You have been walking the ocean's edge,holding up your robes to keep them dry.
you must dive naked under and deeper under,
a thousand times deeper. love flows down.
~ Rumi
I have been doing just this, an ocean-edge balancing act. Getting my toes damp before darting away from the oncoming rush of salt water. Living on the rim of these shallows - themselves just the gateway to the deep. In part, my arrogance is a product of trying to get it all right, trying not to hurt and not to be hurt, to remain unscathed. To continuously do no harm, to be...impeccable. Not to draw blood yet again, and not to have my own veins opened up.
But as you point out, to live is to cause harm. By dwelling here on this edge I am attempting to avoid the territory of broken promises, this time mine, potentially. It is in the what ifs that I bide my time. Not to make a bigger mess of it all. Not to 'fuck it all up' as someone once espoused to have done.
But I am risking mediocrity here at the tideline. Sniffing the saltwater breath of kelp rather than swimming with it, getting tied up in it's slippery fronds. I have never claimed or desired perfection and do not shy away from the swampy mire that sometimes seeps in to these matters of humanity. I am quite willing and able to see through it, know it for the smokescreen that it is. Most messes are made of spilt milk and moments; they are only eternal if we allow them to trick us into thinking so. If we let them persist and steal our gaze, drawing us away from the loosening beauty that empties out into this world daily, minute after minute. To remember that we are all worthy of forgiveness and freedom, love and happiness, and not to bind each other up in an unending accounting of who is to blame.
It is this edge that I need to broach, though I continue to trip over these rivulets of sand as I approach the proffered ocean. To free myself and allow the tug of currents to take me, trusting it as I used to before.
