I'm in a very transitional place right now. I haven't felt this free in a very long time and I can't say I remember what it feels like to care what other people think. I haven't been that vulnerable in awhile. I'm a kind person and have a very solid sense of what aspects of me I cannot alter without compromising the essence of myself.

Recently I've found someone, it's ridiculous really, who inadvertantly makes me feel as though I need to be better. Someone so seemingly principled and understated that I look at my moral flexibility and open-minded aspects and see them as comfortable offshoots of indecision and complacency. I used to have fierce convictions. Or perhaps thought I held those convictions fiercely in hand. In retrospect that time was pretty formative and I recall struggling to develop an educated opinion of a wide range of things. Like trying to pour concrete around your feet to feel grounded. It felt born of anxiety. The world felt so big in places that I craved a more refined lense.

This person doesn't accept the wrongs of the world without kicking and fighting back in every conceivable manner. Through work, through volunteerism, through protesting what they spend their money on or what they put in their body. They remind me of a path I could have chosen for myself many years ago. Normally I would chalk this up to living in Portland, where quiet protests are so mainstream as to not even be notable. However, as this person doesn't prounonce their every thought as an epithet it feels as though their attempts to keep the courage of their convictions is genuine.

I'm antagonistic and willful and independent and comforted by my own good opinion. This I know and I don't pretend otherwise. They're flaws when overused in some circumstances but really quite balanced by an array of other qualities that compose me. When I interact with this person I feel like I'm staring at a better version of myself. Someone who is freed of their righteous burden through their self-inflicted restrictions. At the same time, as a lifestyle, it seems very restless. As though every restriction still stands to be not good enough. The bare minimum that you can accomplish when you come to accept that you aren't going to save a world that badly needs it, is still the bare minimum.

I guess I also don't like the fact that if there is a person who fully lived up to their own expectations of the world and the other people they share a planet with, then they might feel justified in painting everybody with a judgemental brush. I don't know if they do but not knowing is poor comfort when you enjoy a good opinion of that person and don't know whether that estimation is returned. Or really whether or not you deserve that estimation.

But like I said I'm in a very transitional space in my life right now and it allows a lot of things that were once grounded to float and be examined once more. Perhaps not a bad thing, even if it's extremely uncomfortable. I think I just described what a growing pain feels like. All in good time I suppose.

I do not need to know what you are made of. I do not need to rake your underbelly to determine if you are poisonous. I do not need to examine the nuances of you or compartmentalize your traits into neat little rows for my edification. I do not need to judge you preemptively. I do not need to do anything except love and accept you for who you are. You are beautiful. I am beautiful. There is no difference in value between my life and yours. We are all facets of the same. I will feel our common energy and see myself in you. There is no other. A prism of all colors has but one source.

I am adrift amongst the stars.
A distance away the bright winks of light hold steady.
Unreachable and ever in view, there's a tranquility here.
I see but cannot feel.
Stretched wide to gather in all that I may, my eyes expand to take in what my fingers ache to hold.
A phantom limb, a lost tooth, I worry at the nothing, certain that one more pass will stumble my senses back upon the familiar.
I ache to ease my mind, I ache to find purchase within.
I cannot say for certain what it is I'm yearning for.
It is small, it is infinite, it is evasive and unnamed.
Ever reaching in all directions.
Unknowing of which way to move, I'm lost among cosmic possibility.
To choose, I shut out all but the faintest of calls and expand myself towards a whisper of inexplicable.
It will make itself known.
Speaking to me in a manner no singular sense can discern.
It will strike the chord that is my truth and hum through me my misplaced tenderness.
And I will follow and take my ease, release the reigns and know that distant star.
The one out in the vast black, waiting for me to happen upon it and give end to my search.
I thought we had been introduced, once upon a dream.
I was mistaken.
If this particular knowledge had been discovered, if I had had the pleasure, nothing could have withstood my will to love and keep it always.

I have been volunteering intensively for a shelter that will remain nameless.

I'm not sure what my role is there, exactly. I make of it what I want it to be and in that my role is an extension of my mood and energy. I feel good giving love to the surroundings of those who are so overwhelmed by the immediacy of their concerns that they don't worry much about they way in which they leave things. I'm sure on some level I lighten their burden but I do so in pretty innocuous ways. Smiling my hellos and meaning it. Cleaning, cleaning, cleaning...to give them and myself pride in our surroundings. Organizing that which needs to be maintained on a regular basis. I think perhaps I play a more integral role with the staff. Their stress is abated by my desire to expend time and energy their stead, so that they can concentrate more fully on imparting hope and mindfulness in the the thoughts and prayers of the clients.

Not all of these people are good it seems. Perhaps they don't have the luxury of hiding their vices. No one person is all good, I feel. We are all manifestation of our abilities and circumstances, they scales balance them as less fortunate than some. And they are a marginalized lot. The angler who knows how to shine at your face and hustle your heart strings. The steam pot Dad that can't get a handle on his own emotions to keep from releasing his pressure valve onto his own children. The wearied and overburdened young mother who fell for a lecherous bum or simply had sex to early to deal with true reprocussions of reproducing. And the children; emotional conduits for their families pain. They swing from hopeful to despondent to energetic to anxious in turns. I, the observer, am invested in the ability of these human beings to churn forth good from bad. I have a magnified lense of hope for them, as much of them as they'll allow me to know. My care is careful. I can easily imagine what it would mean to feel them fall back into the crack they came from. That thought is too tangible to truly contemplate. I need to love them and keep enough of myself separate that I can continue to shine my good will through my heart and into their own.

I wonder where this will take me, this good feeling. The feeling of community, selflessness and inclusion. I thrive when it spins around me and am fostered by it's need of me. That is my role. To fill need. To find needs unspoken and fill them. I do not wish to play at subservience. I make myself useful and take note of how this beast operates from the inside out. This volunteer program will be over shortly and I feel like I need to hone my abilities in this direction for awhile, sharpen my tools. I wish to fill a more integral need and battle this wave of hopelessness with a sharper mind.

The people, the people who care to work for and within the thin buffer between inhumane and humanity are amazingly persistent. Amazingly hopeful. They resurrect themselves for others on a regular basis. Cheers to all of us who care to be a part of something bigger than ourselves. I am no ordinary ant.

God

I know now that when I was very young, when my mother woke me with a warm wash cloth to remove the sand from my eyes, that I knew love. I knew security. I knew what it meant to be treasured above all else. Things existing beyond the sphere of my mother's watchful eye held little meaning to me. To be within it was to be fulfilled in all ways. Family was womb, womb was family. She prolonged this state for me, my mother and in that I was spoiled. All things began and ended with her word and whether her final say pleased my child-like fancies or not, there was no thought to contradict my certainty that all was right with the world.

My world grew of course. And slowly my mother's sphere diminished until pieces of me broke through the sanctuary of her tender ministrations to reveal a world without the instant gratification of her patient explanations. I shared her with my sister, not quite sure as to why there was a need for a sister to begin with. It was galling to realize that the word sister meant an implicit intrusion upon my connection with my mother. I felt diminished. With a will I did the best I could to cut "sister" off from the choicest bits of affection. I challenged the patience and understanding of our mother. Mine! I thought, felt, ached with my being. A primal take back of what was exclusively belonging to me. A hard lesson. A long hard lesson.

My poor sister. I grew to see with a magnified lense what it meant to watch someone else's pain and rage against those, other than myself, who dared hurt her. My sister was mine. My mother was mine. My mother did not belong to my sister. Sister came second, she knew this. I made sure she knew this and this was just the beginning.

I wish now that I could have beat me senseless. Or senseful. Insert an ounce or two more of compassion and empathy into my child-self, so that I could channel the love I unduly coveted into the parts of my sister that were stunted by all that I took for myself. Such a glut. Such a needless glut. And even now when I know that all of those primal, knee-jerk reactions were hardwired into me, there is a tiny bit of guilt that will never be assuaged by hindsight. I could have been kinder, more generous. Or perhaps not. If I could have been that I imagine I would have been.
Given who and what I was it's a wonder why I was so confused by the actions of other children.

I've always held myself within. Children who put their hands out for a shake upon first meeting were alien-like in their open behavior. I responded in kind of course, those were manners. Manners I knew. Why some children would arbitrarily pick on one peer but not another, was and still is baffling to me. How does a seven year old choose their victim let alone their crime. Threaten to roll a weak-spirited classmate down a big grassy hill with a gang-like ferocity. It blew my mind. And pissed me off. Why? I asked myself time and time again. Different friends, different ages. Always the marginalized children that did nothing to garner such negative attention other than to be marginalized in the first place. Was it an aesthetic choice, a hygenic one, a choice based on handicap? A darwinistic gene rearing it's ugly impulse in the hearts and minds of babes? Who knew then and who knows now.

Now I am a teacher of children. Small ones. I see what their impulses are and how they can be shown that the value of self and others can be symbiotic in even a very small context. To be included and allowed a place of merit and worth in a community of your peers, that is the eutopia of man. I don't recite that in theoretical terms. I see it as a living, breathing possibility manifested in three year olds. A thing learned, yes, but not forcibly. Fostered with empathy, demonstration and follow through. I see their bright eyes, their energy for life pouring forth from them and into all that surrounds them with joyful abandon. I know God in their every thought. They talk to me, these children, in ways that adults no longer do. And I wonder with all of this innate goodness where the rot has come from.

Even with all of their selfish machinations these little beings are discerning. They eat until they're sated, like hummingbirds do. Never sourcing their next meal. They play until they are full of one stimulation and ask to move onto something else. They need not read books on how to prioritize their needs or find happiness. They give to themselves their own happiness. And it makes sense that if we all start out in this place, that knowing what gives us happiness ought to be inherent to our very nature. Yet somewhere along the line we learn otherwise.

These God creatures will learn to shutter themselves. Sign off from the awareness of their psycho-social needs and experience, as adults, periods of time in deep confusion/anger/loss. What steers us away from our absolute knowledge of our needs, our wants? And what or who started the cycle of rot. The thing that slowly alters a childs awareness from being open and inquisitive to insular. Insular, that feeling that breeds a sense of disconnectedness. The root of all that devalues a person within their community, the not-belonging.

Where are the God thieves and who stole God from them?

I want to know. I want to know.