I found my voice.
Actually, I found God’s voice. The one I looked for for so many years. The one I gave up on. The one I disavowed long ago. The one whose possibility I rejected. Then I went toward the calm and the love and the light and I found my voice.
Thank you all. This is my final essay on this blog. Others will probably follow, but this is the last one. I know what I need to do right now, how and what I am meant to sing. And now its time to begin. The music will fill me. I am ready.
Today I thought about J, B’s wife. 20 years ago, she was waiting at a light and a cement truck took a hard turn and overturned on her. They pried her out with the jaws of life. It broke nearly every bone in her body (presumably not the scapies). 20 years later she is still brain damaged, she makes the same cookies every day, she can see from only one eye and she has her hair done twice a week because she cannot reach her own head with her mended shoulders. Her husband B has hobbies and a wife he loves, but she is different now.
I thought about J. I stood beneath a lively oak tree, looking over the mouth end fork of the Rappahannock river, and I thought about a leaf. Then it made sense. I wondered if the leaf wept and cried out when it turned brown and curled over. I wondered if that leaf was gripped with the injustice of other leaves still green. I wondered if this leaf dreamed of a spring time it would never see. I wondered if that leave screamed out as it fell in a wind. And I knew it did not. It just floated down to the ground, where the ground opened is soddy arms and welcomed it home. The leave became mulch, which fed the tree. The tree next year bore fruit, and a squirrell ate one. That squirrel grew stronger and had a nest full of babies, and each baby was eventually eaten by a fozx, sustaining it, or died frozen on thr ground, and the trees and the grass welcomed them home. And the trees themselves, convert the very sunshine, tiny packets of electrons and nuetrinos and quarks and, into oxegen and leaves. Even the tiniest star we can see is contributing one tiny electron to the organism of another. Some chemical structure becomes part star. We are all stars, shining, browning, falling, baking cookies.
Somehow, I stopped worrying about my tiny consciousness and my death and my illness and I celebrated my own browning. And I knew the sound of the one hand when I die is the wind. Or the sprouting of a seed. and we all go on and on.
Then I knew what to do. Its like the morning I heard the sun speak to me, but infinite. I heard God again.
Somewhere along this path I forsake God. What could be his intention, what was to be gained by me laying crying begging to last till morning, weeping to my girlfriend, to my friend J, who is now gone like the winds. Why the paralysis, the blindness, the shaking hands. Why the impotency, the pain, the mixed words. Why the laughing man who found me in my car, the Walking man that found me in my room. The panic attacks, the slurred voice everyone thought was drunk, the nights alone while my peers fucked and fought and found love and luck and rolled the dice, climbing mountains, writing songs, drinking wine, getting the to go box. The glass in my gut, the voices in my head, the spider in my mind, touching me like an alien. the sirens wailing. The clenching fist, the shoes that showed my feet spasm. The ticks. The migraines weeks long with their halos and sounds and pain. The love I could not feel, the phone calls I could not hear. The hugs missed, the lovers I never embraced, the eyes I never looked into. The enemies who I saw everywhere, and the threats they posed. The subway signs I could not read, the books I could not penetrate into one sentence. The isolation, the humiliation. Losing job after job. The silver circle of the barrel of the gun that I saw so clearly when the blackness came. Its promise of sweet release. The hate. The Rage. The darkness I welcomed. Fuck you God. Ill not just deny you, I will stop believing in you. I will burn You out of that heaven you hide in you fucking coward. You bully. You cheat. And I will tell myself that You did this to me. I am an atheist. You are nothing. You are a superstition from weak people afraid to die. I want to die God. I want to reject this gift you gave me and I will work to prove I can do it on my own. All of it you son-of-a-bitch.
If, God, I am so fucking important to you, heal me, free me, prove yourself to me. I will strip you of your existence with math, and biology, and Zen.
Its hard to hear when you are talking. Its harder to hear when you are screaming. Its hardest to hear when you are stubbornly panicking and lunging at the helping hands about you with blood red fangs. But when I locked the door, stood in the circle and let the demons approach, and found that the demons looked like me. Then I let go. . I cried a pond of frustration and pain, I heard Him in math, and biology and Zen.
Its nothing huge. Its nothing odd sounding. I am not growing a beard or eating only the host (Sorry St Frank). Don’t think anything I will do with get me nailed to a cross. Probably wont even make someone’s forehead wrinkled. That’s not my path. In fact, you probably already know what it is. But now its mine. Bitches.
I cried tonight for about an hour. Tears of joy. How long since I have felt those? Held back a decade. Has it already been that long? But I have my path, and strangely have been on it for a while. You never really leave it, you just stop seeing it.
I don’t know how much more I have tonight. I am exhausted. I have started my song and its is my gift to you. My brown leaf, my cookies, my starshine.
Will the symptoms be gone tomorrow. Who knows. My leaf may be falling. Does it matter? Not like you’d think.
