...escuela...of the flesh...the bones...

...they thwart me. I thwart me. So very good at it. Here am I, in the midst of my favorite month and the beginning of my favorite season; I am guaranteed restlessness; respite from the heat; a short but gentle forgiveness of my joints; insight, enlightenment, clarity...

...or so I hope. The older I get, the farther away from certainty I get. The one thing I am sure of is that I hate living a surface life, and I hate having to shut away so much of the real Self. I get tired of carrying the Captain's happiness and mine at the same time. I get tired of human courtesy, human contact. I have faith in the healing properties of solitude and autumn. I have little faith in the capacity of people to comfort me at this point on the compass.

I dream of quiet evenings spent in productivity and efficiency. I dream of solitary travel, as painful as it would be. I dream of being healthy. I dream of moss-grown brick courtyards full of the sounds of water and the street, being Home, knowing that I was in the arms of Home. But even that hope dies as the years pass. It's not so much hopelessness, really, as it is practicality - the knowledge that a lifetime in the practice of learning to overcome most desires - since desire breeds pain - would somehow lead to a karmic outcome: the unfulfillment of one of the most potent desires of my being. It was as though it were enough that I should find my marital soulmate; that I should find my friend soulmates. That I should be able to keep my mother and father and siblings, and see my siblings happily married. More than that? I should not expect.

And perhaps I am wrong to expect more. After all, an apprenticeship to will, to discipline has its price. I should take my treasures and be content. I have accepted that peace is beyond my reach. I have accepted that restless is woven into the fabric of my being and follows the same paths and roads that my blood and breath follow. I accept that. I...just haven't learned to live with that yet. And some days it's harder than others.