Hear today

I stumbled across a blog post a few days ago, titled: "Everything doesn't happen for a reason."

It's a sentiment I'd have disagreed with in the past: Just because we can't see a reason doesn't mean one doesn't exist, right? A bit like this lovely Carl Sagan quote: Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Some things happen for a reason, of course. Exams go well when you study hard, races are easier when you've trained for them, well-laid plans usually lead to events that run smoothly. But not everything adds up quite as simply, or perhaps there's some celestial math I haven't learnt yet.

Patterns are soothing. Like hope and lessons from the past, they're the promise of a better return, a brighter future, a more definite outcome. It's why we seek them out, I guess. And yet, every spiritual guide reminds us to stop expectation and past emotion to live in the moment. Perhaps abandoning dreams and memory are about making room to be present -- not letting go of tomorrow, but a choice, instead, to hear today.

(Time) out of time

I'd rather forget last year. I'd rather believe this new year wasn't. When crystal fragments carve 

blood-bright memories into mind's flesh, why count the passing of twelve months? 

This month last year I held a knife to my wrists on my kitchen floor.

And there was a day when the sun crept up through my skin as I sat on a fallen wall and looked over a once-lost city on a mountain. Lost things, even mundane bricks, are more precious when found again. Do not sit on the Inca walls, the sign says, though I imagine these walls have heard so many children sit and whisper of wishes and fun.  

There was another week - several others - when I cried until I laughed at the insanity of optimism. Months when I thought it would be easier, smarter, more productive to slip into darkness than cling to some imagined future light. The line between depression and madness seemed marked in hope. 

There was a week when I walked foreign streets and laughed with the man I fell in love with. 

There was work I loved, and people I loved doing it with. 

I dreamed of death, more than once. 

There were fractions of peace and joy that glitter sharp-edged in the mess. Soft cocoons of connection. 

When the year tipped over one into the next, a dream I'd held was lost forever.

I clutch them all close, these shards of time, and still they fly free of a calendar's confines. It was a year. This is another. 

Last year I let go of hope. I let go of demanding prayer. And when I let expectations of success go, I left behind also the interrogation of failure.

I couldn't tell you if the optimism died when I let go, or if I let go because it was already gone. Perhaps orphaned hope is found in other dreams, like imagined whispers in the dark. In a parallel world, perhaps a woman stands surefooted on the sun-warmed bedrock I abandoned. Perhaps it is more cherished in its rediscovery, like miracle stones from a different time. 

Perhaps time can heal, but not in the way the years click one into the other. The seam between one year and the next is only a second. But each is broken into far more permanent bits already. So I count time instead in these fragmented essays of emotion.  

One year ends, another begins. Life rips across the imagined lines of time. I let go of my own hopes last year And I felt the warmth of a city that was a lost people's last prayer. Everything lost is found again. Perhaps there will be other magics, other footholds, on the shores of a time yet to come.