Lost

There is something in all of this...

... about getting lost. Getting lost and not quite being found again. It's an existential movement, a placement outside the ordinary realm of being, that is both essentially detached but also intimately connected to the substance of my everyday existence. And perhaps it was ordinary things that caused me to lose my way. Ordinary things that once were tidy, anticipated, expected, that lurched out of place in a sudden frenzy of unpredictability, that no longer permit the easy sense of what-is-about-to-be that was my constant footing, my compass, my way-finder for all the years gone before. 

And the deeper question of consent and permission has awoken in me. Have I traded some fundamental facet of my being in a deal with stakes that were too impossibly high for me to comprehend, let along reckon a fair offering in return? Who is the mysterious interlocutor who holds these cards, who has dealt this hand while knowing all the while what it contains? And why is their reach so greedy that it has swallowed all the fresh corners and unknown turns of journeys that were mine to take and discover? What does their hunger crave that it has prised from me the easy freedoms of biding or spending my time as I choose, of reaching out to embrace what I am drawn to? And why have they built a cage made of absence and denial, even while I sing prettily and dance with all my skill to bring good to the world? 

So I am lost, and deeply bereft. Each day I turn towards a far horizon, a sacred place which glows goldenly, insensible to my gaze. This place holds deep answers to questions I held so close I barely knew they existed. It is alight with the promise of knowing, of being known, of finding a wholeness that is hidden therein. But this place is far distant, unreachable it seems, as much as I reach urgently towards it with every inner movement, every inner word, every moment of silence. How did this sacred mystery come to exist outside my own self, how was it taken from my own shining temple? Is it purely an illusion, intricately wrought from all the predictable desires of anyone who has supped so richly at the table of failure and defeat? That was never my table, and yet I have been held there, dressed in all my finery, for an eternity of excruciation. This shallow version of my past now clothes my life, like the rotting velvets of the treacherous feast, wrapping me in the after effects of a farce that was only ever designed to last a second. 

So I flail. I struggle. I wrestle to free myself from this tangle of what was never mine, so that I can find what is left, wherever it may be. I seek pieces of my self, whatever they are, to reassemble into something that will resemble me, the me that I seek to bring, enlivened into the world. This me needs more than an eternity of suspended secrets and untameable silences to build upon. She needs her own centre, a lodestone to carry with her, to set her true path anew. 

Mayhaps this search for direction has no real bearing on the outcomes of my life. The sun will rise and fall over and again with or without these lost/found pieces of insight. The days and nights will arrange themselves about me as they have these past years. But it is as a landscape that shifts and sways around me, without a centre, without certainty. And always the yearning remains, a constant companion in place of what, who I am seeking.