Loving my way through No One Way.
In love. Out of love.

Trying to remember
I was never not it.

(altered image) original by Scott Froschauer

Every morning the toilet flushes
and I am not grateful.

image: Jessica Walsh

The symphony wasn't playing for me. But I was not separate from it either. There was no position outside the music from which to hear it. I was in it the way the trash and the bird were in it. An event among events. Mutually arising. Inside what was not indifferent to any of it.

image: Universal Man by HIldegard of Bingen

I spent years looking in people who seemed to have already arrived. I am still susceptible to it. The tug is familiar. What has changed is that I recognize it more quickly now, that particular quality of relief, the loosening of the exhausting work of being an incomplete self. I recognize it as information. Not about them. About me. About where I have not yet trusted my own ground.

What came at the end of Table Manor wasn’t a conclusion. It was a question I finally let myself answer. Who was God to me?

image: Jacob Miller, was shot in the head during the Civil War at the Battle of Chickamauga. He lived for about 60 years with the open wound, dying in 1927.

When I fail that image, something inside me contracts. I don’t just feel regret. I feel exposed. Worthless. As if my value has been revoked. I collapse my identity into my worst moment.

image: Rick Owens / Vogue

She no longer asked him to bring her son back and was able to lay him to rest. She had seen that her suffering, though unbearable, was not unique. Grief was not a punishment or a mistake. It was part of being human.

I’m still learning the difference. I remember it, and I forget it, sometimes in the same afternoon. But the kingdom doesn’t depend on how well I manage myself. It’s there even when I stop trying to make it stay.

image: Shantell Martin

Desperation is a gift because it strips away illusion. It unhooks you from the fantasy that you can orchestrate your own rescue. It returns you to humility—not humiliation, but truthfulness. When everything else fails, surrender stops being a spiritual concept and becomes a bodily instinct.

My issue is my ego. It performs and pretends. It hoards hurt and curates holiness. It would rather feel exceptional—high or low—than simply be human.

image: Rebecca Reeve

There is only one light, but each of us receives it through a different lens—a mind shaped by gravity: memory, ego, fear, the pull of incarnation itself. The bending is not a mistake. Without the lens, the light might pass unseen. Form gives revelation its shape.

image: NASA