me too. i just woke up at 10pm....tried to sleep it away. The triggers---up one day, lost the next. wondering what is what....can't discern the fine-line muddles between nature and nurture....the chicken and the egg....how fragile we are, how our environmental changes, both horrific and live-giving, can affect and be affected by our neurons. i have this need to understand it all, but i can't...never will when all we have are mirrors dull and darkly lit...it's why we're tossed back and forth...when we find no anchor and the lies our neurons tell us become logical or how we live...where we live--- in this ball in space, filled with good and bad and gray and static noise we cannot bear.
i can't sleep in my bed anymore because of what is gone... because what is lost to me is no longer there....grieving still that something i once held so much to and counted on as innocence and pure in goodness can be touched by death. We grieve for all the death we see in people's murderous hearts, the way they drown and tear down the other. We do not really want death. we hate it....it is death who is our enemy for having killing so much and taking so much from us even as we read this----whether it was the loss of an innocent creature, or the unkindness of those who are supposed to love us...the death in our words, the death in every cynical quip that grows in cyber space like weeds killing off the young seedling before it even has a chance to sprout. The loneliness of social networks and everywhere we look, the world screams "nihilism". It's a school yard filled with merciless cruelty and despair...everyone blowing out everyone's candle because of the tiny daily death shards lodged in our wandering hearts.....but still we look and want and can't let go of wanting something really living that doesn't last on this earth...NO, we don't really want to die, death is what we hate most...all this putrid dread we see more than others notice. No, death is our enemy but the enemy that still hovers in this mortal sphere...we don't want the empty grave, but we dwell on that corridor; that lonely channel even though everything in our bones scream is the most unnatural....and so we peer over this cliff for only one reason: because we want to escape the death we feel, see, hear and have to carry around like an endless burden...like a robe we'd rather not wear or prefer it would not be a garment of such reality while we nomad through this current existence.
Death means loss...tragic loss. She mourns her cat who was robbed by it, i my dog and all the loss attached to these representatives of the good and living. When my second dog died not long after this one i posted about, it was not just the missing blanket that he was to me that caused me such horrific pain...not just because an innocent thing, pure and good was gone from my side, but it was a reminder of so much loss that came before me and the dreadful fear of what's to come....i.e, the continuation of more losses, the persistent neglect we feel from those who could love us better and how we wish we could just touch the hem of a different robe ...one worn by the man from Galilee---One, who we're told, was untouched by death, or rather, so drenched in it, that despite the blood-sweat on that garden rock, and what he saw inside that poison cup, death could still not pin him down.
Everything around me, every disappointment, every loss, every "what could have been" screams in the wilderness: "is there is only this?!", and yet i also know we were not meant to experience this life in this way....everything is askew and broken...and we bipolars, the broken-spirited, see things, feel things heavier than numb hearts feel. They cloak themselves with words and pontificating lectures, blind in compassion and lost to the very soul of what they even quote and dare to represent. They feel better to feel ripe with rebuke and know nothing of what we suffer and, in so doing, what they think is right, accomplishes the very opposite of their well cited sanctions....they do not know how to hear and listen and learn from the meek, from the last ones in line and thereby, with their absurd rebukes, move to alienate us even further from the very sailor who walks on water defying death at every turn. He dwells in the mouth of the grave…inside the jaw itself so that we would not stumble into it.
and so another arm I have to raise and I’m so weary of lifting….Another shield i must hold up to deflect the foolish mouth and rebuke the rebukers.... And so with them ...even them, who snuff out lights and call us brother, we must contend with and made to feel more alien in this foreign land we never chose to dwell in. Not like this....i won't go out like this. Perhaps it's why all the prophets all seemed a little "off"....tortured by the loss and unfertile hearts and lives they had to watch hurl headlong over cliffs....they walked among throngs of corpses....they screamed for life to come and when the throngs went their own way...when they saw men choose decay and love deceit more than birth...when they watched mankind lay traps with sword in heart spraying daggers with their tongues, they wept and wept and wept for all this wasted loss. They wrestled and lingered longer at the throne waiting for Bethlehem to be born....and so God chose them for their weakness and put a fire in their bellies.... a fire that would not go out till suns stood still and barbarous souls were crushed with mercy and redemption by their maker's broken heart.
We are not prophets chosen as in those ancient days, but we are sometimes seers, blind though we may be...we do not want this pain, this sight, this skewed way of thinking or delusion, but still we’re raw and broken down and it's that weakness that brings us to a crossroad. To look and stretch out in the darkness...fumble even...fall and say there must be air somewhere...light by which to see not: "what could have been" but what "should be" still. Rilke wrote of this. It's sometimes like a cage...like a panther caged, where his vision is like a thousand bars..and behind those bars, no world...a place of ritual-cramped circles in which a mighty will stands paralyzed. Yet though our pacing starts and stops but always starts again as endless bars flicker past our vision, we still want out...not really thru the knife's edge, but through the open door that seems never to open. And so we break and break and ask our maker to bless the broken-hearted and feed us that promised inheritance because, like David, we too wailed and beat our chest at God when only tears were our food and the heavy curtain of the eye lid pressed down too hard to want to go on...and some of us cry out...but God: "who do we have in heaven and earth but you oh lord? To whom shall we turn and follow and find the purpose to awake? To whom shall we go but you? Only you have the words of life....that unspeakable something we want most...the life-blood we were born to have coursing through our veins. And so with this weakened mind, i write this out with tears and a slate in my chest….yet somehow, as i linger, crawl and scratch at that cave wall, a truth is born; A chink of light born out of grief and many sorrows...it is a glimpse that may be gone tomorrow, but somewhere, i hear a vine grow... fruit enough to sustain this waning fig of a heart I have today. And so this odd thing happens: i start to feel somewhere closer to this broken strength born of weakness which the ancients speak of, and i hear ancient words say: come stand at the crossroads and ask which is the good the path...walk on it and live--- though not another soul but i, shall walk beside you.
i remember his words: "come to me all you who are weary and heavy laden and i shall give you rest. Learn from me for i too am lowly of heart...i am meek-made-wise from my humiliation. Help me carry this burden, says he, and yoke yourself to me as we plough through this unfertile field and find peace from such labor whether crops may fail or grow....learn from me and you shall find rest for your souls".
Tonight is resurrection day, but we are here walking around with this dying flesh still and yet somehow a perfect slain lamb is being born within us and it's for the ministry of comfort that we turn this pain and loss and death to words of comfort for those who need to know that once there was a man who bellowed for Lazarus to arise....who wept drops of blood from worry and dread, knowing all the loss, betrayal and death that was to come. It was for our comfort he chose that cup, so that while we carry around the death of christ in our bodies; that death of even the world and from our own festering wounds, we also may carry all those covenants carved into our very bones....a promise to sustain us and comfort others, and in turn, are somehow blessed by the little blessings we could have given them, though we know not how such a crushed and perplexed soul, who dwells often in the moors and death-haunts, could, somehow, be a conduit of peace and hope and God's own calm of holiness that makes the waters still like glass. Man cannot do this, only something other worldly-- outside our lives, outside our neurons and, paradoxically, still within the walls of all this barren land we stand on now.
"He who is the Glory of Israel does not lie or change His mind; for he is not a man, that he should change His mind....
Sanctify them by the truth; [Prayed Jesus], for your word is truth". (1 Sam 15.29 & John 17.17) and I, the logos was made flesh, to walk among treasured souls in jars of clay so that one day, in them, I would dwell…a hearth found in their troubled minds and like homing pigeons lead them back to Easter morning…to the path east of the tired sun where laws and physics will not bind them anymore.
"At death the world does not alter, but comes to an end. Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death." -Ludwig Wittgenstein-
Hold on with me my brothers and sisters and let us learn to overcome the insurmountable.
....after that he just took it like a man and tolerated her obsession with him. she'd followed him everywhere, snuggled, ate, slept and barked with him. She'd ninja down the door, when he got his shower and would howl like a wild thing...desperately licking off the water off his face and body as the shower rained down on his pouty self. Her name is calamity jane and that was her bill hickock...she had sweet eyes for him she did. Her grief for him kills me though...she pulled out his collar out of my bag with her teeth when i got back from the vet without him and wrapped herself in it...licking it, smelling it and finally sleeping on it. cats usually forget stuff fast....but this one doesn't so i take out his toys and we both snuggle with them. She still sleeps on all his spots....his spot on the couch next to me, his spot on my bed, his spot on his floor bed and the other day while i was showering, it broke me down to pieces when she broke in howling....thinking he was there and instinively liked the water off me since there was no him anymore. How long will this grief continue? will i ever get to sleep on a bed again? 
