This is a collection of writings from a few sessions that just kind of sat here gathering cobwebs, and Valentine’s Day seemed like an appropriate time to scrape it together and shovel it out into the world. It’s been about a year now since I have felt a strong connection with someone, and that year felt like a long time until I wrote the words just now and looked at them. Now it just feels like the exhalation of a breath that was held for too long, perhaps for fear that I might never take another. Which is ridiculous, by the way; there’s plenty of fucking air.

Anyway, on to the slop…

MAY 2016

Observing a Syzygy

On a sunny morning in San Diego this past October [2015], I was making a new friend over breakfast. While our encounter was, in truth, a Tinder date, there was absolutely zero expectation of a romance springing from this rendezvous. She had a photo shoot afterwards, and I had to drive to Orange County by way of Torrey Pines to keep on track with my travel itinerary. It was perhaps the lack of expectations, and the lack of pretense, that allowed for us to have the most riveting conversation, completely devoid of small-talk, and to make a connection that endures meaningfully today, paying more dividends in its platonic distance than most of my other affairs of late.

It’s been about a year now since I began a foray into the world of online dating. In that time, I have seen a wide gamut of humanity, and feeling some fatigue with the process now I am considering a sabbatical, perhaps even from dating in general.

For many of us who have used these online services and apps, there is a pattern that emerges and it’s a frustrating one: we matched, we liked each other, we had a good initial first contact, a good chat, exchanged numbers, maybe even had a wonderful and engaging first date. Then, nothing. A chasm opens up and we stand across it from one another, paralyzed, gazing into the silent, still darkness of uncertainty.

But why? Why are we so risk averse? Is it the veil of insecurity, that once lifted exposes us as the fragile, imperfect creatures that we are, and which relegates us to being tossed upon the scrapheap of undesirables where we will languish, rot and die alone? Is it the toothed jaws of commitment, lurking agape in the darkness there below, waiting to ensnare us as we fall into them and imprison us forever, stealing our dreams, tormenting us with the doubt of the better life we could have had instead?

Or is it the hook of plenty, which corrals us back from the precipice, and lures us further down the road, beckoning, promising, that somewhere else hidden in the forest of chance, perfection awaits? It compels us to keep swiping, keep looking, stay high upon the ridge to preserve our superior view of the valley below, and never descend into the mires, the confusing fog, and the messy undergrowth of real human relationships.

I’d say that I’m as guilty of this as anyone, but maybe that’s not fair: I have actually met quite a few women online and I surmise that there are at least a few people out there who will never make an effort to actually meet anyone at all. It would be easy, and perhaps tempting, to use these services solely as a tool for self-validation: collecting and hoarding matches without ever exploring any of them. This could, for a certain kind of person, produce a feeling of being wanted. I get that. I also see how maintaining distance might enhance that feeling. I even experience it myself sometimes, when I’m looking over thumbnail photos of women who found little old me attractive enough to move a single finger this way versus that way, and whom I found attractive enough to make the same deep and meaningful commitment to in my moment of boredom, loneliness, or perhaps intoxication. This is one of the most empty pursuits that I have ever devoted this much energy to, and yet, here I am: observing the abundance in the pastures below.

JULY 2016

Solstice of the Zero Sum

Abundance. Our breakfast conversation had largely centered around the idea of the abundance mindset, which had allowed her to leave a career as a civil servant and become a professional photographer instead, with some impressive clients. Basically the abundance mindset is the attitude that there is enough success, happiness, recognition, and personal value to go around, while the scarcity mindset is the attitude that life is a zero-sum game. Abundance allows us to take risks and live more openly when we believe that our entire life is not riding on this one job, or this one partner, or this one moment that we stand next to some cute stranger in the grocery aisle who might one day rip us apart in divorce court.

More people have written more about this shit than any of us could ever read, so I’m not going to add to that here; search the Internet for more about it or read The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Steven Covey.

Talking about the abundance mindset with someone who had been so empowered by it was a real inspiration to me. I brought that home to Ohio with the rest of Southern California’s lessons, and incorporated it into my everyday existence, as much as I could. I’m not quite ready for a major career or location change, but I think I’ve been ready for a change in my outlook for some time, including my outlook on dating.

It feels good to know that if this one doesn’t respond, I can go on to the next one. If that one is annoying, I can go on to the next one after that. It might seem obvious to some, but it was breaking news to me. I had spent four years in a dysfunctional relationship that made me miserable because I didn’t believe there was anything else, but the scars from that were fading and I was beginning to see in a different light. By the time the Sun entered Scorpio, I had resolved to go on 25 dates before the end of the year 2015. I think I got to 22. I did keep going after that, and I lost count somewhere along the way.

As I did descend into that valley, I saw that there is plenty of cause for reluctance, but there is plenty of cause for moving forward as well. What I have seen, and what I have gathered from the stories of others, is that much of the stigma of online dating is well-deserved. Many of the people there are detached, and too aloof to engage with. Others have an air of desperation in their need for a quick response, or their apologetic nature. Still others seem angry, bitter, and frustrated: hostile towards the very people they are supposedly there to meet, and still hanging on to the hurt of their prior relationships, which commonly ended only months, weeks, or even days ago. The old adage about kissing frogs is as relevant as ever.

I have plenty of flaws myself as well, and plenty of my own baggage. We all do. As I experience the more froggish parts of my own nature, and of the nature of others, there grows a deepening sense that most of us who are engaged in this experiment are being influenced by it, in similar ways. There is something about the landscape of online dating services and apps that engenders this. Never before has there been the possibility of seeing so much of others, while exposing so little of ourselves. I do not think it is particularly healthy, just as other indulgences which produce a jolt of dopamine are generally not. It has done dreadfully little to satisfy the needs that I have enlisted it to fulfill so far, so I’m not certain where this all goes or what I expect to get from it. The only certainty I do experience right now is doubt. There is a lot of doubt.

OCTOBER 2016

A Balanced Orbit is a Narrow Path

I wrote most of the above in the spring and summer, and now as I edit and rewrite this entry with the intent of actually sharing it, I am going to leave out the parts where I wax destitute about what I perceive as this bidirectional reciprocity-of-liking crisis I’m facing personally. I think it’s just kind of ugly and dark where I tend to go with that, and it’s best left unsaid for now. Basically I’m frustrated by being either the pursuer or the object of pursuit instead of being both simultaneously with the same person. I doubt that this feeling is uncommon, and maybe it is fodder for another post someday, but it’s too exhausting and tangled and unseemly for me to take on right now.

Now I’d rather just express my curiosity about how the endless smorgasbord that we now seem to have been presented with affects our appetites. Do those of us who are less inhibited gorge ourselves on the plentiful options? Do those of us who are more cautious peruse to the point where we become overwhelmed and abstain from eating altogether? Have extremes emerged that were not there before? Is abundance a good thing?

It’s actually impossible to date this many people in any respectable amount of time, or even to talk to them with any sense of depth, meaning, or purpose. The logical way to deal with a problem like that is to stop taking on more matches, to stop piling food onto our plates that we cannot eat. That is not what I have done, though. What I have done is pile them on, one after the other, and I suppose on some kind of subconscious level I save them to eat later. Not literally, of course.

Just some of the people you match with and never talk to.

As I remotely view these actual human beings through the tiny keyhole of six photos and 500 characters or less, I find myself largely unmoved.

I find myself even less moved by one blurry profile photo of three people and no description, which makes starting a conversation beyond “hey” kind of impossible. The person who put that profile out there must have done so with such little effort so as to say “I’m not actually doing this.” Some others inspire suspicion, with carefully-framed photos that obscure what I must assume to be heinously deformed or morbidly obese bodies requiring concealment should their occupants have any hope of a real-life encounter.

There are always more profiles however, and so what harm does it do to mosey down the primrose path towards what will perhaps be the one who ignites a true fire in my belly? If I run out of profiles to view today, there are always more tomorrow. And the next day. And the next day after that. And as I keep looking at these profiles, waiting for one to really arouse me, they all start to look the same. Everyone is easy-going. Everyone is laid-back. Everyone likes dogs. Everyone seems happy. But almost nobody seems special, do they? And that’s what we all want, isn’t it? We want someone special. Someone who stops us in our tracks. Someone who was put on this planet just for us. That is the promise: a promise upon which online dating fails to deliver.

February 2017

Occultations

There is no conclusion to this cobbled-together amalgam of thoughts, which is why I probably never published it. I have no new information to report, and no forecast on when there might be some. And that’s cool. It’s cool because there’s always going to be uncertainty, whether you have doubts about your current relationship, hopes for your new relationship, or confusion about your part in the failure of your past relationships. Even if you’re single, like me, you never know what’s around the corner. Every beautiful, calming sunset precedes the dark envelope of night’s mystery, and yet tomorrow always comes.

A year ago I resolved to pursue personal truth in the haze of what distracts us from it: our expectations, the expectations of others, and the limitations we impose upon ourselves. I had suffered from a kind of fear that disguises itself as discipline, loyalty, or sensibility, and I had just begun, through personal upheaval, to gain a sense of how great the cost of that fear might be for a mortal human with limited time.

I resolved therefore to mold myself, without apology, into a more quintessential me in 2015: to take food from my overbearing superego and feed it to my undernourished id, striving without fear to take on whatever challenges my unencumbered, naked proclivities would lead me into. While scary and painful at times, the results of this endeavor, even in its most reckless manifestations, were mostly positive…

WINTER

Meaningful gain is predicated upon meaningful risk.

There was constant motion. A restless, writhing creature was struggling to break free from its chrysalis, yearning to leave behind its former existence for something better. Something unknown. The spark of life within me, that indestructible core of being, was building itself a new body, partly from the broken pieces of a life that, ultimately, was not meant to be. A beach in Tulum. A ski slope in Seven Springs. An apartment in Wicker Park. A warehouse in Camp Washington. Valuable lessons were learned in all of these places and they all had to do with risk. Taking chances. Going for it. The feeling of having lost so much engendered a sense that the consequences would now be somehow lessened. I let my senses fall into the discomfort of unfamiliar territory, and the obscurity of isolation. I let my body fall into the pull of gravity. I let my heart fall into the web of chance. I let my mind and hands fall into the design and construction of a complex machine, under a ridiculous deadline, with a team counting on me.

The mixture of assorted success, failure, discomfort and pleasure experienced during this experiment yielded in summation the sense that, no matter what happened, I was ultimately going to be okay.

I could do anything that I wanted. I was free now. The irony of that freedom, however, is that while it can take us anywhere we wish to go, the real challenge is to return to the quiet of home and become truly present. Once victorious in al-jihad al-asghar, the devoted then turn their attention to al-jihad al-akbar: the greater struggle.

SPRING

Everything is emergent, but nothing is new.

It was nice to stand still for a moment. The prize of Winter’s Jewel sparkled with its brilliant, cold light. It was a light that I would use to illuminate the darker corners of my own nature. There is a hunger in many of us that expresses itself as a desire to move outward, to seek novelty, because we think that this is living. While exploration is vital to a meaningful life, it is also possible that we who pursue what is outside of us are in many ways retreating from what is inside of us, and we are held back from actualizing our potential so long as we fail to strike a balance between the two.

The world is one place. It doesn’t matter if we are in Ohio, or Tuscany, or Sichuan. Flowers bloom in spring. Sun shines in summer. Leaves turn in fall. Snow falls in winter. Waves crash on sandy beaches. Water tumbles over rocks. Stormclouds swell. Lightning strikes. Cities rise from the desert, the forest, and the coast. Civilizations emerge, develop, collapse, and recycle the artifacts of their cultures into new conduits of human endeavor, art, architecture, music, and dance. Meals are shared by family and friends. Laughter is heard. Love waxes and wanes. The moon drifts across the heavens. The sun sets, and the sky opens to reveal the stars. Those stars, and the vast expanses of emptiness between them, reveal that the collective human experience throughout all of history is but one iota of the cosmos viewed through a tiny, imperfect lens. At the same time, looking inward instead of outward, we are faced with the same infinitude of possibility, and the same futility of ever reaching all of what lies beneath, between and behind the folds of the universe that exists within us. [excerpted, 21 April 2015]

The fluctuations of temperature, scenery, culture, movement, and emotion flowed into me as I inhaled this new life. The warm, buoyant breath that filled me left me feeling indestructible. The only place was here. The only time was now. The only frontier was right behind my eyes. I exhaled fire. A pit of unresolved anger and hurt revealed itself, and would take its toll, on health, on friendships, on finances even. It bubbled and spat, molten, heavy, and hot. It burned coming out. There was no running from it; there was only confrontation. Old scraps of paper, fallen leaves, broken promises, dead branches, and memories of prior ambitions that had crashed onto the rocks of circumstance, all filled the chamber of my reckoning. All of it was highly flammable, and for me being so filled with fire too in that moment, it was a hazard. Sorting through this tangled mess was at first easier than I expected, because I was lucky to have amassed some treasures too: knowledge, character, honesty, empathy, and passion. These were solid masonry, and a foundation easily built upon. I had assembled enough heat, light, and gravity to make the center of my universe right here, my plinth a towering pyramid at the junction of the land, the sea, and the sky, touching everything at once, and drawing down heaven to drink from the firmament.

SUMMER

Great falls begin at great heights.

We all have our weaknesses. The view at altitude is breathtaking, but it’s lonely. I was susceptible in this moment to a kind of love, or infatuation rather, that burrows into the fortress of the unbreakable soul and exposes the fragile, yearning heart of an abandoned child at play. Pride is a consequence of too much self-seeking, and a love that serves pride can only end in ruin. I met a darling, inquisitive, beautifully awkward girl who was so enamored with me that her adoration just melted all of my defenses in a matter of weeks, maybe days even. We were together constantly. She rushed to show me off to friends and family. We spoke of many adventures we would take together. We remarked at the oddity, rarity, and gravity of what we were feeling: two balanced aspects that simultaneously negate and fulfill one another’s strengths and weaknesses in a harmony of spiritual and emotional resonance, vibrating, scintillating, piercing through the aether and echoing its perfection to the ends of existence itself. I may be paraphrasing there. She told me over and over how thankful she was to have met me, and how much she loved me, and in the height of escalating intimacy and deepening affection, she suddenly vanished. It had all been a delusion. The withdrawal from heroin could not approach how ecstatic this once felt, and how agonizing it had become. A fog of confusion, filled with clawing, deafening noise intruded into my life, and the air was sucked from my lungs as I fell, headlong, into a dark obsession with how this could possibly be.

After two seconds, an object in free-fall is moving at about 43 miles per hour. The cool, still water of several glacial lakes in the wilderness of Ontario was a soft enough landing, and one with much opportunity for reflection. Here I exhausted my body swimming in cold basins, climbing rugged peaks, and leaping from intimidating cliffs. I exhausted my mind trying to figure out what had just happened. A labyrinth of thought, memories, words, pictures, and me: seeking understanding in the center of it when I should have been seeking refuge at the edge.

The object of my affection and I had built a sanctuary on a foundation of sand, and it had become a sinking prison. Escaping from this maze of desperate perplexity was traumatic: ruminant strings of hope, faith, and emotion tethering me to a future once so quixotically imagined, now burned to cinder and ash. When I finally saw the horizon I fled, in pursuit of the setting sun. Maybe there was something left of my lost summer to be captured in a place like sunny California.

AUTUMN

There is a part of us that cannot be destroyed.

There is so much to busy the mind, the hands, the feet and the eyes along the Southern California coast. I gave myself a busy itinerary with very little idle time. I moved four times in one week, hoping to shake the specter of what I was forced to leave behind. I washed myself clean in the pounding surf at the edge of the Pacific Ocean. Sprained ribs, I emerged from the water with a spirit of renewal and redemption, an entity I would come to call Sum’ketv. Just in time for Halloween.

Sum’ketv (SOOM-kit-uh) is a Muskogee word meaning lost. I was not lost in the sense that I was without direction. I was lost in the way that money has been lost when it is gambled away. I was lost in the way that The Black Pearl was once lost to Jack Sparrow. The harbor where I made my berth had become less relevant, for all of the ocean is connected. I was simply a vessel, but a vessel with great capacities, filled with great treasure, and imbued with the ability to create within its hold a life as free and wondrous as the open sea, if only I could harness its tides, winds, and currents instead of fighting against them in a futile attempt to retain absolute control.

Control and permanence are illusions. I have walked through the ashes of civilizations that could not fall. I have cleaned the bones of immortals. This, too, is amusing, but destined to end. [in the voice of Sum’ketv, October 2015]

It didn’t feel nihilistic, like the numb despair of the hopeless or the cold rage of the disenfranchised. It felt more accepting, like the observation of the Zen master who simply asks: “is that so?” It was accepting the hurt, accepting the joy, accepting the adoration as temporary that brought some measure of peace. Those are states of our lives, not traits of our lives.

The circle of life is more likely a spiral, approaching the same vicinity again without ever touching the same place. Though the Earth has revolved once about the Sun, it has not returned to the same location in the cosmos, and it likely never will. I feel like I’m writing the same passage as I wrote a year ago, and yet I know it’s different. I know I’m different. I know that I’m still very much the same as well, and the work I have to do is still very much the same. Seeking without fear remains my goal moving forward, and it will remain a difficult challenge, even as I am better equipped for it.

What emerged for me at the conclusion of 2015 was that these risks are still very much worth taking. The consequences, while dire at times, are not fatal, nor are they inexorable. Pride doesn’t necessarily precede hubris, nor trust embarrassment, nor love loss, nor loss despair. Acceleration doesn’t necessarily precede havoc. If it does, however, I can survive that. I already have. Skis pointed in the direction of travel, knees bent, leaning forward, inhale, exhale, and let go. There is more out there, and in here, to be encountered in 2016, and my resolution for the New Year is to welcome whatever comes, and fear nothing.

Bring it.

In the summer of 1987, when I was nine years old, my dad taught me the breast stroke in the cool, clear water of a flooded limestone quarry. My mom taught me how to make meatballs, standing on a chair next to the stove. My Aunt Linda, on the other hand, taught me how to deal with panhandlers on the streets of Brooklyn, New York, as we searched for an afternoon snack of potato knishes. Today you hear about New York City in the 1980s, and how rough it was. Linda didn’t care about that.

She was different, Aunt Linda. I called her “Auntie Lin” well into my teens, because that was her personality. That was who she was. Ever vivacious, she was a second mother to me and exposed me to so many of the things that I’m still pursuing today, some of which have become cornerstones of my own identity. She never wanted children of her own, but her legacy was no less enduring for that; she touched many people in her short lifetime and she will forever be missed by those who had the pleasure of knowing her.

Growing up, my parents did not offer much in the way of adventure. We didn’t go on vacation, and I’m not sure if that was for lack of interest or lack of… principal, if you’ll excuse the gratuitous double entendre. My dad taught me about making fire, respecting nature, and the value of hard work. My mom taught me about making art, the wonder of books, and the value of education. Auntie Lin didn’t offer much in any of these regards, but she blew back my horizons many degrees of longitude as she nudged me out of my little Rust-belt bubble into the vast world that waited, breathing, scintillating, beyond the edge of my imagination.

Auntie Lin dragged me off to Disneyland when I was six years old. The incentive to go was that I’d be allowed to take my first ride on an airplane. I remember the trees and the buildings shrinking below as we ascended, and looking out over the horizon as it grew thinner, longer, and further away. It’s still an experience that never gets old. I was forever changed after that moment, and I wonder if I had boarded my first plane at a later age how I might be different today. My mom died having never eaten Chinese food (crazy, I know). My dad will probably do the same. They were always content to keep treading the same path, but Linda looked for novel things to experience. She made me try carbonara, and oysters, and Chinese dumplings. She always told me that I didn’t have to eat it if I didn’t like it, but I at least had to try it. She traveled to Europe, and Asia, and she never made it to Africa but always talked about her dreams to go there. She loved giraffes, and zebras, and other exotic animals, plants, and destinations. She had good taste in furniture and clothing, and bought excellent gifts, months in advance of the holiday or birthday on which they were to be presented. She loved to entertain. Loved telling stories and jokes. Loved making people feel welcome and comfortable.

Her primary vocation was as a hairstylist, but she only worked three days a week. In her free time, she was working paid storytelling gigs, trying new recipes, planning trips, or getting involved with her church. She was always on the go. Always looked perfect. Always had impeccable manners. She could be a little judgmental, and a little impatient, but these were small flaws in the shadow of her expansive and magnetic personality. She was deeply religious and she always tried to evangelize me, but the only gospel I ever accepted from her was the one she demonstrated with her actions: live well, have fun, be kind, explore, and never stop.

Aunt Linda died of Cancer at the age of 59, eight years ago this month. I was 29. It was the first time I ever really thought about my own mortality, and how short our time might really be. I traveled to Europe on my first trans-oceanic flight the following year, on my 30th birthday, and I dedicated the trip to her. I have always kept her in my thoughts and she has forever been an inspiration to just get out there and pursue whatever excites, and whatever beckons from over the edge of the unknown.

I love you Auntie Lin. You’re still with me and you always will be.

Learning to ski has shown me a metaphor for living as a conscientious adult in a world filled with risk.

The first thing one learns is to stand on the skis and balance. But this is not skiing.

Then one learns to move on the skis. But this is not skiing either.

Learning to stop and turn on the skis feels like skiing, but this is also not skiing.

I think that the reward of skiing, aside from the aesthetic pleasure of snow, and cold, and hot chocolate, is the calculation and assumption of escalating risk for escalating reward. The reward is of course, this strange tension that humans enjoy through all sorts of recreational physics, whether skiing, or roller coasters, or skydiving. On one side there is the action of unmitigated physics upon the human body, and the certainty with which they will drive us into descent, disability, and death. We have an innate fear of this, and we should. On the other side, there is the control of those physics through skill and calculation. The greater the risk, the steeper the slope, the more dire the consequences of losing control, the more satisfying the exercise of control becomes. And so it goes.

As a novice skier who finds himself in a particularly introspective place in life, these lessons were as important as anything I could have read in a book. There was a specific moment that I remember on a saturday evening run in blizzard conditions that left me with a latent feeling that something significant had happened, and that feeling has persisted for several days now so I must write about it. I imagine that every novice skier experiences this: seeing the bottom of a small but steep slope, uncertain of our ability to stop on that slope but confident that we can stop at the bottom of that slope. We pause for a moment to calculate those risks and those rewards, and we just let go. We surrender ourselves. We relinquish control for a moment knowing that we will regain it again.

As it is with life. A person who does not risk is living a futile existence. A person who does not calculate is a danger to themselves and others. Somewhere in between lies our best and fullest life, and the extent to which we might experience it depends on our ability to do both of those things in some kind of harmonious tension that escalates over time.

This is about challenging ourselves. This is about overcoming fear. This is about getting up after we have fallen down, and falling down again before getting up again just to fall down again. This is not an external struggle of human versus nature; this is an internal struggle of human versus self. We have all been hurt. We have all protected the scars of that hurt from being torn open again. We have all imagined the best and worst outcomes of a situation and stood idle at the top of that slope, unwilling to tip ourselves over the edge to find out which one will occur.

This brings me to traversal. The novice skier learns to traverse a slope from side to side and descend in a controlled way. There is still risk on one end of an axis. There is still control on the other end. The only thing left to do is to modulate along that axis without ending up completely on one end of it. If we can do this, then we will be getting somewhere. We will be taking greater risks, asserting greater control, and reaping more rewards as we develop and improve, inhaling and exhaling, each at our own pace and on our own path. As that pendulum swings back and forth, our life will be in constant, beautiful motion and we might even feel a harmony inside of us is beginning to develop.

This is not about skiing. Skiing showed this to me. Skiing let me feel this in a very direct and tangible way. This is about letting go of the past and accelerating into the future, even if it’s slowly at first.

It was a little over a year ago that my shovel hit this old hunk of metal in the backyard. It does not have mounting holes and so it is not a license plate. It does not have an address that is found in this neighborhood and so it is likely not a house placard. The number 2014 must have meant something, but still today I do not know what the purpose of this sign was or where it came from. At the time I unearthed the sign it did have meaning for me; it told me that I was on the right track and that 2014 would be a marquee year.

This was going to be my year: the year that everything fell into place. I remember the feeling of good will and optimism, as I brushed the dirt from the raised, enameled numbers and propped my little ferrous fortune cookie on the window sill to watch over my endeavors with the knowing satisfaction that by the time 2015 arrived, major milestones would have been put behind me and I would be well on my way to a more complete self. A comfortable self. A satisfied self.

But that is not the way things turned out. Things turned out quite contrary to that in fact.

After a near-meltdown at work, frustration in my side business, frustration with myself, and the loss of the most important relationship of my adult life, the optimism that I once felt for 2014 has been replaced with contempt. A foul, black, smoldering contempt, for what 2014 could have been had the rest of the universe only held up its end of the fucking bargain.

This placard now sits not in encouragement, but in admonishment of those expectations that I once gripped so tightly as to let go of my most precious asset: a true and honest self. A self that acknowledges its abilities and its limitations, and does not expect of itself or of others what is unreasonable. This is the Dark Night of my Soul: the reckoning that there is no other end of the bargain other than the one I am holding up myself. There is no unseen hand burying metal in the dirt for us to find, or dispensing fortune to us based on how deserving we are. Things do not happen for a reason. It does not all work out in the end. Nothing is meant to be.

In the latter part of 2014, I began to feel a profound emptiness. At the conclusion of 2014, I see a root to this emptiness, a root which must be ripped out in 2015 and burned. This root is the denial and renunciation of the self. My self. A self so denied and devalued that it was swept up in whatever current would carry it away. As the current carried me, I felt weightless, then worthless, then hopeless. I thought about suicide. I fantasized about the world without me in it, and how that might balance the cosmic equation after nothing else had been able to do so. And the current kept pushing me further and further from where I belong. I was truly lost. Maybe I still am.

Then I crashed into something. It was heavy, and hard, and the current did not move it, and could not push me over, around, or past it. I was pinned against this thing and I climbed up onto it to look at the course in front of me. It plunged over a precipice to a place that I did not want to go. I never want to go there. I never want to follow that course. I never want to kill myself, spiritually, mentally or physically. I want to love myself. I want to honor myself. I want to believe in myself.

This anchorage where I have come to rest is my Rosetta Stone. Restoration. Absolution. My treasonous compulsions slain on a stake. Though bruised and soaked, and far from home, the truth of what I am and who I genuinely want to become is the only thing inside of me that is solid and whole, and does not burn, and does not burst, and does not break. And this diamond of truth is buried in there somewhere, covered by years of detritus, sediment, fear, pain, and loss. In order for that diamond to reflect its brilliant light into this world I need to unearth it in the same way that I unearthed this rusty metal sign: by digging.

So my resolution in 2015 is simply to dig. In digging I might make a mess. I might get dirty. I might sever things that are in the way. I might uncover rotten, foul, or toxic material that has been buried for too long. I might disappear beneath the surface, but this search is worth it. It is risky, but it is necessary. It is scary, but it is time.

I will mount this sign in a place where it can remind me of what I have sacrificed, what I stand to gain, and what I stand to lose if I do not have the discipline and courage to keep digging. I intend to keep with me whatever is useful and discard whatever is not. There are those among you who may have tools that I do not have. You may have perspective that I do not have. Maybe you have unearthed your diamond. Maybe you are searching too. Maybe we will search together. Maybe we will drift apart. I wish you all truth, honesty and courage in 2015, and that your journeys all bring you closer to where you truly belong.