Green

Somebody told me I was green. "Welcome to the club." He said, "You came from a land of blue. You're now in a land of yellow. You'll never be yellow, but you can never be blue again. Welcome to the green."

My thoughts immediately turned to Kermit. Do I want to spend each day the color of the leaves? Sure I do. Even though it's not that easy, it's the life for me. I will be- No, I am. Green. That's what I thought.

I guess green goes better with yellow than with blue, or maybe it's just easier to adjust to a new life when you don't have to worry about the ghosts from the old one. Or maybe it really was all just a dream. Maybe my top has finally stopped spinning after 6 months in dream-time (be proud of me Leo, I made it back to the States). I really hope that they were real.

Back here, in the blue, it's harder to push forward. Guilt works not like a millstone, but like a rubber-band, pulling me back to the muck, pulling me back to my sin and self-centered misery. Pulling me back to my old crutches. Just one cigarette, just a little bit tipsy, just a few more minutes. Just indulge for a moment, you've earned it after all.

I found out that I'm more comfortable around children than adults. Give me four 4-12 year olds over three 18-80 year olds any day. Maybe it's because they're still saturating? Not yet blue enough for me to feel the gulf? Probably not, my Dad's the same way.

I love my family, but they're very hard. I love my friends, but they're so far away. I love my God, but contrary to what my mother may believe, sometimes doing the right thing is far from easy, even with his help.

My dear one, so strong and fragile, a wonderful paradox, I'm already wondering if I've been too much spoiled to keep your love. That's as flowery as it's gonna get honey, so write that on your mirror or whatever. Fact is: I think I'm going back to where I came from. I think I'm going back, and I don't want to bring you with me. I don't trust myself with precious things, especially not back there.

At the height of my madness, I turned even cigarettes into oracles. My alcoholic brother is afraid of white lighters, so I suppose superstition runs in the family. I don't want to return to that mindset. It was beautiful yes, but it was hollow, empty. It was a glass tube that sparked brilliantly in the desert sunlight, but I have since tasted water from an earthenware jug. Considering my surroundings, I'd like to keep the jug.

I have so many analogies for life and how it works. So many things I could say, but most of them would just end up confusing the issue (much like the above paragraph). The point of the thing is this: I don't feel like I belong, and I wonder if I'll ever know that feeling again.

Preparing for the Coming Wave

I sat down to write out another manifesto, but I don't have the heart to claim anything with gusto. There's no gusto behind this. I could manufacture some, but that's not the point is it? The point is honesty and passion. And I am honestly and passionately desperate.

I desperately desire to keep the part of me that has developed over the past six months alive and growing. I want telos. I want to mature, and grow, and learn from my God and from the people and situations that my God puts before me. I want to bow in awe before my King and stand in unity with my brothers and sisters, fellow humble servants. I want to wake up every morning with praises on my lips. I want to go into every night with prayers of thanksgiving in my head.

I do not want to return my old idols. I have an altar to Ishtar the size of my imagination. I have had feasts in honor of Pan that lasted long into the night. I was a disciple of Arachne, and I still have the robes. I have smoked the sacred cigarettes of fellowship with the night, and I have drunk the blessed gins of hedonism. 

All that stuff was fun, and I don't think all of it is evil. Most roads have ditches on both sides after all. But, I most certainly was in the ditch that errs on the side of self-indulgence. I don't wish to offend my friends with whom I smoked, drank, and spun my stories, but I think I understand (if only partially) what Paul meant when he said "all these things I consider loss..."

Somewhere else I wondered how my new self would fair in my old life, for I feel that I have certainly changed, and for the better. This is the crux of the matter: I want to seek after God with all of my being. I do not want to be distracted by seeking for pleasure, or questing after eros, or descending into fantasy. I am not disdaining pleasure, or eros, or fantasy. I am simply tired of seeking them for their own sake. 

I want to seek God. I want to find Him. I want to be made complete, matured, perfected, through Him, and I don't care if it takes my entire life. I don't care if it costs me everything else I claim to love. I don't care what it costs. I have found my pearl of great price and I will not see the sun set before it is mine.

I have so very much to learn, and I want to be taught. My past teachers helped me to construct a world of my own understanding, passions, and desires, relative to what I knew. It was a reflection of its creator, broken and incomplete. I want to learn from God. I want to become more like my creator, even though I am broken and incomplete, and will be until the day I die.

I don't really know what I'm trying to say here. I guess I'm trying to process the fact that I'm about to go back home, and that I've changed. I want you to know that, and to understand that, and to please be gracious with me, because I'm still getting used to it.

I humbly ask that you would be willing to put up with me during my time of initial readjustment. I don't know what my first few months back home will be like, but I know that it will be awkward. My concept of myself has changed, and it will be fragile. I know that some of you will care for me, and press me further up and further in, just as you always have, and for that I am thankful. 

I am worried about this coming wave. I don't know if I'll survive it. It looks like it could be a tsunami, and I fear that my newly constructed levies could break. Either way, the current wave is rolling out to sea, and I stand on the beach, once more praying that I survive the next one.