The angst (of March)

It has been a very difficult month for me.  Those of you who have been with me since the early years know that I have not been shy about laying my personal life out, for better or for worse, as my journey West has unfolded.  That journey hit a roadblock of monumental proportions in March.  But this time, the resiliency that had been my creed, was no where to be found.

A friend of mine, whom I have never met, but who became a friend from just reading me write about myself, my life, my journey, suggested that I go back to some of my early blogs and find the man that wrote those words, re-discover myself and find the strength, the source, the faith inside of a half-dozen years of sharing myself on these pages.

Enter this holiday weekend, Easter, 2010.  When I lived on the beach in South Carolina, when my kids were still just kids, Easter's were children chasing across an open field in search of hidden plastic eggs with cheap candy as their prize.  I watched with pride and joy, that even though this wasn't my holiday, those two innocent young girls just brimmed with happiness and contentment, how life seemed so simple, easy and wonderful for all of us back then.

Lost now in another time, another place, another lifetime, I search for the way.  Because what has evolved for me, in terms of a lasting, permanent, peace with myself and all that I have become, is as elusive now as it was when I left home, soon before this blog was born and the journey that I had embraced began being chronicled in this spot.

Angst: a feeling of deep anxiety or dread; typically an unfocused one about the human condition or the state of the world in general.

Sometimes it feels that this blog is my best friend, or maybe at times like these, my only friend.  How much sadder can life become that my only comfort is in writing these words, desperately in a long-in-the-tooth sojourn of personal discovery, finding only solitude, sadness, regret and memories.  Life can seem so tortuously cruel and meaningless.  Yet also so fragile and precious, like at those times long ago, with hundreds of screaming youngsters flailing across Kiawah's Heron Park, in search of hard candy hidden in plastic eggs while a bevy of proud parents stood in amazement of how simple and glorious their lives were at a moment filled with such beauty and wonder.

The beach was always busy on Easter weekend.  The weather in South Carolina was just turning warm enough to enjoy the afternoons of people watching and sand castles, beach chairs and puppies, all mixed together as paradise, a fleeting moment of perfection, where anything was possible and whatever paths we were on that brought us to that place and time, were flawless in their execution and direction, as were our collective lives, at that place, in that time, in those children who taught me how to love, unconditionally and forever.

Now it as come to this, come to pass that those moments are etched in a desperate memory, trying to evoke some reason to be, or some path out of an unwelcome malaise.  Distances can be measured in miles, or in time, or so it seems today, measured in feelings, spirit and detachment from faith, expectation, or desire.

A decade of Easter's has now intervened.  The beach and the kids are still there, but they are not mine, not anymore.  Nor am I anywhere to be seen, felt or found.  In my place sits the remnant of what could have been, but for a journey that intruded instead.

Who knows why we make the choices we do?  What takes over inside of us at crucial moments in our lives and changes everything?

Thoreau wrote, "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation."  And this, "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately...."   Is that not what I have become?  A man living deliberately, in quiet desperation.  There was never any assurance that my path would find a proper, fulfilling end, or that what I left behind, the beach, the home, the children, the paradise, would be left unscathed by my departure and the distance that has taken my place.

What is haunting this Easter Sunday, ten years past my girls' frolicking in life sublime, is the incoherence of my solitude, the empty, senseless culmination of a journey, fallen so hard and short, from deep in the angst of March.

Once there was a way to get back homeward
Once there was a way to get back home
Sleep pretty darling do not cry
And I will sing a lullaby

Golden slumbers fill your eyes
Smiles awake you when you rise
Sleep pretty darling do not cry
And I will sing a lullaby