The day off comes, the physical hurdles cleared.

I'd been reading the Gospels for a while now, years, and the line about hiding the light under the bushel stuck with me.  Without knowing it, the attempt to write in this venue with its accessibility via smartphone and web, I don't know, I guess it came out of that.  Or was supported, fostered...

The question was posed, theoretically, why not then just take to writing "live."  Why be scared of the thoughts that come, the muscular efforts to wriggle within the old skin, to break free of the old shells of limitation.  Cracking free and out of the old leaves creatures vulnerable.  Their new hides are vulnerable, sort, before they harden.  Birds must come out of shells, just with the strength to match their obstacle; and then, even more vulnerable, they will face the next stage of the nest, parental warmth, feeding...

And so each thought was delicate, new-skinned, soft, embarrassing almost.  This is nature, what can you do, but live with it, perfect in its imperfections..

We had come upon an age, you know...  when even holy people would not be able to recognize themselves.  A Mary would not know she was Mary, almost.  Or, rather, she would be discouraged from the self-knowledge, so revolutionary, so radical, so out of this world and unexpected and miraculous...  As if her very DNA would be discouraged from the power of its own inner transformations of self-realization.

And the same with humble Joseph, the old husband "carpenter."  Same with everyone.

Not exactly that they'd be watching the news but just the sediment of two thousand years of skepticism would float down upon the species and its collective mind.  The Christian advancement of the Old would be met with a backlash, so that all miracles, all words and commands from God through angels and Himself would be nullified by the rational.  And the entire DNA of the species would reflect his reptilian retreat from the light, as if not wanting to be out in the light, feeling too vulnerable and with every assumption known by daily survival would be shaken.

I had started, without really knowing it, my little project of reading the Gospels fully and more carefully, in the spirit of giving something a chance.  I began it in moments of leisure, following my truer interests on the gut level, that I feared I would have to seriously pay for down the road.  I dabbled, but I kept it up.  I did not know what, if anything, would come of it.  There was an established pattern in it, the obvious literary quality, the obvious nature of the Gospels being something we all should be familiar with, and also the tradition you could sense in any good writer, in any good person good at public statement.  The old records of Lincoln laid out on the couch reading from the Book of Job...  Obviously, as good as anything to read, and, well, maybe even better, who knows.

And I had sort of begun to outgrow all the things you should read, if you had the time, to have a rough muster of literary history, parts of it, like say, the history of the novel, or any particular stylistic approach or advancement of prose, say, Joyce, or Flaubert, or of the subtle changes in material, aimed more to include the peasant, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, or the angle of perspective on the human condition in Chekhov's great heart.  Things like that.  Kerouac...   Twain.  Bookshelves... piles... Kundera's essays...  Shelves full of Hemingway.

You sort of reach the stage, of "well, now what...  Is that all there is..."

Then I suppose there is the next stage, the philosophical discussion of mind from the old doctors of such things, the Eastern mind...  What do the mental habits of the Buddha, let's say, have to add to all this bulk and body of reading from Shakespeare down unto Yeats, then Larkin...  Ted Hughes...

And then you wear that out too.

And but for a few things, a few tiny kernels, you've worn out even the things you wrote or would write.  No, you're not even going to write about the job you have, the work you do, the things you know.

As if you knew, as in all along, there were bigger fish to fry, bigger fish to catch...

And all this, of course, you only had the roughest of inklings, and would, as is the modern style, dismiss the best of the good as childish, prattle, baby talk almost.  Like talking of Bigfoot, or UFOs, would be the closest comparable thing...

Except for something growing within you.  A strange thing.  Kind of like a plant, a small tree within, a Caduceus of some sort, strengthening within, and strengthening you along with it.

O, but who am I, who am I, but a sinful man.  A man with few chances left, a man of certain age, whose attentions must turn, yes... but with no clue, as it were.  As if living in something like a lack of hope for anything but simply trudging on...  Not quite, no, just that that could be the mood sometimes, something you'd never really accept, because as a human being you would not accept such a death sentence of hopelessness, a thing quite against our very nature.


I guess I'd been trained through a long pattern of scruffy encounters.  Encounters haphazard, not ever fully realized, always somehow rushed, or clipped short, edited, censored by the great illnesses of the soul known to the modern, the Totalitarian, the selling of our own time, the rise of the great master of advertisement, marketing and distraction, the legion of serpents sent by a certain one, "eat from this tree of knowledge, and it will give you powers..."

Who would ever know the truth of these scruffy rough encounters, whose scruffiness was quite well-mirrored by my own appearances through the age of my years, my comings and goings, shirt becoming untucked, collar, life, organizations askew, but for running the barroom as tightly as my strengths and endurance humanly allowed...



But Lord, what blasphemy, the whole of the Old Testament and the New contains, so it would seem... Oh... Yes, but this is the best we know, can now, as of yet.  And its words have garnered the attention and full respect of many a very strong and independent mind of great intelligence...  This craziness of finding the Word of God.  "What is it anyway, a myth like those of the colorful minded Greeks..."

And how could I know, anyway, God...  What can I do but take the leap.


What is His Covenant with us, His low beings down here?  What if we do, indeed, do, or attempt, humbly, to do His work?  What is His work?  How would we know it...

Do not hide your light under the bushel basket, He tells us.


How can you not feel strange.  Still, we are in that mode of hiding ourselves from the Lord, as in the Garden, having messed it all up.  How could you not feel like here you are and you've worked hard, but you've messed up and your boss somehow knows this.  Even our own family, even the holy one, wished to restrain His Son...  "Quiet him down.  Tell him to tell his friends to go home.  Tell him to stop, and resume, after a time of restraint, to apologize and start back living a normal life..."  Yes, we understand he was bored with his previous career choices...  We hope that, with time, he will turn to familiar normalcy.  Maybe try to get him the hope of a book contract, keep him happy in the meanwhile, working on a fictional piece, "my time as a savior."  Stories with a touch of his old good humor, clever boy, kind of like old poor Yorick, to put the table a' laughing...


"It's a big world without."

"Yes, but it is a big world within, as well."






Following the old pattern, the Old Testament, the Prophets, the Gospels, was the best way around the interference pattern.  I could not condition nor control as well as I wanted to the mind's processes in a more effective way.  Even yoga, even meditation, mindfulness, even emotional outburst, nothing stood a candle to the great opening up.  Nothing opened the potential like the old stuff.

For a writer it was indeed like getting rid of the many unclean spirits, the ones that did you no good when you had that time and were brave enough against all one's other condition to write.

Looking for the word, the logos of God, shining in the sky just on a normal day, like those of barren afternoon in Lenten March, even in the most mundane things, opened up matching potential.  If you looked so, and granted this to your DNA, that you could grow and change, even at a late age, even at the age when maturity has arrived and beginning to over-ripen, as it were, then you were open to a new growth.  Well, it's true that old vines make the best wine, sure...  But...

It helped you get over that sense that there was something else you should be doing, a better way to conduct and protect yourself.


I saw myself less and less as a writer.   The writing was only a form to communicate.  One form.  It balanced others.  There was a satisfaction to it, and, just like talking to someone, it was tiring, and you knew your limits.  It let you keep a record.  Who knows the purpose of that, but... keeping a record.