Dear
Athena,
I
wrote almost nothing last month. I imagine that would be the perfect set up for
a joke that would be analyzed later by some English teacher "He says he
hasn't written this last month but won't speak to the last several years of
silence." It hasn't all been silence, but this last month… I don't know
that I want to reflect on it yet because it still feels like it could be my
present. I'm trying hard to be here now in this new month, that's why I'm
writing to you. Everything lit up yesterday and I felt myself dreaming. I
remember this quote the moment were done and it fueled me while I jogged around
the park:
"Faith
is knowing that you're on a team even if you don't know the players."
I've
wanted to have faith again, to have a mythos to rely on. I've been rereading
"Pathways to Bliss" by Joseph Campbell (Hero of a Thousand Faces)
and he speaks to the need of every human to have an organizing mythology and
the reasons why. In the search of uncovering one's own he writes:
"You might ask yourself this question: if
I were confronted with a situation of total disaster, if everything I loved and
thought I lived for were devastated, what would I live for? If I were to come
home, find my family murdered, my home burned up, or all my career wiped out by
some disaster or another, what would sustain me? We read about these things
every day, and we think, 'Well, that only happens to other people.' But what if
it happened to me? What would lead me to know that I could go on living and not
just crack up and quit?"
In
this moment of career loss, which is a particularly specific piercing of pain
in my chest, it is the beauty of the cosmos that you should be on the same path
at the same moment as me. An example of this faith that there are others on my
team even if I don't know who they are. I felt myself, and if I could use my
religious language, believing again. Not in the religion I held before, but in
the belief that I was "Truly not alone in this" (Andrea Gibson -
Living Proof). That there were other people on this team. As I listened to you
speak about the desire and vocation and I could hear someone saying to me all
the things I felt inside myself and it felt like liturgy, like prayer. As if
someone knew the longing of my heart and brought it out, beleaguered from its
cage, and set it free into the world as words in a conversation.
I
dreamt as I ran, a feeling of flying as the sun felt like itself on my skin for
the first time since it forgot. I thought of us reading books and talking of
their meaning, I imagined us our naming our fears, the ones that can't be
spoken till they are buttressed by all the lifelines we have stretched across
the chaos that separates us. All the risks of vulnerable statements and the
declarations of faith to what we could not imagine ourselves without. There was
humanity there I had forgotten could be sustaining, that the relationship
between two people could be enough to give life when all the necessities of modern
American human life went unfulfilled. I remembered that life could be about the
beauty of people sharing it with one another, that it is the greatest beauty in
life. That I've been so drowned in the hustle of work, all the joy had been
filtered out and I thought of peace and happiness only as a dull ambiance. I
dreamt that we found others who would read with us and would share in this life
with us and that we created for the sake of it, not because we would monetize
it in some way. But that it so filled us that it was worth the effort unto
itself. I know that is starts here as well, in this writing to you. I didn't
think this could still be inside me most days. I knew that cognitively from
articles and research and experience that this rests inside and will rise like
a gust across the plains and other times fall silent and still, but I kept
thinking "once I was safe enough then it would finally happen." But
connection is the safety, not the material wealth.
I
imagined us as "educational consultants" (aka mentors) who opened a
private practice counseling students in schools through the anxiety of grades,
starting new, testing, applying, and the confusion of what am I doing during
this time. I didn't think about the money we would make, I thought of the ways we
would struggle, but also be enraptured by the work of it. I don't have the
details, I don't want to work them out alone necessarily. I imagined a world in
which I open a gamestore in Denver and run D&D sessions for autism students
for roleplay therapy. I thought about a safe space for queer kids, students of
color and queer kids of color with a disability reading about superheroes who
look like them.
I
should tell you that in the time that I've written this, I made plans to have a
dance night over at my friend's while his buddies on discord DJ; doing an art
evening with a friend that we can create with no intention of selling; and
asked some friends if they would talk to me about how to open a gamestore in my
area. I'm feeling the itch to go on a run and I'm not sure if there is a proper
way to end this letter. I want to leave it on a note of all the possibilities.
How about this? In anticipation of hearing back from you, this is a writing
play list by Buddy Wakefield (a favorite poet of mine). I listened to it
while writing this to you and I hope that holds something of what I've
described here for you as well. Athena, I feel a fragile and abundant faith knowing
you are with me.
Love you,
Augustine
