Leap of Faith

Well, you could say I was sorta forced into it, between my health and my dear hubby's. But you'd sorta be wrong. The plan for simplifying was always on the agenda - it's just that circumstances forced us to make an earlier choice. Glad of it? Yes I am. Want to go back? Nevaire! As our dear Daughter said last week, "You guys ALWAYS talked about it, for 20 years that I remember, but I never thought you'd acutally do it! Suddenly you took a leap of faith and you were gone!"

Leap of faith, hunh? Well, maybe.

I still get the endless emails from my Conspiracy Theory friends. Some I forward just for laughs, others to give folks a perspective of what might happen, could happen. Love em all. I did cancel my subscriptions to some of the panic feeds when I moved - the ones that had gotten dreadfully miserable and terrified. Don't need their immediacy here.

I still watch my beloved friends getting torpedoed by people they trusted, people I warned them about. Some of their 'enemies' are still their 'trusted friends', mindlessly corrupting everything they touch, arrogantly refusing advice because they "know better" as they carry my dearest buddies to hapless perdition in a handbasket. Some of my beloveds simply refuse - as they did before I left - to see that their 'friends" had it in for them all along, were using them as stepladders, grinding them beneath their graveled feet while pretending to scratch their backs. It still breaks my heart - but, you know, they wouldn't listen to me before, and now as things come to pass, they still won't listen to me. So distance may make the heart grow fonder, but it doesn't make it grow any more believable. Shrug. This far away I can view the nuclear blasts with equanimity, ration, and reason, knowing that the fallout won't be on my plate. "I told you so" doesn't have to be said out loud from 1600 miles.

Oh, I still take an interest. Still lament about the stupidities, the smarmy and airheaded foolishnessses. Still love my handful of real friends. But here I have other things to do. No matter how miserable it makes me to see my friends get bent over, I can't stop it, can't warn against it, can't say any more than I've already said without repeating what I said when I was there. And -there's no point.

What's good is - no more meetings with the bright and progressive and the smiling smarmy knifing bastards any more. What's good is no more horribly overpriced, inedible food, served on lavishly underdone plates in ostentatiously overdone venues, impressing each other with the size of their - um- budgets. What's good is no more evenings in tight shoes and tighter rooms, where too many perfumes and "manly" mass-produced scents assail the nostrils, and the scent of their mendacity insults the spirit. It was starting to feel like I was in an endless production of "Masque of the Red Death", where the partygoers partied ever more and more vehemently, and where I started to become afraid of whose face I would see when the masque was finally lifted...

What is really good is nights with no lights, where billions of stars fling themselves across a deepening sky without glare or interruption. The coyotes howl, the locusts sing, and those are the only sounds - except for the occasional lowing of a complaining sleepless cow. What's really good is walking past a TV news flash and going, "Oh, really? HUNH!" and walking on, intent on purpose, intent on my direction, intent on my ultimate goal.

I can't say my usual - "I don't - oh what IS the word - um - oh yeah, CARE!" - anymore. It is implicit in my absence, and was never really true anyway. I do care. I DO. It's just that people are gonna do what they are gonna do, believe what they are gonna believe, follow blindly whomever dangles the bait that most lures them to their own downfall. I just don't have a front row seat anymore. You can't hear me booing or cheering anymore. I chose to leap into the desired, the unknown, the choice of my life over theirs. And as much as I really do care, I know (as I did while I was there) that people are gonna do what they are gonna do. Then as now, my input means as little as the deepening silence of the night. A silence that is comforting after a busy and productive day, a silence that is refreshing after the physical labors and the spiritually satisfying progression toward a real and fertile goal, a day and a life once again ripe with possiblities.

Leap of faith? No. Leap of surety, leap of confidence, leap of joy. Not a "Fuck you all!" but a quiet refusal to participate anymore in the pathetically multiple-orgiastic, blind, futile rushheadlong into the death of my soul - and yours. I can't watch you do it anymore, especially with that rictus of a smile on your face.

I have to go. The horse is hungry, whinnying and stomping at the corral gate.