Reckoning

There are a lot of dark hours before the sun rises. I love mornings. These are my moments of reckoning, long before light, when the world is mine –when I am alone – and all the agendas, duties, obligations, and people are still asleep. I feel you out there. I feel you inside. Is there something in this universe that I am connected to and can’t free myself from? In these hours, too sober for mercy and too clear for distractions, nothing stands between me and the confrontation with myself. I remember a young Virgo asking me, “What are you looking for?” I have coffee and quiet. There are dog heads resting on my lap and uninterrupted thoughts as I awaken. There is a place within me where peace vies with the wind, and they are both me. What am I looking for here in this deep solitude tucked between all of these towering mountains? Authenticity? Integrity?

My inner dialogue begins. I look out through big windows into a darkness thick and full. “Can you invoke passion? Do you seek a physical and soulful chemistry that makes windows vibrate and lust drip down the walls? Can you make and feel electricity from a breath's distance away? Can you be the river twining down and around a mountain yet remain anchored in yourself, inspired by love, passion, and new combinations of experience, but whole and not dependent upon them for your joy? Have you proven that? Actions speak louder than words, don’t they?” The morning answers my thoughts with silence. One of my dogs adjusts and sighs.

It was at a downtown café that I met the young Virgo. There was a parking garage across the street and virtually every type of metropolitan entertainment within an easy stroll. I felt like there were a lot of online daters meeting someone there for the first time. She was sipping on a mocha latté with whipped cream on top. Between sips she dipped a straw into the cream, a decadence to be enjoyed separately. My coffee was black and unsweetened and I didn’t mind our age difference. She thinks I am an “evolved man,” but I’m not evolved. I’m just navigating the waters a little further downstream maybe. She says that she is too trusting and has been hurt. She says that she spends all of her time at home and is waiting for someone to coax her out. From behind a brightly lit screen, she is looking for silver words to bring her back to exhilaration. I think she suspects that she only has herself to blame for her hurting and loneliness. There are so many selves to serve and discern, aren’t there? Which self is worth the consequences?

“I liked to run with my Virgo mate,” I told the young woman. In a way I was recounting my distant past. My words had other reasons too. “She was always twisty…always anxious…always holding it together…always looking whole. Running was good for her anxiety. Drinking was not. The gods pulled her in every direction, and she never knew which self was authentic. She railed against the weight of the accountability for that, and she railed against the lack of time to fit every self in.

“I said to her, ‘Look up and out. Breathe. There is a bigger picture.’

“She said, ‘You’re beautiful for always looking down the line…for seeing the big picture…and for your use of ellipses. But I hate you for missing the now and never arriving. You’re out there making spaces for rainbows.’” Loving is painful, isn’t it? Some of us make an enterprise of it.

The young Virgo was looking into me silently and I think she half understood what I was saying. While in her stare, the thought occurred to me that maybe an evolving man isn’t looking for anything nor anyone.

The three-legged dog climbs down from the sofa, punctuating my thoughts. My silent, imaginary audience awaits, and I continue. “The ripples on the surface of a person's life are created by deeper currents. What I am looking for ought to reveal what I am all about. Don’t the masters say that the Seer and the Seen are One? Shouldn’t it hold then that the Lover and the Loved are One as well? Do you love yourself without conditions? Do you feel more connected to all things for the time you take in solitude? Then you understand why that is.

“’I've never known anyone who makes love to nature like you do,’ my mate said to me at one of our epic reunions. I undressed that woman on mountain tops and consumed her. Yes, I love nature. You do too. Your love arises from the habit of an honest effort to be authentic. It’s habit, nothing more, and you don’t just take from nature – you give it a calmness. You don’t feel that anything that isn’t nature is real or genuine. Buildings are just structures with walls, in nature, and the trappings of modern life appear to you to be illusions…not authentic…not really loveable. The cost of the illusions is your time, and time is life. You feel that attaching one's self to that which is inauthentic leaves one bereft of self-awareness and constantly empty. You can’t really love that way. You don’t feel that anyone can. There is That which is Love, and another which is called love. You know that the reward for an expanded awareness is an abiding joy that isn’t erased by the waves of life the way love notes on the beach are erased. And so, your live is without conditions.” Doesn’t authenticity come with its own costs though? Nothing is free, is it?

I was taking a detour on the way home later in the day, and the young Virgo sent me a message. “If I were a color, what color would I be?”

I paused to reply, “Changing. Like the way a morning sky can change. Young colors of innocence with deeper hues from the evening’s dark dream places. Brightening remembrance. Pure blues above thought-clouds and occasional storms. The colors of afternoon withering…under an unrelenting sun. Early evening rainbows for the lucky. Brilliant dusks that burn your heart and mind but refuse to be captured by cameras.” We would never talk again. I disappear.

Returning to the sofa with a fresh cup of coffee, I scoot up against the yellow lab. She grunts and hunches up closer to me. In the dark, my hand finds her soft fur and my stream of consciousness continues. “Do you know the difference between building something real versus building sand castles before a rising tide? Your words are real. Your intent, way beyond what you have convinced yourself of it, is real. I feel that our enduring creations are in our words and intentions. Our words are eternal, and our intentions are the archetypes, or gods, we vivify. These are our little contributions to coloring and creating tomorrow…our “spiritual vote” for what will be. Are yours more grounded in Unity or Division? Love or fear? Are you in charge, or do you just react? Do you feel an awareness that your words and smiles travel well beyond the person you shared them with? Does that inform your priorities? And how deeply do you take responsibility? Then you know the magic of sacrifice and discernment, and unlike many people, you put your little self on the alter long ago.

“Or, my fellow traveler, do you spend more of your time concentrating on “things”? What has your mind's time been filled with lately? Is your little self on a pedestal and do your loved ones live in the fall out?

“Ask yourself: Are you authentic? Are you full and glowing? Are you past the negativity of judgment and the drama of being a victim? Are you discerning, solid, and successful with what you attract into your life? Can you build your own fire? Can you maintain it without help? Are you done gazing at pastures across fences? Are you present? Are you complete? Are you grateful?

“Has the notion of ‘authentic' been continually redefined and deepened and does your compassion and empathy arise naturally from your inner strength, from your ‘being', rather than being things that you must intend? This is the most important part.

“Can you say yes to this, yet admit to a calling yearn from somewhere deep that keeps you searching even when you thought the search was over? Do you have it in you to increase, and to be increased, without anything being detracted? Without detracting?

“Then maybe you are my river – maybe it is like this – and maybe I am your mountain. Maybe we missed, but that doesn’t change anything between us, except this space that you don’t fill leaves room for my confrontation.

I sip my coffee and look out through the great windows into the distance where, mysteriously, the few lights that dot the remote mountainsides have been softly and quietly disappearing. And now, in the first light of morning, I can see the white wall of snow silently marching into my life to mute my day’s intentions. Across the third oldest river in the world it lingers, leaving me in this place, so fitting for morning, of being between states: childish wonder and joy, relief only a slave of toil knows, disappointment for goals postponed, hope, reticence, peace, and exhilaration. The snow seems to pause in its advance, having me completely surrounded now, as if to say, “Consider the space, not what you fill it with.”