autumn twilight

The moon is waxing quickly this cycle, her pale light already diminishing noticably in the sky. She hangs above the horizon shrouded by gauzy veils of autumn mist. Her light is split into a cross by the screen outside the window, showing rays of it bursting forth in four directions.

Ah, but poetry does not seem the method of the night. Nay, though words of fluid beauty are coming from my fingers, there is a darkness that I have not overcome. I’m not entirely sure what it is I’m feeling right now. There is much in conflict within me, many things that will need resolution, that are coming to a head. And still, there is patience in me. I am waiting until my choices are made for me, and this is not a good thing.

I believe what Heinlein wrote, that we must not act until waiting is filled. But it is difficult to determine when that has happened. The darker shadows imply that waiting will be filled when you have no choice, or when the choice has been taken out of your hands, but this is only the illusion. This is not patience, but avoidance. In truth, waiting is filled when two criteria have been met.

First: You must know the action you are going to take. This may be simple or complex. It may be difficult or easy, but knowing the action that you will take is inherent.

Second: The circumstances which allow your action to affect the world as though its very fulcrum were subject to the lever of your will must transpire. The world must collaborate to put your action forth as the driving value of the moment.

When those two criteria are filled, then you may act as though waiting has been filled, but not before. And therein lies my challenge. I neither know what circumstances are at play, nor what I’m going to do when they’re set properly. So I can not truly wait. Instead I must study. I invoke my patience, my unyielding ability to sit until I have understood what I need to understand.

And yet, here I am, feeling a bit overwhelmed by the enormity of the world around me. We all have days like that I suppose. Days where the world seems too big and scary, where it seems that everything we want to do is impossible, or that the choices we’ve made in the past have turned us to a course we can not now turn away from.

So how can we deal with that feeling? I know techniques to simply wash it away, to reaffirm myself on my path. I find myself ever so tempted to do just that. Let the fears be banished so I can walk with confidence. But to do so feels like I would be denying myself the right to feel as I feel. To blindly clear the slate of the challenges that my heart is making would be a great disservice to myself and the communities that I serve.

So I struggle to find a balance point, the fulcrum of my own heart. What pieces of what I’m feeling are true? What parts of my experience are actually informing my choices? Which ones are not? If something is not informing my life, it does not belong in my life and should be cast out. So I am looking for the feelings that are incongruent with my life; the pains that have no source; the arguments that have no purpose. And I suspect I’ll find at least a few of them.