2/1//07 - A Moment of Clarity - Letter to Amanda

You and I are going places my friend. And by that I mean adventure like you wouldn't believe. I've been thinking a lot lately about making beauty. About making things and thoughts and love and life beautiful. I think we're pretty good at it and getting better.

I love your reading and your loving it. I love your questioning and appreciating it. I see an invincible kind of happiness in you, and you know what it is? It's that thing. Really.

I love that you'll go for the brilliant adventure story over the safe alternatives. It made me remember that's why I took this job. It's also why being run out of your apartment by gangsters is not such a bad thing :)

I have an idea about the future. I'm thinking about talking to my (former) boss today to negotiate some compensation and finally free myself from the power struggle. It's been hard this week thinking of the disappointment and loss of the opportunity I'd been so excited about for so long. It fell through my hands like water and there was nothing I could have done different to keep it from happening.

This whole thing about pain in the changing tides- my mind goes to Pa'ia beach and how one day we came to swim and half of it was gone. I'd thought about the million pounds of sand and shell lost to the ocean.

What I didn't realize right away was that along this newborn coast, there had been revealed to us a mosaic of new debris and fallen trees and suddenly it wasn't a loss anymore- it was a whole new, beautiful landscape that I couldn't have predicted, even if I tried.

What brilliant landscape has just been revealed to me? What infinite possibility? I love to indulge in this game of being re-shaped again and again, learning new things with each changing tide. I don't know if I'll ever tire of it. It tantalizes me like licking flames of fire to the eyes of man. It's magic to my eyes and ears and mind and soul.

And then?

I figured it out.

I'm going to write. And not because I'm in love with the image of being a writer, or even because I would like to be one... but just because I already do. I'm going to write because it's like breathing air to me. I'm going to write because I'm already writing, and I always have been writing, and always will write, even when no one's looking. I'm going to write like it's too big and it's got to get out of me.

And it occurred to me just now that I might be romanticizing. But then I recall the lesson I just learned when trying to talk sense into my boss- that when people feel deeply moved, they often mistake this overwhelming sensation of love for romance.

Romantic love, in my head, doesn't even come close to the love that emerges out of real human connection. It's a case of mistaken intentions. You see those eyes and arms and hearts, and outward cries reaching up and out and its gorgeousness overwhelms you. The inquiry is so pure, and true, and beautiful. It pierces the soul.

How can you not love it? Two souls touching provides a sense of clarity that we hunger for, every day of our lives. I wake up, every day of my life, for that clarity. I cry out, and I reach my arms for that clarity.

I write for that clarity.

I feel a pressure in my chest right now, from how much I mean it.