I know well enough what happens when you try to force fate.Being aware does not save you from the discomfort of feeling helpless. Knowing what's coming and what will never come again; and feeling like nothing you do can bring back stability.

So do you resign to spin haplessly across black ice hoping at some point you will get your bearings before you lose anything else? Or do you exhaust yourself whittling your square peg into enough of an ellipse to pass?

I am not very good with loss. And I yet, so much of life's work is grieving. I feel myself at a crossroads...one road faith the other good intentions. And I'm on my knees crying please don't make me take faith. It is not always (or ever) a facile decision.

I will move eventually. But for right now, I just want the time and space to mourn the loss of clarity. Of sure-footedness. Of competency. Of knowledge. Of everything I ever knew about myself. I just need that much.

Part II

It happened kind of like this

"...but I need freedom" "What if you are free?" "How can you feel free behind bars when you're literally trapped in a place, a position, a life?" "You are always as free as you think you are...what if you abandon whatever idea of what freedom looks like and decide against all 'common' sense that freedom is not in places, in positions, or even a time in one's life. Freedom is a state of being and one you can choose at any moment in time. How many times have you run away to chase freedom?" "Too many." "Have you ever caught it?" "Sometimes. Usually after I get to a place and stop and catch my breath...then it escapes again and the binds come as if when I am too still the vines grow up around me holding me captive." "What happens when, for that brief moment you exist in freedom?" "I am whole. I feel whole. Then almost immediately I feel terrified of its tendency to flee and I grip it so tightly my hands ache." "And it goes?" "And it goes...maybe that's the trick. I love it too much." "What do you mean?" "I'll eat you up I love you so...that type of love. The consuming kind. Because I crave it so much, I do not know how to co-exist with it. So it runs...and I chase it and it lets me catch it for a moment to see if I've changed, and I never have." "So?" "So...maybe you're right. Maybe I am always only as free as I decide to be, and..you know that saying, 'don't chase, attract'?" "Yes." "Maybe it's like that. Maybe I need to be free to attract freedom." "Maybe, how do you plan to do that?" "I guess I'll start by sitting here a moment." "And the vines?" "Let them come." "Could freedom come to you?" "Maybe." "Maybe?" "Actually it has before." "Could it again?" "I suppose it could." "What if it's not a thing to be chased but a thing to be realized?" "Hmm..." "..and the only way to see it is in those times when we are pausing and catching our breath?"