There is no real question in my mind about why I am thinking in terms of grey. Right now I am looking out my February-stained window and all that meets me is grey. Sky is flatter and more boring than ashes in it's monochrome yet cold blandness. The trees have forgotten how to speak any language and are left contorted and embarrassed in their nakedness. The slowed and bloated (and aptly named) Tar river sloths past its banks after having gorged on too many rainstorms up in the Appalachian foothills out west.
My street is littered with both wet and withered leaves, color leached from their veins. My walls have soaked in the outside sulk and are dripping in sullen shadows. My metaphors lay in a puddle on the floor, though that might just be remnants of a tipped cup of coffee. It is fairly tough to tell at this point and everything muddles together as I start to count on my fingers to determine which day of the week it is.
Huh, even my shirt is grey. I didn't plan that.
Plus Im fairly sure that i'm using the wrong spelling for grey, or maybe its just the British version. Grey vs Gray: The worlds most limp-wristed dispute.
The main thrust of putting any of this down onto black and white is to try to delineate and put margins to why I have been feeling so dissipated. I'm not going to share this one because it is much more about my process in capturing and taking meditative stock of my current mental and spiritual state than it is about entertaining or provoking thought or whatever self-aggrandizing motivation could be tagged onto previous entries. If someone happens to run across it for whatever reason and scrapes some personal insight off of its untidy floor, then they can benefit or increase in confusion at their own risk or reward. This one is for me.
A majority of my life feels hemmed in by a thick and bloodless fog. Mind is addled by a continuous circuit of task to plan to task to outcome to task to error to task to solution to task to task again that limits itself almost entirely to fingertip motions and monotonous and pyrrhic victories over unimportant and ultimately crumbling hills. I'm sure that part of this stems from the nature of hospital work. Every person who I will "heal" or have a hand in "healing" will eventually run out of ability to be mended and will be subjected to worms and dirt. The sole aspect that puts its finger in the dike of overwhelming cynicism and deep sorrow is that each day that the person in the hospital bed is taking their own breaths is a day that can redeem their souls from the pitiable and horrible fate of being their own wildly inept and hideously foolish gods and return the throne of their lives to the rightful King; or at very least to stop eating themselves to death.
All things considered, I still cannot blame my current emotional/spiritual state that is best compared to cold and unsalted grits on the population of humans coming into my workspace anymore than I can blame it on the odd influx of cockroaches into our kitchen in recent days. I'm sure that it is a factor and it would be fairly stupid of me to dismiss it, but if I hang my hat on it as the root diagnosis for the malaise i'm mucking around in then I would be blandly lying to myself and very aware of the fact.
Without any froofy wordplay, the issue is that I have forgotten my margins. Forgotten or failed to retrace them on a regular basis. My personhood has osmosed out into the aether and mingled with it to the point where neither have their own distinct existence. Annihilation at its meh-est. I sat in a cheap armchair too close to the abyss, we melded and now neither of us have eyes to stare at each other through. Melodramatic: Minus 2 points off my blog scorecard.
It is eerily near the portrait that Lewis paints in "The Great Divorce" where the wisps of human souls who have chosen their own solitary and foggy gray hell are suddenly forced to interact with the starkly self-embued grass of heaven. The souls are so lost in terms of their own purpose and meaning and source that they have forgotten their weight and their realness so that when they step on grass that is in concert with its source and self and purpose and meaning, the grass pierces through the feet of the ghastly souls because it meets no margin to interact with. Each blade of grass is so itself that it needs to interact with something of similar self-embodied substance to bend and be walked upon. As per usual, Lewis rapidly elevates an iron-toed boot into my crotch and forces me to look at myself without my spiritual make-up on.
I have forgotten who I am because I have neglected to root in the source of the one who made me. My substance has softened into the gray around me because I turned my face away from the God who holds my only true name written on a white stone in his hand. I have refused the artists chisel with apathetic gestures of self-sufficiency and have attempted to slap sloppy, soggy clay on the statue of myself in attempts to finish what God started because "I know what I need".
"Who has made mans mouth? Who makes him mute, or deaf, or seeing, or blind? Is it not I, The Lord?" Exodus 4:11
"For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother's womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well." Psalm 139: 13-14.
"Or who shut in the sea with doors when it burst out from the womb, when I made clouds its garment and thick darkness its swaddling band, and prescribed limits for it and set bars and doors, and said, 'This far shall you come, and no farther, and here shall your proud waves be stayed'?" Job 38: 8-11
Delineation. Margins. Shape and substance and form and everything that defies that nebulous abolition of man into mist come from God and his careful and fierce carving of our lines, his searing forge giving shape to our metal, his sharp-tipped pen inking our personhood on paper. He abhors the lukewarm and the osmosed man I have drifted towards being and demands that my skin be drastically hotter than the surrounding fog so that I will starkly contrast the dim grey that surrounds my every day life.
William Ernest Henley hoarsely shouted "I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul." Before I get too far ahead of myself, I would make sure to point out that there is no ill will towards Henley. I do believe that we all have impetus in how we conduct our lives and that our responses to hardships are our duty and task. We should take hold of the helm and not be tossed every which way by the storms or life, but the main issue I take with this poem is that a quick google search shows that he was born on August 23, 1849 and died on July 11, 1903. The self proclaimed master of his Fate fell out of a railway carriage which caused his tuberculosis to flare up which ultimately killed him. Similarly, I suspect that he had next to no influence over his birth (due to my having little to no perspective over the supernatural realm, I refrained from speaking with certainty.)
He may have had an undaunted spirit during his 53 years on earth and his personhood was impressive enough to influence Robert Louis Stevenson to fashion his infamous character of Long John Silver in Henleys likeness, but it is difficult to switch my brain off from a very specific "The Office" reference in this scenario. That being when the office crew takes a booze cruise and the captain of the boat gets sick of Dwight and shows him to a fake steering wheel which Dwight enthusiastically grips onto and begins deluding himself into thinking that he is steering the boat. We all know who is actually steering the boat, Dwight/Ernest. Lets stop pretending.
This could quickly de-rail into a discussion about free will versus predestination and I definitely feel that i've already digressed further from my original point than I should have, so this is where I will end.
To sum up. God is God and I am not. I am God's son and He authors my character. My self-ness is rooted in his God-ness. My Man-hood stems from his God-hood and I praise him for that solid, weighty, circumscribed fact.
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