“need” @church decrypted means some % of me belongs some % to them & the crown I have to bow to in gratitude… // say “you made me fearfully and wonderfully & broken and depraved” from 1/2 our mouth “you love me” and 1/2 “you hate” and in one voice “I deserve it, you despise me, & I hope I live forever
things can matter just to me things can matter just to me things can matter just to me things can matter just to me things can matter just to me things can matter just to me things can matter just to me things can matter just to me things can matter just to me things can matter just to me things can matter just to me things can matter just to me things can matter just to me things can matter just to me things can matter just to me things can matter just to me things can matter just to me things can matter just to me things can matter just to me things can matter just to me things can matter just to me things can matter just to me things can matter just to me things can matter just to me things can matter just to me things can matter just to me things can matter just to me things can matter just to me things can matter just to me things can matter just to me things can matter just to me things can matter just to me things can matter just to me things can matter just to me things can matter just to me things can matter just to me things can matter just to me things can matter just to me things can matter just to me things can matter just to me things can matter just to me things can matter just to me things can matter just to me things can matter just to me things can matter just to me things can matter just to me things can matter just to me things can matter just to me things can matter just to me things can matter just to me things can matter just to me things can matter just to me things can matter just to me things can matter just to me things can matter just to me things can matter just to me things can matter just to me things can matter just to me things can matter just to me things can matter just to me things can matter just to me things can matter just to me things can matter just to me things can matter just to me things can matter just to me things can matter just to me things can matter just to me things can matter just to me things can matter just to me things can matter just to me things can matter just to me things can matter just to me things can matter just to me things can matter just to me things can matter just to me things can matter just to me things can matter just to me things can matter just to me things can matter just to me things can matter just to me things can matter just to me things can matter just to me things can matter just to me things can matter just to me things can matter just to me things can matter just to me things can matter just to me things can matter just to me things can matter just to me things can matter just to me things can matter just to me things can matter just to me things can matter just to me things can matter just to me things can matter just to me things can matter just to me things can matter just to me things can matter just to me things can matter just to me things can matter just to me
when we become when you become so tired so completely // unambiguously tired & it (our energy) expires forever our facade falls our bodies lay our faces our faces slip and the lucky the luckiest of us will catch beyond behind (what is behind) what we call ourselves the luckiest catch some reflection of our exact our energy (our lack of it) & let our face slip our body lay facade fall
& the luckiest glimpse it // and never wonder again where our beauty is
When we will know everything we are missing out on It will make us here. It will drown our appetite for it & leave us // at last // I think here.
We will see // and be forced to see there is always a reason auroras escape us
for when I looked, they were not there & when I looked away, they appeared.
The News reported early that what I failed to see in Iceland (despite it being the perfect season) appeared above me while I was busy in Missouri.
& why was I busy? & should I regret? or can I see that there are always beautiful things I am not seeing.
& can I see that what I was busy doing is just the sort of beautiful thing no one else will ever see?
For when we finally know everything we have missed out on we will collapse in noticing that every argument in our head every little wish we ever had & toothpaste drip we saw hit the sink & hair-brush stuck in our knots & the thought you had that finally made sense of everything which you forgot & the precise experience of hope you had once which you lost //no one else, ever, under any circumstance not through any number of scientific or technological advances // you can be certain // there is an exactly zero percent chance that anyone else will ever have them your experiences they will miss out on the kinds of details that would make some photographer weep if she could capture them the sort that every French film is dying to recreate the ones the greatest novels make us think about and suddenly love.
we will all // everyone who isn’t you will miss out
and each one of us is an entire universe like this you are the auroras I will never see the details I would want to know, you cannot recall but you went through them all you experienced every single one of them in the most explicit and exacting possible way in the first person & I can never have that
And so I continue to exist living everyday knowing some seven billion auroras, I must (for all intents and purposes) ignore.
& in response to this the best thing I find for me to do is to do what I can to not ignore mine
If there were nothing in the mourning we could not have at peace then I’d agree
as it is I think compassion only grows in grief compassion only learns another’s name suffering.
“What about a world with no suffering? Is that not the place compassion too compels us toward? Is it, therefore, no holy aim?” I’ll answer. Once compassion finds compassion’s aiming end — it obliterates & all its excess energy imparts itself to life and living it.
between knowing I have all the right beliefs & knowing I do not have to have them
between trusting what I believe about a person and actually trusting them
I would fail examinations // her favorite color her only place she feels at home what every word her friends say she has sometime said and what I make and memorize of them
and CHRIST too I am positioned to accept that I got every fact // got it all almost completely wrong nonetheless and // and nonethe //everloving less I would trust & everloving love THEM nonetheeverlovingless
he is 30 and calling my friends and I a brood of vipers in our temples
in my mind christ is happy smiling, or something, all the time
but he would not be as good a god if he knew not what it is like to be a young confused and suffering
to scrape ones knee and know the world is ending to bump our heads and bleed
I had never been as young as I was the day my 30 years of plans came crumbling in
& when they did I found myself born all over again I held out my hands and looked to my side on his knees, I saw the divine a child surrounded
I saw him young as young as me scared, and weeping, a facsimile of Gethsemane the spirit above and below him a child’s face & a child’s tears going by the name of GOD
I knew that he knew the intensity of feeling knowing something somewhere is holy but not knowing where to find it or what it could be
your face in your knees hoping it’s an ocean an ocean above and below barely breathing half hoping you’ll be swallowed half hoping this very memory will be extinguished eventually
but what I saw in his boyish face was space to give my grief a proper name and a place to stay
I wonder how often he tapped into the sorrow of the earth and I wonder how often it overtook him
& so it was in the curling of his little body that I knew he meant it that I knew he could see and understand completely
I’d always known I was never as hidden from him as I think I intended to be but for the first time in my life that thought did not completely terrify me
nathanael.ink 