Loneliness Obscured

You have always been here, Christ has always been here, if you investigate the beginning this is what you learn. There are no secrets and nothing is holier than anything else. Nothing is hidden that will not be found. Let it be, don't worry, be happy. 

Walking outside at three a.m., moonlight on sparse snow, grateful as always for the chance to remember silence. One or two stars visible from beneath the apple tree, I try to see them as tiny diamantine fruits and briefly they are, how lucky I am! Slowly the stillness in me recalls itself, and what cannot be spoken of gently arises, undoing fear and unhappiness through a process for which I don't and never will have words, oh well. What is the way is the question obscuring the way, the river is not other than the sea, et cetera.

What is the end of hunger, what is the end of war.

What is the end of fear.

Jasper comes back from Israel talking about the Temple Mount, how beautiful and old, what it felt like to be there, a nexus of Abrahamic monotheism, like that, and all I know is that it too shall pass.

When I drank whisky, when I stunted with cocaine. When I stayed up until dawn night after night reading Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, cigarette after cigarette, when I stumbled to The Other Place for gin and tonics at noon, my whole body trembling, my loneliness obscured as it so often was in those days by my desire to destroy myself but not before finding a plausible rationale for self-destruction which - thank Christ - I never found but found the opposite. 

Jeremiah brings me a rock he pried from an Icelandic glacier, and a couple of dice with Viking runes. Maple taffy from Quebec City. I wake early to roast a turkey on his birthday, writing at the kitchen table while everybody sleeps. Notes toward letters I no longer need to send because the other is not distant, there is no distance, there is not even an other. 

What I used to have to imagine I no longer have to imagine. 

What I am saying is, I suffered once, but do not suffer now, and this is not a credit to me nor to anyone, not even God, because it is not an accomplishment but a revelation of what I am in truth, which was not born and cannot die, and dreams it can suffer but cannot in truth suffer.

Chrisoula over my shoulder says I don't think that's the way you use commas. How we lift each other. And you, always you.