dona nobis pacem

As is usual with everyone, I've had a lot going on. The summer was filled with more busyness than reflection and relaxation than I had anticipated or wanted, but it stretched me and I found the distraction welcome; but now that things are beginning to settle down, and fall approaches with its mellowing and dying of the year, I'm beginning, with the settling, to settle, and with the drifting of the silt of my own private hubbub to the bottom of the riverbed, I'm facing with clarity of a number of the things that I didn't have to before, and coming to some choices.

One of the key phrases Leigh Ann and I adopted from Dark Angel was "Stay Strong in the Struggle," and one of the principle ideas we gleaned from Angel was that life is all about the fight, and sometimes we get melodramatic (purposefully, or at least in self-awareness) about it; but I experienced a couple of significant upheavals this year of a kind which I normally try to avoid, and I was still recovering from another significant upheaval from the year before, and I dislike situations without finality, I hate uncertainty and living in the question, and toward the end of this summer I got just plain tired of fighting my own emotions and sank like Eddie Izzard's "flan in a cupboard" into a little self-protective funk.

And it's time to let it all go. It's time to come to finality by embracing the question, it's time to close the door by forgetting it's open, it's time to move forward by letting what's gone be gone and holding on with gratitude and joy to what I have. It's time to relearn that, sometimes, love is letting be; that bitterness and resentment are best combatted by prayer and understanding; that the kindest memory is the shortest; that the best goodbyes are unspoken; that forgiveness trespasses and upholds the boundaries of the necessary. I'm not good at most of these, but life is long, and there's no time like now for getting started.

Besides, I have a lot of work to do. The job is busy (always), my friendships are rich and deepening, I'm reconnecting with some of my old companions, some of my old ambitions, I'm led by a God of healing toward peace when I least expect it, and, ever and again, it's almost fall.