[an eavesdropping on a prayer]
Everybody wants a hero, but nobody wants to stand next to one. Heroes are too radical. Sometimes they work up a sweat while they’re fighting to save you. Everyone wants a hero. and everybody hates perfection. and imperfection. they hate that too. so what is a hero to do? A hero can retreat or be burned at the stake. A hero can’t retreat, though, because everybody hates to be betrayed. Everybody hates to be abandoned. A hero can’t retreat and can’t stay standing What is a hero to do? Never stand up. Little Boy, they didn’t lie to you; you could be a hero some day. They didn’t lie to you. They only disguised the truth. If you stand and succeed they won’t like it. People like heroes in cartoons. in cartoons where they can’t touch or challenge anyone.
I feel defeated. I’ve been chasing Real since my first step. How can I chase something when I don’t even know what I’m looking for? The target changes every week and I just keep running in circles Every book and speaker and seminar and pastor and parent and mentor and friend and book and book and book and seminar and sermon and speech advocates a new philosophy, a new Real. Only one thing is real. I run to It and they tell me how to look at It. They all tell me something different and I’m left there in another circle, just forced to follow the voices telling me how to find the way to find Real. So, they say, just stop listening to the voices. Just wait for the voice of God. Then they tell you how to wait for the voice of God. Then they tell you what God sounds like. So before you know it, you’re running in a circle in a circle listening to the voices tell you how to find the way to find Real while not listening to the voices but instead to listen to them and wait to hear what they tell you God sounds like. I don’t feel better now.
How long will you make me chase this, God, when I don’t even know how to run?
Pictures flash like lightning across my mind. Storms of life have blown me to so many places and burned them into me. Winds of time uproot me and rewire me with a flashbang who is this? What am I and how can I live without this? Never did the stars seem so close as the moment before this tempest pulled me back down from earth and away to everything I have ever known. Just when I find myself rooted comes the dustbowl, tearing me up from the roots and away again. Is there no cure for the clock? This bitter brother leading me nowhere I want to be and nowhere I ever want to leave? This disease is in my breath and blood. My soul is the gravity that pushes me always forward in this harness of time and tempest. Never will I be steady, never will I know static. Not unless I never want it. Circling something bigger, all I want is a piece of today. I want the flavor of yesterday to linger just a little longer. I want tomorrow to simmer a moment longer while I enjoy the aftertaste of today’s dawnbreak. Is that so much to ask? Is that too much for a dying woman to request?
For of course I am dying, I am dying of chronic clock and so are you. This room keeps getting hotter and I keep stripping off layers. That is what time tricks with. It makes the moments smaller and smaller, tricks us to clamor for the next one because this one is too small, this one is too old, that one is too strange, these are too sour to eat, give us more. We don’t want to see these again and before we know it, we never do. That is chronic clock. It is a disease of the mind and breath and blood. A chronic clock, of breath and blood, is a disease of great gravity, ever tying us to pay attention to our demise, and not our days. Cry beloved, for tomorrow will surely come after today. And today is dying. But it’s not dead yet….
