I’m watching an ice-skating video (featuring Jason Brown doing Riverdance). And I’m marveling at boys who spend large chunks of their lives working for 8 minutes of glorious and expressive joy for all the world to see.
And here I am, working for over 50 years to swim through the muck and mire and murk of modern times. Digging into my bones to stare my ancestors in the eyes and learn these truths. That ours are not the deities of Rome or Babylon. That our gods are goddesses and they are brutal and beautiful and passionate and terrifying. That they are larger than worlds and their desires echo across time.
That freedom is not invididual choice but instead being beloved and being loving. That god is a term not for a thing in the aether but for the forces we invoke. That the world will not be silent in the face of destruction and that truths will not remained buried forever.
I am compelled to do the only thing I can with these discoveries. And that’s to write them down. I have no idea whether anyone else will every read them or treasure them as I dearly do.
From this vantage, I only understand that they must leave my heart for others to be able to hear them.
I struggle to capture the lines and wrestle the letters to distill words and words to forge sentences. In the end, I only hope this half-century of mine makes others feel the way me watching 8 minutes of joy made me feel.