Pro/c/gr/ess

What's gonna happen next?

What an odd place i find myself in these days. Since my monastery experience, I find i am less and less invested in my old mythology---those thoughts, beliefs, fear and motivations that drove me to construct my life along certain lines.

I am grieving a lot these days, and doing a lot of letting go and in the meantime, having less and less to cling to. the future does not hold out a lot of hope....... ah, hope, one of the three primary colors in the realm of the spiritual life, along with faith and love. My faith color is the dominant one, these days, and i feel somehow in the fade of hope, that love is developing more of a possibility of emergence into my life. love not in the romantic sense, but rather, compassion. compassion for all people in the plurality of forms of being in the world outside the forming influences and biases of culture and other indoctrinational systems.

anyway, back to the question 'what's gonna happen next?'

well, i can honestly say, whatever happens, i'm not gonna make it so. since most of motivation springs from an active and vibrant [albeit subliminal] sense of hope, i can honestly say that my life will basically stand still for a while. and that's ok, truly. after decades of the pursuit of overarching self-actualizing plans for my future, i have safely arrived in it, only to find that i am not terribly or necessarily excited about it.

but who ever said life had to be exciting? i guess that was something i came to believe somewhere along the line. now i don't think that anymore, so all the stuff i built which rested on that premise is no longer existing, then all those things, whatever they are/were, don't matter anymore either. something inside me tells me that this is really the process of progress and its unravelling. the beginning of death in a sense. i am going to be 55 years old this year after all, and what dreams does a 55 year old dream. i guess i am at the crossroads of letting go all the old ones that don't apply to the vision of my future, which is not the same future that it once was.

it's all very surreal.

i guess when you are partnered, you have a different vision for the future because it includes another person/being around which life you orbit. that's the big dupe of marriage and coupling. get married create your world around and with the other, spawn children then your future becomes the care and concern of and for that progeny. there is no room for 'me' in any of that.

life [and natural death] for bachelor/ettes is significantly different, no? learning how to balance the life of 'me' with life lived for/with others is the great challenge, for a couple of reasons, one being that the responsibility to construct that life depends on one's necessity in creating it, and stoking it and continually revising and repurposing all of the resources necessecary to its proliferation.

all of sudden, i feel tired, that at a time in my life when i thought i would find a lot of rest and retirement, that i have to reach down even further into the bag to find new ideas and strength for living. to devise a new sense of purpose divorced for all of old ways in which i used to purpose my own designs for living.

i guess what's a big part of this is my realizing over the last few days how much i miss minnesota and my friends and life there. in spite of the empty 'minnesota-niceness' of it all, i still had a good personal life beyond my work.....especially prior to my cloister into the discernment process.

i miss having wendy and jodi close by. i miss mickey and the gay men's chorus and all my buddies there. yeah i had a life there, it was real and it miss it.

but now, i have to accept that it is part of my past now.

i am too tired to try to rebuild it here.

lots to st/th/ink about today.
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