Quantifying Elation

Autumn is coming. I'm trying to find the words for the colours I am turning. There have been choices, we all have choices, and our decisions say less about the objects of our desire than they say about whom we desire to become. I met a man who breathed out art where ever he walked. "I've been thinking about the beauty of the everyday," he said, "because if the everyday can not be beautiful then we are all lost," and he turned and made a masterpiece of a lemon rind.

I've been in a backroom trading under the table - my openness for carefulness, my puddle depth for a diving pool, my newly minted for tried and true - and I'm still counting my change to see if I've been had, but either way it's emptied my pockets and the walking is lighter, though slower. There are losses. There is beauty.

It was not God who was shattered and scattered at creation, it was home. And in all of this goodness, in all of this beauty, in each of these choices are echoes of home. It is no wonder then that we want to gather it all to our selves; we are sick with our wandering. But for the first time, this time, I am seeing the sacredness of the choice and how it shaves away like a blade my superfluous self. That there is the wanting is a given. There will always be the wanting. And the sorrow from it. But there is also the turning, the trading, the going from new green to gold, the bags packed, the face set, the feet headed home.