I look out my window and, if I really think about it, it just hurts too much. There is too much to adore, too much waiting to be encountered but that I will never find, too much to see that I will never see. I am hungry but I have lost all hope that the hunger will ever be sated.
Though I try to ignore it, an awareness of it all piles up inside of me. It is a sort of ecstasy combined with famine that just keeps building. Call it “extreme adoration,” if you like and it is a blessing and a curse. It is an acute awareness of the magnificence of all that was created paired with the devastating realization that I will only ever touch the smallest part of it.
Worse, it comes with a mandate to share this love with the world or be crushed by it. Since I do not want to end up a wino curled in an alcoholic daze in a doorway, I do my best to get it out, to bear witness to the glory of creation.
It is not a joke. I know that if I do not get it out, it will destroy me. Some writers talk about the creative process using bucolic images of springs welling up in wooded glades, but for me it is a foul black sludge that I must constantly pump out of me. Beyond me, out in the world, the black sludge turns into a beautiful child that I can admire, but locked within me it is a foul ooze that must be expunged before it putrefies my soul.
After 45 years, I have learned to know myself. The ways I have to honor and pay homage to the glory that is everywhere around me are four: write, make love, dance or play harmonica.
I perform each from a sacred space knowing that with every word, with every caress, with every step, with every note, I am fighting for my life.
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