Thrive!

We missed the gorgeous streak of jalousied light on the texturized white wall in the front room, just above the couch,  blazing with glory from the roiling, radiant sun because we were thinking about how he had “umhed” and “rrrhed” two years ago, backstabbing us in full daylight with people watching apathetically.

And so right there, in full sight of the devine, we dispossessed the present with the raging despotism of the past. If not that, something else is always getting in, between us and beauty.

We are, and I do not hesitate to say this anymore, aesthetically marginalized by our own myopic distortions of present tense reality,  lost in the gap that exists between our pathetic squints and blinks and the blazing, glancing, whipping spiritualized light of shockingly full-tint, full-throttle reality.

We are tyrannized by our habitual, paranoic, self-limiting, psychic-poor, observationless ways. We gunk and sputter to a stop, short of it and late, epistemic hat in hand stuttering excuses.

Enough has been wasted. Enough reality has been squandered. It is time to slow time, to dawdle with the second-hand and to fiddle and twiddle and muddle with duration and intensity and lengthification.

Today I sat out in the backyard with two young friends and talked about their upcoming marriage. Beautiful!  They, the approaching night, the cool ocean breeze, the nasturtiums lurking slyly along the sidelines — all breath-stopping gorgeous. Then the evening tiptoed in on our words,  drop-dead, wow-you-down, baptized in splendor gorgeous. The water fall in the pond fell glancing behind our thoughts and danced into the lovely idea of a more focused future.

We sipped strawberry lemonade on ice, sucking the sugary red nectar inside our mouths, sucking up the symbiotic ambrosia of the together-now.

We poked and prodded several and various globes of seeing and imagining and believing.

I enjoyed it, the ambience of my friends; I relaxed into it, the extruded presence of my spiritual children — our fully mutualized sentience,  the rise and fall of our texturized voices,  the splashing water, the yellow flowers beyond her hair, the shade tree arching above his dark eyebrows, the possibility of a different future flowing into the air and swirling in the breeze around our cheeks.

The question is more obvious to me lately. What does it mean to live wisely, fully, meaningfully?

I  always feel a little cheated, a little out of it, a bit of a distance between myself and what is, and what is beautiful and what is perfect and pure and falling down softly day-to-day on the walls and heads and minds of the righteous and the evil ones too.

I haven’t got it, but I am beginning to grab a few broken bits and pieces of it.

I want to fully embrace the now. I need to acutely and astutely and even savagely engage the present, activate the awareness of the flow of life that is immediate to the moment, to the space close and at hand and nearer than even that, the only spaces that actually exist and that I can touch with my heat-prints in the ever and  now, the water and flowers and air and presence of my people.

I’m telling you and myself now, that I need and want to look into people’s eyes longer than I am accustomed to. To look, to see, to love, to love again because I haven’t looked, and we haven’t and we don’t really see each other, but we can and must and can again as we age and become a million years old in the seeing experience by the power of him who made the blind eyes to see and the seeing eyes to see again.

I confess it; I desperately need to savor my food and drink longer in my mouth than I have before. It is good! It is better than I have given it credit for. It is the gift, of life, the bread of life, and I love it,  stawberry life, lemon life, hazelnut life waterfalling down my tongue and into my throat.

And I need so much, and may I be so bold as to say to you too that you need so much to pick up the child reaching up to us for a hug. I need that child and that child needs me and I need to carry her and take him by the hand and pat his head and affirm the reality and value of the presence person,  of that little, fragile, precious being.

I must and do and want to  reel up that thought again, each thought again, each and every brilliantly-faced thought,  and hold it like a diamond and stare at it and ruminate over it, and polish itwith my mind, like a stone tumbling across the fast flowing stream of my hypothalamic electrifications.

And I need, need, need God, and I now know that I want, want, want the divine, more than anything. I must get clear on this, everything is from him and to him and for him forever, and I will, to thrive, wrap everything up in the him of the him of him.

And I need my dear ones, my family and my friends, and I must pull them around me and have that time and that talk and that presence in the room even when there is no talk. I cannot and will not, I absolutely refuse, to be alone for very long, because this is wise and there is no wise away from my precious ones that have been given to me.

Listen, I don’t have it, but I’m crudely gesturing toward it; I’m psycholingustically guessing about it; I am sociolinguistically posturing it its direction. I’m spirituologically sponsoring, for you and for me, its very essence.

I command you now, in the name of all that is good and holy, run after ontological joy that looks something like what I have tried to show you here.

This is what the proverb makers and the psalm mongers have always meant by being the wisdom-sage scholar.