To California Wine

I often would like to have all my daily thoughts transcribed somewhere for me to go back and review fleeting ideas.  Ideas on happiness and contentment, on concerns for people both in my life and outside.  Because when it comes to sitting down and saying something that will be meaningful it's the daily ponderings that really mean something.  But this is not possible and so anything written becomes an idea of a moment and not that of what I really feel or believe.  For those in my life, the interns I regularly participate in work and leisure, the people I see, they know.  My friends, those I love, know more but not the here and now.  So what is it you want to hear I wonder?  I'm not sure.

This current life is different from the last in that I have found a happiness that, though being incomplete, is the best I've found.  That is quite a statement and one I am seeking to understand perhaps to take with me into the next adventure.  The last six years have tremendously evolved to what I see now and could be the most eventful I'll ever find.  Every year has brought with it new opinions on how to be; knowledgeable, worldly, patient, reclusive, inclusive, wise.  If I say I believe something now it very well might change after the new year.  I have never been very knowledgeable nor patient or wise.  It's time this is clear.  I will not tell you this of course because it's not my idea of a good life to explain what I see but understand what you see and feel what I see.  I have become worldly.  It is easy to be so and comforting.  I am learning to be inclusive because I have had to lie my life away to be included and loved.  People are often difficult to love and sometimes impossible.  I do not regret this.  From now on there will be love where it is possible and patience when it is not.

Utter nihilism may be the clearest truth because it admits none.  I have never found happiness in this kind of truth though I strove for it many years.  Instead there is comfort in choosing.  I have chosen to not believe in a god of any kind.  Religion took hold of my early years and would not let go even till now.  I would rather belong to the hopeful in spite of this.  There is no universal morality but the rightness and wrongness we make up within ourselves.  Divided billions of times over the course of reasoning history and I am left with too staggering a figure to contemplate.  Even my own rightness and wrongness is only a guide from passions - an error I will not bother solving.  The expense of my life has been great but I have had little choice in the matter. I sit somewhere in the middle of the consequence of death and trifling in-congruences.  This will have to do.  I cannot make up for what I am culpable - not by this point.

I have experienced things unimaginable.  Not the worst of things but beyond my evolution.  This really does not matter much as it has effected all of us in these last many years.  If we were being watched we would be notable for our lives.  If.  This is why we all speak.  We want to be understood.  This is why we pray.  We need to be redeemed.  From my seat in history this has been tried and failed too many times to try again.  I am not strong enough to tackle a problem far better people have lived.  Their struggle and sacrifice will be my ticket to peace.  This will not be fair but more fair than is realized now.  Stray words mean little compared to our real heartache - the not knowing the most thinking of us are torn by.

Music has been a great healer.  Beautiful, tragic and relate-able voices and chords that bend my heart when it needs to be felt.  Film, too, has found a place within where few things have reached.  This cannot be understood unless you feel it too.  Think of what really makes you satisfied, not overjoyed, but at peace.  Now you know.  There are ugly truths behind what helps us to survive but we cannot help but be the cause of at least some of these.  People, I have found, myself included, are eager and willing to cause others pain in order to secure their well-being.  In the end I do not know anyone who found what they were looking - not for long.  To be simple seems the best of bad solutions.  It is troublesome and unwieldy for those we live among in the Western world.  It is not impossible.  I know because I cannot help but shed anything unnecessary.  This will seem to be cruel.  Perceptions can be that way.  The cruelty of my own parents' rejection was like this in a way.  I do not forgive or even think of them because it was only that way by force of an uncontrollable complexity.  I cannot control this life either.  Like a read book on a table I walk around and look at it from a distance, observing a life written on pages, to be interpreted and misunderstood at the will of the reader.  But I hold this book as precious.

My friends, you are building the main of my life right now and have been for several years.  In return I will put together the pieces you may be missing - because I miss you too.  We will do many things yet.  For some there will simply not be the place or time.  This only means that I am overflowing with your goodness.  I look forward to the eating and drinking and socializing.  I look forward to the joy of seeing you and the pain of knowing you are gone forever.  In the end we will join one another in that place.  This solidarity is the only one we have.  It is beautiful and not sad.  Is this not enough to let me go?  I will join you all someday but not now.  This long walk has been necessary.

To California wine.  To rocks in green pastures.