March 2014 – Writing with Light: iphotoimpression.com

It has been a difficult few weeks. Life can be such an acrobat performance, the way we have to squeeze, and roll, and jump and fall, all just at the right time. Transitions, be they challenges from the physical, mental or the emotional arenas, have a way of throwing us into a regression and making us momentarily forget that in our heart-of-hearts we are relatively well-analyzed, good people.

The storms that pass over head and sometimes right through us cause us to reflect in a deeper and maybe even new way. The fact that adjustment to conflict is the normal state of affairs take a while for us to understand. In fact, we do not want to understand it. We want to believe in a state of nirvana or seventy-seven virgins, or some form of utopian projection that has life portrayed as it was in the Garden of Eden. We want there to be a God and minions of angels some assigned to us personally. Our very own personal archangels. Maybe, if he was 26 and young and smooth and vibrant and inquisitive and playful and he was as attracted to me as I was to him. Maybe that kind of angel would help me trod along. But the angels that I do not see have not helped me yet; or, if they have they have not let me know it was them.

Essentially, even if I am able to call on archangels, at some point I have to die alone, with nothing and no one but me, myself and I, facing the grim reaper, the eternal darkness that we dread even when we hate our lives. The facing of challenges at some level is a personal and painstakingly slow process by which we get to learn that we have no control. We have no control over any of it. We live in a universe that lives in a universe that is so vast that the smallest atom is still a large mystery. And yet, this is not the problem.

This grim assessment above is not the problem, it is the solution. If we do not understand the nature of life, and the chaotic, and the conflicting, and the concentric repetitions, we will fail at death. And frankly, death is our last chance to get it right.

As human we share with other sentient life the fact that we are driven. There is born into us an energy, a vitality with a mission, with an aim that drives us toward what we want. Desire is the solution to the question of conflict or challenge. We possess no greater tool than to employ our language toward the goal of getting what we want from life. Desire is biology. It is our biology of hope and it is our biology of faith and it is our biology of charity and compassion. Through wanting we improve not only the quality of our lives (while we have them to use), but we improve the entirety of the globe and beyond.

Desire manifests as creative energy characterized by a sense of obligation to the self. Artists have an obligation to create and we are each the architect and artist of our lives. It is a direct contradiction to what we know about life and death. On the one hand we have no control and on the other hand desire sets in motion all kinds of actions that cause conditions to either fall in or out of our favor.