What is it that motivates some to become dissatisfied with the “good” and go off seeking the sublime?  At times risking all, destroying self, bringing on suffering, grief, and poverty of the Soul?  It is called by many names.  Longing, soul ache, wanderlust, calling, pilgrimage, the “pearl of great price,”  I’ve heard it spoken of in many ways.  The energy of the thing motivates the great epic romances and whatever the latest Hollywood thing is.  It is over and against the impulse that suggests one should be realistic and indulge the notion only from time to time at the Theater, or Church, or Nature.  They are all temples of a sort and theaters of the soul.  It is safe and contained in those places.   The rituals, the holy ones, the participants, and the observers, temper the fierce untamed thing and keep it in check.  Here we can sigh longingly, smile or cry as needed, feel the effect of its elixir, then seal up that place again before returning to the real world.

But there seems to be an experience of “Oughtness” which manifests in glimpses of experience and thought and emotion that temps, and teases, and intoxicates, and can become so powerful that  the “good” the “real world” begins to feel mundane, barren, distasteful, and abhorrent.   It may truly be insane, unless of course the “real world” is fashioned on a lie.

There is a sense of insanity in that reason or morality, in the common usage of the word, has  little sway on the process and outcomes.  There are natural laws of existence which provide rough boundaries and consequences.  But its like rocks and sand and surf that cut and grind a swimmer caught up in currents too powerful to manage.  The swimmer has some say in direction and survival manages enough air to keep him alive.  But in the end at best he only avoids one rock to cash into another.  He will be ground down into the sand.  His flailing only changes the when and where to some small degree.  He will eventually, inevitably be washed up on a shore because that is the nature of the place where the water and the dry land meets.

Morality, I think, is not an external force or law like gravity.  It is rather that which manifests itself in the wake of strong, elemental, righteous, true, desire.  Morality can not be a set of rules, or instructions, or a recipe for living.  If it were my cake would have already been baked.  I think rather it is thought and action and emotion which is viable in terms of manifesting that which the heart most desires.  The Pearl of Great Price.

The “insanity” I experience is in my Soul’s stubborn insistence that being reasonable and realistic won’t do.  She will not allow me the comfort of what has been done before even though much of it was admirable even “good.”  She longs for a resounding Yes!  An affirmative from some particular vaguely defined source.  Now it is as if all, but a very few familiar things and people,  repel and drain life from me.  Survival dictates some minimal action to push into the pain, to search out some heretofore unknown pathway.  But I think that like with the rocks and the surf the process will take me to its own end and all my agitation only delay its completion.

With that being said it is still as if I watch while the most tender, sweet, and honest parts of me (the few left)  are given to someone else on a whim.  My protests are irrelevant and laughable.  My mind knows the equation is unbalanced and that  I am the equation.  I have always been the one working the problem and it seems I have been using a math that was not intended for me or is beyond my capability.

I have created love relationships with people and things and ideas that I could not retain.   I poured myself into their leaky container and was spilled out onto the ground.  I mistook cleverness for wisdom and studied the ways of men in order to join their games.  I sought to master and be provided for and sustained by the external.  But all that I built eventually crumbled leaving me desolate and impoverished.  As above, so below.  The external is a mirror of the internal.

These three remain:

Faith – (a verb) To act in accordance with one’s hope.

Hope – The ability to imagine that  It must be so!

Love – Saying Yes to reality, to what is.  Acceptance of the duality beginning with my own.

Edison it is said found 9999 ways not to make a light bulb.  I hope I can beat his record.

No the other way. 🙂

Be Groovy!