Yellow Into Green – Part II
And then Life happens…
…to love ruining everything.
And you grow up and through and over and outward and in spite of. You learn there are deeper reasons and higher costs and mysteries wrapped in riddle. You taste failure, get stung by death (small d, and note that), fall in love only to learn that falling in love happens to be Love’s greatest, cruelest trick: the one that starts you down the adventure where you find out what it really is (and it’s not in the brochure, trust us).
There are schedules to keep, politics to vote on, issues to decide now matter. Bills to pay, things to defend, repairs to be made. Add to this the fact that, for a very long period in the beginning — while you’re family is sprouting, I mean — you’re bone tired. But not only if you’re raising small children, mind you. Because there is no shortage of other mediums in Life’s palette with which to bring you to the end of yourself. Like careers or adventure or crisis or great fortune.
You might let go of loving a spotless house and settle for finding a top to the sippy cup and calling it a clear win. You can lean into, like it or not, the long, slow drag toward a Responsibility you begrudgingly admit is entirely bereft of the wonder of your younger vantages. However it happens, happen it will. The ruination of What You Thought It Was.
That’s what I mean by Life, by God, ruining everything. Any by everything I sort of mean the construct of Innocence with which we come into this and which, I firmly believe, must be ruined in order to be salvaged. The whole ‘the city must be destroyed in order to be saved’ thing woven in the human experience.
There is a period, too, where you forget you remembered any of this. And I think that’s a critical period. Until you come to the place where you confess (not boast…confess) (because boasting shows you’ve confessed nothing) (and you can’t confess boastfully) You Don’t Know. And Not Knowing is only a good thing when you come through it. In the midst of it, in the midst of the cloud, disorientation plays tricks on sight and sound and, I don’t care who you are, if you call that fun, you’re not in it. You’re in the idea of it. The theory.
Being in the cloud and unknowing is what it is, because of what it is. That is, the only thing in our physical universe where cloud descends and touches earth: fog.
Fog doesn’t last forever, though. It doesn’t need to. It can’t, in fact. It needs to be burned off by enough light and time so that orientation can reassert itself and order and understanding and insight and Exactly Where You Are can show itself. It’s relieving.
It can also be bled of wonder.
Back to the window.
I was thinking of photosynthesis and chemicals rushing through minute corridors throughout leaves big and small, and though I didn’t think I had strayed too far from appreciating the Handiwork, I had apparently over-sterilyzed things and earned myself a few Words:
“I love yellow into green.”
I had to laugh.
No matter how correct understanding is, and there is untold worth in understanding, it can, was, and should be brought back around to what I knew years earlier and had shelved as Too Innocent because I didn’t know I didn’t know that what I thought was Truth was actually just theory. Because I hadn’t had my life ruined enough or with the precision only Nature can orchestrate, inside and out.
And I still love precision in its myriad forms.
But, more, always more, I love how He loves yellow into green.
