My courage

We travel far outside, to reflect how far we have travelled inside. The question is always asked, how can I be better? More desirable? But it is so strange to ask such a question. Why not accept myself as I am? Why not? I see myself being brave and worthy in action, and the people tell me I am brave and worthy, but I find that is not proof enough. Aren’t I brave enough, smart enough to face the abyss of my interior fears, my mind that tells my it is impossible to accept myself as I am, well why not try to do the impossible? All the voices telling me warnings, advising me all the reasons and the thousand ways I can be rejected. But I have lived a thousand and one days in solitude to unravel each knot one by one. Here I am a good husband, lover, friend, citizen, father, man, human. The fears ahead in my future was a reflection of my past, a reflection in a lake that I did not wish to see, that I threw stones and created chaos so that I would not see, and in the end I lost all there was left to lose in this mortal life and yet I live, and yet my soul shines like gold coins in the streets after a storm. I have nothing left to transform, nothing left to offer at the altar of alchemy. What am I to do with the rest of my life when the illusion is all I know? The illusion is a cloak I wear to protect my skin from the weather, to hide me from the eyes of strangers. The illusion is my caregiver, my mother and holy Virgin Mary. The illusion is the dream that cannot be broken simply because it does not exist, like a black cat in the night that is not there.

Illusions, illusions we live by and die by. We no longer die in wars most of us, but we die by forfeiting the truth of ourselves while we are alive.

My lover, my equal, my courage.

I will call you my courage because that is what the heart is made of. It is clear to me now that you will accept nothing less. That every step I took to come close to you and sit by your side and feel your warm body next to me was a path of courage, of insignificant but hard choices I made in my strange and winding life. Choices I made in the dark, without knowing what they were called, because the world calls me and my choices by different names, not all of which I agree with. But now I have learned that what they called selfish or ignorant or weak or lazy or stupid was courage after all.