It’s 1:45pm. My bewitching hour hits sooner, faster, here than it does at home. And I can’t stroll around the yard talking to you on the phone about the existential struggle I feel I am in, which in the end-the strolling and talking-serve the struggle just as it designed; to put me off of going to it and doing the it at all.
The it? To place fingertips to keyboard and put into the world something that is calling on my heart; something that beats in my gut.
I can’t know what it is and good grief by default then neither can the world, if I succumb to the easy and seemingly good way that home offered, calling you, which has only ever been a prettily packaged distraction from my work.
Being at Gethsemani is a challenge, which I expected, as well as a revelatory blessing, which I hoped for if not expected as well.
Yet I think the devil in my head is pulling a final charge. Enlisting all the troops to rally to one more attack on my senses even though he knows he’s already been defeated.
Self criticism, judgement, condemnation for taking time to be here at all thus shirking my duties elsewhere; this devil in my head gives a good talk but no longer has any street cred.
I am one full day, 24 hours into arriving here. It’s no surprise he’s going gang busters trying to entrap me with stories of not enough and who do you think you are. This is his final push to put me out of commission, or as he thinks it, keep me safe from worldly criticism and judgement.
The irony though, I have realized, is that it is going to be easier, healthier even, to face the worlds judgments of what I create and put out there than it has been to dance around the self-criticism that has gone on in my head.
Where I might have picked up the phone and called you to lament and hear your placative advise were I at home, I can not do here. Instead I have to sit with myself and all the stories that arise, and criticisms that try to gain footing, and see them for what they are, all by myself. Without otherings advise or counsel I have to put myself in my place, hold my own truth, and trust what ground I stand on, all by myself.
This is difficult; but not as difficult as it has been in the past.
That is why the devil is working so diligently to through the stones that will lay me down.
Without really meaning to, I drew the line in the sand when committing to this week silent retreat.
The line drawn is the one that says this is it; there is no ‘next time’ or ‘perhaps later’. The time is now. I have just enough courage, and just enough trust, and just enough faith in the road I have traveled, to put my hands to the keyboard and simply let come what comes.
Where I have in the past, recent past even, laid my fingers on the keys then pulled back into the headspace that says I have nothing to offer the world and believed it, I now sit with fingers alighting, not caring so much if what I type will have merit, as much as caring that I am typing at all.
If we go there, I get to. This is my current I get to, so I am. And what comes is and will come on its own merit and worth, and I needn’t fuss and fume about what it is or who/what is undermining it. My job is to wave and smile at the army collecting on the hilltop, and turn my eyes and fingers back to the keys and let it flow.
This is all I have right now, this is all there is, and I get to. No matter, what comes.