a pondering of the preponderence

A late night reverie, examining my soul, my heart.

I have charted the path of my emotions and found it neither narrowed nor blocked with age and experience...

but it has become un-navigable, so bent and twisted by disappointment and doubt and the reflexive currents of grim memory.

I shout no less passionately at the sky and the clouds and the wind and the rain, but neither the wind nor the rain nor the sun penetrates this labyrinth.

I am, I believe, immutably alone. For all my action as the faith healer of the heart, having patched back together so many crack'd souls, there is no shamaness I can imagine of the craft and conviction to restore me.

I am not in pain, but numb, terrified (at some levels) of feeling again, for I known what damage follows that joy. I have been the balm and am now, not used up, but feeling used by those who needed me to lead them from their darkness. I am Charon at the water's edge, dwelling too well on the nature of my duties and the hollows of my future.

JC was right, by inference...the damage Ann did may still not be healed. And yet, while I may wish for the end of that pain, when and if it comes I would be diminished, for I gave all I had (too much, most would say) and it was, not inadequate, but unsuited to the task and I burned bridges with friends and family, and even with aspects of myself, that are incapable of being rebuilt.

I know the answer. Don't dwell on it, accept the patchwork nature of my heart (it has always been so) and take my soul up another magnitude, find new fuel and new heat to burn yet brighter. But to echo a question I asked more than a quarter of a century ago...what if it is beyond me? What if I have reached my limit, the boundaries between the man made myth and the place where only the myth remains?

I need some rest. And, I suspect, a lover.