Moving on

I want to quit. Sometimes. Like today.

Not life. Sometimes, I want to quit hoping - and simply live til I die, til others die around me. That is the inevitable path we take, regardless of our outlook. Love and hope are interchangeable, it seems to me. Both are ways we cope with this inevitability. Of death. Not with rage, but with a kind of persistence in the face of so much that would contradict hope. And love.

I could join others in this act of inaction. They poke fun, or they ignore my efforts at living by hope. Mostly they ignore. Me and anyone else who dares to live by hope before death claims us. Or life. The blunt hardness of it. The tenuous skin of handling life - of taking what comes and dealing with it - stretched far too thin over a sea of chance and complexity that mock any attempt at control. We dance as if walking on water - and even our dance resembles the staggering fall of a drunk. We know where this is going. Where it has to end.

Yet some of us dance anyway. And the thing of it is, we don't always fall. Sometimes, the reeling becomes a reel, a launching impossible apart from the terrifying leap into love we take daily, moment by moment, in the face of the maw of uncertainty. We fall. And some of us discover in the act of falling a kind of flight - not so pitiful or pitiable as it might seem from the perspective of those who watch us fall.

Like martyrs who pushed through throngs of would-be faithful, reaching out trembling hands for the blessing of a touch - as if such a tenuous connection could transfer even a glimpse of the leaping life (no, it cannot). Though once having tasted this life (abundant?), I know that nothing else could satisfy the thirst borne of that first taste. I'm cursed with hope. With love that refuses to let me out if its clutches, no matter how hard I kick and scream and rage against its refusal to let me go. To reject me once and for all and let me die in pieces.

I am sacrificed on the altar of love and hope in this world. I have no choice. Nor can I keep it to myself. The curse plays out from my original choice to cleave to hope and to risk love. Relentlessly. There is no longer an option to choose not to choose. I have made a choice that forever defines me, that defines the life I live. Hope eternal, rebirthing relentlessly without mercy, every time I die. I may hide in shame in the garden for an hour or two, but there is an appointment that will be kept in the cool of the afternoon, when the wind blows.

Then demons return to find no room in this house. They go away, empty-handed. As always. Here is where hope lives. On and on.