the inauguration of a new world

i thought i'd ramble for a bit while i sit here alone on a friday night listening to the sound of a bell on a collar on a cat that is trying her best to free herself of it. other than the tinny sound of the bell and the muffled yelps of what must be one of those obnoxious little dogs - it's quiet here. it's the kind of quiet which prompts one to silence it with noise - iTunes, television, even the hum of the air-conditioner though tonite is more september than august and there's no need to cool the place. it's nice. churchlike. church with a yelping dog and a bell, but there is a peace about this messy apartment which seduces one to contemplate.

some of you are close enough to me - physically - to have suffered through the verbal solutions of my recent evaluation of faith in light of science and faith in light of historical fact. it has not been easy to welcome once again - dichotomy. my life until a few years back was spent trying to reconcile an unrelinquishable, determined faith with the persistent sexuality of my experience - constantly mediating the two extremes. to say until suggests i've finished with all that. that's not true. i've merely reached a point where both parties within my conflicted singular soul are two exhausted to compete with each other - furnishing me in the meantime with seeming peace. i've learned a few things which, when invoked, shame each into a managable silence.

but to resume my initial point, "recent evaluation" stretches back a year or two when i returned to school but the actual crisis has been within the past several months. i call it a crisis because for me it is very much a crisis. it's something like a slow growing cancer, perhaps a pregnancy - nothing that will kill you in two months, but something which must be addressed before it crosses the threshold of severity. it's something which your friends and family know about - maybe - and which surfaces for one reason or another in conversation but graduates from news to smalltalk in a matter of months. there it remains largely dormant beneath a fascade of normalcy which smoothes over any alterations and makes the toll appear more mild, more gradual than radical and threatening. inside - even when i'm too busy to entertain it - i feel the difference. much like with cancer, i do not feel well. my dis-ease is more the chemo than the cancer though - the cancer grows slowly and usurps it's priority with deceptive courtesy - the chemo is what makes me violently ill. and just as with cancer, the illness that comes with chemo is a good kind of sick. it's a sickness that reminds you you're fighting and ultimately restores health. that's kind of what i'm feeling. very sick inside - privately sick. i know i have to ask these questions. i know i have to commit to looking for their answers even if there are in fact no answers. i must search long enough until i've committed to the questions themselves as answers and discover whatever sleeping questions that might awaken. i am very sure that this too shall pass as it always has, and i know the process will refine me in ways which will surrender their logic when the time is right.

however obscure and elusive things are now, today's opacity is more transparent than yesterday's clear.

i know i haven't said much here to make what i'm talking about understandable to you, reader. i guess that's not really my point. i don't really want to try to do that. it'd disappoint both of us. because it's my growth, literally as well as the figure mentioned above, i don't think i will ever be able to make it remotely appreciable to you. should i seem to succeed in such an explanation - i will have failed to have apprehended it myself. it is like a circle though. i can tell you that much. like a gold band. it is going back to where i was before and seeing it differently. it is going back to that same place and bringing with me new things to put there - like renting an apartment from an earlier season in one's life, and furnishing it with the comforts and collections that have accumulated since that time. the walls are the same. the doors and windows and the light that shines through them - all familiar. but the surfaces which the light strikes and how the eyes perceive all of it? it's the inauguration of a new world quilted from oddly matched remnants - not wholly unfamiliar, but like the blending of two veteran flavors into a novel third, permits the distinction of constituents. nonetheless, it is only rightly called something new - something different. a marriage.

my life is marrying my life. this is the seam - the line between patches. the leap from paisley to plaid, and the needle penetrates with each needful stitch to join the two. who can see the hole i feel mending. who can see the whole?