Tuesday, February 28, 2012

angels remind me




About a month ago my reflective daughter remarked that the only perfect thing in the world is that everything is imperfect. It seems like it's taken a month, a thousand mile trip, skirting the unforgiving cliffs of California's Route 1 and some very bad news for her statment to cure to full flavor, because recently life became saturated with the exquisite magnanimousness of hopelessness. We're all in it together. No one wins. We're all beset by insanity, short sightedness and absurdity, futility. We chronically undermine our best interests. But that doesn't mean there's no one to love. It means the opposite.

Somehow without remembering this, and maintaining expectations about what life "should" be like, it is impossible to remember what kind of astonishing gift life is, an aesthetic stream of richness and complexity that marries our souls to the world. It doesn’t matter how long it is, or how short, what priviledges one was granted or how one struggled, whether one was pleased or dissapointed, who loved us and who didn't, it is in essence a gift. Most days I let resentment over disappointing circumstances cloud the clarity of that point. It is a rare and astonishing moment when I am redeemed by the angel of pure unadulterated hopelessness.

I think this is another way to view the statment I was considering in a previous post: "There is nothing as whole as a broken heart."

The sun setting over the Pacific at Ragged Point, with clouds fittingly blurring the horizon. I had a terrible night trying to sleep there, yards away from the drop off. It was weird.