Dear Cellist,
You are leaving now. And so am I. But neither to our anticipated destinations, it would seem. And that is fitting, I suppose. As fitting as fate's inscrutable happenstance, which we must hew through rugged grit and wisdom into Providence. Amor fati, and I do love you, Cellist, really, as much as little I ever knew you. You are, I think, inscrutable as fate, and just as beautiful. And in the subtle resin lingerings of soft red sound left velvetly trembling by your passing on--your moving, as the Spirit moves, where you please, and when, to seek some second lease on...something pressing--I hear...
nothing.
No still small voice to reassure with haunted tokens. No message in the open window. Just...the autumn coming on, with its inevitable gust of leaves, to shake the world naked of its covering leaves and bring the cold.
One reads of things like this, perhaps--about the second stage of mysticism: that dark night, this long dark night now coming on, where the Seeker sits longingly awaiting Light, but finds no Light; when ears are cupped to autumn's silence, and the ragged breath is all that stirs the barren leaf-strewn amber-soggy streets with sighs' exasperations.
Where is God?
The difference now, in this dark night now coming on, thirty-years foolish, disatheisted clown, humbug failed hermit, hawksorn, highdive, goldenfretted and firesacked lyre-pressed beaten boy, is my commitment. There is no turning back from Love's faded nimbus, fog-fled, once it's uptaken you toward it. There is only the long gray cold dusk road, uncertain distance, to be walked, in refinding from where you Fell.
And this you follow. Down the valley, up a Purgatory, dayless, durationless. But led, inexorably--like a weeping magnet, wounded, weary. But...determined. Decade-ready.
In lieu of rings, this is your ring--the tatoo of a τὸ Ἕν tortured on your finger for a seeker's slog to Glory. This, your Purgatory, pending Paradiso, wending, waiting, wretched, worried. Why?
For where is God?
There is no "In the flowers! In the goldenrod!" here. Only the long gray dusk road, nimbus-famished and nimbus-fled. But you will trek it. There is no other exit. There is only up, and upward-tending. And in a secret locket, something like a memory of Light, infixed and precious. This, you tend to; feed like frail fire; pamper, prejudiced to the eventual Good which must, which has to break, like lover's smiles from grievances of pettiness; like sun upon storm ruins; shipwrecks, dawnlit; spring from winter's clutches; heaven from the small shards wetted by sinners' shattered alabaster jars upon a savior's blessings.
Adieu, dear Cellist. Tomorrow I will sell my bus, or auction it to the highest bidder. Monastic vessels, going cheap, and the vehicle I'd meant to teach me Spirit: cast lots for, Craigslisted, pawned. Spirit teaches, cloistered or cajoled, cowled or cowed. Perhaps that is the lesson in this lessonless. But still: I cannot help but weep, to see my plans for some transcendence bungled by my ignorance, or misdirection.
And yet, I cannot choose but think: wherever one goes, God-intending, that is one's direction.
If so, I'll intend, and find me in an ever-heaven.
Find you, Cellist, intertwined with some Intention.
Find God--beautiful, brunette, and bending with a bow of resin over hollow wood, and making Her cathedral-music Fate.
Or break the cellic symphony past all pale form
To Light
beyond knowing
is rediscovered
endlessly
as Love
Adieu