, planting onions in their windowsills, dancing in street festivals; hippy idiots with GOD and sutras and bibles and Whitmans and whatever else inspires them under their arms, perspiring; stark, foolish, naked; spreading Light amongst lights, and illuminating with sod Truth the plodding ritualistic slog of the dull world. Whirring about over the face of the Earth, planting trees in odd places on never-ending trajectories. Loving and laughing and weeping and sighing and circling up up up in ecstasies to the angelic Vision, saying, “Heehaw! Hey now. Yes! That’s it. Haha!”
All this I hope to chart, and bring such seeds for future gardens in my foolish ark. All this, Cellist, now just starting! But—more anon. Adieu.
- Leaf
7/15/19 Entry 5: Walls
✓ Finish walls with tongue-and-groove boards. ✓ Cut and lay vinyl flooring.
✓ Fashion cabinets and kitchen counter.
Dear Cellist,
Let us be forever learning. I want to acquire new skills, new arts always. I am such a novice at life… Even now, just bold of 30, circumstance prepares new rounds and gamuts for me—burning-hoops and homespun trials to test my unimagined mettle. (Or so I’ll conceive of fortune, taking new compass from getting lost, as though the buffeting stormwinds were designed to shift my final island. [Existence is movement; living, growth. Time is change; but aging, maturation, telos. Being, given; but Meaning always chosen. I choose reason for my redirection, transmogrifying mortify to resurrection.]) So, let’s grow!
Already I have spoken of my Yes direction. This is artform for a whole lifetime—no easy act. Daily I practice, drawling “Yes yes” to myself, reflecting, or looking out on the soft green trees, and give my blessing to the seasons. “Yes yes” I say, too, to the silly discontentments so unexpectedly wrecking me, and learn, and wise up “Yes yes” to the moment’s lesson. It is helping. Still, this precept needs a life to break open fully, before its pollen nectar crystallizes in true form, and even death is Yessing.
So, beyond this, I have added a second praxis: Floating, flowing…
That is, letting go, and letting be, and simply watching everything without a Me grasping and grasping at it. Just…sit. And see the downtown bustle blur by casually, and watch the evening market orange with evening, sipping a slow drink of froth and joy as, quiet, creepings of eternity ascend in tingling arms and tingling head, and I am glad for gladness, glad to see these brothers pass me by, this couple hand-in-hand, this childsplay laughter rival Adam in his innocence leaping from rock to rock. And then I lose my ‘I’ and simply bleed into reality, and watch existence puttering, and be blessed by it, and know that all is well.
And yes, like meditation breaking, it invariably comes to pass that a beautiful clarinetist in striped pants passes, and I long and wonder and desire and dole. But…then remember, Cellist, and let her go… and know that she and I are grass, and have been burning in some stellar filament together for millennia, maybe loved another in a drop of water, weathered suns, and will be mingled with the dust of Shakespeare, aliens, and angels come dawning eonwake. And what weighs my desire in such a scale, when nebulas and epochs go toe to toe with my dot’s hankering, and I am old before their minute? I grasp and grasp. We grasp, and haggle beggardly for crumbs, muling when comforts cold, and whine for love. But Love is old, and ancient as the atom forces breaking Jodie into a sequoia tree that supernovas in ten centuries.
No, better to take my want for what it’s worth, and learn to love existence non cui bono. To love the ebb and flow of everything, and watch it with all the expectation the tide is due. And when I do, I leave the small ache of my self, and feel enveloped into the very motion of things, and take such pleasure in the very Thatness of what is, however it is, that I am so lost in Thatness, I am That, to some degree, a moment’s flourishing, before I fall back from my reverie into my froth and drink and see a busking girl at banjo chords. But “yes yes…” We are all the tide like this.
Is this, then, the equanimity I seek? Untroubled by small wants, but wanting only Everything, just as it is? Is this the Buddhist’s upekkha, the Greek’s ataraxia, Emerson’s Transparent Eyeball, so melted into matter that the subject becomes object with what it sees, and all that is is what it sees, and all that is is Seeing? Is this some poor pale earthrelic of the beatific gaze, which finds some unity with Trinity in the celestial reflection’s Face come death’s head’s endless awakening?
Or is it merely just a way to cope with days, a reflex to defend against fate—by loving it? It is and must be all these things, dear Cellist. For who can reach Empyreal shores, or break the fetters of samsaric curses, shipwrecked at the drear end of a bottle? Being is given, but Meaning always chosen. And as I sit at downtown outside tables, sipping giant beers I’ve bought, and watching Friday evening move along like Nature Herself, dynamic, flowing, I will look for ripples in the surface where the radiance peeks through. And where the seam is seen [or sown], I’ll pry the edges. Everything is dead already, unless you live it through. Then vivify with wonder! and a stern hope whose star is ever onward, upward—inward. Learn to flow, and ride at the current pace, mindful, in the moment, a knight of infinite resignation, who gains the world—by letting go. “For whoever would save their Life must lose it,” and find themselves not as they were. Or, as Stevens wrote:
I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw
Or heard or felt came not but from myself;
And there I found myself more truly and more strange.
Just this I seek to learn—a disappearance act, perhaps, magician-sly, kenotically self-emptying into the world, and I, an Eye… the world….
But—baby steps.
I sip my drink. And smile at joy that isn’t mine. And court the moment when the radiance strikes, and know again:
it is.
- Leaf.
7/16/19 Entry 6: Interlude – cathedralmusic
✓ Install PEX plumbing. ✓ Install water pump. ✓ Install on-demand water heater.
Ah, Cellist, cellist, celestial > caelestis > caelum—heavenly Cellist; heavensong singer, what are these sweet tunes? This music? Choiress and destiny-composer, angelheaded abbey-Echo, O! Sweet temple resonances, these. This. This music. Filling arches and arches up of my cathedral home. Vibrations holy with the stone and light, like subtle colors wafting welkinward.
There you sit, knees splayed to hold the oaken sacrament, and playing it toward heaven like a sacrifice, eyes bent on skylights—now bended, solemnly shut, and quivering hand poured over resinwood fret’s filaments—ffffffzzzzz—plying Sound for miracle and all the earth’s atonement.
Bow, soft, these most tenderest tones, exalted up to Christ, to Lord Smiling, buddhas, to turning arcs and turning gyres of heavenlight’s gearing spirals thither Dimensionless.
Saw your string and offer it, goblet-like, Godbound through the sugar glass, dear daemon. Dionysian circles wend their workings toward the seraphim, dripping blessing. Eye them with your wish, your existence’ mission: To play sound at stone, to blend volume with the cataclysm, working redemption through cathedralmusic.
Oh, angel, oh, expend your tortured art for this world. Play wood to the bone of depths, and wrench eternity out of the starkness, star-eyed, begging.
I see you, brow-racked, eye-cheeked, rosy-wanton, willing, willing with every fiber the Great Something, eyeing the old Wall of Ages and casting your spell at it, eager, breathless, holy, wretched, endless, blessèd, beatific-radiant in the cast crepuscular beam of the white Rose window, bowing.
And all along the walls of this old stone cathedral: sound, reverberating, rising up the ribbed arcs toward the Light.
This is how the world is saved.
I will build this temple for your Music. I will gather stones from the fields and lay them up, brick by brick, crypt by crypt, Coyote worship, consecrating, wild, steer-eyed, offering and acolyte-led lightning-feeding fealty, darshana-stupid, and sizzling tip-ends of jasmine incense for the ritual murder of that saw bow broken-slaughtered against sawed woodcello F-holes, weeping. Who?
GOD
And the doors to the cathedral blown open—
- Leaf
9/19/19 Entry 7: Close
✓ Check all systems. ✓ Sell all superfluous worldly goods. ✓ Chart course. Find God.
Dear Cellist,
You are leaving now. And so am I. But neither to our anticipated destinations, it would seem. And that is fitting, I suppose. As fitting as fate’s inscrutable happenstance, which we must hew through rugged grit and wisdom into Providence. Amor fati, and I do love you, Cellist, really, as much as little I ever knew you. You are, I think, inscrutable as fate, and just as beautiful. And in the subtle resin lingerings of soft red sound left velvetly trembling by your passing on—your moving, as the Spirit moves, where you please, and when, to seek some second lease on…something pressing—I hear…
nothing.
No still small voice to reassure with haunted tokens. No message in the open window. Just…the autumn coming on, with its inevitable gust of leaves, to shake the world naked of its covering leaves and bring the cold.
One reads of things like this, perhaps—about the second stage of mysticism: that dark night, this long dark night now coming on, where the Seeker sits longingly awaiting Light, but finds no Light; when ears are cupped to autumn’s silence, and the ragged breath is all that stirs the barren leaf-strewn amber-soggy streets with sighs’ exasperations. Where is God?
The difference now, in this dark night now coming on, thirty-years foolish, disatheisted clown, humbug failed hermit, hawksorn, highdive, goldenfretted and firesacked lyre-pressed beaten boy, is my commitment. There is no turning back from Love’s faded nimbus, fog-fled, once it’s uptaken you toward it. There is only the long gray cold dusk road, uncertain distance, to be walked, in refinding from where you Fell.
And this you follow. Down the valley, up a Purgatory, dayless, durationless. But led, inexorably—like a weeping magnet, wounded, weary. But…determined. Decade-ready.
In lieu of rings, this is your ring—the tattoo of a τὸ Ἕν tortured on your finger for a seeker’s slog to Glory. This, your Purgatory, pending Paradiso, wending, waiting, wretched, worried. Why?
For where is God?
There is no “In the flowers! In the goldenrod!” here. Only the long gray dusk road, nimbus-famished and nimbus-fled. But you will trek it. There is no other exit. There is only up, and upward-tending. And in a secret locket, something like a memory of Light, infixed and precious. This, you tend to; feed like frail fire; pamper, prejudiced to the eventual Good which must, which has to break, like lovers’ smiles from grievances of pettiness; like sun upon storm ruins; shipwrecks, dawnlit; spring from winter’s clutches; heaven from the small shards wetted by sinners’ shattered alabaster jars upon a savior’s blessings.
Adieu, dear Cellist. Tomorrow, I set sail. Spirit teaches, cloistered or cajoled, cowled or cowed. Perhaps that is the lesson in this lessonless.
And yet, I cannot choose but think: wherever one goes, God-intending, that is one’s direction.
If so, I’ll intend, and find me in an ever-heaven. Find you, Cellist, intertwined with some Intention.
Find God—beautiful, brunette, and bending with a bow of resin over hollow wood, and making Her cathedral-music
Fate.
Or break the cellic symphony past all pale form
To Light
beyond knowing
is rediscovered
endlessly
as Love
Adieu
Adieu pour toujours ou par espoir de ne jamais ‘’partir’’? ☯️☮️