Last Exit Before Oblivion

When the secrets start to come apart life gets difficult. For most of my life I've cared greatly about things but never shown it. Now, the whole damned world knows. Through this Blog and other things you all know, and God knows, I care about music, sculpture, art, peace, beauty, and many other things that don't count for much in modern society.

My response to threat is to abandon the handle and run. I've used the metaphor here before: the skink's tail gets trapped by a predator and the skink simply abandons the tail and escapes. How much of a life can be abandoned and still have a person be viable?

Of course, writing about it and having it understood are two different things. I have no idea how much of what I've written here is comprehensible. I just write. Comprehension is someone else's responsibility.

Caring is important. I've always known that, and I can see the results of loosening my grip on it. If not for God's hold on me I probably would have gone over the edge, but he holds on and I just kind of stagger on, thinking that if I'm lucky someday things will get better. I don't really care much any more, and I see the outworking of that in my life.

How does one learn to care openly? Jesus knew how to do so. He was no patsy. He always did what His Father instructed. He was so convinced of His Father's love that caring about doing what was right was his first nature. I'm so convinced of the world's hostility that I don't hang around to see if anyone treats my ideas with respect. I expect problems, abandon the issue like yesterday's sand sculpture, and run. It's a bad model for life.

How do I learn to care again? I don't want to care in God's terms. And yet I've done myself more of a disservice by not caring than God has ever done in working to teach me to care from my heart and to hold onto what I care about.

There is a difference, I believe, between acting as if I care and really caring. I know the teaching about learning to care from the act, and perhaps there's some truth to that. It is, after all, better than the alternative. I still don't think it'll hold up for long under the stresses imposed by daily life. Assumed caring is brittle. I've had done with being brittle. I want to be more flexible.

I'd really like to live in beauty, to have my every movement be an expression of confident assumption of God's beautiful life. Instead I just stay indoors and hope no crises show up. Nobody who has done good art has lived that way. I know it's fashionable to believe that art just happens, that it requires no part of the human soul, but I don't believe it. Art without soul isn't art. Art that has no piece of a human being in it is dead. I have no interest in doing something like that, nor perceiving it.

The human heart makes a difference. What is it like to care enough to go ahead and put one's heart out there and be prepared to take the inevitable hits? What is it like to be visible?